Subject Clitics in the Northern Italian Dialects

This book provides an analysis of Subject Clitics concentrating on Astigiano and Turinese, two dialects spoken in the North of Italy, in the areas of Asti and Turin respectively. In the wake of structural economy, this book accounts for the structural position and function of Subject Clitics inside the computational system and for their morphological and distributional properties. It also provides an empirical and theoretical comparison between Piedmontese Subject Clitics and Subject Clitics in other Northern Italian dialects.§§At the theoretical level the higher goal of this book is to promote structure minimality by proposing a treatment of elements of agreement such as Subject Clitics which is compatible with the elimination of Agreement central to the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995).§ It has a significant empirical impact as it deals with data not discussed in previous works on Subject Clitics; It presents a novel theoretical treatment of Subject Clitics by incorporating minimalist guidelines and Optimality Theory to such a complex topic; It presents a detailed review of recent works on Subject Clitics; It proposes a novel theoretical treatment of the variation that characterises the use of Subject Clitics across the Northern Italian Dialects; It opens several paths for future research in the fields of Romance Linguistics and Theoretical Syntax.§Overall the view of Subject Clitics and sentence structure maintained in this book contrasts with the breaking down of functional categories into a myriad of syntactically and semantically distinct projections that has prevailed in several recent studies on Subject Clitics and Romance Syntax in general.