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ADAM LEDGEWAY

OLD NEAPOLITAN WORD ORDER: SOME INITIAL OBSERVATIONS

1. Introduction

Undoubtedly one of the most striking differences between modern and medievalRomance varieties is manifested in the, often, radically differing word order patternsthey permit. By way of illustration, consider the old Neapolitan sentences in (1a-b)and their modern Italian translations in (2a-b):

1 a e viechy reduceva ad etate iuvenile (56.35)1

and old she-brought-back to age juvenile ‘and she could make the old young again’

b E de poy queste parole ademandao lo messayo licencia (55.25)And after these words asked the messenger permission ‘And following these words the messenger asked permission to leave’

2 a e riportava i vecchi a età giovanileand she-brought-back the old to age juvenile

b E dopo queste parole il messaggero domandò licenzaAnd after these words the messenger asked permission

(1a) and (1b) exemplify a common early Romance structure in which the prever-bal position is occupied by some constituent other than the subject, namely the directobject (viechy) and a non-subcategorized adverbial phrase (de poy queste parole),respectively. In the former case, the fronted rhematic direct object, which conveysnew information, constitutes an example of informational focus,2 and contrastssharply with modern Romance varieties such as Italian, where preposing of rhematic

1 This and all subsequent examples of old Neapolitan are taken from the early fourteenth-centuryprose text Libro de la destructione de Troya. Volgarizzamento napoletano trecentesco da Guido delleColonne, ed. by Nicola De Blasi, Rome, Bonacci, 1986.

2 See Knud Lambrecht, Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus and the MentalRepresentations of Discourse Referents, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, ch. 5.

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constituents is only found under quite restrictive pragmatic conditions (namely, tolicense contrastive focus),3 insofar as rhematic objects conveying informationalfocus canonically occur in postverbal position (cf. 2a). Similarly, example (1b)demonstrates how when the preverbal position is occupied by a constituent distinctfrom the subject, the latter, whenever overtly realized, is generally required to followthe verb, giving rise to a case of verb-subject inversion. Significantly, in this andsimilar examples of inversion the subject does not simply follow the verb but alsoprecedes any other sentential constituents (subcategorized or otherwise), witnessthe order subject (lo messayo) + direct object (licencia) in (1b). In modern Italian,by contrast, postverbal subjects generally follow their associated objects and othersentential constituents,4 and in such cases are typically associated with rhematic in-terpretations, whereas the postverbal subject in (1b) is clearly thematic. Conse-quently, in the modern Italian translation of (1b) illustrated in (2b) the thematicsubject obligatorily occurs in preverbal position.

Word order patterns such as those just considered, which can be easily replicatedfor many early Romance varieties, have led a number of linguists to argue that me-dieval Romance word order was characterized by a verb second (V2) constraint.5 Ac-

120 Adam Ledgeway

3 See Paola Benincà, L’ordine degli elementi della frase e le costruzioni marcate. Costruzioni conordine marcato degli elementi, in Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, ed. by Lorenzo Renzi,Bologna, il Mulino, 1988, pp. 129-43 (§1.2.3). Apparent counterexamples to this generalization are themodern dialects of southern Italy which are said to preserve preverbal information focus (cf. Paola Ben-incà and Cecilia Poletto, Topic, Focus, and V2. Defining the CP Sublayers, in The Structure of CP andIP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures. Volume 2, ed. by Luigi Rizzi, Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress, pp. 52-75 (p. 58)). On a restricted type of informational focus in modern Italian uniquely licensedin conjunction with contrastive focus, see Benincà & Poletto, Topic, 61-2.

4 See Paola Benincà and Giampaolo Salvi, L’ordine normale degli elementi nella frase semplice, inRenzi, Grande grammatica, 119-29 (p. 125); and Adriana Belletti, Aspects of the Low VP Area, in Rizzi,Structure of CP and IP, pp. 16-1 (§3).

5 See, among others, Laura Vanelli, Lorenzo Renzi and Paola Benincà, Typologie des pronoms sujetsdans les langues romanes, in Actes du XVIIe Congrès International de Linguistique et Philologie Ro-manes. Volume 3: Linguistique descriptive, phonétique, morphologie et lexique, Aix-en-Provence, Uni-versité de Provence, 1995, pp. 163-76; Laura Vanelli, Strutture tematiche in italiano antico, inTema-Rema in italiano, ed. Harro Stammerjohann, Tübingen, Narr, 1986), pp. 249-73; Laura Vanelli,Ordine delle parole e articolazione pragmatica nell’italiano antico: la “prominenza” pragmatica dellaprima posizione nella frase, in Italant: per una grammatica dell’italiano antico, ed. by Lorenzo Renzi,Padua, Centro stampa Palazzo Maldura University of Padua, 1998, pp. 73-89; Marianne Adams, OldFrench, Null Subjects, and Verb Second Phenomena, unpublished doctoral thesis, UCLA, 1987; BarbaraVance, Null Subjects and Syntactic Change in Medieval French, unpublished doctoral thesis, CornellUniversity, 1989; Barbara Vance, Syntactic Change in Medieval French. Verb-Second and Null Subjects,Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1997; Paola Benincà, Complement Clitics in Medieval Romance: The Tobler-Mus-safia Law, in Clause Structure and Language Change, ed. by Adrian Battye and Ian Roberts, Oxford,Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 325-44; Paola Benincà, On the Functional Structure of the Left Pe-riphery: Evidence from Medieval Romance, unpublished manuscript, University of Padua, 2003; JosepMaria Fontana, Phrase Structure and the Syntax of Clitics in the History of Spanish, unpublished doc-toral thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1993; Josep Maria Fontana, On the Integration of Second Po-sition Phenomena, in Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, ed. by Ans van Kemenade and NigelVincent, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 207-49; Ian Roberts, Verbs and DiachronicSyntax. A Comparative History of English and French, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1993; Fernande Dupuis,

cordingly, in declarative root clauses the verb generally occurs in second positionpreceded by some other constituent of the clause, possibly, though not necessarily,the subject. In what follows it will be demonstrated how a detailed textual analysisof the early philological evidence upholds such a conclusion also for early four-teenth-century Neapolitan, a language which has hitherto not been considered inthis respect. The results of the present study therefore prove particularly significant,inasmuch as they provide a valuable analysis of a key aspect of the early grammarof an otherwise little-studied southern Italian dialect, whilst at the same time pro-viding further significant support for the broad areal distribution of V2 in medievalRomance.6

2. Old Neapolitan: A V2 language

2.1 A Quantitative AnalysisFor the purposes of the present study, a 50-page sample of the Libro de la de-

structione de Troya (De Blasi, pp. 47-97), an early fourteenth-century Neapolitanprose text, was analysed and all examples of finite declarative root and embeddedclauses were recorded.7 The statistical information regarding root clauses gleanedfrom this sample is presented below in Table 1, where clauses have been furtherclassified according to whether they contain a transitive,8 an unaccusative, or an ath-ematic predicate:9

Old Neapolitan Word Order: Some Initial Observations 121

L’expression du sujet dans les subordonnées en ancien français, unpublished doctoral thesis, Universityof Montreal, 1989); Monique Lemieux and Fernande Dupuis, The Locus of Verb Movement in Non-Asymmetric Verb-Second Languages: The Case of Middle French, in Battye and Roberts, Clause Struc-ture, pp. 80-109; Ilza Ribeiro, Evidence for a Verb-Second Phase in Old Portuguese, in Battye andRoberts, Clause structure, pp. 110-39; Giampaolo Salvi, La frase semplice, in Renzi, Grande grammat-ica, pp. 29-113; and Id., La formazione della struttura di frase romanza. Ordine delle parole e cliticidal latino alle lingue romanze antiche, Tübingen, Niemeyer, in press.

6 There is clear evidence that V2 is not limited to the medieval period but, rather, continues there-after, at least in some Romance varieties. For example, Lemieux and Dupuis, Locus, p. 81, argue thatMiddle French (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) was also characterized by a V2 constraint.

7 It should be noted, however, that our analysis does not take into consideration relative clauses(whether headed by a complementizer or a relative pronoun), which will form the subject of a separateforthcoming study, or those clauses containing a preverbal sì. As argued in Ledgeway, ‘Satisfying V2:Sì Clauses in Old Neapolitan’ (unpublished manuscript, University of Cambridge, in prep.), clauses ofthe latter type are characterized by some quite different properties and must be kept quite distinct fromV2 in the technical sense.

8 We use ‘transitive’ here as a short-hand term to refer to all predicates with an external argument,irrespective of whether they additionally assign an internal argument (viz. unergatives, mono-, and di-transitives).

9 We use ‘athematic’ here to refer to those predicates which do not assign either an external or in-ternal argument but, rather, inherit their argument structure directly from their non-finite verbal com-plement (infinitive, participle, or gerund). Such auxiliary structures include, among others, the perfectiveauxiliaries (avere ‘have’, essere ‘be’), modals (dovere / avere a ‘must’, potere ‘can’, volere ‘want’), as-pectuals (stare ‘be’, (in)commenzare ‘begin’, ire ‘go’, venire ‘come’), and causatives (fare ‘make’, las-sare ‘let’).

10 See, for example, Benincà, Complement Clitics, pp. 326, 329, 331-33, 338; Lemieux and Dupuis,Locus, p. 83; Ribeiro, Old Portuguese, p. 26; and Fontana, Second Position, p. 210.

11 See Benincà, Clitic Positions, pp. 333, 338-39.12 See Benincà, Clitic Positions, p. 329.

Adam Ledgeway122

The results of Table 1 highlight how in purely statistical terms old Neapolitan canbe broadly described as a V2 language, inasmuch as just under 43% of all rootclauses were found to be V2, with similar results for individual predicate types (rang-ing from 37% to 54%), whereas V3 and V1 clauses only accounted for 24% and22%, respectively, of all root clauses. Of course, such crude statistical data cannotbe taken as providing conclusive evidence, especially in view of the existence ofother competing orders, in particular V3 and V1. Nevertheless, it is still possible tomaintain a V2 analysis for old Neapolitan, if V2 is strictly understood in a technicalsense and not as a simple descriptive label. In particular, as has been frequently ar-gued for other early Romance varieties,10 V2 is strictly understood here as a syntacticconstraint which requires the finite verb in root clauses to move to the otherwiseempty C(omplementizer) position. This verb movement operation is generally,though not invariably, accompanied by a further movement rule which fronts one (ormore) salient constituent(s) to a preverbal position (the specifier of C, henceforth[Spec, CP]), where it receives a (contrastively / informationally) focalized or the-maticized interpretation. Consequently, whether the verb superficially occurs, forexample, in first, second, third, or fourth position, the V2 generalization nonethelessconsistently holds, insofar as the verb is invariably assumed to have moved to thevacant C position.11

From a typological perspective we can then distinguish on the one hand betweenso-called strict (or rigid) V2-languages and broad (or lax) V2-languages on theother:12 in languages of the former type, including, for example, standard German

Interpreting V2 as the result of verb movement to the vacant C position, weshould expect V2 to be blocked, or at the very least severely restricted, in embeddedclauses since the C position is generally already filled by an overt complementizer.15

13 Even in so-called well-behaved V2 languages like German the V2 constraint cannot be taken asabsolute, inasmuch as V1 and V3 orders, are, albeit to a limited extent, also found there (cf. Sten Vikner,Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the Germanic languages, Oxford, Oxford University Press,1995, p. 90; and Fontana, Second Position, p. 210).

14 See, for example, Paul Kiparsky, Indo-European Origins of Germanic Syntax, in Battye andRoberts, Clause Structure, pp. 140-69 (pp. 140, 143); and Fontana, Second Position, p. 210.

15 This is, of course, an oversimplification in that a small number of Germanic V2 languages, prin-cipally Icelandic (cf. Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson and Höskuldur Thráinsson, On Icelandic Word Order OnceMore, in Modern Icelandic Syntax, ed. by Joan Maling and Annie Zaenen, San Diego, Academic Press,1990, pp. 3-40) and Yiddish (cf. Beatrice Santorini, Two Types of Verb Second in the History of Yiddish,

123Old Neapolitan Word Order: Some Initial Observations

and Dutch, the verb movement rule is accompanied by obligatory fronting of a singleconstituent such that the descriptive V2 constraint is invariably superficially satis-fied,13 whereas in languages of the latter type, including medieval Romance, only theverb movement rule proves obligatory, with variable application of fronting of oneor more sentential constituents, such that the superficial descriptive V2 constraint isnot invariably met. Indeed, it would seem that from a historical perspective the oft-cited rigid characterizations of the V2 constraint represent only a very recent inno-vation within a small subset of the modern Germanic varieties, the original situationin the Indo-European proto-language (witness the comparative evidence of Vedic,Greek, Hittite, early Germanic, and early Romance) being that of a broader V2 typewith at least two left-peripheral (preverbal) positions.14

The (broad) V2 nature of old Neapolitan finds further confirmation in the distri-bution of finite verbs in embedded contexts reported below in Table 2:

in Battye and Roberts, Clause Structure, pp. 53-79), so-called symmetric V2 languages, exhibit gener-alized embedded V2. By contrast, in other Germanic languages (cf. Kiparsky, Indo-European Origins,p. 164 n. 15; Santorini, Two Types, p. 56; and Vikner, Verb Movement, pp. 67, 72) and in early Romance(cf. Vanelli, Strutture tematiche, p. 269, Aafke Hulk and Ans van Kemenade, Verb Second, Pro-drop,Functional Projections and Language Change, in Battye and Roberts, Clause Structure, pp. 227-56 (p.237); Lemieux and Dupuis, Locus, pp. 94ff; Ribeiro, Old Portuguese, pp. 118, 121; Benincà, FunctionalStructure, pp. 14–15, 22–24; and Salvi, La formazione, ch. 1, ch. 3), so-called asymmetric V2 languages,embedded V2 is subject to severe restrictions (see §2.2.7.2 below).

16 See Vanelli, Strutture tematiche, pp. 256, 270 n. 2; Vanelli, Ordine delle parole, pp. 259-61; Ben-incà, Functional Structure, p. 16; Salvi, La formazione, ch.1, pp. 2-5; Alessandra Lombardi and RobertaMiddleton, Alcune osservazioni sull’ordine delle parole negli antichi volgari italiani, in SintAnt. Lasintassi dell’italiano antico. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi (Università Roma Tre, 18-21 set-tembre 2002), ed. by Maurizio Dardano and Gianluca Frenguelli, Rome, Aracne, 2004, pp. 553-82; and

Adam Ledgeway124

Indeed, in contrast to what was noted for root clauses, superficial V2 is not the mostfrequent word order in embedded clauses but comes, an albeit close, second to V1order. Thus, although V2 admittedly continues to prove a common superficial wordorder even in embedded contexts, what is remarkable is that the frequency of V1order has doubled in relation to that found in root clauses, a somewhat surprising re-sult if old Neapolitan were not a V2 language. Under the proposed asymmetrical V2analysis, however, the increased frequency of V1 and the concomitant decrease inV3, V4, V5, and V6 orders is quite expected.

Although such quantitative interpretations of the data provide some significantinsights into old Neapolitan word order and indeed in some respects are arguably in-dicative of asymmetrical V2, qualitative interpretations of the data undoubtedlyprove far more reliable in assessing the V2 status or otherwise of old Neapolitan, es-pecially when coupled together with relevant statistical information. It is to this ap-proach that we turn in the following sections.

2.2 A Qualitative AnalysisIt might be objected that the high frequency of root V2 orders noted above is not

necessarily a surface effect of a V2 constraint, but simply reflects a high percentageof root clauses in which some element, most notably the subject, precedes the verb,giving rise to a surface structure which a priori proves equally as legitimate in a V2language as in a non-V2 SVO language like modern Italian. There are several piecesof evidence, however, that seriously undermine this view, which we shall now con-sider.

2.2.1 Constituent FrontingOut of a total of 350 V2 root clauses only 80 (25 transitives, 37 unaccusatives,

18 athematics), namely 22.8%, were found to be subject-initial, a somewhat surpris-ing result if old Neapolitan were not a V2 language. Rather, as is to be expected ofa V2 language, the preverbal position is not a privileged subject position as is thecase in SVO languages but, rather, constitutes a pragmatically salient position li-censing thematic and rhematic interpretations that is potentially available to all syn-tactic categories, irrespective of their syntactic function and their thematic relationto the predicate.16 Indeed, leaving aside subjects, among the various constituents

Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Sintassi e informazione nell’italiano antico: l’oggetto preverbale, in Dar-dano and Frenguelli, SintAnt, pp. 293–321.


occurring in preverbal position, one finds all complement types, including directobjects (cf. 3a), indirect objects (cf. 3b), various prepositional objects (cf. 3c), andlocative and predicative complements (cf. 3d-e), as well as various kinds of adjunct,including adverbs (cf. 3f-g), adverbial phrases (cf. 3h-i), and various circumstantialclauses (cf. 3j-l):

3 a e sì fuorti cuolpi li donava (66.12)and such strong blows to-it= he-gave ‘and he gave him such strong blows with his sword’

b A questo resposse Iasone (60.12)to this replied Jason ‘Jason replied to this’

c de iuvene faceva viechy (56.34-5)of young she-made old ‘she transformed the young into old’

d In questa citate de Salemina habitava intando lo re Thelamone in this city of Salamis lived then the king Telamon ‘In this city of Salamis there lived at that time King Telamon’ (83.27-8)

e maraviglyoso era lo suono che sse audeva indell’ayro per lo marvellous was the sound that self= heard in-the air through therentinare delle spate (71.17-8)clashing of-the swords ‘the sound of the clashing swords that could be heard in the air was tremen-dous’

f e multo approbaro lo suo consiglyo (93.20)and much they-approved the his counsel ‘they much approved his counsel’

g francamente lo piglyao per le corne (66.26)frankly it= he-took by the horns ‘he simply took it by its horns’

h e per mayure mia secureze lo iurerray (60.22)and for greater my security it= you-will-swear ‘to give me greater assurance thereof you shall swear it’

i a ccavallo ad uno suo forte destriere rompeva le vattaglyeto horse to one his strong war-horse he-broke the battles ‘A stride one of his powerful war-horses he broke up the battles’ (74.14)

j Da poy che nde appero tolto omne cosa intraro After that therefrom= they-had removed each thing they-entered a li templi (74.34)to the temples

‘After they had taken everything from the city, they entered into the temples’k e, poste le vele, se nde tornaro in Grecia (75.23-4)

and placed the sails selves= thence= they-returned in Greece ‘having raised the sails, they returned to Greece’

l e quando le fo licito de se astinire daand when to-him= it-was licit of self= to-abstain fromquella impresa non se volce astinere (86.30-1)that undertaking not self= he-wanted to-abstain ‘and when he was able to refrain from this plan he was not willing to’

2.2.2 ScramblingThe unrestricted accessibility of the preverbal [Spec, CP] position is further con-

firmed by sentences like those exemplified in (4a-d):

4 a ma multo plu me reputo gloriuso de lo valore debut much more myself= I-consider glorious of the valour oftanto nepote [… che…] (50.38-9)such nephew than

‘but I consider myself to be much more glorified by the valour of my nephew[than…]’

b Assay monstrate de essere cortesessema (59.13)very you-show of to-be very-courteous ‘You show yourself to be very kind’

c assay ve èy manifiesto quanto simmo stati‘very to-you= it-is obvious how-much we-are beendommayati e male tractate da li Grieci (93.32-3)damaged and badly treated by the Greeks ‘it is abundantly clear to you how we have been harmed and badly treatedby the Greeks’

d E tanto fo mortale lo spiritum suo cheand so-much it-was mortal the spirit his that to-him=it-l’ensio da lo cuorpo che […] (66.16-7)came-out from the body that ‘And so mortal was its spirit which left its body that […]’

Despite directly modifying a postverbal predicative adjectival complement, the un-derlined adverbial quantifier in each of the four examples above has been fronted,giving rise to a discontinuous structure (for example, multo plu…gloriuso) whichproves wholly ungrammatical in the modern Romance standards, where such mod-ifiers must occur adjacent to their associated adjectives (for example, Italian moltopiù glorioso, assai cortesissima). Such structures, which are quite widely found inold Neapolitan in conjunction with all kinds of syntactic category besides adverbialquantifiers (cf. 5a-f), seem a priori like cases of scrambling, whereby a given con-stituent is moved to a clause-medial position,17 thereby distorting the underlying(canonical) surface linear order and, in many cases, separating modifiers and com-

126 Adam Ledgeway

plements from their associated heads. For instance, in examples (5a-d) the directobject superficially appears in clause-final position preceded by a second (predica-tive / locative / indirect) object which has been scrambled immediately to its left.Similarly, in example (5e) the indirect object of the infinitival complement fare mi-naze ‘to make threats’ has been scrambled out of the embedded clause to a positionabove that of the infinitival complement within the matrix clause, whereas in (5f) theprepositional complement of the adjectival predicate expierti ‘expert’ has beenscrambled to a higher position to the left of the latter.

5 a E sopre la executione de quisto facto averrite inAnd upon the execution of this fact you-will-have invostro caporale e signore Paris mio figlyo e Deyfebo (96.25-6)your corporal and lord Paris my son and Deiphobus ‘And you will have Paris and Deiphobus as your commander and lord in car-rying out this act’

b E poy che foy bene adormentato vidiete in quillo mioAnd after that I-was well asleep I-saw in that mysompno una meraviglyosa visione (91.12-3)dream a marvellous vision ‘After I had fallen fast asleep, I saw in that dream of mine a marvelloussight’

c E Medea disse a Iasone queste parole (61.28-9)And Medea said to Jason these words

d e stando sola Medea inde la camera soa,and staying alone Medea in the room her,revoltavasse a soa memoria quelle parole (60.35-6)she-turned-over=self to her memory those words ‘and alone in her room Medea turned those words over in her mind’

e Iniuriosa cosa è a gentile homo, e specialemente adoffensive thing it-is to gentle man, and especially tohomo cavallaruso, fare minaze (58.18-9)man chivalrous to-make threats ‘It is offensive to make threats to a gentleman, and especially a chivalrousman’


17 This position can perhaps be identified with the clause-medial scrambling position located im-mediately above the lower pre-VP adverbial space discussed in Cinque (Guglielmo Cinque, Adverbs andFunctional Heads. A Cross-linguistic Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press 1999, pp. 117, 214n.7) for modern Italian. On scrambling more generally, see John Ross, Constraints on Variables in Syn-tax, doctoral dissertation, MIT, 1967; and Gert Webelhuth, X-bar Theory and Case Theory, in Govern-ment and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Theory, ed. by Gert Webelhuth, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995,pp. 15-95 (p. 649). For a recent original analysis of scrambling in old Tuscan, according to which scram-bled elements target a focus position within a low left periphery situated in the vP phase, see CeciliaPoletto, La struttura della frase, to appear in Grammatica dell’italiano antico, ed. by Lorenzo Renziand Giampaolo Salvi, unpublished manuscript, University of Padua, 2004; and Cecilia Poletto, The LeftPeriphery of the Low Phase: OV Orders in Old Italian, unpublished paper presented at the Incontro digrammatica generativa, Rome, February 2005.

18 However, on par with modern Italian, when the subject occurs in narrow focus (cf. i.a-c), as is fre-quently the case in unaccusative structures, or when the subject is ‘heavy’ (cf. i.d-f), the subject doesnot immediately follow the verb but, rather, occurs in clause-final position:i a con plu multa grande desonestanza la tene co lluy lo

with more much big dishonesty her= holds with him there Thelamone (83.13)king Telamon ‘and as an even greater act of his dishonourable behaviour King Telamon keeps her prisoner’

b De quisto Eson remase uno figlyolo (49.22-3)Of this Aeson remained one son ‘From this Aeson there remained one son’

c da questa se pote pigylare exemplo onne altra personeform this self= can to-take example each other person ‘everybody else can take example from this’ (62.20-1)

d intuorno de questa mura erano fossate multo larghe et profundearound of these walls were ditches very wide and deepda la parte de fore (78.38-9)from the side of outside ‘And alongside the external city walls there lay very wide and deep ditches’

e Costumata cosa èy intre le femene de non desiderare amore de nullo homousual thing it-is among the women of not to-desire love of no man ‘It is customary among the women not to seek the love of any man’ (58.8)

f se nde farrite lo contrario porriande forse resoltareif thereof=you-will-do the contrary could=therefrom perhaps to-resultaccaysune che forria dampnosa a la vostra salute (94.30-1)occasion that would-be harmful to the your health ‘and if you do not follow [this advice], this might perhaps be harmful to your health’

Adam Ledgeway128

f non so’ in exercicio de vattaglia cossì expierti (89.39)not they-are in exercise of battle so expert ‘they are not so skilled in fighting battles’

In examples (4a-d) it would appear then that the adverbial quantifiers in questionhave first been scrambled to a clause-medial position, thereby stranding their asso-ciated adjectival predicates in situ, before being fronted to clause-initial positionwhere, on account of their quantificational nature, they presumably receive a con-trastively focused interpretation. Not only can we conclude therefore that the pre-verbal position is available to all types of constituent, including scrambledcategories, in accordance with the assumed V2 nature of old Neapolitan, but weshould also note, incidentally, that scrambling, at least of the liberal type discussedabove, seems to be typologically correlated with the V2 parameter (cf. West Ger-manic languages) and its availability in old Neapolitan should consequently be con-sidered another piece of indirect evidence in support of our proposed V2 analysis.

2.2.3 Verb-Subject InversionAnother significant piece of evidence that points to the V2 nature of old Neapoli-

tan comes from the observation that, when a constituent different from the subjectis fronted, this produces verb-subject inversion whenever the subject is overtly re-alized (cf. discussion of (1b) above), contrary to what happens in languages likeItalian.18 Below follow some representative examples (subjects underlined):

For an analysis of postverbal rhematic subjects in Italian, see Luigi Rizzi, Issues in Italian Syntax,Dordrecht, Foris, 1982, Alessandra Giorgi and Giuseppe Longobardi, The Syntax of Noun Phrases,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991; Graziella Saccon, Post-verbal Subjects: A Study Basedon Italian and its Dialects, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1993; Adriana Bellettiand Ur Shlonsky, The Order of Verbal Complements: A Comparative Study, in «Natural Language andLinguistic Theory», 13 (1995), 489-526; Giuseppe Longobardi, “Postverbal” Subjects and the MappingHypothesis, in «Linguistic Inquiry», 31 (2000), 691-702; and Anna Cardinaletti, Toward a Cartographyof Subject Positions, in Rizzi, The structure of CP and IP, pp. 115-65 (§1).


6 a E de la generatione de quisti aucielli narra uno altroand of the generation of these birds relates an otherpoeta, che si clama Ysidoro,inde li libri suoy fabulosamente, ca […] poet, that self=he-calls Isidore, in the books his fantastically that ‘And another poet called Isidor recounts fantastically in his books regardingthe genesis of these birds that […]’ (54.7-8)

b A questo resposse Iasone e disse […] (60.12)to this replied Jason and said […] ‘Jason replied to this and said…’

c A quelle parole resposse lo re Castore in quisto muodoto those words replied the king Castor in this way ‘King Castor replied to those words in this way’ (84.35)

d Ormay, dice la ystoria che […] (67.37)Now says the story that […] ‘Now the story recounts that’

e Poy de queste parole taceo lo valente e sayo cavaliere HectorAfter of these words fell-silent the brave and wise knight Hector ‘After these words the brave and wise knight Hector fell silent’ (90.14)

f Ma non per chella maynera, né a chella intentionebut not for that way nor to that intentionrespondeva lo re Peleo a lo suo nepote (49.30-1)replied the king Peleus to the his nephew ‘But neither for that reason nor with that intention did King Peleus reply tohis nephew’

g poy che se appero salutati insembla, intrao Iasoneafter that selves= they-had greeted together, entered Jasonjoyfully the bedroom allegramenti la camera (61.26-7)‘after they had greeted each other, Jason entered joyfully into the bedroom’

h E contiento fo lo re Priamo per quello parlare (82.26)And happy was the king Priam for that speaking ‘And King Priam was satisfied with that speech’

i e de grosseze era lo muro de quillo palazo XX cubiti (80.31)and of width was the wall of that palace 20 cubits ‘and the wall of that palace was 20 cubits wide’

Adam Ledgeway130

j Allora cessaro le fyamme de lo fuoco ardente (65.19)then ceased the flames of the fire burning ‘The flames of the blazing fire then ceased’

k De poy levaose Medea in piedi (60.30)after lifted=self Medea in feet ‘Afterwards Medea stood up’

l yà non so’ troppo [sic] tiempi passati (81.31)already not are too-much times passed ‘Not very long ago’

Under the proposed V2 analysis, subject inversion in these examples followsstraightforwardly. In particular, if we assume an underlying SVX order (at least fornon-unaccusative structures), verb movement to the C position followed by frontingof some postverbal constituent X to clause-initial position (namely, [Spec, CP]) willinvariably result in the subject immediately following the verb and any other con-stituents (see §2.2.6 below for further qualification about underlying subject posi-tions).

2.2.4 Informational FocusAs already observed in relation to (1a) above, non-clitic-doubled direct objects

with thematic or rhematic interpretations are frequently found to occur in clause-ini-tial position in old Neapolitan, witness the representative examples in (7a-f):

7 a e sì fuorti cuolpi li donava (66.12)and such strong blows to-it he-gave ‘and he gave him such strong blows with his sword’

b Li nuostri Diey invocamo in testimonio che non simmo intrate in questathe our Gods we-invoke in testimony that not we-are entered in thiscitate a quella intentione (55.3-4)city to that intention ‘We call upon our Gods as our witness that we did not enter this city withsuch an intention’

c Le barbute e li capielli de ferro se scippavano da le capo (71.19-20)the chin-guards and the hats of iron selves=they-removed from the heads ‘they tore off each others chin-guards and helmets’

d (levaoese da sedere) e la soa intentione disse in questo muodo (92.19)he-raised=self from seating and the his intention he-said in this way ‘(he stood up) and announced his intention in the following way’

e e la vostra tranquillitate pacifica volite sottomettere a quilli partiti chi so’and the your tranquillity peaceful you-want to-submit to those parties who areplini de omnen periculi (94.32-3)full of all dangers ‘you want to entrust your peaceful tranquillity in those parties that are facedby many dangers’

19 See Lambrecht, Information Structure, p. 201; Vanelli, Ordine delle parole, pp. 80-1, 84-6; Ben-incà, Functional Structure, §3.2.1; and Benincà and Poletto, Topic, §3.

20 See Vanelli, Strutture tematiche, pp. 84-86.21 For an otherwise exceptional case of apparent V2 in modern Italian root declaratives involving

anaphoric preposed objects (so-called anteposizione anaforica), see Benincà, L’ordine degli elementi,p. 141; and Benincà and Poletto, Topics, §3.2.

22 See, for instance, Adolfo Mussafia, Una particolarità sintattica della lingua italiana dei primi sec-oli, in Miscellanea di filologia e linguistica, dedicata alla memoria di Napoleone Caix e Ugo AngeloCanello (1886) pp. 255-61, 474-75; repr. in Adolfo Mussafia. Scritti di filologia e linguistica, ed. by An-tonio Daniele and Lorenzo Renzi, Padua, Antenore, 1983, pp. 291-301; Adolphe Tobler, VermischteBeiträge zur französischen Grammatik, Erste Reihe, Leipzig (n.p., 1875; repr. Amsterdam: Rodopi,1971); Herbert Ramsden, Weak Pronoun Position in the Early Romance Languages, Manchester, Man-chester University Press, 1963; Benincà, Complement Clitics; Giampaolo Salvi, La sopravvivenza dellalegge di Wackernagel nei dialetti occidentali della Penisola iberica, in «Medioevo Romanzo», 15 (1990),177-210; and Salvi, La formazione, ch. 4.


f nulla cosa puotti trovare che me fosse grato a preda (90.36-7)no thing I-could to-find that to-me=was pleasing to prey ‘I could find nothing worthy of hunting’

In all the examples above the fronted object is informationally new, inasmuch asit introduces into the narrative a referent which has not previously figured in thediscourse, giving rise to an example of what is generally known as informationalfocus.19 Although rhematic objects can equally occur in postverbal position, espe-cially when they occur in wide focus together with their associated predicate, theyalso frequently occur in preverbal position in all early Romance varieties, a markedsyntactic strategy whose origins are probably to be sought in the need to isolate theobject from its verb when the former alone constitutes under narrow focus the centralinformational focus of the clause.20 Significantly, such a strategy is not available inan SVO language like Italian where rhematic direct objects (whether under wide ornarrow focus) are restricted to occurring in postverbal position and direct objects canonly be fronted under particular pragmatic conditions, such as when they bear con-trastive focus, an option also available to old Neapolitan (cf. 7f), or when they aretopicalized through clitic left-dislocation, again an option also available to oldNeapolitan (see §2.2.5 below).

From the observed contrast between Italian on the one hand and old Neapolitanon the other it is possible to infer that fronting of rhematic direct objects in oldNeapolitan is movement to [Spec, CP] fed (or better, licensed) by prior movementof the finite verb to the C position, an operation which generally proves impossiblein Italian where generalized verb movement to C in declarative root clauses, namelyV2, fails to obtain.21

2.2.5 Clitic Placement: The Proclisis-Enclisis AlternationOn a par with other early Romance varieties, the distribution of proclisis and en-

clisis in old Neapolitan finite root clauses is subject to a degree of variation in accor-dance with specific structural factors.22 Following in essence Benincà (Complement

Clitics) and Salvi (La formazione), the preverbal space, the so-called left peripheryof the clause, can be understood in terms of two distinct sub-spaces as illustratedschematically in (8):23

8 [TopP HTs, Circum.s, Disloc.s [CP Theme/Focus Vfinite [IP…(S) tVfinite (X)]]]

Immediately above the sentential core (namely, I(nflectional)P(hrase)) in whichthe verb and its associated arguments and any adjuncts are generated, we can identifythe complementizer domain (namely, C(omplementizer)P(hrase)), an area whichhosts the raised finite verb in the head C position and thematicized or focalized con-stituents in its associated specifier position ([Spec, CP]). In turn, CP can optionallybe preceded by an extra-sentential topicalization space (namely, TopP(hrase)), spe-cialized in hosting hanging topics (HTs), scene-setting and circumstantial elements(Circum.s), and dislocated (Disloc.s) constituents. In the technical literature, the hi-erarchical positions filled by these pragmatic relations are in turned identified withthe Specifier positions of corresponding functional projections such as FrameP,SceneP, and TopP.

Now, CP, which apparently only provides for one (specifier) position,24 is to beequated with the position targeted by fronted constituents as part of the V2 rule trig-gered by the prior movement of the finite verb to C (cf. examples (7a-f) above),whereas the hosting of one or more constituents within the topicalization space (in-formally labelled TopP above) is strictly interpreted as independent of the V2 con-straint. Indeed, this view is directly supported by the distribution of clitic placement.In particular, in the presence of a fronted constituent within [Spec, CP] any clitics(given in small caps below) invariably occur proclitic to the verb. This can be demon-strated by examples like those illustrated in (9a-c) where the fronted constituent isa quantified phrase and hence, at least under normal interpretive conditions, inca-pable of undergoing topicalization,25 as well as by examples of informational focuslike (9d) which we have independently argued (§2.2.4) to involve fronting to [Spec,CP] driven by V2:

9 a e tutte quelle tre Dee SE spoglyaro le vestemente loro (91.34-5)and all those three Goddesses selves=they-removed the clothing their ‘and all three of those Goddesses undressed’

b e tutti SE proferzero largamente co le persune e co lo avere loro (88.17-8)and all selves=committed broadly with the persons and with the wealth their ‘and they all broadly committed themselves with their persons and theirwealth’

132 Adam Ledgeway

23 See also Kiparsky, Indo-European Origins, who argues that there are two left-peripheral operatorpositions in English and early Germanic.

24 See Benincà, Complement Clitics, p. 333; Ribeiro, Old Portuguese, p. 126; and Salvi, La for-mazione, ch.3, pp. 4–5.

25 See Guglielmo Cinque, Types of A-bar Dependencies, Cambridge Mass., MIT Press, 1990.

c e tutti LE spetterravano per terra multo crudelmente (74.11)and all them=they-put-down for ground very cruelly ‘and they cut them all down very cruelly’

d e sì fuorti cuolpi LI donava (66.12)and such strong blows to-it he-gave ‘and he gave him such strong blows with his sword’

In contrast, when the topicalization space hosts fronted elements and CP remainsempty, all clitics obligatorily appear enclitic to their associated verb,26 witness thefollowing examples of hanging topic (cf. 10a) and left-dislocation (cf. 10b-c):

10 a E chiunqua avesse desiderato la gloria e la recheze de chesto auroand whoever had desired the glory and riches of this golderaLE necessario inprimo de fare battaglya con chisti duy buoy (50.7-8)it-was=to-him necessary first of to-do battle with this two oxen ‘And whoever had wanted the glory and riches of this gold had first to dobattle with these two oxen’

b le soro vostre, le muglyere e le figlyole per la plu gran parte scazate dathe sisters your, the wives and the daughters for the more big part driven from le lloro maysune tenenoLLE subiecte a vile e luxuriuese servicie (81.35-6)the their homes they-hold=them subjected to nasty and lustful services ‘As for your sisters, wives and daughters for the most part taken from theirhomes, they force them to perform horrid and lustful acts’

c Amico mio Iasone, de queste toy promissiune voglyoNDE essere certaFriend my Jason, of these your promises I-want=thereof to-be certaine secura (60.21-2)and sure ‘My dear friend Jason, I want to be entirely sure of these promises of yours’

In this respect, truly illustrative is the comparison afforded by examples (9d) and(10b), in which the clitic is proclitic in the former but enclitic in the latter, despitethe verb in both cases being preceded by its direct object.

Now these facts find a straightforward explanation in terms of the traditional To-bler-Mussafia Law, one of the principal generalizations of which states that enclisisobtains whenever the verb occurs in clause-initial position. Thus, in the case offronting to CP, proclisis invariably obtains since the verb (raised to C) occurs in sec-ond position preceded by a fronted constituent in its specifier. However, wheneverthe topicalization space hosts a hanging topic and/or a left-dislocated constituent


26 Recall that resumptive clitics are obligatory with left-dislocated direct objects, and prove oblig-atory also with hanging topics whenever the latter are not already referenced by a tonic pronoun orsome other epithet (for discussion, see Paola Benincà, The Position of Topic and Focus in the Left Pe-riphery, in Current Studies in Italian Syntax. Essay Offered to Lorenzo Renzi, ed. by Guglielmo Cinqueand Giampaolo Salvi (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), pp. 39–64 (p. 43).

and [Spec, CP] remains empty, only enclisis is possible because the verb now raisedto C technically occurs in clause-initial position, inasmuch as elements containedwithin the extra-sentential topicalization space prove invisible to the Tobler-Mussafiageneralization which only makes reference to the [Spec, CP] position. In short, weinterpret the observed proclisis-enclisis alternation as a side effect of V2 fed by verbraising to C, which creates either a V1 structure and enclisis (no fronting to [Spec,CP]) or a V2 structure and proclisis (fronting to [Spec, CP]).27 This demonstrates thatclitic placement in old Neapolitan proves sensitive to the placement of the finiteverb and any associated fronted constituents within the left periphery, whereas in va-rieties like modern Italian there is no generalized movement of the finite verb to theC-domain (namely, no V2) and there is generalized proclisis.28

2.2.6 V1 Structures & Subject PositionsAlthough it was previously noted that V2 structures represent the most frequent

type of root clause, V1 orders were also observed to occur relatively frequently, ac-counting for 22.3% of all root clauses. Many such clauses involve (asyndetic) coor-dination with a preceding clause, in which the theme of the first clause is interpretedas the theme of the coordinated clause. For instance, in (11) the thematic subject Loduca Nestore of the first clause is also understood as the thematic subject of the sec-ond coordinated clause:

11 [Lo duca Nestore, intesa la soa ambassaria, montao in grandissima ira] ethe duke Nestor heard the his message mounted in very-great wrath and[tramotao li coluri de la face soa] (85.19-20)he-changed the colours of the face his ‘The Duke Nestor, having heard his message, became very angry and changedcolour’

Another frequent source of V1 root declaratives is afforded by presentative con-texts in which, in the absence of a theme, the whole clause typically receives a rhe-matic interpretation occurring in so-called wide focus (answering the question Whathappened?).29 From a syntactic point of view, such clauses prove particularly sig-

134 Adam Ledgeway

27 For a full technical implementation of this idea, see Benincà, Complement Clitics; and Benincà,Functional Structure.

28 For a discussion of the relationship between V2 and clitic placement in Romance, see Benincà,Functional Structure, §5.4.

29 Within the V2 literature V1 root declaratives have been noted to perform a special stylistic func-tion, occurring principally in so-called contexts of ‘lively narrative’ (Kiparsky, Indo-European Origins,p. 163 n.6) characterized by ‘strong discourse cohesion’ (H. Sigurdsson, V1 Declaratives and Verb Rais-ing in Icelandic, in Maling and Zaenen, Modern Icelandic, pp. 41-69 (p. 45); cf. also Lemieux andDupuis, Locus, p. 98; Ribeiro, Old Portuguese, p. 121; Vikner, Verb Movement, pp. 87, 90; Fontana,Phrase Structure, §3.4.3; and Fontana, Second Position, p. 226). For a discussion of null themes/oper-ators in V1 clauses, see Molly Diesing, Verb Movement and the Subject Position in Yiddish, in Proceed-ings of NELS 18, ed. by Jim Blevins & Julie Carter, Amherst, Mass., GLSA, 1990, pp. 124-40 (p. 56fn.14); Lemieux and Dupuis, Locus, p. 98); and Benincà, Functional Structure, §5.4.

nificant in that they can be assumed to preserve the underlying order of constituents,save the verb which, in accordance with the V2 rule, moves to the vacant C position.As is the case in modern Italian (e.g. È arrivato il treno),30 such V1 structures proveparticularly common in conjunction with unaccusative predicates, witness the verb-subject orders illustrated in (12):

12 a e mancavale de la forza (65.37)and was-missing of the force ‘and he was lacking in strength’

b Ma non passerranno tre anne che nne vederrà (55.13)but not will-pass three years that us=he-will-see ‘But before three years have passed, he will see us again’

c Et eranonce ancora multi aucielle vernanti e copia de altri aucielli (56.1-2)and were=there still many birds migrating and lots of other birds ‘And there were still many migrating birds and many other types of bird’

d Era intando lo tiempo de la primavera (69.14)it-was then the time of the spring

In this respect, old Neapolitan and modern Italian superficially pattern alike,inasmuch as the unaccusative subject, standardly considered to occupy the comple-ment position within the V(erb)P(hrase), is invariably preceded by the verb whichraises to the higher Infl(ectional) head and, in the case of old Neapolitan, raises evenfurther to reach the vacant C position in order to satisfy the V2 constraint. This su-perficial similarity between modern Italian (a non-V2 language) and old Neapolitan(a V2 language) soon disappears however when we consider V1 transitive rootclauses. In Italian presentative constructions in conjunction with transitive predicatesthe subject typically occurs in the preverbal position,31 as demonstrated by example(13) which constitutes an appropriate answer to the question Cosa è successo?‘What happened?’:

13 Giorgio ha buttato l’aranciata nel lavandinoGiorgio has thrown the orangeade in-the sink

From this we can deduce that in a non-V2 language like Italian the preverbalsubject position (standardly associated with the [Spec, IP] position) is information-ally-neutral, insofar as it is not exclusively associated with licensing either thematic(given) or rhematic (new) interpretations. In a V2 language like old Neapolitan, bycontrast, we have seen that the preverbal position immediately to the left of theraised verb (namely, [Spec, CP]) is specialized in hosting either thematic or rhematic


30 See Anna Laura Lepschy and Giulio Lepschy, La lingua italiana. Storia, varietà dell’uso, gram-matica (Milan: Bompiani, 1994), p. 146; Salvi, La frase, p. 54; and Benincà, L’ordine degli elementi,pp. 168-70.

31 Benincà, L’ordine degli elementi, p. 119.

fronted constituents. It follows that presentative clauses in conjunction with transi-tive predicates are necessarily V1 in old Neapolitan since only the finite verb isavailable to raise to the C-space, thereby stranding the other arguments of the verbin their base positions and yielding VSO words orders like those in (14a-c), whichprove totally unacceptable in a non-V2 language like Italian (subjects underlined):

14 a Attesta lo dicto Ovidio poeta lo nascimento de li Mirmidoni fabulosamente inAttests the said Ovid poet the birth of the Myrmidons fantastically intal maynera innelle opere soy, a lo XIV libro de Methamorphoseos (49.1-2)such way in-the works his to the XIV book of Metamorphoses ‘Ovid the poet fantastically gives testimony to the birth of the Myrmidons insuch a way in his works, in book XIV of Metamorphoses’

b Dice la ystoria che lo re Peleo appe uno frate (49.12) says the story that the king Peleus had a brother ‘The story recounts that King Peleus had a brother’

c Et averriano bene quisti Greci insultato contra li Troyani (55.29-30)and would-have well these Greeks insulted against the Trojans ‘And these Greeks had indeed apparently offended the Trojans’

In this respect, example (14c) with a compound verb (perfective auxiliary aver-riano ‘would have’ and participle insultato ‘insulted’) proves particularly revealingin that it transparently demonstrates how the finite auxiliary verb has raised to theclause-initial C position, stranding the subject questi Greci and prepositional com-plement contra li Troyani in their base positions to the left and right, respectively,of their associated lexical (non-finite) verb. Effectively, examples like (14c) provideus with a valuable snap-shot of the underlying word order of old Neapolitan, whichwe can see is clearly SVO. Indeed, on the basis of examples like (14c) we can gofurther and claim that old Neapolitan, unlike modern Italian or English, lacked adedicated preverbal subject position or, more technically, did not project [Spec, IP].32

Evidence to this effect is provided by the position of the adverb bene ‘indeed’ in(14d). According to recent proposals,33 adverbs are universally assumed to occupyfixed positions within the clause and adverbs of the bene class are taken within thisframework to occupy a position immediately to the left of the VP, hence a convenientdiagnostic for identifying the left edge of the latter. Returning to (14d), the positionof bene to the immediate left of the subject, non-finite verb, and prepositional objectimplies that these three occupy their base positions within the VP, namely the Spec-

136 Adam Ledgeway

32 The Extended Projection Principle (EPP), which essentially stipulates that all clauses must havea (grammatical) subject, would then appear not to hold for old Neapolitan, at least if interpreted as NP-raising to [Spec, IP]. Of course, it might be that the EPP is licensed in old Neapolitan by raising of thefinite verb to the Infl head en route to C, the rich pronominal Agr(eement) features on the verb in thispro-drop language sufficing to license the subject (cf. Artemis Alexiadou and Elena Anagnostopoulou,‘Parametrizing AGR: Word Order, Verb-Movement and EPP Checking’, in Natural Languages and Lin-guistic Theory 16 (1998), 491-539).

33 See Cinque, Adverbs.

ifier, Head, and Complement positions of VP, respectively, as illustrated in (15):

15 Et [CP averriano [IP taverriano bene [VP [SpecVP questi Greci [V’ insultato [PP contra liTroyani]]]]]]

Indeed, an examination of other VS(X) examples in our corpus (cf. 16a-b)demonstrates that the subject invariably follows any VP-adverbs (including, amongothers, ancora, multo, bene, sempre, plu, mai), thereby confirming our hypothesisthat there is no (preverbal) [Spec, IP] position above the VP available to the subject.Rather, as we have seen, subjects, just like all other constituents, are restricted to oc-curring in their base position within the VP, unless they receive particular pragmaticsalience, in which case they are fronted to [Spec, CP] where they variously receivea thematic (old) or rhematic (new, narrow focus) reading, or to one of the variousspecifier positions within the topicalization space where they receive a topicalizedreading.

16 a Meraviglyavasse multo [VP [SpecVP lo populo de la terra [V’ tmeraviglyavasse [PP de li muodi Marvelled=self much the people of the land of the wayse de le costume de quisti]]] (56.7-8)and of the customs of these ‘The people of this land marvelled greatly at the way and customs of thesepeople’

c Appe ancora [VP [SpecVP questa citate di Troia [V’ tappe [NP VI porte multoHad still this city of Troy VI doors verylarghesseme]]]] (79.1-2)very-wide ‘This city of Troy had as well VI very wide doors’

The lack of a preverbal [Spec, IP] position above the VP is further confirmed bythe order of constituents in embedded V1 clauses. By way of illustration, considerthe examples in (17a-c):

17 a cà dice lo proverbio che […] (67.30-1)that says the proverb that ‘for the proverb says that […]’

b Auduta che appe Antenore questa resposta (84.29)Heard that had Antenor this reply ‘As soon as Antenor had heard this reply’

c senza accaysune dey materia a li Greci et a li Troyani che […] devesserowithout reason it-gave reason to the Greeks and to the Trojans that they-had-totanta gente de tanta fama morire (53.6-9)so-many people of so-much hunger die ‘for no reason it ensured between the Greeks and Trojans that […] so manypeople should die of such great hunger’

In the embedded examples above, the finite verb cannot move to the C position


because this position is already filled by a complementizer (cà / che ‘that’). Allthings being equal, we can then assume that in (17a-b) the verb raises out of the VPto reach the next highest position available, namely the head of IP (Infl). This is di-rectly reflected in the example (17c), where the lexical verb morire ‘to die’ is forcedto remain in its base position within the VP since the Infl head is already filled bythe auxiliary verb devessero. It follows from this that the subject, which immediatelyfollows the finite lexical verb in (17a-b) and immediately precedes the non-finite lex-ical verb in (17c), must occupy a VP-internal position.34 This is an internally-con-sistent result in that it allows us to make a single generalization about subjectpositions valid for both root and embedded clauses, namely that old Neapolitanlacked a dedicated preverbal subject position (namely, [Spec, IP]).35 This does notmean, however, that embedded examples of SV(X) order are not found in oldNeapolitan, but forces us to assume that instances of embedded SV(X) are actuallycases of embedded V2 (see §2.2.7 below).

By way of a final observation, it is worth noting that the lack of an IP-related sub-ject position in old Neapolitan is entirely in keeping with the V2 nature of the lan-guage. Whereas in a non-V2 language like modern Italian, as we have alreadyobserved, the dedicated preverbal subject position licenses, although not exclusively,both thematic subjects (18a) and rhematic subjects in wide focus (cf. 18b),36 in a V2language like old Neapolitan these same pragmatic functions are typically licensedby movement of the subject to a specifier position within the C-space. It followsthat there would be very little motivation for an IP-related subject position in a V2language,37 especially if the EPP feature (whatever that turns out to be) can be sat-isfied by verb movement to the Infl head (cf. fn. 32).

18 a (Cosa ha trovato Luca?) Luca ha trovato un portafogli

138 Adam Ledgeway

34 The VP-internal position of the subject in (17c) finds further support in the lack of grammaticalagreement between the latter (3.sg.) and the auxiliary (3.pl), perhaps a reflex of the fact that the two failto enter into a structural Agr(reement) relation at any point in the derivation (cf. Hilda Koopman andDominique Sportiche, The Position of Subjects, in «Lingua», 85 (1991), 211-58).

35 The alternative would, of course, be to argue that embedded clauses, but not root clauses, aresubject to the EPP.

36 For a detailed discussion of subject positions in Italian, see Anna Cardinaletti, Subjects and ClauseStructure, in The New Comparative Syntax, ed. by L. Haegeman, London, Longman, 1997, pp. 33-63;and Cardinaletti, Toward a Cartography.

37 On this point, see also Theresa Biberauer, Verb Second (V2) in Afrikaans: A Minimalist Investi-gation of Word Order Variation (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003); TheresaBiberauer, Reconsidering the EPP and Spec-TP in Germanic, in Cambridge Occasional Papers in Lin-guistics 1 (2004), 15-40; and Theresa Biberauer and Ian Roberts, Changing EPP-Parameters in theHistory of English: Accounting for Variation and Change, to appear in «Journal of English Languageand Linguistics», who independently argue against an IP-related subject position for (specific clause-types in) some of the Germanic V2 languages. Rather, where [Spec, IP] is argued to occur in these va-rieties, it is not a subject position, but functions instead as a position to which the verb together with itsarguments raises. This is not say, however, that [Spec, IP] is absent in all medieval V2 Romance varieties(cf. Benincà, Complement Clitics, p. 326; and Lemieux & Dupuis, Locus, p. 90).

What has found Luca Luca has found a wallet ‘What did Luca find? Luca found a wallet’

b (Cosa è successo?) LUCA HA TROVATO UN PORTAFOGLI

What is happened Luca has found a wallet ‘What happened? Luca has found a wallet’

2.2.7 Embedded ClausesAbove we observed (cf. Table 2) that V2 orders, although frequent, are nonethe-

less less numerous in embedded clauses where V1 orders prove more frequent. Pre-viously we interpreted this fact as indirect evidence of the V2 nature of oldNeapolitan, insofar as V2 (namely, movement of the finite verb to C) will normallybe precluded in embedded clauses on account of the C position already being lexi-calized by a complementizer (e.g. c(h)a, che ‘that’, se ‘if’). Although we assume thisto be the case in most instances, this does not imply that V2 is invariably excludedin embedded contexts. Indeed, many examples of embedded V2, albeit often con-strained by various syntactic and pragmatic factors, have been noted in the Germanicand early Romance literature on V2.38 For instance, Benincà (Functional Structure,p. 24) notes in relation to early Romance that: ‘[i]n dependent complement sentencesgoverned by bridge verbs and even dependent relatives the accessibility of CP ap-pears more restricted than in main clauses, but only in quantity, not in quality: thesame structures are allowed even if they are not frequent in Italian varieties andnearly absent in the other Romance languages’. This characterization equally holdsof old Neapolitan, where embedded V2 is constrained by a number of factors.

Before we consider the old Neapolitan data, however, we must first briefly ad-dress the major technical issue associated with embedded V2, namely how can boththe finite verb and a lexical complementizer simultaneously occupy the same C po-sition? In the literature, three principal solutions have emerged in relation to thisproblem. Under one proposal, V2 is to be interpreted as movement of the finite verbto the Infl head with fronting of some other thematic or rhematic constituent to[Spec, IP]. This analysis leaves the higher C position available to host lexical com-plementizers. This solution, while superficially attractive for languages like Icelandicand Yiddish that display generalized embedded V2,39 fails to explain the severely re-stricted nature of embedded V2 in languages like old Neapolitan. This observationhas led some researchers to propose instead that restricted embedded V2 in lan-guages like old Neapolitan should be interpreted as a case of recursion of the C po-sition.40 Under this view, the frequent observation that embedded V2 is restricted tocomplement clauses characterized by a strong degree of assertion,41 the comple-


38 See, for example, Vikner, Verb Movement, ch. 4; and Salvi, La formazione, ch.1, pp. 11-13, ch.3,pp. 5-8.

39 See Santorini, Two Types; and Vikner, Verb Movement, §4.2.1.40 See, among others, Marc Authier, Iterated CPs and Embedded Topicalization, in «Linguistic In-

quiry», 23 (1992), 329-36; Vikner, Verb Movement; and Vance, Syntactic Change, ch. 4.

ments of so-called bridge verbs, can now be understood as an idiosyncratic lexicalproperty of specific predicates which allow CP recursion. Nonetheless, a new solu-tion to this problem has emerged more recently following the seminal work of Ben-incà and Rizzi,42 which has highlighted a more richly-articulated C-space with atleast two distinct complementizer positions Force (e.g. che) and Fin(iteness) (e.g.di), in addition to various Topic and Focus positions sandwiched between these twocomplementizer positions, witness the simplified structural representation in (19a)and the Italian examples in (19b-c) illustrating the lexicalization of these positions:

19 a [ForceP Force [TopP Topic [FocP Focus [FinP Fin [IP…]]]]]b Ho deciso [ForceP che [TopP i tuoi soldi [FocP MAI [IP li spenderò]]]]

I-have decided that the your money never them=I-will-spend ‘I’ve decided that I shall never spend your money’

c Ho deciso [TopP i tuoi soldi [FinP di [IP non spenderli]]]I-have decided the your money of not to-spend=them ‘I’ve decided not to spend your money’

Within this enriched C-space embedded V2 structures can now be accommodatedquite simply by assuming, for example, that the lexical complementizer occupies ahigher position within the C-space such as Force, and that the finite verb raises to alower C position such as Fin.43 In what follows, we too shall assume this to be thecorrect analysis of old Neapolitan embedded V2.2.2.7.1 Constituent Fronting

140 Adam Ledgeway

41 See, for example, Germen deHaan & Fred Weerman, Finiteness and Verb Fronting in Frisian, inVerb Second Phenomena in Germanic Languages, ed. by Hubert Haider & Martin Prinzhorn, Dordrecht,Foris, 1986, pp. 77-110; Anders Holmberg, Word Order and Syntactic Features in the ScandinavianLanguages and English, University of Stockholm, Stockholm, 1986; Vanelli, Strutture tematiche, p.269; Vanelli, Ordine delle parole, p. 78; Christer Platzack, The Scandinavian Languages and the Null-Subject Parameter, in «Natural Language and Linguistic Theory», 5 (1986), 377-401; Adams, OldFrench; Paul Hirshbühler and Marie-Odile Junker, Remarques sur les sujets nuls en subordonnée en an-cien et en moyen français, in «Revue québecoise de linguistique théorique et appliquée», 7 (1988), 63-84; Vance, Null Subjects; Stephen Wechsler, Verb Second and Illocutionary Force in Swedish, in«Edinburgh Working Papers in Cognitive Science», 6 (1990), 299-44; Hulk and van Kemenade, VerbSecond, p. 237; Kiparsky, The Indo-European Origins, p. 164 n.15; Ribeiro, Old Portuguese, pp. 118,121; Santorini, Two Types, p. 56; Fontana, Second Position, p. 246; and Benincà, Functional Structure,p. 24.

42 Bridge verbs were originally identified as a class of predicates that allow extraction out of theirsentential complement (see Henk van Riemsdijk and Edwin Williams, Introduction to the Theory ofGrammar, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1986, p. 294). The notion of bridge verb as a homogeneouscross-linguistic verbal class is, however, fraught with difficulties, insofar as there is a considerable lackof agreement among speakers and across languages as to which verbs belong to this class (Vikner, VerbMovement, p. 702).

43 See Benincà, L’ordine degli elementi; Benincà, Complement Clitics; Paola Benincà, La strutturadella frase esclamativa alla luce del dialetto padovano, in Italiano e dialetto nel tempo. Saggi di gram-matica per Giulio C. Lepschy, ed. by Paola Benincà and others, Rome, Bulzoni, 1996, pp. 23-43; andLuigi Rizzi, The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery, in Elements of Grammar. Handbook of GenerativeSyntax, ed. by Liliane Haegeman, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1997, pp. 281-337.

Returning now to the old Neapolitan data, we begin by noting that in a numberof embedded clauses there intervenes between the complementizer and the finiteverb a constituent different from the subject. As was observed in relation to rootclauses, the frequent preposing of a constituent distinct from the subject is a typicalword order pattern in V2 languages, where such preposing signals the rhematic (cf.20a-d) or thematic (cf. 21a-d) intepretation of the fronted constituent, and the typeof constituent amenable to preposing is essentially unconstrained and ultimately notrestricted to subjects. Indeed, out of a total of 327 embedded V2 clauses, 140 ofthese (29 transitives, 43 unaccusatives, 57 athematics), namely 42.8%, were foundnot to be subject-initial, a fact that highlights the unrestricted nature of the preverbalposition.44

20 a dice lo proverbio che a lo bove morto non fa prode de se le poneresays the proverb that to the ox dead not it be advantageous of self=to-it=to-putl’ erba a lo naso (67.30-1)the-grass to the nose ‘the proverb says that it is not advantageous to place grass before a deadox’s nose’

b La secunda cosa sì èy che con gran potere ne monstramo ad offensionethe second thing thus is that with great power ourselves=we-show to offenceet a destructione de li nuostri nemice (70.2-3)and to destruction of the our enemies ‘The second thing is that we should attack and destroy our enemies withgreat power’

c Onde cannosco che le ferute, che non se ponno curare per medicina,therefore I-know that the wounds that not selves=can to-cure through medicineabesogna che se cureno per lo fierro (93.40 – 94.1)it-is-necessary that selves=cure through the iron ‘Therefore I know that wounds, which cannot be healed with medicine,must be healed through warfare’

d O signuri de grande arditanza, sapite che per lo mundo èy divulgataO lords of great courage you-know that for the world is spreadla nostra potentia, che iammay non ne puossemo a ffare cosa nulla chethe our power that never not ourselves=we-put to to-do thing none thatno nde avessemo avuto triumpho et honore (69.30-2)not thereof we-had had triumph and honour ‘O lords of great courage, you know that our power has spread throughoutthe world, that never did we embark upon anything which has not given ustriumph and honour’

21 a consiglyrria inante, per plu salveze de toa persona, che da chesta cosa


44 For an analysis along these lines, see Benincà, Functional Structure. Interestingly, in a numberof analyses predating the split CP analysis, V2 was interpreted as a movement of the finite verb to thevacant C position to license a Finiteness feature on the verb (cf. Vikner, Verb Movement, §3.4.4), an ideaimplicitly assumed under the present analysis of V-movement to the lower C-head Fin(iteness).

I-would-advise before for more safety of your person that from this thingte romanisse (59.27-8)yourself=you-remained ‘I would sooner advise, for greater safety of your person, that you shouldrefrain from this’

b E ben devite sapere che a li Grieci so’ in potestate le doy parte de loAnd well you-must to-know that to the Greeks are in power the two parts of themundo (89.33-4)world ‘And you must indeed note that the Greeks hold in their power both halvesof the world’

c appe saputo […] che a llui parea veresimile che […] (50.24-6)he-had known that to him it-seemed likely that

d Considerava che a quista insula de Colcosa, ove stava chisto pecoro de auro,he-considered that to this island of Colchis where stood this ram of goldnon se nce poteva gire se non per mare (51.26-7)not self=there=could to-go if not for sea ‘He believed that this island of Colchis, where this golden ram lived, couldonly be reached by sea’

We argue then that in the examples in (20)-(21) the embedded finite verb hasmoved to the lower Comp position Fin, whereas the complementizer is generated inthe highest position Force, as illustrated schematically in (22):

22 …[ForceP che [TopP/FocP XP [FinP Vfinite [IP tVfinite…]]]

2.2.7.2 Complementizer AlternationsThe V2 nature of the sentences in (20)-(21) finds further confirmation in the

form of the complementizer. As demonstrated in Ledgeway,45 in the early dialectsof southern Italy, including Neapolitan, there occur two complementizers, che (<QUOD/QUID) and c(h)a (< QU(I)A). Whereas all types of subjunctive clause are intro-duced by che, indicative complement clauses are headed by either che or c(h)a. Sim-plifying the facts somewhat, it will suffice to note here that either c(h)a (cf. 23a) orche (cf. 23b) are employed when an embedded indicative clause does not contain anytopics or foci, whereas che alone is found in the presence of topics (23c) or foci(23d):

23 a Homero […] dice a li suoy libri ca foro nave MCLXXXVI (115.35)Homer says to the his books that were ships MCLXXXVI ‘Homer says in his books that there were MCLXXXVI ships’

b purriase ben dicere che fo causa multo legiere (53.16)

142 Adam Ledgeway

45 Similarly, Ribeiro, Old Portuguese, p. 118, argues that some types of embedded clause were V2in old Portuguese, as highlighted by the fact that out of a total of 56 complement clauses analysed inone particular fourteenth-century Portuguese text 19 were SV(X) and 12 were XV(S).

could=self well to-say that it-was cause very light ‘it could indeed be said that was very little reason therefore’

c certa speranza che lo re Priamo poterràndecertain hope that the king Priamus will-be-able=therefromrecoperare la soro soa (102.26)to-recover the sister his ‘with certain hope that King Priamus will be able to rescue his sister fromthere’

d Verace cosa èy che a li nuostri Diey fo sempremay grata chella true thing it-is that to the our Gods was always welcome thatpotentia (125.22-3)power ‘It is true that that power has always pleased our Gods’

In view of these distributional facts, it is possible to argue that old Neapolitan hadjust one indicative complementizer c(h)a generated in the lowest C position Finwhich, whenever raised to a higher C position such as Force, as proves obligatorywhenever topics or foci are present, is morphologically spelt out in the form che(namely, c(h)aFin → cheForce). In short, the overt form assumed by indicative che isinterpreted as nothing more than the surface morphological reflex of raising c(h)afrom its base position Fin to some higher position within the C-space. Now, it is notcoincidental that in all the indicative complement clauses (20a-d) and (21b-d) above,which we have argued are V2 structures, the complementizer invariably surfaces inthe form che (and never c(h)a). The impossibility of c(h)a in embedded V2 clausesnow follows naturally: if the lowest C-position Fin is filled by the raised finite verb,then the complementizer is forced to lexicalize the higher C-position Force whereit will necessarily be spelt out formally as che.

Significantly, we may also note at this point that the cases of embedded V2 iden-tified for old Neapolitan involve, with very few exceptions, those same environmentsrecognised for other V2 languages with restricted embedded V2. In particular, asnoted above, embedded V2 in old Neapolitan predominantly occurs in complementclauses to so-called bridge verbs, including, among others, such predicates as dicere‘to say’, conoscere/sapere ‘to know’, considerare ‘to consider’, credere ‘to believe’,pensare ‘to think’, promettere ‘to promise’, respondere ‘to reply’, as well as in spe-cific types of adjunct clause such as those headed by per che ‘because’, avenga dioche ‘although’ and sì che ‘such that’.46 Such parallelism in the distribution of em-bedded V2 strongly suggests that we are correct in our analysis of old Neapolitanas a V2 language, insofar as it patterns in all respects with other asymmetric V2 lan-guages that license V2 only in specific, lexically-restricted embedded contexts.

2.2.7.3 Embedded Enclisis


46 Adam Ledgeway, Il sistema completivo dei dialetti meridionali: la doppia serie di complemen-tatori, in «Rivista di dialettologia italiana», 27 (2003 [2004]), 89-147.

Finally, we need to consider the placement of clitics in embedded contexts. In ac-cordance with the Tobler-Mussafia Law, proclisis represents the norm in embeddedenvironments since the complementizer is canonically taken to occupy the clause-initial position, thereby allowing the clitic to immediately precede the finite verb.47

In a number of cases, however, such as those exemplified in (24a-g), enclisis ex-ceptionally obtains (clitics underlined):

24 a credea certamente che li Troyani portasserole odio (83.32)he-believed certainly that the Trojans brought=to-him hatred ‘he certainly believed that the Trojans held him in hatred’

b per che tutto lo mundo sintionde dammaio (53.9-10)for that all the world felt=thereof damage ‘such that the whole world was affected by it’

c quando ben penso che quella mia soro Exiona, crissuta in tanta grandeze,when well I-think that that my sister Exiona grown in so-much wealthtènesse cossì avergognata da li nuostri nemici (82.18-9)holds=self so shamed by the our enemies ‘when I think that that sister Exiona of mine, who was brought up amidstsuch riches, is now held in such shame by our enemies’

d E non deverriamo stare in dubio che, se movimmo briga contra quilli chi so’And not we-should to-stand in doubt that if we-move cause against those who areplu potenti de nuy senza provedenza, serranne impossebele de more powerful of us without providence it-will-be-to=us impossible of venire a nuostro devoto (90.1-3)to-come to our goal ‘And we should not doubt that, if we move against those who are more pow-erful than us with providence, it will be impossible for us to attain our goal’

e per che èy dicto che per la destructione de Troya foronde facte, sì commo èfor that it-is said that for the destruction of Troy were=thereof made, thus as it-isdicto, queste citate inde lo mundo (54.13-5)said these cities in the world ‘because it is said that through the destruction of Troy, these cities, as it isclaimed, were built in the world’

f legya cosa serrà che per la mutatione de chessa pozatende recoperarelight thing it-will-be that for the change of this you-can-therefrom to-recoverla soro vostra Exiona (92.15-6)the sister your Exiona ‘it will prove easy for you to be able to get your sister Exiona back by ex-changing her for this one’

144 Adam Ledgeway

47 See Ribeiro, Old Portuguese, p. 121; Vance, Syntactic Change, §4.3.1; and Salvi, La formazione,ch.3, pp. 5-8.

g et avenga che de li Grieci fosseronde state multi muorti (72.31)and it-may-happen that of the Greeks were=thereof been many dead ‘and although many of the Greeks had been killed’

Essentially, the embedded clauses in (24a-g) above mimic root clauses: [Spec,CP] remains empty but the topicalization space hosts a topicalized constituentwhich, as observed above (§2.2.5), remains invisible for the purposes of the Tobler-Mussafia Law. Consequently, the clause is technically verb-first and all clitic pro-nouns occur in enclisis. In view of the observed similarity with root clauses, someresearchers have proposed that such embedded clauses should be viewed as rootclauses ‘grafted’ onto an embedded structure.48 Such an analysis, however, proveshighly problematic. Firstly, there is no obvious structural interpretation of what isprecisely meant by ‘root embedded clause’. Clauses are either selected or not andthere is no structure-building operation that allows clauses to be initially generatedas root clauses only to be subsequently grafted within an embedded configuration.Secondly, there appears little doubt that indicative / subjunctive mood selection inembedded complement clauses (not to mention the choice of complementizer in oldNeapolitan) is directly determined by the choice of the higher selecting predicate.There thus exists a strong dependency relation between root and embedded clauses,such that the latter cannot possibly be understood as ‘root embedded clauses’ underany circumstances.49 Finally, the proposed ‘grafting’ analysis is entirely circular; itdoes nothing more than simply restate the original observation that clitic placementin embedded clauses of this type mimics that found in root clauses. Surely, the cor-rect generalization regarding examples like (24a-g) is that they are examples of em-bedded V2, an interpretation which immediately accounts for the observedsimilarities with root clauses.50 In particular, we take the embedded finite verb tohave raised to the lowest C-position Fin, which is in turn preceded by a topicalizedconstituent occupying the specifier position of a TopP and the complementizer chegenerated in the highest C position Force. By way of example, the structural repre-sentation of (24a) is given in (25):

25 credea certamente [ForceP che [TopP li Troyani [FinP portassero [IP -le tportasseroodio]]]]


48 Indeed, proclisis in these contexts can be explained historically as a case of phonological enclisisof the pronoun (originally Wackernagel second position clitics) to the preceding complementizer, sub-sequently reanalysed as proclisis to the verb (Salvi, La formazione, §2.1.2).

49 See Povl Skårup, Les premières zones de la proposition en ancien français, København,Akademisk Forlag, 1975; Salvi, La sopravvivenza, §2.2.2; and Salvi, La formazione, ch.3, pp. 5-8.

50 Lemieux and Dupuis, Locus, pp. 89-90.

3. Conclusion

The evidence reviewed in the preceding sections has highlighted how the wordorder patterns characterizing old Neapolitan root and embedded clauses differ quiteconsiderably from those of a modern Romance language like Italian. Despite enjoy-ing an apparently greater degree of freedom than the latter, old Neapolitan wordorder has been shown nonetheless to be constrained by a number of clearly definablestructural principles which ultimately characterize it as a V2 language. Within thisperspective, the old Neapolitan data can be seen as further evidence for a growingconsensus among Romanists that, typologically, medieval Romance, in its many di-atopic varieties, displayed a high degree of structural cohesion in presenting a uni-form V2 rule.

146 Adam Ledgeway

51 It should also be noted that the apparent rarity of embedded enclisis in the early Romance lan-guages (Salvi, La formazione, ch. 3, §1.2.1, ch. 4, p. 55–56) has led some to dismiss it as nothing morethan an occasional ‘lapsus’, hence best interpreted as a case of ‘root embedding’. Of course, under theV2 analysis the observed rarity of embedded enclisis now follows straightforwardly, insofar as the dis-tribution of V2 is independently known to be severely restricted in embedded environments. Clearly, theincidence of embedded enclisis is even more restricted in clauses in which the verb occurs in third,fourth, fifth, or sixth position, since [Spec, CP] is more likely to host a fronted constituent in thesecases, thereby yielding proclisis. Indeed, the incidence of embedded enclisis in the present corpus was:12 (V2), 2 (V3), and 3 (V4).

Contents

PART ONE: HISTORIES

GIULIO LEPSCHY

Introduction p. 7

BRIAN RICHARDSON

The concept of a lingua comune in Renaissance Italy » 11

MICHELE LOPORCARO

Il vocalismo finale atonodei dialetti emiliani appenninici » 29

RONNIE FERGUSON

The long-term contact influenceof Italian on Venetian: dynamics of convergence,resistance and divergence » 43

NIGEL VINCENT

Learned vs popular syntax: adjective placement in early Italian vernaculars » 55

MAIR PARRY – ALESSANDRA LOMBARDI

The interaction of semantics, pragmatics and syntaxin the spread of the articles in the early vernaculars of Italy » 77

ALESSANDRA LOMBARDI

Definiteness and Possessive Constructions in Medieval Italo-Romance » 99

ADAM LEDGEWAY

Old Neapolitan Word Order: Some Initial Observations » 119

HELENA SANSON

Women, vernacular and the ‘Questione della lingua’ in sixteenth-century Italy » 147

PART TWO: DICTIONARIES

GIULIO LEPSCHY

I dizionari generali e il De Mauro » 163

MARCO CARMELLO e CARLA MARELLO

Le informazioni sintattiche nel Devoto-Oli e in altri dizionari » 165

MARIA G. LO DUCA

Informazioni grammaticali e dizionari:la sistemazione delle voci verbali nel Sabatini-Coletti » 177

CAMILLA BARDEL

Un nuovo dizionario italiano-svedese » 191

CARLA MARCATO

Dizionari dei dialetti » 203

IVANO PACCAGNELLA

La prima lessicografia dialettale e il Veneto, fra Crusca e Patriarchi (e Boerio) » 211

MAX PFISTER

Lessico Etimologico Italiano (LEI) » 233

ARTURO TOSI

Dictionaries of neologisms and the history of society » 249

268 Contents

Finito di stamparenel mese di dicembre 2007

per A. Longo Editore in Ravennada Tipografia Moderna

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