Italian verbal groups: A systemic functional perspective

• Italian verbal group resources from an ideational and interpersonal perspective. • tense, voice , nuclearity , polarity and modality in Italian verbal groups. • text-based discourse semantic perspective on verbal group system and structure. • functional language typology, tense systems and clitics in Romance languages. This paper presents a Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) description of the verbal group in Italian. The focus of the analysis is on how tense , voice , nuclearity, modality and polarity are structured in Italian verbal groups and realised via pronominal clitics alongside verbs and their inflections. The model deals first with ideational meaning ( tense, voice and nuclearity ) and then with interpersonal meaning ( modality and polarity ). Our paper concludes with a brief note on comparable systems and structures in related languages where SFL studies have been carried out (i.e., French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese). The paper thus addresses a research gap in the study of Romance languages – supplementing it with work on Italian.