Italian Restructuring Verbs: A Lexical Analysis

In Italian, there are some verbs which act as a class with respect to certain phenomena such as clitic climbing, long NP-movement, tough constructions and auxiliary selection. They are usually called restructuring verbs after Rizzi (1982) who proposed a restructuring rule in order to account for their properties. In the rst part of this paper, I will propose an analysis of these verbs in terms of argument composition. It is based on the idea that the arguments of the complement verb can be raised to become arguments of the restructuring verb. The analysis will be cast within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) (Pollard & Sag 1987, Pollard & Sag 1994) and will capture intuitions similar to the ones underlying Rizzi's Restructuring Rule (Rizzi 1982) and the Clause reduction analysis of Aissen & Perlmutter (1983). A comparison will be made with an alternative account based on the use of nonlocal features and the Nonlocal Feature Principle, which is the mechanism used within HPSG to account for Unbounded Dependency Constructions. However, I will show that the argument composition analysis is indeed the most appropriate to provide a uniform account of the properties of the restructuring verbs. The second part of the paper will address the issue of dialectal variation. I will consider restructuring verbs in Salentino, a southern Italian dialect and I will focus on one of their properties: clitic climbing. In particular, I will consider the behavior of the verb ulire `want' in the variety of Salentino spoken in the provinces of Brindisi and Taranto. This verb is rather peculiar in that it allows clitic climbing out of a nite clause. I will show that the argument composition analysis proposed for Standard Italian can account for this property and I will suggest that within HPSG the parameterization of linguistic variation occurs in the lexicon.