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

Abstract

This article presents a syntactic analysis of the third 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 spell-out 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

Keywords

• Syntax
• Split CP
• Northern Italian Dialects
• Friulian
• Subject Clitics
• split subject features