Acceso usuarios
Landkreis Konstanz, Alemania
The particle po is used in many varieties of the Northern Italian area, but these varieties differ regarding use and function of the particle. Focusing on the varieties of Dolomitic Ladin I show that po has undergone a grammaticalisation process, evolving from a temporal adverb via various stages such as that of a focus particle into an (obligatory) question marker. The synchronic diatopic variation with respect to use and function of po mirrors the diachronic development of the particle. The second part of the paper addresses the syntax of the particle. The variation in Dolomitic Ladin interrogatives provides evidence for a split-CP analysis à la Rizzi (1997, 2001) and Poletto (2000, 2002). I also propose an implementation of the variation found in Dolomitic Ladin interrogatives within Roberts & Rousssou's (1999, 2003) formal approach to cross-linguistic variation showing that the Dolomitic Ladin facts corroborate an approach to grammaticalisation in terms of a change from the move to the merge option for the realisation of functional feature
