Thematic and lexicon-aspectual constraints on V-S agreement. Evidence from northern Italo-Romance

According to Moravcsik (1978:365) ‘there is no language where, given a constituent class including both members that precede the verb and also members that follow the verb, the verb would agree with some or all of those members following it but with none of those preceding’. This observation finds support in verb-subject inversion constructions in many languages, where, under specific conditions (Corbett 2006:180-183), the agreement inflexion on the verb fails to spell out one or all of the relevant agreement features (Samek-Lodovici 2002). A condition on verb-subject agreement which has not received due attention (though see Corbett 2006:186; Parry 2000) is the thematic role of the controller argument, which is to be determined on the basis of the lexico-aspectual properties of the predicate (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997:113-129). The study of the dialects of Italy has played an important role in bringing to light this condition. In particular, in many of the dialects of the North, verb agreement with a postverbal argument in subject function varies in a way that is reminiscent of the unaccusative–unergative divide, but can only be properly captured considering the lexico-aspectual constraints on argument realization (Parry 2000; 2013