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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.

This chapter offers an overview of the development of the theory of agreement highlighting the major contributions that have been proposed on the basis of the Romance languages. The first part of the chapter follows the analysis of verb–subject agreement from early generative grammar to contemporary syntactic theory. After a short overview of syntactic agreement, the chapter moves on to morphological agreement, discussing among other things the relation between rich agreement and null subjecthood as well as agreement and subject clitics in Romance. The chapter offers a number of examples from standard and non-standard Romance languages.

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.