Article in:
Studies in Language: Online-First Articles

Light-headed relative clauses in Teramano

| California State University, Dominguez Hills
| University of California San Diego
We investigate an unstudied, rich component of the relative clause system in Teramano, one of the Upper Southern Italian languages. We focus on light-headed relative clauses – relative clauses that lack a full nominal head and are introduced by only a Determiner-like or pronominal “light head”. We also briefly describe headed relative clauses in Teramano since the morphosyntactic features they exhibit are relevant for the investigation of light-headed relative clauses. Last, we highlight commonalities and differences between light-headed relative clauses in Teramano and Italian. Our paper provides the first systematic in-depth description of light-headed relative clauses in an Upper Southern Italian language that we are aware of, contributes to the knowledge of Teramano, the study of light-headed relative clauses crosslinguistically, and the ongoing investigation of microvariation among Italian and Italian languages.
Keywords: headed relative clauses, light-headed relative clauses, Upper Southern Italian, Teramano, Abruzzese
Published online: 09 December 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.20037.man
References

References

Benincà, Paola
2012 Lexical complementizers and Headless Relatives. In Laura Brugé, Anna Cardinaletti, Giuliana Giusti, Nicola Munaro & Cecilia Poletto (eds.), Functional heads. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Vol. 7, 29–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Caponigro, Ivano
2021 Introducing Headless Relative Clauses and the findings from Mesoamerican languages. In Ivano Caponigro, Harold Torrence & Roberto Zavala Maldonado (eds.), Headless Relative Clauses in Mesoamerican languages, 1–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo
2020 The syntax of relative clauses. A unified analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Citko, Barbara
2004 On headed, headless, and light-headed relatives. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 22(1). 95–126. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
D’Alessandro, Roberta & Ian Roberts
2010 Past participle agreement in Abruzzese: Split auxiliary selection and the null-subject parameter. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 28(1). 41–72. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hastings, Rachel
1997 Abruzzo and Molise. In Martin Maiden & Mair Parry (eds.), The dialects of Italy, 321–329. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mantenuto, Iara
2017 Demonstratives in Teramano [Unpublished master’s thesis]. University of California Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Mantenuto, Iara & Ivano Caponigro
Forthcoming. Free relative clauses in Teramano. Quaderni di lavoro ASIt – ASIt working papers.
Pellegrini, Giovan Battista
1977 Carta dei dialetti d’Italia. Pisa: Pacini.Google Scholar
Poletto, Cecilia & Emanuela Sanfelici
2018 On demonstratives as relative pronouns. In Marco Coniglio, Andrew Murphy, Eva Schlachter & Tonjes Veenstra (eds.), Atypical demonstratives: Syntax, semantics and pragmatics, 95–126. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Savini, Giuseppe
1881 La grammatica ed il lessico del dialetto Teramano. Torino: Ermanno Loescher.Google Scholar
de Vries, Mark
2002 The syntax of relativization. Amsterdam: LOT (Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics). Available at http://​www​.let​.rug​.nl​/dvries​/pdf​/proefschrift​-mdevries​.pdf (last access 21 October 2020).