Auxiliary Selection in Italo-Romance: A Nested-Agree approach
What is it about?
Auxiliary selection is the alternation of the two forms BE and HAVE for the perfect auxiliary in Romance and Germanic languages. This book offers a derivational analysis of auxiliary selection in Italo-Romance. It explains why the perfect auxiliary shows up in the two forms BE and HAVE, how this alternation comes to be, and why very different factors influence it in closely related varieties (e.g., argument structure in Standard Italian, and the person feature of the subject in so-called Italian dialects). It is argued that auxiliary selection is always the result of the syntactic operation Agree.
Why is it important?
In comparison with previous analyses, this new approach can not only account for all cases of auxiliary selection in Standard Italian (including direct reflexive, indirect reflexive, and impersonal clauses) but also for other person-driven systems and mixed systems, which otherwise are treated very differently. It also explains why so closely related varieties exhibit such distinct systems of auxiliary selection, keeping syntax uniform, and relegating the differences in the lexicon. Moreover, the analysis is also extended to restructuring, thereby offering the very first explicit analysis of auxiliary selection in restructuring. In addition, this book contributes to ongoing discussion on the conditions of the operations Agree and Merge for multiple probes, in particular on the locality condition, with a focus on intervention effects.