Paola Benincà

• Laurea
• Professor Emeritus at University of Padua

It's a series of reflections on the history of linguistic theory, from historical-comparative grammar to generative grammar.

Romance languages have complement clitic pronouns that replace the arguments of a verb.

Current theoretical approaches to language devote great attention to macro- and micro-variation and show an ever-increasing interest in minority languages. In this respect, few empirical domains are as rich and lively as the Italo-Romance languages, which together with Albanian were the main research domain of Leonardo M. Savoia. The volume covers...

The volume contains ten articles previously published elsewhere: P. Benincà & L. Vanelli, Appunti di sintassi veneta, in Guida ai dialetti veneti IV, a cura di M. Cortelazzo, Padova, CLEUP, 1982, pp.7-38. P. Benincà, Il clitico a nel dialetto padovano, in Scritti linguistici in onore di G.B.Pellegrini, Pisa, Pacini, 1983, pp. 25-35. P. Benincà,...

Le iscrizioni in antico volgare delle confraternite laiche veneziane: edizione e commento, by R Ferguson. (Anecdota Veneta: Studi di Storia Culturale e Religiosa Veneziana) Venice: Marcianum Press.

Le iscrizioni in antico volgare delle confraternite laiche veneziane: edizione e commento. Ed. by R Ferguson. (Anecdota Veneta: Studi di Storia Culturale e Religiosa Veneziana) Venice: Marcianum Press.

All Romance languages have complement clitic pronouns which basically replace the arguments of a verb. Only a sub

This book is as an essential tool for both Romance linguists and general linguists which brings together leading recent international scholarship in individual Romance varieties and from different theoretical frameworks and approaches, showing how each may cast new and necessary light on the other. It offers a detailed structural treatment of all t...

This book is as an essential tool for both Romance linguists and general linguists which brings together leading recent international scholarship in individual Romance varieties and from different theoretical frameworks and approaches, showing how each may cast new and necessary light on the other. It offers a detailed structural treatment of all t...

All Romance languages have complement clitic pronouns, which basically replace the arguments of a verb. Only a sub-area of Romance, extending from France through northern Italy to the Adriatic Sea also has subject clitics, connected to the syntactic subject of an inflected verb. In particular the subject clitics of northern Italy have been studied...

Several Occitan dialects spoken in Western Piedmont exhibit no 1sg subject clitic form (a situation widely attested in Northern Italian dialects), although interrogative clauses with a 1sg subject feature an enclitic particle ke , identical to the complementiser. Many attempts have been made to interpret this ke as a reflex of Lat. E(G)O ‘I’ or ori...

Friulian linguistics is a topic that has a bearing on the history of linguistics itself. In the second half of the nineteenth century, both the comparative grammar of the Romance languages and Italian dialectology acquired a valuable model for scientific analysis in the fundamental first volume of the Archivio Glottologico Italiano (1873), which wa...

Italy constitutes a fertile terrain for research into language change, both because of the richness of the dialectal variation and because of the length of the period of textual attestation. Such diversity has long been the staple of research in general and Romance historical phonology, morphology, and lexis, but much less attention has been devote...

In the aphasic production, the verb-noun (V-N) dissociation (a condition whereby brain damage selectively affects one of the two categories, while sparing the other) may have a different nature in different cases, reflecting semantic, syntactic or grammatical class effects. The observation that the V-N dissociations have a different nature goes in...

L'invito a contribuire a un volume sulle varietà tedesche del nord italia con un saggio sulla struttura della frase nel romanzo medievale richiede una breve introduzione che inquadri in una prospettiva più ampia l'argomento di questo contributo. la cosiddetta sintassi a Verbo secondo (V2) è stata identificata sui dati del tedesco, sostenuti da un c...

This chapter concentrates on a specific aspect of headless relatives as they appear in contemporary and earlier varieties of Italo-Romance-as well as in earlier varieties of English-namely the presence of a lexical complementizer adjacent to the wh pronoun. It localizes both the wh and the complementizer in the functional structure of the left peri...

The present study is the first neuropsychological investigation into the problem of the mental representation and processing of irreversible binomials (IBs), i.e., word pairs linked by a conjunction (e.g., “hit and run,” “dead or alive”). In order to test their lexical status, the phenomenon of neglect dyslexia is explored. People with left-sided n...

This article presents a number of cross-linguistic descriptive generalizations concerning Romance languages and points out their theoretical relevance for syntactic theory. It shows how cross-linguistic variation can direct our research toward a precise path and thereby narrow down the number of possible analyses of a given phenomenon. The article...

In the present paper, I consider first the behaviour of singular count nouns, showing that, in the limited set of contexts in which they are found, a specific kind of modification is in many cases necessary. The modification is represented by a variant of a kind defining relative clause. I briefly outline the main syntactic and semantic characteris...

The empirical work on sentence structure over the last several years has been advanced by the so-called cartographic program, which aims to provide a map of the functional projections in clausal architecture; in the framework of this project, a highly articulated functional structure has been developed, where specialised positions appear to have th...

ASIt aims to observe, collect and analyse the linguistic variation displayed by the dialects of a language. The main theoretical hypothesis is that linguistic variation is not due to chance, but depends on the combination of a finite number of parameters. It is a first step towards the creation of a European digital library for recording and studyi...

In this paper we present the results of a project, named ASIt, which provides linguists with a crucial test bed for formal hypotheses concerning human language. In particular, ASIt aims to capture cross-linguistic variants of grammatical structures within a sample of about 200 Italian Dialects. Since dialects are rarely recognized as official langu...

Generalizzazioni descrittive della morfologia nominale in italiano (fiorentino) antico.

1 On grammatical description This collection of papers follows other volumes of the series, which contain some of the results of the Cartographic project; the present volume offers a number of papers specifically dedicated to the fine structure of CP, including the areas at its borders, whose properties and relations with the rest of sentential str...

Il presente contributo raccoglie una serie di osservazioni sulla morfologia verbale di alcune varietà siciliane. La scelta degli argomenti trattati è stata guidata per lo più dai nostri interessi, e in qualche caso è stata condizionata dal tipo di dati che siamo riuscite a raccogliere; essi provengono per la maggior parte dai questionari elaborati...

1. La dialettologia fra grammatica storica e sincronica. Carlo Salvioni si trova in un punto della storia della linguistica in cui si aprivano prospettive profondamente diverse, che sarebbero andate in seguito sempre più allontanandosi. Egli va pienamente collocato nella linguistica storico-comparativa, in particolare nella felicissima fase in cui...

Different kinds of relative clauses in different European modern and ancient languages are observed with respect to the presence or absence of a wh-pronoun and a complementiser, and the precise location of these elements in the fine structure of the left periphery.I will mainly deal with headless relatives and 'non-identifying' restrictive relative...

In this article we intend to illustrate how the ASIS (Atlante Sintattico dell’Italia Settentrionale “Syntactic Atlas of Northern Italy”) project has been created and developed. We discuss the theoretical, empirical, and practical problems that we encountered working on such an enterprise, and the choices we made in order to solve them. We have crea...

This volume presents 16 original studies of variation in languages representing the three main European language families, as well as in varieties of Greek and Hungarian. The studies concern variation in or across dialects or dialect groups, in standard varieties or in emerging regional varieties of the standard. Several studies investigate a speci...

In this paper we document the existence in a Romance languageof a strategy of do (fa) insertion in main non-subject interrogatives parallel to the well-known English case. As our description illustrates, the set of contexts wheredo-support applies in this language is a proper subset of the English contexts. The syntax of fa-support in a language wi...

The paper presents a set of data from Medieval Romance (MR), pointing out the relevance they have to the mapping of the left periphery of the clause (CP), building on the seminal work of Rizzi (1997). The phenomena presented here appear to support the proposal, first made in Benincà (2001) on the basis of modern Italian, that a lower section of the...

In this chapter we intend to contribute to the cartography of the CP layer and give a more detailed analysis of the portion of the CP structure that encodes distinctions between theme and rheme, exploiting data from standard Italian and nonstandard varieties. We interpret the cartographic program as an inquiry aiming at localizing functional projec...

Inspirada en una trobada entre lingüistes i dialectòlegs europeus que dissenyen atles sintàctics dels dialectes dels seus països, l'obra presenta algunes reflexions sobre la situació dels dialectes en els diferents països d'Europa. Examinant la situació d'alguns països en comparació amb la italiana, s'argumenta que per a tenir en compte les diferèn...