Citation: Baldi, Benedetta, and Leonardo Maria Savoia. 2022. Interactions between Clitic Subjects and Objects in Piedmont and North Liguria Dialects. Languages 7: 199. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages 7030199 Academic Editors: Cecilia Poletto and Tommaso Balsemin Received: 28 February 2022 Accepted: 18 July 2022 Published: 29 July 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). languages Article Interactions between Clitic Subjects and Objects in Piedmont and North Liguria Dialects † Benedetta Baldi * and Leonardo Maria Savoia * Department of Humanities and Philosophy, University of Florence, 50121 Florence, Italy * Correspondence: benedetta.baldi@unifi.it (B.B.); leonardomaria.savoia@unifi.it (L.M.S.) † This article is the fruit of common ideation and work. The data have been collected through field research. We are grateful with our intelligent and generous informants: Angelina Minutillo (Celle), signore Ravicchio (Cantoira), Cristoforo Allavena (Pigna), Irma Perucca (Villareggia), Mauro Prolo e Alberto De marchi (Fara Novarese). Abstract: This contribution addresses a set of phenomena attested in the dialects spoken in Piedmont, including Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties, and in West Liguria, concerning the interaction between subject and object clitics. Complementarily to these phenomena, we find the interplay between the realization of the 3rd person clitic and the auxiliary. More specifically, we will investigate the object-for-subject mechanism in the Piedmontese and Franco-Provençal dialects, the one of subject- with-object in some Franco-Provençal dialects and their possible interaction with the auxiliary. In some Piedmontese dialects, the alternation between be and have affects the distribution of subject and object clitics; in particular, the 3rd person clitic can occur in all persons, where it can be ambiguous between the subject or the object reading. The relation between the verb and the realization of its argumental clitics, and the interaction between auxiliaries and clitics are the main topics of this work. Our approach relies on the idea that clitics are the realization of ϕ-features associated with v and T and that auxiliaries are not functional elements but verbs with lexical properties. The theoretical frame we follow is the formulation recently proposed by Chomsky, based on the operation Merge and the Labeling Algorithm, leading to a more appropriate conceptualization of morpho-syntactic structures. Keywords: OCls for SCls; SCls with OCls; auxiliaries; copula; participle 1. Introduction In this article, we address the interaction between subject clitics (SCls) and object clitics (OCls) in some dialects spoken in Piedmont and Liguria. Two main issues will be investigated, that is the distribution of the 1st person SCl in some Franco-Provençal dialects, in Sections 3 and 4, and the distribution of the clitic of 3rd person l ambiguous between the reading of SCl and that of OCl in the Ligurian and Piedmontese dialects, in Sections 5 and 6. Both phenomena have been examined in the previous literature, specifically the Franco-Provençal system by Roberts (1993, 2018) and Savoia and Manzini (2010), and the distribution of l by Poletto (2000), Manzini and Savoia (2005). The treatment of clitics specialized for auxiliaries has represented a problematic issue. Poletto (1993) formulates a first hypothesis assuming that they are subject clitics; this is also the conclusion of Manzini and Savoia (2005, p. 457) substantially because of the complementary distribution with the SCl of 2nd singular person and other similar distributional restrictions. The analysis of Paduan gh ò,z é in Benincà (2007) concludes that gh and z are to be considered as something like inflectional elements. Garzonio and Poletto’s (2011) analysis of phenomena similar to the ones seen for Villareggia in (23)–(24), speak of clitics of auxiliary, assigning them a special syntactic status connected to the interface interpretive level, also based Languages 2022, 7, 199. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7030199 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languages