The Linguistic Review l : 117-154 THE SYNTAX OF "NE": SOME THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS* ADRIANA BELLETTI LUIGI RIZZI 0. INTRODUCTION The syntax of the Italian clitic pronoun ne (=it/them) has several interest- ing properties which have often been discussed in the literature. The primary aim of the present work is to show that the Government and Bin- ding framework (GB, henceforth; Chomsky (1981)) achieves a remarkable level of explanatory adequacy in this domain: it can be shown that the major aspects of the syntax of ne follow straightforwardly from the inter- action of several subcomponents of the System, each of which is fairly simple and has properties independently well motivated: the theory of abstract syntactic Case, the theory of binding, the theory of thematic relations and the subjacency condition on movement rules. The second theoretical aim of the proposed analysis is to motivate partial reformulations and refinements of the principles adopted; such refinements turn out to be satisfactory both conceptually and empirical- ly: A. A new definition is suggested of the structural relation "govern- ment" (the core notion of the GB framework), to the effect that maximal projection boundaries are inviolable for government only äs far äs periphe- ral material is concerned (specifiers and complements): the head of a maximal projection is accessible to an external governer. B. The notion "governing category", relevant for the theory of binding, is reformulated in such a way that not only governed NP's have a gover- * This paper was elaborated during our stay at MIT in the academic year 1979/80. We have highly benefited from innumerable discussions with affiliates of the Department of Linguistics, and in particular with Noam Chomsky, Guglielmo Cinque, Osvaldo Jaeggli, Henk van Riemsdijk, Tim Stowell, Jean-Roger Vergnaud and Amy Weinberg. We are specially indebted to work by Luigi Burzio, Richard Kayne and David Perlmutter on the syntax of ne, which provided the basic empirical observations and/or aspects of the theoretical framework for our analysis. For the specific concerns of the Italian Academy, Adriana Belletti is responsible for sections 1-2 and Luigi Rizzi is responsible for sections 3-4. Brought to you by | Ariz Health Sciences Library Authenticated | 150.135.135.70 Download Date | 11/19/12 5:50 PM