In Sardinian, Friulian, Rhaeto-Romance, Occitan (not considered in this work) and Franco-Provençal varieties spoken in peripheral Italian areas, the -i inflection is not totally eradicated but interacts with plural -s. The coexistence of -s and -i reflects syntactic constraints. Specifically, -i is in complementary distribution with -s or it combines with –s, giving rise to a duplicated lexicalization of plurality. In any event, it is specialized for a subset of the morpho-syntactic contexts. The distribution of -i generally involves the D domain, i.e. determiners and clitics. In some cases, -i is limited to the D elements. Different agreement systems on D and on N emerge, recalling partial or asymmetric agreement phenomena known in literature. Moreover, in the relevant varieties (-)i is in turn the inflection of the dative clitic; this suggests that (-)i is endowed with a slightly different content from plural -s, that, on the contrary, shows no connection with dative.

This contribution examines the relation between genitives/ partitives and indefinites in some Italian varieties. A central question concerns the nature of the preposition de/di (DE) ‘of’ (< Latin de), specifically investigated in contexts where it does not introduce the usual possessive or partitive reading: bare partitives/Partitive articles of Italian varieties, negative contexts in which a negative marker select a partitive occurrence of DE of the type mia+DE in Northern Italian dialects and the linker‐like element in Southern Italian dialects. We propose that these structures rely on the lexical content of DE, corresponding to the elementary relation part‐whole and that their particular behaviour can be treated in the terms of pair‐merge in the sense of Chomsky (2020). The indefinites in varieties devoid of the partitive article will be treated in the final section.

This article aims to propose a treatment of the internal morphological organization of words, based on the idea that morphology is part of syntactic computation. We disagree with Distributed Morphology model, whereby morphology is identified with a post-syntactic component conveying an information ‘separated from the original locus of that information in the phrase marker’ (Embick and Noyer 2001: 557) by rules manipulating syntactic nodes. We also consider inadequate the costly and complex syntactic structures that cartographic approach maps into inflectional strings. We pursue a different conceptualization assuming that morphology is governed by the same rules and principles of syntax. Sub-word elements, including inflections, thematic exponents and clitics, are fully interpretable and enter (pair-)merge operations (in the sense of Chomsky 2020a,b, 2021) according to their content, giving rise to complex words.

A long-time generative tradition treats the functional domains of the verb and noun as a result of motion and affixing; however, assuming a close correspondence between the order in syntax and morphology, as in the Mirror Principle proposed by Baker seems to be too strong a hypothesis and empirically unsustainable. Distributed Morphology (DM) incorporates this idea by translating it into rules manipulating syntactic nodes. The morphological phenomena we will investigate essentially concerns the thematic vowel (TV) and its interaction with agreement morphology. A complex micro-variation emerges, which provides us with a test bench in order to account for the word-internal morphological organization. We question the idea that morphology is an auxiliary and expensive post-syntactic component, DM, that conveys information separated from its original locus as assumed by Embick and Noyer. On the contrary, we think that a more adequate account is reached assuming that the morphology is governed by the same computational rules as the syntax, where the operation Merge combines fully interpretable sub-word elements forming complex inflected words.

The relation between morpho-syntactic structure and its externalization into interpretive levels is the topic of this article. In many languages, typically in Romance and Albanian varieties, modal contexts, specifically imperative and infinitive, and negation, give rise to phenomena of clitic reordering and an interesting micro-variation. Imperative differs from declarative sentences in selecting enclisis except in negative contexts. Moreover, in Albanian mesoclisis appears in the 2nd plural person of imperative, between the verbal base and the person inflection. A similar distribution characterizes Calabro-Lucanian varieties spoken in Lausberg area, in contact with Arbëresh (Italo-Albanian) dialects. This article proposes to analyze the influence of modal contexts on the lexicalization of object clitics (OCls) and their different behavior in connection to their referential properties. Our descriptive and theoretical starting point is the representational morpho-syntactic approach adopted in Manzini and Savoia (2011 and subsequent works; see Section 5).