Syntactic Doubling and the Encoding of Voice in Eastern Abruzzese 1 Theresa Biberauer and Roberta D’Alessandro Cambridge University 1. Introduction Eastern Abruzzese (EA), a southern Italian dialect spoken in Central Italy, exhibits an auxiliary- selection pattern that commonly surfaces in Central and Southern varieties of Italian: as illustrated in (1), it is person- rather than argument structure-driven: 2 (1) a. So viste b. Si viste c. A viste am-1S seen are-2S seen have-3 seen ‘I have seen’ ‘You (s) have seen’ ‘He/she/it has seen’ d. Seme viste e. Sete viste f. A viste 3 are-1P seen are-2P seen have-3 seen ‘We have seen’ ‘You have seen’ ‘They have seen’ As (1) shows, 1 st and 2 nd person subjects in EA select be, while 3 rd person selects have (cf. Rohlfs 1968, Giammarco 1979, D’Alessandro & Ledgeway 2006 and D’Alessandro & Roberts 2006 for further discussion). One question that arises in the context of this type of auxiliary-selection system is how passive meanings such as ‘I am seen’ and ‘you are seen’ are to be expressed: as the glosses associated with (1a, b, d, e) reveal, the perfect active in the 1 st and 2 nd person would seem to involve precisely the auxiliary+participle combination one might expect to realize the passive. Compare Standard Italian (2) in this regard: (2) a. Sono visto b. Sei visto c. Siamo visti d. Siete visti am-1S seen are-2S seen are-1P seen are-2P seen ‘I am seen’ ‘You (s) are seen’ ‘We are seen’ ‘You are seen’ Investigation of EA active/passive alternations reveals a peculiar system which draws on a highly unusual disambiguation mechanism: as shown in (3), the active/passive distinction in this variety is signaled by means of Raddoppiamento fonosintattico (RF), a sandhi phenomenon involving the gemination of initial consonants (cf. Rohlfs 1966, Nespor 1993, Loporcaro 1997): (3) a. ACTIVE: So viste Si viste am-1S seen are-2S seen ‘I have seen’ ‘You (s) have seen’ 1 This work is partially supported by an EU Marie Curie award No. 006833 (“Abruzzese Syntax”) under Framework 6 to D’Alessandro and AHRC project No. AR14458 (“Null Subjects and the Structure of Parametric Variation”) to Biberauer. We gratefully thank Adam Ledgeway, Nigel Vincent and Ian Roberts, and also the audiences at WCCFL25 and the Bristol Italian Dialectology Meeting for their comments and suggestions. All the usual disclaimers apply. 2 We will only address the variety of EA spoken on the coast in this paper. The western variety is a central dialect which exhibits completely different features. 3 The data contained in this paper are from the dialect spoken in Arielli (Chieti). © 2006 Theresa Biberauer and Roberta D’Alessandro. Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon, 87-95. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.