Italo-Romance Dialects Research Articles

The “Return” of Southern Italo-Romance Tonna: From Pseudocoordination to Adverb. A Case Study in Grammaticalization

The present work constitutes an initial look at the use of tonna, an invariable form of tornare ‘return’, used as a relatively uncommon V1 in southern Italo-Romance pseudocoordination structures. Along with losing its ability to inflect, grammaticalization of tornare, frequent across Italo-Romance, has consisted in its shift from lexical motion verb to a functional one with repetitive aspectual value, i.e. tonna mmanciu ‘I eat again’. This paper presents novel data from the variety of Eolian (Italo-Romance dialect of the Eolian Islands), which shows constructions previously unattested with invariable V1s, such as its embedding under functional verbs in non-finite clauses. A cartographic approach building on existing accounts of pseudocoordination V1s – centered on Cinque’s (1999, 2006) hierarchy of functional projections – leads us to consider two overarching explanations for tonna: that it is (a) a functional, aspectual head (in one of the two “repetitive” projections, viz. AspRepetitive(I), AspRepetitive(II)) or (b) an adverb, a specifier in these respective projections. Ultimately, the conclusion that it has (re)grammaticalized to the point of becoming a (deficient) adverb in the lower AspRepetitive(II) proves to be the most convincing from a theoretical perspective. A potential structural consequence is the syncretic status of the AspRepetitive(II) head.

Mid vowels at the crossroads between standard and regional Italian

Abstract The variety of Italian spoken in Bolzano (South Tyrol) represents a singular case in Italy, because it is not the result of a long-term contact between standard and Italo-Romance dialects but rather the outcome of a process of levelling and koineization. In such sociolinguistic scenario, it is interesting to study phonological variability in Bolzano Italian with the aim of understanding which language varieties have possibly played a role as models from a sociolinguistic point of view. The purpose of our exploratory study is to characterize this variety within the spectrum of variation between the standard and the regional norm. In our analysis, we will focus on the set of mid vowels as a window to understand which variety of Italian BI most closely resembles. Through a corpus-based analysis, we will investigate the phonological distribution of mid vowels (for both Italian and Tyrolean speakers), in order to explore whether it can be explained on the basis of a contextual or a lexical distribution.

The cycle in language change

Abstract Language change can be conceptualized as a cyclical process of continuous renewal of the involved elements which somehow change their nature, with respect to phonological or lexico-grammatical features. A crucial aspect of such diachronic evolution is that cyclical change takes place systematically and follows regular and unidirectional patterns of development. Once the change is complete, the same developmental path will be undertaken by new linguistic items in the same cyclical fashion. In this paper, we illustrate the concept of cyclical change by discussing two examples of linguistic cycles. A first instance of cyclical development is displayed at the phonological level by the diachronic changes in the obstruent consonant system taking place from Indo-European to German through the First and the Second Sound Shift: the cycle is completed in the Cimbrian dialects. A second instance is provided by the diachronic process known as Jespersen’s cycle ([1917] 1966): sentential negation, initially expressed through a single negative marker, is later reinforced by an additional one; eventually, this second element becomes the only negative marker available in the sentence while the original marker is deleted. The discussion of the negative cycle takes also into consideration the results of an empirical research conducted on two varieties of an Italo-Romance dialect spoken in northern Italy.

Microvariation in agreement inflection: Subject clitics vs inflection

This article examines the relationship between the presence and shape of subject clitics and verbal endings in a sample of 187 Italo-Romance dialects. It is found that in the majority of languages subject clitics outnumber distinctive inflectional endings. The absence of underspecified systems militates in favour of diachronic and synchronic explanations claiming that the presence of subject clitics is related to the richness of inflection. At the same time, however, the predominance of overspecified systems indicates that further factors are at play in shaping inventories of subject clitics. The second result is that, from a geolinguistic perspective, close dialects exhibit more similarities in the inflectional system than in clitic systems. This brings further support to the claim that inventories of subject clitics do not reflect the array of inflectional endings, whereas some further factors are probably involved in the emergence of subject clitics. Such factors might be either feature geometries/filters, as proposed in the previous literature, or third factors in Chomsky’s sense, i.e. factors that are related to computational efficiency and/or processing costs.

Pseudo-Allomorphy of Articles and Articulated Prepositions in Llanito

In this study, I will provide a decompositional analysis of Llanito’s articles, both definite and indefinite, as well as the many fused preposition + article combinations. Prima facie, Llanito seems to show phonologically conditioned allomorph (PCA) selection, including a melodically-conditioned allomorphy triggered exclusively by /w/. However, taking a Strict CV approach, building on work on Standard Italian (Larsen 998; Faust et al. 2018), Galician (Ulfsbjorninn 2020) and southern and central Italo-Romance dialects, including Old Tuscan varieties, (Russo & Ulfsbjorninn 2021), I will show that the whole system of articles in Llanito can be generated without the use of allomorphy at all. Instead, all the surface variants are generated from the combination of a unified set of syntactic exponents fed through the language’s regular phonology. This analysis joins the Llanito phenomena to the research program started by Scheer (2016) where PCA analyses are reanalyzed in purely phonological terms.

Some notes on central causal clauses in Venetian

Abstract The goal of this paper is to provide novel evidence in favor of an integration of Haegeman’s (2002) taxonomy of adverbial clause subordination by discussing some data from C-introduced causal constructs in Venetian, the Italo-Romance dialect spoken in the city of Venice. Haegeman’s model is based on a two-class categorization of adverbial structures into central clauses, in which matrix-clause phenomena (such as the licensing of some sentence-initial or sentence-final discourse particle-like items, XP-fronting) are excluded, and peripheral clauses, in which these phenomena are licit. The external-syntactic distinction predicted by this model, namely a semantic differentiation resulting from TP/VP-adjunction for central vs. CP-adjunction for peripheral adverbial clauses, has severe consequences for the internal syntax of the a/m constructions, the most striking being the absence of the upper projections of the Split CP of central constructs. The data presented in this paper, however, suggest that (at least) in Venetian, (some) main-clause phenomena may also be licensed in central adverbial clauses under specific circumstances. Additionally, it will be shown that the conclusions drawn from the observation of the Venetian data match the behavior of the same constructions in Standard Italian, as well as in other languages, under the very same conditions.

Totemismo e cultura dialettale. Alcune evidenze a partire dal repertorio paremiologico e fraseologico siciliano

The present work sheds light on the relationship between totemism and dialectal culture starting from the analysis of a range of Sicilian proverbs and phraseologies regarding wild animals (birds, insects and reptiles). The corpus is made up of proverbs and idioms from macro- and micro-areal lexicographical or paremiological repertoires, also considered on the basis of demo-ethnographical studies dealing with Sicilian customs, beliefs and superstitions. The article is aimed both at explaining, from a motivational view point, the value or the origin of a specific expression according to the totemic hypothesis, and at analysing aspects of an ancient era which still dwell in one of the most linguistically conservative levels of the Italo-romance dialects. In particular, the study focusses on two specific features of totemism: on the one hand, the animals’ magical-prophetic power influencing both agricultural and pastoral activities and, more in general, man’s destiny; on the other hand, the fauna’s holiness which justifies expressions of taboo or respect. Moreover, a special attention is paid to fatalism, a common thread which characterises the presence of the animals in the several examples taken into account.

Capturing language change through EEG: Weaker P600 for a fading gender value in a southern Italo-Romance dialect

Grammatical gender processing is a classic topic in the neurolinguistic literature. However, most of the studies consider major standard languages, such as English, Dutch, Spanish or Italian. This is a limitation, since these languages display relatively simple systems that are fairly stable and do not allow to address language variation and change. Here we investigated gender agreement in a dialect of Southern Italy spoken in Agnone, using Event-Related Potentials. Compared with Italian and most standard Romance languages, the Agnonese gender system is more complex (with three target genders: feminine, masculine, neuter) and, also under the pressure of standard Italian, undergoing change, with the neuter merging into the masculine. Results showed that all determiner-noun gender mismatches elicited robust P600 and moderate Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) effects. Yet not all violations involving neuter nouns were equally outright. For masculine-neuter, the amplitude of the P600 was less pronounced than for feminine-neuter violations. Moreover, when looking at individual differences, the P600 for masculine-neuter was progressively reduced as participants’ competence in the Agnonese conservative variety decreased. Since sociolinguistics shows that individual variation within the speech community may reflect linguistic change, the smaller P600 exhibited by less conservative speakers could be described as a brain signature of ongoing language change in the Agnonese gender system. In other words, the attenuation of ungrammaticality-driven brain responses may provide a measurable indicator of the fading of the neuter and its merging into the masculine. This work paves the way to the neurolinguistic description of non-standard varieties and also breaks ground for a “diachronic neurolinguistics”, extending investigation into the neurobiology of language beyond the synchronic dimension.

Different sources of convergent patterns in the Alps

AbstractThe diffusion of particle-verbs in Rhaeto-Romance and Italo-Romance dialects is surveyed on the basis of a selection of 13 AIS maps presenting the responses to 12 input sentences referring to different events. Particle-verbs are more frequent in the coding of motion than non-motion events. The geographic diffusion appears to be biased towards the Central and the Eastern Alps and the Central Po Plain. The distribution of particle-verbs is shown to correlate with the presence of systems of topographical deixis and to result from processes of language shift from Romance to Germanic in the mountains. Diffusion in the plain has resulted from inter-dialectal contact along cross-Alpine trade routes.

The possessive enclitics with kinship nouns in Italo-Romance and the possessive determiners in the Francoprovençal of Faeto

Abstract This paper deals with the possessive constructions in Italo-Romance dialects compared with the possessive constructions of one Francoprovençal (Gallo-Romance) variety spoken in Faeto (Foggia, Apulia). Francoprovençal possessive constructions are at a first glance distinct from Central and Southern Italian possessive constructions, mainly since in Francoprovençal (as in French) possessive forms (clitics) are prenominal. In Central and Southern Italian dialects, we find instead a split possession: 1) postnominal enclitic possessives (weak possessive markers) associated with parental kinship nouns distinct from 2) prenominal possessives associated with common nouns and postnominal strong possessive forms. Crucially, I claim that enclitic possessives are inflexional affixes, that receive a structural word-internal linearization from the same external (syntactical) linearization identified for proclitic possessive markers (in Faeto). I retain that the distinction between postnominal weak enclitics in Italian dialects and Francoprovençal weak prenominal possessive constructions is based on the inalienability (parental kin nouns + enclitics in DP). All possessive clitics (proclitics and enclitics) show a common syntactic configuration and differ only in Distributed Morphology, according to a “late” feature insertion and operations after syntax. Indeed, the possessive determiners represent three different morphological spells out of the same syntactic object: the bundle of features [Person], [(Gender) Number], [Definite], generated in functional heads.

Nuove ricerche sull’Attila Flagellum Dei di Nicolò da Càsola

Abstract My article focuses on the Franco-Italian poem Attila Flagellum Dei, composed by Nicolò da Càsola, an Italian notary, in the second half of the XIV century for the Estensi in Ferrara, in order to celebrate the heroic origins of the family: actually, it is the first encomiastic poem dedicated to them, before the major works by Boiardo and Ariosto. The poem is witnessed by a single manuscript (divided into two tomes), supposedly in the hand of the author himself. My study provides a new biographic profile of Nicolò and his family, also through an overview of some archival documents from the Archivio di Stato in Bologna. The article also presents a brief summary of the narration, and outlines the principal characters, the positive ones (Forest and Gilius in particular) as well as the negative ones (Attila), seen as prototypes alluding to other fictional or historical figures (Forest = Hector of Troy; Attila = the entire Visconti’s family). At last, my paper offers a sample (the proem) of the critical and commented edition I am working at. The text is preceded by an analysis that illustrates its peculiar linguistic features, with a particular regard on the rhymes: indeed, far from being representative of the generic class of Franco-italian works composed by Italo-Romance authors, the poem Attila Flagellum Dei shows a combination of hypercharacterized French and Italo-Romance dialects of Northern Italy.

Primi appunti sulla manipolazione dell’assegnazione del genere in sanvalentinese

"Preliminary Notes on Gender Assignment Manipulation in Sanvalentinese. This contribution draws attention on a peculiar feature of the Italo-Romance dialect spoken in San Valentino in Abruzzo Citeriore, where a subgroup of feminine nouns displays both feminine and masculine plural options. Gender shift to masculine in the plural seems to be exploited to obtain semantic differences related to countability and evaluation, namely to refer respectively to weak differentiation and pejorative meaning. This phenomenon, known as recategorization or gender assignment manipulation, is rather common in African languages of different families, but less pervasive and systematic in Romance. Gender and recategorization in Sanvalentinese are discussed in relation to inflectional classes, of which this contribution provides a sketch. Keywords: gender, number, recategorization, inflectional class, overdifferentiation, collective plural, Romance dialectology, metaphony."

Perceptions of address practices in Italian interregional encounters. A case study of restaurant encounters

Italian regions constitute distinct cultural and linguistic entities, each with their own language varieties. Address forms are reported to be used with different frequencies and connotations in the various regions, not only in local Italo-Romance dialects but also in regional varieties of Italian. As part of a large-scale study on address in Italy with a focus on restaurant encounters, this article investigates perceptions of address practices when individuals relocate to or simply visit other regions of Italy. Upon enquiring about regional differences in the ways waiters and customers address each other, it has emerged that: a) many speakers do perceive regional differences in address practices; b) being addressed by waiters with unexpected forms in interregional encounters can result in positive or negative reactions; and c) reflecting on the perceived pragmatic behaviour by waiters can sometimes lead speakers to formulate representations of regional cultures and identities. Regional pragmatic variation in Italian presents itself as a promising field of research, the results of which would improve our current knowledge of regional varieties of Italian and perceptions thereof.

Grammaticalization of subject agreement on evidence from Italo–Romance

AbstractIn this paper we consider the grammaticalization of subject agreement adducing first-hand synchronic evidence from presentational VS constructions in Italo-Romance dialects. While the existing literature has placed emphasis on the pragmatic properties of the controller, we explore its semantic properties. We argue that variation in subject agreement can only be fully captured with reference to an independently established semantic scale of subjecthood that is based on the position of arguments in semantic representation, and hence on their lexical entailments.Unaffected actoris the default controller in accusative alignment. The patterns of dialect microvariation arise, in our analysis, from variation in macrorole assignment in presentational focus. Our proposal formalizes at the discourse-semantics-syntax interface the idea that, in presentational VS constructions, the core argument S may be treated as part of the predicate, thus failing to control grammatical subject agreement. This happens in presentational focus because the predication is about an implicit topic. The latter can trigger a type of pronominal agreement that is comparable to Bresnan and Mchombo’s (Bresnan, Joan & Sam A. Mchombo. 1987. Topic, pronoun and agreement in Chichewa.Language63. 741–782) anaphoric agreement. This study provides robust arguments in support of an understanding of subject agreement as the grammaticalization of semantic-relation contrasts, as well as pragmatic-role distinctions.

System-oriented and speaker-oriented approaches in Italian sociolinguistics

Two main approaches can be said to characterize sociolinguistic research in Italy since its beginning in the Sixties. One approach is more system-oriented and is mostly inspired by the qualitative variational (socio)linguistics in the poststructuralistic vein of the work of E. Coseriu (Labovian quantitative sociolinguistics is somewhat underrepresented in Italian sociolinguistics). The other approach, largely followed since the Nineties, is speaker-oriented, and has its basis mainly in the perspective of interpretive sociolinguistics. This paper aims at drawing a critical state of the art, discussing, in the light of the basic distinction above, the methods and findings of significant research done on some selected topics characterizing the manifold sociolinguistic situation of Italy, as for instance the contact between Italian and Italo-Romance dialects (the dialects being not locally spoken varieties of Italian, but ‘primary dialects’ in the sense expressed by Coseriu), their distribution in use, the standardisation of the national language, and related phenomena. In a first section we deal with the general theoretical issue about the relationship between the speaker and the linguistic system, and an outline of the differences between a system-oriented and a speaker-oriented approach in linguistics is tentatively sketched out. In a second step the most interesting results of some recent Italian works on different topics in a system-oriented perspective will be pointed out; the same will be made with a choice of recent Italian works developed in a speaker-oriented perspective. As a conclusion, we argue that a better or more adequate way to carry out sociolinguistic research is a cooperation between the two perspectives: due to the nature of language and language behavior, there is no real reason indeed to oppose a speaker-oriented approach to a system-oriented one, or vice versa.

From Language Contact to Language Variation

This paper falls within the line of research dealing with the role of intralinguistic variation in contact-induced language change. Two constructions are compared in terms of their respective degrees of grammaticalization: the progressive periphrasis ese lì c/a+Verb, which is widespread in some Northern Italo-Romance dialects, and the corresponding Italian construction essere lì che/a+Verb. The study focuses on the presence of such constructions in Turin, the capital of the north-western Italian region of Piedmont, in which the former periphrasis is less grammaticalized than the latter. It contends that the grammaticalization process of essere lì che/a+Verb was triggered by the contact between Piedmontese dialect and Italian, whereas the pace of grammaticalization of this periphrasis is affected by the contact between different varieties of Italian. The paper points out that the case study may provide insight into more general issues concerning not only the interplay of contact and variation in language change but also the role of sociolinguistic factors in shaping contact-induced grammaticalization phenomena.

The Romance Component in Yiddish: A Reassessment

AbstractThe presence of a lexical stock of Romance origin in Yiddish has been interpreted differently by various authors. For D. S. Blondheim they represent a direct continuation of Judeo-Latin. For Max Weinreich, those Romance components go back to specifically Jewish languages, which he called southern and western Loez (a variation on the terms “Italkic” and “Zarphatic” once used by Salomon Birnbaum). This study reconsiders the history of those Yiddish words of Romance origin, focusing on the phonetic development they underwent as they integrated into Yiddish. The contribution of Romance historical linguistics confirms the huge importance of the Italo-Romance connection in this lexical stock, which may reflect the phase when Jews from Byzantine Italy began to settle beyond the Alps. A pinpointed examination of the morphophonemic shape of the loanwords may even hint at specific places of origin on the Italo-Romance dialectal maps. In spite of the dominance of Italo-Romance dialects in the Romance-borrowed lexical stock of Yiddish, some terms attested in both Western and Eastern Yiddish obviously have an Old French origin.

How far can diachronic change be predicted

This paper attempts to predict diachronic change in the restricted domain of Italo-Romance first person plural present indicative allomorphs, starting from the reconstructed Proto-Italo-Romance forms -amo, -emo, -imo, preserved in several dialects to this day (with corresponding subjunctives -emo, -iamo, -iamo). The predictions, or rather retrodictions (to be differentiated below) are based on the theory of Natural Morphology (NM). Morphology-initiated changes lead to 64 logically conceivable distributions in the earlier and present Italo-Romance dialects. The retrodictions are meant to account for the identity of attested distributions with possible (‘legal’) distributions, for unattested impossible (‘illegal’) distributions and for two accidental gaps in distributions. Moreover, we try to predict why certain attested distributions are more probable and therefore more frequent than others and introduce a new method of empirically testing such probability retrodictions.

Italian and Italo-Romance dialects

The relative status of dialects and Italian and the different patterns of language use have given rise to potentially different speech communities within the larger Italo-Romance domain. Such communities are mainly determined by the dimensions of geographical, social and age variation. In this paper we are going to present some of these different patterns of dialect and standard Italian, first reviewing some of the most relevant literature of the last two decades, and then analyzing the most up-dated census results concerning language use.

Morphological complexity without abstractness: Italo-Romance metaphony

This paper considers some selected cases of stressed vowel alternations arisen from the application of metaphony in Italo-Romance dialects. While similar cases are often reported in the literature, the ones picked up here stand out because they resist, for several reasons, any analysis treating metaphony as a synchronic phonological rule (albeit opacized), deriving the surface alternants from abstract underlying representations. Such analyses, as standardly practiced in the Generative paradigm from the 1960s to this day, would face insurmountable problems in accounting for the morphological paradigms that capitalize on the metaphonic alternants putting them into service as exponents of morphosyntactic categories. Thus, the study of morphological complexity yields supporting evidence for phonological theories like Natural Phonology, which severely constrains the amount of abstractness permitted to underlying representations.