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One of the best-known cases of language contact within Romance concerns the influence of Greek on the Romance dialects of southern Italy. Here I reconsider the traditional claim that these dialects are essentially Greek disguised as Romance. In particular, I shall draw on recent theories about parameter hierarchies and parametric change in terms of four discrete classes of parameter, namely macro-, meso-, micro- and nanoparameters, to show how such an approach is able to both model and formalize the degree of morphosyntactic convergence and divergence exhibited between Italo-Greek and southern Italo-Romance. While recognizing the essential correctness of Rohlfs’ original slogan spirito greco, materia romanza, this novel approach to an old question will afford us a more nuanced and refined interpretation of the precise nature and extent of Greek-Romance structural contact in this area of southern Italy.

The present paper examines the syntax of the verbs of motion GO and COME in the dialects of northern Calabria. In these dialects both verbs of motion exceptionally license a case of pseudo-coordination, a monoclausal complementation structure in which two finite verbs occur in succession. In contrast to similar structures found in neighbouring southern dialects, it is argued that, despite their ‘special’ monoclausal syntax, GO and COME in the northern Calabrian pseudo-construction are not grammaticalized in that they have not undergone any process of grammaticalization. Rather, GO and COME indicate pure deictic motion and lack any of the typical functional (e.g. temporal) uses of their counterparts in other languages, Romance or otherwise. To capture their behaviour, it is proposed that GO and COME in northern Calabrian lexicalize a low functional head marking the aspectual deictic categories of andative and venitive viewpoint, but do not raise to higher positions within the functional domain to lexicalize grammaticalized categories such as future tense, as often happens in other Romance varieties where GO and COME are now also first-merged in such positions and therefore show the concomitant effects of grammaticalization. This leads to the claim that, in contrast to their equivalents in many other Romance varieties, GO and COME in northern Calabrian are grammatical, inasmuch as they are first-merged in a low aspectual head of the clausal functional domain, but they are not grammaticalized, in that they fail to raise to higher functional heads within the higher functional domain.

In this chapter the editors introduce the book and its aim of showing how the study of comparative and historical data from the Romance languages can illuminate general linguistics. After a brief presentation of the volume and its structure, the editors reflect on how their personal experiences of working with data from the Romance languages have led them to reflect on wider issues in general linguistics. Recurrent themes in their work have been, respectively, morphosyntactic change (Ledgeway) and sound change and its morphological consequences (Maiden). Among the topics whose theoretical implications are explored are: parametric variation, universals, typological variation, pro-drop, word order, linguistic theory and philology, complementizer systems, the interaction of phonological and morphological factors in morphologization, the problem of defining a language family, and the perils of ‘standard language bias’ in the practice of historical linguistics. While these may appear a quite heterogeneous set of issues, they are treated in a way that prompts some major shared fundamental conclusions, in particular that Romance linguistics can make its most powerful contributions to general linguistics when Romance linguists exploit to the maximum the extraordinary wealth of historical and comparative data which the Romance languages and dialects offer them.

Evidence from the Romance languages has played a central role in linguistic debates regarding the relation between structure and change. One of the issues that has attracted most attention has been the connection between periphrasis and inflexion: Latin had rich systems of verbal and nominal inflexion that interacted in various ways with existing periphrastic patterns and structures that incorporated the ingredients of incipient Romance periphrases. These structures are of interest not only to those whose principal focus lies in exploring and explaining the development of the Romance languages, but also to those whose concern is with the broader theoretical implications for our understanding of language structure, variation, and change. This chapter sets out the issues, both theoretical—what models are most appropriate to describe and explain the Romance data?—and empirical—what sources of data are available and what issues arise in exploiting them? We begin with the criteria that serve to distinguish analytic patterns in general before going on to examine the specific properties of periphrastic constructions. From there we consider the interface between periphrasis and inflexion and the different ways they are modelled in current theoretical work. From synchrony, we move to diachrony and the role of grammaticalization in the genesis of new periphrases and inflexions, and interaction on the one hand between internally and externally motivated change and on the other between reconstructed and attested patterns. The chapter concludes with some general reflections on the relation between synchrony and diachrony.

This chapter undertakes an overview of the structural conditions regulating the distribution of a phonological fortition process, raddoppiamento fonosintattico “phonosyntactic doubling”, in the Calabrian dialect of Cosenza, focusing on some particularly striking cases which also reveal the role of phases in constraining the application of RF. On the one hand, the data highlight the advantages of interpreting locality not just narrowly in terms of the three core structural configurations Spec-Head, Head-Head and Head-Comp, but also more broadly in terms of phasal domains, showing how different phonological realizations represent the spell-out of deep syntactic differences mapped at the interface between narrow syntax and PF (Phonological Form). On the other, the theoretical assumptions assumed here provide us with the key to understanding some intriguing empirical generalizations about the role of RF in signalling, among other things, informational structure content and binding relations, which, in turn, throw new light on current theoretical assumptions about clause structure and the nature of phases.

Given therefore the central role of Romance and, in turn, historical linguistics assumed today within the study of linguistics and the many new and exciting perspectives that they continue to afford us in shaping and informing our theoretical understanding of the nature of language, it seemed timely to the editors to bring together in a single issue some of the foremost scholars in the field of Romance Linguistics. In the articles that follow they reflect in fresh and original ways on some major topics in historical linguistics in the light of contemporary thinking across a wide variety of formal approaches and in relation to a large body of empirical research conducted over a vast range of individual Romance languages and dialects, as well as across sub-branches of Romance from a comparative perspective.

International audience; Traditionnellement, la différence typologique principale entre le latin et les langues romanes résiderait dans une distinction entre morphologie et syntaxe : tandis que le latin recourt principalement aux structures synthétiques (en concomitance avec un ordre des mots dit libre), les variétés romanes morphologiquement moins riches ont largement recours aux structures analytiques (en concomitance avec un ordre des mots fixe). Selon une opinion populaire, cette différence refléterait un passage de la non-configurationnalité à la configurationnalité : en latin les relations entre les différents lexèmes sont signalées par la forme des lexèmes mêmes grâce à un système de flexions casuelles et d’accord très riches, alors que dans les langues romanes les relations entre les lexèmes associés sont codées par leurs positions fixes les uns par rapport aux autres. Malgré les aperçus précieux offerts par cette approche configurationnelle, on développe une approche alternative des changements de l’organisation structurelle du latin dans le passage aux langues romanes qui présuppose déjà la présence de la configurationnalité et de la structure fonctionnelle en latin depuis ses origines. De ce point de vue, les différences incontestables entre latin et langues romanes, notamment le remplacement d’un ordre des mots pragmatiquement déterminé par un ordre de plus en plus grammaticalement déterminé et l’apparition parallèle des catégories fonctionnelles, se prêtent à une explication en fonction de changements formels relatifs au paramètre de la directionnalité de la tête et au rôle différentiel de la structure fonctionnelle dans les deux variétés.

Drawing on Romanian examples, this article explores, in a manner which is accessible to both general scholars of the Romance languages and linguists, how the richly documented diachronic and synchronic variation exhibited by Romanian offers a wealth of linguistic data (often of a typologically exotic nature) of interest not just to comparative Romance linguists, but also to general linguists. This perennially fertile and still under-utilized testing ground will be shown to have a central role to play in challenging linguistic orthodoxies and shaping and informing new ideas and perspectives about language change, structure and variation, and should therefore be at the forefront of linguistic research and accessible to the wider linguistic community. At the same time, the discussion will also highlight how a familiarity with current key ideas and assumptions in theoretical linguistics has a significant role to play in understanding the structures and patterns of Romanian., This is the author accepted manuscript. It is currently under an indefinite embargo pending publication by the university of Bucharest.

Nel meridione d’Italia sopravvivono ancora oggi due piccole enclavi lingui-stiche greche, conosciute come greko o grecanico (Calabria) e griko o grico (Puglia). Mentre il greko viene ormai conservato solo da un numero esiguo di parlanti perlopiù anziani della zona meridionale estrema della Calabria, nota come Bovesìa, il griko gode di una maggiore vitalità, seppur sempre notevolmente ridotta, all’interno della cosiddetta Grecìa Salentina, area che include alcuni comuni nella provincia di Lecce, tra cui sette aventi ancora parlanti grecofoni (Calimera, Castrignano de’ Greci, Corigliano d’Otranto, Martano, Martignano, Sternatia, Zollino) . Sebbene in passato le origini della presenza del greco nel meridione d’Italia abbiano dato luogo ad un lungo dibattito, basato su ipotesi apparentemente contrastanti (p. es. Moro-si 1870; Rohlfs 1977; Battisti 1927; Parlangèli 1953) e solo recentemente riconciliate dalla tesi di bilinguismo avanzata da Fanciullo (2007), l’influenza linguistica che l’italogreco ha avuto sulle varietà locali di ro-manzo, e viceversa, attraverso secoli di compresenza nei medesimi territori è ampiamente riconosciuta. E tale è stata l’intensità del contatto greco-romanzo, in entrambe le direzioni, che questo ha finito con l’interessare non solo il lessico delle varietà locali, come spesso accade nei contesti più superficiali di contatto, ma anche la loro architettura più profonda, quale è la morfosintassi . È proprio a questa specifica area di indagine che rivol-giamo la nostra attenzione in questo studio, con il quale ci proponiamo di portare alla luce dei cambiamenti significativi che si sono verificati nell’espres¬sione di alcune categorie aspettuali in italogreco. Concentrandoci sul griko, in particolar modo, illustreremo come, in tempi relativamente recenti, nella macrocategoria aspettuale del cosiddetto ‘perfettivo’ si siano introdotte al tempo passato delle sotto-distinzioni che originariamente non erano marcate a livello formale, come succede peraltro in molte altre varietà di greco, ed andremo a valutare l’eventuale ruolo che il contatto con il ro-manzo locale può aver avuto in questo specifico contesto.

Romanian and the Romance and Greek varieties of the extreme south of Italy show various degrees of diachronic and diatopic microvariation in the loss and retreat of the infinitive, whilst displaying at the same time a high degree of overall structural uniformity in their parallel preservation of the (bare) infinitive in: (1) restructuring contexts; (2) infinitival relatives; and (3) negative imperatives. On the surface, there is nothing a priori to suggest that these three contexts should be connected in any way. Yet the discussion below demonstrates how these three uses can be reduced to a single structural explanation which views the infinitive as a reduced clausal constituent (viz. v-VP) generated in a monoclausal structure selected in all cases by a modal, temporal or aspectual auxiliary which is phonologically overt in (1), but oscillates between overt and covert phonological realizations in (2) and (3) in accordance with crosslinguistic variation. The result is a unified analysis which allows us to capture the distribution of (bare) infinitival complementation in all the relevant varieties quite simply in terms of a so-called restructuring configuration in line with Hill’s (2013a,b, 2017) intuition that the Romanian (and more generally Balkan) bare infinitive instantiates a monoclausal structure selected by a T-related auxiliary.

Starting with Dante’s Apenninic west-east divide into 14 vulgaria (De vulgari eloquentia 1.x.6-9; cf. Coletti 1995), there is a long tradition in Italian dialectology to classify the dialects by geographical criteria. Putting aside many of the details (see Pellegrini 1975; Bruni 1987:290f.; Cortelazzo 1988; Maiden 1995:233-48; Loporcaro 2009), today the dialects are conventionally, though not uncontroversially, classified according to a north-south axis which, although excluding Sardinian (Bossong 2016:65; Mensching and Remberger 2016:270), recognizes the three broad linguistic areas of the north (cf. Benincà, Parry and Pescarini 2016), centre (cf. Loporcaro and Paciaroni 2016) and south (cf. Ledgeway 2016a), characterized, in turn, by a series of internal subdivisions (e.g. Gallo-Italic vs Venetan northern dialects; Tuscan vs non-Tuscan central dialects; upper vs extreme southern dialects). Variously coinciding with early administrative, political and cultural divisions and, in part, with the distribution of the ancient peoples of the peninsula and their substrate languages (Ascoli 1882; Merlo 1937; 1933), these three macro-areas constitute a geographic continuum with linguistic distance increasing proportionately with geographic distance, allowing us to recognize two principal isoglosses (see Rohlfs [1972]1977; Savoia 1997): the La Spezia–Rimini Line – more accurately a bundle of phonetic and lexical isoglosses running from Carrara to Fano – traditionally delineates northern dialects from those of the centre-south which, in turn, are only more loosely differentiated from each other through the bundles of phonetic, lexical and some morphological isoglosses traditionally grouped together under the Rome-Ancona Line.

Given therefore the central role of Romance and, in turn, historical linguistics assumed today within the study of linguistics and the many new and exciting perspectives that they continue to afford us in shaping and informing our theoretical understanding of the nature of language, it seemed timely to the editors to bring together in a single issue some of the foremost scholars in the field of Romance Linguistics. In the articles that follow they reflect in fresh and original ways on some major topics in historical linguistics in the light of contemporary thinking across a wide variety of formal approaches and in relation to a large body of empirical research conducted over a vast range of individual Romance languages and dialects, as well as across sub-branches of Romance from a comparative perspective.

In this article we undertake a morphosyntactic comparison of the Italo-Greek and Italo-Romance varieties spoken in southern Calabria and Salento. In particular, we offer a comparative examination of the system of possessives in the relevant Italo-Greek and Italo-Romance varieties which both contrast a strong and an enclitic series. This symmetry in the two possessive paradigms will also be shown to involve specific structural parallels which we analyse in relation to semantic and syntactic properties of the nominal group such as referentiality and (in)definiteness. Following a close examination of the behaviour of strong possessives in accordance with particular pragmatic uses, we interpret the morphosyntactic properties of the possessives in relation to contact, interference and convergence, not only in southern Italy, but also in the Balkans. Ultimately, we shall demonstrate how the observed convergences are the result of innovative hybrid structures., Leverhulme Trust

Aquest article presenta una visió general descriptiva de la variació en la distribució i legitimació del marcatge diferencial d’objecte en un ampli ventall de dialectes del sud d’Itàlia. Es mostra com la variació en aquesta àrea no és aleatòria, sinó que segueix patrons de variació estructurada que es poden modelar de manera escalar a partir de quatre divisions àmplies basades en la persona gramatical i en les oposicions pronominal-nominal, nuclear-sintagmàtic i animacitat/especificitat. Aquestes quatre dimensions àmplies de variació, al seu torn, s’ha demostrat que amaguen una sèrie de diferències més subtils de naturalesa microvariacional. Se suggereix que aquesta microvariació es pot llegir no només horitzontalment com a variació sincrònica entre els dialectes, sinó també verticalment per proporcionar algunes idees clau sobre el desenvolupament diacrònic del MDO (italo-)romànic.

In this article we bring to light one additional factor underlying so-called Jespersen’s Cycle (JC) in Romance which has to date gone unnoticed, namely the varying position of the finite verb within the IP. More specifically, we show that there exists an empirical correlation between the availability of clause-medial/high verb-movement and Stages II–III of JC in which a postverbal negator is licensed. Drawing on novel data, we demonstrate that this correlation holds not only across modern Romance varieties, but also across early varieties. Formally, we explain this link between negation and verb-movement from the (in)active status of the T-domain and the consequent (im)possibility of donating a [Neg] feature to the lower v-VP domain. Although verb-movement in itself is not a sufficient condition to trigger a shift towards Stages II–III negation, we argue that it is a necessary one, a fact which explains the peculiar distribution of negation strategies across the Romània.

This article provides both a diachronic and synchronic account of the generalization of perfective auxiliary be in specific irrealis modal contexts across numerous Romance varieties spoken in Italy and more widely within the Romània, which has essentially gone unnoticed in the descriptive and theoretical literature. In some cases (southern Calabrian, Latin American Spanish, Portuguese), the distribution of be is to be interpreted as a residue of an original unaccusative syntax which was exceptionally preserved under higher V-movement in irrealis contexts, whereas in others (person-driven dialects of central and southern Italy, southern peninsular Spanish, Romanian) this original unaccusative signal has been reanalysed as a specialized marker of irrealis (lexicalizing a high Mood head) and extended to all verb classes. In the case of Alguerès, by contrast, the generalization of irrealis be is argued to be the result of language contact with surrounding Sardinian dialects where a specific pattern of dedicated irrealis marking of Mood° has been replicated. Finally, the reverse pattern with generalization of irrealis have, the reanalysis of an aspectual distinction between resultative and experiential perfects found in early Romance varieties (Neapolitan, Sicilian, Spanish, Catalan), is shown to involve a similar pattern of dedicated irrealis marking in Mood°.

There is considerable consensus and increasing evidence within the descriptive and theoretica literature that the syntax of medieval Romance, as well as late Latin, was characterized by a verb-second (V2) constraint. Accordingly, in root clauses, and in certain types of embedded clause, the finite verb is argued to raise systematically to the vacant C(omplementizer) position, a movement operation which is variously accompanied by the fronting of one or more pragmatically-salient constituents to the left of the raised verb to target topic and focus positions situated in the left periphery. Now, while the V2 status of medieval Romance and old French in particular is widely supported by detailed empirical and statistical studies like those cited in footnote 3, there are still some dissenting voices, such that the introduction and detailed scrutiny of new data, especially involving a range of more diverse textual sources, is a welcome addition in that it can provide important confirmatory evidence in favour of the V2 hypothesis. The present article therefore undertakes a detailed examination of the word order of a non-canonical old French prose text, the Histoire Ancienne jusqu’à César (henceforth HA), a universal history of particular interest since its earliest manuscript witnesses were produced outside of France in Acre (in the Kingdom of Jersualem), providing us with a precious example of a supralocal use of French transmitted by scribes who were often multilingual, or in any case not necessarily from France, and intended for a broad linguistic readership across France, Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, many of whom would not have had French as a native language. Within this context, the study of word order and, in particular, the evidence for a V2 constraint in the HA offers us a discrete scientifically-controllable variable by which to measure the extent of structural unity across those mutually intelligible medieval koinés, of which the language of the HA is but one example, albeit from outside of France, conventionally considered to constitute old French. If an examination of the word order of the HA, in itself an original result, can be shown to follow a V2 syntax, then this underlines the salience of this structural constraint as a distinctive and stable feature of the grammars of medieval French texts produced both inside and outside of France, including by perhaps less than fully native scribes. At the same time, this strengthens, in turn, claims for the existence of a common medieval Romance syntax characterized by a shared structural norm in the form of the V2 constraint, arguably the common denominator and hallmark of all medieval Romance grammars.

Much attention has been devoted in the literature to the study of imperatival morphology in Romance, and in particular the distribution and nature of true vs suppletive forms exhibited by positive and negative paradigms. Within this scenario we consider below a special case of suppletion in the paradigm of the negative imperative in some dialects of southern Calabria (§2). The relevant paradigms are special in several key respects. First, they involve the extension of an original infinitival desinence to a present indicative verb, giving rise to a hybrid imperatival form which exceptionally marries together finite and non-finite inflexional markings. Second, the synchronic comparison of these southern Calabrian varieties allows us a rare opportunity to reconstruct in diachrony the emergence and extension of the relevant suppletive pattern across different persons. Third, the patterns of suppletion in southern Calabria just outlined do 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 on the surrounding Romance varieties (§3). The resultant system of formal paradigmatic oppositions thus reproduces an underlying Greek model, not a Romance one, giving rise to a case of what Rohlfs famously termed spirito greco, materia romanza (‘Greek spirit, Romance material’). At the same time, these Greek-Romance hybrid patterns also provide significant evidence for the formal morphosyntactic equivalence between competing Greek finite and Romance non-finite forms of subordination, inasmuch as extension of the infinitival desinence never penetrates those imperatival forms introduced by a Greek-style modal subordinator (§4). Finally, the extension of the Romance infinitival desinence according to an underlying Greek model, although initially a manifestation of a suppletive pattern, will be shown to yield in synchrony a novel true imperatival pattern and, in turn, an alternation between a suppletive positive imperative and a true negative imperative, a typologically very rare formal opposition otherwise not attested in Romance or beyond (§5).

This article investigates the expression of progressive aspect by means of verbal periphrases in the Italo-Greek variety known as Grico, spoken in Salento (southern Italy). Building on the extremely valuable, yet out-dated, description of Rohlfs (1977), we first present an overview of the array of different patterns brought to light by our recent fieldwork and through a survey of a selection of both early and contemporary sources which include combinations of (non-)inflected STAND with (non-)finite forms of a lexical verb, optionally linked by functional elements. After describing the empirical scenario, we assess the degree of grammaticalization of the patterns which are still productive today, reconstructing their evolution from earlier periphrases and paying particular attention to the grammaticalization of the ambiguous element pu ‘where; from; that’. Finally, we analyse a hybrid structure currently consistently produced by semi-speakers from different villages, which seems to instantiate a new ‘third’ option within the local repertoire. The article concludes with of a number of observations about the role of this case study for our knowledge of diatopic morphosyntactic microvariation in Grico and for the nature of language contact and language change.

This paper discusses two case studies of microvariation in accusative marking in the Italo-Romance varieties of the extreme south of Italy. In particular, the diatopic variation displayed by the dialects of southern Calabria gives rise to peculiar patterns of alternation between presence or absence of the marker a ‘to’ in flagging the accusative. The realisation of accusative case is partially governed by semantic and referential features, i.e. specificity and animacy. In addition, the nature of the realisation of the D head results in a degree of competition between zero marking and analytic accusative marking with a. Given the century-long co-existence of Latin/Romance and Greek in southern Calabria, the relevant morphosyntactic patterns in Case-marking will also be examined from a language contact perspective. We will highlight how the relevant outcomes do not simply involve borrowing mechanisms or template copying from the lending variety but, rather, produce hybrid structures no longer ascribable to a purely Romance or Greek grammar.

Centuries-old Greek-Romance contact in southern Italy has led to the Hellenization of the local surrounding Romance dialects, as succinctly summed up by Rohlfs’ catchphrase spirito greco, materia romanza (literally ‘Greek spirit, Romance material’) to highlight the fact that in many respects the syntax of these Romance dialects is underlyingly Greek, despite employing predominantly Romance lexis. By the same token, in more recent times the indigenous Greek dialects of these areas have increasingly been subject to Romance influence (in particular, from regional Italian) giving rise to a number of underlyingly Romance structures and features in an otherwise Greek syntax. In this article we draw on two cases studies from the Romance and Greek varieties spoken in Calabria to illustrate how the syntax of argument-marking has variously been subject to contact-induced change. In both cases, it is shown that contact-induced borrowing does not replicate the original structure of the lending language but, rather, combines aspects of core Greek and Romance syntax to produce innovative hybrid structures, the evidence of which can be profitably used to throw light on the formal characterization and nature of convergence and divergence. Furthermore, the data considered here underline how convergence between grammars in contact does not necessarily lead to simple borrowing and transference through interference, but more frequently gives rise to new hybrid structures born of reanalysis of the original Italo-Greek or regional Italian structures within a Romance or Italo-Greek grammar, Leverhulme

In this article we undertake a systematic study of the Itinerarium Egeriae, one of the best known late Latin texts, to determine the proper characterization of the word order of the text and to consider in particular whether the Itinerarium Egeriae can legitimately be considered to present a verb-second (V2) grammar on the par with the well-studied grammars of medieval Romance. The results, based on detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses of the text and, where relevant, appropriate comparisons with medieval Romance, confirm the innovative nature of the syntax of the Itinerarium Egeriae whose word order patterns are shown to follow an asymmetric V2 constraint. The article therefore offers valuable original evidence for the often claimed, but hitherto unproven, hypothesis that the V2 syntax of medieval Romance represents the continuation of a parametric setting already well established in the grammar of late Latin. En aquest article duem a terme un estudi sistemàtic de l'Itinerarium Egeriae, un dels textos del llatí tardà més ben coneguts, per tal de determinar la caracterització adequada de l'ordre de mots del text i veure, en particular, si l'Itinerarium Egeriae es pot considerar legítimament que presenta una gramàtica de verb segon (V2) de manera semblant a les gramàtiques ben estudiades del romànic medieval. Els resultats, basats en detallades anàlisis quantitatives i qualitatives del text i, on és pertinent, en comparacions adequades amb el romànic medieval, confirmen la naturalesa innovadora de la sintaxi de l'Itinerarium Egeriae, els patrons d'ordre de mots de la qual es demostra que segueixen una restricció asimètrica de V2. L'article, per tant, ofereix evidència original i valuosa a favor de la hipòtesi sovint proposada però fins ara no demostrada que la sintaxi V2 del romànic medieval representa la continuació d'una fixació paramètrica ja ben establerta en la gramàtica del llatí tardà.

This book investigates the changes that affected vowel length during the development of Latin into the Romance languages and dialects. In Latin, vowel length was contrastive (e.g. pila 'ball' vs. pi:la 'pile', like English bit vs. beat), but no modern Romance language has retained that same contrast. However, many non-standard Romance dialects (as well as French, up to the early 20th century) have developed novel vowel length contrasts, which are investigated in detail here. Unlike previous studies of this phenomenon, this book combines detailed historical evidence spanning three millennia (as attested by extant texts) with extensive data from present-day Romance varieties collected from first-hand fieldwork, which are subjected to both phonological and experimental phonetic analysis. Professor Loporcaro puts forward a detailed account of the loss of contrastive vowel length in late Latin, showing that this happened through the establishment of a process which lengthened all stressed vowels in open syllables, as in modern Italian casa ['ka:sa]. His analysis has implications for many of the most widely-debated issues relating to the origin of novel vowel length contrasts in Romance, which are also shown to have been preserved to different degrees in different areas. The detailed investigation of the rise and fall of vowel length in dozens of lesser-known (non-standard) varieties is crucial in understanding the development of this aspect of Romance historical phonology, and will be of interest not only to researchers and students in comparative Romance linguistics, but also, more generally, to phonologists and those interested in historical linguistics beyond the Latin-Romance language family.