Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this book is to investigate the syntax of the upper portion of the functional sentence structure on the basis of comparative data collected from the domain of a hundred Romance varieties in northern Italy. This geographical choice is justified by the fact that the dialects spoken in this area are quite homogeneous from a lexical, morphological, and syntactic point of view. They represent an ideal ground for analyzing microvariations in syntax, as the grammatical systems compared do not differ very much from one another. Thus, this is as near as we can get to a controlled scientific experiment, in which grammatical systems that differ only on the basis of a single feature are compared. In this manner, the single varying feature may be isolated and studied through controlled experiments, as there are no other factors to interfere with the definition of the phenomenon under investigation, while the rest of the grammar remains constant. This book is not intended as a typological study, describing the simple distribution facts of a given phenomenon, but rather it aims to determine which phenomena are correlated and in what way these relationships can be encoded into syntax. Therefore, this book does not report all varieties of the data investigated but focuses only on those data that are relevant to the analysis of the empirical domain mentioned above.