The Negative Imperative in Southern Calabria. Spirito Greco, Materia Romanza Again?

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this article is to investigate a special case of suppletion in the paradigm of the negative imperative in some dialects of southern Calabria. First, we show how these paradigms involve the extension of an original infinitival desinence to a present indicative verb, giving rise to a hybrid imperatival form (Section 2). Second, we claim that this pattern of suppletion does not represent a Romance-internal development but, rather, the outcome of contact-induced change and, in particular, the influence of the local Greek sub-/adstrate (Section 3). Furthermore, we show that these hybrid patterns also provide significant evidence for the formal morphosyntactic equivalence between competing Greek finite and Romance non-finite forms of subordination, a typical Balkanism (Section 4). Finally, we demonstrate that the extension of the Romance infinitival desinence according to an underlying Greek model yields in synchrony an alternation between a suppletive positive imperative and a true negative imperative, a typologically very rare formal opposition (Section 5).