On ben in Trentino regional Italian

Abstract

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.

55 | 2021

“…Modal particles appear to be especially frequent in regional/colloquial Northern Italian varieties, as shown by Cognola and Schifano (2018a;2018b) who have carried out a comprehensive study on ben as a modal particle across Italian varieties, and showed that this modal particle is extremely rare in Central and Southern Italian varieties. Coniglio (2008) and Cardinaletti (2015) propose that poi can be analysed as a modal particle in Italian.…”

“…Ben, on the other hand, is considered a modal particle (cf. Coniglio 2008;Cognola, Schifano 2018a;2018b;Cognola, Moroni, forthcoming). Cognola and Moroni (forthcoming) discuss the hypothesis that mica could be analysed as a modal particle paralleling German doch.…”

“…17 The judgements on sentences featuring ben come from a speaker of central Trentino, which Cognola and Schifano (2018a;2018b) have shown to be the most permissive Italian variety in the acceptance of ben. For speakers of this variety ben is possible in with all verbs and in all main clauses, except in embedded clauses with no root properties.…”

“…Cinque 1999); iii) it involves the activation of ForceP in the left periphery (cf. Coniglio, Zegrean 2012) and of FocusP and PolarityP (Cognola, Schifano 2018a;2018b).…”

Verb Second in Old Venetian

“…Whilst it is evident that V-to-C raising fails to hold in embedded contexts, attestations such as (32b-c) highlight that the finite verb and subject raise to clause-internal positions. If we assume adverbs such as seguramente 'safely' and viazamente 'quickly' to lexicalise the TP, following Cinque's (1999) seminar work on the matter and subsequent cartographic works on verb movement in Romance (see Schifano 2018), we see that the subject and object in old Venetian are able to vacate the VP and raise to T (see Ledgeway 2021 for similar findings for old French). Arguably, this could be representative of the incipient development of the EPP feature on T that characterises verb and subject movement in modern Romance.…”