Acceso usuarios
Georgios Vardakis
This paper investigates the nature of the syntactic operation Agree with respect to syntactic restrictions in subject-verb agreement in the derivation of root subjunctive clauses in Corfioto, the endangered Balkan Venetan variety of the Corfiot Jews. Similar to modal clauses in main syntactic contexts in languages of south-eastern Europe, including Balkan Romance and Southern Italian dialects, root subjunctive clauses in Corfioto are introduced by a modal particle and express the speaker’s wish, request, order or plea in declarative and interrogative contexts. I hereby argue that subjunctive clauses in Corfioto differ from main modal clauses found in Western Romance languages including Venetan, Italian and French, as well as Southern Italian dialects regarding their distinct distributional, morphosyntactic and syntactic properties. Based on previous analyses of root clauses with similar distributional and morphosyntactic properties characterizing the Balkan languages, it is proposed that possible restrictions in the licensing of φ-features in subject-verb agreement in root subjunctives in Corfioto are the result of an Agree operation with features inherent to the Speaker and the Addressee in the syntacticized Speech Act layer at the outermost part of the syntactic spine.
