Dissertation: Two Types of Unaccusatives: Evidence from Northern Italian Dialects

本基金资助对意大利北部某些方言句法的论文研究。通过在意大利的实地考察，学生将收集几种不同动词类型的数据。人们感兴趣的主要方言是皮埃蒙特省的博尔戈马尼语。在这种方言中，某些具有相似意义的不及物动词具有独特的句法特性，使它们区别于所有其他动词。这些特性以前没有被注意到，因为博尔戈马尼语是一种很少被研究的方言。语言学家对这类不同的动词所共有的特殊性质很感兴趣，因为它们构成了支持一种假设的证据，这种假设是由其他语言的事实所激发的，即动词意义的某些方面与句法结构有关。

This grant funds dissertation research on the syntax of certain dialects spoken in Northern Italy. By field work in Italy, the student will collect data on several different verb types. The main dialect of interest is Borgomanerese, spoken in the province of Piedmont. In this dialect certain intransitive verbs which share similar meanings have distinct syntactic properties which distinguish them from all other verbs. These properties have gone previously unnoticed because Borgomanerese is a very little studied dialect. The special properties that this distinct class of verbs shares are of interest to linguistics because they constitute evidence in favor of the hypothesis, motivated by facts from other languages, which claims that certain aspects of verb meaning are relevant to syntactic structure.