Micro-variation in imperatives: Enclisis and mesoclisis in Italian and Arbëresh varieties

Imperatives externalize the illocutionary force associated with a command (Aikhenvald 2010), the recipient of which is expressed as the subject of the sentence¹. Of course, the formal properties of the verb vary from one language to another, so that in many languages the imperative can coincide with the lexical base/root of the verb, whereas in others it shows a morphology specialized for the person (Aikhenvald 2010; Alcázar and Saltarelli 2014). In this chapter, we will investigate the imperative in Calabro-Lucanian and Arbëresh dialects, relying on the approach followed by Manzini and Savoia (2005, 2011). In Romance Italian varieties the contrast between the pre-verbal and post-verbal position of object clitics (OCls) differentiates declarative and imperative sentences. Moreover, in these dialects, the distribution of deictic clitics (first person) and dative, and third person clitics is sensitive to DOM, allowing the first person objects to be inserted in mesoclisis. Negation interacts with imperative forms triggering the pre-verbal position of clitics. The subtle micro-variation that emerges provides elements for a deeper understanding of the syntactic and interpretive properties of imperatives.