Michele Loporcaro

On triple auxiliation in Romance

Abstract Romance languages divide into three classes, as far as perfective auxiliation is concerned: as well as languages showing a binary contrast (e.g., French) and languages showing no contrast (e.g., Spanish), several varieties exist in which auxiliation displays three-way choices. Previous research on Romance auxiliaries has failed to recognize this empirical fact due to its focus on auxiliaries as morpho-lexical items, rather than on auxiliation as a syntactic phenomenon. Building on the approach to Romance auxiliation of Perlmutter (1989), this article proposes an analysis of triple auxiliation systems, as well as of systems which display variation in auxiliation, either free or sensitive to verb person. The rise of these mixed systems, like all other recorded changes in Romance auxiliation, is interpreted as one of the manifestations of the retreat of Proto-Romance active/inactive alignment and of the shift back to a more consistent accusative/nominative orientation.

Four-gender systems in Indo-European

A long-established tenet of Indo-European linguistics says that grammatical gender systems all along the history of this language phylum were maximally tripartite and generally tended toward a reduction of gender contrasts. In this article, we shall show that this widely-held idea overlooks the existence of four-gender systems in a substantial part of the Romance language family, a fact that has in turn gone unnoticed so far. We shall provide an analysis of the relevant Romance data, a sketchy comparison with other four-gender systems described in linguistic typological research, and a detailed reconstruction of how the gender systems in question might have developed in the Latin-Romance transition.

Vowel Length from Latin to Romance

1. Introduction 2. Vowel length in the Latin-Romance transition 3. The development of VL in Romance 4. The analysis of Northern Romance vowel length 5. Dialect variation and comparative reconstruction 6. In lieu of a conclusion Appendix: Language and dialect area maps

Variation and change in morphology and syntax: Romance object agreement

Romance past participle agreement in perfective periphrastics, it is argued, has to be analyzed as object agreement. This paper provides a general characterization of Romance object agreement in a typological perspective (Section 2) and then discusses the different diachronic developments of the Proto-Romance rule into the daughter languages (Section 3). The results suggest that change affecting the syntactic working or the morphological marking of agreement can be initiated at either the morphological, the morphosyntactic or the syntactic levels. It may proceed independently on either without affecting the others or may else have repercussions beyond the component from which it started. Special attention is devoted (Section 4) to a case study from a southern Italo-Romance dialect in which syntactic change and the resulting synchronic rule were sensitive to morphology, in a way that is excluded on deductive grounds under many current theories of the morphology-syntax interplay.

Crossing Form and Function: First and Second Person Plural Imperatives in the Dialect of Mesocco

Abstract This paper proposes an explanation for the rise and fall of a 1pl imperative ending in the dialect of Mesocco, a Northern Italo-Romance variety from southern Switzerland. This ending cannot be explained with inherited 1pl morphology: rather, it is best accounted for by assuming the reanalysis of a 2pl imperative hosting a 1sg pronominal object clitic. This reanalysis, it is suggested, must have occurred in the syntactic context provided by the ‘ethical’ dative construction. It has been prompted by several factors, among which the crucial one is functional in nature, viz. the pragmatic homology between 1pl imperative – unmarkedly inclusive in meaning – and the ethical dative construction with a 2pl imperative. Comparative evidence is also adduced from studies in linguistic typology, showing that similar crossovers between 1st and 2nd person plural morphology, although unattested in Romance (or, more precisely, in the better-known standard Romance languages), are not without parallels cross-linguistically. Finally, a functional motivation is provided for the deacquisition of this 1pl imperative form in the dialect of the younger generations.

Composti V+N e genere grammaticale in rumeno

The paper addresses the long standing issue of the number of values of the morphosyntactic category gender in Romanian and argues in favour of a three gender analysis. This is done capitalizing on one domain of empirical evidence, that of V+N compounds.These compound nouns select the kind of alternating gender agreement (masculine singular/feminine plural) which characterizes the neuter gender under threegender analyses. The fact that these nouns do not show the inflections (notably, pluraleand uri) of the productive noun inflection classes to which neuter nouns are otherwise assigned shows the productivity of the neuter (i.e., of the corresponding agreement class per se) and is hence used as an argument against two gender analyses that deny the existence of the neuter gender and reduce the alternating agreement selected by what is labelled traditionally as neuter nouns to an automatic consequence of the inflectional morphology of the relevant nouns.

Noun classes and grammatical gender in Wolof

Abstract In this paper, we propose a reassessment of Wolof noun morphology and morphosyntax. Wolof is usually said to possess a total of 10 noun classes (8 for the singular, 2 for the plural), marked today exclusively on agreement targets. We provide evidence that two more plural noun classes must be recognized, which have so far been misinterpreted as “collective” rather than plural: the evidence we provide is morphosyntactic (from verb agreement) as well as morphological (from class-related asymmetries in the paradigm of the indefinite article). As for method, the main thrust of the paper consists in showing that an accurate analysis of the Wolof data must make use of the three distinct notions “noun class”, “inflectional class” and “agreement class” (or gender). Under the analysis defended here, Wolof turns out to have a fairly complex gender system, featuring 17 distinct gender values. Our analysis – and especially the discussion of Wolof so-called “collectives” – also bears on the general theoretical issue of how to establish the values of the number category.

Sulla Sardegna preromana

Blasco Ferrers Rekonstruktion eines einheitlichen Palaosardischen und dessen Ruckfuhrung auf eine palaobaskische Kolonisierung, mit der sich die im romanischen Vergleich auserordentliche Physiognomie der sardischen (insbesondere der zentral-ost-sardischen) Mikro toponymie begrunden liese, werden auf der Basis der angefuhrten Dokumentation detailliert diskutiert und im Ergebnis als unbewiesen eingestuft.

Studies in Sardinian morphology

The papers gathered in this issue of LeL were originally presented as talks at a workshop on Sardinian Morphology during the 8th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting, held in Cagliari in September 2011. The versions presented here are the extension of the research and the elaboration of the cues and observations which were provided on this occasion. Sardinian morphology is a field of inquiry on which there are several studies in the tradition of Romance (historical) linguistics and dialectology, capitalizing on first-hand field-work. However, the rich array of cross-dialectal variation, in morphology and elsewhere, revealed by research in this descriptive tradition has gone largely unperceived by general linguists, partly due to the paucity of studies in this area whose problematic horizon intersects with hot topics in current theoretical morphology. The present collection of papers is an attempt to take a step towards increasing the visibility of Sardinian morphology for fellow-linguists working in morphological theory, on the Romance languages and beyond. All the papers collected here, albeit coming from partially different theoretical backgrounds, share the effort to place their respective research objects in a theoretical perspective. Thus, if they all give high relevance to a careful description of phenomena, in none of them does the relevance accorded to the empirical data and their description in any way subtend the assumption that observation can be free of theory-ladenness (in the sense of Hanson’s1958 Patterns of Discovery).

Morphological complexity without abstractness: Italo-Romance metaphony

Abstract 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.