The Double Access Reading and Complementiser Deletion in Italian

In this work we consider Sequence of Tense (henceforth SOT) phenomena in Italian and in particular the Double Access Reading (henceforth DAR). The main focus is on the morphosyntactic properties which determine this interpretation. We argue that the DAR doesn't depend on either the mood or the tense of the subordinate predicate, i.e., the present indicative, as is often assumed in the literature on the topic. Rather, it is determined by the semantic and syntactic properties of the matrix predicate. It will be shown that the DAR is strongly related to another phenomenon of Italian, namely, Complementiser Deletion (henceforth CD. See Giorgi & Pianesi (1996), (1997a)). The generalisation we will illustrate is the following: if a syntactic structure allows CD, it does not allow DAR, and vice versa. Adopting the split-C analysis of CD we developed in previous work, we will propose that the DAR depends on the kind of complementiser introducing the subordinate clause