Very …. Extracted: On old Italian molto

In this paper we consider cases of extraction of the degree word molto “very, much” from its modifier position within an AdjP (Giusti 2010a; b; Poletto 2014) in Old Italian. Such cases are reminiscent of Left Branch Extractions (LBE; Ross 1967), but, differently from what happens with adverb extraction in Slavic (Talić 2017), the conditions under which molto-extraction is possible are very restricted: molto can be extracted only when the AdjP is (or modifies a nominal expression) in post-copular predicative position but not outside a fully-fledged DP. We propose that the reason why the structure is so restricted has to do with the presence/absence of a phase boundary, while the reason why this has been lost in modern Italian is the loss of the target position in the CP layer. This allows us to show that the loss of the Verb Second property (V2) in Italian has fine-grained consequences in unexpected domains like quantifier extraction.