Patterns of infinitival and finite complementation in Griko and Salentino

Abstract

Griko and Salentino show various degrees of diachronic and diatopic microvaria- tion in the retreat and loss of the infinitive, whilst displaying at the same time a high degree of overall structural uniformity in their parallel preservation of the infinitive in: (1) restruc- turing contexts; (2) infinitival relatives; and (3) negative imperatives. On the surface, there is nothing a priori to suggest that these three contexts should be connected in any way. Yet this article demonstrates how these three uses can be reduced to a single structural explanation which views the infinitive as a reduced clausal constituent (viz. v-VP) generated in a mon- oclausal structure selected in all cases by a modal, temporal or aspectual auxiliary which is phonologically overt in (1), but oscillates between overt and covert phonological realizations in (2) and (3) in accordance with crosslinguistic variation. The result is a unified analysis which allows us to capture the distribution of infinitival complementation in all the rele- vant varieties quite simply in terms of a so-called restructuring configuration in which the infinitive invariably instantiates a monoclausal structure selected by a T-related auxiliary. At the same time, this analysis also offers us a highly natural explanation of the distribution of finite and infinitival complementation in Salentino after causative make.