Refining the Italian clausal spine in light of Central Adverbial Clauses

While adjuncts like adverbs (AdvPs) and prepositional phrases (PPs) have been shown to be hierarchically merged in a fixed, universal order along the clausal spine (Cinque 1999, 2006), the external syntax of adverbial clauses (Adv-CPs) remains rather underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on a specific subset of Italian Adv-CPs, Central Adverbial Clauses (CACs), i.e., adjunct clauses that structure the event with which they are related (Haegeman 2003). We aim for a twofold goal: (a) to establish which is the first-merge position of CACs and whether they are hierarchically ordered similarly to AdvPs/PPs and, consequently, (b) to provide a comprehensive architecture of adjuncts and, more broadly, to refine that of the (Italian) clausal spine. We argue that CACs are merged at the vP/VP level, below the functional projections hosting postverbal subjects, and then we propose a derivational approach in which their surface order is determined by hierarchical merge and VP-movement plus, eventually, pied-piping (Cinque 2005). Thus, our work ultimately offers new empirical support for Cinque’s (2023) theory of linearization in the verbal extended projection.