Towards a Finer-Grained Theory of Italian Participial Clausal Architecture

Abstract

Much of the recent literature on clitic placement in the Romance languages is converging on the idea that the clause contains three different domains for complement clitic placement. Benincà (2006), for example, provides arguments based on Medieval Romance for a complement clitic placement site in the C-domain (see also Benincà, 1983 and Uriagereka, 1995); Kayne (1989, 1991) gives arguments based on French and Italian for complement clitic placement in the Idomain (see also Martins, 1994 for Portuguese); and, more recently, Cardinaletti and Shlonsky (2004), Cardinaletti (2008), Ledgeway and Lombardi (2004), and Tortora (2000, 2002, to appear) provide evidence for a relatively low clitic placement site, immediately outside the VP (the Vdomain). The question of whether all three domains (C, I, and V) could be available for complement clitics in a single language, or whether languages only make available one or the other domain, is an empirical question which needs to be examined on a language by language basis. A related theoretical question (but one which we do not address in this paper) is why some languages utilize one domain and not the others. The paper is organized as follows: in section 2.1, we present evidence from the behavior of Impersonal si for low clitic placement in Italian participial clauses. In section 2.2, we support the conclusion drawn in section 2.1 by examining the behavior of the clitic ci as it is used with the Italian verb volerci ‘to be necessary.’ We show that the behavior and interpretation of this verb in participial clauses (which is more restricted than that found in finite clauses) is best understood if we take participial clauses to have no access to the higher inflectional field. Section 3 concludes.

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