British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
BA PDF Symposium 200626 April 2006 AbstractsDr Sandra PaoliInformation packaging and the left periphery of the clause: evidence from RomanceRecent work within the generative grammar framework (Frajzyngier 1995, Rizzi 1997, Benincà 2001, Benincà and Poletto 2004) has convincingly shown that the projection headed by the category traditionally labelled as COMP (for Complementiser) does not simply demarcate clausal boundaries, but acts as the interface between pragmatic and propositional content, encoding inflectional as well as discourse information. The result is that the structure of the clausal area around it, the so-called left periphery, is much more articulated than previously thought. Drawing on a number of Northern Italian Dialects (Turinese, Ligurian, Marebbano and Triestino), as well as from standard Italian, making reference to Southern Italian Dialects (Sardinian and Sicilian), early Romance and acquisitional French, the paper investigates the way information are encoded and expressed in the clause, focusing on both inflectional and discourse features. In addition to supporting the refinement and complexity of the structured proposed in the literature, the paper also unveils some interesting differences as to the conditions operative on projections belonging to the same ‘field’, and poses interesting reflection points on the universality of such positions. Dr Sandra Paoli read English Language and Linguistics with Swedish as an undergraduate at the University of York, where she also completed her MA by research focusing on Italian Linguistics. From the University of Manchester she obtained her PhD with a thesis entitled ‘COMP and the left-periphery: Comparative Evidence from Romance’ under the supervision of Prof. Nigel Vincent. In 2003 she was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship which she took up at the University of Cambridge. She has published numerous articles on dialectological studies, and is now in the process of writing a book, ‘The Complementiser and the Inflectional domains: a comparative Romance approach , which includes parts of her PhD thesis and the new research she carried out during her research fellowship.
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