Old Italian Scrambling: the low left periphery of the clause

In this work I intend to investigate a basic notion which has been neglected since the minimalist perspective has been adopted, namely the GB notion of parameter as a unique abstract property ruling a number of different, apparently unrelated phenomena. If, as is generally accepted, language variation is a consequence of formal properties of functional heads, the notion of parameter in traditional terms has virtually no status in the theory of grammar, crosslinguistic differences being fragmented in a series of microparameters, each explaining only one phenomenon. However, the minimalist theory does provide us with alternative tools to capture \u201cclusters\u201d of phenomena. The aim of this work is to show on the basis of diachronic evidence that several phenomena indeed go together and can be traced back to a unique property involving the functional projection(s) located at the edge of phases. The empirical domain of investigation is the syntax of the low IP area and its relations to the syntax of the CP and the DP in Old Italian (OI). As diachronic change has the interesting peculiarity of revealing hidden connections among distinct phenomena, showing that they are lost or acquired at the same time; a number of apparently unrelated properties in OI can in fact be derived as different instances of one and the same abstract syntactic property encoded on a single functional head. While it is well known that Old Romance has the V2 property of subject inversion but not the linear V2 restriction, as V1, V3 and V* constructions with multiple Topics in front of a Focalized constituent are attested (see, a. o., Beninc\ue0 (1985) (2004)), it has gone relatively unnoticed in the literature that OI permits (multiple) scrambling of objects and adverbial XPs to the left of the past participle yielding V-final clauses, as shown in (1): (1) a. quello che per uso \ue8 gi\ue0 dagli antichi servato, (Bono Giamboni, Vegezio, p. 108, r. 25-26) what that for use is already by the ancients preserved b. ed ha'mi la cosa molte volte ridetta (Bono Giamboni, Trattato, p. 131, rr. 20-21) and has-me the thing many times told OI scrambling targets both (non contrastive) focalized (1a) elements and there can be more than one element located to the left of the past participle (1b) (see Grewendorf (2004) for an analysis of scrambling in German as movement to Focus and Topic positions). In OI past participle agreement with postverbal objects (cf. (2)) was still possible: (2) c\u2019ha rifiutata la nobile citt\ue0 di Giadres (Novellino, p. 133, r. 3) that has refused+agr the noble city of Giadres Scrambling is also found inside the DP: an adjective, part of an AdjP (3a), or a complement (3b) can be moved to a prenominal position: (3) a di gentile aspetto molto (Dante, Vita nuova, c. 1292-93) of gentle figure much b S\uec come quando ordino di ritrarre dell\u2019antiche scritte le cose che.. (Brun. Latini Rett. P 11 r.18) So as when (I) order to draw of the ancient writings the things that Interestingly, the noun heading the DP can also be fronted to the left of a quantifier (4a,b) to a higher position anche can be analyzed in the spirit of Longobardi\u2019s work on construct state in Romance. (4) a don\uf2 anella molte (Novellino, p. 123 r. 51) gave rings many All these phenomena are lost at the same time, and precisely when the V2 property of subject inversion is lost: this suggests that they are all instances of the same abstract property. I propose that the simultaneous loss of V2, IP-scrambling, past participial agreement, DP-scrambling and N-fronting can be accounted for by assuming Belletti\u2019s (2004) proposal that the left periphery of the high phase (CP) and the left periphery of the lower vP phase are construed in the same way, namely with a (set of ) TopicP followed by a FocusP and that this proposal can also be extended to the DP phase