The Higher Functional Field: Evidence from Northern Italian Dialects (review)

This is an ambitious study of the functional architecture of sentence left-periphery in Northern Italian dialects (NIDs). Taking as a point of departure the hypothesis that a direct mapping exists between syntactic placement and interpretation, Poletto conducts an amazing experiment on syntactic microvariation to show that the upper portion of sentence in NIDs should be decomposed into sets of functional projections (‘fields’). To fulfill this task, P develops a detailed comparison of 100 varieties concerning several syntactic phenomena that serve as landmarks for determining the number and relative position of functional projections in the left-periphery of sentence, together with the specific interpretation associated with them. This strategy is systematically pursued in five areas—subject clitics (Ch. 2), wh-items (Ch. 3), verb-second (Ch. 4), sentence modality (Ch. 5), and subject positions (Ch. 6)—with major empirical and theoretical achievements, which unfortunately go hand in hand with certain analyses that reveal themselves as too sketchy and speculative to be properly tested.

On the positive side, this book offers new analyses to crucial syntactic phenomena. For instance, the typology and layering of subject clitics (SCLs) that P establishes in Ch. 2 successfully derives important empirical generalizations concerning the distribution of SCLs in NIDs, a remarkable success altogether. Another major achievement is showing that wh-items display a finer-grained typology than commonly assumed and making apparent that their placement in the CP-layer corresponds to clearly distinct interpretations. Furthermore, P also succeeds in treating wh-movement and V-to-C movement as independent phenomena, triggered by different checking requirements. Furthermore, the book fosters new lines of research for outstanding open questions: P gives a new understanding of the role of functional projections in microvariation, new perspectives on clitic doubling, and interesting clues for a fruitful comparison of verb-second phenomena in Rhaetoromance and Germanic varieties.

On the negative side, the organization of the book makes it difficult for the reader to fully evaluate P’s proposals, for one finds obstacles in obtaining an overall articulation of the left-periphery of sentence—a task that Ch. 7 only partially accomplishes. Furthermore, the many empirical and theoretical consequences of her hypothesis are only partially developed, often in a quite speculative way. More should be said, for instance, concerning the functional explosion adopted, for even though its theoretical foundation is programmatically semantic, it relies heavily on morphology in the case of SCLs. Another unsolved theoretical issue concerns movement, for P crucially relies on minimality and the head movement constraint to account for the distribution of certain items, without rendering an explicit formulation of these conditions or the exact application to the cases at hand, which results in an ad hoc machinery.

On the whole, although disagreement may exist on P’s foundational hypothesis or particular analyses, the outcome is clearly positive, for besides shedding new light on significant empirical and theoretical issues, it is a piece of rigorous work. Therefore, it is fair to say that this book stands as a major contribution to Romance syntax in particular, and comparative grammar and dialectology in general.