Abstracts Category : Other

Passives and Impersonals on Evidence from RomanceDialects of Italy

by Victoria Louise Chapman

This study investigates passive and impersonalconstructions in three Romance dialects of Italy: Sicilian,Abruzzese and Tuscan. The aim of this investigation is twofold: onethe one hand I aim to contribute to the documentation of thedialects of Italy, and on the other, I aim to build on existingtheories on passive and impersonal constructions. Whilst there isto date no detailed discussion of passive structures in Italo-Romance dialects, works such as Cennamo (1997), Ledgeway (2009) andRohlfs (1969) suggest that passive structures are unpopular in thedialects of Italy. I explore the extent to which the passive isrejected in each dialect, and, where it is not used, whichconstructions are used in its place. From the data I have collectedon passive constructions in these three dialects, a patternemerges: the acceptability of the passive directly relates to thetransitivity of the verb. Whilst the tolerance of the passivevaries from dialect to dialect, one consistent result is thatpassives are affected by the ranking of the verb on theTransitivity Hierarchy (Hopper and Thompson 1980) and itsentailments. This thesis presents interesting findings on siimpersonals, uno, third person plural impersonals and the Abruzzesenome, which of particular interest, and which I claim is animpersonal clitic, that holds a plural feature. Throughout mydiscussion of impersonals, I develop a hierarchy of impersonals,which is based on the semantic features (+/- referential, +/-definite, +/- irrealis) of each impersonal type. This hierarchycaptures all of the impersonal types found in the three dialects,and allows for cross-dialectal analysis. I present novel findingsrelating to the Tuscan first person plural impersonal si and thesplit in its usage, which, to my knowledge has not yet beendiscussed in the relevant literature. The data show that Tuscanfirst person plural impersonal si can be used with transitive andunergative verbs but not with unaccusatives. I propose a reason forthis split, which is based on what I term agreement features(person, number, gender). As well as providing a detailed analysisof each impersonal type, I attempt to refine existing definitionsof impersonals and propose that all types of impersonalconstructions can be defined by their deficiency in one of thethree agreement features, in other words, they are featuredeficient constructions'.Advisors/Committee Members: PAYNE, JOHN JR, Bentley, Delia, Payne, John.