Summary

Reflexive clitics and their role in the argument structure of verbal predicates have posed significant questions for Romance and other languages. This project aims to further investigate the morpho-syntax of reflexive/SE-clitics in Romance and its consequences for argument structure, by studying SE-structures in a cluster of Aromanian varieties spoken in North-Western Greece. Aromanian is a highly endangered and heavily understudied Eastern Romance variety which is closely related to Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian, but which has also been in close contact with Greek. Aromanian has SE-clitics which behave differently from SE-clitics in other Romance languages (including Romanian) in significant ways. One of the aims of this project is to compare the Aromanian SE-structures to those reported for Eastern Romance (with an emphasis on Daco-Romance), and Romance more generally, and to identify the grammatical features responsible for such variation. This project involves extensive fieldwork on a fairly uncharted variety, based on solid theoretical assumptions, and it differs from previous research in that it follows a micro-parametric approach to dialectal syntax within a small set of closely related varieties.