A Comparative Grammar of Borgomanerese Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax Series

This book presents and analyzes various features of the morphosyntax of Borgomanerese, a Gallo-Italic dialect spoken in the town of Borgomanero, in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy. The study is highly comparative, drawing on the literature on numerous other Italian dialects and Romance languages (as well as English), to inform our understanding of the Borgomanerese phenomena. Christina Tortora takes the many unusual and understudied (and often novel) facts of Borgomanerese grammar as compelling grounds for revisiting and reformulating current analyses of syntactic phenomena in these other languages. The phenomena treated include the syntax and semantics of the weak locative in presentational sentences; the syntax of object clitics and argument prepositions; the syntax of subjects and subject clitics; the syntax of interrogatives; clausal architecture; and the relationship between orthography and theoretical analysis. The principal value of this book lies both in the rich description of the morphosyntactic phenomena of Borgomanerese, many of which have not been previously reported in the literature, and in the consequent novel analyses developed, which contribute insights for other languages and dialects, and advance our understanding of syntax and syntactic theory in general.

Christina Tortora is a Professor of Linguistics at the City University of New York (College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center). She has twice been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (2001, and 2011-12), and is the editor of The Syntax of Italian Dialects (OUP 2003). She has both a National Science Foundation Grant and a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, to support her research on Appalachian English Syntax.