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In this paper, we focus on partitive articles (PAs), i.e., determiners which, generally, have an indefinite interpretation, and on one of their potential correlates, i.e., invariable de, in Francoprovençal, a non-standardized, highly endangered Gallo-Romance language (cf. Zulato, Kasstan & Nagy 2018), and show the fine-grained spatial distribution of these elements in the Swiss and Aosta Valley (Italy) varieties. Presenting several maps based on fieldwork data from Valais (Switzerland) and the Aosta Valley (Italy), we demonstrate that the spatial distribution of PAs and de is more complex than reported in the literature: we complement the basic subdivision of Francoprovençal into two types, Francoprovençal A and B (cf. Kristol 2014, 2016), with a more nuanced picture, in which the morphosyntactic features of PAs play a crucial role: in Francoprovençal A, the presence of PAs depends on the syntactic context whereas, in Francoprovençal B, their presence is limited mainly to two areas, in which singular and plural PAs do not occur together (one area only has singular PAs whereas the other one only has plural PAs). We also show that there is no correlation between phonologically overt plural marking on nouns and absence of PAs; however, we found a correlation between overt sigmatic number marking on nouns and absence of PAs.

In most natural languages, grammatical gender and number features encode semantic attributes concerning the animacy, sex, and numerosity of the referents. Albeit the likely advantage of promptly communicating about such salient attributes, inflectional systems rarely display consistently bijective correspondences between the semantic attributes and the grammatical feature values. In a study on Italian, we explored how this apparently noisy encoding depends on a trade-off between the semantic and the functional aspects of grammatical features. By means of entropy metrics, we assessed the primarily functional purpose of gender and number features in the lexicon, observing a distribution of nouns that can optimally serve agreement-based parsing and prediction of words in sentences. A novel context entropy measure, introduced in this study to assess meaning specificity, revealed a semantic underspecification in masculine and singular nouns denoting animate referents. We argue that underspecification is the hallmark of the particular type of information compression occurring in inflectional systems. In binary inflectional systems, one value specifically encodes a semantic attribute, while the other value does not encode any semantic information, and surfaces as a default for functional purposes; the encoding of two antithetic semantic attributes is less likely. By providing an information-theoretical account of the role of grammatical features based on large-scale data, we set the basis for a scientifically informed pursue of language inclusiveness.

Both proper names and common nouns, when used as terms of address in Romanesco, can be preceded by the particlea(a Nando!‘Hey, Fernando!’) and undergo truncation of the poststress material ((a) dottó’!‘Hey, doc!’). The article presents a panchronic study of this construction in Romanesco, showing how and when truncation and the vocative particleafirst arose and providing a synchronic analysis of the conditions under which they occur today. Vocative truncation is widespread in Central-Southern Italo-Romance, where it obeys conditions that vary subtly across time and space and that the article will touch upon based on the studies available to date. These conditions will be described in detail for Romanesco, showing that they are hierarchically organized and involve all levels of linguistic analysis: the list includes (a) a part-of-speech condition, (b) a condition referring to the syntactic constituent, (c) a semantic/pragmatic condition, (d) one of prosodic minimality, and finally (e) one of lexical semantics, relative to the animacy/definiteness hierarchy. Also the occurrence of theaparticle is subject to conditions which are syntactic-textual, pragmatic and phonological in nature and which identify preferences rather than clear-cut (un)grammaticality, contrary to those that constrain truncation.

Un lettore pone un quesito mettendo insieme alcune parole apparentemente tutte connesse: “Mi chiedo perché la parola fico/figo indicante normalmente il frutto dell’albero omonimo (e le grazie femminili se il sostantivo è al femminile […]) abbia assunto la connotazione gergal-giovanile di ‘bello, ganzo, sorprendente’. Come ci si è arrivati? E come si è arrivati ad usare la medesima parola per descrivere un/a bello/a ragazzo/a? E per quanto riguarda la parola sfiga invece?”. Su quest’ultimo termine chiedono spiegazioni anche una lettrice e un altro lettore che ipotizzano una possibile correlazione con il termine gergale fica e/o figa. Su quest’ultimo termine chiedono spiegazioni anche una lettrice (“Vorrei sapere come e da che cosa è nata la parola sfiga, se ha qualche correlazione con il termine gergale fica o figa e se è una parola maschilista”) e, con formulazione sintomaticamente diversa (che qui non riteniamo opportuno riportare per esteso), un altro lettore, il quale chiede se sia “iellato chi non dispone” liberamente del denotato del termine di cui sopra.

This chapter elaborates on two case studies in structural variation to illustrate how the comparison of closely-related grammatical systems fuels research questions on general theoretical issues. Our first case study regards subject clitics in central Romance dialects. Subject clitics have been studied extensively in the past decades, but they still raise several questions concerning the nature of null subject languages. Analogously, there is a huge literature on the selection of perfective auxiliaries – the second case history in our chapter – and, as in the case of subject clitics, lesser-known non-standard dialects display a kaleidoscope of auxiliation options, whose rationalization poses fascinating analytical challenges and yields insights into basic issues of linguistic theory. The core question raised by our case studies regards the modelling of linguistic diversity: do the above phenomena result from a finite set of discrete parameters or emerge from random language-specific options? We argue that the otherwise ‘hyperastronomical’ number of possible grammars is aptly constrained by syntactic factors, although inflectional morphology – which syntax cannot control entirely – may have a role in the realization of specific auxiliary or subject clitic forms in each dialect and for each person.

The paper provides the first description of the borrowing of Croatian collective numerals into Northern Istro-Romanian and explores the consequences of this borrowing for the morphosyntax of the recipient language. It argues that the collective numerals under examination, which are specified as nominative plural feminine in the Slavic model, took on a different structural specification in the Romance replica, in a way that led to a restructuring of the morphosyntactic system, introducing (sub)gender overdifferentiation on just two agreement targets and, thereby, a complexification in this area of grammar. The illustration of this change is placed against the background of the other contact-induced changes that grammatical gender has undergone in Istro-Romanian during the 20th century, which have led to the borrowing of two dedicated forms in distinct inflectional cells and the rise of two separate defective gender values, each the replica of one number value of the Slavic neuter.

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.

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 study investigates the plural form uni/une deriving from the numeral ‘one’ in the Istriot dialect of Sissano. Sissano is located in the Istrian peninsula, an area characterized by high intensity of linguistic contact. We argue that the rise of such a peculiar form is indeed induced by contact with Croatian and that uni/une is unique in the Italo-Romance domain since, generally, the plural indefinite forms derived from the Latin numeral ‘one’ are pronouns and never occur in attributive position. The use of uni/ une is not attested in the few grammars of Istriot varieties because it is recent and still undergoing a process of grammaticalization. Therefore, we conducted interviews to verify how and to what extent contact with Croatian affects the meaning and the use of uni/une in Sissano. We found that this form is mostly used as a quantifier, bearing mainly the meaning ‘a pair of’, ‘one group of’, in the context of pluralia tantum and plural dominant nouns. We further observe that this quantifier has achieved a more advanced stage of grammaticalization in the younger generation of speakers than in the older ones. We discuss the role played by pluralia tantum as well as by the growing prestige of Croatian in triggering this borrowing and in fostering the grammaticalization process of uni/une on its way to become a marker of indefiniteness.

The languages of the Balkans are a rich source of data on contact-induced language change. The result of a centuries long process of lexical and structural convergence has been referred to as a ‘sprachbund’. While widely applied, this notion has, however, increasingly been questioned with respect to its usefulness. Addressing the linguistic makeup of the Balkan languages, the notion of sprachbund is critically assessed. It is shown that a) the Balkan languages and the Balkan linguistic exclaves (Albanian and Greek spoken on the Italian peninsula) share similar contact-induced phenomena, and b) the principal processes underlying the development of the Balkan languages are borrowing and reanalysis, two fundamental and general mechanisms of language change.

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. (...)'.

At the heart of this special issue are partitive elements (i. e., partitive articles, partitive pronouns, and partitive case markers) which can express different “shades” of partitivity, namely true partitivity, pseudopartitivity, or indefiniteness, that is, the absence of a part-whole relation in the meaning, in contrast to (pseudo)partitivity. Since these partitive elements express (at least) two such notions, as they can be truly partitive but often are not, the questions around partitivity are complex, interrelated and challenging. This special issue, with a strong and wide crosslinguistic (typological) coverage, deals with two overarching topics: first, the geographical distribution of partitive elements and the identification of potential instances of language contact, and, second, sometimes in combination with the first topic, the formal description and explanation of different partitive constructions.

Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish has been studied under various aspects: Spanish as a typical DOM language in typology, Spanish as the most salient Romance DOM language, Spanish and its diachronic evolution and diatopic variation. The present paper discusses different accounts that were given in the literature for the emergence and tendencies of DOM in Spanish. It tries to show that there is, apart from all the semantic and syntactic factors traditionally discussed, an overall basic value of DOM in Spanish which can be extracted analysing those cases where the presence or absence of DOM establishes an obvious opposition in meaning. It is claimed that the contemporary system emerged in Early Modern Spanish and that it seems rather stable in the Spanish speaking world. Furthermore, as a contemporary tendency within this system there seems to be an increase of DOM in cases where marking is facultative, with regional differences within the Spanish speaking world.

Based on dedicated fieldwork, this chapter analyses the gender system of Ripano (Italo-Romance), showing that it displays overt gender marking, but only depending on syntactic context. While overt gender per se and the syntactic dependency of gender marking via agreement on targets have both been described for several languages, the Ripano system is unprecedented, and deserves thorough description: thus, the chapter presents the phonological, morphological, and morphosyntactic prerequisites as well as the syntactic conditions which constrain overt gender marking. It places this peculiarity of Ripano in perspective, describing the many other quite extraordinary properties of this dialect: not only does it mark{--}unusually for Indo-European{--}gender/number agreement on finite verbs, but also on several other agreement targets, including non-finite verb forms, complementizers, wh-words, and even nouns, which in certain syntactic constructions cumulate the usual inherent gender specification with highly unusual contextual gender marking, determined via agreement with the clause subject.

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.

This paper deals with some Logudorese dialects of Northern Sardinia, whose nominal and pronominal morphology has been variously reshaped due to contact with Gallurese/Sassarese. While many of the data discussed here were addressed in the previously available literature, we draw on first-hand fieldwork data to show that further simplification in the system of personal pronouns has taken place (S{\`e}nnori) or is presently ongoing (Luras), resulting in an overall trend towards loss of marking of the gender contrast, everywhere in the plural, at times also in the singular. In particular in the case of Luras, we show that this rearrangement is taking place through a kaleidoscope of subtly differing individual variants.