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While grammatical gender has become simplified through losing the neuter from Latin into the better-known Romance languages, several Romance varieties ended up with more-than-binary gender systems instead, in which two further gender values, both the heirs of the Latin neuter, exist alongside masculine and feminine. Late Latin and Medieval Romance evidence shows that the trend towards a binary gender system is a centuries-long one: we analyse the manifestations of this long-term drift in one Italo-Romance dialect from the four-gender area of Central-Southern Italy, viz. Molfettese, spoken in the province of Bari, information on whose gender system is available from the early 20th century. We ran fieldwork in Molfetta one century later and are now in the position to evaluate the changes that occurred in the meantime. While the four-gender system is still there, the two gender values which are not shared with standard Italian are presently merging into the masculine. Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods and considering both production and perception, we analyse the various facets of this process in terms of loss of lexical and syntactic productivity and consistency of marking across agreement targets. We also show that the change is progressing across the lexicon and the community, with some speakers at the vanguard, and finally show that their behaviour with respect to the on-going change can be effectively captured via scalar acceptability judgments and statistically modelled employing ordinal regression (cumulative link mixed models). Während das grammatische Genus durch den Verlust des Neutrums aus dem Lateinischen in den bekannteren romanischen Sprachen vereinfacht wurde, haben mehrere romanische Sprachvarietäten stattdessen ein mehr als binäres Genussystem entwickelt, in dem neben dem Maskulinum und dem Femininum zwei weitere Genuswerte, beide Erben des lateinischen Neutrums, existieren. Nicht nur das Latein, sondern auch die mittelalterlichen Quellen zeigen, dass die Entwicklung zu einem binären Genussystem ein jahrhundertelanger Prozess ist. Wir analysieren die Manifestationen dieser langfristigen Tendenz in einem italo-romansichen Dialekt aus dem Vier-Genus-Gebiet in Mittel- und Süditalien, nämlich dem Molfettese, das in der Provinz Bari gesprochen wird und über dessen Genussystem Informationen aus dem frühen 20. Jahrhundert verfügbar sind. Wir haben ein Jahrhundert später Feldforschung in Molfetta durchgeführt und sind nun in der Lage, die in der Zwischenzeit eingetretenen Wandelerscheinungen zu beschreiben. Das Vier-Genus-System ist zwar immer noch präsent, aber die beiden Genus-Werte, die im Standarditalienischen nicht vorkommen, verschmelzen gegenwärtig mit dem Maskulinum. Mit einer Kombination aus qualitativen und quantitativen Methoden, die sowohl die Produktion als auch die Perzeption untersuchen, analysieren wir die verschiedenen Facetten dieses Prozesses hinsichtlich des Verlustes an lexikalischer und syntaktischer Produktivität und der Kohärenz der Markierung über alle Kongruenz-Targets hinweg. Wir zeigen, dass die Veränderung transversal sowohl im Wortschatz als auch in der Sprachgemeinschaft voranschreitet, wobei gewisse Sprecher eine Führungsrolle einnehmen. Abschließend wesen wir nach, dass deren Verhalten bezüglich der laufenden Veränderung mittels Bewegungen auf einer Likert Skala effektiv erfasst und mit Hilfe einer ordinalen Regression (cumulative link mixed models) statistisch dargestellt werden kann.

This article presents the entries of the letter E from the Vocabolario del romanesco contemporaneo (VRC), conceived by P. D’Achille and C. Giovanardi in the early 2000’s and then enriched with an extensive etymological section, edited by V. Faraoni and M. Loporcaro. The VRC, of which two sample volumes have so far been published, containing the entries from the letters I, J (2016) and B (2018), aims to collect and scientifically analyse the lexicon of the dialect and regional Italian of Rome from the second half of the 20th century onwards, adopting the synchronic perspective that previous Romanesco lexicography, mainly of an amateur bent, has neglected and which instead proves to be useful both in filling various gaps and above all in grasping the vitality of present-day Romanesco, also in terms of vocabulary. L’articolo presenta il lemmario della lettera E del Vocabolario del romanesco contemporaneo (VRC), ideato da P. D’Achille e C. Giovanardi all’inizio del Duemila e poi arricchito di un’ampia sezione etimologica, curata da V. Faraoni e M. Loporcaro. Il VRC, di cui finora sono stati pubblicati due volumi-campione relativi alla lettera I, J (2016) e alla lettera B (2018), si propone di raccogliere e analizzare scientificamente il lessico del dialetto e dell’italiano regionale di Roma a partire dalla seconda metà del Novecento, nell’ottica sincronica che la lessicografia romanesca, prevalentemente di carattere amatoriale, ha trascurato e che invece si rileva proficua sia per colmare varie lacune, sia soprattutto per cogliere la vitalità del romanesco attuale anche sul piano del lessico.

'Il volume raccoglie quaranta saggi offerti a Franco Fanciullo da colleghi e amici in occasione del suo settantesimo compleanno. Contributi di: Maria Giovanna Arcamone, Francesco Avolio, Marina Benedetti, Maria Patrizia Bologna, Rosario Coluccia, Carlo Consani, Franco Crevatin, Pierluigi Cuzzolin, Alessandro De Angelis, Nicola De Blasi, Paolo Di Giovine, Pietro Umberto Dini, Lorenzo Filipponio, Renato Gendre, Mariafrancesca Giuliani, Cristina Guardiano, Giuseppe Longobardi, Melita Stavrou, Paola Crisma, Romano Lazzeroni, Adam Ledgeway, Norma Schifano, Michele Loporcaro, Giovanni Lupinu, Martin Maiden, Io Manolessou, Angela Ralli, Carla Marcato, Issam Marjani, Giovanna Marotta, Filippo Motta, Maria Napoli, Alberto Nocentini, Andrea Nuti, Giulio Paulis, Paolo Poccetti, Stella Retali-Medori, Domenica Romagno, Francesco Rovai, Giovanni Ruffino, Andrea Scala, Domenico Silvestri, Giuseppina Silvestri, Rosanna Sornicola, Fiorenzo Toso. (...)'.

La comunicazione informerà sullo stato dei lavori del progetto Etimologie del Romanesco Contemporaneo (ERC), che in sinergia con il gruppo di ricerca del Vocabolario del romanesco contemporaneo (Roma Tre) e grazie al sostegno scientifico-logistico offerto dal Lessico etimologico italiano ha per obiettivo il trattamento etimologico sistematico delle voci oggi in uso nel dialetto capitolino (cfr. Autore 1 2016). Per l’occasione verranno discussi etimi notoriamente complessi di lemmi che, spesso per mediazione del romanesco, sono ormai acclimati anche nella lingua comune. Tra questi, jella, per cui è stato possibile rinvenire dati a sostegno di una precedente «ipotesi di lavoro» di Lurati (1998: 134-138); cacchio, che almeno per il valore meridionale di ‘membro virile’ può spiegarsi con capulum ‘manico’ attestato in latino in accezione oscena (e, non, come riportato dalla maggior parte dei repertori lessicografici, per pura deformazione eufemistica di cazzo); e inguacchio, deverbale da inguacchiare spiegababile con un b.lat. *incoaclare, formazione parasintetica da couacla, variante metatetica di lat. cloāca attestata in Consenzio (K V 392,24, Niedermann 1937: 20,23). Accanto a voci come queste, per cui è stato già possibile supportare o proporre interpretazioni a nostro avviso convincenti, ne verranno trattate altre, quali per esempio inghippo o intruglio, per le quali, nonostante l’attenzione dedicata loro in passato da diversi studiosi (cfr. da un lato Alessio 1976, seguito per es. da DELI s.v. e Nocentini s.v.; dall’altro D’Ovidio 1892-1894: 410, Pellegrini 1957: 129-130 e Nocentini 2010, s.v.), una proposta etimologica pienamente soddisfacente ancora manca. Bibliografia e sigle Alessio, Giovanni (1976). Lexicon etymologicon, Napoli, Arte tipografica. Autore 1 (2016). Ricerche etimologiche sul romanesco contemporaneo, in Vocabolario del romanesco contemporaneo. Lettera I, J, a c. di Paolo D’Achille e Claudio Giovanardi, sezione etimologica a c. di Autore 2 e Autore 1, Roma, Aracne, pp. 29-39. D’Ovidio, Francesco (1892-1894). I. scoglio; II. maglia e simili; III. veglia e simili; IV. melo, in «Archivio glottologico italiano» 13, pp. 361-451. ERC: Etimologie del romanesco contemporaneo, estremi anonimizzati per la valutazione del riassunto. K: Grammatici Latini, a c. di Heinrich Keil, Leipzig, Teubner, 1856–1880, 7 voll.; rist. Hildesheim, Olms, 1981. Lurati, Ottavio (1998). Modi di dire: nuovi percorsi interpretativi, Lugano, Fondazione Ticino Nostro. Niedermann, Max (1937). Consentii Ars de barbarismis et metaplasmis. Edition nouvelle suivie d’un fragment inédit de Victorinus De soloecismo et barbarismo, Neuchâtel, Secrétariat de l’Université. Nocentini, Alberto (2010). l’Etimologico. Vocabolario della lingua italiana, con la collaborazione di Alessandro Parenti, Firenze, Le Monnier. Pellegrini, Giovan Battista (1957). La canzone di Auliver, in «Studi mediolatini e volgari» 5, pp. 95-131.

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.

This paper describes the network of scholars co-operating in collective endeavours in Italian dialectology in Switzerland during the first half of the 20th century. Attention is paid to the varying institutional settings in which such networks were embedded. While briefly mentioning scholars active at other Swiss universities (e.g. Fribourg, an important research centre addressed in {\S}1) or outside academia, the main focus is on Zurich, mainly due to J. Jud?s ?most polite hegemony? (as A. Varvaro once insightfully put it). The main collective enterprises mentioned in {\S}{\S}2-3 are the AIS (Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der S{\"u}dschweiz), the recording campaigns organized in 1913 and 1929 by the University of Zurich, and the VSI (Vocabolario dei dialetti della Svizzera italiana). Focusing on the VSI implies considering scholars working in Italian universities in that period, viz. C. Salvioni and C. Merlo. In particular, {\S}{\S}4-5 reconstruct the progressive shift of the VSI from an international to a Swiss national endeavour, pointing out previously unpublished documents that illustrate the so far little-known transitional phase during which the main scientific point of reference moved from Merlo to Jud.

In this paper, we sift the evidence for overdifferentiated gender marking on lower numerals in Medieval Italo-Romance. While the dialects of most of Northern Italy still preserve a masculine vs feminine contrast on ‘two’ and ‘three’ to this day, their ancestors in the Middle Ages, as reflected in early Italo-Romance texts, featured in addition a third form of each (doa, trea), which was selected by just a few nouns ending in -a (e.g. Old Venetan doa para ‘two pairs’). These forms, it is argued, are not innovations – unlike claimed by some – but rather the legitimate outcome of previously regular neuter agreeing forms, to be traced back to (late) Latin in a straight line. By the time the earliest extant documentation of Northern Italo-Romance emerged, these neuter forms of the numerals were quite isolated in the respective systems, as neuter agreement had long been obliterated on other agreement targets (residual persistence of a-agreement on adjectives – it is also shown – is much more sporadic in Medieval Northern Italy than in the South). Such isolation made the occurrence of doa (alongside masc. doi and fem. doe) a case of overdifferentiated gender marking.

The texts composed by the Roman singer-song writer hiding behind the pseudonym Sora Cesira, posted on the world wide web since early in 2011, are parodies of famous musical videoclips which capitalise on a mix of Italo-Romance (mostly standard Italian and Romanesco, but with a pinch of further dialects like Neapolitan) and other languages (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, to which more recently also Latin has been added). These texts are analysed here from the viewpoint of the clues they provide as to the linguistic knowledge to be assumed for their ideal addressee to decode them effectively. In fact, in order for them to achieve their intended comic effect, the texts must be understood: therefore, their author(s) must work based on a (probably largely unspoken) hypothesis about the language portfolio of the addressee. As it turns out, there is, quite unsurprisingly, an imbalance between English and all the rest: English, it will be shown, is the only language from which the texts employ words and constructions that are not decodable in the absence of punctual knowledge. In other words, in order to laugh, while listening to Sora Cesira’s Anglo-Italian, some elementary command of English is needed, while this is hardly required for any other of the languages involved, French included (in spite of its having been, until recently, the first foreign language taught in Italian school).

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.