Sarah Rossi (IUSS Pavia) ‘On Italian Negative Imperatives: New and Old Puzzles’

Seminari del CLT

Divendres, 16 de gener de 2026
Hora 15:30
Connexió en línia

Abstract:
This talk examines the syntax of negative imperatives in Italian, with a special focus on the interaction between negation, clausal reduction, and subject interpretation. Italian and Romance negative imperatives instantiate a typologically rarer pattern in which sentential negation cooccurs with non-imperative (in this case, infinitival) morphology. This gives rise to forms that are superficially identical to generic directives addressed to an arbitrary addressee, as in Non mangiare i funghi, Luca! ‘Do not eat the mushrooms, Luca!’ vs. Non mangiare i funghi (senza l’aiuto di un esperto). ‘Do not eat mushrooms without the help of an expert’.
Despite their superficial identity, these two types of imperatives display systematic syntactic asymmetries. Moreover, spontaneous production data from child Italian show that these superficially identical forms are treated differently in acquisition. These new puzzles add to the longstanding one of negative ineffability, that is the impossibility of negating a true imperative. A way of reconciling these “new and old” puzzles is outlined within an analysis that also takes acquisition data into account.