Il marcamento di genere iperdifferenziato sui numerali e i residui del neutro nei volgari settentrionali antichi

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.