A History of Personal Subject Pronouns in Milanese in Comparison with Other Northern Italian Dialects

The Milanese dialect has undergone a great deal of change with regard to subject-pronoun organization during its history: between the Middle Ages and the Modern era, it went through a period where the subject clitic (scl) system was far more developed than it is now. In fact, in common with other medieval varieties, the Milanese dialect went through a period of asymmetrical pro-drop, wherein the pronominal subject may be lacking in main clauses, but it is almost always present in embedded clauses. During the medieval phase of the Milanese dialect, stressed complement pronouns, which would become modern subject pronouns, may also have been used as subjects on the left periphery of the sentence. As far as the system of Old Milanese is concerned, one can assume the existence of a double series of subject pronouns, a strong one and a weak one, whose difference may be unmarked in the writing system; instead, this system should hold true at least for the transitional phase between the Middle Ages phase and the system in place since the end of the 15yh century. In the documents dating from the 14th-15th centuries a process begins whereby the order between subject pronouns and pre-verbal negation changes: from an order subject pronoun – NEG to an order NEG – subject pronoun. This change seems to be a clue of the structural greater "proximity" of pronominal forms to the verbal inflection, and then a clue of their cliticness, cfr. Rizzi (1986: 398): “[…] the negative clitic and the subject clitic are members of the same clitic cluster”. In the same period, the drastic reduction of Tobler-Mussafia (TM) enclisis detracts from speakers evidence of V2 order: this evidence is lacking on account of the occurrence of a clause structured with the folloiwng word order: “sì- complement clitic - inflected V” and the reduction of evident XVS word order. The only evidence of V2 occurs in presence of some initial particles (mò, donca, etc…). In the 17th century, the Milanese dialect scl system corresponds to system 3 in Renzi-Vanelli’s classification: the presence of scls in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and the 6th person (as far as the 4th is concerned, the scl of the 1st person applies). By the end of the 18th century, scls system has acquired a typology similar to that of contemporary Milanese, except for interrogative inversions which still remained, but now is gone.