Expletive Subject Clitics in Northern Italo-Romance
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper deals with the syntax of subject clitics in Northern Italian Dialects (‘NIDs’). This is one of the classical topics in formal dialectological approaches, starting from Rizzi (1982) and Brandi & Cordin (1981, 1989). In this paper, the author(s) (‘A.’) on the one hand resumes what we know so far, especially from a descriptive point of view. On the other hand, she/he proposes a new, innovative approach to subject clitics that includes some statistical analysis. The paper is well written, clear, and the author proves to be very familiar with the data and with the topic in general. The analysis proposed, in which subject clitics of NIDs are Ds (and not bundles of phi-features, as proposed by Roberts 2010, a.o.), is well grounded and constitutes an important contribution to the debate about the status of subject clitics as agreement markers or true (weak) pronouns; in particular, I find the discussion about the existence of two types of NIDs (“Type A” and “Type B”) and around the role of SubjP particularly insightful.
More detailed discussion
My first proposal is to slightly change the title of the paper. After reading the paper, my impression is that the title is too restrictive: it is true that expletives are a crucial point in the A.’s analysis, but the analysis goes beyond expletives and embraces subject clitics as a whole, while expletives get, all in all, not too much space.
A second remark is that the location of the varieties from which the examples are taken is often completely obscure, when they are spoken in villages. This way of citing is reminiscent of Manzini & Savoia (2005): these volumes are extremely rich and helpful for any research on Italian dialects, but they are not really reader-friendly to consult because too many different varieties are cited, and always just with the name of the village. Therefore, in the A.’s paper it is extremely difficult to evaluate examples from varieties whose geographical location is completely unclear. I would therefore suggest the A. adds the province, or at least the dialect group to which it belongs.
Furthermore, as a non-expert in statistics I find it hard to fully understand what the statistical analyses tell us exactly (I have added comments at specific points). In particular, at p. 8 I do not see an absolute negative correlation between gaps and expletives (more than 80% of the languages with gaps do have expletives): it is true that when you do not have an expletive, in the vast majority of the cases the variety has gaps. But the other way round (varieties with expletives have not got gaps) seems less strong. So, maybe it would good if the A. could explain more in detail what these data exactly mean in statistics, what the statistical tests he/she carried out tell us exactly, and what their limits are.
Connected to the latter question, I wonder whether we should add to Type A-B (page 9) a Type C, varieties that have expletives, gaps and do not double who. Or could it just be seen as a mixed (but not so infrequent) type?
Finally, from a theoretical point of view the biggest issue is probably: what happens in Type B languages in the cases in which they do not have a subject clitic in their inventory (in most languages, when the subject is 1st, 4th of 5th person)? Who absorbs the theta-role here? Does they have a null subject clitic in these cases? Or can the verbal agreement absorb the theta roles just for the persons for which there are no subject clitics (but this seems to be an ad hoc solution).
In the attached pdf, I discuss some minor points and highlight some typos.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
See the attached pdf. Changes are highlighted in yellow in the body of the text.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The major contribution of this paper is bringing statistical analysis to bear on the relations between the various properties that characterize North Italian subject clitics. The results are quite striking and should be followed up in the future.
The precise theoretical interpretation of these results sometimes remain somewhat unclear. Calabrese’s (2011) observation that invariant subject clitics tend to occur in cells where other North Italian dialects have gaps, is taken to be “dummies”. The idea is apparently that the same clitic occurs in three different cells because its feature content does not change from one cell to the other. This may of course be true and fits the intuition that these clitics merely serve to satisfy the EPP, but it is not obviously true. After all syncretism between elements with different feature make-up seems to be a fact of life.
Lacking subject clitics in certain cells is seen as one of the characteristics of the varieties that the author dubs Type B languages. According to Table 7, type B languages can lack subject clitics in some cells, because they allow Agr to satisfy the EPP. This contention is backed up by the observation that lacking subject clitics in some cells is more common in languages with “rich agreement”. (Somewhat surprisingly “richness” is determined on the basis of a 4-cell paradigm leaving out the 1pl and the 2pl.) At the same time, AGR is not able to pick up a subject theta role, unlike the subject clitics.
Some predictions arise that are not discussed. In particular, since a Type B language lacks subject clitics for certain cells, but Agr cannot bear the subject theta role, although it satisfies the EPP, there should be person/number combinations where a sentence like “We work hard” must have a strong pronoun noi as its subject (assuming no 1pl weak pronoun in the dialect), e.g. Veronese as characterized in Table 2. The author does not comment on this, and one is left with the lingering suspicion that the prediction is not quite borne out.
The characterization of Type B languages in Table 7 also makes one wonder if a preverbal DP subject is ever doubled by subject clitic in Type B languages except in cases of resumption. If the subject theta role is assigned to the subject DP, the subject clitic would have no job to do.
Likewise, no Type B language should have expletive subject clitics. This sounds like hoping for too much, but may be true, depending on what the final characterization of Type B languages will look like. (By the way, it is not clear that sentences with meteorological verbs are the best places to look for expletives, since the subjects of meteorological verbs seem to share some properties with arguments, e.g. It may well rain without snowing.)
Author Response
See the attached pdf. Changes are highlighted in yellow in the body of the text.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
