Circumventing the ‘That-Trace’ Effect: Different Strategies between Germanic and Romance

Abstract

In our paper, we deal with the Germanic–Romance language contact, focusing on Cimbrian, a Germanic minority language spoken in Northern Italy. Specifically, we focus on the violation of the well-known that-trace filter, as it appears to be an interesting case of the superficial convergence that we ascribe to the status of T, which is either too rich (model language) or too weak (replica language) to represent a viable landing site for subject extraction.

Resilient Subject Agreement Morpho-Syntax in the Germanic Romance Contact Area

“…In this paper, we concentrate on the first question, because a detailed analysis of the particle da would lead us astray from the general research question we are dealing with here. The proposal we adopt here to explain the bizarre configuration Cimbrian displays is the one put forth in Bidese and Tomaselli (2018); Bidese et al (2020) and Padovan et al (2021): In Cimbrian, SpecT is not a generalized structural subject position as it is in German, because in Cimbrian, SpecT is not a position for nominative case assignment. Hence, being SpecT inactive, i.e., not projected, Cimbrian looks similar to Italian.…”

Fortune and Decay of Lexical Expletives in Germanic and Romance along the Adige River

“…According to Casalicchio and Cordin (2020, p. 262), the absence of subject clitic doubling belongs to a more general phenomenon in these contexts, i.e., the ban of agreement (see also Padovan et al 2021), which can be seen not only from the absence of the subject clitic but also from the absence of agreement in number and gender in the participle (cf. ii):…”