Roberta D'Alessandro

Utrecht University | UU · Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (UiL OTS)

In this paper we discuss a change in the auxiliary selectional pattern of Brazilian Venetan, a heritage Italo-Romance variety spoken in southern Brazil. Venetan varieties display a default form of the past participle in constructions with postverbal subjects and a fully agreeing form in constructions with preverbal subjects: this is true both for t...

A short introduction to drawing and understanding syntactic trees, in Arabic

Syntactic change in contact is generally explained as a result of cognitive, structural/typological, or sociolinguistic factors. However, the relative weight of these factors in shaping the outputs of contact is yet to be assessed. In this paper, we propose a microcontact approach to the study of change in contact, focusing on microsyntactic points...

This debate stems from Michal Starke’s keynote lecture at NELS 51, entitled “UM. Universal Morphology”. The video can be found at this link: https://michal.starke.ch/talks/2020-11_nels/nels_starke.mp4. In his talk, Starke sketches a nanosyntactic analysis of French irregular verbs, with the aim of showing that irregularities in French verbal paradi...

The substantial uptick in research on heritage languages over the past three decades has enhanced our understanding of the development of bilingual grammars throughout the lifespan. This interest has been accompanied by a noticeable increase of experimental work, often combined with some degree of formal rigor. Exclusively and predominantly formal...

In this paper we present data from first generation immigrants (G1) and second and third generation heritage speakers of Friulian, a Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in North-Eastern Italy and also found in Argentina and Brazil. The target phenomenon is subject clitics ( SCL s). We show that SCL s in heritage Friulian are in a process of being reanal...

This article describes the process of preparation and implementation of a data collection enterprise targeting Italo-Romance emigrant languages in North and South America. This data collection is part of the ERC Microcontact project, which aims to understand language change in contact by examining the language of Italian communities in the Americas...

Language change as a result of language contact is studied in many different ways using a number of different methodologies. This article provides an overview of the main approaches to syntactic change in contact (CIC), focusing on the Romance language group. Romance languages are widely documented both synchronically and diachronically. They have...

El maig de 2015, un grup d’eminents lingüistes es van reunir a Atenes per debatre el camí que cal seguir per a la gramàtica generativa. Hi va haver molta discussió i els lingüistes van manifestar la intenció de confeccionar una llista d’èxits de la gramàtica generativa en benefici d’altres lingüistes i de l’àmbit en general. La llista ha estat esbo...

The aim of this work is to identify and analyze a set of challenges that are likely to be encountered when one embarks on fieldwork in linguistic communities that feature small, young, and/or non-standard languages with a goal to elicit big sets of rich data. For each challenge, we (i) explain its nature and implications, (ii) offer one or more exa...

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...

An integrated science of language is usually advocated as a step forward for linguistic research. In this paper, we maintain that integration of this sort is premature, and cannot take place before we identify a common object of study. We advocate instead a science of language that is inherently multi-faceted, and takes into account the different v...

Impersonal si constructions in Italian have been the focus of a number of studies. Many analyses, such as those of Cinque (1988), Chierchia (1995) and Dobrovie-Sorin (1996, 1998, 1999), have been proposed in order to define the puzzling agreement patterns of si constructions. In this paper, I show that all the various agreement patterns derive from...

Syntactic variation can be ascribed to a range of factors. The Borer-Chomsky conjecture, as Mark Baker (2008) refers to it, states for instance that all parameters of variation are attributable to differences in the features of particular items (e.g. functional heads) in the lexicon. In this paper, this hypothesis is carefully considered in relatio...

This volume contains a selection of papers of the 28th Going Romance conference, which was organized by the Linguistics centers of Universidade de Lisboa and Universidade Nova de Lisboa in December 2014. It assembles the invited contributions by Alain Rouveret, Guido Mensching, Luigi Rizzi, and Roberta D’Alessandro, and eleven peer-reviewed papers...

This paper addresses metaphony in Ariellese masculine nouns as a synchronic phonological process and argues against a morphological or lexical analysis. Metaphony in Abruzzese is analyzed as the addition of a mora to express the plural morpheme. This mora needs to be linked to a segment. The chosen segment is the most sonorant element in the syllab...

Submitted.Syntactic variation can be ascribed to different factors. An ongoing debate concerns the possibility of attributing this variation to features in functional projections. The so-called Borer-Chomsky conjecture as formulated by Mark Baker (2008) states that all parameters of variation are attributable to differences in the features of parti...

Submitted to volume.Vocatives are often considered as exceptions to the regularity of language, and therefore often put “outside” of grammar, and pertaining instead to speech. In this paper, we wish to show that this conceptualization of vocatives in wrong: not only are they perfectly regular, but they give us important insights on the grammatical...

This article argues that there can only be one chunk-defining device in grammar: a theory cannot afford to have the same work done twice, once by phases, a second time by prosodic constituency. As it stands, however, phase theory is unable to describe all phonologically relevant chunks; these are too small and too diverse to be delineated. To quali...

This is the final version. It was first published by Edizioni ETS at http://www.edizioniets.it/scheda.asp?N=9788846740212.

Complementizer systems in southern Italian varieties have received a lot of attention in the traditional dialectological literature. In this paper, we try to trace the diachronic development of complementizers in a scarcely documented vernacular Upper southern variety, Abruzzese. We indentify five stages in the development of this system, and two m...

Abruzzese, a southern Italian variety spoken in the central Italian region of Abruzzo, makes use of an impersonal pronoun, nomə, which is the continuation of Latin hŏmo (D'Alessandro & Alexiadou 2006). Nomə is used both as an arbitrary 3rd person pronoun and as a generic pronoun. Its use was quite widespread in the Abruzzo and Molise regions until...

This study provides empirical evidence for the monoclausal status of a specific polar interrogative construction in Sienese, an Italian dialect spoken in Tuscany. At first sight, this question type looks like a biclausal discourse including two separate questions. There is however considerable syntactic evidence in favor of a monoclausal analysis....

The present article explores the complementizer system of Abruzzese. This system apparently features as many as three different complementizers, and is hence richer than the usual double-complementizer systems found in southern Italian dialects. While a richly articulated conception of the left periphery is demonstrated to provide a simple explanat...

In this paper, we present an analysis of the “person-driven” auxiliary-selection system of one variety of the Upper Southern Italo-Romance dialect Abruzzese, along with an account of the pattern of past participle agreement in this variety, which differs somewhat from what is found in more familiar Romance languages. Our account relies on the techn...

In this article, we propose a phase-based alternative to Kayne’s (1989) analysis of past participle agreement in Italian. This analysis captures the principal facts without making reference to specifier-head agreement. Instead, the possibility of overt past participle agreement is determined by the Phase Impenetrability Condition and is linked to t...

BOOK NOTICES 217 ical observations that the volume contains can be usedasthefoundationforstimulatingtheoreticaldiscussions of the issues related to the structure of the noun phrase. [DIMITRIOS NTELITHEOS, University of California, Los Angeles.] ExploringtheSpanishlanguage. By CHRISTOPHER POUNTAIN. London: Arnold, 2003. Pp. xi, 312. ISBN 034071946X....

This paper examines the syntax of the indefinite pronoun nome in Eastern Abruzzese. Nome is syntactically intriguing as it appears in a subject position which is not available to other NPs. Moreover, it does not have any corresponding form in any other Italian dialect, except for Sardinian and some Marchigiano varieties. We first show that nome is...

LANGUAGE,VOLUME 80,NUMBER 4 (2004)880 nature of the rapport and the interactional dimension. The author considers the utterance in its context and thus analyzes what J. L. Austin referred to as ‘the total situation in which the utterance is issued—the total speech act’ (How to do things with words,2nd edn.,ed. by J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa,Cambr...

This dissertation investigates the syntax of impersonal si constructions (ISC henceforth) in Italian in a minimalist framework, focusing on their peculiar agreement patterns and on their interpretation. ISCs introduce a generic, unspecified subject in a clause. Italian is a pro-drop language, and a sentence like (1) is interpreted as referring to a...

Stuttgart, University, Diss., 2004.

Southern Italian dialects are taken to lack subject clitic pronouns. In this paper, we will present evidence of the existence of at least one subject clitic in a Southern Italian dialect. The case in point is Abruzzese, which has in fact an impersonal subject clitic pronoun: nome. In this paper we show that nome is a clitic subject, more precisely...

This paper focuses on an unprecedented use of Raddoppiamento Fonosintattico (RF): in the encoding of voicing alternations in Eastern Abruzzese (EA). RF consistently surfaces in 1 st and 2 nd person passive structures that would, owing to EA's person-driven auxiliary selection system, otherwise be indistinguishable from their RF-less active counterp...

In this paper, I show that Italian impersonal si constructions with verb-object agreement and Icelandic quirky dative constructions have much in common: of them the verb agrees with a Nominative object and they both exhibit a person restriction on the object, which can only be 3rd person. I present evidence that Italian impersonal si constructions...