This article focuses on sequences of Romance clitics wherein a pronominal form is replaced by another clitic exponent, which is primafacie morphologically unmotivated. Bonet (1991) and Harris (1994) among others have argued that these synthetic clusters can be due to the insertion of an elsewhere clitic: a default, nonspecified item that is inserted as a last resort whenever the insertion of other clitics is ruled out. In this article, independent pieces of evidence gathered from Italian and Italian dialects are shown to support this hypothesis

In this article we entertain the hypothesis that cliticization involves a rule of m-merge, which brackets a functional head with another constituent under linear adjacency to build a structure legible at the PF interface.We therefore argue for a division of labour between syntax and morphology in the spirit of Halle and Marantz (1993), although we depart from their model in rejecting a single post-syntactic Morphological Component, and instead assume that syntactic derivation and morphological operations such as m-merge are cyclically interleaved.In the first part of the article, we focus on the behaviour of clitics in contexts of V-to-C movement. As object clitics and negation are pied-piped by the verb to C, crossing the position of subject clitics, we argue that subject clitics are m-merged after V-to-C movement.The second part of the article deals with some puzzling permutations affecting the order of clitic elements. In particular, we focus on the Friulian dialect of Forni di Sotto (Manzini & Savoia 2005, 2009 to show that such permutations are due to morphological rules of fission and metathesis operating after m-merge. We therefore claim that the Forni pattern provides further evidence for syntactically void operations taking place at the Syntax/PF interface.

After a brief outline of the principal episodes in the external history, the chapter surveys the principal aspects of phonology, morphology and syntax of the dialects of northern Italy, including both Gallo-Italic (Ligurian, Piedmontese, Lombard, Emilian-Romagnol) and Venetan dialects. Topics dealt with include: characteristics of northern Italian dialects; suprasegmental phonology; segmental phonology; morphology of nouns and adjectives; verb morphology: tenses, person endings, root alternations, past participles; word formation; pronouns; articles; demonstratives; possessives; agreement in the nominal group; subject clitic pronouns; wh-movement constructions; negation; auxiliaries and double compound forms; restructuring and clitic climbing; clitic syntax.

The paper illustrates the methodology at the basis of the design of a digital library system that enables the management of linguistic resources of curated dialect data. Since dialects are rarely recognized as official languages, first of all linguists need a dedicated information management system providing the unambiguous identification of each dialect on the basis of geographical, administrative and geolinguistic parameters. Secondly, the information management system has to be designed to allow users to search the occurrences of a specific grammatical structure (e.g. a relative clause or a particular word order). Thirdly, user-friendly graphical interfaces must give easy access to language resources and make the building of the language resources easier and distributed. This work, which stems from a project named ASIt (Atlante Sintattico d’Italia), is a first step towards the creation of a European digital library for recording and studying linguistic micro-variation

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