This book presents and analyzes various features of the morphosyntax of Borgomanerese, a Gallo-Italic dialect spoken in the town of Borgomanero, in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy. The study is highly comparative, drawing on the literature on numerous other Italian dialects and Romance languages (as well as English), to inform our understanding of the Borgomanerese phenomena. Christina Tortora takes the many unusual and understudied (and often novel) facts of Borgomanerese grammar as compelling grounds for revisiting and reformulating current analyses of syntactic phenomena in these other languages. The phenomena treated include the syntax and semantics of the weak locative in presentational sentences; the syntax of object clitics and argument prepositions; the syntax of subjects and subject clitics; the syntax of interrogatives; clausal architecture; and the relationship between orthography and theoretical analysis. The principal value of this book lies both in the rich description of the morphosyntactic phenomena of Borgomanerese, many of which have not been previously reported in the literature, and in the consequent novel analyses developed, which contribute insights for other languages and dialects, and advance our understanding of syntax and syntactic theory in general.

List of AbbreviationsChapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: The syntax and semantics of the weak locative0. Introduction1. Unaccusative verb classes2. The syntactic manifestation of the GOAL / non-GOAL distinction in Borgomanerese3. SOURCE-entailing verbs and the existential4. The weak locative goal argument in Italian5. English non-existential weak there as a weak locative goal argumentChapter 3: Object clitics in simple tense, complex predicate, and imperative clauses0. Introduction1. Generalized enclisis in the simple tenses2. Enclisis with past participles in the compound tenses3. Variation in placement: the nature of the clitic itself4. Restructuring verbs5. Enclisis in causative constructions6. Enclisis with imperatives7. Clitic combinationsChapter 4: Object clitics and locative prepositions0. Introduction1. Argument locatives as another type of ?adverbial host?2. The preposition's complement3. Remaining issuesChapter 5: Subject Clitics0. Introduction1. Subject clitic pronouns in Northern Italian dialects2. Subject clitics in Borgomanerese: an overview3. The subject clitic i4. Third person singular l and la5. The second person singular subject clitics tal and t6. The subject clitic a7. The subject clitic ngh8. The impersonal clitic sChapter 6: Interrogatives0. Introduction1. Interrogative pronouns2. The missing preposition3. The difference between cus and que4. Doubly-filled comp and cleft questionsAppendix: Verb ConjugationsReferences