Grand Meeting 2006 in Solf

Syntactic encoding of Aspect in some Northern Italian dialects

Cecilia Poletto Università di Padova e Università di Venezia

In this work I analyse a number of constructions that encode aspectual distinctions in some Northern Italian dialects. On the basis of a survey on aspectual distinctions in several dialects, I show that aspect can be encoded by different elements in the syntactic structure of the clause.

The debate in the syntactic literature concerning the status of sentences containing an auxiliary, whether auxiliaries are simply functional heads inserted in a monoclausal structure identical to the one found in simple tenses (see Cinque (2001)) or require a number of additional functional projections (as Kayne (1994) proposes) has clearly had an influence on how the ASIS projection has selected the topics and the make up of the survey. The general questionnaires have brought to light a number of interesting constructions which were not known before. Many of the nothern Italian dialects have forms which are referred to in the literature as “passé surcomposé”.

In Poletto (1991) I made a pilot study of this construction and put forth the hypothesis that terminative aspect can be encoded by an auxiliary head inserted directly in the syntactic head of Asp° higher that the position where the past participle of the main verb is located. Given that the auxiliary does not have a thematic grid on its own, it does not have any VP (or vP) either. The same type of explanation applies to cases of phrasal verbs where (once again) a terminative aspectual distinction is expressed by means of a lexical preposition, which, as I will show, can also be analysed as being directly inserted in the head of the relevant Asp° projection . However, progressive and prospective aspect apparently require a more complex structure selecting either an infinitival form or what looks at first sight like a bi-clausal structure. I examine the structural status of the clause embedded under the auxiliary and show that progressive is syntactically more complex than terminative aspect.

Although the dialects represented in the ASIS sample display different constructions to express aspectual distinction they all seem to point out towards the conclusion that progressive constructions are syntactically more complex with respect to other types of aspects, which in turn shows that, while syntactic theory is relevant for the makeup of a dialectal enterprise, dialectal data can in turn be relevant for syntactic theory itself.