Syntactic variation: The dialects of Italy (review)

Despite being a relatively new field, dialect syntax has figured prominently in Romance and theoretical linguistics over recent decades. One need only think of the debate on argument marking, the structure of the clause, negation, complementation, and complex predication. The principal focus of this debate has been on parametric microvariation. The transition from early varieties of Latin to Romance was characterized by a number of typological changes, and many of the subtle discrepancies that are attested nowadays across Romance bear testimony to the microvariation that can be encompassed by single linguistic types. Consider word order. While being classified as SVO languages on a par with better-known Romance languages, some dialects of Italy exhibit focusing strategies that are claimed to have derived from Medieval Romance and are reminiscent of V2. In some syntactic domains, the extent of variation attested is more substantial than one would expect, typically as a result of the different vicissitudes of specific typological trends across dialects. This is the case with alignment, as some dialects have restored the predominantly accusative alignment of Latin, whereas others still testify to the shift to active alignment that, having originated in Latin, then yielded one of the principal hallmarks of Romance syntax. With respect to the marking of relations between heads and dependents, by contrast, most Romance languages have maintained the Latin head marking system, at least insofar as the subject is concerned, whereas it is a matter of debate whether French and some northern dialects of Italy have moved to a dependent marking system. Dialect syntax sheds light on the possible parameters of variation in the interfaces between discourse, semantics, morphology, and syntax, while enhancing our understanding of the syntactic effects of those hierarchies that can be claimed to be part of the architecture of human language (for instance, the definiteness hierarchy).

The collection of articles in this book stems from the first Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax Meeting held in April 2005. The aim of this now annual conference is to stimulate theoretical debate on synchronic and diachronic syntax (as well as morphology) in the light of novel evidence from the dialects of Italy. ¹ This is an undeniable contribution of the book that the conference has produced, which I discuss below. The editors' introduction provides an overview of the state of the art in Italian dialect syntax, and its principal and most recent contributions to linguistic theory. It is followed by seventeen peer-reviewed essays in three thematic areas: nominal structure, verbal structure, and the left periphery of the clause. Although the essays take diverse approaches to language analysis, one must concur with the editors that rigorous and systematic study of dialect data will yield empirically robust generalizations and inform important theoretical assumptions, regardless of the particular framework within which they are couched.

Part 1, 'Nominal structures', comprises six essays. PAOLA BENINCÀ, in 'Headless relatives in some Old Italian varieties', shows that the comparative analysis of headless relatives in closely cognate dialects uncovers important characteristics of this construction. For example, case matching between the WH-pronoun of the headless relative and the empty antecedent turns out to be a constraint that is operative only in some languages. VERNER EGERLAND's 'On Old Italian uomo and the classification of indefinite expressions' proposes a typology of indefinites derived from nominals for 'man' (lexical DP, universal generic expression, existential episodic expression, specific expression), arguing that while the types identified form stages of a unidirectional path of grammaticalization, the fourth stage (specific expression) can derive directly from the second one (universal generic expression). In 'Syncretism and suppletion in clitic systems: Underspecification, silent clitics or neither?', M. RITA MANZINI and LEONARDO M. SAVOIA take issue with previous analyses of syncretism and suppletion in Romance clitic systems that consider syncretic and suppletive patterns to be underspecified lexical entries that realize abstract syntactic patterns or license silent items. They propose that morphosyntactic structure is built directly...