Expletives in some southern Italo-Romance varieties and the typology of silent arguments of predication

In this talk we investigate the distribution of deictic expletives in some southern Italo-Romance varieties from inner Cilento (Campania), in the light of the current debate on expletives in Italo-Romance, their morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics and diachrony (Benincà 1994; Manzini & Savoia 2005, I: 172-196; Bernini 2012; Parry 2013; Pescarini 2014, 2016; Bentley, Ciconte & Cruschina 2015; Poletto 2016 int.al, and references therein). A preliminary investigation reveals the existence of two types of (optional) expletives, the deictic neuter singular pronoun keru/ kerə ‘that’ and the masculine singular deictic pronoun kiru ‘that’, displaying an interesting different syntactic distribution. Whereas the neuter form keru/kerə appears to have only a pragmatic function, realizing the ‘silent argument of predication’, an ‘implicit spatio-temporal domain’ (Cruschina 2016: 122) , the masculine deictic kiru signals not only the spatio-temporal frame of predication, as in its existential uses (albeit occurring only with the proform ngi, etymologically a locative adverb, ‘there’) (4), but also conveys a syntactic function, ‘flagging up a forthcoming informationally new element’ when the subject occurs postverbally (Biberauer & van der Wal 2012: 2) as well as a semantic one, as with weather verbs, where the expletive has argument status (Levin & Krejci 2019: 5). Thus, deictic expletives in the southern Italo-Romance varieties investigated appear to bring interesting new data and insights on the status and function of expletives.