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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.

The Romance languages and dialects constitute a treasure trove of linguistic data of profound interest and significance. Data from the Romance languages have contributed extensively to our current empirical and theoretical understanding of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics. Written by a team of world-renowned scholars, this Handbook explores what we can learn about linguistics from the study of Romance languages, and how the body of comparative and historical data taken from them can be applied to linguistic study. It also offers insights into the diatopic and diachronic variation exhibited by the Romance family of languages, of a kind unparalleled for any other Western languages. By asking what Romance languages can do for linguistics, this Handbook is essential reading for all linguists interested in the insights that a knowledge of the Romance evidence can provide for general issues in linguistic theory.

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 addresses the division of labour between morphology and syntax. The testbed is provided by perfective periphrases showing person-driven auxiliary selection in central–southern Italo-Romance, with forms of HAVE and BE within the same paradigm. Such mixed auxiliation systems have been subjected to alternative analyses: a syntactic analysis, tracing the selection of different auxiliaries in different persons (as well as variation in one and the same person) back to differences in syntactic structure vs morphological analyses claiming that the distribution across persons within the paradigm of one and the same verb lexeme is a matter of inflexional morphology, in the same sense as the selection of a specific personal ending contrasting with those from different inflexional classes. The chapter provides a crucial piece of evidence in support of the latter view drawing on an unusual case of phrase allomorphy in the split auxiliary systems of three dialects of central Apulia.

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.

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.

The paper deals with some lexical issues raised by one of the Romanesco poems (n. 407) included in the so-called Misogallo romano (late 18th century). In particular, the work tries to explain four rather puzzling words: 1) pilacche, which possibly has to be considered a copying mistake for pilucche ‘wigs’; 2) Mambrucche (in the syntagma aria de Mambrucche), to be linked to the French song Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre; 3) tricche tracche, whose meaning could be just, as usually in Romanesco, ‘a kind of instrument used in the Holy Week’; 4) policche (in the phrase fa policche), still obscure, for which it is nonetheless possible - among other proposals - to establish a comparison with similar words occurring in the dialects of Todi and Subiaco.

This chapter addresses a series of Greek loan nouns that had previously been integrated into Latin and which may, in some cases, have entered Romanesco via an intermediate step through Tuscan/Italian. The study of these particular nouns yields insights into the system of inflectional classes and grammatical genders - and their interaction - contributing thus to the understanding of this variety’s morphological and morphosyntactic system in diachrony. In particular, I conclude that the inflectional class -a/-i entered Romanesco only from the 15th century onwards through a particular group of Graecisms.

In this paper, I discuss a set of lexical items which are peculiar to (Old) Eastern Tuscan, at odds with Florentine and standard literary Italian. Some of them, such as incigliare ‘to scutch’, oppio ‘poplar’, poccia ‘breast’, are also common in most dialects of the Area (peri)mediana. Among the words which are widespread throughout Central Italy, it is possible to find a small group that Arezzo shares with the dialect of Rome, such as catorcio ‘bolt’, deto ‘finger’, lograre ‘to wear out’, ‘to consume’ and Old Aretine mannarino ‘hog’ or ‘suckling pig’ (Modern Romanesco ‘old ox’ or ‘mutton’).

L’articolo mette in sistema per la prima volta due serie di irregolarità non soddisfacentemente spiegate. 1) Dal latino fu(ĭ)sset (“fosse stato” > “fosse”), in romanesco antico oltre alla forma attesa fosse abbiamo anche forse; in altamurano accanto a fwessǝ abbiamo fwersǝ. 2) Diversi continuatori italoromanzi di fŏrsit (*fŏrsīs) “forse” presentano una vocale tonica diversa dall’attesa /ɔ/: toscano e veneto fórse, veneziano fursi, romanesco furse. Le forme in 1) si possono spiegare con l’influsso dell’avverbio “forse”, le forme in 2) di contro con l’influsso della III singolare del congiuntivo imperfetto di “essere”. L’articolo ricostruisce le condizioni pragmatiche che hanno propiziato questo influsso reciproco, oltre a toccare il problema dell’incrocio in morfologia, e a fornire una messa a punto sugli esiti di fŏrsit e varianti nell’Italoromania. Parole chiave: Fonologia storica italiana, Morfologia storica italiana, Etimologia italiana, Romanesco, Pugliese-salentino, Veneto.

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 (Sennori) 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.

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.

The book addresses grammatical gender in Romance, and its development from Latin. It works with the toolbox of current linguistic typology, and asks the fundamental question of how the Latin grammatical gender system gradually changed into those of the Romance languages. To answer this question, the book capitalizes on the pervasive dialect variation of which the better-known standard Romance languages only represent a fragment. Indeed, inspection of dialect variation across time and space forces one to dismiss the handbook account proclaiming that the neuter gender, contrasting with masculine and feminine in Latin, was eradicated from spoken Latin by late Empire times. Both Late Latin evidence and data from several modern dialects show that this never happened, and that the vulgate account proceeds from unwarranted back-projection of the data from modern languages like French and Italian. Rather, the neuter underwent transformations which are the main culprit for the differences in the gender system observed today between, say, Romanian, Sursilvan, Neapolitan, and Asturian, to cite just a few types of system which turn out to differ significantly. A precondition for establishing the database for diachronic investigation is a detailed description of many such systems, which reveals data whose interest transcends the diachronic issue under consideration: the book thus addresses systems where ‘husbands’ are feminine and others where ‘wives’ are masculine; discusses dialects where nouns overtly mark gender, but only in certain syntactic contexts; and proposes an analysis according to which one Romance language (Asturian) has split inherited grammatical gender into two concurrent systems.

‘Gender’ is a manifold notion, at the crossroads between sociology, biology, and linguistics. The Introduction delimits the scope of linguistic (or grammatical) gender, which is an inherent morphosyntactic feature of nouns in about half of the world’s languages, introducing the definitions and notions which the present work utilizes to investigate gender. While focusing on grammar, this study has implications far beyond (e.g. for gender studies), and capitalizes on findings from other disciplines, such as cognitive neuropsychology. The chapter introduces the basic aim of the monograph, which intends to account for the steps through which the Latin three-gender system was reshaped into the binary systems shared today by most standard Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, and Italian). One crucial definitional tool, highlighted in this chapter, is the distinction between target and controller genders: the two need not coincide everywhere, and mismatches between the two may arise—and did arise in Romance—through change.

The inventory of lesser-known more-than-binary systems gathered for purposes of linguistic reconstruction is now discussed per se, as a valuable complement to our knowledge of linguistic diversity in Europe. The chapter covers topics such as the creation—atypical for Romance—of strictly semantic gender and subgender values; contact-driven change in the gender system (of both Romance and contact languages); and the occurrence in some Romance dialects of unusual conditions on gender agreement (with unexpected sensitivity to inflectional morphology of gender/number agreement rules), of gender agreement on unusual targets (e.g. non-finite verb forms, adverbs, complementizers), and of (highly unusual) syntactically dependent overt gender-marking on nouns. The chapter ends with a gedankenexperiment, showing how the data reviewed thus far would complement the relevant maps of the World Atlas of Language Structures.

The chapter explores the earliest attested stages of the different Romance branches, elaborating on the picture which has emerged in Chapter 4 and showing that the traces of more-than-binary gender contrasts grow increasingly significant, and geographically widespread, as one proceeds backwards in time. Thus, even Northern Italo-Romance and Gallo-Romance, which have no traces of a functional neuter today, still featured in their medieval stage not only a non-lexical neuter adjective inflection for default/agreement with non-lexical controllers (Gallo-Romance), but neuter agreement on (overdifferentiated) lower numerals (Italo-Romance), and scattered remnants of neuter plural agreement on determiners. The latter gradually increase as one moves to Tuscan, Romansh, and, finally, Southern Italian, where the four-gender system is still observed today, with Old Neapolitan even showing a four-target/four-controller gender system, with the two genders in addition to masculine and feminine both going back to the Latin neuter.

Having shown at the end of Chapter 4 that mass/count may be encoded in the gender system, this chapter analyses in depth one Romance variety where the interaction of the mass/count distinction with gender presents itself in a distinctly intricate way, viz. Central Asturian. This features a ‘neuter’ agreement that has been variously analysed as the exponent of a value of the morphosyntactic categories gender or number, or as manifesting the value of some other, purely semantic, category. Complementing the evidence with new data, the chapter concludes that the most economical analysis is one according to which the Asturian neuter is a gender value, but within a second gender system. In this, Asturian parallels a few far-off languages which, in recent studies in linguistic typology, have been argued to possess two concurrent systems for noun classification.

The chapter describes the three-gender system of Latin, with a particular focus on the neuter gender: unlike the masculine and feminine, this was not only assigned to nouns as an inherent feature, and used to specify words from other word classes agreeing with those nouns, but it also served default functions in a range of contexts. Arguably, this property was inherited from (late) Proto-Indo-European, as was the three-way gender system itself, in which the neuter seems to have contrasted with masculine/feminine in terms of (in)animacy. Simplification of the gender system in most of Romance is placed in the broader Indo-European perspective, showing that in most branches the gender contrasts have reduced via a drift that reaches its endpoint in the eradication of grammatical gender in, for example Armenian or Farsi. Within this picture, some Romance dialects apparently deviate, showing complexification rather than simplification of the gender system.

After showing that, for purposes of reconstruction, the dataset must be limited to non-creolized Romance varieties, the chapter discusses the notion ‘remnants of the neuter’, showing that this label covers disparate things, and that what is in focus here is morphosyntactically functional remnants, i.e. traces of a third (controller and/or target) gender. These are then inventoried, showing that almost all Romance languages preserve a third series of targets (in pronouns) for agreement with non-nominal controllers, and Sursilvan has this also on predicative adjectives. Furthermore, Romanian and many Italo-Romance dialects still have a third controller gender, and a subset of the latter even has an additional target gender, with dedicated agreement forms for either (in just one Calabrian dialect) the neuter plural or (in most dialects between the Roma–Ancona line and a line crossing central Puglia and northern Lucania) a neuter hosting just mass nouns (and hence, only singular).

The most widespread type of gender system is exemplified with Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, and Sardinian data. These languages all have parallel binary systems, with the masculine selected by default (e.g. for gender resolution, non-agreement, or—in most cases—agreement with non-nominal controllers). While dialect variation is covered in the following chapters, here a flavour thereof is conveyed by introducing binary convergent systems, which represent a further development (due to sound change merging agreement targets in the plural) of the mainstream binary system. The chapter then reviews semantic and formal assignment rules. Romance gender systems are never entirely semantic, but they always have a semantic nucleus: names of male/female human beings and sex-differentiable animals are assigned masculine and feminine via semantic rule in all Romance languages. These differ widely in the extent to which formal (morphological and phonological) rules are at work, and in how these look.

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.

Both diphthongization and metaphony per se, and the interaction between the two, are among the most investigated topics in Romance historical linguistics. In this paper, I suggest that the two do not originally belong together, in the sense that a) the so-called Romance diphthongization, which affected PRom /ɛ ɔ/ in most Romance languages, was not originally sensitive to the quality of the final unstressed vowel; and b) the different types of metaphony observed across (Italo-)Romance, often involving diphthongization, are most economically explained as changes which all first arose as assimilatory raising, not as diphthongization. These data provide an interesting case study in what one might call the division of labor of phonetics and (morpho)phonology for the explanation of sound change. In this connection, experimental phonetic evidence from Southern Italian dialects will prove crucial.

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 article shows how dialectology can benefit from concepts imported from sociolinguistics, and how, when carefully applied, these concepts can lead to a refined picture of linguistic dynamics. This will be illustrated by analyzing variation in final unstressed vowels in several dialects of Vallo di Diano (Salerno, Italy), whose speakers produce words with either centralized or full final vowels. Phonetic, etymological and geolinguistic evidence is used to show that these dialects are characterized by a highly conservative vowel system, and that final vowel variation can best be explained in terms of contact with a regional koiné variety, rather than with standard Italian.