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Article published In:
Variation in C: Comparative approaches to the Complementizer Phrase
Edited by Jacopo Garzonio and Silvia Rossi
[Linguistic Variation 18:2] 2018
► pp. 315–335

Complementizer doubling and subject extraction in Italo-Romance

| Università Ca’Foscari – Venezia

In this article I analyze the complementizer doubling construction attested in some early and modern Italo-Romance varieties, where a preposed (clausal or non clausal) constituent associated to the selected clause appears in the embedded left periphery preceded and followed by a subordinating complementizer. While the higher complementizer is uncontroversially interpreted as a lexicalization of the head Force°, the lower complementizer has been taken to lexicalize either the functional head Topic° or the functional head Fin°. Relying on previous formal analyses of subject extraction, I argue that in the varieties in which the lower complementizer lexicalizes Fin°, its presence reflects the lexicalization of the mood features encoded by Fin°, and is ultimately due to the extraction of the thematic subject out of the embedded clause through Spec,FinP, a movement strategy made possible by the presence of an expletive pro in the canonical preverbal subject position.

Keywords: complementizer doubling, left periphery, clausal adjunct, topicalization, subject extraction, morphological syncretism, Italo-Romance
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Complementizer doubling in early Italo-Romance
  • 3.Splitting the Topic field: Evidence from complementizer tripling
  • 4.Complementizer doubling in modern varieties of Italo-Romance
  • 5.Subject extraction and criterial constraints in complementizer doubling structures
    • 5.1The subject criterion and the mood features of Fin°
    • 5.2Fin° as a criterial head
    • 5.3Residual issues
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.00020.mun
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