The Higher Functional Field. Evidence from Northern Italian Dialects

This book deals with the syntax of the subject in various sentence types in the Northern Italian domain and provides a detailed syntactic analysis of the left portion of the clause in the dialects spoken in this area. It stems from a comprehensive field work research on hundred dialects on the basis of various tests conducted in the area. The phenomena taken into account involve a) the position of subject clitics, and b) the tests to distinguish several classes of them in the second chapter. The third chapter deals with subject inversion and more generally all strategies found in main and embedded interrogatives and the way different types of subject clitics combine with wh-elements. In the fourth chapter the phenomenon of V2 in Rhaeto-romance varieties is discussed and analyzed as independent from the one of German, it is shown that the V2 found these varieties has peculiar properties that are not shared by German and that can shed light on the layering of the left periphery of the clause. The last chapter includes cases of doubling and the position of nominal subjects in embedded clauses and puts forth the idea that nominal subjects in Romance are always realized in the left periphery of the clause