Structures, Strategies and Beyond : Studies in Honour of Adriana Belletti

The volume contains 18 contributions from senior and junior scholars covering core issues within the theoretical investigation of the architecture and the mechanisms of the faculty of language, with particular emphasis on the computational component. They all pursue a comparative approach, investigating and comparing different languages and dialects or comparing different modes of acquisition, as in Adriana Belletti’s work, to whom the volume is dedicated. The papers in the first part (by Chomsky, Rizzi, Bianchi & Chesi, Cinque, Costa, Calabrese) deal with theoretical issues such as labeling, the cartography of structures and the locality of derivations in a broad sense. The papers in the second part (by Haegeman & Lohndal, Delfitto & Fiorin, Cruschina, Lahousse, Di Domenico and Contemori, Dal Pozzo & Matteini) concentrate on the realization of structure relative to discourse, particularly on topic and focus positions in the vP periphery, and on referential dependencies. The third part collects papers (by Cardinaletti & Volpato, Friedmann, Yachini & Szterman, Snyder & Hyams, Hamann & Tuller, Cecchetto & Donati, Grewendorf & Poletto) that specifically target intervention effects in relative clauses as apparent in different structures, different languages, and different populations. This paper provides an analysis of the left periphery of relative clauses in the Cimbrian variety of Luserna and explores which of the two complementizer systems Cimbrian makes use of in restrictive and appositive relative clauses. Furthermore, the sentential particle da (lit. 'there'), which according to Bidese et al. (2012) is obligatory in restrictive relative clauses with a full DP subject, is shown to have a distribution and function different from its counterparts in Bavarian and Hessian. We argue that the Cimbrian da is neither a locative (as the form might suggest) nor a subject explet