On demonstratives as relative pronouns. New insight from Italian varieties

This paper investigates the use of distal demonstratives as relativizers in order to shed light on the typology of relativization strategies. We concentrate on three Italian varieties, Campobellese (an Eastern Sicilian dialect), Venosino (a variety spoken in Lucania) and Marebbano (a Rhaetoromance V2 variety). In all these varieties the usual form of the relativizer is reinforced with the distal demonstrative. We argue that this relativization strategy is an instance of a syntactically and semantically motivated renewal of the relativizer form, which develops in a stepwise fashion. By comparing Italian varieties with colloquial standard Italian, we show that distal demonstratives are first attested in free relatives. The second step in the widening of contexts in which the demonstrative can be used are two types of non- integrated appositives (see Cinque (2008)), i.e. structures related to the head noun through a small clause structure. The last step is the one in which demonstratives become real relativizers in those structures where extraction/deletion of the head noun is banned for various reasons, namely (i) non-integrated appositive clauses and (ii) prepositional RCs. This progressive widening of contexts corresponds to a progressive loss of features of the demonstrative, which can be described on the basis of a hierarchy on the featural make up of demonstratives, with Person, Number and Gender features being the highest and most resistant ones