Clause and Discourse Phenomena in Inflectional Languages: searching for postposed subjects in diglossic Italian and Veneto child- adult conversations

In this paper I analyze some syntactic and pragmatic distinctions at the level of the organization of the clause in two related inflectional Romance languages, early standard Italian and Vicentino, a Veneto variety of North-eastern Italian dialects. There are, in my hypothesis, different stages in the mastering of the two sets of phenomena, agreement properties and standard linear ordering of Grammatical Relations of Subject and Object. A descriptively adequate generalization of the absence of correlation between these two sets of phenomena, agreement properties and standard ordering of Grammatical Relations of Subject and Object in the first stage of early Italian are offered by considering primitives of linguistic theory, as in the Relational Grammar framework and in some minimalist versions. The research defends the relevance of discourse tools not only in controlling linguistic stipulations, but in capturing wider generalizations and in abstracting properties at sentence level, raising some questions about the notion of Subject, its nature and properties.