Subject clitics in the trentino heritage variety of rodeio
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article investigates the relation between morphological stability and syntactic divergence in the subject clitic (SCL) system of the Trentino dialect of Rodeio (TDR), a heritage variety maintained under the hegemony of Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Building on the characterization of SCLs in Northern Italian dialects as morphological realizations of agreement features in the inflectional domain (Brandi & Cordin 1981, 1989; Rizzi 1986; Poletto 2000, 2008), we examine whether the preservation of the proclitic paradigm in TDR entails the maintenance of the same feature-checking conditions and structural dependencies found in homeland varieties. We show that, despite substantial paradigmatic correspondence, TDR diverges with respect to (i) the optionality of SCL resumption in coordination, (ii) the possibility of interpolation between SCL and the verb, and (iii) competition among null subjects, SCLs, and full pronouns. We argue that these contrasts are compatible with a partial reconfiguration of the SCL’s structural status, involving a weakening of its dependency on the inflectional domain, without loss of the pro-drop parameter. Finally, we discuss possible pathways to this pattern, contrasting diachronic retention and contact effects with BP, and we outline implications for the debate on agreement, pronominality, and grammatical reorganization in heritage languages.
Source: Cadernos de Estudos Lingüísticos
Authors: Letícia Emília Krieck, Sandra Quarezemin
Institution: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7224866738