Topics and expletives in thetic VS sentences: The case of early Romance varieties of northern Italy

In this paper we discuss the function of topics and the emergence of expletives in thetic VS constructions from a corpus of early Romance texts of northern Italy. The sources date from the 13th to the early 16th centuries and are thus characterized by a ‘verb second’ (V2) syntax. We observe that aboutness and referential topics are distributed differently in the medieval vernaculars of northern Italy, as they are coded in pre- and post-verbal position, respectively. We also note that thetic VS structures without an overt aboutness topic exhibit an expletive pronominal form in preverbal position and lack V-S agreement. We propose that the expletive spells out the implicit, context-dependent topic that thetic VS sentences presuppose, signalling the contextually understood spatio-temporal coordinates of the event or situation presented by the thetic construction. The evidence drawn from the written domain of the historical data suggests that there cannot be topicless sentences, as has been observed for the contemporary Romance varieties spoken in northern Italy.