De Gruyter Mouton Split Intransitivity in Italian: 30 (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT], 30)

This book deals with split intransitivity in Italian, providing an in-depth investigation of the selection of the perfective operator, experiencer predicates, si-constructions, agreement, ne-cliticization, past-participle behaviour and word order. The author proposes that the manifestations of split intransitivity in Italian, whilst being variously constrained by well-formedness conditions on the encoding of information structure, primarily derive from the tension between accusative and active alignment. Drawing upon insights provided by Role and Reference Grammar, and relying on crossdialectal comparison and corpus-based evidence, this study makes new empirical and theoretical contributions to the debate on split intransitivity. It will be of interest to researchers in Italian and Romance linguistics, typology and theoretical linguistics.