Voice and functional structure in Italo-Romance tough-constructions

This paper focuses on the amount of functional structure and on the Voice properties of complement clauses in tough-constructions, on the basis of previously unexplored variation patterns in Italo-Romance. Cross-dialectal data from various regions of Italy (north, south, extreme south, and islands) show that two main syntactic types of tough-constructions are attested, interacting with the complementation strategies available in each variety. In Type 1, the embedded clause is a VoiceP with an infinitive; in Type 2, the embedded clause is a full TP or a CP and its verb (non-finite or finite) has either passive morphology or a resumptive object clitic. In light of this distribution, I propose that heavily reduced clauses have a passive-like argument realisation pattern (as in Type 1), in contrast with larger clauses (as in Type 2) which behave in a standard way despite being more heterogeneous. This claim supports an extension of current accounts of clausal complementation in Italo-Romance to one more pattern.