Reduplication as a strategy for ever- free relatives: semantic and syntactic observations

Abstract

Italo-Romance varieties display a typologically rare strategy to realize the unconditional (or free-choice) free relative clauses, i.e. the reduplication of the verb complex. The semantic entailment of unconditionality is not conveyed through the lexicalization of a morpheme corresponding to -ever. Also, the modal force of the semantic operator does not match the selection of the subjunctive morphology, which is not available in most Italian dialects. The Italo-Romance varieties of our sample resort to structural reduplication as the only strategy to express the unconditionality requirement of this type of free relative clauses. In this contribution, I compare unconditionals across Italian dialects and other Romance varieties on the basis of their morphosyntactic properties. In the analysis of the reduplication structure I link the derivation of unconditional free relatives with the semantic and syntactic aspects of free-choice indefinite pronouns. I finally propose a unifying formal account of two types of reduplication configurations, both corresponding to unconditional free relatives, both available across Italo-Romance.