Verb-Second and (micro)-variation in two Rhaeto-Romance varieties of Northern Italy.

Rhaeto-Romance varieties are the only present-day Romance varieties which exhibit the Verb Second constraint (Benincà 1994, Poletto 2002, Salvi 2010). In this chapter we examine two properties typically ascribed to the Verb Second phenomenon, subject-finite verb inversion and restrictions on the co-occurrence of multiple constituents in the sentence-initial position, in two Rhaeto-Romance varieties spoken in South Tyrol (Province of Bolzano, Northern Italy). We demonstrate that both varieties behave like Verb-Second languages as far as both phenomena are concerned, but exhibit a specific Verb-Second system governed by the interplay between syntactic and discourse constraints which differs f…