A Syntactic Analysis of the Subject Clitic "a" in the Friulian Variety of Campone

Abstract

This article presents a syntactic analysis of the third person subject clitic a in Camponese, a heretofore unstudied Friulian variety. Following Poletto's (2000) map of subject clitics, we argue that it bears [+third person] features, and is, in fact, the spellout of the functional head Subj°, located in the highest projection of TP (following Rizzi & Shlonsky 2007). In the first part of the article, we offer a detailed description of the distribution and syntactic properties of the subject clitic a, identifying its position in relation to the other elements that occur in the CP and TP. In the second part we discuss two proposals put forward to account for split clitics like a-l in the related variety of Forni di Sotto, where a and l are held to be part of a single clitic al (Manzini & Savoia 2009, Calabrese & Pescarini 2014. We show that such an account is incompatible with the case of Campone, where the clitics a and l are clearly separate: l is a [uφ]-clitic (Roberts 2010) and is located lower in the TP than the clitic a. We conclude with an analysis, which proposes the integration of Poletto's (2000) typology with a fifth type, corresponding to the clitic a of Campone.

Subject Clitics in Microcontact: A Case Study from Heritage Friulian in Argentina and Brazil

“…There are two exceptions to this restriction in Friulian subject clitics: i) second person singular is generally immune to this restriction, as the subject clitic tu is realized even when it cooccurs with other pronominal clitics and with negation; ii) the subject clitic a, unlike other subject clitics, in some varieties appears before negation and its realization is not affected by the cooccurrence of other clitics; according toPoletto (2000) a is not an agreement clitic, but rather a deictic clitic located in CP, which would explain its idiosyncratic behavior; other works (see in particularCasalicchio & Masutti, 2015) provide evidence that the clitic a in Friulian is a real agreement marker, as shown by its ability to doubles lexical subjects and is repeated in both conjuncts in coordinated structures.Downloaded from Brill.com10/25/2021 03:27:07AM via free access…”

Towards a Typology of Zero Aboutness: Expletive A in Fornese and Chiru in Cilentano

“…The behavior of the discourse-pragmatic expletive a in Fornese can be analogously seen as satisfying a syntactic requirement whereby, if no overt or null aboutness XP is present, zero aboutness must be phonologically realized. It is important to note that Casalicchio and Masutti (2015) independently show that, in the nearby variety of Campone, a lexicalizes Subject • head by virtue of bearing [+ third person] feature. In Fornese, a is found in complementary distribution with overt lexical and pronominal subjects, which suggests that, in this variety, a sits in the specifier position of SubjectP.…”