This book presents and analyzes various features of the morphosyntax of Borgomanerese, a Gallo-Italic dialect spoken in the town of Borgomanero, in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy. The study is highly comparative, drawing on the literature on numerous other Italian dialects and Romance
languages (as well as English), to inform our understanding of the Borgomanerese phenomena. Christina Tortora takes the many unusual and understudied (and often novel) facts of Borgomanerese grammar as compelling grounds for revisiting and reformulating current analyses of syntactic phenomena in
these other languages. The phenomena treated include the syntax and semantics of the weak locative in presentational sentences; the syntax of object clitics and argument prepositions; the syntax of subjects and subject clitics; the syntax of interrogatives; clausal architecture; and the relationship
between orthography and theoretical analysis.
The principal value of this book lies both in the rich description of the morphosyntactic phenomena of Borgomanerese, many of which have not been previously reported in the literature, and in the consequent novel analyses developed, which
contribute insights for other languages and dialects, and advance our understanding of syntax and syntactic theory in general.
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction
2. The syntax and semantics of the weak locative
Introduction
1. Unaccusative verb classes
2. The syntactic manifestation of the GOAL / non-GOAL distinction in Borgomanerese
3. SOURCE-entailing verbs and the existential
4. The weak
locative goal argument in Italian
5. English non-existential weak there as a weak locative goal argument
3. Object clitics in simple tense, complex predicate, and imperative clauses
Introduction
1. Generalized enclisis in the simple tenses
2. Enclisis with past participles in the
compound tenses
3. Variation in placement: the nature of the clitic itself
4. Restructuring verbs
5. Enclisis in causative constructions
6. Enclisis with imperatives
7. Clitic combinations
4. Object clitics and locative prepositions
Introduction
1. Argument locatives
as another type of "adverbial host"
2. The preposition's complement
3. Remaining issues
5. Subject Clitics
Introduction
1. Subject clitic pronouns in Northern Italian dialects
2. Subject clitics in Borgomanerese: an overview
3. The subject clitic i
4. Third person
singular l and la
5. The second person singular subject clitics tal and t
6. The subject clitic a
7. The subject clitic ngh
8. The impersonal clitic s
6. Interrogatives
Introduction
1. Interrogative pronouns
2. The missing preposition
3. The difference between cus
and que
4. Doubly-filled comp and cleft questions
Appendix: Verb Conjugations
References
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Christina Tortora is Professor of Linguistics at the City University of New York (College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center). She has twice been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (2001 and 2011-12) and is the editor of The Syntax of Italian Dialects (OUP 2003). She has both
a National Science Foundation Grant and a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, to support her research on Appalachian English syntax.
Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin
Locality - Edited by Enoch Olade Aboh, Maria Teresa Guasti and Ian Roberts
Variation in Datives - Edited by Beatriz Fernandez and Edited by Ricardo Etxepare
