Perdita dell'infinito e obviation effect in alcune varietà slave e italo-romanze: per un'analisi contrastiva.

The Extreme Southern Italo-Romance dialects (= ESD), Serbian and Croatian exhibit a signifi cant avoidance of the infi nitive, to advantage of dependent fi nite clauses. This syntactic change shows some similarities between these three varieties, but it also reveals some substantial diff erences. Such diff erences concern the so-called manipulative verbs: in the ESD, the implicative manipulative verbs preserve the infi nitive, according the predictions of a well-known typological scale (the so-called binding hierarchy, see Givón 1980; 2001). On the other side, both in Serbian and Croatian all the manipulative predicates take only fi nite dependent clauses, regardless the degree of implicativity they convey. The above-quoted data are very relevant for Croatian especially, where the use of infi nitive is still considerable. We assume that such a diff erence is related to the obviation eff ect. In Croatian (and only partially in Serbian), the lack of coreference between the embedded and matrix subject has been automatically associated with da + pres.ind.-clauses (= subjunctive). On the other side, its fulfi lment has been linked with the bare infi nitive. Thus, the constraints connected with the semantics of the involved predicates have been completely neutralized.