Subject and impersonal clitics in northern Italian dialects

Abstract

The present contribution focuses on the interaction between the impersonal si/se and subject clitics in northern Italian dialects. In western dialects, si co-occurs with a non-agreeing clitic form (while it cannot co-occur with object clitics in the so-called passive-si construction); in Venetan dialects, the co-occurrence of se and subject clitics is degraded/ungrammatical, while in Friulian the combination is acceptable, but the subject clitic is dropped. I argue that the peculiar behaviour of northern Italian dialects results from the Multiple-Agree relation holding between T, sarb, and the argument of passive-like constructions (D'Alessandro 2007), coupled with language-specific constraints on the realisation of T's features (Calabrese & Pescarini 2014).