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.
