Object clitics for subject clitics and DOM phenomena in the Franco-Provençal dialects of Apulia

Abstract

The relation between auxiliaries and argumental properties of the lexical verbs is the question raised by the facts we will investigate. Other issues are posed by the role and the behavior of deictic clitic pronouns in different contexts and in the clitic string. The data examined in this contribution come mainly from the Franco-Provençal dialects spoken in the villages of Celle San Vito and Faeto in North Apulia; these dialects are the heritage linguistic use of ancient minorities dating back to the thirteenth century. We will briefly compare these data with the related data of the Franco-Provençal varieties of West Piedmont. The analysis we propose relies on the idea that auxiliary verbs are not functional elements but preserve their lexical properties, as shown by the identic syntactic behavior of be in its different occurrences. The theoretical frame we follow is the formulation proposed in Chomsky (2020a, b), based on the merge operation and the Labeling Algorithm, leading to a more appropriate treatment of “head movement” and agreeing syntactic structures.