Abstract
This article investigates the contact-induced reorganization of the possessive system in the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken from around the 12th century in the villages of Celle and Faeto in North Apulia and Guardia Piemontese in North-West Calabria. Gallo-Romance possessives exclude the article in the prenominal position, whereas in the Southern Italian dialects, possessives follow the noun preceded by the definite article. This original contrast is no longer visible in the varieties of Celle, Faeto and Guardia which changed the original prenominal position to the postnominal position combining with the article, except with kinship terms, preserving the original prenominal position. At the heart of contact phenomena, there are bilingualism and transfer mechanisms between the languages included in the complex knowledge of the speaker, suggesting a test bed for the treatment of language variation and parameterization. We propose an account of morpho-syntactic and interpretive properties of possessives, making use of the insights from the comparison of contact systems with prenominal (Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties) and postnominal (Southern Italian dialects) possessives. The final part examines the distribution of possessives, tracing it back to the definiteness properties of DP and proposes a phasal treatment based on syntactic and interpretive constraints.
Highlights
Academic Editors: Ángel Gallego, Bruno Camus, Ricardo Etxepare, Iván Ortega-Santos, Diego Pescarini, Abstract: This article investigates the contact-induced reorganization of the possessive system in the
As shown by the data we have reviewed in (14), contact with the Apulian dialects has affected the possessive system of the Apulian Franco-Provençal; a similar redistribution is shown by the Guardia dialect in (15)
In the present case studies, we can reasonably surmise that secondand subsequent-generation speakers grew up bilingual Franco-Provençal/Apulian, Occitan/Calabrian and that their overall linguistic system was subject to a partial reorganization due to transfer from Lx, the Italo-Romance dialect, to Ly, the alloglot variety
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. In Franco-Provençal varieties, possessives occur in the prenominal position and exclude the determiner both in DPs and in predicative contexts, apart from the pronominal use. This distribution is illustrated by the data of some Franco-Provençal varieties spoken in Aosta Valley, Sarre in (2), and in Western Piedmont, Coazze (Susa Valley) in (3). The variable occurrence of the definite article in possessive contexts can be related to the contact with the Northern Italian dialects, which regularly combine the article with the prenominal possessive in the context of common nouns, except with kinships terms.
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