The fate of the -id(i)- morpheme in the Central Dolomitic Ladin varieties of northern Italy: variable conditioning of a morphological mechanism

Abstract

The chapter traces the formal and functional evolution of the verbal derivational formative id(i) - from Latin to Central Dolomitic Ladin, i.e. a subgroup of Rhaeto-Romance. In Dolomitic Ladin - id(i) - developed as an inflectionally bound segment: its intra-paradigmatic occurrence is restricted to the singular and to the third person plural of the present tense of a subset of first conjugation verbs, e.g. Ladin prs.ind. 3. ćiacol-ëi-a ‘he chats’ vs. prs.ind. 4. ćiacolun ‘we chat’. This conforms to the so-called ‘N-pattern’ (cf. Maiden 2003). On the basis of a statistical analysis of fieldwork data, we identify a series of intra-linguistic parameters, viz. etymology and morpho-prosodic structure of the verb root, and sociolinguistic variables, viz. age, dialect competence, and dialect-geographical provenience of the informants, that (co-)determine whether a particular Ladin first conjugation verb is susceptible or not of displaying this ‘infixed’ conjugation pattern. Interestingly, our results also reveal that first conjugation infixation can be exploited at a functional level that extends beyond the morphological domain.