Published 2025-12-19
Keywords
- Italian Syntax,
- Scope Ambiguities,
- Scrambling,
- Verbal Complements,
- WCO Effects
Copyright (c) 2025 Federico Schirato
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
In this study we show that a base word order for the constituents expressing the thematic roles of Theme and Location in Italian can be detected using different tests. After presenting the theoretical framework in which we operate, we identify the base order of Theme and Location with the question-answer test, the results of which are supported by syntactic tests involving quantifiers and possessive adjectives. All these tests point to the existence of a single hierarchical structure of thematic roles which orders verbal complements independently of their argument or adjunct status.