Expletive Subject Clitics in Northern Italo-Romance

The Phonology and Syntax of Preverbal and Postverbal Subject Clitics in Northern Italian Dialects

We argue that preverbal and postverbal subject clitics in northern Italian dialects are the same lexical items. The different forms of proclitics and enclitics can be explained phonologically (i.e., by phonological constraints ranked in a particular order) and by the hypothesis that morphologically neutral vowels may be inserted in final position (what we call morphological epenthesis). The dis...

Subject Pronoun Variation in Central Romance

A considerable amount of research in generative syntax over the last decade and a half has been based on the hypothesis that the settings of binary parameters, such as [± null subject], can exhaustively describe the full range of possible grammars of natural languages!. Indeed, the prime example used by Chomky (1981) is the so-called "null subject parameter", which was supposed to correlate a n...

3 Icelandic Expletive Constructions and the Distribution of Subject Types

Testing Cladistics on Dialect Networks and Phyla (Gallo-Romance Vowels, Southern Italo-Romance Diasystems and Mayan Languages)

This present work deliberately abandons the purpose of capturing the global resemblance between languages and the ambition of giving a rational foundation to probability of changes in linguistics, to focus instead on cladistic approach, which was applied to different dialects and data (gallo-romance, southern italo-romance) through an original coding of philological derivations. Results show go...

Full Expletive Fuzzy Languages

A word u ∈ A+ is an expletive for a fuzzy language λ if λ(xuy) = λ(xy) for all x, y ∈ A+. A full expletive fuzzy language is a fuzzy language in which the set of expletives is A+. Here we prove that the set of full expletive fuzzy languages is a variety and the associated pseudovariety of semigroups is that of midunit semigroups. Subject Classification: 20M35, 20M07, 68Q45