Pragmatic expletive pronouns in the dialects of southern Italy: an experimental-syntactic approach Ghent University
Despite their status as null subject languages, several southern Italian dialects feature expletive subject pronouns. These do not serve as a ‘dummy subject pronoun’ like typical expletives, but rather have a pragmatic function. In Campanian dialects, this expletive takes the form of the distal demonstrative chillo ‘that’. According to the literature, there are two pragmatic uses of chillo, which distinguish themselves formally and ...