Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

(139) 6-person paradigm with a pronominal inverted subject:
Trentino Fiorentino
vegno mi e vengo io
te vigni te tu vieni te
ven elo/ela e viene lui/lei
vegnim noi si vien noi
vegní voi vu'venite voi
ven lori/lore e vien loro
In 0 the AGR-affixes+clitics makes all person/number distinctions except for 3rd-
sng/3rd-pl, which are not distinguished. On the reasonable assumption that 1st-sng is a different
person from 1st-pl ('we' is not simply the plural of 'I'), and similarly 2nd-sng is a different person
from 2nd-pl, so that only 3rd-sng and 3rd-pl are really the same person (or non-person), we can
interpret 0 as indicating than subject inversion in those dialects involves person agreement but
not number agreement (the number agreement for 1st and 2nd persons being parasitic on the
person: e.g. the 4th person 'we' is inherently plural, as opposed to the 1st person 'I'). Null I-
subjects, instead, require both person and number agreement, as we saw. Thus, we could
reformulate 0 as 0, and then add 0:
(140) a. AGR must have an AGR-identifier.
b. X can be an AGR-identifier iff X is rich in person phi-features (five distinctions:
1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th).
c. AGR o /Spec of AGR is the AGR-identifier of AGR.
(141) A null I-subject (be it [±anaphoric]) requires an AGR-identifier being rich in person and
1
number features (six distinctions).
Let us assume that the Northern-Italian dialects under consideration choose the AGR o -