Publication

Volume (Issue)	13
Page(s)	1 - 34

URL	https://www.mmll.cam.ac.uk/files/copil_13_1_bonan.pdf
Type of Open Access	Publisher (Gold Open Access)

This paper focuses on the very specific linguistic domain of nominative (NOM) clitics of the ‘number’ class (Poletto 2000) in ‘non-redundant null-subject systems’ (Roberts 2010). Concretely, I adapt Roberts’ (2007) analysis of French NOM enclitics in ‘complex inversion’ structures to both the assertive and the interrogative NOM clitics of Trevisan, a Venetan dialect. Number clitics, I claim, are not pronominal elements but an inflec- tional class that surfaces as a consequence of a positive setting of Rizzi’s (2017) Spell-Out parameter, i.e., an instruction to pronounce the criterial feature(s). This treatment of number clitics has three main theoretical advantages: (i) it explains their morphosyntactic peculiarities wrt to non-NOM clitic pronouns; (ii) it accounts for the morphological variations and different distributions wrt the V of the assertive vs interrogative series; (iii) it explains their omission in ‘long-subject extraction’ environments, i.e., relatives and it-clefts (Rizzi & Shlonsky 2007, Bonan 2017).