Next, the third section ( Section 4) explores the data on Venetan dialects that are not on the linguistic Germanic–Romance border. In the second section ( Section 3), we revise the data from Trentino (from the seminal work by Brandi and Cordin ( 1981, 1989) to incorporate recent refinements proposed by Cordin ( 2021), based on the data collected by VinKo 4). The first part ( Section 2) offers a description and analysis of the syntax of expletives in Cimbrian. This paper is organized into four sections. 2 In this paper, we will provide further arguments to confirm the robustness of these assumptions based on the syntax of lexical expletives in two groups of languages in the northeastern part of Italy: a (still) V2 Germanic variety such as Cimbrian 3 and the Italian dialectal varieties spoken in Trentino and in the western part of Veneto (the provinces of Verona and Vicenza), on the one hand, in comparison with the eastern Venetian varieties spoken in the provinces of Treviso, Padova, and Venice, on the other hand. ( 2020), maintains that V2 is incompatible with a positive value of the NSP, that is, a specific type of V2 (mandatory Vfin-to-C movement in the root context) is incompatible with a specific type of pro-drop (referential null subject of the third person singular). A third correlation, originally introduced by Hulk and van Kemenade ( 1995) and recently revisited by Bidese and Tomaselli ( 2018), Tomaselli and Bidese ( 2019), and Bidese et al. Since the principles-and-parameters approach was introduced in the generative grammar framework (see Chomsky 1981, 1982, 1986), two descriptive correlations have never been challenged 1: (a) the negative value of the null subject parameter (henceforth NSP) correlates with the occurrence of lexical expletives (b) finite verb movement in the C-domain correlates with subject inversion (Vfin-Subj). While CP expletives only appear in Germanic varieties that maintain V2, the subclassification of TP expletives yields interesting results when comparing Cimbrian and the Venetan varieties in Nord-East Italy, where the gradual disappearance of the positional expletive in free inversion structures and the residual maintenance of impersonal subjects from North to South along the Adige River confirms the distinction between two classes of subject expletives furthermore, the resilience of impersonal subjects and their distribution in the northwestern part of the area under consideration sheds light on the role of language contact which is confirmed along the same axis-but crucially in the opposite direction-by the increasing employment of cleft constructions in WH-clauses replacing enclisis (i.e.,: pronominal subject inversion with the finite verb). The latter can, in turn, be divided into two subclasses: impersonal subjects and positional expletives, which occur with postverbal/low subjects and extraposed subject clauses. Lexical expletives can be divided into two main classes: (i) CP expletives required by the V2 constraint and, hence, by the necessity to lexicalize the position on the left of the inflected verb and (ii) TP expletives connected with the negative value of the pro-drop parameter and, therefore, with the necessity to lexicalize the ’structural‘ subject position, specifically.
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