On the vP Left Periphery and so-called ‘Doubling Structures’ in the Dialect of Cona (Venice)

Abstract

This thesis has the empirical goal of describing the syntax of subject pronouns in the dialect of Cona, a small village in the province of Venice. This will be achieved through grammatically judgement and repetition task of 100 sentences administered in written and oral form in the dialect. The theoretical goal is to argue that so-called ‘doubling structures’ do not support Belletti’s (2005 and 2009) hypothesis of a vP-left periphery. I will consider subject clitics in sentences displaying a ‘doubling structure’, co-occurring with a Focus or a wh-element. I will argue that, unlike simple declarative sentences, which optionally require the presence of the clitic, there are structures which totally refuse it. The distribution of subject clitic pronouns in the dialect of Cona contradicts Belletti’s (2005 and 2009) analysis. The data empirically support Cardinaletti’s (1999) theory according to which what is traditionally defined as a ‘doubling structure’ is not a doubling phenomenon, but rather an instance of subject inversion. Moreover, as stated in Cardinaletti (in print) the occurrence of postverbal subjects is not discourse-motivated and there is no one-to-one correlation between their syntactic distribution and their interpretation.