Interactions between clitic subjects and objects in Piedmont and North Liguria dialects

This contribution addresses a set of phenomenon attested in the dialects spoken in Piedmont, including Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties, and in West Liguria, concerning the interaction between subject and object clitics. Complementarily to these phenomena we find the interplay between the realization of the 3rd person clitic and the auxiliary. More specifically we will investigate the object-for-subject mechanism in Piedmontese and Franco-Provençal dialects, the one of subject-with-object in some Franco-Provençal dialects and their possible interaction with the auxiliary. In some Piedmontese dialects the auxiliary alternation between be and have affects the distribution of subject and object clitics, also to the effect that the 3rd person clitic occurs in all persons. where can be ambiguous between the subject or the object reading, based on the formal identity. The relation between the verb and the realization of its argumental clitics, and the interaction between auxiliaries and clitics are the main topics of this work. Our approach relies on the idea that clitics are the realization of φ-features associated with v (and T) (cf. Roberts 2018) and that auxiliaries are not functional elements but verbs with lexical properties. The theoretical frame we follow is the formulation proposed in Chomsky (2019, 2020), based on Merge operation and the Labeling Algorithm, leading to a more appropriate treatment of ‘head movement’ and a more adequate conceptualization of syntactic structures.