Vol. 11 (2025)
Articles

Embedded stripping in Italian and Complementizer Deletion

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  • Francesca Dal Santo
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/qulso-2421-7220-18661

Published 2025-09-30

Keywords

  • Embedded Stripping,
  • Italian,
  • Complementizer Deletion,
  • Ellipsis,
  • Experimental Syntax

How to Cite

Dal Santo, F. (2025). Embedded stripping in Italian and Complementizer Deletion. Quaderni Di Linguistica E Studi Orientali, 11, 37–56. https://doi.org/10.36253/qulso-2421-7220-18661

Copyright (c) 2025 Francesca Dal Santo

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

In this work I propose an experimental analysis of the role of Complementizer Deletion (CD) in embedded stripping in Italian. I follow Wurmbrand (2017), who proposes the existence of a typological bipartition of languages, namely those which only allow embedded stripping in the absence of the complementizer and those which allow embedded stripping without resorting to CD. In this article, I consider the results of a Likert scale on Italian sentences, on 58 subjects, and conclude that the availability of embedded stripping correlates with the absence of the complementizer. Unexpectedly, CD is preferred over complementizer realization even in indicative embedded sentences, which generally do not allow the complementizer to be deleted. In the article I propose an analysis of this phenomenon based on mood, epistemic heads, and Double Access Reading.

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