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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 30, Frankfurt
Edited by Ingo Feldhausen, Martin Elsig, Imme Kuchenbrandt and Mareike Neuhaus
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15] 2019
► pp. 219–236

Chapter 11
Postverbal subject positions in ‘semi-finite’ clauses in Southern Italo-Romance and Sardinian

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Both Sardinian inflected infinitives on the one hand and Southern Calabrese and Salentino subjunctive complement clauses on the other can be considered semi-finite since, among other things, they are marked for person and number agreement with the subject, as finite clauses, but lack tense marking, on a par with non-finite clauses. These clauses all present VOS as the unmarked word order and allow VSO under specific pragmatic conditions. On the basis of a series of syntactic tests, this paper shows that these orders are derived via remnant VP-movement rather than object shift. Furthermore, it is argued that these varieties, although they allow for VSO, do not form an exception to Gallego’s (2013) generalization on VOS/VSO in Romance.

Keywords: subject positions, complementation, word order, Sardinian, southern Italian dialects
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Inflected infinitives in Sardinian
  • 3.Finite complementation in extreme Southern Italian dialects
  • 4.Subjects in semi-finite clauses: An overview
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Deriving VOS in Romance
    • 5.2Object shift
      • 5.2.1Ne-extraction
      • 5.2.2Binding
      • 5.2.3Specificity
      • 5.2.4Participle agreement
      • 5.2.5Other problems with object shift account
    • 5.3Right-dislocation
    • 5.4Conclusions
  • 6.A note on VSO
  • 7.Conclusions and questions for further research
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 October 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.15.11gro
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