This book provides a detailed account of verb movement across more than twenty standard and non-standard Romance varieties. It examines the position of the verb with respect to a wide selection of hierarchically ordered adverbs, as laid out in Cinque’s (1999) seminal work. The volume uses extensive empirical data to demonstrate that, contrary to traditional assumptions, it is possible to identify at least four distinct macro-typologies in the Romance languages: these macro-typologies stem from a compensatory mechanism between syntax and morphology in licensing the Tense, Aspect, and Mood interpretation of the verb. It adopts a hybrid cartographic / minimalist approach, in which cartography provides the empirical tools of investigation, and minimalist theory provides the technical motivations for the movement phenomena that are observed. It provides a valuable tool for the examination of fundamental morphosyntactic properties from a cross-Romance perspective, and constitutes a useful point of departure for further investigations into the nature and triggers of verb movement cross-linguistically.

The aim of the present article is to discuss the syntactic distribution and semantic/pragmatic interpretation of the discourse particle ben (lit. ‘well’) as used in the Trentino regional variety of Italian. Regarding its distribution, the results of our investigation with native speakers show that ben is admitted in any of the tested TAM contexts (save for non-root embedded clauses) and always sits between the lexical/auxiliary/restructuring verb and the non-finite form. As for its interpretation, it is shown that ben is used to negate an implicit or explicit negative presupposition, i.e. it is primarily connected with negation. These syntactic and interpretative properties are captured by claiming that ben sits in NegPresuppositionalP, where it is licensed by the (c)overt operator no located in ForceP.

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This paper discusses two case studies of microvariation in accusative marking in the Italo-Romance varieties of the extreme south of Italy. In particular, the diatopic variation displayed by the dialects of southern Calabria gives rise to peculiar patterns of alternation between presence or absence of the marker a 'to' in flagging the accusative. The realisation of accusative case is partially governed by semantic and referential features, i.e. specificity and animacy. In addition, the nature of the realisation of the D head results in a degree of competition between zero marking and analytic accusative marking with a. Given the century-long coexistence of Latin/Romance and Greek in southern Calabria, the relevant morphosyntactic patterns in Casemarking will also be examined from a language contact perspective. We will highlight how the relevant outcomes do not simply involve borrowing mechanisms or template copying from the lending variety but, rather, produce hybrid structures no longer ascribable to a purely Romance or Greek grammar.