Object Clitic Reduplication in Perugino

This work describes a case of object clitic reduplication (OCR) in restructuring sentences, in a Central Italian dialect: Perugino. OCR (not attested in the local variety of Italian spoken in Perugia) is optional and alternates with either enclisis or proclisis. It may concern direct and indirect object clitics, without person restrictions, locatives, partitives and reflexives. Only proclisis is instead possible with middle se. In sentences with more than one restructuring predicate, the clitic can occur only twice, and with some restrictions. The data suggest that middle se does not behave like (other) object clitics, including reflexive uses of se, a distinction also revealed by standard Piedmontese. The data also reveal that the boundaries of the two closely related non-standard varieties (the dialect and the local variety of Italian spoken in Perugia) are not blurred, nor are there intermediate repertoires or dialect continua. OCR is compatible with monoclausal as well as with biclausal analyses of restructuring sentences, but not with models that assume a different structure/derivation for restructuring sentences in the case of proclisis and in the case of enclisis. If a monoclausal structure is to be assumed, OCR suggests that there are (only) two clitic positions/strings in the clause. The lower position/string, however, cannot be made available only by lexical verbs.