The development of the southern subjunctive: morphological loss and syntactic gain

Abstract

AbstractMost Romance languages manifest in the verb a robust modal opposition between indicative and subjunctive. Some Romance varieties also mark the relevant distinction in the C-domain through the formal shape of the complementizer. However, in many dialects of southern Italy such morphological marking in the T- and C-domains has been drastically eroded. The evidence reviewed here highlights how in these dialects the relevant modal distinction is still very much alive in the syntax, where the relevant distinction has come to manifest itself in the different positions lexicalized by the verb and the complementizer in the T- and C-domains, respectively. In particular, there emerges an asymmetrical distribution of the verb in realis and irrealis contexts, respectively targeting low and high positions in the sentential core which, in turn, directly correlate with the placement of the (morphologically undifferentiated) complementizer merged in Force in the former case and Fin in the latter.