ABSTRACT

In Italian, as in Latin, verbs agree in number (and gender) with one of their associated (or ‘argument’) nouns, the ‘subject’; verbs having a single argument noun take that noun as their grammatical subject. Until the sixteenth century, interrogative sentences lacking overt noun subjects were normally formed by positioning a subject pronoun to the right of the verb, even where no subject pronoun would have been employed in the corresponding declarative sentences. A verb may take as its complement an object noun phrase or another verb phrase. Modern Italian has two major kinds of verb complement structure: those consisting of an infinitive and those consisting of the complementizer che followed by a finite verb. In imperfective aspect, the action or state expressed by the verb is viewed from the perspective of its internal constituency, and without regard for its temporal limits; in the perfective, the action or state is viewed from an external perspective, with the focus on temporal limits.