The Oxford Guide To The Romance Languages

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/5/2016, SPi
THE OXFORD GUIDE TO THE

ROMANCE LANGUAGES
OXFORD GUIDES TO THE WORLD’S LANGUAGES
GENERAL EDITORS
Adam Ledgeway, University of Cambridge, and Martin Maiden, University of Oxford
ADVISORY EDITORS
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, James Cook University Paul Hopper, Carnegie-Melon University

Edith Aldridge, University of Washington Geoffrey Khan, University of Cambridge
Stephen R. Anderson, Yale University Lutz Marten, SOAS, London
Bernard Comrie, Max Planck Institute for Marianne Mithun, University of California, Santa Barbara
Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig Irina Nikolaeva, SOAS, London
Jan Terje Faarlund, University of Oslo Chris Reintges, CNRS, Paris
Alice Harris, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Masayoshi Shibatani, Rice University
Bernd Heine, University of Cologne David Willis, University of Cambridge
PUBLISHED
The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages

Edited by Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden
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THE OXFORD GUIDE TO THE
Romance Languages
EDITED BY
Adam Ledgeway & Martin Maiden
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In memoria di Alberto Varvaro

1934–2014
Short Contents
Detailed Contents xii

Series Preface xli
Abbreviations xliii
The Contributors lii
Introduction liii
ADAM LEDGEWAY AND MARTIN MAIDEN
PART I: The Making of the Romance Languages
1. Latin as a source for the Romance languages 3

JAMES CLACKSON
2. Latin and Romance in the medieval period: a sociophilological approach 14
ROGER WRIGHT
3. Early evidence and sources 24
BARBARA FRANK-JOB AND MARIA SELIG
PART II: Typology and Classification
4. A structural comparison of Latin and Romance 37

NIGEL VINCENT
5. Romance: a typological approach 50
PAOLO RAMAT AND DAVIDE RICCA
6. Classifications 63
GEORG BOSSONG
7. Romance linguistic geography and dialectometry 73
HANS GOEBL
PART III: Individual Structural Overviews
8. Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Aromanian 91

MARTIN MAIDEN
9. Dalmatian 126
MARTIN MAIDEN
10. Friulian 139
PAOLA BENINCÀ AND LAURA VANELLI
11. Ladin 154
GIAMPAOLO SALVI
SHORT CONTENTS
12. Romansh (Rumantsch) 169

STEPHEN R. ANDERSON
13. The dialects of northern Italy 185
PAOLA BENINCÀ, MAIR PARRY, AND DIEGO PESCARINI
14. Italian, Tuscan, and Corsican 206
ADAM LEDGEWAY
15. The dialects of central Italy 228
MICHELE LOPORCARO AND TANIA PACIARONI
16. The dialects of southern Italy 246
ADAM LEDGEWAY
17. Sardinian 270
GUIDO MENSCHING AND EVA-MARIA REMBERGER
18. French and northern Gallo-Romance 292
JOHN CHARLES SMITH
19. Southern Gallo-Romance (Occitan) 319
MICHÈLE OLIVIÉRI AND PATRICK SAUZET
20. Francoprovençal 350
ANDRES KRISTOL
21. Catalan 363
ALEX ALSINA
22. Spanish, Astur-Leonese, Navarro-Aragonese, Judaeo-Spanish 382
DONALD N. TUTEN, ENRIQUE PATO, AND ORA R. SCHWARZWALD
23. Galician and Portuguese 411
FRANCISCO DUBERT AND CHARLOTTE GALVES
24. Creoles 447
ANNEGRET BOLLÉE AND PHILIPPE MAURER
PART IV: Comparative Overviews
A. Phonology 469
25. Segmental phonology 471
STEPHAN SCHMID
26. Prosodic structure 484
GIOVANNA MAROTTA
B. Morphology 495
27. Inflectional morphology 497
MARTIN MAIDEN
28. Derivational morphology 513
FRANZ RAINER
29. Compounding 524
FRANCESCA FORZA AND SERGIO SCALISE
viii
SHORT CONTENTS
C. Syntax 539
30. The structure of the nominal group 541
GIULIANA GIUSTI
31. The structure of the clause 556
SILVIO CRUSCHINA AND ADAM LEDGEWAY
D. Semantics and pragmatics 575

32. Lexical stability and shared lexicon 577
STEVEN N. DWORKIN
33. Onomasiological differentiation 588
INGMAR SÖHRMAN
34. Information and discourse structure 596
SILVIO CRUSCHINA
E. Sociolinguistics 609
35. Sociolinguistic variation 611
MARI C. JONES, MAIR PARRY, AND LYNN WILLIAMS
36. Diglossia 624
JOHANNES KABATEK
37. Standardization 634
CHRISTOPHER J. POUNTAIN
PART V: Issues in Romance Phonology
38. Diphthongization 647

MARTIN MAIDEN
39. Palatalization 658
LORI REPETTI
40. Sandhi phenomena 669
RODNEY SAMPSON
41. Writing systems 681
THOMAS FINBOW
PART VI: Issues in Romance Morphology
42. Number 697

MARTIN MAIDEN
43. Morphomes 708
MARTIN MAIDEN
44. Tonic pronominal system: morphophonology 722
CHIARA CAPPELLARO
45. Clitic pronominal systems: morphophonology 742
DIEGO PESCARINI
ix
SHORT CONTENTS
PART VII: Issues in Romance Syntax
46. Functional categories 761

ADAM LEDGEWAY
47. Subject clitics: syntax 772
CECILIA POLETTO AND CHRISTINA TORTORA
48. Object clitics 786
IAN ROBERTS
49. Auxiliary selection and participial agreement 802
MICHELE LOPORCARO
PART VIII: Issues in Romance Syntax and Semantics
50. Split intransitivity 821

DELIA BENTLEY
51. Negation 833
CECILIA POLETTO
52. Copular and existential constructions 847
DELIA BENTLEY AND FRANCESCO MARIA CICONTE
PART IX: Issues in Romance Pragmatics and Discourse
53. Illocutionary force 863

ION GIURGEA AND EVA-MARIA REMBERGER
54. Deixis 879
ADAM LEDGEWAY AND JOHN CHARLES SMITH
55. Address systems 897
RICHARD ASHDOWNE
PART X: Case Studies
A. The nominal group 909

56. Case 911
ADINA DRAGOMIRESCU AND ALEXANDRU NICOLAE
57. Gender 924
MICHELE LOPORCARO
B. The verbal group 937

58. Tense and aspect 939
PIER MARCO BERTINETTO AND MARIO SQUARTINI
59. Mood 954
JOSEP QUER
x
SHORT CONTENTS
60. Voice 967

MICHELA CENNAMO
61. Complex predicates 981
MICHELLE SHEEHAN
C. The clause 995

62. Word order 997
GIAMPAOLO SALVI
63. Clausal complementation 1013
ADAM LEDGEWAY
64. Relative clauses 1029
ELISABETH STARK
References 1041
Index 1169
xi
Detailed Contents
Series Preface xli

Abbreviations xliii
The Contributors lii
Introduction liii
PART I: The Making of the Romance Languages
1. Latin as a source for the Romance Languages 3

JAMES CLACKSON
1.1 Chronological and spatial scope of Latin 3
1.2 Classical and vulgar Latin 3
1.3 Changes in the vowel system from Latin to Romance 6
1.4 Development of the future tense 9
1.5 Lexicon 10
1.6 Sources of the Romance languages 12
2. Latin and Romance in the medieval period: a sociophilological approach 14
ROGER WRIGHT
2.1 Latin and Romance in the Middle Ages 14
2.2 Sociophilology 14
2.3 Writing 15
2.4 Writing Romance before written Romance was invented 16
2.5 ‘Vulgar’ Latin 17
2.6 Reading aloud 18
2.7 Written and spoken grammar 19
2.8 Words 20
2.9 The Carolingian reforms 20
2.10 Glossaries and glosses 22
2.11 Sociophilology and politics 22
3. Early evidence and sources 24
3.1 Introduction 24
3.2 Early Romance texts: ‘pathways’ to vernacular writing traditions 25
3.2.1 In-scripturation: inserting Romance utterances in Latin texts 26
3.2.2 In-scripturalization I: pragmatic texts in professional contexts 28
3.2.3 In-scripturalization II: discourse traditions and cultural memory 28
3.3 Writing without focused norms: scriptae and koinés 30
3.4 From medieval manuscripts to linguistic data: pragmatic and sociolinguistic
recontextualization 33
3.5 Final reflections 34
xii
DETAILED CONTENTS
PART II: Typology and Classification
4. A structural comparison of Latin and Romance 37

NIGEL VINCENT
4.1 Introduction 37
4.2 Latin and Romance: some phenomenological comparisons 37
4.2.1 Vowels and diphthongs 38
4.2.2 Nominal morphology and case 38
4.2.3 Inflection and periphrasis 40
4.2.4 Conditionals and counterfactuals 43
4.2.5 Causatives 43
4.2.6 Non-finite forms 45
4.2.7 Complementation 46
4.2.8 Configurationality and analyticity 47
4.3 Which Latin? Which Romance? 47
4.4 Latin, Romance, and the languages of Europe 49
4.5 Final reflections 49
5. Romance: a typological approach 50
5.1 Typologies of Romance languages 50
5.2 Areal typology: Standard Average European and the Romance languages 52
5.3 From Latin to Romance: typologically significant category losses and
innovations 52
5.3.1 Determiners 52
5.3.2 Auxiliaries 53
5.3.3 Word order change 55
5.3.4 Sentence negation 58
5.3.5 The clitic pronoun system and its grammaticalization potential 59
5.3.6 Gender and number categories 60
6. Classifications 63
GEORG BOSSONG
6.1 Introduction: Dante’s idioma tripharium 63
6.2 Identifying the Romance languages 63
6.2.1 The beginnings of Romance linguistics 63
6.2.2 The case of Catalan 64
6.2.3 The case of Sardinian 65
6.2.4 The case of ‘invented’ languages: Francoprovençal and Raeto-Romance 65
6.2.5 Cultural dialects 66
6.3 Problems of internal classification: the case of Italian 67
6.4 Subdivisions of Romance 68
6.4.1 Phonetic reduction and stress type 68
6.4.2 The partitive 69
6.4.3 Verb morphosyntax: aoristic drift 70
6.5 Historical and typological criteria 71
6.5.1 History: the eastern and western Romània 71
6.5.2 Typology: types of vowel system 71
xiii
DETAILED CONTENTS
7. Romance linguistic geography and dialectometry 73

HANS GOEBL
7.1 Linguistic geography 73
7.1.1 Definition and origin 73
7.1.2 Jules Gilliéron and the ALF 73
7.1.3 The second generation of national atlases 74
7.1.3.1 AIS 74
7.1.3.2 ALI 75
7.1.3.3 WLAD and ALR 75
7.1.3.4 Atlas lingüístic de Catalunya 75
7.1.3.5 Atles lingüístic del domini català 75
7.1.3.6 Atlas lingüístico de la Península Ibérica 75
7.1.4 Gallo-Romance regional atlases 76
7.1.4.1 ‘Minor’ atlases 76
7.1.4.2 NALF and ALFR 76
7.1.4.3 Wallonia 77
7.1.5 Italo-Romance, Sardinian, and Raeto-Romance regional atlases 77
7.1.5.1 Regional Italo-Romance atlases 77
7.1.5.2 Raeto-Romance regional atlases 78
7.1.5.3 Sardinian atlases 78
7.1.6 Iberian atlases 78
7.1.7 Daco-Romance regional atlases 78
7.1.8 Pan-Romance linguistic atlases 79
7.1.9 Some guidelines for reading the maps in a linguistic atlas 79
7.1.10 Conclusion 80
7.2 Dialectometry 80
7.2.1 Theoretical, empirical, and methodological preliminaries 80
7.2.2 Dialectometrization of ALF and AIS 80
7.2.3 From the original (ALF and AIS) data to the data matrix 81
7.2.4 From the data matrix to the similarity and distance matrices 82
7.2.5 Graphic processing of the similarity and distance matrices 82
7.2.6 Similarity maps as a tool of dialectometry 83
7.2.6.1 Presentation and interpretation of Maps 7.13-7.16 83
7.2.7 Isoglottic (or interpunctual) synthesis as a tool of dialectometry 84
7.2.8 Parameter maps as a tool of dialectometry 84
7.2.8.1 Presentation and interpretation of Maps 7.19 and 7.20 85
7.2.9 Dendrographic dialectometry 85
7.2.10 Correlative dialectometry 86
7.2.11 Summary 87
PART III: Individual Structural Overviews
8. Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Aromanian 91

MARTIN MAIDEN
8.1 Introduction 91
8.2 Phonology 92
8.2.1 Vowels 92
8.2.2 Consonants 93
8.2.3 Prosody and syllable structure 94
8.3 Orthography and writing systems 95
xiv
DETAILED CONTENTS
8.4 Forms and functions of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs 95

8.4.1 Inflectional morphology of nouns and verbs 95
8.4.2 Major patterns of allomorphy caused by sound change 96
8.4.3 Nominal inflection 100
8.4.3.1 Case and number marking 100
8.4.3.2 Gender, gender marking, and the ‘neuter’ 101
8.4.3.3 Vocative 103
8.4.4 Morphology of personal pronouns 103
8.4.4.1 Form and gender of pro-sentential pronouns 104
8.4.4.2 Clitics and their collocation 104
8.4.4.3 Address pronouns and related phenomena 105
8.4.5 Demonstratives and articles: forms and uses 105
8.4.6 Forms and functions of verbs 108
8.4.6.1 Inflection classes 108
8.4.6.2 Tense, mood, person, and number: synthetic and periphrastic forms 108
8.4.6.3 Aspect marking in Istro-Romanian and other sub-Danubian dialects 111
8.4.6.4 The Megleno-Romanian evidential 111
8.4.6.5 Non-finite forms and their functions: past participles, supines,
gerunds, infinitives 112
8.4.6.6. ‘Feminization’ of the non-finite 113
8.4.7 Derivational morphology 114
8.4.8 Comparative and superlative structures 115
8.5 Syntax 115
8.5.1 Nominal group 115
8.5.1.1 Adjective position 115
8.5.1.2 Possessive constructions and ‘possessive’ article al 116
8.5.2 Verbal group 117
8.5.2.1 Basic word order in the sentence 117
8.5.2.2 Negation 118
8.5.2.3 Interrogation 119
8.5.2.4 Subordination and complementizers 119
8.5.2.5 Infinitives vs subjunctives in subordinate clauses 121
8.5.2.6 Relative clauses 122
8.5.2.7 Causative 123
8.5.2.8 Object marking and prepositional object marking 123
8.5.2.9 Coordinators 124
8.5.3 Adverb position 125
9. Dalmatian 126
MARTIN MAIDEN
9.1 Introduction 126
9.2 Phonology 126
9.3 Inflectional morphology 128
9.4 Nominal group 133
9.5 Verbal group 135
9.6 The sentence 136
10. Friulian 139
10.2 Phonology 140
10.2.1 Vowel System 140
10.2.1.1 Stressed vowels 140
10.2.1.2 Unstressed vowels 141
xv
DETAILED CONTENTS
10.2.2 Consonant system 142

10.3 Morphology 143
10.3.1 Inflectional morphology of nominal categories 143
10.3.1.1 Personal pronouns 145
10.3.2 Inflectional morphology of the verb 146
10.3.2.1 Tense and mood 146
10.3.2.2 Endings 147
10.3.3 Word formation processes 148
10.3.3.1 Derivation 148
10.3.3.2 Word formation processes: composition 149
10.4 Syntax 149
10.4.1 General features 150
10.4.2 Main clauses 150
10.4.3 Main and dependent interrogative clauses 151
10.4.3.1 Other structures with the enclisis of subject clitics 151
10.4.4 Auxiliaries and past participle agreement 152
11. Ladin 154
GIAMPAOLO SALVI
11.2 Historical observations 156
11.3 Phonetics and phonology 156
11.3.1 Vowel system 156
11.4 Morphology 158
11.4.1 Nominal system 158
11.4.2 Verb 160
11.5 Syntax 161
11.5.1 Noun phrase 161
11.5.2 Verb phrase 162
11.5.3 Sentence structure 163
11.5.4 Subordination 167
12. Romansh (Rumantsch) 169
STEPHEN R. ANDERSON
12.2 Phonology 171
12.2.1 Vowels 171
12.2.2 Consonants 171
12.2.3 Prosody: syllable structure and stress 171
12.2.4 Alternations 172
12.3 Morphology 174
12.3.1 Inflection: nouns and adjectives 174
12.3.2 Inflection: verbs 175
12.4 Syntax 176
12.4.1 Nominal phrases 177
12.4.2 Verb phrases 177
12.4.2.1 Clitics 178
12.4.3 Clause structure 179
12.4.3.1 The inversion construction in main clauses 179
12.4.3.2 Inversion in other clause types 180
xvi
DETAILED CONTENTS
12.4.3.3 Impersonal subjects and the syntax of ins 181

12.4.3.4 Verb-second in Surmiran 183
13. The dialects of northern Italy 185
13.1 External and linguistic history 185
13.1.1 Phenomena characterizing northern Italian dialects 187
13.2 Phonology 188
13.2.1 Suprasegmental phonology 188
13.2.2 Segmental phonology 189
13.3 Morphology 191
13.3.1 Nouns and adjectives 191
13.3.2 Verb morphology 193
13.3.2.1 Tenses 193
13.3.2.2 Person endings 193
13.3.2.3 Root alternations 194
13.3.2.4 Past participles 195
13.3.3 Word formation 195
13.3.4 Pronouns 195
13.3.5 Articles 196
13.3.6 Demonstratives 197
13.3.7 Possessives 197
13.3.8 Agreement in the nominal group 198
13.4 Sentence morphosyntax 198
13.4.1 Subject clitic pronouns 198
13.4.2 Wh-movement constructions 199
13.4.3 Negation 200
13.4.3.1 Negators 201
13.4.4 Auxiliaries 203
13.4.4.1 Double compound forms 204
13.4.6 Clitic areas 205
14. Italian, Tuscan, and Corsican 206
ADAM LEDGEWAY
14.2 Phonology 208
14.2.1 Vowels 208
14.2.1.1 Tonic vowels 208
14.2.1.2 Atonic vowels 209
14.2.2.1 Weakening 211
14.2.3 Syllable structure and phonotactics 213
14.2.4 Stress 213
14.2.5 Raddoppiamento fonosintattico 214
14.3 Morphology 214
14.3.1.1 Nouns and adjectives 214
14.3.1.2 Determiners and quantifiers 216
14.3.1.3 Pronouns 216
14.3.2.1 Verb roots 218
14.3.2.2 Inflection 220
xvii
DETAILED CONTENTS
14.4 Syntax 221

14.4.1.1 Pronominals 222
14.4.2.1 Tense, aspect, and mood 224
14.4.2.2 Voice 225
14.4.3 Clause 226
14.4.3.1 Sentence organization 226
14.4.3.2 Agreement 227
15. The dialects of central Italy 228
15.2 Area mediana stricto sensu 230
15.2.1 Phonology 230
15.2.1.1 Vowels 230
15.2.1.2 Consonants 232
15.2.2 Morphology 233
15.2.3 Syntax 237
15.3 Area perimediana 239
15.3.1.1 Vowels 239
15.3.1.2 Consonants 240
15.3.3 Syntax 243
16. The dialects of southern Italy 246
ADAM LEDGEWAY
16.2 Phonology 248
16.2.1 Vowels 248
16.2.1.1 Tonic vowels 248
16.2.1.2 Atonic vowels 250
16.2.2.1 Obstruents 251
16.2.2.2 Sonorants 252
16.3 Morphology 254
16.3.1.2 Determiners and quantifiers 256
16.3.1.3 Pronouns 257
16.3.1.4 Possessives 258
16.3.2.1 Verb roots 259
16.3.2.2 Inflectional markers for TAM, person, and number 260
16.4 Syntax 263
16.4.2.2 Voice 266
16.4.3 Clause 267
xviii
DETAILED CONTENTS
16.4.3.1 Sentence organization 267

16.4.3.2 Auxiliary selection and participle agreement 267
16.4.3.3 Argument marking 268
16.4.3.4 Inflectional core 268
16.4.3.5 Left periphery 269
17. Sardinian 270
17.2 Phonology 272
17.2.3 Sandhi phenomena 276
17.2.4 Suprasegmental features 276
17.3 Morphology 277
17.3.2 Verbal inflection 279
17.4 Syntax 282
17.4.3 Clause syntax 286
17.4.3.1 Basic properties of the clause 286
17.4.3.2 Valency-changing operations 286
17.4.3.3 Finite subordination 287
17.4.3.4 Non-finite constructions 289
17.4.3.5 Information structure 290
17.4.3.6 Illocutionary force 291
18. French and northern Gallo-Romance 292
JOHN CHARLES SMITH
18.2 Geography and demography of French 292
18.3 External and social history and periodization 294
18.4 Structure of French 295
18.4.1 Phonetics and phonology 295
18.4.1.1 Segmental phonology 295
18.4.1.2 Prosody 300
18.4.1.3 Phonotactics 300
18.4.1.4 Syllable structure 301
18.4.1.5 Sandhi phenomena 301
18.4.2 Forms and their functions 302
18.4.3 Syntax 309
18.4.3.1 Ordering of noun and adjective 309
18.4.3.2 Negation 309
18.4.3.3 Word order 310
18.4.4 Second person forms of address 312
18.5 (Other) oïl varieties 312
18.5.1 Internal divisions 313
18.5.2 Structure 313
18.5.2.1 Phonology 313
xix
DETAILED CONTENTS
18.5.2.2 Forms and their functions 313

18.5.2.3 Syntax 316
18.5.2.4 Second person forms of address 317
18.6 Typological reflections 317
19. Southern Gallo-Romance (Occitan) 319
19.1.1 Geography, history, and dialect areas 319
19.2 Phonology 322
19.2.1.1 Stressed vowels 322
19.2.1.2 Unstressed vowels 324
19.2.3 Syllabic structure 326
19.2.3.1 Syllable templates 326
19.2.3.2 Word-final position 327
19.2.3.3 Syllable structure and sentence phonetics 327
19.2.4 Stress 328
19.3 Morphology 328
19.3.1 Nominal morphology 328
19.3.1.1 Gender 328
19.3.1.2 Number 329
19.3.1.3 Case 330
19.3.1.4 Adjectives 330
19.3.1.5 Pronouns and determiners 330
19.3.1.6 Derivational morphology of nominals 332
19.3.2 Verb morphology 333
19.3.2.1 Verb classes 333
19.3.2.2 Present tense and person marking 333
19.3.2.3 Verb stems 334
19.4 Syntax 338
19.4.1 Subject clitics 338
19.4.2 Constituent order 340
19.4.2.1 Subject inversion 340
19.4.2.2 Topicalization and focalization 341
19.4.3 Enunciatives 342
19.4.4 Subordination and the complementizer que 342
19.4.4.1 Alternative subordination types 344
19.4.5 Object clitics 345
19.4.6 Negation 346
19.4.7 Agreement 347
19.4.7.1 Subject–verb agreement 347
19.4.7.2 Sequences of (moods-)tenses 348
20. Francoprovençal 350
ANDRES KRISTOL
20.1.1 Linguistic history and geography 350
20.1.2 The name of the language 352
20.2 Phonetics 352
20.2.1 General 352
xx
DETAILED CONTENTS
20.2.2 The twofold development of Latin stressed A in open syllables 353

20.2.3 Francoprovençal final unstressed vowels 354
20.2.4 The development of ū 354
20.2.5 Stress shift 354
20.2.6 Diphthongization of stressed vowels in open syllables 354
20.2.7 Nasal vowels 355
20.2.8 Palatalization of velar consonants 355
20.3 Morphology and syntax 355
20.3.1.1 Remnants of a two-case system, maintenance of a functioning
two-case system 355
20.3.1.2 Noun determiners: maintenance or neutralization of the
masculine/feminine opposition in the plural 357
20.3.1.3 The partitive article or partitive de 358
20.3.2 The pronominal system 360
20.3.2.1 Stressed personal pronouns 360
20.3.2.2 Subject clitics 360
20.3.2.3 Neuter subject and object 361
20.3.2.4 The neuter demonstrative pronoun 361
20.4 Elements of verb syntax and morphology 361
20.4.1 The split of the first conjugation 361
20.4.2 Present indicative 361
20.4.3 Imperfect indicative 362
20.4.4 Periphrastic tenses 362
20.4.5 Surcomposé forms 362
20.4.6 Future 362
20.4.7 The subjunctive 362
21. Catalan 363
ALEX ALSINA
21.1 Introduction: external elements 363
21.1.1 Territory, geographical dialects, and demography 363
21.1.2 History 363
21.2 Salient diachronic features 363
21.2.1 Vowels 364
21.3 Phonology 367
21.3.1 Stressed vowels 367
21.3.2 Unstressed vowels: vowel reduction and its exceptions 368
21.3.3 Consonant inventory, dialectal variation, and allophones 368
21.3.4 Consonant deletion and assimilation 369
21.3.5 Voicing and devoicing 371
21.3.6 Syllable structure and stress 371
21.3.7 Orthography 372
21.4 Morphology 373
21.4.2 Verb inflection 374
21.4.3 Articles 376
21.5 Syntax 377
xxi
DETAILED CONTENTS
21.5.1 Verbal clitics 377

21.5.2 Subject and objects 379
22. Spanish, Astur-Leonese, Navarro-Aragonese, Judaeo-Spanish 382
22.2 Phonology 385
22.2.1 Vowels 385
22.2.2.1 Stops 387
22.2.2.2 Affricate /ʧ/ 388
22.2.2.3 Fricatives 389
22.2.2.4 Nasals 390
22.2.2.5 Laterals 390
22.2.2.6 Rhotics 391
22.2.2.7 /ʝ/ and initial [w]- 391
22.2.3 Prosody 391
22.2.3.1 Syllable structure 391
22.2.3.2 Stress and rhythm 392
22.2.3.3 Intonation 393
22.2.4 Orthography 393
22.3 Morphology 395
22.3.1.2 Determiners, possessives, quantifiers, interrogatives 396
22.3.1.3 Pronouns 397
22.3.1.4 Count/non-count referential systems 398
22.3.2.1 Conjugations 398
22.3.2.3 Verb roots 400
22.3.4 Other word-formation processes 403
22.4 Syntax 403
22.4.2.2 Copulas 408
22.4.2.3 Adverbs 408
22.4.2.4 Negation 408
22.4.2.5 Passive and middle voice 409
22.4.3 Clause 409
22.4.3.1 Prepositional accusative 409
22.4.3.3 Dequeísmo/queísmo 409
22.4.3.4 Sentence organization and information structure 410
23. Galician and Portuguese 411
23.2 Phonology 415
xxii
DETAILED CONTENTS
23.2.1 Vowels 415

23.2.1.1 Stressed oral vowels 415
23.2.1.2 Unstressed oral vowels 415
23.2.1.3 Stressed oral falling diphthongs 416
23.2.1.4 Unstressed oral falling diphthongs 416
23.2.1.5 Stressed nasal vowels 416
23.2.1.6 Unstressed nasal vowels 416
23.2.1.7 Unstressed nasal falling diphthongs 416
23.2.1.8 Sandhi 417
23.2.2.1 Fricatives, stops, and affricates 417
23.2.2.2 Liquids 417
23.2.2.3 Nasals 418
23.2.3 Syllable and phonotactics 418
23.2.4 Stress 418
23.2.4.1 Non-verb stress 418
23.2.4.2 Verb stress 419
23.3 Morphology 419
23.3.1 Nouns and adjectives 419
23.3.2 Personal pronouns 420
23.3.3 Determiners 421
23.3.3.1 Articles 421
23.3.3.3 Indefinites 422
23.3.3.4 Demonstratives 422
23.3.4 Relatives, interrogatives, and exclamatives 422
23.3.5 Verbs 422
23.3.5.1 Conjugations 423
23.3.5.2 Roots 424
23.3.5.3 Thematic vowel 424
23.3.5.4 Tense, aspect, mood 425
23.3.5.5 Number and person 425
23.3.5.6 Compound forms and periphrases 426
23.3.6 Adverbs 426
23.3.7 Prepositions 426
23.4 Syntax 427
23.4.1 Order of major constituents 427
23.4.2 Agreement 427
23.4.3 Null arguments 428
23.4.3.1 Null subjects 428
23.4.3.2 Null objects 429
23.4.4 The expression of nominal internal arguments 429
23.4.4.1 Dative marking on direct objects 429
23.4.4.2 Double-object constructions 430
23.4.5 Fronting strategies and the structure of the left periphery 430
23.4.6 Se constructions 432
23.4.7 Pronominal syntax 432
23.4.7.1 Clitic placement with tensed verbs 432
23.4.7.2 Clitic placement with non-finite verbs 433
23.4.7.3 Clitic climbing 434
23.4.7.4 Interpolation 434
23.4.7.5 Clitic doubling 434
xxiii
DETAILED CONTENTS
23.4.8 Sentential negation 435

23.4.9 Uses of the single tenses 436
23.4.10 Finite complementation 437
23.4.11 Non-finite complementation 438
23.4.12 Comparative clauses 441
23.4.13 Interrogative clauses 442
23.4.14 Relative clauses 443
23.4.15 Cleft sentences 444
23.4.16 Tough sentences 445
23.4.17 Noun phrases: definite determiners and bare nouns 445
24. Creoles 447
24.1 Preliminary observation 447
24.2 Ibero-Romance-based creoles 447
24.2.1 Introduction 447
24.2.4 Morphosyntax 451
24.2.4.1 Noun phrase 451
24.2.4.2 Verb phrase 454
24.2.4.3 The sentence 456
24.3 French-based creoles 457
24.3.1 Introduction 457
24.3.4 Noun phrase 461
24.3.4.1 Plural of nouns 461
24.3.4.2 Determiners 462
24.3.4.3 Adjectives 462
24.3.4.4 Personal pronouns 463
24.3.5 Verb phrase 463
24.3.5.2 Copula 464
24.3.5.3 Serial verbs 465
24.3.6 Syntax 465
24.3.6.1 Word order in simple sentences 465
24.3.6.2 Valency-changing operations 465
24.3.6.3 Interrogative and focus constructions 466
PART IV: Comparative Overviews

A. Phonology 469
25. Segmental phonology 471
STEPHAN SCHMID
25.1 Vowels 471
25.1.1 Inventories of stressed vowel phonemes 471
25.1.2 Vowel quantity 473
25.1.3 Nasal vowel phonemes and allophonic vowel nasalization 473
25.1.4 Unstressed vowels 475
25.1.5 Metaphony and vowel harmony 476
xxiv
DETAILED CONTENTS
25.2 Consonants 478

25.2.1 Consonant inventories 478
25.2.2 Retroflex consonants 479
25.2.3 Palatal consonants and palatalization 480
25.2.4 Rhotics and rhotacism 481
25.2.5 Lenition and fortition 482
25.2.6 Assimilation processes 483
26. Prosodic structure 484
GIOVANNA MAROTTA
26.1 Quantity 484
26.1.1 Vowel quantity and syllable structure 484
26.1.2 Consonant quantity 485
26.2 Phonological processes and syllable structure 486
26.2.1 Vowels 486
26.3 Syllable structure 486
26.3.1 Onset 486
26.3.2 s+C clusters 487
26.3.3 Nucleus 488
26.3.3.1 Vowels 488
26.3.3.2 Diphthongs 488
26.3.4 Coda 489
26.3.5 Final remarks on syllable structure 490
26.4 Stress 490
26.5 Rhythm 491
26.6 Intonation 492
26.6.1 Statements 492
26.6.2 Narrow focus 492
26.6.3 Yes/no questions 492
26.6.4 Wh-questions 493
26.6.5 Imperatives 493
B. Morphology 495
27. Inflectional morphology 497
MARTIN MAIDEN
27.1 General characteristics 497
27.2 Inflectional morphology of nouns and adjectives 498
27.3 Person and number marking in the verb 498
27.4 Tense (and aspect) marking 501
27.5 Mood: imperative and subjunctive 502
27.5.1 Imperative 502
27.5.2 Subjunctive 504
27.6 Synthetic future and conditional 505
27.7 Non-finite forms 507
27.8 Inflection classes 508
28. Derivational morphology 513
FRANZ RAINER
28.2 Where derivational patterns come from 513
28.3 Where derivational patterns go to 515
xxv
DETAILED CONTENTS
28.4 The main semantic categories of Romance affixation 516

28.4.1 Prefixation 516
28.4.2 Excursus on ‘parasynthesis’ 517
28.4.3 Suffixation 517
28.5 ‘Non-canonical’ types of word formation 520
28.6 The fate of the Latin ‘third stem’ in Romance derivational morphology 521
28.7 Interfixes 522
29. Compounding 524
29.1 Theoretical bases 524
29.1.1 What is considered a compound and what is its head? 524
29.1.2 Classification of Romance compounds in a cross-linguistic framework 525
29.2 Latin and Romance compounds 525
29.3 Overview of compounding in some Romance languages 527
29.3.1 Spanish 527
29.3.2 Catalan 528
29.3.3 French 529
29.3.4. Italian 530
29.3.5 Portuguese 531
29.3.6 Romanian 532
29.3.7 The case of Sardinian 533
29.4 Reduplication in Romance 535
29.4.1 Why reduplication? 535
29.4.2 What reduplication is not: iteration of phonemes and iteration of phrases 535
29.4.3 Morphological processes of iteration 536
29.5 Summary 536
C. Syntax 539
30. The structure of the nominal group 541
GIULIANA GIUSTI
30.1 Nouns 541
30.1.1 Functional features on nouns 541
30.1.2 Object-referring nouns 542
30.1.3 Event/result nouns 543
30.1.4 Relational nouns 543
30.1.5 Proper names 544
30.2 Adjectives 545
30.2.1 Functional features on adjectives 546
30.2.2 Relational adjectives 546
30.2.3 Descriptive adjectives 547
30.2.4 Determiner-like adjectives 547
30.2.5 Direct vs indirect modification 548
30.3 Determiners 549
30.3.1 Inflectional properties of determiners 549
30.3.2 Demonstratives 550
30.3.3 Articles 551
30.3.4 Quantifiers 552
30.4 Possessives 552
30.4.1 Possessive adjectives 553
30.4.2 Genitive possessives 553
30.5 The left periphery of the nominal group 554
xxvi
DETAILED CONTENTS
31. The structure of the clause 556

31.1 Overview of clause 556
31.2 Sentential core 556
31.2.1 Lower left periphery 556
31.2.2 Inflectional domain 559
31.2.2.1 Adverb classes and positions 559
31.2.2.2 Verb positions 560
31.2.2.3 Summary and conclusions 562
31.2.3 Restructuring 563
31.3 Higher left periphery 565
31.3.1 Complementizers 565
31.3.2 Illocutionary force, clause types, and sentence particles 568
31.3.2.1 Declaratives 568
31.3.2.2 Interrogatives 568
31.3.2.3 Exclamatives 570
31.3.2.4 Imperatives 570
31.3.3 Verb Second in old and modern Romance 571
31.3.4 Topic and focus in the left periphery 572
D. Semantics and pragmatics 575

32. Lexical stability and shared lexicon 577
STEVEN N. DWORKIN
32.1 General issues 577
32.2 Pan-Romance survivals and shared lexicon 580
32.2.1 Nouns in DÉRom list 580
32.2.2 Adjectives in DÉRom list 581
32.2.3 Verbs in DÉRom list 581
32.3 Lexical stability, shared lexicon, and semantic fields 581
32.3.1 Numerals 581
32.3.2 Kinship terminology 582
32.3.3 Colour terms 583
32.3.4 Body parts 583
32.3.5 Calendar terms 584
32.3.6 Domestic and wild animals 585
32.4 Relic words 585
32.5 Latinisms 587
33. Onomasiological differentiation 588
INGMAR SÖHRMAN
33.2 Motion and meteorological activity 589
33.2.1 Verbs of motion 590
33.2.2 Verbs and nouns of meteorological activity 591
33.3 Nouns 591
33.3.1 Body parts 591
33.3.2 Designations for human beings 592
33.3.3 Flora and fauna 593
33.3.4 Urbanization 594
33.4 Directional particles/prepositions 594
xxvii
DETAILED CONTENTS
34. Information and discourse structure 596

SILVIO CRUSCHINA
34.2 Topic, focus, and sentence types 596
34.3 Sentence-focus structures 597
34.3.1 Unmarked word order 597
34.3.2 Verb–subject inversion 598
34.4 Predicate-focus structures and topicalization constructions 599
34.4.1 Clitic left-dislocation (ClLD) and hanging topic left-dislocation (HTLD) 600
34.4.2 Clitic right-dislocation (ClRD) 601
34.5 Argument-focus structures and focalization constructions 602
34.5.1 Postverbal focalization and cleft sentences 602
34.5.2 Contrastive-focus fronting 604
34.5.3 Information-focus fronting 605
34.5.4 Mirative fronting, verum-focus fronting, and QP fronting 606
E. Sociolinguistics 609
35. Sociolinguistic variation 611
35.1 French 611
35.1.1 Context 611
35.1.2 Variationist studies 611
35.1.3 Sociolinguistic models and categories 612
35.1.4 Regional sociolinguistic variation 613
35.1.5. Hyperstyle variation 614
35.1.6 Variation and the banlieue 614
35.2 Italo-Romance 615
35.2.1 Sociolinguistic variables 616
35.2.2 Historical sociolinguistic variation 618
35.2.3 Recent standardizing and convergence trends 619
35.3 Spanish 619
35.3.2 Morphosyntax 620
35.3.3 Forms of address 621
35.3.4 Standards and norms 621
35.3.4.1 National norms 621
35.3.4.2 Regional norms 622
36. Diglossia 624
JOHANNES KABATEK
36.2 The evolution of the concept of diglossia 624
36.3 Diglossia in the history of the Romance languages 626
36.3.1 The history of Romance languages and varieties in Europe 626
36.3.2 The history of Romance languages and varieties beyond Europe 629
36.4 Current dynamics in Romance variation and diglossia 631
36.4.1 The impact of globalization: universalism and particularism 631
36.4.2 Levelling 631
36.4.3 The revival of languages 632
xxviii
DETAILED CONTENTS
36.4.4 Creating bilingualism 632

36.4.5 Hybrids and their function 633
36.5 The future of research on diglossia in Romance 633
37. Standardization 634
37.2 The choice of a basis for the standard 635
37.2.1 Identification with a geographical variant 635
37.2.2 Literary standards 637
37.2.3 Eclectic standards 637
37.2.4 Polynomic standards 638
37.2.5 Language names 638
37.3 The nature of codification 639
37.4 Elaboration 639
37.5 Support 640
37.6 Acceptance 641
37.7 The challenge of change and diaspora 642
37.8 Final observations 643
PART V: Issues in Romance Phonology
38. Diphthongization 647

MARTIN MAIDEN
38.1 The data 647
38.2 The problem 648
38.3 The diphthongs in Italy 649
38.3.1 Tuscan 649
38.3.2 Northern Italy 652
38.3.3 Central and southern Italy 654
38.4 Opening diphthongs across the Romance languages 655
38.5 Coincidence or historical unity? 657
39. Palatalization 658
LORI REPETTI
39.2 Latin yod 658
39.2.1 /tj, kj/ 659
39.2.2 /gj, dj, j/ 660
39.2.3 /sj/ 660
39.2.4 /pj, bj, vj/ 661
39.2.5 Sonorant consonant + /j/ 661
39.2.6 Morphological consequences of palatalization by yod 662
39.3 Consonant + front vowel palatalization 662
39.3.1 Velar stop + front vowel 662
39.3.1.1 /gi, ge, gε/ 662
39.3.1.2 /ki, ke, kε/ 663
39.3.1.3 /kw, gw/ + front vowel 664
39.3.1.4 Velar stop + A 664
39.3.2 Non-dorsal consonant + front vowel 665
39.3.3 Morphological consequences of front vowel palatalization 665
xxix
DETAILED CONTENTS
39.4 Consonant + consonant palatalization 666

39.4.1 Consonant + /l/ 666
39.4.2 Velar stop + coronal consonant 667
39.4.3 /ll, nn/ 667
40. Sandhi phenomena 669
RODNEY SAMPSON
40.2 Phonologically conditioned sandhi 669
40.2.1 Vowel-edge phenomena 669
40.2.1.1 Vowel hiatus 669
40.2.1.2 Vowel-edge sandhi adjacent to pause 670
40.2.2 Consonant-edge phenomena 670
40.2.2.1 Left-edge sandhi 670
40.2.2.2 Right-edge sandhi 672
40.3 Morphosyntactically and lexically conditioned sandhi 675
40.3.1 Raddoppiamento fonosintattico 675
40.3.2 Liaison 676
40.3.2.1 Morphosyntactic 677
40.3.2.2 Phonological 677
40.3.2.3 Lexical 677
40.3.2.4 Sociolinguistic 677
40.3.3 Clitics 677
40.3.3.1 Sandhi in verb phrases 677
40.3.4 Sandhi in (preposition +) noun phrase 678
40.3.4.1 Article + noun 678
40.3.4.2 Preposition + noun phrase 679
40.4 Suprasegmental sandhi 679
41. Writing systems 681
THOMAS FINBOW
41.2 The Latin alphabet 681
41.3 Late Latin and early Romance 681
41.3.1 Two-norm hypotheses 681
41.3.2 The single-norm hypothesis 682
41.3.3 Logographic Latin 684
41.4 Textual zones for developing Romance 684
41.4.1 Selecting representational conventions 685
41.4.2 Romance diacritic conventions 686
41.5 Romance writing in other scripts 686
41.5.1 Judaeo-Spanish/Ladino 686
41.5.2 Aljamía 687
41.5.3 Romanian and Moldovan 688
41.5.4 Romance written in the Greek alphabet 689
41.6 Levels of written representation 689
41.7 Developing written traditions 689
41.8 Stability, reform, and regulation 691
41.8.1 Regulatory bodies 692
41.8.2 Spelling reform 692
xxx
DETAILED CONTENTS
PART VI: Issues in Romance Morphology
42. Number 697

MARTIN MAIDEN
42.1 Number in Latin and Romance 697
42.2 A rough typology of modern Romance plural marking 697
42.3 The desinences -e and -i 698
42.4 The remnants of Latin neuter plural -A 700
42.4.1 Number and gender 700
42.4.2 Lexically restricted remnants of plural -A 701
42.4.3 Morphosyntactically singular plurals in Romansh 702
42.4.4 The nature and fate of plural -ora 702
42.5 Invariance 703
42.6 Root allomorphy and suppletion 704
42.6.1 Allomorphy from sound change 704
42.6.2 Continuants of imparisyllabic nominatives 704
42.6.3 Suppletion 705
42.7 Mass nouns, set nouns, and ‘aberrant’ morphology 705
42.8 Borrowing and calquing 707
43. Morphomes 708
MARTIN MAIDEN
43.1 Romance morphomes 708
43.2 Four major morphomic patterns 708
43.2.1 The ‘past participle’ 708
43.2.2 Remnants of perfective morphology 709
43.2.3 The ‘L-pattern’ (‘U-pattern’) 712
43.2.4 The ‘N-pattern’ 712
43.2.5 Morphomes outside the verb 716
43.3 Diachronic persistence of morphomes 716
43.4 Boundaries of morphomic phenomena 717
43.5 The case of the Romance future and conditional 719
43.6 Morphomes outside the inflectional paradigms? 721
44. Tonic pronominal system: morphophonology 722
CHIARA CAPPELLARO
44.2 Aspects of person marking from Latin to Romance 722
44.2.1 ‘Third person pronouns’: a Romance innovation 722
44.2.1.1 The category ‘third person pronoun’ 723
44.2.2 Morphological competition in the history of Romance personal pronouns 725
44.2.2.1 Competition due to ‘case’ loss 725
44.2.2.2 Competition due to loss of semantic contrast between IPSE and ILLE 725
44.3 First and second person marking 726
44.3.1 Romance Type I 728
44.3.2 Romance Type II 729
44.3.3 Romance Type III 730
44.3.4 Romance Type IV 731
44.3.5 Romance Type V 732
44.3.6 Further issues 732
xxxi
DETAILED CONTENTS
44.4 Third person marking 733

44.4.1 Non-canonical phenomena in Romance third person markers 734
44.4.1.1 Canonical inflection 734
44.4.2 Type I 735
44.4.3 Type II 736
44.4.4 Type III 737
44.4.5 Type IV (syncretic and suppletive) 740
45. Clitic pronominal systems: morphophonology 742
DIEGO PESCARINI
45.2 Morphology 742
45.2.1 Object clitics 742
45.2.2 Subject clitics 745
45.2.3 Possessives 748
45.2.4 Auxiliary clitics 748
45.3 Phonology 749
45.3.1 Stress 749
45.3.2 Vowel drop (elision, apocope, syncope) 750
45.3.3 Vowel insertion (prosthesis/epenthesis) 751
45.3.4 On l-: aphaeresis, vocalization, and palatalization 751
45.4 Cluster-internal phenomena 752
45.4.1 Order: generalities 752
45.4.2 Order of object clitics 753
45.4.3 Mutual exclusion patterns 754
45.4.4 Synthetic clusters 755
45.4.5 Vowel alternations 756
PART VII: Issues in Romance Syntax
46. Functional categories 761

ADAM LEDGEWAY
46.1 Rise of analyticity 761
46.2 Rise of configurationality 762
46.3 Romance functional categories 764
46.3.1.1 Articles 764
46.3.1.2 Other determiners 767
46.3.2.1 Romance auxiliaries 767
46.3.2.2 Romance synthetic future(-in-the-past) 768
46.3.2.3 Clitic pronouns 770
46.3.3 The sentence 770
46.3.3.1 Grammaticalized word orders 771
47. Subject clitics: syntax 772
CECILIA POLETTO AND CHRISTINA TORTORA
47.2 Overview 772
47.2.1 The object of study 772
47.2.2 What counts as a subject clitic language? 773
xxxii
DETAILED CONTENTS
47.3 Types of subject clitic 774

47.3.1 Person subject clitics 775
47.3.2 Number subject clitics 776
47.3.3 Deictic subject clitics 777
47.3.4 Invariable subject clitics 777
47.3.5 Summary 778
47.4 Syntactic environments 779
47.4.1 Lack of subject clitics in imperatives 779
47.4.2 Enclisis of subject clitics in interrogatives and other
non-declarative clauses 779
47.4.3 Subject relative clauses 781
47.4.4 Expletive environments 782
47.4.5 Verb class 782
47.5 Subject clitic functions 782
47.5.1 Subject identification 783
47.5.1.1 Position of the subject 783
47.5.1.2 Type of subject 783
47.5.2 Functions unrelated to the identification of a subject 784
47.5.2.1 Place holders 784
47.5.2.2 Left-peripheral functions 785
48. Object clitics 786
IAN ROBERTS
48.2 Basic facts 786
48.2.1 Distribution of object clitics in finite clauses 786
48.2.2 Licensing object-clitic positions 788
48.2.3 Person-case constraints 789
48.2.4 Distribution of object clitics in non-finite clauses 791
48.2.4.1 Infinitives 791
48.2.4.2 Past participles 792
48.2.4.3 Gerunds 794
48.3 Proclisis, enclisis, and mesoclisis 795
48.3.1 European Portuguese and Galician 795
48.3.2 Enclisis patterns in old Romance: the Tobler–Mussafia Law 797
48.3.3 Mesoclisis in old Romance 798
48.4 Clitic climbing 799
48.4.1 Clitic climbing and restructuring 799
48.4.2 Clitic climbing in causatives 800
48.4.3 Clitic climbing and auxiliaries 800
48.5 Clitic doubling 800
49. Auxiliary selection and participial agreement 802
MICHELE LOPORCARO
49.2 Past participial agreement 803
49.2.1 Features involved in Romance past participial agreement 803
49.2.2 Target of past participial agreement 805
49.2.3 Conditions on participial agreement 806
49.2.4 Exceptional cases 811
49.3 Variation in auxiliary selection 812
49.3.1 Relevance of TAM for perfective auxiliation 813
49.3.2 A syntactic gradient for perfective auxiliation 814
xxxiii
DETAILED CONTENTS
49.3.3 Mixed auxiliation systems: unary, binary, or triple 815

49.3.4 Perfective auxiliation at the syntax–semantics interface 817
49.3.5 Some exceptional cases 818
PART VIII: Issues in Romance Syntax and Semantics
50. Split intransitivity 821

DELIA BENTLEY
50.2 The advancement of active/inactive alignment 821
50.3 Split intransitivity and the north/south divide 825
50.4 Further split-intransitivity diagnostics in Romance 827
51. Negation 833
CECILIA POLETTO
51.2 Form(s) and position(s) of the negative marker 834
51.2.1 Jespersen’s Cycle 836
51.2.2 Postverbal negators 837
51.2.2.1 Position of postverbal negators 837
51.2.2.2 Form of postverbal negators 838
51.2.3 New preverbal negative markers 839
51.3 Interaction between negation and verbal forms 840
51.3.1 Negation and modality 840
51.3.2 Negation and aspect 842
51.4 N-words and negative concord 843
51.5 Negation and focus 845
52. Copular and existential constructions 847
DELIA BENTLEY AND FRANCESCO MARIA CICONTE
52.2 Copular constructions: attributive, locative, and possessive 848
52.3 Inverse copular constructions 852
52.4 Existential constructions 854
PART IX: Issues in Romance Pragmatics and Discourse
53. Illocutionary force 863

ION GIURGEA AND EVA-MARIA REMBERGER
53.1 Introduction: sentence typing and illocutionary force 863
53.2 Declarative sentential force 863
53.2.1 Gascon declarative particles 863
53.2.2 Marked declarative particles 864
53.3 Interrogative sentential force 865
53.3.1 Polar interrogatives (yes/no questions) 865
53.3.1.1 Intonation 865
53.3.1.2 Inversion 865
53.3.1.3 From inversion to interrogative inflection or interrogative particle 866
53.3.1.4 Marked VS orders 867
xxxiv
DETAILED CONTENTS
53.3.1.5 Special inversion patterns 867

53.3.1.6 Indirect polar interrogatives 868
53.3.2 Partial interrogatives (constituent questions) 868
53.3.2.1 General observations 868
53.3.2.2 The new syntax of wh-interrogatives in null-subject languages 869
53.3.2.3 The new syntax of wh-interrogatives in non-null-subject languages 869
53.3.2.4 Multiple wh-questions 870
53.3.2.5 Indirect wh-interrogatives 870
53.3.3 Question particles 871
53.4 Imperative sentential force 872
53.4.1 Affirmative imperatives 872
53.4.2 Negative imperatives 873
53.4.3 The jussive/hortative subjunctive 874
53.5 Exclamative sentential force 874
53.5.1 Total exclamatives 875
53.5.2 Partial exclamatives 875
53.5.2.1 Wh-exclamatives 875
53.5.2.2 Exclamative focus fronting 877
53.5.2.3 Exclamatives based on relativization 877
53.6 Optative sentential force 877
54. Deixis 879
ADAM LEDGEWAY AND JOHN CHARLES SMITH
54.1 Demonstratives 879
54.1.1 Type B1(inary) systems 879
54.1.2 Type B1C(inary) systems 881
54.1.3 Type T1(ernary) systems 882
54.1.4.1 Type T2A(ernary) systems 885
54.1.5.1 Type B2A(inary) systems 886
54.1.5.2 Type B2B(inary) systems 887
54.1.5.3 Type B2C(inary) mixed systems 889
54.1.6 Type T2B(ernary) systems 889
54.1.7 Type U(nary) systems 890
54.1.8 Summary 890
54.2 Spatio-personal adverbs 890
54.2.4 Type T2A(ernary) systems 892
54.2.5 Type T2B(ernary) systems 893
54.2.8 Type Q(uaternary) systems 895
54.2.9 Summary 896
54.3 General summary 896
55. Address systems 897
RICHARD ASHDOWNE
xxxv
DETAILED CONTENTS
55.2 Alternations among bound forms of address 897

55.2.1 Social distribution 898
55.2.1.1 Choice of form 898
55.2.1.2 Choice of system 899
55.2.2 Terminology 899
55.2.3 Typology 899
55.2.3.1 Type I 899
55.2.3.2 Type II 900
55.2.3.3 Type III 900
55.2.3.4 Mixing of Types II and III 903
55.2.3.5 Type IV 903
55.3 Free forms of address 904
55.3.1 Syntax and pragmatics 905
55.3.2 Morphological marking 905
55.3.3 Morphophonological patterns 906
55.4 ‘Inverse address’ 906
PART X: Case Studies

A. The nominal group 909
56. Case 911
ADINA DRAGOMIRESCU AND ALEXANDRU NICOLAE
56.2 Nominal and pronominal inflection 911
56.2.1 Inflection of nouns (and adjectives) 911
56.2.1.1 Latin case forms inherited in Romance 911
56.2.1.2 ‘Extended’ accusative 913
56.2.1.3 Case systems in Romance 913
56.2.1.4 Case forms without case marking 914
56.2.2 Case inflection of pronouns (and determiners) 914
56.3 Substitutes for case inflection 916
56.3.1 Determiners and case 916
56.3.2 Use of prepositions and other dedicated case markers 916
56.3.2.1 Analytic genitives 917
56.3.2.2 Partitives and pseudopartitives 918
56.3.2.3 Analytic datives 918
56.3.2.4 Prepositional accusatives: differential object marking 920
56.3.3 Cliticization and clitic doubling 921
56.3.3.1 Cliticization of the core arguments 921
56.3.3.2 Clitic doubling 922
57. Gender 924
MICHELE LOPORCARO
57.2 Gender assignment 925
57.2.1 Semantic rules 925
57.2.2 Formal rules 927
57.3 Gender systems 927
57.3.1 A closer look at two-gender systems 927
57.3.2 Romanian and other three-gender systems 928
57.3.3 Four-gender systems 931
xxxvi
DETAILED CONTENTS
57.4 Mass/count and gender 933

57.5 Some exceptional cases 934
B. The verbal group 937

58. Tense and aspect 939
PIER MARCO BERTINETTO AND MARIO SQUARTINI
58.2 Temporal and aspectual values in present and past ‘simple’ tenses 939
58.2.1 The Present: temporal and aspectual flexibility 939
58.2.2 Perfective and imperfective pasts 940
58.2.3 The Simple Past and its analytic competitors 942
58.3 Compound forms: resultatives, perfects, and perfectives 943
58.3.1 Resultative constructions 944
58.3.2 The ‘aoristic drift’ 944
58.3.3 Specialized perfects 945
58.3.3.1 Inclusive only 945
58.3.3.2 Experiential only? 946
58.3.4 Competing Pluperfects and doubly compound forms 946
58.4 Aspectual and phasal periphrases 947
58.4.1 Progressive periphrases: state-PROG 947
58.4.2 Progressive periphrasis: motion-PROG 949
58.4.3 Habitual and phasal periphrases 950
58.5 Futures: tense interacting with modality 951
58.5.1 A rich variety of forms 951
58.5.2 Future situations: modal uncertainty and prospectivity 952
58.5.3 Futures-in-the-past 952
59. Mood 954
JOSEP QUER
59.2 The exponence of mood 954
59.3 Indicative vs subjunctive contexts 956
59.3.1 Independent uses of the subjunctive 956
59.3.2 Mood distribution in embedded domains 957
59.3.2.1 Subjunctive types 957
59.3.2.2 Argument clauses 959
59.3.2.4 Adverbial clauses 964
59.4 Subjunctive-triggered phenomena 966
59.4.1 Long-distance anaphora 966
59.4.2 Complementizer deletion 966
60. Voice 967
MICHELA CENNAMO
60.2 Voice and transitivity 967
60.3 Voice and argument linking in the transition to Romance 967
60.3.1 Voice distinctions in late Latin 967
60.3.2 Marking and linking of core arguments 969
60.3.3 Passive auxiliaries in the transition to Romance 969
xxxvii
DETAILED CONTENTS
60.4 Voice systems in Romance: synchronic and diachronic issues 970

60.4.1 Reflexive constructions 970
60.4.1.1 Reflexives and middles/anticausatives 970
60.4.1.2 Passive and impersonal/indefinite reflexives 971
60.4.1.3 Grammatical domains 973
60.4.1.4 Nature of the subject 973
60.4.1.5 Temporal-aspectual constraints 974
60.4.1.6 Interpretation of impersonal SE 974
60.5 Passive and impersonal periphrases 974
60.5.1 Constraints and variation 974
60.5.2 Other passive-like/impersonal constructions 976
60.5.3 Impersonal passives 977
60.5.4 Impersonal actives 978
60.6 Other impersonal constructions 978
60.7 Indefinite markers 979
61. Complex predicates 981
MICHELLE SHEEHAN
61.1 Romance complex predicates 981
61.2 Perception verbs 982
61.3 Causative constructions 983
61.3.1 LAXARE causatives 984
61.3.2 MANDARE causatives 984
61.3.3 FACERE causatives 985
61.3.3.1 Faire-par causative 985
61.3.3.2 Faire-infinitif causative 986
C. The clause 995

62. Word order 997
GIAMPAOLO SALVI
62.1 Phrasal word order 997
62.1.1 Noun phrases 997
62.1.2 Adjectival and adverbial phrases 999
62.1.3 Prepositional phrases 999
62.2 The sentence 999
62.3 Subject positions 1002
62.4 Marked orders 1003
62.4.1 Topicalization 1004
62.4.2 Focalization 1004
62.4.3 Marginalization 1005
62.5 Medieval Romance Verb Second (V2) 1005
62.5.1 Modern Romance continuations 1009
62.5.2 Residues 1010
62.6 Extractions 1010
62.6.1 Extraction of complements 1010
62.6.2 Extraction of modifiers 1011
62.7 Scrambling 1011
63. Clausal complementation 1013
ADAM LEDGEWAY
63.1 Preliminary assumptions 1013
xxxviii
DETAILED CONTENTS
63.2 The general Romance complementation pattern 1015

63.2.1 Full clausal complements 1015
63.2.1.1 Inflected and personal infinitives 1016
63.2.1.2 Dual-complementizer systems 1018
63.2.1.3 Recomplementation 1019
63.2.1.4 C(omplementizer)-drop 1021
63.2.2 Reduced and VP clausal complements 1022
63.2.3 From Latin to Romance: an overview 1022
63.3 Balkan-style complementation 1023
63.4 Paratactic complementation 1027
64. Relative clauses 1029
ELISABETH STARK
64.2 The paradigm of relativizers in Romance 1029
64.2.1 General remarks 1029
64.2.2 Overview of (standard) Romance relativizers 1031
64.3 Development of relativizers in Romance 1035
64.4 The ‘gap’ and the ‘resumptive pronoun’ strategy 1038
References 1041
Index 1169
xxxix
Series Preface
We know that close study of individual language families and linguistic areas is vital both
to the synchronic and diachronic study of language and to cognitive science more widely.
Comparative investigations of this type stimulate exciting synergies between different
subdisciplines of linguistics, such as language change, contact linguistics, sociolinguistics,
linguistic typology, textual philology, and microvariation in grammar, sound, and meaning
within and across languages. Besides reflecting and encouraging the links between these
subdomains, the fundamental goal of the series is to publish high-quality, substantial
reference works which represent a set of theoretically informed and systematic guides
to what is known about the world’s languages.
Each Guide focuses on a particular language family, subfamily, or areal grouping, and is
edited by leading authorities, who bring together contributions from the best international
scholars in the field. The Guides aim to show the more general theoretical significance of
the languages’ history, linguistic and sociolinguistic characteristics, and overall to provide
an indispensable reference tool both to specialist scholars and students and to professional
linguists. The approach adopted in all the Guides is systematic and comparative, informed
by the latest research and theoretical and methodological perspectives, and, where appro-
priate, the authors draw on relevant work in such fields as anthropology, archaeology, and
cognitive science.
Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden
University of Cambridge and University of Oxford
February 2015
xli
Abbreviations
For bibliographical abbreviations, see References.
* unattested form or usage Alt. Altamurano (central Pugliese dialect of

** ungrammatical form or usage Altamura, upper southeastern Italy)
(?)? (very) dubious form or usage Amt. Amanteano (northeastern Calabrian
? dialect of Amantea, extreme southwest
substandard/non-standard form or
of Italy)
usage
an alternating neuter
% form or usage which is not universally
accepted as grammatical an. animate
> becomes, yields Anc. Anconitano (central eastern
Marchigiano dialect of city of Ancona,
= cliticized to
eastern central Italy)
Ø null argument (subject or complement)
And. Andalusian (variety of Spanish spoken
ó syllable in region of Andalusia, southern Spain)
$ syllable boundary Ang. Angolar creole
# (i) syllable boundary AngPt. Angolan Portuguese
(ii) ungrammatical in the given Ant. Lesser Antillean creoles
pragmatic context
AP accentual phrase
1/2/3 first/second/third person
Aql. Aquilano (eastern Abruzzese dialect of
I/II/III/IV first / second/ third / fourth city of L’Aquila, upper southeastern
conjugation Italy)
A alternating gender Ara. Aragonese (Pyrenean Ibero-Romance
A(dj) adjective language spoken in Aragon,
abl ablative northeastern Spain)
Abr. Abruzzese (dialect group of Abruzzo, Arb. Arabic
upper southeastern Italy) Arl. Ariellese (eastern Abruzzese dialect of
acc accusative Arielli, upper southeastern Italy)
acc.mrk accusative marker Arn. Aranese (Pyrenean Gascon dialect of
Occitan spoken in the Val d’Aran,
AcI accusative and infinitive construction northwestern Catalonia, Spain)
act active (voice) ARo. Aromanian (Daco-Romance dialects
AD Anno Domini spoken in Greece, Albania, Bulgaria,
adn adnominal Serbia, and the Republic of Macedonia)
adv (i) adverb(ial) art article
(ii) adverbal ASH Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy
AfBrPt. Afro-Brazilian Portuguese Asp Aspect (head position)
AfPt. African Portuguese Ast. Asturian (dialect group of northwestern
Spain)
Agr agreement
Ast.-Leo. Astur-Leonese
Agr. De agri cultura (by Cato)
ATop aboutness topic
Alb. Albanian
Aug. Augustine
Alg. Alguerès (Catalan dialect of city of
Alghero, northwestern Sardinia) Evang. Iohan. Tractatus in Evangelium Iohannis
xliii
ABBREVIATIONS
Auv. Auvernhat (Occitan dialect group of Cai. Cairese (central Ligurian dialect of
Auvergne, central France) Cairo Montenotte, northwestern Italy)
aux auxiliary (verb) Cal. Calabrian (dialect group of Calabria,
Bad. Badiot (Ladin dialect spoken in Alta extreme southwest of Italy)
Badia, Dolomites of southern Tyrol, CArb. Classical Arabic
northeastern Italy) Cat. Catalan
Bal. Balearic (Catalan) Cgn. Carovignese (northeastern Salentino
Băn. Bănăţean (dialect group of Banat, dialect of Carovigno, extreme southeast
southwestern Romania) of Italy)
Bar. Barese (central eastern Pugliese dialect ch. chapter
of Bari, upper southeastern Italy) Chb. Chabacano creole (spoken in the
Bas. Basilicatese (dialect group of Basilicata, Philippines)
upper southern Italy) Cht. Chietino (eastern Abruzzese dialect of
BC Before Christ Chieti, upper southeastern Italy)
Bcl. Barceloní (Catalan of city of Barcelona) Cic. Cicero
Béa. Béarnais (Gascon dialect of Béarn, Ac. Academica
French Pyrenees, southeast France) Att. Epistulae ad Atticum
BeFr. Belgian French Cat. In Catilinam
Bel. Bellunese (northern Venetan dialect of Clu. Pro Cluentio
city of Belluno, northeastern Italy)
Fam. Epistulae ad familiaris
Bgm. Bergamasco (eastern Lombard dialect
Fin. De finibus
of city of Bergamo, central northern
Italy) Leg. Man.Pro Lege Manilia
Blm. Belmontese (northern Calabrian dialect Mil. Pro Milone
of Belmonte, extreme southwest of Italy) Off. De officiis
Bol. Bolognese (eastern Emilian dialect of Orat. Orator ad M.Brutum
city of Bologna, northeastern Italy) Phil. Orationes Philippicae
Boval. Bovalino (southern Calabrian village Planc. Plancius
extreme southwest of Italy)
Pomp. De Imperio Gnaei Pompei
Brg. Borgomanerese (northeastern
Piedmontese dialect of Borgomanero, Red. sen. Post reditum in senatu
northwestern Italy) Rep. De republica
Brn. Brindisino (northeastern Salentino Sen. De senectute
dialect of Brindisi, extreme southeast of Sest. Pro Sestio
Italy)
Tusc. Tusculanae disputationes
BrPt. Brazilian Portuguese
cl clitic
Btc. Batticaloa creole (spoken in eastern Sri
CLat. Classical Latin
Lanka)
Clb. Colombo creole (spoken in western Sri
Btv. Batavia creole (spoken in Indonesia)
Lanka)
Bvt. Beneventano (northeastern Campanian
Cld. Casacalendese (northeastern Molisan
dialect of Benevento, upper
dialect of Casacalenda, upper southern
southwestern Italy)
Italy)
C (i) central
ClLD clitic left-dislocation
(ii) consonant
Cln. Cellinese (northern Salentino dialect of
(iii) coda Cellino San Marco, extreme southeast
c. circa of Italy)
c.o.p. complement of preposition ClRD clitic right-dislocation
Caes. Caesar Clv. Calvellese (southern Basilicatese dialect
B.G. de Bello Gallico of Calvello, upper southern Italy)
xliv
ABBREVIATIONS
Cmp. Campanian (dialect group of Campania, DC dendreme-choremes

upper southwestern Italy) Dch. Dutch
Cmz. Castelmezzanese (southern Basilicatese def definite(ness)
dialect of Castelmezzano, upper
Dem demonstrative
southern Italy)
denot. denotational
coll. colloquial
det determiner (category)
com comitative
Detee determinee
comp complementizer (position)
Deter determiner
compl complement
dial. dialectal
compr comparative
dim diminutive
cond conditional
DO direct object
conj conjunction
DOM differential object marking
conjug. conjugation
(or marker)
cop copula
DomSp. Dominican Spanish
Cor. Corsican
DP determiner phrase
Cos. Cosentino (northern Calabrian dialect
DRo. Daco-Romance
of city of Cosenza, extreme southwest
of Italy) DVE (Dante’s) De vulgari eloquentia
CP complementizer phrase E (i) east(ern)
Cpb. Campobassano (southern Molisan (ii) event time
dialect of Campobasso, upper southern (iii) Romance outcome of ESSE ‘be’
Italy) ECM exceptional case marking
Cpd. Campidanese (dialect group of Egd. Engadine (Romansh dialect of Engadine
Campidania, southern Sardinia) Valley, southeastern Switzerland)
c.pst compound past Elb. Elbano (Tuscan dialect spoken on island
Cpv. Cape Verdean creole of Elba, central Italy)
Crt. Cortonese (eastern Tuscan dialect of Em. Ermita (Chabacano, spoken in the
Cortona, central Italy) Philippines)
Csm. Casamancese creole (spoken in and Eml. Emilian (dialect group of Emilia,
around Ziguinchor, Senegal) northeastern Italy)
Cst. Castilian Eng. English
CSPS Condaghe di San Pietro de Silki ESID(s) extreme southern Italian dialect(s)
Ctn. Crotonese (central eastern Calabrian EuPt. European Portuguese
dialect of city of Crotone, extreme EuSp. European Spanish
southwest of Italy)
expl expletive
Ctz. Catanzarese (central southern
Calabrian dialect of city of Catanzaro, Ext. Extremaduran (dialect group of
extreme southwest of Italy) Extremadura, central western Spain)
Cv Cavite (Chabacano, spoken in the f, F feminine
Philippines) f. (i) folio
Cvl. Castrovillarese (northern Calabrian (ii) and also on following page
dialect of Castrovillari, extreme Fas. Fassano (Ladin dialect spoken in the Val
southwest of Italy) di Fassa, northeastern Trentino,
Dal. Dalmatian (obsolete group of dialects northeastern Italy)
formerly spoken in the Dalmatia region Fda. Fa d’Ambô creole (spoken in the
of Croatia and Montenegro) Annobon and Bioko islands off the coast
Dam. Daman creole (spoken in city of Daman, of Equatorial Guinea)
northwestern coast of India) Fer. Ferrarese (Emilian dialect of the city of
dat dative Ferrara, northeastern Italy)
xlv
ABBREVIATIONS
FF focus fronting Grk. Greek

Ffd. Fiumefreddese (northwestern Calabrian Grm. Germanic
dialect of Fiumefreddo Bruzio, extreme Gsc. Gascon
southwest of Italy)
Gse. Gioiese (southern Calabrian dialect of
FI faire-infinitif causative construction Gioia Tauro, extreme southwest of
fin finite Italy).
Flo. Florentine GSSD general stressed syllable
foc focus (feature) diphthongization
Foc focus (position) Gua. Guadeloupean creole
FP (i) functional projection Guy. Guyanese creole
(ii) faire-par causative construction Gvd. Gévaudanais (Occitan variety spoken in
central southern France in the
Fr. French
Département of Lozère)
Frl. Friulian (dialect group of Friuli,
H Romance outcome of HABERE ‘have’
northeastern Italy)
H* high pitch accent
Frp. Francoprovençal (Gallo-Romance
dialects spoken in central eastern H*+L / H+*L falling complex pitch accent (stressed
France, western Switzerland, and syllable aligned with high / low pitch
northwestern Italy) accent)
Frz. Frazzanese (northeastern Sicilian H- high phrasal accent
dialect of Frazzanò, extreme south of H% high boundary tone
Italy) H-language/-variety high language/variety
fut future hab habitual aspect
Ft (metrical) foot HAC hierarchic agglomerative classification
fw fieldwork notes Hai. Haitian creole
Gad. Gaderano (Ladin dialects from the Val HAS higher adverb space
Badia, Dolomites of southern Tyrol,
Heb. Hebrew
northeastern Italy)
Hng. Hungarian
GaR. Gallo-Romance
Hor. Horace
GBk. Guinea Bissau Kriyol
Carm. Carmina
gen genitive
Sat. Satires
Gen. Genoese
Serm. Sermones
gend gender
HT(LD) hanging topic (left-dislocation)
ger gerund
IbR. Ibero-Romance
Ger. German
IE Indo-European
GGC Gulf of Guinea creoles
Ils. Illasian (southwestern Venetan dialect
Glc. Galician (Ibero-Romance language of
of Illasi, northeastern Italy)
northwestern Spain)
imp imperative
gnr generic
impers impersonal
Got. Gothic
inan. inanimate
GP medieval Galician-Portuguese linguistic
varieties spoken in today’s territories of ind indicative
Galicia and Portugal until the indf indefinite
Renaissance inf infinitive
Grd. Gardenese (Ladin dialect of Val Inf. (Dante’s) Inferno
Gardena, Alto Adige, Dolomites of
southern Tyrol, northeastern Italy) Infl inflectional domain of the sentential
core
Grf. Garfagnino (dialect area of
northwestern Tuscany, central Italy) intj interjection
xlvi
ABBREVIATIONS
IO indirect object Liv. (i) Livy (Ab urbe condita)

IP inflection phrase (ii) Livinallese (Ladin dialect spoken in
ipfv imperfective (aspect) the province of Belluno, northeastern
Italy)
IRo. Istro-Romanian (Daco-Romance
dialects spoken in Istria, Croatia) Lmb. Lombard (dialect group of Lombardy,
central northern Italy)
irreg irregular
Lnd. Landais (Gascon variety spoken in
Isc. Ischitano (Campanian dialect spoken on
Landes, southwestern Occitania,
island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples,
southern France)
upper southwestern Italy)
loc locative
It. Italian
Log. Logudorese (dialect group of Logudoro,
iter iterative aspect
northwestern Sardinia)
ItR. Italo-Romance
Lou. Louisiana creole
JuSp. Judaeo-Spanish
LP left periphery
Kch. Kochi creole (formerly spoken in port
LSC Limba Sarda Comuna (‘Common
city of Kochi, west coast of India)
Sardinian Language’)
KP case phrase
m, M masculine
Krl. Korlai creole (spoken in Raigad District,
Mac. Maceratese (central Marchigiano dialect
Maharashtra, India)
of Macerata, central eastern Italy)
L* low pitch accent
Mad. Madrileño Spanish
L*+H / L+*H falling complex pitch accent (stressed
Maj. Majorcan (Catalan)
syllable aligned with low/high pitch
accent) Mar. Marchigiano (dialect group of Le
Marche, central eastern Italy)
L- low phrasal accent
Mart. Martial (Epigrammata)
L-language/-variety low language/variety
Mat. Materano (southeastern Basilicatese
Lad. (Dolomitic) Ladin
dialect of Matera, upper southern Italy)
LAmSp. Latin American Spanish
Mau. Mauritian creole
LAS lower adverb space
MD metaphonic diphthongization
Lat. Latin
Mdc. Mendicinese (northeastern Calabrian
Laz. Laziale (dialect group of Lazio, central dialect of Mendicino, extreme
Italy) southwest of Italy)
LC(s) liaison consonant(s) Mdv. Moldovan (variety of Romanian spoken
LD left-dislocation in the Republic of Moldova)
LE linking element Mex. Mexican Spanish
Lec. Leccese (southern Salentino dialect of Mid Middle
Lecce, extreme southeast of Italy) Mil. Milanese
Leo. Leonese (dialect group of northwestern Mmb. Mumbai
Spain)
MnP. Montese (western Campanian dialect of
Lex Cur. Lex Romiana Raetica Curiensis Monte di Procida, upper southwestern
Lgb. Longobard Italy)
Lgd. Langadocian (Occitan dialects of Mnt. Mentonasque (Occitan dialect spoken in
Languedoc, southern France) Menton in the Alpes-Maritimes,
Lig. Ligurian (dialect group of Liguria, southeastern France)
northwestern Italy) MOA manner of articulation
Lim. Limousin (Occitan dialect spoken in mod modality
Départements of Limousin, Charente, Mod modern
and Dordogne in southwestern France)
Mol. Molisan (dialect group of Molise, upper
lit. literally south of Italy)
xlvii
ABBREVIATIONS
Mrb. Marebbano (Raeto-Romance dialect nom nominative

from Marèo, Dolomites of southern Nov. Il Novellino (thirteenth-century
Tyrol, northeastern Italy) Florentine text)
Mrg. Maruggese (northern Salentino dialect NP noun phrase
of Maruggio, extreme southeast of
NPAH Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy
Italy)
NPI negative polarity item
mrk marker
num number
MRo. Megleno-Romanian (Daco-Romance
dialects spoken in the northern part of Nuo. Nuorese (Sardinian dialects of Nuoro
Greek Macedonia, and across the border and province, northeastern Sardinia)
in the former Yugoslav Republic of O (i) old
Macedonia) (ii) object
Mrs. Murese (northwestern Basilicatese (iii) onset
dialect of Muro Lucano, upper southern
Italy) O(BJ) object
Mrt. Marateoto (southwetern Basilicatese obl oblique
dialect of Maratea, upper southwestern obs. obsolete
Italy) OC obligatory control
MS manuscript Occ. Occitan
Msl. Marsalese (northwstern Sicilian dialect ocl object clitic
of Marsala, extreme south of Italy)
Orib. Oribasius
Mtn. Mattinatese (northeastern Pugliese
Ors. Oristanese (Sardinian dialect of
dialect of Mattinata, upper
Oristano, spoken in central western
southeastern Italy)
Sardinia)
Mtp. Montpelhierenc (Occitan dialect of
Ov. Ovid
Montpellier, southern France)
Met. Metamorphoses
Mtq. Martiniquais (Martinican) creole
OVS object-verb-subject order
Mul. Ch. Mulomedicina Chironis
P(P) preposition(al phrase)
Mun. Muntenian (dialect group of Muntenia,
central southern Romania) PA pitch accent(s)
Mur. Murciano (Spanish variety spoken in Pad. Paduan (southern Venetan dialect of
southeastern Spain) city of Padua, northeastern Italy)
Mus. Mussomelese (central Sicilian dialect of Pal. Palermitano (northwestern Sicilian
Mussomeli, extreme south of Italy) dialect of city of Palermo, extreme
south of Italy)
n (i) neuter
Pap. Papiamentu creole (spoken on the
(ii) nucleus
Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire,
N (i) north(ern) and Curaçao)
(ii) noun part partitive
(iii) nasal segment pass passive
Nap. Neapolitan PCC person case constraint
neg negator Pcn. Picernese (Basilicatese Gallo-Italic
Ngp. Negapattinam creole (spoken in Tamil dialect of Picerno, upper southern Italy)
Nadu, eastern India) Ped. Pedarese (northeastern Sicilian dialect
NGr nominal group of Pedara, extreme south of Italy)
Niç. Niçard (Occitan dialect of Nice, per. person
southeastern France) Per. Perginese (Trentino dialect of Pergine
NID(s) northern Italian dialect(s) Valsugana, northeastern Italy)
nmz nominalizer Per. Aeth. Peregrinatio Aetheriae
NOC non-obligatory control Petr. Petronius
xlviii
ABBREVIATIONS
Sat. Satyricon prs present tense

Pic. Picard (dialects spoken in Picardy and prt preterite
Pas-de-Calais, northern France) Prv. Provençal Occitan (Occitan dialects
Pie. Piedmontese (dialect group of spoken in Provence, southeastern
Piedmont, northwestern Italy) France)
pf existential or locative proform PrW prosodic word
pfv perfective (aspect) pst past
PKr. Papiá Kristang creole (spoken in Hilir Pt. Portuguese
suburb of Malacca, west Maylasia, and ptcp participle
in Singapore)
Ptl. Putoleano (Campanian dialect of
pl plural Pozzuoli in northeastern outskirts of
Pl. Plautus Naples, upper southwestern Italy)
Amph. Amphitruo Ptn. Potentino (northwestern Basilicatese
Asin. Asinaria dialect of city of Potenza, upper
southern Italy)
Bacch. Bacchides
PtP past participle
Capt. Captiui
Ptr. Pietransierese (northeastern Abruzzese
Cas. Casina
dialect of Pietransieri, upper
Cur. Curculio southeastern Italy)
Epid. Epidicus Pug. Pugliese (dialects of upper southeastern
Men. Menaechmi Italy)
Merc. Mercator Put. Puter (Romansh variety spoken in
Mil. Miles Gloriosus upper Engadine valley, southeastern
Switzerland)
Mostell. Mostellaria
PYTA perfecto/pretérito y tiempos afines
Rud. Rudens (= Romance continuants of Latin
Trin. Trinummus perfective forms)
Plin. Pliny (the Elder) q question particle/marker
N.H. Naturalis Historia Q(P) quantifier (phrase)
plprf. pluperfect R reference time
Plq. Palenquero creole (spoken in northern RaeR. Raeto-Romance
Colombia) RDV relative distance value
PN person and number ref. referential
POA place of articulation refl reflexive
poss possessive reg. (i) regional
PPh prosodic phrase (ii) regular
Prd. Procidano (Campanian dialect of island Reg. Reggino (southern Calabrian dialect of
of Procida, Bay of Naples, upper Reggio di Calabria, extreme southwest
southwestern Italy) of Italy)
prep preposition(al) rel relative
Prg. Perugino (northern Umbrian dialect of Reu. Réunionnais (Reunion) creole
city of Perugia, central Italy)
RF raddoppiamento (or rafforzamento)
Prm. Parmigiano (Emilian dialect of city of fonosintattico (‘phonosyntactic
Parma, northeastern Italy) doubling’)
PROarb phonetically null pronoun with generic, Rgt. Rouergat (Occitan dialect of Rouergue,
arbitrary reference Aveyron, southern France)
prog progressive Rho. Rhodanien (Occitan dialect of the
Prp. Principense creole (spoken on the Island Rhône Valley, southeastern France)
of Príncipe, off the west coast of Africa) RIV relative identity value
xlix
ABBREVIATIONS
Rl Romance language Sic. Sicilian

Rmc. Romanesco (now defunct dialect of SID(s) southern Italian dialect(s)
Rome) Slc. Sanleuciano (northeastern Campanian
Rmg. Romagnol (dialect group of Romagna dialect of San Leucio del Sannio, upper
region, northeastern Italy) southwestern Italy)
Rms. Romansh (dialects spoken in sN semi-word noun
southeastern Swiss Canton of Snc. Sannicandrese (northeastern Pugliese
Graubünden / Grisons / Grigioni / dialect of San Nicandro, upper
Grischun) southeastern Italy)
Ro. Romanian Sns. Senisese (southeastern Basilicatese
Rom. Roman regional Italian dialect of Senise, upper southern
Ros. Rossellonès (Catalan dialect of Italy)
Roussillon, Pyrénées-Orientales, SO/U intransitive (Undergoer) subject of an
southeastern France) unaccusative clause
Rps. Ripese (central Molisan dialect of SOSD stressed open syllable diphthongization
Ripalimosani, upper southern Italy) SOV subject–object–verb order
RTop referential topic Sov. Soveritano (central Calabrian dialect of
S (i) south(ern) Soveria Mannelli, extreme southwest of
(ii) speech time Italy)
S(UBJ) subject s.pst simple past
sA semi-word adjective Sp. Spanish
SA intransitive (Actor/Agent) subject of an Srd. Sardinian
unergative clause Srs. Surselvan (Romansh dialect,
SAC South Asian creoles southeastern Switzerland)
SAE Standard Average European SSDM Salzburg School of Dialectometry
Sal. Salentino (dialect group of Salento, Stm. Santome creole (spoken on the Island of
southern Puglia, extreme southeast of São Tomé, off the west coast of Africa)
Italy) Suet. Suetonius
Sas. Sassarese (Tuscan-based dialects of suf suffix
northwestern Sardinia)
sup supine
sbjv subjunctive
Sur. Surmiran (Romansh variety spoken in
sc small cause Surmeir, including Oberhalbstein and
scl(deic/inv/num/pers) (deictic/invariable/number/person) Unterhalbstein, southeast of Chur)
subject clitic Sut. Sutselvan (Romansh variety spoken in
Scr. Scorranese (southern Salentino dialect Nidwald, south of Chur)
of Scorrano, extreme southeast of Italy) SV subject–verb order
SEAC Southeast Asian creoles SVO subject–verb–object order
Sen. (i) Senese (dialect of Siena, Tuscany) t trace (= underlying / intermediate
(ii) Seneca (the Elder) position) of moved element
Controv. Controuersiae T (i) tense (position)
(iii) Seneca (the Younger) (ii) address form used to those of lower
Ben. De Beneficiis status
Const. De Constantia Tac. Tacitus
Ses. Santeusaniese (southeastern Abruzzese Hist. Historiae
dialect of Sant’Eusanio del Sangro, TAM tense, aspect, and mood
upper southeastern Italy)
Tar. Tarantino (central Pugliese dialect of
Sey. Seychellois (Seychelles) creole city of Taranto, upper southeastern
sg singular Italy)
l
ABBREVIATIONS
Ter. Terence VDM Visual DialectoMetry

Andr. Andria Ven Venetan
Hec. Hecyra Ver. Veronese (Venetan dialect of city of
Phorm. Phormio Verona, northeastern Italy)
ThLL Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Vgl. Vegliote (defunct Dalmatian dialect
formerly spoken on island of Veglia
Tn Ternate (Chabacano, spoken in Manila
(Krk) in the northern Adriatic sea)
Bay, the Philippines)
Vic. Vicentino (Venetan dialect of city of
top topic (feature)
Vicenza, northeastern Italy)
Top topic (head position)
Virg. Virgil
TOP topicalization
Ecl. Eclogues
Trk. Turkish
Vit. Viterbese (northeastern Laziale dialect
Trn. Trentino (dialect group of Trento, of Viterbo, central Italy)
northeastern Italy)
Vlc. Valencian (Catalan)
Tsc. Tuscan
Vld. Vallader (Romansh variety spoken in
Tug. Tugu creole (formerly spoken in lower Engadine Valley, southeastern
northern Jakarta, Indonesia) Switzerland)
Tur. Turinese (central Piedmontese dialect VN (Dante’s) Vita Nuova
of city of Turin, northwestern Italy)
Vnz. Venetian
TV thematic vowel
voc vocative
U undergoer
VOS verb–object–subject order
UGC Upper Guinea creoles
VOT voice onset time
Umb. Umbro/Umbrian (Italo-Romance
VP verb phrase
dialect)
VR province of Verona (northeastern Italy)
USID(s) upper southern Italian dialect(s)
VS verb–subject order
v verso
Vsd. Vallesaccardese (eastern Campanian
V (i) vowel
dialect of Vallesaccarda, upper
(ii) verb southwestern Italy)
(iii) address form used to those of VSO verb–subject–object order
higher status (or to indicate distance or
Vva. Vivaro-Alpine (Occitan dialect spoken
solidarity)
in northeastern Occitania, southern
Val. Valéian (southeastern Occitan dialect of France)
the Vallée de l’Ubaye, Alpes-de-Haute-
V2 verb second (syntax)
Provence, southern France)
W west(ern)
Vâo. Valdôtain (Francoprovençal variety
spoken in Aosta Valley, northwestern Wal. Wallon (French dialect of Wallonia,
Italy) southern Belgium)
Var. Varro WM working map
Rust. De re rustica X unspecified head element
Vbc. Verbicarese (dialect of Verbicaro XP unspecified phrasal category
spoken in Lausberg Zone of northern Zm Zamboanga (Chabacano, spoken in the
Calabria, southern Italy) Philippines)
li
The Contributors
Alex Alsina, Pompeu Fabra University Alexandru Nicolae, University of Bucharest

Stephen R. Anderson, Yale University Michèle Oliviéri, University of Nice Sophie Antipolis
Richard Ashdowne, University of Oxford Tania Paciaroni, University of Zurich
Paola Benincà, University of Padua Mair Parry, University of Bristol
Delia Bentley, The University of Manchester Enrique Pato, University of Montreal
Pier Marco Bertinetto, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa Diego Pescarini, University of Zurich
Annegret Bollée, University of Bamberg Cecilia Poletto, Goethe University of Frankfurt
Georg Bossong, University of Zurich Christopher J. Pountain, Queen Mary, University
Chiara Cappellaro, University of Oxford of London
Michela Cennamo, University of Naples Federico II Josep Quer, ICREA Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Francesco Maria Ciconte, University of Puerto Rico Franz Rainer, Vienna University of Economics and Business
James Clackson, University of Cambridge Paolo Ramat, University of Pavia
Silvio Cruschina, University of Vienna Eva-Maria Remberger, University of Vienna
Adina Dragomirescu, University of Bucharest Lori Repetti, Stony Brook University
Francisco Dubert, University of Santiago de Compostela Davide Ricca, University of Turin
Steven N. Dworkin, University of Michigan Ian Roberts, University of Cambridge
Thomas Finbow, University of São Paulo Giampaolo Salvi, Eötvös Lórand University
Francesca Forza, University of Bologna Rodney Sampson, University of Bristol
Barbara Frank-Job, University of Bielefield Patrick Sauzet, University of Toulouse-Le Mirail
Charlotte Galves, State University of Campinas Sergio Scalise, University of Bologna
Ion Giurgea, ‘Iorgu Iordan - Al. Rosetti’ Institute of Stephan Schmid, University of Zurich
Linguistics, Bucharest Ora R. Schwarzwald, Bar-Ilan University
Giuliana Giusti, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice Maria Selig, University of Regensburg
Hans Goebl, University of Salzburg Michelle Sheehan, Anglia Ruskin University
Mari C. Jones, University of Cambridge John Charles Smith, University of Oxford
Johannes Kabatek, University of Zurich Ingmar Söhrman, University of Gothenburg
Andres Kristol, University of Neuchâtel Mario Squartini, University of Turin
Adam Ledgeway, University of Cambridge Elisabeth Stark, University of Zurich
Michele Loporcaro, University of Zurich Christina Tortora, City University New York
Martin Maiden, University of Oxford Donald N. Tuten, Emory University
Giovanna Marotta, University of Pisa Laura Vanelli, University of Padua
Philippe Maurer, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Nigel Vincent, The University of Manchester
Anthropology Lynn Williams, Brigham Young University
Guido Mensching, University of Göttingen Roger Wright, University of Liverpool
lii
Introduction
The Romance languages are among the most widely studied across a wide variety of formal approaches and in relation
and researched language families in modern linguistics, to a large body of empirical research conducted on the full
their data having always been prominent in the linguistic range of individual languages, dialects, and sub-branches of
literature and contributed extensively to our current Romance.
empirical and theoretical understanding of phonetics, Second, the Guide has been conceived in such a way as to
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, bring together in a single volume a truly comprehensive
sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics. Their prominence and detailed structural treatment of the individual Romance
reflects the richly documented diachronic variation exhib- varieties and their comparative structures. While there are
ited by the Romance family, which, coupled with our exten- excellent manuals and handbooks dedicated to the Romance
sive knowledge and abundant textual documentation of the languages, including classic comparative historical and mas-
ancestral language, Latin, offers insights into a range of sively detailed encyclopedic treatments (e.g. Meyer-Lübke
variation through time and space certainly unparalleled 1890-1902; Lausberg 1965; 1966; Holtus et al. 1988-2005;
for any other Western languages. In short, the Romance Ernst et al. 2003-8), these are written in German and
languages and dialects constitute a treasure house of lin- Romance languages and involve costly multi-volume
guistic data of profound interest and importance not just for works. They are not therefore immediately accessible to
Romance linguists but also for non-Romance specialists. all scholars. Of course, there are also some very useful
This perennially fertile and still under-utilized testing smaller-scale works in English, such as Hall (1974), Elcock
ground therefore has a central role to play in challenging (1960; 1975), Harris (1978a), Harris and Vincent (1988), and
linguistic orthodoxies and shaping and informing new ideas now Maiden, Smith, and Ledgeway (2011; 2013) and Ledge-
and perspectives about language change, structure, and way (2012a), as well as detailed structural treatments of
variation; and our current knowledge in these areas, includ- some of the better-known individual Romance languages
ing individual varieties and their comparison, deserves to be (e.g. Maiden 1995 for Italian; Fagyal et al. 2006 for French;
made available to the wider linguistic community. Azevedo 2005 for Portuguese; and Penny 2002 for Spanish).
The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages is intended as However, unlike the present Guide, none of these offers a
an essential tool for both Romance linguists and general detailed structural treatment of all the individual Romance
linguists, which is original in two particular respects. First, varieties and Romance-speaking areas (including standard,
it seeks to integrate the results and findings of different non-standard, dialectal, and regional varieties of the
theoretical frameworks, models, and approaches to the Romània continua and the Romània nova),1 as well as a com-
Romance languages, although the data and the relevant parative treatment of major topics, issues, and case studies
empirical generalizations remain the focus of interest across different areas of the grammar of the Romance
throughout. To this end, the multi-author format of the languages.2
present volume brings together leading recent inter-
national scholarship in individual Romance varieties and 1
While still very valuable, but now out of print for some time, Harris
from different theoretical frameworks and approaches, and Vincent (1988) only offers structural overviews of the standard
and shows how each may cast new and necessary light on Romance languages and a small selection of the non-standard varieties
(Occitan, Sardinian, Raeto-Romance, and creoles), but not a comparative
the other. The present volume therefore provides an oppor- treatment of general structural issues.
tunity for some of the foremost scholars in the field to 2
While Maiden, Smith, and Ledgeway (2011; 2013) offers a selective
reflect in fresh and original ways on the major issues in comparative treatment of some major topics and issues in a variety of
areas of Romance linguistics, it does not include structural overviews of the
Romance linguistics in the light of contemporary thinking individual Romance varieties.
The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages. Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden (eds)
Introduction © Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. liii
The Guide, organized along thematic lines into 10 parts, forms and structural organization of address systems), and
brings together a rich variety of comparative in-depth stud- hence are largely ‘internal’ to the discipline, whereas the
ies in Romance linguistics organized according to different ‘case studies’ tend to involve topics of wider interest where
grammatical phenomena, different approaches, and differ- the relevant Romance linguistic evidence (e.g. gender, case,
ent language groupings (including a number of illustrative word order) has played an important role in shaping and
maps),3 specifically dealing with 1: The making of the informing more general theoretical ideas and debates among
Romance languages; 2: Typology and classification; 3: Indi- linguists, and hence is also ‘external’ to the discipline.
vidual structural overviews (of Romance languages, dialects, Many authors have wished to thank those who have, in
and linguistic areas); 4: Comparative overviews (in turn various ways, assisted them in preparing their chapters. The
divided into: Phonology; Morphology; Syntax; Semantics editors join them in expressing particular thanks to: Orlando
and pragmatics; Sociolinguistics); 5: Issues in Romance Alba, Scott Alvord, Luigi Andriani, Giordano De Angelis,
phonology; 6: Issues in Romance morphology; 7: Issues in Xavier Bach, Marcello Barbato, Enrico Benella, Paola
Romance syntax; 8: Issues in Romance syntax and seman- Benincà, Gaetano Berruto, Guylaine Brun-Trigaud, Edoardo
tics; 9: Issues in Romance pragmatics and discourse; and 10: Cavirani, Massimo Cerruti, Dumitru Chihai, Fabio Chioc-
Case studies (in turn divided into the following subsections: chetti, Greville Corbett, Silvio Cruschina, Jean-Philippe Dal-
The nominal group; The verbal group; The clause). The bera, Mourizio Dardano, Antonio Fábregas, Irene De Felice,
volume thus forms a coherent whole, in that the selection Werner Forner, Maria Ana Gassman, Anabela Gonçalves,
of issues and case studies, coupled with the comparative Martina Irsara, Alessandra Lombardi, Florentin Lutz-Beck,
overviews of individual grammatical phenomena, in turn Fabio Macedoni, Alessandro Parenti, Lorenza Pescia, Anna
contextualized against the historical and typological back- Pineda, Silvano Poeta, Ignazio Putzu, Tom Rainsford,
ground explored in Parts 1 and 2, offer empirical breadth Péter Salvi, Norma Schifano, Stephan Schmid, Heidi Siller-
and wider theoretical context to the many language-specific Runggaldier, Giuseppina Silvestri, John Charles Smith, Ildikó
issues explored in the structural overviews of the individual Szijj, Anna Thornton, Carli Tomaschett, Fiorenzo Toso, Oana
Romance varieties. In particular, ‘issues’ pick up those Uță Bărbulescu, Paul Videsott, Nigel Vincent, Irene Vogel,
topics of Romance linguistics which have, traditionally, Ian Watson, Elena Weber Wetzel. Heartfelt thanks are also
been predominantly (though not exclusively) of interest due to the numerous native speakers of Romance languages
specifically to Romance linguists (e.g. origin and distribu- whose judgements have been called on in writing this book.
tion of the diphthongization of Romance open mid vowels; Finally, the editors are deeply grateful to John Davey of
Oxford University Press, whose idea this book originally
was, and who guided it through its early stages, and latterly
3
While every effort has been made to mark linguistic boundaries accur- to his successor, Julia Steer, and to Vicki Sunter, for their
ately on the maps, they are intended to be indicative only. unflagging enthusiasm and support for the project.
liv
7.1 Spatial distribution of the reflexes of Latin -ELLU(M) (in CULTELLUM, 7.2 Quantitative synthesis of the areas of diffusion of the outcome -o
ALF 341 couteau ‘knife’). Presumed diachronic development: A: -el, -et; (< -ELLU(M), -ELLE(M)), as found in six ALF maps: 115 bateau ‘boat’, 117
B: -ew; C: -ea, -eo, -jo, -ja; D: -a, -e, -o. The most recent stage is the beau ‘beautiful’, 252 château ‘castle’, 341 couteau ‘knife’, 810 manteau
change -jo > -o, which has spread from the Île-de-France. The oldest or ‘coat’, 986 peau ‘skin’. This pattern of spread is characteristic of
most conservative stages are the outcomes in A, all located in the linguistic phenomena which originate in the Île-de-France. Note its
south. Cf. Brun-Trigaud, Le Berre and Le Dû (2005:250). discontinuous (‘tentacle-like’) diffusion as well as the presence of
‘parachuted’ advanced outposts of the form -o, particularly in the
west. Cf. Brun-Trigaud, Le Berre and Le Dû (2005:310).
7.3 Spatial distribution of the presence (marked ‘avec pronom sujet’ 7.4 Spatial distribution of the Gallo-Romance and Celtic (Breton)
on the map) or absence (marked ‘sans pronom sujet’) of personal words for ‘cockerel’ (ALF 320 coq). Latin gallu(m) survives in the
pronouns in the dialect equivalents of the French phrase il tonne ‘it is types gal and jau. The majority type coq is of onomatopoeic origin.
thundering’ (ALF 1315). Absence of the personal pronoun is also the In Gascony the types biguey (< UICARIU(M)), hasan (< PHASIANU(M)) and pol
position in Latin. The Gascon form que (see §§19.4, 52.2.1) is obliga- (< PULLU(M)) are explicable, according to Gilliéron and Roques
tory in assertive utterances. The auvergnat form quo (< HOC) has (1912:121-31), by speakers’ metalinguistic reactions against ‘trouble-
pronominal value. Throughout the green-coloured region, pronom- some homonymy’ between the locally identical outcomes (gat, in
inal reflexes of Latin ILLUM are in use. Cf. Brun-Trigaud, Le Berre and both cases) of the word for ‘cat’ (< CATTU(M)) and the word for
Le Dû (2005:105) ‘cockerel’ (< GALLU(M)). Cf. Brun-Trigaud, Le Berre and Le Dû (2005:266).
magis altus comparare
plus altus accaptare
captare
acheter
plus haut
mai înalt croumpà cumpăra
com
più
pra
pra
lto
catà,ciatà
is a
alt
re
com
comprar
o
más alto
ma
mes alt
accaptare
7.5 Broad geographical distribution of comparative markers. For comparison of 7.6 Broad geographical distribution of Romance terms for ‘to buy’. Classical Latin
adjectives, the usually synthetic structure found in Latin was replaced, by the time EMERE, which rapidly disappeared from use, was replaced by COMPARARE ‘procure,
of late Latin, by analytic constructions based on the Latin adverbs PLUS ‘more’ obtain’, initially present throughout the Romània. Subsequently, there emerged in
(continued in Gallo- and Italo-Romance) and MAGIS ‘more’ (in Ibero- and Daco- northern France the type AD+CAPTARE ‘seize’ (> Fr. acheter), and in Piedmont and Liguria
Romance). Note the clear division of the Romània into two. The peripheral position the type CAPTARE. For specific historical reasons (French expansion into Sicily and
of the MAGIS type suggests the greater antiquity of this type. Cf. Rohlfs (1971:239, 35). southern Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), the type corresponding to
French acheter has been ‘exported’ to these areas. Cf. Rohlfs (1971:306;140).

ALPINE:
V guancia `cheek´
m.571 ǧember
stone-
VI gafio `half landing´ pine tsirm
II
I
VII chiascione `sheet´ GAULISH:
m.342
night -kt->-x́t-
m.583
III alder verna
m.287
seven,
eight
-e, -0>-
IV ETRUSCAN:
m.354
fire -k->-x-
V
OSCO-UMBRIAN:
m.135
the hip lumfu
m.325
october octufer
VI Rohlfs
VII (1972:20) glefa
m.9
when -nd->-nn-
GREEK:
m.61 lt. naka
I crusca `bran´
cradle Gk. naka
II brea `plank´
III scrana `chair´ REMNANTS

IV zolla `clod´ OF LINGUISTIC SUBSTRATES IN THE AIS
7.7 Superstrate effects. Spatial diffusion of some lexemes of Ger- 7.8 Alleged substrate effects. Spatial diffusion of some linguistic
manic origin from seven AIS maps: the type I crusca ‘bran’ (AIS 257); features of various origins. The map shows the area of diffusion of
type II brea ‘plank’ (AIS 232 due assi ‘two planks’); type II scrana (AIS phonetic and lexical features. The Alpine lexemes ǧember and tsirm
897 seggiola ‘chair’); type IV zolla (AIS 1420 zolla ‘clod of earth’); type are of pre-Indo-European origin. The type verna is of Celtic origin,
V guancia (AIS 113 guancia ‘cheek’); type VI gafio (AIS 870 loggia while the type naka comes from the Greek of southern Italy. The
‘balcony, landing’); type VII chiascione (AIS 1531 lenzuolo ‘sheet’). All words lumfu, octufer, nd gleba are Osco-Umbrian variants, respect-
seven types are of Langobard origin and their disparate spatial ively, of the synonymous Latin lumbus, october, and glaeba. The devel-
distribution reflects the decentralization of Langobard rule during opments /kt/ > /çt/ as well as the fall of final unstressed /e/ and /o/
its existence as an independent political entity (588-774). The types have been attributed, but far from unanimously, to the Celtic sub-
crusca, zolla, and guancia have entered standard Italian. Cf. Rohlfs strate. The same goes for the spirantization of Latin intervocalic /k/
(1971:293;119). in northern Tuscany, attributed by some to the remote influence of
Etruscan. A case can also be made for Osco-Umbrian origin of the
development /nd/ > /nn/. Cf. Kuen (1962/1970:240;223).
ALF (1902–1908) ALF (1902–1908)
A series: maps 1–1421 A series: maps 1–1421
Wallonia (Belgium) Wallonia (Belgium)
Picardy Picardy
ENGLISH CHANNEL GERMANY GERMANY

ENGLISH CHANNEL
Normandy Normandy
LUXEMBOURG LUXEMBOURG
Channel Islands Channel Islands
(British) (British)
Lorraine Lorraine
Romance- Romance-
speaking Brittany speaking Brittany Alsace
Alsace
Swiss
Swiss Romandy
Romandy
Poitou Poitou
Val Val
Saintonge d'Aosta Saintonge d'Aosta
(Italy) (Italy)
ATLANTIC Valli ATLANTIC Valli

Valdesi Valdesi
(Italy) (Italy)
Gascony Gascony
Provence
Provence
Languedoc
Basque Country Languedoc Basque Country
MEDITERRANEAN
MEDITERRANEAN Roussillon
0 100 200 Roussillon 0 100 200
km SPAIN VORONOI MAP: km SPAIN VORONOI MAP:

641 Survey points 641 Survey points
0: missing data [1] 1791 Polygon sides 0: missing data [1] 5: k [161] 10: t [1] 1791 Polygon sides
∫ 6: t∫ θj

1: mercredi [374] 1: [292] [38] 11: [8]
2: dimercre [233] 2: ∫j [9] 7: s [18] 12: tsj [2]
3: mercre [33] 3: ts [57] 8: tj [7] 13: st [1]
4: t∫j [38] 9: tç [7] 14: stj [1]
7.9 Spatial distribution of the Gallo-Romance terms for ‘Wednesday’. The map 7.10 Spatial distribution of the outcomes of Latin /k/ before stressed /a/ (in
shows the domains of the early Christian types MERCURII DIES (> Fr. mercredi), DIES reflexes of mercatus, ALF 812 marché ‘market’). Presumed diachronic devel-
MERCURII (> Oc. dimecres), and MERCURIUS (> Auv. mercres) (ALF 839 mercredi). For the opment: A: /k/ (= type 5); B: /tj/ (= type 8), /ts/ (= type 3); C: /tʃ/ (= type 6), /
other days of the week (except Sunday) the geolinguistic structures are very tç/ (= type 9); D: /ʃ/ (= type 1). The oldest forms (stage A) are found in the
similar: cf. FEW, s.v. LUNA. south and in Picardy. The more recent outcomes (stage B) occur in transi-
tional areas between the south and the north. Stage D represents the
‘French’ outcome, which can be shown to have arisen by the fourteenth
century. Cf. FEW, s.v. LUNA.
Romansh-speaking area Romansh-speaking area

Ladin-speaking area Ladin-speaking area
Trentino Trentino
Ticino Ticino
Standard Friuli- AIS (1928–1940) Standard Friuli- AIS (1928–1940)
French Venezia French Venezia
Grid 1: 382 Romance-speaking Grid 1: 382 Romance-speaking
Giulia Giulia
Val survey points Val survey points
d'Aosta d'Aosta
Veneto Veneto
Cherso Cherso
Istria Istria
Emilia- Emilia-
Romagna Romagna
Piedmont Liguria Piedmont Liguria
ADRIATIC SEA ADRIATIC SEA
Marche Marche
LIGURIAN LIGURIAN
Tuscany Tuscany
SEA SEA
Abruzzo Abruzzo
Elba and Molise Elba and Molise
Lazio Puglia Puglia

Sardinia Sardinia Lazio
Campania Basili- Campania Basili-

TYRRHENIAN cata TYRRHENIAN cata
Basilicata Basilicata
SEA SEA
IONIAN SEA IONIAN SEA
Calabria Calabria
Sicily Sicily
0 100 200 0 100 200
km km
coastline, national border VORONOI MAP: coastline, national border VORONOI MAP:
regional border 382 Survey points regional border 382 Survey points
linguistic border 970 Polygon sides linguistic border 970 Polygon sides
0: missing data [2] 3: MAMA [228] 0: missing data [3] 3: QUELLO [179]
1: MADRE [62] 5: MARE [90] 1: CODESTO [12] 4: IL [29]
2: QUESTO [159]
7.11 Spatial distribution of the Italo-Romance, Raeto-Romance, and Sardinian words 7.12 Spatial distribution of the Italo-Romance, Raeto-Romance, and Sardinian
for ‘mother’ (AIS 8 mia madre ‘my mother’). The type madre is the most ancient. demonstrative adjectives in the phrase ‘to this child’ (AIS 42 a codesto bambino ‘to
this child’). The type questo is the most ancient.
ALF (1902–1908) ALF (1902–1908)
A series: maps 1–1421 A series: maps 1–1421
Wallonia (Belgium) Wallonia (Belgium)
Picardy Picardy
ENGLISH CHANNEL GERMANY ENGLISH CHANNEL GERMANY
Normandy Normandy
LUXEMBOURG LUXEMBOURG
Channel Islands Channel Islands
(British) (British)
Lorraine Lorraine
Romance- Romance-
speaking Brittany Alsace speaking Brittany Alsace
Swiss Swiss
Romandy Romandy
Poitou Poitou
Val Val
Saintonge d'Aosta Saintonge d'Aosta
(Italy) (Italy)
ATLANTIC Valli ATLANTIC Valli

Valdesi Valdesi
(Italy) (Italy)
Gascony Gascony
Provence Provence
Basque Country Languedoc Basque Country Languedoc

MEDITERRANEAN MEDITERRANEAN
Roussillon Roussillon
0 100 200 VORONOI MAP: 0 100 200 VORONOI MAP:
641 Survey points 641 Survey points
SPAIN 1791 Polygon sides SPAIN 1791 Polygon sides
km km
Visualization: MINMWMAX 6-tuple Similarity distribution: MINMWMAX 12-tuple Visualization: MINMWMAX 6-tuple Similarity distribution: MINMWMAX 12-tuple

173 75 74 75
[1] 39.18 – 43.86 (n = 66) [1] 37.55 – 47.95 (n = 9)
80 79
[2] – 48.54 (n = 246) [2] – 58.35 (n = 159) 75 52 50
91 54
[3] – 53.22 (n = 98) 82 [3] – 68.75 (n = 129)
[4] – 64.39 (n = 101) 52
[4] – 75.99 (n = 127) 17
65 51 7
[5] – 75.56 (n = 74) 14 16 36 2
23 26 11 [5] – 83.23 (n = 149)
[6] – 86.73 (n = 37) 38 45 52 59 66 73 80 87
40 46 52 58 64 70 76 82 [6] – 90.48 (n = 67)
Total: 640 Total: 640 RIV999,k
RIV724,k
7.13 A typical Languedocien similarity profile: similarity map to the ALF point 7.14 A typical similarity profile of the northern Domaine d’Oïl: similarity map to
724 Rieupeyroux, Département Aveyron). Similarity index: RIV724,k. Corpus: 1,681 the artificial ALF point ‘Standard French’ (= P: 999). Similarity index: RIV999,k.
working maps (= total ALF corpus). Algorithm of visualization: MINMWMAX (6- Corpus: 1,681 working maps (= total ALF corpus). Algorithm of visualization:
tuple). MINMWMAX (6-tuple).
Romansh-speaking area Ladin-speaking area Romansh-speaking area

Trentino Ladin-speaking area
Ticino Trentino
Standard Friuli-
Venezia
AIS (1928–1940) Standard
Ticino Friuli- AIS (1928–1940)
French French Venezia
Giulia Grid 1: 382 Romance-speaking Grid 1: 382 Romance-speaking
Giulia
Val survey points Val survey points
d'Aosta d'Aosta
Veneto Veneto
Cherso Cherso
Istria Istria
Emilia- Emilia-
Romagna Romagna
Piedmont Liguria Piedmont Liguria
ADRIATIC SEA ADRIATIC SEA
Marche Marche
LIGURIAN LIGURIAN
Tuscany Tuscany
SEA SEA
Abruzzo Abruzzo
Elba and Molise Elba and Molise
Sardinia Lazio Puglia Puglia

Sardinia Lazio
Campania Basili- Campania Basili-

TYRRHENIAN cata TYRRHENIAN cata
SEA Basilicata SEA Basilicata
IONIAN SEA IONIAN SEA
Calabria Calabria
Sicily Sicily
0 100 200 0 100 200
km km
VORONOI MAP: coastline, national border VORONOI MAP:
coastline, national border
382 Survey points regional border 382 Survey points
regional border
970 Polygon sides linguistic border 970 Polygon sides
linguistic border
Visualization: MINMWMAX 6-tuple Similarity distribution: MINMWMAX 12-tuple Visualization: MINMWMAX 6-tuple Similarity distribution: MINMWMAX 12-tuple
52 50 85
57
[1] 44.19 – 49.94 (n = 18) 43
[1] 46.99 – 52.74 (n = 24)
47 48 70
[2] – 55.68 (n = 95) [2] – 58.49 (n = 44) 72
[3] – 61.42 (n = 74) 30 [3] – 64.24 (n = 155)

24
[4] – 68.09 (n = 104) [4] – 70.95 (n = 99) 30
14 27
[5] – 74.76 (n = 78) 10 [5] – 77.65 (n = 19) 13 14 18 22
4 11 11
[6] – 81.43 (n = 12) 2 [6] – 84.36 (n = 40) 8
Total: 381 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 Total: 381

47 52 57 62 67 72 77 82
RIV261,k RIV999,k
7.15 A typical Lombard similarity profile: similarity map to AIS point 261 Milan. Similarity 7.16 A typical similarity profile of central Italy: similarity map to the artificial AIS point
index: RIV261,k. Corpus: 3,911 working maps (= total AIS corpus). Algorithm of visualization: ‘Standard Italian’ (= P: 999). Similarity index: RIV999,k. Corpus: 3,911 working maps (= total
MINMWMAX (6-tuple). AIS corpus). Algorithm of visualization: MINMWMAX (6-tuple).
Romansh-speaking area
ALF (1902–1908) Trentino
Ladin-speaking area
A series: maps 1–1421 Ticino
Wallonia (Belgium) Standard Friuli- AIS (1928–1940)
French Venezia
Picardy Giulia Grid 1: 382 Romance-speaking
ENGLISH CHANNEL GERMANY Val survey points
d'Aosta
Normandy Veneto
Cherso
Channel Islands LUXEMBOURG
(British) Istria
Emilia-
Lorraine Romagna
Romance- Piedmont Liguria
speaking Brittany Alsace ADRIATIC SEA
Marche
LIGURIAN
Tuscany
SEA
Abruzzo
Elba and Molise
Swiss
Romandy
Poitou
Sardinia Puglia
Lazio
Val
Saintonge d'Aosta
(Italy)
Campania Basili-
ATLANTIC Valli TYRRHENIAN cata
Valdesi SEA Basilicata
(Italy) IONIAN SEA
Gascony
Provence Calabria
Sicily
Basque Country Languedoc
MEDITERRANEAN
Roussillon
VORONOI MAP:
0 100 200 641 Survey points coastline, national border 0 100 200 VORONOI MAP:
SPAIN 382 Survey points
1791 Polygon sides regional border
km km 970 Polygon sides
linguistic border

Visualization: MEDMW 10-tuple Distance distribution: MEDMW 10-tuple Visualization: MEDMW 10-tuple Distance distribution: MEDMW 10-tuple
203202 111
203 111
[1] 5.42 – 11.08 (n = 202) [6] – 19.80 (n = 154) 202 154 [1] 10.19 – 15.45 (n = 112) [6] – 23.03 (n = 83) 111 83
156 111 83
[2] – 13.10 (n = 202) [7] – 21.58 (n = 156) 156 [2] – 17.32 (n = 111) [7] – 24.34 (n = 83)
83
[3] – 14.76 (n = 203) [8] – 23.77 (n = 156) [3] – 18.98 (n = 111) [8] – 26.25 (n = 83)
203 156 112
[4] – 16.41 (n = 202) [9] – 27.81 (n = 156) [4] – 20.30 (n = 111) [9] – 30.47 (n = 83) 83
[5] – 18.26 (n = 203) [10] – 56.99 (n = 156) 156 82

[5] – 21.82 (n = 111) [10] – 47.52 (n = 82)
total: 1791 6 13 20 27 34 41 48 55 total: 970 11 16 21 26 31 36 41 46
RDVjk RDVjk
7.17 Honeycomb map (isogloss synthesis) showing a synopsis of 1,791 interpoint 7.18 Honeycomb map (isogloss synthesis) showing a synopsis of 970 interpoint distance
distance values.Distance index: RDVjk. Corpus: 1,681 working maps (= total ALF values. Distance index: RDVjk. Corpus: 3,911 working maps (=total AIS corpus). Algorithm
corpus). Algorithm of visualization: MEDMW (10-tuple). of visualization: MEDMW (10-tuple).
ALF (1902–1908) Ladin-speaking area

Trentino
Ticino
A series: maps 1–1421
Wallonia (Belgium) Standard Friuli-
Venezia
AIS (1928–1940)
French Grid 1: 382 Romance-speaking
Picardy Giulia
GERMANY Val survey points
ENGLISH CHANNEL
d'Aosta
Veneto
Normandy Cherso
Channel Islands LUXEMBOURG Istria
(British) Emilia-
Lorraine Romagna
Marche
LIGURIAN
Tuscany
SEA
Abruzzo
Elba and Molise
Swiss
Romandy
Poitou
Sardinia Lazio Puglia
Val
Saintonge d'Aosta
(Italy)
Campania Basili-
(Italy) IONIAN SEA
Gascony
Calabria
Provence Sicily
MEDITERRANEAN
Roussillon
0 100 200 VORONOI MAP:
coastline, national border 0 100 200 VORONOI MAP:
SPAIN regional border 382 Survey points
641 Survey points
km 1791 Polygon sides
linguistic border km 970 Polygon sides
Visualization: MEDMW 10-tuple Skewness distribution: MEDMW 10-tuple Visualization: MEDMW 10-tuple Skewness distribution: MEDMW 10-tuple
47 47
86 47
[1] -0.97 – -0.42 (n = 87) [6] – 0.89 (n = 42) [1] -1.72 – -0.08 (n = 47) [6] – 0.50 (n = 28)
[2] – -0.33 (n = 86) [7] – 1.07 (n = 42) [2] – 0.02 (n = 47) [7] – 0.64 (n = 30)
86 28
[3] – -0.25 (n = 86) [8] – 1.19 (n = 42) 86 [3] – 0.11 (n = 47) [8] – 0.82 (n = 29) 47 30
[4] – -0.20 (n = 86) [9] – 1.40 (n = 42) [4] – 0.20 (n = 47) [9] – 1.47 (n = 30) 29
[5] – 0.19 (n = 41) [10] – 1.96 (n = 42) 87 87 42

42
42
[5] – 0.40 (n = 47) [10] – 2.43 (n = 30) 47 30 30
total: 641 41 42
total: 382
–1 0 1 2
0 1
gj gj
7.19 Choropleth map of the synopsis of the skewness values of 641 similarity 7.20 Choropleth map of the synopsis of the skewness values of 382 similarity distribu-
distributions. Similarity index: RIVjk. Corpus: 1,681 working maps (= total ALF tions. Similarity index: RIVjk. Corpus: 3,911 working maps (= total AIS corpus). Algo-
corpus). Algorithm of visualization: MEDMW (10-tuple). rithm of visualization: MEDMW (10-tuple).
ALF (1902–1908) I Ladin-speaking area
A series: maps 1–1421 Trentino
Ticino
Picardy French Venezia
E Grid 1: 382 Romance-speaking
Giulia
ENGLISH CHANNEL E
GERMANY
Val H survey points
d'Aosta
Normandy Veneto
LUXEMBOURG Cherso
Channel Islands F
(British) Istria
Lorraine G Emilia-
Romance- Romagna
speaking Brittany Piedmont Liguria
Alsace
ADRIATIC SEA
F Marche
LIGURIAN
Tuscany
G SEA
Abruzzo
Elba
D and Molise
Swiss
Romandy
Poitou
Sardinia Puglia
Lazio
Val
Saintonge
D d'Aosta
(Italy)
C
Campania Basili-
ATLANTIC Valli A TYRRHENIAN cata
Valdesi Basilicata
(Italy) SEA B
Gascony A IONIAN SEA
B
C
Provence Calabria
Sicily
MEDITERRANEAN
Roussillon
B
0 100 200 VORONOI MAP
0 100 200 VORONOI MAP:
SPAIN coastline, national border
641 Survey points regional border 382 Survey points
linguistic border

&
#
A B C D E F G A B C D E F G H I
"$
3 4 3 4
2 1 2 1
7.21 Dendrographic classification of 641 locolects (= ALF points). Similarity 7.22 Dendrographic classification of 382 locolects (= AIS points). Similarity index: RIVjk.
index: RIVjk. Corpus: 1,681 working maps (= total ALF corpus). Dendrographic Corpus: 3,911 working maps (= total AIS corpus). Dendrographic algorithm: hierarchical
algorithm: hierarchical grouping method of Joe Ward Jr. Number of den- grouping method of Joe Ward Jr. Number of dendremes/choremes (A-G): 9. 1, 2: the two
dremes/choremes (A-G): 7. 1, 2: the two first ramifications (Domaine d’Oïl vs first ramifications (northern Italy vs central and southern Italy). 3, 4: two subsequent
Domaine d’Oc). 3, 4: two subsequent subgroupings of the Domaine d’Oïl. subgroupings of northern Italy.
ALF (1902–1908)

Ladin-speaking area
A series: maps 1–1421
Trentino
Ticino
Picardy
French Venezia
Grid 1: 382 Romance-speaking
Giulia
ENGLISH CHANNEL GERMANY Val survey points
d'Aosta
Normandy Veneto
Cherso
Channel Islands LUXEMBOURG
(British) Istria
Emilia-
Lorraine
Romagna
Marche
LIGURIAN
Tuscany
SEA
Abruzzo
Elba and Molise
Swiss
Romandy
Poitou
Sardinia Lazio Puglia
Val
Saintonge d'Aosta
(Italy)
Campania Basili-
(Italy) IONIAN SEA
Gascony
Provence Calabria
Sicily
MEDITERRANEAN
Roussillon
0 100 200 VORONOI MAP: coastline, national border 0 100 200 VORONOI MAP:
SPAIN 641 Survey points regional border 382 Survey points
km 1791 Polygon sides linguistic border km 970 Polygon sides
Visualization: MEDMW 6-tuple r(BP) distribution: MEDMW 12-tuple Visualization: MEDMW 6-tuple r(BP) distribution: MEDMW 12-tuple
63 36
[1] -0.15 – 0.37 (n = 88) 64 [1] 0.04 – 0.66 (n = 56)
63 35
63
[2] – 0.52 (n = 87) [2] – 0.71 (n = 56)
28
[3] – 0.64 (n = 87) 63
63 [3] – 0.74 (n = 56) 28
44 36
[4] – 0.75 (n = 126) 43 44 43 [4] – 0.76 (n = 71) 28
35
44 28
[5] – 0.83 (n = 127) [5] – 0.84 (n = 72) 36 36
44 28
[6] – 0.93 (n = 126) [6] – 0.91 (n = 71) 28
Total: 641 –0.149 0.003 0.155 0.308 0.460 0.612 0.765 0.917 Total: 382
0.044 0.168 0.291 0.414 0.537 0.660 0.783 0.906
r(BP)j r(BP)j
7.23 Choropleth map of the correlation values (according to r(BP)) between 7.24 Choropleth map of the correlation values (according to r(BP)) between 382
641 similarity values (according to RIVjk) and 641 proximity values (according similarity values (according to RIVjk) and 382 proximity values (according to Euclidean
to the Euclidean proximity). Corpus of the similarity measurement: 1,681 proximity). Corpus of the similarity measurement: 3,911 working maps (= total AIS
working maps (= total ALF corpus). Algorithm of visualization: MEDMW (6- corpus). Algorithm of visualization: MEDMW (6-tuple).
tuple).
PART I
The Making of the

Romance Languages
CHAPTER 1
Latin as a source for the

Romance languages
JAMES CLACKSON
1.1 Chronological and spatial scope stylized poetry of Vergil (Publius Virgilius Maro, 70-19 BC),
of Latin Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-68 BC), and Ovid (Pub-
lius Ovidius Naso, 43 BC-17/18 AD) written in quantitative
metres based on Greek models, and sometimes employing
The traditional date for the founding of Rome is 753 BC, but
extreme hyperbaton and recondite vocabulary; through
our earliest records for the Latin language date from around
speeches and historical works written in prose, which can
200 years later. Only a few Latin texts survive from before
combine multiple subordinate clauses to achieve highly
200 BC, but after this date there is a wealth of material, both
elaborate periodic sentences; to dramatic comedies, satires,
through inscriptional sources and transmitted manuscripts
and novels that sometimes appear to imitate different
of literary and sub-literary compositions. The corpus of
speech styles of individual characters. Texts, usually surviv-
surviving Latin texts up until AD 476, the time of the depos-
ing in manuscript form, which treat technical matters, or
ition of Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor in the
instruction manuals, such as medical or veterinary trea-
west, is greater than ten million words, with well over
tises, works on military tactics or land surveying, cook-
100,000 surviving inscriptions. Documents or inscriptions
books, and the like, are usually written in less elaborate
written in Latin have been found throughout the Roman
styles of Latin, and sometimes referred to as ‘sub-literary’
empire, as far north as Hadrian’s Wall in Britain (an import-
texts. Epigraphic and documentary evidence also encom-
ant new source of Latin documents written on wooden
passes a broad range, comprising carefully composed offi-
tablets) and as far south as Philae in Egypt. Texts in Latin
cial inscriptions recording laws or imperial decrees; poorly
have been found in all the regions now populated by
scratched or painted graffiti from walls at Pompeii and
speakers of varieties of Romance in the Romània continua
other Roman settlements; laundry lists, letters, and
and also in other areas, including Britain, north Africa, and
accounts from military camps and the like; and countless
central Europe, where the modern languages do not derive
examples of funerary epitaphs left in memory of patrons,
from Latin. Indeed, many of the most important Latin
relatives, and friends (see Cooley 2012 for a recent survey).
authors of the imperial and later periods were born outside
To add to this, there is a rich tradition of grammatical
the domain of modern Romance languages: St Augustine
literature in Latin, which, though largely prescriptive,
(Aurelius Augustinus, AD 354-430) was a native of what is
sometimes can give insights into the speech of individuals
now Algeria; St Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus, AD 347-420),
and social groups.
whose translation of the Bible into Latin is still in use, was
born in the Roman province of Dalmatia, probably in what is
now Slovenia; Priscian (Priscianus Caesariensis, fifth–sixth
century AD), author of the most extensive and most import-
ant ancient grammar of Latin, was born in north Africa and 1.2 Classical and vulgar Latin
spent his working life in Constantinople (now Istanbul);
Tribonianus (died AD 541 or 542), one of the compilers of Latin evolved into the Romance languages, and it is natural
the Latin codification of laws under Justinian, was a native to seek antecedents to linguistic developments in Romance
of Side, now in southern Turkey. within Latin. The huge range of evidence for Latin offers
The chronological and spatial spread of Latin is conse- many possibilities to the researcher. In some accounts
quently vast. The corpus of surviving Latin texts also pre- (e.g. Solodow 2010:107, see also other references in Adams
sents an enormous variety of material written in different 2013:7), the Roman world in the last century of the republic
registers. Literary texts range across genres: from the and during the empire is presented as diglossic. According
This chapter © James Clackson 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 3
JAMES CLACKSON
to this view, so-called ‘Classical Latin’ was the H(igh) var- Italy also take place in the transition from Latin to Romance
iety, which was also the written form taught at school and (see Coleman 2000 for a survey of various phonological
employed by members of the Roman elite. This is the form changes). These include the palatalization of velars before
in which nearly all literary texts and official inscriptions are front vowels (observable in Umbrian); loss of final conson-
composed. Classical Latin is itself the result of a period of ants (found in Umbrian); the monophthongization of diph-
linguistic standardization which took place some time thongs (again found in Umbrian); and a series of vowel
between 150 BC and AD 100, and is associated with precepts mergers, including between long e and short i (found in
and models laid down by authors such as Cicero (Marcus Oscan, but assumed for Umbrian as well). In §1.3, I shall
Tullius Cicero, 106-43 BC) and Caesar (Gaius Julius Caesar, discuss in more detail the case of the vowel mergers and the
100-44 BC) (see further Clackson 2011b). Followers of the monophthongization of the diphthong ae.
notion of a Latin diglossia often use the term ‘Vulgar Finally, it is assumed that some vulgar Latin forms are
Latin‘ to designate the L(ow) variety, which is presumed to found in Latin texts, because they have ‘leaked’ into the
be the spoken idiom of the lower classes (note however that compositions of particularly unskilled, or undereducated,
other scholars attribute other senses to the term ‘Vulgar individuals, who did not have sufficient competence or
Latin’, see Adams 2013:7-27 for a recent survey of some of training to manipulate the Classical Latin idiom. Palmer
the different senses accorded to the term; cf. also §2.5). (1954:149) uses a geological metaphor to convey this view
Vulgar Latin is held to be the ancestor of the Romance of vulgar Latin occasionally breaking through the inert
languages, but, according to the diglossia theory, its subor- crust of the Classical language: ‘[t]here are, as it were, in
dinate status usually prevented its representation in the the dead landscape of literary Latin, seismic areas where
written record. Consequently, in order to access the actual occasional eruptions reveal the intense subterranean activ-
source of Romance languages, different strategies may be ity which one day will make a new world of language.’
explored. The model of vulgar Latin as the ‘submerged’ language is
First, it is possible to examine texts written before the apparently supported by some Latin texts. Of these one of
process of standardization. The bulk of surviving literary the most important is the Satyrica, a Roman novel which
texts composed during the period before the standardiza- only survives in fragments, written in the first century AD by
tion of the Classical language are the comedies of Plautus Petronius (Gaius Petronius Arbiter, c. AD 27-66). The longest
(Titus Maccius Plautus, d. c.184 BC) and Terence (Publius extant portion of the novel, now known as the Cena Trimal-
Terentius Afer, d. 159 BC); these are dramatic works often chionis, describes in extravagant detail a dinner party hosted
based on Greek originals. Plautus and, to a lesser extent, by a wealthy freed slave, Trimalchio. Unusually among
Terence exhibit more variation in their language than later ancient writers of literary works, Petronius represents the
Classical authors, and consequently some of their linguistic speech of Trimalchio, his wife, and the band of fellow
features have been assumed to have been stigmatized in the freedmen at dinner as markedly different, in vocabulary,
Classical language and to have disappeared from the written sentence structure, and word-endings, from the speech of
record, only to emerge in Romance languages 1,000 years other characters in the novel and from the language of the
later (Pulgram 1958:321). An example from the lexicon is surrounding prose narrative. This can be illustrated from a
given in §1.5. section of a longer speech given by the character Echion,
Other possible sources for the pre-standardized spoken identified as a collector of rags. In this passage Echion
Latin, and also for the vulgar Latin of the regions outside addresses Agamemnon, a pedantic teacher of rhetoric,
Rome, have been found in the surviving inscriptions written who has been silent up to this point in the dinner:
in the sister languages of Latin from Italy, especially
Umbrian, attested from a region roughly corresponding to uideris mihi, Agamemnon, dicere: ‘quid iste argutat molestus?’
modern Umbria, and Oscan and the so-called ‘minor dia- quia tu, qui potes loquere, non loquis. non es nostrae fasciae, et
lects’ spoken in central and southern Italy until the first ideo pauperorum uerba derides. scimus te prae litteras fatuum
esse. quid ergo est?
century BC (see Marchesini 2009 for a recent survey). As
[Agamemnon, you look like you are saying ‘What is this bore
speakers switched from these varieties into Latin during
going on about?’ Because you, who can speak, don’t speak. You
the Romanization of Italy, it is possible that they continued are not one of our gang, and so you laugh at the words of us ’umble
to incorporate features of their native phonology into their folk. We know that you are mad for learning. What’s it all about
pronunciation of their second language; and hence by ana- then?]
lysing these languages, it may be possible to unearth some
detail about the local Latin spoken in Italy in the period Agamemnon is presented as ‘able to talk’, meaning that
from 200 BC to AD 100. Some of the developments which are he can speak correct or standard Classical Latin, but holding
seen in Oscan, Umbrian, and other languages once spoken in back from the conversation, and instead laughing at the
4
LATIN AS A SOURCE
language of the freedmen, who belong to a different social the form a non b, i.e. ‘a not b’. For example pauper mulier non
group. It is certainly true that the narrator of this section is paupera mulier, which might be translated ‘[the correct form
poking fun at the language of the freedmen, since the is] pauper mulier “poor woman” not paupera mulier’. The
introductions and conclusions to their speeches include statement thus indicates that PAUPER is an adjective declined
ironic statements about the quality of their language such according to the Latin third declension class, and does not
as ‘Such sweet conversation . . . ’. It is also true that the group with adjectives such as INTEGER ‘whole’, which are
freedmen’s speeches contain infringements of the prescrip- declined in the first/second declension class, with a femin-
tions of the grammarians (and deviations from the vast ine INTEGRA. The phrase paupera mulier thus indicates that the
majority of literary usage). Some of these departures from adjective has made the same switch of declension class as
the norms are further mirrored in sub-literary documents that which was seen in Echion’s pauperorum, in the passage
and graffiti (see Adams 2003b for a recent collection) and of Petronius cited above. Palmer (1954:154) took the Appen-
many of them also win out over the Classical forms in the dix Probi to be ‘notes on current errors in speech’ and
later Romance languages. Two of the non-Classical features ascribed it to the third or fourth century AD, and likewise
of Echion’s speech will suffice to exemplify these features. Pulgram (1958:317), who dated it even earlier. However,
First, the word pauperorum is assigned to a different declen- consideration of the full text means that the compilation
sion class than is normal in Classical Latin (it should be dates from the fourth century or later, although some of the
PAUPERUM ‘of the poor’ the genitive plural of the third- observations may repeat grammatical precepts that have
declension adjective PAUPER), and we know that the gram- their origin as far back as the first century BC. More import-
marians censured this switch of declension (Palladius in Keil antly, it is clear that the list is concerned not with the
1855-80, IV:83f.) and it appears in the Appendix Probi (on correction of spoken errors but with written forms of
which see below). Some of the continuations of the word in Latin (as already noted by Grandgent 1908:5 ‘a list of good
Romance languages, such as It. povero (with F povera) show and bad spellings’, a statement changed in later editions, see
the same change in declension class (although in other also Clackson 2011c:518f.). Some of the written forms may
Romance varieties the change has not taken place: compare also have been castigated when used in speech (as in the
e.g. Sp. pobre). Secondly, Echion conjugates the verb mean- case of paupera mulier), but we cannot assume that the forms
ing ‘to speak’, LOQUI, as an active rather than deponent for which replacements are recommended necessarily
(hence loquere in place of infinitive LOQUI, and loquis in place occurred in the spoken language, and it is certainly incor-
of second person singular LOQUERIS). In Romance languages rect to imagine that all of these items were characteristics
the marking of verbs with active meaning through passive of a single dialect of spoken Latin.
morphology was also lost, and the beginnings of the process Petronius is therefore unique for the representation of
are observable in Latin literary and sub-literary texts writ- non-Classical Latin alongside the Classical variety of his
ten in later centuries (cf. also §60.3). But the view expressed narrative. Moreover, the evidence of Petronius does not
by some scholars that the deponent is avoided in spoken necessarily support the diglossia model of Classical and
Latin as early as the first century AD (see e.g. Pulgram vulgar Latin. Indeed, the freedmen themselves are not rep-
1978:223) is open to doubt, since there are in fact very few resented as all speaking a uniform dialect: characters
examples of the transfer of conjugation of deponent verbs exhibit various different non-Classical features (see the
to the active in the speeches of the freedmen in Petronius. collection of material gathered by Boyce 1991), and individ-
As Flobert pointed out (1975:308), most ‘vulgar’ writers in ual freedmen have idiosyncratic speech styles, such as the
this period are comfortable with deponents, whereas trans- freedman Hermeros, who code-switches between Latin and
fers from the deponent to the active are found in authors of Greek (see Adams 2003a:21); Petronius also seems to have
Latin of the highest literary pretension. drawn partly on literary models in constructing the speech
The representation of the speech of the freedmen in of the freedmen (see Leiwo 2010). Furthermore, failure to
Petronius therefore contributes to the conclusion that follow the precepts of grammarians in speech is not limited
some features of Latin were censured by grammarians and to Petronius’ freedmen, or indeed to any particular class of
avoided in the literary register, but present in speech. One Roman society. Several ancient sources remark, for
grammatical work in particular has also been often cited as example, on the impatience of the Emperor Augustus
a parallel for Petronius’ apparent direct citations of every- (63 BC–4 AD) with the precepts of the grammarians (some
day speech, the so-called Appendix Probi. This is actually the are collected at Adams 2007:16f.). Augustus made use of
third of five grammatical appendices to the Instituta Artium prepositions with the names of towns and had a preference
of Probus, found in a seventh–eighth-century manuscript for syncopated forms such as caldus in place of CALIDUS
now in Naples (and re-edited in Powell 2007). The Appendix ‘warm’. From much later in the history of Latin there is an
consists of a collection of over 200 word pairs, expressed in explicit statement of a grammarian, Pompeius (late fifth to
5
JAMES CLACKSON
early sixth century AD) that a phrase in use in speech among In the remainder of this chapter I will exemplify these
the educated of his day (inimicus tuus est ‘he is your enemy’) points by consideration of three different areas in which
is not Latinus ‘(Classical) Latin’ (see further Adams 2013:13- attempts have been made to find the origin of Romance
15 for this and other examples and discussion). formations within Latin. These will be the changes in the
There is indeed little to support the view that the vowel system (cf. also §4.2.1, §25.1); the development of new
language situation during either the Roman republic or forms of the future tense (cf. also §46.3.2.2); and develop-
empire was one of diglossia, and statements in the sources ments in the lexicon (cf. also Ch. 32). More detailed work on
imply that Latin speakers of all classes varied their speech these topics, and many other aspects of the origins of
in different contexts, and that for all classes and at all Romance features within Latin can be found in the recent
periods there may have been a disjuncture between forms compendious work of Adams (2013), to which I shall make
used in the written language and those used in speech. frequent reference.
Cicero, for example, refers in one of his letters to himself
as using sermo plebeius, which can be literally translated as
‘plebeian language’, but this is better translated as ‘collo-
quial style’, and does not refer to a separate Latin variety.
Similarly, Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, c. AD 35-95)
1.3 Changes in the vowel system
refers to the conversational language of the Roman elite from Latin to Romance
between friends and family both as ‘everyday speech’
(sermo cotidianus) and as sermo uulgaris, a phrase normally Latin distinguished five short and five long vowels, which
rendered into English as ‘vulgar Latin’. When Latin authors will be distinguished in what follows through the use of a
of the later empire, including grammarians and Christian macron on the long variants: i ī e ē a ā o ō u ū. Roman authors
writers such as Jerome and Augustine, differentiate and scribes did not make a systematic distinction between
between educated forms which are used by the uulgus, i.e. long and short vowels in writing, although long vowels are
the ‘masses’, with what is Latinus, i.e. Classical Latin, they sporadically marked by various devices at different stages in
may be contrasting social distinctions of language, but they the history of the language, including doubling of the letter
may also be referring to words found in the written lan- representing the vowel (e.g. inscriptional paastores for Latin
guage (and not used in speech even by the educated) with PASTORES ‘shepherds’), the placement of a small mark called
spoken forms. an apex over the letter, and, in the case of the vowel ī, the
Since features which were stigmatized by grammarians use of an elongated form of the letter in inscriptions. Vowel
were in fact found in the language of all classes of society, it length is also revealed through metrical compositions,
is necessary to adjust the view that vulgar Latin was the which rely on patterned alternations between long and
submerged language of the underclass, driven underground short vowels. In the earliest Latin inscriptions there is
after the second century BC, and only able to break free from evidence for a series of diphthongs, including ai, au, ei, oi,
the veneer of Classical Latin at the end of the Middle Ages. It and ou, but a series of monophthongizations from the third
is certainly true that some spoken features were avoided in to the first century BC eliminated ei, oi, and ou, which mostly
the written language (most clearly certain vocabulary merged with inherited ī and ū (see Weiss 2009:100-104, 142f.
items, as will be discussed in §1.5), and that in the later for details of these changes). By the first century BC, there-
periods of the language the gap between what was said and fore, Latin only had two diphthongs attested in a large
what was written was considerable. However, speakers of all number of words, which are written ae and au (with oe, eu,
classes deviated from the written norms of Classical Latin, and ui restricted to a few lexical stems); in Latin verse,
and there is no a priori reason to assume that all of the diphthongs were scanned as equivalent to a long vowel.
features in Romance originated as ‘change from below’. The vowel system of Latin was to undergo substantial
Some of the linguistic developments within Latin may changes in the Romance languages. Length was lost as a
indeed have begun amongst the more wealthy or better distinctive feature of vowels, and instead vowel length
educated, and spread from there to all speakers; I shall became concomitant with the place of the accent (see
discuss an example in §1.4. In the words of Adams Loporcaro 2011a:53-8 and Adams 2013:43-51 for recent
(2013:858): ‘ “Submerged” does not necessarily mean “vul- accounts and surveys of the literature). Short vowels appear
gar”.’ The conclusion must therefore be that in assessing the to have been lengthened under the stress accent, and
origin of the Romance languages within Latin, it is import- unstressed long vowels shortened. A characteristic set of
ant to consider the widest range of Latin texts as possible in mergers takes place for stressed vowels. In general (exclud-
order to gain insight into how the written standard itself ing individual developments in peripheral areas such as
developed over time, and what lay behind it. Sardinia, Sicily, and in the east), ē merges with i and ō
6
LATIN AS A SOURCE
merges with u; neither ī nor ū merges with any other vowel; assessing the impact of Oscan speakers on the Latin
the low vowels ā and a merge together. This seems to reflect language. This is because of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79
a qualitative difference between the long and short mid AD, and the consequent burial of several coastal communi-
vowels which is noted by some ancient writers on language: ties under the volcanic ash and lava flow, which led to the
the long mid vowels were pronounced more close than the preservation of large amounts of sub-literary Latin,
short mid vowels, and the short high vowels were pro- scratched or painted on the walls and buildings, or, remark-
nounced comparatively open. A further change was the ably, preserved in carbonized wax-tablets. There is a great
monophthongization of the diphthong represented by the deal of surviving documentary material, around 11,000
digraph ae, which merged in quality with the short vowel e. inscriptions in total, including around 8,000 graffiti and
The net effect of these changes is the establishment of a dipinti (as the painted inscriptions are known) from Pompeii
vowel system with distinctive high-mid and low-mid vowels and surrounding areas. It should not be assumed that these
in place of one with length distinctions but only three inscriptions present a unified linguistic picture, or that they
distinctive vowel heights. were all composed by members of the lower classes (see
As I mentioned in the previous section, there is good Kruschwitz and Halla-aho 2007 and Kruschwitz 2010 for
evidence that developments analogous to the Romance recent surveys of Pompeian graffiti and their value for the
changes took place in Oscan. In Oscan, vowel length can be linguist). However, inscriptions reveal that Pompeii was an
expressed by doubling of the letter used to represent the Oscan-speaking town before it became a Roman colony in
vowel, but in native texts the doubling is almost entirely the first century BC, and a few Oscan inscriptions from
restricted to initial syllables of words, supporting a hypoth- Pompeii date from the first century AD (Crawford et al.
esis that all words were stressed on their first syllable, and 2011:39; the latest datable inscription appears to have
that in non-stressed syllables the length distinction was been written in the decade before the eruption, Crawford
lost. Non-initial syllables show a three-way contrast in et al. 2011:702f.). Furthermore, the quantity of non-literary
front vowels, which are represented in the native alphabet Latin surviving from Pompeii and surrounding areas allows
of Oscan by the signs transcribed i, í, and e. The high-mid the researcher to make more widespread use of statistical
vowel, represented by the letter í, derives historically from techniques than work on historical linguistics normally
both *i and *ē. On the back axis, Oscan also shows merger of allows.
inherited *ō and *u, with both vowels normally written as u, In order to ascertain whether speakers have already
the accented ú representing the outcome of inherited *o. made adjustments to the Latin vowel system, scholars
Hence, for example, the writing dunúm ‘gift’ < *dōnom. It is have looked at what I shall call mis-spellings. If a word
usually assumed that Umbrian has undergone the same set containing the vowel ē is represented in script by a spelling
of vowel mergers as Oscan, although the writing systems with i, or the vowel i is represented by the vowel sign used
used for Umbrian never innovated a consistent way of for e, then this may indicate that the composer of the text
representing the triple distinction of vowel height, and has merged the two vowels in his or her everyday pronun-
the picture is obscured by a rule lowering u before nasals ciation. Väänänen (1966:20-22) collected the examples of
(Meiser 1986:51f., 120-22). As for the diphthongs, Oscan such mis-spellings from Pompeii. The picture is complicated
generally maintained the set which it had inherited from by various orthographic factors. For example, in the cursive
its parent language (i.e. ai, ei, oi, au, and ou); in Umbrian, all alphabet used for many of the low-level texts in Pompeii,
inherited diphthongs had been monophthongized by the the letter <e> is often written with two upright strokes, II,
third century BC. leading to the possibility that a careless or hasty attempt to
Similarities between the Sabellian (as the language group write <e> may result in something which is read as .
which encompasses Oscan and Umbrian is now known) and Furthermore, in some cases writers select archaic orthog-
the Romance developments of the vowel system inevitably raphies of words, in which the long high front vowel ī was
lead to the question of whether there is any ground for spelt with the letter <e>, reflecting an early Latin pronunci-
connecting the two. Does Romance reflect, in the termin- ation of the outcome of monophthongized *ei (Weiss
ology of Seidl (1994:368), a ‘lingua romana in bocca sabellica’ 2009:101). Once these factors are taken into account, there
(‘Roman language in the mouths of Sabellian speakers’)? are hardly any good examples of mis-spellings of the
Much previous scholarship assumes it does (see Eska expected type within accented syllables. The only good
1987:147 for references to those who have accepted the remaining case is the word for ‘lucky’, FELIX (which is also
notion of an Oscan substrate acting on Latin, to which can frequent as a personal name), which is once written filix for
be added Coleman 2000). Unlike many other cases where fēlīx; however, the same word is also attested written felex,
language change has been hypothesized to reflect periods of which shows a highly anomalous representation of the vowel
prehistoric linguistic contact, there is better evidence for ī by the letter <e>. It is likely that in this word speakers tended
7
JAMES CLACKSON
to enunciate the two vowels with the same quality, some- vowel of matching quality. The monophthongization of ae
times choosing to repeat the vowel of the initial syllable, to a long low-mid e-vowel seems to have been widespread in
sometimes that of the second syllable. In comparison, Latin judging from inscriptional and documentary evidence.
Väänänen found many more examples of the diphthong Knowledge of when to write ae and when to write e appears
ae spelt with a simple <e> in Pompeii, and reverse spel- to have been a mark of good education in the later empire,
lings, with an etymological ē (or ĕ) represented by the but we cannot be certain whether any speakers aimed to
digraph <ae> (Väänänen 1966:24; see also Coleman preserve the diphthong in speech (Adams 2013:80f.).
1971b:185-90 for a wider collection of such spellings in For the first good evidence for the loss of distinctive
Latin inscriptions, and Adams 2013:75-7 for a survey of vowel quality in Latin, it is necessary to look at later texts,
other recently discovered evidence for this change from and here it is more rewarding to consider the work of
the early empire). grammarians and other commentators on Latin, combined
The conclusion from these spellings would appear to be with the analysis of the metrical practices found in literary
that, in the first century AD, the confusion between ē and i authors, rather than inscriptional or documentary evidence.
was not yet at a stage where it permeated into speakers’ Both Loporcaro (2011a:530-58) and Adams (2013:43-51) treat
writing habits (so also Eska 1987; Adams 2013:58f.), whereas this material in far more detail than is possible here, so
the monophthongization of ae was already under way. I will merely present a couple of pieces of evidence in order
These two developments run counter to the theory of an to exemplify what the sources can reveal. First, some
Oscan substrate in the Latin spoken around the Bay of writers on Latin state that there is a tendency to lengthen
Naples, since Oscan speakers had preserved the diphthong, short vowels when they are in a stressed syllable. For
but operated with a distinction between high-mid and low- example, the fifth-century grammarian Consentius (Publius
mid vowels. Indeed, the vowel system of the Latin spoken at Consentius) identifies as a linguistic vice the practice of
Pompeii seems to be in step with other evidence for the African speakers of Latin of pronouncing the word for
pronunciation of spoken Latin in other areas of the early ‘pepper’, PIPER, with a long vowel in the first syllable, and
Roman empire. Letters and administrative documents from elsewhere he castigates the African practice of pronouncing
Egypt and north Africa, from the Roman forts at Vindo- unaccented long vowels as short, as in the word ŌRĀTOR
landa on Hadrian’s wall (now in northern England), and ‘speaker’, in which the unaccented initial ō was pronounced
from Vindonissa (now in the canton of Aargau in Switzer- short. Since Augustine refers to similar processes of length-
land) also fail to show confusion between accented ē and i ening of vowels under the accent (although without the
(see Adams 2013:51-8 for a survey). In the same documents, same prescriptivism observable in Consentius), it has been
there is good evidence for the monophthongization of ae usual to associate this change specifically with African Latin
(Adams 2013:73-5). Vowels in final syllables of polysyllabic (thus Loporcaro 2011a:54f.). But Adams (2013:47-51) cites
words (which were never under the stress accent in the work of grammarians and authors outside Africa to
speech) do show alternations in writing between e and i, show that other speakers in the empire were already uncer-
but here the merger affects short e and short i, and need tain about vowel length in the third century AD. Of interest
not be related to the changes which will later affect here is Adams’s reference to the work of Holmes (2007) on
Romance vowels. the use of rhythmical endings of periodic sentences
If the distinctive merger of ē and i is not attested in the (so-called clausulae) in the author Vegetius (Publius Flavius
early empire, what can be said about the loss of distinctive Vegetius Renatus, c.400 AD). Vegetius strove to emulate
vowel quantity? As already mentioned above, the Pompeian Classical models by employing a restricted set of clausulae,
spellings sometimes write ae where we expect both etymo- but he seems to have been uncertain about which vowels in
logical ē and ĕ. Pulgram (1978:229) took this as a clear open syllables were traditionally scanned long and which
indication that in spoken Latin, length was no longer dis- were scanned short. The evidence for Vegetius is significant,
tinctive, but that the oppositions between vowels were since it involves the work of an elite Roman (Vegetius was
solely based on quantity. But these criticisms had already in the imperial administration, and addressed his work on
been countered by Coleman (1971b; 1974). In Coleman’s military organization to the emperor), and thus indicates
view, the vowel which resulted from monophthongized ae that the collapse of length distinctions may have been
shared its length with inherited ē, but agreed with ĕ in its widespread among the Latin of all classes by this date.
quality, as a more open vowel than the inherited ē. When Of all the different sources for discovering when the
writers chose to replace an original ē with ae, as in aegisse for vowel system of spoken Latin moved closer to that of the
ēgisse ‘to have led’, they selected a writing which matched in Romance languages, inscriptional evidence can only tell us
length but not quality; but when they wrote ae for ĕ as in so much. In the case of the diphthong ae, inscriptional
Saecundae for the personal name Sĕcundae they chose a evidence is particularly useful, since it allows the precise
8
LATIN AS A SOURCE
dating of the early appearance and the spread of spellings SCRIBES, was, for some speakers, indistinguishable from the
that reflect a change in pronunciation. For the loss of vowel second person singular of the present, SCRIBIS; the third person
quantity, however, inscriptional spellings are not as helpful singular of the future of the verb ‘to deny’, NEGABIT, overlapped
as explicit statements by grammarians and Latin authors with the third singular of the perfect, NEGAUIT (see Adams
and the careful analysis of metrical features. It is true that it 2013:653f. for references to textual examples using these
is possible to count up cases of metrical inscriptions where exact forms).
vowel quantities differ from the norm in different areas Indications of this uncertainty over the correct morph-
(Loporcaro 2011a:56f. cites a study of Herman 1982 which ology of the future indicative can be seen from attempts to
does exactly this). But here it is not clear whether the replace the analytic future tense with other constructions.
results actually reveal the spread of a phonological phe- Thus Echion, one of the fictional freedmen whose language
nomenon, or the differing expertise and education of verse is represented by Petronius (part of which was cited at §1.2),
composers in different places and different times. In gen- uses the following forms in the course of a long speech:
eral, such quantitative studies of inscriptional material have habituri sumus for HABEBIMUS ‘we shall have’, daturus est for
revealed rather less about the changing nature of spoken DABIT ‘he will have’, and persuadeam in place of PERSUADEBO
Latin than is sometimes claimed (see Adams 2007:629-35 for ‘I shall persuade you’. The first two forms make use of a
a critique of some studies of this sort). periphrasis of the verb ESSE ‘to be’ with the future participle,
and the third employs the subjunctive in place of the future
(note that in the third and fourth conjugations, the first
person singular of the subjunctive is identical with the first
1.4 Development of the future tense person singular of the future, hence REGAM means both ‘I will
rule’ and ‘I may rule’; Echion may have generalized this
In Classical Latin the four main conjugation classes into pattern to verbs of the second conjugation, into which
which all regular verbs fall differ in the formation of the PERSUADEO falls). The periphrasis with the future participle
future tense. In the first and second conjugation, and in and the verb ‘to be’ is also found in other sub-literary
early Latin also in the fourth conjugation, the future is documents. For example Claudius Terentianus, a Roman
formed through the addition of a morpheme incorporating soldier in Egypt whose correspondence is a rich source of
b (hence first person -BO, as in AMABO ‘I will love’ formed from non-standard Latin forms, once writes missurus es in place of
the verb AMARE) to the stem; in the third and fourth conju- MITTAS ‘you will send’ and once daturus est in place of DABIT ‘he
gations, a different formation is used, incorporating a mor- will give’; Terentianus also twice substitutes the future
pheme ē (except in the first person), giving a paradigm REGAM tense with a verb conjugated in the present (Adams
‘I will rule’, REGES ‘you will rule’ from the verb REGERE. The 1977:49). It is worth noting in passing that, although the
Latin future tense was replaced in Romance by a number of use of the present tense with future meaning is paralleled in
different constructions, all of which have their origin in other Latin texts including the comedies of Plautus, it is not
periphrases. Thus a periphrasis of infinitive and HABEO in itself indicative of a socially marked speech variant, but
‘have’ is found in most of western Romance, a periphrasis rather of conversational and colloquial language; and the
of HABEO AD ‘have to’ þ infinitive or DEBEO ‘owe, must’ þ use of the present with future meaning in both Plautus and
infinitive in Sardinian, and UOLO ‘want’ þ infinitive in Roma- Petronius can be explained in terms of pragmatics or com-
nian. The change from the Latin future to the Romance future municative effect (Leiwo 2010:287-91; Adams 2013:666-72).
is one of the perennial topics of the historical development of Despite the apparent avoidance of the Classical Latin
Romance (see Adams 2013:652-4 for a short survey of some future forms, there is no clear indication in either Petronius,
recent literature on the topic, as well as §46.3.2.2). sub-literary documents and letters, or other texts associ-
What light can Latin sources shed on this issue? There ated with a lower register of Latin that the construction of
are some indications from our sources that Latin speakers in infinitive þ HABEO was coming to be used in place of the
the early empire were uncomfortable with the future future. Indeed, the infinitive þ HABEO construction does not
morphology of Classical Latin. Phonological changes, includ- occur with an unambiguous future meaning in any of the
ing the changes in the vowel system discussed in the previ- texts collected in Rohlfs (1969b) earlier than the fifth cen-
ous section and the merger in some positions of the voiced tury AD. The early seventh-century Chronicon Fredegarii (II 62)
bilabial stop (represented in Latin orthography by the letter has often been cited for the first evidence for the contracted
) with the labiovelar approximant (represented by ), form of infinitive followed by the verb habeo in a literary
had led to an overlap between some forms of the future text. The specific passage involves a folk etymology for the
with either present or perfect forms. Thus the second name of the town Daras, reproducing a fictional conversa-
person singular of the future of the verb meaning ‘write’, tion between the sixth-century Byzantine emperor
9
JAMES CLACKSON
Justinian and a Persian king (Herman 2000:74). The Persian same order as in the later Romance futures, Sacerdos pre-
king says to Justinian non dabo ‘I will not give [up the town]’ sents perhaps the earliest incontestable example of the
employing the Classical Latin synthetic future DABO, but construction with a future meaning in Latin; but there are
Justinian replies daras ‘you will give [it up]’ i.e. the result parallels from the third century onwards, in other educated
of a contraction of DARE HABES ‘give.INF have.2SG.PRS.SBJV’. The and generally high-status authors. In the words of Adams
contracted form of the future occurs only once, in this (2013:657f.) ‘the periphrasis seems to have had some cur-
instance, in all literary Latin of the period, where it is rency among the educated as an exponent of deontic and
necessary for the sake of the pun—and, incidentally, alethic modality when it was convenient to convey an
where it occurs in a citation of supposed direct speech. ambiguity, with an idea of futurity also present’.
The use of the contracted form here suggests however The infinitive þ HABEO construction is therefore instruct-
that it was recognized and employed by speakers of all ive for the researcher into the sources of Romance within
classes by this time; it is appropriate in the mouth of an Latin. Although the texts gathered under the label of ‘vulgar
emperor. Latin’, particularly in the early empire, may reveal aspects
Although the infinitive þ HABEO construction does not of the breakdown of the Classical Latin system of expressing
appear in texts normally considered to be ‘vulgar Latin’ futurity, they give no indication of the construction which
with future meaning, it is not entirely absent from all would eventually win out in Romance. Indeed, the best
Latin texts before the fifth century AD. Indeed, it is found source for this construction is not found in sub-literary
as early as Cicero in Classical Latin, but here with a different documents or texts written by or intended for those with
meaning (and in both orders infinitive þ HABEO and HABEO þ little education, but is found in the works of grammarians
infinitive). In Cicero, a phrase such as HABEO DICERE ‘I.have say. and others who are usually thought of as linguistic purists.
INF’ (more common in Cicero with the infinitive placed after If the construction did exist in the speech of the uneducated
the modal than in the order DICERE HABEO) means ‘I can say’ and illiterate, it was evidently not stigmatized by grammar-
(Adams 1991:155f.). In later authors the construction can ians, but was also present in their written and presumably
also mean ‘I have to say’ or ‘I must say’. Indeed, Adams in their spoken language too (see Adams 1991:135 on Pom-
(1991) detected a pattern in the order of the constituents in peius’ composition technique and style, and for the conclu-
the fifth/sixth-century AD grammarian Pompeius, who has sion that ‘his treatise is bound to preserve characteristics of
38 examples of the infinitive þ HABEO construction in his the spoken language’).
commentary on the Ars of the earlier grammarian Aelius
Donatus. Pompeius uses the order HABEO þ infinitive when
the context supports an interpretation of either possibility
or obligation, but when he has the order infinitive þ HABEO, 1.5 Lexicon
the context usually excludes a reading of possibility, and the
construction must be understood to mean ‘have to’ or The final area of Latin and its continuation into Romance
‘must’. The link between obligation and futurity is found that I shall consider is the lexicon. In many respects the
in many languages (the Sardinian future is an obvious par- lexicon is a straightforward area of language to track his-
allel for a former modal verb expressing obligation becom- torically, since it is possible to isolate individual words and
ing grammaticalized as a future exponent; cf. §17.4.2). States detect their first (or last) appearance in the written record,
of affairs which are obligatory must come into effect at a and digital corpora make it possible to search quickly
future point in time, and hence there is a natural slide from through millions of words of text for lexical items. Contrast
verbs which express obligation to markers of futurity. It is with this the domain of syntax, where much more labour is
not surprising that some of the examples from Pompeius required in order to search for and detect changing patterns
can also be rendered into English by a future tense. over time; the researcher also needs to take into account a
Indeed, it appears that in other grammarians there are host of other factors, for example, the disruption of natural
much earlier examples with the HABEO þ infinitive construc- word orders through the metrical constraints imposed by
tion (in this order) having a meaning which can only be verse or by clausulae in prose (discussed in §1.3). However, it
translated by a future. Pinkster (1987:207) cites a passage of is no surprise that the maxim ‘every word has its own
the third-century grammarian Sacerdos (Marius Plotius Sa- history’ (or ‘chaque mot a son histoire’) is usually attributed
cerdos) discussing the difference between the past, present, to the Romance linguist Jules Gilliéron (1854-1926) (although
and future. There are some people, Sacerdos says, who deny it does not appear in his published work; see Christmann
that the present tense exists because everything has either 1971). Lexical developments from Latin to Romance are
been done or will be done: aut factus esse aut habere fieri (Keil extremely varied, with many idiosyncratic and unparalleled
1855-80, VI:432.13). Although the constituents are not in the developments of individual words, alongside wider, more
10
LATIN AS A SOURCE
general patterns of semantic change and replacement (see even when discussing punishments to slaves. In the first
Stefenelli 2011 and Dworkin 2011 for recent surveys of century AD, COLAPHUS reappears in literary texts, but there it is
lexical stability and lexical change from Latin to Romance, generally associated with the language of the underclass. In
as well as Ch. 32). the works of Quintilian, it only appears in a piece of
In the investigation of the origins of the Romance reported speech, deemed ‘unworthy of a gentleman’, and
vocabulary, it is important to consider all the evidence in the narrative section of Petronius it occurs with the
from Latin sources, and not focus in on certain registers or original field of reference when describing the beating
text types; prior assumptions about the nature of vulgar administered to a slave. It is also evident that the word
Latin (as discussed in §1.2) can be misleading. Indeed, the had also by this time come to have a wider sense in the
replacement of lexical items is also still frequently seen in spoken language, since Petronius has one of the freedmen
terms of the vulgar Latin of the lower classes winning out utter a derived form, the verb PERCOLOPABANT, which is on its
over Classical Latin forms used by the elite (see e.g. way to becoming the general word for ‘hit’ (Adams
Stefenelli 2011:583 for a recent expression of this view), or 2007:439). The second example is a word for ‘mouth’ (on
of colourless terms being replaced by those which were which see now also Adams 2013:782; cf. also §32.3.4). In
more ‘expressive’ (so Stefenelli 2011:572f.). These views Classical Latin BUCCA is restricted to the meaning ‘cheek’,
can be bolstered by lists of lexical winners and losers: TESTA but it replaces the Classical Latin term OS ‘mouth’ in western
‘pot’, generally replaces CAPUT with the meaning ‘head (Fr. Romance (It. bocca, Sp./Pt. boca, Fr. bouche, etc.). The mean-
tête, It. testa, but in Naples and surrounding dialects testa still ing ‘mouth’ is however attested in the Latin sources, once in
means ‘earthenware pot, vase’, and the word for ‘head’ is the speech of a freedman in Petronius, and the biographer
still capo); PORTARE ‘carry a burden’ and LEVARE ‘lift’ oust FERRE in Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, c. AD 69–22) reports
the meaning ‘carry’ (It. portare, Fr. porter, Sp./Pt. portar, Sp. that the emperor Augustus used the term in his letters.
llevar, and Pt. levar); CABALLUS ‘workhorse’ becomes the every- Furthermore, something close to the meaning ‘mouth’
day word for ‘horse’ as opposed to EQUUS (It. cavallo, Fr. cheval, appears to lie behind the phrase IN BUCCAM UENIT ‘come to
Sp. caballo, Pt. cavalo, Ro. cal; note that Lat. EQUA ‘mare’ mind’ which occurs even in the correspondence of Cicero.
survives in some languages, e.g. Sp. yegua, Ro. iapă; cf. These examples show that, although some words may
discussion in §33.3.3); CASA ‘hut’ wins out against DOMUS or have gained an association with lower registers, and seemed
AEDES in the meaning ‘house’ (Ro. casă, It./Sp./Pt. casa) and to have been either unconsciously avoided in high-register
many others (see the useful material gathered in Stefenelli compositions or to have been actively stigmatized and ridi-
2011). However, in some of these cases alternative explan- culed (as the statements of Quintilian and Suetonius sug-
ations are possible. Already 60 years ago, Benveniste gest), they were still used by some members of the educated
(1954:256) argued that in late Latin TESTA could be used in classes in writing as well as speech, and could be deployed
medical texts as a term for the skull (compare English for effect even in a written literary work. The spoken and
brainpan), and that the medical sense may be the origin of written language were part of a single continuum, and there
the Romance term, although of course the semantic shift was no gap between the two. It is important to note also
from a meaning ‘container’ to ‘head’ can be widely paral- that the patterns of word avoidance in Classical Latin are
leled (Dworkin 2011:590f.). not always shared across all literary genres. Thus for
It is certainly the case that one feature of Classical Latin example, as Housman (1930) noticed, Latin poets do not
was the avoidance of words which could be associated with generally use ASINUS to refer an ‘ass’ or ‘donkey’, but instead
certain registers, and that some lexical items that occur in prefer the diminutive ASELLUS (or a Greek term); and ASINUS is
early Latin are systematically avoided by writers of the indeed the term which wins out in Romance (It. asino,
Classical period. In Clackson (2011b: 52f.) I discussed two Fr. âne, Sp./Pt. asno, etc.), with ASELLUS surviving in Italian
examples. First, the Latin word meaning ‘a punch’ or ‘a with the sense of ‘woodlouse’, asello. But the avoidance of
thump’: COLAPHUS (also spelt COLAPUS), which was to give the ASINUS only takes place in Latin poetry. In historical prose,
standard word for a ‘blow’ or ‘hit’ in Romance languages ASINUS is attested, even in the stylist Tacitus (Publius Cornelius
(e.g. Fr. coup, It. colpo). The Latin word originates as a loan Tacitus, AD 56-117), whose delicacy is such that he notoriously
from Greek, and came into the language probably through prefers to use a periphrasis rather than call a spade a PALA
the speech of slave traders from the south of Italy, where ‘spade’, instead referring (at Annals 1. 65) to ‘that by which
Greek was the lingua franca (Adams 2003a:351 n.100). Plau- earth is tilled or turf is cut’ (as noticed by Palmer 1954:142).
tus and Terence and other comedians use the word freely, The case of ASELLUS and ASINUS is further noteworthy, since
especially in the description of beatings given to slaves. ASELLUS is in origin a diminutive of ASINUS, and therefore offers
However, Cicero and other writers in the first century BC a counterexample to a widespread pattern whereby a
employ other Latin terms, ICTUS or PLAGA, to refer to blows, diminutive replaces its base noun, which has led scholars
11
JAMES CLACKSON
to think that ‘[d]iminutives must have been not only widely documents such as those from Vindolanda, which included
used but thought of as a colloquial feature’ (Herman lists of everyday items, no doubt more such terms in use in
2000:99). It is true that in high registers of Latin diminutives the spoken language would be found.
are frequently avoided, and they sometimes surface in texts
that are often thought of as more low-level or colloquial.
However, not all diminutives in Latin, even those which are
found only in low-level texts, are destined to survive into 1.6 Sources of the Romance languages
Romance. Consider, for example, the class of diminutive
adjectives that occur in Cicero’s letters. The adjective BELLUS Latin speakers of all classes during the empire, and probably
‘fine, pretty’, in origin a diminutive form of BONUS ‘good’, is during the last centuries of the republic, did not write
attested 24 times in Cicero’s correspondence, but only 13 exactly as they spoke. Even Cicero, the model for later
times in his more voluminous prose speeches and philo- language purists, states that he would rather say posmeri-
sophical works, and it does not occur in high-register poetry dianus ‘in the afternoon’ with omission of the medial t in the
or the Latin historians. Both BELLUS and BONUS survive into written Classical form POSTMERIDIANUS (Orator 157, cited by
Romance (It. bello, Fr. beau, etc.; Ro. bun, It. buono, Fr. bon, Adams 2013:153). Anyone writing down Latin was in some
etc.), and generally with the same meanings as in Latin. sense actually ‘writing up’ (to borrow the term of Langslow
Cicero also uses other diminutive adjectives in his letters: 2000:412)—that is to say, using literary or educated models
INTEGELLUS ‘unharmed’ (beside CLat. INTEGER ‘whole’), LONGULUS for the spellings, syntactic constructions, and vocabulary.
‘long’ (beside LONGUS ‘long’), and even BARBATULUS ‘a bit Although inscriptions and graffiti may reveal clues about
bearded’ (beside BARBATUS ‘bearded’) (see Leumann et al. divergent phonological developments, learning how to
1977:308 for these formations). However, unlike the adjec- write was also a process of learning how to spell, and it is
tive BELLUS, none of these forms is continued into Romance. important not to confuse the author of a ‘misspelt’ Latin
Furthermore, some of the lexical items that occur in appar- text with an ancient amateur phonetician, attempting to
ently more colloquial or everyday registers, such as letters, record precisely the sounds of speech. Some sub-literary
but not in more literary works need not necessarily reflect texts abound in deviations from the classical norm, but
the spoken language that would win out in the end. Here these were also the result of a meeting between everyday
again the equation between ‘colloquial’ or ‘vulgar’ and the speech and a literary education. Even the female author of
material that is to survive into the Romance languages is far the Itinerarium Egeriae (known in older scholarship as the
from adequate. Perigrinatio Aetheriae), a chatty account of a trip to the Holy
Despite the caveats of the preceding paragraphs, many Land written in the fourth century AD (Väänänen 1987:8),
words which were to become winners in Romance scarcely long prized as a treasure trove of ‘vulgar’ forms’, wrote up
appear at all in the record of written Latin, whether in her Latin in the hope of emulating the norms of her day
literary, sub-literary, or inscriptional genres. Some of the (for which the model was probably the Latin Bible trans-
finds of ‘new Latin’ in the last 30 years, such as the docu- lation rather than Cicero). Thus Egeria employs parti-
ments written on wood from the Roman fort at Vindolanda, ciples, the ablative (and in some cases accusative or
or papyrus or ostraca from north Africa and the Near East, nominative) absolute construction, and subordinating
have revealed how patchy our record of the Latin which was or complement clauses which she has little control over,
in day-to-day use actually is. Adams (2013:777) cites three but which reveal her desire to make her account more
words now attested from texts from Roman Britain around ‘literary’ (see Clackson and Horrocks 2007:286-92 for fuller
100 AD, baro ‘man’, uectura ‘wagon’, and cimusa ‘cloak’, which discussion).
are scarcely attested in any other source for Latin with Given that all surviving Latin is mediated through a
these meanings before the fourth century AD, and even written form, and that the origins of the Romance languages
thereafter largely avoided in Latin texts of all types. All lie in the (irrecoverable) spoken language (with, of course,
three of these words have reflexes in Romance, and it is occasional feedback from educated norms or ‘corrections’
likely that they continued in use throughout the Roman incorporated into speech), there will always be a mismatch
empire, but were largely avoided in all genres with any between the Latin sources and the parent of the Romance
pretence of literary merit. Since the Roman educational languages. However, there is a great deal of surviving Latin,
system taught literacy largely through the inculcation of written over a long timescale and across a wide geograph-
Classical literary texts and models (see Clackson ical spread, in very disparate genres and registers. In this
2011b:241f.), anyone who had learned how to write became chapter I have shown some case studies of what can be
accustomed to avoiding terms which were not found in learned from careful consideration of the totality of the
literary works. If there were a greater surviving portion of written evidence, without preconceived notions about
12
LATIN AS A SOURCE
which are more likely sources for the Romance languages. texts, both those that are traditionally classed as ‘Vulgar’
Inscriptional evidence, such as the surviving graffiti and and those from higher or more technical registers, are
dipinti from Pompeii, may be helpful in establishing chron- essential for the understanding of developments in morph-
ologies of sound change, but should be combined as far as ology, syntax, and lexicon. But in some cases, such as the
possible with other sources. The non-Latin native languages infinitive þ HABEO construction, or in the history of individ-
of Italy do not seem to have had a major impact on the ual lexical items, the sources may not (yet) reveal what was
spoken ancestor of Romance. Literary and sub-literary actually taking place in ancient speech.
13
CHAPTER 2
Latin and Romance in the

medieval period
A sociophilological approach
ROGER WRIGHT
2.1 Latin and Romance in contemporaries as being more than one; what we now call
the Middle Ages French, Occitan, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, and a number
of Italian dialects were conceptually separate in their
speakers’ minds, each with its own name, and endowed
The ‘Middle Ages’ are a chronological concept and nothing
with distinctive writing systems which reinforced their
else, but even so they are not clearly defined. The phrase
independence (Romanian, further east, was in a separate
comes from Renaissance scholars who saw the culture of
context). Medieval Latin also continued as yet another con-
their own age as a high point, the first one since the
ceptually distinct entity. There have been other cases of
Classical period, with everything in between just being in
fragmentation, notably as Indo-European split into many
the middle, and by implication inferior. The adjective ‘medi-
languages over the prehistoric millennia, but the process of
eval’ is formed from the Latin phrase Medium Aevum (mean-
such a break-up of one language into many still remains
ing ‘middle age’). Where the Middle Ages end is not
rather mysterious, in particular as it was experienced by the
generally agreed, although around 1500 might be the best
Romance speakers involved.
consensus. Hispanists have a convenient date for the end of
their Middle Ages: 1492, with Columbus’s first voyage and
the Christian capture of Muslim Granada. Italians see the
Renaissance as starting, and the Middle Ages as ending,
several decades earlier than that. Where they begin is 2.2 Sociophilology
even more contentious. For present purposes, the early
Middle Ages will be taken to begin after the political and Inevitably, the only direct evidence we have for these
military end of the western Roman empire in the early fifth developments is in written form. The scholarly analysis of
century; but since the following two centuries are often also the available written evidence in the light of modern socio-
called ‘late antiquity’, there are scholars who date their linguistic developments can be referred to as ‘sociophilol-
start to later than that. ogy’ (as in Wright 2003). Philology in the British tradition
The common language spoken in the Roman empire was involves the study of ancient texts for their linguistic evi-
Latin. The official written language was also Latin, whose dence, although in continental Europe the related terms,
use continued to be deemed official not only by the admin- such as Italian filologia, imply an interest in literary ques-
istrative classes but also in due course by the Christian tions as well. Sociophilology studies texts from the past for
Church. The ‘Latin’ of the period between 400 and 800 AD is the evidence which they can shed on sociolinguistic ques-
best viewed, in the light of modern sociolinguistic advances tions of the age in which they were written; and it can also
in the understanding of linguistically complex societies, as operate in the other direction, making use of modern socio-
a single but multivariable language. One of the most interlinguistic advances in the philological analysis of the texts.
esting features of the following centuries is that it did not That is, the two disciplines are able to help each other, and
stay a single language. This fragmentation was not inevit- help us understand what the writers, readers, and audiences
able; Greek, for example, is still thought of as being Greek, of individual documents were experiencing and trying to
even though the differences between ancient and modern achieve.
Greek are substantial. Yet by the late thirteenth century, Already before the advent of sociolinguistics in the late
what had been one language had come to be thought of by 1960s, historical linguists had established the fact (which
14 This chapter © Roger Wright 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
LATIN AND ROMANCE IN THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
may still seem counterintuitive to some) that languages are ‘ought’ to write, according to established patterns of
always changing. Not necessarily changing in a dramatic orthography and perceived grammatical correctness. That
fashion, but there are always new pronunciations of words is, older and more formal features of a language are more
turning up, new constructions, new words and affixes, and likely to appear in a text than the equivalent colloquial
new meanings for existing words. Sometimes the innov- variants, and the spellings used will not manifest attempts
ations catch on, and spread from being the habits of an to reproduce the phonetic features but the traditionally
individual or a minority group to becoming general features required orthographic forms.
of the language as a whole; sometimes they fall out of use The grammatical tradition taught to apprentice scribes in
again. Often there already exists an older feature with a the early Middle Ages took its morphological prescriptions
similar function, with which the new one is initially in from Aelius Donatus’s mid-fourth-century Ars Minor, and its
competition, and if that older one eventually falls out of spellings from the established tradition. Gradually, Donatus’
use, then we can refer to the sequence of events as being ‘a work developed from being seen as descriptive (describing
linguistic change’, in the singular; but we need to be aware what had happened in written texts of the past) to being
that at least two phenomena are involved in such a change, thought of as prescriptive (telling us what we ought to do);
the advent of the new and the loss of the old. Most changes and several subsequent grammarians developed the
involve a period of variation between old and new, which thoughts and attitudes of that grammar into a pedagogical
may sometimes be quite long, and need not necessarily end tradition, one of whose main effects has been to confuse the
at all. There is nothing sinister or undesirable about this; evidence. This tradition did not include specific instructions
linguistic variation is not a problem in itself, and provides concerning syntax, and in fact during the earlier years of
flexibility to a speaker. Grammarians, however, and the Middle Ages (as above defined) it seems that syntax did
teachers, tend to dislike variation, and usually prefer to not change as much as morphology, which was changing
decree that one variant is ‘correct’ and others ‘incorrect’ markedly, particularly in nouns and adjectives; this may
rather than simply telling their clients that there are two explain why Donatus devoted most of his attention to mor-
(or more) ways of expressing a particular meaning. phological details. Later, in the early sixth century, the
In the early Medieval Latin and Romance case, we have a originally north African grammarian Priscian prepared a
huge amount of written evidence provided for us by those serious and detailed account of Latin syntax for the benefit
who spoke the language we are investigating. But it is not a of his Greek-speaking students in Constantinople, in effect
straightforward matter to study it. One of the advances the first serious university-level account of Latin syntax
made jointly by historical linguists and sociolinguists over (whereas Greek had been studied that way for centuries
the last few decades has been to establish the great differ- and provided Priscian with a number of models). When
ences which there can be, and usually are, between spoken the Carolingian scholars, at the end of the eighth century,
and written usage, even of the same individual. Written were establishing the syllabus for standard Christian edu-
texts are not photographic evidence of the way their cation they prescribed Donatus as the elementary primer
authors speak. Indeed, it would be very difficult to write in and Priscian for more advanced study. Never mind that by
such a way, reproducing all the prosodic and phonetic then both authors’ works were notably out of date; their
idiosyncrasies such as intonation, elisions, hesitations, san- authoritative nature was more important. This sophistica-
dhi effects, anacolutha, or relative loudness. And in practice tion of the syllabus led to notably ‘better’ (i.e. more old-
that is never what writers aim to do. They aim to commu- fashioned) Latin in written texts in ninth-century France
nicate their meaning, not their phonetics. than had been used in the previous period, but it also led to
an increasing separation of the formal educated register, in
both speech and writing, from the way in which everybody,
including the literate, actually spoke in real life when buy-
2.3 Writing ing cabbages etc. The eventual conceptual split between
normal spoken usage and the formal register, often referred
Writing does not come naturally to a human being in the to then as grammatica (as still by Dante in his De vulgari
way speech does; we are innately programmed to acquire eloquentia, five centuries later) and by us now as ‘Medieval
speech as we grow, but in order to write we have to be Latin’, grew in the general consciousness until it became felt
taught. Somebody has to teach us, and our written habits in due course to be a conceptual distinction between two
are inevitably affected by what our teacher wished us to do. distinct languages, Latin and Romance. By then, some
Unfortunately for the subsequent philologists, teachers scholars in a few enterprising intellectual centres had
never teach their students to represent colloquial syntax developed alternative ways of writing which did not corres-
in phonetic transcription; they teach them what they pond to the prescriptions of the grammarians and teachers,
15
ROGER WRIGHT
and the two ways of writing came to seem to represent two First, though, we need to find another way of discovering
languages rather than two ways of writing the same lan- what the writers actually said—other, that is, than by inter-
guage. The word romanz (spelled in more than one way) was preting texts as examples of phonetic script—for it some-
first applied to the new written modes, and it seems more times seems as if investigators have chosen to decide that
feasible to see the development of these deliberately new texts were phonetic scripts (avant la lettre), in defiance of the
written modes as a prime cause of the conceptual split fact that Romance speakers probably would not have known
between Latin and Romance (as the Swedish Latinist Tore how to operate such a script even if they had conceived the
Janson believes; e.g. Janson 2002) than as the result of one idea of attempting it. We can make some deductions from
which had already happened (the view of the French Latin- spelling mistakes—although these need not have been
ist Michel Banniard; e.g. Banniard 1991a; 1992). inspired by a desire for phonetic transcription either—and
occasionally from explicit comments made by grammarians
and other thoughtful intellectuals, although the Roman
grammarians were more concerned with writing than
with speaking. In the event, the main mechanism we have
2.4 Writing Romance before written available now for deciding how words were pronounced in
Romance was invented the past comes from the techniques of phonetic reconstruc-
tion. These were first developed by those hoping to recon-
Until both the newly reformed Latin, advocated and largely struct the language which we now call Indo-European,
practised by the Carolingian scholars, and the newly spoken by the distant ancestors of those speaking descend-
reformed Romance writing systems to which they inadvert- ant Indo-European languages which we know something
ently led came to be the norm in a Romance-speaking about. There is no direct way of knowing if such reconstruc-
community, the writers of the early Middle Ages were in tions really are valid representations of what was spoken
the same position as English speakers are now when writing over 5,000 years ago, but they might well be, and there is no
their own language. In particular, there is not necessarily better investigative method available. These techniques
any direct connection between the way we pronounce have also been used to reconstruct the pronunciations of
words and the way we write them; that is, written forms the language from which the later Romance languages
are not phonetic transcriptions of what words sound like. It derived, and again, probably with a great deal of accuracy.
seems natural, within an alphabetic tradition, to feel that Unfortunately, the practitioners of the method have
the point of our system lies in a correlation between written claimed to be reconstructing ‘proto-Romance’ (on the ana-
symbol and sound, but writers are aiming to convey mean- logy of ‘proto-Indo-European’), whereas in fact they were
ing, regardless of the phonetics. Even in an alphabetic trad- simply discovering how Latin words were pronounced.
ition such as ours, written symbols such as 60 (correlating to A problem with the method is the difficulty of locating the
Eng. [ˈsɪks.tɪ], Fr. [swa.sᾶt], etc), or the synonymous lx used results in real time, but we can take their discoveries to be
in the first millennium AD (correlating to original Lat. [sek. largely accurate for at least the later periods of Latin
sa.ˈgin.ta] and Romance in tenth-century Castile [se.sa.ˈen. speech, that is, the early Middle Ages.
ta], etc), abbreviations such as Mrs (for [ˈmɪ.sɪz]), and silent Thus, as a result of their investigations, it can be gener-
letters such as 50 per cent of those in my own surname ally agreed that, for example, the phonemic distinction
(Wright), etc., are taken in our stride when writing and between long [aː] and short [a] had disappeared all over
reading (including reading aloud), because we have been the Romance-speaking world before the Middle Ages;
taught to do so. In general, we can be trained to overcome and that this was a phonetic change with morphological
the problems caused by such asymmetries, and accept that consequences, given that (for example) the length of that
writing a letter p at the start of the words pneumonia and vowel distinguished nominative from ablative in the singu-
psalm in England, or, in ancient Rome, writing a letter h at lar of first-declension nouns (e.g. NOM [ˈro.sa] ‘a rose’ vs ABL
the start of the word HOMINEM ‘man.ACC’, and an m at the end [ˈro.saː], for use after relevant prepositions). The results are
of that same word, is as ‘correct’ as it would now be ‘incor- not often the same all over the Latin-speaking communities,
rect’ to pronounce psalm as [psɑm] with [p] or, in Rome, in practice. For example, it can be agreed that words which
HOMINEM as [ˈho.mi.nem] with [h] and [m]. This lack of a originally had a [k] before a front vowel came instead to
direct fit between letters and sounds is annoying for the have a pronunciation with an affricate articulated further
subsequent philologist, but we are not entitled to react as if forwards than a velar [k]; thus the initial sound of Latin
it were not the case; and if we have some understanding of CAELUM ‘sky’ became at some point the [ʧ ] still to be heard
the social and pedagogical background of the writers we can in It. cielo and the [ʦ] of OSp. cielo and OFr. ciel. Something
go a long way to working out what was happening. similar happened to the voiced velar [g] before a front vowel,
16
which generally (cf. though MAGISTRUM > It. maestro ‘master’) which had inspired the initial alphabetical representation
became [ʤ] (as Lat. GEMELLUS > It. [ʤeˈmɛllo] ‘twin’). of a word had lost its original directness and reliability.
In Latin texts, these changes necessitated no alterations Teachers may have reacted to the asymmetry as the
to spelling at all, and, being isolated changes which applied teachers of modern-English-speaking children have, by
in all circumstances, caused no great problems. Many teaching spelling one word at a time, in addition to some
changes were conditioned changes, however, only operating basic principles. This possibility can complicate issues fur-
under certain conditions, and these could have been more ther for modern analysts because, if a word is consistently
problematic. Apart from these cases just considered, where spelt in one way in a particular centre, that consistency may
a velar consonant preceded a front vowel, the words ini- simply reflect the fact that the teachers successfully man-
tially pronounced with intervocalic unvoiced plosive con- aged to persuade their pupils to write it that way, whatever
sonants came to have voiced ones instead (other than in the phonetics. In tenth-century León, for example, the word
central and southern Italy and the Balkans; cf. §25.2.5). For originally written ECCLESIA ‘church’ was regularly written
example, in most areas the Latin word written as UITAM ‘life. eglesia, despite apparently beginning with [i]- (Pensado
ACC’ came to be pronounced [ˈvi.da] (the same change as 1991). Teachers were not necessarily all inclined to make
English writer coming to be pronounced with [d] in the USA) the same prescriptions; some, for example—particularly in
and LUPOS ‘wolves.ACC’ as [ˈlo.bos]. Conditioned changes such northern France, in much of which [ka]- became [ ʃa]- as in
as this one, which only applied between vowels inside a CATTUM > Fr. chat ‘cat’—seem to have looked more kindly
word, are more awkward for us to analyse, since the pre- than others on adopting the originally Greek letter k, to
scribed standard written form remained the same, as it represent [k] unambiguously. In the early Middle Ages, if
always will until somebody authoritative changes what such an operationally practical procedure of teaching spell-
people are taught; but the combination of the knowledge ing word by word was used, it would be likely to vary from
provided by reconstructions and that given by the texts leads place to place precisely because the phonetics were increas-
us to the sociophilological conclusion that after a while many ingly coming to vary from place to place as well. Recon-
words written with a letter t between vowels corresponded to struction is unable to locate developments precisely in time,
voiced pronunciations of the word with a [d]. so we need to make chronological estimates for this vari-
There was thus a letter, in this case t, with more than one ation which are compatible with the documentary evidence.
possible corresponding sound. Such variation is not difficult Unfortunately there is no modern scholarly consensus as to
for writers and readers to learn to take in their stride, but as when the speech of different areas began to diverge notice-
time goes by, this lack of direct correspondence became ably. The reconstruction specialists tend to argue for a
more complicated. We can tell, for example, that in most remarkably early date (BC, often), Latinists (e.g. Adams
areas words which originally ended in -[t] came to be pro- 2007) and many Romanists tend to prefer a date more like
nounced without that final consonant (a change progressing AD 600; and if we accept that mutual intelligibility can often
at different rhythms in different places, seeming to take apply even between speakers who do not speak in the same
longest in France); but, particularly since the final letter t way, as is the case in modern Britain, we can envisage the
was an integral part of a standard and common verbal affix, Romance-speaking community as indeed having different
teachers continued to train apprentice scribes to write that habits in different places but, even so, remaining largely
letter at the end of forms such as SCRIBIT ‘writes’ or HABUIT mutually intelligible until the ninth century or even later.
‘had’ long after there was any sound there for it to corres-
pond to. Meanwhile, it was probably still generally main-
tained by teachers that t corresponded to [t], since words
beginning with that sound and that letter saw no change in 2.5 ‘Vulgar’ Latin
the initial consonant, and the sounds and letters at the start
of a word are psychologically the most salient. Thus, in Spelling mistakes are good evidence, but it is not always
much of early medieval western Romance, there came in clear what they are evidence of. Errors in surviving epi-
due course to be a situation where a letter t at the start of a graphic data, on tombstones and other inscriptions, have
word usually corresponded to [t]-, whereas between vowels been much discussed (e.g. by Herman 1990), but here too
mid-word it corresponded to [d], and at the end of a word contextual details, such as the itinerant nature of masons
corresponded to no sound at all; in the Iberian Peninsula, and the practicalities of fitting messages into the space
for example, tota was then the written form of [ˈto.da] ‘all’, available on the stone, can lead to uncertainty on our part
and tenet the written form of [ˈtje.ne] ‘holds’. as to whether a non-standard form is just a quirk or evi-
Because of phonetic developments, there were many such dence of a feature in the speech of the mason or the
cases in which the direct letter–sound correspondence composer of the text. Inscriptions, however, are at the
17
ROGER WRIGHT
best of times a formalized genre with its own particularities, Oral culture played a more prominent role then than now;
even within the written mode as a whole. A fair number of almost all texts were intended to be read aloud, and were
people could read, and many of these could also write, to expected to be intelligible when so read (this expectation
judge, for example, by the evidence of the graffiti found at was made clear by Michel Banniard’s 1992 book Viva Voce).
Pompeii (datable to a period before AD 79); but most of the The same assumption also applied to sermons and hagiog-
surfaces they wrote on were biodegradable, such as raphy in church, and even to the main church offices. There
papyrus, which was used into the eighth century and even is nothing surprising about this; in the modern world also
beyond, or wax tablets, used in schools, or even tree bark. written works are expected to be intelligible to the illiterate
But there is also evidence available in the shape of scribbles when read aloud, as is the case with all books for young
on pottery, jewellery, wooden tablets, slates, and other children, for example. Not knowing how to read is in itself
surfaces. The genres involved there tend not to be repre- no bar to understanding something when it is read aloud.
sentative of unmarked vernacular; perhaps the closest we It also seems that it was a legal necessity in many early
can come to direct written evidence for the speech of the medieval areas for some documents to be read aloud to the
empire itself is in the letters discovered at Vindolanda (near interested parties, and for those parties to confirm that they
Hadrian’s Wall, but written before the wall was built), which had heard and understood them, before the documents
were written on wooden tablets and then thrown away, only became legally valid. This aspect of their society is highly
surviving by chance and difficult for all except a few experts significant for the modern sociophilologist. It implies two
to decipher now. Slates with curses scratched on them have details in particular. First, that the phonetic form of the
been discovered at Bath in southern England, where they words must have been sufficiently close to that of the
were thrown into the hot springs in the hope that the gods normal colloquial speech of the period for the uneducated
would carry out the wishes of the writer. Pottery has sur- listener to recognize what the words were; there is no
vived with writing added by bilingual Gaulish-Latin problem about accepting this, because then and now the
speakers at La Graufesenque in France. The fifth-century normal practice, when reading aloud, is for the reader to
‘Albertini Tablets’ found in north Africa are intriguing for recognize each written word in sequence as a whole, to be
several reasons, not least because they were written in a led from that information to the relevant part of their
rural and not obviously literate area. This kind of appar- mental lexicon, which among other information contains
ently special case continues into the Middle Ages; the so- the phonological representation of the word, and then to
called ‘Visigothic Slates’ with texts scratched on them in the move instantaneously from there to a normal phonetic
seventh century (which have nothing linguistically Visi- realization. The recognition of the lexical word is the crucial
gothic about them; edited by Velázquez Soriano 2000), factor for the reader, not the translation of individual let-
found in the provinces of Ávila and Salamanca in central ters into individual sounds one at a time; they would, for
Spain where slate seems to have been more easily accessible example, see the written form UITA ‘life’ and automatically
than papyrus or wax, demonstrate that even in areas far read it aloud as [ˈvi.da] with no problem; or now see Wright
from the main cultural centres, society still functioned on a and say [rajt]. Given what we saw above, that there is and
basis of written documentation which was expected to be was no bar to having normal spoken forms whose standard
understood. The survival of such informal texts is due to the written counterpart is unlike a phonetic transcription of
permanent nature of the material on which they were writ- their evolved pronunciation, there is nothing unreasonable
ten, and it seems likely that very much more once existed on in the postulated scenario that in the early Middle Ages an
other surfaces and has perished. Such non-standard evidence uneducated listener could usually be trusted to recognize
has often been categorized as being in ‘Vulgar Latin’, a the words read aloud; the readers might naturally, as is
venerable but unfortunate phrase which even the specialists normal in a legal context, have a formal air about them as
in the topic might well have preferred not to use (e.g. they read, but they would not wish to baffle the audience. It
Herman 2000; cf. also §1.2). is noticeable that in the seventh century Isidore of Seville’s
instructions to lectores concentrated on their being prepared
and speaking clearly, but did not mention any detail which
we could call phonetic; he did not, for example, tell the
2.6 Reading aloud lectores to be sure not to pronounce the middle consonant
in UITA as [d], because both readers and listeners would
The early Middle Ages were not an illiterate time. Literacy naturally operate with a [d] there anyway.
in the modern sense was more restricted then than it is in The second implication of the ability of illiterate listeners
the modern world, but throughout the centuries written to understand texts read aloud to them is that the morph-
laws and documents were the basis for regulating society. ology and the syntax used in the detailed sections of
18
documents (as opposed to the legal formulaic clichés) were down on the page, since the writers could spell the words
also largely intelligible, whether or not the listener used the traditional way whatever they had come to mean.
that morphology and syntax in their own speech. This Syntax was not taught in the early medieval curriculum
grammatical conclusion is not surprising either, once we before the Carolingians recommended the study of Priscian’s
look at some of the texts, because, outside the legal formu- Institutiones; even then, it was only for advanced students.
laic sections, the morphology and syntax used in those parts This wide lack of syntactic self-awareness has the great
of a document which had to be prepared specifically for the advantage for us that, for example, the word order found
occasion nearly always correspond to our reconstructions of in documentation was as a result usually closer to that of
the features of the time. For example, if we are investigating contemporary real life than to that of older ‘Classical’ lit-
a tenth-century document from the Iberian Peninsula, we erature. Strikingly, the main detail about ‘Classical’ Latin
will not be surprised to note that (apart, perhaps, from a few syntax which seems to be well known nowadays is that the
set phrases) ablative case forms are largely absent and verb usually came at the end of a sentence. This was largely
genitive case forms are rare, being replaced by prepos- true of subordinate clauses, and it could have been true of
itional phrases with the same function. We can reconstruct main clauses as well at an earlier stage, but Donatus never
that the value of ‘of ’, for example, was usually expressed in tells his readers this. Donatus had little, if any, interest in
speech with the word de (which had originally meant ‘down syntax, and one consequence of this insouciance was that
from’), and it often is in documentation as well (cf. §56.3.2). even those writers in subsequent centuries who were taking
care to follow his prescriptions as regards morphology felt
no qualms about presenting the normal word order of their
own early Romance on the written page. Thus in early
2.7 Written and spoken grammar medieval texts verbs sometimes come at the end, some-
times in the middle, and sometimes at the start of the
Many of the morphosyntactic developments of early sentence, in a distribution similar to that found much
Romance involved the increasing use of existing words later in the first texts in written Romance, whose writers
with grammatical functions which they had not had earlier, also to a large extent wanted to reproduce their own natural
or had had only rarely (cf. §46.3); not just the common use order of the words.
of DE ‘of ’ to express a possessive meaning previously the Morphology was different, in that most of Donatus’ Ars
domain of the genitive, and AD ‘to’ to express the meanings Minor, the standard textbook, was concerned with it. The
previously allotted to the dative, but also the use of origin- fact that this fourth-century handbook concentrated so
ally demonstrative ILLE ‘that’ in what we would now think of much on this aspect suggests that the old systems were
as a definite article function (‘the’), the use of UNUS as an breaking down already by then, such that students of the
indefinite article (‘a’, rather than a numeral meaning ‘one’). written language needed to be told details explicitly. The
Other examples are the use of HABERE (originally ‘to have’) as paradigms concerned continued to be taught and learnt,
an auxiliary verb in perfect and future tense formations, the and the word endings to be used in writing must have
extended use of ESSE ‘to be’ as a passive auxiliary in combin- come to dominate much scribal pedagogy. Most verbal
ations where the tense of that auxiliary determined the inflections continued into Romance, although naturally in
tense of the whole compound (which had not been the evolved phonetic forms. While the nominal inflections still
case previously, when the sense of present or past was survived to some extent in speech, learning and using them
determined by the accompanying participle; thus during in new written texts would not have been too demanding;
the first millenniumAD AMATA EST (lit. ‘loved.FSG is’) changed but there came a time when, in much of the western
from meaning ‘she was/has been loved’ to meaning ‘she is Romance-speaking area, only one ending for the singular
loved’), and the use of the reflexive pronoun SE ‘-self ’ as a and another for the plural of most nouns, and also of most
means of expressing a passive meaning without implying adjectives in addition to the gender distinctions, survived in
the existence of an agent (a usage which had occasionally speech (cf. §27.2). This was usually a form deriving from the
occurred earlier, but eventually came to be a normal con- original accusative (although both the accusative and nom-
struction for such a purpose, particularly but not only in inative cases survived in the oldest northern French). The
Spain (cf. §60.4.1); e.g. ModSp. se habla inglés lit. ‘self= speaks distinctions between nominative, accusative, and dative still
English (= English is spoken)’). These developments all survive, however, in some pronouns, such as, in the central
involved the grammatical extension and semantic weaken- Iberian Peninsula, él < ILLE ‘he’, lo < ILLUM ‘him’, and le < ILLI
ing of words which already existed. Since, therefore, these ‘to him’, and in some areas the third-person genitive plural
words already had a canonical written form, there was no survives as well, e.g. ILLORUM > It./Fr. loro/leur ‘their’; these
problem involved in putting these newer constructions have since become possessive adjectives, and also both
19
ROGER WRIGHT
function as the dative third-person plural pronoun, so the swapped legalisms over their ploughs; a legal register is
semantics of the nominal endings would not have been always a legal register. But it would not have been difficult
totally inaccessible to the intuitions of the trainee early for Romance-speaking lawyers to learn the usual profes-
medieval scribe. Even so, all over the Romance world we sional terminology (as English lawyers can easily learn to
find some early medieval texts in which the writer seems to use such terms as notwithstanding), and theirs still remains a
have learnt what the nominal endings were (morphology) register of the same language; similarly, modern English
but occasionally to have little idea of when to use which one lawyers use a special kind of English in their work, not a
(syntax). Only rarely would this have led to actual unintel- different language entirely, and they too use normal
ligibility, and even then in context a sentence containing vocabulary when buying cabbages. In the Middle Ages, how-
inappropriate inflections, when read aloud, would almost ever, among the hyperliterate and erudite few, antiquarian-
certainly have been made clearer in some other way; for ism was often fashionable. This could take several forms.
example, in many areas, the subject and the object came Hymn writers often used lines copied from other hymns of
increasingly to be tied to a particular position in the sen- the past, deliberately wishing to sound archaic; historians
tence relative to the verb. Often, in a particular context, attempted at times to imitate ancient historians as models;
only one interpretation of an ostensibly ambiguous sen- Isidore of Seville often preferred the relatively recherché
tence could have come to a listener’s mind, for, as the lexical resources of his own highly educated idiolect; a
sociolinguists say, every text has a context, and sociophilol- number of writers such as Avitus of Vienne, and some of
ogists are allowed to say that too. As regards the oblique the Visigoths, even seem sometimes to have preferred con-
nominal case forms, uncertainty caused by inexpert use of voluted imitations of the past to contemporary comprehen-
the endings was compensated for by an increased use in sibility. Modern Latinists are tempted to call such
writing of the prepositions, such as DE ‘of, from’ and AD ‘to’, manifestations of righteous energy ‘good Latin’, but to
which were coming to express the same meaning as had most people at the time it might well have seemed merely
earlier been expressed by the nominal inflections; since the odd, rather than good. A little sociophilologically inclined
meaning thereby resided in the preposition rather than in thought will tell us that writers who skilfully made them-
the ending, it came to be of no practical significance if the selves intelligible, while of necessity respecting most of the
inflection of the noun governed by the preposition was not orthographical and morphological rules of the tradition
the one that would be expected by a grammarian. In some which they had been taught, do not deserve to be criticized,
texts it seems that every preposition governs an accusative as they often have been by modern scholars, for writing ‘bad
form of the noun, but that is to overdetermine the point of Latin’, ‘barbarous Latin’, ‘corrupt Latin’, ‘decadent Latin’,
the inflection; what had once been the specifically accusa- etc.; they were successfully writing the early Romance of
tive direct object form was becoming the normal caseless their age, for practical purposes, and no more attempting to
citation form available to be used in any grammatical cir- reproduce bygone features of previous centuries than we
cumstance, as would be normal in Romance. Conversely, the now aim to write like Chaucer.1
writers of some texts seem to be so chary of using preposi-
tions even when an old Latin text would have been crying
out for them that we can probably deduce that their
teachers had specifically given instructions not to use 2.9 The Carolingian reforms
them because they were thought stylistically undesirable.
This peaceful coexistence, within the one language, of
evolving speech and a practical approach to the traditional
rules of writing was rudely shattered by the reforms of the
2.8 Words end of the eighth century, as a sociophilological look at
the Carolingian texts confirms. The scholars at the court
Vocabulary comes and goes in any language, but there of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne (Charles the Great)
needs to be a special context for a word to exist in a text felt that they were creating a renewal of Christian life and
when it does not exist in normal speech. Unfortunately, in Latin culture; they called it a renovatio, but it is usually
the Latin and Romance case such special contexts are com- referred to now in English as the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’.
mon in the surviving written evidence. For example, the As explained above, this had a linguistic aspect, significantly
legal texts which are our main evidence for the age natur-
ally include legal terminology of a kind which laymen do 1
The Portuguese scholar António Emiliano has written many studies
not regularly use. We should not deduce from the existence emphasizing this point, with particular reference to texts from Portugal but
of such words that seventh-century Italian peasants merrily relevance to the whole Romance area, e.g. Emiliano (2005).
20
impelled by the rediscovery of Priscian’s huge Institutiones. pronounce it in the vernacular way. This need to know the
The result was a marked conceptual and practical split Latin letter–sound correlations for the new Romance spel-
between the grammatica of the educated (which we now lings to work as intended helps explain why all the early
call ‘medieval Latin’) and normal everyday speech. written Romance texts, in every area, were elaborated in
The leader of the educational reforms was the English centres of expert Latinity. The new Romance texts cannot
churchman Alcuin of York. He, and the many other scholars have been designed for illiterates, since those who could not
of Germanic native speech at Charlemagne’s court, was used read at all could not read Romance any more than they
to pronouncing Latin words with the same technique which could read Latin.
we use now, but which no native speaker would ever have The new written modes, at least at the start, were
done previously: that is, allotting a specified sound to each designed to inspire a particular reading aloud, rather than
written letter, as if all speech were reading aloud. This to reproduce an oral event which the writer had already
method of pronouncing the words, making no allowances heard. In particular, as historians will confirm, the text of all
for any silent letters, in which e.g. every written t gave rise the Strasbourg Oaths must have been fixed carefully in
to a spoken [t], was usually unlike the vernacular pronun- advance, for legal reasons, rather than being a subsequent
ciation of the same words—which was probably the main recollection of something said spontaneously, as several
reason why Alcuin was horrified at the way his rustic handbooks have implied. They too were in the legal register.
neighbours in Tours spoke. In any event, the Carolingian The new genre of the Sequence, where each syllable of the
scholars required all students educated by the Church to use words had to correspond to one note of the pre-existing
that kind of pronunciation when reading aloud in an eccle- music, also needed careful advance planning; and when the
siastical context. This made the readings hard for the con- genre was extended from Medieval Latin to Romance the
gregation to follow, so in due course the authorities partly result was the written Romance text which has happened to
relented, allowing the sermons to be delivered in intelligible survive of the late ninth-century Sequence (Cantilène) of
mode again, as they had been before; we know this from the Eulalia from St Amand. It is probably no coincidence that
famous Council of Tours edict 17, of 813, which was repeated the choir at St Amand and the German king who read the
at the Council of Mainz in 847 under the aegis of Alcuin’s Romance Oaths at Strasbourg were primarily German-
star pupil Rhabanus Maurus. But, outside the sermons, this speaking; as such, they would have needed more guidance
ecclesiastical combination of the unnatural spelling– on how to pronounce their text intelligibly as Romance, as
pronunciation and the antiquated grammar now instilled was required in the sociophilological context, than would a
during the pedagogical process led increasingly to a feeling native speaker.
that what existed was in effect two languages, rather than, The determination to make written works and spoken
as before, two modalities of the same language (see Wright performances in Latin more like those of the Roman empire
1982). Shortly after that, when some enterprising scribes (or, at least, what the scholars of the Carolingian age
began to experiment with new ways of writing designed to thought they had been like) can be seen in the elaboration
inspire an intelligible vernacular reading aloud, rather than of new versions of previously existing texts, such as some of
a Latinate one which would have pleased Alcuin, the pres- the saints’ lives. The Belgian scholar Marieke Van Acker in
ence of such unusual texts as the Strasbourg Oaths (842) and particular (e.g. Van Acker 2007) has analysed in detail the
the Sequence of Eulalia, written towards the end of the differences there are in such redactions of different periods,
ninth century, a presence gradually increasing over the showing how the ninth-century increase in linguistic simi-
next two centuries, reinforced the idea that Latin and larity to ancient texts was bought at the price of a decrease
Romance were two separate languages. The new methods in intelligibility. This had its effect in the liturgy as well,
of writing come under the heading of what Romanists call a where the congregations became spectators rather than
new scripta, which did not involve any new symbols but did participants. The new grammatica (Medieval Latin) had the
use the existing ones to create new written forms for words sociolinguistic prestige, naturally, and the relative sociolin-
which approximated to phonetic transcriptions of their guistic inferiority of written Romance was to continue for a
normal spoken form (as was normal practice by now in thousand years or so; even after it had been invented,
the new Medieval Latin). Thus the word previously written written Romance was at first confined to relatively unim-
UIRGINEM (‘maiden, virgin’; as used e.g. by Gregory of Tours in portant genres such as poetry, and it was only in the
the late sixth century), and pronounced in the vernacular thirteenth century that most serious genres began to be
something like [ˈvjer.ʤ‰], could in the new scripta be writ- prepared with the new Romance systems.
ten as vierge, and when a reader or singer came across this The elaboration of both Medieval Latin, as a new separate
written form their knowledge of the Latin letter–sound entity from normal usage, and written Romance, as a delib-
correspondences would help them (if they needed help) to erate way of writing which could approximate a phonetic
21
ROGER WRIGHT
transcription of the vernacular, were at first the property of one day be highly instructive for our view of the socio-
the Carolingian empire; that covered a large area, including philological phenomena of the age. It failed to receive
northern France, the Languedoc, much of northern Italy, such an analysis from the British Latinist Wallace
and Catalonia. Other areas managed to cope successfully M. Lindsay, who devoted most of his eccentric edition
with the inherited traditional modes for many decades (Lindsay 1926) merely to seeking out the classical sources
yet. The papacy, for example, was not affected by these of several of the entries; in fact it is those details with no
reforms at the time. But during the eleventh century, we obvious source other than the compiler’s own resources
can see both the spread of a higher-style written Latin and that will be the most revealing of the sociolinguistic cir-
the first glimpses of a local written Romance in other areas; cumstances of the time.
in the peninsular kingdoms of Aragon, Navarre, León, Cas- These glossaries are not to be confused with glosses.
tilla, Galicia, and Portugal from the 1080s, but never in Some of the earliest written evidence for the evolution of
Romance-speaking communities in Muslim Spain, where Romance comes in the form of individual glosses added in
Church Latin was not required; and in many Italian areas, the margin or between the lines of Latin manuscripts, in an
north and south, including Sardinia. The main stimuli for attempt to elucidate the old text; most such glosses are in
the definitive dissociation of the two as independent separ- recognizable orthography, but there comes a time when
ate languages were the intellectual movements which we some are deliberately written in a non-standard manner—
sometimes refer to collectively as ‘the Twelfth-Century for example, in eleventh-century La Rioja. An understand-
Renaissance’; if the Carolingian Renaissance marks the end ing of the social context, allied to philological analysis,
of the early Middle Ages in France, the twelfth-century suggests that these non-standard glosses usually come into
counterpart marks their end in Romance Europe as a whole. the category of a different way of writing the same language
rather than representing an early attempt to create the
fully independent Romance writing systems which we see
in later contexts.
2.10 Glossaries and glosses
Scholars and intellectuals of the early Middle Ages had an

interest in language, but this was usually in the written 2.11 Sociophilology and politics
sacred languages, not in their own vernacular. Grammar-
ians mostly followed established traditions. One genre, how- The question of why anybody bothered to invent new writ-
ever, was specifically designed for readers of the time with ing systems at all does seem to be initially answered with
linguistic interests, and yet it has hardly been exploited at reference to the advent of the spoken distinction between
all by Romanists: the monolingual glossaries. The bilingual grammatica and vernacular. Such inventions were not inev-
glossaries featuring Latin words and their equivalents in itable, at any rate. Writers could have continued to operate
other languages can tell us a great deal about those other with the systems they had inherited, as modern English has,
languages and the bilingual communities which they and as modern Chinese has, despite the great evolutions
belonged to, but for present purposes it is the copious there have been since these writing systems were invented;
monolingual Latin–Latin glossary tradition which fascinates but in the Latin–Romance case, once the inherited trad-
and intrigues as much as it baffles. These monolingual itional written mode became closely associated with the
glossaries are word-lists which originated in particular cir- new spelling–pronunciation system and had established
cumstances, such as providing useful terminology for itself in the basic educational curriculum, any written text
apprentice notaries, or in lists of glosses that had been which the writer wished to be given a vernacular reading
earlier added to texts of all kinds. And as more material aloud was going to need the updated system. Oaths in a
accrued to them, the glossaries grew in size. They were not judicial court, sequences and sermons in church, hagiog-
in any sense Latin–Romance dictionaries, as the most curs- raphy at saints’ festivals, and poems designed for entertain-
ory of sociophilological investigations can confirm. The ment were thus among the first genres to be adapted this
huge early eighth-century compendium the Liber Glossarum, way. And as the idea of a possible new written mode spread
which developed out of the seventh-century Hispanic ‘Visi- out from France, so did the realization that different areas,
gothic’ context and which now survives in two manuscripts with different linguistic features, would need different spel-
in Paris and the Vatican, has never been fully edited, nor lings for the same words. Thus the new idea of written
examined in depth by a linguist. Each word has its own ‘Romance’ as being a separate language rather than just a
history in that tradition, but given an understanding of separate writing system preceded (but only by a couple of
the social and historical context, such an analysis could generations) the idea that speakers in different geographical
22
areas had different Romance languages needing different separate and much later issue, not involving a co-existing
ways of writing. Latinate guise.) Thus the important Treaty of Cabreros of
This latter idea was taken up by politicians who felt that 1206, which established the political relationship between
each kingdom deserved its own written language, an idea Castile and León for ever after, was the first such treaty
which is still powerful in regions of Spain and Italy. Thus it anywhere to be written in Romance vernacular (edited in
is probably no accident that the Catalans, who seem to have Wright 2000); half a century later, King Alfonso X’s Fuero
been happy to use the written Romance modes developed Real of 1256, the collective law code of his expanding Cas-
for Occitan during the second half of the twelfth century, tilian kingdom, established the written vernacular as having
when the two areas were both ruled from Barcelona, devel- full legal validity. Philological analysis on its own would not
oped their own distinctive writing system shortly after the reveal what was going on; historical and social analysis would
battle of Muret (1213) which led to the political separation not get much further without the philology; it has been the
of the two areas. Similarly, the idea that Portuguese was a sociophilological combination of the two which has led to our
separate language from Galician, needing a distinctive writ- current understanding of how and why the invention and
ten form, followed the late twelfth-century political inde- then the use of Romance writing spread as it did.
pendence of Portugal from Galicia. Conversely, the idea that Once almost all texts were written in Romance, by the
Leonese was a separate language from Castilian, deserving late thirteenth century, the philologist’s analyses become
its own writing system and social identity, did not last long more straightforward. There were still some aspects of
after the political union of the two areas under Fernando III standardization which meant that the written text was not
in 1230. Italian linguistic politics were, as ever, more com- a direct photographic representation of a spoken counter-
plicated in that there were a large number of politically part, but standardization in medieval Romance languages
independent units and fewer centralizing and standardizing was never as strict as it was in Latin, despite the gradual
tendencies until the very end of the Middle Ages. Broadly spread of the Paris-based scripta in France and the Castilian-
speaking, though, it was the combination of the fashion for based scripta in the Kingdom of Castile. Latin was taken to be
new writing systems and political nationalism which led to the language that had grammar. The growth in the gram-
the general adoption, all over western Europe, including matical study of the vernacular began in Italy in the fif-
French-speaking England and the Low Countries, of a locally teenth century, and was given much impetus by Nebrija at
elaborated vernacular writing mode rather than Latin for the court of Ferdinand and Isabel, but these figures are part
practical and administrative purposes. (The sociophilologi- of the intellectual atmosphere that mark the end of the
cal background to the emergence of written Romanian is a Middle Ages, beyond the remit of the present chapter.
23
CHAPTER 3
Early evidence and sources

B A R B A R A F R A N K -J O B AND MARIA SELIG
3.1 Introduction the Iberian Peninsula, where a rich production of charters

and other legal texts documents the new functions of the
The first texts documenting the Romance vernaculars date written vernaculars, the contrast for the other Romance-
from the eighth and ninth centuries AD. One of the earliest of speaking areas is not as dramatic, but still considerable:
these texts is the Indovinello Veronese, a short riddle mixing Iberian Peninsula (without Catalonia) 750-1150: 7; 1150-
Romance and Latin sentences and scribbled between 730 and 1250: 870 (805 charters and legal texts); Catalan and Occitan
750 AD by an Italian copyist on the front pages of a Visigothic areas 750-1150: 88; 1150-1250: 216; Italian areas 750-1150:
prayer book (Frank and Hartmann 1997:1091). Another fam- 16; 1150-1250: 62; Sardinia 750-1150: 19; 1150-1250: 20;
ous example is provided in the Strasbourg Oaths, the citation Raeto-Romance areas 750-1150: 2; 1150-1250: 1.
of oral oath formulas in a Latin chronicle written by Nithard, The quantitative data are in accord with the sociocultural
a grandchild of Charlemagne, in the second half of the ninth development of the Romance-speaking world of late
century and transmitted in a tenth-century manuscript antiquity and the early and high Middle Ages. The decline
(Frank and Hartmann 1997:5016). Further references would in literacy from the seventh century onwards (e.g. the
add a multitude of pragmatic contexts in which Romance abandonment of lay schooling and the retreat of literacy
sentences or texts were written down. They show that the to clerical institutions) is reflected in a widening gap separ-
very first Romance documents are not attached to a cultural ating written clerical and oral lay culture (Riché 1962;
movement aiming at institutionalizing Romance vernaculars Banniard 1992). It is important to point out that this gap
as written languages, but to singular and varying circum- was not only cultural but also linguistic. Latin was, after the
stances in which writing in the vernacular was a preferable codification undertaken by, for instance, Quintilian in the
exception to using Latin, which was the normal written second century AD and Donatus in the fourth, a standard
language (Selig 2006; 2008a). language that integrated only some of the linguistic devel-
To detail and strengthen this view, let us first look at the opments characteristic of the spoken, diglossically low ver-
quantitative data. Up to 1150, Romance documentation is naculars (Cuzzolin and Haverling 2009). The extent to which
fragmentary and accidental. In northern France and Anglo- Latin in late antiquity became a diglossic high variety that
Norman England, for instance, there are 21 Romance manu- was ‘learned largely by formal education and [ . . . ] used for
scripts dating from the period between 750 and 1150; other most written and formal spoken purposes but [ . . . ] not used
Romance-speaking areas add another 132 manuscripts for by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation’
the same period (Iberian Peninsula, 7; Catalan and Occitan (Ferguson 1959:336) is the subject of lively debate among
areas, 88; Italian areas, 16; Sardinia, 19; Raeto-Romance Latin and Romance scholars (Banniard 1992; Wright 2002;
areas, 2). Though surely manuscripts have been lost, this is 2012; Varvaro 2013b; see also Ch. 2 and §36.3). Suffice it to
an extremely small number of documents compared not say that the Romance vernaculars developed in contexts
only to the Latin tradition but also to Old English and old complementary to formal and written communication, and
High German vernacular manuscripts (Lusignan 2011:15f.). that in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages the standard
Only from 1150 onwards do we have a continually increas- written language ceased to follow the changes characteris-
ing number of written Romance texts. Between 1150 and tic of the informal and non-elitist varieties. It should be
1250, the Inventaire (Frank and Hartmann 1997) lists 1,225 clear that this was not the end of Latin nor the end of Latin
manuscripts coming from Anglo-Norman England and communication between clerics and the laity (what
northern France and another 1,169 from other Romance- Banniard 1992 calls ‘vertical communication’). There was
speaking areas. In Anglo-Norman England and northern no communicative breakdown, necessitating the ‘invention’
France, this amounts to an increase to 58 times larger in of Romance writing. Rather, we have a long period of oligo-
only a quarter of the time in comparison to the preceding literacy (Goody and Watt 1968). During this situation, where
period: 750-1150: 21; 1150-1250: 1225. With the exception of literacy was restricted to a very small educated elite, two
24 This chapter © Barbara Frank-Job and Maria Selig 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
EARLY EVIDENCE AND SOURCES
cultures—a clerical written, Latin culture and the oral the coexistence of two cultures: on the one hand, the highly
Romance culture of the laity—coexisted. Only in the twelfth literate Latin culture of the clergy and, on the other, the
century do we find clear evidence for the massive appro- oral culture of laypeople. These two cultures were inter-
priation of literacy outside the clerical elite (Martin woven, and there was no clear-cut border between tradi-
1988:121-77). By then, the overwhelming domination of tions attached to Latin and developing Romance literacy
Latin in written communication began to be weakened by (Selig 2006; 2011). The latter drew largely on the culture
the increasing use of Romance varieties in writing. This was of the centuries-long written tradition of Latin as an
the starting point of a centuries-long standardization pro- elaborated and codified standard language, known in
cess in the course of which the Romance vernaculars gained medieval times as grammatica. This included references
a new shape as they developed into diasystems with written to linguistic practices developed in Latin written trad-
vernacular varieties dominating them. ition, but also the adoption of the textual practices devel-
This brief survey of the sociolinguistic and sociocultural oped in the traditional domains of Latin writing and in its
evolution shows that we need to make an internal differen- well-defined range of discourse traditions (i.e. genres or
tiation of the written evidence. We propose to distinguish a text types; cf. Koch 1997a). These Latin discourse tradi-
first period which starts with the appearance of entire texts tions constituted an integral part of the medieval Lebens-
or parts of texts written in Romance, not in Latin (for prior welt functioning within the communicative needs and
and indirect documentation of Romance developments in aims of their practitioners.
Latin texts, see Ch. 1). These texts give direct access to the Latin and its discourse traditions were, however, not the
vernacular, and document a new awareness of the linguistic only source of early Romance written evidence. The second
differences between normal written Latin and varieties used sociocultural framework for the beginning of Romance writ-
outside this functional domain. By choosing non-Latin ing is provided by vernacular orality, be it the ceremonial
forms as a means of written communication, the scribe/ (diglossically high) communications of the laity (‘elaborated
author documents the new status of formerly solely spoken orality’; cf. Koch and Oesterreicher 2001; 2012; cf. also
Romance varieties. Yet it is not easy to decide whether Assmann and Czaplicka 1995:126) or discourse traditions
these varieties are still part of a diasystem including and rooted in the oral practices of everyday communication in
dominated by Latin or whether they should be analysed as pragmatic or informal contexts. These oral discourse prac-
autonomous languages. We will opt for the first solution, tices are only indirectly accessible nowadays through the
prolonging the diglossic situation up to the moment when medium of written texts. Yet their oral origins are still
the increasing use of Romance in writing initiates its full detectable due to some of their formal and semantic fea-
emancipation from Latin and the emergence of vernacular tures. Their written transmission is, however, overlaid with
varieties firmly attached to communicative distance and writ- typical features of the written tradition.
ten usage. This bipartite division of early Romance evidence Looking at the appearance of the vernaculars in the written
will be reflected in the following sections. First, we will talk media from the angle of discourse traditions and their prag-
about the early fragmentary and sporadic use of Romance matic anchoring in formal or informal communicative
forms in writing, showing the communicative contexts which conditions (‘communicative distance/communicative immedi-
are more prone to abandon Latin in favour of Romance acy’; cf. Koch 1997a; Koch and Oesterreicher 2001; 2012;
varieties (§3.2). The analysis of the early documentation Oesterreicher 1997) allows us to gain an overview of the
will be followed by some reflections on later developments medieval Romance-speaking world, which goes beyond their
attached to the institutionalization of Romance-language lit- many local particularities and helps us to detect the ‘path-
eracy, such as the development of local scribal traditions ways’ leading to early Romance written texts. In fact, we can
(scriptae) and tendencies to koineization (§3.3). Finally, we observe in all the Romance regions the emergence of the same
will conclude these reflections about the early Romance evi- types of written texts, which can be divided into three groups.
dence and sources with some remarks on the consequences First of all, there are short geographically and tempor-
for editorial work and linguistic data analysis (§3.4). ally scattered stretches of limited communicative impact
belonging to the everyday practices of communicative
immediacy (Koch and Oesterreicher 2001; 2012) as well as
texts or parts of texts which were not intended for
3.2 Early Romance texts: ‘pathways’ repeated reception, written outside the usual text field
to vernacular writing traditions of a manuscript and often accompanying or inserted in
Latin texts. Their transmission was exclusively due to the
The appearance of written evidence of the Romance lan- Latin texts and manuscripts they were added to. With
guages took place in a sociohistorical situation shaped by Oesterreicher (1993) we can call this type of Romance texts
25
‘in-scripturations’.1 Very often, these texts are bilingual, 1997:1093), and the oldest inscriptions in volgare (‘vernacular’)
Latin–Romance, attesting to the typical diglossic situation from the Italian area (Frank and Hartmann 1997:1001-4).
of the Romance-speaking societies of the early Middle Ages These documents were the continuation of a long-standing
(Selig 1993) with Latin representing the high variety, tradition of late Latin scribes who played with the linguistic
Romance the low (cf. §3.2.1). contrast between the high and the low varieties (e.g. Classical
A second context is provided by all sorts of ‘pragmatic’ vs vulgar Latin) for humoristic or ideological purposes (Selig
texts which facilitate the professional work of its authors, 1993). For the scribes of these vernacular texts or passages
such as administrative or juridical texts, but also lists of within texts, there was a smooth transition from the contrast
accounts, taxes, debtors, or goods (cf. §3.2.2). Finally, we between vulgar Latin and Classical Latin to that between
have to mention all those Romance texts which, as literary Romance vernaculars and Latin.
texts, contribute to the cultural memory of the society and The marginal and somewhat contingent character of
therefore account for their authors’ and scribes’ metalin- these short and often fragmentarily recorded texts in
guistic awareness of the vernaculars as languages in their Romance shows that writing them down was not perceived
own right, side by side with Latin (cf. §3.2.3). These texts are by medieval scribes as the start of a new tradition or even as
the very first and almost premature vestiges of discourse the launching of writing conventions for the vernaculars.
traditions which belonged to the collective memory of the On the contrary, the Romance texts or passages function as
secular society and whose unfolding and expansion first a stylistic contrast within the Latin context, and in this
started after 1150. Only these last two types of discourse sense represent the continuation of written vulgar Latin.
traditions contributed to the collective memory of the This is the case of the volgare (‘vernacular’) inscriptions
Romance-speaking communities and can therefore attest representing the utterances of ordinary people in mural
to ‘in-scripturalization’ (Oesterreicher 1993; Tristram paintings and mosaics of northern Italy (examples are listed
1998), the process that eventually resulted in the conven- in Frank and Hartmann 1997:1001-32), where the Italo-
tionalization of supraregional writing norms and text tra- Romance parts were meant to contrast with the Latin pas-
ditions, and, in the end, in the standardization of the sages within the text with a comic effect or an ideological
Romance languages. purpose (Koch 1999). In the mural paintings representing
the story of St Clement in Rome (Frank and Hartmann
1997:1003), for example, the evil pagans speak in the vulgar
3.2.1 In-scripturation: inserting Romance vernacular whereas the saint speaks in Latin. For most of
utterances in Latin texts the scribes using Romance in their probationes pennae,
namely their scribblings in the margins of Latin manu-
scripts, these utterances were clearly meant to represent
Accompanying the presentation of documents in Tables 3.1– spontaneous and expressive speech, be it vulgar Latin or
3.3, we give an overview of the documents stemming from Romance. This is the case in the oldest evidence for Raeto-
before the middle of the twelfth century, commenting on Romance, a probatio pennae added to the front page of a Latin
some of them in more detail.2 Due to limitations of space, the manuscript at the monastery of St Gallen in Switzerland
lists contain only the most important Romance texts (Frank and Hartmann 1997:1092). Here the scribe starts with
attested before 1150. The written documentation of spon- a biblical citation in Latin and continues with the spontan-
taneous utterances is attested in nearly all regions of the eous expression of his emotions:
Romance-speaking world, and in most cases, these attest-
ations represent the very first documentation of the respect- Hoc est deus meus. (Latin:) This is my God.
ive vernaculars: examples include the Probatio pennae (‘pen deus meus, ut quid dereli- my God, why hast Thou forsaken
trials’) in Raeto-Romance (Frank and Hartmann 1997:1092), quisti me j Diderros me j (Raeto-Romance:) Diderros
the Italo-Romance Postilla amiatina (Frank and Hartmann nehabe should
diegemuscha j earn a fly from it[ . . . ]
[...] [...]
1
The terms ‘in-scripturation’ and ‘in-scripturalization’ (Tristram In principio erat uerbum3 (Latin:) In the beginning was
1998:12) translate the corresponding German distinction between Verschrif- the Word
tung and Verschriftlichung (Oesterreicher 1993). The former refers to a more
or less word-for-word transfer from the spoken to the written medium,
while the latter implies the presence of such specific conventions of written
3
texts as textual coherence, structural completeness, and lexical precision. Liver (2010:84). Our translation follows the interpretation of Sabatini
2
Our overview will not include the Romanian area, which shows a (1963:153) cited by Liver (2010:84f.) and the reading of diege as a verbal form
considerable delay with respect to the appearance of the first vernacular following Liver (2002), who gives the corresponding Latin translation of the
documents (Windisch 1993; §8.1). utterance as: ‘Diderros inde habere debeat muscam’.
26
Table 3.1 In-scripturation: Romance utterances in Latin texts

DATE OF NAME , INVENTORY NO . COMMUNICATIVE CONTEXT LANGUAGE ( S )
DOCUMENT
8th c. Indovinello veronese probatio pennae; bilingual riddle added Latin–Italo-Romance

IS 1091 to the front pages of a prayer book
1st half of 9th Graffitto di Commodilla Mural inscription; graffito Italo-Romance
IS 1001
c.960–963 Placiti Cassinesi Citations of testimonies in Latin court Latin–Italo-Romance
documents (Campanian)
1087 Postilla amiatina Short commentary added to a Latin Italo-Romance added to a
IS 1093 charter Latin text
c.1000 Probatio Pennae of Würzburg Added to the first page of a Latin Latin–Raeto-Romance
IS 1092 manuscript
11th c., end Iscrizione di San Clemente Mural inscription; utterances of persons Latin–Italo-Romance
IS 1003 illustrated in a fresco (Roman)
10th–11th c. Nithardi Historiarum Libri IV, Romance oath formulas in a Latin Latin citations of spoken
containing the oaths of historiographic text oaths in French and German
Strasbourg
IS 5016
11th c. Deux griffonnages français Marginal notes in the Latin Vita French added to a Latin text
IS 1094 Sancti Cilliani
11th c. Didascalia sopra una figura di Legend accompanying the picture Greek–Italo-Romance
leone of a lion added on the last flyleaf
IS 1024 of a Byzantine codex
11th c. Glosas Emilianenses Glosses in a Latin manuscript Spanish (Navarro-
IS 1050 Aragonese) and Basque
added to Latin texts
11th c. Glosas Silenses Glosses translating a Latin penitential Spanish translation added to
IS 1051 a Latin text
c.1148 Mosaico dei duellanti di Vercelli Italo-Romance inscriptions in a mosaic Italo-Romance utterances of
IS 1002 originating from the cathedral persons illustrated in the
of Vercelli mosaic
IS = Inventaire systématique in Frank and Hartmann (1997). The statistics are based on the overview in the same work.
Nearly the same case can be seen in a short marginal note [this] is well done for he will render it to you. Ave Maria
scrawled in a Latin collection of saints’ lives in which the gratia plena Dominus4
scribe expresses his emotions in Romance words, but
changes to Latin for the conventional text of the prayer
The palaeographic and linguistic analysis of these very
(all other scribblings in the margins of this manuscript are
short texts shows that each scribe had to overcome the
in Latin):
problems of recording a not yet codified language, and
had to devise his own system for rendering spoken utter-
[ . . . ] en noster segneur [ . . . ] ie croi ke uos ames par amos
ances using a graphic system designed for Latin. As can
nostre segnor
[ . . . ] in our Lord [ . . . ] I think that you love with love our
Lord 4
Frank and Hartmann 1997:1094: Douai, Bibliothèque municipale,
bin est raison | car il uos puet bin rendere aue Maria gracia ms. 857, f. 110v, the manuscript and scribbled note both date from the
plena Dominus 11th c. Text following Gysseling (1949:210, Appendice, no. 1).
27
easily be seen, most of the texts cited from this group are cela re/decir ka s(an)c(t)e Ius/te kesos .U.
written without using the system of abbreviations vineyard around [the monastery of] San Justo five cheeses.
employed in Latin writing. Furthermore, where spaces Inilo/alio de apa te/II kesos en que
were used between words, the amalgamation of preposi- In the other of the abbot’s, two cheeses.—In which
tions and articles with the lexemes they are associated with pu seron ogano/kesos : IIII Inilo
shows a Latin-based conception of morphology (Frank they planted this year, four. In the one
1994:42-60). However, these sporadic experiments with the de ka strelo :I:
vernacular could not lead to a tradition. They did not cor- of Castrillo, one,
respond to the needs of formal written communication. Inila uinia maIore/:II: [ . . . ]
Thus there was, for the scribes, no need for continuity in in the big vineyard, two [ . . . ].6
these writing practices.
For this kind of writing, the information-storage capaci-
ties of the graphic medium are decisive. Texts of this type
3.2.2 In-scripturalization I: pragmatic (In-scripturalization I) contain data of all kinds: information
texts in professional contexts about merchandise, estates, or properties as well as fees,
taxes, and lists of debtors among other things. With the
Conto navale pisano (end of the eleventh or beginning of the
The texts of this second group all turn out to be the (some- twelfth century), the enumeration of payments made by the
times premature) forerunners of pragmatic discourse tradi- city of Pisa for its merchant marine, the very beginnings of
tions which were to take over the functions of former Latin north Italian municipal administration in the vernacular is
practices in monasteries, chanceries, or the administrative represented. The survival of this early representation is
offices of courts and towns. Latin traditions provided a large due to the fact that the parchment containing it was used
repertoire of formulas and textual models for the vernacu- to protect the cover of a Latin codex. As a result, we can
lars that were first sporadically and later regularly inserted conclude that these types of Romance writing were not
into the respective Latin text formulas. intended for longer-lasting transmission. Yet as premature
Scribes of Latin charters frequently inserted citations of examples of an emerging writing practice, these early prag-
vernacular testimonies or oaths (originating from older matic texts show that Romance had become an ordinary
German oral law) into the framework of Latin charters, as part of communicative life in monasteries, chanceries, and
can be seen in the feudal oaths from southern France and urban offices.
Catalonia, which stood at the beginning of a broad medieval
tradition of private charters in the vernaculars (Frank 1996;
Kosto 2007). 3.2.3 In-scripturalization II: discourse
The linguistic form of these texts is rather simple—many
of them are mere lists (Koch 1990)—and many, such as the
traditions and cultural memory
feudal oaths, show a highly formulaic style. The scribes
inserted the vernacular into the Latin context without The texts belonging to this group clearly rank among the
highlighting the language switch in the layout of the docu- most famous early medieval texts of the Romance lan-
ments; or they added the vernacular in the blank spaces of guages. The scribes/authors of these texts willingly estab-
Latin charters or manuscripts. Thus, the Nodicia de kesos, the lished new discourse traditions and contributed to the
oldest extant pragmatic text from Spain, was added in the emergence of Romance conventions for texts belonging to
blank verso (reverse side) of a Latin charter dating from the the cultural memory of the lay community. Of course, the
tenth century. The text contains a short list which indicates emergence of diglossically high ceremonial texts in the
occasions of the donation of cheeses (for the work of the vernaculars was directly affected by Latin writing tradi-
monks of the abbey) followed by the respective number of tions, taking its point of departure from these. This was
cheeses:5
No di cia de/kesos que/espisit f(rate)r /

Note about cheeses that Brother 6
Nodicia de kesos, León, Archivo de la Catedral, ms. 852, 1st part (end of
se meno Inlab[ore]/def(rat)r(e)s Inilo ba the 10th c.). For a complete reproduction of this selection see <http://
Semeno donated for the work of the brothers. In the cembranos.org/fotos/Nodicia%20de%20Kesos.JPG> (last download 27 May
2013); for a detailed analysis with the complete transcription and Spanish
translation, see Morala Rodríguez (2008). See Frank (1994:55-7) for an
5
Our transcription follows the layout of the original text. analysis of the graphic conventions of the scribe.
28
Table 3.2 In-scripturalization I: pragmatic texts

DATE OF NAME , INVENTORY NO . COMMUNICATIVE CONTEXT LANGUAGE ( S )
DOCUMENT
1st quarter of Glossario di Monza Fragment of an Italo-Romance– Italo-Romance (Lombard)–Greek

the 10th IS 1078 Greek glossary for a travelling (Byzantine)
century clerk (the glossary contains a
vocabulary of everyday use)
c.980 Nodicia de kesos List written by a monk of the Spanish (Leonese) mixed with
IS 9059 abbey of San Justo y Pastor some Latin words
c.1034 Serment de fidélité prêté par Roger Oath of fealty sworn by the count Latin–Occitan (only parts of the
Ier, comte de Foix, à son oncle Peire, of Foix to the archbishop of oaths are in Romance)
évêque de Gérone Gérone
IS 72153
Middle to end Conjurations romanes dans le Conjuration formulae for the Latin–Occitan
of 10th c. Breviarium Alarici healing of injuries, added on in
IS 3076 the margins of a Latin
manuscript in the possession of
the cathedral of Clermont-
Ferrand
c.1050 Convention Convention with a feudal oath Latin–Catalan (only parts of the
IS 75002 between private individuals oaths are in Romance; the rest of
the charter and parts of the
oaths are in Latin)
1035–1055 Jurament feudal de Ramon Oath of fealty Latin–Catalan (only parts of the
IS 75001 oaths are in Romance)
c.1053 Serment de fidélité prété par Guillem Oath of fealty sworn by the count Latin–Occitan (only parts of the
II de Besalu of Besalu to the archbishop of oaths are in Romance)
IS 72150 Narbonne
c.1078 Serment de fidélité prêté par la Oath of fealty sworn by the Latin–Occitan (only parts of the
vicomtesse de Narbonne viscountess of Narbonne to the oaths are in Romance)
IS 72151 archbishop of Narbonne
Discourse tradition of feudal oaths in south France and Catalonia
1089 Carta cagliaritana Charter, confirmation of a Sardinian (written in the Greek
IS 74017 donation alphabet)
Discourse tradition of Sardinian charters in the Greek alphabet
c.1090 Partición de Huesca Note regarding the partition of Latin–Spanish
IS 9060 goods
End of 11th or Conto navale pisano List of expenses concerning the Italian (Tuscan)
beginning of IS 9061 equipping of ships by the city of
12th c. Pisa
c.1120 Premier et second cartulaire de Cartulary of the monastery of Latin–Occitan
l’aumônerie de Saint-Martial Saint-Martial de Limoges
contenant des notices de donations containing notes on donations
IS 9121–9212, 9123–9125
Before 1150 Cartulaire des vicomtes de Millau Cartulary of the viscounts of Occitan – Latin (only few parts
contenant le Censier de la vicomté Millau containing the Zinsbuch are relevant)
IS 9017 (Book of Tithes) of the county
Discourse traditions: charters and administrative texts of monasteries in Occitan
c.1150 Nota en català coŀloquial Short commentary added to a Catalan added to a Latin text
IS 1095 Latin charter
29
only possible because, at least in the beginning, this was in had not yet been elaborated for this purpose. After a few
accordance with the interests of the clergy. In fact, nearly lines full of omissions and intricate phrases, the scribe gave
all the early texts we find in this group seem to stand in up (Liver 2010:85).
close relation to the instructional programme of the Caro- With the success of this type of Romance text production,
lingian Reform (see §2.9), and in particular to conform to the vernacular took on its role in the cultural domains
the wish of the Church to open to the laity the most hitherto reserved for the Latin of the Church. For the first
important parts of the Christian faith—whose practice had time in the Middle Ages, lay people participated in the
until then been exclusively in Latin. cultural memory of literacy, and this had a strong impact
Starting in northern France shortly after the Carolingian on the evolution of Romance written traditions. From the
reforms, these discourse traditions, which contributed to mid-twelfth century onwards we see, particularly in north-
the participation of the laity in Church ceremonies (e.g. ern and southern France, an explosion of written vernacular
para-liturgical songs, prayers and plays, sermons, and the texts—sermons, para-liturgical songs and plays, and hagio-
religious instructions of the laity), seemed to blaze trails for graphic narratives, but also examples of older oral narrative
the future use of writing in the Romance vernaculars. Most and lyrical forms which were, from then on, committed to
of these texts are bilingual, leaving the official (liturgical) writing: the chansons de geste, the poems of troubadours and
part in Latin and employing the Romance languages in the trouvères, courtly romances, and short narratives. Together
more emotional and imaginative parts. with these novel written text traditions, a new courtly and
The oldest of these texts, the Laudes de Soissons, added to urban Romance-language reading public was emerging.
the Latin Litany of the Saints a formula of benediction in the
vernacular which addressed the Carolingian princes. Even if
the Romance parts of the text are short (commonly only the
name(s) of the prince(s) followed by a collective To lo(s) iuva
‘May Thou bless him/them’), their repetitive and collective
3.3 Writing without focused norms:
use must, for the people who until then were not used to scriptae and koinés
participating in church ceremonies at all, have made a great
impression on lay churchgoers, and certainly had an impact From the mid-twelfth century, the increasing use of writing
on the collective identity of Carolingian congregants. Start- by the laity and the emergence of a lay public for written
ing from these subtle beginnings, the discourse traditions of vernacular literature changed the sociolinguistic conditions
para-liturgical songs, prayers, plays, and dances began their of vernacular literacy. In the diglossic situation in which
triumphant advance first in northern and southern France, Latin was the uncontested high written variety and
but from the twelfth century onwards in Italy and Spain Romance only sporadically surfaced in written texts, we
as well.7 cannot expect what modern sociolinguistics (in standard-
Within the context of the reforms of Cluny and, some- ization research) has described as the processes attached to
what later for the Spanish regions, the reform of Burgos, the the increasing use of written language (external/internal
translation of the most important sacred texts was part of elaboration, selection/acceptance, codification; cf. Haugen
the instructional programme for laypeople. In the textual 1983; see also Ch. 37). But when chansons de geste or other
transition to Romance this textual practice starts with literary genres became firmly associated with reading and
interlinear and marginal translations of the Bible or texts writing and when not only clerics but also lay people began
for the catechism (e.g. the Formula di confessione umbra, to use the written medium for demanding linguistic tasks
Frank and Hartmann 1997:2176, or the famous Eadwine Psal- (external elaboration), the linguistic situation changed: pro-
ter containing interlinear translations in English and cesses such as the creation of complex structures capable of
(Anglo-Norman) French, Frank and Hartmann 1997:2044). fulfilling the tasks typical of communicative distance
The very first instances show that the work of translation (internal elaboration) as well as tendencies to develop
from Latin to a completely un-normed language of everyday supra-local norms, the so-called scriptae (selection/accept-
use was complex and arduous. The Raeto-Romance transla- ance), accompanied the institutionalization of vernacular
tion of the beginning of a Latin sermon (interlinear trans- writing and prepared the ground for standardization.
lation from Einsiedeln, Frank and Hartmann 1997:2135) These processes varied in intensity from region to region,
shows the major difficulties the scribes had in rendering but throughout the Romance-speaking areas and continuing
the complex style of the Latin text in a vernacular which until at least the sixteenth century, the linguistic situation
was marked by the absence of codified standard written
7
See Frank and Hartmann (1997:213-41) with more examples from languages which were dominant within a stable vernacular
northern and southern France, Italy, Castile, and Catalonia. diasystem with low local or regional dialects. Thus, the
30
Table 3.3 In-scripturalization II: cultural memory

DATE OF DOCUMENT NAME , INVENTORY NO . COMMUNICATIVE CONTEXT LANGUAGE ( S )
End of 8th c. Laudes de Soissons Formula of benediction in Latin–French

IS 2054 the Latin Litany of the Saints
End of 9th c. Séquence en l’honneur de Sequence about the life of a French
sainte Eulalie saint
IS 2055
1st half of 10th c. Sermon anonyme sur Jonas Outline of a bilingual sermon Latin–French
IS 2134
Last third of 10th c. Chanson de la Passion, Para-liturgical song about French
fragment from Augsburg the passion of Christ (Berschin and Berschin 2011)
IS 2056
Late 11th c. Interlinear translation Partial translation of a Latin Latin–Raeto-Romance
from Einsiedeln sermon added to a pseudo-
IS 2135 Augustinian sermon
End of 11th c. Formula di confessione umbra Confessional formula Italo-Romance (Umbrian)–Latin
IS 2176 inserted into a collection of (the texts to be spoken by the penitent
liturgical and para-liturgical and by the priest are in Umbrian; the
texts formula for the absolution is in Latin)
11th c. Boëci Hagiographic song about a Occitan
IS 2093 saint’s life
c.1000 Passion du Christ (1) et Saint Para-liturgical song about (1) French with evidence of influence
Léger (2) the passion of Christ (1) from Occitan–Latin
IS 2057 Para-liturgical song about (2) French
the life of a saint (2)
c.1000 Alba bilingue Para-liturgical song in Latin Latin–Occitan
IS 2058 and Occitan (a matins hymn)
c.1100 Chanson de Sainte Foy d’Agen Para-liturgical song about a Occitan
IS 2059 saint’s life
c.1100 Para-liturgical songs from Collection of para-liturgical Latin–Occitan (4 Occitan songs in a
Saint-Martial de Limoges songs related to Mary collection of Latin songs)
IS 2060
Beginning of 12th c. Cérémonial d’une épreuve Instructions for a trial by Latin–French (most of the text is in
judiciare ordeal Latin; the scribe performs
IS 2169 intrasentential code-switching
between French and Latin )
Beginning of 12th c. Sermons limousins First part of a collection of Occitan–Latin
IS 2136 sermons
1st part of 12th c. Epître farcie de saint Etienne Para-liturgical song about a Latin–French (region of Tours)
IS 2063 saint’s life inserted in a Latin
missal (missale turonense)
c.1150 Quant li solleiz Para-liturgical hymn about (Norman) French
IS 2061 the Song of Solomon
c.1150 Hilarii ludi Collection of para-liturgical Latin–French (2 of 15 plays are in
IS 2064 plays with French refrains French)
Middle of 12th c. Eadwine Psalter containing Interlinear translation of Latin–(Anglo-Norman) French–English
interlinear translations liturgical texts: the Latin text
IS 2044 with both an English and a
French translation
31
process not only of elaboration and codification, but also of manuscripts by removing all non-Milanese elements. Cer-
selection and acceptance were far from being completed in tainly, the copyists did change the language of the texts by
the period we are looking at. adapting it to the public they were writing for. But the
Traditional approaches to the early phases of Romance Milanese version Contini creates is an ahistorical hypoth-
writing traditions have generally ignored the standardizing esis by a modern scholar and is certainly far from the
dynamics. The idea was that in the early phases, scribes and language of a medieval cleric who knew and practised
authors started by using their local dialects, and that the Latin as well as the vernacular, and who was writing not
emergence of supra-local standards was accomplished by for his urban compatriots but for a Christian discourse
taking over the most prestigious among the existing written community with no precise local restrictions (Wilhelm
dialects. This idea is much too simple to do justice to the 2009).
emergence of the new standard languages, nor does it do Many other editors besides Contini have tried to extrapo-
justice to the earliest texts. For, after all, the future standard late an ‘original’ on the basis of the differing manuscript
varieties would not turn out to be identical to any single versions of medieval texts. The work of the copyists was
regional dialect, but would be the result of a mixing of nearly always seen as a source of contamination, distorting
heterogeneous linguistic features. Furthermore, the early what was originally meant to be a locally homogeneous
scribes did not reproduce their local dialect faithfully when linguistic artefact. It is essential to emphasize that the
undertaking the task of writing a vernacular text. A local knowledge about what was, dialectically speaking, the cor-
dialect, which is an ensemble of linguistic forms anchored in rect form relied heavily on nineteenth-century data,
everyday conversation, is not readily adaptable to written because dialects, and especially dialect borders, were
vernacular communication aimed at a supra-local public. In assumed to be stable and not subject to divergence over
situations of communicative distance, the medieval authors time (cf. Dees 1980; 1987; Lodge 2004:53-102). Those inter-
could not yet switch to a supra-local variety, because only ested in securing medieval evidence for dialectal variation
Latin was suitable for this role. But they could ‘delocalize’ therefore suggested dismissing literary texts and concen-
their language by integrating Latinisms, by taking over the trating on charters handed down in only one copy, which
linguistic features of prestigious discourse traditions such could be localized and dated by using external evidence.
as Occitan or Sicilian courtly lyric poetry, or by choosing This, in turn, would permit scholars to localize the linguistic
forms common to more than one regional speech commu- features used in the text. But even in this case, the trad-
nity. In doing that, they created linguistically hybrid texts, itional idea of homogeneity turned out to be insufficient.
but the linguistic form of their texts was, consequently, now Remacle (1948), who analysed one of the earliest Wallon
clearly distant from everyday conversation (Selig 2008b). charters, discovered that even the language of charters was
The idea of linguistic hybridization in early Romance not local, but integrated elements belonging to other dialect
texts contrasts with traditional concepts, but is more suited areas. He therefore introduced the notion of scripta into
to an explanation of why we rarely, if ever, find dialectally medieval philology, by which he meant a written variety
homogeneous texts among the early written Romance used regularly by medieval scribes and containing local as
sources. One of the most widely debated problems, the well as supra-local features. Remacle insisted on the dis-
localization of the Strasbourg Oaths, is much less puzzling tance separating this variety from the medieval dialects. In
in view of a conception of the feudal oath as something used his opinion, even the charters could not reflect local dialects
throughout the entire Carolingian realm and leading to a because it was not one of the intentions of the scribes to
mixing of southern and northern dialect forms (and Latin document the spoken everyday language. On the other
forms as well). Such a solution obviates the need to search hand, he emphasized the regional nature of the scriptae,
for a place where all the isoglosses evoked by the text each scripta having a limited regional spread because unify-
coincide. Even if written in Poitiers, as Castellani (1969) ing factors such as central administrations or centralizing
proposes, the Strasbourg Oaths were not Poitevin, but Caro- literary traditions were still too weak.
lingian. The same argument is applicable when examining One of the major problems, then, is to explain why and
vernacular texts with an extended manuscript tradition. how supra-local practices developed and how they spread.
Traditional philology has persistently tried to reconstruct Remacle himself suggested that the scribe of the Wallon
a lost original in order to obtain a dialectally homogeneous charter he analysed tried to imitate central Parisian lan-
text. One of the most famous examples of such a reconstruc- guage, thus sticking to the idea that, from a very early date,
tion is Contini’s (1960) edition of Bonvesin da la Riva, a vernacular literacy in northern France was oriented
Milanese cleric writing religious instruction for the laity. towards the prestigious variety of the Île-de-France. As
Contini claims that Bonvesin originally wrote in his Milan- there are practically no vernacular documents from the
ese dialect, and therefore ‘expurgates’ even the earliest Île-de-France before the middle of the thirteenth century
32
(Lusignan 2011:65-84), this is equivalent to postulating that clearly dominant standard varieties. Consequently, there is
the central dialect must have been diffused orally, possibly still considerable room for individual variation.
by means of an epic tradition (Hilty 1968). The major prob-
lem posed by this approach is that the first written ver-
nacular evidence from the Île-de-France has no clear
dialectal identity because it integrates numerous linguistic
3.4 From medieval manuscripts
features not originating in the region (Lodge 2004:80-102).
To explain this dialect mixing, Cerquiglini (1991) formulated
to linguistic data: pragmatic and
the hypothesis that the forerunner of the written central sociolinguistic recontextualization
documents went back to the Carolingian chancery, which
planned and consciously created a hybrid variety unifying The preceding sections have clearly shown that the early
the different oïl-speaking areas. Another attempt to explain period of transmission of the Romance languages (eighth to
this dialect mixing is offered by Lodge (2004), who follows the twelfth centuries) constituted an exception to medieval
models of modern dialectology explaining the formation of Latin writing practices, on which they remained strongly
immigrant koinés in modern urban settings (Trudgill 1986; dependent for centuries. This is true also for the contexts
Kerswill 2002; Kerswill and Trudgill 2005; see also Grübl and the forms of transmission of the oldest documents.
2011). Lodge claims that the dialect mixing was the result of Particular codex forms and layouts for Romance texts only
an oral koineization process in medieval Paris. Immigrants, developed in the second phase (from 1150 onwards), the
coming to the new metropolitan centre and bringing with phase of tradition-building for the vernaculars. Before that,
them their autochthonous dialects, spontaneously created a the conservation of a written document in a Romance lan-
new vernacular that integrated the different dialect features guage represented fortuitous exceptions in which Romance
by accommodation processes in oral everyday conversation. documents written on a durable material survived, due in
It has also been suggested that written Castilian is based on all probability to their Latin context of transmission.
the result of koineization processes, in this case centred The profound influence of Latin writing traditions can be
around the migrations during the Reconquista period seen in the graphic conventions of early Romance texts, in
(Tuten 2003). Linguistic code-mixing, then, seems to be find- which Latin words served as orientation for word-separation
ing more and more acceptance among Romance scholars: practices (see §3.2.3) and in which layout patterns which
oral koineization is suggested to have taken place before were typical of Latin text traditions were chosen. This
the beginning of written documentation, as proposed by makes it indispensable that the editors of early Romance
Lodge or Tuten. Another approach sees hybridization as the texts respect these Latin contexts as carefully as possible.
result of written language planning among the clerks of the The editor should furnish a detailed description of the asso-
Carolingian chancery (Cerquiglini 1991). ciated Latin texts and the composition of the codex which
However that may be, it is not necessary to restrict contains the Romance text. Furthermore, the circumstances
accommodation processes to oral communication, nor to of its genesis and use also need to be indicated (locality, date,
restrict hybridization to a momentary effort at language identities of its owners, scribes and readers, etc.; Frank and
planning. The notion of scripta, introduced by Remacle and Hartmann 1997, I:13-16).
consolidated by subsequent research, or the conception of Traditional editions usually dating back to the nine-
written and oral koiné formation, formulated in order to teenth or the first half of the twentieth century rarely
explain the particularities of northern Italo-Romance writ- give a faithful representation of the medieval text. Hap-
ten vernacular (koiné padana; Sanga 1990), is sufficient to pily, most of the time we have a rich fund of information
grasp this peculiarity of written medieval vernaculars. The about the background of the manuscripts (and we should
language of medieval manuscripts is regional because it is make use of this contribution on the part of traditional
based on local dialects, the richest linguistic reality avail- philological scholarship). Unfortunately, however, these
able to medieval authors and scribes. It is, however, not a editions often distort the text of the manuscripts so much
direct reflection of the spoken dialects, because authors and that the original texts cannot—or can hardly—be recognized.
scribes created hybrid linguistic forms adapted to the new For a long time, indeed, it was common practice to remove
supra-local aims of their texts. If the intensity of written supposed inconsistencies or ‘faults’ whenever the editor
production triggers institutionalizing processes, these thought it necessary. Traditional editors also tried to minim-
forms can develop into scriptae, that is, specific linguistic ize the difference between medieval and modern layout
practices of chanceries and centres of manuscript produc- or (ortho)graphic conventions. Often, the editors did not
tion and/or associated with particular discourse traditions. indicate when they were expanding the abbreviations so
But these scriptae do not attain the status of fixed and frequently used in medieval manuscripts—a practice that
33
makes morphological research difficult, if not impossible cases of language contact and code-mixing, we still meet
(Schøsler 1984). with flexible and instable norms. In northern France, a
Editorial practices have changed, and we now have charter written for a local bourgeois public contains more
numerous editions which try to come as close as possible local and regional forms than one directed to aristocratic or
to the medieval situation. We can add that, with the possi- royal institutions—even when the same scribe wrote both of
bilities of modern digital editions, the wording chosen by them (Völker 2003). Another source of variation between
the editors can easily be supported with the help of digital texts according to their actual communicative background
images of the manuscript(s).8 There is an increasingly clear is the degree of dependence on Latin. When translating—or
tendency to avoid an anachronistic imposition of concepts better, adapting—the Dialogi of Gregory the Great to old
originating in modern standard language situations, and to French, the French author clearly devised new forms in
accept the specific textual and linguistic conditions of medi- trying to imitate Latin structures (Frank and Hartmann
eval vernacular texts. Zumthor (1987; 1990) showed that, in 1997:2156).
medieval vernacular culture, there was no idea of a fixed
(written) text to be preserved by the copiers, but rather that
of a fluid, flexible model to be followed (mouvance of the
medieval text). The many varying versions of a medieval 3.5 Final reflections
text often make it impossible for modern editors to distin-
guish clearly between author and scribe and between ori-
The analysis of the early evidence and sources of the
ginal and copy. We can adopt this conception of a flexible
Romance languages in the Middle Ages represents a field
model even when talking about linguistic norms. In medi-
of research in its own right that requires its own methods.
eval times, linguistic norms may have their sources in
The most important principle of this research is to avoid
everyday interaction, because these norms are grounded
anachronistic concepts and perspectives in the description
in a dense social network and frequent and continuous
and interpretation of the medieval data. Consequently, it is
interaction. However, the use of vernacular varieties in
necessary to abandon traditional conceptions of textual and
written communication entailed entering a communicative
linguistic norms, traditional ideas about written language
domain in which linguistic models existed, but in which
use, and clear-cut distinctions between languages or even
there was still considerable space for creativity in the
varieties. On the other hand, it is necessary to adopt the
search for solutions adapted to actual circumstances. One
results of modern sociolinguistic approaches to language
of the most striking examples of the openness of medieval
contact, multilingual practices in the everyday life of diglos-
linguistic norms is the hybrid language of some literary
sic communities, standardization, and the identitary and
adaptions (Occitan–French in the Girart de Roussillon or
normative power of writing the vernacular. In this sense
French–Lombardian in north Italian epics; cf. Pfister 1970;
old French, old Italian, and old Spanish are modern names
Holtus and Wunderli 2005). Even if we ignore these clear
for a linguistic reality which is difficult to capture: during
the first centuries of our period, we are confronted with the
coexistence of individual solutions produced within one
text, perhaps never to be reproduced by a larger speech
8
See <http://ebeowulf.uky.edu/> (last downloaded 8 October 2015). For community. Then, from 1150 onwards, we encounter a
more information about digital editions of medieval texts, see <www.digi-
talmedievalist.org>. For the early Romance texts mentioned here, most of multitude of scriptae, which were flexible regional norms
the digital editing work still remains to be done. There are, however, a few and which were far from representing codified standard var-
remarkable initiatives, e.g. the Base de Français médiéval for old French from ieties. Consequently, medieval linguistic data should never
Lyon University: <http://txm.bfm-corpus.org/> (last downloaded 8 October
2015), which gives information about the Strasbourg Oaths, the Eulalie, the be decontextualized: because the Romance varieties have
Passio Christi, and Saint Léger; for Spanish manuscripts see <http://admyte. such a low degree of codification, insights into the reasons
com/home.htm> (last downloaded 8 October 2015); for old Italo-Romance and the conditions governing this variation are more likely
texts, see http://www.silab.it/frox/200/ind_scu.htm (last downloaded on
8 October 2015) and http://www.ovi.cnr.it/ (last downloaded on 8 October if it is seen in the light of the particular circumstances of
2015), a database for old Italo-Romance. its genesis.
34
PART II
Typology and Classification

CHAPTER 4
A structural comparison of Latin

and Romance
NIGEL VINCENT
4.1 Introduction of scholarship argued that the passage from Latin to

Romance involved a shift from synthesis to analysis (for
Not surprisingly, most historically oriented research on the discussion of work in this tradition see Schwegler 1990, as
Romance languages has focused either on documenting and well as §46.1). A second danger consists in what we may
analysing the changes that have taken place in the passage call the terminological fallacy of assuming that a given
from Latin to the modern Romance vernaculars or on recon- label identifies equivalent phenomena in different lan-
structing those stages in that transition which must be guages. This risk is particularly evident in the domain of
postulated but for which direct attestation is not to be non-finite verb forms, where terms such as ‘gerund’ and
found in the surviving documents. This tradition of work ‘supine’ are used in reference to rather different entities in
is well represented by Maiden, Smith, and Ledgeway (2011), the parent and the daughter languages, as discussed in
which is organized around the twin themes of stability and §4.2.6. Thirdly, we need to be clear about what kind of
change, of persistence of some aspects of the structure of Latin is being compared with what kind of Romance. Latin
Latin set against the many innovations at all levels of is a language with more than a millennium of attested
linguistic structure that characterize the emergence and history, and the Romance languages are more or less well
diversification of the Romance languages. However, it can documented over a similar timespan. We would not lightly
also be instructive to stand back and compare from a dis- take the English of Chaucer to be the same entity as
tance the ‘before’ and the ‘after’, and it is just such an modern English, and we must be wary of doing the same
exercise which is undertaken in the present chapter. The in respect of Latin and Romance, especially ‘if one regards,
perspective then is not so much diachronic as, to use an as surely one may, Romance as modern Latin’ (Pulgram
older term, metachronic: the juxtaposition of patterns 2001:353). I consider in more detail the issues that arise in
over time without an assumption that there is a direct this connection in §4.3.
historical connection between them. Alternatively, this
chapter can be viewed as an exercise in linguistic typology,
with the implication not only that Latin and Romance are
4.2 Latin and Romance: some
compared with each other but that the structures they phenomenological comparisons
exhibit can in turn be fitted into the larger space of
possible grammars of natural languages. In this sense this I begin with some brief comparative case studies. The cover-
chapter complements Ramat and Ricca’s contribution to age is by no means systematic but rather the cases are
this volume (Ch. 5). chosen to highlight some of the contrasts between Latin
Before looking in greater detail at some examples, it will and Romance at different levels of structure. All the
be as well to bear in mind a few caveats. The first concerns examples are from the domains of phonology, morphology,
the need to find the appropriate level at which to make and syntax. The more fragmentary nature of lexical struc-
the comparison: aim too high and the result may be ture makes similar typological comparison difficult without
unsustainable or empty generalizations, too low and we going into greater detail than space permits. For discussion
risk offering no more than an atomistic list of features. An of stability and change in relation to the lexicon see §1.5,
example of the latter sort is the observation that Latin has Ch. 32, and the excellent chapters by Stefenelli and by
contrastive vowel length while the Romance languages Dworkin in Maiden, Smith, and Ledgeway (2011); and for
mostly do not (§25.1): true but unenlightening. More prob- the methodological issues surrounding lexical comparison,
lematic, however, are the former, as when an earlier vein see Koptjevskaja-Tamm et al. (2007).
This chapter © Nigel Vincent 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 37
NIGEL VINCENT
4.2.1 Vowels and diphthongs of Terelle, from which these forms are taken, the only
difference between the singulars [ˈkwambə] ‘field’, [pwo
ˈpawərə] ‘poppy’ and the plurals [ˈkjambə] ‘fields’, [pje
The vowel inventory of Latin can be labelled, in the terms of
ˈpawərə] ‘poppies’ lies in the quality of the diphthong in
World Atlas of Language Structures, ‘average’ (Maddieson
the first syllable (Schirru 2013). Diachronically we have a
2013): five vowels, each distinctively long or short, varying
combination of propagination and final vowel reduction;
along the dimensions of front vs back and high vs low but
metachronically we have a contrast between plural forma-
with no secondary contrasts determined by rounding, nasal-
tion achieved through suffixation and through internal
ization, or other phonetic dimensions. However, when we
vowel alternation or ablaut (cf. Ch. 42).
come to examine the outcomes within modern Romance,
there is considerable variety, especially once all the non-
standard languages and dialects are considered (cf. §25.1).
We find contrastive nasalization (French, Portuguese, many
4.2.2 Nominal morphology and case
northern Italian dialects), contrastive rounding of front
vowels (French and many Gallo-Italian dialects), further Perhaps one of the most salient differences lies in the
height differentiation within the mid vowels (Italian, Cam- centrality of nominal case inflection within the grammatical
pidanese, Galician), central vowels (Romanian), vowel system of Latin when compared to its almost total absence
reduction in unstressed syllables (French, European Portu- in the modern Romance languages (cf. §56.2). The one
guese, Catalan, and many upper southern Italian dialects), exception is Romanian, and even here distinctions of mor-
vowel harmony (dialects of Umbria and southern Tuscany, phological case are effectively limited to determiners and
Brazilian Portuguese, Haitian creole), and some new sec- feminine singular nouns. There are also some very residual
ondary length contrasts (Milanese, Bolognese, Friulian, case-related patterns found in Raeto-Romance (cf. §12.3.1).
eastern Caribbean creoles). The situation in the earlier attested stages of Romance is
A special word needs to be said here about diphthongiza- not that different. Apart from traces in old French and old
tion, a process which in a variety of ways has been central to Occitan, case morphology had become extinct before the
the development of the vowel systems of modern Romance earliest attestations of the Romance languages (see
(Loporcaro 2011b:119-35). Typological databases such as Sornicola 2011a for discussion and references). Even then
the World Atlas of Language Structures treat diphthongs as it was arguably not the central means by which relations
sequences of vowels or combinations of vowels and glides, within the clause were signalled (cf. Schøsler 1984 and
an approach which is by no means inappropriate when §§18.4.2.1.1.3, 19.3.1.3), much of the responsibility there
dealing with Latin, where a word such as CAUSA ‘cause’ is in falling, as in the modern languages, to linear position in
minimal contrast with CASA ‘hut’, just as a word with an the clause (cf. §62.2).
initial consonant cluster like CRĒDŌ ‘I believe’ forms a min- We should be careful, however, to avoid the simplistic
imal pair with the single initial consonant in CĒDŌ ‘I yield’. In generalization that case in Latin is straightforwardly
modern Romance, however, the diphthongs, whether the replaced by, and is directly comparable to, word order in
result of metaphony or stress-induced (cf. Ch. 38), are com- Romance, and this for a number of reasons. First, on typo-
monly integrated into patterns of morphophonemic alter- logical grounds: there are many languages in the world that
nation: Sp. poder ‘be.able.INF’ vs puede ‘be.able.PRS.IND.3SG’, OFr. have neither fixed, syntactically determined word order nor
lief ‘raise.PRS.IND.1SG’ vs levons ‘raise.PRS.IND.1PL’, Isc. [ˈʦwoppə] case marking, so there can be no universal requirement that
‘lame.MSG’ vs [ˈtscppə] ‘lame.FSG’, It. buono ‘good’ vs bontà the loss of one precipitates the rise of the other. Second, as
‘goodness’. Formally therefore, diphthongs in Romance is all too evident from the many developments described in
may be defined in terms of vowel sequences, but function- the chapters of this volume, new subsystems emerge grad-
ally they often work on a different plane within the linguis- ually over time and with many local variants and restric-
tic system when compared with what we find in Latin. tions, so that stating equivalences between different parts
More generally, the cumulative effect of sound change of language systems at different times is at best risky and
can lead to a striking innovation in morphological typology. most often simply erroneous. To these general consider-
Consider yet another source of diphthongs, namely so- ations we may add more particular factors, which are pre-
called propagination, a sound change whereby an etymo- cisely the outcome of the diachronic processes just alluded
logically unjustified semi-vowel repeats the features of a to. Thus, linear order is, to varying degrees in different
neighbouring high vowel so that, for example, [ˈbaŋku] languages and different registers, determined not solely by
‘bench’ yields [ˈbwaŋkə] and [ˈbaŋki] ‘benches’ yields syntactic factors but also by considerations of discourse and
[ˈbjaŋkə]. As a consequence, in the central Italian dialect information structure (cf. Chs 34, 53). The role of arguments
38
A STRUCTURAL COMPARISON
in the clause can also be signalled by other mechanisms (3) a. fui ego illa
such as clitic pronouns attached to the verb (so-called ‘clitic be.PFV.1SG I.NOM that.ABL
doubling’ cf. §§48.5, 56.3.3) or the choice of BE vs HAVE as aetate (Lat., Pl. Bacch. 1079)
perfect auxiliary in languages like French and Italian which age.ABL
have retained this feature (cf. §49.3). ‘I have been at that age’
Most discussions in the literature concern the role of case
b. tu aegrota si lubet
as marking the main arguments of the clause, or what
you.NOM be.ill.IMP if please.PRS.3SG
Nichols (1986) calls ‘dependent-marking’ (cf. §46.2). Thus,
aetatem (Lat., Pl. Cur. 554)
in Latin the subject of a finite clause is marked nominative
age.ACC
regardless of whether that argument is an Agent, an Experi-
‘you be ill all your life if it suits you’
encer, or a Patient. And if those same arguments appear as
subjects of the embedded accusative and infinitive (AcI)
All such uses in the modern Romance languages are
construction (cf. §§63.2.1, 63.2.3), they would, as the name
taken up by range of prepositions expressing different
implies, occur in the accusative. Hence in (1) populus is
dimensions of time, space, and quality. Some of these are
nominative and me is accusative even though both have
direct continuers of Latin prepositions such as IN ‘in(to)’
the same semantic role with respect to the same lexical
and PER ‘through’, and some are Romance creations such as
verb:
French pendant or Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese durante
‘during’. Since the number of prepositions in any one
(1) populus me uere iurasse
Romance language is considerably greater than the num-
people.NOM.SG me.ACC truly swear.PRF.INF
ber of Latin cases it is in general impossible to speak of
iurauit (Lat., Cic. Fam. 5.2.7)
simple equivalence between a given Latin case and a
swear.PFV.3SG
Romance preposition.
‘the people swore that I had sworn truly’
For two cases, however, something like direct compar-
ability between preposition and case across time does at
That the choice of the subject case is determined by the
first sight seem more plausible. Table 4.1 shows how virtu-
status of the clause is confirmed by the fact that if the
ally the full range of functions of the Latin genitive find
infinitive occurs in the main clause—the so-called ‘historic
their equivalent in Romance (here exemplified by French)
infinitive’—the subject is nominative not accusative, hence
constructions with continuers of the Latin preposition DE
ego in (2) contrasting with me in (1):
‘(down) from, about’ (for Romanian cf. §8.4.3.1).
The historical route to this state of affairs is slow and
(2) ego cunas recessim . . . trahere et
complex (see Adams 2013:ch.13 for detailed discussion and
me.NOM cradles.ACC backwards drag.INF and
exemplification), but the outcome is hard to deny. Data of
ducere (Lat., Pl. Amph. 1112)
push.INF
‘I pulled and pushed the cradles backwards’ Table 4.1 Latin genitive and French de compared (from
Vincent and Börjars 2010)
These, then, are clear instances of what is sometimes
called ‘structural case’, since the role of the nominal morph- CONSTRUCTION LATIN FRENCH GLOSS
ology is precisely to mark the structural function of the

N complement REX REGUM le roi des rois ‘the king of
item in question. Latin, however, was also characterized by
kings’
extensive use of semantic case, in which the form of the
A complement AUIDUS avide de gloire ‘eager for
noun is determined by the meaning rather than the struc-
GLORIAE glory’
ture. Thus, the preposition IN when accompanied by the
V complement MEMINI je me souviens ‘I remember
ablative indicates location (IN AGRO ‘in the field.ABL’) and by
UIUORUM des vivants the living’
the accusative destination (IN AGRUM ‘into the field.ACC’). In
Partitive MULTI beaucoup des ‘many of the
other instances, the case-marked noun alone has a semantic
CIUIUM citoyens citizens’
role without prepositional support. This is a feature which
Quality UIR MAGNAE un homme ‘a man of
has been entirely lost even in those Romance languages
ELOQUENTIAE d’une grande great
which preserve (a semblance of) structural case. Thus the
éloquence eloquence’
ablative aetate in (3a) refers to a particular point in time
Possessive DOMUS REGIS le palais du roi ‘the king’s
while the accusative aetatem in (3b) expresses a period of
palace’
time:
39
NIGEL VINCENT
this kind can be taken as evidence for the role of the of the forms in question into paradigmatic sets and the
genitive as the third structural case in Latin, as already establishment of the appropriate cluster of morphosyntac-
argued, so to speak avant la lettre, in Benveniste (1962), and tic features. Within such an approach, the segmentability or
the consequent need in Romance to develop an all-purpose otherwise of a form such as AUDIEMINI is not so central as the
marker of dependence in non-verbal constructions and with fact that it realizes the set of features [FUTURE, 2ND PERSON,
the equivalents of verbs that in Latin took non-accusative PLURAL, PASSIVE] in association with the lexeme HEAR.
arguments such as MEMINI ‘remember’ and OBLIUISCOR ‘forget’. When we compare such a system with the verb systems of
Something similar can be said for the relation between the modern Romance languages, we find a number of note-
the Latin dative and constructions in Romance with des- worthy similarities and differences. On the one hand, almost
cendants of Latin AD ‘to’ such as the indirect object (Lat. all the Romance languages have a core of inflected forms,
iungitoque materiae ‘and join.IMP it to the timber.DAT’ (Cato since they inherit sub-paradigms derived, with due allow-
Agr. 18.6) beside Fr. joins-le aux bois ‘join.IMP=it to.the tim- ance being made for the effects of sound change and ana-
bers’) and the complements of some adjectives (Lat. filius logy, from the Latin present and imperfect indicative. This
patri similis ‘the son.NOM (is) similar.NOM to the father.DAT’ historical inertia of the core tense/mood/aspect categories
(Cic. Fin. 5.5.12) beside It. il figlio è simile al padre ‘the son is of the inflected verb is consistent with wider typological
similar to.the father’). However, once again we should not patterns which suggest that this part of a system is likely to
be too hasty in drawing conclusions from formal similar- remain stable even under the pressures operative in pidgi-
ity. Thus Latin has a dative of Agent in expressions with nization let alone under the conditions of more gradual
the gerund like hoc.NOM tibi.DAT curandumst. ‘this.NOM you.SG. language change (Roberts and Bresnan 2008). In the context
DAT look.after.GER=is (= this must be looked after by you)’ of this widespread pattern a striking exception are those
(Pl. Bacch. 691), but this should not be equated to the use Salentino dialects (southeastern Italy) where today the sim-
of the combination à/a ‘to’ + NP to mark the demoted ple, unmarked present/imperfect is realized by a weakened/
agent in a causative such as Fr. il a fait lire la lettre à son uninflected form of STARE (AC), namely sto(ng’) a fazzu > sta
frère ‘he made his brother (lit. ‘to his brother’) read the ffazzu, stava a facía > sta ffacía, etc. (Ledgeway forthcoming a,
letter’. The latter use is clearly a Romance development and cf. §63.4).
(Norberg 1945). Such continuity on the content side has been shown in
I conclude this section with brief mention of two further the work of Martin Maiden and colleagues to be balanced by
respects in which, just as we saw in §4.2.1 with regard to some significant restructuring on the form side (see e.g.
number marking in the dialect of Terelle, the interaction of Maiden 2005 and the contributions in Cruschina et al.
morphological and phonological changes has led to striking 2013b). This is the consequence of the development of
typological divergences from the Latin source. The first of formal patterns which are not directly relatable to the
these concerns the emergence of a morphologically sig- morphosyntactic features that the forms realize, or what
nalled contrast between mass and count nouns in some (following Aronoff 1994) have come to be called morphomes
central and southern Italian dialects (cf. §16.3.1.2, §57.4 for (cf. Ch. 43). Interestingly, Aronoff chose a Latin example to
more details). The second involves the genesis of a gender make his original theoretical point, namely the so-called
alternation within verb agreement in Ripatransone (cf. third stem seen in forms such as the supine FACTUM and the
§57.5 for details). future participle FACTURUS (< FACERE ‘to do’), in which there is a
shared stem even though the morphosyntactic properties,
[PAST, PASSIVE] and [FUTURE, ACTIVE] respectively, contradict each
4.2.3 Inflection and periphrasis other (but see now Remberger 2012 for a non-morphomic
analysis of this example). In any case, the independently
In traditional morphological terms, the Latin verb system is motivated historical loss of the Latin future participle
a prototypical example of an inflecting pattern, according to means that any morphomic mismatch between form and
which tense, mood, and aspect are expressed through a set meaning in this instance does not survive into Romance
of verb endings, which sometimes segment neatly and (with the possible exception of Romanian: see Maiden
sometimes do not (cf. §27.1). Thus AMABITUR ‘(s)he will be 2013c). However, as Maiden elsewhere has shown, a number
loved’ can be quite straightforwardly broken down into AM- of new such patterns have arisen. We have mentioned the
A-BI-T-UR ‘love-TV-FUT-3SG-PASS’, whereas a similar segmenta- effect of stress-induced diphthongization, which leads a
tion for AUDIEMINI ‘you(PL) will be heard’ is less evident. verb like morire ‘die’ in Italian to have an alternation
Systems like this are most effectively modelled by a theory between the diphthong in the stem-stressed present tense
of the kind Stump (2001) has called ‘inferential realiza- forms muoio, muori, muore, muoiono and the simple vowel
tional’, in which the key constructs are the arrangement in the ending-stressed moriamo, morite. This so-called
40
N-pattern sets the first, second, and third persons singular and perfective subsystems. For the former passive is real-
and the third plural of the present tense against all other ized through a set of inflectional endings as the represen-
forms of the inflectional paradigm (cf. §43.2.4). In the case of tative examples in Table 4.2 demonstrate.
the Italian verb uscire ‘go out’ there is no sound change By contrast, in the perfective subsystem the inflected
involved, but nonetheless two different stems have come active forms have passive correspondents constructed out
to be distributed according to the same schema: thus, esco, of the past participle plus the appropriate imperfective
esci, esce, escono with the stem of OIt. escire (< Lat. EXIRE) vs form of the verb ESSE ‘be’, as in Table 4.3.
usciamo, uscite with the stem of uscio ‘door(way)’. This sug- It will be immediately clear that the periphrastic forms in
gests that the pattern has become stabilized within the Table 4.2 do not yield to a straightforwardly compositional
morphological systems of Romance even in the absence of analysis. Given the independent uses of these forms in other
morphosyntactic or phonological motivation. More gener- contexts, we would expect a sequence such as AMATUS ERAT to
ally, in different ways in different languages, morphomic mean ‘he was loved’. Indeed, the modern Italian formal
templates appear to organize and maintain the structure of descendant era amato does mean precisely that.
the verbal paradigms in Romance in ways that do not have The intervening historical stages are too complex to be
Latin antecedents. considered here (for recent discussion see the chapters by
Another respect in which a number of Romance varieties Burton and by Danckaert in Adams and Vincent forthcom-
differ from Latin is in the extension of person/number ing) but the end result is clear: the modern Romance lan-
marking from the finite to the non-finite parts of the verb guages have periphrastic passives across the whole system
system (see also §63.2.1.1). Thus in the Portuguese sentence (cf. §60.5), and these can be analysed compositionally: the
in (4) the infinitive terem bears the same suffix -em as a finite present passive has a present auxiliary, the future passive a
verb form such as metem ‘they put’ and agrees with its future auxiliary, and so on. At the same time, other ways of
subject os deputados ‘the deputies’: expressing passive have emerged, notably the so-called
‘impersonal se’ construction (cf. §60.4.1.2), so that these
(4) Penso terem os deputados votado a new periphrastic forms are not always the ones that most
I.think have.INF.3PL the deputies vote.PST.PTCP the naturally realize the content of a Latin passive in a given
proposta. (Pt.) discourse context.
proposal Since almost all the modern languages have also devel-
‘I think the deputies have approved the proposal.’ oped a periphrastic expression of perfect (see §§49.3 and
58.2.3), the combination of perfect and passive leads to
So-called inflected infinitives, though with differences in compound periphrases of a kind unknown in Latin. Thus,
the detail as to which persons show agreement and the
etymologies of the agreement markers, are also found in
Galician, medieval Leonese, old Neapolitan, and the Logu- Table 4.2 Imperfective active and passive forms
dorese variety of Sardinian. As Loporcaro (1986) notes in his ACTIVE PASSIVE
account of the Neapolitan material, the development of this
kind of agreement depends on the clear segmentability of PRESENT UIDEO ‘I see’ UIDEOR ‘I am seen’
the finite verb forms from which the endings are drawn—in FUTURE CAPIES ‘you will CAPIERIS ‘you will be
other words a kind of morphological agglutination which capture’ captured’
contrasts with the inflectional type inherited from Latin. IMPERFECT AMABAT ‘(s)he loved’ AMABATUR ‘(s)he was
Striking too in old Neapolitan is the extension of this pat- loved’
tern of agreement to other non-finite forms such as the
gerund (essendovo ‘being.2PL’, volendeno ‘wanting.3PL’) and
the past and present participles (datonosse ‘given.3PL=REFL’, Table 4.3 Perfective active and passive forms
timentino ‘fearing.3PL’). Amongst the modern languages, this
structure is also attested in Algarve varieties of Portuguese ACTIVE PASSIVE
(Ledgeway 2012a:294).
PRS.PFV UIDI ‘I have seen’ UISUS ‘I have been
However, perhaps the most notable respect in which the
SUM seen’
verbal systems of Romance differ from that of Latin lies in
FUT.PFV CEPERISTI ‘you’ll have CAPTUS ‘you’ll have
the many periphrastic patterns that have emerged and the
captured’ ERIS been captured’
ways in which, in consequence, those systems have been
PLPRF AMAUERAT ‘(s)he had AMATUS/A ‘(s)he had
restructured (cf. §§5.3.2, 46.3.2.1). Let us begin with the
loved’ ERAT been loved’
passive, where Latin has a split between the imperfective
41
NIGEL VINCENT
the forms in the rightmost column of Table 4.3 have modern Table 4.4 Some Romance progressive periphrases
equivalents such as Fr. j’ai été vu, It. sarai stato catturato, Pt.
LANGUAGE PROGRESSIVE CONSTRUCTION
tinha sido amado/a. At the same time the different etyma of
the auxiliary sequences is an eloquent demonstration of the Sardinian essere ‘be’ + gerund
variety of ways in which the different languages have in- Spanish estar ‘be’ + gerund
novated: Fr. ai été has the HAVE auxiliary with a past parti- ir ‘go’ + gerund
ciple that derives from STATUM ‘stood’; It. sarai stato has the andar ‘walk’ + gerund
same source for the past participle but uses the BE auxiliary; Old French être ‘be’ + gerund
Pt. tinha sido has a participle based on SEDERE ‘sit’ and an Italian stare ‘be, stand’ + gerund
auxiliary from TENERE ‘hold’. andare ‘go’ + gerund
Another type of compound periphrasis is the so-called venire ‘come’ + gerund
surcomposé or doubly compound forms shown in (5) (this Portuguese estar ‘be’ + gerund
and subsequent examples from Apothéloz 2010; see further ir ‘go’ + gerund
discussion and exemplification in Schaden 2007, Vincent andar ‘walk’ + gerund
2014a:12f., 17f., and §58.3.4):
(5) Quand elle a eu terminé

when she have.PRS.3SG have.PST.PTCP finish.PST.PTCP
la chanson, on a applaudi. forms combine with other periphrastic parts of the system.
the song one have.3SG.PRS clap.PST.PTCP In Italian, for example, the combination of the perfect and
(Fr., Léo Malet, Le Soleil n’est pas pour nous, 1949) the progressive periphrasis is not possible, hence the
‘When she had finished her song, people clapped.’ ungrammaticality of **sono stato lavorando whereas Srd. so
istatu travallande ‘I have been working’ is entirely acceptable
(Remberger 2006a:272-81) as is the combination of perfect
And once again we can see different solutions in relation
with the progressives built out of andare and venire in
to the choice of auxiliaries, where (6a) has the normal
Italian, and as is the perfect with the estar construction in
French present perfect sequence HAVE + été expressing
Spanish and Portuguese.
past (so-called ‘aoristic drift’, Schaden 2012) and (6b) can
A second point concerns the Piedmontese periphrasis
be interpreted either as involving a process of auxiliary
examined in Ricca (1998). In this case we have the same
attraction or as the past participle of avoir having gener-
ingredients—forms of tenere ‘hold’ plus the past participle—
alized and developed into a tense marking particle
which also serve to constitute the perfect in Portuguese or,
(Vincent 2014b).
apparently, in some southern Italian dialects:
(6) a. Il a été parti. (Fr.)
(7) E chiel me teniva
he have.PRS.3SG be.PST.PTCP leave.PST.PTCP
and that.MSG me keep.IPFV.3SG
‘He had left.’
aggrezà (Pie., G.G. Alione 1521)
b. Il est eu parti. (Fr.) annoy.PST.PTCP
he be.PRS.3SG have.PST.PTCP leave.PST.PTCP ‘And that man kept annoying me’
‘He had left.’
Examples like this have sometimes been translated with
Either way, we are far both in structural and typological the Italian ‘go’ progressive (mi andava irritando) but, as Ricca
terms from our Latin starting point. shows, the meaning here is iterative, close to English keep on
A final class of periphrases that have developed in differ- doing, which is more consistent with the use of the past
ent ways in different corners of Romance are those which participle in this construction rather than the gerundio
express progressive aspect constructed out of a variety of which is the norm in progressive periphrases.
Latin ingredients as shown in Table 4.4. Taken together, all these developments raise an interest-
Although all these constructions express ongoing or iter- ing series of theoretical questions about the status of the verb
ated actions, there is considerable variation in the precise paradigm in Latin and Romance. Within traditional grammar,
semantic and syntactic constraints, which we will not go the periphrastic passives exemplified in Table 4.3 were
into here (see §58.4 for discussion and exemplification). Two regarded as completing a paradigm that consisted in all the
particular points are, however, worthy of comment in a other cells of synthetic forms. In Börjars et al. (1997) this view
comparative context. The first concerns the way these was incorporated into a modern theoretical framework that
42
falls within Stump’s inferential-realizational class referred complements typically had a verb in the infinitive (§§4.2.7,
to above, and the general theoretical argument was devel- 63.2.3), counterfactuals were expressed by past or pluper-
oped across a wider range of languages by Ackerman and fect subjunctives in both clauses, as in the following pair of
Stump (2004). It is but a simple step from that to see the examples, where the same verb form scriberem occurs in one
verbal paradigm of a modern Romance language such as case in the apodosis and in the other in the protasis:
Portuguese or Catalan or French as being constituted of a
very similar abstract structure but with the periphrastic (9) plura scriberem si ipse
forms having expanded to cover all the cells defined by the more.NEUT.PL write.PST.SBJV.1SG if self.NOM.SG
feature [PASSIVE]. It is then another short and logically con- possem (Lat., Cic. Att. 8.15)
sistent step to argue that, in those varieties that have doubly can. PST.SBVJ.1SG
compound forms, the reach of the periphrastic part of the ‘I would write more if I could do so myself ’
paradigm has been extended even further. In sum, the extent
of the verb paradigm varies considerably from one modern (10) si scriberem ipse longior epistula
language to another, and between these and Latin. Moreover, if I.wrote.SBJV self long.COMPR.NOM letter. NOM
the boundaries of the paradigm are inevitably fuzzy, since fuisset (Lat., Cic. Att. 17.13a.3)
the various periphrastic formations have evolved at different had.been.SBJV.3SG
speeds within different languages through the grammatical- ‘If I wrote myself, the letter would have been longer’
ization of a range of lexical verbs (for more discussion see
Vincent 2011; 2014a,b). A relic of the Latin pattern, by contrast, survives in
Sicilian through forms which directly continue the Latin
pluperfect subjunctive (Bentley 2000a,b) and in many south-
4.2.4 Conditionals and counterfactuals ern Italian dialects such as Calabrian (Lombardi 1994) where
the exponents derive from the Latin pluperfect indicative.
Another periphrasis which develops out of Latin ingredients
consists of the infinitive plus a form of HABERE (cf. §46.3.2.2).
Unusually, and probably because the auxiliary follows
4.2.5 Causatives
rather than precedes the lexical verb, this periphrasis is
unique within Romance in subsequently undergoing uni- All the analytic verb forms we have considered so far are
verbation to yield a new set of forms which express future instances of auxiliation, in which responsibility for deter-
(Fr. chanterai, It. canterò, Sp. cantaré, Pt. cantarei, etc) and mining the semantic argument roles falls solely on the
future in the past (Fr. chanterais, It. canterei, Sp. cantaría, Pt. lexical verb with the auxiliary supplying an appropriate
cantaria, etc). Since these forms are synthetic they are usu- tense and/or aspect value. However, the term ‘analytic’ is
ally treated as part of the verb paradigm, although the also used in reference to the rather different type of con-
evidence from Ibero-Romance, where clitic pronouns can struction which expresses causativity and permission in
still intervene between stem and ending, suggest that here Romance, in which a verb such as Fr. faire ‘make’, Pt. mandar
is another respect in which the evolving verb paradigms of ‘command’, It. lasciare ‘let’ contributes its own argument,
Romance have had fuzzier boundaries than is standardly namely the causer or permitter:
taken to be the case for Latin. An additional outcome is that
these languages now have a dedicated inflectional means (11) Fece leggere il libro ai suoi
for expressing the consequence of a counterfactual sentence make.PST.3SG read.INF the book to.the her.PL
such as (8) following the universal preference for forms studenti. (It.)
combining the features [FUTURE] and [PAST] to exercise this student.PL
function (cf. Iatridou 2000): ‘She made her students read the book.’
(8) Si Pierre voulait nous aider, je serais In an example such as (11), this structure obeys a range of
if Pierre want.IPFV.3SG us= help.INF I be.COND.1SG tests for monoclausality, including the fact that clitic pro-
très surpris. (Fr.) nouns attach to the ‘do’ verb, the structure will not iterate
very surprised (contrast Eng. he made his colleagues make their students read
‘If Pierre wanted to help us, I would be very surprised.’ the book), and the subject argument of the infinitive is
‘demoted’ and introduced by the preposition a ‘to’ (for
In Latin, where a dedicated verb form with this function more details see §61.3 and for the distinction between
was not available, and arguably not necessary since clausal different types of combination of a support verb and a
43
NIGEL VINCENT
lexical verb in a Romance context, Rosen 1997; Abeillé and (15) purpureamque uuam facit albam pampinum
Godard 2010). purple.ACC=and grape.ACC makes white.ACC vine.shoot.ACC
From a typological point of view, this kind of complex predi- habere (Lat., Lucilius Saturam fragmenta 1224)
cate structure stands halfway between genuinely biclausal struc- have.INF
tures (such as the Eng. make construction) and inflectional or ‘and it (the sun) causes the pale vine-shoot to bear purple
synthetic causatives found in languages such as Turkish and grapes.’
Hungarian, and in residual fashion in the prefix be- in English
verbs such as bemuse, belie, begrudge (Shibatani and Pardeshi Despite the superficial similarity to the Romance causa-
2002). Latin too has the residue of the Indo-European causative tives in such examples, there is good reason to treat them as
suffix -iya- in verbs in -eō such as MONEO ‘warn’, in origin a biclausal. In particular, the embedded subject here is
causative on the stem *men- ‘think’ (cf. MENS ‘mind’). However accusative as in the AcI construction in (1) (and see also
already in Latin the origins of this pattern had been obscured and §4.2.7) and the infinitive can be overtly inflected for passive
verbs like MONEO have developed more specific meanings just as as in (16), an option which is not available in Romance even
the lexicalized Eng. be- verbs have. To express the transparent when the argument marking would suggest a passive as in
meaning ‘cause someone to do something’, Latin falls into the the so-called faire-par construction (see §61.3.3.1).
biclausal category, using a construction with various main verbs
such as EFFICIO ‘cause, bring about’ and IUBEO ‘order’ followed by a (16) fecit et Asterien aquila [ . . . ]
full finite clausal complement introduced by UT ‘that’. Among make.PFV.3SG and Asterie.ACC eagle.ABL
these is the verb FACIO ‘make’ as in (12) and (13) (the latter teneri (Lat., Ov. Met. 6.108)
example is taken from the compilation in Chamberlain 1986): hold.INF.PASS
‘she showed Asterie being held by an eagle’
(12) ea . . . feci ut essent
that.NEUTPL.NOM do.PFV.1SG COMP be.PST.SBJV.3PL It is out of beginnings such as this that there emerges the
nota nostris (Lat., Cic. Ac. 1.2.8) Romance construction with the biclausal structure being
know.PST.PTCP.NPL.NOM our.DAT.PL reanalysed as monoclausal following the demise of the AcI
‘I caused those things to be known to our people’ as a productive mechanism for the expression of verb com-
plements. This new structure is attested across the whole of
(13) adicies super esicia, Romance except Romanian, although in many southern
pour.FUT.2SG over quenelle.NPL Calabrian and Salentino varieties a finite clause introduced
facies ut ferveat by a complementizer such as mu/ma/mi/cu is preferred (cf.
make.FUT.2SG COMP boil.PRS.SBJV.3SG §63.3). In the same region there is also evidence for a
‘pour over the quenelles, bring to the boil’ structure which has now become biclausal again, via so-
(Lat., Apicius, De re coquinaria II.i.5) called ‘destructuring’ (Ledgeway 2014b). This kind of sec-
ondary development, in which a Romance language recon-
More reduced in structure is the pattern found in structs in a different way a structure that has parallels to
examples such as (14), where facit ‘he makes, portrays as’ the Latin point of departure, is akin to that noted in §4.2.1,
governs two coordinated clauses, one headed by the infini- where some Romance varieties have recreated a contrastive
tive laudare and the other by the participle conloquentem (the length opposition in vowels that both parallels and is dif-
example is from the rich documentation of Latin and old ferent from what can be observed in Latin.
and modern Italian in Robustelli 2000): Finally, in the context of the typology of linguistic
change, a notable feature is the way the historical profile
(14) Polyphemum Homerus [ . . . ] cum ariete etiam of the descendants of FACERE ‘make’ (and a few other verbs
Polyphemus.ACC Homer.NOM with ram.ABL even such as LAXARE ‘let’, UIDERE ‘see’) remains constant over
conloquentem facit eiusque laudare many centuries. There are some adjustments over time
with.talk.PRS.PTCP.ACC makes his=and praise.INF to the rules governing the position of clitics, but there is
fortunas (Lat., Cic. Tusc. 5,115) no evidence of further shifts of meaning or of the causa-
fate.ACC.PL tive and the main verb fusing (univerbation). These facts
‘Homer even has Polyphemus talking to a ram and are fully in accord with the hypothesis advanced by Butt
praising its fate’ and Lahiri (2013) that so-called ‘light verbs’ like Fr. faire
‘make’ and its cognates show systematically different dia-
The older example (15) is another in which we have the chronic profiles from auxiliaries and do not follow the
combination FACERE ‘make’ plus infinitive in what is clearly a clines of grammaticalization which are characteristic of
causative sense: the latter.
44
4.2.6 Non-finite forms (20) omnia loca quae filii Israhel

all.NPL places.N which.NPL sons.NOM Israel
tetigerant eundo uel redeundo
In introducing this chapter I alluded to what I called the
touch.PLPRF.3PL go.GER.ABL or come.back.GER.ABL
terminological fallacy, that is to say the danger that the
(Lat., Per. Aeth. 5.11)
same term may identify different items within different
‘all the places which the sons of Israel had touched
grammatical traditions, thus giving a spurious sense of
while going or coming back’
comparability to constructions which may in fact show
significant differences. Perhaps nowhere is this danger
Somewhat confusingly, these forms are called gerundio/
more evident than when we come to deal with non-finite
gerúndio in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, the term we
forms of the verb. Thus, Latin grammarians, and Indo-
adopt in what follows, but gérondif in French. And neither in
Europeanists more generally, identify the gerund and the
Latin nor in Romance do these forms bear much similarity
gerundive as distinct formations with different syntactic
to the constructions called ‘gerund’ in English, which none-
behaviours (for the background to the relation between
theless stands at the base of much modern linguistic
the two, see Jasanoff 2009). Example (17) shows the two
terminology.
forms coordinated, where the gerundive premendae, as a
A further dimension emerges when we bring together ge-
deverbal adjective, agrees with its associated noun plebis
rundio/gerúndio and periphrases and consider the case of the
while the gerund or verbal noun recuperandi has its own
compound formation such as It. avendo mangiato ‘having eaten’,
object in the accusative:
Fr. étant arrivé ‘having (lit. ‘being’) arrived’, Pt. tendo visto ‘having
seen’. Although these formations are built out of ingredients
(17) tempus premendae plebis putabant with transparent Latin etymologies, they have no equivalents
time.N.ACC press.GER.GEN.FSG people.GEN.FSG think.IPFV.3PL in Latin, where a past participle by itself suffices to convey the
recuperandique iura (Lat, Liv. 2.34.7) sense of an anterior accompanying action, as in (21):
recover.GER.GEN.NSG=and law.NPL
‘they thought it would be time to put pressure on the (21) hostes proelio superati [ . . . ]
people and recover the rights’ enemy.NOM.PL battle.ABL.SG defeated.NOM.PL
miserunt . . . (Lat., Caes. B.G. 4.27.1)
These forms could also occur in one of the very few Latin sent.3PL
periphrases as in Cato’s famous slogan Carthago delenda est ‘the enemy, having been defeated in battle, sent [ . . . ]’
‘Carthage.NOM.FSG destroy.GER.NOM.FSG be.PRS.3SG (= Carthage is
to/must be destroyed)’. Instead, these forms were deliberately constructed on the
In Romance, on the other hand, we have forms that derive analogy of the finite periphrastic perfects by medieval and
from the ablative of the gerund but which serve either to Renaissance authors seeking to translate such Latin texts,
form periphrases of the kind reviewed in §4.2.3 or as adver- and in consequence to this day retain a sense of belonging
bial adjuncts, carrying out the function that would have been to a more formal and typically written register rather than
assumed by the present participle in Latin (see also §4.3): that of everyday speech.
Another category where the terms overlap but the func-
(18) Tornando a casa, sono caduto. (It.) tions do not is ‘supine’ (Lat. supinum). Within Latin the term
return.GER to house I.am fall.PST.PTCP refers to a verbal noun which occurs as a verbal comple-
‘On my way home, I fell over.’ ment in the accusative (abiit piscatum ‘go.PRF.3SG fish.SUP.ACC
(= he has gone fishing)’ (Pl. Rud. 898)), and the dative (tu me
The Latin source of this construction originally had tibi habes despicatui ‘you.NOM me.ACC you.DAT have.PRS.2SG des-
instrumental or causal force, as in (19), but already in pise.SUP.DAT (= you consider me despised by you)’ (Pl. Men
early texts there are contexts where it is hard to see any- 693)) and in the ablative as an adjectival complement (facil-
thing more than one action accompanying another, and by ius dictu quam re ‘easy.COMPR say.SUP.ABL than thing.ABL (=
late Latin the construction is commonly used in ways indis- easier said than done)’). The accusative of the supine has
tinguishable from Romance (20) (for detailed discussion, see already virtually fallen out of use by classical times and the
Adams 2013:ch.27): dative/ablative, or so-called second, supine does not survive
much longer (Kroon 1989).
(19) sum defessus quaeritando (Lat., Pl. Amph. 1014) Romanian also has a form standardly referred to as the
be.PRS.1SG tired.M.SG search.GER.ABL supine and defined by Hill (2013b:230) as ‘an invariable verb
‘I’m tired out as a result of searching’ form that is morphologically equivalent to the masculine
45
NIGEL VINCENT
singular of the past participle’ (cf. also §8.4.6.5), which dialects there is evidence of a contrast between a subjunctive
begins to appear in early modern Romanian as a replace- complementizer (e.g. cu) beside an indicative one (ca); see
ment for the infinitive and which is used in the modern further §63.2.1.2. In Romanian and the dialects of the
language, among many other things, as a nominalized extreme south of Italy, where the infinitive has receded
verb with a suffixed definite article and a dependent (cf. §63.3), we find particles such as Ro. să and NESic. mi
genitive (spǎlatul podelelor m-a obosit ‘wash.SUP.DEF.MSG which have been analysed as occupying various kinds of
floor.GEN.PL me=has tired (= the washing of the floors has functional position within the extended clause structure
tired me out)’) and in a verbal construction introduced by associated with the higher and lower portions of the sen-
the preposition/complementizer de ‘of ’ and with a direct tential core and higher left periphery respectively (§§31.2-
object (de tuns iar iarba ‘PREP/COMP cut.SUP again grass.DEF 3). Another typologically unusual development which is
(= to cut the grass again)’). The difference in functions as found in dialect texts across the whole of medieval Italy is
well as the lengthy time gap between the disappearance the use of repeated complementizers (so-called recomple-
of the Latin form and the emergence of the Romanian one mentation; cf. §63.2.1.3) where the embedded clause has a
suggest that the two have nothing in common but their fronted element such as an adverbial expression or a topic
name, a conclusion endorsed in the recent study by as in (22):
Dragomirescu (2013d). That said, there is an argument
that, at the level of form, the Latin so-called ‘third stem’ (22) dise che, stando in prexum, che certi dì li
(Aronoff 1994) on which the supine is built can still be he.said that being in prison that certain days the
detected in the modern Romanian formations (Maiden soi ligami miraculosamenti se desligavam
2013c). his bonds miraculously self= loosened
(Lig., Dialogo de Sam Gregorio composito in vorgà, LVIII.2)
‘he said that, being in prison, that on some days his
4.2.7 Complementation bonds were miraculously loosened’
Example (1) above involves the accusative and infinitive Elsewhere, as noted in §4.2.3, the infinitive has stayed and
construction, in which the subject of an embedded comple- has acquired the person/number inflection more commonly
ment of a verb of saying, thinking, or believing is in the associated with a finite verb. Infinitive complements are
accusative case accompanied by a verb in the infinitive, in also generally introduced in Romance languages by their
this particular instance the perfect infinitive iurasse. This own dedicated complementizers deriving from the Latin
construction, which constitutes one of the mainstays of prepositions AD ‘to’ and DE ‘of ’, although the principles
sentential complementation in Latin, represents a major determining the distribution of these items varies from
difference with respect to Romance and is, in broader typo- language to language and between historical stages of the
logical terms, a relatively uncommon means of marking same language (see further §§63.1-2). In the exceptional
clausal embedding (Cristofaro 2003). Other strategies in case of early Sardinian we even find doubling of infinitival
Latin include uses of other non-finite forms such as the de as in (23):
gerund(ive) and supine, as mentioned above, and the infini-
tive as in DOCEO TE SCRIBERE ‘I.teach you.ACC write.INF (= I teach (23) Conporait Istephane Unkinu a Barusone de
you to write)’ (object control) or with a shared subject in the bought Istephane Unkinu to Barusone of
so-called prolative infinitive (subject control) as in quod Nurki sa parte sua dessu salto
conatus sum agere ‘which.N.ACC.SG try.PST.PTCP I.am do.INF Nurki the part his of.the wood
(= which I tried to do)’ (Pl. Trin. 1150). In general the only de Conca maiore, et ego deiuli .ij. uaccas
contexts in Latin where the complement involves a finite of Conca Maggiore and I gave=him 2 cows
verb are subjunctive clauses introduced by the complement- in .viij. sollos, in fine de
izers UT (positive) and NE (negative) or in indirect questions, in 8 coins in end of
which also typically have verbs in the subjunctive. The si lu perdea custu, de torraremi saltu
Romance languages, by contrast, conform to the pattern if it=he.lost this of return.INF=me wood
more widely found in the languages of the world in which (OLog., Condaghe di S. Pietro di Silki)
embedded clauses are introduced by dedicated complement- ‘Stefano Unchino bought from Barusone of Nurki his
izers of various kinds (for details see Ch. 63). With the excep- share of the woody terrain of Conca Maggiore, and
tion of Romanian, the standard languages tend to have only I gave him two cows worth eight coins for this, so that
one complementizer (Fr. que, It. che, etc.) regardless of the if I were to lose this, he would give me the woody
mood of the embedded clause, but both in earlier texts and in terrain in return’
46
4.2.8 Configurationality and analyticity 4.3 Which Latin? Which Romance?
In §4.2.3 we discussed the issue of synthesis vs analysis In addition to the appropriate level of detail at which to
insofar as it was applicable within the verbal system, but juxtapose structures, a further issue concerns the variety of
the traditional account encompassed a much wider range Latin to be taken as the point of comparison. The examples
of phenomena including the marking of comparison by a discussed so far are for the most part consistent across all
suffix and the ablative case (PULCHRIOR SORORE ‘beautiful.COMPR varieties, but special issues arise when it comes to some
sister.ABL (= more beautiful than my sister)’) rather than by designated levels or kinds of Latin.
an intensifier and a connecting particle (MAGIS/PLUS BONELLA Of particular interest in this connection is the suggestion
QUAM SOROR MEA ‘more beautiful than my sister’); AD ‘to(wards)’ that has been made by a number of scholars that there are
+ NPACC and DE ‘(down) from’ + NPABL instead of dative and constructions in the earliest Latin texts which bear a
genitive respectively; linear word order rather than case remarkable similarity to later developments in Romance
marking to express core grammatical relations like subject (see Marx 1909 and the contributions to Adams and Vincent
and object (cf. §62.2); and so forth. The defining feature for forthcoming). One such is the combination of the verb HABERE
this distinction lies then in whether the exponents of the ‘have’ with the past participle (cf. above §4.2.3, and
construction in question are bound within the word or are §46.3.2.1), which has yielded a perfect periphrasis across
free, and we have seen, for example in comparing tense/ almost the whole family. Apparent examples are found as
aspect periphrases with causatives, that this dichotomy is early as Plautus and Terence:
not sufficiently subtle to handle the observable differences
in behaviour. We have also seen that forms like the condi- (24) conclusam hic habeo uxorem
tional and the future are synthetic in modern Romance but enclose.PST.PTCP.ACC.FSG here I.have wife.ACC
require us to postulate intervening analytic patterns as part saeuam (Lat., Ter. Phorm. 744)
of their diachronic trajectories. An alternative approach, fierce.ACC.FSG
which covers some of the same empirical territory, distin- ‘I have shut up here my fierce wife’
guishes between configurational structures, in which the
behaviour of the elements depends on their position in a (25) uir me habet [ . . . ]
hierarchically defined phrase structure, and non- husband.NOM me.ACC has
configurational ones, in which the elements contain within despicatam (Lat., Pl. Cas. 189)
themselves their own structural determinants (Ledgeway despise.PST.PTCP.ACC.FSG
2012a and §46.2). The historical development is then one ‘my husband has despised me’
from non-configurational to configurational. Such an
approach has much to recommend it, but two caveats are On closer inspection, however, examples of this kind are
in order. First, as with the analysis vs synthesis distinction, more appropriately translated as ‘I have my fierce wife shut
we need to apply it at the level of the construction rather up here’ and ‘my husband holds me in contempt’; in other
than the language as a whole (Schwegler 1990), since some words as a biclausal construction in which uxorem and me
syntactic domains may attain configurationality before are the objects of the transitive verb habeo and are in turn
others. Thus, it is reasonable to argue that the prepositional modified by the secondary predicates conclusam and
phrase was already configurational in our earliest Latin despicatam.
texts, nearly a millennium before we begin to get evidence The general methodological conclusion from examples
of configurational VPs or complement clauses (see Vincent such as this is that we cannot make comparisons simply
1999a). Second, the distinction only makes sense in the by looking at the combination of forms and invoking the
context of a theoretical architecture that admits non- modern meaning even where that is plausible, but we must
configurational structures. If all noun phrases are as a take the modern meaning only when the context dictates
matter of course analysed as determiner phrases (DPs) or that and no other (Adams 2013; Varvaro 2013a). In other
all case forms as case phrases (KPs), then it makes little instances there are semantic differences that need to be
sense to say that even Latin is non-configurational. taken into account with what at first sight seem like equiva-
The lesson, then, with both the distinctions we have lent constructions as when AD/DE + NP are compared to the
discussed in this section is that their validity and applicabil- dative/genitive (Baños Baños 1996). For further discussion
ity depends at once on the level at which they are deployed of both these examples see Adams (2013), and on the issue
and the theoretical framework within which they are in general see the contributions to Adams and Vincent
conceived. (forthcoming).
47
NIGEL VINCENT
While the structures of Classical and later Latin, and to a The Latin pattern is occasionally encountered in classical
lesser extent early Latin, figure in the standard Romance prose but achieves a special pre-eminence in the medieval
handbooks, not much discussed there is the role of language, where it can allow the writer to achieve a rhyth-
medieval Latin. By this term is standardly meant the mical clause ending known as the cursus, something which
language as codified and transmitted for legal, adminis- was taught as a marker of rhetorical elegance in the studia
trative, educational, and cultural purposes in the period generalia or universities where writers like Rolandino were
approximately from the sixth to the thirteenth century educated. It is notable that the pattern disappears from both
AD. These are the years in which the spoken language Latin and vernacular texts once such instruction reverts to
must be considered to have diverged sufficiently from adherence to classical norms with the coming of Humanism
the written language for the latter to be codified and trans- in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
mitted in monasteries and, in due course, universities, On the other hand, we also find in texts from this medieval
and yet before the return to classical norms that accompan- period evidence of the way Romance is developing, as it were,
ied humanism and the birth of textual philology in the behind the scenes. For example the tenth-century texts
Renaissance. Yet it is possible to adduce examples where a called the Placiti cassinesi are regularly and rightly referred
Romance pattern differs from classical norms but has a to as being the earliest attestations of Italo-Romance (see
parallel in medieval Latin. Such instances fall into two dis- Ledgeway 2011c for recent discussion and references).
tinct categories. On the one hand they may reflect the Less commonly commented on is the fact that the ver-
requirements of a standardized written medieval Latin, as nacular passages, which are embedded in a court report
in the case of the sequence [Adj N ET ‘and’ Adj] discussed written in Latin, are introduced by the words et testifi-
in Vincent (2007b), where the Latin examples from the cando dixit ‘and bearing.GER.ABL witness he said [ . . . ]’,
thirteenth-century Paduan chronicle by Rolandino in where we see an ablative of the gerund being used to
(26) can be set beside examples from early Italian vernaculars express an accompanying action as discussed in §4.2.6,
as in (27): and contrasting for example with the biblical responderunt
illi dicentes ‘they replied him.DAT.SG saying.PRS.PTCP.NOM.PL
(26) a. in diuina pagina et humana (I.5.3) [ . . . ]’ (Mark 8,28) (see Vincent 2007a, and on the Latin
in divine.ABL.FSG page.ABL.SG and human.ABL.FSG background Adams 2013:ch.27).
‘on both divine and human pages’ As always, caution is required in determining which cat-
egory a given example falls into. Thus, several textbooks
b. post multa facta et ardua (I.15.23)
report the example in (28) from the sixth-century prelate
after many.ACC.NPL. deed.ACCPL and hard.ACC.NPL
and chronicler Gregory of Tours as a covert instance of the
‘after many hard deeds’
developing Romance perfect periphrasis, but in context it is
c. parua tamen uipera et clear that the meaning is in fact ‘you have the bishop as an
small.NOM.FSG yet viper.NOM.SG and invited guest’ and not ‘you have invited the bishop’ (Haverling
occulta (III.6.12) forthcoming):
hidden.NOM.FSG
‘small and hidden viper’ (28) ecce episcopum [ . . . ] inuitatum
look bishop.ACC.SG invite.PST.PTCP.ACC.SG
(27) a. da questi grandi omini e habes (Lat., Gregory of Tours, Life of the Fathers 3.1)
by these great men and have.PRS.2SG
possenti (Ven., Lapidario Estense, prologue 58) ‘Look, you have the bishop as an invited guest’
powerful
‘by these great and powerful men’ And just as we asked ‘Which Latin?’ we can also pose the
question ‘Which Romance?’ The foregoing discussion has
b. molta chacciagione e
assumed that the only relevant dimensions when it comes
much game and
to picking Romance comparanda are geographic and tem-
buona (Umb., Il conto di Corciano di Perugia, 7,18)
poral, but there are also social dimensions consequent upon
good
the processes of vernacular standardization (see Pountain
‘much good game’
2011 and Ch. 37). At the level of lexis these developments
c. de diversi herbi et hodoriferi are manifest in the contrast between learnèd and popular
of various herbs and fragrant vocabulary. For instance, French and Spanish have different
‘of various and fragrant herbs’ words for ‘dog’—chien and perro respectively—but share the
(Sic., Libru Dialagu S.Gregoriu, 163:26) adjective for things relating to this animal: canin and canino
48
(Vincent 2007b). This can often be detected through the European (SAE), as discussed and referenced in §5.2, that is
differential effects of sound change. French chien has under- to say the idea that there is a set of features which charac-
gone palatalization of Latin [k] before [a] and the diph- terize this group of languages and whose worldwide typo-
thongization of the stressed vowel, but neither of these logical distribution is skewed in the direction of Europe. At
are to be seen in the adjective because it has been borrowed the same time, not all the features in which Romance has
directly from the written language rather than inherited via innovated with respect to Latin are shared in this way. Thus,
the spoken language. the Germanic languages have determiners but not clitic
As an example of a syntactic structure which is found in pronouns, although these have the same etymological
Romance only in high register literary and philosophical source in many Romance languages. And again, Slavonic
texts, and which is borrowed directly from Classical Latin, languages do not have a verb HAVE out of which a HAVE
we return to the accusative and infinitive construction alternation in the perfect could be constructed (Drinka
briefly mentioned in §4.2.7. Consider example (29), which forthcoming). In some cases the zone with shared proper-
is taken from a classic of scientific writing in the vernacular, ties is rather more restricted, as with the surcomposé tenses
Galileo’s Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi (1632): discussed briefly in §4.2.3, which are found most commonly
in a region encompassing Romance and Germanic dialects
(29) [ . . . ] dirà poi quello essere un on either side of the Alps (Schaden 2007).
say.FUT.3SG then that be.INF a Romance also has a foothold in another linguistic area or
bellissimo diamante (It.) Sprachbund, namely that found in the Balkans and made
most.beautiful diamond famous by the Danish linguist Kristian Sandfeld (1930),
‘(who) will say that that is a most beautiful diamond’ where Romanian sits side by side with Bulgarian in having
end-articles, and with Bulgarian, Greek, and Albanian in its
Examples of this kind only survive in the modern lan- (partial) loss of infinitival complementation.
guage in technical and bureaucratic registers.
4.4 Latin, Romance, and the languages 4.5 Final reflections

of Europe
It is significant that we began this chapter by discussing the
By way of conclusion, let us broaden the perspective to comparison of languages over time, and more specifically
include some of the other languages which share the same the dimensions of comparison as they emerge in the case of
geographical space as Romance, where we can observe an Latin and Romance. We have now seen that for a fuller
interesting contrast between developments in the lexical picture we need to integrate the temporal (diachronic),
and the morphosyntactic domains. In the former, there are the spatial (diatopic), and the social (diamesic and diastra-
many shared items transmitted through Latin as the lan- tic) dimensions, and to be alert to the interacting effects of
guage of culture and science and thus not only to the change and contact in the development of new language
Romance languages, as noted above, but also to Germanic structures and systems. But perhaps what is most striking
and, to a lesser extent, Slavonic and sometimes even non- about the comparison between Latin and Romance is that,
Indo-European languages like Hungarian and Finnish. More different though they are in many respects when viewed
striking, however, are the developments at the level of from a typological perspective, the ingredients of the latter
morphosyntax, where it is precisely among those structures are virtually without exception to be found in the former.
that the Romance languages have innovated with respect to And this fact in turn should alert us to two general lessons:
Latin that we find parallels particularly with the Germanic first, that comparable forms do not imply comparable func-
languages, all of which share with Romance (with local tions, and second that the key to understanding the balance
differences of distribution) the presence of articles, comple- between language diversity and uniformity is to be found
mentizers, a perfective HAVE/BE alternation, and aspects of less in the mechanisms of a putative universal grammar
V2 order (cf §62.5). This has led to considerable research than in the pathways of linguistic change as witnessed in
in recent years around the concept of Standard Average language variation (Levinson and Evans 2010).
49
CHAPTER 5
Romance
A typological approach
5.1 Typologies of Romance languages while the verb continues to reference both Agent and
Patient.
Nowadays there exist many proposals for classifying lan- It is thus possible to characterize different types of con-
guages from a typological point of view. In principle all the structions via this symbolism. Example (1) will be repre-
proposed typological approaches are acceptable. In what sented by
follows we shall base our description on the viewpoints of
the major contemporary proposals. These in fact comple- XnYaVx ip3Sg [n = NOM, a = ACC, ip3Sg = Present Indicative,
ment each other, since they refer to different aspects of 3rd person singular]
language. Thus, word order typology is not in contrast with
the actancy-based approach nor head/dependent-marking All members of the sentence have morphological mark-
typology. Since a ‘holistic typology’, capable of explaining ing, and there is no morphological difference between ani-
all the facts a language exhibits via a unique principle, does mate and inanimate participants. Compare:
not yet exist, we will choose from time to time the
approaches that are the most fitting to describe the various (2) Non omnis arbusta iuuant
phenomena at issue. not all.ACC.MPL bushes.NOM please.IND.PRS.3PL
One typological taxonomy is the ‘Actancy Typology’: humilesque myricae (Lat., Virg. Ecl. IV, 2)
Lazard (1997) has sketched a typology according to the humble.NOM.FPL=and tamarisks.NOM
behaviour of the semantic roles of Agent and Patient in ‘not everyone likes bushes and humble tamarisks’
relation to the verb. He assumes as a basic semantic struc-
ture that which contains a Predicate, an Agent, and a Patient The intransitive sentence (3) will be XnVx ip3Sg, whereby
(or Undergoer, Experiencer) such as (1) which he calls the Agent of the one-actant verb behaves like that of the
‘phrase d’action’ (‘process’), ‘construction biactancielle ma- two-actant sentence (1).
jeure’ (‘major biactancy construction’). The grammatical
relations between the predicate and its arguments may be (3) Dominus uenit. (Lat.)
expressed by their order in the sentence, by special mark- master.NOM come.IND.PRS.3SG
ings on the predicate or on the arguments or even on the ‘The master is coming.’
predicate and (parts of) its arguments.
This kind of notation enables us to classify different
linguistic alignments and constructions (the active, the
(1) Dominus seruum uerberat. (Lat.) ergative, the antipassive, the inactive, etc.). What makes
master.NOM servant.ACC whip.IND.PRS.3SG the cross-linguistic comparison possible is the invariable
‘The master whips the servant.’ semantic content and the functional relations obtaining
between the predicate and its two basic arguments, namely
Lazard makes use of very neutral symbols such as X, Y, Agent and Patient.
and V(erb) and provides these symbols with indices which Romance languages have predominantly constructions of
express their mutual relations. Thus the abstract structure the types X0Y0Vx ip3Sg and X0Vx ip3Sg:
X0Y0Vxy symbolizes a structure where the Agent and Patient
have no marking, but the verb is marked both for the Agent (4) Le maître bat le serviteur. (Fr.)
and the Patient; XiY0Vxy will, in turn, refer to a structure the master beat.IND.PRS.3SG the servant
where the Agent has marking but the Patient does not, ‘The master beats the servant.’
50 This chapter © Paolo Ramat and Davide Ricca 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
A TYPOLOGICAL APPROACH
(5) Le maître arrive. (Fr.) determiners (‘operators’). The relation between the two
the master come.IND.PRS.3SG elements is specified on the dependent one (hominis/the
‘The master is coming.’ man’s).
The unmarked word order is subject+verb+object (SVO) in (7) hominis domus (Lat.)
declarative sentences (cf. also §§31.1-2, 34.3.1, 62.2). Latin, man.GEN house.NOM
on the contrary, had SOV as basic word order, though other ‘the man’s house’
linearizations were frequently used according to focalizing
strategies. Example (2), for instance, has the subject humil- The Romance languages, where genitival prepositions are
esque myricae in focus position at the end of the sentence. linked (prosodically and syntactically) with the possessor,
The word order typology inspired by Greenberg (1966) still belong to the dependent-marking type: cf. Fr. la maison
unifies under a general principle many linguistic phenom- [de(/à) Pierre]PP ‘the house of(/to) Pierre’.2
ena such as the relation between verb and object, noun and Gender agreement in adjectives is another good instance
adjective, noun and genitive, noun and relative clause, of dependent marking both in Latin and Romance
standard and comparative. The unifying principle is the languages:
relation between Determinee (Detee) and Determiner
(Deter): the OV order is Deter+Detee, the VO order is the (8)
reverse. The transition from Latin to Romance sees a drift a. altus mons bona sors (Lat.)
from OV, which was prevalent (but not compulsory) in high.NOM.MSG mountain.NOM.(M) good.NOM.FSG fortune.NOM.(F)
Classical Latin, to VO. However, Classical Latin already had ‘high mountain’ ‘good luck’
some VO features (e.g. it had mostly prepositions instead of
b. monte alto fonte fresca (It.)
postpositions, and the order noun–genitive was already
mountain.NOM.(M) high.NOM.MSG spring.NOM.(F) fresh.NOM.FSG
prevailing over the more archaic genitive-noun order, cf.
‘high mountain’ ‘fresh spring’
Ledgeway 2012a:213).
The typology proposed by Nichols (1986) is based on the
In (8), nouns with the same phonetic structure (mons–sors
‘head-marking’ vs ‘dependent-marking’ dichotomy. It is still
and monte–fonte) have no sign of their gender, and only the
a debated question which is the head of a noun phrase.
dependent adjectives tell us that mons and monte are mas-
According to ‘categorial grammar’, the constituent whose
culine while sors and fonte are feminine. On the contrary,
category coincides with the category of the entire phrase is
subject agreement inflection on the verb is a clear head-
the Determinee (‘operand’), and the Determiner (‘operator’)
marking feature both in Latin and in Romance. This is not
is the adjoined, specifying element (see Bartsch and
surprising, since this is probably the most widespread head-
Vennemann 1982:39). In the adpositional phrase (6) the
marking feature cross-linguistically (Nichols 1986:77). On
head is the preposition ab and the dependent NP urbe condita
the whole, Latin and Romance approach more closely the
marks its relation with the head via a special case, namely
dependent- than the head-marking type, but Romance lan-
the ablative. However, in a language in which prepositions
guages much less so than Latin, as will be seen.
do not govern case (like most Romance languages),1 the PPs
Dependent-marking languages seem to disprefer VO
are neither head- nor dependent-marked, i.e. they are neu-
order (cf. Nichols 1986:79). However, neither Latin nor—
tral with respect to the distinction.
much less so—Romance fully comply with this tendency
(see §5.3.3).
(6) ab urbe condita (Lat.)
In the verb system tense, mood, aspect, and person mor-
[[from]PREP [[city.ABL]N [founded.ABL]PTCP]NP]PP
phemes, as usual in fusional languages, follow the base (cf.
‘from the foundation of the city [Rome]’
Lat. CANTAUERUNT, Fr. chantèrent, Sp. cantaron, etc., ‘sing.IND.PST.
PFV.3PL’) and determine the verbal nature of the word while
In a noun phrase expressing the possession relationship,
the base is not necessarily verbal (CANTUS, Fr. chant, Sp. canto
such as (7), domus (and house) are the determined ‘heads’
mean ‘song’). At any rate, in the evolution from Latin to
(‘operands’) and hominis (and the man’s) are the ‘dependent’
Romance we note ‘a progressive reversal of the directionality
1 2
Exceptions are Romanian and medieval Gallo-Romance, which keep There are some cases of prepositionless possessors in Romance
bicasual systems in nouns, adjectives, and determiners. More instances of (cf. §§16.3.1.1, 56.2.14), in modern French remnants like Hôtel-Dieu, lit.
case-governing prepositions are of course found with personal pronouns, ‘house God’, or in southern Italian dialects, e.g. Verbicarese [a ’kasa u
with up to four-case systems still attested in some varieties of southern prov‰s’sur‰], lit. ‘the house the professor’ (Silvestri 2012:569). These obvi-
Italy and Sardinia (Loporcaro 2008; 2009). ously qualify as neutral with respect to the head/dependent typology.
51
parameter from a regular head-final setting towards a head- Several of these features probably spread later and grad-
initial setting’ (Ledgeway 2012a:236), and the synthetic form ually in a wider area in the following centuries, often via the
(ils) chantèrent ‘(they) sing.IND.PST.PFV.3PL’ has been progres- mediation of high-prestige varieties (Latin first of all, but
sively replaced by the analytic (ils) ont chanté (lit. ‘(they) later some established national languages as well, e.g. Ger-
have.3PL sung’), where the grammatical information (ont man for their eastern neighbours such as western Slavonic
‘they have’) has been fronted. and Hungarian). Therefore, it is still an open question how
Coseriu (1987; 1988) noticed the difference between nom- pervasive SAE features are at the level of non-standard
inal and verbal systems in the Romance languages. Verbs varieties, even those strictly related to the ‘core’ SAE lan-
tendentially have an internal, synthetic determination: Fr. guages (cf. Murelli and Kortmann 2011). A clear example of
(nous) chantons/chanterons/chanterions, It. cantiamo/canter- a defining SAE feature strongly influenced by sociolinguistic
emo/canteremmo, Pt. cantamos/cantaremos/cantaríamos ‘we factors is given by the relative clause construction employ-
(are) sing(ing)/we will sing/we would sing’. Non-relational ing a relative pronoun, i.e. a quite peculiar subordinator
functions such as number, person, tense, or mood are which marks the syntactic role it assumes in the relative
expressed internally to the verb. Relational functions that clause, but agrees at the same time in gender/number with
establish a relation between two terms tend, on the con- the relativized head, e.g. Pt. As senhoras das quais falei são
trary, to be expressed in Romance languages by analytic professoras ‘The women of whom I spoke are professors’.
means: Lat. DULCIOR ‘sweet.COMPR’ vs Sp. más dulce, Ro. mai Since the relative pronoun so defined is extremely rare
dulce, It. più dolce, Nap. [kkju dˈdoʧə] lit. ‘more sweet’, Lat. outside Europe but nearly universal in standard west Euro-
MARCI FILIUS ‘Marcus.GEN son.NOM’ > It. figlio di Marco, Pt. filho do pean languages (Comrie and Kuteva 2011), it appears to be
Marco, Fr. fils de Marc ‘son of Mark’. one of the best diagnostics for SAE (Haspelmath 1998:279).
However, looking in more depth beyond standard lan-
guages, the construction turns out to be rare or nonexistent,
e.g. in most dialects of Italy (cf. §64.4) and Germany
5.2 Areal typology: Standard Average (Fleischer 2004). In Italo-Romance dialects, the most com-
European and the Romance languages mon strategy is pronoun retention (Cennamo 1997b:194):
the relative subordinator is invariable (most often [ke]
A different approach within the typological perspective deals ‘that’) and the argument role of the relativized noun is
with the geographical dimension of interlinguistic contact and coded by a resumptive clitic within the relative clause.
the possible rise of linguistic areas. In this domain, a much-
discussed topic in the last decade concerns the reshaping of (9) [el ˈtozo ke ge go preˈsta el ˈlibro] (Pad.)
Whorf ’s (1941) impressionistic intuition of Standard Average the boy that DAT.3SG= I.have lent the book
European (SAE) into a workable and even measurable/gradable ‘The boy I lent the book to.’
concept to identify a linguistic area embracing the core of
western Europe (cf. van der Auwera 1998; Haspelmath 1998; The limitation of relative pronouns essentially to stand-
2001; for a more recent assessment, see van der Auwera 2011; ard varieties is readily explained by interpreting its spread
see also §4.4). Romance languages all participate, more or less as a reflex of the Latin model on the rhetorical/communi-
intensively, in the phenomenon, as do Germanic languages, cative strategies of prestigious European languages, but
western Slavonic, and Balkan languages; however, the very sheds some doubts on the definition of SAE if we do not
core of the SAE linguistic area appears to be centred on the take into account its sociolinguistic context.
felicitously named ‘Charlemagne Sprachbund’ (van der Auwera
1998:824), which involves German, Dutch, and, among the
Romance languages, just French and northern Italian dialects.
5.3 From Latin to Romance: typologically
Most areally shared features of SAE appear indeed to have
originated in the early Middle Ages (Haspelmath 2001),
significant category losses and
plausibly in a period of widespread bilingualism, especially innovations
between Latinized populations and Germanic newcomers in
central Europe. Historically, the progressive emergence of 5.3.1 Determiners
SAE may have had its critical period at the time of the
expansion of the Franks in central Europe (Pippin and his One of the most important innovations characterizing the
son Charlemagne) and the diffusion of the Holy Scripts as Romance languages is the introduction of the definite and
well of their vulgar translations into Germanic, Romance, indefinite articles (for detailed discussion see §§30.3.3,
and even Slavonic languages. 46.3.1.1). As is known, the definite article derives from
52
Latin demonstratives used as deictic reinforcement, mainly minimum in French: cf. It. ho comprato (del) pane e (delle)
at the level of the spoken language; witness in (10) the use of cipolle vs Fr. j’ai acheté du pain et des oignons ‘I bought (some)
distal demonstrative ILLE (> Cat./Sp. ella, Fr. lela, It. il/ bread and (some) onions’. Finally, for mass nouns a central
lola, Ara./Cor./Glc./Pt. and SItR. oa, Occ. lo(u)/ella, Ro. area within Romance languages—excluding the whole of the
-(u)l-a):3 Iberian Peninsula, and southern Italo-Romance (but for old
Neapolitan see Ledgeway 2009a:189-91)—has developed a
(10) Phaselus ille quem uidetis partitive article (cf. §6.4.2), which is obligatory in French
little.boat.NOM that.NOM.M who.ACC.MSG see.2PL while it may alternate with zero in Italian. In some Italo-
hospites [ . . . ] (Lat., Catullus 4.1) Romance varieties it may coincide with the simple prepos-
guests.VOC ition ‘of ’ rather than articulated forms: cf. Tur. [i l aj kaˈta d
‘That little boat you see, strangers . . . ’ paŋ] ‘I bought some (lit. ‘of ’) bread’.
Other Romance languages derive their definite article

from Lat. IPSE, originally a topic marker and intensifier (e.g.
5.3.2 Auxiliaries
Lat. ipse Caesar ‘Caesar himself ’, Cic. Fam. 6.10.2), which
yields Srd. susa, and Balearic and Costa Brava Cat. essa. Another important change in Romance concerns the emer-
As for the indefinite article, it continues the Latin car- gence of a new system of auxiliaries (cf. §46.3.2.1). Accord-
dinal number UNU(M)UNA(M) ‘one’ (> Cat./It./Sp. ununa, Fr. ing to Benveniste (1968) we have here a ‘conservative
unune, Occ. u(n)uno, Pt. umuma, Ro. uno, Cal. nuna), change’, whereas in the previous case of the articles we
as happens in many other linguistic traditions (cf. Dryer can speak of a ‘innovating change’ inasmuch we can observe
2011a). As in the case of the definite article, an article-like the emergence of a new category (albeit not completely
use of UNUS is already attested in Classical Latin, although unknown to the mother language: see (11)). The Romance
rarely and in very limited contexts: verb system introduces many periphrastic forms that have
roughly the same function as the synthetic forms of the
(11) non [ . . . ] Pompeium tamquam unus mother language (cf. §46.1). The Latin first person singular
not Pompey.ACC like a/one.NOM.MSG perfect DIXI corresponds both to It. dissi ‘I said’ (simple past,
manipularis secutus sim. (Lat., Cic. Att. 9.10.2) the so-called ‘passato remoto’) and ho detto ‘I have said’ (the
soldier.NOM having.followed be.SBJV.PRS.1SG so-called ‘passato prossimo’). The same holds for many
‘I did not follow Pompey like a private soldier.’ (De la Romance languages (cf. §58.2.3), though the frequency and
Villa 2010:228) the functions of the periphrastic vs the simple forms may
vary from language to language.
The simultaneous presence of the indefinite and definite The bridging contexts which set the conditions for the
article in a language is considered by Haspelmath change to develop are already found in Latin. Compare (12)
(2001:1494) one of the most significant features of SAE as a with (13), (14):
linguistic area. In the overall picture, all Romance languages
do in fact show this feature, although, as noted above, not (12) neiue quis in eo agro agrum oqupatum
all Romance languages belong to the SAE core. Nevertheless, and.not someone in that field land.M.ACC occupied.ACC.MSG
conditions of use of the articles differ sharply across habeto (Lat., CIL I2 585, 25; 111 BC)
Romance languages, and cannot be discussed here in detail have.IMP.FUT.3SG
(but see e.g. Stark et al. 2007). In some varieties, the definite ‘and nobody must keep occupied the land in that field’
article may not occur with the inherently definite personal
names, in others it is possible or obligatory (some varieties In (12) the ‘immediate constituent’ analysis is [[agrum
of Catalan even have a dedicated form: M en/F na). Variation oqupatum]NP [habeto]V ]VP (with OV, but Detee+Deter in the
among the Romance languages is found regarding co-occur- NP). Hence, the meaning of (12) is not that of a perfective
rence with possessives: cf. Fr. (**la) ma valise vs It. **(la) mia action in the past (‘someone occupied’); rather it refers to a
valigia ‘(the) my suitcase’. Also the possibility of a zero- universally valid state of affairs enshrined in the law.
article or ‘bare’ NPs (chiefly mass nouns, abstract nouns, On the other hand, in (13) and (14) the past participles
and/or postverbal plural indefinites) varies greatly, with a exquisitum and probatum may, and probably should, be inter-
preted as belonging not to the NP but to the VP, giving it a
3 perfect tense value (see Ramat 1987:142-7; Ledgeway
Also in other linguistic traditions (e.g. Semitic) the source of definite
articles is to be sought in the spoken style of non-literary texts (cf. Putzu 2012a:130-33). Note that probatum does not even agree
and Ramat 2001). with haec omnia.
53
(13) dicam de istis graecis [ . . . ] quid Athenis gerund: Sp. estaba trabajando, It. stavo lavorando ‘I was work-
I.will.say about these Greeks what Athens.LOC ing’, although other strategies may occur. Many of them are
exquisitum habeam (Lat., Cato ad fil. frg. 1) based on a location schema (cf. Heine 1993:32): Gen. [suŋ
discovered.ACC.NSG have.SBJV.PRS.1SG deˈre: a ˈskri:ve/suŋ ki ke ˈskri:vu ˈi:na ˈletja] (Toso 1997:217)
‘I will say about these Greeks [ . . . ] what I have found ‘I’m writing a letter’ (lit. ‘I’m behind to write’/‘I’m here that
out in Athens/(what I hold as discovered in Athens)’ I write a letter’).
It. andare ‘to go’ may be considered a passive auxiliary in
(14) haec omnia probatum habemus
sentences where the main verb has a meaning such as ‘lose,
this.ACC.NPL all.ACC.NPL tried.ACC.NSG we.have
destroy’ (see Giacalone Ramat 2000:126f.):
(Orib. Synopsis 7.48; Lat. transl. 6th c.)
‘we have tried all these things’
(16) La memoria di questi fatti va/ è andata
the memory of these facts goes/ is gone
In the course of history of the Romance languages the
perduta. (It.)
periphrastic construction became more and more grammat-
lost
icalized, and in some contemporary varieties it has almost
‘The memory of these things is being/has been lost.’
replaced the ancient perfect in all its functions (cf. §58.3.2).
The extreme cases are spoken French, most dialects of
In non-perfective tenses, andare may freely combine with
northern Italy, Sardinian, and spoken Romanian, where
the passive past participle of all transitive verbs; however, it
the simple past has disappeared altogether.
acquires a deontic meaning with the passive, as in (17):
Typologically, the use of a ‘have + past perfect participle’
construction to form a perfect tense (whether or not it (17) La memoria di questi fatti va/andava/andrà
further grammaticalizes into a general perfective past) is the memory of these facts go.PRS/IPFV/FUT.3SG
another strong diagnostic of SAE, according to Haspelmath mantenuta/salvata. (It.)
(2001:1495). Together with Romance, it is found in all Ger- maintained/saved
manic and some Balkan languages: Greek, Albanian, and ‘The memory of these things must be/had to be/will
Macedonian. On the other hand, it is practically unknown have to be maintained/saved.’
outside Europe (Dahl 1995; note, however, that a transitive
possession verb ‘have’ is by itself relatively uncommon In several Romance languages, the same movement verb
across the world). The parallel constructions in the different has been grammaticalized as a future auxiliary, in an alla-
branches of European languages, arising roughly in the tive construction quite parallel to Eng. going to. In instances
same period, point to a complex contact picture (cf. such as (18), there can still be ambiguity with the original
Giacalone Ramat 2008:135-43). The case seems to exemplify meaning as a verb of motion:
well the situation of ‘(contact-induced) replica grammat-
icalization’ or even a ‘grammaticalization area’, in the (18) Las señoras van a dormir. (Sp.)
words of Heine and Kuteva (2005:92-4, 182-5). the ladies go to sleep.INF
Alongside the perfect periphrastic constructions with ‘The ladies go to sleep/will (soon) sleep.’
HABERE there also exist those with auxiliary ESSE ‘be’, the
distribution of which is discussed in detail in §49.3. Similarly, Fr. aller and Pt. (especially Brazilian) ir ‘go’ are
Other verbs, too, progressively assumed the role of aux- used as auxiliaries for expressing future, especially if estab-
iliary, and the Romance languages offer a large palette of lished as certain:
different functions for the new auxiliaries. For example,
Spanish distinguishes between a dynamic passive auxiliary (19) Je vais [**à] lui téléphoner. (Fr.)
(ser) and a stative passive auxiliary (estar): I go.IND.PRS.1SG to him.DAT= phone.INF
‘I’m going to call him.’
(15) El coche era pintado. vs
the car ser.IND.IPFV.3SG painted (20) Vou [**a] ver um filme no cinema. (Pt.)
‘The car was being painted’ go.IND.PRS.1SG to see.INF a film in.the cinema
El coche estaba pintado. (Sp.) ‘I’m going to see a film at the cinema.’
the car estar.IND.IPFV.3SG painted
‘The car was painted.’ Catalan also has the construction anar a ‘to go to’ +
infinitive. However, its meaning is not future proper, but
Reflexes of STARE ‘to stand’ are the most widespread aux- rather imminential: its limited uses as a future proper are
iliary for expressing the progressive when followed by the mostly considered as due to Castilian interference (cf. Fabra
54
1986:88; Badia i Margarit 1962, I:394, n. 12; Gavarró and Laca see Giacalone Ramat and Sansò 2014). Note the imminential
2002:2693f.). On the other hand, in Catalan a very similar meaning in (25):
construction (anar ‘to go’ + infinitive, without a ‘to’) has the
opposite meaning: it is the current punctual past tense in (24) El ei vegnius cattaus. (Srs.)
the contemporary language. On the discourse-based motiv- he is come found
ations which led to such an unexpected development, see ‘He has been found.’
Detges (2004). Example (21) shows both periphrases in the
(25) Masa vine pusă de ei în colţ. (reg. Ro.)
same sentence (Gavarró and Laca 2002:2693):
table=the comes put.FSG by them in corner
‘The table is going to be put by them in the corner.’
(21) El fiscal anava a esternudar, però va
the prosecutor go.IPFV.3SG to sneeze.INF but go.PRS.3SG
It is impossible to describe here all the verbs which
aguantar-se. (Cat.)
function as auxiliaries in the Romance languages (cf.
restrain.INF.=himself
§46.3.2.1 and the list in Ledgeway 2012a:122-4). What
‘The public prosecutor was about to sneeze, but he
matters is that the periphrastic forms have the auxiliary
restrained himself.’
(=Detee) first and the main verb (=Deter) following it.
This is consistent with the general trend we observed
In a few Gallo-Romance varieties the verb ‘come’ may be
in §5.1: the transition from Latin to Romance languages
used as an auxiliary for the immediate past, but in this case
involves a tendential drift from Deter+Detee to the
the construction involves, much less unexpectedly, an abla-
reverse order. However, inversion is possible in the
tive instead of an allative preposition:
Romanian future and conditional, in archaizing usage
(cf. 26) where the auxiliary is an eroded form of the
(22) Elle vient de le voir. (Fr.)
verb a vrea ‘want’.
she comes from him= see.INF
‘She has just seen him.’
(26) Adormi-vom. (Ro.)
(23) Venh de me lavar. (Lgd.) fall.asleep.INF = AUX.FUT.1PL
I.come from me= wash.INF ‘We shall fall asleep.’
‘I have just washed.’ (Ledgeway 2012a:123).
This inversion reminds one of the western Romance
Coming back to future periphrases, Romance displays a future grammaticalization pattern CANTARE HABEO ‘sing.INF I.
host of different patterns. Typologically, they match almost have’ with OV order. Traces of the periphrasis that gave rise
perfectly the main lexical sources for future ‘grams’ attested very early in the history of the Romance languages to the
worldwide (cf. Bybee et al. 1994:251-71; Dahl 2000b), which new synthetic forms are still found in the (literary) Portuguese
comprise verbs of motion (see above) and modal verbs type lavar-me-ei lit. ‘wash.INF=me=I.have (=I shall wash myself)’,
expressing volition (Ro. voi (originally meaning) ‘I want’ + alongside lavarei-me lit. ‘wash.INF.I.have=me’, where the clitic
infinitive) or obligation (Nuo. devo/Cpd. deppu ‘I must’ + pronoun is inserted between the basic verb and the ending
infinitive, Jones 1993:90, and the many reflexes of the type that derives from Lat. HABERE ‘to have’. Similarly, the condi-
HABERE DE/AD ‘to have of/to’). Perhaps the only major type tional may be lavar-se-iam lit. ‘wash.INF=selves=they.had (= they
lacking is change-of-state futures (as in Ger. ich werde ‘I would wash themselves)’.
become’ + infinitive). However, the Romansh ventive
futures (Dahl 2000b:321; Ledgeway 2012a:123) might fill
the gap, given the very close semantic connection between 5.3.3 Word order change
‘come’ and ‘become’, and the fact that Romance reflexes of
UENIRE ‘to come’ may be often used to express just change of Although Ledgeway (2012a:201, n. 29) observes that it is
state, with no movement involved, e.g. It. viene brutto, lit. difficult to provide a consistent definition of the term
‘(the weather) is coming bad’. ‘head’ as used by Nichols (1986:56f.) and others, there is
The change-of-state meaning is indeed the most plausible a general agreement that the change from OV (i.e. Deter+
starting point for a third pattern of grammaticalization of Detee) to VO (i.e. Detee+Deter) is one of the main features
‘come’: namely, its use as a passive auxiliary with the pas- characterizing the shift from Latin to the Romance lan-
sive past participle in Italian and various other Romance guages. However, it has to be noted that Latin was not a
languages (and, because of language contact, in some Alpine rigid OV language with obligatory final position of the
Germanic dialects such as Cimbrian and Bavarian; Ramat verb, like Turkish or Japanese. As a basically inflectional
1998:227f.; Heine and Kuteva 2005:186; for non-IE parallels language, its word order was rather free. For instance, in
55
the very same author we find with an SOV order (27) and Most variation within Romance does not involve the basic
with OSV (28). orders, but rather their rigidity, both diatopically and dia-
chronically. While the unmarked order is SVO everywhere,
(27) Caesar suas copias in proximum marked sentence orders reflecting differences in informa-
Caesar.NOM his.ACC.FPL troops.ACC in next.ACC.MSG tional structure are marginal in French, but quite common,
collem subducit (Lat., Caes. B.G.1.22.3) for example, in Italian and Spanish: in Italian VOS and OVS
hill.ACC withdraws are possible, and Spanish, besides VOS order pragmatically
‘Caesar withdraws his troops to the next hill’ similar to Italian, has also VSO for all-rhematic sentences
(Zubizarreta 1999:4232-4). Historically, both old Italian and
(28) copias suas Caesar in proximum
old French displayed less rigidity in many constructions
troops.ACC his.ACC.FPL Caesar.NOM in next.ACC.MSG
than their contemporary descendants (cf. §§31.3.3, 62.5).4
collem subducit (Lat., Caes. B.G. 1.24.1)
The increasing rigidity which developed from Latin to
hill.ACC withdraws
Romance languages has been traditionally connected with
‘Caesar withdraws his troops to the next hill’
the loss of case endings. However, reduction of case endings
is attested already in ancient Latin: the famous funeral
Compare also (29) with (30), and these in turn with (31)
inscription of Lucius Cornelius Scipio (CIL I2, 9, second half
where the verb interrupts the object NP:
of the third century BC) illustrated in (32) would be as in (33)
in ‘Classical’ Latin.
(29) maximas gratias agit (Lat., Cic. Att. 3.8.4) = OV
greatest thanks does
(32) honc oino ploirume cosentiont
‘He thanks very much’
this.ACC.M one.ACC.M most.NOM.MPL agree.IND.PRS.3PL
(30) agit maximas gratias (Lat., Cic. Att. 1.20.7) = VO R[omane] / duonoro optumo fuise
does greatest thanks Roman.NOM.PL good.GEN.MPL best.ACC.MSG be.INF.PST
‘He thanks very much’ uiro (OLat.)
man.ACC
(31) maximas agit gratias (Lat., Cic. Att. 3.5.1)
‘the majority of Romans agree that this one has been
greatest does thanks
the best of the good men’
‘He thanks very much’
(33) hunc unum plurimi consentiunt Romani/bonorum
optimum fuisse uirum (CLat.).
Examples (27) and (28) carry the same information
(refer to the same state of affairs), but they focus on differ-
We can see that final -m is regularly omitted in oino,
ent components of the information. Even a formulaic sen-
duonoro, optumo, and uiro. This may involve neutralization
tence of epistolary style may have variants, as shown in
with the nominative singular, because also the nominative
(29)-(31).
ending -s is not fully stable: for instance, it does not appear
The fact is that in strong inflectional languages almost
in Fourio, from the inscription from Tusculum (CIL I2, 49,
every word (excepting adverbs, adpositions, and most
third century BC):
numerals) has a morphological mark that assigns to the
word its semantic function in the sentential syntax: the
(34) M. Fourio C. F. tribunos militare de
word is, so to say, self-sufficient, independently of its pos-
M. Furius.NOM C. F. tribune.NOM. military.ABL.SG from
ition (cf. Marouzeau 1922:1; Meillet 1964:439).
praidad Maurte dedet (OLat.)
Romance languages progressively lost this freedom and
plunder.ABL Mars.DAT gave.3SG
word order became more rigid. One may find Lat. Platonis libri
‘The tribune M. Furius, son of Caius, gave (this object)
as well as libri Platonis ‘the books of Plato/Plato’s books’ but
to Mars from a military plunder’
not, say, It. **di Platone i libri, Fr. **de Platon les livres, or Pt.
**de Platão os livros. The basic transitive sentence (see §5.1)
e.g. ‘John loves Mary’—with S, O, and V—shows an SVO order,
just as in English where ‘Mary loves John’ has a totally 4
To give some old Italian illustrations, from Salvi and Renzi (2010):
different meaning. Generally, it can be said that in Romance degree adverbs could follow the modified adjective (bella molto lit. ‘beautiful
the order within the NP/DP is much more rigid than that very’, lucidi troppo lit. ‘bright too.much’, Ricca 2010:736); preverbal predicate
within the VP and sentential modifiers: in particular, sen- adverbs were commonplace: allora il cavaliere dolcemente le parlò lit. ‘then the
knight sweetly spoke to her’ (Ricca 2010:717); direct objects could freely
tence adverbs may surface more or less everywhere, occupy the post-auxiliary position: i nimici avessero già il passo pigliato lit. ‘the
although they show some preferential sequences. enemies had already the pass taken’ (Benincà and Poletto 2010:71).
56
Consequently, it cannot be said that the loss of final (38) mandatae quae sunt uolo deferre epistulas
consonants automatically generated the use of prepositions, given which are I.want deliver letters
nor vice versa. In (34) we see that an ablative (praidad) is (Lat., Pl. Persa 694)
preceded by a preposition (de): case marking and preposi- ‘I want to deliver the letters that were given (scil. to me).’
tions are often used simultaneously. There has been a con-
spiracy between the two factors and the process leading However, the most frequent order was already N + rela-
from Platonis libri ‘Plato.GEN books’ to i libri di Platone ‘the tive clause (i.e. Detee+Deter). In French, as well as in the
books of Plato’ developed along a continuum lasting centur- other Romance languages, it would be impossible to have
ies. In (34) Fourio coexists with nominative case-marked **qui (m’) ont été consignées je veux livrer les lettres ‘which (to.
tribunos (CLat. tribunus). me=) have been given I want to deliver the letters’. What is
Note that in some Romance varieties, after the loss of the possible is les lettres qu’on (m’) a consignées je veux les livrer ‘the
distinction between nominative and accusative (tribuno = letters which were given to me I want to deliver them’, with
nominative and accusative), a new direct object marker a pronominal anaphoric resumption of ‘letters’ in the main
was developed much later via the prepositions a ‘to’ or (in clause.
Romanian) pe ‘on’: The same holds for comparative constructions: Latin had
both comparative + standard and standard + comparative,
(35) Chiamàu a Micheli. (SCal.) whereas Romance languages have just comparative + stand-
he.called a Michele ard: Cor. Antone hé più vechju ché/cà Filippu ‘Antone is older
‘He called Michele.’ than Filippu’.
Finally, in Latin adjectives may precede (39) or follow (40)
(36) Ana a văzut-o pe Maria. (Ro.)
their head:
Ana has seen=her pe Maria
‘Ana has seen Maria.’
(39) lex est recta ratio
At this stage, the object relation is marked similarly to the law.NOM.SG is right.NOM.FSG way.NOM.SG
other non-subject roles in the sentence. Moreover, the imperandi (Lat., Cic. Leg. Man. I, 42)
reintroduction of a direct object marker makes inversion rule.GER.GEN
easier: A Micheli chiamàu (though with Micheli now focal- ‘(the) law is the right way to rule’
ized), since the object is clearly marked. In no Romance (40) in senatus populique Romani
language, however, has this prepositional marking of the in Senate.GEN.SG people.GEN.SG=and Roman.GEN.MSG
object been generalized: it is limited to a subset of NPs, potestate (Lat., Cic. Phil. 6.4)
whose extension varies, but is generally identifiable as an power.ABL.SG
upper segment of the well-known typological hierarchies ‘under control of the Roman Senate and people’
of animacy and/or definiteness (cf. Bossong 1998:218-30).
For instance, in (37) we have both the direct object with a
The traditional view is that the adjective is preposed
and without a, depending on the different status of the two
when it is strictly connected to the noun as an epithet, as
NPs along the hierarchy (a pronoun vs a NP with a lower
in (39), and postposed if it delimits a particular subclass,
degree of referentiality):
as in (40) (cf. Ernout and Thomas 1989:162f.): urbanus
praetor ‘an urbane praetor’ (epithetic) vs praetor urbanus
(37) Più nobili cosa esti vinciri a se
‘praetor of the town’ (classifying). However, there are
more noble thing is win.INF a REFL.3
many counterexamples, such as nauibus [ . . . ] onerariis vs
medemmi ca vinciri li jnimici
onerariae naues (Caes. B.G. 4.22.3/4.22.4) ‘transport ships’.
selves than win.INF the enemies
Other authors claim that the N-adjective order was
(OSic., [1321–37], Iemmolo 2009:202)
already the unmarked in Classical Latin (see Ledgeway
‘It is nobler is to overcome oneself than to overcome
2012a:210-13).
the enemies’
In Romance languages we have instances of clear seman-
tic oppositions: Fr. un pauvre causeur ‘a poor speaker’ is a
As for the other features related to the OV or VO order person who is not gifted for speeches, whereas un causeur
(Greenberg’s ‘universals’), we may observe, again, a freedom pauvre is a speaker who is poor (‘not rich’); It. numerose
which progressively diminished in the Romance languages. famiglie means ‘many families’ but famiglie numerose ‘large
Latin, especially old Latin, could have the relative clause families’; Sp. un pobre hombre is a ‘poor fellow’ whereas un
preposed to its referent head, thus with Deter+Detee: hombre pobre is a ‘poor man’. Apart from such cases of strong
57
contrast, the adjective–noun order is still quite generally (including both word-like and affixal negators, and even
available in some Romance languages, for example Italian, negative verbs, which do not have much in common with
although the prenominal position has a restricted semantic the process outlined above) is by far the most common
range: it cannot have classifying function (relational adjec- worldwide, with about 52% of the total, while V-NEG types
tives like **il regionale treno ‘the regional train’ are excluded). amount to about 28%, and the discontinuous ‘double neg-
From a general typological perspective, the relative ator’ type to about 15% (with several minor or hybrid types
flexibility of order of noun and adjective is not surprising, accounting for the remaining 5%).
given that this order—contrary to Greenberg’s (1966) As a matter of fact, French-based creoles in Louisiana and
expectations—does not really correlate with the VO/OV Guadeloupe have restored the typologically unmarked pre-
parameter, as shown by Dryer (1988). verbal position of negation, thus completing Jespersen’s
Reasons of space do not permit us to describe other facts Cycle (Ramat 2006):
related to word order(s) such as the usage of prepositions
and postpositions (prepositions are in principle consistent (41) Mo pa kup. (Lou.) Nu pa vle. (Gua.)
with VO, postpositions with OV; Latin already shows a clear I NEG cut we NEG want
preponderance for prepositions). Summing up, Latin was a ‘I don’t cut.’ ‘We don’t want.’
predominantly OV language, but not a rigid one, i.e. not
consistently OV. The passage from Latin to Romance saw a A different typological perspective on sentence negation
drift from OV to VO, again not in a rigid way, as we have is taken in Miestamo (2005), whose main defining param-
seen in the case of adjectives. eter is the dichotomy between ‘symmetric’ and ‘asymmet-
ric’ negation. The negative construction is labelled
symmetric if it does not differ from the corresponding
5.3.4 Sentence negation affirmative in any other meaningful way than by the pres-
ence of negative markers (Miestamo 2005:61).
A significant instance of differentiation in word order In particular, asymmetry may involve: (i) neutralizations
among the Romance languages is offered by sentence neg- in the negative paradigm (e.g. fewer tense–mood distinc-
ation, reflecting the different stages of the well-known tions, or no person inflection in the negative constructions);
Jespersen’s Cycle (Jespersen 1917:4; see e.g. Schwegler (ii) the occurrence of a dedicated ‘negative verb’ which
1990:153-74; Bernini and Ramat 1996; van der Auwera and carries inflection; (iii) some sort of specialized tense-
Neuckermans 2004:458f.; cf. also §51.2.1). The inherited aspect-mood marking for negative constructions.
order, with the Latin sentence negator NON ‘not’ preceding On the whole, despite the relevant functional motivations
the finite verb in main declarative sentences, has been for the different kinds of asymmetric negation, symmetric
maintained, together with the marker itself, in the lateral negation turns out to be the most widespread type in
areas (Iberian Peninsula, central and southern Italy, and Miestamo’s balanced language sample, which deals with
Romania). Central regions—apart from Liguria and Veneto main declarative sentences only. Romance languages all
in northern Italy—have seen a host of basically parallel, but display the symmetric type in such sentences, although
independent, processes of renewal, by which a multitude of they often show (as Latin did) asymmetry in imperatives
different items (chiefly: (i) the negative quantifier ‘nothing’; (especially in the second person singular), a favourite locus
(ii) lexical items originally denoting minimal quantities, for asymmetry cross-linguistically (van der Auwera and
such as ‘step’, ‘crumb’, ‘drop’, etc., so-called ‘negative polar- Lejeune 2011). Negative imperatives may require a different
ity items’; and (iii) expressions of holophrastic negation verb form as in (42) and (43), or the use of a dedicated
originally occurring sentence-finally) have grammaticalized auxiliary, as [sta] ‘stay’ in (44):
as sentence negators.
Most of the above processes give rise to a new V-NEG order, (42) Canta! Non cantare! (It.)
although many varieties (standard Fr. ne . . . pas is obviously sing.IMP.2SG NEG sing.INF
the most familiar) display the intermediate stage of discon- ‘Sing!’ ‘Don’t sing!’
tinuous negation. However, the new postverbal negators, due
(43) ¡Canta! ¡No cantes! (Sp.)
to their different historical origins, cannot be subsumed
sing.IMP.2SG NEG sing.SBJV.PRS.2SG
under a single syntactic position: for a detailed analysis, see
‘Sing!’ ‘Don’t sing!’
Parry (1996) for Italo-Romance, and §51.2.2.
At any rate, the resulting V-NEG order taken as a whole is (44) [ˈkanta] [nu sta a kanˈta] (Gen.)
clearly marked from a general typological perspective: in sing.IMP.2SG NEG stay.INF to sing.INF
Dryer’s (2011b) sample of 1,326 languages, the NEG-V type ‘Sing!’ ‘Don’t sing!’ (Toso 1997:214).
58
Note that in all three cases the prohibitive negation is the From this perspective the relevant data involve so-called
same as in declaratives. Cross-linguistically, this combination left- and right-dislocations (we use the term simply as a
(special imperative + normal negative) is the less common of useful label, without implying that they are the result of any
the four logical possibilities (van der Auwera and Lejeune kind of movement rule), in which the full NP and its clitic
2011), and within Europe it is almost exclusively peculiar to resumption (or anticipation) co-occur in the same utter-
Romance. Moreover, within Romance there is a very strong ance, as in the following Italian examples where the object
correlation between the two parameters discussed in this clitic le co-occurs with the full NP object:
section: preverbal negation patterns with asymmetric
imperatives, and vice versa. For a discussion within the (45) Le chiavi le prendo io. (It.)
generative framework, see Zanuttini (1997:105-54). The keys them= I.take I
‘I’ll take the keys myself.’
(46) a. Le ho prese le chiavi. (It.)
5.3.5 The clitic pronoun system and them= I.have taken.FPL the keys
its grammaticalization potential ‘I’ve taken the keys.’
b. Le ho prese io, le chiavi. (It.)
Another major innovation in the Romance system with them= I.have taken.FPL I the keys
respect to Latin is undoubtedly the development of clitic ‘It’s me that took the keys.’
pronouns. These are found in all Romance varieties for the
object and the dative function, and less extensively for Sentences (45) and (46) are not pragmatically equivalent
oblique functions. to those without a clitic such as (47) because (simplifying
A series of clitic subject pronouns is also found in a considerably) they tend to imply topicalization of the object
central area of the Romance domain, comprising French, NP, which in the unmarked sentence (47) is normally part of
northern Occitan, Francoprovençal, Romansh except Sur- the rheme.
selvan, Ladin, Friulian, and northern Italo-Romance, includ-
ing Florentine. This latter series is often not complete for all (47) Prendo/ho preso le chiavi. (It.)
persons, depending on the variety. The literature on both I.take/I.have taken.MSG the keys
subject and non-subject clitics is huge (see Chs 45, 47, 48). ‘I(’ll) take/I’ve taken the keys.’
We limit ourselves to some brief considerations about the
typological significance of this innovation. As a matter of fact, and despite complications in
Cross-linguistically, Romance non-subject pronominal the range of their pragmatic value(s) (Berruto 1985;
clitics have rather close parallels in other Indo-European Frascarelli 2003), dislocation constructions are never obliga-
languages of Europe, especially Slavonic (cf. Dimitrova- tory in Italian, from a strictly syntactic point of view. This
Vulchanova 1999) and Greek (cf. Anagnostopoulou 1999). means that the clitics cannot be considered (yet?) merely
They do not fit particularly well into the picture of Standard as agreement markers. Right dislocations are probably a better
Average European, however, and they have never been starting point than left dislocations for a full grammatical-
proposed as an identifying and typical feature for this lin- ization of the construction, because the transition to an obliga-
guistic area, although they were the object of a dedicated tory ‘objective conjugation’, with the clitic as an agreement
volume within the ‘Eurotyp’ project (van Riemsdijk 1999). marker (cf. Berretta 1989), would be unproblematic in terms of
For all three families, perhaps the most significant typo- the word order of the ‘major constituents’.
logical issue is the extent to which they can be considered The grammaticalization process of the clitic towards an
an instance of a head-marking strategy for non-subject roles agreement marker is more advanced in Spanish, where
in the sentence. This would mean in the case of Romance a constructions displaying clitic obligatoriness do exist, and
significant change with respect to Latin, which is usually therefore cannot be dealt with in terms of some marked
characterized as overwhelmingly dependent-marking, as pragmatic value (cf. Lehmann 1982:238). For instance, there
seen in §5.1 (cf. Nichols 1986:89). Related to this issue, and is no alternative in Spanish if the object is a full personal
applicable to subject clitics as well, is the question of the pronoun, as in (48), or the quantifier todo ‘everything’, as
level of grammaticalization of clitics along the syntax– in (49):
morphology continuum. A strictly head-marking interpret-
ation of clitics would imply their turning into obligatory (48) Yo lo/le vi a él. vs **Yo vi a él. (Sp.)
agreement markers on the verb, fully entering the domain I him= saw to him I saw to him
of inflectional morphology. ‘I saw him.’
59
(49) Yo lo sabía todo. vs **Yo sabía todo. (Sp.) Starke 1999:167) il ‘he’ is not a clitic, but a weak pronoun,
I it= knew all I knew all since it does not allow for doubling (Jean **il chante ‘John
‘I knew everything.’ sings’) and allows for gapping in coordination (Il chante et
danse ‘he sings and dances’). Some informal varieties of
Moreover, in many varieties of Spanish the dative clitic is spoken French, however, display exactly the reverse pat-
obligatory in ditransitive constructions, as in (50) (from tern, suggesting that in these varieties i(l) has turned into a
Company 2001:21): ‘true’ clitic: Jean i chante.
In northern Italian dialects subject clitics display the
(50) Juan le /**Ø dio un libro a Pedro. (Sp.) highest level of complexity and variation, leading Poletto
Juan him.DAT= gave a book to Pedro (2000:11-40) to propose four distinct positions in the pre-
‘Juan gave a book to Pedro.’ verbal subject clitic field. Moreover, in some varieties fur-
ther postverbal clitics exist (e.g. Bol. [a ˈsiː] ‘you.PL are’, but
The same obligatoriness for dative clitics is the rule in [siːv] ‘are you.PL?’; Hajek 1997b:277), which show a higher
many Italo-Romance dialects, especially of the north level of bondedness with the verb stem, and quite different
(Poletto 1997:141): paradigms, so that they have often been described as part of
inflectional morphology (in terms of ‘interrogative conju-
(51) [Maˈria a l a ˈda-je /**ˈdajt ɐŋ gation’). For a discussion, see Poletto (1998; 2000:42-55) and
Maria SCL3SG= Ø= has given = DAT:3/given a §47.4.2.
ˈliber a ʤuˈan] (Tur.)
book to Gioan
‘Maria gave a book to Gioan.’
5.3.6 Gender and number categories
Although left and right dislocations are attested through- Although both gender and number will be dealt with in
out the history of Romance, some diachronic studies on separate chapters (Chs 57, 42), it seems useful to mention
Spanish corpora point to a gradually increasing relative some points of typological import.
frequency of dative doubling constructions like (50) from At first sight, it might be thought that the two categories
the sixteenth century onwards, until becoming nearly have remained substantially stable in the transition from
obligatory in a twentieth-century Mexican written and Latin to Romance, as well as the loci of their expression (not
spoken corpus (cf. Company 2001:23). necessarily the forms, of course), apart from the loss of one
It may be puzzling that the obligatoriness of the dative of the three values of the gender category, namely the
clitic seems to be much more widespread across Romance neuter gender. However, a closer look yields a less straight-
than that of the object clitic. From the point of view of the forward picture.
grammaticalization target, one would expect the contrary, As for gender, the analysis of data depends very much on
because languages which mark three arguments on the verb how the category is defined. Referring to ‘target genders’,
are much less common cross-linguistically than those which i.e. to the number of contrasting inflectional markers found
mark subject and object (or, more generally speaking, the in the paradigm of the agreement targets (adjectives, deter-
three core roles Agent, Patient, and (intransitive) subject miners, etc., cf. Corbett 1991), it is indeed the case that
only; see §5.1). However, considering things from the other targets in Romance inflect for two values only (apart from
end of the scale, the dative argument (often expressing the the case of ‘mass neuter’ in central-southern Italy and
Beneficiary or Experiencer) is usually much higher on the Asturian, itself a disputed counterexample: see below). If,
animacy hierarchy with respect to the Patient. This makes it however, we deal with nominal gender (‘controller gender’
a better candidate for individuation, saliency, and availabil- in Corbett 1991) and we take it as an inherent property of
ity for anaphoric reference. each nominal lexeme which divides nouns into distinct
There is no space to deal even cursorily with the complex agreement classes, then Romanian indisputably has three of
issue of subject clitics, for which see §45.2.2 and Ch. 47. them, since most inanimate nouns select masculine targets
Their behaviour is by no means uniform. Although they all in the singular and feminine targets in the plural (Maiden
originate from the Latin subject personal pronouns EGO ‘I’, TU 2011a:172). To designate this third agreement class, the label
‘you.SG’, ILLE ‘that.one’, etc., subject clitics fill a continuum of ‘alternating gender’, as used by Loporcaro and Paciaroni
which has free (weak) personal pronouns at one end and (2011), among many others, is probably less misleading
fully bound morphological agreement markers at the other. than the traditional one of ‘neuter’, but does not change
Standard French is located at one end of the continuum, to the need for a tripartition among nominals (cf. also
the extent that in some approaches (e.g. Cardinaletti and Acquaviva 2008:136). The issue, however, is currently much
60
disputed: for a different approach, which postulates just two reducing the original three-value system or at most keep-
genders but assigns independent controller capability to the ing it intact.5
single nominal inflectional markers, see Maiden (2011a:701, It is fair to say that the very nature of ‘mass neuter’ as a
n. 36; 2013b). phenomenon pertaining to gender does not meet universal
The Italian case for a distinct alternating gender is less consensus. For instance, Corbett (2000:124f.) considers the
clear. Nouns like l’uovo ‘the egg’, plural le uova, which select Asturian data as an instance of ‘mass number’ and Ledgeway
masculine targets in the singular and feminine ones in the (2009a:150) speaks of a third independent inflectional cat-
plural, as in Romanian, do exist, but they are very limited in egory [num] for Neapolitan.
number (twenty or so), are not productive, and represent a Coming now to number distinctions proper, the apparent
residual class. For them, Acquaviva (2002; 2008:123-61) pro- typological uniformity of Romance data needs some quali-
poses a different description. Relying on the fact that sev- fication. Certainly all Romance varieties distinguish just two
eral of such nouns admit two plural forms, an -a feminine values for this category, singular and plural, as did Latin; but
and an -i masculine, often with difference in meaning (e.g. the expression of the category is not that uniform (for
MSG braccio ‘arm’, FPL braccia ‘arms’ [of persons], MPL bracci further discussion of the typological issues from a
‘arms’ [of objects, e.g. bracci di un fiume ‘arms of a river’]), Romance-internal perspective, see also §42.1). A significant
and relying further on a syntactic argument about gender dimension of variation regards the form—or the bare
resolution in coordinate phrases, Acquaviva suggests that existence—of morphological marking on the noun. Despite
the relationship between il braccio and le braccia is not the overwhelming cross-linguistic prevalence for suffix-
inflectional, but derivational: according to him, braccio/-i is ation, for several Romance varieties suffixation turns out
a regular masculine noun, and le braccia is a different lex- to be only a recessive strategy. In French, nouns are basic-
eme, a feminine plurale tantum related to the former by a ally uninflected for number (despite orthography and
conversion process. Clearly, if braccia no longer belongs to liaison phenomena in very limited contexts, e.g. les jeux
the same inflectional paradigm of braccio, there is no need olympiques [le ʒøzolɛˈ̃ pik] ‘the Olympic games’); only a
for an alternating gender at all. But see further discussion in small minority of nouns keep the number distinction in all
§42.4.2. This argument cannot, however, be automatically contexts (essentially some words ending in -[al], with plural
extended to older phases of Italian; nor to several Italo- -[o], such as chevalchevaux ‘horse(s)’). In many colloquial
Romance varieties in central and southern Italy, where the varieties of Spanish, as in Andalusia and many areas of Latin
type is much more widespread and the agreement patterns America, the plural suffix -s is being lost, leaving—in the
in coordination may work like in Romanian, as shown by extreme case of full disappearance—most nouns uninflected
Loporcaro and Paciaroni (2011:406-09). for number (Penny 2000:122-5, 148-50). But probably the
Typologically, many of the Italo-Romance varieties greatest wealth of cross-linguistically marked solutions is
mentioned above are more interesting than Romanian, found in northern Italy. Invariability tends to be the rule—
because, besides a still vital alternating gender, they also apart from small, phonologically conditioned classes and
display a different phenomenon, also a remnant of the remnants of metaphonetic stem alternants—for all mascu-
Latin neuter, but kept fully separate synchronically: the lines (i.e. for the majority of nouns) in Piedmontese, Lom-
so-called mass neuter. In these varieties, many mass nouns bard, and Emilian varieties, while in Romagna the dominant
(not only original Latin neuters) require a set of agree- strategy appears to be the typologically marked stem-
ment targets different from masculines, i.e. they belong to change process, due to the relevance of morphologized
a different agreement class and therefore to a different metaphonetic processes. See, for instance, the examples—
gender. The opposition is reflected generally in the deter- with both nouns and adjectives—from Lugo (Pelliciardi
miners (e.g. Mac. [lo pa] ‘bread’, mass neuter, vs [lu ka] 1977, quoted in Maiden 1997b:21):
‘the dog’) and may extend to other targets like adjectives
(Paciaroni and Loporcaro 2010). A similar, though not (52) [spos] ‘husband’ – PL [spus]
identical, phenomenon is present in Asturian and Leonese [moart] ‘dead’ – PL [murt]
(Ojeda 1992). Leaving the details to the discussion in [aˈmear] ‘bitter’ – PL [aˈmer]
§§16.3.1.2 and §57.4, it is important to stress that this [mes] ‘month’ – PL [mis]
‘fourth gender’ is productive (it is assigned to borrowings [bɛl] ‘beautiful’ – PL [beal].
like ‘sport’, and applies e.g. to nominalized infinitives),
and, unlike the alternating gender discussed above, it is
5
also a target gender. As discussed in Loporcaro and However, wider surveys would be needed here, especially concerning
the possible emergence of alternating genders in languages which also keep
Paciaroni (2011), four-gender systems are a rarity in the original Indo-European tripartite masculine/feminine/neuter distinc-
Indo-European, where the dominant tendency has been tion (cf. Loporcaro and Paciaroni 2011:413).
61
However, the most ‘exotic’ instance is found in western b. Lo/E(h)to perro peligroso e(h)tán
Lombard and Emilian varieties which couple the invariable the/this.MPL dog dangerous are
or metaphonetic masculines with a subtractive (or at least encadenao. (And.)
anti-iconic) process for the -a feminines: Mil./Bol. [la enchained
ˈskarpa], PL [i ˈskarp] ‘the shoe(s)’ (a very rare phenomenon ‘The/these dangerous dogs are chained up.’
cross-linguistically).
(54) a. [ɐl/ɐŋ/kust/kul ˈliber ] (Tur.)
Although these data are basically the consequence of
‘the/a/this/that book.’
‘blind’ phonetic changes, they led to a recurrent evolu-
tionary tendency concerning the marking site(s) of plural b. [i/ɐd/ˈkusti/kuj ˈliber] (Tur.)
information. Unlike Latin, number in Romance can be ‘the/some/these/those books.’
viewed as a stable inflectional category only if we look
beyond the noun. Clearly, number is always a property of Some instances of preservation of inflectional marking
the NP (or DP) as a whole, but the dominant strategy in cannot be easily accounted for on purely phonetic grounds,
Latin, a typical fusional language, was the redundant and may be restorations/conservations reflecting a mor-
marking of the feature on both the noun and its agree- phosyntactic principle of generalizing the preferential
ment targets (determiners, quantifiers, possessives, adjec- locus for number marking outside the noun. In Torinese,
tives, and anaphoric pronouns). In the Romance varieties this is the case for the masculine plural ending -i in the
in which many or most nouns are invariable, very little demonstrative [ˈkusti] ‘these’ above, and in quantifiers:
has changed at the level of the phrase: nearly all phrases [ˈtanti/ˈpɔki ˈliber] ‘many/few books.’
still carry unambiguous number information, due to the Similar instances of selective marking of plural on deter-
fact that number inflection has been generally preserved miners only are reported for several other Romance varieties
in determiners, quantifiers, and other grammatical items (e.g. Auvergnat and Brazilian Portuguese) by Ledgeway
(and also verbs). (2012a:290), who takes them as reflecting a more general
For instance, in Andalusian Spanish we have (53a,b) and tendency towards increase of head-marking strategies in
in Torinese (54): the transition from Latin to Romance. This is certainly pos-
sible, but ultimately depends on the still problematic defin-
(53) a. El/E(h)te perro peligroso e(h)tá ition of head: articles are clearly heads with respect to N in
the/this.MSG dog dangerous is the current DP approach of generative models, but would be
encadenao. (And.) considered as modifiers in other models, including that
chained adopted by Nichols (1986) in her original proposal of the
‘The/this dangerous dog is chained up.’ head/dependent typology.
62
CHAPTER 6
Classifications
GEORG BOSSONG
6.1 Introduction: Dante’s knowledge of all its branches: for Dante, it is enough that
idioma tripharium ‘multa per eadem vocabula nominare videntur, ut “Deum”,
“celum”, “amorem”’ (‘many [of the core concepts] are
expressed by the same words, as “God”, “heaven”, “love”’,
The first attempt to classify the Romance languages was
I.viii.6). Third, Dante has some intimations, or premoni-
made by Dante Alighieri, in his De vulgari eloquentia (written
tions, of the true nature of the relationship between the
c.1305). The principal aim of this treatise was the search for
Romance languages, but of course he did not yet really
a unified literary language in Italy; its publication in the
understand it in the same way that linguists and philolo-
Renaissance, more than two centuries after its composition,
gists in general came to understand it during the nine-
incited the debate on the so-called questione della lingua
teenth century. The time was not yet ripe for the insight
(‘language question’), which would last at least until the
that the Romance languages had ‘sprung from some com-
nineteenth century. The important point for the present
mon source’, as Sir William Jones stated with respect to
discussion is the fact that this treatise contains the first
Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin in 1786, and that their common-
serious classification of European languages in general, of
alities and differences can be explained as the result of
the Romance languages, and of the dialects of Italy. For the
historical changes. Dante, however, comes surprisingly
macro-level of Europe, he proposes a first idioma tripharium,
close to a true historical understanding when he writes:
namely a tripartite division into the languages of the south,
‘the vernaculars of these three peoples stem from one and
of the north (Germanic-Slavonic), and of the east (Greek).
the same language’ (I.viii.3).
The southern languages constitute what we call today the
Romance family. In turn, these languages represent a sec-
ond idioma tripharium, namely the varieties of northern and
southern France, and of Italy. The distinctive criterion is the
affirmative particle ‘yes’: oïl, oc, and si. Evidently, while the 6.2 Identifying the Romance languages
tripartite classification of Europe is still extremely vague
and nebulous, the tripartite classification of Romance is 6.2.1 The beginnings of Romance linguistics
more precise: the subdivision of France into the domain of
oïl and oc has remained valid until today; on the other hand, Evolution was the key word which revolutionized linguistic
Dante seemingly was not aware that Spain also belonged to thought from the end of the eighteenth century. Static
the domain of si. On a still lower level, Dante proposes a juxtaposition became dynamic development. The idea of
classification of the Italian dialects which is astonishingly the genealogical tree helped scholars to understand the
detailed and accurate for its time. historical relationship between the protolanguage and its
Apart from being a pioneering attempt, Dante’s classifi- descendants. The discovery of Sanskrit and its link with
cation merits closer examination for several reasons. First, Greek and Latin had served as a catalyst for understanding
the choice of the criterion of classification is crucial. If a the link between Latin and Romance (cf. Bossong 1990:293-
single criterion is selected, the resulting classification is 305). François-Juste-Marie Raynouard (1761-1836), the
clear-cut. The affirmative particle is, from a modern point enthusiastic explorer of medieval Provençal poetry, still
of view, not particularly significant (cf. Ro. da ‘yes’); never- confused the language of the troubadours with the
theless, it has proved its usefulness and still forms the basis Romance protolanguage itself, an error corrected by
of a crude subdivision of France. The picture becomes vastly August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), who also formu-
more complex if more than one criterion is used. Second, lated for the first time the program of a historical com-
the internal unity of the Romance family, its ‘family resem- parative study of the Romance languages (von Schlegel
blance’, can easily be detected, even without a deeper 1818). Schlegel was responsible for the nomination of
This chapter © Georg Bossong 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 63
GEORG BOSSONG
Friedrich Diez (1794-1876) to the newly created chair of This formula is remarkable not only for the subclassifica-
Romance Philology, and can be considered the founder of tion of Catalan within Romance but also for general meth-
Romance studies as a specialized academic discipline. In his odological reasons. The question of what a language
Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen (1836), he divides the ‘essentially’ is might not simply be difficult, but systemat-
Romance domain into six languages: two languages in ically misleading. Classification aims at drawing clear-cut
the east (Italian and Romanian, the latter being called boundaries where in reality there might be only series of
‘Wallachian’), two in the southwest (Spanish and Portu- gradual changes and transitions. In a close-knit language
guese), and two in the northwest (Provençal and French). family like Romance, it proves difficult not only to deter-
Geographical grouping proves important also in this founding mine the number of individual languages but also to distin-
work of Romance philology. All six languages are said to stem guish clearly separated subgroups. Romània is in fact full of
from Latin as their common source, a language which is ‘still ‘bridges’ like Catalan. The neighbouring Pyrenean languages
intertwined with our civilization’. Indeed, the relationship of offer additional examples, less widely known than Catalan
the Romance languages to their mother tongue is special but significant from a general perspective. This mountain
insofar as Latin persists as a classical language, which has range unites rather than separates. Aragonese is a bridge
left profound and indelible marks on European culture. language just like Catalan, showing many Gallo-Romance
features in phonetics and morphosyntax.
Gascon (whose specificity within the panorama of Occitan
dialects was recognized already in the Middle Ages, when it
6.2.2 The case of Catalan was qualified as lenguatge estranh, a ‘strange’ or ‘foreign
language’) has more features in common with Ibero-
The division of the Romance family into six individual Romance than has any other variety of Occitan. From his
languages was the starting point for later developments, Gascon perspective, Pierre Bec, a Romanist scholar and a
with the number of languages steadily increasing. One case writer in his own native dialect, has postulated a zone in the
is the classification of Catalan (cf. also §21.2). For a long time central Romània which he called ‘Occitano-Romance’. It
Romanists of central Europe considered it a variety of Occi- comprises at its core the different varieties of Occitan,
tan, despite its important role as an independent literary such as Provençal, Languedocian, and Limousin, and at its
language in the Middle Ages. This classification is still margins two largely deviant varieties: Gascon in the west
reflected in the popular usage: the language of the famous and Catalan in the east. One has to admit that this is an
Misteri d’Elx, a religious drama celebrated annually in Elche, elegant picture which catches some important aspects of
is called lemosí (‘Limousin’) in the local dialect, which means reality, but of course in this way we have to accept a new
that a historical continuity is still felt to exist between the entity, namely Occitano-Romance, to be added to the pre-
language of the medieval Provençal troubadours and south- viously postulated groups Gallo-Romance and Ibero-
ern Valencian. When knowledge about the two languages Romance. ‘Entities should not be multiplied beyond the
increased, it became clear that it was advisable to treat necessary’: if we wish to apply what is commonly called
them as independent entities; Diez already preferred to Occam’s razor, classification becomes a difficult task. The
classify Catalan as an independent language in the third question remains whether it is really necessary to create
edition of his grammar. Only with the publication of such an intermediate entity. But perhaps we should not ask
Meyer-Lübke’s Das Katalanische in 1925 did the position of whether it is necessary, but whether it makes sense to use it
Catalan as a language in its own right become firmly estab- as a heuristic tool. A unit like ‘Occitano-Romance’ may help
lished among Romance linguists. However, the debate on to shed light on a number of features that might otherwise
the internal subclassification of Catalan continued. If we pass unnoticed.
assume that a division between ‘Gallo-Romance’ and The example of Catalan shows that classification prob-
‘Ibero-Romance’ is valid, it is evident that French belongs lems arise at two different levels: the level of determining
to the former, Spanish and Portuguese to the latter. But how the basic units to be classified, namely the individual lan-
is Catalan to be treated, a language which exhibits features guages; and the level of combining these basic units into
of both these groups? Is it essentially a Gallo-Romance or an higher groups. Problems of both these kinds occur in every
Ibero-Romance language? The debate about this thorny corner of the Romània. But with respect to Catalan, there is
question has occupied comparative Romance linguists for still another question with general implications. Although
decades (see Baldinger 1971:125-60). Badia i Margarit found according to strictly linguistic criteria it seems evident that
a convincing solution to this long-standing problem with his all its varieties belong to the same language, for political
frequently quoted formula that Catalan is a ‘bridge lan- reasons a special status is postulated for Valencian, the
guage’ between the Iberian Peninsula and France (pp. 12f.). language of the autonomous community of the País
64
CLASSIFICATIONS
Valencià. In this region it is officially called ‘Valencian’ and independent Romance language, or even as an independent
treated legally as a language in its own right. Although such branch inside the family, and so it is classed alongside the
a classification is not justifiable on purely linguistic great national languages like French and Italian in all mod-
grounds, it is firmly established in the social and political ern manuals of Romance linguistics.
reality of the present-day Valencian region, and as such it
has to be taken into account, even though from a structural
and typological point of view this makes no sense. The 6.2.4 The case of ‘invented’ languages:
general conclusion has to be drawn that external factors,
especially the consciousness of the speakers, are crucial for
Francoprovençal and Raeto-Romance
the classification of languages. Such external factors cannot
be simply neglected by linguists as ‘unscientific’; the main The relationship between internal and external factors—the
point is that the fundamental difference between internal contradictions which may arise between the analyses of
and external factors should never be forgotten. Real dan- linguists and the consciousness of speakers—can be illus-
gers can arise from a confusion between these two. trated by two other cases, Francoprovençal and Raeto-
Romance. Both these languages were in a sense ‘invented’
by Graziadio Ascoli (1829-1907). He discovered that certain
6.2.3 The case of Sardinian phonetic developments in the centre of the Romània singled
out two dialect groups as separate from the rest (cf. §§12.2,
Sardinian is another case in point (see also §17.1). In the 20.2). On the one hand, a number of varieties situated
Middle Ages and during the Renaissance it was universally geographically between the domain of French and Occitan
recognized as an independent language. Dante reserved for turned out to share the basic feature that their consonants
it a place apart in his enumeration of fourteen Italian dialect resembled French, whereas their vowels were rather more
areas, stressing the archaic features whereby it has like Occitan. In 1873 Ascoli coined the term ‘Franco-
remained relatively closer to Latin than any other Romance Provençal’ (§20.1.2), which gained wide acceptance in
language, stating that ‘Sardinians imitate Latin like apes’ (I. linguistics (in recent times the term ‘Arpitan’ has been
xi.7). What made its status as an independent language proposed instead). On the other hand, Ascoli postulated
doubtful in popular belief is the fact that sociolinguistically that a number of linguistic varieties in the Alpine region
speaking it belongs to the area of Italy where diglossia formed one basic unit, which he called ‘Ladino’ and which
between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ is an absolutely general was later baptized ‘Raeto-Romance’ by Theodor Gartner
phenomenon. In this context, Sardinian is frequently con- (1883). Whether or not the varieties classified as ‘Raeto-
sidered one more instance of a ‘dialect’, just like Lombard or Romance’ really form a coherent group was subject of
Sicilian. The fact that it differs from Italian more profoundly heated debates for decades: the so-called questione ladina
than such ‘dialects’ was not easily recognized by non-lin- (‘Ladin question’). The arguments were not always scien-
guists. As a consequence, Sardinian found its way relatively tific; in some cases they had clear political overtones. In
late into the classical list of Romance languages. As for the recent times, this question has been discussed with new
subclassification of Sardinian within the Romance family as historical and linguistic arguments (Benincà and Vanelli
a whole, its status remains unclear. In several respects it 2005a). All this cannot be resumed here in detail (see
goes together with the western Romània (e.g. preservation Kristol 1998a; Bossong 2008:173-80; also §12.1). Just one
of syllable final -s, lenition of intervocalic stops), in other point should be stressed in the present context because it
aspects it coincides with the eastern languages (e.g. the is methodologically relevant for classificatory issues. Both
treatment of the group -ct-), whereas some features are groupings, Francoprovençal and Raeto-Romance, have
specific (e.g. the definite article derived from IPSE, not from their origin in Romance linguistics: there is no feeling
ILLE; cf. §46.3.1.1), with parallels only in some Occitan and among speakers of belonging to a higher unity over and
Catalan varieties. Classification of Sardinian according to above the local or regional dialect.
the criterion of archaic vs innovative features is contradict- The small number of remaining speakers of Francopro-
ory: phonetically it has some claim to be all in all the most vençal live in three different states: France, Switzerland,
conservative Romance languages, but morphosyntactically and Italy. There was never a local capital, never a cultural
it is in some respects more innovative than most other or political centre where a unified standard could have been
languages (e.g. replacement of synthetic present and pret- formed. Lyon and Geneva have always been oriented
erite forms of the verb by analytic ones; cf. §17.4.2). Be this towards Paris, and the Italian Val d’Aosta has Turin as its
as it may, from a strictly linguistic point of view there can centre. There was never any awareness of the linguistic
be no doubt that Sardinian is to be classified as an similarities between the dialects of these regions; these
65
GEORG BOSSONG
dialects are simply classified as local ‘patois’, independent Gallo-Romance and Italo-Romance, especially the northern
from one another and all dominated by standard French. Italian dialects which are best grouped under the label
The term ‘Francoprovençal’ is scarcely known to the gen- ‘Gallo-Italic’. In this sense, the three branches of Raeto-
eral public. It does not play any role in the construction of Romance form in their totality a kind of ‘bridge language’,
identity by the speakers. Interestingly, it is also little pre- a linguistic link between the different worlds which meet in
sent in the scientific literature on the Romance languages. the heart of the Alps.
The Lexikon der romanistischen Linguistik, which in its Iberian
parts lists Aragonese, Asturian, and even the medieval
Mozarabic as languages in their own right, does not accord
6.2.5 Cultural dialects
such a right to Francoprovençal. In his concluding pano-
ramic essay, Michael Metzeltin, while devoting a whole The number of Romance languages recognized as independ-
chapter, for example, to Corsican (1998: 1058f.), mentions ent entities has steadily grown over the last two centuries.
Francoprovençal only in passing, in the chapter on French This is due to broader knowledge, deeper understanding,
(p. 1063). In my comparative introduction to the Romance and the emancipation of certain varieties which claim to be
languages I decided not to give Francoprovençal the status acknowledged as ‘languages’. When integrating external
of an independent language, thus limiting the number of factors into the classification, the consciousness of the com-
Romance languages to nine (Bossong 2008:29). In short, in munity of speakers is essential. If Asturian (bable), for
the case of this ‘language’ discovered by Ascoli, external instance, had the status of a dialect of Spanish in the past,
factors have prevailed over internal ones. in recent years the emergence of autonomous regions with
Despite the fundamental similarity of having been dis- their own language has led to the claim that Asturian is also
covered by linguists, the case of Raeto-Romance is some- a language in its own right. A formerly unwritten dialect
what different. Briefly, it seems clear that today many now has its own written norm, a royal academy of the
scholars maintain the idea of a unity among the three language, and a certain prestige in public life. Its neighbour,
dialect groups which form this language. The term ‘lan- Galician, which linguistically may be considered a dialect of
guage’ in a case like this can only be taken in the sense of Portuguese (or Portuguese as a dialect derived historically
a diasystematic unity, a kind of platonic idea rather than a from medieval Galician), is nowadays the joint official lan-
tangible reality. The three communities which make up this guage of the autonomous region of Galicia, with rights and
language are distributed among Swiss Grischun/Grigioni/ public functions almost equal to those of Spanish. Should we
Grisons/Graubünden, the central Dolomites, and the region count then Galician as one of the Romance ‘languages’?
of Friuli, the last two in Italy. There is no geographical According to the well-known schema established by Kloss
contiguity between these zones, in contrast to Francopro- (1978) and Haarmann (1975:186-200; see Bossong 2008:27f.),
vençal, whose components immediately border on each varieties like Galician are to be classified as a Kulturdialekt, a
other. Nevertheless, there is a certain awareness of a connec- language form with the sociolinguistic status of an inde-
tion between Romansh, Ladin, and Friulan, even among the pendent language, although from a structural point of view
general public. Metzeltin treats the three language groups as its distance with respect to a reference language is not
separate entities (Metzeltin 1998:1052-5), but in most current sufficient to classify it as a language of its own.
manuals (though not this one) they appear under the com- Corsican is another case in point; the distance of Corsican
prehensive label of Raeto-Romance. Pierre Bec has coined from standard Italian, or more precisely from the dialects of
the term ‘Raeto-Friulan’, in order to avoid the misleading Tuscany which lay at the base of the standard Italian liter-
association of a (highly doubtful) substratal influence of the ary language (cf. §14.1), is relatively small in comparison
prehistoric Raetic tribe. The notion of Raeto-Romance (or with other varieties considered ‘dialects’. Like other dialects
Raeto-Friulan) can serve as a practical tool, especially if we of the Apennine Peninsula, it maintained a relatively stable
draw a parallel with Bec’s aforementioned Occitano-Romance. relation of diglossia with standard Italian, until Corsica
There is a large zone in the centre of the Romània where passed to France in 1769. It lost its natural ‘roof ’ and was
all major language groups (except Romanian) are directly in transformed into an isolated minority language. In this
contact. This zone reaches from Gascony in the west to the situation, a proper norm for Corsican was established, max-
Alpine arc in the east. This contact zone is characterized by imally differentiated from Italian. As a consequence, Cor-
numerous transitions and continuities. Gascon and Catalan sican was transformed into a ‘newborn Romance language’
form a transition between Ibero- and Gallo-Romance; Fran- (Goebl 1988). This language prototypically realizes the con-
coprovençal functions as a mediator between northern and cept of cultural dialect.
southern Gallo-Romance; and the three dialect groups of But there are other instances of cultural dialects in the
Raeto-Romance constitute the transitional area between Romània. One particularly clear example is Judaeo-Spanish
66
CLASSIFICATIONS
(cf. also §22.1). Undoubtedly this variety belongs structur- Wartburg (1950). This binary division is based on several
ally to the domain of Spanish and has all the linguistic criteria of phonetic evolution, such as the treatment of
properties of a dialect of Castilian, from which it has his- intervocalic stops and the palatalization of the consonant
torically derived by natural divergence since the expulsion cluster /kt/. It is frequently assumed, implicitly or expli-
of the Jews from Spain in 1492. It has developed some citly, that the subdivision into eastern and western lan-
distinctive vocabulary, due to contacts with different languages represents the most important and significant
guages (Hebrew, Turkish, French, etc.), and went its own dividing line in the whole Romània. If this is accepted, we
way in phonetics and morphosyntax, but it is still recogniz- also have to accept that this essential boundary cuts across
able as a Spanish dialect today, so close to Spanish that no Italy; the famous La Spezia–Rimini Line not only divides the
linguist would classify it as a language. Nevertheless, it has a Romània as a whole but also separates northern from pen-
written norm of its own, based on the use of the Hebrew insular (central and southern) Italy. From this perspective,
alphabet; for centuries it was written exclusively with a the linguistic unity of the entity called ‘Italian’ is seriously
special variety of Hebrew characters, and even today the put into question, purely for reasons of historical phonetics.
use of the Latin alphabet follows rules significantly different But a closer look reveals that there are differences not only
from Spanish (rules of Turkish in Istanbul, of French in in diachronic developments (traditionally attributed to
Brussels, and of English in Israel). The term ‘cultural dialect’ the Celtic substrate in the north) but also in numerous
is absolutely appropriate in a case like this. If Corsican is basic features of the morphosyntactic type. In the following
classified as a Romance language, then Judaeo-Spanish discussion, the northern varieties will be subsumed under
should receive the same treatment; nevertheless, this the heading Gallo-Italian. The main varieties of Gallo-Italian
Ibero-Romance variety does not appear in current lists of include Piedmontese, Lombard, Ligurian, and Emilian-
the Romance languages as an independent entity. Romagnol (Venetian is a case apart since it has many fea-
tures in common with Tuscan, which we cannot discuss in
detail here).
In Bossong (2008), thirteen language-internal criteria
were used to characterize the individual Romance lan-
6.3 Problems of internal classification: guages (in addition to three external criteria). Of these,
the case of Italian five do not coincide in Gallo-Italian and the rest of Italy. In
addition to conspicuous phonetic features, such as the pres-
The problems of classification do not end at this point. The ence of front rounded vowels or nasalization, there are
question is not only whether cultural dialects should be systematic differences in the verb system: as in modern
counted as ‘languages’ because of external criteria of clas- spoken French, the synthetic past has largely disappeared,
sification; there are also far-reaching problems regarding a having been replaced by the analytic past perfect; and
classification according to internal criteria. These problems person is variously expressed by subject clitics. In Gallo-
are complex and controversial; in this contribution, only a Italian, these clitics are accompanied by inflectional mark-
few points can be briefly discussed. ing on the verb. This means that, in contrast to modern
By far the most difficult and complex domain for a lin- French, they are not the sole exponents of person and
guistic classification of the Romània is the Apennine Penin- number and so do not function as a replacement of verbal
sula as a whole, and this question must be mentioned here, markers, but rather as a supplement to them, as the sche-
however briefly (for detailed individual discussions, see Chs matic comparison of Piedmontese and French in Table 6.1
13-16). To say simply that from Sicily up to the Alpine arc shows (standard Italian is given in addition).
‘Italian dialects’ are spoken everywhere is grossly mislead- From a typological perspective, Piedmontese (and the
ing. The internal variability is immense, as Dante had other varieties of Gallo-Italian) shows a picture which dif-
already pointed out in some detail. It is highly problematic fers profoundly from its northern as well its southern
to reduce this variability to just one diasystem, under the
unified label ‘Italian’. It is far more convincing and realistic Table 6.1 Exponents of person and number in Piedmontese,
to distinguish at least two diasystems, distinct in their French, and Italian
historical evolution and profoundly different in their typo-
logical properties. PIEDMONTESE FRENCH ITALIAN
One of the oldest binary classifications of the Romània is

i=ˈkaŋt-o ʒǝ=ʃãt ˈkant-o ‘I sing’
its division into an eastern and a western part. It was
it=ˈkaŋt-e ty=ʃãt ˈkant-i ‘you.SG sing’
already anticipated by Matteo Bartoli in the early twentieth
a=ˈkaŋt-a i=ʃãt ˈkant-a ‘he sings’
century, but the idea found its classical formulation in von
67
GEORG BOSSONG
neighbours; it forms a bridge between Gallo- and Italo- well known since the beginnings of Romance philology,
Romance. This alone would be sufficient to justify classify- some languages are ‘conservative’ whilst others can be
ing Gallo-Italian as a language in its own right (‘language’ in described as ‘progressive’. Without going into detail, we
the sense of ‘dialect group’ or ‘diasystem’). may recall that Sardinian has some claim to be, from the
The list of Romance languages is variable, according to perspective of historical phonetics, the most conservative
the criteria used. It is a long way from Dante’s intuitions to Romance language, whereas modern French has some claim
the detailed knowledge we have today. A comprehensive list to have developed to the point that it has achieved the most
would have to go far beyond the classical nine languages drastic and far-reaching changes. All post-tonic material in
(from west to east, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, French tends to be lost; and in other positions too phonetic
French, Raeto-Romance, Italian, Sardinian, and Romanian) erosion had strong effects. AUGUSTUM ‘August’, AUT ‘or’, UBI
and include varieties of so different a nature as Galician, ‘where’ all yield /u/, AQUAM ‘water’, ALTUM ‘high’, AD+ILLUM/
Judaeo-Spanish, Aragonese, Gascon, Francoprovençal, Gallo- ILLOS ‘to the.MSG/PL’ all yield /o/: phonetic erosion could not
Italian, or, in the field of Romanian (which we have not possibly go any further—the next step would be silence! As a
discussed here), Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, or Istro- consequence, the stress system has undergone profound
Romanian (languages which have some intriguingly specific changes. Only in French has word stress ceased to be
features of their own, see Ch. 8; Bossong 2008:263-9)—not to phonemic; all words are stressed on the last syllable, such
mention languages which died out in historical times like that there is now just one possibility for stress placement.
Mozarabic or Dalmatian (cf. Ch. 9). The question of how In contrast, the number of possible places for stress has
many Romance languages there are is not just unanswer- even increased in Sardinian; given that words ending in
able; it is pointless, since such a list will necessarily remain consonants are followed by a paragogic vowel, the number
an open one. of syllables was augmented, and so also the number of
stressable units. It is higher than three, with a clear pre-
dominance for the antepenultimate. The other Romance
languages are situated somewhere between these two
6.4 Subdivisions of Romance extremes, of conservation and even increase in Sardinian
and far-reaching reduction in French. Italian and Roma-
How all these languages are to be subdivided into meaningful nian are close to the conservative end of the scale, stress
groupings is yet another question, no less difficult than the on antepenultimate syllables being frequent (even pre-
question of how many Romance languages can be distin- antepenultimate in Romanian). Spanish and Portuguese
guished. Different criteria will yield different results, and occupy an intermediate position, with antepenultimate,
since the number of possible criteria cannot be limited, the penultimate, and ultimate syllable in equal measure; in
potential for subdivisions is unlimited as well. The crucial Catalan and Raeto-Romance, the frequency of antepenul-
question is whether it is possible to single out some criteria timate stress was reduced drastically, but it still occurs.
which seem to be more significant than others and to look for Occitan has gone one step further by eliminating the
features which show a similar distribution. In this context, antepenultimate position, but it still keeps the contrast
the role of linguistic typology is essential. Features found in between stress on the penultimate and the ultimate syl-
the Romance languages are not unique, and to analyse them lable. This is just one step away from French where only
in the perspective of general comparative linguistics helps to the ultimate position may now bear stress. To illustrate
better understand them. In the following section, three phe- this point, one elementary example (1a-f) will be sufficient
nomena from different areas are presented which all show a (note that the here accent indicates stress and is not part
specific pattern of distribution. Comparing the three phe- of normal orthography):
nomena, a general conclusion can be drawn.
(1) a. sos ómines[e] (Srd.)
6.4.1 Phonetic reduction and stress type b. oámenii (Ro.)
c. gli uómini (It.)
d. los hómbres (Sp.)
The first phenomenon belongs to the domain of historical e. los ómes (Occ.)
phonetics. It can be subsumed under the heading ‘phonetic f. les hommes [lez ˈcm] (Fr.)
reduction’. Erosion of phonetic material is a natural and ‘the men’
therefore universal phenomenon; in all languages, sounds
disappear. In the Romance family, this reduction proceeded The emerging picture can be resumed as follows. There is
at a different pace in the individual languages. As has been continuous increase of phonetic erosion, but this is as we
68
CLASSIFICATIONS
advance from south to north, from Sardinian passing The following simplified series of examples illustrates
through Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, Catalan, and this typological cline:
Raeto-Romance, and from Occitan to French; parallel to
this phonetic reduction, the number of possible places for (2) a. Quiero carne. (Sp.)
stress is also reduced from four (and more) to just one. The I.want meat
eastern outlier Romanian does not fit into this geographical ‘I want (some) meat.’
scheme; in this case it remains close to the conservative
type found in Italian. The endpoint is reached in French: b. Eau vouless charn. (Rms.)
more reduction is impossible. French forms part of this cline I would.like meat
from south to north, but it has gone to such an extreme that ‘I would like (some) meat.’
a new stress type has been reached: stress has become (3) a. En tinc tres de petites. (Cat.)
predictable, so in a phonemic perspective it has lost its of.it= I.have three of small.FPL
distinctive force; French moved from ‘nexus’ to ‘’cursus’ in ‘I have three small ones.’
the terminology of Pulgram (1970). In other words, French
is an integral part of the Romance family since it followed b. Bi nd’ aìat de zente. (Srd.)
the same evolutionary processes, but at the same time it has there= of.it= had of people
radically departed from the rest of the family by bringing ‘There were many people.’
these processes to their ultimate conclusion. (4) a. Manjar (de) carn. (Gsc.)
eat.INF of meat
‘To eat meat.’
6.4.2 The partitive
b. Vòli d’ oulivas. (Prv.)
I.want of olives
A similar distribution of features can be observed in the case ‘I want (some) olives.’
of the partitive. The so-called ‘partitive article’ of modern
French is the endpoint of a typological cline which follows a (5) a. Demandar del pan. (Auv.)
pattern resembling that of phonetic erosion in several ask.INF of.the.MSG bread
respects. It is possible to distinguish four degrees on this ‘To ask for (some) bread.’
scale: b. Voglio (delle) mele. (It.)
1. Complete absence of any kind of partitive; this is true I.want of.the.FPL apples
for Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, and interestingly ‘I want (some) apples.’
Raeto-Romance which in this domain does not fit into c. Ci sono (degli) uomini. (It.)
the general picture. there= are of.the.MPL men
2. The preposition de ‘of, from’ indicates the partitive in ‘There are (some) men.’
connection with the pronominal adverb derived from
Latin INDE ‘thence’; this minimal form of the partitive is (6) a. Je veux de la viande. (Fr.)
found in Sardinian, Catalan, and Gascon. I want of the.FSG meat
3. The preposition is de ‘of, from’ found in other contexts ‘I want (some) meat.’
as well; it does not combine with the definitive article b. Il y a des hommes. (Fr.)
but remains unchanged. This stage is reached in the
it= there= has of.the.PL men
central dialects of Occitan, optionally including
‘There are (some) men.’
Gascon.
4. The preposition de ‘of, from’ is combined with the
definite article and forms with it an indissoluble unit. Here again a cline from south to north can be detected.
The rule of article fusion works in Italian and in the Constructions limited to a specific context, like those found
northernmost dialects of Occitan. in Sardinian, Catalan, and Gascon, mark an initial stage which
5. Modern French belongs basically to type 4., but in is more fully advanced in central Occitan. Northern Occitan
addition this evolution has gone one step further inso- and Italian have practically reached a stage similar to that of
far as nouns without an article are possible only under French, except for the fact that the partitive has become
very limited conditions, and the partitive article obligatory in almost every context in modern French. In
occurs not only in object position but in almost all the case of the partitive, Romanian goes together with Span-
syntactic contexts. ish, Portuguese, and (interestingly) Raeto-Romance. Once
69
GEORG BOSSONG
more we observe a configuration in which French is inte- Italian, especially in the north, which is strongly influenced
grated into Romance continuum but marks an extreme end- by the dialects of northern Italy, the analytic perfect is
point of development. gaining ground at the cost of the synthetic perfect.
(5) Interestingly, two ‘outlier’ languages, Romanian and
Sardinian, have also replaced the synthetic perfect with the
6.4.3 Verb morphosyntax: aoristic drift analytic perfect in modern times (except for conservative
dialects). This parallel with modern spoken French is intri-
The third example concerns verb morphosyntax. Reference guing; it has not yet found a satisfying explanation (cf. also
is made to the famous and often described ‘aoristic drift’ §§8.4.6.2, 17.4.2).
(Harris 1982; Squartini and Bertinetto 2000; cf. also §58.3.2). (6) The case of Catalan is special, since in this language
In the verb system of Romance, the analytic perfect repre- (except for Balearic and Algherese) the synthetic perfect has
sents one of the most important innovations with respect to been replaced by a new analytic tense formed with the verb
Latin. The synthetic past of Latin resulted from the fusion of anar ‘to go’ (cf. 21.4.2), which has future value in French and
two Indo-European tenses, the perfect and the aorist. In the Spanish. The synthetic and analytic perfects continue to be
subsequent development of Romance, the simple past was used side by side, but under a new morphological guise:
maintained in some languages but replaced by the analytic
perfect in others. This replacement is an important criter- (7) a. Ha treballat molt. (Cat.)
ion for the classification of Romance. When describing the he.has worked much
panorama of Romance using this criterion, two separate ‘He has worked a lot (and his work is still
perspectives have to be taken into consideration: the sys- influential).’
tem, i.e. the number and the structure of morphological b. Va treballar molt. (Cat.)
tenses, and its use, i.e. the frequency of the respective AUX.PST.3SG work.INF much
tenses and their semantic range. The following broad pic- ‘He worked a lot (looking back at a life’s work).’
ture emerges.
(1) In the southernmost parts of Italy (Sicily, central- In the case of the ‘aoristic drift’ we observe again a config-
southern Calabria, and some limited pockets of Salento) uration where French is at the end of a scale rooted in the
the analytic perfect is existent in the system, but its use is Romània as a whole. In contrast to the other phenomena
rare and restricted to an experiential value (e.g. l’aju vistu lit. discussed above, it is joined by other languages, some geo-
‘him=I.have seen (= ‘I know what he looks like)’ vs u vitti lit. graphically contiguous (Gallo-Italian, Raeto-Romance), some
‘him=I.saw (= I have seen/I saw him)’). Here, the synthetic geographically distant (Sardinian, Romanian). The general
perfect has been preserved in most contexts where it was position of French is once more confirmed.
replaced by the analytic perfect in other Romance lan- In historical phonetics, in the nominal system, and in the
guages (cf. §16.4.2.1). verbal system the general outline of classification shows
(2) In the south and the west of the Iberian Peninsula, the similar tendencies. A number of gradients can be observed
analytic perfect does exist, but its use is limited to strongly which start in the south (southwest and/or southeast), pass
perfective contexts. This is the case in Portuguese, Galician, from there through the areas in the centre of the Romània,
Asturian, as well as in the Spanish of Andalusia, the Canary and end up in modern French. The path goes from Portu-
Islands, and large areas of Latin America (see §§23.4.9, guese and Spain through Catalan and the Occitan dialects up
22.4.2.1). to French; or from southern Italy through central and
(3) In the Spanish of central and northern Spain, in northern Italian dialects to Raeto-Romance and French
standard Italian, and in Occitan, the relation between the again. Such a conclusion matches the theory of Alonso
analytic and synthetic perfects is maintained; both tenses (1954), who proposed a distinction between a Romània con-
are functionally distinct but both in common use. tinua, in which French is included, and Romanian, which
(4) In northern Italian dialects, Raeto-Romance, and mod- definitely falls outside this group. The position of French is
ern spoken French, the analytic perfect is replacing, or has ambiguous: on the one hand, it is an integral part of the
already replaced, the synthetic perfect (cf. §§10.4.4, 12.4.2, great continuous zone of languages in western Europe,
13.3.2.1, 18.4.2.1.2.4). The analytic perfect has become the linked with each other by numerous transitional zones; on
normal narrative tense. The synthetic perfect still exists in the other, it is evident that it frequently occupies a special,
the system of French, but its use is confined to the literary and even extreme, position. Romanian stands apart. As
language and has become archaic. The same holds of consequence, we obtain a tripartite classification (as was
Engadine, whereas the other dialects of Romansh entirely Dante’s, but of course of a very different kind): the Romània
lost the synthetic perfect centuries ago. In modern spoken continua, French, and Romanian.
70
CLASSIFICATIONS
6.5 Historical and typological criteria As types, their number is maximally equal to the
number of unmarked elements, never higher. As
tokens, they occur with less frequency in running text.
Classifications may be made according to the criteria used:
4. Marked categories are diachronically less stable than
they may be historical or typological (see Iliescu 1998).
unmarked ones. This means in fact that they tend to
Either the diachronic or the synchronic perspective may
disappear.
prevail. It is even possible to consider one and the same
phenomenon from both perspectives. The distinction All these points can be verified with respect to front
between diachrony and synchrony is not exclusive. Both rounded vowels and to nasal vowels.
have their own truth, like film and photography. Traditional
1. All Romance languages have front unrounded and oral
classifications have mainly been based on historical criteria.
vowels, but only some of them have also front rounded
(e.g. French, Occitan, Gallo-Italian, partially Raeto-
6.5.1 History: the eastern and Romance) and/or nasal vowels (e.g. French, Portu-
western Romània guese, Gallo-Italian).
2. Their frequency roughly corresponds to the overall
frequency in a representative sample of human lan-
The famous distinction between the western and eastern
guages. The agreement is nearly perfect in the case of
Romània is a case in point: the loss of word-final /s/ is a
nasality: if we count Gallo-Italian as 1/2 and the
natural process, found in many languages all over the world;
whole of the Romània as 9, 27% of Romance lan-
it is also omnipresent in the Romance area, since final /s/
guages have nasal vowels; the World Atlas of Language
was also lost at a later date in French, and is currently being
Structures (Haspelmath et al. 2008:ch.10) gives the fig-
lost via aspiration in Andalusian and numerous American
ure of 26% for languages with nasal vowels, referring
varieties of Spanish. Historically speaking, then, it makes
to a sample of 244 languages. The classification of
sense to distinguish a class of languages which have con-
Romance with respect to vowel nasality exactly fits
served final /s/ until more or less recently (western
the universal tendency. Front rounding reaches a
Romània) and a class of languages which had already lost
higher score than the universal tendency (26% vs
final /s/ in antiquity (eastern Romània) (cf. §42.2). But from
7% for a sample of 562 languages), but it must be
a typological perspective it would be pointless to distin-
noticed that front rounding is particularly frequent
guish two distinct classes of languages—with and without
in northern Eurasia (Haspelmath et al. 2008:ch.11); in
final /s/; such a distinction only makes sense within the
this geographical context, the figure found in
history of the Romance family.
Romance is rather normal.
3. In all the aforementioned Romance languages, the
6.5.2 Typology: types of vowel system number of the marked elements is less than the
number of the unmarked elements. For instance,
French has four nasals in a system of sixteen
The presence of nasal vowels and of front rounded vowels is
vowel phonemes; in Portuguese, open and close /e/
different. Of course, these phenomena are the result of
and /o/ are distinguished in oral, but not in nasal
diachronic processes too (everything in language is a result
vowels. Nasal and front rounded vowels occur less
of history), but in cases like these it makes sense to distin-
frequently in running text than their unmarked
guish typologically defined classes. Nasality and front
counterparts.
rounding are typologically marked features. The notion of
4. Nasality is stable in French and Portuguese, less so in
markedness plays a central role in research on typology and
Gallo-Italian. Interestingly enough, it can be shown
universals. It has the following implications:
that nasal vowels were formerly present in some var-
1. Unmarked categories can occur without their marked ieties, but that they have changed to oral vowels in
counterparts, but not the other way round. This is a the course of history. Catalan is a clear example:
relationship of asymmetric implication: A implies B, forms like bo ‘good’ < BONUM presuppose an older
but B does not imply A. nasal vowel which was denasalized. The same can be
2. As a consequence, marked categories are rarer than said with respect to Galician: denasalization is one of
their unmarked counterparts when comparing lan- the most conspicuous features distinguishing Galician
guages in a global perspective. from Portuguese. Front rounded vowels have lost their
3. Marked categories are also less frequent than roundedness in most dialects of Raeto-Romance,
unmarked ones with respect to individual languages. except in Engadine (LUNAM ‘moon’ gives glina in
71
GEORG BOSSONG
Surselvan, via a stage with a front rounded vowel still of language. Typology offers important clues for the classifi-
preserved in glüna in Vallader). cation of the Romance languages and for the explanation of
historical changes which have brought about the constitu-
From a typological point of view, a classification accord-
tion of language classes.1
ing to the presence or absence of marked features yields
important insights. It helps to distinguish what is idiosyn- 1
For a discussion of the classification of the Italic branch of Indo-
cratic and what is due to universal tendencies. Romance European and of creole languages of Romance descent, see Bossong
languages realize in their own way the universal regularities (forthcoming).
72
CHAPTER 7
Romance linguistic geography

and dialectometry
HANS GOEBL
7.1.2 Jules Gilliéron and the ALF

7.1 Linguistic geography
After early geolinguistic experience in the canton of Valais,
7.1.1 Definition and origin
and encouraged by Gaston Paris (1839-1903), Jules Gilliéron
Linguistic geography as a discipline is concerned with the (1854-1926) conceived the idea of producing a single linguis-
empirical, analytic, and theoretical study of the areal distri- tic atlas, the Atlas linguistique de la France (ALF), for the whole
bution of individual linguistic features. Its chief instrument of the Gallo-Romance area (including Swiss Romandy, Wal-
is the linguistic atlas which, within Romance linguistics, lonia, the valleys of western Piedmont, and the Channel
usually takes the form of a folio-style work consisting of Islands).2 In practical terms, this involved a single field-
several hundred linguistic maps on which, in the case of worker (Edmond Edmont, 1849-1926) collecting data in
‘national’ linguistic atlases, are to be found—again for sev- loco, directly transcribing informants’ answers according
eral hundred localities, each identified by a different to a special phonetic annotation, preparing and administer-
number—the phonetic transcriptions for a given item. Lin- ing a wide-ranging standardized questionnaire, eliciting
guistic geography was first conceived of both as a method spontaneous translations always from one informant per
and as a heuristic procedure by Jules Gilliéron, the founder locality, and establishing a grid of enquiry points based on
of the Atlas linguistique de la France (ALF), the first fully the organization of the French départements. The project
operational Romance linguistic atlas, which was destined was expertly completed by Edmont between 1897 and 1901
to become a model for many other similar endeavours. in 638 localities variously distributed across France, Switz-
Linguistic geography must be not be confused with lan- erland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Channel Islands.
guage geography which, by contrast, is concerned with Printing of the atlas began in 1902 and was completed in
charting the geographical extension of whole linguistic 1910 with the publication of ten folio volumes.
areas. It must also be kept separate from dialectology The atlas proper is made up of three series: series A (638
which has more general aims and a much longer pedigree. enquiry points and 1,421 maps alphabetically arranged
The theoretical and methodological position of linguistic according to their titles: abeille ‘bee’–vrille ‘gimlet’), series
geography within Romance linguistics is well established, B (328 enquiry points across the south of France and 326
enjoying intradisciplinary links with research in diachronic maps: s’abriter ‘to take shelter’–vous autres ‘you (exclusive
linguistics, lexicology and lexicography, phonetics, and all plural)’, and series C (204 enquiry points across the south-
branches of variationist research. Its interdisciplinary con- east of France and 173 maps: abricot ‘apricot’–voler ‘to steal’).
nections include ethnology, anthropology, human geog- Alongside the folio volumes, the publication also includes an
raphy, genetics, and other disciplines with a geographical introductory volume (ALF Notice), a table of contents (ALF
interest.1 Table), and a supplement (ALF Suppléments). The ALF proved
extremely useful in launching Romance geolinguistics, in
terms both of fieldwork and of future publications.
1 Reception of the ALF was lukewarm in France, whereas
The available literature is now vast, including: Gamillscheg (1928),
Jaberg and Jud (1928), Jaberg (1936), Pop (1950), Coseriu (1955), Iordan among German, Swiss, Austrian, and Scandinavian Roman-
(1962:171-308), Vàrvaro (1968:199-231), Vidos (1968:63-108), Gli atlanti lin- ists, many of whom had followed Gilliéron’s courses at the
guistici (1969), Kratz (1969), Massobrio (1986), Atlanti regionali (1989), Goebl
(1992), Euskaltzaindia (1992), Ruffino (1992), Winkelmann (1993), García
Mouton (1994), Bal et al. (1997:161-5), Winkelmann and Lausberg (2001),
2
Chauveau (2003), Matranga and Sottile (2007), Cugno and Massobrio (2010), On Gilliéron, see also Dauzat (1922), Pop (1950), Pop and Pop (1959),
Colón and Gimeno Betí (2011). Wolf (1975), Lauwers et al. (2002), Swiggers (2010).
This chapter © Hans Goebl 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 73
HANS GOEBL
École Pratique des Hautes Études, it was decidedly more 7.1.3.1 AIS
enthusiastic (cf. Jaberg 1908; 1936; Rosenqvist 1919; von
One of the first initiatives in this respect was the Atlante
Ettmayer 1924; Gamillscheg 1928).
italo-svizzero (AIS) edited by Jaberg and Jud (1928–40).3 Ori-
Gilliéron became the first interpreter of his own geolin-
ginally they had planned a linguistic atlas limited to the
guistic study. His fundamental idea was based on the inter-
Raeto-Romance and Italo-Romance-speaking areas of Switz-
pretation of the changing areal distributions of different
erland, with an appendix dedicated to northern Italy and a
linguistic types in the original ALF maps. Thus was born
parallel survey of central and southern Italy by Italian
the study of areal linguistics proper, which aimed on the
linguists. Owing to disagreements with Italian linguists
one hand to reconstruct the spatial distribution of the
and doubts about the effectiveness of their Atlante linguistico
different areas (diachronic stratification) and on the other
italiano (ALI), Jaberg and Jud decided to extend the coverage
to interpret (in terms of semantics, etymology, etc.) indi-
of the AIS to the whole of the Italian Peninsula (including
vidual forms. Gilliéron attached considerable importance to
Sicily and Sardinia) with the launch of their surveys in 1919.
the metalinguistic behaviours and ‘philosophies’ of dialect
In contrast to ALF, the questionnaire used by AIS was
speakers, increasingly shifting his interests to the study of
concerned above all with the field of agriculture and all its
phonetics and lexis.
numerous terminological and work-related aspects in
Unlike some foreign linguists (cf. Jaberg 1908; Rosenqvist
accordance with the ‘Wörter und Sachen’ approach. The
1919; von Ettmayer 1924), Gilliéron was always interested in
questionnaire was now arranged, not in alphabetical
the close study of the fine linguistic detail of the ALF data,
order, but along semantic lines, and came in three versions,
rejecting any type of quantitative examination and remain-
with the most frequently employed containing around 1,700
ing faithful to the ‘tipofobo’ doctrine of his master Gaston
questions. It was administered by three fieldworkers, all
Paris (1888) regarding the ‘non-existence of dialects’.
experts in Romance linguistics, who were assigned to the
The logistical coordinates of Gilliéron’s study relative to
following areas: Paul Scheuermeier, from northern Italy to
the size of the surveyed grid and length of the questionnaire
Rome; Gerhard Rohlfs, the rest of the Peninsula and Sicily;
no doubt draw on the previous experiences of many French
and Max-Leopold Wagner, Sardinia. The grid of localities
geographers, demographers, economists, and statisticians
surveyed also included several large cities in order to allow
involved in extensive fieldwork (Palsky 1996).
the identification of two socially differentiated linguistic
In terms of its content, the ALF questionnaire, which
levels. Eventually, the principle of employing a single
surveys not only individual words but also short, semantic-
informant for each of the localities was abandoned, with
ally simple phrases, includes phonetics, morphology, and,
Scheuermeier in particular apparently showing consider-
above all, lexis. By contrast, there are very few questions
able empathy towards the speakers of the localities he was
relating to syntax. With very few exceptions, the question-
responsible for surveying.
naire was applied across the entire area under investigation,
Another innovation of the AIS surveys was their frequent
allowing inter-comparability of the results of many differ-
use of photographs (of objects, instruments, landscapes, and
ent enquiry points, a key prerequisite for their global quan-
informants) and of drawings (cf. Scheuermeier 1936). The
titative analysis within the dialectometric approach.
photographs were archived in Berne, while the drawings
Given the onomasiological approach adopted by the ALF,
were used in a large ethnographic and onomasiological
its data clearly provided a powerful boost to research within
publication printed during and after the Second World
the ‘Wörter und Sachen’ paradigm, reprised with some
War (Scheuermeier 1943/56).
enthusiasm in northern Europe (Jaberg 1936; Quadri 1952;
The fieldwork carried out for AIS was completed in 1928,
Iordan 1962:84-95, 276-85; Vidos 1968:80-93; Goebl 1992).
and was published between 1928 and 1940 including an
This happy methodological marriage also lies behind Wart-
introductory and theoretical volume (Jaberg and Jud 1928)
burg’s conception of the Französisches etymologisches Wörter-
and eight volumes containing the atlas folios with 1,705
buch, witness his dedication of the first volume to the
linguistic maps. Thanks to the integration of the ‘Wörter
‘Neogrammarian’ Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke and the ‘revolu-
und Sachen’ component in the questionnaire, the precision
tionary’ Jules Gilliéron.
and accuracy with which the field surveys were conducted,
and the overall quality of all parts of the publication, AIS
7.1.3 The second generation of national atlases represents a true masterpiece and worthy successor to ALF.
The striking example provided by the ALF immediately

inspired others to imitate it, leading naturally to correc-
tions and improvements of all types. 3
For further details, see also Jaberg and Jud (1927), Jud (1928).
74
LINGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY AND DIALECTOMETRY
7.1.3.2 ALI of ALR I were destroyed in a fire, whereas the unpub-

lished data of ALR II began to be published from 1956,
The Atlante linguistico italiano (ALI) was conceived immedi-
together with the supplement serie nouă (‘new series’).
ately after the First World War by the Italian linguists
Similarly, the new series of ALR II has seen the publi-
Bartoli, Parodi, and Goidanich. From the outset, the size of
cation of four volumes.
the planned grid of enquiry points and questionnaire were
much larger than those of the AIS. Surveys began in 1925 but The grid of enquiry points for the two Romanian atlases
were interrupted during the Second World War and were also includes Aromanian and Megleno- and Istro-Romanian
completed in the 1950s. After many difficulties, and thanks localities, as well as Slavonic and Hungarian-speaking local-
to the technical and logistical intervention of the Roman ities in Romania.
Istituto Poligrafico, the first fascicle was published in 1995.
To date eight fascicles have been published (with a total of
831 maps). In the publications the grid of enquiry points is 7.1.3.4 Atlas lingüístic de Catalunya
divided into two: 589 points for the north, and 359 points for The publication of the results of a Catalan atlas, the Atlas
the south. On the ALI webpage can be found the indices for lingüístic de Catalunya, initiated by A. Griera during the First
the published fascicles. World War, began in 1923 and continued until 1964. The
atlas has eight volumes, an index (Haesler 1964), and an
introductory volume published in 1964. It surveys 101
7.1.3.3 WLAD and ALR
points and contains 1,276 maps.
We owe our first geolinguistic survey of the Romanian area The same Griera also published a micro-atlas for Andorra,
to Gustav Weigand, who had put together and published his Atlas lingüístic d’Andorra (Griera 1960), and another for the
Linguistischer Atlas des dacorumänischen Sprachgebiets (WLAD) Gascon varieties of the Val d’Aran, the Atlas lingüístic de la
independently of ALF. WLAD was published in nine fascicles Vall d’Aran (Griera 1973).
between 1898 and 1909 and covers a network of 752 enquiry
points. The printed work only contains 48 linguistic maps in
which the geolinguistic information is presented in a rather 7.1.3.5 Atles lingüístic del domini català
complex form, making their consultation difficult. Badia i Margarit’s idea for a new linguistic atlas of the
Romanian initiatives for the creation of a ‘home-grown’ Catalan-speaking area, the Atles lingüístic del domini català,
linguistic atlas, Atlasul lingvistic român (ALR), go back to the goes back to the 1950s, but progress was hampered for a
1920s and the efforts of Puşcariu, Pop, and Petrovici, who long time by Franco’s linguistic policies, although these dif-
actively began work on the project just before the outbreak ficulties were eventually overcome by Veny and Pons i
of the Second World War. Two innovations are worthy of Griera. Publication of the atlas began in 2001, and there are
note: now seven volumes in total covering a network of 190
(1) The organization of two parallel surveys: enquiry points, including 1,689 maps as well as ethnographic
• ALR I (large grid [= 301 enquiry points] with limited photographs and partial indices, all produced using the latest
questionnaire [c.2,000 questions]. Responsibility of in digitalized technology. Besides the editio maior, there is also
Pop). a smaller version, the Petit atles lingüístic del domini català
• ALR II (small grid [= 87 enquiry points] with (Veny 2007-11), with colour-coded maps with commentary.4
extended questionnaire [c.4,000 questions]).
(2) The parallel publication, in addition to the volumes
containing the atlas proper with transcriptions col-
7.1.3.6 Atlas lingüístico de la Península Ibérica
lected in loco, of small box-set volumes (Micul atlas The idea for a pan-Iberian linguistic atlas, the Atlas lingüístico
lingvistic român) with maps in which some of the main de la Península Ibérica (1962), goes back to the 1920s and to
patterns of the original data are presented through Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who was succeeded by Navarro
the use of coloured symbols. These volumes are prin- Tomás. A large part of the 527 surveys, conducted by
cipally intended for the general public. Two volumes seven fieldworkers, was carried out—under less than ideal
(1938, 1948) were published from ALR I and a single conditions—during the Civil War. At the end of the War the
volume with a supplement (1940) from ALR II. The collected materials were saved by Navarro Tomás, who took
Micul atlas lingvistic român gave rise to two volumes for them to the United States, where they remained until they
part I (Pop 1938-42), completed by Pop in 1962 with a
third volume, and a single volume for part II (Pop 1940). 4
Also of significance are Alcover and Moll (1929/1930/1932) and Perea
Following the Second World War, the unpublished data (2001).
75
HANS GOEBL
were returned to the Spanish Consejo Superior de Investi- 7.1.4.2 NALF and ALFR
gaciones Científicas at the end of the 1950s. Following com-
A second geolinguistic survey of France was undertaken by
pletion of the surveys (1947–54), one volume was published
Dauzat in 1939. His project sought to produce a series of
in 1962.
regional atlases characterized by a narrow grid of enquiry
Fortunately, David Heap successfully salvaged the ori-
points and a two-part questionnaire which, in addition to a
ginal questionnaires for all 527 enquiry points, many of
general section, also contained a specialized regional sec-
which had become dispersed during and after the Civil
tion dedicated to ‘ethnographic’ questions.
War. Today all 527 notebooks for each of the enquiry points
In all his preparatory studies Dauzat emphasized the
are available online at http://www.alpi.ca.
necessity of ensuring the intercomparability of the data to
be collected. Unfortunately, subsequent developments,
7.1.4 Gallo-Romance regional atlases which were marked by the whimsical behaviour of some
important names such as Gardette, did much to harm Dau-
zat’s calls for unity. A general index published by Billy
Alongside ALF, Gallo-Romance also boasts a series of small
(1993) revealed that there are not even ten identically titled
‘individual’ atlases dedicated to smaller areas, as well as the
maps in the whole NALF/ALFR series.
prestigious series Nouvel atlas linguistique de la France (NALF),
The founding atlases of NALF were those for the Lyonnais
subsequently also renamed the Atlas linguistiques et ethnogra-
province by Gardette (Atlas linguistique et ethnographique du
phiques de la France par régions (ALFR). The starting point for
Lyonnais, Gardette 1950-76), for Gascony by Séguy (1954-74),
all of these atlases was the detailed and authentic study of
and for the Massif Central by Nauton (1957-63). The French
‘infra-national’ areas through a much narrower grid of
national research body, CNRS, which had been interested in
enquiry points and the administration of regionally adapted
this line of research since 1939, provided for the finances
questionnaires. In many cases the use of French–patois
and publication of NALF/ALFR between 1961 and 1991. To
translation was forbidden, and replaced by ‘directed con-
date, 19 Romance regional atlases have been founded and
versation’ in the local dialect. There were no changes, how-
published in France.
ever, to the principles of transcribing in loco and publishing
The typographic appearance of the maps in these atlases is
the linguistic maps as full text maps.
very similar, all making use of a red or orange background on
which ALF-style phonetic transcriptions have been repro-
7.1.4.1 ‘Minor’ atlases duced by calligraphers. Not all atlases, however, include an
index, an introductory volume, or photographs. Unfortu-
Among the minor atlases we can cite here: Guerlin de Guer
nately, some individual attempts to later digitize some of
(1903) for Normandy; Millardet (1910a) for Landes in central
the published atlases were halted in 1991 when funding
Gascony; Bruneau (1914-26) for the Ardennes; Terracher
from the CNRS was withdrawn (cf. Simoni-Aurembou 1998).
(1912-14) for Angoumois; Bloch (1917) for Vosges; Meunier
Other Gallo-Romance atlases are:
(1926) for Nivernais; Devaux (1935) for Terres-Froides
(between Lyon and Grenoble); and Svenson (1959) for the (i) for the Oïl area: Atlas linguistique et ethnographique
Vendée Marshes. Of these, Millardet’s atlas stands out for its picard (Carton and Lebègue 1989-2010), Atlas linguis-
limited areal coverage (85 enquiry points over 2,500km2), as tique et ethnographique normand (Brasseur 1980-2011),
does Terracher’s for its particular focus on tracing through Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Bretagne romane,
morphology how geolinguistic patterns interconnect with de l’Anjou et du Maine (Guillaume and Chauveau 1975-
geographical patterns of intermarriage. 83), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de l’Ile-de-France
Also relevant here are the geolinguistic studies carried et de l’Orléanais (Simoni-Aurembou, 1973-8), Atlas lin-
out under the auspices of the Swiss dictionary project Glos- guistique et ethnographique de la Champagne et de la Brie
saire des patois de la Suisse romande (Gauchat et al. 1924-33), (Bourcelot 1966-89), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique
which were published partly in tabular form in the Tableaux de la Lorraine romane (Lanher et al. 1979-88), Atlas lin-
phonétiques des patois suisses romands (62 enquiry points, 480 guistique et ethnographique de la Franche-Comté
tables). For the Francoprovençal dialects of the Val d’Aosta (Dondaine 1972-84), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique
there is the Atlas des patois valdôtains, which has still yet to de Bourgogne (Taverdet 1975-84), Atlas linguistique et
be published. For the Swiss Valais dialects we now have ethnographique du Centre (Dubuisson 1971-93), Atlas lin-
Kristol’s multimedial online Atlas linguistique audiovisuel du guistique et ethnographique de l’Ouest (Poitou, Aunis, Sain-
francoprovençal valaisan (Kristol in progress) which offers tonge, Angoumois) (Massignon and Horiot 1971-83);
visual and acoustic data from the last speakers of the local (ii) for Francoprovençal: Atlas linguistique et ethnographi-
Francoprovençal variety (see also Ch. 20). que du Lyonnais (Gardette 1950-76), Atlas linguistique et
76
ethnographique du Jura et des Alpes du nord (Martin and linguistico etnografico italiano della Corsica (Bottiglioni 1933-
Tuaillon 1971-8); 42), was Bottiglioni. The work, sumptuously published
(iii) for the Oc and Catalan area: Atlas linguistique et ethno- during the years of Italian fascism, consists of ten volumes,
graphique de l’Auvergne et du Limousin (Potte 1975-92), an introduction, and an index-dictionary. Empirically, its
Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Gascogne distinguishing feature is the systematic use of sentences to
(Séguy 1954-73), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique elicit answers. Between 1995 and 2009 a local Corsican
du Languedoc occidental (Ravier 1978-93), Atlas linguis- initiative also published three volumes of a new atlas, the
tique et ethnographique du Massif Central (Nauton 1957- Nouvel atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Corse (Dalbera-
63), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Provence Stefanaggi 1995-2009), which also benefits from some digi-
(Bouvier and Martel 1975-86), Atlas linguistique et talized techniques.
ethnographique du Languedoc oriental (Boisgontier For mainland Italo-Romance, the first initiatives were
1981-6), Atlas linguistique et ethnographique des Pyrén- rather modest, namely surveys with results published in
ées orientales (Guiter 1966). tabular form (Melillo 1955a; 1955b). Things took a leap for-
ward with the advent of ‘sociological’ geolinguistics, which
was concerned with recording not only basilectal but also
7.1.4.3 Wallonia
mesolectal registers. Important in this respect are the Nuovo
The idea for a geolinguistic survey of Wallonia is due to Jean atlante dei dialetti e dell’italiano regionale (Sobrero et al. 1991)
Haust, who compiled a very wide-ranging questionnaire and in particular the Atlante linguistico siciliano (Ruffino 1985- ),
including, in addition to the spheres of agriculture and the which, although still far off publishing a real linguistic atlas,
petite bourgeoisie, also the grammar of the Romance dia- acts as a permanent research laboratory.
lects of Belgium. For various (economic and administrative) Operating within a multidimensional (or variationist)
reasons, publication only began in 1953. Today the opus framework are the Atlante linguistico della Basilicata (Del
magnum, the Atlas linguistique de la Wallonie (Haust et al. Puente and Giordano 2010), Atlante linguistico campano
1953-2011), boasts 17 volumes, whereas its editio minor, the (Radtke 2002- ), and Atlante linguistico-etnografico della Calab-
Petit atlas linguistique de la Wallonie (PALW), is made up of ria (Trumper 2010- ), although the latter two have yet to
three volumes, including colour-coded maps. A feature of publish real atlas volumes in paper format.
PALW is the codified presentation of the data in the maps For northern Italy, we can cite the regional atlas of
and the inclusion, in each of the maps, of extensive western Piedmont, Atlante linguistico ed etnografico del Pie-
comments.5 monte occidentale (Telmon and Canobbio 1985-2013), which
has all the hallmarks of a classical regional linguistic atlas,
including in loco surveys of the basilect, an onomasiological
7.1.5 Italo-Romance, Sardinian, and
bias, and traditional paper format publication. The same is
Raeto-Romance regional atlases true of the non-Raeto-Romance sections of the two parts of
the Atlante linguistico del ladino dolomitico (ALD; Goebl et al.
Italian initiatives in the area of regional atlases have suf- 1998; 2012) where, for the sake of the accessibility of the
fered from an absence of central planning, perhaps because published data, both paper and digital formats have been
they lack an autochthonous methodological model such as made available.
ALF for France. Also worthy of note is the Swiss initiative behind the
Vocabolario dei dialetti della Svizzera italiana, which, in add-
ition to publishing fascicles since 1952, also offers a wealth
7.1.5.1 Regional Italo-Romance atlases of geo- and ethnolinguistic documentation in its headquar-
The first regional initiative was for an atlas of Corsica, the ters in Bellinzona.
Atlas linguistique de la Corse (Gilliéron and Edmont 1914-15), For central Italy we must mention Giacomelli’s Atlante
which Gilliéron and Edmont had developed before the First linguistico toscano (Giacomelli et al. 2000). It is a diagenera-
World War and from which just 799 maps were published. tional geolinguistic study focusing exclusively on lexis
Further publications were stopped by Gilliéron, most prob- available on CD-ROM.
ably because of the devastating criticisms levelled at him Finally, mention must be made of two recent micro-
by some Italian linguists. The proponent of the new Cor- regional atlases for Istria, both compiled by Filipi and Buršić
sican atlas, together with its patriotic title, Atlante Giudici: Atlante linguistico istrioto/Istriotski lingvistički atlas
(1998) for Istrian and Atlante linguistico istroveneto/Istromle-
5
For further bibliography, see Pop (1950), Tuaillon (1976), Goebl (1978), tački lingvistički atlas/Istrobeneški lingvistični atlas (2012) for
Holtus (1990), Ravier (1991), Simoni-Aurembou (1998). Istro-Venetan.
77
HANS GOEBL
7.1.5.2 Raeto-Romance regional atlases 7.1.6 Iberian atlases

The first regional atlas for the area is the Friulian Atlante
storico linguistico etnografico friulano (Pellegrini and Pellis Following the Second World War, Spanish geolinguistics
1972-86), devised and edited by Pellegrini. The principal was championed by Manuel Alvar (e.g. Alvar 1969). We
focus of the atlas is lexis. The published work consists of owe to him most of the regional initiatives in this area,
six volumes and one introductory volume. The survey starting from the Atlas lingüístico y etnográfico de Andalucía
covers 199 enquiry points, including Slovene and German (Alvar 1961-73; 230 enquiry points). There then followed,
linguistic localities. Only one part of the published work in chronological order, the Atlas lingüístico y etnográfico de
(c.700 units) includes maps, with a large part of the pub- las Islas Canarias (Alvar 1975-8; 51 enquiry points), the Atlas
lished material consisting of short tables each containing lingüístico y etnográfico de Aragón, Navarra y Rioja (Alvar
about a dozen pieces of information. 1979-83; 176 enquiry points), the Atlas lingüístico y etnográfico
The other regional Raeto-Romance regional atlas is the de Cantabria (Alvar 1995-; 55 enquiry points), and the Atlas
Atlante linguistico del ladino dolomitico (ALD), divided into two lingüístico y etnográfico de Castilla y León (Alvar and Duero 1999;
parts (ALD-I and ALD-II; Goebl et al. 1998 and 2012) published 213 enquiry points). The general approach of these atlases,
in nine volumes.6 Each part covers 217 enquiry points, and whose respective questionnaires contain many questions of
contains 884 and 1,066 maps, respectively. Methodologic- an ethnographic nature, and their publication follow trad-
ally, it is a basilectal atlas, very similar to ALF. Its defining itional lines, with the exception of the additional consider-
characteristic is its appearance in both traditional paper ation they give to female language (already adopted in the
and electronic formats. As well as the nine volumes of Atlas lingüístico y etnográfico de Andalucía). Two atlases were
atlases (containing 1,950 maps), online sites for each part conceived along different lines: the Atlas lingüístico y etnográ-
offer the following features: (a) pdfs of all the published fico de Castilla–La Mancha (García Mouton and Moreno
maps (with supplementary lists); (b) a search engine for the Fernández 1989; 161 enquiry points), which is available online
data contained in both parts; (c) two acoustic databases and offers separate documentation for male and female
where all interviews with informants can be accessed. Of informants, and the Atlas lingüístico galego (Santamarina et al.
the 217 ALD enquiry points, only a quarter relate to Raeto- 1990-2005; 176 enquiry points). The Cartografía lingüística de
Romance, with the rest distributed across Lombard, Tren- Extremadura (González Salgado 2000) is only available online
tino, and Venetan localities. For the 21 dialects of Dolomitic (www.geolectos.com). Finally, we must also mention here the
Ladin there is also available online an ‘acoustic atlas’ based geolinguistic initiatives carried out by non-Spanish Romanists
on a separate data collection which makes use of the digital such as Krüger (1935-9).8
technology made available by the VIVALDI project (see The weak point of Iberian geolinguistics is the mainland
below).7 Portuguese territory, where for some time there has been a
project, the Atlas lingüístico-etnográfico de Portugal e da Galiza
(Saramago 1974- ), which has produced a questionnaire and
7.1.5.3 Sardinian atlases a list of enquiry points. However, it still has not published
In this category there are two works: one a synthesis of any atlas data. For the Azores, by contrast, there exists a
Sardinian data collected for ALI (Terracini and Franceschi substantial atlas (Saramago 2001-; 17 survey points).
1964) and the other a contribution by Wagner (1928), which
offers a wealth of geolinguistic documentation by way of an
appendix. 7.1.7 Daco-Romance regional atlases
Of particular interest for the entire Italo-Romance area is
the Berlin initiative Vivaio acustico delle lingue e dei dialetti Regional initiatives began in 1958 under the aegis of the
d’Italia (VIVALDI) led by Kattenbusch and Tosques. It brings Romanian Academy, subsequently finding their way into
together an online acoustic database which was collected one of two series of atlases: Noul atlas lingvistic român pe regiuni
through a basilectal-oriented questionnaire based on that and Atlasul lingvistic român pe regiuni. Internal coordination
used for AIS. At present the acoustic material available between both projects was much better than in France, both
online includes northern and central Italy, the islands employing very similar questionnaires. Between 1967 and
(Sicily and Sardinia), and many provinces of southern Italy. 2007 Atlasul lingvistic român pe regiuni covered three regions,
Maramureş, Dobrogea, and Transylvania, while Noul atlas
6 8
Also of interest here is the Dicziunari rumantsch grischun (1939). For further references on Ibero-Romance, see González González
7
<http://ald.sbg.ac.at/ald/ald-i> (1992), Veny (1991).
78
lingvistic român pe regiuni covered, between 1967 and 2009, the Maps focusing on sounds may reveal every link in the
four regions of Banat (Neiescu et al. 1980-2005), Crişana (Stan relevant chain of phonetic development: see Map 7.1 (devel-
and Uriţescu 1996-2003), Moldova and Bucovina, and Oltenia opment of Lat. -ELLU(M)) and Map 7.10 (development of Lat.
(Cazacu et al. 1967-84). At present the data from both atlases /k/ before stressed /a/). For the Gallo-Romance domain the
are being unified to produce a single national Romanian most ancient stages (-el and k, respectively) occur in the
synthesis covering more than 1,000 survey points, with the south (in the Occitan domain), while the more recent stages
first volume (Saramandu 2005- ) having been published.9 (-o or ʃ, respectively) are concentrated in the north (often
Bessarabia, previously part of the Soviet Union, was sur- then radiating outwards from the Île-de-France). In some
veyed between 1968 and 1973 as part of the Atlasul lingvistic cases, by overlaying some of the outcomes from maps for
al Moldovei (Udler and Melnic 1968-73), which was tran- etymologically related forms we may obtain a clearer
scribed using Cyrillic phonetic characters. impression of how some outcomes have radiated outwards
The Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian areas were sur- (see Map 7.2).
veyed by German Romanists through the Atlasul lingvistic Map 7.3 explores a morphosyntactic feature (obligatory
aromân (Kramer and Dahmen 1985-94) and Wild’s (1983) presence or absence of subject personal pronouns; with a
Meglenorumänischer Sprachatlas, respectively. Both atlases clear geographical distribution: once again the south stands
employed a reduced version of the questionnaire used for out for its conservativeness (see also Map 7.12).
the Atlas linguarum Europae (ALE; Weijnen and Alinei 1976). From a broad geographical perspective, phenomena dis-
Also now available is Atanasov’s (2009) Atlasul lingvistic al tributed around the periphery but not in the centre, reveal
dialectului meglenoromân. older stages of Romanization, while the centre may reveal
Istro-Romanian is covered by the Atlasul lingvistic istroro- an innovation (see Map 7.5).
mân/Atlante linguistico istrorumeno/Istrorumunjski lingvistički The interpretation of lexical maps, where the main
atlas (Filipi 2002-7). challenge is to reconstruct the structural evolution,
must go hand in hand with the use of historical sources
(etymological dictionaries such as Französisches etymolo-
7.1.8 Pan-Romance linguistic atlases gisches Wörterbuch (von Wartburg 1928-2002) or Lessico
etimologico italiano (Pfister and Schweickard 1979- ) (see
Maps 7.4, 7.6, 7.9, and 7.11). In Map 7.4, beside the innov-
Here mention must be made of the Atlas linguistique roman
atory type coq, the Latin type GALLU(M) is still in the
(Tuaillon and Contini 1996-2009), which is an offshoot of the
majority; however the Gascon types biguey, hasan, and
pan-European geolinguistic ALE project. In 1987 some of the
pol are to be explained, according to the interpretation
Romance collaborators on ALE decided, under the guidance
offered by Gilliéron and Roques (1912), as a kind of
of Tuaillon and Contini, to put together a separate group of
‘metalinguistic’ reaction on the part of speakers of
researchers with the aim of publishing (with the Roman
these dialects in order to avoid an ‘homonymie fâcheuse’
Istituto Poligrafico) annotated cartographations of a certain
(a ‘troublesome homonymy’) between the original words
number of items from the ALE questionnaire.
for ‘cat’ and ‘cockerel’, which otherwise would both have
given rise to *gat as a consequence of regular sound
change. The phenomenon has become famous in the
7.1.9 Some guidelines for reading the maps linguistic literature as ‘avoidance of homonymic clash’;
in a linguistic atlas see also Bynon (1979:186-9). Map 7.6 reveals one of many
pan-Romance lexical replacements, which were already
It is inherent in the way the data contained in the maps in a under way in late Latin. These often seemed to favour
linguistic atlas are gathered (standardization of the question- more ‘substantial’ forms, so that the (to take the example
naire, intercomparability, appropriateness of the questions of the infinitive) trisyllabic EMERE ‘to buy’ gave way to the
asked, etc.) that they may be interpreted diachronically, des- tetrasyllabic COMPARARE). This map also shows a secondary
pite their synchronic nature (as witness the subtitle of Brun- lexical diffusion (that of reflexes of AD+CAPTARE), due to
Trigaud et al. 2005: Du temps dans l’espace ‘Of time in space’). well-documented historical causes.
This intimate interrelation between space and time (or his- Map 7.9 reflects terminological variation in the early
tory) is true of all ‘geographically based’ sciences. Christian Church (concerning the names of the days of the
week) and the subsequent geolinguistic outcome. The three
rival types (DIES MERCURII, MERCURII DIES both ‘day of Mercury’,
MERCURIUS ‘Mercury’) were all present in the Christian
9
See further Caragiu-Marioteanu (1989), Olariu (2010). Romània by the fourth century.
79
HANS GOEBL
The even distribution of the grids used in the atlases may through the quantitative synthesis of dialectal data drawn
be very useful for the documentation of superstrate and from traditional linguistic atlases, to identify and study the
substrate effects (see Maps 7.7 and 7.8). While for the lexi- areal patterns (or, better, laws) hidden in the mass of data of
con, the assumption that such factors have been at work can these same atlases. As a rule, the original maps of the
be easily demonstrated by detailed comparision between linguistic atlases often present highly complex, not to say
the starting point and the endpoint, for sound change, chaotic, structural distributions, such that over the course
where the transmission of linguistic contact effects is of the last 100 years or so the belief, or rather conviction,
harder to track, this procedure is more complicated. Thanks has sprung up among many philologists and linguists that
to evidence from Osco-Umbrian for the development /nd/ > the areal distribution of linguistic features is exempt from
/nn/, we have better evidence in support of this (nonethe- intrinsic or significant regularities. Since early work in the
less controversial: see Varvaro 1979) hypothesis than for 1970s (cf. Séguy 1971; 1973) dialectometry has progressively
the alleged Celtic origin of the change /kt/ > /çt/ where shown this belief to be false for the study of both synchronic
there is a lack of historical documentation. and diachronic geolinguistics.
Within the framework of the Salzburg School of Dialecto-
metry (SSDM), these laws are assumed to derive directly
7.1.10 Conclusion from the particular attitude of dialectal and basilectal
speakers towards the geographic space of their habitat,
Of course the work required for the conception and comple- referred to for some years now by the SSDM as the ‘basi-
tion of a linguistic atlas is not to be confused with linguistic lectal management of space by Homo loquens’. It is equally
geography itself. On the whole, geolinguistic work is carried assumed that laws that apply on the spatial axis are the
out on the data of published linguistic atlases and takes on a direct counterpart to those that apply on the temporal axis
variety of methodological approaches, including both quali- (‘sound laws’), which were first discovered and widely
tative (frequent in the past) and quantitative (employed for debated by the Neo-grammarians at the end of the nine-
several decades in the field of dialectometry). The formal teenth century.
structuring of linguistic atlases in terms of a two-dimensional From a purely operational point of view, qualitatively
matrix (N enquiry points multiplied by p maps) and the the SSDM takes full advantage of the entire range of
Gilliéronian principle of intercomparability of the data have theoretical, conceptual, and methodological tools of trad-
always offered the possibility (though long neglected) of itional linguistic geography (based on atlases) and, quan-
analysing these data not only in considerable individual detail titatively, uses a wide range of numerical and graphic
but also in global terms. A prerequisite for this, however, is methods at the heart of numerical taxonomy (cf. Sneath
the good metrological quality of the atlas data. Although this and Sokal 1973) and modern quantitative geography and
was guaranteed at the time of Gilliéron and of Jaberg and Jud, cartography.
many of the atlases produced since no longer satisfy the Since 1999 all dialectometric analyses carried out in Salz-
formal principles embodied in ALF and AIS, preferring instead burg (and, to a certain extent, elsewhere) have employed
to limit themselves to the encyclopedic collection of data Visual DialectoMetry (VDM) software which allows almost
which do not lend themselves to intercomparability but all the stages of the SSDM methodological procedure to be
which are readily localizable. Empirical excesses of this type carried out by computerized means (Fig. 7.1).10
have not been infrequent in variationist studies in the field of
geolinguistics, which are expected to combine the survey of
basilectal and mesolectal data. The result is a deterioration in 7.2.2 Dialectometrization of ALF and AIS
the quality of the aforementioned two-dimensional matrix
and the utility of the data for global analyses.
The examples given in Table 7.1 are generated from the
dialectometrical analysis of about 40% of the original maps
contained in the ALF (carried out between 1996 and 1999)
7.2 Dialectometry
10
The fundamental monograph on SSDM is Goebl (1984). Other works by
7.2.1 Theoretical, empirical, and methodological the same author include, in French, Goebl (1981; 2002; 2003; 2005; 2008b;
preliminaries 2012), in Italian, Goebl (2008a; 2013), and in English, Goebl (2006; 2007;
2010). A full bibliography of Goebl’s works on dialectometry can be found at
<https://www.sbg.ac.at/rom/people/prof/goebl/dm_publi.htm>. Useful
Just like many of the sciences ending in the suffix ‘-ometry’, general information on dialectometry and on the VDM programme can be
dialectometry is an inductive discipline which sets out, found at: <http://www.dialectometry.com>; <http://ald.sbg.ac.at/dm>.
80
N enquiry points
Distance
matrix - Isogloss synthesis
(RDVjk) (honeycomb maps)
p working maps
Subdivision by N enquiry points
P atlas maps (ALx)
linguistic
categories: RDVjk= 100 – RIVjk
vocalism, RIVjk , WIV(1)jk
ALx consonantism,
N enquiry points
morphology, - Similarity maps
vocabulary etc. Similarity - Beam maps
matrix - Parameter maps
RIVjk , WIV(1)jk - Correlation maps
- Trees (dendrograms)
n enquiry points N enquiry points N enquiry points
Measurement Visual processing Interpretation
of similarities of the of the map
Taxation and distances square matrices structures
1 2 3 4 5
Original data source A Data B Similarity C Taxometric D
(Linguistic atlas x) matrix and distance results
matrices (statistical and numerical)
Fig. 7.1 Flow chart of the dialectometrical methods used by 7.2.3 From the original (ALF and AIS) data
the Salzburg School of Dialectometry
to the data matrix
Table 7.1 Key features of the dialectometrical analysis of The basic task of applied Romance linguistic geography had
the ALF and AIS always been the production of specific cartographations
based on the reading of individual atlas maps. For this
ALF AIS
purpose blank paper maps, generally called ‘silent maps’,
No. of original maps 626 (out of 1,310 (out of had always been available, circulated by the authors of the
analysed 1,421) 1,705) first linguistic atlases (ALF, AIS) and used by linguists for the
No. of derived 1,681 3,911 preparation of cartograms of which a large number have
‘working maps’ been published. The founding masters of the Romance lin-
(WM) guistic geography (cf. §7.1) produced a large number of
Linguistic Phonetics, Phonetics, these, many of which have since made their way into the
categories morphosyntax, morphosyntax, Romance handbooks.
lexis lexis Maps 7.9 and 7.10 (generated from ALF) and 7.11 and 7.12
(from AIS) provide typical examples: Maps 7.9 and 7.11 are
concerned with lexical features, whereas Map 7.10 is con-
and of all the maps contained in the AIS (carried out cerned with phonetic features and therefore based only on a
between 2007 and 2009). selection of the information contained in the corresponding
In the case of ALF, only a part of the original data was original ALF map. The same holds for Map 7.12, which is
analysed because of the potential amount of work involved, concerned with morphological features. In addition, the
whereas in the case of AIS about a quarter of the original following facts should be noted: (i) each of the coloured
maps were discarded since they were found to contain areas of the four maps corresponds to a specifically defined
empirical gaps. It is worth stressing that within the dialec- linguistic type (known in the SSDM as a ‘taxate’); (ii) the
tometrical approach it is essential that the data to be ana- extension and configuration of the taxate areas are
lysed constitute a complete dataset. Furthermore, the extremely variable; (iii) the number of taxates for each of
number of ‘working maps’ is always far greater than that the working maps also varies considerably, ranging between
of the original maps, especially in the case of those dealing 2 and 91 (taxates/working map) for ALF and between 2 and
with phonetic features. Consequently, it is possible to 153 for the AIS.
extract from the data of a single original atlas map several The process of deduction for a working map which pre-
working maps. supposes the definition of a precise classificatory criterion,
81
HANS GOEBL
Data matrix Similarity matrix RIVjk

(qualitative multistate characters) (symmetrical)
]
working maps (characters)
N 6 100 66 66 25 25 25
]
p . 5 66 100 50 33 33 33
enquiry points
. .
. 4 j j j j j j 4 66 50 100 33 33 33
k
i 3 h h h i i 3 25 33 33 100 75 75
RIVjk .
.
2 e e f g g . 2 25 33 33 75 100 100
.
1 1 a a a b c d 1 1 25 33 33 75 100 100
[
[
1 2 3 4 5 6 6 5 4 3 2 1
enquiry points missing data enquiry points
[ 1 . . . j . k . . . N ] [ N . . . j . . . 1 ]
Fig. 7.2 Data matrix and similarity matrix: scheme of calcu- Looking now at Fig. 7.2, the standard index of similarity
lation of the interdialectal similarities via RIVjk (Relative used by the SSDM is the ‘Relative Identity Value’ (RIVjk),
Identity Value) which from a statistical perspective is very simple in that it
measures the percentage of identical taxates between two
enquiry points (j and k). The result is a square similarity
is called (in the terminology employed in the SSDM) a matrix (with the dimensions N by N) from which can be
‘taxatation’. deduced, through a simple arithmetical transformation
(similarity [RIV]) + distance [RDV] = 100),11 a distance matrix
(of the same dimensions).
7.2.4 From the data matrix to the similarity An example calculation is given in Fig. 7.2: the similarity
and distance matrices RIV between the vector points 3 and 4 is the quotient of the
number of pairwise matchings of taxates (= 1; taxate j in the
fourth working map) and the number of all the pairs of
Fig. 7.1 clearly shows that the dialectometry methods used
analysable taxates (= 3; without the second working map,
are aligned with one another in a chain-like formation.
which contains a gap): RIV3,4 = 1/3 x 100 = 33%.
Consequently, the initial qualitative information gradually
The following link in the dialectometric chain (C) is of
passes from the qualitative to the quantative only to emerge
capital importance for the purposes of linguistic geography:
again, at the end, in cartographic form once more (stage 4).
it exploits the quantitative data saved in the two square
For this reason the cartographic language used in this
matrices according to the theoretical and heuristic require-
regard is qualitative rather than quantitative.
ments of diatopic linguistics.
Following the taxatation of the data from the original
atlas maps (stage A), it is possible to establish, by gathering
together all the analysed working maps, the data matrix 7.2.5 Graphic processing of the similarity
(stage B). The latter therefore contains qualitative data and distance matrices
which are situated, metrologically speaking, at the level of
the cardinal (or nominal) measurement scale.
For ALF the respective dimensions are: 641 enquiry points The aim of stage C is to visualize, with appropriate graphic
by 1,681 working maps; the total number of taxate areas (= means, the numerical variability of certain sectors of the
taxates belonging to all linguistic categories) is 20,043. AIS two square matrices. The selection of these sectors depends
presents the following values: 382 enquiry points by 3,911 entirely on the assumptions and requirements of linguistic
working maps; the total number of taxate areas (= taxates geography.
belonging to all linguistic categories) is 40,564. The internal Two cartographic representations are used: maps with
variability of AIS data therefore considerably exceeds that detached choric tessellations (choropleth maps) and maps
highlighted on the basis of the original ALF maps. with linear contour lines (isarithmic maps). Both are
The following stage (B) consists in the calculation of the marked through a variation in colour progressions. The
existing similarities between N localities (or enquiry points)
of the data matrix. 11
RDV = Relative Distance Value.
82
quantitative extension of the colour intervals is regulated accompanying slopes, inclines, and valleys. This
by two algorithms, MINMWMAX and MEDMW, which attri- regularity follows directly from the organization of
bute ‘cold’ colours to numerical values below the arithmetic space in accordance with the laws inherent in the
mean and ‘warm’ colours to values situated above. The VDM ‘basilectal management of space’ evoked above.
software programme makes it possible to quickly change (iii) The spatial configuration of the choroplethic profile
the number of colour intervals (between 2 and 20) and to of a similarity map (and of other dialectometrical
choose between three visualization algorithms (including of visualizations) largely depends, regardless of the
course MINMWMAX and MEDW). underlying corpus, on the nature of two very import-
Each of our maps consists of three parts: the map itself, the ant heuristic tools, the similarity index and the visu-
numerical legend (bottom left), and a histogram (bottom alization algorithm. Here we apply three standard
right) which enables the visualization of the statistical nature SSDM tools: the Relative Identity Value (RIVjk) and
of the underlying frequency distribution of the map. the two visualization algorithms MINMWMAX and
All the grids of atlas enquiry points dialectometrized by MEDMW. Moreover, thanks to the numerous possibil-
us were polygonized in line with Voronoi geometric prin- ities that the VDM software offers for calculating
ciples. This procedure has enormous heuristic advantages, values and cartographation, the generation and sub-
in that it allows, above all, direct and unambiguous visual sequent comparison of a large number of choro-
comparison of the profiles of choropleth and isarithmic plethic profiles from different sources can be carried
maps. Of course, the number of polygons corresponds to out with considerable ease and in very little time.
the number of enquiry points taken into consideration. For (iv) Reduced similarity rates across space are directly
ALF, the number of original enquiry points (= 638) was related, albeit to varying degrees, to an increase in
increased by three artificial points corresponding to the the respective geographic distances. This fact, which
standard languages (French, Italian, and Catalan). For AIS, represents furthermore a high-ranking linguistic
of the 404 original (Romance) enquiry points 29 were dis- universal, will be used within the framework of cor-
carded since they presented empirical gaps, and two artifi- relative dialectometry (cf. §7.2.10).
cial points (corresponding to Italian and French) were
Thanks to their very distinct choroplethic profiles, simi-
added, as well as the five following cities surveyed by
larity maps highlight the following geolinguistic properties
Scheuermeier: Turin, Milan, Venice, Bologna, and Ferrara.
of the respective local dialect or basilect: its position within
As a consequence, the grid of enquiry points for AIS is
the surveyed grid, which is interpreted as a relational frame-
slightly smaller, with 382 points.
work; the degree of integration (penetration, interaction,
etc.) of its dialectality within the surveyed grid; and the
‘communicative’ efficiency of the respective dialect. Further-
7.2.6 Similarity maps as a tool
more, similarity maps are amenable to various types of
of dialectometry interpretation including, notably, diachronic and sociological
interpretations (cf. Goebl 1981:369-81; 1984:100-113).
The similarity map represents the most important tool of Particularly noteworthy is the incredible stability of
the SSDM. Besides the usual polygonized background, each (choroplethic) similarity profiles within a (geo)typologically
similarity map has a preselected reference point and coherent area. It is for this reason that the comparative
encodes through a variation in colour progressions a pro- consideration of a number of similarity profiles whose ref-
gressive fall in the linguistic similarity values in relation to erence points are aligned along a suitably preselected path
the highest value (100%) associated with the reference point proves so informative. In this way there emerge some strik-
itself (RIVjj = 100). ing ‘special’ effects which cast new light on the abovemen-
To enable a better understanding of similarity maps, four tioned ‘basilectal management of space by Homo loquens’.
points in particular must be noted:
(i) The polygon for the reference point always remains
7.2.6.1 Presentation and interpretation of
white on the maps and is usually situated in the
centre or at the edge of the red coloured area (inter-
Maps 7.13-7.16
val 6) corresponding to the atlas survey points char- The choroplethic structure of Map 7.13 displays a similarity
acterized by the highest degree of similarity. profile which is typical for central Languedocian, while that
(ii) In general, the profile of spatial patterning follows a for Map 7.14 (with standard French as reference point)
regular structural partitioning comparable to the highlights the degree of integration of French among the
single peak of a mountain landscape with numerous dialects of the Gallo-Romance area.
83
HANS GOEBL
The choroplethic structure of Map 7.15 is ‘typically’ Lom- Note furthermore that the configuration of the isogloss
bard, with the extension of the warm areas limited to the Po bundles, represented in dark blue and with thick lines, are
Plain, the appearance of cold colours (indicating large lin- not structured linearly. Actually, the segregation between
guistic distances) in the Raeto-Romance areas (Graubün- the different enquiry points is in general rather more grad-
den/Grisons/Grigioni/Grischun, South Tyrol, Friuli), and ual and accompanied by marked compartimentalization
the compact cold coloration of the regions south of Rome. effects. By contrast, the red-coloured polygon aggregate
Map 7.16, whose reference point is standard Italian, zones encoded by thin lines highlight linguistically coherent
shows the degree of Italianization of the Italo-Romance, areas (or dialect kernels).
Raeto-Romance, and Sardinian dialects. Especially interest-
ing is the very close position of the dialects of the Veneto
(and Istria) to standard Italian (class 4, in yellow), most
7.2.8 Parameter maps as a tool
probably to be explained as a result of the specific condi-
tions surrounding the Romanization of the area at the
of dialectometry
beginning of the second century BC.
The extremely variable statistical nature of N similarity
distributions of a given similarity matrix soon led to the
close examination not only of the values of the various
7.2.7 Isoglottic (or interpunctual) synthesis
statistical parameters (such as the minimum, the maximum,
as a tool of dialectometry the arithmetic mean, etc.) but also of their geolinguistic
significance. The synopsis of symmetry parameters, notably
From a cartographic perspective, isoglottic (or interpunc- Fisher’s skewness values, of a given similarity distribution
tual) syntheses belong to the class of isarithmic maps, was thus shown to be very useful in geolinguistic terms for
whose basic iconic elements are based, not on polygon the detection of so-called ‘linguistic compromise’ (Ger.
areas, but on polygon sides generated through a preceding Sprachausgleich), in turn closely connected to the often
geometric examination of the surveyed grid. The preparation very complex overlapping of taxate areas contained within
of Maps 7.17 and 7.18 therefore involves the following stages: the same data matrix. In essence, linguistic compromise
refers to the varying integration of a particular basilect
(i) Triangulation of the atlas network in line with Delau-
within the larger geolinguistic grid through the intermix-
nay geometric principles, yielding 1,791 triangle sides
ture of small-scale (oligo-choric), middle-scale (meso-
for the ALF grid and 970 triangle sides for the AIS grid.
choric), and large-scale (mega-choric) taxate areas with
(ii) Polygonization of the triangulated network in line
the rest of the atlas data.
with Voronoi geometric principles, yielding 1,791
The quantitative consideration of the occurrence of oligo-,
and 970 polygon sides for ALF and AIS, respectively.
meso-, and mega-choric areas in the various attribute vec-
(iii) Preparation of the polygonized map based on rela-
tors of a data matrix can be efficiently carried out by
tive distance values (RDVjk).
measuring the symmetry of the various similarity distribu-
From a taxometric or dialectometric perspective, the tions computed on the basis of the data matrix.
establishment of Map 7.17 is based on 1,791 RDVjk ranging It is obvious, and further supported by our own empirical
between 5.42% and 56.99%, whereas the same variation in experience, that among the various basilects of a given
Map 7.18 (derived from AIS) is based on 970 values ranging geolinguistic grid some are more isolated than others,
between 10.19% and 47.52%. The visualization of these dis- whereas other basilects are perfectly connected with the
tance values (1,791, 970) is encoded through variation in the other members of their given grid. To understand this
colourings and the thickness of the lines representing the phenomenon better, it will help to reflect upon the follow-
polygon sides: with higher RDVjk come thicker lines and a ing observation. Each of the 641 attribute vectors of the
greater use of blue colouring. corresponding number of localities in our ALF network is
In this way there emerge, in many areas on our two maps, marked by 1,681 geolinguistic attributes (or taxates). Now,
line-like phenomena which correspond to well-known bun- each of these 1,681 taxates corresponds to a taxate area
dles of isoglosses. In Map 7.17 this happens between the Oïl whose size can range, theoretically, between 1 and 640
and Oc areas, and in Map 7.18 south of the Romansh-speak- points (or polygons). The percentage of oligo-, meso-, and
ing area, along the western arc of the Alps, the Po and the mega-choric areas among all 1,681 taxate areas thus proves
Adige, between the Veneto and Friuli, along the Apennines, of utmost importance for assessing the degree of integra-
in northern Sardinia, and around all the linguistic islands of tion of one of the 641 vector points in the entire ALF
the south and Sicily. network. It follows from this that a vector point which is
84
largely associated with small (oligo-choric) taxate areas can result of the centuries-old expansion of the linguistic type
only play a very limited communicative role within the of the Langue d’Oïl from the Île-de-France, while the latter
entire network, and vice versa. reflects the progressive retreat of Francoprovençal in the
A comparison of the numerical legends of similarity Maps face of the Langue d’Oïl to the north and the Langue d’Oc to
7.13 and 7.14 reveals that the extremely variable symmetry the south.
of a given similarity distribution can have a particular The three predominantly red-coloured polygon aggre-
linguistic meaning. The legend from Map 7.13 (relating to gates (intervals 10-8) in Gascony, Languedoc, and Provence
the Occitan dialect of Rieupeyroux, ALF point 724) reminds represent the last bastion of opposition to the propagation
us that of the 640 similarity values which have been of the pan-Gallo-Romance linguistic compromise.
mapped, 212 (= 101+74+37) points, namely the minority, The skewness profile for (AIS) Map 7.20 proves equally
are above the arithmetic mean of 53.22%, whereas 428 (= clear. On the Po Plain, the dark blue and light blue coloured
66+264+98) fall below the arithmetic mean. A different pic- polygons encode a well-defined departmentalization, in
ture emerges for Map 7.14 in relation to standard French, which the Adige and the Po, together with long stretches
where 347 (= 127+149+67) points, namely the majority, are of the Apennines from Liguria to the Marches, stand out as
above the arithmetic mean of 68.75%, with 297 (= 9+159+129) important dividing lines characterized by very intense cur-
points below the arithmetic mean. The (relative) communi- rents of interaction. Another cavity marked in part by class
cative connection between standard French and the rest of 1 and 2 polygons (and therefore potentially characterized
the grid is therefore higher than that for the dialect of by intense currents of interaction) can be found between
Rieupeyroux. central (Lazio, Umbria, Marche) and southern (Abruzzo,
In an absolutely symmetrical frequency distribution, Molise, Campania, etc.) Italy. The ‘warm’ coloured zones
there are the same number of scores on both sides of the are found in the Graubünden/Grischun/Grigioni/Grisons,
arithmetic mean. If that is the case, Fisher’s skewness value Friuli, Tuscany, and above all in the south of the Peninsula
is zero. When, however, most of the measurement scores and Sardinia.
are concentrated above the arithmetic mean, the skewness It is clear that the linguistic islands situated in the south
values are negative. In the opposite case (the majority of the (AIS points 715 (Francoprovençal), 760 (Provençal)) and
measurement scores are below the arithmetic mean), they Sicily (AIS points 865, 836, and 817 (Gallo-Italic)), which
are positive. since their genesis have been subject to continuous linguis-
tic exchanges, are to be included among intervals 1 and 2.
The same is true of the northern part of Sardinia, which,
7.2.8.1 Presentation and interpretation of Maps 7.19
given its gradual Tuscanization through continuous demo-
and 7.20 graphic imports from Corsica over the centuries, displays
For a proper understanding of both maps, it is essential to many characteristics of a genuine linguistic island.
explain the linguistic meaning of the use of different
colours:
(i) Blue-coloured polygons: areas of great linguistic
7.2.9 Dendrographic dialectometry12
compromise characterized, both in diachrony and
synchrony, by considerable interactive dynamism One of the most efficient means of numerical classification
with respect to the rest of the ALF or AIS network. used by the SSDM has for over 40 years been Hierarchic
These are thus very active areas heavily marked by Agglomerative Classification (HAC), which generates, as a
outward and inward linguistic contact. heuristic output, dendrographic tree-like structures of vari-
(ii) Warm-coloured polygons: areas of little linguistic ous kinds. These trees, which thanks to a similarity matrix
compromise characterized, both in diachrony and with the dimensions NN always have N leaves, are gener-
synchrony, by a high degree of linguistic conserva- ated by a reiterated process of binary fusions governed by a
tism (or immobilism) with respect to the rest of the specific agglomerative algorithm. This process always
surveyed grid. These are therefore areas whose ori- begins from the leaves.
ginal linguistic type has been preserved for some International numerical classification (or taxometry)
considerable time and protected to a great extent employs a large number of algorithms to which correspond
from all external influences. a similarly large number of trees. The utility of these trees for
An examination of (ALF) Map 7.19 reveals the presence of
a large blue circular configuration in the north and a small
semi-circular configuration in the southeast. The former is 12
The following discussion is exemplified by Maps 7.21 and 7.22.
85
HANS GOEBL
any given research project must be assessed on a case-by- similarities and Euclidean proximities by visually examin-
case basis through the combined evaluation of the require- ing N similarity maps with an equal number of proximity
ments of statistical analysis and Romance geolinguistics. maps. Clearly, such a simple visual examination would not
HAC trees consist of a hierarchy of disjunctive clusters produce scientifically robust results. The preferred solu-
with a binary structure, whose inner quantitative variability tion is therefore to exploit modern statistical methods
proceeds from the leaves (= foliage) towards the root which make it possible to measure the relation between
(= trunk) of the tree. Consideration of the changing vari- two series of values empirically ascertained through
ability in the internal branching structure of these trees is appropriate correlation indices, and to subsequently visu-
of great relevance especially for geolinguistic classification alize a synopsis of their respective results. More con-
and pattern recognition. The dendrographic algorithm cretely, this procedure consists in the preparation of a
applied in such cases is the Ward algorithm, whose utility similarity and a proximity matrix of equal dimensions
in geolinguistics has been demonstrated on the basis of (N by N), whose duly matched vector pairs lend themselves
wide-ranging data. to N calculations of the given numerical correlations.
As demonstrated by Maps 7.21 and 7.22, in dialectometry Following the computation of the N correlation calcula-
one must always begin with the projection in space of the tions, the N calculated values are mapped in accordance
resulting dendrographic classification of the tree (so-called with the usual norms of the SSDM.
‘spatialization’). In this process, the coloration of the clus- The statistically most suitable correlation index is the
ters from the tree (‘dendremes’) are linked to the analogous Bravais–Pearson Correlation Coefficient r(BP). The r(BP)
areas (‘choremes’) of the spatialization. In the cases at hand, measures the linear correlation between two quantitative
the colouring is not very extensive, with only seven den- variables ranging between values of –1 and +1.
dreme-choremes (DC) for ALF and nine for AIS, representing To better understand the correlation maps, it helps to
well-known dialect areas. The linguistic interpretation must think of the two correlated variables as forces or energies
always begin with the first bifurcation after the root. ready to extend across space. From this perspective, it is
On Map 7.22 the biggest division (between DC A-E and DC legitimate to ask whether this propagation of the two vari-
F-I) highlights the famous La Spezia–Rimini Line. Thanks to ables operates in perfect harmony (convergence) or in more
the further bipartition based on the ‘Padan’ DC A-E, we can or less marked disharmony (divergence). Naturally, both
remove the entire Romansh area (DC A). The remaining area variables must in turn be given an appropriate diachronic
of the Padan Plain can be divided into the Veneto (DC E) and and synchronic linguistic interpretation, which we take
the rest of Gallo-Romance (DC B-D), and so on. here to be the correlation between language and geography.
It should be emphasized, however, that the choremes Incidentally, correlative dialectometry can also be suc-
show in all cases a spatially very compact distribution and cessfully employed between two different linguistic cat-
that the higher ramifications of the tree prove extremely egories or between two dialectometrical corpora with
important for geolinguistic classifications. different numbers of working maps.
Looking at Maps 7.23 and 7.24, which reveal spatial
distributions which can be readily interpreted from a
7.2.10 Correlative dialectometry linguistic point of view, we can note the following use of
colours:
Correlative dialectometry, which grew out of the detailed
study of the correlation between linguistic distance and (i) Red and orange colours (intervals 5 and 6): areas
geography, is only a fairly recent instrument of the SSDM where there persists a primitive harmony between
(Goebl 2005). The intimate relationship between space and the energies of language and space which, unlike
language can be immediately exemplified by a comparison ‘natural’ linguistic exchanges, are not found with
of a normal similarity map (computed using the RIVjk) with shifts in phonemes and lexemes. These are conserva-
a similar map based on proximity values calculated accord- tive areas which have not been contaminated
ing to Pythagoras’ well-known theorem and hence in linguistically.
accordance with Euclidean geometric principles. Applica- (ii) Dark blue and light blue colours (interval 1 and 2):
tion of Pythagoras’ theorem proves quite straightforward areas where the primitive harmony between lan-
given the prior integration of the geographic coordinates (x guage and space has been deeply disturbed by outside
and y) of the ALF and AIS enquiry points into the VDM factors through the interference of cultural, social,
software. and political dynamic forces of various kinds. These
In theory, it would be possible to ascertain the existing are linguistically restless areas permeated by long-
(cor)relations between the spatial variability of dialect lasting (socio)linguistic dynamic forces.
86
Map 7.23 illustrates a clear bipartition of the Gallo- 7.2.11 Summary

Romance domain caused by centuries-old friction and con-
flicts between forces from the north and the south. The
To conclude this summary presentation, we reiterate some
trend revealed by the choroplethic profile of the map sug-
of the most salient characteristics of the SSDM:
gests that the impact of the forces from the north was
always greater than that of the forces from the south. Also (i) It is an inductive method which, through the numer-
worthy of note is the perfect graduation of the spatial ical synthesis of very diverse empirical data, leads to
distribution of the r(BP) values. the discovery of regularities and geolinguistic laws,
Turning to Map 7.24, it can be seen that the restless zones otherwise hidden within the analysed data.
(interval 1, in dark blue) are mostly situated in the northern (ii) It is a method based on the quantitative analysis of
part of Tuscany, Liguria, Veneto (including Istria), and space which, precisely for this reason, considers the
northern Sardinia. This same map also underscores the general mapping (or visualization) of its numerical
highly plausible fact that the five linguistic islands in the results as the optimal heuristic process.
south (points 715, 760) and Sicily (points 865, 836, and 817) (iii) It is a method which, on account of its intrinsic
are areas subject to considerable linguistic movement. The comparative approach, is always open to interdiscip-
foundation of a linguistic island represents, in principle, a linary collaborations of all kinds.
total breakaway from the primitive harmony between the (iv) It is a method empirically based on linguistic atlases
energies of language and space. proper and similar empirical collections.
The high degree of linguistic movement associated with (v) It is a method, whose origins lie in Romance lin-
the north of Tuscany and the Veneto is highly symbolic, guistics, which is a part of the tradition of classical
especially in light of the early centralization (‘medianizza- linguistic geography that prides itself on the har-
zione’) of the Veneto and the respective processes of export- monious reconciliation of traditional knowledge
ation (out of Tuscany) and importation (on the part of the with the latest in methodological and techno-
Venetan dialects) of linguistic material of various kinds. logical innovations.
87
PART III
Individual Structural Overviews

CHAPTER 8
Romanian, Istro-Romanian,
Megleno-Romanian, and Aromanian
MARTIN MAIDEN
8.1 Introduction dialect of Muntenia, one of a group of—largely mutually

intelligible—‘Daco-Romanian’ varieties, including Moldovan,
maramureșean (Maramureș), crișean (Crișana), bănățean
Romanian (and other, closely related, ‘Daco-Romanian’ var-
(Banat), and the linguistically transitional dialects of
ieties), Aromanian (also called ‘Macedo-Romanian’), Istro-
Transylvania.
Romanian, and Megleno-Romanian jointly constitute the
The remaining dialects, spoken south and west of the
four subdivisions of the ‘Daco-Romance’ branch of the
Danube, may be collectively termed ‘sub-Danubian’. Istro-
Romance languages. Although they share a common ances-
Romanian is spoken in some localities in northeastern Istria
tor, their early history (including the location and extent of
(Croatia) to the south of Mt Učka, and in the town of Žejane
the territory where ‘Daco-Romance’ originated; cf. Andreose
to its north. Its speakers probably descend from pastoral
and Renzi 2013:287), and the historical links between them,
communities originally resident in Bosnia, Serbia, and Cro-
remain obscure. Aromanian and Romanian probably became
atia in the late Middle Ages, who settled in Istria from about
separate before the eleventh century, Istro-Romanian and
the fifteenth century. The language’s place of origin, and
Romanian not before the thirteenth; the affiliation of
whether it originally broke away from varieties spoken in
Megleno-Romanian is debated.
the Romanian lands, or from those spoken in the Balkans, or
Modern standard Romanian is spoken over a territory
represents dialect mixing, remain controversial (cf. Sârbu
which roughly includes the Roman province of Dacia, but
and Frăţilă 1998:13-18). Toponyms and documentary evi-
also areas historically outside the Roman Empire (Crişana,
dence show that Istro-Romanians were once more widely
Maramureş, Bucovina, northern Moldova, Bessarabia, cen-
settled in Istria and on the islands of Krk and Rab. There are
tral and eastern Muntenia). It is today the official language
today perhaps 200-250 speakers in Croatia, mainly elderly
of the Republic of Romania (the mother tongue of 90% of
and all bilingual in Croatian (Orbanić 1995; Filipi 2003).
perhaps 22 million inhabitants), and of the Republic of
Dianich (2012:146) suggests that émigré speakers in New
Moldova, where it is spoken natively by some three quarters
York outnumber those in Istria.
of a population of 3.4 million.1 There are Romanian-speaking
Aromanian speakers are scattered widely over the Bal-
communities near the frontiers of Romania in northeastern
kans, notably southern Albania, central and northern
Bulgaria, Serbia (Timoc valley and Voivodina), Hungary, and
Greece, and southwestern Macedonia (see Kahl 1999; 2006;
in Ukraine. Map 8.1 reflects the extent of Daco-Romance
Demirtaş-Coşkun 2001; Nevaci 2013). Estimates of their
varieties as it was towards the middle of the twentieth
numbers range from 2–300,000 to over 500,000 (see
century; some of the outlying varieties to the northeast, in
Dahmen 2005; Nevaci 2013:18). The major subdivisions are
particular, may now have disappeared.
the pindean and grămostean communities, mainly in Greece
Romanian’s emergence as an official language was a grad-
and the Republic of Macedonia, and the fărşerot and grabo-
ual, patchy process, lasting from the mid sixteenth century
vean communities, mainly in Albania. Since the first half of
to the mid nineteenth. The basis of the standard is the
the last century there has also been a substantial Aroma-
nian community in Romania, especially in Dobrogea
(Saramandu 2003a).
Megleno-Romanian has some 5,000 speakers, principally
1
For sketches of the politics and ideology behind the so-called ‘Moldo- in villages in the Pella and Kilkis prefectures of northern
van language’, essentially identical to Romanian (but cf. Popușoi 2013 for
Russian influence), see e.g. Andreose and Renzi (2013:309f.), Varvaro Greece, and over the frontier in the Republic of Macedonia,
(2013b:341). Also §37.2.5. around Huma. We lack detailed documentation of the
This chapter © Martin Maiden 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 91
MARTIN MAIDEN
0 100 200 miles Lviv R. D

Kraków niep
er
0 150 300 km
R.
Dn
ies R. Dnipropetrovsk
R. ter
Košice Kolomeo Bu
Da g
nu
be
Vienna
Cernăuţi Balta
Debrecen Nikolaevsk
R.
Budapest
P
Iaşi
ru
t
Chişinău
isa
Cradea Kherson
R. T
Cluj-Napoca Sea of
Azov
Odessa
R. Drava Szeged
Arad
Trieste Sibiu
R. Mure
ş
Timişoara Braşov Galaţi
R. S Ploieşti
ava
R. Mo
Belgrade Craiova Bucharest Black
R. O
lt
rava
Vidin
A Ruse
Sea
d R. Dan
ube
ri
a Niš Varna
t
i
Sofia
c
S
Plovdiv
e
R. R. M
Edirne
a
Va ari
tsa
rd
Tirana ar
Istanbul
Bitola
Sea of
Marmara
Thessaloníki
Ankara
za
rit
Grevena
st
Vi
R.
Larisa
Ioánnina A e g e a n
I o n i a n S e a
S e a Aromanian
Athens
Istro-Romanian
Romanian
Megleno-Romanian
Map 8.1 Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Aromanian in the mid-twentieth century (based on Capidan
1941)
language before the twentieth century, and theories of its 8.2 Phonology
origins range from the view that it is a Daco-Romanian
dialect transplanted to the Balkans, to the position that it
is an offshoot of Aromanian. Reviewing the evidence, 8.2.1 Vowels
Atanasov (2002:15-27) rather favours the former view.
The principal focus here will be Romanian, the other The phonemic inventory is shown in Table 8.1.
branches of Daco-Romance being illustrated where they There are also glides [j] (e.g. ied [jed] ‘kid’) and [w], plus
show particularly distinctive characteristics. diphthongs [e̯a] and [o̯a].
92
ROMANIAN
Table 8.1 Vowels A phonotactic constraint of Romanian (not sub-Danubian

dialects), with significant morphological consequences (see
FRONT CENTRAL BACK
e.g. Chițoran 2002:145f.), involves neutralization of the
High i ɨ u frontness distinction between [ə] and [e] and between [ɨ]
Mid e ə o and [i]. After the glide [j] and after [i] only the front mem-
Low a bers of these pairs occur, while there is also evidence for a
similar process after [w], such that the [ə] vs [e] distinction
is neutralized in favour of [ə]; on the synchronic status of
Particularly distinctive of Romanian among Romance lan- this type, see Chițoran (2002:148f.). For some morphological
guages are:2 results of these processes, see Table 8.4e and §8.4.2.
Word-initial mid or high vowels may receive an on-glide,
(i) a high central vowel [ɨ] (largely the product of his-
especially in inherited vocabulary (e.g. opt [ʷopt] ‘eight’,
torical processes of nasalization of [a] or [e], or of
inimă [ˈʲinimə] ‘heart’), but such pronunciations are con-
centralization of [i] usually determined by preceding
sidered substandard.
*[rr], or of centralization of vowels before tautosyl-
labic [r]; see Renwick 2014:33-62, 84-100 for its vari-
ous sources): e.g. mână [ˈmɨnə] ‘hand’ < MANUM, râu 8.2.2 Consonants
[rɨu̯] ‘river’ < RIUUM, târziu [tɨrˈziu̯] ‘late’ < TARDIUUM;
(ii) stressed [ə] (largely the product of historical central-
ization of [e] determined by certain preceding con- Table 8.2 shows the phonemic consonant inventory, which
sonants): e.g. rău [rəu̯] ‘bad’ < REUM;3 is unremarkable from a Romance perspective. An original
(iii) diphthongs with mid-vowel onset glides [e̯a] and voiced dental alveolar affricate [ʣ] survives in many dia-
[o̯a]: e.g. seară [ˈse̯arə] ‘evening’, coadă [ˈko̯adə] ‘tail’. lects (of Moldova, Maramureș, and Banat) and in Aroma-
nian, but yields [z] in standard Romanian, Megleno-, and
The phonological status of the glides in [e̯a] and [o̯a], and of Istro-Romanian: Ro. vezi [vezʲ] ‘you see’ vs Aro. [veʣ]. Vir-
[j] and [w], is complex and controversial: cf. e.g. the discus- tually all consonants have palatalized counterparts, some
sions in Vasiliu (1989:4), Avram (1991), Chiţoran (2002), of them participating in morphophonological alternations:
Renwick (2014:63-83). e.g. [pʲ] (SG lup [lup] ‘wolf ’ PL lupi [lupʲ]), [zʲ] (SG englez [enˈglez]
Sub-Danubian varieties have mostly lost the distinction ‘Englishman’ PL englezi [enˈglezʲ], SG câine [ˈkɨine] ‘dog’ PL câini
between high and mid central vowels, original [ə] generally [ˈkɨinʲ]), etc. [tʲ] - [dʲ] occur only in the context [ʃtʲ] (e.g. ești
becoming [ɨ] in Aromanian, original [ɨ] generally becoming [jeʃtʲ] ‘you.SG are’) and [ʒdʲ] (the latter is rare, e.g. the place-
[ə] in Istro-Romanian, and both (when stressed) merging as name Cuejdi [kuˈʲeʒdʲ]). The phonetic and the phonological
[ɔ] in most Megleno-Romanian varieties: Ro. pâine [ˈpɨin̯ e] status of word-final postconsonantal [ʲ] is problematic: see
‘bread’, mână [ˈmɨnə] ‘hand’ vs Aro. [ˈpɨni], [ˈmɨnɨ]; IRo.
[ˈpəre], [ˈməra]; MRo. [ˈpɔi ̯ni], [ˈmɔnə]. Table 8.2 Phonemic consonant inventory
The vocalic inventory is not differentiated by stress.
Whereas in many Romance varieties [ə] only occurs VOICELESS VOICED
unstressed, Romanian also has it in stressed syllables: e.g.

Bilabial stops p b
care [ˈkare] ‘who, which’ vs cărui [ˈkərui̯] ‘whose’ from ORo.
Labio-dental fricative f v
[kəˈrui̯] ‘whose’, with historical shift of stress without adjust-
Dental stop t d
ment in vowel quality. The diphthongs [e̯a] and [o̯a] princi-
Dental alveolar affricate ʦ
pally originate, historically, in stressed syllables, but there is
Palatal alveolar affricate ʧ ʤ
no phonological constraint against their occurrence
Velar stop k g
unstressed (e.g. asemenea [aˈsemene̯a] ‘like’, dincoace pro-
Glottal fricative h
nounced either [dinˈko̯aʧe] or [ˈdinko̯aʧe] ‘over here’).
Alveolar fricative s z
Stress-linked asymmetry occurs, however, in Aromanian,
Palatal-alveolar fricative ʃ ʒ
where unstressed [e], [ə], [o] are generally raised to [i], [ɨ], [u].
Nasals
Bilabial m
2
Dental n
For the Romanian vowel system as a distinctive historical development
involving simple loss of Latin length distinctions for back vowels, but also Liquids
quality mergers (as in ‘western’ Romance languages) for front vowels, see Lateral l
e.g. Loporcaro (2011b:113f.). Trill r
3
On the nature of this vowel, cf. Renwick (2014:13, 36-8).
93
MARTIN MAIDEN
the overview in Vasiliu (1989:2f.), who represents it as [ʲ̥], an boundaries: înnebuni [ɨnːebuˈni] ‘to madden’ < în + nebun
‘asyllabic sound with palatal timbre lacking glottal vibration ‘mad’. Fărșerot varieties of Aromanian have [mː] < *[mn]ː
and resembling a simple palatal aspiration whose duration is ˈlemnu > ˈlemːu ‘wood’.
shorter than that of the semi-vowel [j]’. It resolves as [i] Stress never falls more than four syllables from the end of
when followed by a clitic pronoun or article: lupi [lupʲ] the word,5 but otherwise there are few constraints. Most
‘wolves’ vs lupilor [ˈlupilor] ‘of the wolves’. In the case of [s] words are paroxytonic (casă [ˈkasə] ‘house’, formulă [for
we have not **[sʲ] but [ʃ], and in that of [h] not **[hʲ] but [ç]: ˈmulə] ‘formula’, cobalt [ˈkobalt] ‘cobalt’, superfluu [super
SG pas [pas] ‘step’ PL pași [paʃ], SG ierarh [jeˈrarh] ‘hierarch’ PL ˈfluu] ‘superfluous’), but proparoxytones and oxytones
ierarhi [jeˈrarç]. Velars immediately preceding front abound: caracatiţă [karaˈkatiʦə] ‘octopus’, lucrăm [luˈkrəm]
vowels are always palatalized: chel [kʲel] ‘bald’, ghici! [gʲiˈʧ] ‘we work’, măsea [məˈse̯a] ‘molar’, făcu [fəˈku] ‘(s)he did’;
‘guess.IMP.2SG!’. telefon [teleˈfon] ‘telephone’. Borrowing from French
Dialects of Moldova and southeastern Romania and much accounts for the high incidence of (par)oxytones in learnèd
of central and northern Transylvania, with Aromanian vocabulary for which most other Romance languages have
(Vasiliu 1968:119-22), show various palatalizing modifica- proparoxtyones (Sp. fenómeno vs Fr. phénomène [fenoˈmɛn],
tions of labials before [ʲ] or [i]. For [p] and [b] these produce, Ro. fenomen [fenoˈmen] ‘phenomenon’). Anteproparoxytones
according to locality, outputs such as [pc͡ ] and [bɟ͡ ], [c] and mainly end in -iţă, originally a Slavonic (feminine) deriv-
[ɟ], or even, in Moldova, [kʲ], [gʲ]. For [f] and [v] outputs such ational suffix (veveriţă [ˈveveriʦə] ‘squirrel’, lapoviţă
as [c] and [ɟ] and even (in Maramureș) [s] and [z] are [ˈlapoviʦə] ‘sleet’), but note darămite [ˈdarəmite] ‘not to
common. For input [m], [mn], or [n] (especially in Moldova), mention’, the last two syllables of which are, in origin, clitics.
we have [nʲ]. The following contrasts standard examples Primary stress in the clitic group falls on the host verb,
with their counterparts in the speech of Vad (ALRR-Marm. but it may also fall on the negator nu: e.g. nu (le) știu [ˈnu (le)
point 225): pivniță–[ˈcignʲiʦə] ‘cellar’; albină–[alˈɟinə] ‘bee’; ˈʃtiu] ‘I don’t know (them)’.
fin–[sin] ‘godson’; viespi–[zesc] ‘wasps’; vin–[zin] ‘wine’; Constraints on syllable structure are few (Vasiliu 1989:6;
omidă–[ʷomˈnʲidə] ‘caterpillar’. Istro-Romanian sequences Chițoran 2002:12-18): onsets and codas may be empty, or
of labial + [j] result in labial + [ʎ] (reflecting a similar process comprise up to three consonants (the third being [r] in
in Croatian): Ro. fier ‘iron’ vs IRo. [fʎer]. onsets): grajd [graʒd] ‘barn’, jgheab [ʒge̯ab] ‘trough’, jneapăn
In Romanian, original [ɲ] and [ʎ] both became [j], [ˈʒne̯a.pən] ‘juniper’, hrean ‘horseradish’, ctitor ‘founder’,
although [ɲ] survives to this day in Banat and was present lemn ‘wood’, istm ‘isthmus’, mreajă [ˈmre̯a.ʒə] ‘net’, ștreang
in the north in the sixteenth century. Both survive in sub- [ʃtre̯aŋg] ‘noose’, strâmt ‘narrow’, naramz ‘orange tree’
Danubian dialects: Ro. iepure ‘rabbit’, tămâie ‘incense’ vs (regional), bilingv ‘bilingual’. Syllable-final (C)C+liquid is
MRo. [ˈʎepuri], [təˈməɲə]. impossible, and in word-final position the liquid must
In inherited vocabulary, Istro-Romanian has a reduced make a syllable with a following vowel: this is why word-
incidence of intervocalic [n], because of the change [n] > [r]: forms whose roots end in (C)C+liquid preserve the historical
IRo. [ˈbire] ‘well.ADV’ vs Ro. bine. For [n] > [r] in old Romanian, desinences -u and -i as full vowels (cf. Tables 8.3l, 8.4c) even
persisting vestigially in some varieties, notably of the west- when, elsewhere, final unstressed [u] has been deleted, and
ern Carpathians, see Avram (1990:130-43). -i is at best preserved as [ʲ]. In pindean and grămostean
The consonant [h] is common, but limited in the standard Aromanian [u] and [i] survive after all word-final consonant
language to loanwords (e.g. from Slavonic hrean ‘horserad- clusters.
ish’, duh ‘spirit’, from Hungarian hotar ‘boundary’, from Opposite voice values in adjacent obstruents tend to be
Turkish mahala ‘suburb’). avoided: frecvent [fregˈvent] ‘frequent’, anecdotă [anegˈdotə]
‘anecdote’, abțibild [apʦiˈbild] ‘transfer’. The sequence writ-
ten s + n/l may be [s] or [z] + n/l: smântână [smɨnˈtɨnə] or
8.2.3 Prosody and syllable structure4 [zmɨnˈtɨnə] ‘sour cream’, slănină [sləˈninə] or [zləˈninə] ‘lard’;
the rare sr is always [zr]. A peculiarity of Daco-Romance is
the sequence [m] + dental, without homorganic assimilation
Length plays no role in Romanian phonology, although
of the nasal. Indeed in some cases original [nt] has become
sequences of identical vowels arising at morpheme bound-
[mt]: SENTIT > simte ‘(s)he feels’: see Sala (1976:33); Avram
aries may be realized long; thus, lupii (‘the wolves’ < lupi
(1990:194-6).
‘wolves’ + plural definite article -i) is [ˈlupiː] or [ˈlupii̯] (see
Vasiliu 1989:3). The sound [nː] may arise at morpheme
5
Stress is (generally) unaffected by the presence of enclitic pronouns:
e.g. cumpără-ni-le [ˈkumpərə ni le] ‘buy.IMP.2SG=us=them (= buy them for us)’,
4
For intonation, see Dascălu (1998). but see §45.3.1.
94
ROMANIAN
8.3 Orthography and writing systems orthography, the use of g and c for [ʤ] and [ʧ], and gh and
ch for [g] and [k], before front vowels reflecting Italian
usage, and the invention of ș for [ʃ], due to G. Șincai, see
The modern orthography of Romanian is broadly phonemic
Onu (1989:311f.). Between 1828 and 1859, ‘transitional
(but cf. Onu 1989:321). The letter i, when not a syllabic
alphabets’ were developed comprising both Cyrillic and
nucleus, indicates [j] (ied ‘kid’) or [i ]̯ (tei ‘lime’), or [ʲ] when
Roman letters (Onu 1989:309f.). A Roman-based standardized
following a consonant word-finally (lupi ‘wolves’ [lupʲ]).
writing system was introduced in Wallachia and (independ-
Written word-final -i after palatals is often inaudible (pași
ently) in Transylvania in 1860, and in Moldova in 1862.
[paʃ] ‘steps’). Word-initial e has the value [je] in third person
Tensions between etymologizing (Latinizing) and broadly
pronouns (el [jel] ‘he’) and in the verb ‘be’ (este [ˈjeste], era [je
phonemic principles were resolved, largely in favour of the
ˈra] ‘(s)he is, was’). Oa generally represents [o̯a] (or [wa],
latter, by the Romanian Academy’s first official orthography,
systematically so syllable-initially): boală [ˈbo̯alə] ‘illness’,
produced in 1881. This, reflecting Wallachian norms of pro-
oaie [ˈwaje] ‘sheep’), but may stand for [oa] ([ˈboa] ‘boa’).
nunciation, favoured elimination of regional variants both
Ea is [e̯a] (e.g. andrea [anˈdre̯a] ‘knitting needle’) but [ja]
from spelling (Onu 1989:307) and from pronunciation.
syllable-initially (e.g. evaluează [evaluˈjazə] ‘(s)he evaluates’),
The twentieth century (Stan 2012b) saw various spelling
and it may also represent [ea] (real [reˈal] ‘real’). The spelling
reforms, following broadly phonemic principles, with the
eea represents [ˈeja] (Andreea [anˈdreja] a female name).
peculiar exception of the sound [ɨ] for which spellings either
C and g represent velars, but palatal affricates before ortho-
as â, or as î (or as both, following sometimes complex
graphic front vowels (citesc [ʧiˈtesk] ‘they read’). H, normally
distributional principles) have at different times been pro-
[h], is used diacritically after c and g to indicate that they
posed. In 1953, general use of î was prescribed, subject to
represent velars: gem [ʤem] ‘I moan’ vs ghem [gʲem] ‘ball of
revision in 1965 so that român ‘Romanian’, and related
wool’. X, restricted to neologisms, represents [ks] (ortodox
words, were spelled thus on etymological grounds (high-
[ortoˈdoks] ‘orthodox’) but sometimes [gz] intervocalically
lighting the link with Lat. romanus ‘Roman’). In 1993 norms
(examen [egˈzamen] ‘examination’). Before the desinence -i,
established in the Communist period were reversed in
with palatalization of the sibilant element, x is replaced by
Romania (not until 2001 in the Roman-based spelling
cș: ortodocși [ortoˈdokʃ] ‘orthodox.MPL’.
adopted in the Republic of Moldova) in favour of a system
This relative transparency of the sound–letter relationship
fundamentally derived from one proposed in 1904, such that
is not matched at the prosodic level, and Romanian possesses
â is used word-internally and î at the beginning and end of
no established means of indicating intonation or stress: pairs
words. The same reform reintroduced etymologizing spel-
such as [ˈkɨntə] ‘(s)he sings’ vs [kɨnˈtə] ‘(s)he sang’, or [ˈia] ‘the
lings sunt, suntem, sunteți ‘I.am, we.are, you.PL are’ (banished
linen blouse’ vs [ja] ‘(s)he takes’, are homographs (cântă, ia).
in 1953), although they are widely pronounced [sɨnt]-.
Romanian is unusual among Romance languages in hav-
The Romanian of the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet
ing first been written so late (perhaps not before the four-
Socialist Republic, and subsequently of the Moldovan Soviet
teenth century), and in the Cyrillic alphabet. The oldest
Socialist Republic, adopted Cyrillic as part of a Stalinist
surviving document directly composed in Romanian dates
policy (effectively from 1924, but reaffirmed from 1938 and
from 1521 (the letter of Neacșu of Câmpulung), although the
again in 1941; see Deletant 1996:53, 58f., 61) seeking to assert
Hurmuzaki Psalter (Psaltirea Hurmuzaki) is older, being a
the separateness of the ‘Moldovan language’ from Romanian.
copy, made around 1500, of a fifteenth-century translation
This was no reversion to the traditional Cyrillic script of
of the Psalms. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth
Romanian, but an adaptation of Cyrillic as used to write
centuries see uncoordinated attempts to simplify the some-
modern Russian, with concessions to peculiarities of Roma-
times erratic and opaque Cyrillic spellings of Romanian (see
nian phonology (э for [ə] and ӂ for [ʤ]). See also §41.4.3.
Onu 1989:305f.), and also the beginnings of the introduction
of the Roman alphabet (see Stan 2012a). Already in the
eighteenth century various examples of writing in the
8.4 Forms and functions of nouns,
Roman alphabet, following Polish, Hungarian, German, and
Italian models, appear in Transylvania, and it is the activity pronouns, adjectives, and verbs
of Greco-Catholic intellectuals (the ‘Transylvanian School’;
Onu 1989:307f.), notably the model created by Petru Maior 8.4.1 Inflectional morphology of nouns
(who invented the letter ț, unique to Romanian, for [ʦ]), and verbs
that from the latter part of the eighteenth century and the
early nineteenth lays the basis of modern Romanian orthog- Nouns, adjectives, and verbs have complex inflectional
raphy. For the emergence of j for [ʒ], reflecting French paradigms, characteristically comprising a lexical root
95
MARTIN MAIDEN
Table 8.3 Noun morphology
FEMININE
(a) SG PL (b) SG PL (c) SG PL (d) SG PL
ADV fată ‘girl’ fete casă case coadă cozi țară ‘land’ țări
‘house’ ‘tail’
ADN fete fete case case cozi cozi țări țări
(e) SG PL (f) SG PL (g) SG PL (h) SG PL
ADV floare flori stea ‘star’ stele carte cărți pară ‘pear’ pere
‘flower’ ‘book’
ADN flori flori stele stele cărți cărți pere pere
MASCULINE
(i) SG PL (j) SG PL (k) SG PL (l) SG PL
brad ‘fir’ brazi cal ‘horse’ cai copac copaci cuscru ‘one’s child’s father-in- cuscri
‘tree’ law’
(m) SG PL (n) SG PL (o) SG PL (p) SG PL
câine ‘dog’ câini șarpe șerpi perete pereți păr ‘hair’ peri
‘snake’ ‘wall’
NOUNS WITH ALTERNATING GENDER (MASCULINE SINGULAR AND FEMININE PLURAL)
(q) MSG FPL (r) MSG FPL (s) MSG FPL (t) MSG FPL
cot ‘elbow’ coate ac ‘needle’ ace lac ‘lake’ lacuri pod ‘bridge’ poduri
(u) MSG FPL
ou ‘egg’ ouă
+ desinence(s). The desinential marking of number and In modern nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, stress never
gender (and case) on nouns and adjectives is cumulative, falls on the desinence. The verb inherits more faithfully
as is that of person, number, mood, and often tense in verbs than in most Romance languages the Latin patterns of
(cf. §§27.2-5). The paradigms (or partial paradigms) given in stress: this is characteristically arrhizotonic, falling on the
Tables 8.3 and 8.4 (for adjectives see §8.4.3.2) illustrate some lexical root usually only in the singular and third person
of the main characteristics of the system. For the case plural forms of the present and of the subjunctive. What
distinctions indicated by ‘ADV’ and ‘ADN’, see §8.4.3.1. Since distinguishes the third conjugation (e.g. Table 8.4h,i) is that
stress is not indicated orthographically, it is here marked by stress falls, as in Latin, on the root in the infinitive and
bold face; recall that g and c are [ʧ] and [ʤ] before i and e. throughout the present indicative; there is however a wide-
spread tendency, especially in sub-Danubian dialects, for
stress to shift to the desinence in these first and second
person plural present forms. It is also characteristic, prin-
8.4.2 Major patterns of allomorphy caused
cipally, of third conjugation verbs that they may have rhi-
by sound change zotonic past participles, and that if their pluperfect and
preterite have a segmentally distinctive root allomorph,
Few Romance languages so consistently preserve in their then stress falls on that allomorph in the preterite in the
synchronic morphology the effects of their phonological third person and throughout the plural (Table 8.4h,i;
history. Lexical roots in Romanian usually show allomorphy Maiden 2009b and §43.2.2).
due to sound change; much desinential allomorphy also has The effects of historical raising of unstressed [a] and [o]
phonological origins. Table 8.4f presents one extreme case— appear in Table 8.4e,j, although this alternation type is by
a suppletive verb whose alternation pattern is nonetheless no means general (cf. Table 8.4i,o). Similarly extensive, but
almost exclusively attributable to the effects of sound no longer productive (despite occasional analogical exten-
changes, and which derives from the perfectly regular sions in neologisms), is the effect of historical diphthong-
Latin LEUARE. More usually, patterns of root allomorphy ization of [e] and [o] to [e̯a] and [o̯a] when not followed by a
remain predictable synchronically, although the phono- high vowel (see, e.g. Loporcaro 2011b:128f.): cf. Tables 8.3c,e,
logical processes causing them are defunct. q; 8.4a,d,h,j,l. Subsequent remonophthongization of [e̯a] to
96
ROMANIAN
Table 8.4 Verb morphology: synthetic forms
(a) Infinitive pleca(re) ‘leave’

Gerund plecând
Past participle plecat
Present Subjunctive Imperative Imperfect Pluperfect Preterite
1SG plec (să) plec plecam plecasem plecai
2SG pleci (să) pleci pleacă plecai plecaseși plecași
3SG pleacă (să) plece pleca plecase plecă
1PL plecăm (să) plecăm plecam plecaserăm plecarăm
2PL plecați (să) plecați plecați plecați plecaserăți plecarăți
3PL pleacă (să) plece plecau plecaseră plecară
(b) Infinitive cumpăra(re) ‘buy’
Present Subjunctive Imperative
1SG cumpăr (să) cumpăr
2SG cumperi (să) cumperi
3SG cumpără (să) cumpere cumpără
1PL cumpărăm (să) cumpărăm
2PL cumpărați (să) cumpărați cumpărați
3PL cumpără (să) cumpere
(c) Infinitive urla(re) ‘yell’
1SG urlu (să) urlu
2SG urli (să) urli urlă
3SG urlă (să) urle
1PL urlăm (să) urlăm
2PL urlați (să) urlați urlați
3PL urlă (să) urle
(d) Infinitive lucra(re) ‘work’
1SG lucrez (să) lucrez
2SG lucrezi (să) lucrezi lucrează
3SG lucrează (să) lucreze
1PL lucrăm (să) lucrăm
2PL lucrați (să) lucrați lucrați
3PL lucrează (să) lucreze
(e) Infinitive tăia (tăiere) ‘cut’
Gerund tăind
Past participle MSG tăiat
Supine tăiat
1SG tai (să) tai
2SG tai (să) tai taie
3SG taie (să) taie
1PL tăiem (să) tăiem
2PL tăiați (să) tăiați tăiați
3PL taie (să) taie
97
MARTIN MAIDEN
(f) Infinitive lua(re) ‘take’

1SG iau (să) iau
2SG iei (să) iei ia
3SG ia (să) ia
1PL luăm (să) luăm
2PL luați (să) luați luați
3PL iau (să) ia
(g) Infinitive vedea (vedere) ‘see’
Gerund văzând
Past participle MSG văzut
Supine văzut
1SG văd (văz) (să) văd (văz) vedeam văzusem văzui
2SG vezi (să) vezi vezi vedeai văzuseși văzuși
3SG vede (să) vadă (vază) vedea văzuse văzu
1PL vedem (să) vedem vedeam văzuserăm văzurăm
2PL vedeți (să) vedeți vedeți vedeați văzuserăți văzurăți
3PL văd (să) vadă (vază) vedeau văzuseră văzură
(h) Infinitive coace(re) ‘bake, ripen’
Gerund cocând
Past participle MSG copt
Supine copt
1SG coc (să) coc coceam copsesem copsei
2SG coci (să) coci coace coceai copseseși copseși
3SG coace (să) coacă cocea copsese coapse
1PL coacem (să) coacem coceam copseserăm coapserăm
2PL coaceți (să) coaceți coaceți coceați copseserăți coapserăți
3PL coc (să) coacă coceau copseseră coapseră
(i) Infinitive pune(re) ‘put’
Gerund punând
Past participle MSG pus
Supine pus
1SG pun (pui) (să) pun puneam pusesem pusei
2SG pui (să) pui pune puneai puseseși puseși
3SG pune (să) pună (puie) punea pusese puse
1PL punem (să) punem puneam puseserăm puserăm
2PL puneți (să) puneți puneți puneați puseserăți puserăți
3PL pun (să) pună (puie) puneau puseseră puseră
(j) Infinitive muri(re) ‘die’
Gerund murind
Past participle MSG murit
Supine murit
1SG mor (să) mor muream etc. murisem etc. murii etc.
2SG mori (să) mori mori
3SG moare (să) moară
1PL murim (să) murim
2PL muriți (să) muriți muriți
3PL mor (să) moară
98
ROMANIAN
(k) Infinitive fugi(re) ‘run, flee’

Gerund fugind
Past participle MSG fugit
Supine fugit
1SG fug (să) fug fugeam etc. fugisem etc. fugii etc.
2SG fugi (să) fugi fugi
3SG fuge (să) fugă
1PL fugim (să) fugim
2PL fugiți (să) fugiți fugiți
3PL fug (să) fugă
(l) Infinitive plăti(re) ‘pay’
1SG plătesc (să) plătesc
2SG plătești (să) plătești plătește
3SG plătește (să) plătească
1PL plătim (să) plătim
2PL plătiți (să) plătiți plătiți
3PL plătesc (să) plătească
(m) Infinitive urî (urâre) ‘hate’
Gerund urând
Past participle MSG urât
Supine urât
1SG urăsc (să) urăsc uram urâsem urâi
2SG urăști (să) urăști urăște urai urâseși urâși
3SG urăște (să) urască ura urâse urî
1PL urâm (să) urâm uram urâserăm urârăm
2PL urâți (să) urâți urâți urați urâserăți urârăți
3PL urăsc (să) urască urau urâseră urâră
(n) Infinitive veni(re) ‘come’
Gerund venind (viind)
Past participle MSG venit
Supine venit
1SG vin (viu) (să) vin (viu) veneam etc. venisem etc. venii etc.
2SG vii (să) vii vino
3SG vine (să) vină (vie)
1PL venim (să) venim
2PL veniți (să) veniți veniți
3PL vin (să) vină (vie)
(o) Infinitive coborî (coborâre) ‘descend’
Gerund coborând
Past participle MSG coborât
Supine coborât
1SG cobor (să) cobor coboram coborâsem coborâi
2SG cobori (să) cobori coboară coborai coborâseși coborâși
3SG coboară (să) coboare cobora coborâse coborî
1PL coborâm (să) coborâm coboram coborâserăm coborârăm
2PL coborâți (să) coborâți coborâți coborați coborâserăți coborârăți
3PL coboară (să) coboare coborau coborâseră coborâră
99
MARTIN MAIDEN
[e] (dialectally, [ɛ]) before unstressed [e], limited to Daco- extensive. Root-final dentals and [s] systematically show
Romanian, complicates the picture further: see the third [ʦ], [z] (< [ʣ]), and [ʃ], respectively, before [i] (see
person present and subjunctive in Table 8.4a,d,l. Other alter- Table 8.3c,g,i,j,o; 8.4g; also 1SG.PRS las ‘leave’ vs 2SG.PRS lași).
nations with the same origin, but with modified effects due Root-final -st(r) alternates with șt(r) in these cases: nostru
to the nature of the preceding phonological environment, - noștri ‘our.MSG/PL’. Final unstressed [i] caused palatalization
appear in Table 8.3a,d,h,n. Particularly noticeable here (in of [l] and [n], yielding [ʎ] and [ɲ], both of which became [j] in
Table 8.3a,h, where the historically underlying form is feată, Daco-Romanian. Note that in the first conjugation [l] and [n]
peară, as still attested in sub-Danubian dialects) is the cen- escape this alternation (speli ‘you wash’), while in nouns and
tralizing effect on front vowels, including [e̯a], of an imme- adjectives [n] never today displays the alternation, and [l]
diately preceding labial (blocked when the following vowel does so only sporadically (cal - cai ‘horse’, but șacal - șacali
is front); this effect also accounts for the singular of ‘jackel’, vale - văi ‘valley’, but sală - săli ‘hall’).
Table 8.3p, in forms of Table 8.4g with the root-vowel ă or Modern standard Romanian (with sub-Danubian dialects)
a: Aro. 1SG.PRS ˈvedu 3SG.PRS ˈve̯adi; also Ro. 1SG.PRS spăl ‘I wash’, has eliminated from its inflectional morphology nearly all
2SG.PRS speli, 3SG.PRS spală. The same process accounts for the effects of Romance palatalization before yod (see §39.2.6).
alternation of the root-final unstressed vowel in Table 8.4b. Old Romanian and many modern Daco-Romanian dialects,
A historically earlier centralizing effect (this time independ- however, display palatalizing/affricating effects of historic-
ent of the character of the following vowel and triggered by, ally underlying yod in the first person singular present and
inter alia, preceding sibilants) is observable in Table 8.3d subjunctive and in the third person subjunctive: these are
(for original țeară țeri), a pattern subsequently analogically the forms given in parentheses in Table 8.4g,i,n, and there
extended into almost all feminine nouns with stressed has been considerable analogical spread of the alternation
vowel [a] and the ending -i (cf. Table 8.3g; Maiden 1997c). into other verbs (thus Table 8.4i). See also Maiden (2011d).
Historical centralization of front vowels (Sala 1976:76-80,
96f.), produced by originally preceding *[rr], appears in
Table 8.4m (< *orˈrire). What is affected here is the vowel
8.4.3 Nominal inflection
immediately following the root. Comparing Table 8.4l, with
8.4.3.1 Case and number marking
a typical fourth conjugation verb, with Table 8.4m repre-
sentative of a couple of dozen verbs, we see that the mater- Romanian opposes what is traditionally called a
ial following the root in the latter is exactly the same as in ‘nominative-accusative’ (subject and direct object) case-
Table 8.4l, modulo the effects of centralization, and that the form to a ‘genitive-dative’ (indirect object). However,
type represented by Table 8.4m is historically an offshoot of these terms rather force Romanian morphology into the
the former. Table 8.4o stands in a similar relation, historic- Procrustean bed of Latin, and I employ the (approximate)
ally, to 8.4j: here, accidental merger in the third person labels ‘adverbal’ for the form principally associated with
singular present with the corresponding ending of the subject and direct object, and ‘adnominal’ for the other.
first conjugation (cf. Table 8.4a) has induced partial transi- The locus of morphological case-marking is the deter-
tion of this verb to the first conjugation (cf. Maiden 2009c). miner,6 and among nouns (and adjectives) only feminine
A still productive phonological constraint neutralizes the singulars show it (Table 8.5).
distinction between front and central vowels after [j] in
favour of front vowels. This is why in Table 8.4e we have
tăind [təʲind], not **tăiând, 1PL.PRS tăiem, not **tăiăm, and 3SG. Table 8.5 Case marking on determiners (and feminine
PRS taie (identical to the subjunctive) not **taiă, and 3SG.PRT
singular nouns)
tăie not **tăiă. Historical neutralization of the distinction
MSG MPL MSG MPL
between [e] and [ə] after [w] explains why the plural of ou in
ADV acest cal ‘this aceşti cai calul ‘the caii
Table 8.3u is ouă not **oue.
horse’ horse’
The effects of historical palatalization/affrication on
ADN acestui cal acestor cai calului cailor
root-final velars before front vowels (see §39.3.1) are exten-
FSG FPL FSG FPL
sive (Tables 8.3k,r; 8.4a,h,k). While the phonological process
ADV această casă aceste case casa ‘the house’ casele
is no longer productive, this type of alternation remains
‘this house’
exceptionless within inflectional morphology. For the his-
ADN acestei case acestor case casei caselor
tory of these velar/palatal alternations, see e.g. Maiden
(2011d; 2013a).
The effects of the historically later phenomenon of pal-
atalization and/or affrication before [i] (see §39.3.2) are also 6
For the enclitic definite article, see §8.4.5.
100
ROMANIAN
Noun paradigms almost never have more than two word nouns (such as names of months: lui mai ‘of May’) and in
forms. These normally distinguish number, not case (see substandard varieties may be used with femininine proper
Table 8.3), but feminines have a distinct adnominal case names in -a (lui Silvia) and with demonstrative pronouns
form in the singular, virtually always identical to the form referring to persons (lu ăsta ‘of him’, for ăstuia). Historically,
of the plural (itself invariant for case). This pattern for lui (substandardly pronounced lu) is a remnant of a pre-
feminines is robustly replicated throughout the history of posed masculine singular form of the definite article
Romanian—morphological innovations always affecting (see Stan 2013a:264). The form lu serves in southern Istro-
feminine plural and adnominal singular identically Romanian (Kovačec 1984:567f.) as a proclitic marker, invari-
(Diaconescu 1970:213; Carabulea 1977:572; Rosetti ant for number and gender, of adnominal case in combination
1986:489). For exceptions, involving the relatively recent with the enclitic definite article (1):
importation of the ending -uri into the plural of feminine
mass nouns and creating three distinct word forms, see (1) dɑ lu ˈvɑʦile fir
Maiden (2014). give lu cows.the.FPL hay
It is overall impossible to predict plurals from singulars. ‘Give the cows hay!’
The only (nearly) safe generalizations are that a noun whose
singular ends in a consonant, or -u, will have a correspond- In northern Istro-Romanian this use of lu is limited to the
ing plural in -i if it has animate reference (e.g. Table 8.3i,j, singular, and to the masculine; it has a feminine singular
k,l), and that any noun whose (adverbal) singular ends in -e counterpart le. Use of an invariant lu appears in most var-
will have plural -i (e.g. Table 8.3e,g,m,n,o). Feminine adver- ieties of Megleno-Romanian (Capidan 1925:145-50; Atanasov
bal singulars in -ă alternate with forms in -e or –I, but it is 2002:213f.), where it is a generalized case marker, lacking
impossible to predict which: -e tends to predominate with particular connection with definiteness; there is also a clear
animate reference (româncă–românce ‘Romanian woman’, distinction between genitive and dative functions, lu being
but cf. țigancă–țigănci ‘gypsy woman’). Table 8.3q-u illus- genitive, la dative: lu/la un om ‘of/to a man’; lu/la unə muˈʎari
trates so-called ‘neuter’ nouns, which are characterized by ‘of / to a woman’; lu/la omu(l) ‘of/to the man’; lu/la muˈʎerli
gender alternation, being masculine in the singular but ‘of/to the women’.
feminine in the plural. ‘Neuters’ end in a consonant, or -u,
in the singular (the only significant exception being MSG
nume - FPL nume ‘name’), but in the plural generally have 8.4.3.2 Gender, gender marking, and the ‘neuter’
either -e or -uri. The distribution of these two endings is There is a degree of semantic predictability of gender,
unpredictable, except that, usually, only -e is possible where nouns referring to males and females being overwhelmingly
stress does not fall on the last syllable of the root (leagăn– masculine or feminine respectively, with decreasing con-
leagăne/**leagănuri ‘cradle’; yet cf. sinus–sinusuri ‘sinus’). sistency as one descends the animacy hierarchy (e.g. M tată
Marking of adnominal case is normally inflectional in ‘father’, F mamă ‘mother’, despite the former carrying an
Daco-Romanian (see §8.5.2.8 for prepositional object mark- apparently feminine ending). The opposition between mas-
ing; also §56.3.2.3). However, indirect objects may be culine and feminine forms may also be exploited to mark
expressed by the preposition la ‘to’ + (adverbal) noun. The the difference between cultivated trees (masculine) and
lower the degree of humanness, the higher the likelihood of their fruits (feminine): M păr ‘pear tree’, F pară ‘pear’. The
marking the indirect object prepositionally (la with human gender of inanimates is usually unpredictable (M soare ‘sun’,
recipients is characteristic of colloquial registers): Dă mân- F floare ‘flower’). All so-called ‘neuters’ (discussed below)
care la porci ‘Give food to the pigs’, but ??Dă mâncare la have inanimate (more accurately, ‘non-living’) reference,
profesori ‘Give food to the teachers’ (cf. Iorga Mihail 2013a). but not all inanimates are ‘neuter’.7
La obligatorily marks indirect objects before morphologic- Gender is to a signifcant degree morphologically predict-
ally invariant prenominal elements such as numerals and able on the basis of the inflectional endings, a fact of great
some quantifiers (cf. the uses of a as a prepositional genitive importance to the question of the ‘neuter’. As Table 8.3
marker, in §8.5.1.2). There is also colloquial use of la as a shows, -i can be masculine plural or feminine plural, -e
genitive marker: acoperișul la casă ‘the roof of the house’. masculine singular or feminine singular or feminine plural,
Except for feminines in unstressed -a, which take definite while -ă, overwhelmingly feminine singular, contains a few
adnominal -ei (Silvia–Silviei), adnominal case is generally masculines (e.g. tată ‘father’, popă ‘priest’). Yet -Ø and -u are
marked on singular proper names by the gender-invariant
proclitic form lui: telefonul lui Ion/lui Ani ‘John’s/Ani’s tele- 7
Alleged exceptions to the rule that all ‘neuters’ denote inanimates are
phone’. This usage has extended to invariant common animal ‘animal’, mamifer ‘mammal’, and dobitoc ‘animal, beast’—but these
nouns referring to persons and to some invariant inanimate primarily denote kinds.
101
MARTIN MAIDEN
uniquely associated with masculine singular, and both -e There has been very extensive historical generalization of
and -uri, when they are plural desinences, with feminine the plural desinence -i for feminine plural -e (e.g. roată
agreement. ‘wheel’–roate > roată–roți; cf. Iordan 1938:10-17, 32-5, 40-42),
Whether Romanian has a ‘neuter’ is controversial (e.g. but this—with a few significant exceptions—never occurs in
Hall 1965; Marcus 1967:123, 143; Jakobson 1971:188; Farkas ‘neuters’ in -e (e.g. always os ‘bone’–oase, never **oși). ‘Neu-
1990; Matasović 2004:51; Maiden 2011a:701 n. 36; 2013e; ter’ plural -e may in fact be replaced by -i, but only where
§57.3.2). Unquestionably, the ultimate source of the ‘neuter’ some other morphological factor guarantees the unique
plural desinences are Latin neuter desinences, but until gender identifiability of the plural.9 Thus the old ‘neuter’
recently (see Bateman and Polinsky 2010) little attention plural ending -ure (preserved in Istro-Romanian) gives way
has been given to the role of purely morphological factors in to -uri (ORo. timp–timpure ‘time’ > timp–timpuri) because the
determining the status of nouns as ‘neuters’. ‘Neuter’ means resultant -uri continues (by virtue of -ur-) to be uniquely
‘neither masculine nor femininine’ but the so-called ‘neuters’ associated with feminine agreement. Moreover, principally
are actually both masculine (in the singular) and feminine in eastern Romania, certain nouns such as buzunar ‘pocket’
(in the plural), and this by virtue of their inflectional and mădular ‘limb’ have ‘neuter’ plurals buzunări and mădulări
morphology. It is a striking (and little-observed, but see (cf. older and standard buzunare and mădulare). This replace-
Philippide 2011:433) characteristic, both today and in ment of -e by -i is licensed precisely because it is accompanied
diachrony, that ‘neuters’ have singulars which by their by the introduction of the stressed vowel alternant ă which
form are unambiguously masculine and plurals which by is, as we saw above, a unique and unambiguous marker of
their form are unambiguously feminine. ‘Neuters’ in singu- feminine. The same pattern of characteristically feminine
lar -ă are unknown, those in -e (ambiguous for gender) stressed vowel alternation sometimes also percolates into
vanishingly rare, while the ‘neuter’ plural endings are -e nouns with -uri plurals: cf. the type zarzavat ‘vegetable’–zar-
or -uri, both consistently selecting feminine agreement zavături in dialects of Maramureş and Moldova (cf. also
(Table 8.6). Atanasov 2002:197, 207 for Megleno-Romanian).
The fact (§8.4.3.1) that plural forms need to be memorized The morphology of adjectives is a subset of that of the
by speakers alongside singulars, and that gender in ‘neuters’ major categories of nouns. Most (e.g. MSG alb MPL albi F.ADV.SG
is systematically predictable from desinential morphology, albă F.ADN/PL albe ‘white’) distinguish gender as well as num-
suggests that in such nouns the alternating gender is ‘mor- ber. Adjectives in singular -e (e.g. M/F.ADV.SG verde F.ADN/M/FPL
phologically driven’, being exclusively a function of the verzi ‘green’) do not distinguish gender (except in the
identity of the plural forms. The term ‘neuter’ in this light adnominal singular).10 Feminine adjectives with adverbal
is a superfluous misnomer for a set of nouns whose alter- singular -ă generally have alternating forms in -e, although
nating masculine and feminine gender is a consequence of there are exceptions, especially with regard to adjectives
their morphology.8 ending in -că or -gă, many of which have alternants in -i,
This sensitivity of nouns with alternating gender to the identical to the corresponding masculine plurals (e.g. MSG
form of their singulars and plurals is borne out by history. sec, FSG seacă MPL/FPL seci ‘dry’). Adjectives agree in number,
gender (and case) with the nouns they modify (Table 8.7).
Table 8.6 So-called ‘neuters’ (with agreeing
adjective MSG alb FPL albe ‘white’) Table 8.7 Adjectival agreement
MASCULINE SINGULAR FEMININE PLURAL SG ( ADVERBAL FEMININE PL ( ALSO ADNOMINAL

SINGULAR ) FEMININE SINGULAR )
scaun alb ‘white chair’ scaune albe
cadru alb ‘white frame’ cadre albe M copac / scaun alb ‘white tree/chair’ copaci albi
telefon alb ‘white phone’ telefoane albe copac / scaun verde ‘green tree/ copaci verzi
raft alb ‘white shelf’ rafturi albe chair’
tavan alb ‘white ceiling’ tavane albe F frunză albă ‘white leaf ’ frunze / scaune albe
lucru alb ‘white thing’ lucruri albe frunză verde ‘green leaf ’ frunze / scaune verzi
9
The existence of a series of nouns (all neologisms) in plural -ii, such as
8
The fact (cited e.g. by Loporcaro §57.3.2) that alleged ‘neuters’, includ- MSG studiu ‘study’ -FPL studii, mentioned by Loporcaro §57.3.2, does not
ing singularia tantum, always show feminine plural agreement under coord- change this point. Romanian nouns denoting non-living beings and ending
ination, whereas masculines do not, is a simple consequence of the fact that in -ii in the plural all have feminine plurals, predictably so from their form.
the default agreement pattern for conjoined inanimate nouns is feminine 10
This class includes a handful of invariants, e.g. feroce ‘fierce’, cumsecade
plural (see below). ‘decent’.
102
ROMANIAN
The default plural agreement is masculine when the 8.4.3.3 Vocative

referents are animate. Matters are more complex with
Romanian possesses a morphological vocative (see §55.3.2),
coordinated nouns denoting non-living entities. The ten-
which distinguishes both gender and number. The mascu-
dency is for agreement to be feminine plural, masculine
line singular is usually marked by -e (stăpân ‘master’, VOC
plural agreement being limited in principle to cases where
stăpâne), generally reckoned to continue Latin second
the conjoined inanimate nouns each have a masculine
declension vocative -E, although a Slavonic source is pos-
plural form (conjoined masculine singularia tantum always
sible. Singular nouns in -ă or -a (overwhelmingly feminine)
have feminine plural agreement, in the absence of any
have vocatives in -o, an ending undoubtedly borrowed from
plural form whose morphology might lead speakers to
Slavonic: fată ‘girl’, VOC fato; Ana, VOC Ano; masculine popă
assign feminine gender to the agreement). Compare
‘priest’, VOC popo. This type is considered colloquial and is
examples (2)-(4), where the respective plurals of the con-
mainly encountered in southern Romania. Many Daco-
joined nouns are masculine meri and peri, feminine scaune
Romanian vocatives also affix -e to the masculine definite
and tablouri, and masculine pereți but feminine uși:
article -ul (șoferul ‘the driver’ VOC șoferule)—a phenomenon
first attested in the sixteenth century and today the only
(2) Mărul şi părul sunt albi.
productive means of masculine singular vocative formation.
apple.tree.the.MSG and pear.tree.the.MSG are white.MPL
There is no easy way of predicting whether -e or -ule is used.
‘The apple tree and the pear tree are white.’
Forms in -u, and consonant-final monosyllables, usually
(3) Scaunul şi tabloul sunt albe. take -ule (hoț ‘thief ’ VOC hoțule, fiu ‘son’ VOC fiule); vocatives
chair.the.MSG and picture.the.MSG are white.FPL used in addressing relatives usually end in -e (văr ‘cousin’
‘The chair and the picture are white.’ VOC vere, nepot ‘grandson’ VOC nepoate). In some cases, the
variant endings comport semantic distinctions: e.g. doamne
(4) Peretele şi ușa sunt albe.
‘lord’ vs domnule ‘sir’. Where masculines admit two forms,
wall.the.MSG and door.the.FSG are white.FPL
-ule tends to be pejorative (VOC doctore ‘o doctor’ vs doctorule
‘The wall and the door are white.’
‘quack!’). A curious feature of Aromanian (Saramandu
1984:435f.) is that in nouns used as vocatives, final
However, feminine plural agreement may apply even when
unstressed mid vowels fail to undergo otherwise general
the coordinated nouns are wholly non-feminine. The nouns in
phonological raising: ˈfrati ‘brother’, VOC ˈfrate, SG ˈfe̯atɨ ‘girl’
(5) and (6) each have masculine plurals (ochi, obraji, munți, codri),
PL ˈfe̯ati ‘girls’, VOC ˈfe̯atə, ˈfe̯ate. In informal usage in Roma-
yet readily show feminine plural agreement under coordination:
nian the plural vocative is simply the definite form of the
adverbial plural (e.g. VOC băieții ‘boys’, doamnele ‘ladies’), but
(5) Ochiul şi obrazul sunt
what is remarkable is the use, restricted to Romanian, of
eye.the.MSG and cheek.the.MSG are
adnominal definite forms as vocatives: e.g. ADN.PL domnilor și
neatinse (neatinși).
doamnelor ‘ladies and gentlemen’.
untouched.FPL (MPL)
‘The eye and the cheek are untouched.’
(6) Muntele şi codrul sunt 8.4.4 Morphology of personal pronouns
mountain.the.MSG and wood.the.MSG are
frumoase (frumoși).
As in other Romance languages, personal pronouns divide
beautiful.FPL (MPL)
into stressed and unstressed (clitic) series (Table 8.8). Rela-
‘The mountain and the wood are beautiful.’
tively unusual is the fact that direct and indirect object are
distinguished in the first and second persons in the stressed
In reality, speakers show considerable variation over
series, and just the singular persons in the unstressed series.
gender agreement with coordinated inanimates as, among
There are no clitic subject pronouns.
others, Mallinson (1984) and Croitor and Giurgea (2009:30f.)
The distinction between direct and indirect object in the
attest, and grammarians may contradict not only each other
first and second person singular forms is neutralized in
but even themselves on the subject (cf. Windisch 1973:34-
Aromanian, in favour of the original object form (ˈmini,
46). It remains clear that the fact that the ‘default’ gender
ˈtini), although the original first person singular subject
for the plural of inanimates is feminine leads speakers
form jo(u̯) may is also available as an object: see
to apply feminine agreement to coordinated inanimates
Saramandu (1984:442). In Megleno-Romanian the distinctive
generally, even for nouns which, singly, would select mas-
stressed dative forms have been replaced the preposition
culine agreement in the plural.
la + direct object form (Atanasov 1984:520).
103
MARTIN MAIDEN
Table 8.8 Stressed and clitic personal pronouns certain prepositions. Proclisis is general (examples 7, 9, 10,
16, 17), except that gerunds (11), positive imperatives (12,
STRESSED
13), and imperative-like interjections, such as iată ‘here is’,
subject DO IO
na ‘take’ (14), select enclisis, as do nouns and prepositions.
1SG eu mine mie
However, the feminine singular DO clitic o is enclitic to
2SG tu tine ție
the past participle or infinitive in auxiliary + past parti-
3SG el(M) ea(F) lui(M) ei(F)
ciple/infinitive constructions, if the auxiliary commences
3SG/PL. REFL sine sie
with a vowel, and optionally so if it does not (8, 9, 10). This
1PL noi nouă
behaviour of o, limited to Daco-Romanian and becoming
2PL voi vouă
established only in the eighteenth century, was probably
3PL ei(M) ele(F) lor
phonologically determined. Finally, with coordinated
CLITIC
second person imperatives of the type ‘go and . . . ’, the
DO IO second imperative commonly displays proclisis (15). In
1SG mă, m- îmi, mi periphrastic constructions comprising auxiliary or modal
2SG te îți, ți verb + non-finite lexical verb form, clitics are attached to
3SG îl, l(M) o(F) îi, i (and precede) the auxiliary or modal (16), so ‘clitic climb-
3SG/PL.REFL se, s- își, și ing’ is obligatory; but cf. Dragomirescu 2013c:194). In
1PL ne ne, ni periphrastic constructions comprising auxiliary/modal +
2PL vă,v- vă, v-, vi finite (subjunctive) lexical verb form, they attach to the
3PL îi, i(M) le(F) le, li lexical verb (17). The following examples principally use
second person singular dative (î)ți as representative of
indirect object pronouns and third person plural feminine
The clitics show considerable allomorphy. IO variants in -i direct object le as representative of direct object
are selected in combination with a following DO clitic pronouns.
pronoun; those with î- (found only in Daco- and Istro-
Romanian, and only in proclisis), are used exclusively (7) Se duce pentru a ți le
when the pronoun is the sole clitic (except where preceded self= takes for to IO.OCL.2SG= DO.OCL.F3PL=
by the negator nu or the complementizer să, or followed by cumpăra.
vowel-initial auxiliaries). The overall effect is that there are buy.INF
no ‘asyllabic’ clitics. The variants ni and vi before DO clitics ‘He goes to buy them for you.’
(ni-l dă ‘he gives it to us’) seem to be modelled on mi-, ți-.
Note that hosts are always vowel-final when bearing enclitic (8) Ți- a cumpărat- o.
IO.OCL.2SG= has bought= DO.OCL.F3SG
pronouns. The variants m-, v- are employed immediately
before vowel-initial auxiliary verbs (mă are / ne are ‘he has ‘He’s bought you it.’
me/us’, but m-a avut/ne-a [ne̯a] avut ‘he has had me/us’), and (9) Ți- o va cumpăra. (Îți va
v- is also used before clitic o (v-o dă ‘he gives it to you’). In IO.OCL.2SG= DO.OCL.F3SG= will buy.INF (IO.OCL.2SG will
clitics with final [i] and [e], these vowels are tautosyllabic in cumpăra- o.)
combination with a following vowel-initial auxiliary verb: ți- buy.inf= do.ocl.f3sg)
am [ʦi̯am] spus ‘I’ve told you’, ne-ar [ne̯ar] vedea ‘he’d see us’. ‘He’ll buy it for you.’
(10) Ți- ar cumpăra- o.
8.4.4.1 Form and gender of pro-sentential pronouns IO.OCL.2SG= would buy.INF= DO.OCL.F3SG
Pro-sentential anaphoric pronouns (stressed or unstressed) ‘He’d buy it for you.’
systematically have feminine singular morphology, yet
(11) Cumpărându- ți- le, am uitat
masculine singular agreement: Ceea ce spui e fals: n-am
buy.GER= IO.OCL.2SG = DO.OCL.F3PL I.have forgotten
făcut-o ‘that.which.FSG you2SG.say is false.MSG: not I.have
ceva.
done it.FSG (= What you say is false, I didn’t do it)’.
something
‘While I was buying you them, I forgot something.’
8.4.4.2 Clitics and their collocation (12) Cumpără- ți- le!
Clitics are principally hosted by verbs; much more rarely, in buy.IMP.2SG= IO.OCL.2SG= DO.OCL.F3PL
elevated and archaizing styles, also by noun phrases or ‘Buy them for yourself!’
104
ROMANIAN
(13) Cumpărați- vile! Some modern northern and western dialects (Moldova,
buy.IMP.2PL= IO.OCL.2PL = DO.OCL.F3PL Bucovina, Maramureș, Banat) display what may be a ‘com-
‘Buy them for yourselves!’ promise’ between the earlier and the newer distribution in
auxiliary + participle constructions, such that the clitic occurs
(14) Na- le tu!
twice, proclitic to the auxiliary and enclitic to the participle:
INTJ= DO.OCL.F3PL you
e.g. Banat m o auˈzɨtu mə, lit. ‘me=has.heard=me’. In Istro-
‘You take them!’
Romanian, it is probably Croatian influence which has led
(15) Du- te și le cumpără. to strikingly low cohesion between clitics and hosts, various
go.IMP.2SG= DO.OCL.2SG and DO.OCL.F3PL buy.IMP.2SG kinds of syntactic material, including whole noun phrases,
‘Go and buy them.’ being allowed between them (note that Croatian unstressed
pronouns tend to occupy the Wackernagel position, although
(16) Ți le poate cumpăra.
this is not invariably true of Istro-Romanian):
IO.OCL.2SG= DO.OCL.F3PL= can.3SG buy.INF
‘He can buy you them.’
(18) la voi se kum ˈziʧe
(17) Poate să ți le cumpere. at you REFL.CL how says
can să IO.OCL.2SG= DO.OCL.F3PL= buy.3SBJV ‘How does one say it among you?’
‘He can buy you them.’
(19) io s akˈmo ˈbolna, me piˈʧoru ˈdore.
I am now ill, DO.OCL.1SG leg.the hurts
Nominal enclisis is limited to dative singular (non-
‘I’m ill now, my leg hurts.’
reflexive) clitics, and broadly indicates the possessor (cf.
§8.5.1.2). Thus casa-i frumoasă or frumoasa-i casă, lit. ‘house.
the=to.him beautiful’ or ‘beautiful.the=to.him house’ mean
8.4.4.3 Address pronouns and related phenomena
‘his beautiful house’. The host is strictly speaking the DP, In addition to the basic, informal, familiar address pronouns
with attachment to the first element of the phrase (which 2SG tu, and 2PL voi (and corresponding verb forms), Roma-
also bears the definite article). Prepositions which can nians strictly use (morphologically invariant) dumneavoastră
host enclitic pronouns are polysyllabic and most have some (< domnia voastră ‘your.PL lordship’) and the second person
internal structure which either derives from a preposition plural verb form, both in the singular and the plural, in
+ noun with enclitic dative (e.g. în juru-i, lit. ‘in the sur- addressing strangers and in acknowledgement of the
round=to.him’, i.e. ‘around him’) or displays similar internal addressee’s social or professional status, although this
structure comprising a preposition followed by a second usage is notably limited to the standard language and not
element, such as deasupra-mi ‘above me’, înainte-ne ‘before us’. established in the dialects of Romania. In the singular
Sequences of more than one clitic are only possible with there is a term which in the standard language is intermedi-
verb hosts, in the order IO-DO. Enclisis may be accompanied ate between tu and dumneavoastră, namely dumneata
by specific morphological peculiarities in the host. Gerunds (originally ‘thy lordship’, ADN dumitale), with second person
display final -u (except before FSG.ACC clitic o): făcând ‘doing’, singular verb form (with colloquial variants such as mata,
făcându-l ‘doing it’, but făcând-o. A phenomenon attested in matale)—forms which are well established in dialect usage.
the early eighteenth century in Transylvanian and western The factors selecting dumneavoastră also operate for third
Daco-Romanian dialects is ‘mesoclisis’ in second person person pronouns, MSG dumnealui (originally ‘his lordship’),
plural imperatives, such that the clitic is interposed FSG dumneaei, and PL dumnealor being selected over el, ea,
between the stem of third conjugation verbs and the second ei/ele, respectively (broadly equivalent to dumneata, there
person plural ending -ți: duce-vă-ți! for duceți-vă! lit. ‘take also emerged relatively recently a third person form, MSG
yourselves!’, ‘go’, or face-ne-ți! for faceți-ne! ‘make us!’ (see dânsul, FSG dânsa, MPL dânșii, FPL dânsele). For an account of
also §53.4.1; cf. Halle and Harris 2005 for similar develop- these gradations, see Niculescu (1965), Vulpe (1980),
ments in Latin-American Spanish); there is also a type, first Vasilescu (2008:212-18; 2013b:401-4). This system seems
attested in nineteenth-century Muntenian, involving iter- limited to Daco-Romanian.
ation of the desinence after the clitic -ți, yielding duceți-vă-ți!
(see Frâncu 1981-2).
In earlier history unstressed pronominal elements (and 8.4.5 Demonstratives and articles: forms
auxiliaries) were subject to ‘Wackernagel’ conditions, tend- and uses
ing to occur immediately after the first major constituent of
the clause, and never clause-initially: e.g. Văzutu-l-am, lit. The demonstrative system is of the proximal vs distal type, with
‘seen him I.have’ vs modern L-am văzut ‘him=I.have seen’. continuants of Latin ISTE (e.g. acest) in the former function and of
105
MARTIN MAIDEN
Table 8.9 Demonstratives

Proximal demonstratives
Prenominal adjective Pronouns and postnominal adjective
M F M F
SG PL SG PL SG PL SG PL
ADV acest acești această aceste acesta aceștia aceasta acestea
short ăsta ăștia asta astea
ADN acestui acestor acestei acestor acestuia acestora acesteia acestora
short ăstuia ăstora ăsteia ăstora
Distal demonstratives
Prenominal adjective Pronouns and postnominal adjective
M F M F
ADV acel acei acea acele acela aceia aceea acelea
short ăla ăia aia alea
AND acelui acelor acelei acelor aceluia acelora aceleia acelora
short ăluia ălora ăleia ălora
11
ILLE (e.g. acel) in the latter (Table 8.9). The initial ac- continues a (22) Mașina acelui profesor/profesorului
deictic particle ECCUM. The pronouns are differentiated from the car.the that.ADN.MSG teacher/teacher.the.ADN.MSG
adjectives by the presence in the former of word-final -a (pos- acela (aceluia) / ăla
sibly from Latin HAC). Demonstrative pronouns and adjectives that.ADV.MSG (that.ADN.MSG) / that.ADV.MSG
agree with the corresponding noun for number, gender, and este verde.
case (although in spoken usage the postnominal adjectives is green
generally lack case agreement). The prenominal adjectives ‘That teacher’s car is green.’
may precede other prenominal adjectives and quantifiers. Post-
(23) Ăla mă jignește.
nominal demonstrative adjectives are morphologically identi-
that.MSG me= insults
cal to the demonstrative pronouns, and are strictly adjacent to
‘That bloke insults me.’
the noun, which always bears the definite article. The short
forms of the pronouns and postnominal adjectives (see also (24) Asta este ciudat.
Giurgea 2013b) are characteristic of spoken and informal usage, this.FSG is strange.MSG
the postnominal adjective tending to have derogatory conno- ‘This is strange.’12
tations when used with reference to persons in the short forms,
as do the pronouns, especially in their short forms. Only the The formal distinction between prenominal and post-
postnominal adjectives can normally bear contrastive stress, nominal, and long and short, forms is generally absent in
the prenominal position being ‘a mere endophoric determiner, sub-Danubian dialects (Kovačec 1971:108f.; Saramandu
a text-cohesion device’ (Nicolae 2013a:299). Thus (20-24): 1984:444; Atanasov 2002:217f.), as is the requirement that
the noun bear the definite article in combination with a
(20) Acei băieți/ Băieții aceia/ăia vorbesc postnominal demonstrative. Istro-Romanian and Megleno-
those.MPL boys.MPL / boys.MPL those.MPL talk Romanian demonstratives systematically precede the noun.
cu aceștia/ăștia. There is more than one kind of definite article
with these.MPL (Table 8.10), but the source of the principal variety is the
‘Those boys talk with these.’ Latin distal demonstrative ILLE. This is consistently enclitic,
being attached to the right of the noun (or of an adjective
(21) Această studentă / Studenta aceasta/asta este
preceding the noun): drumul lung, lit. ‘road.the long’ (or
this.FSG student.FSG / student.FSG this.FSG is
lungul drum ‘long.the road’). For a survey of views on the
mai inteligentă decât aceea/aia.
origins of this enclisis, see Stan (2013b:286).
more intelligent than that.FSG
‘This (female) student is cleverer than that one.’
11
In some Aromanian varieties locative adverbs display a ternary sys-
12
tem: aˈo̯a ‘here (by me)’–aˈʦia ‘there (by you)’–aˈklo ‘there’. Daco-Romanian For the use of the feminine form (with masculine agreement) in the
dialects of Oltenia display a similar distinction (see §54.2.2). pro-sentential demonstrative, see §8.4.4.1.
106
ROMANIAN
Table 8.10 The forms of the definite article (26) A explodat mașina Irinei, nu cea a
has exploded car.the.FSG Irina.ADN, not cel.FSG a
SG PL profesorului.
M F M F teacher.the.ADN
ADV -(u)l/-le -(u)a -i -le ‘Irina’s car exploded, not the teacher’s (one).’
ADN -(u)lui -i -lor
(27) Cei doritori să plece sunt rugați să
cel.MPL desirous.MPL to leave are asked.MPL să
ridice mâna.
The plural articles are suffixed to the plural of the host
raise.3.SBJV hand.the
(lupi ‘wolves’, lupii, lupilor; case ‘houses’, casele, caselor; străzi
‘Those desirous of leaving are asked to raise their
‘streets’, străzile, străzilor; drumuri ‘roads’, drumurile, drumur-
hands.’
ilor). In the adverbal singular, -ul is suffixed to consonant-
final hosts (lup, lupul), and -l to those in -u (centru ‘centre’,
A notable use of cel (see Nicolae 2013c:312f.) modifies
centrul); -le is suffixed to masculines in -e (câine ‘dog’, câinele).
postnominal adjectives or adjectival phrases within definite
The adverbal feminine form affixes -a to nouns in final -e
noun phrases:
(pâine ‘bread’, pâinea), while nouns in -ă ‘replace’ this final
vowel with -a (casă ‘house’, casa). Note that masculine nouns
(28) a. podul lung
with the morphological appearance of feminines behave in
bridge.the.MSG long.MSG
the same way with respect to the article (popă ‘priest’, popa).
Feminines whose singular ends in a stressed vowel take -ua b. podul cel lung
[wa] (stea ‘star’, steaua; zi ‘day’, ziua). The adnominal singular bridge.the.MSG cel.MSG long.MSG
affixes -lui (or -ului with words ending in consonant) in the ‘the long bridge’
masculine and -i to the adnominal form of the feminine (case
(29) a. casa de peste râu
‘house’, casei, străzi ‘street’, străzii).
house.the.FSG of across river
The functions of the enclitic definite article do not differ
significantly from those of its cognates elsewhere in b. casa cea de peste râu
Romance (although see below); but it is noteworthy that house.the.FSG cel.FSG of across river
prepositions (other than cu ‘with’, and those selecting ‘the house across the river’
adnominal case) debar the use of the enclitic article on the
noun they govern, unless that noun is modified. Thus What distinguishes (b) from (a) in (28) and (29) is that in
pe/sub/peste/lângă/la pod/masă, lit. ‘on/under/over/beside/ (b) the property expressed by the adjective is foregrounded,
to bridge/table’, but pe/sub/peste/lângă/la podul lung/masa pe as a defining, well-known characteristic of the referent (cf.
care o vezi, lit. ‘on/under/over/beside/to bridge.the long/ Ștefan cel Mare ‘Stephen the Great’).
table.the which you see’. Arguably, the basic marker of indefiniteness is zero. As
Romanian is distinct from other Romance languages in elsewhere in Romance there is an indefinite article derived
possessing what many view as a second form of definite from Latin UNUS ‘one’ (at least in the Romanian singular and
article, cel. This is originally a demonstrative (see Nicolae adnominal plural), which precedes the noun (or prenominal
2013:310), identical in its forms to the series of ‘long’ distal adjective) and agrees for number, gender, and case with the
demonstrative adjectives acel, etc. given in Table 8.10, minus noun (Table 8.11 and example 30).
initial a-. In Romanian (not sub-Danubian varieties) it is
used instead of the enclitic definite article with ordinal (30) o casă a unor prieteni / a
numerals (cei șapte stâlpi ai înțelepciunii ‘the seven pillars of INDF.FSG house a INDF.M.ADN.PL friendMPL / a
wisdom’) and in marking superlatives (see §8.4.8). unei prietene
Cel is prominent in pronominal function, nominalizing INDF.ADN.FSG friend.ADN.FSG
adjectival and genitival phrases (the enclitic definite article ‘a house of some friends / of a woman friend’
is impossible in this role):
Table 8.11 Forms of the indefinite article
(25) A explodat mașina nouă, nu
M F
has exploded car.the.FSG new.FSG, not
SG PL SG PL
cea veche.
ADV un Ø / niște / unii o Ø / niște / unele
cel.FSG old.FSG.
ADN unui unor unei unor
‘The new car exploded, not the old one.’
107
MARTIN MAIDEN
Indefiniteness is usually not overtly marked in the adver- marked by the preceding particle să < *se < Lat. SI ‘if ’) has
bal plural, although the invariant partitive marker niște third person forms derived from the Latin present subjunct-
(from nu știu ce ‘I don’t know what’) is available. Partitive ive. The remainder were replaced at an early stage in the
meaning is normally marked by the bare noun (again, niște history of Daco-Romance by those of the present indicative,
is possible) (31). Plurals unii and unele (bearing suffixed except in a fi ‘be’, which has the root fi- throughout the
definite articles) have the ‘semi-definite’ meanings ‘certain’, subjunctive (while old Romanian had vestiges of a distinct-
‘a number of ’ (32). ive subjunctive form in the first and second persons singular
of a avea ‘have’).
(31) Mănâncă (niște) prăjitură / prăjituri. A distinctive characteristic of about half of first conjuga-
he.eats (some) cake / cakes tion verbs (Table 8.4d), and of the overwhelming majority of
‘He eats (some) cake/-s.’ fourth conjugation verbs (Table 8.4l,m), is the appearance of
referentially ‘empty’ formatives or ‘augments’ -ez- (-eaz-)
(32) Unele prăjituri nu îmi priesc.
and -esc- (-eșt-, -easc-) / -ăsc- (‑ășt‑, -asc-), respectively,
indf.fpl cake.FPL not to.me= please
between the lexical root and the desinence in the singular
‘Some (certain kinds of) cakes don’t agree with me.’
and third person forms of the present and subjunctive (see
Maiden 2004c and also §§27.8, 43.2.4).
Indefiniteness is also frequently expressed in the (ad-
Second person imperatives are generally identical to
verbal) singular by the bare noun (33). In effect, when the
forms of the present indicative (save sunteți ‘you are’ vs IMP
identity of the referent is foregrounded (with ‘extensional’
fiți ‘be’, the latter a subjunctive). A small group of high-
rather than ‘intensional’ meaning) then the indefinite art-
frequency verbs have dedicated second person singular
icle is likely, otherwise not (34).
forms (partly inherited from Latin; see Maiden 2006): 2SG.
PRS faci, zici, (a)duci, ești, vii vs 2SG.IMP fă ‘do’, zi ‘say’, (a)du
(33) Trebuie ciocan.
‘bring’, fii ‘be’, vino ‘come’. Negated second person singular
is.necessary hammer
imperatives are identical to the infinitive (e.g. nu duce ‘don’t
‘We need [something meeting the description of] a
bring’, nu cânta ‘don’t sing’; see also §51.3.1): some Banat
hammer.’
dialects (cf. Mării 1969; Neagoe 1984:264) preserve a once
(34) Trebuie un ciocan special. more widespread analogical extension of this pattern into
is.necessary a hammer special the plural, marked by addition of a second person plural
‘We need a special hammer.’ desinence to the ‘long’ infinitive in -re (see §8.4.6.5): e.g. nu
ducereți, nu cântareți.13 Second person singular imperatives
(of non-first conjugation verbs) tend to distinguish transi-
8.4.6 Forms and functions of verbs tivity: transitives characteristically end in -e, hence identi-
cal to third person singular present indicative (e.g. deschide
8.4.6.1 Inflection classes ‘open3G.PRS/IMP’; sparge ‘break3SG.PRS/IMP’), while intransi-
The verb has four major inflection classes, continuing tives (there are exceptions, cf. Table 8.4g) end in -i, hence
those of Latin, principally identifiable by a characteristic identical to second person singular present indicative (e.g.
‘theme’ vowel immediately following the lexical root in mergi ‘go2G.PRS/IMP’; taci ‘be.quiet2SG.PRS/IMP’). Nielsen
parts of the paradigm (notably the infinitive). The third Whitehead (2012:294-302) suggests that the final -i is a
conjugation is additionally distinguished by root stress in phonologically regular reflex of the Latin second conjuga-
the infinitive and first and second person plural presents. tion imperative ending -Ē in phrase-final position (e.g. TACĒ >
Typical examples of the major classes appear in *ˈtaʧi > taci); since transitives are usually followed by an
Tables 8.4a-d (first conjugation),Table 8.4g (second conju- object noun, and tend thereby not to be phrase-final,
gation), Table 8.4h,i (third conjugation), and Table 8.4j-l phrase-final position tended to be characteristic just of
(fourth conjugation). The type illustrated at Table 8.4m,p intransitives, and -i was accordingly reanalysed and gener-
is discussed later. alized as a marker of imperative.
The synthetic forms of the pluperfect, which continue the
Latin pluperfect subjunctive, have disappeared in Mara-
8.4.6.2 Tense, mood, person, and number: synthetic
mureş, most of Transylvania (except for the southeast and
and periphrastic forms
Romanian has five sets of finite synthetic verb forms, indi- 13
See Haiman and Benincà (1992:86) for parallels in Vallader Romansh
cating tense, mood, and person and number of the subject, and Moena Ladin; also discussion of ‘inflected infinitives’ in §27.7, and
as illustrated in Table 8.4. The subjunctive (virtually always Loporcaro (1995c) for southern Calabria.
108
ROMANIAN
parts of Munţii apuseni), Crişana, Banat, and Istro-Romanian, The auxiliaries of the perfect indicative and subjunctive
Megleno-Romanian, and Aromanian, in favour of analytic are shortened forms, respectively, of the present and
constructions (see below). The pluperfect invariably shares subjunctive of the lexical verbs HAVE and BE (although the
the same stem as the preterite (see §43.2.2), a past perfect- full forms are used in these functions in Aromanian
ive tense form now rarely used in Romania (being largely and Megleno-Romanian); auxiliary BE is in Romanian invari-
supplanted by the analytic perfect), except in archaic and ant, lacking person and number endings. The selection of
literary usage, but surviving extensively there into the nine- auxiliary HAVE vs BE depends purely on morphosyntactic
teenth century. The modern dialectal picture (ALR maps 1977- category, the former being used in Romanian with the
96; 2017-20) shows the preterite generally absent in Moldova, perfect indicative, the latter everywhere else: see further
in Transylvania (except Ţara Haţegului and the western Car- §49.3.1 and, particularly, Ledgeway (2014a) for an explan-
pathians), Maramureş (where it survives but sporadically), and ation of this distribution.
Dobrogea. In Oltenia it typically has ‘hodiernal’ reference, Modern Romanian lacks synthetic future forms.16 The
while the analytic perfect refers to a ‘pre-hodiernal’ past (see principal type of analytic future comprises a phonologically
§58.2.3). In Megleno-Romananian and Aromanian the preterite reduced form of the present indicative of an old form of the
is the usual exponent of past perfective, but it is extinct in verb WANT plus (short) infinitive. Spoken and informal regis-
Istro-Romanian. ters possess additional periphrases with an auxiliary
Daco-Romance also has a synthetic conditional (Zamfir derived, again, from WANT (Table 8.13).
2007:322f.). Extinct in modern Romanian, it was present The oi plăti type also serves (principally in the third
there into the sixteenth century and survives in modern person) as an ‘epistemic’ or ‘presumptive’ future in the
Aromanian and Istro-Romanian. It appears to represent a standard: o plăti ‘perhaps/I guess he’s paying’. The future
fusion of Latin perfect subjunctive and future perfect, whose of BE, o fi has exclusively this function. There is also a
forms were already identical or very similar in Latin (e.g. 3SG. dedicated periphrastic structure with presumptive function,
FUT.PRF/PRF.SBJV FECERIT > fecere ‘he would do’), appearing in old
14
comprising the future of BE and the gerund of the lexical
Romanian only in the protasis of conditional sentences whose verb: va/o fi plătind ‘he’s probably paying’ etc. The type o să
apodosis contained a future, imperative, or present subjunct-
ive verb (see Ivănescu 1980:155f.).15 The synthetic conditional
seems usually to have future-time reference in Aromanian Table 8.13 Informal/spoken forms of the future
(consider most of the examples given by Nevaci 2006:149-52)
1SG oi plăti o să plătesc
and Istro-Romanian (cf. Pușcariu 1926).
2SG ăi/ei/îi/ii plăti o să plătești
Analytic forms are an integral part of the verb system.
3SG a/o plăti o să plătească
They generally comprise an auxiliary marking person, num-
1PL om plăti o să plătim
ber, and mood, and a non-finite form of the lexical verb.
2PL ăți/eți/îți/oți plăti o să plătiți
Note that all verbs follow exactly the template given in
3PL or plăti o să plătească
Table 8.12 in respect of their analytic forms.
Table 8.12 Principal verb periphrases: perfect infinitive (a) fi plătit ‘(to) have paid’
PRF . IND PRF . SBJV FUT FUT . PRF . COND PRF . COND
AUX HAVE + PST . PTCP AUX BE + PST . PTCP AUX + INF FUT BE + PST . PTCP AUX + PST . PTCP COND BE + PST . PTCP
1SG am plătit (să) fi plătit voi plăti voi fi plătit aș plăti aș fi plătit
2SG ai plătit (să) fi plătit vei plăti vei fi plătit ai plăti ai fi plătit
3SG a plătit (să) fi plătit va plăti va fi plătit ar plăti ar fi plătit
1PL am plătit (să) fi plătit vom plăti vom fi plătit am plăti am fi plătit
2PL ați plătit (să) fi plătit veți plăti veți fi plătit ați plăti ați fi plătit
3PL au plătit (să) fi plătit vor plăti vor fi plătit ar plăti ar fi plătit
16
Romanian lacks dedicated structures expressing ‘future-in-the-past’.
14
See esp. Haverling (2013:24f.) for their formal and functional overlap An event presented as future with respect to some reference point in the
in Latin. past is expressed simply by a future: Spun/Spuneam că va plăti ‘I say/was
15
For precedents in the use of the future perfect in Latin, see e.g. saying that he will/would leave’ (cf. also §8.5.2.4). For the semantic history
Haverling (2013). of the future (and conditional), see Popescu (2012).
109
MARTIN MAIDEN
plătesc is characteristic of informal, and especially spoken, Banat, Nevaci (2006:146), Sârbu and Frățilă (1998:26),
registers. Note that it comprises an invariant auxiliary, o, Atanasov (1984:577) for Istro-Romanian.
followed by the present subjunctive of the lexical verb, and The Romanian perfect conditional comprises the condi-
that the latter alone marks person and number, and hosts tional of auxiliary BE plus past participle. Istro-Romanian
clitics. differs (cf. Kovačec 1971:143, 149), using a combination of
There is an additional periphrasis comprising the present the conditional auxiliary with the past participle of BE fol-
of the lexical verb avea ‘have’ + să + subjunctive, originally a lowed by the infinitive of the lexical verb: i̯o rɛʃ fost kənˈtɑ,
deontic construction ‘have to . . . ’ (e.g. 1SG am să plătesc, 2SG ai lit. ‘I would been sing.INF (= I’d have sung)’. Crișana (Urițescu
să plătești, 3PL au să plătească ‘I/youSG/they will (lit. ‘have to’) 1984:310) has a construction combining a (morphologically
pay’), often retaining connotations of necessity (cf. peri- invariant) form of the imperfect of a vrea ‘want’ + infinitive
phrastic futures in southern Italian dialects in §16.4.2.1). (cf. Zamfir 2007:346-9 for this pattern in old Romanian).
This structure is practically never used with the (bisyllabic) A similar situation obtains in Megleno-Romanian, where
first and second person plural (avem, aveți), and rather an invariant form of the imperfect of WANT is combined
rarely in the third person singular (are), so that it is effect- with the subjunctive: vre̯a sə viˈnim ‘we would come’. Crișana
ively limited to the (monosyllabic) first and second person further shows traces of an alternative perfect conditional,
singular and the third person plural. See further Pană comprising the perfect of a vrea ‘want’ + infinitive, a type
Dindelegan (2012:572f). widely attested in the sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-
The expression of future is intimately linked with the turies, particularly in northern and western Romania
subjunctive in Megleno-Romanian and Aromanian. In the (Frâncu 1997:140; Zamfir 2007:351-34): am vrut muri, lit.
former, indeed, the future is mainly expressed by the sub- ‘I have wanted to die (= I’d have died)’. In Aromanian a
junctive (Capidan 1925:167f.) (i.e. si (= Ro. să) + present (morphologically invariant) form of the imperfect of WANT
(subjunctive) forms of the verb). In the latter, future is is deployed variously with the present subjunctive (vre̯a s
principally expressed in a way cognate with the Romanian ˈkɨntu), synthetic conditional (vre̯a s kɨnˈtarimu), imperfect
voi + infinitive type. The crucial differences (regional vari- (vre̯a s kɨnˈtamu), or periphrastic pluperfect of the subjunct-
ants of form aside) are: (i) instead of the infinitive, forms of ive (vre̯a s aˈve̯amu kɨnˈtatɨ) to form past conditionals
the subjunctive are used (expressing the person and number (cf. Capidan 1932:472f.): all the foregoing are glossed by
of the subject); (ii) the auxiliary verb is morphologically Saramandu (1984:459) as ‘I would have sung’. In Megleno-
invariant va (unlike Romanian voi etc., which inflects for Romanian the past conditional is formed by the invariant
person and number): cf. Ledgeway (forthcoming a) for form of the imperfect of WANT used for the present condi-
southern Italian parallels. For example: va sɨ ʃtiu ‘I will tional, combined with the perfect subjunctive: vre̯a sə ˈaibə
know’, va sɨ ʃtibɨ ‘s/he/they will know’ (= Ro. voi ști, va/vor flat, lit. ‘(he) wanted that he have found (= he’d have found)’.
ști). Given that the Aromanian subjunctive has multiple In most Daco-Romance varieties outside Moldova, Mun-
tense forms (see below), there are multiple possible com- tenia, and Oltenia (and the western Carpathians) the plu-
binations of either of the future auxiliaries with any of the perfect is expressed periphrastically rather than
subjunctive tenses (for parallels in creole languages, cf. synthetically. In Aromanian (where the synthetic form per-
§§24.2.4.2.1, 24.3.5.1), many of which occur with variable haps once existed: Nevaci 2006:110; 2013:28), and in
degrees of semantic transparency (see Saramandu 2003b; Megleno-Romanian, it is formed from the imperfect indica-
Nevaci 2006:115-40). Va + analytic perfect subjunctive yields tive of auxiliary HAVE plus past participle (Capidan
a future perfect, and the same meaning can be produced by 1932:463f.); there are traces of this structure in old Roma-
combining va with the subjunctive preterite (e.g. va s ˈfe̯aʦe nian (cf. also §49.3.1).
‘he’ll have done’: Capidan 1932:470). Widespread in dialects of Transylvania, Banat, Crișana,
For the complex evolution of the periphrastic condi- and Maramureș is a pluperfect periphrasis comprising the
tional, see Zamfir (2007:321-76). The modern standard pre- perfect of BE (auxiliary HAVE + past participle fos(t)) and the
sent conditional comprises an auxiliary derived from the lexical past participle.17 Thus Feneș (ALR point 102) o fos
ancestor of a vrea ‘want’ combined with the short infinitive kənˈtatu̯, lit. ‘they.have been sung (= they had sung)’. Istro-
of the lexical verb. For the earliest attestations and values of Romanian seems to lack dedicated pluperfect forms (but cf.
this type see Zamfir (2007:324-32). The morphological and Pușcariu 1926:181) and past anteriority is generally indi-
phonological history of the auxiliary aș, etc., is problematic cated by a perfect with an adverb meaning ‘already’.
(see Rothe 1957:117f.), and interference from auxiliary
forms of HAVE is possible. For forms of the auxiliary in initial
/r/-, see Frâncu (1997:140, 341) for seventeenth-century 17
The lexical past participle is invariant. The verb BE generally lacks a
Romanian, Neagoe (1984:264) for modern southwestern periphrastic pluperfect (cf. ALR map 2166).
110
ROMANIAN
The subjunctive is invariant for tense. Its forms are iden- Table 8.14 Istro-Romanian aspectual pairs (infinitive)
tical to those of the present indicative in the first and
IMPERFECTIVE PERFECTIVE
second persons; in the third they are generally distinct
from the present indicative, and continue the Latin present skaˈkɛi ̯ jump skoˈʧi
subjunctive forms, while a fi ‘be’ has a distinctive set of spoviˈdɛi ̯ confess spoviˈdi
subjunctive forms for all persons and numbers. With very ˈtorʧe spin poˈtorʧe (or spreˈdi)
few exceptions in fixed expressions, the subjunctive is laˈtrɑ bark zalaˈtrɑ
always immediately preceded by să (< *se ‘if ’). There is durˈmi sleep zadurˈmi
also a ‘perfect subjunctive’, comprising să, a nowadays maʧiˈrɑ grind zmeˈʎi
invariant form of the subjunctive of BE, namely fi, and the fareˈkɑ shoe a horse prikuˈji
past participle. While it is sometimes viewed as a ‘past’ bɛ drink poˈpi
subjunctive, its function is better described as simply mark-
ing anteriority or perfectivity (cf. A ieșit fără să spună nimic
(entirely so for auxiliaries and modals). There is also exten-
‘He went out without saying anything’ and A ieșit fără să fi
sive morphological marking of iterative aspect.
spus nimic ‘He went out without having said anything’). This
For a characterization of the functional and lexical
overall picture is broadly true for most dialects (although
nuances expressed by the aspectual differences see espe-
auxiliary fi inflects for person and number in many var-
cially Hurren (1969; 1999:114-38), and in particular his con-
ieties). Aromanian (to a lesser extent Megleno-Romanian)
siderations on the status of iterative forms. The
is, however, different: while Romanian has only one set of
morphological or lexical substance of these distinctions
verb forms for the subjunctive, all Aromanian synthetic
(see Table 8.14) may be wholly Croatian (the aspectual vari-
verb forms, together with the analytic constructions com-
ants are borrowed from Croatian), may involve borrowing
prising auxiliary plus past participle, have a corresponding
of a (usually) Croatian aspect-marking affix into a Romance
subjunctive. In most cases the sole marker of ‘subjunctive’ is
verb in the perfective or iterative, or may involve lexical
the local equivalent of să (see Caragiu Marioțeanu et al.
borrowing of a Croatian verb for one aspect (notably to
1977:188; Nevaci 2006:125). The uses of the different Aroma-
mark perfective). These distinctions may also correspond
nian tense forms of the subjunctive are peculiarly complex
to differences of conjugation class.
(see esp. Nevaci 2006 for a description). They often reflect
Northern Istro-Romanian is apparently the only Romance
the tense of the main clause (e.g. past tense verbs preceded
language which has lost the inherited imperfect tense form (it
by the subjunctive marker are used where the main verb is
is also retreating in southern varieties). Overall (cf. Pușcariu
past), but they are also used in future and conditional
1926:178f., 257; Hurren 1969:88-90; 1999:97f.) this may be
marking and in certain circumstances as admiratives.
because in a system where the entire verb system distin-
Indeed, there even exists a preterite form of the subjunctive
guishes aspect, it is sufficient—to express the meanings gen-
(uniquely among Romance languages), which has an ad-
erally associated with the imperfect—to use a periphrastic past
mirative (or ‘dubitative’: cf. Saramandu 1984:459; Nevaci
form comprising auxiliary verb and an imperfective or itera-
2006:153), function: e.g. sɨ lu ˈfecu ˈmini, lit. ‘sɨ it= did.1SG.PRT
tive form of the past participle (data after Hurren 1969):
I (= Really, did I do it?)’.
(35) in ʃpiˈtu̯al am munˈkat ʒir ˈsaka zi
8.4.6.3 Aspect marking in Istro-Romanian in hospital I.have eaten.IPFV fruit every day
and other sub-Danubian dialects ‘In hospital I used to eat fruit every day.’
The morphology of the Istro-Romanian verb is permeated, (36) oˈbiʧno am kumparaˈveit kʷarne, ˈali jer
under Croatian influence, by the marking of aspect (cf. usually I.have bought.ITER meat, but yesterday
Pușcariu 1926:251-53; Kovačec 1963:25-8, 37; 1966:70f.; am kumpaˈrʷat ˈribe
1968:108f.; 1971:123-30; Hurren 1969; Sala 2013:219). No I.have bought.IPFV fish
other Romance language shows any comparable degree of ‘I usually bought meat, but yesterday I bought fish.’
aspect marking, although Megleno-Romanian also borrows
aspect marking from Slavonic (Atanasov 2002:226f.). Virtu-
ally all verbs distinguish—in all tenses, and in finite and
8.4.6.4 The Megleno-Romanian evidential
non-finite forms—imperfective and perfective aspect. Only Several varieties of Megleno-Romanian possess an ‘eviden-
a few dozen (of Romance origin, such as laˈsɑ ‘let’, ɨntreˈbɑ tial’ periphrastic perfect, expressing information of which
‘ask’, aˈflɑ ‘find’, ramaˈre ‘remain’, veˈde ‘see’, ˈkrede ‘believe’, the speaker was not the direct witness (see Atanasov
ˈspure ‘say’, avˈzi ‘hear’, muˈri ‘die’) may lack aspect marking 1984:528; 2002:244f.; also Aikhenvald 2004:288f.). It comprises
111
MARTIN MAIDEN
the past participle followed by a dedicated, enclitic form of The gerund is morphologically invariant, and occasional
the present or imperfect of auxiliary HAVE: compare perfect ari adjectival uses showing agreement are learnèd imitations of
mənˈkat ‘he has eaten/ate’ (with proclitic auxiliary) and evi- French present participles (cf. Nicula 2013b:246f.). It has
dential mənˈkat əu̯ ‘(apparently/I’m told) he has eaten/ate’. various clausal functions as an adjunct (44), a modifier
(45), an argument of the object of certain (particularly
perception) verbs (46). For detailed discussion, see
8.4.6.5 Non-finite forms and their functions: past
Niculescu (2013b).
participles, supines, gerunds, infinitives
The past participle is used, in combination with an auxiliary, (44) Deschizând ușa, ne vede.
in various perfective periphrases (§8.4.6.2). In such con- open.GER door.the, us= he.sees
structions it shows no agreement with the subject or object ‘While/By opening the door, he sees us.’
of the verb (cf. §49.2). Past participles of transitive verbs
(45) un complot vizând să atace Londra
may be used predicatively, including the passive, and then
a plot aim.GER să attack.3.SBJV London
agree with the noun they modify (37-39).
‘a plot aiming to attack London’
(37) Pereții păreau proaspăt văruiți. (46) Aud plouând
walls.the.MPL seemed fresh painted.MPL I.hear rain.GER
‘The walls seemed freshly painted.’ ‘I hear it raining.’
(38) istoria unei țări cucerite
Continuants of the Latin infinitive survive robustly
history.the.FSG a.ADN.FSG country.ADN.FSG conquered.ADN.FSG
throughout Daco-Romance. In old Romanian it had both a
de turci
long form (preserving Latin final -RE) and a short form
by Turks
(with -RE truncated), without clear distinction of function.
‘the history of a country conquered by the Turks’
In the modern language, in contrast, these forms have a
(39) Țara a fost cucerită de turci. clear functional differentiation (Pană Dindelegan 2013a:
country.the.FSG has been conquered.FSG by Turks 215f.): the short form remains part of the inflectional
‘The country was conquered by the Turks.’ paradigm of the verb and appears in various periphrastic
structures (see Table 8.8), while the long is a (feminine)
The past participles of unaccusatives may be used pre- noun, potentially deviating from the verb semantically:
dicatively and as extrasentential adjuncts:
(47) a. Cântarea ți- ar plăcea.
(40) Maria era plecată în Franța. sing.INF(long).the to.you= would please.INF(short)
Maria was departed.FSG in France ‘The song/singing would please you.’
‘Maria was away in France.’
b. plăcerea de a cânta
(41) Ajunși la râu, beau. please.INF(long).the of to sing.INF(short)
reached.MPL at river they.drink ‘the pleasure of singing’
‘Having/Because they’ve reached the river, they
drink.’ With the exception of periphrastic structures, verbs gov-
(42) Le știam întoarse acasă. erned by a putea ‘be able’, and certain relative constructions
them.FPL= I.knew returned.FPL home introduced by a avea ‘have’ or a fi ‘be’ (48, 49), modern
‘I knew them to be/to have come back home.’ infinitives are preceded (including in their citation form in
dictionaries and grammars) by the particle a (originally a
The past participles of a few transitives/unergatives, preposition ‘to(wards)’ used in purposive constructions),
notably a mânca ‘eat’, a bea ‘drink’, a citi ‘read’, a ocoli ‘go separable from the infinitive only by clitic pronouns, the
round’, can also be used predicatively with active meaning negator, and the clitic adverbs (§8.5.3); cf. Pană Dindelegan
(cf. §16.4.2.2): (2013a:212-14). The construction a + infinitive is available as
complement of prepositions (50, 51).
(43) Ajung la școală nemâncați.
they.arrive at school NEG.eaten.MPL (48) N- am ce spune.
‘They arrive at school on an empty stomach (lit. not I.have what say.INF
‘uneaten’).’ ‘I have nothing to say.’
112
ROMANIAN
(49) Nu este cine ne ajuta. (52) Culesul merelor a început.

not is who us= help.INF harvest.SUP.the apple.the.ADN.PL has begun
‘There is nobody to help us.’ ‘The harvesting of apples began.’
(50) Românii sunt reticenți în a cumpăra online. (53) A plecat la cules mere.
Romanians.the are reticent in a buy.INF online he.has left to harvest.SUP apples
‘Romanians are reluctant to buy online.’ ‘He went apple-picking / to pick apples.’
(51) Se gândește la a pleca. (54) Vine vremea treieratului.
self= thinks to to leave.INF comes time.the thresh.SUP.the.ADN.SG
‘He thinks of leaving.’ ‘Threshing time comes.’
(55) maşină de spălat vase
While in Istro-Romanian the long infinitive is extinct, the
machine of wash.SUP vessels
short form is lost in Aromanian and virtually extinct in
‘dishwasher’
Megleno-Romanian (but see Atanasov 2002:231).
Romanian, uniquely in Romance, has a ‘supine’ form for (56) Hainele sunt (bune) de purtat.
almost every verb. It is inflectionally invariant and always clothes.the are (good) de wear.SUP
identical in form to the masculine singular past participle.18 ‘The clothes are (fit) for wearing.’
Direct descent from its Latin namesake is plausible on
(57) Se dăruiește cântatului.
phonological and morphological grounds, but doubtful in
self= dedicates singSUP.the.ADN.SG
that the supine has many functions which its Latin coun-
‘He dedicates himself to singing.’
terpart lacked, while Pană Dindelegan (2011) shows from
old Romanian that the earliest uses were predominantly (58) Nu- mi vorbi de frecat parchetul!
nominal, rather than verbal (see also Dragomirescu 2012; not to.me= speak.INF of scrub.SUP floor.the
2013b), unlike its primarily verbal uses in Latin. It is usually ‘Don’t tell me about scrubbing the floor!’
claimed (Caragiu Marioţeanu 1962:33; 1968:106; Brâncuş
(59) Urăsc pârâtul.
1967; Stan 2001:552) that the supine is unique to Daco-
I.hate accuse.SUP.the
Romanian, inviting the inference that it is a recent, local
‘I hate snitching.’
innovation. In fact, while the supine is principally found
there, there are traces in Megleno-Romanian. See Maiden (60) Ion se lasă de fumat.
(2013c) for some considerations about its history, and for a Ion self= leaves off smoke.SUP
suggestion that it also survives in Aromanian. The supine ‘Ion gives up smoking.’
has numerous functions, irreducible to any common
(61) De lucrat, lucrez.
denominator (cf. Soare 2007; Maiden 2013c), of which a
about work.SUP I.work
detailed typology may be found in Pană Dindelegan
‘I do indeed work.’
(2013a:234-45). In examples (52, 54, 57, 59) it functions
variously as subject, object, or prepositional complement (62) Cartea asta e greu de citit.
of the verb, potentially bearing the definite article (inflect- book.the.FSG this.FSG is hard.MSG of read.SUP
ing for case) and/or being modified by an adjective. In (53, ‘This book is hard to read.’
55, 58) it takes a direct object. It expresses goal or purpose
after verbs of motion followed by la ‘to’ (53). It is used, Supines, infinitives, and subjunctives frequently show
preceded by the preposition de, to indicate use or purpose functional overlaps (see Pană Dindelegan 2013a:244f.):
(e.g. (55), also o unealtă de pescuit ‘a device for fishing.SUP’,
etc.). In example (61) the supine, preceded by de, topicali- (63) Este ușor de spus / a spune / să spui.
zesa following finite verb. It is a notable feature of Roma- it.is easy de say.SUP / to say.INF / să say.2SG.SBJV
nian ‘tough’-constructions (cf. Pană Dindelegan 2013a:240), ‘It’s easy to say.’
illustrated in (62), that the predicate adjective is invariant,
regardless of gender and number of the subject (cf. ordinary
8.4.6.6. ‘Feminization’ of the non-finite
agreeing predicative cartea e grea ‘book.the.FSG is hard.FSG’).
Daco-Romance non-finite forms display an apparent
18
tendency to acquire the morphosyntactic trappings of
Some nominalized supines acquire lexically idiosyncratic meanings
for which they may display plural forms: e.g. venit, supine of a veni ‘to come’,
feminine gender. The ‘long’ infinitive (§8.4.6.5), used nom-
has plural venituri in the sense ‘income’. inally, displays feminine gender agreement and inflects
113
MARTIN MAIDEN
like a feminine noun: e.g. Ro. o înţelegere nouă ‘a.FSG under- with special suffixes differentiating females from males.
standing new.FSG’, adnominal singular unei înţelegeri noi ‘of. There are often two kinds of adjective, one of which
a.FSG.ADN understanding.SG.ADN new.FSG.ADN’. Nominalized has the suffix ‑esc, and usually a corresponding adverb
infinitives are very often abstract nouns, and it is perhaps in -ește meaning ‘in the manner of . . . ’, but mostly ‘in
because Romanian abstract nouns are very often feminine the language of . . . ’. The name of the language is normally
that these infinitives assume feminine gender. However, a feminine form of one of the adjectives (reflecting
there is also some morphological ‘feminization’ of other ellipsis of feminine limbă ‘language’). Consider the forms
non-finite forms, albeit not throughout Daco-Romance. In in Table 8.15, associated with România ‘Romania’, Franța
Aromanian, the (invariant) form of the past participle ‘France’, Germania ‘Germany’, Japonia ‘Japan’, and Anglia
used in analytic tense forms comprising auxiliary + past ‘England’.
participle has a distinctively feminine (singular) ending, Neither the forms nor their distribution (there are gaps)
usually -ɨ (see e.g. Nevaci 2006:168-70): ai̯ avˈʣɨtɨ ‘you’ve are systematically predictable. The ending -că for females (a
heard’, aˈve̯amu durˈɲitɨ ‘I/we had slept’. Maiden Slavonic loan) is usually found where there is a correspond-
(2013c:513) suggests that a number of apparent nominal- ing term for males in -n; otherwise what is historically a
ized feminine past participles in Aromanian are really double suffix, part Romance and part Slavonic, namely
‘feminized’ forms of the supine. Feminized past parti- -oaică, is used. Note the requirement that the forms denot-
ciples are well attested within Romania as well, solely ing females be used in apposition with nouns denoting
feminine forms of the past participle appearing in ana- females: o studentă franțuzoaică/**franțuzească/**franceză ‘a
lytic tense forms, particularly in dialects of Crișana, Mar- French (female) student’.
amureș, and parts of northern Transylvania, wherever the The semantic distinction between the adjective in -esc
auxiliary is fi ‘be’ (see Orza 1980; Urițescu 2007): e.g. aș fi (for its etymology, see Arvinte 1983) and the other adjective
cântată ‘I’d have sung.FSG’. The gerund, too, sometimes can be elusive. Those in the first column of Table 8.15 are
displays apparent feminine morphology. Aromanian and (mainly) recent learnèd borrowings and tend to denote
Istro-Romanian gerunds end in -a (cf. Caragiu Marioțeanu what officially pertains to the state or the government of
1968:122f.; Nevaci 2006:175f.), and gerunds in -ă are spor- the associated territory (guvernul român, armata română
adically attested in Romanian dialects, notably of eastern ‘the Romanian government/army’), while -esc tends to
Muntenia.19 denote what is inherently and traditionally characteristic
of the territory (vin românesc, basm românesc ‘Romanian
wine/tale’).
8.4.7 Derivational morphology Adverbs generally lack distinctive morphological mark-
ing (cf. Chircu 2008; Mîrzea Vasile 2012). Those derived from
Derivational morphology principally involves suffixation adjectives are identical to the masculine singular adjective
(often with attendant, predictable root allomorphy; see (cântecul este frumos ‘the song.MSG is beautiful.MSG’ and el
Stan and Moldoveanu Pologea 2013:607-11). Many pre- cântă frumos ‘he sings beautifully’); only bun ‘good’ has a
fixes are recent, learnèd, importations (anti-, para-, re-), distinctive adverbial form, bine ‘well’ (some sub-Danubian
although răs-/răz- is an older Slavonic loan with iterative dialects lack even this) and adjectives in -esc, have adverbs
or intensifying meaning, e.g. a citi ‘to read’, a răsciti ‘to in -ește (firesc ‘natural’, firește ‘naturally’), a type absent in
read over and over’. For a survey of suffixal marking of Istro-Romanian (Sârbu and Frățilă 1998:28). This -ește also
sex differences, and the rich system, in particular, of has some productivity in producing adverbs from nouns:
(sometimes multiple) diminutive suffixes (the latter fre- oameni ‘people’, omenește ‘humanly’. Occasional forms in
quently used in informal speech, especially when ‑mente, such as literalmente ‘literally’ are borrowings from
addressing children: e.g. pat ‘bed’, pătuț ‘beddy’), see other Romance languages, although an inherited reflex of
Croitor (2013:598-606). Romance *-ˈmente persists in altminteri ‘otherwise’ (Hummel
Derivational morphology differs significantly from 2013:25f.). Istro-Romanian, by dint of borrowing the Cro-
other Romance languages in the formation of ethnonymic atian neuter and adverbial desinence ‑o, has created a dis-
nouns and adjectives and related adverbs and glottonyms. tinctive inflectional marking for adverbs, e.g. ɑt ‘other.MSG’,
Such nouns denoting persons may have distinctive forms, ɑto ‘otherwise’: see Sala (2013:223-5). An interesting device
is the adverbial use of certain nouns as intensifiers, e.g. e
19
These facts might be seen against a broader context of ‘feminization’ supărat foc ‘he’s angry fire (= he’s really angry)’, e curat lună
in Romanian. Compare the use of certain prepositions as feminine nouns ‘it’s clean moon (= it’s as clean as a whistle)’. For various
(§8.5.1.2), or of the pronoun sine ‘self ’ as a nominalized feminine (e.g. în
sinea mea ‘in self.the.FSG my.FSG’ ‘in my inner self ’), or morphologically other modes of adverb formation, see Mîrzea Vasile and
feminine pro-sentential pronouns (§8.4.4.1). Dinică (2013).
114
ROMANIAN
Table 8.15 Derivational morphology of ethnonymic adjectives

ADJECTIVE - ESC ADJECTIVE MALE PERSON FEMALE PERSON ADVERB GLOTTONYM ( LIMBA )
M român românesc român

F română românească româncă română
românește
M francez franțuzesc francez
F franceză franțuzească franțuzoaică franceză
franțuzește
M german nemțesc neamț (german)
F germană nemțească nemțoaică (german(c)ă) germană
nemțește
M japonez japonez
F japoneză japoneză japoneză
M englez englezesc englez

F engleză englezească englezoaică engleză
englezește
Numeral formation is more transparent than in most adjective: mult ‘much’, mai mult ‘more’; bun ‘good’, mai bun
Romance languages. The numbers 11-19 inclusive have the ‘better’; bine ‘well’, mai bine ‘better’; rău ‘bad, badly’, mai rău
structure ‘one (etc.)’ spre (‘on, above’ < Lat. SUPER) zece ‘ten’: ‘worse’. The superlative is formed by preposing the deter-
unsprezece ‘11’, doisprezece ‘12’, treisprezece ‘13’, paisprezece miner cel to the comparative: cel mai mult ‘the most’, cel
‘14’ (but cf. patru ‘4’), cincisprezece ‘15’ [ˈʧinsprezeʧe] (cf. mai bun ‘the best’. Megleno-Romanian, however, forms
cinci [ʧinʧ] ‘5’), șaisprezece ‘16’ (but cf. șase ‘6’), șaptesprezece superlatives by suffixing the definite article to the com-
‘17’, optsprezece ‘18’, nouăsprezece ‘19’. In spoken usage there parative (mai ˈmarli fiˈʧ or ‘more big.the boy (= the biggest
are also variants unșpe, doișpe, treișpe, paișpe, cinșpe, șaișpe, boy)’), although this construction may also be preceded
șapteșpe, optșpe, nouășpe. The gender distinction made for the by the cognate of cel (ʦəl). According to Kovačec
units M un F o M doi F două is not made for unsprezece/unșpe, (1971:108), Istro-Romanian makes no formal distinction
and only inconsistently in doisprezece. Multiples of 10 from between comparative and superlative, mai bur, lit. ‘more
20 to 90 inclusive follow the formula ‘two tens’, etc.: douăzeci good’, being both ‘better’ and ‘best’. Northern Aromanian
‘20’, treizeci, patruzeci, cincizeci ([ʧinˈzeʧ], șaizeci (but cf. șase (Saramandu 1984:442) borrows from Slavonic the forma-
‘6’), șaptezeci, optzeci [obˈzeʧ], nouăzeci. Aromanian preserves tive nai, used to form superlatives: nai ˈbunlu, lit. ‘nai
a reflex of Latin UIGINTI ‘20’, ˈɟinʤiʦ, while the -spre- type also good.the’, ‘the best’.
occurs from ‘21’ to ‘29’, e.g. treisprɨˈɟinʤiʦ ‘23’. Note also
Romanian douăzeci și trei, lit. ‘twenty and 3 (23)’, optzeci și
nouă, lit. ‘eighty and nine (89)’ (but o sută trei ‘103’, o mie nouă
‘1009’, etc.). In Romanian, numbers ending in -zeci (și . . . ), as 8.5 Syntax
also sută, PL sute, o mie, PL mii ‘thousand’, milion, PL milioane
‘million’, miliard, PL miliarde ‘billion’, are followed by de 8.5.1 Nominal group
before a NP: e.g. șaizeci și opt de pahare ‘68 glasses’, patru
sute de oameni ‘400 people’, etc., but optsprezece cărți ‘18
8.5.1.1 Adjective position
books’, patru sute două pahare ‘402 glasses’, etc. In Megleno- The most distinctive characteristic of the syntax of adjec-
Romanian and Aromanian de is also thus used with numbers tives is their consistent collocation to the right of the noun
from 11 to 19. (Stan 2013c:356, 362f.; Brăescu 2013:426-8). There is a small
class of exclusively prenominal (non-contrastive) adjec-
tives, for example fost ‘former, late’, biet ‘poor’(evaluative),
8.4.8 Comparative and superlative structures așa-zis ‘so-called’. Another small class, including mare ‘large/
great’, simplu ‘simple/mere’, vechi ‘long-standing, former/
Romanian lacks synthetic forms, comparison of adjectives old’, adevărat ‘real/true’, may have meanings corresponding
(and adverbs) being expressed by the periphrasis mai + to the first of each pair of glosses given, when prenominal.
115
MARTIN MAIDEN
Otherwise, prenominal position is a stylistically marked (68) a. acei copaci ai vecinului

device serving principally to topicalize the property those.MPL trees.MPL al.mpl neighbour.the.ADN.MSG
expressed by the adjective. ‘those trees of the neighbour’
b. copacii doborâți de furtună ai
(64) Prietenii tăi pricepuți cumpără o mașină
trees.the.MPL felled.MPL by storm al.mpl
friends.the your clever buy a car
vecinului
nouă albastră.
neighbour.the.ADN.MSG
new blue
‘the neighbour’s trees felled by the storm’
‘Your clever friends buy a new blue car.’
c. copacii vecinului
(65) un om mare / un mare om
trees.the.MPL neighbour.the.ADN.MSG
a man big / a big man
‘the neighbour’s trees’
‘a large man / a great man’
(69) a. scaunele noastre și ale profesorului
(66) vechea mea bicicletă / bicicleta mea veche
chairs.the.FPL our.FPL and al.FPL teacher.the.ADN.MSG
old.the my bicycle / bicyle.the my old
‘our chairs and the teacher’s’
‘my previous bicycle / my old bicycle (my bicycle
which is old)’ b. scaunele, vândute din greșeală, ale noastre
chairs.the.FPL, sold.FPL by mistake, al.FPL our.FPL
(67) ideile tale uimitoare / uimitoarele tale
‘those chairs, sold by mistake, of ours’
ideas.the your astounding / astounding.the your
idei c. scaunele noastre
ideas chairs.the.FPL our.FPL
‘your astounding ideas’ ‘our chairs’
In sub-Danubian dialects, through contact with Sla- Al is employed even where the head noun is a proper
vonic or Greek, adjectives readily precede nouns. The name: Carmen a lui, adică a bătrânului ‘His Carmen, that is the
influence of Croatian in Istro-Romanian is evident in old man’s’. Prepositions which select the adnominal case are
that, in such cases, the preposed adjective cannot bear notably treated as if they were (feminine) nouns ending in a
a definite article (Croatian lacks articles): thus ˈomu definite feminine singular article. One consequence of this is
beˈtar, lit. ‘man.the old’, but beˈtar om, lit. ‘old man’, that they select possessive adjectives rather than personal
both ‘the old man’. pronouns as pronominal complements. Correspondingly, if
the preposition is somehow separated from a noun it gov-
erns, then feminine singular possessive article a must pre-
8.5.1.2 Possessive constructions and ‘possessive’ cede that noun:
article al
(70) Vorbește împotriva/înaintea/asemenea mea și
The so-called ‘possessive definite article’ al (MSG al, FSG a, MPL he.speaks against /before/like my.FSG and
ai, FPL ale) is unparalleled elsewhere in Romance. For an a prietenilor.
account of its etymology (probably Latin ILLE) and its histor- al.fsg friend.MPL.ADN
ical development, see Giurgea (2013b). Its use and distribu- ‘He speaks against/before/like me and his friends.’
tion reflect a strict requirement that, in constructions
comprising nouns with a complement which is a possessive In northern Daco-Romanian, instead of al, ai, ale there is
adjective or which is in the genitive, that complement one form a, invariant for number and gender.
should always be immediately preceded by an explicit, In Daco-Romanian ‘possessor’ (usually a noun phrase in
grammatically definite marker of the gender and number the adnominal case or a possessive adjective) normally
of the head, and that this marking must unfailingly be follows ‘possessum’; in sub-Danubian varieties, possessors
realized in one of two complementary ways: in the default tend to precede possessum (see e.g. Kovačec 1984:570;
case the gender and number of the head must be expressed Atanasov 2002:219). Possessives generally immediately
by al; otherwise the head must show the enclitic definite follow the noun they modify, preceding other adjectival
article, which must immediately precede the possessor or modifiers. For the extent to which possessive adjectives
possessive adjective. Contrast (68a,b) and (69a,b) with (68c) possess characteristically adjectival properties, see Nicolae
and (69c): (2013b:339f.); the major point is that they can modify
116
ROMANIAN
definite nouns, so that the normal way of expressing ‘my (76) adevăratul sens a ceea ce spune.
shoe’ etc. is literally ‘shoe the my’: real.the.MSG meaning.MSG a that which he.says
‘the real meaning of what he says.’
(71) pantoful meu / tău / său
shoe.the.MSG my.MSG / your.MSG / his,her,its.MSG Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, and Megleno-Romanian dis-
/ nostru / vostru play specialized possessive structures used in terms of kin-
/ our.MSG / your.MSG ship or close relation. Typically the bare noun is used
(unmodified by determiners or adjectives) with a phonolo-
(72) pantofii mei/ tăi/ săi
gically reduced enclitic form of the singular possessive
shoes.the.MPL my.MPL/ your.MPL/ his,her,its.MPL
adjective. Note that here, for the third person, only the
/ noștri / voștri
possessives in s- appear, and that some of the kinship
/ our.MPL / your.MPL
terms may have special lexicalized forms: frate-meu/
(73) casa mea/ ta/ sa ‑tu/‑su ‘my/your/his brother’; soră-ma/-ta/-sa ‘my/
house.the.FSG my.FSG/ your.FSG / his,her,its.FSG your/his sister’, and mă-sa ‘his mother’ vs mamă
/ noastră / voastră ‘mother’, tac-su ‘his father’ vs tată, frac-tu ‘your brother’
/ our.FSG / your.FSG vs frate ‘brother’, bărbac‑su ‘her husband’ vs bărbat ‘hus-
band’ (see further Frâncu 1977; Nicolae 2013b:341f.). The
(74) casele mele/ tale/ sale/ noastre
possessives in these forms tend not to inflect for case,
house.the.FPL myFPL / your.FPL/ his,her,its.FPL/ our.FPL
but the feminine has special adnominal forms -mii, ‑tii,
/ voastre
-sii (e.g. soră-mii vs non-lexicalized surorii mele ‘my
/ your.FPL
sister’s’).
Kinship and close relation terms diverge (in the singular)
The remaining third person possessives are adnominal
from the principle (§8.4.5) that unmodified nouns do not
forms of the personal pronouns, and do not show gender,
take the definite article when governed by a preposition.
number, or case agreement with the noun. Singular lui is
What is involved is a kind of elliptical structure in which a
used with grammatically masculine, singular ei with gram-
virtual possessive is interpreted as being present (Nicolae
matically feminine, possessors: casele lui ‘his/its houses’,
2013b:348):
pantofii ei ‘her/its shoes’. Historically (Nicolae 2013b:336f.),
the distinction between său etc. on the one hand, and lui and
(77) Merg la bunica.
ei on the other was that the former was anaphoric and the
I.go to grandmother.the
latter not. This remains predominantly true in Istro-
‘I go to (my) grandmother’s.’
Romanian, while in spoken Romanian lui and ei prevail in
either case. In old Romanian, său could also mean ‘their’,
Extensive use is made of indirect object enclitic pronouns,
and this still holds of the cognate Istro-Romanian form. In
attached to the verb, as possessive markers. This clitic
Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian the său type is
dative possessive is inherently non-contrastive and usually
restricted to kinship terms (see below), while in Megleno-
associated with the topic of the sentence (Niculescu
Romanian lui is the third person singular form for either
2013a:188f.).
gender. The third person plural possessive is invariant lor
(pantoful/pantofii/casa/casele lor ‘their shoe/shoes/house/
(78) Mintea îmi merge bine.
houses’). In northern Istro-Romanian, possessive adjectives
mind.the to.me= goes well
are preceded by invariant a and carry inflectional markers
‘My mind works well.’
of adnominal case (Kovačec 1971:111, 117).
Invariant a is also used to mark the genitive of cardinal (79) Nu le știu numele.
numerals and many quantifier expressions (75), as well as not to.them= I.know name.the
that of a nominalized relative clause introduced by ce or ceea ‘I don’t know their name.’
ce (76):
(75) ușile acestor/a zece /a neobișnuit 8.5.2 Verbal group

doors.the.FPL these.ADN.PL/a 10/a unusually of
de multe/a numeroase case
8.5.2.1 Basic word order in the sentence
many.FPL/a numerous houses Basic word order is relatively free. For description, and
‘the doors of these/of ten/of unusually many/of discussion of the debate as to whether Romanian is
numerous houses’ fundamentally SVO or VSO, see Pană Dindelegan
117
MARTIN MAIDEN
(2013a:119-25); cf. also §§31.2.1, 34.3.1, 62.3. Both SV and (88) ˈbovu ɨnˈtrɛba ˈɑsiru
VS are common, the former being preferred when the ox.the asks ass.the
subject is agentive (80), the latter when it is not (81). In ‘The ox asks the ass.’ or ‘The ass asks the ox.’
general, unaccusative verbs prefer VS, especially when the
subject is a bare noun (unmodified by determiners) (cf. 82
and 83). VS is also preferred with rhematic subjects (84).
8.5.2.2 Negation
Direct and indirect object NPs are typically postverbal (see, Sentence negation is realized by nu < NON, proclitic to finite
e.g. Pană Dindelegan 2013a:142-4,147f.,157), but can be read- forms of the verb and the (‘short’) infinitive. Nu (in speech
ily fronted, for example for focus effects (85, 86; cf. also and informal usage n- when followed by a vowel-initial
§34.5). auxiliary verb) may be separated from the finite verb form
only by clitic pronouns and clitic adverbs (§8.5.3):
(80) Președintele se pregătește pentru discurs.
president.the self= prepares for speech (89) Nu ți- l trimit.
‘The president prepares for his speech.’ neg to.you= it= I.send.
‘I don’t send you it.’
(81) A murit președintele.
has died president.the
Nu also negates constituents:
‘The president has died.’
(82) Președinții și miniștrii vorbesc la congres. (90) Nu eu fac asta ci tu.
presidents.the and ministers.the speak at congress not I do this but you
‘The presidents and the ministers speak at the ‘It isn’t I who do this but you.’
congress.’
Supines, past participles, gerunds, ‘long’ infinitives, and
(83) Vorbesc președinți și miniștri la congres.
many adjectives (including past participles used adjec-
speak presidents and ministers at congress
tivally and adverbially), are negated by the prefix ne- (of
‘Presidents and ministers speak at the congress.’
Slavonic origin):
(84) Se pregătește pentru discurs președintele,
self= prepares for speech president.the, (91) o scrisoare netrimisă
nu ministrul. a.FSG letter.FSG NEG.sentPST.PTCP.FSG
not minister.the ‘an unsent letter’
‘The president prepares for the speech, not the minister.’
(92) Acest lucru este de neconceput.
(85) Mâncam prăjitură la petrecere. this thing is of neg.conceive.SUP
we.ate cake at party ‘This is inconceivable.’
‘We were eating cake at the party.’
(93) Neștiind orașul, Ion se rătăcește
(86) Prăjitură mâncam la petrecere. neg.know.GER town.the, Ion self= loses
cake we.ate at party ‘Not knowing the town, Ion gets lost’
‘Cake (was what) we were eating at the party.’
With negative pronouns, adverbs, conjunctions, and
Evidently under the influence of Croatian (Pușcariu indefinite constructions, whether they follow or precede
1926:265f.; Kovačec 1984:580), Istro-Romanian readily allows the verb, Romanian displays ‘negative concord’, the verb
any permutation of S, V, and O (and particularly preposing of the clause in which they appear always selecting the
of the object to the verb) without any necessary difference negator nu (Manea 2013:563):
of meaning, or of focus, and even while lacking the inflec-
tional marking of case characteristic of Croatian: (94) Nici timp nici bani nu are. / Nu
neither time neither money neg has/ neg
(87) ʃ aˈtunʧe ˈviru pripaˈvim ʃi oˈʃɔre are nici timp nici bani.
and then wine.the we.prepare and eggs has neither time neither money
̯
skuˈhɛi m ‘He has neither time nor money.’
we.boil
‘And then we prepare the wine and boil eggs’. (Sârbu The same holds for ne- in verbs: e.g. nimeni neavând
and Frățilă 1998) bani or neavând nimeni bani ‘nobody having money’.
118
ROMANIAN
8.5.2.3 Interrogation expresses a desiderative-hortative meaning (108). As some

of the following show, the same matrix verb may sometimes
Romanian lacks dedicated syntactic or morphological
occur with both că and să, according to the meaning of the
exponents of sentence interrogation. Assertions and ques-
main verb.
tions are structurally identical, the latter usually having
rising intonation. Ion l-a văzut pe Mihai(?) is both ‘Ion saw
(97) Recunoaște că trișează.
Mihai’ and ‘Did Ion see Mihai?’ Interrogative pronouns,
he.recognizes că he.cheats.PRS.IND
adjectives, and adverbs occur sentence-initially. If these
‘He recognizes that he cheats.’
are not subject forms, then the subject, if overt, is left- or
right-dislocated: (98) Recunoașterea din partea lui că trișează
recognition.the from part.the his că he.cheats.PRS.IND
(95) Valiza cântărește mult. / Cât ne uimește.
suitcase.the weighs much / how.much us= astonishes
cântărește valiza? ‘His recognition that he cheats astonishes us.’
weighs suitcase.the
(99) Este adevărat că trișează.
‘The suitcase weighs a lot.’ / ‘How much does the
it.is true că he.cheats.PRS.IND
suitcase weigh?’
‘It’s true he cheats.’
A distinctive characteristic of Romanian (shared with (100) Îl acuză că trișează.
Slavonic languages, cf. Rudin 1988) is that all interrogative him= they.accuse că he.cheats.PRS.IND
words in a sentence can be fronted: ‘They accuse him of cheating.’
(101) Putea/ Voia/Avea intenția/ Nu știa
(96) Cine cui (și) când îi dă banii?
he.could/wanted/had intention.the/not he.knew
who to.whom (and) when to.him= gives money.the
să trișeze.
‘Who gives whom the money (and) when?’
să cheat.3SBJV
‘He could/wanted to/intended to/did not know
how to cheat.’
8.5.2.4 Subordination and complementizers
(102) Să fi trișat el, asta a fost o surpriză.
Subordination is principally marked by one of two
să be cheated he this has been a surprise
means: the complementizer că introducing a subordinate
‘That he cheated, that was a surprise.’
clause containing a verb in the indicative, or să introducing
a verb in the subjunctive. One major difference between că (103) Să fi știut ce o așteaptă, n-ar fi
(usually assumed to derive from Lat. QUOD) and să (< *se < Lat. să be known what her= awaits not=would be
SI ‘if ’) is that while the former is separable from the subor- venit.
dinate verb the latter is tightly bound to it, admitting the seen.
intercalation only of clitics, negator nu, and so-called ‘clitic ‘Had she known what was in store for her, she
adverbs’ (see §8.5.3). In addition, while că may sometimes be wouldn’t have come.’
omitted under coordination (and only then), să never is
(104) Trebuie să fi trișat.
(Gheorghe 2013a:467).
it.is.necessary să be cheated
Broadly, că introduces verbs the realization of whose
‘He must have cheated.’
sense is asserted, and să verbs the realization of whose
sense is not asserted (Gheorghe 2013a:467-9 gives a (105) Începe să ningă.
typology of the distinctions). The să type is thus normal in it.begins să snow.3SBJV
subordinate clauses where the main clause expresses vol- ‘It’s starting to snow.’
ition, potential, permission, necessity, purpose, command-
(106) Spune că/să plecați astăzi.
ing, prohibiting, fearing, hoping, inception, continuation, or
he.says că/să leave.2PL.PRS.IND today
introduces a topic about which some assertion is only sub-
‘He says that you are leaving/that you should leave
sequently made. The association with commands has
today.’
given rise to a second type of second person imperative
(often more attenuated in its force) that is marked simply (107) Să plecați astăzi!
by să + subjunctive without an overt matrix clause (107). The să leave.2PLSBJV today
same construction used in the first and second persons ‘Leave today!’
119
MARTIN MAIDEN
(108) Să plec/plece azi! When the subject or any other syntactic material precedes
să I.leave/leave.3SBJV today să, and there is an overt preceding main clause, then ca
‘May I/he leave today!’ must precede (129-131), although this construction seems to
have become established only around the beginning of the
(109) Nu știe că a nins.
twentieth century (Graur 1968:335). For the theoretical sig-
not he.knows că AUX.IND snowed
nificance of this distinction in complementation marking,
‘He doesn’t know [the fact that] it has snowed.’
and its place among Romance patterns of complementizer
(110) Nu știu să fi nins. marking, see Ledgeway (2011b:431f.; 2012a:170); also
not I.know să AUX.SBJV snowed Gheorghe (2013a:470). For the view that ca in these con-
‘I am unaware of its having snowed.’ structions should be viewed as an independent element, not
part of a ‘compound’ complementizer ca . . . să, see Sava
Note that că is also selected after left-dislocated senten- (2012). Note that astfel încât, and other expressions meaning
tial adverbs (cf. Cruschina 2010c) such as probabil ‘probably’, ‘in order that’, ‘in such a way that’ also license the move-
sigur ‘certainly’, bineînțeles ‘of course’: ment of material in front of să:
(111) Bineințeles/Probabil că te iubește. (116) Spune ca tu și prietenii tăi să plecați.

of.course/probably că you= he.loves he.says ca you and friends.the your să leave.2PL.SBJV
‘Of course/Probably he loves you.’ ‘He says that you and your friends should leave.’
(117) Vrea ca astăzi să plecați.
In spoken language the role of verbs of ‘saying’ both as
he.wants ca today să leave.2PL.SBJV
expressing assertions and commands or wishes is some-
‘He wants you to leave today.’
times reflected in a construction combining că and să,
where să represents in indirect speech what in the original (118) Totul era organizat astfel / astfel organizat
utterance was a command or a wish: everything was organized so / so organized
încât nimeni să nu poată să trișeze.
(112) Au spus că să plece. încât nobody să not can.3SG.SBJV să cheat.3SG.SBJV
has said că să leave.3.SBJV ‘Everything was organized so nobody could cheat.’
‘(What) they said (is) that he should leave.’
(119) Voi azi sau mâine să plecați!
youPL today or tomorrow să leave.2PL.SBJV
‘In order that’, ‘so that’, ‘for . . . to’ can be expressed by
‘You leave today or tomorrow!’
combining another complementizer ca (generally thought
to derive from Lat. QUIA) (or pentru ca) followed by a clause (120) Noi azi sau mâine să plecăm?
introduced by să, according to the following pattern: wePL today or tomorrow să leave.1PL.SBJV.
Nicio șansă!
(113) Aprind lumina ca fetele să mă vadă. no chance
I.light light.the ca girls.the să me= see.3.SBJV ‘Us leave today or tomorrow? No chance!’
‘I turn on the light in order for the girls to see me.’
Temporal expressions follow a slightly different pattern:
(114) Deschideam ușa ca (voi) să ieșiți.
those introducing events or actions viewed as unrealized at
I.opened door.the ca (you) să go.out.2PL.SBJV
the reference time, such as înainte ‘before’, select să + sub-
‘I was opening the door for you to go out.’
junctive; those referring to actions realized after or during
the reference time, such as după ‘after’, select ce + indicative
Note also consecutive constructions such as astfel încât . . .
(some, such as până să/ce ‘until’, may take either depending
să ‘in such a way/so that’:
on the perspective):
(115) Ascund comoara astfel / așa de adânc încât
(121) Am plecat înainte să vină/după ce
I.hide treasure.the so so of deep încât
I.have left before să come.3SG.SBJV/after ce
hoții să nu o găsească.
au venit prietenii.
thieves.the să not it= find.3.SBJV
have.3PL.PRS.IND come friends.the
‘I hide the treasure so (deep) that thieves don’t find it.’
‘I left before/after my friends came.’
Să is practically fused to the following verb, and almost
no syntactic material can intervene between it and the verb. In informal usage, după ce can be combined with că, in the
Subjects thus must follow the verb phrase or precede să. ‘cumulative’ sense ‘on top of . . . ’:
120
ROMANIAN
(122) După ce că mă jignește, mă și trădează. subjunctive introduced by să). The Romanian infinitive is
after ce că me= insults me= also betrays not, however, ‘dying out’ (cf. Schulte 2007).
‘He insults me and on top of that betrays me.’
(126) Poate să plece.
An equivalent of să + subjunctive where the verb indicates he.can să leave.3.SBJV
goal or purpose, largely restricted to informal registers, is ‘He can leave.’
de, where the verbs in both the main and subordinate clause
(127) Vor să vină.
have the same tense and mood:
they.want să come.3.SBJV
‘They want to come.’
(123) Se ducea de lua apă din fântână.
self= took.3SG.IMP de got.3SG.IMP water from well (128) Încearcă să te convingă. (Încearcă a
‘He was going to get water from the well.’ he.tries să you= persuade.3SG.SBJV (he.tries to
te convinge.)
This de (which can only be followed by a verb in the you= convince.INF)
indicative or conditional) can also function as a ‘functional ‘He tries to persuade you.’
head on the border between coordination and subordin-
(129) Începea să ningă. (Începe >a a ninge)
ation’ (Gheorghe 2013:472):
it.began să snow.3.SBJV (it.began to snow.INF)
‘It began to snow.’
(124) Se duc de iau benzină, și hoții
self= take de get.3PL.PRS petrol, and thieves.the (130) Îl învață să înoate. (Îl învață
le fură mașina. him= he.teaches să swim.3.SBJV (him= he.teaches
to.them= steal car.the. a înota.)
‘They go and get/to get petrol and thieves steal to swim.INF)
their car.’ ‘He teaches him to swim.’
A related meaning of de is ‘(so much) so that’: The (bare) infinitive remains optionally possible after a
putea ‘be able’ (131) and in the relative construction in (132),
(125) Se sperie așa de rău de leșină. and (preceded by the infinitive marker a) in phrases directly
self= frightens so of bad de he.faints introduced by a preposition (133-135).
‘He’s so badly frightened he faints.’
(131) Poate pleca.
For other uses of de, equivalent to dacă ‘if ’, and as relative he.can leave.INF
pronoun, see Gheorghe (2013a:472f.) and §8.5.2.6. ‘He can leave.’
A distinctive characteristic of Romanian subordination
(132) N- am pe cine mă ajuta.
(characteristic also of Slavonic languages and Greek, but
not= I.have pe whom me= help.INF
not of other Romance languages) is that verbs in subordin-
‘I’ve nobody to help me.’
ate clauses containing reported assertions may preserve the
tense form of the original proposition: thus ninge ‘it’s snow- (133) dorința de a se alege Maria șefă de
ing’, a nins ‘it has snowed’, but also ziceam/știam că ninge/a wish.the of to self= elect.INF Maria head of
nins, lit. ‘I said/knew that it is (= was) snowing / has (= had) catedră.
snowed’, beside ziceam/știam că ningea/ninsese, lit. ‘I said/ department
knew that it was snowing/had snowed’. The latter type is ‘the wish for Maria to be elected head of
the unmarked option: for the distinction between the two department.’
possibilities, see Zafiu (2013a:63f.).
(134) pentru/fără a dansa (mireasa)
for/without to dance.INF (bride.the)
‘for/without (the bride) dancing.’
8.5.2.5 Infinitives vs subjunctives in subordinate clauses (135) Era o mare favoare a- l fi
Romanian participates (Sandfeld 1930:177; Rosetti 1986:237; it.was a great favour to him= AUX.INF
Joseph 1983) in that phenomenon characteristic of the Bal- ajutat Oana să pregătească textul.
kan Sprachbund whereby infinitives in subordinate clauses helped Oana să- prepare.3.SBJV text.the
controlled by arguments of the main clause have given way ‘Oana(’s) having helped him prepare the text was a
to finite forms (in Romanian, usually forms in the great favour.’
121
MARTIN MAIDEN
Note that the (optional) overt subject of the infinitive in (139) Ceea ce faci este absurd.
such constructions always occurs postverbally. See further what that you.do is absurd
Pană Dindelegan (2013a:101f.). ‘What you do is absurd.’
Broadly speaking, the infinitive is more used in Daco-
Romance the further north one goes (and its importance ‘Headless’ relatives with [–human] reference may be
inside periphrastic constructions should never be over- expressed by ce ‘what’, and with [+human] reference by
looked, cf. §8.4.6.2). In Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian, cine (otherwise meaning ‘who?’, dative cui). Note also
verbal uses of the infinitive (§8.4.6.5) are restricted to the the use of cine, ce, unde ‘where’ + subjunctive or infinitive,
constructions indicating necessity (e.g. Aro. va or lipˈse̯asti mɨ with the meaning ‘anyone who’, ‘anything that’, ‘any-
ˈkari ‘it is necessary to eat’; Capidan 1932:548-50; Saramandu where to’:
1984:460) and can also, in Aromanian, express the goal of
motion verbs (Nevaci 2006:163), Megleno-Romanian also (140) Ce mă uimește la omul acesta este
using it with the verb BE ABLE (Atanasov 2002:229f.) and certain what me= amazes at person.the this is
future periphrases. Within Daco-Romanian the infinitive sur- modestia sa.
vives most extensively in the north and northern Banat modesty.the his.
(Lăzărescu 1984:230f.; Neagoe 1984:267; Vulpe 1984:343; ‘What amazes me about this person is his modesty.’
Marin and Marinescu 1984:380; Farcaș 2006), notably after
verbs of volition, inception, and ability. (141) Cine vrea să crească mare, după masă
who wants să grow big, after meal
la culcare.
8.5.2.6 Relative clauses to lying
‘He who wants to grow up big, after eating should
Relative clauses may be introduced by the relative pronoun go to bed.’
care, or by ce. Both are invariant for gender and number,
although from the earliest texts until the eighteenth century (142) Nu găsesc cu cine să merg la meci.
(cf. Frâncu 1997:129, 331), and to some extent the nineteenth, not I.find with who să I.go to match
care could take the definite article, signalling the gender and ‘I can’t find anyone to go to the match with.’
number of the antecedent, and in Istro-Romanian it still shows (143) Nu am unde să merg.
a suffixed definite article. Care has an adnominal MSG căruia, FSG not I.have where să I.go
căreia, PL cărora, and (when it precedes the noun; cf. §64.2.2 n.9) ‘I’ve nowhere to go.’
a specialized possessive a/al/ai/ale MSG cărui, FSG cărei, PL căror,
where al etc. (see §8.5.1.2) agrees in number and gender with
Relatives with antecedents expressing manner,
the possessum, and cărui agrees with the antecedent:
time, or place select as relativizer the appropriate
adverbial relativizer: cum ‘how’, când ‘when’, unde
(136) fata ai cărei frați cântă
‘where’:
girl.the.FSG almpl whose.ADN.FSG brothers.MPL sing
‘the girl whose brothers are singing’
(144) Felul cum (or în care) vorbea îi
way.the how (or in which) he.spoke them=
The pronominal antecedent of a relative is provided by
scandaliza.
the pronoun cel. The relativizer ceea ce ‘that which’ (cf.
shocked
§8.4.4.1) is used with reference to an abstract notion or
‘The way he spoke shocked them.’
proposition (139):
(145) De fiecare dată când citesc, mă doare
(137) Cei care doresc să plece au of each time when I.read, me= hurts
those who wish să leave.3.SBJV they.have capul.
voie. head.the
permission ‘Whenever I read, my head aches.’
‘Those wishing to leave may do.’
(146) locul unde locuiești.
(138) Le- am spus celor care îmi place.the where you.live
to.them= I.have said to.those who to.me= ‘the place where you live.’
scriu că le voi răspunde.
write that to.them= I.will answer In colloquial registers (see e.g. Gheorghe 2013b:494f.),
‘I told those who write to me that I’ll answer them.’ invariant de may serve as a relativizer.
122
ROMANIAN
8.5.2.7 Causative20 animates may lack prepositional object marking when they
have a lower degree of discourse salience (156, 157)
Causative constructions comprise a verb of causation (a face
(Manoliu Manea 1994:3-52), notably when modified by
‘make’, a lăsa ‘let’, a pune ‘put’) followed by a subordinate
indefinite determiners or quantifiers, negative quantifiers,
subjunctive clause expressing what is caused. They are
or the interrogative quantifiers câți, câte (158). Contexts in
biclausal constructions in which the arguments of each
which the identity of the subject and object are ambiguous
verb appear in their respective clause (there is no ‘clitic
may also select pe: this happens with comparative expres-
climbing’; cf. §§31.2.2.3, 48.4.2, 61.3.3.2.1.6.2, 63.2.2):
sions as in (160, 161), or with relative pronouns which,
because they always precede the verb, occupy the canonical
(147) I- am făcut pe băieți să le
position of the subject (§8.5.2.1). In substandard speech pe is
them= I.have made pe boys să them=
commonly omitted with the direct object relative care. Some
mănânce pe toate.
uses of pe function less to mark ‘objecthood’ than the fact
eat.3.SBJV pe all
that the object unexpectedly has nominal status (164). In
‘I made the boys eat them all.’
general, pronominalizations of adjectives, e.g. tot ‘all’ and
(148) O veți pune să le scrie. pronominalized adjectives introduced by cel or al (§§8.4.5,
her= you.will put să them= write.3.SBJV 8.5.1.2), require prepositional object marking (165, 166).
‘You’ll make her write them.’ Prepositional object marking is, however, incompatible
with the possessive dative clitic.
8.5.2.8 Object marking and prepositional object marking
Omission of the direct object is common where its referent (151) Te vreau pe tine.
is recoverable from context. Since Romanian lacks partitive you= I.want pe you
pronouns, an objectless construction is normal when a ‘I want you.’
partitive object is understood (150) (152) Pe noi ne- au văzut.
pe us us= they.have seen
(149) Duci gunoiul? Da, duc. ‘Us they have seen.’
you.take rubbish.the? yes, I.take
‘Are you taking the rubbish out? Yes, I’m taking it.’ (153) I- am întâlnit pe soții Rădulescu/
them= I.have met pe spouses.the Rădulescu
(150) Ne plac copiii dar nu avem. pe ei.
to.us= please children.the but not we.have pe them
‘We like children but don’t have any.’ ‘I met Mr and Mrs Rădulescu/them.’
Romanian displays direct object marking via the prepos- (154) Îl consideram mai îndreptățit să ia
ition pe (‘on (to)’)—a construction which possibly originates him= I.considered more entitled să take.3.SBJV
in verbs with a directional component (such as ‘call (to)’, Premiul Nobel pe Nichita Stănescu.
‘point (to/at)’) where the goal of the action, equivalent to Prize.the Nobel pe Nichita Stănescu.
the object of the verb, was expressed by pe (Onu 1959). ‘I considered Nichita Stănescu worthier of the
Absent from sub-Danubian dialects, this construction appar- Nobel Prize.’
ently emerged, before the sixteenth century, in the Roma- (155) O salut pe mama ta.
nian lands (Pană Dindelegan 2013a:135). Broadly, her= I.greet pe mother.the your
prepositional direct object marking is deployed where the ‘I greet your mother.’
status of the noun as grammatical object is somehow ‘unex-
pected’, or otherwise unclear. Nouns and pronouns whose (156) Îi iubește pe copii.
referents are high in animacy and specificity (those, espe- them= he.loves pe children
cially pronouns, denoting human beings, proper names, ‘He loves the children.’
kinship terms) prototypically denote the agent of transitive (157) Iubește copiii.
verbs and are therefore typical subjects; their relatively he.loves children.the
‘marked’ status as direct objects is systematically signalled ‘He loves children.’
by pe (151-153) (cf. Ledgeway 2011b:470). Nouns denoting
(158) (Pe) câți clienți ai refuzat?
(pe) how.many clients you.have refused
20
For Romanian passives, see §60.5. ‘How many clients did you refuse?’
123
MARTIN MAIDEN
(159) N- ai refuzat (pe) niciun client. (168) O carte (o) trimite, dar nu și banii.
not= you.have refused (pe) no client a book. (it=) he.sends but not also money.the
‘You didn’t refuse any client.’ ‘A book he sends, but not the money.’
(160) Mânca ceva, ca o găină.
The sub-Danubian dialects lack prepositional object
he.ate something like a hen
marking (see e.g. Caragiu Marioțeanu 1975:198, 237, 277).
‘He was eating something, like a hen [i.e. as a hen
Object marking of high animacy direct objects via clitic
would].’
doubling does occur, however, in Aromanian and Megleno-
(161) Mânca ceva, ca pe o găină. Romanian (169, data from Atanasov 2002), but not in Istro-
he.ate something like pe a hen Romanian (169).
‘He was eating something like a chicken [i.e. as he
would eat a chicken].’ (169) au̯ flɔ ʃi i a̯ ʦɛ ˈbaːbə
her= found also she that old.lady
(162) Apa care curge din stâncă este dulce.
‘She found that old lady too.’
water.the which flows from rock is sweet
‘The water that flows from the rock is sweet.’
Romanian shares with some other Balkan languages
(163) Apa pe care o beau este dulce. (Sandfeld 1930:201f.) the property of having a (small)
water.the pe which it= I.drink is sweet class of verbs allowing a(n inanimate) secondary direct
‘The water I drink is sweet.’ object in combination with an animate direct object.
These are a învăța ‘teach (someone something)’, a anunța
(164) (Îl) scot (pe) ‘pe’ din propoziție.
‘announce, tell (someone something)’, a examina ‘test
(it=) I.remove (pe) ‘pe’ from sentence
(someone on something)’, a întreba ‘ask (someone some-
‘I remove [the word] ‘pe’ from the sentence.’
thing)’, a sfătui ‘to advise (something to someone)’, a ruga
(165) Arunc șosetele mele, dar nu și pe ale ‘ask (something of someone)’. A trece ‘to (help someone)
I.throw socks.the.FPL my.FPL but not also pe ale cross (something)’ also behaves in this way. In such
tale. constructions the secondary direct object (unlike
your. FPL the primary) cannot be passivized, nor is it possible to
‘I throw my socks away but not yours.’ cliticize both objects. See further Pană Dindelegan
(2013a:144-8).
(166) Arunc șosetele galbene dar nu și pe
I. throw socks.the.FPL yellow.FPL but not also pe
(170) Era râul prea mare ca s- o
cele verzi.
was river.the too big so that her.DO
those.FPL green.PL
poată trece apa.
‘I throw away the yellow socks but not the green
can.3.SBJV cross.INF water.the
ones.’
‘The river was too deep for him to be able to get her
across the water.’
The preceding examples also amply illustrate the con-
comitant of prepositional object marking, namely the
additional marking of the object on the verb by a clitic 8.5.2.9 Coordinators
object pronoun. This clitic doubling (Pană Dindelegan The principal coordinators (see further Croitor 2013) are și
2013a:136) is obligatory in combination with pe, but ‘and’ (<SIC ‘thus’; Latin ET ‘and’ survived, as e, into the six-
absent when the object is cine ‘who?’ or cineva ‘someone’, teenth century, and in Istro-Romanian), și . . . și ‘both . . . and’,
nor is it obligatory in the case of indefinite or negative nici ‘nor’, nici . . . nici ‘neither . . . nor’ (<NEQUE ‘and not’), sau
quantifiers. Clitic doubling to mark the object also ‘or’, sau . . . sau ‘either . . . or’ (possibly an amalgam of reflexes
occurs, independently of pe, when direct objects precede of Latin SIUE ‘or if ’ and AUT ‘or’—the latter gave ORo. au), also
the verb, obligatorily so where the object is topicalized fie . . . fie ‘either . . . or’. ‘But’ is dar (also însă ‘however’), but to
(167), less consistently so where it is merely focused contradict a negation ci (< QUID ‘what, that’). Unusual is the
(168). existence of a coordinator ‘intermediate’ between și and dar.
Whereas the latter contradicts some aspect of a preceding
(167) Cartea o trimite, dar nu și banii. affirmation, iar introduces a proposition containing infor-
book.the.FSG it= he.sends but not also money.the mation which is ‘minimally adversative’, or simply not
‘The book he sends, but not the money.’ inferable from what precedes:
124
ROMANIAN
(171) Locuiește la Paris, dar muncește la București. not only in that they typically immediately precede the
he.lives in Paris but works in Bucharest verb they modify (being collocated to the right of proclitic
‘He lives in Paris, but works in Bucharest.’ pronouns, of the complementizer să, and of the infinitive
marker a) but also in being placed to the right of auxiliary
(172) Nu locuiește la Paris, ci la București.
verbs in analytic constructions. Mai (more rarely prea) may
not he.lives in Paris but in Bucharest
also be incorporated into adjectives, supines, and gerunds
‘He doesn’t live in Paris but in Bucharest.’
with the prefixed negator ne-:
(173) Azi este la Paris iar mâine pleacă
today he.is in Paris iar tomorrow he.leaves (176) Îl și detest.
la București. him= even= I.detest
to Bucharest ‘I even detest him.’
‘Today he’s in Paris and tomorrow he leaves for
(177) Ți- am mai trimis niște cărți.
Bucharest.’
to.you= I.have more sent some books
‘I have also sent you some books.’
8.5.3 Adverb position
(178) În ciuda bolii, studentul tot studiază.
Adverbs and adverbial phrases are typically collocated left in spite.the illness.ADN.SG, student.the tot studies
of adjectives (174) and right of verbs (175): ‘Despite his illness, the student still studies.’
(179) Nemaiștiind ce să facă, se dă
(174) un cântec extraordinar de/nemaivăzut de
not=more=knowing what să do.3.SBJV, self= gives
a song extraordinary de/never.seen de
bătut.
/foarte/relativ/ puțin frumos
beaten
/very/relative little beautiful
‘No longer knowing what to do, he gives up.’
‘a(n) extraordinarily/unprecedently/very/
relatively/not very beautiful song’
Note (cf. 174) that when an adjective precedes another
(175) Cântă extraordinar/cu adevărat/mult/puțin. adjective (or an adverb), and serves to predicate the extent
he.sings extraordinary/with truth/much/little to which, or manner in which, the property expressed by
‘He sings extraordinarily/truly/much/little.’ the following adjective or adverb obtains, then the follow-
ing adjective or adverb must be preceded by de: românii sunt
A small class of adverbs—și ‘also, even, therewith, incredibil de/neașteptat de/atât de prietenoși, lit. ‘the Roma-
already’, mai ‘more, still’, tot ‘still, too, also’ (except in the nians are incredibly/unprecedentedly/so de friendly (i.e.
sense ‘nonetheless’), prea ‘too (much)’, cam ‘rather’—are the extent to which/way in which they are friendly is
‘clitic’ adverbs (cf. Mîrzea Vasile and Dinică 2013:447f.), incredible, etc.)’.
125
CHAPTER 9
Dalmatian
MARTIN MAIDEN
9.1 Introduction (reflecting his native speech),2 and what he produces is a

recollection of a language he had heard his parents speaking,
and which he had once spoken with his grandmother and
In June 1898, on the Adriatic island of Krk (Veglia), a sep-
others (see e.g. Maiden 2004b:88f. for the status of Udaina’s
tuagenarian named Tuone Udaina (officially, Antonio
knowledge of Vegliote). Yet the final, ‘Vegliote’ manifest-
Udina) died in an explosion—and with him died the Dalma-
ation of this language offers enough material to allow useful
tian branch of the Romance languages. In the Middle Ages,
descriptive generalizations.
Dalmatian varieties had been spoken along the coast of
modern Croatia, from Krk, Cres, and Rab in the north
through Zadar, Trogir, Split, Dubrovnik (formerly Ragusa),
and Kotor in Montenegro in the south. At its height 9.2 Phonology
(Muljačić 1971:400) Dalmatian perhaps had 50,000 speakers.
Of its history we know little, the evidence coming largely Bartoli was unable to make sound recordings (DD§37), but
from loanwords surviving in Croatian, place names, and he does provide a phonetic transcription (here adapted to IPA),
occasional Dalmatian words in Venetian or Latin texts pro- on which the following is largely based. Of rhythm, intonation,
duced locally. Dalmatian receded rapidly from the late Mid- and syllabification we know virtually nothing. Bartoli (DD§263)
dle Ages before Croatian and Venetian. The only substantial observes, however, that the articulatory basis and phonetic
texts are from nineteenth-century Krk. We have fragmen- inventory of Udaina’s Vegliote is almost indistinguishable
tary evidence for fourteenth-century Ragusan, but this from that of contemporary Venetan dialects of the region
variety is heavily influenced by Venetian, the dominant (including e.g. a retracted articulation of /s/ and /z/; DD§276).
Romance language of the eastern Adriatic and, as an official Only the vowel /uo̯/ (see below) seems unique to Vegliote.
language, also by Croatian. There is no sign of Dalmatian’s There is no evidence for length distinctions of any kind.
survival in Ragusa beyond the fifteenth century, and by the Word stress is usually oxytonic or paroxytonic, the inci-
late nineteenth it clings on only among a few farming and dence of the former being augmented, historically, by the
fishing families on Krk. Never the vehicle of a prestigious widespread deletion of word-final unstressed vowels;
culture, after the ‘loss’ of Ragusa Dalmatian was not the proparoxytones occur, but largely in loanwords from Italo-
language of any major urban centre.1 There is no normative Romance or Slavonic. Romance word-final /e/ and /o/ have
grammar, no dictionary, no written tradition. generally been deleted (e.g. nu̯at ‘night’ < *ˈnɔtte, kup ‘head’
We owe most of our knowledge of Dalmatian to the < *ˈkapo). Deletion is blocked by preceding consonant clus-
awakening of scientific interest in it in the nineteenth ters (ˈdekro ‘to say’ < DIC(E)RE), ˈsaŋglo ‘alone’ < SING(U)LUM,
century, especially Bartoli’s compendious Das Dalmatische ˈjoŋko ‘eleven’ < *ˈundeke < UNDECIM, ˈvapto ‘eight’ < OCTO,
(1906; also Bartoli 2000), hereafter ‘DD’. The core of that ˈkuo̯rno ‘meat’ < CARNEM; historically underlying vowels
work is Udaina’s several thousand words of reminiscences, other than /a/ all emerge under these circumstances as
folklore, songs, and responses to questions about grammar /o/. Other final vowels (/a/, but also /e/—the outcome of
and lexicon. Udaina’s Vegliote is sprinkled with Venetisms unstressed final /i/ and of Romance final /as/; cf. Maiden
1996a) are better preserved (e.g. ˈduote ‘you give < *ˈdati
< DATIS; veˈtruna ‘old.FSG’ *veteˈrana, veˈtrune ‘old.FPL’ < *vete
ˈranas), yet also sporadically subject to deletion.
1
For more discussion of the historical background and original dialectal
2
divisions, see e.g. Muljačić (1971; 1995; 2000), Zamboni (1976a), Doria Bartoli (see Maiden 2004b:91 n. 13) perhaps overestimated his know-
(1989b), Mihăescu (1993), Trummer (1998), Bernoth (2008:2731f.). For the ledge of Croatian. However, Muljačić (p.c. 2005) finds that Udaina’s mother
thorny question of the classification of Dalmatian among Romance lan- had a mainland Croatian surname, inferring that he might have learnt at
guages, see e.g. Windisch (1998), Bernoth (2008). least some Croatian from her.
126 This chapter © Martin Maiden 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
DALMATIAN
Table 9.1 Consonantal inventory of Dalmatian

BILABIAL LABIODENTAL DENTAL ALVEOLAR PALATAL VELAR
Plosive p b t d k g
Nasal m n ŋ
Trill r
Fricative fv s z j
Lateral l ʎ
Affricate ʦ ʣ ʧ ʤ
Word-initial stressed vowels and diphthongs are absent, (e.g. ˈkai r̯ a ‘wax’ < *ˈke.ra < CERAM vs ˈstala ‘star’ < *ˈstel.la
being always preceded by a glide /j/ (e.g. ju̯alb ‘white’ < STĒLLAM; neˈpau̯t ‘nephew’ < *ne.ˈpo.te < NEPOTEM;5 ˈspai k̯ a ‘ear
< ALBUM; ˈjalara ‘ivy’ < HEDERAM; ˈjiltri ‘other’ < ALTERI). of corn’ < *ˈspi.ka < SPICAM vs feʎ ‘son’ < *ˈfiʎ.ʎu < FILIUM; aˈvoi̯t
The vowel inventory is differentiated according to stress. ‘had.PTP’ < *a.ˈvu.tu < HABITUM vs ˈnoʎa ‘nothing’ < NULLA).6
In unstressed syllables only /a/, /u/, /o/, /i/, and /e/ occur; The consonantal inventory (Table 9.1) is unremarkable
the pretonic vowels in native, inherited Vegliote vocabulary (/ʃ/ and /ʒ/ are absent).
tend to be just /a/, /e/, and /o/, while word-finally /u/ Udaina tends to replace /s/ with /ʦ/, e.g. ˈkuoʦa for
never occurs. In stressed syllables, in addition to /a/, /u/, ˈkuosa ‘house’ or ʦaˈpai t̯ e for saˈpai t̯ e ‘know!’ (DD§276).
/o/, /i/, and /e/ there is a series of diphthongs. Two of This behaviour may be a hypercorrecting tendency attrib-
these are effects of early Romance diphthongization of /ɛ/ utable to his native Venetan, where /s/ frequently corres-
and /ɔ/ resulting (cf. Ch. 38) in Vegliote closed syllables, in ponds to Italian affricate /ʦ/ (cf. the modern Venetan
diphthongs realized respectively as /i ̯e/ or /i ̯a/, and as pronuniciation raˈgaso for It. ragazzo raˈgatʦo ‘boy’).
/u̯a/. For original */ɛ/ we have ˈsi̯anpro ‘always’ < *ˈsɛm. A feature of Dalmatian historical phonology well known
pre < SEMPER; pi a̯ t ‘chest’ < *ˈpɛt.tu < PECTUS. Historically in the comparative literature is absence of palatalization of
underlying /a/ shares the fate of /ɔ/,3 in open and closed velar consonants before front vowels: compare ˈkai n̯ a ‘din-
syllables, a fact which suggests their early merger (e.g. ner’, It. cena /ˈʧena/ < *ˈkena < CENAM.7 In Ragusan there is
ˈmu̯arta ‘dead’ < *ˈmɔr.ta < MORTUA, ˈnu̯at ‘night’ < *ˈnɔt.te no palatalization before either vowel (DD§429), and Dalma-
< NOCTEM, ju̯alb ‘white’ < *ˈal.bu < ALBUM, ˈbu̯arba ‘beard’ tian thereby patterns with central Sardinian (and probably
< *ˈbar.ba < BARBAM). In original open syllables, front vowel Daco-Romance; cf. Skok 1926). The change /k/ > /ʧ/ before
diphthongs have monophthongized as /i/ (ˈpitra < *ˈpje.tra /i/ (e.g. ˈʧiŋko ‘bedbug’ < CIMICEM, ˈpwarʧ ‘pigs’ < PORCI) is
< PETRAM; dik ‘ten’ < *ˈdje.ke < DECEM) while the reflex of internal to Vegliote and appears to be a recent development
original /a/ and /ɔ/, namely /uo̯/, frequently monophthon- independent of Romance palatalizations (cf. Solta
gizes as /u/ (e.g. ˈkuo̯sa/ˈkusa ‘house’ < *ˈka.sa < CASAM; fuo̯k/ 1980:148f.), being triggered also by the initial glide of the
fuk ‘fire’ < *ˈfwo.ku < FOCUM).4 This sound (which I have tried diphthongs /i e̯ / or /i a̯ / (e.g. munˈʧal ‘hill’ < *munˈkjel < ?
to approximate in IPA here; Bartoli gives it as ‘uo’ with a MONTICELLUM; cf. korˈtjal ‘knife’ < CULTELLUM) and, apparently (cf.
superscript ligature) appears to involve a high back vowel DD§430), before a high front rounded vowel /y/, the
with a more closed articulation at the onset than at the end; assumed historical reflex (see DD§299, 302) of /u/ in
Udaina himself denies that it resembles Italian uo ([wɔ]), stressed open syllables (e.g. ʧol ‘arse’ < *kyl < *ˈkulu
describing it rather as a ‘long, open /u/’. The remaining < CULUM).8
diphthongs are characterized by a final glide. One is directly There are sporadic signs of devoicing of word-final con-
inherited from Latin (e.g. ˈpau̯ki ‘few.M’ < PAUCI); the remain- sonants. Udaina gives both voiced and voiceless alternatives
der are outcomes of historically underlying /e/, /o/, /i/, in el ʣau̯k/ʣau̯g de i buʧ ‘the yoke of the oxen’ (< IUGUM);
/u/ in open syllables (of paroxytones), yielding respectively also mut ‘now’, vit ‘I see’ (< MODO, UIDEO), but fi a̯ d ‘faith’ or
/ai /̯ , /au̯/, /ai /̯ , /oi /̯ . These diphthongizations must have gruo̯nd ‘big’ (< FIDEM, GRANDEM), uf ‘egg’ (< OUUM) but viv ‘alive’
occurred at a time when distinctions of consonantal length (< UIUUM).
survived, being absent in open syllables which would, his-
torically, have been closed by following long consonants 5
The fate of historically underlying /o/ in closed syllables is problem-
atic; see DD§295.
6
Note that in closed syllables */i/ and */u/ > /e/ and /o/, and */e/ > /a/.
3 7
In old Ragusan, /a/ in stressed open syllables yields /e/. See also DD§425.2 for /ɡ/.
4
Bartoli (DD§286) believes that /u/ is the original result in oxytones, and 8
Examples with /ɡ/ are scarce. Bartoli (DD§425) offers ˈspiraʧ ‘aspara-
/uo/ in paroxytones, but the evidence is unclear. gus’ < *asˈparaɡi, and triʧ ‘you pull’ < *ˈtraɡi. Neither form is from Udaina.
127
MARTIN MAIDEN
Word-final /n/ is usually [ŋ] (e.g. puŋ ‘bread’ < PANEM), but To the extent that the effects of this change survive, they
[n] after [i ]̯ (e.g. SG jaŋ ‘year’ PL jai n̯ ). This velarization is an rarely involve alternation: rather they have been analogic-
active phonetic process, applying even after synchronic ally introduced into the singular (note e.g. the two forms of
deletion of word-final -a (e.g. noŋ for ˈnona ‘grandmother’). the singular ‘year’ in (12) and also (10), where the plural
Word-internally, /n/ assimilates to the position of a follow- allomorph has penetrated the singular).10 There are also
ing consonant, but remains [n] before labials (e.g. inpaˈrut remnants of allomorphy caused by historical palatalization
‘learned’). of preceding root-final velars, dentals, and laterals
(cf. DD§500), but these appear mostly to have been eliminated
in favour of the singular allomorph, with the exception of
ˈtoʧi ku̯inʧ ‘everyone, all and sundry’, ‘all of ’, whose second
9.3 Inflectional morphology element (used also in the feminine singular and plural ˈtoʧa
ku̯int, ˈtoʧe ku̯inʧ), derives from Latin QUANTI ‘how many’
(cf. SG kuont), and SG pu̯ant ‘stitch’ PL pu̯anʧ.11 Palatalization
Noun and adjective morphology distinguishes gender (mas-
of the lateral persists, apparently systematically, in the plural
culine and feminine) and number (singular and plural), but
of reflexes of the Latin diminutive suffix -ELLUM (11).
not case. These are marked on nouns (and on adjectives and
pronouns) by desinences which are unstressed vowels.
(1) i veˈtruni ˈfero konˈti̯anti
Given frequent deletion of word-final unstressed vowels,
the.MPL old.MPL were happy.MPL
these endings are often absent, with resultant invariance
‘The old people were happy.’
(see 2, 4, 5, 6, 7); inflectional gender and number marking
appears most consistently on determiners and pronouns. (2) joi ̯ŋ jag doi ̯ jag
There are two inflection classes. One is characterized by ‘one needle two needles’
singular -a, predominantly associated with feminine (but
(3) ˈkosta ˈlaŋga ˈkoste ˈlaŋge
masculine ˈtuo̯ta ‘father’), with corresponding feminine
this.FSG language these.F languages
plural desinence -e (3); the other shows zero inflection in
the singular (or -o). The latter kind—which historically (4) la mu̯ask ˈkoste mu̯ask
subsumes Latin second and third declensions—if they are the.FSG fly these.F flies
masculine, take the plural desinence -i (1), and normally do
(5) la kluf le kluf also ˈjoi ̯na kluv ˈtuo̯nte ˈkluve
so if they have singular -o (e.g. SG ˈfrutro–PL ˈfrutri ‘brother’);
the.FSG key the.FPL keys a.FSG key so.many.F keys
if they are feminine they are usually invariant, but some-
times take -e (5). In the plural there is strict alignment of (6) joi ̯n pi ̯as kunt pia̯ s
endings with gender: -i is uniquely masculine, and -e is a.MSG fish how.many.M fish
uniquely feminine. Adjectives generally follow the pattern
(7) ˈjoi ̯na krau̯k doi ̯ krau̯k
of MSG veˈtruŋ, FSG veˈtruna, MPL veˈtruni, FPL veˈtrune ‘old’.9
a.FSG cross two crosses
There are remnants of a class of ‘ambigeneric’ nouns,
which are masculine in the singular and feminine in the (8) ˈjultro ˈjiltri
plural (cf. §§8.4.3.2, 14.3.1.1, 16.3.1.1, 57.3.2). Udaina pro- other.MSG others.M
duces several times a feminine plural ˈlane ‘(pieces) of
(9) kuo̯ŋ ˈkuini
wood’ or ‘firewood’. In an old religious song he utters FPL
dog dogs
deˈnakle ˈnoi d̯ e ‘naked knees’, which he says he does not
understand (this form is attested in other texts; see DD§118). (10) kinp kinp (also ˈkinpi)
Ive (1886) also obtained from Udaina, again in a song, the FPL field fields
ˈmoi r̯ e ‘walls’. The singular counterparts of these words in
(11) korˈti ̯al korˈti ̯ai ̯
Vegliote are masculine (cf. DD:col.196; although Udaina has
knife knives
FSG ˈlana ‘wood’).
Nouns and adjectives show little root allomorphy. There (12) el jai ̯n ˈtranta, el ˈjultim de l jaŋ
are occasional remnants of the phonological effects of the the.MSG year thirty the.MSG last.MSG of the year
plural desinence -i: one is assimilation of stressed /a/ in the ‘the year (18)30, the last day of the year’
root, whose outcome is /i/ (/ai /̯ in reflexes of ANNI ‘years’).
10
Cubich (DD:cols. 127/125) has SG scluav ‘servant’ PL scliv.
9 11
An example of reanalysis as an adjective of what is in origin an toʧ < *ˈtotu ‘all’ has root-final /ʧ/ throughout its paradigm, but this
adverbial phrase, is daˈku̯ard ‘of accord, in agreement’, which may have appears to involve analogical extension of an original palatalization of MPL
an agreeing plural daˈku̯ardi. *ˈtoti.
128
DALMATIAN
Pace Bartoli (DD§506), Vegliote is able to distinguish gen- (16) ju lo kaˈʦure ˈdrante
der on the numeral ‘two’ (MPL doi ̯ ˈfelʤi ‘two boys’ vs FPL ˈdoe I him= chase.FUT in
kreaˈtoi r̯ e ‘two girls’), although the masculine form tends to ‘I’ll chase him in.’
prevail regardless of gender. (17) i mai ̯ laˈvur li ai ̯ fat
Like other Romance languages Vegliote has a double set the.MPL my.MPL jobs them.M= I.have done
of pronouns, ‘stressed’ (cf. Ch. 44), used in isolation, for ‘I’ve done my jobs.’
contrastive emphasis or after prepositions, and ‘unstressed’
(18) ke ju, ˈtune uˈdai ̯na, ge la ju dat ˈfure
or ‘clitic’ (cf. Ch. 45), adjacent to a verb.
for I, Tuone Udaina to.him=it.F have given out
While most Romance languages show some morphological
‘For I, Tuone Udaina, provided it to him.’
differentiation for case in the stressed series, especially in
first and second person pronouns, there is little evidence for (19) e le skirp le aˈvas koˈsai ̯k aˈpjarte
this in Vegliote. The stressed 1SG pronoun is mostly ju (< EGO) and the.FPL shoes them.F= have thus open.FPL
and what was, historically, the subject form of this pronoun ‘And they had their shoes open like that.’
also appears after prepositions (e.g. koŋ ju ‘with me’), (20) leˈvur le a ˈkuo̯ʦa
although there is also maiŋ̯ , apparently < *ˈmene (cf. Ro. take.INF= them.F to house
mine) and sometimes also me, which (cf. DD§491) seems to ‘to take them home.’
derive from dative MIHI.12 The second person singular stressed (21) ju ge deˈkaro ke l te ˈdua per el ʧol
form is te (sometimes ti), from Latin dative TIBI. The most I to.him= tell.FUT that he= you.SG= give on the arse
common form of the first person plural stressed pronoun is ‘I’ll tell him to smack your bottom.’
noˈjiltri, a combination of first person plural noi ̯ and ˈjiltri
(22) el je ju dat ˈjoin̯ a zleˈputa
meaning ‘other.PL’. We do not know whether this form agrees
he to.him= has given a slap
for gender (in principle there could be feminine ?noˈjultre).
‘He gave him a slap.’
For the second person plural the text offers both voˈjiltri and
reflexes of Lat. UOS ‘you.PL’, usually voi̯.
The clitic reflexive pronoun (in its various functions) is
The system of third person stressed pronouns continues
invariably se (originally third person), regardless of person
Latin demonstrative ILLE ‘that’, with inflectional marking of
or number:
number and gender. Indeed, one’s impression is that the
desinential marking of these categories is better preserved
(23) se manˈʧua join̯ aɲeˈluo̯t
on the pronouns than elsewhere: MSG jal, FSG ˈjala, MPLˈjali, FPL
REFL= eats a lamb
ˈjale. The singular first and second person (direct and indir-
‘One eats a lamb.’
ect) clitic object pronouns are me and te. The corresponding
plurals are poorly attested, but we have 2PL ve (also vi) (see (24) ju nu se poˈtaja muˈvur
13-15). The third person direct object forms are (16-20) MSG I not REFL= can move.INF
lo/l, FSG la, MPL li, FPL le. Udaina employs a third person indirect ‘I cannot move myself. ’
object ge (apparently a Venetism; see DD§493), but also, (25) ʣai ̯ fur se fu̯at
occasionally, je (or ju), which is probably indigenous (< ILLI): go make= REFL fuck.INF
see examples (18), (21), (22). Neither form seems to vary for ‘Fuck off!’
number (whether there is gender variation is unclear). (26) a reveˈdar se
(13) ˈduo̯ me dik ˈsu̯aldi to resee. INF= REFL
give.IMP= me ten soldi (= coins) ‘until we see each other again.’

(14) e ti faʦ veˈdar ke no ti
Vegliote admits unstressed subject pronouns, but their
and you.2SG= I.make see.INF that not you
use appears unsystematic and there can be difficulties in
poˈtaja porˈtuo̯r la
ascertaining whether the pronouns are stressed or not. The
can wear.INF= it.FSG
‘And I show you that you cannot wear it.’
(15) ju ve deˈkaja ki ke ˈfero ˈkosti veˈtruni
I you= tell who that were these.M old.MPL
‘I’ll tell you who these old people were.’13
testimony to Ive (1886), Udaina recounts an altercation in which his wife
addresses him with a plural form to which he initially replies in kind,
12
Cubich (DD:col.139) has junda con maic ‘come with me’, showing a thereafter using 2nd person singular. The force of this use of the plural is
remnant of Latin comitative MECUM (cf. Salvi 2011b:323). unclear: the fact that his wife is reproaching him for unjustified absences
13
In this example (cf. also 107) Udaina addresses Bartoli directly, using a from the marital home may be relevant. In other Vegliote texts the Prodigal
2nd person plural form as formal (‘polite’) mode of address. In his Son addresses his father in the plural, and God is also so addressed.
129
MARTIN MAIDEN
use of an unstressed subject form seems particularly com- (34) ju no lo poˈtaja a soˈfrur
mon for the first person and second persons singular and I not it= could PREP suffer.INF
rare for the first and second persons plural (but cf. Renzi ‘I could not stand it.’
and Vanelli 1983; §45.2.2).14 The third person forms are MSG
(35) El cuan blaja me moscuar
(e)l, MPL i, FSG l(a), FPL l(e). Clitic doubling (the use of a clitic
the dog wants me= bite.INF
subject form in the presence of an overt pronominal or
‘The dog wants to bite me.’
nominal subject) is common but, again, not systematic.
(36) Blaj me scutro un diant
(27) ju ku̯ank kal ju dorˈmaja in pins I.want me= remove.INF a tooth
I some time I sleep in foot ‘I want to remove my tooth.’
‘I sometimes sleep standing.’
Subject clitics precede object clitics (but, as 37 shows, may
(28) ˈguorda kost pia̯ s ke viv k (el) ˈfero
be preceded by a negator):
look this fish how alive that (it) is
‘Look how alive this fish is.’
(37) ju aˈvas doi ̯ baˈrie̯ ma no le me ˈviza
(29) el ju ʧaˈput fuk toʧ el paˈluʦ I have two berets but not they me= go
it has caught fire all the building buŋ ne ˈjoi ̯na ne la ˈjultra
‘The whole building caught fire.’ good nor one nor the other
‘I have two berets but neither suits me.’
(30) i ˈpeli nom nat i bule fuˈmur
the little.ones just born they want smoke.INF
The inflectional morphology of Udaina’s verb is remark-
‘The kids want to smoke as soon as they born.’
able. One recognizes the remnants of a system like that found
in Italo-Romance and elsewhere, with three non-finite
It is noteworthy in (27) and (30) that the subject pronouns
forms (infinitive, past participle, and gerund) and, among
are coreferent with a topicalized overt, strong subject which
finite forms, present, two pasts (imperfect and preterite)
is clearly in the left periphery, being followed by a focalized
and a future.15 There are also traces of a distinction between
constituent. This suggests that the preverbal pronoun is
indicative and subjunctive in present and imperfect. The
indeed a subject clitic, for otherwise here we would expect
imperative is generally identical to the third person present
to find (as e.g. in Italian), a null subject.
form in the singular, and to first and second person present
It is unclear whether the partitive clitic ne (< INDE) in the
forms in the plural. In addition, most verbs had belonged to
following is indigenous or a Venetism:
one of four major inflection classes, principally associated
with a thematic vowel located between root and inflectional
(31) ge ne deˈkaja de ˈtoʧi i koˈlau̯r
ending, in parts of the paradigm (notably the infinitive). In
to.him= PART= I.said of all the colours
Udaina’s speech this system has practically collapsed, par-
‘I told him all sorts of things.’
ticularly for tense and mood.16
(32) ˈkunte ke el ne aˈvas Infinitives and past participles are well preserved, but
how.many that he PART= has there are few attestations of gerunds. Among finite forms,
‘How many has he?’ number distinctions are wholly neutralized in the third
person (this characteristic is general in Vegliote and not
As may be inferred from some of the above, indrect object merely in Udaina), originally third person singular forms
clitics precede direct object clitics. Clitics precede the verb, having supplanted those of the third person plural (e.g. e ‘is’
except that they follow imperative and infinitive forms (but and ‘are’; ˈpu̯arta ‘he/they wear(s)’); moreover, there is
note 35 and 36). There is evidence for clitic climbing with rarely any inflectional distinction between third person
modal verbs (24, 33, 34), but Cubich (DD:col. 119) had also and first person singular (e.g. ˈbule, both ‘I want’ and ‘he
obtained examples such as (35) and (36) without it: wants’), and quite often none between these and second
person singular. First and second person plurals, however,
(33) ju ve veˈnare a kaˈtuo̯r robustly retain distinctive desinences -me and -te (e.g. fav
I you come.FUT to seek
‘I’ll come to look for you.’
15
The preterite is effectively extinct, excepting a few forms of the verb
‘be’ (1PL ˈfoim
̯ o, 3SG/PL foit̯ , 2PL ˈfu̯aste).
16
For the delicate question whether this is an idiosyncrasy of Udaina’s,
14
Ive (1886) obtains from Udaina a 1st person plural subject nu. rather than a feature of ‘late Vegliote’, see Maiden (2004b:89).
130
DALMATIAN
ˈlume, favˈlute ‘we/you speak’, deˈkai t̯ e ‘you say’, meˈtai ̯me (41) el mi ˈtuota e l su ˈfero d aku̯ard ke
‘we put’). the my father and the her were agreed that
Verbs are arrhizotonic in most of the paradigm, but ˈfurme el matriˈmoɲ noˈjiltri doi ̯
rhizotonic in singular and third person forms of the present. make.FUT.1PL the marriage we two
Largely as a result of regular sound change affecting vowels, ‘My father and hers agreed that we would get
this entails root vowel allomorphy (e.g. prik ‘I pray’ vs married.’
preˈkur ‘pray.INF’; pluk ‘it pleases’ vs PRS plaˈkua; ˈpu̯arta
(42) se ju veˈdar ˈprai ̯ma ju te ˈdure su l ʧol
‘they carry’ vs IPFV porˈtua).
if I see.FUT first I you= give.FUT on the arse
The synthetic future tense forms require special comment
‘If I’d seen you first I’d have slapped your bottom.’
(see further Maiden 2008b). Unlike most Romance languages
of western Europe, Dalmatian lacks a future tense form
In Udaina’s speech (noticeably less so in his earlier testi-
historically built from an infinitive + stressed present tense
mony to Ive) the system of tense distinctions is collapsing.
form of the verb ‘have’ (cf. §§27.4, 46.3.2.2). The Dalmatian
This is not purely ignorance: Udaina can, and does, make
future is stressed on the root or the thematic vowel, not the
morphological tense distinctions when the distinction is
ending, and typically has in first person singular and third
salient (e.g. in contrasting current and past customs: see
person forms the endings -ro or -re (sometimes -ra); the
Maiden 2004b:92). Moreover, the imperatives (usually iden-
second person singular is always in -re and the first and
tical to forms of the present indicative) are virtually all
second persons plural -rme and -rte. This future originates
clearly preserved in their historically expected forms.
in the future perfect and/or the present perfect subjunctive
Otherwise, the surviving distinctively present tense forms
forms of the Latin verb (already largely identical in Latin),
mainly have present-time reference, but there is promiscu-
and is thereby cognate with the Portuguese (and old Spanish)
ous use of imperfect tense forms as presents and even
future subjunctive and the old Romanian (and modern Aro-
futures, and of future tense forms (especially ˈfero, the
manian and Istro-Romanian) conditional. There is probable
future of ‘be’), with present or past reference. For example,
influence from the Latin pluperfect indicative (reflected in
when Udaina lists various body parts which are hurting
the ending -a). Insofar as one can still detect its functions in
(DD§45) there are five instances of the ‘correct’ present
the nineteenth century, it has not only future time, but also
tense dul (‘it hurts/they hurt’) but eight of doˈlua (formally,
conditional and counterfactual value (note that continuants
an imperfect), without temporal distinction.
of the Latin pluperfect indicative assume conditional value in
This formal confusion has a specific internal explanation
several western Romance varieties, while the continuants of
(Maiden 2004b). The imperfect tense forms historically have
the future perfect/perfect subjunctive provide conditionals
two sets of endings, first conjugation -ˈua (< Lat. -ABA-) vs
in Daco-Romance). It can function as a future-in-the past (41)
-ˈaja (< *-ˈea-, *-ˈia-, Lat. -EBA-, -IBA-) for other conjugations.
and can appear both in the protasis and the apodosis of
By coincidence, -aj(a) is also a characteristic formative of
counterfactual constructions (42):17
many present tense verbs. This latter -aj(a) is cognate with
the formative -ez- found in many Romanian verbs (§8.4.6.2),
(38) manˈʧurme e ˈbarme daˈpu
deriving from a proto-Romance affix *-edj-. In Romance this
eat.FUT.1PL and drink FUT.1PL later
suffix becomes an ‘empty morph’, collocated between lex-
‘We’ll eat and drink later.’
ical root and desinence and found in Romanian (and prob-
(39) ju ʧaˈpure de i ̯ bei ̯ su̯ald se ju venˈdas ably also in old Dalmatian), just in the singular and third
I get.FUT of the nice money if I sold person forms of the present (cf. Maiden 2004c, and §43.2.4),
la mi ˈrau̯ba where it always bears primary stress. Originally limited to
the my stuff the first conjugation, it had already spread into other con-
‘I’d get some nice money if I sold my stuff. ’ jugations.18 The result, then, is a situation where in many
verbs the present in -ˈaja is indistinguishable from the
(40) ju paˈkura dik duˈkat
imperfect in -ˈaja. This model of identity then extended to
I pay.COND 10 ducats
first conjugation verbs, whose imperfect ending -ˈua is
‘I’d pay ten ducats.’
thereby analogically introduced into the present tense.
The replacement of present by imperfect forms affects not
17 only the singular and third person forms, but first person
Elsewhere, we find remnants of the old imperfect subjunctive (in -ˈas)
in the protasis, and the Dalmatian ‘future’ in the apodosis, of counterfactual
sentences: e.g. se te fu̯as joi̯n siˈɲau̯r ˈduore toʧ a i ˈpoper ‘If you were a
18
gentleman you’d give everything to the poor’, sel venˈdas toʧ, el devenˈtura See also Jud (1973:444f.), who rather underestimates the systematic
ˈpoper ‘If he sold everything he’d become poor’. and structured nature of the change.
131
MARTIN MAIDEN
plural and second person plural forms as well. Although it conjugation marker (/u/ or /uo/) is liberally extended
was originally restricted to the first conjugation, there is into other conjugations. The distinctions are best pre-
generalization of the novel present tense -ˈua into other served in the infinitive, but even these see frequent shifts:
conjugation classes, leading to the bizarre situation, from a e.g. favˈlur ‘talk’ < FABULARI, veˈdar ‘see’ < *veˈdere < UIDĒRE,
historical-comparative perspective, of non-first-conjugation ˈdekro < DICERE (but cf. plaŋˈgur ‘weep’ for expected
verbs, with present tense meaning, displaying first conjuga- **ˈpluŋgro < PLANGERE); the fourth conjugation (historically
tion past tense morphology (e.g. plaŋˈgua ‘they complain’ in -ˈire) should have infinitives in -er (attested elsewhere
for expected pluŋg). in Vegliote, e.g. durmer ‘sleep’ < DORMIRE), but Udaina
Remnants of present and imperfect subjunctive forms replaces this with -ar (dorˈmar).
rarely retain a functional distinction. One encounters traces We have little opportunity for insight into derivational
of optative expressions such as di te salˈves ‘[would that] morphology. There is evidence for the use of the feminine
God saved you’, recorded by Ive. The lability of the relation singular ending of original first conjugation past participles
between subjunctive forms and modal functions can be seen (in -ˈuta or -ˈuota) to form nouns (both deverbal and denom-
in (43), in the context of an expression of necessity in the inal) expressing a (usually) rapid, completed action (cf.
main clause. Its first manifestation is that of a historical §28.4.3). Thus ˈjoi ̯na zleˈputa ‘a slapping’ < ˈzlep(a) ‘slap’,
non-first conjugation present subjunctive (ˈtiɲa), its second, ˈjoi ̯na kaˈkuo̯ta ‘a shit, act of shitting’ (cf. kaˈkuo̯r ‘shit’).
in the same context, is a second person singular present Diminutive suffixal formations in -ai ̯n- (< Lat. -in-), -ˈuo̯t and
tense form teˈnua, remodelled on the first conjugation -(ʧ)al (< -(C)ELLUM) are observable: aɲeˈluo̯t ‘little lamb’;
imperfect indicative (see above). bateˈlai ̯na ‘little boat’; porˈʧal ‘piglet’ (cf. pu̯ark ‘pig’); basal
ˈʧala ‘little church’ (cf. baˈsalka ‘church’). There is some
(43) biˈzuɲ ke la muˈʎer ˈtiɲa ni ̯at evidence for diminutive suffixes -ai̯k-, -au̯k-, possibly from
is.necessary that the woman keep.PRS.SBJV clean *-ik-, *-uk-: sanˈtai̯ko ‘(little) saint’, moˈrau̯ka ‘(little, female)
ˈkosta ˈrau̯ba; el paˈver de la lover’. The widespread Romance device of forming com-
this stuff the wick of the pounds by combining second person singular imperative of
lois̯ a biˈzuɲ ke te teˈnua ni ̯at the verb (cf. Maiden 2007a) with a noun, is represented for
light is.necessary that you keep clean example in grutaˈkuo̯ʦa ‘cheese grater’ (from ˈgruta ‘grate’ +
‘The woman must keep this stuff clean; you must keep ˈkuo̯ʦa ‘cheese’).
the wick clean.’ Vegliote (with e.g. Daco-Romance and southern Italo-
Romance) generally lacks adverbs morphologically distinct
Where in other Romance languages one might expect a from adjectives (cf. §§8.4.7, 16.4.3.4), adverbial functions usu-
subjunctive (cf. §59.3.2), an indicative form may appear, ally being expressed by the masculine singular of the adjec-
while some subjunctives seem to be regularly used with tive. Thus, corresponding to the adjectives (MSG) buŋ ‘good’, bil
values elsewhere expected of the indicative (cf. example ‘fine, beautiful’, we find ʣai̯ buŋ ‘it’s going well’, fu̯at bil ‘done
37, where ˈviza is formally a subjunctive). beautifully’. There is however an adverb mul ‘badly’ (< MALE):
A notable example of the neutralization both of mood and mul mi̯as ‘badly put’. Occasional examples of *-ˈmente adverbs
tense distinctions involves the originally imperfect sub- (cf. §28.2), fu̯arteˈmi̯ant ‘strongly’, jultraˈmi̯ant ‘otherwise’,
junctive form ‘have.3SG’ (aˈvas < Lat. HABUISSET). The reference mulaˈmi̯ant ‘badly’, are probably Italo-Romance loans.
of example (44) is to an event in the past: There is virtually no sign of synthetic comparative or
superlative forms of adjectives and adverbs. Vegliote does
(44) a ku no la aˈvas da tuˈfuo̯r possess adverbs mi̯ei̯ or mai̯ ‘better’ (< MELIUS; cf. buŋ ‘good,
to that not she have to stink.INF well’), and pi̯as ‘worse’ (cf. < PEIUS; cf. ri ‘bad’), but comparison is
‘in order that it should not have to stink’ usually effected by preposing ple (< PLUS ‘more’) to the relevant
form. The comparator, ‘than’, is expressed by de (or ke). The
(45) no aˈvas ne el gal ne le gaˈlai ̯ne
texts lack examples of negative comparison (‘less’) or clear
not have nor the cock nor the hens
examples of superlative marking. Udaina produces the follow-
‘He had neither cock nor hens.’
ing, combining a number of these features:
(46) ˈguo̯rda ke ˈgruonde jal ke aˈvas kol oˈʦel
look what big wings that have that bird (47) favˈlur ple buŋ, ple mai ̯ ke de kol
‘Look what big wings that bird has!’ speak.INF more good, more better than of that
ke favˈlua i veˈtruni
Historical distinctions of inflection class-marking theme which spoke the old
vowels have largely dissolved: in particular, the first ‘to speak better than the old people did’
132
DALMATIAN
(51) i ˈnuestri veˈtruni

9.4 Nominal group the.MPL our.MPL old.MPL
‘our old people’
The definite article derives from the Latin demonstrative
(52) il su ˈfrutro, i sui ̯
adjective ILLE ‘that’: MSG el, FSG la, MPL i, FPL le. The masculine
the.MSG POSS.3MSG brother the.MPL POSS.3MPL
singular is often /l/ when preceded by a vowel, systematic-
ˈfrutri, la ˈsoa soˈrau̯la, le
ally so when the preceding word is a vowel-final prepos-
brothers the.FSG POSS.3FSG sister the.FPL
ition; the feminine singular is l when followed by a vowel.
POSS.3FSG
The singular indefinite article derives from UNUS ‘one’: in
ˈsoe soˈrau̯le
general it is joiŋ (F ˈjoi n̯ a), which is historically a stressed
POSS.3FSG sisters
variant of what also appears in the form uŋ, an unstressed
‘his/her/their brother, ‘his/her/their brothers’,
variant; the principle for the distribution of the two forms is
‘his/her/their sister’, ‘his/her/their sister’
unclear:19
There is also a shorter (probably clitic) form of the first
(48) ju deˈkaja k el ˈfero joi ̯n prat gruo̯nd,
person singular possessive adjective, mi, apparently limited
I said that he was a priest great,
to nouns denoting close male relatives. In the same context,
uŋ viˈkuo̯r
both mi (or its variant me) and third person su may follow
a vicar
the noun:
‘I said he was a great priest, a vicar’
(53) el mi ˈtuo̯ta e la ˈmaja ˈni̯ena
There is a partitive construction comprising preposition
the my father and the my mother
de ‘of ’ + definite article: leˈvur de l gruŋ ‘to take some grain’.
‘my father and my mother’
There is a plural of the indefinite article using the originally
partitive construction de + definite article: de i bei ̯ su̯ald (54) mi feʎ or fel me
‘some nice money’. my son son my
Vegliote has a two-term system of demonstrative adjec- ‘my son [address form]’
tives (and corresponding pronouns), kost vs kol. The former
(55) ˈsia̯ nte ˈfrane mi
is apparently proximal (to the speaker), the latter non-
listen.IMP Frane my
proximal (cf. §54.1.1):
‘Listen, my Frane!’
(49) kost kuˈtjal me pluk de ple de kol (56) el ˈtuta su
this knife me= pleases of more than that the father their
‘I like this knife more than that one.’ ‘their father’
The system of possessive adjectives comprises terms cor- Possession, alienable and inalienable, is usually expressed
responding to first singular and plural, second singular and by the syntagm ‘NP + preposition de + NP’, where the first
plural, and third person (without distinction for number) noun denotes the entity ‘possessed’ and the second
possessors. They generally precede the noun but may follow the ‘possessor’. As elsewhere in Romance, the full range
it, and agree for number and gender in the same way as of semantic relationships expressed by this construction
ordinary adjectives. They are usually combined with a goes from literal ‘possession’ to associations of various
determiner. kinds:
(50) el ˈmajo oˈlivo, una ˈmaja ˈamia̯ , (57) la ˈluo̯na de le ˈpire

the.MSG my.MSG Olivo, a.MSG my.MSG friend the.MPL the wool of the sheep
i maiˈ̯ felʤi, le ˈmaje ˈfelʤe
(58) la ˈkuo̯ʦa de la ˈmaja ˈni̯ena
the.MPL my.MPL sons the.FPL my.FPL daughters
the house of the my mother
‘my Olivo, an aunt of mine, my sons, my daughters’
(59) la mu̯art de l su ˈtuo̯ta
19 the death of the his father
Before un, Udaina uses not the preposition in ‘in’, but int (int una
konpaˈnaja ‘in a group’). In his earlier testimonies (e.g. DD:col.148) he had
(60) ˈjoi ̯na pu̯art de l mu̯and
used int with the definite article as well (int el etc.). One is reminded of the
special use of într-un rather than **în un, in Romanian. a part of the world
133
MARTIN MAIDEN
It is impossible to get a really clear picture of variation in There are instances of pre-position, possibly influenced
adjective position in relation to the noun, or of the semantic by (Italian?) literary or bureaucratic formal style:
or other distinctions associated with prenominal vs post-
nominal positions. Vegliote does not appear to display the (71) el mi deˈfu̯ant ˈtuo̯ta
strong tendency for postposition of adjectives found in the my late father
Romanian and southern Italy (cf. §§8.5.1.1, 16.4.1). In gen-
eral, adjectives follow the noun: (72) l anˈtik veˈtruŋ disˈku̯ars
the ancient old speech
(61) ˈku̯alke ˈlaŋga foˈri̯ast
some language foreign Relative clauses are generally introduced by the re-
lativizer ke (sometimes ko) ‘who, which’ (invariant for
(62) ˈjoin̯ a ˈbesta salˈvutika gender and number). The relativizer is frequently (not
a beast wild obligatorily) followed by a clitic subject pronoun on
the verb marking the number and gender and also
The adjectives ‘good’, ‘beautiful’, ‘bad’, ‘big’, and ‘small’ case (cf. 77) of the antecedent. It also regularly occurs
tend to precede the noun:20 in combination with locative, temporal, and adverbial
relatives anˈdu ‘where’, kuo̯nd ‘when’, and kuŋ ‘how’.
(63) ˈjoin̯ a ˈbuna doŋ Note that ke alone can also express relative ‘where’,
a good woman ‘when’ (e.g. 76).
(64) ˈjoin̯ a ˈbi ̯ala ˈbesta
a fine beast (73) poˈtai̯te ajuˈtur ˈkosti ˈpoper ke i plaŋˈgua
can.2PL help.INF these poor REL they cry
(65) ri ti ̯anp
ˈsi ̯anpro ke i no aˈvas ˈnoʎa de ko manˈʧur
bad weather
always that they not have nothing of which eat.INF
(66) ˈjoin̯ a ˈmau̯ra ˈspai ̯sa ‘You can help these paupers who always complain
a big expense they have nothing to eat’
(67) ˈjoin̯ a ˈpela valiˈʧala (74) ˈkole ˈpitre ke join̯ a da fur
a little valley those stones REL one has PREP do.INF
da porˈtuo̯r le
Note the contrastive postposition in el pi a̯ s ˈpelo ‘the PREP carry.INF= them
little fish’ (DD§44), where ‘small’ fish are distinguished ‘Those stones that one has a job to carry.’
from ‘large’. The word veˈtruŋ ‘old’ occurs in both positions,
(75) aˈvai ̯me una siˈku̯ar ko no poˈtaim̯ e soporˈtuo̯r
but there are too few examples to be certain about the
we.have a drought REL not we.can tolerate.INF
significance of the distinction. The expressions ˈpoper
‘We have a drought we can’t stand.’
mai n̯ ‘poor me!’, ˈpoper di a̯ u̯l ‘poor devil!’ suggest that a
preposed form of this adjective means ‘deserving of sym- (76) kaˈnul ke ku̯ar la ˈjaku̯a
pathy’ (cf. Ledgeway 2011b:399). Quantifiers, including canal REL runs the water
ordinal numerals, precede the noun: ‘a canal where/in which the water runs’
(77) jal ke ge pluk de ple dorˈmar
(68) mu̯alt veŋ
he REL to.him= pleases more sleep.INF
much wine
‘he to whom it is more pleasing to sleep’
(69) ˈtuo̯nti ˈmi ̯ari di jain̯
(78) kuo̯nd ke ˈfero i veˈtruŋ viv
so.many thousands of years
when REL were the old alive
(70) la ˈprai ̯ma nu̯at e l ˈpraim
̯ o dai ̯ ‘when the old folk were alive’
the first night and the first day’
(79) joi ̯n baˈʦau̯n ke aˈvas la maˈʦok de soi̯s
a stick REL has the knob of up
anˈdu ke se klaˈpua ko le muŋ
where REL one grasps with the hands
20
Compare, however, joi̯n puoŋ grund ‘a big loaf ’, with postposed
adjective. Also ju jai̯ beˈvut [ . . . ] ˈjoi̯na skodeˈlau̯ta ˈmau̯ra de lat, lit. ‘I ‘a stick which has a knob at the top where one grasps
drank a bowl big of milk’. it with one’s hands’
134
DALMATIAN
9.5 Verbal group (86) l e kasˈkuo̯ta ˈtuo̯nta ˈjaku̯a

it is fallen.FSG so.much.FSG water.F
Vegliote possesses a system of verbal periphrases compris- ‘So much rain has fallen.’
ing auxiliary verb inflected for number and person and past (87) la ˈfero anˈduo̯ta
participle of the lexical verb. This construction provides the she is gone.FSG
past perfective form and is the sole construction having this ‘She went.’
function (the synthetic preterite tense form being virtually
extinct).21 With regard to the choice of the auxiliary, HAVE is (88) l e veˈnut kau̯k
overwhelmingly predominant and there appears to be no he is come.MSG here
context in which it cannot be used (80-84). A few verbs, ‘He came here.’
indicating change (or continuation) of state, or motion, such as
‘die’, ‘be born’, ‘stay’, ‘fall’, ‘go’, ‘come’, ‘pass’, ‘stay’, seem vari- In such constructions there may be agreement of past
ably to retain BE (85-88).22 In the following examples, ju, jai̯, ai̯, a, participles for number and gender with their direct object,
aˈvai̯me are forms of the verb HAVE, while e, ˈfero are forms of BE: but our capacity to observe this is hampered by deletion of
final vowels. Apparently the only example of agreement
(80) el siˈɲau̯r ˈadelmaŋ ju inpaˈrut la ˈlaŋga with a full direct object noun is:
the Mr Adelmann has learned the language
(89) el gu̯ab ju manˈʧute le ˈfaik̯ e
(81) li ai ̯ veˈdut fu̯ars dik ˈvu̯alte the hunchback has eaten.FPL the.FPL figs.F
them= I.have seen perhaps ten times
e daˈpu ju no li ai ̯ veˈdut ple The remaining examples come from Udaina’s testimony
and after I not them= I.have seen more to Ive (1886), and involve feminine singular direct object
‘I saw them perhaps ten times and then I never saw clitics:
them again.’
(82) ju a̯i stuo̯t iŋ abaˈʦi; ju jai ̯ foit (90) jal la jai ̯t ˈprai ̯sa, el la jai ̯t
I have been in Abbazia; I have been he it.F has taken. FSG he it.F= has
in arb; ju jai ̯ anˈduo̯t in arb; ju jai ̯ dzait̯ a inpeˈguo̯ta e la jai ̯t ˈʧuo̯lta ˈvaja
in Rab; I have gone to Rab I have gone to wrapped.FSG and it.FSG has taken.FSG away
kaiˈzol; jai ̯ anˈdut a l ˈplavnik ‘He took it, wrapped it, and removed it’
Caisole have gone to the Plavnik
‘I’ve been in Abbazia; I’ve been in Rab; I’ve gone to Asked whether he has had breakfast, Udaina replies si, ju
Rab; I’ve gone to Caisole; I’ve gone to Plavnik.’ jai ,̯ lit. ‘yes, I have’, in which the auxiliary is repeated
without the past participle (cf. Salvi 2011b:356).
(83) ju kasˈkut ˈtuo̯nta nia̯ v The passive is formed from auxiliary ‘be’ + past participle
has fallen so.much snow (91), although there are other devices for demoting the
‘So much snow has fallen.’ subject of a transitive verb, most prominently the use of a
(84) te se a taˈʎut third person clitic reflexive pronoun se. The reflexive clitic
you REFL= has cut se also has ‘indefinite subject’ value (i.e. ‘one’), in which case
‘You’ve cut yourself. ’ it may function as a subject pronoun of verbs taking direct
objects.
(85) l e resˈtut un ˈpelo orˈfan perˈko l
he= is remained a little orphan because he= (91) la ˈbarka ˈfero kariˈkuo̯ta
e mu̯art el ˈtuo̯ta e la ˈnie̯ na the.FSG boat is loaded.FSG
is died the father and the mother
‘He ended up a little orphan because his father and (92) le stal de l ʦil se vit
mother died.’ the stars of the sky REFL= see
‘The stars in the sky are seen.’
21
In principle, future tense auxiliaries and past tense auxiliaries in this
construction produce future perfect and pluperfect meanings respectively, There are few examples of causatives, but these follow a
but the effacement of morphological tense distinctions makes such uses widespread Romance pattern (cf. §61.3) using ‘do’ (fur) or
difficult to identify.
22
The data are too fragmentary to tell whether other parameters could be sometimes ‘let’ (laˈsur) + infinitive (with clitic climbing,
relevant, such as person (cf. §49.3). All examples of auxiliary BE are 3rd person. cf. 93):
135
MARTIN MAIDEN
(93) ti faʦ veˈder (102) la senˈtaja ri ti ̯anp la ˈjakwa perˈko

you= I.make see.INF it feels bad weather the water because
‘I make you see.’ ˈfero plain̯ el pu̯art
is full the harbour
(94) ˈfua meˈtuor ˈjoin̯ a su̯al ˈnau̯va ne la skirp
‘The water smells of bad weather because the
make.IMP put.INF a sole new in the shoe
harbour is full.’
‘Have a new sole put in the shoe!’
(95) la jai ̯ laˈsuo̯ta ˈfure There are a few cases of direct objects preceding verbs:24
her= I.have let.FSG do.INF
‘I let her do (so).’ (103) joi ̯n vu̯as ˈmau̯ro per i fiau̯r teˈnur ˈdrante
a vase big for the flowers keep.INF within
‘a big vase to keep flowers in’
9.6 The sentence (104) ju paˈkura dik duˈkat per saˈpuo̯r ˈkosta
I pay.COND ten ducats for know.INF this
Basic word order is Subject + Verb + Object (96, 97), although ˈlaŋ ga favˈlur
not rigidly so.23 Postverbal subject position is particularly language speak.INF
common with unaccusative verbs, or when the subject is ‘I’d give ten ducats to know how to speak this
presented as ‘new’ information (98-102). language.’
(96) la siˈɲau̯ra strasiˈnua per la (105) je kreˈdua ke aˈvait de ˈnosko laˈsuo̯t

the lady drags through the I thought that you.had something left
kal el su visˈti̯at ‘I thought you’d left something.’
street the her dress
‘The lady drags her dress along the street.’ Sentential negation is effected by placing a reflex of Latin
NON (no, nu, noŋ) immediately before the verb; only clitic
(97) daˈpu ju jai ̯ duo̯t ˈjoi ̯na zlep a l pronouns (including subject clitics) can intervene between
the I have given a slap to the negator and verb. This negator can also bear primary stress
ˈmajo ˈfrutro in the verbal group, in which case it is nau̯ŋ (note that in
my brother combination with the verb ‘be’, the latter almost always
‘Then I gave my brother a slap.’ takes the form e in the third person present):25
(98) ke veˈnaro el ˈtuo̯ta
that come.FUT the father (106) noŋ dimentiˈkuo̯te el veˈtruŋ uˈdain̯ a
‘for father will come.’ not forget.IMP the old Udaina
‘Don’t forget old Udaina!’
(99) ˈfero muo̯rt join̯ feʎ a l mi koʦaˈbrain̯
is died a son to the my cousin (107) ˈkosti pi ̯as ˈnau̯n e frie̯ sk
‘A son of my cousin’s has died.’ these fish not are fresh
‘These fish are not fresh.’
(100) tra di a duˈrut el fuo̯k
three days has lasted the fire Negative pronouns, quantifiers, and adverbs, such
‘The fire lasted three days.’ as ˈnoʎa, ˈni̯ante ‘nothing’, ˈnaŋka ‘not even’, ne . . . ne
(101) ju kasˈkut ˈtuo̯nta ni ̯av ‘neither . . . nor’, mui ̯ ‘never’, require the negator (noŋ etc.)
has fallen so.much snow before the verb. Unlike Italian, but like Romanian or French,
‘So much snow has fallen.’ this holds regardless of whether the negative pronoun or
adverb precedes or follows the verb:
24
In (105) the direct object is intercalated between auxiliary and past
23
Udaina freely uses left- (and right-) dislocation (usually with pronom- participle.
inal marking of a dislocated object): e.g. el pi̯as ˈpelo i lo meˈtua su le 25
Nau̯ŋ occurs throughout Udaina’s version of the Ten Commandments
gradeˈluote, lit. ‘the little fish they put it on the grills’. (Ive 1886).
136
DALMATIAN
(108) ˈni ̯ante no l ja det but examples (118) and (119) contain what are, at least
nothing not he has said historically, subjunctive subordinate verbs:27
‘He said nothing.’
(114) ju jai ̯ resˈpu̯ast ke ju noŋ
(109) ˈnaŋka join̯ de i̯ siˈɲau̯ri noŋ saˈpaja
I have answered that I not
not.even one of the gentlemen not knew
poˈtaja favˈlur iŋ slav
faˈvlur iŋ vekliˈsuŋ
can speak.INF in Slav
speak.INF in Vegliote
‘I replied that I could not speak Slav.’
‘Not one of the gentlemen could speak Vegliote.’
(115) ju vit ke veˈnaro la ˈkisa
‘No’ is na (vs se ‘yes’), but we also find it used once to I see that come.FUT the drizzle
negate an adverbial phrase (na ˈfenta ˈtara ‘not down to the ‘I see it’s going to drizzle.’
ground’). Note also the clausal uses of na and se: me pur de
(116) ju deˈkua k el deˈkaja a voi ̯
na/se, lit. ‘it seems to me of not/yes’, ‘it seems to me not/
I said that he say to you
so’. Negation of second person singular imperatives
‘I said that he should tell you.’
involves negator + infinitive, or (as in 110) negator + infini-
tive of stu ‘stand’ + infinitive:26 (117) ju vis da l barˈber k el me
I go to the barber that he to.me=
(110) no stu dorˈmur / kanˈtuo̯r / manˈʧur raˈzua la ˈbuo̯rba
not stand sleep.INF / sing.INF / eat.INF shave the beard
‘Don’t sleep/sing/eat!’
(118) aˈvai ̯me mia̯ s ˈdrante de l deˈfu̯ant ˈveskovi
we.have put inside of the late bishop
Modal verbs select infinitival complements (if the subject
feˈretiʧ ˈku̯atri ˈlitr i mi ̯as de ˈjoin̯ a mediˈʦiŋ
of the subordinate clause is coreferential with that of the
Feretić four litres and half of a medicine
modal), as do motion verbs. Note that infinitival comple-
a ku no l aˈvas da tuˈfuor
ments with poˈtuor ‘be able’ may be preceded by the prep-
to that not he had to stink.INF
osition a (and that this construction still allows clitic
‘We put into the late bishop Feretić four and a half
climbing).
litres of a medicine so that he should not stink.’
(111) ju no lo poˈtaja a soˈfrur (119) diˈkai ̯te ke l ˈviza
I not it= could PREP suffer say that he go
‘I couldn’t bear it.’ ‘Tell him to go!’
(112) jal ˈbule venˈdur toʧ perˈko la ˈʦua ˈni ̯ena
Vegliote did not have dedicated syntactic structures for
he wants sell.INF all because the his mother
interrogation. Yes/no questions were formally identical to
ˈblaja ke la venˈdua
assertions, although we may assume they were distin-
wants that it= sells
guished by intonation:
‘He wants to sell everything because his mother
wants him to sell it.’
(120) la ˈjalara ˈfero per manˈʧur
(113) el ʣai ̯ a ˈkuo̯ʦa sua kaˈtuo̯r la the ivy is for eat.INF
he goes to house her seek.INF her ‘Is ivy edible?’
‘He goes to her house to look for her.’
Examples of interrogative pronouns, adverbs, and adjec-
Finite subordinate clauses are usually introduced by the tives are ku ‘who, what?’, jo or anˈdu ‘where’, kuond ‘when?’,
complementizer k(e) or, (a ku ‘in order that’). One cannot kul ‘which?’:
easily talk of mood distinctions in subordinate clauses given
the wholesale effacement of morphological mood differences, (121) ku ˈjera ˈdrante
who was inside
‘Who was inside?’
26
In reciting the prohibitions of the Ten Commandments, Udaina (Ive
1886) has negator + infinitive four times, but also three plain imperatives
after negatives. Possibly the two types of negative imperative express an
27
aspectual difference. Cf. DD:§532 for old Ragusan.
137
MARTIN MAIDEN
(122) jo te ʣai ̯ (124) ke koˈraja ke aˈvas kol jom

where you go what courage that has that man
‘Where are you going?’ ‘What courage that man has!’
(125) kunt pi ̯as ke ju vi
(123) kuond ti ʣai ̯ in baˈʦalka
how.many fish that I see
when you go to church
‘How many fish I see!’
‘When do you go to church?’
(126) de ko ke toˈnaja
Exclamatives use the words for ‘how’, ‘which’, ‘what’ of what that it.thunders
followed by relativizer ke: ‘How it’s thundering!’
138
CHAPTER 10
Friulian
10.1 Introduction central or Dolomitic Ladin in a variegated area containing

some of the valleys located between South Tyrol, Trentino,
and the Bellunese area, and Friulian), several different
Friulian is spoken in the area corresponding to the north-
hypotheses have been put forward to account for their
eastern Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, which borders
common features. At the present stage of research, the
Austria to the north, Slovenia to the east, the Mediterranean
most plausible hypothesis seems to be that which considers
Sea to the south, and the Veneto region to the west (Map
these varieties as pertaining to ‘peripheral’ linguistic
10.1). The linguistic border between Friuli and the Veneto
areas, which as such have independently maintained
does not exactly coincide with the administrative border
linguistic stages once shared with all the other northern
between them: while in the northern and central areas the
Italian dialects. While the rest of northern Italy has gone
Venetan dialect penetrates into Friulian territory, in the
through successive innovations which have altered its dia-
southern area Friulian extends into the Veneto.
lectal shape, these same changes did not occur in the Ladin
A sociolinguistic survey carried out in the late 1990s
territories precisely because of the geographical and/or
(Picco 2001) reports that, in the area identified as Friulian-
historical-political-cultural isolation of these regions
speaking, speakers who regularly use Friulian amount to
(Francescato and Salimbeni 2004; Vanelli 2006).
57.2% of the population (c.430,000 speakers).
From a linguistic perspective, Friulian appears to be a
Friuli was originally inhabited mostly by the Carni, a
fairly unitary variety where the distinctive characteristics
Celtic tribe, and by the Veneti, while its Romanization
of its linguistic system are concerned. Nonetheless, internal
started with the foundation of Aquileia in 181 BC. Subse-
varieties can still be readily distinguished, the best-defined
quently the region was settled by the Longobards, who
of which have a geographical distribution closely corres-
established there the duchy of Friuli, which lasted from
ponding to the old Roman municipalities (subsequently
the sixth until the eighth century. The duchy was eventually
converted into dioceses). The Friulian-speaking area can
subsumed into the Holy Roman Empire as the patriarchate
thus be divided into the following subvarieties:
of Aquileia, which was ruled from the eleventh until the
fifteenth century by the bishops of Aquileia, mostly of 1. Central-eastern Friulian, spoken in the territory of the
German origin. In these centuries, Friuli was integrated diocese of Aquileia, which is the most widespread variety
into the feudal system of the empire; it thus remained and which has been adopted as a model for the written
isolated from the rest of Italy, where in the meanwhile the language, in both official and literary documents. Within
communes started to appear, a crucial event from both a this area, the most eastern area, where the Gorizian var-
socioeconomic and cultural point of view. In 1420 Friuli was ieties are spoken, has a special position.
annexed to the republic of Venice, and remained part of it 2. Northern or Carnic Friulian, the most conservative var-
until 1797, when it was ceded to Austria. After the wars of iety, spoken in the Alpine area in the north, which was
the Risorgimento and the First World War, Friuli was even- formerly dependent on the municipality of Iulium Carni-
tually integrated into Italy. cum (Zuglio).
The linguistic peculiarities of Friulian with respect to the 3. Western (or Concordiese) Friulian, corresponding to the
other dialects of northern Italy stand out by sharing in diocese of Concordia, spoken to the west of the river
phenomena common to a group of northern Romance var- Tagliamento, and representing the most innovative var-
ieties, which have been collectively named ‘Ladin’ or ‘Raeto- iety in a number of respects (given also the mutual
Romance’ (Ascoli 1873; Gartner 1883; cf. Chs 11 and 12). influence with the neighbouring Veneto; cf. Rizzolatti
Since the so-called Ladin varieties do not form a coherent 1996).
and unitary group, but are scattered over a discontinuous For each of these major areas, further internal distinc-
territory (Romansh in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, tions can be identified (Francescato 1966:91-125; Frau 1989).
This chapter © Paola Benincà and Laura Vanelli 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 139
Pontebba Tarvisio
Ampezzo Tolmezzo
Tag
li a m ento
Gemona
Tarcento
Me
Maniago
dum
S. Daniele
a
ento
Cividale
Spilimbergo
Tagliam
Udine
Natisone
Sacile
Pordenone Codroipo
Gorizia
S. Vito
al Tagliamento Palmanova nzo
Iso
Monfalcone
Latisana Marano Lagunare
0 200 400 miles
0 300 600 km Marano

Lagoon
Grado
Lagoon
Lignano
Carnic Friulian Grado Trieste
Western Friulian Adri a ti c Sea
Muggia
Eastern Central Friulian
Map 10.1 Varieties of Friulian
10.2 Phonology /i/ /u/

/e/ /o/
/ɛ/ /ɔ/
10.2.1 Vowel system
/a/
10.2.1.1 Stressed vowels
The phonological system of Friulian stressed vowels consists of As for the corresponding long vowels, long low mid
two distinct series of short and long vowels. The short vowels vowels are not part of the system (except for some rare
are the same as in Italian, and are distributed as follows:1 cases), given the general tendency to pronounce long mid
vowels as high mid (hence, the presence of minimal word
1
The distribution of high and low mid vowels depends on the local pairs in which short low mid vowels are opposed to long
pronunciations; but in general, minimal pairs are extremely rare. high mid vowels, as in [peːs] ‘weight’ vs [pɛs] ‘fish’, or [poːk]
140
FRIULIAN
‘little’ vs [pɔk] ‘stalk, stem’). Friulian long vowels are thus spoken Latin: long vowels originated in what Francescato
the following: /aː/, /iː/, /eː/, /uː/, /oː/. On the phonetic (1966:130-43) has called ‘strong positions’, as opposed to
characterization of Friulian vowels, see Finco (2007). those contexts in which no lengthening occurs, i.e. ‘weak
While phonologically short vowels can be found in every positions’. From a historical point of view, lengthening
context, long vowels are limited to some specific phono- takes place in those vowels which originally occurred in
logical environments, i.e. they can be found only in final an open syllable in Latin, and have come to occur in a single-
closed syllables with a single-consonant coda: [riːt] ‘he coda closed final syllable in Friulian as a result of the loss of
laughs’, [fuːk] ‘fire’, [canˈtaːt] ‘sung’, [goˈloːs] ‘glutton final unstressed vowels other than ‑A, e.g. CANTATU(M) > [can
(ous)’, [neːf] ‘snow’. When the final consonant is a (non- ˈtaːt] ‘sung’, NĬUE(M) > [neːf] ‘snow’, ACĒTU(M) > [aˈze.t] ‘vin-
affricate) obstruent,2 the presence of either a short or a long egar’, CRŬCE(M) > [kroːs] ‘cross’, UŌCE(M) > [voːs] ‘voice’). Note
vowel gives rise to contrastive oppositions, as in [laːt] ‘gone’ that the lengthening of Ĕ and Ŏ—short vowels in Classical
vs [lat] ‘milk’, [paːs] ‘peace’ vs [pas] ‘step, pace’, [luːs] ‘light’ Latin, low mid vowels in spoken Latin—is accompanied also
vs [lus] ‘luxury’, [bruːt] ‘broth’ vs [brut] ‘ugly’ (see Baroni by raising to [iː] and [uː], as in DĔCE(M) > [diːs] ‘ten’, PĔDE(M) >
and Vanelli 2000 and Vanelli 2005:ch. 8, for a review of the [piːt] ‘foot’, NŎUE(M) > [nuːf] ‘nine’, FŎCU(M) > [fuːk] ‘fire’. Hence,
rich literature on the topic; see also Francescato 1966; these vowels have the same evolution as Ī and Ū, cf. UĪUU(M) >
Hualde 1990; Repetti 1992; 1994). [viːf] ‘alive’, CRŪDU(M) > [kruːt] ‘raw’. In ‘weak positions’, i.e. in
From a phonological perspective, the most relevant fact Latin closed syllables or in Friulian open syllables, vowels are
is that the occurrence of long vowels is totally predictable phonologically short (SĬCCU(M) > [sek] ‘dry’, CANTATA(M) > [can
from the surrounding context. Specifically, when a word ˈtade] ‘sung.FSG’, UĪUA(M) > [ˈvive] ‘alive.FSG’); however, it should
presents V:C#, the non-final postvocalic obstruent in all its also be noted that low mid vowels < Ĕ and Ŏ have had a
morphophonologically related forms is always voiced: peculiar development in weak positions as they underwent
[ˈlaːt]/[ˈlade] ‘gone.MSG/FSG’, [ˈluːs]/[luˈzoːr] ‘light/glimmer’, diphthongization into [je] and [we] respectively (cf. Ch. 38):
[ˈpeːs]/[peˈza] ‘weight/weigh.INF’, [ˈneːf]/[neveˈa] ‘snow/ e.g. SĔPTE(M) > [sjet] ‘seven’, MĔDICU(M) > [ˈmjedi] ‘doctor’; SCHŎLA(M) >
snow.INF’. By contrast, if a word presents VC#, the non- [ˈskwele] ‘school’, ŎS(SUM) > [wes] ‘bone’.
final obstruent in all its morphophonological related A distinction between vowels in strong vs weak position
forms is always voiceless: [lat]/[laˈta] ‘milk/breastfeed.INF’, is present throughout the Friulian area, although these
[mat]/[ˈmate] ‘mad.MSG/FSG’, [pas]/[paˈsa] ‘step/pass.INF’, vowels may undergo different developments in the different
[mɛt]/[ˈmɛti] ‘I put/put.INF’, [sɛk]/[ˈsɛce] ‘dry.MSG/FSG’, varieties. In particular, Carnic Friulian presents the falling
[rɔs]/[‘rɔse] ‘red.MSG/FSG’. diphthongs [ej] and [ow] instead of the expected [eː] and
Thus the occurrence of a long vowel is to be understood [oː]; in Gorizian and western Friulian, long vowels are no
in relation to its proximity to a final devoiced voiced con- longer part of the system, but a distinction between vowels
sonant (cf. §10.2.2). Starting from the observation that in strong and weak position is still detectable in the out-
vowels are phonetically longer before voiced consonants comes of mid vowels: in Gorizian, for instance, Ĕ and Ŏ have
than before voiceless ones (a phenomenon occurring also developed into [i] and [u] in strong positions, and into [je]
word-internally, where the different vowel length is simply and [we] in weak positions. Similarly, western Friulian neu-
allophonic, cf. the stressed -a in [ˈdade] ‘given.PTCP’ which is tralizes the developments of high mid and low mid vowels
longer than the -a in [ˈdate] ‘date’), the further vowel with the diphthongs [ej] and [ow] in strong positions (e.g.
lengthening in final devoicing contexts is to be thought of [pejt] ‘foot’ < PĔDE(M) and [nejf] ‘snow’ < NĬUE(M), [fowk] < FŎCU(M)
as a sort of compensatory process for the devoicing of the ‘fire’, and [vows] ‘voice’ < UŌCE(M)).
final consonant, in the sense that the neutralization of
the voiced/voiceless opposition in final consonants triggers
the phonologization of the short/long opposition in tonic
10.2.1.2 Unstressed vowels
vowels (see Baroni and Vanelli 1999; Vanelli 2005:ch. 8).
Diachronically, the origin and the peculiar distribution of The Friulian unstressed vowel system consists of five short
long vowels results from an innovation in the Friulian vowel vowels, since the distinction between high mid vowels and
system with respect to the original tonic vowel system of low mid vowels has been levelled in favour of high mid
vowels. As regards their distribution, diachronic processes
2
When followed by an affricate or a nasal, the vowel is always short
have largely limited the occurrences of vowels in word-final
([mjetʃ] ‘middle’, [pots] ‘well’, [maŋ] ‘hand’, [bɔŋ] ‘good’), while the vowel is position. As generally happens in the Gallo-Romance area
usually long ([caːr], ‘dear; cart; meat’ if followed by a vibrant. Finally, before and in particular in the dialects of northern Italy (except for
laterals, the length of the vowel varies from variety to variety, although a
general tendency towards lengthening is clearly identifiable ([ɟaːl] ‘cock’,
the majority of Venetan dialects, cf. §13.2.2), Latin
[maːl] ‘evil’). unstressed final vowels other than -A are lost in Friulian,
141
Table 10.1 Inventory of Friulian consonants

BILABIAL LABIODENTAL DENTAL ALVEOLAR POSTALVEOLAR PALATAL VELAR LABIOVELAR
Plosive /p/ /b/ /t/ /d/ /c//ɟ/ /k/ /g/

Fricative /f/ /v/ /s/ /z/a
Affricate /ʦ/ /ʣ/ /ʧ/ /ʤ/
Approximant /j/ /w/
Nasal /m/ /n/ /ɲ/
Trill /r/
Lateral /l/
a
In a larger area of Carnia and of Central Friuli (except for the city of Udine and surrounding areas) the fricative class also
includes post-alveolars /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ (see §9.3.2.1.).
hence UNU(M) > [uŋ] ‘one’, OCTO > [vɔt] ‘eight’, DECE(M) > [diːs] As for non-final unstressed vowels, it should be noticed that
‘ten’, UIGINTI > [vinc] ‘twenty’. many Friulian varieties present a process of ‘vowel harmony’
In most Friulian varieties, Latin unstressed final -A has raising pretonic mid vowels to [i] and [u] in the presence of a
developed into -e (e.g. UNA(M) > [ˈune] ‘one.FSG’, PORTA(M) > high tonic vowel. The following examples show how the
[ˈpwarte] ‘door’, canta(t) > [ˈcante] ‘he sings’, CANTATA(M) > assimilatory process affects the height of underlying (tonic)
[canˈtade] ‘sung.FSG’); western and eastern Friulian, partly mid vowels when these become unstressed through the add-
Carnic Friulian and some southern varieties present the ition of stressed diminutive suffixes like -ìn(e) and ‑ùt(e), while
form -a, while -o (the most attested outcome in old Friulian, they remain unchanged if the suffix is -àt(e), -ét(e), -òn(e): for
subsequently lost and replaced by -e or -a) is still retained in instance from [ˈbɛstje] ‘beast’ one finds [bistiˈute], but [beste
some isolated varieties of Carnia and of the western part of ˈate], from [ˈkɔtule] ‘skirt’ > [kutuˈliŋ], but [kotoˈlate], from
the region. [ˈzbrendul] ‘rag’ > [zbrinduˈlut], but [zbrendoˈloŋ], from
Beside -e (which, as will be shown in §§10.3 and 10.3.2.2, [ˈskɔve] ‘broom’ > [skuˈvute], but [skoˈvet]. Yet, when a low
has become a morphological ending in both the nominal vowel intervenes between the unstressed mid vowel and the
and verbal domains), one may also encounter a word-final tonic high vowel, raising is blocked: from [boˈkaːl] ‘jug’ one
-i, whose origin may be: finds [bokaˈlut], from [ˈpɛvar] ‘pepper’ > [pevaˈriŋ].
(a) etymological when it is the result of raising to -i of a front
mid vowel or of a low post-tonic vowel occurring in final
position because of the loss of a postvocalic consonant,
10.2.2 Consonant system
namely in (i) the development of words ending in -ĬCU(M),
-ACU(M), e.g. [ˈmjedi] ‘doctor’ < MEDĬCU(M), [ˈstɔmi] ‘stom- The phonological system of Friulian presents only simple
ach’< STOMACHU(M), where final -k has been lost; and (ii), in consonants since, like the other dialects of northern Italy,
rhizotonic II conjugation infinitives, e.g. [ˈpjerdi] ‘lose.INF’ Friulian shows degemination of Latin geminate consonants,
< PERDĔRE, in which the final -r has fallen (cf. §10.3.2). which by contrast are still preserved in Italian and in
central-southern varieties (see §§14.2.2, 15.2.1.2, 16.2.2).
Final -i is not etymological in the following cases:
Table 10.1 summarizes the inventory of Friulian consonants
(b) when it occurs as an epenthetic vowel in those words in (from Finco 2007:55).
which the loss of the final unstressed vowel has left a A distinctive characteristic of the Friulian consonant sys-
final syllable with a complex coda formed by an obstru- tem is the presence of the palatal stops /c/ and /ɟ/, which
ent + a sonorant (l and r). Such a complex coda violates originated through a process of palatalization affecting the
the constraints imposed by the syllabic ‘sonority hier- Friulian velar consonant before -A (arguably a front, or in
archy’, and so a syllabic nucleus must be restored, as in any case a [–back] V) in initial or postconsonant position
[ˈdopli] ‘double’, [ˈmagri] ‘thin’. (see below for postvocalic palatalization). The fact that such
(c) when final -i is the inflectional ending for the first a phenomenon is present today not only in Friulian but also
person singular of the present indicative of the first in other so-called Ladin (cf. §11.3.2) varieties and in a num-
conjugation ([ˈcanti] ‘I.sing’), the imperfect indicative ber of Raeto-Romance varieties of Graubünden has led
([canˈtavi] ‘I.sang’), and the present subjunctive of all scholars to interpret it as a distinctive feature of the Ladin
conjugations ([ˈcanti] ‘I.sing’, [ˈtazi] ‘I.shut.up’, [ˈpjerdi] ‘type’ as opposed to the other northern dialects. However,
‘I.lose’, [‘dwarmi] ‘I.sleep; see §10.3.2.2). more in-depth studies lend support to the hypothesis that
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FRIULIAN
palatalization is not to be thought of as a phenomenon As regards sonorants, modern Friulian has an alveolar trill
originally distinguishing Friulian from the rest of the north- /r/ and an alveolar lateral /l/. It is possible to hypothesize
ern Italian vernaculars, but rather as an ‘endemic’ charac- also a palatal alveolar /ʎ/ for old Friulian which, from the
teristic of the whole Cisalpine region (see Pellegrini 1991; sixteenth century onwards, was replaced by /j/, subsequently
Videsott 2001; Francescato and Salimbeni 2004; Zamboni reduced to Ø in specific contexts (see above for the various
2004; Vanelli 2006). origins of /j/): FAMĬLIA(M) > [faˈmee] ‘family’ (OFrl. fameglo (gl =
Here are some examples of word-initial and postconso- [ʎ])). Unlike the dialects of northern Italy in which the -l- of
nant palatalization (note that final -A > -e): [ˈcaze] ‘house’, Latin consonant clusters obstruent + l becomes a palatal, the
‘[ˈmɔsce] ‘fly’, [ˈblance] ‘white.FSG’, [calˈca] ‘limestone’, [ɟat] Friulian reflexes of these clusters retain the original lateral
‘cat’, [ˈlunɟe] ‘long.FSG’, [ˈlarɟe] ‘large.FSG’. Palatalization has feature: FLORE(M) > [floːr] ‘fiower’, CLAUE(M)S > [klaːf] ‘key’.
also targeted those cases with an original geminate velar The nasal phonemes of Friulian are the labial /m/, the
consonant which subsequently underwent degemination: alveolar /n/, and the palatal /ɲ/. Their opposition, however,
BŬCCA > [ˈbɔce] ‘mouth’, SĬCCA > [ˈsece] ‘dry.FSG’.
3
is neutralized not only in preconsonant position, where the
As shown in Table 10.1, obstruents are either voiced or nasal assimilates to the place of articulation of the following
voiceless, yet in word-final position only voiceless obstru- consonant ([camp] ‘field’, [sgloɱf] ‘swollen’, [taɲc] ‘much.M’,
ents are found, since a synchronically productive process of [foŋk] ‘mushroom’), but also in word-final position, where
devoicing operates in Friulian—a rule commonly also found the nasal is usually realized as a velar: [maŋ] ‘hand’ vs [mani
in many Gallo-Romance varieties, e.g. [neveˈa] ‘snow.INF’ vs ˈa] ‘to handle’. In some cases, not only is the nasal palatal [ɲ]
[neːf ] ‘snow’, [ˈcalde] ‘hot.FSG’ vs [calt] ‘hot.MSG’. realized as a velar but its [palatal] and [nasal] features are
Voiced consonants are often the result of a diachronic ‘split’ into two distinct segments (see Calabrese 2005:135-49):
phonological process common to all northern Italian dia- the palatal feature surfaces as /j/ while the nasal feature is
lects, namely, intervocalic stop lenition (cf. §§13.2.2, 25.2.5). realized as a /ŋ/, e.g. [pujŋ] ‘fist’ vs [puˈɲa] ‘punch.INF’.
In such a context, weakening has different outcomes depend- The tendency towards final nasal weakening is contrasted
ing on the type of consonant it affects: as regards stops, by a typical Friulian phenomenon consisting of the inser-
voiceless dentals become voiced (e.g. MATURU(M) > [maˈduːr] tion of an epenthetic consonant after the nasal with the
‘ripe’), while voiced plosives remain voiced (RIDERE > [ˈridi] ‘to effect of preserving its nasal articulation. The epenthetic
laugh’); labials become voiced fricatives, as in CAPĬLLI > [caˈvej] consonant can have the same place of articulation as the
‘hair’ (see also the labio-dental fricative -f- > -v-, SCROFA > underlying nasal as in [saˈlamp] ‘salami’, [omp] ‘man’, [leɲc]
[ˈskrɔve] ‘sow’). Velars need to be dealt with separately ‘wood’, [ˈzovint] ‘young’, or as the surface velar nasal, e.g.
since they underwent two distinct developments: when fol- [straŋk] ‘hay’, [fluŋk] ‘river’. The process of consonant epen-
lowed by a vowel other than -a, they are usually dropped, as thesis is widespread throughout the Friulian area; but its
in SECUNDU(M) > [seˈont] ‘second/according to’, while, if they degree of application varies across the different varieties,
are followed by -a, lenition leads to palatalization, so that the and even within the same variety this phenomenon can be
outcome is [j] (which at times can be reduced to Ø), as in lexically determined, as it is possible to find [saˈlamp]
IOCARE > [ʤuˈja] ‘to play’, AMICA(M) > [aˈmie] ‘girlfriend’, FAGARIU ‘salami’, but [oŋ] ‘man’ (Tuttle 1992; Heinemann 2002).
(M] > [faˈjaːr] ‘beech’, LEGARE [leˈa] ‘to tie’.
The segment [j] (which sometimes > Ø) is attested also as
an outcome of prevocalic -GI, -GE, e.g. ARRŬGIA(M) > [ˈro(j)e]
‘irrigation ditch’. The corresponding voiced -CI, -CE also under-
went palatalization and lenition, developing into /z/ː
10.3 Morphology
ACETU(M) > [aˈzeːt] ‘vinegar’, COCINA(M)> [kuˈzine] ‘kitchen’
(word-final /z/ is devoiced to [s] when the final vowel is 10.3.1 Inflectional morphology of nominal
lost: cf. CRUCE(M) > [kroːs] ‘cross’).4 But, in non-final post-tonic categories
syllables, -CI- develops into -j, as in FRACĬDU(M) > [frajt]
‘rotten.MSG’. In Friulian, nouns and adjectives inflect for gender (mascu-
line and feminine) and for number (singular and plural).
Most of the masculine singular forms have no desinence, so
3
The palatal obstruents are maintained in Carnia and in most of the that the word coincides with the lexical morpheme. In the
central area, but have been replaced by the post-alveolar affricates [ʧ] and vast majority of cases, words (nouns and adjectives) end in a
[ʤ] in western, eastern, and southern varieties, as well as in the city of consonant: [caŋ] ‘dog’, [frut] ‘child’, [arˈmaːr] ‘wardrobe’.
Udine.
4
In the varieties with post-alveolar fricatives, the outcomes are /ʒ/ and Feminine forms are normally formed by adding -e to the
/ʃ/: [aˈʒeːt] ‘vinegar’, [diːʃ] ‘says’. lexical morpheme: [ˈcaze] ‘house’, [ˈfrute] ‘child, girl’,
143
[ˈbjɛle] ‘nice.FSG’. In western and eastern Friulian, partly in Friulian also presents some differences in vowel alterna-
Carnic Friulian, and in a number of southern varieties, the tions between singular and plural forms of feminine words,
feminine morpheme is -a, while in some isolated areas of where the only permanent feature is the fact that the vowel
Carnia and the western region, the F morpheme is -o (cf. of the plural is always higher than (or at least at the same
§10.2.1.2 and Francescato 1966:41-3). level as) the vowel of the singular. In particular, (a), -o/-os,
There are nonetheless some feminine nouns ending in a -a/-as are found in some isolated varieties of Carnia; (b) in
consonant which derive from the Latin third declension. In the central area -e/-es, -a/-as are variously present; (c) in
such cases, the gender may be signalled through agreement the varieties of the west and of the Gorizian area, one finds
phenomena in the clause: [voːs] ‘voice’, [pjel] ‘skin’, [suːr] ‘sister’. -a/-is (cf. Francescato 1966:74-8).
Masculine words ending in a vowel are rare, in particular: While the sigmatic plural is the unmarked form and
(a) -ì, [aˈmi] ‘friend.M’, [fi] ‘son’ (F [aˈmie] ‘girlfriend’, [‘fie] definitely the most widespread, there is another strategy
‘daugther’); (b) -i, [salˈvadi] ‘wild.MSG’, [ˈlami] ‘insipid.MSG’ for plural formation: so-called ‘palatal plurals’ (Benincà and
(F [salˈvadje], [‘lamje]); [ˈmestri] ‘teacher.MSG’ (F [ˈmestre]), Vanelli 1978; Vanelli 2010a). This type of plural formation
cf. §10.2.1.2; (c) -e ([poˈɛte] ‘poet’, [ˈbarbe] ‘uncle’). is subject to phonological, morphological, and lexical
Adjectives generally belong to the unmarked class with a constraints: it is found for instance with a closed class
masculine ending Ø and a feminine ending -e, even when of masculine words whose phonological representation
deriving from the Latin second class, which did not mark ends in an alveolar consonant (except for -r), i.e. in -t/-d,
gender, e.g. [grant]/[ˈgrande] ‘big.M/F’, [ˈzɔviŋ]/[ˈzɔvine] -n, -s/–z, -l. The plural is formed by replacing the alveolar
‘young.M/F’. A number of adjectives remain uninflected, consonant with a palatal (or palato-alveolar) segment,
mainly adjectives of learnèd origin ending in -l and -r, namely [c] (or [ʧ]; cf. §10.2.2), [ɲ], [ʃ], [j].6 Some examples
which passed into Friulian as loanwords from Italian (as of palatal plurals are: [dut]/[duc] ‘all.MSG/PL’, [kest]/[kesc]
will be shown, adjectives in -l are indeed differentiated in ‘this/these’, [grant]/[granc] ‘big.MSG/PL’, [boŋ] (</bon/, cf.
the plural): [komuˈna:l] ‘communal’, [reguˈlar] ‘regular’. §10.2.2) /[boɲ] ‘good.MSG/PL’, [aŋ] (</an/)/[aɲ] ‘year/-s’;
In some cases, the M Ø / F -e alternation is also accom- [naːs]/[naːʃ] ‘nose/-s’, [fuːs]/[fuːʃ] ‘spindle/-s’, [caˈval]/[ca
panied by some other differences in the lexical morpheme ˈvaj] ‘horse/-s’, [bjel]/[bjej] ‘nice.MSG/PL’.
which derive from the synchronic and diachronic applica- In some central Friulian varieties, including those spoken
tion of the typical phonological processes of Friulian (see in the city of Udine and in the neighbouring areas extending
§10.2.2). Specifically: southward (together with the whole of western and eastern
Friulian), in which the palatal-alveolar sibilant [ʃ] is not
(a) M – voiceless C#/ F – voiced C +e#: [morˈoːs]/[morˈoze]
present, words ending in [s] show no distinction between
‘boyfriend/girlfriend’, [calt]/[ˈcalde] ‘hot.M/FSG’.
singular and plural: for instance, [na:s] is both singular and
(b) M – [k]#/ F – [ce] # or – [ ɟe] #: [sek]/[ˈsece] ˈdry. M/FSGˈ, [blaŋk]/
plural (cf. Benincà and Vanelli 1978:269f.). Note also that
[ˈblance] ‘white.M/F.SG’, [lark]/[ˈlarɟe] ‘wide. M/FSG’.
most central Friulian varieties have replaced the forms
(c) M – V:r#/ F – Vrje: [maˈsaːr]/[maˈsarje] ‘colonist settler/
[boɲ] and [aɲ] with the innovative [bojns] and [ajns],
housemaid’, [forˈnaːr]/[forˈnarje] ‘baker. M/FSG’.
which result from two distinct processes: (1) breaking of
The unmarked strategy for plural formation is to add the [ɲ] into two segments, [jŋ], where [j] carries the palatal
ending -s to the singular form (cf. also Ch. 42). In the words feature and [ŋ] the nasal ([bojŋ] and [ajŋ] are indeed
ending in -e (generally feminine), the addition of -s is attested in some varieties); (2) addition of the plural suffix
accompanied in most varieties by raising of singular -e- to -s, thus marking [bojns] and [ajns] ‘twice’ for plural.
-i-: [fuːk]/[fuːks] ‘fire/-s’, [blaŋk]/[blaŋks] ‘white.MSG/PL’, As already noted, palatal plurals are only found with a
[kwarp]/[kwarps] ‘body/-ies’, [arˈmaːr]/[arˈmaːrs] ‘ward- closed class of words: [aŋ]/[aɲ] ‘year/-s’ but [furlˈaŋ]/[furl
robe/-s’, [loːf]/[loːfs] ‘wolf/-ves’, [caŋ]/[cans] ‘dog/-s’,
[mat]/[maʦ] ‘mad man/men’,5 [salˈvadi]/[salˈvadis] ‘wild.
MSG/PL’, [maŋ]/[mans] ‘hand/-s’, [pjel]/[pjels] ‘leather/-s’, 6
The forms ending in lateral [l] are not pluralized through the replace-
[suːr]/[suːrs] ‘sister/-s’, [ˈmestri]/[ ˈmestris] ‘teacher/-s’, ment of -l with the corresponding palatal [ʎ] (as is the case with the other
[ˈneri]/[ ˈneris] ’black. MSG/PL’, [ˈcase]/[ˈcasis] ‘house/-s’, consonants), but through the replacement with the palatal semivowel [j].
[ˈbjɛle]/[ ˈbjɛlis] ‘nice.FSG/PL’, [salˈvadje]/[salˈvadijs] ‘wild. Since [ʎ] is not part of the phonetic inventory of modern Friulian, the
presence of -j can be accounted for by considering it the final result of a
FSG/PL’. process which can be called a ‘repair strategy’ (Calabrese 2005), a process
eliminating segments not allowed by the phonological inventory of a given
language. Such an account is also supported diachronically, since it should
5
In most central Friulian varieties, though, the alveolar affricate of the be remembered that old Friulian, whose system did include [ʎ], had palatal
plural has been reduced to -s, hence [mat]/[mas] ‘mad.MSG/PL’, [ɲɔt] /[ɲɔs] plurals like magl [maʎ] ‘evils’, piçugl [ˈpiʦuʎ] ‘little ones’ (Benincà and
‘night/-s’ (see §10.2.2). Vanelli 1998a:67).
144
FRIULIAN
ˈans] ‘Friulian/-s’, [dut]/[duc] ‘all.MSG/PL’ but [mat]/[maʦ] In addition to the pronouns illustrated so far, there are
‘mad.MSG/PL’. also reflexive free pronouns, which have a specific form,
It is nonetheless productive in two word classes: (a) with [sɛ], only for the third person singular (with no gender
masculine words in -l, particularly in loanword adjectives distinction). In the other persons, reflexive pronouns have
from Italian, which present the same singular form in both the same form as the non-reflexive accusative ones.
masculine and feminine but different forms in the plural, As regards clitic pronouns, Friulian is in line with the
MPL in -j and FSG in -s, e.g. [komuˈnaːl] both masculine and dialects of northern Italy in presenting, besides accusative
feminine singular but MPL [komuˈnaj] and FPL [komuˈnaːls]; and dative clitics, also a complete series of nominative
(b) masculine words in -st, like [trist]/[trisc] ‘bad.MSG/PL’, clitics used as subjects (see Vanelli 1984a; Benincà and
[kest]/[kesc] ‘this.M/these.M’, [arˈtist]/[arˈtisc] ‘artist/-s’. Vanelli 1984; and §10.4.2; for a history of subject pronouns
From a diachronic perspective, palatal plurals are recon- in Friulian and in the dialects of northern Italy, see Vanelli
structed through the palatalization of alveolar consonants 1987).
triggered by the nominative plural ending -I of the Latin (or The series of clitic pronouns also includes: reflexive clit-
proto-Romance) second declension (hence, what synchron- ics used as direct and indirect objects, an impersonal clitic,
ically forms a lexical class, was diachronically a grammat- used when the subject has a generic, indeterminate, or
ical class). passive interpretation (cf. Yamamoto 1993); and lastly, a
The co-occurrence of the two types of plural also allows partitive clitic. A locative-existential clitic (the equivalent
for the reconstruction in old Friulian of an old two-case of It. ci/vi ‘there’) is not part of the Friulian system (at
declension, similar to that attested for French and Occitan least of central Friulian): [al e poːk lat] lit. ‘SCL is little milk
(cf. Benincà and Vanelli 1978 and1998b; Maiden 2000b). (= there isn’t much milk)’.
More specifically, if the nominative ending -I is the trigger Table 10.2 lists the proclitics of Friulian. In enclisis, some
of palatal plurals, the sigmatic plural derives from the pronouns have a different form, in particular, the accusative
accusative (-AS for the first declension, -OS for the second, enclitic for 3 FSG is le ( [la ˈpwarti jo] ‘I bring her’ vs [ˈpwarti
and -ES for the third). Thus, at least for those nouns which le tu] ‘you bring her!’). The nominative enclitic for 3PL is o,
belonged to the second declension of Latin, Friulian bears for instance [a ˈcantiŋ] ‘they sing’ vs [ˈcantin o?] ‘do they
traces of the reflexes of both nominative and accusative. sing?’) (see §10.4.2).
As regards dative clitics, the colloquial language usually
replaces ur (< Lat. ĬLLŌRUM) with the SG form i (ɟi).
In various Friulian varieties clitics may also present for-
10.3.1.1 Personal pronouns
mal variants, and such variation is especially rich in the
As generally happens in Romance, Friulian too presents two series of nominative clitics. Generally, the forms for the first
series of personal pronouns: a series of free and tonic singular and first and second plural are the same, but in a
pronouns (cf. Ch. 44), and a series of unstressed clitics (cf. number of varieties, especially in the east, these have the
Chs 45, 47, 48), whose syntactic distribution is treated in form [i] (in some variety [a] is also found), while in the west,
§10.4.2. the 2SG clitic is [ti]. One may also encounter [a] for the third
However, unlike most dialects of northern Italy (cf. singular clitic, and [e] for the third plural. In some other
Ch. 13), which normally have one single free pronominal varieties still, there is also a non-referential clitic [a] used
form per grammatical person, used for all grammatical with weather verbs and impersonal verbs (cf. §10.4.2).
functions, and unlike Italian, which distinguishes in first
and second person singular between nominative io and tu
and oblique me and te, Friulian presents three distinct forms
for first and second singular, differentiated for case: nom- Table 10.2 Friulian clitic forms
inative [jo] and [tu] (subjects), dative [mi] and [ti] (indirect SINGULAR PLURAL
objects governed by the preposition a ‘to’, e.g. [mi daˈraŋ alk
a mi]/[ti daˈraŋ alk a ti]) ‘they will give something to me/to 1 2 3 1 2 3
you’); and accusative [mɛ] and [tɛ] (for direct objects and NOM o tu al (M), e (F) o o a
objects of prepositions other than dative a ‘to’, e.g. > [al a ACC mi ti lu (M)/la (F) nus us ju (M)/lis (F)
saluˈdaːt ˈdome mɛ/tɛ] ‘He just greeted me/you’, [al a fat dut DAT mi ti i (ɟi) nus us i (ur)
par mɛ/tɛ] ‘He did everything for me/you’). REFL mi ti si si si si
Other grammatical persons do not show such variants for
IMPERS si
case: 3SG M luj/F je, 1PL no, 2PL vwˈaltris (most common)/vo
PART (a)nd
(used as an address form), 3PL loːr.
145
10.3.2 Inflectional morphology of the verb perfect has been replaced in all its uses by the analytic
perfect (passato prossimo), which, like the pluperfect and
future perfect, is formed by a verb periphrasis consisting
Friulian verbs present three inflectional classes or conjuga-
of auxiliary [ve] ‘have’ or [ˈjesi] ‘be’ plus the past participle
tions which are distinguished by thematic vowel: a for first-
(cf. also §49.3). Friulian also displays some surcomposé tenses
conjugation ([klaˈma] ‘to call’), e for second-conjugation
(made up of an analytical inflected form of auxiliary vé and
([taˈze] ‘to shut up’), and i for third-conjugation [sinˈti] ‘to
the past participle of the lexical verb (auxiliary jessi ‘be’may
feel/hear’).
be found but very rarely and only in some varieties): [o ai
Thematic vowels surface only in some forms of the para-
vuːt klaˈmaːt] ] [o ves vuːt klaˈmaːt] lit. ‘I have had called’, ‘I
digm, namely, (a) in the second person plural of the present
had had called’. These tense forms are rarely used anaphor-
indicative, the present subjunctive, and the imperative: [kla
ically, to refer to some point anterior to a reference point
ˈmajs], [taˈzejs]/[taˈzeːs], [sinˈtiːs] (IND/SBJV); [klaˈmajt], [ta
retrievable from the discourse (cf. Poletto 2009; Marcato
ˈzejt]/[taˈzeːt], [sinˈtiːt] (IMP); (b) in the imperfect of both
1986; Benincà 1989). The most typical contexts in which
indicative and subjunctive: 1SG [klaˈmavi], [klaˈmas]; [ta
they occur (and this holds especially for the past surcomposé
ˈzevi], [taˈzes]; [sinˈtivi], [sinˈtis]; (c) in the infinitive: [kla
form) are experiential. Their function is to underline that it
ˈma(ː)], [taˈze(ː)], and [sinˈti(ː)]. However, some verbs of the
is the case that a type of situation has already come about,
second conjugation also present a rhizotonic infinitive, in
rather than to indicate an actual occurrence of that situ-
which case the final unstressed vowel appears as -i (cf.
ation (cf. Melchior 2012), as in [o ˈvin ˈʤa ˈvuːt ˈstaːt in
§10.2.1.2): [ˈskrivi] ‘to write’, [ˈbati] ‘to beat’.7
aˈmerike, ma no ˈsin maj staːs in ˈafrike] ‘we have been to
In a large subclass of third-conjugation verbs, all singular
America, but we’ve never been to Africa’ (i.e. ‘America is a
persons and the third person plural of the present (indica-
place we have been to . . . ’, ‘it is the case that we have been
tive and subjunctive), and the second person singular of the
to America . . . ’).
imperative present between the verbal root and the inflec-
Frulian presents the following verbal moods: indicative,
tional endings an affix -/is/- (or ‑/iʃ/- for those varieties
imperative, subjunctive, and conditional, all of which are
with post-alveolar sibilants), corresponding to the It. -/isk/-):
finite moods with different endings for persons, and infini-
1/3SG of [fiˈni] ‘to end’ and [parˈti] ‘to leave’, [fiˈnis], [parˈtis],
tive, gerund, and participle, which are non-finite moods
2SG [fiˈnisis], [parˈtisis], 3PL [fiˈnisiŋ], [parˈtisiŋ] (against
with no person endings.
[sint] and [ˈsintiŋ] for the verb [sinˈti]).
In regular conjugation, the other finite tenses and moods
All the Friulian verbal roots share a peculiarity regarding
are formed on the stem of the present (the same for indi-
stress position, which, in the rhizotonic forms, can only fall
cative, imperative, and subjunctive) with the addition of
on the final syllable, e.g. [peˈtɛne] ‘he.combs’, [preˈdice] ‘he.
specific affixes: IND.IPFV -av-, -ev-, -iv- [klaˈmav]-, [taˈzev]-,
foretells’, [seˈmɛne] ‘he.sows’ [reˈgɔle] ‘he.regulates’, com-
[sinˈtiv]-; IPFV.SBJV -as-, -es-, -is- (‑aʃ-, -eʃ-, -iʃ- in those varieties
pared to the corresponding lexical nouns, which are stressed
with post-alveolar sibilants), cf. [klaˈmas]-, [taˈzes]-, [sin
on the immediately preceding syllable [ˈpjetiŋ] ‘comb’,
ˈtis]-; future -ar- ([klaˈmar]-, [taˈzar]-, [sintar]-.8 The affix
[ˈprɛdice] ‘preaching’, [ˈsɛmine] ‘sowing’, [ˈrɛgule] ‘rule’.
for conditional has a particular form -arés- (/-aréʃ-),9 e.g. 1SG
[klamaˈres], [tazaˈres], [sintaˈres], from Lat. infinitive + HA-
BUISSE(M) ‘I.had.had.SBJV’ (cf. Iliescu 1995).
10.3.2.1 Tense and mood
As regards non-finite moods, in the varieties spoken in
The synthetic tenses of the Friulian verb system are the the hills of central Friuli (and in Carnic Friulian) the final
present, imperfect and, future. The synthetic perfect (pas- tonic vowel of the infinitive is long: [klaˈmaː], [taˈzeː], [sin
sato remoto) is still preserved but only in some varieties in ˈtiː]. The gerund (and present participle, which however is
the most conservative areas of Carnia (cf. Benincà 1989:576). hardly used) displays two types of affixes: -ànt for verbs
As in the rest of northern Italy (cf. §13.3.2.1), the synthetic of the first conjugation and -ìnt for other conjugations
([klaˈmant], [taˈzint], [sinˈtint]).
7
Second-conjugation verbs with rhizotonic and arrhizotonic infinitives
have the same inflectional paradigm; only some isolated conservative
varieties present a rhizotonic form with a -[is] ending for the 2nd person
plural in the present indicative of verbs with a rhizotonic infinitive, e.g.
8
[ˈkrodis] ‘believe.2PL’ [ˈpjerdis] ‘lose.2PL’, [ˈcolis] ‘take.2.PL’ (INF [ˈkrodi], Some 3rd-conjugation verbs have -ir-, e.g. [finˈir]-, [parˈtir]-, [muˈrir]-
[ˈpjerdi], [ˈcoli]) against [taˈzeːs]/[taˈzejs] ‘shut.up.2PL’ (INF [taˈze]). This (as opposed to **[finˈar]-, **[paˈrtar]-, **[muˈrar]-).
9
distinction, now seldom found, was indeed common in Friulian at least Verbs presenting -ir- in the future, have -irés- instead of -arés- in the
until the 15th c. (cf. Benincà and Vanelli 2005b:260; Maschi 2000). conditional.
146
FRIULIAN
10.3.2.2 Endings Carnic area), this analogical process did not take place at all,
and consequently the second person singular ending occurs
The endings of Friulian verbs have the following general
with different forms: in the present indicative of the first
characteristics (cf. Benincà and Vanelli 2005b; Iliescu 1970;
conjugation and in the imperfect indicative, the ending is -is
1983; 1984; Iliescu and Mourin 1991):
(< -AS), whereas it is -s in the present indicative of the second
(a) First person singular is expressed by two different
and third conjugations, and in the imperfect subjunctive
endings, -i and Ø: -i is found in the imperfect indicative
and the conditional: [ˈklamis], vs [taːs], [sinʦ]; [klaˈmavis],
and present subjunctive of all conjugations ([klaˈmavi], [ta
vs [klaˈmas], [klamaˈres] (the -s ending assimilates with the
ˈzevi]; [ˈklami], [ˈsinti]); it is also found in the future, where
sibilant of either the root or the mood affix, hence [s+s] or
it is preceded by -a: [klamaˈraj], [sintaˈraj]; the Ø ending is
[ʃ+s]) = [s]).
found in the imperfect subjunctive and conditional of all
(c) In the third person singular, there is an alternation
conjugations (subjunctive: [klaˈmas], [taˈzes]; conditional:
between -e in the present indicative of the first conjugation
[klamaˈres], [tazaˈres]).
and the indicative imperfect (< -A(T)), cf. [ˈklame], [kla
The present indicative displays both endings in accord-
ˈmave]), and Ø in the present indicative of the conjugations
ance with conjugation class: -i for the first conjugation,
other than the first ([taːs], [sint]), in the imperfect subjunct-
([ˈklami]), and Ø in the second and third conjugations
ive ([klaˈmas], [taˈzes]), and in the conditional ([klamaˈres],
([taːs], [bat], [sint]). While the Ø ending is etymological,
[tazaˈres]). In these tenses and moods, then, first person
since the Latin 1SG ending -O was regularly lost like all
singular and third person singular are identical. In addition
other final unstressed vowels other than -A, -i represents
to these endings, there is also the ending for the future,
an innovation which entered Friulian in the sixteenth cen-
which is the only stressed one, i.e. -à ([klamaˈra], [tazaˈra]).
tury (Maschi 1996–7; 2000:205):10 at first -i was added to the
Finally, the present subjunctive of all conjugations has an
present indicative (which had no ending), and then it was
-i ending for third person singular ([ˈklami], [ˈtazi], [ˈsinti]),
analogically extended to the present subjunctive, in which
analogically formed on the ending for first person singular
there was an alternation between Ø for I conjugation (< E
(which derives in turn from the present indicative). Hence
(M)), and ‑a/e/o (according to the variety, see §10.2.1.2) < A
the presence of -i is characteristic of the whole inflectional
(M) for other conjugations). Finally, -i was extended also to
paradigm of the present subjunctive for all conjugations.
the imperfect indicative, where it replaced -a/e/o (< A(M)),
(d) The first person plural ending is the most stable
for instance in CLAMABA(M)) ‘I was calling’ (cf. Benincà and
because it has a single form, -in, occurring as stressed [ˈiŋ]
Vanelli 2005b).
in the present indicative and subjunctive, and in the future,
(b) The second person singular is characterized by a sig-
and as unstressed in other tenses: present [klaˈmiŋ], [taˈziŋ];
matic ending found in all tenses and all moods except the
future [klamaˈriŋ], [tazaˈriŋ]; imperfect indicative [kla
imperative, for which one finds -e < Lat. -A ([ˈklame]) in the
ˈmaviŋ], [taˈzeviŋ], imperfect subjunctive [klaˈmasiŋ], [sin
first conjugation, and Ø < Lat. -E, -I ([bat], [sint]) for the other
ˈtisiŋ], conditional [klamaˈresiŋ], [tazaˈresiŋ].
conjugations. The ending is -is in all tenses and moods with
In the west and in the Carnic area, some conservative
the exception of the future, in which it is -às, e.g. [klamaˈras],
varieties present different forms for the first person plural
[bataˈras], e.g. PRS.IND [ˈklamis], [ˈtazis]; IPFV.IND and SBJV [kla
of the present indicative according to conjugational class, in
ˈmavis], [taˈzevis]; [klaˈmasis], [taˈzesis]; COND [klama’resis].
which the respective thematic vowels are maintained: I -àn,
The -is ending is the regular development of Latin -AS
II -én, III -ìn ([klaˈmaŋ], [taˈzeŋ], [baˈteŋ], [sinˈtiŋ]) (these are
(exactly as in feminine plural words, e.g. [ˈpwartis] < PORTAS
the ‘etymological’ endings < -AMU(S), -ĒMU(S), ‑ĪMU(S), which
‘doors’, see §10.3.1). It is then the expected etymological
are also attested in old Friulian). In most Friulian varieties,
ending for the present indicative of the first conjugation,
the merger of the endings in -in for the present is the result
for the present subjunctive of conjugations other than the
of an analogical process levelling the ending on that of the
first, and of the imperfect indicative (< ‑AS, against -IS, -ES > -s).
III conjugation (cf. Benincà and Vanelli 2005b:256-8).
While old Friulian endings closely corresponded to those
(e) The second person plural ending has a sigmatic form,
of Latin, modern Friulian presents some innovations, having
-is, just like the ending for the second person singular; the
an analogical extension of -is, which has become the typical
two forms coincide in the imperfect indicative and sub-
ending of the second person singular. Nonetheless, in some
junctive, and the conditional ([klaˈmavis], [taˈzevis], [sinti
conservative varieties (especially, but not exclusively, in the
ˈvis]; [klaˈmasis], [baˈtesis], [sintiˈsis]; [klamaˈresis], [bata
ˈresis], [sintaˈresis]). In the present indicative and subjunct-
10
ive, the same ‑is is added to the thematic vowel: I -àjs ([kla
In these same contexts, most Gallo-Romance varieties have developed
a non-etymological vowel ending (-i, but also -e or -ə) (for a discussion of ˈmajs]); II -éjs ([baˈtejs], but in some central varieties the
which see Benincà and Vanelli 2005b). ending is -é:s, e.g. [baˈteːs], which is to be analysed as a single
147
unsegmentable suffix); III -ijs ([sinˈtijs], but again, this end- elsewhere in Romance. The most interesting part of deriv-
ing can be analysed as ‑i:s, a single unsegmentable suffix; cf. ational morphology concerns evaluatives. Friulian presents
Vanelli 2007b). In the future, the second person plural all the common Romance suffixes—ĪNU, ‑ĬTTU, -ONE—which are
ending is -é:s ([klamaˈreːs], [bataˈreːs], etc.). very productive, as well as typical Friulian suffixes which
The second person plural ending for the imperative is the are even more so (see De Leidi 1984 for a very well organ-
only non-sigmatic form (< Lat. -ATE, -ETE, -ITE), but the vocalic ized and commented inventory of Friulian suffixes, from a
part of the ending is the same as in the indicative: I ‑àjt, II diachronic and synchronic perspective). As is generally the
conjug. -éjt/-é:t, III -ìjt/-ì:t. case in Romance, the compatibility of suffixes with a given
The inflectional system for second person plural arises nominal or an adjectival base is unpredictable.
from a series of diachronic changes, mostly motivated by This area of Friulian grammar can help to improve our
analogical processes, which have brought about the understanding of nominal structure (cf. Ch. 30). Evaluative
reorganization of the system itself. Starting from the Latin suffixes have in many cases a corresponding evaluative
inflections -ĀTIS, -ĒTIS, -ĪTIS, and -ĀTE, -ĒTE, -ĪTE, the expected adjective. For instance, Italian can use the suffix -ìno (piedino
second person plural endings in the present indicative and ‘small foot’, principino ‘little prince’) or the adjective piccolo
in the imperative are [ˈaːs], [ˈeːs], [ˈiːs], and [ˈaːt], [ˈeːt], [ˈiːt], ‘small’ (piccolo piede, piccolo principe), whereas languages like
respectively, which are attested in old Friulian. The inser- French or English, which largely lack this kind of suffix,
tion of -[j] started from the verb fa ‘to do’, in which [fajs]/ generally use the adjective petit or little, respectively (petit
[fajt] are the regular outcome of Latin < FACĬTIS/FACĬTE (cf. prince, petit pied; little prince, little foot). The dimensional
§10.2.2). At first (fourteenth century), [j] was analogically evaluation is just one of the many values of this suffix, as
extended to a number of verbs like da ‘to give’, sta ‘to stay’, is generally the case with other evaluative suffixes which
la ‘to go’, which, sharing with fa the peculiarity of a ‘light’ often cannot be easily translated, especially when they are
stem, are very often targeted by analogical processes. Sub- used with endearing or derogatory value.11 As shown in
sequently, most Friulian varieties further extended this Cinque (2007), the order of cumulative evaluative suffixes
innovation to all verbs of the first conjugation (and partially in nouns is the mirror image of the order of evaluative
also to verbs of the second). However, some varieties pre- adjectives; Friulian is a particularly rich source of data for
sent the regular endings to this very day: in some isolated testing and deepening this theory, because it has a very rich
varieties of Carnia, for instance, one still encounters lexicon of suffixes, which can combine very freely and may
[klaˈmaːs] and [klaˈmaːt] (cf. Benincà and Vanelli also modify verbs and adverbs.
2005b:259-63; Maschi 1996-7; 2000; Vanelli 2007b). The diminutive suffix -út < *-uttu is only attested in
(f) The third person plural ending is -in, which is always Friulian, and is also the most productive; the second most
unstressed and has regularly developed from -AN(T), -EN(T)): productive diminutive is -ít < *-ittu, quite rare in Romance
present [ˈklamiŋ], [ˈtaziŋ], [ˈsintiŋ]. The ending has a differ- (present in Spanish, in some varieties of Istria, and with
ent form, [ˈan], just in the future: [klamaˈraŋ], [bataˈraŋ]. In residual traces in other areas). They compete with
the other tenses, the endings for first and third persons other more widespread diminutives, namely -ìn < -ĪNUM, -ét
plural are then homophonous, cf. IMFV.IND [klaˈmaviŋ], IPFV. < *‑ittu, -ùs < ‑UCEUM.12
SBJV [sinˈtisiŋ), COND [tazaˈresiŋ]. Augmentative and derogatory functions are also associ-
In western Friulian, and in some Carnic varieties, third ated with various suffixes, whose distribution is again
person singular and plural are identical, as is the rule in the barely predictable: -àt < *-attu, -ats < -ACEUM, -on < -ONEM.
Venetan system. The only ending found continues that of Suffixes can cumulate, and their order is predictable: biel
the third person singular. ‘beautiful’, biel-uss-át diminutive + derogatory ‘not so ugly’,
**bjel-at-ùs; gras ‘fat’, grass-on-át augmentative + derogatory
‘awfully fat’, **grass-at-òn.13 The same diminutive can
10.3.3 Word formation processes
The word formation processes of Friulian are in general 11

At a certain level of abstraction they are presumably connected; it
those commonly found in Romance (cf. Ch. 28). We consider seems e.g. that the basic value of -ĪNUM, from early Latin to Romance, is that
only those aspects that differ from other Romance varieties. of expressing a ‘relationship’ with the referent of the lexical base. As such,
in addition to the diminutive value, which developed later, it can form
ethnic adjectives and nouns (It. tunisino ‘from Tunis’), or surnames (It.
Paolini ‘the sons and descendants of Paolo’). See Prosdocimi (forthcoming).
10.3.3.1 Derivation 12
All these have a feminine form, with -e added to the suffix (-ìne, -ùsse,
etc.).
The derivational processes of Friulian largely involve the 13
The suffix -ón ‘large, big’, can even be iterated: grand-on-ón ‘very very
use of suffixes, many of which correspond to those used big/large’, grass-on-ón ‘very very fat’.
148
FRIULIAN
combine, according to a fixed order: cjase, cjas-ine, cjas-ute; causative (or permissive) structures: sclòpecûr ‘crack.heart
cjas-in-ùte, ‘nice little house; **cjasutine. (= heartbreak)’, tòrne-cònt ‘fit-sum (= profit)’. Analogous
Evaluative suffixes enter in adverb formation processes, observations apply to Italian forms parallel to these,
usually accompanied by a preposition: grum ‘clot’> in grum- which could even have provided the pattern for the
us-út ‘curled up (of a living being)’. Friulian forms.
The productivity of evaluatives in Friulian extends to the The old-fashioned term pan-prendi bread+take = ‘snack’,
modification of the Aktionsart of the verbal root; the a genuine Friulian compound, has an apparently particu-
diminutive suffix -ín, though not very productive with lar structure, with the object preceding the verb; it
nouns, is freely used with verbs, indicating an action per- appears to be a more normal N+N compound if we con-
formed ‘a little’ (occasionally, or with scarcely any attention sider that prendi (cf. Nuovo Pirona, s.v.) is both an infini-
or concern): balà ‘to dance’ > balinà ‘to dance a little’, morosà tive, meaning ‘to dine’, and a deverbal noun, meaning
‘to flirt’ > morosinà ‘to flirt with particular inconstancy’; a ‘dinner, meal’ (cf. It. desinare). The compositional scheme
variant ‑ignà < -IN-E-ARE is also used (gotà ‘to drip’ > gotiñà ‘to of this compound is, though, still unclear: the compound
trickle’). The augmentative suffix ‑ón can be added to a verb can be a copular, identificational compound; being a kind
root of activity adding intensive or iterative specification: of meal, we would paraphrase it as indicating ‘a meal
kori ‘to run’ > koronà ‘to run intensively’, etc. (which is just) bread’; cf. It. cassapanca ‘chest.bench (= a
The suffix -ón can form a denominal or deverbal noun to chest (which is also) a bench’). The Romance order,
indicate a characteristic physical feature or habit of a though, is normally with the head to the left; with this
human being: cjâf ‘head’, cjavón ‘person with a big head’, order, we have then ‘bread which is a meal’, and this is
bevi ‘to drink’, bevón ‘drunkard’; added to a verb root it also a possible interpretation.
forms a nominalization: zburtà ‘to shove’, zburtón ‘a shove’; A group of compounds N+N are of the genitival or, more
finally, like other evaluative suffixes, it forms adverbs indi- generally, ‘specificational’ kind: N (P) N, as in It. caposta-
cating attitudes of the body, or of moving (often combined zione ‘head (of the) station’, or Frl. pan-kuk ‘bread (of the)
with a preposition): (in) zenogl-ón-(s), ‘kneeling’ < zenoli cuckoo’, jarbe-rogne ‘herb (of the) scabies’; the regular
‘knee’, a sdronden-ón ‘strolling’, a tast ón-(s) ‘gropingly’.14 order is N ‘of ’ N, the opposite order, as in teremòt ‘earth-
The suffix -àrt, (Grm. -HART), which in various Romance quake’, originally ‘earth.GEN.motion’, is a Latin continu-
languages is relational and evalutative, in general with ation, where the basic order was GEN+N (cf. Ch. 29).
negative evaluation, in Friulian alone has assumed the func- Friulian preserved until quite late genitival constructions
tion of a deverbal nominalizer, competing with general lacking an overt preposition, in particular with kinship
Romance (though not Romanian) reflexes of -ATAM (Rohlfs names (fradi Pjeri ‘brother (of) Pieri’; cf. also §56.2.1.4);
1969a:§1108; De Leidi 1984:77f.): cjalà ‘look at’, cjalàrt/cjalade this characteristic probably supported a class of com-
‘a look, glance’; sclipà ‘to spray’, sklipàrt/sclipàde ‘a spray’. pounds with the nominal mari ‘mother’ with an abstract
meaning, roughly corresponding to ‘whole, entire’ (e.g.
marimont ‘mother.world (= whole world)’), or ‘the core of
10.3.3.2 Word formation processes: composition something’ (e.g. mari-moment ‘mother-moment (= very
moment (when something happened)’). The noun mari
In general, Friulian strategies for forming compound words
‘mother’ has maintained this value in various expressions
are consistent with widespread Romance patterns.
(see Nuovo Pirona, s.v. mari), with the preposition OF (la mari
The nominal compound transitive verb + object is very
dal dì ‘the mother of the day (= the whole day)’) or without
productive; the verb assumes a root form, indistinguish-
it (la mari zornade ‘the mother (of) day’).
able from the imperative (cf. Maiden 2007a; Floricic 2008),
and the structure is head-external: tae-lens ‘cut-woods
(= lumberjack)’, pìke-piére ‘break-stones (= stonebreaker)’,
pice+tabàrs ‘hang+cloaks (= coat stand)’. All these are head- 10.4 Syntax
external compounds, which—as we have said—are very
productive. There are a few cases of intransitive verb +
As in the preceding sections, we will base the description of
subject (external argument), probably to be interpreted as
Friulian syntax on the so-called central Friulian koiné, high-
lighting only in some cases comparisons with other var-
14
See Meyer-Lübke (1890-1902, II:§§621-4, 456–59), Rohlfs (1969a:§§885, ieties. The main grammatical units and the ways they
886, 887, 890, 1095) for a general Romance outline; in certain functions the combine in phrases are basically the same as those found
suffix -ONE seems to form a sort of participle of an often virtual verb; this is
confirmed by Friulian, in which a participial-gerund is a possible alterna- in other Romance languages, and, more specfically, as in the
tive: là a sdronden-ón or là sdrondenant ‘to go strolling’. dialects of northern Italy (cf. §13.4).
149
10.4.1 General features the form of a vowel probably derived from 1SG o < EGO ‘I’.
They are ordered after the negator. They are almost always
obligatory in main clauses, even when another subject,
In the nominal group, the article is prenominal, and adjec-
noun, or pronoun, or operator is present; in a simple sen-
tives are ordered among themselves and with respect to the
tence the only exception is when the verb is accompanied
noun head as in the dialects of northern Italy (see the
by an object clitic or the negator; in this case all subject
generalizations in Cinque 2010, and §13.3.1, §30.2). The
clitics, except 2SG tu, are obligatorily dropped (in some
functional modifiers (articles, demonstratives, possessives)
varieties third person singular and plural can also be
have in general the same properties as the dialects of
maintained):
northern Italy. The subordination and coordination strat-
egies also basically correspond to Romance grammatical (1) a. O vin cjantât.
patterns (cf. Ch. 63). SCL= we.have sung
A phenomenon worthy of note is the interaction of pos- ‘We have sung.’
sessives with the partitive and definiteness: here Friulian is
b. (**O) lu vin cjantât.
more similar to English than to northern Italian dialects or
SCL= it= we.have sung
Italian: It. eravamo in cinque lit. ‘we were in five (=there were
‘We have sung it.’
five of us)’ is Frl. o jèrin in cink di lôr lit. ‘we=were in five of
them’. This is probably related to another peculiar feature c. Al/E cjante.
of Friulian, namely the fact that it has no locative clitic, and he/she= sings
has a very limited use of the partitive clitic, constrained by ‘He/She sings.’
phonology (see Benincà 2007b:219f., and §10.1.1).
d. (??Al/**E) lu cjante.
In the verbal group there are interesting periphrases;
(he/she) it= he.sings
some substitute a nominalization or a nominal form of the
‘He/She sings it.’
verb. For example, the expression corresponding to ‘two
years after my birth’ is doj ans dopo nasût iò, lit. ‘two years
The second context that is incompatible with a subject
after born I’; for ‘I was all trembling’ we find o jeri dut che o
clitic is found solely in northern varieties, in relative and
trimavi, lit. ‘I was all that I trembled’ (see Frau 1984:89f.).
interrogative clauses modifying the subject: normally the
The verb of ‘pure necessity’ corresponding to It. bisogna
third person singular and plural subject clitic must be pre-
(see Benincà and Poletto 1997) is rendered by an interesting
sent, unless the complementizer co/cu is used (see below).
periphrasis of volé ‘want’ + intransitive past participle (un-
In the southwestern area, west of the Tagliamento river,
ergatives and unaccusatives: al ûl durmît lit. ‘it wants slept’ =
subject clitics are preceded by vocalic clitics (cf. Benincà and
‘it is necessary to sleep’, al ûl curût ‘it wants run’ = ‘it is
Vanelli 1984; Benincà 1986:468-70; Poletto 2000:ch. 3): a for
necessary to run’). This structure is also found in some
third person singular and plural, i for the other persons (the
neighboring Venetan dialects, but apparently not elsewhere
deictic persons, which include the speaker and/or the
in northern or southern Italy (see Berizzi and Rossi 2011).15
hearer).
The obligatoriness of subject clitics is relatively recent; in
texts from the end of the nineteenth century the subject
10.4.2 Main clauses clitic was frequently missing if another subject was present,
even when postposed. (cf. Benincà 1986:467; see the
Among Romance languages with subject clitics (cf. Ch. 47), nineteenth-century parables in Pirona 1871, and the trans-
the Friulian system presents particularly clear and interest- lations of Boccaccio’s novella in Papanti 1875:517-31).
ing, albeit not yet well-understood, characteristics. In con- The area of Gorizia still has today an archaic system
trast to the dialects of northern Italy, Friulian subject clitics (attested also in the texts in Pirona 1871; Papanti 1875;
display a complete paradigm, including non-argumental Pellis 1911): the subject clitics for first person singular and
subjects; as in the dialects of northern Italy, first person first and second persons plural (vocalic clitics) are absent,
singular and first and second persons plural are identical, in the others are optional (under conditions which still remain
unclear); moreover, the second person singular and plural
15
Apparently similar structures with deontic ‘want’ and past participle in some verb moods, for example the conditional, are
are much more common both in northern and southern dialects; they are, enclitic. Dialects southwest of Gorizia (territory of Sonziaco)
though, only possible with the past participle of a transitive verb, and the have a clitic a which can precede any subject clitic, along the
deep object as the surface subject of ‘want’: Cal. ssu pisce vò mangiatu ‘this
fish wants eaten (= this fish has to be eaten’); see also §16.4.2.2). In the lines of what was observed for dialects west of the Taglia-
Friulian structure above, by contrast, ‘want’ is impersonal. mento river. These marginal areas should be studied
150
FRIULIAN
specifically, because the minimal variation they show with Varieties of the north of the region (Carnia) also use this
respect to the central koiné could throw light on properties structure for main questions; in this area, the comple-
of subject agreement. mentizer has also a form cu/co; in this context the third
person singular and plural subject clitic is not possible
(cf. 5c):
10.4.3 Main and dependent interrogative (5) a. Cui cu tu as vjodût?
clauses who that=you you.SG have seen?
‘Who have you seen?’
Main interrogative clauses are characterized by the enclisis b. Cui c al ven?/ Cui co ven?
of subject clitics, or an ‘interrogative inflection’. It is notice- who that=he comes?/who co comes?
able that, while most northern Italian dialects and French ‘Who’s coming?’
have gradually lost this property, Friulian preserves it very
robustly, both in wh-questions and in yes/no-questions: c. **Cui co l ven?
who co he= comes
(2) a. Cui as-tu viodût?
who have=you.SG seen? The same happens in indirect questions (6a) and in rela-
‘Who have you seen?’ tive clauses (6b):
b. Di ce fevelàis-o? (6) a. No sai cui c al ven/co ven.
of what talk=you.PL? not know who that he comes/co he.comes
‘What are you talking about?’
b. Il fantàt c al cjante/co cjante uè al è Pieri.
c. Cuand part-ial? the boy that he sings today he is Peter
when leaves=he? ‘The boy that sings today is Pieri.’
‘When does he leave?’
The enclitic masculine third person subject clitic is iden- 10.4.3.1 Other structures with the enclisis of
tical to the third person singular dative+accusative clitic
subject clitics
cluster, which appears for example in imperatives (cjant-ial
can mean, depending on the context, either ‘sing=him=it’ = Subject–clitic inversion is found in exclamatives which,
‘sing it to him!’ or ‘sings=he (=does he sing?)’). This identity syntactically, are in fact non-canonical questions (see
is not the result of phonological rules. Obenauer 2004), such as:
The enclitic subject appears even when the subject itself (7) Ce mi toc-jal di viodi!
is interrogated: what me.touches=it of see.INF
(3) Cui vegn-jal? ‘What I have to see!’
who comes=he? Syntactically ‘genuine’ exclamatives do not admit subject–
‘Who’s coming?’ clitic inversion, and require a complementizer after the
A dependent interrogative clause cannot have subject– exclamative constituent:
clitic inversion, and moreover, as in many dialects of north- (8) Ce biel frut che tu sês!
ern Italy, a complementizer che, or co/cu, ca, depending on what nice boy that you are
the variety,16 is inserted after the wh-pronoun: ‘What a nice boy you are!’
(4) a. (Ti domandi) cui ch al ven. Another kind of exclamative clause is introduced by a
(I am asking you) who that he=comes negator preceding a verb with subject–clitic inversion; the
‘(I’m asking you) who is coming.’ negator is considered ‘expletive’ because it does not negate
b. (Ti domandi) cui ch al à cjantât. the sentence; it bears in fact on the presupposition, and
(I am asking you) who that he=has sung marks the content of the sentence as unexpected (through a
‘(I’m aksing you) who has sung.’ ‘scalar implicature’: see Portner and Zanuttini 1998;
Zanuttini and Portner 2003):
16 (9) a. No a-jal dit dut a so pari!

Probably the complementizers /ko, ku, ka/ are to be analysed as
incorporations of vocalic clitics (a, o) into the bare complementizer /ke/, not has=he said everything to his father
but there is no clear evidence. ‘Incredible! he has said everything to his father!’
151
b. No mi toc-jal di partì domàn! b. Che l sedi benedét/sedi-al benedét!

not to.me=touches=it of leave.INF tomorrow that he=be blessed/be=he blessed
‘Damn, I have (unexpectedly) to leave tomorrow!’ ‘May he be blessed!’
c. Ch o sedis maladéts!/ sedis-o
This construction is used in the dialects of northern Italy
that you.2PL=you.be damned!/ you.be=you.2PL
too, in particular in the Veneto (Benincà 1996a). As in
maladéts!
Venetan dialects (and in Italian, where the phenomena
damned
are less evident), an optative clause can either be intro-
‘May you be damned!’
duced by a conjunction se ‘if ’ (10a), or have subject clitic
inversion (10b-d); the verb occurs in the imperfect subjunct- Subject enclitic inversion with present subjunctive
ive (10a,b), pluperfect (10c), or surcomposé (10d) (see applies (or used to) also in disjunctive coordination of hypo-
§10.3.2.1); a nominal subject can appear only either right- thetical clauses, again if the conjunction is absent:
or left-dislocated:
(13) Sed-ial pùar o sed-ial sior/Ch al sedi pùar o ch al sedi
(10) a. (To fradi), s al sunas il viulìn, (to fradi)! sior (no m impuàrte).
(your brother), if he played the violin (your brother) be=he poor or be=he rich/that he be=poor or that
‘If only your brother played the violin!’ he=be rich (I don’t care)
‘Whether he’s poor or rich (I don’t care).’
b. (To fradi), sunas-jal il viulìn!
(your brother) played=he the violin! In Munaro (2010b) all these cases are analysed in detail
‘If only your brother played the violin!’ and localized with great precision in the left periphery of
sentence structure.
c. Ti ves-jo dit la veretât!
to.you=had=I told the truth
‘If only I had told you the truth!’ 10.4.4 Auxiliaries and past participle agreement
d. Ves-jo vût fevelât!
had=I had spoken! The main characteristics of the grammar of auxiliaries are
‘If only I had spoken!’ the same as those found in the dialects of northern Italy.
All the sentences above have a variant with se ‘if ’, with- The general rule concerning past participle agreement is
out clitic inversion: (10cˈ) se jò ti ves dit la veretât!, (10dˈ) se jo basically the same in Friulian (cf. §49.2): the past participle
ves vût fevelât!) agrees with the subject when the auxiliary is (or would be),
The same phenomenon is found, with the same tenses, in if BE were present, and never agrees when the auxiliary is (or
the protasis of the if-clause; if the complementizer is miss- would be) HAVE. A non-agreeing past participle has the
ing, inversion applies; with compound tenses the sentence unmarked masculine singular form. The past participle of
is interpreted as ‘irrealis’, or counterfactual: transitive verbs agrees instead with the direct object: agree-
ment in this context is not obligatory everywhere, but
(11) a. Vigniss-ial to pari, o podaressin là. apparently is strongly preferred in all varieties.
he.came=he your father, we=we.could go
‘If your father comes (which is unlikely), we (14) O aj ??vjodût/vjodúdis lis stelis.
could go.’ I have seen.MSG/seen.FPL the stars.F
b. Fossi-al vignut Zuan, e saressin lâs. ‘I have seen the stars.’
he.were=he come Zuan, they would.be gone. The same kind of (mild) obligatoriness emerges in rela-
‘Had Zuan come, they would have gone.’ tive clauses: the transitive verb agrees with the relativized
Quite exceptionally, with respect to the dialects of north- object, even though there is no agreement marking on the
ern Italy, inversion applies (or used to apply) also in the complementizer:
present subjunctive; in this case the subordinating conjunc- (15) Lis stelis c o ai viodudis a jerin dÎs.
tion that alternates with inversion is che ‘that’, and the the stars.FPL that I I.have seen.FPL they.were ten
value is ‘augurative’ (the first person is considered ‘The stars that I saw were ten.’
impossible):
Agreement with the object is obligatory when the object
(12) a. Che tu sedis benedét/sedis-tu benedét! is a third person clitic (cf. (16)), and if the object precedes
that you=be blessed/be=you blessed the past participle in accordance with typical Friulian word
‘May you be blessed!’ order (see Paoli 2006):
152
FRIULIAN
(16) a. Lis aj vjodudis/**viodût. b. Us aj vjodúdis.

them.F I.have seen.FPL/seen.MPL you(FPL) I.have seen.FPL
‘I have seen them’ ‘I have seen you.’
b. O aj lis stelis vjodudis.
I I.have the stars.F seen.FPL But agreement with an object clitic is impossible if the
‘I have seen the stars.’ clitic is reflexive, and the auxiliary is HAVE:
With first and second person singular and plural object

(18) Marie si a petenât/si e petenàde/**si a petenade.
clitics, the participle can either agree or not:
Marie herself has combed.MSG/herself is combed.FSG/
(17) a. Us aj vjodût. herself has combed.FSG
you(FPL) I.have seen.MSG ‘Marie has combed her hair.’
153
CHAPTER 11
Ladin
GIAMPAOLO SALVI
11.1 Introduction gave rise to the postulation of a Raeto-Romance group in

the first place. Multiple further questions then arise,
including:
The identification and classification of the Ladin var-
3. What were the boundaries of the territory in ques-
ieties, within the Romance domain, is a matter of long-
tion and how were they formed? Solution (2b) presup-
standing and ongoing debate, in which purely linguistic
poses original continuity with neighbouring Romance-
and historical arguments are often overshadowed by
speaking territories, and explains the discontinuities
arguments whose motivation is political. Rather than
by claiming that the areas in question became isolated
being of benefit to the different points of view, this has
due to the imposition of political and cultural frontiers;
led to a hardening of positions. It is significant that the
solution (2a) tends to assume a clearly defined frontier
Ladin dialects are spoken in a region historically con-
which then became blurred in some places as a result
tested between the newly born Italian state and the
of uninterrupted contact with neighbouring Romance
Austro-Hungarian Empire, one which ultimately passed
varieties.
from Austria to Italy at the end of the First World War.
4. What exactly are the varieties to be included in the
Ladin thus had the misfortune of being at the centre of
individual subgroups? This issue is particularly acute in
linguistic interest precisely at a time when its classifica-
the case of Ladin. In the history of Ladin studies, even the
tion (as a northern Italian variety related to the neigh-
residual presence of certain archaic phonetic characteris-
bouring Trentino and Venetan varieties, or as a linguistic
tics (ones that in the distant past were more widespread
group distinct from these varieties) could be used as an
in northern Italian dialects and later disappeared; see
argument for political claims over the territory in which
§11.3.2), has been enough to label as ‘Ladin’ rather differ-
it was spoken.
ent and widely separated dialects, ranging from those of
The main points of the linguistic debate have been:
the Val di Sole and the Val di Non to the west of the Adige
1. Whether there is an independent ‘Raeto-Romance’ lin- in Trentino to the dialect of Comelico in northern Veneto.
guistic group including, in addition to Ladin, the Romansh A narrower definition classes as ‘Ladin’ those Romance
varieties (see Ch. 12) spoken in the Swiss canton of Grischun varieties spoken in the former territory of the prince-
(Grigioni, Grisons, Graubünden), and the Friulian varieties bishop of Brixen/Bressanone, i.e. those dialects spoken
(see Ch. 10). around the Sella massif in the Dolomites: these have a
2. The nature of the connections between the three shared history and are united by an awareness of linguis-
supposed groups of Raeto-Romance. Do these groups tic identity which sets them off from the neighbouring
represent: (a) the survival of a ‘transalpine’ Latinity dialects.
which has been almost completely submerged to the
north of the Alps by High German varieties; or (b) the I will therefore use the term ‘Ladin’ in the narrow sense,
survival of an archaic phase of a ‘cisalpine’ Latinity proposed by Carlo Battisti, of ladino atesino (‘Adige Ladin’)
which in the rest of northern Italy has been overtaken or ladino dolomitico (‘Dolomitic Ladin’). I shall not consider
by innovations which transformed its linguistic charac- the variety of Cortina d’Ampezzo, which—although it has a
teristics? Those who favour solution (2a) have to explain long shared history with the Sella dialects (having passed
the massive presence south of the Alps of remnants of to the Tyrol in 1511), and despite the fact that its speakers
‘transalpine’ Latinity and the undeniable vertical affin- identify with those dialects—nonetheless belongs linguis-
ities, so to speak, between varieties of the plains (Lom- tically with the Cadore dialect, of which it is actually a
bard, Venetan) and their respective neighbouring conservative variety. The varieties of the following valleys
mountain varieties (Romansh, Ladin). Those who favour belong to Ladin (with some 25–30,000 speakers in total; see
position (2b) must explain the horizontal affinities which Figure 11.1).
154 This chapter © Giampaolo Salvi 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
LADIN
P u s t e r
t
a
l
0 2.5 5 miles
0 5 10 km
MARÈO
Brixen Al Plan
San Martin de Tor

LADIN
ra
de
co
Ga
ar
Is
Gardena San Linêrt
Urtijëi BADIÒT
GHERDËINA
Rèba
FODÓM
CAZÉT
Bozen
Cianacei
TRANSITIONAL
DIALECTS
BRACH
Vich
sio
e
Avi
ol
ev
rd
MOENAT Moena
Co
Trento Belluno
Map 11.1 The varieties of Ladin
(a) Val Badia/Gadertal with the side-valley of Marebbe/ Vigilio/Sankt Vigil/Al Plan for marebbano and that of
Enneberg/Marèo, with the two varieties marebbano Badia/Abtei for (upper) badiotto). I shall call these
(marèo) and badiotto, the latter being further divided varieties gaderano.
into the varieties of the lower valley (ladin) and of the (b) Val Gardena/Gröden/Gherdëina, with gardenese (gher-
upper valley (badiòt) (I shall use the varieties of San dëina) (which is linguistically homogeneous).
155
GIAMPAOLO SALVI
(c) Val di Fassa/Val de Fascia, where we have fassano elementary schools in Val di Fassa. In 1989 Ladin was rec-
(fascian), divided into the upper valley variety (cazét) ognized as an official administrative language in the prov-
and the lower valley variety (brach), to which must be ince of Bolzano, and in 1993 also in Val di Fassa. See, in
added Moena (moenat), which is linguistically fassano, general, Craffonara (1995) and, on the modern linguistic
even though politically Moena belonged to the epis- situation, Dell’Aquila and Iannàccaro (2006).
copal principality of Trento (unless otherwise stated We have no medieval texts in Ladin. The oldest certainly
I shall exemplify these varieties with the cazét variety Ladin documents are the translation of some proclamations
of Canazei/Cianacei). of the bishop of Bressanone (1631, 1632, c.1703-10) in a
(d) The upper valley of the Cordevole, with livinallese supra-local administrative scripta based on the gaderano-
(fodóm), in the commune of Livinallongo/Fodom, and livinallese type. A more substantial quantity of texts appears
the dialects of the neighbouring localities, which con- only from the nineteenth century.
stitute a transitional zone with upper agordino (I shall As varieties taught at school and used in public adminis-
exemplify these with the dialect of Arabba/Rèba). tration, the Ladin varieties of Trentino-Alto Adige have a(n
almost) standardized writing system. A common written
The denomination Ladin (historically = ‘Latin’) arises from
variety (including ampezzano) has also been developed,
the extension, in the nineteenth century, of a term that was
namely ladin standard (or ladin dolomitan), on the model of
indigenous at least in the Val Badia and with which speakers
rumantsch grischun (see Schmid 2000; cf. also Ch. 12).
distinguished themselves from the neighbouring Germanic
A bibliography of studies on Ladin up to 2010 is found in
population (Kramer 2000).
Videsott (2011). In addition to general reference works
(Holtus et al. 1988–2005:§§124, 218-25, 504; Ernst et al.
2003–08:§§14, 19, 30, 54, 58, 67, 119b, 126b, 147, 153b, 228),
a more general recent presentation can be found in Haiman
11.2 Historical observations and Benincà (1992). Apart from studies on individual var-
ieties (of these, Elwert 1943 stands out for its methodology
The traditional view (Pfister 1982) is that the territory and data), there is a historical grammar (Kramer 1976;
where Ladin is today spoken was uninhabited until the 1977), an etymological dictionary (Kramer 1988–98), and a
end of the early Middle Ages, when it was settled from the linguistic atlas (Goebl et al. 1998; Goebl et al. 2012).
valley of the Isarco, over the Val Gardena, and from Val Gallmann et al. (2007; 2010; 2013) is an excellent German–
Pusteria, over the Val Badia. On this account, Ladin is the Ladin (gardenese and gaderano)–Italian contrastive grammar.
sole survivor of the Latinity of the valley of the Isarco and
Pusteria, where it was submerged by Germanization from
the late seventh century. However, numerous recent arch-
aeological discoveries suggest partly stable settlements in 11.3 Phonetics and phonology
the Ladin valleys dating from antiquity. The lack of written
evidence for the early medieval period makes it a moot 11.3.1 Vowel system
point whether the medieval and modern settlements dir-
ectly continue ancient ones (Chiocchetti 2008). The stressed-vowel system (Craffonara 1977) develops dis-
As we have seen, the Ladin valleys (except Moena) tinctively according to whether there has been lengthening
belonged until the beginning of the nineteenth century of the vowel determined by syllable structure (e.g. where
more or less directly to the same political and religious entity, Latin had an open syllable in a paroxtyone which later
namely the episcopal principality of Bressanone (part of became an oxytone in Ladin) or not (e.g. in closed syllables)
Tyrol, hence, from the fourteenth century, of the Habsburg (Tables 11.1 and 11.2)
domains), of which they were the Romance-speaking part. The lengthening contexts may differ according to variety:
After they passed to Italy in 1919, the current administrative in origin there was no open-syllable lengthening environ-
subdivision came into being: Badia, Marebbe, and Gardena ment in those reflexes of Latin proparoxytones or paroxy-
became part of the province of Bolzano, Fassa of the province tones which have remained such in Ladin (as is shown by
of Trento, and Livinallongo of the province of Belluno. the development of ɔ in all varieties; for ɛ the data are hard
Under the special autonomous status of Trentino-Alto to interpret). Lengthening did take place later in these
Adige (granted in 1948 and 1972), the Ladins of the province environments in gardenese and fassano (but not in gaderano
of Bolzano were recognized as a linguistic group in 1951, and livinallese), as is shown by the outcomes of the vowels a,
and teaching in Ladin was introduced in obligatory school- e, and o: PALAM ‘spade’ > Grd. [ˈpela], Fas. [ˈpɛla] (as for NASUM)
ing; from 1969 teaching in Ladin was also introduced in vs Mrb. [ˈpara], Bad. [paːra], Liv. [ˈpala] (as for SACCUM); SĒDECIM
156
LADIN
Table 11.1 Development of stressed vowels in historical lengthening contexts

ROMANCE VOWEL MAREBBANO BADIOTTO GARDENESE FASSANO LIVINALLESE
NASUM ‘nose’ a neːs nɛːs nes nɛs nɛs

MĔL (*ˈmɛle) ‘honey’ ɛ mi miːl miəl mjel mjel
NǑUEM ‘nine’ ɔ nø ny nuəf nef nwof
ACĒTUM ‘vinegar’ e aˈʒej aˈʒaj aˈʒæj aˈʒɛj aˈʒej
LŬPUM ‘wolf ’ o lu lu læwf lɔwf lowf
Table 11.2 Development of stressed vowels in historical non-lengthening contexts

ROMANCE VOWEL MAREBBANO BADIOTTO GARDENESE FASSANO LIVINALLESE
SACCUM ‘sack’ a sak saːk sak sak sak

SĔPTEM ‘seven’ ɛ sɛt set set set set
CŎLLUM ‘neck’ ɔ kɔːl kɔːl kɔl kɔl kɔl
SĬCCUM ‘dry’ e sɛk sak sæk sek sɑk
MŬSCAM ‘fly’ o ˈmoʃa ˈmoʃa ˈmoʃa ˈmoʃa ˈmoʃa
‘sixteen’ > Grd. [ˈsæjdəʃ], Fas. [ˈsɛjdeʃ] (as for ACĒTUM) vs Mrb. deletion) of intervocalic obstruents (see reflexes of ACETUM,
[ˈsɛdeʃ], Bad. [ˈsadəʃ], Liv. [ˈsɑdeʃ] (as for SICCUM); GULŌSAM GULOSAM, above) and devoices word-final consonants (see
‘gluttonous.F’ > Grd. [guˈlæwza], Fas. [goˈlɔwza] (as for reflexes of NASUM (-[S]- > -[Z]- > -[S]), NOUEM (-[W]- > -[V]- > ‑[F]),
LUPUM) vs Mrb., Liv. [goˈloza], Bad. [guˈloza] (as for MUSCAM). LUPUM (-[P]- > -[V]- > -[F]), above).
The vowel ɔ shows no differentiation conditioned by length: Ladin also shows some features in common with Friulian
MOLAM ‘millstone’ > Mrb. [ˈmɔra], Bad. [ˈmɔːra], Grd., Fas., Liv. and Romansh, and these are the basis of the identification of
[ˈmɔla] (like COLLUM). In gaderano *u (< Ū) has become y or ø the three as forming an independent linguistic group. It has
(according to dialect and phonetic context): CRŪDUM ‘raw’ > been shown, however, that what is involved is a matter of
Gad. [kry], CŪNAM ‘cradle’ > Mrb. [ˈkøna], Bad. [ˈkyna]; FRŪCTUM independent conservation of phenomena once found over a
‘fruit’ > Gad. [fryt]. much broader area of northern Italy (cf. Pellegrini 1991;
The original vowel length distinction determined by syl- Vanelli 2005; also Videsott 2001). These features are: (a)
lable structure has been phonologized in gaderano, but there palatalization of k and ɡ before the vowel a; (b) conserva-
is no exact correspondence between original lengthening or tion of consonant + l clusters; (c) conservation of final -s.
non-lengthening contexts and modern long or short vowels: Palatalization of k gives c/ʧ (intervocalically, j/Ø), while
long vowels have been shortened in absolute final position ɡ gives ɟ/ʤ/j (intervocalically, j o Ø): CABALLUM ‘horse’ > Mrb.
(cf. Mrb. [mi] vs Bad. [miːl] ‘honey’), and new long vowels [caˈval], Bad. [caˈvaːl], Grd., Fas., Liv. [ʧaˈval]; BRACAM ‘trou-
have arisen through fusion of two identical vowels (Bad. [fu sers’ > Mrb., Liv. [ˈbraja], Bad. [ˈbraːja], Grd. [ˈbrea], Fas.
ˈraː] ‘he was drilling’ < -aa), etc. Minimal or near-minimal [ˈbraa]; GALLUM ‘cock’ > Mrb. [jal], Bad. [ʤaːl], Grd., Fas., Liv.
pairs for marebbano are: /ˈara/ ‘wing’ ~ /ˈaːra/ ‘threshing [ʤal]; PLAGAM ‘wound’ > Mrb., Liv. [ˈplaja], Bad. [ˈplaːja], Grd.
floor’, /ˈpɛr/ ‘pear’ ~ /ˈpɛːr/ ‘pair’, /ˈpiʃ/ ‘piss’ ~ /ˈpiːʃ/ [ˈplea], Fas. [ˈpjaa].
‘feet’, /ˈbɔʃk/ ‘wood’ ~ /aˈrɔːʃk/ ‘frog’, /o/ ‘or’ ~ /ˈoː/ In the (recessive) varieties which still have the stop c, it
‘wants’, /ˈtut/ ‘taken’ ~ /ˈduːʧ/ ‘sweet’, /ˈdøt/ ‘all’ ~ /ˈøːt/ stands in opposition to ʧ, derived from Romance palataliza-
‘empty’, /ˈmyʃ/ ‘donkey’ ~ /ˈmyːʃ/ ‘faces’. tion of Latin (or other) k:1 Mrb. [cɛːr] ‘dear’ < CARUM vs [ʧɛːr]
As in the surrounding dialects, final vowels other than -a ‘certain’ < CERTUM (Craffonara 1979).
fall (see Table 11.1). /Cl/ clusters are retained in all varieties except fassano. In
gaderano and gardenese kl and ɡl have become tl and dl
respectively: FLOCCUM ‘flake’ > Mrb., Grd., Liv. [flɔk], Bad.
11.3.2 Consonant system [flɔːk]; CLAUEM ‘key’ > Gad., Grd. [tle], Liv. [kle]; GLACIEM ‘ice’ >
Like other varieties of northern Italy, Ladin lacks geminate 1

The stop c may also be realized as an affricate, but one more retracted
consonants, has undergone voicing (and sometimes than ʧ.
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GIAMPAOLO SALVI
Mrb., Grd. [ˈdlaʧa], Bad. [ˈdlaːʧa], Liv. [glaʧ]. In fassano the consonant: Mrb. [lɛt]/[lɛc] ‘bed/s’, Grd. [liət]/[liəʧ]; Mrb.,
lateral becomes j in the nineteenth century (but the out- Grd., Fas., Liv. [bas]/[baʃ] ‘low’; Mrb., Bad. [myl]/[myj]
comes kj < kl, j < gl (and kl intervocalically) remain distinct ‘mule/s’; but in forms whose roots end in consonant + l,
from the ʧ/ʤ typical of dialects of northern Italy): [fjɔk], the plural ends in -i: Gad., Grd. [vedl]/[ˈvedli] ‘old’, Liv.
[kjef], [ˈjaʧa] (beside [ˈʤaʧa]), [ˈɛje] ‘eye’ (< OC(U)LUM). [ˈvegle]/[ˈvegli].
Final -s is preserved as a noun-adjective plural and sec- Masculines in -r and -m generally have plurals in -(e)s,
ond person singular (as well as, partially, second person save in livinallese, which has a zero desinence: Mrb. [car]/
plural) ending (see §11.4). Elsewhere it is lost: PLUS ‘more’ > [cars] ‘cart/s’, Grd. [ʧar]/[ˈʧarəs] vs Liv. [ʧar] (SG/PL); Fas.
Mrb. [ply], Bad. [plø], Grd., Liv. [plu], Fas. [pju]. [ram]/[ˈrames] ‘branch/es’ vs Liv. [ram] (SG/PL).
As in other peripheral varieties of northern Italy, the With forms in -k the plural reflects -i (palatalization) in
outcomes of Romance palatalization are still palatals (ʧ, ʃ, gaderano and livinallese: Mrb. [piŋk]/[piːŋc] ‘pine/s’, Liv.
ʒ, according to origin and context), rather than alveolar as [piŋk]/[piŋʧ]; in gardenese and fassano it may be in -i or
elsewhere in northern Italy; *kinkwe ‘five’ > Lad. [ʧiŋk]; -es: Grd. [puək]/[puəʧ] ‘little/few’, [fuək]/[fuəʃ] ‘fire/s’ vs
GENTEM ‘people’ > Mrb. [ʒɔnt], Bad. [ʒant], Grd. [ʒænt], Fas. [piŋk]/[piŋks]; Fas. [pek]/[peʧ ] vs [fek]/[feges]. In certain
[ʒɛnt], Liv. [ʒent] (cf. the reflexes of ACETUM in Table 11.1); other cases fassano and, in part, gardenese have generalized
RATIONEM ‘reason’ > Mrb. [raˈʒuŋ], Bad. [rəˈʒuŋ], Grd. [rəˈʒoŋ], the plural in -(e)s, while other varieties have the -i type
Fas. [reˈʒɔŋ], Liv. [reˈʒoŋ]; PICEUM ‘spruce’ > Bad. [paʧ], Grd. (Chiocchetti 2001), e.g. with nouns whose roots end in -p
[pæʧ], Fas. [peʧ], Liv. [pɑʧ]; *bruˈsjare ‘burn’ > Gad. [burˈʒe], and -v/f (in these cases, with the fall of -i, the plural is
Grd., Liv. [bruˈʒe], Fas. [bruˈʒɛr]. identical to the singular): Gad. [camp] ‘field/s’, Liv. [ʧamp]
Another typical development is the treatment of mb in vs Grd. [ʧamp]/[ˈʧampəs], Fas. [ʧamp]/[ˈʧampes]; Gad.
posttonic position: CAMBAM ‘leg’ > Mrb., Fas. [ˈjama], Bad. [kɔːrf] ‘crow/s’, Liv. [kɔrf] vs Grd. [kɔrf]/[ˈkɔrvəs], Fas.
[ˈʤaːma], Grd., Liv. [ˈʤama], and similarly that of nd in [kɔrf]/[ˈkɔrves].
the same position (except in gardenese): UENDERE ‘sell’ > Mrb. We also find cumulation of plural marking, namely pal-
[ˈvɛne], Bad. [ˈvanə], Fas. [ˈvener], Liv. [ˈvɑne] vs Grd. atalization + s or, more frequently s + palatalization: Bad.
[ˈvændər]. Gaderano and gardenese have /h/ via loans from [daːn]/[daːɲs] ‘damage/s’, Bad. [ˈpɛːrə]/[ˈpɛːrəʃ] ‘father/s’,
German: Gad. [rɛːhl] roe deer’ (< Tyrolese Ger. reachl), Grd. Grd. [ˈpɛrə]/[ˈpɛrəʃ], Fas., Liv. [ˈpɛre]/[ˈpɛreʃ]. In fassano the
[hekəlˈne] ‘crochet’ (< Ger. häkeln). -i can also cause palatalization of tonic /a/: Fas. [an]/[ɛɲ]
‘year/s’, [pra]/[pre]‘meadow/s’.
In some nouns denoting persons, gaderano and gardenese
form the plural with a suffix derived from -ONES (M)/-ANES (F):
11.4 Morphology Mrb. [møt]/[miˈtuŋs] ‘child/children’, Bad. [myt]/[miˈtuŋs],
Grd. [mut]/[muˈtoŋs]; Mrb. [ˈmøta]/[miˈtaŋs] ‘little girl/s’,
11.4.1 Nominal system Bad. [ˈmyta]/[miˈtaŋs], Grd. [ˈmuta]/[muˈtaŋs].
Adjectives all form their feminines in -a, including those
Feminine nouns and adjectives with singulars in -a have which in Latin did not vary for gender: Grd. [ʒæwn]/
plurals in -es, except in the lower Val di Fassa and Livinal- [ˈʒæwna] ‘young.M/F’ (cf. IUUENEM.M/F). Sound changes have
longo, where the plural is in -e: Mrb. [ˈʧoːla]/[ˈʧoːles] given rise to numerous alternations between masculine and
‘onion/s’ vs Liv. [ˈʧeola]/[ˈʧeole]. Other feminines have feminine: Gad. [blaŋk]/[ˈblaːnca] ‘white.M/F’, [foʃk]/[ˈfoʃa]
plurals in -(e)s, while in lower Val di Fassa and in Livinal- ‘black.M/F’, Grd. [plæŋ]/[ˈplæjna] ‘full.M/F’, Fas. [ˈtebek]/
longo the plural is identical to the singular: Grd. [pɛrt]/ [ˈtebja] ‘lukewarm.M/F’, Liv. [sowrt]/[ˈsowrda] ‘deaf.M/F’.
[ˈpɛrtəs] vs Fas. (brach) [part] ‘part/s’. Free subject pronouns for the first and second persons
In the masculine the plural may be in -(e)s or -i; the singular are derived (contrary to most northern Italian
modern distribution of the two endings is largely determined dialects, and with the exception of livinallese) from nomina-
by the ending of the root, although very unpredictably and tive rather than oblique forms: EGO ‘I’ > Mrb. [ju], Bad. [jø],
variably according to dialect. The plural in -i is also realized Grd. [iə], Fas. [ʤe] vs Liv. [mi] < MIHI; TU ‘thou’ > Gad. [tø],
in very different ways according to the end of the root: it may Grd., Fas. [tu] vs Liv. [ti] < TIBI; the third person forms
be retained or deleted; in the latter case the plural may be (subject and oblique) are from ILLUM (MSG)/ILLAM (FSG)/ILLI
identical to the singular, except where the ending -i has (MPL)/ILLAS (FPL): Mrb. [ɛl]/[ˈɛra]/[ej]/[ˈɛres], Bad. [al]/[ˈala]/
caused palatalization of the preceding consonant or vowel. [aj]/[ˈaləs], Grd. [æl]/[ˈæjla]/[æj]/[ˈæjləs], Fas. [el]/[ˈɛla]/
In general, we have plurals in -i, in all varieties, for [iʧ]/[ˈɛles], Liv. [dɑl]/[ˈdɑla]/[dɑj]/[ˈdɑle] (the d- in the livi-
masculines whose roots end in -t, -s/-ʦ, and -l; in these nallese forms may be due to the final -d of the preposition a
cases the plural is realized as palatalization of the final (d) ‘to’ in constructions of the type [ad ɑl] > [a dɑl]).
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LADIN
Table 11.3 Clitic subject pronouns (proclitic/enclitic)

MAREBBANO BADIOTTO GARDENESE FASSANO LIVINALLESE
1SG i/i i/i -/i - / (-e) - / jo

2SG t(e) / te t(ə) / (tə) t(ə) / - te / te te / to
3SG.M al / (e)l al / (ə)l l / (ə)l el / (e)l l / lo
3SG.F ar(a) / (e)ra al(a) / (ə)la la / (ə)la la / la la / la
1PL i / ze (i) / z(e) -/s - / -e - / zo
2PL i/e (i) / (e) -/- -/- -/o
3PL.M aj / i aj / i i/i i/i i / li
3PL.F ares / (e)res aləs / (ə)ləs ləs / (ə)ləs les / les le / le
All varieties also have clitic forms of the subject pronoun b. kæʃ gwant tə feʒ i a ti (Grd.)
(cf. Ch. 47), although not with the same syntactic properties this dress to.you.SG= make =I to you.SG.DAT
(see §11.5.3). In preverbal position, gardenese, fassano, and ‘This dress I am making for you.’
livinallese, like many northern Italian dialects, have only
three forms: second person singular, third person singular, The system of oblique clitic pronouns is analogous to that
and third person plural. Upper badiotto also has a first of most northern Italian dialects (see also Ch. 48), but does
person singular form, while the remainder of badiotto, and not display a locative form; thus existential expressions
marebbano, have a complete series (although the first person of the type ‘there is . . . ’ are expressed by ‘it is . . . ’ (cf. 51a
singular, first person plural, and second person plural forms and 58):
are identical, as in many northern Italian dialects). In
enclitic position (under inversion, see §11.5.3), gaderano (3) la ˈite l ˈera ˈuna ˈfemena (Fas.)
and livinallese have a complete series (as did gardenese until there in it.SCL was a woman
the nineteenth century; Gartner 1879:76, 87); this asym- ‘There was a woman in there.’
metry between the proclitic and enclitic series is also typ-
ical of many northern Italian dialects (Renzi and Vanelli As in many northern Italian dialects, the third person
1983). Cf. Table 11.3. reflexive clitic se has been extended to the first person
Gaderano and gardenese also display an impersonal subject plural; in gardenese the 1PL se has only reflexive value,
pronoun form: Mrb. [aŋ]/-[(o)ŋ], Bad. [aŋ]/-[(ə/u)ŋ], Grd. while for reciprocals a non-reflexive clitic is used:
[ŋ]/-[(ə)ŋ] (for fassano and livinallese, see example (28)).
This form is plural, as is apparent from the agreement of (4) a. i muˈtoŋs nəz a manˈda ʤawˈloni (Grd.)
the participle (1), while gender depends on the referent: the children to.us= have sent sweets
‘The children have sent us sweets.’
(1) aŋ e ʒyːs / aŋ e ˈɲydəs b. næws sə oŋ kumˈpra ʤawˈloni (Grd.)
one= be.3 gone.MPL one= be.3 come.PTCP.FPL we REFL= have bought sweets
saluˈdadəs (Bad.) ‘We have bought ourselves sweets.’
greeted.PTCP.FPL
‘One has gone/One [female subject] has been greeted.’ c. næws nəz oŋ manˈda ʤawˈloni (Grd.)
we to.us= have sent sweets
In the free oblique pronoun series, two forms are distin- ‘We have sent each other sweets.’
guished in the first and second persons singular: Gad. [mɛ]/
[tɛ], Grd., Fas., Liv. [me]/[te] and Gad. [me]/[te], Grd., Fas., In gaderano, se has replaced the first and second person
Liv. [mi]/[ti]. The first type (< ACC ME/TE) is used as a direct plural clitics in all uses:
object and after a preposition, while the second (< DAT MIHI/
TIBI) is used as an indirect object, always accompanied by the
(5) a. arˈʒiɲe-s la maˈrana (Bad.)
preposition a: prepare.IMP.SG=to.us the lunch
‘Make lunch for us!’
(2) a. l aˈniəl ros iə pra te (Grd.) b. s uˈduŋ manˈʤaŋ (Bad.)
the lamb brown is near you.SG.ACC you.PL= we.see eating
‘The brown lamb is near you.’ ‘We see you eat.’
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GIAMPAOLO SALVI
11.4.2 Verb ˈtees], [viʒiˈtea], [viʒiˈtoŋ], [viʒiˈtɛde], [viʒiˈtea]; [fjoˈreʃe],

[fjoˈreʃes], [fjoˈreʃ], [fjoˈrjoŋ], [fjoˈride], [fjoˈreʃ].
In the present subjunctive, gaderano and livinallese display
The first person singular has the desinence -e (Mrb./lower the same desinence for all singular forms and the third
Bad. -i) in the present, imperfect indicative and subjunctive person plural: Mrb. [ˈcanti] ‘sing.1SG/2SG/3SG/3PL.SBJV’, Bad.
in all conjugations (in marebbano only in the present tense, [ˈcantəs], Liv. [ˈʧɑnte]. In gardenese and fassano first and
in badiotto only in the present indicative; in upper badiotto second person singular forms are identical to those of the
the -e may be absent): e.g. Fas. [ˈʧante]/[ˈʧante]/[ʧanˈtɛe]/ indicative, while the third person singular forms have -e in
[ʧanˈtase] ‘sing.1SG.PRS.IND/1SG.PRS.SBJV/1SG.IPFV.IND/1SG.IPFV. all conjugations: Grd. [ˈʧantə], Fas. [ˈʧante]. In the first and
SBJV’. Here we have the restoration of a non-etymological second persons plural, except for fassano, the forms are
personal ending after the fall of -O in the present indicative, identical to the indicative but also have a suffix: in gaderano
common to many Romance varieties (French, Catalan, Occi- and gardenese, as in various northern Venetan dialects, the
tan, northern Italo-Romance), sometimes with extension to suffix is -(z)e (in fact an enclitic subject pronouns form (cf.
other tenses and moods (Benincà and Vanelli 2005b:243–56). Table 11.3); in some varieties this suffix also appears in the
The second person singular has the desinence -es (< -AS; in forms of the imperfect indicative and the imperfect sub-
lower Val di Fassa and Livinallongo -e, due to the loss of junctive): e.g. Mrb. [canˈtuŋze]/[canˈtejze] ‘sing.1PL/2PL.SBJV’
final -s) throughout the paradigm (save, in marebbano, for (in the second person plural, -z- is the intervocalic reflex of
the present subjunctive; see below): e.g. Fas. [ˈʧantes]/ the ending -s; in the first person plural it is analogical on
[ˈʧantes]/[ʧanˈtɛes]/[ʧanˈtases] ‘sing.2SG.PRS.IND /2SG.PRS.SBJV/ this -z-). In livinallese the suffix is -be ([ʧanˈtombe]/[ʧan
.2SG.IPFV.IND /.2SG.IPFV.SBJV’. ˈtejbe]), analogical on the subjunctive of the verb HAVE,
The first person plural present ending is Gad. -uŋ/Grd., where the -be of [ˈɛbe] ‘have.1SG.PRS.SBJV’ has been reinter-
Fas., Liv. -oŋ (-juŋ/-joŋ in the fourth conjugation) < -UMUS, as preted as a suffix added to the first person singular indica-
in northern Venetan dialects: e.g. Fas. [ʧanˈtoŋ]/[baˈtoŋ]/ tive [ɛ] ‘I have’ with corresponding restructuring of the
[dorˈmjoŋ] ‘we sing/we beat/we sleep’. entire paradigm: [ˈɛbe], [ˈa(s)be], [ˈabe], [ˈombe], [ˈejbe],
The second person plural present indicative ending is -Vjs [ˈabe] (cf. also Benincà 1999). In fassano the forms of the
(Mrb., lower Bad., Grd.)/-V:s (upper badiotto)/-Vj (Liv.)/ imperfect subjunctive are used (see below), as in the neigh-
-Vde (Fas.), where V is the thematic vowel: e.g. Mrb. [can bouring fiammazzo dialects, but some dialects have a special
ˈtejs]/[baˈtejs]/[dorˈmiːs] ‘you sing/you beat/you sleep’, first person plural subjunctive ending -ane/jane, while the
upper Bad. [canˈteːs]/[baˈteːs]/[durˈmiːs], Liv. [ʧanˈtej]/[ba second person plural is identical to the indicative: [ʧan
ˈtej]/[dorˈmjej], Fas. [ʧanˈtɛde]/[baˈtede]/[dorˈmide] (with the ˈtane]/[ʧanˈtɛde].
same thematic vowel for first and second/third conjuga- As is usually the case in northern Italy, Ladin has lost the
tions in all varieties except fassano). The ending -de is not synthetic preterite form and uses only the analytic perfect
easy to explain, while in other varieties the ending is a in its stead.
normal reflex of ‑TIS. In the imperfect indicative, while gaderano and fassano
The third person plural is always identical to the third distinguish three types of suffix and delete -v-, gardenese
person singular for all verbs, as in Venetan and many other and livinallese have extended the second/third conjugation
northern Italo-Romance dialects: e.g. Mrb. [ɛ] ‘is/are’, Bad. suffix to the first and preserve -v-: Mrb. [canˈtaː]/[baˈtɛa]/
Fas., Liv. [e], Grd. [iə]. [dorˈmia] ‘I sang/beat/slept’, Bad. [canˈtaː]/[baˈtɔː]/[dur
The differential development of vowels according to ˈmiː], Fas. [ʧanˈtɛe]/[baˈtee]/[dorˈmie] vs Grd. [ʧanˈtɔvə]/
stress has given rise to frequent root allomorphy: e.g. Grd. [baˈtɔvə]/[durˈmivə], Liv. [ʧanˈtɑve]/[baˈtɑve]/[dorˈmive]).
[ˈkontə]/[kunˈtoŋ] ‘tell.1SG/1PL’, [ˈselə]/[saˈloŋ]‘salt.1SG/1PL’, In the first and second person plural forms Livinallese
[ˈmæwʒə]/[muˈʒoŋ] ‘milk.1SG/1PL’. The alternation may also adds -ve (from the first and second person singular forms)
involve syllable structure: Grd. [ˈprɔvə]/[purˈvoŋ] ‘try.1SG/ to the corresponding present forms: [ʧanˈtoŋve]/[ʧanˈtejve]
1PL’, [ˈkræjə]/[kərˈdoŋ] ‘believe.1SG/1PL’. ‘sang.1/2PL’.
In the singular and third person plural forms of present In the imperfect subjunctive marebbano, lower badiotto,
indicative and subjunctive and in the second person singular and fassano distinguish three types of modal-temporal suf-
imperative, the first and fourth conjugations display a large fixes, while upper badiotto, gardenese, and livinallese have
subset of verbs which show, respectively, reflexes of the extended the second/third conjugation suffix to the first:
formatives -IDI- and -ESC-: Mrb. [viʒiˈtejes]/[floˈrɛʃes] ‘you.SG Mrb. [canˈtas]/[baˈtɛs]/[dorˈmis] ‘I sang/beat/slept’, Fas.
visit/flourish’, Bad. [viʒiˈtajəs]/[fluˈraʃəs], Grd. [viʒiˈtejəs]/ [ʧanˈtase]/[baˈtese]/[dorˈmise] vs (upper) Bad. [canˈtes]/
[fluˈræʃəs], Fas. [viʒiˈtees]/[fjoˈreʃes], Liv. [viʒiˈteje]/[flo [baˈtes]/[durˈmis], Grd. [ʧanˈtæsə]/[baˈtæsə]/[durˈmisə],
ˈrɑʃe]; cf. the complete paradigms in fassano: [viʒiˈtee], [viʒi Liv. [ʧanˈtɑse]/[baˈtɑse]/[dorˈmise]. In gardenese, fassano,
160
LADIN
and livinallese the third person singular and plural have the
c. la ˈmuta kuˈrjæwza /la ˈmutaŋs kuˈrjæwzəs (Grd.)
analogical ending -a: Grd. [durˈmisa] ‘he slept’, Fas. Liv. [dor
the.SG girl.SG curious.SG/ the.SG girl.PL curious.PL
ˈmisa] (vs Mrb. [dorˈmis], Bad. [durˈmis]). Marebbano has
‘the curious girl/the curious girls’
generalized a single form for the three persons of the
singular and the third person plural: [canˈtas] ‘(I/you/
What is involved historically is the fall of final -s in
(s)he/they) sang’. In the first and second persons plural,
preconsonantal position, which was subsequently morpho-
livinallese analogically attaches the first and second persons
logized and extended to all contexts (including prevocalic:
singular ending -se in to the present tense forms: [ʧan
[l ˈawʧa]/[la ˈawʧəs] ‘the goose/the geese’—note that the
ˈtoŋse]/[ʧanˈtejse] ‘we/you sang’.
feminine plural article is not elided before vowels). This is
In the imperative the second person plural is always
also apparent from the fact that masculine noun phrases
distinct from the present indicative: Mrb. [dorˈmide], Bad.,
(predominantly with a plural in -i) have a regular plural
Grd. [durˈmidə], Fas., Liv. [dorˈmi] ‘sleep!’. The ending -de
(8a); a good many masculines, however, do not show the
does not appear in combination with a clitic reflexive: Bad.
plural ending if they precede the head, irrespective of
[senˈte-s] (sit.IMP.PL=REFL) ‘sit!’, while with non-reflexive clit-
whether the plural is in -s (8b) or in -i (8c).
ics the situation is variable: Bad. [dajˈde-la]/Mrb. [dajˈdede-
la] (help.IMP.PL=her) ‘help her!’. In second person singular
negative imperatives, as in Italian, the infinitive is used (cf. (8) a. l bel ʧɔf /i bjej
(23) and (24c)). the.SG beautiful.SG flower.SG the.PL beautiful.PL
In addition to the normal analytic tense forms there are ˈʧɔfəs (Grd.)
also corresponding double compound analytic forms to flower.PL
indicate the completedenss of the action with transitive ‘the beautiful flower/the beautiful flowers’
verbs (cf. §58.3.4): b. i prim ˈʧɔfəs (cf. prims ‘first.PL’) (Grd.)
the.PL first.SG flower.PL
(6) ˈbelə iˈniər ˈɔva pawl aˈbu ‘the first flowers’
already yesterday had Paolo have.PTCP
fiˈna si læwr (Grd.) c. i ʃtlet ˈrevəsc (cf. ʃtleʧ ‘bad.PL’) (Grd.)
finished.PTCP his work the.PL bad.SG turnip.PL
‘By yesterday Paolo had finished his work.’ ‘the bad turnips’
All varieties show the Romance future (see §§27.6, The same phenomenon occurs in the upper Val di Fassa, but
46.3.2.2, 58.5). A periphrasis involving the reflexes of UENIRE it has followed slightly different paths and only affects
‘to come’ + preposition a + infinitive was once widespread feminine noun phrases (Chiocchetti 2002–3; Rasom 2006).
but has now disappeared. The Romance conditional (see We need to distinguish two cases: (a) noun phrases in which
§§27.6, 46.3.2.2, 58.5.3) is not found, however (see §11.5.2). the adjective precedes the noun, and (b) those in which it
follows the noun. In case (a), only the noun takes the plural
ending (9); the article may be in the plural, but only if it is
followed by a form that does not show a plural marker: cf.
11.5 Syntax (10a) vs (10b):
11.5.1 Noun phrase (9) a. la ˈbɛla ˈfemena /la ˈbɛla

the.SG beautiful.SG woman.SG /the.SG beautiful.SG
In Gardenese feminine plural NPs, no material preceding ˈfemenes (upper Fas.)
the nominal head shows plural agreement, while adjectives woman.PL
following the head do agree (7c): ‘the beautiful lady/the beautiful ladies’
b. ˈduta ˈsia ˈrɔbes (upper Fas.)
(7) a. la ˈpitla ˈmuta / la ˈpitla ˈmutaŋs (Grd.)
all.SG his.SG thing.PL
the.SG little.SG girl.SG/the.SG little.SG girl.PL
‘all his things’
‘the little girl/the little girls’
b. ˈduta ˈkæla piˈtura /ˈdutaˈkæla piˈturəs (Grd.) (10) a. les ʧiŋk (upper Fas.)
all.SG that.SG painting.SG/ all.SG that.SG painting.PL the.PL five
‘all that painting/all those paintings’ ‘five o’clock’
161
GIAMPAOLO SALVI
b. la ˈdoes (upper Fas.) b. l patiˈmant də d ˈaːtri

the.SG two.PL the suffering of of others
‘two o’clock’ ‘the suffering of others’
In case (b), the plural ending can appear only on the In gaderano and gardenese the numeral ‘one’ is followed by
postnominal adjective (11a), but it can also appear both on the indefinite article:
the noun and on the adjective (11b). What is involved is not
entirely clear, but the two situations tend each to be associ- (15) ˈyna na ˈkoːsa mə ˈpaza (Bad.)
ated with a different interpretation of the relation between one a thing me= grieves
adjective and noun: in (11a) the adjective has restrictive ‘One thing grieves me.’
value (white clouds are identified as opposed to clouds of
any other colour), while in (11b) the adjective has descriptive
value (there were clouds, which happened to be black): 11.5.2 Verb phrase
(11) a. la ˈnigola ˈbjɛnʧes no ˈpɔrta ˈpjevja (upper Fas.) For the selection of auxiliary verbs in analytic tense forms,
the.SG cloud.SG white.PL not= bring rain matters are much as in Italian (cf. §49.3) and French, except
‘White clouds do not bring rain.’ with reflexive verbs, where the auxiliary is generally HAVE
b. l ˈera ˈɛnʧe ˈʦeke ˈnigoles ˈnɛjgres (upper Fas.) (16, 17), although in some varieties certain verbs (e.g.
it.SCL was too some cloud.PL black.PL motion verbs) present BE (18):
‘There were also black clouds.’
(16) s a məˈtu pər ˈʃtreda (Grd.)
Unlike northern Italian dialects, Ladin does not use the REFL= has put through road
definite article with a possessive used as a determiner: Mrb. ‘He set off on his way.’
[ˈtøa ˈcøːra] ‘your.SG goat’, Bad. [ˈtya ˈcoːra], Grd. [ti ˈʧæwra], (17) la se a fat konˈtɛr (Fas.)
Fas. [ˈtia ˈʧawra]; but Liv. [la ˈtua ˈʧowra] (due to recent she= REFL= has made tell.INF
influence by neighbouring northern Italian dialects). ‘She got told.’
In gaderano and gardenese generic reference in a plural NP
may be expressed with the definite article, as is generally (18) sə n iə ʒit (Grd.)
the case in other Romance languages, but also without it, as REFL=thence= is gone
in Germanic: ‘He went off.’
(12) (i) caŋs e də boɲ kumˈpaːɲs d la pərˈsona (Bad.) The past participle agrees in number and gender with the
(the) dogs are of good friends of the man direct object only for third person clitics (Loporcaro
‘Dogs are good friends of man.’ 1998b:92f., 147-9; cf. §49.2.1), but in gaderano this usually
happens only in the feminine singular (19a,b):
Ladin has not developed a partitive article, but de ‘of ’ is
used in indefinite noun phrases where an adjective precedes (19) a. i t l a ˈdada (Bad.)
the noun (13) (see also 12), and before some determiners I= to.you.SG= it.F= have given.F
(quantifiers, deictics, and anaphorics) (14); this de may also ‘I have given it to you.’
be preceded by a preposition (13b/14b): b. al m i a vny (Bad.)
he= to.me= them.M= has sold.SG
(13) a. aˈoŋ veˈdu de ˈbie ˈfjores (Fas.) ‘He has sold them to me.’
we.have seen of beautiful flowers
‘We have seen some beautiful flowers.’ In fassano and livinallese (non-emphatic) negation shows a
b. tə də ˈpitla ˈgrupəs (Grd.) pre-verbal particle (20), but in the other varieties there are
in of little groups normally two elements (cf. §51.2.1), one preceding and one
‘in little groups’ following the inflected verb (21), although in some contexts
(e.g. when the negator is ‘expletive’, rather than a genuine
(14) a. ˈsilvia nəz a ʃkrit də plø ˈlatrəs (Bad.) marker of negation, as in comparative constructions; cf.
Silvia to.us= has written of several letters §51.4) a single preverbal particle is possible (22) (Gsell
‘Silvia has written us several letters.’ 2002–3; see Zanuttini 1997 for northern Italo-Romance):
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LADIN
(20) ˈana no vɛŋ (Fas.) (27) a. te l ˈdage (Fas.)

Anna not= comes to.you.SG= it= I.give
‘Anna is not coming.’ ‘I give it to you.’
b. da me ne (Fas.)
(21) ˈana nə vaɲ ˈnia (Bad.)
give.IMP =to.me =thereof
Anna not= comes not
‘Give me some!’
(22) ˈrita ˈlæwra də plu də kæl kə la
(28) la fawʧ, se la ˈguʦa kon la ˈpera (Fas.)
Rita works of more of that that she=
the scythe IMPERS= it.ACC= sharpens with the whetstone
nə məˈsæsa (Grd.)
‘The scythe is sharpened with a whetstone.’
not= should
‘Rita works more than she should.’
As is usually the case in northern Italo-Romance, the
indirect object is generally doubled by a dative clitic:
A recent development is that in gardenese and upper
badiotto the preverbal particle may be omitted in spontan-
(29) ˈana ti ˈʃiŋka n ˈlibər a si kumˈpanja (Grd.)
eous speech.
Anna to.her= gifts a book to her friend.F
In gaderano and gardenese only preverbal negation is pos-
‘Anna gives a book to her friend.’
sible in the imperative (as well as the two-element variety),
but with a different particle (no rather than ne):
The modal functions of the conditional are expressed by
the imperfect subjunctive:
(23) no i tuˈkɛ (Grd.)
not= them.M= touch.INF
(30) nos luraˈsane de pju se foˈsane paˈe mjeʧ (Fas.)
‘Don’t touch them!’
we would.work more if we.were paid better
‘We would work more if we were paid better.’
Non-subject clitics are always preverbal, except in the
affirmatve imperative; thus in fassano, we have proclisis
To express the future-in-the-past the imperfect is used
with the infinitive (24a) and the negative imperative
(31a), but in gaderano and gardenese the pluperfect subjunctive
(24b) (cf. also 23), enclisis with the affirmative impera-
may also be used (31b), a usage which, with verbs that take the
tive (25):
subjunctive, can indicate either anteriority or posteriority (32):
(24) a. jɛj a me ˈtoner la ˈfɛjdes (Fas.)
come.IMP.SG to to.me= shear.INF the sheep.PL (31) a. ˈana a dit kə ˈklawdia aŋkunˈtɔva ˈmarko
‘Come and shear my sheep!’ Anna has said that Claudia meet.PST.IPFV Marco
da la ʧiŋk a bulˈsaŋ (Grd.)
b. no te ˈmever (Fas.) at the five at Bolzano
not= you.SG.O= move.INF ‘Anna said that Claudia would meet Marco at five
‘Don’t move!’ in Bolzano.’
(25) ˈʒvete-me la ˈkandola b. . . . ˈæsa aŋkunˈta . . .
empty.IMP.SG=to.me the bucket had.SBJV met.PTCP
‘Empty my bucket!’
(32) iə raˈtɔvə kə ˈklawdia ˈæsa ʃkrit la ˈlætra
Clitic climbing is not possible with semi-auxiliaries I believed that Claudia had.SBJV written the letter
(except in fassano, for which cf. 33b): ‘I believed that Claudia had written/would write the
letter.’
(26) uˈla puˈdes i pa l ʧaˈfɛ (Bad.)
where could =I Q it.O= find.INF
11.5.3 Sentence structure
‘Where could I find it?’
In clitic clusters the order is dative + accusative/partitive Fassano and livinallese show the same structures as northern Italo-
(27); where it exists (fassano, livinallese), the impersonal Romance, while gaderano and gardenese show a verb-second
clitic se precedes the accusative clitic, as in Venetan structure similar to that found in Romansh (cf. also §§31.3.3,
dialects (28): 62.5). In fassano and livinallese the basic constituent-order is SVX,
163
GIAMPAOLO SALVI
and pre-posing any constituent will not cause subject–verb form) appears before vowel-initial auxiliaries (38b) and
inversion (33); in particular, pre-posing the direct object requires always when there is inversion (38c); in this construction
a resumptive clitic (33b): the verb has masculine singular agreement (see 38b, 51a):
(33) a. iɱˈvea de ˈpɛʃka toˈfɛɲa el paˈtroŋ deˈʧɛza va (38) a. ˈrua la ˈmama (Fas.)
in eve of Epiphany the master of house goes arrives the mother
ˈduta la maˈʒoŋ (= XSV . . . ) (Fas.) ‘The mother arrives.’
all the house
b. l e ruˈa la ˈmama (Fas.)
‘On the eve of Epiphany, the master of the house
it.SCL= is arrived.MSG the mother.F
goes all over the house.’
‘The mother has arrived.’
b. ˈkɛla vaˈlɛnta, ˈsia ˈmɛre no la la
c. ˈrue-l la ˈmama?
that good her mother not= she= her=
arrives=it.SCL the mother
poˈdea veˈder (= OSV . . . )
‘Is the mother arriving?’
could see.INF
‘Her mother couldn’t stand the good one.’
As in neighbouring northern Italo-Romance dialects, the
subject clitic normally follows the negative particle (39);
As generally in northern Italo-Romance (Poletto 1993b; Rasom only in some upper fassano and livinallese varieties may the
2003), the expression of the subject is not obligatory for those third person clitic also precede the negator (40):
persons which lack a subject clitic, namely first person singular
and first and second persons plural (34). It is obligatory for those (39) se no te ˈfoses veˈɲu da me (Fas.)
persons which have such a clitic (second person singular, third if not= you.SG.S= were come.PTCP to me
person singular and plural). While the subject clitic is always ‘If you hadn’t come to me . . . ’
expressed in the second person singular (except in the impera-
(40) no l /l no a dit oˈla ke l va (Fas.)
tive), even in the presence of an independent subject (35), in the
not= he= he= not= has said where that he= goes
third person singular and plural the clitic subject is obligatory
‘He hasn’t said where he’s going.’
only in the absence of any other preverbal subject (36a):
In interrogative sentences, fassano subject clitics show
(34) Ø ˈvage bɛŋ ˈɛnʧe su per ˈkɛla ˈburta (Fas.)
subject–verb inversion (Siller-Runggaldier 1993), optionally
I.go surely also up through that ugly
accompanied by the interrogative particle pa. In partial
‘I can perfectly well go up the nasty one (stairway)’
interrogatives the inversion construction (41a) alternates
nowadays with a construction introduced by ke, which
(35) tu te ˈpawses (Fas.)
requires neither inversion nor pa (41b), and corresponds
you.SG you.SG= rest
to the structure of subordinate interrogatives (see 40, 49b;
‘You rest.’
cf. Chiocchetti 1992; Hack 2012; and for northern Italo-
Romance, Poletto and Vanelli 1995):
(36) a. la fiˈlɛa (Fas.)
she= span
(41) a. tant de lat ɛ-la pa? (Fas.)
‘She was spinning.’
(how.)much of milk has=she Q
b. ʃta ˈpiʧola (l) a ʃkomenˈʦa a preˈɛr (Fas.) ‘How much milk does she give?’
this child.F (she=) has begun to beg.INF
‘This little girl began to beg.’ b. tant de lat ke la fɛʃ? (Fas.)
(how.)much of milk that she= makes
With two or more conjoined verbs, the subject clitic must be
repeated with each verb: Gaderano and gardenese may be described as verb-second
languages, characterized by (partial) asymmetry between
(37) la s a ferˈma e la e ˈʒita ˈite (Fas.) the order of words in main clauses and that in subordinate
she= REFL= has stopped and she= is gone in clauses (cf. §§31.3.3, 62.5.1). In subordinate clauses the nor-
‘She stopped and went in.’ mal order is SVX; in main clauses any constituent may be
placed in immediate preverbal position, in which case
In presentative structures there is no subject clitic (38a), but subject—be it pronominal (42a,c), or lexical (42b)—and finite
a dummy subject clitic (identical to the masculine singular verb are inverted (there are some limitations on such
164
LADIN
fronting, particularly in upper badiotto; see Valentin 1998– Where two or more conjoined verbs share the same subject,
99; Poletto 2000:ch. 4). In particular, unlike fassano and the subject (even if it is a clitic) is not normally repeated:
livinallese (see 33b), if the fronted element is a direct object
(with topic function) it is not additionally marked by a (45) l plu ʒæwn va n di da si ˈperə
resumptive clitic (42c): the more young goes one day to his father
i Ø diʃ (Grd.)
(42) a. iˈlo a l ʃkumənˈʧa a məˈne na and says
there has =he begun to lead.INF a ‘The younger one goes one day to his father and says
ˈʃtleta ˈvita (= XAuxSVPTCP . . . ) (Grd.) [ . . . ]’
bad life
‘There he began to lead a bad life.’ Apart from conjoined sentences, the expression of the
preverbal subject is obligatory if there exists a subject clitic
b. kæʃt an iə naˈdel də ˈʒuəbja (= XVS . . . ) (Grd.)
(46a); the subject clitic is never expressed if the verb is
this year is Christmas at Thursday
preceded by any other subject (46b); in upper badiotto,
‘This year Christmas falls on a Thursday.’
however, the tonic second person singular subject pronoun
c. ˈkæla e i puˈdu mə kumˈpre dan is accompanied by the corresponding clitic (46c):
that.F have =I been.able to.me= buy.INF before
træj ˈani (= OAuxSVPTCP . . . ) (Grd.) (46) a. l a aˈbu si arpəˈʒoŋ (Grd.)
three years he= has had his inheritance
‘That one I managed to buy three years ago.’ ‘He has had his inheritance.’
b. l plu ʒæwn (**l) va n di
In the analytic forms of unaccusative constructions the sub- the more young he= goes one day
ject may also stand after the participle if it has rhematic value: da si ˈperə (Grd.)
to his father
(43) da ˈsara vaɲ impiˈadəs ləs lyms (Bad.) ‘The younger son goes one day to his father.’
at evening come turned.on the lights
c. tø t ˈcantes (Bad.)
‘In the evening the lights are turned on.’
you.SG you.SG = sing
‘You sing.’
Whether the V2 system of these varieties is due to
contact influence from Germanic varieties (German and The subject clitic precedes the negator:
Tyrolese dialects), as has been traditionally claimed, or
preserves the early Romance V2 system possibly (47) tə nə ˈfɔvəs ˈnia iˈlo (Grd.)
favoured by language contact (Benincà 1994:ch. 4) is you.SG= not= were not there
hard to tell in the absence of written documentation. ‘You weren’t there.’
In any case, Ladin V2 is different both from modern
German V2 (which displays verb-final position in subor- The same generalization holds for postverbal subjects:
dinate clauses) and from old Romance V2 (which is they must be expressed if there exists a corresponding
less rigid in allowing various kinds of left-dislocation; enclitic form (48a), but not if there is not one (48b) (in badiotto
Benincà 2006). the subject enclitic pronoun is optional in the second person
The verb can also occupy the first position: this regularly singular). Unlike preverbal position, a postverbal free subject
occurs in polar questions (44a) and whenever the preverbal may be accompanied by an enclitic subject pronoun
subject is not expressed (44b): indeed, as in the dialects of (Valentin 1998–9; Salvi 2003): in gardenese this happens only
the other group (that which does not have V2), the expres- with pronominal subjects (49a), while in badiotto doubling is
sion of the preverbal subject is not obligatory in the also possible with nominal subjects (49b):
absence of a subject clitic (Table 11.3):
(48) a. kæʃt kərˈdɔv-i pərˈdu (Grd.)
(44) a. ʃkriʃ pa maˈria naˈlætra ? (= VQS . . . ) (Grd.) this believed=I lost
writes Q M. a letter ‘This one I believed lost.’
‘Is Maria writing a letter?’ b. zæŋ faˈʒæjs Ø na tel ˈfeʃta (Grd.)
b. e pja ŋ paˈvæl (= AuxVPTCP . . . ) (Grd.) now you.PL.make a such feast
I.have caught a butterfly ‘Now you make such a feast.’
165
GIAMPAOLO SALVI
(49) a. duˈmaŋ va l æl da l duˈtor gender and number with the subject; cf. §60.5); in gaderano and
tomorrow goes =he he to the doctor gardenese, however, COME is always used (52c):
da i dænts (Grd.)
of the teeth (52) a. i veˈɲia keʧ te l ˈɛga (Fas.)
‘Tomorrow he goes to the dentist.’ they= came cooked.PTCP.PL in the water
‘They were boiled in water.’
b. iˈniːr ti a i damaˈnɛ
yesterday to.him= have =they asked b. ˈnoʃa veˈʒina e ʃtat morˈduda (Fas.)
sy kumˈpaːɲs ʃ al our neighbour.F is been.M bitten.F
his mates if he= ‘Our (female) neighbour has been bitten.’
es ˈvøja da ʒi imˈpara a l mɛːr (Bad.)
c. la beʃ iə uˈnida laˈveda (Grd.)
had.SBJV wish to go.INF along to the sea
the laundry.F is come.PTCP.F washed.PTCP.F
‘Yesterday his mates asked him if he felt like going
‘The laundry has been washed’
with them to the seaside.’
In presentative sentences there is always a dummy sub- Gaderano and gardenese also allow passivization of
ject clitic, in preverbal position (50a) or, where inversion is intransitive (unergative) verbs, with impersonal value:
required, in postverbal position (50b) (see also (51a); Siller-
Runggaldier 2012): (53) l iə uˈni baˈla ˈduta nuət (Grd.)
it.SCL is come.PTCP danced.PTCP all night
(50) a. l a kərˈda su ˈduta la muˈtaŋs (Grd.) ‘One danced all night.’
it.SCL= has called up all the girls
‘All the girls phoned.’ Gaderano and gardenese also make extensive use of ‘modaliz-
ing’ particles. In addition to pa, which is obligatory in partial
b. ŋkwæj a l kərˈda su ˈduta
interrogatives (in fassano it is optional), badiotto also has ma,
today has =it.SCL called up all
mo, and pö, which, like pa, can all appear for example in jussive
la muˈtaŋs (Grd.)
sentences, with different values (Poletto and Zanuttini 2003; cf.
the girls
also §§31.3.2, 53.3.3): ma marks the viewpoint of the listener
‘Today all the girls phoned.’
(54a), mo the viewpoint of the speaker (54b), pö contradiction
of an expectation (54c), pa focalization of an order (54d);
Where other Romance languages (with fassano and livinal-
several of these particles can also appear together:
lese) use left-dislocation to topicalize a constituent (with
possible clitic doubling), gaderano and gardenese use the
immediate preverbal position, without clitic resumption. (54) a. tɛ tə ma n de də vaˈkanʦa (Bad.)
This holds even where topicalization affects only one part take.IMP.SG = to.you.SG ma a day of holiday
of some constituent (51): ‘Take a day’s holiday!’
b. puʦˈnajə-mə mo inc i calˈʦa (Bad.)
(51) a. lawˈranʧ nən iə l ʃtat truəps kə clean.IMP.SG=to.me mo also the shoes
workers thereof= is =it been.M.SG many that ‘Clean my shoes too!’
lawˈrɔva tə ˈkæʃta ˈfrabika (Grd.)
worked in this factory c. ˈmanʤə-l pø kə ʃə nɔ vaɲ əl frajt (Bad.)
‘As for workers, there were many working in this eat.IMP.SG=it pö for if not becomes =it.SCL cold
factory.’ ‘Eat it or it’ll get cold!’
b. ˈlibri nən a l liət puəʧ (Grd.) d. faˈje-l pa dəsiˈgy (Bad.)

books thereof= has =he read.PTCP few do.IMP.PL=it pa definitely
‘As for books, he has read few.’ ‘Do do it!’
Note that when we have a partitive quantification, pre- Gaderano and gardenese are also characterized by a very
posing of the noun is always accompanied, as in Italian and productive use of the construction verb + locative adverb.
French, by the partitive clitic (n(en)). This is very widespread in northern Italy (Cordin 2011), but
In all varieties the passive auxiliary is COME (52a). In analytic here it is taken further on the model of German verbs with
tense forms in fassano and livinallese, as in Italian, it is BE (52b) an adverbial particle, on which the Ladin structures are
(but note that in this case the participle does not agree in often calqued (Hack 2011): Grd. [tɔ su] ‘take up (= gather,
166
LADIN
take on)’ (Ger. auf-nehmen), [pənˈse dɔ] ‘think after (= reflect)’ c. la maˈeʃtra ˈlaʃa ˈljæʒər la ˈʃtɔrja da
(Ger. nach-denken), [di ˈɔra] ‘say out (= speak out, plainly)’ the teacher.F lets read.INF the story by
(Ger. aus-sagen), [ˈmætər prɔ] ‘put to (=add)’ (Ger. zu-setzen); n ʃkuˈle (Grd.)
Bad. [uˈdaj ˈite] ‘see in (= comprehend)’ (Ger. ein-sehen), [sə a schoolchild
ʃlarˈʤe ˈfɔra] ‘REFL broaden out (= expand)’ (Ger. sich aus- ‘The schoolteacher has the story read by a school-
breiten), [to sø] ‘take up (pick up; receive; record)’ (Ger. auf- child (= tells a schoolchild that he must/is allowed
nehmen). to read the story).’
In fassano and livinallese relative clauses are formed as,

11.5.4 Subordination generally, they are in northern Italo-Romance (cf. §64.4):
they are all introduced by the complementizer ke, and the
Gaderano and gardenese are distinguished from fassano and function of the relativized element may or may not be
livinallese (and other northern Italo-Romance varieties) by expressed by a clitic (if one is available), as in the case of
the use of the gerund with verbs of perception (Casalicchio the direct object (57), with differentiation between restrict-
2011): ive (57b) and appositive (57a) relatives; in other cases the
relativized element is not expressed (58):
(55) a. ntaŋ i prims ˈani də ˈvita ˈɔva ˈʤina
during the first years of life had Gina (57) a. uŋ foreʃˈtjer ke neˈʃuɲ no l koɲoˈʃea (Fas.)
ˈdoŋka me awˈdi rujəˈnaŋ tuˈdæʃk (Grd.) a stranger that nobody not= him= knew
therefore only heard speaking German ‘a stranger that nobody knew’
‘So during the first years of her life Gina had only
b. kel ke l eʃpoziˈʦjoŋ vel moˈʃɛr (Fas.)
heard German spoken.’
that.DEM that the exhibition wants show.INF
b. n di a l awˈdi la uʃ ‘what the exhibition wants to show’
one day has =he heard the voice
(58) te ki loˈkali ke l e ˈite ʒɛnt (Fas.)
dəˈdio ti diˈʒaŋ (Grd.)
in those premises that it.SCL= is inside people
of God to.him= telling
‘in those premises where there are people’
‘One day he heard the voice of God telling him . . . ’
In badiotto and gardenese, subject relatives (59a) and direct
The causative construction is broadly similar to that of
object relatives (59b) are introduced by ke, but never with a
Italian and French (cf. §61.3), i.e. the lexical subject of a
clitic, while in marebbano we have two different forms: ko for
transitive infinitive may be expressed either via the indirect
subject relatives (60a) and ke for direct object relatives
object (56b) or via a by-phrase (56c), but gaderano and garden-
(60b):
ese are distinguished from the general Romance type because
factitive can also be expressed, as in German, via the verb
(59) a. daˈʒæ-mə la pɛrt kə mə ˈtoka (Grd.)
‘let’. While the verb ‘make’ indicates the achievement of a
give.IMP.PL=to.me the share that to.me= is.due
result (56b), ‘let’ expresses the motivation to act, usually as a
‘Give me that share which is mine!’
consequence of some appropriate speech act, as well as (as in
other Romance languages), ‘allowing’ (56a,c) (Iliescu 1997): b. dut kæl kə m æjs kumanˈda (Grd.)
all that.DEM that to.me= you.PL.have ordered
(56) a. la maˈeʃtra a laˈʃa pawˈse i muˈtoŋs (Grd.) ‘all that you have ordered me to do’
the teacher.F has let.PTCP rest.INF the children
‘The schoolteacher made/let the children rest (60) a. kɛl ɛl ko ne salyˈdaː ˈɲaŋka (Mrb.)
(= told the children that they had/were allowed that man that.SUBJ not= greeted.IPFV even
to rest).’ ‘that man who didn’t even use to say hello’
b. la maˈeʃtra ti a fat ʃkri b. kɛl ke i aː koɲeˈʃy (Mrb.)
the teacher.F to.them= has made.PTCP write.INF that.DEM that I= had known
na ˈlætra a i muˈtoŋs (Grd.) ‘the one that I had known’
a letter to the children
‘The schoolteacher made the children write a With constituents introduced by a preposition, these var-
letter (= brought it about that the children wrote ieties use the distal demonstrative followed by ke, which is
a letter).’ probably a calque on German dialect structures in which the
167
GIAMPAOLO SALVI
relative pronoun, formally identical to the demonstrative, is Relatives lacking an antecedent have the same structure
followed by an invariant element wo ‘where’ or was ‘what’ as subordinate interrogatives (see (40)) and are introduced
(Gallmann et al. 2010:§196): by an interrogative pronoun followed by ke:
(61) dɔː la məˈzyra kuŋ ˈkala kə os (62) ˈke kə a uˈradləs da alˈdi, ˈaːldes (Bad.)
according.to the measure with that.DEM that you.PL who that has ears to hear.INF hear.SBJV
məzuˈreːs e parˈtiːs ˈfɔːra, sə ɲaˈraː-l ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear!’
measure and share out so will.come=it.SCL
parˈti ˈfɔːra a os (Bad.)
shared.PTCP out to to.you.PL.CL
‘As you measure and divide, so shall it be distributed
to you.’
168
CHAPTER 12
Romansh (Rumantsch)
S T E P H E N R. A N D E R S O N
12.1 Introduction 1962; Ganzoni 1977) and Vallader (‘lower’ Ladin, in the lower
Engadine; cf. Arquint 1964; Ganzoni 1983). This division
considerably understates the internal diversity within Ru-
The topic of this chapter is a cluster of linguistic varieties
mantsch. For example, within Surmiran the speech of Vaz
spoken in the Swiss canton of Graubünden (Grischun, Grisons,
(Ebneter 1981; 1994) and of Bergün (Lutta 1923) both differ
Grigioni), as shown in Map 12.1. Collectively, these are
in important ways, phonologically and lexically, from that
referred to locally as Rumantsch, with alternative spellings
spoken in Salouf and Savognin, which is the basis of written
such as ‘Romontsch’ and (in English) ‘Romansh’; within the
Surmiran (codified in large part by Signorell et al. 1987). The
valley of the Engadine the language is known as ‘Ladin’. This
language of Val Mustair, in the far southeast of the Enga-
chapter uses the local name, ‘Rumantsch’. Following Ascoli
dine, is quite different from the Vallader of the main valley
(1873) and Gartner (1883), Rumantsch is often grouped with
and from other forms of Rumantsch (Schorta 1938), and
Friulian and Ladin (see especially Chs 10, 11) as a Raeto-
there is diversity within the other major areas as well.
Romance branch of Romance. While there are similarities
In addition to the numerous local varieties (and multiple
among these languages, and a degree of mutual intelligibility,
literary standards), there is rumantsch grischun, which
there is no significant evidence (from characteristic shared
aspires to be a pan-dialectal standard. This language was
innovations) that this is a distinct historical unit within
created by the Romance philologist Heinrich Schmid in 1982
Romance. See Haiman and Benincà (1992) for discussion.1
on the basis of six months’ work. Schmid, not himself a
Since 1938, Rumantsch has been one of Switzerland’s four
Rumantsch speaker, constructed rumantsch grischun primar-
national languages; but until a referendum of 1996 it was
ily on the basis of forms from Surselvan, Surmiran, and
not an official language, and its real status is not obvious
Vallader, minimizing irregularity and reconciling differences
either in principle or in practice. It is not the equal of
among the sources by a sort of ‘majority rule’. The result
German, French, or Italian in significant respects such as
has been widely accepted by non-Rumantsch speakers in
education and public administration. In the 1990 census,
Switzerland as a way to avoid choosing one form of the
about 66,000 people indicated Rumantsch as the language
language over others.
of which they had the best command or which they most
Within the canton of Graubünden, there has been a con-
used, and of those some 41,000 lived in Graubünden. Virtu-
certed effort to impose rumantsch grischun as a literary and
ally all are at least bilingual—mostly in German (Swiss
official standard, and to introduce it in schools in place of
German and/or High German), though Italian is important
local varieties. On the basis of referenda this was done in
in parts of the canton.
some 40 (of 81) communes in Rumantsch-speaking areas
Five Rumantsch varieties possess established written
between 2007 and 2009, although at least 15 have since
standards. From west to east, these are Surselvan (in Ober-
returned to the use of local forms. Among Rumantsch
wald, southwest of Chur; cf. Spescha 1989), Sutselvan (in
speakers, there has been very considerable resistance to
Nidwald, south of Chur), Surmiran (in Surmeir, including
rumantsch grischun. School children in particular find it an
Oberhalbstein and Unterhalbstein, southeast of Chur; cf.
imposition to have to learn this language, which is not the
Grisch 1939; Thöni 1969; Signorell et al. 1987), Puter
spoken language of their relatives and the surrounding
(‘upper’ Ladin, in the upper Engadine valley; cf. Scheitlin
community, and has no substantial traditional literature.
Rumantsch is therefore unusual in being endangered both
1
An excellent description of the social and linguistic situation is Bradley from without (by German) and from within (by an artificial
(forthcoming); more extensive discussion is in Haiman and Benincà (1992) standard perceived to have minimal relevance or utility).
(though this is to some extent out of date and not always reliable in detail), This chapter cannot do justice to the full variety of
Haiman (1988), and Liver (2010). A description for non-specialists with a
bias toward the position of the Lia Rumantscha (major supporters of ‘Rumantsch’. The treatment of various areas of structure
rumantsch grischun) is in Gross (2004). will be based primarily on Surmiran, which in many
This chapter © Stephen R. Anderson 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 169
170
STEPHEN R. ANDERSON

G E R MANY
Vallader Surmiran
FRANC E
Putèr Sutsilvan
LI EC HTE N STE I N
Val Müstair Surselvan
GERMAN AU STR IA
see main map
ROMANSH
(RUMANTSCH)
FRENCH
ITALIAN
ITALY
FRANC E
ITALY
Chur
Davos
Zernez
Disentis/
Mustér
Savognin
St Moritz
Ticino Italian
Bargaiot (Italian of the Val Bregaglia)
Pus’ciavin (Italian of the Poschiavo Valley)
Graubünden Swiss German
Valaisan Swiss German
Bavarian
Map 12.1 Languages of Canton Graubünden (Switzerland)

ROMANSH (RUMANTSCH)
respects falls between Surselvan and Sutselvan on the one and rising [jo, ju, wa], as well as triphthongs [jej, joj, jow].
hand and the Ladin varieties of the Engadine on the other, Slightly different inventories are found in the other
both linguistically and geographically. varieties.
Unstressed syllables generally contain only short [ə]
(written a or e), [Ĭ] or [Ŭ], though unstressed mid vowels
are also found. These differences are connected with the
12.2 Phonology system of stem alternation described in §12.2.4. Unstressed
[ɛ] and [ɔ] are largely limited to the unstressed stem cor-
The most remarkable aspect of the phonology is the extent responding to a stressed stem with long stressed (open or
to which a variety of originally phonological processes have closed) similar mid vowels. Roughly two dozen verbs (of
been replaced by a system of lexically specified stem alter- several hundred) with stressed [ˈɛ] or [ˈɔ] show an
nations conditioned by stress. unstressed vowel with the same quality, while in a few
verbs, unstressed [ĕ] alternates with [ˈaj] or [ˈej].
12.2.1 Vowels
12.2.2 Consonants
The vowels of stressed syllables in Surmiran are shown in
Table 12.1. The consonant systems of all forms of Rumantsch are
The distinction between [e] and [ɛ] is not generally indi- roughly the same, as illustrated for Surmiran in Table 12.2.
cated orthographically, although it is the basis of contrasts. Distributionally, in syllable-final position [ŋ] appears to
Open mid vowels are, however indicated in opposition to the near exclusion of [n], although a few instances of syl-
closed in some frequent words forming minimal pairs: e.g. lable-final [n] are found as the reflex of original long -nn-
cò [kɔ] ‘here’, co [ko] ‘where?’; èra [ˈɛrə] ‘age’, era [ˈerə] ‘was’. (onn [ɔn] ‘year’ < ANNUM). Otherwise [ŋ] appears only as a
There is a contrast between long and short vowels, result of the assimilation of [n] to a following velar, with one
though the standard orthographies are not consistent in exception: in the paradigm of bung [buŋ] ‘good’, the final [ŋ]
indicating it. In general, stressed vowels are lengthened in is often extended to intervocalic position in the feminine
open syllables and before final [l] and [r], but short in other singular buna/bunga, suggesting a least a minimal contrast-
closed syllables. Stressed short vowels in open syllables ive value for [n] vs [ŋ].
occur, however, in which case they are indicated ortho- Obstruents are devoiced word-finally and assimilate in
graphically by gemination of the following consonant. The voicing to following obstruents. Before another consonant,
lengths sometimes contrast, but this is indicated ortho- [s] is replaced by [ʃ], which assimilates to [ʑ] before voiced
graphically only in a limited set of minimal pairs: e.g. êr obstruents. An exception is the second person singular verb
[eːr] ‘field’, er [er] ‘also’; gôt [goːt] ‘woods’, got [got] ‘drop’; îgl ending -st, which is [st]; this probably reflects the origin of
[iːʎ] ‘eye’, igl [iʎ] ‘the.MSG’. Rumantsch vowel length requires this ending as -s with subsequent incorporation of a clitic
further investigation. pronominal element -t.
The stressed vowel systems of the other varieties are
largely similar. Surselvan lacks the contrast [o]/[ɔ], but
adds a contrast between tense [u] and lax [ʊ]. Sutselvan 12.2.3 Prosody: syllable structure and stress
has this and also a contrast between tense [i] and lax [ɪ].
The Engadine dialects add the front rounded vowels [y] and
[œ] to the Surmiran system. Montreuil (1999) describes a range of phenomena relating
In addition to (short and long) vowels, Surmiran has a to syllables, syllabification, and the stress pattern of Ru-
number of diphthongs: falling [aj, aw, ej, ɛj, oj, ow, ɔw, iə] mantsch, on the basis of a Surselvan form of the language
(Caduff 1952). That description is largely applicable else-
where in Rumantsch.
Table 12.1 The vowels of stressed syllables of Surmiran
Most of the consonants in Table 12.2 can serve as onsets,
[ BACK ROUND ] CENTRAL [+ BACK + ROUND ] except for [ʥ], [ɲ], and [ŋ]. Onset clusters consist of stop or
fricative followed by [l], [r], or velar stop plus [w]; [ʃ]
high i u
followed by [p, t, ʨ, k, f, m, n, r] or the corresponding voiced
closed mid e o
clusters with [ʑ] followed by [m, n, r]. Combinations with
open mid ɛ ɔ
pre-consonantal [ʃ] and post-consonantal sonorant are
low a
limited to [ʃpr, ʃpl, ʃtr, ʃkr].
171
STEPHEN R. ANDERSON
Table 12.2 The consonant system of Surmiran

LABIAL DENTAL PALATAL MEDIO - PALATAL VELAR LARYNGEAL
stops p b t d k g
affricates ʦ ʨ ʥ ʧ
fricatives f v s z ʃ ʑ h
nasals m n ɲ ŋ
laterals l ʎ
rhotic r
Codas exclude single voiced obstruents and [h], although which implies that epenthesis should apply to stressed,
voiced codas are found in a few words of learnèd origin inflected forms.
(e.g. diagnosa ‘diagnosis’), and also arise word-internally However, this leads to problems in analysing the first
by assimilation to a following voiced onset (e.g. masdar person singular present indicative of Surmiran verbs
[məzˈdar] ‘mix.INF’). A small set of coda clusters consisting whose stem ends in a cluster of consonant plus [r], [l], or
of liquid or nasal plus consonant, or [ʃ] plus stop, are found. [n] such as pavl-ar ‘feed.INF’. This form within the paradigm
However, word-final -s can be found in inflected forms has no suffix, and thus for such a verb the relevant shape is
following any possible coda, including sibilants: igl codesch monosyllabic pavl [pafl] ‘(I) feed’ (with final devoicing);
[iʎ ˈkɔdɛʃ] ‘the book’, igls codeschs [iʎs ˈkɔdɛʃs] ‘the books’. compare the disyllabic˚ third person singular form pavla
These final segments are evidently outside the scope of the [ˈpavlə] ‘((s)he) feeds’. The epenthesis rule ought to apply
basic syllable. to the first person singular form, but does not. Conse-
Primary stress is to be seen as the formation of a quently, there is a minimal contrast with the noun pavel
quantity-sensitive trochee at the right edge of the word. [ˈpavəl] ‘fodder’, apparently built on the same root.
The descriptive generalization for Surmiran is given in (1). Kamprath (1988) discusses several possible ways to derive
the contrast between pavl ‘I feed’ and pavel ‘fodder’, though
(1) Main stress falls on the penult if the rhyme of the final all have problems. Depending on the theory one adopts of
syllable consists of [ə], possibly followed by [r], [l] [n], the interaction among phonological and morphological
or [s]. If the final rhyme contains another vowel, or [ə] regularities, it may be possible to eliminate this apparent
followed by some other consonant, main stress falls on difficulty and treat the [ə] vowels in final weak syllables as
this syllable instead. epenthetic; regardless of that, the descriptive generaliza-
tion in (1) remains valid.
The notion of weak final syllable implicit here can be
rationalized in part on the basis of the language’s phon-
ology. First, we can note the suggestion that final [s] is not
12.2.4 Alternations
part of the syllable, but an appendix, and so the final
sequence [əs] characterizes a syllable whose rhyme is sim- Aside from a limited set of low-level adjustments such as
ply [ə]. With respect to rhymes consisting of ə plus [r], [l], or final devoicing and voicing assimilation in clusters, the
[n], Kamprath (1988) and Montreuil (1999) treat the [ə] as most striking differences between alternating forms built
epenthetic. On this analysis, a word like pader [ˈpadər] on the same stem depend on the location of stress in the
‘father’ is phonologically /padr/, and forms a monosyllabic resulting word. Comparing forms such as cantar [kənˈtar]
trochee, expanded by epenthesis. In this case, the only weak ‘sing.INF’, canta [ˈkantə] ‘(s)he.sings’; sgular [ʑgŬˈlar] ‘ fly.INF’,
syllables that need to be recognized are ones whose rhyme sgola [ˈʑgolə] ‘(s)he.flies’, it might appear that what is at
consists simply of [ə]. stake is simply vowel reduction in unstressed syllables (see
The epenthesis analysis is not straightforward. To e.g. Kamprath 1988:214). However, as argued in Anderson
achieve the desired effect of removing final syllables like (2008; 2011; 2013), while the kind of vowel reduction Kam-
that of pader from consideration, stress must evidently be prath (and others) describe is real, it is complicated in the
assigned to forms to which epenthesis has not (yet) applied. modern language by the effects of various other sound
The syllables making up inflectional suffixes count as pre- changes. A great many (discussed in e.g. Lutta 1923, Grisch
sent for the assignment of stress (thus cant-a [ˈkantə] 1939, Haiman and Benincà 1992, Eichenhofer 1999) have
‘((s)he) sings’, but cantess [kənˈtɛs] ‘(he) would sing’), affected stressed and unstressed vowels differently, leading
172
ROMANSH (RUMANTSCH)
to patterns of alternation that cumulate simple reduction generally appear; in other items, there is no corresponding
with much other variation, so that in the modern languages verb, but an alternation of a type appearing in some verbs
it is no longer possible to tease these various changes apart nonetheless characterizes stressed vs unstressed forms, as
as distinct regularities. shown in Table 12.4.
The result is a system in which essentially every stem of a Anderson (2013) shows that the arguments for this pos-
‘content’ word has two distinct forms, depending on ition also extend to forms of Rumantsch beyond Surmiran,
whether primary word stress (as governed by the general- so that the pattern of phonologically conditioned allomor-
ization in (1)) falls on the stem or on an ending. In some phy is apparently a general fact about Rumantsch.
instances, the difference is as simple as the alternation Another notable pattern of alternation is a relation
illustrated by the forms of cantar just given, but in others between certain diphthongs and sequences of simple
it is less direct. Consider Table 12.3 (where stress is indi- vowel plus a velar stop, in pairs such as peirer [ˈpɛirər]
cated by a written accent, although this is not an ortho- ‘pear tree’, peir [pɛkr] ‘pear’. The development of a velar
graphical convention). stop from the second element of a diphthong (often referred
Even when the difference between the two forms of a to in German as Verschärfung) is found sporadically in
stem only involves the quality of a single vowel, the ‘vowel Romance languages (cf. §20.2.6), and also in Germanic (e.g.
reduction’ account is insufficient. Given any specific Faroese: Anderson 1974).
stressed vowel, it is impossible to predict which of the Forms with Verschärfung are traditionally found in some
three unstressed qualities [Ĭ, ə̆, Ŭ] corresponds, and given varieties of Surmiran and in Puter and Vallader. Their
any unstressed vowel, it is impossible to predict the corres-
ponding stressed vowel. The result is that stems must be Table 12.4 Stress-related stem alternations in Surmiran
listed with two possible phonetic forms, where the choice
VERB OTHER FORMS
between these can only be made once the stem is combined
with other morphological material and the location of pri- STRESSED UNSTRESSED STRESSED UNSTRESSED
mary stress determined (in accord with (1)). Such a system STEM STEM STEM STEM
of phonologically conditioned allomorphy is undoubtedly as

barschúnga burschanár barschúng burschanéda
extensive as any found in any of the world’s languages, since
‘brush’ ‘brush.INF ’ ‘brush (N)’ ‘(process of)
it pervades the lexicon.
brushing’
The argument (Maiden 2011a) that this pattern may not
gótta guttár gót ‘drop (N)’ gutélla ‘drip
represent phonologically conditioned allomorphy but is
‘drips3SG.PRS’ ‘drip.INF’ (N), (eye)drop’
part of the morphology of the verb (along the lines of
guttaráda ‘sudden
‘L-pattern’ and ‘N-pattern’ regularities demonstrated by
snow-melt’
Maiden for other Romance languages; see §43.2.3-4) is not,
léia liiér léia ‘union, liadéira ‘(ski)
in my view (see e.g. Anderson 2013), correct for Surmiran
‘binds3SG.PRS’ ‘bind.INF ’ alliance’ binding’
nor for other forms of Rumantsch. Given the transparently
leiabarschúng lióm ‘string;
phonological conditioning factor of stress, I maintain that
‘brush- garter’
this must trump an analysis in terms of an arbitrary list of
binder’
verb categories in which the ‘stressed’ vs ‘unstressed’ allo-
néiver ‘snow. navía néiv ‘snow’ naváglia ‘big
morph of a stem should appear. Indeed, the same set of
INF’ ‘snow.PST. snowfall’
regularities extends well beyond the verb to include nom-
néiv PTCP’ naváda ‘(lots of )
inal forms. Where the stem in question appears in the
‘snow.3SG.PRS’ snow’
formation both of verbs and of nouns, the same alternations
tóffa tuffár tóf ‘fart’ tuffóus ‘stinky’
‘stink.3SG.PRS’ ‘stink.INF’
Table 12.3 Stem forms and stress in Surmiran méir ‘wall’ miráglia ‘walling,
INF 3 SG . PRS . IND stonework’
miráder ‘wall-
smarschanár smarschúnga ‘loaf ’ maker’
flammagér flommégia ‘blaze’ déir ‘hard’ diráglia ‘hardness’
misirár maséira ‘measure’ dirézza ‘very hard’
murmagnér marmógna ‘murmur’ fréid ‘cold fardáglia ‘great
luvrár lavóura ‘work’ (N, A)’ cold’
sgarmár sgróma ‘de-cream (milk)’ fardóur ‘coolness’
173
STEPHEN R. ANDERSON
distribution in the Bravuogn form of Surmiran is discussed Adjective inflection is generally straightforward. In Sur-
by Kamprath (1987). The ‘standard’ Surmiran spoken miran, the feminine is formed from the masculine by adding
around Savognin no longer displays Verschärfung, although –a. Adjectives ending in a weak syllable (/ə/ followed by
some conservative speakers produce such forms, and are /r, l, n/) show only the consonant before the feminine
familiar with the alternation as a systematic pattern. For ending (pover/povra ‘poor’; stanchel/stancla ‘tired’); an adjec-
one speaker from Salouf, for example, the diphthongs [ɛi] tive ending in a vowel may have a distinct, consonant-final
and [ɔu] yield [ɛk] and [ɔk], respectively, in closed syllables: stem in the feminine (blo/blava ‘blue’). Verb participles and
e.g. [a bun ənsˈvɛkr] for a bun ans veir ‘to good us= see.INF related adjectives have more elaborate gender marking
(= au revoir)!’ and [flɔkr] for flour ‘flower’. Speakers recog- (see §12.3.2).
nize such forms as traditional, and one does not hear them Adjectives are also marked as plural by adding -s. In
in everyday speech. Surselvan, some adjectives display stem alternations similar
to those in Table 12.6 between the masculine singular on the
one hand and the masculine plural and feminine on the
other, shown in Table 12.7.
12.3 Morphology
Surselvan notably also distinguishes (masculine singular)
adjectives used attributively from those appearing predica-
12.3.1 Inflection: nouns and adjectives tively. In adjectives showing stem alternation such as in
Table 12.8, the predicative form is built from the stem
Nouns have gender (masculine or feminine), and the only found in the plural and the feminine, with the addition
inflectional category overtly marked on most is number. of -s.
General across Rumantsch is the plural marker ‑s (lost after An additional complication (still limited to Surselvan) is
stem-final /s/) for masculine and feminine nouns, articles, the fact that adjectives predicated of an expression that
and adjectives. Thus the Surmiran forms in Table 12.5. does not refer to an individual take the same form as the
A few nouns have irregular plural stems: igl om ‘the man’ attributive masculine singular, while the distinctive pre-
vs PL igls omens, igl pe ‘the foot’ vs PL igls peis. While marking dicative form illustrated in Table 12.8 is limited to predica-
of plural is particularly simple in Surmiran, in Surselvan a tions of individuals: quel/igl ei bien ‘that/it.IMPERS is good’ vs
number of masculine nouns have different stems in the quel ei buns ‘that one.MSG is good’.
plural, as shown in Table 12.6.
Table 12.5 Plural-marking with -s in Surmiran Table 12.7 Surselvan stem alternations in adjectives
GENDER SINGULAR PLURAL SG PL
M igl giat igls giats ‘the cat’ M bien buns ‘good’

M igl vistgia igls vistgias ‘the article of clothing’ F buna bunas
F la donna las donnas ‘the woman’ M tgietschen cotschens ‘red’
F la difficultad las difficultads ‘the difficulty’ F cotschna cotschnas
M igl codesch igls codeschs ‘the book’ M schliet schliats ‘bad’
M igl curs igls curs ‘the course’ F schliata schliatas
M tschiec tschocs ‘blind’
F tschocca tschoccas
Table 12.6 Surselvan stem alternations in

masculine plurals
Table 12.8 Surselvan attributive vs predicative adjectives
SINGULAR PLURAL
SINGULAR PLURAL
iert orts ‘garden’
iev ovs ‘egg’ attributive in bien ‘a good buns ‘good
migiel migeuls ‘(drinking) glass’ carstgaun man’ carstgauns men’
vierm viarms ‘worm’ predicative il carstgaun ‘the man ils carstgauns ‘the men
utschi ustchals ‘bird’ ei buns is good’ ein buns are good’
174
ROMANSH (RUMANTSCH)
12.3.2 Inflection: verbs Table 12.10 Endings of Rumantsch synthetic verb forms
PRS . IND IPFV . IND FUT . IND PRS . SBJV IPFV . SBJV IMP
Most verbs in Surmiran fall into one of six classes (cf.
Table 12.9), distinguished on the basis of the infinitive suffix 1SG -Ø -avə/ -əro/-ĭro -ə -ɛs/-ɪs
and certain other suffixes. -evə/-ivə
Verbs agree with their subject in person and number. 2SG -əs -avəs/ -əros/ -əs -ɛsəs/ -ə
(Synthetic) finite forms are the present, imperfect, and -evəs/-ivəs -ĭros -ɪsəs
future indicative, present and imperfect subjunctive, and 3SG -ə -avə/-evə/ -əro/-ĭro -ə -ɛs/-ɪs
the imperative (with second person singular, second person -ivə
plural, and first person plural forms).2 A notable feature of 1PL -aɲ/ -avən/ -əron/ -ən -ɛsən/ -aɲ/
Rumantsch is the fact that the subjunctive is used generally -iɲ -evən/-ivən -ĭron -ɪsən -iɲ
in clauses representing indirect speech. The imperfect sub- 2PL -ɛʦ/ -avəs/ -ərosəs/ -əs -ɛsəs/ -e/i
junctive also serves as a conditional. Regular endings for ɪʦ -evəs/-ivəs -ĭrosəs -ɪsəs
these forms are as in Table 12.10.3 3PL -ən -avən/ -əron/ -ən -ɛsən/
Although it has virtually disappeared from the spoken -evən/-ivən -ĭron -ɪsən
language, a synthetic (perfective) past definite form sur-
vives in literary Puter and Vallader. For periphrastic forms
of the verb, see §12.4.2.
second person plural forms. Other tenses display a consist-
Within their paradigms, verbs display the pattern of stem
ent stem shape throughout: the present subjunctive has
alternation described in §12.2.4, depending on the difference
stem stress throughout and thus the ‘stressed’ allomorph,
between forms with stem stress and those with stress on the
while the imperfect indicative, the future and the imperfect
desinence. On the basis of the endings shown in Table 12.10,
subjunctive (/conditional) uniformly stress the ending and
it will be seen that the only tenses within which alternation
show the ‘unstressed’ stem allomorph.
appears are the present indicative and the imperative. Given
A number of verbs in the conjugation classes marked by
the basic principle of stress formulated in (1), in these
the infinitive endings -[ar] and ‑[ejr] do not show alterna-
paradigms the ‘stressed’ allomorph of the stem will appear
tions in stem shape, but form their ‘stressed’ stem by adding
in all singular forms and the third plural, with the
the suffix -esch between the stem and the personal endings:
‘unstressed’ stem allomorph appearing in the first and
e.g. gratular/(el) gratulescha ‘congratulate.INF/(s)he.congratu-
lates’, tradeir/(el) tradescha ‘betray.INF/(s)he.betrays’. Similar
Table 12.9 Surmiran verb classes forms are found throughout Rumantsch; in Vallader, rele-
vant verbs in -ar take -esch (e.g. invidar/invidescha ‘invite’),
INF 1 PL . PRS 1 SG . IPFV 1 SG . FUT 1 SG . COND PST . PTCP
while those in -ir take the form -isch (e.g. chapir/chapischa
( M / FSG )
‘understand’). This pattern is particularly common with
-ar cantar -agn -ava -aro -ess -o/ada borrowed words, for which it can be suggested that it allows
-[ar] ‘sing’ speakers to avoid having to choose a particular stem-
-er lascher -agn -eva -aro -ess -ea/eda alternation pattern over others.
-[er] ‘leave’ Non-finite forms include, in addition to the infinitive, the
-ier spitgier -agn -iva -aro -ess -ia/eida past participle and a present participle (or gerund) marked
-[iər] ‘expect’ by -ond. All of these forms have primary stress on the
-eir tameir -agn -eva -aro -ess -ia/eida ending, and thus are based on the ‘unstressed’ stem allo-
-[ɛjr] ‘fear’ morph. Past participle forms when used attributively or
-er tanscher -agn -eva -aro -ess -ia/eida under certain other circumstances (see §12.4.2.1) show
-[ər] ‘reach’ agreement in gender by means of the endings in Table 12.9.
-eir parteir -ign -iva -iro -iss -ia/eida A large number of verbs display irregular inflection. For
-[ejr] ‘depart’ example, compare the Surmiran forms in Table 12.11.
12.3.3 Derivational morphology

2
Surselvan and Sutselvan, unlike Surmiran and the Engadine languages,
have no synthetic future.
3
Surselvan has a distinctive first person singular present and imperfect Many nouns have, in addition to regular plurals in -s, an
indicative ending -el (of unclear origin; but cf. §27.3). additional feminine singular collective form built with the
175
STEPHEN R. ANDERSON
Table 12.11 Irregular inflection in Surmiran verbs Among many other types of verb derivation is for-
mation of causatives by the suffix ‑antar: e.g. tascheir ‘to
EIR NEIR ( VU ) LEIR DEIR STAR SAVEIR
keep quiet’, taschantar ‘to silence’; schalar ‘to feel cold,
‘go’ ‘come’ ‘want’ ‘say’ ‘stay’ ‘know’
freeze’, schalantar ‘to make cold, freeze’; bargeir ‘to cry’,
1SG vign vign vi dei stung sa sbargantar ‘to make someone cry’. This suffix can also
2SG vast vignst vot deist stast sast derive factive verbs from other parts of speech: e.g.
3SG vo vign vot dei stat so rabgia ‘anger’, rabgiantar ‘to anger’; stanchel ‘tired’, stan-
1PL giagn nign lagn schagn stagn savagn clantar ‘to tire someone out’. For stems ending in ‑aint,
2PL gnez niz lez schez stez savez this syllable is replaced with -antar: turmaint ‘torment
3PL von vignan vottan deian stattan son (N)’, turmantar ‘to torment’; cuntaint ‘pleased’, cuntantar
‘to satisfy’.
Apart from a small set of prefixes, suffixation is the
primary mode of derivational word formation. There are
suffix -a (originally a neuter plural ending): e.g. igl crap ‘the also a number of patterns of compounding, although no
rock’, igls craps ‘the rocks’, but la crappa ‘the rocks (collect- substantial study of them exists (see Spescha 1989:176-94).
ive)’. For further discussion of this type of plural formation, Apparently very productive is the class of exocentric com-
see §41.4. pounds with the shape [[V][N]]N as in It. portalettere lit.
The most productive diminutive suffixes are -ign/-igna ‘carry.letters (= postman)’. Many such compounds are
and -et/-etta: these differ in that the first indicates primarily found throughout Rumantsch. The order of the verb and
that the referent is smaller than some norm (om ‘man’, nominal elements here is the opposite of the typical
omign ‘little man’; planta ‘plant’, plantigna ‘little plant’), Germanic order in synthetic compounds. It is therefore
while the second carries the additional sense of endearment noteworthy that Rumantsch consistently adapts compounds
(omet ‘sweet little man’, (la) brev ‘letter’, brevetta ‘dear little in the ‘Romance’ order: compare Ger. Staubsauger lit. ‘dust.
note’). Similarly, of the two commonest augmentative suf- sucker (= vacuum cleaner)’ with Surmiran tschitschapolvra
fixes, -ung/-unga implies that the referent is much larger ‘lit’ ‘sucks.dust’. In such a case, a possible source was Italian
than the norm (omung ‘very large man, giant’; tgesa ‘house’, (cf. aspirapolvere ‘breathe.dust’) Here the lexical composition
tgesunga ‘huge house, mansion’) while the other, -atsch/-atscha, of the form is German, but the structure is typically
carries a pejorative sense in addition to the notion that the Romance. Also, the German structures tend to contain
referent is larger than normal (omatsch ‘big, clumsy, missha- agentive nouns, whereas the Rumantsch (and wider
pen man’; ora ‘weather, storm’, oratscha ‘miserable, beastly Romance) structure is always verb + noun. Given the num-
weather’). In feminine nouns the sense of extreme size can ber of German loans in Rumantsch, it remains notable that
be emphasized by treating the augmentative as masculine: compounds with the German order and structure are essen-
femna ‘woman’; femnunga ‘strikingly large woman’; (en) fem- tially non-existent.
nung ‘a truly huge woman’.
Comparatives and superlatives are formed analytically:
grond ‘large’, pi grond ‘more large (= larger)’, igl pi grond lit.
‘the more large (= largest)’. Two adjectives have synthetic 12.4 Syntax
(and suppletive) comparatives: bung ‘good’, migler ‘better’
and schlet ‘bad’, mender ‘worse’. The varieties of Rumantsch differ in detail in their syntax.
In addition to a number of simple forms (e.g. bagn ‘well’, The focus here is Surmiran; for a description from the
adegna ‘always’, ansemen ‘together’), adverbs are freely perspective of Surselvan, see Haiman and Benincà (1992),
formed from adjectives by addition of the suffix -maintg: Liver (2010), and especially Spescha (1989). The discussion
curt ‘short’, curtamaintg ‘shortly’; spert ‘quick’, spertamaintg below concentrates on the most distinctive syntactic prop-
‘quickly’, etc. The suffix is added to the feminine form of the erty of Rumantsch, namely that it is a verb-second language
adjective, except in the case of polysyllabic adjectives ending (cf. §§31.33, 62.5)—the only modern Romance language of
in -ar or ‑al, where the masculine form serves as the base. this type, apart from some forms of Ladin subject to sign-
Rumantsch has extremely rich systems of spatial adverbs, ificant German influence (§11.5.3). Given the extensive con-
referring to locations in terms of relative topographic pos- tact with German, it is tempting to see this as a trait
ition in the mountainous terrain in which they are spoken. borrowed from that language, but other evidence suggests
This is documented in considerable detail by Ebneter (1994); that V2 may be an older development entirely within
see also §33.4 for examples. Romance (Benincà 1985).
176
ROMANSH (RUMANTSCH)
12.4.1 Nominal phrases accepted’). Analytic future forms are also built from neir,
the preposition a/ad and the infinitive (ia vign a cantar ‘I am
going to sing’, ia vign ad aveir canto ‘I am going to have sung’)
There are definite and indefinite articles (Sur. MSG igl, MPL igls,
(cf. §§46.3.2.2, 58.5.2).
FSG la, FPL las, and MSG en, FSG ena, respectively; the indefinite
The selection of auxiliary aveir or esser (see also §49.3) is
article has no plural form); these are initial in the phrase
in part predictable and in part lexically idiosyncratic. Aveir
except when preceded by a universal quantifier (e.g. tot igls
is used with all transitive verbs, impersonal verbs (e.g. plover
scolars ‘all the students’) and agree in gender and number
‘to rain’), and most intransitives (e.g. durmeir ‘to sleep’,
with the head noun. Demonstratives (chel ‘this’, tschel ‘that’,
tramblar ‘to tremble’, flureir ‘to bloom’, sclareir ‘to shine’),
lez ‘the same’, and tal ‘such a’) occur in complementary
whereas esser is used with other intransitives, including
distribution with the articles and agree in gender and num-
verbs of being, movement, or change (e.g. star ‘remain,
ber with the head, as do interrogatives (e.g. qual/quals/
live’, correr ‘run’, crescher ‘grow’, nescher ‘be born’, fugeir
qualla/quallas ‘which’), indefinite quantifiers (e.g. bler
‘flee’): igls prietschs èn carschias fitg ‘the prices are (= have)
‘many’), and possessives. The possessive is accompanied by
risen a lot’, la bela vascheia da savung è schluppada! ‘the pretty
the article: igl mies codesch lit. ‘the my book’, except with
soap bubble is (= has) burst!’.
kinship terms: mia mamma ‘my mother’. Numeral quan-
Reflexive verbs build their analytic tenses with aveir
tifiers also appear initially but do not (except en/ena ‘one’)
when they take an indirect complement, as with sa deditgier
show agreement.
a ‘dedicate oneself to (something)’, sa lubeir da ‘permit
Adjectives generally follow the noun they modify (and
oneself (something)’, and when the reflexive is interpreted
agree with it in gender and number):
reciprocally, as with sa veir ‘see each other’, s’ancleir ‘under-
stand each other’. Otherwise these forms take esser.
(2) a. igl pro verd In analytic tenses formed with esser, the past participle
the.MSG meadow.MSG green.MSG agrees in gender and number with the subject, while forms
b. la tgesa gronda with auxiliary aveir use the default masculine singular
the.FSG house.FSG big.FSG form of the past participle unless preceded by a direct
object clitic (see §12.4.2.1, and cf. §49.2). Thus, el è rivo ‘he
is (= has) arrived.MSG’, ella è rivada ‘she is (= has) arrived.FSG’,
Under various circumstances, however, adjectives pre-
nous ischan rivos/rivadas ‘we are (= have) arrived.MPL/FPL’, but
cede the noun, as in the case of ordinal numbers (la do-
el ò cumpro en disc ‘he has bought a disk.MSG’, ella ò cumpro ena
deschavla lecziun ‘the twelfth lesson’). A certain number of
cassetta ‘she has bought a cassette.FSG’, nous vagn cumpro
frequent evaluative adjectives generally precede the noun
tgameischas novas ‘we have bought new.FPL shirts.F’, all with
(en bel de ‘a nice day’, ena buna donna ‘a good woman’) unless
the masculine singular past participle.
used contrastively: la tgapitscha bela, betg la treida ‘the nice
There are a number of modals and other verbs that take
cap, not the ugly (one)’. Adjectives that are normally post-
infinitival complements, in some cases preceded by a lexic-
nominal can appear prenominally when expressing a figura-
ally idiosyncratic preposition: ella vot star a tgesa ‘she wants
tive or subjective sense: l’ava tgoda ‘the warm water’ but en
to stay home’, betg ambleida dad eir alla posta ‘don’t forget (lit.
tgod angraztg ‘a warm welcome’.
‘of ’) to go to the post office’, igl meir stat per sbalunar ‘the
wall is about (lit. ‘stands for’) to collapse’.
Adverbs generally follow the lexical verb: vous scrivevas
12.4.2 Verb phrases adegna sen al tavla ‘you always wrote on the board’, el è rivo
ier ‘he arrived yesterday’, el saleida curtaschevlamaintg igl
Complex verb expressions in Surmiran include several ana- plevant ‘he greets the minister courteously’.
lytic tenses formed with auxiliaries aveir ‘have’ and esser ‘be’ Sentential negation is expressed in Surmiran with a two-
with the past participle, including the perfect (el ò canto ‘he part structure (cf. §51.2.1). The clitic na precedes the finite
has sung’, el è partia ‘he is (= has) left’; subjunctive el vegia verb while the negative adverb betg follows: la feglia na
canto, el seia partia), pluperfect (el vess canto ‘he had sung’, el canta betg ‘the daughter NEG sings NEG’, Carlo n’ò betg maglea
era partia ‘he was (= had) left’; subjunctive el vess canto, el fiss la fretga ‘Carlo NEG has NEG eaten the fruit’. Na also appears
partia), the conditional perfect (homophonous with the plu- sometimes with other negatives, such as mai ‘never’, nign
perfect subjunctive), and a future perfect (el varo canto ‘he ‘no one’. In spoken Surmiran, however, the particle na is
will have sung’, el saro partia ‘he will be (= have) left’). often omitted. In the imperative, only betg appears, pre-
Passives are formed with auxiliary neir ‘come’ with the ceding the verb: betg lava la steiva! ‘NEG clean.IMP.2SG the
past participle (la proposta vign acceptada ‘the proposal is living.room!’.
177
STEPHEN R. ANDERSON
12.4.2.1 Clitics In compound tenses, the reflexive pronoun is prefixed to

the lexical verb and not to the inflected auxiliary (6):
Surmiran and other forms of Rumantsch have a set of
subject clitics (Ch. 47), which appear in association with
the inversion of subject and finite verb (see §12.4.3). Other (6) La bartga è sa sfundrada an pacas minutas.
clitics associated with the verb include object pronominals, The boat is OCL.REF= sunk.FSG= in few minutes
reflexive/reciprocal elements, and the first component of ‘The boat sank in a few minutes.’
the two-part negation marker mentioned above.
Object pronominal clitics are the same for direct and indir- When a direct object clitic precedes the verb, the parti-
ect objects; distinct forms are used as independent words in ciple agrees with it in gender and number (7); there is no
argument position or following a preposition. With ditransi- agreement with clitics representing the indirect object
tive verbs, either the direct or the indirect object (or neither) (8), nor with preceding non-clitics, such as relative pro-
can appear as a clitic, with the remaining object(s) appearing nouns (9):
as non-clitic full pronouns in argument position, with no
significant difference of meaning. Only if the direct object is (7) a. El igl ò cumpro.
third person and the indirect object first or second is it he OCL.3MSG= has bought.MSG
possible for both objects to appear as clitics (see also §45.4.2). ‘He bought it.’
Reflexive forms are slightly different from non-reflexive
(cf. Table 12.12). In the spoken language, there is a tendency b. El l’ ò cumprada.
to use invariable sa as the reflexive pronoun for all persons. he OCL.3FSG= has bought.FSG
Except in the positive imperative, non-reflexive object ‘He bought it.’
clitics are usually placed before the inflected verb, following (8) a. Ia va las purtadas all’onda.
the first element of the negation where present (3). The I have OCL.3FPL= brought.FPL to.the aunt
same is true of the negative imperative (4), but in the ‘I have brought them to auntie.’
positive imperative the pronoun follows the verb (5):
b. Ia va la purto las flours.
(3) a. Te n’igl ast betg cumpro. I have OCL.3F= brought.MSG the flowers
you.SG NEG=OCL have not bought ‘I have brought her the flowers.’
‘You have not bought it.’ (9) Las flours tgi te ast cumpro èn
b. Vous n’ans vez betg returno igl amprest. the.FPL flowers.FPL which you have bought.MSG are
you.PL NEG=OCL.1PL have not returned the loan sfleuridas.
‘You haven’t returned the loan to us.’ faded
‘The flowers which you have bought are/have faded.’
(4) Betg ans porta chella roba!
not OCL.1PL= bring that stuff
In analytic tenses, the object pronoun can precede the
‘Don’t bring us that stuff!’
participial form of the lexical verb instead of the finite
(5) Porta’ns chella roba! auxiliary (10); with infinitival forms of the lexical verb as
bring= OCL.1PL that stuff complements of modals and other verbs, the clitic precedes
‘Bring us that stuff!’ the infinitive (11):
Table 12.12 Object clitics in Surmiran (10) a. Te n’ast betg igl cumpro.
you NEG=have not OCL.3SGM=bought.MSG
FREE FORM OBJECT CLITIC REFLEXIVE CLITIC
b. Te n’ast betg la cumprada.
1SG me am ma you NEG=have not OCL.3SGF=bought.FSG
2SG tè at ta ‘You have not bought it.’
3SG.M el igl sa
(11) Nous lagn la tarmetter dumang.
3SG.F ella la sa
we will OCL.3SGF=send.INF tomorrow
1PL nous ans ans
‘We are going to send it tomorrow.’
2PL vous az az
3PL.M els igls sa
In causative constructions with far ‘make’ and lascher ‘let’
3PL.F ellas las sa
the pronoun precedes the causative verb (12):
178
ROMANSH (RUMANTSCH)
(12) a. Nous igls faschagn correr. Table 12.13 Subject clitic elements in Surmiran
we OCL.3MPL= make run.INF
‘We will make them run.’ 1SG =a
2SG =t
b. El n’ans lascha mai eir ad ouras.
3SGM =’l
he NEG= OCL.1PL=lets never go.INF to hours
3SGF =’la
‘He never lets us go by the hour.’
3SG impersonal =(i)gl
1PL =s(a)
12.4.3 Clause structure4 2PL Ø
3PLM/F =igl
The basic word order in Surmiran is SVO (13).
(13) Ursus discorra rumantsch stupent. Surmiran is not in general a pro-drop language: that is,
Ursus speaks Rumantsch excellently null subjects are not allowed in the absence of a subject
‘Ursus speaks Rumantsch very well.’ clitic (17).
Non-subjects can, however, appear freely in initial pos- (17) a. **Discorra rumantsch stupent.
ition for reasons of emphasis, topicality, or other matters of speaks Rumantsch excellently
discourse structure. When this happens the subject appears
b. **Rumantsch discorra stupent.
immediately after the finite (main or auxiliary) verb (14).
Rumantsch speaks excellently
(14) a. Rumantsch discorra Ursus stupent.
Rumantsch speaks Ursus excellently Just as with the third person subjects, first and second
‘Ursus speaks Rumantsch very well.’ person subjects cannot be phonetically null (or omitted)
except in the presence of a subject clitic, though the
b. Stupent discorra Ursus rumantsch. fact that the second person plural clitic is itself null
excellently speaks Ursus Rumantsch partially obscures this fact. First person examples are
‘Ursus speaks Rumantsch very well.’ given in (18):
When the subject is inverted with the finite verb, the verb (18) a. Ia/**Ø discor mal rumantsch.
can be accompanied by a clitic element referring to the (I) speak badly Rumantsch
subject, as in (15a). Such a clitic is not possible when inver- ‘I speak Rumantsch badly.’
sion has not taken place (15b).
b. Rumantsch discor ia/**Ø mal.
(15) a. Rumantsch discorra’l Ursus stupent. Rumantsch speak (I) badly
Rumantsch speaks=SCL.3SG Ursus excellently ‘I speak Rumantsch badly.’
‘Ursus speaks Rumantsch very well.’ c. Rumantsch discorr a (ia) mal.
b. **Ursus discorra’l rumantsch stupent. Rumantsch speak =SCL.1SG I badly
Ursus speaks=SCL.3SG Rumantsch excellently ‘I speak Rumantsch badly.’
Subject clitic elements are set out in Table 12.13. In all persons, the presence of an overt inverted subject
When a non-subject occupies initial position, and the together with a subject clitic lends contrastive or emphatic
verb is accompanied by a subject clitic from the set in force to that element of the sentence.
Table 12.13, this sanctions a phonetically null subject (16).
(16) Rumantsch discorra’l stupent. 12.4.3.1 The inversion construction in

Rumantsch speaks=SCL.3SG excellently main clauses
‘He speaks Rumantsch very well.’
Among non-subjects that trigger inversion by appearing in
initial position are argument nominals, prepositional
4
Much of this section is drawn from Anderson (2006). phrases, participial phrases, and entire clauses (19).
179
STEPHEN R. ANDERSON
(19) a. La steiva ò Ursus nattagea bagn. infinitives of Breton (Anderson 1981). Unlike Breton, Sur-
the living.room has Ursus cleaned well miran doubles the verb by a finite form of the same verb,
‘Ursus cleaned the living room well.’ rather than with a finite form of a dummy ‘light’ verb. For
some speakers, the construction in (21) is only possible with
b. Tar igl gi da rummy vala igl joker
synthetic verb forms.
in the game of rummy is.worth the joker
While constituents of a variety of types can appear ini-
adegna 25 puncts.
tially, there is a limit of one such element in preverbal
always 25 points
position. Sentences such as (22), in which the preverbal
‘In the game of rummy, the joker is always worth 25
material does not correspond to a single constituent, are
points.’
thus not possible.
c. Giond ier a spass ò Ursus scuntro Ladina.
going yesterday at walk has Ursus met Ladina (22) **Ier la steiva ò Ursus nattagea.
‘While walking yesterday, Ursus met Ladina.’ yesterday the living.room has Ursus cleaned
‘Yesterday Ursus cleaned the living room.’
Among variations on this theme is the possibility of
having a bare past participle alone in initial position (20). Finally, it is important to note that the verb in the inver-
When this happens, the participle cannot be accompanied sion construction is accompanied by any and all clitic elem-
by its object or by other complements. The only exception is ents (in addition to a subject clitic, if present) that would
certain short, common manner adverbs (e.g. mal ‘badly’), appear with it in uninverted sentences, as illustrated in (23).
which some speakers accept in sentences such as (20e). This
complex of possibilities is reminiscent of ‘stylistic fronting’ (23) a. Cleramaintg n’ ò ’l Ursus betg savia.
in Icelandic and other Scandinavian languages (see also obviously NEG= has =OCL.3SGM Ursus not known
Franco 2009). ‘Obviously Ursus didn’t know that.’

b. Ier seira n’ ans ò Maria betg.
(20) a. Maglea va ia en traclo cun caschiel. yesterday evening NEG =OCL.1PL has Maria not
Eaten have I a sandwich with cheese telefono
‘I ate a cheese sandwich.’ phoned
‘Yesterday evening Maria didn’t phone us.’
b. **Maglea en traclo cun caschiel va ia.
eaten a sandwich with cheese have I
c. La notg passada ò Gion durmia mal.
12.4.3.2 Inversion in other clause types
the night past has Gion slept badly Inversion in Surmiran is not limited to declarative main
‘Last night John slept badly.’ clauses. For pragmatic reasons associated with the inter-
pretation of non-subject material in initial position, such
d. Durmia ò Gion mal la notg passada
constituents are rare in subordinate clauses, but when they
slept has Gion badly the night past
occur, they trigger inversion as in (24).
e. (?)Durmia mal ò Gion la notg passada
slept badly has Gion the night past (24) a. Cartez tg’ igl settember turnans
believe. 2PL that the September return.1PL.SBJV=SCL.1PL
Another possibility is that of an infinitive in initial ainten chel hotel?
position, followed by a finite form of the same verb. Again, in that hotel
the fronted infinitive cannot be accompanied by comple- ‘Do you think in September we’ll return to that hotel?’
ments (21):
b. Ia pains tgi dultschems vegia Corinna gugent.
I think that sweets has Corinna gladly
(21) a. Cantar canta’l Ursus ena canzung.
‘I think Corinna likes sweets.’
sing.INF sings=SCL.3MSG Ursus a song
‘Ursus is singing a song.’
When question words are fronted, they also trigger inver-
b. **Cantar ena canzung canta’l Ursus sion (25).
sing.INF a song sings=SCL.3MSG Ursus
(25) a. Tge ò’la (Ladina) cumpro?
This construction is again reminiscent of one found in What has =SCL.3FSGF (Ladina) bought
other Romance languages and also in the topicalized ‘What did Ladina/she buy?’
180
ROMANSH (RUMANTSCH)
b. Cura ò’la (Ladina) cumpro en auto? count as a non-subject element in initial position. Sentences
when has=SCL.3SGF (Ladina) bought a car such as (29) show that inversion is not triggered by subor-
‘When did Ladina/she buy a car?’ dinating expressions alone.
c. Igl auto da tgi ò’la (Ladina) cumpro?
(29) Siva tg’els on en unfant, stat el pi
the car of who has=SCL.3SGF (Ladina) bought
since that.they have a child is he more
‘Whose car did Ladina/she buy?’
savens a tgesa.
often at house
When the question word corresponds to the subject,
‘Ever since they have had a child, he is home more
inversion would result in no change of word order. The
often.’
fact that subject clitics are impossible when the subject is
questioned (26), while questions involving non-subjects do
Finally, unlike questions, relative clauses do not generally
permit clitics (25), suggests that no inversion occurs in the
show inversion, regardless of what is relativized (30).
former case.
(30) a. Igl codesch tgi è sen meisa post aveir.
(26) Tgi ò(**’l/**’la) cumpro en auto?
the book which is on table can=SCL2SG have.INF
who has( SCL.3SGM/F) bought a car
‘The book which is on the table you can have.’
‘Who bought a car?’
b. Igl velo tgi Ursus ò cumpro n’è betg nov.
When the question word is extracted from an embedded the bike which Ursus has bought NEG=is not new
clause, that clause preserves the basic order, and it is the ‘The bike which Ursus bought is not new.’
matrix clause that displays inversion (27).
c. Igl gioven agl qual ia va scretg
the youngster to.the which I have written
(27) Tge manegias te tgi Ladina vegia (**la)
è sto igl mies scolar.
what think.2SG you that Ladina has (**SCL.3FSG)
is been the my student
cumpro?
‘The youngster to whom I wrote was my student.’
bought
‘What do you think that Ladina bought?’ d. La matta dalla qualla te ast survagnia en
the girl from.the which you have received a
Inversion is also characteristic of yes/no questions, canaster mareida proximamaintg.
although in this construction there is no (overt) sentence- basket marries soon
initial non-subject. The uniformity of this structure with ‘The girl who turned you down is marrying soon.’
that of other instances of inversion is confirmed by the
presence of subject clitics in sentences like (28c,d). We might expect the relative pronoun tgi to be similar
to the complementizer tge in this respect, but even complex
(28) a. È igl viadi sto tger? relative expressions such as agl qual ‘to which/whom’ fail to
is the trip been expensive produce inverted orders (or the associated subject clitics).
‘Was the trip expensive?’
b. Ast er te gost da neir?
12.4.3.3 Impersonal subjects and the syntax of ins
have.2SG also you desire to come.INF
‘Do you want to come too?’ Additional light is shed on the verb-second construction in
Surmiran by the syntax of the element ins ‘one’ (cf. also
c. Lain sa (nous) eir cugl tren?
§60.7). This generally appears in lieu of an overt subject,
want=SCL.1PL we go.INF with.the train
with impersonal interpretation similar to that of Ger. man
‘Do we want to take the train?’
or Fr. on (31).
d. At ò gl plaschia an Sicilia?
OCL.2SG has= SCL.3SG.IMPERS pleased in Sicily (31) Ins na pò betg eir quant spert tg’ins
‘Did you like it in Sicily?’ Ins NEG can not go.INF as fast that-ins
vot sen las autostradas svizras.
Inversion does not always occur where it might be wants on the motorways Swiss
expected. Subordinate clauses are commonly introduced ‘You can’t go however fast you want on the Swiss
by a complementizer tge, and we might expect this to motorways.’
181
STEPHEN R. ANDERSON
Like similar impersonal elements in many other lan- clitic that appears in inversion structures with other im-
guages, ins cannot represent a non-subject argument (32). personals, such as existentials and weather verbs.
(32) a. **Igls pulizists na pon betg veir ins da lò. (35) a. Ainten chell’ ustareia ins (na) magl igl
the policemen NEG can not see.INF ins from there in this inn ins NEG=eat.SCL3.IMPERS
‘The police can’t see one from there.’ betg schi bagn, on igl detg.
not so well have= SCL.3PL said
b. **Mintgign digls guids ò la sia moda da trattar ‘In this inn you don’t eat so well, they said.’
Each of.the guides has the his way of deal.INF
cun ins. b. Ins pò’gl fimar cò?
with ins ins can.SCL3.impers smoke.INF here
‘Each of the guides has his way of dealing with one.’ ‘Can you smoke here?’
c. Cun tge tren ins vo’gl igl migler
Although it appears to be simply an indefinite pronoun with what train ins goes= SCL3IMPERS the better
restricted to subject position, ins does not act like other per eir da Sargans a Wien?
arguments occupying subject position. In particular, it does to go.INF from Sargans to Vienna?
not undergo inversion with the verb when a non-subject is ‘Which train is better to go from Sargans to Vienna?’
clause-initial (33).
Ins is derived from Latin UNUS ‘one’. Its behaviour, how-
(33) a. Dalla derivanza digls rets ins so tant scu
ever, is not simply that of a pronoun. Rather, it seems
of.the origin of.the Raeti ins knows so.much as
similar to Romance reflexive impersonal structures such
navot.
as Sp. En México se trabaja mucho ‘In Mexico one works a
nothing
lot’ or It. Si lavora sempre troppo ‘One always works too
‘Of the origins of the Raeti we know almost nothing.’
much’. These are based on a verb clitic (in those languages,
b. D’anviern ins pò eir sur tot igls pass cun auto identical with the third person reflexive; cf. §60.4.1) in
in winter ins can go.INF over all the passes with car association with an otherwise empty subject position, pre-
‘In the winter you can go over all of the passes by car.’ sumably occupied by a phonologically null pronominal. See
also Anderson (1982) and McCloskey (2005) for parallels in
Similarly, ins fails to invert in yes/no or content ques- Celtic. In these respects, Surmiran sentences with ins differ
tions (34). from impersonal sentence types in other forms of Ru-
mantsch, e.g. Vallader (36a), Puter (36b), Surselvan (36c).
(34) a. Ins viagia pi bagn cugl tren u cugl
ins travels more well with.the train or with.the (36) a. Passand tras il desert as chatta
auto sch’ ins fò viadis pi lungs? passing across the desert 3SG.REFL finds
car if ins makes trips more long qualchevoutas skelets (Vld.)
‘Does one travel better by train or by car when sometimes skeletons
making longer trips?’
b. Passand tres il desert chatta ün
b. Tge meis digl onn ins dovra pneus passing across the desert finds ün
what month of.the year ins needs tyres qualchevoutas skelets. (Put.)
d’anviern aint igl Grischun? sometimes skeletons
of.winter in the Graubünden ‘Crossing the desert, one sometimes finds skeletons.’
‘What month of the year do you need winter tyres in
Graubünden?’ c. Nua ein ins cun la lavur? Ins ei
where is ins with the work. Ins is
Although the position of ins immediately before the verb alla fin. Na, alla fin ein ins mai. (Srs.)
does not change in contexts such as (33) and (34) where we at.the end. no, at.the end is ins never
would expect inversion, we find another diagnostic of inver- ‘Where are we with the job? We’re finished. No,
sion in these sentences. A subject clitic =(i)gl can appear in we’re never finished.’
ins sentences precisely when we would expect inversion: in
the presence of an initial non-subject (35a), in yes/no ques- In Vallader, impersonals are formed using a third person
tions (35b), and in content questions (35c). This is the same singular reflexive verbal clitic. In Puter, this construction is
182
ROMANSH (RUMANTSCH)
possible, as well as one with ün (also < UNUS) in subject Furthermore, in periphrastic modal constructions (40),
position, but it behaves as a normal pronoun and inverts ins always precedes the finite verb, while ans, like other
with the verb when appropriate. In Surselvan, we have an object clitics, can attach to the infinitive.
ins phonetically like the Surmiran form but which (like Put.
ün) acts like a normal pronoun. Finally, in Sutselvan we have (40) a. El vot ans tarmetter dumang ena factura.
ign, another reflex of UNUS which again acts like a normal he wants OCL.1PL=send.INF tomorrow a bill
pronoun. ‘He wants to send us a bill tomorrow.’
Some Surmiran speakers accept sentences in which ins
has inverted with the verb as in (37), but report that this b. Mintgatant ins stò(’gl) spitgier en po.
order ‘sounds like German’. Since nearly all speakers of often ins must(=3IMPERS) wait.INF a bit
Surmiran are bilingual in German, this influence is not ‘Often you have to wait a bit.’
hard to account for; what is notable is the fact that this c. **Mintgatant stò(’gl) ins spitgier en po.
order is still felt as foreign to Surmiran. often must(=3IMPERS) ins wait.INF a bit
(37) Chegl dei ins dapertot. The behaviour of ins, and in particular its failure to
that says ins everywhere invert when appropriate despite evidence that the associ-
‘That they say everywhere.’ ated verb has been displaced in the same way as other
inversion constructions, finds a natural explanation if it
Since ins derives from UNUS used pronominally, why does has been reanalysed as a special sort of preverbal clitic. On
it not behave as a pronoun? At least one older description that account, sentences with ins have a subject position
(Grisch 1939) transcribes ins as potentially homophonous occupied by a phonetically null pronoun with generic,
with ans, the first person plural object clitic. Similarly, arbitrary reference, denoted below as ‘PROarb’, associated
Signorell et al. (1987:120) note that ins and ans are not the with a clitic (ins) attached to the verb and positioned
same, implying that they are sometimes confused. And before such other clitics as the first part of negation or
indeed, in rapid speech for many speakers, the two may an object pronominal.
not be distinct phonetically. A relation between imperso- Historically, this situation probably arose as a result of
nals and first person plural forms is known from both the similarity of ins to the first person plural clitic ans. The
French and (regional) Italian (cf. §§14.4.2.2, 18.4.3.3.2.1, reanalysis might have been facilitated by similarities to
60.7). Similarly, in Surmiran sentences such as (38), imper- Italian, a language in which (a) impersonal sentences
sonal ins should be interpreted as having first person plural involve ‘PROarb’ as subject and a preverbal clitic, and (b)
reference. first person and impersonal reference are closely related.
Given Surmiran speakers’ widespread familiarity with Ital-
(38) Scu indigen ins sa renda savens betg ple ian, especially before the more recent expansion of Ger-
as native ins REFL render often not much man influence in Graubünden, this does not seem
chint digls prievels da nossa nateira. implausible.
account of.the dangers of our nature If so, ins does not undergo inversion with the verb when
‘As a local, we often don’t pay attention to the dan- conditions require it, because this element does not occupy
gers in our natural setting.’ subject position but is rather a preverbal clitic associated
with phonetically null ‘PROarb’. The only visible conse-
A relation between impersonals and first person plural quence of inversion in this case is the possible introduction
forms might, then, have played a role in the development of of an appropriate subject clitic ((i)gl).
ins. This is not to suggest that they are the same element in
the modern language; they are phonetically distinct (as [ɪns]
vs [ə̆ns]) outside rapid speech, and although both act as if
they were clitics attached at the left of the finite verb, they
12.4.3.4 Verb-second in Surmiran
occur in different positions with respect to other clitics (39): What is the significance of these facts for an understanding
of verb-second in Surmiran? As a clitic, ins is attached to the
(39) Da lò ins n’ans vei’gl betg finite verb, and does not alter its position with respect to
from there ins NEG-1PL sees.3SG=3IMPERS not that word under displacement in inversion constructions.
cleramaintg. But that implies that the sequence ‘ins+verb’ is simply
clearly another instance of the verb together with its accompany-
‘From there one doesn’t see us clearly.’ ing clitic(s). Consequently, sentences like (31) have no
183
STEPHEN R. ANDERSON
phonetically realized element preceding the verb, and so (42) a. Ign dastga fimar dapartut an
the verb is not in second position, but rather first. If, on the ins can smoke.INF everywhere in
contrary, we said that ins in (31) ‘counts’ as filling first quell’ustreia. (Sut.)
position, then we would be in trouble with sentences like that restaurant
(33), where an initial non-subject, combined with ins, would ‘You can smoke anywhere in that restaurant.’
result in the verb being in third position. Since no other
b. Gl’unviern san ign ir cugl auto sur
re-orderings occur in these cases, we must conclude that the
the winter can ins go.INF with.the car over
verb in Surmiran is not required to be in second position.
tut igls pass. (Sut.; cf. 32b)
A few other sentence types reinforce this point. Matrix
all the passes
experiencer predicates (‘be unhappy’, ‘seem’, etc.) with
‘In the winter you can go over all of the passes by car.’
postposed sentential subjects and clitic pronominal experi-
encers have the verb together with its object clitic in c. Quant gitg ân ign cugl auto antocen
sentence-initial position (41). how long has ins with.the car to
senzum igl pass? (Sut.)
(41) Am displai /A me displai(‘gl) top the pass
OCL.1SG= displeases /to me displeases (=3IMPERS) ‘How long is by car to the top of the pass?’
tgi chesta construcziun antscheva
that this construction begins Furthermore, impersonal experiencer sentences in Sut-
cugl verb. selvan parallel to Surmiran examples in which the verb is
with.the verb initial, like the first variant of (41), always have dummy
‘I am unhappy that this sentence begins with the verb.’ subjects (43).
Sentences of this sort are always impersonal. It is possible (43) Igl/**Ø mi disple ca questa seira
for them to have an initial dummy subject igl; such dummy it me= displeases that this evening
subjects are normally obligatory in true impersonal sen- sto jou star a tgea. (Sut.)
tences, but with a pronominal clitic representing the must I stay.INF at home
experiencer need not appear. Yet when the experiencer is ‘I am sorry I have to stay home this evening.’
represented by a full prepositional phrase, as in the second
variant of (41), initial igl is obligatory unless the experiencer It appears that the grammar of Sutselvan really does
prepositional phrase is preposed (as here), in which case we constrain the verb to occur in second position, and the
have a normal inversion construction as evidenced by the same appears true of the other Rumantsch languages. In
possibility of the subject clitic. The generalization seems to Surmiran, however, the element ins was reanalysed as a
be that a preverbal clitic (ins, or am in 41) can count as ‘sort clitic, possibly because of its similarity to ans and other
of ’ a subject, thus avoiding the need either for dummy igl or factors cited above. Such a reanalysis could not have taken
inversion. place in Sutselvan, since ign bears no particular resemblance
For some perspective on these facts, consider their ana- to any preverbal clitic. Consequently, for a significant class
logues in Sutselvan. Here the cognate of ins, ign (also < UNUS), of sentences the verb-second condition ceased to be true in
behaves like a normal pronoun occupying an argument Surmiran, and was lost. Modern Surmiran is a ‘verb-second’
position rather than like a clitic (42). Consequently, it language only in the sense that inversion occurs where it is
undergoes inversion in sentences parallel to those in Sur- motivated by the presence of material preceding the subject
miran in which inversion does not take place. and in questions.
184
CHAPTER 13
The dialects of northern Italy1

P A O L A B E N I N C À , M A I R P A R R Y, AND DIEGO PESCARINI
13.1 External and linguistic history (excluding Piedmont, Liguria, and Veneto), when he estab-
lished the Cisalpine Republic (1797–1815) during the Italian
campaign.
The linguistic sub-areas that can be identified in northern
Despite very marginal and ephemeral political recogni-
Italy since the very first records are Piedmontese, Occitan,
tion, this area has preserved the character of both a cultural
Lombard, Venetan, Friulian, Ligurian, and Emilian-Romagnol
and a linguistic community, albeit of a very special type.
(Map 13.1). Ladin (Ch. 11), Romansh (Ch. 12), and Occitan
Until Roman colonization, the area was mostly inhabited
(Ch. 19) have also been considered to belong to this area in
by Celtic speakers, apart from a few areas where other, Italic
some respects, but their status is marginal; they are treated
languages were spoken, most of which were celticized to a
in separate chapters and are not included in our comparison.2
greater or lesser extent before the adoption of Latin; this
Since the earliest studies on Italian dialects, starting from
Celtic substratum was considered the first cause of the
Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (DVE) down to Ascoli (1873),
indisputable unity of this linguistic area (Biondelli 1853;
northern Italy has been seen as a coherent linguistic sub-
Ascoli 1873).4
area of Romance, a linguistic and cultural area that, despite
Dante (DVE I, xix) refers explicitly to a ‘common language’
the rich dialectal variation, also has a unitary character.3
of northern Italy, a superdialectal vernacular, which he
There are geographical reasons that motivate this concep-
called semilatium ‘(the language) of a half of Italy’.5
tion, which are also among the factors that produced the
Mussafia (1864), after a detailed examination of medieval
relative grammatical consistency of the languages found
texts, concluded that northern authors adopted languages
there. The area corresponds to the basin of the river Po
that had just some features of the local varieties but mainly
and its tributaries, and is bordered on the northern side by
showed a homogenized form, where the most local features
the arc of the Alps from west to east, and the Apennines and
were deleted and many morphological and lexical features
the sea to the south.
extended beyond their original location.
This area has never enjoyed political status, except for a
The debate that has developed over the years to oppose
short period in the first century BC, when it was a Roman
or support Mussafia’s position is due first of all to the fact
province, Gallia Cisalpina, the ‘Gaul on this side of the Alps’
that the term ‘koiné’ can be taken in a strong or in a lax
(from the Roman perspective). Soon after, in 42 BC, it was
sense, referring either to a stable and unitary language,
incorporated into Italy proper and, with Augustus’s
or (as we prefer) to an unstable set of varieties showing
reorganization of the Empire, was subdivided into four
clear traces of merging and simplification; it is well known,
regions (within a total of eleven).
for example, that it is sometimes impossible to localize
In the following centuries, only Napoleon gave—for a
short period—a political identity to part of northern Italy
4
In a certain tradition of philological studies, only Piedmontese, Lom-
bard, and Emilian-Romagnol are considered areas of Celtic population. In a
more flexible perspective, such as that adopted by Pellegrini in his studies
1
Although this chapter is the result of close collaboration between the on toponymy (cf. Pellegrini 1981), all northern Italy shows a greater or
authors, main responsibility for the work is divided as follows: Benincà lesser influence of Celtic languages. Even those areas, such as southern
§§13.1, 13.4, 13.3.2.2; Parry §§13.2, 13.3, 13.4.3.1; and Pescarini §§13.2.1, Veneto, that apparently differ and have a Venetic substratum were celti-
13.3.2.3, 13.3.2.4, 13.3.4. cized, in particular the rural population, just before (or during) the process
2
Even though Friulian is also dealt with separately (Ch. 10), we will refer of Romanization.
5
to it when necessary, because it exhibits most northern Italian phenomena, The point is crucial for his theory of vulgare latium, i.e. Italian, the
and in a form that often provides us with a key to understanding those vernacular of Italy: since vulgare semilatium, the vernacular of the northern
traces found in other dialects of northern Italy. half of Italy, exists (he says) together with many local varieties, we can
3
Dante, DVE I, xv–xix; Fernow (1808:259f. and passim); Biondelli (1853), assert that vulgare latium, Italian, also exists, and, unlike the many inad-
Ascoli (1873:esp. 450-53), to quote just the key references (see Benincà equate local varieties, can provide a common vernacular substitute for
1996b). Latin (cf. Ewert 1940).
This chapter © Paola Benincà, Mair Parry, and Diego Pescarini 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 185
186

Occitan Venetan Friulian
Francoprovenç
Francoprovençal Ladin Slovenian
Germanic
Gallo-Italian dialects Tuscan
Marebbe
Ortisei
Bolzano
L a d i n
Cortina d’Ampezzo
Moena
Alpine
Lombard
Western
o
T r e n t i n o
tin
n Friulian
L. Maggiore Trento re Belluno
nT
L. Como
r Udine
Varese ste
Aosta Ea Pordenone
Eastern Gorizia
Como Bergamo L. Iseo Friulian
Liventino
Eastern L.
Garda
Lombard Treviso
Northern Novara Milan Vicenza Trieste
Central Triestino
Piedmontese
Western Brescia Verona Venetan
Vercelli Gulf of
Lombard Venice
Padua Venice
Pavia
Turin
Po Cremona Mantua
Asti
Piacenza Rovigo
Alessandria
South-western
Piedmontese South-eastern Western Po
Piedmontese Emilian Parma Ferrara ADRIATIC
Reggio Eastern Emilian SEA

Cuneo nell’Emilia
Ligurian Modena
Genoa
Bologna
Savona Ravenna
La Rom
Gulf of Spezia ag
no
Genoa Carrara Forli
lo
Imperia Massa ernn Rimini
a
Tusrth
c
Pistoia
No
Lucca
LIGURIAN Florence San
Pisa Marino Pesaro
SEA
Map 13.1 Dialects of northern Italy

THE DIALECTS OF NORTHERN ITALY
precisely—on the basis of linguistic characteristics—a medi- This process produces a series of varieties progressively
eval text from northern Italy. less marked and with a wider circulation, which are in fact a
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a literary (kind of ) koiné, or else the precondition for the birth of a
current connected to the popularization of the French koiné.7 Note that even the most prestigious centre of a sub-
romances in northern Italy used a language (in fact a set area (such as Milan, Venice, or Florence) did not export into
of linguistic varieties closely linked to each other and to their respective region’s variety their most distinctive
French) called ‘franco-italiano’, ‘franco-veneto’, or ‘franco- features.8
lombardo’. This language was a mixture of lexical and mor-
phological features from northern dialects and literary and
regional French, unstable but quite well defined; each 13.1.1 Phenomena characterizing northern
author could adapt this basic instrument, emphasizing Italian dialects
some French (or some local) aspects, with the certainty of
being understood in the whole territory, albeit within a
restricted set of social and cultural strata (see Pellegrini To conclude this introduction, let us sum up those charac-
1956; Renzi 1970). The northern Italian dialect repertoire teristics that are shared by all northern Italian varieties,
included a choice of morphemes and functional words: for marking northern Italy as part of an innovative sub-area of
example, Pellegrini (1956:136–9) illustrates the alternation, Romance comprising French, the dialects of northern Italy,
even within the same text with the same verb, of the Friulian, Ladin, and Romansh. From now on we will term
endings -on/‑emo with the sole function of marking first this sub-area ‘northern Romance’.
person plural. Originally these morphemes belonged to dif- Looking at diachronic phonological phenomena, we have:
ferent varieties; later, for a long period, they were part of • A common, but not exclusive, Romance vowel system (cf.
this incipient koiné, whereas more recently they have again §25.1.1) underlying all the modern systems of this area
become distinctive of different dialects or dialectal areas. (Tagliavini 1969:237; Lepschy and Lepschy 1977:45). Final
The basis for the evolution towards a sort of unity was the unstressed vowels, except -a, are dropped; this rule
grammatical and lexical features that the languages of the affects all northern Italian dialects, even though it
area had in common. Moreover, the diachronic phono- applies to different sets of contexts, depending on the
logical rules that characterized the sub-areas were part of dialect; in particular, in southern Veneto and Ligurian
a unitary system of rules which bound these dialects, the contexts are very limited. All unstressed vowels are
including French varieties. As a consequence, the shared weak, and tend to be neutralized or to disappear; this is
Latin stock was recognizable even if it had been modified particularly evident in Emilian and Piedmontese but,
by diachronic phonological rules. In situations like these, again, less prominent in southern Veneto and Liguria.
one could even say that the development of a koiné is • All double consonants (in many cases produced by the
unavoidable, the necessary product of cultural and commer- assimilation of Latin obstruent consonant clusters) are
cial contacts of people speaking very similar languages. phonetically shortened (cf. §25.2.5). Intervocalic voice-
The medieval situation calls to mind what Trumper less obstruents are voiced; in some dialects some
(1977) described as ‘macro-diglossia’, which obtains in obstruents in this context disappear. Putting together
many Italian regions in modern times: speakers have at these two rules, one notices that no voiceless obstruent
their disposal the local dialect and one or more varieties
obtained by undoing the operation of the more specific
phonetic and phonological rules, thus obtaining a less features, but instead was influenced by the Venetian high level language.
This means that a High local variety had not arisen.
marked language. In macro-diglossic areas, the local dia- 7
At an even higher level, between northern and central-southern Italian
lects survive longer, ‘protected’ by the existence of dialectal speakers, more radical operations are required. At this level, as pointed out
varieties of higher level and larger circulation. Conversely, by Vincent (2007c; 2012), a sort of unconscious syntactic comparison is at
in a micro-diglossic area, the local dialect is directly work, an operation that requires a pre-existing syntactic similarity—or
comparability—between the languages involved. Vincent underlines the
opposed to a regional variant of Italian, and it disappears relevance of this aspect for the formation of an Italian national koiné,
more rapidly.6 and draws attention to the ‘Cremona papers’ (published by Baglioni 2010);
there, well before national unification, a sort of unitary Italian is attested,
in northern Africa and in the Mediterranean area, including in documents
of an official nature; it had indisputable non-local characteristics, not at all
6
Trumper (1977) uses Emilia-Romagna to illustrate a typical micro- based on literary Italian—a koiné produced spontaneously through contact.
8
diglossic region, where dialects are disappearing more rapidly than e.g. in Vincent (2006b) points out the similarity with the prototypical Greek
the Veneto. In an interesting analysis, Matarrese (1990) shows that in the koiné, analysed by Morpurgo Davies (1987). See also Ferguson (2003; 2007)
15th c. the language used in Romagna, in particular in the court and on Venetian as a sort of koiné. On colonial Venetian, developed on the
chancery of Ferrara, was not aligned with Florentine, nor showed local Adriatic coasts, see Folena (1968–70).
187
resulting from simplification is voiced in intervocalic extensively in some Alpine Lombard varieties, e.g. Soglio
position in any dialect.9 (Val Bregaglia, Switzerland): [ˈtɛrːɐ] ‘earth’ < TERRAM ~
• Finally, a diachronic rule that today shows its effects [ˈkɛːrɐ] ‘dear.FSG’ < CARAM (Loporcaro et al. 2005:601).
only in French varieties, Ladin, and Romansh (see Regarding the diachrony of degemination, sonorants
§39.3.1.4), namely the palatalization of [ka/ɡa], origin- were targeted after obstruents (Martinet 1955) and under-
ally affected more or less the whole of northern Italy, went degemination quite recently: the northern dialects
for clear traces of it have been painstakingly collected spoken by communities settled in Calabria and Sicily around
and discussed throughout the area (see Pellegrini the twelfth century exhibit /ɖ(ɖ)/ from /ll/, e.g. [jaˈɖina]
1991:35f.; Vigolo 1986; Tuttle 1997b). < GALLĪNAM ‘hen’ (Piazza Armerina, Sicily, Rohlfs 1969a:229).
Pescarini (2011) noted that in certain thirteenth-century
All Romance languages show the general tendency to
vernaculars such as old Veronese the orthographic alterna-
substitute synthetic forms by analytic forms, a process
tion between <l> and <ll> was still phonologically relevant,
that can be seen as part of a more abstract and generalized
as apocope was not allowed after <ll>, e.g. cavall(**o) ‘horse’,
diachronic drift (§46.1), leading to a progressive reduction
ell(**o) ‘he’ before a consonant. As apocope was not permit-
of syntactic movement (Benincà and Poletto 2005); this
ted after geminates (see Zamboni 1976), this means that
tendency is decidedly more widespread in northern Italian
apocope is blocked by the double segment represented by
dialects than in other Italian varieties.
the grapheme <ll> and hence that degemination of sonor-
• Similarly, negation in northern Italy appears with variants was not complete in the thirteenth century.
ous types of negative marker, which have different Elsewhere, non-etymological geminates emerged after
locations in the sentence structure (cf. §51.2.1). short tonic vowels, arguably to fulfil a generalized require-
• The most obvious, and best-studied phenomenon that ment that stressed syllables must be heavy (§26.1.1). In
characterizes northern Italian dialects (and northern Piedmontese this happened after [ə] < late Lat. [e]: [ˈvədːe]
Romance including Florentine) is the presence of sub- ‘see.INF’, [ˈməsːa] ‘mass’, while in Bolognese we observe con-
ject pronouns with variable degrees of obligatoriness, sonantal lengthening after [a] < late Lat. [e] [sakː] ‘dry’ ~
since the Middle Ages: see §13.4.6 and Ch. 47 for the [saːk] ‘sack’, [ˈfatːa] ‘slice’ ~ [ˈfaːta] ‘made.FSG’ (Coco 1970:88).
details of this characteristic, which interacts with many Due to the same requirement regarding the heaviness of
fundamental aspects of sentence structure. tonic syllables, non-final vowels in stressed open syllables
were lengthened. As a consequence of apocope and degemi-
nation, in several dialects vowel length remained the only
phonological clue to distinguish minimal pairs such as [peːs]
13.2 Phonology < PĒ(N)SUM ‘weight’ vs [pes] < PĬSCEM ‘fish’ (Mendrisiotto, Lurà
1987); [puˈliːt] < POLITUM ‘clean’ ~ [puˈlit] < PULLI + *ˈetti ‘chicks.
The fundamental unitary nature of the area resulting from DIM’ (Biella area, Grassi 1968:158); [pɑːs] ‘peace’ < PACEM
the shared application of the rules described above is in fact ~ [pɑs] ‘step’ < PASSU(M) (Canavese: Oglianico) vs Tur. [pɑːz]
obscured by local variation, due to the application of more ~ [pɑs]); Cremonese [kaːr] ‘dear.MSG’ < CARUM ~ [kar] ‘cart’
specific rules. < CARRUM (Oneda 1976).
Some dialects have acquired new distinctive length con-
trasts in stressed syllables as a result of syncope, e.g. Gen.
13.2.1 Suprasegmental phonology [ˈpusu] < PUTEUM ‘well (N)’ ~ [ˈpuːsu] < PULSUM ‘wrist’, [ˈpaŋsa]
< PANTICEM ‘belly’ ~ [ˈbaːŋsa] < BILANCIAM ‘scales’ (Toso 1997:16f.).
Northern Italian dialects are characterized by two general- Vanelli (1998a) reviews different theoretical analyses of
ized diachronic processes: degemination and loss of the development of phonological vowel-length oppositions,
unstressed vowels. The former is attested in (almost) all arguing that word-final devoicing of an originally inter-
northern dialects, although various dialects exhibit the vocalic consonant in Friulian contributed to extra length-
emergence of non-etymological context-determined gemin- ening of the preceding vowel (e.g. in [laːt] < *(al)ˈlatu ‘gone’
ation due to primary stress (see below). Consonantal-length (~ [lat] < *ˈlakte ‘milk’). Indeed, these long vowels are
oppositions appear to have survived in some peripheral significantly longer than those that occur before the inter-
areas such as Apennine Emilian dialects and more vocalic voiced consonants of their morphological alter-
nants, e.g. [ˈlaːde] ‘gone.FSG’. Acoustic measurements show
that the (definitely) devoiced final consonants remain sig-
9
Some apparent counterexamples, such as past participles of strong nificantly shorter than shortened original Latin geminates.
verbs, are in fact clear cases of analogical extension. For Milanese, Nicoli (1983:52) also records a difference in
188
the quality of the devoiced obstruent, since he describes consonants such as m (< ME, ‘me’), t (< TE, ‘you.SG’), l (< ILLUM,
devoiced final consonants as being intermediate between ‘him’), e.g. Tur. **it m ! it am ‘you to.me’ (Vanelli 1984b).
the voiced and voiceless obstruents. In word-final position, syllabification is obtained by
Furthermore, the length distinction may be accompanied means of a paragogic vowel, as in southern Romagnol, e.g.
by differences in the quality of the vowel and/or following [ˈforne] < FURNUM ‘oven’. Elsewhere, as in northern Romagnol
consonant: Mil. [loˈdɒː] < LAUDATUM ‘praised.PST.PTCP’ ~ [loˈda] < and Emilian, an epenthetic vowel is inserted between the
LAUDARE ‘praise.INF’, [peːz] < PENSUM ‘weight’ ~ [pɛs] < PISCEM two consonants, e.g. [ˈforɐn].
‘fish’ (Nicoli 1983:45f.). In Piedmont, Liguria, and Emilia- The distribution of such repairs is subject to cross-
Romagna especially, long close-mid vowels [e] and [o] in linguistic and intralinguistic variation, the latter depending
open syllables evolved into falling diphthongs, e.g. Pie. ultimately on the nature of the cluster: sequences formed by
[ˈtɛjla], Lig. [ˈtɛj(ɹ)a], < TĒLAM ‘canvas’. Emilian-Romagnol segments that are close on the sonority scale, e.g. a glide
varieties show a tendency towards opening of the diph- and a sonorant, are more readily repaired than others
thong’s first element [ˈtajla], and in several Modenese dia- (Bafile 2003b). The same syllabic principle is arguably
lects /aː/ in open syllables underwent fronting to /æ/ e.g. responsible for the insertion of epenthetic consonants in
[mɛːr] < MARE ‘sea’. In Piedmontese (but not Canavese var- sonorant + sonorant sequences, e.g. nombre < NUMERUM ‘num-
ieties) this phenomenon only affected the tonic vowel of ber’ (Brisighella (Ravenna), AIS map 476). Elsewhere, syllabic
first conjugation infinitives. constraints trigger the insertion of epenthetic consonants
As previously mentioned, northern vernaculars exhibit or cause the hardening of a glide to obtain a CV syllable, e.g.
cases of apocope, namely loss of final vowels. As in Tuscan, PAUOREM > [paˈgyra] ‘fear’ (Travo, Piacenza), cf. It. paura
in central Veneto apocope is allowed only after single son- (Zörner 1989).
orants and it targets only [o] and [e]. The latter is not
subject to apocope when expressing feminine plural fea-
tures, as the feminine plural ending was not -e at the time 13.2.2 Segmental phonology
when apocope occurred (Maiden 1996a). In dialects of Lom-
bardy, Piedmont, and Emilia-Romagna, by contrast, apocope
The different outcome of Latin single intervocalic conson-
extended to other phonological contexts (i.e. after any kind
ants has served as a well-known isogloss for typological
of consonant) and to any final vowel but -[a]. Regarding the
classification not only within Italo-Romance but within
interplay of degemination and apocope, Zamboni (1976b)
the contiguous Romance-speaking area of Europe; but
observed that apocope was originally sensitive to the length
recent scholarship argues for a more nuanced view that
of the preceding consonant: in Venetian apocope is thereby
sees northern Italo-Romance (and wider western Romance)
mandatory after -L-, e.g. [mjel] ‘honey’ vs **[ˈmjele] < *
phenomena as but a further stage of evolution from what is
ˈmɛle, while it is not allowed after -LL-, e.g. [ˈkae] ‘alley’ vs
found in central and insular Italo-Romance (Giannelli and
**[kal] < CALLEM. Such a synchronic distribution throws light
Cravens 1997). In intervocalic position short consonants
on the chronological order of the phonological processes, as
were prone to extensive lenition, involving voicing, fricati-
it entails apocope having taken place before degemination.
vization, and sometimes total loss, with significant variation
Alternatively, degemination may be deemed a phonetic
between and sometimes within regions:
process without effects on the phonological representation
of double segments, which remain intact. i. -[p]- > -[b]- > -[v]- > Ø, e.g. Rmg. [ʃ aˈvoŋ], Mil. [saˈũ],
As a consequence of vowel loss, Lombard and, more Ven. [saˈoŋ] < SAPONEM ‘soap’;
frequently, Piedmontese and Emilian-Romagnol dialects ii. -[t]- > -[d]- > -[ð]- > Ø (although in the absence of
allow obstruents in coda position, e.g. [ˈkød.ɡa] ‘pig skin’ apocope of the following vowel, restoration as [d] is
< *ˈkoteka (Frignano, Modena: Uguzzoni 1971) and complex common, especially in Lombard and Venetan, or as a
consonantal clusters in word-initial position, e.g. Tur. [fnuj] glide in Piedmont), e.g. Gen. [veˈɲyu], [veˈɲya] ‘come.
‘fennel’ < FENUCULUM, Eml. [zbdɛl] ‘hospital’ < HOSPITALEM. Such PST.PTCP.M/FSG’ < *veˈnutu/-a, Mil. [senˈti], [senˈtida]
consonantal clusters are sometimes avoided by either clus- ‘heard.PST.PTCP.M/FSG’ < *senˈtitu/-a, Vnz. [maˈɲa], [ma
ter reduction (e.g. Frl. [fɔːr] ‘oven’ < FURNUM) or by inserting a ˈɲada] ‘eaten.PST.PTCP.M/FSG’< *manduˈkatu/-a, but the
non-etymological vowel. In word-initial position, a pros- nearby dialect of Burano has MSG [maˈɲao] ~ FSG [ma
thetic segment allows the leftmost segment to syllabify as ˈɲa], while urban Veronese has [maˈɲado] ~ [maˈɲada]
the coda of a newly formed syllable (Sampson 2010), e.g. Pie. (Marcato and Ursini 1998:306);
[avˈziŋ] ‘neighbour’ < UICINUM. The same prosthetic vowel is iii. [k] > [ɡ] > [ɣ] > Ø in Piedmont, if in the vicinity of the
used to syllabify clitic elements (see §13.4.4), which in dia- front vowels, [i], [y], [ø], e.g. Lmb. [furˈmiɡa], Ven. [for
lects with generalized apocope are reduced to single ˈmiɡa], Pie. [fyrˈmia] < FORMICAM ‘ant’.
189
As mentioned above, Latin intervocalic geminates were Liguria appears to be a fairly recent phenomenon (Forner
shortened over the whole area, usually remaining distinct 1997:250).
from the original short consonants. Significantly, geminates In Venetan dialects, only mid vowels originating from
have never been subject to voicing: unvoiced consonants Latin tense vowels are affected by metaphony (even though
are in fact maintained in intervocalic contexts when derived the tense/lax distinction is now neutralized for back vowels,
from geminates, e.g. Ven. [ˈtose] ‘cough’ < TŬSSEM vs [ˈtoze] while front mid vowels maintain the Latin distinction).
‘girls’ < TŌNSAS ‘girls’, while the reflex of -NN- remains distinct Hence, metaphony never targets reflexes of Lat. Ŏ (e.g. SG
from that of short [n], which is weakened in final position: [ˈloɡo, ˈfoɡo, boŋ] ‘place, fire, good’ ~ PL [ˈloɡi, ˈfoɡi, ˈboni])
Cai. [ɑn] ‘year’ < ANNUM ~ [aŋ] ‘they have’ < HABENT, Tur. [pɑn] and Ě (e.g. [ˈfɛro, ˈvɛro, ˈbɛlo] ‘tool, true, nice’ ~ PL [ˈfɛri, ˈvɛri,
‘cloth’ < PANNUM ~ [paŋ] ‘bread’ < PANEM (see below for ˈbɛj]). Reflexes of Ē, Ō do undergo metaphony: [ˈtozo, ˈtuzi]
Milanese). ‘boy, -s’, [ˈfjore, ˈfjuri] ‘flower, -s’, [ˈvero, ˈviri] ‘glass, -es’,
Front rounded vowels [y] < Ū and [ø] < Ŏ are further [ˈmeto, ˈmiti] ‘I put, you put’. In old Paduan (e.g., 16th-c.
distinctive northern features, although absent from Romag- Ruzante) mid lax vowels in metaphonic contexts diphthong-
nol and Venetan varieties, e.g. Pie./Gen. [ˈlyŋa], Lmb. [ˈlyna] ized (as in southern Italian dialects: see Calabrese 1985): MSG
‘moon’ < LUNAM. The fronting of [u] > [y] was often ac- bon ‘good ’~ PL buoni, MSG vegio ‘old’~ PL viegi.
companied by the raising of back vowels: [o] > [u], [ɔ] > [o], Vowel harmony is attested in Lombardy (Sanga 1997:256)
[ɑ] > [ɔ], e.g. Pie. [ˈura], Gen. [ˈua], but Ven. [ˈora] ‘hour’ and Piedmont. In Piverone (Piedmont), the vowel height of
< HORAM. Stressed low-mid vowels produced early rising the stressed vowel determines the height of the final vowel
diphthongs over the whole area, as in Italian, probably (Flechia 1896–8; Canalis 2010): if the stressed vowel is high
originating in metaphonic contexts (Maiden 1997b; this (/ɪ i u y/), only [a i u] appear as final vowels, otherwise only
volume §38.3.2), i.e. when followed by high vowels, nor- [a e o] are possible. This harmonization leads automatically
mally [i] in northern Italian dialects.10 These diphthongs to [i/e] allomorphs for feminine plural and second singular
usually re-monophthongized, giving [e] < [je], e.g. Pie. endings, and [u/o] for third plural, e.g. [ˈlyva] ‘she-wolf ’
[pe], Rmg. [pæ], Ven. [ˈpie] ‘foot’ < PEDEM, and [ø] (<*[ɥo] < LUPAM ~ PL [ˈlyvi], but [ˈpɛra] < PETRA(M) ‘stone’~ PL [ˈpɛre];
< *[wo]), where [u] was fronted to [y], e.g. Pie. [œv], Lmb. [a ˈskrivu] ‘(they) write’ < SCRIBUNT but [a ˈkrɛdo] ‘(they)
[øf], Lig. [ˈœvu ], but Ven. [ˈɔvo] ‘egg’ < OUUM ‘egg’. [ø] may believe’ < CREDUNT.
also derive from [ɔ] in other palatalizing contexts, such Final obstruent devoicing is characteristic of Lombard,
as before a palatalized preconsonantal [k], a development Emilian, Romagnol, and some Piedmontese varieties. Among
that failed to take place in the Veneto: Pie. [nœjt], Lig. the latter, Canavesano, Astigiano, and Biellese tend to
[ˈnøte], Ven. [ˈnɔte] ‘night’ < NOCTEM. devoice final consonants: Asti [œf] ‘egg’ < ˈɔvu, Biellese
Metaphony (for a definition, see §§25.1.5, 38.1), as a rule [raʧ] ‘ray’ < RADIUM vs Tur. [raʤ] (Berruto 1970:29), but
triggered by -[i] (a characteristic plural desinence), affected western and southern varieties maintain voiced consonants,
most of the territory, but has long been receding, although which remain phonemically distinct from their voiceless
morphologized relics abound, e.g. Mil. MSG [kel]/ FSG [ˈkela] counterparts: Tur. [lyz] ‘light’ LUCEM ~ [lys] ‘pike’ < LUCIUM,
‘this/that’ ~ [ki] ‘these/those’ < ECCU ILLUM/ILLAM/ILLI (Nicoli [nɑz] ‘nose’ < NASUM ‘nose’ ~ [nɑs] ‘(it/he/she) is born’
1983:176), Cerano (Novara): MSG [ku] ‘that’ ~ [ky] ‘those’ < *ˈnaske. Similar contrasts may also be found in Emilia-
(Manzini and Savoia 2005, III:605), as well as residual Romagna: Bol. [frap] ‘rags’ ~ [frab] ‘blacksmith’ < FABRUM,
areas, especially southern Veneto, around Padua and [lot] ‘I struggle’ < LUCTOR ~ [lod] ‘I praise’ < LAUDO (Coco
Vicenza, but excluding Venice, Romagna ([fjawr] ~ [fjur] 1970:94, 96); Lugo [mats] ‘bunch’ ~ [maʣ] ‘May’ (Pelliciardi
‘flower,-s’ < *ˈflore, -i, Piedmont (Biella area): [maŋ] ~ 1977:24f.).
[mɛŋ] < *ˈmanu, -i ‘hand, -s’ (Berruto 1974:30), and periph- While Milanese exhibits distinctive vowel length in the
eral Alpine regions, for instance, in Ticinese (Sanga presence of vowel apocope and final obstruent devoicing
1997:254). Metaphony in the Alpine Intemelian group in (e.g. [ɡœp] [ˈɡœːbɒ] ‘hunchback’ < *ˈɡɔbbu, *ˈɡɔbba, [maʧ]
‘May’ < MAIUM), apocope and devoicing are not crucial for the
10
Support for this theory comes from the fact that words with original development of phonologically relevant vowel length in
non-high final vowels often show no diphthongs, e.g. Pie. [ˈskora] < SCHŎLAM, Genoese (see the examples above) and various Emilian
‘school’, [ˈnora] < *ˈnɔra ‘daughter-in-law’, [om] < HŎMO ‘man’ as opposed to Apennine dialects, e.g. Lizzano in Belvedere: [kaŋˈta] < CAN-
[kør] ‘hearts’ < *ˈkɔri, [bø] ‘oxen’ < *ˈbɔvi (Rohlfs 1966:140f.), where the
earlier diphthong *[ɥo] has remonophthongized; analogical levelling would TATUM ‘sung’ ~ [kaŋˈtaː] CANTATIS ‘you.PL sing’ (Loporcaro et al.
account for the spread of such diphthongs to the singular. An alternative 2006).
theory proposed by Pellegrini (1982:17) and Zamboni (1993:467) is that the Vowel nasalization is another feature that distinguishes
greater number of syllables in proparoxytones and words retaining final
vowels led to a compensatory shortening of stressed vowels that hindered the development of northern from that of central and
diphthongization. See also Sánchez Miret (1998) and Ch. 38. southern Italo-Romance, linking it again with transalpine
190
Romance. In some cases this has led to the emergence of characteristic of some parts of the north, especially as the
nasal vowels, which may be found in a swathe of dialects first element of a consonantal cluster in Romagnol and
‘running from northern and eastern Piedmont through Trentino varieties, but also in parts of Piedmont, Lombardy,
western and central Lombardy and down to the south- Emilia, and the Veneto, e.g. [ˈmu ʃ ka] ‘fly’ < MUSCAM. Palatal-
eastern area of Emilia-Romagna’ (Sampson 1999:247), e.g. ized final consonants also contribute in many areas to the
Mil. [sãː] ‘healthy’ < SANUM ~ [saː] ‘salt’ < *ˈsale, [sa] ‘he marking of number (see below).
knows’ ~ [san] ‘they know’ (both verb forms revealing the
analogical influence on SAPERE of the paradigms of DARE, STARE;
Rohlfs 1968:285). Note that the nasal consonant reappears in
morphological alternation and derivational forms: Mil. [mã] 13.3 Morphology
‘hand’ < MANUM ~ [maˈnina] ‘little hand’; [bũ] < ‘good.MSG/PL’
< BONUM, -OS ~ [bɔn] ‘good.FPL’ < BONAS. However, vowel nasality 13.3.1 Nouns and adjectives
is retreating under the influence of the standard language.
Elsewhere vowels denasalized, resulting often in a sequence In the north of Italy the inflectional morphology of nouns
of vowel and velar nasal coda [ŋ] or [ŋ]: Cai. [dɛŋʧ] ‘tooth’ and adjectives has been drastically reduced compared to
< DENTEM, Gen. [maŋ] ‘hand’ < MANUM, Ven. [viˈsiŋ] ‘neighbour’ that of Latin, following the loss of case distinctions (partially
< UICINUM. Since parts of the northwest and Emilia-Romagna retained, however, in the pronominal system), the fall of
also experienced nasalization in stressed syllables followed most final vowels other than [a] in some regions, and the
by an intervocalic single nasal, the restoration of a velar spread of dominant patterns of variation at the expense of
occlusion has resulted in nasal sequences such as Prm. others. The grammatical categories of number and gender
[ˈloŋne], Bol. [ˈloŋna] ‘moon’ < LUNAM, which in the west continue in most areas to be marked through inflection,
have long been reduced to intervocalic [ŋ]: Tur./Gen. although this may be conveyed by stem change due to
[ˈlaŋa] ‘wool’ < [ˈlaŋna] < LANAM. metaphony or consonantal palatalization affecting certain
The palatalization of the liquid in the cluster C + [l] is a groups of nouns. Invariable nouns, however, are more com-
development that characterizes most Italo-Romance var- mon than in the centre and south due to the loss of
ieties (excluding some Abruzzo dialects, Sardinian, Friulian, unstressed vowels, the analogical spread of feminine plural
and Ladin) (cf. §39.4.1), but a distinctive feature of most -[e] to former Latin third declension nouns, and the regres-
northern Italian dialects is the further palatalization of sion of metaphony. Diachronic developments also show the
the first consonant of some of the clusters, especially the spread of inflectional syncretism, which may neutralize the
velars, but also the labials [p], [b], and labio-dental [f] in gender distinction, especially in the plural.
Liguria (see Table 13.1). The affricates [ʦ] and [ʣ] that In Liguria and southern Veneto, where final vowels were
developed from Latin velar and dental consonants followed largely maintained, we find two main inflectional alterna-
by a front vowel or yod have simplified to fricatives [s] and tions corresponding to gender and number, e.g. Gen. [ˈfiʤu,
[z] in all but conservative areas, such as the Val Bormida: -i] ‘son, ‑s’, [ˈfiʤa, -e] ‘daughter, -s’, Ven. [ˈnɔno, -i] ‘grand-
[ˈʦɛjna] ‘supper’, [u leʣ] ‘he reads’. father, -s’, [ˈnɔna, -e] ‘grandmother, -s’.
Some instances of palatalized velars before [a], typical of This dominant pattern, with clear gender marking,
Gallo-Romance, Ladin, and Friulian, suggest the phenom- attracted members of the Latin third declension, such as
enon was more widespread in the past (Tuttle 1997) and Gen. [ˈnɛvu, -i], Vic. [neˈvodo, -i] ‘nephew, -s’ < NEPOTEM, -ES,
they survive in peripheral areas, e.g. in Alpine Lombard Gen. [ˈnɛsa, -e], Vic. [neˈvoda, -e] ‘niece, -s’ < NEPOTEM, -ES; Noli
[ɡjat] ‘cat’ (Sanga 1997:259). Palatalized sibilants are (Liguria) and Ven. [ˈava, -e] ‘bee, -s’ < feminine APEM, -ES.
Table 13.1 Palatalization of the cluster C + [l]

LATIN TUR . MIL . BOL . RAVENNA GEN . VEN .
CLAUEM ‘key’ ʧaw ʧɒf ʧɛf ʧeɐf ˈʧave ˈʧave

PLUIT ‘(it) rains’ pjøw pjøf pjɔf pjɔɐf ˈʧøve ˈpjɔve
*ˈblanku ‘white’ bjaŋk bjãŋk bjæŋk bjãŋk ˈʤaŋku ˈbjaŋko
FLOREM ‘flower’ fjur fjur fjawr fjor ʃu fjor
CAENAM ‘supper’ ˈsiŋa ˈsɛna ˈsanɐ ˈsæjnɐ ˈseŋa ˈsena
BRACCHIUM ‘arm’ brɑs brɑʃ bras bras ˈbrasu ˈbraso
LEGIT ‘(s/he) reads’ lɛz leʧ lɛz lɛz ˈleze ˈlɛze
191
Otherwise, the rest of the class shows an [e]/-[i] number texts, for longer than in the rest of Italo-Romance (for
alternation in the masculine: Gen. [ˈpɛʃe, -i] , Ven. [ˈpese, -i] details see Benincà and Vanelli 1978, which develops the
‘fish’< PISCEM, -ES, but feminine nouns have typical FPL -[e] and findings of Sabatini 1965a; also Maiden 2000b). The two-case
are thus invariable: Gen./Ven. [ˈʧave] ‘key, -s’ < CLAUEM, -ES. system disappeared before the appearance of the first Italo-
Despite the loss of final -[e] due to apocope, e.g. Mil. [ˈdɔna ~ Romance texts, but according to Benincà and Vanelli the
dɔn] ‘lady, -ies’ < DOMINAM, ‑AS, it was kept or reinstated as a retention of two plural inflection types was favoured by the
feminine plural marker in eastern Lombardy and most of marked nature of the palatalized forms, which also guaran-
Piedmont, Tur. [ˈdɔna ~ ˈdɔne], and as -[i] in some dialects: teed the number distinction in words ending in -[s]; else-
Finale Emilia [ˈdɔni]. Maiden’s (1996a) comprehensive over- where in northern Italy the presumed loss of -[s] resulted in
view of the much discussed issue of whether Romance -[i] invariable plural forms. An alternative phonetic develop-
and -[e] plurals derive from the nominative or oblique case ment is proposed by Forner (2005) in a comparative study
forms, concludes that the latter most likely continues the that draws on Alpine Ligurian variational data that involve
Latin accusative feminine plural -AS, as the fact that it Latin accusative -OS > [uj] > [i].11 He suggests that such a
produced no instances of palatalization of the preceding hypothesis, which does not have recourse to a two-case
consonant suggests that at the relevant period it featured system, is not implausible for other areas, especially north-
the diphthong *[aj] and not the front vowel one would ern dialects.
expect, were it a reflex of the nominative plural -AE. Palatalized plurals, which link these varieties to Ladin
Zörner (1995) also adduces persuasive evidence regarding and Friulian and which were once widespread in the Po
the different development in northern Italian dialects of valley, are today in regression but survive in conservative
stem-final nasals in first and third declension feminine varieties: Bresciano [ɡat] ‘cat’ < CATTUM ~ [ɡaʧ] ‘cats’, [aˈsɛŋ]
nouns: in reflexes of the former their evolution parallels ‘donkey’ < ASINUM ~ [aˈsɛɲ] ‘donkeys’; Venetian nouns in
that of word-internal nasals in contrast to the word-final -[oŋ]: [balˈkoŋ] ‘balcony’ ~ [balˈkoj], ‘balconies’; and in cer-
pattern of nasalized vowel found in the latter, e.g. [vi'zəjn] tain closed paradigms, e.g. the quantifier ‘all’, Mil. [tyt] ~
‘female neighbours’ < UICINAS ~ [parˈzõ] ‘prisons’ < PREHENSIONES. [tyʧ] ‘all’, Cai. [ˈtyʧi], but Tur. [ˈtyti]. Similarly, metaphonic
Invariable Friulian, Ladin, Alpine Lombard nouns in -[a] < -AS plurals are becoming rarer, although still characteristic of
(Val Bregaglia, Ticino), e.g. ['kabra] ‘goat, -s’ < CAPRAM, -AS, as Emilia-Romagna, Liguria, and southern Veneto (not Venice):
in parts of northern Tuscany (Rohlfs 1968:30) reveal a simi- Biella: [maŋ] ~ [mɛŋ] ‘hand, -s’; Bol.: [ba] ~ [buː] ‘ox, oxen’,
lar tenacity of the most open vowel, but total loss of -S. [paʃ] ~ [pɛʃ] ‘fish’; Lugo [ˈojum] ~ [ˈujum] ‘elm, -s’, [ˈvedar] ~
In the core Piedmontese and Lombard varieties, and in [ˈvidar] ‘glass, -es’, [ɡat] ~ [ɡæt] ‘cat, -s’ (Pelliciardi 1977);
northern Veneto (Feltrino, Bellunese), most masculine Gen. [kaŋ] ~ [kɛŋ] ‘dog, -s’, [feˈraː] ~ [feˈræ] ‘blacksmith’;
nouns are invariable, as are all nouns ending in a stressed SVen. [ˈmeze] ~ [ˈmizi] ‘month, -s’, [niˈsoeo] ~[ niˈsui] ‘sheet,
vowel and feminine nouns ending in a consonant or a -s’ (Marcato and Ursini 1998:68).
support vowel, e.g. Tur. [əl ɡɑt ~ i ɡɑt] ‘the cat, -s’, [əl Despite a wide range of dialect variation in plural forma-
ˈprɛvi ~ i ˈprɛvi] ‘the priest, -s’, [la fjur ~ le fjur] ‘the flower, tion (Rohlfs 1968:25–51) and unusual developments such as
-s’ [la ˈmɑre ~ le ˈmɑre] ‘the mother, -s’; Mil. [l œʧ ~ j œʧ] the western Lombard feminine plural in -[ˈan], e.g. [ˈtuza] ~
‘the eye, -s’, [el maˈri ~ i maˈri] ‘the husband, -s’, [la reːt ~ i [tuˈzan] ‘girl, -s’, noun inflection in northern Italian dialects
reːt] ‘the net, -s’. Specific phonetic changes have resulted in reveals a consistent trend towards regularizing paradigms
a number of exceptions within the masculine group, due to through the extension of dominant patterns of variation.
the palatalization of a stem-final coronal consonant prior to Regarding the small group of nouns that preserve the Latin
the loss of postulated plural -[i] inflection: Tur. [fil] ~ [fij] neuter ending [a] for pairs or collectives (MSG -[o] / FPL -[a]),
‘thread, -s’ [kaˈval] ~ [kaˈvaj] ‘horse, -s’; [ɑŋ] ~ [ɑɲ] ‘year, -s’ this trend dates back to medieval times (see §42.4). The
but also modern, [ˈɑni]; Mil. [fraˈdɛl] ~ [fraˈdɛj], Ven. [fra plural of such nouns either acquired the regular feminine
ˈdɛjo] ~ [fraˈdɛj] ‘brother, -s’. Palatalized stems may cooccur plural -[e] as in Liguria: Gen. [ˈlɛrfu] ~ [ˈlɛrfe] ‘lip.MSG, lips.
with inflexion, where this exists: Gen. [aˈmigu] ~ [aˈmiʒi] FPL’, [ˈɔsu] ~ [ˈɔse] ‘bone, -s’, or zero ending in Romagna:
‘friend, -s’, [ˈkasu] ~ [ˈkaʃi] ‘kick, -s’, [ˈaze] ~ [ˈaʒi] ‘donkey, Lugo, [l ɔs] ~ [aʎi os] ‘the bone, the bones’, [l ov] ~ [aʎi ov]
-s’ (Toso 1997:53f.), whereas Pie. [aˈmiz] ‘friend’ shows a ‘the egg, the eggs’, but [e braʦ] ~ [al ˈbraʦa] ‘the arm, the
singular analogically formed from a palatalized plural.
Northern Italian palatalized plurals are deemed to have 11
Regarding the origin of the -[i] inflection, whereas a phonetic devel-
derived from the Latin nominative case in -[i], while their opment via palatalization of [s] and vowel raising plausibly accounts for
coexistence with -[s] plurals in Friulian reflects the persist- reflexes of Latin third declension undifferentiated nominative/oblique
nouns and adjectives ending in -ES (> [ej] > [i]), the possibility of [i] from
ence in this area of a two-case system (nominative vs second declension oblique -OS has been rejected in the main (see Maiden
oblique), similar to that found in early Gallo-Romance 1996a).
192
arms’, (Pelliciardi 1977:53f.), thus remaining anomalous in However, a small area on the border of Piedmont and
the change of gender (although new masculine -[i] plurals Liguria has witnessed the almost total assimilation of con-
emerged for some, with semantic differentiation), or the ditional forms to the past subjunctive paradigm (see the
group was totally assimilated into the dominant masculine discussion on southern Italian dialects in §16.4.2.1), presum-
one, as in Piedmont, Lombardy, and the Veneto: Tur., Mil. ably due to the combined effect of their semantico-syntactic
[l œv] ~ [j œv] ‘the egg, -s’, Ven. [ˈlavaro, -i] ‘lip, -s’, [ˈvɔvo, -i] affinity (Harris 1978a:181f.) and to the phonological weak-
‘egg,-s’. However, -[a] plurals (and feminine gender) survive ness of /r/ in this area (see Parry 1990):
in the Ravenna area, without the metaphony found in the
corresponding masculine plural formations, which have (1) [s a l maŋˈʤɛjsa tyt, a maŋˈʤɛjsa trop] (Cai.)
metaphorical meaning: [ˈbrasa] ‘arms’ ~ [i brɛs] ‘the arms if I= it=ate.SBJV all I eat.COND too much
(of a cross)’ (Masotti 1999). ‘If I ate it all, I would eat too much.’
The fact that the very few /r/ conditionals found in the
13.3.2 Verb morphology area (in Cairese just ‘be’: COND. [saˈɹɛjsa] ~ PST.SBJV [ˈfusa])
belong to frequent irregular verbs, such as ‘do’, ‘know’,
13.3.2.1 Tenses suggests that these are relics of a previous state of affairs
Verb systems normally include the following finite forms: and that the current formal identity of verbs in the protasis
indicative (present, imperfect, past, future), subjunctive and apodosis of Valbormidese conditional structures is not
(present, imperfect, past, and pluperfect), and conditional analogous to the continuation of the two Latin pluperfect
(present and past). subjunctives found in Swiss Raeto-Romance and southern
In modern vernaculars, perfect tenses are normally ana- Italo-Romance (Parry 1990).
lytic even if the simple past (preterite) was robust in north-
ern Italian varieties from the Middle Ages to the
Renaissance. Among the synthetic verb forms the condi-
13.3.2.2 Person endings
tional is noteworthy for its morphological diversity, reflect- In many dialects (excluding Piedmontese and some Emilian
ing the different evolution of the form in the various and Ligurian varieties), third person singular and plural
regions. Like the future forms, of which it originally repre- endings are syncretic.
sented a past version (future-in-the-past), its various expo- Moreover, as noted by Rohlfs (1968:§527) and Meyer-
nents derive from a periphrasis involving the infinitive and Lübke (1895:§§131–6), in northern Italian dialects as in
an inflected form of HABERE ‘have’ (in this case past tense). French the first singular ending -o is expected to disappear
Some early texts, especially Lombard, retain instances of as a result of the general rule deleting all final vowels except
analytic forms of both future and conditional (Rohlfs -A. In fact, northern Italian dialect and French texts show
1968:334, 346), e.g. Barsegapé, a portare ‘(he) ‘has.PRS carry. that the rule had regularly applied, e.g. OFr. aim ‘I.love’, Occ.
INF (= he will carry)’, Bonvesin, have fa ‘(I) had.PAST do.INF cant ‘I.sing’, OBgm. laf ‘I.wash’. The same rule affected the -o
(= I would do)’, but modern conditional paradigms can be ending of second and third conjugations (OFr. dor ‘I.sleep’,
divided into three main types deriving from (cf. §§27.6, vent ‘I.sell, OOcc. ven ‘I.sell’), which is still zero in French and
46.3.2.2): (a) infinitive + imperfect indicative of HABERE (the many northern Italian and French dialects. The translations
most common pan-Romance type); (b) infinitive + preterite collected by Salviati in 1584–6 (Papanti 1975) have Mil. digh
of HABERE (as in Italian), including a now common subtype ‘I.say’ < DICO, intend ‘I.mean’ < INTENDO; Bol. digh, pregh ‘I.pray’
which shows influence of the imperfect subjunctive in < PREGO(R). Mantuan dig, vugn ‘I.come’ < UENIO, but Bgm. has
the spread of an -[s] infix; (c) mixed paradigms, showing already dighi, zuri ‘I.swear’ < IURO. Where old varieties had a
the overlap of types (a) and (b). AIS map 1019 offers first zero ending, more recent forms present an -i/-e ending.
person singular conditional formatives for ‘I would eat’ as Papanti’s (1875) translations present Bgm. dighe, zure, Bol.
follows: type (a) [manˈʤria], [manˈʤ(r)ɛjva], corresponding degh, pregh, Mil. Disi, vegni, preghi. Most Piedmontese var-
broadly to Piedmont and Liguria respectively; type (b) ieties have -o, -u, though some still display the zero ending,
[manʤɐˈre], broadly characterizes Emilia-Romagna, while as do most Ladin and Romansh varieties.
type (c) [manʤɐˈrisa], flourishes in Lombardy. Venetan A careful examination of Friulian, Ladin, and Swiss
dialects, furthermore, show mixed paradigms in which the Romansh permits us to reconstruct the development of
above types are distributed according to person distinctions this innovation, which seems valid for northern Italian
(Zamboni 1974): Pad. 1SG magnarìa, 2SG te magnarissi, 3SG el dialects, French, and French dialects. The phenomenon
magnarìa; Vnz. 1SG magnarave, 2SG and PL magnaréssi; Bel. 2PL involved more or less all northern Italian dialects, namely
magneréssi, all other persons magneràe/magnerìe. all those dialects where final unstressed vowels (except -a)
193
fall. The frozen developmental stages of Friulian show us Support for this hypothesis may be found in the fact that
that it starts in the present indicative of the first con- there exist varieties of Lombard where the accent remains
jugation, with -a as thematic vowel; the extension to the on the verb root: cànt-um, tròv-um, véd-om ‘we sing, find, see’
other conjugations (occasionally to other tenses and (with weakened atonic vowel also cànt-en, tròv-en, etc. ‘we
moods) follows, but in many varieties never happened: sing, we find, we see’; cf. Bgm. om canta ‘man (= one) sings’
we have -i in the first conjugation and Ø in the others, or > ‘we sing’, OMil. (Bonvesin) um era (< HOMO ERAT) ‘we were’
-i in all conjugations (or, in the past, Ø in all conjugations), (later èr-um, with enclisis of grammaticalized -um); see
but we never find Ø in the first conjugation and -i in the Meyer-Lübke 1895:§135; Rohlfs 1968:§530).
others.
This means that the reason for the insertion of -i must be
a situation produced in the first conjugation: the thematic 13.3.2.3 Root alternations
vowel coincides with the ending in the second and third
Root alternations result in cross-paradigmatic and intra-
persons singular, which are never deleted, following the
paradigmatic patterns of allomorphy and suppletion. The
rule (-AS > -is, -os, -as; -A > -e, -o, -ə); -o, the first person
former are due to analogical changes among a given class of
singular ending, however, was targeted by the deletion
verbs, usually athematic ones. In northern Italian dialects,
rule, and this produced an asymmetry in the syllabic align-
for instance, the velar of the root dic- [dik]- ‘say’ fac- [fak]-
ment of the singular paradigm:
‘do’ is often extended to other roots of the present indica-
tive, starting from the first person singular as in Ven. dag-o
(2) a. cant
‘I give’, stag-o ‘I stay’. Intra-paradigmatic effects, conversely,
I.sing
cause the extension of the irregularity across different cells
b. can-tis of the paradigm of the same lexeme. (3a,b) shows the dis-
you.SG.sing tribution of this velar element in the present indicative
c. can-te paradigm of veder(e) ‘to see’: notice that first and second
(s)he.sings plural roots display no irregularity (see Maiden 2005;
Maschi 2007):
This description is valid for all varieties of northern
Romance that share the same format of the deletion rule.
(3) a. vegu, vegi, vega, vedému, vedéj, vega (Gavi Ligure,
Analogical processes used -i / -e / -u (according to dia-
AIS 1693)
lect) as a first singular morpheme, extending the ending to
other conjugations, or to such tenses as the imperfect indi- b. vek, vek, vek, vedòn, vedé, vek (Claut, Udine, AIS
cative, which displayed no asymmetry. 1693)
The nature of the epenthetic vowel is in some cases that of Northern dialects differ with respect to the treatment of
a neutral vowel, also used to repair disallowed consonant first and second person plural endings, which can either
clusters and optimize syllabic structures (in Friulian, Ladin, maintain the etymological root (as above), select for a
or Piedmontese), in other cases it clearly represents the different allomorph, or take the same root as the other
encliticization of the first person singular subject pronoun i, e. persons. These possible outcomes are illustrated in
For first plural present indicative, the common Romance Table 13.2, which compares the present indicative of ‘to
basis is -amo, -emo, -imo, subsequently reduced to -émo, -ìmo, go’ (< IRE) in three dialects. In all dialects, the root v- has
prevalent in northern Italian dialects. In western dialects replaced the etymological root in some forms of the present
‑on / -um(a) (in old Bergamasque we find -om, Pie. -uma). The indicative except for first and second persons plural, which
latter may be comparable to the French expression of first
person plural on chant ‘man sings > we sing’ < HOMO CANTAT; Table 13.2 Paradigm of ‘to go’ in Ladin,
this could mean that the indefinite form substituted the Venetan, and Lombard dialects
regular morphological continuation of the first person
plural ending. A parallel development is found in Flo. si LAT . FAS . VER . MIL . MONZA
canta (cf. §14.4.2.2), Frl. si cjante ‘one sings, we sing’; on the

EO vae vo vo vo
other hand an indefinite subject omo ‘man’ appears in early
IS vas vè ve vet
old Italian (see Egerland 2010; cf. also §60.7). The ending
IT va va va va
-òm, -ùm(a) could be the result of enclisis, to be compared
IMUS zon nemo vem vem
with the above-mentioned first person singular vocalic end-
ITIS zide nè ve andé
ing, and with enclisis of other subject pronouns in Lombard
EUNT va va van van
(cante-t ’sing=you.SG’, cantu-f ‘sing=you.PL’).
194
show a different behaviour: in Dolomitic Ladin varieties, are particularly striking in the case of evaluative suffixes.
they are reflexes of the original etyma (often with a pros- Lat. ‑ACEUS, for instance, which was originally used to form
thetic consonant); in Venetan and central Friulian dialects adjectives from nouns, has acquired in Tuscan/Italian a
they take a suppletive root (> It. andare, Fr. aller, Frl. là, Ven. pejorative meaning (e.g. amorazzo ‘flirt’), while in several
nare: see Prosdocimi 1993; 2001 for one proposed etymol- northern dialects it has an augmentative value, e.g. Ven.
ogy); in Lombard dialects (Maschi 2007), the root v- has been caenaso ‘big chain’. Milanese exhibits the peculiar augmen-
extended to the whole paradigm, as in Milanese. Some tative/pejorative suffix -atter, e.g. ongiatter ‘long nail’, whose
Lombard dialects show a mixed pattern in which both unclear etymology (Rohlfs 1969:381f.) might be related to the
suppletive and levelled forms coexist, showing that the Friulian derogatory -at < *-attu.
second person plural resists paradigmatic levelling more The morphophonological shape of affixes is affected by
than the first person plural. the phonological evolution of each vernacular, which may
lead to overlap of the reflexes of etymologically distinct
suffixes as in Piedmont, where the reflex of suffix ‑ORIA has
13.3.2.4 Past participles replaced that from -tora in the formation of nomina agentis,
As previously noted, athematic verbs tend to exhibit cross- e.g. filoira ‘spinner.F’, sartoira ‘dressmaker.F’.
paradigmatic analogies regardless of their etyma. This is As for nominalizations, the northern dialects exhibit a
true also for the endings of past participles, which in series of suffixes which etymologically have nothing or little
many dialects is ‑t(o)/‑it(o) (< FACTUM ‘done’, DICTUM ‘said’) to do with nominalization such as Bgm. -aja (< ‑ALIA, Salvioni
even for participles in -ATUM, -ITUM, where a voiced coronal 1896, e.g. marüdaja ‘maturation’ < marudà ‘to ripen’), Ven.
was the expected output. The unvoiced alveolar has been and Frl. -one (e.g. rosegón ‘bite’ < rosegar ‘to nibble’, sburtón
extended to other roots as illustrated in Table 13.3 compar- ‘shove’ < sburtar ‘to shove’), Pie. ‑er(o) < ‑ARIUM (e.g. semineri
ing Veronese, a dialect which has preserved the etymo- ‘sowing’).
logical distinction, with Ligurian and Piedmontese, in
which past participles have been levelled.
Several dialects have developed innovative endings
which arguably derive from the extension of the formative
13.3.4 Pronouns
-sto of reflexes of POS(I)TUM ‘put’ and QUAES(I)TUM ‘asked’. By
combining this ending with the thematic vowel -é- of the Nominative pronouns occur in a double series: strong and
second conjugation we obtain the Venetan ending -èsto clitic. The former derive from Latin oblique (non-
which from the fifteenth century onwards gave rise to nominative) forms, while the latter are reflexes of the
alternations such as movesto/mosso ‘moved’, piasesto/piasso Latin nominative series. Diachronically, the emergence of
‘liked’, coresto/corso ‘run’, tasesto/tasù ‘fallen silent’ tolesto/ the clitic series appears parallel to the progressive special-
tólto ‘taken’. In some Alpine dialects, both in Lombardy and ization of oblique forms with subject function, observable
Veneto, the same suffix gave rise to a series of participles since the earliest attestations (see §13.4).
ending with -óst(o)/-óstu (e.g. curostu ‘run’, muvostu ‘moved’), Etymologically oblique subject pronouns spread rapidly
possibly by analogy with posto ‘put’, nascosto ‘hidden’ (Rohlfs to other contexts, replacing nominative strong forms. This
1968:§624). led to widespread syncretism between nominative and
accusative tonic forms. Third person forms are reflexes of
oblique/genitive pronouns such as lui ‘he/him’, lei ‘she/her’,
13.3.3 Word formation loro ‘they/them’ < GEN.PL ILLORUM (sometimes M lori, F lore with
analogical plural). First and second person plural strong
Cross-dialectal variation is mainly due to differences con- pronouns derive from reflexes of NOS/UOS compounded
cerning the semantic value of a given suffix. Such differences with ALTERI ‘others’ arguably originating from an exclusive
form. Thus the strong series of the dialect spoken in Brescia
Table 13.3 Past participle endings of athematic verbs (Lombardy): me ‘me’, te ‘te’, lü/le ‘he/she’, noter ‘we’, voter
‘you.PL’, lur/lure ‘they.M/F’.
VERONESE LIGURIAN PIEDMONTESE In various dialects of Lombardy, third person strong
pronouns can combine with deictic particles expressing
FACTUM ‘done’ fato faitu fait
proximity/distance, e.g. lüche ‘he/him, who is near the
DATUM ‘given’ da daitu dait
speaker’ vs lüla ‘he/him, who is far from the speaker’.
STATUM ‘stayed’ sta staitu stait
Things are more complicated with clitic pronouns, as
*anˈdatʊ ‘gone’ nda andaitu andait
their paradigms have been subject to noticeable changes.
195
As for subject clitics, the early vernaculars (thirteenth In other dialects, the first person plural clitic is expressed
and fourteenth centuries) do not exhibit any clear attest- by a reflex of Lat. ME ‘me.ACC’:
ation of them. Cases of morphologically reduced nominative
forms are in fact attested (cf. ello > el or lo ‘he’), but their (7) El me interesa no. (Mil.)
status as syntactic clitics is far from straightforward until it= to.us= care.3SG not
the sixteenth century (Vanelli 1984b). ‘We do not care.’
Paradigms of subject clitics in present-day dialects are
systematically defective (§45.2.2). Furthermore, subject clit- A special case of syncretism concerns reflexive forms; in a
ics display various enclisis/proclisis asymmetries. Zero ex- number of varieties the third person reflexive (< SE/SIBI) has
ponence, for instance, is more frequent in proclisis, while been extended to other persons. In the following example,
enclitic forms, if present, are closer to their etyma than for instance, the reflexive form se occurs with a first person
those in proclisis. plural subject:
First singular, first plural, and second plural subject clitics
are often expressed by a single syncretic exponent, which (8) Se sem setà gio. (Mil.)
usually coincides with a reflex of EGO ‘I’. In some dialects, ourselves= we.are seated down
certain subject clitics are expressed by the combination of ‘We sat down.’
two exponents, a ‘vocalic’ formative (possibly derived from
EGO) followed by an etymological one, e.g. Frl. i ti ‘you’ (cf. Benincà and Poletto (2005) show that the extension of the
§45, §47). se-type clitic to other persons follows an implicational scale,
In Piedmontese (Parry 1993), the first person plural whose starting point is the first person plural pronoun and
enclitic =ne has been extended to the first person singular endpoint is the second person singular pronoun (see §48.3).
and, later on, to other plural persons: In some Lombard dialects, first and second person reflexives
are expressed by combining the first and second person
(4) Còs i fas ne? ‘What am I doing?’ (Tur.) clitic with the third person reflexive one, e.g. Lugano va sa
Còs i fom ne? ‘What are we doing?’ ‘yourselves’.
Còs i fev(e) ne? ‘What are you doing?’ Compound forms, i.e. clitics formed by the combination of
Còs a fan ne? ‘What are they doing?’ two morphological exponents, are frequently attested to
what SCL= do =SCL express locative and partitive clitics (see Ch. 45). In many
Venetan dialects, for instance, the genitive/partitive clitic is
formed by a combination of the locative clitic ghe /ge/ and the
Object clitics (§45.2.1) are often expressed by syncretic
partitive element ne. Penello (2003) reports cases of composite
exponents as well. In all dialects, a single exponent expresses
partitive forms which may be analysed as reduplicated forms
both the third person dative and the so-called locative clitic
of the usual partitive ne/en, e.g. nin ‘of it/them’ in Romagnol;
(on the origin of the syncretism, see Benincà 2007a).
Cai. nun (before a consonant, Parry 2005:176).
(5) a. Bisògn che ghe parla

it.is.necessary that to.him/her/them= I.speak 13.3.5 Articles
subit. (Aldeno, Trentino)
now
‘It is necessary that I speak to him/her/them now.’ Underlying extensive formal microvariation, all northern
varieties have definite articles deriving from the Lat. ILLE
b. Sula zima del mont, gh è arivà su paradigm, although reflexes of the IPSE paradigm are preva-
on.the top of.the mountain, there= is arrived up lent in the northwest with weak demonstrative value
prima el Giorgio. (Ascoli 1901). The preconsonantal masculine singular defin-
before the Giorgio ite article exhibits two main types, el and lo, which in the
‘Giorgio arrived first on top of the mountain before.’ medieval period were contextually determined (see Vanelli
1992 on their evolution). Most regions have generalized one
In some dialects, the exponent /ɡ/ stands for a first or the other, e.g. Liguria has the lo type (the [l] has been lost
person plural clitic too: but reappears before vowels): [u kaŋ] ‘the dog’, [l ˈœvu] ‘the
egg’; the el type dominates elsewhere: Ver. [el ˈspozo]
(6) Al ge interesa miga. (Sondalo, Lombardy) ‘spouse’, Bel. [al paŋ] ‘bread’, but Burano [lo ˈvɔvo] ‘the
it= to.us= care.3SG not egg’; Bgm. [ol luf], ‘the wolf ’ but [o] before an initial sibilant
‘We do not care.’ (Bernini and Sanga 1987:80), Pie. [əl kaŋ] ‘the dog’. In the
196
Monferrato and Val Bormida a variant [ɛɹ] alternates with especially in adnominal function, since the ECCU+ILLUM form,
[u] before initial coronal consonants: Cai. [ɛɹ kaŋ] ‘the dog’, just like original ILLE, has lost its specific ostensive value and
but [u lɒjt] ‘the milk’, [u ʃpeʤ] ‘the mirror’, but this [u], been generalized: Lmb. [kel ˈliber ki/li/la] ‘this/that (near
unlike Lig. [u], which is the product of aphæresis, represents you)/that book’. In Brugé’s generative analysis (1996), these
a vocalization of preconsonantal [l] (Parry 2005:139). Similar adverbs occupy the base position of the demonstratives in
morphological variation is found in the feminine plural, the noun phrase, whereas the first component raises to the
although in this case the le type dominates (Liguria, Veneto, determiner position.
Turin), but the el/er type is common in southern Piedmont, In Piedmontese and some western Ligurian varieties
and Romagna has al. Syncretic forms are found before vowels three terms may be found, e.g. Tur. [stu] / [kust] ~ [əs]
in Piedmont and Lombardy, often [j] via palatalization, while < IPSUM ~ [kul], but the IPSE reflex is not associated specifically
[i] for both masculine and feminine plural is typical of with the addressee, unlike in some southern varieties. It can
Lombard and northeast Piedmont (see Vanelli 1998b). also relate to the speaker, while in southern Piedmontese
Unlike central and southern dialects, northern dialects and western Ligurian varieties it has been generalized to
(and northern Tuscany) have a partitive article, as does refer to all three deictic persons, as has also the [stu]
French, composed of the preposition ‘of ’ and the definite paradigm in Ventimigliese (Azaretti 1977:171f.): [sta/sa
article. Use of the preposition on its own for indefinite ˈdona ki/li/lɑ] ‘this/that woman’. In some dialects, e.g. Val
quantification is found in many Piedmontese varieties, e.g. Bormida, the reflex of IPSE represents the only real demon-
Canavesano (9), and after a negative in Piedmontese, Lom- strative, with binary or ternary spatiotemporal distinctions
bard, and Ligurian (10): expressed by locative adverbs that are obligatory in pro-
nominal usage, but optional with demonstrative adjectives
(9) [a ˈvɛnta piar d viŋ] (Canavesano) (like Fr. ce): Cai. [ɛs ki] ‘this one’, [ɛs li] ‘that one’, [ɛs lɑ] ‘that
EXPL.SCLmust take PART wine one over there’, [ɛs kaŋ ki/li/lɑ] ‘this/that dog’. Lexicalized
‘we must get wine’ reflexes of ISTE survive for temporal reference, e.g. [ʃta-
maˈtiŋ] ‘this morning’, while [kul] (< ECCU ILLUM) is used for
(10) [nu ɡ ɛ de viŋ] (Gen.)
cataphoric and anaphoric reference. Valbormidese demon-
not there= is PART wine
stratives show a special evidential use in narratives: whilst
‘there isn’t any wine’
anaphoric [ɛs] refers to things/events which are presented
in their immediacy, [kul] marks them as distant, either
As in standard Italian, the plural of the indefinite article
temporally or psychologically (Parry 1994). Azaretti (1977)
takes the form of the partitive article, which is however not
describes the Ventimigliese [stu] < ISTE / [su] < IPSE ~ [ˈkelu]
always obligatory (see Parry 2005:142f. for Cairese).
< ECCU ILLUM opposition in terms of physical or temporal
presence of the referent.
13.3.6 Demonstratives
13.3.7 Possessives
On the whole demonstrative systems are based on a binary
spatiotemporal opposition that simply relates the referent Possessives normally agree in number and gender with the
positively or negatively to the deictic centre, namely the head noun, but often show reduced forms (with respect to
speaker (cf. §54.1.1). Short forms derived from ISTUM exist their predicative forms) in attributive functions, especially
alongside long ones from ECCU ISTUM, e.g. Ven. [sto] / in the case of the singular and the third person plural, which
[ˈkwesto] ‘this’ ~ [ˈkweo] ‘that’; Bol. [st] / [kwast] ~ [kwal], is normally identical with the singular (cf. §45.2.3). These
Gen. [stu] / [ˈkwestu] ~ [ˈkwelu]. In parts of Emilia-Romagna, reduced forms may not agree for number or for gender, as
the feminine plural of the proximal demonstrative ends in for instance in Bgm. 1SG [me], 2SG [tɔ], and 3SG/PL [sɔ]; Gen.
-[l], presumably by analogy with the distal demonstrative [mɛ], [tɔ], [sɔ]; and Rmg. [mi], [tu], [su]. The permutations,
and the definite article: [stil/stal ˈdɔni] ‘these women’, but however, are many: whereas Turinese masculine posses-
in predicative function the full form is used: [ˈkwesti/ sives do not vary for number (like most nouns), Cairese
ˈkwisti] (Manzini and Savoia 2005, III:591–600). possessives vary just for number in the masculine, and
Orientation to the addressee may still be achieved using Milanese possessives nowadays just for gender in the sin-
the postnominal spatial adverbs [ki] ‘here’ and [li]/[le] gular (Nicoli 1983:169) (Table 13.4).
‘there’: Gen. [sta ˈkaza ki] ‘this house’, [sta ki] ‘this one’. In In predicative constructions we may find fuller agreeing
some dialects (Lombard, Emilian, Friulian), these postposed forms: Cai. [a ɹɛ ˈmia/ˈtua/ˈsua] ‘she’s mine/yours/his
adverbs are the sole exponents of the spatial distinctions, (/hers/theirs)’.
197
Table 13.4 Prenominal possessives in Turinese

TURINESE CAIRESE MILANESE
1 SG 2 SG 3 SG 1 SG 2 SG 3 SG 1 SG 2 SG 3 SG
MSG me to so me to so mɛ tɔ sɔ
FSG ˈmia ˈtoa ˈsoa me to so ˈmia ˈtua ˈsua
MPL me to so mej toj soj mɛ tɔ sɔ
FPL ˈmie ˈtoe ˈsoe me to so mɛ tɔ sɔ
1PL 2PL 3PL 1PL 2PL 3PL 1PL 2PL 3PL
MSG nostr vostr so noʃtr voʃtr so ˈnɔster ˈvɔster sɔ
FSG ˈnostra ˈvostra ˈsoa ˈnoʃtra ˈvoʃtra so ˈnɔstra ˈvɔstra ˈsua
MPL ˈnostri ˈvostri so ˈnoʃtri ˈvoʃtri soj ˈnɔster ˈvɔster sɔ
FPL ˈnostre ˈvostre ˈsoe ˈnoʃtre ˈvoʃtre so ˈnɔster ˈvɔster sɔ
A noteworthy difference between northern dialects and ‘those.PL beautiful.FPL/ugly.FPL women here’ (Manzini and
the other Italo-Romance varieties regards the order of noun Savoia 2005, III:600). Aly-Belfadel’s (1933) description of
and possessive adjective when used attributively (Renzi Turinese grammar distinguishes between prenominal and
1997:164f.): the possessive normally precedes the noun in postnominal position for some adjectives: [kaˈtivi vziŋ] ‘bad.
northern dialects, as in Italian, whereas the postnominal MPL neighbours’ ~ [vziŋ kaˈtiw] ‘neighbours bad.MSG’; [ˈbravi
position is characteristic of most centre-southern dialects fiœj] ‘good.MPL children’ ~ [fiœj braw] ‘children good.MSG’,
(cf. §§14.4.1, 16.4.1) and Sardinian. Views differ on whether but such variation seems now obsolete. Conversely, as with
this difference may be attributed to noun movement or to possessives, some dialects show no agreement marking on
different base-generation positions of the possessive prenominal adjectives but it appears postnominally and in
(Manzini and Savoia 2005, III:563–9). Within the NP the predicative position: Oviglio [kul vɛʤ ˈdɔni] ‘those.FPL old.M
possessive is generally preceded by a determiner, by default women.FPL’ ~ [kul ˈdɔni ˈvɛʤi] ‘those.FPL women.FPL old.FPL’ ~
the definite article, but, as in the standard, this is usually [i suŋ ˈvɛʤi] ‘they.F are old.FPL’ ~ [i suŋ vɛʤ] ‘they.M are old.M’
omitted with singular names of relatives in most northern (Manzini and Savoia 2005, III:595).
dialects, including Friulian—although this does not seem to Northern dialects often show gender agreement on
be the case in eastern and Alpine Lombard, or Romagnol. cardinal numbers up to three, e.g. Mil., Ven. [duː] ~ [dɔ]
The omission of the definite article can be restricted to a ‘two.M/F’, [triː ~ trɛ] ‘three M/F’; Cai. [duj ~ ˈduɛ], [træj ~ trɛ],
subgroup of kinship names, while in some varieties, e.g. in and quantifiers in some varieties show agreement even in
the Veneto, the definite article may be absent in the plural partitive constructions, e.g. Ven. [un ˈpoka de ˈpasta] ‘a. MSG
also, and some central Piedmontese dialects, such as Turi- little.FSG of pasta.FSG (= a little pasta)’, [un ˈpoki de ˈbizi] ‘a.MSG
nese, omit the definite article with all common nouns, little.MPL of peas.MPL (= a few peas)’ (Cinque 1997:188). Ligur-
except for the masculine plural (see Manzini and Savoia ian forms for ‘too much’ and ‘little/few’ may not agree (Toso
2005, III for rich exemplification). 1997:115): Gen. [g ɛ ˈtrɔpu ˈʤɛŋte] ‘there is too much.MSG
people.FSG (= there are too many people)’, [g ɛ ˈpɔku ˈgɔti]
‘there is little.MSG tumblers.MPL (= there are few tumblers)’;
13.3.8 Agreement in the nominal group this is presumably a development from the partitive con-
struction described by Battye (1989:109–11).
In the case of the invariable nouns described above, their
gender and number usually emerge from agreeing deter-
miners (but see Manzini and Savoia 2005, III for microvaria-
tion), exemplifying the move towards head- rather than 13.4 Sentence morphosyntax
dependent-marking (Ledgeway 2012a:290). We have seen
that reduced adnominal possessives may not show agree- 13.4.1 Subject clitic pronouns
ment, but in some dialects adjectives show agreement mor-
phemes even though nouns do not, as with Tur. [ˈtyti] ‘all’ The most evident phenomenon characterizing northern
above, and Masi Torello (Ferrara): [ki ˈbeli/ˈbruti dɔn ki] dialects is the presence of subject clitics. This feature of
198
northern dialects (including Florentine) and the French area interrogatives can borrow the structure of a headless rela-
has been the topic of intensive investigations and analyses tive clause (see discussion in Benincà 2006; 2010).
since Kayne (1975). In general, as overt indexes of functional All Romance languages in the medieval stage (until the
positions, subject clitics offer direct or indirect evidence for mid-fourteenth century) are V2 languages (cf. §§31.3.3,
a detailed analysis of many grammatical constructions, as 62.5); only those belonging to northern Romance have an
shown in Ch. 47. The systems that have been observed and asymmetric pro-drop, which must be related to properties
described for northern Italy display much fine-grained vari- of verbal inflection.
ation; empirical research has shown that the different cases At this time, subject pronouns were not clitic, but weak,
can be ordered in a series of implicational generalizations pronouns, in the sense of Cardinaletti and Starke (1999).
(see Poletto 2000 for a detailed overview which resumes and Around the fifteenth century they became clitics and
analyses decades of research). formed a series, matched by a series of new tonic pronouns
In a broad sense northern dialects are varieties of non- (see Vanelli 1987). In almost all varieties of northern
pro-drop languages. The dichotomy between northern Romance (including French and Florentine) the tonic pro-
Romance and dialects of southern Italy in this respect has nouns are not the continuation of the subject pronouns of
been recognizable since the earliest attestations of Latin and early Romance, but arose in the fourteenth and
Romance; in medieval texts, northern Romance varieties fifteenth centuries from stressed non-nominative pronouns
show what has been called ‘asymmetric pro-drop’, a conse- (cf. §13.3.4). The issue is clear for first and second person
quence of the asymmetric V2 of early Romance (see Benincà singular: in French, as in Milanese or Florentine, the tonic
2006 and bibliography therein): in northern dialects, pronouns are not from Latin EGO, TU, but are new formations,
together with old Florentine, the verb requires an overt based on accusative or non-nominative ME, TE. Texts of the
subject, unless its syntactic position allows it to structurally period immediately before the grammatical change show
control the subject position. In main clauses the inflected that in fact the first occurrences of non-nominative pro-
verb moves to the vacant Comp(lementizer) position, from nouns used with a function related to the subject are pre-
where it governs the subject position, licensing a null sub- cisely cases in which the pronoun does not receive
ject (below indicated as Ø); in dependent clauses, verb nominative case: even though it is related to the subject, it
movement to the Comp position is partially or completely is in a position in which it is forced to receive a default case.
inhibited (depending on the kind of subordinate clause), This happens with subjects of non-finite verbs, subjects in
because in a dependent clause the Comp position is assumed postverbal position, coordination of subjects, complements
not to be vacant; when the verb does not move to this of come ‘as, like’ (see, for Venetian, Stussi 1965:213, 215;
position, the expression of the subject is obligatory. The Benincà 1994:170-72; for French, Foulet 1919:§§205–7).
following examples are from Benincà (2006): Leaving Friulian to one side, as its system is different
with respect to other relevant aspects also, this evolution
(11) Quand tu veniss al mondo, se tu voliss of strong pronouns distinguishes the varieties of northern
when you came to.the world, if you wanted Romance, and is not found in proper null subject
pensar, negota ge portassi Ø, negota Romance languages. Rohlfs (1968:§434; cf. AIS VIII, 1627)
think.INF nothing there= you.brought Ø, nothing interestingly notes that the only contexts in which we
n poi Ø portar (OMil.: Bonvesin) find a non-nominative pronoun connected with a subject
from.there= you.can Ø take.INF in southern dialects are precisely the same as those which
‘When you came into the world, if you think about it, in early Romance permitted a non-nominative pronoun
you didn’t bring anything, and nothing can you take (< ME, TE).
away’ These phenomena regarding verb agreement include
Florentine, yet not Italian. On the other hand, these phe-
(12) et lo pan ch’ e aveva en man dé nomena, which involve many syntactic constructions, link
and the bread that I had in hand slammed all northern dialects specifically with French and French
Ø per la bocha a Madalena. (OVen.: Lio Mazor) dialects.
Ø on the mouth to Madalena
‘and I slammed the bread that I had in my hand on
Madalena’s mouth’
13.4.2 Wh-movement constructions
The strongest inhibitors of movement are dependent The more salient aspects of the reflexes of clitic pronoun
interrogative structures; the few apparent counterexamples syntax are described in Ch. 47. We highlight some points
can be accounted for by recognizing that dependent here, in particular concerning those varieties, such as
199
Venetan dialects, where a wh-pronoun is incompatible leave it in a postverbal position (see Munaro 1999; Munaro
with a doubling clitic. The following examples are from et al. 2001).
Paduan: An interesting generalization emerges from the observa-
tion of the strategies of interrogative clause formation in
(13) a. Chi (**lo) invitarè to? (Pad.) northern dialects: no dialect shows the insertion of the
whom (**him=) will.invite =you? complementizer [ke] ‘that’ together with subject clitic
‘Whom will you invite?’ inversion, and no dialect shows subject clitic inversion in
dependent interrogatives. The few exceptions can be
b. Chi vegnarà (**lo)? (Pad.) accounted for by recognizing that interrogatives can adopt
who will.come =he? the structure of headless relative clauses (see Benincà
‘Who will come?’ 2012).12
(14) a. Gò comprà el libro che te volevi lèzare
I.have bought the book that you= wanted read.INF
(**lo). (Pad.)
13.4.3 Negation
(**=it)
Northern dialects display all the different stages of Jesper-
b. Go visto la toza che (**la) ga fato l’
sen’s Cycle (see §51.2.1) and the distribution of negators in
I.have seen the girl that she= has made the
the sentence can throw light on the diachronic process,
esame co ti. (Pad.)
suggesting specific hypotheses on the internal composition
exam with you
of negation words and the functional projections involved
In Venetan varieties, this property allows us to distin- in negation. Like other phenomena above, this characteris-
guish restrictive relative clauses from other kinds of tic concerns Piedmont, Lombardy, and Emilia Romagna, but
relative clauses, such as appositive (non-restrictive) and not the Veneto and Liguria.
kind-defining relatives (see Benincà and Cinque 2014). The analysis of microvariation of western northern dia-
From Paduan: lects (and French) strongly suggests that each feature has a
location in a functional position in the structure; northern
(15) a. Gò portà el romanso de Anne Tyler, . . . Italian dialect negative particles perform the functions sub-
I.have brought the novel by Anne Tyler, sumed by the single negator in Latin, Italian, Venetan,
che te volevi lèxar Ligurian, Tuscan, and central and southern dialects.
that you= wanted read.INF Zanuttini (1997) distinguishes two kinds of preverbal neg-
=lo. (Pad., appositive relative clause) ator (a clitic and an independent negative head; see also
=it Cinque 1999:21) and three positions for postverbal negators.
The origins of the negative polarity items that become
b. Mario ze un tozo . . . che el vole jutare postverbal negators are mainly either lexemes indicating a
Mario is a boy that he= wants help.INF minimal quantity, e.g. mi(n)ga ‘crumb’, or grammaticalized
tuti. (Pad., kind-defining relative clause) expressions containing a negation.13 Milanese, for example,
everybody
12
This hypothesis may explain the interesting fact that in some Ligur-
This pattern is by no means shared by all varieties; in ian, Piedmontese, and Friulian dialects interrogative pronouns derive from
particular, subject clitics very often double a ‘wh’ subject, in demonstrative + complementizer. In Ligurian varieties we have kelu ke
relative as in interrogative clauses (see Benincà 1986; ‘who?, which?’ (lit. ‘that (pronominal) that (complementizer)’: Cuneo
1997), in Friulian là che ‘where (lit. ‘there that’). These forms derive from
Poletto 2000; Parry 2007b). Subject clitics invert with the headless relative pronouns, which are characterized by the phonological
verb in main interrogatives, but this property, which was realization of the complementizer (see Munaro 2001; Benincà 2012); some
widespread in northern dialects, has slowly receded since dialects and languages (e.g. Italian) use a demonstrative pronoun with non-
specific interpretation followed by the complementizer to introduce a
the seventeenth century. The loss of verb movement to the headless (or ‘light-headed’) relative clause (see Citko 2004). The complex
vacant Comp(lementizer) position is revealed by the order of pronoun and complementizer can grammaticalize, producing an inter-
subject clitic–verb, and in some dialects (except most Ligur- rogative pronoun. This phenomenon further supports the close relation-
ship between headless relatives and interrogatives.
ian and Emilian dialects) is accompanied by the insertion of 13
Cinque (1976) has shown that the negative polarity item mica involves
a complementizer [ke] ‘that’ to follow the wh-word (see the presupposition that the negated event was expected to happen. The
Parry 2003, in particular for Piedmontese). Furthermore, presupposition is valid for Vnz. miga as well; evidence provided by Cinque is
that this postverbal element cannot appear in constructions that involve a
some Lombard and Venetan dialects apparently do not presupposition of their own, such as restrictive relative clauses or the
move the wh-pronoun to the clause left periphery, but protasis of the conditional sentence. Testing these properties in an area
200
has two postverbal elements: a minimal quantity, mica/ Most varieties have only one lexeme as negator, which
minga ‘crumb’, and a negative nò, which adds a presuppos- appears in a different position when it assumes a specific
ition.14 They have different positions in the sentence: minga presuppositional value.16
precedes, and no follows, the past participle:
(16) a. Mario el parla minga. (Mil.) 13.4.3.1 Negators

Mario he= speaks not
The predominant Italo-Romance negation strategy, namely
‘Mario doesn’t speak.’
preverbal negation alone (Neg 1), continuing Latin morph-
b. Mario l’ ha minga parlà. (Mil.) ology and syntax, is found in the northeast and northwest:
Mario he= has not spoken Venetan, Friulian, and some Ladin varieties, as well as
‘It is not true that Mario has spoken.’ Ligurian. In the central Po area, Piedmontese, and Lombard
have mainly Neg3, in which a postverbal element, originally
c. Mario el parla nò. (Mil.)
used to ‘reinforce’ the preverbal negative, has taken over
Mario he speaks not
the preverbal negator’s functions; it can be a noun with
‘It’s not true that Mario speaks.’
general reference merged with a negative, Pie. nen(t) ‘noth-
d. Mario l’ ha parlà nò. (Mil.) ing’ < NE GENTEM ‘no people’ (Rohlfs 1968:218; Iliescu 2011); or
Mario he= has spoken not non-negative minimizers such as Lmb. mi(n)ga (< MICA(M)
‘It is not true that M. has spoken.’ ‘crumb’), Eml. brisa (< *ˈbrisa ‘crumb’), which became negative
through frequent collocation with the preverbal negative in
Turinese has two postverbal negations: nen, the simple an intermediate discontinuous strategy, n . . . nen/minga/brisa
negation, and pa, the presuppositional negation (Zanuttini (Neg 2), or less frequently, a resumptive holophrastic negator
1997), as in the following examples:15 added clause-finally, Lmb. nò. The transitional Neg2 type is
still found in Emilian as well as in some Alpine Lombard
(17) Maria a l’ ha pa / nen mangià la carn. (Tur.) (Ticinese) and border Piedmontese–Ligurian varieties, while
Maria she= has NEG / NEG eaten the meat. Venetian seems to be currently developing a form of Neg2
(Garzonio and Poletto 2009). AIS map 653 shows the three
Both negators seem to occupy the same position with types:
respect to the past participle; actually, their position is,
respectively, before (pa) or after (nen) the adverb già (20) a. nu durmiˈɔ (Lig.)
‘already’: NEG sleep.FUT.1SG
b. a= n= ˈdorum ˈbriʒɐ (Bol.)
(18) A l’ ha pa gia ciamà. (Mil.)
SCL NEG sleep.FUT.1SG NEG
he= has not already called
‘It is not true that he has already called!’ c. ˈdyrmiraj nɛŋ (Pie.)
sleep.FUT.1SG neg
(19) A l’ avia gia nen vulu ’ntlura. (Mil.)
he= had already not wanted then d. ˈdormaro ˈmiga / nɔ (Lmb.)
‘At that time he hadn’t already wanted.’ sleep.FUT.1SG NEG
‘I shan’t sleep.’
These structural types do not correlate with homoge-

neous geographical areas: particularly in transitional
areas, microvariation involves two or even all three strat-
extending from Verona (western Veneto) to Lombardy (see Pescarini 2005
for a first account), we found that the set of incompatible constructions
egies, as in the Val Bormida (Parry 1997b), where Neg2
reduced progressively as one moved further westwards, towards the area prevails, but Neg1 is found in irrealis clauses and in struc-
where the negation is postverbal. This result, if confirmed, suggests that tures such as n . . . âtr ‘only’, with Neg3 favouring two
the presupposition conveyed by the postverbal negative polarity element is
more complex than it seems, and should be decomposed into smaller units,
which are deactivated as the dialect advances along Jespersen’s Cycle. 16
On the other hand, if a dialect has more than one postverbal negator,
14
See Vai (1996) for the diachronic development of negation in they have different positions and values; however, one Emilian dialect has
Milanese. two postverbal lexical negators, both belonging to the ‘minimal quantity’
15
As has been widely recognized, all negative sentences involve a class (briza and minga ‘crumb’), and no possible interpretative or syntactic
presupposition; we are referring here to more explicit and stronger pre- difference has been found; the reason is apparently connected to sociolin-
supposition concerning the expectations that the positive sentence be true. guistic factors (see Colombini 2007; Benincà and Tortora 2011).
201
Table 13.5 Piedmontese negation and Vinet 2005 for French) is confirmed by Piedmontese
and contemporary Venetan data (Parry 2013b).18 A feature
STAGE 1 STAGE 2 STAGE 3 STAGE 4 STAGE 5
of the development of negation in northern Italian dialects
no(n) V ne V (n)e V which has stimulated much theoretical discussion is the
ne V nen n(e) V nen n V nen way in which the preverbal negative marker came to inter-
V nen V nen V nen act with other preverbal clitic elements. Up to and including
the sixteenth century the former always follows subject
clitics and precedes complement clitics in all Italo-Romance
texts, as in modern French. However, from the seventeenth
main contexts: (a) with the verbs BE and HAVE (frequent as century some northern texts show variations: in Paduan,
perfective auxiliaries) and (b) in the presence of preverbal the preverbal negative now precedes all subject clitics,
complement clitics, particularly nasal ones.17 This contem- except for the vocalic clitic a that is not marked for person
poraneity of variants may be captured by adopting van der or gender agreement, while in early seventeenth-century
Auwera’s (2010) five-stage evolutionary model to illustrate Milanese the preverbal negative follows the second person
the evolution of Piedmontese negation (variation is gov- singular, but precedes the third person singular subject
erned by text type, register, and linguistic context) clitics occurring with auxiliary verbs, and by the end of
(Table 13.5). the century negation precedes the former also (Vai
All early Italo-Romance varieties have strategies that 1995:161–3). By the twentieth century the Ligurian second
reinforce the preverbal negative marker in particular prag- person singular subject clitic is similarly affected, although
matic contexts, but the northern Gallo-Italian group present variability is still found in Genoese (Toso 1997:229).
the same continuation of Jespersen’s Cycle as found in Examples of even more unusual preverbal ordering of
Gallo-Romance. All these varieties were prone not only to clitics and negation are discussed in Parry (1997b): in the
syllabic and vocalic weakening (NON > no, ne, n, also found in Val Bormida, on the Piedmontese–Ligurian border, the pre-
some southern varieties, e.g. Abruzzese and Campanian), verbal negative follows not only all subject clitics but also
which often resulted in near or total homophony with two all first and second person complement clitics, singular and
common preverbal clitics (the first person plural comple- plural, as well as all reflexive clitics. Occasionally two pre-
ment clitic derived from NOS ‘we; us’ and the partitive from verbal negative markers may be heard, confirming the
INDE ‘thence’), but also to the development of subject clitics availability of two preverbal structural positions:
and interrogative verb-subject clitic inversion. Thus, in add-
ition to pragmatic influences that obtained elsewhere too, (22) [e ŋ te ŋ kaˈpiʃ] (Carcarese, Val Bormida)
these factors arguably contributed to the grammatical- I= NEG= you= NEG= understand
ization of new expressions emerging from the cyclical ‘I do not understand you.’
renewal of negative structures by placing structural con-
straints on the preverbal space. Diachronic Piedmontese Zanuttini (1997) argues from such data that there are two
data, together with the current microvariation of Val Bor- types of preverbal negative markers: a ‘strong’ one that
mida dialects, show that if grammaticalized discontinuous negates the clause on its own, represents an independent
structures exist, the preverbal negative is most likely to be syntactic head, located higher than the agreement projec-
dropped when other proclitics occur, thus avoiding the tion, that may interact with subject clitics; the other a
more costly operation of substitution: ‘weak’ one, which needs an adverbial reinforcer, raises
with the verb from a structurally low position, and may
(21) [u l ɛ ʧiŋ] ~ [u n ɛ nɛŋ ʧiŋ] > > therefore interact with complement clitics. Although this is
it= is full it= NEG is NEG full generally the case, there exist dialects with Neg2 that show
‘It is full.’ ‘It is not full.’ reordering involving subject clitics (NEG-SCL), e.g. in Emilia
[u l ɛ nɛŋ ʧiŋ] (Cai.) (Zörner 1994:89), and dialects with Neg1 where the negative
it= is NEG full follows some complement clitics (see Parry 1997b; 2013b,
‘It is not full.’ and for more examples, together with an alternative theor-
etical interpretation, Manzini and Savoia 2005, III:286f.).
Furthermore, the tendency to drop the preverbal nega-
tive in interrogative inversion structures (see Martineau
18
Benincà and Poletto (2005) draw an interesting comparison between
the diachronic development of negation and that of interrogative and
personal pronouns; in all three areas we have the emergence of clitic
17
See Zeli (1968) for Ticinese varieties. forms and doubling structures.
202
Another distinctive northern feature pertains to second negation at both sentence and constituent level (i.e. head- and
person singular negative imperatives, which in Piedmont- dependent-marking). In this case all elements appear post-
ese and Lombard are formed simply by negating the positive verbally, but in many dialects there are structural constraints
imperative (as in French), unlike the dominant Italo- on cooccurrence that produce the following typical hierarchy:
Romance strategy of negating the infinitive: modal/aspectual periphrases > compound tenses > prepos-
itional phrases, with the contexts on the left of the hierarchy
(23) a. [ˈkaŋta] ~ [ˈkaŋta nɛŋ] (Pie.) most favourable to negative concord between the postverbal
sing sing.IMP NEG negator and the negative indefinite (Parry 1996:247):
‘Sing!’ ‘Don’t sing!’19
(24) A veul nen mangé gnente. (Tur.)
b. [ˈkaŋta] ~ [nu sta a kaŋˈta] (Lig.)
he/she= wants NEG eat.INF nothing
sing NEG stay to sing.INF
‘He/she doesn’t want to eat anything!’
‘Sing!’ ‘Don’t sing!’
Zanuttini (1997:105–54) attributes this variation to struc- (25) a. L’ ha minga mangià nisün. (Mil.)
tural differences involving two different types of negative he/she= has NEG eaten nobody
marker: (a) a preverbal type (non, nu, etc.) that can negate ‘Nobody has eaten!’
the clause on its own but is incompatible with ‘true’ impera-
b. Ghe l do no a nisün. (Mil.)
tives of lexical verbs, as it requires some form of syntactic
to.him= it= I.give NEG to nobody
expression of mood (morphologically or via an auxiliary,
‘I’m not giving it to anyone!’
which may be phonetically null); and (b) a postverbal nega-
tive adverb (nen, minga, etc.) that does not interfere in the
movement of the true imperative to the vacant Comple- 13.4.4 Auxiliaries
mentizer position. Given that early northern dialects show
cases of the non type with true imperatives and some survive As noted above, the preterite has disappeared in practically
in Romagnol ([nu ˈkaska] NEG fall.IMP ‘don’t fall’, AIS map 1621 all northern dialects and has been replaced by analytic
pt. 499), as well as in Friulian and Ladin (Vai 1998), Parry forms. In northern dialects BE is used as an auxiliary in
(2010b) offers an alternative interpretation, arguing that the combination with unaccusative verbs, and HAVE with transi-
current syntactic rule could be the result of pragmatic tives and unergative verbs; unlike other Italo-Romance var-
responses to homophony (in Piedmontese) and analogical ieties, indefinite se ‘self=’ does not automatically trigger the
influences (in Lombard) rather than syntactic incompatibility. auxiliary BE, but in some varieties maintains the auxiliary
Negative concord, ‘the co-occurrence of more than one required by the verb when used in non-indefinite sen-
negative element in the same clause with the interpretation tences.20 In Venetan dialects we have:
of a single instance of negation’ (Zanuttini 1997:9), is a well-
known feature of Italian and Italo-Romance varieties, which (26) a. Mario ga viagià tanto. (Ven.)
tend to exhibit the asymmetric variety, whereby a postver- Mario has travelled much
bal negative indefinite must always occur in the scope of a b. Se gà /**ze viagià tanto, in sti ani.
sentential negative or other negative element, but a prese has is travelled much, in these years
verbal one cannot occur with the sentential negator, e.g. It. ‘People/we have travelled much, during these last
non viene nessuno ‘NEG comes nobody (= nobody comes)’ vs years.’
nessuno (**non) viene. Many medieval varieties allowed the
latter combination (symmetric negative concord): it (27) a. Mario à mangià ben. (Cornuda)
appears consistently in early Piedmontese and still obtains Mario has eaten well.
in modern Venetian (Marcato and Ursini 1998:188), which b. Se a sempre mangià ben, in Italia.
retains the preverbal negator: nissun no vien ‘nobody comes’. se has always eaten well, in Italy
Although Gallo-Italian varieties have lost the preverbal sen- ‘People have always eaten well, in Italy.’
tence negator and their n-words can convey negation inde-
pendently, the cycle of negative strengthening to convey 20
In order to get an indefinite se it is necessary to choose verbs and
more robust denial continues with the emergence of post- contexts that render less plausible an interpretation which involves the
verbal negative concord, confirming the tendency to mark speaker, in which case a 1st person plural form of the verb is preferred. This
aspect, which has also been pointed out for Milanese by Massimo Vai (p. c.),
seems the opposite of that found in Friulian or Florentine, where imper-
sonal se with the 3rd person singular verb is the normal way of rendering a
19
The infinitive is [kaŋ'tɛ]. 1st person plural form.
203
In Piedmontese the auxiliary is BE, not only with indefin- f. I se gà petenà. (Pad.)
ite se, but with all types of se constructions (even though They= themselves= have combed
‘have’ is found in a few varieties):
In western central Veneto, in the dialect of Fossalta di
(28) L’ è condanà=sse ij colpévoj a sinch ani. (Tur.) Piave, only first person singular has the auxiliary BE, the
SCL= is sentenced =se the guilty to five years other persons select auxiliary HAVE. The choice of the other
‘The guilty were sentenced to five years auxiliary, in any case, does not produce strong ungrammat-
(of imprisonment).’ icality but just an effect of unnaturalness.
In Milanese (from Nicoli 1983, and Massimo Vai, p.c.) we
(29) Chiel a l’ è guardà =sse ant lë specc. (Tur.)
find:
he SCL= is looked =himself in the mirror
‘He (has) looked at himself in the mirror.’
(32) a. Me son lavàa. (Mil.)
myself= I.am washed
Parry (1998) provides a detailed description and analysis
‘I have washed myself. ’
of all Piedmontese constructions involving se. Note the
enclitic position of the clitic to the past participle, a specific b. Te s’ è / sè lavàa. (Mil.)
characteristic of Piedmontese to which we return below. you= se= you.have / you.are washed
Milanese as well uses the auxiliary BE with indefinite se:
c. El s è lavàa. (Mil.)
he= himself= he.is washed
(30) a. S’ è mangià dumà verdüra. (Mil.)
se= is eaten only vegetables d. S èmm lavàa. (Mil.)
‘People/we have eaten only vegetables.’ se= we.have washed
b. S’ è caminà pòc. (Mil.) e. Ve sì lavàa. (Mil.)
se= is walked little yourselves you.are washed
‘People/we have walked little.’
f. S’ hinn lavàa. (Mil.)
se= they.are washed
With reflexive se (both with argument and inherent
reflexive verbs) the majority of dialects can use indiffer-
It is possible that the preference for one or other auxil-
ently HAVE or BE. Some dialects, in particular of the central
iary, at least in some varieties, also depends on the seman-
Veneto, display a sort of mixed paradigm: Paduan, for
tics of the verb (see Manzini and Savoia 2005, III:§§5.5-6;
example, uses the auxiliary BE with first and second singular
Cennamo and Sorace 2007; cf. also §49.3.4).
and second plural reflexives, and auxiliary HAVE with third
In the Lombard dialect of Mendrisio in southern Switzer-
singular and plural; second plural can more freely choose
land (Lurà 1987), the two auxiliaries are in some cases
one or the other auxiliary:21
indistinguishable, due to the fact that s- is ambiguously
interpretable as the clitic se or as the root of the auxiliary
(31) a. Me so petenà. (Pad.)
BE; but first person singular has clearly the auxiliary BE and
myself= I.am combed
third person singular and plural the auxiliary HAVE, replace-
‘I have combed my hair.’
able by the auxiliary BE (Lurà 1987:169):
b. Te te sì petenà. (Pad.) The ambiguity of some forms of HAVE and BE paradigms
you= yourself= are combed (due not to accidental phonological evolutions but to gram-
maticalization processes) are found in many dialectal areas,
c. El se gà petenà. (Pad.)
all over Italy; see data and discussion in Manzini and Savoia
he= him/herself= has combed
(2005, III:§5.9), Bertocci and Damonte (2007).
d. Se ghemo petenà. (Pad.)
ourselves= we.have combed
e. Ve sì / ghì (gavì) petenà. (Pad.)
yourself= you.are / you.have combed
13.4.4.1 Double compound forms
In eastern varieties compound verbal forms are found with
two auxiliaries; the auxiliaries can be three in the varieties
21
A similar pattern is found in Abruzzese dialects (Giammarco 1979, and
that accept these forms in the passive (cf. also §58.3.4). The
data stored in the ASIt database: <http://asit.maldura.unipd.it>). most common case displays a (generally grammaticalized)
204
past participle of the verb HAVE inserted between the auxil- hypotheses concerning the functional architecture of the
iary and past participle of the lexical verb; the first auxiliary clause. The syntax of complement clitics in medieval
can be inflected in any tense and mood (apart from the Romance, as well as the syntax of subject clitics in modern
preterite, which is incompatible with the aspectual value varieties, suggests a functional area in the left periphery
of the form, as attested in the very few villages that have available for clitics.
double compound past tenses and that still had the preterite All proclitics to the inflected verb are currently assumed
until a few decades ago). The form can appear in a main to be in an area within the inflectional domain (§31.2.2); by
clause, in which case the interpretation is that of a ‘semel- contrast, northern Italian dialects provide evidence for a
factive’ aspect: the event is exceptional, or happened just low clitic placement site, immediately outside the verb
once (33); it can appear in a dependent temporal clause, phrase (see Benincà and Tortora 2009; Tortora 2010 for
introduced by ‘when, after that’, and in this case the aspect detailed references).23
is ‘completive’ perfect (34). We give examples from the When a complement clitic is associated with a non-finite
Venetan dialect of Cereda (Teresa Vigolo, p.c.): verb, we find clitic pronouns enclitic on the past participle,
but only in Piedmontese (except Canavesano dialects) do
(33) a. In tempo de guera go bio patìo la fame. they fail to climb to the finite auxiliary, and in some cases
in time of war I.have had suffered the starvation they appear twice (proclitic on the auxiliary and enclitic on
‘During the war, I even starved.’ the past participle). The following examples are from Mon-
dovì and Cairo Montenotte (ASIt data; see also Parry 1995;
b. La ze bio na parfin in Russia.
2005); (35a,b) show enclisis to the past participle, whereas in
she= is had gone even in Russia
(36) the clitic is both in proclisis to the auxiliary and in
‘She even went to Russia.’
enclisis to the past participle (the latter scheme is attested
c. I ze bio sta ciamà anca lori. in Biondelli’s 1853 and Papanti’s 1875 texts):
they= is had been called even them
‘They have been called, even them.’ (35) a. I j oma vesti =sse in.
we= CL= have dressed =ourselves in
(34) a. Dopo ch el ga bìo parlà, l’ è na via.
pressa (Mondovì, Pied.)
after that he= has had spoken he= is gone away
quick
‘After he had spoken, he went away.’
‘We dressed ourselves quickly.’
b. Co l’ è bio rivà, l’ è na trovar la.
b. J eu vist la jer.
when he= is had arrived he= is gone to.find =her
I= have seen =her yesterday
‘When he arrived, he went to see her.’
(36) A’ m sun fò me in fazin. (Cai.)
Double auxiliaries with similar characteristics have been I= me= is made =me a foccaccia
described for Friulian and Veneto (Benincà 1989:577f.; ‘I made myself a focaccia.’
Marcato 1986), where the construction is stylistically very
marked, but widely used, and for old and modern French With respect to the idea that Romance languages display
(Foulet 1925; Schlieben-Lange 1971), where it is documented a diachronic drift progressively reducing leftward (upward)
much earlier than in northern Italian dialects (the first syntactic movement, Piedmontese varieties are particularly
record for northern Italy is in the Istrian variety repre- interesting, with evidence coming from different areas of
sented in Salviati’s 1584–6 version of Boccaccio’s novella, syntactic structure (Tortora 2014b).
in Papanti 1875:24).22
13.4.6 Clitic areas
The variability of the positions of clitics in sentence struc-

ture in different dialectal areas and in diachrony inspires
22 23
Double auxiliaries are also found in southern Italian dialects, with Northern dialects are also particularly rich in sentential particles,
characteristics that differ in an interesting way from those of northern which mark semantic or pragmatic nuances, and with their ordering
dialects (see Ledgeway 2009a:596–600, D’Alessandro and Ledgeway 2010b, restrictions localize the related functional projections: see Munaro and
and references therein). Poletto (2005), Poletto and Zanuttini (2010), and Ch. 53.
205
CHAPTER 14
Italian, Tuscan, and Corsican

ADAM LEDGEWAY
14.1 Introduction Thus, although the basis of Italian can be said to be

(medieval) Florentine, modern Italian cannot be equated
Italian has its roots in Tuscan dialect and, in particular, the tout court with the modern Florentine vernacular, inas-
fourteenth-century dialect of Florence, which was originally much as Florentine and other Tuscan dialects underwent
‘a mere face in the crowd’ (Maiden 2002:32) among the numerous changes following the codification of the liter-
numerous local continuations of spoken Latin in Italy. ary language during the first decades of the sixteenth
Even when a Tuscan literary vernacular began to emerge century (Andreose and Renzi 2013:302-7; cf. §37.2.1). As a
during the thirteenth century, embodied most notably in result, there is an unmistakable gap today between written
the literary works of the tre corone ‘three crowns’ (i.e. Dante, Italian and the modern spoken varieties of Tuscany,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio), it represented just one of several although this is often vehemently denied by Tuscans them-
competing literary vernacular traditions (alongside Latin) selves who, at most, begrudgingly refer to their own local
which had sprung up in different parts of medieval Italy varieties as vernacoli ‘vernaculars’, rather than dialetti. With
(Migliorini and Griffith 1984:ch. 4). However, by the end of the exception of the province of Massa-Carrara, part of the
the fifteenth century a Florentine-based supraregional Garfagnana, and the Senio valley, Tuscan dialects are
scripta was beginning to emerge as a national literary lan- spoken throughout the modern-day region of Tuscany
guage and by the sixteenth century had become established and Corsica (see below) and uniquely share, to the exclu-
as the usual language of literary composition and public sion of all other Italo-Romance varieties (with the excep-
documents, such that the numerous other regional lan- tion of some northern Umbrian dialects), the distinctive
guages were now relegated to the status of dialects (dialetti). development of intervocalic -RI-/-RE- > *‑[rj]- > ‑[j]- (‑[jj]- in
Apart from Rome, where the indigenous dialect was Garfagnana and -[ɉɉ]- in Corsica): AREAM ‘threshing floor’ >
replaced by Tuscan during the fifteenth and sixteenth cen- Tsc.-It. aia (Grf./Cor. ajja/aghja). Other distinguishing fea-
turies (Ernst 1970; Trifone 2008:35-59), it was not until after tures, though not universally found across all varieties,
the Unification of Italy in 1861 that the diffusion of Italian include raising (called ‘anaphonesis’) of the high-mid
was actively promoted among the masses through the edu- vowels before nasal+velar or palatal sonorants (FŬNGUM
cation system and subsequently reinforced by a series of (> *foŋgu) > fungo ‘mushroom’), general absence of metaph-
sociohistorical and economic developments (including two ony (§§25.1.5, 38.3.1; FECI > It. feci ‘I did’ vs Fr. fis, Pt. fiz, Sp.
world wars, conscription, northern industrialization and hice), the maintenance of unstressed vowels (STOMACHUM >
concomitant internal migration, mass media) which pro- stòmaco vs Eml. [stɔŋk], Nap. [ˈstɔmməkə]), and so-called
duced the necessary conditions for Italians from different gorgia toscana (‘Tuscan throat’) involving spirantization of
areas gradually to adopt a common spoken language. Con- intervocalic stops (cf. §§14.2.2.1, 40.2.2.1.2), e.g. hai capito
sequently, over the last 150 years dialects have increasingly [aj haˈɸiθo] ‘you have understood’. Geographically and
given way, to varying degrees in different areas, to Italian as linguistically Tuscan dialects are neither northern
a spoken language, albeit a heavily marked regional variety (Ch. 13) nor southern (Ch. 16), but represent a distinct
of Italian closely related to the local dialects (Sobrero 1988; linguistic area generally considered to be structurally
Cardinaletti and Munaro 2009). Today Italian is the official more conservative than other Italo-Romance areas and
language of the Republics of Italy and San Marino, and is one traditionally divided into four main sub-areas (Pellegrini
of the four official languages of Switzerland, where it enjoys 1977; Giannelli 1988:601, 604): Florentine, western Tuscan
the status of sole official language in the Canton Ticino and (Elbano-Pisan-Lucchese-Pistoiese), eastern Tuscan (Aretino-
represents, alongside German and Romansh, one of the Chianaiolo), and southern Tuscan (Senese-Grossetano). At
official languages of the Canton of Grigioni/Graubünden/ the north(east)ern and southern extremes of the region
Grischun/Grisons (see Map. 14.1). the local dialects increasingly show affinities with northern
206 This chapter © Adam Ledgeway 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
ITALIAN, TUSCAN, AND CORSICAN
Genoa
MS
Carrara
Massa
PO
LIGURIAN LU Pistoia
SEA Lucca PT Fl
Viareggio
Prato
Florence
Pisa
Scandicci
Empoli
Cascina
AR Arezzo AR
FI Florence Livorno
Pl Arezzo
GR Grosseto Gorgona
LI Livorno
LU Lucca
MS Massa-Carrara Siena
PI Pisa LI
PT Pistoia SI
PO Prato
SI Siena Capraia
Mt
Cap GR Amiata
Corse
Elba Grosseto
Bastia
Pitigliano
Calvi
Haute-Corse
Corte Cervione Giglio
Val D'Aosta Friuli-Venezia

Cargèse Trentino- Giulia
Alto
Corsica Adige
Lombardy
Veneto
Ajaccio Piedmont
TYRRHENIAN
Emilia
ur i a
L ig Romagna SAN
MARINO
Corse-du-Sud SEA
Ma
Tuscany
Sartène
rc
he
Figari Porto Vecchio Umbria
Corsica Abr
uz
z
Lazio
o
Bonifacio Molise Pug

l ia
Ca
Gallura mp
a
Sa l e
n ia
Ba
nto
Sardinia li c
si
ata
Calabria
Sassari
Sardinia Sicily
Map 14.1 Standard Italian, Tuscan, and Corsican
207
ADAM LEDGEWAY
Table 14.1 Italian (Tuscan) and Corsican tonic vowels

CLAT . FĪLUM PĬLUM TĒLAM SĔPTEM PĀNEM / CĂNEM ŎCTO UŌCEM NŬCEM MŪRUM
late Lat. ˈfilʊ ˈpɪlʊ ˈtela ˈsɛtte ˈpane/ˈkane ˈɔtto ˈvoke ˈnʊke ˈmurʊ
It. ˈfilo ˈpelo/ˈtela ˈsɛtte ˈpane/ˈkane ˈɔtto ˈvoʧe/ˈnoʧe ˈmuru
CNCor. ˈfilu ˈpɛlu/ˈtɛla ˈsettɛ ˈpanɛ/ˈkanɛ ˈottu ˈbɔʤɛ/ˈnɔʤɛ ˈmuru
SCor. ˈfilu/ˈpilu ˈtela/ˈsɛtti ˈpani/ˈkani ˈɔttu / ˈvoʧi ˈnuʧi/ˈmuru
dialects (loss of atonic vowels, subject clitics, lack of verb and a front/central/back distinction representing the regu-
agreement with postverbal subjects) and southern dialects lar outcome of the late Latin qualitative system (cf. §25.1.1)
(assimilation of ‑MB-/‑ND-, lengthening of intervocalic ‑[ʤ]‑/ in which the high [–tense] front and back vowels lowered to
‑[b]‑, possessive enclitics). merge with the high-mid vowels (long/short vowel length
In addition to Tuscany proper, Tuscan-based dialects are oppositions are purely allophonic and entirely predictable
also spoken in Corsica and northern Sardinia (Sassari/Gallura), with long vowels occurring in open syllables (except word-
following Pisan domination of Corsica and northern Sardinia finally) and short vowels in closed syllables: [ˈdoːna] ‘he.
during the Middle Ages. Even when control of these areas donates’ (but [doˈnɔ] ‘he.donated’) vs [ˈdɔnna] ‘lady’).
passed to Genoa between 1284 and 1768, Tuscan remained Although central-north Corsican follows essentially the
the official language of administration and continued as the same development, the qualities of the mid vowels are
language of culture in Corsica well into the mid-nineteenth reversed—a development traditionally explained as the out-
century long after the island had passed into French hands come of raising with subsequent monophthongization of
(see also §6.2.5). Tuscanization is greater in the northeast the original diphthongal reflexes of the low-mid vowels
and centre of Corsica, so that the principal dialectal subdiv- (Dalbera-Stefanaggi 1991:548; Barbato 2005-6:21), namely
ision is between cismontincu spoken in the north-east and *[ɛ] > [jɛ] > [je] > [e] and *[ɔ] > [wɔ] > [wo] > [o], in turn
pumontincu in the south-west (Giacomo-Marcellesi 1988:824; giving rise to the lowering of the original high-mid vowels
Nesi 1988:802f.; Dalbera-Stefanaggi 1991:310-22), the latter (*[e] > [ɛ] and *[o] > [ɔ]) to maintain maximal differentiation
including the archaic Sardo-Corsican area straddling the between the two outcomes (cf. also eastern Catalan). By
southern extreme of the island and northern Sardinia contrast, far southern Corsican dialects, together with
(Melillo 1977:21-3). The sole unifying feature of Corsican dia- those spoken in northern Sardinia, neutralize vowel length
lects, which in turn distinguishes them from the Tuscan main- along the lines of the Sardinian vowel system (cf. §17.2.1),
land (with exception of Amiatino, Pitiglianese, and Capraiese), except that they show allophonic vowel lengthening with
is the raising/retention of word-final -O/-U (Nesi 1988:803): concomitant raising in open syllables (viz. [ɛ] > [e]; [ɔ] > [o]),
DICO/FOCU(M) ‘I.say/fire’ > Cor. [ˈdiku/ˈfoku] vs Tsc. [ˈdiho/ˈfɔho]. except before nasals ([bɛni] ‘well’).
In what follows, discussion will focus principally on Ital- The mid vowel oppositions thus give rise, at least in
ian emphasizing what unites, rather than differentiates, central Italy and many regional Italian varieties of the
Italian Tuscan, and Corsican, although some significant upper south, to numerous lexical minimal pairs such as
areas of divergence (including among the numerous acc[e]tta/acc[ɛ]tta ‘axe/(s)he.accepts’ and sc[o]po/sc[ɔ]po
regional varieties of Italian) will be highlighted.1 ‘I.sweep/aim’, although subject to some notable diatopic
variation, both within Tuscany (Flo./Sen. m[ɛ]mbro/
m[e]mbro ‘member; limb’) and across the central-upper
southern territory (Tsc.-It. l[ɛ]ttera/col[o]nna ‘letter/col-
14.2 Phonology umn’ vs Rom. l[e]ttera/col[ɔ]nna; Tsc.-It. d[o]po/v[e]rde
‘after/green’ vs Nap.-It. d[ɔ]po/v[ɛ]rde). However, in most
14.2.1 Vowels regional varieties such minimal pairs are neutralized: this
is the case in Sardinia and in the far south, where only the
14.2.1.1 Tonic vowels open variant is found in stressed positions (acc[ɛ]tta ‘axe;
(s)he.accepts’, sc[ɔ]po ‘I.sweep; aim’), and in northern Italy
As illustrated in Table 14.1, Italian and Tuscan varieties have
where the high and low mid vowels are allophonic vari-
seven tonic vowels distinguished by four levels of height
ants. For instance, in large areas of Lombardy [e] occurs in
open syllables (b[e]ne ‘well’, id[e]a ‘idea’), and [ɛ] (or even
1
Where phonetic detail is irrelevant to the point at hand, Tuscan and [æ]) in closed syllables (except before nasals) and in word-
Corsican forms will be cited in a broadly Italian orthography. Unless
otherwise indicated, all examples should be understood to refer to Italian; final position (cap[ɛ]lli ‘hair’, t[ɛ] ‘tea’), hence acc[ɛ]tta ‘axe;
non-standard forms are preceded by ?. (s)he.accepts’.
208
Metaphonetic raising of the front low-mid vowel trig- In limited cases unstressed vowels can fall, including
gered by final -i is only found today in some areas of the lexicalized cases of historical aphæresis (ABSENTIA ‘absence.ABL’
Garfagnana ([uˈʃɛllo]/[uˈʃelli] ‘bird/s’). Widespread, by con- > senza ‘without’, (H)ARENAM > Tsc.(-It.) rena ‘sand’), and apoc-
trast, is open-syllable diphthongization of the low-mid ope of word-final -o, -e, and, more rarely, -i following son-
vowels in Italian and most of north and western Tuscany orants, in some cases optional (son(o) vecchio ‘I.am old’, andar
(§26.3.3.2), e.g. UENIS > v[jɛ]ni ‘you.SG.come’, MOUES > m[wɔ]vi (e) avanti ‘go.INF ahead’) or typical of higher registers (sottil(e)
‘you.SG.move’ (realized as [je] and [wo] in Garfagnana, Elba, ragionamento ‘subtle reasoning’), and in other cases obliga-
and in most of the upper south, whereas in northern Italy tory (un(**o)/quel(**lo)/bel(**lo)/buon(**o) cappello ‘a/that/
the close pronunciation is limited to the front variant), the beautiful/good hat’, speciale + ‑mente > specialmente ‘espe-
origins of which are most probably to be sought in the cially’). Though frequent in previous stages of the literary
generalization of open-syllable metaphonetic diphthong- language, elision is today increasingly disfavoured (unless
ization to all open syllables (§38.3.1): v[jɛ]ne/m[wɔ]ve ‘he.- lexicalized: d’/**di accordo ‘of agreement (= okay)’), witness
comes/he.moves’. In dialects of central-northern Corsica such replacements as l’erbe (archaic) with le erbe ‘the.FPL
such diphthongs which, as noted above, were later to grasses’, and quest’amico and s’alza increasingly with questo
undergo raising and monophthongization, were also amico ‘this.MSG friend’ and si alza ‘self= gets.up’. Syncope, on
extended to closed syllables (*[ˈpɛttu] > [ˈpjɛttu] > [ˈpjettu] the other hand, is more limited and is found with a small
> [ˈpettu] ‘chest’, *[ˈpɔrta] > [ˈpwɔrta] > [ˈpworta] > [ˈporta] class of lexical items (d(i)ritto ‘straight’, comp(e)rare ‘buy.INF’),
‘door’). According to one view (Ventigenovi 1993), mono- and historically in a number of irregular future/conditional
phthongization of the back diphthong also occurred in roots (saperò/-ei > saprò/-ei ‘know.FUT/COND.1SG’) and, most
most of Tuscany between the sixteenth and seventeenth probably, in proparoxytones where a counteretymological
centuries, hence ModFlo./Rom. m[ɔ]vi/m[ɔ]ve ‘you.SG. epenthetic vowel has since been introduced (DEBILEM ‘weak’ >
move/he.moves’, whereas another view (Rohlfs 1966:106- *ˈdeble > debole, CHRONICAM ‘chronicle’ > *ˈkronka > cronaca).
7, 133-5) holds that the diphthong is not indigenous to There is also a widespread tendency in casual speech for
Tuscany but was introduced into the literary language word-final vowels, especially following long consonants, to
from outside. On the distribution of anaphonesis, see §14.1. be pronounced with a bisbigliato (‘whispered’) voiceless real-
ization (e.g. dieci [ˈdjɛʧi]).
14.2.1.2 Atonic vowels
In unstressed positions Italian and Tuscan present a reduced
14.2.2 Consonants
system of five vowels /i e a o u/ (word-final /u/ is limited to
loans: jujitsu ‘jujitsu’), whereas Corsican dialects oscillate The consonantal phonemes of standard Italian are given in
between as many as five vowels /i e (ɛ) a u/ (centre- Table 14.2.
north) and as few as three /i a u/ (south), with some non- The principal oppositions involve length and voice. With
trivial effects on inflectional morphology in the latter case the exception of the voiced alveolar fricative /z/ (and the
(CRUCE(M)/CRUCES ‘cross/-es’ > cruci). Such reductions give rise approximants /j w/, if they are not considered allophones of
to a neutralization of the open/close distinction in the mid /i u/), all segments show a short/long phonemic contrast,
vowels (id[ɛ]a vs id[e]àle ‘idea/ideal’, [ɔ]sso/[o]ssùto ‘bone/ witness such pairs as rupe/ruppe ‘cliff/he.broke’, cade/cadde
bony’) and variable reduction, in accordance with speed of ‘he.falls/he.fell’, eco/ecco ‘echo/here.is’, casa/cassa ‘house/
delivery (and register), of the high vowels /i u/ > [j w] when cash.register’, cacio/caccio ‘cheese/I.hunt’, pani/panni
adjacent to a vowel in non-nuclear positions (viale [viˈale]/ ‘loaves/cloth(e)s’, polo/pollo ‘pole/chicken’, although such
[ˈvjale] ‘avenue’, acuità [akuiˈta]/[akwiˈta] ‘sharpness’). distinctions can be neutralized in diastratically marked
These asyllabic realizations prove particularly frequent, in northern regional pronunciations in accordance with the
all positions, in casual northern speech, witness such stig- tendency of the underlying dialects to eliminate long con-
matized pronunciations as piolo [ˈpjo·lo] ‘peg’, Manuela sonants (cf. §13.2.1). Exceptional are the palatals /ʃ ɲ ʎ/ and
[ma·ˈnwe·la], and assidui [as·ˈsi·dwi] ‘assiduous.MPL’ for stand- affricates /ʦ ʣ/, which are always long when intervocalic
ard [pi·ˈɔ·lo], [ma·nu·ˈɛ·la], and [as·ˈsi·du·i]. In large areas of (liscio [ˈliʃʃo] ‘smooth’, spugna [ˈspuɲɲa] ‘sponge’, paglia
the upper south unstressed (front and central) vowels tend [ˈpaʎʎa] ‘straw’, ozio [ˈɔtʦjo] ‘idleness’, ozono [odˈʣɔno]
towards schwa, yielding significant inflectional neturaliza- ‘ozone’), except in northern Italy, where they are only
tions (napoletano/-a/-i/-e [napələˈtanə] ‘Neapolitan.MSG/FSG/ long when represented as such orthographically (cf. also
MPL/FPL’), whereas in the extreme south the high vowels tend Srd.-It. -/ʃ/-, -/ɲ/- in pe[ʃ]e ‘fish’, ra[ɲ]o ‘spider’): NIt. spazzi
to lower if not word-/phrase-final (usignoli [ʊsɪɲˈɲɔli] [ˈspatʦi] ‘you.SG.sweep’ vs spazi [ˈspaʦi] ‘spaces’. In southern
‘nightingales’). Italy to these five segments we can add /b ʤ j/ (the first two
209
ADAM LEDGEWAY
Table 14.2 Consonantal phonemes of standard Italian

BILABIAL LABIO - DENTAL DENTAL ALVEOLAR PATALO - ALVEOLAR PALATAL VELAR
Stop p b t d k ɡ
Fricative f v s z ʃ
Affricate ʦ ʣ ʧ ʤ
Nasal m n ɲ
Lateral l ʎ
Trill r
also in many southern Tuscan varieties) which are realized france[z]e ‘English/French’, ca[s]a/ca[z]o ‘house/case’),
long when intervocalic: SIt. una [dʤ]ornata [bb]u[jj]a lit. ‘a whereas in northern and central-southern Italy /z/ and
day dark’. In Calabria and large parts of Salento and Sicily /s/ alone are found in intervocalic position, respectively:
lengthening of the intervocalic (and post-nasal/-liquid) NIt. ca[z]a/ca[z]o vs SIt ca[s]a/ca[s]o (though in recent times
voiceless stops is typically accompanied by aspiration: there is a growing tendency, especially among younger
moti/motti/monti/morti/molti [ˈmɔti/ˈmɔtthi/ˈmɔnthi/ˈmɔrthi/ (female) southern speakers, to employ the more prestigious
ˈmɔlthi] ‘movements/quips/mountains/dead.MPL/many.M’. northern voiced variant). In all varieties the sibilant
A noticeable feature of Sardinian regional pronunciation assumes the voicing value of the following consonant in
is the tendency to lengthen consonants both in pre- and s+C clusters, e.g. [s]pendo ‘I.spend’ vs [z]bendo ‘I.unbandage’
post-tonic positions (rupe/ruppe ‘cliff/(s)he.broke’ both real- (with concomitant palatalization before velars and labials in
ized as [ˈruppe], aveva [avˈvevva] ‘(s)he.had’), a tendency Campania and Molise, e.g. [ʃ]pendo/[ʒ]bendo, and before
also found with post-tonic /p t k/ in Emilia (pipa [ˈpippa] alveolars in southern Lazio and Abruzzo, e.g. [ʃ]tendo
‘pipe’). ‘I.stretch.out’, [ʒ]dento ‘I.break.teeth’), but is voiceless
Voicing contrasts, on the other hand, involve all when word-initial ([s]entito ‘felt.PTCP’, including following
non-sonorants (rupi/rubi ‘cliffs/you.SG.steal’, dica/diga prefixes: ri[s]entito ‘resentful’) and following consonants
‘he.say.SBJV/dyke’, fanno/vanno ‘they.do/they.go’, mancia/ (bor[s]a ‘bag’), though often ‘affricated’ in the latter case
mangia ‘tip/he.eats’), with the exception of /ʃ/, whose in Pisan, Lucchese, and central-southern Italy (bor[ʦ]a/
voiced counterpart is limited to a handful of French loans bor[ʣ]a). Characteristic of Emilian speech is the palatalization
(gara[ʒ]e, abat[ʒ]our ‘bedside lamp’). In Tuscan (and in some of the sibilant, surfacing as [ʒ] in intervocalic position and [ʃ]
parts of neighbouring central regions), by contrast, [ʒ] is the elsewhere (son bolognese [ʃom boloˈɲeʒe] ‘I.am Bolognese’).
regular intervocalic allophone of /ʤ/ (Tsc. Gigio [ˈʤiʒo] A not too dissimilar distribution applies to the alveolar
‘Luigi.DIM’), in the same way that its voiceless counterpart affricates, both represented as z in standard orthography,
[ʃ] represents the intervocalic allophone of /ʧ/ (Tsc. cece which are only phonemically contrastive in the standard
[ˈʧeʃe] ‘chickpea’, sometimes also found in absolute word- and central regional varieties, again with a very low func-
initial position, e.g. (Pisa) Il Suo cognome? – Cerri [ˈʃɛrri] ‘Your tional load, in both word-initial (cf. [ʦ]io ‘uncle’ vs [ʣ]ero
surname? – Cerri’), an outcome also found in large areas of ‘zero’) and word-internal (cf. schi[tʦ]o ‘I.sketch’ vs schi[dʣ]o
central-southern Italy such as Rome, Naples, and Palermo; ‘schizo(phrenic)’) positions. In the north, by contrast,
this allophone remains distinct from the phoneme [ʃ], which they are positional variants, the voiced affricate regularly
is always realized long in these same varieties in intervocalic occurring in word-initial position ([ʣ]io, [ʣ]ero) and
position (cf. pece/pesce [ˈpeʃe/ˈpeʃʃe] ‘pitch/fish’). In Cor- the voiceless variant word-internally (schi[tʦ]o ‘I.sketch;
sican, by contrast, [ʒ] represents not only the regular inter- schizo(phrenic)’), with the exception of manzo ‘beef ’, pranzo
vocalic variant of /ʤ/ but also the regular intervocalic ‘lunch’, and mezzo ‘half ’ which generally display [(d)ʣ]; in
outcome of -[sj]- (> Tsc. [ʃ]): BASIUM > basgiu [ˈbaʒu] ‘kiss’ Emilia-Romagna the alveolar affricates are typically real-
(cf. Tsc. ba[ʃ]o). ized as dentals, namely, [dδ]io, schi[tθ]o. In the south too the
The potential voice contrast in the alveolar fricatives is voiced variant tends to generalize in word-initial position,
one of the clearest indicators of geographical origin in but may also occur in word-internal position (sen[ʣ]a ‘with-
modern-day Italy: only in Tuscany do they occur in phon- out’) in accordance with local patterns of allophonic, lex-
emic opposition, albeit with a low functional load (cf. chie[s]e/ ical, and diastratic variation for which it is difficult to
chie[z]e ‘(s)he.asked/churches’) and a growing preference provide any general tendencies.
for [z] among many speakers, where their distribution is Also noteworthy are many areas of Corsica and southern
synchronically unpredictable and lexicalized (cf. ingle[s]e/ Italy which maintain a phonemic contrast (albeit lexically
210
Table 14.3 Nasal allophonic variations ‘dust’), except before voiced dentals, where assimilation
obtains (caldo > [ˈkallu] ‘hot’). In Venetan and Ligurian
CENTRAL - SOUTHERN ITALY NORTHERN ITALY
varieties too, palatalization of preconsonantal /l/ is
/__ + /p u[m] pacco/buono/modo u[ŋ] pacco/buono/ frequent, witness such realizations as Ven.-It. qua[ʎ]che/
b m/ ‘a parcel/voucher/way’ modo qua[j]che ‘some’, whereas in southern Italy it is often velar-
/__ + /t u[n̪] taglio/dente ‘a cut/ u[ŋ] taglio/dente ized (colpo [ˈkoɫpo] ‘blow’) or assimilated, an outcome par-
d/ tooth’ ticularly frequent in Sicily (e.g. [ˈkɔppɔ]). When long, the
/__ + /k u[ŋ] cane/gatto ‘a dog/cat’ u[ŋ] cane/gatto alveolar lateral is often realized as a cacuminal in Garfag-
ɡ/ nino (CABALLUM > [kaˈwaɖə] ‘horse’), as well as in southern
/__ + /f u[ɱ] fatto/vento ‘a fact/ u[ŋ] fatto/vento Corsica (PELLEM > [ˈpeɖi] ‘skin’), which is also the outcome of
v/ wind’ *-[lj]- in the far south of the Island (PALEAM > [ˈpaɖa] ‘straw’).
/__ + /ʃ no[ɲ] scio/cerco/gioco/ no[ŋ] scio/cerco/ As for the palatal lateral, we have seen that this is often
ʧ ʤ ɲ ʎ/ gnocchi/gli parlo ‘not I.ski/ gioco/gnocchi/gli biphonemic in the north (moglie [ˈmolje] ‘wife’), whereas in
I.seek/I.play/gnocchi/to. parlo most of Umbria, Lazio, and Campania it is realized as a long
him=I.speak’ approximant ([ˈmojje]), thereby merging with /j/ which is
also typically realized long in these same areas (cf. paglia/
paia ‘straw/pairs’, realized as [ˈpaʎʎa]/[ˈpaja] in the stand-
restricted) between [k]/[ɡ] and [c]/[ɟ] in such pairs as Cal.-It. ard but neutralized in C-SIt. as [ˈpajja]).
succhi [ˈsukki] ‘juices’ (cf. SG succo) vs succhi [ˈsucci] Turning finally to rhotic consonants, the standard has an
‘you.SG.suck’ (cf. 1SG succhio). The opposite phenomenon of alveolar trill with a short/long phonemic contrast (ca[r]o/
depalatalization is widespread across northern Italy in conca[rr]o ‘dear/cart’), a distinction lost in southern Tuscany
junction with the segments /ɲ ʎ/ (as well as /ʃ/ in Piedmont and most of Lazio with generalization of the short variant
and the Veneto), which are generally biphonemic (/nj lj (sj)/), (viz. ca[r]o ‘dear/cart’), as well as in northern Corsica
hence neutralizations of pairs such as Campania/campagna (TAURUM/TURRIM > [ˈtɔru]/[ˈtɔrɛ] ‘bull/tower’). By contrast, in
[kamˈpanja/kamˈpaɲɲa] ‘Campania/countryside’ and l’Italia/ southern Calabria, Sicily, and southern Corsica the trill is
li taglia [liˈtalja/liˈtaʎʎa] ‘(the.)Italy/them=he.cuts’ indiscrim- typically long in word-initial position (SCal.-It. [rr]ana
inately realized as [kamˈpanja], [liˈtalja]. ‘frog’). Also worthy of note is the so-called erre moscia
The sonorants also present a number of interesting fea- (‘soft r’), which generically refers to a number of non-
tures. Beginning with the nasals, these are particularly standard, but common (especially in Piedmont, Alto Adige,
subject to allophonic variation, displaying homorganicity Liguria, Emilia, and Trentino), realizations of the rhotic
with the following segment both within and across word consonant, ranging from a uvular trill [ʀ], to a uvular frica-
boundaries, except across northern Italy where syllable- tive [ʁ], to a labiodental approximant [ʋ], hence lavoro
final nasals are systematically velarized (cf. Table 14.3). [laˈvoro] ‘work’ ) [laˈvoʀo], [laˈvoʁo], [laˈvoʋo]. In large
Nasal assimilations also affect the consonantal clusters parts of the far south rhotics are often realized as a retroflex
-MB-/-ND- in southern Tuscany which, on a par with the (e.g. Sic.-It. [laˈvoʀɽo]), which leads to retroflexization also
dialects of the centre and upper south, yield ‑[mm‑/‑nn]‑: of /t d/ in the clusters (s)tr-/(s)dr- (e.g. Cal.-It. [ʈɽɛ] ‘three’,
lembo > lemmo ‘hem’, rotondo > rotonno ‘round’. Throughout the [vɛˈɖɽɔ] ‘I.will.see’, [ˈʃɽada] ‘street’).
centre-south, in spontaneous, unguarded speech all conson-
ants typically undergo some (though not necessarily full)
voicing in postnasal position (banca [ˈbaŋɡa] ‘bank’, insieme 14.2.2.1 Weakening
[inˈzjɛme] ‘together’, Francia [ˈfraɲʤa] ‘France’), often giving According to von Wartburg’s (1950) classic distinction based
rise to neutralizations (quanto/quando [ˈkwando] ‘how.much/ on the La Spezia–Rimini isogloss distinguishing, among
when’ and campi/cambi [ˈkambi] ‘fields/you.SG.change’) and other things, between a western leniting and an eastern
hypercorrect realizations (quindi ?[ ˈkwinti] ‘therefore’, lungo non-leniting Romània, Italian, Tuscan, and Corsican are
?
[ ˈluŋko] ‘long’). expected to preserve Latin short voiceless intervocalic
As for the laterals, in preconsonantal position the alveo- stops. While this is overwhelming true of Italian (witness
lar is particularly liable to modification in many parts of such examples as SAPERE > sapere ‘to know’, ROTAM > ruota
Italy. In western and central-northern Tuscany and Amiata, ‘wheel’, AMICAM > amica ‘friend.F’), there are a number of
for instance, preconsonantal /l/ is typically palatalized (alto well-known counterexamples, many of which have trad-
> [ˈaitto] ‘other’) or, less frequently today, rhotacized in itionally been argued to represent northern loans linked
western Tuscany (['arto]); the latter development also char- to specific fields of contact such as seafaring (riva ‘(river)
acterizes northeastern Corsican (PULUEREM > [ˈpɔrbara] bank’ (< RIPAM), OTsc. coverta ‘deck’ (< COPERTAM), lido ‘coast’
211
ADAM LEDGEWAY
(< LITUS), laguna ‘lagoon’ (< LACUNAM)) and religion (badessa cf. §40.2.2.1.2). Indeed, in some parts of Tuscany, and even
‘abbess’ (< ABBATISSAM), badia ‘abbey’ (< ABBATIAM), vescovo within the same speakers, voicing and spirantization co-
‘bishop’ (< EPISCOPUM)); indeed, in a number of cases the exist, such that it is natural to expect in Italian both
lexemes affected are only found in the literary (standard) cases of voicing (cavo ‘cable’, mudare ‘change.INF’, pregare
language but are not indigenous to Tuscany: SECARE > segare ‘pray.INF’) and variation (lacrima/lagrima ‘tear’, sopra/sovra(-)
‘saw.INF’ (cf. Tsc. serrare), *eks+batikuˈlare > sbadigliare ‘above(-)’), stipare/stivare ‘cram.INF/stow.INF’, cotesto/codesto
‘yawn.INF’ (cf. Tsc. alare), *akuˈtjare > aguzzare ‘sharpen.INF’ ‘this/that(addressee-oriented)’). This view finds further sup-
(cf. Tsc. ammolare). In most cases, however, external influ- port in the observation that voicing and spirantization in
ence looks at best highly doubtful, since many of the words many varieties (provinces of Lucca, Pisa, and Livorno) show a
affected involve lexemes showing voicing in all (Italo‑) greater tendency to affect /k/ than the other two stops,
Romance varieties, hence probably already voiced in com- hence the existence of cases of partial voicing in Italian
mon spoken Latin (arrivare ‘arrive.INF’, povero ‘poor’, padella such as fegato ‘liver’ (< FICATUM) with voicing of the original
‘frying pan’, ricevere ‘receive.INF’), and/or words of a non- stop, but not the dental.
exotic nature and hence unlikely to have been borrowed As Table 14.4 shows, weakening is also found elsewhere:
(padre ‘father’, madre ‘mother’, medesimo ‘same’, strada ‘street’, in Corsican intervocalic voiceless stops are regularly voiced
scodella ‘bowl’, grida ‘shouting’, ago ‘needle’, fregare ‘rub/steal. in central-northern dialects, whereas in the regional pro-
INF’, luogo ‘place’). Exemplary in this respect is the Tuscan nunciations of central (Marche, Umbria, Lazio) and upper
addressee-oriented demonstrative codesto ‘this/that’ (< ECCUM southern (Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Basilicata) Italy they
+TIBI+ISTUM), which, as a uniquely Tuscan form, could not are regularly realized with relaxed muscular tension, vari-
possibly have been borrowed from the north which, more- ously yielding lenis voiceless stops ([b̥ d̥ ɡ̊]) or fully voiced
over, lacks addressee-oriented demonstratives (cf. §54.1.3). stops [b d ɡ].
Also relevant here are mixed cases (bottega ‘shop’, lattuga Intervocalic weakening is not, however, limited to the
‘lettuce’, budello ‘gut’) that show voicing, hence potentially voiceless stops, but also affects their voiced counterparts
of northern origin, but retain long consonants which incon- which in many of these same varieties may variably
trovertibly prove their non-northern origin. undergo fricativization or even deletion (see Table 14.5).
Evidence like this points to a situation of dialect mixture, In central-northern Corsican, fricatives and affricates are
with indigenous voicing of /p t k/ (> [b d ɡ]) in many Italian also weakened in intervocalic position (/f v s ʃ ʦ ʧ/ > [w Ø z
words borrowed from eastern and southern Tuscan dialects ʒ ʣ ʤ]), e.g. [f]ilu/u [w]ilu ‘(the) thread’, [s]ale/u [z]ale ‘(the)
which, together with those spoken in Garfagnana and Elba, salt’, [ʃ]otta/a [ʒ]otta ‘(the) goat’, whereas in southern dia-
regularly voice intervocalic stops, in contrast to other Tus- lects (and Gallura) only fricatives are affected (/f v s ʃ ʦ ʧ/ >
can varieties which show spirantization (> [ɸ θ h(/Ø)]), [v w z ʒ ʦ ʧ]): cavallu [kaˈ(w)allu’ ‘horse’, casa [ˈkaza] ‘house’,
traditionally referred to as gorgia toscana (see Table 14.4; a sciotta [a ˈʃɔtta] ‘the goat’.
Table 14.4 Weakening of intervocalic voiceless stops in central and upper southern Italy
##___ V ___ V ##___ V ___ V ##___ V ___ V
It. [p]asta ‘pasta’ la [p]asta ‘the pasta’ [t]ela ‘canvas’ la [t]ela ‘the canvas’ [k]asa ‘house’ la [k]asa ‘the house’
Flo. [p]asta la [ɸ]asta [t]ela la [θ]ela [k]asa la [h]asa/[Ø]asa
C‑NCor. [p]asta a [β]asta [t]ela a [d]ela [k]asa a [k]asa
C-SIt. [p]asta la [b]asta/[b̥]asta [t]ela la [d]ela/[d̥]ela [k]asa la [ɡ]asa/[g̊]asa
Table 14.5 Weakening of intervocalic voiced stops in central and upper southern Italy
##___ V ___ V ##___ V ___ V ##___ V ___ V
It. [b]arca ‘boat’ la [b]arca ‘the boat’ [d]enti ‘teeth’ i [d]enti ‘the teeth’ [ɡ]atta ‘she-cat’ la [g]atta ‘the she-cat’
Flo. [b]arca la [β]arca [d]enti i [δ]enti [ɡ]atta la [γ]atta
C‑NCor. [b]arca a [w]arca [d]enti i [δ]enti/[Ø]enti [ɡ]atta a [j]atta
C-SIt. [b]arca la [β]arca/[bb]arca [d]enti i [δ]enti [ɡ]atta la [γ]atta/[Ø]atta
212
14.2.3 Syllable structure and phonotactics are limited to a number of grammatical words (non ‘not’,
in ‘in’, per ‘for’, il ‘the.MSG’) and loans (camion ‘lorry’, gas, club,
including with biconsonantal codas such as sport), although
The structure of the Italian syllable is given in Fig. 14.1.
in reality the former are clitics and resyllabify with the
The preferred syllable type is the open syllable (CV),
following word to form a single phonological word (non
hence syllabifications such as a-ma-no (**am-a-no) ‘they.
esce [no·ˈnɛʃ·ʃe] ‘not=(s)he.exits’, il conto [il·ˈkon·to] ‘the=
love’, pie-tra (**piet-ra) ‘stone’, as evidenced by the distribu-
bill’), while the latter typically acquire in central and south-
tion of the diphthong here which is limited to open syllables
ern Italy a paragogic vowel (CIt. ‑[e], upper/extreme SIt.
(cf. pel-le ‘skin’). Other syllable types in order of frequency
-[ə/ɪ]) with lengthening of the preceding consonant
are CVC (fan-go ‘mud’) > CCV (sto ‘I.stand’) > VC (an-dò ‘(s)he.
([ˈklɛbbe/-ə/-ɪ]), except in the north, where consonant-
went’) > CCCV (stra-da ‘street’) > CCCVC (spruz-zo ‘spray’).
final words are well-formed (though subject to devoicing:
Syllables consist therefore of at least a simple (ho ‘I.have’),
[klɛp]). In a number of (learnèd) loans codas can also host
or complex (ai ‘to.the.MPL’), nucleus, including in the latter
obstruents, often producing non-native consonantal clus-
case long vowels in stressed open syllables (ve-na [veː-na] <
ters such as ‑[tm]- (atmosfera ‘atmosphere’), ‑[kn]- (tecnico
[vee-na] ‘vein’), but may also include an onset and/or a
‘technical’), -[ps]- (psicologia ‘psychology’), ‑[tn]- (Vietnam),
coda. The former may be simple (può ‘he.can’, though
and -[ks]- (taxi). In practice, these clusters are subject to
word-initial onsets with [ɲ] and [ʎ] are extremely rare:
different regional patterns of adaptation, ranging from zero
gno-mo ‘gnome’, gli ‘to.him; the.MPL’) or involve a cluster
to partial assimilation in the north ([ˈtaksi], [admosˈfɛra]),
consisting of:
complete assimilation in the centre ([tasˈsi], [ammosˈfɛra]),
(i) /p b t d k ɡ f/ + /r/ in ‘popular’ words (pro-vo ‘I.try’, to vocalic epenthesis in the upper/extreme south ([ˈtakəsə/
fred-do ‘cold.MSG’) or + /l/ in (learnèd) loans (blan-do ˈtakɪsɪ], [atəmosˈfɛrə/atɪmosˈfɛra]).
‘mild’, clo-ro ‘chlorine’, club), with three-term clusters
arising in conjunction with an initial sibilant (popu-
lar: spre-co ‘I.waste’; learnèd: scle-ro-si ‘sclerosis’); 14.2.4 Stress
(ii) /s/ + /p b t d k ɡ ʧ ʤ f v l r m n/: spil-la ‘pin’, scen-tra-
to ‘off centre’, sge-lo ‘thaw’. Synchronically, lexical stress is in principle unpredictable
and may fall on the final (capitò ‘he.turned.up’), penultimate
Where possible, however, sC(C) clusters are subject to
(capìto ‘understood’), antepenultimate (càpito ‘I.turn.up’), or
sandhi resyllabification, hence the use of masculine
pre-antepenultimate syllable, though limited to the plurals
singular articles lo/uno ‘the/a’ instead of the typical precon-
of proparoxytonic third person singulars (càpitano ‘they.
sonantal allomorphs il/un before such clusters (uno spintone
turn.up’), and is phonemic, as these examples illustrate.
[u·nos·pin·ˈto·ne] ‘a push’; §14.3.1.2) and the insertion, espe-
Stress can even be placed further back through adjunction
cially in former stages of the language, of a prosthetic -i (in
of enclitic pronouns (fàbbrica! ‘produce.IMP.2SG’: fàbbricalo!
Isvizzera ‘in Switzerland’; cf. §40.2.2.1.2). Exceptionally, in
‘produce=it!’, fàbbricamelo! ‘produce=me=it!’, fàbbricamicelo!
some central-southern regional varieties a closed class of
‘produce=me=there=it!’). Despite these variations, some
lexical items, sometimes as a result of aphæresis, display
generalizations about stress placement can be made,
word-initial long consonants in the onset, including chiesa
namely stress most frequently falls on the penultimate,
(< (E)CCLESIAM) ‘church’, dio (< Iddio) ‘god’, due ‘two’, dieci ‘ten’,
especially if this is closed (merènda/**mèrenda ‘snack’),
qua (< (E)CCU HAC) ‘here’, là (< (I)LLAC) ‘there’, merda ‘shit’, Napoli
except in the case of some (mainly Greek) loans (màndorla
‘Naples’, più ‘more’, re ‘king’, loro (< (I)LLORUM) ‘they’), minestra
‘almond’, pòlizza ‘insurance policy’ and also some place-
‘soup’.
names, such as Òtranto, Tàranto). In many other cases stress
Codas, by contrast, are limited to /l r s n m ɲ/ and long
is predictable from morphological information; for instance,
consonants (col-po ‘blow’, pet-to ‘chest’). Word-final codas
second person plural verb forms are always paroxytonic:
scrivète ‘you.write’, scrivevàte ‘you.were.writing’, scriverète
Syllable ‘you.will.write’.
Less frequently stress placement is subject to variation, as
Onset Rhyme happens in cases of two adjacent stresses where the first
oxytonic stress may optionally retract to the penultimate:
(C) (C) (C) Nucleus Coda Perchè fùgge? ) Pèrche fùgge? ‘why (s)he.flees?’ In other
(C)
cases stress may be subject to diatopic variation, including
V (V)
a tendency for syllable-initial stress in the north (NIt. móllica
Fig. 14.1 Italian syllable structure ‘crumb’, récluta ‘recruit’, cázzio ‘I.tell.off ’ vs C-SIt. mollíca,
213
ADAM LEDGEWAY
reclúta, cazzío), a pattern which has extended across the Synchronically, then, Tuscan-based RF can be interpreted
Peninsula in many other cases with original penultimate as a compensatory lengthening process to make up the
stress now perceived as an indicator of (a pompous) higher weight of word-final stressed syllables where vowels
register (édile/edíle ‘construction.ADJ’, dévio/devío ‘I.deviate’, are intrinsically short (§14.2.1.1): [maɲ-ˈʤɔ ˈtanto] )
evápora/evapóra ‘it.evaporates’). Much rarer are genuine [maɲ-ˈʤɔt- ˈtanto] ‘(s)he.ate so.much’). In the same contexts
cases of free variation: ámaca/amáca ‘hammock’, Núoro/ northern and southern varieties show stress retraction to avoid
Nuóro, Kósovo/Kosóvo, sálubre/salúbre ‘healthy’. Other specific the anomaly of a ‘light’ stressed final syllable ([maɲ-ˈʤɔ ˈtanto]
regional patterns include a tendency to avoid oxytonic ) [ˈmaɲ-ʤɔ ˈtanto]), a strategy also found in Tuscan-based
stress in Tuscan by adjunction of an extra syllable through varieties whenever consonantal lengthening is not a possibilty
paragogic -(n)e (no > nóe ‘no’, sì > sìe ‘yes’, icchè > icchène ([maɲ-ˈʤɔ ˈwɔva] ) [ˈmaɲ-ʤɔ ˈwɔva] ‘(s)he.ate eggs’).
‘what’), and the opposite tendency in Campania for (par)- The result then is that, apart from the closed class of
oxytonic stress in consonant-final loans (compúter > com- synchronically opaque cases in (i) and (ii), Tuscan-related
putér(re), Mary Póppins > Mary Poppíns, Hóllywood > Ollivúdde). varieties today display an entirely regular prosodically
determined RF, whereas elsewhere in the centre and the
south RF is a lexically determined idiosyncratic property of
14.2.5 Raddoppiamento fonosintattico a small class of words whose membership is particularly
susceptible to diachronic and diatopic variation (Loporcaro
Besides word-internal assimilations (FACTUM > fatto ‘done’), 1988b): Flo., Cor./Laz. tu [+/-RF] ‘you.2SG’.
Italian has also created new long consonants across word
boundaries through the process of raddoppiamento/rafforza-
mento fonosintattico (RF) ‘syntactic doubling/reinforcement’
(§40.3.1): NEC TU > né tu [netˈtu] ‘neither you’. Synchronically, 14.3 Morphology2
the words that trigger RF in Italian, Tuscan (though not in
northwest and southeast), Romanesco, Corsican, and north-
ern Sardinia (Sassari-Gallura) include:
14.3.1 Nominal group
(i) a closed class of unstressed monosyllables (e.g. a ‘to’, 14.3.1.1 Nouns and adjectives
da ‘from, by’, e ‘and’, o ‘or’, ma ‘but’, che ‘that’): a As illustrated in Table 14.6, nouns belong to one of three
[ff]irenze ‘to Florence’; classes (adjectives to just the first two). In class 1 desinences
(ii) four polysyllables (d)ove ‘where’, come ‘as’, qualche are cumulative expressing both number (singular/plural)
‘some’, sopra(/sovra-) ‘over’: qualche [mm]otivo ‘some and gender (masculine/feminine), and continue the Latin
reason’; (predominantly masculine) second and (predominantly
(iii) all oxytones (though not those produced through feminine) first declensions in‑U(M)/*-i and -A(M)/-AS (> *-aj
recent apocope: fai > fa’ ‘do.IMP2SG): perché [ff]umi? > -e) respectively, whereas in class 2 desinences are syncre-
‘why smoke.2SG?’, do [tt]utto ‘I.give everything’. tic for gender, continuing the Latin (masculine and femin-
In the rest of central and southern Italy (as in the corres- ine) third declension in ‑E(M)/-ES (> *-ej > -i).3 Much smaller
ponding dialects), by contrast, RF is confined to the words in and unproductive are class 3 nouns (there are no adjectives
(i), (ii), and a restricted number of oxytones in (iii): SIt. a in this class), which are inflectionally more restricted in
[ff]irenze, qualche [mm]otivo vs perché [ff]umi?, but do [t]utto. that they lack a feminine singular and a masculine plural,
Diachronically, RF therefore originates as an external sandhi such that desinences are distinctive and cumulative, unam-
assimilation triggered by those words in (i), (ii), and a small biguously expressing both gender and number, continuing
number of those in (iii) which all ended historically in a final Latin second declension neuters in -U(M)/-A (§42.4). Nouns
consonant: ET PANEM > e [pp]ane ‘and bread’, SUPER+AD TOTUM > and adjectives which consist only of a lexical stem without
sopra[tt]utto ‘above all’, PLUS LUCEM > più [ll]uce ‘more light’. any inflectional desinence, including monosyllables (re
Because of the opacity of the original conditioning environ- ‘king(s)’), learnèd loans (serie ‘series’, (im)pari ‘(un)even’),
ment, in Tuscan RF was subsequently reinterpreted as a recent loans (puma), clipped forms (virtude > virtù ‘virtue(s)’,
property triggered by all final-stressed vowels on account cinematografo > cinema), and nominalized parts of speech
of a large number of oxytones being among those words (i/il come ‘the.MSG/PL how’), are invariable.
originally triggering RF in (i) and (ii) (e.g. TRES > tre ‘three’,
PER+QUID > perché ‘because; why’, NEC > né ‘neither’, (ECCUM+)SIC > 2
For discussion of Italian derivational morphology, see §§28.4, 29.2.4.
così ‘thus, so’), including those which historically do not end 3
Neuter nouns of the 2nd and 3rd declensions predominantly merged
in an consonant: sto [kk]almo ‘I.remain calm’ (cf. Lat. STO). with the masculines of classes 1 and 2. See further §§27.2, 42.4, Ch. 57.
214
Table 14.6 Italian nominal/adjectival paradigms ‘(pair of) limbs’, ossa ‘skeleton’). In light of this pattern,
many non-original neuters with mass meanings were inte-
CLASS 1 CLASS 2 CLASS 3
grated into this class (dito: diti/dita ‘individual fingers/fin-
anzian- ‘elderly giovan- ‘young uov- ‘egg’ gers of the hand’; muro: muri/mura ‘individual walls/city
(person)’ (person)’ wall(s)’), including FSG (AURICULAM >) l’orecchia ‘the ear’ (with
M F M/F M F regular FPL le orecchie) with analogical FPL le orecchia on which
SG anzian-o anzian-a giovan-e uov-o – the MSG l’orecchio was backformed. Given the recessive
PL anzian-i anzian-e giovan-i – uov-a nature of this class, the plurals of many such nouns,
whether original neuters or not, are in some cases now: (i)
used interchangeably (ginocchio: ginocchi/ginocchia ‘knees’);
(ii) restricted to just one of the two genders (lenzuolo: len-
These paradigms are broadly found in other varieties, but zuola ‘sheets’, calcagno: calcagni ‘heels’, with MPL lenzuoli and
with some minor differences. In Tuscany (and often in old FPL calcagna rarely heard); (iii) reanalysed as feminine sin-
Italian) and western Corsica class 2 feminine nouns and gulars (la legna ‘the firewood’, la frutta ‘the fruit’; cf. also
adjectives are invariable (voce ‘the.FSG/PL voice(s)’), giving substandard FSG ?una ciglia ‘an eye-lash’, for standard MSG un
rise to a gender distinction in the plural of common nouns ciglio with non-count FPL le ciglia ‘the eye-lashes’).
and adjectives: giovane poliziotte ‘young.SG/FPL police.women’ Despite the predominant inflectional patterns identified
vs giovani poliziotti ‘young.MPL policemen’. In southern Cor- in Table 14.6, there is no straightforward correlation
sica, where unstressed ‑e regularly raises to -i, feminine between morphological marking and grammatical gender,
class 1 nouns and adjectives have plurals in -i (SCor. vacca/ witness such examples as masculine problema ‘problem’,
vacchi ‘cow/s’ vs NCor. vacca/vacche), as do all members of omicida ‘murderer’ and feminine mano ‘hand’, radio ‘radio’.
class 2 (SCor. mari ‘sea(s)’ vs NCor mare/mari ‘sea/s’). Also Although there is a strong correlation between natural and
remarkable in this same area is the extension of original grammatical gender (re (M) ‘king’ vs regina (F) ‘queen’, but
neuter plurals in -A (cf. discussion of southern dialects in ministro (M) ‘minister’, star (F) ‘star, celebrity’), in most cases
§16.3.1.1) to masculine plurals of class 1 (focu/foca ‘fire/s’, grammatical gender is lexicalized (cf. viso/faccia (M/F) ‘face’).
muntoni/muntona ‘ram/s’) and, to a lesser extent, of class 2 In a small number of cases gender varies with number (eco
(fiori/fiora ‘flower/s’, mesi/mesa ‘month/s’), including ani- (M/F) ‘echo’ vs echi ‘echoes’ (M), carcere/carceri (M/F)
mates (preti/preta ‘priest/s’). In northwest Corsica, nouns ‘prison/-s’, l’analisi/?gli analisi (FSG/MPL) ‘the analysis/-es’),
of class 3 regularly show final -[ɛ] in the plural: linzolu/-e in others it appears to be free, albeit subject to diatopic
‘sheet/‑s’. variation (N/SIt. arancia/?arancio (F/M) ‘orange’, N/SIt. scato-
In class 1 masculines (but not feminines) number can la/?scatolo (F/M) ‘box’) and idiolectal variation (cioccolato/
also be marked by a velar/palatal stem alternation, an cioccolata (M/F) ‘chocolate’, zucchino/zucchina (M/F) ‘cour-
alternation typical of (learnèd) proparoxytones (pòrtico/-ci gette’, un/una (e‑)mail (M/F) ‘an email’),4 whereas in others
‘porch/es’, biòlogo/-gi ‘biologist/s’), while paroxytones tend it yields subtle differences. For instance, a ‘(financial) bank’
to retain the velar throughout (albergo/‑ghi ‘hotel/s’, pidòc- is banca (F), whereas the masculine banco only occurs in
chio/‑cchi ‘louse/lice’). Exceptional are a handful of animates specific names (Banco di Roma ‘Bank of Rome’) and with
where continuation of Latin nominative in -I ensures a the meaning ‘(casino) bank(er)’. More difficult to grasp is
palatal plural (Maiden 2000b; cf. §42.3): amìco/-ci ‘friend/s’, the difference between tavolo/tavola (M/F) ‘table’: whereas
nemico/-ci ‘enemy/-ies’, greco/-ci ‘Greek/s’, monaco/-ci the masculine is generally used for the concrete piece of
‘monk/s’, porco/-ci ‘pig/s’. In rare cases the alternation has furniture (spostiamo il tavolo/??la tavola ‘let’s move the
been lexicalized: mago/-ghi ‘sorcerer/s’ vs i re magi ‘the table’), the feminine is reserved for figurative uses (A ta-
Three Wise Men’ (with non-standard analogical singular vola/**tavolo non si grida! ‘There’s no shouting at the table’,
?
un re magio). capotavola ‘head of the table (lit. head.table)’).
As noted, class 3 nouns form a closed and dwindling class As in other Romance varieties, gender may in a limited
(e.g. centinaio/-a ‘hundred/s’, migliaio/-a ‘thousand/s’, paio/-a number of cases also have semantic functions. For instance,
‘pair/s’, miglio/-a ‘miles’; cf. OIt. occhio/-a ‘eye/s’, letto/‑a in conjunction with fruits and their trees the masculine
‘beds’, nido/-a ‘nest/s’), many of which also developed mas- normally indicates the tree and the feminine the associated
culine plurals. In such cases, the masculine plural typically fruit (pero/pera ‘pear tree/pear’, ciliegio/ciliegia ‘cherry tree/
conveys count and/or figurative meanings (corni ‘musical cherry’). Less regular, and somewhat subject to diatopic
horns; horns (of dilemma)’, membri ‘members’, ossi ‘(individ-
ual) bones’) whereas its feminine counterpart expresses 4
Some speakers make a distinction here between the masculine (= email
non-count, literal meanings (corna ‘(pair of) horns’, membra system) and the feminine (= email message).
215
ADAM LEDGEWAY
variation, is the correlation between gender and size in and prepausally (ne cerco uno ‘I’m looking for one’) and FSG
specific lexical pairs, where feminine indicates a larger un’ (or increasingly una) before vowels (un’/una amica). In
version of the masculine (coltello/coltella ‘knife/meat southern Tuscany, Elba, and in colloquial Italian more gen-
cleaver; bread knife’, buco/buca ‘hole’, mestolo/mestola erally the feminine form una often undergoes aphæresis
‘ladle’, fosso/fossa ‘ditch/pit’, spillo/spilla ‘pin/brooch’). (compra ’na macchina! ‘buy a car!’). The standard language
While no variety has preserved case distinctions, south- and northern-central regional varieties also present a par-
ern Corsican shows a lexically restricted vestige of the early titive article di ‘of ’ + definite article used before singular
Romance oblique case (§56.2.1.4) in such collocations as a non-count and plural indefinites: mi serve (della) farina ‘I
casa lu preti ‘at house the priest (= at the priest’s house)’. need (some) flour’, vengono (degli) amici ‘(some) friends are
Corsican also differs from Italian and Tuscan in showing a coming’.
distinct form of the vocative: on a par with Logudorese The standard language presents a binary demonstrative
(§17.3.1) and southern Italian dialects (§16.3.1.1), it marks system questo ‘this’ (< ECCU+ISTUM) vs quello ‘that’ (< ECCU+ILLUM),
the vocative by truncating all material following the tonic minimally marking a [speaker] distinction (Ledgeway
vowel: O Ghjuvà! (cf. It./Tsc. (O) Giovanni!). 2004b:67f., 97f.; cf. also §54.1.1), whereas the local varieties
of Tuscany, together with formal registers of (mainly bur-
eaucratic) Italian, may also overtly mark the addressee
14.3.1.2 Determiners and quantifiers through the addressee-oriented term codesto (/cotesto; on
The basic forms of the definite article, which continue the Elba and Giglio quesso, Corsica quessu < ECCU+IPSUM). With the
Latin distal demonstrative ILLE ‘that’ (§46.3.1.1), are il/i (MSG/ exception of quello, in adnominal function the other two
PL: il/i gatto/-i ‘the cat/s’), la/le (FSG/PL: la/le gatta/-e ‘the she- forms also regularly present the non-reinforced ECCU forms
cat/s’); before vowels in the singular both genders present ’sto and testo (Elba, Giglio/Cor. sso/ssu) in speech, which have
the allomorph l’ (an elided form of MSG/FSG lo/la: l’amico/ been lexicalized in a number of temporal adverbials (stasera
amica ‘the friend.M/F’), and in the masculine plural gli (gli ‘this evening’, stavolta ‘this time’). In the spoken language
amici ‘the.MPL friends.M’). The latter form, together with the especially the demonstratives may be reinforced by the
singular lo, are also found before masculine forms beginning postnominal deictic adverbs qui/qua here’ and lì/là ‘there’
with non-tautosyllabic consonantal clusters (s+C, z-, gn-, ps-, giving rise to such discontinuous expressions as quest’idea
x-: lo/gli zio/zii ‘the uncle/-s’), as well as before s+[w] in many qua/qui ‘this idea (here)’, quel palazzo lì/là ‘that building
northern varieties (il/?lo suocero ‘the father-in-law’). This (there)’.
same allomorphic distribution is also found in conjunction Quantifiers are not morphologically distinguished from
with the distal demonstrative quello ‘that’ (also built on ILLE: adjectives, but present the same inflectional classes: Class 1:
ECCU ‘behold’ + ILLUM) and extended to the prenominal adjec- tanto/-i (MSG/PL), tanta/-e (FSG/PL) ‘so much/many’; Class 2:
tive bello ‘beautiful’: quel/bel gatto, quei/bei gatti, quell’/bell’a- sufficiente/-i (SG/PL) ‘enough’. Exceptional are the invariable
mico, quegli/begli amici (cf. §30.3.1). In northern Tuscany the qualche ‘some’, abbastanza ‘enough’, assai ‘many’, ogni ‘each’,
final lateral of MSG il is systematically assimilated (il gatto and the ordinals from ‘2’ upwards (due, tre, quattro, etc.).
[i ɡˈɡatto] ‘the cat’; cf. STsc. lo gatto) and in the plural the
masculine form of the article is, alongside i, frequently e
(e gatti), whereas in the west (Elbano, Lucchese) and south
14.3.1.3 Pronouns
the conservative form li is found (li gatti). The allomorphs lo The principal pronominal forms of the standard language
and gli of the standard language are not that frequent across are given in Table 14.7.
Tuscany, where we often find in their place the pre-vocalic We begin by noting that clitic forms are limited to the
singular ill’/ell’ (ill’/ell’amico/amica) and plural l’ (l’amici/ object function, with the exception of 2SG tu, which in
amiche), and il/i (/e) elsewhere (il zio [i tˈʦio]). With the northern-central varieties behaves to all intents and pur-
exception of the northernmost dialects of Cap Corse, in poses as a subject clitic in that it is excluded from root
preconsonantal position the lateral has been lost in Cor- contexts, where it is replaced by erstwhile object te
sican yielding u (MSG), a (FSG), NCor. i (PL), SCor. i/e (M/FPL). ((S)It./N-CIt. Paghi tu/?te? ‘Are you paying?’), appearing
The forms of the indefinite article (UNUM/UNAM ‘one.M/F’), only and obligatorily in subjunctive clauses (where singular
which are limited to the singular (except in Corsica, where person marking is completely/partially neutralized in the
plural forms uni/une are found in conjunction with the present/imperfect subjunctive: paghi ‘pay.1/2/3SG.PRS.SBJV’,
quantifier pochi/poche ‘few’ with the meaning ‘a fair number pagassi ‘pay.1/2SG.IPFV.SBJV’) despite Italian being a pro-drop
of ’: l’ani vistu uni pochi ‘a fair few have seen him’), present language (vogliono che **(tu) ti penta ‘they.want that (you=)
much less variation, namely un/una (M/FSG), with MSG uno yourself=repent’). A not too disimilar situation is found in
used before non-tautosyllabic consonantal clusters (uno zio) Corsican, where a full series of subject clitics (cf. tonic/clitic
216
Table 14.7 Italian pronouns

1 SG 2 SG 3 MSG 3 FSG 3 SG >2 SG 1 PL 2 PL 3 MPL 3 FPL 3 PL >2 PL
Subject
Clitic tu (si)
Weak egli, esso ella, essa essi esse
Tonic io tu (/te) lui lei Lei, (Ella, Essa) noi voi loro Loro
Object
Clitic acc. lo, si (refl) la, si (refl) La, si (refl) li, si (refl.) le, si (refl) Le, si (refl)
ci vi
Clitic dat. mi ti gli, si (refl.) le (/?gli), si (refl) Le, si (refl) gli, si (refl) si (refl)
Weak loro Loro
Tonic me te lui, sé (refl) lei, sé (refl) Lei, sé (refl) noi voi loro, sé (refl) Loro, sé (refl)
Genitive (possessives)
Weak/ mio tuo suo Suo nostro vostro loro Loro
tonic
eio/e, o (1SG), tù/tu (2SG), ellu/ella / (e)llu/(e)lla (3M/FSG), noi/no (cf. also Corsican third singular polite form of address sciò
(1PL), voi/vo (2PL), elli/elle / (e)lli/(e)lle (3M/FPL)) is also < signore ‘sir’: sciò pò stà sicuru ‘you can be sure’).
restricted to embedded contexts (§14.4.1.1): Ø e cumprerete Apart from the genitive case functions of possessives,
a u scagnu quand’è vo falate ‘Ø.2PL them= will.buy.2PL at the overt case distinctions are limited to the first and second
office when SCL.2PL= descend.2PL’. More liberal, by contrast, persons singulars (io/tu ‘I/you.NOM’ vs me/te ‘me/you.OBL’,
are most northern Tuscan varieties, which present a (par- but N-CIt. te ‘you.NOM/OBL’) and the third persons (lo/la/li/le
tial) series of subject clitics found in both root and embed- vs gli/loro), with overt markers of gender restricted to the
ded contexts (Brandi and Cordin 1981; 1989; cf. also §47.2.2): third person (lui/lo/gli vs lei/la/le). The traditional weak 3PL
Flo. e, tu, gli/e-la, e, vu, gli/e-le (cf. (te) tu parli ‘(you) dative loro (parlo loro ‘I.speak them.DAT’) is now generally
SCL2SG=speak’). Italian also has an indefinite subject clitic si replaced by original 3MSG clitic gli (gli parlo ‘3DAT=I.speak’),
‘self ’ (si viaggia ‘one travels’), systematically employed in which has also replaced 3FSG le in all but the most careful
Tuscan to express the first person plural, often in conjunc- registers (le/gli parlo ‘3DAT=I.speak’), thereby neutralizing
tion with noi ‘we’ or the 1PL subject clitic e: (noi) si viaggia ‘we original gender and number distinctions. In uneducated
travel’. usage, this gli is frequently rivalled by originally locative ci
In addition to null and tonic subject forms, Italian also (see below) and in Tuscan and Elbano (gli >) (g)ni and ne
presents in the third persons a restricted set of weak pro- respectively: ?ci mando un regalo ‘I’ll send him/her/them a
nouns egli/ella, esso/essa, essi/esse (the latter ess- forms typ- gift’. Although it is generally the MSG lo that is used with non-
ically with inanimate reference), now generally limited to specific, neuter reference (te lo dico ‘to.you=it.MSG= I.say’), in
very formal and/or written styles, which, unlike their tonic Corsican (as in Occitan (la) and Romanian (o)) the FSG (l)a
counterparts, only occur in preverbal position (lui/egli viene assumes this function: a ti digu. The object clitic forms in -i
lui/**egli ‘(he) comes (he)’) and, like clitics, are incompatible (ti scrissero ‘you=they.wrote’) present allomorphs in -e when-
with modification (proprio lui/**egli parlò ‘precisely he ever immediately followed by an accusative third person
spoke’) and coordination (lui/**egli e Mario parlarono ‘he clitic or ne (see below) (te la scrissero ‘you=it.FSG=they.wrote’),
and Mario spoke’). and third person forms gli (M/(?)F) and le (F) are both replaced
As in other Romance varieties, the standard language by glie- (gliela scrissero ‘3DAT=it.FSG=they.wrote’).
marks a binary distinction in the singular address system In addition to their respective first person plural and
between tu (familiar) and Lei (formal/polite)—the latter second person (plural) functions, ci, and vi (the latter now
grammatically feminine singular (with formal variants Ella, restricted to formal registers) also function as locatives (ci/
Essa), though accompanying modifiers today generally dis- vi andò ‘there=(s)he.went’) and clitic substitutes for numer-
play gender agreement in accordance with the natural gen- ous prepositional phrases including those headed by a ‘to,
der of the referent (Lei è generoso/-a ‘You are generous.MSG/ at’ (penso alla morte ‘I think to.the (= of the) death’ ) ci penso
FSG’)—while in the plural the distinction is lost with gener- ‘thereto=I.think’) and con ‘with’ (Con Marco, ci esco poco ‘With
alization of voi, except in the most affected styles where Marco, therewith=I.go.out little’). Also relevant here is the
Loro can still be found (§55.2.3.3). In the south (though partitive clitic ne (ne prese due ‘thereof=(s)he.took two’),
not Sicily), voi is also used as the formal/polite singular which may also substitute for prepositional phrases headed
217
ADAM LEDGEWAY
by di ‘of ’ (sono il titolare della macchina ‘I.am the owner of.the Table 14.9 Distribution of thematic vowel
car ) ne sono il titolare ‘thereof=I.am the owner) and da
ROOT THEMATIC VOWEL INFLECTION
‘from’ (Da Isernia, ne tornava tardi ‘from Isernia therefrom=
f
(s)he.returned late’). -re infinitive
g
Turning to the possessives, with the exception of the 3PL parl- ‘sing’ -a- -to participle
loro (< ILLORUM ‘those.GEN’), which is not that frequent in vend- ‘sell’ -e- -vo 1SG.IPFV.IND
everyday use in Tuscany, Corsica, or in many northern fin- ‘finish’ -i- -i 1SG.PRT
regional varieties where it is frequently replaced by suo -ssi 1SG.IPFV.SBJV
(Cor. so), in Italian these mark the number and gender of
their associated possessum (il/i mio/miei cellulare/-i
‘the.MSG/PL my.MSG/PL mobile.telephone.MSG/PL’), except in ‘see/sell.IPFV.SBJV.3SG/GER’), whereas in some (southern) Cor-
Tuscan/Corsican, where the singular persons present the sican dialects the original Latin third and fourth conjuga-
invariable prenominal forms mi’/mo (or me), tu’/to, and su’/so tions have merged in the infinitive (cf. rhizotonic LEGERE/
(It./Tsc./Cor. tua/tu’/to madre ‘your mother’), as well as the DORMIRE > ˈleɉɛ/ˈdormɛ ‘read/sleep.INF’ vs arrhizotonic kanˈta/
Tuscan gender-neutral postnominal plural forms mia, tua, vuˈlɛ ‘sing/want.INF’, though not in verbs that take the -sc-
sua (i fratelli/le sorelle tua ‘the.MPL brothers/the.FPL sisters augment) and the gerund (liˈɉindu/durˈmindu vs kanˈtɛndu/
your.PL’). Enclitic forms were found in the medieval lan- vuˈlɛndu).
guage (màmmata ‘mum=your’) and are still found today in Thematic vowels thus represent a semantically arbitrary,
Elbano (màmmita) and southern Corsican (màmmata). How- lexicalized marker of conjugational class. In synchronic
ever, the modern language distinguishes weak and tonic terms, however, their presence in specific forms has often
forms (Cardinaletti 1998): the former occur in prenominal been obscured or neturalized, e.g. UID-E-S > *ˈved-ej > ved-i
position and the latter in postnominal position and are ‘you.SG.see’, including in the future/conditional stem (<
distinguished, among other things, by their relative com- infinitive) of first conjugation verbs where pretonic -a- is
patibility with contrast, coordination, and modification: la regularly raised in Florentine to -e-: CANTARE ‘sing.INF’ +*ajo/
(**mia e tua) macchina mia e tua ‘the (my and your) car my ɛ(bb)i ‘I.have/had’ > canterò/canterei ‘I.will/would.sing’.
and your’. In Tuscan and Corsican the distinction is also
marked morphologically through the contrast between
invariable (mi’/mo (/me), tu’/to, su’/so) and agreeing (mio/ 14.3.2.1 Verb roots
meiu, tuo/toiu, suo/soiu) forms: Tsc./Cor. il (mi’) amico (mio)/ While regular verbs such as cantare ‘to sing’ present a single
u (me) amicu (meiu) ‘the (my.WEAK) friend (my.TONIC)’. root throughout the paradigm (e.g. cant-a/-ò/-i/-asse ‘sing.-
PRS.IND.3SG/-PRT.3SG/-PRS.SBJV3SG/-IPFV.SBJV.3SG’), a number of
irregular verbs present two or more stems: [ɛsk]- (esco(no)/
14.3.2 Verbal group esca ‘exit.PRS.IND.1SG(3PL)/PRS.SBJV.SG’) vs [ɛʃʃ]- (esci/esce
‘exit.PRS.IND.2SG/3SG’) vs [uʃ ʃ]- (uscire/uscivo/uscii/uscissi
‘exit.INF/IPFV.IND.1SG/PRT.1SG/IPFV.SBJV.1/2SG’). Much synchronic
The basic morphemic structure of the verb is given in
root allomorphy follows one of two morphomic distribu-
Table 14.8.
tions known as the ‘U-pattern’ and ‘N-pattern’ (Maiden
Verbs are traditionally divided into three conjugations in
2011b; §§42.2.3-4) illustrated in Tables 14.10 and 14.11.
accordance with the thematic vowel that surfaces in such
In Table 14.10 we have a velar-/palatal-final root alterna-
forms as the infinitive and numerous finite forms as illus-
tion as a result of the historical palatalization of the
trated in Table 14.9. Except in the infinitive, the Latin sec-
root-final velar before front vowels (§39.3.1), such that the
ond and third conjugations merged into a single class
second and third persons singular and the first and second
marked by the thematic vowel -e- (UIDÉRE/UÉNDERE > vedére/
persons plural indicative present a palatal-final root allo-
véndere ‘see/sell’: ved-e-sse/ved-e-ndo / vend‑e‑sse/vend-e-ndo
morph (lEdʤ-), whereas the first person singular and third
person plural indicative, together with (most) persons of
Table 14.8 Basic morphemic structure of the verb
THEMATIC VOWEL
Table 14.10 Italian U-pattern: leggere ‘to read’
ROOT ( LEXICAL ( CONJUGATIONAL INFLECTION ( MARKING FOR 1 SG 2 SG 3 SG 1 PL 2 PL 3 PL
MEANING ) MARKER : - A -, - E -, - I -) TAM , PERSON , AND NUMBER )
PRS.IND. leggo leggi legge leggiamo leggete leggono
cant- ‘sing’ -a- (1st conjugation) -va (PST.IPFV.IND.3SG) PRS.SBJV legga legga legga leggiamo leggiate leggano
218
Table 14.11 Italian N-pattern: sedere ‘to sit’ erstwhile inchoative infix -isc-, whose distribution in verbs
with thematic vowel in -i- also follows the N-pattern (finisco
1 SG 2 SG 3 SG 1 PL 2 PL 3 PL
(no)/finiamo ‘finish.PRS.IND.1SG(3PL)/1PL’).
PRS.IND. siedo siedi siede sediamo sedete siedono Mention should also be made here of a variant of the
PRS.SBJV sieda sieda sieda sediamo sediate siedano U-pattern, the so-called ‘L-pattern’ (cf. Table 14.12), in
which the distinctive velar-final root allomorph is limited
to the first person singular of the present indicative and the
the subjunctive all share the original velar-final root allo- whole of the present subjunctive. This pattern is practically
morph (lɛgg-). In Table 14.11, by contrast, the effects of limited to central Italy and, in particular, southern Tuscan
open-syllable diphthongization of the tonic low mid vowels varieties, where it affects verbs which end in a root-final [r],
(§14.2.1.1) have produced an alternation between a diph- and above all Corsican, where it regularly affects verbs which
thongal root allomorph (sied-) in the rhizotonic forms of the end in any consonantal root-final sonorant: Cor. curgo/curghi
paradigm (first, second, third persons singular and third ‘heal.PRS.IND.1SG/PRS.SBJV.SG’ (cf. cura ‘(s)he.heals’), falgu/falghi
person plural of the present indicative and subjunctive) ‘descend.PRS.IND.1SG/PRS.SBJV.SG’ (cf. fala ‘(s)he.descends’),
and a monophthongal root allomorph (sed-) in the remain- pilgu/pilghi ‘take.PRS.IND.1SG/PRS.SBJV.SG’ (cf. piglia ‘(s)he.
ing arrhizotonic first and second persons plural (cf. Maiden takes’), mengu/menghi ‘hit.PRS.IND.1SG/PRS.SBJV.SG’ (cf. mena
and Smith 2014). In both patterns, the cells affected by each ‘(s)he.hits’).
of the root allomorphs fail to show any isomorphism with Another important root alternation concerns the preser-
any natural morphosyntactic class, insofar as the relevant vation of Latin perfective root allomorphs (so-called PYTA
root allomorphs unite in each case a set of persons from roots; see Maiden 2000c; §27.7), whose distribution has
across the present indicative and subjunctive which syn- become restricted to the preterite and a number of past
chronically represent an arbitrary subset of person, num- participles of verbs predominantly of the second conjuga-
ber, and mood specifications. Nonetheless, we can identify in tion where it has been reanalysed as a stressed alternant:
these root alternations recurrent distributional patterns (cf. pósi, ponésti, póse, ponémmo, ponéste, pósero ‘placed.1SG/2SG/
U-pattern: tengo(no)/tieni ‘hold.PRS.IND.1SG(3PL)/2SG’, rimango 3SG/1PL/2PL/3PL’, pós-to ‘placed.PTCP’. Exceptional is the verb
(no)/rimani ‘stay.PRS.IND.1SG(3PL)/2SG’, salgo(no)/sali ‘ascend.PRS. ‘be’, which presents rhizotonic stress throughout the para-
IND.1SG(3PL)/2SG’, dico(no)/dici ‘say.PRS.IND.1SG(3PL)/2SG’, conosco digm and hence shows the perfective stem f- in all persons:
(no)/conosci ‘know.PRS.IND.1SG(3PL)/2SG’; N-pattern: odo(no)/ fui, fosti, fu, fummo, foste, furono. Of the four principal Latin
udiamo ‘hear.PRS.IND.1SG(3PL)/1PL’, muoio(no)/moriamo ‘die.PRS. formations of the perfective root, the reduplication type
IND.1SG(3PL)/1PL’, devo(no)/dobbiamo ‘must.PRS.IND.1SG(3PL)/1PL’, (e.g. CUCURRI ‘I.ran’) has, with the single exception of diedi/
esco(no)/usciamo ‘exit.PRS.IND.1SG(3PL)/1PL’) which, though lack- diede/diedero (< DEDI/DEDIT/DEDERUNT ‘gave.1SG/3SG/3PL’; cf. desti/
ing synchronic phonological and functional coherence, are demmo/deste ‘gave.2SG/1PL/2PL’), entirely disappeared, with a
replicated and expanded with considerable force beyond similar fate befalling the vocalic alternation type (e.g. FŬGIT/
their predicted regular distributions. For example, the inher- FŪGIT ‘flee.PRS.IND.3SG/PRT.3SG’), which survives in just two
itance and extension of the U-pattern can be seen in (old) verbs: feci/fece/fecero ‘did.1SG/3SG/3PL’ (cf. facesti/facemmo/
Italian verbs such as vedere ‘see’, chiudere ‘close’, and fuggire faceste), vidi/vide/videro, ‘saw.1SG/3SG/3PL’ (cf. vedesti/vedemmo/
‘flee’ (vegg(i)o(no)/vedi ‘see.PRS.IND.1SG(3PL)/2SG’, chiugg(i)o(no)/ vedemmo). More robust, by contrast, are the -UI- (e.g. HABUI
chiudi ‘close.PRS.IND.1SG(3PL)/2SG’, fuggo(no)/fuggi ‘flee.PRS.IND.1SG ‘I.had’) and sigmatic (e.g. SCRIPSI ‘I.wrote’) formations, e.g.
(3PL)/2SG’), and the extension of the N-pattern may even ebbi/ebbe/ebbero ‘had.1SG/3SG/3PL’ (cf. avesti/avemmo/aveste),
involve suppletion, as in the case of GO, where in the present scrissi/scrisse/scrissero ‘wrote.1SG/3SG/3PL’ (cf. scrivesti/
indicative/subjunctive there is a root alternation between scrivemmo/scriveste), which have analogically spread to
v- (< UADERE ‘to go, walk’) and and- (< AMBULARE ‘to walk’): many other verbs including: -UI- type (> *-wi-, with con-
vado (Tsc. vo)/vai/va/vanno/vada(no) ‘go.PRS.IND.1SG/2SG/3SG/ comitant lengthening of the preceding consonant) conobbi
3PL/PRS.SBJV.SG(3PL)’ vs andiamo/andate/andiate ‘go.PRS.IND.1PL/ ‘I.met’, crebbi ‘I.grew’ (cf. Cor. pobbi/fubbi ‘I.could/was’ vs It.
2PL/PRS.SBJV.2PL’. Also significant is the distribution of the potei/fui), caddi ‘I.fell’, bevvi ‘I.drank’, nacqui ‘I.was.born’, stetti
Table 14.12 Corsican L-pattern: amparà ‘to learn’

PRS.IND. ampargu ampari ampara amparemu amparate amparanu

PRS.SBJV amparghi amparghi amparghi amparghimu amparghite amparghinu
219
ADAM LEDGEWAY
‘I.stood’, tenni ‘I.held’, venni ‘I.came’; (*-si-; cf. the analogical Of course, the representation in Table 14.14 makes the
role played by participles in -SUM > -so) accesi ‘I.lit’, corsi not uncontroversial assumption that in certain paradigms
‘I.ran’, fesi/offesi/difesi ‘I.split/offered/defended’, fusi there is no overt exponent of TAM, as in the case of the
‘I.melted’, nascosi ‘I.hid’, presi ‘I.took’, persi ‘I.lost’, uccisi present and (in certain persons of) regular preterites. Thus,
‘I.killed’; Tsc. vensi ‘I.came’, volsi ‘I.wanted’, morsi ‘I.died’. In there arise competing analyses: leaving aside the question
some cases, an innovative *-wi- type is combined with a of thematic vowels, final -o, for example, in canto ‘I.sing’
vocalic root alternation: seppi/seppe/seppero ‘knew.1SG/3SG/ could be analysed as a simple marker of person/number
3PL’ (cf. sapesti/sapemmo/sapeste), ruppi/ruppe/ruppero ‘bro- with zero TAM morph (viz. cant-+-Ø-+-o) or a cumulative
ke.1SG/3SG/3PL’ (cf. rompesti/rompemmo/rompeste). exponent of TAM, person, and number (viz. cant-o). Similar
issues arise in relation to person and number marking, as
shown in Table 14.15.
14.3.2.2 Inflection If the final formant (-a, -à, -ebbe, -i) in the third person
singular in all paradigms (except the preterite) is analysed
Some representative exponents of inflectional markers for
as the default singular third person marker (rather than,
TAM, person, and number are given in Table 14.13, where it
say, the thematic vowel with zero person/number marker
is to be noted that markers of individual TAM functions
in the present), then there is a transparent relationship
cannot be isolated. For example, -v- and -s- in cantavano/
with the plural formed by adjunction of plural markers -no
spensero are cumulative exponents of past (tense), imper-
(with RF in the future) or -ro, e.g. canta + -no ) cantano,
fect/perfective (aspect), and indicative (mood), and simi-
canterebbe + -ro ) canterebbero, though not in Florentine
larly -ss- in dormissero simultaneously marks past (tense)
where in the present -ano has generalized to all three
and subjunctive (mood), with aspect underspecified since,
conjugations in the indicative (viz. cantano/vendano/finis-
despite its traditional label, the so-called imperfect sub-
cano) and -ino in the subjunctive (cantino/vendino/finischino;
junctive is neutral with regard to the aspectual distinction
cf. also the generalization of -i to all singular persons in the
(cf. so che dormì/dormiva durante il viaggio ‘I.know that
present subjunctive of second and third conjugation verbs
he.slept.IND.PRFV/IPFV (= slept/was sleeping) during the jour-
in western Tuscany and Corsica: bevi ‘drink’, credi ‘believe’,
ney’ vs non so se dormisse durante il viaggio ‘not I.know whether
venghi ‘come’, dormi ‘sleep’). This pattern extends naturally
he.slept.SBJV (= slept/was sleeping) during the journey’).
also to the preterite in Tuscan (and optionally in old Italian)
Indeed, a superficial examination of the various verb
where the third person plural is transparently forged from
paradigms (cf. Table 14.14) reveals that, when overtly
adjunction of -no (which then undergoes RF) to the third
marked, TAM are invariably realized cumulatively.
singular: cantò/vendé/finì + -no ) cantonno/vendenno/fininno.
A similar transparent relationship between the singular and
Table 14.13 TAM, person, and number marking the plural is also possible with the second person in certain
paradigms. If we interpret -st- as a marker of second person,
INFLECTION
then we can transparently analyse final -i and -e in the
ROOT THEMATIC VOWEL TAM PERSON NUMBER
preterite and conditional as exponents of singular and
cant- ‘sing’ -a- -v- -a- (3) -no (PL) plural number, respectively.
(PST.IPFV.IND) Of course, morphemic segmentations other than those in
spen- ‘extinguish’ Ø -s- -e- (3) -ro (PL) Table 14.15 are also possible synchronically. For example, it
(PST.PRFV.IND) might be argued that person and number are doubly
dorm- ‘sleep’ -i- -ss- -e- (3) -ro (PL) marked in the third person plural of regular preterites if
(PST.IPFV. -rono is considered bimorphemic (viz. -ro + -no), given that
SBJV)
synchronically there is evidence for the independent exist-
ence of these markers elsewhere in the paradigm (cf.
cantasse-ro, cantava-no), including in irregular preterites
Table 14.14 Cumulative exponence of TAM where the third person plural marker today is -ro (fece-ro
‘they.did’), and in the past often alternated with -no (fece-no)
PRS . IPFV . PRT ( PUNCTUAL FUT / PRS . IPFV .
or even combined with the latter (fece-ro-no).
IND IND PAST PERFECT ) COND SBJV SBJV
Also of note here is the first person plural in large parts of
Ø -v- i) Ø (parlai ‘I.spoke) -r- Ø -ss- Tuscany which is canonically expressed by the third person
ii) -s- (arsi ‘I.burnt’) singular in conjunction with the indefinite clitic si ‘self-’
iii) stetti (‘I.stood’) preceded by the subject clitic e or the tonic pronoun noi
‘we’ (e/noi si partì in fretta ‘we left in a hurry’), except for the
220
Table 14.15 Person and number marking

PRS . IND IPFV . IND PRT FUT COND PRS . SBJV IPFV . SBJV
1SG cant-o cantav-o canta-i canter-ò canter-ei cant-i cantass-i

2SG cant-i cantav-i canta-st-i canter-ai canter-est-i cant-i cantass-i
3SG cant-a cantav-a cant-ò canter-à canter-ebbe cant-i cantass-e
1PL cant-iamo cantava-mo canta-mmo canter-emo canter-emmo cant-iamo cantass-imo
2PL canta-te cantava-te canta-st-e canter-ete canter-est-e cant-iate canta-ste
3PL cant-a-no cantav-a-no canta-rono canter-anno canter-ebbe-ro cant-i-no cantass-e-ro
present tense of ‘be’ where semo ‘we.are’ is still widely punctual/dynamic (Tsc. i’ ero torna ‘I was (= had) returned.FSG’,
found. In other areas, by contrast, distinct forms of the Cor. induve l’ai buscu? ‘where it.MSG=you.have obtained.MSG?’)
first person plural survive. For instance, in rural areas of and resultative-stative readings (Tsc. nun son quattrini butti via
the west of the region the present indicative still distin- ‘not they.are money.MPL thrown.MPL away’, Cor. u granu era
guishes, in contrast to the generalization of -iamo in Italian tribbiu è mondu ‘the wheat.MSG was threshed.MSG and win-
and the literary language, between first conjugation ‑amo nowed.MSG’), the lexically closed class of short participles
(lavamo ‘we.wash’), second conjugation -emo (vedemo ‘we. that has entered the standard (literary) language are special-
see’), and third conjugation -imo (partimo ‘we.leave’); simi- ized in marking the resultative-state interpretation, whereas
larly for Elbano passamo ‘we.pass’, scendemo ‘we.descend’, the longer forms are employed with the punctual/dynamic
and venimo ‘we.come’. In Corsica, however, there is a binary interpretation: si è guastata/caricata la macchina ‘the car has
distinction between -emu, which has been extended from broken down/been loaded’ vs è guasta/carica la macchina ‘the
the second to the first conjugation (cantemu ‘we.sing’, per- car is broken/laden’, abbiamo stancato/svegliato Giorgo ‘we
demu ‘we.lose’), and -imu (durmimu ‘we.sleep’). have tired out/woken up Giorgio’ vs Giorgio è stanco/sveglio
Corsican is also of interest in relation to the imperfect ‘Giorgio is tired/awake’ (cf. also avvezzo/avvezzato ‘accus-
indicative, which, in contrast to Italian, which preserves tomed’, chino/chinato ‘bowed’, colmo/colmato ‘filled’, gonfio/
distinctive TAM marker -B- > -v- in all three conjugations gonfiato ‘swollen’, lesso/lessato ‘boiled’, logoro/logorato ‘worn
(cantava/faceva/dormiva ‘sing/do/sleep.PST.IPFV.3SG’), shows out’, tronco/troncato ‘truncated’).
the intervocalic labial only in the first conjugation (cantava
vs facìja/durmìja). Less consistent across the island is the
formation of the conditional: in the more Tuscanized north
we find the typically Tuscan pattern of infinitive + affixed
forms of the preterite of HABERE ‘have’ (CANTARE+*ɛbbi > can- 14.4 Syntax
tereb(b)i ‘I.would.sing’), whereas in the south we find a
mixed paradigm with forms of the imperfect of HABERE in 14.4.1 Nominal group
all persons (CANTARE+*ia > cantarìja ‘I.would.sing’), but with
the option of forms of the preterite in the second persons
The basic structure of the nominal group is given in (1) and
(CANTARE+*ias/*iste > cantarìi/cantaristi (SG), CANTARE+*iatis/
exemplified in (2; cf. Ch. 30):
*istes > cantarìate/cantaristi (PL)).
Also noteworthy is the presence in Tuscan and Corsican
(1) (Q) (det) (poss) (Q) (adj) N (compl) (adj) (PP)
of so-called short participles—alongside regular full forms—
in verbs principally of the first conjugation: Tsc. porto/por- (2) tutti i tuoi tanti begli studi di
tato ‘carried’, tocco/toccato ‘touched’, arrivo/arrivato ‘arrived’; all the your many lovely studies of
Cor. trovu/trovatu ‘found’, compru/compratu ‘bought’, as well sintassi dettagliati del passato
as second conjugation compiu/compiutu ‘completed’. Mor- syntax detailed of.the past
phologically, these short forms prove remarkable insofar
as they lack any overt marking for perfective aspect Apart from elliptic structures in which a headless nom-
(namely, the usual -T- > -t- formative) and simply show a inal can be referenced by an agreeing determiner (plus
single final number/gender formative: Tsc. cerca-t-o modifier(s)), e.g. Quale sciarpa compra? – Quella (rossa)
‘seek-PRFV-MSG’ vs cerc-o ‘seek-MSG’ (cf. homophonous cerc-o ‘Which scarf.FSG (s)he.buys? – That.one.FSG (red.FSG)’, the
‘seek-PRS.IND.1SG’). While such forms regularly display both only obligatory element is the nominal head, which may
221
ADAM LEDGEWAY
occur without a determiner in complement positions and determiner, witness their incompatibility with the overt
when the postverbal subject of an unaccusative verb (af- article ((**la) tua mamma ‘(the) your mother’), though not
fondano navi lit. ‘sink.3PL ships’: ‘They sink ships/Ships in Tuscan, which requires an overt article in such cases: **
sink’), and in asyntactic uses such as lists and titles (la) mi mamma ‘the my mum’. A similar behaviour charac-
(hanno chiamato zii, nipoti, cugini e amici ‘uncles, nephews, terizes the common noun casa ‘house’, which in Tuscan co-
cousins and friends rang’).5 Unlike post-determiner quan- occurs with the article (la mi casa ‘the my house’), but in
tifiers, pre-determiner universal quantifiers may also give Italian seems to occupy the canonical determiner position
rise to discontinuous structures, spelling out the base or judging by the order N+possessive and obligatory absence of
intermediate position(s) of a moved NP: [NP (tutti) i ragazzi] the article ((**la) casa mia ‘(the) house my’). This latter
dovevano (tutti) poter (tutti) salire (tutti) ‘(all) the boys had.to pattern is widely exploited in the south with proper
(all) be.able.INF (all) go.up.INF (all)’. names (Lorenzo tuo ‘Lorenzo your’), whereas northern and
In the unmarked case, possessives are prenominal and central varieties lexicalize the article (il tuo Lorenzo ‘the your
obligatorily co-occur with a determiner or quantifier (il/un/ Lorenzo’). Indeed, while proper names can be said to sys-
nessun nostro successo ‘the/a/no our success (= our success/ tematically lexicalize the determiner position (or co-occur
a/no success of ours)’), and only occur in postnominal with a null expletive article) in Italian and the south, in
position when contrastive: il successo nostro, non vostro, lit. northern and central varieties this is only generally true of
‘the success our, not your’. In this respect, possessives masculine proper names (Giorgio), whereas female ones
mirror adjectives which also license non-contrastive vs require the article (?la Giorgia).6
contrastive readings in accordance with their pre- vs post- We thus see a tendency in southern regional varieties of
nominal position (cf. Cor. u (vechju) portu (vechju) ‘the former Italian for the head noun to raise to a higher position within
port/ old port (as opposed to the new one)’). Oversimplify- the nominal structure in (2a), such that, in contrast to
ing somewhat, prenominal and postnominal adjective posi- central and northern varieties, it typically precedes posses-
tions typically correlate with the following respective sives, non-contrastive adjectives, and quantifiers (SIt. soldi
interpretations: (i) inherent/non-inherent (la tedesca metico- assai ‘money much’ vs N-CIt. assai soldi ‘much money’), even
losità/l’industria tedesca ‘the (typical) German meticulous- displacing the (partitive) article: N-C/SIt. viene la Chiara/
ness/German industry’; (ii) descriptive/distinguishing (un Chiara ‘comes (the/) Chiara’, beve del vino/vino ‘(s)he.drinks
(giovane) attore (giovane) ‘a young actor’); (iii) subjective/ (of.the/) wine’.
objective (un (simpatico) amico (simpatico) ‘a nice friend’);
and (iv) figurative/literal (una calda accoglienza/una bibita
calda ‘a warm welcome/drink’). This explains why, when 14.4.1.1 Pronominals
thanking one’s host, one says grazie per il tuo gentile invito
Italian is a null-subject language, hence in most contexts
‘thanks for your kind invitation’, rather than grazie per il tuo
verbs occur without an overt subject pronoun (Ø mangiamo
invito gentile, which might suggest that, in contrast to other
‘eat.1PL’) which are generally only employed when: (i) mark-
occasions, the person’s invitation was kind. Matters were,
ing contrastive focus (gridano LORO, non io! ‘THEY shout, not I’);
however, quite different in early Italian, with contrastive
(ii) disambiguating between masculine and feminine refer-
readings equally licensed in prenominal position (Vincent
ence, especially in coordinate structures (Carla e Ugo studiano
2007b; Giusti 2010c:599-609): OTsc. con tondo giro/uno tagliere
insieme, ma lui/??Ø non si stanca mai ‘Carla and Ugo study
tondo ‘with (a) round circle/a round chopping board’. In line
togther, but he/Ø never gets tired’); (iii) addressing a person
with the underlying dialects (cf. §§16.41, 17.4.1), southern
with the grammatically feminine third person singular
and Sardinian regional varieties tend to prefer postnominal
polite form Lei, at least when initializing the discourse (Lei
possessives and, in a similar fashion, make greater use of
gradisce qualcosa da bere? ‘Would you like something to
postnominal adjectives, including with non-contrastive
drink?’); (iv) employing second person singular subjunctive
readings: i vestiti miei vecchi, lit. ‘the clothes my old’ (cf. C-NIt.
verb forms (cf. §14.3.1.3): vogliono che **(tu) sparisca ‘they
i miei vecchi vestiti).
want that (you) disappear.PRS.SBJV.2SG’. As noted in §14.3.1.1,
In conjunction with unmodified, singular kinship terms,
possessives appear to co-occur with a null expletive
6
Also relevant in this respect is the behaviour of river names in Cor-
sican, which, in contrast to Italian, generally occur without the article: ci
avimu un par di fiumi, Tavignanu e Ristonica ‘we have a couple of rivers, (the)
5
Kinships terms and casa ‘house’ may also occur without a determiner Tavignano and (the) Restonica’. The distribution of the definite article in
when interpreted as discharging a possessor semantic role on an overt or Corsican also stands out for its absence in generic contexts, e.g. Capicursini
understood genitive modifier (G. Silvestri, p.c.): Zia ha preparato la pasta al anu saldatu sta petra ‘(the) Capcorsins laid this stone’ (cf. an identical pattern
forno ‘(My/Our) aunt has prepared a pasta bake’, casa di Maria non è lontana widely found in 17th-c. Italian texts from the northeast; M. Maiden, p.c.),
‘Maria’s house is not far’. Vittura ùn ne ai più? ‘(the) car, have you not got one any more?’
222
Table 14.16 Order of clitic clusters

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
mi gli, le (DAT) vi ti ci si (REFL) lo, la, li, le si (INDF/PASS) ne
despite being a null subject variety in root clauses, in self= he.burns (= he gets burnt in the sun)’ vs ?al sole non si ci
embedded contexts Corsican usually requires referential può stare ‘at.the sun not one.INDF= there= can stand.INF (= you
and non-referential pronominal subjects to be overtly real- can’t stay out there in the sun)’. Note finally that although
ized, albeit in reduced clitic form (Cum’ella vi pare. Ø3sg Basta clusters of three or more clitics are somewhat rare, they are
ch’elle falinu ‘As SCL.FSG= to.you= seems. Ø3sg suffices that SCL. theoretically possible: vi ci si dedica ‘thereto= one.INDF= self =
FPL= descend.3PL’), a distribution strikingly reminiscent of a dedicates (= one dedicates oneself to it)’, ci se lo compra
pattern found in medieval (Gallo‑)Romance V2 varieties ‘there= self= it= buys’ (= he buys it for himself there)’.
(§§31.3.3, 62.5), where subject pronouns were obligatory A striking feature of Corsican, shared by medieval Tuscan
realized in embedded contexts (Benincà 1984). (cf. lo mi diede lit. ‘it= me= he.gave’), is the preservation of
Null pronominal objects, on the other hand, prove more the order accusative (lu/la/li/le) + dative (mi/ti/ci/vi) in such
restricted and are only found with arbitrary, generic refer- sequences as un’ la t’aghju detta? ‘not it= to.you=I.have said?’,
ence, and hence license default third person masculine dallumi! ‘give.IMP.2SG=it=me’ (see also §45.4.2). An archaic
plural agreement on any co-referent modifiers (just like enclitic pattern is also found in Corsican yes/no questions
indefinite si ‘one, people’: quando si è perplessi ‘when one is where verb fronting of perfective auxiliaries, but not other
puzzled.MPL’): questo comportamento lascia [Ø3pl] perplessi ‘this verbs, yields enclisis of any accompanying object clitics (Aila
behaviour leaves [one/people] puzzled.MPL’. lampata l’acqua in u radiatore? ‘have.2SG=it.FSG poured
Turning now to object clitics, when these combine they the.water.F in the radiator?’, Avetene camere? ‘have.2PL=ther-
do so in the order given in Table 14.16. eof rooms?’), but not apparently in wh-questions: induve l’ai
Not all potential combinations in Table 14.16 are, how- buscu? ‘where it=have.2SG obtained?’.
ever, possible. For instance, me le can only be interpreted as Clitics are adverbal in that they obligatorily attach to a
1+7 (me le affidano ‘they entrust them to me’), and not 1+2 verbal host (including the quasi-verbal imperatival deictic
(‘me to her’) which can only be rendered through the use of ecco ‘behold, here/there.is!’: eccolo! ‘here.is=him’), proclitic-
(clitic and) tonic combinations: mi affidano a lei ‘me= ally in the case of finite verb forms (lo preparo/preparerò
they.entrust to her’, affidano me a lei ‘they.enstrust me to ‘it= I.prepare/will.prepare’), and enclitically in the case of
her’. Although in the standard the order 7+9 is not allowed, non-finite forms (prepararlo/preparandolo/preparatolo ‘pre-
the reverse order is not uncommon in regional varieties (?ne pare.INF=it/prepare.GER=it/prepare.PST.PTCP=it’); yet in many
lo ringraziai ‘I thanked him for it’). Combinations involving 1 central and southern varieties clitics can be separated
+3/4 are generally ruled out, though they prove very nat- from their associated verb by an intervening lower adverb
ural in southern varieties where the first clitic is typically (§31.2.2.1): ?lo quasi/sempre/ancora capisco ‘it= almost/
interpreted as an ethic dative and the second as accusative always/still I.understand’ (Ledgeway and Lombardi 2005).
(?mi ti levi dai piedi! ‘to.me= you= remove.2SG from.the feet In conjunction with the imperative, clitics are enclitic with
(= you’ll leave me alone!)’) or, more rarely, as an accusative affirmative forms (preparalo/preparatelo! ‘prepare.IMP.2SG/
+dative combination (?mi vi dedico ‘me= to.you I.dedicate’). PL=it’) and traditionally proclitic with negated forms (non lo
Identical combinations of clitics are invariably excluded: preparare/non lo preparate! ‘not it= prepare.IMP.2SG/PL’),
hence locative ci/vi ‘there’ cannot combine, respectively, although northern varieties have extended enclisis to the
with personal ci/vi (vi ci manderà ‘(s)he.will.send you there’ negated imperative (also accepted in the standard): non
or ‘(s)he.will.send us there’), and indefinite si in combin- prepararlo/non preparatelo!
ation with reflexive clitic si surfaces as ci si (ci si diverte ‘one With restructuring predicates (§31.2.2.3), clitics may
amuses oneself ’). The distinction between indefinite and either remain on the infinitive, typical of northern varieties
reflexive si is further marked by their different positions (riesco a farlo ‘I.manage to do.INF=it’), or climb to the restruc-
with respect to the third person accusative clitics in 7, turing predicate, typical of central-southern varieties (lo
yielding minimal pairs such as lo si prende/se lo prende ‘one riesco a fare ‘it= I.manage to do.INF’), the highest one if
takes it/he takes it for himself ’ (but se ne prende tanto either there is more than one (lo devo riuscir(**lo) a fare ‘it= I.must
‘one takes a lot of it’ or ‘he takes a lot of it for himself ’). In manage.INF(=it) do.INF’). Climbing also requires auxiliary
most southern varieties this distinction also extends to the switch (cf. §§14.4.3.1, 63.2.2) if the embedded infinitive is
locative ci ‘there’, hence al sole ci si brucia ‘at.the sun there= unaccusative (ho voluto vestirmi ‘I.have wanted dress=me’ )
223
ADAM LEDGEWAY
mi sono voluto vestire ‘me= I.am wanted dress.INF’); cf. also the for example, is frequently reserved for marking generic and
switch from essere ‘be’ to avé ‘have’ in Cor. v’aghju statu à habitual readings (Silvio fuma ‘Silvio smokes’, i.e. is a
senta ‘you=I.have been to listen.INF (= I’ve been listening to smoker) with the analytic forms employed to mark ongoing
you)’. Exceptional are the causative predicates fare/lasciare dynamic events (Silvio sta fumando ‘Silvio is smoking’). Such
‘make/let’, with which climbing is always obligatory (§61.3): is its expansion that many speakers now readily extend the
la fece/lasciò aprire ‘it.FSG= he.made/let open.INF (= he had it/ periphrasis even to stative predicates: mi sta piacendo il film
let it be opened)’; Cor. lascemuli dì à Nunzia è à Petru ‘to.me= is pleasing the film’, oggi stiamo stando sulla spiaggia
‘let.IMP.1PL=them say.INF to Nunzia and to Petru (= let’s let ‘today we.are being on.the beach’. Consequently, one of the
Nunzia and Petru say them)’. principal uses of the synthetic present, including in Tuscan
Although not sanctioned in the standard language, doub- (Giannelli 1988:601), is to mark future time (oggi piove, lit.
ling structures, especially with dative clitics, are frequent in ‘today it.rains’), with the formal future paradigm now
all but the most guarded of speech, and not necessarily largely limited to epistemic modal uses (saprà già tutto! ‘he
involving dislocation of the doubled NP: lo voglio il caffè probably already knows everything’). From this perspective,
‘it.MSG= I.want the.MSG coffee.M’, gli mando poi un messaggio the temporal distinctions of the indicative parallel those of
agli altri ‘3DAT= I.send then a message to.the.MPL others.M’. As the subjunctive where present and future are also formally
noted by Benincà and Poletto (2004b), dative doubling struc- neutralized in the present subjunctive paradigm: penso che
tures improve considerably in acceptability if the clitic venga ‘I.think that come.PRS.SBJV.SG (= is coming/will come)’.
co-occurs with an accusative clitic: gliel’ho detto a Gianni Corsican, by contrast, employs reduced forms of avé ‘have’ +
‘3DAT.it= I.have said to Gianni’. da ‘from’ + infinitive, originally a deontic periphrasis, to
As already observed in §14.3.1.3, quite different is the mark future: emu da andà in Bastia ‘we.have from go.INF in
behaviour of weak pronouns and, in particular, the dative Bastia’.
third person plural loro, which must immediately follow at The traditional distinction between the past and present
least one verb form. Consequently, with simplex verb forms perfective in terms of present relevance—mi rubarono/hanno
it is always postverbal (spiego loro la teoria ‘I.explain to.them rubato la macchina ‘to.me= they.stole/they.have stolen the
the theory’), but in conjunction with compound verbs forms car (= my car was stolen (perhaps since recovered/returned
and restructuring predicates it may occupy any one of the to me)/has been stolen (and I’m still without it)’—is subject
available postverbal positions: ho (loro) voluto (loro) spiegare to considerable diamesic, diaphasic, and diatopic variation.
(loro) la teoria ‘I.have (to.them) wanted (to.them) explain.INF While in formal written and (to a lesser extent) spoken
(to.them) the theory’. registers the distinction is maintained, though increasingly
lost in the neo-standard (Berretta 1983:212), in everyday
spoken Italian the distinction only survives in central and
14.4.2 Verbal group upper southern Italy and in Corsican (Cor. Culombu scuprì a
Merica/quistannu sò stata malata ‘Columbus discovered Amer-
14.4.2.1 Tense, aspect, and mood ica/this year I’ve been ill’), but not in northern Italy and
On the temporal axis the indicative verb system formally Sardinia, where the process of aoristic drift (§58.3.2) has led
distinguishes between past, present, and future time, and, in to the generalization of the present perfective as the sole
turn, their imperfective (synthetic) and perfective (predom- past perfective paradigm: N/C-SIt. Mussolini ha conquistato/
inantly analytic) aspectual variants (see Table 14.17). conquistò il potere nel 1922, lit. ‘Mussolini has taken/took
In many respects, the system outlined in Table 14.17 is an power in 1922’. In uneducated speech in southern Calabria
idealization. For instance, the synthetic past and present and Sicily, by contrast, the distribution of the analytic
imperfective paradigms are increasingly, and in particular perfective is highly restricted: whereas perfective situ-
areas (Sardinia, southern Italy), rivalled by originally ations, even with present relevance, are generally expressed
marked progressive analytic forms consisting of the auxil- by the synthetic paradigm (Ti serve il bagno? – No, mi lavai ‘Do
iary stare ‘stand’ + gerund, such that, the synthetic present, you need the bathroom? – No, I’ve washed (lit. myself=
I.washed)’), the analytic paradigm is limited to marking pre-
Table 14.17 Temporal, aspectual, and mood distinctions sent results of past actions (non mi ha chiamato ‘not me=
(1SG of cantare ‘to sing’) he.has called (= I have no news of him because he hasn’t
called)’; cf. non mi chiamò ‘not to.me= he.called (= he didn’t
PAST PRESENT FUTURE call/hasn’t called me)’) and experiential aspect (ho mangiato il
kebab ‘I.have eaten the kebab (= I know what a kebab tastes
Imperfective cantavo canto canterò
like because I have eaten one in the past)’). As noted in
Perfective cantai ho cantato avrò cantato
§14.3.2.2, although in the subjunctive all varieties overtly
224
mark the present perfective, the distinction between past comparison (Manzini 1996): Non dici che sia colpevole? ‘You’re
perfective and imperfective is neutralized: non credo che not saying that I am.SBJV guilty?’; Cor. quant’è elli sianu i gracini
abbia mentito/mentisse ‘not I.believe that he.has.SBJV lied/ di una caspa d’uva ‘as if they are.SBJV from a bunch of grapes’.
he.lied.SBJV (= lied/was lying)’. In some cases, it is possible therefore to create meaningful
Apart from its standard temporal uses as an imperfect- indicative/subjunctive contrasts, as with the following
ive past (cf. capivo ‘I was understanding’ vs inchoative/ causal/final readings of perché lit. ‘for.that’: lo dico perché ci
punctual capii/ho capito ‘I realized’), the imperfect also crede/creda ‘I say it because he believes.IND/so that he
expresses several modal values, including attenuative (De- believes.SBJV it’.
siderava? ‘What would you like (lit. you.wanted)?’), ludic Diatopically, however, the distribution of the subjunctive
(Allora io ero il medico e tu il malato ‘So I’ll be (lit. I.was) the is not uniform. In line with the underlying dialects,
doctor and you the patient’), and conditional perfect (in throughout the south the subjunctive is typically replaced
quel caso non venivo ‘in that case I would not have come (lit. by the indicative in unguarded speech, even after volitional
I.came)’). In the same way that the present is frequently predicates (?vollero che pagavamo), though not in jussive
employed with future value, the imperfect is often used to contexts, where the imperfect subjunctive is indiscrimin-
mark the future-in-the-past, a usage still frowned upon by ately employed: ?(digli che) entrasse! ‘(tell her to come in/)let
purists: promise che telefonava ‘he promised that he would her in!’. In Tuscany, by contrast, it is just the past subjunct-
(have) phone(d) (lit. ‘he.phoned’)’. In the latter case, the ive which is avoided, hence sembrava che capivano ‘it seemed
conditional can also be employed but, in contrast to other that they understood.IND’, but sembra che capiscano ‘it seems
Romance varieties, since the eighteenth century only the that they understand.SBJV’. Although enjoying a robust dis-
perfective paradigm is found (Maiden 1996b), thereby neu- tribution in the north, including in relaxed spoken registers,
tralizing the imperfective/perfective distinction: promise in the colloquial speech of all Italians the subjunctive can
che avrebbe telefonato/**telefonerebbe lit. ‘he.promised that exceptionally be replaced by the indicative in the second
he.would.have phoned/he.would.phone’. Indeed, the syn- person singular, even after volitional predicates (Lepschy
thetic paradigm is limited to marking irrealis events and and Lepschy 1988:234): non vogliono che **faccio/?fai/**fa storie
potential actions (berrei volontieri una birra ‘I’d willingly ‘they don’t want that make.PRS.IND.1SG/2SG/ 3SG a fuss’. This
have a beer’), as well as evidentiality (Secondo la stampa, il restriction to the second person singular might be under-
ministro sarebbe malato ‘according to the press, the minister stood as an alternative strategy of distinctly marking the
is (allegedly) ill’). second person singular other than resorting to the obliga-
As for the subjunctive, its distribution broadly mirrors tory use of the subject clitic tu (§§14.3.1.3, 14.4.1.1).
that found in the other Romance varieties, with the excep- A further alternative to the subjunctive, at least in subject
tion that it survives, at least in formal registers, in indirect and adjunct clauses, is the personal infinitive with postver-
questions (gli chiesi quanto guadagnasse/guadagnava ‘to.him= bal subject (Ledgeway 1998; 2000:ch. 4; Mensching 2000; cf.
I.asked how.much he.earned.SBJV/IND’). Apart from some also §63.2.1.1), a construction found in colloquial registers
infrequent (possibly elliptic) exceptions (Dio ci salvi! ‘God of Italian (?prima di chiamare lei, dormivo ‘before of call.INF
save us!’), the subjunctive is principally employed as a her, I.was.sleeping’; cf. standard prima che lei chiamasse . . .
marker of subordination and indeed, unlike embedded indi- ‘before that she called.SBJV’), Tuscan (pe’ un marcì i’ grano, si
catives, may therefore license omission of the finite com- pigliava un copertone ‘for not rot.INF the wheat, we would.take
plementizer che ‘that’ (cf. §63.2.14): penso (che) sia giusto a large.blanket (to cover it with)’), and Corsican (di prima à
‘I.believe (that) it.is.SBJV correct’ vs so **(che) è giusto mettasi idda in vinochju, altari ùn si ni fighjulaia più ‘of before to
‘I.know (that) it.is.IND correct’. Essentially, the subjunctive is place.INF=self she in knee, altar not one.INDF= of.it= looked
licensed by semantic (intensional subjunctive) or syntactic more (= until she knelt down, you couldn’t look at the
(polar subjunctive) factors or a combination of both. In the altar)’).
former case, the subjunctive is licensed by lexical properties
of the selecting (e.g. volitional, epistemic, factive) predicate
which typically characterize the embedded event as unreal-
14.4.2.2 Voice
ized at the time of speaking (vollero che/a condizione che To defocus (or even suppress) the Agent and topicalize the
pagassimo ‘they wanted/on condition that we should pay’; Patient, the standard resorts to the analytic essere ‘be’ +
Cor. ci vole ch’o ci venga più spessu ‘it is necessary that I come participle passive construction with subjectivization of the
here more often’), whereas in the latter case the subjunctive underlying object and suppression, or demotion to an
is licensed, though somewhat less consistently than in the oblique phrase, of the underlying subject: una macchina
former, by occurring within the domain of a syntactic oper- investì l’anziano ‘a car ran.over the old.man’ ) l’anziano fu
ator such as negation, interrogation, conditionality, or investito (da una macchina) ‘the.old.man was run.over (by a
225
ADAM LEDGEWAY
car)’. In addition to essere ‘be’, Italian also employs venire between active Agent transitive/intransitive subjects (A/SA)
‘come’ and andare ‘go’ as dynamic and deontic passive aux- and stative Undergoer transitive objects/intransitive sub-
iliaries, respectively: la tavola è/viene/va apparecchiata ‘the jects (O/SO). This explains why, in terms of basic word order,
table is/comes (= gets)/goes (= must be) set’. In spoken transitive/unergative subjects precede the verb, whereas
Italian, the passive is generally replaced by active structures unaccusative subjects occupy the canonical postverbal
with clitic left-dislocation (§§31.3.4, 34.4.1) of the non- object position (in association with a preverbal subject clitic
Agent, including prepositional complements:7 l’anziano, lo in many Tuscan dialects and in embedded contexts in Cor-
investì una macchina ‘the old.man him= ran.over a car’, A sican): Gigi (A/SA>) fumava (la sigaretta (O)) ‘Gigi was smoking
Luca, la mamma gli regalò un telefonino ‘to Luca the mum (the cigarette)’, Sul tavolo fumava una tazza di tè (SO) ‘On the
to.him= gave a mobile.phone (= Luca was given . . . )’. Also table there was a steaming cup of tea’; cf. also Cor. Lisandru
frequent in spoken registers is the use of a generic null capisce a lingua ‘Lisandru understands the language’ vs (s’ella)
third person plural subject: Cor. Oghje m’aspettanu à cullazione affacca una vittura ‘(if it=) appears a car’.
ind’è a signora Fiffina ‘today me=they.expect at lunch at This same distinction underlies the distribution of the
signora Fiffina’s’. A final strategy, found in all registers, is perfective auxiliaries avere/essere ‘have/be’ and participle
the third person si ‘self-‘ construction which usually requires agreement (Ch. 49): transitive/unergative subjects align
suppression of the underling Agent: si aggiusterà il tetto ‘self= with avere and fail to control participial agreement (Giuliana
repair.FUT.3SG the roof (= the roof will be repaired)’. ha aumentato/**-a (i prezzi) ‘Giuliana.F has raised.MSG/FSG (the
Related to the latter construction is indefinite si, found prices.MPL)’), while unaccusative subjects license auxiliary
with both transitives (lo si aggiusterà ‘it= one.INDF= essere and control participial agreement just like (preverbal
repair.FUT.3SG (= one will repair it)’) and intransitives (a ques- clitic) objects (I prezzi, li ha aumentati ‘the prices.MPL, them.M=
t’ora si dorme ‘at this hour one.INDF sleeps’). As a semantically she.has raised.MPL’): sono aumentati i prezzi ‘are raised.MPL
plural animate subject, it requires grammatically plural the.MPL prices.M’.8 With a number of unaccusative and un-
agreement on any coreferent modifiers (quando si è madri, si ergative predicates which select for a locative or temporal
sembra sempre stanche ‘when one.INDF is mothers, one.INDF argument, the VS order correlates with an implicit locative/
seems always tired.FPL’)—a development which has been gen- temporal argument anchored to the here and now of the
eralized in Tuscany, where si and third person singular verb speaker which acts as the subject of predication (Benincà
represents the unmarked expression of the first person 2001a:137-9): ØLoc è arrivato Lorenzo ‘Lorenzo has got [here]’,
plural: (noi) si sciopererà ‘(we) one.INDF strike (we’ll strike)’. ØLoc ha chiamato il sindaco ‘the mayor has called [here]’,
In Corsica indefinite si is frequent in the south (si ghjungh- ØTemporal è morto il gatto ‘the cat has died [now/today]’.
jia stanchi morti ‘one.INDF arrives tired.MPL dead.MPL’), whereas Other quirky subjects that may act as subject of predication
in northern dialects pre- or postverbal omu (< HOMO ‘man’) is (Cardinaletti 2004) include dative experiencers (mi basta il
typically employed: s’omu ùn capisce issi nomi ‘if-one.INDF not pensiero ‘to.me= suffices the thought’) and locatives (su Gianni
understands these names’. A related phenomenon is the use cadde una disgrazia ‘on Gianni fell a misfortune’).
of a parsona ‘the person’ in such structures as issa stretta hè Corsican, Elbano, and southern regional varieties of Italian
troppa ratta, a parsona priculeghja calchì cascatura ‘this path is mark specific animate direct objects with the preposition
very steep, the person risks some fall (= there’s a danger of a ‘to’ (cf. §56.3.2.4). While in Elbano and Corsican it is
falling)’. Also frequent in Corsican is the lexicalized eviden- restricted to pronominals (Elb. vedo a te ‘I.see to you’), kinship
tial marker dice chì lit. ‘says that’ (often shortened to ce chì; terms (Cor. aghju vistu à me frateddu ‘I.have seen to my
Cruschina and Remberger 2008): dice chì cantanu cusì bè ‘they brother’), and proper names (Cor. emu infattatu à Petru
apparently sing very well’. ‘we.have met to Petru’), including place names and rivers in
Corsican (Cor. à Parigi u salutu ‘to Paris it= I.greet’), in southern
Italy it is also found with full NPs: vai a chiamare al medico!
14.4.3 Clause ‘go to call.INF to.the doctor!’ However, even in Italian, including
14.4.3.1 Sentence organization

The organization of the clause shows a number of overt 8
In the standard language all reflexive predicates, where the surface
reflexes of an active-stative syntax (§50.2), distinguishing subject is typically coreferential with the object (hence simultaneously
characterized as A and O), select auxiliary essere and generally show agree-
ment with the subject: Chiara si è pettinata ‘Chiara self= is combed.FSG’. In
7
Judging by examples such as issa lettara, ci vulia ch’edda fussi stata risposa many substandard varieties, as well as in Corsican, auxiliary avere/avé is
ottu à oghji lit. ‘this letter, it.was.necessary that it= was been replied to a selected with ethic reflexives which are essentially transitive structures: ?se
week ago’, Corsican also allows passivization of some types of indirect l’ha comprato al mercato ‘self= it=he.has bought at.the market’; Cor. u m’aghju
object. lettu in un milampu ‘it= myself=I.have read in an instant’.
226
among Tuscans and northerners, it is exceptionally licensed ‘there= wants two bedrooms (= two rooms are needed)’,
with clitic left-dislocated (pro)nominal objects in conjunc- quante camere ci vole? ‘how.many bedrooms there= wants?’,
tion with psych-predicates (**(a) me questa spiegazione non mi mi hè bastatu una pizza ‘to.me= is sufficed.MSG a.FSG pizza.FSG’.
soddisfa ‘(to) me this explanation not me= satisfies’), a usage This explains why in Tuscan and Corsican the verb in
probably calqued analogically on the frequent correspond- passive si constructions (§14.4.2.2) fails to show agreement
ing dative structure with psych-verbs such as piacere ‘to with the postverbal patient: Tsc. si raccoglie i rifiuti ‘self=
please’ (a me mi piace ‘to me to.me= it.pleases’). That clitic collects the.MPL refuse.MPL’, Cor. in stu paesi, un ci si trova cà
left-dislocation also plays a role in licensing the prepos- parsoni stragni ‘in this village not there= self= finds but
itional accusative in such structures is shown by the fact persons strange.PL’. A similar non-agreeing structure is
that even in colloquial Tuscan and northern varieties, where also possible in Italian, but is only licensed under particular
the prepositional accusative is otherwise excluded (Tsc-/NIt. semantico-pragmatic conditions (D’Alessandro 2007): while
criticano (**a) te ‘they.criticize (to) you’), the prepositional an agreeing construction such as In Italia si mangiano gli
accusative may be licensed with clitc left-dislocated first and spaghetti ‘in Italy self= eat.3PL the.MPL spaghetti.MPL’ marks
second person pronouns (?a te, ti criticano ‘to you you= they. an accomplishment (namely, ‘people eat spaghetti in Italy’),
criticize’), though not with third person pronouns or NPs the non-agreeing variant (note also the absence of the
(**a lui/Michele, lo criticano ‘to him/Michele him= they.criti- article) In Italia si mangia spaghetti ‘in Italy self= eats spa-
cize’) in accordance with a pattern also found in some south- ghetti.MPL’ is interpreted as an activity (namely, ‘spaghetti is
ern dialects (§16.4.3.3). eaten/spaghetti-eating goes on in Italy’). Agreement for
number also fails to obtain in the standard when the patient
is cliticized (si preparano le bozze ‘self= prepare.3PL the.FPL
14.4.3.2 Agreement proofs.F’ ) le si prepara(??no) ‘them.FPL= self= prepare.3SG
In contrast to Italian, in Tuscan and Corsican third person (PL)’), though agreement for number and gender continues
subject–verb agreement is sensitive to syntactic configur- to be registered on the participle in compound paradigms: le
ation (Brandi and Cordin 1989). Whereas canonical prever- si è preparate ‘them.FPL= self= is prepared.FPL’.
bal subjects routinely control verb agreement, including an Past participle agreement with a preceding direct object
agreeing preverbal subject clitic in many Tuscan varieties clitic also shows some variation. In the standard, agreement
(Flo. delle ragazze le hanno telefonato ‘some girls SCL.3FPL ha- is only obligatory in the third person (e.g. le ho conosciute
ve.3PL phoned’), default third person singular agreement— ‘them.F I.have met.FPL’), and optional, though increasingly
together with a non-agreeing preverbal subject clitic in less frequent, in the other persons (ci avevano conosciuto/-i/-e
Tuscan—systematically obtains whenever the subject is ‘us= they.had met.MSG/MPL/FPL’). In Florentine, by contrast,
postverbal (gli ha telefonato delle ragazze ‘SCL.3 has phoned agreement is systematic with all clitics (t’ho trovata ‘you.SG=
some girls’) or moved to a left-peripheral focus position I.have found.FSG’), whereas in Corsican agreement with a
(quante ragazze gli ha telefonato? ‘how.many girls SCL.3 has non-third person clitic is invariably ruled out: m’/ci hà
phoned?’). Similarly, in Corsican we find: ci vole due camere basgiatu ‘me=/us= he.has kissed.MSG’.
227
CHAPTER 15
The dialects of central Italy

15.1 Introduction ‑/o/ and ‑/u/, the main isogloss defining the area, except
for the southeastern fringe (cf. §15.2.1.1). On the Tyrrhenian
side, the border cuts across what is today southern Lazio
Central Italy (Map 15.1) includes Tuscany and Rome which
(northern Campania until 1927) starting just west of Gaeta
are both, in different ways, central to the linguistic history
and proceeding northwards to include Frosinone, the west-
of Italy. However, in the classification of Italo-Romance
ern strip of Abruzzo (with L’Aquila and Avezzano), and the
dialects the label area mediana (mediano ‘median, central’)
northern tip of Lazio. From the southeastern border of
refers to the central Italian dialects minus Tuscany (see
Umbria, the line then goes northeastwards into the Marche,
Ch. 14) (except a tiny southern strip), while Rome has a
excluding Ascoli and the southern part of its province,
somewhat special status in this subdivision.1
which belongs to the upper south subdivision. Today no
There are two readings of the label area mediana: in the
regional administrative unit lies entirely within the area
broader sense (as in Pellegrini 1977), its northern border
mediana except Umbria, which straddles the mediana and
includes Monte Argentario and the southeastern corner of
perimediana areas. Conversely, a southeastern strip of Tus-
the Tuscan province of Grosseto, all of Umbria and, in the
cany (Grossetano-Amiatino area) is included, linguistically,
Marche, the province of Ancona, touching the Adriatic in
in our territory, sharing some criterial isoglosses with the
Senigallia and excluding the northernmost province of the
rest of the central non-Tuscan dialects (§15.3.1).
Marche (Pesaro-Urbino). In the narrower sense (as in
Though this chapter is mainly synchronic, the present-
Vignuzzi and Avolio 1994:642), the northwestern frontier
day distribution of the criterial isoglosses can hardly be
of the area is the Tiber and the dialetti mediani are the
understood without reference to historical/demograph-
dialects spoken southeast of Rome in Lazio and the south-
ical factors: isogloss bundles demarcating dialect (sub-)
eastern half of Umbria; further (north)east, in the Marche, is
areas correspond much more closely to ancient political/
the Maceratese-Fermano area, though not Ancona and ter-
ethnic borders than to modern administrative ones. Thus,
ritory. This latter view amounts to acknowledging the
the linguistic border in the Tiber valley, cutting across
Rome–Ancona line as a linguistic border (Rohlfs 1937),
(present-day) Umbria, corresponds to the pre-/protohis-
whereas on the former reading the area mediana reaches as
toric border between Etruscans (to the west) and the Italic
far north as the Carrara–Fano line (Pellegrini’s revision of
Umbrians (to the east), reflected in the two Roman Re-
von Wartburg’s 1936, 1950 La Spezia–Rimini line). Uncon-
giones Augusteae VII Etruria/VI Umbria. Subsequently, the
troversially, most of the distinctive characteristics dis-
area perimediana in Umbria and Marche corresponds
cussed below have the Rome–Ancona line as their
roughly to the Byzantine corridor (with Perugia and the
northwestern border: it seems therefore advisable to
Tiber valley) which resisted the Langobardic invasion in
adopt Vignuzzi’s (1994:332) terminology, using area mediana
the sixth century. Not only did ancient borders contribute
in the narrow sense while giving the label area perimediana
to shaping isoglosses still observable today, but so did the
to the area bordering on Tuscany north and west of the
attracting force exercised by some major urban centres.
Rome–Ancona line, encompassing southeastern Grossetano,
Thus, the linguistic identity of area perimediana, which
northwestern Lazio, northwestern Umbria, and the prov-
shares many features with Tuscany, was partly shaped,
ince of Ancona in central Marche. The lower border of the
from the late Middle Ages, by Florentine linguistic pres-
area mediana, by contrast, coincides basically with the reten-
tige, whereas the erosion of typically mediano isoglosses in
tion of the original contrast between word-final unstressed
southern Lazio (especially along the Tyrrhenian coast)—
and possibly the spread of metaphonic diphthongization
1
to southern Umbria, according to Barbato (2008:278)—is
Transcriptions from sources not adopting IPA are adapted. Whenever
unreferenced, data stem from our fieldnotes. Loporcaro is primarily attributable to the increasing prestige of Romanesco. This
responsible for §§15.1, 15.2.1, 15.3.1, Paciaroni for §§15.2.2–3, 15.3.2–3. shared ab initio several features with Florentine—e.g. the
228 This chapter © Michele Loporcaro and Tania Paciaroni 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
THE DIALECTS OF CENTRAL ITALY
SP 1-5 Carrara-Fano bundle of isoglosses

La
Spezia
MS 1,2,3,5
1.
2.
Lenition of -C-
Lenition of -P-
3. Lenition of -T-
Carrara 4 4. Degemination
2,3 5. -Rl- >[ j]
41 1,2,3,4,5
5
LU SAN MARINO
Rimini
6-9 Rome-Ancona bundle of isoglosses
6. Distinction between final unstressed -/o/ and -/u/
Lucca
RN 2
1
Pesaro 7. -ND- > [n:]
LIGURIAN FI 2,5 2 2
8. -MB-, -NV- > [m:]
9. Postnasal voicing
SEA Florence
Fano
1 Urbino Senigallia
1,3,4 PU AN
3,4
Città di
Gorgona 5 Castello
Pietralunga
Gubbio
5
ADRIATIC
Magione 7,8 see inset map below
Capraia SEA
MC
S. Martino in Campo Perugia San Ginesio
6 7,8
Panicale
PG 6
Foligno
9 Mùccia Servigliano 6
AN Ancona Abbadia San Salvatore Gualdo Cattaneo

FM 6
Ascoli
GR
5
AP Ascoli Piceno Elba Grosseto Marsciano 9
Trevi
Piceno
FM Fermo
FI Florence Orvieto
Todi Norcia AP
Pianosa Scansano 6
Spoleto
6
FR Frosinone 7,8 Pitigliano
9
Bolsena Amelia Terni
GR Grosseto Leonessa
SP La Spezia Monte Argentario
5
Montefiascone
Viterbo
Canepina
Vasanello
Cantalice
Pizzoli
6
TR
VT
Greccio
AQ L’Aquila Vetralla
9
Fabrica di Roma Rieti L’Aquila
LT Latina Montecristo Giglio Ronciglione
9 Civita Castellana Poggio di Roio Piànola
LU Lucca Montalto di Castro Capranica
Faleria
6
Sant’Oreste Ascrea
MC Macerata
MS Massa-Carrara
Tarquinia Fiano Romano
Palombara Sabina
6 Massa d’Albe
Magliano de’ Marsi
RI
Roccagiovine Tagliacozzo
NA Naples Avezzano
PG Perugia
Camerata Nuova
6,9 RM Cese dei Marsi
Cervara di Roma Canistro
Castelmadama
PU Pesaro-Urbino TYRRHENIAN Rome 6,9 Colonna Roiate Arcinazzo Vallepietra
RI Rieti SEA Frascati Rocca di Serrone
AQ
Papa
RN Rimini Genzano Nemi 6
Paliano Vico nel Lazio
Lanuvio Veroli
RM Rome Velletri Segni Alatri
Sora
9 6 Arpino
TR Terni Cori Frosinone
VT Viterbo Castro dei Volsci
Anzio
Nettuno
Amaseno Cassino
LT FR
Ausonia
AN
Sonnino
PU Ostra Ancona
7
7 3,4 Sabaudia Terracina Spigno Saturnia
7
Certopiano Montecarotto 3,4 Minturno
Jesi 9
3,4 9 Arcevia Gaeta
3,4 6 Osimo
Montelago di
Sassoferrato 9 6
6
Sassoferrato 8
8
NA
9
Poggio San Romualdo Ponza
8 Naples
7,8 Fabriano Treia
6,9
Macerata
Gualdo Matelica 6 Ischia
Tadino
Esanatoglia MC
PG6 9
San Severino M. Monte S. Giusto
FM AIS points are listed in italics Capri
Map 15.1 Dialects of central Italy
merger of word-final -/u/ and ‑/o/, seen in the San Clem- century onwards. Finally, a further central force in the
ente inscription (around 1100: dereto ‘behind’ < DE RĔTRO = linguistic history of Italy, though falling outside area med-
palo ‘post’ < PĀLUM, Castellani 1976:111-21), already occur- iana, is Naples, which has contributed to the retreat of
ring in the Romance forms in the tenth-century Latin mediano isoglosses in the postmedieval period.
texts from Rome discussed by Formentin (2012-13:45)— During the Middle Ages, in fact, the features which char-
and became more and more florentinized (loss of meta- acterize the area mediana today covered a larger territory.
phonic diphthongs, ‘weak’ articles, etc.) from the fifteenth Southwards and eastwards it stretched into the Cassino
229
area—which today is linguistically part of the upper south, inventory in this position, unlike Tuscan, is still
merging word-final unstressed vowels except ‑/a/ as ‑/ə/ observed in a substantial part of the area mediana, e.g.
([ˈjwornə] ‘day(s)’ < DIURNUM/-I, Maccarrone 1915:16)—to the dialect of Spoleto (province of Perugia) contrasts
cover the whole of present-day Lazio, as well as the whole [ˈmaɲːo] ‘eat.1SG’, [ˈkreːto] ‘believe.1SG’ vs [ˈtitːu] ‘roof ’,
of Abruzzo and Molise, and the southern Marche including [ˈbelːu] ‘beautiful.MSG’ (Moretti 1987:81-4); Rieti [ˈsɛnto]
the province of Ascoli (cf. Vignuzzi 1994:332; Barbato ‘hear.1SG’, [senˈtɛnːo] ‘hear.GER’ vs [ˈaːku] ‘needle’, [ˈokːju]
2008:280). Northwards it extended as far as Romagna, ‘eye’ (Campanelli 1896:34-8); Macerata [ˈvɔʝːo] ‘want.1SG’,
where, in contrast to other Gallo-Italic dialects (except [caˈmɛnːo] ‘call.GER’ vs [ˈnaːsu] ‘nose’, [ˈruʃːu] ‘red.MSG’. This
Ligurian), word-final unstressed vowels were preserved deserves to be treated in more detail since it is the only
until the late fourteenth century (Sanfilippo 2007:424), as isogloss singling out the area mediana dialects from those
well as the final ‑/o/ vs ‑/u/ contrast (Formentin 2007:146- spoken all around them. In most dialects in this subdivision
53). A fortiori, the same was true of northern Marchigiano (Vignuzzi 1988:619; Avolio 1995:36), retention of this contrast
(Urbino), which belonged to the area mediana until the goes hand in hand with so-called Sabino (or Ciociaresco)
fifteenth century (Vignuzzi 1988:611). This gradual shift of metaphony (named after Sabina and Ciociaria, north and
some of the criterial isoglosses (particularly those involving southeast of Rome respectively), which involves raising not
final unstressed vowels and metaphony) has resulted, espe- only of proto-Romance high-mid but also low-mid vowels
cially at the southeastern border, in a gradual transition when they originally preceded unstressed -/i/ < -Ī or -/u/ < -Ŭ
from the mediano to the upper southern type (Vignuzzi (examples in Table 15.1 from Ascrea, in Sabina, province of
1988:607). The modern dialect situation can be compared Rieti; see Fanti 1938:210-17):
with its medieval antecedents, because the area under A minority of dialects show metaphonic diphthongiza-
examination is the best documented for the earliest period: tion, not raising, of low mid vowels as in Neapolitan
about two thirds of all extant vernacular Italian texts (and most of the upper south; §16.2.1.1.1), witness the
between the tenth and early thirteenth centuries come following examples from Norcia in Table 15.2 (Moretti
from this zone (cf. Baldelli 1983:95). 1987:116 and AIS pt 576).
A further distribution, now attested in the dialects of
Rocca di Papa and, less systematically, Nemi (Castelli
Romani, Lorenzetti 1995:20), involves metaphonic diph-
15.2 Area mediana stricto sensu thongization such as that in (b) in Table 15.1 (e.g.
[ˈpjetːu] ‘breast’, [ˈwosːu] ‘bone’), alongside lack of me-
15.2.1 Phonology taphony of high mid vowels ([ˈfredːu/-i] ‘cold.MSG/PL’,
[ˈorʦu/-i] ‘bear,-s’), except in third person pronouns
15.2.1.1 Vowels ([ˈisːu/-i] MSG/PL vs [ˈesːa/-e] FSG/PL). As observed by
Preservation of the distinction between word-final Lorenzetti (1995:18f.), apart from pronouns this situation
unstressed ‑/o/ and ‑/u/ and, hence, of a five-vowel corresponds to old Romanesco, where lack of metaphonic
Table 15.1 Distribution of metaphony in dialect of Ascrea

+ METAPHONY METAPHONY
a. /e/ [ˈmitːi] ‘put.2SG’, [ˈmiːlu] ‘apple’ [ˈmetːo] ‘put.1SG’, [ˈmeːla] ‘apples’

/o/ [ˈʃpuːsu] ‘bridegroom’ [ˈʃpoːsa] ‘bride’, [ˈʃpoːso] ‘marry.1SG’
b. /ɛ/ [ˈwecːu] ‘old.MSG’, [ˈermi] ‘worms’ [ˈwɛcːa] ‘old.FSG’, [ˈɛrme] ‘worm’
/ɔ/ [ˈnoːwu] ‘new.MSG’, [ˈmoːri] ‘die.2SG’ [ˈnɔːwa] ‘new.FSG’, [ˈmɔːre] ‘die.3SG’
Table 15.2 Metaphonetic raising in the dialect of Norcia

+ METAPHONY METAPHONY
a. /e/ [ˈmitːi] ‘put.2SG’ [ˈmetːo] ‘put.1SG’

/o/ [ˈsuːlu/-i] ‘alone.MSG/PL’ [ˈsoːla/-e] ‘alone.FSG/PL’
b. /ɛ/ [ˈbːjɛjːu] ‘beautiful.MSG’ [ˈbːɛlːa] ‘beautiful.FSG’
/ɔ/ [ˈmwɔrti] ‘dead.PTCP.MPL’ [ˈmɔrte] ‘death’
230
raising (cf. (a) in Table 15.2) is usually regarded as original Metaphony in verb inflection in the third person plural of
(Ernst 1970:53-8).2 non-first conjugation verbs (Dressler and Thornton 1991),
Also much debated is the diachronic relationship occurs in the northern part of the upper south (see the
between Tables 15.1 and 15.2: Loporcaro (2011b:130-35) con- examples from Sora, Arpino, and Castro dei Volsci in
cludes that the distribution in Table 15.2 is a further devel- Merlo 1909:70-74; cf. Parodi 1893:302-6; Vignoli 1911:167f.)
opment of that in Table 15.1, such that the entire area and a substantial part of the area mediana up to a line Rome–
mediana must have originally displayed only rising metaph- Rieti–Norcia according to Merlo (1909:70): e.g. Rieti
ony of the Sabino/Ciociaresco type, as argued by Barbato [ˈsentu/-i] ‘feel.3PL/2SG’ vs [ˈsɛnto] ‘feel.1SG’, [ˈmoːru/-i]
(2008). Supporters of the opposite view (e.g. Merlo 1920:170; ‘die.3PL/2SG’ vs [ˈmɔːro] ‘die.1SG’ (Campanelli 1896:17, 51).
Balducci 1993:160) point to the fact (Vignuzzi 1984:36 n.27) One also finds third person plural metaphony further
that diphthongs occur in some isolated points such as Grec- north, in the lower Valnerina (province of Terni,
cio, on the western limit of Reatino, bordering on Umbria, Ugoccioni 1990:226).
which are surrounded by the metaphony type illustrated in As noted, the five-vowel system once spanned a larger
Table 15.1 and interpreted as remnants of a previous stage. territory, and there is clear evidence for its continued
Indeed, Grecciano has [ˈfwoːku] ‘fire’, [ˈbwoːnu] ‘good.MSG’, further retreat: for instance, in Umbria the contrast is
[ˈwortu] ‘vegetable garden’. However, as shown by stable in the southeastern corner (Terni, Spoleto) but is
Giammarco (1970:440) and Paiella (1973:422-7), it also has losing ground east of the Tiber in the Foligno area, whose
[ˈkornu] ‘horn’, [ˈodːʒi] ‘today’, with Sabino metaphony as urban dialect preserves [ˈmuːru] ‘wall’, [ˈaːku] ‘needle’
in the surrounding area, and, crucially, [ˈio ˈkwoːʧo] ‘I cook’, (vs [ˈmɛjːo] ‘better’ < MĔLIOR, [sarˈbanːo] ‘save.GER’), yet
[ˈwosːa] ‘bones’, with diphthongs outside the metaphonic also has, unpredictably, some occurrences of ‑/o/ as
environment, clear proof that diphthongs are not original outcomes of ‑U ([ˈkruːðo] ‘raw.MSG’, Moretti 1987:107f.).3
(and, in the second case, that they cannot be due to In Gualdo Cattaneo, on the other hand (17 km west-
Tuscanization). southwest), only a few words with the -[itːu] suffix
A further reconstructive inference concerns the condi- retain word-final -/u/ (e.g. [kaˈrːitːu] ‘small waggon’,
tioning environment of metaphony: this seems to have been [karˈʦitːu] ‘sock’) whereas word-final -/o/ has generalized
originally characterized as [+high], such that dialects in this elsewhere (Ugolini 1977:293). This shows that final -[u]
area where metaphony is triggered only by (the outcome of) has been yielding to -[o] through lexical diffusion: also
‑Ī, not by ‑Ŭ (> ‑/o/), highlight a secondary restriction of the dialects spoken in areas near the upper south border, in
application context; cf. [ru ˈpɛːɛ], [ri ˈpjɛːi] (AIS 1.163) ‘the the southeast of the area mediana, show a similar situ-
foot, the feet’ in the dialect of Norcia (pt 576), or [kaˈpelːo], ation, as is the case for the Cicolano varieties described
[kaˈpijːi] ‘hair.SG/PL’, [ˈpɛe], [ˈpjei] ‘foot, feet’ in Amerino by Giammarco (1970:435): in Leonessa one unpredictably
(Moretti 1987:125; [ɛl ˈpjɛːi] ‘the feet’ AIS pt 584), within a finds either [korˈtɛlːo] ‘knife’, [ˈleɲːo] ‘wood’ or
system where metaphony shows exceptions ([ˈbɛlːo/‑i] [kaˈneʃtru] ‘basket’, [maˈeʃtru] ‘teacher’. Giammarco
‘beautiful.MSG/PL’). Also near the southern border of the (1970:436) also observed that the -[u] vs -[o] contrast is
area mediana one observes comparably irregular distribu- stable in the bigger centres of the belt between Terni,
tions: for Veroli (province of Frosinone) Vignoli (1925:11-16) Rieti, and L’Aquila, whereas lexical diffusion of -[o] < -[u]
reports for proto-Romance stressed /ɔ/ in closed syllables is observed in the surrounding small villages. South of
regular alternations like [ˈmɔrtu/ˈmorti] ‘dead.PTCP.MSG/PL’, L’Aquila and southeast of Cicolano, a Tuscan-like four-
but also [ˈɡrusːo] ‘big.MSG’ < GRŎSSUM, which has been treated vowel system has become established in a corridor
irregularly on a par with lexemes with proto-Romance (described in detail by Schanzer 1989:146-8) stretching
stressed /o/ (e.g. [ˈrutːo/ˈrotːa] ‘broken.PTCP.MSG/FSG’), pre- from Tagliacozzo, Magliano de’ Marsi, and Massa d’Albe
supposing previous application of metaphony in this con- (province of L’Aquila) down to the Tyrrhenian coast
text as well (cf. however Maiden 1991a:143 n.5). (Anzio, Nettuno, Sabaudia), whence it reaches Rome and
2
Merlo (1929:47) claimed that preliterary old Romanesco must have had 3
This need not affect phonemic structure, since ‑O > -[o] is stable. Thus,
metaphony as in (a) in Table 15.1 too and, recently, Formentin (2012:66f.) one can say that transcriptions of Folignate words in Bruschi (1980:xxix)
uncovers examples of metaphony in a 14th-c. text (e.g. lavoratore/lavoraturi reflect phonemic perception (e.g. [ˈmɔːro] ‘die.1SG’, [ˈpɔrto] ‘bring.1SG’ vs
‘worker, -s’). While these attest to a transitional system, Formentin [ˈventu] ‘wind’, [ˈvoːnu] ‘good.MSG’). However, vacillation in the notation of
(2013:303) concludes that these are instances of incipient, animacy- ‑U as ‑o/‑u was already observed in Folignate popular spelling in the early
sensitive metaphonic alternations, rather than remnants of earlier regular 20th c. (cf. Ugolini 1977:296), and, to a lesser extent, in 14th-c. texts
metaphonic alternation, given their absence from the Romance forms (Mattesini 1990:178). Similar instances of phonetic vacillation have been
in medieval Latin documents from Rome (documented in Formentin described for all sub-areas of the area mediana (cf. Franceschi 1979:1930;
2012–13:18, 43). Lorenzetti 1995:27; Paciaroni 2009b; Paciaroni and Loporcaro 2010:503).
231
the perimediano part of Lazio west of the Tiber.4 Thus, in [ˈporko] ‘pig’, [ventaˈrejːo] ‘small wind’ vs [ˈmunːuru] ‘cloth to
Canistro (province of L’Aquila) one finds ‑/o/ in both clean the oven’, [aˈʧiːtɯ/-o] ‘vinegar’), and in two larger areas
[ˈstiːso] ‘spread.PTCP.MSG’ (< ‑U) and [ˈkreːdo] ‘believe.1SG’ of Lazio. The first, described by Merlo (1920:234; 1922:53) for
(< ‑O) (Crocioni 1901:431f.), and at Velletri in [ˈvjento] Cervara di Roma ([ˈfridːu] ‘cold.MSG’, [ˈmuːru] ‘wall’, [ˈpanːu]
‘wind’ and [ˈmɔːvo] ‘move.1SG’ (Crocioni 1907:33-5). ‘cloth’ vs [ˈtempo] ‘time’, [ˈosːo] ‘bone’), spans a territory east
That this is a transitional stage between the five-vowel of the capital with its northern limit at Roccagiovine (west)
and the Tuscan system is suggested also by geographic and Camerata Nuova (east), stretching southeastwards down
distribution. Schanzer (1989:170) shows that some of the to Roiate (Orlandi 2000:103f.), Arcinazzo, and Vallepietra (cf.
dialects of southern Lazio which today merge final Merlo 1930:52). The second, further south, includes Minturno,
unstressed vowels as -[ə] (Terracinese) restore contrasting Spigno Saturnia, and Coreno Ausonio (see, for Minturno, the
unstressed vowels in slow/accurate speech. Moreover, ALI data discussed in Schirru 2012:167f., e.g. [ˈletːo] ‘bed’,
these contrasts are preserved (though see below for pro- [ˈbːoːno] ‘good.MSG’ vs [ˈnaːsu] ‘nose’, [ˈviːnu] ‘wine’). This latter
gressive assimilation involving -U) in an enclave further to vowel harmony system, as noted, is surrounded by dialects
the east (including Minturno, Ausonia, Spigno Saturnia etc.; with a binary contrast between word-final -/ə/ and -/a/, while
cf. Schanzer 1989:172f.) beyond today’s border with the the former lies between five-vowel systems, to the west, and
upper south subdivision: e.g. in Minturno [lo ˈviːno] ‘wine’, Tuscan-like four-vowel systems, to the east.
[ʎːo kaˈpːeʎːo] ‘the hat’, [la ʧeˈraːsa/le ʧeˈraːse] ‘the cherry.
SG/PL’. In the reduction brought about by this merger, one
5
still observes intermediate stages preserved in neighbour- 15.2.1.2 Consonants

ing dialects. Some dialects west of the southern Lazio strip
The features distinguishing the area mediana from Tuscany
with Tuscan vowel systems show a three-way contrast ‑/ə/
do not really single out this dialect group but are (or were)
< ‑O,‑U,‑E vs ‑/i/ < -Ī vs ‑/a/ < ‑A: e.g. Alatri (Ceci 1886:174-6)
widely shared with the rest of central-southern Italy (i.e.
[ˈmɛrdə] ‘deserve.1SG’, [prəˈsutːə] ‘ham’, [ˈʧeɲːərə] ‘ash’ vs
with Pellegrini’s 1977 upper and extreme south). Thus the
[ˈtau̯la] ‘table’ vs [kaˈvaʎːi] ‘horses’; Vico nel Lazio (Avolio
isoglosses listed in (1), exemplified with data from the
1993:xx; 2009:99) [ˈwaːdə] ‘go.1SG’, [ˈfatːə] ‘done.PTCP.MSG’,
dialect of Ascrea (province of Rieti, Fanti 1938-40):
[ˈpaːnə] ‘bread vs [ˈokːa] ‘mouth’ vs [kaˈpiʎːi] ‘hair.PL’.
In between, both geographically and structurally, there
(1) a. -ND- > [nː]: [ˈwenːe] ‘sell.INF’, [ˈtunːu] ‘round.
are dialects like Amasenense with a phonological four-
MSG’, [ˈfjonːa] ‘slingshot’
vowel system where ‑/o/ < -O, ‑U only optionally merges
b. -MB-, -NV- > [mː]: [ˈpjumːu] ‘lead’, [ˈmːokːa] ‘in (the)
with ‑/ə/ < ‑E: [ˈkanto/‑ə] ‘sing.1SG’, [kaˈvaʎːo/‑ə] ‘horse’ vs
mouth’, [ˈmːeːʃe] ‘instead’
[ˈfraːtə] ‘brother’ vs [ˈɛrva] ‘grass’ vs [ˈkriʃːi] ‘grow.2SG’
c. -LD- > [lː]: [ˈkalːu] ‘hot, heat’, [ʃfaˈlːa] ‘flake.INF’
(Vignoli 1920:35).
d. -I̯- (= -DI̯-) > [j]: [jeˈtːa] ‘throw.INF’, [ˈjuu] ‘yolk’,
In addition, there are four zones in the area mediana in
[ˈmaːju] ‘May’, [deˈjuːnu] ‘fast
which -U > -[o] applied context-dependently (only after non-
(ing)’
mid stressed vowels), giving rise to partial rightward vowel
e. -MI̯- > [ɲː]: [weˈnːeɲːa] ‘grape harvest’
harmony. This happened in just one dialect of central Mar-
f. -RI̯- > [r]: [kraˈpaːru] ‘goatherd’ < CAPRARIUM,
che (San Severino, province of Macerata: [ˈkotːo] ‘cooked.
[paˈnaːra] ‘basket’ < PANARIAM
PTCP.MSG’, [aˈlːesːo] ‘boiled meat’ vs [fiˈniːtu] ‘ended.PTCP.MSG’,
g. B - > [v] (> Ø) (and -C V - > [Cb]): [ˈokːa] ‘mouth’
[ˈkaːʃu] ‘cheese’; Paciaroni and Loporcaro 2010:501f.; Biondi
< BUCCAM, [ʒbeˈla] ‘unveil’, [abːiˈa]
2013:587-624), in two centres of the province of L’Aquila,
‘start.INF’
Poggio di Roio where it is productive, and Piànola where it is
h. voicing of stops after nasals: [ˈtempû] ‘time’,
being lost (see Avolio 2009:111f., e.g. Piànola [ˈtempo] ‘time’,
[manˈt̬elːu] ‘cloak’, [kanˈt̬ ʃ elːu]
‘gate’.
4
As observed in §15.1, Rome stands out in this context. While all dialects
inherited from Latin the 5-vowel system, in Rome the ‑/u/ vs ‑/o/ contrast
The list, first given by Merlo (1920:240-45), includes fea-
had merged by the time of the earliest documents, whereas the Lazio tures of different ‘weight’, in many respects: (1f), for
dialects northwest of Rome preserved the contrast until much later instance, is pervasive, occurring across the lexicon, and is
(Bianconi 1962:48f.; Formentin 2012-13:120). Barbato (2008:280 n.14) enter-
tains the hypothesis that this early isolation of Rome from its surroundings
shared by northern Italo-Romance (as opposed to -RI̯- > [j] in
was at least partly due to its close relationship with Naples in the 7th-8th c., Tuscany and part of the area perimediana); (1e), on the other
prior to the pro-Frankish turn of the papacy. hand, spans most of Italy south of Fano (province of Pesaro-
5
Note that this enclave is also a stronghold of Sabine raising metaph-
ony, as opposed to Neapolitan diphthongization, a further argument for the
Urbino, AIS pt 529, 7.1316) but is restricted to just a few
conservative nature of the distribution in Table 15.1 vs that in Table 15.2. lexemes (where it competes with [m]). (1c) stretches into
232
just the northern part of the upper south, as far as the and 567 (AIS 1.148, 149, 151). This has attracted nouns
Cassino–Gargano line (Avolio 1990), whereas (1a,b) and from other classes, e.g. AIS 6.1068 ‘the sheep/PL’, Serrone,
(1h) coexist as the two outputs of one chain shift in most pt 654 [la ˈpɛːku/le ˈp̬ɛːk̬o], Poggio San Romualdo, province
of southern Italy, with the exception of Sicily and parts of of Ancona, [a/ e/i ˈpjeːgu] (see below; cf. also Rohlfs
Calabria, and Salento (cf. §16.2.2.2). (1a,b) also extend into 1968:16-19). Competing plural formations occur for etymo-
the area perimediana (cf. §15.3.1.2). logically feminine nouns of the third inflectional class.
Since the changes resulting in these isoglosses all Inherited [ˈcaː(v)e/ˈca(v)i] ‘key/-s’ has been common since
involved restructuring of phonological representations, the earliest texts (e.g. in Codex diplomaticus Cajetanus, AD 997,
their outputs (diverging from Tuscan) are subject to stand- duo parti ‘two parts’; De Bartholomaeis 1902-5),7 and has
ardization pressure and word-by-word replacement. This is been extended to class one plurals (e.g. [ˈkarti] ‘papers’,
most clear in Rome, whose medieval dialect featured the [ʧiˈpulːi] ‘onions’; for further examples see Rohlfs 1968:25-7)
entire list except (1h) (Merlo 1929; Ernst 1970), whereas and in some dialects even to the singular, e.g. Veroli [ˈfau̯ʧi]
contemporary Romanesco only retains (the lexicalized out- ‘scythe.FSG=PL’, [ˈkau̯ʧi] ‘lime.FSG=PL’, [ˈkjavi] ‘key.FSG=PL’,
puts of) (1f) and (1a) ([bːibːiˈt̬aːro] ‘cold-drink seller’, [ˈparti] ‘part.FSG=PL’ (Vignoli 1925:44). Forms like [ˈfau̯ʧi],
[ˈkwanːo] ‘when’) and, more sparingly, (1b,c) ([ˈpjomːo] [ˈkau̯ʧi] show that it is not a matter of (semantically)
‘lead’, and the sole lexical item [ˈkalːo] ‘heat’), the rest unmarked plurals. Moreover, in Veroli masculine pluralia
having been swept away by Tuscanization. Even abstracting tantum have developed from defunct feminine singulars,
away from these secondary standardization effects, the e.g. [ˈmaʃkri] ‘masks’ from {[ˈmaʃkra] (Vignoli 1925:44-6;
areal distribution of these isoglosses becomes fuzzier, not see discussion in Formentin and Loporcaro 2012:241). The
unexpectedly, as one approaches the Rome–Ancona line. introduction of the plural suffix -[e] from the first to the
Thus, in the province of Ancona, Balducci’s (1987:281) iso- third inflectional class is an old phenomenon (cf. ad l’altre
glosses show that (1a) reaches furthest north, including Jesi, matre ‘to the other mothers’ in the early fourteenth-century
Osimo, Arcevia, and Fabriano, whereas (1b,c) exclude Jesi Maceratese Pianto delle Marie; Ugolini 1959:119) and wide-
and Osimo, and (1b) alone excludes Arcevia.6 These lines spread, e.g. AIS 5.889, Trevi (pt 575), Rieti (here coexisting
have been moving, though, as shown by the fact that with [ˈɟaːi]) [ˈɟaːe/ˈɟaːe]; Treia [ˈcaːe/ˈcaːe] ‘key/-s’ (Rohlfs
Crocioni’s (1906:13-16) description of the variety of Certo- 1968:33f.; Maiden 1996a:157-9).
piano of Arcevia displays all these features: [ˈgranːe] ‘big’, In noun inflection, several kinds of morphonological stem
[ˈgamːa] ‘leg’ (and hypercorrect [ˈnsomba] ‘in sum’), [ˈkalːo] alternation occur. They often feature multiple exponence of
‘heat’, [ˈsɔlːo] ‘coin’, [ˈfalːa] ‘fold, brim’ (and hypercorrect morphosyntactic information, with number (e.g. Mac.
[mbeˈʧilde] ‘idiot’); cf. Tsc. gamba vs insomma, caldo, soldo, [ˈpeʃːe/ˈpiʃːi] ‘fish.SG/PL’) and, for adjectives, also gender
falda vs imbecille. (Mac. [ˈboːno/ˈboːnu/ˈboːni/ˈbɔːna/ˈbɔːne] ‘good.N/MSG/
MPL/FSG/FPL’) signalled on root allomorphs in addition to
inflectional endings. Many varieties have a class of mascu-
15.2.2 Morphology line nouns ending in a stressed vowel following apocope of a
following syllable starting with /n/, /l/, or /r/ in the sin-
gular, but not in the plural (e.g. Matélica [paˈtro/paˈtruːni]
Affixal inflectional classes and stem alternations are com-
‘lord/-s’, Poggio S. Romualdo [boˈtːo/boˈtːuːni] ‘button/-s’)
mon features of inflectional systems in this area.
or in both (e.g. Servigliano, Camilli 1929:226, Mac. [paˈtro/
The historically underlying noun system must have been
paˈtru ‘lord/-s’]). This is a further development of a former
everywhere similar to that observed in Rieti (Campanelli
regular metaphonic alternation (cf. §15.2.1.1).
1896 and AIS pt 624). Classes -a/-e and -u/-i from the Latin
Some dialects with word-final five-vowel systems have an
first and second inflectional classes are overall stable and
inflectional class -o/Ø including only nouns belonging to the
even reinforced (see e.g. AIS 7.1403, Rieti, Leonessa, pt 615,
(mass) neuter gender. This class arose from replacement of
Nemi, pt 662 [(l)a ˈfarʤa] ‘scythe’ (< FALCEM); 6.1042, Palom-
the original suffix -u (or -e) with -o on the analogy of neuter
bara Sabina, pt 643 [u ˈbːɔːvu/i ˈbːoːvi] ‘the ox/-en’
determiners in -o (see below): Genzano and Lanuvio (prov-
(< BŎUEM/-ES); Rohlfs 1968:12-16). Preservation of the
ince of Rome, Lorenzetti 1995:27f., 171) [o ˈviːno/ˈkaːʃo]
inherited Latin fourth inflectional class is widespread: e.g.
‘the.N wine/cheese’ vs [u ˈlibːru] ‘the.M book’. The correl-
[la/le ˈmaːno] ‘the hand/-s’ in Scansano, or Muccia, pts 581
ation with metaphonic raising is variable: many dialects
retained the original metaphonic alternant of the stressed
6
At the northeastern extremity of the crucial bundle of isoglosses,
urban Anconitano has neither (1a,b) nor postnasal voicing: [ˈtɛmpu]
‘time’, [ˈkwantu] ‘how much’, [kumˈpra] ‘buy.INF’, [ˈmondu] ‘world’ 7
Gaeta, now at the northwestern border of the upper south subdivision,
(Parrino 1967:23f.). belonged to the area mediana in the Middle Ages (Barbato 2008:280).
233
vowel, not only in masculine nouns that preserved final -[u] Table 15.3 The four-gender system of Roiatese (Orlandi
but also in neuters that replaced it with -[o]: cf. [ˈferːu] ‘iron 2000:105f., 111)
implement’ vs [ˈferːo] ‘iron’ in Treia (AIS pt 558; today with
SINGULAR PLURAL
optional degemination [r] < [rː]) or in Cantalice (province of
Rieti, Paiella 1973:435); the same is true of the dialects of N lo pa — ‘bread’ (mass)
Servigliano (Camilli 1929:225) and Ascrea (Fanti 1939:131). M ju ˈpetːu i ˈpetːi ‘chest’
In other dialects the stressed vowel of o-ending neuters was AN ju ˈtitːu le ˈtetːora ‘roof ’
readjusted, e.g. Norcia, AIS pt 576 [lo ˈfɛːro] ‘DEF.N iron’ vs F la ˈkaːsa le ˈkaːsi ‘house’
[lu ˈpjɛtːu] ‘the.M breast’ (maps 2.403, 1.125), Leonessa pt 615
[lo ˈfɛːro] vs [ru ˈpjetːu] (see Rohlfs 1966:185; Maiden
1989:182; 1991a:160-62, 177-9; Lorenzetti 1995:187f.).
Several inflectional classes evince the persistence of The same opposition as with definite articles is found every-
forms once associated with the Latin neuter gender: the where ab initio in demonstratives and clitics (see the
class -u/-a < -Ŭ(M)/-A is more robust than the corresponding thirteenth-century Ritmo cassinese, de quillu mundu ‘from
-o/-a class in standard Italian: e.g. Segni (province of Rome, that.MSG world’ vs quello ke sactio ‘that.N which I know’, lo
Lorenzi 2005:xli), [ˈorto/ˈɔrta] ‘garden/-s’, Roiate (Orlandi bollo pria mustrare ‘it.N= I.want first show.INF’, lo mello ‘the.N
2000:106) [stiˈriʎːu/steˈrelːa] ‘small pigsty/-ies’, [liˈviːtu/ best’; Formentin 2007). Moreover, in various dialects this
leˈveːta] ‘olive grove/‑s’, Cori (Chiominto 1984:151) opposition has come to be marked on nouns (see above),
[veˈlotːʃo/veˈlɔtːʃa] ‘yolk/-s’, [siˈpːortiko/siˈpːɔrtika] ‘inter- adjectives, participles, and quite exceptionally even on indef-
ior of porch’, [ˈvaːgo/ˈvaːga] ‘grape/-s’; Poggio San Romualdo inite articles (see below) and degree adverbs: e.g. Mac. [lu pre
[ˈlimːitu/ˈlemːeta], ‘natural slope/-s dividing plots of land’; ˈʃutːu ɛ ˈtːandu/**ˈtːando ˈvoːnu] ‘the ham is very.MSG/N
Rohlfs (1968:35-7). A -u/-e class developed through analogical good’ vs [lo ˈpa ɛ ˈtːando/**ˈtːandu ˈvoːno] ‘the bread is
replacement of the old neuter plural -a suffix with -e typically very.N/M.SG good’.
associated with feminine plural, e.g. Servigliano (Camilli From a lexical point of view, this neuter is productive, as
1929:226), Mac. [ˈmuːru/ˈmuːre] ‘wall/-s’, Spoleto [ˈlabːru/ it attracts recent loans (e.g. Treiese [o ˈʃːambo] ‘shampoo’).
ˈlabːre] ‘lip/-s’ (Cuzzini Neri and Gentili 2008). In some dia- Semantically, it hosts only non-countable nouns, and nom-
lects both -u/-a and -u/-e classes coexist, leading inalizations are assigned to it (e.g. Treiese [o maˈɲːa] lit.
to overabundance in the plural: Treiese [ˈɔːu//ˈɔːa/ˈɔːe] ‘the eat.INF (= eating’)). Syntactically, neuter agreement
‘egg/-s’. A ‑u (‑o)/‑ora class (from the reanalysis of TEMPOR-A occurs with clausal subjects or objects as controllers (see
‘times’ > TEMP-ORA) is (near) extinct in the whole area (e.g. Cori, §15.2.3, (5)).
Chiominto 1984:151, archaic [leˈviːto/leˈveːtera] ‘olive The alternating neuter has forms syncretic with the mas-
grove/-s’, now [leˈviːto/leˈviːti]), except central-southern culine in the singular and the feminine in the plural, though
Lazio: Serrone (AIS pt 654) [ˈraːmo/ˈraːmora] ‘branch/-es’ medieval varieties still had residues of non-syncretic forms
(Rohlfs 1968:39-41). An innovative class -u (-o)/-ore occurs, in the plural (see Faraoni et al. 2013:178). This agreement
e.g. Servigliano: [ˈfiːko/ˈfiːkore] ‘fig/‑s’ (Camilli 1929:226). pattern is selected by nouns of several inflectional classes:
Plurals in -ora are well documented in early texts from all -u/-a, -u/-e, -u (-o)/-ora, -e/-era, e.g. Treiese [u ˈvratːʃu/
areas at least until the fourteenth century (cf. Faraoni 2012). /e ˈvratːʃa/ˈvratːʃe] ‘the arm/-s’; Roiatese [ju ˈwaːku/
A salient feature of the area mediana (and most of the le ˈwaːka] ‘grape/-s’, [ju ˈniːvu/le ˈneːora] ‘the nest/-s’,
upper south) is the occurrence of gender systems with four [ju ˈwaːku/le ˈwaːkora] ‘the small grape/-s’, [j ˈorto/le
values. Besides masculine and feminine, as in Italian, there ˈɔrtera] ‘the kitchen-garden/-s’, [ju ˈnoːme/le ˈnɔːmera]
are two neuter genders due to a split of the Latin neuter, a ‘the noun/ -s’ (Orlandi 2000:106).
so-called ‘mass neuter’ or ‘neo-neuter’ (N) and an ‘alternat- The dialect of Poggio S. Romualdo displays remnants of a
ing neuter’ (AN; see §57.3.3). The agreement paradigm that symmetrical inquorate (Corbett 1991:172) alternating gen-
motivates this analysis is exemplified from the dialect of der, selecting agreement targets syncretic with feminine
Roiate in Table 15.3 with definite articles, which is where in the singular and with masculine in the plural, e.g. [a
gender contrasts are signalled most systematically. paˈtaːta/i paˈtaːti] ‘the.FSG potato/the.MPL potatoes’ (but
Before [‒COUNT] nouns like ‘bread’, there is a third distinct form also [e paˈtaːte] ‘the.FPL potatoes’; Poeta 1988:51f.), [na
of the article contrasting with both masculine and feminine.8 ˈpjeːgu/i ˈpjeːgu] ‘a.FSG/the.MPL sheep’ (Balducci 2000:124f.;
this archaic form co-occurs with [e ˈpjeːgu] ‘the.FPL sheep’,
Silvano Poeta, p.c.). A similar gender-system occurred in old
8
On alternative accounts, treating the contrast [lo ˈpa] ‘bread’ vs [ju
ˈpetːu] ‘the chest’ in dialects like that in Table 15.3 as a merely semantic Romanesco (Formentin and Loporcaro 2012), and persists in
mass/count distinction within the masculine gender, see §57.4. some modern southern dialects (§57.3.3, 25).
234
As for evaluative suffixes, diminutives are mostly formed (Camilli 1929:228) masculine singular [(ˈkwi)stu]/
with -[itːu], -[ilːu], -[utːʃu], e.g. Spoleto, [baˈʃitːu] ‘little kiss’, [(ˈkwi)sːu]/[(ˈkwi)lːu] ‘this (near speaker)/this (near
[tutːsiˈtːilːu] ‘little crust (of bread)’, [kavaˈlːutːʃu] ‘little hearer)/that’: full forms are used both adnominally and
horse’, Moretti (1987:100f.). pronominally; reduced forms occur only before nouns (cf.
The comparative is analytic (e.g. Mac. [ˈpju ʃˈtritːu] lit. §54.1.4). Gender/number marking capitalizes on metapho-
‘more narrow’), though synthetic forms from MĔLĬOR ‘better’, nic alternation, metaphony having applied in masculine
PĔIOR ‘worse’, MĬNUS ‘less’ survive almost everywhere, e.g. singular/plural [ˈkwistu/-i] but not in neuter or in feminine
Rieti [ˈmɛʎːo], [ˈpɛːjo], San Ginesio [ˈmiːno] (Merlo singular/plural [ˈkwesto/-a/-e]. Additional pronominal
1906:442f.). Superlatives in ‑issimo are not found, with forms for human referents are: [kusˈtu]/[kuˈsːu]/[kuˈlːu].
intensification marked by repetition (e.g. Mac. [ɛ ˈtːʃuːk̬u The same three-way contrast occurs in the locative adverb
ˈʧuːk̬u] ‘he/it is very small’; Rohlfs 1968:87f.), by construc- (e.g. Serviglianese [ˈɛkːo]/[ˈɛsːo]/[ˈɛlːo]; Camilli 1929:231) and
tions such as adjective + degree adverbial (e.g. Mac. [ɛ ˈbːrau the presentative adverb (e.g. [ˈɛkːuju]/[ˈɛsːuju]/[ˈɛʎːuju]
un ˈtːsakːu] ‘he/it is very good (lit. good a sack)’), or adjec- ‘here/there he is’, Cervara, Merlo 1922:53), and, more seldom,
tive + apposition (e.g. Spoleto [sɔ aˈmaːri araˈbːjaːti] ‘they in the modal adverb: Paliano (province of Frosinone; Navone
are very bitter (lit. bitter angry)’, Moretti 1987:96; Rohlfs 1922:95) [akːuˈsi]/[asːoˈsi]/[alːoˈsi] ‘in this/that way’; Pizzoli
1968:89). (province of L’Aquila; Vignuzzi 1997:315) [kːuˈʃinda]/[sː-
Throughout the area the definite article displays the so- uˈʃinda]/[lːuˈʃinda] ‘in this/that way’. The adverbs for the
called ‘strong’ form, retaining the etymological final vowel: two non-proximal meanings have been secondarily shaped by
Reatino [(l)o] neuter, [(l)u/(l)i] masculine, [(l)a/(l)e] femin- superimposing the three-way contrast originally found in
ine ([l] prevocalically; Campanelli 1896:35f., 65f.), from Latin demonstratives onto [(a)kːuˈʃi]/[(a)kːuˈsi] < *AD-(E)CCU-SIC. The
*ilˈlɔk, ILLU(M)/ILLI, ILLA(M)/ILLAE (see fn. 18, Ch. 57). There is forms show some variation: for instance in Umbria (Spoleto)
much (micro‑)diatopic formal variation, especially regard- and western Marche (Esanatoglia), [ˈtesto] < TIBI ĬSTU(M) occurs
ing the development of original -LL- before high vowels as the addressee-oriented demonstrative, and the same goes
(Vignuzzi 1997:316; Rohlfs 1968:107). The most widespread for the perimediano dialects of southern Tuscany (Grossetano-
type (found in much of the lower Sabine area in the prov- Amiatino) (Moretti 1987:98; Rohlfs 1968:210-12; Vignuzzi
inces of Rome and Rieti, in the Terni area, and in Macerata 1997:317; Giannelli 2000:109). Non-reinforced forms [ˈeʃto]/
and parts of its province) retains the initial lateral, whereas [ˈesːo]/[ˈelːo] are well attested in modern varieties (e.g. Rieti,
other dialects, similar to Reatino, tend to weaken and/or Treia) and documented since the earliest texts (fourteenth-
lose it: rhotacized [ru, ri] occurs, for example, in Greccio century Pianto delle Marie: s’ello è viro ‘if that.N is true.N’; Ugolini
and Norcia (Moretti 1987:120); palatalized [ju (ʎu), ji (ʎi)] in 1959:120).
the Sabino dialects of the L’Aquila area (Avolio 2009:81f.; Personal pronouns retain a two-way case opposition in
119f.) and in the Lazio dialects south and east of Rome (cf. first/second person singular in almost all dialects, with
Table 15.3). neutralization elsewhere, including the third persons sin-
Indefinite article forms are exemplified with data from gular/plural, e.g. Spoletino [ˈio] ‘I’ vs [ˈme] ‘me’, [ˈtu] ‘you.SG.
Esanatoglia (AIS pt 557) [un(u)/nu] masculine, [(u)na] fem- NOM’ vs [ˈte] ‘you.SG.OBL’, alongside non-case-marked [ˈisːu/
inine ([n] prevocalically). In many dialects the masculine ˈesːa] ‘3SG.M/F ’, [ˈnui ̯] ‘1PL’, [ˈvui ̯] ‘2PL’, [ˈisːi/ˈesːe] ‘3PL.M/F ’
singular ‘strong’ allomorph tends to yield to ‘weak’ [(u)n], (Moretti 1987:96). For the third persons singular/plural the
except before consonant clusters not entirely syllabified as type [ˈisːo/‑u] < ĬPSŬ(M) prevails in the whole area. In first/
onsets: Spoletino [unu ʃˈtrilːu] ‘a shout’ vs [ŋ ˈkaːne] ‘a dog’ second persons, plural forms compounded with ‘other.PL’
(Moretti 1987:94). In just one dialect of Lazio, Roiatese, and are common. These distinguish gender, e.g. Treia, M
one in the Marche, (rural) Maceratese (see Table 57.9 for [nuˈandri], [vuˈadːri] vs F [noˈandre], [voˈadːre]. Non-subject
discussion of similar examples from the upper south), mor- forms for the first/second persons singular are mainly from
phological change has brought about the rise of a neuter accusative MĒ, TĒ; some dialects also have reflexes of dative MĪ
indefinite article: Roiate [no ˈviːnu (ke mbriˈaːka)] ‘a wine.N < MIHI and analogical TĪ (for TIBI); both pairs of forms can
(that gets you drunk)’ vs [nu ˈɟoːo] ‘a.MSG nail’ vs [na ˈrɔːsa] cooccur as cell-mates in all non-subject functions, e.g. Maté-
‘a.FSG rose’ (Orlandi 2000:113). Some maceratese speakers lica [a/de/ko ˈmːe/ˈmːi] ‘to/of/with me’ and [a/de/ko ˈtːe/
have this contrast (e.g. [no ʃˈpɔrte] ‘INDF.N sport’ vs [nu ˈtːi] ‘to/of/with you.SG’. More rarely, they contrast, e.g. Co-
ʒˈgritːsu] ‘a.MSG draft’ vs [na ʃˈpiːna] ‘a.FSG thorn’), observed lonna: OBJ/OBL [a ˈmːi/ˈtːi = pe ˈmːi/ˈtːi] vs COM [ko ˈmːe/ˈtːe]
only with nouns with initial heterosyllabic consonant (vs SUBJ [ˈio/ˈtu]) (Loporcaro 2001d:462). Non-human refer-
clusters. ents are often picked up by demonstratives, but personal
Adnominal and pronominal demonstratives encode a pronoun forms are also amply attested. A survey of old
three-way person-oriented contrast, e.g. in Serviglianese texts confirms the occurrence of case-marked forms of
235
the personal pronoun: e.g. Ritmo su Sant’Alessio, AD 1211: a the rest, as non-first conjugation verbs have a suffix -[u] <
tTeve ‘to you.SG’, con seco ‘with him-/herself ’ (Formentin -UNT, which induced metaphony, and no epithetic vowel, e.g.
2007:120-23); Pianto delle Marie: illu ‘he’ vs lui ‘him’ (Ugolini Rieti, second class [ˈiːdu] ‘they see’, third class [nˈtenːu]
1959:119). ‘they intend’, fourth class [ˈmoːru] ‘they die’ vs first class
In verb morphology, evidence for the pan-Romance [ˈlɛːanu] ‘they remove’ (AIS 8.1687-94; Rohlfs 1968:255f.). For
opposition between first conjugation and non-first conjuga- the origins of this phenomenon, see Merlo (1909:70, 82f.),
tion comes both from neutralization of affixal distinctions Maiden (1991a:171f.), for its areal distribution Vignuzzi
and from class-specific regularities in stem selection. A few (1988:617).9
cases of opposition between the fourth and non-fourth In the imperfect indicative, the original system (proto-
conjugations and full conjugational neutralization in some Romance *-[ava]-, *-[eva]-, *-[iva]- survives in some var-
cells of the paradigm also occurs. ieties (e.g. Ascrea, Fanti 1939:118-20), whereas neutraliza-
The present indicative shows a strong tendency to com- tion between non-first conjugation verbs is widespread. For
plete class neutralization in all forms but third person. instance, Spoletino has extended overabundance, due to the
Analyzing neutralization in the first and second persons generalization of fourth conjugation *-[iva]- into the second
plural present indicative, Barbato (2013b) shows that many and the third, and of second and third *-[eva]- into the
dialects have a binary distinction between first conjugation fourth: [kanˈdaːa] ‘sing.IMPF.IND.3SG’ vs [guˈdiːa/goˈdeːa]
and the rest, e.g. Spoletino [kanˈdaːmo/kanˈdaːte] ‘sing.1/ ‘enjoy.IMPF.IND.3SG’, [mːiˈtiːa/mːeˈteːa] ‘reap.IMPF.IND.3SG’,
2PL’ vs [goˈdeːmo/guˈdiːmo//goˈdeːte/guˈdiːte] ‘enjoy.1/ [parˈtiːa/ parˈteːa] ‘leave.IMPF.IND.3SG’ (Cuzzini Neri and
2PL’, [meˈteːmo/miˈtiːmo//meˈteːte/miˈtiːte] ‘reap.1/2PL’, Gentili 2008:xl-xliii; cf. also Rohlfs 1968:291f.). In gerunds,
[parˈteːmo/parˈtiːmo//parˈteːte] ‘leave.1/2PL’ (Cuzzini Neri some varieties have the same pattern of neutralization, e.g.
and Gentili 2008:xl-xliv; see also Trevi AIS pt 575, Norcia pt Spoleto [parˈlanːo] ‘speak.GER’ vs [veˈtɛnːo] ‘see.GER’, [me
576, Amaseno, Vignoli 1920). Some varieties in the Sabine ˈtɛnːo] ‘reap.GER’, [parˈtɛnːo] ‘leave.GER’ (Moretti 1987:103),
area have extended second and third conjugation endings to whereas many varieties have generalized -[ˈɛnːo] of the
the first, creating a binary opposition between the fourth non-first conjugation to all conjugations (Rohlfs 1968:366).
and the rest, e.g. Ascrea (Fanti 1939:118-20) [maˈɲeːmo/ Stem alternation has been on the rise, often involving
maˈɲeːte] ‘eat.1/2PL’, [pjaˈʧeːmo/pjaˈʧeːte] ‘like.1/2PL’, enhancement of class distinctions (Maiden 2011a:209-14).
[meˈteːmo/meˈteːte] ‘reap.1/2PL’, [kroˈpiːmo/kroˈpiːte] For instance, in the second person singular present indica-
‘cover.1/2PL’ (see also Palombara Sabina, AIS pt 534). Other tive form, metaphonic raising triggered by -[i] and related
varieties have generalized the first conjugation endings to stem allomorphy occur widely: Serviglianese [ˈmitːi]
all verbs, e.g. Verolano (Vignoli 1925:49-58) [maˈɲːaːmə/ ‘put.2SG’ vs [ˈmetːo/ˈmetːe/miˈtːiːmo/meˈtːeːte] ‘put.1SG/
maˈɲːaːtə] ‘eat.1/2PL’ = [pjaˈʧaːmə/ pjaˈʧaːtə] ‘please.1/2PL’, 3SG/1PL/2PL’ (Camilli 1929:224, 229). In this context, many
[kuˈʧaːmə/kuˈʧaːtə] ‘cook.1/2PL’, [muˈraːmə/muˈraːtə] varieties of Lazio, Abruzzo, and Marche do not show the
‘die.1/2PL’ (though some ‑ĒRE verbs resisted analogy: [pa expected output of low mid vowels /ɛ ɔ/ (i.e. /e o/), but
ˈreːmə/paˈreːtə] ‘seem.1/2PL’; a similar situation obtains in rather /i u/ (the regular output of high mid vowels), e.g.
Castro dei Volsci, Vignoli 1911:167-76), others the second Cervara, Merlo (1922:13, 19) [ˈlɛːo] ‘remove.1SG’ vs [ˈliːi]
conjugation, e.g. Monte S. Giusto, province of Macerata ‘remove.2SG’, [ˈsɔːno] ‘ring.1SG’ vs [ˈsuːni] ‘ring.2SG’. This
[kanˈdeːmo/kanˈdeːt̬e] ‘sing.1/2PL’, [pjaˈt̬ ʃ eːmo/pjaˈt̬ ʃ eːt̬e] phenomenon is termed ‘hypermetaphony’ by Maiden
‘please.1/2PL’, [koˈr(ː)eːmo/koˈr(ː)eːt̬e] ‘run.1/2PL’, [parˈteːmo/ (1991a:179-87). For Lazio, see also Merlo (1909:77; 1922:13,
parˈteːt̬e] ‘leave.1/2PL’ (see also Cervara and Castelmadama), 19); for Abruzzo, Avolio (2009:110f.). In Maceratese
and yet others the third conjugation, e.g. Segni (Lorenzi 2005: (Paciaroni 2013), hypermetaphony amplifies class distinc-
xlvi) [parˈliːmo/parˈliːte] ‘speak.1/2PL’, [teˈniːmo/teˈniːte] tions: in first conjugation verbs, either the expected meta-
‘hold.1/2PL’, [perˈdiːmo/perˈdiːte] ‘lose.1/2PL’, [senˈtiːmo/ phonic pattern occurs (e.g. [ˈsɔːno] ‘ring.1SG’ vs [ˈsoːni]
senˈtiːte] ‘hear.1/2PL’ (cf. also Serrone, AIS pt 654). An asym- ‘ring.2SG’), or it does not where metaphonic alternations
metric neutralization with generalization of the third conju- have been levelled out (e.g. [ˈpeːlo/-i] ‘peel.1/2SG’), whilst
gation endings in the first person plural and of the second in verbs of the other macro-class alternation always occurs
conjugation endings in the second is widespread in the Mar- and the metaphonic alternant has stressed /i u/, from both
che, e.g. Mac. [kanˈdiːmo/kanˈdeːt̬e] ‘sing.1/2PL’, [pjaˈt̬ ʃ iːmo/
pjaˈt̬ ʃ eːt̬e] ‘please.1/2PL’, [kuˈr(ː)iːmo/koˈr(ː)eːt̬e] ‘run.1/2PL’, 9
Rural Sabine (like other parts of area mediana and upper south) displays
[parˈtiːmo/parˈteːt̬e] ‘leave.1/2PL’ (see also Treia AIS pt 558, 3rd person plural present indicative in -[au] for certain highly irregular
Servigliano, Camilli 1929:229). verbs (Avolio 2009:82f., 115), e.g. [ˈʃtau] ‘stand.3PL’, [ˈdau] ‘give.3PL’, [ˈau]
‘have.3PL’, [ˈsau] ‘know.3PL’, [ˈfau] ‘do.3PL’, [ˈvau] ‘go.3PL’ (forms from Tèr-
In the third person plural, a substantial part of the dia- mine, Coppito, Cese); L’Aquila, Piànola, Bazzano, and Pagànica have
lects has a binary distinction between first conjugation and [ˈʃtanːo], [ˈdanːo], [ˈanːo], [ˈsanːo], [ˈfanːo] instead.
236
etymological /e o/ (regular metaphony: e.g. [ˈkur(ː)i] cf. also Moretti 1987:121), and sometimes occurs in the
‘run.2SG’) and /ɛ ɔ/ (hypermetaphony: e.g. [ˈdurmi] third person singular and plural (Mac. [ˈsɔːrema]/
‘sleep.2SG’). [ˈsɔːret̬a]/[ˈsɔːresa] ‘sister=my,=your,=his/her’, [ˈʦiːsi/-e]
Novel allomorphy also arises from the insertion of a ‘uncles/aunts=their’). Enclisis is rarer if the possessed is
root-final velar in the first person singular present indica- plural (e.g. Mac. [ˈfraːt̬imi] ‘brothers=my’; cf. also
tive, and the whole paradigm of the present subjunctive Chiominto 1984:159), and rarest if the possessor is plural
(which is very rare except for third persons), e.g. Treiese (e.g. Sonnino, AIS pt 682, 1.18 [neˈputeno/-ne] ‘grandchil-
[ˈdaːk̬o] ‘give.1SG’, [ˈvaːk̬o] ‘go.1SG’, [ˈrmaŋgo] ‘remain.1SG’, dren=ours’, 1.21 [neˈputevo/-ve], ‘nephew/-s=yours’;
[ˈʃtaːk̬o] ‘stay.1SG’, [ˈtɛŋgo] ‘hold.1SG’ [ˈveːk̬o] ‘see.1SG’, Rohlfs 1968:124f.). In a few varieties one finds (even
[ˈvɛŋgo] ‘come.1SG’. rarer) proclitic forms limited to kinship terms, phonolo-
In the dialects on the Adriatic side, the third person gically reduced and with neutralization of gender and
plural merges with the singular in all tenses/moods, number: Terni (Moretti 1987:114) [mi=ˈpaːtre] ‘my=-
e.g. Mac. [li ˈɣalːi/lu ˈɣalːu ˈk̬and̥a] ‘the cocks/the cock father’, [mi=ˈmaːtre] ‘my=mother’, [su=ˈfiʝːu] ‘his/her=son’
sing/s’. (cf. also AIS 1.5, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16-30). In predicative position
The conditional is commonly of the type /kantaˈriːa/, due and after prepositions the definite article always precedes
to univerbation of the infinitive plus imperfect indicative possessive pronouns: Norcia (Moretti 1987:97f.) [ˈkwilːu
forms of HABĒRE ‘have’ (cf. §46.3.2.2), e.g. Rieti [beaˈriːa] < ˈpɔtːu ˈɛ lu ˈsuːa] ‘that child is (lit. the) his’; AIS 6.831,
BĬBĔRE HABĒBA(M) ‘drink.COND.1SG’, [boˈriːa] < *voˈlere HABĒBA(M) Leonessa, pt 615 [ar ˈdupːju de ri ˈmiːa] ‘the double of (lit.
‘want.COND.1SG’ (AIS 5.1035, 8.1603; Rohlfs 1968:340f.). South- the) mine’.
ern Lazio and Umbria have remnants of the conditional Another feature occurring throughout the area is differ-
formed from the preterite of HABĒRE. For instance, in the ential marking of specific, animate direct objects by /a/ ‘to’
dialect of Ascrea, this occurs in first and second persons (DOM; cf. §56.3.2.4). Cross-dialectal variation in DOM obeys
singular and plural, e.g. [manːeˈriʃti] ‘you.SG would send’ the Animacy Hierarchy: it occurs everywhere in first and
(from first conjugation [maˈnːa]), whereas [ˈiːa] occurs else- second person pronouns (2a; see Loporcaro 2013:134),
where, e.g. [manːeˈrːiːa(nu)] ‘I/(s)he/they would send’, with where DOM originated. Then, moving rightwards along the
variation in the first singular: [manːeˈrːiːa/manːeˈrːebːe] hierarchy, it occurs with decreasing likelihood on third
(Fanti 1939:118-20). Intermingling of imperfect subjunctive person pronouns, proper nouns, kin terms, definite noun
-[ss]-forms in the conditional paradigm also occurs (Rohlfs phrases, and indefinite noun phrases, all denoting humans
1968:343f.), as the Maceratese second singular and first and or highly personified animals (2b-e; cf. Navone 1922:97;
second plural forms of [fuˈɟːa] ‘escape’ show: [fuɟːiˈriːo/-a, Rohlfs 1969a:7-9):
‑iˈriʃti/-iˈriʃːi, ‑iˈriːa, ‑eˈrɛsːimo, ‑eˈrɛʃte, ‑iˈriːa] (see further
Maiden 2001b:15-18). (2) a. sɔ ˈvːisto a ˈvːui̯ /(**a) ˈɛsːa (Colonna)
ˈ
I.am seen.N to you.PL to her
‘I have seen you/her.’
15.2.3 Syntax
b. si ˈvːiʃto a ˈfːraːtimo (Paliano)
ˈ
you.2SG are seen.N to brother=my
In the noun phrase, central dialects display postnominal
‘Did you see my brother?’
possessives: Roiate (Orlandi 2000:117) [j ˈaːsenu ˈmeːo] lit.
‘the.MSG donkey.MSG my.MSG’. The possessive often has a c. lo si vːeˈnːuːto a j ˈaːsenu (Paliano)
ˈ
unique form, with gender/number neutralization. In the it.MSG= you.are sold.N to the.MSG donkey.MSG
Marche, southern Umbria, Abruzzo, and part of Lazio ‘Did you sell the donkey?’
(including Romanesco), the most widespread type is 1SG
d. non ˈt̬ ʃ erk̬o a ɲːiˈʃu (Treia)
[ˈmiːa], 2SG [ˈtuːa], 3SG/PL [ˈsuːa] (see AIS 1.13, 1.14, 8.1554;
NEG I.look.for to nobody
Rohlfs 1968:120-22,127-9); Mac. [lu paˈeːse ˈmiːa, ˈtuːa, ˈsuːa]
‘I’m not looking for anybody.’
‘the country my, your, his/her/their’ (cf. also Moretti
1987:97, 121, 139). With kinship terms, and sometimes e. ˈvaːk̬ɔ t̬ ʃ erˈk̬ɛnːo a ŋ k̬amːeˈrjeːre (Treia)
after ‘house’, ‘master’, and a few other nouns, the definite I.go look.for.GER to a waiter10
article is excluded and the possessive can encliticize. This ‘I’m looking for a waiter.’
is systematic in the first/second persons singular (Roiate
[ˈpaːremu]/[ˈpaːretu] ‘father=my/your’ vs [ju ˈpaːtre ˈseo]
‘the.MSG father.MSG his.MSG’ (Orlandi 2000:118f.); Segni
[ˈkaːsoma]/[ˈkaːseta] ‘house=my/your’ (Lorenzi 2005:xlii; 10
/a/ is obligatory if the waiter is known, but otherwise optional.
237
The article is ungrammatical with both male and female The same ending marks agreement with neuter nouns (5c),
first names ([(**lu) ˈpɛpːe] and [(**la) ˈmaːri]) and kinship contrasting with masculine (5d).
terms with possessive ([(**la) mi ˈmamːa] ‘(**the) my mum’). Variation in auxiliary selection occurs widely. First, aux-
The area mediana must once have preserved agreement of iliation can be sensitive to temporal-aspectual-modal val-
the past participle with lexical direct objects in transitive ues, with the most common split between present perfect
clauses (cf. ex. (17) in §49.2.3). Today this is still the case and all other paradigms (cf. §§49.3.1, 49.3.3), as shown for
in the southernmost dialects (examples from Chiominto Frascatano in (6) (Lorenzetti 1995:251f.):
1984:179):
(6) a. so/ si / ˈseːmo/ ˈseːte
ˈ ˈ
(3) a. ˈntoːnjo ɛ ˈrotːa la ˈbːrɔkːa (Cori) I.am you.2SG.are we.are you.2PL.are
ˈ
Ntonio is broken.FSG the.FSG jug.FSG dorˈmiːtu (Frascatano)
‘Antonio broke the jug.’ slept.N
‘I/you.SG/we/you.PL have slept.’
b. so ˈkːoːte le ˈpruŋka (Cori)
ˈ
I.am picked.FPL the.FPL plum.FPL b. aˈveːvo / aˈviːvi dorˈmiːtu (Frascatano)
‘I’ve picked the plums.’ I.had you.2SG.had slept.N
‘I /you.SG had slept.’
Nearer the Rome–Ancona line this agreement becomes
c. aˈvriːa/aˈvrisːi/aˈvresːimo/aˈvresːivo dorˈmiːtu
rarer. Thus, systematic agreement in the dialect of Poggio
(Frascatano)
S. Romualdo in the Ancona hinterland (Balducci 1993:150)
I/you.SG/we/you.PL.would.have slept.N
proves highly exceptional, but its presence there shows that
‘I/you.SG/we/you.PL would have slept.’
this agreement once spanned the whole area mediana:
(4) i ˈpɛkora a ˈrːotːa na ˈfratːa (Poggio) The present of BE (E) is used to form the present perfect of
ˈ transitives and unergatives (6a), which select HAVE (H) in the
the.MPL sheep.MPL have.3 broken.FSG a.FSG thicket.FSG
‘The sheep broke a thicket.’ pluperfect indicative (6b) and past conditional (6c).
Second, the split can be determined by person: the most
Capitalizing on the ‑/o/ vs ‑/u/ contrast in §15.2.1.1, frequent pattern displays a split in the present perfect
these dialects are among the very few Romance languages between third person with HAVE and other persons with BE
that display an overt contrast between agreement in the (cf. data from L’Aquila in §49.3.3). Consider again Frascatano
masculine singular and non-agreement, since both lack of (Lorenzetti 1995:251f.), where unergative clauses in the pre-
agreement (5a) and agreement with a non-nominal control- sent perfect select BE in first and second persons (6a), but
HAVE in third persons (7a):
ler (5b) are realized with neuter endings on participles (and
other targets):
(7) a. a/ ˈanːu dorˈmiːtu (Frascatano)
ˈ
(5) a. ˈpɛpːe a ˈʃːordo/**ˈʃːordu lu has have.3PL slept.N
ˈ ‘(S)He/They has/have slept.’
Joseph.M has untied.N/untied.MSG the.MSG
ˈk̬apːju (Mac.) b. ɛ ˈiːtu / so ˈiːti (Frascatano)
slip.knot.MSG ˈ ˈ
is gone.MSG are.3PL gone.MPL
‘Joseph untied the slip knot.’ ‘(S)He/They has/have gone.’
b. a ˈɟːi a lu ˈmaːre m=ɛ ˈsːɛmp̬ re
ˈ
to go.INF to the.MSG sea.MSG me=is always However, many other person-driven splits are found: for
p̬ ːjaˈt̬ ʃ uːt̬o/**p̬ ːjaˈt̬ʃ uːt̬u (Mac.) example, in the dialect of Ascrea, in transitives and unerga-
pleased.N/pleased.MSG tives first and second person plural have BE, while HAVE is
‘I have always liked going to the sea.’ found elsewhere (Fanti 1939:122).
Third, auxiliation can depend on clause type. While in
c. lo ˈp̬ a m=ɛ p̬ ːjaˈt̬ʃuːt̬o/**p̬ ːjaˈt̬ʃ uːt̬u (Mac.)
ˈ some varieties the same pattern occurs with all verbs (e.g.
the.N bread.N me=is pleased.N/pleased.MSG
L’Aquila, Giammarco 1973; cf. §49.3.3), one often finds a
‘I liked (the) bread.’
binary opposition. Moreover, many varieties show more
d. lu preˈʃutːu m=ɛ p̬ ːjaˈt̬ʃuːt̬u/**p̬ ːjaˈt̬ʃuːt̬o (Mac.) complex auxiliation contrasts, capitalizing on person-
ˈ
the.MSG ham.MSG me=is pleased.MSG/pleased.N driven alternation and free variation of BE/HAVE. These
‘I liked (the) ham.’ mixed systems are exemplified with Maceratese in (8):
238
(8) a. ˈesːa ɛ kːaʃˈkaːt̬a / s=ɛ ʒveˈʝːaːt̬a/ s=ɛ (9) se oˈɲːuːnu saˈriːa ʃˈtaːt̬u a ˈkːaːsa ˈsuːa
ˈ ˈ ˈ
she is fallen.FSG REFL=is waken.up.FSG REFL=is if everyone.MSG would.be been.MSG at home his
rviʃˈtiːt̬a / s ɛ rːiʃˈpoʃta ða p̬er ˈesːa (Mac.) aˈvriːo ðurˈmiːt̬o ˈp̬ rɔbːʝo ˈk̬omːe ˈtːe (Mac.)
ˈ
dressed.FSG REFL=is answered.FSG by for her I.would.have slept.N exactly as you
‘She has fallen/woken up/got dressed/has answered ‘If everyone had been at home, I’d have slept like you.’
herself .’
In many dialects, including those with patterns like (9),
b. ˈesːa s ɛ lːaˈaːt̬a/ s a
ˈ ˈ the imperfect indicative is employed in both clauses:
she REFL=is washed.FSG REFL=has
laˈaːt̬o le ˈma (Mac.)
(10) se mːe vuˈliːi ˈvɛ no lːo faˈʧiːi (Mac.)
washed.N the hands
if me= want.IPFV.2SG well NEG it= do.IPFV.2SG
‘She has washed her hands.’
‘If you had loved me, you would not have done it.’
b' ˈesːa s ɛ mːaˈɲːaːt̬a/ s a maˈɲːaːt̬o
ˈ ˈ
she REFL=is eaten.FSG REFL=has eaten.N In other varieties, especially in Abruzzo (Avolio
lu ˈp̬ uʝːu (Mac.) 2009:117f.), the subjunctive occurs in both protasis and
the chicken apodosis:
‘She has eaten the chicken.’
(11) se pːoˈtesːe ji meˈnesːe (Cese dei Marsi)
c. ˈesːa a maˈɲːaːt̬o lu ˈp̬ uʝːu / a
ˈ ˈ if can.SBJV.1SG them=beat.SBJV.1SG
she has eaten.N the chicken has
‘If I could, I’d beat them up.’
fat̬iˈɣaːt̬o (Mac.)
worked.N
‘She has eaten the chicken/has worked.’ 15.3 Area perimediana
Transitives and unergatives (8c) select HAVE, unaccusative
and monadic reflexives (8a) BE, whereas in dyadic reflexives 15.3.1 Phonology
and antipassives (8b,b') there is free variation. While in 15.3.1.1 Vowels
Maceratese this applies throughout the paradigm, many
Most features characterizing this subgroup as opposed to
other varieties combine a triple clause-type-driven
the dialects in §15.2 are shared with Tuscan (cf. §14.2), and
contrast—most frequently in the third persons—with
for some this sharing was more systematic in the past. This
person-driven splits, partially seen for Frascatano in (6)-
is the case for rhotic deletion in the -RI̯- cluster, which once
(7), as schematized in Table 15.4.
spanned all of Umbria, Viterbo, and northern Marche
This system has been well described (cf. Lorenzetti
(Castellani 1950; 2000:263), whereas today it has yielded to
1995:245-57; Loporcaro 1999b; Tufi 2005; Paciaroni 2009a),
‑r- in many areas, e.g. in the province of Perugia, AIS 7.1468
and seems to be more frequent than other triple auxiliation
‘l’aja’ = ‘the farmyard’ has [ˈaːja] in Panicale pt 564 and
systems. But the area mediana is not unitary in this respect
Orvieto pt 583, but [ˈaːra] in Marsciano pt 574, whereas
(pace Cocchi 1995).
Amelia (province of Terni, pt 584) shows two responses,
In conditional sentences, one finds different patterns. In
[ˈaːra] (innovatory)/[ˈajːa] (conservative). For many more
some varieties (including Romanesco), the conditional
features, though, what one observes is the erosion, under
mood occurs both in the protasis and in the apodosis (see
Tuscan pressure, of traits originally shared with the area
AIS 8.1633-4; Rohlfs 1968:142f.).
mediana stricto sensu. Thus, the area perimediana has merged
unstressed ‑/u/ with ‑/o/, yielding a four-way contrast in
Table 15.4 Triple mixed auxiliation system final unstressed syllables as in Florentine. The merger has
been spreading constantly: for instance Fabriano today has
1 SG 2 SG 3 SG 1 PL 2 PL 3 PL the Tuscan system (Balducci 2000:27), but its earliest docu-
ment, the Carta fabrianese (AD 1186), still showed the distinc-
a. E E E E E E Unaccusatives/
tion, though ‘with some vacillation‘ (Castellani 1976:193).
monadic reflexives
Even in dialects with generalized ‑/o/, evidence for an
b. E E E/H E E E/H Dyadic reflexives,
earlier contrast is provided by the application of metaphony
antipassives
before ‑/o/ < ‑U, but not before ‑/o/ < ‑O (e.g. Certopiano
c. E E H E E H Unergatives,
(Arcevia) [ˈbwoːno] ‘good.MSG’ (< ‑U) vs [ˈɔtːo] ‘eight’ (< ‑O);
transitives
Crocioni 1906:3), that tends to retreat in the dialects near
239
the Roma-Ancona line: in Montelago di Sassoferrato, farmers.M/F’, [le ˈfijːe] ‘the sons=daughters’, at Tarquinia
Balducci (1986:285f.) recorded regular metaphonic alterna- (Blasi 1983:2f.) [ˈvɔːe] ‘want.2SG’, [le ˈsasːe] ‘the stones’,
tions such as [ˈmoʃːo]/[ˈmuʃːe] ‘soft.MSG/MPL’, [ˈrːoʃːo]/ [l ˈɔkːje] ‘the eyes’, as far as Capranica (Schanzer 1989:144)
[ˈrːuʃːe] ‘red.MSG/MPL’, showing that metaphony does not [le ˈmi fraˈtɛlːe] ‘my brothers’, southeast of which one finds
apply before ‑/o/ < ‑U, but also obsolete [ˈrːuʃːo] ‘red.MSG’ < again -[i] < ‑Ī at Vetralla. In the Middle Ages, this isogloss
*ˈrʊsseʊm, which suggests that the process was previously might have spanned a continuous territory, as shown by the
operating in this context too. fact that, in Umbria, medieval documents from Perugia,
Expansion of the Tuscan model, with loss of metaphony, Gubbio, and Todi displayed -[e] < ‑Ī (Ugolini 1970:477),
implies the generalization of open-syllable diphthongs as whereas nowadays this feature, still systematic in Orvietano
outcomes of proto-Romance /ɛ/, as seen in AIS 1.163 il piede, ([le ˈkaːne] ‘the dogs’, [ˈbːutːele] ‘throw=them.M’; Moretti
i piedi ‘the foot, the feet’, where Umbria west of the Tiber has 1987:131; see Ugolini 1970:477 for medieval Orvietano),
the same diphthong in the singular and the plural (Scan- crops up sporadically, e.g. Gualdo Tadino [suˈmaːre] ‘don-
sano, pt 581 [ˈpjɛːde/‑i]). Hyperextension of the diphthong keys’ (Moretti 1987:137), mostly in rural dialects (e.g. at
is observed in some dialects of the province of Viterbo, e.g. S. Martino in Campo, 13km south of Perugia, but not in
Fabrica di Roma [ˈpjetːso] ‘piece’, [ˈsjerta] ‘wreath’ (Cimarra contemporary Perugino).
and Petroselli 2008:39). As for proto-Romance /ɔ/, the area
perimediana generally has [ɔː], for example in all inflected
forms of ‘good’ ([ˈbɔːno/‑a/‑e] in Orvieto, AIS 4.710, pt 583), 15.3.1.2 Consonants
though scattered remnants of an older open-syllable diph-
We saw in (1) that features characteristic of the area mediana
thong (lost in Florence in the eighteenth century but still
reach as far northwest as the Rome–Ancona line, thereby
attested in southeast Tuscany) occur near the Tuscan bor-
excluding dialects of the area perimediana which pattern
der ([ˈbuɐ̯no/‑a/‑e] ‘good.MSG/FSG/PL’ in Panicale, province of
with Tuscan for the relevant traits. One notable exception
Perugia, pt 564). For the distribution, intersection, and dia-
is the assimilations (1a,b), which today cover all of Lazio and
chronic development of open-syllable diphthongs and me-
stretch into southern Tuscany. In Umbria some evidence
taphony in the different sub-areas, see Reinhard (1955-6)
suggests that they may have percolated north of the Rome–
and §38.3.
Ancona line in the past: cf. the hypercorrections (‑nd- < ‑NN‑,
Changes in the final and the stressed vowel systems are
‑mb‑ < -MM-) in Prg. [ˈklonda] ‘column’, [ˈnʦomba] ‘in sum’
interconnected, albeit in complex ways. As one enters the
(Moretti 1987:41).11
area perimediana proper, moving away from the Rome–
The influence of the Tuscan prestige model has operated
Ancona line, no metaphonic contrast in the stressed vowels
constantly in the area perimediana: one telling example is the
persists past the merger of final ‑/u/ with ‑/o/ (nor is there
dialect of Certopiano di Arcevia (Crocioni 1906), the rural
/i/-induced metaphony), so that the vowel system is the
outlying part of Arcevia where Crocioni was born in 1870.
Tuscan one (cf. §14.2.1), e.g. Bolsena (province of Viterbo;
A century later, the distinctively non-Tuscan features of
Casaccia and Tamburini 2005:19, 82) [ˈesːo/‑a/‑e] ‘he/she/
that dialect, such as metaphony and the assimilations in
they.M/F’, [lː ˈɔo/ˈɔa] ‘the egg/eggs’; Senigallia [ˈspɔrki]
(1a,b), were to be found ‘not even in the rural outlying areas
‘dirty.MPL’, [ˈnɔːvi] ‘new.MPL’, [ˈneːri] ‘black.MPL’ (Mancini
[ . . . ], not even in the memories of the oldest generations’
1986:198). Identity with Tuscan also involves final
(Franceschi 1979:1925). Likewise, for Perugino, Moretti
unstressed vowels for most of the area perimediana except
(1987:28) points out that the original dialect has disap-
for a present-day discontinuous territory stretching from
peared and what is left is only a ‘dialectalizing Italian’.
the western part of the Ancona province over part of north-
Such radical discontinuity is unusual in Italy, except for
western Umbria down to the northern fringe of the coast of
dialects exposed to early and massive Tuscan influence
Lazio (Montalto di Castro), where final unstressed vowels
like those discussed in this section. At the southern fringe
reduce to an asymmetrical three-vowel system /e a o/ via
of the area perimediana, Romanesco is the best investigated
merger of ‑/i/ (< ‑Ī) with ‑/e/. At the northeastern border of
case (Ernst 1970).
this area, one finds, for example, at Arcevia [ˈpatre] ‘father.
The eastern part of the area perimediana, at an even earlier
SG/PL’, [ˈpeːro/ˈpiːre] ‘pear.SG/PL’, [ˈpɛrde/ˈpjerde] ‘lose.3SG/
stage, was subject to the spread of innovations from north
2SG’ (Crocioni 1906:9); at Montelago di Sassoferrato [ˈpjeːde]
of the La Spezia–Rimini line, so that a belt stretching from
‘foot.SG/PL’, [ˈvjecːo/‑e/ˈvɛcːa/-e] ‘old.MSG/MPL/FSG/FPL’,
[ˈveːde/ˈviːde] ‘see.3SG/2SG’ (Balducci 1986:254-73). At the
11
southwestern extreme in Viterbo one has [le ˈkaːne] ‘the However, as Balducci (2000:23) observes with examples from the
dialect of Osimo, south of Ancona ([ˈkambura] ‘room’, [ˈsembula] ‘bran’),
dogs’ (Galeotti and Nappo 2005:45) and likewise at Bolsena comparable outcomes occur in Tuscan varieties which never had the
(Casaccia and Tamburini 2005:18-20) [le kontaˈdiːne] ‘the assimilations (1a,b) such as Lucchese (cf. Rohlfs 1966:382).
240
Senigallia to Perugia and Città di Castello (Umbria), then In the province of Ancona, in addition to this kind of
into eastern Tuscany, participates in distinctive changes of obstruent voicing, there is a more recent tendency to
western Romance such as degemination and intervocalic voice intervocalic /s/ (cf. also Florentine), reported by
lenition. In most of these dialects, degemination applies Balducci (1987:280) for the speech of younger generations
before stress, e.g. Senigallia (Mancini 1986:222-30) *kattivʊ > for Jesi, Fabriano, Sassoferrato, Arcevia, where elderly
[kaˈtiːvo] ‘bad’, GALLINAS > [ɡaˈliːne] ‘chickens’; Magione speakers only had intervocalic [s] as in all of central and
(Moretti 1974:260) *bokkone > [boˈkoːne] ‘morsel’. southern Italy. This type of intervocalic lenition clashes
Northern Umbria displays the spread of another northern with the more recent voicing of the kind found (also in
feature, palatalization of stressed /a/ in open syllables, sandhi) in Romanesco, which is spreading into the Ancona
which from Romagna and northern Marche crosses the hinterland: Ostra (Balducci 1987:280) [l auˈgaːd nun a ga
Apennines to reach Perugia and northern Umbria, where ˈbiːdo] ‘the lawyer has not understood’ (cf. It. l’avvocato non
it is recessive; for instance, in Gubbio only the most elderly ha capito).
of Ugolini’s (1970:472f.) informants had [ɛ] in [ˈkɛːsa] ‘house’ The grossetano-amiatino area (Giannelli 2000:105-12) pre-
(< CASAM), [laˈvɛ] ‘wash.INF’ (< LAUARE). Another northern trait serves a series of non-Tuscan features characteristic of the
infiltrating these marginal dialects is unstressed vowel dele- area (peri)mediana, such as the lack of voiced intervocalic /z/
tion, leading to the restructuring of the underlying form in (cf. [ˈspɔːsa] ‘spouse.FSG’) and gemination of intervocalic /b/
Senigalliese ([vnut] ‘come.PTCP.MSG’, [ˈtutː lə paˈrɔl] ‘all the ([ˈdebːutu] ‘debt’, as a reaction to the loss of allophonic [v]/
words’; Balducci 1979:1952f.), whereas in Perugino it [bː] variation caused by the changes in (1g)). Pitigliano
remains a synchronic process applying both word- (province of Grosseto) seems to represent this residual
internally ([ˈlɛtːəra] ‘letter’) and across words ([ɛ ˈstatə state most faithfully, preserving even the ‑/u/ vs ‑/o/
ˈʤusto] lit. ‘it.is been just’; Agostiniani et al. 1997:8-10). contrast ([ˈmaːnu] ‘hand’ vs [ˈpɔtːso] ‘can.1SG’; Longo
With pre-stress degemination, perimediano dialects have 1936:24), which has been attested ever since the earliest
lost raddoppiamento fonosintattico (cf. §14.2.5, §40.3.1), today extant document from this area (Castellani 1976:103-9),
absent in Ancona ([tre ˈtɛste] ‘three heads’; Parrino 1967:25) showing ‑u instead of Tuscan ‑o < ‑U. The contrast, with
and the northern part of its province (cf. the isogloss in variation ‑o/-u < ‑U vs ‑o < ‑O, is still residually observed in
Balducci 1987:274; 2000:24), as well as in Gubbio and Città di some amiatino dialects: e.g. in Abbadia San Salvatore visu
Castello ([trɛ ˈvɔlte] ‘three times’; Mattesini 1989:xviii; ‘face’, manu ‘hand’ vs erono ‘they were’, guardavo ‘I was
Moretti 1987:66, 74).12 looking’ (Visconti 2010; cf. also Giannelli 2000: 106, 140).
Urban Anconitano departs from surrounding dialects
in degeminating all obstruents except /sː/ also after stress:
[kaˈpɛːlo] ‘hat’, [ˈdɔːna] ‘woman’, [ˈkwaːtru] ‘four’ vs
15.3.2 Morphology
[ˈgrɔsːu] ‘large.MSG’ (Parrino 1967:23-5).13 In northeastern
Umbria (Città di Castello), degemination after stress applied While inflectional class distinctions through affixal morph-
only after proto-Romance low(-mid) vowels: [kaˈpɛːlo] ‘hat’, ology occur in the whole area, stem alternation patterns are
[ˈlɛːto] ‘bed’, [ˈpaːla] ‘ball’ vs [kaˈpɛlːo] ‘hair’ < CAPĬLLUM, found only in small sub-areas (see below).
[ˈtɛtːo] ‘roof ’ < TĒCTUM (Mattesini 1989:xviii). Migration of originally third declension nouns to the
Intervocalic obstruent lenition adds to degemination in first and second classes (e.g. Jesino TUSSEM/-ES > [ˈtoːʃa/-e]
the chain shift which reshaped western Romance consonant ‘cough’, PISCEM/-ES > [ˈpeːʃo/-i] ‘fish/-es’), and retention of
systems (cf. §25.2.5). Intervocalic voicing has affected Flor- the inherited Latin fourth declension, are common (e.g.
entine very marginally, becoming established for stops in Fabrica di Roma [la/le ˈmaːno] ‘the hand/‑s’, Canepina
just a few scattered lexemes and more widely for ‑S-, which [a/e ˈfiːko] ‘the fig/-s’, Cimarra and Petroselli 2008:73;
was voiced in a substantial share of the lexicon (cf. AIS 1.149, 151, Ronciglione, province of Viterbo, pt 632
§14.2.2.1). As for stops, Ancona shows systematic /k/-voi- [a/e ˈmaːno] ‘the hand/-s’). Third declension feminine
cing ([ˈpɔːgu] ‘few’, [ˈgrɛːgu] ‘Greek.MSG’) and lexically idio- [e]-plurals (identical with the singular) are widespread,
syncratic voicing of other obstruents ([puˈduːtu] ‘can.PTCP. e.g. Orvieto, Montefiascone (Mattesini and Ugoccioni
MSG’; Parrino 1967:23; Balducci 2002:454). 1992), Montecarotto, AIS pt 538, Jesi [ˈcaːe/ˈcaːe] ‘key/-s’
(AIS 2.218, 5.889, pt 556 and others). This is documented
since the oldest texts: for instance, in old Anconitano
(Debanne 2011:176) it occurs categorically: le dicte torre
12
Moretti (1974:261-67) describes retention of raddoppiamento after just ‘the.FPL said.FPL towers.F’. In dialects spoken in the area
some monosyllables in only the most rural register of the dialect of
Magione (Perugia). (outlined in §15.3.1.1) where ‑Ī > -[e], singular and plural
13
Final -[u] < -O = ‑U is now judged obsolete by our informants. are identical in this class, e.g. Orvietano [l/le ˈkaːne] ‘the
241
dog/-s’ (Moretti 1987:131), bolsenese [r/le ˈkaːne] (Casaccia (Moretti 1987:48) [ɛ ʧiˈnin ʧiˈniːno] ‘he/it is very small.MSG
and Tamburini 2005:18). This change affects all inflectional (lit. small small)’, and/or modification of the adjective, e.g.
classes, so that e.g. at Orvieto and Montefiascone one finds Fortuna (province of Viterbo; Cimarra and Petroselli
not only [ˈfjoːre] ‘flower/‑s’, but also [ˈpeːlo/ˈpeːle] ‘hair/-s’, 2008:74) [ˈbːɛlːo ˈfɔrte] lit.’ beautiful.MSG strong’, Anc.
and, with variation between the two classes, [ˈbɔː(v)o/ˈbɔːe/ [ˈbɛːlo mbelˈpɔ] lit. ‘beautiful.MSG a.nice.bit’, [ʤeˈloːsa
/ˈbɔː(v)e/ˈbɔː(v)a] ‘the ox/-en’ (Mattesini and Ugoccioni 1992). ˈmarʧa] lit. ‘jealous.FSG rotten.FSG ’ (Jesi, Balducci 2000:122).
Extension of this innovation to other parts of speech varies. Preconsonantal masculine singular definite and indefin-
Masculine plural adjectives have ended in -[e] since the earliest ite articles usually occur in the so-called ‘weak’ form which
texts throughout this area, whereas definite articles alternate has lost its etymological final vowel, although ‘strong’ forms
between conservative -[i] (Montelago di Sassoferrato [i ˈgatːe] percolate west of the Tiber to Civita Castellana (Viterbo):
‘the cats’; Balducci 2000:28), prevailing—according to Giannelli [o ˈpa/ˈka] ‘the bread/dog’ (Cimarra and Petroselli 2008:74).
et al. (2002:67)—in Umbria (but Orvieto [le ˈkaːne] ‘the dogs’; These are older forms, which used to occur across the area
Moretti 1987:133), and innovative -[e] in Lazio (but Graffignano perimediana in the Middle Ages; for example, in old anconi-
(province of Viterbo) [li ˈfiːke] ‘the figs’; Moretti 1987:133). tano (Debanne 2011:173) the ‘strong’ form was predominant,
In some dialects, metaphonic [i]-plurals coexist with [e]- and the ‘weak’ one exceptional. In modern anconitano
plurals, e.g. AIS 7.1298, Amelia [ˈnoːʃe//ˈnoːʃe/ˈnuːʃi] ‘wal- the only forms are [(e)l] and [(u)n], which occur also before
nut/-s’ (Maiden 1991a:175-7). For masculine nouns from the /s/ + C: [(e)l/(u)ɱ ˈfjoːlu/ˈstɔmigu] ‘the/a son/stomach’
third declension -[i] is common: Anc. [uˈnoːre/uˈnoːri] (Parrino 1967:24; Romina Ramazzotti, p.c.). Other perime-
‘honour/-s’. In parts of Umbria, the suffix -[a] has been diano dialects retain ‘strong’ forms as positional allomorphs,
reanalysed as a masculine plural suffix and extended to selected before initial consonants not syllabified in the
adjectives as well as to second and third declension mascu- onset, as is the case in Sassoferrato and in Vallesina, espe-
line nouns (e.g. Magione (Perugia; Maiden 1997b:73) cially in Montecarotto and Jesi, where [(e)l] and [lo] have
[ˈkjwoːdo/ ˈkjwoːda] ‘nail/-s’, [ˈdɛnte/ˈdɛnta] ‘tooth/teeth’; the same distribution as in Florentine, except that the latter
AIS 2.230, pt 574) and even, at times, to the singular: Prg. is selected also before /rː/, which is always geminated:
(Moretti 1987:46) [faˈkɔtːʃa//faˈkɔtːʃe/-a] ‘wheelwright/-s’, [lo ˈrːiːso] ‘the.MSG rice’ (Franceschi 1979:1930; Tatiana Frat-
Orvieto [ˈsaŋgwa] ‘blood’ (Mattesini and Ugoccioni 1992). tesi, p.c.), [no rːeˈvɔlvəre] ‘a.MSG revolver’ (Balducci
Relatedly, in this sub-area there are many examples of 2000:122). In Perugino one finds an alternation of the Flor-
overabundance, e.g. Orvieto [ˈbɔː(v)o/ˈbɔːe//ˈbɔː(v)e/ entine kind between [l ˈdɛːdo/ˈkɛːne] ‘the die/dog’ and [lo
ˈbɔː(v)a] ‘the ox/-en’ (Mattesini and Ugoccioni 1992). In ˈspɔːso/ˈtːsompo] ‘the bridegroom/jump’ (Moretti 1987:45).
the rest of the area perimediana, class -o/-a persists (e.g. Most of Umbria (not only west of the Tiber, but beyond it to
Tuscia, Cimarra and Petroselli [ˈsorgo/ˈsɔrga] ‘furrow/‑s’, Amelia: [(ɛ)l ˈpɔtːo] ‘the child’, p. 127) displays the weak
[pruˈjːɛlːo/pruˈjːɛlːa] ‘plum/-s’), but in some dialects is on form, whereas [lu ˈkaːne] ‘the dog’ (Foligno, p. 109) is now-
its way to depletion (cf. Ancona, AIS pt 539, maps 1.90, 102, adays confined southeast of a line Nocera–Spello–Narni
105, 144-45, 162, 6.1054, 1132, 1145). Replacement of class (p. 161). Even there variation is observed in some dialects:
-o/-ora with class -o/-i seems to be almost completed. thus, [l ˈkaːne] also occurs in Foligno, whose medieval dia-
The dialects of the Orvieto area and northern Lazio dis- lect (Mattesini 1990:185) only had MSG lu (contrasting with
play residues of an old stem alternation due to Neapolitan- neuter lo). In Bolsena (Viterbo), the allomorph /lo/ is
style metaphony, e.g. Orvieto area (Mattesini and Ugoccioni selected before consonants not syllabified as onsets
1992) [bːuˈd(j)ɛlːo//bːuˈdɛlːa/bːuˈdɛlːe] ‘1.pipe; 2. bowel/PL’, ([lo ˈɲːɔkːo/ˈjːoŋko/ˈʃːaːme] ‘the dumpling/reed/swarm’),
[bːarˈl(w)ɔtːso] ‘wine pot’. In the Jesi area there are scat- whereas the weak form occurs elsewhere ([r faˈʃɔːlo/
tered remnants of stem alternations due to metaphony, to moˈʃːiːno/ˈʦoːle] ‘the bean/gnat/sun’); the context before
our knowledge only in the innovative class -[ˈo]/-[ˈu], e.g. /l/ is the only one which protected it from rhotacism
[pepaˈro/pepaˈru] ‘pepper/-s’. ([l ˈlaːgo] ‘the lake’, see Casaccia and Tamburini 2005:17).
The grammatical gender system is usually binary (mas- In most varieties, demonstratives encode a ternary con-
culine/feminine). In addition, an inquorate alternating neu- trast, e.g. Prg. (Moretti 1987:50) [ˈkwisto, ˈkwista, ˈkwiste]
ter is documented, e.g. AIS 1.153, Montecarotto, pt 548: [əl ‘this.MSG, FSG, M/FPL’ (near speaker) vs [ˈtisto, ˈtista, ˈtiste]
ˈdeːdo/le ˈdeːda] ‘the finger/-s’. ‘this.MSG, FSG, M/FPL’ (near hearer) vs [ˈkwilːo, ˈkwilːa,
As for evaluative suffixes, diminutives are only (Perugia, ˈkwijːe//ˈkwi/ˈkwilːe] ([kwil] before word-initial onsets)
Moretti 1987:54) or mostly (Orvieto, Moretti 1987:133) ‘that.MSG, FSG, M/FPL’ (distant from speaker/hearer); for a
formed with -ino. detailed description and analysis of old and modern data,
Superlative forms in -issimo are not used, and the super- see Reinhard (1955-6:213-17). In some dialects, the second-
lative is usually expressed by reduplication, e.g. Prg. degree demonstrative is [ˈkwesːo] < ĬPSUM, as in Jesi (Gatti
242
1910:685). The demonstrative may co-occur with the cor- The conditional mood usually ends in -[ˈiːa] ([kantaˈriːa] ‘I
responding spatial adverb, e.g. in the area amiatina (Giannelli would sing’), though many dialects display overabundance
2000:109) [ˈkestu meˈkːi] vs [ˈtestu mesˈti] vs [ˈkelːu meˈlːi (o in some cells, with remnants of the HABUI-conditional, e.g.
[meˈlːa]), in Vasanello (Viterbo) [tistonˈdi/tistanˈdi] ‘this.M/F the conditional of ‘eat’ in Prg. [maɲːəˈriːa/maɲːeˈribːe/
(near hearer)’ (Cimarra and Petroselli 2008:76). Occasionally, maɲːeˈrebːe, maɲːəˈriste/maɲːeˈreste, maɲːəˈriːa/maɲːe-
one finds a proximal/distal contrast on manner adverbs: Jesi ˈribːe/maɲːeˈrebːe, maɲːəˈrisːəme/maɲːeˈresːimo/maɲːeˈri-
(Gatti 1910:687; Malvina Copparoni, p.c.) [kuˈʃi]/[akːuˈʃi] vs sːimo, maɲːəˈriste/maɲːeˈreste, maɲːəˈrii̯no/maɲːeˈriːono/
%
[asːuˈʃi] vs [alːuˈʃi] ‘in this/that way’ (proximal/near maɲːeˈrinːo/maɲːeˈrebːəno] (Moretti 1987:58). Mixed condi-
hearer/distal); Bolsena (Casaccia and Tamburini 2005:23) tional paradigms also arise via inclusion of imperfect sub-
[akːuˈsi] vs [stoˈsi] ‘in this/that way’ (near speaker vs hearer). junctive -[sː] forms, usually in second persons singular/
In some varieties, the system reduced to a binary plural and first person plural, as in Anc. [maɲːeˈriːa, maɲːe
[proximal] opposition: Anc. [ˈsto] vs [ˈkwel/ˈkul]; additional ˈrisːi, maɲːeˈriːa, maɲːeˈrisːimo, maɲːeˈriste, maɲːəˈriːane].
pronominal forms for human referents are [kuˈlu/kuˈliːa]. Both kinds of variation are combined in Jesino (Gatti 1910:685,
For personal pronouns, all dialects display the third per- 689): [faˈriːa/faˈrebːi] ‘I would do’, alongside [faˈresːimo] ‘we
son singular forms [lu/ˈliːa] ‘he/she’, and most have would do’. Forms such as [morgaˈresːamara] ‘we would die’
adopted the Florentine innovation of generalizing the (Montefiascone; Cimarra and Petroselli 2008:80) occur between
accusative form in the second person singular for all func- northern Lazio and the Orvieto area (Magnanini 2010).
tions, e.g. Jesino [ˈio] ‘I’ vs [me] ‘me’, [te] ‘you.2SG’, [lu/ˈliːa] Dialects on the east side show systematic (e.g. Jesino [ɛ]
‘3SG.M/F ’, [nu(ˈa)/nuˈaltri] ‘1PL’, [vu(ˈa)/vuˈaltri] ‘2PL’, [ˈloːra] ‘be.PRS.IND.3SG/PL’, [ˈmaɲːa] ‘eat.PRS.IND.3SG/PL’, Gatti 1910:688)
‘3PL’ (Gatti 1910:684) (see also Giannelli 2000:109). The or prevalent syncretism of third persons in all tenses and
change is ongoing in some dialects, where te freely alter- moods, e.g. Anc. [el ˈgaːlo ˈkanta]/[i ˈgaːli ˈkanta/ˈkantane]
nates for the subject function with the inherited nominative ‘the cock sings/the cocks sing.3SG/PL’ (cf. also Balducci
tu: e.g. Prg. [ˈio] ‘I’ vs [me] ‘me’, [ˈtu(e)/te] ‘you.SG’ vs [te] 2000:23-6). This syncretism has been overwhelming since
‘you.2SG.OBL’, [ˈlu(e)//ˈliːa/ˈlɛ] ‘3SG.M/F ’, [no(ˈaltre)] ‘1PL’, [vo the earliest texts, except for essere ‘be’, e.g. Fabrianese
ˈaltre] ‘2PL’, [ˈloːre] ‘3PL’ (Moretti 1987:48). (1400-1403) è vendute ‘is.3SG sold.FPL’, era segnate ‘was.3SG
In verb morphology, affixal allomorphy tends to retain a marked.FPL’ vs sono ‘are.3PL’ (Stussi 1967:145) (see also
ternary inflectional class distinction. In the first person Debanne 2011:185 n. 169 on old anconitano).
plural indicative, ‑/amo/ vs ‑/emo/ vs -/imo/ generally
persist, e.g. Jesino [kanˈtaːmo] ‘we sing’ vs [goˈdeːmo] ‘we
enjoy ourselves’ = [mjeˈteːmo] ‘we reap’ vs [parˈtiːmo]
15.3.3 Syntax
‘we depart’, area amiatina (Giannelli 2000:109) [ˈkantamu]
‘we sing’ vs [veˈdeːmu] ‘we see’ vs [senˈtiːmu] ‘we listen’ Most syntactic features for which the area perimediana
(cf. Mattesini and Ugoccioni 1992:xviii-xxxii). The same departs from the dialects spoken southeast of the Rome-
holds for the imperfect indicative, e.g. Anc. (Romina Ancona line are shared with Tuscany. As in other structural
Ramazzotti, p.c.) [kanˈtaːva] ‘I sang’ vs [veˈdeːva] ‘I saw’ = components, the area mediana features generally stretched
[kuˈreːva] ‘I ran’ vs [veˈniːva] ‘I came’.14 A ternary distinc- further to the north, and in part still cross the line today,
tion is also retained in the preterite and arrhizotonic past as is the case for enclitic possessives which occur on the
participles (containing a stressed thematic vowel), e.g. Prg. Adriatic coast in the hinterland of Senigallia (e.g. [ˈfrad̥ed̥o]/
[maˈɲːo] ‘(s)he ate’ vs [veˈde] ‘(s)he saw’= [mjeˈte] ‘(s)he [ˈsɔred̥a] ‘brother/sister=your.2SG’), and even in some rural
reaped’ vs [parˈti] ‘(s)he left’, [maˈɲːaːto] ‘eaten’ vs [ve- Pesarese dialects (Balducci 1979:1971), and on the Tyrrhen-
ˈduːto] ‘seen’ = [mjeˈtuːto] ‘reaped’ vs [parˈtiːto] ‘left’. Ger- ian coast in the province of Viterbo, e.g. Canepina [ˈfratito/
unds display mostly a binary opposition [first conjuga- ˈsɔrita] ‘brother/sister=your.2SG’, more rarely [ˈfratimi/-ti]/
tion]: [maˈɲːando] vs [veˈdɛndo]= [mjeˈtɛndo] vs [parˈtɛndo]. [ˈsɔrime] ‘brothers/sisters=my’ (Cimarra and Petroselli
A root-final velar is frequently inserted into the first 2008:75). In the Marche, both AIS maps and our fieldwork
person singular present indicative and the present subjunct- document variation with kinship terms between prenominal
ive forms, e.g. Jesino [ˈvaːgo/-a] [ˈstaːgo/-a] [ˈfaːgo/-a] and postnominal possessive (with the definite article), the latter
[ˈdaːgo/-a] ‘go/say/do/give.PRS.IND/SBJV.1SG’ (see also Rohlfs being obligatory elsewhere, e.g. Anc., AIS 1.13 [tu fraˈtɛːlo/i fra
1968:260f.). ˈtɛːli ˈtui] ‘your =brother.MSG/the.MPL brother.MPL your.MPL’,
8.1554 [i kalˈʦoːni ˈtu] ‘the.MPL trouser.MPL your.MPL’ (see
also Mancini 1987:486). The northern order ‘DEF.ART + possessive
14
A peculiar imperfect indicative form (e.g. Pitigliano [aˈnːaːmara] ‘we
were going’; Magnanini 2010:336) occurs at the border between Tuscany, + (kinship) noun’ is common in the rest of the area, e.g.
southwest Umbria, and northern Lazio. Pietralunga (AIS pt 546) [i tu kalˈʦoːni] ‘(lit. the) your trousers’,
243
Città di Castello (Moretti 1987:75, 148) [ɛl mi ˈbaːbo] ‘(lit. the) my Interesting (non-)agreement phenomena are found,
father’. Variation is sometimes observed, e.g. Viterbese (Urbani particularly in the variety of Sassoferrato, as described
1999:19) [li ˈfiːje ˈmiːi]/[li mi ˈfiːje] lit. ‘the sons my/the my by Peverini (2011). In Sassoferratese, third person verb
sons’. In certain varieties, particularly of northern Lazio forms usually do not show any number opposition, and a
(Cimarra and Petroselli 2008:75), the article is optional with single form (etymologically singular) occurs with both
kinship terms: [(l) tu ˈnɔnːo] ‘(the) your grandfather’. singular and plural subjects. However, optional full
Another feature shared with area mediana (and the south) agreement in number is possible for unaccusatives,
is DOM (marked by /a/ ‘to’), exemplified with data from when the subject is topicalized through left- or right-
Ancona in (12a,b) (Romina Ramazzotti, p.c.; see also Parrino dislocation (15a) or the subject is in contrastive focus
1967:25) and from Civita Castellana in (12c) (Cimarra and (15b):
Petroselli 2008:34):
(15) a. arveˈniːa / arveˈniːano da la
(12) a. ɔ ˈvisto a mi maˈriːto / a ˈmarko return.IPFV.IND.3SG return.IPFV.IND.3PL from the
I.have seen to my husband.MSG to Marco.M sˈkɔːla a ˈpːjedi ai ˈtempi ˈmiːa, i
a sto ˈfjɔːlo (Anc.) school at feet at times mines the.MPL
to this.MSG child.MSG muˈneːjə (Sassoferrato)
‘I have seen my husband/Marco/this child.’ boy.MPL
‘In my time they returned from school on foot, the
b. ˈaːne maˈʦaːto a ˈkul poˈre:to / a kul
children.’
they.have killed.MSG to that.MSG poor.MSG to that.MSG
ˈpɔːro ˈka (a) um ˈpɔːro ˈkristo (Anc.) b. I MUˈNEːJƏ da la sˈkɔːla arveˈniːa,/
poor.MSG dog[MSG] to a.MSG poor.MSG person.MSG the.MPL boy.MPL from the school return.IPFV.IND.3SG
‘(They) have (= somebody has) killed that poor arveˈnjaːno, ˈmiːga le muˈnɛlːe (Sassoferrato)
person/dog/a poor person.’ return.IPFV.IND.3PL non the.FPL girl.FPL
‘It was the boys who returned from school, not the
c. caˈma a ˈuːno (Civita Castellana)
girls.’
call.INF to someone.MSG
‘to call someone’
Crucially, transitive and unergative verbs never license
full agreement (16a,b):
In some areas (particularly northern Umbria), feminine
first names and kinship terms take the article, as exempli-
(16) a. a /**ˈanːo rˈkolto i
fied with Perugino (Moretti 1987:45; Mattesini 2002:488,
have.3SG /have.3PL pick.up.PTCP.MSG the.MPL
494):
bagaˈrotːsi kwa ˈoltro ˈjeri, i muˈneːjə
beetles here there yesterday the.MPL boy.MPL
(13) ɔ ˈvisto la ˈmamːa e la
(Sassoferrato)
I.have seen the.FSG mum.FSG and the.FSG
‘They picked up the beetles over there
ʤoˈvanːa (Prg.)
yesterday, the children.’
Giovanna.F
‘I have seen my mum and Giovanna.’ b. I ˈSORT ʃi de ˈnɔtːe ˈmaɲːa /
the.MPL mice of night eat.3SG
On the Adriatic coast, this feature occurs from Senigallia **ˈmaɲːano ˈsjempre i biˈseje, ˈmiga
northwards. eat.3PL always the.MPL peas, not
Participial agreement triggered by a third person indirect i bagaˈrotːsi (Sassoferrato)
object li occurs in an area of northern Lazio, delimited by the.MPL beetles
Monfeli (1993:13-17). See ex. (14) in §49.2.1, and the example ‘It’s the mice who always eat the peas at night, not
from Faleria (Cimarra and Petroselli 2008:38, 86 n.36): the beetles.’
(14) ɟːi=li=ˈi ˈditːi? Sassoferratese displays also a person-driven split

3IO=3MSG.DO=have.2SG tell.PTCP.MSG between third singular and other persons, nested into a
si n ɟːi=li=ˈi ˈditːi, ˈdiˈɟːiːli (Faleria) three-way clause-type-driven split, which distinguishes un-
if NEG 3IO=3MSG.DO=have.2SG tell.PTCP.MSG tell.IMP.2SG=DO=IO accusatives and monadic reflexives ((a), Table 15.5) vs
‘Have you told him/her/them about it? If you ha- dyadic reflexives and antipassives (b) vs unergatives and
ven’t, tell him/her/them!’ transitives (c).
244
Table 15.5 Triple mixed auxiliation system, Sassoferrato In conditional sentences, the conditional occurs both in
(Peverini 2011) protasis and apodosis, as in Montefiascone (pt 612, AIS
8.1633–4) in (17) (see Rohlfs 1968:147):
a. E E E E E E Unaccusatives/
monadic reflexives (17) si ˈtːu lo ʧerˈkaʃtre, lo troaˈreʃtre
b. E E E/H E E E Dyadic reflexives, if you it= look.for.COND.2SG it= find.COND.2SG
antipassives (Montefiascone)
c. H H H H H H Unergatives, ‘If you looked for it, you’d find it.’
transitives
245
CHAPTER 16
The dialects of southern Italy

ADAM LEDGEWAY
16.1 Introduction b. vocative formation through truncation of material

following tonic vowel: Nap. Gennà’! ‘Gennaro!’
(cf. §14.3.1.1, §17.3.1);
The dialects of southern Italy represent the numerous local
c. present or auxiliary periphrasis (rather than syn-
linguistic outcomes of spoken Latin—itself in contact with
thetic form) for the future: Reg. avi a turnari a Missina
many sub-/adstrate languages (Prosdocimi 1978; Adams
‘he has to (=will) return to Messina’ (cf. §§46.3.2.1-2);
2003a)—as it evolved, naturally and largely unaffected by
d. absence of present subjunctive (save residues in cen-
formal education south of an isogloss conventionally taken
tral Salento);
to run approximately from Rome in the west to Ancona in
e. syncretism of manner adverbs with adjective;
the east (Pellegrini 1977; Cortelazzo 1988; Savoia 1997b).
f. restricted use of prenominal adjectives;
Although not forming a single politico-administrative unit
g. distinction between realis/irrealis complementizers:
today, the different regions and peoples of this vast area
(cf. §§31.3.1, 63.2.1.2);
have at various times been united: first under the Kingdom
h. liberal focus fronting: (cf. §§31.3.4, 34.5.3-4);
of Sicily, a realm established under eleventh-century Nor-
i. prepositional accusative (cf. §56.3.2.4).
man rule unifying Sicily with the southern mainland but
divided in 1282 between the Aragonese and Angevin dynas- Despite considerable structural unity and general mutual
ties giving rise to the insular and peninsular Kingdoms of intelligibility (Avolio 1995:29f.), southern dialects do not
the Two Sicilies with capitals in Palermo and Naples, form an entirely homogeneous linguistic group, being
respectively. They were united again in 1443 as the King- standardly divided—following isoglosses that cut across
dom of the Two Sicilies (with capital in Naples) under Calabria at Cetraro, Bisignano, and Torre Melissa and across
Alfonso V of Aragon, which then variously passed under Apulia just south of Taranto, Martina Franca, Ceglie Messa-
French, Spanish, Austrian, and Bourbon rule before being pica, and Ostuni—into dialects of the upper south (southern
annexed to the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1860, becoming part Lazio (south of a line Circeo-Ceprano-Sora), Abruzzo
of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. (excluding the upper Aterno Valley and western Marsica),
Consequently, southern dialects, often together with Molise, Campania, Basilicata, northern Apulia, northern
those of central Italy (cf. Ch. 15), share a number of phon- Calabria) and those of the extreme south (Salento, central-
etic, morphological, and syntactic features (Rohlfs 1972:9, southern Calabria, Sicily).2 These subdivisions (see Map
27-31; Ledgeway 2000; Loporcaro 2009:120-39), including:1 16.1) broadly coincide with the traditional linguistic areas
of Oscan and Greek speech and, in part, the historical realms
(1) a. neutralization of /v/ vs /b/ distinction, with fortis of the Kingdoms of Sicily and Naples. The distinctions
variant (-)[bb]-; between upper southern and extreme southern dialects
are often significant, though not invariably coinciding
1
exactly with this binary division (cf. Avolio 1995:chs 4,5;
Whenever phonetic detail is irrelevant (especially in §§16.3-4), forms
will be cited in a broadly Italian-based orthography where: (i) ch/gh = [k]/[g] Loporcaro 2009:142-59), including distinct (un)stressed
(otherwise h = Ø), c+i/e = [(t)ʃ], g+i/e = [dʤ], sci = [(ʃ)ʃ], gli = [ʎʎ, jj], z = [ʦ, ʣ] vowel systems, weakening/retention of intervocalic voice-
(long intervocalically), -d.d.- = [ɖɖ(ʐ)]; (ii) all orthographically double con- less stops, morphological marking of mass number
sonants are realized long; (iii) unless otherwise indicated (by an acute
accent whenever vowel quality is irrelevant), stress is paroxytonic. This (cf. §57.4), presence/absence of reflexes of the Latin infini-
broadly Italian-based representation reflects the local orthographic prac- tive ending -RE, post- vs prenominal position of possessives,
tices of the dialects which, in most cases, enjoy long and rich written retention of simple past/present perfect distinction vs
(literary) traditions, from which many of the present examples are
drawn. It should also be noted that in most upper southern Italian dialects
unstressed (and especially front) vowels are typically realized as schwa
2
(cf. §16.2.1.2), especially word-finally (e.g., Nap. càmmara/-e ['kammərə] Northern Apulian dialects of the upper south and southern Apulian
‘bedroom/-s’, surdato/-e [sur'datə] ‘soldier/-s’, vénnere ['vennərə] ‘sell.INF’). dialects of Salento are labelled ‘Pugliese’ and ‘Salentino’, respectively.
246 This chapter © Adam Ledgeway 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
THE DIALECTS OF SOUTHERN ITALY
Ancona
TUSCANY MARCHE
UMBRIA
Campli ADRIATIC
SEA
Pescara
Chieti
ABRUZZO Arielli
Popoli Lanciano
LAZIO Sant'Eusanio Teramo
del Sangro Guglionesi
Rome
San Felice del Molise
MOLISE Sannicandro
Sora Casacalenda Mattinata
Campobasso Sant'Elia a Pianisi Manfredonia
Ceprano Sepino Lucera Foggia
Cassino Gallo Cercepiccola Molfetta
Matese Troia Bari
San Felice Circeo Pietramelara San Leucio Benevento
del Sannio Bitonto
Sant'Angelo a Cupolo Mola
Caserta
Giugliano CAMPANIA Vallesaccarda Ruvo di Ceglie
Puglia PUGLIA Messapica
Monte di Procida Naples Ponticelli Avellino
Procida Siano Muro Lucano Altamura Ostuni
Martina Carovigno
Forio Pozzuoli Salerno Potenza Matera Franca
Ruoti Brindisi
Ischia Bacoli Basento
Va
Eboli Calvello Sava Cellino S. Marco

llo
Castelmezzano
BASILICATA Taranto SALENTO Lecce
di
Sala Corleto Ag Maruggio San Donato Vernole

D
ri
n Consilina
ia
o Parabita
Senise Gulf of Nardò Otranto
Ascea Scorrano
Maratea Taranto Gallipoli Matino
Santa Maria
Verbicaro Cassano di Leuca
TYRRHENIAN Castrovillari Sibari
Co
SEA s c il e
ti
Diamante
ra
C
Cetraro Bisignano
CALABRIA
Cosenza Torre Melissa
Fiumefreddo Bruzio
Mendicino
Belmonte Calabro
Scigliano Crotone
Amantea
Catanzaro
Vibo
Valentia
Soverato
Nicotera Stilo
Gioia Tauro
Roccella Ionica
Palermo Reggio
di Calabria
Frazzanò Bova IONIAN
Casignana
Mistretta Grotta SEA
Mussomeli
SICILY
Ribera Pedara
Aidone
Delia
Syracuse
Scicli
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
Map 16.1 Dialects of southern Italy
247
ADAM LEDGEWAY
generalization of simple past, presence/absence of copular reached further north, as witnessed by a small ‘Outpost’
distinctions derived from Lat. ESSE/STARE ‘be/stand’ and (Lausberg 1939:44-6) of dialects spoken east of Potenza
HABERE/TENERE ‘have/hold’ (cf. §52.2), and wide/restricted along the Basento (cf. Castelmezzanese) which present a
use of the infinitive (cf. §63.3). hybrid system marrying together the mergers of the com-
What follows limits discussion to a selection of the most mon Romance system in the front vowels with the quanti-
salient features (for fuller treatments, see Rohlfs 1966; tative neutralizations of the ‘Sardinian’ system in the back
1968; 1969a; Loporcaro 1988a; 2009; Holtus et al. 1988; vowels, of the kind that also historically underlies Roma-
Avolio 1995; Maiden and Parry 1997; Ledgeway 2000; nian (cf. Loporcaro 2011b:113f.). Still within the Lausberg
2009a) emphasizing what unites, rather than differenti- Zone, to the (south)west we find further hybrid systems in
ates, southern dialects. the ‘Transitional Zone’ (cf. Verbicarese; Silvestri 2008-9)
combining a predominantly ‘Sicilian’ system (see below)
typical of the neighbouring ‘Southern Zone’ with some
sporadic ‘Sardinian-type’ outcomes in the high-mid vowels
16.2 Phonology typical of the ‘Middle Zone’.
In the so-called ‘Southern Zone’, encompassing the
16.2.1 Vowels whole of Calabria south of Diamante-Cassano-Sibari, Sicily,
and central-southern Salento, we find the ‘Sicilian’ penta-
16.2.1.1 Tonic vowels
vocalic system with neutralization of height distinctions in
The entire gamut of variation in Romance vowel systems the high vowels, a distribution which, following Lausberg
(cf. §25.1.1) is found across southern Italy, as illustrated in (1966:§162) and Fanciullo (1984), is now generally assumed
Table 16.1. to represent a later development of the common Romance
The two principal Romance vowel systems that underlie system.
such variation are the so-called ‘Sardinian’ pentavocalic The distribution of the ‘Sicilian’ system was undoubtedly
system (cf. Senisese; see also §17.2.1), in which original more extensive in the past (Barbato 2005), including north-
Latin quantitative differences were simply neutralized ern Salento, southern Campania (northern Cilento and
(cf. §17.2.1), and the common Romance heptavocalic system Salerno), and large parts of Basilicata. A direct testimony
(cf. Neapolitan), in which the late Latin high [‑tense] front of this historical distribution is still visible today in:
and back vowels lowered to merge with the high-mid
vowels yielding mid-vowel oppositions such as ˈvenə/ˈvɛnə (i) southern Cilento (Rohlfs 1988:84f.; De Blasi 2006:46f.)
‘vein/(s)he.comes’ (< UENAM/UENIT), ˈoɲɲə/ˈɔɲɲə ‘finger-nail/ where an isolated pocket of dialects northwest of the
each’ (< UNGULAM/OMNES). Whereas the latter system is found ‘Transitional Zone’ to the south of Ascea-Vallo,
across most upper southern Italian dialects (cf. Map 16.2), together with the isolated dialect of Sala Consilina
the former is today limited to the so-called ‘Middle Zone’ of further north in the Vallo di Diano (Avolio 1995:60),
the Lausberg Zone (Lausberg 1939; Martino 1991) straddling continue to display a Sicilian system;
southern Basilicata (south of rivers Sauro and Agri) and (ii) the so-called ‘peripheral’ pentavocalic system
northern Calabria (north of rivers Crati and Coscile). Previ- (cf. Carovignese) which represents a further layering
ously, the distribution of this ‘Sardinian’ type probably on an original ‘Sicilian’ system (Barbato 2002:40-44)
Table 16.1 Tonic vowels in southern Italian dialects

CLat. FĪLUM NĬUEM TĒLAM PĔDEM PĀNEM/CĂNEM CŎR SŌLEM CRŬCEM LŪNAM
‘thread’ ‘snow’ ‘canvass’ ‘foot’ ‘bread/dog’ ‘heart’ ‘sun’ ‘cross’ ‘moon’
late Lat. ˈfilʊ ˈniße ˈtela ˈpɛde ˈpane/ˈkane *ˈkɔre ˈsole ˈkrʊke ˈluːna
Sns. ˈfilə/ˈnivə ˈtɛlə/ˈpɛrə ˈpanə/ˈkanə ˈkɔrə/ˈsɔlə ˈkruʧə/ˈlunə
Cmz. ˈfilə ˈnevə/ˈtela/ˈperə ˈpanə/ˈkanə ˈkorə/ˈsolə ˈkruʧə/ˈlunə
Nap. ˈfilə ˈnevə/ˈtelə ˈpɛrə ˈpanə/ˈkanə ˈkɔrə ˈsolə/ˈkroʃə ˈlunə
Sic. ˈfilu/ˈnivi/ˈtila ˈpɛri ˈpani/ˈkani ˈkɔri ˈsuli/ˈkru(t)ʃi/ˈluna
Vbc. ˈfɪlə/ˈnɪva/ˈtɪla ˈpɛtra ˈpanə/ˈkanə ˈkɔrə ˈsʊlə/ˈkrʊʧa/ˈlʊna
(UĒNAM>) ˈvɛna ˈfrɔnta (<FRŌNTEM)
Cgn. ˈfilu ˈnɛvə/ˈtɛla/ˈpɛtə ˈpani/ˈkani ˈkɔrə/ˈsɔlə/ˈkrɔʃə ˈluna
248
Lucera
Foggia
A D R I AT I C
Bisceglie
Benevento SEA
Bitonto
Bari
Spinazzola Monopoli
Avellino Ripacandida
Naples
Altamura
Fasano
Ostuni
Salerno
Picerno Matera Brindisi
Carovigno
Potenza Mesagne
Massafra
Ginosa
Castelmezzano Francavilla
Taranto Fontana
Sala Pisticci
Consilina Lecce
Vallo Nardò
Tursi
Senise Gulf of Galatina
TYRRHENIAN Ta r a n t o
Lauria
Gallipoli
Sapri Oriolo
SEA Maratea
Castrovillari
Scalea Gagliano
Cessano Sibari del Capo
Verbicaro
Diamante
Common Romance vowel system Cetraro Rossano

(e.g., Naples) Acri
Cirò

Peripheral Zone (e.g., Carovigno)
Cosenza
Outpost
(Romanian-style vowel system, e.g., Castelmezzano)
Intermediate Zone Crotone

(Sardinian-Sicilian hybrid vowel system, e.g., Verbicaro) Lamezia Terme IONIAN
Catanzaro SEA
Middle Zone (Sardinian vowel system, e.g., Senise)
Southern Zone (Sicilian vowel system) Soverato

Vibo Valentia
Map 16.2 Tonic vowel systems in southern Italy

ADAM LEDGEWAY
found in Lausberg’s ‘Peripheral Zone’ (cf. also ˈfiksə ‘fax/-es’ (D’Alessandro and van Oostendorp 2014:3f.),
Fanciullo 2014). Significantly, the latter extends pre- rəˈsjettə ‘reset.2SG (a computer)’ (Maturi 2002:186).
cisely from northern Salento into eastern and north- Whether the outcomes of metaphony are raising or diph-
ern Basilicata, and finally into southeastern thongization, it is not uncommon for them to be involved in
Campania, forming a natural transition between the secondary developments. Thus in Barese the metaphonic
common Romance system to the north, the ‘Outpost’ falling diphthongs [ˈuə]/[ˈiə] currently show oscillation
of Romanian-style systems to the south, and the between the original diphthongal output and an innovative
‘Sardinian’ (Middle Zone) and ‘hybrid’ (Transitional reduced monophthongal variant (Valente 1975:15-17).4 Con-
Zone) systems of the Lausberg Zone to the south versely, in Bitontino original monophthongal outputs such
and east. as *ˈkjinə ‘full.MSG’ (< PLENU(M)) were subject to diphthongiza-
tion (viz. ˈkjɔjnə) as was primary -[i]- (cf. *ˈfikə > ˈfɔjkə ‘fig’).
16.2.1.1.1 Metaphony and spontaneous diphthongization Spontaneous diphthongs of this type prove particularly
common in Abruzzese, Molisan, and Pugliese, as well as
The effects of metaphonic raising or diphthongization of
the Bay of Naples and just to the north of Naples, roughly
reflexes of the low mid vowels Ĕ/Ŏ triggered by *-u (though
corresponding to the same areas displaying metaphony of
not in eastern Abruzzo and some neighbouring Laziale dia-
/a/. Though details vary considerably from dialect to dialect
lects) and *-i are widespread throughout the coast and
(Sornicola 2006a; Ledgeway 2009a:50-52; Loporcaro 2009:73-
interior, respectively, of the upper South (Barbato 2008;
5, 144f.), there is a greater tendency for spontaneous diph-
cf. §38.3.3), e.g., *ˈdɛnte/-i ‘tooth/teeth’ > Santeliano
thongs to develop in open syllables (cf. Alt. CASA(M) > kɛi̯s
ˈdɛntə/ˈdentə vs Cos. ˈdɛnthɛ/ˈdiənthi, *ˈkɔl(lek)tʊ/-i /-a/-e
‘house’ vs QUANDO > kand ‘when’), as in the case of the
‘collected.PTCP.MSG/PL / FSG/PL’ > Sorano ˈkotə/ˈkɔtə vs Nap.
Manfredoniano mid vowels /e/ > [ei] (ˈpeip̯ ə ‘pepper’,
ˈkwovətə/ˈkɔvətə, whereas metaphony of the high mid
ˈmei̯sə ‘month’), /ɛ/ > [ɛi]̯ (ˈmɛi̯lə ‘honey’), /ɔ/ > [ɔu̯]
vowels produces raising: *ˈmetti/-e ‘put.2SG/3SG’ > Bvt.
(ˈrɔu̯tə ‘wheel’), /o/ > [ou̯] (ˈvou̯ ʃ ə ‘voice’, ˈnou̯ ʃ ə ‘walnut’).
ˈmittə/ˈ'mettə, *ˈrossʊ/-i ‘red.MSG/PL’ > Cpb. ˈruʃʃə. In the
In dialects around the Bay of Naples, by contrast, the high
extreme South, by contrast, diphthongization is the norm,
mid vowels /e/ and /o/ variously produce the falling diph-
reaching on the mainland as far as Vibo Valentia-Stilo in
thongs [ai ̯, ei ̯] and [au̯, oʊ], respectively, in both open syl-
Calabria (Sov. ˈpiənʦi/ˈpɛnʦa ‘think.2SG/3SG’, ˈʈɽuəvi/ˈʈɽɔva
lables (Foriano: ˈnai̯və ‘snow’, ˈnau̯ ʃ ə ‘walnut’) and closed
‘find.2SG/3SG’), as far as Nardò-San Donato-Vernole for Ŏ and
(Foriano: ˈsai̯kkə ‘dry.F’, ˈrau̯ssə ‘red.F’), whereas the high
Gallipoli for Ĕ in Salento (Cln. bˈbwɛnu/-i ‘good.MSG/PL’
vowels /i/ and /u/ diphthongize as [øi ̯, œi ̯] and [eu̯] in open
vs bˈbɔna/‑e ‘good.FSG/PL’, ˈpjɛrtu/-i ‘open(ed).MSG/PL’ vs
syllables (Ptl. ˈvøi ̯nə ‘wine’, (*ˈpelʊ > ˈpilə >) ˈpøi ̯lə ‘hair’,
ˈpɛrta/-e ‘open(ed).FSG/PL’), and in Sicily affects just the
ˈleu̯nə ‘moon’, (*ˈsolʊ > ˈsulə >) ˈseu̯lə ‘alone.MSG’), and also in
central-eastern part of the island (Ruffino 2001:44-6)
closed syllables in the case of /i/ ((*ˈpeʃʃi > ˈpiʃʃə >) ˈpøi̯ʃ ʃə
where it is generally thought to represent a late develop-
‘fishes’). As with metaphonic dipthongization, the real-
ment.3 More rare, and largely limited to the eastern upper
ization and quality of spontaneous diphthongs is often sen-
south (Abruzzo, Molise) and western Campania
sitive to phonosyntactic conditioning (Rohlfs 1966:30f.;
(cf. Sornicola 2006a), is metaphony of /a/ which tends to
Loporcaro 2009:145), witness the presence of the diphthong
operate in open syllables (Maiden 1991a; Ledgeway
only in prepausal position in Mol. ji lə ˈvaid̯ ə ‘I him= see’ vs
2009a:54f.): *ˈnasʊ/-i > Camplese ˈnasə/ˈnisə ‘nose/-s’,
lə ˈvedə ˈjojjə ‘him= see I’.
*ˈakʊ/-i > MnP. 'ɛkə ‘needle/-s’.
Although metaphonic alternation is reportedly recessive
in some upper southern dialects, for instance in many
16.2.1.2 Atonic vowels
dialects of the Gargano where its distribution is erratic
(Carosella 2005:101-4), or in certain sections of society Southern atonic vowel systems are summarized in
such as younger, middle-class speakers of Neapolitan (Del Table 16.2.
Puente 1995), it is certainly still morphologically productive In all unstressed positions, ESIDs1 (extreme southern
in many other areas, witness such neologisms as Arl. ˈfaksə/ Italian dialects) present just three vowels, merging all
front vowels in [i] and back vowels in [u] (generally lowered
to [ɪ ʊ] when not word-/phrase-final), e.g., Sic. POSSIBILE(M) >
3
Metaphonic raising, however, extends to the southeastern corner of
Salento (Grimaldi 2003; Loporcaro 2009:154): Santa Maria di Leuca ˈdɛntʰɛ/
4
ˈdentʰi ‘tooth/teeth’. In Calabria and parts of northern Salento, as well as In some dialects variation in the nature of the diphthong (falling vs
central Sicily (cf. n.5), metaphony is also exceptionally triggered by -u (<-O): raising, reduction to monophthong) is subject to phonosyntactic condition-
PENSO ‘think.1SG’, *ˈtrɔvo ‘find.1SG > Sov. ˈpiənʦu, 'ʈɽuəvu, *ˈmɔro ‘die.1SG’ > ing (Loporcaro 2009:122f.; Silvestri 2009): Adranita bˈbɔnu ˈmiədiku ‘good
Cln. ˈmwɛru. doctor’ vs ˈmɛdiku bˈbuənu lit. ‘doctor good’.
250
Table 16.2 Atonic vowels systems in southern Italian dialects

PRE - TONIC / POST - TONIC ( NON - FINAL ) POST - TONIC ( FINAL )
Ī Ĭ Ē Ĕ AĀ Ŏ Ō/Ŭ Ū Ī Ĭ Ē Ĕ Ā/Ă Ŏ Ō Ŭ
ESIDs1 (Sic., C-SCal., SSal.) ɪ a ʊ i a u
ESIDs2 (NCal., CSal.) ɪ a ʊ i ɛ/e a u
USIDs ə(/i) a(/ə) u(/ə) ə(/u) ə a/ə ə
pʊsˈsibbɪli ‘possible’, *baˈsjare > vaˈsari ‘kiss.INF’, CŬNICULU(M) > generally reduce to [ə/u], respectively (m[ˈe]na/m[ə]nà
kʊˈniɟɟu ‘rabbit’, with concomitant effects on inflectional ‘throw.PRS.3SG/INF’, m[ˈo]nna/m[u]nnà ‘peel.PRS.3SG/INF’) and
morphology: CRUCE(M)/CRUCES ‘cross/-es’ > ˈkruʧi, CREDIS/CREDI(T) non-mid vowels oscillate with [ə] (frav[i]cà/frav[ə]cà ‘prod-
‘believe.2SG/3SG’ > ˈkrɛdi. A variation on this system (ESIDs2) is uce.INF’, tav[u]lètta/tav[ə]lètta ‘board (for pasta-making)’,
found in and around Cosenza and in central Salento where terr[a]mòto/terra[ə]mòto ‘earthquake’), whereas in non-final
front mid-vowels do not raise word-finally, e.g., Blm. HODIĒ > posttonic positions all vowels generally merge as [ə], though
ˈɔjɛ ‘today’ (‑[ɛ] > -[a] following a vowel in hiatus in Cosentino, again with some oscillations in the high and, especially, low
hence ˈɔja), SEPTĔ(M) > ˈsɛtthɛ ‘seven’ (cf. Sic. ˈɔji, ˈsɛtthi). vowels: FORFICE(M) > fuórf[ə]ce ‘scissors’, TABŬLA(M) > tàv[ə]la
Despite superficial appearances, this system, at least in ‘table’, sùbb[ə]to(/sùbb[i]to) ‘immediately’, àv[ə]to (/àv[u]to)
northern Calabria (cf. also northern Salentino), differs from ‘tall’, càmm[ə]ra/càmm[a]ra ‘(bed)room’. In final position, by
the core ESIDs1 system in the back vowels too, inasmuch as contrast, all vowels are realized as schwa, though some
reflexes of -Ō/‑Ŏ must have fallen together with reflexes of -Ŭ fluctuation is possible with -A (variously -[a, a, ɐ, ə]; Avolio
[‑ʊ] much earlier than elsewhere in the extreme South since, 1995:41f.): bello/-a/-e [bˈbɛllə] ‘beautiful.MSG/FSG/PL’.
like the latter (cf. Cos. ˈkuənthu ‘story’ < CONTŬ(M)), the former In other cases it is not uncommon for unstressed vowels
also trigger metaphony, e.g., Cos. ˈkuənthu ‘tell.1SG’ < CONTŌ, and syllables to fall (e.g., Ffd. AXILLAM > scid. d. a ‘wing’), includ-
(skrɪv)- ˈiənnu ‘(writ)-ing.GER’ < (SCRIB)-ENDŌ; ˈsuɔru ‘sister’ < SORŎ ing the pan-southern historical loss of word-initial /i/-
(R), Ffd. (NCal.) ˈuətthu ‘eight’ < OCTŎ (today Cosentino, under before tautosyllabic nasals giving rise to novel onset
Italian influence, has ˈɔtthu; but Sic. (Scicli) ˈkɔnthu ‘tell.1SG’, clusters (Cpb. ’mbronta ‘finger-print’, Sic. in ‘in’+vucca
(skrɪv)-ˈɛnnu, ˈsɔru, ˈɔtthu). Thus, in the back vowels – phon- ‘mouth’ > ’mmucca), and apocope of word-final vowels typ-
etically -[u] everywhere in the extreme South – ESIDs1, at ically following long consonants (UACCA(M) > Pgl. vacc’ ‘cow’,
least in those dialects with metaphony, distinguish phonolo- LINGUA(M) > Isc. lènk ‘tongue’, SAPIO > Cal. sacci’ ‘know.1SG’). Rife
gically between reflexes of -Ō/-Ŏ (non-metaphonizing) and ‑Ŭ across all dialects is the tendency to elide unstressed
(metaphonizing), whereas in ESIDs2 such as Cosentino the vowels: Cht. m’ (< me) a vinute n’ (< nu) idee lit. ‘me has
phonological opposition is neutralized.5 come an idea’.
Superficially simpler are USIDs (upper southern Italian
dialects) where above the Cetraro-Bisignano-Torre Melissa
and Taranto-Ostuni lines, especially in final position, all 16.2.2 Consonants
unstressed vowels may potentially neutralize as [ə],
although there is a notable areal tendency for (final) [a] to At a certain level of phonological abstraction, the conson-
display greater resilience (Rohlfs 1966:176; Retaro antal inventory of southern Italy can be modelled by way of
2008:121f.; Ledgeway 2009a:71-8; Loporcaro 2009:145-7), wit- the representation in Table 16.3.
ness Verbicarese which reduces all final vowels to schwa
with the exception of -A (Silvestri 2008-9): *ˈpɛktʊ/-i
‘chest/-s’ > ˈpɪə̯ttə, CANTO > ˈkantə ‘sing.1SG’, *ˈkane/-i 16.2.2.1 Obstruents
‘dog/-s’ > ˈkanə, but CASAM > ˈkasa ‘house’. In Neapolitan, Alongside voice and length, a major distinctive characteris-
for instance, in pretonic positions front/back mid-vowels tic of the southern consonantal system is fortis/lenis oppo-
sitions. In all dialects, in non-postconsonantal positions
the historically underlying voicing contrast in the stops
(p/b, t/d, k/ɡ) is maintained, at least traditionally, through
a fortis/lenis opposition between a stop series /p t k/ and
5
An intermediate case is represented by Mussomelese (S. Cruschina p.c.) a fricative/sonorant series /v (/β/ʋ); ð (/ɾ/l); ɣ (j)/, often
which presents the ESID1 system in the front vowels (ˈɔji, ˈsɛtthi), but the
ESID system in the back vowels (ˈduarmu ‘sleep.1SG’ < DORM(I)Ō, (skrɪv)-
2 with further weakening > [Ø] and producing frequent
ˈiannu, ˈsuaru, ˈuatthu). counteretymological restorations (Ponticellese *ˈ(v)ɪɾələ >
251
ADAM LEDGEWAY
Table 16.3 Consonantal phonemes in southern Italian dialects

BILABIAL LABIO - DENTAL DENTAL ALVEOLAR PALATO - ALVEOLAR PALATAL VELAR
Stop p b t d c ɟ k g
Fricative f v s ʃ
Affricate ʦ ʧ dʤ
Nasal m n ɲ
Lateral l ʎ
Approximant j
Trill r
ˈgwɪɾələ ‘widower’).6 Only in fortis positions, namely -[ʤ]-, and ‑[ɟɟ]- under RF (Bar. (a ʃ)ʃi ‘(to) go.INF’, Vallatese ʊ
postconsonantly (principally lexicalized word-internal ʃəˈnʊccə/rə ʤənˈɣʊccə ‘the knee/‑s’).
sequences) including under RF (cf. §§14.2.5, 40.3.1), do ori- A partial reversal of the pattern in Table 16.4 is found
ginal (long) voiced stops resurface contrasting with the in Salentino (cf. Table 16.5), where the original voiced stops
corresponding (long) voiceless stops. Coupled with the fact /b/ and /d, g/ undergo lenition (reduction to /Ø/) and
that in USIDs there is also variable voicing of the original fortition (devoicing to /t/, /k/), respectively, in word-initial
unvoiced stops in postvocalic position (Maturi 2002:82; and intervocalic positions. Thus although there arises a
Ledgeway 2009a:86), though without risk of merger with partial neutralization with the voiceless stops – complete
the original voiced stops now weakened to fricatives/ word-internally: CRUDUM > cru[t]u ‘raw.MSG’ vs ROTAM > ro[t]a
sonorants, it is clear that voicing contrasts only play a ‘wheel’ –, the original contrast is restored in postconsonan-
minor phonological role in the consonantal system with tal positions, including under RF.
[b(b)], [d(d)], and [ɡ(ɡ)] reduced to postconsonantal allo- Apart from [f]/[v] (e.g., U/ESID [f]a(ci)/[v]a(ci) ‘do/go.3SG’,
phones of /v/ (whether < B or U), /ð/, and /ɣ/.7 The situation though not when lengthened: [ff]a(ci)/[bb]a(ci)), the limited
is summarized in Table 16.4.8 role of voicing contrasts is highlighted by the fact that none
As the final row of Table 16.4 illustrates, a similar fortis/ of the remaining segments enters into a phonemic voicing
lenis opposition is found with reflexes of (-)GE/I- and (‑G/D)Ĭ̯- opposition.9
which typically produce /j (ʝ)/ (cf. also *bl-: Grm. blund- >
Bacolese ˈjʊnnə ‘blond.M’), with the exception of southeast-
ern Campania, most of northern and eastern Basilicata, 16.2.2.2 Sonorants
northern-central Apulia (as far as southeastern Gargano), Neutralization of voicing contrasts and consonantal weak-
and Salento (Rohlfs 1966:§§156, 158, 182, 218, 220, 278-9; ening also involve the nasals (Loporcaro 2009:126-28). From
Fanciullo 1988:669; Russo and Aprile 2001:14f.) where ori- the late Middle Ages the assimilations -nd-/-mb- > ‑nn‑/
ginal /j/ produces /ʃ (ɕ)/. Unlike the other oppositional ‑mm- began to spread from central Italy southwards
pairs, however, in postconsonantal position -/j/- and Sal. (Varvaro 1979) and today cover the entire South except
-/ʃ/- yield word-internally not the expected -[ɟ]- and -/ʃ/- central-southern Calabria (below Amantea-Scigliano-
but -[ʤ]-/-[ j]-, -[ʤ]- (USIDs/ESIDs, Sal.: uor[ʤ]o/uor[j]u, Crotone), the northeastern corner of Sicily (Varvaro
er[ʤ]u), whereas USID /ʃ/ alternates according to dialect 1979:189f.), and a strip of central-northern Salento (between
between -[ʃ]- and -[ʤ]- postconsonantally (cf. Vsd. ˈʊə̯ɾ ʃə, Brindisi-Otranto on the Adriatic and Gallipoli-Nardò on the
Giuglianese ˈʊoɾʤə, Mtn. ˈjuərʃə ‘barley’) and between -[ʃʃ]-, Ionian):10 QUANDO > Mat. quonn ‘when’, PLUMBUM > chijmm ‘lead’
(but Lec. quandu, LUMBUM > lumbu ‘loin’). More limited in
distribution is voicing of postnasal voiceless stops (includ-
6
See Rohlfs (1966:§§150, 153, 155, 167, 215-17), Fanciullo (1986:70-78; ing across word boundaries) which extends across the upper
1988:671-74; 1997:12-16), Loporcaro (1988a:86f.), Andalò and Bafile (1991),
De Blasi and Imperatore (2000:52-57), Maturi (2002:82), Ruffino (2001:47-9), south as far as northernmost Calabria in the west and
De Giovanni (2003:99-101), Ledgeway (2009a:85-8, 91-9), Retaro (2008:125- Taranto-Ostuni in the east (but, in regional Italian, extends
34). The details of these fortis/lenis oppositions vary enormously across
dialects (see Russo and Aprile 2001).
7 9
Both early and recent loans, mainly from Italian, fall outside these The functional load of the palatalized velars [c, ɟ] (< -KJ-/-GJ-) is some-
patterns (cf. Russo and Aprile 2001:12). what limited, entering into very few minimal pairs with the velar stops
8
In many dialects, under the influence of Italian and in accordance with /k, ɡ/: Nap. cacca/cacchio [ˈkakkə/ˈkaccə] ‘shit/noose’.
complex sociolinguistic factors, some of these traditional oppositions have 10
Assimilation of *-ld- > -ll- (CAL(I)DUM > Mol. ca[ll]o ‘hot’), by contrast, is
undergone various reanalyses with subsequent relexicalizations and today recessive only reaching as far as the Cassino-Gargano line (De
phonological restructuring (Russo and Aprile 2001:13). Giovanni 2003:105).
252
Table 16.4 Fortis/lenis contrasts in the dialects of southern Italy

USIDS ( NAP .) ESIDS ( COS .)
LENIS POSITION FORTIS POSITION LENIS POSITION FORTIS POSITION
##/ V ___ V C +/ C #___ [+ RF ] ##/ V ___ V C +/ C #___ [+ RF ]
P p~[p p& b̥ b] p(p) pp p p(p) pp

na [b̥]ippa pi[pp]a tre [pp]ippe na [p]ippa pi[pp]a tri [pp]ippe
‘a pipe’ ‘pipe’ ‘3 pipes’
B/ U v, β, ʋ, Ø b(b) bb v b(b) bb
na [v]arca ’n [b]arca tre [bb]arche na [v]arca ’n [b]arca tre [bb]arche
‘a boat’ ‘in (a) boat’ ‘3 boats’
T t~[t t d̥ d] t(t) tt t t tt
na [d̥ˇ]ela ru[tt]o tre [tt]ele na [t]ila ru[tt]u tri [tt]ile
‘a canvass’ ‘broken.MPL’ ‘3 canvases’
D ð, ɾ, l, Ø d(d) dd ð, ɾ d(d) dd
nu [ɾ]ente ’n [dd]uje tre [dd]iente nu [ð]ente ’n [d]ua tri [dd]ienti
‘a tooth’ ‘in two’ ‘3 teeth’
C k~[k k g̊ g] k(k) kk k k(k) kk
na [g̊]ˇasa puor[k]o tre [kk]ase na [k]asa puor[k]u tri [kk]ase
‘a house’ ‘pig’ ‘3 houses’
G ɣ, j, Ø ɡ(ɡ) ɡɡ ɣ, j ɡ(ɡ) ɡɡ
nu [ɣ]allo luon[g]o tre [gg]alle nu [ɣ]ad. d. u luongu tri [gg]ad. d. i
‘a rooster’ ‘long.MSG’ ‘3 roosters’
(-)GE/I-, (‑G/D)Ĭ̯- j, ʝ / ʃ, ɕ ɟ, ʤ / ʃ, ʤ ɟɟ / ʃʃ, ʤ, ɟɟ j, ʝ / ʃ ɟ, j / ʃ, ʤ ɟɟ / ʃ ʃ
o [j]uoko / ECmp. uor[ʤ]o / ECmp. tre [ɟɟ]uoche / u [j]uocu / uor[j]u / tri [ɟɟ]uochi /
u [ʃ]ueko uer[ʃ/ʤ]o ECmp. tre Lec. lu Lec. er[ʤ]u Lec. ttre [ʃ ʃ]echi
‘the game’ ‘barley’ [ʃʃ/ʤ]ueche [ʃ]ecu
(< IOCUM) (< HORDEUM)
Table 16.5 Development of Salentino (Leccese) stops

LENIS POSITION FORTIS POSITION
##/ V ___ V C +/ C #___ [+ RF ]
P p p(p) pp
nna [p]ippa pi[pp]a ttre [pp]ippe
‘a pipe’ ‘pipe’ ‘three pipes’
B/U Ø b(b) bb
nna [Ø]arca ’n [b]arca, a[bb]ergu ttre [bb]arche
‘a boat’ ‘in (a) boat, hotel’ ‘three boats’
T t t(t) tt
nna [t]ila ru[tt]o ttre [tt]ile
‘a canvas’ ‘broken’ ’three canvases’
D t d(d) dd
nnu [t]ente ’n [d]oi, sor[d]u ttre [dd]ienti
‘a tooth’ ‘in two, deaf ’ ‘three teeth’
K k k(k) kk
nna [k]asa var[k]a ttre [kk]ase
‘a house’ ‘boat’ ‘three houses’
G k ɡ(ɡ) ɡɡ
nnu [k]ad. d. u len[ɡ]u tre [gg]atte
‘a rooster’ ‘long’ ‘three cats’
253
ADAM LEDGEWAY
across the extreme south). Coupled with the previous 16.3 Morphology
assimilations, in these dialects distinctions in the original
bilabials and dentals are maintained (GAMBAM/CAMPUM >
ga[mm]a/ca[mb]o ‘leg/field’, QUANDO/QUANTUM > qua[nn]o/ 16.3.1 Nominal group
qua[nd]o ‘when/how.much’), but not in the velar series 16.3.1.1 Nouns and adjectives
(BANCAM/LONGAM > ban[ɡ]a/lon[ɡ]a ‘bank/long.FSG’). Extreme As illustrated in Table 16.6, nouns may each belong to one of
southern dialects, by contrast, regularly aspirate the voice- up to five inflectional classes, distinguishing three target
less stops in postnasal position (Lec. cam[ph]u, quan[th]u, ban genders (masculine, feminine, and alternating masculine~-
[kh]a), a feature found also under lengthening and following feminine), whereas each adjective belongs to one of the first
[r, l] (Cos. la[tth]e ‘milk’, par[th]a ‘leave.3SG’), but regularly three.11
show voicing of other voiceless segments postnasally on In classes 1/2 desinences are historically cumulative,
a par with USIDs: Cos. Fran[ʤ]a ‘France’, PENSARE > pen[z]à expressing both number (singular/plural) and gender (mas-
(> pen[ʦ]à) ‘think.INF’. culine/feminine) – today generally reduced to schwa in
The palatal /ʎ/ (< -LI-, (-)GL-, -BL-), which is long inter- upper southern dialects – continuing the Latin predomin-
vocalically (very rarely found word-initially: GLANDAM > NCal. antly feminine and masculine first and second declensions
[ʎʎ]anna ‘acorn’), is generally realized as an approximant in in -A(M)/-AS (> *-aj > -e (> ESID1 -i)) and ‑U(M)/*-i, respectively.
southern Lazio, Campania, Molise, and Abruzzo (FILIAM > Gender, but not number, may also be also marked in class 2
fi[jj]a ‘daughter’, *kʊˈniglʊ > cuni[jj]o ‘rabbit’, NEB(U)LAM > masculine nouns/adjectives by metaphony (cf. puor-/puerc-
ne[jj]a ‘fog’), but in Pugliese and the extreme southern (M) vs porc- (F)), and class 1 nouns with high-mid vowels (but
dialects (as well as Procidano and Ischitano) as a stop: not adjectives) may (optionally) signal number in some
SCal./Lec./Sic. fi[ɟɟ]a, cuni[ɟɟ]u, ni(e)[ɟɟ]a. Similarly, alveolar dialects, including old Neapolitan, which developed a rival
/l/ variously undergoes, in preconsonantal position,: (i) feminine plural inflection *-i (Maiden 1991a:§§7.6.4.2; §8.4):
rhotacization, especially before velars and labials (SOLCUM > ONap. corune/corone ‘crowns’ (cf. SG corona; Ledgeway
Nap. surco ‘furrow’, Lec. UULPEM > urpe ‘fox’); (ii) velarization, 2009a:61-4). Class 2 nouns/adjectives, as illustrated in
often with subsequent epenthesis of [v] (ALTUM > Nap. auto > Table 16.6, may also mark number through velar/palatal
àveto ‘tall’); (iii) simple deletion following rhotacization or stem oppositions, an alternation typical of a handful of
velarization (ALTERUM > Nap./Cos. ato/atru, *ˈvɔlta > Cht./Pal. animates (and inanimates with unmarked plurals: Mtn.
vote/vùota ‘time, occasion’). When long or following a back funge ‘mushroom/-s’, sparge ‘asparagus’, stinge ‘mastic/-s’)
vowel, the lateral is frequently velarized in upper southern (Maiden 2000b; cf. §42.3): Nap. ammico/-ce ‘friend/s’,
dialects, but in the Bay of Naples and generally below the miéreco/‑ce ‘doctor/-s’, mònaco/muónace ‘monk/-s’.
Eboli-Lucera-Troia-Foggia line the geminated lateral is sub- In class 3, desinences are syncretic for gender, as well as
ject to a series of weakenings (Avolio 1995:68f.), the various for number in upper southern dialects and ESIDs1 (following
stages of which can be summarized as -[ll]- > -[dd]- > -[ɖɖ]- neutralization and raising of -e/-i and -e, respectively; cf. Sic.
(> ‑[ɟɟ]‑) > ‑[r‑/-ɾ]-. In most of Basilicata, Apulia, and north- (SG/PL) notti, p(i)eri), continuing the Latin (masculine/femin-
ern Salento the outcome is -[dd]-, e.g. ILLUM/ILLAM > Mat. ine) third declension in ‑E(M)/-ES (>*‑ej>-i). Here too metaph-
ju[dd]/ja[dd] ‘he/she’, Bar. CABALLUM > cava[dd]o ‘horse’, CERE- ony is in evidence, but serves to mark plural number,
BELLUM > Cln. cirvie[dd]u ‘brain’, whereas in the Bay of Naples
although since eradicated in many (upper) southern dialects
there is much (unpredictable) variation between the distri- in feminine class 3a nouns (cf. ModNap. notte (SG/PL) vs Lec.
bution of the different outcomes, e.g., Prd. ga[ll]ina/ notte/n(u)etti), thereby reintroducing a gender distinction in
ga[ɖɖ]ina ‘hen’ vs cepo[dd]a ‘onion’ vs bié[ɾ]o ‘beautiful.MSG’ the plural of common nouns/adjectives: UIR(I)D- ‘green’:
(Como and Milano 2002; Pianese 2002; Ledgeway ModNap. verde/vierde (MSG/FSG/FPL/MPL) vs Lec. ’erde/’ierdi
2009a:105f.). More uniform is the situation in dialects of (SG/PL). In many dialects class 3a, and to a more limited
the extreme south where the outcome is a retroflex, typic- extent 3b, nouns/adjectives have passed to class 1(/2);
ally, according to Loporcaro (2009:151), an affricate (Cos./ exemplary in this respect is Verbicarese where all class 3a
Lec. ILLUM/-AM > i[ɖɖʐ]u/-a ‘he/she’), more rarely an obstruent nouns with original singular -e -[ə] (cf. class 3b CANE(M) >
(Conflentese/Amatese i[ɖɖ]u/‑a). Various retroflex outputs can[ə] ‘dog’) have been integrated into class 1 with final -[a]
are also found in dialects of the extreme south for reflexes of (Loporcaro and Silvestri 2011:§3.1): NOCTE(M) > nott[a] ‘night’,
-(S)TR-/-TTR, as well as for -R- in southern Calabria, Sicily, and LUCE(M) > luci[a] ‘light’.
Salento where word-initially it is also lengthened: REUERSARE >
Sic. [ɽɽ]uvisciari ‘vomit.INF’. Otherwise isolated is the retroflex
realization of -/(l)l/- in Abruzzese dialects of the Valle 11
For residues of the fifth declension in Neapolitan, see Ledgeway
d’Orte: PALU(M) > pa[ɭ]e ‘pole’, GALLU(M) > ja[ɭɭ]e ‘rooster’. (2009a:137-9).
254
Table 16.6 Nominal inflectional classes

2
USIDS ( NAP .) ESIDS ( LEC .)
CLASS SINGULAR PLURAL SINGULAR PLURAL
1 (F) porc-a -[ə] porch-e -[ə] porc-a porch-e ‘sow/-s’

2 (M) puorc-o -[ə] puorc-e -[ə] puerc-u puerc-i ‘boar/-s’
3a (F) nott-e -[ə] nuott-e -[ə] (obs.) nott-e n(u)ett-i ‘night/-s.F’
3b (M) per-e -[ə] pier-e -[ə] pet-e piet-i ‘foot/feet.M’
4 (F) man-o -[ə] man-o -[ə] man-u man-u ‘hand/-s’
5a (M/F) uov-o -[ə] ov-a -[ə] (u)è-u ò-e ‘egg.M/-s.F’
5b (M/F) camp-o -[ə] càmp-ora (obs.) camp-u càmp-ure ‘field.M/-s.F’
Inflectionally more restricted are classes 4 and 5. The merite/merétere ‘husband/-s’, Bar. mamme/màmmere ‘mum/-s’).
former, limited to a handful of residues of, and additions In some dialects, classes 5a and 5b may combine, with FPL ‑a
to, Latin feminine fourth declension nouns are inflectionally specializing as a marker of collective plurals (Giammarco
invariable nouns continuing ‑Ŭ(M)/‑Ū(S) > -u/-o (cf. §42.5): 1979:129; De Giovanni 2003:109): Cercepiccolese/Sepinese
Prd.,Isc./Cos. chèpo/capu ‘head(s)’, mèno/manu ‘hand(s)’, ˈkasə ‘house’: ˈkasərə/ˈkasa ‘houses/residential district’.
ècho/acu ‘needle(s)’, Cos. sùoru ‘sister(s)’, ficu ‘fig(s)’. Since By contrast, class 5a enjoys considerable stability across
early times, however, this class has been unstable showing the South (cf. Rohlfs 1968:§§368, 370, 384; Ledgeway
in many dialects migrations to class 5b (see below) and class 2009a:143-50), e.g., Isc. (-a > -e -[ə]) scuogghie/scogghie
1 (together with analogical (NURUS > *ˈnɔra>) nora ‘daughter- ‘rock/-s’, presutte/-otte ‘ham/-s’, tratture/‑ore ‘drawer/-s’, so
in-law’ and (SOCRUS > *ˈsɔkra>) socra ‘mother-in-law’): Nap. much so that it has been extended as a generic plural
fica, capa, sora, mana. As for the asymmetrical paradigm of marker (in part alongside original -i) in southern Calabria
class 5 nouns, these lack a feminine singular and a mascu- and Sicily into class 2 nouns (though sometimes with a
line plural, such that desinences are (historically) distinct- collective reading: Sic. acietri/acietra ‘birds/flock of birds’),
ive and cumulative unambiguously expressing both gender including animates (Rohlfs 1968:§368; Sornicola 2010):
and number (§42.4), continuing Latin second and third Mistrettese pilu/-a ‘hair/‑s’, juornu/jorna ‘day/-s’, dutturi/-a
declension neuter inflections in ‑U(M)/-A and ‑U(S)/‑OR‑A ‘doctor/-s.M’, scarparu/-a ‘cobbler/-s’. More generally, many
(subclasses 5a/b; cf. §42.4.4). Class 5b is today recessive in class 5a nouns have also integrated non-original neuters
many areas, including Naples (cf. relics such as truono/trò- with mass meanings giving rise to competing masculine
nele ‘thunderclap/-s’ (< -ole < -ora), vico/vécole ‘alley/-s’; and feminine plurals in -i and -a (cf. Lec. nnuti/nnùture
Ledgeway 2009a:141f.), dialects north of Vesuvius (màrmele above), where the masculine typically conveys count and/
‘marble objects’; Retaro 2008:154f.), and Lecce where -ORA > or figurative readings (Nap./Lec. cuófane/panari ‘baskets.M’,
-ure is now restricted to a handful of items where it freely Prd. semmiente ‘(scattered) seeds.M’, Sic. ligni ‘pieces of wood.M’)
alternates with masculine plurals in -i () hybrid class and the feminine non-count, literal meanings (Nap./Lec.
2/5b), e.g., nitu ‘nest’: niti/nìture, campu ‘field’: campi/càmpure, còfana/panare ‘basketfuls.F’, Prd. semmenta ‘(collection of)
nnutu ‘knot’: nnuti/nnùture,12 not to mention hybrid class 4/ seeds.F’, Sic. ligna ‘firewood.F’). In some dialects these pat-
5b nouns alternating between -u/-ure plurals: capu ‘head’: terns are recessive today, with both plurals being used
capu/càpure, manu ‘hand’: manu/mànure (cf. also acu (M) ‘nee- interchangeably (Prd. piette/piatte ‘plates.M/F’, Lec. ùeti/ùete
dle’: achi (M)/àcure (F)). Yet, in other areas reflexes of -ORA ‘elbows.M/F’) or with one of the two falling into disuse (Nap.,
appear more robust (Rohlfs 1968:40f.), continuing to mark lenzuole/lenzola ‘bed.sheets.F/M’ (obs.)); not infrequently the
not only inanimates (Cld. puzze/pózzere ‘well/-s’, Bar. stezze/ feminine is reanalysed as a collective singular (Nap. a trònola
stòzzere ‘piece/-s’), but also extended to mark animates (Cld. ‘the.FSG thunder(.claps).FSG’).
Despite the inflectional classes identified in Table 16.6,
12 there is no straightforward correlation (synchronically)
Sornicola (2010:553) highlights how in Sicilian the opposition between
-i/-ira plurals correlates with pragmatico-prosodic distinctions, only the between morphological marking and grammatical gender,
latter occurring in focal contexts. This is not true, however, of all Sicilian witness Cos./Lec. capu ‘head.F’ vs ‘leader.M’. Despite a strong
varieties; for instance in Mussomelese (S. Cruschina, p.c.) the distinction correlation between natural and grammatical gender (Snc.
between -i/-ura plurals (e.g., vùascu ‘wood, forest’: vùaschi/vùascura) is
purely diagenerational, with the former used among younger speakers mendone/pècura ‘ram.M/sheep.F’), grammatical gender is lex-
and the latter exclusively among speakers from the older generations. icalized (cf. Sic. vavaluci/vurpi ‘snail.M/fox.F’). In many cases,
255
ADAM LEDGEWAY
especially in nouns historically in -e (SG)/-i (PL) (Maiden l’annu/-i ‘the year.M/-s.M’, Scr. l’ura/l’osse ‘the hour.F/
2011a:§3.2), the dialects show numerous divergences with bones.F’.13 Although in the plural gender distinctions are
respect to other (Italo-)Romance varieties, e.g., pan- often lost through vocalic merger, in many upper southern
southern pìnnulo/-u ‘pill.M’, scàtulo/-u ‘box.M’, pólece/pùlice dialects a distinction persists through the consonantal length-
‘flea.M’, (g)atta ‘cat.F’. In some cases, gender may oscillate ening (RF) triggered by the original final -[s] of the feminine:
freely, e.g. Nap./Lec. serpe ‘snake’, cucuzzella/-iello / Slc. i [f]igli ‘the.MPL sons.M’ vs ’i [ff]iglie ‘the.FPL daughters.F’.
cucuzzed. d. a/‑ied. d. u ‘courgette.M/F’ (but NCal. (M) cucuzzieddu), Most upper southern dialects (not eastern Abruzzese nor
more rarely in accordance with number (e.g., Lec. fine/-i some dialects of the province of Bari) also present an add-
‘end.F/-s.M’, but fine/-i ‘aim.M/-s.M’), and in others yields itional ‘mass/neuter’ article (with corresponding homoph-
semantic differences: Cmp./Cal. livello/-u ‘level.M’ vs livella onous accusative clitic) derived from *ilˈlok (with analogous
‘spirit-level.F’ (but Lec. lied. d. u ‘(spirit-)level.M’), Lec. tàulu/ formations in the demonstratives: ECCU+ISTOC/*ipˈsok/*ilˈlok),
tàula ‘workbench.M/table.F’ (but Cos. tàvulu/tàvula ‘table.M/ an erstwhile neuter form which initially arose with Latin
plank.F’). neuter nouns (e.g., FERRUM ‘iron’) but eventually extended to
Gender may, in a limited number of cases, also have many masculines with mass interpretations (e.g., PANEM
semantic functions. In conjunction with cultivated fruits ‘bread’, SANGUINEM ‘blood’). The distinction between reflexes
and their trees the masculine normally indicates the tree of count ILLU(M) and non-count *ilˈlok variously surfaces in
and the feminine the associated fruit, e.g., Cal./Sal./Sic. the quality of the continuant of the lateral (Sanfeliciano ju
piru/-a ‘pear tree/pear’ (but cf. Ledgeway 2009a:164-66). cane/lu lardo ‘the dog/(the) pork.fat’), the absence/presence
Less regular, and subject to dialectal variation, is the cor- of initial-consonant lengthening (RF), historically a case of
relation between gender and size in lexical pairs where sandhi assimilation of final ‑k (Bar. u [m]are/u [mm]ìire ‘the
feminine indicates a larger version of the referent of the sea/(the) wine’), or both (Molfettese u [f]ùeco/rə [ff]ùeco ‘the
masculine (Nap./NCal./Lec. cucchiaro/-u ‘spoon.M’ vs cuc- fireplace/(the) fire’).14 In these dialects, ‘mass/neuter’ is a
chiara ‘big wooden spoon, ladle; trowel.F’, Nap./Lec. canisto/ productive category and regularly extended to all substan-
canisciu ‘small basket.M’ vs canesta/caniscia ‘ large basket.F’, tivized parts of speech, such as adjectives (Nap. ’o [n]uovo/’o
Isc. tiene/tiana ‘small/big frying.pan.M/F’). [nn]uovo ‘the new.one/(the) newness’) and infinitives (’o
No variety preserves case distinctions (Rohlfs 1968:5-7, [ff]ummà ‘(the) smoking’), as well as neologisms (’o [rr]ap
8-11). However, some USIDs retain a lexically restricted ‘(the) rap-music’). On one view (cf. §§57.3.3-57.4), the ‘neu-
vestige of the early Romance oblique case (cf. §§30.4.2, ter’ article makes it possible to identify four controller
56.2.1.4) indefinite genitive phrases such as ONap. a pede la genders in upper southern dialects, insofar as different
porta ‘at foot (of) the door’, Vbc. a casa granna u figghio u nominal classes are contrasted through the different agree-
sìnnico ‘the house big the son the mayor (= the mayor’s son’s ment patterns they select with the article: modern Neapol-
big house’), Cvl. A Madonna u Castiddu, a Vadda, u Puddinu, u itan class 1/3a/4 nominals select ’a~’e [+RF], classes 2/3b ’o/’e
Tuvulu ‘the Madonna (of) the Castle, (of) the Valley, (of) [‑RF], class 5a(/b) ’o/’e [+RF], and so-called (mass‑)neuter
the Pollino, (of) the Tuff ’ (Rohlfs 1969a:§630; Battipede nouns ’o [+RF]. The other view (cf. Ledgeway 2009a:150-54;
1987a:251; Ledgeway 2009a:125f.; Silvestri 2012; 2014a). Maiden 2011a:170f.) is to interpret the distinction synchron-
With Corsican (§14.3.1.1), Logudorese (§17.3.1), and Roma- ically in terms of number, recognizing that a subset of some
nian dialects of Maramureș (Maiden 2006:52), southern dia- masculine ‘mass’ nouns may be distinguished from other
lects form a vocative by deleting all material following the masculine (mass) nouns (Nap. ’o [tt]aliano/’o [t]aliano ‘(the)
tonic vowel (D’Alessandro and van Oostendorp 2010): Cht. Italian (language)/the Italian.man’).
Graziè! (<Graziella). The forms of the indefinite article (from UNUM/UNAM ‘one.
M/F’), which are limited to the singular (except in colloca-
tion with reflexes of ALTEROS/ALTERAS ‘other.MPL/FPL’ + numeral:
16.3.1.2 Determiners and quantifiers Ped. n’autri deci ‘an other.PL ten’), present much less vari-
Broadly speaking, in the modern dialects the (pre- ation, namely nu/na (M/FSG; but MSG un in western Sicily),
consonantal) definite article (< ILLE ‘that’) – and correspond- with n’ used prevocalically, e.g., Vbc. nu jure/na mulengiana/
ing accusative object clitics (§16.3.1.3.2) – varies according
to whether the lateral is retained (eastern dialects) or lost
(western dialects), e.g., Frz. i/u piccirid. d. u/-i ‘the.MSG/PL 13
But cf. Ruffino (1997:370; 2001:57) for western Sicilian, and Granatiero
boy.M/-s.M’, a/i piccirid. d. a/-i ‘the.FSG/PL girl.F/-s.F’; Scr. lu/li (1987:51), Ledgeway (2009a:172f.) for Procidano, Ischitano, and Mattinatese.
14
cristianu/-i ‘the.MSG/PL man.M/men.M’, la famija/le famije Some dialects present a distinct ‘neuter/mass’ form of the indefinite
article and numeral for ‘one’: Mtn. nu [mm]èle accussì ddólece ‘such a sweet
‘the.FSG/PL family.F/‑ies.F’, with the lateral surfacing prevocal- honey’, cusse e cudde sò unu [ww]ine ‘this one and that one are one (and the
ically (generally long in immediate pretonic position): Frz. same) wine’.
256
n’atru/-a ‘a.M flower.M/a.F aubergine.F/an.M/F other.M/F’, and ‘to/for/with me/you’ (prepositional), and sometimes even a
are formally differentiated from the numeral ‘one’ which three- or four-way case distinction (Rohlfs 1968:137-40;
retains the initial vowel (cf. Slc. nu/unu libbro ‘a/one book’). Loporcaro 2008:218-30). For instance, in Neapolitan there
There is no partitive article in the modern dialects potentially operates a three-way distinction between i’/tu
(Ledgeway 2009a:189-91), with singular non-count and ‘I/you’ (subject), a/pe me/te ‘to/for me/you’ (prepositional),
plural indefinites variously occurring in bare form, with a and co mico/tico (alongside me/te) ‘with me/you’ (comitative
reflex of CERTUM ‘certain’, or with a low numeral (typically <MECUM/TECUM), whereas Murese (Mennonna 1977:115) marks
‘two’): Cos. s’avìa accattatu (certe/dua) sasizze ‘he had bought a four-way distinction between i’/tu ‘I/you’ (subject), a mi/ti
(some/two) sausages’. ‘(to) me/you’ ((in)direct object), tra mev’ e tev’ ‘between me
As documented in Ledgeway (2004b; forthcoming c) and and you’ (prepositional), and cu mich’/tich’ ‘with me/you’
in §54.1, southern demonstrative systems are variously (comitative). Although comitative forms prove relatively
organized in terms of a ternary person-based opposition common, they have often extended beyond the original
contrasting reflexes of (ECCU+)ISTE, (ECCU+)IPSE, and (ECCU+)ILLE, comitative context: Nap. avimma parlà io e ttico ‘I and you
and more frequently in terms of a binary opposition must talk’, Mat. a mek ‘(to) me’.
between speech-participants and third-person variously The first and second plural tonic forms continue reflexes
contrasting reflexes of (ECCU+)ISTE vs (ECCU+)ILLE (e.g., Brindi- of NOS/UOS ‘we/you’ in both subject and oblique functions,
sino) or (ECCU+)IPSE vs (ECCU+)ILLE (e.g., Cegliese). Almost with- e.g., Abr./Mol. nu/vu, Sal. nui/’ui, occasionally reinforced by
out exception, the modern dialects formally mark the reflexes of ALTERI ‘other.PL’ sometimes receiving a marked
pronominal/adnominal paradigmatic opposition in reflexes exclusive reading (Nap. nuje/vuje ate) and sometimes an
of ECCU+ISTE/IPSE – and ECCU+ILLE in southern Calabria and Sicily unmarked non-exclusive reading (SCal. nuàttri/vuàttri,
(cf. SCal./Sic. d. d. u ‘that’) – through use of ECCU-reinforced and Sic. nuà(u)tri/vuà(u)tri; cf. also pan-southern pejorative tu
non-reinforced forms, respectively, e.g., Parabitano stu lib- n’a(u)t(r)o/u lit. ‘you an other’).
bru/’d. d. a cane ‘this.M book/that.F bitch’ vs quistu/quid. d. a ‘this. The inherited second-person distinction TU (singular) and
one.M/that.one.F’. UOS (plural)—and associated pronominal and verb forms—
Quantifiers are not morphologically distinguished from persists, especially in rural dialects of Abruzzo, Campania,
adjectives: classes 1/2: (a)nguno(/-u)/-a ‘some.M/FSG’; class 3: northern Calabria, and Salento where polite singular address
quale/-i (SG/PL) ‘which’. Exceptional are reflexes of *ˈtanto ‘so is marked, when necessary, through an appropriate title:
much’ and *ˈkwanto ‘how much’, which in many dialects Teramano T’aje dett’ a’ ssignirí ‘to.you.SG= I.have told, sir’. In
present -a in the (masculine/feminine) plural, most probably most other areas, and increasingly in those where tu trad-
an original neuter inflection ‑A, e.g., Brn. tanda cani ‘so.many itionally constituted the sole form of singular address, the
dogs.M’ (often also extended to the singular, e.g., Mtn. quanda reflex of UOS today represents both the singular and plural
pene vue? ‘how.much bread you.want?’); however, quantu, form of polite and/or respectful address (NCal. Vostra accil-
together with pocu ‘little, few’, is often invariable in dialects lenza staviti buoni? lit. ‘Your excellence you.are.PL well?’),
of the extreme south: SCal. quantu fogghji? ‘how.many.MSG whereas TU is used reciprocally among speakers of all ages
leaves.F?’, Sal. pocu misi ‘few.MSG months.M’. Other forms are bound by close ties. The situation in Sicily is quite different
uninflected, including assai(e) ‘much, many’, ogne/-i ‘each’, (cf. Ledgeway 2015a:106f.) where, traditionally at least, the
and the ordinal numerals from ‘three’ upwards. reciprocal polite form of address among the lower classes, as
well as in addressing those of lower social status non-
reciprocally (here rivalled by vui), is voss(í)a/vassía/ssa (< vos-
16.3.1.3 Pronouns signuría ‘your lordship’) employed with a third-singular verb
(vossia mangia troppu lestu ‘you’re eating too quickly’),
16.3.1.3.1 Tonic forms
whereas voscenza (< vostra eccellenza ‘your excellence’) is
All varieties present a series of tonic subject pronouns and reserved for addressing people of higher rank. On the wide-
separate series of tonic and clitic object pronouns, as well as spread phenomenon of inverse address, where the speaker
possessive pronouns/adjectives (cf. Rohlfs 1968:120-30; addresses the interlocutor with the title of his/her own
Lombardi 2007a). In the first and second persons singular, relationship to the addressee (e.g. Abr. nem plagne,
original nominative forms (i(o), tu(e)) have generally been la mamma lit. ‘don’t cry, the mum’ (said to son), see §55.4.
preserved (Loporcaro 2008:212): Nap. tu scasse e i’ pavo! ‘You In the third person, dialects above the Eboli-Lucera line
break and I pay!’ (but Sal. mie/tie (?< ME/TE or MIHI/TIBI; generally employ reflexes of IPSE (Cmp. isso/-e ‘he/they.M’,
cf. Loporcaro 2008:209; Sornicola 2014). Consequently, in essa/-e ‘she/they.F’) and those below the line reflexes of ILLE
the tonic paradigm all varieties mark at least a binary case (Mat. iudd/iadd ‘he,they.M/she,they.F.’), though in the plural
distinction, e.g. Cos. iu/tu ‘I/you’ (subject) vs a/pi/cu mia/tia many dialects now present reflexes of apparently non-
257
ADAM LEDGEWAY
indigenous ILLORUM (cf. Nap. lloro, Mat. lar, NCal. l(u)oru). clusters (Mtn. li puerte la vesta but **li/ce la puerte ‘to.her=
Unique today is the situation in Salento where many var- you.take the dress’, ‘to.her=it you.take’).16
ieties employ reflexes of both IPSE and ILLE, e.g. Scr. issu/-a,
id. d. u/-a ‘he/she’ (cf. §44.2.2.2). Also frequent everywhere are
proximal (CHISSO) and, especially, distal (CHILLO) demonstra-
16.3.1.4 Possessives
tives, though these are not invariably interchangeable with Excepting the province of Potenza, extreme southern Calab-
reflexes of IPSE/ILLE. For instance, in embedded contexts the ria, and Sicily (Sic. mè/tò maritu ‘my/your.SG husband’),
latter may have coreferential or disjoint reference but the modern dialects present a dual series of adjectival and
former only disjoint reference: Cos. [Cicciu]i dicia ca [id. d. u]i/j/ enclitic possessives. The enclitics do not generally mark
[chiru]j/**i um bena ‘[Cicciu]i says that [he]i/j is not coming’. gender (Sal. fràtuta/sorda ‘brother.M=your.SG/sister.F=your.SG’),
are limited to singular possessa (Cos. sùoruta ‘sister=your.SG’,
16.3.1.3.2 Clitic forms
but Cgn. serúrete ‘sisters.your.SG’), and generally restricted to
The clitic oblique forms show case syncretism between the first two singular persons (Abr. pátreme ‘father=my’,
accusative and dative in the first and second persons. In fíjjete ‘son=your.SG’), though third person forms are not infre-
the singular the forms display regular local outcomes of ME quent in southern Calabria and Salento (Sal. sirsa ‘father=
and TE, broadly me/te in the upper south and mi/ti in the POSS.3SG’), and first and second plural forms also occasionally
extreme south. The formal outcomes of the plural forms occur in dialects of the upper south (NCmp. nònneno ‘grandad
show greater variation. For the first person we find reflexes =our’). The adjectival paradigm, by contrast, displays
of: (i) ECCE-HIC > ce/ci in southern Lazio, Abruzzo, Molise (Cht. agreement for number and gender (Nap. ’o/’e libbro/-e mio/
ce spuseme ‘we marry (one another)’, more rarely se ‘self-’ in mieie ‘the.MSG/MPL book.M/-s my.MSG/MPL’, ’a/’e màchina/-e mia/
the same area: s’allaveme ‘we wash ourselves’); (ii) HINCE > nce/ meie ‘the.FSG/FPL car.F/-s my.FSG/FPL’), though generalized, ori-
nge in dialects of the upper south above the Eboli-Lucera ginally neuter, -a is frequent in the plural (Cos. i frati/sùoru
line (Nap. nce verimmo ‘we see each other’); (iii) NOS > (n)ne/ tua ‘the brothers.M/sisters.F your.PL’). In the third person
(n)ni/ndi (cf. Loporcaro 1995; 1998a) generally in dialects of plural, reflexes of SUUS (Abr lu pajese sé ‘the country their’)
the upper south below the Eboli-Lucera line (Bas. ne jazzame are often rivalled by reflexes of the genitive pronoun ILLORUM
‘we get up’) and in dialects of the extreme south (Brn. ndi (Bar. u paise (de) lore ‘the country (of) their/them’).
amamu ‘we love one another’). In the second person we
predominantly find forms variously interpreted as reflexes
of UOS ‘you.PL’ or IBI ‘there’, e.g., ve in the upper south and vi 16.3.2 Verbal group
in the extreme south (but Sal. bu < UOS).
In the third person, all varieties distinguish between The basic morphemic structure of the verb is given in
accusative and dative (but cf. §16.4.3.3), and between non- Table 16.7.
reflexive and reflexive (reflexive se/si) functions (the latter Verbs are divisible into two conjugations (henceforth
often continuing ECCE-HIC>(c)ce in Abruzzese and Pugliese: classes 1 and 2) in accordance with the thematic vowel
Mtn. ce ne vanne ‘self= therefrom= go.3PL’). Accusative clitics that surfaces in numerous finite and non-finite forms as
generally mark gender and number through the quality of illustrated in Table 16.8. Except in the infinitive where in
the lateral (if present) and the vowel (but EAbr. le [lə] ‘him/ some dialects of the upper south the Latin second/third
her/them’), and many upper southern dialects further sig- conjugations are still accentually distinguished (e.g., UIDÉRE/
nal plural number and the ‘mass/neuter’ distinction UÉNDERE > Nap. veré/vénnere ‘see.INF/sell.INF’), all original
through RF (Ruotese lu/la ˈvekə ‘him/her= I.see’ vs rə non-first conjugation verbs have merged into a single class
bˈbekə ‘them.M/F= I.see’). The dative (l)li/(l)le/d. d. i/je, by con- marked by the thematic vowel -e- [e, ə] in the upper south
trast, does not distinguish number, continuing reflexes of
ILLI(S) and, more frequently, forms syncretic with the first- Table 16.7 Morphemic structure of the verb
person plural already seen above, namely ce/(c)ci (Sic. ci
parrassi ‘let him speak to him’), nce/nge (Bar. nge piaceva ‘it ROOT THEMATIC VOWEL INFLECTION
pleased (to) him/her/them’), and NOS > (n)ne/(n)ni/ndi (SBas. ( CONJUGATION MARKER : ( MARKING FOR TAM ,
- A -, - E -/- I -) PERSON , AND NUMBER )
nne fa fridd’ lit. ‘to.him= it.makes cold’).15 In dialects pre-
senting reflexes of ILLI(S) alongside one of the first-person cant- ‘sing’ -a- (1st conjugation) -va (PST.IPFV.IND.3SG)
plural syncretic forms, the latter alone is employed in clitic
15
The opposite development is found in eastern Abruzzese (Verratti
16
1998:59). For discussion of stressed enclitics in southern dialects, see §45.3.1.
258
Table 16.8 Distribution of thematic vowel

USIDS ( NAP .) ESIDS ( SCAL .)
ROOT TV INFLECTION ROOT TV INFLECTION
f f
Conjug. 1 cant- ‘sing’ ‑a- (-re) cant- ‘sing’ -a- (-ri) infinitive
g g
perd- ‘lose’ -ie /-tte perd- ‘lose’ -(v)i 1SG.PRT
Conjug. 2 ‑e- -va ‑i- -va 1SG.PST.IPFV.IND
part- ‘leave’ -sse part- ‘leave’ -ssi 1SG.IPFV.SBJV/COND
Table 16.9 Southern Italian N-patterns

(a) Cos. n[ɛ]sciu n[ìə]sci n[ɛ]scia n[i]scimu n[i]scite n[ɛ]scianu ‘exit’

(b) Mrs. m[ɔ]ro m[wo]re m[ɔ]re m[u]rimo m[u]rite m[ɔ]reno ‘die’
(c) Isc. furrésche furrísce furrésce furrímme furríte furréscene ‘finish’
(d) Mtn. vumechèiše vumechíše vumechèiše vumechéme vumechéte vumechèišene ‘vomit’
Table 16.10 (Old) Neapolitan present indicative/subjunctive L-patterns

(a) cano[ʃk]o canu[ʃʃ]e cano[ʃʃ]e canu[ʃʃ]immo canu[ʃʃ]ite canó[ʃʃ]eno ‘know’

cano[ʃk]a canu[ʃk]e cano[ʃk]a canu[ʃk]ammo canu[ʃk]ate canó[ʃk]ano
(b) puozzo può pô putimmo putite ponnu ‘can’
pozza puozze pozza puzzammo puzzate pòzzano
(c) scengo scinne scenne scennimmo scennite scénneno ‘descend’
scenga scinghe scenga scengammo scengate scéngano
and -i- in the extreme south:17 Nap. ver-e-va/venn-e-va/ven-e- 16.3.2.1 Verb roots
va, Sic. vid-i-va/vinn-i-va/vin-i-va ‘see/sell/come.PST.IPFV.IND.1SG’. A number of verbs present two or more root allomorphs:
Generally, in class 2 the infinitive converges on the original Nap. [jɛʃk]- (jesco ‘exit.PRS.IND.1SG’) vs [jɛʃʃ]- (esce(no)
third conjugation proparoxytonic type in dialects of the ‘exit.PRS.IND.3SG(PL)’) vs [aʃʃ]- (ascì/asceva/ascette/ascesse ‘exit.
upper south and northern Calabria (MOUÉRE/UÉNDERE/PARTÍRE > INF/IPFV.IND.1SG/PRT.1SG/IPFV.SBJV.1’). Much synchronic root al-
Nap. / Cos. móvere/vénnere/pártere / móva/vínna/párta ‘move. lomorphy follows one of two ‘morphomic’ distributions
INF/sell.INF/leave.INF’, but cf. Tar. UENÌRE/TRANSÌRE > venére/
known as the ‘N-pattern’ and ‘L-pattern’ (Maiden 2011b;
trasére ‘come.INF/enter.INF’), although in some original fourth cf. also §§43.2.3-4) illustrated (here from the present
conjugation infinitives the paroxytonic variant still option- tense) in Tables 16.9 and 16.10.
ally survives (e.g., Nap. partí). In southern Calabrian and In Table 16.9(a,b) an apophonic alternation obtains
Sicilian, by contrast, the infinitive in class 2 oscillates between a root allomorph with a tonic low mid vowel (and
between the original third/fourth pro-/paroxytonic types its metaphonic variant), viz. n[ɛ]sci, m[ɔ]r-, in the rhizotonic
(cádiri/cadíri ‘fall.INF’, míntere/mintíre ‘put.INF’, séntere/sentíre forms of the paradigm (singular persons and third person
‘feel.INF’), whereas in central Calabrian and Salentino it plural) and an atonic high vowel root allomorph, viz. n[i]sci-,
converges on the original fourth conjugation paroxytonic m[u]r-, in the arrhizotonic first/second-persons plural and
type (UIDÉRE/FRÍGERE/UENÍRE > Ctz. vidíra/frijíra/veníra, Scr. vi- elsewhere. Analogously, in Table 16.9(c,d) the distribution of
tíre/friscíre/viníre ‘see.INF/fry.INF/come.INF’). the erstwhile inchoative infix -sc- in class 1 verbs and the
original Greek iterative-intensive infix -ØÇ- in class 2 verbs
follows the N-pattern.
17
In Abruzzese -e- has generalized to class 1 verbs in the present of the Table 16.10(a) exemplifies a velar-/palatal-final root
first/second persons plural: candeme/candete ‘we/you.PL sing’. alternation resulting from historical palatalization of the
259
ADAM LEDGEWAY
root-final velar before front vowels (§39.3.1), such that the vinni/mbippi/catti/potti ‘I.saw/had/held/came/drank/fell/
distinctive velar-final root allomorph is limited to the first could’, Sic. potti/vitti/catti/vinni/vippi ‘I.could/saw/fell/
person singular of the present indicative and the whole of came/drank’, Sal. sippi/potti/ibbi/chiobbe ‘I.knew/could/
the present subjunctive, although in Calabrian and Sicilian had/it.rained’; (ii) generalization of root-final sibilants:
the palatal has ousted the velar entirely: Cal./Sic. canu[ʃ ʃ]u. Gse. misi/(d)ezi/ntisi/vozi/parsi ‘I.put/gave/heard/wanted/
An identical distribution can be observed in Table 16.10(b,c) seemed’, Sic. morsi/vorsi/misi/’ntisi ‘I.died/wanted/put/
with alternations between an affricate-/vocalic-final root heard’, Sal. crisi/uesi/muersi/cursi ‘I.believed/wanted/died/
and a velar/alveolar nasal-final root, respectively. However, ran’. In the modern dialects, many of these ‘strong’ forms
with the exception of puté ‘can’ Table 16.10(b), the present are today rivalled by ‘weak’ forms (cf. Sal. misi/mentìi ‘I.put’,
subjunctive is almost entirely defunct across the south, so misu/mentutu ‘put.PST.PTCP’), so much so that in most dialects
that original L-pattern alternants are today limited to the of the upper south (cf. §16.3.2.2) strong perfects have been
first person singular present indicative. entirely replaced by innovative weak formations (Tar. fasci-
Despite not displaying isomorphism with any natural mor- bbe ‘I.did’ replacing earlier reflex of FECI (< FACERE); cf. De
phosyntactic class, there are in these root alternations recur- Giovanni 2003:113).
rent distributional patterns which are replicated with
considerable force beyond their predicted distributions
(see Maiden 1992; 2005; 2010; 2011b:223-63; §§43.2.3-4):
16.3.2.2 Inflectional markers for TAM, person,
N-pattern (illustrated from present tense): Cal./Sic. dugnu/
duni/dúna(nu) ‘give.PRS.IND.1/2/3SG(3PL)’ vs damu/dati
and number
‘go.PRS.IND.1/2PL’ (< DARE/DONARE ‘give/donate, bestow’), Cld. Some representative exponents of inflectional markers for
casche/chiésche/cásche(ne) ‘fall.PRS.IND.1/2/3SG(3PL)’ vs chedéme/ TAM, person, and number are given in Table 16.11. Markers
chedéte (or chescame/chescate) ‘fall.PRS.IND.1/2pl’ (< *kasi'kare/ of individual TAM functions cannot be isolated. For
CADERE; Vincelli 1995:114); L-pattern (illustrated from first example, -v- and -ss- in cangiávanu/díssiru are cumulative
person singular present): Prd. piggo/saggo ‘take/ascend.1SG’ exponents of past (tense), imperfect/perfective (aspect),
vs pigghie/sagghie . . . ‘take/ascend.2SG’, Sal. crisciu/isciu and indicative (mood), and similarly -rr- in potarríanu sim-
‘believe/see.1SG’ vs criti/iti . . . ‘believe/see.2SG’. For example, ultaneously marks conditional (mood) and future (tense).
the extension of the L-pattern through generalization of 1SG Indeed, an examination of the various verb paradigms
-go and ‑co is widespread among dialects of the upper south, (cf. Table 16.12) reveals that, when overtly marked, TAM are
with the former generalizing above all, though not exclu- invariably realized cumulatively.
sively, with verbs ending in a consonantal root-final sonorant
(Isc. mango/vengo/sengo/pergo ‘send/sell/feel/lose.1SG’) and Table 16.11 TAM, person, and number marking in
the latter with stems in -/Ct/- (Nap. aspecco/jecco/mecco Nicoterese
‘wait/throw/put.1SG’). In Barese -co has generalized to all
verbs, e.g., pásseco/spèzzeco/pèrdeco/piásceco/pòzzeco/ábreco/ ROOT THEMATIC INFLECTION
dòrmeco/capísceco ‘pass/break/lose/please/be.able/open/ VOWEL

TAM PERSON NUMBER
sleep/understand.1SG’, extending even beyond the present
(cf. mangiábbe(co)/mangiásse(co) ‘sing.PRT.1SG/SBJV.IPFV.1SG’). cangi- ‘change’ -á- -v- (PST.IPFV.IND) -a- (3) -nu (PL)
Another important root alternation concerns the preser- dí- ‘say’ Ø -ss- (PST.PFV.IND) -i- (3) -ru (PL)
vation of Latin perfective root allomorphs (so-called PYTA pot- ‘can’ -a- -rr- (IPFV.COND) -ía- (3) -nu (PL)
roots; see Maiden 2000c; §27.4), whose distribution has
become restricted to the preterite (best preserved in dia-
lects of the extreme south) and a number of past participles Table 16.12 Cumulative exponence of TAM in Catanzarese
of verbs predominantly of the second conjugation where it
has been reanalysed as a stressed alternant: Sic. víppi/vivísti/ PRS . IND IPFV . IND PRT ( PUNCTUAL PAST COND
víppi/víppimu/vivístivu/víppiru ‘drank.1SG/2SG/3SG/1PL/2PL/ PERFECT )
3PL’, vípp-ito ‘drunk.PTCP’. Exceptional is the verb ‘be’, which

Ø -v- (i) Ø (trova-vi -r-
presents rhizotonic stress throughout the paradigm and
trovu ‘I. trova-v-a ‘I. ‘I.found’) trove-r-a
hence shows the perfective stem f- in all persons: Tar.
find’ found’ (ii) -s- (par-z-a ‘it. ‘I.would.find’
fuéwe, fuèste, fu, fuèmme, fuèsteve, fórene, Sic. fuvi, fusti, fu,
seemed’)
fummu, fústivu, furu. There has been notable analogical
(iii) -CC- (vi-nn-a ‘I.
spread of certain PYTA root shapes (cf. Maiden 2000c): (i)
came’)
lengthening of root-final consonant: Gse. vitti/eppi/tinni/
260
Table 16.13 Person and number marking in Neapolitan vénnere ‘sell’

PRS . IND IPFV . IND PRT FUT COND IPFV . SBJV / COND
1SG vénn-o vennév-a venn-ètte vennarr-ággio vennarr-ía vennéss-e

2SG vínn-e vennív-e venn-íste vennarr-áie vennarr-ísse venníss-e
3SG vénn-e vennév-a vent-ètte vennarr-á vennarr-ía vennéss-e
1PL venn-ímmo vennéva-mo venn-ètte-mo venarr-ímmo vennarr-íamo vennéss-emo
2PL venn-íte vennív-e-ve venn-íste-ve venarr-íte vennarr-ísse-ve venníss-e-ve
3PL vénn-e-no vennév-a-no venn-ètte-no venarr-á-nno vennarr-ía-no vennéss-e-ro
Table 16.14 Distribution of metaphony in present indicative

Mol. ˈvevə ˈvivə ˈvevə vəˈvemə vəˈvetə ˈvevənə ‘drink’

Nap. ˈmɛttə ˈmjettə ˈmɛttə mətˈtimmə mətˈtitə ˈmɛttənə ‘put’
WAbr. ˈdɔrmə ˈdwormə ˈdɔrmə durˈmemə durˈmetə ˈdwormənə ‘sleep’
Cos. ˈliəju ˈliəji ˈlɛja lɛˈjimu lɛˈjiti ˈlɛjanu ‘read’
The representation in Table 16.12 assumes that in certain curses (e.g., Lec. Puezzi aìre sette anni te duluri! ‘May.PRS.SBJV.2SG
paradigms there is no overt exponent of TAM, as in the case you have seven years of sorrow!’), and optionally in central
with the present and (in certain persons of) regular preter- Salentino in the third persons of class 2 verbs (Lec. ogghiu cu
ites. There are, however, alternative analyses: leaving aside me senta/sente ‘I.want that me= he.hears.SBJV/IND’).
thematic vowels, final ‑u, for example, in trovu could be Exceptional is the situation found in the Lausberg Zone
analysed as a simple marker of person/number with zero where the second and third persons singular retain reflexes
TAM morph (viz. trov-+-Ø-+-u) or a cumulative exponent of of -S and -T, respectively, across all paradigms (Martino
TAM, person, and number (viz. trov-u). 1991:68-70): Mrt. càntasi/càntati ‘sing.2/3SG’. Reflexes
A typical example of person and number marking is (including RF) of 3SG -T, but not ‑S, occur southwards beyond
shown in Table 16.13. this area to include most of northern Calabria (Cos. mi
With the exception of the present and the future (the piácia(di) [(t)t]roppu ‘me= it.pleases much’). In the past, it
latter in any case today obsolescent and predominantly must have spread further south still judging by the RF effect
restricted to literary registers), the paradigms in of all third singular verbs forms today in the central Calab-
Table 16.13 display a widespread transparent pattern of rian province of Catanzaro (cf. Loporcaro 1997a:114-17).
person and number marking whereby the plural forms are Metaphony, as well as final inflections where they exist,
productively forged by adjunction of the plural markers marks person in various persons and paradigms, witness the
‑mo/-no(/-ro) and -ve (<UOS ‘you.PL’) to the corresponding representative present tense paradigms in Table 16.14. In all
singular forms:18 vennéva+‑mo/-no, venníve+-ve (cf. formation dialects the second-person singular displays metaphony
of old Neapolitan inflected non-finite forms; Loporcaro triggered by final *-i. In many dialects such as Neapolitan,
1986; Vincent 1996; Ledgeway 2009a:588-90). As observed it is also found in the first/second persons plural (although
in §16.3.2.1, outside Calabria and Sicily first-person singular one cannot exclude morphological mergers here with the
may also be marked by velar-final stems in the present original third/fourth conjugations; cf. Ledgeway 2009a:59f.),
indicative (cf. obsolescent vengo alongside venno ‘I.sell’, as originally triggered by final ‑ʊ/-i of -MU(S)/-TI(S), as well as in
well as fené[ʃk]o vs fené[ʃ ʃ]e ‘finish.1/3SG’), e.g., Prd. vongo/ the third-person plural in some dialects of central Sicily,
sengo/spango/vango ‘I.want/feel/extend/go’, EBas. doche/ northern Calabria, Molise, and western Abruzzo which con-
stoche ‘I.give/stand’, a root alternation also affecting the tinue final Ŭ(NT) > -ʊ (>*‑ʊ+‑nV). Finally, in dialects such
now obsolete present subjunctive. The latter today survives as Cosentino where metaphony is also triggered by final -u
only in a few (lexicalized) residues and, above all, in reflexes (< -Ō; §16.2.1.2), the first person singular also shows metaphony.
of *poˈtere ‘can’ (cf. Table 16.10(b)) frequently employed in Metaphony may also surface in the second person singu-
lar positive imperative (Ledgeway 2014c): although entirely
18
On the grammaticalization of enclitic -tu ‘you.SG’ in Sicilian, see also absent in some dialects, in many it has been morphologized
Cruschina and Rinollo (2013). across both conjugations (Mrs. cien’/curr’/muor’! ‘dine/run/
261
ADAM LEDGEWAY
die.IMP.2SG’), whereas in others it is excluded from class 1 verbs of both conjugations: Mat. lassúbb/d’ciúbb/capjsciúbb/
(Clv. remine/viene! ‘remain/come.IMP.2SG’ vs leve/**lieve! m’ttúbb/faciúbb ‘I.left/said/understood/put/did’, Bar.
‘remove.IMP.2SG’) or just from a subset of these, sometimes mangiabbe/perdibbe/petibbe/screvebbe/venibbe/sapibbe/velibbe
fluctuating with non-metaphonic variants (Bvt. aspette/aspi- ‘I.ate/lost/could/wrote/came/knew/wanted’.
ette! ‘wait.IMP.2SG’ vs raccunte/**racconte! ‘tell.IMP.2SG’). The Also relevant is the tendency to replace strong participles
second person singular negative imperative, alongside the with their weak counterparts, a development well advanced
suppletive use of the infinitive (EAbr. nen tuccà! ‘not touch. in many dialects of the extreme south (e.g. SCal. scinnutu/
INF’), is also frequently expressed by the gerund in Pugliese, mintutu ‘descended/put’), whereas further north and in
Basilicatese, and Calabrian, variously preceded by the infini- most dialects of the upper south the strong and weak
tival auxiliary ‘go’: Mat. nan gj scjonn a fatiè! ‘not go.INF go.GER variants co-exist (cf. NCal. scisu/scinnutu, misu/mintutu;
to work.INF’, Savese no ccritannu! ‘not shout.GER’. Another Lombardi and Trumper 1998). In the latter dialects, the
frequent alternative for the negated singular/plural strong forms regularly display both punctual/dynamic and
imperative is senza ca ‘without that’ + finite verb (Grottese resultative-stative readings, whereas the weak forms are
senza ca t’attuppi l’uocchi! lit. ‘without that yourself=you. limited to the former function (Ledgeway 2000:302f.;
cover the eyes’) 2009a:582-5, 633; cf. also §43.3): Cos. avìa spasi/spannutu i
As noted in §16.3.2.1, in many modern dialects of the panni ‘I had hung.out.MPL/MSG the washing’ vs i panni eranu
upper south strong perfects have been systematically spasi/**spannuti for’u barcune ‘the washing was hung.out.MPL/
replaced by one of two innovative weak formations, namely MPL on the balcony’.
-tt- (cf. *ˈstɛtui > stetti ‘I.stood’) and ‑bb-/-pp- (HABUI > ibbi/ippi Less consistent across the south is the formation of the
‘I.had’), witness such replacements as ONap. fece ‘(s)he.did’ conditional: alongisde the pan-southern use of the imper-
by facette. The former is found in western Abruzzo, Molise, fect indicative with conditional value (Mtn. vulèive nepoche
northern Apulia, Basilicata, and most of Campania where it de pene ‘I.wanted (=would like) some bread’) and imperfect
variously occurs (cf. Table 16.15) in: (i) just the first and subjunctive (Cht. Pecché n’avesse da cambà? ‘Why shouldn’t
third persons singular of class 2 and third person singular he live?’), we also find, especially in literary registers, a
of class 1 (Corletano); (ii) first and third persons singular of mixed paradigm based on the infinitive with affixed forms
both conjugations (Popolese); (iii) all persons except second of the imperfect of HABERE ‘have’ in all persons except the
persons singular and plural of class 2 (Neapolitan); (iv) all second persons which continue the preterite (e.g., CANTARE
persons except first and second persons plural of both +*'ia/*'iste > canta(r)ría/canta(r)rísse ‘I/you.SG.would.sing’,
conjugations (Gallese); (v) all persons of both conjugations with variable lengthening of the vibrant depending on dia-
(Procidano). lect). Dialects of Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Lucania, and
By contrast, the other weak perfect formation in ‑bb-/-pp- northern-central Calabria also employ a conditional form in
is found only in southeastern Basilicatese, southern Pugliese, -e(r)ra continuing the Latin pluperfect indicative (Ctz. ac-
and northern Salentino (as far as Ostuni), but, unlike the cussì accattèramu menu medicini ‘that way we’d buy less
previous formation, is limited to the first person singular of medicine’).
Table 16.15 Distribution of weak -tt- perfect

tuccu- ‘touch’ -ái -áste

-ètte -èmme -ísteve -èrne Corletano
durm- ‘sleep’ -ítte -íste
g
magn- ‘eat’
-jòtte -íste -ètte -èseme -èste -jòrno Popolese
durm- ‘sleep’
magn- -áie -áste -áie -áiemo -ásteve -áieno Nap.
durm- ‘sleep’ -ètte -íste -ètte -èttemo -ísteve -èttero Nap.
pert- ‘lose’ -átte -átte -átte -ámme -áste -áttene Gallese
ved- ‘see’ -íette -íette -ètte -èmme -èste -èttene Gallese
parl- ‘speak’ -átte -ítte -átte -átteno -ítteve -átteno Prd.
muv- ‘move’ -iétte -ítte -ètte -ètteno -ítteve -ètteno Prd.
262
16.4 Syntax neighbourhood’ (vs zzona bbrutte ‘neighbourhood bad/

ugly’). Other adjectives found in prenominal position,
namely bbuene ‘good’, granne ‘big’, pòvere ‘poor’, vècchije
16.4.1 Nominal group ‘old’ and, to an even greater extent male ‘bad’, sande ‘holy’,
jalde ‘tall’, vasce ‘short’, are today not productive, displaying
The basic structural template of the nominal group is exem- varying degrees of fossilization (cf. (bbuene) fìgghije
plified from Barese in Table 16.16. (bbu(e)ne) (good-hearted) son (good-hearted/simple-
Elliptic structures aside, the only obligatory element of minded)’ vs (**bbuene) sìnneche/falegnàme/scarpare (bbu(e)ne)
the nominal group is the noun (phrase), which may occur as (good-hearted) mayor/carpenter/shoe-maker (good-hearted/
a bare indefinite when the object of a transitive (Scr. Sta skilful)’.
senti ndoru de pitate? ‘Can you sense (the) smell of potatoes?’) Quite remarkable is the [animate] (e.g., Molese) or
or a preposition (Scr. scioca a carte ‘he plays to (= with the) [human] (e.g., Altamurano) agreement distinction in
cards’), or the subject of an unaccusative (Scr. annu rrivare the masculine postnominal adjective found in a number of
pècure ‘will arrive sheep (= there’ll be sheep coming)’). Pugliese varieties (Loporcaro 1997d:343; Cox Mildare
Otherwise NPs usually co-occur with at least a determiner, 2001:57f.), where the canonical masculine and feminine
including generic, abstract, and unique referents (Cht. E forms respectively mark the [+animate/human] and [‑ani-
pecchè lu cane corre appresse a la gatte? lit. ‘Why does the mate/human] readings: Molese i kəˈnɛɟɟə bˈbunə/bˈbonə
dog chase the cat?’), though generally not proper nouns ‘the.MPL rabbits.M good.M/F (= tame/tasty rabbits)’, Alt. l
which are intrinsically referential (Mat. m’ò talafunet Chiarjn ˈemmə ɲɲʊu̯r/ɪ ˈwefə ɲɲau̯r ‘the men.M black.M/the.PL
‘me=has rung Chiarina’). The exception here is Salentino, oxen.M black.F’.
where, probably under local Greek (Griko) influence The preferred postnominal position of nominal modifiers
(Ledgeway 2013b:208-10), personal names take the definite is also evident in possessive adjectives which, with the
article: Lec. la Maria sta fface nn’iniezione allu Caitanu ‘(the) exception of Potentino, extreme southern Calabrian, and
Maria is giving (the) Gaetano an injection’. Sicilian dialects (e.g., Ptn. mi/ta fra ‘my/your brother’),
Apart from quantifiers and determiners, very little can obligatorily occur today in postnominal position in conjunc-
occur before the NP. Although the template in Table 16.16 tion with a prenominal determiner (Tar. u (**mie/tue/sue)
shows a prenominal adjectival position, this is highly cane mie/tue/sue ‘the (my/your.2SG/his,her) dog my/
restricted across all dialects, because adjectives, whether your.2SG/his,her’). The possessive immediately precedes
non-contrastive or contrastive (typically pre- and postnom- unfocused postnominal adjectives (Ledgeway 2009a:262f;
inal in Romance; cf. §§30.2.5, 62.1.1), typically occur post- Andriani forthcoming:ch. 2), e.g., Cos. a màchina mia vecchia
nominally: Nap. nu pueta granne lit. ‘a poet big (= great/tall)’. scassata ‘the car my old broken’, though not in all dialects,
In most dialects, only a handful of rudimentary evaluative witness Vbc. u cuane nìvere vuestre ‘the dog black your.PL’
adjectives expressing polar positive/negative values – and (Silvestri 2014b:3). Alongside the adjectival form, most dia-
at most only one per phrase – may occur prenominally lects also display an alternative pseudo-partitive possessive
(Rohlfs 1969a:330; Ledgeway 2007b; 2009a:230-45). Andriani construction (also found with the copula) in which the
(forthcoming:ch.2) observes that in Barese there are only possessive is preceded by a reflex of DE ‘of ’ + definite article
three productive prenominal adjectives, namely bbelle and (Rohlfs 1968:§433; D’Alessandro and Di Sciullo 2009;
bbrave ‘fine, good(-natured)’ (restricted to animates) and Ledgeway 2009a:263-65; Silvestri 2014b): Santangiolese (a
bbrutte ‘bad’, whose rudimentary evaluative readings may Cupolo) a casa r’a sua ‘the.FSG house.F of the.FSG his.FSG (= his
also be licensed in postnominal position alongside a range house)’, Cpb. chisto è ddu mije ‘this is of.the.M.SG my.MSG (= this
of various contrastive readings: bbelle crestiane ‘good is mine)’. Agreement patterns vary notably across dialects:
(-natured) person’ (vs crestiane bbelle/berefatte lit. ‘person (i) the article and the possessive agree in both number and
good(-natured)/beautiful (lit. beautiful(ly).made)’), bbrava gender with the head noun: Nap. l’ammico/-a d’’o/’a mio/mia
fìgghije ‘good(-natured) daughter’ (vs fìgghija bbrave ‘the friend.M/F of the.M/F my.M/FSG’, l’ammice/-che d’’e mieie/
‘daugher good(-natured)/skilful’), bbrutta zzone ‘bad e mmeie ‘the friends.M/F of the.M/FPL my.M/FPL’; (ii) the
Table 16.16 Structure of nominal group

(Q) ( DET ) (Q) ( ADJ ) N ( COMPL ) ( POSS ) ( ADJ ) ( ADJUNCT )
tutte chidde tanta bbelle mazze de cime de cole tù vierde ddà

all those many fine.MPL bunches.M of tops.F of cauliflower your.MPL green.MPL there
263
ADAM LEDGEWAY
article and possessive agree in number with the head noun, 16.4.1.1 Pronominals
but not in gender: Arl. la case jè di lu (**la) mé ‘the.FSG house.F 16.4.1.1.1 Tonic pronouns
is of the.MSG (the.FSG) my.SG’, le case jè di li mi ‘the.FPL houses.F
are of the.PL my.PL’; (iii) the article and possessive agree in All southern dialects are pro-drop. Nonetheless, in Campa-
gender with the head noun, but not necessarily in number: nian varieties overt third person subject pronouns (< ECCU
Vbc. quidda cammisa d’a/d’î vostra/-re ‘that.FSG shirt.FSG of +ILLE ‘that.one’) are posssible in at least two structural con-
the.FSG/FPL your.FSG/PL’. Thus, whereas in dialects with pat- texts. The first concerns exclamative clauses containing a
terns (i) and (ii) restrictive vs partitive readings can be third-person expletive or referential subject (often with
contrasted by number oppositions (cf. Nap. nu cappiello d’’o strong pejorative overtones), hence typically restricted to
tuio ‘a.M hat.M of the.MSG your.MSG (=a hat of yours)’ vs nu main clauses (Sornicola 1996:325f.; Ledgeway 2009a:290-
cappiello d’’e tuoie ‘a.M hat.M of the.MPL your.MPL (= one of your 92):19 Nap. Chello è facele! ‘It.N is easy!’, Pietramelarese Ma
hats)’), in dialects with pattern (iii) the opposition is neu- chillo mò è gruosso! ‘But now he’s all grown up!’, Sianese Chillo
tralized: Vbc. nu cappieddo d’î tuva ‘a.M hat.M of the.MPL è femmena! ‘but HE is a woman!’. There thus emerges a
your.MPL (= a hat of yours/one of your hats)’. significant structural difference between declarative and
The enclitic possessives introduced in §16.3.1.4 display exclamative clauses, which in other dialects of southern
quite different behaviour, apparently occupying the deter- Italy are distinguished merely by intonation, but which in
miner position, from which they attract singular kinship Campanian are marked by the absence/presence of an overt
terms (and also other inalienable possessa such as casa pronoun (cf. Ø/Chella è pazza/! ‘She’s mad(!)’, Ø/Chello è overo/
‘home’, patrone ‘master’), as witnesssed by the fact that ! ‘It’s true(!)’). The second context involves use of the exple-
they generally prove incompatible with other determiners tive neuter pronoun chello ‘it, that’ (Sornicola 1996:332f.;
(Bar. (**u) marìteme/maritte ‘(the) husband=my/your.SG’, Ledgeway 2009a:294; 2010a:§4), which surfaces with extra-
(**la) sòrema/-ta ‘(the) sister=my/your.SG’, (**la) cass’te posed clauses (Nap. chello è facele a parlà ‘it’s easy to talk’),
‘(the) house=your.SG’) and precede all adjectives (Arl. zíe- indefinite subjects (Nap. chello nun se pò ascì a sera ‘it’s not
ma bbella ‘aunt=my beautiful’) including emphatic, doubling posible to go out in the evening’), and impersonal verbs
possessive adjectives (Slc. páito tujo ‘father=your.SG your.SG’). (Nap. chello chiove ‘it’s raining’). As in the previous cases,
More rarely, the enclitic can be found with plural kinship such examples are frequently accompanied by exclamative
terms (Bar. nepúdeme ‘grandchildren=my’), in which case intonation, but are also characterized by specific
they may also combine with the definite article (Arl. li pragmatico-semantic readings not available with the cor-
fríte-me ‘the brothers=my’; D’Alessandro and Migliori repsonding null expletive. In particular, the expletive only
2014:6f.). proves felicitous in explicative contexts which contain an
Demonstratives canonically behave like determiners pre- implicit or explicit presupposition questioning why a par-
ceding their associated NP, whether in clitic or reinforced ticular event or state of affairs salient in the discourse has
form, the latter variant typically surfacing only in pragmat- come about. For instance, chello chiove ‘it is raining’ consti-
ically marked contexts: Mus. ??chissu/ssu libbru ‘that book tutes an appropriate reply to ‘But why do you need my
(near you)’ vs CHISSU LIBBRU m’a dari! ‘It’s THAT book which you umbrella?’, but would not be a felicitous description of the
have to give me!’. Noteworthy is the emphatic pattern of weather after glancing out of the window, for which the
demonstrative doubling found in Abruzzese (Finamore only grammatical structure is Ø chiove.
1893:22; Verratti 1998:48f.) where the NP is sandwiched
between a clitic demonstrative determiner to its left and a 16.4.1.1.2 Clitics
corresponding reinforced adjectival form to its right: Lan- Object clitics present several interesting properties. Unlike
cianese stu pajése queste lit. ‘this= village this’, Ses. ssi chiene most Romance varieties, combinations of first and second-
quisse ‘those= dogs those (near you)’. person clitics are well formed, usually interpreted as an
In conclusion, in contrast to dialects of northern and accusative+dative sequence (Cht. me ti si messe a la coccie
central Italy (Renzi 2001), the head noun occupies a very ‘me.DAT= you.SG.ACC= are put to the head (= you’ve got into my
high position to the left within the nominal structure in head)’), although the opposite reading is not excluded (Nap.
dialects of southern Italy from where it precedes posses- me te pozzo cunfidà ‘me.ACC= you.SG.DAT I.can confide.INF
sives and all but a very restricted class of adjectives, not to (= I can confide in you))’. As for the indefinite subject se/si
mention many quantifiers (e.g., Isc. cu frette asseie ‘with ‘self-’, it is incompatible with other clitics apart from
haste (too.)much’), even displacing the (partitive) article
(cf. Siracusano si mangiàu virdura e fummaggiu ‘he ate 19
Overt expletive subject iddu ‘he/it.M’ is also attested, albeit less fre-
(some) vegetables and (some) cheese’, Unn’è (**l’)Aitina? quently, in Calabrian and Sicilian in (rhetorical) exclamatives (Ledgeway
‘Where is (the) Gaetana?’). 2013c:281f.).
264
partitive/elative (n(d)e/n(d)i) and locative ((n)ce, (n)ci) clitics much it.pleased’. Equally noteworthy is the exceptional
(the latter frequently occurring in the order se/si + (n)ce/(n) interpolation of object clitics between perfective auxiliary
ci). Many dialects also mark a distinction between partitive and participle in many eastern Abruzzese varieties, with the
and elative functions of the INDE clitic: in the former the clitic attaching enclitically to auxiliary BE (Ses. sòmele messe
clitic may occur in isolation (Cht. ne té tante ‘of.them= he.has la scolle ‘I.am=me=it.F put.PTCP the.FSG tie.F’), but proclitically
many’), but when employed with elative value it obligatorily to auxiliary HAVE (se l’a messe ‘self= it.F= he.has put.PTCP the.FSG
co-occurs with a pleonastic reflexive clitic (Cht. **(me) ne tie.F’). In conjunction with the infinitive, clitic placement
esce ‘from.here= me I.exit’). Also characteristic of southern displays considerable variation according to dialect (e.g.,
dialects is the use of the locative clitic ((n)ci/(n)ce) to refer- Mdc. signu venuta ppe ti rape ‘I.am come for you.SG= open.INF’
ence predicative complements: Ses. quille è buone e vvu’ nen ci vs Ped. vinni ppi pigghiarimi ‘he.came for fetch.INF=me’) and
sete ‘they are good and you’re not (it)’. choice of introductory preposition (e.g., Nap. de/a ‘of/to’
All dialects employ the antipassive (La Fauci 1984:224), so + proclisis/enclisis: stu gulìo ’e me parlà ‘this desire of me=
that in unmarked punctual contexts transitives and speak.INF’ vs pruvaie a farlo ‘he.tried to do.INF=it’), whereas in
intransitives generally occur with a pseudo-reflexive clitic: other cases there is free variation (Nap. l’avarrise ditta senza
Mat. cè t’ha s’nnet? ‘what yourself.SG= you.have dreamt?’, me guardà ’nfaccia ‘it=you.would.have said without me= look.
Mtn. me sarrije múerte ‘myself= I.would.be died’, Cln. mo’ INF in.face’ vs num putèvemo stà senza vederce ‘not we could
t’apri na salumeria ‘now yourself.SG= you.open a delicatessen’, remain without see.INF=us’).
Acese ni facemu ’na partita e carti ‘ourselves= we.do a game of With restructuring predicates (§31.2.2.3), clitics invari-
cards’. The reflexive construction also often licenses a ably climb to the (highest) functional predicate (Ledgeway
causative reading, despite the absence of the canonical 2000:156f.;170-72), e.g., Mtn. ce l’amm’a scì ppeghié ‘there=
causative predicate FACERE ‘make’ (§61.3.3): Cos. s’è operata ’i him= we.have to go.INF fetch.INF’, and in some varieties
core ‘self= she.is operated of heart (= she had her heart leave an overt residue by way of a copy of the clitic(s) on
operated on)’, Nap. m’aggia tirà nu dente ‘myself=I.have.to the infinitive: Cos. u prùovu a ru fà ‘it= I.try to it= do.INF’.
extract.INF a tooth’. By contrast, in many northern Calabrian Whereas in many Italo-Romance and Occitan varieties
dialects the genuine (inherent) reflexive clitic is often climbing also requires auxiliary switch (cf. §14.4.3.1) if the
absent in compound tenses with auxiliary BE in accordance embedded infinitive is unaccusative, this is not the case in
with a tendency widespread in early Romance: Amt. those dialects that otherwise display BE with unaccusatives:
ppua su’ assettati ‘then they.are seated (cf. s’assettà Mtn. nge how ulute venì ‘not.there he.has wanted come.INF’.
‘self=sit.down.INF’)’, Cos. tardu è ricùotu u frate ‘late is
returned the brother (cf. si ricoglia ‘self=return.INF’).
Clitic doubling is widespread, especially with indirect 16.4.2 Verbal group
objects (Ledgeway 2009a:354f.), e.g., Ripeso mu decette e
mme ‘me=it he.said to me’, Mtn. a mmè me pejéce ‘to me
16.4.2.1 Tense, aspect, and mood
me= it.pleases’, and direct objects marked by the prepos- On the temporal axis, the verb formally distinguishes pre-
itional accusative (Ledgeway 2000:ch.2; 2009a:356f.; cf. also sent (Bvt. viéneno ‘they come’) and past, the latter further
§16.4.3.3), e.g., Nap. mannammìllo a stu nnammurato tuio! distinguishing between perfective (present perfect/past
‘send=me=him ACC.MRK this.M fiancé your.MSG’, although this punctual: Bvt. anno venuto/vénenno ‘they have come /they
in large part coincides with the tendency to dislocate given/ came’) and imperfective (Bvt. venéveno ‘they were coming’).
topicalized constituents (§16.4.3.5). Another frequent con- Formerly, all dialects presented an indigenous form of the
text of clitic doubling is weak relatives where a resumptive Romance synthetic future (cf. §46.3.2.2), relics of which
clitic identifies the gap left by a silent relative pronoun survive predominantly in the third persons with epistemic
(§64.4): Ses. s’è mmorte chelu vecchiarelle che le vedévame modal value (Loporcaro 1999a). Future time in the modern
‘that old man died that him= we used to see’. dialects, by contrast, is marked either by an original deontic
Clitic placement also shows a number of differences in periphrasis HAVE (to/of/from) + infinitive (Ctz. ha de nivicara
comparison with other Romance varieties. Perhaps the ‘it.has of snow.INF (= will snow)’ or the simple present (Ctz. ’e
most striking is the widespread tendency for proclitics to lunedì ncumincia a dieta ‘the diet starts on Monday’). In the
attach to a ‘low’ preverbal adverb rather than the finite verb latter case there is no confusion with the present, in that
(Ledgeway and Lombardi 2005; Manzini and Savoia 2005, present time (including dynamic events and states, but not
III:537-41), a consequence of the lower position of the verb usually generic and habitual situtations) is predominantly
in these varieties situated more towards the right within marked by one of three periphrases: (i) reflexes of STARE
the verb phrase (cf. §16.4.3.4): Cos. ti ammalappena/subbitu/ ‘stand’ + gerund found across the south (Nap. sto tenenno
quasi/tantu piacìa ‘you.SG= barely/immediately/almost/so. na pacienza ‘I.am having a patience (= showing considerable
265
ADAM LEDGEWAY
patience)’); (ii) TENERE (a) ‘hold (to)’ + infinitive in Molise and systematically substituted by the present indicative: Ctz. ti
Abruzzo (Cpb. té ffá a casa ‘he holds do.INF the house (= he’s sciali/scialavi ma ’i guardi ‘yourself.2SG= enjoy.2SG/enjoyed.2SG
cleaning the house)’, Ripeso té ppjjove ‘it.holds rain.INF’); (iii) that them= you.watch.IND (= you enjoy/enjoyed watching
reflexes of STARE ‘stand’ AC ‘and’ +VFinite in Pugliese (Tar. u them)’. Finally, in dialects of the upper south, by contrast,
stonn’a bbédeno ‘him= they.stand and they.see’), and with the imperfect subjunctive has not been entirely eradicated,
fossilized non-inflecting sta ‘stand- > PROG.MRK’ + VFinite in but continues to be employed, alongside its frequent condi-
Salentino (Ledgeway forthcoming a; cf. also §63.4): Matinese tional uses, with original subjunctive value even replacing
sta ccuntamu cose te famija ‘stand.PROG.MRK we.discuss things of the now defunct present subjunctive, although it too is
family’. often replaced by the imperfect indicative. Specifically, the
A distinction between the past punctual and present imperfect subjunctive survives as a highly marked form
perfect in terms of present relevance—Nap. me prumettette licensed in just two contexts (Ledgeway 2009a:503-11;
nu pare ’e chile ’e fasule e nun me l’ha purtate ‘me= he.promised 2009b:10f.). The first concerns root and embedded jussive
a couple of kilos of beans and not me= them= has brought’— clauses, e.g., Abr. dijje che cce jesse! ‘tell.iMP2SG=him that
is found across the south, with two major exceptions: (i) the there= he.go.IPFV.SBJV’, although even here the corresponding
province of Cosenza where since the late nineteenth cen- indicative forms are not unknown (Nap. cumannáieno a uno
tury ‘aoristic drift’ (§58.3.2) has led to generalization of the ca turnava ‘they.ordered to one that he.returned.IPFV.IND’).
present perfective as the sole past perfective paradigm (Cos. The other bastion of subjunctive usage is volitional con-
m’annu fricatu a màchina ‘me= they.have stolen the car (= my texts, where the indicative is robustly attested whenever
car was/has been stolen)’); (ii) below the Nicastro-Sersale the main clause predicate is in the present (Cos. vuogliu ca
line in southern Calabria, Sicily, and in some dialects of parri ‘I.want that speak.2SG.PRS.IND’), alternates freely with
‘Greek’ Salento where perfective situations, even with pre- the subjunctive when the matrix predicate is in the past
sent relevance, are generally expressed by the synthetic (vulìa ca parrave/parrasse ‘I.wanted that speak.2SG.PST.IND/
paradigm (Ctz. ’mbecchiasti, Loré ‘you.aged (= have become SBJV’), but is excluded whenever the matrix predicate occurs
old), Loredana’), and the analytic paradigm is limited to in an irrealis form such as the conditional (vulesse/vulerra ca
marking present results of past actions (Acese n’haiu vivutu parrasse/**parrave ‘I.would.like that speak.2SG.PST.SBJV/IND’) in
nenti ‘not I.have drunk nothing (= I’m sober)’; cf. non vippi accordance with a rule of modal attraction between matrix
nenti ‘not I.drank nothing’ (= I didn’t drink/haven’t drunk and embedded predicates (Ledgeway 2009a:507). Another
anything)’), experiential aspect (Ctz. hai mai vistu ’nu picciu- important alternative to the subjunctive in subject and
lid. d. u ccu l’occhi asciutti davanti i doluri? ‘have you ever seen a adjunct clauses, as well as complement clauses in Sicilian,
child with dry eyes in the face of such pain?’), and iterative is the personal infinitive with (typically postverbal) nom-
aspect (Riberse nni sti misi chi aviti durmutu ccà, sempre d. d. à inative subject whenever overt (Ledgeway 1998; 2000:ch. 4;
aviti durmutu, ’na vota sula capitau ca durmemu nautri ’na me Mensching 2000; Bentley 2014a; cf. also §63.2.1.1): Mtn. sò
stanza di lettu! ‘in these months which you.have slept (= been sciute prime de venì tu ‘I left before of come.INF you’, Sic. partìu
sleeping and continue to sleep) here, always there you.have senza virillu so pa’ ‘he left without see.INF=him his father’.
slept (= been sleeping), only once it.happened.PRT that
we.slept.PRT in my bedroom’).
The subjunctive is commonly claimed to have been sys-
16.4.2.2 Voice
tematically replaced by the indicative (cf. Rohlfs 1968:§559; The formal passive construction BE + participle with subjec-
1969a:§681; Cordin 1997:89f.), e.g., Sic. vuliti chi cci vaju iu? tivization of the underlying object and suppression/demo-
‘do you want that I.go.IND?’, yet the situation is much more tion of the underlying subject is rarely employed, e.g., Mtn.
complex. First, until the latter half of the nineteenth cen- la porte è stete serrete da jindre ‘the door is (= has) been closed
tury the subjunctive constituted a robust and productive from inside’. Dialects of the upper south additionally mark a
morphological category (Loporcaro 1999a:70-73; Ledgeway dynamic/punctual vs stative/durative reading of the pas-
2009a:501-3). By the modern period, however, the present sive participle through the copular opposition between
subjunctive had fallen entirely out of use, except for some reflexes of ESSE ‘be’ and STARE ‘stand’: Nap. ’a porta era/steva
lexical residues (cf. mannaggia/mannaia! ‘damn it!’ < male chiusa ‘the door was (being)/was (remained) closed’. In place
‘evil’ + aggia/aia ‘have.3SG.SBJV’) and the third person of of the passive are preferred active structures with clitic left-
non-first conjugation verbs in some dialects of central Sale- dislocation (§31.3.4, §34.4.1) of the non-Agent: la porte,
nto (Bertocci and Damonte 2007). Second, in dialects of the j’hanne serrete da jindre ‘the door, it=they.have closed from
extreme south, which make only limited use of the infinitive inside’. Also common is the third-person si/se ‘self-’ passive
(cf. §§16.4.3.5, 63.3), the demise of the subjunctive affects with transitives: Cos. s’ann’i munnà i patate ‘self= must
not only the present, but also the imperfect, both being peel.INF the potatoes’. Of particular note here are Molisan
266
and Abruzzese which employ with passive/indefinite value Ciccio’).20 As these examples demonstrate, this same dis-
l’ome/n’ome (< HOMO ‘man’; Hastings 1994; D’Alessandro and tinction underlies the distribution of the perfective
Alexiadou 2006; D’Alessandro 2014), a ‘weak’ pronoun which auxiliaries and participle agreement (Ch. 49), inasmuch as
precedes lexical verbs (Ses. l’ome/n’ome dice ‘one says’), but transitive/unergative subjects align with avé ‘have’ and fail
which follows (higher) auxiliaries and modals (e.g., Ses. l’avè to control participial agreement, while unaccusative sub-
l’ome ditte ‘it=had one said’); revealing are Santeusaniese jects license auxiliary èsse(re) ‘be’ and control participial
examples like j’a n’ome ’vé rrubbiete ‘to.him= has one had agreement just like transitive objects. However, this con-
robbed (= one had robbed him)’, where in the variant servative correlation between active-stative syntax and
double-auxiliary pluperfect formation (a ‘has’, ’vé ‘had’) auxiliary selection and participle agreement is not so robust
the indefinite pronoun follows the first, but precedes the across all dialects, including Neapolitan where unaccusa-
second auxiliary (Verratti 1998:104f.). tives may also equally select HAVE (Ledgeway 2000:ch.6;
Widespread across all dialects are want-passives 2009a:§15.1) and past participle agreement has considerably
(Ledgeway 2000:ch.7) which can be employed with vol- weakened (Ledgeway 2009a:827-31; Loporcaro 2010a).
itional (Deliese u voliti diciutu in lingua taliana? ‘it.M= you.
want said.MSG in language Italian?’) or deontic (Casignanese
li rosi vonnu mbiverati ‘the.PL roses.F want watered.PL’) 16.4.3.2 Auxiliary selection and participle agreement
value. In the former case passivization of the indirect object
Simplifying considerably (though see §49.3), we can recog-
may also be exceptionally licensed and is reflected either
nize at least six other patterns of auxiliary selection across
through the presence of auxiliary BE (Roccellese illu voli èssiri
the south. The first concerns person-driven systems com-
spiegata a lezioni ‘he wants be.INF explained.FSG the.FSG
mon to many dialects of central and southern Italy such as
lesson.F’) or through subject-controlled participle agree-
Ariellese (Tuttle 1986; Manzini and Savoia 2005, II:729-45:
ment (Cos. id. d. a vo lavata i capid. d. i ‘she wants washed.FSG
D’Alessandro 2010:31f.), where with all predicates first/sec-
the.PL hairs.M’).
ond persons select BE (so/si fatijate/cascate lit. ‘I.am/you.SG.
Typical of southern dialects is the use of transitive/
are worked.SG/fallen.SG’) and the third person HAVE (a fatijate/
unergative past participles with middle value (Bentley and
cascate ‘(s)he.has worked.sg/fallen.SG’). Alongside these var-
Ledgeway 2014; 2015), hence examples such as Cos. simu
ieties, we also find dialects such as Altamurano which com-
arrivati all’aeropuortu ggià prenotati ‘we arrived at the airport
bines both options into a single system of so-called triple
already booked.MPL (= having already booked in)’, Sic. vínniru
auxiliation (Loporcaro 2007b), where first/second person
manciati ‘they came eaten.PL (= having already eaten)’
subjects invariably align with BE (sɔ/sə mːanˈʤɛi ̯t ‘I.am/
(cf. §8.4.6.5 for Romanian). Similarly, transitive participles
you.SG.are eaten’, albeit in free alternation with HAVE: ˈaɟɟə/
are frequently employed in conjunction with privative senza
a manˈʤɛit̯ ), but third person subjects retain the conserva-
‘without’ with middle value (Mtn. (cammise) senza sciaquete
tive transitive-unaccusative HAVE/BE split (a manˈʤɛi ̯t/e
‘(shirt) without washed (= unwashed shirt); Granatiero
rːʊˈmwɛsə sʊul ‘he.has eaten/he.is remained alone’). The
1987:80), as well as the infinitive (Nap. cafè senza mmacenà
third pattern involves a temporal split as exemplified by
‘coffee without grind.INF (= unground coffee)’; Ledgeway
Procidano (Ledgeway 2009a:624-6), which displays a trad-
2009a:665; cf. Sp. una camisa sin planchar ‘a shirt without
itional HAVE-BE transitive-unaccusative split in the present
iron.INF (= unironed)’).
perfect (ho mangeto/songo juto ‘I.have eaten/I.am gone’), but
generalization of BE in all other perfective paradigms (fovo
16.4.3 Clause mangeto/juto ‘I.was eaten/gone’). Next, old Sicilian contrasts
such as li pili ià li eranu caduti ‘the.PL hairs.M already to.him
16.4.3.1 Sentence organization were fallen.PL’ vs si chilla dirrupa avissi caduta ‘if that.F rock.F
had.IPFV.SBJV fallen.FSG’ highlight a modal split, common to
The organization of the clause shows a number of overt
many medieval varieties (Ledgeway 2003a), whereby the
reflexes of an active-stative syntax (§50.2), distinguishing
traditional transitive-unaccusative split is overridden in
between Agent transitive/intransitive subjects and Under-
irrealis modal contexts with the extension of auxiliary
goer transitive objects/intransitive subjects. This explains
HAVE to all predicates. Another frequent pattern, especially
why, in terms of basic word order, transitive/unergative
subjects precede the verb (Nap. Ciccio s’ha véppeta na birra/
Ciccio ha víppeto ‘Ciccio self= has drunk.FSG a.F beer.F/Ciccio 20
Many unaccusatives and unergatives select for a locative/temporal
has drunk.MSG’), whereas unaccusative subjects occupy the argument where VS order correlates with an implicit locative/temporal
argument anchored to the here and now of the speaker functioning as the
canonical postverbal object position (s’è véppeta ’a birra ‘self= subject of predication (Ledgeway 2009a:771-4): Nap. ØLoc sta venneno ’o
is drunk.FSG the.FSG beer.F’, è sciso Ciccio ‘is descended.MSG padrone ‘[here] is coming the boss’.
267
ADAM LEDGEWAY
in dialects of the extreme south (though not Salentino), is person tonic pronouns. This is the case in Ariellese where,
the generalization of HAVE to all verb classes and grammat- as with auxiliary distribution (D’Alessandro 2012), there
ical persons: Gse. avìa dittu/morutu ‘she.had said/died’, Fior- obtains a person split between prepositionally marked
illa si nd’avìa calatu ‘Fiorilla self= therefrom had descended’. first/second persons and unmarked third person (so viste a
Finally, the opposite pattern is found in Bovese (Squillaci tte/(**a) jisse/(**a) Marije ‘I.am seen ACC.MRK you.OBL.SG/(ACC.
forthcoming; Schifano and Silvestri 2014; Schifano et al. MRK) her/(ACC.MRK) Maria’). Many other varieties, by contrast,
2014) where BE has generalized to all verbs (though restricted are more liberal, extending the prepositional accusative to
to the pluperfect): eru/eri/era/èramu/èravu/èranu lavuratu/iutu the third person, especially pronouns, proper names, and
‘I.was/you.SG.were/(s)he.was/we.were/you.PL.were/they.were kinship terms, in turn, often doubled by a clitic: Mtn. A
worked.MSG/gone.MSG’. cchenèije che vé truwènne? ‘ACC.MRK who are you looking
As for participle agreement (cf. §49.2, and Loporcaro for?’, l’ha viste a Mmarije? ‘her=have you seen ACC.MRK
1998b), here too there is considerable variation. Varieties Maria?’. The greatest variation is found with full NPs
such as Gioiese and Bovese with generalization of HAVE or BE where the distribution of the prepositional accusative,
have lost participle agreement in all configurations, includ- even with animate and full referential referents, often
ing with clitic direct objects: Gse. l’avìa ferutu ‘her= he.had proves optional: Nap. avimmo cugliuto (a) ll’avvocato ‘we wel-
injured.MSG’, Bovese i piatti, ll’eru lavatu ‘the dishes.M, comed (ACC.MRK) the lawyer’, se tenesse a n’ato ommo vicino ‘if
them=I.was washed.MSG’. At the other extreme we find var- only I had ACC.MRK another man’ vs se m’avesse spusato no
ieties like Salentino where, irrespective of auxiliary selec- brigante ‘if I had married a bandit’. However, when animate
tion, there is generalized agreement not only with constituents are moved to the left periphery, they always
unaccusative subjects (Scr. li tre su già ssuti ‘the.MPL three license the prepositional accusative: Cos. am’i chiamà (a r)u
are already exited.MPL’), but with all objects, whether full or mièdicu ‘we must call (ACC.MRK) the doctor’ vs **(a r)u mièdicu
pronominal (Scr. aggiu nnutti ddo chili de biscotti ‘I’ve ll’am’i chiamà ‘ACC.MRK the doctor him=we.must call’.
brought.MPL two kilos.M of biscuits.M’). Other varieties Another significant area of variation concerns various
show an intermediate situation where agreement is today dative-shift type constructions where an underlying dative
restricted to participles showing metaphonic alternation case-marked RECIPIENT is marked accusative when realized as
for gender (cf. Mtn. hou rutte/rotte lu cicene/la pegnete ‘I. a clitic (Sornicola 1997b:335-7; Loporcaro 1998b:129f.;174-6;
have broken.PTCP.M/F the jar.M/cooking.pot.F’), even in Ledgeway 2000:ch.2; 2009a:844-7; Maturi 2002:177f.). In
those varieties where final vowels remain otherwise intact. many dialects accusative-marking of Recipients is restricted
This is clearly visible in varieties that present both strong to monotransitives, e.g., Alt. la mə'gːerə nʤə/lʊ koʊ̯ ʃ /rɪit̯
metaphonetic and weak non-metaphonic participle vari- ‘the wife him.DAT/him.ACC= cooks/smiles’, Cos. cci/u sparu/
ants for the same verb, where only the former shows parru/cucinu/scrivu ‘him.DAT/him.ACC= I.shoot/speak/cook/
agreement (cf. Ffd. Cicciu s’avìe letta/lejutu a líttera ‘Ciccio write’, and is excluded in ditransitives (cf. Cos. cci/**u cucinu
self= had read.PTCP.FSG/read.PTCP.MSG the.F letter.F’), ultim- a pasta ‘him.DAT/him.ACC I.cook the pasta’). Many dialects of
ately highlighting how past participle agreement is sensi- the upper south, however, extend this pattern to ditransi-
tive, not only to syntactic configurations, but also to tives provided the genuine direct object is not referenced by
morphological distinctions (Loporcaro 2010a). Finally, we an accusative clitic. Hence in these varieties accusative-
must mention the exceptional behaviour of eastern Abruzz- marked Recipients surface with unergatives (Nap. vuie ’o
ese dialects like Ariellese where participles indiscrimin- rispunnete pure? ‘you.PL him.ACC reply.2PL also?’), ditransitives
ately display metaphonic agreement with any plural (Mat. u vegghj sbott do jav a cazian ‘him.ACC I.want scramble.INF
argument (D’Alessandro and Roberts 2010), be it subject two eggs for breakfast’), and even unaccusatives (Nap. ’o
(seme magnite/**magnate lu biscotte ‘we.are eaten.PL/SG jett’incontro ‘him.ACC= he.went towards’). The alternation
the.MSG biscuit.M’) or object (so magnite/**magnate li biscutte between dative and accusative marking of Recipients is
‘I.am eaten.PL/SG the.PL biscuits.M’). not however free and is subject, at least, to animacy restric-
tions, e.g., Cos. a Maria/a ra líttera cci rispunnu ‘to Maria/to
the letter.F 3OCL.DAT= I.reply’ vs a Maria/**a ra líttera a rispunnu
16.4.3.3 Argument marking ‘to Maria/to the letter.F 3OCL.ACC.FSG= I.reply’.
While all dialects mark specific animate direct objects with
the preposition a ‘to’ (cf. §56.3.2.4), they differ as to which
classes of NP are affected (Sornicola 1997a; Fiorentino 2003;
16.4.3.4 Inflectional core
Guardiano 2010; Ledgeway 2000:ch.2; 2009a:831-42; Maturi The position of the verb also shows interesting propeties
2002:231; Reynolds 2005). At the very least, the prepos- (Ledgeway and Lombardi 2005; Ledgeway 2009a:777-81;
itional accusative proves obligatory with first and second 2009b; Schifano forthcoming a, b). Above all, in most
268
dialects the verb sits in a low position within the sentential of an implicit, null object ‘the speech, talk’ (= ‘the lawyers
core from where it follows not only high adverbs (e.g., forze gave a clear talk’).
‘maybe’) but also many low pre-VP adverbs (e.g., ancora
‘still, yet’, ggià ‘already’) which in most Romance varieties
16.4.3.5 Left periphery
follow the verb (§§31.2.2.1-2), thereby producing the clitic-
adverb interpolation structures observed in §16.4.1.1.2. This Turning to the left periphery (see Ledgeway 2010b), we note
characteristic is brought out most acutely by a comparison an overwhelming tendency for all dialects obligatorily to
of the position of the verb in realis root/embedded clauses vacate all given/topical constituents from the sentential
and irrealis (subjunctive) clauses (Ledgeway and Lombardi core dislocating them (with resumptive clitics where avail-
2014; cf. also §31.2.2.2.1): whereas in the former case the able) to the left (or right) periphery (Cruschina 2011b),
verb follows low adverbs such as ggià ‘already’ (Lec. (tici ca) hence the apparent high incidence of clitic doubling and
l’Anna ggià u sape ‘(he says that.REALIS) Anna already it= such structures as Nap. nc’’a mannáiemo(,) a’ léttera a Don
knows’), in the latter case it climbs to the highest available Michele ‘him.DAT= it.F= we.sent the.FSG letter.F to Don Michele’
position preceding such adverbs (speru cu u sape ggià ‘I hope ) ’a léttera, a Don Michele, nc’’a mannáiemo, a Don Michele, ’a
that.IRREALIS it= she.knows already’). lettera, nc’’a mannáiemo, ’a lettera nc’’a mannáiemo(,) a Don
The position of the verb also discriminates in some dialects Michele, etc. When predicates are topicalized, these are gen-
between different types of negation. For example, in Cosen- erally copied from the sentential core and preceded by the
tino postverbal mancu is an emphatic negator ‘not even’ topic marker from DE ‘of ’ (cf. Romanian; §8.4.6.5): Cos. ’i
(Cicciu un mi canuscia mancu ‘Ciccio doesn’t even know me’), bbíed. d. u, è propriu bbíed. d. u ‘of handsome, he’s really hand-
whereas preverbal mancu licenses a presuppositional reading some’, ’i mangià, u’ mmangia mai ‘of eat.INF, not he.eats never’.
of the negator (Cicciu un mi mancu canuscia ‘but Ciccio doesn’t Also striking is the frequent use of focus fronting (§§31.3.4,
know me’). Other dialects mark presuppositional negation 34.5.2-4), a tendency that becomes stronger and more lib-
through different means. Sicilian, for instance, has grammat- eral the further south one moves, including contrastive
icalized the negator neca from an erstwhile structure non è focus (Mat. Wè Marì, ca TOND GIAÒV’N nan sì! ‘Hey Maria, you’re
ca . . . ‘not it.is that . . . ’ (Cruschina 2010b:31; Garzonio and not SO YOUNG yourself!’), informational focus (Nap. ’O pate
Poletto 2010:78f.; cf. also §51.2.3), e.g., Mus. neca ci vonsi jiri songh’io! ‘I’m the daddy!’), and mirative fronting (Cos. Nu
‘but they didn’t want to go there’, whereas Salentino has càvuciu a ru culu ti dugnu! ‘I’ll give you a kick up the arse!’).
grammaticalized the minimizer filu ‘(not a) thread’ in this Within this category can be included quantified expressions
function (Ledgeway forthcoming b): Scr. nu stau filu distratta which are also typically fronted: Cht. Caccose s’a scurdate
‘but I’m not absent-minded’. ‘he’s forgotten something’.
South of Gaeta-Rieti-Teramo (Rohlfs 1969a:243-5) manner In relation to finite complementizers, we note that, trad-
adverbs are syncretic with adjectives, the adjectival form itionally, all dialects present a dual series formally distin-
equally performing adverbial functions (Ledgeway 2011a): guishing realis (indicative) from irrealis (subjunctive)
Lec. li cuenti li sacciu fare bueni ‘the accounts them= I.know modality (Ledgeway 2004a; 2005; cf. also §63.2.1.2), namely
do.INF good.MPL’. As the latter example demonstrates, the (QUIA >) ca ‘realis’ vs (QUID >) che [ke/kə/ki] (USIDs),
adverbial adjective may also show agreement under specific ((QUO)MODO >) ma/mu/mi (southern Calabria, northeastern
structural conditions. In particular, the adverbial adjective Sicily), (QUOD >) cu (Salento), e.g., Guglionesano m ˈɔnnə
may agree with Undergoers, be these transitive objects (Cos. ˈdəttə ka vɛ ‘me =they.have said that(ca) he.comes.IND’ vs
miscu bbone i carte ‘I’ll shuffle the.PL cards.F good.FPL’) or ˈvujjə kə vvi ‘I.want that(che) you.come.IND’. Today in most
unaccusative subjects (Acese Bona accuminciau a jurnata! dialects of the upper south this distinction has been neutral-
‘good.FSG began the.FSG day.F’), but not with transitive sub- ized (Ledgeway 2009b; 2012c; Ledgeway and Lombardi 2014),
jects (Cos. i frati lavanu bbona/**bbuoni a màchina ‘the broth- with generalization of either ca (Ruvese m ˈɔnnə ˈðittə/
ers wash good.FSG/MPL the.FSG car.F’). Generally, unergative ˈvɔʎʎə ka ˈvɛnə ‘me= they.have said/I.want that(ca) he.
subjects behave like transitive subjects (e.g., Nap. Maria comes.IND’) or che (Monterodunese m ˈɛnnə ˈrittə/ˈvɔʎʎə kə
cantaie bbuono/**bbona ‘Maria sang good.MSG/FSG’), but in vvɛ ‘me= they.have said/I.want that(che) he.comes.IND’). In
some dialects they may control agreement under specific dialects of the extreme south, however, where, like Roma-
structural and semantic conditions. For example, in Mus. nian, finite clauses predominantly replace the traditional use
l’abbocati parlaru chiari/chiaru ‘the lawyers spoke clear.PL/ of the infinitive (cf. §§8.5.2.5, 63.3), the distinction between
MSG’, agreement with the subject results in a subject- the two complementizers is robustly maintained (Calabrese
oriented activity reading ( ‘the lawyers were clear in their 1993; Ledgeway 1998): Roccellese pari ca sugnu ’nta la galleria
speech’), whereas the non-agreeing masculine singular form ‘it seems that(ca) I’m in the tunnel’ vs aviti mu partiti ‘you.PL.
produces an object-oriented accomplishment reading, albeit have that(mu) you.PL.leave (= you must leave)’.
269
CHAPTER 17
Sardinian
GUIDO MENSCHING AND E V A -M A R I A R E M B E R G E R
17.1 Introduction Sardinia (Catalan in Alghero and Ligurian varieties on the

islands of Sant’Antioco and San Pietro).
Scholars from the nineteenth century onwards (e.g.
Sardinian is the autochthonous development from Latin in
Gröber 1884:210f.) claimed that, because of the early con-
Sardinia following the Roman conquest during the first
quest of Sardinia, Sardinian conserved elements from
Punic war.1 In the first texts of the eleventh century it is
archaic Latin. Yet the survey in Mensching (2004b) shows
already a language distinct from the dialects of Italy.
that this hypothesis cannot be maintained, since most of the
The inherited lexicon shows some unique conservations
relevant features (e.g. lack of palatalization of /k/ and /ɡ/
(Porru 1942) such as domo ‘house’ (< DOMO) and mannu ‘big’
before /e/ and /i/) were still common in Latin during the
(< MAGNUM), as well as others common to other Romance
first centuries AD. It thus seems that the Latin of Sardinia
varieties but non-existent or rare in Italy including the
was not significantly different from that spoken elsewhere
reflexes of SCIRE ‘to know’ (cf. Ro. a şti) and UERUEX ‘sheep’
until at least the end of the third century AD. The striking
(cf. Ro. berbec ‘ram’, but also Fr. brebis ‘ewe’). There are,
conservative elements of Sardinian are not sufficient to
however, also some striking parallels to southern Italian
classify it as archaic, since it also shows numerous
dialects (cf. Rohlfs 1937a, and Ch. 16).
innovations.
Although Sardinian should be considered as a language in
Some of the changes are due to language contact. Pre-
its own right (in the sense of Abstandsprache; cf. Kloss 1987),
Roman languages are mostly reflected in toponymy and
there is no common standard. Thus, the notion ‘language’
some lexical items. The Paleosardinian substratum, of
must be understood in the sense of a bundle of varieties
uncertain origin, may also be responsible for some phono-
usually classified into northern/central Logudorese and
logical phenomena and, in part, the phonological make-up
southern Campidanese varieties, with a border zone of
of Sardinian words (e.g. syllable structure, repetitive vowel
overlapping isoglosses in the central part of the island, the
patterns such as í-i-i; cf. Serra 1960, and §17.2.1).2 After the
western area of which is sometimes called Arborense (cf.
fall of the western Roman empire, the Vandals were present
Map 17.1). The eastern half of the Logudorese-speaking
on the island only for around 80 years (455-533): the almost
territory includes the subvariety around Nuoro, often con-
total lack of direct Germanic influences in Sardinian is a
sidered a variety in its own right, termed central Sardinian.
distinctive feature with respect to Italian and most other
It is held to be the most conservative variety, a judgement
Romance languages.3 Sardinia belonged to the Byzantine
mostly due to the lack of voicing of intervocalic stops and
Empire from the seventh century, but during the conflicts
the conservation of Latin velars (§17.2.2). Since Arborense is
against the Saracens, neglect by Byzantium led to the devel-
not a uniform variety, sharing features of both Logudorese
opment of independent political structures in the shape of
and Campidanese, we shall not consider it here, but rather
the Judicates of Cagliari, Torres, Arborea, and Gallura. The
refer to three main varieties, Nuorese, Logudorese, and
threat posed by the Saracens was overcome at the begin-
Campidanese. Map 17.1 also shows two northern varieties,
ning of the eleventh century with the aid of Pisa and Genoa,
Sassarese and Gallurese, which have their origin in the
who gained special privileges, so that the Judicates (except
Italian dialects imported from Pisa and Genoa from the
Arborea) lost their autonomy. Whereas Byzantine Greek left
eleventh to the fourteenth centuries (cf. Ch. 14). They will
only a few traces, the contribution of old Italian varieties, in
not be considered here, nor will other languages spoken in
2
For the substratum, see Blasco Ferrer (2002:35-8) and Paulis (2008).
Phoenician/Punic and Greek elements are negligible (cf. Wagner
1
For a general introduction see Atzori (1982), Contini and Tuttle (1982), 1997:150-65).
3
Tagliavini (1969:388-93), Jones (1988b), Blasco Ferrer (1995a; 2000), Jones For the superstratum influences mentioned, see Wagner (1997:62-
(1997), Bossong (2008). 4,165-74,184-232), Blasco Ferrer (2002:189-212).
270 This chapter © Guido Mensching and Eva-Maria Remberger 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
SARDINIAN
Nuorese
Logudorese
Campidanese
Arborense
GALLURESE
not Sardinian
SASSARESE
Sassari
CATALAN
Alghero LOGUDORESE
NUORESE
Nuoro
ARBORENSE
Oristano
CAMPIDANESE
Cagliari
LIGURIAN
S. Pietro
S. Antioco
Map 17.1 The Sardinian dialects (modified version of Virdis 1988:905)
271
particular Tuscan, is considerable in the area of vocabulary 17.2.1 Vowel system

(e.g. Log. betzu, Cpd. beciu ‘old’; cf. Tsc.-It. vecchio), including
some functional elements (e.g. indefinites). The most
The Classical Latin vowel system (cf. §25.1) was reduced to
numerous superstratum elements stem from Catalan and
five vowels in the so-called ‘Sardinian vowel system’ (cf. also
(Castilian) Spanish, since Sardinia passed to the Kingdom of
§16.2.1.1), the result of quantitative neutralization without
Aragon (where Catalan was official) at the beginning of the
change in quality: Sardinian originally has three degrees of
fourteenth century, becoming part of the united Spanish
height with no distinction between close mid and open mid
Kingdom from 1479. In 1718 Sardinia passed to Piedmont,
front and back vowels. The vowels e and o are usually
and in 1861 to united Italy. Since then the political history of
pronounced open as [ɛ] and [ɔ], but are phonetically close
Sardinian has followed that of Italy, including its linguistic
in the context of metaphonic raising to [e] and [o] before a
policies, leading to diglossia and a new wave of italianisms
high vowel in the following syllable ([i] < Lat. I, [u] < Lat. U,
(cf. Rindler-Schjerve 1987).
but also early glides). Thus, in Logudorese, we find tempus
At the end of the last millennium, a regional law on
[ˈtempus] ‘time’ < TĔMPUS vs tempos [ˈtɛmpɔs] ‘times’ < TĔMPOS
‘promotion and support of culture and language in Sardinia’
and bonu [ˈbonu] ‘good.MSG’ < BŎNU(M) vs [ˈbɔnɔs] ‘good.MP’ <
(Regione Autonoma della Sardegna 1997) and a national law
BŎNOS.
on ‘regulations for the protection of historical linguistic
In Campidanese, metaphony led to the development of
minorities’ (Parlamento Italiano 1999) created a legal basis
open mid front and back vowels now in systematic oppos-
for official bilingualism. From 1999 to 2001 an expert com-
ition with the corresponding close mid front and back
mittee was established in order to elaborate a standardized
vowels because of final vowel neutralization: when metaph-
orthography and grammar.4 The resulting system, the Limba
ony was no longer active, the atonic vowel system was
Sarda Unificada (‘Unified Sardinian Language’), strongly
further reduced to three vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/ by word-
favoured Logudorese and became a matter of highly polem-
final vowel raising, e.g. Cpd. bonus [ˈbɔnus] ‘good.MPL’ < BŎNOS
ical debate, leading to a second committee and a revised
vs Log. bonos [ˈbɔnɔs] and Cpd. beni [ˈbɛni] ‘well’ < BĔNE vs Log.
proposal, the Limba Sarda Comuna (LSC, ‘Common Sardinian
bene [ˈbɛnɛ] ‘well’ (cf. Map 17.2, isogloss 2). Consequently, we
Language’),5 but also to several counter-proposals. For this
now have minimal pairs like beni /ˈbeni/ ‘come.IMP.2SG’ < UĔNĪ
reason and without a systematic presence in the school
and beni /ˈbɛni/ ‘well’ < BĔNE, and ollu /ˈɔllu/ ‘oil’ < OLEUM and
system, official bilingualism in Sardinia is still far from
ollu /ˈollu/ ‘I want’ < *ˈvɔljo. Thus, /e o/ vs /ɛ ɔ/ has become
being a reality.
part of the phonological system in these varieties.6
In contrast to many other Romance languages, there is no
spontaneous diphthongization (cf. §38.1). The old Latin
diphthongs were monophthongized (AE, OE > [ɛ]; AU > [a],
17.2 Phonology rarely [o]). Apparent diphthongs are secondary, for
instance, due to consonant deletion, e.g. Cpd. meigina ‘cure’
Phonetics and phonology is the main area of variation < MEDICĪNAM.
among the Sardinian dialects. Comprehensive studies are The two resulting Sardinian vowel systems are summar-
Wagner (1941), from a diachronic perspective, and the ized in Tables 17.1 and 17.2.
phonetic geolinguistic atlas of Sardinia by Contini (1987). Some Campidanese dialects have nasals vowels parallel
For the Campidanian area, important sources are Virdis to all seven oral vowels ([ĩ, ẽ, ɛ̃, ã, ɔ̃, õ, ũ]) whenever elision
(1978) and Bolognesi (1998). Furthermore, Virdis (1988) of a posttonic nasal consonant took place and the surround-
describes the Sardinian-speaking area offering a geolinguis- ing vowels were nasalized, e.g. LŪNA> [ˈlũã] ‘moon’ (Sanluri).7
tic profile (cf. Map 17.1) based on several decisive isoglosses Furthermore, in dialects of the Sarrabus area (Böhne 1950)
referring mainly to phonological criteria (cf. Map 17.2). both intervocalic /l/ and /n/ are substituted by a glottal
stop,8 but the nasal leaves its trace by nasalizing the
4
Earlier attempts were Porru (1811), Spano (1840), Corraine (1990; 1992), preceding vowel, yielding minimal pairs such as [ˈmaɁu]
Blasco Ferrer (1986), Bolognesi (1999). Cf. also the overviews in Blasco
Ferrer (1986:62 n.110; 2002:109-12), Jones (1993:8-12), Mensching and
Grimaldi (2005), Stolfo (2009) and the documentation available at Condaghes
<http://www.condaghes.com/limbasarda.asp>.
5 6
The LSC permits the use of local varieties in a standardized spelling (a Bolognesi (1998) and Frigeni (2002) claim that in Campidanese the
practice followed here, with some modifications, to note Sardinian vowel system remains underlyingly a 3-height system.
7
examples graphematically), but also proposes a standard spelling and Cf. Wagner (1941:62-4), Contini and Boë (1972:192, 166), Virdis
grammar. The standard version, adopted on an experimental basis by the (1978:53), Bolognesi (1998:26f.).
8
Regione Autonoma della Sardegna in 2006, tries to reflect the most wide- In some varieties of the Barbagia also /k/; cf. Wagner (1941:71), Contini
spread variant. (1971), Virdis (1978:41), Wolf (1985).
272
SARDINIAN
GALLURESE
SASSARESE Martis
Sassari Tula
Oschiri
Ploaghe 4a
CATALAN 4/4a
Ittiri Ozieri Buddusò
Alghero Pattada Siniscola
BARONIE
Bitti
Lula
Bonorva
Orune
PLANARGIA 4a 4
Nuoro
Bosa 4
Macomer Dorgali
BARBAGIA
4a 3 1-9
Cuglieri
4a-3 1
Bonarcardo 9 9 Fonni
2-7-8-9
Baunei
2 7 4
1 3
Major isoglosses 2-4-6-7
Aritzo 2
1 = [ke]/[ki] > [t∫] 1 8
8 8
2 = -[e]/[o] > -[i]/[u] Oristano 2
6
3 = [kj]/[tj] > [ts] 1 Laconi
4 = [kj]/[tj] > [0]
4a = [kj]/[tj] > [tt]
5 = [kj]/[tj] > [t∫]
6 = [kj]/[tj] > [ss] MARMILLA
7 = DEF.ART.PL is (vs sos,sas) Perdasdefogu
8 = [s]+C > [is]+C TREXENTA 6
9 = [r] > [arr]- 6
Sanluri 3
Senorbi
Villaputzu
SARRABUS- 3
GERREI
3
Iglesias
5
Cagliari
LIGURIAN 3
S. Pietro
SULCIS
S. Antioco 5
Map 17.2 The main isoglosses of Sardinia (modified version of Virdis 1988:908)
273
Table 17.1 The Sardinian vowel system: relevant diachronic (but also synchronic, cf. §17.2.3) phono-
Logudorese/Nuorese logical process is lenition of the (etymologically simple)
plosives /p, t, k, b, d, ɡ/ and voiceless fricatives /f, s/. The
FRONT CENTRAL BACK
rule is given in Table 17.3.
Close /i/ /u/ Thus we have the following results:
Mid /ɛ/ /ɔ/
Open /a/ (1) Nuo. Log. Cpd.
a. [sɛˈkarɛ] [sɛˈɣarɛ] [sɛˈɣai] < SECARE ‘cut’
b. [ˈkɔða] [ˈkɔa] [ˈkɔa] < CAUDAM ‘tail’
Table 17.2 The Sardinian vowel system: c. [triˈvoʣu] [triˈvoʣu] [treˈvullu] < TRIFOLIUM ‘trefoil’
Campidanese
FRONT CENTRAL BACK
The Nuorese area is the most conservative, since it
mostly preserves intervocalic voiceless plosives.9 Both
Close /i/ /u/ Nuorese and Logudorese also maintain velar plosives before
Close mid /e/ /o/ front vowels, whereas Campidanese has palatalized them
Open mid /ɛ/ /ɔ/ (cf. Map 17.2, isogloss 1): Nuo./Log. [ˈkentu], but Cpd.
Open /a/ [ˈʧentu] < CENTUM ‘hundred’, Nuo./Log. [ɡiˈrare], but Cpd.
[ʤiˈrai] < GYRARE ‘turn.INF’. In Nuorese these affricates only
appear in loans (mostly from Italian, but also from Catalan
< MALU(M) ‘bad’ vs [ˈmãɁu] < MANU(M) ‘hand’. The phonological and Spanish). The same is true of the palatal nasal /ɲ/ and
status of these nasal vowels is controversial. the approximant /w/. Some Nuorese dialects (e.g. Bitti and
Vowel assimilation seems also to be quite common, espe- Lula) distinguish (Latin) /b/ and /v/ (Wagner 1941:97; Jones
cially in Campidanese, e.g. [pis.ti.ˈna.ɣa] ‘carrot’ < PASTINACAM 1997:318), elsewhere both appear as /b/. The interdental
or [ˈan.ʤu.lu] ‘angel’ < ANGELUM. Also, [ɛ] in hiatus is raised to fricative /θ/, particular to Nuorese (cf. Map 17.2, isogloss 4)
[e] or [i], e.g. MEUM > miu ‘my.MSG’, and /o/ to /u/ after a labial and absent from Logudorese and Campidanese, can have
or before /nd/, e.g. tùndiri < TONDERE ‘shear.INF’. Present in all different origins (Wagner 1941:109f.), e.g. /ˈθiu/ ‘uncle’
dialects is raising of mid vowels in pretonic position as in < Grk. theios, Lat. [kj] as in /ˈfaθo/ < FACIO ‘I do’, and Lat. [tj]
cuntentu < CONTENTUM ‘satisfied’ and grinucu < GENUCULUM ‘knee’. as in /ˈpuθu/ < PUTEUM ‘well’ (cf. Map 17.2, isogloss 4). In
All varieties show the so-called paragogic vowel, involv- some Nuorese subdialects, word-initial F- is deleted in abso-
ing a phonological process by which the vowel of a final lute initial position (cf. Virdis 1988:908). Nuorese (with
syllable in a word ending in a consonant is copied and Logudorese) has an affricate /ʣ/, which mostly stems
attached to the final consonant giving rise to a further CV from Latin L+j, e.g. FILIUM > [ˈfiʣu] ‘son’, but is also found in
syllable, but only prepausally or at the end of an utterance. (mostly Italian) loans e.g. [ˈʣɛntɛ] instead of [ˈʤente]
Thus we have Log. [is.ˈtran.ʣo.zo] / Cpd. [is.ˈtran.ʤu.zu] ‘people’. The affricate /ts/ is not hereditary in most of the
‘strangers’ and Cpd. perdas [ˈpɛr.da.za] ‘stones’, timèis Nuorese territory, deriving mostly from It. /ʧ/ (OIt. cittade >
[ti.ˈme.i.zi] ‘you.PL fear’. Other (non-copied) paragogical [ʦitˈtaðɛ] ‘city’). The Nuorese consonant system (as in the
(epenthetic) vowels are found in (mostly) monosyllabic dialect of Lula) is given in Table 17.4.
words, cf. tui < TU ‘you.SG’, innoi < IN HOC ‘here’, cras > /ˈkra.zi/ The Logudorese system has lenition of voiceless inter-
‘tomorrow’ and also verbal forms such as funti ‘they are’, vocalic plosives (but [ß ð ɣ] are not phonemic), but lacks
asi ‘you.SG have’. velar palatalization like Nuorese (palatals only appear
A phonological process found mainly in Campidanese in loans); Logudorese does not have /θ/, since the Latin
yields prosthetic vowels before initial /r/, e.g. a in arriu contexts /kj/- and /tj/- produced other results, like /tt/ in
‘river’, arriri ‘laugh’ (cf. Map 17.2, isogloss 9). In Logudorese /ˈfatto/ < FACIO ‘I do’ (cf. Map 17.2, isogloss 4a) (Cpd. /ˈfadʣu/,
and Nuorese prosthetic vowels appear before /s/+consonant /ˈfatʦu/), /ˈputtu/ < PUTEUM ‘well (N)’ (Cpd. /ˈputʦu/, /ˈpuʧu/).
clusters, e.g. Nuo. /isˈkɔla/ vs Cpd. /ˈskɔla/ < SCHOLAM ‘school’ In Campidanese (Table 17.5), Latin /k ɡ/ were palatalized to
(cf. Map 17.2, isogloss 8). /ʧ ʤ/ and lenition took place for /p t k b d ɡ f s/ often up to
complete deletion of the consonant.
17.2.2 Consonant system
9
They are not all intact in all subvarieties; e.g. Nuoro has /t/ > /d/ (UITAM >
The consonant system and the phonetic realizations of /ˈbida/ ‘life’) or even further reduced to Ø in masculine participles (Pittau
consonants vary greatly among the dialects. The most 1972:109).
274
SARDINIAN
Table 17.3 Lenition processes

LENITION RULE NUORESE LOGUDORESE CAMPIDANESE
a. voiceless plosives > voiced fricatives – + +

/p t k/ > [ß ð ɣ]
b. voiced plosives > voiced fricatives (> Ø) + + (> Ø) + (> Ø)
/b d ɡ/ > [ß/v ð ɣ]
c. voiceless fricatives > voiced fricatives + + +
/f s/ > [v z]
Table 17.4 Nuorese (from Jones 1988b:319)

BILABIAL LABIODENTAL DENTAL ALVEOLAR RETROFLEX POST - ALVEOLAR PALATAL VELAR
Plosive pb td ɖ kɡ
Fricative f (v) θ s
Affricate ʦʣ (ʧ ʤ)
Nasal m n (ɲ)
Lateral l
Vibrant r
Approximant (w) j
Table 17.5 Campidanese

BILABIAL LABIODENTAL DENTAL ALVEOLAR RETROFLEX POST - ALVEOLAR PALATAL VELAR
Plosive pb td ɖ kɡ
Fricative fv s
Affricate ʦʣ ʧʤ
Nasal m n ɲ
Lateral l
Vibrant r
Approximant (w) j
In most dialects /w/ is present only in loans, since no not one of phonological length. Furthermore, even in the
diphthongization took place and the Latin nexus /kw/ and most conservative Nuorese dialects, where the voiceless
/ɡw/, which contained the approximant, had a different intervocalic plosives have been preserved, and an oppos-
development, namely /b/, as in QUATTUOR > battor ‘four’; in ition /pp/~/p/, /tt/~/t/, /kk/~/k/ is in principle present,
Campidanese, however, Lat. /kw/ is mostly maintained, e.g. the status of a double vs a simple consonant remains
[ˈkwatt(u)ru]. All dialects have retroflex voiced plosives unclear for the voiced plosives, since simple voiced plosives
which originate from Latin -LL-, e.g. UILLAM > bidda [ˈbiɖɖa] developed into /ß ð ɣ/ with the former length opposition
‘village’, PULLUM > puddu [ˈpuɖɖu] ‘rooster’. Furthermore, now being /bb/~/ß/, /dd/~/ð/, /ɡɡ/~/ɣ/.10 In Logudorese/
intervocalic /l/ is subject to phonological processes not Campidanese, where voiceless plosives have also been sub-
only word-internally, but also across word boundaries, giv- ject to lenition, at least for plosives the length opposition
ing rise to [ß w ʁ Ɂ ɡw L Ø] depending on dialect area (cf. also has been lost. Moreover, even in Nuorese intervocalic plo-
Frigeni 2005:21; Molinu 2009). sives seem to have the same length, regardless of their
The status of Sardinian geminates is unclear (Bolognesi
1998:158-65; Ladd and Scobbie 2003). As we have seen, the 10
Cf. Wagner (1941:195, fn.1), Lüdtke (1953:413), Virdis (1988:904), Jones
former Latin opposition LL~L changed to /l/~/ɖ/, which is (1988b:321), Frigeni (2005:20).
275
origin: /ˈlatɛ/ < ˈlakte ‘milk’ and /ˈlatu/ < LATUS ‘side’ Typical lexical triggers of phonosyntactic strengthening
(whereas we have Cpd. /ˈlati/, Log. /ˈlatɛ/, but Cpd./Log. are the conjunction e < ET ‘and’ and the preposition a < AD ‘to,
/ˈlaðu/; Jones 1988b:321). As for obstruents, former gemin- at’, as well as the interrogative particle a < AUT (cf. §17.4.3):
ates in all Sardinian varieties are characterized by the fact
that they do not undergo lenition as do most simple inter- (2) A cantamus? [akkanˈtamuzu] (Nuo.)
vocalic consonants—but they do not seem to be phonolo- a we.sing
gically long, with the exception perhaps of Nuorese ‘Shall we sing?’
voiceless plosives. The only geminates which seem to
show a phonemic length contrast in most Sardinian var- Furthermore, since Sardinian has many inflected words
ieties are the sonorants /nn/ (cf. manu ~ mannu; cf. Virdis ending in a consonant, especially -t in verbal inflection,
1978:55) and /rr/.11 Nevertheless phonetic strengthening is phonosyntactic strengthening is found in exactly those con-
common in all dialects, as in Cpd. (Senorbì) [tɛˈllɛffɔnu] texts where assimilation processes can take place, e.g. fit
‘telephone’ < It. telefono (Molinu 2009:151), or as a conse- pastore [fippasˈtɔre] lit. ‘he.was shepherd’.
quence of metathesis, which often leads to consonant Final -s and -r in syllable contact with an initial consonant
reinforcement at the former position of the dislocated are either assimilated, when the initial consonant is /n/ or
vibrant, e.g. drommire ‘to sleep’ > DORMIRE. /l/ (sos luches [sɔl ˈlukɛzɛ] ‘the lights’ and battor litros [ˈbattɔl
ˈlitrɔzɔ] ‘four litres’), or neutralized to [s], e.g. before /p t k/
(duas caras [duas ˈkaraza] ‘two faces’, but battor caras [ˈbattɔs
17.2.3 Sandhi phenomena ˈkaraza] ‘four faces’) or to [r], e.g. before most other con-
sonants (battor domos [ˈbattɔr ˈðɔmɔzɔ] ‘four houses’, but sas
domos [sar ˈðɔmɔzɔ] ‘the houses’); in intervocalic context /s/
Lenition of word-initial consonants also takes place syn-
is voiced phonosyntactically (see also Contini 1986, and
chronically in intervocalic contexts—including where the
§40.2.2.2.1).
initial consonant is followed by a glide or [r]. Whereas in
Nuorese voiceless intervocalic plosives are preserved also
across word boundaries, e.g. [su ˈpanɛ] ‘the bread’, in 17.2.4 Suprasegmental features
Logudorese we find [su ˈßanɛ] and in Campidanese [su
ˈßani]. In all Sardinian dialects, /b d ɡ/ undergo lenition
Most Sardinian words are stressed on the penultimate syl-
in intervocalic phonosyntactic contexts, thus Nuo. [su
lable. Stress on the last syllable is generally avoided, leading
ˈßɔɛ] ‘the ox’, [saˈ ðɔmɔ] ‘the house’, [su ˈɣenneru] ‘the
to the addition of paragogic vowels on monosyllabic words,
son-in-law’, Log. [su ˈɔɛ], [sa ˈɔmɔ], [su ˈenneru], and Cpd.
even for loans: [kafˈfɛi] ‘coffee’ (< It. caffè), [gatˈtɔu] ‘cake’
[su ˈɔi], [sa ˈɔmu], [su ˈenneru]. The same holds for the
(< Fr. gâteau)—an exception being vocatives with apocope
development of /f s/ with [ˈfoku] ‘fire’ in [su ˈvoku] ‘the
(but only in Logudorese, see §17.3.1). Campidanese also
fire’ and Nuo./Log. [ˈsɔlɛ]/Cpd. [ˈsɔli] ‘sun’ in [su ˈzɔlɛ]/[su
creates new oxytones by nasalization and contraction as
ˈzɔli] ‘the sun’. Further phonosyntactic lenition processes
in LANAM > lãã > lã ‘wool’, vowel contraction and/or conson-
in the Campidanese area include, e.g. [ˈʧelu] ‘sky’ vs [su
ant deletion, e.g. fà ‘bean’ < FABAM. In imperatives clitics can
ˈʒelu] ‘the sky’.
attract the stress (Cpd. nàra! ‘tell.IMP.2SG!’ but nara·mì! ‘tell.
As for phonosyntactic doubling (cf. §40.3.1), in Sardinian
IMP.2SG=me!’; Nuo. daze·mì·las ‘give.IMP.2SG=me=them’), with
it is not a phonological rule (cf. also Loporcaro 1997a,b). It
much dialectal variation.12
involves a (diachronic) lexical assimilation process between
The paragogic vowel (cf. §17.2.1) has consequences for
word-final and word-initial consonants which triggers pho-
syllable structure, since in absolute final position paroxy-
nosyntactic strengthening. Since word-internal ‘geminates’
tones become proparoxytones, e.g. amigos is realized as
seem to have the same length as word-initial consonants
[a.ˈmi.ɣɔ.zɔ]. Furthermore, in Sardinian, proparoxytones
altered by the sandhi rule discussed here (Contini 1986:530),
are more often maintained than in other Romance lan-
they cannot be geminates proper, namely, phonologically
guages (Virdis 1978:29f.); in the verbal paradigm even infini-
long consonants. In the phonetic transcription, neverthe-
tives in -ĒRE (and occasionally in -IRE and -ARE) tended to
less, we shall represent these consonants by a double
change their stress pattern, thereby joining the third
notation.
11 12
Double consonants are usually not represented in the LSC standard Cf. Blasco Ferrer (1988a); Bolognesi (1998); Loporcaro (2000);
and other graphemic systems (cf. §17.1), with some exceptions (b l m n r s). Mensching (2004a:78); Kim and Repetti (2013:268); also cf. §§17.3.2, 40.4,
The grapheme dd (spelled dh in other systems) represents [ɖ]). 45.3.1.
276
SARDINIAN
Table 17.6 Inflectional classes of nouns (Logudorese/Nuorese)
I.F ‘pear’ pira piras

IIa.M ‘rooster’ puddu puddos
IIb.M ‘heart’ coro coros
IIc.M ‘time’ tempus tempos
III.M ‘mountain’ monte montes
III.F ‘sister’ sorre sorres
IV.M ‘barber’ barberi barberis
conjugation, whose infinitives are stressed on the stem (cf. declension), the conservation of the ending -t for the third
§17.3.2). Geisler (1994) claims that the initial syllable of a person singular and of the Latin imperfect subjunctive.
word is strengthened due to a ‘general levelling of accentual Rather, Sardinian morphology is structurally highly innova-
stress’ in syllables with primary and secondary accent and, tive, since many morphological patterns were replaced by
as a consequence, the weakening of obstruction in syllable analytic structures (cf. §§17.4.2, 46.1). We may also mention
contact. According to him, this is why, especially in Campi- the absence of synthetically formed adverbs and the ana-
danese, metathesis is progressive (e.g. càpra > cràpa) and lytic formation of ordinal numbers (article + de ‘of ’ + car-
accentual shift occurs in the verbal forms. dinal number), e.g. Log./Nuo. su de bator, Cpd. su de cuatru lit.
Metathesis of [r] (also from /l/) is common in all dialects; ‘the of four’ (‘the fourth’; cf. Wolf 1983).
however, the output is different in Logudorese/Nuorese and
Campidanese. In the latter, /r/ in the coda seems to be
banned (Frigeni 2005:17), which is the main reason for 17.3.1 Nominal inflection
metatheses such as FIRMARE > frimmai ‘to stop’ (Lörinczi
1971:425-8; cf. also Virdis 1978:75f.; Lai 2013). Consequently, Sardinian nouns come in four classes which can be defined
the remaining consonant of the cluster dissolved by metath- on the basis of plural morphology, at least in Nuorese and
esis is phonetically reinforced. In Nuorese the result of Logudorese, i.e. class I with plurals in -os, class II with
metathesis can also be a closed syllable, e.g. PETRAM > perda plurals in -as, and classes III and IV with plurals in -es and
‘stone’ (besides preda/preta). -is, respectively (see Table 17.6).13
Metathesis also produces marked syllable onsets in word- Class I continues the Latin first declension. Based on the
initial position, like [sr], [mr], [ʧr], [ʤr], and also [zr], [ʒr] in singular morphology, class II is divided into three sub-
word-initial position, cf. [ˈsroɣu] < SOCRUM ‘father-in-law’, classes: IIa, ending with -u (most frequent or ‘regular’,
[ˈmruɣu] < MUTULUM ‘pile’, [ʤrɛnˈnaʣu] < IANUARIUM ‘January’, from the Latin second declension); IIb, ending in -o (con-
in Campidanese (cf. Geisler 1994:115-17). taining words of various origins); and IIc, ending in -us (with
Studies on the intonation of Sardinian focus on interroga- Latin words of the third declension that were originally
tives (cf. Contini 1976; Schirru 1982). The intonation of neuter, e.g. tempus ‘time’, corpus ‘body’; Cpd. cinus ‘ash’).
Nuorese is studied by Lai (2002). Recently, a group of Class III is mostly based on masculine and femininine
researchers (the Grup d’Estudis de Prosòdia directed by words of the Latin third declension, and has, as in Latin,
Pilar Prieto) has proposed a preliminary description of no default gender. This class, apart from Latin nouns coming
Sardinian prosody and intonation in the ToBI system (cf. from the masculine and feminine accusative singular forms,
Vanrell et al. 2015). Their findings suggest that the most also contains nouns to which a paragogical -e was added,
general contrasts found in other Romance languages are such as some nouns ending in -EN that were neuter in Latin
also used in Sardinian. (e.g. FLUMEN > frùmene ‘river’, SEMEN > sèmene ‘seed’). Class IV
mostly contains elements of old Tuscan, and Catalan, origin,
in particular the suffix -eri (cf. §17.3.3).
Due to the neutralization of final -i/-e and -o/-u in Cam-
17.3 Morphology pidanese (cf. §17.2.1), in this variety, classes IIa and IIb as
The view that Sardinian morphology is conservative 13

The table is adapted from Pittau (1972:67). For the section on nominal
(Wagner 1997:290) can only be upheld in some respects, morphology, we refer in particular to Wagner (1997:316f.; 1938-9:98-107,
110f.); Pittau (1972:16, 68f., 145; 1991:78, 143); Blasco Ferrer (1986:82-92,
including the -us ending of originally neuter nouns (now 107-9; 2002:81-3); Molinu (1989; 1998); Jones (1993:31-4); Mensching
an allomorph of the singular ending of the second (2004a:26-31, 44-5, 53-6).
277
well as III and IV show the same endings, respectively cando/candu ‘when’, cantu ‘how many’), with the excpetion
(IIa,b: SG -[u], PL -[us]; III, IV: SG -[i], PL -[is]). However, the of Log./Nuo. ite, Cpd. ita ‘what’ (supposedly < QUID DEU(S)
relevant (sub)classes can still be distinguished by (lack of) ‘what god’, DES I 349-50). Possessives are mostly derived
metaphony, as pointed out by Bolognesi (1998), such as s[o] from the Latin equivalents (e.g. Nuo. meu ‘my’, tuo ‘your.SG’,
nu/s[ɔ]nus ‘sound(s)’ (IIa) vs c[ɔ]ru/c[ɔ]rus ‘heart(s)’ (IIb); suo ‘his, her, its’, nostru ‘our’, bostru/brostu ‘your.PL’), except
m[ɛ]ri/m[ɛ]ris ‘master(s), owner(s)’ (III) vs barb[e]ri/barb[e]ris for the third person plural Log./Nuo. issoro, Cpd. insoru
‘barber(s)’ (IV). ‘their’ (< GEN. IPSORUM ‘of the very same.PL’; cf. Loporcaro
Gender appears reduced to masculine and feminine. 2001).
Nouns almost exclusively stem from the Latin accusative, The personal pronoun system is similar to that of most
with some very rare exceptions, such as Log. sorre/Cpd. sorri Romance languages, showing clitic as well as full pronouns.
< SOROR ‘sister’ (Wagner (1960-64, II:428f.) and mere/meri The latter exist for subject and oblique functions. The sub-
‘master, owner’ (< MAIOR, DES II:108) from the Latin nomina- ject forms are (according to the notation of the LSC) deo ‘I’,
tive, as well the Latinism Deus ‘God’. Some fossilized remain- tue ‘you.SG’, issu ‘he, it’ (or isse for persons only)/issa ‘she’,
ders of cases other than nominative and accusative include nois ‘we’, bois ‘you.PL’, issos/issas ‘they’ (Regione Autonoma
the genitive in the names of the days Monday, Tuesday, della Sardegna 2006), but Campidanese mostly has nosu for
Wednesday (lunis, martis, mèrcuris), the vocative in some the first and bosàt(u)rus for the second person plural. These
person names (such as Antoni, Nuo. Dumìniche), and the pronouns are also used as obliques, except for the first and
ablative in Nuo./Log. domo ‘house’. Note that Logudorese second persons singular, which are Nuo./Log. me(ne) and
Sardinian developed a productive vocative formed from te(ne), Cpd. mei and tei. In Logudorese and Nuorese (and
truncating all material following the accented vowel, e.g. partially in Campidanese), the prepositions a ‘to’ and cun
Antoni > Antò, Maria > Marì (cf. Floricic 2002; Cabré and (also: chin) ‘with’ select diverging forms, such as Nuo. a
Vanrell 2013; Vanrell et al. 2015; cf. also §§14.3.1.1, mime, a tibe, but chinmecus, chintecus (from MECUM, TECUM, cf.
16.3.1.1). Some neuter plural nouns are conserved as femin- OIt. meco, teco, Sp. conmigo, contigo). Sardinian object clitics
ine singular, showing a collective meaning (e.g. frùttora are presented in Table 17.7 (the first and second person
‘fruit’, linna ‘wood’, bestimenta ‘clothes’) (cf. §42.4). Sardinian pronouns also serve as reflexives).
has also developed a productive system of using the singular Sardinian has three types of clitic adverb, traditionally
form to denote an indefinite number of small items, mostly listed among the pronouns: Nuo./Log. bi; Nuo./Log. nde (in
of fruits, vegetables, insects, and small animals, the result some places: ne)/Cpd. ndi; Nuo./Log. (n)che/Cpd. (n)ci. The
being a collective reference, e.g. Nuo. patata ‘potatoes’, clitics bi (restricted to Log./Nuo.) and (n)che/nci are used for
musca ‘flies’, pira ‘pears’, preducu ‘lice’ (characterized by locatives, roughly meaning ‘(to/from) there’, whereas nde/
Mensching 2005:96-8 as object mass nouns). ndi substitute prepositional phrases introduced by the prep-
There are class I and IIa,b adjectives (bonu/bona ‘good’; osition de, similar to Italian ne and French en. Nuo./Log. bi
Log. galloffo, Cpd. galloffu/galloffa ‘miscreant’, with -u/-o sig- mostly indicates location and goal, and (n)che usually indi-
nalling masculine and -a for feminine) and class III adjec- cates source. Campidanese uses (n)ci for all three locative
tives (Nuo./Log. forte, Cpd. forti ‘strong’, for both genders). functions.
Comparatives and superlatives are formed analytically
using prus (< PLUS ‘more’; Log. also plus/pjus), with the excep-
tion of bonu ‘good’ (Log./Nuo. mezus, Log. me(n)gius, Cpd. Table 17.7 Object clitics
mellus ‘better’) and malu ‘bad’ (pe(j)us ‘worse’). Elative for-
IO DO
mation in -issimu is not indigenous. Forms such as bellìssimu,
NUO ./ LOG . CPD . NUO ./ LOG . CPD .
often found in poetry, are italianizing. Intensification is
expressed by the quantifier meda (Nuo. also meta) ‘much’ 1SG mi
or by reduplication (bellu bellu ‘very beautiful’). 2SG ti
The definite article derives from IPSE ‘himself ’. In all 3MSG ddi lu ddu
dialects, it is su (M) and sa (F) in the singular. The plural is li
3FSG la dda
sos/sas in Nuorese/Logudorese, and mostly is for both gen- 3REFL si
ders in Campidanese (cf. Map 17.2 isogloss 7 and Map 17.3). 1PL nos si/nosi nos si/nosi
The indefinite article is unu/una. Demonstratives show a 2PL bos si/(b)osi bos si/(b)osi
threefold distinction as in Latin (custu ‘this (proximal)’, 3PL.M ddis los ddus
cussu ‘that (medial)’, and cuddu ‘that (distal)’; CF. §54.1.4). 3PL.F
lis
las ddas
Most interrogatives are similar to those of other Romance 3REFL si
languages (Log./Nuo. chie, Cpd. chini ‘who’, cale ‘which’,
278
SARDINIAN
Table 17.8 Infinitives according to verb classes as a present participle (at least it also has this function in
abba buddinde ‘boiling water’ and the progressive peri-
LOG ./ NUO . CPD .
phrases discussed in §17.4.2), is formed with -a-nde, -i-nde,
I STEM+à+-re istimàre STEM+a+i stimài ‘to love, esteem’ -e-nde in Nuo. (see Map 17.3); in the other varieties all three
II STÈM+e+r pònner STÈM+(i+r)i pònn(ir)i ‘to put’ classes have the same ending in most places (-ende in Log.,
III STEM+ì+re partìre STEM+ì+ri partìri ‘to leave’ -endi or -endu in Cpd.).
The personal endings of the verb are usually distinct for
each person (e.g. in Nuo.: -o, -s, -t, -mus-, -tes/(d)es, -n; note
the conservation of final -t in the third person singular; in
17.3.2 Verbal inflection Campidanese -t is also preserved in the third person plural,
see Map 17.3). Interestingly, in Campidanese, original per-
fect endings have entered the second person singular and
The Sardinian verb presents three conjugation classes con-
plural of the imperfect indicative (e.g. of partìri ‘to leave’:
tinuing the Latin first, third, and fourth conjugations. 14
partìast(a)/partèstis).
They show the patterns in the infinitive illustrated in
The tense/mood system for the synthetic verb forms is
Table 17.8.
exemplified in Table 17.9 for the three basic varieties (the
Original second conjugation verbs have shifted stress to
analytic tenses/moods—the indicative and subjunctive of
the stem and thereby entered class II, which also hosts some
the compound perfect and pluperfect, the future I and II
verbs originally stemming from the Latin fourth conjuga-
and the present and past conditional—will be discussed in
tion such as Nuo./Log. bènner/Cpd. bènn(ir)i ‘to come’. The
§17.4.2).
infinitives of verbs of class II in Logudorese/Nuorese are
The synthetic Latin perfect is mostly lost (except for a
often spelled with final -e (e.g. pònnere ‘to put’). Since this -e
very few small areas, see Map 17.3). The preservation of the
does not usually appear unless before a pause and the -r is
Latin imperfect subjunctive in Nuorese/Logudorese is note-
affected by the neutralization process described in §17.2.4, it
worthy, although generally only àer ‘have’ and èsser ‘be’
must be considered as paragogical and should thus not be
preserve these forms. With other verbs, it seems to have
represented graphematically (cf. Pittau 1972:98f.; Molinu
survived (with various modifications) only in the southern
1998:132; Mensching 2004a). The infinitive can be inflected
(Barbagia) part of Nuorese and in several Logudorese var-
for person and number (cf. §63.2.1.1), which is a rather rare
ieties.15 The Nuorese/Logudorese areas that have lost the
feature in Romance and can only be found today in Portu-
imperfect subjunctive of verbs other than èsser and àer use
guese and Galician (Loporcaro 1986; Mensching 2000). The
periphrastic forms, i.e. IPFV.SBJV of èsser/àer + participle, i.e.
forms of the inflected infinitive are identical to those of the
the original Sardinian pluperfect subjunctive, for the imper-
imperfect subjunctive (see §17.4.3.3 for the syntax of the
fect subjunctive. Campidanese has forms like cantèssit that
inflected infinitive).
ultimately derive from the Latin pluperfect subjunctive (but
The other non-finite forms are the gerund and the past
are probably taken from Catalan).
participle. The latter is formed regularly for classes I and III:
Like all Romance languages, some Sardinian verbs show
istima(d)u ‘loved’, parti(d)u ‘departed’ (Nuo. also ‑atu/‑itu).
alternations which affect the first person singular present
Class II contains some verbs with a regular past participle
indicative and all persons of the present subjunctive, thus
pattern STÈM+i+du (Nuo. also ‑tu), e.g. tìmi(d)u / tìmitu ‘feared’,
leading to the common Romance L-pattern (Maiden 2005;
but most participles of this class are irregular. Some can be
2009a:47). The L-pattern is exclusively caused by original
derived from the corresponding Latin past participles (e.g.
yod (cf. Table 17.10).
fatu ‘made’, cotu ‘cooked’, postu ‘put’), but many are specific
The L-pattern extends to some other verbs by analogy,
Sardinian formations, often based on the old synthetic per-
and often old synthetic perfect stems (see above for the past
fect, e.g. àpi(d)u ‘had’, crèti(d)u ‘believed’, including (for
participle) ‘intrude’ into the present tense, occupying the L-
Nuo./Log.) some interesting forms that show -f-, such as
pattern cells, such as the stem ap- for àer/ai ‘have’ or the
Log. pàrfidu ‘seemed’, bàlfidu (from baler ‘to be worth’),
perfect stems with the -f- theme: parfo ‘I seem’ or balfo ‘I am
chèrfidu ‘wanted’. The gerund, perhaps better characterized
worth’ (for further discussion of the L-pattern in northern
Logudorese, see Loporcaro 2012b:17-20; also cf. §43.2.3).
14
Overviews of Sardinian verb inflection are: Wagner (1938-9); Blasco We find suppletion in a small number of verbs. One
Ferrer (1984a; 1986); Iliescu and Mourin (1991); Pisano (2004-6; 2008; 2010a, example is the Italianism andare/andai ‘to go’. Some forms
b). Two Logudorese varieties (Buddusò and Bonorva) are exhaustively
described in Molinu (1989) and Loporcaro (2012b), respectively. We have
15
also included some information and examples from Pittau (1972), Lepori For original Latin proparoxytone stress in verbs of class II, see Map
(2001), Mensching (2004a). 17.3.
279
GALLURESE
SASSARESE Martis
Sassari Tula
Oschiri
Ploaghe
CATALAN
Ittiri Ozieri Buddusò
Alghero Pattada
Siniscola
Bitti
Lula
Bonorva
Orune
Nuoro
Bosa
Macomer Dorgali
Imperfect subjunctive with
original accentuation: fàcheret
Cuglieri
Conservation of Latin Bonarcado
perfect including relics Fonni
Baunei
Synthetic perfect:
innovative forms in -esi or -ei
Aritzo
Three different endings for the
gerund in central Sardinian Oristano
(vs two endings or one ending
for all conjugation classes) Laconi
Third person pl. in -nt
(south) vs -n (north)
(approximation)
Approximate upper isogloss

of the ca/chi distinction Perdasdefogu
Definite plural article is (south)

vs sos/sas (north)
Sanluri
Senorbi
Villaputzu
Iglesias
Cagliari
LIGURIAN
S. Pietro
S. Antioco
Map 17.3 Approximate geolinguistic distribution of morphosyntactic phenomena in Sardinian
280
SARDINIAN
Table 17.9 Synthetic tenses/moods (2SG) (cantare/cantai ‘to 17.3.3 Word formation
sing’)
NUO ./ LOG . CPD . The first comprehensive work on Sardinian word formation
is Wagner (1952). Pinto’s (2011) work is also historical.
PRS.IND cànta Unless otherwise stated, in what follows examples are
PRS.SBJV càntes càntis taken from Wagner (1952) and Pinto (2011), with some
IPFV.IND cantàbas/cantaìas cantàst(a) additions from various dictionaries (DES, Puddu 2000;
IPFV.SBJV cantàret cantèssit Rubattu 2001-4; Farina 1987; 1989).
IMP cànta According to Pinto (2011:18), characteristic of Sardinian is
its poverty of prefixes. Only a small part of the vocabulary
shows prefixes, and the few formations that can be found
usually involve only three prefixes: (i) a-, (ii) in-, and (iii)
Table 17.10 The L-pattern (Campidanese) for the verb pònni Nuo./Log. is-/Camp s-, all of them verbal. A (< AD) provides
(ri) ‘to put’ the verb with a reiterative/intensive value or it describes
1 SG 2 SG 3 SG 1 PL 2 PL 3 PL (re-)entering into a state, as in Log. abbumbare ‘to get drunk’
from bumbare ‘to drink’. Many examples given by Pinto
PRS.IND pòngiu pònis ponit ponèus ponìes pònint (2011:113) can be described as causative, e.g. Nuo./Log.
PRS.SBJV pòngia pòngias pòngiat pongiàus pongiàis pòngiant allù(gh)er, Cpd. allùiri ‘to light’ from lù(gh)er/lùxi(ri) ‘to
shine’; Log. appasare ‘to calm down’ < pasare ‘to rest’. These
changes in Aktionsart logically go along with a change in
of UADERE ‘to go’ are locally preserved in Nuorese and the valency. The prefix in- sometimes shows intensifying func-
Barbagia region for the first person singular present indi- tion, such as Log. impasare ‘to make a pause’ < pasare, but
cative, and are more widespread in the second and third most of Pinto’s examples are strongly lexicalized and no
persons of the singular, whereas the plural always seems to longer transparent (e.g. Log. basare ‘to kiss’ > imbasare ‘to
present forms of andare. Elsewhere this verb is mostly a match’). The prefix is-/s- continues (DE)EX- (Wagner 1952:136)
regular verb without suppletion (cf. Loporcaro 2012b:13). and mostly seems to have an adversative meaning, as in Log.
The verb ‘to be’ (èsser/èssi(ri)), apart from the kind of sup- iscuncordare, Cpd. scuncordai ‘to disagree’ from cuncordare, -ai
pletive variation known from other Romance languages ‘to agree’. While this verb may have been built on an Italian
(E-forms besides S-forms), has striking imperfect forms, model (cf. It. concordare > sconcordare), there are also clearly
which show the F-theme of the Latin perfect (FUI), cf. the independent formations such as Cpd. crosai ‘to seal’ > scrosai
LSC version (Regione Autonoma della Sardegna 2006), essen- ‘to unseal’.
tially corresponding to Log. fia, fias, fiat, fiamus, fiais, fiant. The These three prefixes have mostly been used for parasyn-
-a- is not present everywhere, and the first person singular thetic verb formation (cf. Pinto 2005, and also §28.4.2), a
has local variants with -p-, so we get e.g. in Nuoro: fipo, fis, fit, pattern which has given rise to an impressive number of
fimus, fizis, fin. In Campidanese, the first person singular mainly N-to-V-formations (Pinto 2011:135 reports around
shows many variants (e.g. femu, fia, fudiu).16 Finally, it is 500 in the DES), e.g. ammustare/ammustai ‘to press grapes’
worth mentioning that in Campidanese the F-theme can (< mustu ‘must’), isconcare/sconcai ‘to behead’ (< conca ‘head’).
also be found in the third person plural of the present The most important word formation process is suffix-
tense of èssi(ri), so we get funt(i) alongside sunt(i). The verb ation. Pinto (2011:56) has identified around 60 nominal
nàrrer/nàrri ‘to say, tell’ (< NARRARE), is mostly conjugated and adjectival suffixes. The most frequent for N-to-N deriv-
regularly following the first conjugation, cf. the present indi- ations are ‑ale/ali (< -ALIS): Nuo./Log. fundale, Cpd. fundali
cative paradigm according to LSC: naro, naras, narat, naramus, ‘bottom (of a valley or the sea), dregs’ (< fundu ‘depth’),
narades, narant. This verb has developed short forms without -arju/-arzu/‑argiu (< -ARIUS): Nuo. berbecarju, Log. berbegarzu,
-r- (e.g. in Cpd.: nau, nas, nat, naus, nais, nant(a)), which locally Cpd. brebegargiu ‘shepherd’ (< berbeche/berbeghe/brebei
appear as alternatives to the full forms.17 ‘sheep’), -eri (< OCat. ‑er(i), OTusc. ‑eri): Nuo./Log. castanzeri,
Cpd. castangeri ‘chestnut seller’ (< castanza/castangia ‘chest-
nut’), -ile/-ili (< -ILIS): Nuo. fochile, Log. foghile, Cpd. foxili ‘fire
16
As all Campidanese verbs in the imperfect tense, the second person place’ (< focu/fogu ‘fire’); for V-to-N derivations -ATA: torrada
has Latin perfect endings (e.g. singular: fìast(a), fusti, fudiàst(a); plural: festis, (Nuo. also torrata) ‘return’ (< torrare/torrai ‘to return’), -TOR:
fistis, fustis, fudistis).
17
Cf. also the hearsay marker nachi < na(ra)t chi/nanchi < na(ra)n chi
Nuo. messatore, Nuo./Log. messadore, Cpd. messadori ‘mower’
(Cruschina and Remberger 2008). (< messare/messai ‘to mow’), -TORIUS: Nuo. filadorju, Log.
281
filadorzu, Cpd. filadroxu ‘spinning place/wheel’ (< filare/filai type, which forms masculine singular nouns. The nominal
‘to spin’), -ŪRA: ingranidura ‘seeding’ (< ingranire,-iri ‘to seed’); element often presents plural morphology, as in Cpd.
for N-to-A derivations -ŌSUS: Nuo. pretosu/predosu, Log. pe- stasibois ‘rest-harrow’ (literally ‘fatigue+oxen’) or Log.
drosu, Cpd. perdosu ‘stony’ (< preta/preda/pedra/perda ‘stone’), fagheganneddos ‘kind of winder for spinning’ (< fagher ‘to
-UTUS: Nuo./Log. pitudu, Cpd. pitzudu ‘beaked’ (< pitu/pitzu make’ + caneddu ‘rolling spin’), Cpd. faiganeddus. Whereas
‘beak’). the verbs involved in this pattern are mostly transitive,
There are many other suffixes and some that are mostly we can find some examples built from intransitive verbs,
present in loans, in particular in learnèd words and italian- such as lampaluche/-lughe/-luxi ‘flashing’ (< lampare/lampai
isms (e.g. the V-to-N-suffixes -tzione and -àntzia, ‑èntzia men- ‘to flash, to glitter’+ luche/lughe/luxi ‘light’). This word
tioned in Regione Autonoma della Sardegna 2006). In the formation process is still productive (cf. Lepori 2001:144):
standardization debate, the use of the autochthonous suf- Cpd. bogapruini ‘vacuum cleaner’, bogaludu ‘mud wing’
fixes is sometimes suggested: Cpd. standardisadura instead of (bogai ‘remove’, pruini ‘dust’, ludu ‘mud’); also cf. sciacua-
standardizatzioni ‘standardization’ (CSNC 2009), elaboradore pannus ‘washing machine’ (sciacuai ‘rinse’, pannus ‘clothes’),
or carculadore ‘computer’, Cpd. computadori/carculadori/ordi- sciacuastrexu ‘dishwasher’ (strexu ‘recipient, dish’) (CSNC
nadori) (cf. Regione Autonoma della Sardegna 2006:56; CSNC 2009:182).
2009:182). Verbs are often formed from nouns by what can be
Wagner (1952:3) had also referred to the poverty of regarded as conversion or null suffixation. Thus, the verb
affective suffixes. Diminutives are formed by the still very stem of arcare/arcai ‘to curve’, arc-, corresponds to the
productive -eddu, -a (-ELLUS), cf. domedda (< domo/domu nominal stem of arcu ‘bow’ (but cf. Pinto 2011:23, 99-102).
‘house’), which can also attach to adjectives, e.g. Nuo./Log. With very few exceptions belonging to the third conjugation
minoreddu (< minore ‘small’), with the variant Nuo. -icheddu, class, this process builds verbs of class I, e.g. Log. landare ‘to
Log. -igheddu, Cpd. -ixeddu. The Latin suffix -ONE had some collect acorns’ from lande ‘acorn’, linnare/linnai ‘to collect
productivity for augmentative/pejorative formations in wood’ from linna ‘wood’. Many Sardinian nouns are also the
earlier times, but now seems to have been supplanted by result of V-to-N-conversion, in the sense that the verbal
Log./Nuo. -atzu, Cpd. -aciu of Italian origin. stem is transformed into a nominal stem (mostly belonging
As in all Romance languages (cf. Ch. 29), compounding in to class IIa); cf. ammentu ‘memory’ < ammentare, -ai ‘to
a strict sense (i.e. excluding syntagmatic compounds, e.g. remember’, Log. chistionu ‘talking, quarrel’ < chistionare ‘to
those containing prepositions, see Pinto 2011:34-7) is much talk, to discuss’, Nuo. issèperu, Log. issèberu, Cpd. iscèberu
lesss productive than derivation (cf. also §29.2.7). There is a ‘choice’ < isseperare/isseberare/sceberai ‘to choose’, Log./
small series of mostly strongly lexicalized left-headed com- Cpd. accorru ‘enclosure, corral’ (< accorrare,-ai) for ‘to gather
pounds, such as N+N: Log. murufossu (‘border of a ditch or or shut in the cattle’.18
field’, DES II,142) < muru ‘wall’ and fossu ‘ditch’, or Cpd.
lanarrangiu ‘spider web’ < lana ‘wool’ and arrangiu ‘spider’;
N+A: Log. gattagreste ‘marten’ < gattu ‘cat’ and agreste ‘wild’.
There is a N+A noun formation pattern with a juncture 17.4 Syntax
vowel /i/ (Pinto 2011:41 discusses its status with a few
examples extracted from DES; some more examples can be
Since Michael Jones’s (1993) seminal study, Sardinian has
retrieved from Wagner 1952:145f.). They mostly serve to
become one of the most quoted Romance languages in
name animals, and the first part consists of a body part,
modern syntactic theory. Although Jones analyses data
e.g. for birds ala ‘wing’: Arborense alimannu ‘lark’ (mannu
exclusively from Lula, a Nuorese village, it has become
‘big’); Log. aliarza ‘finch’ (Nuo. also aliarja) (barzu/barju
commonplace to consider Sardinian syntax as quite homo-
‘multicoloured’), Log. alibintu ‘finch’ (pintu ‘coloured’). The
geneous and less subject to variation than other areas of the
juncture vowel is much more common and popular in a
linguistic system (e.g. phonology). However, recent studies,
right-headed N+A pattern, which leads to adjectives that
such as Bentley (2011), show that there is considerable
mostly characterize persons and show a lesser degree of
microvariation.
opacity than the other patterns mentioned so far, including
fully transparent words such as those quoted by Wagner
(1952:144) from Nuorese folk songs, e.g. pilibrundu ‘blond
haired’ (< pilu ‘hair’ + brundu ‘blond’), coriduru ‘hard-hearted’
(< coro ‘heart’ + duru ‘hard’).
As in other Romance languages, one of the most pro-
ductive types of compounding is the exocentric V+N-to-N 18
Pinto (2011:137-44) treats these cases as backformations.
282
SARDINIAN
17.4.1 Nominal group Apart from transparent partitive constructions such as

una de sas berbeches (‘one of the sheep’), un’azicu de (custu)
vinu ‘a bit of (that) wine’, the literature mentions the Cam-
Within the Sardinian noun phrase (cf. Jones 1993:ch.2),19
pidanese quantifier element unos/-as cantu (where cantu is
most prenominal elements (articles, demonstratives, wh-
not inflected) with an optional de (e.g. unas cantu (de) melas
determiners, and numerals) show agreement with the
‘some apples’). Here, the partitive semantics is lost (similar
head noun (3a).20 The quantifiers cada or Nuo./Log. donzi/
to Fr. beaucoup de ‘a lot of ’). Sardinian seems not to have an
Cpd. dogna ‘each’, Nuo./Log. carchi/Cpd. calincunu,-a ‘some’
independent partitive construction for indefinite mass
are also prenominal. With the exception of calincunu, these
nouns or plurals (unlike (central-northern) Italian and
do not inflect (3c,d). The item totu ‘all’ is usually uninflected
French, cf. dell’acqua/de l’eau ‘some water’). The cases men-
too, and needs a determiner which it precedes (3b):
tioned in the literature (Wagner 1997:328; Blasco Ferrer
1984a:84f.) are mostly of clitic right-dislocation, where
(3) a. sos/custos/cales/duos/tres libros (Nuo.)
bare nouns are preceded by de ‘of ’ (see §17.4.3.5). In con-
the.MPL/these.M/which.PL/two.M/three books.M
trast, a non-dislocated indefinite direct object of a singular
‘the/these/which/two/three books’
mass or plural noun is bare and not introduced by de: Apo
b. tottu sas/custas duas/tres berbeches (Nuo.) mandicatu petha ‘I ate meat’ (Jones 1993:217).
all the.FPL /these.F two.F/three sheep.FPL Bare nouns cannot appear in subject position. However,
‘all the/these/both/three sheep’ Sardinian allows even singulars of count nouns to be bare in
some non-subject environments. Apart from more or less
c. donzi/cada pitzinnu (Nuo.)
idiomatic locative expressions such as in/a domo ‘(at) home’,
‘each child’
in mesa ‘on the table’, such cases include complements of
d. carchi pitzinnu (Nuo.) verbs of possession in negated or interrogative contexts, e.g.
‘some child/some children’ Maria non juchet bonete ‘Maria has no hat on’; Bonete juchìas?
‘Did you have a hat on?’ (note that Spanish and Romanian
Attributive adjectives are rare in prenominal position (cf.
behave similarly).
4a), only very few items taking this position, e.g. bellu
Names of persons and towns regularly lack articles, as do
‘beautiful’, bonu ‘good’, bravu ‘good, well-behaved’, santu
kinship terms. For the latter, the words designating parents
‘holy’, pòveru ‘poor’. All of these are Italian loans which
and grandparents, at least in most varieties, also lack a
were apparently borrowed together with their syntax. All
possessive pronoun when they belong to the speaker (i.e.
other attributive adjectives, as well as possessives, are
babbu = ‘my father’). Finally, the use of the definite article
obligatorily postnominal:
with a kinship term usually forces a third person singular
possessor reading (sa sorre = ‘his/her sister’). In such cases,
(4) a. unu bellu/**mannu libru; unu libru bellu/mannu
the possessive pronoun is even judged ungrammatical by
a nice big book a book nice big
many speakers.
‘a nice/big book’
As in other Romance languages, there is no dedicated
b. su (**meu/miu) libru meu/miu device to express specificity. However, quantifiers and
the my book my other indefinites can be classified with respect to their func-
‘my book’ tion as or to their co-occurrence with specific and non-
specific expressions: charchi and cali(n)cunu ‘some’ show a
Adjectives, including possessives, show concord in gender strong preference for [–specific] NPs, whereas the indefinite
and number with the head noun (thus: sos libros bellos lit. article as well as unos(‑as), cantos(-as) (de), argunos(-as), paritzos
‘the.MPL books.M beautiful.MPL’, una mesa manna ‘a.FSG big.FSG (-as) (only Log.) and diversos(-as), also meaning ‘some’ or
table.FSG’, tres mesas mannas lit. ‘three tables.FPL big.FPL’). The ‘several’, are mostly restricted to [+specific] contexts. As
properties of the quantifier meda (M/F, Nuo. also meta) shown in Mensching (2005), many of these indefinites were
‘many, much’ are subject to diatopic variation; the post- taken from Italian varieties and some from Spanish.
nominal position is generally preferred, and, especially in Specificity is known to play a role in the Spanish prepos-
this case, it can lack number agreement. itional accusative construction (Torrego 1998; von
Heusinger and Kaiser 2003). Sardinian also has differential
object marking (DOM; cf. Bossong 1982),21 whose surface
19
§17.4.1 is mostly based on this chapter, with additions from Blasco
21
Ferrer (1986) and Mensching (2004a; 2005; 2012). Cf. Jones (1993:65-8), Floricic (2003), Mensching (2005), Mardale
20
Only ‘one’ and ‘two’ among the cardinal numbers. (2008).
283
properties are in fact similar to Spanish: whereas indirect b. Apo dormiu. (Nuo.)
objects are regularly preceded by the preposition a, direct have.PRS.1SG slept
objects often bear this preposition but only when they refer ‘I have slept.’
to persons, at least as a rough approximation. However, in
contrast to Spanish, in Sardinian DOM usually occurs only A typical causative/ergative alternation in Sardinian can
with definite nominal expressions. They can either be be obtained by the reflexivization of a causative transitive
inherently definite such as personal pronouns, proper verb, giving rise to an ergative/unaccusative alternation
names, or kinship terms, or become definite by the use and with selection of BE in the latter case (and participle
the definite article. DOM is obligatory with inherently def- agreement, see below; Jones 1993:99):
inite expressions and optional with others:
(7) a. Maria at abbertu sa janna. (Nuo.)
(5) a. Apo vistu a issa / a Maria / a Maria have.3SG open.PTCP the door
have.1SG seen to.DOM her / to.DOM Maria / to.DOM ‘Maria has opened the door.’
frate meu / a Nàpoli.
brother my / to.DOM Naples b. Sa janna s’ est abberta. (Nuo.)
‘I saw her/Maria/my brother/Naples.’ the door.F REFL= be.3SG open.PTCP.FSG
‘The door opened.’
b. Apo vistu (a) su dotore.
have.1SG seen to.DOM the doctor However, some verbs also show a causative/ergative
‘I saw the doctor.’ alternation without reflexivization, e.g. issire ‘to take out
something’ (with HAVE) and ‘to go out’ (with BE), or a causa-
The exact properties and diatopic variation of cases such tive/unergative alternation like buddire ‘to boil something’
as (5b) require further investigation. Note that with proper and ‘to boil’ and imparare ‘to learn’ and ‘to teach’ (both with
names animacy or even a [+human] feature is not decisive, HAVE). Other verbs can be used as unaccusatives with or
since the construction at issue also appears with place without a reflexive clitic with no noticeable change in
names (5a). Whereas the nominal expressions in (5a) are meaning, e.g. assimidzare/s’assimidzare ‘to resemble’ and mòr-
all specific, this is not the case with interrogative pronouns rer/si mòrrer ‘to die’ (with BE), but mòrrer is also transitive
and negative indefinites, which also obligatorily trigger ‘to kill’ (with HAVE), hence another example of the causative/
DOM when applied to humans (a chie ‘whom’, a nemos ergative alternation (cf. Jones 1993:99f., 123; Puddu 2000,
‘nobody’). In addition, other indefinite NPs never show s.v.).
DOM, even when they are specific. It thus seems that defin- Sardinian encodes most of its principal tense, aspect, and
iteness and (with the exception of proper names) a mood oppositions, not by synthetic inflection, but analytic-
[+human] feature are relevant, but specificity is not. ally. Not only are the perfect and the pluperfect expressed
by analytic forms, but the conditional and the future also
consist of periphrastic constructions involving a finite aux-
17.4.2 Verbal group iliary and a main verb in a non-finite verbal form (cf. Iliescu
and Mourin 1991:448; Jones 1988a):
In the verb group, argument structure (valency, categorical
selection, and thematic roles) and the event situation (lex- (8) a. Apo/Aio cantau. (Nuo.)
ical and syntactic aspect) are encoded. (Di)transitive and have.PRS/PST.1SG sing.PTCP
unergative verbs on the one hand and unaccusative verbs ‘I have/had sung.’
on the other show different syntactic behaviour with
respect to auxiliary selection in the perfect/pluperfect. Un- b. Ap’ a cantare. (Nuo.)
accusative verbs select BE and (di)transitive and unergative have.PRS.1SG to sing.INF
verbs select HAVE:22 ‘I will sing.’
c. Des àer/èsser. (Nuo.)

(6) a. Soe arribau. (Nuo.) must.PRS.2SG have.INF/be.INF
be.PRS.1SG arrived ‘You will have/be.’
‘I have arrived.’
d. Ap’ àer cantau. (Nuo.)
22
Cf. Remberger (2006a), and also §§49.3, 50.2; for the passive, see have.PRS.1SG have.INF sing.PTCP
§17.4.3.2. ‘I will have sung.’
284
SARDINIAN
e. des àer cantau. (Nuo.) have had sung’, dio àer àppiu fatu ‘I would have had done’; cf.
must.PRS.2SG have.INF sing.PTCP 22; cf. also Pisano 2010b, and §58.3.4). These periphrases
‘You will have sung.’ consist of an auxiliary, HAVE or BE, and two past participles,
one representing another auxiliary and the other one the
f. Dio cantare / àer cantau. (Nuo.)
full verb and appear typically (but not necessarily) in coun-
must.PST.1SG sing.INF / have.INF sing.PTCP
terfactual conditionals or other irrealis contexts
‘I would sing/have sung.’
(§17.4.3.3).23
The present tense too can be said to be periphrastic, at
The future with dèper (only used in the simple future of
least in the case of a specific reference situation where the
the verbs èsser ‘to be’ and àer ‘to have’) is typically Logudor-
progressive form built on the verb BE and the gerund/pre-
ese/Nuorese, but less widespread than the formation with
sent participle is chosen in many more contexts than in
àer. The paradigm of the auxiliary dèper is not the same as
Italian:
dèper in the sense of ‘must’ (e.g. 2SG des vs depes; cf. Blasco
Ferrer 2002:86; for the HAVE TO type, see also Bentley 2009).
(10) Soe faeddande in sardu / cumprendende.
(8f) is the new analytically formed conditional which—in
be.PRS.1SG talk.GER in Sardinian understand.GER
contrast to most other Romance languages (§46.3.2.2)—
‘I’m talking in Sardinian/I understand.’
remains analytical, representing a future-in-the-past con-
struction, with the future auxiliary dèper ‘must’ in the past
This progressive periphrasis can be also used with stative
giving rise to the meaning of the conditional I or the
verbs such as ‘to understand’ and in the imperfect, giving
perfective conditional II. In Campidanese, the conditional
rise to a progressive in the past (cf. Jones 1993:83f; also cf.
is formed with the imperfect tense of ài ‘have’ (Blasco Ferrer
Blasco Ferrer and Contini 1988:844).24
1986:123f.), hence emu/iast/iat/emus/estis/iant a cantai. Most
Argument structure is co-responsible for auxiliary
of the auxiliaries used in the Sardinian verb phrase are
choice, and if the auxiliary is BE, participle agreement with
morphophonologically reduced forms of the verbs they
the surface subject is obligatory (cf. §49.3). However, in
stem from (cf. §46.3.2.1).
contrast to Italian, reflexive constructions with the reflex-
There is a tendency in several varieties across the whole
ive pronoun representing the indirect object in the dative
island to continue to express immediate past/past action
(reciprocal, reflexive, dative of interest) select HAVE and
with effect on the present by means of the analytic perfect
do not exhibit participle agreement (cf. Loporcaro
and more remote past/past action without effect on the
1998b:46, 54):
present (earlier expressed by the synthetic perfect) by
means of the pluperfect, see Mensching (2012), where a
(11) ['bɔre e p'peðru z an 'daðu 'ðuaz
sample sentence from Ploaghe, one of the few localities
Bore and Pedru REFL.DAT= have.3PL give.PTCP two
that still have the synthetic perfect (cf. Map 17.3), is con-
istruttur'raðaza] (Log.)
trasted with varieties that have lost the synthetic forms:
slaps
‘Bore and Pedru gave each other two slaps in the face.’
(9) a. Un’annu como, giaju meu, chi deris
a year now grandfather my who yesterday
Yet, not only argument structure but also the referential
at lòmpidu otant’annos, mi contèit a mie
properties of the arguments are decisive for auxiliary
has completed eighty years me= told.3.SG.PRT. to me
selection, witness the following existential constructions
e a sorre mia custu contadu.
(cf. also §52.4) which exhibit definiteness effects (Jones
and to sister my this story (Ploaghe/VIVALDI)
1993:114f.):
b. Jaju, chi eris at fatu
grandfather who yesterday has made (12) a. Bi sun istados issos.
otant’annos, a mime e a sa carrale aiat there= be.PRS.3PL be.PTCP.MPL they.M
eighty years to me and to the sister had [strong definite pivot] (Nuo.)
contau cust’istòria. ‘They were there.’
told this story (Nuoro/VIVALDI)
‘Yesterday, my grandfather, whose eightieth birth-
day was yesterday, told the following story to me and
my sister.’
23
The participle cannot be doubled if BE or HAVE are used as main verbs
(cf. Pisano 2010b:129).
Iliescu and Mourin (1991) also list three surcomposé tenses 24
Cf. Casti (2012) for a detailed overview of other periphrastic
(aio àpiu cantau ‘I had had sung’, des àer àpiu cantau ‘you will constructions.
285
b. B’ at metas frores in sa than preverbal subjects (for information structure, see

there=have.PRS.3SG many flowers in the §17.4.3.5, and for general discussion, Ch. 34).26 Besides the
tanca. [weak indefinite pivot] existential constructions mentioned above, unaccusative
meadow verbs in general show postverbal subjects (cf. 32b; also
‘There are many flowers in the meadow.’ Giurgea and Remberger 2012b). Inversion is typical for
interrogatives (§§53.3.1.2, 53.3.1.5) as well as for focus front-
In existential constructions proper, as in (12b), the arguing (§§34.5.2-4), a phenomenon particular to Sardinian.
ment coming into existence, the pivot, can only be indefin- However, Sardinian has never been argued to display V2
ite (it must be ‘brand new’; cf. Bentley 2004b). In this case, effects in its earliest stages, having had a preference for V1-
the position of the pivot is postverbal, auxiliary selection is clauses (cf. Lombardi 2007b; Wolfe 2013a,b). Nevertheless, in
HAVE, and there is no agreement. (12a), with a strong, defin- transitive sentences the order of principal sentential con-
ite argument, is not an existential but a locative construc- stituents is now SVO.
tion (cf. Remberger 2009) and in this case the argument can The clitic pronouns mentioned in §17.3.1 usually occur
either be pre- or postverbal, auxiliary selection is canonical, immediately before the finite verb (cf. 31). With gerunds
i.e. BE for unaccusatives, and there is always agreement (cf. and imperatives, they are enclitic (biende·la ‘seeing=her’,
La Fauci and Loporcaro 1997; Bentley 2004b; 2011). Imper- nara·lis ‘tell=them!’; for pro- vs enclisis cf. §48.3). In contrast,
sonal presentational constructions with a verb in the per- infinitives show proclisis (pro la bier lit. ‘for her= see.INF (= in
fect,25 like b’at vènnitu tres pitzinnas ‘three girls have arrived’, order to see her)’; cf. §17.4.3.3). Clitic pronouns form clus-
show the same properties as the existential construction ters in the order dative–accusative (e.g. Nuo./Log. mi lu, ti lu;
proper (auxiliary HAVE; no agreement; postverbal subject), Cpd. mi ddu, ti ddu ‘me/you.SG it’). When two third person
whereas canonical clauses in the perfect, like bi sun vènnitas clitics are combined, there are morphophonological modi-
sas pitzinnas ‘the girls have arrived there’, correlate with the fications (e.g. Nuo. li+lu > [liu] ‘him it’) or the dative pronoun
locative constructions (auxiliary BE, if unaccusative; agree- is replaced by another clitic (e.g. bi in Lula; si in Cpd.) The
ment; also possibly preverbal subject). clitic adverbs precede third person clitics but follow first
Participle agreement, which is obligatory in conjunction and second person clitics.
with auxiliary BE, additionally appears in the context of Sentential negation is encoded by non (with a variant
accusative clitics, where it is obligatory in the third person, no mostly used before vowels, cf. also Floricic 2012). This
but not in the first and second person nor with the partitive element precedes the finite verb and, if present, proclitics.
clitic n(d)e (cf. Loporcaro 1998b:42). Items such as Log./Nuo. nemos, niune/neune, Cpd. nemus,
nisciunu(s) (‘nobody’), nudda ‘nothing’, mai ‘(n)ever’, prus
(13) a. [ˈbɔre lɔz a bˈbiðozo] (Log.) ‘more’, among others, still require the element no(n) (nega-
Bore them.M= have.3SG see.PTCP.MPL tive concord). However, if these items appear preverbally,
‘Bore has seen them.’ no(n) is omitted:
b. [ˈbɔre nnɔz / bbɔz / mm / tt a
(14) a. No apo bi(d)u a niune/nisciunus.
Bore us= you.PL= me= you.SG= have.3SG
not have.1SG seen to.DOM nobody
bˈbiðu] (Log.)
‘I haven’t seen anybody.’
see.PTCP.MSG
‘Bore has seen us/you.PL/me/you.SG.’ b. Niune/nisciunus est bènni(d)u.
nobody is come.PTCP
c. [(ˈpiraza) n ˈapo maniˈɣaðu una] (Log.)
‘Nobody came.’
pears thereof= have.1SG eat.PTCP.MSG one
‘I have eaten one (of the pears).’
17.4.3.2 Valency-changing operations
Besides the canonical passive,27 formed with auxiliary be,
17.4.3 Clause syntax Sardinian has a want-passive similar to that of several
Italian dialects (cf. Jones 1993:124f; Remberger 2006b;
17.4.3.1 Basic properties of the clause §§16.4.2.2, 60.5.2):
Sardinian is a null subject language with several construc-
tions where postverbal subjects appear more natural
26
For the basic properties of the clause, we refer to Jones (1993) with
some additions from Blasco Ferrer (1986).
25 27
These impersonal constructions are possible not only with intransi- As in many mostly spoken varieties, canonical passive constructions
tive verbs, i.e. unaccusatives, but also with unergatives as in (18a), but not are not very frequent even in Sardinian (cf. Loporcaro 1998b:43 fn.7 and
with transitives. references therein).
286
SARDINIAN
(15) a. Custa domo est istata fraicata dae much a valency-changing operation but complex predicate
this house.FSG be.3SG be.PTCP.FSG build.PTCP.FSG by formation (cf. §61.3.3). Since clitic climbing (cf. §17.4.3.3) is
un’ italianu. (Nuo.) obligatory in these constructions, causative constructions
an Italian are complex but monoclausal, comprising the argument
‘This house was built by an Italian.’ structure of both the causative verb (responsible for the
thematic role of the Agent) and the infinitival verb, whose
b. Sa màchina keret accontzada dae
thematic subject becomes the object of the causative verb.
the car.FSG want.3SG repair.PTCP.FSG by
As in modal verb constructions, auxiliary selection in causa-
unu mecànicu. (Nuo.)
tive constructions is only dependent on the full verb in the
a mechanic
infinitive.
‘This car needs to be repaired by a mechanic.’
Another type of valency-changing operation concerns

17.4.3.3 Finite subordination28
reflexive constructions (cf. §§17.4.2, 60.4.1). The following
constructions involving a reflexive can be found (cf. Burzio Adverbial subordinate clauses are formed with conjunctions
1986): such as Log./Nuo. cando, Cpd. candu ‘when’, ca ‘because’,
Log./Nuo. pro chi/Cpd. po chi ‘so that’, manca(r)i ‘although’.
1. unaccusative reflexives, which belong to the causa-
There are many more comprising other elements plus chi
tive/unergative alternation like si abbèrrer ‘self=
‘that’, e.g. in su mentres/-is chi ‘while’, apenas chi ‘as soon as’,
open.INF’, si brujare ‘self= burn.INF’ (cf. 7b vs 7a);
apustis chi ‘after’.
2. inherent reflexives, e.g. s’irballare ‘self= be.mistaken.
In Logudorese and most of Nuorese territory, comple-
INF’, si pentire ‘self= repent.INF’, which are inherently
ment clauses are generally introduced by the complement-
unaccusative and do not take part in a valency chan-
izer chi:
ging operation;
3. reflexive constructions proper where the reflexive
(17) a. Juanne at natu chi Maria fit malàida. (Nuo.)
clitic indicates a reduction of the argument structure
Juanne has said that Maria was ill
of a transitive verb like lavare ‘wash.INF’ giving rise to
‘Juanne said that Maria was ill.’
an unaccusative verb such as si lavare ‘self= wash.INF’
(cf. 16a; Loporcaro 1998b:45); b. Cheljo chi Maria venzat. (Nuo.)
4. impersonal constructions with si where any class of want.1SG that Maria comes.3SG.PRS.SBJV
verb can be involved, giving rise to an impersonal ‘I want Maria to come.’
construction with an arbitrary subject; this is not a
valency-changing operation proper (cf. 16b); Volitional verbs such as cherrer ‘want’ and some other
5. passive-medial constructions involving si where the predicates which introduce non-veridical contexts select
underlying object is promoted to subject, triggering the subjunctive in the complement clause, as do directive
obligatory subject–verb (and participle) agreement, predicates. In Campidanese there is a widespread system
whereas the underlying subject is suppressed; this with two complementizers (cf. §63.2.1.2), chi (or ci) and ca,
construction can have a modal interpretation (cf. 16c; the northern extension of which enters the Arborense zone
Jones 1993:127): in the west and penetrates Nuorese territory at Fonni and
Dorgali; see the tentative isogloss in Map 17.3. Roughly
(16) a. [manˈʤɛɖɖa z ɛ ssamuˈnaða] (Log.) speaking, ca is used after verba dicendi, sentiendi, and putandi,
Mangedda.F REFL= be.3SG wash.PTCP.FSG whereas chi (ci) is used after verba timendi and volitional
‘Mangedda washed herself. ’ verbs. Although in some places the system seems recessive
with speakers confusing both complementizers, it is gener-
b. In custa bidda si ballat meda. (Nuo.)
ally well preserved and aligned with mood (ca with indica-
in this village REFL= dance.3SG much
tive, chi/ci with subjunctive). The system is still absolutely
‘In this village people dance a lot.’
stable in many places. Thus with predicates that can
c. Cussas cosas non si fachen. (Nuo.) select either the indicative or the subjunctive (cf. Jones
these things not REFL= do.3PL 1993:253-60), the correlation between indicative and ca
‘hose things are not (should not be) done.’
28
For this section, see Blasco Ferrer (1986:195-202); Jones (1993:251f.,
As for causative verbs, as in lu faco/lasso travallare ‘I make/ 249, 291-3, 296, 305-8); Manzini and Savoia (2005, I:452-69); Mensching
let him work’ (Nuo.; Jones 1993:271), these involve not so (2004a:55, 72, 84); Damonte (2006b); Mensching (2012).
287
and subjunctive and chi is clearly part of the grammatical The sequence of tenses in conditional clauses varies
competence of the speakers: greatly. In Nuorese/Logudorese speculative/counterfactual
conditional sentences can contain either conditional forms
(18) a. Paret ca non b’ at or the imperfect or pluperfect indicative both in matrix and
seems that not there= have.3SG.IND in subordinate clause. Pittau (1991:151) also mentions the
abbochinau nessunu. (Dorgali) use of the imperfect subjunctive in the protasis (only with
called nobody èsser ‘be’ and àer ‘have’) and the conditional in the apodosis.
‘It seems that nobody has called.’ Blasco Ferrer (1986:202) includes Campidanese and presents
the imperfect (Nuo.-Log.: pluperfect, cf. §17.3.2) subjunctive
b. Mi paret chi apat abbochinau in the protasis with the conditional in the apodosis as the
me seems that have.3SG.SBJV called most frequent pairing. The conditional and the imperfect
calincunu. indicative in both clauses is mentioned as an alternative.
somebody According to Mensching (2012), a frequent option for a
‘It seems to me that somebody has called.’ condition that can be fulfilled, in particular for Campida-
nese, is [ . . . COND . . . [si/chi . . . IPFV]]:
Chi (ci) is also the complementizer for relative clauses,
roughly corresponding to English relative ‘that’. In a Cam- (20) Emus a trabballai de prus, chi si
pidanese area partially overlapping with the ca/chi distinc- had.1PL.IPFV to work.INF of more if us=
tion for complement clauses, ca and chi are used as pagànta mellus.
complementizers for relative clauses, but here no mood pay.3PL.IPFV.IND better
distinction is involved. In these places, ca appears in apposi- ‘We would work more if they paid us better’ (Cagliari/
tive relative clauses, whereas chi is used in restrictive rela- VIVALDI.)
tive clauses:
Nuorese/Logudorese sometimes employ the conditional
in the main clause and the imperfect subjunctive in the si
(19) a. su beciu, ca ddi boliat bene
clause:
the old.man which him= wanted good
meda. (Laconi/VIVALDI)
(21) Creo chi dian mandigare si apèren
much
believe.1SG that would.3PL eat.INF if had.3PL.IPFV.SBJV
‘The old man, who loved him very much.’
fàmine. (Log./Ittiri)
b. unu procu grassu ci papàt su randi. hunger
a pig fat that ate the acorn ‘I think they would eat if they were hungry.’
(Laconi/VIVALDI)
‘A fat pig that was eating acorns.’ The most widespread option for unreal conditions seems
to be pluperfect in both clauses. A less frequent option is
For functions other than subjects and objects, i.e. the pluperfect subjunctive in the si clause with either
after prepositions (including dative a ‘to’) the pronouns pluperfect indicative or conditional II in the matrix clause.
Log. cale(s), Cpd. cali(s) preceded by the definite article can Typically Nuorese, but also documented in (northern) Lo-
be used in formal style, probably under Italian influence. gudorese, is a kind of ‘surcomposé’ pluperfect, which is
The autochthonous construction uses chi while repeating usually found in the protasis but is accepted by some
the associate in the relative clause in the shape of a clitic speakers in the apodosis (VIVALDI; cf. also Jones 1993:83;
(dative) or a full pronoun with the relevant preposition, Pisano 2010b):
cf. Jones’s (1993:294) example (Nuo.) sa pitzinna chi so issitu
(22) a. Si l’ aia àpidu ischidu, fia
chin issa, literally ‘the girl that I went out with her’ (cf.
if it= have.PST.1SG had.PTCP know.PTCP be.PAST.1SG
§64.2.2).
’ènnidu. (Ploaghe)
For indirect constituent questions, a wh-word is located
come.PTCP
at the left periphery of the embedded clause, and for indir-
ect yes/no questions the complementizer si ‘if, whether’ is b. Si l’ ai’ ischiu, fip’ istau
used, with no effect on word order. The complementizer si is if it= have.PST.1SG know.PTCP be.PAST.1SG be.PTCP
also used in conditional clauses, but in Campidanese chi (ci) bènniu. (Nuoro)
is preferred, at least in the zone where the ca/chi distinction come.PTCP
for complement clauses exists. ‘If I had known it, I would have come.’
288
SARDINIAN
17.4.3.4 Non-finite constructions prepositional element (Jones 1993:260-63). In adverbial

infinitival clauses these are elements such as pro (Cpd. po)
Modal and aspectual periphrases are obligatorily restruc-
‘in order to’, chentza (or chene, chena, sena and many other
turing in Sardinian, i.e. clitic climbing is not optional, with
local variants) ‘without’. The preposition de ‘of ’ forms com-
clitics standing proclitic to the finite verb (cf. Jones
pound expressions that also introduce infinitival clauses,
1993:142; Remberger 2008):
such as prima de/innantis de ‘before’ and also appears in
infinitival complements to adjectives (e.g. cuntentu de
(23) Juanne lu cheret / **cheret lu fàcher. (Nuo.)
‘glad to’). Finally, verbs that lexically select a preposition
Juanne it= want.3SG / want.3SG it= do.INF
for NP objects present the same preposition when intro-
‘Juanne wants to do it.’
ducing an infinitival clause (such as servire ‘to serve’ + a
‘to’, but si pentire ‘to repent’ + de ‘of ’). In other cases,
As a consequence, auxiliary selection is solely dependent
when there is no lexically or otherwise motivated prep-
on the main verb, since the verb complex is monoclausal,
osition, the elements a ‘to’ or de ‘of ’ serve as a kind of
never on the modal verb alone. Thus we get HAVE selection
default (cf. 25, where the infinitive clause acts as a direct
with the transitive verb preguntare ‘to ask’ and BE selection
object of the verb provare, which does not select for any
with the reflexive, unaccusative si frimmare ‘to stop’ (Sa-
preposition; see also §63.2). Similarly a ‘to’ (or de ‘of ’) is
Limba 1999-2012):
obligatory in subject clauses: Nuo. A faveddare su sardu no
est diffitzile ‘To speak Sardinian is not difficult.’ Subject
(24) a. Apo chèrfidu preguntare a babbu.
clauses clearly seem to favour the element a ‘to’, whereas
have.1SG want.PTCP ask.INF to dad
many transitive verbs (e.g. of saying and believing, but also
(Log./Pattada)
verbs meaning ‘to finish’) prefer de ‘of ’ (Jones 1993:260;
‘I wanted to ask my dad.’
Mensching 2004a:42).
b. No si sun chèrfidos frimmare. (Log./Martis) Like Spanish, Catalan, Gascon, and (in some cases) Roma-
not REFL= be.3PL want.PTCP.MPL stop.INF nian as well as old Italian and most modern Italian dialects,
‘They didn’t want to stop (themselves).’ Sardinian allows an overt postverbal subject in infinitive
clauses (in the nominative case, which can be seen in the
In this sense, modal constructions are similar to causa- case of pronouns) (Blasco Ferrer 1986:159; Jones 1992), the
tive and permissive constructions, in which clitics also so-called personal infinitive (cf. §63.2.1.1):
appear in proclitic position before the finite verb.29 The
difference is that in causative constructions the clitic rep- (26) At segau is pratus po non papai
resents the logical subject of the embedded clause and is has broken the plates for not eat.INF
case-marked by the causative main verb and not by the tui. (Cpd.)
infinitival verb (as it is in the monoclausal modal con- you.NOM
struction). In periphrases involving a gerund, as in the ‘He broke the plates in order for you not to eat.’
aforementioned progressive form, clitic climbing seems
optional, cf. Log. Juanne los fit chirkande/fit chirkande·los
In Nuorese/Logudorese the infinitive can even be
‘Juanne was looking for them’.
inflected in such cases (cf. §17.3.2; Pittau 1972:93f.; Jones
Unlike the modal and aspectual periphrases, other con-
2000):
structions are biclausal:
(27) a. prima de torraret issu / andaren issos (Nuo.)
(25) Juanne provat a lu fàcher /**lu provat a fàcher.
before of return.INF.3SG he / go.INF.3PL they
Juanne try.3SG to it= do.INF / it= try.3SG to do.INF
‘before he returns/they return.’
‘Juanne tries to do it.’
b. Nara·li a bènneret! (Nuo.)
Here clitic climbing is impossible, since main and subor- tell=him to come.INF.3SG
dinate clause are clearly separated by the element a ‘to’, ‘Tell him to come!’
which marks the left edge of the embedded clause. In fact,
infinitives in biclausal structures are always introduced by a Example (27b) shows that the infinitive can be inflected
even when there is no overt subject. The forms of the
inflected infinitive correspond to the imperfect subjunctive.
29
For the following discussion of the clausal properties of the infinitive Varieties that have lost the imperfect subjunctive with
construction and the behaviour of clitics, see Jones (1993:137, 143, 271). verbs other than èsser ‘be’ and àer ‘have’ (cf. §17.3.2.2) may
289
still use the corresponding forms of all verbs as the inflected b. Meta abba amus bitu. (Nuo.)
infinitive.30 much water have.1PL drunk
Finally, perception constructions employ the gerund and ‘We have drunk much water.’
not the infinitive (Amus intesu sos tenores cantande/**cantare
c. Tropu malu seu stètiu. (Bonarcado)
‘We heard the tenors singing’ (cf. Pittau 1972:139; Jones
too bad be.1SG be.PTCP
1993:285; cf. also §61.2), as in other Romance varieties
‘I have been too bad.’
such as Catalan and Romanian.
d. Mandatu sa lìtera apo. (Nuo.)
sent the letter have.1SG
17.4.3.5 Information structure ‘I have sent the letter.’
In Sardinian the (discourse) topical subject can be overt, but
It is sometimes difficult to consider the fronted element
is mostly omitted (28a). One possibility to mark an all-new
as a focus, in particular in cases such as (30a) (see further
context is inversion (28b):
Jones 2013). However, we shall continue to use the term
focus fronting.
(28) a. (What did Maria do?) At comporau unu libru.
To make a non-subject constituent the topic of a sen-
‘She bought a book.’
tence, Sardinan has clitic left-dislocation (ClLD) and, for
b. (What happened?) Est arribada Maria. backgrounding of a constituent, clitic right-dislocation
‘Maria has arrived.’ (ClRD), which consist in displacing a constituent to the left
or right edge of the clause while inserting a coreferent clitic
The default focus of a sentence is on the rightmost part of pronoun (for objects). The following example of the inter-
the sentence, i.e. it is (part of) the last constituent (Jones action of ClLD with focus fronting shows how the ClLD
1993; 2013). Thus, in (28a) the focus can either be the whole constituent must precede the focus fronted constituent
VP or the NP unu libru. Since there is no overt topic in (28b), (Lörinczi 1999:104; cf. §34.4):
the whole sentence can be the focus (i.e. a thetic expression)
or the focus can be Maria (for a question such as ‘Who has (31) E tui sa fà papàda ti dd’
arrived?’). However, for cases such as those in (28a), Sardin- and you the bean.FSG eaten.FSG you.DAT= it=
ian often fronts the focused constituent by a special fronting asi? (Cpd.)
operation. When present, the subject has to appear have.2SG
postverbally: ‘And you, did you eat the beans?’
(29) Unu libru (**Maria) at comporau (Maria). Here only the topicalized object, not the topicalized sub-
a book Maria has bought Maria ject, is repeated in via the clitic (dda) (ti is an ethic dative).
‘Mary bought a book.’ The participle agrees with the dislocated object (and with
the clitic). With ClRD and ClLD participle agreement is also
This structure resembles, but is not identical to, the focus- obligatory in the case of dative clitics (reflexive or not) and
ing operation in Italian identified e.g. by Rizzi (1997), first and second person clitics (cf. Loporcaro 1998b:55f.).
because the latter (and similar constructions in other There is no participle agreement with the focus fronted
Romance languages) are mostly reserved for contrastive object (30b).
focus (cf. §34.5.2). This structure is ungrammatical in neg- Bare NPs in object position (cf. §17.4.1) as well as nouns
ated sentences and can apply to almost all constituent types, modified by quantifiers or adjectives can also become
including adjectival phrases, participles, and even the entire topics, showing a special variant of ClLD and ClRD, in
VP (Jones 1993; Bentley 2009; Remberger 2010; Mensching which the preposition de ‘of ’ is inserted before the NP/
and Remberger 2010a,b; Egerland 2011; Jones 2013): noun (obligatorily with ClRD and optionally with ClLD),
and the resulting PP is mirrored by the clitic nde/(n)ci
(30) a. Fatu l’ at. (Nuo./Log.) (Mensching 2008a):
done it= have.3SG
‘He did it.’ (32) ((De) fustinagas,) nd’ agatas in butega (, de
OF carrots ADV= find.2SG in shop OF
30 fustinagas). (Log.)
For discussion of personal and inflected infinitives from a pan-
Romance view, see Mensching (2000); for detailed description of the Sar- carrots
dinian structures, see Jones (1992; 1993:270-82). ‘You will find (some) carrots in the shop.’
290
SARDINIAN
For this construction, which seems to exist in all lan- (34) a. Vistu l’ as? (Nuo.)
guages that have a clitic of the en/ne-type, see Jones seen him= have.2SG
(1993:17), Mathieu (2004), Mensching (2005; 2008a). The ‘Have you seen him?’
left-dislocated items in example (32) can be interpreted as
b. Ozu comporaes? (Nuo.)
hanging topics when de is absent.
oil buy.2PL
‘Do you buy oil?’
17.4.3.6 Illocutionary force
However, fronting is also common in declaratives (cf.
Sardinian examples for the basic sentence types (in the
§17.4.3.5), and what makes it appear so frequent in ques-
sense of sentence force, cf. §53.1) are given in (33) (Jones
tions may be the fact that question focus can also be placed
1993:25-7):
on single constituents and even the predicate, which in the
latter case often creates a verum-focus interpretation (cf.
(33) a. Neune est vènnitu. (Nuo., declarative)
also Giurgea and Remberger 2012a; for another view, see
nobody be.3SG come.PTCP
Jones 2013).
‘Nobody has come.’
Available only in Nuorese/Logudorese is the formation of
b. Ite as fatu? (Nuo., wh-interrogative) polar questions by the question particle a (< AUT ‘or’), which
what have.2SG do.PTCP sometimes implies the illocutionary force of a request
‘What have you done?’ (cf. 2). Another strategy, found in other Romance languages
(cf. §53.3.3), consists in using the wh-item ite ‘what’ as a
c. Nara·mì·lu! (Nuo., positive imperative)
question particle (cf. Mensching 2012; note that there is no
tell.IMP=me=it
pause between ite and the rest of the sentence) (VIVALDI):
‘Tell it to me!’
d. No mi lu nies! (Nuo., negative imperative)
(35) a. Ite azes bisonzu de unu teracu? (Nuo.)
not me= it= tell.SBJV.2SG
‘Don’t tell it to me!’ b. E ite tenies bisongiu de unu seracu?
(and)what have.2PL need of a farm worker
e. Ite bellu chi ses! (Nuo., exclamative)
(Cpd./Perdasdefogu)
what nice that be.2SG
‘Do you need a farm worker?’
‘How nice you are!’
f. Deus m’ assestat! (Nuo., optative) There are particles which serve to modify a basic sen-
God me= help.SBJV.3SG tence type by specifying aspects of its illocutionary force,
‘May God help me!’ e.g. ge in declaratives, which adds an affirmative flavour (cf.
§53.2.2), and ello in (polar and constituent) interrogatives,
Constituent questions are built by fronting the interroga-
which connects the question to the situational context and
tive pronoun (33b). Positive imperatives have their own
often gives it a rhetorical interpretation (Hinzelin and
inflectional forms for the second person, whereas negative
Remberger 2009; cf. §53.3.3).
and other imperatives are served by the paradigm of the
The fronting operations mentioned above and described
subjunctive (33c,d); in the negative imperative, clitics are in
in §17.4.3.5 add emphasis, mirativity, or verum-focus inter-
proclitic position. Exclamatives usually involve the same
pretation also to declaratives so that speakers often inter-
type of pronoun as interrogatives (cf. 33e, with the insertion
pret them as illocutionary acts of exclamation (note the
of chi), but do not show inversion effects. Optatives contain
exclamation mark):
verbal forms in the subjunctive (33f).
Polar questions are often characterized by predicate
fronting or argument fronting, which leads Jones (1993:24) (36) E bastare diat! (Log.)
to consider fronting as one of the typical Sardinian question and suffice.INF must.3SG
formating processes (Pittau 1991:143): ‘It would be enough!’
291
CHAPTER 18
French and northern Gallo-Romance

JOHN CHARLES SMITH
18.1 Introduction of the canton of Fribourg, and of approximately the western

half of the canton of Valais. In Andorra, French has a
privileged status in the education system, although it is
French (in French, français) is the northern Gallo-Romance
not an official language. In the Channel Islands (the baili-
variety also historically labelled ‘langue d’oïl’ (to distinguish
wicks of Jersey and Guernsey, the latter including Alderney,
it from the ‘langue d’oc’, or Occitan (cf. Ch. 19), after the
Sark, and Herm), French, although no longer the official
word for ‘yes’ in the respective languages). The term
language and not widely spoken, continues to be used for
‘French’ is to an extent ambiguous. It is most commonly
some legal and administrative purposes. The approximate
used to denote the literary and standard language of France
population of French-speaking areas in Europe is 70,000,000
(and some former French possessions), which has a complex
(France: 63,700,000; Monaco: 33,000 (of whom 75% are
history, but which essentially emerged from a Parisian
native French-speakers); Wallonia 3,300,000; Brussels
‘supernorm’ (Lodge 1993). On the other hand, expressions
960,000 (estimates of the proportion who speak French
such as ‘French dialects’ and ‘old French’ encompass var-
vary between 70% and 90%); Luxembourg 537,000; Val
ieties which are neither ancestors nor descendants of stand-
d’Aosta 127,000 (of whom 75% speak French, but almost all
ard (or Parisian) French. I shall reserve the term ‘French’ for
as a second language); ‘Romandy’ (French-speaking Switz-
the standard language and varieties which have subse-
erland) 1,500,000). See further Andreose and Renzi (2013).
quently developed from it, and use the term ‘oïl varieties’
Outside Europe, French has official status in the overseas
to refer to the many northern Gallo-Romance varieties
départements of France (Guadeloupe and Martinique, in
which developed in parallel with it from Latin (Map 18.1).
the Caribbean; Guyane, in South America; Réunion and
(Whilst this dichotomy is useful for purposes of exposition,
Mayotte, in the Indian Ocean); its overseas collectivities
there has naturally been a degree of reciprocal influence
(Saint-Barthélémy and Saint-Martin, in the Caribbean;
between local varieties and the standard language.)
Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, off the coast of Newfoundland;
French Polynesia and Wallis-and-Futuna, in the Pacific); the
special French collectivity of New Caledonia; and various
countries which have at some stage been colonized or
18.2 Geography and demography settled by France or Belgium. In Canada, it has co-official
of French status at federal level with English (and is therefore a
co-official language of the federal territories of Nunavut,
French is the sole official language of France, and has official Yukon, and the North-West Territories); at provincial level, it
status in some adjacent areas: the principality of Monaco, is the sole official language of the province of Quebec (popu-
the Belgian region of Wallonia, the Belgian capital of Brus- lation 8,000,000, of whom 6,250,000 are French-speakers), is
sels (where it is co-official with Flemish), the grand duchy co-official with English in the province of New Brunswick
of Luxembourg (where it is the sole language of legislation, (population 750,000, of whom 250,000 are French speakers),
although German and Luxembourgish have equal status and is spoken by minorities in every other Canadian prov-
with it as languages of the administration and the courts), ince, especially Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New-
and the Val d’Aosta in northwestern Italy (where it is foundland and Labrador, and Manitoba. In the 2011 census,
co-official with Italian). In Switzerland, French is one of the total number of Canadians claiming French as their
four national languages. It is the sole language of the can- mother tongue was approximately 7,300,000, representing
tons of Geneva, Vaud, and Neuchâtel, of all but one com- 22% of the population, with about 10,000,000 claiming to be
mune (Ederswiler) of the canton of Jura, of an area in the able to conduct a conversation in the language.
northwest of the canton of Bern representing about 10% of In Haiti (population nearly 10,000,000), French is
its territory, of approximately the western three-quarters co-official with creole, and it is accorded special status in
292 This chapter © John Charles Smith 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
FRENCH AND NORTHERN GALLO-ROMANCE
FLEMISH
Wallon GERMAN
Picard
Area
Champenois
Norman
rn
J o r et Lin e Lorrain
te
es
Francien
W
f
B o u n d ar y o
BRETON
Gallo
Franc-
Comtois
Bourguignon
Angevin
Poitevin-
Saintongeais
Croissant
FRANCOPROVENÇAL
ITALIAN
OCCITAN
BA
SQ
U
E
CATALAN
Map 18.1 French and northern Gallo-Romance varieties
the US states of Louisiana, Michigan, Maine, and Vermont. Seychelles. Despite no longer having official status, it
In the former French Indian comptoir of Pondicherry, remains an important means of communication in the
French shares official status with English, Malayalam, Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia), in Mauritania, and
Tamil, and Telugu; whilst in Vanuatu, in the Pacific, it is in Lebanon, and is widely used in Mauritius.
co-official with English and Bislama. In Africa, it has the Although French is an official language in many coun-
status of sole official language in Benin, Burkina Faso, tries, Ager’s comments still hold:
Congo (Democratic Republic), Congo (Republic), Gabon,
While first speakers of [English and Spanish] live in countries
Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo. It is
where nearly everybody speaks them, and where population
co-official with English in Cameroon, with English and
growth is steady, first speakers of French tend to live in countries
Rwandan in Rwanda, with Arabic in Chad and Djibouti, in which half or less of the population speaks French, and in
with Arabic and Comorian in the Comoros, with Burundian countries—particularly in Africa—where population growth is
in Burundi, with Sango in the Central African Republic, explosive, but where the political or economic situation is such
with Spanish in Equatorial Guinea, with Malagasy in Mada- that this fact does not increase the numbers of French first lan-
gascar, and with English and Seychellois creole in the guage speakers. (Ager 1995:45)
293
JOHN CHARLES SMITH
The Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie has reliable is another early text, the Eulalia Sequence, a short
estimated that the number of French speakers in the world poem from about 880. However, this contains many features
in 2010 was 220,000,000, although this figure includes many of Picard, a northern oïl variety. It is clear that, whilst the
who have been educated in French but are not native language of both texts represents early northern Gallo-
speakers. For further information on French outside Europe, Romance, in neither case is the language of the text the
see Jones and Pountain (2013). direct ancestor of contemporary standard French.
French is also an important international language. It is Although French clearly has its origins in Latin, many
one of six official languages of the United Nations (and one of scholars have posited the influence on this Latin of a sub-
the two working languages of the UN Secretariat), one of 24 strate, in the form of Gaulish, a Celtic language spoken
official languages of the European Union, one of three official before the arrival of the Romans, and a superstrate, in the
languages of the International Union of Railways, and the form of Frankish, a Germanic language spoken by the Salian
sole official language of the Universal Postal Union. It was, Franks who inhabited the area after the fall of the Roman
from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the empire, some of whom founded the Merovingian dynasty.
unrivalled language of diplomacy and international commu- Neither language is well attested, and, apart from a handful
nication. It is also the language of one of the world’s great of obvious lexical influences, the ascription of various
literatures. These facts have given French an importance phonological, morphological, and syntactic features to this
which transcends the number of its native speakers. contact influence rarely extends beyond speculation.
Lodge (1993) relates the emergence and subsequent con-
solidation of a French standard to Haugen’s four processes of
standardization: selection, elaboration of function, codifica-
tion, and acceptance (Haugen 1966). These are perhaps best
18.3 External and social history envisaged as fluid, interrelated, and overlapping processes,
and periodization rather than as rigid and sequential stages. Because of the
importance of Paris as a commercial centre and, ultimately,
In a sense, French begins life as an epiphenomenon of the as the seat of the court, the major ecclesiastical institutions,
Carolingian Reforms (Wright 1982; Banniard 2013; see also and for many years the only university north of the Alps, the
§2.9). As a result of linguistic changes which were not language of the Île-de-France became progressively more
reflected (or not systematically reflected) in writing, writ- widespread during the Middle Ages, both as a lingua franca
ten Latin had acquired an essentially logographic interpret- and as a prestige norm; but it is premature to speak of a
ation. The introduction of a literal, phonographic, ‘standard’ at this date, because there was no polity or demo-
pronunciation of Latin by Carolingian scholars led to the graphic for which this lingua franca could serve as a stand-
creation (or the extreme reinforcement) of a distinction ard. (Another, less convincing, reason sometimes adduced for
between what was, in diglossic terms (Ferguson 1959), the the pre-eminence of Parisian is its geographical centrality,
‘H’ language and the ‘L’ language—the rustica romana lingua and hence its alleged mutual intelligibility with other var-
(glossed by Banniard 2013:82 as ‘the Latin of the illiterate’; ieties.) However, with the decline of feudalism and the acqui-
cf. §36.1). As early as 813, the Council of Tours prescribed sition by the French monarchy, through conquest, marriage,
that sermons should be preached in the rustica romana and donation, of a sizeable contiguous territory, ‘France’
lingua, in order for them to be comprehensible to those emerges as a nation-state at the end of the fifteenth century,
(the majority) who were not versed in Latin. The clearer and the language of Paris moves into areas which had previ-
conceptual distinction between two languages also led to ously been the domain of Latin—indeed, this process of
attempts to write the rustica romana lingua—combining Lat- elaboration of function is perhaps best viewed as the
inizing etymological orthography with attempts at phono- encroachment of the ‘L’ language in diglossia-with-bilingual-
graphic spelling. Conventionally, the first attestation of ism as defined by Fishman (1967) (in this case, French) into
French is the Strasbourg Oaths, sworn in 842 between the functions which had hitherto been the preserve of the ‘H’
brothers Charles the Bald and Louis the German (cf. §§3.1, language (in this case, Latin).1 In an over-simple but not
3.3). However, a large number of problems arise with this wholly inaccurate view, the sixteenth century is the century
text—most importantly, that the manuscript dates from of elaboration (although many grammars and bilingual
approximately 150 years after the event, with attendant
doubts about the accuracy with which the language is
1
recorded. Moreover, each brother swore his oath in the It is important to realize that the ‘language of Paris’ was, by the time of
its ‘selection’, the result of koinéization (Siegel 1985), resulting from mas-
other’s native tongue, and therefore a language which was sive in-migration over several centuries (Lodge 1993; 2004; for discussion of
not his own, raising further questions of authenticity. More some relevant data, see Smith and Sneddon 2002).
294
dictionaries in fact date from this period) and the seven- variations of this ‘standard’ language, and these will be
teenth century one of codification. referred to where appropriate. In particular, we shall con-
It remained for the standard language to become the sider ‘Midi French’, spoken in the southern part of France,
language of French society as a whole, and this was one of where Occitan is, or was, the indigenous language and
the aims of the French Revolution (see Surre-Garcia arguably provides a substrate. Reference will also be made
2010:32–4). So committed was the Revolution to breaking to Belgian and Swiss French, and to the two varieties of
with the past that it introduced new political structures, French spoken in Canada: Laurentian French (spoken in
new administrative divisions, a new system of weights and most of the province of Quebec and in provinces to the
measures, and even a completely new calendar. But the west, including particularly Ontario and Manitoba) and Aca-
language it promulgated as the language of united Repub- dian French (spoken in the provinces of New Brunswick,
lican France was not new; it was the linguistic norm of the Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Prince Edward Island, as
ancien régime, there being no other candidate. It was gener- well as in two areas of Quebec: the north shore of the Baie
ally understood that linguistic unity could only be achieved des Chaleurs (the south coast of the Gaspé Peninsula) and
by education, specifically the schooling of children; but it the Îles de la Madeleine. Whilst each of these varieties has a
proved impossible to implement such a policy at the time. It coherent identity, none of them is monolithic. Swiss French,
took the Industrial Revolution, which generated an enor- in particular, exhibits substantial variation.
mous increase in national wealth and led to dramatic
improvement in the speed of travel, to provide the circum-
stances in which this aim could be realized, in particular by 18.4.1 Phonetics and phonology
the training, at state expense, of schoolteachers and their
18.4.1.1 Segmental phonology
dispatch throughout France, far from where their native
variety was spoken. The spread of standard French was A maximal phonemic inventory of contemporary standard
finally ensured by the laws passed under the Third Republic French would contain 38 items, although few (if any)
in 1881 and 1882 and bearing the name of the Minister of speakers, exhibit the full system.
Education, Jules Ferry. The first made elementary education
18.4.1.1.1 Vowels
free, the second made it compulsory.2
French is conventionally divided into ‘Old French’, ‘Mid- Table 18.1 shows the phonological vowel system of (stand-
dle French’, and ‘Modern French’. Opinions vary widely and ard) French.
wildly concerning the definition of these periods. Many Standard French distinguishes four degrees of vowel
scholars have tried to link them to external factors, such aperture: low, mid low, mid high, and high. Apart from
as historical events or literary production; the only linguis- low vowels, all unrounded, the back vowels are rounded,
tic criterion adduced for the end of the ‘Old French’ period is whilst there are two series of front vowels, rounded and
the loss of the nominal case system. It is difficult to find a unrounded. In addition, there is a mid central vowel [ə], to
consensus; but for many, ‘Old French’ ends in the fourteenth be discussed below. There are three mid low nasal vowels,
century, ‘Modern French’ begins in the early seventeenth, corresponding to each series of oral vowels (front
and ‘Middle French’ lies in between the two (for extensive unrounded /ɛ̃/, front rounded /œ̃/, back rounded /ɔ̃/),
discussion, see Smith 2002). and a low back unrounded nasal vowel /ɑ̃/. Some varieties
exhibit a phonemic opposition between short and long
unrounded mid low oral vowels /ɛ/ ~ /ɛː/, as in mettre
[mɛtʁ] ‘put.INF’ vs maître [mɛːtʁ] ‘master.N’. This opposition
18.4 Structure of French has effectively disappeared from the standard French of
France (if found at all, it is generally in the speech of the
What follows gives as full an overview as here possible, elderly), although it remains a feature of Swiss and Lauren-
concentrating on two types of phenomena: those which tian French. Indeed, many Swiss varieties exhibit a phon-
pose interesting problems for linguistic theory and those emic opposition of length for most oral vowels in final open
which set French apart from most other Romance lan- syllables, with length corresponding historically to the
guages. The variety described will be standard (broadly presence of a (since deleted) final schwa; this opposition
speaking, Parisian) French; there are, of course, regional therefore serves, inter alia, to distinguish between mascu-
line and feminine forms of many vowel-final adjectives
2 (Métral 1977; Racine and Andreassen 2012:180-2). This
For the external history of French, see Lodge (1993) and Caput (1972).
The effects of the political and Industrial Revolutions are dealt with, widespread distinction of quantity is a common character-
respectively, by Balibar and Laporte (1974) and Weber (1977:67–94). istic of oïl varieties (see below), but it is unusual in French
295
JOHN CHARLES SMITH
Table 18.1 The maximal phonological vowel system of (standard) French

FRONT BACK
CENTRAL
UNROUNDED ROUNDED ROUNDED UNROUNDED
ORAL NASAL ORAL NASAL ORAL NASAL ORAL NASAL
High i y u
Mid high e ø o
Mid low ɛ ɛː ɛ̃ œ œ̃ ə ɔ ɔ̃
Low a ɑ ɑ̃
per se. Except for the instances just noted, vowel length by length and position both playing a role and assuming
itself is not phonemic, but rather phonetic. Vowels are greater or lesser importance according to phonological con-
traditionally divided into two groups, often misleadingly text and geographical area (Métral 1977:152).
labelled ‘intrinsically’ and ‘extrinsically’ long. So-called The situation regarding mid vowels is complex. In the
intrinsically long vowels (the rounded mid high vowels standard language of France and in Laurentian and Acadian
/o/ and /ø/, the low back vowel /ɑ/, and all the nasal French, /ɔ/ and /œ/ do not occur word-finally, so that
vowels) are long in any final closed syllable, whilst so-called oppositions such as sotte /sɔt/ ‘silly.FSG’ vs saute /sot/
extrinsically long vowels (the remainder) are long in a final ‘(s)he.leaps’ are neutralized in sot ‘silly.MSG’ and saut ‘leap.
syllable closed by one of the consonants /ʁ/, /v/, /z/, or N’, both /so/, although this is not the case in Belgian or non-
/ʒ/; in addition, phrase-final vowels are longer than those Genevan Swiss French, where a distinction exists between
in other positions. In Laurentian French, long(er) vowels sot /sɔ/ and saut /so/ (Warnant 1997; Hambye et al. 2003;
tend to ‘diphthongize’ (to lower and be followed by a hom- Métral 1977:154; Racine and Andreassen 2012:183f.). How-
organic glide), especially when phrase-final (Table 18.2). ever, no such neutralization affects the front unrounded
The phonemic distinction between front and back low vowels in the standard language, as witness the distinction
oral vowels (/a/ vs /ɑ/) has been lost by most contempor- between près /pʁɛ/ ‘near’ and pré /pʁe/ ‘meadow’. In
ary speakers of the standard French of France, although a non-final position, the opposition between /e/ and /ɛ/ is
small number of (mainly elderly) conservative speakers still neutralized in many varieties. In standard French, [e] is
exhibit it. For the majority, the two segments have merged generally preferred in non-final open syllables and [ɛ] in
as /a/ (Hansen 2012:155f.). An allophonic difference non-final closed syllables; however, in Swiss French, [ɛ] is
between [a] and [ɑ] is sometimes found; inter alia, [ɑ] may commonly found in both types of syllable, so that l’étoile ‘the
be used to convey elegance or pretentiousness. Contrast this star’ and les toiles ‘the canvases’, both of which would be
with the situation in Laurentian French, where the phon- pronounced [letwal] in the standard language of France, are
emic distinction between them is still robust: tache /taʃ/ distinct in Switzerland—[lɛtwal] and [letwal], respectively
‘stain’ vs tâche /tɑʃ/ ‘task’ (in addition to being subject to (Métral 1977:148). For speakers of some varieties, especially
positional constraints: e.g. in word-final position /ɑ/ is of Midi French, the distribution of mid high and mid low
normal: chat /ʃɑ/ ‘(male) cat’ vs chatte /ʃat/ ‘(female) cat’; vowels is entirely determined by syllable structure, the mid
in practice, /ɑ/ is often realized as [ɒ] in this variety.) In high vowels occurring in open syllables and the mid low
Belgian French, the front vowel no longer contrasts with a vowels in closed syllables in both final and non-final posi-
back vowel, but a phonemic opposition of length remains tions; not only are sot and saut both /so/, but sotte and saute
for many speakers: tache /taʃ/ vs tâche /taːʃ/ (Hambye et al. are both /sɔt/ and près ‘near’ and pré ‘meadow’ are both
2003). The position in Swiss French is more complicated, /pʁe/. For these speakers, the distinction between the
Table 18.2 Final-vowel length and diphthongization in Laurentian French
français [frãsɛ] ‘French.MSG’ vs française [frãsajz] ‘French.FSG’

chaud [ʃo] ‘hot’ vs chose [ʃɔwz] ‘thing’
jeu [ʒø] ‘game’ vs jeûne [ʒœɥn] ‘fasts’
paix [pɛ] ‘peace’ vs père [pajr] ‘father’
il vend [ivã] ‘he sells’ vs ils vendent [ivaw̃d] ‘they sell’
mon [mɔ̃] ‘my’ vs monde [mɑw̃d] ‘world’
296
two degrees of height is purely allophonic, and their vowel hear (on this phenomenon and its implications, see espe-
system is best analysed as having only three degrees of cially Labov 1994:349–70). The /œ̃/ vs /ɛ̃/ distinction is
aperture: low, mid, and high (Watbled 1995; Coquillon and robust in most other varieties of French, but not Acadian
Turcsan 2012). In Acadian French, the mid back vowels /ɔ/ French.
and /o/ are raised to /u/ before a nasal consonant (some- Other mergers and chain shifts also affect French nasal
times also before /z/): homme [um] ‘man’, personne [paɾsun] vowels. In the standard language of France, there is an ‘anti-
‘person’. clockwise’ movement (if we view front vowels as being on
In Laurentian and Acadian French, high vowels are laxed ‘left’); /ɛ̃/ be has long been realized as [æ̃], and now shows
when short and in final closed syllables, e.g. mis [mi] ‘put. signs of lowering further to [ã] and in some cases backing
PTCP.M’ and mise [miːz] ‘put.PTCP.F’ vs mine [mɪn] ‘mine; coun- towards existing /ɑ̃/, which is itself raising towards /ɔ̃/.
tenance’. This laxing may spread to preceding vowels Meanwhile, /ɔ̃/ is regularly realized as [õ]. By contrast, in
through vowel harmony, e.g. positive [pɔzitiv] ‘positive.FSG’ Laurentian French, the movement is clockwise, with /ɔ̃/
vs positif [pɔzɪtɪf] ‘positive.MSG’. Although these lax vowels tending to lower towards /ɑ̃/, /ɑ̃/ regularly realized as [ã]
are not generally analysed as separate phonemes, they may and /ɛ̃/ as [ẽ]. Finally, in Acadian French, /ɔ̃/ and /ɑ̃/ tend
contrast with the corresponding tense vowels found, for to merge as /ɑ̃/. Given that /œ̃/ and /ɛ̃/ also merge in this
instance, in loanwords from English, such as mean [min], variety (as /ɛ̃/; see above), the resulting system contains
and so may be regarded as marginally phonemic (see Hall just two nasal vowels.
2013). Another salient feature of Laurentian French is devoi- In Laurentian French, nasal vowels are less nasal than in
cing or deletion of pretonic high vowels, particularly preva- the standard French of France, in that the velum is being
lent when they occur between voiceless consonants. Thus, lowered later in the articulation of the vowel, and to a lesser
for many Laurentian speakers, citation ‘quotation’ and station extent (Charbonneau 1971). (As noted above, they also tend
‘metro station, railway halt’ are homophones ([stasjɔ̃]). to diphthongize in lengthening contexts.) In Midi French,
The phonetic realization of schwa varies; some speakers nasal vowels are also generally less nasalized than in north-
have [ø] and/or [œ], others have [ə]. On the rare occasions ern varieties, and are followed by a nasal consonant (Durand
when it is phrase-final, and therefore stressed, it is realized 1988). Watbled (1995) argues that this nasal consonant is not
as [ø]: dis-le ‘say.IMP.2SG=it.M’ [dilø]. Many (probably most) a segment in its own right, but rather a ‘consonantal phase’
speakers realize it as [ø] or [œ] in other contexts as well. In of the vowel, probably linked to its lesser nasalization.
Midi French, schwa is realized more frequently than in Where the nasal vowel occurs before a pause or another
northern varieties, including in word-final position, where vowel, this ‘consonantal phase’ is generally velar, e.g. grand
it generally (but not always) corresponds to etymological ‘big.MSG’ [ɡʁɑ̃] (NFr.) vs [ɡʁãᵑ] (SFr.). When the nasal vowel
/ə/. However, realization of such schwas does not occur is followed by a consonant in the same phonological phrase,
100% of the time; for instance Walter (1990:32) records a its ‘consonantal phase’ is homorganic with the consonant
maximum of 86%, with the phenomenon particularly fre- which follows (Table 18.3).
quent in Languedoc-Roussillon. An additional use of schwa
is as a phatic ‘tag’, referred to by Carton (2000:34) as a ‘filled 18.4.1.1.2 Glides
pause’.
There are three glides, or semivowels, one corresponding to
According to received wisdom, in most northern varieties
each series of oral vowels: front unrounded /j/ (yod); front
of French the two front nasal vowels have merged in rela-
rounded /ɥ/; back rounded /w/; e.g. miette /mjɛt/ ‘crumb’,
tively recent times, most Parisian speakers no longer dis-
muette /mɥɛt/ ‘mute.FSG’, mouette /mwɛt/ ‘seagull’. /ɥ/ is
tinguishing brin /bʁɛ̃/ ‘blade (of grass)’ and brun (originally
absent from some varieties, notably Belgian French, espe-
/bʁœ̃/, now also /bʁɛ̃/) ‘brown.MSG’. This distinction is
cially before /i/. However, this rarely leads to mergers
alleged to have disappeared because /œ̃/ is a complex, or
(Warnant 1997; Hambye et al. 2003; Hambye and Simon
marked, segment, and/or because the opposition /ɛ̃/ ~ /œ̃/
2012:135f.), since the words involved are normally disyllabic
has a very low functional yield (the brin/brun opposition is
practically the only lexical contrast in which it is salient).
However, Hansen (1998) finds that /œ̃/ has been somewhat Table 18.3 Nasal vowel + consonant sequences
unrounded, but has not generally merged with /ɛ̃/, so that
most speakers (approximately 75%) maintain a four-way NORTHERN FRENCH MIDI FRENCH
distinction at the level of production, although perceptually

encore ‘again, still’ [ɑ̃kɔʁ] [ãᵑkɔʁə]
the two vowels are sometimes confused. Here, we may
planter ‘plant.INF’ [plɑ̃te] [plãⁿte]
therefore have a near-merger, with speakers producing an
bon pain ‘good bread’ [bɔ̃pɛ̃] [bɔ̃ᵐpɛ̃ŋ]
instrumentally detectable distinction which they cannot
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JOHN CHARLES SMITH
in these varieties—muette /myɛt/ vs mouette /muwɛt/ (cf. ‘marginal’ phoneme (Hall 2013), especially given potential
also miette /mijɛt/). minimal pairs such as chopine /ʃɔpin/ ‘(half-litre) bottle’ vs
shopping /ʃɔpiŋ/ ‘shopping (centre)’. Indeed, the inventory
18.4.1.1.3 Liquids of marginal phonemes might be augmented by the /ʧ/ and
French has two liquids, /r/ and /l/. In the standard lan- /ʤ/ found in loanwords and proper names such as tchèque
guage, /r/ is usually realized as a uvular fricative [ʁ]; it may ‘Czech.SG’, jazz, Tchaïkovski, and Giotto, although these may
also be realized as a uvular trill [ʀ] or, regionally, as an also be regarded as sequences of plosive plus fricative.
apical trill [r]. In fact, in rapid speech, French /r/ has a great In Laurentian French, the dental plosives /t/ and /d/ are
variety of realizations, often as various types of approxi- affricated by assibilation before high front vowels and front
mant. When it follows a voiceless obstruent, it is itself glides: petit [pətˢi] ‘small.MSG’, tu [tˢy] ‘you.NOM.SG’, tuile [tˢɥɪl]
normally devoiced: compare cadre [kadʁ] ‘frame.N’ vs quatre ‘tile’, dis [dᶻi] ‘say.2SG’, ardu [aʁdᶻy] ‘arduous.MSG’, Diane
[katʁ̣]/[katχ] ‘four’; grise [gʁiz] ‘grey.FSG’ vs crise [kʁ̣iz]/ [dᶻjan] ‘Diane’. In most varieties of Acadian French, these
[kχiz] ‘crisis’. In Midi French, a distinction can be found consonants are unaffected by a following high vowel, but
between voiced and voiceless /r/ in word-final position, become palatal affricates before a front glide, e.g. tuile [ʧɥɪl],
corresponding to the presence or absence of an etymo- Diane [ʤjan].
logical (possibly underlying) schwa: pore [pɔʁ] ‘pore’ Acadian French is unusual in having a phoneme /h/,
([pɔʁə] also possible) vs port [pɔʁ̣]/[pɔχ] ‘port’. In the Laur- broadly corresponding to the ‘h aspiré’ of the standard
entian French of the province of Quebec, there are trad- (see §18.4.1.5.4).
itionally two variants of /r/ː [r], found in Montreal and Geminate consonants are not widespread in any variety
western Quebec more generally, and [ʁ] found in Quebec of French. Some speakers distinguish between forms of the
city and the east of the province more generally. More verbs courir ‘run’ and mourir ‘die’, such as nous courons
recently, the eastern uvular variant has been encroaching [nukuʁɔ̃] ‘we run’ vs nous courrons [nukuʁːɔ̃] ‘we shall run’,
on the apical trill in Montreal and the west (Sankoff et al. vous mourez [vumuʁe] ‘you die’ vs vous mourrez [vumuʁːe]
2001; Sankoff and Blondeau 2007). In Acadian French, /r/ is ‘you will die’ (this is unlikely to be a spelling pronunciation:
generally realized as an apical flap [ɾ], although a uvular trill contrast elle pourra ‘she will be able’, which is only ever
[ʀ] and a retroflex approximant [ɹ] are found in some realized as [ɛlpuʁa].) These consonants could be analysed
varieties (Cichocki 2008). Because the uvular fricative is as phonemically long; but they could perhaps more plaus-
the standard realization of /r/ in most European varieties ibly be derived from an underlying sequence of two con-
of French, the phoneme is usually transcribed as /ʁ/. sonants. In favour of the latter analysis is the occurrence of
purely phonetic consonant length where identical segments
18.4.1.1.4 Consonants occur underlyingly on either side of a word boundary (jupe
plissée lit. ‘skirt pleated’ [ʒypːlise], including cases in collo-
Table 18.4 shows the phonological consonant system of
quial speech where a liquid has been deleted for phonotactic
(standard) French.
reasons: quatre tables ‘four tables’ [katːabl]), or resulting
There are three pairs of plosives, one member of each
from the deletion of a word-internal schwa (là-dedans
pair voiceless and one voiced,3 and likewise three pairs of
‘inside’ [ladədɑ̃], becoming [ladːɑ̃]). Occasionally, in elevated
fricatives, one member of each pair voiceless and one
or pretentious speech, a phonetically long consonant may
voiced. In conservative speech, there are also three nasals:
be found as a spelling pronunciation: e.g. collègue [kɔlːɛɡ]
bilabial /m/; /dental /n/; palatal /ɲ/; however, many
‘colleague’. See further Meisenburg (2006).
speakers have linearized the palatal nasal into a sequence
/nj/. The final nasal consonant of English loanwords ending 18.4.1.1.5 Typology and diachrony
in -ing (such as parking ‘car park’) is realized in various ways, of segmental phonology
but some speakers have imported the English velar nasal
The consonant inventory of French is broadly comparable
/ŋ/, which therefore has at least some presence in the
with that of most other major standard Romance languages.
contemporary French system. It might be regarded as a
However, the vowel system is more complex, both quanti-
tatively (leaving aside Swiss length, it contains between 12
3 and 17 items) and qualitatively (it contains front rounded
The distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants in European
French is characterized by a negative voice onset time (VOT) for the former vowels and nasal vowels; such segments are found in some
and a short-lag VOT for the latter. However, in Quebec, this distinction is other Romance varieties, but are rare in the standard lan-
much less marked, and there is considerable overlap between the VOT for guages, although Portuguese has nasal vowels and Occitan
voiced and voiceless segments. VOT may therefore be regarded as a phon-
emic cue in standard European French, but not in the variety spoken in has /y/). The origins of this complexity lie in a variety of
Quebec. See Caramazza and Yeni-Komshian (1974). sound changes which took place in the late Latin of Gaul and
298
Table 18.4 The maximal phonological consonant system of (standard) French

BILABIAL LABIO - DENTAL DENTAL PALATAL VELAR
Plosives Voiceless p t k
Voiced b d ɡ
Fricatives Voiceless f s ʃ
Voiced v z ʒ
Nasals m n ɲ (ŋ)
in early old French. Diphthongization in tonic open syllables nasality of the vowel remains contextual (or contingent).
affected a greater range of vowels than elsewhere; in par- However, subsequently, the feature [+nasal] is reinterpreted
ticular, mid high vowels were diphthongized, as well as (and as inherent in the vowel, which is reanalysed as a nasal
almost certainly later than) mid low vowels. The back diph- phoneme, distinct from the corresponding oral vowel. It is
thongs [uɔ] (mid low) and [ou] (mid high) were subsequently arguably only after this reanalysis has taken place that the
differentiated by the mid element moving forward, yielding disappearance of the nasal consonant will leave the preced-
[uɛ] and [eu], respectively. Later, a monophthongization ing nasal vowel intact.
took place, in which these segments were delinearized (i.e. Although nasalization can be broken down into the pro-
features of two or more elements were combined into a cesses described above, it is not unreasonable to see it, in
single element), yielding [œ] and [ø], respectively. The addition, as a process of delinearization. Instrumental
emergence of these front rounded vowels may have been research (Linthorst 1973; Feng and Castelli 1996) shows
facilitated by the prior existence in the language of /y/, that nasal vowels are, in many respects, like diphthongs:
with which they formed a front rounded series. Both the they are long, and they appear to consist of two elements,
greater range of diphthongization in northern Gaul and the an oral element followed by a nasal element. If diphthongs
much later monophthongization have been linked to word are represented as branching nuclei, it is possible to inter-
stress—an increase in the length component of tonic stress pret nasalization as the incorporation of the [+nasal] feature
in late Latin/early old French, which some have ascribed to of the nasal consonant into the vowel.
Frankish contact influence, although this external motiv- Nasalization of vowels is sometimes claimed to have
ation is by no means proven; and a shift in the later Middle taken place progressively, between the tenth and twelfth
Ages (possibly as early as the twelfth century: see centuries, low vowels being affected first, then mid vowels,
Marchello-Nizia 1995) away from word stress to phrasal and finally high vowels. Thus vowels are nasalized in
stress, with a consequent weakening of most tonic syllables. decreasing order of resonance. The reason for this is prob-
The distribution of [œ] and [ø] is no longer strictly etymo- ably articulatory. The less resonant a vowel, the higher the
logical: e.g. [œ] does not appear in a final open syllable, nor position of the tongue. Since the velum is lowered to prod-
[ø] before tautosyllabic [ʁ]. uce a nasal vowel, this constricts the oral cavity more than
The emergence of phonemic nasal vowels begins with a usual and may make it difficult for the tongue to be raised;
regressive assimilation, the velum lowering to produce a there is, in a sense, a contradiction between the two articu-
following nasal consonant whilst the vowel is still articulations. Another hypothesis claims that all the vowels were
lated, causing air to pass through the nasal cavity before the nasalized at the same time, but that less resonant vowels
vowel has come to an end. This process yields phonetically were nasalized less than their more resonant counterparts
nasalized vowels in many languages. In French, however, (for the same articulatory reasons).
coda nasal consonants were lost, and yet the preceding Subsequently, high and mid high nasal vowels lowered, to
vowel remained nasal, despite loss of the conditioning con- mid low and low positions, respectively (arguably for the
text. This is an example of a change which is arguably same articulatory reasons). Nasal vowels before nasal con-
hearer-based (perceptual), rather than speaker-based sonants denasalized, possibly through hypercorrection (in
(articulatory). Ohala (1989; 1992; 1993) refers to it as ‘hypo- Ohala’s terms, the reinterpretation of an inherent feature
correction’, inasmuch as it consists of the reinterpretation as contextual), giving rise to spelling/pronunciation con-
of a contextual feature as an inherent feature. (We might trasts such as femme ‘woman’ /fẽm/ > /fãm/ > /fam/. (On
also speak of the reinterpretation of a contingent feature as the evolution of nasal vowels in French, see Sampson
an essential feature.) The first stage of nasalization, as we 1999:1–31, 53–112).
have seen, is for the nasality of the consonant to propagate Modern /l/ is always ‘clear’, although old French had a
to the vowel by anticipation or regressive assimilation. The ‘dark’ allophone of /l/ ([ɫ]) before consonants, which
299
JOHN CHARLES SMITH
subsequently vocalized to /u/. Together with subsequent (Marchello-Nizia 1995:189), but lexically determined word
monophthongization, it is this vocalization which has given stress persisted as an expressive device, until the late four-
rise to plurals of the type cheval /ʃəval/ ‘horse’ vs chevaux teenth or early fifteenth century (Marchello-Nizia 1995:172,
/ʃəvo/ ‘horses. Earlier stages of French had a third 174f.). In the contemporary language, non-final syllables
liquid phoneme, in addition to /l/ and /r/ː the palatal ‘L’ may bear stress for affective emphasis (cf. C’est terrible
(‘L mouillé’) /ʎ/. Although still present in many oïl varieties, [sɛˈtɛʁibl] ‘It’s great’) or to resolve misunderstandings (cf.
in the standard language, this phoneme merged with /j/ J’ai dit méconnu, pas inconnu [ʒediˈmekɔny|paˈɛ̃kɔny] ‘I said
between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (Pope little-known, not unknown’); otherwise, secondary stress is
1934:§106c). assigned to them largely according to eurythmic principles
/r/ was realized as an apical trill in old French. There is (Di Cristo 1999). There is a tendency in Canadian French for
evidence that, in popular speech, at least, this apical real- some phrase-penultimate syllables to lengthen, and then
ization moved forward from an alveolar to a dental position, they may (appear to) receive stress (Walker 1984).
and simplified to a (voiced) fricative: compare the doublets
chaire ‘pulpit, (professorial) chair’ (learnèd) vs chaise ‘chair’
(popular) which arise in the sixteenth century. Functional-
18.4.1.3 Phonotactics
ists see the uvular realization of /r/ as a reaction to this The so-called ‘three-consonant rule’ (loi des trois consonnes)
trend, although this articulation will not have been trig- excludes sequences of more than two consonants (liquids
gered by any homophonic clash; it must already have been and interconsonantal glides counting as consonants). There
present in the language, and may have propagated as a are exceptions: sequences of an obstruent followed by a
result of the clash. There was a tendency for /r/ to be lost liquid at the end of a cluster may combine with a preceding
word-finally, especially after high and mid high vowels, continuant (most commonly a liquid) to form a sequence of
most strikingly in the -er ending of the first conjugation three (compare arbre /aʁbʁ/ ‘tree’, ecphrase /ɛkfʁaz/ ‘ek-
infinitive and the -ier ending of nouns and adjectives: com- phrasis’); sequences of four consonants are acceptable when
pare contemporary porter /pɔʁte/ ‘carry.INF’, portier the obstruent is preceded by /s/; thus extraordinaire
/pɔʁtje/ ‘doorkeeper’; but note the minimal pair fier /fje/ /ɛkstʁaɔʁdinɛʁ/ ‘extraordinary’, petite structure
‘trust.INF’ vs fier /fjɛʁ/ ‘proud’ (Pope 1934:§§394–402). /pətiʦtʁyktyʁ/ ‘small structure’. Phrase-initially, the con-
The major changes to the inventory of consonant phon- straint becomes a ‘two-consonant rule’, excluding sequences
emes involve palatalization. In a widespread Romance of more than one consonant, again with the proviso regard-
development (cf. §39.3.1), the velar plosives /k/ and /ɡ/ ing ‘obstruent plus liquid’ sequences and /s/ (cf. scrupule
palatalized before the non-low front vowels /i/, /e/, and /skʁypyl/ ‘scruple’, splendide /splɑ̃did/ ‘splendid’, strontium
/ɛ/. In old French, this process yielded affricates /ʦ/ and /stʁɔ̃sjɔm/ ‘strontium’, all of which are acceptable phrase-
/ʤ/, respectively (note the asymmetrical outcome, initially). Schwa may be deleted up to the limits set by these
whereby the voiceless segment is further forward than rules, and, in ordinary rapid speech, normally is.
its voiced counterpart). These segments have become Even with these caveats, these ‘rules’ are only general
fricatives /s/ and /ʒ/ in the modern language. In a second tendencies, and are violated by some speakers. Pronunci-
palatalization, which is not widespread in Romance (see ations which contradict the three-consonant rule are par-
§39.3.1.4), /k/ and /ɡ/ also palatalized before /a/, ticularly frequent when the initial consonant of the cluster
although this development was symmetrical, yielding /ʧ/ of three is a liquid or /s/ː thus, for fortement ‘strongly’ and
and /ʤ/, respectively (subsequently /ʃ/ and /ʒ/). Mean- justement ‘precisely’, /fɔʁtmɑ̃/ and /ʒystmɑ̃/ may be heard
while, in a development common to most western alongside /fɔʁtəmɑ̃/ and /ʒystəmɑ̃/, especially in and
Romance languages, lenition affected intervocalic plosives. around Lyon (Walter 1990). On the other hand, in popular
First, voiceless intervocalic plosives became voiced, then speech, phrases such as ours blanc ‘polar bear (lit. bear
the plosives became fricatives. Finally, in many contexts, white)’, film noir ‘film noir (lit. film black)’ are often realized
these fricatives assimilated to an adjacent vowel, becoming with epenthetic schwa [uʁsəblɑ̃], [filmənwaʁ] (Martinet
glides or disappearing completely. 1969; cf. also §40.2.2.2.2).
When the three consonants include a liquid between two
obstruents, then, in colloquial speech, the cluster may be
18.4.1.2 Prosody simplified by deleting the liquid: e.g. quatre fois ‘four times’,
Prosodically, contemporary French is characterized by syl- regularly [katʁəfwa], colloquially [katfwa].
lable timing and lacks word stress. Stress falls on the final These phenomena, together with the fact that schwa is
syllable of the phonological phrase. Twelfth-/thirteenth- now commonly realized as [œ] and/or [ø] (although some
century French had already acquired phrasal stress speakers maintain a distinct vowel [ə]), have posed
300
interesting theoretical problems (see Morin 1978; Verluyten such an analysis, yielding allomorphic variants; for instance,
1988; Walter 1990; Hansen 1994; Racine and Grosjean 2002; alongside arbre /aʁbʁ/ ‘tree’, we find /zaʁbʁ/ (/z/+arbres),
Durand and Eychenne 2004). often identified as a plural form ‘trees’ (Morin 2005).
Assimilation in French is generally regressive (cf. observer Although most of those identified as possibly having this
[ɔpsɛʁve] ‘observe.INF’) and can apply across word boundar- allomorphic analysis of the liaison consonant are illiterate
ies: on se bat [ɔ̃zba] ‘we fight (lit. one=self=fights)’. speakers of a non-standard variety (suggesting that spelling
may be an influence on the perception of liaison), there is
corroborating evidence for such an analysis in certain cases:
18.4.1.4 Syllable structure cf. the verb zieuter ‘get an eyeful of ’, which clearly derives
Although at earlier stages French observed the Sonority from /z/+yeux ‘eyes’. The /z/ in these examples might even
Sequencing Principle, whereby segments increase in sonor- be seen as a plural prefix; but this analysis would run into
ity up to the nucleus and decrease in sonority thereafter, problems when the liaison consonant precedes an otherwise
the disappearance of final schwa gave rise to syllables which invariable word: thus, whilst it might be possible to analyse
violated this principle, at least in their coda: thus quatre leurs enfants [lœʁzɑ̃fɑ̃] ‘their children’ and leurs anciennes
/katʁ/ ‘four’, table /tabl/ ‘table’. Nonetheless, in many col- maisons ‘their former houses’ [lœʁzɑ̃sjɛnmezɔ̃] as containing
loquial varieties, and especially in Laurentian and Acadian the plural forms /zɑ̃fɑ̃/ (/z/+enfants) ‘children’ and /zɑ̃sjɛn/
French, such codas tend to be simplified to [kat], [tab], so (/z/+anciennes) ‘former’, respectively, it makes less sense
maintaining the principle. Onsets may also violate the Son- to regard phrases such as leurs assez longues carrières
ority Sequencing Principle (and with it the two-consonant [lœʁzaselɔ̃ɡkaʁjɛʁ] ‘their fairly long careers’ as containing
rule, if they are phrase-initial) in contemporary French, an allomorph /zase/ (/z/+assez) of the otherwise invariable
although this is rarer: psychologie /psikoloʒi/ ‘psychology’, assez ‘fairly’; in these circumstances, the /z/ is perhaps
pneu /pnø/ ‘tyre’. In some varieties of (especially Midi) better analysed as a clitic. However, the commonest view
French, an epenthetic schwa may be inserted, again avoid- of the liaison consonant is that it is a ‘floating segment’,
ing violation of the principle: [pənø]. inserted at a relatively late stage. Evidence comes from
hypercorrection, in which a consonant other than that
expected is inserted at the word boundary, showing that,
18.4.1.5 Sandhi phenomena in these cases at least, the liaison consonant is not under-
18.4.1.5.1 Enchaînement lying. It should also be noted that in Laurentian French a
liaison consonant never triggers laxing of a preceding high
It is normal for consonants to form a syllable onset when vowel, e.g. petite ami [pətˢɪtami] ‘girlfriend (lit. small.FSG
followed by a vowel, even if a word boundary intervenes. friend.F)’ vs petit ami [pətˢitami] ‘boyfriend (lit. small.MSG
This type of syllabification, in which a word-final consonant friend.M)’, thereby suggesting that at no stage does it close
(or ‘obstruent plus liquid’ cluster) forms a syllable with a the syllable.
following word-initial vowel, is known as enchaînement. Liaison is favoured in a number of environments. Mono-
Whilst enchaînement does not always take place, it is very syllables are more likely to trigger liaison than polysyl-
much the norm (cf. §40.3.2). lables. Liaison is especially likely when it results in the
audible realization of plurality. It regularly occurs between
18.4.1.5.2 Liaison
a determiner and a following item, at the boundary between
A synchronic survival of the differential disappearance of a proclitic or enclitic pronoun and its verb, and between an
some final consonants is the sandhi phenomenon of liaison, adjective and a following noun. On the other hand, it is
in which a consonant which is not pronounced in other unusual between a singular noun and a following adjective.
contexts appears at a word boundary when followed by a Although prescriptive grammars set out hard and fast rules
vowel or certain glides; cf. les chênes [leʃɛn] ‘the oak trees’, for liaison, these are idealizations. Durand and Lyche (2008)
but les ifs [lezif] ‘the yew trees’ (cf. §40.3.2). Despite its undertake a large corpus-based study of liaison and dem-
origins, liaison is difficult to analyse synchronically in onstrate that it exhibits significant variation. Other studies
terms of the non-deletion of an underlying consonant of the linguistic variability of liaison include Green and
which terminates the word preceding the boundary, Hintze (1990) and Sampson (2001), who deals with liaison
although attempts to do so were undertaken by generative following nasal vowels. For general accounts of the phe-
phonologists in the 1960s, notably Schane (1968; but cf. nomenon, see Tranel (1987:168–90), Fouché (1959:434–77),
Schane 1974). Although it might seem implausible to view Delattre (1966), and Encrevé (1988), and for sociolinguistic
the liaison consonant as forming part of the word following aspects of liaison, see Ashby (1981) and Armstrong
the boundary, there is evidence that some speakers make (2001a:177–207).
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JOHN CHARLES SMITH
A particular issue arises when a liaison consonant is enchaînement are blocked. Thus, although the initial <h> of
followed by a glide: thus les oiseaux [lezwazo] ‘the birds’ the word hache ‘axe’ does not represent a phoneme, and the
contrasts with les whiskies [lewiski] (**[lezwiski]) ‘the word is pronounced [aʃ], an immediately preceding definite
whiskies’, and les iambes [lezjɑ̃b] ‘iambs’ with les yachts article is la, not l’ (la hache [laaʃ], not **l’hache **[laʃ]); the
[lejat] (**[lezjat]); compare, too, the minimal pair les iodes plural form les haches ‘the axes’ is [leaʃ], not **[lezaʃ];
[lezjɔd] ‘iodines’ (i.e. types of iodine) vs les yod [lejɔd] ‘yods’. and sept haches ‘seven axes’ syllabifies as [sɛt / aʃ], not
Some scholars have attempted to account for this distinc- ** [sɛ / taʃ]. The phenomenon is rarer in colloquial French
tion by claiming that, for liaison to take place, both the glide than in more formal registers.
and the vowel must appear in the nucleus; when the glide
appears in the onset, liaison is blocked (Tranel 1987). Such
an analysis is descriptively accurate, but relatively unexpla- 18.4.2 Forms and their functions
natory. The different treatment of the two sets of items may
be linked to the fact that the words which do not trigger 18.4.2.1 Inflection
liaison are recent foreign loans. 18.4.2.1.1 Noun morphology
For the claim that liaison is becoming less frequent, at
least in so-called ‘optional’ contexts, see Hansen (2012:167f.) 18.4.2.1.1.1 NUMBER
for Parisian, Côté (2012:261–68) for Laurentian, and Cichocki There are two numbers in French, singular and plural. There
(2012:226f.) for Acadian. has never been a morphological dual, although a quantifier
18.4.1.5.3 Elision ambes ‘both’ existed in old French; it was replaced by tous les
deux in middle French. The disappearance of final -/s/ from
Elision is the deletion of a word-final vowel before a word standard French means that most nouns lack audible num-
beginning with a vowel. It is not a general process, but is ber marking, since the singular and plural are phonologic-
restricted to certain items, chief amongst which are the [ə] ally identical (except in liaison contexts; see above). A small
of the preposition de ‘of, from’, the masculine singular number of nouns have counter-iconic plurals which may be
definite article le, the first person singular subject clitic je, motivated by the fact that their referents are habitually
the neutral subject clitic ce (but not the homophonous referred to in the plural (compare Tiersma 1982): such are
masculine singular demonstrative, which has the allomorph œuf /œf/ ‘egg’ vs œufs /ø/ ‘eggs; bœuf /bœf/ ‘ox’ vs bœufs
cet in these circumstances), the singular object clitics me /bø/ ‘oxen’; os /ɔs/ ‘bone’ vs os /o/ ‘bones. Another category
(first person), te (second person), and le (third person mas- of audible plurals comprises nouns which exhibit an alter-
culine), and the third person reflexive clitic se, the negative nation -/al/ ~ -/o/ (orthographically -al ~ -aux) or -/aj/ ~
clitic ne, the interrogative/relative/complementizer que -/o/ (orthographically -ail ~ -aux), e.g. cheval ‘horse’, chevaux
‘what/which, whom, that/that’, and compound conjunc- ‘horses’; travail ‘work’, travaux ‘works’. There is a tendency
tions formed with que (quoique ‘although’, lorsque ‘when’, in many colloquial varieties to extend audible invariability
etc.), and the [a] of the feminine singular definite article la to these ‘exceptional’ plurals.
and the homophonous third person singular feminine object
clitic. Clitics only elide before other items in the same clitic
18.4.2.1.1.2 GENDER
group. The final [i] of si ‘if ’ is elided before the third person
singular and plural masculine clitic subject pronoun il, ils, French has two genders, masculine and feminine. There is
but in no other circumstances. In colloquial speech only, the no real class of ambigeneric nouns, although, in most refer-
final [y] of the second person singular subject pronoun tu ence books, amour ‘love’, délice ‘delight’, and orgue ‘organ’
may be elided, especially before vowel-initial forms of the are given as nouns which are masculine in the singular and
verbs être ‘be’ and avoir ‘have’. The distribution of elision feminine in the plural. In fact, the three items are quite
with glide-initial words is the same as that of liaison (see different. Délice seems to be genuinely ambigeneric. The
above), presumably for the same reasons: cf. l’oiseau vs le other two are less obviously (or prototypically) so. Orgue is
whisky; l’iambe vs le yacht; l’iode vs le yod. masculine in the plural when it refers to several instru-
ments, but feminine plural when it refers to one (large)
18.4.1.5.4 H aspiré
instrument. Likewise, amour is masculine in the plural
So-called ‘h aspiré’—inappropriately named, as the phenom- when it refers to different types of love, and also normally
enon never involves aspiration, never involves the sound in the contemporary language when it refers to people
[h] (except in Acadian French: see above), and may not even loved or love affairs; the use of the feminine when the plural
involve the letter <h>—describes a sandhi phenomenon has this meaning is nowadays regarded as old-fashioned
whereby expected processes of liaison, elision, and and/or poetic.
302
Gender is less predictable from the form of the noun than it served as a case inflection in only a subset of masculine
in many Romance languages (see also §57.2.2). A variety of nouns, and that even here it could mark either case (nom-
processes, amongst them apocope, final-vowel reduction, inative in the singular, oblique in the plural), ensured hesi-
and the deletion of many final consonants, have led to the tation and confusion through most of the old French period,
obliteration of many cues to gender which survive in many and led to the demise of the system. Moreover, the progres-
other varieties. sive disappearance of final -/s/ and -/z/ increasingly left
The gender of some words appears to be derived by the inflection as a purely orthographic device. Zink
metonymy or ellipsis: thus la crème ‘cream’ (F), but le crème (1997:36) estimates that at least one in three instances of
‘white coffee’ (M), either metonymically on account of le café inflectional -s was not realized phonetically in the spoken
‘coffee’ (M) or elliptically—le (café à la) crème. However, it French of the thirteenth century.
may be that ellipsis and/or metonymy are too simple as Before disappearing completely, the nominal case system
explanations of this phenomenon; eau ‘water’ is feminine, went through a period of instability, with the form–function
yet names for proprietary brands of water vary in gender: la relationship showing signs of collapse before any reduction
Badoit, la Volvic are feminine, but le Perrier, un Évian are in morphological case marking. Bédier (1927:248), in a cele-
masculine, and the gender cannot plausibly be ascribed to brated barb, claims that, after the tenth century, the only
the form of the word itself. texts which use the case forms ‘correctly’ are modern gram-
There is some variation in the gender of particular nouns mars of old French; but northern authors and scribes, at
(for example, astérisque ‘asterisk’ is conventionally mascu- least, show some consistency in case usage into the very late
line, but frequently feminine in colloquial speech). There fourteenth century. The case forms were lost differentially,
are also examples of a noun having different genders in disappearing in western before eastern texts, and from
European and Laurentian French (e.g. the loanword job is nouns earlier than from determiners (for a fuller account,
masculine in Europe, but tends to be feminine in Canada). see Schøsler 1984). By the mid-fifteenth century, however,
awareness of the distinct case forms was limited to the fact
18.4.2.1.1.3 CASE
that they had once existed; if they were used at all, it was as
The only items which exhibit case in modern French are a grammatically unmotivated marker of archaism (cf. Pope
singular and third person plural pronouns. A nominal case 1934:§806; Longnon 1977:24f.; Marchello-Nizia 1997:122);
system existed in the medieval language, which distin- even if the haphazard use of the case forms is a conscious
guished a nominative (subject) case from an oblique (‘else- literary device, it still demonstrates that the forms them-
where’) case. Although the oblique served mostly to encode selves were now opaque.
objects of verbs, objects of prepositions, and adjuncts, it Generally, the modern French form is derived from the
could also, in early old French, encode an indirect object old French oblique case. For most nouns, the oblique was
(dative) or a possessor (genitive). the commoner form, and this fact may well have favoured
The realization of the case system was nugatory. Regular its retention, but a more likely explanation lies the fact that
feminine nouns lacked distinct case forms: thus, SG rose ‘rose’ old Romance had moved towards an active–stative/ergative
vs PL roses ‘roses’, in both cases. Regular masculine nouns alignment in which, unlike in a nominative–accusative
marked the nominative with -s and the oblique with zero in alignment, the unmarked form is the stative/absolutive
the singular, and the nominative with zero and the oblique case (Ledgeway 2012a:304f.). Moreover, the ‘Ø = singular;
with -s in the plural: thus, NOM.SG murs, OBL.SG mur ‘wall’ vs -s = plural’ pattern was already present in most feminine
NOM.PL mur, OBL.PL murs ‘walls’. Nouns which did not exhibit nouns, regardless of case, and may have constituted an
these paradigms etymologically were nonetheless attracted analogy. Finally, the ‘Ø = singular; -s = plural’ of the oblique
into them—thus ‘mother’ and ‘father’, which differ simply is iconic, whereas the ‘-s = singular; Ø = plural’ pattern of the
by their initial segment in late Latin and have otherwise nominative is counter-iconic. In the oblique case, where the
identical paradigms, yield, respectively, etymological SG plural form carries a mark of plurality (the final -s), the
mere vs PL meres, in both nominative and oblique, but marked meaning is expressed by the marked form, whereas
(most commonly) analogical NOM.SG peres, OBL.SG pere vs NOM. the nominative case, it is the unmarked singular which has
PL pere, OBL.PL peres. A small number of nouns exhibited the morphological marking. Nonetheless, in certain
imparisyllabic paradigms (cf. NOM.SG emperedre, OBL.SG emper- instances, chiefly involving imparisyllabic nouns, the nom-
eor ‘emperor’); most of these nouns were masculine, but inative case form is the one that survives: e.g. peintre/
note NOM seur, OBL sereur ‘sister’ (although no imparisyllabic **peinteur ‘painter’, prêtre/**prévoire ‘priest’, ancêtre/**an-
noun had etymological -s in the nominative singular, we cesseur ‘ancestor’, sœur/**sereur ‘sister’, traître/**traiteur
again find this inflection added to masculines by analogy, ‘traitor, fils/**fil ‘son’. Some personal proper names, too,
e.g. empereres). The fact that the only inflection was -s, that continue the nominative, as witness the final -s of Charles,
303
JOHN CHARLES SMITH
Georges, Jacques. All these nouns are animate and many of homogeneity of this conjugation. For instance, intransitive
them are agentive, meaning that they are especially likely or transitive ‘change-of-state’ verbs derived from an adjec-
to occur as subjects; or else they are frequently used as tive will tend to belong to this regular -ir class—thus
vocatives (another possible function of the nominative). intransitive grandir ‘become big, grow’, transitive agrandir
For general discussion of animacy and frequency as factors ‘enlarge’ (cf. grand ‘big’); intransitive faiblir ‘weaken’, transi-
influencing the evolution of case-systems, see Winter tive affaiblir ‘weaken’ (cf. faible ‘weak’). But this class is no
(1971:55–61); for specific discussion of the survival of the longer productive (the last new forms are, famously, alunir
nominative, see Mańczak (1969) and Spence (1971). ‘land on the moon’, first attested in 1921 (cf. lune ‘moon’),
Morphological noun case has completely disappeared and amerrir ‘land in the sea’, first attested in 1928 (cf. mer
from French. However, in the modern language we ‘sea’), both by analogy with existing atterrir ‘to land’; the last
occasionally find doublets, where each case form has ‘change-of-state’ verb derived from an adjective appears to
survived, but as a separate lexical item. Examples (ori- have been rosir ‘grow pink’ (cf. rose ‘pink’), first attested in
ginal nominative first, original oblique second) are: on 1823 (all dates from Imbs 1971–94); even before it ceased to
(indefinite subject pronoun) ‘one’ vs homme ‘man’; Gilles be productive, there were change-of-state verbs derived
(proper name) vs gille ‘carnival clown; simpleton’; Jac- from adjectives which belonged to other conjugations
ques (proper name), also ‘peasant; bumpkin; jay (bird)’ vs (such as rapetisser ‘make small’, more rarely ‘grow small’
jacque ‘jerkin’; and possibly chantre ‘cantor; choirmaster; (cf. petit ‘small’) and hausser ‘raise’ (cf. haut ‘high’); and many
poet’ vs chanteur ‘singer’. In each of these examples verbs in the regular -ir class are neither change-of-state
(cf. Smith 2005; 2011a), the original nominative yields verbs nor derived from an adjective (applaudir ‘applaud’;
a more agentive item and the original accusative/ languir ‘languish’, etc., including the relatively recent
oblique a less agentive item, in keeping with the func- (1907) onomatopœic vrombir ‘buzz’). For discussion, see
tion of the original case form. Kobayashi (1988:398f.) and Hewson (1997:149).
Descriptions of case in old French are given by Nyrop A majority of -ir verbs contain an ‘augment’ (realized as
(1925:174–209), Pope (1934:§§794–807), Zink (1997:27–38), -i- or -iss-, depending on context, and derived from Latin
and Buridant (2000:62–104), and case-loss is dealt with by inchoative -ISC-; cf. §43.2.4) in the present indicative and
Laubscher (1921). A more detailed account of some these subjunctive, the present participle, and the imperfect indi-
phenomena appears in Ashdowne and Smith (2007), cative; however, a significant minority, many with high
Schøsler (1984; 2001), and van Reenen and Schøsler (1986; token frequency (e.g. sortir ‘go/come out’, dormir ‘sleep’),
1997; 2000). lack it, cf. nous finissons ‘we finish’ but nous dormons
‘we sleep’.
18.4.2.1.1.4 ABSENCE OF MORPHOLOGICAL DIMINUTIVES
There is a small class of regular -re verbs, although many
AND AUGMENTATIVES
verbs with this infinitive ending exhibit irregular para-
Unlike many Romance languages (cf. §28.4.3), French has digms. Interestingly, all -oir verbs are irregular, despite
lacked productive diminutive or augmentative morphology this infinitive ending originating in the regular second
since the sixteenth century. Original diminutives have conjugation of Latin.
become lexicalized as separate words, often with little or A number of heteroclitic conjugations exist in French.
no semantic connection, thus livret, originally ‘little book’, Ouvrir ‘open’, couvrir ‘cover’, offrir ‘offer’, and derivatives
now ‘passbook; libretto’; lunette, originally ‘little moon’, now behave like -ir verbs in the future, conditional, simple
‘curved window; (in the plural) spectacles’; chevalet, origin- past, and past subjunctive, but like -er verbs in most
ally ‘little horse’, now ‘easel’. other parts of the paradigm (their imperfect is indeter-
minate between that of -er or augmentless -ir verbs, and
18.4.2.1.2 Verb conjugation
they have an idiosyncratic past participle in -ert). Saillir ‘to
French has four infinitive endings: -er, -oir, -re, and -ir, each stand out’ and derivatives (assaillir ‘assault’, tressaillir
traceable back to one of the Latin conjugations: I (-ĀRE), II ‘start, shudder’) behave in the same way, except
(-ĒRE), III (-ĔRE), and IV (-ĪRE), respectively. However, the that their past participle additionally aligns with that of
distribution of these endings and their associated para- -ir verbs.
digms is very different in French. By far the largest conju-
18.4.2.1.2.1 MORPHOMIC STRUCTURE
gation, and the only one still productive, is the -er class,
traditionally called the ‘first conjugation’. The second lar- A striking feature of French is the relatively low frequency
gest is the -ir class, which traditional French grammar of the ‘morphomic’ ‘N-’ and ‘L-’ patterns, which are wide-
calls the second conjugation, although it corresponds to spread in most other areas of the Romània, and the total
the Latin fourth. Claims have been made about the semantic absence of the ‘U-pattern’. On this point, see §43.4.
304
18.4.2.1.2.2 TENSE AND ASPECT 1992:221). They have two principal uses: as approximate but
less formal equivalents of the passé antérieur, and ‘to stress
The tense/aspect system of French is here exemplified with
aspectual perfectivity and, in some cases, the relative rarity
forms of faire ‘make, do’, and described in the formalism of
of occurrence of the event’ (Ayres-Bennett and Carruthers
Hornstein (1990), modifying the original theory of
1992:221). For discussion, see Cornu (1953), Stéfanini (1954),
Reichenbach (1947), in which the moment of speech (S), an
Holtus (1986), and Ayres-Bennett and Carruthers (1992).
event time (E), and a reference point (R), are linked by
Strikingly absent from French are periphrastic construc-
relations of simultaneity (,) or successiveness (—). The
tions involving the gerund, widespread in many Romance
merit of Hornstein’s analysis is that it reduces Reichen-
languages. Such constructions existed up to the sixteenth
bach’s original ternary analysis to two binary relationships
century, but survive only in fossilized formulae such as Il
between E and R on the one hand and S and R on the other
(s’en) va croissant/augmentant, lit. ‘It is going (away) growing/
(see also Comrie 1981). Formal written French has a syn-
increasing’.
thetic present [(E,R)•(S,R)] (je fais ‘I do’), preterite or simple
Various explanations have been proposed for the shift
past [(E,R)•(R—S)] (je fis ‘I did’), imperfect [also (E,R)•(R—S),
from the simple to the compound past in ordinary speech
the difference being one of aspect] (je faisais ‘I did’), future
(cf. §§6.4.3, 58.3.2). One of the commonest is that the com-
[(E,R)•(S—R)] (je ferai ‘I shall do’), and future in the past [(E,R)
pound past, with its use of an auxiliary and a past participle,
•(S—R), but with S referring to a moment of speech in the
is easier to acquire and manipulate than the simple past,
past] (je ferais ‘I would do’). Other tense/aspect forms are
which may have an unpredictable stem in irregular verbs
realized analytically and involve an auxiliary followed by a
and exhibits inflections which are otherwise rare (notably
non-finite form of the verb: thus, with the past participle,
first person plural -mes and second person plural -tes).
the present perfect or compound past [(E—R)•(S,R)] (j’ai fait
Against this claim of greater simplicity must be set the
‘I have done’), the pluperfect [(E—R)•(R—S)] (j’avais fait ‘I had
fact that the stem of the past participle of irregular verbs
done’), the past anterior [also (E—R)•(R—S), but with the
shows a similar unpredictability, and that the distribution
implication that E immediately precedes R] (j’eus fait ‘I had
of the two auxiliaries involved—avoir ‘have’ and être ‘be’—is
done’), the future perfect [(E—R)•(S—R)] (j’aurai fait ‘I shall
orthogonal to all other features of verb class. Another argu-
have done’), and the future perfect in the past [(E—R)•(S—R),
ment is that French is becoming a more analytic language.
but with S referring to a moment of speech in the past]
Whilst this is probably true, it does not explain why this
(j’aurais fait ‘I would have done’); and, with the infinitive, the
particular verb form is affected. In addition, any explan-
future [(R—E)•(S,R)] (je vais faire ‘I am going to do’). A small
ation should ideally take into account parallel develop-
number of unaccusative verbs form their compound past
ments in other languages, including (northern) Italian,
tenses with the auxiliary être ‘be’, rather than avoir ‘have’ (je
(southern) German, and Australian English (Engel and Ritz
suis allé ‘I have (lit. am) gone’). In ordinary conversational
2000; Ritz and Engel 2008). One possible account involves
language, the values of the preterite have been taken over
speaker attitude. The use of [(E—R)•(S,R)] to represent [(E,R)•
by the present perfect (hence the use of the term ‘com-
(R—S)] involves shifting the reference point from the event
pound past’ as a more appropriate label for the latter form;
to the moment of speech, and could be seen as explicit
§58.3.2), although the preterite (‘simple past’) is still found
encoding of present relevance (compare Grice’s maxim of
in more elevated discourse (which can include formal lec-
relation) in the form of the verb itself. (The use of the ‘historic
tures, political speeches, and even television news reports);
present’, where [(E,R)•(S,R)] is used to represent [(E,R)•(R—S)],
monosyllabic third person singular forms of frequently
could be seen as having a similar motivation.) Having no
occurring verbs (e.g. fut ‘was’, eut ‘had’, fit ‘did’) are espe-
records of the ordinary spoken language of the seventeenth
cially likely. The past anterior, with its preterite auxiliary,
and eighteenth centuries, we can only speculate on the
has likewise disappeared from the spoken language.
course followed by this change, but it is at least likely that
A periphrastic construction je viens de faire lit. ‘I come
the compound past began to be used with preterite value in
from do.INF’ also exists, and has been claimed by some (e.g.
contexts where the speaker wished to stress the salience of
Flydal 1943; Harris 1978a) to have entered the tense/aspect
an event or action. A similar usage can still be found in a
system as a unambiguous exponent of the present perfect;
variety of written registers. See also §§6.4.3, 58.3.2.
however, such a claim is at best premature.
A prescriptive rule is that the past participle of a com-
In addition to the above forms, we find double compound
pound past tense formed with avoir ‘have’ should agree with
forms (surcomposés), where the auxiliary is itself a com-
a preceding direct object (but not with one that follows the
pound form (cf. also §58.3.4); thus, j’ai eu fait, lit. ‘I have
verb), although this agreement is frequently absent from
had done’. These are ‘perceived to be on the margins of
the spoken language (where, in any case, no past participle
acceptable French grammar’ (Ayres-Bennett and Carruthers
has an audibly distinct plural and the majority exhibit no
305
JOHN CHARLES SMITH
distinct feminine form). See Smith (1995a; 1996; 1997; 1999; 18.4.2.1.2.3 MOOD
2001a), who claims that the phenomenon may have a func-
In the present tense, alongside the indicative, French has a
tional motivation (cf. also §49.2).
subjunctive mood (il fasse ‘he do.SBJV’). In many regular
In addition, there is evidence that, in the contemporary
verbs, the forms of the two moods are identical in several
spoken language, the pluperfect is taking over some of the
persons.
functions previously encoded by the simple past (Engel
It is not a straightforward matter to give an account of
1996). These developments could be linked as follows, in
the distribution of the subjunctive in contemporary French.
terms of the formalism used above: the preterite [(E,R)•(R—
Bally (1932) and others go so far as to claim that it no longer
S)] is replaced by the present perfect [(E—R)•(S,R)]; as a
has any semantic value and is entirely determined by gram-
result, in contexts where it is necessary for the reference
mar. Connors (1978) distinguishes between an ‘automatic’
point explicitly to precede the moment of speech, the plu-
subjunctive and a ‘non-automatic’ subjunctive. Where the
perfect [(E—R)•(R—S)] is drafted in.
subjunctive can be identified as having a meaning, it is
The imperfect, as its name implies, originates as an
often claimed to encode ‘non-assertion’. Thus, the distinc-
imperfective (past) tense. The opposition between this
tion between Je cherche quelqu’un qui sait (IND) parler plu-
form and the preterite (or, in ordinary speech, the com-
sieurs langues and Je cherche quelqu’un qui sache (SBJV) parler
pound past) represents the one point in the French verb
plusieurs langues, both translatable as ‘I’m looking for
paradigm where a significant aspectual opposition appears
someone who can (IND/SBJV) speak several languages’, is
(cf. also §58.2). However, through various metaphorical
that the former refers to a specific individual, whilst the
uses, the imperfect has subsequently acquired a large num-
latter is non-specific, and does not imply that such a
ber of values which derive from its imperfectivity, but are
person exists. But the functional yield of this distinction
no longer strictly interpretable as aspectual. In literary
is slight—both sentences can be rendered (albeit in an
texts since the mid-nineteenth century, it is frequently
extremely formal style) as Je cherche un polyglotte ‘I’m
found as a narrative form; by describing events or actions
looking for a polyglot’, and this latter type of sentence is
in medias res, without reference to their completion, it cre-
not generally felt to be unacceptably ambiguous.
ates a subjective impression: we see something happening
Although ‘non-assertion’ may seem a relatively unprob-
rather than seeing it happen. Arguably derived from this
lematic concept, its realization can vary between languages
value is a contemporary journalistic usage in which the
(Wierzbiecka 1988:140-61). In French, it is generally possible
imperfect encodes authorial identification with the action
to assert a proposition if one believes it to be true: thus, in
or the agent. The imperfect can also be used to indicate
addition to clearly assertive predicates, such as savoir ‘know’
various degrees of hypotheticality (as in the protasis of
and certain ‘certain’, predicates such as croire ‘believe’ and
conditional sentences, or the ‘pre-ludic’ imperfect of chil-
probable ‘probable’ are also normally followed by an indica-
dren’s play; see Fleischman 1989) or even counterfactuality.
tive; however, when they are negated or in the interroga-
It can also be used with hypocoristic value (Fleischman
tive, a subjunctive normally follows. On the other hand, in
1995) or to attenuate a statement: thus Je voulais vous poser
addition to clearly non-assertive predicates, such as nier
une question ‘I wanted [imperfect] to ask you a question’
‘deny’, impossible ‘impossible’, more weakly non-assertive
encodes greater politeness or deference than use of the
predicates, such as douter ‘doute’, possible ‘possible’, are
present, but not past time reference.
generally followed by a subjunctive. However, when verbs
In standard European French, the aller (‘go’) future (je vais
such as nier or douter are negated, many speakers continue
faire lit. ‘I.go do.INF’), originally a proximate or immediate
to use a subjunctive in the following clause, rather than the
future [(R—E)•(S,R)], has been making inroads into the
indicative which would be semantically justified, demon-
expression of the ‘unmarked’ future [(E,R)•(S—R)], tradition-
strating that, here at least, use of the subjunctive may
ally encoded by the synthetic je ferai (Jones 1996:160). In
have become lexicalized. For the rest, the subjunctive is
Laurentian French, this process is more advanced, and, in
particularly likely to be found with verbs of volition and
the spoken language, the aller future has ousted the syn-
with the verb of obligation falloir ‘be necessary’ (see e.g.
thetic future from positive sentences, although the syn-
Poplack 1992).
thetic form continues to be possible in negative sentences
In addition to the present subjunctive, there is also a past
(Deshaies and Laforge 1981; Emirkanian and Sankoff 1985;
subjunctive (il f ît, conventionally referred to as the ‘imper-
Lesage and Gagnon 1992; Zimmer 1994; Poplack and Turpin
fect subjunctive’, although this is something of a misnomer,
1999; Sankoff and Wagner 2006). The process here is similar
as it may also serve as a preterite subjunctive and may have
to the replacement of the simple past by the compound
future reference when following a main verb in the condi-
past (see above), and much the same arguments could be
tional). However, this form is moribund in the contemporary
adduced.
306
language, and has effectively been lost from spoken French indicative in the protasis and a conditional perfect in the
(see Jeppesen Kragh 2010). Its disappearance has been linked, apodosis. The ‘conditional’ then became free to imply a
not always convincingly, to various factors, including aes- condition, rather than being restricted to the apodosis of a
thetic considerations. The most plausible account involves conditional sentence, as in, for instance: Il serait ridicule de
sequence of tenses. The subjunctive has now effectively dis- croire que le soleil tourne autour de la terre ‘It would be ridicu-
appeared from main clauses in French: apparent exceptions lous to believe that the sun goes round the earth’ (implied
are either fossilized locutions (À Dieu ne plaise ‘God forbid’, lit. condition: if anybody did believe it). In a further develop-
‘May it not please God’) or reinterpretation of the former ment, such implied conditions led to autonomous uses of
subjunctive as an invariable particle (compare Vive la France the ‘conditional’ as an attenuative form of the verb. One
‘Long live France’, but also Vive nous, not **Vivions nous ‘Long such use is to express politeness or deference, with the
live us’). For as long as the subjunctive could be used in main implied condition: if I were to ask you, etc.—for example:
clauses, a distinction of tense was semantically functional; Est-ce que vous auriez du lait? ‘Would you (happen to) have
however, with the restriction of the subjunctive to subordin- some milk?’. Another is as an evidential (implied condition:
ate clauses, the tense of the subordinate clause could gener- if the evidence is to be believed, e.g. Le gouvernement aurait
ally (although not always) be inferred from the tense of the décidé d’augmenter les impôts ‘(We understand that) the gov-
main clause, and the tense distinction in the subjunctive lost ernment has decided to increase taxes’, as opposed to Le
much of its functionality. This change might be construed as gouvernement a décidé d’augmenter les impôts, which simply
an example of hypercorrection (see §18.4.1.1.5): tense in the states the fact directly. It is clear that the conditional can
subjunctive is reinterpreted as contextual (triggered by the now be used to encode ‘non-assertion’ in a way which makes
verb of the main clause) rather than inherent. it in some respects a rival to the subjunctive.
The conditional is an extension of (and formally identical
18.4.2.1.3 Determiners
to) the ‘future-in-the-past’. Changes in the structure of
conditional sentences led to the emergence of this form in As in most Romance languages, the French definite article
a new environment. A key development was its use in the derives from the Latin distal (non-discourse-participant)
apodosis of hypothetical conditional sentences. In old demonstrative ILLE (cf. §46.3.1.1). A reinforced form of ILLE,
French, irrealis conditional sentences, both potential and preceded by the ostensive particle ECCE (‘behold’), was also
hypothetical, had a subjunctive in both the protasis and the available, and this became the unambiguous exponent of
apodosis. Subsequently, the imperfect subjunctive of the remote deixis (‘that’). Unlike many Romance languages,
potential conditional protasis gave way to an imperfect which have retained a three-term demonstrative system
indicative, possibly to stress the realizability of the condi- similar in function to the Latin one, old French reduced
tion (as opposed to the absolute unrealizability of a coun- the number of demonstratives to two: cist ‘this’ and cil
terfactual condition). By analogy, a ‘past tense of the future’ ‘that’ (§54.1.1). These items could occur with or without a
was required in the apodosis. Hence the pattern S’il vînt, nous complement, functioning as either determiners or pro-
jouassions ‘If he came, we would play’ is replaced, on the nouns. Subsequently, the system was further reduced, to a
analogy of S’il vient, nous jouerons ‘If he comes, we shall play’, single term (cf. §54.1.7), with the earlier proximate/remote
by S’il venait, nous jouerions. opposition being refunctionalized (most clearly in the fem-
Counterfactuals could also be expressed in old French by inine) as a distinction between a determiner and a pronoun
the imperfect subjunctive (which itself derives from the (cf. cette femme ‘this/that woman’ vs **cette; celle ‘this/that
Latin pluperfect subjunctive). In principle, therefore, the (one)’ vs **celle femme; Marchello-Nizia 1995).
old French equivalent of S’il vînt, nous jouassions was ambigu- Orr (1962) suggested that the definite article functioned
ous as between potential and counterfactual readings, in old French much as it does in contemporary English, i.e.
although the context would often resolve any ambiguity. as a marker of definiteness. The comparison is not exact, but
From the fourteenth century onwards, the analytic pluper- it is useful. Epstein (1993; 1994; 1995) gives a more detailed
fect subjunctive came to rival the imperfect subjunctive in account of the use of the definite article in old French,
this context, and eventually the analytic pluperfect form arguing that an early function of this item was to attract
became the sole exponent of counterfactual conditionality. attention to an item in an ‘affective’ way, that is, its value
In counterfactuals, the subjunctive survived for longer (and was essentially pragmatic and ‘subjective’.
remains possible in extremely formal French: S’il fût venu, Subsequently, the ‘definite article’ extended its meaning
nous eussions joué ‘If he had come, we would have played’). to encompass generic reference. It has sometimes been
But normally, this pattern, too, succumbed, and was claimed that this development was connected with the
realigned on the analogy of the other types of conditional, loss of audible inflectional information, namely, with the
becoming S’il était venu, nous aurions joué, with a pluperfect loss of final -/s/ (and, to an extent, final -/ə/), it became
307
JOHN CHARLES SMITH
difficult, sometimes impossible, to discern the number or argued, may be the result of Celtic substrate influence.
gender of a noun or adjective from its form, so the article In some regional varieties, especially in Belgium and
was co-opted as a marker of these categories. This view of Switzerland, septante and nonante are used for ‘seventy’
sound change triggering grammatical change is implausible. and ‘ninety’, respectively. Quatre-vingts is robust in all
In fact, the emergence of what is in part a number and areas, and, although both huitante and (more rarely) octante
gender marker from an article is a very widespread devel- occur for ‘eighty’, they are rare.
opment, found in many languages where nouns still have Cardinal numerals above ‘one’ (un (M), une (F)) do not vary
audibly distinct forms for different numbers and genders for gender, although, quite exceptionally, we find separate
(see Greenberg 1978), and does not appear to be linked to gender forms for ‘two’ and ‘three’ (M [dø], [tɾwa]; F [døs],
the specific morphophonological structures of French (cf. [tɾwas], respectively) in some varieties of Acadian French
also the survival of case marking on the article after it had (Cichocki 2012:227).
been lost from nouns discussed in §18.4.2.1.1.3). In addition, Ordinal numerals for ‘first’ and ‘second’ derive from late
it has been argued independently that generic reference Latin: premier, second. Alongside the latter is the more
may in some ways be related to definite reference, as the transparent deuxième, formed by suffixing -ième to the
exhaustive membership of a set is identifiable (see e.g. cardinal numeral. Ordinal numerals from three upwards
Chierchia 1998; Krifka et al. 1995). are formed in the same way: troisième, quatrième, etc. The
The result of this change is that a contemporary French etymological ordinals above ‘second’ which are found in
sentence such as J’aime les fraises, although it can bear the many other Romance languages disappeared from French
meaning ‘I like the strawberries’, has the default interpret- in this function by the seventeenth century, although they
ation ‘I like strawberries (in general)’. The former sense can are still found in the expression of fractions (un tiers ‘a
be unambiguously expressed by J’aime ces (lit. ‘these/those’) third’, un quart ‘a quarter’; but thereafter un cinquième ‘a
fraises, leaving J’aime ces fraises-là to convey the meaning ‘I fifth’, etc.), in musical intervals (une tierce ‘a third’, une
like those strawberries’. As in Latin, the ‘bare’ demonstra- quarte ‘a fourth’, une quinte ‘a fifth’, une sixte ‘a sixth’; but
tive acquires a broadly definite value, and is replaced by a une septième ‘a seventh’, etc.) and in some set expressions
reinforced form in its unambiguously demonstrative sense. (un tiers, une tierce personne ‘a third party’; Charles-Quint ‘the
The indefinite articles un (M), une (F) derive from the Emperor Charles V’; une quinte (de toux) ‘a coughing fit’,
numeral ‘one’, with which it is phonologically identical, originally a bout of coughing that recurred every fifth
save that the numeral is an ‘h aspiré’ word (cf. §18.4.1.5.4), hour).
whilst the article is not. In old French the indefinite article A striking feature of contemporary French in compari-
generally refers only to items with specific reference; non- son to many other Romance languages is its reduced num-
specific indefinite items appear without an article. How- ber of inflected quantifiers. The only quantifier which
ever, like the definite article, its range is extended, and it inflects for both numbers and both genders is tout ‘all’.
comes to mark indefiniteness in general, regardless of Chaque ‘each’ is always singular, and plusieurs ‘several’
specificity. always plural; neither item varies for gender. Quelque
The partitive article consists of the preposition de ‘of, ‘some’ exhibits variation for number, but not for gender.
from’ plus the generic form of the noun (see §6.4.2). Thus, Earlier stages of the language had forms such as tant ‘so
in old French, partitivity is expressed simply by this prep- much, so many’ mou(l)t ‘much, many’, maint ‘many’, the last
osition. As the definite article comes to be the exponent of still marginally used as a jocular archaism, which did
generic reference, so the partitive article changes to du, de inflect for number and gender. However, inflected quanti-
la, des, etc. fiers have largely disappeared, and quantification is now
commonly encoded by an invariable item followed by the
18.4.2.1.4 Numerals and quantifiers
preposition de ‘of ’. In some cases, the invariable item
French cardinal numerals up to and including sixteen derive derives from an earlier inflected item: thus mou(l)t de
straightforwardly from their Latin equivalents. ‘Seventeen’, ‘much, many’ (no longer current, but found in the six-
‘eighteen’, and ‘nineteen’ are formed compositionally: dix- teenth century) and tant de ‘so much, so many’ (still cur-
sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf. Multiples of ten from twenty to sixty rent). Other invariable quantifiers have always been
inclusive also derive from Latin etyma. For multiples of ten invariable (beaucoup de ‘much, many’, trop de ‘too much,
between seventy and ninety inclusive, the standard lan- too many’, assez de ‘enough’), including some which were
guage has recourse to a vigesimal system (soixante-dix, lit. originally adverbs (tellement de ‘so much, so many’ (lit.
‘sixty-ten’, quatre-vingts, lit. ‘four-twenties’, quatre-vingt-dix ‘such’), énormément de ‘a huge amount/number of ’ (lit.
lit. ‘four-twenty-ten’), which, it has been inconclusively ‘enormously’). See Battye (1995).
308
18.4.3 Syntax It was not uncommon in old French to emphasize neg-

ation by adding an element (often a quasi-object minimizer;
18.4.3.1 Ordering of noun and adjective cf. §51.2.2) after the verb. The elements most frequently
The adjective in French canonically follows the noun, in used in this function were pas ‘step’, point ‘stitch’, mie
keeping with the general tendency of the language to ‘crumb’, goutte ‘drop’, mot ‘word’. In time, these elements
place dependents after heads (cf. §62.1.2). However, it is were grammaticalized as markers of emphatic negation,
not rare for certain adjectives to precede the noun; in changing polarity as described above. At this stage, they
these circumstances, they are generally said to have a all had much the same meaning, and it is therefore unsur-
more ‘subjective’ or ‘affective’ meaning. prising to find one of them tending to take over the func-
In fact, adjective–noun order in French is a complex mat- tions of the rest. The form which has triumphed is pas.
ter, and notions such as ‘subjectivity’ and ‘affectivity’ do not Price (1998:252f.) suggests that pas was ‘selected’ because
do justice to that complexity. The meaning of a phrase in it was the most common emphatic negative particle in the
which the adjective follows the noun is straightforwardly speech of Paris. But why should pas have been so frequent in
compositional: thus, une église ancienne, lit. ‘a church old’, the first place? Its frequency may have to do with the
simply means ‘an old church’, and can be glossed with une frequency of verbs of motion, and may also involve the
église qui est ancienne ‘a church which is old’. Contrast the very basic metaphor of ‘time is space’, although even in
phrase in which the same adjective precedes the same noun: early texts we find pas used with a broad range of verbs.
une ancienne église ‘a former church’. Here, the meaning is Point continued to be frequent in transitive constructions,
non-compositional: what is referred to is not (or no longer) a and overwhelmingly with partitive objects. It subsequently
church, and need not be old. A fortiori, the phrase cannot be survived, albeit more marginally, in the standard language
glossed with the relative clause already quoted (on these (according to the Petit Robert, it is archaic, literary, or
issues, see Cinque 2010). What we appear to have here is a regional), often expressing greater emphasis or a marked
semi-lexicalized expression (église could be replaced by any presuppositional value (see Kiparsky and Condoravdi 2006).
relevant noun). The example just quoted is near one end of a Other particles also survive in some fixed expressions; com-
spectrum—one could argue that items such as grand-père pare the rhyming proverb À la Sainte-Mélanie, de la pluie n’en
‘grandfather’ lie at the extremity of the spectrum, being veux mie (‘On St Melanie’s Day, I don’t want any rain’) and
fully lexicalized. At the other end of the spectrum, it is Qui ne dit mot consent (‘[Someone] who says nothing gives
difficult to be as trenchant about the difference in meaning consent’). Goutte survives as an occasional marker of neg-
between, say, un bonbon délicieux and un délicieux bonbon, both ation with the verbs voir ‘see’, dire ‘say’, boire ‘drink’, and
of which could be translated as ‘a delicious sweet’, although croire ‘believe’.
the latter may be more salient as a result of its non- Pas subsequently lost its emphatic or presuppositional
compositional or partly lexicalized meaning. A handful of value and became a co-marker of negation, along with ne.
adjectives (e.g. piètre ‘poor, pathetic’) are restricted to pre- This double marking could have proved stable; but the
nominal position; in keeping with the analysis proposed former element disappears, being weaker, in that (as a
above, they never occur predicatively. clitic) it could never bear stress. A few contexts in contem-
porary French allow ne as a negative particle in isolation,
without pas: the verbs savoir ‘know’, pouvoir ‘be able’, cesser
‘cease’, and oser ‘dare’ may use this construction in certain
18.4.3.2 Negation contexts in elevated (written) registers; likewise certain
Latin NON ‘not’ evolved regularly in two ways in French, conditional and indefinite structures (e.g. Si ce n’est . . .
becoming non [nɔ̃] when stressed, and nen [nən], then ne, ‘Except for (lit. If it is not)’; Qui d’entre nous n’a eu cette
when unstressed. impression? ‘Who amongst us has not had this impression?’).
The distribution of non and ne in old French was there- These are to be distinguished from the so-called ‘expletive
fore, to start with, phonologically determined. We find both ne’ found in structures such as Je crains qu’il ne vienne ‘I fear
non and ne negating verbs. However, the unstressed form he will come (lit. not come.3SG.SBJV)’; Avant qu’elle n’arrive . . .
gradually came to be associated with verbal negation, and ‘Before she arrives (lit. not arrive.3SG.SBJV)’; Il est plus intelli-
the stressed with other contexts, so that the distribution of gent qu’il n’en a l’air ‘He is more intelligent than he seems (lit.
the two items is now grammatically determined. In particu- not=of.it has the air)’, which is not a negative element as
lar, non is the negator of nouns and of adjectives and such, but which arguably arises through a process of crypt-
adverbs (although it has now been largely replaced by pas analysis (Croft 2000), where some semantic element in a
in the latter two contexts, except in very formal language). construction receives double exponence (cf. §51.5). In this
It is also a discourse particle, ‘no’. case, the cryptanalysis is brought about by interference
309
JOHN CHARLES SMITH
from the entailment (‘I’d rather he didn’t come’; ‘She hasn’t situation will resolve itself into a simple dichotomy between
arrived yet’; ‘He doesn’t seem intelligent’). Je sais as unambiguously positive and Je sais pas as unam-
Jespersen (1917) claimed that, in many languages, a biguously negative.
‘cycle’ existed, whereby the encoding of negation oscil- For further discussion, see Ashby (1976; 1981; 2001),
lated between single and double exponence, and that the Mosegaard Hansen (2009; 2013), Mosegaard Hansen and
ne > ne . . . pas > pas development was a prime example of Visconti (2009).
this (§51.2.1). There is some evidence that ‘Jespersen’s
Cycle’, a term coined by Dahl (1979), may be starting
again in French: a handful of colloquial varieties, particu- 18.4.3.3 Word order
larly in the New World, appear to permit, e.g. J’ai pas rien Key to a diachronic understanding of two major aspects of
compris, lit. ‘I have NEG nothing understood’ in the sense of contemporary French syntax—inversion and the use of sub-
‘I understood nothing’. See e.g. Rowlett (1998:165–8) and ject clitics—is the role played by the ‘verb-second’ (V2)
Valdman (2007, s.v. jargonner). constraint at earlier stages of the language (cf. §§12.4.3.4,
Croft (2000) sees the development of French negation as a 31.3.3, 62.5). Old French exhibited a strong tendency
process of ‘metanalysis’, in which two elements switch func- towards verb-second word order, possibly under Germanic
tion. More specifically, metanalysis is a combination of influence, and it has been convincingly argued that this
‘hypoanalysis’ and ‘hyperanalysis’, consisting of the simul- word order has left significant traces in the modern
taneous reinterpretation of a contextual feature as inherent language.
and an inherent feature as contextual. Croft himself argues
(2000:130f.) that negation is contextual and emphasis inher- 18.4.3.3.1 Inversion and interrogation
ent, and that the high correlation between negation and Formal registers present two types of inversion (see also
emphasis may mean that ‘the negative function is attributed §53.3). The first inverts a verb and its clitic subject: it is
to the emphatic element, while the emphatic function is found in questions and after a handful of sentence-initial
attributed to the nonlinguistic context’. However, another triggering items (à peine ‘scarcely’, ainsi ‘thus’, aussi (in this
metanalytical interpretation is possible. Originally, ne is the context) ‘therefore’, encore (in this context) ‘even then’, peut-
marker of negation (a semantic feature, therefore arguably être ‘perhaps’, sans doute ‘probably’, and toujours ‘nonetheless,
inherent) and pas is an emphatic element (a pragmatic still’) where it is a relic of an original verb-second constraint.
feature, therefore arguably contextual). Ne and pas together The second inverts the verb and a non-clitic subject (so-called
therefore encode emphatic negation. The reanalysis of pas ‘stylistic inversion’): it is found after wh-words. It follows that
as a marker of negation gives rise to the possibility that ne both types of inversion are found in wh-questions; but else-
may be reinterpreted as a marker of emphasis and therefore where they do not overlap. Yes/no questions involving a
retained in certain contexts, i.e. that the division of labour non-clitic subject may exhibit ‘complex inversion’, in which
between the two items may be inverted. This is borne out by the subject precedes the verb, but with an agreeing enclitic
the fact that je sais pas ‘I don’t know’ is the normal way of subject: thus Jean vient-il? lit. ‘Jean comes=he?’.
encoding negation in spoken French, whilst je ne sais pas ‘I do Contemporary spoken French uses inversion sparingly.
not know’ encodes emphatic negation. Questions often involve the introductory element est-ce que
A final approach to the rise of pas involves the phenom- (lit. ‘is=it that’), generally analysed as a particle rather than
enon of misunderstanding and its impact on language acqui- a verb, or affirmative word order with interrogative inton-
sition, as discussed by Labov (1994:545–99). Assume that, at ation. In some colloquial registers, the final syllable of
the relevant stage of the language, ne can be deleted in a complex inversions such as Jean vient-il? has been reana-
sentence which does not contain pas (or some other post- lysed as a postverbal interrogative particle and extended to
verbal negative). In this case, the sentence will sound iden- other persons (thus, Tu viens-ti? ‘Are you coming (lit. you
tical to the corresponding positive sentence. Any given come-ti)?’). In the corresponding registers of Laurentian
occurrence of such a sentence will be interpreted according French, this particle has become -tu, under the influence
to context—sometimes its meaning will be clear, and some- of the second person subject clitic.
times it will be unimportant. Children acquiring the lan-
guage are therefore faced with two types of ne-less 18.4.3.3.2 Clitic pronouns
sentence: Je sais pas ‘I don’t know’, which is unambiguously
18.4.3.3.2.1 SUBJECT CLITICS
negative, and Je sais, which is ambiguous as between nega-
tive and positive. Through a complex statistical analysis of French is not a pro-drop language. All non-imperative finite
these ‘unsupported zeroes’, involving the notion of ‘prob- verbs require an overt subject. Thus, first and second person
ability matching’, Labov shows that, over time, this type of pronouns are always expressed, and if no lexical subject is
310
present, a third person subject pronoun is likewise required. topic shift, serving simply to put the verb second. It has
The nature of these pronouns has been the subject of much been claimed that subject clitics arose as unambiguous
debate. Some (e.g. Harris 1978a) have seen them as by now exponents of verbal person following the merger of many
representing inflectional prefixes; in favour of this analysis is inflections as a result of sound change and analogy, but this
their inseparability from the verb (except by other items of a is both theoretically implausible and at variance with the
similar nature) and the ungrammaticality which results when evidence of the chronology of the change. Certainly, ambi-
they are conjoined. Yet the items in question do not always guity may have played a role in the spread of the change
behave like prefixes. They can, in fact, be conjoined, albeit in once it was under way (for instance, the second person
very limited circumstances. Thus, **Ili et ellej viendront ‘Hei and plural was more resistant to the loss of pro-drop, and
shej will come’ is ungrammatical, as is **Ili ou ellej viendra ‘Hei Vance (1997:326) notes that ‘the stressed, unique desinence
or shej will come’, where reference is to two separate individ-
of this verb form may have slowed down its replacement by
uals. However, Ili ou ellei viendra ‘Hei or shei will come’, where
the overt-subject variant’); but it did not trigger it. The
reference is to a single individual of unknown sex, is gram-
synchronic and diachronic issues are complex; see Adams
matical, at least in written ‘officialese’. Moreover, unlike ver-
(1987b), Roberts (1993), Vance (1997).
bal affixes, they also have reference (cf. Il viendra demain—‘il’,
French also has an indefinite subject clitic on ‘one’ (cf.
c’est-à-dire, Pierre ‘He will come tomorrow—“he”, that is,
§60.7). This form originates as the nominative case of the
Pierre’); again, these constructions are identified by many
word for ‘man(kind)’ (see above), a fact which has led some
speakers as stylistically marked. These facts argue that the
scholars to claim that it results from the superstrate influ-
synchronic analysis of these items as clitics is fundamentally
ence of Germanic (specifically Frankish), although this can-
correct, but that, having cliticized from originally free pro-
not be demonstrated, and indeed a similar development is
nouns, they may now be tending towards further grammat-
found in a variety of languages. In spoken French, on (with
icalization, without having yet turned into affixes.
third person singular verb agreement) is regularly used as a
The rise of clitic subject pronouns and the loss of pro-
first person plural, replacing nous (cf. similar developments
drop arguably relates to the ‘verb-second’ constraint dis-
in Tuscan; §14.3.2.2).
cussed above. Although various items could be fronted to
‘rescue’ V2 in old French, pro-drop and V2 will have come 18.4.3.3.2.2 OBJECT CLITICS
into conflict when a sentence consisted of a bare verb, and, Object clitics are proclitic to the verb, except in positive
in these circumstances, V2 took precedence, with the sub- imperative sentences, where they are enclitic (see
ject pronoun, which had previously marked emphasis or Tables 18.5 and 18.6). Many attempts have been made to
Table 18.5 Order and combination of non-subject proclitics

I II III IV V
me ‘me’ le ‘him; it.M’ lui ‘him/her.DAT’ y ‘there, to it’ en ‘from there, of it’
te ‘you.SG’ la ‘her; it.F’ leur ‘them.DAT’
se self-‘ les ‘them.ACC’
nous ‘us’
vous you.PL’
No more than one item from each column, up to a maximum of two; items in columns I and III may not co-occur.
Table 18.6 Order of non-subject enclitics

I II III IV
le ‘him; it.M’ me (moi when phrase-final) ‘me’ y ‘there, to it’ en ‘from there, of it’
la ‘her; it.F’ te (toi when phrase-final) ‘you.SG’
les ‘them’ lui ‘him/her.DAT’
nous ‘us’
vous ‘you.PL’
leur ‘them.DAT’
No more than one item from each column, up to a maximum of two.
311
JOHN CHARLES SMITH
account for their ordering and combination (see e.g. Seuren (Martineau 1985), whilst in both Laurentian and Acadian
1976; 2002; Kayne 1991; 1994:19–21; Manzini and Savoia 2004; French preposition stranding sometimes occurs. Both pat-
Pescarini 2010; 2014), although a commonly held view is that terns are found in the Laurentian sentence Moi, je rencontre
they cannot be generated by any underlying syntactic prin- des filles j’ai été à l’école avec ‘Me, I meet girls I was at school
ciple, but must be the result of a surface stipulation or ‘filter’. with’ (as opposed to standard Moi, je rencontre des filles avec
Very occasionally, sequences of three object clitics occur, qui j’ai été à l’école), quoted by Martineau (1993), who sug-
the last one being y (compare Je la leur y rapporte ‘I bring it gests that English influence is not the only factor here. For
back to them there’ and On vous l’y montrera ‘They will show preposition stranding in Acadian French, see King (2000).
it to you there’) (see Grevisse 2011:§682b3). In colloquial
speech, it is also possible to find second person ‘ethic’
datives, which may be added at the beginning of a sequence 18.4.4 Second person forms of address
without violating the maximum limit; cf. Je vais te me le
refroidir, moi, lit. ‘I’m going to you me him make cold French has a second person singular and a second person
(= He’ll be good and cold by the time I’ve finished with plural (respectively, the clitic pronouns tu and vous and
him)’; and, with two ethic datives Avez-vous vu comme je te related forms, together with corresponding verb morph-
vous lui ai craché à la figure? lit. ‘Have you seen how I you.SG ology). In fact, tu is a ‘familiar’ singular; ‘polite’ or ‘formal’
you.PL have spat to the face (= Did you see how I spat in his address in the singular involves vous. The terms ‘familiar’ vs
face)?’ (see further Smith 2001b). ‘polite’ or ‘formal’ are quite inadequate for the complexities
involved in this ‘social deixis’ (Fillmore 1997), detailed dis-
18.4.3.3.3 Dislocation/detachment
cussion of which lies outside the scope of this chapter (but
A major issue concerns the extent to which the patterns see §55.2.3.2). Following early work by Brown and Gilman
observed encode grammatical functions, such as subject and (1960), the value of these forms has been dealt with by
object, and the extent to which they encode discourse prag- Bustin-Lekeu (1973), Claudel (2002), Gardner-Chloros
matics and information structure (Topic/Comment; (1991), Halmøy (2000), Hughson (2002), Maley (1974),
Theme/Rheme). Central to this debate are sentences exhib- Morford (1997), Peeters (2004), and Schoch (1978), for con-
iting so-called ‘dislocation’ or ‘detachment’, in which an temporary French, and by Foulet (1930:198–201), Hunt
element appears at either the left or right edge of the (2003), Nyrop (1925:§§192–203), Kennedy (1972), and
sentence, but is also encoded by a clitic pronoun (cf. Mason (1990) for earlier stages of the language.
§§31.3.4, 34.4). The two dislocated positions may serve a There is also an ‘indefinite’ use of tu and vous, corres-
variety of functions, creating Topics and ‘Anti-Topics’, but ponding to more formal on ‘one’ (see e.g. Ashby 1992;
also signalling the beginning (left-dislocation) and end Coveney 2003a; and Williams and van Compernolle 2009).
(right-dislocation) of a conversational turn. Singular tu in this function can have plural reference.
A striking feature of dislocation is that a right-dislocated
element is more bound to the remainder of the sentence
than a left-dislocated element. For instance, a right-
dislocated item retains its case marking, whilst a left- 18.5 (Other) oïl varieties
dislocated item does not: Il m’a donné un livre, à moi ‘He
me=has given a book to me’; **Il m’a donné un livre, moi It is difficult to delimit the area of oïl speech. Within the
‘He me=has given a book, me’; Moi, il m’a donné un livre ‘Me, Gallo-Romance area, Occitan is spoken to the south of the oïl
he me=has given a book’. The implication is that Topic varieties (cf. Ch. 19), and Francoprovençal to the southeast
position is not (or only loosely) syntactically linked to the (Ch. 20). It has been claimed that the southern boundary of
remainder of the sentence. These loosely linked Topics may the oïl domain corresponds to the southernmost limit of
also be embedded. Frankish settlement (Jochnowitz 1973 notes correlation
For discussion of dislocation and related structures in with other cultural and social phenomena), with the excep-
French, see Barnes (1985), Lambrecht (1981). De Cat tion of a salient on the southwest, stretching through Sain-
(2007:215) concludes that ‘spoken French should be tonge almost to Bordeaux. Some of the characteristics
regarded as a discourse-configurational language’. which distinguish French from the neighbouring standard
languages are inadequate as definitions of oïl speech: thus
18.4.3.3.4 Complementizer deletion and
palatalization of Latin /k/ before /a/ also occurs in some
preposition stranding
northern varieties of Occitan, but not in some Picard and
In Laurentian French, the complementizer que ‘that’ may be Norman oïl varieties, whilst the non-pro-drop feature of
omitted in relative, complement, and adverbial clauses French is shared by many northern varieties of Occitan.
312
The major isoglosses separating oïl varieties from Occitan Jersey, and Sark, where they were widely spoken until the
and Francoprovençal involve raising of Latin tonic /a/ to Second World War (Jones 2001:3f.).
/e/: this development is general in oïl varieties, is not found
in Occitan, and occurs only after palatals in Francoproven-
çal (cf. NGaR. mer ‘sea’, cher ‘dear’, NOcc. mar, char; FPr. mar, 18.5.2 Structure
chier). However these isoglosses do not always coincide,
leading to transitional areas, the most notable being the 18.5.2.1 Phonology
‘croissant’, located between Angoulême in the west and The majority of oïl varieties have, like the standard language,
Vichy in the east and encompassing in particular the north- four degrees of aperture and exhibit front unrounded, front
ern part of the départements of Haute-Vienne and Creuse rounded, and back rounded vowels, together with nasal
and the southern part of the département of Allier (see vowels. The most significant difference is that length con-
Brun-Trigaud 1990; 1992). tinues to be significant in many oïl varieties. Sometimes, the
distinction between short and long vowels corresponds to a
18.5.1 Internal divisions surface distinction between monophthongs and diphthongs.
In addition, several oïl varieties have high and/or mid high
nasal vowels. Thus, for example, the phonemic vowel inven-
The so-called ‘Joret line’ (see Joret 1883) is a major isogloss tory of mainland Norman is distinguished from that of the
running east from just north of Granville, on the Cotentin standard language chiefly by an opposition between long and
Peninsula, and separating varieties which have palatalized short vowels at almost all positions, including nasal vowels; it
/k/ and /ɡ/ before /a/ (to the south) from varieties to the also distinguishes three heights of nasal vowel: low, mid low,
north which have not (Picard, northern Norman). However, and mid high. Table 18.7 is adapted from Hall (2008:11).
the ‘line’ is an idealization, since this feature is lexically The consonant inventory is similar to but larger than that
diffuse. Two other isoglosses run close to the Joret line, and of standard French, because of the presence of affricates and
the resulting bundle is sometimes also referred as the Joret the velar fricative /x/ (variously realized [x], [ɣ], or [h]).
line, lato sensu: to the south, /k/ before /i/ and /e/ palatal- Table 18.8 is adapted from Hall (2008:12).
izes to /s/, whilst to the north it palatalizes to /ʃ/ (again, We also generally find the same glides as in standard
this feature is lexically diffuse); and to the south, /w/ French (although front rounded /ɥ/ is absent from some
becomes /ɡ/, whilst to the north it becomes /v/. Further varieties, particularly Wallon), the same two liquids /l/ and
east, the bundle splits: the two palatalization isoglosses turn /r/ (the latter with various realizations), and additionally /ʎ/.
north, and define the boundary between Picard to the west Sandhi phenomena similar to those described for French
and Wallon to the east, whilst the ‘/w/ > /ɡ/ vs /v/’ isogloss exist in most oïl varieties. Liaison occurs in Picard (Flutre
continues to run east and becomes more diffuse. 1955:42), Wallon (Hendschel 2012:61f.), and Franc-Comtois
A broad western area is generally defined by the failure of (Alex 1965:80), but often in more limited contexts than in
the early medieval diphthongs /ei/ and /ou/ to dissimilate the standard language (Davau 1979:500). Both liaison and
to /oi/ and /eu/, as they did further east (see §18.4.1.1.5); elision are rare in the Lorrain of Ranrupt (Aub-Büscher
the relevant isogloss runs approximately from the Channel 1962:§17). ‘H aspiré’ occurs, and is indeed realized as [x],
coast just south of the Somme estuary to where the rivers [ɣ], or [h] in many Norman varieties. However, it is absent
Dordogne and Garonne meet to form the Gironde. from many other varieties; e.g. Gilliéron and Edmont (1902–
A major isogloss in the east involves initial /kl/. To the 10: 691) et les hêtres ‘and the beech trees’ shows liaison
west of the isogloss, this cluster remains /kl/; to the east, it (hence absence of ‘h aspiré’) in much of Picardy, southern
becomes /tj/, with a brief intermediate transitional area Wallon, and parts of the Île-de-France.
which exhibits /kj/. This isogloss is sometimes seen as
delimiting Champenois (to the west) from Lorrain and
Bourguignon (to the east); however, many varieties of 18.5.2.2 Forms and their functions
Haute-Marne, traditionally labelled Champenois, lie to the
18.5.2.2.1 Inflection
southeast of this line, whilst some Lorrain varieties lie to
the west. A broad division exists between eastern varieties, which do
Many (perhaps most) oïl varieties are moribund or no not audibly mark number on nouns (Franc-Comtois, Alex
longer spoken. The northern varieties, Picard and Wallon, 1965:78; Picard, Flutre 1955:41f.; Lorrain, Aub-Büscher
still exhibit some vitality, as do western varieties of Norman 1962:42, §31; Wallon, Remacle 1952:74), and western var-
and Gallo (the oïl speech of eastern Brittany). Norman varieties, where some nouns exhibit distinct plural forms. In
ieties are also found on the Channel Islands of Guernsey, general, nouns ending in a consonant are invariable for
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JOHN CHARLES SMITH
Table 18.7 The phonemic vowel system of mainland Norman varieties

FRONT CENTRAL BACK
UNROUNDED ROUNDED ROUNDED UNROUNDED
ORAL NASAL ORAL NASAL ORAL NASAL ORAL NASAL
High i iː y yː u uː
Mid-high e eː ẽ ẽː ø øː ø̃ ø̃ː o oː õ õː
Mid-low ɛ ɛː ɛ̃ ɛ̃ː œ œː ə ɔ ɔː
Low a ɑ ɑ̃ ɑ̃ː
Table 18.8 The phonological consonant system of mainland Norman

BILABIAL LABIO - DENTAL DENTAL PALATAL VELAR
Plosives Voiceless p t k
Voiced b d ɡ
Fricatives Voiceless f s ʃ x
Voiced v z ʒ
Affricates Voiceless ʧ
Voiced ʤ
Nasals m n ɲ ŋ
number, as in French (Norman, Lepelley 1974:102; Gallo, northern Haute-Saône. Adam (1881) analyses this form as
Chauveau 1984). However, nouns ending in a vowel com- a proximate or hodiernal imperfect; Russo (2012) suggests
monly have an audibly distinct plural, because the original that the contrast between the pan-Romance imperfect and
/-s/ has either become yod, or has affected the preceding the ‘second’ imperfect corresponds throughout the area of
vowel, lengthening it, raising it, or fronting [ə] to [ɛ] Lorraine where it is found to a distinction between ‘larger
(Norman, Lepelley 1974:102f.; Jones 2001:28; Gallo, conceptual distance’ and ‘smaller conceptual distance’,
Chauveau 1984:161–69; Tourangeau, Davau 1979). although this basic contrast is interpreted in a variety of
Gilliéron and Edmont (1902–10: 269) cheval, chevaux ways, according to area, corresponding to more remote past
‘horse, horses’ shows widespread regularization of this vs more recent past, evidentiality vs direct perception, or
type of plural: most localities have generalized the plural irrealis/non-factive vs realis/factive.
form. The distinction remains in a small area of the Île-de- Unlike most spoken registers of French, which have lost
France and the contiguous départements of Oise, Eure, and the distinction between a simple past encoding the preterite
Seine-Maritime. [(E,R)•(R—S)] and a compound past encoding the present
perfect [(E—R]•(R,S)], many oïl varieties have retained this
18.5.2.2.2 Tense and aspect distinction. Gilliéron and Edmont (1902–10:96) J’eus ‘I had’
The inventory of tense and aspect in oïl varieties is in (compare 102 J’ai eu ‘I have had’) records preterite forms in
general the same as or a subset of that of standard French. western and southern Normandy, in most of the Gallo-
However, Lorrain exhibits an additional form, in the so- speaking area, in northeastern Wallon, and sporadically in
called ‘second’ imperfect (cf. té chantéïe pan-Romance Lorrain, Franc-Comtois, and Bourguignon. Other sources
imperfect (< CANTABAS) vs té chantézor ‘second’ imperfect, confirm that the preterite remains robust in many areas,
both glossed as ‘you were singing’). It has been argued and is indeed perhaps more widespread than the data from
that this ‘second’ imperfect results from the incorporation Gilliéron and Edmont (1902–10) would suggest. Speakers of
into the verb of a following adverb HORA (Latin) or ores the Norman variety of the Val de Saire will use the preterite
(Lorrain) ‘now’. It is present in the south of the Lorrain- when speaking Norman but, in the same circumstances, will
speaking area, but absent from the north (Lanher et al. use the compound past when speaking French (Lepelley
1979–88: map 1060); Dondaine (1972:444f.) also notes ‘traces’ 1974). Likewise, the preterite is normally used to express
of the ‘second’ imperfect in the varieties of Fougerolles and [(E,R) • (R—S)] in the Norman varieties of the Channel
Grandrupt in the contiguous Franc-Comtois area of Islands (Liddicoat 1994:188f.; Jones 2001:158) and in Gallo
314
(Chauveau 1984). It continues to be used in eastern Wallon, progressive; for instance, Aub-Büscher (1962:84, §107)
and sporadically in southern Wallon; it is not currently used observes that, in the Lorrain variety of Ranrupt, all verbs
in other Wallon dialects, although it was still found in now take HAVE apart from the verb ‘come’, which takes BE. In
central Wallon in the nineteenth century (Hendschel contrast, HAVE and BE are both found, with a distribution
2012:§154, p.169; Remacle 1956:55–67). In Lorraine, it is similar to that in standard French, in many western dialects
current in southwest Lorraine, especially in the Vosges, (Lepelley 1974). However, Jones (2001:109f.), after observing
and is sporadically found elsewhere; être ‘be’ is particularly that BE is found with all reflexive verbs and with ‘come’ and
frequent in this form (ALLR 1068–71). In the Franc-Comtois all its derivatives in the Norman variety of Jersey, also notes
variety of Naisey, the preterite is found only in the first and a ‘degree of confusion’, and presents some evidence that
third persons, and only with verbs which denote ‘an easily HAVE is encroaching on BE in some other contexts. As in
localizable action’ (Alex 1965:115)—the verb given as an Ranrupt, auxiliary BE is particularly robust with the verb
example is arriver ‘arrive’. (Like Lepelley, Alex notes that ‘come’.
his informants will never use the simple past in such con- For j’ai été ‘I have been’, Taverdet (1975–84: map 1768)
texts when speaking French.) Taverdet (1975–84: map 1784) notes je suis été, lit. ‘I am been’ in southern Yonne, northern
records the survival of the preterite at 23 points in central Nièvre, and southwestern Côte-d’Or, and (possibly via me-
Burgundy (southeast Yonne, eastern Nièvre, southwest tanalysis, but see also discussion in Kayne 1993) je suis eu, lit.
Côte-d’Or, and northern Saône-et-Loire). However, confirm- ‘I am had’ in southern Nièvre, northwestern Saône-et-Loire,
ing the findings of the ALF, preterite forms are not recorded and northeastern Côte-d’Or (also found in Francoprovençal,
in Dubuisson (1971–93; see also Davau 1979) and are absent cf. §20.4.4).
from Picard. As regards past participle agreement with direct objects,
It seems that we have a split here between western we may divide oïl dialects into two broad groups. In eastern
varieties, where the preterite is still in general use and dialects (Picard, Wallon, Lorrain, Bourguignon, Franc-
shows no signs of attrition, a central area, from which it Comtois, Champenois), there is no object–participle agree-
has disappeared, and an eastern area, where it continues to ment; in western dialects (Norman, Gallo, Tourangeau, Sain-
exist, but exhibits the characteristics of a ‘relic’ feature (it is tongeais), agreement obtains with any type of preceding
found only in ‘islands’; it is more frequently found with, or direct object. In a small area of the extreme southwest, no
even restricted to, some verbs and/or persons; it is known agreement occurs.
to have disappeared relatively recently from adjacent The double compound form is more widely used in oïl
areas). varieties than in standard French (see e.g. Taverdet 1975–84:
In the Norman and Gallo varieties where the preterite is map 1764, which notes it for nine points in southwestern
found, the -is -/i/ preterite found in -ir and regular -re verbs Côte-d’Or and northern Saône-et-Loire, and Alex 1965:116,
has been extended to -er verbs: Norman /ʒakati/ ‘I bought’, who notes that this form effectively serves to replace the
/ʒali/ ‘I went’ (cf. standard Fr. j’achetai, ‘I bought’, j’allai ‘I preterite in the Franc-Comtois variety of Naisey). Some
went’, and cf. je finis I finished’, je vendis ‘I sold’, etc.), thereby varieties have several double compound forms (cf. §58.3.4);
creating what is, diachronically, a heteroclitic conjugation. the extreme case is probably the eastern Wallon variety of
Some irregular verbs form their preterite in -us -/y/ or in La Gleize, in which the auxiliary may appear in the com-
-ins -/ɛ̃/; the latter pattern, found in the standard language pound past, the pluperfect, the future perfect, the perfect
only in venir ‘come’, tenir ‘hold’, and derivatives, has subjunctive, and the pluperfect subjunctive (but not the past
extended to prendre ‘take’ and mettre ‘put’ (Liddicoat anterior) (Remacle 1956:70-83).
1994:188). By contrast, some Bourguignon varieties have In addition to the synthetic and GO futures, some eastern
generalized the first conjugation inflections in this tense: oïl varieties form a future using the verb WANT followed by
Taverdet (1975–84: map 1763) ils finirent ‘they finished’ notes the infinitive (see, e.g. Alex 1965:116 on the Franc-Comtois
[finisɛr] as the form of this -ir verb in south-eastern Yonne, variety of Naisey).
eastern Nièvre, southwestern Côte-d’Or, and northern In some oïl varieties, the subjunctive is in decline.
Saône-et-Loire; cf. standard Fr. ils finirent but ils portèrent, Descusses (1986:125) notes that, in the Champenois of Ge-
and note the extension of the augment (see §18.4.2.1.2) to spunsart the present subjunctive has disappeared except in
the preterite. the verbs ‘have’ and ‘be’, although even here most speakers
In many eastern oïl varieties, HAVE is the sole auxiliary of have only passive knowledge of the forms. Similarly, the
the compound past tense (Wallon: Hendschel 2012:§166b, present subjunctive is ‘in decline’ in the Norman varieties
p.177; Remacle 1956:39–48; Lorrain: ALLR 1072–6; Champe- of Jersey and Guernsey (Jones 2000; 2001:114–18), although
nois (Gespunsart: Descusses 1986:126; Picard: Flutre it is robust in commands and after verbs indicating desire
1955:59). The replacement of HAVE by BE has been or obligation. However, the past subjunctive remains
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JOHN CHARLES SMITH
widespread in Jersey and Guernsey, as well as on the Gilliéron and Edmont (1902–10: 896) Le roseau plie mais ne
mainland. In the Channel Islands, it may nonetheless rompt pas; . . . pour qu’il ne puisse pas courir dans le pré ‘the reed
be replaced by the conditional (Jones 2001:117) or the pret- bends but does not break; ...so that he can’t run in the
erite (Liddicoat 1994:173). Taverdet (1975–84: map 1784) meadow’ shows that the postverbal negator pas (< PASSUM
records the survival of the past subjunctive at 22 points ‘step’) is general in most of the oïl area, whilst point
in central Burgundy (southeast Yonne, eastern Nièvre, (< PUNCTUM ‘point; stitch’) is also found more sporadically.
southwest Côte-d’Or, and northern Saône-et-Loire); at all In general, both sentences contain the same negative par-
but two of them, the preterite is also found. The past ticle; where pas is found in one and point in the other, there
subjunctive also occurs in eastern Wallon; it is in decline is no overall consistency of distribution. There is a concen-
elsewhere in Wallonia (Hendschel 2012:171f.; Remacle tration of point in the northern Île-de-France and southern
1956:67–70). Picard. Wallon has nin (< NON ‘not’), and Lorrain and many
As in French, inflected quantifiers have largely been eastern Champenois varieties have mie (< MICAM ‘crumb’).
replaced by invariable items followed by de ‘of ’. In addition These data are corroborated by information from more
to the items quoted in §18.4.2.1.4, we find cognates of recent sources. Carton and Lebègue (1989–2010: map 652)
grandement ‘greatly’ and bravement ‘bravely’ in this function show that pas in general in Picard, with mie at some isolated
(see Battye 1995 and Carton and Lebègue 1989–2010: points and nin in a small area to the east. Haust et al. (1953–
map 654). 2011, II: §75, 205–9) shows nin as general in Wallon, with mie
in the extreme south and point in the extreme west. What is
difficult to gauge from this type of data is the possibility
18.5.2.3 Syntax that different negative particles may have different inten-
Adjectives more commonly precede nouns in oïl varieties sity or pragmatic inference; for instance, Flutre (1955:71)
than in standard French. This is the normal order in Wallon notes that, in the Picard variety of Mesnil-Martinsart, mie is
(Hendschel 2012:85–87; cf. also §§30.2.5, 62.1.2), especially in a more categorical negation than point.
eastern varieties; see also Bernstein (1991). In Norman, Gilliéron and Edmont (1902–10:25) Où vas-tu? lit. ‘Where
many adjectives, including colour adjectives and monosyl- go=you?’ shows a construction using que ‘that’ and non-
labic adjectives, regularly precede the noun (Liddicoat inversion (the equivalent of Où que tu vas? lit. ‘Where that
1994:217–19); Jones (2001:111–14) finds that in Jersey all you go?’) as the normal way of forming wh-questions across
colour adjectives and four out of five other adjectives, almost all the oïl-speaking area, except Wallon and northern
including 35% of ‘long’ adjectives, are preposed. Lorraine, where the equivalent of Où vas-tu? is usual.
Like standard French, oïl varieties are not pro-drop lan- Gilliéron and Edmont (1902–10: 85) L’as-tu [lu]? ‘Have you
guages. A striking feature of oïl varieties is the very wide- [read] it?’ shows inversion as normal in oïl varieties in
responses elicited for this yes/no-question. However, alter-
spread use of je (< EGO ‘I’) as first person subject clitic in the
native means of question formation are widely used.
plural as well as the singular. Gilliéron and Edmont (1902–
A detailed discussion of interrogation in Picard is under-
10: 360, 515) show that je is used as the first person plural taken by Dagnac (2013). The particle -ti (see §18.4.3.3.1) is
subject clitic in the vast majority of the oïl-speaking area, commonly found (Chaurand 1968:238), as is -tu in the same
including the whole of the west and the south (Île-de- function. In central Picard, an interrogative particle ‑jou
France, Lorrain, Bourguignon, southern Champenois); nous also appears (Carton and Lebègue 1989–2010: map 659 rec-
‘we’ is found only in Wallon, eastern Picard, and northern ords a prefixed form of this particle jou que ‘jou+that’; see
Champenois. The first person plural object clitic is nous ‘us’ also Emrik 1966), derived from the first person subject
everywhere (compare Gilliéron and Edmont (1902–10: 898). pronoun (Hrkal 1910:262). We therefore have the intriguing
As in French, object pronouns are enclitic to positive situation that Picard (depending on variety) can form an
imperatives; however, there is generally no distinction of interrogative with a particle which derives, or appears to
ordering between proclitic and enclitic pronouns, so that, derive, from a first person pronoun (jou), a second person
corresponding to standard dis-le-moi ‘tell it to me’ and donne- pronoun (tu), or a third-person pronoun (ti), although the
les-nous ‘give them to us’, most oïl varieties exhibit the particles in question do not appear to be restricted to verbs
equivalent of dis-me-le ‘tell me it’ and donne-nous-les ‘give with a subject corresponding to the person of the pronoun
us them’ (Wallon: Hendschel 2012:§114e; Lorraine: ALLR from which the particle is derived.
1141, 1153; Aub-Büscher 1962:§45; Picard: Carton and The particle -ti is found in other oïl varieties, too (see
Lebègue 1989–2010: map 630; Flutre 1955:49; Bourguignon: Chauveau 1984 for Gallo). However, the way interrogation
Virely 1906:206; Franc-Comtois: Alex 1965:90e; Norman: may vary according to the verb or grammatical person
Lepelley 1974:§334; Liddicoat 1994:246). involved. In the Franc-Comtois variety of Naisey, inversion
316
is the normal method of forming yes/no questions with insight is valid. In contrast, French does not stand out
frequently used verbs, whilst less common verbs use the from other Romance languages in its consonantal typology.
equivalent of est-ce que (Alex 1965:118). In the Norman of For morphosyntax, Coseriu (1987; 1988) proposed that
Jersey, inversion is the normal way of forming interroga- the Romance languages were distinguished from Latin by a
tives in second and third persons (singular or plural), but typology whereby relational concepts receive relational (i.e.
first person interrogatives are formed using the particle -ti analytic) exponence and non-relational concepts receive
(Liddicoat 1994:208f.). non-relational (i.e. synthetic) exponence. Amongst other
Picard exhibits a purposive construction in which a noun things, such a typology accounts for the general Romance
or a disjunctive pronoun may appear with the infinitive. The tendency to express number and gender inflectionally but
pronoun always precedes the infinitive; the noun may pre- for the functions of noun case to be replaced by prepositions
cede or follow it: thus pour moi faire ‘for me do.INF (= for me and word order; for the use of simple tenses to encode
to do/so that I can do)’; pour les chevaux manger or pour simultaneity of reference point and event (for instance,
manger les chevaux ‘for (the horses) eat.INF the horses (= for the preterite) and compound tenses to encode the disjunc-
the horses to eat/so that the horses can eat’; Chaurand tion of these two points (for instance, the present perfect
1968:193–5). and the pluperfect); for the use of diminutive morphology
to encode intrinsic smallness, but the use of an adjective
meaning ‘small’ modifying the noun to encode extrinsic
18.5.2.4 Second person forms of address smallness; and so on. French and oïl varieties are slow to
‘Familar’ vs ‘polite’ or ‘formal’ second person forms of conform to this typology, as they retain a nominal case
address exist in oïl varieties. No real study of the use of system into the Middle Ages. Although ‘Middle French’
these forms has been undertaken; it is likely that usage may be defined as the period when French conformed to
differs between varieties. Two structural points merit com- the pattern identified by Coseriu (see Smith 2002), it rapidly
ment. First, in an area of central Lorraine comprising the became a largely analytic language, losing productive
south of the département of Meuse, east-central Meurthe- diminutive and augmentative morphology, and marking
et-Moselle, and west-central Moselle, the second-person number (most of the time), gender (some of the time), and
‘plural’ has two separate inflections, one (generally /o(w)/) most tense distinctions analytically, at least in ordinary
indicating plurality, the other (generally /e(j)/) indicating speech. Some oïl varieties are closer to the Coseriu type
‘politeness’ (ALLR 1054). Second, in the Wallon of Liège, the than standard French; however, there is no correlation
second person clitic pronouns are té (‘familar’ singular) and between two of the most salient features: maintenance of
vos ‘vous’ (plural and ‘polite’ singular), with vos exhibiting a a distinction between a synthetic preterite and an analytic
conjunctive form vos-ôtes, lit. ‘you others’ when plural; how- present perfect, and retention of audible number marking
ever, because of the use of vos as a ‘polite’ singular, vos-ôtes on nouns.
has been reinterpreted as a ‘polite’ plural, and an analogical The inflectional morphology of French and oïl varieties
‘familiar’ plural conjunctive pronoun tés-ôtes has been cre- has either lost or greatly reduced the incidence of the
ated from té (Remacle 1952:243). person-related morphomic patterns which characterize
Romance as a whole: see §43.4.
In terms of Ledgeway’s (2012a:314) ‘northern–southern
continuum’, French and oïl varieties are ‘northern’ lan-
18.6 Typological reflections guages, which ‘very broadly, though not exhaustively or
without exception’ exhibit: prolonged retention of V2 syn-
How are French and oïl varieties situated within a typology tax; presence of subject clitics; prolonged retention of nom-
of the Romance languages? Their phonology is character- inal case system; opposition between auxiliaries HAVE and
ized by a much larger number of vowels than is typical of BE; retention of past participle agreement; loss of preterite.
Romance in general, including front rounded vowels and It may be significant that, whilst all of northern Gallo-
nasal vowels, which are not characteristic of the family as a Romance displays the first three characters, not all oïl
whole. Kabatek and Pusch (2011:72f.) claim that ‘the most varieties fit into this typology with respect to auxiliary selec-
complex Romance vowel system is that of European French, tion, past participle agreement, and survival or disappear-
with 12 oral and four nasal vowels’. As we have seen, most ance of the preterite. Most eastern and northeastern oïl
varieties of European French arguably have fewer vowel varieties have lost past participle agreement and have gen-
phonemes, whilst Laurentian French arguably has at least eralized auxiliary HAVE. To that extent, they are typologically
one more oral vowel; moreover, many oïl varieties contain homogeneous, although the two features in question are
considerably more vowels than this. However, the basic ‘southern’ rather than ‘northern’. However, the preterite,
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JOHN CHARLES SMITH
although still found in some of these areas, is a relic medieval period) by losing the case system before eastern
feature. If anything, the preterite is more widespread in varieties, whereas it is eastern varieties which have in
western oïl varieties, where there is normally an oppos- general innovated in the spread of auxiliary HAVE and the
ition between HAVE and BE as auxiliaries and past participle loss of past participle agreement. None of this calls Ledge-
agreement is robust. Moreover, if we take a panchronic way’s typology into question. But, again, the data invite
perspective (which may or may not be justified), we may further research into the nature of the correlation
note that it is western varieties which innovate (in the between the various characters of this typology.
318
CHAPTER 19
Southern Gallo-Romance (Occitan)

19.1 Introduction1 language. By the twentieth century, the social situation for
Occitan had worsened with the development of mass media,
ongoing urbanization, migration, and schooling in French.
19.1.1 Geography, history, and dialect areas Today Occitan is a seriously endangered language. In Midi
Pyrénées, for instance, a recent survey estimated 4% of the
Southern Gallo-Romance, usually generically referred to as
population to have complete mastery of the language, with
Occitan, is spoken in the southern third of France, from the
only 14% enjoying a reasonable command of the language
Atlantic Ocean to the Alps, from the north of the Massif
(Téléperformance 2010). Familial transmission of local forms
Central to the Mediterranean Sea (see Map 19.1; see also
of Occitan stopped around 1950 in rural areas where previ-
Ronjat 1913:2-9; 1930:10-25; Bec 1963:10; Sumien 2006:136-
ously it had been maintained. Occitan has gained a limited
39). Outside France, Occitan is spoken in Italy in about 16
presence in the education system (including universities)
valleys (provinces of Cuneo and Turin), to which should be
and receives some support from local authorities; it is sup-
added the linguistic island of Guardia Piemontese (La Garda)
ported by various groups and institutions (e.g. the Institut
in Calabria, southern Italy. Occitan is also spoken in Val
d’Estudis Occitans) who promote its use and transmission.
d’Aran (part of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Spain). Occitan
Today Occitan is mostly written using the so-called ‘clas-
was a major language of culture in the Middle Ages, the first
sical orthography’ as defined by Louis Alibert (Alibèrt [1935]
extant literary texts having been written in the eleventh
1976; 1965; Lafont 1971; see also Kremnitz 1974 for a histor-
century (Boeci c.1050) with non-literary texts appearing
ical perspective on Occitan writing systems). We systemat-
around 1100 (Brunel 1926; Belmon and Vielliard 1997), the
ically use this form of orthography in all glosses in §§19.2-3.
most celebrated being the lyric poems of the troubadours.
To help the reader with these orthographic forms, the
After c.1500, French replaced Occitan in formal use, giving
interpretation of the orthographic notation is given in
rise to a diglossic situation which received legal enforce-
Table 19.1. Variant realizations are discussed in §19.2.
ment by the Royal Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêt (1539;
Major dialect divisions rest upon two independent splits
Lodge 1993:16-27; Courouau 2012). Despite its eviction
which can be traced back to the first attestations of the
from the sphere of power and officiality, Occitan remained
language (cf. Map 19.1). One split divides Occitan into north-
the sole language of the majority of the population (in
ern and southern Occitan, and the other distinguishes Gas-
towns as well as in the countryside). Occitan also remained
con from common Occitan.2 The boundaries in Map 19.1 are
the medium of an uninterrupted and not insignificant liter-
established on the basis of the traditional feature distin-
ary production, using various dialect forms (cf. Lafont and
guishing north from south Occitan, namely (the second)
Anatole 1970; Courouau 2008).
velar palatalization (cf. §39.3.1.4): north chantar ‘sing.INF’,
During the French Revolution, plans were made to eradi-
vacha ‘cow’ vs south cantar, vaca. For Gascon, the most
cate the use of any language other than French (de Certeau
cited feature, debuccalization of f to h, has been retained.
and Revel 1975). The nineteenth century was a time of both
A number of other specific evolutions concern roughly the
regression and revival for Occitan. While French expanded
same area: fall of intervocalic -n- (Gsc. haria ‘flour’ for
as a consequence of urbanization and industrialization, and
farina), prosthesis of a (Gsc. arriu ‘river’ for riu), change of
because of the French-medium public education system,
Latin. -LL- to -r- intervocalically and to -th ([tʲ] > [t]) word
there arose in 1854 an Occitan cultural and literary revival
finally, after the fall of final non-low vowels (eth, era ‘he, she’
movement organized around the figure of the writer Mistral
< ILLUM, ILLAM (stressed) instead of el, ela). For Gascon features,
(Martel 2010). The enterprise was successful for poetic cre-
see Massoure (2012:46f.) in particular.
ation but much less so for the social enhancement of the
2
See Bec (1963:34-62; 1973:16-20), Ravier (1991), Sumien (2006:141-50),
1
Sauzet is responsible for §§19.1-3 while §19.4 is due to Oliviéri. Dalbera (1989), Forner (2001).
This chapter © Michèle Olivieri and Patrick Sauzet 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 319
320

4
5
1
1
3
1: North of line -1-: chabra (NOcc) vs cabra, craba.

2: West and South of line -2-: hemna (Gsc) vs femna.
3: East of line -3-: lei [lej]~[li] def. art. pl. (Prv.) vs los, las
4: West of line -4-: dels, de las indef. art. pl. (Lim.) vs de (or Ø) (the line only represents
the limit of the phenomenon inside NOcc.)
5: East of the line-5-: chanto ‘I sing’(Vivalp.) vs canti, cante, chante.
Map 19.1 Occitan dialects

Table 19.1 Modern Occitan orthography

a
VOWELS PRETONIC AND TONIC POST - TONIC EXAMPLES
a, à [a] [ɔ] parlarà ‘he will speak’, parla ‘he speaks’,

iá [jɔ] – disiá ‘he said’, foliá ‘madness’
e, é [e] [e] pese ‘pea’, espés ‘thick’
è [ɛ] – pè ‘foot’, cèl ‘sky’
i [i] [i] indici ‘clue’
o, ó [u] [u] modorro ‘lout’, joncós ‘rush-covered’
ò [ɔ] – òc [ɔ] ‘yes’, còp ‘blow’
u [y] [y] mut ‘dumb’, Jèsus [ˈʤɛzys] ‘Jesus’
DIPHTHONGS
au, òu, eu . . . [aw], [ɔw], [ew] . . . naut ‘high’, nòu ‘new’, beu ‘(s)he drinks’
ai, òi, ei . . . [aj], [ɔj], [ej] . . . mai ‘more’, gòi ‘lame’, rei ‘king’
ieu [jew] ([iw]) ieu ‘I’, Dieu ‘God’
iu [iw] viu ‘alive’
uò [ɥɔ], [jɔ] fuòc ‘fire’
ue (uè) [ɥɛ] nuèch ‘night’ (Gsc. nueit [n(w)e(j)t])
CONSONANTS
b [b] ([β]) baba [baβɔ] ‘larva’

final: [p] òrb ‘blind
c + a, o, u : [k] can ‘dog’, còl ‘neck’
+ e, i : [s] cèl ‘sky’, aicí ‘here’
ç [s] çò(que) ‘what REL.’, dançar ‘to dance’, braç ‘arm’
ch [ʧ ] chòt ‘owl’, estrech ‘narrow’
d [d] ([δ]) det ‘finger’, dedal ‘thimble’
final: [t] nud ‘naked’
f [f] fum ‘smoke’, buf ‘puff ’
g + a, o, u : [ɡ] ([γ]) gal ‘cock’, agut ‘had’
+ e, i : [ʤ] gèta ‘sprout’,
final: [k] or [ʧ] assag [aˈsaʧ] ‘try’, castig [kasˈtik] ‘punishment’
h [h] (in Gascon only) hum ‘smoke’, boha ‘it blows’
j [ʤ] jòc ‘game’, assaja ‘(s)he tries’
l [l] lop ‘wolf ’, pel ‘hair’
lh [ʎ] ([j]) palha ‘straw’
m [m] man ‘hand’
n [n] nas ‘nose’
nh [ɲ] vinha ‘vineyard’
p [p] pan ‘(loaf of) bread’
qu [k] quicòm ‘something’, quora ‘when INTER.’
r initial and geminate [rː], riu ‘river’, tèrra ‘land’
intervocalic or in complex ara ‘now’, tres ‘very’
onset [ɾ] pòrta ‘door’, mar ‘sea’
in coda: [r]
s initial, postconsonantal, sal ‘salt’, salsa ‘gravy’, passaròsa ‘hollyhock’
and geminate [s],
intervocalic [z]
t [t] talh ‘cut’, cat ‘cat’
th [t] (formerly [tʲ] castèth ‘castle’ (Gascon for castèl)
v [b] (also [v]), va [ba], also [va] ‘(s)he goes’
[β] (also [v], [w]) lavar ‘to wash’ [laˈβa], also [laˈva], [laˈwa]
x [ʦ] (also [(j)z]), exemple ‘example’
[s] (before consonant) tèxt ‘text’
z, tz [z], tz [ʦ] zòu ‘let’s go!’, dètz ‘ten’
k, w, y only in foreign words
a
Accent signs (`, ˊ) are only written on stressed vowels.
19.2 Phonology Table 19.3 Old Occitan vowel inventory

FRONT CENTRAL BACK
19.2.1 Vowel system
High i u
19.2.1.1 Stressed vowels Mid tense e o
Occitan displays seven tonic vowels (Table 19.2) which pre- Mid lax ɛ ɔ
serve the common western Romance vowel system Low a
(Lausberg 1966:§§156-7). Differences between old and mod-
ern Occitan involve round high vowels.
The following examples illustrate the vowel inventory: Table 19.4 Modern Occitan vowel inventory (stressed
position)
(1) a. nas [nas] ‘nose’ (< NĀSUM)
b. mar [mar] ‘sea’ (< MĂRE) FRONT FRONT BACK
c. pè [pɛ] ‘foot’ (< PĔDEM) UNROUNDED ROUNDED CENTRAL ROUNDED
d. nòu [nɔw] ‘nine’ (< NŎUEM) High i y u

e. tres [tɾes] ‘three’ (< TRĒS) Mid tense e
f. pel [pel] ‘hair’ (< PĬLUM) Mid lax ɛ ɔ
g. flor [flu(r)] (OOcc. [flor]) (< FLŌREM) Low a
h. gola [ˈɡulɔ] (OOcc. [ˈɡola], (< GŬLAM)
i. fil [fil] ‘thread’ (< FĪLUM)
j. lum [lyn] ‘light’ (< LŪMEN) (OOcc. [lum])
In old Occitan a was probably realized as [ɑ] before
19.2.1.1.1 Stressed vowels (variant patterns)
nasals, whereas today many dialects, especially in the
Massif Central, labialize [a] before nasals: chanta [ˈʧɔntɔ] An interesting variant is the Landais vocalic system (Bec
‘(s)he sings’. Examples (1c,d) show the absence of Romance 1971:451; Allières 1989) (see Table 19.5).
diphthongization in Occitan (cf. Ch. 38). While [ɛ] does not The key feature of this system is the shift from [e] to [œ]
generally diphthongize (except in palatal environments (also found in some northern Auvergnat dialects), thereby
cf. §19.1.1.2), in some large dialect areas (e.g. Provençal giving different content to traditional minimal pairs (cf.
and Rouergat) [ɔ] now undergoes diphthongization Lnd. sèt [sɛt] ‘seven’~ set [sœt] ‘thirst’, instead of [sɛt] ~
(in closed syllables as well): pòrc [pwɔrk], [pwɛrk], [set]). Labiality, rather than tenseness, now distinguishes
[pwark] ‘pig’. the two vowels, so that mid vowels are realized tensed or
[e] and [ɛ] are contrastive in all positions: sèt [sɛt] lax according to syllable structure: [ɛ], [ɔ] in closed syllables,
‘seven’ ~ set [set] ‘thirst’, crèma [ˈkɾɛmɔ] ‘cream’ ~ crema [e], [o] in open syllables.
[ˈkɾemɔ] ‘burning’. Examples (1i,j) illustrate the initial sta- A frequent variant vowel system substitutes [ø] (or [œ])
bility of Latin ī > [i] and ū > [u]. However, Occitan shares for [y] as in Arles, where muscle ‘muscle; mussel’ is
with French, Francoprovençal, and some northern Italian [ˈmøːskle] rather than [ˈmyskle] (Coustenoble 1945:39;
dialects fronting of [u] to [y], and raising of the back mid Allières 1976). This system is found from Arles to an area
high vowel, e.g. flor OOcc. [flor] > ModOcc. [flu(r)] or [flʊ] on the edge of Catalan-speaking domains which has neither
(Ronjat 1930:128; Bourciez 1956:151f.; Wartburg 1967:37- [y] nor [ø].
48). As a consequence, the Occitan vowel inventory Sainte-Agnès, located at the extreme southeast of the
evolved into an asymmetrical system (cf. Table 19.3 and domain (Dalbera 1995; Dalbera and Oliviéri 2001) presents
Table 19.4).
Table 19.5 Landes’ Occitan vowel inventory (Gascon negre)
FRONT FRONT BACK
UNROUNDED ROUNDED CENTRAL ROUNDED
Table 19.2 Vowels from proto-Romance to Occitan
High i y u
Latin vowels Ī Ĭ, Ē Ĕ Ā, Ă Ŏ Ō, Ŭ Ū Mid ɛ œ ɔ
OOcc. Vowels (= proto-Romance) i e ɛ a ɔ o u Low a
Mod.Occ. vowels i e ɛ a ɔ u y
NB: /ɛ/ [e] or [ɛ], /œ/ [ø] or [œ], /ɔ/ [o] or [ɔ].
322
SOUTHERN GALLO-ROMANCE (OCCITAN)
an original vowel system among Occitan dialects, where behaviour of mid vowels which during the twelfth century
high vowels diphthongize to falling diphthongs (e.g. fil (Ronjat 1930:148-85; Grafström 1958:67) underwent a pro-
[fœj] ‘thread’), other simple vowels remain unchanged cess of conditioned diphthongization before palatal conson-
(except for optional /e/~/ɛ/ neutralization, e.g. lèbre ants + glide (e.g. nòch/nòit ‘night’ > nuèch [nɥɛʧ] (nuòch [ɲɔʧ],
[ˈlɛbre]~[ˈlebre] ‘hare’), and rising diphthongs reduce to nueit [n(w)e(j)t]); lèch/lèit ‘bed’ > lièch (lieit)), and less sys-
simple vowels (e.g. vielh [vij] ‘old’) (Table 19.6). tematically before velars, e.g. fòc ‘fire’ > fuòc (Gsc. huèc
Limousin and Auvergnat have developed a length con- [hwɛk], Niç. fuec [ˈfɥœke]).
trast resulting from the loss of -s in coda accompanied by A much-discussed case is the suffix -ARIUM/-ARIAM (M/F),
compensatory lengthening (Javanaud 1981:42-4,101), an first attested as -èir/-èira in old Occitan and today occurring
opposition which often plays a morphological role in con- as -ièr/-ièira in central Occitan. Some variants (WLgd: -ièr
trasting nominal number (e.g. Lim. pè [pe] ‘foot’ vs pès [peː] /-ièra, Prv. -ier/-iera) represent unproblematic reductions of
‘feet’) and second person singular from third in verbal this pattern, whereas Auvergnat has ‑èir/-èira and Gascon -èr
paradigms (e.g. Lim. chantas [sãːˈtaː] ‘you.SG sing’ vs chanta ‑[ɛ]/‑èra (-èir [ɛj]/-èira [ˈɛjɾɔ] in northern Gascon). This dis-
[ˈsãːtɔ] ‘(s)he sings’). Recall that post-tonic /a/ is realized [ɔ] tribution can be explained by assuming a general shift from
(cf. §19.1.1.2) (Table 19.7). [aj] to [ɛj] in pre-literary Occitan. In addition to [aj] in the
Unlike southern varieties, Limousin also has phonetic metathesized form [-ajru] from ‑ARIUM, this change also
nasal vowels which are systematically long and never applied to the outcome of HABEO: > *ˈajjo > *aj > èi ‘I have’
appear before a coda. As with length, the absence/presence as an independent form and as an ending in the future
of nasality can play a morphological role: chantan [sãːˈtãː] tense-forms (§19.3.2.3.1.1) (èi would then represent the
‘you.SG sing’ vs chanta [ˈsãːtɔ] ‘(s)he sings’. regular phonetic evolution, in contrast with analogical ai),
and in the thematic preterite CANTA(U)I > kantaj > cantèi,
19.2.1.1.2 Diphthongs contrary to the generally accepted interpretation which
considers it analogical on vendèi < UENDE(E)DI (cf. Anglade
Although Occitan displays neither SOSD nor GSSD (see
1921:272). Auvergnat forms, where -èir, -èira is preserved,
Ch. 38), it presents a large set of diphthongs from other
reflect the absence of conditioned diphthongization of [ɛ]
sources, including preservation of Lat. -AU-, e.g. causa
which is attested by other forms, e.g. mèlhs [mɛj] for mièlhs
[ˈkawzɔ] ‘thing; cause’ < CAUSAM. Also striking is the
< MĔLIUS ‘better.ADV’ in Vinzelles (Dauzat 1897:66). Gascon
forms result from relative chronology. The shift of -ai to
-èi is traditionally considered a feature typical of Gascon
Table 19.6 Sainte-Agnès Occitan stressed vowel inventory among Occitan dialects, and one in which Gascon resembles
FRONT FRONT BACK Iberian languages. Under the present analysis, what is spe-
UNROUNDED ROUNDED CENTRAL ROUNDED cific to Gascon is a late shift of [aj] to [ɛj]. This shift is too
late to provide input to diphthongization (hence -èir (then
High i > [əj] y > [əɥ] u > [əw] -èr) and not -iè(i)r in Gascon), but is triggered by the output
Mid tense e of velar vocalization: FACTUM ! [hajt] ! [hɛjt] hèit ‘done’,
Mid lax ɛ ɔ without diphthongization. Common Occitan, in contrast,
Rising jɛ > [i] ɥœ > [y] wɔ > [u] preserves -ai- sequences where [j] results from the vocal-
diphthongs ization of a velar (fait, or fach; also tais ‘badger’ as against
Low a Gsc. tèish < TAXO; cf. Sauzet 2002).
Occitan diphthongs also result from vocalization pro-
cesses, e.g. PATREM > paire ‘father’, or coalescence, e.g. DEUM
Table 19.7 Limousin vowel system ‘god’ > Dèu > Dieu [djew] often further simplified to [diw].
Vocalization of -l also provides diphthongs. In central Len-
FRONT FRONT BACK gadocian it occurs in coda position before coronals other
UNROUNDED ROUNDED CENTRAL ROUNDED than [s], e.g. cauda < calda ‘hot.F’, but alba ‘dawn’, falsa ‘false.F’,
sal ‘salt’. Dialects other than Lengadocian tend to vocalize
High /i/ /iː/ /y/ /yː/ /u/ /uː/
every l in coda (e.g. Gsc., Prv. auba, faussa, sau).
[I] [iː] [ʏ] [yː] [ʊ] [uː]
On the whole, diphthongs begin with [w, ɥ, j] ([ɥ] is
Mid /e/ /eː/ /ɔ/ /ɔː/
absent in Gascon, and often reduced to [j] or deleted
[e] [ej] [ɔ] [ɔː]
in other dialects) or end in [w, j], while triphthongs
Low /a/ /aː/
present two glides: ieu [jew] ‘I, me’, uèi [ɥɛj] ‘today’, uòu
[ɔ] [aː]
[ɥɔw] ~ [jɔw] ‘egg’.
323
paragogic vowel following a consonant cluster: negre ‘black’,

19.2.1.2 Unstressed vowels mòble ‘piece of furniture’.
In atonic positions, Occitan has five vowels. In pretonic An extremely common post-tonic vowel is [ɔ] or [o], the
position this results in the inventory in Table 19.8. modern realization of Latin final -A: tèrra [ˈtɛrːɔ] ‘earth’.
In unstressed positions, the opposition between lax Reasons for still considering it synchronically the realiza-
vowels ([ɛ, ɔ]) and their tense mid or high counterparts tion of /a/ are the mutual exclusiveness of [a] and [ɔ] as
([e, u]) is neutralized. This gives rise to a productive process post-tonic vowels and alternations in the thematic class of
of vowel alternation which applies in both flexion and verbs: canta [ˈkantɔ] ‘(s)he sings’ vs cantam [kanˈtan] ‘we
derivation. In the verb trobar ‘to find’, rhizotonic forms sing’, cantava [kanˈtaβɔ] ‘(s)he was singing’. Other argu-
show ò [ɔ] (tròbi, tròbas, tròba . . . ‘I/you.SG/(s)he.find(s) . . . ’), ments rely on a comparison of dialectal systems. Some
whereas arrhizotonic forms have o [u] (trobam [tɾuˈβan] ‘we. dialects pronounce [ˈtɛrːa] with post-tonic [a] (Nice, Mont-
find’, trobèri ‘I.found’). The same is true of derivation, wit- pellier, and surrounding areas, as well as Velay and some
ness trobador [tɾuβaˈδu] ‘poet, troubador’. localities between Béarn and Bigorre). The dialect of Lunel
Some dialects (Limousin, northern Lengadocian) have the (Hérault) presents the interesting peculiarity of labializing
pre-tonic inventory given in Table 19.9. /a/ as [ɔ] only after phrasal stress: la taula lònga [la ˌtawla
Alternations reveal that those dialects shift pretonic /a/ ˈlɔŋgɔ] but la lònga taula [la ˌlɔŋga ˈtawlɔ] ‘the long table’.
to [ɔ]: parli [ˈparli] ‘I speak’, parlam [pɔrˈlan] ‘we speak’, mas According to Roque-Ferrier (1878), the dialect of Bessan has
[mas] ‘farm’, maset [mɔˈzet] ‘cottage’. [a] when the post-tonic syllable is open but [ɔ] when closed:
There are five vowels in the post-tonic inventory, which la granja de las fadas [la ˌgranʤa de las ˈfadɔs] ‘the barn of the
is often identical to the variant pretonic inventory just fairies’. Much more common is the alternation between
described (cf. Table 19.9). Post-tonic -i, as in òli [ˈɔli] ‘oil’, is singular [ɔ] and plural [aː], which is found in most of Limou-
frequent and results from -IUM, -EUM final sequences where sin: la taula [lɔ ˈtawlɔ] ‘the table’, las taulas [laː tawˈlaː] ‘the
the final vowel has been lost, e.g. OLEU(M) > *ˈɔlju > [ˈɔli], tables’. Sometimes the qualitative variation is more subtle
whereas post-tonic -u [y] as in patus [ˈpatys] ‘grazing [ɑ] vs [a] for [aː], as in recent fieldwork by Oliviéri, or the
ground’ is rare. Post-tonic -o [u] may stem from Latin pro- more radical [ɔ] vs [ɛː] in Nontron.
paroxytones (e.g. nívol [ˈniβu] ‘cloud’) or result from Spanish Labialization combined with closure yields [u], a rare type
loans (e.g. carraco [kaˈrːaku] ‘gipsy’). It is also frequent in found in Medoc Gascon and some points in lower Rhoda-
verb morphology (cf. §19.3.2.2). Thousands of lexical items nian. It was typical of the dialect spoken by the Jews around
end in -e (òme ‘man’, jove ‘youth’), which in many cases is a Avignon (sometimes called Shuadit, Szajkowski 2010): Resi-
dèm dins de terra’ estranjas [esˈtranʤu] sense maisons, terras, ni
granjas [ˈgɾanʤu] ‘We live in foreign countries without
houses, lands or farms’ (cf. Sabatier 1877:49). On the basis
Table 19.8 Modern Occitan pretonic vowel inventory of this diversity Bec (1973:35) postulates a /ə/ with various
FRONT FRONT BACK realizations [ɔ], [a], [ə], but since this purported phoneme is
UNROUNDED ROUNDED CENTRAL ROUNDED only present in post-tonic position where /a/ would be
absent, it is simpler to admit /a/ in both positions (with
High i y u various realization in post-tonic position).
Mid e Realization of post-tonic /a/ as [ə] occurs in western
Low a Gascony. Putting aside [y] which is in any case marginal in
this position, post-tonic vocalism in western Gascony is
limited to two vowels, namely [ə] on the one hand, which
represents [e], [ɔ] (/a/), and [u] of other dialects, and [i] on
Table 19.9 Modern Occitan pretonic vowel inventory the other (cf. §19.3.2.3.3 for consequences for verb
(variant) morphology).
FRONT FRONT BACK
UNROUNDED ROUNDED CENTRAL ROUNDED 19.2.2 Consonant system
High i y u
Mid e Table 19.10 provides the inventory of Modern Occitan
tense consonants.
Mid lax ɔ The inventory of stops is unremarkable. Intervocalically,
Occitan voiceless stops represent the outcome of Latin
324
Table 19.10 Modern Occitan consonants almost all of Languedoc, and a large portion of Auvergne
(Ronjat 1932:6). In western Gascon (Béarn) Latin initial B-
LABIAL CORONAL PALATAL VELAR GLOTTAL
and U- (or in strong position after a coda) and the outcomes
Stop p t k of intervocalic -P- and -B-, -U- uniformly yield [b] (secondar-
b d ɡ ily weakened to [β]): trobava lo vin bon [tɾuˌβaβɔ luβi ˈβu] ‘he
Affricate ʦ ʧ found the wine good’. Central Gascon presents the same
ʤ initial neutralization but intervocalically opposes [b] and
Fricative f s (ʃ) (h) [w] (the latter corresponding to classical and eastern Occ.
(v) z [v] < -B- and -V-): trobava lo vin bon [tɾuˌβawɔ luβi ˈβu]. North
Nasal m n ɲ and east Occitan maintain the classical distinction of v ~ b:
Lateral l ʎ Lim. trobava lo vin bon [tɾuˌbavɔ luˌvi ˈbu], Prv. [tɾuˌbavɔ lu
Vibrant ɾ, r ˌvḭŋ ˈbṵŋ]. Central Occitan, as a consequence of the spread of
betacism, has lost the opposition of v and b and now coin-
cides with western Gascon pronunciation.
Most Occitan dialects fail to distinguish between [s] and
[ʃ], and confusing the two sounds was considered typical of
geminate voiceless stops, whereas voiced stops derive from Provençal pronunciation of French in the nineteenth cen-
Latin voiceless stops (and more rarely from voiced gemin- tury, as confusion of [v] and [b] was the hallmark of Gascon
ates): copa ‘cup’ < CUPPAM, cata ‘she-cat’ < CATTAM, seca ‘dry.F’ < accent in the seventeenth. Basically, Occitan makes no
SICCAM, loba ‘she-wolf ’ < LUPAM, giba ‘hump’ < GIBBAM, prada opposition between [s] and [ʃ] (nor between their voiced
‘meadow’ < PRATA, paga ‘(s)he pays’ < PACAT. In the first docu- correspondents [z] and [ʒ]). The articulation of [s] and [z] is
ments of the language, voiced stops appear word finally. In often apical and postalveolar rather than predorsal and
the poem of Santa Fe (second half of eleventh century, cf. alveolar : [ɕ], [ʑ] (Maurand 1974:94-97 for a precise descrip-
Lafont 1998) we find, for instance, fòg ‘fire’ < FOCUM (ModOcc: tion in a central Lengadocian dialect). Auvergnat presents
f(u)òc), cab ‘head’ < CAPUT (ModOcc. cap). But final devoicing [ʃ] as a conditioned variant of [s] before front vowels:
became established in the course of the twelfth century sal [ɕa] ‘salt’, cima [ˈʃimɔ] ‘summit’. In Limousin [ʃ] and [ʒ]
(Grafström 1958:215-19), giving rise to systematic alterna- are the regular pronunciation of what is [s] ([ɕ]), [z] ([ʑ])
tions in verb and nominal paradigms: sabi ‘I know’ vs sap elsewhere, while [s] and [z] (alongside [ð] and [θ]) can be
‘(s)he knows’, polit (M) vs polida (F) ‘beautiful’. By contrast, the realization of what are affricates elsewhere:
voiceless occlusives from Latin geminates remain stable Lim. cerchar [ʃerˈsaː] ‘to seek’ instead of cercar [serˈka] (or
in inflectional and derivational processes: sec/seca ‘dry.M/F’ cerchar [serˈʧa]).
< SICCUM/-AM. In central Occitan peis ‘fish’ is realized [pejs], whereas in a
In the southwestern area voiced stops after sonorants southwestern portion of Lengadocian, in contact with Gas-
(except nasals) and before vowels become approximants con and Catalan, the variant realization [pejʃ] is found with
(Ronjat 1932:4; Séguy 1978:26): saba [ˈsaβɔ] ‘sap’, margue [ʃ] a conditioned allophone of /s/ after [j]. In Gascon, how-
[ˈmarγe] ‘handle’. Such weakening is more marked for [b] ever, the realization is [peʃ] written peish (cf. Cat. peix [peʃ]).
and [ɡ], which in some dialects and contexts may disappear As a result the opposition of /s/ and /ʃ/ is phonological in
altogether, e.g. albar [alˈβa] ‘silver poplar’, but Gsc. aubar Gascon, yielding minimal pair as peish [peʃ] ~ pes [pes]
[awˈa], diguèt [diˈγɛt] ‘(s)he said’, but Rgt. [diˈɛt] ~ [djɛt]. ‘weight’. Interestingly the loanword from French cheval
Weakening of voiced stops may alter word-initial conson- ‘horse’ gives Lgd. chabal [ʧaˈβal], Prv. chivau [ʧiˈvaw], but
ants according to the preceding environment: un buòu Gsc. shivau [ʃiˈβaw].
[ymˈbjɔw] ‘an ox’, lo buòu [luˈβjɔw] ‘the ox’, sèt buòus [sɛb Affricates give rise to much variation. The inventory in
ˈbjɔws] ‘seven oxen’. Table 19.10 is maximal and probably does not hold in its
Such weakening is geographically coextensive with beta- entirety for any single dialect today. Affricate [ʦ] (tradition-
cism, which in the Middle Ages was considered a feature ally written tz) presents gaps in its distribution: it appears
typical of Gascony—where the earliest documents do wit- mostly word-finally (exceptions are dotze ‘twelve’, tretze
ness systematic replacement of initial v by b (Grafström ‘thirteen’). Classically, this limited distribution corresponds
1958:137). Classical poetry presents no hint of betacism, to a morphological alternation, e.g. ditz [diʦ] ‘(s)he says’,
and when the fourteenth-century grammarians in Toulouse disèm [diˈzɛn] ‘we say’ (in old Occitan pronounced [diˈʣem]).
criticized betacism as a Gasconism, they were probably also In Provençal and eastern and central areas of Lengadoc [ʦ]
criticizing a common popular pronunciation of their own also becomes [s]: [dis], crotz [kɾus] ‘cross’ (Gascon and cen-
town. Today, the betacizing area covers all of Gascony, tral [kruʦ]).
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The palatal affricates [ʧ] and [ʤ] have many different uvular [ʁ]: rire [ʁːiɾe] ‘to laugh’. In Marseille, a velar or
outcomes. In some dialects they depalatalize, as in uvular realization is attested (and stigmatized) in the eight-
lower Rho. chata [ˈʦatɔ] ‘girl’, jaça [ˈʣasɔ] ‘sheepshed’ eenth century at a time when the French norm was the
(Coustenoble 1945:86f.). Albigés and Roergàs depalatalize apical r (Stéfanini 1969:167). Nothing about the rhotics
and neutralize voicing: chòt [ʦɔt] ‘owl’, [ˈʦasɔ], whilst Be- clearly forces one to interpret them as the realization of
ziers neutralizes without depalatalizing: [ʧɔt], [ˈʧasɔ]. Like an underlying length contrast or a simple vs geminate
Gascon, western Lengadocian has an affricate [ʧ] (with a low opposition. Initial length represents a problem for the
frequency), but a fricative palatal [ʒ], e.g. jamès [ʒaˈmɛs] geminate approach (because geminates in general and
‘(n)ever’, while some parts of Gascony have [j] instead of other Occitan geminates are intervocalic and distributed
[ʒ] ([jaˈmɛs]). over the two adjacent syllables), but Gascon prosthesis can
tg is the traditional notation for what was probably a be understood as a repair strategy: r.(rat) > (ar).(rat) sug-
geminate affricate, e.g. vilatge [biˈladʤe] ‘village’. An argu- gesting that initial r- length (or doubling) entails extrasyl-
ment for considering tg as originally representing a gemin- labicity of the first part of the rhotic in that position.
ate is the systematic absence of a coda before tg, which
always immediately follows a vowel. This is the expected
situation given the span of the canonical Occitan syllable, 19.2.3 Syllabic structure
which only allows for one segment in coda (§19.2.3). In the
case of domètge ‘tame ADJ’ < DOMESTICUM, the geminate turns
19.2.3.1 Syllable templates
out to have triggered -s- deletion (dome(s)tge). Dialects The maximal syllabic template includes a branching onset
where j is [ʒ] have [ʤ], elsewhere tg is neutralized with j (O) and a branching rhyme (R), where the vocalic nucleus
[ʤ] or with ch [ʧ]: [biˈlaʤe], [biˈlaʧe]. (N) is followed by a single segment in coda (C), as in cròs
Occitan has three nasals: lama [ˈlamɔ] ‘blade’, lana [ˈlanɔ] [kɾɔs] ‘pit’, namely [(kɾ)O(ɔN sC)R]. All types with simpler
‘wool’, lanha [ˈlaɲɔ] ‘sorrow’. The velar nasal exists as con- structure also are allowed: sal [sal] ‘salt’, fa [fa] ‘(s)he does’,
textual variant of the nasal in coda (where there is no òs [ɔs] ‘bone’, a [a] ‘(s)he has’.
distinction between nasals): longa [ˈluŋɡɔ] ‘long.F’. Word- A branching onset ordinarily means a two-segment onset.
finally, Provençal neutralizes the three nasals with a Onsets like rhymes respect the sonority hierarchy, with
reduced velar nasal preceded by a slightly nasalized vowel: increasing sonority in onsets and decreasing sonority
pan [pa̰ŋ] ‘bread’, banh [ba̰ŋ] ‘bath’, volam [vuˈla̰ŋ] ‘scythe’. in rhymes. One type of branching onset is the obstruent–
Central and western Lengadocian drop final -n and neutral- liquid type: tres ‘three’, breçar ‘rock.INF’. Another type is
ize the other two to a coronal realization: pan [pa] ‘bread’, consonant–glide: piòt [pjɔt] ‘turkey’, coeta [ˈkwetɔ] ‘tail’.
banh [ban] ‘bath’, volam [buˈlan] ‘scythe’. Word-final -n dele- Some dialects allow onsets with three segments: truèlh
tion is a feature common to Limousin, Auvergnat, Lengado- [tɾɥɛl] ‘wine-press’, tròç [tɾwɔs] ‘morsel, piece’ (in some of
cian, and part of Gascony (together with Catalan). the dialects which diphthongize stressed /ɔ/ cf. §19.2.1.1).
Traditionally, Gascon also drops intervocalic -n-, e.g. lana > In coda position we find glides (second element of falling
laa [la], [lã] ‘wool’, but a new source of -n- is assimilation of diphthongs), e.g. mai ‘more’, liquids, e.g. mar ‘sea’, nasals,
-nd- clusters: landa ‘waste’ > lana. Gascon keeps final -m and e.g. Gsc. man [maŋ] ‘hand’, and [s], e.g. ostal ‘house’. Like
-nh distinct: volam [buˈlam], banh [baɲ]. glides, nasals occupy the coda position. Occitan, at least
The two laterals l and lh [ʎ] also neutralize word-finally in southern dialects, has no phonological nasal vowels. Even
Lengadocian, where talh [tal] ‘cut’ rhymes with sal ‘salt’. Provençal, which has more nasalization in vowels than
Gascon preserves the palatal word-finally, e.g. talh [taʎ], Lengadocian, for instance, presents only a short vocalic
but vocalizes the coronal, e.g. sau [saw]. Provençal presents nasal transition between an oral vocalic phase and the
similar forms, albeit with ([ʎ] > [j]), namely talh [taj], sau nasal consonant, e.g. Prv. tèmps [tɛɛ̃ŋ] ‘time; weather’.
[saw]. Limousin has true phonetic nasal vowels, which however
In recent times, French influence is conspicuous in rela- only occur in open syllable and hence can also be analysed
tion to the velar or uvular realization of r. The phonetic as the combination of an oral vowel and a nasal coda (cf.
value inherited from Latin is coronal with a short/long §19.2.1.1.1).
contrast: pera [ˈpeɾɔ] ‘pear’ vs tèrra [ˈtɛrːɔ] ‘earth’. Length Obstruents other than s are excluded from coda position
is neutralized in coda, with a realization typically longer as exemplified by loanwords such as factor [fa(t)ˈtu] ‘post-
than simple intervocalic [ɾ], but shorter than long [rː]. man’ or factur [fa(t)ˈtyr] from Fr. facteur where [k] is deleted
Initial r- is systematically long (rat [rːat] ‘rat’), which or assimilated. When the realization is geminate, the first
explains the Gascon prosthesis, namely arrat [arːat]. Some half of the geminate can be assumed to bear no local speci-
dialects keep short [ɾ] apicoalveolar, but replace [rː] by a fications, thus regularly allowing geminates to violate
326
distributional constraints on codas (Schein 1981; Sauzet word-final vocalization and hence internal vocalization:
1988). Most Occitan internal geminates are sonorants: espa- sau ‘salt’, autre ‘other’, auba ‘dawn’. Lengadocian dialects
tla [esˈpallɔ] ‘shoulder’, femna [ˈfennɔ] ‘woman’, setmana have no final vocalization but always present some degree
[semˈmanɔ] ‘week’ ([rː] too can be considered the geminate of internal vocalization.
counterpart of [ɾ]). In some cases obstruents also geminate: In Limousin the restricted syllabic inventory mentioned
regde [rːedde] ~ [rːette] ‘stiff ’. Geminates however are above is also found word-finally: words end in a short or
absent in northern Occitan and Provence. long vowel, oral or nasal (always long in the latter case), in
Limousin stands out since it strongly prefers open syl- diphthongs, or in -r.
lables. The only segments allowed in coda are glides and r.
As we have seen (§19.2.1.1.2), l in coda position vocalizes,
nasals are combined to form long nasal vowels, and -s
19.2.3.3 Syllable structure and sentence phonetics
deletes with compensatory lengthening. In Aquitano-Pyrenean dialects, sentence phonetics involve
deletion of extrasyllabic material and assimilation of seg-
ments excluded from coda positions. Deletion applies to
19.2.3.2 Word-final position lexical material, e.g. sèrp verinosa [ˌsɛr beɾiˈnuzɔ] ‘poisonous
Restrictions on the content of coda presented in §19.2.3.1 snake’, but also applies to plural -s after a coda: ostals nòus
appear to be greatly violated word-finally. Indeed, word- [osˌtalˈnɔws] ‘new houses’. Interestingly, reduction in deter-
final position is an important place to observe variation miners operates differently: the masculine plural form of
among dialects, as witnessed by Bec’s (1963:54f.; 1973:23) the Lengadocian articulated prepositions are written dels
classical distinction between two large dialect areas, namely ‘of.the.PL’, als ‘to.the.PL’ and this reflects the pronunciation
Aquitano-Pyrenean (Gascony and most of Lengadoc) and in old Occitan, whereas in modern Occitan they are pro-
Alverno-Mediterranean (Limousin, Auvergne, and Pro- nounced [des], [as] before voiceless stops ([dej], [aj] before
vence). According to Bec, the first is characterized by con- other consonants, and [dez], [az] before vowels, cf.
servatism, whereas the second is more innovative (where §19.3.1.2).
conservatism and innovation mostly concern phonetic phe- Word-final postvocalic stops assimilate with any follow-
nomena at the end of words and their morphological ing consonant: sèt pans [sɛpˈpas] ‘seven loaves of bread’. In
consequences). eastern Lengadocian stops delete before consonants rather
In Aquitano-Pyrenean dialects words often end in obstru- than trigger gemination. In some Carcinol dialects, stops
ents and in clusters: lop [lup] ‘wolf ’, pòrc [pɔrk] ‘pig’. In may delete word-finally before a pause, but still trigger
Alverno-Mediterranean dialects, the same words would gemination, thus yielding a form of raddoppiamento fonosin-
fit the syllabic template described in §19.2.3.1: [lu], [pɔr]. tattico (cf. Maas 1970; see also §40.3.1). Extrasyllabic stops or
Bec’s partition can thus be interpreted as follows: Alverno- stops in coda resyllabify: trauc escur [ˌtɾawkesˈky] ‘dark
Mediterranean dialects have the word schema [ó*]W (words hole’.
are sequences of canonical syllables: ó) whereas Aquitano- In Provençal (a [ó*]W dialect), syntactic phonetics mostly
Pyrenean dialects have the schema [ó*<C>]W allowing one involves hiatus reduction. Loss of final stressless vowels
final extrasyllabic consonant: [(sɛr)] ‘snake’(cf. Sauzet before another vowel is common to all dialects where
2004). Both types of dialects block concord in banning initial equivalents of the following sentence could be found: lo
extrasyllabic material: words beginning in s+C, popular or brave òme arriba a quatre oras [luβɾaβ ˌɔmarːˌiβ akaˈtɾuɾɔs]
learnèd, have all undergone prosthesis: escala < SCALA ‘lad- ‘the good man arrives at four o’clock’. Aphaeresis is less
der’, espòrt ‘sport’. Niçard secondarily licenses final exstra- frequent but favoured by some morphemes, in particular
syllabic consonants by paragoge: [(sɛr)] > [(sɛr)(pe)]. the indefinite article (un, una [yn], [ynɔ]): manja una poma
Eastern Lengadoc shows a particular pattern allowing [ˌmanʤɔnɔˈpumɔ] besides [ˌmanʤynɔˈpumɔ] ‘he is eating
for substantial [lup], but not quantitative violation [sɛr] an apple’ (in Limousin ’na is the general form of the femin-
(**[sɛrp] in that variety), except with plural morphology: ine article), the verb èsser ‘to be’ in the third singular of the
ostals [usˈtals], sèrps [sɛrs]. This last form is common to all present indicative (e.g. la pacha’s facha [lapaʧɔjˈfaʧɔ] ‘the
central Occitan varieties which do not allow double extra- deal is done’). Aphaeresis is more frequent after a stressed
syllabicity: adding plural triggers deletion of the lexical vowel: aquò’s vertat [aˌkɔjβerˈtat] ‘that’s true’. Sequences of
extrasyllabic segment. Western Gascon allows double ex- vowels (including morphemes) can be entirely deleted: vòl
strasyllabicity, lexical and flexional: sèrps [sɛrps]. anar a Albi ‘he wants to go to Albi’ can be realized [ˌbɔla
There is also a link between word-final and word-internal ˈnalβi]. In Provençal, hiatuses and hiatus reduction are more
coda vocalization, inasmuch as the former implies the lat- frequent since final vowels are more common. In a poem by
ter. Peripheral dialects from Provence to Gascony show Bigot (dialect of Nîmes) we find s’avancè’n tonalièr ‘a cooper
327
stepped forward’ which would be s’avancèt un tonelièr in ‘hemp’ (< CANNAPUM) (Dalbera 1994:376-89). In other dialects,
Lengadocian. Even stressed vowels may delete to avoid proparoxytones have been completely eliminated: cànebe >
hiatus: aquò èra ‘that was’ pronounced as [aˈkɛɾɔ] in cambe, pèrsega > persèga < PERSICAM.
Lengadocian. Occitan avoids stress clash: stress deletes before another
stress or is displaced: pòt pas [pɔpˈpas] ‘he can’t’, podèm pas
[ˌpuδɛmˈpas] ‘we can’t’. 2SG.SBJV manges [ˈmanʤes] has initial
19.2.4 Stress stress and 2PL.SBJV mangetz [manˈʤeʦ] (west Lengadocian or
Provençal [manˈʤes]) has final stress. When these forms are
Words have final or penultimate stress (see below for excep- used to express prohibition, both are stressed alike before
tions). Morphological limitations aside, heavy (viz. the stressed negator pas: lo manges pas [luˌmanʤesˈpas]
consonant-final) final syllables attract stress: escamandràs ‘don’t you.SG. eat it’, lo mangetz pas [luˌmanʤepˈpas] ‘don’t
[eskamanˈdras] ‘shameless person’. Words with penult you.PL. eat it’ (also [luˌmanʤesˈpas], homophonous with the
stress often end in vowel: espalancada [espalaŋˈkaδɔ] singular). Vowel alternations, however, are only deter-
‘thrashing’. In all dialects, however, a number of words mined by word stress: lo portetz pas [luˌpurtepˈpas] ‘don’t
end in stressed vowels, e.g. Prv. qualitat [kaliˈta] ‘quality’, carry it/him’ (cf. pòrta [ˈpɔrtɔ] ‘he carries’). Accentuation of
abeluc [abeˈly] ‘eagerness’, cascarelet [kaskareˈle] ‘whimsical.M’, clitics is discussed in §19.3.1.5.1.
in which final stops (banned from word-final position in
Provençal) are postulated synchronically by cognate forms:
qualitadós ‘of good quality’, abelugar ‘to stimulate’, cascareleta
‘whimsical.F’. Lgd. camin [kaˈmi] ‘way’, reponchon [rːepunˈʧu] 19.3 Morphology
‘black bryony’ have a final stressed vowel and so have Gsc.
legidor [leʒiˈδu] ‘reader’ or lavader [lawaˈδe] ‘washing house’. 19.3.1 Nominal morphology
Camin is related to caminar ‘to walk’ and other derived forms
postulating a final underlying /n/, the other examples con- Gender morphology is basically realized as -Ø (M) vs -a (F),
tain suffixes whose feminine form would be respectively and number morphology as -Ø (SG) vs -s (PL), hence Lgd. amic
-ona [ˈunɔ], -idora [iˈδuɾɔ], -adera [aˈδeɾɔ]. This leads to the ‘friend.M’, amiga [aˈmiγɔ] ‘friend.F’, amics [aˈmiʦ] ([aˈmiks] in
generalization that words ending in a (phonological) con- WGsc.) ‘friends.M’. amigas [aˈmiγɔs] ‘friends.F’. Almost all
sonant or in a diphthong have final stress. Otherwise stress adjectives mark feminine gender through the -a morpheme,
falls on the penult. All this means that stress assignment even where not etymologically justified: grand/-a ‘big.M/F’
depends on the weight of the last syllable: a heavy (closed) (< GRANDEM.M/F).
final syllable attracts stress, otherwise stress is penult.
There are exceptions in both directions, lexical and mor-
phological. Lexical exceptions include isolated words such
19.3.1.1 Gender
as aquò ‘that’ or aicí ‘here’, or loanwords such as cafè ‘coffee’. Underived nominals present no necessary correlation
A number of words end in unstressed -ol (< Lat. proparoxy- between gender and ending, witness vin (M) ‘wine’ vs fin (F)
tones in -ULUM), which in modern Occitan tend either to ‘end’, còst (M) ‘cost’ vs pòst (F) ‘board’. Masculine nouns
eliminate the final -l (nívol [ˈniβu] ‘cloud’) or to regularize ending in -a are rare learnèd loans such as lo papa ‘the
stress in the basic word nívol > nivol [niˈβul]. Morphological pope’, lo califa ‘the caliph’, though in medieval texts they
exceptions are found in noun (taulas [ˈtawlɔs] ‘tables’, cf. were sometimes treated as feminine (Lafont 1967:69). In
§19.3.1.2) and verb morphology (cantas [ˈkantɔs] ‘you.SG derived nominals, suffixes are gender-specific; for instance
sing’, cf. §19.3.2.2; cantàvem [kanˈtaβen] ‘we sang.IMPF ’, cf. -atge, -ament, -ador are masculine, while -ason [aˈzu] and
§19.3.2.3.1). Central Limousin tends to eliminate such excep- (-i)tat are feminine. With certain minimal pairs, the femin-
tions and transparently assign stress to the last heavy (long ine indicates a larger version than the corresponding mas-
or closed) syllable in the word: taulas [tawˈlaː] ‘tables’, chan- culine form: pairòl (M) is a smaller cauldron than pairòla (F),
tas [sanˈtːa] ‘you.SG sing’. and cotèl (M) refers to a smaller knife than a cotèla (F). In
Two modern dialects allow antepenult stress, Niçard and some cases, -a (< Lat. NPL -A) carries a mass interpretation:
Aranese Gascon. In Aranese, proparoxytones are all learnèd frucha ‘fruit’ (mass) vs fruch/-es ‘fruit/-s’ (countable), fuèlha
words such as gramàtica ‘grammar’ and música ‘music’. ‘foliage’ (mass) vs fuèlha/-s ‘leaf/leaves’ (countable).
Niçard has the same type of exceptions perhaps due to Natural gender (sex) is sometimes expressed by different
coexistence with Italian as an official language until 1860. lexical items: fraire ‘brother’, sòrre ‘sister’, ase ‘ass’, sauma
Niçard also has a class of popular proparoxytones such as ‘she-ass’, pòrc ‘swine’, truèja ‘sow’. However, many forms are
pèrsegue [ˈpɛsege] ‘peach’ (< PERSICUM), cànebe [ˈkanebe] derivationally related, exploiting the same morpheme that
328
is used to mark agreement in adjectives, namely masculine - òmes [luˌzawtɾeˈzɔmes] ‘the other men’. Many dialects pre-
Ø and feminine -a: cosin/-a ‘cousin.M/F’, mèstre/-a ‘master/ sent a syllabic variant of the plural morpheme (viz. -[es],
mistress’, auc/-a ‘gander/goose’ (cf. Sauzet and Brun- with WLgd. variant -[is]) after sibilants, affricates, and s
Trigaud 2009). +stop clusters: nas/nases ‘nose/-s’, braç/braces ‘arm/-s’,
A small group of pronouns do not pick out specific noun nuèch/nuèches ‘night/-s’. Some dialects, however, (such as
phrases and can be considered neuter in reference. Aiçò Agenés) leave such nouns unmarked for plural: nas ‘nose(s)’.
‘this’ is deictic: Qu’es aiçò? ‘What is this? (said in reference Following an opposite trend other dialects (Roergàs) may
to what the speaker can currently see before him/her). Aquò add syllabic plurals to words ending in sonorants or vowels:
‘that’, by contrast, typically has anaphoric reference: Aquò ostal, ostalses ‘house(s)’ instead of ostals, camin, camisses
m’agrada, lit. ‘I like that’ (said e.g. in reference to what the ‘way(s)’ instead of camins [kaˈmis]. Syllabic plurals are also
addressee has just said). Also neuter is çò [sɔ] modified by an frequent with determiners and quantifiers, e.g. aquel/aqueles
adjective or relative clause: çò mieu ‘that [which is] mine’, çò ‘that.MSG/PL’, tot/totes ‘all.MSG/PL’, tant/tantes ‘so.many.MSG/PL’,
que disi ‘what I say’. The etymology of these words is indeed thereby ensuring systematic marking of number.
neuter (they include an outcome of the neuter pronoun HŎC), Final stops combine with the plural morpheme to prod-
but the reason for considering aquò and similar words neu- uce an affricate [ʦ] or [ʧ] (the affricate may further reduce
ter is the fact that they trigger a specific agreement pattern to [s] in some dialects), e.g. lops [luʦ]/[luʧ]/[lus] ‘wolves’,
(a definitory condition for the existence of a gender distinc- cats [kaʦ]/[kaʧ]/[kas] ‘cats’, but are deleted before the
tion following Corbett 1991). The clitic neuter pronoun, o [u] plural morpheme when a coda precedes: pòrcs [pɔrs] ‘pigs’.
(< (unstressed) Lat. HŎC, variants: ac, va . . . , is used with a Western Gascon dialects, however, allow both stop+s clus-
preceding pronominal antecedents (Aquò, o vesi, lit. ‘that, ters and heavy clusters: lops [lups], pòrcs [pɔrks]. In some
I see it’: ‘I can see that’) or to reference genderless phrases, dialects at the border between Lengadoc and Provence (e.g.
such as clauses: [Que vendrà pasi, oi sabèm totes ‘[That (s)he Quissac), the plural marker -s in the noun in only realized
will not come], we all know (that)’. The pronoun o is also after a vowel (when a coda position is available), e.g. pin/pins
used to refer to adjectives (in which gender is present only [pi]/[pis] ‘pine tree/-s’, but grum/grums [gry̰n] ‘grain/s’. In
by agreement and not intrinsically): Polidai, oi es fòrça ‘Pretty, the same dialect plural is always marked on the determiner,
she is very much indeed’. Clitic neuter pronoun o (or its e.g. los [lus] ‘the.MPL’, las [las] ‘the.FPL’ (cf. Sauzet 2012).
variants) is distinct from masculine lo and feminine la. Sigmatic marking may also involve phonetic modification
Compare: Aquò o vesi and L’ostal, lo vesi ‘The house.M. I can (Allières 1954; Dalbera 1993; Maas 1967; Sibille 2014). For
see it.M’, La carrièira, la vesi ‘The street.F., I can see it.F’. In old example, in Lengadoc and western Gascon [s] becomes yod
Occitan, neuter gender was also manifested by the agree- before all consonants except unvoiced stops, e.g. los pòrcs
ment of an attributive adjective in a predicative construc- [lusˈpɔrs] ‘the pigs’ but los buòus [lujˈβjɔws] ‘the oxen’. The
tion. With a masculine singular subject, nominative change of [s] to yod may also trigger further changes in the
agreement is marked by -s on the adjective: e·l pas fo blancs preceding vowel (mostly in rapid speech) los [luj] ! [lyj] !
e·l vis fo bos (Guilhem IX, duke of Aquitaine) ‘and the bread.M. [li], [laj] ! [lɛj] ! [li]. A few dialects (in Rouergue) rather
NOM. was white.M.NOM., and the wine.M.NOM. was good.M.NOM. alter /s/ to [l] in the same context [lulˈβjɔws]. Before
(cf. ModOcc. e lo pan foguèt blanc, e lo vin foguèt bon without unvoiced stops, other alterations may occur, namely aspir-
case marking.) But when agreeing with a neuter subject, an ation [luhˈpɔrs], or partial [luɸˈpɔrs] or total assimilation
adjective took a zero ending: çò m’es bo(n)(**bos) ‘that.N is [lupˈpɔrs] of [s]. Alteration of the plural morpheme may
good.N to me (= I like that, I agree with that)’. Some dialects apply after all parts of speech in the appropriate phonetic
had a neuter clitic form lo (< ILLUD) homophonous with lo context. In some dialects it also applies to all instances of
(<ILLUM). The modern offspring of such dialects (part of final -s, no matter what their morphemic value is. However,
Provençal), after the loss of case marking, must now be the proclitic status of the definite article and its close link to
analysed as simply using masculine as default gender. See the following noun or adjective makes change almost sys-
also Ch. 57. tematic in this context, while it is much more sporadic in
the noun. The transparent preservation of the sigmatic
plural in the noun supports an interpretation of the com-
19.3.1.2 Number plex alternations in the article as allomorphic realizations
Occitan has inherited and largely preserved a sigmatic of /z/ rather than as a vocalic type of plural marking.
plural, which continues the Latin accusative plural (see However, in dialects where final -s is lost in the noun,
§42.1). A large southwestern area of Occitania together allophonic variation in the determiner have generally
with a conservative Alpine area pronounce all instances of been reinterpreted as giving rise to a uniform vocalic plural
final plural -[s] (realized as [z] before vowels), e.g. los autres marking whose expression is mostly limited to the
329
determiner (Sauzet 2012; Barra-Jover 2012): lei buòu(s) [lej adjectives basically applies wherever plural is also marked
ˈβjɔw] ‘the oxen’ and hence lei pòrc(s) [lejˈpɔr] ‘the pigs’. in nouns. After -s, or affricates, dialects with syllabic plural
This reorganization of plural marking, which took place in nouns have the same such plurals in the adjectives too:
in about the sixteenth century (cf. Ronjat 1932:272; 1937:34), anglés/angleses ‘English.SG/PL’, drech/dreches ‘straight SG/PL’.
forms the major characteristic distinguishing Provençal The Provençal plural type (vocalic and limited to deter-
from Lengadocian, but it is also found in an area in Perigord. miners and quantifiers) generally leaves adjective invari-
Provençal has plurals such as leis òmes [lejz ~ liˈzɔme], lei able (except, as we have seen in §19.3.1.3 when they precede
dròlles [lej~liˈdɾɔlle], lei femas [lej~liˈfemo], with [lej] the the noun). Exceptions to gender marking are jove ‘young’
eastern Provençal realization, and [li] the Rhodanian real- (although the form jova can be found), and some Gascon
ization (resulting from a general reduction of pretonic varieties which preserve adjectives in -au (< -al) invariant
diphthongs in that dialect). In Provençal or Perigourdin, for gender, e.g. pena mortau ‘deadly sadness’ like pecat mor-
masculine and feminine articles are not distinguished tau ‘deadly sin’. In other dialects the same preservation
from each other in the plural. In Rhodanian and other occurs in lexicalized phrases, e.g. rauba novial ‘wedding dress’.
Provençal dialects, plural is marked not only marked deter- Comparison is expressed with the adverbs mai or p(l)us
miners but also in prenomimal feminine adjectives, e.g. leis ‘more’ and mens ‘less’, with the standard of comparison
bèlei chatas [liˌbɛliˈʦato] ‘the beautiful girls’ vs leis chatas introduced by que ‘that’ (sometimes by de ‘of ’): una paret
polidas [liˌʧatopuˈlido] ‘the pretty girls’. In the general Pro- mai bassa ‘a lower wall’, una pèl pus blanca que son mocador
vençal system, [z] is only preserved to avoid hiatus in the ‘a skin whiter than her handkerchief ’. There exist residual
determiner: [lizaˈmi] leis amics ‘the friends.M’. synthetic comparatives such as melhor/-a ‘better.M/F’, and
Another important deviation from the sigmatic type is others restricted to specific set phrases, e.g. la màger part
the Limousin system (Chabaneau 1876; Javanaud 1981), ‘the greater part’, pas la mendre causa ‘not the slightest
where loss of final -s (like every coda -s in this dialect) has thing’, but es mai grand que tu (**màger que tu) ‘he is taller
been (to use the traditional terminology) ‘compensated’ by than you’, Vilafranca es mai pichòta (**mendre) que Tolosa.
vocalic lengthening (probably through debuccalization of Equality is expressed by tan(t) . . . coma . . . (e.g. un trabalh tan
[s] to [h] in the first stage) with concomitant attraction of complicat/tant aisit coma un autre ‘a job as difficult/easy as
stress: Lim. l’òme [ˈlɔme] ‘the man’ vs los òmes [ly ɔˈmej] ‘the another’). The comparative forms mendre < MINOR and màger <
men’, la femna [lɔˈfenɔ], las femnas [laː feˈnaː] (cf. Mok 2008; MAIOR represent cases of both nominative case preservation
Floricic 2010; Sauzet 2011). and exceptional gender invariability: lo fraire/la sòrre màger
[ˈmaʤe] ‘the elder brother/sister’ (but dialectally they
also happen to undergo regular variation: lo fraire mage/la
19.3.1.3 Case sòrre maja).
Modern Occitan preserves functional case marking only in The superlative is formed by preposing the definite art-
clitic pronouns (§19.3.1.5.1), whereas old Occitan had until icle before the noun, e.g. la paret mai/pus bassa lit. ‘the more
the fourteenth century a binary case system (cf. §56.2.1.3) low wall’, although repetition of the article before the
contrasting nominative and oblique nominal forms (called adjective under French influence is frequent (la paret la
‘objective case’, cas régime in reference grammars, Anglade mai bassa). Intensification is expressed by adverbs fòrça
1921:211), albeit systematically only in the masculine, e.g. [ˈfɔrsɔ]/[ˈfɔsɔ], plan [pla] or (Gsc.) hèra [ˈhɛrɔ]: fòrça/plan/
OOcc. lo cavals (NOM.SG), lo caval (OBL.SG), li caval (li cavalh) (NOM. hèra bon ‘very good’. Various prefixes also convey superla-
PL), los cavals (OBL.PL) ‘the horse(s)’. As a general rule, modern tive meaning, e.g. subrebon lit. ‘over.good’, repoirit lit. ‘re.
forms continue the oblique form, e.g. caval/cavals ‘horse/-s’, rotten’, as can reiteration: donèt una granda granda fèsta ‘he
with the exception of some animates which continue the gave a huge (lit. big big) party’.
nominative (Chabaneau 1887), e.g. SOROR > sòrre ‘sister’, PRES-
BYTER > prèire ‘priest’, and the agent suffix -ATOR, -ITOR >
-aire/-eire (e.g. cantaire ‘singer’, tondeire ‘shearer’). In the 19.3.1.5 Pronouns and determiners
latter case, oblique case is also continued by a variant
19.3.1.5.1 Pronouns
form of the suffix namely -ador, -edor: pecador ‘sinner’; pone-
dor ‘paper layer (in a paper mill)’. The forms of tonic and clitic pronouns are set out in
Table 19.11.
Tonic forms of pronouns are used for emphasis (to
19.3.1.4 Adjectives express topic or focus) and as the object of prepositions.
Adjectives all mark number and, in most cases, gender: Tonic forms are etymologically nominative. In old Occitan
vièlh(s) ‘old.M(PL)’, vièlha(s) ‘old.F(PL)’. Number marking in they were distinct from the tonic oblique used as a
330
Table 19.11 Occitan tonic and clitic pronouns

Tonic ieu tu el (M), ela (F) nosautres (M), -as (F) vosautres (M), -as (F) eles (M), elas (F)
vosa
Clitic DO me te lo (M), la (F), o (N) nos vos los (M), las (F)
vosa se (REFL) se (REFL)
Clitic IO me te li nos vos lor (li)
vosa se (REFL) se (REFL)
a
Polite form.
complement of prepositions: ni èu non sent, en mi tant d’ardi- before vowels (ie vau ‘there= I.go’, i’es [jes] ‘there= (s)he.is’).
ment (Gaucelm Faidit) ‘and I.NOM don’t feel, inside me so The genitive-ablative form ne presents a variety of context-
much courage’, where èu, tonic nominative, is the medieval ual realizations: ne mangi, n’ai manjat ‘of.it= I.eat/of.it=I.have
(pre-diphthongation) form for ieu, and mi a tonic oblique. eaten’, me’n dona/li’n (or i en)/nos en dona ‘me/him~her/us=
Similarily: tu me diràs si a ti plais ‘you SG.NOM will say to me of.it= (s)he.gives’. ne also may present a form ni (cf. mi, ti, si
whether it pleases you (lit. to you.SG.OBL)’. In early modern for me, te, se) or a double realization ne’n which often
Occitan (as in Godolin’s works, c.1620) ieu (and its variant replaces the simple form particularily in Provence: ne’n
form jo resulting from a shift of the syllabic summit: [jew] > vòle ‘of.it=of.it I.want (= I want some)’. Moreover, an amal-
[iw] > [ju] > [ʒu]) is still distinct from mi (per mi ‘for me’, de gamated form has appeared since the eighteenth century in
mi ‘of me’, encontra mi ‘against me’), but the neutralization is some Provençal dialects, e.g. Niç. n’i en [ɲen] (Ronjat
complete in the second person singular: per tu ‘for you’ as 1937:567-9; Gasiglia 1984:305; Oliviéri 1991), which combines
well as tu bèla Margòt ‘you beautiful Margot’. In Godolin’s the genitive-ablative n'en/nen with the dative or locative li/i
work, clitic objects in the first and second persons are me (see §19.4.5).
and te, respectively. As stress falls on the word-final foot, and as there is a
While in southern dialects the stressed form continues priori no limit to the number of preceeding syllables, pro-
the medieval subject pronoun, the northernmost part of clisis is phonologically unmarked. Adjunction of unstressed
Occitania uses outcomes of the oblique case for the stressed syllables on the left of the host word entails no violation of
form: me, te (cf. Fr. moi, toi). This option correlates approxi- the prosodic well-formedness of the whole. A phrase such as
mately (though the details are yet to be confirmed) with the la te baila ‘it= you.SG (s)he.gives’ is neither prosodically nor
existence of clitic subject forms (cf. §19.4.1). phonologically distinct form a simplex verb form such as
The reinforced plural forms nosautres ‘we’, vosautres ‘you’ latejava ‘(s)he was beating (fruits from a tree)’. Proclitic
(< nos/vos ‘we/you.PL’ + autres ‘others’) become frequent in forms are treated phonetically as lexical pretonic syllables,
the late middle ages (fifteenth century). Note the distinction so that in dialects where latejava is pronounced [lɔteˈʤaβɔ],
between the true plural vosautres, -as and the polite form la te baila would also be realized as [lɔteˈβajlɔ] (with an
vos. The reinforced form nosautres has shortened variants, identical labialization of pretonic /a/ in both forms). By
namely n’autres in the east (n’autrei in Provence) and nosaus contrast, enclisis involves either violation of the general
in the west (Gascony). Beside the existence of specific stress pattern or stressing the clitic, the latter being gener-
stressed oblique personal pronouns in medieval Occitan, ally preferred. Consequently, with enclisis in the imperative
the clitic first and second person singular forms me and te phrase stress falls on the last clitic: manja-lo! [manʤɔˈlu] ‘eat.
presented dialectal variants mi, ti. These variant forms are IMP.2SG=it!’, dona-lo-me! [dunɔluˈme] ‘give.IMP.2SG=it=me!’. In
continued in the modern dialects. Lengadocian the feminine pronoun in enclisis is labialized,
Other clitic forms must be added to the forms in e.g. Manja-la! [manʤɔˈlɔ] ‘eat.IMP.2SG=it(F)!’, as if the pronoun
Table 19.11, namely the ablative-genitive (also partitive were post-tonic (cf. the final vowel in manja). The enclitic -la
object) form ne (< INDE ‘thence’) and the locative form i (<IBI thus behaves as if phonologically unstressed, only receiving
‘there’ or HIC ‘here’), sometimes complemented by çai (deic- stress at a later phonetic level. Toulouse and surrounding
tic locative), lai (anaphoric or deictic for distant location). dialects present an alternative to the default stress strategy
The locative form (i) and the dative form (li) very frequently on the (last) enclitic, witness the contrast between manja-le!
fall together, resulting in the undifferentiated use of i or li [ˌmanʤɔˈle] ‘eat.IMP.2SG=it!’ (Toulouse also has le for lo as a
(according to dialect) with one or the other meaning. Rho- clitic pronoun, paralleling the forms of the article, cf.
danian has a fused form which is ie before consonants and i’ §19.3.1.5.1) and manjatz-le! [manˈʤalle] ‘eat.IMP.2PL=it!’,
331
where the enclitic is stressed (former case) unless it follows a aquel ‘this/that’ (cf. §54.1.1): aqueste libre ‘this book’ (e.g.
final stressed syllable (latter case; see Sauzet 1986). here on my table) vs aquel libre ‘this/that book’ (e.g. we
are talking about). This binary contrast extends to the
19.3.1.5.2 Determiners
neuter forms aiçò ‘this vs aquò ‘this/that’, and to the locative
The most general forms of the definite article are lo [lu] adverbials aicí ‘here’ (e.g. where the speaker is) vs aquí
(MSG), la (FSG), los (MPL), las (FPL), also Prv. lei (M/FPL). A large ‘here/there’ (e.g. an understood place of reference).
area around Toulouse (Nègre 1978) has le instead of lo. A third form, aiceste, is much rarer than the other two.
Almost all modern Occitan dialects present articulated Speakers having this form in their grammar use it to mark
forms of the prepositions de ‘of, from’ and a ‘to, at’, e.g. de contrastive deixis (cf. §54.1.3): aqueste libre es mieu, mas
lo > del ‘of the.MSG’, a lo > al ‘to/at the.MSG’ (with plural forms aiceste es tieu ‘this book is mine, but this other one is yours’.
dels [des], als [as]), while articulated forms of other preposi- Occitan has both tonic adjectival possessives used with
tions vary across dialects (and even within dialects): per lo > the definite article (lo mieu paire, la mia maire ‘(the) my
pel ‘for/by.the’, sus lo > sul ‘on.the’, jos lo > jol ‘under.the’. In father’, ‘(the) my mother’) and clitic forms used without
the feminine, basically, no contraction occurs: de la, a la, de the article (mon paire ‘my father’, ma maire ‘my mother’; cf.
las, las. Contraction of plural feminine forms is found in also §§30.4, 46.3.1.2). Dialects vary in their use of one or the
dialects where masculine and feminine plural forms of the other form: some lack the tonic forms altogether (e.g. Rho-
article have fallen together, e.g. Provençal where lei PL.M/F danian), while others heavily restrict the use of the clitic
entails dei [dej ~di] PL.M/F < de lei, ai [ej ~i] PL.M/F < a lei. Some forms (e.g. Rouergat, Gascon). Tonics are also used as pro-
dialects around Montpellier do however contract the fem- nouns: lo mieu, la tia [tjɔ] and predicatively: lo libre es mieu/
inine article in the plural (yielding daus [das] for both tieu ‘the book is mine/yours’. Common Occitan has levelled
gender in that dialect) although they have distinct forms the etymological vocalism of the possessive, atonic (mon,
for uncontracted forms in the plural (los, las). ton, son) as well as tonic (mieu, tieu, sieu, also meu, teu, seu
Another distinctive form of article is the Pyrenean Gas- without diphthongization maybe as a result of the word
con form eth (M)/era (F), found in an area contiguous to the le only bearing secondary stress). Gascon, however, maintains
article on the one hand and the Catalan area where the the etymological distinction in forms such as lo men (< MEUM),
definite article is el. Some linguists consider this article the lo ton, lo son (< TUUM, SUUM).
result of a secondary stress on the Latin demonstrative ILLE Clitic possessives closely parallel the article. Compare:
‘that’ (indeed, all over Gascony the tonic third person pro- mon, ma, mos, mas and lo, la, los, las. In old Occitan, final -n
noun is eth/era ‘he/she’ in contrast to the common Occ. el/ in mon (< M(E)UM) could be dropped, yielding a form mo (to,
ela), while others believe it to be the reanalysis of the so). In modern Occitan forms such as mo fraire ‘my brother’
articulated form deth ‘of.the.MSG’ > (d’) eth (Eygun 2004). An (for mon fraire) are sporadically found. In the feminine,
article form evolved from IPSE/IPSA rather than ILLE/ILLA elision was regular: m’amiga ‘my friend.F.’ whereas modern
namely so (sel before a vowel), sa has been preserved in an Occitan, like French, deploys mon in the feminine before
area east of Grasse (eastern Provence) and has left many vowels: mon amiga. The third person pronoun son, sa, sos, sas
traces in toponymy and anthroponymy elsewhere (cf. may specialize in the designation of a unique possessor,
§46.3.1.1): forms like Sacasa, Sarriu for sa casa ‘the house’, with a form lor (< ILLORUM), lors marking the plurality of
s’arriu ‘the river’ are attested as place or family names (in possessors, but son, sa may also be used (like Latin SUUS,
official French notation, Sacaze, Sarrieu). SUA) for multiple possessors. (cf. in §19.3.1.5.2 the possible
The indefinite article in the singular is un (M), una (F), use of li as a dative clitic in both singular and plural, beside
reduced in Limousin to n’, ’na. To express both partitive the possibility of lor, specifically plural.)
(mass indefinites) and plural, central and eastern dialects
employ de ‘of ’, e.g. beure d’aiga ‘to drink water’, manjar de
pomas ‘to eat apples’, while southern Gascon and neighbouring
19.3.1.6 Derivational morphology of nominals
Lengadocian dialects use zero in the same cases, namely béver Conversion is extremely productive, yielding nouns and
aiga, minjar pomas, and northern Gascon and Limousin employ adjectives from verbs, e.g. cridar ‘to shout’ > crit (M) ‘shout’,
de + article (cf. §6.4.2): beure de l’aiga, minjar de las pomas. crida (F) ‘proclamation, call’, enflar ‘to inflate’ > enfle/-a
Those words traditionally called ‘demonstratives’ may ‘inflated.M/F’, although, as these examples illustrate, gender
carry two basic values, namely deictic (truly demonstrative) is unpredictable (Jagueneau 1995). Also productive are
or anaphoric values. The most widespread system draws a deverbal derivational affixes (Alibèrt 1976:355-92; Ronjat
binary distinction between a referent associated with the 1937:330-407), including the agentive suffix-aire/-eire (jogar
speaker’s deictic sphere, marked by aqueste ‘this’, and all to play’ > jogaire ‘player’, vendre ‘to sell’ > vendeire ‘sales-
referents considered to fall outside that sphere, marked by man’), the suffix -ador (Gsc. -ader) indicating instruments
332
and places (e.g. semenar ‘to sow’ > semenador ‘sower’, lavar ‘to adjective can present any of the seven tonic vowels (cf.
wash’ > lavador ‘wash-house’), and the suffixes -ament , -atge, fòrtament [ˌfɔrtɔˈmen] ‘strongly’ with the same vowel as
and -ason used to derive action nominals (e.g. laurar ‘to fòrta [fɔrtɔ] ‘strong.F’, but in contrast with a derivative like
plough’ > laurason ‘ploughing (time)’). afortiment [afurtiˈmen] ‘affirmation’). By contrast, Provençal
Among denominal derivations, we may mention here the treats such erstwhile compounds as derived forms (cf. Prv.
use of evaluatives (diminutives: -et, -on, -èl; augmentative fortament [furtaˈmḛŋ]).
-às), e.g. pastorelet ‘young shepherd’ (< pastor ‘shepherd’ + èl +
et), ostalàs ‘large (ugly) house’ (< ostal ‘house’ + -às), the
agentive -ièr (Lat. < -ARIUS) used to indicate trades and pro- 19.3.2 Verb morphology
fessions (e.g. pairòl ‘kettle’ > pairolièr ‘cauldron maker’, per-
ruca ‘whig’ > ‘perruquièr ‘hairdresser’) as well as the names of 19.3.2.1 Verb classes
trees from the corresponding fruit (e.g. poma ‘apple’ > pomièr Verbs are distributed across three classes (Chabaneau
‘apple tree’), whereas the feminine form of the suffix is used 1876:218-20) in accordance with the different forms of their
to indicate the place where a particular plant is cultivated third person singular present indicative, e.g. parar ‘to avoid’:
(e.g. ceba ‘onion’ > cebièira ‘onion patch’), which can also be para [ˈparɔ] ‘avoids’, parir ‘to give birth; obey’: parís [paˈɾis]
expressed by the suffix -eda (cf. rove ‘oak’ > rovièira ‘oak ‘gives birth; obeys’, and parer ‘to seem’: par [par]. Class 1 is
wood’ vs albar ‘white poplar’ > albareda ‘white poplar wood’). characterized by the presence of a theme vowel -a appearing
Adjectives can be formed from nouns with -ós (e.g. gost in a number of arrhizotonic and rhizotonic forms, e.g. parl-a
‘taste’ > gostós ‘tasty’, pesolh ‘louse’ > pesolhós ‘louse-ridden’), ‘(s)he speaks’, parl-a-m [parˈlan] ‘we speak’, parl-a-va [par
whereas nouns designating a particular quality can be ˈlaβɔ] ‘(s)he was speaking’, whereas classes 2 and 3 are athe-
formed from adjectives by suffixation of -esa (e.g. amar matic. Class 2 presents a suffix -iss-, -ís in the present indica-
‘bitter’ > amaresa ‘bitterness’) or -or (fresc ‘fresh’ > frescor tive (and such forms of the imperative as are not identical
‘freshness’). With the same meaning are the now lexicalized with subjunctive forms) (cf. §27.8), e.g. leg-ís ‘you.SG read’,
-tat (e.g. libertat ‘freedom’ < LIBERTATEM) and its productive whereas in class 3 verbs the root is not followed by anything
variant -etat (e.g. franc ‘frank’ > franquetat ‘frankness’). in the third person singular present indicative, e.g. bat ‘(s)he
The polyvalent verbal suffix -ejar can be added to adjec- beats’, vei ‘(s)he sees’. Furthermore, only classes 1 and 2 are
tives (e.g. verd ‘green’ > verdejar ‘to be/turn green’), nouns productive, witness the following Lengadocian distributions
(braç ‘arm’ > bracejar ‘to move one’s arms’), and verbs (e.g. from the DOF database: 10,644 verbs (class 1), 1,266 (class 2),
trabalhar ‘to work’ > trabalhejar ‘to pretend to work’)’. Para- and 446 (class 3 which includes a number of mutually exclu-
synthetic formations take the prefixes a- or en- and the sive variant forms). Finally, classes 2 and 3 share the same
suffixes -ar (thematic class) or -ir (suffixed class) and can endings, thereby often contrasting with class 1.
be aded to an adjective (e.g. ateunir ‘to make thin’ < a- + tèune
‘thin’ + -ir) or a noun (e.g. embartassar ‘to cover with shrubs’
< en- + bartàs ‘shrub’ + -ar). 19.3.2.2 Present tense and person marking
The most frequent type of nominal compounds involves
The forms of the present indicative for the verbs parlar ‘to
V + N formations (= nouns) and N + A formations (= adjec-
speak’, bastir ‘to build’, and vendre (Gsc. véner) ‘to sell’ are as
tives or nouns). The former, e.g. pòrtamantèl ‘coat stand’, are
follows:
exocentric compounds and are systematically masculine
except when used to refer to female individuals: es un/una
(2) a. parlar: parli, parlas, parla, parlam, parlatz, parlan
cercagarrolha ‘s/he is a brawler (lit a seek.brawl)’. Adjective
b. bastir: bastissi, bastisses, bastís, bastissèm, bastissètz,
compounds also are exocentric, e.g. capleugièr [kallewˈʤɛ]
bastisson
‘absent-minded (lit. head.light)’, and inflect for gender (e.g.
c. vendre: vendi, vendes, vend, vendèm, vendètz, vendon
feminine capleugièira [kallewˈʤɛjɾɔ]).
Occitan forms manner and sentential adverbs mainly The paradigms in (2) correspond to current usage in
with the suffix -ment/-mens, a compound formation built standard Occitan and are also representative of western
on the Lat. ablative MENTE ‘with/of a mind’ (followed by so- Gascon and the southern Lengadocian dialects of Ariège
called ‘adverbial -s’ in the variant -mens). Its original status and Aude. Divergence from this pattern is, however, fre-
as a nominal phrase could be seen in old Occitan, inasmuch quent, as the following remarks make clear.
as under coordination -ment/-mens did not need to be The first person singular in central and western Occitan is
repeated (e.g. autament e fòrt ‘loudly and strong(ly)’; Jensen -i, as well as in a part of Provence including Nice. Another
1986:303). In modern Occitan, adverbs in -ment qualify as common ending is -e (north and east), while -o [u] is specific
compounds because the preceding feminine singular to Vivaro-Alpine (Bec 1973:18f.; Dalbera 1994:600-604;
333
Casagrande 2010). In classical medieval Occitan, by contrast, reasons as 2SG -es, namely that person markers in the the-
the first person singular is unmarked, e.g. c(h)ant ‘I sing’, matic conjugation consist solely of a consonant. Generaliza-
bastisc ‘I build’, ven(d) ‘I sell’, in accordance with the general tion of the thematic ending would either lead to phonetic
loss of final non-low unstressed vowels. The most straight- complications in combining -n, -s, or -m with consonant-
forward innovation to explain is –e, which corresponds to final stems or would involve introduction of the theme
the reanalysis of a final supporting -e in verbs whose root vowel into the athematic class, a contradictory require-
ends in stop+liquid (e.g. tremble ‘I tremble’), with a similar ment. Gascon and western Lengadocian keep the distinction
explanation for Vva. -o (cf. tremblo). The most difficult case between parlan ‘they speak’ and dison ‘they say’, whereas in
is the -[i] ending (Ronjat 1937:154; Müller 1955; Grafström Provençal neutralization is sometimes phonetic as post-
1968:110), which has variously been considered the output tonic [o] and [a] merge into [o] (instead of rising to [u] as
of a false regression in cases where final -e in hiatus would happens elsewhere): cantan [ˈka̰nton], dison [ˈdizon].
have de-syllabized to a glide (e.g. cante ara ‘I sing now’ Conditioned diphthongization (§19.2.1.1.2) is a potential
*[ˌkanˈtjara] > canti (ara)) or, more plausibly, a regressive source for other alternations, as diphthongization was
from of the -[j] ending of the auxiliary ai [aj]/èi [aj] ‘I have’, limited to stressed positions (cf. fuèlha ‘leaf ’ vs folhum [fu
also present in the synthetic future (e.g. cantarèi/cantarai ˈʎyn] ‘foliage’), but this type of alternation has been levelled
‘I will sing’), and weak preterites (e.g. cantèi ‘I sang’). out: rather than pojar, **puèja (cf. puèg ‘hill’) the form in use
The second person is -as [ɔs] in the first class (i.e. the is pojar, poja ‘to climb’.
theme vowel -a- followed by an ending -s), and -es [es] in Auxiliaries present irregular paradigms. Forms of èsser ‘to
the remaining two, although a number of dialects (e.g. be’ are soi, ès, es, sèm, sètz, son. Alternative forms include 1SG
Rhodanian) as well as the Mistralian norm generalize -es, som [sun], so [su] (< SUM with or without exceptional pres-
e.g. cantes (for cantas). The third person singular lacks any ervation of the final nasal), sòi with -i ending as soi, by
marking: verbs of the first class end in the bare theme vowel analogy of ai ‘I have’ etc., 2SG sès, as well as the traditional
(-a), verbs of the second class in the predesinential suffix subjunctive forms 1SG siái [sjɔj], siáu [sjɛw], and 2SG siás [sjɔs],
(-iss-, written -ís word finally) and verbs of the third class [sjɛs]. Less frequently, except in Rhodanian, subjunctive
reduce to the radical. forms also replace the first and second persons plural indi-
In the first person plural some dialects generalize -èm, cative: siam, siatz. Forms of aver ‘to have’ are ai (or èi), as, a
though less frequently than 2SG -es. In general, class 2 suffix (often pronounced [ɔ]), avèm, avètz, an (often aun [ɔw]). The
-iss- is stable throughout the paradigm, but in some Gascon verbs far ‘to do’ and anar ‘to go’ present considerable simi-
dialects it is absent in the first and second persons larities to aver: fau, fas, fa, fasèm, fasètz, fan, and vau, vas, va,
plurals, namely, basteishi, basteishes, basteish, bastim, bastitz, anam, anatz, van (note the unique first person singular
basteishen. desinence -u in fau and vau < FA(CI)O/UA(D)O).
Most dialects extend arrhizotonic stress to reflexes of
Latin third conjugation verbs (e.g. disètz ‘you.PL say’, fasètz
‘you.PL do’) in accordance with the ‘N Pattern’ (Maiden
19.3.2.3 Verb stems
2005:152-64; cf. §43.2.4) Limousin has abandoned the In the thematic class, all forms are made on the same stem,
N pattern (at least as far as stress is concerned), inasmuch variation being only phonetic (pòrti, portam). In the second
as stress is directly conditioned by the weight of the ending class, the suffix characteristic of this type of verbs presents
as can be seen in (3). three forms: -iss- in the present indicative (bastissi ‘I build’),
-isc- in the present subjunctive (bastisca ‘I build’), -igu- in the
(3) Indicative present: Limousin pattern preterite (bastiguèri ‘I built’). Other tenses are formed using
one of these variant forms of the suffix. In the third class,
parlar: parle [ˈparle], parlas [parˈlaː], parla [ˈparlɔ], parlam various cases arise. Some verbs present just one stem,
[parˈlãː], parlatz [parˈlaː], parlan [parˈlãː] (or parlen [parˈlẽː]). phonetic variation aside, e.g. vendi, venda, vendèri < vendre
‘to sell’, whereas others present two stems: one whose
The third person plural is -an in the first class (i.e. the distribution in the paradigm corresponds to the distribution
theme vowel -a- followed by -n), -on in the athematic of the -iss- suffix in class 2 (e.g. dis- in disi ‘I say’ and related
classes. A frequent variant of the latter in the west (Gascon, forms), the other one to the distribution of the -isc- and -igu-
Limousin) is -en (e.g. venden ‘they sell’). There is a strong and suffixes in class 2 (dig(u)- [diγ]- in diga PRS.SBJV, diguèri PRT.IND.
ancient tendency in southern Limousin and Lengadocian to of verb dire ‘to say’). Finally, some verbs in class 3 present
generalize -on (pronounced -[u(n)] as in [ˈparlu], frequently three stems corresponding to each variant of the second
written as parlo ‘they speak’, dizo ‘they say’ in medieval class suffix, e.g. in the verb saber ‘to know’: sab- in sabi PRS.IND
documents). This athematic ending spreads for the same parallels -iss-, sapi- in sàpia PRS.SBJV parallels -isc- and saup- in
334
saupèri PRT.IND parallels -igu-. The stem used in the preterite, cal que digam), irregular second person imperative forms
is often formed by adding a -g(u)- [gʷ] affix to the present often (albeit not always) remain astray: diga, digatz as
stem, the outcome of Latin perfective marker -U- > [w] imperative forms become distinct from the innovative sub-
(Dalbera 1990; Casagrande 2011; 2012), e.g. ven ‘(s)he junctive: cal que digue, que diguetz.
comes’ venguèt ‘(s)he came, vòl ‘(s)he wants’ volguèt ‘(s)he The imperfect always shows the same stem as the pre-
wanted’, or by substituting the same -g(u)- to the final sent, and presents a different morpheme in thematic and
consonant of the present stem, e.g. disi ‘I say’, ditz ‘ (s)he athematic classes. The verb èsser ‘to be’ is the only verb
says’, diguèt ‘(s)he said’, bevi ‘I drink’, beu ‘(s)he drinks’, presenting a specific stem for this tense: its paradigm is
beguèt ‘(s)he drank’. Some dialects expand the use of -g- to given in (5) after the regular types.
stems ending in stops, e.g. vendeguèri ‘I sold’, bateguèri ‘I beat’
for vendèri, batèri. (5) Imperfect indicative
parlar: parl-avi, -avas, -ava, -àvem, -àvetz, -avan
19.3.2.3.1 Tenses formed on the present indicative stem bastir: bast-issiái, -issiás, -issiá, -issiam, -issiatz, -issián
vendre: vend-iái, -iás, -iá, -iam, -iatz, -ián
Second persons in the imperative are normally built on èsser : èri, èra, èra, èrem, èrez, èran
the same stem as the present. In the second person sin-
gular, the imperative is nothing more than the verbal stem Across dialects, parlava mostly presents phonetic vari-
(and hence is homophonous with third person singular). In ation (e.g. [parˈlaβɔ], -[ˈawɔ], -[ˈavo]). Athematic classes
the plural, the second person is identical to the indicative, present less straightforward variation. The old Occitan
whereas the first person is the same as that of the form, preserved in some Comengés varieties (southeastern
subjunctive. Gascony), had a disyllabic realization of the suffix: disia [di
ˈzia] ‘(s)he was saying’. Regular labialization of post-stress
(4) Imperative present -a, and synaeresis, yields the typical Lengadocian form disiá
parlar: 2SG parla, 1PL parlem, 2PL parlatz [diˈzjɔ]. An even earlier synaeresis followed (or preceded)
bastir: 2SG bastís, 1PL bastiscam, 2PL bastissètz by a contextual palatalization of -a explains the Provençal
vendre: 2SG vend, 1PL vendam, 2PL vendètz type disiá [diˈzje]. Gascon has two types in this case: disè
and disèva. The latter form seems to have been rebuilt to
The presence of a subjunctive form in the first person parallel cantava (and bastiva, a form specific to Gascony in
plural of imperative must not be confused with use of the class 2). The short form has received many interpretations
subjunctive to express prohibition. The difference is mani- (Bourciez 1937; Allières 1988), the simplest being that it
fested in clitic placement, e.g. mangem-la ‘let’s eat it!’ with takes the similar Provençal development to a more
enclisis (in this case the subjunctive form can be considered advanced stage, viz. -[ˈia] > -[ja] > -[jɛ]. Early fixation of
fully integrated into the imperative), but la mangem pas! ‘we the stress on -i- (homotony) and the resulting uniformity
must not eat it!’ with proclisis as is normal in the subjunct- of the paradigm would have favoured reduction of [jɛ] to
ive of which prohibition can be considered a specific use. In [ɛ], whereas in Provençal variation in the vowel (disiá [di
the negative, all three forms are subjunctive: la manges pas/ ˈzje], disiam [diˈzja̰ŋ]) favours the conservation of the glide
la mangetz pas ‘don’t you.SG/PL eat it’. Standard French has (Sauzet 2002).
the same clitic placement variation between Mangeons-la! vs Etymologically, the old Occitan first person singular is
Ne la mangeons pas!, although not using subjunctive forms identical to the third person singular, e.g. cantava ‘I/(s)he
(**Mangions-la! **Ne la mangions pas!). But spoken French sang’, disiá ‘I/(s)he said’, a feature retained today in many
presents a tendency to generalize enclisis in the prohibition dialects. However, normative use after the practice of
(Mange-la pas!), a tendency absent form Occitan dialects writers like Bodon or Roqueta chooses to mark the distinc-
which employ the subjunctive to express prohibition tion: cantavi vs cantava, disiái vs disiá. Provençal marks the
(**Manges-la pas.) A few imperatives are irregular, e.g. vèni first person with -e in the thematic class and with final [w]
‘come.SG!’, vai ‘go.SG!’, while others represent frozen sub- in all other cases, e.g. cantave (cf. cante) vs disiáu [diˈzjɛw].
junctives, e.g. diga ‘say.SG’ (originally and still in some dia- Various suggestions have been put forth to explain -iáu.
lects: digas), digatz ‘say.2PL’. Such irregular subjunctive forms Some consider it as a loan form neighbouring Alpine
present the highest degree of independence from their (where -o [u] is the first person marker), others claims
etymological paradigm. Whereas both negative forms and that it may be the result of fusion of a postposed subject,
first person plural of imperative follow dialectal evolution viz. disiá ieu [dizjeˈjew] > disiáu [diˈzjew].
of the subjunctive (e.g. diguem, diguem pas instead of digam, In the plural, Lengadocian and Gascon fix stress on the
digam pas, like cal que diguem ‘it is necessary for us to say’ for vowel following the root, e.g. cantàvem ‘we sang’, cantàvetz
335
‘you.PL sang’, with stress falling on the same syllable as in 1SG 19.3.2.3.1.1 INFINITIVE AND TENSES FORMED ON INFINITIVE
cantavi. This fixing of stress is called homotony in Allières (FUTURE AND CONDITIONAL)
(1971:30). In the athematic conjugations, homotony is hid-
Infinitives of the first and second classes end in -r, e.g.
den by synaeresis. Interaction of homotony and synaeresis
parlar, bastir, though -r is no longer audible except in Alpine
is however responsible for variations in the realization of
dialects (e.g. chantar [ʧanˈtar]/[ʧanˈtaʁ]). In the third class
vendiam [benˈdjan] (synaeresis before homotony) vs [ben
we find -re after stops and glides (e.g. batre ‘to beat’, deure ‘to
ˈdjɔm] (homotony before synaeresis: labialization of a to
owe; must’) and -er [e] elsewhere (e.g. conéisser ‘to know’).
[ɔ] resulting from the post-tonic stage of the vowel).
Old Occitan had a number of final-stressed athematic infini-
According to Allières (1971:30-32), homotony is typical
tives (from the Latin second conjugation), e.g. mover ‘to
of western dialects. Niçard does not show it, having
move’, veser ‘to see’, of which only a handful survive in the
cantavam, cantavatz with final stress. In Provence west of
modern dialects (which also have been lexicalized as
Nice and in eastern Lengadoc stress moves in the first
nouns), e.g. aver [aˈβe] ‘to have’, poder ‘to be able’. In popular
two plural forms, but at the cost of doubling of the
use, these forms have usually been replaced by ‘strong’, or
imperfect morpheme: cantaviam, cantaviatz (cf. vendiam,
rhizotonic forms such as saupre for saber ‘to know’, deure for
vendiatz). Gascon and the rest of Lengadoc have homo-
dever. Forms such as avèrre/agudre replacing aver ‘to have’
tonous forms as given in (5) according to a pattern which
present more complex alterations. Used as nouns, teleo-
is also found in the preterite and past subjunctive. Gascon
tonic infinitives may tend to become differentiated from
also generalizes homotony to the present subjunctive
the verb by retaining the final vibrant, e.g. poder [puˈδer]
(càntem, vénam or, in the west, càntim, vénim), and in the
‘power’. In Gascon class 3 verbs, all infinitives are rhizotonic
western dialects, also to present indicative: càntam
and end in unaccented -er: bàter for batre ‘to beat’, véner for
[ˈkantɔm], càntatz [ˈkantɔʦ] or càntem [ˈkantəm], càntetz
vendre ‘to sell’, sàber for saber ‘to know’.
[ˈkantəʦ], the imperative (viz. cantatz) being the only
As in many other Romance languages (cf. §§27.6, 46.3.2.2),
exception to this pattern. In the imperfect, Limousin
the future is originally an analytic tense consisting of the
has phonetic placement of stress as in the present, e.g.
infinitive followed by a (reduced) form of the auxiliary aver
chantave [sãːˈtaːve], chantavas [sãːtaˈvaː].
‘have’. In old Occitan these two elements could still be separ-
A third verbal form sharing the present stem is the
ated by clitics (Anglade 1921:274): dir vos ai ‘I shall say to you’
gerund: en cantant, en bastissent, en vendent. Some dialects
(lit. ‘say.INF=you=I.have’). The future paradigms are as in (6).
tend however to build this form on the preterite stem, e.g.
en bastiguent or en vegent instead of en vesent from the verb
(6) parlar: parlarai, parlaràs, parlarà, parlarem, parlaretz, parlaràn
veire ‘to see’ (PRT vegèri). Dialects around Toulouse present a
bastir: bastirai, bastiràs, bastirà, bastirem, bastiretz, bastiràn
very specific way of forming the gerund by adding -[n] to
vendre: vendrai, vendràs, vendrà, vendrem, vendretz, vendràn
the phonetic form of the infinitive whatever this form is and
without modifying stress placement. In the thematic class
The first person singular also has the variant cantarèi etc.,
no change results, e.g. cantar [kanˈta] > en cantant [eŋkan
on a par with the variation between the forms for ‘I have’,
ˈtan], whereas in the suffixed class (bastir [basˈti]) the result
namely èi for ai, and some Vivaro-Alpine dialects have
is bastint [basˈtin] (instead of bastissent). The latter form
cantarèi, -ès, -è, . . . (Ronjat 1937:234). The third person singu-
could be analysed as a mere modification in morpheme
lar is often pronounced [kantaˈɾɔ] in Lengadocian on a par
selection bast-i-nt (with -i- as in the infinitive of this class
with a similar pronunciation of a [ɔ] ‘(s)he has’ (cf. also va
and -nt [n] as in the first class, cantant), but in the third class,
[bɔ] ‘(s)he goes’, fa [fɔ] ‘(s)he does’), with corresponding
forms are en véndrent [emˈbendɾen], en bàtrent [ˈbatɾen], en
plural forms in [ˈɔw] (where [w] is the asyllabic version of
conéissent [kuˈnejʃen] (cf. conéisser [kuˈnejʃe]), en èssent
-u, the generalized athematic ending of the third person
[eˈnɛsen] (cf. èsser [ˈɛse] ‘to be’). The starting point of this
plural). Sauzet (1998) has suggested that these could reflect
peculiar formation has to be a reanalysis of the thematic
the clitic status of the underlying third person verb ‘have’
(first conjugation) gerund as resulting from the quasi-
forms, such that a form like cantarà [kantaˈɾɔ] ‘(s)he will
syntactic ajunction of -n to the infinitive (/kant-a-r/ !
sing’ would be comparable to canta-la! [kantɔˈlɔ] ‘sing.IM-
[kanˈta] + n ! [kanˈtan] rather than from regular derivation
P2SG=it’. A possible confirmation is the completely atypical
(/kant-a-n/! [kanˈtan]). The reanalysis is invisible as far as
paroxytonic future in (7) found in Barèges Gascon (Rohlfs
only the first conjugation is concerned, but is manifested
1977:220; Massoure 2003:202) representing the generaliza-
when the procedure is applied to the third conjugation (en
tion of penultimate stress on the basis of a former paradigm
bàtrent [ˈbatɾen]). This surely has to do with the substitution
cantarèi, cantaràs, cantara [kanˈtaɾɔ] (with unaccented
of gerund by infinitive in neighbouring varieties of Gascon
enclitic auxiliary).
and part of Auvergnat.
336
(7) parlar: parlèri, parlàras, parlàra, parlàram, parlàratz, parlàran -èc, itself analogical on old Occitan strong forms like ac
bastir: bastìri, bastìras, bastìra, bastìram, bastìratz, bastìran ‘had’, dec ‘(s)he had to’, producing paradigms like cantègui,
vener: venèri, venèras, venèra, venéram, venératz, venèran cantègues, cantèc, . . . , where eventually intervocalic [γ] is
replaced by [β] to yield a paradigm where imperfect and
Other interpretations have been proposed (stress retrac- preterite in the class 1 are only distinguished by choice of
tion, Coromines 1937:462, Lausberg 1956:220, or a different vowel, namely, cantavi [kanˈtaβi] ‘I was singing’ vs cantèvi
etymology, namely the Latin future perfect: Rohlfs [kanˈtɛβi] ‘I sang’. By contrast, Limousin and Gascon have
1977:220) which are discussed in connection with similar uniformized the preterite by levelling the third person
facts in Dalmatian in Maiden (2008b). plural ending to one syllable, e.g. cantèi, cantès, cantèc (or
Alpine dialects of Occitan spoken in Italy have lost the cantè), cantèm, cantètz, cantèn (vs cantèron in other dialects),
future tense altogether and use a periphrastic construction whereas some Lengadocian dialects have generalized -r-
involving an adverb instead: ieu chanto puèi (lit. ‘I sing then’) only to the first and second persons singular: cantèri, can-
= cantarai ‘I shall sing’. tères, preserving cantèm, cantètz in the first and second
Conditional endings correspond to a reduced form of the plural.
imperfect of aver ‘to have’, as shown in (8). Central Lengadocian as illustrated in (9) has long forms in
the first two plural persons and homotony, whereas in the
(8) parlar: parl-ariái, -ariás, -ariá, -ariam, -ariatz, -arián same persons Provençal presents morpheme doubling as in
bastir: bast-iriái, -iriás, -iriá, -iriam, -iriatz, -irián the imperfect, e.g. canteriam, canteriatz (with -ia- as in imper-
vendre: vendr-iái, -iás, -iá, -iam, -iatz, -ián fect disiam, following -er-). Instead of the uniform preterite
endings that prevail in common Occitan, Gascon often pre-
As in the imperfect, the ending -iá is realized [jɔ] or [jɛ] sents vowel qualities characteristic of each verb class in the
and results from synaeresis of -ia. Gascon has forms: canteré preterite, e.g. at Mazerolles cantèi, -ès, èc . . . , bastii [basˈtij],
[kanteˈɾe], -és, -é, . . . , parallel to the athematic short imper- bastís, bastic . . . , venoi [beˈnuj], -ós, -oc.
fect venè ‘I came’ (vs venèva). The fact that only the short The imperfect subjunctive is always built on the same
form is present in the conditional (**cantarèva) supports the stem as the preterite (cf. the PYTA pattern in Maiden
secondary character of venèva. The difference in vowel qual- 2001a).
ity may result from a varying output of [ja] > [(j)ɛ] or [(j)e]
and a different choice in the conditional to avoid confusion (10) parlar: parl-èsse, -èsses, -èsse, parlèssem, -èssetz, -èsson
with the future (in Gascon the future canterèi is often real- bastir: bastigu-èsse, -èsses, -èsse, -èssem, -èssetz, -èsson
ized [kanteˈɾɛ]). vendre: vendèsse, -èsses, -èsse, -èssem, -èssetz, -èsson
19.3.2.3.2 Preterite and forms built on the preterite
Some dialects have 1/3SG parlès, and sometimes the inflec-
In modern Occitan all preterite forms are regular, as far as tional vowel is -a-: parlèssa, parlèssas, . . . Non-etymological
endings are concerned, as shown in (9). first person marking also occurs, e.g. parlèssi, bastiguèssi.
Gascon dialects with different vowels in the preterite mor-
(9) parlar: parl-èri, -ères, -èt, -èrem, -èretz, -èron pheme present a parallel variation in the past subjunctive,
bastir: bast-iguèri, -iguères, -iguèt, -iguèrem, -iguèretz, -iguèron e.g. parlèssi, bastissi, venossi. Provençal, including Niçard, has
vendre: vend-èri, -ères, -èt, -èrem, -èretz, -èron forms with double morphemes (granted -ia- in -iam, -iatz is
considered a dissemination of the athematic imperfect mor-
Preterite endings -èri, -ères, . . . combine with the distinct pheme; cf. §19.3.2.3.1) in the first and second persons plural:
second (or preterite) stem if there is one: cantèri, vendèri . . . like cantessiam, cantessiatz.
canti, vendi . . . but bast-igu-èri, digu-èri, vengu-èri, veg-èri . . . with a A third form sharing the preterite stem (when a specific
different stem from the present stem : bast-iss-i, dis-i, ven-i, ves-i. preterite stem exists) is the past participle. Forms are as
The -r- which appears throughout the paradigm spreads in (11).
from the third person plural, where it is etymological (cf.
Lat. -ERUNT). Some northern dialects in Perigord and (11) a. parlar: parlat, FSG. parlada
Auvergne have built a similar paradigm generalizing the b. bastir: bastit, FSG bastida
-t from the third person singular, e.g. at Les Martres de c. vendre: vendut, FSG venduda , creire (‘to believe’): cre-
Veyre (Auv.) we find chantèi [ʦãˈte], chantètes [ʦãˈtɛte], gut, FSG -uda (cf. creguèri), aver (‘to have’) : agut, FSG
chantèt [ʦãˈtɛ], chantètem [ʦãˈtɛtẽ], chantètetz [ʦãˈtɛte], -uda, poder (‘to be able’): pogut, FSG poguda (cf. po-
chantèton [ʦãˈtɛtu] (Ronjat 1937:247). In the Toulouse guèri), téner (‘to hold’): tengut, FSG -uda (cf. tenguèri),
area, by contrast, some dialects generalize -gu- from a 3SG voler (‘to want’): volgut, FSG -uda (cf. volguèri).
337
In the athematic class, there are a number of irregular par with cante ‘I sing’. In Gascon the present subjunctive
past participles such as vist (veire ‘to see’), dich or dit (dire ‘to sometimes present a palatalized stem (e.g. etymological
say’), fach or fait (far ‘to do’), cuèch (còire ‘to cook’). The verb valha ‘it be worth’ <UALEAT) and sometimes generalizes the
èsser ‘to be’ has a past participle estat, FSG -ada, from estar palatal element to all class three verbs as a part of the
(which is still in use in Gascon as a distinct verb but has inflection yielding forms such as vénia ‘I sell’ for venda, and
fallen out of use in most other varieties). bàtia ‘I beat’ for bata. In most of western Gascony, where
post-tonic vowels are reduced to [ə] and [i] such that PRS.SBJV
cante would be identical to PRS.IND canta (both [ˈkantə]),
19.3.2.3.3 Present subjunctive
reduction of [jə] to [i] gave rise to a subjunctive -i ending,
Setting aside class 2 verbs which in classical and normative e.g. veni (< vénia) ‘sell’ PRS.SBJV.1/3, and by generalization also
usage have different stems, there are few verbs which build canti ‘sing’ PRS.SBJV.1/3.
their present subjunctive on a specific stem, e.g. aver ‘to
have’: (ai), avèm, aviái (on the present stem av-), aguèri (on
the preterite stem agu-) but aja [ˈaʤɔ] (with a stem aj-,
specific to the present subjunctive; saber ‘to know’: sabi,
sabiái (stem sab-), saupèri (stem saup-) but sàpia, sàpias . . . 19.4 Syntax
sapiam . . . (on stem sapi- ), conéisser ‘to know, to be aquainted
with’ coneissi, conseissiái (stem coneiss-), coneguèri (stem con- 19.4.1 Subject clitics
egu-) but conesca (stem conesc-). There is a tendency, at least
in eastern and central dialects, to generalize a two-stem Like most Romance languages, Occitan dialects are mainly
system in the third (athematic) conjugation, with the sec- pro-drop. However, some varieties of old and middle Occi-
ond stem ending in -g and common to preterite and present tan have been shown to display subject pronouns (Sauzet
subjunctive. Western Provençal or eastern Lengadocian dia- 2007), something which the study of modern dialects can
lect presents forms as bateguère, meteguère for batèri, metèri shed new light on if we accept that diatopic variation
‘to beat, to put’ PRT.IND. In the same dialects, stem 2 and stem reflects diachronic change (Oliviéri 2010; 2011). Indeed, the
3 also tend to fall together so that present subjunctive modern varieties are not all pro-drop and some dialects
shares the same stem as preterite and imperfect subjunct- located at the boundaries of the Occitan-speaking area dis-
ive. For class 2, bastiga (bastigue) (PRS.SBJV), instead of bastisca play subject clitics for some persons, while others have no
‘build.SBJV’, is the rule in Provençal and is frequent in eastern such clitics (cf. also §47.3). Between the full pro-drop Occi-
Lengadocian. Outside class 2, the verb aver ‘to have’ is aga tan varieties and the oïl dialects which are similar to French
(ague) (PRS.SBJV) instead of aja in Provençal (cf. PRT aguère), and in this respect, there is a transitional area in which subject
agèri [ˈaʤɛɾi] (PRT) instead of aguèri in Lengadocian (cf. SBJV clitics gradually emerge. Indeed, in the south-east of France
aja [ˈaʤɔ]). Other cases of levelling are PRT sapièri (on a par between Nice and the Italian border, we can establish an
with sàpia from saber ‘to know’) or conega, conegue (on a par isogloss delimiting (western) Occitan from (eastern) Ligur-
with coneguèri, from conéisser ‘to know (somebody), to ian on the basis of several factors, the main syntactic one
recognize’). being the pro-drop parameter (Dalbera 1989; Forner 2001).
Endings in the present subjunctive are as in (12). To the north of the Occitan area, on the other hand, the facts
appear at first less clear insofar as it is difficult to identify
(12) parlar: parl-e, -es, -e, -em, -etz, -en regularity in the emergence of subject clitics (see Map 19.2
bastir: bast-isca, -iscas, -isca, -iscam, -iscatz, -iscan where increasing darkness indicates the presence of subject
vendre: vend-a, -as, -a, -am, -atz, -an clitics). The situation is described in detail by Heap (2000) and
Oliviéri (2011) and summarized in Table 19.12.
Some dialects such as eastern Gascon extend first person Oliviéri (2011) highlights a gradual emergence of subject
singular marking from the present indicative into the pre- clitics in terms of different features, the first being the
sent subjunctive to give such forms as parli or pàrlei (instead [Person] feature which distinguishes Person 1 and 2 on
of parle). Also the third person plural morpheme -on can be one hand from Person 3 on the other. This reflects the fact
generalized from the indicative, e.g. canton [ˈkantu] ‘they that a subject clitic can first appear for Persons 1 and 2 or
sing.IND/SBJV’. The present subjunctive presents a rare case for Person 3. The next feature to emerge is [Speaker], which
(in Occitan) of analogy operating from the thematic class to distinguishes Person 1 from Person 2, with one or both
the other classes, as shown by the fact that all Provençal clitics of the pair being expressed. Finally, [Number] and
dialects and a great number of Lengadocian dialects have [Gender] features are introduced into the system, triggered
generalized inflectional -e, e.g. vende ‘I sell’, digue ‘I say’ on a by Person 3 or by Person 2 and thereby giving rise to a full
338
SOUTHERN GALLO-ROMANCE
Subject clitics
ko in meteorological constructions
Enunciative que
‘Third topicalization’
Map 19.2 Occitan dialects: distribution of syntactic features
(OCCITAN)
Table 19.12 Verb paradigms in northern Occitan: estre ‘to be’ (present indicative)
LE MONT - COUSSAC - ST - PARDOUX -
DORE TARGON EYMOUTIERS BONNEVAL LA - RIVIÈRE AIGUILLES TAYAC
1 se sej jo se se sø a sju sˈɛj

2 t se te ʃɛʲ te se ty se ty se sɛs tœ sˈe
3 e ej ej we we al ɛs ew ˈej
4 sã sɔ̃ nu sũ nu sũ nu sũ (nu) sẽŋ sˈõŋ
5 sɛ bu ʃej vu se vu se vu se (vu) se vuˈzaw sˈe
6 sɔ̃ sɔ̃ sũ sũ i sũ i sũ zi sˈõŋ
paradigm as witnessed by the northern dialects (cf. Heap the unmarked SV(O) order, and indeed this inverted order is
and Oliviéri 2013). shown to occur, albeit mostly in literary texts (13a,b) and
The emergence of expletive clitics is less straightforward. idioms (13c):
Following Chomsky’s distinction (1981) between non-
argument (= genuine expletive, e.g. impersonal ‘it’), and (13) a. E cour lou Diable au degoulòu. (Prv.)
quasi-argument (= weather ‘it’), Kaiser et al.’s (2013) study and run.3SG the Devil to.the abyss
of northern Occitan dialects shows a differential emergence ‘And the Devil runs to the abyss.’
of expletive clitics in accordance with this distinction. For
b. Creson las gents que son mòrts. (Lgc.)
instance, some dialects which are fully pro-drop, in that
think.3PL the people that be.3PL dead
they do not display any argumental (= referential) subject
‘People think that they are dead.’
clitics, uniquely employ a quasi-argumental subject clitic
/ko/ (lit. ‘that’) in meteorological constructions, a phenom- c. Picon doui oura. (Niç.)
enon which expands progressively northwards (from Cor- ring.3PL two hours
rèze to Creuse) to other impersonal constructions. This ‘The clock strikes two.’
development is represented in Table 19.13, where the only
verbal form without an overt subject clitic is the impersonal However, this order is not as frequent as in Italian or
verb caler ‘to be necessary’ which requires a ‘genuine’ exple- Spanish. For instance, Lafont (1967:372f.) claims that an a
tive subject, hence phonologically null. priori ambiguous sentence like (14a) will be automatically
interpreted as (14b), and only with difficulty as (14c).3
Table 19.13 Progressive emergence of the ‘quasi-argument’
/ko/ (14) a. Canta la prima.4
CORRÈZE CREUSE sing.3SG the springtime
FAUX - ROYÈRE - DE -
b. ‘(S)he sings the springtime’
TREIGNAC MAZURAT VASSIVIÈRE
c. ‘Springtime sings.’
ka pløu ka plo kɔ mɔʎɔ ‘it is raining’ Thus, if the possibility of a VS order exists, as was com-
faj fʁɛ ka fe frɛ kɔ fej fʀe ‘it is cold’ mon in old Occitan (Jensen 1986:362; Romieu and Bianchi
fɛ nɥɛ ka fɛ nœʲ kɔ faj nɛ ‘it is dark’ 2002:164), it is not productive in oral language today.
Indeed, in the THESOC Occitan database (Dalbera et al.
mø ʃɑ̃blə me sẽblə kɔ me semblɔ ‘it seems to me’
1992- ), which contains a number of oral texts, the VS
sɔu fo fo ‘one must’
configuration is almost absent (Oliviéri 2004). This may be
due to French influence or represent an independent
internal innovation, but in any case remains a phenomenon
19.4.2 Constituent order which needs to be studied in greater detail.
19.4.2.1 Subject inversion 3
However, our informants are not unanimous on this point, and some
One of the classic correlations of a positive setting for the favour (14c) as the unmarked interpretation. Prosody is probably also at
pro-drop parameter is so-called ‘free subject inversion’ play here.
4
Where the dialect is not explicitly identified, the examples are pan-
(Chomsky 1981; 1982; Rizzi 1982). Since (most) Occitan dia- Occitan. In §19.4 examples are written in accordance with their original
lects are pro-drop, we should expect V(O)S deviations from spelling.
340
b. A París, lai anarai. (Lgd.)

19.4.2.2 Topicalization and focalization To Paris there= go.FUT.1SG
A noteworthy characteristic of Occitan is that the sentential ‘I will go to Paris.’
constituents are often displaced for pragmatic purposes
(18) a. Joan, li ai parlat. (Lgd.)
(cf. §§31.3.4, 34.4-5), namely for encoding focalization
John to.him= have.1SG talked
or topicalization (Ronjat 1913:249-69; 1937:524, 643-5;
‘I have talked to John.’
Camproux 1958:499-504; Lafont 1967:371-83; Alibèrt
1976:349-53; Gasiglia 1984:346-9; Hourcade 1986:313-16). b. París, lai anarai. (Lgd.)
Although widespread in the area, this phenomenon seems Paris there= go.FUT.1SG
to be greater in the west of the domain, especially in ‘I will go to Paris.’
Gascony and Béarn. As shown in the examples below, vari-
ous elements (e.g. objects, subjects, adverbs, infinitives) can Beside these types of topicalizations which are well
be fronted under focalization (15a,b; henceforth in small attested in other Romance varieties, some Occitan dialects
caps) and topicalization (15c,d; henceforth underlined): (especially in Languedoc) license another kind of topicaliza-
tion structure (Sauzet 1989; Lahne 2005; Faure and Oliviéri
(15) a. MA BACHO ai perdut. (Gvd.) 2013), where the subject (19a) or a complement (19b) of the
my cow have.1SG lost embedded clause is anticipated in the matrix sentential
‘I have lost my cow.’ core:
b. M’ an dich que PROUN vous plas. (Niç.)
(19) a. Sabi ton paire que vendrà.
to.me= have.3PL said that rather to.you please
know.1SG your father that come.FUT.3SG
‘They told me that you like it pretty much.’
‘I know that your father will come.’
c. Lo temps, cresi que va cambiar. (Lgd.)
b. Cresi pas los dròlles que li
the weather think.1SG that go.3SG change
believe.1SG not the children that to.them=
‘The weather, I think it’s going to change.’
aguèsson donat de còcas.
d. Dormir que cal. (Lgd.) have.3PL given of cakes
sleep.INF that must ‘I do not think that they gave cakes to the children.’
‘One must sleep.’
Faure and Oliviéri (2013) treat such cases as examples of
Another option is rightwards movement (Ronjat 1937:572), embedded hanging topic, witness the parallel between the
for both focalization (16a) and topicalization (16b): root and embedded hanging topics in (20a,b), despite the
fact that ‘aboutness’ topics are supposed to occur at the left
(16) a. Te creiran, TU! (Lgd.) edge of the whole sentence since they involve a root phe-
you= believe.FUT.3PL you nomenon (Cinque 1990b).
‘They will believe YOU!’
(20) a. Lo libre, los estudiants n’ an parlat.
b. Vous n’en farien, li gènt, d’ istòri! (Prv.)
the book the students of.it= have.3PL talked
to.you= of.it=would.do.3PL the peopleofstories
‘The students have talked about the book.’
‘People would make a fuss about it (to you)!’
b. Sabi lo libre que los estudiants
Among the various types of Romance topicalization know.1SG the book that the students
(Cinque 1983; 1990b; 1997; Benincà 2001a), Occitan displays n’ an parlat.
clitic left-dislocation (cf. 17a,b) and hanging topics (cf. 18a, of.it= have.3PL talked
b). In the former case, the topic bears the same case as the ‘I know that the students have talked about the book.’
clitic (here marked by the preposition a ‘to’), while in the
latter the hanging topic appears without a case-marker and The geographical distribution of this structure (see Map
is referenced by a resumptive case-marked element (clitic, 19.2), which can be related to other characteristics of (some)
epithet) in the sentential core. Occitan dialects which display the presence of a comple-
mentizer que ‘that’ in independent clauses (see below), sug-
(17) a. A Joan, li ai parlat. (Lgd.) gests a progression from east to west, with an increasing use
to John to.him= have.1SG talked of the complementizer que, along with a greater freedom in
‘I have talked to John.’ word order.
341
19.4.3 Enunciatives Enunciative particles have been subject to a number of

descriptions, especially que which has been variously
described as the ‘marker of the verbal predicate itself ’
A well-known fact of Occitan syntax is the use of so-called
(Bouzet 1951:50) and as an embedded complementizer in
‘enunciative particles’ (cf. also §§31.3.2, 53.2.1), especially in
an elliptic structure (Ronjat 1937:537). In actual fact, in main
Gascony and Béarn, but also to a lesser extent in the other
and independent clauses que appears to mark the assertive
dialects. As has been noted by Camproux (1958:445) and
force of the sentence, as opposed to e, which marks inter-
Lafont (1967:17, 350), this configuration also exists and has
rogation, while be and ya express exclamation and eviden-
existed elsewhere in the Occitan-speaking area, though less
tiality, respectively. In recent generative analyses, it has
frequently and in a not-yet-grammaticalized form. In Gas-
been pointed out that the particles occur to the right of
cony, it is attested from the fourteenth century, and it has
the subject, the latter clearly a topic (Poletto 2000:148-50),
become systematic since the eighteenth century. Indeed, it
giving rise to a structure which is reminiscent of the embed-
has been much described for Gascon, where the phenomenon
ded hanging topic constructions discussed in §19.4.2.2.
is most salient, as shown in Map 19.2. In these dialects, Bouzet
According to Ledgeway (2012a:173-5), who distinguishes
(1951:48) notes four enunciative particles, que, e, ya (with
between a high and a low position for complementizers
variant ye), and be (cf. 21a-e). They all share the property of
within the left periphery (cf. §§31.3.1, 63.2.1.2), Gascon
occurring immediately to the left of the finite verb and
enunciative que lexicalizes the lower of the two positions.
following the preverbal lexical subject. Moreover, they are
A similar analysis is provided by Morin (2005; 2006), who
obligatory in main clauses and are mutually exclusive.
argues that in subordinate clauses the particle e is a ‘light’
variant of que occupying the lower complementizer position
(21) a. U òmi qu’ abè dus hilhs.
where it is preceded by overt topicalized subjects (22a),
a man que have.PRT.3SG two sons
although que can also appear in these same contexts (22b).
‘A man had two sons.’
b. E tournarán touts? (22) a. Que cau que la mainada e hasca lo camin.
e come.back.FUT.3PL all que must that the girl e do.SBJV.3SG the way
‘Will they all come back?’ ‘The girl must go her way.’
c. Coan lou hilh e boulou partí . . . b. Ne pensi pas que Pèir qu’ ei un pèc.
when the son e want.PRT.3SG leave.INF not think.1SG not that Pèir que be.PRS.3SG a idiot
‘When the son wanted to leave . . . ’ ‘I don't think that Peter is an idiot.’
d. Ye tournará u díe ou aute.
ya come.back.FUT.3SG a day or another 19.4.4 Subordination and the
‘He will come back some day.’ complementizer que
e. Be soun bères aqueres áulhes!
be be.PRS.3PL pretty these ewes As in most other Romance grammars, though not all (cf.
‘How pretty these ewes are!’ §§63.2.1.2, 63.3), indicative (23a) and subjunctive (23b) com-
plement clauses are introduced by the complementizer que
The type que (21a) is the most common and occurs in ‘that’:
declarative root clauses, and sometimes in subordinate
clauses (Bouzet 1932:48). The particle e appears in two (23) a. Sabi que vendrà. (Niç.)
distinct contexts: in interrogative (or exclamative) sen- know.1SG that come.FUT.3SG
tences (21b), and in subordinate clauses (21c) where it ‘I know that she or he will come.’
seems to replace que. Its origin is not clear; although many b. M’ agrada que vengue. (Niç.)
(e.g. Wheeler 1988b) suppose that it has emerged from e to.me= please.3sg that come.SBJV.3SG
‘and’ < ET, this hypothesis is rejected by others (e.g. Bouzet ‘I am pleased that she or he is coming.’
1932; 1951). According to Bouzet (1951), the particle ya/ye
(21d) comes from the Latin IAM ‘already’ and emphasizes The functions of que are, however, much greater than
assertion, somewhat like ‘indeed’, and perhaps comparable this. For instance, although all Occitan grammarians prod-
to the Spanish ya. As for be (< BENE ‘well’) in (21e), it involves uce a list of relative pronouns (viz. que ‘which/whom’, qui/
the interlocutor and can be glossed by a question tag such qu ‘who’, doun/on ‘where’, dont ‘whose’), their use seems to
that the meaning of (21e) is something like ‘How pretty they be rare and it is questionable whether relatives are still a
are, these ewes, aren’t they?’. reality. Another supposed relative construction involves the
342
article and quau (lou quau, la quala, dóu quau, en la quala, etc.), b. la mainada (de) qui vedes aquiu6
but all scholars indicate that this type of relative clause is the girl (of) that see.PRS. 2SG here
rare and antiquated and has today been replaced by que. ‘the girl you see here’
While possibly more frequent, the situation is the same for
c. lo vilatge de qui vedetz lo campanèr
the locative pronoun doun (and its variants ont, on . . . )
the village of that see.PRS. 2PL the bell.tower
‘where’, such that phrases like (24a) are more usually ren-
‘the village whose bell tower you can see’
dered with the complementizer que and case-marked clitic
pronoun in the sentential core (24b) (cf. also §64.4). d. lo dia qui la vedoi
the day that her= see.PRS.PST.1SG
(24) a. la maioun doun estau (Niç.) ‘the day I saw her’
the house where live.PRS.1SG
‘the house where I live’ Occitan also employs que in circumstantial clauses where
it is preceded by various adverbs and prepositions, witness
b. la maioun que li estau (Niç.)
the following Niçard examples (Gasiglia 1984:373-8) illus-
the house that there= live.PRS.1SG
trating purposive (28a), concessive (28b), and temporal (28c)
‘the house where I live’
circumstantial clauses.
Similarly, for the other case functions the complement-
izer que is combined with an appropriate disambiguating (28) a. A escrich per fin que venguessian.
case form in the sentential core (cf. §64.4): have.3SG written for that come.SBJV.PST.1PL
‘He wrote for us to come.’
(25) a. l’ ome que lou siéu can es marrit (Niç.)
b. Mi fas rire meme que n’
the man that the his dog be.PRS.3SG vicious
Me= make.2SG laugh even that of.it=
‘the man whose dog is vicious’
aigui gaire envuèia.
b. l’ ome que li parli (Niç.) have.SBJV.1SG not.much desire
the man that to.him= speak. PRS.1SG ‘You make me laugh even though I do not feel like
‘the man to whom I speak’ laughing.’
c. un libre que n’ ai besoun (Niç.) c. Partet denant que Juli venguesse
a book that of.it= have.PRS.1SG need leave.PST.3SG before that Juli come.SBJV.PST.3SG
‘a book (that) I need’ ‘He left before Juli came’
However, in the case of a direct object, the accusative

However, in most cases que alone is sufficient:
clitic can be absent (26), as is often the case in Occitan
(see §19.4.5), so that que has sometimes been regarded as a
(29) a. Madamo fai sa toueleto que
relative pronoun instead of as a mere complementizer.
Madam do.3SG her toilette that
bai sourti. (Gvd.)
(26) l’ ome que vehi (Niç.)
will.3SG go.out.INF
the man that see.PRS.1SG
‘Madam is getting ready in order to go out.’
‘the man I see’
b. Rasou aguet que garriguet. (Gvd.)
To the west the Gascon dialects (27) behave differently: que right have.PST.3SG that get.well.PST.3SG
(which we have seen plays other pragmatic roles) is replaced ‘He was right because he recovered.’
by qui, which is no longer used in Occitania as a nominative
c. Noun si di ‘crac’ que noun
pronoun,5 and is thus available for relativizing functions:
not one say.3SG ‘crack’ that not
sigue en lou sac. (Niç.)
(27) a. la mainada qui ei vestida de blanc
be.SBJV.3SG in the bag
the girl that be.PRS.3SG dressed of white
‘Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched.’
‘the girl who is dressed in white’
5 6
The only case where qui and que contrast is in the interrogative para- In Béarn, qui, like que, can be reinforced freely with a semantically
digm where the former is used for animates and the latter for inanimates. empty de (Hourcade 1986:108, 266, 299).
343
Although it is usually claimed that this que is a mere b. Beire de bouguets, auriô
‘relational tool’ or an ‘introducer’ without any meaning, see.INF some mushrooms have.COND.3SG
one can wonder if it does not bear a pragmatic or semantic chagut un boun Dieus. (Gvd.)
value here. Indeed, it seems that these facts have to be been.necessary a good God
related to other occurrences of que, and this phenomenon ‘In order to see mushrooms, a good Lord would have
could actually represent the first stage of the evolution been necessary.’
towards the enunciative, as it is suggested by Camproux
c. Despuèi non t’ aver vist, om
(1958) and Lafont (1967). Once again, the diatopic variation
Since not you= have.INF seen one
reveals that, diachronically, que seems to have acquired an
me parla. (Lgd.)
increasing importance in Occitan, probably from east to
me.DAT= speak.3SG
west, and Lafont (1967:347) observes that ‘[the Occitan
‘Since the last time I saw you, people have been
speech] advances entirely supported by que’.
speaking to me.’
Another frequent subordination type are absolute parti-

19.4.4.1 Alternative subordination types
ciples. Although these are not infrequent in (formal regis-
Despite the high frequency of que, other subordination ters of) Romance, their distribution in Occitan, and
structures without que are also quite usual. One alternative especially Niçard, is particularly noteworthy in that they
(though not without pragmatic repercussions) to a finite are not limited to intransitive participles whose surface
complement clause is the use of the infinitive with an overt subjects are Undergoers (viz. U/SO) as elsewhere in
disjoint subject (Camproux 1958:277-81; Lafont 1967:287-9), Romance (cf. §50.4), but are also found with Agentive sub-
as illustrated by the contrast between (30a) and (30b). jects in transitive structures. By way of example, consider
the contrast between the absolute participial construction
(30) a. Bogue que partiat. (Gvd.) in (32a) and the finite que clause equivalent in (32b):
want.1SG that leave.SBJV.2PL
‘I want you to leave.’ (32) a. L’ espous audit acò, lest
the husband hear.PTCP that quick
b. Bogue el parti. (Gvd.)
toca sola (Niç.)
want.1SG he leave.INF
touch.3SG sole
‘I want him to leave.’
b. Quoura l’ espous a audit acò, lest
Given the absence of overt nominative vs oblique case When the husband have.3SG hear.PTCP that
distinctions in tonic pronouns (cf. §19.3.1.5.1), it is impossible toca sola. (Niç.)
to determine the case form of the infinitival subject in (30b), quick touch.3SG sole
although the widespread distribution of these constructions ‘When the husband heard that, he ran away.’
in other Romance languages (cf. Ledgeway 1998; 2000:ch. 5;
Mensching 2000), where there is a case distinction and where As with infinitive clauses above, the particularity of this
it is possible to see the nominative case of such infinitival structure resides in the fact that no coreference is required
subjects, make it very likely that el in (30b) is nominative. between the matrix and embedded subjects:
The geographic distribution and extension of this subor-
dination type are not clear. For instance, it does not appear (33) Fach lou batejà, lu pairin si
to be natural in Nice, while it is well attested in Languedoc Do.PTCP the baptism the godparents themselves=
and seems to be very usual in Béarn. Further research is fan veire. (Niç.)
needed but once again there emerges a progressive devel- make.3PL see.INF
opment running from east to west. ‘When the baptism is finished, the godparents show up.’
Such infinitival structures are also found in circumstan-
tial clauses: Outside Niçard, the structure is less productive: in
Languedoc it is reserved for literary usage, whereas in
(31) a. Lou meteguèrou de fouoro sans aberre Gascon it hardly occurs at all. Indeed, there would seem to
Him= put.PST.3PL outside without have.INF be a complementary geographical distribution between this
soupat (Gvd.) participial construction and the infinitival one seen above.
eaten Finally, Alibèrt (1976:307) highlights another frequent and
‘They threw him out without any supper’ original structure which involves the past participle, the
344
circumstantial complementizer que, and fronting. Here, as (cf. also §45.4.2). However, the ordering of accusative and
shown in (34), the past participial has been moved into the dative clitics presents variation. According to Ronjat
left periphery above the complementizer to what appears to (1937:547, 565-8), most central Occitan dialects display the
be a focus position. This pattern is widespread in the Occitan dative–accusative order (37), while eastern (Provençal),
domain, and can be taken to provide further evidence for the northern, and southwestern (Gascon) dialects have
frequent recourse to the left periphery (cf. §§19.4.2.2, 19.4.3). accusative–dative order (38).
(34) Vist que l’ a, de mala (37) a. Li lou paguè. (Prv.)

see.PTCP that it= have.PST.3SG by bad 3SG.DAT= it.ACC= pay.PST.3SG
fòrça lo retira. (Lgd.) ‘She/he paid him/her for it.’
strength it= take.out.PST.3SG
b. Douno - me lou! (Prv.)
‘As soon as he has seen it, he takes it out with difficulty.’
give.IMP= me.DAT= it.ACC
‘Give it to me!’
19.4.5 Object Clitics c. Me lou dis. (Prv.)
me.DAT= it.ACC= say.2SG
‘You say it to me.’
As seen in §19.3.1.5.1, Occitan displays several complement
clitics, bearing different cases. They are generally proclitic (38) a. Lou vous presenti. (Niç.)
(35a), except in assertive imperative forms, where they him.ACC= you.PL.DAT= introduce.1SG
stand enclitic to the verb (35b). ‘I introduce him to you.’
b. Porto lou mi! (Gvd.)
(35) a. Pèire ié douno uno poumo. (Prv.)
bring.IMP =it.ACC= me.DAT
Peter 3SG.DAT= give.3SG a apple
‘Bring it to me!’
‘Peter gives him/her an apple.’
c. Lou li panet. (Rgt.)
b. Cantas - ié un pau quaucarèn! (Prv.)
it.ACC= 3SG.DAT= steal.PST.3SG
sing.imp =3SG.DAT a bit something
‘She/he stole it from him/her.’
‘Sing something to him/her!’
Today, this geographical distribution is not well estab-
Furthermore, some dialects, especially in the extreme
lished, and it seems that individual dialects have independ-
southwest (Gascony) and the extreme southeast (Menton),
ently chosen one order or the other. Indeed, in the
also display enclitics with the infinitive (Ronjat 1937:548-
southeast (Alpes-Maritimes), where both orders are
50), e.g. Gsc. atrapa lo ‘catch.INF =it.M’, Mnt. pourtà-ra ‘carry.
attested, Dalbera (1991:611) suggests that there is a correl-
INF=it.F’, as well as with the present participle in Gascon
ation between the presence of a neuter accusative clitic and
(Ronjat 1937:549f.), e.g. seguint-lou ‘following=him’.
the dative–accusative order. In particular, he shows that in
In conjunction with (semi-)auxiliaries, clitics may adjoin
dialects where a neuter accusative clitic exists, as in the
to the infinitive or, more frequently, may climb to the
Vésubie valley (Nice hinterland), the order is accusative–
matrix (semi-)auxiliary:
dative with the masculine accusative clitic (39a), but dative–
accusative with the neuter clitic (39b):
(36) a. Vous lou dève dire. (Gvd.)
you.PL.DAT= it.ACC= must.3SG say.INF
(39) a. Lou ti fau veire.
‘She/he must say it to you.’
him.ACC= you.DAT= do.1SG see.INF
b. L’ ai cresegu vèire. (Gvd.) ‘I show him to you.’
3SG.ACC= have.1SG thought see.INF
b. T’ ou fau veire.
‘I thought that I saw him/her/it.’
you.DAT= it.N.ACC= do.1SG see.INF
c. Nous mandou querre. (Gvd.) ‘I show it to you.’
1PL.ACC= send.PST.3PL Qfetch.INF
‘They sent for us.’ The genitive-ablative (n’en/nen) and the locative clitics
((l)i) always occur after accusative and dative clitics. When
When more than one clitic is expressed, the relative they combine, their respective order is subject to variation
ordering of these elements depends on the case they bear and both orders are attested: nen i, n’i, or (l)i (en), but some
345
Provençal dialects such as Niçard display the composite and (iii) both together (discontinuous negation). Today
form [nien] (40) (Oliviéri 1991; Vernet 2003:298). type 2 appears to be the more widespread, except in south-
ern Gascony, where it never occurs, and in the north
(40) N’ien vehìi fouòrça. (Niç.) (Limousin), where type 3 is preferred. According to Lafont
GEN-LOC= see.PST.1SG there (1967), type 2 emerged in Occitan in the seventeenth cen-
‘I saw some of them over there.’ tury and has extended to most of Occitania. The negator
most frequently employed is pas/pa (< PASSUM ‘step’; cf. 45a)
As seen in §19.3.1.5.1, this form also encodes a combin- which can in turn combine with negative polarity items
ation of the genitive-ablative n’en/nen and the dative clitic (45b,c) such as pus ‘any more’, rès/ren ‘nothing’, jamai
(l)i (41), especially in the Provençal area: ‘never’, cap ‘not one’, brica/gens ‘not at all’, gaïre ‘hardly’,
degun ‘nobody’.
(41) . . . ch’ una bella nien gardi! (Niç.)
that a fine 3PL.DAT-it.GEN= keep.1SG (45) a. Ou farai pas. (Gvd.)
‘ . . . since I intend to play a trick on them!’ it= do.FUT.1SG not
‘I will not do it.’
Clitics also show two other important tendencies. The
b. D’ amour sé parlo pas pus gaïre. (Prv.)
first consists in adding an ‘ethic dative’ to clitic sequences
of love one speak.3SG not no.more hardly
(42a,b), which follows both accusative and dative clitics.
‘We no longer talk about love.’
(42) a. Lou mi pènsi. (Niç.) c. Manquet pas (noun) res de . . . (Gvd.)
it.ACC= me.DAT= think.1SG miss.PST.3SG not not nothing of
‘I think about it.’ ‘She didn’t miss anything of . . . ’
b. Li te prendrai soun bastou. (Lgd.)
Remarkably, type 1 employing the sole preverbal noun/
3sg.DAT= you.DAT= take.FUT.1SG his/her stick.
nou/n’ is absent from the ALF (Gilliéron and Edmont
‘I will take his/her stick away from him/her.’
1902-10), despite being widely attested in grammars and
collected data throughout Occitania. Its geographical distri-
This phenomenon is widespread, but it seems to be very
bution is thus not clear. According to Camproux (1958:478),
productive in Béarn, where as many as three or four clitics
in Languedoc the continuant of Latin NON can be used to
may co-occur (Hourcade 1986:103):
mark an emphatic negation, as opposed to non-emphatic
negation marked by pas. In this light, Gasiglia’s (1984) claim
(43) Que ’u se t’ at mingè tot. (Béa.)
that noun and pas seem to alternate freely in Niçard (46)
que it.M= self.DAT= you.DAT= it.N= eat.3SG all
might similarly be interpreted to imply that the use of one
‘He ate it all up.’
or the other is determined by unexplored pragmatic or
syntactic constraints:
The second tendency, which again is geographically wide-
spread, consists in deleting the accusative pronoun in clitic
(46) Noun vouòli / vouòli pas. (Niç.)
sequences:
not want.1SG want.1SG not
‘I don’t want.’
(44) Lou li vau dounà. > Li vau dounà.
it.ACC= 3SG.DAT= go.1SG give.INF > 3SG.DAT= go.1SG give.INF As with pa(s), noun too can combine with negative polar-
‘I will give it to him/her.’ ity items (e.g. Camproux 1958:476).
(47) a. Re noun benguet. (Gvd.)

nothing not come.PST.3SG
19.4.6 Negation ‘Nothing at all arrived.’
b. Jamai noun poudiô tene sa lengo. (Gvd.)
Negation can be expressed in several ways, which are never not can.PST.3SG hold.INF his/her tongue
also all present in other Romance varieties. Three types ‘(S)he could absolutely never keep quiet.’
can be distinguished (for further discussion see §51.2):
(i) a negative preverbal marker derived from Latin NON Moreover, in Niçard noun is strictly required in the second
‘not’; (ii) a negative postverbal marker such as pas; person singular negative imperative, whether expressed by
346
the subjunctive (48a), widespread across the Occitan domain, Alpes-Maritimes) requires doubling of the preverbal neg-
or the infinitive (48b). ator noun following the verb (cf. Brazilian Portuguese), such
that ‘I don’t speak’ is normally unemphatically rendered as
(48) a. Noun v’ en anès! (Niç.) noun parli noun. Once again, further investigation and ana-
not you.PL= of.it= go.SBJV.2PL lysis appear to be necessary.
‘Don’t go!’
b. Noun t’ en anà! (Niç.)
not you.SG= of.it= go.INF 19.4.7 Agreement
‘Don’t go!’
19.4.7.1 Subject–verb agreement
Noun also shows up instead of pas in comparative struc- Rules governing subject–verb agreement seem to be subject
tures (49), where it alternates with zero and appears as a more to a semantic relation between the two constituents
kind of expletive (cf. §50.4). than to a grammatical one. Thus, when the subject is a
collective noun, the verb can be singular but is usually
(49) O lous uels mai gronds que noun plural.
have.3SG the eyes more big than not
lou bentre. (Gvd.) (51) Lo mond que te fan pas res. (Lgd.)
the belly the people that to.you= do.PRS.3PL not nothing
‘His/her eyes are bigger than his/her stomach.’ ‘People that don’t do anything to you.’
Type 3 discontinuous negation is largely attested in the More surprisingly, the plural can also be licensed by
north (Limousin) and constitutes the regular construction in locutions such as mai d’un ‘many’ (lit. ‘more than one’), cap
Béarn. Elsewhere it can occur freely, but it is questionable ‘none’, or degun ‘nobody’. While it is clear that mai d’un is
whether it represents an indigenous form in these areas. The semantically plural, this is not so obvious in the case of cap
preverbal element is noun/non or its variants (ne, n’) and the and degun, unless they are used in a construction which
postverbal negator is pas (50a). Moreover, in Béarn redun- represents a plural, e.g. ‘all the persons present in the
dancy also flourishes inasmuch as discontinuous negation house’, witness (52):
may combine with negative polarity items (50b,c). Further-
more, presence of negation also generally excludes (though (52) Degun d’ aqueste ostal . . . te faràn
not invariably in all dialects) the use of enunciative que. nobody of this house you make.FUT.3PL
metre a la prison . . . (Lgd.)
(50) a. Ne cau pas créder tot çò qui ditz. (Béa.) put.INF at the jail
not must not believe.INF all this that say.PRS.3SG ‘Nobody in this house . . . will send you to jail.’
‘One must not believe everything he says.’
Plural agreement also arises when the subject consists of
b. N’ èi (pas) vist arrens. (Béa.)
two coordinated noun phrases, even if the coordinator is
not have.1SG not seen nothing
not e ‘and’:
‘I haven’t seen anything.’
c. Non n’ èi pas briga minjat. (Béa.) (53) Lou paire emé la maire plouravon.
not of.it= have.1SG not not.at.all eaten the father with the mother cry.PST.3PL
‘I didn’t eat anything at all (of it).’ ‘The father and the mother were crying together.’
Finally, there are also many more sporadic differences Conversely, two noun phrases coordinated by e ‘and’ can
regarding negation across the Occitan domain. For instance, trigger singular agreement in such cases as (54), where the
in enquiries in northern dialects the sentence ‘you don’t verb agrees with the first noun phrase Dieu ‘God’, ignoring
know’ is often translated with a structure in which the the second one, since plural is expected with the collective
negative verb phrase (regardless of the presence of discon- noun lo mond.
tinuous negation or subject clitics) is doubled with an
affirmative copy, namely, [sabi pa sabi], [tœ sæj pɑ tœ (54) Dieu e lo mond o sap. (Lgd.)
sæj], [ty nɛ sabɛ pæ ty sabɛ]. Another construction found god and the people it know.3SG
in the extreme southeast (Gorbio, near Menton, in the ‘God and everybody knows that.’
347
Moreover, verbal agreement can also depend on the d. Se bei pas que lou tron l’
intended grammatical person, rather than on that of the one see.PRS.3SG not that the thunder it=
surface grammatical subject. For example, in (55a) the aguèssie toucat.
semantic subject is second person plural, i.e. ‘no one have.SBJV.IPFV.3SG touched
among all of you’, which overrides the third person singular ‘You say that the thunder has struck it, but I think
of the grammatical subject. In (55b), the subject is a collect- that it is not true.’
ive noun, and therefore should trigger the third person
plural, but the intended meaning includes the speaker, If we try to summarize the different analyses, it appears
hence the verb occurs in the first person plural, giving rise that Occitan moods and tenses bear aspectual values,
to the reading ‘everyone in the house including me’. which appear in complex sentences as well as in inde-
pendent clauses. Four aspects are therefore distinguished:
(55) a. Degun auretz pas rason. (Lgd.) the real, the eventual, the potential, and the unreal. Over-
nobody have.FUT.2PL not reason all, the real corresponds to the use of indicative tenses
‘None of you will be right.’ (56a), the eventual is marked by the present subjunctive
(56b), the potential by the conditional (56c), and the
b. Touto l’ oustalado plouravian. (Prv.)
unreal by the imperfect subjunctive (56d). Since this phe-
all.FEM the household cry.PST.1PL
nomenon is also attested in independent clauses, each
‘All of us were crying.’
mood and tense having its own aspectual value, it seems
that they can combine freely, thus displaying many
All these observations lead us to conclude that grammat-
semantic nuances.
ical relations are in many cases more sensitive to semantic
This combinatorial freedom is particularly noticeable in
factors than to purely grammatical ones.
sentences with hypothetical clauses, since the hypothesis is
subject to various modalities, depending on whether or not
19.4.7.2 Sequences of (moods–)tenses the condition is realizable, possible, probable, or potential.
Many types of structure are therefore possible, expressing
According to traditional grammatical descriptions, Occitan
numerous subtle distinctions in meaning and some of them
can obey the usual Romance rules regulating the sequence
displaying novel combinations and uses of the moods and
of tenses and moods. Basically present subjunctive is used in
tenses, witness (57a-h).
discourse and imperfect subjunctive in narration (see below
after example 60, for the notion of discourse and narration).
(57) a. Se ven, o vei. (Lgd.)
However, there is a certain latitude in the use of moods and
If come.IND.PRS.3SG 3SG.ACC= see.IND.PRST.3SG
tenses. For instance, Camproux (1958:126, 174) gives the
‘If she/he comes, she/he will see it.’
following combinations (56) of a sentence such as ‘We
can’t see that the thunder has struck it’, each corresponding b. Se ven, veirà.
to a slightly different meaning (cf. also Lafont 1967:217-37). If come.IND.PRS.3SG see.FUT.3SG
‘If she/he comes, she/he will see.’
(56) a. Se bei pas que lou tron l’
c. Se vendrà, veirà.
one see.PRS.3SG not that the thunder it=
If come.FUT.3SG see.FUT.3SG
o toucat. (Gvd.)
have.IND.PRS.3SG touched
‘The thunder has struck it, but we cannot see that.’ d. Se veniá, veiriá.
b. Se bei pas que lou tron l’ If come.IND.IPFV.3SG see.COND.3SG
one see.PRS.3SG not that the thunder it= ‘If she/he comes, she/he will see.’
aje toucat.
e. Se vendriá, veiriá.
have.SBJV.PRS.3SG touched
If come.COND.3SG see.COND.3SG
‘You say that the thunder has struck it, but I do not
know if it is true.’
f. (Se) venguès, veiriá.7
c. Se bei pas que lou tron l’
If come.SBJV.IPFV.3SG see.COND.3SG
one see.PRS.3SG not that the thunder it=
auriô toucat.
have.COND.PRS.3SG touched
‘You say that the thunder has struck it, and I do not 7
Gasiglia (1984:380) notes that this is the most frequent structure in
know if it is true, but it is possible.’ Nice.
348
g. (Se) venguès, veguès. c. Creniô que mi fariôu

If come.SBJV.IPFV.3SG see.SBJV.IPFV.3SG fear.IND.IPFV.1SG that to.me= make.COND.PRS.3PL
‘If she/he came, she/he could see it.’ lou reprotche.
the reproach
h. Se venguèt, vendrà.
‘I was afraid that they would blame me.’
If come.IND.PST.3SG come.FUT.3SG
‘If (it is true that) she/he came, she/he will come (60) Disiô que farô tout ço que pourrô. (Gvd.)
again.’ say.IPFV.3SG that do.FUT.3SG all this that can.FUT.3SG
‘She/he said that she/he would do her/his utmost.’
In these examples, we can see that the future can be used
in the subordinate clause, if the fact is real and if the main It remains unclear, however, whether these aspectual
clause is in the future. According to Camproux (1958:60), the distinctions exist in all Occitan dialects, or whether they
difference between (57b) and (57c) is that in (57c) the are still used productively today.8 It is notable that, with a
moment in the future is more precise. The conditional can few exceptions regarding the loss of the preterite in some
also appear in the embedded clause, as well as in the main dialects of eastern Vivaro-Alpine and the Landes, both pret-
clause. In dialects where the preterite still exists, its use erite and imperfect subjunctive are in normal use. Occitan
creates even more possibilities for modulating the expres- keeps a clear-cut distinction beween two systems
sion (57h). Moreover, when the imperfect subjunctive is (Benveniste 1959; Weinrich 1973). On the one hand, there
used in the subordinate clause, the complementizer se can is a discourse system (or ‘commentary’ for Weinrich) organ-
be omitted (57f,g), since this mood–tense intrinsically car- ized around a deictic value of present to which past or
ries hypothetical meaning. Thus, contrary to the usual rules future are referred directly, past in this case being
of sequence of tenses, the imperfect subjunctive can also expressed by analytic past. On the other hand, there is a
appear when the main clause is in the present indicative narrative system organized around an autonomous refer-
(Camproux 1958:131), as shown in (58). ence in the past with which preterite or imperfect (which
differ aspectually) mark coincidence. Anteriority is
(58) Se troubèssie uno majouflo, la expressed by analytic tenses, and posteriority by the ‘con-
if find.SBJV.IPFV.1SG one strawberry it= ditional’. In a famous eighteenth-century novel (Gardy and
monje sutiô. (Gvd.) Sauzet 1988), the main character first says Vos dirai que soi
eat.PRS.IND. 1SG at.once nascut a Solòrgues ‘I’ll tell you that I was born [analytic
‘If I found a strawberry, I would eat it immediately.’ past] in Solorgues’, but a few sentences later says Mas gents
quand nasquère avián pas una palada de tèrra ‘My parents
All configurations therefore seem to be possible, and it is when I was born [preterite] didn’t possess a single spadeful
not surprising to find sentences where the conditional (59c) of land’. The objective date of birth of the character
appears instead of the imperfect subjunctive (59a,b) or the remains unchanged from one sentence to the other, but
future instead of the expected conditional (60). in the first case the discourse induces an analytic past
referring to the time of utterance, whereas the second
(59) a. Crènie que mi fàsiou sentence belongs to the narration, for which the preterite
fear.IND.PRS.1SG that to.me= make.SBJV.PRS.3PL sets an absolute date. Modern usage has remained
lou reprotche. (Gvd.) unchanged in this respect.
the reproach
b. Creniô que mi faguèssiou
fear.IND.IPFV.1SG that to.me= make.SBJV.IPFV.3PL 8
E.g. in Nice (and perhaps more generally in Provençal), the sequence of
lou reprotche. tenses seems to be more strictly observed in object subordinate clauses
the reproach than it is in Languedoc.
349
CHAPTER 20
Francoprovençal
ANDRES KRISTOL
20.1 Introduction generalization risks oversimplification or downright mis-

representation of reality: different phonetic developments
and different morphosyntactic systems regularly coexist
20.1.1 Linguistic history and geography within a single region or in immediately neighbouring vil-
Gardette (1950) proposes the following account—to which lages, and the isoglosses delimiting them may vary greatly
I subscribe—of the emergence of Francoprovençal. After an in their geographical position. As Gauchat (1905) showed, in
initial period of Romanization emanating from the Roman addition to this major interdialectal variation there is major
Provincia Narbonensis, Francoprovençal came into being intradialectal variation.
along the corridors of influence created by the Roman Standardization is equally absent in writing. Even if the
highways which connected the Po Plain to the basins of earliest documents date from the thirteenth century, Fran-
the Rhône and the Rhine, over the major mountain passes coprovençal has never developed a common written trad-
of the western Alps (Grand-Saint-Bernard, Petit-Saint- ition. It has always been essentially restricted to the domain
Bernard, Mont-Cenis; see Map 20.1). Francoprovençal thus of informal oral communication (but cf. Merle 1991 and
represents a kind of crossroads (Hasselrot 1937:2) between Tuaillon 2001 for its more or less sporadic literary tradition)
northern Italian dialects (particularly Piedmontese), Occi- and has lived side by side with supraregional written lingua
tan dialects, and oïl dialects, and indeed Raeto-Romance francas: first Latin (until the beginning of the sixteenth
(Romansh) to the east, from which Francoprovençal was century in territories under Savoyard influence, and until
driven apart by the intrusion of Alemannic in the ninth the end of the ancien régime in the episcopal state of Valais),
century. Contact with the Germanic world does not seem, then French.
however, to have left significant structural remnants. To a greater or lesser extent each author developed his
The earliest phonetic and lexical features distinguishing own practices in writing, generally on the basis of the
Francoprovençal from other Gallo-Romance varieties can writing conventions of French. Now the latter are ill-suited
be identified from the sixth century (Schmitt 1974a,b; to a language which has several phonemic sounds ([ĩ, ỹ, ũ; θ,
Chambon and Greub 2000; Kristol 2002; 2004; 2013a; 2014), ð, ɬ], etc.) not found in French and which has (unlike French)
particularly on the evidence of place names. a phonologically distinctive word stress, giving rise to oppo-
What we call ‘Francoprovençal’ is not ‘a’ language but a sitions between oxytones and paroxytones: [siˈri] ‘wax.INF’
collection of speech varieties displaying a common linguis- vs [ˈsiːri] ‘wax’, [ruˈza] ‘dew’ vs [ˈruːza] ‘rose’ (cf. Tuaillon
1972:336).
tic typology yet an extremely high degree of dialect frag-
Today several mutually incompatible writing systems are
mentation. Francoprovençal has (or had) not one but
available: the BREL system for Valdôtain (Assessorat de
several leading linguistic (micro-) centres (Lyon, Grenoble,
l’Éducation et de la Culture 2012), the Conflans system for
Geneva, Fribourg, Sion, Aosta, etc.), each with very variable
the Savoyard varieties (Groupe de Conflans 1983), as well as
domains of influence; it is split between regions which are
the graphie commune pour les patois valaisans (‘common writ-
today parts of France, Italy, and Switzerland, all countries ing system for the patois of Valais’; Maître and Pannatier
which, jointly, have never shared the least degree of polit- 2009). The pseudo-etymological ‘supradialectal’ writing sys-
ical unity—apart from having once belonged to the ephem- tem (ORA, subsequently ORB), proclaimed by its author
eral second kingdom of Burgundy, which disappeared in 999 (Stich 2001; 2003) to be de référence (i.e. normative, a point
AD. It has therefore never experienced any linguistic stand- of reference), implies a historical depth for writing in Fran-
ardization. It is a real linguistic testbed, exhibiting many of coprovençal which it has never had. This system is incoher-
the paths of development possible in western Romance ent, and technically unusable (Martin 2002; Fluckiger 2004);
languages. This means that any description requires refer- this has not stopped it being adopted by a few dozen people,
ence to a specific variety (or group of varieties). Any who have learned Francoprovençal as a second language,
350 This chapter © Andres Kristol 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
Belfort
Basel
OÏL VARIETIES Dijon

Delémont
Besançon
Dôle
Bienne
Neuchâtel
Autun
ALEMANNIC
Pontarlier Bern
Chalon
Fribourg
Lons
Louhans
Lausanne
Charolles
Mâcon
Sierre
Vichy Geneva Sion
Bourg
Roanne
Villefranche Vaux
Thiers Annecy
Matterhorn

Lyon Gd St-Bernard
FRANCOPROVENÇAL Mt Blanc
VARIETIES Aosta
Montbrison
Pt St-Bernard
Chambéry
Vienne La Tour
St-Etienne du Pin
Moutiers
PIEDMONTESE
St-Jean de
Maurienne
FRANCOPROVENÇAL
Annonay
Mt Cenis
Grenoble
Le Puy Susa
Romans Turin
OC VARIETIES Valence Mt Genèvre Oulx
Pignerol
Briançon
Map 20.1 The Francoprovençal linguistic domain

ANDRES KRISTOL
who are active in the arpitaniste movement, and who are Évolène (Valais) where, according to Maître and Matthey
much to be seen on the Internet (Bichurina forthcoming). (2003; 2004), a third of school-age children were still using
The geographical domain of Francoprovençal has Francoprovençal within the family. There are no similar
retreated considerably over the centuries. Its southern cases in France. The situation is better in Val d’Aosta,
boundary with ‘Vivaro-Alpine’ Occitan has remained rela- where, despite the major presence of Italian and the official
tively stable; but in one particular case, Tuaillon (1964) status of French, oral transmission of Francoprovençal,
identified a locality (Génissieux, lower Isère valley) whose although endangered, has not yet entirely ceased.
name is of a Francoprovençal type, but whose speech
belongs today to Vivaro-Alpine Occitan. In contrast, it has
lost considerable ground to the north and northeast. At the 20.1.2 The name of the language
time of the fragmentation of Gallo-Romania, modern
Franche-Comté must have been part of the (proto‑)Franco- Because of its lack of political unity, Francoprovençal
provençal domain (Dondaine 1971; 1972; cf. also Jud 1939; does not bear a traditional established name. The term
Burger 1971; Taverdet 1971; Chambon 2011; Chambon and ‘Franco-Provençal’ was coined by Ascoli (1878), in his first
Müller 2013a,b). The old Francoprovençal stratum was over- scientific description of the modern varieties. This name,
lain by oïl varieties of a Burgundian type before the appear- generally adopted in academic research, is infelicitous:
ance of the first written vernacular documents; up in the Francoprovençal is not a mixture of French and ‘Provençal’.
Jura, the retreat of Francoprovençal in the face of Franc- Following a proposal by Gardette, it was decided to write it in
comtois has continued down to the present (Lobeck 1945). French as francoprovençal, to show that it is an independent
In present-day Alemannic Switzerland, a survey of place Romance language, with its own distinctive characteristics.
names shows that, before the Germanization which began Some other proposed names are scarcely any happier (cf.
towards the end of the sixth century, all regions west of the Tuaillon 1972). Suchier (1888:718) calls it Mittelrhônisch
Reuss and south of the Rhine, as far as Basel and the upper (translated as moyen rhodanien, ‘middle Rhônian’, Suchier
valley of the Rhône, belonged to the (proto-)Francoproven- 1891), which literally excludes the Francoprovençal var-
çal domain (Kristol 2002; 2004; 2013b). The progression of ieties of the Loire basin, the Rhine basin, and the Po basin.
Alemannic at the expense of Francoprovençal was only Other nomenclatures (lyonnais, savoyard, forézien) are too
stemmed during the nineteenth century, but the price regional. In Swiss Romandy, the well-attested historical
paid for fixing the linguistic boundary was the rapid aban- appellation is roman or romand (Kristol 2005); this recurs
donment by the people of Swiss Romandy of Francoproven- sporadically in Val d’Aosta as well (Merle 2010), beside the
çal in favour of French (see Kristol 2006). generic, omnipresent term patois. The designation (h)arpi-
Two Francoprovençal linguistic islands in southern Italy, tan, invented in 1973 by an extreme left-wing activist (cf.
Faeto and Celle di San Vito (province of Foggia), owe their Bichurina forthcoming), is currently being promoted by the
origins to colonizations during the fourteenth century arpitaniste movement. It is formed from arp (‘mountain
(Kattenbusch 1982). pasture’ in some Francoprovençal varieties), and is sup-
Francoprovençal appears on the UNESCO red list of most posed to denote ‘a vast region around Mont Blanc’, which
endangered languages. Its decline has been apparent since makes it of little use for designating the varieties of the east
the mid-nineteenth century. Until the 1820s and 1830s its and north of the area (Lyonnais, Forez, Francoprovençal of
use in speech, as an informal language (alongside know- the French Jura, north of Vaud, Fribourg, Neuchâtel). The
ledge of French as a formal and written language among term has not been taken up in the specialized linguistic
that part of the population that had been to school), is literature.
attested in every layer of society. It first ceases to be trans-
mitted in the protestant industrialized regions of Swiss
Romandy (Kristol 2013c) and in the French cities, where it
disappears towards the beginning of the twentieth century. 20.2 Phonetics
Despite the fact that speaking patois was forbidden in
schools from the beginning of the nineteenth century, in 20.2.1 General
rural regions of France and Swiss Romandy the break comes
later (roughly between 1930 and 1950; cf. Schüle 1971; There are high-quality monographic descriptions of numer-
Kristol 1998b; Maître 2003). At the time of writing (2013), ous Francoprovençal varieties, generally focusing on histor-
in the most conservative regions, native speakers are gen- ical phonetics (e.g. Fankhauser 1911; Gerster 1927; Duraffour
erally over 70 years old. In Swiss Romandy, transmission to 1930, 1932a; Lavallaz 1935; Hasselrot 1937; Gardette
the young persists only in one mountain municipality, 1941a; Ahlborn 1946; Keller 1958; Müller 1961). Among the
352
FRANCOPROVENÇAL
best of these are Martinet (1956) for Hauteville (Savoy) and An analogous twofold development is also observed in
Bjerrome (1957) for Bagnes (VS), which also take into final unstressed syllables, as illustrated in Table 20.3.
account their phonological systems. This twofold development has morphological conse-
The Francoprovençal varieties generally have a vowel quences: it splits Latin first conjugation verbs into two
system with four degrees of aperture, having two sets of conjugational subclasses (cf. Table 20.4). Even if in the mod-
front vowels, one set of back vowels, and numerous diph- ern varieties certain oppositions have been eliminated ana-
thongs, both rising and falling. Vowels with the lowest logically, they are still attested over most of the area.
degree of aperture generally display significant allophony
(long stressed vowels are more closed, short stressed vowels
or unstressed vowels are more open): [iː – ɪ], [yː – ʏ], [uː – ʊ].
Table 20.1 Development of Latin stressed A in open
Short stressed mid vowels or atonic mid vowels ([e̞, ø̞, o̞])
syllables, with and without palatalization for PRATUM
neutralize the opposition between long vowels, which are
‘meadow’ and MERCATUM ‘market’
always stressed [eː – ɛː], [øː – œː], [oː – ɔː]. Certain varieties
maintain a phonological opposition between [a] and [ɑ] (for (a) PRÁTUM >[pra] > [pro]
Bagnes, cf. Bjerrome 1957:27, 29), while others do not (for > [marˈʧi, marˈʦi, marˈθi, marˈfi], etc.
Hauteville, see Martinet 1956:74). For nasal vowels and their
(b) MERCÁTUM > [marˈʧie] > [marˈʧje] > [marˈʧe, marˈʦe,
phonological status, see §20.2.6.
marˈθe], etc.
The consonant system varies greatly from variety to
> [marˈʧja] > [marˈʧa, marˈʦa]
variety, making a pan-Francoprovençal description impos-
sible. I shall limit myself here to a small selection of the
most salient phenomena.
Table 20.2 Development of stressed or pretonic A in open

syllables before nasal consonants
20.2.2 The twofold development of Latin
stressed A in open syllables (a) MÁNUM ‘hand’ > [mɑ̃]; PÁNEM ‘bread’ > [pɑ̃]
(b) CÁNEM ‘dog’ > [ʧɛ̃, ʦɛ̃, ʦĩŋ, θɛ̃], etc.
-IÁN- (suffix) > [in] > [ı̃, ɛ̃]
The first linguistic description of Francoprovençal (Ascoli
1878) focused on certain sound changes, first and foremost
the twofold development of Latin stressed A in open
syllables: Table 20.3 Development of final unstressed A
(a) the vowel is maintained after a non-palatal conson-
ant, as in Occitan (PRÁTUM ‘meadow’ > [ˈprɑ], Occ. (a) PORTA > [ˈpɔrta] ‘door’
[prat], but Fr. [pʁe]), sometimes with secondary back- (b) UACCAM > [ˈvaʦi, ˈvaθi] ‘cow’; FILIAM > [ˈfəʎə, ˈfiʎi]
ing > [ɔ]; but ‘daughter’; *monˈtanja > [monˈtaɲi] ‘mountain’
(b) the vowel is fronted after palatal consonants, analo-
gous to what we find in old French (‘Bartsch’s Law’),
with numerous subsequent divergent dialectal devel-
opments, all of them present in the modern varieties Table 20.4 Development of Latin verb paradigms in -ARE
(all the forms given simplify the actual multiplicity of VERBS WITH NON -
developments of the dialect forms) (Table 20.1). PALATALIZING ROOTS
The twofold development of Latin stressed A in open ( E . G . PORTÁRE VERBS WITH PALATALIZING
syllables or pretonic syllables also occurs before nasal con- ‘ CARRY ’) ROOTS ( E . G . MINDU ˈ KARE ‘ EAT ’)
sonants (cf. Table 20.2); in this case, the post-palatal devel-
Infinitive [porˈta] [mɛ̃ˈʣi, mɛ̃ˈði, mði]
opment [jan > in] is attested in the seventh century on
(-ARE)
certain Merovingian coins, whose date and place can be
Imperfect [porˈtaːvɔ] [mɛ̃ˈʣiːvo, mɛ̃ˈðiːvɔ]
identified (GRATIANOPOLE(M) ‘Grenoble’ > Gracinopole, Gracinoble;
(-ABAM)
cf. Chambon and Greub 2000; Greub 2012). The evidence of
Past [porˈta] [mɛ̃ˈʣi, mɛ̃ˈði, mðja]
place names from the western Swiss Alemannic Romania
participle
Submersa means that it must have occurred by the sixth
(‑ATUM)
century at the latest (Kristol 2002).
353
ANDRES KRISTOL
20.2.3 Francoprovençal final unstressed vowels [ˈplymɔ]); cf. also the indefinite article ŪNU, ŪNA > [ɔ̃, ˈɔna].
Similarly, in many varieties (Val d’Aosta, Swiss Romandy,
most French varieties), Ū (> proto-Romance /u/) is pre-
A further defining characteristic of Francoprovençal arises
served as a semi-vowel [w] when it finds itself in hiatus as
from the diversity of its final unstressed vowels. Old French
the result of the fall of an intervocalic consonant: masculine
(with all oïl varieties) maintains just one final unstressed
*venˈdutu > [vɛ̃ˈdy] ‘sold’, but feminine *venˈduta > [vɛ̃ˈdwɑ]
vowel, [ə]. This derives from Latin -A (PORTA > porte ‘door’), or
(with a shift of stress on to the final [a]; cf. §20.2.5), mascu-
may continue any final unstressed vowel after certain con-
line CRŪDUM > [kry] ‘raw’, feminine CRŪDAM > [krwɑ]. In the
sonant clusters, notably muta cum liquida (e.g. PAUP(E)RUM >
varieties of the east of the Valais, etymological [u] is gen-
pauvre ‘poor’). This [ə] ceases to be pronounced from the
erally maintained.
sixteenth century [> [pɔʁt], poːvʁ]), whence northern
French varieties acquired a typically word-final stress pat-
tern. Occitan has three final unstressed vowels: the continu- 20.2.5 Stress shift
ant of Latin final -A (which in most modern varieties
becomes [ɔ] but may also yield [ə]): PORTAM > [ˈpɔrtɔ, ˈpɔrta,
ˈpɔrtə] ‘door’; -E as a support vowel after consonant clusters Many Savoyard and Dauphinois varieties (Geneva, Haute-
(as above): ALT(E)RUM > [ˈawtre] ‘other’; and -I, e.g. in the Savoie, Haute Maurienne, region of Grenoble) show a stress
continuants of old proparoxytones whose final syllable has shift which turns original paroxytones into oxytones (see
been deleted: DOMÍNIUM > [dɔˈmini] ‘domain’. Duraffour 1932a; Duc 1988; Tuaillon 1988). In Haute-Savoie,
Francoprovençal basically distinguishes four final developments such as [faˈrina] ‘flour’ > [farˈna], [koˈzena,
unstressed vowels: kuˈzena] ‘kitchen’> [kuzˈna, kɔʒˈna] are frequent (likewise in
place names: [ðe̞ˈnɛva] ‘Geneva’ > [ðe̞nˈva], [morˈzɪna] ‘Mor-
-[a] < Latin -A: FEMINAM > [ˈfɛna] ‘woman’, PORTAM > [ˈpɔrta] zine’ > [morzˈna]). In Matheysine (Duc 1988; 1991), the
‘door’; phenomenon particularly affects feminines: [ˈfɛna]
-[e̞] < Latin -E, maintained as a support vowel after cer- ‘woman’ > [fɛˈna], [ˈsima] ‘peak’ > [siˈma], [ˈfiʎi] ‘daughter’
tain consonant clusters: FRATRE(M) > [ˈfrɑʁe̞] ‘brother’, > [fiˈʎi], [ˈviɲi] ‘vine’ > [viˈɲi]; a masculine example is [ˈkudu]
and in the feminine plural (< Lat. ACC.PL -AS): FEMINAS > ‘elbow’ > [kuˈdu]. This development is however unpredict-
[ˈfɛne̞] ‘women’; able and unsystematic: [ˈdaʎi] ‘the scythe’ remains paroxy-
-[Ɔ] < Latin -O, maintained as a support vowel after cer- tonic, and the indefinite article ina may bear stress either on
tain consonant clusters, and as a first person singular the first or the second syllable, depending on context and
desinence: FABRUM > [ˈfɑvrɔ] ‘smith’, ALTERUM > [ˈɑːtrɔ] phrasal rhythm.
‘other’; PORTO > [ˈpɔrtɔ] ‘I carry’; By studying the metre used in the authors Jean Millet
-[i] < Latin postpalatal -A (cf. Table 20.3): FILIAM > [ˈfiʎi] (c.1600-75), who does not display this phenomenon, and
‘daughter’. André Blanc, alias Blanc la Goutte (1690-1745), in whose
Actually, many modern varieties tend to reduce the range work it is firmly established, Tuaillon (1988) has managed
of final atonic vowels to [ə], even deleting the final vowel to date the stress shift to the turn of the seventeenth–
altogether in many lexical items. The criterion for estab- eighteenth century for the speech of Grenoble.
lishing the northern boundary of Francoprovençal with oïl is
that a variety may be considered Francoprovençal so long as
20.2.6 Diphthongization of stressed vowels
it maintains certain paroxytones.
in open syllables
20.2.4 The development of Ū Francoprovençal, like the oïl varieties, Romansh, and most
northern Italian varieties but unlike Occitan, undergoes
both phases of diphthongization of Latin stressed vowels
While Occitan, French (apart from eastern Wallon), and
in open syllables (cf. Ch. 38), with a variety of different
Gallo-Italian have front rounded [y] from Latin Ū, Franco-
outcomes in the modern dialects as a consequence of stress
provençal long preserved the sound [u], and in part still
shifts, deletion of the second element, or secondary
does so in modern dialects (cf. Philipon 1911; Tuaillon 1968).
monophthongizations:
Even in dialects which nowadays have [y], there are some
signs that [u] was long preserved, especially when the First diphthongization: reflexes of Latin Ĕ/Ŏ:
change [u] > [y] was blocked by a nasal consonant: e.g. PĚDEM > e.g. [ˈpiːe, ˈpiːa, pi; pje, pja] ‘foot’;
PLŪMAM > [ˈplɔma, ˈpʎɔma] ‘feather’ (but Fr. [plym], Occ. BŎUEM > e.g. [ˈbua, ˈbue, ˈbuo, bu; bwe, bwu] ‘ox’.
354
FRANCOPROVENÇAL
Second diphthongization: reflexes of Latin Ĭ, Ē/Ŭ, Ō: 20.2.8 Palatalization of velar consonants

NĬUEM > e.g. [ˈnai, ˈnae, nɛ, nɛk], ‘snow’; TĒLA > e.g. [ˈtaila,
ˈteila, ˈteiɡla, ˈtɛla], ‘canvas’;
Francoprovençal, with northern Occitan and most oïl var-
PRŌDEM > [praw, praʏ, prø, pru, pro, prok] ‘enough’.
ieties, shows palatalization of Latin velar consonants
In several Val d’Aosta, Valais, and Dauphinois varieties, before front vowels. In numerous varieties, the fronting
the output of the second diphthongization undergoes a of the place of articulation goes much further than it does
consonantification of its final element, which in Francopro- in northern Occitan or in oïl. At the same time, it consti-
vençal linguistics is called a ‘parasitic consonant’ (cf. tutes a major internal differentiator because most of the
Jeanjaquet 1931:45; Keller 1958:59-65). Romansh (Upper En- intermediate stages in this process are still attested syn-
gadine, Bravuogn, Sursés; cf. Lutta 1923:88-90, 313; Grisch chronically in the modern varieties. It is at its most
1939:24-8; also §38.2) undergoes a similar phenomenon extreme in some upland regions, in the two Savoyard
called, since Gartner (1910:165-8), ‘diphthong hardening’. départements; the most conservative forms appear in per-
In Francoprovençal, the ‘parasitic consonant’ may be ana- ipheral areas.
logically extended to other forms: cf. MSG [pʏˈtik], FSG For Latin C before front vowels in stressed syllables, the
[pʏˈtikta] ‘small’ but [pʏˈti], [pʏˈtita] in other varieties. main stages in its development are (1) [ʧ] (> [ʃ]) > (2) [ts] (>
Some modern dialects present a third phase of more [s]) > (3) [θ] > (4) [f] > (5) [ɦ]. In principle, in this series, C+A is
recent spontaneous diphthongizations. For Vaux-en-Bugey, always one step ‘behind’ C+E/I, the development of the latter
Duraffour (1930) mentions [eː] > [ai] and [oː] > [au]; for Forez, merging with that of T+/j/.
Gardette (1941a:213-33) describes allophonic diphthongiza-
• In the northern Francoprovençal area (mountains of
tions of long stressed vowels for all degrees of aperture.
Neuchâtel), in the lower Val d’Aosta, the lower valley
of the Isère, and certain varieties of Matheysine, C+A
stays at the stage [ʧ] (sometimes > [ʃ]), with forms of the
20.2.7 Nasal vowels type [ʧɑ̃] ‘field’ (< CAMPUM), [ʧɑ̃ˈsɔ̃] ‘song’ (< *kanˈtjone)
and [ʧ ɪ ̃, ʧɛ̃, ʧœ̃] ‘dog’ (< CĀNEM).
Francoprovençal is one of those Romance languages which • Most varieties of Swiss Romandy (Fribourg, Vaud, cen-
have nasal, or nasalized, vowels. In numerous varieties, tral Valais), the middle and upper Val d’Aosta display
even high non-mid vowels have a nasal counterpart ([ɪ ̃, ʏ̃, stage (2): [ʦɑ̃] (< CAMPUM), [ʦɑ̃ˈθɔ̃] (< *kanˈtjone), [ʦĩ, ʦĩŋ,
ʊ̃]). The opposition between high mid and low mid oral ʦɛ̃, ʦœ̃] (< CĀNEM).
vowels is neutralized ([ẽ̞, ø̞̃, õ̞]), with a more closed realiza- • Varieties of the Geneva area, most Haut-Savoyard var-
tion, in general, than in modern French. The individual ieties, and those of the Chablais Valaisan display stage
realizations of the most open vowel may vary from [æ̃] (3): [θɑ̃] (< CAMPUM), [θarˈbɔ̃] ‘coal’ (< CARBŌNEM), [θɑ̃ˈfɔ̃]
to [ɒ̃]). (< *kanˈtjone).
In Val d’Aosta, in Maurienne, in certain Dauphinois var- • Some mountain varieties of the two Savoyard départe-
ieties, and a small area between Pontarlier and Besançon, ments go as far as stages (4) and (5): [fɑ̃ˈɦɔ̃] ‘song’
we observe a great variety of treatments of etymological (< *kanˈtjone); in the spring of 2013 I heard [ɦat]
intervocalic -N-, for example in reflexes of AUĒNAM ‘oats’, ‘cat’ (< CATTUM) at Fontcouverte-la-Toussuire (Haute-
CATĒNAM ‘chain’ (cf. Keller 1958:65-72): Maurienne).
maintenance of a single nasal vowel or diphthong: [ẽa],
[ẽɪ̃a];
oral vowel or diphthong + [n]: [ena], [ejna];
oral vowel + [ŋ]: [eŋa], [eːŋa]; 20.3 Morphology and syntax
nasal vowel or diphthong + [n]: [ẽna], [ẽɪ̃na];
nasal vowel + [ŋ]: [ẽŋa];
oral or nasal vowel + [r] (< [n]), sometimes with subse- 20.3.1 Nominal group
quent deletion of [r]: [ẽra], [era] (> [ea]), [ẽɪr̃ a], [ejra] 20.3.1.1 Remnants of a two-case system, maintenance
(> [eja]). of a functioning two-case system
A tongue-twister from Lanslebourg (Haute-Maurienne, cf. The Grenoblois Somme du Code of the thirteenth century
Groupe de Conflans 1983:7) illustrates the phonological (Royer and Thomas 1933) documents a two-case declension
yield of these oppositions: [la ˈfiŋa ɔt ˈyna ˈfɛ̃na ˈf ɪ ̃na] ‘the system comparable to those of old French and old Occitan
bitch has a fine chain’. (cf. §§18.4.2.1.1.3, 19.3.1.3, 56.2.1.3). In the masculine, it is
355
ANDRES KRISTOL
Table 20.5 The two-case system in the Somme du Code

MASCULINE FEMININE
SUBJECT OBLIQUE SUBJECT OBLIQUE
SG le pare ‘the father’ lo pare ‘the father’ li mare ‘the mother’ la mare ‘the mother’
le jugos ‘the judge’ lo jugo the judge’ li fenna ‘the woman’ la fenna ‘the woman’
le maris ‘the husband’ lo mari ‘the husband’ li filli ‘the daughter’ la filli ‘the daughter’
le grans ‘the grain’ lo gran ‘the grain’ li chosa ‘the thing’ la chosa ‘the thing’
PL li frare ‘the brothers’ los frares ‘the brothers’ les serors ‘the sisters’ les mares ‘the mothers’
li jugo ‘the judges’ los deners ‘the money’ les clames ‘the claims’ les noces ‘the weddings’
li hereter ‘the heirs’ les choses ‘the thing’ les choses ‘the things’
Table 20.6 The two-case system in fourteenth-century documents from Fribourg

MASCULINE FEMININE
SUBJECT OBJECT SUBJECT OBJECT
SG li moistre lo cita li persona la maneire

‘the master (baker)’ ‘the person cited’ ‘the person’ ‘the manner’
li citaz lo citour ‘one who cites’ li pertie la forma
‘the person cited’ ‘part’ ‘the form’
li avoyez ‘the advocate’ lo profit li comunitaz ‘the community’ la comunita ‘the community’
‘the profit’
li consetz ‘the counsel’ lu pris li farina la farina ‘the flour’
‘the price’ ‘the flour’
PL li avoye ‘the advocates’ les encuraz ‘the curates’ les dames les conditions ‘the conditions’
‘the ladies’
li forneir ‘the bakers’ les garzon les parties les choses
‘the boys’ ‘the parts’ ‘the things’
li garzon les bins les apertenances ‘the belongings’ les meiz
‘the boys’ ‘the goods’ ‘the kneading troughs’
expressed via the form of the definite article and via the inflexional ‑s when they are used predicatively (Ratel and
singular and plural forms of the majority of nouns. In the Tuaillon 1956:317-20; Ratel 1958:22-24).
feminine, the definite article alone expresses the distinction A fully functional two-case system does survive, however,
in the singular. In the plural, the subject and oblique forms in the varieties of the eastern Valais (cf. Kristol 2013a). It is
of the masculine definite article differ from the feminine typologically close to the medieval system found in Fri-
form, which does not mark the case-distinction (see bourg, but is realized solely in the singular forms of the
Table 20.5). definite article:
An analogous two-case system is attested in the
(1) [tɔ lʏ mũn ɑˈʦœtœ lɔ pɑ̃ŋ
fourteenth-century ‘para-Francoprovençal’ (Gossen 1970)
all the.SUBJ.M world buys the.OBJ.M bread
scripta of Fribourg (cf. Werro et al. 1839-77:3), although
ve lo̞ bʊlɔ̃ˈʒɛr] (Montana)
in Fribourg the opposition between masculine and femin-
at the.OBJ.M baker
ine is neutralized in the plural oblique forms (see
‘Everyone buys bread at the baker’s.’
Table 20.6). This system fades and ultimately vanishes
towards the second half of the fifteenth century (cf. (2) [lʏ ˈmamɐ ʃ ɛ aʃø̝ˈtaeø ʃʊɡ lɔ
Fuhrer 2013). the.SUBJ.F mother REFL AUX sit.PTCP on the
In modern Francoprovençal a morphological trace of the bɔr dɛ la ˈkuᵏsʏ] (Lens)
two-case system survives in the varieties of La Maurienne: edge of the.OBJ.F bed
in the singular, masculine nouns and adjectives present ‘The mother sat on the edge of the bed.’
356
FRANCOPROVENÇAL
Table 20.7 The two-case system of the eastern Valais Table 20.8 The two-case feminine and masculine singular
and masculine plural system at Évolène
FEMININE
MASCULINE [ˈmata] ‘ GIRL ’ FEMININE
[maˈtɔŋ] ‘ BOY ’ [ˈʣœʊ] ‘ FOREST ’ MASCULINE [ˈmata] ‘ GIRL ’
SUBJECT OBLIQUE SUBJECT OBLIQUE [maˈtɔŋ] ‘ BOY ’ [ˈzɔʊ] ‘ FOREST ’
SUBJECT OBLIQUE SUBJECT OBLIQUE
Singular [lʏ maˈtɔŋ] [lɔ maˈtɔŋ] [lʏ ˈmata] [la ˈmata]
[lʏ ˈʣœʊ] [la ˈʣœʊ] Singular [lʏ maˈtɔŋ] [lɔ maˈtɔŋ][lʏ ˈmata] [la ˈmata]
Plural [lɛ maˈtɔŋ] [lɛ ˈmatɛ] [lʏ ˈzɔʊ] [la ˈzɔʊ]
[lɛ ˈʣœʊ] Plural [ɪ maˈtɔŋʃ] [lɛ maˈtɔŋʃ] [lɛ ˈmatɛ]
[lʏ maˈtɔŋʃ] [lɛ ˈzɔʊʃ]
Leaving aside the numerous allomorphs ([li, lʏ, lə, i], etc.
of the masculine and feminine subject forms, [la, a] for the
feminine object, [lɔ, ɔ] for the masculine object)—and some
further complications involving vowel-initial words—we
obtain the following system (cf. Table 20.7):
• The masculine noun is invariable; number and case singular (masculine [lʊ]/[lɔ] with allophones, feminine
distinctions are expressed on the definite article [la]), as in all Romance languages, but also in the plural
([lʏ]-[lɔ] in the singular, [lɛ] in the plural). (masculine ([lʊ]/[lɔ] with allophones, feminine [le]/[lɛ]/
• The feminine noun is invariable in the singular; the case [lə], and similar; cf. Martin and Tuaillon 1971-81:maps III
distinction is expressed by the definite article ([lʏ]-[la]). and IV, and the detailed study by Martin 1972). These
Nouns derived from the Latin first declension, in -A, also varieties continue the Occitan area which has the same
display a morphological distinction between -[a] (sin- phenomenon and extends from Gascony to the north of
gular) and -[ɛ] (plural), replicated in the specific form of the Occitan domain, except for the Provençal varieties
the plural article [lɛ], which is identical for masculine proper which neutralize gender in the plural like French.
and feminine. Feminines which derive from other Latin Our examples are from the Chablais Valaisan, a continu-
declension classes (e.g. IURIS > [ˈʣœʊ, ˈzɔʊ] ‘forest’ are ation of the area studied by Martin (1972):
invariable, like masculines. (4) [ɔ̃ lu tɑˈsɔ̃ l ɑ̃ fe
There is just one variety of the eastern Valais (Évolène) oh the.MPL badgers they have do
which retains an audible plural desinence ([s] or [ʃ]) both in dʏ ˈmoːʊ dɛ̃ː lu ʦã] (Troistorrents, Valais)
masculines and feminines (except for original first declen- some damage in the.MPL fields
sion feminines). It also maintains a two-case system in the ‘Oh the badgers they have done damage in the fields.’
masculine plural (Table 20.8). (5) [le le ʣɛ̃ ɐʦeˈtaʋã le ˈbote
Example (3) illustrates the opposition between the two the.FPL the.FPL people bought the.FPL shoes
forms of the article and the presence of plural markers in ʋe l kɑʁdɑˈɲeː] (Troistorrents)
masculine nouns: at the shoemaker
(3) [i mjo̞ paˈrɛ̃s aʦɛˈtavɔ̃ pa lɛ ‘The . . . the people bought the shoes at the
the my.SUBJ.MPL parents.MPL bought not the shoemaker’s.’
ʦamˈbø̝t - n aˈvɪ̃ŋ dɛː pwɛʃ ˈmimɔ]
hams.OBJ.FPL we had some pigs ourselves The gender distinction in the plural also appears after a
‘My parents didn’t buy hams—we had pigs ourselves.’ preposition (cf. 6-9). The masculine forms are contracted,
the feminines are not:
• Masculine plural, preposition [a] ‘to, at’:
20.3.1.2 Noun determiners: maintenance or
(6) [le bwɔt ɪ m faã mo
neutralization of the masculine/feminine opposition
the shoes they me= hurt
in the plural ɪ taˈlɔ̃] (Troistorrents)
Over a wide area, from south of Grenoble to Lake Léman, gender at.the.MPL heels
is distinguished by means of the definite article not only in the ‘The shoes are hurting me on the heels.’
357
ANDRES KRISTOL
• Feminine plural, preposition [a] ‘to, at’: de, like most of Occitan (cf. Ronjat 1937, III:127f.; for the
geolinguistic distribution of these two types in the Franco-
(7) [a ɑ̃ ˈkope la ˈlãn a
provençal of France, see Martin and Tuaillon 1971-81:maps
ah one cuts the wool to
1562, 1563; for Swiss Romandy, see, e.g. Gauchat et al. 1925:
le ˈfɑje̝] (Troistorrents)
cols 40, 41, 43, 88, 133, 193). In the north of the Francopro-
the.FPL sheep
vençal area (southern Doubs, Jura, northeast Ain, northern
‘Ah they cut (one cuts) the sheep’s wool.’
Haute-Savoie, the Swiss cantons of Vaud, Geneva, Fribourg,
Neuchâtel, and the Chablais Valaisan), most varieties use
• Masculine plural, preposition [de] ‘of ’ (or partitive
the complete partitive article; the southern varieties of
marker):
Francoprovençal in France, the varieties of the central Val-
(8) [ɔ̃ ʋwɑ pa me sɔˈʋɛ̃ de ais and all of Val d’Aosta only use partitive de.
one sees not more often of.ART.MPL The complete partitive article, in those varieties which
moˈtse] (Troistorrents) have developed it, is morphologically identical to the forms
sparrowhawks of the definite article preceded by de; generally, in the var-
‘One doesn’t often see sparrowhawks any more.’ ieties which distinguish gender in the plural, the same dis-
tinction is made for the partitive article. It is grammaticalized
• Feminine plural, preposition [de] ‘of ’ (or partitive to a greater degree than in standard French, where normative
marker): influences have acted as a brake (Wallon, however, displays a
comparable syntax to that of the Francoprovençal dialects,
(9) [ˈɑʋo d le kwəˈzən] (Troistorrents)
which possess a complete partitive article; Remacle 1952/60,
I.had of.ART.FPL cousins
I:104-7): the complete partitive article is also used, for
‘I had some (female) cousins.’
example, after a negator (example 12):
The same distinction characterizes possessive deter- (12) [o ma mjɪʁ gʀã e̝ lɑʧ ɛ̈ˈtav pa d le
miners in the plural: oh my mother big she bought not PART.FPL
ˈbʁöjɛ e e faˈsa ˈme̝mɐ] (Val-d’Illiez)
(10) [kɑ̃ j ecˈjɑ̃ ˈpuʁə mʊ ɡʁɑ̃ paˈʁɑ̃
clothes she them= made self-
when they were little my.MPL grand parents
‘Oh my grandmother she did not buy clothes, she made
nə vəhˈjɑ̃ lə z ɔˈʁɑ̃ʒ k a
them herself .’
not saw the oranges but at
θaˈlɑ̃də e e ɑ̃ˈkɔʁ] (Sixt, Haute-Savoie)
In varieties which only use the partitive preposition [də],
Christmas and and again
it is clearly distinguished from the ‘full’ definite article
‘When they were small my grandparents only saw
preceded by the preposition [də] (examples 13-15, from a
oranges at Christmas, if that.’
female informant from Bionaz):
(11) [me mɑɑ̃ k œ ˈkʁɔlɔ̃] (Sixt) (13) [aˈdɔ̃ kãn ˈʣɑːlə nɔ tɔˈpɛ̃ lə
my.FPL hands t.. er tremble then when freezes we cover the
‘My hands are er trembling.’ fløː aˈwɪ də ˈʀɑːmə də ˈplɑ̃tə]
flowers with PART branches of trees
In contrast, northern varieties (northern French Jura, ‘When it freezes we cover the flowers with tree
Fribourg, Neuchâtel, Vaud), eastern Valais, and Val d’Aosta branches’
neutralize the gender opposition in the plural of the definite
(14) [l ɑ plɑ̃ˈtɔ ɔn ɪˈpɛɛ̃ja - ʊ deˈzɔ dɪ pjɑ]
plural article (see Table 20.7) and of possessive determiners
he has planted a thorn under of.ART.M/FPL feet
([mɛ, tɛ, sɛ, no, vo, ło] and other variants). The presence of
‘He planted a thorn . . . under the feet’
this neutralization in the oblique case in old documents
from Fribourg (cf. Table 20.6) and its geographical extent (15) [lə ʣɔ dɪ ˈfɪtə ˈbøtɔ lʊ kʊtɪˈʎʊ̃
suggest that this development is indigenous. the days of. ART.M/FPL festivities I.put the dress
pɪ ʣɛɛ̃ pə aˈlɪ ɑ ˈmesːɐ]
most pretty for go.INF to mass
20.3.1.3 The partitive article or partitive de ‘On holidays I put on my prettiest dress to go to Mass’
Francoprovençal is divided into varieties which have gram-
maticalized a complete partitive article, like modern In these same varieties, in the plural—unlike partitive de
French, and those which have a simple partitive preposition in French—vowel-initial forms are preceded by a linking -[z]
358
FRANCOPROVENÇAL
or -[ʒ] clearly of analogical origin (example 16, female (c) Stressed personal pronoun ([mɛ], [tɛ] ‘I, you’, etc.) pre-
informant from Bionaz). The same has been observed for ceded by the prepositions à ‘to’ or de ‘of ’, more rarely
the variety spoken in Macôt (Haute Tarentaise; Groupe de vers ‘towards’, as the complement of the noun: [ʎʏ
Conflans 1994:162). vʏˈʒe̞ɛ̃ a mɛ] lit. ‘the neighbour to me’ = ‘my neigh-
bour’, [lɑ vʏˈsĩja də mɛ] ‘the neighbour of me' = ‘my
(16) [œ pə fe lɔ buˈʎoŋ œ ˈbøtːo
neighbour’, [lʏ ˈpaʁɛ vɛʁ nøʊ] ‘the father towards us’ =
er for make.INF the stock er I.put
‘our father’. In these expressions, the group ‘prepos-
də z ˈʊsə aˈwɪ la mɪˈoːla]
ition + personal pronoun’ is generally unstressed; if
PART bones with the marrow
there is emphatic stress it falls on the noun.
‘Er, to make the stock, er, I add some bones to the
(d) Zero possessive (definite article + noun): [e ˈpɑʁe] ‘the
marrow.’
father’ = ‘my father’, [lʏ vɪˈʒɪŋ] ‘the neighbour’ = ‘my
neighbour’, in cases of inalienable possession, or
This ‘false liaison’ with [z] or [ʒ] undoubtedly represents
where the possessor is indicated by context.
a plural formative agglutinated to the start of vowel-initial
nouns (see also Duraffour 1932b:48f.): my recordings show What is noteworthy about the morphology of series (a) is
an analogous, etymologically ‘unjustified’ [z] or [ʒ] appear- the masculine first and second persons plural forms (the
ing regularly before vowel-initial nouns in syntagms such as type [ˈnotrɔ̃, ˈnutrɔ̃, ˈnuɦrɔ̃, ˈnuθrɔ̃; vɔtrɔ̃], etc.; the middle
[sĩŋ ʒ uɹs] ‘five bears’ (Arbaz), [ny z aranˈdoːə] ‘nine swal- consonant in these forms reflects the different treatment of
lows' (Isérables), etc. Latin -ST- according to variety), undoubtedly formed on the
analogy of the masculine singular ([mɔ̃, tɔ̃, sɔ̃] (Hasselrot
1939-40). The type [ˈnotrɔ̃, vɔtrɔ̃], covers most of the Fran-
20.3.1.4 Possessives coprovençal area and is unknown outside it (Hasselrot 1966:
Francoprovençal varieties have several different synchronic map), but does not constitute a unique common identifier of
devices for the expression of possession (Keller 1958:141f.; Francoprovençal because it is absent in some areas whose
Marzys 1964:60-65; Bjerrome 1957:76f.; Pannatier 1995:124-9). ‘Francoprovençal-hood’ is beyond doubt (central Valais,
Val d’Aosta, northern Vaudois, Neuchâtel, and French
(a) Possessive determiner [mɔ̃ /mʊ̃, ma], etc., analogous
Jura ). The feminines [ˈnutra, ˈnuθra; ˈvutra], etc. (< NOSTRA,
to Fr. mon, ma, etc., Occ. mon, ma, a clitic possessive
*ˈvɔstra) are not specifically Francoprovençal.
form which functions like other noun determiners,
Information on the use of the different forms is contra-
and may or may not neutralize gender in the plural
dictory. According to Bjerrome (1956:76), in Bagnes, series (a)
(cf. §20.3.1.2). It is found everywhere. Examples: [mɔ̃
and (b) are virtually interchangeable, with some slight pref-
vɪˈʒĩ] ‘my neighbour’ (Arbaz); [mũ ˈɔmːo] ‘my hus-
erences dependent on context. According to Marzys (1964:60-
band’ (Bionaz); [mi mat ɛ jɔ] ‘my.SUBJ daughter and I’
65), the often archaizing and so-called ‘episcopal’ Valais (see
(Nendaz); [ma ˈbuːba] ‘my daughter’ (Liddes).
Jeanjaquet 1931 for this term) strongly maintains series (a)
(b) Possessive adjective, generally preceded by the def-
and (b), while so-called ‘Savoyard’ Valais, a transit zone, is
inite article: [lʏ mjɔ/lo mjɔ] and allomorphs in var-
tending to lose series (b). According to Gauchat et al. (1924-
ieties with a two-case system, [lɔ meŋ] and variants in
33, III:599f.)., s.v. cho ‘his/her’, the presence of series (a) in the
Val d’Aosta, etc.; [lʏ ˈmajɛ, la ˈmajɛ], etc. in the fem-
eastern Valais reflects the recent influence of French. The rest
inine. This full possessive form is formally identical to
of Swiss Romandy only preserves series (a). Keller (1958:141f.)
the possessive pronoun, analogous to the old French
attributes the almost exclusive use of series (b) in Val d’Aosta
type le mien frère, Gsc. lo men hrair, lit. ‘the mine
to Piedmontese influence, which is considered to be advan-
brother’. Well attested in old Francoprovençal texts,
cing into the middle and upper valley, where series (a) and (b)
in the modern varieties, it is principally found in Val
still coexist. The problem with this interpretation is that the
d’Aosta and the eastern Valais. Examples: [lɔ mœœ̃ŋ
eastern Valais uses the traditional series (b), where any
vøˈzœ̃] ‘the mine neighbour’ (Bionaz); [lɪ mjo̞ vɛ̈ˈʒʏ̃]
northern Italian influence can be ruled out. There is no
‘the.SUBJ.M mine neighbour’ (Hérémence); [lɔ mjɔ bjɔ
comparable study for the Francoprovençal spoken in France.
frar] ‘the.OBJ.M mine brother-in-law’ (Évolène); [mjo̞
My own material—over 2,500 occurrences of the posses-
ˈfɹɑjeø] ‘mine brother’ (Lourtier); [e mæjʏ ˈbubɐ] ‘the.
sive recorded between 1994 and 2001 in 25 localities in the
SUBJ.F mine daughter’ (Lourtier); [a mɛɪʏ meˈʑɔ̃] ‘the.
Haute-Savoie, Valais, Val d’Aosta area—reveal the following
OBJ.F mine house’ (Lourtier), etc. In affective registers,
distribution:
series (a) and (b) may be used together: [ma mej
zɔˈwena] lit. ‘my mine young’ = ‘my dear daughter’,
[mũ mjo fʏs] lit. ‘my mine son’ = ‘my dear son’ • Chablais varieties spoken in Valais and France, in Liddes
(Évolène), with the weak form as determiner. (Val d’Entremont) and St-Jean (Anniviers) only present
359
ANDRES KRISTOL
series (a) forms, beside the zero possessive (d) which is • No case system, oblique, after preposition (Torgnon,
found everywhere. Val d’Aosta):
• In a compact area on the left bank of the Rhône, from
(20) [tə t ɑˈdʊ̃e tɪ pwʏ de mɛ]
Évolène (Val d’Hérens) to Orsières (Val d’Entremont),
you REFL.2SG remember Q then of me
and including Sixt (Haute-Savoie), series (a) and (b)
‘Will you remember me?’
coexist, with a clear predominance of (b) in Évolène.
• At Chalais and all along the right bank of the Rhône, the
The geographical distribution of the two types remains to
double series of possessives, stressed and unstressed, is
be studied. In the ALAVAL data, lower Valais, neighbouring
expressed by series (a) and (c); (c) appears to have
Haute-Savoie, and the Val d’Aosta show no case distinction;
completely evicted type (b).
central Valais has the two-case type (Kristol 2009a:50-53).
• A small group of varieties (Nendaz, Isérables, and Héré-
The latter is also attested for the Val Soana (Zörner
mence) maintain series (a), (b) and (c), but show a clear
2004:107-9) and the Tarentaise (Macôt; Groupe de Conflans
preference for the zero possessive (d).
1994:133). Forez, however, has neutralized the case distinc-
• At Bionaz (Val d’Aosta), series (a), (b), and (c) are attested,
tion (Gardette 1941b:24).
but (c) is predominant. In Torgnon (Val d’Aosta), I have
found only (a) and (b), with (a) clearly preferred.
This long list shows how difficult it is to generalize about 20.3.2.2 Subject clitics
Francoprovençal: from a shared starting point each variety
The morphology and syntax of Francoprovençal so-called
has developed its own preferences.
‘unstressed’ (clitic) subject pronouns has greatly intrigued
linguists (Marzys 1964; 1970; 1981; Martin 1974a; 1974b;
Favre 1981-2; Heap 2000; Diémoz 2007; 2008; 2009; Kristol
20.3.2 The pronominal system 2008; 2009a,b; 2010; Hinzelin and Kaiser 2012; see also dis-
cussion in Ch. 47). They are striking in their polymorphism
20.3.2.1 Stressed personal pronouns and their inter- and intradialectal variation (see Kristol
For ‘stressed’ or ‘disjunct’ personal pronouns, certain west- 2009a,b; 2010). The evidence of the data collected and ana-
ern Romance languages maintain a two-case system which lysed by these authors invalidates clearly the opinion of
distinguishes the subject and the oblique (e.g. It. io ‘I’ vs me Renzi and Vanelli (1983), Vanelli et al. (1985:163), and others
‘me’); others, such as modern French or most Occitan var- (e.g. Tuaillon 2003:118) who consider Francoprovençal as a
ieties, have neutralized the case distinction (Fr. moi, Occ. jo, language with an obligatory subject clitic pronoun.
subject and object: Fr. moi je viens ‘I come’ vs il vient avec moi According to Marzys (1964:118-21), use of the subject clitic
‘he comes with me’; Gsc. jo que vieni ‘I come’ vs que vien dab jo is obligatory in the second person singular, fairly regular in
‘he comes with me’). In modern Francoprovençal, both the first and second persons plural, but optional, and some-
systems coexist: some varieties maintain a two-case system times very rare, in the first and third persons singular. The
(examples 17, 18), while others have abandoned the case rates of usage vary considerably from one variety to another
distinction (examples 19, 20): (Kristol 2009a). Exactly the same situation is found in Val
d’Aosta (Favre 1981-2; Diémoz 2008). In some varieties the
• Two-case system, subject (Arbaz, Valais):
subject clitic is employed systematically; in others it is
(17) [e soˈse̞t ʃi jɔ̈ kʏ ʒ e ʦɪsoˈɲe] optional or even wholly absent. Some varieties have only
the socks am I who them= have knitted one subject pronoun, which is stressed (and has no clitic
‘I was the one who knitted the socks.’ counterpart). The remainder have two series, stressed and
clitic. In all varieties the syntax of the first person singular is
• Two-case system, oblique case, after preposition (Arbaz, different from that of the second or third person singular, and
Valais): from the plural forms. Some varieties have a complete set of
subject clitics, used virtually systematically in any context.
(18) [vɑ hʊ t œ̃ ʃ ɥɪˈnɪ de̞ mɛ]
Others have a complete set of subject clitics, but the use of
go you REFL.2SG remember of me
certain forms is optional. Others, still, lack a complete set of
‘Are you going to remember me?’
subject clitics, some forms either not existing or not being
used. Only the second person singular is always obligatory.
• No case system, subject attribute (Torgnon, Val d’Aosta):
What exactly governs the use of clitic subjects in individual
(19) [lɛ ʦyˈsɔ j ɛ mɛ ke̞ lɛz e tʁekɔˈtu] varieties has still to be uncovered (see Ch. 47). For a possible
the socks it is I who them= have knitted correlation between maintenance of verb morphology distin-
‘I was the one who knitted the socks.’ guishing person and use of clitic subjects, cf. §20.4.2.
360
FRANCOPROVENÇAL
The situation in Francoprovençal varieties of France of the verb (infinitive, present participle, past participle; cf.
remains to be investigated, but the grammar of the variety Reymond and Bossard 1979:95):
spoken in Macôt (Tarentaise) also states that the first per-
(21) On m’a cein contâ lit. ‘one has me that told’= ‘I have
son singular subject pronoun ‘does not exist’ (Groupe de
been told that’
Conflans 1994:133). Works which simply classify Francopro-
vençal as a language with obligatory subject clitic pronouns (22) On pâo pas cein dèvortolyî lit. ‘one cannot that unravel’
are definitely in need of revision. For some considerations (23) Ein cein deseint lit. ‘in that saying’ [but cf. Fr. en ce disant]
of the problematic theoretical implications of the Franco-
provençal system, see e.g. Heap (2000), Hinzelin and Kaiser This order may recur in the use of ça ‘that’ in Vaudois
(2012), and Kristol (2010). regional French (Bürgi 1999:157-9).
20.3.2.3 Neuter subject and object

The southern part of the oïl domain, roughly to the south of 20.4 Elements of verb syntax
the Loire, as well as the adjacent Occitan and Francopro- and morphology
vençal areas are typologically united in their maintenance
of a formal distinction between the masculine and the
20.4.1 The split of the first conjugation
neuter clitic, both subject and object (cf. also discussion in
Ch. 57). How this distinction is expressed differs greatly The most original feature of Francoprovençal verb morph-
from region to region (cf. Clédat 1883; Vignon 1901; 1905; ology is the phonetically caused split of reflexes of Latin
Martin 1974b; Kristol 1991). first conjugation verbs into two sub-paradigms (cf. §20.2.1;
For the subject (cf. ALF, maps 1035 and 143), in Poitou, the Table 20.4).
distinction is expressed by [lə] (masculine) – [ɔl] (neuter). In
the Occitan areas of the Massif Central, the distinction is of
the type [o] (M) – [ku] (N). In the French areas of the Centre, 20.4.2 Present indicative
the distinction is of the type [i] (M) – [sa] (N). In most of the
Francoprovençal varieties affected, the distinction is made The first person singular present indicative is marked by
between [i] (M) and [o]/[e] (N). preservation of the Latin first conjugation desinence -O:
The direct object (cf. ALF, maps 410, 745, and 1316) has [m aˈpɛːlɔ] ‘I call myself ’, [ˈmɛtɔ] ‘I put’, [ˈveːjɔ] ‘I go’,
much the same geographical distribution: the south of the [ˈdrʏmɔ] or [druˈmeʃɔ] ‘I sleep’ (the latter with an analogical
Gallo-Romance domain (French, Francoprovençal, and Occi- ‘augment’: see Chs 26 and 42), but [ʃi]/[ʃe] ‘I know’, [vwe̞]/
tan) preserves the distinction, although neutralization of [ˈvʊɪ]/[ˈwɛɪ] ‘I want’.
the distinction encroaches in places around Bordeaux and The ending -[ɔ] distinguishes the first from the second and
in the Rhône valley. The distinction is expressed by [lə] (M) – third persons singular, the last two being identical for all
[zu] (N) in Poitou, [lu] (M) – [za]/[zu]/[bo]/[ɔk], etc. (N) in verbs. Thus for example 1SG [ˈprɛ̃ʒɔ] ‘I take’, 2SG [tə prɛ̃], 3SG
Occitan, [lɔ] (M) – [ɔ]/[u]/[i] (N) in Francoprovençal. The [(i) prɛ̃]). This distribution of forms might partly explain the
regional French spoken in the Francoprovençal area obligatory use of the subject clitic in the second person
affected by this phenomenon, basically between Geneva singular (cf. §20.3.2.2), while the use of the first person
and Grenoble, calques this distinction by means of a neuter singular subject clitic is often rare or actually nonexistent,
personal pronoun y versus the masculine singular pronoun and that of the third person singular subject clitic is optional;
le (Tuaillon 1983): j’y sais ‘I know that’, j’y vois ‘I see that’, but but other factors are also at work here (Kristol 2010).
je le vois ‘I see it (e.g. the umbrella)’. The second person plural sometimes maintains reflexes
of Latin rhizotonic forms (SÁPĬTIS > [ˈsɑːdɛ] ‘you know’); in
some regions, this desinence was extended analogically into
20.3.2.4 The neuter demonstrative pronoun phonetically regular arrhizotonic forms (cf. Martin 2001;
Unlike Fr. ce and Occ. aquò ‘this/that’, which contain a con- from my data: *AD+CAPTĀTIS > [ɑθˈtɑ] ‘you buy’ at La
tinuant of Latin HOC ‘this’, the main neuter demonstrative Chapelle-d’Abondance (Haute-Savoie), but [əʦəˈtadə] at
pronoun in Francoprovençal is [sɛ̃]/[ʃɛ̃]/[ʃɛn], or similar Bionaz (Val d’Aosta); UENĪTIS > [vəˈni] ‘you come’ at Liddes
forms, probably descended from a Latin type *ECCE + INDE lit. (Valais), but [suˈvnɪːdɛ] at La Chapelle-d’Abondance.
‘behold + thence’. The position of this pronoun is notably In verbs of the -ARE conjugation, vocalic alternations, due
different from that of ce and aquò: in the Francoprovençal of to stress shift between the root and the ending (see also Chs
Vaud it was systematically placed before the non-finite forms 27 and 43), are relatively frequent (the type [ˈplœːrɔ] ‘I
361
ANDRES KRISTOL
weep’ - [plɔˈrɔ̃] ‘we weep’). In verbs of the -ĪRE conjugation As is apparent in (24), ‘be had’ has a rival in ‘be been’.
we often observe analogical extension of the ‘augment’ (see Under the influence of French, one also hears ‘have been’.
§43.2.4) [ɛs] or [ɛʃ]. In Bagnes (Valais), [ˈfʊjɔ] ‘I flee’ coexists
with [fʊˈjəsɔ] (Bjerrome 1957:105). For Vaux (Ain), however, 20.4.5 Surcomposé forms
Duraffour (1932b:67) observes that verbs of this type are
much less frequent than in French. The surcomposé (double compound analytic; cf. §58.3.4)
forms, which express ‘ante-anteriority’ or a past which is
20.4.3 Imperfect indicative definitively over and which are also found in the regional
French of the south and southeastern part of France and
Francoprovençal has in principle maintained two sets of Swiss Romandy and beyond (Cornu 1953; Carruthers 1993;
imperfect indicative endings: (a) in -v- from Latin verbs in 1996), are very current in Francoprovençal, particularly in
-ABAM, (b) without -v- for other verbs (< ĒBAM, etc.): main clauses:
(a) [aʁˈʋaʋɔ] ‘I arrived’ (first conjugation verbs with non-
(25) [dœ bətəˈɹɑɪ j en e ʒy plɑ̃ˈto] (Lourtier)
palatalizing roots)
some beetroots I of.them have had planted
[mĩŋˈʒjɛvɔ], [mˈðiːvɔ] ‘I ate’ (first conjugation verbs
‘I have planted some beetroots [but I don’t any more].’
with palatalizing roots)
(b) [vɛ̃ˈdɛ] ‘I sold’
[de̞ˈvɛ] ‘I owed/had to’ 20.4.6 Future
[vʏɲˈɛ] ‘I came’
The varieties of Val d’Aosta have grammaticalized a peri-
In fact, the forms in -v- have often spread analogically, e.g. phrastic form of the future (based on a reflex of the original
[prɛ̃ˈʒʲevɔ] ‘I took’ (Miège, Valais), [fiˈzivɔ̈] ‘I made’ (Torgnon, temporal adverb POS(T) ‘then’) which is in competition with
Val d’Aosta/Vallée d’Aoste), and the numerous realizations of the traditional Romance future formed from infinitive +
the imperfect of the verb ‘see’ attested in my data: [vɛˈjevʊ] ‘I HABERE ‘HAVE’ (cf. §27.6, §46.3.2.2): [tə ˈvɑɪ pwi] lit. ‘you see
saw’ (Les Marécottes, Valais), [vɛˈjɑːvɔ] ‘I saw’ (Montana, then’ = ‘you’ll see’ (Bionaz), [ɪ ˈveɲɔ̃ pwa] ‘they come then
Valais), [veˈɪvɔ] ‘I saw’ (Torgnon, Val d’Aosta) (= they’ll come)’, but also [ɑləˈʀɔ̃] ‘they’ll go’ in Bionaz, [tʏ
vɪɲɛˈʀɛː] ‘you’ll come’ in Torgnon.
20.4.4 Periphrastic tenses Francoprovençal belongs to the great eastern Gallo-
Romance area which has a periphrastic future formed
Some varieties invert the auxiliary verbs BE and HAVE in the from the verb WANT + infinitive, without any volitional con-
compound past of the verb BE (‘be had’ for ‘have been’). The notation : [i nə vu pɑ tarˈdi] lit. ‘he does not want to be late’
phenomenon is ancient: it is found in the fourteenth- = ‘he will not be late’ (Duraffour 1932b:60). This form is very
century para-Francoprovençal scripta from Fribourg (13 much alive in the regional French of the area, with Neuchâ-
March 1342; Werro et al. 1839-77, III:158): Humber dit Göfens tel, the Swiss Jura, and Franche-Comté as its epicentre. Its
de Norea est heuz sentencie en la justise de Fribour, lit. ‘Humbert geolinguistic extent has still to be studied. It seems to be
known as Göfens of Norea has been (lit. ‘is had’) sentenced absent in Valais and Val d’Aosta, but I have heard it in the
in the court of Fribourg’. lower valley of the Isère, west of Grenoble.
This construction remains current in the ‘episcopal’ Val-
ais varieties (Sion and Sierre areas), but is also found else-
where (example from Liddes, Val d’Entremont):
20.4.7 The subjunctive
(24) [my soˈvyɲɔ ke l aˈlaɔ̃ wɪ In the subjunctive, the morphological opposition between
I remember that they were.going with present and imperfect tenses has ceased to be functional.
la ʋjɛʣ aˈpy sɔ̃ iˈta] According to Duraffour (1932b:58f.), in Vaux (Ain), the forms
the sledge after they.are been of the present subjunctive ([kə ðə ˈθɑ̃tɔ, kə ðə ˈvɛ̃dɔ], ‘that
w li ʦarˈɡɔse kã lə I sing’, that I sell’, etc.) and the imperfect ([θɑ̃ˈtiːsɔ, vɛ̃ˈdiːsɔ])
with the two-wheeled.carts when the were virtually interchangeable. In general, the west of the
ʦyˈmẽ l e ʒu ɔ̃ mwɛ pi ˈlɑrʣɔ area preserves the present tense forms while the east has
path it is had a bit more wide generalized the (more marked) imperfect subjunctive
‘I remember they used to go with the sledge then forms. Certain varieties have developed a present subjunct-
they went on two-wheeled carts when the path was ive marked by an infix [z] or [j] ([θɑ̃ˈtezɔ, θɑ̃ˈtejɔ] ‘sang’; cf.
a bit wider.’ Martin 1990:682).
362
CHAPTER 21
Catalan
ALEX ALSINA
21.1 Introduction: external elements century, as shown by the large number of texts written
in Catalan (see the Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic
(CICA)).
21.1.1 Territory, geographical dialects, During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Catalan
and demography remained practically the only language used in the Catalan
linguistic area. However, two events in the seventeenth and
Catalan is the native language of portions of four different
eighteenth centuries led to its subsequent subordination to
present-day states in Europe. The following territories con-
foreign languages: the dismemberment of the portion of
stitute the area in which Catalan is the ancestral language:
Catalonia north of the Pyrenees from the rest of Catalonia
(1) Andorra; (2) the département of Pyrénées-Orientales in
and its annexation to France in 1659, and the annexation of
France; (3) Catalonia, excluding the Occitan-speaking Val
the Catalan-speaking territories south of the Pyrenees to
d’Aran; the eastern strip of Aragon; most of the Valencian
Castile after the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714. The
Country; and the Balearic Islands, in Spain; and (4) the town
disappearance of a Catalan state was followed by a series of
of Alghero in Sardinia, in Italy. See Map 21.1 of the Catalan-
laws prohibiting the use of Catalan in all official and public
speaking area, which shows the classification of the geo-
situations, making French north of the new border and
graphical dialects of Catalan into the western and eastern
Spanish south of it the languages for written and formal
groups.
uses.
The population of the Catalan-speaking area is eleven
At the end of the nineteenth century, there was a wide-
million, more than seven million of whom can speak the
spread social demand for a unified standard form of the
language. The vitality of Catalan varies considerably from
language. The engineer and self-made linguist Pompeu
region to region. Catalan has limited presence at both the
Fabra almost single-handedly developed and proposed the
northern and southern tips of its linguistic area, but is alive
standard Catalan norms currently in use.
and visible elsewhere in this area.
Following Franco’s victory at the end of the Spanish civil
war in 1939, Catalan entered a period of complete prohib-
ition. With his death in 1975 and the collapse of the regime,
21.1.2 History the Catalan territories under Spanish administration have
implemented language policies designed to increase the
Catalan originated and developed in the northern strip of knowledge and use of Catalan. As a result, Catalan is
the current Catalan-speaking area on both sides of the again used in all communicative contexts, even though in
Pyrenees, to which the pre-Catalan Romance-speaking some (e.g. the administration of justice) its presence is
area was reduced as a result of the Muslim occupation of still very limited (see Melchor and Branchadell 2007 for
most of the Iberian Peninsula in 711. Over the following six more information about the history and sociology of the
centuries, Catalan gradually expanded southwards. The last language).
major expansion of the language took place in the thir-
teenth century with the conquest of the kingdoms of
Majorca (the Balearic Islands) and Valencia.
Catalan is first attested in the written record in the ninth 21.2 Salient diachronic features
century as words or short phrases in texts otherwise writ-
ten in Latin, and we find the first texts fully written in This section reviews some of the salient diachronic features
Catalan around 1150 (cf. §3.1). Catalan is the main written of Catalan (Badia i Margarit 1951; Moll 1952), many of which
language in the Catalan-speaking area from the twelfth are shared with Occitan, to which it is closely related.
This chapter © Alex Alsina 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 363
ALEX ALSINA
NORTHERN
CENTRAL
NORTHWESTERN
WESTERN
CATALAN
EASTERN
CATALAN
BALEARIC
VALENCIAN
SARDINIA
ALGUERÈS
Map. 21.1 The Catalan-speaking area
21.2.1 Vowels split: /ə/ in most of the Balearic Islands, /ɛ/ in central
Catalan, and /e/ in the western dialects, as shown in (1c).
One of the diachronic features that distinguishes Catalan (1)
(see also §14.2.1.1 for Corsican) in the Romance context is
a. SĚLLAM > s/e/lla ‘saddle’ LĚPOREM > ll/e/bre ‘hare’
the ‘switch’ that has occurred with the mid front vowels:
BRĚUEM > br/e/u ‘brief ’ SĚMPER > s/e/mpre ‘always’
spoken (late) Latin /e/ has evolved into central Catalan /ɛ/
SĚCAT > s/e/ga ‘reaps; cuts’ BĚNE > b/e/ ‘well’
and proto-Romance /ɛ/ has evolved into central Catalan /e/,
leaving aside a few instances of /ɛ/ that have remained as b. FĚRRUM > f/ɛ/rro ‘iron’ APĔRTUM > ob/ɛ/rt ‘open’
such. It is clear that this switch cannot have occurred CAELUM > c/ɛ/l ‘sky’ PRĔTIUM > pr/ɛ/u ‘price’
directly: if /ɛ/ had changed into /e/, while /e/ remained c. PLĒNUM > pl/ə/ (Bal.) pl/ɛ/ (central) pl/e/ (western)‘full’
/e/, the two vowels would have merged. Whereas /ɛ/ PĬRA > p/ə/ra (Bal.) p/ɛ/ra (C) p/e/ra (W) ‘pear’
became /e/ in all Catalan dialects (1a), apart from certain BĬBIT > b/ə/u (Bal.) b/ɛ/u (C) b/e/u (W) ‘drinks’
contexts (1b), the treatment of Latin /e/ shows a dialectal CATĒNAM > cad/ə/na (Bal.) cad/ɛ/na (C) cad/e/na (W) ‘chain’
364
CATALAN
Table 21.1 Stages in the evolution of the front mid vowels
Vulgar Latin ProtoCatalan ProtoCatalan Central Catalan Western Catalan

Stage 1 Stage 2
e e ə e ə e ə e ə
ɛ ɛ ɛ/(ɛ) ɛ ɛ
A possible explanation (although by no means the only originated from the transformation of /k/ in coda position
one) is schematized in Table 21.1. First, /e/ became the into /j/, closed to /ej/ and subsequently coalesced to /e/:
central or back vowel /ə/ (stage 1). Once /e/ had disap- FACTUM > *[ˈfajto] > *[fejt] > fet ‘done’, FRAXINUM > *[ˈfrajsinu] >
peared from the vowel inventory, /ɛ/ closed becoming /e/, [ˈfrejʃen] > freixe ‘ash (tree)’.
except in a few words and contexts in which it remained /ɛ/ Another salient feature of Catalan diachronic phonology,
(stage 2). At this point, the front mid vowels had given way which also groups Catalan with Occitan and French, is the
to a three-way distinction: /ɛ–e–ə/. This is the stage that is generalized loss of vowels other than /a/ after the stressed
preserved in present day Balearic Catalan. In the rest of the syllable. In words with penultimate stress, the loss of word-
eastern Catalan dialects stressed /ə/ changed to /ɛ/ (Badia i final /e/ and /o/ is the norm (CABALLUM > cavall ‘horse’, DENTEM >
Margarit 1951:142; Mascaró 2002:120f), restoring the seven- dent ‘tooth’, PANES > pans ‘loaves’, DICO > dic ‘I.say’), although a
vowel system, except that original /ɛ/ and /e/ had switched vowel (-e) is retained following consonant groups that do not
positions. In western Catalan dialects stressed /ə/ changed qualify as codas (LATRO > lladre ‘thief ’, NOSTRUM > nostre ‘our’,
back to /e/: here the original seven vowel system is UENTREM > ventre ‘belly’). In words with antepenultimate stress,
restored as well, except that most of the instances of ori- one of the two post-tonic vowels is generally lost: the penul-
ginal /ɛ/ are now /e/ and only a few of the original cases of timate vowel is lost in preference (as in DUODECIM > *ˈdodeke >
/ɛ/ remain as such. dotze ‘twelve’, HEDERAM > heura ‘ivy’, LEPOREM > llebre ‘hare’,
The original mid open vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ (from CLat. Ĕ HOSPITEM > hoste ‘guest’, EPISCOPUM > bisbe ‘bishop’). In certain
and Ǒ, respectively) underwent a process of diphthongiza- contexts, however, the non-final vowel is retained and the
tion, but only when immediately followed by a front glide last vowel is dropped: when the unstressed penultimate
(cf., however, §38.3). Examples of non-diphthongized /ɛ/ vowel precedes an /n/ (HOMINEM > *[ˈɔmen] > home ‘man’,
are given in (1a,b). As for non-diphthongized /ɔ/, we can IUUENEM > *[ˈʒoven] > jove ‘young’, FRAXINUM > *[ˈfrejʃen] > freixe
cite HǑSPITEM > h/ɔ/ste ‘guest’, BǑUEM > b/ɔ/u ‘ox’, BǑNAM > b/ɔ/ ‘ash (tree)’), as well as in other contexts (*ˈessere > ésser ‘be.
na ‘good.FSG’. When followed by the front glide, the mid open INF ’, PLANGERE > plànyer ‘pity.INF ’, FLEBĬLEM > frèvol ‘weak’).
vowels are hypothesized to have undergone diphthongiza-
tion and subsequent raising of the mid vowel /ɛj/ > /jej/ >
/jij/ > /i/ and /ɔj/ > /woj/ > /wuj/ > /uj/, e.g. SPĔCULUM > espill
‘mirror’, MĔDIUM > mig ‘half ’, LĔCTUM > llit ‘bed’, SĔX > sis ‘six’; 21.2.2 Consonants
and ǑCULUM > ull ‘eye’, CǑCTUM > cuit ‘cooked’, PǑDIUM > puig ‘hill’,
FǑLIA > fulla ‘leaf ’. Evidence that the process went through As in western Romance in general, a voiceless obstruent in
the stages indicated is provided, according to Coromines onset position after a vowel becomes voiced (cf. §25.2.5):
(1971:249), by the words HǑDIE > (a)vui ‘today’ and ǑCTO > vuit OPACAM > obaga ‘shady side of the mountain’, CAPRAM > cabra
‘eight’, where the word-initial back glide in the stage /wuj/ ‘goat’, UITAM > vida ‘life’, SECURUM > segur ‘safe’, DEFENSAM > devesa
became the voiced fricative [v], and by the word *ˈvɔkitu > ‘meadow’. Geminate obstruents were shortened: CUPPAM >
buit ‘empty’, where the initial /v/ fused with the following copa ‘cup’, GUTTAM > gota ‘drop’, SICCAM > seca ‘dry.FSG’, ABBATEM
/w/ into /b/. This diphthongization of the mid open vowels > abat ‘abbot’. Intervocalic voiced obstruents undergo len-
before the front glide is a feature that Catalan shares with ition, leading to a fricative (CABALLUM > cavall ‘horse’, PLORABAT
Occitan and French, in contrast with Spanish, where these > plorava ‘cried.3SG’, ALAUDAM > alosa ‘lark’), to a glide in coda
vowels fail to diphthongize only before the front glide. position (BIBIT > beu ‘drinks’, PEDEM > peu ‘foot’, IUGUM > jou
The Latin diphthong AU coalesced into the monophthong ‘yoke’), or to the loss of the consonant (SABUCUM > saüc ‘elder
/ɔ/: PAUCUM > poc ‘little, few’, CAUSAM > cosa ‘thing’, AURUM > or (tree)’, *aˈbutu > OCat.haüt ‘have.PTCP’, LAUDARE > lloar ‘praise.
‘gold’. The early western Romance diphthong /aj/, which INF’, IUDAEUM > jueu ‘Jew’, RUGAM > rua ‘wrinkle’).
365
ALEX ALSINA
When an /l/ was adjacent to a front glide, the two seg- 21.2.3 Morphology
ments coalesced into the palatal /ʎ/, as in other Romance
languages, represented by the digraph ll in modern Catalan:
Plural forms of nouns and adjectives have the suffix -s
FILIUM > fill ‘son’, PALEAM > palla ‘hay’, OCULUM > ull ‘eye’, MELIUS >
added to the default singular stem. When the stem ends
OCat. mills ‘better’. At a later stage, two different sound
in a sibilant, the addition of the plural suffix requires the
changes increased the number of words with /ʎ/. On the
presence of an epenthetic vowel between the two sibilants.
one hand, initial l was palatalized as /ʎ/: LANAM > llana ‘wool’,
In old Catalan this epenthetic vowel was the default vowel
LUNAM > lluna ‘moon’, LINGUAM > llengua ‘tongue’, LOCUM > lloc
e; so, the plural forms of ós (< URSUM) ‘bear’, pes (< PENSUM)
‘place’, *ˈlakte > llet ‘milk’; on the other hand, geminate ll
‘weight’, or cors (< CORPUS) ‘body’ were ósses, peses, and
was palatalized as /ʎ/: CABALLUM > cavall ‘horse’, GALLINAM >
corses, respectively. However, by the fifteenth century a
gallina ‘hen’, COLLEM > coll ‘mountain pass’. The palatal /ʎ/
new plural form was established in which the epenthetic
from these two origins converged in most Catalan dialects
vowel was replaced by o, giving the forms óssos, pesos, and
with earlier /ʎ/ that had originated from the /lj/ or /jl/
cossos, respectively. This special epenthetic vowel was
sequences. In some dialects—Balearic and the northern half
restricted to masculine forms, thereby distinguishing the
of central Catalan—this merger or neutralization did not
masculine from the feminine form of lexemes that had
happen because earlier /ʎ/ lost its lateral component and
previously not distinguished gender morphologically:
became a glide, /j/, before the new palatal /ʎ/ emerged.
instead of franceses ‘French.PL’ for both genders, with the
The palatal nasal /ɲ/, with the spelling ny, also has
introduction of francesos as the masculine form, franceses
various origins. The /nj/ group gave /ɲ/, as in UINEAM >
became exclusively feminine. This specialized epenthetic
vinya ‘vineyard’, EXTRANEUM > estrany ‘strange’, AGNELLUM >
vowel originated in forms in which final -e changed to -o
anyell ‘lamb’, LIGNA > llenya ‘fire wood’. Geminate nn is some-
through assimilation to the back rounded stressed vowel
times palatalized as /ɲ/ (ANNUM > any ‘year’, CANNAM > canya
in forms like SUBERUM > *ˈsure > suro ‘cork’, ROTULUM > rotlle >
‘reed’, PINNAM > penya ‘rock’) and sometimes simplified as /n/
rotllo ‘role’, TAURUM > *ˈtaure > toro ‘bull’, *ˈmoniku > monge
(CANNABEM > cànem ‘hemp’, CAPANNAM > cabana/cabanya ‘hut’).
> monjo ‘monk’.
The group mn also yielded these two alternative results: /ɲ/
The definite article in Catalan has two sets of forms: one
, as in DAMNARE > danyar ‘hurt.INF’, and /n/ as in DOMINAM >
set derived from Latin ILLE ‘that’—lo/el, la, etc.—and another
*ˈdomna > *ˈdonna > dona ‘woman’.
derived from Latin IPSE ‘self ’—so/es, sa, etc. The two forms
Word-final n is lost: MANUM > *man > mà ‘hand’, UINUM > *vin
coexisted in all the Catalan speaking territory up to the
> vi ‘wine’, HOMINEM > *ˈomen > home ‘man’. This loss fails to
twelfth century. At that point the written language
occur whenever an affix follows the n, including the plural s,
adopted the ILLE forms; the IPSE forms disappeared from
and in words that tend to be used proclitically (MANUS > mans
the written documents but remained the everyday forms
‘hands’, UNUM > un ‘one’, NEC + UNUM > OCat. negún ‘no/any’).
of part of the territory and nowadays are the normal form
After the loss of word-final n, a new sound change created
in the spoken language of the Balearic Islands and have a
more intervocalic and final /n/: the sequence nd between
residual use in the coastal area from Blanes to Cadaqués
vowels is simplified as /n/ (UENDIT > ven ‘sells’, ROTUNDAM >
(for further discussion, see §46.3.1.1 and Ledgeway
rodona ‘round’, RESPONDEBAT > responia ‘answered.3SG’).
2012a:§4.2.2.1). The IPSE forms are attested in many place
The back glide in coda position has several different
names, particularly, in the eastern dialect area: Collserola (<
origins. Latin intervocalic B (> v) and U which came to be
coll ‘mountain pass’ + s’ ‘the’ + erola ‘clearing’), Sant Quirze
in coda position, after the loss of post-tonic vowels, became
Safaja (< Sant Quirze’ Saint Quiricus’ + sa ‘the’ + faja ‘beech
the back glide /w/: BIBERE> beure ‘drink.INF’, CLAUEM > clau ‘key’,
tree’). As for the ILLE forms, old Catalan had an allomorphy
NOUUM > nou ‘new’. Intervocalic /d/ and /ɡ/ also became /w/
in the masculine singular between lo, the etymological
when in a coda, as a result of vowel deletion: CREDIT > creu
form, and the reduced form /l/, used whenever the article
‘believes’, CADERE > caure ‘fall.INF’, IUGUM > jou ‘yoke’. Latin /k/
immediately followed or was preceded by a vowel. This
became a palatal affricate before a front vowel and was
system is still in use in the northwestern dialect. From the
subsequently fronted to /ʦ/; in intervocalic position, like
reduced form, a reinforced form el, pronounced [el] or [əl]
all obstruents, it became voiced and subsequently /δ/; when
depending on the dialect, emerged for use before
it occurred in coda position through the loss of posttonic
consonant-initial words, which replaced the etymological
vowels it became the back glide: DICIT > diu ‘says’, NUCEM > nou
lo. Before vowel-initial words, the reduced form, written l’,
‘walnut’, PACEM > pau ‘peace’. The Latin group /tj/ converged
continued to be used. This system, with an alternation
in its evolution with Latin /k/ before a front vowel at the
between el and l’ for the masculine singular, is now
/ʦ/ stage: PRETIUM > preu ‘price’, PUTEUM > pou ‘well’, PALATIUM >
standard.
palau ‘palace’.
366
CATALAN
Some of the most salient diachronic facts of verb morph- forms: in the eastern dialect, because unstressed /e/ and
ology concern the form of past participles, infinitives, first /a/ were neutralized to /ə/, and in most of the northwes-
person singular verb forms, and present subjunctives. Cata- tern dialects because etymological -a in the third person
lan, like Occitan, French, and Italian, but in contrast to singular forms of the present indicative of the first conju-
Spanish and Portuguese, has several irregular participial gation was replaced by -e. The sound change mentioned
forms in /z/ and /t/ and forms that regularly continue at the beginning of §21.2.3 by which final -e changed to -o
Latin -UTUM in the second conjugation, in addition to the through assimilation to the back rounded stressed vowel
regular first and third conjugation past participles des- created some forms that avoided this ambiguity (Coromines
cended from -ATUM and ‑ITUM respectively. Examples of the 1971:204-7): compre > compro ‘I.buy’, done > dono ‘I.give’. In
irregular forms of the second conjugation are FUSUM > fos central and northwestern dialects, this ending was general-
‘melted’, CLAUSUM > clos ‘closed’, INCENSUM > encès ‘lit’ – with -s, ized to all first person singular forms of the present indica-
phonemic /z/, as shown by the feminine forms fosa, closa, tive, except for those forms (of the second conjugation) that
etc. – and DICTUM > dit ‘said’, TRACTUM > tret ‘removed’, SCRIPTUM > were different from the corresponding third person singu-
escrit ‘written’ – with -t, phonemic /t/, as shown by the lar: this produced new forms such as canto, porto, sembro,
feminine forms dita, treta, etc. Among the regular forms of entro, whereas forms such as dic ‘I.say’, vinc ‘I.come’, crec ‘I.
the second conjugation we can cite begut ‘drunk’, mogut believe’ and veig ‘I.see’ (distinct from diu ‘says’, ve ‘comes’,
‘moved’, crescut ‘grown’, temut ‘feared’, of analogical origin. creu ‘believes’, or veu ‘sees’) remained unchanged. In north-
Catalan has some infinitives with stress on the stem, ern dialects, -i became the mark of first person singular
again like Occitan, French, and Italian, and unlike Spanish forms, e.g. canti, porti, sembri, entri.
and Portuguese. The Latin first, second, and fourth conju- The present subjunctive forms with stress on the verb
gation forms of the infinitive were stressed on the ending stem, due to regular phonetic changes in old Catalan, had no
and have remained so in Catalan: PLORARE > plorar ‘to weep’, vowel following the stem in the first conjugation (DURET > dur
HABERE > haver ‘to have’, AUDIRE > oir ‘to hear’. But the Latin ‘last.3SG.PRS.SBJV’, CANTEM > cant ‘sing.1SG.PRS.SBJV’) or had an
1
third conjugation forms were stressed on the stem, as are epenthetic vowel (INTRET > entre ‘enter.3SG.PRS.SBJV’), while
their Catalan descendants, ending either in -re (e.g. BIBERE > /a/ is found in the other conjugations (DICAM > diga ‘say.1SG.
beure ‘to drink’, PERDERE > perdre ‘to lose’, MOLERE > moldre ‘to PRS.SBJV’, DEBEAT > deja ‘owe.3SG.PRS.SBJV’). The epenthetic vowel
grind’), or in -er (e.g. PLANGERE > plànyer ‘to pity’, CRESCERE > -e was generalized to all first conjugation verbs, giving
créixer ‘to grow’, or CURRERE > córrer ‘to run’). forms like dure and cante, which is the situation preserved
The loss of final unstressed vowels other than /a/ yielded in Valencian. In most other dialects, the -i ending is found
first person singular forms in the present indicative either for the present subjunctive: duri, canti, entri. The origin of
without a vowel or with the epenthetic vowel -e when this ending is presumed to be from forms like sàpia ‘know.1/
needed to syllabify the preceding consonant cluster: AMO > 3SG.PRS.SBJV’, dòrmia ‘sleep.1/3SG.PRS.SBJV’, témia ‘fear.1/3SG.PRS.
am ‘I.love’, CANTO > cant ‘I.sing’, PORTO > port ‘I.carry’, COMPARO > SBJV’, òbria ‘open.1/3SG.PRS.SBJV’, còbria ‘cover.1/3SG.PRS.SBJV’,
compre ‘I.buy’, SEMINO > sembre ‘I.sow’, INTRO > entre ‘I.enter’. where the -ia ending was the result of regular phonetic
The insular dialects (Balearic and Alguerès) generalized the laws; from these forms it was generalized giving forms
absence of an ending to all the first person singular forms of like tròbia (or tròpia) ‘find.1/3SG.PRS.SBJV’ and càntia ‘sing.1/
the present indicative, such that today, in addition to 3SG.PRS.SBJV’; the -ia ending was then reduced to -i (Coromines
etymological forms like cant, these dialects also have 1971:272f.).
compr, sembr, and entr. According to Coromines (1971:206),
by the fifteenth century the peninsular dialects had gener-
alized the -e ending to all first person singular forms of the
present indicative of first conjugation verbs; this means 21.3 Phonology
that, alongside forms like compre and sembre, these dialects
also had ame, cante, and porte for the first person singular. 21.3.1 Stressed vowels
This is the situation currently found in Valencian.
In the dialects of Catalonia, this situation created wide- The inventory of stressed vowels in most continental var-
spread homophony between first and third person singular ieties of Catalan consists of seven vowels, illustrated in (2)
for central Catalan:
1
There is an alternative form heure from HABERE in the non-auxiliary use. (2) [diw] diu ‘says’ [us] ús ‘use’
The conflation of the 2nd and 3rd conjugations has resulted in some stress
shifts and the emergence of doublets like caber/cabre ‘fit’, valer/valdre ‘be [dew] déu ‘god’ [os] ós ‘bear’
worth’. [dɛw] deu ‘owes’ [daw] dau ‘die’ [ɔs] os ‘bone’
367
ALEX ALSINA
There are two dialects in which the inventory of stressed unstressed syllables with just [i], [ə], and [u], and Majorcan
vowels is different from this: north Catalan and most has [o] in addition to these three vowels.
varieties of Balearic Catalan. North Catalan lacks the con- As a result, eastern Catalan has many more homophones
trasts in the mid vowels: historically, [e] and [ɛ] have caused by vowel reduction than western Catalan. For
merged as [e], whereas [o] and [u] have merged as [u] example, western Catalan distinguishes the feminine and
and [ɔ] has closed to [o]. Consequently, north Catalan has the masculine forms of certain adjectives and nouns such
the simpler five-vowel inventory: /i, e, a, o, u/. Most of as [ˈmaγra] magra (F) and [ˈmaγre] magre (M) ‘lean’,
Balearic has [ə] in addition to the seven vowels illustrated [ˈtɛndra] tendra (F) and [ˈtɛndre] tendre (M) ‘tender’,
in (2) (cf. §21.1). In some reduced areas of the Balearic [ˈsɔγra] sogra ‘mother-in-law’ and [ˈsɔγre] sogre ‘father-in-
Islands, [ə] has evolved into [ɛ], as in central Catalan, but law’. In eastern Catalan these pairs are homophonous:
independently of it, as in Mahón and a region in the centre [ˈmaγrə] magra/magre, [ˈtɛndrə] tendra/tendre, [ˈsɔγrə]
of Majorca. sogra/sogre, [ˈkaβɾə] cabra/cabre, [ˈpaɾə] para/pare, and
Mid front vowels show a great degree of variability [ˈʎaδɾə] lladra/lladre.
within the same dialect and even in the same area and There are some very restricted environments in which
are not completely free in their distribution. Within the unstressed [e] and [o] are retained as such in central Cata-
same dialect zone, a given word may be pronounced with lan. On the one hand, there is a small group of words, which
an [ɛ] in some areas and with an [e] in other areas. But are obvious loans from Greco-Latin, Spanish, or English, in
even in the same area, certain words are used with both which these vowels are retained in posttonic position, as in
mid front vowels. This is the case with words like consell (4) from Wheeler (2005:70f):
‘council’, primavera ‘spring’, or rem ‘oar’ in Barcelona,
whose stressed vowel varies between [e] and [ɛ] (see (4) àlg[e]bra ‘algebra’ class[e] ‘class’
Badia i Margarit 1970). And, finally, there is a phonological bàsqu[e]t ‘basketball’ rèc[o]rd ‘record’
process, discovered by Mascaró (1984a), by which mid Bóst[o]n tún[e]l ‘tunnel’
vowels are half-open ([ɛ] or [ɔ]) when followed by an
unstressed derivational suffix, which explains contrasts The other situation in which we find exceptions to the
such as (3): vowel reduction rule is when underlying /e/ is adjacent to
/a/ and, less categorically, when it is adjacent to /o/ or /ɔ/,
(3) as in (5) and (6):
[pləˈto] / [pləˈtɔnik] Plató ‘Plato’ / platònic ‘platonic’
[kuˈlon] / [kuˈlɔniə] colon ‘settler’ / colònia ‘settlement’ (5) [iδeˈal] ideal ‘ideal’ [səɾeˈal] cereal ‘cereal’
[sisˈtemə] / [sisˈtɛmik] sistema ‘system’ / sistèmic ‘systemic’ [irəelˈitə] israelita [reəβilˈitə] rehabilita
[duˈsen] / [duˈsɛnsjə] docent ‘teacher’ / docència ‘teaching’ ‘Israelite’ ‘rehabilitates’
[əeɾuˈpɔrt] aeroport [ˈaɾeə] àrea ‘area’
‘airport’
21.3.2 Unstressed vowels: vowel (6) [teˈɔlək] teòleg [teuˈkɾasjə] teocràcia

‘theologian’ ‘theocracy’
reduction and its exceptions
[urfeˈo] orfeó ‘choral [kuɾeuγɾəˈfiə] coreografia
society’ ‘choreography’
The fundamental difference between eastern and western
dialects concerns the extent of vowel reduction in
unstressed syllables. In western dialects the mid vowels
21.3.3 Consonant inventory, dialectal
neutralize to the half-close vowel, so that /ɛ/ becomes [e]
and /ɔ/ becomes [o] in unstressed syllables merging with
variation, and allophones
/e/ and /o/, respectively. In eastern dialects /ɛ/, /e/, and
/a/ become [ə] in unstressed syllables, and, with the excep- The inventory of consonant phonemes is shown in Table 21.2.
tion of Majorca, /ɔ/ and /o/ merge with /u/ as [u] in In most dialects, /v/ has merged with /b/ as [b]~[β], and
unstressed syllables. Majorca follows the western pattern so there is only one phoneme, /b/, corresponding to /v/ of
of neutralization of the back vowels in unstressed syllables. older stages of the language and to orthographic v. /v/ is
Thus, in western Catalan there are five contrasting vowels retained as a separate phoneme, phonetically distinct
in unstressed syllables, whereas in central Catalan and from /b/, in Alguerès, Balearic, and southern and northern
in Menorca and Ibiza there is a three-way contrast in Valencian. Central Valencian—the area including and
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CATALAN
Table 21.2 Inventory of consonant phonemes

LABIAL DENTO - ALVEOLAR ALVEOLO - PALATAL VELAR
− VOICE + VOICE − VOICE + VOICE − VOICE + VOICE − VOICE + VOICE
Plosive, affricate p b t d ʧ ʤ k ɡ
Fricative f (v) s z ʃ (ʒ)
Nasal m n ɲ
Tap ɾ
Lateral l ʎ
surrounding the city of Valencia—has lost the /v/–/b/ dis- that the tap and the trill only contrast intervocalically: this
tinction. The area around the city of Tarragona, including follows from the assumption that the trill is a geminate (/ɾɾ/)
towns such as Reus and Valls, retained the distinction until in this position, which is the only position in which geminate
the first half of the twentieth century, and today it is only consonants are allowed in Catalan. In the other positions in
found in very old speakers in this area, if at all. which the trill occurs, it is an allophone of the phoneme /ɾ/.
Most dialects distinguish between the fricative /ʒ/ and A well-known source of allophonic variation, which Cata-
the affricate /ʤ/, but in most of Valencia (the region of La lan shares with Spanish, Basque, and some Occitan varieties,
Marina Alta being an exception, cf. Colomina i Castanyer is the phenomenon of voiced-stop lenition (Wheeler
1985) and the southern part of Catalonia the distinction is 2005:317f.). The pairs [b]~[β], [d]~[δ], and [ɡ]~[γ] are in
absent and [ʤ] is used, corresponding to both [ʒ] and [dʤ]~ complementary distribution and considered to be allo-
[ʤ] in other dialects. phonic realizations: the fricative, or approximant, allo-
The central area of the Valencian Country, which phone ([β], [δ], [γ]) is found in onset position following a
includes the city of Valencia, and much of the Catalan- continuous segment (vowel, liquid, or fricative), as in (7a); in
speaking strip of Aragon, lack the voiced strident phonemes all other contexts, the stop realization ([b], [d], [ɡ]) is found,
/z/ and /ʤ/ which have merged with their voiceless coun- as in (7b). There are two exceptions to this rule: [d], rather
terparts and are pronounced [s] and [ʧ]. than [δ], occurs after a lateral, and [b], rather than [β], after
There is a debate about whether the affricates /ʤ/ and the labio-dental fricative, as in (7c).
/ʧ/should be considered separate phonemes or the
sequence of a stop and the fricative /z/ or /ʒ/ (Wheeler (7) a. agrada [əˈγɾaδə] ‘likes’ obliga [uˈβliγa] ‘forces’
2005:11-13). The interpretation of these affricates as a phon- ho diu [u ˈδiw] ‘it= says’ es diu [əz ˈδiw] ‘REFL=
emic unit seems to be preferred for those dialects that lack says’
[ʒ] and only have [ʤ]. The fact that both alveolo-palatal el grau [əl ˈγɾaw] ‘the carbó [kəɾˈβo] ‘coal’
affricates occur word-initially, a position where obstruent degree’
clusters are not allowed, is an argument for assuming the
b. grau [gɾaw] ‘degree’ diu [diw] ‘says’
unit interpretation of these affricates. However, in the dia-
un grau [uŋ ˈgɾaw] ‘a et diu [əd ˈdiw] ‘you=
lects that have [ʒ] contrasting with [ʤ] and normally have
degree’ says’
the alveolo-palatal fricatives in word-initial position, the
futbol [fudˈbɔl] ‘football’ regle [ˈreɡɡlə] ‘ruler’
interpretation of these affricates as a sequence of two phon-
emes is more strongly motivated. The fact that the contrast c. faldilla [fəlˈdiʎə] ‘skirt’ ell diu [eʎ ˈdiw] ‘he says’
between [ʒ] and [ʤ] and between [ʃ] and [ʧ] is only found in filòsof banal [fiˈlɔzuv bəˈnal] ‘banal philosopher’
intervocalic position is an argument for the biphonemic
proposal, given that a cluster of a stop and an alveolo- The Catalan lenition rule differs from the Spanish and
palatal fricative can only occur in intervocalic position. Basque rules in that Catalan lenition only occurs in onset
Catalan, like Spanish, has a tap [ɾ] and a trill [r], which position, whereas Spanish and Basque also have lenition in
contrast intervocalically giving rise to such minimal pairs as coda position (Mascaró 1984b; Hualde 1991:99-107).
mirra [ˈmirə] ‘myrrh’ and mira [ˈmiɾə] ‘look’ or serra [ˈsɛrə]
‘saw’ and cera [ˈsɛɾə] ‘wax’. On the basis of such contrasts one
might be tempted to assume that the two rhotic sounds are 21.3.4 Consonant deletion and assimilation
distinct phonemes. However, there are several arguments
that favour the analysis in which there is only one rhotic There are several alternations consisting of the presence or
phoneme (Wheeler 2005:24f.). The main argument is the fact absence of the stem-final consonant, depending on whether
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ALEX ALSINA
or not the consonant is in word-final position or in the final obrer [uˈβɾe] obrers [uˈβɾes] obrera [uˈβɾeɾə] obrerisme
coda of the word: final-n deletion, final-r deletion, and ‘worker’ [uβɾəˈɾizmə]
cluster simplification. ‘workers’
Many stems end in a stressed vowel when the stem is movement’
word-final, but have an [n] following this vowel when the sencer [sənˈsɛ] sencers [sənˈsɛs] sencera [sənˈsɛɾə] senceret [sənsəˈɾɛt]
stem is followed by a suffix, as shown in (8). The orthog- ‘whole’ ‘whole
raphy reflects this alternation, which is common to all (diminutive)’
Catalan dialects. por [po] ‘fear’ pors [pos] – poruc [puˈɾuk]
‘fearful’
(8) Bare stem +Plural +Feminine Derived form
suffix suffix Many words retain final -r including most words with
sa ‘healthy’ sans sana sanitat ‘health’ penultimate stress, except for infinitives. While some
ple ‘full’ plens plena emplenar ‘fill out’ generalizations can be made about where retention or
carbó ‘coal’ carbons – carbonitzar deletion of final -r is more likely (Wheeler 2005:333-8),
‘carbonize’ the classical analysis involving a rule of final r-deletion
matí ‘morning’ matins – matiner ‘early requires an important number of exceptions (Wheeler
riser’ 2005:338).
Certain consonant clusters containing a stop in second
This alternation reflects the diachronic process by position are reduced word-finally through the loss of the
which word-final -n was lost. The classical generative stop (Lleó 1970:25-9; Wheeler 1979:280-87; 2005:220-49;
analysis has been to assume that these n/ alternation Mascaró 1983:100-11; 1985; 1989; Iverson 1993a,b; Morales
words have an underlying representation with final /n/ 1995; Bonet i Alsina and Lloret 1998:108-14). This stop-
and that there is a rule of word-final n-deletion, which deletion process is specific to Catalonia and Ibiza; it is cat-
derives the surface forms without [n]. However, this rule egorical when the stop follows a nasal and in many words
has many limitations: (a) it does not affect verbs, except in the groups /lt/ or /ld/ and also occurs in the groups /st/,
for two verb roots (ve ‘comes’ and té ‘has’); (b) it only /rt/, and /rd/, but only in less formal styles. (10) illustrates
affects words with stress on the last syllable, since there this process using central Catalan pronunciation.
are many words like origen ‘origin’ or òrgan ‘organ’ that
retain the word-final n; and (c) there are many lexical (10) Bare stem Derived forms
exceptions to this rule, even among non-verb forms with a. junt [ʒun] junta (F) ajuntar [əʒunˈta]
word-final stress such as algun ‘some’, clon ‘clone’, and ‘together [ˈʒuntə] ‘join.INF ’
gran ‘big’. llamp [ʎam] llampec [ʎəmˈpɛk] ‘flash of
An alternative to the n-deletion rule suggested by ‘lightning’ lightning’
Wheeler (2005:330-32) consists in assuming that the alter- franc [fraŋ] franca (F) franquesa [frəŋˈkɛzə]
nating stems like those in (8) have two allomorphs, one with ‘frank’ [ˈfraŋkə] ‘frankness’
and one without final -n, and that a set of constraints favour malalt malalta (F) malaltia [mələlˈtiə]
the vowel-final allomorph just in case the allomorph is [məˈlal] sick [məˈlaltə] ‘sickness’
word-final.
A similar phenomenon to that just discussed is the r/ b. just [ʒust] / justa (F) ajustar [əʒusˈta]
alternation, although the latter is different in that: (a) the [ʒus] ‘just’ [ˈʒustə] ‘adjust.INF’
historical loss of final /r/ is not reflected in the orthography fort [fɔrt] / forta (F) enfortir [əɱfurˈti]
and is not common to all dialects, since Valencian, except- [fɔr] ‘strong’ [ˈfɔrtə] ‘strengthen.INF’
ing the northernmost and southernmost tips of the Valen-
cian Country, maintains final [ɾ]; and (b) the r-less forms The requirement that the two consonants involved be
occur not only in word-final position but also when followed homorganic (i.e. have the same point of articulation) is
by the plural morph, as illustrated in (9) using central shared by all the forms on the left column of (10), but
Catalan pronunciation. would not be satisfied by forms such as corb ‘crow’, amarg
‘bitter’, calb ‘bald’, talc ‘talcum’, bosc ‘forest’, Casp (place
(9) name), which retain the final stop. For obligatory stop
Bare stem +Plural suffix +Feminine suffix Derived form deletion, as in (10a), the requirement that the first conson-
dur [du] ‘hard’ durs [dus] dura [ˈduɾə] duresa [duˈɾɛzə] ant of the cluster be non-continuant is clearly satisfied
‘hardness’ when it is a nasal and is satisfied by a lateral only when
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CATALAN
the following consonant is dental-alveolar (Wheeler cas [kas] ‘case’ cas únic [kaz ˈunik] ‘unique
2005:221f.). In (10b), the two consonants are homorganic, case’
but the first one is continuant, which accounts for the
b. peix [peʃ] ‘fish’ peix alat [peʒ əˈlat] ‘winged
variable application of the process.
fish’
calaix [kəˈlaʃ] calaix obert [kəˈlaʒ uˈβert]
‘drawer’ ‘open drawer’
21.3.5 Voicing and devoicing
c. roig [rɔʧ] ‘red’ roig i negre [rɔʤ i ˈnɛγɾə]
‘red and black’
Catalan neutralizes voice contrasts among obstruents in
matx [maʧ] matx igualat [maʤ iγwəˈlat]
word-final and coda position, through the interaction of
‘match’ ‘balanced match’
three different processes. While obstruents show contrasts
in voice in onset position, all obstruents are voiceless in d. bolígraf [buˈliγɾəf] bolígraf espatllat [buˈliγɾəv
absolute final position before a pause. ‘pen’ əspəʎˈʎat] ‘broken pen’
xef [ʃɛf] ‘chef ’ xef estrella [ʃɛv əsˈtreʎə]
(11) Obstruent word-final Obstruent before a vowel ‘star chef ’
a. llop [ʎop] ‘wolf ’ lloba (F) [ˈʎoβə]
tap [tap] ‘stopper’ tapa [ˈtapə] ‘cover.3SG.PRS. A version of this process is also found in Portuguese,
IND’ Occitan, and French (at least) among the Romance lan-
guages (Wheeler 2005:162).
b. mut [mut] ‘mute’ muda (F) [ˈmuδə]
Finally, obstruents in coda position assimilate in voicing
brut [bɾut] ‘dirty’ bruta (F) [ˈbɾutə]
to the following consonant, if there is one, whether in the
c. llec [ʎek] ‘ignorant’ llega (F) [ˈʎeγə] same word or across words, as shown in (13):
rebec [rəˈβɛk] ‘unruly’ rebeca (F) [rəˈβɛkə]
(13) Voiceless Voiced obstruent
d. cus [kus] ‘sew.3SG.PRS. cusi [ˈkuzi] ‘sew.3SG.PRS.
obstruent
IND’ SBJV’
a. cap [kap] ‘head, cap de colla [kab də ˈkɔʎə]
tus [tus] ‘cough.3SG.PRS. tussi [ˈtusi] ‘cough.3SG.PRS.
leader’ ‘group leader’
IND’ SBJV’
barret [bəˈrɛt] barret girat [bəˈrɛd ʒiˈɾat]
e. raig [raʧ] ‘ray, jet’ rajos (PL) [ˈraʒus] ‘hat’ ‘turned-around hat’
feix [feʃ] ‘bundle’ feixos (PL) [ˈfeʃus]
b. cops [kɔps] cops amagats [kɔbz əməˈγaʦ]
f. lleig [ʎeʧ] ‘ugly’ lletja (F) [ˈʎeʤə] ‘blows’ ‘hidden blows’
escabetx [əskəˈβɛʧ] escabetxar [əskəβəˈʧa] sacs [saks] sacs apilats [sagz əpiˈlaʦ]
‘marination’ ‘marinate.INF’ ‘sacks’ ‘piled up sacks’
c. subalpí [supəlˈpi] subdelegat [subdələˈγat]
These facts are analysed by positing a rule of word-final
‘pre-Alpine’ ‘subdelegate’
obstruent devoicing and an underlying representation of
sud-americà sud-vietnamita [sudbjədnəˈmitə]
the stem of words like llop/lloba or mut/muda with a final
[sutəməriˈka] ‘south Vietnamese’
voiced obstruent, which remains voiced if followed by a
‘South
vowel-initial suffix, but is devoiced if final in the word.
American’
In addition to devoicing, when the underlying voiced fricative
d. obtenir [uptəˈni] objecte [ub'ʒektə] ‘object’
/ʒ/ occurs word-finally, it becomes the affricate [ʧ], thereby
‘obtain.INF’
undergoing a neutralization with the affricates /ʤ/ and /ʧ/,
taxi [ˈtaksi] ‘taxi’ examen [əɡ'zamən]
rather than with the voiceless fricative /ʃ/, as we see in (11e).
‘examination’
Word-final fricatives and affricates, whether underly-
ingly voiced or voiceless, become voiced when adjacent to
a vowel in the following word, as shown in (12):
21.3.6 Syllable structure and stress
(12) Word-final before Word-final before a vowel
pause Catalan does not allow onsets consisting of /s/ and another
a. cos [kɔs] ‘body’ cos elàstic [kɔz əˈlastik] consonant. In non-initial contexts, the sequence /sC/ is
‘elastic body’ resolved by syllabifying the two consonants in different
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ALEX ALSINA
syllables: inscriure [ins.ˈkɾiw.ɾə] ‘inscribe.INF’, destrucció [dəs. accenting words is the following: stress on the last syllable
truk.ˈsjo] ‘destruction’, caspa [ˈkas.pə] ‘dandruff ’, constel·lació requires an accent only if the word ends in a vowel, a vowel
[kuns.tə.lə.ˈsjo] ‘constellation’. In word-initial contexts, the plus s, or the groups en and in, as in (15a); otherwise no
potential conflict is resolved by inserting the least marked accent is used to signal stress on the last syllable, as in (15b);
vowel ([ə] in eastern Catalan) before the consonant group: stress on the penultimate syllable is only signalled by means
escriure /skɾiwɾə/ [əs.ˈkɾiw.ɾə] ‘write.INF’, estel /stɛl/ [əs.ˈtɛl]. of an accent if the word does not end in a vowel, a vowel
As a general rule, a consonant that can be syllabified plus s, or the groups en and in, as in (15c); elsewhere
either in the onset or in the coda of a syllable is preferen- penultimate stress is unmarked, as in (15d); antepenulti-
tially syllabified as an onset. However, an exception to this mate stress is always marked with an accent, as in (15e).
rule occurs with many stem-final /bl/ and /gl/ sequences, For the purpose of accenting words, a high vocoid after a
as the stop is syllabified as the coda creating a geminate, in consonant counts as a syllabic nucleus (except in the
eastern Catalan and most of the northwestern varieties qu-/qü- and gu-/qü- sequences), even if it is pronounced as
(Wheeler 2005:265-9), as in (14). a glide.
(14) amable [əˈmab.blə] ‘kind’ possible [puˈsib.blə] (15) a. perdó ‘pardon’ arròs ‘rice’
‘possible’ homenàs ‘big guy’ entén ‘understands’
regla [ˈreɡ.ɡlə] ‘rule’ feble [ˈfeb.blə] ‘weak’
b. segon ‘second’ entens ‘you.SG.understand’
arreglar [ərəɡˈɡla] afeblir [əfəbˈbli] ‘weaken’
cabell ‘hair’ finalitat ‘purpose’
‘arrange’
c. crèdit ‘credit’ orígens ‘origins’
The position of word stress in Catalan is subject to some cérvol ‘deer’ apèndix ‘appendix’
general constraints and lexical specificities. The general
d. meravella arrossos ‘rices’
constraints are of two kinds, as proposed in Wheeler
llapis ‘pencil’ origen ‘origin’
(2005:276f.), depending on whether or not the word is a
verb. In verb forms, stress falls on the last stressable affix, e. càndida ‘candid.F’ llúdries ‘otters’
if there is one; otherwise, on the last syllable of the stem. In dèficit ‘deficit’ espécimen ‘specimen’
non-verb forms, stress can occur on any one of the last
three syllables of a word, with the following condition: In addition to the cases in which the accent is used
antepenultimate stress is only possible if the penultimate following the rule just presented, some words have what is
syllable is light (i.e. does not have a coda). Thus, since all called a ‘diacritic accent’ in order to distinguish them from
vowels in a stem are stressable, verb forms consisting of a another word. The list of words with a diacritic accent does
stem and an unstressable vowel in a suffix always have not follow any systematic rule. The following are some pairs
penultimate stress, even though the corresponding noun of words involving a diacritic accent: és ‘is’ and es (third
or adjective may have antepenultimate stress. This gives person reflexive clitic pronoun), sé ‘I.know’ and se ‘self-’, ús
rise to contrasts such as fabrica [fəˈβɾikə] ‘manufacture.3SG. ‘use’ (N) and us ‘you.PL’, són ‘they.are’ and son ‘sleep’ (N), dóna
PRS.IND’ vs fàbrica ‘factory’ [ˈfaβɾikə], castiga ‘punish.3SG.PRS.IND’ ‘gives’ and dona ‘woman’, vénen ‘they.come’ and venen
[kəsˈtiγə] vs càstig ‘punishment’ [ˈkastik], copia ‘copy.3SG.PRS. ‘they.sell’.
IND’ [kuˈpiə] vs còpia ‘copy’ (N) [ˈkɔpjə], etc. Another mark that is used on vowels is the diaeresis. This
has two distinct uses in Catalan. On the one hand, if it is
placed on the u in the groups qu- and gu- before e or i, it
21.3.7 Orthography indicates that this letter is to be interpreted as a glide (as,
without the diaeresis, it is mute), as in qüestió [kwəsˈtjo]
In the vocalic domain the letter e represents both phonemes ‘question’, ambigües [əmˈbiγwəs] ‘ambiguous.FPL’, pingüí
/e/ and /ɛ/ (and also /ə/ in most of Balearic) and the letter [piŋˈɡwi] ‘penguin’. On the other hand, it is placed on i and
o represents both /o/ and /ɔ/. Nevertheless, an ortho- u to signal that these letters correspond to syllabic nuclei
graphic distinction is made in a partial way between the when they immediately follow a vowel and cannot be
two pairs of mid vowels through the use of accents. accented by the general accent rule: veïna ‘neighbour.F’
The position of word stress is represented by means of the (but veí ‘neighbour.M’), veïnat ‘neighbourhood’, maleït
presence and absence of accents. When a vowel needs to be ‘damned’, destruïm ‘we.destroy’, peülla ‘hoof ’.
written with an accent, the acute accent is used for the Western dialects have a phonological rule by which
closed vowels /i/, /e/, /o/, and /u/ and the grave accent posttonic stem-final /a/ becomes [e] when not word-final;
is used for the open vowels /ɛ/, /a/, and /ɔ/. The rule for the effects of this rule are represented in the orthography. In
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CATALAN
eastern varieties this rule is merely orthographic, as both 21.4 Morphology

unstressed /a/ and unstressed /e/ are phonetically [ə].
Some examples of this a/e alternation rule follow: carta
‘letter’ vs cartes ‘letters’, fulla ‘leaf ’ vs fulles ‘leaves, canta 21.4.1 Nominal inflection
‘sings’ vs cantes ‘you.SG.sing’ and canten ‘they.sing’, sentia
The inflectional morphology found on nominal categories
‘felt.3SG’ vs senties ‘you.SG.felt’ and sentien ‘they.felt’.
(nouns, adjectives, and determiners) reflects the syntactic
Among consonant letters, c and g correspond to /s/ and
features of number and gender. There is no case morph-
/ʒ/ respectively, when followed by e or i, but correspond to
ology except in a vestigial way on pronouns (§21.5.1).
/k/ and /ɡ/ respectively in all other contexts. So, while c is
The suffix /z/ (written -s) is the exponent of plural
/k/ in cosa ‘thing’, crema ‘cream’, or opac ‘opaque’, it is /s/ in
number. As a general rule, this suffix is added to the stem
cel ‘sky’, fàcil ‘easy’, or opacitat ‘opacity’. Likewise, g is /g/ in
of nouns, adjectives, and determiners to signal that the
gust ‘taste’, grega ‘Greek.FSG’, or llarg ‘long’, but is /ʒ/ in gel
word is syntactically plural. The absence of this suffix indi-
‘ice’, àgil ‘agile’, or lògic ‘logical’. Before e and i, the phon-
cates that it is syntactically singular. Examples of pairs of
emes /k/ and /ɡ/ are spelled qu and gu respectively, which
singular and plural forms are: tap ‘stopper’ ~ taps ‘stoppers’,
gives rise to alternations with the letters c and g such as seca
fàcil ‘easy.SG’ ~ fàcils ‘easy.PL’, quin ‘which.SG’ ~ quins ‘which.PL’,
‘dry.FSG’ vs seques ‘dry.FPL’, marco ‘I.mark’ vs marques ‘you.SG.
aquella ‘that.FSG’ ~ aquelles ‘those.FPL’. The presence of this
mark’, or formiga ‘ant’ vs formigues ‘ants’, amagar ‘hide.INF ’ vs
suffix may cause the insertion of an epenthetic vowel before
amagui ‘hide.3SG.PRS.SBJV’.
it: if the stem is of the masculine gender, has stress on the
Ç is pronounced /s/ and appears in final or prevocalic
last syllable and ends in /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʧ/, and, in some
position except before e and i, where it alternates with c:
dialects, also in /ʒ/, /ʤ/, /sk/, or /st/, the vowel [u] (or [o],
puça ‘flea’ vs puces ‘fleas’, capaç ‘capable.SG’ vs capaces ‘cap-
depending on dialect), written ‑o, is inserted between the
able.FPL’, venç ‘win.3SG.PRS.IND’ or vençut ‘win.PTCP’ vs. venci
stem and the plural suffix, as shown in (16) (see §21.2.3 for
‘win.3SG.PRS.SBJV’ or vèncer ‘win.INF’. The occurrence of ç/c, as
the origin of this epenthetic vowel):
opposed to s or ss, given the homophony of these graph-
emes, is determined on etymological grounds.
(16) a. dolç [dols] ‘sweet.MSG’ dolços [ˈdolsus] ‘sweet.MPL’
J is pronounced [ʒ] and the digraph tj is pronounced
cabàs [kəˈβas] ‘basket. cabassos [kəˈβasus] ‘bas-
[dʤ] and they alternate with g and tg respectively with
MSG’ kets.MPL’
the same phonetic values when preceding e or i. The
generós [ʒənəˈɾos] ‘gen- generosos [ʒənəˈɾozus]
digraph -ig is used only in word-final position, optionally
erous.MSG’ ‘generous.MPL’
followed by -s, representing the sound [ʧ] corresponding
calaix [kəˈlaʃ] ‘drawer. calaixos [kəˈlaʃus] ‘drawer.
to devoiced /ʒ/ and /ʤ/, which gives rise to alternations
MSG’ MPL’
between intervocalic g or j and final ig (roig ‘red.M’ and
empatx [əmˈpaʧ] ‘indi- empatxos [əmˈpaʧus] ‘indi-
roja ‘red.F’, passeig ‘walk.MSG’ and passejos ‘walks’, veig
gestion.MSG’ gestion.MPL’
‘see.1SG.PRS.IND’ and vegi ‘see.1SG.PRS.SBJV’) and between tg
or tj and final ig (enuig ‘annoyance’ and enutjar ‘annoy. b. bateig [bəˈtɛʧ] ‘bap- batejos [bəˈtɛʒus] ‘baptism.
INF’, mig ‘half.M’ and mitja ‘half.F’, lleig ‘ugly.M’ and lletges tism.MSG’ MPL’
‘ugly.FPL’). rebuig [rəˈbuʧ] ‘rejec- rebutjos [rəˈbuʤus] ‘rejec-
The palatal nasal /ɲ/ is ny: bony ‘lump’, canya ‘cane’, tion.MSG’ tions.MPL’
nyicris ‘weakling’. The palatal lateral /ʎ/ is ll: lloc ‘place’, disc [disk] ‘disk’ discos [ˈdiskus] ‘disks.M.PL’
milla ‘mile’, full ‘page’. Catalan has the exclusive letter com- llest [ʎest] ‘smart.MSG’ llestos [ˈʎestus] ‘smart.MPL’
bination l·l (known as ela geminada ‘geminate l’) to represent
/ll/, as in til·la ‘linden flower infusion’ or xarel·lo ‘type of The plural forms in (16a), with the epenthetic -o, are
wine’, or the /l/ of words with etymological /ll/, as in common to all dialects, but some dialects maintain the
col·laborar ‘collaborate.INF’, il·limitat ‘unlimited’, or mel·liflu older plural forms corresponding to (16b), without the
‘mellifluous’. epenthetic vowel: bateigs, rebuigs, discs, and llests.
The letter x has several values: the voiceless palatal Words that show a gender opposition between feminine
fricative /ʃ/ (xai ‘lamb’, xocolata ‘chocolate’, cuixa ‘thigh’, and masculine in the singular have a feminine form ending
peix ‘fish’, carxofa ‘artichoke’), the voiceless palatal affricate in -a (phonetically [a] or [ə] depending on the dialect) and,
/ʧ/ as part of the tx digraph (motxilla ‘backpack’, despatx generally, a masculine form characterized by the absence of
‘office’) and either /ɡz/ (examen ‘examination’, exempt a gender suffix; the masculine form may either end in a
‘exempt’), generally before the stressed syllable, or /ks/ consonant or in an epenthetic -e (phonetically [e] or [ə]
(lax ‘lax’, expert ‘expert’). depending on the dialect) if the word requires a vocalic
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ALEX ALSINA
support and, in a few words, in the affix -o (phonetically [o] form of the non-finite forms of the verb—infinitive, gerund
or [u] depending on the dialect) or -u after a vowel. Thus, we and participle—as shown in (18) using the regular verbs
have masculine/feminine pairs like those shown in (17), plorar ‘to cry’, perdre ‘to lose’, and dormir ‘to sleep:
transcribed according to the central Catalan pronunciation:
in (17a), with the -a/ contrast; in (17b), with the -a/-e (18) Conjugation Infinitive Gerund Participle
contrast; and, in (17c), with the -a/-o or -a/‑u contrast. I plorar plorant plorat
II perdre perdent perdut
(17) a. dolça [ˈdolsə] ‘sweet.FSG’ dolç [dols] ‘sweet.MSG’ III dormir dormint dormit
contenta [kunˈtentə] content [kunˈten]
‘happy.FSG’ ‘happy.MSG’ Verbs of the second conjugation show a great deal of
diputada [dipuˈtaδə] diputat [dipuˈtat] variation and irregularity. This is seen even in the non-
‘representative.FSG’ ‘representative.MSG’ finite forms. Conjugation II infinitives come in three
forms: those ending in unstressed -er, like témer ‘to fear’,
b. pobra [ˈpɔβɾə] ‘poor.FSG’ pobre [ˈpɔβɾə] ‘poor.MSG’
créixer ‘to grow’, or plànyer ‘to pity’, those ending in
mestra [ˈmɛstɾə] mestre [ˈmɛstɾə]
unstressed ‑re, like caure ‘to fall’, vendre ‘to sell’, or prometre
‘teacher.FSG’ ‘teacher.MSG’
‘to promise’, and those ending in stressed -er, like saber ‘to
ampla [ˈamplə] ample [ˈamplə]
know’, poder ‘to be able’, or voler ‘to want’. In addition, there
‘wide. FSG’ ‘wide. MSG’
are the irregular dur ‘to take’, dir ‘to say’, fer ‘to do’, and ser/
c. flonja [ˈflɔnʒə] flonjo [ˈflɔnʒu] ésser ‘to be’. Conjugation II participles have various endings,
‘fluffy. FSG’ ‘fluffy. MSG’ besides the regular -ut (§21.2.3): ‑s (/z/) ending, as in ofès
sonsa [ˈsonsə] ‘dull.FSG’ sonso [ˈsonsu] ‘dull.MSG’ ‘offended’, romàs ‘remained’, empès ‘pushed’, and ‑t (/t/)
atea [əˈtɛə] ‘atheist.FSG’ ateu [əˈtɛw] ‘atheist.MSG’ ending, as in dut ‘taken’, cuit ‘cooked’, estret ‘narrowed’.
There are a few participles in ‑st: vist ‘seen’ and post ‘laid’
A good number of words belong to both grammatical and their derived forms. Conjugation III also has a few
genders, with no overt marking to distinguish them (e.g. irregular participles, ending in -ert: e.g. obert ‘opened’, sofert
estudiant ‘student’, diferent ‘different’, igual ‘equal’, amable ‘suffered’, complert ‘fulfilled’.
‘kind’). In most of these words, the absence of a gender In conjugation I, many forms include the thematic vowel
contrast in the singular form is maintained in the plural (TV) -a between the verb stem and the affixes that mark
form, so, for example, the plural form estudiants ‘students’ tense, mood, and person and number, as seen in (18) for the
can be used as a masculine word (as in aquests estudiants non-finite forms. It is present in some forms of the present
‘these.M students’) or as a feminine word (as in aquestes indicative and imperative (plora, as well as plores and ploren,
estudiants ‘these.F students’), just like the singular form where the rule replacing unstressed a in closed syllable by e
can. But there is a class of words that, while having no applies), in the imperfect indicative (plorava), in the simple
gender opposition in the singular, have distinct gender past (plorà), in the future (ploraré), and in the conditional
forms in the plural. These are words like capaç ‘capable’, (ploraria). It disappears when adjacent to a vowel, as in the
feliç ‘happy’, or precoç ‘precocious’, which coincidentally all present subjunctive (plori). The Balearic dialects preserve
end in -ç: their plural form requires the insertion of an the TV in the first and second plural forms of the present
epenthetic vowel between the stem and the plural affix, indicative (ploram and plorau, respectively), whereas the
which is o for the masculine form, such as the forms in continental dialects have replaced it by ‑e‑ in these forms
(16), and the unmarked epenthetic vowel e for the feminine (plorem and ploreu). A similar situation arises with the
form. In the singular form, they are used for both genders, imperfect subjunctive, which has the TV a in Balearic
as in un nen capaç ‘a boy.MSG capable.SG’ and una nena capaç ‘a (ploràs), but has undergone a replacement of the TV by ‑e‑
girl.FSG capable.SG’, but, in the plural, they have different in the continental dialects (plorés).
forms for each gender: uns nens capaços ‘some.MPL boy.MPL Conjugation II verbs have the TV -e in many forms
capable.MPL’, unes nenes capaces ‘some.FPL girl.FPL capable.FPL’. where this vowel is stressed: gerund, first and second
plural forms of the present indicative (perdem and perdeu),
in the simple past (perdé), and in the imperfect subjunctive
21.4.2 Verb inflection (perdés), but lack this morpheme in forms where stress is
on another vowel. There is a class of conjugation II
Verbs are grouped into three morphological classes, or verbs that take a /ɡ/ morph in many of their forms.
conjugations, on the basis of the inflectional affixes they For example, a verb like prendre ‘take.INF’ has the stem
take. These three classes are clearly distinguished by the /prɛn/, which we find without the /ɡ/ morph in many
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CATALAN
forms such as pren ‘take.3SG.PRS.IND’, prenia ‘take.3SG.IPFV.IND’, subjunctive, imperfect indicative, and conditional of the
or prenent ‘take.GER’, and with the /g/ morph in all of the first conjugation verb plorar ‘to weep’, given in the central
subjunctive forms, as in prengui ‘take.3SG.PRS.SBJV’, prengués Catalan standard:
‘take.3SG.PST.SBJV’, and in the first person singular of the
present indicative, where the /ɡ/, being final in the (20) PRS.SBJV PST.SBJV IPFV.IND COND
word, is devoiced: prenc ‘take.1SG.PRS.IND’. Other verbs that 1SG plori plorés plorava ploraria
behave like prendre in taking the /ɡ/ morph, are beure ‘to 2SG ploris ploressis ploraves ploraries
drink’, escriure ‘to write’, ofendre ‘to offend’, valdre ‘to be 3SG plori plorés plorava ploraria
worth’, treure ‘to remove’. The /ɡ/ morph is also added to 1PL plorem ploréssim ploràvem ploraríem
the stem to form the participle if the verb in question has 2PL ploreu ploréssiu ploràveu ploraríeu
a regular participle in ‑ut (begut ‘drunk’, valgut ‘been 3PL plorin ploressin ploraven plorarien
worth’), but not if the verb has an irregular participle in
/z/ or /t/ (pres ‘taken’, escrit ‘written’). The first person singular forms have a distinct morph-
Conjugation III verbs have the TV -i in many forms: non- ology in the future, the simple past, and the present indica-
finite forms, as in (18), first and second plural forms of the tive, which are illustrated in (21) together with the
present indicative (dormim and dormiu), the simple past compound past for plorar. The simple past is used in formal
(dormí), the future (dormiré), the conditional (dormiria), and style and has been replaced in colloquial usage by the
the imperfect subjunctive (dormís). A class of conjugation III compound past in all dialects except for central Valencian.
verbs takes the -eix morph (a semantically empty morph, The compound past consists of an auxiliary (vaig, vas, va,
like the TV and the /ɡ/ morph) in exactly those forms etc.) and an infinitive. This auxiliary form is historically
that would otherwise be stressed on the stem and, instead, derived from the present indicative of anar ‘go’, but differs
are stressed on this morph. This morph has the variant -ix from it morphologically: 1PL and 2PL are vam and vau for the
(and -isc or -ixc) in western dialects and the allomorphs ‑eix auxiliary, but anem and aneu for the lexical verb, and in
and -esc in Balearic. (19) shows the present indicative and some dialects the auxiliary has developed forms analogical
present subjunctive forms of dormir ‘to sleep’, which does of the simple past (vàreig, vares, vàrem, etc.). In the present
not take this morph, and of servir ‘to serve’, which does take indicative, the ending for first person singular varies
it, in the central Catalan form. depending on dialect, as noted in §21.2.3. Leaving aside the
verbs with the /ɡ/ morph and a few irregular verbs
(19) PRS.IND PRS.SBJV PRS.IND PRS.SBJV (which have first singular present indicative forms like
1SG dormo dormi serveixo serveixi veig ‘I.see’, faig ‘I.do’, vaig ‘I.go’), regular verbs in central
2SG dorms dormis serveixes serveixis and northwestern Catalan have an -o ending for the first
3SG dorm dormi serveix serveixi person singular of the present indicative, as shown in (21)
1PL dormim dormim servim servim
2PL dormiu dormiu serviu serviu (21) FUT PRS.IND PRT COMPOUND PAST
3PL dormen dormin serveixen serveixin 1SG ploraré ploro plorí vaig plorar
2SG ploraràs plores plorares vas plorar
Catalan has a rich system of forms that reflect person and 3SG plorarà plora plorà va plorar
number agreement with the subject in finite verb forms. 1PL plorarem plorem ploràrem vam plorar
The suffix -s on the verb signals a second person singular 2PL plorareu ploreu ploràreu vau plorar
subject, except in the imperative form, where it lacks a 3PL ploraran ploren ploraren van plorar
specific affix. The suffix -m on the verb indicates a first
person plural subject; the suffix -u is for a second person The imperfect indicative has the ending -ia (with stress
plural subject; and the suffix -n is for a third person plural on the i) for conjugations II and III (perdia, domia), but, in a
subject. There is no specific morphology for a third person few conjugation II verbs in which this ending immediately
singular subject. As for the marking of first person singular follows a vowel, stress has been displaced to the preceding
subjects, it varies depending on the tense and mood vowel and the i is pronounced as a glide: feia ‘do.1/3SG.IMPF.
involved. In the subjunctive forms, both present and past, IND’, deia ‘say.1/3SG.IMPF.IND’, queia ‘fall.1/3SG.IMPF.IND’. Valen-
there is no specific morphology for first person singular cian has preserved the imperfect subjunctives in -ra (des-
subjects and, so, there is a homonymy for forms agreeing cended from the Latin pluperfect indicative): plorara,
with first and third person singular subject. This homonymy perdera, dormira. In the other dialects, only two forms in
also occurs in imperfect indicative and conditional forms. -ra have survived, but are equivalent in content to a condi-
(20) shows the various forms for present subjunctive, past tional form: fóra ‘be.1/3SG.COND’ and haguera ‘have.1/3SG.COND’.
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ALEX ALSINA
See Perea (2002) and Wheeler (2002) for more information (l’església ‘the church’), and unique entities (la mar ‘the
about verbal inflection. sea), in phraseology (a la dreta ‘on the right’), with place
names (l’Havana), etc. So, in the same phrase it is possible to
have instances of both articles: el sol de s’horabaixa ‘the
21.4.3 Articles afternoon sun’.
Some Catalan dialects have what is known as the ‘per-
The standard form of the definite article is el/l’ (MSG), la/l’ sonal article’ used before personal names. The classical
(FSG), els (MPL), and les (FPL). The reduced form l’ is used before system, preserved in the Balearic Islands, has n’ before a
words beginning with a vowel: el nét ‘the grandson’, l’avi ‘the vowel and, before a consonant, en for the masculine and na
grandfather’, la lluna ‘the moon’, l’aurora ‘the dawn’. The for the feminine: en Fuster, na Maria, n’Adrià, n’Amàlia. In a
prescriptive rule requires the use of the full FSG form la large part of central Catalonia, in the system considered
when it precedes an unstressed i or u, as in la inèrcia ‘the standard, the masculine form en is preserved, sometimes in
inertia’ or la unitat ‘the unity’, although in spoken usage competition with the definite article, and elsewhere the
there is some variation. The prepositions a ‘to’, de ‘of ’, and forms of the definite article are used: en Fuster, la Maria,
per ‘by/for’, and ca ‘at the house of ’, a reduced form of casa l’Adrià, l’Amàlia. In the rest of Catalonia, except for the
‘house’, combine with the full forms of the singular and southern portion, the definite article is used as the personal
plural masculine article (not with the reduced form) as article. And in this southern portion of Catalonia and in
amalgamated, or contracted, forms: al, als, del, dels, pel, pels, the Valencian Country, there is no personal article, e.g.
cal, cals. Examples: al sentit ‘to the sense’, dels antics ‘of the Fuster, Maria.
old ones’, pel carrer ‘along the street’, cals avis ‘at the grand-
parents’ house’, but per l’amic ‘by the friend’, ca l’avi ‘the
grandfather’s house’. As noted in §21.2.3, the northwestern
dialects (and to some extent the southern part of the central
21.4.4 Word formation
dialect) preserve the classical forms of the masculine article
lo and los, alternating with the contracted forms just men- Many of the derivational affixes found in Catalan are not
tioned and with the asyllabic forms l and ls, which are used used in the formation of new words. This is the case with the
when the l can be syllabified with an adjacent vowel: trau los suffixes -ill(a) found in forquilla ‘fork’ or cordill ‘string’, or
llibres ‘bring out the books’, dels llibres ‘of the books’, agafa·ls -ença in naixença ‘birth’ or temença ‘fear’. On the other hand,
llibres ‘pick up the books’. many affixes are productive, as they can be used in forming
The non-standard colloquial varieties have a so-called new words, e.g. the diminutive suffix -et(a), the augmenta-
‘neuter’ form lo, not accepted by prescriptive grammar, tive -as(sa), and the pejorative -ot(a). Using these suffixes we
which is used without a noun and has an abstract value: lo can form llibret, llibràs, or llibrot, from llibre ‘book’, or lletreta,
bo ‘that which is good, the good’, lo autèntic ‘the genuine lletrassa, or lletrota, from lletra ‘letter’. Other productive
stuff ’, lo que m’agrada ‘what I like’. The standard norm suffixes are -isme ‘-ism’ and -ista ‘-ist’, as in budisme ‘Bud-
requires the usual masculine article in such cases: el bo, dhism’ and budista ‘Buddhist’, -ada (manifestation typical of
l’autèntic, el que m’agrada. someone), as in pujolada ‘action typical of a person named
The Balearic dialect maintains an active use of the article Pujol’, -ció ‘-tion’ and ‑dor ‘-ator’, as in experimentació ‘experi-
descended from IPSE (cf. §21.2.3). The forms are es/s’ (MSG), sa/s’ mentation’ and experimentador ‘experimenter’, -itzar ‘-ize’, as
(FSG), es (MPL), and ses (FPL), where s’ has the same phono- in verbalitzar ‘to verbalize’. Among the more productive
logical conditioning as the standard l’: es nin ‘the boy’, s’homo prefixes, we can mention des- ‘de-’ as in desactivar ‘to deacti-
‘the man’, s’al·lota ‘the girl’, es peus ‘the feet’. The same vate’, in- ‘in-’ as in inhabilitar ‘to disqualify’, and re- ‘re-’ as in
elements as in standard varieties yield the contracted recomptar ‘to recount’.
forms as, des, pes, and cas. The masculine forms so and sos Another word formation process is compounding.
are used by older people in Majorca only after the prepos- A productive compound type is the V-N noun, in which
ition amb ‘with’: amb so cotxo ‘in the car’. A phonological the first member is a verb in its unmarked ending and the
dissimilation rule in Majorca and Menorca turns a sibilant second, a plural noun: parabrises (para ‘stop’ + brises
into a stop before another sibilant, giving forms such as es ‘breezes’) ‘windscreen’, netejavidres (neteja ‘clean’ + vidres
sac [ədˈsak] ‘the sack’, ses joves [sədˈʒovəs] ‘the young ‘window panes’) ‘window cleaner’, obreampolles (obre ‘open’
women’, ets homos [ədˈzɔmos] ‘the men’. Despite the general + ampolles ‘bottles’) ‘bottle-opener’. This process is recursive:
use of the IPSE article in Balearic, the ILLE article is used in a netejaparabrises (neteja ‘clean’ + para ‘stop’ + brises ‘breezes’)
variety of syntactic contexts (cf. §46.3.1.1): to name the ‘windscreen wiper’. Another frequent compound is the N-A
hours of the day (les tres ‘three o’clock’), institutions adjective: panxacontent (panxa ‘belly’ + content ‘happy’)
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CATALAN
‘carefree’, camacurt (cama ‘leg’ + curt ‘short’) ‘shortlegged’, and north Catalan enclitics attract stress on the last syllable
pèl-roig (pèl ‘hair’ + roig ‘red’) ‘red-haired’. (cf. §§40.3.3.1, 41.3.1), in some cases causing the otherwise
Adverbs are formed quite productively by concatenating stressed syllable of the verb to undergo vowel reduction, as
an adjective in the feminine singular form and the stem in the Balearic forms visitar-los [vizitəlˈlos] ‘to visit them’,
-ment: dolçament ‘sweetly’, estúpidament ‘stupidly’, breument entra-hi [ənˈtrəj] ‘go in’ (Colomina i Castanyer 2002:579),
‘briefly’, constantment ‘constantly’. The resulting structure is which is clear evidence of the affixal status of verbal clitics.
on the border between compounding and syntax. The two Verbal clitics can be proclitic or enclitic. While medieval
component elements are inseparable and function as a unit, Catalan allowed verbal clitics to either follow or precede a
as a word, and each one has an unreduced vowel, which is finite verb form, depending on the syntactic contexts (cf.
characteristic of compounds. However, unlike compounds, §48.3), modern Catalan requires clitics to be proclitic on
it has secondary stress on the first component element verb forms except for positive imperatives and non-finite
(Mascaró 2002:115). And, under coordination, it is possible forms (except for participles, to which clitics cannot attach).
to have the -ment ending on only the first of the two (or Northern Catalan only allows enclitics with positive impera-
more) coordinated adverbs, as in insistentment i repetida tives (Bonet 2002:937f). Thus, we have contrasts such as (22)
‘insistently and repeated(ly)’, with the same meaning as in most dialects:
the more common construction with -ment on all coordin-
ated adverbs: insistentment i repetidament (López and Morant (22) a. La compraré. (cf. **compraré-la)
2002:1808). it= I.buy.FUT
‘I will buy it.’
b. per comprar -la (cf. **per la comprar)
21.5 Syntax for buy.INF=it
‘in order to buy it’
21.5.1 Verbal clitics
A large class of verbs that take a non-finite form, such as
The affixal status of verbal clitics is shown by the fact that a an infinitive, as their complement allow the syntactic
clitic cannot be separated from the verb it attaches to, not dependents of the complement verb to become their own
even by the negative element no ‘not’, which in turn must syntactic dependents (Aissen and Perlmutter 1983; Rizzi
stand adjacent to the verb. If we consider the relative 1978; cf. also §31.2.2.3). Among these are modals like voler
position of no and other usually preverbal elements such ‘to want’, poder ‘may, can’, deure ‘must’, movement verbs,
as ja ‘already, no longer’ or hom ‘indefinite personal subject’ aspectual verbs, and the auxiliary of the compound past.
with respect to the verb, we find that no is always adjacent The most visible effect of this is the phenomenon of clitic
to the verb: ja no cantem vs *no ja cantem ‘we no longer sing’, climbing. Given the modal pots ‘you.SG.can’ and the infinitive
or hom no canta vs. *no hom canta ‘one does not sing’. When a comprar ‘buy.INF’, we can have the clitic la, corresponding to
clitic is present before the verb, it cannot precede no: no la the direct object of the infinitive, attached to the infinitive,
cantem vs *la no cantem ‘we do not sing it’. Another argument as in pots comprar-la, or attached to the finite verb, as in la
for the affixal status of clitics is that they behave like affixes pots comprar, both with the meaning: ‘you can buy it’. When
with respect to certain phonological processes. For there is a sequence of verbs that allow clitic climbing, the
example, the process of cluster simplification discussed in clitic may appear on any of the verbs in the sequence, as
§21.3.4 applies word-finally, reducing a consonant cluster shown in the following sentence, where the possible posi-
like /nt/ to [n] even if followed by a vowel in the same tions are indicated with the clitic in parentheses: (la) vas
phrase, as in anant a París [əˈnan ə pəˈɾis] ‘going to Paris’; yet poder(-la) començar(-la) a comprar(-la) lit. ‘(it=) AUX.PST be.able.
it fails to apply when the verb is followed by a vocalic clitic, INF(=it) begin.INF(=it) to buy.INF(=it)’.
hi or ho, as in anant-hi [əˈnanti] ‘going there’. Likewise with The form of a given clitic, leaving aside dialectal vari-
r-deletion (§21.3.4), as shown by contrasts such as fer honors ation, depends on whether it is attached to a verb or to
[fe wˈnors] ‘do honours’ vs fer-ho [ˈfeɾu] ‘to do it’. For most another clitic and whether it immediately precedes or fol-
dialects, verbal clitics are a layer of affixes that do not affect lows a consonant or a vowel in the same V-clitic unit. We
stress (i.e. the rule of stress placement ignores clitics), can distinguish three classes of clitics depending on
which explains the possibility of forms with the stressed whether their underlying representation consists of only
syllable followed by more than two unstressed syllables one consonant (1Consonant), consists of a consonant and
only when clitics are involved: dóna-me-les ‘give them to the plural morph (2Consonant), or includes a vowel (Syl-
me’, permetre-se-la ‘to allow himself it’. However, in Balearic labic). The 1Consonant class includes /m/ (1SG), /t/ (2SG), /s/
377
ALEX ALSINA
(3REFL), /n/ (PART), /l/ (3MSG.ACC). In the standard dialect, third person plural dative form). In these forms, o is
these clitics add the unmarked vowel spelled e to their inserted before the plural morph when they are attached
right when preceding a clitic beginning with a consonant, to a consonant-final verb, giving nos, vos, and los (a special
as in (23a), or following a verb ending in a consonant and allomorph is needed for vos), as in (25a); otherwise, if the
not before a vowel, as in (23b); otherwise, they add the initial consonant of the clitic is not adjacent to a vowel, the
vowel e to their left if not adjacent to a vowel, as in (23c), vowel e is added before it or the /w/ in /wz/ becomes
and remain unchanged when they are adjacent to a vowel, syllabic u, as in (25b); and, elsewhere, no change occurs, as
as in (23d,e). This is illustrated in (23) for the 1SG clitic: in (25c).
(23) a. Me la dóna. (25) a. per donar-nos permís

me= her= gives for give.INF=us permission
‘He gives it to me.’ ‘to give us permission’
b. per donar-me permís b. Ens dóna permís.

for give.INF=me permission us= gives permission
‘to give me permission’ ‘He gives us permission.’
c. Em dóna permís. c. Dóna’ns permís!

me= gives permission Give.IMP2SG=us permission
‘He gives me permission.’ ‘Give us permission!’
d. M’ha donat permís. Finally, clitics of the Syllabic class are la (3FSG.ACC), les (3FPL.
me=has given permission ACC), li (3SG.DAT), ho (3NEUT.ACC), and hi (LOC). The only alterna-
‘He has given me permission.’ tion they show is the deletion of the vowel of la, which
e. Dóna’m permís! occurs in the same context as with the homophonous article
Give.IMP2SG=me permission la (§21.4.3): la dóna ‘he gives it’, l’hem donada ‘we have given
‘Give me permission!’ it’, la intueix ‘he intuits it’.
Clitics can combine with each other and the order in
Within the 1Consonant class, the 3MSG.ACC clitic differs in which they appear follows the template in (26) (Bonet
one of the contexts from the other members of the class. As 2002:973):
expected, it is el before a consonant-initial verb (el veig ‘I see
him’) and the single consonant l’ or ’l when adjacent to a (26) es > 2nd person > 1st person > 3rd person > en > ho/hi
vowel (me’l dóna ‘he gives it to me’, l’he vist ‘I have seen him’,
per veure’l ‘to see him’). But, following a consonant-final Although sequences of more than four clitics are rare,
verb, it is lo (not le): this template governs the order in cases like se me l’hi va
emportar ‘she took it away from me’ or se te n’hi va quedar un
‘one of them stayed there on you’. However, certain clitic
(24) a. per donar-lo
combinations do not exist, and the content in terms of
for give.INF=it
semantic and syntactic features that would correspond to
‘to give it’
them is expressed by means of another morpheme combin-
b. Deixeu-lo! ation. This is what happens with the clitic cluster that
leave.IMP.2PL=him corresponds to two third person pronouns, one accusative
‘Leave him!’ and one dative, in the non-Valencian standard. Since the
third singular dative clitic is /li/ and the third person
Like the e that is added in the contexts illustrated in (23), accusative clitics are /l/, /la/, /lz/, /laz/ in accordance
the o in lo can also be analysed as an epenthetic vowel, but with gender and number, the transparent combinations of
with the difference that it is a case of morphologically a clitic from each of these two sets are li’l, li la, li’ls, and li les,
conditioned epenthesis. This epenthetic o is also found in which are the forms used in Valencian. Outside Valencia,
the clitics of the 2Consonant class, which consists of three the same content corresponds to the accusative clitic fol-
forms with the plural morph /z/, spelled s: /nz/ (1PL), /wz/ lowed by hi: l’hi, la hi, els hi, les hi, which is not a transparent
(2PL), and /lz/ (3PL). (The clitic /lz/ in the prescriptive norm combination. If the third person dative is plural, its com-
is either the third person masculine plural accusative form, bination with another third person pronoun is the concat-
distinct from the corresponding feminine form les, or the enation of the third person plural dative clitic /lz/ with a
378
CATALAN
third person accusative clitic in the standard common to An example of this use is hi in haver-hi ‘(existential) be’:
Valencian and non-Valencian: els el, els la, els els, els les. Many haver with an existential meaning requires the locative clitic
non-standard varieties outside Valencian have extended the hi: No hi ha remei ‘There is no solution’. The lexically
analysis of /i/ (hi) as the expression of third person dative required clitic behaves like any other clitic and undergoes
and use it regardless of whether it is a singular or a plural clitic climbing: Hi pot començar a haver un remei ‘There may
third person dative. As a consequence, the phonological begin to be a solution’. Other examples of lexically required
sequence /lzi/ (els hi) corresponds to either one or two or inherent, clitics are the reflexive clitics in so-called
third person pronouns one of which is dative and the other pronominal verbs: queixar-se ‘to complain’, desempallegar-se
plural, with either gender being possible. Thus it can corres- ‘to free oneself ’, endur-se ‘to take away’.
pond to a third person plural dative pronoun, regardless of Finally, the reflexive clitic se may be the marker of pas-
gender, as in els hi donem nous ‘we give them walnuts’; or to two sivization (personal or impersonal). Verbs of many different
third person pronouns, of which the accusative is singular and classes (transitive, intransitive, unaccusative) may take this
the dative is plural, or of which the accusative is plural and the marker, leaving the argument that would otherwise be the
dative is singular, or both of which are plural. Thus, a sentence subject (the logical subject) unexpressed, but understood to
like els hi donem can mean ‘we give it to them’, ‘we give them to be human, as shown in (29a) for two unaccusative verbs. If
him/her’, or ‘we give them to them’ (Bonet 2002:954-61). there is no subject, as in (29a,b), it is said to be an imper-
Many verbal clitics correspond to pronouns and fulfil a sonal se construction. If there is a subject, as in (29c), as
grammatical function in the clause, which can be the direct shown by agreement, it is said to be a passive se
object, indirect object, and various kinds of prepositional construction.
obliques. However, verbal clitics sometimes function as
agreement markers, as lexically required markers, or as (29) a. Quan es torna de vacances, s’ arriba cansat.
passivization markers. We find clitics functioning as agree- when SE= returns from holidays, SE= arrives tired
ment markers when there is clitic doubling: the clitic agrees ‘When you come back from holidays, you arrive tired.’
in features such as person, gender, and number with the NP
b. No se l’espera fins demà.
or PP that fulfils the complement function of the verb. An
not SE= him=expects until tomorrow
accusative clitic may function as an agreement marker only
‘He is not expected until tomorrow.’
when the object phrase is a pronoun (obligatorily, if the
latter is a first or second person pronoun): c. S’han venut els millors seients.
SE=have.3PL sold the best seats
(27) a. T’ he vist a tu ‘The best seats have been sold out.’
you= I.have seen ACC.MRK you
‘I saw you’
b. L’ he vista a ella. 21.5.2 Subject and objects
her= I.have seen.FSG ACC.MRK her
‘I saw her’
The grammatical function subject in Catalan has the follow-
ing properties: it agrees with the verb; it can be omitted
As for dative clitics, whereas the prescriptive norm
with a definite interpretation; it has no case marking; it
recommends limiting their use as agreement markers to
cannot be expressed as (or replaced by) a pronominal verbal
the same cases as accusative clitics, many dialects and
clitic; in a copular passive clause, it corresponds to the
speakers use them as agreement markers much more gen-
direct object of the active counterpart. A copular passive
erally, almost obligatorily, as in Spanish:
includes a form of the auxiliary ser and the participle of the
lexical verb, as in (30a); the logical subject (corresponding to
(28) a. Què (li) vas dir a la Marta?
the active subject) is optionally expressed with a phrase
what her.DAT= you.PST say.INF to the Marta
introduced by per ‘by’.
‘What did you say to Marta?’
b. Això no (li) servirà a ningú. (30) a. Han estat descrits els símptomes
this not 3SG.DAT= will.serve to no.one have.3PL been described.PL the symptoms
‘This will not be any use to anybody.’ (per un doctorand).
(by a doctoral student)
Some verbs require specific clitics that do not fulfil any ‘The symptoms were described (by a doctoral
grammatical function: these are lexically required markers. student).’
379
ALEX ALSINA
b. Ha descrit els símptomes un doctorand. person clitic els and the participle descrits are both mascu-
have.3SG described the symptoms a doctoral line plural. The reality of the spoken language is that,
student leaving aside some conservative dialects (Balearic and
‘A doctoral student described the symptoms.’ northern Catalan) which display participle agreement in
more contexts than are allowed in the standard language,
In the passive (30a), the subject NP els símptomes agrees most speakers either do not have any participle agreement
with the finite verb form of its clause han and with the or restrict participle agreement to the feminine accusative
participle of the passive verb descrits. Its thematic role is clitics la (SG) and les (PL) or just to the FSG la (Bel 2002:1134-7;
that of the direct object of the active (30b). Rosselló 2002:1932–4). Thus, for many speakers, when refer-
A direct object does not agree with the verb, as in (30b). In ring to a feminine singular antecedent such as la construcció
addition, (a) it cannot be omitted with a definite interpret- ‘the construction’, it is normal to say l’ha descrita ‘he
ation; (b) it may be expressed as a pronominal clitic; (c) it described it’, with agreement on the participle, while the
sometimes has a specific case morphology; and (d) it some- unmarked form of the participle would be used with mas-
times agrees with the participle in compound tenses with culine clitics, such as in l’ha descrit ‘he described it.MSG’ or els
haver ‘to have’. A sentence like (30b) would be ungrammat- ha descrit ‘he described them.M’.
ical without the direct object (**Ha descrit ‘He described’) or The canonical, or syntactically unmarked, position of the
would be interpreted as having a generic or non-specific phrase (NP, PP) corresponding to the object or other com-
object of description. The sentence is grammatical if the plements of the verb is after the verb in the same inton-
object is expressed by means of an accusative object: ational phrase, as seen in (25) and (32) for the direct object
and in (28) for the indirect object. Leaving aside instances of
(31) Els ha descrits. clitic doubling, in which clitics function as mere agreement
them= has described.MPL markers, pronominal clitics are the expression of a comple-
‘He described them.’ ment of the verb; consequently, a complement expressed as
a clitic cannot also be expressed as a phrase. Thus, the direct
A human direct object is sometimes marked with the object of descriure ‘describe’ can be expressed as an NP
same preposition that marks indirect objects, namely a following the verb, as in He descrit la Marta ‘I described
‘to’. This preposition has the colloquial variants amb, en/ Marta’, or as an accusative clitic, as in l’he descrita ‘I
an, and ana in all of its uses (Sancho Cremades 2002:1730f.), described her’, but not as both, as in **l’he descrita la Marta
including as a direct object marker. Prescriptive grammar ‘I described her Marta’.
restricts this use of a to strong personal pronouns (mi If a phrase appears at all co-occurring with a coreferential
‘me’, tu ‘you.SG’, ell/-a ‘him/her’, nosaltres ‘us’, vosaltres ‘you.PL’, clitic, it appears in a dislocated position, where it fills a
si ‘-self ’)—see (27)—and other pronouns and quantifiers such discourse function such as topic, but not the complement
as tothom ‘everyone’, tots ‘all’, el qual ‘whom’ and to construc- function filled by the clitic. Thus, the NP la Marta is a
tions in which the direct object could be confused with the dislocated phrase in (33), as it appears either before the
subject (as in El perseguia com el gat a la rata ‘She chased him like verb, as in (33a), or separated from the preceding verb by an
the cat chases the rat’; Sancho Cremades 2002:1737f.). Collo- intonational break, as in (33b):
quial Catalan makes a much more general use of a with human
direct objects. Thus, while both sentences in (32) are found (33) a. La Marta, l’he descrita.
colloquially, only (32a) is accepted by prescriptive grammar. the Marta her=I.have described.FSG
‘Marta, I described her.’
(32) a. Ha descrit a tothom.
b. L’he descrita, la Marta.
has.3SG described ACC.MRK everyone
her= I.have described.FSG the Marta
‘He described everyone.’
‘I described her, Marta.’
b. Ha descrit a tots els sospitosos.
has.3SG described ACC.MRK all the suspects There is considerable debate as to whether the phrasal
‘He described all the suspects.’ expression of the subject should be assumed to have its
canonical position following the verb in the same inton-
Lastly, according to the prescriptive norm, a direct object ational phrase, like the object and other complements, or
expressed as a third person clitic in a compound tense should be assumed to have a canonical position before the
(haver ‘to have’ + participle) agrees with the participle in verb. What we find is that the NP subject can be postverbal
gender and number, as illustrated in (31), where the third without an intonational break separating it from the verb,
380
CATALAN
with all kinds of verbs: unaccusatives, as in (30a), since way that the presence of an object clitic implies that the
passive structures are unaccusatives, and transitives, as in object is pronominal and that there is no phrase corres-
(30b). However, the subject can also be preverbal, without ponding to the object (31), and that, if there is a phrase
any other syntactic difference in the sentence and with the coreferential with the object, it is a topic phrase (33), a
same truth-conditional semantics, as in (34), corresponding subject may be pronominal with no phrase corresponding
to (30). And it can also be postverbal, with an intonational to it (31-33). If there is a phrase that provides referential
break before it, as in (35). content to the subject, it is a topic coreferential with the
pronominal subject and appears in a displaced position, as
(34) a. Els símptomes han estat descrits in (34) and (35) (see Bresnan and Mchombo 1987). When
the symptoms have been described.MPL the verb does not license a null pronominal subject, the
(per un doctorand). subject is realized as a phrase in the verb phrase (30).
for a doctoral.student A similar view is defended in Rosselló (1986), Bonet i
‘The symptoms have been described by a doctoral Alsina (1990), and Vallduví (1992b; 2002), whereas the
student.’ view that the canonical subject position can also be pre-
verbal has been defended most recently by Forcadell
b. Un doctorand ha descrit els símptomes
(2013).
a doctoral.student has described the symptoms
There is a special preverbal position in which negative
‘A doctoral student has described the symptoms.’
and quantified expressions such as ningú ‘nobody’, res ‘noth-
ing’, poca cosa ‘not much’, as well as interrogative phrases
(35) a. Han estat descrits (per un such as qui ‘who’, can appear in either subject or comple-
have been described.MPL by a ment function (Vallduví 2002:1264-7):
doctorand), els símptomes.
doctoral.student the symptoms (36) Alguna cosa direm /sortirà.
b. Ha descrit els símptomes, un doctorand. some thing we.will.say /will.come out
has described the symptoms a doctoral.student ‘We will say something’/‘Something will come out.’
A plausible interpretation of these facts is that there is Focus fronting allows any dependent of a verb to appear
no difference between subject and complements with in initial position in the sentence and is interpreted as a
respect to their canonical position as phrases: it is in the contrastive focus (37) (Vallduví 2002:1267-72):
verb phrase (following the verb in the same intonational
phrase). The difference between the subject and the com- (37) UN GOS, tenim, no un gat.
plements is that there are no subject clitics and the verb a dog we.have, not a cat
optionally licenses a null pronominal subject. In the same ‘It’s a dog that we have, not a cat.’
381
CHAPTER 22
Spanish, Astur-Leonese, Navarro-Aragonese,

Judaeo-Spanish
D O N A L D N. T U T E N , E N R I Q U E P A T O , AND O R A R. S C H W A R Z W A L D
22.1 Introduction between Astur-Leonese and Navarro-Aragonese, which

shared, with Mozarabic, some features which Castilian did
not). The mountainous region directly north of Burgos is
Our topic is a set of language varieties which may be
traditionally regarded as part of the original Castilian-
referred to as central Ibero-Romance, as we do here, or
speaking area, although varieties spoken there, including
Hispano-Romance (cf. Map 22.1). Spanish, the most widely
Pasiego (Penny 1969), show conservative features which are
spoken and written Romance language, has well over
not typical of most varieties known as castellano since the
400,000,000 native speakers and at least 60,000,000 second
thirteenth century.
language users (Ethnologue 2013). It is an official language
Modern scholars have tended to group what they consider
in Spain, nineteen Latin American republics and Puerto Rico
to be non-Spanish varieties of central Ibero-Romance accord-
(see Map 22.2), as well as Equatorial Guinea in Africa. There
is residual use in the Philippines and frequent use in many ing to the regions in which they were once spoken: Astur-
parts of the USA, associated with long-standing Hispanic Leonese in Asturias and León, Navarro-Aragonese in Navarre
populations in New Mexico and south Texas, and even and Aragon. Astur-Leonese is used as a cover label for the
more so with first- and second-generation members of varieties that have been used in areas between Old Castile and
Hispanic/Latino immigrant groups across that country. Galicia-Portugal, those to the east being most similar to Span-
Spanish has been the object of official standardization ish and those to the west most similar to Galician-Portuguese.
since the founding of the Royal Spanish Academy (Real Today, the most vigorous varieties of Astur-Leonese are those
Academia Española) in 1713-14, which since 1951 has spoken in rural communities of Asturias, where some 100,000
worked with the Association of Academies of the Spanish speakers are believed to remain (Ethnologue 2013). These are
Language on the codification and elaboration of the often divided into western, central, and eastern varieties,
language. collectively known as asturiano/u or bable, the latter a trad-
Spanish, known in Spanish as castellano ‘Castilian’, or itional yet pejorative label. Since 1980 the Academia de la
español, arose as one of many varieties which formed part Llingua Asturiana has promulgated a standard form, based
of the peninsular Ibero-Romance dialect continuum. This primarily on central varieties. To the south, vestigial use of
continuum, which survives to varying degrees among rural western Astur-Leonese is retained in western areas of the
speakers in the northernmost, largely mountainous, zones provinces of León, Zamora, and Salamanca. Unlike areas
of the Peninsula, dates back to late Roman and Visigothic south of Salamanca, there is no clear division (bundle of
times and was manifest also in the now-extinct southern isoglosses) between these varieties and those of Galicia or
Ibero-Romance varieties, conventionally known as Moz- Portugal, today generally understood to be varieties of a
arabic, used by Mozarabs (Arabicized Christians) and others standardized Galician language or of Portuguese. However,
who lived under Moorish rule from 711 AD to the twelfth Mirandese, with 10-15,000 speakers, is a variety of western
century. By most accounts, Castilian first arose in the region Leonese spoken in the Portuguese region of Miranda do
of Old Castile near Burgos during the repopulation of the Douro; it shares some features with Galician-Portuguese that
northern meseta in the ninth century; from there it was other Astur-Leonese varieties do not. Recognized by Portugal
carried south during the ‘reconquest’ and repopulation of in 1999 as a distinct language, it has become an object of
the central Peninsula, spreading progressively west and east standardization. Further south, some conservative western or
the further south it was taken (forming a kind of wedge ‘Leonese’ features occur in rural Extremadura.
382 This chapter © Donald N. Tuten, Enrique Pato, and Ora R. Schwarzwald 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
FRANCE
Asturias Cantabria Basque
Country
Galicia
Navarre
Leon Burgos
Castile La Rioja
and
Leon Huesca Catalonia
Valladolid
Miranda do Douro
Zamora Aragon
Salamanca
Madrid
PORTUGAL
Castile-La Mancha Valencian

Community
Extremadura

Murcia
Andalusia
Seville
Astur - Leonese
Aragonese
Basque
Spanish
Approximate limit of count/non-count

referential systems
Map 22.1 Local varieties of Central Ibero-Romance in the Iberian Peninsula (note that Spanish has long been employed in all regions of Spain, including those
with local varieties). Spanish is also the primary language of the Canary Islands (not shown on this map).
CUBA
DOMINICAN
MEXICO REPUBLIC
PUERTO
HONDURAS RICO
GUATEMALA
EL SALVADOR NICARAGUA
COSTA RICA
VENEZUELA
PANAMA
COLOMBIA
ECUADOR
PERU
BOLIVIA
PARAGUAY
CHILE
URUGUAY
ARGENTINA
Map 22.2 Spanish-speaking areas of Latin America (excluding mainland US)
384
SPANISH, ASTUR-LEONESE, NAVARRO-ARAGONESE, JUDAEO-SPANISH
‘Navarro-Aragonese’ is a cover label for eastern varieties (or set of varieties) has undergone, first in Burgos and Old
historically spoken south of the Pyrenees in areas between Castile (ninth and tenth centuries), later as the reconquest
Old Castile (and Basque-speaking regions of the Basque and the repopulation of the Peninsula progressed into
Country and northern Navarre) and Catalonia, including Toledo and New Castile (after 1085), Betic Andalusia (after
La Rioja, southern Navarre, and Aragon. Today, Navarro- 1224), Granada, Canary Islands, and the Americas (after
Aragonese survives only vestigially in varieties traditionally 1492). Although Astur-Leonese and Navarro-Aragonese
known as Aragonese (aragonés) spoken in Pyrenean villages have generally been more conservative than Spanish, dia-
of Upper Aragon; they are often referred to by local names: lect mixing during the reconquest also seems to have con-
e.g. ansotano in Ansó, belsetán in Bielsa, chistabino in Gistaín. tributed to the differentiation of more conservative
There remain at most 10,000 native speakers; most of these northern varieties (those which survive most vigorously
speak more easterly varieties, such as benasqués (in Benas- today) from southern varieties which tended to favour
que), which share some features with Catalan. Attempts to many of the simpler features of Spanish (though subse-
standardize and promote a unified Aragonese have led to quently Spanish has exercised constant pressure on Astur-
the creation of the Consello d’a Fabla Aragonesa in 1976, the ian and Aragonese). Judaeo-Spanish, too, shows the impact
unofficial Academia de l’Aragonés in 2006, and the official of the dialect mixing and levelling which accompanied the
(though controversial) Academia Aragonesa de la Lengua in Sephardic diaspora (Penny 2000:174-93), though it retains
2013, which is also to be responsible for regulating and some markedly conservative features of medieval Spanish
standardizing use of some eastern varieties hitherto and also includes innovations resulting from language
labelled as Catalan. contact.
Judaeo-Spanish, also known as Judezmo or Ladino, cannot
be associated with particular regions of the Iberian Penin-
sula or the Americas, being the language of descendants of
the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain (Sefarad in Hebrew) 22.2 Phonology
in 1492. Indeed, varieties of Judaeo-Spanish show mixing of
Castilian phonological, grammatical, and lexical features
22.2.1 Vowels
with those of other varieties of Ibero-Romance, including
Asturian and Aragonese. Judaeo-Spanish came to be used A defining characteristic of Spanish and central Ibero-
across Europe and the Mediterranean wherever Sephardic Romance is the five-phoneme tonic vowel system, with
communities were established, particularly within the Otto- three degrees of aperture and distinctions between front,
man Empire (cf. Map 22.3). Significant differences developed central, and back vowels.1 These vowels include: /i/ (piso
between western varieties spoken mainly in Morocco and ‘floor’), /u/ (puso ‘put.PRT.3SG’), /e/ (peso ‘weight’), /o/ (poso
eastern varieties spoken mainly in Greece and Turkey, but ‘sediment’) and /a/ (paso ‘pass’). Spanish developed the
also in the Balkans. Varieties of Judaeo-Spanish are still five-vowel system from an earlier seven-vowel system
used to a limited extent in areas where Sephardic groups (cf. §25.1.1) after western Romance /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ diphthong-
have remained or resettled, including Turkey but also the ized (> /ie/ and /ue/) in both open and closed syllables
United States, various locations in Europe and especially (cf. §38.4). These prototypically short, tense vowels have
Israel. Perhaps 100,000 speakers of Judaeo-Spanish remain, remained remarkably stable over time and space (especially
but most of these are older and the language is unlikely to /a/). Phonemic distinctions based on length do not exist.
survive them (Harris 1994). In the nineteenth and twentieth The five vowel phonemes also occur in atonic syllables.
centuries Judaeo-Spanish was subject to competing forms of Neutralization of atonic /e/~/i/ and atonic /o/~/u/ has
unofficial standardization. In 1997 the government of Israel long been a feature of most colloquial varieties, particularly
set up the Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino i su Kultura, in pretonic position (see Penny 2000:211): Sp./Ast./JuSp.
which aims to preserve the language and supports Aki
Yerushalayim, a journal published in Judaeo-Spanish since 1
General discussion of phonological and grammatical features is based
1979 (Bunis 1992; Schwarzwald 2002; Varol Bornes 2008; on descriptions and analyses included in Zamora Vicente (1967), Green
Orfali 2010). (1988a), Nagore Laín (1986), Lipski (1994; 2008), Alvar (1996a, b), Bosque
Penny (2000; 2002) points out that Spanish phonology, and Demonte (1999), Bunis (1999), Penny (2000; 2002), Zagona (2002),
Hualde (2005), Quintana Rodríguez (2006), Academia de la Llingua
grammar, and lexicon are characterized by extensive sim- Asturiana (2001), Real Academia Española/Asociación de Academias de la
plification, levelling, and mixing. Penny, and Tuten (2003), Lengua (2009–11), Academia de l’Aragonés (2010), Hualde et al. (2013).
suggest that these features are in part the result of the Examples are from Spanish unless otherwise noted. Judaeo-Spanish words
are often given in phonetic transcription and followed by the standard
repeated phases of intense koineization (dialect mixing Spanish equivalent when this is similar to the Judaeo-Spanish word; other-
leading to formation of a new variety) which this variety wise a transliteration from Hebrew script is provided.
385
ENGLAND Danzig
Hamburg
London RUSSIA
Amsterdam
ATLANTIC S Antwerp
ER
OCEAN ND POLAND
FLA
Rouen Paris Zamość
rld Prague
Wo
ew
ine
N FRANCE
To
Rh
La Rochelle Vienna
Santiago de Bordeaux (Peireorade)

Compostela Biarritz
Bayonne Venice
St Jean de Luz Genoa
Avignon Belgrade
Marseilles Ferrara
L
Pisa Danube
Black Sea
GA
SPAIN Livorno
RT U
Madrid Zaragoza Sofia

Lisbon Ragussa
PO
Barcelona Corsica Ancona

Toledo Monastir
Rome Adrianople
Valencia (Bitola)
Córdoba Sardinia Istanbul
Naples TH
Seville Cartagena Salonika E
Cadiz Granada O T Bursa
Cagliari Valona TO
Málaga MA
Tangier Corfu N
EM
Larache Arcila Palermo Izmir (Smyrna) PI
Tig
RE
ri
Sicily Eup
s
Oran Tunis Catania hr
at
Aleppo es
Tlemcen
Fez Nabeul
Rhodes
Cyprus Beirut
NORTH AFRICA Mediterranean Sea Crete Damascus
Jerba Safed
Tiberias
Jaffa
Tripoli
Jerusalem
Alexandria
Cairo
Waves of emigration of Jews and Conversos

From the end of the 15th century to the mid 16th century
From the middle of the 16th century to the end of the 17th century
Map 22.3 The spread of Judaeo-Spanish

señor~siñor ‘sir’, Sp. podrir~pudrir ‘to rot’. In Asturian and (/i/ /u/), realized as a front or back glide respectively, as in
Aragonese, neutralization of /a/~/e/ can occur (Chistabino /ie/ = [je], /ue/ = [we], /uei/ = [wej]. Such sequences occur
Ara. ansera~ensera ‘handle’). Indeed, neutralization is so word-internally (miedo ‘fear’, sueño ‘sleep’, buey ‘ox’) and
regular in Chistabino Aragonese and Judaeo-Spanish of across word boundaries in connected speech ([tweɾˈmano]
Budapest and Bucharest that these varieties have reduced tu hermano ‘your brother’). Falling diphthongs (Sp. peine
atonic vowels to just three: /a/ /i/ /u/ (Mott 2007:108; ‘comb’< PECTINEM) are dispreferred, though Aragonese con-
Penny 2000:187). Deletion of word-internal, often post- serves them in reflexes of -ULT- and -CT- (see §39.4.2) (e.g.
tonic vowels, which occurred historically in Spanish, MULTUM, FACTUM > Ara. muito ‘much’, feito ‘done’ vs Sp. mucho,
remains possible in Aragonese ([ˈaspɾa] áspera ‘rough.F’). In hecho), and they are common in western Astur-Leonese:
Mexican and Andean Spanish, atonic vowels (particularly WAst. peito ‘chest’, cousa ‘thing’ vs Sp. pecho, cosa). Judaeo-
/e/) which occur between voiceless obstruents are fre- Spanish shows variable phonetic reduction of [ej] to [e]:
quently devoiced and reduced ([ˈpaɾ.te̥s] partes ‘parts’). [ˈrejna~ˈrena] reina ‘queen’.
Treatment of final atonic vowels differs across varieties. Although Asturian and Aragonese share the five-vowel
Historically, Spanish word-final vowels were reduced to system with Spanish, there are variable historical and mod-
three: /e/ /o/ /a/ (whereas Asturian and Cantabrian ern realizations of the reflexes of Romance tonic /ɛ/ (<Ĕ)
retained at least four); /u/ and /i/ were reintroduced to and /ɔ/ (< Ŏ): [ɛ, ja, je] and [ɔ, wo, wa, we] (Tuten 2003:121f.).
Spanish through borrowing and other means (e.g. tribu In Spanish, the diphthongs stabilized early on with regular
‘tribe’). Spanish deleted historical final /e/ after many [je] (e.g. BĔNE > bien ‘well’) and [we] (e.g. BŎNUM > bueno ‘good’)
voiced consonants (CANTARE > cantar ‘to sing’, UERITATEM > (but see §38.4). Today, standard Asturian and Aragonese are
verdad ‘truth’); eastern Aragonese favours deletion (particu- like Spanish in preferring [je] and [we], but these varieties
larly of /e/) in still more contexts: Ara. puent ‘bridge’, tot ‘all’ are also distinguished by diphthongal reflexes in historical
vs Sp. puente, todo. Asturian also retains lexicalized examples prepalatal contexts where Spanish retains a monophthong
of final vowel deletion once found more widely (Ast. diz vs (see also §38.4): ŎCULUM > Ast. güeyu, Ara. uello/güello, Sp. ojo).
Sp. dice ‘says.PRS.IND.3SG’), but in western Asturian final On the other hand, Judaeo-Spanish sometimes has monoph-
unstressed /e/ is variably retained in contexts where it is thongs where Spanish has diphthongs (possibly influenced
elsewhere lost (WAst. facere ‘to do’ vs Sp. hacer). Final /e/ by contact with Portuguese): [ˈpɾeto] prieto ‘black’, [ˈponte]
and /o/ are subject to raising in Asturian ([ˈnweʧi] nueche puente ‘bridge’.
‘night’), Judaeo-Spanish (standard [ˈiʒo] ~ dialectal [ˈiʒu~ Same-vowel sequences are often reduced to a single
ˈfíʒu] hijo ‘son’), some varieties of Aragonese, and Cantab- vowel in colloquial speech ([alˈβaka] albahaca ‘basil’), but
rian (Penny 1969), but can also be found in Spanish, as reinforcement by epenthesis is frequent in some varieties:
in rural Puerto Rico: [ˈpoti] pote ‘pot’, [ˈpelu] pelo ‘hair’ Ast./Ara. creyer ‘to believe’ vs Sp. creer. Hiatus can be lost in
(Oliver 2008). all varieties, though with varying degrees of social accept-
Spanish tonic and atonic vowels show some laxing in ance: Sp. [pe.ˈɾi.o.ðo] ~ [pe.ˈɾjo.ðo] período~periodo ‘period’,
closed syllables, with high and mid vowels realized with [te.ˈa.tɾo] ~ [ˈtja.tɾo] teatro ‘theatre’. Judaeo-Spanish, Astur-
slightly lower articulations, and /a/ often realized as ian, and particularly Aragonese manifest loss of hiatus
slightly fronted (fronting/raising of atonic /a/ in final syl- (sometimes by elision: Ara. almada < almohada ‘pillow’) as
lables is also typical of Asturian and some dialects of Judaeo- well as its reinforcement by epenthesis (often a front glide):
Spanish: JuSp. [ˈavlan~ˈfavlan~ˈfavlen] hablan ‘they.speak’). Ara. [banˈdjaɾ] or [bandeˈjaɾ] bandear ‘to ring (bells)’, JuSp.
In eastern Andalusian Spanish, deletion of final /s/ has left [ˈti.a] ~ [ˈti.ja] tía ‘aunt’.
tense and lax vowels (often extended by vowel harmony to
preceding syllables) as surface markers of number: [ˈpelo]
pelo ‘hair’ vs [ˈpɛlɔ] pelos ‘hairs’. Metaphonetic raising 22.2.2 Consonants
is found in Asturian and Cantabrian, in which final atonic
/o/ and /u/ distinguish non-count from count adjectives
22.2.2.1 Stops
and some nouns; final /u/ tended to have a raising effect on Varieties of central Ibero-Romance generally retain six stop
the preceding vowel, leading to alternations of the type phonemes /p t k/, /b d ɡ/. Prototypically, the voiceless
[ˈpelo] ‘hair’ vs [ˈpilu] ‘(a) hair’ (see below; §§27.2, 57.4). stops are unaspirated plosives. These may appear alone in
Subsequent final vowel raising in some varieties has opaci- syllable/word-initial, or in syllable/word-final position in
fied the source of the change: [ˈpelu] ‘hair’ vs [ˈpilu] ‘(a) hair’ borrowings from Latin and other languages, though Arago-
(Penny 1969; 2000; Hualde 1989). nese has traditionally permitted word-final /t/: verdat
Diphthongs and triphthongs are composed of one non- ‘truth’. They may also combine with a following lateral or
high vowel (/e/ /a/ /o/) and one or two atonic high vowels tap in syllable-initial position (but initial **/dl/ is not
387
allowed, and initial /tl/ is acceptable only in some Latin extreme, eastern varieties of Aragonese (and Gascon) are
American varieties): Sp. paz ‘peace’, playa ‘beach’, prado well-known for lack of voicing of Latin voiceless inter-
‘meadow’, teatro ‘theatre’, concreto ‘concrete’, [ˈat.las] [ˈa. vocalic stops (CANTĀTUM/-AM > EAra. cantato/a ‘sung.MSG/FSG’).
tlas] atlas. In some varieties (e.g. Canarian and Cuban Span- Historical retention of /b/ in the Latin sequence /mb/ is
ish), /p t k/ are subject to variable voicing in intervocalic characteristic of Asturian: LUMBUM > Ast. llombu ‘loin’ vs Sp./
position (Hualde 2005:143). Spanish shows stylistically vari- Ara. lomo. Aragonese has tended to assimilate post-nasal
able weakening or deletion of voiceless stops when in syl- voiced stops, leading to loss of /d/ in the sequence /nd/:
lable- and word-final position, so that doctor ‘doctor’ may DEMANDARE > demanar ‘to ask for’ vs Ast./Sp./JuSp. demandar
be articulated as [dokˈtoɾ], [doɣˈtoɾ]~[doxˈtoɾ], or [doˈtoɾ]. ‘to demand; to sue’.
Deletion is frequent in word-final position (autostop [awtos Judaeo-Spanish differs in several respects. First, /ɡ/ does
ˈto] ‘hitch-hiking’), though less so in some monosyllabic not normally follow the stop/approximant alternation. In
words: pop, rock. In Asturian and Aragonese some syllable- some dialects, one finds exclusive use of [ɣ] (as in Salonika)
final voiceless stops have been vocalized: Ara. dialeuto ‘dia- or [ɡ] (as in some Turkish communities). In others, [ɡ] and
lect’, Ast. dialeutu, Sp. dialecto. [ɣ] alternate freely, while in Istanbul Judaeo-Spanish they
Phonemes /b/ /d/ /ɡ/ have a distribution similar to that can alternate as in Spanish, but some words show selection
of the voiceless stops, though word-final /d/ is common in of either [ɡ] or [ɣ] in initial position (Hualde and Saul
inherited words (Sp. verdad ‘truth’) and word-final /b/ /ɡ/ 2011:97). Second, /d/ often follows the stop/appoximant
only in borrowings. Within and across words, these phon- alternation, but loanwords can show oppositions in inter-
emes are realized with stop and approximant allophones in vocalic position: [saˈdik] ‘righteous person’ < Heb. <Ṣaddiq>
complementary distribution: /b/ (written Sp. b or v) is [β] in vs [seðaˈka] ‘charity’ < Heb. <Ṣədāqā>). Judaeo-Spanish shows
all contexts except after pauses and nasals, where it is [b] a stable contrast between phonemes /b/ and /v/, reflecting
(e.g. [β] in leve ‘light’ vs [b] in enviar); /d/ is articulated as [ð] partial conservation of medieval /b/ and /β/ (or /v/ in
except after pause, nasal, or lateral, where it is [d] (e.g. [ð] in historical southern Iberian varieties): [la ˈviða] la vida ‘the
cada ‘each’ vs [d] in caldo ‘broth); /ɡ/ is articulated as [ɣ] life’ vs [la ˈboka] la boca ‘the mouth’. However, the modern
except after pause and nasal, where it is [ɡ] (e.g. [ɣ] in mago distribution of /b/ and /v/ does not always match the
‘wizard’ vs [ɡ] in manga ‘sleeve’). This pattern is found in medieval distribution of /b/ and /β/. The contrast has
Spanish, Asturian, Aragonese (see below for Judaeo- also become important for distinguishing numerous bor-
Spanish), but there is variation. For instance, in highland rowed forms: [xaˈveɾ] ‘friend’ (from Hebrew) vs [xaˈbeɾ]
Colombia and Costa Rica, stops are preferred after all con- ‘news’ (from Turkish). The allophone [β] is no longer used,
sonants (see Hualde 2005:145f.). Syllable-final position except in some Moroccan Judaeo-Spanish varieties influ-
favours the greatest variation. Thus in óptimo ‘optimal’ enced by modern Spanish (Schwarzwald 2002:576-8).
syllable-final /p/ may be articulated as any of a range of
variants between conservative [p] and weakened [β], while
in obtener ‘to obtain’ syllable-final /b/ may be articulated as
22.2.2.2 Affricate /ʧ/
any of a range of variants between prototypical [β] and Spanish, Asturian, Aragonese, and Judaeo-Spanish all have a
emphatic [p]. Historically Astur-Leonese syllable-final phoneme /ʧ/, but not necessarily with the same origin or
voiced stops have been weakened to a lateral (known as distribution. Spanish and Asturian developed /ʧ/ from post-
‘Leonese l’) rather than a fricative or approximant (e.g. Ast. nasal consonant clusters (ancho ‘wide’ < AMPLUM), whereas
alministración ‘administration’ vs Sp. administración). Aragonese did not (cf. amplo). In Asturian and Spanish the
Historical weakening of plosives continues today. In affricate also developed from -CT- and -ULT- (FACTUM > Ast.
Spanish, word-final /d/ is often deleted ([usˈte] usted ‘you’) fecho, Sp. hecho ‘done’, MULTUM > mu(n)cho ‘much’), while
or, in Castile, devoiced ([maˈðɾiθ] Madrid); intervocalic /d/ is Aragonese (and western Astur-Leonese) retains more con-
also regularly deleted in the masculine participial ending servative forms (Ara. feito, muito). Aragonese /ʧ/ also devel-
-ado ([kanˈsao]~[kanˈsaw] cansado ‘tired.MSG’). Judaeo- ops from Latin initial G- and I-: GELĀRE > Ara. chelar ‘to freeze’,
Spanish shows variable deletion in word-final position but IUUENEM > choven ‘young’; cf. Sp. helar, joven. Judaeo-Spanish
deletion in ‑ado is rare. Both types of deletion are normal in shares the Spanish distribution and uses this phoneme in
Asturian and western Aragonese, where it is represented in many borrowings ([ʧaˈdiɾ] ‘umbrella’ < Turkish). The proto-
standard orthographies: Ast. actitú ‘attitude’, faláu ‘spoken. typical allophone of /ʧ/ is prepalatal [ʧ], but in some Anda-
MSG’, Ara. autitú, fablau, vs Sp. actitud, hablado. In Andalusian lusian and Caribbean Spanish varieties (and in Aragonese) it
and Caribbean Spanish, loss of /d/ is found in other con- is often weakened to [ʃ]: Sp. [muˈʃaʃo] muchacho ‘boy’. In
texts: [biˈβio] vivido ‘lived’, [kanˈsaː]~[kanˈsa] cansada ‘tired. other varieties it can be fronted (as in Chile), and in Canar-
FSG’, [naː]~[na] nada ‘nothing’, [ˈbia] vida ‘life’. At the other ian Spanish it is often slightly retracted, voiced, and more
388
occlusive, making its articulation similar to some allo- OSp. dodze. These facts suggest to some observers that a split
phones of /ʝ/ (so that muchacho can sound like muyayo to has occurred between /ʒ/ and /ʤ/, at least in some var-
outsiders) (Alvar and Quilis 1966). ieties (Penny 2000:180).
The sibilants of all other varieties have suffered devoi-
cing, which began in medieval Spanish and spread to other
22.2.2.3 Fricatives varieties. In Aragonese, the sibilant system was reduced to
Asturian and Aragonese retain Latin /f/: Lat. FARĪNAM > Ast. four phonemes:
farina ‘flour’, Lat. FORTEM > fuerte ‘strong’, Lat. FRIG(I)DUM > Ast.
• /θ/ (< /ʦ/ /ʣ/): caza ‘hunt’, cient ‘hundred’
fríu ‘cold’, Ara. farina, fuerte, frío. Spanish is distinguished by
• /s/ (< /s̺/ /z̺/): casa ‘house’, espeso ‘thick’
the change /f/ > [h], except before liquids and [w] (with
• /ʃ/2 (< /ʃ/): [ˈka(j)ʃa] caixa ‘box’
medieval phonologization of /h/ in contrast to /f/; see
• /ʧ/ (< /ʒ/ and [ʤ] < I-, GE-/I-): choven ‘young’, cheneral
Penny 2002:90-94). Subsequently, [h] has been lost in pres-
‘general’, prochecto ‘project’
tige varieties despite retention in orthography: harina,
fuerte, frío. In Spanish and Asturian, /f/ is articulated [f] in In Asturian, devoicing left only three voiceless phonemes,
standard or prestige varieties/styles but also as [ɸ] in distinguished by point of articulation:
popular/rural varieties (Aragonese tends to conserve labio-
• /θ/ (< /ʦ/ /ʣ/): caza ‘hunt’, cien ‘hundred’
dental articulations). The bilabial is often realized as [ʍ]
• /s/ (< /s̺/ /z̺/): casa ‘house’, espesu ‘thick’
before [w]: [ʍweɾte] fuerte ‘strong’, which may be
• /ʃ/ (< /ʃ/ /ʒ/): caxa ‘box’, xeneral ‘general’
perceived—and therefore reproduced—as [f], [h], or [x].
Judaeo-Spanish shares the patterns of change and variation The early modern Spanish system showed a three-way con-
of Spanish; however, where maintained, initial /f/ is nor- trast: predorsal /s/ vs apical /s̺/ vs prepalatal /ʃ/. In the
mally pronounced as a labiodental. In the speech of Salonika Spanish of Castile, phonemic distinctions were reinforced by
and parts of the Balkans /f/ was maintained in contexts fronting the first phoneme to [θ] and backing the last to a [x]:
where it was lost in Spanish ([ˈfoɾno] horno). In Judaeo-
• /θ/ (< /ʦ/ /ʣ/): caza ‘hunt’, cien ‘hundred’
Spanish historical /f/ before [w] is realized in some com-
• /s/ (< /s̺/ /z̺/): casa ‘house’, espeso ‘thick’
munities as [x]: [xwe] fue ‘(s)he.was’; [aˈfweɾa]~[aˈxweɾa]
• /x/ (< /ʃ/ /ʒ/): caja ‘box’, general ‘general’
afuera ‘outside’; [ˈfweɾsa]~[ˈxweɾsa] fuerza ‘power’ (Quintana
Rodríguez 2006:93-100); similar pronunciations can be Apical /s̺/ retains contrastive value (vs predorsal /s/)
found in the popular Spanish of Spain and Latin America. only in Mirandese, but [s̺] has long been retained as the
The development of the central Ibero-Romance sibilants dominant allophone of /s/ in the north of Spain. Today,
is unique within Romance. Medieval central Ibero-Romance non-apical articulations of /s/ are increasingly common in
had six sibilant phonemes (Penny 2002:98): predorsal /ʦ/ the Spanish of Castile ([ˈkas̺a] or [ˈkasa] casa ‘house’), while
and /ʣ/, apical /s̺/ and /z̺/, and prepalatal /ʃ/ and /ʒ/. The /x/ is normally articulated as a uvular fricative or trill [χ]
predorsal affricates weakened to fricatives in all varieties. ([ˈχoɾχe] Jorge). In this and other conservative varieties of
Only Mirandese conserves six phonemes. Judaeo-Spanish Spanish, as well as Asturian, Aragonese, and Judaeo-Spanish,
retains voiced and voiceless phonemes, but has lost contrast syllable-final /s/ before voiced consonants is often voiced
between predorsal and apical fricatives: ([ˈmizmo] mismo ʻsameʼ). In Andalusian and Latin American
Spanish, sibilant devoicing was accompanied by merger of
• /s/ (< /ʦ/ /s̺/): [paˈsaɾ] pasar ‘move’, [sjen] cien ‘hundred’
/ʦ/ /ʣ/ and /s̺/ /z̺/. The result was a single phoneme /s/.
• /z/ (< /ʣ/ /z̺/): [deˈziɾ]~[diˈziɾ] decir ‘to say’, [ˈkoza] cosa
As a result of these changes, the sibilants have been reduced
‘thing’
to just two phonemes in Andalusia and America:
• /ʃ/: [ˈbaʃo] bajo ‘low’ (also frequent before /k/: [buʃˈkaɾ]
buscar ‘to seek’) • /s/ (< /ʦ/ /ʣ/ /s̺/ /z̺/): casa ‘house’, caza ‘hunt’, cien
• /ʒ/: [moˈʒaðo] mojado ‘wet’. ‘hundred’
• /x/ (< /ʃ/ /ʒ/): caja ‘box’, general ‘general’
The phoneme /ʒ/ has an allophone [ʤ] which probably
existed in old Spanish and has often been regularized in In urban and northern varieties of Andalusian Spanish,
word-initial position: [ˈʤoven]~[ˈʒoven] joven ‘young’. How- and in most Latin American varieties, the primary allo-
ever, borrowings have introduced consistent [ʒ] in word- phone of /s/ is predorsal [s] (a pronunciation known as
initial position ([ʒuɾˈnal] ‘newspaper’ < French) and consist- seseo). However, in some rural varieties of Andalusia and
ent [ʤ] in word-medial position (/kaveˈʤi/ ‘coffee-shop
owner’ from Turkish). Moreover, [ʤ] consistently substi- 2
Note that Aragonese /ʃ/ derives also from sequences such as -SC-,
tutes medieval /ʣ/ in a few words: [ˈdoʤe] doce ‘twelve’, cf. which developed differently elsewhere: PISCEM > Ara. peix ‘fish’, Sp. [peθ] pez.
389
Central America, the primary allophone is a non-sibilant as well. Deletion of final nasals after nasalization of preced-
post-dental fricative (a pronunciation known as ceceo). In ing vowels is frequent in the Caribbean: [kõ pã] con pan
some Latin American varieties (e.g. Argentina, central Mex- ‘with bread’.
ico), the primary allophone of /x/ remains [x]: [ˈxoɾxe] Jorge.
However, in much of Andalusia and Latin America (e.g.
Caribbean, highland Colombia), [x] has been replaced by
22.2.2.5 Laterals
[h]: [ˈhoɾhe] Jorge. All varieties of central Ibero-Romance retain /l/, which can
In much of southern Spain, the Caribbean, and coastal be found in word/syllable initial and final contexts, regularly
Latin American, syllable-final /s/ is prone to weakening; pronounced as an alveolar lateral. The lateral suffers assimi-
[los ˈkaskos] los cascos ‘the headphones’ may be articulated lation to the point of articulation only of following coronal
with aspiration of sibilants [loh ˈkahkoh], gemination [lok consonants, within and across words: Sp. [ˈkal d ̪ o] caldo
ˈkakko], or deletion [lo ˈkako] (Alba 2004). Judaeo-Spanish ʻbrothʼ, [elˈθesto] el cesto ʻthe basketʼ, [kolʲˈʧon] colchón ʻmat-
and Spanish both have a phoneme /x/, but they appear to tressʼ. In western Andalusia, syllable-final /l/ is often articu-
be of different origin. Words of Hebrew and Arabic origin, lated as [ɾ] (cf. [ˈaɾma] alma ‘soul’; cf. arma ‘weapon’).
such as [alˈħað] ‘Sunday’ (< Arabic) and [ˈmaʕla-ˈmata] All varieties of central Ibero-Romance once had a palatal
‘approximately’ (< Hebrew), are pronounced with pharyn- lateral /ʎ/, in word- and syllable-initial position only.
geal /ħ/ /ʕ/ and glottal /h/ by Judaeo-Spanish speakers Today, Asturian and Aragonese conserve /ʎ/, as do a few
who have lived in the vicinity of Arabic speakers (e.g. in varieties of Spanish. However, the distribution of the phon-
north Africa and Jerusalem). However, most Judaeo-Spanish eme is different in each variety due to different historical
speakers pronounce these elements as velar fricative [x] or developments. In all varieties, -LL- developed to /ʎ/ (e.g.
delete them entirely (Schwarzwald 1981). CASTELLUM > Sp. castillo ‘castle’) and -LIV-, -C’L-, -G’L- developed
to /ʎ/, but only Aragonese retains this stage (MULIEREM > Ara.
muller ‘woman’, Ast. muyer, Sp. mujer); in Asturian and Span-
22.2.2.4 Nasals ish, initial PL‑, CL-, FL- frequently developed to /ʎ/ (e.g. CLAUEM
Spanish, Asturian, and Aragonese have three nasal > Sp./Ast. llave ‘key’ vs Ara. clau); in Asturian (and eastern
phonemes: /m/ /n/ /ɲ/. In Spanish, these can appear in Aragonese) word-initial L- developed to /ʎ/ (LUNAM > lluna
word- and syllable-initial position (though /ɲ/ is rare in ‘moon’ vs Sp./Ara. luna). A noteworthy feature of eastern
this position), while only /n/ is normally found in word- Aragonese (Ribagorzan) is the retention of /ʎ/ in reflexes of
final or prepausal position: Sp. mamá ‘mum’, nena ‘girl’, ñoño initial PL, CL, FL: [pʎoˈɾaɾ] [kʎaw] [ˈfʎama] (see Tuten 2003:138,
‘silly’, pan ‘bread’. Asturian generally follows this pattern, but 289). In some western Asturian varieties /ʎ/ is realized as
alternates /n/~/ɲ/ word-initially: nube~ñube ‘cloud’. In east- one of several (usually) affricate sounds, including [ʦ],
ern Aragonese (Ribagorzan), final /m/ can appear (podem ‘we. which are referred to collectively as che vaqueira and repre-
can’, Betlem ‘Bethlehem’, cf. Sp. Belén); as can final /ɲ/: estany sented with a special grapheme: l ̣l ̣una ‘moon’ (similar phe-
‘tin’ (cf. Sp. estaño). Most Judaeo-Spanish varieties have nomena have been identified in Aragonese). In western
reanalyzed /ɲ/ as [n.j]: JuSp. [es.pan.ˈjol] vs Sp. [es.pa.ˈɲol] Astur-Leonese, initial PL-, CL-, FL- which did not undergo
español ‘Spanish’. Under the influence of Hebrew and Aramaic, palatalization converted /l/ to /ɾ/: praza ‘plaza’.
Judaeo-Spanish also allows word-final [m]: [jeɾuʃaˈlaim] In Spanish, /ʎ/ is retained only in Spain (among older,
Jerusalén ‘Jerusalem’; it also assimilates word-initial /n/ to rural speakers, particularly in the north), the Andes, and
following [w]: [ˈmwevo] nuevo ‘new’. Paraguay. Elsewhere, palatal lateral /ʎ/ and palatal fricative
In all varieties of central Ibero-Romance, nasals regularly /ʝ/ have merged, creating homophones such as [ˈbaʝa] vaya
assimilate to the point of articulation of a following con- ‘go.PRS.SBJV.3SG’, baya ‘berry’, and valla ‘fence’. In Spanish, this
sonant, within and across words: Sp. [emˈbjaɾ] enviar ‘to merger (known as yeísmo) now represents the prestige
send’, [ˈeɱfasis] énfasis ‘emphasis’, [en̪toˈleðo] en Toledo ‘in norm. Judaeo-Spanish has also lost /ʎ/, normally through
Toledo’, [kanˈsaɾ] cansar ‘to tire’, [ˈteŋɡo] tengo ‘I have’. the delateralization typical of yeísmo: [ʝaˈmaɾ] llamar ‘to call’.
However, sequences of nasals are often distinguished in Since Judaeo-Spanish had previously merged [lj] with [ʎ],
formal, standard Spanish: [ˈimno] himno ‘hymn’. In Asturian, words which had this sequence now show /ʝ/: [kaˈjenti]
word-final /n/ is often velarized before vowels, pauses, and caliente ‘hot’ (Penny 2000:180).
nasals: fabla[ŋ] ‘they speak’, [eŋmarˈkaɾ] enmarcar ‘to frame’.
In western Andalusia velarization of final nasals occurs
most frequently before a pause, while in the Caribbean [ŋ]
22.2.2.6 Rhotics
is frequent in all word-final contexts, including before Spanish, Asturian, and Aragonese contrast tap /ɾ/ and trill
vowels, and in some varieties before non-velar consonants /r/ in intervocalic position: Sp. pero ‘but’ vs perro ‘dog’. The
390
trill is regular in word-initial position (Ast. rede ‘net’, Sp. red, words written with initial hi+V (hierba ‘grass’ < HĚRBAM)
Ara. ret) and following word-internal alveolar consonants present an interesting case. Literate speakers tend to articu-
/n/ /l/ /s/: Ast. vienres ‘Friday’, Sp. alrededor ‘around’. The late only [j] in initial position; however, popular, casual
tap is found in consonant clusters: Ast./Ara. prau, Sp. prado speech favours strengthening that is typical of /ʝ/. This is
‘meadow’. In syllable- and word-final position (Sp. cortar ‘to reflected in informal Spanish writing (e.g. yerba, which is
cut’), the opposition is neutralized; [ɾ] is unmarked, while [r] also the standard Asturian form). Judaeo-Spanish prefers [j]
is often used to mark emphasis. In Asturian and Aragonese, for phoneme /ʝ/ and for words written with hi+V: [jo] yo ‘I’,
final /ɾ/ tends to be elided in infinitives followed by a clitic, [ˈjave] llave ‘key’, [ˈjeɾva] hierba ‘grass’.
although this is not reflected in Aragonese orthography: Word-initial [w] is found in diphthongized reflexes of
Ast. velu, Ara. veyer-lo ‘to.see=him/it’. Aragonese also tends initial Latin Ŏ (Lat. OS(SUM) > hueso ‘bone’) but also in borrow-
to elide /r/ phrase-finally and when followed by the plural ings such as huipil/güipil ‘Guatemalan blouse’. In prestige
morpheme /s/: [baˈlos] valors ‘values’. use, speakers are careful to articulate [w] (analysable as a
It is often claimed that Judaeo-Spanish no longer con- glide realization of /u/), at least in some words (hueso
trasts /ɾ/ and /r/ (Penny 2000:178), since neither traditional ‘bone’). However, the initial consonant in these words is
nor modern orthography has marked a distinction between often strengthened to a fricative [ɣw], with simultaneous
them. However, the opposition is sometimes realized in articulation of the labial and velar aspects (suggesting a
certain forms: [ˈpeɾo] pero ‘but’ vs [ˈpero] perro ‘dog’. In separate phoneme /w/), or even to a stop + glide: [ɡw].
Spanish, both /r/ and /ɾ/ show variation in their articula- The stop articulation [ɡw] is clearly sequential and suggests
tion. For instance, /r/ is often articulated as a retroflex a realization of two existing phonemes: /ɡ/ and /u/, as in
sibilant in La Rioja (Spain), Mexico, the Andes, and Argen- Sp. guardia ‘guard’. Therefore, illiterate speakers may have
tina, while it is often partially or fully devoiced in Caribbean in mind /gu/+V and vary between stronger and weaker
varieties. In Puerto Rico /r/ is velarized in rural speech. articulations of this, as in [ˈa(ɣ)wa] agua ‘water’.
Final /ɾ/ is often lateralized in Caribbean varieties, allowing In other varieties initial strengthening has become the
both arma ‘weapon’ and alma ‘soul’ to be articulated as norm, but in Judaeo-Spanish, [we] is reinforced not only in
[ˈalma]. In some varieties (e.g. in the Dominican Republic initial position ([ˈɣwezmo]~[ˈɡwezmo/u] OSp. huesmo ‘smell’)
and Cuba), syllable-final /ɾ/ undergoes a range of weaken- but also in post-consonantal position, so that [ˈʤweves] jueves
ing processes, including aspiration, gemination, nasaliza- ‘Thursday’ becomes [ʤuˈɣweves]~[ʤuˈɡweves]. In other
tion, vocalization, deletion: [ˈpah.te], [ˈpat.te], [ˈpaŋ.te], forms, the resyllabification required by strengthening is
[ˈpaj.te], [ˈpa.te] for parte ‘part’. accomplished through vowel prothesis: [elˈɣweɣo] luego
‘later’ (Penny 2000:179). When the preceding consonant is
voiceless, the reinforcing labiovelar element devoices to
22.2.2.7 /ʝ/ and initial [w]- [ʍ], reanalysed as [f] or [x]; thus, Sp. sueño ‘sleep, dream’
The phoneme /ʝ/ is typically articulated as a voiced slit may be realized as [ˈswenjo]~[eʃˈfwenjo]~[eʃˈxwenjo] (Penny
fricative [ʝ] or glide [j] in all central Ibero-Romance var- 2000:179; Quintana Rodríguez 2006:33-40).
ieties. Its distribution is not the same in all varieties, since it
developed from different sources, such as onglides of diph-
thongs in initial position, delateralization of /ʎ/, and glide 22.2.3 Prosody
epenthesis (typical of Asturian, Aragonese, and Judaeo-
Spanish): yo ‘I’, yegua ‘mare’, Ast. mayu, Sp./Ara. mayo
22.2.3.1 Syllable structure
‘May’, Ast. muyer ‘woman; wife’ (cf. Sp. mujer, Ara. muller, Central Ibero-Romance varieties share similar constraints
JuSp. [muˈʒeɾ]), Ast./Ara. creyer (cf. Sp. creer) ‘to believe’, on syllable structure. Nuclei may include monophthongs,
JuSp. [koˈmijan] comían ‘they ate’. In Spanish, at least, a diphthongs, or triphthongs. Word-internal and word-medial
number of variant articulations have developed: [ʒ], [ʤ], onsets are limited to single consonants or obstruent + liquid
[ɟ]. Variants [ʒ] and [ʃ] are typical of Buenos Aires, with clusters (Sp. ma.dre ‘mother’); three segments are not
younger speakers preferring [ʃ]. In many varieties, some or allowed in onsets. Judaeo-Spanish variably accepts tautosyl-
all of [j] [ʝ] [ʒ] [ʤ] [ɟ] alternate in the speech of single labic /s/-+ stop (+ liquid) in onsets (JuSp. [spon.ˈʤaɾ]~
speakers. In Asturian, [j] or [ʝ] alternate with stop or affri- [esponˈʤaɾ] esponjar ‘rinse’), but Spanish, Asturian, and
cate [ɟ], which tends to appear after pauses and nasals (cf. Aragonese do not, requiring resyllabification and prothetic
Mott 2007:106 for Aragonese). This pattern, which often /e/ in both inherited words and borrowings with such clus-
includes post-lateral contexts, follows that of the obstruents ters: Sp. [es.kɾi.ˈβiɾ] escribir (< SCRIBERE) ‘to write’, [esˈtɾes] estrés
/b/ /d/ /g/ and is increasingly current in many varieties of ‘stress’. Interestingly, Judaeo-Spanish accepts initial conson-
Spanish (e.g. in central Spain, Puerto Rico). In Spanish, ant clusters in Spanish words (brodar ‘to embroider’), but not
391
in Hebrew loanwords ([beɾaˈxa] ‘blessing’ cf. ModHeb. braxa, stress on one syllable (and, at least in Spanish, secondary
[sefaˈɾað] ‘Spain’ cf. ModHeb. Sfarad). stress occurs only as a rhetorical device). Some compounds
Central Ibero-Romance varieties strongly favour open (pez espada ‘fish sword (= swordfish)’) and adverbs ending in
syllables. Coda consonants tend to suffer weakening and -mente ([ˈrapiðaˈmente] rápidamente ‘quickly’) carry two pri-
deletion (see above) and syllable codas permit far fewer mary stresses (Hualde 2013:161-3). Stress in central Ibero-
consonants than onsets. Word-medial consonants are Romance is unpredictable and phonemic; it may fall on the
attached to a preceding syllable if they cannot be syllabified final syllable ([pɾaktiˈko] practicó ‘practiced.PRT.3SG’), the
as an onset; thus **/st/ is disallowed in Sp. cons.tan.te ‘con- penultimate ([pɾakˈtiko] practico ‘practice.PRS.IND.1SG’), or
stant’. In Spanish, word-medial codas include stops and /f/, the antepenultimate (Sp. [ˈpɾaktiko] práctico ‘practical’).
usually found in learnèd borrowings, as well as more fre- Stress can fall only on one of the last three syllables of
quent /s θ n l ɾ/: asco ‘disgust’, manta ‘blanket’; Judaeo- conventional words; in standard varieties, enclitics may be
Spanish allows word-medial /x/. Word-medial coda clusters written as part of the verb (with indication of pre-
are found exclusively in learnèd forms (e.g. /eks.tra.ˈer/ antepenultimate stress) but do not influence lexical stress
extraer ‘to.extract’), which historically have been prone to placement: cf. Sp. ¡pásamelo! ‘pass.IMP.2SG=to.me=it (= pass it
simplification: [es.tɾa.ˈeɾ]. Word-final codas are even more to me)’. Two generalizations can be made about stress
tightly constrained: stops are found only in recent borrow- placement. First, in the Spanish of Castile, Asturian, and
ings, but /s n l ɾ r/ are allowed in all varieties (Sp. mes Aragonese, words ending in a consonant other than /s/ or
‘month’, pan ‘bread’, papel ‘paper’, vivir ‘to live’). Spanish and /n/ are normally oxytones: Sp. [ka.ˈpaθ] capaz ‘capable’, Sp.
Judaeo-Spanish allow /d/ and /x/ (Sp. reloj ‘watch’); bor- verdad, Ara. verdat ‘truth’, Sp./Ast./Ara. pasar ‘to pass’ (in
rowings in Judaeo-Spanish show numerous coda consonants Latin American Spanish and Judaeo-Spanish, words where
not normally found in Spanish. Aragonese allows /ʃ/ (peix final /θ/ is replaced by /s/ remain as oxytones: Lat. Am. Sp.
‘fish’) and /t/ (cf. Ara. virtut ‘virtue’ , Sp. virtud, Ast. virtú), [kaˈpas] capaz ‘capable’ vs [ˈkapas] capas ‘layers’). Second,
though this is often deleted. Final /θ/ occurs in Asturian, the great majority of words ending in a vowel, /n/ or /s/
Aragonese, and Spanish of Castile: paz ‘peace’. show stress on the penultimate syllable: Sp. [ˈaβlo]/[ˈaβlas]/
Word-final consonant clusters are traditionally disallowed. [ˈaβlan] hablo/hablas/hablan ‘speak.PRS.IND.1SG/2SG/3PL’, JuSp.
In Aragonese, final vowel deletion has created final consonant [ˈbovo] bobo ‘stupid’, Ast. faltosu ‘stupid’, Ara. mesmo ‘same’.
clusters in /nt/ /st/ and /ɾt/, but these are usually simplified: Exceptions to these two patterns also occur: Sp./Ast.
Ara. [pwen] puent/puen ‘bridge’. Addition of plural morpheme [ˈlapiθ]/[ˈʎapiθ] lápiz/llápiz ‘pencil’. Proparoxytones are
/s/ has also created coda clusters such as /ns/ /ls/ /ɾs/ (Ara. always exceptional within the general stress patterns of
belsetáns ‘inhabitants of Bielsa’), which are disallowed in Span- central Ibero-Romance: Sp. física ‘physics’, JuSp. [ˈmuzika]
ish, but these too are sometimes subject to simplification: Ara. música ‘music’. These are often learnèd borrowings and thus
[koɾðés] corders ‘lambs’. In Spanish, newer borrowings are less frequent in the rural varieties of Asturian and Arago-
often pronounced (at least by younger speakers) with final nese; indeed Aragonese often converts them to paroxy-
consonants (see above) and clusters (in plurals with /s/) that tones: [ˈmeðiko]~[meˈðiko] médico ‘doctor’. Judaeo-Spanish
are traditionally disallowed: chefs, pósters. retains original stress in borrowings and this creates
In spoken discourse, resyllabification of consonants numerous exceptions to the tendencies of Spanish: cf. Heb-
and vowels is normal in all varieties/styles (e.g. Sp. ha.bla.n rew borrowings [saˈdik] ‘righteous person’ and [ˈsadik]
es.pa.ñol ‘they.speak Spanish’). In faster speech, various ‘name of the eighteenth Hebrew letter’.
processes can lead to synalepha; contiguous same vowels Given its relative lack of difference in quantity or quality
may coalesce ([menˈkan̪ta] me encanta ‘to.me= it.enchants between tonic and atonic vowels, Spanish is often charac-
(= I love it)’, different vowels may each shorten (['es.te̯o̯ɾ.ðe. terized as having ‘syllable-timing’ (a perception of regular-
na.ˈðoɾ] este ordenador ‘this computer’), suffer diphthongiza- ity in the timing of all syllabic sonority peaks, rather than
tion ([mjeɾ.ˈma.na] mi hermana ‘my sister’), or deletion, only the sonority peaks of stressed syllables). This classifi-
which is common in all popular varieties (Ast. [me.ˈnu.ðas. cation is undoubtedly an oversimplification, since prosody
ˈtɾo.θa] menuda estroza ‘quite.a disaster’) and sometimes leads to lengthening of some stressed vowels (see below),
represented orthographically (Ara. m’has visto ‘me=have. and the segments which make up each syllable contribute to
PRS.IND.2SG seen (=you have seen me)’. differences in syllable length (e.g. low vowels are longer
than high vowels; voiceless stops are longer than voiced
stops; a trill is longer than a tap), but it is also true that tight
22.2.3.2 Stress and rhythm constraints on onsets and codas contribute to less variation
In central Ibero-Romance, most classes of words, aside from in the length of these units. If ‘syllable-timing’ and ‘stress-
function words such as prepositions and conjunctions, carry timing’ are understood as points on a continuum, it seems
392
clear that Spanish (and central Ibero-Romance generally) is Caribbean Spanish and Asturian (as in Galician), a circum-
better characterized by ‘syllable-timed’. flex pattern is preferred for unmarked yes/no questions; in
this pattern, pitch rises to a peak on the first accented
syllable and continues high until the final accented syllable
22.2.3.3 Intonation (without downsteps), and is then followed by a sharp final
Intonation varies greatly in different varieties of central fall (Sosa 1999:204; Hualde 2005:270; López Bobo et al. 2008).
Ibero-Romance and Spanish, but in all varieties, lexically- Mott (2010:66) provides evidence of a similar pattern in
stressed syllables serve as anchoring points for pitch Chistabino Aragonese. For comparative analysis of a range
changes, and intonation peaks associated with a stressed of Spanish varieties, see Prieto and Roseano (2010a). See also
syllable are often realized on the post-tonic (however, cit- §22.4.3.4.
ation and emphatic forms show intonation peaks, along
with increases in intensity and duration, on the stressed
syllable).
22.2.4 Orthography
In prototypical broad focus declarative sentences of
Spanish (Manuel nos mandó un regalo ‘Manuel to.us= sent a The modern writing systems used to represent central
gift’), the prenucleus begins with low pitch, followed by a Ibero-Romance varieties are largely phonemic. Table 22.1
rise on the first tonic syllable and a peak on the post-tonic. presents the phoneme–grapheme correspondences in each
Subsequent prenuclear peaks are also realized on post- orthography as most recently specified by relevant author-
tonics but are progressively downstepped. The stressed ities of Spanish (Real Academia Española 2010) and Asturian
syllable of the sentence nucleus is realized with the lowest (Academia de la Llingua Asturiana 2005). There is no com-
peak (or with a continuous fall in pitch), followed by a monly accepted orthographic system for Aragonese; some
gradual decline. Despite its lower intonation peak, the last systems are more phonemic, such as the ‘norms of Huesca’
stressed syllable is often lengthened and perceived as hav- (Consello d’a Fabla Aragonesa 1987), and others more
ing greater prominence than preceding accents (thus Span- etymological, such as that of the Academia de l’Aragonés
ish often prefers to place focalized items in final position). (2010); we represent the more recent norms below and
This general pattern holds for most varieties of Spanish (but generally employ them in this chapter. The case of Judaeo-
see Sosa 1999:189; Hualde 2005:275), Istanbul Judaeo- Spanish is more complicated. During the twentieth century,
Spanish (but see Hualde and Saul 2011:105), Chistabino many Sephardic communities started using Roman scripts
Aragonese (but cf. Mott 2010:58), and Asturian (see further (Bunis 1992; 1999:73f.). A particularly well-known Roman
Alvarellos Pedrero et al. 2011). script (much influenced by English orthography) is that
Unmarked pronominal questions (¿Quién nos mandó el developed and used by the journal Aki Yerushalayim since
regalo? ‘Who to.us= sent the gift?’) are realized with a falling 1979, which we represent below in the column labelled
contour similar to that of declaratives. However, the ‘JuSp.-AY’. However, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth
stressed syllable of the question word is articulated with century, Judaeo-Spanish was usually written with the Heb-
the highest pitch (often without displacement of the peak), rew alphabet, which is primarily consonantal and read from
with other accents downstepped and a fall after the final right to left (Schwarzwald 2002; Orfali 2010). Two principal
stressed syllable. A final rise is used in some pronominal scripts were used: the Hebrew square form for printed
questions in order to mark politeness or tentativeness. liturgical texts (which often included vocalization, or the
These patterns appear in all varieties of central Ibero- use of diacritics to indicate vowels, as in ‫ˈ[ אוְֹר ֵדין‬oɾden]
Romance, but for the Chistabino variety of Aragonese, ‘order’), and the Rashi script for most other texts (without
Mott (2010:66) provides evidence of unmarked use of final vocalization, as in ‫)אורדין‬. Both scripts are represented in
rises in this question type. the right-hand column of Table 22.1. Note that an empty cell
Prototypical yes/no questions often do not differ from indicates that a particular phoneme is not conventionally
declaratives in their syntax, so intonation is crucial for their considered relevant for that variety. Parentheses appear
pragmatic marking (cf. María te dejó una llave ‘María to.you around letters used only in marked foreign borrowings.
left a key’ and ¿María te dejó una llave? ‘Did María leave you a Other sound–grapheme correspondences occur which are
key?’). In most varieties of Spanish and Istanbul Judaeo- not included in Table 22.1. For instance, the letter h is used
Spanish, the last stressed syllable is articulated with a low in Spanish, Asturian, and Aragonese but does not corres-
pitch followed by a sharp rise; the prenucleus is like that of pond to a phone in the standards: Sp. [ˈombɾe] hombre ‘man’.
declaratives, but, as in pronominal questions, the entire The sequence /ks/ is sometimes represented by x in Span-
sentence is often articulated in a higher pitch range (Sosa ish, Aragonese, and JuSp.-AY (where it may also represent
1999:198; Alvarellos Pedrero et al. 2011 for Asturian). In /ɡz/): Sp. [ekˈsamen]~[eɣˈsamen] examen ‘exam’, JuSp.
393
Table 22.1 Conventional phoneme–grapheme correspondences of central Ibero-Romance

SP . AST . ARA . JUSP .- AY JUSP .- HEB . SQUARE / RASHI FORM NAME
/a/ a a a a ‫אא‬ Aleph, word-medial and final position

‫הה‬ He, word-final only
/e/ e e e e ‫יי‬ Yod
/o/ o o o o ‫וו‬ Vav
/i/ i, y i, y i, y i ‫יי‬ Yod
/u/ u, ü u, ü u, ü u ‫וו‬ Vav
/p/ p p p p ‫פפ‬ Pe
/t/ t t t t ‫טט‬ Tet
‫תת‬ (Tav in Hebrew words)
/k/ ca,o,u ca,o,u ca,o,u, que,i k ‫קק‬ Kof
que,i, (k) que,i q+üe,i ‫ככ‬ (Kaf in Hebrew words)
q+ua,o, (k)
/b/ b, v, (w) b, v b, v, (w) b ‫בב‬ Bet
/v/ v '‫'ב ב‬ Bet +diacritica
/d/ d d d d ‫דד‬ Dalet (=[d])
‫ד' 'ד‬ Dalet +diacritic (=[ð])
/ɡ/ ɡa,o,u, ɡue,i ɡa,o,u, ɡue,i ɡa,o,u, ɡue,i ɡ ‫גג‬ Gimel
ɡ+ü e,i ɡ+ü e,i ɡ+ü e,i
/ʧ/ ch ch ch (j) ch '‫'ג ג‬ Gimel+diacritic
/ʤ/ dj '‫'ג ג‬ Gimel+diacritic
/f/ f f f f ‫'פ 'פ‬ Pe+diacritic
/h/ (h) ‫הה‬ (He in proper names,
toponyms and loan words)
/s/ s s s, sce,i s ‫םס‬ Samekh
‫צצ‬ (Tsadi in Hebrew words
(rarely /ʦ/))
/z/ z ‫זז‬ Zayin
/θ/ z, ce,i z, ce,i z, ce,i, -tzb
/ʃ/ x x, -ix- sh ‫שש‬ Shin
/ʒ/ j '‫'ז ז‬ Zayin+diacritic
/x/ j, ɡe,i, (h) (h) (j) h, .hc ‫חח‬ Ḥet (also [ħ]) in Hebrew
& Arabic words
‫ככ‬ (Kaf in Hebrew words)
/l/ l l l l ‫לל‬ Lamed
/ʎ/ ll ll ll
/m/ m m m m ‫ממ‬ Mem
/n/ n n n n ‫ננ‬ Nun
/ɲ/ ñ ñ ny ny ‫ינ ינ‬ Nun Yod (=[nj]</ɲ/)
/ɾ/ -r-, -r -r-, -r -r-, -r r ‫רר‬ Resh
/r/ r-, -rr- r-, -rr- r-, -rr- r ‫רר‬ Resh
/ʝ/ y y y y ‫יי‬ Yod
hi+V ‫יי יי‬ Double Yod
‫יל יל‬ Lamed Yodd
initial hu+V ɡüe,i ue- (<Ŏ) ɡu+V ‫וג וג‬ Gimel Vav
/u/+V or ɡüe,i ɡua,o,u hu+V ‫וו וו‬ Double Vav
394
/w/ or ɡua,o,u, ɡü+V, (w)

/ɡu/+V (w)
/ʕ/ ‫עע‬ Ayin in Hebrew words
a Vav has rarely been used to represent /v/ since the 19th c.
b This digraph represents [ʦ] in the eastern variety of Ribagorzano in Benasque.
c This grapheme appears in sequence s.h (e.g. es.huenyo ‘sleep, dream’), distinct from sh.
d From the 19th c. double yod represented yeísmo, but lamed yod (previously = /ʎ/ and [lj]) was maintained for some common words such as ella, ellos
‘she, they’, though pronounced [ˈeja, ˈelos].
[egzaˈmen]. Judaeo-Spanish /ks/ was also represented by classified within this schema: whisky/güisqui ‘whisky.MSG’
‫ סק סק‬or ‫ זג זג‬in the Hebrew scripts. In Judaeo-Spanish < Eng. whisky, JuSp. [zaˈxu]~[zaˈxuð] ‘prerogative.MSG’ < Heb.
Hebrew scripts, the aleph (‫ )א א‬was used before any initial zəxut. Inherited nouns usually derive from Latin accusative
vowel and between word-medial vowels. forms, though some relics of other cases remain (e.g. UENERIS
In Spanish and Asturian, any word which does not follow ‘(day) of Venus’ > viernes ‘Friday’). Case marking has been lost
the general tendencies of lexical stress must be written with in central Ibero-Romance, except for residual markings found
an accent mark (in the 2010 Aragonese norms, use of accent in personal pronouns, but gender and number inflections are
marks is restricted to cases of possible confusion, such as retained.
verb forms). In Spanish, exceptional forms include all pro- Every noun is either masculine or feminine; a very few
paroxytones (rápido ‘fast’), oxytones which end in a vowel, Latin plural neuters are retained as feminine singular with
-n or -s (plató ‘film set’, relación ‘relation’), and paroxytones collective meaning (cf. Sp. leño ‘log.MSG’ < LIGNUM ‘wood.NSG’
which end in any other consonant letter (huésped ‘guest’). but leña ‘firewood.FSG’ < LIGNA ‘(pieces of) wood.NPL’). Most
Written accents are also used to indicate hiatus in cases class I nouns are feminine, class II are masculine, and class
where they could otherwise be read as diphthongs (Sp. III are either masculine or feminine. Exceptions to these
[ba.ˈul] baúl ‘trunk’, [fi.lo.so.ˈfi.a] filosofía ‘philosophy’) and patterns exist (Sp. día ‘day.M’, mapa ‘map.M’, problema ‘prob-
as a diacritic to distinguish some common homophones (Sp. lem.M’; mano ‘hand.F’). Since class III nouns show no overt
atonic tu ‘your.2SG’ vs tonic tú ‘you.2SG’). Finally, a distinctive marking for gender, they are prone to variation within and
characteristic of Spanish (and Asturian and Aragonese) across varieties. Thus, calor ‘heat’ is masculine in standard
punctuation is the use of inverted question and exclamation Spanish, can be feminine in non-standard varieties (Anda-
marks (¿Quién eres? ‘Who are you?’, ¡Es increíble! ‘It’s incred- lusia, Río de la Plata, the Andes), and is normally feminine
ible!’), which signal the relevant sentence types from the (though still variable) in Asturian, Aragonese, and Judaeo-
beginning of the phrase. Spanish. Some terms are masculine or feminine according
to context of use (Sp. mar ‘sea’, Ast. sangre ‘blood’, Ara. clin
‘mane’). Gender of nouns which refer to inanimate objects is
arbitrary. Nouns with animate referents normally allow
22.3 Morphology gender alternation (Sp. un niño/una niña ‘a boy/a girl’,
señor/señora ʻMr/Mrsʼ), although epicenes exist (e.g. Sp.
22.3.1 Nominal group persona ‘person’ and serpiente ‘serpent’ are feminine inde-
pendent of the sex of the referent) and some forms do not
22.3.1.1 Nouns and adjectives mark gender overtly (e.g. Sp. periodista ‘journalist’ can be
In central Ibero-Romance most nouns can be grouped into masculine or feminine). In Spanish, overt marking of sexual
three inflectional classes based on singular forms: class I, gender is increasing, with some nouns in -ta developing a
ending in -a, continues the Latin first declension (Sp. amiga masculine form ending in -to (modisto ‘fashion designer.M’)
‘friend.FSG’); class II, ending in -o (Ast. -u) continues the Latin and some masculine nouns ending in -e developing a dis-
second declension (Sp. amigo ‘friend.MSG’, Ast. amigu); class tinct feminine form in -a (jefe/jefa ‘boss’; presidente/presi-
III, ending in -e or a consonant, continues the Latin third denta ‘president’; Kattán-Ibarra and Pountain 2003:11-15;
declension (Sp. puente ‘bridge.MSG’, fuente ‘fountain.FSG’, mar Batchelor and San José 2010:64-83). Historically, gender
‘sea.M/FSG’, nación ‘nation.FSG’). Borrowings are usually was exploited to make semantic distinctions (Pountain
adapted to one of these classes, though some cannot be 2005) and relics of this use persist; relative size could be
395
distinguished (Ast. deu (M) ‘finger, toe’, dea (F) ‘big toe’; Sp. 22.3.1.2 Determiners, possessives, quantifiers,
cántaro/cántara (M/F) ‘pitcher/large pitcher’) as well as (pos- interrogatives
sibly size-related) distinctions between trees and their
The definite article is derived from ILLE ‘that’. In Spanish and
fruits/flowers (cerezo/cereza (M/F) ‘cherry tree/cherry’, ca-
Judaeo-Spanish the forms are el (MSG), la (FSG), los (MPL), las
melio/camelia (M/F) ‘camellia.tree/camellia’). In a few cases,
(FPL). There exists a neuter article lo (Ara. el), that creates
gender changes with number (arte ‘art.MSG’ vs artes ‘arts.FPL’).
mass or generic nouns from adjectives (as well as neuter
Nominalized adjectives and parts of speech are masculine
relativizers lo que ‘what’ and lo cual ‘which’): lo bueno ‘it.NSG
(Sp. el azul ‘the.MSG colour.blue’, el cómo ‘the.MSG how’).
good.MSG (= the good thing)’; lo que quieran ‘it.NSG that want.
Number is expressed by a separate morpheme. In Span-
PRS.SBJV.3PL’(= whatever they may want)’. Asturian and Ara-
ish, singular nouns ending in a vowel mark the plural with -s
gonese share similar systems, but Aragonese definite art-
(Sp. perro/perros ‘dog/s’; casa/casas ‘house/s’; cantante/can-
icles are o (MSG), a (FSG), os (MPL), as (FSG), and these have
tantes ‘singer/s’). Those ending in a consonant do so with -es
numerous contextual/dialectal variants (including lo/ro/l’,
(Sp. profesor/profesores ‘teacher/s’; voz/voces ‘voice/s’), as
la/ra/l’, los/ros, las/ras), with apocopated forms appearing
may standard Spanish words ending in a tonic vowel:
before vowels. Asturian and Aragonese also retain con-
esquí/esquís/esquíes ‘ski/s’. Those ending in atonic vowel + s
tracted forms of high-frequency preposition + article com-
have identical plurals (martes ‘Tuesday/s’), while those end-
binations: Ast./Ara. na casa ‘in.the.FSG house.FSG’ vs Sp. en la
ing in a tonic vowel + -s add -es (ciprés/cipreses ‘cypress/-es’).
casa. The indefinite article is un (MSG) / una (FSG); plural unos
In Aragonese, plurals may add -s directly after a consonant
and unas ‘some’ function as quantifiers. Aragonese retains a
(mon(t)s ‘mountains’); words ending in -ero form the plural
partitive article de (see §22.4.1). Demonstratives form a
by placing -s immediately after the root (cordero/corders
three-point system that correlates broadly with grammat-
‘lamb/s’). In some varieties, historical final /t/ + plural /s/
ical person: Sp. este/esta/estos/estas ‘this (near me).MSG/FSG/
has developed to /θ/: Ara. [toθ] totz/toz ‘all.MPL’ vs tot ‘all.
MPL/FPL’, ese/esa/esos/esas ‘this/that (near you)’, aquel/
MSG’. In Asturian, plural marking includes vowel alternation:
aquella/aquellos/aquellas ‘that (over there)’. Neuter forms
masculine ‑u/-os (llobu/llobos ‘wolf/-ves’), feminine -a/-es
esto/eso/aquello refer to propositions and assertions. Astur-
(casa/cases ‘house/s’). Judaeo-Spanish sometimes employs
ian (esti/esi/aquel) and Aragonese (iste/ixe/aquel) show simi-
Hebrew endings for masculine plural /-ím/ and feminine
lar forms, while Judaeo-Spanish has developed a primarily
plural ‑/ot/ (pronounced [oð]): [laˈðɾones]~[laðɾoˈnim]
two-point system, contrasting este/esta ‘this.MSG/FSG’ and
‘thieves’, [maˈkas]~[maˈkoð] ‘plagues’ (< Heb. makka).
akel/akeya ‘that.MSG/FSG’.
Both predicative and attributive adjectives agree in gen-
Possessives are derived from Latin equivalents. Spanish
der with the noun to which they refer: una calle larga ‘a.FSG
nuestro/a/os/as ‘our.MSF/FSG/MPL/FPL’ (cf. JuSp. muestro, whose
street.FSG long.FSGʼ; la calle es larga ‘ the.FSG street.FSG is long.
FSG’. Most adjectives show the same set of inflectional classes
/m/ results from assimilation to following [w]) and second
as nouns (I: Sp. buena ‘good.FSG’, II: Sp. bueno ‘good.MSG’, III: person plural vuestro/a/os/as ‘your.2PL’ (also JuSp. [ˈɡwestro,a,
Sp. fuerte ‘strong.SG’). Adjectives mark plural as do nouns os,as]) are used as preposed and postposed (including predi-
(buena/buenas ‘good.FSG/FPL’, bueno/buenos ‘good.MSG/PL’, cate) forms, but in the singular and third person plural,
fuerte/fuertes ‘strong.SG/PL’, trabajador/trabajadores/trabaja- separate forms have developed, with prenominal forms
dora/trabajadoras ‘hardworking.MSG/MPL/FSG/FPL’; cf. Ast. FPL marked only for number (mi amigo ‘my friend’ vs un amigo
trabayadores). Adjectives ending in -sta or -ta as well as mío ‘a friend of mine’): mi/s vs mío/a/s (cf. JuSp. [ˈmijo]) ‘my’,
those ending in -e are invariant for gender (Sp. egoísta tu/s vs tuyo/a/s ‘your.2SG’, su/s vs suyo/a/s ‘his, her, its, their,
‘selfish’, inteligente ‘intelligent’, difícil ‘difficult’). Adjectives your.3SG/PL, your.3PL’. Monosyllabic preposed forms are clitics
ending in consonants often do not mark gender overtly in Spanish and Judaeo-Spanish, while postposed and predi-
(cortés ‘courteous.SG’). However, there is variation across cate forms are tonic adjectives. Corresponding preposed
varieties (cf. Sp. nacional ‘national.SG’ and JuSp. [nasjoˈnal/a] forms in Asturian are tonic mió/s, to/s, so/s. Aragonese uses
‘national.M/FSG’), and a subset of consonant-final adjectives only bisyllabic tonic forms in all positions (os míos uellos ‘the.
(along with their nominalized forms) regularly mark fem- MPL my.MPL eyes.MPL (= my eyes)’; see also §22.4.1.1).
inine gender by adding -a: e.g. those ending in ‑dor/-dora (as Quantifiers generally follow the morphological pattterns
in trabajador/a ‘hardworking.M/F’) and in -és/-esa (francés of adjectives: tanta/-s (FSG/PL) ‘so much/many’, tanto/-s (MSG/
‘French.MSG’, francesa ‘French.FSG’). A few masculine singular PL); bastante/-s (SG/PL) ‘enough’. The quantifier cada ‘each’ is
adjectives (e.g. bueno ‘good’, primero ‘first’) delete the final invariable. Numerals (other than uno/-a ‘one.M/F’ and mul-
vowel before nouns and grande shortens to gran before tiples of 100) are also uninflected (dos casas ‘two houses.FPL’
masculine and feminine singular nouns: un buen vino ‘a.MSG but doscientas casas ‘two.hundred.FPL houses.FPL’), but west-
good.MSG wine.MSG’; una gran mujer ‘a.FSG great.SG woman’). ern Asturian retains duas/dues ‘two.FPL’. Most interrogatives
396
are similar to those of other Romance languages: qué ‘what’; passive marker and as a subject clitic in indefinite se con-
quién/-es ‘who.SG/PL’ (Ara. qui ‘who’, JuSp. ken~kien); cómo structions (see §22.4.2.5). In Spanish, se (an analogical
‘how’ (Ara. quiénto ‘in what manner’); cuándo ‘when’; replacement of OSp. ge) also functions as an allomorph of
cuánto/-s ‘how much/many’; por qué ‘why’; dónde ‘where’ le/les in third person dative + accusative clitic sequences: se
(JuSp. Ast. ónde, Ast. ú, Ara. do/don), cuál/-es ‘which.SG/PL’ lo di ‘to.him/her/them= it= I.gave’.
(for which Judaeo-Spanish, Asturian, and Aragonese also Judaeo-Spanish, Asturian, and Aragonese have similar sys-
mark gender: cuálo/-a ‘which.M/F’). tems with some differences in basic forms. For instance,
Judaeo-Spanish shows alternating subject forms mozotros/
as~mozós/ás ‘we’ (on analogy with muestro ‘our’ and clitic
22.3.1.3 Pronouns
forms) and vozotros/vozós ‘you.2PL’. Some Aragonese varieties
Central Ibero-Romance has tonic subject pronouns, tonic use third person subject forms er (MSG), era (FSG), ers (MPL), and
oblique pronouns (prepositional complements) and accusa- eras (FPL). In Aragonese and some American Spanish varieties
tive, dative, and reflexive clitics. Basic forms of standard subject forms are regularized as obliques: Ara. pa tu ‘for you’,
Spanish are presented in Table 22.2. con yo ‘with I’. Asturian and Aragonese alternate first person
Usted ‘you.SG’ (< vuestra merced ‘your grace’) and ustedes plural clitic nos with mos, while Judaeo-Spanish uses only the
‘you.PL’ function as formal/deferential second person tonic latter form. Some Aragonese varieties allow el (MSG) and es
pronouns; they mark gender only on corresponding (MPL) as accusative clitics; Asturian uses -y, -yos/ys, and Ara-
third person clitics: a usted la conozco ‘PA you her.FSG= I. gonese li, lis as third person dative clitics. Both Asturian and
know (= I know you)’. First and second person subject
Aragonese show frequent apocope of clitics. Alone among
plurals developed from fusion of OSp. nos and vos with
central Ibero-Romance varieties, Aragonese retains adverbial
otros/as ‘others.MPL/FPL’. Vos ‘you.2PL’ survives in some rural
clitics, including en/ne (< INDE) ‘thence; thereof ’ and, less
varieties of Spain, and vos ‘you.2SG’ persists in many parts of
vigorously, bi/i/ibi/ie/ye (< IBI) ‘there’. En/ne typically pronom-
Latin America (a use known as voseo). Oblique pronouns
inalizes (or copies) partitive and other phrases with de: no li’n
occur after prepositions (a mí ‘to me’, de ti ‘of you.2SG’), but
central Ibero-Romance shows two suppletive forms, includ- fablan ‘not to.him/her= thereof= they.speak (= they don’t
ing Sp. conmigo/contigo ‘with me/with you.SG’, which derive speak to him/her (about those things)’; m’en voi ‘me.REFL=
from combination of con ‘with’ and reflexes of MECUM/TECUM thence= I.go (= I am going away (from here))’. After dative
‘me.with/you.with’ (with analogical adjustment of the tonic li/les, it can be an allomorph of third person accusative clitics:
vowel to /i/). Only third person clitics show overt marking dando-li-ne ‘giving=to.him/her=it/them’. Bi/i generally pro-
of case, and only third person accusative clitics show overt nominalizes locative and other phrases with a (e.g. datives):
marking of gender (lo ‘it.MSG’ also serves for indefinite or no i voi ‘not there= I.go (= I don’t/won’t go there)’; si/se no lo i
‘neuter’ reference). Se, along with other reflexive forms, is das ‘if not it= there= give.2SG(= if you don’t give it to him/her)’.
used as a marker of true reflexives, of reciprocals (see Bi has been grammaticalized in the existential haber-bi ‘there
§22.4.1.1), and of a range of semantic contrasts in many is/are’: no bi’n ha ‘not there= thereof= has.3SG (= there isn’t/
verbs (e.g. ir ‘to go’ vs irse ‘to go away’). It is also used as a aren’t (any))’.
Table 22.2 Pronouns of standard Spanish

1 SG 2 SG 3 MSG 3 FSG 3 SG >2 SG 1 PL M / F 2 PL M / F 3 MPL 3 FPL 3 PL >2 PL
SUBJECT
yo tú él ella usted nosotros/as vosotros/as ellos ellas ustedes

OBLIQUE
mí ti él ella usted nosotros/as vosotros/as ellos ellas ustedes

REFL. mí ti sí sí sí nosotros/as vosotros/as sí sí sí
CLITIC
ACC. me te lo la lo/la nos os los las los/las

DAT. me te le le le nos os les les les
(se) (se) (se) (se)
REFL. me te se se se nos os se se se
397
22.3.1.4 Count/non-count referential systems a blow (= he gave it a hit)’. In this most advanced system, all
case distinctions are lost (i.e. le/les is used for masculine
In central and eastern Asturian, and the Spanish of Cantab-
count reference, la/las for feminine count reference, and lo
ria and central-northern Castile, there exist a range of
for non-count reference). Most forms of leísmo, laísmo, and
systems that mark count/non-count reference overtly (see
loísmo (use of lo/s as datives) are socially stigmatized, but use
Map 22.1). This marking is found most consistently in pro-
of leísmo to refer to masculine persons (which are always
nouns, including tonic pronouns (e.g. demonstrative esto
count nouns) is accepted in standard Spanish, where an
‘this.NSG’ and subject pronoun ello ‘it.NSG’ for non-count ref-
opposition is possible between le vi ‘I saw him’ and lo vi ‘I
erence) and third person accusative clitics, but can also be
saw it’. This type of leísmo is also found locally in some
found in adjectives and nouns.3 In Asturian and Cantabrian,
peripheral zones (e.g. near Toledo).
accusative clitics lu (MSG) and la (FSG) pronominalize (or copy)
count nouns, while ‘neuter’ lo (NSG) pronominalizes (or co-
pies) non-count nouns: el paquete olvidélu ‘the.MSG package.
MSG, I.forgot=it.MSG’; a María no la conoces ‘PA María, not her.
22.3.2 Verbal group
FSG= know.2SG (= you don’t know María)’; la leche comprólo
22.3.2.1 Conjugations
‘the.FSG milk.FSG bought.PRT.3SG=it.NSG’. Similarly, in Asturian
postnominal (attributive and predicate) adjectives show Central Ibero-Romance is traditionally characterized—at
three endings: masculine count -u (llibru malu ‘bad.MSG least in the infinitive—by three conjugation classes with
book.MSG’), feminine count -a (neña mala ‘bad.FSG girl.FSG’), distinct theme vowels: cantar ‘to sing’ (continuing Latin
and non-count -o (carbón duro ‘coal.MSG hard.NSG (= hard first conjugation), comer ‘to eat’ (continuing Latin second
coal)’, ropa vieyo ‘clothes.FSG old.NSG (= old clothes)’; el fumu conjugation), and vivir ‘to live’ (continuing Latin fourth
yera blanco ‘the.MSG smoke.MSG was white.NSG’). Some mascu- conjugation). Latin third conjugation forms have generally
line nouns also show this distinction: fierru ‘clothes iron’ vs been reassigned to the second conjugation (Sp. hacer < FACERE
fierro ‘iron (metal)’; pelu/pilu ‘[one] hair’ vs pelo ‘head of hair’ ‘to do’), but some Latin third conjugation verbs have been
(cf. §22.2.1). reassigned to the fourth (Ast., Ara. dicir ‘to say’, Sp. decir <
In rural/popular Spanish of most of Cantabria and much DĪCERE); some variation exists in assignment (cf. Ast. bater, Sp.
of Old Castile, count/non-count distinctions are also marked batir ‘to beat’ < BATTUERE). The first conjugation is numerically
(Fernández-Ordóñez 2001; 2006; 2006/7; 2009). However, the largest and accommodates most new coinings (usually
here le (homophone of dative le) is the masculine singular
with ‑ear, cf. tuitear ‘to tweet’). However, outside of Arago-
count clitic (see Tuten 2003:173-203 for its origin), while lo is
nese, most inflected forms of modern second and third
retained as the non-count ‘neuter’ singular: el paquete le
conjugations use the same mix of -e- and -i- as theme
olvidé ‘the.MSG package.MSG it.NSG= I.forgot (= I forgot the
vowels; for instance, there is neutralization of theme
package)’; la leche lo compré ‘the.FSG milk.FSG it.NSG= bought.
vowel distinctions in second and third conjugation gerunds
PRT.1SG (= I bought the milk)’. Postnominal adjectives also
show marking, but this is only evident after feminine nouns: (Sp. cantando vs comiendo, viviendo) and participles (Sp. can-
la buena leche fresco se toma templado ‘the.FSG good.FSG milk.FSG tado vs comido, vivido). Distinctions between the second and
fresh.NSG self= takes.3SG lukewarm.NSG (= one drinks good third are marked only in the infinitive (beber ‘to drink’ vs
fresh milk warm)’. In Castile, the long existence of leísmo, vivir ‘to live’), the future and conditional (beberé/viviré ‘I will
or syncretism between accusative and dative clitic le, has drink/live’, bebería/viviría ‘I would drink/live’), and a hand-
favoured analogies that have tended to erase clitic case ful of other inflected forms: bebemos/vivimos ‘drink/live.PRS.
distinctions in some local varieties. The most common of IND.1PL’ (cf. JuSp. [beˈvimos]/[biˈvimos]); bebéis/vivís ‘drink/
the analogical extensions is laísmo, or the use of la not only live.PRS.IND.2PL’ (cf. JuSp. [beˈveʃ]/[biˈviʃ]); bebed/vivid ‘drink/
as accusative but also as dative: la dije la verdad ‘to.her= I.told live.IMP.2PL’). Indeed, some Latin American varieties do not
the truth’; cf. standard Sp. le dije la verdad. Other extensions employ any voseo forms (2SG < 2PL), thereby exaggerating this
lead to loss of case distinctions in the plural (las and either tendency. Nevertheless, as Penny (2002:190) point outs, the
los or les become both dative and accusative), and in some association of high vowels with the third (‑ir) conjugation
advanced systems (e.g. near Valladolid) lo comes to be used helps to preserve the distinction (see §22.3.2.3). Aragonese is
as a non-count dative clitic: lo dio un golpe ‘to.it= gave.PRT.3SG much more conservative, in that contrasting forms exist for
gerunds (trobando ‘finding’, metendo ‘inserting’, partindo ‘part-
3
In other varieties of Spanish, ello is retained as a relic of count/non- ing’), the imperfect indicative (trobaba ‘I was finding’, meteba
count systems (which also existed in medieval Castilian), and it now ‘I was putting’, culliba ‘I was taking’), and the imperfect
appears primarily in formal registers and fossilized expressions such as
por ello ‘for/because.of it’ (Harris-Northall 2010). subjunctive.
398
22.3.2.2 Inflection have sung’) and subjunctive (haya cantado), pluperfect indi-
cative (había cantado ‘I.had sung’) and subjunctive (hubiera/
Central Ibero-Romance finite verbs mark person, number, hubiese cantado), and the conditional perfect (habría cantado
tense, mood, and aspect. Prototypically, synthetic verb ‘I.would.have sung’); there are varied forms of haber in other
forms show the following order of morphemes: lexical varieties, and in some varieties use of other auxiliaries (see
stem + theme vowel + tense/aspect marker + person marker §22.4.2.1).
(e.g. imperfect cant+á+ba+mos ‘were.singing.IPFV.IND.1PL’). There are numerous differences between Spanish syn-
Most forms fuse TAM, person, and number markers, how- thetic paradigms and those found in other varieties of
ever, so neat segmentation is not usually possible, as is central Ibero-Romance. First, cantara forms are not used in
evident in the -ó of Sp. cantó ‘sing.PRT.3SG’). Table 22.3 Aragonese, and in Asturian they, along with cantare forms,
shows synthetic forms of a regular first conjugation Spanish function as both an imperfect subjunctive and a pluperfect
verb. indicative (see below). In Spanish it cannot be claimed that
Many of the patterns displayed in Table 22.3 are true for cantara and cantase are always equally acceptable in the
all varieties of central Ibero-Romance. For instance, certain imperfect subjunctive: cantase forms are associated with
forms appear repeatedly with the same function: -s (2SG; formal/written language, and in Latin America cantara
though not in standard Sp. cantaste), -ais/eis/is (2PL), -mos forms dominate entirely. In first conjugation verbs Judaeo-
(1PL), -n (3PL). Syncretism of person–number marking is Spanish uses a monophthong and /ʃ/ in second person
found in only a few forms, such as imperfect cantaba plural endings ([avˈlavaʃ] ʻyou.2PL were speaking’), con-
(though Belsetán Aragonese can use -e to distinguish the serves /d/ in second person plural future ([avˈlaɾaðeʃ]
first person singular imperfect). Alternation between pre- ʻyou.2PL will speakʼ), shows final /í/ in some preterite
sent indicative and present subjunctive is marked by alter- forms of -ar verbs ([avˈli] / [avˈlimos] ʻspoke.PRT.1SG/1PLʼ)
nation in the theme vowel: canta/cante, and the reverse for and metathesis of /s/ in second person singular preterite
verbs of the second conjugation (come ‘eat.PRS.IND.3SG’/coma endings ([avˈlates] ʻyou.2SG spokeʼ (found also in some
‘eat.PRS.SBJV.3SG’) and the third (vive ‘live.PRS.IND.3SG’/viva colloquial varieties of Spanish: hablates), and has ‑/ˈava/
‘live.PRS.SBJV.3SG’). and -/ˈija/ in imperfects. Asturian shows /e/ or alternation
Not shown in the chart are imperatives, whose affirma- /a/~/e/ in many forms, sometimes with resultant
tive forms necessarily include the theme vowel: ¡canta! ‘sing. syncretism (fales ʻspeak.PRS.IND.2SG’ and ‘speak.PRS.SBJV.2SG’).
IMP.2SG’ and ¡cantad! ‘sing.IMP.2PL’. Negative imperatives and Aragonese also shows a number of noteworthy differences:
other persons use forms of the subjunctive: ¡no hables! ‘not -atz/-etz/-itz to mark second person plural (cantatz ʻsing.PRS.
speak.PRS.SBJV.2SG’; ¡hablemos! ‘speak.PRS.SBJV.1PL’, ¡hable! ‘you. IND.2SG’); -nos to mark first person plural in some paradigms
speak.PRS.SBJV.3SG’. The now rarely used future subjunctive (fablábanos ‘were.speaking.IPFV.IND.1PL’); highly variable pret-
cantare (3SG), continuing the Latin perfect subjunctive and erite endings showing the effects of competing analogies: -é
future perfect, is also excluded from the chart (see (1SG), -és (2SG), -ó/-é (3SG), -émos (1PL), -étz (2PL), ‑ón/‑oron (3PL);
§§22.4.2.1, 27.5.2). There are also several analytic perfect second and third conjugation preterites with diphthong
paradigms: present perfect indicative (Sp. he cantado ‘I. -ie- (metié ‘I.put.in’; cf. Sp. metí ); and conditionals in -ba
Table 22.3 Finite synthetic forms of standard Spanish (Sp. cantar ‘to sing’)
PRS . IND IPFV . IND PRT FUT COND PRS . SBJV IPFV . SBJV
1SG canto cantaba canté cantaré cantaría cante cantase/

cantara
2SG cantas cantabas cantaste cantarás cantarías cantes cantases/
cantaras
3SG canta cantaba cantó cantará cantaría cante cantase/
cantara
1PL cantamos cantábamos cantamos cantaremos cantaríamos cantemos cantásemos/
cantáramos
2PL cantáis cantabais cantasteis cantaréis cantaríais cantéis cantaseis/
cantarais
3PL cantan cantaban cantaron cantarán cantarían canten cantasen/
cantaran
399
(trobarba ‘I.would.find’). Many varieties of Latin American with the -e-/-i- alternation extend the high vowel through-
Spanish (e.g. Argentina, Central America) maintain use of out the present subjunctive (see Table 22.5).
second plural desinences with informal vos ‘you.2SG’ (which Moreover, in all -ir verbs, high vowels appear in other
competes with or replaces tú); however these forms are parts of the paradigm beyond those of the N-pattern. Thus,
often monophthongized (cf. peninsular cantáis/coméis a high vowel is also found in first and second person plural
‘sing/eat.PRS.IND.2PL’, and American cantás/comés ‘sing/eat. forms of the present subjuntive in verbs such as sentir ‘to
PRS.IND.2SG’). feel’ and dormir ‘to sleep’ (sintamos/sentimos/siento ‘feel.PRS.
SBJV.1PL/PRS.IND.1PL/PRS.IND.1SG’; durmáis/dormís/duermo ‘sleep.
PRS.SBJV.2PL/PRS.IND.2PL/PRS.IND.1SG’), third person forms of the
22.3.2.3 Verb roots preterite (see Table 22.5; cf. durmió/durmieron ‘slept.PRT.3SG/
3PL’), other PYTA forms (midiera ‘measure.IPFV.SBJV.3SG’, dur-
While regular verbs such as cantar ‘to sing’ present a single
miese ‘sleep.IPFV.SBJV.3SG’), and the gerund (midiendo ‘measur-
root throughout the paradigm, hundreds of verbs show two
ing’, durmiendo ‘sleeping’). So strong is the association of
or more. Much root allomorphy in the present tense follows
high vowels with the inherited Latin fourth conjugation (see
the morphomic distribution known as the ‘N-pattern’
Penny 2002:185–90) that some verbs show extension of the
(Maiden 2011b:241), as illustrated in Table 22.4.
high vowel throughout most or all of the paradigm (e.g. Sp.
Historically, this manifestation of the N-pattern derives
cubrir ‘to cover’, Ast. midir ‘to measure’, JuSp. durmir ‘to
from diphthongization of Romance tonic /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ in
sleep’), though fluctuation between roots with mid vowels,
open and closed syllables. This produced two primary
high vowels, and diphthongs is frequent in non-
atonic/tonic alternations: -e-/-ie- (as seen in Table 22.4) as
standardized varieties (JuSp. sintir~sentir ‘to feel’, [ˈsintaʃ]~
well as -o-/-ue- (Sp. negar ‘to deny’: niego ‘I.deny’, mover ‘to
[ˈsjentaʃ] ‘feel.PRS.SBJV.2SG’ ).
move’: muevo ‘I.move’); note the exceptional alternation of
The other major morphomic distribution that character-
-u-/-ue- in Sp. jugar ‘to play’ – juego ‘I.play’. This pattern was
izes central Ibero-Romance is the ‘L-pattern’ (see Maiden
subsequently extended to other verbs which had not
2011b:223-5 for historical sources of this pattern, and
inherited the alternation: Sp. pensar ‘to think’ (< PĒNSĀRE) –
§43.2.3). Most verbs in this class show a velar-final (/k/ or
pienso ‘I.think’; Ast. correr ‘to run’ (< CURRERE) – cuerro ‘I.run’ cf.
/ɡ/) root allomorph limited to the first person singular of
Sp. corro). In some cases, diphthongs have been eliminated
the present indicative and all forms of the present subjunct-
through analogical levelling (cf. Sp. entrego ‘I.hand.over’
ive, as in decir ‘to say’ (see Table 22.6).
(OSp. entriego), Ara. chugo ‘I.play’), while in other cases
In some varieties of Aragonese (e.g. Belsetán), the velar
they have been extended throughout the paradigm (rural
does not appear in all forms of the subjunctive of this and
Ast.-Leo./Sp. juegar ‘to play’).
other verbs (diziamos/diziaz ‘say.PRS.SBJV.1PL/2PL’; Lozano
A third alternation (partly the result of metaphony; see
Sierra and Saludas Bernad 2005:112). The Spanish verb crecer
§§38.4, 43.2.4) appears in the present tense of verbs in -ir (<
‘to grow’ is typical of the L-pattern with root-final /k/
Latin fourth conjugation); in these cases, atonic -e- alter-
(crezco/crezca/creces ‘grow.PRS.IND.1SG/PRS.SBJV.1SG/PRS.IND.2SG’).
nates with tonic -i-, following the N-pattern for the present
While in both decir and crecer the pattern is etymological,
indicative (see Table 22.5), as do other ‑ir verbs which show
root-final /ɡ/ has been extended by analogy to a number of
-e-/-ie- and -o-/-ue- alternations (sentir ‘to feel’ – siento ‘I.feel.
other verbs (e.g. venir ‘to come’: vengo/venga/vienes ‘come.
IND’, dormir ‘to sleep’ – duermo ‘I sleep.IND’). However, verbs
PRS.IND.1SG/PRS.SBJV.1SG/PRS.IND.2SG’). In this and other cases, the
extension of the velar has reinforced a pre-existing etymo-
Table 22.4 Spanish N-pattern: perder ‘to lose’ logical L-pattern. Thus, conservative Asturian (like old
Spanish) preserves an L-pattern for tra(y)er ‘to bring’
which distinguishes trayo/traya/tra(y)es ‘bring.PRS.IND.1SG/
PRS.IND. pierdo pierdes pierde perdemos perdéis pierden PRS.SBJV.1SG/PRS.IND.2SG’, but insertion of the velar (now
PRS.SBJV pierda pierda pierda perdamos perdáis pierdan found in all other varieties of central Ibero-Romance)
Table 22.5 Spanish medir ‘to measure’

Table 22.6 Spanish L-pattern: decir ‘to say’
PRS.IND. mido mides mide medimos medís miden
PRS.SBJV mida midas mida midamos midáis midan PRS.IND. digo dices dices decimos decís dicen
PRT medí mediste midió medimos medisteis midieron PRS.SBJV diga digas diga digamos digáis digan
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helps mark the distinction (cf. Sp. traer ‘to bring’: traigo/ ‘be.1SG/2SG/3SG/1PL/2PL/3PL’ in the present indicative, while
traiga/traes ‘bring.PRS.IND.1SG/PRS.SBJV.1SG/PRS.IND.2SG’). Asturian and Aragonese show yes/ye ‘be.2SG/3SG’. Aragonese
The preservation of Latin perfective forms is the source has sotz/setz ‘be.2PL’, and like Judaeo-Spanish, somos/semos
of yet more root allomorphy. Such ‘PYTA’ roots (as labelled ‘be.1PL’.
by Maiden 2011a:180) are retained in a number of forms
which have varied functions (see below). In Spanish, they
are the preterite (decir ‘to say’: dije/dijiste/dijo/dijimos/dijis-
22.3.3 Derivational morphology
teis/dijeron ‘said.1SG/2SG/2SG/1PL/2PL/3PL’) and both forms of
the imperfect subjunctive (dijese/dijera ‘say.IPFV.SBJV.1SG’). In a Derivation, particularly suffixation, is the most important
few cases they survive in participles (puesto ‘placed’, escrito process used in central Ibero-Romance to create new words
‘written’, Ara. quiesto ‘wanted’); strong forms may be and/or modify basic meanings of existing words. Many
retained as adjectives, beside innovative weak participles suffixes involve changes of lexical categories. Below we
(Sp. adjective preso ‘captured’ vs participle prendido ‘fas- provide examples of some of the most common suffixes
tened’). Strong preterites stress the penultimate syllable in shared across varieties as well as some which are more
the first person and third person singular (Sp. tuve/tuvo typical of a particular variety. We also provide examples
‘had.PRT.1SG/3SG’ vs comí/comió ‘ate.PRT.1SG/3SG’). They are of some derived forms which are constructed differently
also characterized by high vowels /i/ or /u/ in the stem in across varieties:
every verb except traer ‘to bring’: poner ‘to put’: puse ‘put.
• Adjectives: -ero/a (maderero ‘wood-related’ < madera
PRT.1SG’; venir ‘to come’: vine ‘came.PRT.1SG’; note that traje ‘I.
‘wood’); -dor/a (acusador ‘accusing, reproachful’ < acusar
brought’ coexists with truje in rural Spanish and other
ʻto accuseʼ); -és/esa (holandés ‘Dutch’ < Holanda ‘Hol-
varieties (JuSp. [ˈtɾuʃe]). PYTA roots may be characterized
land’); -al (nacional ‘national’ < nación ‘nation’); -ano/a
by final consonantal alternations (traducir ‘to translate’
(italiano ‘Italian’ < Italia ‘Italy’); -ble (envidiable ‘enviable’
-traduje ‘translated.PRT.1SG’) or by combinations of vowel
< envidiar ‘to envy’); -ico/a (numérico ‘numeric’ < número
and consonant changes (estar ‘to be’: estuve ‘was.PRT.1SG’). In
‘number’); -ivo/a (permisivo ‘permissive’ < permiso ‘per-
Aragonese these roots have suffered levelling in most verbs,
mission’); -oso/a (nervioso ‘nervous’ < nervio ‘nerve’; cf.
and in other varieties many forms which once retained
JuSp. -[ˈozo,a] saludozo ‘healthy’ and Sp. saludable
PYTA roots have been regularized: OSp. escrise vs Sp.
‘healthy’ < salud ʻhealthʼ). JuSp. also employs borrowed
escribí ‘wrote.PRT.1SG’; OSp. mise vs Sp. metí ‘put.in.PRT.1SG’
suffixes such as ‑[li]/-[ja] (< Turkish): [aftaxaˈli]~[avtaxaˈli]
(see also §43.2.2).
ʻoptimistʼ < Heb. havtaħa ‘assurance’.
A minor pattern exists in some futures and conditionals;
• Verbs: -ar/-ear (envidiar ‘to envy’ < envidia ‘envy’; blan-
where these forms show the effects of syncope and epen-
quear ‘to whiten’, cf. Ast. blanquiar < blanco ‘white’),
thesis or metathesis (or deletion of an entire syllable),
-ificar (clarificar ‘to clarify’ < claro ‘clear’); -izar (moder-
the same root is used for both the future and conditional:
nizar ‘to modernize’ < moderno ‘modern’); Ast. -exar
Sp./Ast saldrá/saldría ‘leave.FUT.3SG/COND.3SG’, diré/diría
(escornexar ‘to.butt, gore (with horns)’); JuSp. -[iˈgwaɾ]
‘say.FUT.1SG/COND.1SG’; JuSp. [ponˈdɾe]~[poɾˈne]/[ponˈdɾija]~
([aboniˈgwaɾ] ‘to make good, improve’ < bueno ‘good’).
[poɾˈnija] ‘put.FUT.1SG/COND.1SG’; but note Ara. caldrá/cal-
• Nouns: -miento (nacimiento ‘birth’ < nacer ‘to be born’);
dría~ calerba ‘be.necessary.FUT.3SG/COND.3SG’.
-aje (frenaje ‘braking’ < freno ‘brake’; JuSp. [esklaˈvaʒe]
Central Ibero-Romance varieties show other cases of
‘slavery’ < esclavo ‘slave’, cf. Sp. esclavitud); -ado (vision-
unusual allomorphy and suppletion in a few high-frequency
ado ‘viewing’ < visión ‘vision’); -ismo (feudalismo ‘feudal-
verbs. While Judaeo-Spanish and Asturian (variably) retain
ism’< feudal ‘feudal’); -ista (purista ‘purist’ < puro ‘pure’);
the conservative forms so ‘I am’, do ‘I give’, vo ‘I go’, estó ‘I
-dad (actividad ‘activity’ < activo ‘active’ ); Ast. -áu/‑ada
am’, these all add a glide in Spanish and Aragonese (soy, doy,
(fardeláu/fardelada ‘small bagful’ < fardel ‘small bag’);
voy, estoy), as does the form hay ‘there is/are’. Hay is prob-
Ara. ‑adizo (for products of actions: serradizo ‘wood
ably a fused form of medieval ha ‘it has’ + y ‘there’ (< IBI), but
shaving’ < serrado ‘sawn.PTCP’); JuSp. ‑[ˈʤi]/‑[ˈʤija] <
the source of the final glide in the first person forms is
Turkish ([mentiɾaˈʤi] ‘liar’ < mentira ‘lie’); JuSp. ‑[ˈiʒo]
debated. The verbs ser ‘to be’ and ir ‘to go’ show numerous
([toˈsiʒo] ‘coughing’ < tos ‘cough’).
suppletive forms: Sp. soy ‘I.am.PRS.IND’, era ‘I.was.IPFV.IND’, fui ‘I.
was.PRT’; voy ‘I.go.PRS.IND’, iba ‘I.was.going.IPFV.IND’, fui ‘I.went. Most central Ibero-Romance sentence and manner
PRT’. These two verbs show full syncretism in all forms of the adverbs are formed by adding -mente (Ara. -ment) to the
preterite (Sp. fui ‘I.was; I.went’) and imperfect subjunctive feminine form of adjectives: Sp./Ara. serio ‘serious’ > seria-
(Sp. fuera/fuese). The present tense forms of ser also differ mente ‘seriously’, Ara. seriament. The origin of this suffix in
across varieties: Spanish has soy/eres/es/somos/sois/son Latin ablative singular (feminine) MENTE ‘(with a) mind’ is
401
recalled not only by the feminine form of the adjective base diminutives have also been lexicalized (Sp. bolso ‘bag’ vs
but also by (1) frequent retention of stress on both the bolsillo ‘pocket’).
adjective and suffix ([ˈlentaˈmente]) and (2) optional use of Augmentatives, normally added to nouns, show great
only one suffix in coordinated series of adverbs: lenta y variation as well. A common augmentative suffix is -ón:
claramente ‘slowly and clearly’. Some adjectives are used as Ast. gatón ‘large cat’ < gato ʻcatʼ; Ara. crabón ‘large goat.M’ <
adverbs: corrió rápido ‘s/he ran fast’. Central Ibero-Romance craba ‘goat.F’, Sp. notición ‘bombshell.M’ < noticia ‘news.item.F’
varieties also have lexical adverbs (bien ‘well’, mal ‘badly’, (although in Aragonese and Judaeo-Spanish, and in a few
siempre ‘always’): Ast./Ara./JuSp. agora vs Sp. ahora ‘now’; Spanish words, it can function as a diminutive). Spanish and
Ast. asina, Ara. asinas, JuSp. ansí~ansina , Sp. así ‘thus’; Ast. other central Ibero-Romance varieties also make frequent
anguañu, JuSp. [oˈganjo] vs Sp. este año ‘this year’ (cf. OSp. use of -ote/a and -azo/a and variant forms (grandote ‘huge,
hogaño). In some cases, -mente is added to existing adverbs: hulking’ < grande ‘big’, exitazo ‘huge success’ < éxito ‘success’;
cf. Sp. casi, Ast. cuasimente, Caribbean Sp. casimente ‘almost’ note that ‑azo is also used to mean a blow of some kind: Sp.
(see Pato 2010). codazo, Ast. coldazu ‘blow with the elbow’). Some diminutives
Central Ibero-Romance is well known for its rich inven- (-ucho/a, -(z)uelo/a) and augmentatives (-ote) are often used
tory and frequent use of evaluative affixes, including as pejoratives: cuartucho ‘poky little room’ < cuarto ‘room’,
diminutive, augmentative, and pejorative suffixes. These mujeruela ‘tart’ < mujer ‘woman’, machote ‘tough guy’ < macho
do not change the category of the corresponding word, ‘male’. Other suffixes serve primarily as pejoratives: -aco/a
but lend particular nuances to their meaning in context (pajarraco ‘big ugly bird’ < pájaro ‘bird’), -acho/a (ricacho ‘filthy
(smallness, affection, pejoration, intensification, euphem- rich person’ < rico ‘rich’), ajo/a (migaja ‘miserable crumb’ <
ism, emphasis, approximation, and irony; see Reynoso miga ‘crumb’), -ato/a (niñato ‘spoiled brat’ < niño ‘child’), ‑ejo
Noverón 2002; Prieto 2005; Fortin 2011). Diminutive suffixes (tipejo ‘oddball’ < tipo ‘type’), -orro/a (tintorro ‘cheap red wine’ <
are normally added to nouns, but can be used with adjec- tinto ‘red (wine)’), ‑uzo/a (gentuza ‘rabble’ < gente ‘people’); Ast.
tives or even adverbs in some varieties (LAmSp. ahorita -ayu/-uyu (tristayu ‘sad thing’). Note that Judaeo-Spanish uses
‘right now’ < ahora ‘now’, Ast. cerquina ‘quite near’ < cerca -ucho/acho, along with -[aʧi], as non-pejorative diminutives
‘near’), gerunds (callandito ‘hushing a little’ < callando ‘hush- (Avram > [avɾaˈmuʧo]~[avɾaˈmaʧi] ‘dear/little Avram’).
ing’), pronouns and quantifiers (nadita ‘nothing at all’ < nada Central Ibero-Romance prefixes cannot change the lex-
‘nothing’). Forms vary greatly. Asturian prefers -ín/ina ical categories of the words they attach to (nouns, verbs,
(which as -ino/a is common in western Spain and in adjectives or adverbs, according to the prefix), but they are
Judaeo-Spanish) and -ucu/a (also preferred in Cantabria): an important means of modifying word meaning. Indeed,
Ast. llibrín ‘small book’ < llibru ‘book’, azulín ‘bluish’ < azul this is increasingly so (at least in Spanish), as indicated by
‘blue’, homucu ‘small man’ < home ‘man’. Aragonese uses new superlatives super- ‘super-’, hiper- ‘hyper-’, and mega-
-ín/ina for some diminutives (usually indicating smallness), ‘mega-’ (superenfadado ‘super-angry’), diminutive mini-
but in other cases prefers -et/eta (pobret ‘poor little thing’ < (minicomputadora ‘minicomputer’), and other prefixes
pobre ‘poor’). Spanish uses many diminutive suffixes, but whose use is on the rise: auto- (autoestima ‘self-esteem’),
-ito/a is by far the most frequent today (vaquita ‘small cow’ bio- (biodiversidad ‘biodiversity’), eco- (ecoturismo ‘ecotour-
< vaca ‘cow’); it can appear as -(e)cito in some words, ism’). Some long-established prefixes are characteristic of
particularly if they end in /e/ or certain consonants: only one or a few varieties, including Ast. per- (perguapu
suavecito ‘very soft’ < suave ‘soft’, lucecita ‘small light’ < luz ʻvery attractive’) and LAmSp. requete- (requetebién ʻvery
‘light’). Judaeo-Spanish allows use of -ito in some words well’), but many are shared by all. These include such
ending in a velar consonant ([vaˈkita] ʻsmall cowʼ), but common forms as des- for negation (Ast. despesllar ‘to
uses primarily ‑[ˈiko,a]: [livˈɾiko] ‘small book’, [esteˈɾika] unlock’, Ara. desfer ‘to undo’, Sp. descafeinado ‘decaffeinated’,
‘dear Esther’; [z] is inserted following some words which JuSp. [dezmazaˈlaðo] ‘unlucky, miserable’ < Heb. mazal ‘luck’),
end in a glide or vowel other than /a/: [ombɾeˈziko] and re- for repetition (Ast. refacer, Ara. refer, Sp. rehacer ‘to re-
‘small/young man’ < [ˈombɾe] ‘man’. The suffix -ico/a is do’). Numerous others exist to indicate quantity (multi-),
also widespread in Spanish, and it is preferred in eastern intensity/size (micro-), negation (in-), temporality (pre-), col-
Spain (including lowland Aragon) and Costa Rica. Else- laboration (co-), support/opposition (pro-), position (extra-).
where in Latin America it can be used following word Parasynthesis also occurs: Sp. enriquecer, Ast. arriquecer ‘to
roots ending in /t/ to avoid repetition (gatito~gatico enrich’ < rico ‘rich’; Ara. enmudeixer ‘to go silent’ < mudo
‘small cat’ < gato ‘cat’), including other diminutives in ‘dumb, silent’; JuSp. [enfeuˈzjaɾ] ‘to trust’ < [feˈuzja] ‘trust’.
-ito (chiquitito~chiquitico ‘very very small’ < chico ‘small’). Central Ibero-Romance prefers syntactic means to
The suffix -illo/a (Ast. -iellu/a, Ara. -iello/a) also survives in express superlatives and comparatives, but a few synthetic
use, especially in Andalusia (chiquillo ‘small boy’). Some and derived forms are also employed. Superlatives and
402
comparatives are normally formed analytically using más though not plentiful, do occur: cantautor < cantante+autor
‘more’ (< MAGIS): e.g. Sp. más alto que yo ‘more tall.MSG than I (= ‘singer-songwriter’; portuñol < portugués+español ‘mix of
taller than me)’; el más alto de todos ‘the.MSG more tall.MSG of Portuguese and Spanish’. Finally, Spanish and central
all.MPL (= the tallest of all)‘. However, there exist four syn- Ibero-Romance do allow direct conversion of some forms;
thetic comparative forms: Sp. mejor ‘better’, peor ‘worse’, adjectives are often used as adverbs (see above), and are
mayor ‘bigger, greater’, menor ‘smaller’. Even these compete regularly used as nouns, but only when accompanied by
with analytic forms, sometimes as semantic equivalents (Sp. articles (el/un rubio ‘the/a blond.guy.MSG’), while infinitives
mayor and más grande/viejo ‘bigger, older’), sometimes with can be used as nouns: el votar es un deber ‘voting is a duty’. In
semantic differences (Sp. más bueno ‘morally better’). There this last example, votar is a transparent nominalization of an
exists an absolute superlative (elative) suffix ‑ísimo/a (bellí- infinitive, while deber is used with its acquired meaning of
simo ‘very beautiful.MSG’), but intensification is usually ‘duty’ (however deber can be also be used to nominalize the
expressed by muy ‘very’ (Ast. mui, Ara. muito): muy bello verb deber ‘to owe’).
‘very beautiful’. Recently, as indicated above, use of prefixes
(perhaps borrowed from English) has become a common
colloquial means to express the absolute superlative: super-
guay ‘super-cool’. Some Latin American Spanish varieties 22.4 Syntax
use the suffix -azo to similar effect: lindazo ‘really pretty’.
22.4.1 Nominal group
22.3.4 Other word-formation processes Within the central Ibero-Romance noun phrase, articles,
demonstratives, wh-determiners, quantifiers, numerals,
Other processes aside from derivation serve to enrich the possessives, and a few adjectives normally precede the
lexicon of central Ibero-Romance. Compounding has a long noun. Articles and demonstratives show agreement in
history of productive use and the presence of compounds gender and number, as do most quantifiers and a few
appears to be growing (at least in Spanish), possibly under wh-determiners: las/estas/algunas/unas/cuántas/dos casas
the influence of English (consider the well-known Spanish ‘the.FPL/these.FPL/some.FPL/how.many.FPL/two houses.FPL’.
borrowing rascacielos ‘scrapes+sky’ < skyscraper), although Demonstrative adjectives can be postposed; this usage is
the structure of the compounds in each language is distinct. emphatic and often pejorative: el libro ese ‘the.MSG book.
Three noteworthy patterns of compounding in Spanish and MSG that.MSG (= that book)’. In Spanish and Judaeo-Spanish,
central Ibero-Romance are (V.PRS.IND.3SG + N.PL = N: lavaplatos preposed possessives are classed as determiners (mi madre
‘wash+plates (= dishwasher)’, Ara. trencauesos ‘break+bones ‘my mother’), but in Asturian and Aragonese they are
(= vulture)’; N.SG + N.SG = N: Sp. aguanieve ‘water+snow classed as adjectives and can co-occur with determiners:
(= sleet)’, fecha límite ‘date+limit (= deadline)’; N-/i/ + A = Ast. la mió madre ‘the.FSG mine.SG mother.FSG (= my mother)’;
A (in which the final vowel of the noun changes to -/i/: Ara. os míos cans ‘the.MPL mine.MPL dogs.MPL (= my dogs)’.
pelirrojo ‘hair+red (= redheaded)’ (see Varela 1990; Moyna These and similar constructions were used in old Spanish
2011). Parasynthetic compounds, created through com- and are retained in literary Judaeo-Spanish and in some
pounding and suffixation, also occur: quinceañero ‘fifteen + areas of Spain and Latin America (e.g. Guatemalan Sp. un
year + -ero (= 15-year-old)’. mi amigo ‘a.M my.SG friend.MSG (= a friend of mine)’). In mod-
Acronyms based on initial letters only are increasingly ern Spanish, possessive adjectives are postposed: unos perros
frequent in Spanish institutional discourse: ONU [ˈonu] míos ‘some.MPL dogs.MPL mine.MPL (= some dogs of mine)’.
(< Organización de las Naciones Unidas ‘the United Nations In all varieties of central Ibero-Romance, third person
Organization’), sida (< Síndrome de Inmunodeficiencia Adquirida possessives (Sp. su/suyo) suffer from referential ambiguity
‘AIDS.MSG’). Clipping has led to the creation of many current (e.g. su casa ‘his, her, your.3SG, their, your.3PL house’). They
Spanish two-syllable paroxytones (foto < fotografía ‘photo- can be replaced or doubled by a pronominal PP; replace-
graph’). It has become very frequent in colloquial usage: ment is particularly frequent in Aragonese (o libro de yo ‘the
progre < progresista ‘progressive’, profe < profesor/a ‘teacher’. book of I’), while doubling is common in some varieties of
Slang terms resulting from clipping often challenge normal Latin American Spanish (su padre de usted ‘POSS.3 father.MSG
patterns: la mili ‘military service’ (with unstressed final -/i/), of you.3SG (= your father)’).
manifa < manifestación ‘protest’ (with clipping of word end Quantifiers often appear without other determiners
and addition of feminine -/a/). Some acronyms, frequent in (Sp. mucha gente ‘a lot of people’, Ara. bellas mullers
commercial contexts, are based on initial syllables: Banamex ‘some women’, Ast. delles veces ‘some times’, ninguna
< Banco Nacional de México ‘National Bank of Mexico’. Blends, ventaja ‘no advantage’). Some can appear following definite
403
determiners (los pocos habitantes ‘the few inhabitants’, tus complements may appear with bare nouns: el vino contiene
muchos amigos ‘your many friends’); but note todos los otros alcohol/vitaminas ‘the.MSG wine.MSG contains.3SG alcohol.MSG/
‘all the others’. Todos, a floating quantifier, can appear in vitamins.FPL (= wine contains alcohol/vitamins)’; sin alcohol
numerous positions: (todos) ellos (todos) son (todos) estudiantes ‘without alcohol’. A subject NP of an unaccusative verb may
‘they are all students’. The plural article forms unos/unas appear with a bare noun: pasan animales ‘pass.PRS.3PL animals.
normally function as quantifiers (unos amigos ‘some friends’) MPL (= animals pass by)’. A subject NP of a transitive/uner-
but some combinations recall their origins as indefinite gative verb requires an article: los animales comen la hierba
articles: unos pocos amigos ‘a few friends’. Quantifiers may ‘the.MPL animals.MPL eat.3PL the.FSG grass.FSG (= animals eat
also be used pronominally: Sp. todos/muchos desaparecieron (the) grass)’; however, locative inversion overrides this con-
‘all.MPL/many.MPL disappeared.3PL’. straint: en esta escuela estudian niños ‘in this school study
Prepositional phrases and relative clauses always follow children’. Bare nouns also appear in certain fixed expres-
the head noun, while adjectives may precede or follow it. In sions: en casa ‘at home’.
all varieties of central Ibero-Romance, postnominal position
is unmarked for most restrictive or contrastive attributive
adjectives: la camisa blanca o la camisa negra ‘the.FSG shirt. 22.4.1.1 Pronominals
FSG white.FSG or the.FSG shirt.FSG black.FSG (= the white shirt or
the black shirt)’. Only a very few adjectives (e.g. Sp. bueno Central Ibero-Romance varieties are null subject languages;
‘good’, malo ‘bad’, grande ‘great, big’, ordinals such as primero overt subject pronouns are normally employed only to
‘first’) are normally prenominal (shortened Spanish forms mark contrastive focus or switch reference (ella fuma pero
buen.MSG, primer.MSG, and gran.SG appear in this position; see yo no ‘she smokes but I don’t’). However, Caribbean Spanish
§22.3.1.1): Ast. un bon/güen amigo ‘a.MSG good.MSG friend.MSG (= makes more regular use of overt pronouns (particularly
a good friend)’; Sp. una gran fiesta ‘a.FSG big.FSG party.FSG (= a informal tú ‘you.2SG’) than do other varieties, interpreted
great party)’. In both positions adjectives agree in gender by some as a result of the frequent neutralization between
and number with the head noun (but in Asturian only a second and third person singular verb forms following loss
postposed adjective of a non-count head noun appears with of final -s in the former (cf. fumas/fuma ‘smoke.2SG/3SG’ >
non-count -o; see §22.3.1.4). Preposed adjectives are fre- fuma). Null subjects are required with non-referring subjects
quent in formal/literary Spanish. Generally, these are (es obvio ‘it.is obvious’), including those of existential and
appositive, recalling known or expected qualities of the atmospheric verbs (hay muchos coches ‘has many cars
noun or expressing the speaker’s subjective evaluation: el (= there are a lot of cars)’; llueve ‘it.rains’). Null objects are
valiente guerrero ‘the.MSG brave.SG warrior.MSG’. Some adjec- normally ungrammatical, but a null object may be gram-
tives show semantic differences according to position matical if it is interpreted as indefinite. In reply to ¿Com-
(though context of use influences meaning): un viejo amigo praste leche? ‘bought.PRT.2SG milk (= did you buy milk?)’, one
‘an.MSG old.MSG friend.MSG (= a long-time friend)’ vs un amigo may answer Sí, compré ‘yes bought.PRT.1SG (= Yes, I bought
viejo ‘an.MSG friend.MSG old.MSG (= an old/aged friend)’. There (some)’; but note that in Aragonese, the reply requires a
are also syntactic constraints that require postnominal pos- partitive clitic: Sí, en crompé.
ition of the adjective (e.g. participles and adjectives with Clitics are always immediately adjacent to the verb. In
complements must follow the noun: una mujer leal a sus Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish, and Aragonese, clitics are nor-
principios ‘a woman loyal to her principles’). mally proclitic (María me vio ‘María saw me’). In these
Within the nominal phrase, adverbs precede the adjec- varieties, they are enclitic only with positive affirmatives
tives they modify: un coche muy/extremadamente rápido ‘a.MSG (dámelo give.2SG.IMP=to.me=it ‘give it to me’), gerunds (dicién-
car.MSG very/extremely fast.MSG (= a very/extremely fast dolo ‘saying=it’), and infinitives (verlo ‘to.see=it), though in
car)’. Within central Ibero-Romance, only Aragonese uses a Judaeo-Spanish a clitic may also precede an infinitive: gusto
partitive article to mark indefinite mass and plural nouns: da de lo ver ‘pleasure it.gives of him= to.see (= it’s a pleasure
¿ya no ne b’ha de lupos? ‘already not thereof=there=have.3SG to see him)’. Asturian retains a system in which clitics are
PART wolves (= are there no longer any wolves?)’; sin de normally enclitic (María viome ‘María saw=me’) and are
medrana = ‘without PART fear’. Like Aragonese, Asturian excluded entirely from sentence-initial position. In some
retains (though variably) a partitive following quantifiers: contexts, either proclisis or enclisis is possible, in others
Ara. muitas de mullers ‘many women’; Ast. muncho (de) pan only proclisis, as with certain types of subordinate clause
‘much bread’; dello (de) lleche ‘some milk’. and with finite (non-restructuring) matrix verbs preceded
Use of bare nouns, apart from proper names (which in by a negative (Ast. María nun me vio ‘María not me= saw
colloquial speech often appear with articles), is tightly con- (= María didn’t see me)’); an interrogative pronoun (Ast.
strained. In Spanish, mass and indefinite plural count noun ¿Ónde vos llevaron? ‘where you.2PL= take.PRT.3PL (= where did
404
they take you?)’), certain indefinite pronouns, and with ‘to.me= made educate.INF=her (= s/he made me educate
fronted foci (see below). her)’, raising of la is prohibited because the referent is
In Asturian, Spanish, and Judaeo-Spanish, clitics are nor- animate (cf. me lo hizo leer ‘to.me= it= made read.INF (= s/he
mally sequenced according to the following simplified tem- made me read it)’.
plate: [se] – [2P] – [1P] – [3P.IO] – [3P.DO] (in no instance are all Clitic doubling is a characteristic feature of central Ibero-
positions filled). Sequences of non-reflexive third person Romance. Pronominal and non-pronominal indirect object
clitics show dative–accusative order, non-third person clit- full phrases regularly co-occur with a dative clitic: le dije la
ics precede other persons, second person precede first per- verdad a ella/Susana ‘to.her= told.PRT.1SG the truth to her/
son clitics, se precedes other clitics, and phonetically Susan (= I told the truth to her/Susan)’. Only in formal
identical clitics are excluded (Zagona 2002:16). Examples registers do indirect object full phrases appear without the
include: me los diste ‘to.me= them.MPL= gave.PRT.2SG (= you clitic double. Pronominal and anaphoric (reflexive or recip-
gave them to me)’; dándomelo ‘giving=to me=it (= giving it to rocal) direct object full phrases regularly co-occur with a
me)’; and with an ethic dative: se te la comió un perro ‘REFL.3= clitic double: lo veo a él (pero no a ella) ‘him= I.see PA him (but
to.you.2SG= it.FSG= ate a dog (= a dog ate it up, affecting you)’. not PA her) (= I saw him (but not her)’; Juan se vio a sí mismo
Aragonese differs chiefly by ordering third person accusa- ‘Juan SELF= saw.PRT.3SG PA SELF same (= Juan saw himself)’; Juan
tives before first person and second person datives (los me y Pedro se vieron el uno al otro ‘Juan and Pedro SELF= saw.PRT.3PL
diés ‘them.MPL= to.me= gave.PRT.2SG (= you gave them to me’)) the.MSG one.MSG PA.the.MSG other.MSG (= Juan and Pedro saw
and reflexives (including se in some combinations), datives each other)’. In these examples, the same sentences without
before adverbial clitic en/ne, and by allowing variation in the clitic are ungrammatical (e.g. **vi a él). Constructions
the order of en/ne and adverbial clitic bi/i (see §22.3.1.3). such as lo veo a él are generally limited to marking contrast-
Clitic climbing occurs regularly with modals (e.g. poder ive or emphatic focus, or specifying referents of the clitic. In
‘can, to be able to’, deber ‘must, should’), restructuring verb Judeo-Spanish and in some Latin American varieties of
+infinitive predicates (e.g. ir a ‘to be going to’, volver a ‘to do Spanish (notably in Argentina), direct object clitics may
again’, acabar de ‘to finish doing’, tener que ‘to have to’) and also co-occur with personal and inanimate definite refer-
verb+gerund sequences (e.g. estar ‘to be’, seguir ‘to keep on’, ents (as in colloquial Italian): lo vi a Juan ‘him= saw.PRT.1SG PA
andar ‘to go around’). Thus, María debe decírnoslo ‘María must Juan (= I saw Juan)’; yo no las traje las llaves ‘I not them.FPL=
say.INF=to.us=it (= María must say it to us)’ alternates with brought.PRT.1SG the.FPL keys.FPL (= I didn’t bring the keys)’.
María nos lo debe decir; similarly, Juan sigue buscándolo ‘Juan See also §22.4.3.4 for doubling in clitic left-dislocation.
continues searching.for=it’ alternates with Juan lo sigue bus-
cando. In phrases with multiple modals or restructuring
verbs, intermediate positions are possible: no podemos volver 22.4.2 Verbal group
a dártelo ‘not can.2PL return.INF to give.INF=to.you.2SG=it (= we
cannot give it to you again)’ alternates with no podemos 22.4.2.1 Tense, aspect, and mood
volvértelo a dar and no te lo podemos volver a dar. Split cliti- Collectively, central Ibero-Romance varieties use a range of
cization is not normally possible in these constructions synthetic and analytic perfect verb forms to encode tense,
(**María nos debe decirlo; though some Judaeo-Spanish aspect, and mood oppositions; however, Asturian is notable
speakers find this and similar examples acceptable). How- for its traditional lack of analytic perfects. For other
ever, in causative constructions with hacer ‘to make’ + varieties, Table 22.7 outlines an extremely simplified and
infinitive, climbing is only required for the clitic which idealized version of the indicative verb system, which dis-
corresponds to the logical subject of the embedded clause, tinguishes between past, present, and future time, as well as
while climbing is optional or in some cases disallowed (see between imperfective and perfective aspectual variants
Ordóñez 2013:446) for the clitic which corresponds to a (two of which are analytic perfect forms with auxiliary
complement of the embedded verb. Thus, él me hizo hacerlo haber ‘to have’ in Spanish).
‘he to.me= made do.INF=it (= he made me do it)’ alternates The present refers to present habitual actions and
with él me lo hizo hacer, while in the case of me hizo educarla states, to progressive actions (María trabaja ‘María works/
Table 22.7 Temporal-aspectual distinctions of indicative verbs (1SG of Sp. cantar ‘to sing’)
PAST PRESENT FUTURE
Imperfective cantaba canto cantaré

Perfective canté he cantado había cantado
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is working’), and to future states and events (vamos mañana The imperfect refers to past states or events, seen as
‘we’re going tomorrow’). However, analytic progressives occurring over an unspecified period of time, as being in
(see below) allow specification of the progressive aspect progress when some punctual event occurred, or as habit-
(in this and all other tenses), and both the synthetic and ual: estábamos enfermos ‘we.were.IPFV.IND ill’; yo hacía la comida
analytic futures can be used to specify futurity (see below). cuando llamaron ‘I was.making.IPFV the meal when they.
The neutralization of present and future is a feature of the called.PRT’; nos llamábamos todas las semanas ‘us.REFL= called.
present subjunctive: no creo que venga ‘not I.believe that IPFV.IND.1PL all the weeks (= we called each other every
come.PRS.SBJV.3SG (= I don’t believe s/he is coming/will week)’. It may also refer to future-in-the-past: dijo que no
come)’. venía ‘said.PRT.3SG that not came.IPFV.IND.3SG (= s/he said that
Prototypically, the present perfect refers to events and s/he wasn’t coming)’. In colloquial usage, the imperfect can
states with present relevance: todavía no has terminado el replace the conditional in the apodosis of a conditional
examen ‘yet not have.2SG finished the exam (= you haven’t sentence and it can replace the conditional perfect with
finished the exam yet)’, hemos hablado antes ‘we.have spoken modals and simple present in polite expressions: si no fuera
before’. Note that perfectives, particularly the present per- por él, no tenías este trabajo ‘if not were.IPFV.SBJV.3SG for him,
fect, generally disallow placement of adverbs or a subject not have.IPFV.IND.2SG this job (= if it weren’t for him, you
between auxiliary and participle; thus inversion usually wouldn’t have this job)ʼ; ¡Me lo podías decir! ‘to.me= it=
requires movement of both auxiliary and participle: cf. could.IPFV.IND.2SG say.INF (= you could have told me!)’; quería
**¿Ha él ido? ‘Has he gone’ and ¿Ha ido él? ‘Has gone he pedirte un favor ‘I.wanted.IPFV ask.INF=you.2SG favour
(= has he gone?)’. The preterite prototypically refers to (= I wanted to ask you a favour)’. Note that the imperfect
whole events and states completed and/or begun at a spe- subjunctive neutralizes distinctions between perfective and
cific past moment without effect on the present, including imperfective: no es posible que él viniese/viniera ‘not it.is
past events or states completed before another: terminé el possible that he came.IPFV.SBJV.3SG (= it is not possible that
examen en dos horas ‘I.finished.PRT the exam in two hours’; he came/was coming/would come)’.
una vez terminaron de trabajar, tomaron unas copas ‘one time Conventionally, the future makes reference to a future
finished.PRT.3PL of work.INF took.PRT.3PL some drinks (= once action or event (iré ‘I will go’). However, with competing use
they finished work, they had some drinks)’. Note that in of present forms and the periphrastic future (see below), it
Judaeo-Spanish perfect tenses can be formed with auxiliary is most frequently used to communicate volition/obligation
aver or tener ‘have’ (ave/tiene ido ‘s/he.has gone’), while or epistemic modality in the present: estará enfermo ‘be.FUT.
Aragonese forms perfects of some verbs with ser–estar ‘be’ IND.3SG ill.MSG (= he is probably ill)’. The future perfect refers
(see below and §22.4.2.2). to a completed state or action in the future; it also marks
In Asturian (which lacks analytic perfects), the preterite epistemic modality for the present perfect: la clase habrá
continues to be used for past actions/states with and without terminado a las cinco ‘the class will.have ended at the five
effect on the present (falé ‘I spoke; I have spoken’). In other (= class will have ended at five o’clock)’.
varieties, use of the preterite overlaps with that of the The conditional expresses future-in-the-past and occurs
present perfect, so that ‘you worked’ and ‘you have worked’ in the apodosis of speculative/counterfactual conditional
can be expressed by has trabajado or trabajaste. Unsurpris- sentences: me dijeron que llegarían tarde ‘me= told.PRT.3PL
ingly, there exists much regional variation in the use of these that would.arrive.COND.3PL late (= they told me they would
two tenses. In some varieties of Spanish (e.g. central Spain, arrive late)’; si tuviera dinero, viajaría a Italia ‘if had.IPFV.
Peru, Bolivia), the beginnings of aoristic drift (§58.3.2) can be SBJV.1SG money, would.travel.COND.1SG to Italy (= if I had
found in the use of the present perfect to refer to past events money, I would travel to Italy)’. It also marks epistemic
completed within the same day, other present-related time modality for the imperfect and politeness: estaría enfermo
periods (‘this month’, ‘this year’), or within any implicit ‘be.COND.3SG ill.MSG (= he was probably ill)’; ¿Le importaría
extended present. Speakers of these varieties prefer present cerrar la ventana? ‘to.you= matter.COND.3SG close.INF the win-
perfect forms with anoche ‘last night’ and ayer ‘yesterday’, dow (= Would you mind closing the window?)’. The condi-
while speakers of other varieties opt for the preterite: María tional perfect is used to mark epistemic modality in past
ha llegado ayer ‘María has arrived yesterday (= María arrived perfects and also occurs in the apodosis of past counterfac-
yesterday)’ vs María llegó ayer ‘María arrived.PRT yesterday (= tual sentences (with the pluperfect subjunctive in the prot-
María arrived yesterday)’. Some Spanish varieties (e.g. asis): habría estado enfermo ‘would.have.COND.3SG been.PTCP ill.
Argentina) offer evidence of an opposite tendency, with MSG (= he must have been ill)’; si lo hubiera sabido, no habría
prototypical uses of the perfect being replaced by the pret- ido ‘if it= had.IPFV.SBJV.1SG known, not would.have.COND.1SG
erite: todavía no terminaste el examen ‘yet not finished.PRT.2SG gone.PTCP (= if I had known it, I wouldn’t have gone)’. Note
the exam (= you haven’t finished the exam yet)’. that in colloquial usage conditional sentences show great
406
variation of TAM choice in the protasis and apodosis, often thinking/believing, which otherwise license the indicative):
favouring parallel use of tenses, as in the not uncommon cf. quiero que vengas ‘I.want that come.PRS.SBJV.2SG (= I want
Spanish use of the pluperfect subjunctive in past counter- you to come’); creo que vienes ‘I.believe that come.PRS.IND.2SG
factuals: si hubiera tenido tiempo, hubiera ido ‘if I.had.SBJV had (= I believe that you come/are coming)’; no creo que vengas
time, I would.have.SBJV gone’ (Penny 2002:248-54). ‘not I.believe that you.come.PRS.SBJV.2SG (= I don’t believe that
Prototypically, however, the pluperfect refers to events you’re coming)’. With some matrix verbs (e.g. of emotion)
which occurred before another past event: cuando Juan llegó the subjunctive is sufficient to mark subordination and may
a casa, María ya se había ido ‘when Juan arrived.PRT to home, license the omission of the finite complementizer que ‘that’:
María already SELF= had.IPFV gone.PTCP (= when Juan came temo (que) estén enfadados ‘I.fear (that) they.are.PRS.SBJV angry.
home, María had already left)’. In this context, informal MPL’. Despite these semantic and syntactic constraints,
Spanish can substitute the preterite for the pluperfect. The meaningful contrasts can be made in some cases between
pluperfect has the same value as the so-called ‘past anterior’ the indicative and subjunctive, such as in temporal adjunct
form, which in Spanish is now restricted to formal writing clauses: lo hago cuando llego ‘it= I.do when I.arrive.PRS.IND
and constrained to use after a handful of conjunctions: des- (= I do it when I arrive)’ vs lo hago cuando llegue ‘it= I.do
pués de que él hubo llegado, ella se fue ‘after that he had arrived, when I.arrive.PRS.SBJV (= I’ll do it when I arrive)’.
she self= went (= after he had arrived, she left)’. In Asturian, The infinitive acts as a verb complement, as a noun
the pluperfect is expressed with synthetic forms: él yá los (sometimes with preceding article), as a complement of a
visitara/visitare la selmana anterior ‘he already them had.visited preposition: no sabe cantar ‘not know.PRS.3SG sing.INF (= s/he
the week prior (= he had already visited them the week doesn’t know how to sing)’; (el) nadar es bueno para la salud
before’). Pluperfect uses of synthetic forms of the type cantara ‘(the.MSG) swim.INF is good.MSG for the health (= swimming is
(which continue its original Latin function) can also be found good for health)’; sin pensar ‘without think.INF (= without
in subordinate clauses of formal, written Spanish, particu- thinking)’. In adverbial adjuncts, an uninflected personal
larly in Latin American journalistic prose. infinitive with postverbal subject (or overt preverbal subject
A few varieties of Aragonese (e.g. in Hecho) are distin- in Caribbean Spanish) may be substituted for a finite clause
guished by two largely vestigial features of analytic perfect with subjunctive or indicative (cf. §63.2.1.1): antes de que
forms. First, the participle of transitive verbs can agree in llegara yo, empezó la fiesta ‘before of that arrive.IPFV.SBJV.1SG I,
gender and number with a preceding full or clitic direct began the party (= before I arrived, the party began)’; antes
object or the subject of a reflexive verb whose auxiliary is de llegar yo, empezó la fiesta ‘before of arrive.INF I, began the
haber ‘to have’: a vida que has feita ‘the.FSG life.FSG that ha- party’ vs Caribbean Sp. antes de yo llegar, empezó la fiesta. The
ve.2SG made.ptcp.FSG (= the life that you have made)’. Second, infinitive is regularly used when the subject of a matrix and
while unergative verbs select haber ‘have’ as the auxiliary embedded verb is the same (quiero ir ‘I.want go.INF ’), but in
(e.g. ebas plorau ‘you.had.2SG cried’), some unaccusative more formal registers can also be used with verbs such as
verbs (including verbs of movement and reflexives of tran- decir ‘to say’ and creer ‘to believe’, which otherwise require a
sitive verbs) can select ser ‘be’ (see §22.4.2.2), with obliga- finite complement: él cree saberlo todo ‘he believes know.
tory agreement of the participle with the subject: yes plegada INF=it all’ vs él cree que lo sabe todo ‘he believes that it= he.
‘are.2SG arrived.PTCP.FSG (= you (F) have arrived)’; sén yeran knows all (= he believes that he knows it all)’.
idos ‘SELF=thence= were.IPFV.IND.3PL gone.PTCP.MPL (= they (M) The gerund acts as a complement of some verbs, and as
had gone away’); se son feitos muito ricos ‘SELF= are.3PL made. an adverbial clause, which may refer to the subject or object
PTCP.MPL very rich.MPL (= they (M) have made themselves/ of the main verb: Juan sigue comiendo ‘Juan keeps.on eating.
have become very rich).’ GER’; María salió corriendo ‘María left running.GER’; María lo vio
Use of the subjunctive, which remains vigorous in all corriendo ‘María him= saw running.GER (= María saw him
varieties, broadly reflects that found in other varieties of running)’. In Asturian (and rural Spanish) the gerund can
Romance. Thus, the subjunctive is employed primarily as a follow the preposition en: en llavando ‘after washing’ (cf. Sp.
marker of subordination. In relative clauses, the subjunctive al lavar ‘upon washing’).
is regularly licensed by nonexistent, negated, or non- Numerous periphrastic forms have developed in Spanish
specific antecedents (No conozco a nadie que sepa eso ‘not I. and central Ibero-Romance to highlight or specify particular
know PA nobody that knows that (= I don’t know anybody semantic functions which overlap in the core verbal system
who knows that)’. In complement clauses, it is licensed by (see Olbertz 1998; Yllera 1999). The most important of these
semantic factors (e.g. a subclass of matrix verbs, including are the analytic progressive and the periphrastic future. The
verbs of desire, emotion, volition, demand, and denial) and, first of these is composed of a form of estar ‘to be’ (or ser-estar
less consistently, by syntactic factors, such as negation of in Aragonese) + gerund. It can be used to specify progressive
the matrix verb (including those of saying, perception, and aspect in any verbal form (particularly in Spanish): Ast. ta
407
nevando ‘(it) is snowing’; JuSp. estavamos kaminando ‘we.were. week’; Mott 1992-3), while for other functions, all forms are
IPFV.IND walking’; Sp. habremos estado/estuvimos viajando ‘we. limited to one paradigm (Belsetán estar-se ‘to remain’).
will.have been/we.were.PRT travelling’; Ara. yeran fablando
‘they.were.IPFV.IND speaking’. The periphrastic future is com-
22.4.2.3 Adverbs
posed of ir ‘to go’ + a ‘to’ + infinitive (the preposition is
optional in Judaeo-Spanish; Asturian dir is followed directly Verb phrase adverbs can appear in a range of positions in an
by the infinitive). It is now a primary means of marking SVO sentence: before or after the verb, after the object or
future tense and, when used with the imperfect, future in before the subject; for example, the adverb ya ‘already’ may
the past: Sp. voy/iba a estudiar español ‘I.am/was.going to occupy any of these positions in the following sentence: (ya)
study.INF Spanish’; JuSp. vo meldar manyana ‘I.am.going to. los niños (ya) recibieron (ya) los regalos (ya) ‘The children
read tomorrow’; Ast. vas cayer ‘you.are.going to.fall’. Note (have) already received the gifts’. However, not all types of
however that similar forms in eastern Aragonese have past adverbs can occupy all of these positions, and specific
reference, as in Catalan (cf. §21.4.2): vas trobar ‘go.2SG.PRS to. adverbs are more marked in certain positions than are
find (= you found)’. others. For instance, a wide range of adverb types (including
those of manner and quality) may appear immediately
following the verb, while only a limited range of adverbs
22.4.2.2 Copulas (of time, place, and extent) may also appear immediately
There exist two copulas: ser and estar (Ast. tar). In Asturian, before the verb (Zagona 2002:163). Indeed, Ocampo (1995)
Spanish, and Judaeo-Spanish, ser is used for reference to argues that while for most Spanish adverbs the unmarked
essential or inherent qualities of basic aspects (material, position is postverbal, the unmarked position for some
size, personality, etc.), origin, nationality, relationship, pro- adverbs (e.g. Sp. ya ‘already’, siempre ‘always’, todavía ‘yet’,
fession, possession, time, and dates. Estar refers to non- casi ‘almost’) is immediately preverbal: siempre juegan
inherent aspects, such as location and position, transitory ‘always they.play (= they always play)’. Note that sentence
condition, results of an action, and state of being of a adverbs normally appear before or after subjects: (Probable-
subject.4 Significant differences in meaning can be signalled mente) María (probablemente) leyó el informe ‘(Probably) María
by choice of ser or estar, particularly with predicate adjec- (probably) read the report’.
tives: María es alegre ‘María is happy’ vs María está alegre
‘María is tipsy’. Nevertheless, there is variation in usage
across varieties; in Mexican and Chicano Spanish, estar
22.4.2.4 Negation
appears to be taking over some functions of ser. For
instance, estar is increasingly used with adjectives of phys- Negation is encoded by no ‘not’ (Ast. nun). This or another
ical description that traditionally would have required ser: negative element must precede the finite verb and any
cuando estábamos pequeños ‘when we.were small’ (Silva- proclitics; emphatic non-negation can be marked by insert-
Corvalán 1994). This continues a historical tendency within ing sí in the same position: no lo escribió ‘not it= wrote.PRT.3SG
Spanish, which for instance has extended use of estar to (= s/he didn’t write it)’ vs sí lo escribió ‘yes it= wrote.PRT.3SG (=
mark location of all non-event referents. In Aragonese, s/he did write it)’. Note that if an adverb intervenes
these distinctions are not consistently made. For instance, between no and the verb, then the scope of the negator is
in Belsetán Aragonese (Lozano Sierra and Saludas Bernad limited to the adverb: no siempre canto ópera ‘not always I.
2005:106f.), the forms and functions of ser and estar are sing opera (= I don’t always sing opera)’. Items such as Sp.
distinguished in the preterite, but otherwise the forms of nunca ‘never’, nadie ‘nobody’, nada ‘nothing’, ninguno/a
ser and estar have been mixed in a suppletive paradigm (i.e. ‘none, no one’, tampoco ‘neither’ must appear with preverbal
forms of ser are used for most finite forms, including the no (negative concord), unless they appear preverbally them-
present and imperfect, while non-finite forms are estar/ selves: no me lo dijo nunca ‘not to.me= it= said never (= s/he
estáu/estando ‘to.be/been.MSG/being’). In some varieties, never said it to me)’ vs nunca me lo dijo ‘never to.me= it=
either form can be used for certain functions (Chistabino said’. In Spanish, only one negative item may precede the
Ara. serán/estarán aquí una semana ‘the will be here (for) a verb, but in Asturian, Aragonese, and Judaeo-Spanish, this
constraint does not apply: Ast. nengún (nun) lo fizo ‘nobody
4
The distinction between ser and estar is now often analysed as a lexical (not) it= did (=nobody did it)’. Aragonese differs from other
distinction between ‘individual-level’ and ‘stage-level’ predicates (Zagona varieties by allowing two negative markers of a single verb
2002:47f.). However, Camacho (2013) argues that some uses, such as time of (discontinuous negation): no ye pas claro ‘not is not clear
day with ser and progressives with estar, do not fit neatly in this analysis; he
proposes that there exists an aspectual distinction between the two, with (= it’s not clear)’. The lexicalized combination no pas also
estar marking inchoative aspect and ser unmarked for aspect. negates other constituents: no pas yo ‘not me/I’.
408
22.4.2.5 Passive and middle voice película ‘I.saw the film’; buscaban a un médico ‘they.were.
seeking PA a doctor (= they were looking for a (specific)
To topicalize the patient and demote (or suppress) the
doctor)’ vs buscaban un médico ‘they.were.seeking a doctor (=
agent, standard/formal varieties use the analytic passive
they were looking for a(ny) doctor)’. However, exceptions to
construction ser ‘be’ + participle, with subjectivization of
these constraints exist. For instance, the prepositional
the underlying direct object (which may remain in postver-
accusative is often used with inanimate direct objects
bal position) and suppression (or demotion to an oblique
when there exists the possibility of confusion between the
phrase) of the underlying subject: los herederos vendieron la
subject and object (i.e. when the subject is also inanimate),
casa ‘the heirs sold the house’ ! la casa fue vendida (por los
and its use is required before direct object negative indefi-
herederos) ‘the house was sold (by the heirs)’. The analytic
nites: esta tradición caracteriza al sur ‘this tradition charac-
passive may also be formed with copula estar ‘be’ (wherever
terizes PA.the.MSG south.MSG’; no conocemos a nadie ‘not
the ser-estar distinction is marked); this option denotes not a
know.1PL PA nobody.MSG (= we don’t know anyone)’.
process but rather a resultant state and requires suppres-
sion of the Agent: la casa está vendida ‘the house is sold’. In
spoken varieties, clitic left-dislocation is often used to top- 22.4.3.2 Relative clauses
icalize the patient (see §22.4.3.4). Another strategy, found in
Relative clauses are introduced by a variety of relativizers:
all registers, is use of the third person reflexive se ‘self ’
pronouns (e.g. Sp. que ‘that’, quien/-es ‘who.SG.PL’, article + que,
construction (‘passive se’), with agreement between the
article + cual/-es ‘the.MSG/the.FSG which’ or los/las cuales ‘the.
usually postverbal subject (= Patient) and suppression of
MPL/the.FPL which’, including neuter lo que and lo cual), adverbs
the underlying agent: se vendió la casa ‘self= sold.3SG.PRT the
(e.g. Sp. donde ‘where’, cuando ‘when’, como ‘like, as’), or, only
house (= the house was sold)’; aquí se venden casas ‘here self=
in formal Spanish, the possessive determiner cuyo/a ‘whose’
sell.3PL.PRS houses (= houses are sold here)’. Note that this
(la mujer cuyos hijos ‘the.FSG woman.FSG whose.MPL sons.MPL’).
construction is similar to the middle construction (la puerta
Relative pronouns often appear in the same constructions,
se abrió ‘the door opened’), distinguished from the passive
but neither que, the most frequent of these, nor the others can
construction only by lack of an implicit agent.
be used in all constructions. In Spanish, the form of relativized
Not unrelated to the ‘passive se’ construction is indefinite
constituents varies depending on (1) whether the clause is
(or so-called ‘impersonal’) se, in which se functions as a
restrictive or non-restrictive, (2) the grammatical function of
subject clitic. In all varieties, this is commonly used with
the relative phrase within the clause, and (3) features (gender,
intransitive verbs (aquí se duerme bien ‘here SCL= sleeps well
number, definiteness, human/non-human) of the antecedent.
(= here one sleeps well)’, copulas (se está bien aquí ‘SCL= is well
For instance, quien is disallowed in the following restrictive
here (= it’s/we’re fine here)’, and transitive verbs which
clause (with subject antecedent of the relativizer): Sp. la mujer
have definite personal complements preceded by the prep-
que/**quien vino ayer ‘the woman that/**who came yesterday’;
ositional accusative (se busca a los delincuentes ‘SCL= searches
but in a similar non-restrictive clause, either que or quien is
PA the.MPL criminals.MPL (= the criminals are being sought)’.
acceptable (la mujer, quien/que vino ayer). For restrictive
In some Latin American varieties of Spanish (e.g. Peru,
clauses with a direct object antecedent, a number of relativi-
Argentina, Judaeo-Spanish), indefinite se also occurs with
zers are acceptable: la mujer que/a quien/a la que/a la cual conocí
transitive verbs followed by impersonal and indefinite
‘the woman that/PA whom/PA the.FSG that/PA the.FSG which
personal complements: se vende casas ‘SCL= sells.3SG houses
I met’; but many speakers reject use of que in a similar non-
(= houses are sold/one sells houses)’; se busca actores ‘SCL=
restrictive clause: las mujeres, a quienes/**que conocí ayer ‘the
seeks.3SG actors.MPL (= actors are sought/one seeks actors).
women, PA whom / **that I met yesterday’. Finally, notice that
restrictive relativization of non-human direct objects requires
que: el libro que /**el que /**el cual compré ‘the book that I.
22.4.3 Clause bought’ (cf. Zagona 2002:56-62).
22.4.3.1 Prepositional accusative
Central Ibero-Romance is characterized by a prepositional 22.4.3.3 Dequeísmo/queísmo
accusative construction, in which the preposition a ‘to’, Finite complements introduced by the complementizer que
normally used to mark indirect objects, is also used to ‘that’ may appear directly following verbs as postposed sub-
mark direct objects with specific human or human-like jects (me alegra que hayas venido ‘to.me is.pleasing that you.
referents. This is known as ‘personal a’ (cf. §56.3.2.4); its have.SBJV come’ (= I am pleased that you have come)’, and
use is very consistent in Spanish and Judaeo-Spanish, less so they also appear as noun phrase complements (pienso que
in Asturian and Aragonese: vi a Juan ‘I.saw PA Juan’ vs vi la vendrán ‘I.think that they.will.come’), or following a
409
preposition with verbs which take PP complements (me alegro Contrastive focus can be marked on final and non-final
de que hayan venido ‘myself= make.happy.1SG of that they. constituents by use of emphatic stress (characterized by a
have.SBJV come (= I am happy that they have come)’. In higher-than-normal pitch peak reached on the stressed syl-
contemporary non-standard Spanish (and other varieties), lable): Who bought the newspaper? ! [FOC Juan] compró el
there is much variation in the use of que with and without periódico; What did Juan do with the newspaper? ! Juan [FOC
preceding de, so that a verb like pensar can appear with an compró] el periódico (note that cleft sentences are also used to
intervening de when followed by finite complements (so- mark this kind of focus). In Asturian, emphatic stress on the
called dequeísmo): pienso de que vendrán ‘I.believe of that subject is accompanied by proclisis: ¡[FOC este rapaz] nos lo díxo!
they.will.come’. Similarly, verbs that normally have a PP ‘this boy to.us= it= said (= it was this boy who said it to us)’.
complement can appear without de (so-called queísmo): me Non-subject foci may also be fronted to the left periphery of
alegro que hayan venido. the sentence: [FOC el periódico] compró Juan. In these cases, the
fronted focus receives emphatic stress and is obligatorily
accompanied by subject–verb inversion when the fronted
22.4.3.4 Sentence organization and information structure focus is a complement of the verb. Bare nouns with unaccu-
Central Ibero-Romance is characterized by SVO basic word sative verbs may also be fronted: niños llegaron (y no adultos)
order but, like other varieties of southern Romance, shows ‘children arrived (and not adults)’.
patterns which correspond to an active/stative syntax The syntactic patterns of exclamations and interrogatives
(Ledgeway 2011b:447-71). Therefore, S must be understood are similar to those of focus fronting. Exclamations front
as an active Agent transitive or intransitive subject (A/SA) the direct object or predicate complement, usually accom-
and O as the stative undergoer transitive object or intransi- panied by a wh-word (articulated with emphatic stress), and
tive subject (O/SO). In this system, transitive subjects and show subject–verb inversion: ¡Qué grande está el nene! ‘How
unergative subjects precede the verb (Juan perdió el libro big is the boy (= how big the boy is!)’. Non-echo interroga-
‘Juan lost the book’; Juan perdió ‘Juan lost’), while transitive tive questions require fronting of the wh-word/phrase
objects and unaccusative subjects follow it (se perdió el libro (articulated with peak intonation) along with inversion:
‘self= lost the book (= the book was/got lost)’. ¿Con quién salió Juan? ‘With whom left Juan (= with whom
Information structure is also key to explaining sentence did Juan leave?); ¿Qué quieres (tú)? ‘What want (you) (= what
structure. In all-focus sentences (those which respond, for do you want)?’. In Caribbean varieties, speakers prefer ¿Qué
example, to an implicit ‘What happened?’), unmarked sen- tú quieres? ‘What do you want?’, without inversion and with
tence orders are A–V–O, SA–V, and V–SO (as exemplified overt use of the personal pronoun. Polar questions may
above); in these cases, the entire sentence is considered the show inversion, but are often marked only by final rising
focus (there is no topic). In other contexts, the presupposed intonation: ¿Compró Juan el periódico? ¿Juan compró el periód-
information of a topic tends to appear in sentence-initial ico? ‘Did Juan buy the newspaper?’
position (frequently coinciding with A and SA, which are Since topics generally precede predicates, subjects (in both
often not overt), while the new, asserted information of the active and passive sentences) often occupy topic position.
focus appears toward the end of the sentence. Wh-questions However, other constituents may be topicalized by disloca-
can be used to identify the discourse context of focalized tion, usually to the left periphery: todos los días compra Juan el
constituents: What happened? ! [FOC Juan compró el periódico] periódico ‘all the days buys Juan the newspaper (= Juan buys
‘Juan bought the newspaper’; What did Juan do? ! Juan [FOC the newspaper every day)’. This frequently occurs with com-
compró el periódico]; What did Juan buy? ! Juan compró [FOC el plements, which can be topicalized by left-dislocation, with
periódico] (Olarrea 2012:605). The association of nuclear stress an overt coreferential element: (en cuanto a) Juan, no me
with sentence-final neutral focus (Zubizarreta 1998) favours acuerdo de él ‘(as for) Juan, not me.REFL= remember of him
the tendency to place focalized items towards the end of the (= as for Juan, I don’t remember him)’. Complements (and
sentence. The need to mark neutral (non-emphatic) focus of other constituents) may also be topicalized by clitic left-
constituents also favours use of varied word orders, so that the dislocation, which disallows an overt coreferential element
context set up by ‘Who bought the newspaper?’ requires other than a required clitic (el periódico lo compró Juan ‘the
movement of the subject to sentence-final position to mark newspaper it= bought Juan (= the newpaper, Juan bought it)’;
neutral focus: compró el periódico [FOC Juan]. In transitive sen- a Juan le gusta el café ‘to Juan to.him= is.pleasing the coffee (=
tences, subjects (agents) may appear in different positions Juan likes coffee)’ (see also Gutiérrez Ordóñez 1997;
(SVO, VOS, VSO), so that beside Pedro llamó a María, one also Zubizarreta 1999; Rodríguez Ramalle 2003; 2005). In more
finds llamó a María Pedro and llamó Pedro a María ‘Pedro called colloquial language one finds clitic right-dislocation, which
María’, each of which allows different orderings of given and also requires a clitic copy but is articulated with pause
new information. intonation: Juan lo compró, el periódico.
410
CHAPTER 23
Galician and Portuguese

23.1 Introduction century; in Angola only 20% of the population spoke Portu-
guese natively in the 1990s (Inverno 2005), and only about 6%
In 711 Muslims conquered the Iberian Peninsula. The terri- at the same period in Mozambique (Gonçalves 2010). In both
tories today known as Galicia, the north of Portugal, and the countries Portuguese is still largely spoken as a second lan-
westernmost strips of Asturias, León, and Zamora were, guage, with new varieties developing rapidly. In Cape Verde
significantly, never occupied by the Muslims, nor aban- and Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe, Portuguese co-exists,
doned by their older, Romance-speaking, inhabitants. mainly as a second language, alongside Portuguese-based
Thus, the Romance of this area was preserved and con- creoles.
tinued evolving without interruption despite the Muslim In Galicia (Monteagudo 1999; Mariño 2008), the dialects
conquest. Later, the consciousness of a linguistic entity were gradually excluded from administration and high cul-
different from Latin and other surrounding varieties ture and replaced by Spanish. By the end of the sixteenth
emerged. Throughout the thirteenth century, written century, Galician had become a set of varieties spoken above
forms of this entity started to be used (Boullón and all by the working classes. As a part of Spain, Galicia wel-
Monteagudo 2009) and a flourishing poetry emerged. Nat- comed an increasing number of Spanish-speaking civil ser-
urally, these varieties were not uniform, inasmuch as they vants who contributed to the Castilianization of the
had been continuously evolving since Romanization and territory. Today Galicia is bilingual (Fernández Rodríguez
hence displayed considerable geographic variation, which and Rodríguez Neira 1994). Strong and prolonged contact
has been preserved until the present day. with Spanish determined in part Galician’s evolution and its
The territories where these dialects emerged to the south present shape (Monteagudo and Santamarina 1993). Only
of the river Minho became contemporary Portugal, while from the nineteenth century has Galician developed a cul-
those to the north made up Galicia; the easternmost strip tured literature, with an orthography inspired by that of
was included in the Kingdom of León. While Portugal Spanish and independent from that of Portuguese. In 1978
became an independent country, Galicia was first grouped Galician was declared a co-official language in Galicia and
with León, and finally included in Spain (see Map 23.1). was then introduced into the educational system and public
In Portugal (Teyssier 1982; Azevedo 2005; Castro 2006), administration. In 1982 the Institute for the Galician Lan-
the northern dialects, termed Portuguese, were carried south guage and the Royal Galician Academy developed a standard
along with the Reconquista, eliminating Mozarabic, Berber, variety (Instituto da lingua galega / Real Academia Gallega
and Arabic dialects. Portuguese became the language of 2003). However, some groups, believing that Galician and
administration and cultured literature, developed a stand- Portuguese are still one language, developed alternative
ard variety, and gradually spread to every social context. standards, more or less akin to Portuguese and far removed
Finally, Portuguese was exported to Brazil and the African from vernacular Galician.
and Asian colonies. Today Portuguese is official in Angola, The varieties spoken in the westernmost strip of Asturias
Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, present similar problems. While they are traditionally
São Tomé and Príncipe, and East Timor; this expansion also considered part of the Galician language, some Asturian
produced the development of some Portuguese-based cre- academics (SLNE 2006) argue that they constitute an inde-
oles (cf. §24.2, and Map 23.2). pendent language and merit their own standardization’s
In Brazil thousands of African slaves and the indigenous process.
peoples played a role in structuring the language (Lucchesi Along the Spanish-Portuguese border there exist some
2012a). They learned Portuguese through processes of pidgi- Spanish localities such as Alamedilla (Salamanca), Cedillo
nization and creolization which left their mark on the Bra- and Herrera de Alcántara (Cáceres), Olivenza (Badajoz),
zilian varieties. Portuguese was also taken to Mozambique where Portuguese is spoken. The varieties spoken in San
and Angola, mainly from the second half of the twentieth Martín de Trevejo, Eljas, and Valverde del Fresno (Cáceres)
This chapter © Francisco Dubert and Charlotte Galves 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 411
Bay of Biscay
GALICIA
Minho
NAVARRA
R. LEÓN
R. Do
uro
L
ro CASTILLE ARAGÓN
R. Dou
A
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
G
U
o
de g
on
T
us
R. M
g
Ta
R.
R
PO
us
g
Ta
R.
AL-ANDALUS
Map 23.1 Galicia and Portugal in the eleventh century
have caused some controversy (Gargallo Gil 2007) as to Portuguese, and originated from a long-standing geograph-
whether they should they be considered Galician, Portu- ical, political, and cultural division in the Iberian Peninsula.
guese, or independent entities (see Map 23.3). Modern Galician maintained some of the features of the
We shall use the term Galician-Portuguese (GP) for the original common language, lost in standard Portuguese, it
medieval varieties spoken in Galicia and Portugal until did not participate in subsequent changes that occurred in
roughly the Renaissance, although some consistent differ- Portugal and were taken to Brazil, and has followed its own
ences already existed during the late Middle Ages (Maia history, in which contact with Spanish has played a crucial
1997). Following this period, we shall speak of Galician role in selecting some features and adding others. The other
(Glc.) and Portuguese (Pt.) as different languages and will split is between Galician and European Portuguese on one
use these labels to refer to features shared by almost all hand, and Brazilian Portuguese and African Portuguese on
the varieties of each language. Furthermore, we shall the other. It arose from the situation of contact which
need to distinguish between European Portuguese (EuPt.), occurred in Brazil and Africa, which introduced into
African Portuguese (AfPt.), Angolan Portuguese (AngPt.), Romance features of the Niger-Congo family, affecting
and Brazilian Portuguese (BrPt.), as well as Afro-Brazilian some deep grammatical aspects such as agreement and
Portuguese, a dialect spoken by isolated communities des- nominal determination. From this perspective, despite the
cending from African populations (Lucchesi et al. 2009). For name given to each variant, the major distance, at least
a historic comparision between Galician and Portuguese, see from the syntactic point of view, is likely to be the one
Monteagudo (2012). associated with the second split, since it involves typo-
We shall see that there are two main splits in the Gal- logical changes, also called—in particular by Baker
ician/Portuguese area. One is between Galician and (2008a)—‘macro-parametric’ changes.
412
PORTUGAL
ATLANTIC
OCEAN PACIFIC
OCEAN
MACAU
CAPE
VERDE
GUINEA-BISSAU
PACIFIC
OCEAN SÃO TOMÉ
AND PRÍNCIPE
EAST
BRAZIL TIMOR
ANGOLA
INDIAN
MOZAMBIQUE OCEAN

GALICIAN AND PORTUGUESE
Map 23.2 Portuguese in the world
Bay of Biscay
GALICIAN
PORTUGUESE
ATLANTIC
OCEAN La Alamedilla
San Martin,
Eljas and Valverde
Cedillo and
Herrera de Alcántara
PORTUGUESE
Olivenza
Eastern limit of Galician gheada
Eastern limit of Galician seseo
Southern limit of devoicing of

coronal fricatives
Southern limit of preservation of /t∫/

Northern limit of /v/
Map 23.3 Galician and Portuguese isoglosses in the Iberian Peninsula
414
23.2 Phonology [e] shifted to [ɐ] when immediately followed by palatals: t[ɐ]
nho ‘I have’, des[ɐ]jo ‘desire’.
Dialectal European Portuguese developed new vowels
23.2.1 Vowels (Cintra 1971; Segura and Saramago 2001; Segura 2013). In
23.2.1.1 Stressed oral vowels Beira-Baixa and Alto-Alentejo [u] was fronted to [y]: l[u]me >
Galician-Portuguese had the seven tonic oral vowels of l[y]me ‘fire’; [e] labialized and lowered to [œ]: coz[œ]r ‘to
western spoken Latin: /i/, /e/, /ɛ/, /a/, /ɔ/, /o/ and /u/ cook’; [ow] > [o] (cf. §23.2.1.3) fronted to [ø]: r[ø]pa ‘clothes’.
(cf. §25.1.1). However, there was not a straightforward cor- In southwestern dialects, original [a] > [ɒ]: c[ɒ]bra ‘goat’; [u]
respondence between original Latin vowels and their > [y]: l[y]me ‘fire’; [e] > [ɛ]: s[ɛ]da ‘silk’; and [ɛ] > [æ]: p[æ]dra
Romance outcomes: the lexical incidence of each vowel ‘stone’. In São Miguel (Azores) original [i] > [ɪ, e]: barr[e]ga
depended on historical changes not always shared by the ‘belly’; [e] > [ɜ]: d[ɜ]dos ‘fingers’; [ɛ] > [æ]: f[æ]rro ‘iron’; [a] >
entire community. Thus, in old western Galician atonic final [ɒ, ɔ] by vowel harmony: [puˈðɒɾ] ‘to lop, to prune’; [o] > [u]:
-[u] < -UM could raise tonic [ɛ] and [ɔ] of some nouns and senh[u]r ‘mister’; [u] > [y]: l[y]me ‘fire’; and [ow] > [ø]: r[ø]pa
adjectives (Fernández Rei 1990; Ferreiro 1995; Penny 2009); ‘clothes’. In some dialects of Madeira, [i] diphthongized to
this u-metaphony was a word-specific phenomenon and the [ɐj]~[ɨj], and [u] to [ɐw]: [ˈlua] > [ˈlɐwɐ] ‘moon’.
close -mid stressed vowel of the singular spread to the In northwestern European Portuguese, mid vowels diph-
plural, which ended in [os] < -OS: s[o]gro(s) ‘son(s)-in-law’, thongized: [e] > [je], [o] > [wo] (t[je]ve ‘he had’). In Madeiran
but [ɔ]vo(s) ‘egg(s)’, p[ɔ]rco(s) ‘pig(s)’; eastern Galician tends and Azorean dialects rising diphthongs emerge if the
to preserve the low-mid vowels in this context (s[ɔ]gro(s)). stressed vowel is preceded by a high vowel: fumar > fum[wa]r
In Portuguese (Williams 1938), u-metaphony on tonic ‘to smoke’.
[ɛ, ɔ] was more regular than in Galician: [o]vo ‘egg’, p[o]rco
‘pig’; tonic [ɔ] in the masculine plural, ending in [os], tended
to be preserved: m[o]rto/m[ɔ]rtos ‘dead.MSG/PL’. Words with 23.2.1.2 Unstressed oral vowels
etymological tonic [o] < Ō were analogically attracted to the The vocalic repertoire is reduced in unstressed syllables,
model of morto: fam[o]so, fam[ɔ]sos, fam[ɔ]sa(s) ‘famous.MSG/ with vowels becoming unstable. In final position GP [e, a, o]
MPL/F(PL)’. Tonic [e] of the singular, however, spread to the shifted respectively to EuPt. [ɨ, ɐ, u], BrPt. [i, a, u] (southern
plural (cap[e]lo ‘cowl’ > cap[e]los ‘cowls’). In northern Euro- dialects preserve [e, o]), and Glc. [ɪ, ɐ, ʊ]. In European
pean Portuguese u-metaphony did not occur (Paiva Boléo Portuguese final vowels can be devoiced or deleted: tem
and Silva 1962). [pu̥]~tem[pʷ] ‘time’; in Beira-Baixa and Alto-Alentejo, [u]
In western Galician there exist instances of word specific centralized to [ɨ] or fell entirely: tud[ɨ] ‘all’. In Galician
a-metaphony by which tonic [e, o] were lowered to [ɛ, ɔ], devoicing is common: mont[ɪ]̥ s ‘hills’.
respectively, in adjectives and nouns: HŌRAM > h[ɔ]ra ‘hour’, The repertoire in non-final vowels is bigger. European
ĬLLAM > [ɛ]la ‘she’. a-metaphony in Portuguese is again less Portuguese presents [i], [ɨ] (neutralization of tonic [e, ɛ]), [ɐ],
lexically restricted: Glc. mo[e]da ‘coin’, f[o]rma ‘form’ vs Pt. and [u] (neutralization of tonic [ɔ, o, u]); [ɨ] cannot appear in
mo[ɛ]da, f[ɔ]rma; again, northern European Portugese main- initial position. In Brazilian Portuguese and Galician only
tains mid closed vowels in words like [e]sta ‘this.F’, [e]sa mid vowels are neutralized: [i], [e], [a], [o], and [u] (see
‘that.F’, aqu[e]la ‘that.F’, [e]la ‘she.F’ (Nunes 1933; Révah Table 23.1).
1958). An i-metaphony caused the raising of [e, ɛ]: FĒCĪ > Pt. In European Portuguese non-reduced vowels may appear
fiz ‘I did’, MĬHĪ > mim ‘me’. in different contexts and varieties, sometimes in variation:
Portuguese (but not Galician) centralized [a] before hetero- thus, in learnèd words like af[ɛ]ção ‘disease’; in initial pos-
syllabic nasals: c[ˈɐ]ma ‘bed’. In standard European Portuguese ition, [u]relha, [o]relha, [ɔ]relha ‘ear’; in syllables closed by /l/,
Table 23.1 Pretonic vowels

EUPT . BRPT . GLC .
‘it turns’ / ‘to turn’ v[ˈi]ra / v[i]rar v[ˈi]ra / v[i]rar v[ˈi]ra / v[i]rar
‘it drinks’ / ‘to drink’ b[ˈɛ]be / b[ɨ]ber b[ˈɛ]be / b[e]ber b[ˈɛ]be / b[e]ber
‘it must’ / ‘to must’ d[ˈe]va / d[ɨ]ver d[ˈe]va / d[e]ver d[ˈe]ba / d[e]ber
‘it eats’ / ‘to eat’ c[ˈɔ]me / c[u]mer c[ˈɔ]me / c[o]mer c[ˈɔ]me / c[o]mer
‘it eats.SBJV’ / ‘to eat’ c[ˈo]ma / c[u]mer c[ˈo]ma / c[o]mer c[ˈo]ma / c[o]mer
‘it pierces’ / ‘to pierce’ f [ˈu]ra / f [u]rar f [ˈu]ra / f [u]rar f [ˈu]ra / f [u]rar
415
s[a]ltar ‘to jump’; in morphologically related words, v[ɛ]lho 23.2.1.5 Stressed nasal vowels
‘old’ > v[ɛ]lhice ‘old age’. In fact, their usage seems to be
Nasal vowels resulted from: a) the loss of Latin intervocalic
increasing (Emiliano 2009). Unstressed vowels may also be
-N- (§23.2.2.3): UĪNUM > GP [ˈβĩ.o] ‘wine’; b) lexically deter-
deleted (§23.2.3).
mined left-to-right assimilations: MĔAM > GP [ˈmĩ.a] ‘my/
In northern Brazilian Portuguese it is possible to find
mine.F’; c) automatic anticipatory assimilations: ŬNDE > GP
generalized low mid vowels in pretonic position (c[ɔ]mer
[ˈõn̪de] ‘where’. While Galician retained nasal stops in the
‘to eat’). Galician permits pretonic mid open vowels,
coda ([ˈõn̪dɪ]), Portuguese lost them leaving nasalized
sometimes in free variation ([ɔ]rtiga vs [o]rtiga ‘nettle’),
vowels ([ˈõdɨ]) (cf. §23.2.2.3).
sometimes distinctive in determined lexical items (v[ɔ]tar
Galician maintained the height of the vowels nasalized by
‘to vote’ vs b[o]tar ‘to throw’). Both in Brazilian Portu-
the anticipatory assimilations: [ãn̪]das ‘you walk’, v[ɛ̃n̪]des
guese and Galician harmonic processes may raise mid
‘you.sell’, [bɛ̃ŋ] ‘well’; only western Galician raised the low
vowels: p[e]dir > p[i]dir ‘to ask’; European Portuguese
mid vowels of some nouns and adjectives: DĔNTEM > d[ẽ]nte
unstressed /i/ is realized as [ɨ] before another /i/: m[ɨ]
‘tooth’ (EGlc. d[ɛ̃]nte).
litar ‘soldier’.
In Portuguese tonic [ã], [ɛ̃], and [ɔ̃] raised to [ɐ̃], [ẽ], and
[õ]: c[ɐ̃]mpo ‘field’, s[ẽ]mpre ‘always’, v[ẽ]ndes ‘you.sell’. Final
[ẽ] diphthongized to [ẽȷ ̃]~[ɐ̃ȷ ̃]: BĔNE > [bɛ̃n] > [bẽ] > [bɐ̃ȷ]̃ ~[bẽȷ ̃]
23.2.1.3 Stressed oral falling diphthongs
‘well’. In Brazilian Portuguese [a], [ɛ], and [ɔ] followed by
Stressed oral diphthongs in European Portuguese are [aj] a heterosyllabic nasal were nasalized and raised: [ˈkõ.mi]
(bairro ‘neighbourhood’), [ɐj] (leite ‘milk’), [ɛj] (papéis ‘(s)he.eats’ (EuPt. [ˈkɔ.mɨ]).
‘papers’), [ɔj] (faróis ‘lights’), [oj] (noite ‘night’), [uj] (cuida GP [ˈĩ] in hiatus developed a nasal palatal consonant
‘(s)he.cares.for’), [iw] (partiu ‘(s)he.split.PST’), [ew] (meu (CAMĪNUM > cam[ĩo] ‘way’ > cam[ĩɲʊ]). GP [ũ] in hiatus lost
‘mine’), [ɛw] (céu ‘sky’), [aw] (causa ‘cause’). the nasal feature (LŪNAM > [ˈlũa] > [ˈluɐ] ‘moon’; but ŪNAM >
GP [ej] in words such as madeira ‘wood’ was reduced to [ũa] > Glc. [uŋɐ], Pt. [uma] ‘a/one.FSG’). Other stressed nasal
[e] in southern European Portuguese, and in most Brazil- vowels behaved in particular ways (Lorenzo 1988):
ian Portuguese varieties; in standard European Portu-
• -ANAM > GP r[ãa] ‘frog’: Pt. r[ˈɐ̃]; Glc. r[ˈa], r[ˈãŋ]
guese [ej] > [ɐj]. Northern European Portuguese dialects
• -ANEM > GP c[ãn] ‘dog’: Pt. c[ɐ̃w̃]; Glc. c[ˈãŋ]
created new instances of [ej] when [e] was followed by a
• -ANUM > GP ch[ão] ‘ground’: Pt. ch[ɐ̃w̃]; Glc. ch[ˈãŋ], ch[ˈa],
palatal segment: f[ej]cho ‘I.lock’. GP [ow] in words such as
ch[ˈaw]
cantou ‘(s)he.sang’, or ouro ‘gold’ was reduced to [o] in
• -ŌNEM > GP ladr[õn] ‘thief ’: Pt. ladr[ɐ̃w̃]; Glc. ladr[õŋ]
southern European Portuguese (§23.2.1.1). In isolated
• *ˈʊdɪnem > OPt. multid[õe] ‘crowd’: Pt. multid[ɐ̃w̃]
words, [ow] and [oj] were exchanged: [ˈkojzɐ] ‘thing’ <
CAUSAM. Galician and northern European Portuguese Thus, the Portuguese stressed endings [ãn], [ão], [õe] and
retained both [ej] and [ow]. [õn] converged in [ɐ̃w̃].
The Latin groups -ŬLT-, -ŬCT-, -ŪCT-, -ŎCT-, -ŎRI-, etc., con-
verged on [oj] in most Galician dialects: noite ‘night’, coiro
‘leather’, moito ‘much’, troita ‘trout’, enxoito ‘dried’ (Fernández 23.2.1.6 Unstressed nasal vowels
Rei 1990). In Portuguese, they had different results depending Portuguese permits pretonic nasal close-mid vowels: [ĩ, ẽ, ɐ̃,
on the etymon: noite, couro~coiro, muito, truta, enxuto. õ, ũ] (§23.2.1.2). Galician, having only contextual nasalized
In Brazilian Portuguese final stressed rhymes closed by vowels, adds [ɛ̃, ɔ̃], preserving [ã]. Final Pt. [ẽ] > [ẽȷ ̃]~[ɐ̃ȷ ̃]: perd
[s] developed palatal semivowels: [pajs] ‘peace’, [lujs] ‘light’. [ɐ̃ȷ]̃ ‘they.lose’. In dialectal Portuguese, denasalization of
The vocalization of [ɫ] > [w] in the coda also created new final [ẽ] is common, giving [ɨ] in Portugal and [i] in Brazil.
diphthongs (§23.2.2.2). Galician preserves the nasal consonants: and[ɐ̃ŋ] ‘they.walk’,
falar[ʊ̃ŋ] ‘they.spoke’, viv[ɪ̃ŋ] ‘they.live’.
23.2.1.4 Unstressed oral falling diphthongs

Unstressed oral diphthongs in European Portuguese are 23.2.1.7 Unstressed nasal falling diphthongs
[ɐw] (saudade ‘longing’), [ɐj] (queixume ‘moan’), [aj] (paisagem GP [ẽe] < -ĬNEM and unstressed verbal ending [ẽn] (GP parten
‘landscape’), [oj] (noivado ‘engagement’), [uj] (cuidado ‘care’), ‘they.split’) produced Pt. [ẽȷ ̃]~[ɐ̃ȷ ̃]: virg[ɐ̃ȷ ̃] ‘virgin’. This diph-
[ew] (europeu ‘European’), [aw] (pautar ‘to rule’). In Galician, thong spread to loanwords: linguag[ɐ̃ȷ]̃ ‘language’. In dia-
[aw] corresponds to [ɐw], [ej] to [ɐj], and [ow] is preserved lectal Portuguese, denasalization is also common here,
(pousar ‘to lay’). giving EuPt. [ɨ] and BrPt. [i]. Galician-Portuguese unstressed
416
endings [ão], [ãn], and [õn] merged in [ɐ̃w̃] in Portuguese: sot ‘you’re silly’; elsewhere /s/ followed by voiced or fricative
[ɐ̃w̃] ‘attic’, cant[ɐ̃w̃] ‘they.sing’, cantar[ɐ̃w̃] ‘they.sang’, which consonants may be realized as [ɾ]: as mans [aɾ ˈmãŋs̺] ‘the
may also be denasalized: sot[ow] or sot[u]. In Galician, hands’.
[ẽe] and [ão] were reduced to [ɪ] and [ʊ], respectively: hom Northeastern European Portuguese dialects preserve the
[ɪ], sot[ʊ]. distinction between lamino- and apicoalveolar fricatives in
the onset: ma[s]a ‘mallet’ vs ma[s̺]a ‘dough’, co[z]er ‘to cook’
vs co[z̺]er ‘to sew’. The other dialects merged laminals and
23.2.1.8 Sandhi apicals: while central European Portuguese selected the
Final unstressed [a] may result from the coalescence of two apicals, the remaining dialects chose the laminals. In stand-
contiguous unstressed occurrences of /a/ belonging to dif- ard European Portuguese /s/ in the coda is a voiced alveolar
ferent words: Olha a menina! [ˈɔʎa mẽˈnĩnɐ] ‘look.at the girl’. when intervocalic (os olhos [uz ˈɔʎuʃ] ‘the eyes’) and post-
In Galician, [ɔ] may appear when unstressed final /a/ alveolar when followed by a consonant (besta [ˈbeʃtɐ] ‘beast’,
merges either with the /u/ of the indefinite article (era desde [ˈdeʒdɨ] ‘from’) or in final position (olhos [ˈɔʎuʃ] ‘eyes’).
unha nena [ˈɛɾɔŋɐ ˈnẽnɐ] ‘she was a girl’), or with the /o/ This palatalization does not occur in most Brazilian Portu-
of the definite article or the third person masculine accusa- guese dialects nor in northern European Portuguese.
tive pronoun (cántao! [ˈkãn̪tɔ] ‘sing=it’). In southern central In western Galician /ɡ/ was replaced by /h/. In this
Galician non-low vowels of determiners and pronouns phenomenon, known as gheada, [ɡ] is only preserved if
become open mid if preceded by [j], a dialectal realization preceded by [ŋ] inside the word (ma[ŋɡ]o ‘handle’, where it
of the conjunction e ‘and’ before vowels: e una nena [jɔŋɐ may be devoiced: man[ŋk]o). Nowadays, velar or pharyngeal
ˈnẽnɐ] ‘and a girl’ (in northwestern European Portuguese fricatives are replacing [h], so that gato ‘cat’ may be pro-
this phenomenon happens only with definite articles, nounced [h]ato, [x]ato, and [ħ]ato. Gheada is the most stereo-
Segura 2013). typed phenomenon of Galician (Recalde 2002–03) and many
people are recovering /ɡ/ from Spanish cognates. Spanish
loanwords have introduced fricative velars in dialectal Gal-
23.2.2 Consonants ician: [koˈlexjʊ] ‘school’.
Galician /b/, /d/, and /ɡ/ (where used) are realized as
23.2.2.1 Fricatives, stops, and affricates stops after nasals or pause and as approximants elsewhere
Northern European Portuguese and Galician lack /v/, which (/d/ after /l/ is realized as a stop: [ˈkal ̪dʊ] ‘broth’). In
is taken over by /b/: vai [ˈbaj] ‘he.goes’. European Portuguese this alternation is attributed to fast
In Galician, GP /ʃ, ʒ/ in onset positions merged as /ʃ/; GP speech; Brazilian Portuguese lacks these approximants.
/s̺, z̺/ merged as apical /s̺/, and GP /ʦ, ʣ/ merged as Galician, northwestern European Portuguese and some
laminal /s/. Afterwards, in western Galician /s/ merged dialects of Brazilian Portuguese preserve [ʧ ] inherited
with /s̺/, some varieties preferring [s̺], others [s]; elsewhere, from Galician-Portuguese in words like [ʧ ]orar ‘to cry’ <
laminal /s/ shifted to /θ/. The outcome of merging /s̺/ and PLORARE. The other Portuguese dialects merged [ʧ] with [ʃ]:
/s/ is known as seseo (see Table 23.2): [ʃ]orar. Brazilian Portuguese recovered postalveolar affri-
Some western Galician dialects permit /θ/ in the onset, cates by palatalizing /t, d/ followed by /i/: [ˈʧia] ‘aunt’,
but not in the coda, producing alternations such as [ˈpas̺] / [ˈʤia] ‘day’.
[ˈpaθɪs̺] ‘peace.SG/PL’. Glc. /s/ in coda is voiceless if followed
by a vowel, and always apical: [os̺ ˈoʎʊs̺ ˈtews̺] ‘your eyes’; in 23.2.2.2 Liquids
the westernmost dialects, /s/ before a consonant may be
realized either as [ʃ]~[ʂ]~[h], es (=[ˈɛʂ]~[ˈɛʃ]~[ˈɛh]) parvo Latin word-internal intervocalic -L- was dropped (CALENTEM >
quente ‘hot’); Latin ‑LL- was degeminated (ĬLLAM > ela ‘she’). GP
Table 23.2 Galician coronal fricatives in onset position [l] remained in intervocalic position; velarization in coda
position is general in Portuguese and common in dialectal
GP SESEO COMMON GALICIAN Galician. In Brazilian Portuguese [w] replaced [ɫ] in coda:
[ˈsɔɫ] > [ˈsɔw] ‘sun’.
caixa ‘box’ [ʃ] [ʃ] [ʃ]
GP [ʎ] was preserved in European Portuguese. In Madeira,
já ‘already’ [ʒ] [ʃ] [ʃ]
[l] palatalizes if preceded by [i]~[j]: [ˈvɐjʎɐ] vila ‘village’. In
maça ‘mallet’ [ʦ] [s̺]~[s] [θ]
vernacular Brazilian Portuguese [j] has replaced [ʎ]: mu[j]er
cozer ‘to cook’ [ʣ] [s̺]~[s] [θ]
‘woman; wife’. Glc. [ʎ] is being replaced by [ɟ], mu[ɟ]er
massa ‘dough’ [s̺] [s̺]~[s] [s̺]
‘woman; wife’. Some Spanish loanwords in dialectal Galician
coser ‘to sew’ [z̺] [s̺]~ [s] [s̺]
have introduced [ɟ] in initial position: [ɟ]ama ‘flame’, instead
417
of [ʧ]ama. Galician intervocalic [j] may be strengthened to Table 23.3 Outcomes of hiatuses
[ɟ]: ra[ɟ]o ‘lighting’ < RADIUM (Dubert 2013).
GALICIAN - PORTUGUESE PORTUGUESE GALICIAN
Asturian Galician preserved intervocalic -L- (CALENTEM >
[kaˈlɛ̃n̪tɪ]); easternmost varieties palatalized -LL- (ĬLLAM > [ˈeo] feo ‘ugly.M’ [ˈɐju] feio [ˈeʊ] feo
[ˈeʎɐ]~[ˈeɟɐ]) and word-initial L- (*lakte > [ʎ]eite~[ɟ]eite [ˈea] fea ‘ugly.F’ [ˈɐjɐ] feia [ˈeɐ] fea
‘milk’; Babarro González 2003). [ˈɛo] ceo ‘sky’ [ˈɛw] céu [ˈɛʊ] ceo
GP [ɾ] and [r] were distinctive in intervocalic word- [ˈɔa] moa ‘molar’ [ˈɔ] mó [ˈɔɐ] moa
internal position: ca[ɾ]o ‘expensive’ vs ca[r]o ‘cart’; word-
initially or preceded by a nasal, [r] was used in the onset:
[r]ua ‘street’, hon[r]a ‘honour’; [ɾ] appeared elsewhere: t[ɾ]oca ‘psychology’. In European Portuguese spelling, the first let-
[ɾ] ‘to exchange’. Standard Portuguese replaced [r] with [ʀ], ter of learnèd groups such as ct, pt, cç indicates that the
alternating with [x]. In Brazil [h] may replace [ʀ]~[x]: [ˈhua] preceding unstressed vowel is not reduced (§23.2.1.2;
‘street’; retroflex articulations of BrPt. [ɾ] in onset positions Emiliano 2009).
are possible; in coda positions vernacular Brazilian Portu- In Galician words of popular origin only /s/, /θ/, /ŋ/, /l/,
guese transformed [ɾ] into [x] or eliminated it entirely: [mu and /ɾ/ are permitted in the coda: [beθ] ‘time’, [bẽŋ] ‘see.IND.
ˈjɛx]~[muˈjɛ] ‘woman; wife’. PRS.3PL’. Except for the plural [ŋs̺] (§23.3.1), branching codas
Thus, while in Portuguese [x, h] are historically related to are forbidden in popular words; [ŋ] of the word-internal
rhotics, in Galician they are related to voiced velar stops or coda [ŋs̺] is deleted in frequently used learnèd words:
found in Spanish loanwords. [is̺tiˈtutʊ] ‘high school’.
In Portuguese words of popular origin only /s/, /l/,
and /ɾ/ are permitted in coda positions: [veʃ] ‘time’ and
23.2.2.3 Nasals ‘see.IND.PRS.2SG’. The dropping of unstressed vowels in
Latin word-internal intervocalic -N- was dropped (PLĒNUM > European Portuguese permits other segments to appear
cheio ‘full.MSG’); Latin ‑NN- was degeminated (PANNUM > pano in final position ([dẽt] ‘tooth’); also, it produces sequences
‘rag’). Nowadays, onsets may be filled with [m], [n], and [ɲ], of consonants uncommon in Romance languages
although [ɲ] cannot usually appear in initial position. BrPt. ([ˈdʃtɾezɐ] ‘skill’), and syllabic consonants ([pɾ̩ziˈdẽt]
[ɲ] may be replaced by [ȷ]̃ : [ˈteȷ ̃u] ‘I.have’. In Madeira and the ‘president’).
Azores, [n] palatalizes if preceded by [i, j]: [viˈɲaɣɾɨ] ‘vin- Galician-Portuguese had hiatuses that were treated dif-
egar’. Galician has an intervocalic [ŋ] in the words unha ferently according to their composition (see Table 23.3).
[uŋɐ] ‘a.F, one.F’, algunha [aɫˈɰuŋɐ] ‘some.F’, and ningunha Portuguese transforms the initial high vowel of the hia-
[nĩŋˈɡuŋɐ] ‘no.F’ (Pt. [umɐ], [aɫˈɡumɐ], and [nĩˈɲũmɐ]) (Colina tuses into semivowels: cear [ˈsjaɾ] ‘to dine’, miudo [ˈmju.du]
and Díaz-Campo 2006). Galician nasals in final position are ‘small’; Galician preserves the hiatuses: [θe.ˈaɾ], [mi.ˈu.ð̞ʊ].
velar, even if followed by a vowel: [nõŋ a mĩŋ] ‘not to me’
(§23.3.2).
23.2.4 Stress
23.2.3 Syllable and phonotactics Stress neither strictly depends on the quantity of the syl-
lable nor is it linked to a position in the word. However,
Syllables without onsets or with a branched onset are per- some tendencies may be detected (Mateus and Andrade
mitted, the same being true for codas: Pt. [ɐ.ˈmi.ɡuʃ] 2000).
‘friends’, Glc. [a.pɾo.pja.ˈθjõŋs̺] ‘appropriations’. Consonantal
heterosyllabic clusters are admitted: [ˈaɫ.tu] ‘high’. In words
of popular origin, sonority tends to increase from the onset
23.2.4.1 Non-verb stress
to the nucleus and to decrease from the nucleus to the coda; In non-verb categories penultimate syllables tend to be
segments in the coda tend to be more sonorous than seg- stressed if the last one ends in a single vowel: Pt. [ˈsẽpɾɨ]
ments in the following onset. When these conditions are not ‘always’, [ˈkoɾpu] ‘body’ (plurals have stress on the pen-
fulfilled, adjustment mechanisms are common. Thus, in ultimate syllable, albeit ending in /s/, [ˈkɔɾpuʃ]); final
clusters such as [kt], [ps], [pt], [ɡn], [tm], appearing in syllables tend to be stressed if they contain a diphthong
learnèd words, Galician tends to eliminate the first stop or end in a consonant: [iɾˈmɐ̃w̃] ‘brother’, [dɨˈpojʃ]
([s̺ikoloˈʃiɐ] ‘psychology’), although sometimes lenitions ‘after’.
may occur (defe[w]to ‘defect’). Brazilian Portuguese intro- However, in [kɐˈfɛ] ‘coffee’ or [ɐˈvo] ‘grandfather’ the
duces an epenthetic /i/ in these contexts: p[i]sicologia stress falls on the last syllable, despite ending in vowel; in
418
[puˈsivɛɫ] ‘possible’, [ˈlapiʃ] ‘pencil’, it falls on the penulti- Although syncretic forms are found (o/a amante ‘the.M/F
mate, despite the last syllable ending in consonant. Finally, (male/female) lover.M/F’), there exists a strong and product-
some words (mainly learnèd words or loanwoards) stress ive correlation between the ending /a/, the feature femin-
the antepenultimate: [ˈuɫtimu] ‘last’. ine and the semantic value ‘female’. Feminine forms
referring to women were (and are) created by adding /a/
to nouns ending in consonant or by substituting /a/ for /e/
23.2.4.2 Verb stress and /o/: senhor ‘mister, madam’ > senhor ‘mister’, senhora
Verbs tend to stress the penultimate syllable (Table 23.8): ‘madam’; presidente ‘president.M’ > presidenta ‘president.F ’.
[ˈkɐ̃tu] ‘I.sing’, [kɐ̃ˈtamuʃ] ‘we.sing’. However, the infinitive Further unpredictable formatives may be found in the fem-
([kɐ̃ˈtaɾ] ‘to sing’), regular preterite ([kɐ̃ˈtɐj] ‘I.sang’), imper- inine word-forms of these pairs: duque ‘duke.M’ vs duquesa
fect ([kɐ̃ˈtavɐ] ‘I.was.singing’), pluperfect ([kɐ̃ˈtaɾɐ] ‘I.had. ‘duchess.F’, herói ‘hero.M’ vs heroína ‘heroine.F’.
sung’), past subjunctive ([kɐ̃ˈtasɨ] ‘I.sang’), and future sub- With inanimates grammatical gender may differentiate
junctive ([kɐ̃ˈtaɾ] ‘I.will.sing’) always stress the thematic formally and semantically related lexemes: cesto ‘(small(er))
vowel, what may produce oxytonic ([kɐ̃ˈtɐj] ‘I.sang.PFV’) basket.M’ vs cesta ‘basket.F’, madeiro ‘log.M, beam.M’ vs madeira
and proparoxytonic forms ([kɐ̃ˈtasɨmuʃ] ‘we.sang.SBJV’); ‘wood.F’; in many cases the masculine expresses a smaller
the future indicative and the conditional always stress variant of the feminine (Álvarez and Xove 2002:396-99).
the tense/aspect/mood suffixes, which may produce oxy- Plural is expressed by adding to the singular form a final
tonic ([kɐ̃taˈɾɐj] ‘I.will.sing’) and proparoxytonic forms suffix with three phonologically conditioned allomorphs:
([kɐ̃taˈɾiɐmuʃ] ‘we.would.sing’) (Wetzels 2007). /s/, /es/, and /js/. Galician words ending in vowel, semi-
Galician always has penultimate stress in the imperfect vowel, or nasal consonant, add /s/: [ˈkas̺ɐs̺] ‘houses’, [ˈrejs̺]
([kãn̪taˈβ̞amʊs̺] ‘we.were.singing’), the pluperfect ([kãn̪ta ‘kings’, [ˈkãŋs̺] ‘dogs’ (central dialects replace the nasal by
ˈɾamʊs̺] ‘we.had.sung’), and the conditional ([kãn̪taɾi.ˈamʊs̺] /s/: [ˈkas̺] ‘dogs’; eastern dialects replace the nasal by /js/:
‘we.would.sing’). [ˈkajs̺]). Polysyllabic oxytonic words ending in /l/, [anĩˈmal]
Unstressed pronouns occurring enclitic to the verb ‘animal’, replace the lateral by /js/, [anĩˈmajs̺] (§23.2.2.2);
(§23.3.2) do not affect stress location: Glc. cantabámolo ‘we. most Galician dialects simply add /es/: [anĩˈmalɪs̺]. Paroxy-
were.singing=it’. tonic words ending in /s/ are syncretic: [ˈlapis̺] ‘pencil.SG/PL’.
In all other cases, the exponent of plural is /es/: [ˈs̺ɔl] /
[ˈs̺ɔlɪs̺] ‘sun/s’, [ˈfaθil] / [ˈfaθilɪs̺] ‘easy.SG/PL’.
Portuguese words ending in a vowel or semivowel add /s/:
23.3 Morphology [ˈrɐjʃ] ‘kings’, [ˈɔmɐ̃ȷ ʃ̃ ] ‘men’. Words ending in [ˈɐ̃w̃]
(§23.2.1.5; Table 23.4) present morphophonemic alterna-
23.3.1 Nouns and adjectives tions in the plural, depending on their etymon.
Oxytonic forms ending in /l/ replace the lateral by /js/:
Nouns distinguish both gender (masculine, feminine) and [ɐnĩˈmaɫ] / [ɐnĩˈmajʃ], [sɔɫ] / [sɔjʃ] ‘suns’; some monosyllabic
number (singular, plural). Although nouns ending in /o/ forms simply add /es/: [ˈmɛɫ] / [ˈmɛlɨʃ] ‘honey/types of
tend to be masculine, carro ‘cart.M’, and nouns in /a/ fem- honey’. Unstressed ending /il/ is replaced by /ɛjs/: [ˈfasiɫ]
inine, casa ‘house.F’, there exist exceptions like foto ‘photo.F’, / [ˈfasɛjʃ] ‘easy.SG/PL’.
día ‘day.M’; nouns ending in /e/ or a consonant may be Portuguese words containing the diminutive suffix -zinh-
either masculine or feminine, ponte ‘bridge.F’, sangue ‘flood.M’, form the plural by adding /s/ to the end of the word and
mel ‘honey.M’, pel ‘skin.F’. modifying the ending of the root: leãozinho / leõezinhos ‘little
Gender is always expressed through agreement in adjec- lions’ (Glc. leonciño, leonciños); animalzinho / animaizinhos ‘lit-
tives and determiners: Glc. a pel branca ‘the.FSG skin.FSG tle animals’ (Glc. animaliño, animaliños). Alternations caused
white.FSG’, o paxaro branco ‘the.MSG bird.MSG white.MSG’.
Although grammatical gender usually lacks semantic Table 23.4 Singular/plural alternations for words ending in
content, in some animate nouns there is a correlation [ˈɐ̃w̃]
between masculine and ‘male’, and feminine and ‘female’:
menino ‘boy.M’ vs menina ‘girl.F’, homem ‘man.M’ vs mulher SG PL
‘woman.F’. However, there are epicene animate nouns: pes- -ANES > [ɐlɨˈmɐ̃w̃] [ɐlɨˈmɐ̃ȷ ̃ʃ] ‘German’
soa ‘person.F ’, formiga ‘ant.F’. When the speaker is not inter- -ŌNES > [rɐˈzɐ̃w̃] [rɐˈzõȷʃ̃ ] ‘reason’
ested in expressing the sex, the masculine nouns are usually -ANOS > [iɾˈmɐ̃w̃] [iɾˈmɐ̃w̃ ʃ ] ‘brother’
used to refer to both males and females: Glc. os dereitos do -*ʊDINES > [aptiˈdɐ̃w̃] [aptiˈdõȷ ̃ʃ] ‘aptitude’
neno ‘children’s rights (lit. ‘the rights of.the.MSG boy)’.
419
by u-metaphony (§23.1.1) help to mark gender in Galician (n (and the corresponding verbal forms) only survive in north-
[o]vo(s)/n[ɔ]va(s) ‘new.MSG(PL)/FSG(PL)’); and both gender and ern European Portuguese, plural addressees require: (iv)
number in Portuguese (n[o]vo vs n[ɔ]vos/n[ɔ]va(s) ‘new.MSG’ vocês in intimate and informal contexts, and (v) os senhores
vs ‘new.MPL/FSG(PL)’). / as senhoras with strangers, both constructions taking third
Some plurale tantum nouns are developing singular forms: person plural verbs and coreferent pronouns.
Glc. pantalón~pantalóns, BrPt. calça~calças ‘trousers’. Brazilian Portuguese distinguishes: the informal con-
struction, formed with você(s) as nominative and oblique,
and coreferent verbs in third person; and the polite con-
23.3.2 Personal pronouns struction with o senhor, a senhora. In dialects keeping tu, the
pronoun may agree with verbs either in the second or third
Personal pronouns (Table 23.5) preserve case, whose prop- person singular.
erties may appear overtly expressed with those of person, In African Portuguese (Inverno 2009:250-52) polite você
number, politeness, and gender. The forms of nominative ‘you.SG’ licenses either grammatically second or third per-
and oblique pronouns are stressed; accusative and dative son singular agreement and coreferential pronominals: você
forms are clitics (Brito et al. 2003:827). ficas/fica com este peso todo encima de ti/si ‘you carry.2/3SG this
Dative clitics contract with third person accusative clitics: weight all on your back (lit. on top of you)’.
Galician distinguishes the informal construction, with the
• me + o(s), a(s) > mo(s), ma(s)
second person (singular and plural) pronouns and verbal
• te + o(s), a(s) > to(s), ta(s) (EuPt.)
forms; and the polite construction, with the nominative and
• che + o(s) > cho(s), cha(s) (Glc.)
oblique form vostede(s) (< vossa(s) mercé(s) ‘your grace’) in
• lhe + o(s), a(s) > lho(s), lha(s) (EuPt.); llo(s), lla(s) (Glc.)
conjunction with coreferent third person pronouns and
• nos + o(s), a(s) > no-lo(s), no-la(s) (EuPt.); nolo(s), nola(s) (Glc.)
verbs. Usage of the polite construction tends to be replaced
• vos + o(s), a(s) > vo-lo(s), vo-la(s) (EuPt.); volo(s), vola(s) (Glc.)
by the informal one even with strangers. Galician dialects
• lhes + o(s), a(s) > lho(s), lha(s) (EuPt., dialectal Glc.); llelo(s),
preserve the nominative and oblique 1PL.M/F nosoutros/as
llela(s) (Glc.)
and 2PL.M/F vosoutros/as.
However, familiar and polite styles use partially different Oblique first and second person forms contract with Pt. com
pronominal systems (see also §55.2.3.5). European Portu- / Glc. con ‘with’: comigo ‘with me’, contigo ‘with you.SG’, connosco
guese distinguishes three degrees of familiarity for ‘one ‘with us’, convosco ‘with you.PL’. The third person reflexive
addressee’: (i) in intimate contexts and from older to oblique si (SG/PL) also contracts with com: consigo. In Galicia
younger speakers the second person singular verb and pro- and in Brazil analytical constructions are replacing connosco
nouns are used; (ii) between friends or colleagues, the spe- and convosco: Glc. ven connosco > ven con nós ‘come with us’.
cial nominative and oblique form você (< vossa mercé ‘your Third person ele(s), ela(s) contract with de ‘of/from’ and
grace’), or the name of the addressee, are used in conjunc- em ‘in’: dele(s), dela(s), nele(s), nela(s). Si and consigo are also
tion with coreferent third person singular pronouns and used in European Portuguese with non-reflexive value as a
verbs; and (iii) with strangers, the o senhor (lit. ‘the sir’), a polite form of address: falei consigo ‘I spoke with you’. In
senhora (lit. ‘the lady’) construction is used in conjunction Galician el(es), ela(s) appear with reflexive value, some times
with coreferent third person singular pronouns and verbs. reinforced by mesmo/-a ‘same.M/FSG’: Xoana1 só pensa nela1
Since the second person plural pronouns vós, vos, convosco (mesma1) ‘Xoana only thinks of herself ’.
Table 23.5 Portuguese personal pronouns (Galician variants in italics)

STRESSED FORMS CLITICS
PERSON NOMINATIVE OBLIQUE ACCUSATIVE DATIVE
1sG eu mim (min), comigo me me

2sG tu (ti) ti, contigo te te (che)
3sG ele (el), ela ele (el), ela, si, consigo o/a lhe (lle)
se se
1PL nós nós, connosco nos nos
2PL vós vós, convosco vos vos
3PL eles, elas eles, elas, si, consigo os/as lhes (lles)
se se
420
The third person accusative presents three allomorphs preserved; the use of o(s), a(s) before words ending in /ɾ/ and
(overtly marked for number and gender) phonologically /s/ preserves these consonants: ves a casa ‘you see the
conditioned by the host: house’.
The definite article contracts with some prepositions
(i) no(s) (M(PL)), na(s) (F(PL)), selected by verbs ending in
(Galician forms in italics):
nasal diphthongs in European Portuguese: utilizam-no
‘they.use=it.MSG’; in Galician, selected by verbs ending • a ‘to’: ao (ó) / à (á) ‘to.the.M/F’
in oral diphthongs: utilizouna ‘he.used=it.FSG’; • Glc. ca ‘than’: có / cá ‘than.the.M/F’
(ii) lo(s) (M(PL)), la(s) (F(PL)), selected by verbs ending in /s/ • Glc. con ‘with’: co / coa ‘with.the.M/F’
or in /ɾ/; its insertion implies the deletion of /ɾ/ and • de ‘of, from’: do / da ‘of/from.the.M/F ’
/s/: vês ‘you.see’, ver ‘see.INF’, but vê-lo ‘you.see=it.MSG’ • en ‘in’: no / na ‘in.the.M/F ’
and ‘see.INF=it.MSG’; • por ‘by, through’: pelo (polo) / pela (pola) ‘by/through.
(iii) o(s) (M(PL)), a(s) (F(PL)), elsewhere. In Galician nasals the.M/F’
preceding o(s), a(s) are alveolar: [ˈbẽŋ] ‘they.see’, but
The source of the indefinite article is ŪNUM/-AM ‘one.M/F’:
[ˈbẽnʊ] ‘they.see=it.MSG’.
Glc. [ũŋ], [uŋɐ] (cf. §23.2.1.5, §23.2.2.3), Pt. [ũ], [ũmɐ]. It
In most Galician dialects the third person plural dative is contracts with some prepositions (Galician forms in italics):
lle: deille diñeiro ‘I gave money to him/her/them’ (Fernández
• Glc. con ‘with’: cun / cunha ‘with.a.M/F’
Rei 1990).
• de ‘of, from’; dum (dun) / duma (dunha) ‘of/from.a.M/F ’
Reflexive clitics have special forms only in the third
• em ‘in’; num (nun) / numa (nunha) ‘in.a.M/F ’
person, se (3SG/PL).
In Brazilian Portuguese, 1PL nós ‘we’ is less used than a gente In spoken Galician, un, unha optionally contract with
(lit. ‘the people’; see Lopes 2003), with third person singular words ending in unstressed ‑a (§23.2.1.8, §23.3.7): onda un
verb agreement: a gente gosta de viajar ‘we like (lit. the people [õn̪dɔ̃ŋ] ‘beside.a.MSG’. The masculine plural of both un and
likes) to travel’. The forms te, lhe, você may be used as second the indefinites algún, ningún varies across Galician dialects:
singular person direct objects; and te, lhe, para vocé as indirect west [ũŋs̺]; centre [us̺], [uŋɪs̺], [uŋʊs̺]; east [ujs̺].
objects (Lopes and Cavalcante 2011). In spoken Brazilian third
person accusatives have been replaced by ele(s)/ela(s); 3SG lhe 23.3.3.2 Possessives
only refers to one addressee, eu lhe mandei o texto ‘I sent you.SG
the text’, but eu mandei o texto para vocês (‘to you.PL’); eu lhe vi ‘I Possessives agree in gender and number with the nominals
saw you.SG’, but eu vi vocês (‘you.PL’). In African Portuguese, lhe they modify; their form also depends on the number and the
may refer to a third person direct object: eu vi-lhe ‘I see him/ person of the possessor (Table 23.6).
her’ (Inverno 2009:174f.). In vernacular Brazilian Portuguese and African Portu-
guese (Gonçalves 2010) both seu and teu refer to singular
possessors: Você vai em seu/teu carro ‘You.SG go in your car’;
the construction de vocês refers to plural possessors: O carro
23.3.3 Determiners de vocês ‘your.PL car’. With a non-participant possessor,
Brazilian Portuguese uses the constructions dele(s), dela(s)
23.3.3.1 Articles ‘of.him(them.M), of.her(them.F)’: O carro dela ‘her car (lit. ‘the
The old forms of the Galician-Portuguese definite articles, lo(s) car of.her’)’. In European Portuguese, vosso is used in polite
‘the.M(PL)’, la(s) ‘the.F(PL)’, derive from the distal demonstra- contexts: As suas/vossas equipagens ‘your.PL luggage’ (§23.3.2).
tive ĬLLE ‘that’. In the discourse, when preceded by a word In Galician voso is only used with plural informal possessors:
ending in a vowel, the lateral was dropped, just as with As vosas maletas ‘your.PL suitcases’.
intervocalic -L- inside the word (§23.2.2.2): ve la casa > ve a
Table 23.6 Possessives (Galician forms in italics)
casa ‘(s)he sees the house’; the new form o(s), a(s) spread to
absolute initial position in both Galician and Portuguese, and POSSESSOR HEAD
to all the contexts in Portuguese. However, GP lo(s), la(s) were
M(PL) F(PL)
preserved in Galician when the preceding word ended in /s/
1SG meu(s) minha(s) (miña(s))
or /ɾ/; the insertion of Glc. lo(s), la(s) after word ending in /s/
2SG teu(s) tua(s) (túa(s))
or /ɾ/ implies the deletion of these segments: ve/s la/ casa >
3SG/PL seu(s) sua(s) (súa(s))
ve/la/ casa ‘you.SG see the house’ (Fernández Rei 2002).
1PL nosso(s) (noso(s)) nossa(s) (nosa(s))
Anyway, in contemporary Galician the allomorphs o(s), a(s)
2PL vosso(s) (voso(s)) vossa(s) (vosa(s))
are also spreading to the contexts where lo(s), la(s) had been
421
The Galician construction de ‘of ’ + possessive.MSG to the Table 23.7 Portuguese demonstratives
right of the noun expresses inalienable possession:
Variable, masculine [ˈe]ste(s) [ˈe]sse(s) aqu[ˈe]le(s)
(1) unha casa de noso (Glc.) Variable, feminine [ˈɛ]sta(s) [ˈɛ]ssa(s) aqu[ˈɛ]la(s)
a.F house.F of our.MSG Invariable, masculine [ˈi]sto [ˈi]sso aqu[ˈi]lo
‘our own house (= we own the house)’
aquilo locate something as neither close to the speaker nor
In Galician the chunk cada un (o) seu X ‘each one his/her/
the addressee.
its/their X’ grammaticalized into a distributive possessive,
In Galician, there is dialectal variation according to the
cadanseu(s), cadansúa(s):
stressed vowel (Fernández Rei 1990): most dialects use
(2) Van en cadanseu coche (Glc.) [e]sto, [e]so, aqu[e]lo as invariable masculines and [e]sta(s)
go.3PL in each.one.his.MSG car.MSG and [e]sa(s) as the feminines; variable masculine [i]ste(s),
‘Each one goes in his car’ [i]se(s), aqu[i]l(es) are located in the south; aqu[ˈe]la(s)
appears in the east.
In vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, esse combined with
23.3.3.3 Indefinites aqui ‘here’ is replacing este: essa mulher aqui ‘this woman’;
Indefinites, traditionally classified as quantifiers or identi- esse combines with aí ‘there’and aquele with lá/ali ‘over
fiers, may be either variable or invariable. there’: essa mulher aí ‘that woman’, aquela mulher lá ‘that
Invariable indefinites include: woman over there’ (§23.3.6).
The demonstratives contract with the prepositions de ‘of,
• Glc. alguén [aɫˈɰɛ̃ŋ] / Pt. [aɫˈɡɐ̃ȷ]̃ alguém ‘somebody’
from’ and em ‘in’: deste, desse, daquele, and neste, nesse, na-
• algo ‘something’
quele. Portuguese spelling also represents the contraction of
• Glc. ninguén [nĩŋˈɡɛ̃ŋ] / Pt. ninguém [nĩˈɡɐ̃ȷ]̃ ‘nobody’
aquele with the preposition a ‘to’: àquele. They may also
• Pt. tudo ‘all’ (not used in Galician)
contract with the indefinite outro ‘other’: estoutro/estoutra,
• Pt. outrem ‘someone else/other person’ (not used in
essoutro/essoutra, aqueloutro/aqueloutra.
Galician)
• nada ‘nothing’
• cada ‘each/every’ 23.3.4 Relatives, interrogatives,
Variable indefinites include: and exclamatives
• Glc. algún(s), algunha(s) / Pt. algum(s), alguma(s) ‘some/any’
• Glc. ningún(s), ningunha(s) / Pt. nenhum(s), nenhuma(s) The invariable relatives are que ‘that, which’, quem ‘who,
‘no/any’ whom’ (Glc. quen [kɛ̃ŋ]), onde ‘where’, como ‘how’, quando
• todo(s), toda(s) ‘all/every’ ‘when’; the variable forms are quanto(s), quanta(s) ‘how
• outro(s), outra(s) ‘other’ many/much’, qual, quais ‘what, which, who’, cujo(s), cuja(s)
• Glc. moito(s), moita(s) / Pt. muito(s), muita(s) ‘a lot of ’ ‘whose’. In Galician, cujo, cuja, lost in the spoken language,
• pouco(s), pouca(s) ‘little/few’ were recovered in the written variety as cuxo, cuxa.
• varios, varias ‘a few, several’ The interrogatives and exclamatives are quanto(s), quanta(s)
• mesmo(s), mesma(s) ‘same’ ‘how many/much?, so many!’, qual, quais ‘what, which
• certo(s), certa(s) ‘some, a certain’ (one)’; que ‘what, which’, quem ‘who, whom’, quando ‘when’,
• tanto(s), tanta(s) ‘so many / so much’ como ‘how’, onde ‘where’.
23.3.3.4 Demonstratives 23.3.5 Verbs

Demonstratives (Table 23.7), whose etyma are ĬSTUM ‘that’,
ĬPSUM ‘-self ’ and *akku+illu ‘behold+that’, are arranged in The morphological structure of verbs includes a root, a
three series (cf. §54.1.3, §54.1.5.2). In each series there exists thematic vowel (TV), a tense/aspect/mood suffix (TAM),
an invariable form, only inflected for the masculine singu- and a number and person suffix:
lar, and variable forms that inflect for gender and number.
In Galician and in European Portuguese, este(s), esta(s), isto (3) Root+TV+TAM+Number/Person
locate something as close to the speaker; esse(s), essa(s), isso cant+a+ra+mos
locate something as close to the addressee; aquele(s), aquela(s), ‘we had sung’
422
cantari-am/-an bateri-am/-an partiri-am/-an

23.3.5.1 Conjugations
IND.FUT
Verbs are grouped into three conjugations (cf. Table 23.8).
cantarei baterei partirei
The first conjugation, with thematic vowel in /a/ (cant-a-r
cantarás baterás partirás
‘to sing’), continues the Latin first conjugation; the third,
cantará baterá partirá
cantaremos bateremos partiremos
Table 23.8 Regular conjugations (divergent Galician forms cantare-is/-des batere-is/-des partire-is/-des
are given in italics; tonic vowels are underlined) cantar-ão/-án bater-ão/-án partir-ão/-án
I II III SBJV.PRS
cante bata parta
IND.PRS cantes batas partas
canto bato parto cante bata parta
cantas bates partes cantemos batamos partamos
canta bate parte cante-is/-des bata-is/-des parta-is/-des
cantamos batemos partimos cant-em/-en bat-am/-an part-am/-an
canta-is/-des bate-is/-des parti-s/-des
SBJV.PST
cant-am/-an bat-em/-en part-em/-en
canta-sse/-se bate-sse/-se parti-sse/-se
IND.PST.IPFV canta-sses/-ses bate-sses/-ses parti-sses/-ses
canta-va/-ba batia partia canta-sse/-se bate-sse/-se parti-sse/-se
canta-vas/-bas batias partias cantá-ssemos/ baté-ssemos/ partí-ssemos/
canta-va/-ba batia partia -semos -semos -semos
cant-ávamos/ bat-íamos/-iamos part-íamos/ cantá-sseis/-sedes baté-sseis/-sedes partí-seis/
-abamos -iamos -sedes
cant-áveis/-abades bat-íeis/-iades part-íeis/-iades canta-ssem/-sen bate-ssem/-sen parti-ssem/-sen
canta-vam/-ban bati-am/-an parti-am/-an
INF (non-inflected)
IND.PST.PFV cantar bater partir
cantei bat-i/-ín part-i/-ín
INF (inflected)
canta-ste/-ches bat-este/-iches parti-ste/-ches
cantou bateu partiu cantar bater partir
cantamos batemos partimos cantares bateres partires
cantastes batestes partistes cantar bater partir
cantar-am/-on bater-am/-on partir-am/-on cantarmos batermos partirmos
cantardes baterdes partirdes
IND.PLPRF cantar-em/-en bater-em/-en partir-em/-en
cantara batera partira
GER
cantaras bateras partiras
cantara batera partira cantando batendo partindo
cant-áramos/ bat-éramos/ part-íramos/ PTCP
-aramos -eramos -iramos cantado batido partido
cant-áreis/-arades bat-éreis/-erades part-íreis/
-irades
cantar-am/-an bater-am/-an partir-am/-an
COND with thematic vowel in /i/ (part-i-r ‘to split’), continues the
cantaria bateria partiria Latin fourth conjugation; the second, with thematic vowel
cantarias baterias partirias in /e/, unites the Latin second (tem-e-r ‘to fear’) and third
cantaria bateria partiria conjugations (bat-e-r ‘to beat’). Today, only the first conju-
cantar-íamos/ bater-íamos/ partir-íamos/ gation is productive.
-iamos -iamos -iamos Some verbs have oscillated between the second and third
cantar-íeis/-iades bater-íeis/-iades partir-íeis/-iades conjugations (cf. Table 23.9).
423
23.3.5.2 Roots Table 23.9 Oscillations between second and third

conjugations
The front or dorsal stressed root vowels (cf. Table 23.10)
show morphophonemic alternations in most verbs of the GALICIAN PORTUGUESE
second/third conjugations.
The present subjunctive and the first person singular ‘to receive’ recibir receber
of the present indicative share the same root vowel: ‘to live’ vivir viver
c[o]ma, b[e]ba, s[u]ba. In Portuguese, the second person ‘to say’ dicir (dialects: decer) dizer
singular of the imperative has an open-mid root vowel, ‘to fall’ caer (dialects: caír) caír
while in Galician it has a close-mid one. For nasal root
vowels, see §23.2.1.5. The verbs affected by these alter-
nations differ in both languages: Pt. dever ‘to must’, par- Table 23.10 Stressed root vowel alternations
ecer ‘to seem’, conhecer ‘to know’, obedecer ‘to obey’, etc,
have alternations; Glc. deber is non-alternating, and Glc. BEBER COMER SUBIR
parecer, coñecer, obedecer, etc, only have alternations in ‘ TO DRINK ’ ‘ TO EAT ’ ‘ TO GO UP ’
some dialects.
IND.PRS.1SG b[e]bo c[o]mo s[u]bo
Third conjugation verbs with a root vowel /e/
IND.PRS.2SG b[ɛ]bes c[ɔ]mes s[ɔ]bes
(e.g. pedir ‘to ask for’, Table 23.11) present significant
IND.PRS.3SG b[ɛ]be c[ɔ]me s[ɔ]be
differences.
IND.PRS.3PL b[ɛ]bem c[ɔ]mem s[ɔ]bem
In Galician, most verbs of this kind follow the pattern of
IMP.2SG (Glc.) b[e]be c[o]me s[u]be
Glc. pedir ‘to ask for’; only medir ‘to measure’, mentir ‘to lie’,
IMP.2SG (Pt.) b[ɛ]be c[ɔ]me s[ɔ]be
seguir ‘to follow’, sentir ‘to fill’, and ferir ‘to wound’ follow
the pattern of Glc. servir ‘to serve’. In Portuguese, however,
most verbs follow the model of Pt. servir. In fact, while
dialectal European Portuguese is transferring non- Table 23.11 Root vowel alternations in pedir ‘to ask’ and
alternating verbs of the third conjugation to the alternat- servir ‘to serve’
ing model (frigir ‘to fry’ is shifting from frijo, friges . . . to
GALICIAN PORTUGUESE GALICIAN PORTUGUESE
frijo, freges . . . ), dialectal Galician tends to replace the low
PEDIR PEDIR SERVIR SERVIR
mid root vowels of the third conjugation with high vowels,
with servir, sentir behaving like pedir, and subir becoming IND.PRS.1SG p[i]do p[ɛ]ço s[i]rvo s[i]rvo
regular (subo, subes . . . ). Galician verbs of the second con- IND.PRS.2SG p[i]des p[ɛ]des s[ɛ]rves s[ɛ]rves
jugation remain alternating. IND.PRS.3SG p[i]de p[ɛ]de s[ɛ]rve s[ɛ]rve
The present subjunctive and the first person singular of IND.PRS.1PL p[e]dimos p[ɨ]dimos s[e]rvimos s[ɨ]rvimos
the present indicative in some verbs of the second/third IND.PRS.3PL p[i]den p[ɛ]dem s[ɛ]rven s[ɛ]rvem
conjugations share irregular roots: Pt. perc-o ‘I.lose.IND’, perc- SBJV.PRS.1SG p[i]da p[ɛ]ça s[i]rva s[i]rva
as ‘you.lose.SBJV’, but perd-es ‘you.lose.IND’, perd-eu ‘he.lost’, SBJV.PRS.1PL p[i]damos p[ɨ]çamos s[i]rvamos s[i]rvamos
perd-er ‘to lose’. IMP.2SG p[i]de p[ɛ]de s[i]rve s[ɛ]rve
Some frequent verbs (dizer ‘to say’, haver ‘to have’, saber
‘to know’, etc) have special roots in the preterite, the plu-
perfect, the past subjunctive, and the future subjunctive;
these forms, known as perfect stems (cf. Table 23.12), are Table 23.12 Perfect stems
root-stressed in the first and third persons singular of the DIZ - ER ‘ TO SAY ’ 1 SG / PL ESTAR ‘ TO BE ’ 1 SG / PL
preterite: houve ‘I/(s)he had’.
Imperfect diz-ias/diz-íamos est-ava/est-ávamos
Preterite diss-e/diss-emos estiv-e/estiv-emos
23.3.5.3 Thematic vowel Pluperfect diss-era/diss-éramos estiv-era/estiv-éramos
The present subjunctive (parta ‘I.split’) and the first person
singular of the present indicative (parto ‘I.split’) lack a the-
matic vowel. In the second and third persons singular of the Brazilian Portuguese, and [ɪ] in Galician (bate ‘(s)he.beats’,
present indicative and in the second person singular of the parte ‘(s)he.splits’). In the third person plural of the present
imperative, the thematic vowels of the second/third conju- indicative Portuguese has bat[ɐ̃ȷ]̃ ‘they.beat’, part[ɐ̃ȷ ̃] ‘they.
gations are neutralized as [ɨ] in European Portuguese, [i] in split’, while Galician presents bat[ɪ ̃ŋ], part[ɪ ̃ŋ] (§23.2.1.7).
424
In the first person singular of the preterite of the first be inserted between the infinitive and the endings (phono-
conjugation, the thematic vowel /a/ shifted to /e/ because logically reduced forms of the present indicative and the
the metaphony of final /j/, cant-e-i (§23.2.1.3); in the sec- imperfect of haver ‘to have’), a phenomenon known as
ond/third conjugations it is tonic /i/ (Pt. bat-i, Glc. bat-í-n), mesoclisis: amarei / amar-te-ei ‘I will love / love you (lit.
also used in the Galician second person singular of the love.INF=you=I.have)’, amaria vs amar-te-ia ‘I would love /
preterite of the second conjugation, bat-i-ches (Pt. bat-e- love you (lit. love.INF=you=I.had)’. In Galician and Brazilian
ste). In the third person singular of the preterite of the Portuguese mesoclisis is not possible; thus, in these var-
first conjugation, the thematic vowel /a/ shifted to /o/ ieties the future indicative and the conditional are con-
because the metaphony of final /w/; in most dialects of sidered synthetic tenses (Wetzels 2007; Álvarez and Xove
Portuguese /o/ and /w/ fused, Pt. cant[ˈo], while Glc. cant 2002), the /ɾ/ being a part of the tense/aspect/mood suffix:
[ˈow] (§23.2.1.3). In dialectal Galician the thematic vowels of canta-re-mos ‘we.will.sing’, canta-ría-mos ‘we.would.sing’.
the third person singular of the preterite of the second/ In Brazilian Portuguese new irregular participles have
third conjugations may be neutralized, e.g. NWGlc. bat-i-u, been created and are used in the perfect active: ter pego
part-i-u (Fernández Rei 1990). (besides ter pegado) for ‘to have seized’, ter trago (besides ter
The thematic vowel in participles of the second conjuga- trazido) for ‘to have brought’ (Scher et al. 2013).
tion is [i]: bat-i-do.
The irregular verbs with perfect stems (§23.3.5.2) present
a thematic vowel /ɛ/ (Câmara 1979): Pt. fiz[ɛ]mos ‘we.did’ (cf. 23.3.5.5 Number and person
regular bat[e]mos ‘we.beat.PST’).
The specific suffixes of number/person are 2SG -s, 1PL -mos,
2PL Pt. -is / Glc. –des, and 3PL Pt. -m (§23.2.1.7) / Glc. -n. The
infinitive can be inflected for number and person (cf.
23.3.5.4 Tense, aspect, mood §23.4.10). In southern European Portuguese gerunds are
Six tenses have specific tense/aspect/mood suffixes (cf. inflected for the 2SG cantandes ‘singing.2SG’, 1PL cantándomos
Table 23.13; Villalva 2003, Álvarez and Xove 2002). ‘singing.1PL’, and 3PL cantandem ‘singing.3PL’ (Lobo 2001). In
The present indicative, the preterite and the imperative Galician the gerund, inflected for 1PL cantándomos ‘sing-
do not have specific tense/aspect/mood suffixes; these ing.1PL’ and 2PL cantándodes ‘singing.2PL’, was recorded in
properties share their expression with those of number/ only one dialect (Rianxo).
person (§23.3.5.5). In the imperfect, pluperfect, present subjunctive, past
The future indicative cantarei ‘I.will.sing’ and the condi- subjunctive, future subjunctive, and inflected infinitive the
tional cantaria ‘I.would.sing’ are special cases, as they result first and third persons singular forms are syncretic: falava
from the grammaticalization of the constructions infinitive ‘I/(s)he.was.speaking’. In the inflected infinitive and the
+ HABEŌ ‘I have’ and infinitive + HABĒBAM ‘I had.IPFV’, respect- future subjunctive the vowel /e/ links the tense/aspect/
ively (cf. §46.3.2.2). Standard European Portuguese pre- mood and the number/person suffixes in the second person
serves both tenses as a kind of compound forms (Mateus singular and third person plural, cantares and cantarem
and Andrade 2000; Villalva 2003), since clitic pronouns can (§23.2.1.7); both tenses use the suffix -des in the second
person plural forms, cantardes.
Table 23.13 Tense/aspect/mood suffixes (divergent Galician Tense, aspect, mood, person and number share suffixes in
forms in italics) the present indicative, the preterite and the imperative
(Table 23.14, exclusive Galician forms in italics).
SECOND / THIRD
FIRST CONJUGATION CONJUGATIONS
Pluperfect ra Table 23.14 Tense, aspect, mood, person, and number

Imperfect va (ba) a suffixes (Galician variants in italics)
Present e a PRESENT INDICATIVE PRETERITE IMPERATIVE
subjunctive
Past subjunctive sse (se) 1SG -o -i (-n) —
Future r 2SG -s -ste (-ches) no suffix
subjunctive 3SG no suffix -u —
Infinitive r 1PL -mos -mos —
Gerund ndo 2PL -is (-des) -stes -i (-de)
Participle do 3PL -m (-n) -ram (-ron) —
425
In Galician the suffix -n expresses first person singular of and northern European Portuguese, and African Portu-
the preterite in the second/third conjugations: batín, partín guese prefer estar ‘to be’ + a ‘to’+ infinitive: Estou a comer
(Álvarez and Xove 2002); in the Portuguese first person ‘I am eating (lit. ‘I.am to eat.INF)’.
singular of the preterite of the second/third conjugations, • Tense: future ir ‘go’ + infinitive: Vou visitar Lisboa ‘I will
-i merges the thematic vowel and the number/person suffix: visit Lisbon (lit. I.go visit.INF Lisbon)’.
bati, parti; Glc. -o expresses the third person singular of the • Modality: obligation ter ‘have’ + de ‘of ’/que ‘that’ +
preterite of the irregular perfect stems, dixo ‘(s)he.said’ infinitive: Tens de/que falar comigo ‘You have to speak
(§23.3.5.2, Pt. disse). For the pronunciation of the third with me’.
person plural forms, see §23.2.1.7. • Voice: passive ser ‘to be’ + participle agreeing in gender
Galician preserves the second person plural forms, while and number with the subject: Eu sou amado ‘I am loved.
in Portuguese they only appear in the northern European MSG’. In Galician and Brazilian Portuguese, passive voice
dialects; second person singular forms are current in Gal- is characteristic of formal written varieties.
ician and European Portuguese, while Brazilian Portuguese
has lost them in most dialects.
Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese only distinguishes the
23.3.6 Adverbs
first person singular from the other persons: eu canto ‘I sing’
vs tu/você, ele, nós/a gente, vocês, eles canta ‘you.SG, he, we, Locative adverbs may express three degrees of distance:
you.PL, they sing’. In standard varieties, the third person aquí, Pt. cá / Glc. acá~acó ‘here’; aí ‘there’; alí, Pt. lá / Glc.
plural forms appear (eles cantam ‘they sing’), as do first alá~aló ‘far away’. The forms cá~acá~acó or lá~alá~aló indi-
person plural forms (nós cantamo(s) ‘we sing’). Formal var- cate a less precise location than aquí, alí (cf. also §54.2.5).
ieties may also include second person singular forms (tu Temporal adverbs may be absolute (hoje ‘today’) or rela-
cantas). Afro-Brazilian Portuguese and African Portuguese tive (depois ‘after’). Modal adverbs may be divided into
only have the third person singular forms (§23.4.2). quantifiers (pouco ‘little’, bastante ‘enough’), manner adverbs
(bem ‘well’, mal ‘badly’), interrogatives (quando ‘when’,
quanto ‘how much’), etc. Some adverbs receive diminutive
23.3.5.6 Compound forms and periphrases or superlative suffixes: perto ‘near’, pertinho ‘quite near’ or
pertíssimo ‘really near’. Adding the suffix -mente ‘-ly’ to the
Compound forms with haber ‘have’ to express perfect aspect
feminine forms of adjectives creates new adverbs: rápida
collected in Galician popular varieties (Dubert García 1999)
‘quick.FSG’ > rapidamente ‘quickly’. In some cases the form
reflect Spanish influence. The perfect or anterior values are
of the adverb is identical to the form of the adjective and
usually expressed in spoken Galician with synthetic tenses:
may alternate with the -mente form (ele veio rápido/rapida-
mente ‘He came quick/-ly’).
(4) Espero que tenhas chegado (Pt.)
I.hope that you.have.SBJV arrived
Espero que chegaras/chegases (Glc.) 23.3.7 Prepositions
I.hope that you.arrive.PST.PRF/SBJV.PST
‘I hope you have arrived’
The essential prepositions are a ‘to’, ante ‘before, facing’, após
(Pt.) ‘after, behind’, até (Glc. ata) ‘until’, com (Glc. con) ‘with’,
Galician and Portuguese share a periphrasis formed with
contra ‘against’, de ‘from, of ’, desde ‘from’, em (Glc. en) ‘in’,
the present indicative of ter ‘have’ + participle expressing
entre ‘between, among’, para ‘to, for’, perante ‘before, in the
iterative aspect. While with the auxiliary in the imperfect
presence of ’, por ‘through, for, by’, sem (Glc. sen) ‘without’, sob
iterative meaning is preserved in Galician, it is lost in
(Pt.) ‘under’, sobre ‘about, over’, and tras ‘after, behind’.
Portuguese: Glc. Teño ido á Coruña ‘I have gone to Corunna
Galician developed canda ‘with’ from cando ‘when’ (Vén
more than once’, Eu xa tiña ido á Coruña ‘I had been to
canda min ‘He is coming with me’), onda ‘close to’ from onde
Corunna (probably, more than once)’.
‘where’ (Veu onda min ‘He came where I was’, Vive onda o río
Both languages share most of the other periphrases
‘He lives close to the river’). Galician also preserved coma <
(Cunha and Cintra 1984; Álvarez and Xove 2002):
QUOMODO AC ‘like, as’ (tan alto coma min ‘as tall as me’), and ca <
• Aspect: progressive estar ‘to be’ + gerund or estar ‘to be’ QUAM ‘than’ (máis alto ca min ‘taller than me’; cf. §23.4.11).
+ a ‘to’+ infinitive, with different geographic distribu- Prepositions are one of the areas in which the influence
tions: Galician, Brazilian Portuguese, and southern of African languages has been more salient in African Por-
European Portuguese use estar ‘to be’ + gerund: Estou tuguese, and to a lesser extent in Afro-Brazilian Portuguese
comendo ‘I am eating’; southwestern Galician, standard and vernacular Brazilian Portuguese (cf. Laban 1999;
426
Chavagne 2005; Petter 2009; Gonçalves 2010). In Brazilian claim that there are different ways of focalizing subjects:
Portuguese this is mainly reflected in the substitution of either VXS or VSX, which all involve subject postposition.
the preposition a ‘at, to’ by em lit. ‘in’ (locative), para lit.
‘for, towards’ (dative) and in many cases the absence of (6) a. Este sábado vaille facer unha caseta
preposition yielding a double object constructions (cf. this Saturday will=to.him make.INF a kennel
§23.4.4). ó can Gabriel.
to.the dog Gabriel
b. Este sábado vaille facer Gabriel unha

this Saturday will=to.him make.INF Gabriel a
23.4 Syntax
caseta ó can.
kennel to.the dog
23.4.1 Order of major constituents ‘Gabriel will make a kennel for the dog on Saturday.’
The neutral order in Galician and all dialects of Portuguese

In both Portuguese and Galician, when subjects are right-
is SVO (Ambar 1992; Costa 2004; Gupton 2010). However,
dislocated at the end of the sentence, the preverbal position
since all these languages are null subject languages (§23.4.3),
can be occupied by an overt agreeing pronoun (§23.4.7):
they also allow subject postposing, mainly with unaccusa-
tive verbs, and unaccusative constructions like passive and
(7) a. Está pronto, o vestido azul
se ‘self ’-constructions. In this case, the variation between
it.is ready the dress blue
SV and VS depends both on the verb and on the information
structure of the clause. Existential haver ‘be’ and se con- b. Ele está pronto, o vestido azul.
structions yield obligatory VS, unless S is topicalized. With it is ready the dress blue
passives and other unaccusative verbs, the position of ‘The blue dress is ready.’ (Tarallo and Kato 1989)
the subject depends mainly on its informational status as
new or old information. However, it must be noted that, (8) El era un cachazudo aquel mestre Flute.
unlike in European Portuguese, in Brazilian Portuguese he was a slow that master Flute
the SV order can convey both the interpretation in which ‘Master Flute was slow.’ (Álvarez, Regueira, and
S is already given in discourse and the interpretation in Monteagudo 1986)
which all the sentence is new information, as illustrated
below: SOV is a very marked order, which requires O to be a
quantifier or a quantified expression (for orders in which
(5) [Context: What happened?] O is in the initial position, see §23.4.5).
a. Chegou o João (9) Ele nada me disse. (Pt.)

arrived the John he nothing me=said
b. O João chegou (**EuPt./BrPt.ok) A min nada me dixo. (Glc.)
the John arrived to me nothing me=said
‘John arrived.’ ‘He said nothing to me.’
As a consequence, VS is less frequent in Brazilian Portu-

Embedded tensed clauses follow the same pattern, except
guese than in European Portuguese.
for interrogative clauses (cf. §23.4.12)
As for VSO and VOS orders, there is a great variation
among varieties. Both are possible in European Portuguese,
with a marked interpretation. According to Costa (2004),
VSO is only felicitous in European Portuguese if both S and 23.4.2 Agreement
O are new information, and VOS requires the interpretation
of the subject as new information. In Brazilian Portuguese The general rule in Galician, European Portuguese, and stand-
VSO is ungrammatical, and VOS is restricted to contexts in ard Brazilian Portuguese is that tensed verbs agree in person
which O is a very predictable object, and S is a familiar topic and number with the subject, when it is in preverbal position.
(Pilati 2006). In Galician, according to Gupton (2010), VSO Whenever it occupies the postverbal position with unaccusa-
and VOS are not natural in affirmative clauses at least when tive verbs or in passive constructions, agreement is variable
the subject is a full NP. However, Álvarez and Xove (2002:79) in Portuguese, despite the pressure of normative grammar.
427
(10) Veio-nos à memória as declarações The fact that this phenomenon is found both in Brazil and
came.3sg=to.us to.the memory the statements Africa, and that the same kind of agreement is characteristic
prestadas. of Bantu, and more generally Niger-Congo, languages (Baker
made 2008a; Avelar 2009) suggests that it is the effect of contact
‘The statements made came to our memory.’ with African languages. It must be noted however that in
(Peres and Móia 1995:453) vernacular Brazilian Portuguese this kind of agreement is
not found with objects of transitive verbs, unless the subject
Lack of agreement is also reported for Portuguese and is deleted:
Galician with postverbal coordinated subjects or in the
context of list interpretation: (17) a. As revistas xerocaram.
the journals xeroxed.3PL
(11) Espero que te ajude o estudoe algumasorte. (Pt.) ‘The journals were xeroxed.’
I.hope thatyou=helpsthestudy andsome luck
‘I hope that study and luck will help you.’ b. **As revistas xerocaram João.
(Peres and Móia 1995:447) the journals xeroxed.3PL John
‘John xeroxed the journals.’
(12) Presentouse na casa do alcalde o
presented.3SG=self in.the house of.the mayor the Agreement with non-tensed verbs will be described in
vello, a filla e o neto (Glc.) §23.4.10.
old the daughter and the grandchild
(Álvarez and Xove 2002:84)
‘The old man, his daughter, and his grandchild 23.4.3 Null arguments
presented themselves at the mayor’s.’
23.4.3.1 Null subjects
In vernacular Brazilian Portuguese and African varieties All varieties permit null subjects, although with some
agreement in number is variable in all cases. Lack of agree- important differences. In European Portuguese null subjects
ment in person is found in African Portuguese and in Afro- are very frequent and licensed in any tensed and inflected
Brazilian Portuguese (Laban 1999; Chavagne 2005; Lucchesi infinitival context. In Brazilian Portuguese null subjects
et al. 2009): have been reported to be less frequent and syntactically
more constrained (Galves 1987; Figueiredo Silva 1994;
(13) Io fechô janela. Duarte 1995; Barra Ferreira 2000; Kato 2000; Modesto 2000;
I closed.3SG window Rodrigues 2004). The fact that they are not licensed in
‘I closed the window.’ contexts from which extraction is not possible (clauses headed
by wh-phrases) has led some scholars to argue that they are
(14) Ucês branco tem bué de dinheiro. not pronominal categories, but a different kind of null elem-
you.PL white.SGM has a.lot of money ent—either bound by a null topic or left over after movement.
‘You white people have a lot of money.’ It has been shown that they behave in a way similar to that
observed in languages like Finnish or Marathi (Holmberg et al.
Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese and African Portuguese 2009), which have been dubbed as partial null subject lan-
present an innovative agreement pattern with fronted NPs guages. One property of these languages is that null subjects
which do not represent the lexical subject of the verb: of tensed clauses may receive an arbitrary interpretation.
(15) As ruas do centro não tão passando. (18) Aqui não usa saia (BrPt., Galves 1987)
the streets of.the center NEG are passing here NEG use.3SG skirt
ônibus (Avelar and Galves 2012) ‘Here they do not wear skirts.’
buses.
‘Buses are not passing through the streets of In European Portuguese and Galician such an interpret-
downtown.’ ation requires the use of the reflexive clitic se ‘self ’ (§23.4.6).
According to Oliveira and Santos (2007), the frequency of
(16) Os olhos saíram lágrimas. null subjects in Angolan Portuguese is similar to that of
the eyes came.3PL.out tears (Gonçalves 2010:47) European Portuguese. However they stress that first person
‘Tears came out of his/her eyes.’ lexical pronouns tend to be used more frequently than
428
others, which is a property frequently observed for Brazil- Farrell 1990; Cyrino 1993; 1997). Although it existed in Latin,
ian Portuguese. this is an isolated fact in the Romance area, since in other
Galician and dialectal European Portuguese have lexical languages, including Galician, null objects are normally
expletive (viz. dummy) subjects, as illustrated in (19)-(20) restricted to an indeterminate or indefinite interpretation.
(Carrilho 2005:89, 93): Raposo (1986) shows that in European Portuguese null
objects cannot freely replace overt pronouns in any context.
(19) Os tabuleiros, ele também os há In particular, they are not acceptable in relative clauses,
the trays, EXPL.3MSG also them=has complements of nouns, and adjunct sentences, all structures
de barro, não é? from which it is also impossible to extract some phrase by
of clay, NEG it.is? wh-movement.
‘As for trays, there are also some of them which are Speaking of John
made out of clay, isn’t it?’ (23) Encontrei-o / [Ø] no mercado ontem.
I.met.=him [Ø] at.the market yesterday
(20) Ah, se chover era melhor, mas ele ‘I met him at the market yesterday.’
ah, if rain.SBJV.FUT.3SG it.was better, but EXPL.3MSG
não chove amanhã. (24) Conheço bem a pessoa que o encontrou /
NEG rains tomorrow I.know well the guy that him=met /
‘Oh, it would be better if it rains, but it won’t rain encontrou **[Ø] no mercado.
tomorrow.’ met [Ø] at.the market
‘I know well the guy who met him at the market.’
Carrilho (2005) gives many pieces of evidence that the
expletive pronoun does not occupy the subject position.
Raposo (1986) concludes that null objects in European Por-
This can be seen in (21), where the pronoun co-occurs
tuguese are derived by the abstract movement of a null
with a lexical subject in preverbal position:
pronoun to a null position identical to the positions occupied
by relative or interrogative phrases, whose interpretation is
(21) Então, mas ele um ferrolho não é assim. (AAL89)
given in discourse.1,2 Sentences like (24) are perfect in Brazil-
so, but EXPL.3MSG a bolt NEG is like.this
ian Portuguese with a null object, which suggests that null
‘But a bolt is not like this.’
objects in this language do behave like overt pronouns
(Galves 1989; Farrell 1990). Additionally, they correspond
She proposes that the expletive pronoun is generated in
to the most frequent form of anaphoric object, varying only
some position in the left periphery (cf. §31.3). Carrilho’s
with tonic pronouns, since third person clitics are no longer
analysis extends to Galician, which displays the same pat-
used in the spoken language (Duarte 1986; Monteiro 1991;
tern as dialectal European Portuguese, as exemplified in
cf. §23.4.7).
(22). Sentence (22b) demonstrates that the expletive pro-
noun does not occupy the position of subject, since there is a
lexical preverbal subject (eu).
23.4.4 The expression of nominal internal
(22) a. El era unha noite de lúa. arguments
EXPL.3SG was a night of moon
‘It was a moonlit night.’
23.4.4.1 Dative marking on direct objects
In Galician direct objects may be (and in some cases must
b. E el eu, a verdade sexa dita,
be) introduced by the dative marker a ‘to’ (Álvarez,
and EXPL.3SG I, the truth be said,
Regueira, and Monteagudo 1986:521; Álvarez and Xove
coidei que era certo.
2002:97f.; Cidrás Escáneo 2005; cf. also §56.3.2.4). This prop-
I.thought that it.was right
erty, already present in Galician-Portuguese, is also found to
‘And me, truth be said, I thought that it was right.’
some extent in classical Portuguese, but it is not productive
(Álvarez, Regueira, and Monteagudo 1986:169)
1
In technical terms, the null object is bound by a null operator, inter-
23.4.3.2 Null objects preted via co-indexation with a null topic.
2
In both European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese null This analysis, as well as the acceptability judgments it is based on, is
revised in Raposo (2004). In this text he argues that null definite objects,
objects may receive a specific interpretation analogous to both in European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, are correlated with
that of personal pronouns (Raposo 1986; Galves 1989; 1997; the existence of null definite determiners (§23.4.15).
429
in current European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. Gonçalves (2010:49) also reports the use of the prepos-
Although there is much dialectal variation involved, the ition a ‘to’ to introduce an NP assigned a recipient role in
following Galician paradigm can be considered as a good Mozambican Portuguese:
approximation of the contexts in which the dative marker is
obligatory (25a), optional (25b), and prohibited (25c) in (28) Pode incentivar aos criminosos a cometerem
marking accusative objects. it.may stimulate.INF to.the criminals to commit.3PL
um crime.
(25) a. Eu vin **(a) Pedro. a crime
I saw (to) Pedro ‘This can encourage the criminals to commit crimes.’
b. Eu vin (a) meu irmán.
I saw (to) my brother This use of the preposition a can be compared to the use
c. Eu vin (**a) un neno. of the dative third person clitic lhe to express direct objects,
I saw (to) a child also observed both in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese and
vernacular African Portuguese (cf. §23.3.2).
Examples in (25) show that animacy, definiteness, and

specificity play an important role in the distribution of the 23.4.4.2 Double-object constructions
dative marker since it is required by proper names and
rejected by indefinite NPs. Less specific definite NPs are In African Portuguese and some dialects of Brazilian Portu-
compatible with it but do not require it. guese, in particular Afro-Brazilian Portuguese (Scher 1996;
Additionally, the dative marker obligatorily occurs with Lucchesi and Mello 2009; Gonçalves 2010), the preposition a
personal pronouns, the quantifiers todos ‘all’, calquera ‘any- ‘to’ can be omitted as the marker of the recipient role of
body’, ambos ‘both’, when with human reference, as well as ditransitive verbs, yielding double object constructions. In
in the expression un ao outro ‘each other’, and the indefinite Afro-Brazilian Portuguese the order of the direct and indir-
pronoun un ‘one’. Personal pronouns, and todos ‘all’ for some ect objects is variable:
speakers, must be doubled by an accusative clitic on the
verb. Such doubling is impossible with referential full NPs. (29) Chegou na sala, entregou o
arrived.3SG in.the room gave.3SG the
(26) a. Vino a el. emissário a carta. (Gonçalves 2010:48)
I.saw=3SG.ACC to him emissary the letter
‘I saw him.’ ‘He arrived in the room, he gave the emissary the
letter.’
b. Vinos a todos.
I.saw=3PL.ACC to all (30) Ele vendia compade Jacó porco gordo.
‘I saw all.’ he sold compade Jacó pig fat
c. **Vino a Pedro. (Lucchesi and Mello 2009)
I.saw=3SG.ACC to Pedro ‘He sold a fat pig to Compade Jacó.’
‘I saw Pedro.’
(31) Cê manda pedi um empresti ele.
you make ask.INF a loan him
With some verbs, direct objects may be introduced by the (Lucchesi and Mello 2009)
prepositions en ‘in’, con ‘with’, and de ‘of/for’, yielding a ‘You ask him for a loan.’
modification of the aspectual value of the event (Álvarez
and Xove 2002:99f.).
23.4.5 Fronting strategies and the
structure of the left periphery
(27) Leu o libro.
read.PST.3SG the book
European Portuguese has four strategies for fronting elem-
‘He read the book.’
ents to the left periphery (Duarte 1987:69): hanging topics
Leu no libro. (HT), left-dislocation (LD), clitic left-dislocation (ClLD), and
read.PST.3SG in.the book topicalization (TOP) respectively exemplified in (29)-(32) (cf.
‘He has been reading the book.’ also §31.3.4, §34).
430
(32) Bom . . . praias, adoro a Arrábida. Portuguese or in other Romance languages in which, in
well beaches I.adore the Arrábida contrast to ClLD, it cannot appear in embedded clauses
‘Well . . . beaches, I adore Arrabida.’ (Cinque 1983; Duarte 1987):
(33) A Maria, encontrei ontem aquele amigo dela (37) Pedro pensa que essas crianças, a Maria esqueceu de
The Maria I.met yesterday that friend of.her pegar elas na escola. (Kato 1993)
que faz cinema. Peter thinks that these children, (the) Mary forgot to
that does cinema take them to.the school
‘Mary, yesterday I met that friend of hers who makes
films.’
Another difference between ClLD and LD observed by
Duarte in European Portuguese is that in the latter only
(34) Ao teu amigo, ainda não lhe pagaram one phrase can be fronted:
to.the your friend, yet NEG to.him=paid.3PL
os direitos de autor, pois não? (38) **O João, esse livro, nunca o ofereci a ele.
the rights of author, then not the John, this book, never it=offered.1SG to him
‘Your friend, they didn’t yet pay him the author
rights, did they?’ (39) Ao João, esse livro, nunca lho ofereci.
To.the John, this book, never to.him.it=offered.1SG
(35) Qualquer prospecto que lhe apareça, ele lê. ‘I never offered this book to João.’
any folder that to.him=appears, he reads
(Duarte 1987:73f.) In Brazilian Portuguese (38) is grammatical, which sug-
‘Any folder he gets his hands on he reads.’ gests that LD in Brazilian Portuguese has the properties
of ClLD in European Portuguese. This is consistent with
The existence of the TOP construction (and null objects in the existence of a pronominal paradigm in which the
general, §23.4.3.2) differentiates Portuguese from the other third person clitic is substituted by the tonic pronoun
Romance languages, including Galician,3 in which construc- (§23.3.2).
tions like (35) are allowed only if the fronted noun phrase is LD in Brazilian Portuguese is particularly frequent in
focalized or is not specific (namely, if no clitic could be used subject position (Pontes 1981; Duarte 1995; Galves 1997),
in the same context). In Portuguese, by contrast, both TOP both in embedded and matrix clauses, with animate refer-
and CLLD are allowed when the displaced NP is specific.4 ents as well as inanimate ones.
(36) a. Esse livro só encontrei na FNAC (Raposo 2004) (40) a. A competência linguística ela é de natureza mental
this book only found.1SG at.the FNAC the competence linguistic it is of nature mental.
(Pontes 1981)
b. Esse livro só o encontrei na FNAC.
‘The linguistic competence is mental in nature.’
this book only it=found.1SG at.the FNAC
‘I only found this book at FNAC.’ b. Eu acho que o povo brasileiro ele tem
I think that the people Brazilian he has
uma grave doença. (Duarte 1995)
Brazilian Portuguese presents the same alternation. But,
a serious illness’
coherently with the loss of third person clitics (§23.3.2) and
‘I think that Brazilians have a serious illness.’
the high frequency of null objects, ClLD appears only in
formal registers. In the spoken language, therefore, TOP
Brazilian Portuguese has another topicalization construc-
varies mainly with LD which, in Brazilian Portuguese, does
tion (Pontes 1980; 1981; Duarte 1987; Galves 1998) in which a
not present the restrictions observed in European
genitive or a locative phrase is fronted to the preverbal
position, yielding an apparently SVO sentence. As in
3
This is coherent with the fact that topicalization is a recent innovation examples (15)-(17) in §23.4.2, the preverbal phrase may
in Portuguese. It appears in Portuguese texts only from the nineteenth
century (Andrade 2013). For Brazilian Portuguese, see Cyrino (1993; 1997). agree with the verb (Galves 1998):
4
Recent work by Andrade (2013) shows that TOP and ClLD are function-
ally differentiated in discourse. The former is preferentially used when the (41) Esse relógio estragou o ponteiro.
topic has been previously mentioned, while resumption is favoured by
shifting or contrastive topics. However, Duarte (1987) claims that it is this clock broke.3sg the hand
TOP that is associated with contrastivity. ‘The hand of this alarm clock is broken.’
431
(42) Essa casa bate bastante sol. (Pontes 1980) Galician and Portuguese display two differences. First, Por-
this house beats much sun tuguese, but not Galician, uses se in non-finite constructions
‘Much sun beats on this house.’ (Raposo 1992; Cavalcante 1999; Berlinck et al. 2009):5
(43) Os relógios estragaram o ponteiro. (50) Eu não entendo se morar longe do mar.
the clocks broke.3PL the hand I NEG understand se=live.INF far from.the sea
‘The hands of this alarm clock are broken.’ ‘I do not understand how one can live far from the
sea.’
Dialectal European Portuguese offers other interesting types of
topicalization, with a reverse effect on agreement, in that pre- Second, there is a tendency in Galician, at least with a
verbal plural noun phrases appear with singular verbs (Varejão class of verbs, for se constructions to be used as real passive
2006; Naro and Scherre 2007; Galves 2012; Lucchesi 2012b): constructions together with the preposition por ‘by’.6
(44) Os nossos agasalhos é estes. (51) Aprobouse polo goberno.

the our clothes it.is those approved.3SG=se by.the government
‘Our clothes are those ones.’ ‘It was approved by the government.’
(45) As quenguerelas só presta para pescar. In Brazilian Portuguese tensed se constructions are in
the crabs only serve.3SG for fishing many cases replaced by null subject sentences without se,
‘Crabs are only good for being fished.’ due to the possibility of the interpretation of null subjects of
tensed clause as indeterminate (cf. §23.4.3.1, ex. 22). But,
The lack of agreement in this case derives straightforwardly because of a strong tendency to overtly lexicalize the pre-
if we hypothesize that the preverbal phrase is in topic position, verbal position, indetermination is frequently expressed by
and a null expletive occupies the subject position. personal pronouns like nós ‘we’, a gente ‘we, people’, você
Finally, Galician displays another kind of topicalization ‘you’, or its clitic form cê (cf. Berlinck, Duarte, and Oliveira
construction with agreeing pleonastic pronouns (Álvarez 2009:132-38).
et al. 1986:168). Finally, in dialectal European Portuguese, specially on
Madeira, Martins (2003) finds a construction in which inde-
(46) Don Casto era un home pequenote el. terminate se co-occurs with a lexical subject that agrees
Don Casto was a man little he with the verb, which she analyses as a topic phrase that
‘Don Casto was a little man.’ transmits its person-number features to se, as in a double
subject construction.
23.4.6 Se constructions
(52) Pois [ . . . ] a gente também se chama mosquitos.
well the people also se=call.3SG mosquitos
As in many other Romance languages, reflexive se construc-
‘Well, they are called/people call them mosquitos.’
tions are associated with several functions, with se both as
an argument (reflexive and reciprocal interpretations) and
as a marker of indetermination close to passivization (med-
23.4.7 Pronominal syntax
ial, indeterminate, and passive interpretation).
23.4.7.1 Clitic placement with tensed verbs
(47) As crianças ofereceram-se presentes uma à outra. One of the most distinctive properties of European Portu-
the children offered.3PL=se gifts one to.the other guese and Galician is that clitic pronouns obligatorily
‘The children offered gifts to each other.’ appear in postverbal position in some tensed clauses. In
both languages enclisis is obligatory in main affirmative
(48) Aluga(m)-se casas. clauses either when the verb is in absolute first position in
rent.3SG(/PL)=se houses the sentence (53) or when the phrase that precedes it, be it
‘Houses are for rent.’
(49) Aqui, trabalha-se muito. 5

See Raposo and Uriagereka (1996) for the restriction on the interpret-
here, work.3SG=se much ation of se ‘self-’ as indeterminate (indefinite in their terms) in inflected
infinitive clauses.
‘Here, people work a lot.’ 6
This was a current construction in Galician-Portuguese (Naro 1976).
432
the subject of the sentence, an adverb or a topic NP or PP, European Portuguese which requires enclisis), the conjunc-
receives a referential interpretation (54). tion que ‘that’ in the locution ter que ‘have to’, a wh-word in
an infinitival relative, and whenever it is preceded by neg-
(53) Subiulle unha lixeira roibén ás meixelas. (Glc.) ation (Álvarez and Xove 2002; Mateus et al. 2003).8 With
rose=to.him/her a light flush to.the cheeks some main verbs (cf. §31.2.2.3), the clitic can also climb to
**Lle subiu unha lixeira roibén ás meixelas. the tensed form (cf. §23.4.7.3).
to.him/her=rose a light flush to.the cheeks
‘A light flush appeared on his/her cheeks.’ (57) Ele mandou convidá-la / **a convidar. (Pt.)
he ordered invite.INF=her / her=invite.INF
(54) A Maria deu-lhe este livro ontem. (Pt.) ‘He made people invite her.’
the Mary gave=to.him this book yesterday
**A Maria lhe deu este livro ontem.
the Mary to.him=gave this book yesterday (58) Fico triste de sabê-lo / o saber. (Pt.)
‘Mary gave him this book yesterday.’ I.stay sad to know.INF=it / it=know.INF
‘I feel sad to know that.’
In the other contexts proclisis is obligatory. This includes
embedded clauses,7 and non-affirmative clauses when the (59) Teño que falarche / che falar. (Glc.)
negative or interrogative item precedes the verb. Preverbal I.have. that speak.INF=to.you / to.you=speak.INF
focalized or quantified elements also yield proclisis, as well ‘I have to speak to you.’
as some adverbs (já, ‘already’; ainda, ‘yet’; também, ‘also’;
sempre, ‘always’): (60) Non sabía en que metelos / os meter.
NEG knew.1SG in what put.INF=them / them=put.INF
(55) O meu corazón che mando. (Glc.) (Glc., Álvarez and Xove 2002)
the my heart to.you=send.1SG ‘I did not know where to put them.’
‘It is my heart that I send you.’
(61) O mestre mandoume
(56) Alguém me disse que virias. (Pt.) the master ordered=to.me
somebody to.me= said.3SG that come.cond.2SG tiralo / mandoumo tirar. (Glc.)
‘Somebody told me that you would come.’ take.away.INF=it / ordered=to.me=it take away
‘The master made me take it away.’
For Brazilian Portuguese, Teyssier (1976:95) observes that
‘[p]roclisis is the natural tendency of the language’. This is In European Portuguese, when the infinitival verb bears
true even in absolute first position, showing that Brazilian inflection marking, only proclisis is possible (Mateus et al.
Portuguese lost the Tobler-Mussafia Law (Galves et al. 2005). 2003:863; §23.4.11).
According to Chavagne (2005) and Inverno (2009:177f.), the In Brazilian Portuguese, in parallel with the tendency
same happens in African Portuguese. observed with tensed verbs, the clitic is normally proclitic
to the non-finite verbal form. This is shown by sentences in
which some element intervenes between the tensed verb
23.4.7.2 Clitic placement with non-finite verbs and the infinitival verb (Galves 1997):
In both Galician and Portuguese clitics can attach to infini-
(62) Não posso no momento lhe dar
tival forms. Brazilian Portuguese also allows for clitics to
NEG can.1SG in.the moment to.you= give.INF
attach to past participles, whereas European Portuguese
uma resposta.
excludes this option (Mateus et al. 2003:848). In Galician
an answer
and European Portuguese clitics are enclitic to the infini-
‘I cannot give you an answer now.’ (BrPt., NURC
tival verb whenever this is the direct complement of a
Project Corpus)
tensed verb, but can be enclitic or proclitic to it when it is
introduced by a preposition (with the exception of a ‘to’ in
7
In both European Portuguese and Galician enclisis is sometimes found
8
in embedded clauses, mainly when some phrase intervenes between the There is some controversy regarding the possibility of enclisis in
conjunction and the verb (cf. Frota and Vigário 1996; Álvarez and Xove negative infinitival clauses. Duarte and Matos (2000:118), for instance,
2002:565) describe it as ungrammatical.
433
Enclisis to the infinitival verb, however, is frequently this property was largely lost, except in conjunction with
found with third person accusative clitics (cf. Monteiro negation.9 However, some form of interpolation is still alive
1991; Galves 1997). in Galician (Álvarez and Xove 2002) and dialectal European
The same behaviour is observed with past participles. Portuguese (Magro 2008). In dialectal European Portuguese
Instead of climbing on to the tensed auxiliary, the clitic the elements that can appear between the clitic and the
remains proclitic to the participial form (Teyssier 1976:97): verb are mostly pronouns, some adverbs, and negation.
(63) a. Não tinha ainda se afastado. (BrPt) (66) Sabe o que lhe ele disse?
NEG had.3SG yet se=moved.away you.know the what to.him= he said
‘Do you know what he said to him?’
b. Não se tinha ainda afastado. (EuPt)
NEG se=had yet moved.away
(67) Fazem o carvão que ainda hoje se aí faz.
‘He had not yet moved away.’
make.3PL the coal that still today se=there make.3SG
‘They make the coal that is still made there today.’
This suggests that clitics in Brazilian Portuguese do not
move out of the position which contains the verb of which Álvarez and Xove (2002:569) claim that in Galician inter-
they are the complement. They are verb-related clitics, polation is a conservative phenomenon. According to these
while European Portuguese clitics are Infl(ection)-related authors, the most frequently interpolated elements are
clitics (Galves et al. 2005; cf. §31.2.2). This claim is supported the negation non ‘not’, personal pronouns (mostly eu ‘I’),
by the additional fact that clitic-climbing is extremely rare and the indeterminate pronoun un ‘one’. They however
in Brazilian Portuguese, even in the written language. acknowledge that, like in dialectal Galician, other elements
like PPs, doubling pronouns, and subjects can be
interpolated.
23.4.7.3 Clitic climbing
In Galician and in European Portuguese the clitic argument (68) Fai o que che eu mando. (Glc.)
of a non-finite verb can be affixed to the inflected verb of do.IMP the what to.you=I order
which the non-finite verb depends. Álvarez and Xove ‘Do what I tell you.’
(2002:568f.) claim that in Galician, this can occur with vol-
itional, epistemic, causative, perception, movement, and (69) o día que se un casa (Glc.)
stative verbs. Besides these, the class of verbs that licenses the day that se=one marry.3SG
clitic climbing in European Portuguese includes aspectual ‘the day that one marries’
verbs:
23.4.7.5 Clitic doubling
(64) Quíxome vender unha moto /
In European Portuguese, clitic doubling is restricted to the
he.wanted.=to.me sell.INF a motorbike /
doubling of tonic pronouns and some quantifiers. In this
quixo venderme unha moto. (Glc.)
case, it is obligatory. However full NPs cannot be doubled by
he.wanted sell.INF=to.me a motorbike
clitic pronouns.
‘He wanted to sell me a motorbike.’
(70) Vi-os a eles / a todos / **aos meninos. (EuPt.)
(65) O João começou-lhe a ensinar russo / começou
I.saw=them to them / to all / to.the boys
the John began=to.him teach.INF Russian / began
‘I saw them / all of them / the boys.’
a ensinar-lhe russo. (Pt.)
teach.INF=to.him Russian
Galician displays a much more extended use of this con-
‘John began to teach him Russian.’
struction, which is, according to many scholars, obligatory
with dative complements:
23.4.7.4 Interpolation
In old Portuguese any phrase could intervene between the
clitic and the verb in embedded clauses and in matrix
clauses beginning with focalized elements (Martins 1994; 9
Interpolation appears in Portuguese literary texts in the nineteenth
Ribeiro 1995; Namiuti 2008). From the sixteenth century century (Magro 2008).
434
(71) a. Deille un regalo a Xoán / ao neno. (Glc.) (74) Não vi o João. (Glc.: Non vin a Xoán.)
I.gave=to.him a gift to John / to.the boy NEG saw.1SG the John (Glc.: NEG saw.1SG to Xoán)
‘I did not see John’
b. ??Dei un regalo a Xoán / ao neno.10 (Glc.)
I.gave a gift to John / to.the boy (75) a. Não vi ninguém. (Glc.: Non vin a ninguén.)
‘I gave a gift to John / to the boy.’ NEG saw.1SG nobody (Glc.: NEG saw.1SG to nobody)
b. **Vi ninguém. (Glc.: **Vin a ninguén.)

Occurrences of clitics doubling the corresponding saw.1SG nobody (Glc.: saw.1SG to nobody
stressed forms are observed in vernacular Brazilian Portu- ‘I saw nobody.’
guese (Avelar and Galves 2012):
(76) **Ninguém não veio. (Glc.: **Ninguén non veu.)
nobody NEG came
(72) Me leva eu junto com você.
‘Nobody came.’
me=take.IMP I together with you
‘Take me together with you.’ (http://www.re
cantodasletras.com.br/poesias/2534441) Não/non can also serve as a short negative answer, which
can be followed by the repetition of não/non followed by
This property is directly linked with two other special V: Q – Viste o João? (‘Did you see John?’) A - Não, não vi (‘No,
features of vernacular Brazilian Portuguese. First, stressed I did not’).12
personal pronouns can appear in the position of direct Galician, European Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese/
object (§23.3.2). Second, their form is independent from African Portuguese present some differences. In postnom-
their syntactic function. In (72), although eu ‘I’ is the direct inal position, indefinites can function as negative polarity
object of leva ‘take’, its form is not distinct from that of the items both in Galician and in Portuguese. In the former this
nominative. In the same poem from which (72) was possibility is restricted to the postverbal position:
extracted, we find the nominative form eu in the position
of complement of the preposition sem ‘without’, instead of (77) Não tenho dinheiro algum. (Pt. ✓; Glc. ✓)
the standard oblique form mim ‘me’. NEG have.1SG money some
‘I have no money.’
(73) Não vai embora sem eu! (vernacular BrPt.)
NEGgo.IMP away without I (78) Pessoa alguma gosta de ser maltrada. (Pt. ✓; Glc. **)
‘Don’t go without me!’ person some likes to be ill.treated
‘Nobody likes to be ill-treated.’
Taken together, the existence of the reduplication with-
out a preposition and the invariability of the pronouns A further peculiarity of Galician is the use of senón (lit. ‘if
suggest that they are not marked for case as proposed by not’) as an adversative conjunction in negative clauses
Avelar and Galves (2012). (Álvarez and Xove 2002:197).
(79) Non quedaches de vir ás nove, senón

23.4.8 Sentential negation NEGarranged.2SG to come at.the nine, if not
ás nove e media. (Glc.)
Portuguese and Galician have a negative item não/non ‘not’ at.the nine and half
which occurs before the verb, and undergoes negative con- ‘You did not arrange to come at nine but at nine
cord with negative items following the verb. Intrinsically thirty.’
negative elements cannot appear in postverbal position Álvarez and Xove (2002) also mention that the focaliza-
without the presence of preverbal não.11 Conversely, when tion of some expressions can yield a negative interpretation
they are in preverbal position, não cannot occur: of the sentence:
(80) Na miña vida tal vin.

10
There is no real consensus on this matter. See e.g.: in.the my life such saw.1SG
(i) Di(lle) ao señor que veña (Freixeiro Mato 2000:133) ‘I never saw such a thing.’
say(=to.him) to.the sir that come.sbjv.3sg
11 12
In Brazilian Portuguese (75b) is possible as the emphatic negation of a Não/non can also negate constituents, e.g. o não respeito às leis é
previous claim that the speaker saw somebody. condenável lit. ‘the non respect of the laws is punishable’.
435
Finally, Galician displays an extensive use of expletive (85) Chama-o! (EuPt.) / Chama ele! (BrPt./AngPt.)
negation. Besides its use in exclamative sentences, also call=him.ACC/call he.NOM
possible in Portuguese (Mateus et al. 2003:785), it manifests ‘Call him!’
itself in the possibility of replacing algún/alguén ‘some,
somebody’ by ningún/ninguén ‘no, nobody’, in comparative
clauses and in the tag question ¿non si?—cf. (128) in (86) Não o chames! (EuPt.) / Não chama ele! (BrPt./AngPt.)
§23.4.12—(Álvarez and Xove 2002:198-200). NEG him=call.imp / NEG call.imp he.
‘Don’t call him!’
(81) Cantas veces (non) temos ido nós
how.many times (EXPL.NEG) have.1PL gone we
Both Chavagne and Inverno report the use in Angolan
ó lago de Castiñeiras!
Portuguese of the adverb ainda ‘still’ as a negative short
to.the lake of Castiñeiras
answer.
‘Many times we have gone to the lake of Castiñeiras!’
(82) É improbable que ninguén / alguén a alugue. (87) Q: Queres ir comigo?
it.is unlikely that nobody / somebody it=rent.SBJV.3SG You.want go with.me
‘It is unlikely that anybody would rent it.’ ‘Do you want to go with me?’
A: Ainda.
(83) É mellor usar luvas de goma ca (non) yet
it.is better use.INF gloves of rubber than (EXPL.NEG) ‘No.’
de tea.
of fabric
‘It is better to use rubber gloves than fabric gloves.’
23.4.9 Uses of the single tenses
In Brazilian Portuguese, two innovative types of sentential
negation emerged (Schwenter 2005; Biberauer and Cyrino
In European Portuguese and Galician, present indicative
2009; Teixeira de Sousa 2012). First, there is a bipartite form,
may express progressive aspect (¿Que comes? ‘What are
which consists in the doubling of the NEG item at the end of
you eating?’), as well as future (Amanhã vou a Coimbra ‘I
the sentence (84a). This construction is also reported by
shall go to Coimbra tomorrow’) and narrative past (Em
Inverno (2009) and Chavagne (2005) for Angolan Portu-
1492, Colombo descobre a América ‘In 1492, Columbus dis-
guese. As extensively discussed by Inverno (2009:275-84),
covered America’).
such a construction is different from the emphatic construc-
The preterite may be used as a present perfect (Hoje ergui-
tion found in European Portuguese as well as in many other
me cedo ‘Today I have got up early’), a punctual perfective
Romance languages, in which a final NEG item is uttered after
(Ontem ergui-me cedo ‘Yesterday I got up early’), and a future
a pause or an intonational break.
perfect (Amanhã às oito já me ergui ‘Tomorrow at eight I will
In the second construction, there is no pre-verbal não and
have got up’). In Brazilian Portuguese, the preterite can be
only the final one occurs. This is a felicitous utterance only when
used to express a result (for the use of 3SG pagou, §23.3.2):
it implies the presence in the discursive context of the presup-
position of what precedes the negation. To our knowledge, this
(88) Pagou, levou!
latter construction is not reported for Angolan Portuguese.
paid.IND.PFV.3SG took.IND.PFV.3SG
‘After you pay, you take it out!’
(84) a. Não fui no teatro não.
NEG went.1SG in.the theatre NEG
The imperfect expresses a progressive or habitual past:
b. Fui no teatro não. Trabalhava na Bahía ‘I was working/used to work in Bahia’.
went.1SG in.the theater NEG The imperfect, the conditional, and less frequently, the
‘I did not go to the theatre.’ synthetic pluperfect are used in polite requests or to
express counterfactuality:
Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese and Angolan Portuguese share
two further properties. First, negation does not change the form (89) Queria / Quereria / Quisera pedir um favor. (Pt.)
of the imperative. Second, it does not affect the position of the want.IPFV.1SG / want.COND.1SG / ask.INF a favour
pronoun, since at least for the third person, it is more natural to want.PST.PRF.1SG
use tonic pronouns than clitic pronouns (§23.3.2). ‘I would like to ask a favour.’
436
(90) Cantava / Cantaria / Cantara Brazilian Portuguese the second person singular imperative
sing.IPFV.1SG / sing.COND.1SG / sing.PST.PRF.1SG may be used in negative contexts: Não come ‘Don’t eat’
se soubesse. (Pt.) (§23.4.8).
if I.know.SBJV.PST.1SG Some verbs have regular and irregular participles: pre-
‘If I could, I would sing.’ ndido vs preso ‘arrested’ (cf. §27.7, §43.2.1). In Portuguese,
the regular forms tend to be used with the auxiliary ter
In Galician, the synthetic pluperfect cantara is used to ‘have’ (tinha prendido ‘I.had arrested’), while the irregular
express past perfect aspect or anterior tense: Glc. Eu xa forms tend to be employed with ser ‘be’ in the passive (foi
falara con ela, Pt. Eu já tinha falado com ela ‘I had already preso ‘he.was arrested’) or as resultative-stative adjectives
spoken with her’. The Galician pluperfect also tends to (as mãos presas ‘the bound hands’). The tendency seems to be
replace the past subjunctive cantase (cf. (Latin-American that the two participle forms are essentially aspectually
varieties of) Spanish): Se foras/foses, veríalo ‘If you went distinguished, e.g. prendido [+dynamic, +punctual] vs preso
there, you would see it’). [+resultative, +durative], and distinguished for voice (pre-
The future indicative also expresses epistemic modality ndido = active vs preso = passive).
(Pt. Serão as sete horas ‘Probably it is seven’) and orders (Pt.
Não matarás! ‘Don’t kill!’). It is frequently replaced by the
periphrasis ir ‘to go’ + infinitive (e.g. Pt. vou comer ‘I’m going 23.4.10 Finite complementation
to eat’).
Conditional may express future in the past (Pt. Disse que o Both in Galician and Portuguese, the subordinating conjunc-
faria mais tarde ‘He said that would do it later’), evidentiality tion is que ‘that’, for all classes of verbs that select
and reported facts (Glc. Habería tres ‘There were apparently non-interrogative finite clauses, and se ‘if ’, if the clausal
three’), and counterfactuality (Pt. Fa-lo-ia, se pudesse ‘I would complement has an interrogative feature (cf. §63.2.1). Des-
do it, if I could’). pite this common framework, Galician and Portuguese pre-
The present subjunctive marks present or future events sent some differences. In Galician, for instance, que and se
and may express orders or desires: Pt. É melhor que o faças ‘It can co-exist in indirect interrogative clauses. Se can also be
is better that you do it’, Pt. Faça-o! ‘Do.IMP.2SG.POLITE=it!’. Past preceded by the preposition de (Álvarez and Xove 2002:661).
subjunctive may express counterfactuality: Fa-lo-ia, se pu-
desse. The future subjunctive is used in Portuguese, but has (93) Di a avoa que se quedas a durmir. (Glc.)
completely disappeared from Galician, where it is replaced says the grandmother that if stay.2SG to sleep.INF
by the present indicative in conditionals and the present ‘Grandmother is asking if you sleep at home.’
subjunctive in all other contexts.
(94) Avísame de se vas. (Glc.)
(91) Se quiseres, faço-o. (EuPt.) warn.IMP=me for if go.2SG
If want.SBJV.FUT.2SG, do.IND.PRS.1SG=it ‘Warn me if you go.’
Se queres, fágoo. (Glc.)
If want.IND.PRS.2SG, do.IND.PRS.1SG=it In vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, in parallel with
‘If you want, I’ll do it.’ clausal complementation in conjunction with nouns, there
is a tendency for que to be preceded by de ‘of ’, even if the
(92) Faz como quiseres. (EuPt.) verb does not normally select de. Following a tradition in
do.IMP.2SG how want.SBJV.FUT.2SG Spanish grammar, this phenomenon is called dequeísmo
Fai como queiras. (Glc.) (Mollica 1989; cf. §22.4.3.3).
do.IMP.2SG how want.SBJV.PRS.2SG
‘Do it the way you want.’ (95) Eu poderia provar para o povo de que houve fraude
I could prove to the people of that it.had fraud
The imperative has only forms for the informal second nas eleições passadas.
person (2SG canta ‘you.SG.sing’, 2PL cantai ‘you.PL.sing’), with in.the elections passed
the present subjunctive being used in other cases não cantes! ‘I could prove to people that there was fraud in the
‘don’t sing (NEG sing.SBJV.PRS.2SG.INFORMAL)!’, cante! ‘sing (sing. last elections.’
SBJV.PRS.2SG.POLITE)!’ (§23.3.2). Galician may replace the second
person plural imperative with the infinitive: comer! ‘eat!’, In Angolan Portuguese the conjunction que is frequently
Non comer! ‘Don’t you eat!’. In African Portuguese and omitted in subordinate clauses (Chavagne 2005:256):
437
(96) Tinha um rapaz que não queria Ø eu trabalhava (Pimpão 1999; Inverno 2009:237f.; Meira 2009; Bagno
It.had a guy that NEG wanted Ø I worked 2012:562), as illustrated in (103):
nesta casa.
in.this house (103) [A povoação] permite que o estado continua
‘There was a guy who did not want me to work people allow.3SG that the State keeps.IND
in this house.’ agindo de tal maneira.
behaving of such way
‘People allow the state to keep acting this way.’
In complement clauses, there is an opposition between
indicative and subjunctive, governed by the lexical proper-
ties of the main predicate. Verbs which express judgement, 23.4.11 Non-finite complementation
doubt, and desire tend to select the subjunctive (Mateus
et al. 2003; Azevedo 2005):
Galician and Portuguese, like other Romance languages,
display an abundant use of infinitival complementation to
(97) Creio que vens. (Pt.)
express obligatory control, i.e. the interpretation of the
think.1SG that come.IND.2SG.
subject of the infinitive clause as referring to the subject
‘I think that you shall come.’
(and sometimes the object) of the main verb (cf. §63.1). Here
we shall concentrate on two domains in which they both
(98) Quero que venhas. (Pt.)
display a specific behaviour in the Romance domain and
want.1SG that come.SBJV.2SG
present some remarkable differences among dialects and
‘I want you to come.’
variants: inflected infinitival and causative constructions
(cf. §61.3, §63.2.1.1).
(99) Não creio que venhas. (Pt.)
Within Romance Galician and Portuguese belong to a
NEG think.1SG that come.SBJV.2SG
small groups of languages that have inflected infinitives,
‘I do not think that you shall come.’
as illustrated in (104)-(105) respectively from Álvarez and
Xove (2002:307) for Galician and Raposo (1987:87) for Euro-
There is variation, however, associated with differences
pean Portuguese.
in meaning:
(104) Cóntame como foi o ires
(100) A Rita procura um livro que tem/tenha
tell.IMP=me how was the go.INF.2SG
the Rita searches a book that has.IND/SBJV
caer nas mans deses desalmados. (Glc.)
gravuras. (Pt.)
to.fall in.the hands of.these soulless
drawings
‘Tell me how you fell into the hands of these heart-
IND ‘Rita is looking for a specific book which has
less people.’
drawings.’
SBJV ‘Rita is looking for any book which has draw-
ings.’ (Mateus et al. 2003:264) (105) Eu lamento os deputados terem
I regret the deputies have.INF.3PL
trabalhado pouco. (Pt.)
(101) Quando vem/vier
worked little
when come.IND.PRS.3SG/SBJV.FUT.3SG
‘I regret that the deputies did not work much.’
ele, vou-me embora. (Pt.)
he, go.1SG=me away
IND ‘Every time he comes, I leave.’ However, the conditions on its licensing vary considerably
SBJV ‘If he comes, I will leave.’ from variety to variety. In European Portuguese the
inflected infinitive is possible in complements to factive
(102) Diz que eu trabalho/trabalhe bem. (Pt.) (105), causative, and perception verbs (106), in adjoined
says that I work.IND.PRS/SBJV.PRS well clauses introduced by a preposition (107)-(108)—a ‘to’
IND ‘He affirms that I work well.’ requires a determiner, except in gerundive infinitival con-
SBJV ‘He orders that I work well.’ structions, see below—and in subject clauses (109). It can
also occur in complements to epistemic verbs, but in this
In vernacular Brazilian Portuguese and African Portu- case the subject of the infinitival clause is obligatorily post-
guese the indicative tends to replace the subjunctive verbal (110). It can occur neither in complements to
438
volitional verbs (111), nor in constructions introduced by a claim that explicit subjects are infrequent in infinitival
wh-element, like interrogative and relative clauses (112).13 clauses since, if the subject is explicit, it is more natural to
use a tensed clause. No such restriction appears to exist in
(106) Eu vi / deixei os meninos entrarem em casa. (Pt.) European Portuguese, in which explicit subjects freely occur
I saw let the boys come.INF.3PL in house in inflected infinitival clauses.
‘I saw / let the boys come into the house.’ The masculine singular definite article o is frequently
used in Galician to introduce inflected infinitive clauses
(cf. 104). In European Portuguese this use is limited to the
(107) Eu entrei em casa sem os meninos verem. (Pt.)
temporal clauses introduced by the preposition a ‘to, at’. All
I came in house without the boys see.INF.3PL
this suggests that infinitival clauses are more nominal in
‘The boys did not see me come into the house.’
Galician than in Portuguese.
In Brazilian Portuguese it is more accurate to speak of
(108) Ao aproximarem-se, os rapazes the personal infinitive than of the inflected infinitive,
At.the move.closer.INF.3PL=se the boys since the existence of a personal marking on the infinitival
cumprimentaram os amigos. (Pt.) verb is dependent on the productivity of agreement mark-
greeted the friends ing on the verb in general, which varies depending on the
‘When they got closer to each other, the boys geographical and social dialects, as seen above. The
greeted their friends.’ inflected infinitive in a restrictive sense is therefore
mostly used in written and standard spoken language.
However, even if inflection is not present on the verb,
(109) Será difícil eles aprovarem a proposta. (Pt.)
Brazilian Portuguese does present the personal infinitive,
it.will.be difficult they approve.INF.3PL the proposal
in the sense that lexical subjects frequently show up in the
‘It will be difficult that they accept the proposal.’
preverbal position of infinitival clauses, with or without
agreement marking on the verb, in contexts similar to
(110) Eu afirmo terem os deputados trabalhado those illustrated in (105)-(110). Furthermore, except if
I claim have.INF.3PL the deputies worked the clause that contains it is in first position in the sen-
pouco. (Pt.) tence, personal infinitival clauses are frequently intro-
little duced by the preposition de ‘of ’:
‘I claim that the deputies have not worked much.’
(113) a. A Maria achou maus (d) eles sairem
the Mary found bad (of) they go.INF.3PL.out
(111) **Eu desejava os deputados terem trabalhado
batido. (BrPt.)
I desired the deputies have.INF.3PL worked
quickly
mais. (Pt.)
‘Mary did not like their going out quickly.’
more
‘I would appreciate that the deputies had worked b. A Maria convenceu a Ana deles
more.’ the Mary convinced the Ann of.they
trabalharem aqui. (BrPt.)
work.INF.3PL here
(112) **Nós não sabemos quem convidarmos para o
‘Mary convinced Ann that they should work here.’
we NEG know who invite.INF.1PL for the
(Figueiredo Silva 1996: 147)
jantar. (Pt.)
dinner
‘We do not know who is to be invited for the dinner.’ As in European Portuguese, the personal infinitive can be
introduced in Brazilian Portuguese by the preposition para
‘for’. In this case, if the subject is first person singular, two
The contexts in which Galician allows the inflected infini-
types of case-marking are possible: nominative, as in Euro-
tive are more limited. It mainly occurs in adjunct and
pean Portuguese (114a), and oblique (114b), which is an
subject clauses. Furthermore, Álvarez and Xove (2002)
innovation of Brazilian Portuguese.
13
(114) a. Esse livro é para eu ler.
All the examples are from Raposo (1987), except for causative and
perception verbs, which are not considered in his paper, and (108), from b. Esse livro é para mim ler.
Mateus et al. (2003:725). ‘This book is for me to read.’
439
The (114b) example shows that the preposition is able to (117) a. Eu vi os meninos a devorar(em) o gelado. (EuPt.)
assign case to the subject, as in the English for . . . to con- I saw the children to devour.INF(3PL) the ice.cream
struction. The variation in (114) suggests that Brazilian
b. Eu vi os meninos devorando o sorvete. (BrPt.)
Portuguese has two underlying structures for the personal
I saw the children devouring the ice.cream
infinitive, the (114a) one, similar to European Portuguese
and the (114b) one, which is the innovative one. c. Vin os nenos devorando o xeado. (Glc.)
Brazilian Portuguese has another distinctive property saw.1SG the children devouring the ice.cream
observed by Modesto (2011). While inflected infinitival ‘I saw the children devouring the ice cream.’
clauses without expressed subjects are ungrammatical if
the subject is not controlled, they are grammatical as com- Another remarkable property of infinitival complementa-
plements to epistemic and declarative predicates if the tion in Portuguese is found in causative constructions. Euro-
subject is controlled, i.e, if it refers to the subject of the pean Portuguese displays three alternative ways of
main verb, at least in part (in this case, we have ‘partial expressing causation (Gonçalves 1999; Mateus et al. 2003).
control’). Desiderative requires partial control in order to These are infinitival construction with an accusative subject
legitimate the inflectional mark on the verb. The first part is (cf. Eng. I believe him to be innocent), in which the subject of the
illustrated in (115) and the second in (116): infinitive receives case from the main verb (118a); inflected
infinitival constructions, in which the subject receives case
from the inflectional element on the verb (Raposo 1987)
(115) a. **Ele detesta fumarmos perto dele. (EuPt. ✓) (118b), and finally, so-called faire-infinitif (or clause-union)
he hates smoke.INF.1PL close of.him constructions (§61.3.3.2) in which the infinitival verb forms
‘He hates that we smoke close to him.’ a single complex verbal predicate with the tensed verb
b. **Ele entrou em casa sem vermos. (EuPt. ✓) (118c). In the latter case, when the infinitival verb is transi-
he came into house without see.INF.1PL tive, its subject is case-marked by the preposition a ‘to’.14
‘We did not see when he came into the house.’
(118) a. Os pilotos mandaram os mecânicos
the pilots ordered the mechanics
(116) a. Os motoristas dizem estar(em) sendo vítimas de arranjar o carro.
the drivers say be.INF(3PL) being victims of fix.INF the car
assaltos.
hold-ups b. Os pilotos mandaram os mecânicos arranjarem
‘The drivers claim that they are victims of hold-ups.’ the pilots ordered the mechanics fix.INF.3PL
o carro.
b. A Maria decidiu viajarem juntas. the car
the Mary decided travel.INF.3PL together
‘Mary decided that they would travel together.’ c. Os pilotos mandaram arranjar o carro
the pilots ordered fix.INF the car
aos mecânicos.
Such facts tend to reinforce the analysis (cf. §23.4.3) of to.the mechanics
Brazilian Portuguese as a partial null subject language, since ‘The pilots made the mechanics fix the car.’
they bring additional evidence of the weakness of the agree-
ment marker on the verb. While it is not sufficiently strong In Galician, things are different. First, the inflected infini-
to identify null subjects, it is sufficiently weak to license tive is not used in this context (Sousa Fernández 2012). The
control in some contexts. sentences in which the subject precedes the infinitival verb
A final construction to be mentioned in connection with can therefore only be cases in which (accusative) case is
the inflected infinitive is what Mateus et al. (2003:643) dub assigned to the subject by the main verb. However, Galician
the gerundive infinitival construction and Raposo (1989) calls has two more possibilities, using the preposition a ‘to’,
the prepositional infinitival construction. It possibly devel- illustrated in (120)-(121). In the first one, it is the prepos-
oped in European Portuguese in parallel with the replace- ition that assigns case to the infinitival subject. The second
ment, in European Portuguese, of the periphrasis estar ‘to be’ one is a version of the faire-infinitif construction.
+ gerund by estar + a ‘to’ + infinitive (§23.3.5.7) from the
eighteenth century. In Galician and Brazilian Portuguese, 14
Perception verbs follow the same pattern, with one difference: in their
such a replacement did not take place, and the more natural complements, the faire-infinitif construction is possible with intransitive
way of expressing (117) is by using the gerund. verbs, but not with transitive verbs (cf. Mateus et al. 2003:650f.).
440
Consistently with the obligatory doubling of dative phrases, (123) a. Gaspar ten tantos anos coma min / **eu. (Glc.)
a dative clitic appears on the verb in both cases. Gaspar has as.many years as me / I
b. Gaspar tem tantos anos quanto
(119) María fixo os rapaces traer a merenda.
Gaspar has as.many years how.many
Mary made the boys bring.INF the lunch
eu / **mim. (Pt.)
I / **me
(120) María fíxolles aos rapaces traer a merenda.
‘Gaspar is as old as me.’
Mary made=to.them to.the boys bring.INF the lunch
(124) a. Ninguén chega ao traballo antes
(121) Fíxenlles comer a merenda ós rapaces.
nobody arrives at.the work before
I.made=to.them eat.INF the lunch to.the boys
ca min / **eu. (Glc.)
‘I made the boys eat the lunch.’
than me / I
Brazilian Portuguese displays only the two first construc- b. Ninguém chega ao trabalho antes do que
tions of (118). For the persons that have no personal mark- nobody arrives at.the work before of.the that
ing, i.e. the first and third persons singular, the ambiguity eu / **mim. (Pt.)
that generally occurs with full NPs extends to personal I / me
pronouns. This is because, as seen in §23.3. 2, the nomina- ‘Nobody arrives at work before me.’
tive forms can be used in object position. So, given sen-
tences like (122a) and (122b), we do not know what is the In some cases, que and como can alternate respectively
underlying structure of the infinitival clause. The existence with ca and coma, but crucially, this is not possible with
of (122c), however supports the hypothesis that the unique pronouns (Álvarez and Xove 2002:172f).
causative structure of vernacular Brazilian Portuguese is Both Galician and Portuguese use do que (lit. ‘of.the that’)
the infinitival construction with accusative subject. in alternation with que ‘that’. In Galician, but not in Portu-
guese, the prepositional element of do que may inflect (Gal-
(122) a. Deix’eu ver! ician examples from Álvarez and Xove 2002:175):
let.IMP=I see
‘Let me see!’ (125) a. Ten menos necesidades das
he.has less needs.FPL of the.FPL
b. Faz ele entrar!
que ti pensas. (Glc.)
Make.IMP he enter.INF
that you think
‘Make him come in!’
b. Tem menos necessidades do que / **das
c. Faz eles entrar!
he.has less needs.FPL of.the.MSG / of.the.FPL
Make.IMP they enter.INF
que tu pensas. (Pt.)
‘Make them come in!’
that you think
‘He has fewer needs than you think.’
23.4.12 Comparative clauses
This suggests that in (125a) the comparative element is
the preposition de ‘of ’, which is followed by a free relative
Galician has two comparative particles that do not exist in
clause, while in (125b) do que was grammaticalized as a
Portuguese: ca ‘than’ and coma ‘as’. Sentences (123) and (124)
complex comparative conjunction. This analysis is sup-
show that they assign case to the term that follows them, as can
ported by the fact that de can occur by itself in Galician
be seen from the oblique form of the first person singular
but not in Portuguese:
pronoun, contrasting with Portuguese, in which the pronoun
is nominative in this context.15 This suggests that coma and ca
(126) a. Sempre compra máis do necesario. (Glc.)
are prepositions, or prepositional complementizers (cf. §23.3.7).
always buy.3SG. more of.the.MSG necessary
b. Sempre compra mais do **(que o)
15
It cannot be claimed that min is the default case in Galician, since it always buy.3SG more of.the.MSG that the.MSG
cannot be used in isolation to answers to questions: necessário. (Pt.)
(i) Quen bebeu o viño? Eu / **min. necessary
‘Who drank the wine? Me.’ ‘He always buys more than he needs.’
441
23.4.13 Interrogative clauses (Glc. Que compraches?, Pt. O que compraste? ‘What have you
bought?’; Glc.—Non estou de acordo con iso;—Co que? ‘– I don’t
agree with this;—With what?’). The equivalent of (128c) can
In interrogative clauses, Galician, European Portuguese, and
therefore only be ¿Que leu Xoán? lit. ‘what read Xoán?’.
Brazilian Portuguese display many differences concerning
In embedded sentences both SV and VS are possible in
the respective order of the subject and the verb, the move-
both Galician and European Portuguese, except for que ‘that’
ment of the wh-phrase to clause-initial position, and the use
that requires subject-verb inversion. It must be noted how-
of the interrogative marker (é) que ‘(it.is) that’ (Álvarez,
ever that all the examples of indirect questions given by
Regueira, and Monteagudo 1986; Ambar 1992; Lopes Rossi
Álvarez and Xove (2002:592f.) have VS, and sometimes VOS.
1993; Barbosa 2001; Costa 2004; Gupton 2010).
In both languages, wh-phrases move obligatorily to the
European Portuguese has two main types of interrogative
first position of the interrogative clause, except in echo
structure with and without the interrogative marker é que
questions (Álvarez et al. 1986:154).
‘it.is that’, as illustrated in (127).
Brazilian Portuguese strongly contrasts with both Euro-
pean Portuguese and Galician. First, it allows SV order in
(127) a. Que livro é que o João leu?
any direct or indirect interrogative clause (130a). Second, it
which book is that the John read
frequently displays wh in situ in root interrogatives, inde-
b. Que livro o João leu? pendently of the echo interpretation (130b). Finally, the
which book the John read interrogative marker é que co-exists with que (130c). The
‘Which book did John read?’ same happens in cleft sentences (cf. §23.4.15, ex. 149b).
Finally, the interrogative pronoun que is no longer used in
Sentences without é que have obligatory subject-verb this language in root interrogative sentences, except with é
inversion when the wh-phrase is bare, as shown in (128)- que (131) (Lopes Rossi 1993).
(129), independently of their status as arguments or
adjuncts. In the case of adjunct movement, if the verb is (130) a. Onde a Maria comprou esse livro?
transitive, VSO order emerges, as can be seen in (129c). where the Mary bought this book
b. A Maria comprou esse livro onde?
(128) a. Que / O que é que o João leu? (Pt.)
the Mary bought this book where
what / the.MSG what is that the John read
c. Onde que a Maria comprou esse livro?
b. **Que / **O que o João leu?
where that the Mary bought this book
what / the.MSG what the John read
‘Where did Mary buy this book?’
c. Que / O que leu o João?
what / the.MSG what read the John
(131) a. Que é que você quer?
‘What did John read?’
what is that you want
(129) a. Quando é que a Maria comprou esse livro? b. **Que você quer?
when is that the Mary bought this book what you want
b. **Quando a Maria comprou esse livro? c. O que você quer?
when the Mary bought this book the.MSG what you want
‘What do you want?’
c. Quando comprou a Maria esse livro?
when bought the Mary this book
‘When did Mary buy this book?’ In yes/no questions, the natural order is SV(O) (Mateus
et al. 2003:461). However, in both European Portuguese and
Galician doubly contrasts with European Portuguese in that Galician VS order is also a possibility in this context.
it has neither a grammaticalized é que, nor the possibility of Finally, it is a common feature of Galician and Portuguese
SV order, even when the wh-phrase is not bare. The equiva- that short answers may consist of the repetition of the verb,
lent sentences of (127a,b, 128a, and 129a) are therefore impos- instead of an affirmative polarity item. An important differ-
sible in this language. Another difference lies in the form o que ence seems to occur, however. According to Álvarez and
which co-exists with que in European Portuguese interroga- Xove (2002), si ‘yes’ is always a felicitous answer to a ques-
tives, but in Galician, que only takes the definite article when tion, whereas in Portuguese, especially in European Portu-
asking about the preceding context or when showing surprise guese, the use of sim ‘yes’, alone, without the repetition of
442
the verb, is very much restricted to emphatic discursive A casa que caiu / a casa que
contexts. This can be due to the different nature of si and the house that fell.down the house that
sim, which can be observed in other facts that distinguish caeu (Pt./Glc.)
Galician from Portuguese: fell.down
(i) si can be used as an affirmative particle followed by the
conjunction que ‘that’ (Álvarez and Xove 2002:183): (136) A casa na que vives (Glc. √/Pt. ??)
the house.FSG in.the.FSG that live.2SG
(132) ¿Non che deron o premio, verdade? (Glc.) A casa em que vives (Glc. √/Pt. √)
NEG to.you=gave.3PL the price, true the house.FSG in that live.2SG
‘They did not give you the price, did they?’ ‘The house in which you live’
‘Si que mo deron’
yes that to.me=it=gave.3PL
‘Yes, they did.’ In spoken Galician, the preposition can occur with a
personal pronoun, leaving only que in the position of the
(ii) si can follow non ‘not’ in tag questions (Álvarez and relative pronoun. This is the so-called resumptive strategy
Xove 2002:182, 184), in variation with é ‘it.is’: (cf. §64.4). This occurs with prepositional complements
as well as with direct objects (in this case, the pronoun is
(133) Vós xa me perdoastes ¿non si / é? (Glc.) a clitic). The resumptive pronoun can also refer to the
you already to.me=forgave NEG yes / it.is subject, but in this case it follows the verb (Álvarez and
‘You already forgave me, didn’t you?’ Xove 2002:578f.). It can also follow the verbal complement
(140).
(iii) In its emphatic use, si precedes the verb in Galician
and follows it in Portuguese:
(137) Alicia é unha rapaza que estudara Pancho
Alicia is a girl that had.studied Pancho
(134) a. Aníbal si sabe destes asuntos. (Glc.)
con ela. (Glc.)
Aníbal yes knows of.these matters
with her
(Álvarez and Xove 2002:200)
‘Alicia is a girl with whom Pancho had studied.’
b. Aníbal sabe sim desses assuntos (Pt.)
Aníbal knows yes of.these matters
(138) Teño eu unha vaca que non a cambio
‘Aníbal does know about those matters.’
have I a cow that not her=exchange.1SG
por nada. (Glc.)
23.4.14 Relative clauses for nothing
‘I have a cow that I do not exchange for anything’
Galician and European Portuguese are superficially identical
when introduced by que ‘that’ with a subject or direct object
function (135), but differ when a preposition is involved (139) Un rapaz de Sober, que é el baixiño e
(136). In this case, at least for some speakers, Galician a guy from Sober, that is he short and
tends to require the presence of the definite determiner a/ de cara redonda (Glc.)
o ‘the’ (Álvarez and Xove 2002:576),16 while European Por- of face round
tuguese tends to reject it (136). ‘A guy from Sober, who is short and has a round face’
(135) A casa que compraste / a casa que

(140) Unha rapaza que é de Muros ela (Glc.)
the house that you.bought the house that
a girl that is from Muros she
compraches (Pt./Glc.)
‘A girl who is from Muros’
you.bought
Brazilian Portuguese is the language that provides more

variants for relative clauses. Tarallo (1983) distinguishes
16 standard, resumptive, and PP-chopping (Pt. cortadora) rela-
Álvarez and Xove (2002) mention this fact but claim that the tendency
of substituting o(s) que/a(s) que lit. ‘the(PL) that’ for que with any preposition tive clauses. The latter is an innovation with respect to both
should be banished. Galician and European Portuguese. This variant differs from
443
the resumptive one by deleting both the preposition and the f. O corvo comeu foi o queijo.
pronoun: the crow ate it.was the cheese
‘It was the cheese that the crow ate.’
(141) O trem que eu cheguei nele (BrPt.)
the train that I arrived in.it
‘The train in which I arrived’ In Galician, only the sentences in which there is the
visible wh-operator o que ‘(the that’—(144a, c, d)– are gram-
Additionally, resumptive relative clauses are very frequent, matical. The requirement for the presence of the wh-phrase
with the resumptive pronoun in all possible functions, includ- can be seen also when the cleft phrase is prepositional.
ing in subject position, where, unlike Galician, it appears in
preverbal position. Moreover, it appears in its tonic form even (145) a. **? É nesta casa que vivo. (Glc.)
if it is in object or dative position (cf. §§23.3.2, 23.4.7).17 In (143) it.is in.this house that I.live
we see both a lexical pronoun in subject position of the relative b. É nesta casa na que / onde
clause and the same lexical pronoun, with the same reference, it.is in.this house.FSG in.the.FSG that / where
in object position of the embedded clause. vivo. (Glc.)
live.1SG
(142) O rapaz que eu vi ele / Ø na festa ‘It is in this house that I live.’
the guy that I saw him / Ø in.the party
já foi embora. (BrPt., Galves 1997)
already left (146) a. ** Eu traballo é nesta universidade. (Glc.)
‘The guy I saw in the party already left.’ I work it.is in.this university
b. **Onde eu traballo é nesta universidade. (Glc.)
(143) Você acredita que um dia teve uma mulher where I work it.is in.this university
you believe that one day had.3SG a woman ‘It is in this university that I work.’
que ela queria que a gente
that she wanted that the people
entrevistasse ela por telefone! (Tarallo 1983) (147) a. É ese libro o que estou lendo. (Glc.)
interviewed.3SG her by telephone it.is this book.MSG the.MSG that I.am reading
‘You believe that there was a woman that wanted to be ‘It is this book that I am reading.’
interviewed by phone!’ b. Son estes libros os que
they.are those books.MPL the.MPL that
23.4.15 Cleft sentences estou lendo. (Glc.)
I.am reading
Mateus et al. (2003:685) claim that in European Portuguese ‘These are the books that I am reading.’
the range of cleft constructions exemplified in (144) is
greater than in the other Romance languages:
Furthermore, the possibility of agreement in (147b)
shows that in Galician cleft sentences involve free relative
(144) a. Foi o queijo o que o corvo comeu.
constructions.
it.was the cheese the that the crow ate
The situation in Brazilian Portuguese is different (cf.
b. Foi o queijo que o corvo comeu. Braga et al. 2009:255f.). Only (144b, c, f) are natural, with
it.was the cheese that the crow ate the additional possibility, and possibly preference, for the
copula to remain in the present tense. Note that the wh-
c. O que o corvo comeu foi o queijo.
phrase is acceptable only in first position (144c). Moreover,
the that the crow ate it.was the cheese
Brazilian Portuguese displays two more possibilities, not
d. O queijo foi o que o corvo comeu. considered in (144):
the cheese it.was the that the crow ate
(148) a. O queijo foi / é que o corvo comeu.
e. O queijo é o que o corvo comeu.
the cheese it.was / it.is that the crow ate
the cheese it.is the that the crow ate
b. O queijo que o corvo comeu
17
Note that we find in relative clauses in Brazilian Portuguese exactly the cheese that the crow ate
the same distribution of null and lexical pronouns as in simple clauses. ‘It was the cheese that the crow ate.’
444
The description in Ribeiro and Cortes Júnior (2009) shows (153) Essas crianças são difíceis de dormir. (BrPt.)
that Brazilian Portuguese is very close to Afro-Brazilian these children are difficult.PL of sleep.INF
Portuguese with respect to cleft sentences. The only differ- ‘These children have trouble sleeping.’
ence is the presence in the latter of what the authors call a
double copula, as illustrated in (149), from Ribeiro and
Cortes Júnior (2009:222):
23.4.17 Noun phrases: definite
(149) É só o mestre é que manda. determiners and bare nouns
it.is only the master it.is that orders
‘It is only the master that gives orders.’
In Galician and European Portuguese determiners agree in
number and gender with the nouns they introduce: o(s)
23.4.16 Tough sentences amigo(s) the.M(PL) friend.M(PL)’, a(s) amiga(s) ‘the.F(SG) friend.
F(PL)’. Lack of agreement inside NPs is a hallmark of the
overseas dialects of Portuguese, as already observed by the
In Portuguese and Galician so-called ‘tough sentences’ (cf.
pioneering work of Adolfo Coelho (1967 [=1880; 1882; 1886]).
Eng. This problem is tough to solve) take the preposition de ‘of ’:
Lack of agreement in number is widespread, in vernacular
Brazilian Portuguese (Guy 1981; Scherre 1988). Lack of
(150) a. O João é difícil de convencer. (Pt.)
agreement in gender is restricted to Afro-Brazilian Portu-
b. Xoán é difícil de convencer. (Glc.)
guese (cf. Lucchesi 2009), and frequent also in African Por-
John is difficult of convince.INF
tuguese (Chavagne 2005; Inverno 2009). In vernacular
‘John is difficult to convince.’
Brazilian Portuguese and African Portuguese it is usual for
the plural to only be expressed on the determiner:
In (150), as in English and the other Romance languages,
the subject of the copula is understood as the object of the (154) É mãe de tres filho. (AfPt.)
infinitival clause. In Brazilian Portuguese, however, it can she.is mother of three child.SG
also be understood to be its subject.18 So, sentence (151) ‘She is a mother of three children.’
potentially has two readings (Martins and Nunes 2006).
(155) Aqueles prédio que estão ali (AfPt.)
(151) O João é difícil de elogiar.
those.PL building.SG that are there
the John is difficult of praise.INF
‘those buildings there’
a. ‘It is hard to praise João.’ (BrPt./EuPt.: √)
b. ‘João rarely praises someone.’ (BrPt.: √; EuPt.: *)
The use of definite determiners displays considerable
According to Martins and Nunes’ analysis, the (151b)
variation in the Galician-Portuguese area. European Portu-
reading is obtained by subject raising from (152):
guese and Galician present roughly the same use, but
important differences are found among European Portu-
(152) É difícil (de) o João elogiar. (Br.Pt.)
guese on one hand, and Brazilian Portuguese and African
it.is difficult (of) the John praise.INF
Portuguese on the other. For instance, in possessive NPs, if
‘João rarely praises (someone).’
the possessive precedes the noun, the use of the determiner
(except when the NP is a vocative or a predicate) is obliga-
This interpretation is favoured by the possibility of the
tory in European Portuguese and Galician (except for kin-
occurrence of the preposition de ‘of ’ in infinitival sen-
ship terms in the latter) but subject to considerable
tences such as (113) (cf. §23.4.9). It may also be linked to
variation in Brazilian Portuguese (Silva 1982; Chavagne
the possibility of topicalized non-arguments agreeing with
2005:251; Castro 2006; Floripi 2008).
the verb (cf. §23.4.5). As a consequence, Brazilian Portu-
There is also a tendency in Brazilian Portuguese and
guese ‘tough’ sentences can take an intransitive infinitival
African Portuguese not to use the definite determiner
verb.
after the quantifier todos ‘all’.19 Moreover, Brazilian
19
It should be noted that this use is also found in classical Portuguese
(cf. for instance, in Fernão de Oliveira (b. 1507): Todas coisas têm seu tempo
‘all.FPL things.FPL have their time’), as well in all medieval varieties of
18
This was initially noted by Galves (1987). Romance (cf. §30.3.3).
445
Portuguese permits plural bare nouns in subject position, article, with some exceptions (e.g. Portugal, Angola, Moçam-
with indefinite or generic interpretation, as well as singular bique). When the determiner is feminine, it can be dropped
bare nouns with generic interpretation while, in Galician after a preposition in European Portuguese (a França/em
and European Portuguese, plural and singular bare nouns França/Na França ‘(the) France/in France’),22 but not in Bra-
are allowed only in object position, including the postverbal zilian Portuguese.
subject position of unaccusatives, always with indefinite Finally, as a general property, only the definite deter-
interpretation, and generic NPs require a definite determiner is used to refer to body parts:
miner (Mateus et al. 2003:220f.).20
(160) a. Lavei as mãos. (Pt.)
(156) Gato gosta de leite. (BrPt.) I.washed the hands
cat.SG likes of milk ‘I washed my hands.’
‘Cats like milk.’
b. Cortei o cabelo. (Pt.)
I.cut the hair
(157) Comi cabrito ao almoço. (EuPt.) ‘I had my hair cut.’
I.ate kid at.the lunch
‘I ate kid for lunch.’
However, the construction in (160b) in which the agent is
different from the possessor presents dialectal differences.
(158) O homem é um animal racional. (EuPt.) For instance, (161) is acceptable only in Galician and Brazil-
the man is an animal rational ian Portuguese:23
‘Man is a rational animal.’
(161) O João operou o pé. (Br.Pt.)
the John operated the foot
In Afro-Brazilian Portuguese and in African Portuguese
‘John had his foot operated on.’
bare NPs may occur in also subject position with a definite
interpretation (Chavagne 2005; Baxter and Lopes 2009;
Inverno 2011). Still, there is evidence that the phenomenon is much more
productive in Brazilian Portuguese than in Galician. In
(159) Terrero era grande. effect, only in the former is the sentence possible without
court was large the presence of the object (O João operou ‘John was operated
‘The court was large.’ on’),24 which suggests that (161) in this language is similar
to sentences like o carro furou o pneu lit. ‘the car pierced the
tyre (= the car had a puncture)’, and is derived by the same
The use of the definite article to refer to persons in a
process, which allows for any internal phrase to raise to
familiar way is widespread, ranging from obligatory in
subject position, provided that either the verb has no
European Portuguese to dominant in Brazilian Portuguese,
lexical subject or its lexical subject is not projected (cf.
with the notable exception of the Brazilian dialect of
§23.4.5).
Bahia.21 Country names are generally preceded by a definite
22
This is a case of variation among speakers that, to our knowledge, has
20
For a discussion of the syntax and semantics of singular bare nouns in not been studied in a rigorous way.
23
Brazilian Portuguese, cf., among others, Munn and Schmitt (2001), Schmitt The equivalent of (161) in European Portuguese would be fui operada
and Munn (2003), and Oliveira and Rothstein (2011). ao pé ‘I was operated to.the foot’. We thank Ana Maria Martins, Clara Pinto,
21
Álvarez and Xove (2002:380) claim that the use of definite determiner and Fernanda Pratas for their help on this matter.
24
with anthroponyms varies from region to region, but that in any case it is In Galician, this sentence requires the presence of se: Xoán operouse
weakened in the new generations. onte ‘John was operated on yesterday’ (cf. §23.4.6).
446
CHAPTER 24
Creoles
24.1 Preliminary observation in Singapore (both places in Malaysia), Batavia and Tugu
Creole in Indonesia, and Macau in China.
In creolistics, ‘superstrate’ refers to the language or lan- The Spanish-based creoles developed from the beginning
guages of the groups (mostly European) socially dominant of the seventeenth century. Papiamentu is spoken on the
during the process of creolization, and ‘substrate’ to the islands of Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire (United Kingdom of
socially dominated groups (of Africans, Asians, Amerindians). the Netherlands), Palenquero in northern Colombia, and
After creolization, both super- and substrate languages may Ermita, Cavite, Ternate, and Zamboanga Chabacano are, or
have played (or still play) the role of an adstrate language were, spoken in the Philippines.
when a given creole language is in contact with one or more Note that the Spanish status of Papiamentu is controver-
of these languages. Of course, adstrate languages do not have sial. For some linguists, Papiamentu is Portuguese-based, for
to be super- or substrate languages, but may be any other others it is Afro-Portuguese-based, the Spanish element in
languages with which a creole language has been or is in Papiamentu being due to relexification in most cases. Simi-
contact. Map 24.1 shows Ibero-Romance-based and French- lar claims have been made for Palenquero.
based creoles across the world. The following geographical areas will be referred to: Carib-
bean (Curaçao and Colombia), Upper Guinea (Cape Verdean
Islands, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal), Gulf of Guinea (São Tomé and
Príncipe, Equatorial Guinea), south Asia (India, Sri Lanka), and
southeast Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Philippines).
24.2 Ibero-Romance-based creoles Many Ibero-Romance-based creoles are either extinct or
endangered. The most lively of these creoles are Papia-
24.2.1 Introduction mentu, Cape Verdean Creole, Guinea-Bissau Kriyol, and
Zamboanga Chabacano. Diu and Korlai, both spoken in
The first European nation to start colonial expansion was India, and also Papiá Kristang, spoken in Malacca (Malaysia),
Portugal, in the late fifteenth century, and this also signalled show less vitality.
the beginning of linguistic (and social) creolization in Africa According to sociohistorical criteria, Papiamentu and the
and Asia. The starting point of this expansion was the Upper Gulf of Guinea Creoles (henceforth GGC) Santome, Princi-
Guinea region (around 1460), comprising the Cape Verde pense, and Fa d’Ambô are plantation creoles; the Upper
islands, Guinea-Bissau, and the Casamance province of Sene- Guinea creoles (henceforth UGC), the south Asian creoles
gal, where the following creole languages are spoken: Cape (henceforth SAC), and the southeast Asian creoles (hence-
Verdean Creole, Guinea-Bissau Kriyol, and Casamancese forth SEAC) are fort creoles; Angolar and Palenquero are
Creole. The next region to be occupied by the Portuguese Maroon creoles (i.e. creole languages that were spoken by
was the Gulf of Guinea region (the islands of São Tomé, Africans who escaped from slavery and rebuilt their own
Príncipe, and Annobón, around 1470), where Santome, An- societies in the forest).
golar, Principense, and Fa d’Ambô are spoken.
From 1511 onwards, many Indo-Portuguese creole varieties
emerged in South Asia (India and Sri Lanka). There are (or
were) creole varieties spoken in Diu, Daman, Mumbai, and
24.2.2 Phonology
Korlai in northern India; Mangalore, Kannur (Cannanore),
Mahé, Kochi (Cochim), Negapattinam in southern India; and The most widespread vowel systems among Spanish-based
finally, in Colombo, Batticaloa, and Trincomalee in Sri Lanka. creoles consist of five (oral) vowels with three degrees of
The last region where Portuguese-based creoles developed height (i, e, a, o, u), as in Palenquero and the Philippine
is Southeast Asia: Papiá Kristang in Malacca and Singapore creoles, and systems of seven (oral) vowels with four
This chapter © Annegret Bollée and Philippe Maurer 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 447
Louisiana creole
Haitian creole
St. Barthélémy
Cape Verdean creole
Papiamentu Casamancese creole
Guinea-Bissau Kriyol
Palenquero
Guyanais
Ibero-Romance-based creole
Endangered Ibero-Romance-based creole
Karipuna creole
Extinct Ibero-Romance-based creole
French-based creole
Guadeloupe
Marie-Galante
Les Saintes Dominica
Martinique Principense
St. Lucia
Santome
Angolar
Grenada
Fa d’Ambô
Trinidad
Map 24.1 Ibero-Romance-based and French-based creoles
448
CREOLES
Macau
Diu
Daman
Mumbay
Korlai
Ermita Chabacano
Mangalore
Cannanore Cavite Chabacano
Mahé Negapattinam Ternate Chabacano
Cochim Trincomalee
Batticaloa
Colombo Zamboanga Chabacano
Singapore
Papiá Kristang
Seychelles creole Tugu creole

Batavia creole
Rodrigues creole
Mauritian creole
Reunion creole
Tayo
449
degrees of height (i, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, o, u) are found in most 4. In the Philippine creoles, f tends to become p, as in
Portuguese-based creoles and in Papiamentu. CvChb. plór ‘flower’ < Sp. flor, or príju ‘cold’ < Sp. frío.
Phonemic nasal vowels exist in some Portuguese-based
creoles, especially among UGC, GGC, and SAC; the nasal Tone is a topic that needs thorough investigation. It
vowels are absent from the SEAC. An example of an oppos- seems that full tone systems only exist in the GGC; Papia-
ition between oral and nasal vowels is Prp. pɛsa ‘to lend’ < Pt. mentu has a reduced tone system which is combined with
prestar vs pɛ͂sa ‘to think’ < Pt. pensar. stress.
In some creoles nasalization is an effect of a following The GGC have a two-tone system with a high and a low
nasal consonant or glide, as in Pap. mainta [maˈĩ(n)ta] tone (which could also be interpreted as a neutral tone). In
‘morning’ (< Sp. mañanita ‘early morning’). The variant Principense, disyllabic nouns show four different tone me-
maĩta shows that the nasal consonant may be completely lodies, according to the context: mínú ‘child, girl’, pókò ‘pig’,
absorbed by the nasalized vowel. kàsó ‘dog’, and àrè ‘king’. These four melodies occur in a
Schwa also exists in many creoles (e.g. Cape Verdean frame which consists of the TAM particle ka ‘future, habit-
Creole, Papiá Kristang, Batavia Creole, Papiamentu), ual’ and a disyllabic verb with two low (or neutral) tones.
although in some cases not as a phoneme (see also There are not many minimal pairs, probably because most
§24.3.2); in Papiamentu, for instance, it occurs in words are derived from Portuguese, which is not tonal.
unstressed final syllables after an onset consonant and Some examples of minimal pairs are ótó ‘other’ vs òtò
before l or r, as in apel [ˈapǝl] ‘apple’ or dòkter [ˈdɔktǝr] ‘neck’, máká ‘hammock’ vs mákà ‘mark’, kúmí ‘top’ vs kùmí
‘doctor’. In less European-influenced varieties of Papia- ‘road’. Angolar has roughly the same tone system, and in
mentu, these words are realized as apu and dòktu, without Santome, the four tone melodies of disyllabic nouns occur in
schwa and final consonant. a frame where the disyllabic verb with two low tones is
Consonants which do not exist in Portuguese and Span- zero-marked (i.e. where zero has the function of referring to
ish and which are thus due to substrate influence are, for perfective aspect).
example, the coarticulated labiovelars gb and kp, which Papiamentu’s reduced tone system also consists of a
only occur in Principense (ukperi ‘basket’ < Etsako (Nigeria) high and a low tone, but only two tone melodies occur:
úkphàlì, gbé ‘to crush’ < Edo (Nigeria) gbé ‘to beat’) and the high–low and low–high. It is mostly used to distinguish
interdentals ð and θ, which occur exclusively in some syntactic categories: most disyllabic verbs have a low–high
varieties of Angolar (dhakama [ðakama] ‘to tremble’ < Kim- tone melody, and most disyllabic nouns have a high–low tone
bundu (Angola) zakama; potho [pɔθɔ] ‘town’ < Pt. povoação). melody, as 'pàrá ‘to stop’ vs 'párà ‘bird’ (vs pà'rá ‘stopped’, with
These non-Iberian phonemes occur only among Atlantic stress shift). Counterexamples are for instance fángù ‘to
creoles. catch’ (< Dch. vangen) and mùchá ‘child’ (< Sp. muchacho ‘boy’
There are some (more or less) regular sound changes or muchacha ‘girl’).
which are due to sub- or adstrate influence.
1. Palatalization of s and z before i occurs in Cape Ver-

dean creole and Papiamentu (Cpv. xintxi ‘to feel’ < Pt. 24.2.3 Morphology
sentir, Pap. kushina ‘kitchen’ < Sp. cocina). In the GGC,
this process is accompanied by a depalatalization of Inflectional morphology is very rare in the Atlantic area and
Pt. ʃ and ʒ before the other vowels (Stm. suba and Prp. is completely absent from southeast Asia, but it is quite
usuva ‘rain’ < Pt. chuva; Stm. and Prp. zuda ‘to help’ < Pt. frequent in south Asia, especially in the North Indian
ajudar). This results in a complementary distribution creoles.
of ʃ/ʒ before i and s/z before the other vowels. Note In the Atlantic, nominal inflectional morphology is rep-
that in the Angolar varieties which possess the inter- resented by the plural suffix -s/-es in the UGC.
dentals, this opposition is realized as s/z before i and In south Asia, there is nominal inflection (plural -s) and
Ɵ/ð before the other vowels (sia ‘full’ < Pt. cheia (F), also verbal inflection. Verbs are inflected for tense and
thêlêvêdha ‘beer’ < Pt. cerveja). aspect, but not for person. In Mumbai, for instance, perfect-
2. Pre-nasalization of initial consonants is frequent in ive past was built in the following way: verbs ending in -á
Palenquero (ngusano ‘worm’ < Sp. gusano) and in GGC have -ou/ô, verbs ending in -é have -eu, and verbs ending in
(Stm., Prp., Ang. nda ‘to walk’ < Pt. andar). -í have -iu. The fact that the verb ending governs the choice
3. In Batavia and Tugu Creole, Pt. z becomes ʤ, as in of the suffix is a matter of ‘conjugational class’ and also
kadju ‘house’ < Pt. casa, or kamidja ‘shirt’ < Pt. camisa, as occurs in other Indo-Portuguese varieties like Diu and Kor-
in Portuguese loanwords in Malay and Javanese. lai (Cardoso 2009; Luís 2011).
450
CREOLES
Perfective aspect may be marked twice: by the preverbal have no plural marker, with the exception of using redupli-
particle ja or ji (< Pt. já ‘already’) and by the aforementioned cation of the noun in some very rare cases (Clements
suffixes (examples 1a and 1c): 1996:28).
1. One strategy, observed in the UGC as well as in SAC,
(1) a. Pai, eu jipecc-ou contra céo
corresponds to that found in the European super-
father I PFV sin-PFV against heaven
strate, namely by affixing -s (after vowel) or -is
(Mmb., Dalgado 1998a:121)
(after consonant) to the noun, as in Cpv. baka ‘cow’
‘Father, I committed a sin against heaven’
vs baka-s ‘cows’, or mudjer ‘woman’ vs mudjer-is
b. e alli despend-eu tud su dinheir ‘women’.
and there spend-PFV all his money 2. One substrate-derived strategy, which is found in Pa-
(Mmb., Dalgado 1998a:121) piamentu (Caribbean) and in the GGC, is to use the
‘and there he spent all his money’ third person plural pronoun (see also §24.3.4.1). In
Papiamentu, it follows the noun, as in kas ‘house’ vs
c. Então êll ji ergu-iu e já
kas-nan ‘houses’, and in the GGC it precedes the noun,
then he PFV stand.up-PFV and PFV
as in nineteenth-century Principense kaxi ‘house’ vs
foi pert do su pai.
ina kaxi sê ‘these houses’. This strategy is common in
go.PFV near of his father
Atlantic creoles and in some west African languages,
(Mmb., Dalgado 1998a:122)
e.g. Ewe (Ghana and Togo) or Yoruba (Nigeria), but,
‘Then he stood up and went to his father’s place.’
in relation to the GGC, it does not occur in the
major African substrate language family: the
Some verbs have suppletive forms, such as falá ‘to say’ vs
Edoid languages (Nigeria). However, the third person
diss ‘said’, trazê ‘to bring’ vs trouxe ‘brought’, or vai ‘to go’ vs
plural pronoun in the GGC is of Edoid origin: Edo iɽ͂ã
foi ‘went’ (as in example 1c).
‘they’, which became ine in Santome, ina in early Prin-
Fused forms are very rare; in Principense, there are
cipense, or nan in Annobón, and has probably been
examples of fusion of noun and demonstrative as in dyêxi <
brought to Curaçao from the Gulf of Guinea.
dya ixi ‘that day’, and also of verb with an object pronoun as
3. Another substrate-derived strategy is reduplication,
in me < mara/maa + e or li ‘bind her/him/it’, or ten < tama/tan
which is found in SEAC, and which is due to Malay
+ e or li ‘take her/him/it’.
influence. The reduplication may be total or partial. An
Derivational morphology is more widespread (see also
example of a partial reduplication is PKr. kren-krensa
§24.3.3 below); deverbal derivation is especially frequent.
‘children’ (< Pt. criança ‘child’).
Past participles are found in almost all Ibero-Romance-based
4. Still another substrate-derived strategy is to use
creoles, even in some SEAC: Cpv. fla-du ‘spoken’, Csm. papiya-du
substrate material: in Palenquero (Colombia) with
‘spoken’, Ang. thaga-ru ‘salted’, Diu fika-d ‘become’, or Tug.
the Bantu-prefix ma (hende ‘person’ vs ma hende
iskrebe-du ‘written’. In most languages, the past participle is
‘people’) and in the Philippine creoles with manga/
only used attributively or predicatively, but in some SAC
mañga (also written mga) of Philippine origin (CvChb.
varieties, the participle may also be used in order to form
el visinu ‘the neighbour’ vs el mañga visinu ‘the
periphrastic tenses (e.g. Krl. ti anda-d [PST go-PTCP] ‘had gone’).
neighbours’).
Other frequent derivational morphemes are action nouns
5. A further strategy is to draw on grammaticalized
and agentives, derived from Pt./Sp. -mento, respectively
superstrate lexical material, as in Diu, where tud < Pt.
from -dor/-dora (or the older form -dera for feminine
tudo ‘everything’ is used: mĩ tud amig ‘POSS.1SG PL friend
nouns): Pap. papia-mentu (< papia ‘to speak’) ‘conversation,
(= my friends)’.
Papiamentu’, Cpv. piska-dor ‘fisher’ (< piska ‘to fish’), Btv.
bende-dera ‘saleswoman’ (< bende ‘to sell’). Note that in many creoles the use of the plural marker is
restricted: in Papiamentu, it may not co-occur with a
quantifier, unless the noun phrase is overtly definite: tres
24.2.4 Morphosyntax kas ‘three houses’ vs **tres kasnan vs e tres kasnan ‘the three
houses’. This is the most widespread use. In Principense,
24.2.4.1 Noun phrase the nominal plural marker ine may be used with inanimate
nouns only if the noun phrase is overtly definite: ine dôsu
24.2.4.1.1 Plural of the noun
laanza sê ‘PL two orange DEM (= these two oranges)’ vs **ine
There are five strategies for the formation of the (additive) dôsu laanza. This restriction does not hold for human
plural of the noun (or noun phrase); Korlai is reported to nouns.
451
24.2.4.1.2 Determiners Adnominal demonstratives are found in prenominal as

well as in postnominal position. Prenominal demonstratives
Almost all Ibero-Romance-based creoles lack a dedicated
are found for instance in Palenquero (ese mujé ‘this woman’),
definite article. Some creoles, however, may use one of the
in Capeverdean (kes povu ‘these people’), in Krl. (akə sirwis
adnominal demonstratives with functions of a definite art-
‘that work’), and in Papiá Kristang (iste prau ‘this boat’).
icle (e.g. generic reference or associative function). In the
Postnominal demonstratives are found in the GGC, as in
following Tugu examples, (2a) illustrates the generic func-
Stm. inen poto se ‘PL door DEM (= these doors)’. Tugu allows
tion of the distal demonstrative aka ‘that’, and (2b) its
both positions (ake albër neli ‘that rice plant vs miang iste
associative function.
‘this morning’), and Papiamentu has discontinuous demon-
strative constructions, where the obligatory definite article
(2) a. Fruta patola margodju aka marga.
(which is originally a demonstrative, as shown above) pre-
fruit cucumber bitter that bitter
cedes the noun and where a spatial adverb follows it (e hende
(Tug., Maurer 2011:26)
akí ‘the person here (= this person)’).
‘The fruit of the bitter cucumber is bitter.’
Most Portuguese-based creoles have two demonstratives
b. Nosotër kontenti fay orta, tara klapa. (e.g. UGC, Fa d’Ambô, SAC, SEAC, and Palenquero); the GGC
we happy make garden plant coconut (except for Fa d’Ambô) have three demonstratives, such
Mas dianti nos bota aka somenti. that one is used as an out-of-sight demonstrative, as with
more front we put that seed Prp. sê ‘this’, xila ‘that’, and xi ‘out-of-sight’. The Spanish-
‘We like to cultivate a garden, to plant coconut based creoles have three demonstratives (except for Palen-
palms. First we plant the seeds.’ quero); however, they only refer to the distance from the
speaker/hearer and are not bound to the individual speech
In example (2b), the noun somenti ‘seeds’ has not been act participants as is the case in Spanish (este/esta ‘near to
introduced into discourse before. The demonstrative is used the speaker’, ese/esa ‘near to the hearer’, aquel/aquella ‘away
because of the associative link with orta ‘garden’ and klapa from speaker and hearer’; for further discussion, see
‘coconut’. §54.1.3). An example is Cavite Chabacano, which has este
The Ibero-Romance-based creoles that possess a dedicated ‘near to the speaker/hearer’, ese ‘at some distance from the
definite article are the Philippine creoles, Papiamentu, and speaker/hearer’, and aquel ‘far away from the speaker/
some varieties of nineteenth-century SAC. In the Philippine hearer’.
creoles, the definite article corresponds to the Spanish mas-
24.2.4.1.3 Personal pronouns
culine singular article el: CvChb. el doctor ‘the doctor’. In
Papiamentu, the definite article is derived from an older
24.2.4.1.3.1 SUBJECT PRONOUNS
demonstrative es (< Pt. este/esse or Sp. este/ese), which in
modern Papiamentu still occurs in the pronominal demon- In the Atlantic area, the bound first person singular pro-
stratives (e.g. esaki ‘this’, etymologically ‘this-here’, see the noun in the UGC and the GGC is realized as n, with allo-
adnominal demonstrative e . . . aki below, where e corres- morphs m or ŋ according to the onset consonant of the
ponds to the definite article, cf. e hòmber ‘the man’). However, following word; in Papiamentu, it is realized as mi. These
this article does not fulfil all the functions of a definite article; forms could go back either to the Portuguese pronoun mim
an example is the generic function, which is fulfilled by a bare ‘me’, used after prepositions, or, in the case of Papiamentu,
noun phrase (in contrast to the Tugu demonstrative in to the corresponding Spanish mí ‘me’. The only exception to
example 2a above) (see also §24.3.4.2): this is Palenquero, which has i/yo, derived from Sp. yo ‘I’.
The Portuguese-based Asian creoles have a form which
(3) Kachó tin kuater pia. (Pap.) derives from Pt. eu ‘I’: Di. eu, Krl. yo, PKr. eu, Tug. iyo. The
dog have four foot Philippine creoles have yo, as in Spanish.
‘Dogs have four paws.’ In the light of this areal distribution (Atlantic vs Asia),
the question arises why the Atlantic creoles (with the
An example of nineteenth-century Indo-Portuguese is exception of Palenquero) should all have a nasal conson-
Colombo, which uses the invariable definite article o (< Pt. ant in their first person singular form. The answer could
o ‘the.MSG’): o mulher ‘the woman’, o mundo ‘the world’ be that the first person singular pronoun of many west
(Dalgado 1998b:85, 106). However, since no such article African languages starts with a nasal consonant, for
exists in the modern varieties of Indo-Portuguese creoles instance Ewe (Ghana) mɛ, Fon (Benin) n, Yoruba (Nigeria)
it is very probable that this article belonged to the variety m/ng/mo, Igbo (Nigeria) m/mú, Kimbundu (Angola) ng/eme,
spoken and written by Catholic priests. Kikongo (Angola) n/m/mono.
452
CREOLES
The second person singular subject pronoun is almost (4) a. Fetha e [...] a ka zi kani pôkô.
exclusively derived from Pt. vós or OSp. vos ‘you.NOM(PL)’. feast this GNR HAB do meat pig
Exceptions are Prp. txi (< Pt. ti ‘you.OBL.SG’) and ZmChb. tu (Ang., Maurer 1995:61)
(< Sp. tú ‘you.NOM.SG’): Cpv., GBk. bu, Stm., Ang., Fda. bô, Mmb. ‘At this feast, one prepares pork.’
os, Btc. voos, CvChb. vo, Plq. bo.
b. A tha ku ê kikiê bêndê?
The third person singular subject pronoun is derived
GNR COP him fish sell
with
from Pt. ele or Sp. él ‘he.NOM’ in all Iberian-based creoles:
(Ang., Maurer 1995:62)
GBk. i, Prp. ê, Dam. il/ɛl. Gender distinctions are found only
‘Do you have fish to sell?’
in some Indo-Portuguese varieties: Diu el (M) vs ɛl (F), Man-
galore el vs ella, Clb. elle vs ella, Btc. eli vs ɛla. c. A ka be ne Dizibôa.
Plural pronouns offer a less homogeneous picture. On the GNR HABgo them Lisbon
one hand, some creoles, especially Asian creoles and Papia- (Ang., Maurer 1995:61)
mentu, combine the superstrate pronouns with Pt. outro or ‘They used to go to Lisbon.’
Sp. otro ‘other’ (which is also found in the Sp. forms nosotros
‘1PL’ and vosotros ‘2PL’; see also §24.3.4.4); on the other, some
creoles have retained substrate forms for one or more In example (4c), the verb be is reflexive, matching Pt. ir-se
plural pronouns. The following creoles have forms based ‘to go, to leave’, and the reflexive pronoun of the 3PL ne (a
on outro/otro ‘other’: Dam. ilot ‘3PL’; Mmb. usot ‘2PL’, elot/ilot short form of ane/ene) is used in order to refer anaphorically
‘3PL’; Krl. udzo ‘2PL’, elo ‘3PL’; Kch. ellotro ‘3PL’; Clb. nossotros to the singular pronoun a.
‘1PL’, vossotros ‘2PL’, ellotros ‘3PL’; PKr. bolotu ‘2PL’, olotu ‘3PL’;
24.2.4.1.3.2 OBJECT PRONOUNS
Macau vosotro ‘2PL’, ilotro ‘3PL’; Btv. nosotër ‘1PL’, bosotër ‘2PL’,
ilotër ‘3PL’, CvChb. nisos ‘1PL’, vusos ‘2PL’, ilos ‘3PL’; EmChb. nisos In some languages, the object pronouns do not differ from
‘1PL’, TnChb. motro ‘1PL’, lotro; Pap. boso [ˈbòsó] ‘2PL’. In some the subject forms, as for example in Papiamentu, where mi,
creoles, the forms with outro/otro exist alongside forms that ‘1SG’, bo ‘2SG’, e ‘3SG’, nos ‘1PL’, boso ‘2PL’, and nan ‘3PL’ may be
lack outro/otro, e.g. Dam. ez/ilot, Clb. nos/nossotros and vos/ used for both subject and object. But bo and e as object
vossotros, or Btv. nos/nosotër. pronouns have an allomorph: bu and ele.
Substrate forms occur in the GGC: Stm. inen ‘3PL’ and the In some languages there are forms which differ from the
derived form inansê ‘2PL’; Ang. ane/ene ‘3PL’, thê ‘2PL’; Prp. owo subject pronouns, as for instance GBK: n/n ‘1SG’, bu/u ‘2SG’, i/l
‘2PL’, ina (older form)/ine (modern form) ‘3PL’; Fda. namsêdji ‘3SG’, no/nu ‘1PL’, bo/bos ‘2PL’, e/elis ‘3PL’.
‘2PL’, ineyn ‘3PL’. The forms ina/ine/inen/nan derive from an In most Asian creoles, the pronoun is marked by an
Edo (Nigeria) form iɽ ã͂ (as noted above) and owo corresponds adposition which derives from Pt. para ‘for’ or com
to Edo ùwà. Ane/ene could be a form derived from ine(n), but ‘with’ (or from Sp. con ‘with’ in the case of Philippine
Kimbundu (Angola) ene is more probable, since Angolar is creoles) and here, too, there are cases where object
heavily influenced by Kimbundu and other Western Bantu pronouns do not correspond to the subject pronouns,
languages. especially in SAC. An example is Ngp. 1SG ê/eu ‘I’ vs par
In the Caribbean, we find nan ‘3PL’ in Papiamentu (which mi(m) ‘me’, as opposed to SEAC like Papiá Kristang,
is a cognate of the corresponding GGC forms) and ané in where the object pronoun has the same form as the
Palenquero, which is the same as one of the Angolar forms, subject pronoun: yo ‘I’ vs ku yo ‘me’. Diu has a alongside
but which might have been directly borrowed from Bantu pǝ (a mĩ/pǝ mĩ ‘me’), and one of the varieties of Mumbai
and not necessarily via one of the GGC. Palenquero has has exclusively a. In Batticaloa, the adposition takes the
furthermore the second person plural enú (< Kimbundu form of a postposition: elis-pǝ ‘them’. Note that these
enu), which competes with utere (< Sp. ustedes ‘you’). adpositions are used with nouns as well as pronouns
In Asia, only Zamboanga Chabacano has substrate forms: (cf. example 25).
kitá ‘1PL inclusive’, kamí ‘1PL exclusive’, kamó ‘2PL’, silá In cases where the (unmarked) direct object pronoun and
‘3PL’(< Hiligaynon (absolutive forms) kita, kami, kamo, sila). in cases where the object pronoun is marked by an adposi-
Zamboanga Chabacano is the only SEAC to have retained tion, it is possible to speak of case marking (nominative vs
the inclusive/exclusive distinction of Malay or the Philippine oblique, since the object pronouns are used for direct as well
languages. as for indirect objects).
The GGC all possess a generic subject pronoun a which In most Asian creoles having an overt object marker,
has been retained from Edo. Besides its generic use (4a), it there is differential object marking (cf. §56.3.2.4): human
may also occur as a honorific pronoun (4b), or as a synonym pronouns (and nouns) tend to be marked, whereas animates
of e.g. ane ‘3PL’ (4c): and inanimates tend to be unmarked.
453
24.2.4.2 Verb phrase auxiliary. The GGC lack such a marker; instead, they have
24.2.4.2.1 Tense, aspect, and mood the marker ka of unknown origin. The marker ta may mark
a verb only for progressive functions as in Korlai or Papiá
At the semantic level, all Ibero-Romance-based creoles Kristang; it may also refer to a progressive and a habitual
make a distinction between imperfective and perfective situation and mark present reference for a subset of stative
aspect, but they differ in three ways: some creoles mark verbs as in Diu, or (almost) correspond to a present tense
present/past tense distinctions, some do not (except for marker as in Papiamentu.
future), and some have additional tense categories. In the Atlantic area, the imperfective past marker is
The creoles which have only aspectual distinctions are derived from a past form of the copula estar ‘be’: estava
the southeast Asian languages (Papiá Krisgang, Macau, Bata- (Pt.) or estaba (Sp.), as in Pap. tabata or in GGC tava. In
via Creole, and the Philippine creoles). Papiá Kristang, for Palenquero and UGC, a marker ba/bang is used, which is
example, has a future marker lo/logu, an imperfective a suffix in the Cape Verdean varieties; note that in
marker ta, and a perfective marker dja: Palenquero object markers may intervene between the
verb and ba; in Casamancese Creole, bang occurs
(5) a. Amiáng otu dia, eli logu bai mar. between the first and the second object in double object
tomorrow other day 3SG FUT go sea constructions:
(PKr., Baxter 1988:126)
‘The day after tomorrow, he will go fishing.’ (6) Entonse el ase komplá-mi-ba mucho planda.
b. Eli ta sintí boskeré ngganá ku eli. then she HAB buy-me-PST many banana
she IPFV feel youwant trick OBJ she (Plq., Patiño Rosselli 1983:125)
(PKr., Baxter 1988:129) ‘Then she used to buy me a lot of bananas.’
‘She is/was thinking you want/wanted to trick her.’
(7) N Ø da Pidru bang kobur.
c. Eli ja bai mar onti anoti. I PFV give Peter PST money
he PFV go sea yesterday night (Csm., Biagui and Quint 2013:45)
(PKr., Baxter 1988:119) ‘I had given Peter some money.’
‘He went fishing last night.’
It is not clear whether ba/bang is derived from the Por-
Atlantic creoles distinguish aspect as well as tense. An tuguese or Spanish imperfect (‑va/‑ba) or from some sub-
example is Papiamentu, which uses lo as a future marker, ta strate language (Mandinka baŋ, Jola Fogny ban, Manjaku ba,
as an imperfective present marker, tabata as a past imper- all meaning ‘finish’; see Biagui and Quint 2013:45).
fective marker, and a as a perfective marker. However, A widespread future marker is derived from the Portu-
there is a difference between Papiamentu and Cape Verdean guese adverb logo ‘right away’; it occurs in Asian creoles and
creole and the GGC. The marker ta in Cape Verdean Creole Papiamentu, but not in Afro-Portuguese, where the future
and the marker ka in the GGC conflate future, present marker is ta (UGC) or ka (GGC), as noted above. The follow-
habitual, and modifies a subset of stative verbs. This ing SAC have logo (realized as logu, lo, or lɛ): Korlai, Manga-
means that these languages do not possess a dedicated lore, Kannur, Mahé, Kochi, Negapattinam, Colombo, and
future marker. Furthermore, in the UGC and the GGC per- Batticaloa. In the SEAC, it occurs in Papiá Kristang, Singa-
fective aspect is not overtly marked, i.e. the bare verb is pore, Macau, Batavia Creole, and Tugu Creole.
used to refer to a past perfective situation. Note that the Other Asian creoles have a future marker derived from
bare verb is also used in many creoles for present reference the modal auxiliary haver de (Pt.)/haber de (Sp.) ‘have to’, ha
in (a subclass) of stative verbs. de ‘has to’: ad in Diu, Mumbai, Mangalore (which has both lo
Additional TAM markers are found in SAC, for instance a and ad), di/de in Cavite, Ermita, and Ternate Chabacano, ay
future-in-the-past/counterfactual marker in Mumbai (avi, in Zamboanga Chabacano.
as opposed to the future marker a/ad) (Dalgado 1998a:114), Except for the Philippine creoles, the future marker,
a pluperfect marker in Korlai, which is a compound tense (ti whether derived from logo or ha de, marks affirmative
anda-d ‘PST go-PTCP (= had gone)’, Clements1996:32), or a future; negated future derives from não ha de ‘hasn’t to’:
subjunctive marker -s in Daman (kanta-s ‘sing’, Clements num ad in nineteenth-century Daman Creole, nad in
and Koontz-Garboden 2002:221). twentieth-century Daman Creole, nada in Mangalore,
Etymologically, almost all Ibero-Romance-based creoles Mahé, and Kochi, nada/nade in Colombo, naa in Batticaloa,
have a TAM marker ta, which is derived from the Portu- nadi in Papiá Kristang and Macau, nada in Batavia and Tugu
guese or Spanish copula estar ‘be’ used as a progressive Creole. A different form is Korlai nupa(d).
454
CREOLES
A widely discussed matter in creole studies is the possi- only one copula is used in Stm. (sa/tava),1 Pap. (ta/tabata) in
bility of combining the future marker (sometimes called the Atlantic; Krl. (tɛ/ti), Ngp. (tem), Clb. (tem/tinha) in South
‘irrealis marker’), the past tense marker, and the imperfect- Asia, and Btv. (teng or ting) in southeast Asia. The following
ive aspect marker. These combinations occur most fre- creoles use two copulas (either two formally distinguished
quently in progressive past (or present) counterfactual copulas, or one zero copula and one formally marked):
contexts (‘s/he would have been working’). According to Cape Verdean creole in the Atlantic; Daman, Diu, Mumbai,
Bickerton (1981:58), the order of the three markers should Kochi in south Asia; and Papiá Kristang, Cavite and Ermita
be tense-mood-aspect in creole languages. However, in Chabacano in southeast Asia. In Cape Verdean Creole, e (< Pt.
many creoles these markers are not adjacent, either (i) é ‘s/he is’) is used with predicative nouns and adjectives to
because one is an affix (e.g. -ba in Cpv.), whereas the others refer to permanent situations and sta to temporary situ-
precede the verb, (ii) because one lies outside the verbal ations (Baptista 2002:102); with locatives only sta is used.
complex, e.g. Pap. lo, which precedes the singular subject In twentieth-century Daman, te/ting is used both with
pronouns, or (iii) because a language lacks one of the three adjectives (for temporary situations) and locatives, and
markers, as in SEAC which lack a past tense marker. Fur- e/er is used with nouns and with adjectives for permanent
thermore, an ordering other than tense-mood-aspect is situations (Clements and Koontz-Garboden 2002:227f.). Diu
attested in Principense, which has mood-tense-aspect: and Mumbai behaves in a similar way. In Papiá Kristang,
predicative nouns and adjectives are zero-marked; with
(8) Ontxi [ . . . ] xi no ka tava sa xivi, no locatives, the copula teng is used.
yesterday if we MOOD PST PROG work we In the Philippine creoles, predicative nouns and adjec-
ka tava vê txi fa. tives are zero-marked for present reference, but with loca-
MOOD PST see you NEG tives, three copulas are distinguished, e.g. in ZmChb. taki ‘is
(Prp., Maurer 2009:90) here’, talyi ‘is there’, and talla ‘is yonder’ (derived from Sp.
‘Yesterday [ . . . ] if we had been working, we wouldn’t está ‘is’ and aquí ‘here’, allí ‘there’, and allá ‘yonder’), and
have seen you.’ only one negated copula nway ‘is not here/there/yonder’
(< Sp. no hay ‘there isn’t’). Additionally, the copula estaba is
The difference in categorial complexity (or in the amount used for past reference of predicative nouns and adjectives:
of overtly expressed categories) between the tense-aspect-
mood systems of the Ibero-Romance-based creoles may be (9) Estaba le mestra. (ZmChb., Steinkrüger 2013:159)
explained by the influence of their substrate or adstrate COP.PST she teacher
languages. A relatively simple system is found in SEAC, since ‘She was a teacher.’
these languages lack an imperfective past tense marker, hav-
ing thus a purely aspectual system. This parallels the aspect Formally, Palenquero possesses four copulas: e/era, ta,
system of, for example, Malay. More complex systems are jue, and senda. With predicative nouns and adjectives, e is
found among Atlantic creoles, which reflects the fact that used for permanent states and ta for temporary states; ta
many African languages also possess more formally marked is also used with locatives. The form senda is only found with
tense-aspect-mood categories than Malay. The most complex predicative nouns and adjectives referring to permanent
TAM systems are found among the SAC, an observation which states and thus is a synonym of e/era. Jue/jueba (< Sp. fue
may be explained by the fact that both superstrate and sub- ‘was.3SG’) is used as a copula for nouns and thus is a partial
strate languages are very complex in this domain. synonym of e/era and senda (< Sp. sentar ‘to seat’, estar
sentado ‘to sit’).
24.2.4.2.2 Copula
A special case is Guinea Bissau Kriyol, which does not
With regard to copulas, the Ibero-Romance-based creoles do possess predicative adjectives. In this language, they are
not show a uniform picture (see also §24.3.5.2). Formally, some treated like stative verbs. With predicative nouns, Guinea
copulas are derived from a finite form (third person singular Bissau Kriyol uses i (which corresponds to a grammaticalized
present indicative or imperfect indicative) of the Portuguese 3SG pronoun, via topicalized subjects) or sedu. The copula used
or Spanish verbs ser (generally permanent situations) and for locatives is sta.
estar (generally temporary situations and locatives). Others In several creoles, there is free variation between pres-
are derived from a finite form (third person singular present ence and absence of a copula, whether restricted to one or
or imperfect indicative) of the Portuguese verb ter ‘to have’.
The derivation from ter is restricted to SAC and SEAC. 1
The copula sa in the GGC is derived from Portuguese está ‘s/he is’; st is
Creole languages also differ regarding the number of regularly reduced to s in these creoles, as can be seen in Pt. festa ‘feast’ >
copulas used. For predicative adjectives, nouns, and locatives Stm. fesa.
455
to more functions. In Kochi, for instance, e and zero are used will be considered here. ‘Give’ serials are less common than
for predicative nouns and adjectives, whereas locatives directional serials; they occur in GGC and in some SEAC. In
obligatorily take tem, and in Tugu Creole, the copula teng all these languages, the verb for ‘give’ is also used as a main
may be absent in all syntactic environments. verb.
24.2.4.2.3 Serial verbs
(14) No ka tega kikiê ra pato.
Serial verbs are not uncommon in Ibero-Romance-based we hab hand.over fish give boss
creoles (see also §24.3.5.3). The most serializing languages (Ang., Maurer 1995:181)
are the GGC, but serial verbs are also found in Papia- ‘We used to hand over fish to the boss.’ or: ‘We used to
mentu and SEAC. They are absent from Cape Verdean hand over fish (to somebody else) for the boss.’
Creole, the SAC, the Philippine creoles, and Palenquero.
The most widespread serial verbs are directional serial (15) Yo ya tizé floris
isti da ku eli.
verbs, ‘take’ serial verbs, and ‘give’ serial verbs. In what I PFV flower give OBJ he
bring this
follows, directional and ‘give’ serial verbs will be (PKr., Baxter 1988:212)
discussed. ‘I brought this flower for her.’
24.2.4.2.3.1 DIRECTIONAL SERIAL VERBS
(16) Vai liva levá caldo dá Papá!
Directional serial verbs consist of two movement verbs go upstairs bring broth give Daddy
(see also §24.3). The first verb refers to the manner of (Macau, Ferreira 1996:84)
the movement, like ‘go on foot’, ‘run’, or ‘swim’, and the ‘Go upstairs and take your Daddy the broth!’
second verb indicates the direction of the movement of
the first verb, such as ‘go’, ‘come’, ‘enter’, or ‘leave’. They In the substrate languages of the Ibero-Romance-based
occur in the Atlantic as well as in the Pacific. Some creoles, ‘give’ serials occur mainly in central west African
examples are: languages (especially from Ghana to Nigeria) and in Sinitic
languages.
(10) El a landa bai. (Pap.)
he pfv swim go
‘He swam away.’ 24.2.4.3 The sentence
24.2.4.3.1 Word order in monotransitive sentences
(11) I nada i bin li. (GBk., Incanha Intumbo, p.c.)
he swim he come here The unmarked word order patterns in monotransitive sen-
‘He came swimming.’ tences are SVO, SOV, VSO, and VOS. The most widespread
word order is SVO, which occurs in the Atlantic as well as in
(12) Ê landa vika. (Prp., Maurer 2009:119) Asia:
he swim come
‘She arrived swimming.’ (17) Mala xoze wa bluz ku guya.
Mary sew one shirt with needle
(13) Tio Padre andá vai meo-meo di sala. (Fda., Post 2013:86)
Tio Padre walk go middle of living-room ‘Mary sews a shirt with a needle.’
‘Tio Padre walked to the middle of the living-room.’
(18) Barber tira-n ispi su.
Marking of the subject on both verbs as in Guinea Bissau barber pull-PROG thorn his
Kriyol is not uncommon in serializing languages (Krl., Clements 2007:168)
(Aikhenvald 2006:40f.). ‘The barber was pulling the thorn [out of his tail].’
Examples of directional serial verb constructions in sub-
strate languages can be found in west African languages (19) Taté ja olá ku bela Rozil.
such as Ewe or Yoruba, as well as in southeast Asian lan- Taté PFVsee OBJ old Rozil
guages such as Hokkien and Bazaar Malay. (PKr., Baxter 1988:176)
‘Taté saw old Rozil.’
24.2.4.2.3.2 ‘GIVE’ SERIAL VERBS
‘Give’ serial verb constructions may fulfil many functions, SOV occurs only in SAC, exclusively in Batticaloa, and
but only ‘give’ serials referring to recipients or beneficiaries co-occurring with SVO in Korlai (see example 18):
456
CREOLES
(20) Nɔɔyva ung ɛnɛɛla triiya nooyvu-su The following examples illustrate indirect-object con-
bride one ring bring groom-GEN structions in SAC and SEAC:
maan-ntu lo-botaa.
hand-LOC HAB-put (Btc., J. Smith 2013:119) (25) Yo a da kriãs pə tɛtɛ
‘The bride brings a ring and puts it on the groom’s hand.’ I FUT give child OBJ aunt
(Diu, Cardoso 2009:196)
(21) Eu grand sentiment te.
‘I will give the children to my aunt.’
I great feeling have
(Kannur, Schuchardt 1889:524)
(26) eo dja tridji kartu djuntadu kung ile.
‘I have a great feeling.’
I PFV bring letter together OBJ he
(Btv., Maurer 2011:78)
It seems that SOV word order as the unmarked order is due
‘I have brought letters for him.’
to sub- or adstrate influence of the south Asian languages
through bilingualism (for Korlai see Clements 1996:151-6).
(27) Da abraço com ele.
VSO occurs exclusively in the Philippine creoles, and is
give hug OBJ he
due to the influence of Philippine languages:
(Singapore, Coelho 1967[1886]:719)
‘Give her/him a hug.’
(22) Ya buta el nuchacho el leche.
PFV spill the boy the milk
24.2.4.3.3 Verb doubling in contrastive-focus
(CvChb., Llamado 1972:83)
constructions
‘The boy spilt the milk.’
A typically Atlantic feature of creole languages (and of non-
In Cavite and Ternate Chabacano, VSO is the dominant creole west African languages) is verb doubling in
word order, but, according to Sippola (2013:152), VOS also contrastive-focus constructions. It occurs in Guinea Bissau
occurs if the object is indefinite, as in (23): Kriyol, in GGC, and in Papiamentu:
(23) Ya cumpra mansanas el mujer. (28) Bô ska bêbê!— Inô, kume so n

PFV buy apple the lady you PROG drink no eat FOC I
(CvChb., Sippola 2013:152) ska kume. (Stm., Hagemeijer 2013:69)
‘The lady bought an apple.’ PROG eat
‘You are drinking!—No, I am eating.’
24.2.4.3.2 Object marking in ditransitive constructions
(29) ta kèiru boso ta kèiru, t’ami bosonan
Ibero-Romance-based creoles show two alignment patterns in COP walk 2PL PROG walk COP-1SG 2PL
ditransitive constructions: double-object and indirect-object a bin buska? (Pap.)
constructions (see also §24.3.6.1). There is a clear distributional PFV come look.for
pattern: in the Atlantic area, all Ibero-Romance-based creoles ‘are you walking around, [or] have you come to look
have double-object constructions, and some languages have for me?’ (Maurer 1988:143)
both double-object and indirect-object constructions, whereas
the Asian languages have exclusively indirect-object construc- The two examples show different focus constructions: San-
tions. The following examples illustrate double-object and tome marks the end of the focus with so ‘only’ and Papiamentu
indirect-object constructions in an UGC: marks the beginning of the focus with the copula.
(24) a. Tina dá se prufsor un flor.

Tina give her teacher a flower 24.3 French-based creoles
(Cpv., Swolkien 2013:26)
‘Tina gave her teacher a flower.’
24.3.1 Introduction
b. Maria ta ben dá un flor pa se
Maria PRS come give a flower OBJ her French-based creoles developed in the multilingual planta-
prufsor. (Cpv.) tion societies of former French colonies in America, on some
teacher islands in the Indian Ocean, and in New Caledonia. The first
‘Maria is going to give a flower to her teacher.’ French settlement in the Caribbean was founded in 1626 on
457
Saint-Christophe (now St Kitts); it became the starting point language of the media and also plays an important part in
for the colonization of several of the Lesser Antilles in the education; Chinese and Indian languages are spoken by
course of the seventeenth century, beginning with Marti- small minorities. The Seychelles were settled in 1770 by
nique and Guadeloupe in 1635. From 1660 onwards French French colonists and their slaves, mainly from Mauritius;
colonists settled on the western part of Hispaniola, which they came under British rule together with Mauritius, and
had been abandoned by the Spaniards when they moved to attained independence in 1976. Seychelles creole, closely
the mainland. The colony named Saint-Domingue was ceded related to Mauritian, is spoken by some 85,000 inhabitants
to France by the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) and declared its of the archipelago in the Indian Ocean and by diaspora
independence as the Republic of Haiti in 1804. Haitian creole speakers mainly in Kenya, the UK, and Australia. Official
has more speakers than any other creole language, about 9.5 languages are creole, English, and French.
million in Haiti and about 2 million in the USA, Canada, the A creole named Tayo by its speakers emerged in the
Dominican Republic, and overseas France. The islands of period 1860-1910 in Saint-Louis near Nouméa, New Caledo-
Martinique and Guadeloupe remained French possessions nia. The village was founded as a religious training centre by
and are today overseas départements of France, while others the French Marist missionaries for young male Melanesians
came under British control in the eighteenth or nineteenth from the whole country. The estimated number of speakers
century and are now independent. The number of speakers of is about 3,000 (Ehrhart and Revis 2013).
Lesser Antillean creole is difficult to determine because no Traditionally, French creoles exist as ‘low varieties’ in
information is available for Dominica and St Lucia, except situations of diglossia, the ‘high variety’ being either French
that along with the official language English, creole—called or English (or both, as in Mauritius and the Seychelles). The
patois—is widely used among the 70,000 Dominicans and the French–creole diglossia was one of the prototypical situ-
170,000 St Lucians. Guadeloupean and Martinican creole are ations described by Ferguson (1959; cf. Ch. 36). This situ-
spoken by about 600,000 speakers for each variety, including ation is changing gradually everywhere. Creoles are no
diaspora communities in France and Canada. longer stigmatized languages; they are gaining prestige,
Following several unsuccessful attempts beginning in 1604, and have been accorded official status in Haiti and the
permanent French settlement of Guiana started in the middle Seychelles.
of the seventeenth century. In today’s overseas département Since the latter part of the twentieth century, most
of Guiana, the estimated number of creole speakers is 64,000. scholars have viewed the development of creoles as a grad-
Karipuna creole, closely related to Guyanais, is the mother ual process of language change, due mainly to imperfect
tongue of about 3,500 Amerindian speakers (Karipuna and second-language learning by adults (mostly slaves). In the
Galibi-Marworno) living near the rivers Curipi and Uaçá, tribu- case of French creoles, one can distinguish two types of
taries of the Oyapock which forms the border between Brazil sociohistorical circumstances leading to the emergence of
and French Guiana (Röntgen 1998). a creole, the société d’habitation (‘homestead society’) in the
Louisiana was claimed for France in 1682, but coloniza- first decades of settlement, and the société de plantation
tion was not undertaken before 1699; in 1803 the colony was (‘plantation society’), which does not appear until the col-
sold by Napoleon and became a state of the USA. Louisiana ony begins to develop a full-fledged agricultural industry. In
creole, spoken by fewer than 7,000 Afro-Americans, creoles the initial period, the number of whites is greater than or
of colour, and whites in southern Louisiana, is an endan- equal to that of blacks, and the slaves have access to the
gered language, not being passed on to children. language of the colonists, the base language of the creole,
French colonization in the Indian Ocean began in 1665 on whereas in the second phase this is no longer the case.
the island of Bourbon, named Reunion after 1848, today the A creole emerges and stabilizes when new slaves, imported
fourth overseas département where a French-based creole on a massive scale extending over several generations, are
is spoken along with French by the majority of the popula- instructed and acculturated by ‘Creole’ slaves born in the
tion as well as by diaspora communities in France, the total colony, the target of the newly arrived slaves being approxi-
number of speakers amounting to 800,000. Mauritius was mate varieties of French as spoken by the Creoles
occupied by the French in 1721, transferred to British own- (Chaudenson 2001:95-129). In most cases the plantation
ership in 1812, and granted independence in 1968. Maur- society follows and replaces the homestead society, but
itian creole, the dominant spoken language in Mauritius and there are exceptions: in Louisiana, Guiana, and Reunion,
on the island of Rodrigues, is used by everybody born on small farms survived alongside big plantations until the
these islands and by Mauritians who emigrated to Europe or end of slavery. It seems that this notable difference in the
Australia. The number of speakers exceeds 1,300,000, many ecology of creole genesis has led to differences in the degree
of them being plurilingual: English is the official language, of restructuring, because creoles which developed in col-
but French has always been, and remains, the dominant onies where the homestead society lasted longer remained
458
CREOLES
closer to French (Klingler 2003b; Bollée 2007; Wiesinger creoles there is an additional distinction between short and
2013). Reunion creole is a special case insofar as the devel- long vowels. Graphic representations in Table 24.1 are
opment has resulted in a continuum from acrolect to basi- added in angled brackets (< >) when they differ from the
lect, characterized by considerable variation. The phonetic symbols.
sociohistorical factors leading to the stabilization of a creole The opposition between front unrounded and rounded
(labelled ‘basilectalization’ by Mufwene 2002:53) have vowels in French has been retained in certain acrolectal
recently been described by Wiesinger (2013). varieties; the vowels [y, ø, œ, œ̃] are also attested in con-
It can be assumed that the approximate varieties of French servative varieties in Louisiana, Haiti, Guadeloupe, and
which preceded the development of stabilized creoles shared Reunion. The phoneme schwa occurs in Reunion creole
many features with the français marginaux, marginal varieties with four allophones: [ә], zero, [o], and [ø], [ø] being
of overseas French subject to little or no normative pressure restricted to acrolectal varieties and [o] being characteristic
(Bollée 2007:98-102; Neumann-Holzschuh 2008). of basilectal varieties. In Mauritian creole, schwa (written
Unless otherwise indicated, data and examples provided <ë>) is becoming frequent in acrolectal speech as an alter-
in the following sections are taken from the survey articles native pronunciation in words with [i] or [e] (dilo, delo, dëlo
by Baker and Kriegel, Bollée, Colot and Ludwig, Fattier, ‘water’ < Fr. de l’eau ‘some water’) but does not yet have
Klingler and Neumann-Holzschuh, Michaelis and Rosalie, phonemic status.
and Pfänder in Michaelis et al. (2013). All examples are Close mid and open mid vowels are phonemic in Ameri-
transcribed in the official orthography of Haitian or Sey- can creoles in word-final position, e.g. Hai. chante ‘to sing’
chelles creole (see Tables 24.1 and 24.2). < Fr. chanter vs chantè ‘singer’ < Fr. chanteur; mo ‘word’ < Fr.
mot vs mò ‘dead’ < Fr. mort. In Indian Ocean creoles they are
allophones governed by syllable structure: close vowels
24.3.2 Phonology occur in open syllables, open vowels in closed syllables.
Vowel length is distinctive in Indian Ocean creoles; it
The phonological system of basilectal French creoles con- goes back to combinations of [V+r] or [i+j] in French: Reu.
sists of seven oral and three nasal vowels; in Indian Ocean Mau. Sey. ta [ta] ‘pile’ < Fr. tas vs tar [tɑː] ‘late’ < Fr. tard; Reu.
Sey. (p)ti [(p)ti] ‘small’ < Fr. petit vs fiy [fiː] ‘daughter’ < Fr.
Table 24.1 Vowels fille. Long vowels stemming from French [ɛr] and [ɔr] are
always open, the graphic representation being <er> or <or>.
FRONT CENTRAL BACK In Mauritian, [V+r] has resulted in the long vowels [ɑː, ɔː] or
in the diphthongs [iә, eә, uә].
Close i, iː <ir> u <ou>/ uː <our>
Regressive non-distinctive nasalization is observed in all
y 
creoles except Mauritian, variation being particularly fre-
Close mid e o
quent in Haitian and Seychellois: Hai. lanmè/lamè, Ant.
ø <eu>
lanmè, Sey. lanmer < Fr. la mer ‘sea, ocean’. /e/ and /a/ in
Open mid ɛ <è>, ɛː <er> / ɛ̃ <en> ɔ <ò>, ɔː <or>, õ <on>
Seychellois and /e/ in Haitian, Louisianais, and Martinican
œ <eu>, œ͂ <eun>
undergo progressive nasalization in final position following
Open a, ɑː <ar>, ɑ̃ <an>
/n/, /m/, or /ɲ/: Sey. mwan ‘month < Fr. mois; Hai. Lou. Mtq.
Table 24.2 Consonants
BILABIAL LABIO-DENTAL DENTAL/ALVEOLAR ALVEOLAR PALATAL VELAR GLOTTAL
Plosive: voiceless p t k
voiced b d g
Nasal m n ŋ
Trill r
Fricative: voiceless f s ʃ <ch> h
voiced v z ʒ <j> ɣ <r>
Affricate: voiceless ʧ <tch>
voiced ʤ <dj>
Lateral l
Glide ɥ j <y>
459
nen, Sey. nennen ‘nose’ < Fr. nez. By contrast, Mauritian is fwi ‘fruit’ < Fr. fruit (ALPA 4 and 63). In Dominican and St
characterized by denasalization of historically nasalized Lucian creole, r is pronounced [w] and written <w> in any
vowels, e.g. lame ‘hand’ < Fr. la main, pima ‘chilli’ < Fr. pimant. position.
French creoles feature a maximum of 24 distinct conson- In French creoles, stress is always on the last syllable
ants, some of them ([ɥ], [h]) of limited occurrence. of isolated words as well as phrases and sentences. An
The inventory is largely the same as in French, with one exception is Mauritian creole, described as a ‘stress-timed
significant exception: Indian Ocean creoles have lost the language’ where three kinds of syllables can be distin-
opposition of alveolar and palatal fricatives: only alveolar guished: unstressable in all circumstances (e.g. TAM mark-
/s/ and /z/ survive: Fr. cheveux > seve ‘hair’; Fr. juge > ziz ers), obligatorily stressed in all circumstances (e.g. prefixes
‘judge’. ré- and dé-), and stressable syllables: all lexical words con-
The plosives /t/ and /d/ sometimes undergo assibilation tain at least one stressable syllable. Stress placement can
before /i/, /j/ (or /y/ in acrolectal varieties). This feature, distinguish different words or meanings, e.g. refér ‘to
characteristic also of Canadian French, is attested in Louisi- recover (from ailment)’ vs réfer ‘to make or do again’
ana and sporadically in Haiti; in Mauritius, /t/ and /d/ are (Baker and Kriegel 2013:253).
palatalized, as [tj] and [dj], or lightly affricated, as [ts] or [dz]. The following syllable structures are attested (examples
Some creoles have voiced and unvoiced affricates which from Haitian): V (an ‘in’), CV (do ‘back’), CCV (dlo ‘water’), VC
do not exist in French and are found mainly in onomato- (ak ‘with’), VCC (aks ‘axle), CVC (chat ‘cat’), CCVC (flèch
poeias (e.g. Hai. tchap ‘chopping sound’), in words of non- ‘arrow’), CVCC (taks ‘tax’). CCCV in syllable onsets occurs
French origin (e.g. Lou. Mau. tchèk < E. check, Hai. tchèkòp in Mauritian and Seychellois in words of recent introduction
< E. checkup; Lou. Mtq. tchololo ‘weak coffee’ < Fon cololò ‘too (strik ‘strict’, striktir ‘structure’), whereas in American cre-
liquid’), or as the result of palatalization of /k/ and /g/ oles s + C(C) have prosthetic e-: Hai. estrik, estrikti. Syllables
before front vowels (cf. §39.3.1). The latter development, with a CC coda are very rare because of the reduction of
attested only in American creoles, has not yet been fully word-final clusters: tab < Fr. table ‘table’, siklis < Fr. cycliste
described as to geographical spread and phonetic results. ‘cyclist’ (Nikiema 2002:83f.).
The following examples show that there is considerable Traditionally French-based creoles were written with ad
variation: Fr. gueule ‘mouth’ > Lou. lagèl/ladjel, Hai. djòl/ hoc ‘etymological’ spellings based on French orthographic
dyòl/gyòl, Ant. gèl/gyèl/djèl/djòl, Guy. djol; Fr. queue ‘tail’ > conventions. Etymological spellings were easy to read by
Lou. (la)keu/(la)tche, Hai. (la)ke/(la)tye/tche, Ant. (la)ke/(la) persons literate in French, but unsuited for teaching mono-
tye/(la)tche, Guy. latcho. lingual creole speakers to read and write. For literacy cam-
The development of French /r/ is extremely complex; the paigns in Haiti, a phonological orthography was devised in
absence or near-absence of /r/ is the shibboleth of French 1941, adopted in modified form by the National Office for
or creole speakers from the Caribbean (Pustka 2012:271).2 In Literacy and Community Development (ONAAC), and offi-
fact, final -r and postvocalic r have disappeared without cially recognized by the government in 1979 (Valdman
overt trace in American creoles, e.g. Lou. disik, Hai. Ant. 2007:v-vi). A very similar orthography was proposed by
Guy. sik ‘sugar’ < Fr. sucre; Ant. bò(d)lanmè ‘beach’ < Fr. bord the former GEREC-F (Groupe d’Études et de Recherches en
de la mer ‘seaside’; ma ‘pool’ < Fr. mare; toujou ‘always < Fr. Espace Créolophone et Francophone) in Martinique in 1976;
toujours (ALPA 2, 9, 208). However, the loss of /r/ can explain this spelling, with some further modifications (Bernabé
lexical exceptions to nasalization, e.g. Hai. mòn ‘mountain’ 2001), is widely used in the French overseas départements,
< Fr. morne vs monn ‘world’ < Fr. monde; fèmen ‘to close, shut’ except Reunion, where several spelling systems have been
< Fr. fermer vs fenmèl/femèl ‘female’ < Fr. femelle (Nikiema proposed but no agreement has so far been reached. In
2002:87). /r/ in initial or intervocalic position is described Mauritius, several competing writing systems have also
as an apico-alveolar tap or trill for Louisianais and as a been used since the 1970s, and it is only recently that one
voiced velar or uvular fricative [ɣ/ʁ] for Indian Ocean cre- of them, the grafi-larmoni devised by V. Hookoomsing in
oles. In Haitian and Antillean, initial /r/ has two allophones 2004, has received official recognition. It was introduced in
in complementary distribution: [ɣ] in non-labial context, primary schools in 2012. The official orthography of Sey-
[w] in labial context, i.e. before rounded vowels and after chelles creole, promoted by the Lenstiti Kreol (Creole Insti-
labial consonants, e.g. Hai. Ant. wòch ‘stone, rock’ < Fr. roche; tute), shares many features with the Haitian writing system.
The main differences between the orthographic systems in
use are: [e] is written <é> and [j+V] <ia, ien, ion> in the
2
A caricature of Antillean French is the speech of the Caribbean pirate Antillean orthography, but <e>, <ya, yen, yon> in Haiti. All
in Astérix: ‘Galè’e ’omaine à t’ibo’d! (Galère romaine à tribord!) ‘Roman
galley on the starboard side’ (A. Uderzo and R. Goscinny, La Zizanie (1970), Indian Ocean spelling systems use <ir, er, ar, or, our> for
10). long or open vowels; no accents are needed on <e> an <o>
460
CREOLES
because their close or open pronunciation is non- limited number of derivational affixes inherited from
distinctive. Grafi-larmoni uses <sh> for [ʃ], <ch> for [ʧ], <in> French are productive in all French creoles. By contrast,
for [ɛ̃], <ien> for [jɛ̃], and <x> for [ks]. countless new words have been formed by compounding,
according to the same patterns as in French, the only
difference being the absence of the prepositions de ‘of ’
24.3.3 Morphology and à ‘to, at’ in many nominal compounds:
verb + noun: Indian Ocean creoles fourne(n) ‘nosy’ (four/-e
Nouns are morphologically invariable, with the exception of
‘to stuff ’ + ne(n) ‘nose’); Hai. lave tèt ‘ritual washing of
a small number of nouns and adjectives referring to human
the head [voodoo]’;
beings which have separate male and female forms, e.g. Hai.
noun (+ a / d) + noun: American creoles pyebwa, Reu. Sey.
Ant. Guy. soutirè/soutirèz ‘accomplice, receiver of stolen
pyedibwa ‘tree’ (pye ‘foot’ + bwa ‘tree’); Ant. zèl (a)
goods’. For animals, natural gender can be expressed by
pwason ‘fins’ (zèl ‘wing’ + pwason ‘fish’) (ALPA 137);
preposed mal/femel ‘male/female’, e.g. Sey. en mal/femel
noun + adjective or adjective + noun: Ant. fig jonn/mi
bourik ‘a male/female donkey’. Feminine forms of French
‘sweet banana’ (fig ‘banana’ + jonn/mi ‘yellow/ripe’)
adjectives survive in lexicalized forms such as Hai. movèz fwa
(ALPA 68), move tan ‘storm; hurricane’ (move ‘bad’ +
‘bad faith’, movèz/fos kouch ‘miscarriage’.
tan ‘weather’) (ALPA 35 and 36).
Many nouns show agglutination of French articles or final
elements of preceding determiners: legliz ‘church’ < Fr. l’é- The following affixes are productive:
glise ‘the church’; Lou. dolo, dilo, dlo, Hai. Ant. Guy. dlo, Reu.
-e for verbs: Hai. Ant. lak ‘fish bait’ ! lak(y)e ‘to bait (the
dlo, dolo, Mau. Sey. delo, dilo ‘water’ < Fr. de l’eau ‘some water’;
line)’;
Lou. Ant. Guy. Reu. Mau. Sey. za(n)mi ‘friend(s)’ < Fr. les amis
-aj/-ay for nominalization: Hai. bafre ‘to deceive’ ! bafray
‘the friends’; Lou. nòm, nonm, lòm, Hai. nonm, lonm, (z)òm, Ant.
‘deceit’;
nonm, Guy. wonm ‘man’ < Fr. un/l’homme ‘a/the man’; Mau.
-è, -èz for agent nouns or adjectives: Hai. Ant. drivaye ‘to
Sey. ledo ‘back’ < Fr. le dos ‘the back’. Agglutination of la is
drift around’ ! drivayè [M], drivayèz [F] ‘drifter, loafer’;
frequent and variable in American creoles and extremely
ti- (< Fr. petit ‘small’) for diminutives: Hai. timoun ‘child’;
frequent in Mauritian and Seychellois—in Seychellois it has
Ant. ti bèf ‘calf ’ (ALPA 85);
remained a productive phenomenon up to the present, e.g.
de- and re- for verbs: Hai. Ant. klete ‘to lock’ ! deklete ‘to
lafrankofoni ‘French-speaking countries’, lazenofobi ‘xeno-
unlock’; Hai. derape ‘to start’ ! rederape ‘to make a
phobia’. The agglutinated elements do not carry grammat-
fresh start’.
ical meaning and cannot be analysed as morphemes.
The same is true of short and long forms of verbs in Two suffixes borrowed from contact languages occur only
Indian Ocean creoles, with the exception of morphologically in Haitian creole: -adò (Sp. ‑ador) forming agent nouns/
marked past tense in acrolectal Reunion creole. Verbs in adjectives: pale ‘to speak’ ! paladò ‘talker, prattler; talk-
Mauritian and Seychellois have either one form, e.g. bwar ative’ and -mann (< Eng. -man): kawotchou ‘tyre’ ! kawotch-
‘to drink’, aste ‘to buy’, or two forms, the long form oumann ‘tyre repairman’.
usually ending in -e, e.g. al – ale ‘to go’, kit – kite ‘to leave’.
The distribution of these forms is governed by the syntactic
context: the short form is used whenever the verb is imme- 24.3.4 Noun phrase
diately followed by an argument and the long form at the
end of a clause or speech group: Sey. Zot kit Soungoula zot ale
24.3.4.1 Plural of nouns
‘They leave Soungoula they go (away)’. Bare nouns can have singular or plural meaning, e.g. Sey. la
Creole word formation has not yet received the attention lasyet in lave ‘now the plate/the plates is/are washed’.
it deserves, except chapters in Chaudenson (1974:988-1051) Plural is marked in Antillean with se . . . la, in Louisiana
and Valdman (1978:129-59). It is typical of creole languages and Haiti by the postposed determiners -ye and -yo respect-
that many lexical items are not uniquely assigned to par- ively, expressing definiteness at the same time: Lou.
ticular word classes, ‘changes from one word class to so kouzen‑ye ‘his cousins’; Hai. ti nèg yo ‘the small boys’;
another are most frequently not signalled by derivational Guy. -ya is a blend of -ye and the definite article -a: tifi-ya
markers’ (Colot and Ludwig 2013:209), e.g. Hai. fann ‘to ‘the girls’ (in nineteenth-century Guy. ye la, see example 36
crack, split’ ! ‘crack, split’; sal ‘dirty, soiled’ ! sal ‘to below). The postposed plural markers -ye and -yo are hom-
dirty, soil’; Mau. Sey. lager ‘fight’! lager ‘to fight’. This onymous with the 3PL pronoun ye, yo ‘they’. The same type
may be the reason why affixation ‘plays only a minor role of plural marking is found in other creoles (see also
in the creation of new words’ (Valdman 1978:148). Only a §24.2.4.1.1) and in several west African languages; its
461
presence in Caribbean French creoles has therefore been Demonstrative determiners are postposed in Louisiana
attributed to the influence of African substrates. According (‑sa-la/-sa-a, PL -sa-ye), Haiti (-sa a, PL -sa yo) and Antillean
to Manessy, the structure is ultimately of Yoruba origin (-lasa/tala/sala, PL se . . . lasa/tala/sala).3 Guyanais, Reunion,
(1955:154-63). and Mauritian creole have discontinuous forms: Guy. sa . . . a
In Reunion creole, plural is marked with le for inanimates (mo kontan sa liv-a ‘I like this book’), Reu. së . . . la, PL se . . . la.
(le ros ‘the stones’) and bann (< Fr. bande ‘group’) for ani- For Mauritian, Baker and Kriegel describe sa . . . la, but also sa
mates (bann zanfan ‘the children’); the distinction is, how- alone, as ‘unambiguous demonstratives’, while ‘in many
ever, not clear-cut, as le is also found with animates: le instances it is difficult to decide whether la alone, which
zanfan ‘the children’. In Mauritian and Seychellois, bann is occurs with far greater frequency than either sa or sa . . . la,
optional and found in contexts where plural reference is should be considered a demonstrative or definite article’
relevant for communication. In Seychellois, however, it has (2013:255). In Seychellois, where the above-mentioned vari-
become much more frequent in modern written texts, ation was noted in a text from the early twentieth century,
where ‘it seems to have grammaticalized into a quasi- preposed sa has been generalized; Michaelis and Rosalie
obligatory plural marker’ (Michaelis and Rosalie 2013: 263; ‘observe incipient use of the demonstrative sa as a definite
cf. Bollée 2000). article’ (2013:263). The postposition of determiners (also
possessives, see below) and the plural marker -ye/-yo (see
above) was attributed to west African substrate influence,
which has been the topic of some debate.
24.3.4.2 Determiners
In all French creoles the indefinite determiner is derived
from French un, une ‘a’ (Lou. en, Hai. yon, Ant. on/an, Guy. 24.3.4.3 Adjectives
oun, Indian Ocean creoles en), preposed to the noun and
Following French patterns, adnominal adjectives are either
distinguished in form from the numeral ‘one’ having the
preposed or postposed; prenominal adjectives have narrow
same etymon, e.g. Lou. enn, Hai. youn/ yonn, Ant. yonn/yenn.
semantic intension and wide semantic extension, e.g. gro
Louisianais and Reunionnais have non-systematic gender
‘big’, bon ‘good’, whereas postnominal adjectives have wide
distinction and a plural form de (< Fr. des ‘of.the.PL’). In
semantic intension and a limited range of application, e.g.
Guadeloupe, de and le (< Fr. les ‘the.PL’) indicate quantitative
entelizan ‘intelligent’, difisil ‘difficult’, fatige ‘tired’. In Indian
restriction (Colot and Ludwig 2013:210).
Ocean creoles, preposed adjectives can be reduplicated for
Demonstratives are derived from Fr. ce ‘this’, ces ‘these’,
emphasis, while reduplicated postposed adjectives have an
and the discontinuous distal form ce/ces . . . là ‘that/those’; ce
attenuative effect:
was replaced by the more salient pronoun sa < Fr. ça ‘that’ in
the course of creolization. Three variants appear in old texts
(30) Zot res dan en lakaz malang-malang. (Mau.)
and in modern creoles: preposed sa-, postposed -la and
3PL live in INDF house dirty-dirty
discontinuous sa . . . la (as well as the above-mentioned
‘They live in a house which is a bit dirty.’
Lesser Antillean plural marker se . . . la). These variants are
the starting point for a process of grammaticalization from
For reduplication of verbs, adjectives, and other parts of
demonstrative to definite function which is still ongoing
speech in Indian Ocean creoles, see Chaudenson (1974:1048-
(Bollée 2004; see also §24.2.4.1.2). Formal variation and
51), Baker (2003), and Bollée (2003); since sufficiently similar
semantic complexity of adnominal determiners in French
reduplications are found in Malagasy, these may have been
creoles can be explained by the fact that speakers of differ-
a source for a structure not observed in American creoles.
ent creoles have made different choices and that certain
While in Indian Ocean creoles comparatives and superla-
forms represent intermediate stages of the semantic devel-
tives are formed with pli ‘more’ (< Fr. plus), a comparative
opment (cf. Goodman (1964:47), and Valdman (1978:191):
construction with pase (< Fr. (dé)passer ‘to surpass’) is found
‘[the] semantic value [of -la] is intermediate between that
in American creoles: in traditional varieties of Louisianais,
of the definite article and the demonstrative in French’).
in Haitian, Guyanais, and in certain regions of the Lesser
A postposed determiner -la, labelled as definite article,
Antilles (Dominica, St Lucia, Trinidad, sporadically in Mar-
exists in all French creoles, but has become obsolete in
tinique, see ALPA 273):
modern Seychellois. In Haitian and Antillean, it occurs with
five contextual variants (Hai. tab la ‘the table’, zo a ‘the bone’,
3
pon an ‘the bridge’, fanm nan ‘the woman’, mont lan ‘the According to Goodman (1964:56), the form ta ‘stems from the expres-
sion C’EST À [‘it is to’] plus a noun or pronoun, where the morpheme
watch’; for the distribution of variants in the Lesser Antilles boundary was misinterpreted’. Originally, the form belongs to the paradigm
see ALPA 289-96); in Guyanais it has the variants -a and -an. of possessive pronouns.
462
CREOLES
(31) Entel p(l)i gran pase m. all American creoles have forms derived from older or
so-and-so more old pass 1SG dialectal variants of Fr. eux: iaulx [jo] > Hai. Ant. yo; yeux
(Hai., Fattier 1998, map 2160) [jø] > Lou. Guy. ye (cf. FEW 4, 551a). Consonantal variants of
‘So-and-so is older than me.’ most pronouns (m, w, l, y, n) appear before or after vowels.
A series of oblique pronouns with initial a- is unique to
Since verbs meaning ‘pass’ or ‘surpass’ are used to indi- Reunion creole; a probable explanation is convergence of
cate comparison in several Atlantic creoles (e.g. Princi- French à moi ‘to me’, à vous ‘to you’, etc. and Malagasy
pense) and west African languages, a good case can be object/possessive pronouns with the same initial vowel
made for substratal influence (Holm 1988:188-90; cf. Heine (Chaudenson 2003:404f.).
and Kuteva 2002:229f.). In most French creoles, adnominal possessives are largely
homophonous with subject personal pronouns; exceptions
are 3SG forms in Louisianais, Mauritian (so), and Seychellois
24.3.4.4 Personal pronouns (son). Reunion creole has remained closer to French with
Personal pronouns of French-based creoles are derived from four forms differing from the personal pronouns: mon ‘my’,
the French tonic and disjunctive pronouns moi, toi, lui, nous, out ‘your’, son ‘his’, nout ‘our’. Possessive determiners pre-
vous, eux; many plural forms go back to forms with autres cede the noun in Louisianais, Guyanais, and Indian Ocean
‘others’ (see also §24.2.4.1.3.1). ‘As a result, the pronoun creoles, while they are postposed in Haitian and Antillean.
systems of all varieties have a great deal in common, though In Guadeloupe the pronoun is preceded by the preposition
there are considerable differences in detail’ (Klingler a/an: Ant. matant mwen vs Gua. (ma)tant an mwen ‘my aunt’
2003b:212; cf. Goodman 1964:34-46). A distinction between (ALPA 307-21).
subject and non-subject forms is observed in most creoles in
the singular (but not necessarily for all persons), e.g. Lou.
Mau. mo, Sey. mon ‘I’ vs Lou. mo/mwa/mwen/mon, Mau. Sey. 24.3.5 Verb phrase
mwa ‘me’; Ant. Guy. Sey. i ‘he, she, it’ vs li ‘him, her, it’. In the
plural, this distinction is found only in Reunion (see below)
24.3.5.1 Tense, aspect, and mood
and Louisiana: nouzòt ‘we’, vouzòt ‘you’ can have all func- As a rule, French creoles combine an invariable verb form
tions, whereas nou or ouzòt/zòt/zo occur only as subject. with preverbal markers denoting tense, aspect, and mood.
The forms of the first person singular stem from moi, The majority of these markers, derived from French verbs
pronounced [mwɛ] until the eighteenth century, yielding or verbal periphrases, occur in several creoles, often with
mwen with progressive nasalization; mwen is still attested similar functions. The overall picture is, however, very
everywhere except in Guyanais, Mauritian, and Seychellois. complex; only a brief and incomplete outline can be
Several variants developed by reduction of the diphthong attempted in the following section (for a more detailed
and loss of initial m-, e.g. Lou. Guy. Mau. mo, Sey. mon, Ant. cross-creole comparison see Klingler 2003b:263-73). While
man/an. The object form mwa in Louisianais, Mauritian and all simple markers are inherited from French, their various
Seychellois is probably a later innovation. combinations are mostly creole innovations.
The second person singular is marked by ou/vou. Aktionsart, i.e. the distinction between stative and
A distinction in the singular between familiar to, twa and dynamic verbs, is crucial in the American creoles because
honorific forms ou/vou ‘is found in early data in almost all it determines the meaning of unmarked verb forms:
French creoles’ (Baker and Kriegel 2013:254); today it is unmarked dynamic verbs have past meaning, e.g. Guy. li
retained in Louisiana and Mauritius and declining in pèdi so chimen ‘he lost his way (he got lost)’, unmarked
Reunion. stative verbs have present meaning: Ant. i konnèt anpil
All creoles have nou for the first person plural, Louisianais sekrè ‘he knows many secrets’. By contrast, in Indian Ocean
also nouzòt. In Haitian, the same form nou is used for first creoles, both stative (or adjectival) and dynamic verbs with
and second persons plural. Since this homonymy is not zero marker convey present meaning. Nevertheless, the
attested before the twentieth century, interference from stative/non-stative distinction is relevant for the interpret-
African languages at the end of the colonial period seems ation of other markers in these creoles. The following pre-
a possible explanation (Fattier 1998:850). verbal markers are shared by all or several French creoles.
Reflexes of vous autres ‘you.PL (lit. you. others)’ are found The marker te or ti (Reu. te i) < Fr. été ‘been’ or étais/était
in all creoles: vouzòt/zòt/zo in Louisianais, zòt/zot in the other ‘was’ (possibly from the verbal periphrasis être à faire ‘to be
varieties. A notable feature of Indian Ocean creoles is the doing’: il était à manger ‘he was eating’) indicates simple past
coalescence of vous autres > zot ‘you’ and eux autres > zot for all verbs in Indian Ocean creoles. In American creoles, it
‘they’ (cf. Bollée 2007:50, 125-7). For the third person plural, denotes past with stative verbs, e.g. Lou. li te malad la smèn
463
pase ‘she was sick last week’ (Klingler 2003b:253) and past- In Guyanais, ka expresses progressive with non-stative
before-past with dynamic verbs (but in Louisianais also predicates and actual state with stative predicates:
habitual past action), e.g. Gua. an te vin ‘I had come’. In
Louisianais and Haitian, te is also used with counterfactional (34) Ki sa ou ka kolè? (Guy.)
meaning: what it 2SG PROG anger
‘Why are you angry now?’
(32) Si ou te renmen m, ou t a
if 2SG PST love 1SG 2SG PST FUT The marker ava/va/a, from the French immediate future
vini avè m. (Hai., DeGraff 2007:103) formed from aller ‘to go’ + infinitive (il va pleuvoir ‘it’s going
come with 1SG to rain’), appears in all French-based creoles to indicate
‘If you loved me, you would come with me.’ future in combination with all categories of verbs (e.g. Sey.
ou a vini ‘you’ll come’; ou a konnen ‘you’ll know’). In Antillean,
The progressive marker ape/ap/pe stems from Fr. après it is attested in early texts but was soon replaced by kay, a
‘after’, used in the periphrasis être après à/de (lit. ‘to be after combination of ka and ay < ale, with the variants kèy and ke.
to/at’) + infinitive expressing progressive aspect. This peri- Indian Ocean creoles have two future markers for all verbs,
phrasis is obsolete in standard French, but still alive in Reu. va/sava/sar/sa/ and (le)pou, Mau. Sey. a/ava/va and pou
regional and overseas varieties. In Louisiana, ape/ap/pe (< Fr. être pour (lit. ‘to be for’) + infinitive expressing immi-
occurs (in Pointe Coupée alongside more frequent e) with nent future); a/ava/va + verb being interpreted as indefinite
dynamic verbs to mark progressive, iterative and habitual, future, pou + verb as definite future in Mauritian whereas
imminent future, and counterfactual; with some adjectival the semantic distinction is not clear in Seychellois; in any
verbs it has inchoative meaning: m ape fatige ‘I’m getting case, pou is much more frequent after the negator pa.
tired’. Its functions in Haitian are similar: with dynamic A combination of the past marker te/ti and a is found in
verbs, its meaning is progressive aspect and future (m ap most creoles with the function of counterfactual: Sey. mon ti
manje ‘I’m eating/I’ll eat’), with stative predicates (verbs or a kontan konnen . . . ‘I would like to know . . . ’.
adjectives) certain future: m ap wè ou demen ‘I’ll see you The French verb finir exists in all creoles as a full verb
tomorrow’, or inchoative aspect: l ap malad ‘he is getting with the meaning ‘to finish’, but has also become the
sick’. In combination with ale, yielding the forms pral/prale/ source of a preverbal marker fin/in/n denoting the termin-
apral, it serves to indicate immediate future. ation or completion of an action in Haitian. In Mauritian
The marker apre/ape/pe is also found in Indian Ocean and Seychellois, it marks perfect with current relevance
creoles, in Reunion creole in a French-like structure with when used with non-statives, completed change of state
copula: li le/(le)te/sra apre dormir ‘he is/was/will be sleep- with current relevance with statives. In Reunionnais, fin(i)
ing’. In Mauritian and Seychellois, pe marks progressive is found alongside la or la fin(i) for perfect. A marker for
aspect or immediate future with dynamic verbs and past-before-past is formed by compounding ti and fin: Reu.
on-going change of state (‘become’) with stative verbs. te fin(i), Mau. Sey. ti’n.
Combinations of ape/ap/pe with the (preceding) past
marker te/ti indicate progressive past or past on-going
change of state (‘was becoming’).
24.3.5.2 Copula
A progressive marker ka is used in Antillean and Guyan- With regard to the copula, the French creoles—except
ese creole.4 In Antillean the marker ka conveys progressive Reunionnais—have a great deal in common, but show
meaning with dynamic verbs: an/man ka manje ‘I’m eating’, some variation as to forms and syntactic contexts
habitual, iterative, or inchoative meaning with stative (Klingler 2003b:299-304; see also §24.2.4.2.2). Equational sen-
verbs: tences with nominal predicates have a copula se (< Fr. c’est
‘that/it is’) in American creoles (sa in Guyanais), but no
(33) Moun Latitans ka manje anpil pwason. (overt) copula is found before adjectival and adverbial
people Petite Anse PROG eat much fish predicates (locatives), except in Guyanais, where fika (< Pt.
(Mtq., Klingler 2003b:266) ficar ‘to stay, remain’) is used in locative phrases. However,
‘The people of Petite Anse eat lots of fish.’ in clause-final position (clefts, wh-questions) a copula ye
appears in Louisianais, Haitian, and Antillean: Ki moun ou
ye? ‘Who are you?’; Guyanais has fika in clause-final position:
Ki lò li fika? ‘What time is it?’ (Klingler 2003b:302). Mauritian
4
The origin of ka is uncertain; about 20 etymologies have been proposed and Seychellois do not employ a copula, but do use TAM
(see Hazaël-Massieux 1996:236f. and esp. Röntgen 2005). markers with non-verbal predicates, e.g. Sey. ou papa ti
464
CREOLES
reziser ‘your father was a manager of an estate’. In clause- (38) Pwason a naje monte larivyè.
final position, a copula appears taking the form ete, also fish DEF swim go.up river
used with TAM markers: (St Lucian, Carrington 1984:108)
‘The fish swam up the river.’
(35) Ki so gran frer ti ete? (Mau.)
what POSS old brother PST COP
‘What was his elder brother?’ 24.3.6 Syntax
24.3.6.1 Word order in simple sentences
24.3.5.3 Serial verbs
Word order at clause level is SVO in French creoles. With
It is debatable whether serial verbs should be treated under ditransitive verbs, double-object constructions (without
the heading ‘syntax’ or whether the examples provided in preposition) occur in all varieties with the recipient preced-
the literature are better analysed as lexicalized verbal ing the theme (see also §24.2.4.3.2):
compounds.
The latter is suggested by Saint Jacques Fauquenoy (39) Donn tout marmay sakenn en pti bout! (Reu.)
(1972:87), who gives examples from Guyanais: pote-vini give all child each indf small piece
(‘carry’ + ‘come’) ‘to bring’, pote-ale (‘carry’ + ‘go’) ‘to take ‘Give each of the children a small piece!’
away’, menen-ale (‘lead’ + ‘go’) ‘to take away’, menen-vire
(‘lead’ + ‘turn’) ‘to bring back’. However, the fact that the Direct object + a ‘to’ + indirect object (indirect-object con-
direct object is placed between the two constituents (mo struction) is found in Louisiana and (very rarely) in Reunion
menen li vire ‘I brought him back’) is an argument in favour creole; in Mauritian, the indirect object is marked with any of
of a syntactic analysis of these constructions. the forms derived from Fr. avec ‘with’: avek/ek/av/ar:
Serial verbs are found only in American creoles (with the
exception of Louisiana), but also in central west African (40) Mo ti dòn liv la ar Pyer. (Mau.)
languages (see §24.2.4.2.3). The most widespread types are: 1SG PST give book DEF with Pierre
• ‘Give’ serial verbs: ‘I gave Peter the book.’
(36) faut chimin pou voyé, tout lé jou, baille blangue In Haitian, Antillean, and Guyanais, ba/bay is used to
need road for send all day give white introduce indirect objects (see also §24.2.4.2.3.2). This
yé la, farine qué divin group, sharing ‘a significant number of features’, has been
PL DEF flour and wine (Guy., Parépou 1885/1980:51)
labelled ‘Bay Creoles’ by Goodman (1964:16f.).
‘we need roads in order to transport flour and wine
for the whites every day’
24.3.6.2 Valency-changing operations
This quotation from the first creole novel illustrates the There is no morphologically marked passive in French cre-
construction with bay ‘give’ (< Fr. bailler [obs.] ‘to give’) oles, with the exception of Mauritian and Seychellois. Pas-
which has been grammaticalized to a preposition bay or ba sive meaning can be expressed by sentences without
‘to, for’, used also to introduce indirect objects (Holm subject, referring to a non-specific human agent:
1988:184f.):
(41) Isi i plant pa manyok. (Reu.)
(37) Pote liv la ba papa ou! (Hai.) here FIN plant NEG manioc
carry book DEF to father POSS.2SG ‘Here one does not grow manioc (no manioc is grown).’
‘Bring the book to your father!’
Alternatively, the patient or beneficiary can be moved
• Directional serial verbs consisting of two motion into subject position: Sey. lasyet in lave ‘the dishes are
verbs occur in several American creoles; they are par- washed’.
ticularly frequent in Haitian. The above-mentioned A morphologically marked passive construction with the
examples pote ale, pote vini, mene ale, mene vire from auxiliary ga(n)ny ‘get’ (< Fr. gagner ‘to win, earn’) has emerged
Guiana are also attested in Antillean creoles (Bernabé in Mauritian and Seychellois. The full verb ga(n)ny/-e mean-
1983:1299). ing ‘to obtain, receive, earn’ + NOUN was the source of a
465
grammaticalization process which led to a restricted use of (44) Fanmi a-w se ki moun? (Ant.)
gany passives in Mauritian with verbs of negative physical parents P.2SG it.is which person
affection and to unrestricted and very frequent use in mod- ‘Who are your parents?’
ern Seychellois (Kriegel 1996:11-39; Heine and Kuteva
2002:145-7):
Bimorphemic interrogative phrases, considered a typical
feature of creoles, are frequent especially in American cre-
(42) Koripsyon ki swa dan domenn piblik
oles, e.g. Hai. ki bò/(ki) kote (‘which side’) ‘where’, ki jan
corruption REL be in domain public
(‘which manner’) ‘how’; Gua. ki lè (‘which hour’) ‘when’, ki
ouswa prive pa pe ganny tolere.
biten (‘which thing’) ‘what’. However, the reality is more
or private NEG PROG AUX tolerate
complicated than has been suggested (see Baker 2009:28).
(Sey., Bollée and Kriegel forthcoming)
The Haitian linguistic atlas provides four different forms for
‘Corruption is not tolerated either in the public or in
subject questions: ki moun ‘which person’, kyès ‘who’ (< Fr.
the private domain.’
qui est-ce qui lit. ‘who is it who’), ki sa or sa ‘(who) that’, and
several variants also for other wh-questions (Fattier
The creole equivalents of most French reflexive verbs are
1998:853-6).
unmarked, but reflexive voice can be expressed with object
As Baker has shown, bimorphemic interrogatives, which
pronouns, in Louisianais and Mauritian optionally rein-
exist alongside monomorphemic question words in all
forced by mèm (< Fr. même ‘-self, same’), e.g. Lou. li tchouwe
creoles (e.g. Hai. kouman, ‘how’, konbyen ‘how much/
li-mèm ‘he killed himself (committed suicide)’. The reflexive
many’; Mau. kouma ‘how’, kan ‘when’), constitute a pro-
can be expressed by kò ‘body’ + POSS in Haitian, Antillean, and
ductive pattern. The study of early texts shows that, con-
Guyanais:
trary to what had been assumed, many bimorphemic
question words were creole innovations preceded histor-
(43) Leve kò a-w la! (Ant.)
ically by monomorphemic forms inherited from French
remove body P.2SG here
(Baker 2009:32).
‘Get out of here!’
French creoles offer various focus constructions; most of
them have cleft constructions with se ( . . . ki), e.g. Hai. se li ki
Similarly, in Indian Ocean creoles reflexives can be
di m sa ‘it was HIM who told me that’. Antillean and Guyanais
expressed by POSS + (le)kor, e.g. Sey. mon demann mon lekor
show a focusing particle a instead, used with optional . . . ki
‘I ask myself (I wonder)’, in Haitian also by tèt ‘head’ + POSS (li
(REL), but in Antillean only when the focused element is
touye tèt li ‘he killed himself ’) and kadav ‘body’. The latter is also
negated:
attested for reciprocal use: yo renmen kadav yo ‘they love each
other’ (Fattier 1998:860-62). In other French creoles, reciprocity
is expressed with èn-a-lòt ‘one another, each other’ (Lou.) or yonn (45) A pa Ijeni (ki) ka bat Ijenn. (Ant.)
‘one’ . . . lòt ‘other’ (Ant.), in Guyanais, Mauritian, and Seychellois FOC NEG Ijeni (REL) PROG beat Ijenn
with a word meaning ‘comrade’ (cf. Heine and Kuteva 2002:92f.), ‘It’s not Ijeni who is beating Ijenn.’
e.g. Sey. zot kontan kanmarad ‘they love each other’.
Verb doubling in contrastive-focus constructions, a typ-
24.3.6.3 Interrogative and focus constructions ical feature of Atlantic creole languages and of non-creole
west African languages, occurs in Haitian and Antillean (also
Polar questions are normally marked by a rising intonation
for adjectives) (see also §24.2.4.3.3):
pattern, but also by an interrogative marker èsk(e)/ès/eski
(< Fr. est-ce que, lit. ‘is it that’) which is found in all French
creoles except Reunionnais. In content questions, the inter- (46) Se mache Bouki te mache, li pa te kouri.
rogative pronoun or adverb usually occupies sentence- FOC walk Bouki PST walk 3SG NEG PST run
initial position, but, depending on the context, final position (Hai., DeGraff 2007:113)
is also possible: ‘Bouki had walked, not run.’
466
PART IV
Comparative Overviews
A. Phonology
CHAPTER 25
Segmental phonology
STEPHAN SCHMID
25.1 Vowels results from the merger of lat. Ĭ Ē and Ŭ Ō into /e/ and /o/,
respectively, and served as a point of departure for several
further developments. This heptavocalic system appears in
25.1.1 Inventories of stressed vowel phonemes numerous Romance dialects and languages, including Ital-
ian, Galician, and Portuguese; Corsican and (eastern main-
No Romance language has fewer than five stressed vowel
land) Catalan also have the same seven vowels, but the
phonemes; vowel systems with seven phonemes are quite
etymological open and closed mid front vowels have been
widespread and there are varieties with more. In the fol-
reversed. These inventories have a fourth degree of aper-
lowing, the vowel systems of the major Romance languages
ture, allowing phonemic contrasts between mid high and
are presented, moving from the smaller inventories to the
mid low vowels (/e/ ~ /ɛ/, /o/ ~ /ɔ/). In principle, this is
more complex.
true of Italian (cf. §14.2.1.1), where the heptavocalic Tuscan-
Starting with pentavocalic systems, Sardinian has /i ɛ a ɔ u/
based standard contains numerous minimal pairs opposing
and Sicilian /ɪ ɛ a ɔ ʊ/ (cf. Loporcaro 2011b:112,116); the
mid to high and low vowels:
typologically least marked system is the Spanish /i e a o u/
inventory. These three vowel systems have followed differ-
(2) pizzo [ˈpitːso] ‘lace.MSG’
ent diachronic developments: whereas Sardinian simply
pezzo [ˈpɛtːso] ‘piece.MSG’
shows a merger of long and short Latin vowels of the
pazzo [ˈpatːso] ‘crazy.MSG’
same height, Sicilian and Spanish present further develop-
pozzo [ˈpotːso] ‘well.MSG’
ments of the heptavocalic ‘common Romance’ vowel system
puzzo [ˈputːso] ‘stink.1SG’
(see below).
In Spanish, the five vowel qualities are not only easy to
It is harder to find minimal pairs opposing the mid high and
discriminate perceptually but evenly placed in the articula-
mid low vowels, such as pesca /ˈpeska/ ‘fishing (N)’ and pesca
tory vowel space. Moreover, each phoneme enters into
/ˈpɛska/ ‘peach’ or fosse /ˈfos.se/ ‘was.SBJV.3SG’ and fosse
numerous minimal pairs (cf. Martínez-Celdrán et al.
/ˈfɔs.se/ ‘ditches’. Overall, the functional load of these con-
2003:256):
trasts is low and often absent from many regional varieties.
In Ibero-Romance, the ‘common Romance’ system is also
(1) piso [ˈpiso] ‘step.PRS.1SG’
found in Galician (Regueira 1999:83f.), and seven oral vowels
peso [ˈpeso] ‘weigh.PRS.1SG’
form part of the inventory of Portuguese (cf. Cruz-Ferreira
paso [ˈpaso] ‘pass.PRS.1SG’
1999:127; Mateus and d’Andrade 2000:17-23), as in (3) (from
poso [ˈposo] ‘pose.PRS.1SG’
Barbosa and Albano 2004:229):
puso [ˈpuso] ‘put.PST.3SG’
(3) sico [ˈsiku] ‘chigoe flea.MSG’
Vowel systems with six different qualities are infrequent.
seco [ˈseku] ‘dry.MSG’
One example comes from the southern Italo-Romance dia-
seco [ˈsɛku] ‘dry.1SG.PRS’
lect of Canosa di Puglia (province of Bari), which has in saco [ˈsaku] ‘bag.MSG’
addition to the five peripheral vowels /i ɛ a ɔ u/ the high soco [ˈsɔku] ‘hit.1SG’
central /ɨ/ (Stehl 1980:213-18). Another vowel system ana- soco [ˈsoku] ‘hit.MSG’
lysable as comprising six phonemes is found in Surselvan, suco [ˈsuku] ‘juice.MSG’
which presents an asymmetric six-vowel inventory /i e ɛ a ɔ
u/, with [ʊ] as a short allophone of /uː/ (cf. Liver 1999:128). The contrast between mid high and mid low vowels seems
The ‘common Romance’ vowel system (cf. Loporcaro rather robust (in particular for the front vowels), as witness
2011b:115) contains the seven vowels /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/; it minimal pairs such as séde [ˈsedɨ] ‘thirst’ ~ sède [ˈsɛdɨ] ‘seat’
This chapter © Stephan Schmid 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 471
STEPHAN SCHMID
and avó [ɐˈvo] ‘grandfather’ ~ avò [aˈvɔ] ‘grandmother’ ‘rose’ and [ˈlyːʒe] ‘light’). Occitan has /y/ (e.g. madur
(Barbosa 1994:134). [maˈdy] ‘ripe’), but lacks mid front rounded vowels
The /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/ vowel inventory also characterizes (Wheeler 1988b:247). Conversely, standard French has
central Catalan (Carbonell and Llisterri 1999:62): three oral front rounded vowels /y ø œ/ (Harris 1988:210;
Fougeron and Smith 1999:78), with a high functional load:
(4) ric [rik] ‘I laugh’
cec [sek] ‘blind’ (6) ni [ni] nu [ny] noeud [nø] nous [nu]
sec [sɛk] ‘dry’ ‘nor’ ‘nude’ ‘knot’ ‘we’
sac [sak] ‘bag’ pire [piʀ] pure [pyʀ] peur [pœʀ] pour [puʀ]
soc [sɔk] ‘log’ ‘worse ‘pure’ ‘fear’ ‘for’
soc [sok] ‘I am’
suc [suk] ‘juice’ The vowel inventory of standard French is among the most
complex in Romance, with sixteen vowel qualities /i e ɛ a ɑ ɔ
In Catalan, the contrast between mid high and mid low o u y ø œ ə ɑ̃ ɛ̃ ɔ̃ œ̃ /, distributed over four degrees of height,
vowels also survives: té [te] ‘has’ ~ te [tɛ] ‘tea’, ós [os] ‘bear’ including three front rounded vowels and four nasal vowels
~ os [ɔs] ‘bone’. An eight-vowel system is present in Balearic (cf. §18.4.1.1.1). Unsurprisingly, a vowel system with sixteen
varieties, which add /ə/ to the stressed vowel inventory (cf. phonemes is liable to simplification. The contrast between
Recasens 1991:59; Wheeler 2005:37): séc [sek] ‘fold’ ~ sec [sɛk] /a/ and /ɑ/ is no longer realized by most speakers in France,
‘I sit’ ~ sec [sək] ‘dry’. despite minimal pairs such as mal [mal] ‘badly’ ~ mâle [mɑl]
Stressed central vowels also occur in eastern Romance, ‘male’ (Harris 1988:210). Even contrasts between mid high
standard Romanian showing a different type of heptavocalic and mid low vowels /e/ ~ /ɛ/ and /o/ ~ /ɔ/ are at risk. While
system, namely /i e a ɨ ə o u/ (E. Vasiliu 1989:1; Chițoran minimal pairs for the back mid vowels are limited (e.g.
2002:7). paume [pom] ‘palm of the hand’ ~ pomme [pɔm] ‘apple’),
With respect to the ‘common Romance’ vowel system, those between the front mid vowels are important in
such an inventory is definitely more marked, in that it morphology, given that final /e/ and /ɛ/ may occur as
contains the central vowels /ɨ ə/ which are relatively rare verb suffixes, indicating different temporal and aspectual
as tonic vowels among the languages of the world. Minimal values: cf. (j’ai) chanté [ʃɑ̃te] ‘(I have) sung’ vs (je) chantais
pairs for the five peripheral vowels are formed with the ‘sing.IPFV.IND.1SG’ [ʃɑ̃tɛ], (je) chanterai [ʃɑ̃təʀe] ‘sing.FUT.1SG’ vs
following words: (je) chanterais ‘sing.COND.1SG’ [ʃɑ̃təʀɛ]. Nevertheless, in collo-
quial French there is a strong tendency for mid high and mid
(5) pic [pik] ‘(a) little’ low vowels to occur in complementary distribution, in par-
sec [sek] ‘dry’ ticular the front vowels: [e] mainly occurs in open syllables,
sac [sak] ‘bag’ [ɛ] being restricted to closed syllables.
soc [sok] ‘elder’ French exhibits considerable geographic variation in the
suc [suk] ‘juice’ varieties spoken both within and outside France (cf. Durand
et al. 2009a). In some respects, the latter exhibit more con-
There are also a number of minimal pairs with non- servative traits, as in Canadian French, where the /a/ ~ /ɑ/
peripheral vowels in stressable monosyllables such as var contrast is better preserved (Eychenne and Walker
[var] ‘whitewash’ ~ văr [vər] ‘cousin’ or sun [sun] ‘I ring’ ~ sân 2010:254). Similarly, the vowel system of Swiss French is
[sɨn] ‘breast’. more conservative than that of metropolitan French in that
Vowel inventories of greater complexity are typical of it better maintains the contrast between /e/ and /ɛ/
‘northern Romance’, which comprises Raeto- and Gallo- (Racine and Andreassen 2012:184).
Romance as well as some northern Italian dialects. The Quebec French shows some innovations which lead to
Romansh of Vallader has a nine-vowel inventory which further complexification of the vowel system:
adds to the common Romance vowel system the two
rounded front vowels /y/ and /ø/: e.g. glisch [ʎiːʃ] ‘smooth’ (7) a. pis [pi] ‘worse’ lu [ly] ‘read’ tout [tu] ‘all.M’
~ glüsch [ʎyːʃ] ‘light’ or figl [fiʎ] ‘son’ ~ fögl [føʎ] ‘sheet of b. pipe [pɪp] lutte [lʏt] toute [tʊt]
paper’. Front rounded vowels also occur in the Romansh ‘pipe’ ‘struggle’ ‘all.F’
variety of Puter and in many Gallo-Italian dialects (e.g. Mil.
[ˈlyna] ‘moon’ and [føːk] ‘fire’; cf. Sanga 1997:254; Tur. Here the tense vowels [i y u] occur in open syllables, but are
[ˈfyma] ‘(s)he.smokes’ ~ [ˈfuma] ‘we.make’ and [vøl] ‘(s)he. lowered to [ɪ ʏ ʊ] in closed syllables (Eychenne and Walker
wants’ ~ vol [vol] ‘flight’; cf. Berruto 1974:15; Gen. [ˈrøːza] 2010:255). However, there is a restriction regarding the coda
472
SEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY
consonant in closed syllables, since the high allophones also /ɔ/ ~ /ɔː/ fossa [ˈfɔsa] ‘tomb’ fosa [ˈfɔːsa] ‘false.FSG’
occur before the voiced continuant consonants [ʀ v z ʒ], /u/ ~ /uː/ culla [ˈkula] ‘ball’ cula [ˈkuːla] ‘flow.3SG’
which trigger lengthening and tensing: court [kuːʀ] ‘short.
MSG’, vive [viːv] ‘lively.FSG’, douze [duːz] ‘twelve’, juge [ʒyːʒ] The Ladin variety of Marèo has the nine vowel qualities /i e
‘judge (N)’ (Côté 2012:242). ɛ a ɔ o u y ø/, for all of which one can assume distinctive
vowel quality. Bernardasci (2013) confirms the phonetic
robustness of the duration differences with acoustic
measurements:
25.1.2 Vowel quantity
(9) /i/ ~ /iː/ /ʃkri/ ‘write.INF ’ /ʃkriː/ ‘write.3SG’
Distinctive vowel quality was a crucial feature of the phono- /ɛ/ ~ /ɛː/ /pɛr/ ‘pear’ /pɛːr/ ‘pair’
logical system of Classical Latin, but was lost with the rise of /a/ ~ /aː/ /ˈara/ ‘wing’ /ˈaːra/ ‘farmyard’
Romance as the generalized lengthening of stressed vowels /o/ ~ /oː/ /ros/ ‘brown’ /roːs/ ‘tubes’
in open syllables led to the so-called ‘quantity collapse’ (cf. /y/ ~ /yː/ /myʃ/ ‘donkey’ /myːʃ/ ‘faces’
Loporcaro 2011a:50-58; 2015a). This allophonic rule of
proto-Romance survives in Italian (e.g. /ˈkasa/ ‘house’ ! Similarly, Friulian exploits phonemic length contrasts quite
[ˈkaːsa]), being absent in Spanish and Romanian. A number systematically (Frau 1984:20-30):
of Romance varieties have established new distinctive
vowel quantities as a consequence of various phonological (10) /i/ ~ /iː/ dì [di] ‘day’ dî [diː] ‘say.INF ’
processes, in particular degemination, open syllable length- /e/ ~ /eː/ pes [pes] ‘for the’ pês [peːs] ‘weight’
ening, and diphthongization (cf. §26.1.1, Ch. 38). /a/ ~ aː/ pas [pas] ‘step’ pâs [paːs] ‘peace’
Typologically, distinctive vowel length is very marked /o/ ~ oː/ voj [voi ̯] ‘I go’ vôj [voːi̯] ‘eyes’
(Maddieson 1984:129), mostly occurring in inventories /u/ ~ /uː/ mut [mut] ‘mute’ mûd [muːt] ‘mode’
with a larger number of segments, given that vowel systems
tend to first exploit contrasts based on vowel quality Acoustic measurements have yielded large differences
(Maddieson 2011:544). This observation is confirmed by a between short and long vowels in Friulian (Baroni and
sample of 44 Italo-Romance dialects, where vowel quantity Vanelli 1999). Friulian vowel length can be distinctive only
only appears in inventories with at least ten phonemes in oxytones, whereas in Vallader and Marèo it may occur
(Schmid 1999b:260). Phonemic vowel quantity constitutes also in paroxytones.
another feature which characterizes ‘northern Romance’, Both quantity patterns of vowel length appear in north-
occurring in northern Italo-Romance dialects as well as ern Italian dialects (in particular Lombard and Emilian).
Raeto- and Gallo-Romance. Some of these varieties behave like Friulian (e.g. most Lom-
Traces of distinctive vowel length are found in some bard dialects; cf. Sanga 1997:254f.), but a few may also
varieties of French spoken outside France (§18.4.1.1.1), for display vowel quantity in stressed penultimate syllables
instance in Switzerland: here the /a/ ~ /ɑ/ contrast is (e.g. Cremonese). Diachronically, systems with distinctive
partially replaced by a difference in duration (Racine and vowel quantity only in oxytones represent a further devel-
Andreassen 2012:187), and a similar duration contrast opment of systems also allowing phonemically long vowels
has been reported for vowels in word-final open syllables in paroxytones (cf. Loporcaro 2007a; 2015a).
(e.g. ami [ami] ‘friend.M’ ~ amie [amiː] ‘friend.F’, at least if
elicited in minimal pair style; cf. Racine and Andreassen
2012:180-82).
Phonemic vowel quantity appears in all three areas trad- 25.1.3 Nasal vowel phonemes and allophonic
itionally assigned to Raeto-Romance, as may be illustrated
vowel nasalization
with examples from Romansh (Vallader), Ladin (Marèo), and
Friulian. For instance, the Vallader dialect of Scuol (lower
Engadine) offers the following minimal pairs (Gredig Vowel nasality is distinctive and very salient both in French
2000:47-50): and Portuguese, but allophonic vowel nasalization occurs in a
number of varieties, e.g. Romanian and some Italo-Romance
(8) /i/ ~ /iː/ fit [fit] ‘rent’ fid [fiːt] ‘trust.1SG’ dialects. Nasal vowels and vowel nasalization play a much
/e/ ~ /eː/ tschel [ʧel] ‘other.MSG’ tschêl [ʧeːl] ‘heaven’ greater role in Romance than is commonly realized (see
/ɛ/ ~ /ɛː/ per [pɛr] ‘for’ pêr [pɛːr] ‘pair’ Sampson 1999:351; for a comprehensive analysis of vowel
/a/ ~ /aː/ lat [lat] ‘milk’ lad [laːt] ‘large.MSG’ nasalization in Romance see Loporcaro 2011b:139-41).
473
STEPHAN SCHMID
The nasalization of a vowel in contact with a following Portuguese is different from French in that vowels may also
nasal consonant is a virtually universal phonetic process show slight allophonic nasalization beyond the syllable
(Hajek 1997a:4-31; Sampson 1999:1-31), most often occur- boundary, which is the result of a regressive assimilation
ring as an instance of partial regressive assimilation in from /ɲ/ (e.g. banho [ˈbɐ̃ɲu] ‘bath’), and there are three
tautosyllabic VN sequences. In the long term, the perceptual nasalized diphthongs: mão [mɐ̃ũ̯] ‘hand’, mãe [mɐ̃ı ̯̃] ‘mother’,
reinterpretation of such allophonic nasality as an inherent põe [põĩ̯] ‘put.3SG’.
property of the vowel (accompanied by dropping of the The closely related Galician lacks distinctive nasality and
nasal consonant) may create new phonemic nasal vowels. conserves nasal consonants in coda position, while allo-
Vowel nasality can be lost again, as is illustrated by Bgm. bu phonic nasality seems quite systematic (Regueira 1999:83,
[bu] ‘good’ < BŎNU(M) and mut [mut] ‘mountain’ < MŌNTE(M) 85). In standard peninsular Spanish, allophonic vowel nasal-
(Sanga 1984b:52). ization is marginal (Sampson 1999:167), but in Andalusian
For modern standard French, the norm prescribes the Spanish allophonic—sometimes even unconditioned or
four phonemic nasal vowels /ɑ̃ ɔ̃ ɛ̃ œ̃/. The first three spontaneous—nasality is pervasive (Sampson 1999:167,
show a high functional load: 171) and intrinsically related to the velarization of nasal
consonant in the syllable coda in words such as en [ẽŋ] ‘in’
(11) rend [ʀɑ̃] ‘give back3.SG’ rond [ʀɔ̃] ‘round’ rein [ʀɛ̃] ‘kidney’ (cf. Hauser 2012).
The contrast /ɛ̃/ vs /œ̃/ has been abandoned in the The Italo-Romance domain shows a rather diversified
Parisian-dominated norm of metropolitan French, where picture (Sampson 1999:235-81, 356-8). Substantive vowel
minimal pairs such as brin [bʀɛ̃] ‘stalk’ ~ brun [bʀœ̃] nasalization is found both in Corsica and Sardinia
‘brown’ are no longer supported by the phonological aware- (Sampson 1999:282-97; Loporcaro 2011b:140f.). Campidanese
ness of speakers. has V$NV > Ṽ$Ṽ, e.g. [ˈbĩũ] ‘wine’ < UĪNU(M). While standard
Diachronically, the four vowel phonemes of modern Italian and most central-southern dialects lack both phon-
French are the result of two ordered processes: allophonic emic and systematic allophonic nasalization, nasal vowels
vowel nasalization before a tautosyllabic nasal consonsant occur in several northern Italian dialects (Hajek 1997a:141;
followed by loss of the nasal consonant (Sampson 1999:65- Sampson 1999:357), in particular in Emilia-Romagna (Hajek
112). In popular varieties of southern France, an intermedi- 1997b:274; Loporcaro 2011b:140). Phonemic nasality is
ate stage remains audible, given that often a coda nasal assumed for Rossano (province of Massa) by Rossi
consonant is pronounced (e.g. les gens rentrent dedans [le (1976:762) and for Travo (province of Piacenza) by Zörner
ʒɑ̃ŋ rɑ̃ntrə dədɑ̃ŋ] ‘people go inside’). In these varieties, (1989:88-90). Allophonic nasality is typical for Venice
the nasal either assimilates to the place of articulation of (Zamboni 1974:12) and for most varieties of the Veneto,
the following consonant or has a default velar realization in where different variants—e.g. [ˈpẽŋsa] and [ˈpẽsa]
syllable-final position (Coquillon and Turcsan 2012:113). ‘think.3SG’—co-occur along the sociolinguistic continuum
Under certain phonological analyses, nasality is con- (Mioni and Trumper 1977:337f.). Finally, a nasalized pronun-
sidered the surface realization of an underlying VN ciation of [ɑ̃] is typical of lower-class pronunciations in
sequence rather than an inherent property of the Naples (Ledgeway 2009a:49).
vowel; cf. Durand (2009) for southern French and In southern Italy, nasal vowels are uncommon (Sampson
Barbosa (1994:134-7) and Mateus and D’Andrade 1999:242-5, 361), but they occur in a few varieties such as
(2000:17-23) for Portuguese. In principle, the diachrony the Calabrian of San Giovanni in Fiore. Here, low vowels are
and synchrony of nasal vowels in Portuguese is similar to nasalized not only in the usual VN$ context (e.g. [ˈsɜ̃nɡʊ]
that of French (Sampson 1999:176-202), and alternative ‘blood’) and before a heterosyllabic nasal consonant (e.g.
descriptions assume phonemic nasal vowels for this lan- [ˈɜ̃ːnima] ‘soul’), but even in NV sequences: e.g. [ˈmɜ̃rtʰɪ]
guage as well (Cruz-Ferreira 1999:127; Barbosa and ‘Tuesday’ (Mele 2009:32; cf. Loporcaro 2011b:141).
Albano 2004:229). Progressive nasalization also appears in a few Portuguese
Modern standard Portuguese has in addition to the seven words (e.g. mãe [mɐ̃ı ]̯̃ ‘mother’ < MATRE(M)), and another
oral vowels [i e ɛ a ɔ o u] the five nasal vowels [ı ̃ ẽ ɐ̃ õ ũ]: aspect is shared by these two Romance varieties, namely
the raising and centralization of Latin A concomitant with
its nasalization. Diachronically, the raising of low vowels
(12) quinto [ˈkĩtu] ‘fifth.MSG’
quento [ˈkẽtu] ‘warm.1SG’ before a nasal consonant also occurred in the east. Present-
canto [ˈkɐ̃tu] ‘sing.1SG’ day Romanian (which shows a considerable degree of allo-
conto [ˈkõtu] ‘short story’ phonic vowel nasalization; cf. Sampson 1999:302) exhibits
fundo [ˈfũdu] ‘ground’ the high central vowel /ɨ/ as an outcome of Latin A before
474
SEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY
nasal consonants (e.g. câmp [kɨmp] ‘field’, lână [ˈlɨnə] ‘wool’). reduces its heptavocalic stressed vowel system /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/
The present vowel quality testifies to the denasalization of a along the ‘peripheralizing’ route to a pentavocalic
vowel which must have been fully nasal at an earlier stage unstressed vowel system /i e a o u/; these five vowels
(Loporcaro 2011b:141). occur in pretonic position, as appears from the infini-
tives finire [fiˈniːre] ‘finish’, cenare [ʧeˈnaːre] ‘dine’, can-
tare [kanˈtaːre] ‘sing’, portare [porˈtaːre] ‘bring’, and
25.1.4 Unstressed vowels fumare [fuˈmaːre] ‘smoke’. Thus, in unstressed position,
the contrast between mid high and mid low vowels is
neutralized in favour of the former, as occurs, for
The presence of an equal number of stressed and unstressed example, through stress shift in verbal inflection and
vowel phonemes has been claimed to be a typical feature of word formation:
so-called ‘syllable-timed’ languages (Auer 1993:6). Con-
versely, languages regarded as ‘stress-timed’ or ‘word- (13) a. vola [ˈvoːla] ‘(s)he.flies’ vs volare [voˈlaːre] ‘fly.INF’
based’ often show a complex inventory of stressed vowels nota [ˈnɔːta] ‘(s)he.notes’ vs notare [noˈtaːre] ‘note.INF’
combined with a reduced number of unstressed (and often b. pena [ˈpeːna] ‘pain.F’ vs penoso [peˈnoːso] ‘painful’
centralized) vowels. The reduction of the vowel inventory bene [ˈbɛːne] ‘well’ vs benevolo [beˈnɛːvolo]
may follow two different routes: either the unstressed ‘benevolent’
vowels constitute a subset of the stressed vowels in the
periphery of the vowel space, or the few unstressed vowels Like Spanish, Italian lacks unstressed /u/ in word-final
show a ‘reduced’—centralized—timbre. The ‘peripheraliz- position (exceptions are loanwords such as guru). Final -i is
ing’ route of vowel reduction tends more towards the very frequent, particularly as a suffix in nominal and verbal
syllable-based pole of the typological continuum, whereas inflection (e.g. porti [ˈpɔrti], ‘bring.2SG’ or ‘harbours.M’). In
the ‘centralizing’ route points towards the stress- or word- Sicilian and other far southern Italian dialects, numerical
based pole. The lower number of unstressed vowels often vowel reduction works in a similar fashion along the ‘per-
implies the neutralization of contrasts which are fully ipheralizing’ route, but more drastically, only three
operative among the stressed vowels. Following the ‘cen- unstressed vowels /ɪ a ʊ/ remaining of the five stressed
tralizing route’, the last degree of reduction consists in the vowels /ɪ ɛ a ɔ ʊ/.
deletion of unstressed vowels. Moving away from the syllable-based rhythm type, we
Spanish comes close to the ideal ‘syllable-timed’ lan- find ‘mixed’ systems of unstressed vowel inventories which
guage, since all five stressed vowel phonemes /i e a o u/ show both peripheralization and centralization. This is the
also occur in unstressed syllables (at least in pretonic pos- case with upper southern Italo-Romance and its best-known
ition): mirar [miˈɾaɾ] ‘watch’, cenar [θeˈnaɾ] ‘dine’, cantar representative, Neapolitan, which reduces heptavocalic
[kan̪ˈtaɾ] ‘sing’, llorar [ʎoˈɾaɾ] ‘weep’, and fumar [fuˈmaɾ] stressed [i e ɛ a ɔ o u] to [i a ə u] in pretonic position (cf.
‘smoke’; word-finally, however, the inventory of unstressed Ledgeway 2009a:49; also §16.2.1.2), e.g. infinitives piglià
vowels is reduced to /e a o/ in basic vocabulary (and [e] is [piʎˈʎɑ] ‘take’, magnà [maɲˈɲɑ] ‘eat’, ferì [fəˈri] ‘wound’,
lost following consonantal sonorants: pan ‘bread’, sal ‘salt’, purtà [purˈtɑ] ‘bring’. The last example shows that, for the
mar ‘sea’). back mid vowel, Neapolitan follows the peripheralizing
Romanian also presents an identical set of vowel phon- route of vowel reduction, if one compares the infinitive
emes in unstressed and stressed syllables, /i e a ɨ ə ɔ u/. with the trochaic present 3SG form porta [ˈpɔrta] ‘(s)he.
Thus in pretonic position: a picta [a pikˈta] ‘paint’, a pleca [a brings’; the unstressed front mid vowel has been reduced
pleˈka] ‘leave’, a capta [a kapˈta] ‘capture’, a căra [a kəˈra] to schwa, and this has also occurred with verbs having
‘carry’, a cânta [a kɨnˈta] ‘sing’, a pompa [a pomˈpa] ‘pump’, a etymological pretonic /iː/: fenì [fəˈni] ‘finish’ (< FĪNĪRE).
fuma [a fuˈma] ‘smoke’. Since two of the stressed phonemes, Word-finally, Neapolitan in principle distinguishes [a] and
/ɨ ə/, are central vowels, the option of centralization as a [ə] (e.g. guagliona [gwaʎˈʎoːna] ‘girl’ ~ guaglione [gwaʎˈʎoːnə]
means of timbre reduction is unavailable. Moreover, central ‘boy’), but nowadays there seems to be a growing tendency
vowels appear in minimal pairs where unstressed word- for [a] to merge with [ə] word-finally, especially in phrase-
final vowels bear morphological information: cf. casă final position.
[ˈkasə] ‘house.SG’, casa [ˈkasa] ‘house.the.FSG’, case [ˈkase] As for northern Romance, it is well known that, in
‘house.PL’. diachrony, unstressed proto-Romance vowels underwent
Nevertheless, in many phoneme inventories the massive syncope in many varieties, both in pretonic and
unstressed vowel phonemes are fewer than the stressed, word-final position. Diachronic apocope of all word-final
and often neutralization occurs. For instance, Italian vowels except continuants of -A is a general feature of
475
STEPHAN SCHMID
many northern Italian dialects (cf. Loporcaro 2011a:68). Brazilian Portuguese reduces its unstressed vowels along
A similar pattern appears in the nearby Romansh varieties, the peripheralizing route, obtaining the same inventory as
which show most of their unstressed vowels in pretonic Italian /i e a o u/ (Mateus and D’Andrade 2000:18).
position /i/ and /u/ (e.g. Vld. pisser [piˈseːr] ‘sorrow’, pussant There is a deeper difference between European and Bra-
[puˈsant] ‘mighty’, s-chüsar [ʃcyˈzaːr] ‘to excuse’), whereas zilian Portuguese which involves not the timbre of the
the number of word-final unstressed vowels is heavily unstressed vowels, but their realization vs syncope. In
reduced; in addition, post-tonic /e/ and unstressed /a/ fact, European Portuguese applies syncope heavily to pre-
are centralized to [ə] and [ɐ] (e.g. Vld. pitschen [ˈpiʧən] tonic [ɨ], so that a verb such as receber /ʀɨsɨˈbeɾ/ ‘receive.INF ’
‘small.MSG’, pitschna [ˈpiʧnɐ] ‘small.FSG’, raschun [rɐˈʒun] is [ʀzˈβeɾ]. Brazilian Portuguese prefers the universally
‘reason’). unmarked CV syllable pattern, adding anaptyctic and para-
In modern French, schwa is the diachronic outcome of gogic vowels to English loanwords such as futbol [ˌfuʧiˈbou̯]
final -A and unstressed E (e.g. porte [pɔʀtə] ‘door’ < PORTA(M); and rock [ˈʁɔki].
devoir [dəvwaʀ] ‘must’ < DEBĒRE). Perceptually, the timbre of
this vowel may sometimes resemble either [ø] or [œ], but
according to acoustic measurements it is best transcribed as
25.1.5 Metaphony and vowel harmony
[ə] (Fougeron et al. 2007). Phonologically, the so-called e
muet (‘mute e’) or e caduc (‘falling e’) offers an intriguing In the preceding section, we have encountered numerous
pattern of variation, its presence/absence being determined verb forms where the quality of the stem vowel alternates
by a number of stylistic factors; for instance, formal dis- according to the stressed or unstressed position of the
course is more likely to contain schwas, whose occurrence syllable concerned. Other vowel alternations in Romance
may even be mandatory in poems and songs for metrical are determined by the quality of the following vowel. In
reasons. Final schwa is not retained in the citation forms of modern French, some verbs display a mid low vowel in
words such as porte ‘door’ (transcribed in dictionaries as monosyllabic forms such as aime [ɛm] ‘(s)he.loves’ and mêle
[pɔʀt]), but the norm prescribes the insertion of an e muet [mɛl] ‘(s)he.mixes’, whereas in bisyllabic forms the stem has
in those phonosyntactic contexts where otherwise a string [e] if the following vowel is mid high as well (aimer [eme]
of three consonants would arise: thus, porte ouverte ‘open ‘love.INF ’, mêlé [mele] ‘mix. PST.PTCP’) and [ɛ] if the following
door’ is normally realized as [pɔʀt uvɛʀt], whereas porte vowel is low (aimable [ɛmabl] ‘lovable’). Such regressive
fermée ‘closed door’ should be [pɔʀtə fɛʀme]. Nevertheless, distance assimilation is gradient rather than categorical
speakers of modern French often disobey this so-called ‘law (Nguyen and Fagyal 2008), but it potentially constitutes
of the three consonants’ (cf. also §18.4.1.3). the initial state of ‘metaphony’, a (morpho)phonological
The peripheral varieties of the Iberian Peninsula display process which has extensively marked the history of the
patterns of vowel reduction unknown to Castilian. While Romance languages.
Galician and Valencian still share the same inventory of In Romance, metaphony is a quite widespread phono-
unstressed vowels (/i e a o u/ in word-internal and /e a o/ logical process; stem vowel alternations often bear mor-
in word-final position), central and eastern Catalan offers a phological information concerning the categories of
different picture: only unstressed /i/ and /u/ preserve their person, gender, and number, thus belonging to the realm
timbre, whereas back mid vowels are raised to /u/ and all of morphonology. Basically, metaphony is triggered by a
other vowels are reduced to schwa (Carbonell and Llisterri high vowel /i/ or /u/ occurring in a following syllable
1999:62). There is no difference between word-internal and (usually but not always adjacent), which determines the
word-final unstressed vowels: cf. portar [puɾˈta] ‘carry.INF ’, raising or diphthongization of preceding vowels; the target
porto [ˈpɔɾtu] ‘carry.1SG’, porti [ˈpɔɾti] ‘carry.SBJV.3SG’, porta vowels are mostly mid, but may also be low. In some
[ˈpɔɾtə] ‘door.FSG’; escalfat [əskəlˈfat] ‘warmed up’. varieties, the original triggering vowels have been weak-
Similarly, European Portuguese reduces its unstressed ened either by centralization or by apocope, so that the
vowel inventory along both the peripheralizing and the original phonetic motivation of the morphological rules
centralizing route (Cruz-Ferreira 1999; Mateus and became opaque.
D’Andrade 2000:17-23): of the seven stressed oral vowels, In Logudorese, metaphony constitutes an allophonic rule
only unstressed /u i/ occur, and two centralized vowels which is fully transparent in synchrony: the mid vowels
/ɐ ɨ/ are additionally present: /ɛ ɔ/ are raised to [e o] before /i u/ (cf. Jones 1997:317;
Loporcaro 2011b:127):
(14) moro [ˈmɔɾu] ‘reside.1SG’ vs morar [muɾˈaɾ] ‘reside.INF ’
chego [ˈʃɛɡu] ‘arrive.1SG’ vs chegar [ʃɨˈɡaɾ] ‘arrive.INF ’ (15) a. [ˈpɛːðɛ] ‘foot’ [ˈbeːni] ‘come.IMP.2SG’
pago [ˈpaɡu] ‘pay.1SG’ vs pagar [pɐˈɡaɾ] ‘pay.INF ’. b. [ˈsɔːla] ‘alone.FSG’ [ˈsoːlu] ‘alone.M.SG’
476
SEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY
Metaphony in nominal inflection is typical of Portuguese, Metaphonic raising of /a/ is also very common in the
where gender is mainly signalled both by suffixes with dialects of northern Italy (cf. Rohlfs 1966:43f; Maiden
different vowel phonemes and by an alternation between 1991a:234 and passim).
mid low and mid high vowels in the stem: A similar morphophonological raising of low vowels
appears in Romanian, e.g. in fată [ˈfatə] ‘girl’ vs fete [ˈfete]
(16) a. essa [ˈɛsɐ] ‘this.FSG’ esse [ˈesɨ] ‘this.MSG’ ‘girls’. In the marking of number, Romanian also presents an
b. nova [ˈnɔvɐ] ‘new.FSG’ novo [ˈnovu] ‘new.MSG’ alternation between diphthongs and simple vowels: cf. seară
[ˈse̯arə] ‘evening.F’ vs seri [serj] ‘evenings.F’, and floare
In most cases, it is the following high back vowel which [ˈflo̯are] ‘flower.F’ vs flori [florj] ‘flowers.F’. What historically
triggers the raising of the stem vowel, and the alternation underlies these alternations is a contrast /ɛ/ vs /e/, /ɔ/ vs
between the mid high and mid low degree of aperture seems /o/, possibly reflecting the raising of previously lowered mid
to be less regular with front vowels; indeed, with many vowels under metaphony; here, diphthongization applied
adjectives, the mid low front vowel is used for both the to non-metaphonized low mid vowels (cf. Loporcaro
masculine and the feminine, e.g. perto [ˈpɛɾtu] ‘close.MSG’ and 2011b:128).
perta [ˈpɛɾtɐ] ‘close.FSG’. In several regions of northwestern Finally turning to northern Italy, metaphony mainly
Ibero-Romània such as Cantabria and Asturias (Penny 2009), occurred as raising of mid vowels triggered by word-final
unstressed mid vowels are raised under the influence of a /i/, which was sometimes morphologized as a means of
following stressed vowel, e.g. in the infinitives midir ‘to plural formation and in the second person singular of the
measure’ and murir ‘to die’ (cf. Cst. medir and morir). present (Rohlfs 1966:94f; Savoia and Maiden 1997:20). More-
In Italo-Romance, metaphony occurs in almost all dialects over, metaphony has been lost in many dialects as a phon-
except Tuscan (but cf. §38.3.1). Nearly all metaphonic sys- etic process, and even in those which have retained
tems have raising of high mid vowels, but some differ in metaphonetic plural formation, it is restricted to particular
respect of what they do to low mid vowels. In central and lexical items. For instance, vowel raising is no longer pro-
southern Italy, a great variety of metaphonic phenomena ductive in the Veneto (Tuttle 1997b:266), where it only
both in verbal and in nominal inflection has been docu- appears in a few remnants such as [ˈtoːzo] ‘boy’ vs [ˈtuːzi]
mented (cf. Maiden 1991a:154-79; Savoia and Maiden ‘boys, children’; here, despite its lexical fossilization, the
1997). Simplifying this very diversified picture, one can original phonetic motivation of the vowel raising is still
mention two basic patterns of metaphony (cf. Loporcaro transparent, given the conservation of the final vowel.
2011b:132). The so-called metafonia sabina or ciociaresca, pre- This is not the case in those Gallo-Italian dialects where
dominating in central Italy, basically consists of an alterna- stem vowel alternation appears in the plural formation of
tion between mid low and mid high stem vowels (outcome certain lexical items, given that the originally triggering
of Ĕ and Ŏ) triggered by /i/ and /u/ (cf. the examples in 17a word-final /i/ has been lost through apocope. Still, traces
from Servigliano, Marche, quoted in Loporcaro 2011b:132). of metaphony are found in a number of Lombard and Pied-
In a wider area of southern Italy we find so-called ‘Neapol- montese dialects, as is shown by the following examples
itan’ metaphony, which produces the diphthongization of from Mendrisio (Ticino): tré ‘three.F’ vs trii ‘three.M’, curtèll
mid vowels followed by high vowels (17b): ‘knife.M’ vs curtéi ‘knives.M’, bò ‘ox.M’ vs böö ‘oxen.M’ (Lurà
1987:52f.).
(17) a. [ˈmɔːre] ‘(s)he.dies’ [ˈmoːri] ‘you.SG.die’ In principle, metaphony (sometimes called Umlaut) can
[ˈpɛːde] ‘foot.M’ [ˈpeːdi] ‘feet.M’ be considered one type of ‘vowel harmony’, i.e. regressive
b. [ˈmɔːrə] ‘(s)he.dies’ [ˈmwoːrə] ‘you.SG.die’ distance assimilation between two vowels, where the typic-
[ˈpɛːrə] ‘foot.M’ [ˈpjeːrə] ‘feet.M’ ally stressed target vowel belongs to the word stem and the
typically unstressed triggering vowel belongs to a suffix.
Most dialects of central and southern Italy coincide with Nevertheless, the term ‘vowel harmony’ is more often
regard to the treatment of proto-Romance /e/ and /o/, employed for progressive distance assimilation between
which are raised to /i/ und /u/: cf. Nap. [ˈneːra] ‘black.FSG’, several vowels, and this phenomenon has been documented
[ˈniːrə] ‘black.MSG’, [ˈkorːə] ‘(s)he.runs’ [ˈkurːə] ‘you.SG.run’. in a number of Romance varieties as well. Moreover, total
Metaphony most often produces the raising of a mid regressive assimilation of word-internal unstressed vowels
vowel, according to the ‘height hierarchy’ postulated by occurs in some dialects of central Italy, e.g. in the valley of
Maiden (1991a:123f.), but raising of /a/ does occur in some Aniene (in the Marche region): cf. [ˈmanːuku] ‘handle.SG’,
dialects of upper southern Italy, in particular in Abruzzo [ˈpɛtːene] ‘comb.SG’ vs [ˈmanːiki] ‘handle.PL’, [ˈpetːini] ‘comb.
and the Bay of Naples, producing alternations such as PL’ (Schirru 2012); for regressive vowel harmony in southern
[ˈkaːnə] ‘dog.M’ vs [ˈkɛːnə] ‘dogs.M’ (cf. Rohlfs 1966:44f). Italian dialects see Maiden (1988b).
477
STEPHAN SCHMID
Low-level (i.e. phonetic) progressive vowel assimilation varieties as a uvular trill [ʀ] or fricative [ʁ]. Finally, the
occurs in Friulian, where a slight raising of final mid vowels three approximants /j w ɥ/ are characteristic of French:
is triggered by preceding stressed vowels: [ˈmo̞vile̞] ‘move. bien [bjɛ̃] ‘well’, noir [nwaʀ] ‘black’, nuit [nɥi] ‘night’.
IMP.2SG=her’ vs [ˈkɔpilɛ] ‘kill.IMP.2SG=her’ (Miotti 2009). Like French, Castilian Spanish has a consonant system
A more salient form of progressive vowel harmony is with 20 phonemes (Green 1988a:81-5; Martínez-Celdrán
found in central Sardinian, for instance in the dialect of et al. 2003:255f.; cf. also §22.2.2). We find the same six
Àllai; here, final -E is sistematically raised to /i/ after /u/ stops /p t k b d g/, but four unvoiced fricatives with
and /i/ and conserved after /ɔ/ and /ɛ/: [ˈluːɣi] ‘light’, phoneme status /f θ s x/; the three voiced fricatives [β ð
[ˈpiːɣi] ‘tar’ vs [iˈnːɔɣe] ‘here’, [ˈfaɛˑrɛ] ‘to do’ (Loporcaro ɣ] occur as contextual variants of the voiced stops /b d g/
2011c:122). The most radical case of vowel harmony is (often realized as approximants, e.g. [ð̞]). Spanish lacks a
represented by the total progressive assimilation which labio-dental voiced fricative (the letters and <v> both rep-
occurs in some Valencian dialects (Jiménez 1998), where resent the phoneme /b/ and its allophone [β]). There is only
the stressed mid low vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ are copied to the one affricate, /ʧ/ (e.g. in chica [ˈʧika] ‘girl’), and the same
following word-final unstressed vowels derived from Latin three nasals appear as in French /m n ɲ/: cf. cama [ˈkama]
-A: [ˈtɛrɛ] ‘earth’ < TĔRRA(M), [ˈkɔzɔ] ‘thing’ < CAUSA(M). ‘bed’, cana [ˈkana] ‘grey.haired.FSG’, caña [ˈkaɲa] ‘cane’.
Finally, extremely diversified patterns of progressive Regarding liquids, standard Spanish has the alveolar lateral
vowel assimilation have been documented for the dialects /l/ (e.g. vuelo [ˈbwelo] ‘flight’) and, in principle, also the
of Canton Ticino (Switzerland) and some neighbouring dia- palatal lateral /ʎ/ (e.g. calle [ˈkaʎe] ‘street’), but the latter
lects of northern Italy, where vowel harmony can be total or has undergone a number of further developments in several
mixed (cf. Delucchi forthcoming). Total harmony appears in varieties. The two vibrants /r/ and /ɾ/ form phonemic
the dialect of Claro, where the final unstressed vowel simply contrasts intervocalically, e.g. carro [ˈkaro] ‘car’ ~ caro
copies the stressed vowel of the stem, as appears from [ˈkaɾo] ‘expensive’; word-initially, only the trill occurs and
words such as [ˈtɛrɛ] ‘earth’ < TĔRRA(M) and [ˈlunu] ‘moon’ elsewhere only the tap (e.g. rojo [ˈrːoxo] ‘red’, puerta
< LŪNA(M). A mixed system is found in Monte Carasso, where [ˈpweɾta] ‘door’). Finally, we find a palatal and a labial-
/a/ is the default final vowel for feminine nouns with velar approximant, such as in bien [bjen] ‘well’ and bueno
etymological final -A, except when the stem has a stressed [ˈbweno] ‘good’; word-initially, the palatal glide is hardened
mid low vowel: [gaˈlina] ‘hen’, [ˈgura] ‘throat’, and [ˈyɟa] and realized as a palatal affricate [ ɟ ʝ] in several varieties
‘grape’ vs [paˈdɛlɛ] ‘pan’ and [ˈpɔrto] ‘door’. (e.g. yo [ ɟ ʝo] ‘I’).
In Portuguese, there is arguably a phoneme system with
21 consonants (cf. §23.2.2), with some differences between
European Portuguese (Parkinson 1988:138; Cruz-Ferreira
25.2 Consonants 1999:126; Mateus and D’Andrade 2000:10f.) and Brazilian
Portuguese (Barbosa and Albano 2004:228). We find the
25.2.1 Consonant inventories same series of stops and fricatives as in French, /p t k b
d ɡ/ and /f s ʃ v z ʒ/. Word-initially, the sibilants form
From a diachronic perspective, all Romance languages have minimal pairs such as sina [ˈsinɐ] ‘fate’ ~ zina [ˈzinɐ] ‘peak’
incremented their inventories as compared to Latin, with and chá [ʃa] ‘tea’ ~ já [ʒa] ‘already’. In coda position, how-
many of the new consonants belonging to the palatal (or ever, the contrast between the four phonemes /s ʃ z ʒ/ is
palato-alveolar) place of articulation (see Ch. 39). neutralized, as in the European Portuguese pronunciation of
Modern French has an economical and rather ‘regular’ the expression os olhos tristes da menina [uz ˈɔʎuʃ ˈtriʃtɨʒ dɐ
consonant system which largely exploits the feature mɨˈninɐ] ‘the sad eyes of the girl’: not only is the feature
[voice] (Harris 1988:213-18; Fougeron and Smith 1999:79; [voice] specified according to the following segment, but
cf. also §18.4.1.1.4). Among its 20 phonemes, there are six sibilants are also palatalized in utterance-final and precon-
stops /p t k b d g/ at the ‘canonical’ three places of articu- sonantal position (this is not the case in Brazilian Portu-
lation (labial, dental, and velar) and six fricatives /f s ʃ v z ʒ/. guese). Like French, European Portuguese has no affricates,
Fricatives occur in word-final position, as shown by face [fas] which in turn appear as allophones in Brazilian Portuguese
‘face’ ~ phase [faz] ‘phase’ and cache [kaʃ] ‘(s)he.hides’ ~ cage as a result of palatalization. In both varieties we find the
[kaʒ] ‘cage’. Affricates are lacking in the core lexicon of same three nasals /m n ɲ/ as in French and Spanish: gama
French. There are three nasals /m n ɲ/, the last only [ˈgɐmɐ] ‘range’, gana [ˈgɐnɐ] ‘desire’, ganha [ˈgɐɲɐ] ‘(s)he.
occurring in intervocalic and word-final positions (cf. bai- earns’. Again, we find an alveolar and a palatal lateral
gnoire [bɛɲwaʀ] ‘bathtub’, vigne [viɲ] ‘vine’). As to liquids, /l ʎ/ (cf. fala [ˈfalɐ] ‘speech’ ~ falha [ˈfaʎɐ] ‘fault’), but Euro-
there is one lateral /l/ and one vibrant, realized in most pean Portuguese has an additional contextual variant [ɫ],
478
SEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY
since laterals are velarized in coda position, e.g. mal [mal̴] pronunciation of grigio [ˈɡriːʒo] ‘grey.MSG’). The phonemic
‘badly’ (the ‘dark l’ has been vocalized in Brazilian Portu- contrast between /s/ and /z/ has a low functional load and
guese, hence pronunciations such as [mau̯]). As in Spanish, exists only intervocalically in the Tuscan-based standard
there is a phonemic contrast between two r sounds, with a norm (cf. §14.2.2). Otherwise, [s] and [z] show a purely
great variety of phonetic realizations both within Portugal complementary distribution: [s] occurs before vowels in
and Brazil. The approximants /j w/ occur as onglides, in word-initial position (e.g. sole [ˈsoːle] ‘sun’, but elsewhere
words such as quatro [ˈkwatɾu] ‘four’ and quieto [ˈkjɛtu] the sibilant shares the feature [voice] with the following
‘quiet.MSG’, but there are also many falling diphthongs, e.g. consonant (e.g. stanco [ˈstaŋko] ‘tired’, sbaglio [ˈzbaʎːo] ‘mis-
in pai [pai̯] ‘father’ and pau [pau̯] ‘stick’ (cf. Mateus and take’); between vowels, the northern varieties of Italian
d’Andrade 2000:18). employ the voiced sibilant and the southern varieties trad-
The phonemic inventory of Catalan varies according to itionally have the voiceless one (but among the younger
different descriptions (Wheeler 1988b:171; Carbonell and generations, intervocalic /z/ is spreading southwards very
Llisterri 1999:61; Wheeler 2005:11); here we will assume 22 fast; cf. §14.2.2). Italian has the four affricates /ʦ ʣ ʧ ʤ/,
consonant phonemes (cf. also §21.2.2). Along with the with again a low functional load for the contrast /ʦ/ ~ /ʣ/,
canonical six stops /p t k b d ɡ/, Catalan has the five whereas numerous minimal pairs are found for /ʧ/ ~ /ʤ/
fricatives /f s ʃ z ʒ/, e.g. foc [fok] ‘fire ’, soc [sok] ‘I.am’, such as celato [ʧeˈlaːto] ‘hidden’ ~ gelato [ʤeˈlaːto] ‘ice
caixa [ˈkaʃə] ‘box’, casa [ˈkazə] ‘house’, and joc [ʒok] ‘play (N)’; cream’. There are three nasals /m n ɲ/, two laterals /l ʎ/,
the voiced labio-dental fricative [v] occurs in Tarragona and one vibrant /r/, and two approximants /j w/. The three
Majorca, whereas central Catalan shows the same allo- phonemes /ʃ/, /ɲ/, and /ʎ/, the latter only occurring inter-
phonic [b β] alternation as Castilian (e.g. in the adjective vocalically, are ‘intrinsically’ long (e.g. lascia [ˈlaʃːa] ‘(s)he.
blava [ˈblaβə] ‘blue.FSG’). Unlike Spanish, Catalan has both leaves’, sogno [ˈsoɲːo] ‘dream’, figlia [ˈfiʎːa] ‘daughter’); the
the unvoiced and the voiced palato-alveolar affricate: des- same holds for intervocalic /ʦ ʣ/ (e.g. pazzo [ˈpatːso] ‘crazy.
patx [dəsˈpaʧ] ‘office’, metge [ˈmeʤə] ‘doctor’. Again, Catalan MSG’, mezzo [ˈmɛdːzo] ‘half.MSG’).
has the three nasals /m n ɲ/; from a purely distributional A slightly more numerous consonant inventory is found
point of view, one could attribute phoneme status also to in three minor Romance varieties, namely Friulian (cf.
the velar [ŋ] in words such as sang [saŋ] ‘blood’, but minimal §10.2.2) and the two Romansh varieties of Surselvan and
pairs can be found only with proper names of foreign origin. Vallader (cf. §12.2.2). Friulian basically shares the conson-
Contrasts among nasals are maintained word-finally, as antal system of Italian (cf. Miotti 2002:238), with two differ-
appears from the minimal pair llum [ʎum] ‘light’ ~ lluny ences: there are two palatal stops /c ɟ/, but a palatal lateral
[ʎuɲ] ‘distant’; note that Catalan has a palatal lateral /ʎ/ does not occur; thus Friulian counts 24 consonant phon-
which occurs word-initially. As to vibrants, we find the emes. Similarly, the inventories of the Romansh varieties
same phonemic contrast as in Spanish between the trill have in addition to the Italian consonants the four phon-
/r/ and the tap /ɾ/: cf. the minimal pair carreta [kaˈrɛtə] emes /ʒ c ɟ h/: thus, the consonantal system of Vallader
‘small car’ ~ careta [kaˈɾɛtə] ‘mask’. The approximant /j/ numbers 27 items (Schmid 2010:186), whereas Surselvan has
mainly occurs as offglide, whereas /w/ also appears as 25, lacking /ʣ/ and /ʤ/ (Liver 1999:129-33).
onglide: aigua [ˈai̯ɡwə] ‘water’, pau [pau̯] ‘peace’, cuatre
[ˈkwatrə] ‘four’ (Carbonell and Llisterri 1999:62).
Romanian, too, has 22 consonant phonemes (cf. Mallinson
25.2.2 Retroflex consonants
1988:395; Chiţoran 2002:10; see also §8.2.2). Unlike French
it also has the glottal fricative /h/ and the three affricates Retroflex consonants are relatively rare among the world’s
/ʧ ʤ ʦ/ (as in facem [ˈfaʧem] ‘we do’, mergem [merʤem] languages (Maddieson 1984:32, 81). Within Romance, they
‘we go’, and puţin [puˈʦin] ‘a little’), but lacks /ɲ/ and /ɥ/. occur in Sardinia, Corsica, and the extreme south of Italy
As for /j w/, the palatal approximant occurs both as onglide (Sicily, southern Calabria, Salento), as well as in some
and as offglide (e.g. piaţă [ˈpjaʦə] ‘market’, ceai [ʧai̯] ‘tea’), regions of southern America (Brazil, Argentine, and Chile).
whereas /w/ only appears as an offglide (e.g. greu [greu̯] In the Mediterranean area, a widespread diachronic pro-
‘heavy.MSG’). cess is retroflection of -LL-, which appears as a retroflex
Italian has the largest consonant inventory of the major geminate stop [ɖː] in Sardinian (both Campidanese and
Romance languages, with 23 phonemes (cf. Bertinetto and Logudorese, e.g. [ˈnuɖːa] < NULLA(M) ‘nothing’; cf. Jones
Loporcaro 2005:132)—if one counts the two approximants 1997:377) and in southern Corsican (e.g. [ˈiɖːa] < ILLA(M)
/j w/ as consonants (otherwise, Italian has 21 phonemes; cf. ‘she’; see Dalbera-Stefanaggi 1997:307). Retroflex stops of
§14.2.2). There are six stops /p t k b d ɡ/ and five fricatives the same type (e.g. ILLU(M) > [ˈiɖːu]) are attested in several
/f s ʃ v z/; [ʒ] only occurs in the Tuscan vernacular (cf. the Calabrian dialects (Loporcaro 2001c:215), but most far
479
STEPHAN SCHMID
southern Italian dialects present as the outcome of -LL- merger of [ʎ] and [j] has led to an opposite process of word-
another retroflex consonant with a different manner of initial strengthening, which appears in affricated pronunci-
articulation, namely the affricate [ɖːʐ], as in [ˈiɖːʐu] < ILLU(M) ations of words such as yo [ɟʝo] ‘I’ and llorar [ɟ ʝoˈɾaɾ] ‘to
(see Loporcaro 2001c:215-20). Analysing the phoneme inven- weep’. Typical of the River Plate area is the phenomenon
tory of these varieties from a synchronic point of view, of žeísmo, a further development towards a palato-alveolar
[ɖːʐ] constitutes the voiced counterpart of /ʈːʂ/, which in fricative, originally voiced but nowadays more often voice-
turn is the result of the consonant cluster *-ttr-, e.g. Sic. less: e.g. [ˈkaʒe] or [ˈkaʃe] ‘street’ (Lipski 1994:170).
[ˈkwaʈːʂʊ] ‘four’; the voiceless retroflex affricate [ʈʂ] also Turning to obstruents, the most obvious diachronic pro-
occurs as a singleton, e.g. Sic. [ˈmaːʈʂɪ] ‘mother’ (Loporcaro cess is the palatalization of Latin velars C-, G- before front
2001c:220-22). vowels in words such as CĒNA(M) ‘dinner’ > It. [ˈʧeːna], Ro.
In the Mediterranean area a third pattern, derived from [ˈʧinə]. Less common is the diachronic palatalization of the
STR, has led to a retroflex articulation with a fricative elem- velars C-, G- before /a/, a typical feature of northern
ent. For Corsican, Dalbera-Stefanaggi (1997:307) reports a Romance (see §39.3.1), which first gave rise to the palatal
triconsonantal realization as in [ˈnɔʂʈɽu] ‘our’ < NOSTRU(M), stops [c ɟ]. This stage is still present in Romansh and
whereas in many Sicilian dialects this articulation is tran- Friulian, as illustrated by the words for ‘dog’ < CANE(M) and
scribed as biconsonantal fricative plus vibrant cluster [ʂɽ] ‘cat’ < CATTU(M), which are cjan [caːŋ], gjat [ɟat] in Friulian
(cf. Consolino 1994:164f.). For the Calabrian dialect of (Miotti 2002:242) and chan [can], giat [ɟat] in Vallader
S. Giovanni in Fiore, this sound is analysed by Mele (Schmid 2010:186). This feature has been invoked as an
(2009:78) as a single articulation [ɽ̊ː] (e.g. [ˈɽ̊ːɜ̃njʊ] argument for the unity of the Raeto-Romance varieties,
‘stranger’). but a closer look at its areal distribution reveals that palatal
Finally, a retracted and devoiced pronunciation of the stops also appear in conservative Alpine Lombard dialects,
vibrant in /tɾ/ clusters is widespread in Latin American in words such as chjascia [ˈcaːʃɐ] ‘(s)he.chases’ or ghjévum
Spanish, e.g. in the highlands of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, [ˈɟeːvum] ‘we had’ (Schwarzenbach 2012:113); it is safe to
and Bolivia, as well as northern Argentina and Chile (Penny assume that once the palatalization of C-, G- before /a/ was a
2000:157). An affricated realization of /tɾ/ or /dɾ/ may be common process in large areas of northern Italy (cf. Tuttle
found in Chile (Lipski 1994:200): encontró [eŋkon̪ˈʈʂo] ‘(s)he. 1997a:29). In many northern Romance varieties, the palatal
found’ and pondría [pon̪ˈɖʐia] ‘(s)he.would.put’. stops have developed further into palato-alveolar affricates
or fricatives (e.g. Fr. chèvre [ʃɛvʀ] ‘goat’ < CAPRA(M)), and at
present the merger of /ʧ/ and /c/ appears to be a linguistic
25.2.3 Palatal consonants and palatalization change in progress in Vallader (Schmid 2011).
Palatal stops also occur in many dialects of southern Italy
Romance languages have developed a number of palato- as continuants of CL- and PL- clusters: cf. Bar. [ˈcatːsə]
alveolar and palatal consonants such as [ʃ ʒ ʧ ʤ ʎ ɲ c ɟ], ‘square’ < PLATEA(M) (Loporcaro 1997a:342) and Cal. [ˈcaːβe]
which have arisen from clusters with /j/ (the only palatal ‘key’ < CLAUE(M) (dialect of San Giovanni in Fiore; cf. Schmid
consonant of Latin), from geminates, or from the affrication 2011:1762). In these dialects, unlike Romansh, the palatal
of velar stops followed by front vowels (cf. Loporcaro stops seem more resistant to merger with the palato-
2011b:143–50; see also Ch. 39). Present-day Romance lan- alveolar affricates, despite their typological markedness.
guages also show a number of synchronic alternations Different forms of palatalization processes are also at
where palatalization is involved. work synchronically in several Romance varieties; for
The palatal nasal /ɲ/ occurs in almost every Romance instance, alveolar sibilants often become palato-alveolar
language (except Romanian), whereas the palatal lateral [ʎ] before a following consonant. A general *sC constraint
is less common and stable, as it does not form part of the occurs in Romansh and in northern Italo-Romance dialects:
French inventory and is subject to variation in other lan- cf. stupenta [ʃtuˈpɛntɐ] ‘marvellous.FSG’ in Surselvan and
guages. In some southern and central varieties of standard crìscto [ˈkriʃto] ‘Christ’, sc-chjalèwru [ʃcaˈleu̯ru] ‘outdoor
Italian [ʎː] is replaced with [j], so voglio [ˈvɔʎːo] ‘I want’ is stairway’ in the Ticino dialect of Brugnasco (Glaser and
pronounced as [ˈvɔjːo]. The same weakening process is very Loporcaro 2012). Unconditioned palatalization of /s z/ is
common in many varieties of Spanish (in particular in fast found in several dialects of southern Italy (e.g. northern
speech, but not only), where [ʎ] can be realized as an Calabria; cf. Rohlfs 1966:380), whereas in Neapolitan the
approximant, hence calle ‘street’ is pronounced [ˈkaje]. process only applies before labial and velar consonants,
This phenomenon of yeísmo (cf. §22.2.2.5) is indeed wide- thus depending on the acoustic feature [grave]: cf. sfizio
spread in the Spanish-speaking world (cf. Penny [ˈʃfitːsjə] ‘pleasure’, scugnizzo [ʃkuˈɲːitːsə] ‘rascal’, but chisto
2000:120f.,147f.; Gómez and Molina Martos 2013), and the [ˈkistə] ‘this’ (Sornicola 1997b:333; Ledgeway 2009a:99). The
480
SEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY
opposite occurs in Agnone (Molise), where /s/ is palatalized The same pattern as in Galician also appears in northern
before coronals, but not before velars and labials Portugal (e.g. in the region of Oporto), whereas the central
(Meo 2003). and southern pronunciation (e.g. Lisbon) contrasts a dorsal
In Brazilian Portuguese, the dental stops /t d/ are real- with an apical rhotic: cf. carro [ˈkaʀu] ‘car’ vs caro [ˈkaɾu]
ized as palato-alveolar affricates if followed by a high front ‘expensive’.
vowel (Barbosa and Albano 2004:228), e.g. in the name of In Latin America, there are additional rhotic variants in
the drink batida de coco [baˈʧida ʤi ˈkokʊ] (cf. the alterna- both Spanish and Portuguese. Besides the retroflex variants
tion between gato [ˈgatʊ] ‘cat’ and its diminutive gatinho of /tɾ/ clusters, /r/ is realized as a ‘groove fricative’ (e.g.
[gaˈʧiɲʊ] ‘kitten’). tierra [ˈtjer̝a] ‘land’) in several regions, for instance in north-
ern Argentina (Lipski 1994:171; Penny 2000:157). A more
diversified picture is offered by Brazilian Portuguese,
25.2.4 Rhotics and rhotacism where the common Ibero-Romance contrast between the
‘weak’ and the ‘strong’ rhotic is realized in different forms.
Cross-linguistically, the prototypical rhotic is a coronal The variety of São Paulo illustrated by Barbosa and Albano
trill [r]; this articulation occurs in many Romance lan- (2004:228) contrasts an alveolar tap and a voiced velar
guages, including Romanian, Sardinian, Romansh, and Ital- fricative: caro [ˈkaɾu] ‘expensive’ ~ carro [ˈkaɣu] ‘car’. The
ian. In the latter two, the uvular [ʀ] trill also occurs as a ‘weak’ rhotic /ɾ/ may be dropped word-finally in São Paulo,
free variant, characterizing individual speakers of some in particular in infinitives, e.g. cantar [kanˈta] ‘to sing’;
regional varieties. Uvular r-sounds are typical of Surselvan further south (e.g. state of Paraná), /ɾ/ is pronounced as
and can be heard in some regions of northern Italy, in an approximant [ɹ], if it occurs in coda position: carne
particular Lombardy and Piedmont (where this pronunci- [ˈkaɹnɪ] ‘meat’ (Giangola 2001:132). The ‘strong’ phoneme
ation is called erre moscia ‘flabby r’). In the Sicilian and /ɣ/ is pronounced as a voiced fricative intervocalically,
southern Calabrian pronunciation of standard Italian, whereas in word-initial position it undergoes devoicing
word-initial /r/ is lengthened by an allophonic rule: ricco (e.g. roda [ˈxɔda] ‘wheel’) and may even shift to the glottal
[ˈrːikːo] ‘rich’. place of articulation ([ˈhɔda]).
The uvular rhotics of modern French are relatively Also of interest is the diachronic phonological process
recent, and an apical realization must have been the norm whereby a rhotic has developed out of another (homor-
until the seventeenth century. [r] still appears in some ganic) consonant. For instance, in Ro. fereastră ‘window’ <
varieties of southern France, in accordance with the typical FENESTRA(M) a nasal has been replaced by a vibrant; this
pattern of Occitan, and in some non-European French var- phenomenon was widespread in old Romanian dialects
ieties: the apical trill is found in particular in Africa as a and persists in the western Carpathians and Istro-
contact phenomenon (e.g. in Senegal; Boutin et al. 2012:61) Romanian. The history of Romanian also shows the system-
and in the Montreal area, where it may be interpreted as a atic rhotacism of intervocalic single /l/, e.g. moară < MŎLA(M)
conservative feature (now being replaced by dorsal vari- ‘mill’. Indeed, rhotacism most often affects the lateral /l/,
ants: Sankoff and Blondeau 2007). As to the precise pronun- for instance in the word-initial muta cum liquida clusters of
cation of the uvular rhotic in metropolitan French, Portuguese (cf. Pt. praia ‘beach’ < PLAGIA(M) with Sp. playa).
dictionaries indicate [ʀ], but nowadays a fricative [ʁ] (so- Occasionally, the same process also occurred in southern
called ‘r grasseyé’) prevails in the use of even the Parisian Italian dialects (e.g. in the northern Calabrian toponym
bourgeoisie (Lyche and stby 2009:220). In turn, r grasseyé is Praia a Mare), but in this area /l/ is more often rhotacized
subject to further variation: it is often realized as an after vowels: cf. northern Calabrian surcu < SŬLCU(M) ‘furrow’
approximant (e.g. alors [alɔʁ̞] ‘then’), and it may undergo (Falcone 1976:509). The syllabic coda seems to be a preferred
devoicing, in particular after voiceless consonants or in context for rhotacism also in other Romance varieties: cf.
prepausal position: trois [tʁ̥wa] ‘three’, fort [fɔʁ̥] ‘strong’ Rom. vorpe < UULPE(M) ‘fox’ or And. arto < ALTU(M) ‘high’.
(Fougeron and Smith 1999). Lambdacism, or lateralization, is relatively rare among the
Catalan, Castilian, and Galician share the phonemic con- Romance languages, though it characterizes Puerto Rican
trast between a trill and a tap, both produced with the Spanish (Lipski 1994:332-4). A different form of rhotacism is
tongue tip (Carbonell and Llisterri 1999:61; Martínez- at work in those southern Italian dialects where the rhotic is
Celdrán et al. 2003:255; Regueira 1999:82): derived from a homorganic voiced stop (cf. §16.2.2.1), e.g.
Nap. père ‘foot’ < PĔDE(M). [r] may even alternate synchronic-
(18) Cat. serra [ˈsera] ‘saw (noun)’ cera [ˈseɾa] ‘wax’ ally with [dː], according to whether the underlying /d/ is
Sp. perro [ˈpero] ‘doɡ’ pero [ˈpeɾo] ‘but’ affected by raddoppiamento fonosintattico or not: for instance,
Glc. corro [ˈkoro] ‘I run’ coro [ˈkoɾo] ‘choir’ in the Calabrian dialect of San Giovanni in Fiore we find [nʊ
481
STEPHAN SCHMID
ˈrɛntʰɛ] ‘a tooth’ (< DENTE(M)) as opposed to [tʂi ˈdːie̯ntʰɪ] ([ˈkaβɾa], [ˈrːweða], [oɾˈmiɣa]) or even with voiced approxi-
‘three teeth’ (Mele 2009:54). In this case, rhotacism is not mants ([ˈkaβ̞ɾa], [ˈrːweð̞a], [oɾˈmiɣ̞a]). The phonemes /b d ɡ/
related to syllable structure; the weakening or strengthen- are realized as stops only in utterance-initial and postnasal
ing of the consonant is instead determined by the segmental positions: hence vivo [ˈbiβo] ‘(I) live’ and concierto en vivo
and prosodic context, thus belonging to the wider phenom- [kon̪ˈθjeɾto em ˈbiβo] ‘live concert’, but yo vivo [jo ˈβiβo] ‘I
enology of lenition and fortition. live’. The allophone [ð] is often deleted in fast speech,
especially in the past participle suffix -ado (e.g. comprado
[komˈpɾao] ‘bought’).
25.2.5 Lenition and fortition The final stage of the lenition chain, elision, has been
reached by many words of modern French, if one compares
The terms ‘lenition’ and ‘fortition’ have been employed in monosyllables such as vie [vi] ‘life’ and feu [fø] ‘fire’ with Lat.
different ways in the phonological literature, in both a UĪTA(M) and FŎCU(M); some Gallo-Italian dialects have repaired
broader and a narrower sense. The narrower sense we will the hiatus created through elision by (re)introducing coun-
adopt here is mainly concerned with the weakening and teretymological intervocalic consonants, e.g. in Lmb. üga <
strengthening of obstruents which often undergo changes UUA(M) ‘grape’ (Lurà 1987:95).
along two scales of consonantal strength, defined in terms In Tuscan, lenition primarily operates as the spirantization
of openness and sonority (Lass 1984:178). Along the dimen- known as gorgia toscana (cf. §§14.2.2.1, 40.2.2.1.2): postvocalic
sion of openness a stop may turn into a fricative, and along /p t k/ are realized as voiceless fricatives [ɸ θ h], as in la pipa
the dimension of sonority a voiceless obstruent may [la ˈɸiɸa] ‘the pipe’, dito [ˈdiθo] ‘finger’, and oca [ˈɔha] ‘goose’
become voiced; two different forms of lenition may apply (cf. Giannelli and Cravens 1997); in western Tuscany [h] may
one after another, and the final step along both lenition even be deleted ([voˈaːle] ‘vowel’: Rohlfs 1966:266).
scales leads to the elision of the consonantal segment. Lenition of postvocalic voiceless stops also occurs in
The diachrony and synchrony of the Romance languages central and southern Italy, albeit in a different form, given
exhibit a wide variety of lenition phenomena, in particular that /p t k/ are mostly realized as lenes or ‘lax’ consonants [b̥
after vowels (cf. Loporcaro 2011b:150-54). According to von d̥ ɡ̊], i.e. with lesser articulatory tension and shorter dur-
Wartburg’s (1936) proposal, the voicing of the unvoiced ation (cf. §§14.2.2.1, 16.2.2.1). This feature is typical of the
stops /p t k/ provides a divide between the eastern and popular Italian spoken in Rome, where hai capito? ‘have you
the western Romània (cf. §6.3): understood?’ is pronounced as [ai̯ ɡ̊aˈb̥iːd̥o] (Bertinetto and
Loporcaro 2005:135). Note that unvoiced stops are lenited
(19) Lat. CAPRA(M) ‘goat’ Ro. capră Sp. cabra not only word-internally, but also across word boundaries if
Lat. RŎTA(M) ‘wheel’ Ro. roată Sp. rueda the preceding vowel is unstressed (otherwise raddoppia-
Lat. FORMĪCA(M) ‘ant’ Ro. furnică Sp. hormiga mento fonosintattico takes place). In central and southern
Italian dialects and in the corresponding regional varieties
In principle, standard Italian and Tuscan adhere to the of Italian, postvocalic lenition may also produce a voiced
eastern pattern, conserving the unvoiced stops (in fact the variant [p̌ t̬ k̬] (cf. Ledgeway 2009a:86f.); this process also
corresponding Italian words are capra, ruota, formica), but in affects fricatives, hence pronunciations such as [ˈbwɔna
many lexemes voicing has occurred in the indigenous lexi- ˈs̬eːra] ‘good evening’ (cf. Nocchi and Schmid 2007).
con: cf. It. riva < RIPA(M) ‘shore’, strada < STRATA(M) ‘street’, lago In southern Italy, the voicing of unvoiced stops occurs
‘lake’ < LACU(M) (see §14.2.2.1). In riva, lenition operates both after nasal consonants, e.g. Nap. ’n campagna [ŋ k̬amˈp̌aɲːə]
in the dimensions of sonority and openness, given that ‘in (the) countryside’ (Ledgeway 2009a:87); this progressive
voicing has been followed by spirantization, as in the cor- assimilation of the feature [voice], widespread in other
responding French word rive [ʀiv]. southern regions such as Calabria and Sicily, may lead to
In Sardinian, lenition is pervasive synchronically and hypercorrect pronunciations such as [ˈprɛnte] ‘(s)he.takes’
appears in different forms: voiceless stops are retained in for [ˈprɛnde] (cf. Schmid 2005).
Nuorese, but lenited in Campidanese and Logudorese, where In eastern Calabria, e.g. in S. Giovanni in Fiore, an oppos-
they are transformed into voiced fricatives (su porcu [su ite process of fortition occurs, as unvoiced stops are aspir-
ˈβorku] ‘the pig’, sa terra [sa ˈðɛrːa] ‘the earth’, and su cane ated after nasal consonants: [ˈkɜ̃mpʰʊ] ‘field’, [ˈmɜ̃ntʰʊ]
[su ˈɣanɛ] ‘the dog’); voiced stops are in general elided: su ‘cloak’ (Mele 2009:152). In fact it is the C.C context which
caddu [su ˈɣaɖːu] ‘the horse’ < CABALLUM (Jones 1988b:320f.). triggers the aspiration of the second, syllable-initial con-
Spanish orthography hides the fact that spirantization sonant, as is shown by the second segment of geminates in
operates synchronically as an allophonic rule; thus the words such as /ˈcat.tʊ/ ‘flat.M’! [ˈcatːʰʊ] and /ˈkac.cʊ/
words in (19) are pronounced either with voiced fricatives ‘noose’ ! [ˈkacːʰʊ]. A similar fortition process involving
482
SEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY
voiceless stops is affrication, which occurs after sonorants Regressive assimilation is also found before sonorants and
both in the dialects of central and southern Italy and in with the palatal place of articulation (e.g. un lloc [uɲ ʎɔk] ‘a
the corresponding regional varieties of Italian: cf. Rom. place’), and takes place both word-internally and across
/ˈpɛn.so/ ‘I think’! [ˈpɛnt͜so], /il ˈsoːle/ ‘the sun’ ! [il word boundaries.
ˈt͜soːle] (Bertinetto and Loporcaro 2005:135). In some Romance varieties, however, only velar nasals
In general, it seems that fortition is less pervasive in are allowed in syllabic codas. This constraint appears in
Romance than lenition from a diachronic point of view as most northern Italian dialects, not only word-finally (e.g.
well, but nevertheless some cases should be mentioned. ben [beŋ] ‘well’) but also word-internally: Gen. [ʧaŋˈzeŋdo]
Quite widespread is the hardening of word-initial glides: ‘weeping’ (Forner 1997:251). Piedmontese has velar nasals
cf. /w/ > /v/ or /b/ in Latinate UINU(M) > Fr. vin, It./Sp. vino also in word-final consonant clusters and between vowels:
‘wine’; */w/- > /g(w)/- in Germanic *werra > Fr. guerre, It./ [ʤeŋt] ‘people’, [ˈsmaŋa] ‘week’ (Parry 1997a:240). Velariza-
Sp. guerra ‘war’; /j/ > /ʒ, ʤ, x/ in IOCU(M) > Fr. jeu, It. gioco, Sp. tion of syllable-final /n/ is, like /s/-weakening in the same
juego ‘play (N)’. Devoicing of intervocalic voiced stops context, a feature of southern peninsular Spanish which has
occurred in Salentino: [ma'tɔnˑa] ‘Madonna’, ['nːɛku] ‘I spread to many American varieties (see Sampson 1999:170f.;
deny’ (Loporcaro 1997d:342). Finally, in northern Romance, Penny 2000:151). As in the case of Veneto dialects, velariza-
word-final obstruent devoicing followed apocope, as can be tion of the syllable-final nasal consonant is a preliminary
illustrated with the development of Lat. CLAUE(M) ‘key’: Fr. step towards nasalization of the preceding vowel (see
clef [kle], Vld. clav [klef], Frl. clâv [klaːf], Lmb. ciaf [ʧaːf]. Hauser 2012 for the Andalusian varieties of Seville and
Granada).
Another assimilation process concerns the feature
[voice] in adjacent consonants. Portuguese sibilants are
25.2.6 Assimilation processes voiced before vowels and voiced consonants both word-
internally and across word boundaries, whereas the Span-
In many Romance languages, nasal consonants assimilate ish phoneme /s/ is voiceless before vowels and has a
their place of articulation towards that of a following con- voiced allophone [z] only before voiced consonants
sonant. In syllabic codas, the three phonemes /m n ɲ/ are (Martínez-Celdrán et al. 2003:258): casa [ˈkasa] ‘house’,
neutralized and two additional allophones [ɱ ŋ] occur at esto [ˈesto] ‘this’, mismo [ˈmizmo] ‘same’, es debido [ez
the labio-dental and velar place of articulation; this holds, ðeˈβiðo] ‘is due’. In standard Italian, the phonemic contrast
for instance, for Spanish and Italian (cf. Martínez-Celdrán /s/ ~ /z/ is neutralized in preconsonantal contexts (spalla
et al. 2003:258; Bertinetto and Loporcaro 2005:134). While [ˈspalːa] ‘shoulder’, svago [ˈzvaːɡo] ‘amusement’), whereas
the articulatory motivation of all these processes remains in northern regional varietes of Italian, [z] is also a con-
the same, from the point of view of phonemic analysis we textual allophone of /s/ in intervocalic position (Schmid
may distinguish the two contextual variants [ɱ] and [ŋ] 1999a:136).
(occurring only before homorganic consonants) from the French is more complicated, given that voiceless /s/ is
phonemes /n/ ~ /m/ ~ /ɲ/, which are neutralized if fol- allowed before nasals, e.g. communisme [kɔmynism] ‘com-
lowed by a consonant, but nevertheless form minimal pairs munism’, but two adjacent obstruents need to share the
in prevocalic position: e.g. It. modo [ˈmɔːdo] ‘way, manner’ ~ same specification of the feature [voice] (cf. Léon
nodo [ˈnɔːdo] ‘knot’, Sp. mono [ˈmono] ‘monkey’ ~ moño 2007:100). In obstruent clusters, regressive assimilation
[ˈmoɲo] ‘ribbon’. The pervasiveness of this assimilation occurs not only word-internally (e.g. Afghan [af̬ɡɑ̃] ‘Afghan’,
process can be shown from Catalan (Carbonell and observer [ɔpsɛrve] ‘to observe’) but also across word bound-
Llisterri 1999:64), where place assimilation of nasals occurs aries, in particular in casual speech where (de)voicing
before bilabial and velar stops (un viatger [um bjəˈʤe] ‘a applies after syncope of e muet: je crois ‘I believe’ /ʒə
traveller’, gran capa [graŋ ˈkapə] ‘big coat’) as well as before kʀwa/ ! [ʒ̊kʁ̥wa], dans ce bar ‘in this bar’ /dɑ̃ sə baʀ/ !
a labio-dental fricative (confessar [kuɱfəˈsa] ‘to confess’). [dɑ̃s̬baʁ].
483
CHAPTER 26
Prosodic structure
GIOVANNA MAROTTA
26.1 Quantity connected with loss of Latin geminate consonants (cf. Hau-
dricourt and Juilland 1949; Lüdtke 1956; Loporcaro 2007a;
Filipponio 2012; Savoia 2015).
26.1.1 Vowel quantity and syllable structure Ladin and Friulian varieties distinguish vowels length-
ened historically (in original open syllables) from short
Although vowel quantity was a major phonological feature
vowels (in original closed syllables): see Salvi (1997:287f.)
of Latin, it did not survive as such in any Romance language
and §11.3.1. In Friulian, there is phonological contrast of
(Lausberg 1965:§§156-62; Weinrich 1958). In Ibero-Romance,
vowel quantity (see Baroni and Vanelli 1999; §10.2.1.1). In
with Catalan, no long vowels occur as phonological seg-
Gallo-Romance and Gallo-Italian, the picture is complicated
ments, but vowels are lengthened in stressed open syllables
by widespread syncope and apocope, which have heavily
(Borzone de Manrique and Signorini 1983; Roca 1999; Major
modified the skeletal pattern and shortened word length
1985; Moraes and Wetzels 1992; Recasens 1996; Aguilar et al.
(Loporcaro 2011a). The effects of the historical develop-
1997), although to a lesser degree than in other Romance
ments (briefly, degemination, loss of long vowels in
languages (Botinis 1989). Italian, Sardinian, central and
unstressed syllables and in stressed closed syllables, vowel
southern Italian dialects all show allophonic vowel length-
lengthening in stressed open syllables) create new contrasts
ening depending on syllable structure and stress, according
in the quality of vocalic segments, in particular for mid
to the Strong Rhyme Constraint, which requires a heavy
vowels (§25.1). Vowel length is no longer distinctive in
rhyme in a stressed syllable (Marotta 1999a):
French (Durand et al. 2002; Durand and Lyche 2003; 2008).
(1) a. Stressed open Lat. ROTAM ‘wheel’ Only the contrast between [ɛ] and [ɛː] sporadically survives:
syllable e.g. faites ‘done.PTCP.FPL’ with [ɛ], and fête ‘holiday’ with [ɛː]
It. [ˈrwɔːta] (Walter 1997). Contemporary French exhibits the so-called
Srd. [ˈrɔːδa] ‘Law of Position’: mid closed [e, o, ø] occur in open syllables,
Mac. [ˈrɔːta] whereas mid open [ɛ, ɔ, œ] occur in closed syllables (Plénat
Cal., Sic. [ˈrɔːta] 1987; Morin 2000; Walter 1997; Detey et al. 2010). The trend
towards a correlation between closeness of mid vowels and
b. Stressed closed Lat. SACCUM ‘sack’
syllable structure is constant, though variable; it is system-
syllable
atic in southern varieties, but has a more limited range of
It. [ˈsakːo]
application in standard French.
Srd. [ˈsakːu]
In northern Italian dialects, varieties where no /V~Vː/
Mac. [ˈsakːu]
contrast occurs (such as Piedmontese, Venetan) coexist
Cal., Sic. [ˈsakːu]
alongside other systems showing short and long vowels.
c. Unstressed syllable Lat. AMICUM For instance, a few conservative dialects spoken in the
‘friend’ area of Biella (close to the western Lombard dialects),
It. [aˈmiːko] exhibit vowel length. Ligurian dialects appear to reflect
Lad. (Val [aˈmiːk] especially closely the original prosodic schema of the
Marebbe) word. Long vowels consistently arise from the deletion of
Srd. [aˈmiːγu] the final syllable with a stop in onset position, e.g. [fræː]
Mac. [aˈmiːku] ‘brothers’ < FRATRES; a sort of compensatory vowel lengthen-
Cal., Sic. [aˈmiːku]. ing applies, allowing preservation of the original prosodic
structure. On the other hand, vowel lengthening in stressed
In some Romance varieties the emergence of a new open syllables also applies: [ˈkuːa] = It. coda ‘tail’, whereas in
phonological contrast in vowel length is probably closed syllables short vowels are preferred. Vowel quantity
484 This chapter © Giovanna Marotta 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
PROSODIC STRUCTURE
was recreated in Ligurian following coda deletion (e.g. FALSU and ['kaɾo], respectively; Green 1998a:80). The phonological
(M) > [ˈfaːsu] ‘false’) but not where there had been degemi- contrast inherited from Latin has sometimes been reinter-
nation (FACIO > [(*)ˈfassu] > [ˈfasu] ‘(I) do’; Forner 1975). preted as a difference in manner of articulation: in Portu-
In western Lombard, vowel length is distinctive, although guese, the rhotics [ʀ] and [ɾ] contrast only between vowels:
limited to final syllables: [anˈda] ‘go.INF’ vs [anˈdaː] ‘gone. e.g. carro vs caro. Unlike other Romance languages of Iberia,
PTCP.FSG’, [pas] ‘step’ vs [paːs] ‘peace’ (Sanga 1984b; Loporcaro Catalan does contrast consonant quantity (Wheeler
2007a:320). In eastern Lombard, loss of vowel quantity is 2005:36f.), though not all consonants can be geminated.
connected with the general, and early, fall of final vowels: The geminate affricate [dʤ͡ ̠ ] can contrast with [ʤ͡ ̠ ] or [ʒ],
whereas long vowels in open syllables were unaffected by whereas long obstruents are rather rare (except for [bb] and
quality changes, short vowels in closed syllables were [dd] in words such as obvers ‘obverse’, adduir ‘adduce’). In
lowered, with consequent replacement of the length con- most Catalan dialects, [b] and [ɡ] may geminate before [l]:
trast by one of quality: [i] > [e]; [y] > [ø]. Emilian dialects e.g. poble [ˈpɔbːɫə] ‘village’, regla [ˈreɡːɫə] ‘rule’; in Valencian,
constantly exhibit long vowels, with minimal pairs such as voiced stops are lenited in this context. Geminate sonorants
[ˈfata] ‘slice’ vs [ˈfaːta] ‘done.PTCP.FSG’, [mel] ‘thousand’ vs (except [ɲː]) are more common: e.g. summa ‘summary’ vs
[meːl] ‘honey’ (Coco 1970; Hajek 1997b; Filipponio 2012). suma ‘sum’, innecessari [inːəsəˈsaɾi] ‘unnecessary’, iŀlusió
Short vowels are linked to a simple nucleus, whereas long [iɫːuziˈo] ‘illusion’; a long /ʎː/ may also occur: e.g. ratlla
vowels project two skeletal slots, i.e. two moras, linked to [ˈraʎːə] ‘line’. However, some Catalan varieties, such as
the nucleus, thus producing a heavy rhyme. The occurrence Valencian, avoid geminate segments even for sonorants.
of long vowels in stressed syllables is another aspect of the Latin long consonants have been systematically short-
Strong Rhyme Constraint. ened in French; nowadays, geminates are possible only in
the written forms of loanwords such as addition ‘bill’, illustre
‘illustrious’, or of certain morphological contexts: e.g. je
26.1.2 Consonant quantity mourrais ‘I would die’.
In northern dialects of Italy consonants are normally
short. Nevertheless, gemination processes may occur in
Latin consonants exhibit phonologically contrastive length,
some areas. In Piedmontese, for instance, long allophones
and geminates have heterosyllabic status, in that they con-
are produced after [ǝ] (cf. Parry 1997a; Savoia 2015). In
strain lexical stress assignment. In CVCVC:V words, the
Ligurian, many segments may geminate, for instance /p b
penultimate syllable is stressed, even if it contains a short
k ɡ t dʃ s/, although according to Toso (1997:35) the gemin-
vowel: CAPÍLLUS ‘hair’. Note that long segments are tautosyl-
ate consonants are perceived as long due to the shortness of
labic if they are vowels, but heterosyllabic if they are con-
the preceding vowel. In Emilia and Romagna, consonants
sonants. Only Italian, Sardinian, and central-southern
have been degeminated (e.g. *[ˈɡatta] > Bol. [ˈɡaːta] ‘cat’;
dialects of Italy have systematically preserved the original
Hajek 1997b); nevertheless, new long consonants may sur-
geminates of Latin:
face (e.g. UITAM > Bol. [ˈvetta]; cf. It. [ˈviːta] ‘life’). In Friulian,
long consonants do not occur (Vanelli 1997a:280).
(2) SICCAM ‘dry.FSG’ > It. secca; Sic., Srd. [ˈsikːa]
Central and southern dialects of Italy show a clear con-
ANNUM ‘year’ > It. anno; Sic., Srd. [ˈanːu]
trast of consonant length. In Calabria and Salento, long
voiceless stops are normally longer than in standard Italian,
The correlation of consonant quantity has actually been
and often aspirated, especially in final or focus position
strengthened in Italian, Sardinian, and central-southern
(Sorianello 1996). On the other hand, in Neapolitan the
Italian dialects due to assimilation:
length contrast seems to be largely replaced by the lenis/
fortis distinction (Ledgeway 2009a:87-89).
(3) FACTUM ‘done.MSG’ > It. fatto; Srd., Sic. [ˈfatːu]
In conclusion, only in a rather small geographical area
SEPTEM ‘seven’ > It. sette; Srd. [ˈsɛtːe], Sic. [sɛtːi]
(chiefly the Italian Peninsula) do geminate consonants still
IPSAM ‘she’ > It. essa; Srd., Sic. [ˈisːa]
occur as inherited from Latin. However, in that same area new
MAGNUM ‘big.MSG’ > Srd. [ˈmanːu]
geminates may arise from assimilation processes, both word-
SOMNUM ‘dream/sleep’ > It. [ˈsonːo], Srd. [ˈsonːu].
internally (e.g. It. otto ‘eight’ < OCTO; see above) and across word
In Ibero-Romance, the C/C: contrast has been lost. In boundaries, where raddoppiamento fonosintattico may occur
Castile, geminates have been preserved for the class of (It. [ʧiˈtːa ˈvːɛkːja] < CIUITATEM UETULAM; see also §40.3.1).
rhotics and in intervocalic position: e.g. carro ‘cart’ vs caro Another source of gemination concerns the development
‘expensive’. However, the contrast seems nowadays to be of the Latin long lateral, giving rise to a long retroflex in
grounded in tenseness rather than length (therefore, ['karo] Sardinian and some southern Italian dialects:
485
GIOVANNA MAROTTA
(4) Srd. [ˈmɔɖɖɛ] ‘soft.SG’ < MOLLEM, Sic. [kaˈpiɖɖi] ‘hair’ < CAPILLI; 26.2.2 Consonants
Srd. [ˈpɛɖɖe] , Sic. [ˈpɛɖɖi] ‘skin’ < PELLEM.
Srd. [ˈnuɖɖa], Sic. [ˈnuɖɖa] ‘nothing’ < NULLAM.
Palatalization processes need not modify the prosodic
structure, but in the case of palatalizing effects induced
The emergence of retroflex consonants, long (as in pre-
by j *ˈfakjo > Pt. faço, It.
Lunigiana), may be related to the occurrence, in a wide area
faccio (two syllables), Fr. fais (one syllable) (Lausberg
of the Romance domain, of a velar lateral in coda position.
1969:§24). Weakening processes in onset position (voi-
cing and lenition of stops) do not modify syllable struc-
ture: in both cases, a weaker segment is produced in
the same structural position. However, the surface out-
26.2 Phonological processes puts depend on the ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ position of
and syllable structure the segment, the intervocalic position being typically a
leniting context, and the post-coda position a non-
leniting context (Brandão de Carvalho 2008; Marotta
26.2.1 Vowels 2008).
The assimilation processes which frequently occur in
Besides loss of vowel quantity, diphthongization of the
coda position do not alter the prosodic skeleton, inasmuch
reflexes of Latin Ĕ and Ŏ to /jɛ/ and /wɔ/ (or similar
as they give rise to a geminate consonant which preserves
forms) is a macrophenomenon in the development from
the original syllable weight: e.g. SEPTEM > It. sette ‘seven’. In
Latin to Romance. For an overview of the controversial
systems where no geminated consonants are allowed, coda
issue of its origins, see §38.
weakening may involve consonant deletion (see also
The phonological change from a stressed vowel into a
§26.1.2).
diphthong is a strong cue for the association of the new
Metathesis may change the overall prosodic pattern of
diphthongs with two skeletal slots linked to the syllable
the word, particularly in the case of segment movement
nucleus. However, there is evidence for the association of
from complex onset to coda position: Cmp. PETRAM > [ˈpɛrδa]
the onglides of Romance diphthongs with the onset pos-
‘stone’. In Campidanese the opposite also occurs, with
ition. First, their distribution is free (e.g. It. piano ‘slowly’,
metathesis of a coda liquid into the syllable onset,
miele ‘honey’, pioggia ‘rain’, uomo ‘man’, fuoco ‘fire’); second,
and consequent creation of an open syllable: DORMIRE >
they do not exclude vowel lengthening (It. [ˈpjaːno],
[droˈmiːri] ‘to sleep’ (Jones 1988b). The same kind of
[ˈfwɔːko]): if diphthongs were associated with two skeletal
metathesis of an original coda consonant is attested in
slots in the nucleus, no lengthening would occur, since the
other areas of the Romance domain, for instance, in Lom-
stressed syllable would already have the right syllable
bard dialects ([druˈmi] ‘to sleep’).
weight (Marotta 1988).
Place assimilation for nasal segments in the coda occurs
Processes of vowel reduction have influenced word struc-
systematically in most Romance languages (as in Latin),
ture, by reducing word length and number of syllables. Wide
both word-internally and in sandhi contexts: e.g. It. anche
areas have been strongly affected by such deletion, in par-
[ˈaŋke] ‘also’, con Paolo [kom ˈpaːolo] ‘with Paul’, Cat. tan poc
ticular the so-called western Romània. In eastern Romance,
[tam pok] ‘so little’, tan clar [taŋ klar] ‘so clear’.
nuclei are normally preserved, although processes of vowel
weakening do occur, with frequent centralization of
unstressed final vowels (e.g. southern dialects of Italy).
In languages where vowel reduction and deletion have
applied, the number and type of consonant clusters have 26.3 Syllable structure
increased. For instance, in the Gallo-Italian domain no ori-
ginal unstressed vowel except -A has survived and therefore 26.3.1 Onset
syllable structure is quite complex (§26.3).
The vowel nasalization found in some Romance varieties In onset position, Romance languages normally admit every
(e.g. Portuguese, French) does not change the prosodic struc- consonant of their phonological inventory, although some
ture of the word, although it is a phonological process enrich- phonotactic constraints apply. Alveolar affricates are not
ing the vowel system: since nasalization involves lengthening found word-initially in Catalan; the palatal affricate [ ʧ͡ ̠ ] is
of the vowel, the weight of a sequence V+N is equivalent to almost completely excluded in the variety of Barcelona,
that of a nasalized vowel, i.e. in both cases, two moras. whereas in other dialects [ ʧ͡ ̠ ]- is more common, often
486
PROSODIC STRUCTURE
replacing initial [ʃ]- (Hualde 1992:379). Palatal [ɲ], and even ‘week’, Pie. [ˈsmaŋa]; DEBERE > [dvajr] ‘must’ (Repetti
more so [ʎ], are rare in Italian. 1997:55; Filipponio 2012). In initial clusters /lC/ and /rC/
Complex onsets generally obey the sonority hierarchy. not obeying the strength hierarchy, a prosthetic vowel may
The most common cluster is muta cum liquida, inherited emerge: e.g. LAETAMEN > Bol. [alˈdaːm] ‘manure’ (Hajek
from Latin, both in word-initial and in word-medial pos- 1997b:238).
ition: e.g. GRATIA(M) > Pt. graça [ˈgɾaːsɐ], Sp. gracia [ˈgɾaːθja], Ligurian, Lombard, and Venetan are different even in this
ECat. gràcia [ˈgɾaːsiə] ‘grace’; LIBRU(M) > Pt. livro [ˈliːvɾu], Cst. respect, since unstressed vowels may be retained: e.g. Lig.
libro [ˈliːβɾo], ECat. libre [ˈʎiːβɾə] ‘book’; FRUCTU(M) > It. [ˈsete veˈʒiŋ] vs Pie. [ˈsetǝ ˈvziŋ] ‘seven neighbours’; Ven.
[ˈfrutːo], Log. [ˈfrutːu], Fr. [ˈfʁɥi] ‘fruit’. The tautosyllabic [ˈljɛvore] ‘hare’ vs It. [ˈlɛːpre] (Zamboni 1981:22).
status of C+L is questionable for some words (e.g. INTEGRUM
‘whole’ > Sp. entero, Fr. entier, It. intero) and for some var-
ieties (e.g. dialects of Puglia; Loporcaro 2011a:91f.).
26.3.2 s+C clusters
The clusters /tl/ and /dl/, absent in Latin (Marotta
1999b), do not generally occur in Romance, except sporad- In Latin, these clusters were limited to sequences of two
ically in internal position in loanwords from Classical Greek; voiceless segments (see Marotta 1999b:300). In Romance
e.g. It. atlante, Cat. atles ‘atlas’. languages admitting s+C clusters, the sibilant normally
In systems where only stop+liquid clusters are accepted agrees for voicing with the following consonant: e.g. It.
(Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Sardinian), ‘repair scarso [ˈskarso] ‘scarce’, sbiadito [zbjaˈdiːto] ‘faded’; Log.
strategies’ normally take place in the case of other [skamˈbelːu] ‘stool’, [zgaˈrːai] ‘to get wrong’. In Romanian
sequences. In loanwords from Greek with C+n or C+s, the sibilants [s] and [ʃ] may be in free variation in lower
vowel epenthesis or deletion of the first consonant occurs. registers (E. Vasiliu 1989:5).
Both processes affect the syllable structure and the rhyth- The s+C clusters are normally considered heterosyllabic,
mic structure of the word. In most dialects of Brazilian especially if there is a stop in second position, because they
Portuguese, these ‘illicit’ initial clusters are split into two violate the Sonority Principle. Strong evidence for this
syllables by vowel-epenthesis, mostly of [i] (psicologia comes from initial vowel epenthesis in varieties such as
‘psychology’ > [pisikoloˈʒiːɒ]); in northern Portugal epen- Ibero-Romance, central Sardinian, and French varieties,
thetic [ɨ] may be used ([pɨsikuluˈʒiːɐ]), whereas in southern which only allow this kind of sequence in learnèd words
Portugal epenthesis is rare, and the first consonant is (e.g. Fr. spirituel [spiʀiˈtɥɛl] ‘spiritual’). According to lan-
deleted (Mateus and D’Andrade 1998). In ill-formed word- guage, epenthetic /e/ or schwa is inserted before word-
initial clusters the first element tends to drop in Catalan initial clusters beginning with /s/: SCHOLA(M) ‘school’ > Sp.
and Spanish, whereas epenthesis occurs before [s]+C clus- escuela [esˈkwela], Pt. escola [əsˈkɔlə], Cat. escola [əsˈkɔlə],
ters (cf. Lloret 2002): Cat. gnom [nom] ‘gnome’, pterodàctil although new s+C clusters may appear, especially in fast
[təɾuˈðaktil] ‘pterodactyl’, Spanish of Castile pneumático speech, through deletion of unstressed centralized vowels:
[neuˈmatiko] ‘tyre’, psicología [sikoloˈxia] ‘psychology’, Pt. [ʃt] in estar, ‘to be’; [ds] in decifrar, ‘to decode’; [sp] in
gnomo [ˈnomo] ‘gnome’. In French, clusters comprising separar ‘to separate’ (Mateus and D’Andrade 1998). Never-
stop + nasal or sibilant are marginally admitted (psychologie theless, these clusters remain heterosyllabic, a nucleus still
[psikoloˈʒi]), although deletion also occurs, especially in being present at the phonological level. Deletion of precon-
sub-standard varieties. sonantal [s] in the history of French provides additional
Romanian has a richer set of complex onsets. Besides stop evidence for its association with the coda position and for
+ liquid clusters (e.g. prinde ‘catch’, clei ‘glue’), /h/ + /l, r/ the heterosyllabic status of s+C clusters: cf. It. pasta, Fr. pâte
sequences are also possible (hlizi ‘to giggle’, hrană ‘food’). ‘pastry’.
The cluster /m/ + liquid, occurring only in words of Slavonic The picture outlined so far also applies to three-
origin (e.g. mlădios [ˈmlǝdijos] ‘slender’; mreană [ˈmre˰ anǝ] consonant clusters s+C1+C2: these were already allowed in
‘barbel’; Chiṭoran 2002:14) must be considered heterosylla- Latin and remain widely stable; cf. STRATA(M) > It. strada
bic, by not obeying the Sonority Principle (Clements 1990; ‘street’, SCRIPTUM > Cmp. [ˈskritːu], Sic. [ˈskritːu] ‘written’.
Kenstowicz 1994). Marginal heterosyllabic clusters compris- Phonological systems not allowing s+C regularize three-
ing two plosives may also occur in Romanian (see Stan consonant clusters through epenthesis: SCRIBERE > Sp. escribir
2013d:13). [eskriˈβiɾ], Cat. escriure [əsˈkɾiwɾə], although epenthesis
Consonant clusters are much richer in Gallo-Italian dia- never occurs word-internally, thus confirming the associ-
lects, where aphaeresis, apocope, and syncope have led to ation of the sibilant with the complex coda of the preceding
drastic reduction in word length as well as to new sequences syllable (Sp. trans.cri.bir ‘to transcribe’). Three-consonant clus-
of consonants; for instance, SEPTIMANAM > Bol. [ˈstmɛːna] ters are allowed in Romanian as well, with a heterosyllabic
487
GIOVANNA MAROTTA
fricative as first element: [s] or [ʃ] before voiceless conson- Nasal vowels are normally produced with longer duration
ants ([ʃ] does not occur before [k]+C clusters) and [z] before than their oral counterparts, their syllable weight being the
voiced consonants. The second element may be any stop, same as a closed syllable (§26.2.1).
except [b], while the last element must be a liquid: e.g. străin
‘foreign’, ştrengar ‘naughty’, zdrăngăni ‘to rattle’.
26.3.3.2 Diphthongs
Diphthongization of Latin stressed Ě, Ŏ occurs in Spanish,
26.3.3 Nucleus French, Italian, and Romanian, with the production of on-
glides [j, w] (see Ch. 38). The process is triggered only in
26.3.3.1 Vowels open syllables in some systems (e.g. Lat. PETRAM ‘stone’ > It.
pietra [ˈpjɛːtra], Fr. pierre, but Lat. FESTAM ‘feast, party’ > It.
The inventory of vocalic segments is greater in stressed
festa, Fr. fête; Lat. NOUUM ‘new’ > It. nuovo [ˈnwɔːvo], but Lat.
syllables than in unstressed. Catalan has [a ɛ e i ɔ o u] in
MORTEM ‘death’ > It. [ˈmɔrte]), or independently of the struc-
stressed syllables but only [i ə u] in unstressed. French,
ture of the syllable rhyme in others (e.g. Cst.Sp. fiesta
Catalan, Occitan, Romansh, and Romanian historically
[ˈfjɛsta]; Ro. piatră ‘stone’, foarte ‘strong’; Frl. [ˈpjere]
drop final unstressed vowels (except A), which may weaken
‘stone’, [ˈsjet] ‘seven’ < SEPTEM, [ˈskwele] ‘school’ < SCHŎLA(M),
to [ə].1 In French, unstressed vowels normally are reduced
[ˈwes] ‘bone’ < Lat. ŎS(SUM)).
to schwa and often deleted, especially in final position and
In systems where diphthongization did not occur, on-
in fast speech (Walker 2001). However, they are retained (or
glides [j w] as well as rising diphthongs are nevertheless
reinserted) in musical lyrics and poetry.
present, e.g. Cat. [wa] (quatre ‘four’; Wheeler 1988a), [wə] in
In stressed syllables, at least three levels of openness are
qüestió ‘question’; Gsc. [ˈgwajre] ‘not much’ (in other dialects
distinguished in Spanish, Romanian, Logudorese-Nuorese,
[ˈgajre], Wheeler 1988b:253).
and northern Catalan, while many languages show four
Languages allowing front round vowels (e.g. French, Occi-
(Portuguese, other varieties of Catalan, Italian, Campida-
tan, Gallo-Italian dialects) also have a glide [ɥ]. Like the
nese, Occitan, French). Moreover, front rounded vowels
other onglides, [ɥ] may be preceded by a consonant: e.g.
occur in Occitan, French, and some northern Italian dialects;
Fr. [bɥ] in buisson ‘bush’, [ʒw] in joie ‘joy’, [mj] in miel ‘honey’;
e.g. Fr. peu ‘little’, with [ø], peur ‘fear’, with [œ], lune, with [y];
Gen. [nɥaː] ‘to swim’. Romanian allows [–high] onglides; e.g.
Lmb. [ˈlyːna] ‘moon’, [ˈtøt] ‘all’, [ˈbrøt] ‘ugly.M’, [ˈbryta] ‘ugly.F’
foarte ‘strong’.
(Loporcaro 2007a). Finally, [–low] central vowels occur in
A different kind of diphthongization may arise too,
Piedmontese, Catalan (only schwa), and especially Romanian,
with offglides emerging from Latin stressed Ē, Ō; e.g. Pie.
which has a high central vowel.
[kanˈdɛi̯la] ‘candle’ < *kandeːla (Parry 1997a:239); Eml.
Nasal vowels occur in French, Portuguese, southern var-
[fjawr] ‘flower’ < FLŌRE(M) (Hajek 1997b:274).
ieties of Spanish (Andalusia, Murcia) as well as many Carib-
Original Latin falling diphthongs undergo monophthon-
bean varieties, and also in some northern Italian dialects.
gization over a wide area: CAUSAM > It. cosa, Fr. chose [ʃɔz]
Their number is always lower than that of oral vowels.
‘thing’, POENAM > It. pena ‘punishment’, TAURUM > It. toro, Cst.
Distinctively nasalized vowels developed in offgliding diph-
toro ‘bull’. The process already occurred in the low registers
thongs throughout Emilia-Romagna. More recently, in Emi-
of Latin (Adams 2013). In some areas, such as southern
lian dialects they tend to lose the nasalized glides in favour
Italian dialects and Romanian, original au is retained, along-
of a nasal velar consonant (UINUM ‘wine’ > [vẽȷ ̃] > Bol. [veŋ]),
side with a rather strong trend towards monophthongiza-
whereas in Romagna nasal vowels survive almost every-
tion, for instance in Calabrian and Neapolitan dialects. In
where (UINUM > [vẽ:]), with the co-occurrence of a typologi-
Sardinian diphthongs reduce to [ɛ] (<AI, OI, as in general) and
cally marked contrast between oral and nasal vowels before
[a] (< AU) (e.g. Nuo. [ˈpaku] < PAUCUM, [ˈpɛna] < POENAM).
nasals: e.g. [ˈpɛna] ‘feather’ vs [ˈʦẽna] ‘meal’ (Hajek
In all Romance standard languages the original falling
1997b:274). Nasal vowels also occur in some varieties of
diphthongs of Latin persist in learnèd words. New falling
Campidanese where intervocalic [n] is elided or replaced
diphthongs also emerge in the Romance domain, due to
by a glottal stop, with nasalization of the preceding vowel:
different phonological processes; see Ch. 38.
Cmp. [ˈbı̃ʔu], [ˈbĩu] ‘wine’ < UINUM; [ˈlũʔa], [ˈlũa] ‘moon’ <
Falling nasal diphthongs are frequent in Portuguese and
LUNAM.
occur in word-final syllables, either stressed ([ɐ̃ȷ ̃] mãe
‘mother’; [ɐ̃ȷ ̃] refém ‘hostage’; [õȷ ̃] compões ‘(you) compose’;
[ũȷ ̃] muito ‘much’; [mɐ̃w̃] mão ‘hand’) or unstressed ([ɐ̃ȷ]̃
1
Note that in Occitan, original final -a may surface as [ɔ] or more rarely prendem ‘(they) arrest’; [ɐ̃w̃] falam ‘(they) talk’; Mateus and
as [e] (e.g. Bea., EGsc.) or [a] (e.g. Auv., Niç., Mtp., Ros.). D’Andrade 1998).
488
PROSODIC STRUCTURE
Although Latin lacked triphthongs, most modern more frequent in some varieties (such as Italian and Span-
Romance languages have developed them. In Portuguese, ish), whereas in others the latter prevails (e.g. French,
triphthongs may combine a glide and an oral or nasal Catalan, Romanian).
diphthong: [jaj] criais ‘you.PL create’, [jej] fiéis ‘faithful.PL’, The coda may comprise one segment in all varieties,
[jɐ̃w̃] leão ‘lion’, [waj] recuai! ‘put back!’, [wɛj] cruéis ‘cruel. while two elements are admitted in quite a large part of
PL’, [wɐj] voei ‘(I) flew’, although a syllable boundary may the Romània. However, richer codas are allowed only in
arise in these sequences. Triphthongs are also found in word-final position, and in a few varieties, such as Catalan
other languages: e.g. Sp. apreciáis ‘you.PL appreciate’, buey and Romanian (see below).
‘ox’; Cat. guaitar ‘to watch’, liqüeu ‘you.PL blend’; Occ. buòu In the case of a simple coda, segments marked by the
‘ox’, Gsc. [gwajre] ‘not much’, Lgd. sieu ‘his’, It. puoi ‘you can’. features [+coronal, +continuous] can be found everywhere:
Romanian has triphthongs with [e̯] as onglide: e.g. citeai ‘you e.g. It. corto ‘short’, It. alto ‘high’, costo ‘cost’; Pt. curto ‘short’,
were reading’, citeau ‘they were reading’ (Pană Dindelegan papel ‘paper’, Fr. cheval ‘horse’, tir ‘shooting’, âne ‘donkey’,
2013a:12); moreover, there are sequences stressed on the Cat. tren [tɾɛn] ‘train’, sol [sɔɫ] ‘sun’, gros [gɾɔs] ‘big’, Prv.
third element, e.g. [e̯o̯a] (pleoàpe ‘eyelids’), [i ̯o̯a] (creioàne [ˈmɛstʀe] ‘teacher’, [pwɔrto] ‘door’.
‘pencils’); the syllable boundary in these clusters is never- In many languages nasals are allowed in coda, often
theless questionable. giving rise to nasalized vowels (e.g. Pt. mundo ['mũdu]
‘world’, rim [rĩ] ‘kidney’, Fr. fin [fẽ], Pt. fim [fĩ] ‘end’). When
in coda, nasals are normally homorganic with the following
26.3.4 Coda consonant, even across word-boundaries (e.g. It. ponte, Sp.
puente ‘bridge’, It. campo, Srd. campu, Occ. camp, ‘field’, It.
The traditional hypothesis of a general trend in all Romance banca ‘bank’, Sp. banco, with [ŋ]; It. co[ŋ k]alma ‘with calm’,
languages towards the open syllable has recently been dis- i[m p]ausa ‘in pause’.
puted (cf. Loporcaro 2011a), on the basis of the following Liquids in coda position are normally weakened. Laterals
evidence: may surface as velars (e.g. Portuguese), as rhotics, or as
rounded glides; e.g. FALCEM > It. falce, Sic. [ˈfawʧi], Pie.
(a) maintenance of clusters composed of s+stop (+liquid)
[ˈfaws] ‘scythe’, UULPEM > Pie. [ˈvurp] ‘fox’. Rhotics may sur-
over a wide area of the Romània;
face as monovibrants or glides in coda position.
(b) preservation of geminate consonants in some languages;
In Romance varieties where the processes of vowel dele-
(c) emergence of new complex consonant clusters in the
tion have been more active, stops are allowed in coda
Gallo-Romance area, due to syncope and apocope.
position: Gallo-Italian [gat] ‘cat’, Eml. [ˈkøgda] ‘pig skin’,
However, the majority of Romance languages have lost [akˈse] ‘thus’, Fr. sec ‘dry’, Cat. gats [gaʦ] ‘cats’.
some Latin clusters, crucially reducing the number and type Where the number of segments accepted in the coda is
of segments associated with the syllable coda. In particular, quite restricted (e.g. Italian, Sardinian, Portuguese, Occitan),
Portuguese, Castilian Spanish, Sardinian, Italian, and central deletion or epenthesis may apply in the case of an ill-
and southern dialects of Italy do not allow a stop in coda, formed coda. For instance, in marked sequences of the
except in the case of geminates: (FAC.TUM ‘done.PTCP’ > It. fatto, type stop+stop, quite frequent in recent loanwords, Euro-
Sic. fattu). In the same varieties no final consonants are pean Portuguese speakers tend to delete the first stop, while
allowed in word-final position, except marginally for cor- Brazilians may insert epenthetic [i]: e.g. adverso ‘adverse’
onal sonorants and nasals. Nevertheless, in other Romance may be [aʤiˈvɛχsu], McDonald’s [mɛ̞kiˈdõnɐ̞wʤis].
varieties (Catalan, Occitan, French, Romanian, Friulian, and While some languages do not allow two-consonant codas
northern dialects of Italy), the set of consonants allowed in (Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Sardinian, Occitan),2
coda position is richer. others show a richer set of sequences; for instance, Gallo-
Therefore, the overall picture does not allow us to repre- Italian dialects. Complex codas show two basic formats:
sent the Romance space in simple terms of a generalized
(a) C1+C2 obeying the strength hierarchy: liquid or nasal
coda weakening within a drift towards open syllables
+ stop (Cat. alt ‘tall’, verd ‘green’; Fr. harpe ‘harp’, Alpes
(Marotta 1998). Rather, a sort of balance between opposite
‘Alps’; Eml. [serˈpẽːŋt] ‘snake’; Ro. simt ‘I feel’), or [s] +
trends may be proposed: on the one hand, reduction of
voiceless stop (Cat. trist ‘sad’, fosc ‘dark’, verd ‘green’,
syllable complexity, with phenomena such as deletion and
Ro. vest ‘west’);
weakening of consonants in coda, favoring open syllables;
on the other, deletion of unstressed nuclei, producing new
closed syllables. Both trends occur in Romance languages, 2
Except loanwords, often derived from Classical Latin (e.g. Sp. construir
but to different degrees, since the former is stronger and ‘to build’, It. instabile ‘unstable’, Cat. èxtasi ‘ecstasy’).
489
GIOVANNA MAROTTA
(b) C1+C2 which do not obey the strength hierarchy: Fr. Italian Peninsula; e.g. gorgia Toscana (Marotta 2008; cf. also
laps ‘period of time’, risque ‘risk’, axe ‘axis’, merle §14.2.2.1), lenition in central and upper southern dialects
‘blackbird’, acte ‘act’; Ro. ritm ‘rhythm’. (Loporcaro 2007a; see also §§15.3.1.2, 16.2.2.1).
The metrical structure of Spanish is very different from
Finally, languages allowing complex codas may license
French, but very close to Italian, although Spanish and
three consonants in word-final position; for instance, Cat.
French both belong to the western Romània. Moreover,
erms ‘uncultivated’, bruscs [bɾusks] ‘abrupt’, whereas in
taking complexity of syllable structure as a parameter of
word-medial position a cluster simplification occurs: e.g.
variation, a line can be drawn between French varieties and
esculptor [əskulˈto] ‘sculptor’ (Hualde 1992:381), Ro. istm
Gallo-Italian dialects, on the one hand, and Ibero-Romance,
[ism] ‘isthmus’ (E. Vasiliu 1989).
Ladin, Romanian, Italian with central-southern Italo-
Romance, on the other.
26.3.5 Final remarks on syllable structure
Romance syllable structure may be summarized in the fol- 26.4 Stress3

lowing terms. First, it has a major structural break before
the nucleus, the rhyme being clearly differentiated from the
In general the syllable which was prominent in Latin
onset, since only the elements located after the syllable
remains stressed in Romance. For instance, trisyllabic
nucleus increase syllable weight. The formation of nuclei
words may become bisyllabic or even monosyllabic, but do
is maximally constrained, because only vowels are allowed,
not show stress shift: e.g. SÁLICEM ‘willow’ > It. sálice, Sp. sauce
as in Latin. The nucleus component tends to be reduced in
[ˈsawθe], Nap. [ˈsalǝʧǝ], Fr. saux [ˈso].
complexity (both in quantity and quality of segments), thus
The physical parameters involved in production of stress
continuing the diachronic drift already active in the transi-
are duration and amplitude at the acoustic level, corres-
tion from Indo-European to Latin (Lehmann 2005). The
ponding to length and intensity in perception. With refer-
simplification of the nucleus component may involve an
ence to the main metrical parameters (Hayes 1995), in the
increase in the complexity of the coda, especially in Gallo-
great majority of varieties foot-headness remains basically
Romance varieties.
fixed, as in Latin, on the left of the metrical foot. However,
Onsetless syllables are allowed at the lexical level, though
in French and other Gallo-Romance dialects, having phrasal
in speech flow word-initial onsets may be created by resyl-
stress more than lexical stress, this parameter does not
labification of the last consonant of the preceding word: e.g.
apply.
It. un amico ‘a friend’ > u.na.mi.ko; Fr. avec amour ‘with love’ >
In many Romance languages, stress is free and distinctive.
a.ve.ca.mour. In the great majority of Romance systems,
Italian, Friulian, Romanian, and Ibero-Romance, show min-
onset complexity remains quite low and faithful to Latin
imal pairs for lexical stress: e.g. Sp. sábana ‘sheet’ vs sabána
forms.
‘savannah’; It. cápito ‘I turn up’ vs capíto ‘understood’ vs
Typologically, syllable structure appears relatively
capitó ‘it happened’; Ro. ácele ‘the needles’ vs acéle ‘those.FPL’.
unmarked in a wide area of the Romània (Italian, Spanish,
Stress is also free and distinctive in northern dialects of
Sardinian, central and southern dialects of Italy), where in
Italy: e.g. Ven. [faˈdiga] ‘labour’ vs [fadiˈga] ‘to labour’
general onset, nucleus, and coda show low degrees of com-
(Zamboni 1974:15), Gen. [ˈseja] ‘evening’ vs [seˈja] ‘it will
plexity. However, Gallo-Romance varieties show a more
be’ (Forner 1997).
complex syllable structure, because of vowel reduction pro-
Although stress is assumed to be free for many Romance
cesses (Loporcaro 2011a:64-67).
languages, there is a noticeable tendency for lexical prom-
The traditional division of the Romance area into western
inence to be on the penultimate syllable. This holds for
and eastern (von Wartburg 1950; see also §6.5.1), based on
Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian,
two phonological features—preservation of Latin word-final
Sardinian, Ladin, but not French and other Gallo-Romance
-S and lenition of intervocalic stops—appears to be
varieties (northern Italian dialects too), where widespread
questionable.
apocope and syncope have considerably reduced the
For instance, though French is classified as a western
variety, it has lost final -s in its evolution, although it may
still survive in the context of liaison. Similarly, Romanian,
3
traditionally classified as an eastern variety, lacks conson- In what follows, when words are given in their orthographic forms,
stress will be indicated by means of an acute accent on the vowel of the
ant gemination, unlike Italian (Brandão de Carvalho 2008). stressed syllable. Note particularly that this does not necessarily reflect the
On the other hand, weakening of stops is attested in the orthographic conventions of the languages described.
490
PROSODIC STRUCTURE
number of syllable nuclei, increasing the number of mono- 26.5 Rhythm

syllables or oxytones.
Furthermore, some morphological constraints make the
The traditional analysis of speech rhythm distinguishes
assignment of lexical stress not completely free. For
stress timing and syllable timing. In recent years, research
instance, some verb endings are inherently stressed: e.g.
has focused on the acoustic correlates of speech rhythm, on
It. parliámo, Sp. hablámos, Pt. falámos ‘(we) speak’, It. mangiáva
variables derived from durational measurements of conson-
‘(he/she) was eating’, Sp. tomába ‘(he/she) was taking’. The
antal and vocalic intervals (Ramus et al. 1999; Grabe and
same holds for nominal suffixes: e.g. It. píccolo ‘small’ vs
Low 2002; Dellwo and Wagner 2003; Bertinetto and Bertini
piccolíno ‘smallish’; Pt. Brasíl ‘Brazil’ vs brasiléiro ‘Brazilian’.
2008), on the idea that rhythm is a prosodic property of
It is normally assumed that in (late) Latin stress had a
speech which can be measured in the signal in simple
dynamic, expiratory nature. However, the degree of this
numerical terms. These algorithms do not, however, allow
intensive stress was not necessarily the same within the
us to relate acoustic data to phonological constraints,
entire Romance space. I claim that stress was based more on
although they are widely used because of their explicitness
intensity than length in Gallo-Romance, whereas elsewhere
and predictive value. Nevertheless, rhythm metrics only
stress was associated with the increase of segment duration
reflect the duration and clustering of segments, whereas
in relation to timing preferences (see §26.5).
the complexity of syllable structure and the reduction of
As far as the parameter of quantity-sensitivity is con-
unstressed vowels are fundamental to the perception of
cerned (Hayes 1995), retention of the basic metrical pattern
speech rhythm, in that more reduction and more consonant
of Latin determines the survival of this prosodic parameter
clusters indicates stress timing, while less reduction and
across Romance varieties. However, its function is different:
shorter clusters means more syllable timing (Dauer 1983;
whereas Latin is a quantity-sensitive language by virtue of
Gil 1986; Nespor et al. 2011).
assigning lexical stress on the basis of the weight of the
Rhythmic classes cannot therefore be conceived as abso-
penultimate syllable, in Romance languages, which basically
lute categories. A more realistic view places languages on a
preserve the original position of stress, quantity sensitivity
typological continuum, between the two ideal poles of syl-
is no longer active, but rather is an effect, or a relic, of
lable timing and stress timing (Bertinetto 1989; Mairano and
historical development (§26.1.1).
Romano 2011; Schmid 2012).
Contemporary Italian shows the trend to shift stress on to
The great majority of Romance varieties are traditionally
the first syllable of the word, especially in northern var-
considered as syllable-timed (Marotta 1985; Dascălu 1998;
ieties (cf. Marotta 1999a): e.g. cáduco ‘decrepit’, édile ‘build-
Ramus et al. 1999; Wheeler 2005; but against this see Bor-
ing.ADJ’, móllica ‘dough’, persuádere ‘to persuade’, sálubre
zone de Manrique and Signorini 1983). European Portu-
‘healthy’, instead of standard penultimate stress. In con-
guese, however, is considered a stress-timed language,
trast, in Campania stress is moved on to the final syllable
because unstressed vowels are not only much shorter than
of the word if it ends in a consonant, the word also acquiring
stressed ones but also centralized and often deleted, while
a final centralized vowel: e.g. pulman ‘coach’ > [pulˈmanːə],
Brazilian Portuguese is classified as a syllable-timed lan-
valzer ‘waltz’ > [valˈʦɛrːe], with gemination of the final
guage, having a simpler syllable structure (CV) and a
consonant (Ledgeway 2009a:34).
heavy reduction of consonant clusters. Experimental data
Occitan, except around Nice and in neighbouring areas
cast some doubts on the syllable timing of a number of
speaking northwestern Italian dialects, tends to fix stress on
Italian dialects too (Trumper et al. 1991; Schmid 2004).
the penultimate syllable. Proparoxytones are avoided,
In French, northern French varieties, and Gallo-Italian
stress shifting to the following syllable, as in lagréma ‘tear’,
dialects, the complex syllable structure with frequent
perségue ‘peach’, silába ‘syllable’, classíca ‘classical’, credúla
vowel deletion does not allow a simple computation of
‘credulous’ (Wheeler 1988b).
syllables, suggesting that their timing could be placed in
A similar phenomenon occurs at the morphosyntactic
the middle of the rhythmic continuum.
boundary in some southern dialects of Italy. In Neapolitan,
A new, global key to interpreting of Romance prosodic
in phrases comprising a verb followed by clitics, if the
evolution could arise from the relevance of the strict inter-
emerging structure is what is known in Italian as bisdrucciolo
action between stress, rhythm, and syllabification: if we
('óóóó), two phenomena occur: gemination of the conson-
assume that proto-Romance could have shifted towards
ant of the last clitic and stress shift from the verb root to the
stress timing, we might easily understand the wide exten-
penultimate syllable (cf. also §45.3.1): e.g. [ˈpɔrta] ‘bring!’,
sion of such phenomena as reduction of unstressed vowels,
[ˈpɔrtalǝ] ‘bring it!’, but [pɔrtaˈmilːǝ] ‘bring it to me!’;
syncope, and enrichment of consonant clusters (see
[ˈfravǝkǝ] ‘build!’, but [fravǝˈkalːǝ] ‘build it!’ (Bafile 2008;
Loporcaro 2011a:107).
2012; Ledgeway 2009a:33-35).
491
GIOVANNA MAROTTA
26.6 Intonation correction focus (Gili-Fivela et al. forthcoming). In European

Portuguese, the focus contour shows a peak on the stressed
syllable of the focalized word, immediately followed by a
The variability in intonation observed in Romance lan-
fall; the corresponding tonal transcription is H*+L. In Span-
guages does not give rise to prosodic dialectal macro-
ish (Prieto and Roseano 2010a), the nuclear PA which signals
areas, because not only may the same region exhibit
narrow focus is L+H*, followed by a L% boundary tone. This
internal differences, but the same melodic pattern may
complex rising PA is quite common in Spanish, and associ-
also be attested in geographically distant areas. This varie-
ated with the nuclear syllable of other types of utterances
gated picture in Romance suggests the sociophonetic rele-
(imperatives, yes/no questions, as well as echo and wh-
vance of intonation as a marker of diatopic variation.
questions).
26.6.1 Statements 26.6.3 Yes/no questions
Following a prosodic universal, Romance varieties share a The prosodic variation among Romance languages is more
final fall in the melodic contour in neutral declarative evident in yes/no questions, where many melodic patterns
sentences and broad-focus statements, as acoustically dem- may be used, even in geographically quite close areas. The
onstrated by the f0 curve. More precisely, these syntactic basic difference concerns the alignment of the final tonal
structures show a low or falling nuclear accent followed by a raising, which is the typical feature of questions in natural
low final boundary tone. Within the autosegmental frame- languages (Ladd 1990): alongside varieties showing final
work (cf. Ladd 2008), the corresponding pitch accents (PA) high boundary tone (i.e. H%), there are others (e.g. Catalan,
would be L* or H+L* followed by L%, for example in Italian, Italian, Sardinian) where the increase of f0 is anticipated on
Friulian, Catalan, Castilian Spanish, French, Sardinian, the penultimate syllable, whereas the last syllable shows a
Romanian (cf. Frota and Prieto 2015). limited decline, represented in autosegmental terms by a
In French, PA are not associated with every lexically low boundary tone, i.e. L%.
stressed syllable, but rather occur on the last syllable of Florentine as well as many northern varieties of Italian
the Accentual Phrase (AP), but not on schwa. The tonal (e.g. Milan, Turin, Bologna, Genoa), shows a final raising of
movements, normally associated with the right edge of f0, i.e. (H-)H%, whereas a final falling pattern is typically
the AP, are obligatory in this position and always associated attested in many southern varieties (Palermo, Naples, Bari,
with the final metrically strong syllable of the AP, making Cosenza) and also in northwest Tuscan varieties such as Pisa
the nature of what is considered a PA in French quite and Lucca (Marotta and Sorianello 2001; Gili-Fivela 2008).
different from the PA of other Romance languages. The corresponding autosegmental transcription of the lat-
ter melodic configuration would be H-L%, with the high
phrasal tone linked to the penultimate syllable and the
26.6.2 Narrow focus high boundary tone to the last syllable of the utterance.
Polar questions in Spanish exhibit strong intonation vari-
Differences emerge in the expression of narrow contrastive ability across varieties (Sosa 1999; Prieto and Roseano
focus, at least regarding the PA, the edge tones always being 2010a), although two main dialect clusters may be identi-
low, L-L%. The wide variability of the data may be reduced fied. The first includes the peninsular varieties as well as
to three basic Romance types (Frota and Prieto Mexican, Ecuadorean Andean, and Chilean Spanish var-
forthcoming): ieties: the nuclear accent, normally L*, is followed by a
final high rise H%. The second cluster includes most Ameri-
(a) L+H*: the Spanish of Castile, French, standard Italian
can Spanish varieties (Argentinian, Venezuelan Andean, and
and many varieties of Italian (Florence, Siena, Lucca,
Caribbean) and Canarian; in these dialects, the final pattern
Milan, Turin, Naples);
of yes/no questions is typically a fall, formally marked by a
(b) H+L*: Sardinian, some southern Italo-Romance var-
L% final boundary tone.
ieties (e.g. Bari, Pescara);
In European Portuguese, as well, the distinctive feature of
(c) H*+L: Romanian, European Portuguese, the Italian of
yes/no questions is the obligatory final rise, represented by
Pisa and Bari.
a complex PA H+L* followed by a final boundary tone, H%.
In Italian, the first tonal configuration may also be real- Northern varieties show a nuclear low PA instead, followed
ized with a simple high PA, i.e. H*, whereas the third PA by a complex contour composed of a rise and a small fall in
seems to be used in particular for expressing contrastive/ the final part of the utterance, i.e. L*H-L%. If the polar
492
PROSODIC STRUCTURE
question includes a word in focus, the nuclear syllable that of yes/no questions (Cruz-Ferreira 1998; Frota 2002).
shows a low-rising pitch instead of the nuclear fall typical Moreover there seems to be no empirical evidence in Euro-
of neutral polar questions. pean Portuguese for phrase accents, nor for other prosodic
A wider scaling is often associated with the speech act of phrases. The lack of relevance for the prosodic hierarchy
questioning. In Campidanese Sardinian, yes/no questions could be related to the stress timing normally assumed for
show a falling nuclear PA, with upstep of the High tone, Portuguese (§26.5).
i.e. ¡H+L*, which contrasts with the PA found in declaratives, In French wh-questions, a rising f0 movement is normally
that is H+L*. The boundary tone is always L%, as in the other associated with the wh-word or with the initial syllable of
types of questions in Sardinian. Some differences occur the typical French wh-locution est-ce que. Moreover, the
instead in the edge tone of the Accentual Phrase, which nuclear contour at the end of the sentence is marked by a
can be realized as L- (more often), but also as H- (Vanrell fall or by a rise that ends at a lower pitch than the rising
et al. 2015). In Friulian polar questions, a final rise is nor- movement occurring on the wh-word. When the wh-word is
mally found, with a global increase of the f0 range in the realized at the end of the sentence, it is always accented and
utterance (Roseano et al. 2015). the final contour of the utterance typically shows the for-
A rising contour followed by a final fall of f0 has often mat L+H* H%.
been observed in French, in the absence of specific morpho- In Italian, length of utterance and of wh-word are rele-
syntactic markers (subject inversion, interrogative markers, vant. Monosyllabic morphemes such as chi ‘who?’, che
etc.). The corresponding transcription is L+H*H% or H*H%. ‘what?’ are often unstressed and then deprived of PA,
When morphosyntactic markers are used in the question, whereas bisyllabic forms such as dove ‘where?’, come
the shape of the intonation contour is less stable, since it ‘how?’, and especially perché ‘why?’ show a high tone asso-
may be realized with a final rising contour (L+H*), with ciated with the stressed syllable of the wh-word (Marotta
a lower boundary tone, encoded in autosegmental terms 2002).
as !H%, with the diacritic marking downstep. Romanian wh-questions show a f0 peak on the initial wh-
word, followed by a marked descending contour (Ladd 1996;
Dascălu 1998). Since no further pitch movement is normally
26.6.4 Wh-questions observed, especially in short utterances, native speakers
perceive the wh-word as bearing the main accent. Although
Remarkable variability is also found in wh-questions, the intonation contour of Romanian wh-questions shows
although some patterns appear more frequent than others. the same falling pattern as the statements, a remarkable
A first shared prosodic feature is the association of a high difference concerns the higher tonal levels associated with
PA with the wh-word, especially in a short utterance the accented syllable of the wh-word. A terminal rise in wh-
(cf. Ladd 1996 for Romanian; Marotta 2002 for Italian; questions is quite rare in this language; when it occurs, it
Estebas-Vilaplana and Prieto 2010 for Spanish; Prieto 2014 expresses politeness.
for Catalan; Frota 2014 for Portuguese; Vanrell et al. 2015 for
Sardinian). Second, the final contour is often falling, not
rising as in polar questions (Frota and Prieto 2015).
26.6.5 Imperatives
In peninsular Spanish, the unmarked final profile of wh-
questions is the same as for statements, i.e. a final falling Imperative utterances are expressed by falling patterns
contour (L% as boundary tone), with the peculiar feature of across Romance (Frota and Prieto 2015). The nuclear
a high peak associated with the wh-word, normally located PA may vary, although the most frequent are either H+L*
at the beginning of the utterance (cf. Sosa 1999; 2003; or H*+L. The phrase accent as well as the boundary tone are
Estebas-Vilaplana and Prieto 2010). A final rising contour both low, i.e. L-L%. Besides this rather unmarked melodic
(i.e. H-H%) expresses a nuance of special interest and major pattern (widely attested cross-linguistically), other prosodic
involvement of the speaker in the speech act. features are normally associated with this kind of utterance,
In European Portuguese the contour of wh-questions is such as faster speech rate, broader tonal range, sharp fall of
also similar to that of declarative sentences. In both, the f0, and higher values of intensity.
prenuclear contour shows a high plateau, whereas the In Spanish, the low final boundary tone is shared by all
nuclear contour consists of a sharp fall in the last stressed dialects, whereas the nuclear configuration of this utterance
syllable of the Intonational Phrase (H+L*L%). Another pos- type alternates between that of broad-focus statements (as
sible contour, adding politeness to the wh-question, shows a in Venezuelan Andean, Ecuadorean Andean, and Argentin-
final rise after the accentual fall; in this case, instead of a ian Spanish) and that of narrow-focus statements and ex-
final L%, a high boundary tone (H%) is produced, similar to clamatives (as in Castile, Canarian, Chilean, and Mexican
493
GIOVANNA MAROTTA
Spanish). Specific tonal configurations may also be used to rate and a higher value of intensity have also been
express requests: e.g. L*H-L% in Castile and Puerto Rican observed (Vanrell et al. 2015). In Italian and its varieties,
Spanish; L+H*H-L% in Mexican Spanish. the melodic contour shows a falling pattern on the nuclear
European Portuguese (Frota et al. 2015) shows two main portion of the imperative utterance; the corresponding
patterns for sentences employing morphological complex PA is then either H+L* or H*+L. Phrase accent and
imperatives: boundary tone are both low, i.e. L-L%. A sharp fall of f0 and a
faster speech rate are also normally associated with this
(a) a low nuclear accent on the last stressed syllable of
kind of sentence. In the varieties of French, the intonation
the utterance, preceded by a peak on the first stressed
contour used in imperatives is rising-falling, i.e. L+H*L%.
syllable: H*L*L%;
When imperative forms are used to make a request,
(b) a complex PA on the last accented syllable of the
rather than give an order, the melodic contour may be
utterance, also used for yes/no questions and
rising-falling, i.e. H+L*L%. In Romanian, the intonation
declarative sentences: either L*+H L% or H*+LL%.
contour for commands begins with a L+H* pre-nuclear
The two patterns are associated, however, with different accent followed by a nuclear accent, expressed by the com-
pragmatic functions, although they have the same morpho- plex PA H*+L; a final fall is expressed by a low boundary
syntactic form, since the second pattern expresses a real tone (L%).
command, whereas the first normally expresses a request. The main intonation contours of the Romance languages
In Sardinian, commands show the same melodic pattern are now described in the Interactive Atlas of Romance Inton-
found in statements: a prenuclear rising pitch accent L+H* ation, coordinated by Prieto, Borràs-Comes, and Roseano).
and then a falling nuclear accent H+L*. The boundary tone is For a more detailed picture of the topic, see Frota and Prieto
always low (L%). In this kind of utterance, a faster speech (2015).
494
B. Morphology
CHAPTER 27
Inflectional morphology
MARTIN MAIDEN
27.1 General characteristics number. The desinence can—sometimes—be analysed into

component formatives associated with particular grammat-
ical categories or combinations thereof, in the order ‘aspect
The inflectional morphology of Romance (as of Latin, cf.
marker + tense/mood marker + person/number marker’.
Matthews 1972:67-77; §4.2.3) tends to be ‘fusional’.1 Cumu-
In nouns and adjectives, number marking and grammat-
lative and zero exponence, suppletion, syncretism, and
ical gender marking are everywhere synthetic. In the verb,
‘empty morphs’ all occur, to differing degrees, throughout
non-finite forms, all inherited from Latin, remain synthetic:
Romance, and clean segmentability into morphemes is
FACERE ‘make’ (INF), FACTUM (PST.PTCP), FACIENDO (GER) > Pt. fazer,
exceptional. Sometimes (usually because of sound change)
feito, fazendo; Fr. faire, fait, faisant; Ro. face(re), făcut, făcând.
one finds lexemes whose inflectional paradigms contain
However, finite forms (largely inherited from Latin, but see
word forms for which the relation between form, on the
§27.7) differ considerably across languages in the extent to
one hand, and lexical and grammatical meaning, on the
which they are expressed synthetically. Portuguese has nine
other, is wholly opaque.2 Thus the monosyllabic word
synthetic ‘tenses’ (distinct arrays of forms marking tense,
forms of the verb ‘have’, ai [e] and ho [ɔ] respectively in
mood, and aspect): present indicative, present subjunctive,
French and Italian, express ‘have.1SG.PRS.IND’.
imperfect indicative, imperfect subjunctive, preterite, plu-
Nevertheless, most word forms exhibit some internal
perfect indicative, future, conditional, and future subjunctive
structure, usually of the type ‘root (+ theme vowel) + inflec-
(and arguably a tenth, if one includes the inflected infinitive;
tional desinence’. The root is normally the ‘leftmost’ portion
see §27.7), while some Romanian dialects of central Transyl-
of the word, and bears the lexical meaning. The theme
vania have, in current use, only three (present indicative, the
vowel is a referentially empty element present in a subset
subjunctive—historically the present subjunctive—and the
of cells of the inflectional paradigm and the basis of distinc-
imperfect indicative; cf. §8.4.6.2). Many languages have, or
tions particularly of verbs, into arbitrary inflection class
had, around seven: e.g. Italian with present indicative, pre-
(another inheritance from Latin, see §27.8). The remainder,
sent subjunctive, imperfect indicative, imperfect subjunctive,
the ‘rightmost’ portion, is the ‘desinence’, the principal
preterite, future, and conditional.
domain of exponence of tense, aspect, mood, person, and
Romance differs significantly from Latin in the extent of
root allomorphy and of syncretism. For the emergence of
1
I deal here with ‘synthetic’ word forms, those whose component root allomorphy for number in nouns and adjectives, see
morphological structure is rigidly inseparable and immutable. In reality, §42.6. While Latin verbs displayed various types of idiosyn-
the boundary between synthetic word forms and ‘analytic’ structures is not
always sharp (see Ledgeway 2012a:385; §4.2.3), and the components of cratic root allomorphy originally correlated with aspect and
apparent analytic structures, comprising auxiliaries or clitics, may show extensively conserved in Romance (see §43.2.2), the major
degrees of ‘fusion’. E.g. Romance languages may display some fusion of verb innovation lies in the fact that all Romance languages
forms with (clitic) subject pronouns: in Romansh and Ladin varieties the
verb has a special set of phonologically reduced word-final clitics used in acquire abundant patterns of root allomorphy correlated
interrogative and certain other types of construction usually requiring with person, number, tense, and mood. Many of its sources
syntactic inversion of subject and verb (see e.g. Alton and Vittur (principally phonological and involving, particularly, stress-
1968:47f.; Minach and Gruber 1972:76-80; Haiman and Benincà 1992:95f.;
and §47.4.2); see also Cruschina and Rinollo (2013) for a Sicilian enclitic related vowel differentiations and palatalization), and their
pronoun-cum-agreement marker, and §27.3 for the development of a sec- subsequent history and role as ‘morphomic’ templates giv-
ond person plural pronoun as a desinence in southern Italy. For many ing rise to novel alternations, are discussed in §§43.2.3 and
Gallo-Romance and northern Italo-Romance varieties it could be argued
(e.g. Rizzi 1986) that what are conventionally regarded as ‘obligatory 43.2.4.3 For a proposal that the morphological complexity of
subject clitics’ are analysable as part of the inflectional morphology of the verb sometimes favoured phonetic processes producing
the verb (see also §47.5).
2
By the ‘inflectional paradigm’ of a lexeme I mean the array of word
forms which express its lexical meaning in combination with grammatical
3
values. See also §§8.4.2, 13.3.2.3.
MARTIN MAIDEN
quantitatively greater root allomorphy there than else- examples from Romanian, or some of those from Surselvan,
where in the grammar (especially in respect of metaphony above. There are various analogical adjustments in the
in central and southern Italy), see Maiden (1991a,b): e.g. distribution of the desinences. Italian has introduced -i
Cervara (Lazio; Merlo 1922): FPL ˈmɔrte ‘dead vs MPL ˈmorti, from the preterite into the imperfect subjunctive while -o
but 3SG.PRS.IND ˈstɔrʧa ‘wring’ vs 2SG.PRS.IND ˈsturʧi. of the modern imperfect indicative (as also in Nuorese) is
Syncretism (complete formal identity between cells of analogically introduced from the present; modern Roma-
the paradigm having different grammatical content) was nian forms in -m are re-formed on the first person plural,
rare in the Latin verb, and remains so in Logudorese and thereby producing syncretism for number. Various lan-
Nuorese Sardinian. Most modern Romance languages, how- guages in a ‘central’ area, spanning Friulian (§10.3.2.2.),
ever, have extensive and systematic patterns of syncretism, Ladin, Surselvan, most northern Italian dialects (§13.3.2.2),
nearly always historically due to phonologically induced Occitan, Francoprovençal (§20.4.2), French, and Catalan
neutralization of PN desinences. A number of these are display, especially in the first conjugation (e.g. Friulian),
described below and in §§42.5 and 43.2.4 (see also §§13.3.2.2, an unexpected, overt exponent of person and number in
15.3.2, 22.3.2.2, 24.3.5.5, 56.2.1.2). place of an expected zero (given regular deletion of
In what follows I make extensive illustrative use of unstressed final -o). This usually takes the form -i (or -e)
reflexes of Latin CANTARE ‘sing’ and FACERE (perfective root in Friulian, Ladin (see §11.4.2), Occitan (see §19.3.2.2), and
FEC-) ‘make’. some Catalan dialects; in French first conjugation present
indicatives we find -e (/ə/) (cf. Fr. chante vs OFr. chant).
Standard Catalan has -o, apparently influenced by Spanish
and characteristic just of present tense verbs that show no
27.2 Inflectional morphology root allomorphy for person and number (e.g. 1SG.PRS creixo
of nouns and adjectives ‘grow’ 2SG.PRS creixes etc. vs 1SG.PRS plac ‘please’ 2SG.PRS plaus).
See Iliescu (1969), and particularly Benincà and Vanelli
(2005b:243-56), who propose that the vowel is added, ori-
Inflectional marking of number, found across Romance, is
ginally in the first conjugation (to which it remains limited
discussed in Ch. 42. For the expression of gender, and some
in French, Friulian, and Valencian), to provide an equal
other semantic distinctions (e.g. singular -a for feminines and
number of syllables with the other forms of the first
-o or -u for masculines), see §§27.8, 57.2, and Maiden
conjugation present indicative which are vowel-final (see
(2011a:167-74); also §§15.2.2, 16.3.1.2, and 57.3.3 for the inflec-
also §13.3.2.2). The principal source of this vowel was
tional distinction of mass (‘neuter’) from ‘count’ nouns in
probably a small number of verbs in which a vocalic reflex
Italy and Spain. Inflectional marking of case on nouns and
of -o was regularly preserved from deletion after conson-
adjectives is largely extinct, the major exception being Roma-
ant + /r/ or /l/ (e.g. INTRO > OFr entre ‘I.enter’), and it is
nian (§§8.4.3.1, 56.2.1.3). For discussion of other remnants of
significant that the Surselvan ending in this case is -el,
inflectional case marking (typically of ‘nominative vs oblique’
apparently a (metathesized) reflex of original postconso-
distinctions) see especially §56.2.1; also §18.4.2.1.1.3.
nantal *-lo.
There is a high degree of language-internal and cross-
linguistic consistency in reflexes of the Latin first person
plural ending -MUS: CANTAMUS FACIMUS (PRS.IND), CANTEMUS FACIAMUS
27.3 Person and number marking (PRS.SBJV), CANTABAMUS FACIEBAMUS (IPFV.IND), CANTAUIMUS FECIMUS
in the verb (PRFV.IND), CANTAUISSEMUS FECISSEMUS (PLPRF.SBJV); Sp. cantamos, can-
temos, cantábamos, cantamos, cantásemos; hacemos, hagamos,
Romance inherited from Latin a suppletive system of first hacíamos, hicimos, hiciésemos; Srs. cantein, canteien, cantaven,
person singular marking, whose ‘default’ desinence was -M, [ . . . ] cantassen; fagein, fageien, fagevan, [ . . . ], fagessen; It. can-
but whose desinence was -O in present indicative and -I in tiamo, cantiamo, cantavamo, cantammo, cantassimo; facciamo,
perfect indicative. Given that final -M was usually phonolo- facciamo, facevamo, facemmo, facessimo; Ro. cântăm, cântăm,
gically deleted without trace, the result is first person sin- cântam, cântarăm, cântaserăm; facem, facem, făceam, făcurăm,
gular forms (Table 27.1) lacking any overt exponent and făcuserăm. For Fr. -ons (e.g. faisons, chantons) and the now
often displaying syncretism with other forms (notably suppletive preterite ending -mes, ultimately reflecting -MUS,
third person singular, see below), whose endings happened see, e.g. Pope (1952:339, 373); for Italian preterite -mmo, see,
also to have been deleted. e.g. Maiden (1995:127). For discussions of the various kinds
Lack of overt exponence is increased in some languages of present tense first person plural desinences found in
by phonological deletion of unstressed final vowels: cf. Italo-Romance (especially -um(a), -om(a) of various northern
498
INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY
Table 27.1 First person singular marking

LAT . PT . OCC . SRS . NUO . IT . RO .
PRS.IND CANTO canto canti (cante) cantel ˈdɔmɔ ‘tame’ canto cânt
(ORo. cântu)
PRS.SBJV CANTEM cante cante canties dɔmɛ canti cânt
(ORo. cântu)
IPFV.IND CANTABAM cantava cantavi cantavel dɔˈmabɔ cantavo cântam
(cantave) (OIt. cantava) (ORo. cânta)
PLPRF.IND CANTAUERAM cantara
PFV.IND CANTAUI cantei cantèri cantai cântai
(cantère)
PLPRF.SBJV CANTAUISSEM cantasse cantesse (cantessi) cantass cantassi cântasem
(OIt. cantasse) (ORo. cântase)
PRS.IND FACIO faço fau fetsch(el) ˈfakɔ faccio fac
(ORo. facu)
PRS.SBJV FACIAM faça faga fetschi ˈfaka faccia facă
IPFV.IND FACIEBAM fazia fasiá fagevel faˈkia facevo făceam
(OIt. faceva) (ORo. făcea)
PLPRF.IND FECERAM fizera
PFV.IND FECI fiz faguèri feci făcui
PLPRF.SBJV FECISSEM fizesse faguèsse fagess facessi făcusem
(OIt. facesse) (ORo. făcuse)
dialects, possibly originating in a pronominal reflex of HOMO analogical adjustments, there remains considerable dia-
‘man’, see Spina (2011:161-224), also §13.3.2.2.4 chronic and language-internal unity in the marking of
There is a high degree of language-internal and dia- second person plural. The ending virtually always con-
chronic unity in marking second person. For the singular, tinues Latin -(V)TIS, in all tenses and moods (for the special
modern Romance languages fall into two groups: the ‘sig- case of the imperative, and Italo-Romance -te, see §27.5.1).
matic’ (in -s) and the ‘vocalic’ (in -i; historically, also -e). The Thus CANTATIS, (PRS.IND), CANTABATIS (IPFV.IND), CANTAUISTIS (PRFV.
‘vocalic’ varieties are most of Italo-Romance, Dalmatian, IND), CANTAUISSETIS (PLPRF.SBJV); FACITIS, FACIEBATIS, FECISTIS, FECISSETIS
and Daco-Romance, the remainder being overwhelmingly > Sp. cantáis, cantabais, cantasteis, cantaseis; hacéis, hacíais,
sigmatic. Historically, however (Maiden 1996a), both sets hicisteis, hiciéseis; Cat. canteu, cantàveu, cantàreu, cantéssiu;
continue Latin -S, the ‘vocalic’ type reflecting regular feu, fèieu, féreu, féssiu; Srs. cantas, cantavas, [ . . . ], cantasses;
sound changes historically affecting final -Vs: CANTAS, CANTA- fas, fagevas, [ . . . ], fagessies; Fr. chantez, chantiez, chantâtes,
BAS, CANTAUISSES; FACIS, FACIEBAS, FECISSES > Sp. cantas, cantabas, chantassiez; faites, faisiez, fîtes, fissiez; Ro. cântați, cântați,
cantases; haces, hacías, hicieses; Cat. cantes, cantaves, cantasses; cântarăți, cântaserăți; faceți, făceați, făcurăți, făcuserăți. The
fés, feies, fessis; Srs. contas, cantavas; cantasses; fas, fagevas, suppletive French desinence -tes, in the preterite and in
fagesses; It. canti (OIt cante), cantavi (OIt. cantave), cantassi; certain present indicative verbs (e.g. faites), reflects the
fai, facevi (OIt. faceve), facessi; Ro. cânți, cântai, cantaseși (older fact that in these cases the reflex of -TIS was once preceded
cântasei); faci, făceai, facessi. For modern Daco-Romance pret- by a consonant. For Aromanian and old Romanian 2PL -tu,
erite and pluperfect second person singulars in -și, see see Maiden (2009b:298-302).
Maiden (2009b:297f.). The relatively transparent matching, language-
Although cross-linguistic unity has been largely des- internally, between form and meaning in the exponence of
troyed by the effects of local sound changes and various second person plural is nonetheless subject to various local
disruptions. Widespread in Italo-Romance (cf. Rohlfs
4
1968:148f.) is formation of a new second person plural
For other examples of grammaticalization of reflexes of HOMO as a
plural marker, see D’Alessandro and Alexiadou (2006) and D’Alessandro desinence by suffixation, to the form of the second person
(2014). singular, of what appears to be a clitic subject pronoun
499
MARTIN MAIDEN
Table 27.2 Suffixation of reflexes of UOS (underlined) in the Table 27.3 Third person singular desinences
second person plural in northern and southern Italo-
NUORESE NOVA SIRI
Romance
TRAVO CALVELLO
PRS.IND ˈdɔmat ‘tames’ ˈlɛːβəðə ‘lifts’
( ZÖRNER 1989) ( GIOSCIO 1985) PRS.SBJV ˈdɔmɛt –
IPFV.IND dɔˈmabat ləˈβaːβəðə
PRS.IND kãˈtɛ faˈʧitə IPFV.SBJV dɔˈmarɛt ləˈβissəðə
PRS.SBJV kãˈtɛ PRT – ləˈβaːjəðə
IPFV.IND kãˈtɛva faˈʧivətə PRS.IND ˈfakɛt ˈfa(aðə)
IPFV.SBJV kãˈtasva faˈʧissəvə PRS.SBJV ˈfakat –
FUT kãˈtri IPFV.IND faˈkiat faˈʧiːjəðə
COND kãˈtrisva faˈʧistəvə IPFV.SBJV faˈkɛrɛt faˈʧissəðə
PRT – faˈʧiːβəðə
derived from Latin UOS ‘you.PL’5 (Table 27.2). This typically Table 27.4 Neutralization of number marking in third
affects only past tense forms (with conditionals), or a subset person
thereof (cf. §16.3.2.2): SERVIGLIANO ALPAGO
All Latin third person singular forms (Table 27.3) ended in ( CAMILLI ( ZÖRNER OLD
-T, and third person plurals in -NT. The final dental survives 1929) 1989) ROMANIAN
as a distinctive third person singular marker in Sardinian
(e.g. Nuorese; Pittau 1972) and in dialects of the so-called 3SG.PRS.IND FACIT fa fa face
‘Lausberg Zone’ in the Basilicata–Calabria border area (e.g. 3PL.PRS.IND FACIUNT fa fa facu
Nova Siri; Lausberg 1939); see also Loporcaro (1997a:114-17) 3SG.PRS.SBJV FACIAT ˈfatʧa ˈfae facă
and §16.3.2.2: 3PL.PRS.SBJV FACIANT ˈfatʧa ˈfae facă
Final -t also survived in early northern Gallo-Romance, 3SG.IPFV.IND FACIEBAT faˈʧia ˈfea făcea
longest of all when preceded by a consonant, and remains 3PL.IPFV.IND FACIEBANT faˈʧia ˈfea făcea
audible under conditions of liaison in French (see Lausberg (mod.
1965:§§547-9, 553, 554). făceau)
Generally the the third person singular desinence has 3SG.PLPRF.SBJV FECISSET faˈʧesse ˈfese făcuse
been deleted, creating a situation in which there is fre- 3PL.PLPRF.SBJV FECISSENT faˈʧesse ˈfese făcuse
quently no longer any desinence, and in which there is (mod.
syncretism with other forms lacking overt person and num- făcuseră)
ber marking, principally the first person singular forms: e.g. 3SG.PRT FECIT ˈfeʧe făcu
FACIAM (1SG.PRS.SBJV), FACIAT (3SG.PRS.SBJV); FACIEBAM (1SG.IPFV.IND), 3PL.PRT FECERUNT ˈfeʧe făcură
FACIEBAT (3SG.IPFV.IND); FECISSEM (1SG.PLPRF.SBJV) FECISSET (3SG.PLPRF.
SBJV) > Sp. haga haga; hacía hacía; hiciese hiciese; Egd. ˈfaʧa
ˈfaʧa; ˈfɛva ˈfɛva; fɛs fɛs; Ascrea (Lazio) ˈfaççe ˈfaççe; faˈçea in the verb the difference between -T and -NT had been the
faˈçea; faˈçesse faˈçesse; ORo. (facu facă); făcea făcea; făcuse sole distinguisher of number, syncretism normally ensues
făcuse. (Table 27.4).
While reflexes of -NT (originally preserved intact in north- In Romanian there is additional syncretism in the present
ern Gallo-Romance including Francoprovençal, elsewhere of first conjugation verbs: CANTA CANTANT > cântă cântă. The
generally becoming -n), survive widely as markers of third plural preterite form of Servigliano, ˈfeʧe, shows how, in
person plural, syncretism is yet further increased by dele- many dialects with general syncretism, even forms origin-
tion of this entire desinence, in Daco-Romance, Dalmatian, ally with additional marking of plural are made analogically
western and Carnic varieties of Friulian, Ladin (§11.4.2), to conform to this pattern (cf. also Lat. PRS.IND EST ‘is’ SUNT >
modern Italo-Romance varieties of the northeast including ɛ ɛ), a development also widely observable in southern
eastern parts of the Marche (§15.3.2) and Abruzzo. Wherever Romanian dialects (cf. Marin 1991:51-3).
Central and southern Italy also appears, originally, to
have participated in deletion of -NT. The desinence -no,
5
See also §§11.4.2, 13.3.2.2, 16.3.2.2. characteristic of Italian with much of central and southern
500
Table 27.5 Present and imperfective indicative forms

PT . CAT . FR . SRS . IT . RO .
3PL.PRS.IND CANTANT cantam canten chantent cantan cantano cântă

FACIUNT fazem fan font fan fanno fac
3PL.IPFV.IND CANTABANT cantavam cantaven chantaient cantavan cantavano cântau
FACIEBANT faziam feien faisaient fagevan facevano făceau
Italy, originates in the third person plural present indicative reanalysed -ră (originally the marker of third person plural
of the verb ‘be’, sono, -no being reanalysed as a number preterite) as a marker of plural, extending it to all plural
marker and then spreading analogically to most other forms of preterite and pluperfect, but only to them: 1SG.PRT
third person plural forms; for an account see e.g. Maiden cântai 2SG cântași 3SG cântă 1PL cântarăm 2SG cântarăți 3SG cân-
(1995:130f.). In some central Italian dialects generalization tară; 1SG.PLPRF cântasem 2SG cântaseși 3SG cântase 1PL cântaserăm
of -no (or -nu) tends noticeably to ‘target’ just those cases 2SG cântaserăți 3SG cântaseră. For a remarkable case of innov-
that would otherwise have been identical to the singular: atory desinential marking of both number and gender of the
e.g. first conjugation (PRS.IND) MANDAT ‘send’ MANDANT; (PRS.SBJV) subject in Marchigiano dialects between the Tronto and Aso,
MANDET MANDENT; (PFV.IND) MANDAUIT MANDAUERUNT; (PRS.SBJV) COOPER- see Parrino (1967), Harder (1988), Ledgeway (2012a:299-310);
IAT COOPERIANT; (PFV.IND) MANDAUIT MANDAUERUNT; (PRS.IND) COOPERIT also §56.5.
‘cover’ COOPERIUNT; > Ascrea (in Lazio, Fanti 1939) ˈmanna
ˈmannanu; ˈmanne ˈmannenu; ˈkrɔpe ˈkrɔpenu, but
manˈnao manˈnaru; ˈkrɔpe ˈkropu.
The third person plural desinences -ro (-ru) in central and
27.4 Tense (and aspect) marking
southern Italo-Romance (see also §14.3.2.2), and -ră in
Romanian, originate in the Latin perfective indicative (CAN-
TAUERUNT, FECERUNT), where -RU- constitutes an additional
The Romance languages almost universally show a set of
marker of third person plural alongside -NT, and the sole continuants of the Latin present indicative and imperfect
marker thereof after deletion of -NT. In Daco-Romance, -ră indicative forms (but see §9.3 for Vegliote, and §8.4.6.2 for
remains confined to the preterite in sub-Danubian dialects, northern Istro-Romanian) (Table 27.5).
but has spread into the pluperfect in Romanian (cântară, The exponent of imperfect tense usually appears between
cântaseră; făcură făcuseră). In various Italo-Romance dialects the lexical root and the PN desinence, some languages
it has often been extended into the imperfect subjunctive showing suppletion, largely of phonological origin, related
(It. cantarono, cantassero; fecero, facessero); see further Maiden to conjugation class (and occasionally according to person
(2009a:289-97).6 and number: French has -i- rather than -ai- as imperfect
Despite the numerous extensions and redistributions of PN marker in the first and second persons plural, chantions,
desinences, there is virtually no creation of general, distinct- chantiez, etc.). Latin had a phonologically conditioned stress
ive, invariant forms for one particular person or number, or alternation between the first and second person plural of
combination thereof. In dialects of Istria, or the Ladin of Val the preterite and the remaining forms (e.g. FACIÉBAM, FACIÉBAS,
FACIÉBAT, FACIEBÁMUS, FACIEBÁTIS, FACIÉBANT) which is retained in
Gardena, -i (or -e) is almost general for first person singular,
yet it is not found in the future. There are some signs of some languages (widely in central Italy: e.g. It. facévo, facévi,
emergence of distinctive marking of number, independent of facéva, facevámo, faceváte, facévano), but also extensively
person. Apparently on the analogy of the second person regularized, for example in Friulian, Romansh, western
plural ending -ti, we find in Gallurese and Sassarese extension Occitan (§19.3.2.3.1), Romansh, Catalan, and Ibero-Romance
of -i, (also an inflectional marker of plural in nouns and (e.g. Sp. hacía, hacías, hacía, hacíamos, hacíais, hacían). The
adjectives) to all plural forms of the verb (albeit not consist- irregular and suppletive imperfect of the verb ‘be’ survives
ently in the first person plural): e.g. (Bazzoni 1999): PRS.IND 1PL widely: 3SG ERAT 3PL ERANT > Sp. era, eran, Cat. era, eren, It. era,
laˈbɛmmu ‘wash’, 2PL laˈbeddi, 3PL ˈlabani; IPFV.IND 1PL laˈba- erano. French has replaced reflexes of ERAM etc. with a form
bami, 2PL laˈbabaddi, 3PL laˈbabani. Standard Romanian has apparently continuing the imperfect indicative of STARE
‘stand’ (e.g. 3SG. était). For other imperfect indicative roots
of this verb, see, e.g. §17.3.2; Decurtins (1958:176, 184);
6
Cf. also Magnanini (2010). Ledgeway (2009a:394).
501
MARTIN MAIDEN
Another past indicative tense form initially inherited by today (see Lunn and Cravens 1991; and §22.4.2.1), as it does
all Romance languages is the Latin present perfective indi- in written and formal Portuguese (3SG.PLPRF.IND CANTAUERAT,
cative (the Romance ‘preterite’, also called ‘perfect’, ‘simple FECERAT > cantara, fizera), and Galician. It survived in old
7
past’). The principal distinction between preterite and Sardinian apparently as a past anterior (Wagner 1938-
imperfect indicative was that the latter had past perfective 9:21f.), but in Italo-Romance (principally mainland southern
(vs imperfective) value: see especially §58.2.3. Today the Italy: e.g. Nova Siri (Lausberg 1939) faˈʧɛːrəðə), old Catalan,
preterite’s continuants are wholly or virtually absent in old Occitan (and old Piedmontese; see Gamillscheg
modern spoken French (cf. §18.4.2.1.2.2), Balearic and west- 1912:186f., 242), it was typically used in the apodosis of
ern Catalan (§21.4.2), much of northern Italo-Romance non-past conditionals (e.g. old Roman fécera). Although
(§13.4), Romansh (but not Engadine varieties), Ladin, most obsolescent at the time of the earliest texts and largely
Friulian varieties (§10.3.2.1; see also Haiman and Benincà restricted to northern and eastern varieties, the form also
(1992:88-90) for Friulian, Ladin, and Romansh), northern survived in old French (see Moignet 1959; Togeby 1966:178f.;
Calabria (province of Cosenza; §16.4.2.1), and standard Lausberg 1966:§828).
Romanian (but see §8.4.6.2); it had virtually disappeared in Sardinian (some Logudorese varieties and southern Nuor-
Vegliote Dalmatian. ese) has an imperfect subjunctive form in -re-, generally
The salient characteristics of the preterite in modern acknowledged (see also §17.3.2; Loporcaro 1986; Mensching
Romance are (a) that (in many languages) it displays some 2000; cf. also §17.3.2) to continue the Latin imperfect sub-
distinctive person and number desinences (see §27.3), not- junctive (whose stem was always identical to that of
ably first person singular -i (or reflexes thereof), second the imperfective infinitive): DOMARET ‘he tamed’, FACERET >
person forms in ‑st-, and a third person plural containing Nuo. dɔˈmarɛt, faˈkɛrɛt.
-r- and, (b), that some verbs have an idiosyncratic root
allomorph which carries stress in at least some parts of
the preterite (principally first and third persons singular,
more rarely first person plural). The range and evolution 27.5 Mood: imperative and subjunctive
of these special allomorphs are discussed in §43.2.2 (also
Maiden 2000c; 2001a,b; 2011a:174-201). ‘Regular’ preterites
(principally those of the first and fourth conjugations)
27.5.1 Imperative
usually continue Latin stems comprising root + theme
Most modern Romance languages lack systematic, dedicated
vowel + perfective marker U. Many second conjugation
second person imperative morphology.8 To begin with the
verbs were characterized by root + U. Some examples of
plural, Latin imperatives displayed a distinctive ending -TE
modern developments involving first conjugation verbs
(PORTATE ‘carry!’), distinguishing them from all other second
(e.g. reflexes of CANTARE), second conjugation verbs origin-
person plurals, which ended in -TIS. This distinction is usu-
ally in -U- (e.g. reflexes of TENERE ‘hold’), third conjugation
ally neutralized in Romance. Maiden (2007a:159-61) argues
verbs with special root allomorphs (FACERE and DICERE ‘say’),
that the general second person plural desinence -te of mod-
and fourth conjugation verbs (e.g. DORMIRE ‘sleep’) are given
ern Italian (and most Italo-Romance varieties) arises from a
in Table 27.6.
generalization of an originally imperative ending to all
The /r/ originally characteristic of third person plural
second person plurals (e.g. portate ‘you carry’, portate
tends to generalize throughout the preterite (excepting
‘carry!’). More usually, the distinction is neutralized in
third person singular) in many varieties of Occitan, as well
favour of continuants of non-imperative -TIS (e.g. Ro. purtați
as Balearic and western Catalan: see §19.3.2.3.2 for this and
‘you carry’, purtați ‘carry!’; Fr. portez, portez). Distinctive
other generalized preterite markers. The final dental seen
imperative reflexes of Latin -TE persist however in Ibero-
throughout Engadine preterites possibly originates in the
Romance, old Catalan, Sardinian, Romansh, Ladin, and
preterite of the verb ‘stand’, whose preterite root is ʃtɛt-
(Haiman and Benincà 1992:90 interpret this development
differently).
Some languages possess a synthetic pluperfect. The Daco- 7
But see Dietrich (1987).
8
Romance continuant of the Latin pluperfect subjunctive Individual lexemes (high-frequency basic ones) may have special
imperative forms. The imperative of ‘be’ is often identical to, or derived
emerges as a pluperfect indicative (3SG.PLPRF.SBJV CANTAUISSET, from, the present subjunctive (e.g. Ro. 2SG.PRS.IND ești, 2PL.PRS.IND sunteți, 2SG.IMP
FECISSET > Ro. PLPRF cântase, făcuse). Continuants of the Latin fii, 2PL.IMP fiți; Fr. 2SG.PRS.IND es, 2PL.PRS.IND êtes, 2SG IMP sois, 2PL.IMP soyez), and for
pluperfect indicative occur or occurred in most Romance some languages this is also true of ‘have’ (It. 2SG.PRS.IND hai, 2PL.PRS.IND avete,
2SG.IMP abbi, 2PL.IMP abbiate; Fr. 2SG.PRS.IND as, 2PL.PRS.IND avez, 2SG.IMP aie, 2PL.IMP
varieties (not Daco-Romance). In old Spanish it persisted as ayez). For special, sometimes suppletive, 2nd person singular imperatives in
a past anterior, a function which it retains in some measure Romanian and Italian, see Maiden (2006; 2007a).
502
Table 27.6 Romance preterite forms

PT . OCC . ( NICE ) EGD . IT . ARO .
1SG CANTAUI cantei kanˈtɛri canˈtɛt cantai kɨnˈtai

2SG CANTAUISTI cantaste kanˈtɛres canˈtɛtast cantasti kɨnˈtaʃ
3SG CANTAUIT cantou kanˈtɛt canˈtɛt cantò kɨnˈtə
1PL CANTAUIMUS cantamos kanteˈrjaŋ canˈtɛtans cantammo kɨnˈtəmu
2PL CANTAUISTIS cantastes kanteˈrjas canˈtɛtas cantaste kɨnˈtatu
3PL CANTAUERUNT cantaram kanˈtɛrun canˈtɛtan cantarono kɨnˈtarɨ
1SG TENUI tive tenˈgɛri tɲɛt tenni ʦɨˈnui
2SG TENUISTI tiveste tenˈgɛres ˈtɲɛtast tenesti ʦɨˈnuʃ
3SG TENUIT teve tenˈgɛt tɲɛt tenne ʦɨˈnu
1PL TENUIMUS tivemos tengeˈrjaŋ ˈtɲɛtans tenemmo ʦɨˈnumu
2PL TENUISTIS tivestes tengeˈrjas ˈtɲɛtas teneste ʦɨˈnutu
3PL TENUERUNT tiveram tengeˈrun ˈtɲɛtan tennero ʦɨˈnurɨ
1SG FECI fiz faˈgɛri fɛt feci ˈfeʧu
2SG FECISTI fizeste faˈgɛres ˈfɛtast facesti fɨˈʦeʃ
3SG FECIT fez faˈgɛt fɛt fece ˈfe̯aʦi
1PL FECIMUS fizemos fageˈrjaŋ ˈfɛtans facemmo ˈfe̯aʦimu
2PL FECISTIS fizestes fageˈrjas ˈfɛtas faceste ˈfe̯aʦitu
3PL FECERUNT fizeram faˈgɛrun ˈfɛtan fecero ˈfe̯aʦirɨ
1SG DIXI disse diˈgɛri ʤɛt dissi ˈʣɨʃu
2SG DIXISTI disseste diˈgɛres ˈʤɛtast dicesti ʣɨˈseʃ
3SG DIXIT disse diˈgɛt ˈʤɛt disse ˈʣɨsi
1PL DIXIMUS dissemos digeˈrjaŋ ˈʤɛtans dicemmo ˈʣɨsimu
2PL DIXISTIS dissestes digeˈrjas ˈʤɛtas diceste ˈʣɨsitu
3PL DIXERUNT disseram diˈgɛrun ˈʤɛtan dissero ˈʣɨsirɨ
1SG DORMIUI dormi durˈmɛri durˈmit dormii durˈɲii
2SG DORMIUISTI dormiste durˈmɛres durˈmitast dormisti durˈɲiʃ
3SG DORMIUIT dormiu durˈmɛt durˈmit dormì durˈɲi
1PL DORMIUIMUS dormimos durmeˈrjaŋ durˈmitans dormimmo durˈɲimu
2PL DORMIUISTIS dormistes durmeˈrjas durˈmitas dormiste durˈɲitu
3PL DORMIUERUNT dormiram durˈmɛrun durˈmitan dormirono durˈɲirɨ
Friulian (cf. Lausberg 1966:§805). See also Maiden (2007a:152) canta, Ro. cântă, cânți cântă; Lat. UENDE ‘sell’ vs UENDIS UENDIT > Sp.
for new, distinctively imperative forms in some northern vende, vendes vende, It. vendi, vendi vende, Ro. vinde, vinzi vinde;
Italo-Romance varieties. Lat. DORMI ‘sleep’ vs DORMIS DORMIT > Sp. duerme, duermes duerme,
Most Romance languages, unlike Latin, lack a morpho- It. dormi, dormi dorme, Ro. dormi, dormi doarme. For the typo-
logically distinct second person singular imperative, the rele- logically unusual correlation between imperative morph-
vant form being identical either to the third or second person ology and transitivity in Romanian, see §8.4.6.2.
singular present indicative.9 The historical explanation for Daco-Romance displays a number of what may be
this syncretism is principally phonological: the Latin impera- described as ‘imperative-only’ verbs, which are in effect
tives had a zero ending, such that the subsequent regular defective save for their imperatives (Maiden 2006:53-5),
deletion of the 3SG.PRS.IND -T (with certain other phonological e.g. Ro. 2SG haide ‘get going’, 1PL haidem, 2PL haideți. See
changes, including reduction of 2SG.PRS.IND -AS, -ES, -IS to -i in García García (1983:211) for a western Asturian example.
Romanian and Italo-Romance: see Maiden 1996a) yielded Romance, like Latin, generally lacks morphologically dis-
identity of the imperative with one of these forms: e.g. Lat. tinctive first person plural imperatives. The Latin pattern,
CANTA vs CANTAS CANTAT > Pt. canta, cantas canta, It. canta, canti deploying the present subjunctive as imperative, remains
widespread: e.g. Lat. 1PL.PRS.IND FACIMUS vs 1PL.PRS.SBJV/IMP FACIA-
MUS, Pt. fazemos vs façamos, Sp. hacemos vs hagamos, Ro. facem
9
But cf. §16.3.2.2.
503
MARTIN MAIDEN
Table 27.7 Romance subjunctive forms for continuants of FACERE

LAT . PT CAT . FR . SRS . NUO . IT . RO .
PRS FACIAT faça faci fasse fetschi ˈfakat faccia facă

IPFV FACERET faˈkɛrɛt
PLPRF FECISSET fizesse fes fît fagess facesse
FUT.PFV/PFV.SBJV FECERIT fizer (ORo. fecere)
vs să facem. Historically, Italo-Romance largely adhered to Table 27.8 Romance present subjunctive (third person
this pattern: generalization of -iamo as the present tense singular) forms
first person plural ending in Italian (facciamo) originates LAT . PT . FR . IT . RO .
in an imperative use of a subjunctive form: cf. Maiden
(2007a:161f.); Meszler and Samu (2007); also Rohlfs (1968: IND CANTAT canta (OFr. chante) canta cântă
353) for parallel neutralizations in the distinction between SBJV CANTET cante (OFr. chant) canti cânte
first person plural present indicative, subjunctive, and IND UENDIT ‘sells’ vende vend vende vinde
imperative in Italo-Romance. In many other places, the SBJV UENDAT venda vende venda vândă
first person plural present indicative has come to serve IND DORMIT ‘sleeps’ dorme dort dorme doarme
also as imperative. This occurs in much of southern Italy SBJV DORMIAT dorma dorme dorma doarmă
(Rohlfs 1968:353), where present subjunctive forms have
been replaced by indicatives. On irregular imperatives in
Occitan, often conserving older forms of the subjunctive,
from which they have become morphologically estranged, intact the Latin imperfect subjunctive, elsewhere extinct
see §19.3.2.3.1 and especially Swearingen (2011) (also (Table 27.7).10
Maiden et al. 2010). Spanish has reanalysed the continuant of the Latin plu-
perfect indicative as a second form of imperfect subjunctive
(FECERAT > hiciera).
27.5.2 Subjunctive The Latin present subjunctive was characterized by a
kind of ‘reversal’ of theme vowels with respect to the
Overall, Romance shows asymmetry between indicative and present indicative, still widely observable, at least in its
subjunctive, there being fewer synthetic tense-forms of the effects, in modern Romance. In brief, the present subjunct-
subjunctive than of the indicative: for examples, see ive of the first conjugation contained /e/, while that of all
§§16.3.2.2, 16.4.2.1; 18.4.2.1.2.3; 20.4.7. The extremes are other conjugations contained /a/ (identical to the theme
Istro-Romanian, which now completely lacks subjunctive vowel of the present indicative in the first conjugation)
forms inflectionally distinct from the present indicative, (Table 27.8).
except the verb ‘be’ (cf. Pușcariu 1926), and southern Possibly under analogical pressure from the non-first
Calabrian and northwestern Sicilian varieties which lack conjugation marker, /a/, some varieties neutralize the dis-
any morphologically distinct forms of the subjunctive. tinction between indicative and subjunctive in the first
Most varieties inherit just the Latin present and pluperfect conjugation, in favour of the former. Thus the singular
subjunctive series, the latter becoming the ‘past’ or ‘imper- and third person forms of the French first conjugation
fect’ subjunctive. The exceptions are Daco-Romance (where present subjunctive are now identical to the indicative (3SG
the old pluperfect subjunctive becomes pluperfect indica- porte porte). Similarly, Aromanian has lost distinctive sub-
tive) but where, in sixteenth-century Romanian and still in junctive forms in the first conjugation (e.g. ˈkɨntɨ ˈkɨntɨ vs
Aromanian and Istro-Romanian, a synthetic ‘conditional’ ˈdo̯armi ˈdo̯armɨ).
form survives amalgamating forms of the Latin future per- Leaving aside various cases of phonologically motivated
fect and perfect subjunctive (cf. §8.4.6.2), and Galician, Por- neutralization, the distinction between indicative and
tuguese, and old Spanish the cognate form furnishes a third
tense form of the subjunctive, known as ‘future subjunctive’. 10
For the relationship between this form and the ‘inflected infinitive’,
Sardinian is probably the only variety to have inherited see §27.7.
504
subjunctive is often liable to be neutralized morphologic- 27.6 Synthetic future and conditional
ally. Most resistant to such neutralization are third person
forms. Various languages (Ladin, Friulian, Venetan, Istrian,
Some varieties continue a synthetic future derived from
and dialects of the Rome-Ancona corridor) show a tendency
Latin future perfect forms, but the Latin imperfective
to replace present subjunctive by present indicative forms
futures (e.g. CANTABO, FACIAM), in contrast, leave no trace,
in the first and second person plural, while more widely
with the marginal exception of the old French future of
these parts of the verb often fail to display the root allo-
the verb ‘be’ (e.g. OFr. 3SG.FUT iert ‘s/he will be’ < ERIT; cf.
morphy otherwise typical of the subjunctive of the relevant
Pope 1952:368), and probably Sp. 2SG.PRS.IND eres ‘you are’ <
verb (cf. It. 3SG.PRS.SBJV venga ‘come’, 1PL.PRS.SBJV veniamo, 2PL.
FUT ERIS. Latin future perfective forms (e.g. CANTAUERIT,
PRS.SBJV veniate). On first and second persons plural as loci of
FECERIT)—probably mixed with the perfect subjunctive, with
removal of distinctive subjunctive morphology, see particu-
which in late Latin they overlapped both formally and
larly Maiden (2012). In Romanian, not only first and second
functionally (see Haverling 2013:24f.)—are the likely source
persons plural but also first person singular are identical to
of the Dalmatian future (e.g. ˈfure ‘he’ll do’, deˈkaro ‘he’ll
the present indicative, except for the verb ‘be’ (SBJV fiu fii fie
say’): see Maiden (2007c; §§18.3, 19.3.2.3.1.1). In Ibero-
fim fiți fie), and vestigially, in old Romanian, ‘have’.
Romance the cognate forms (e.g. Pt. cantar, fizer) are ‘future
Actual reinforcement of the distinctness of the subjunct-
subjunctives’ (obsolescent in Spanish). In Daco-Romance
ive from the indicative is rare, except for cases involving
they yield the conditional, which survives today in Aroma-
root allomorphy in the present subjunctive (e.g. It. chiede
nian (kɨnˈtari, fɨˈʦe̯ari), and Istro-Romanian (see §8.4.6.2).
‘ask’ - chieda > chiede - chiegga; Ro. vinde ‘sell’ - vândă >
The one respect in which some varieties create an innov-
archaic and dialectal vinde - vânză; OFr. treuve ‘find’ - treuve
atory set of synthetic forms concerns the future tense (see
> treuve - truisse), but these probably involve reinforcement
also §§7.2.4, 43.5). Medieval Italo-Romance (although the
of the U-pattern or L-pattern ‘morphomes’, discussed in
forms are today restricted to central and northern dialects;
§43.2.3, rather than specifically of present subjunctive
cf. Loporcaro 1999a, and §16.4.2.1), Surmiran and Engadine
marking. Maiden (2012) argues that one should also view
Romansh, Ladin, Friulian, Gallo-Romance, and Ibero-
as a matter of ‘morphome reinforcement’, rather than ‘pre-
Romance all inherit a future tense form originating in a
sent subjunctive marking’, the interestingly widespread
periphrasis comprising the infinitive followed by the pre-
phenomenon, in Engadine and Surmiran Romansh, various
sent indicative of the verb HAVE. In most languages (not
dialects of the Lombard and Piedmontese Alps, parts of
Ladin or Romansh) there also exists a historically parallel
Liguria, Corsica, and northern Sardinia, Gascon varieties of
form comprising the infinitive and a past indicative form of
the Hautes Pyrénées, and certain Ibero-Romance dialects of
HAVE, usually labelled ‘conditional’, and having among its
the Cordillera Cantábrica, whereby the present subjunctive
functions reference to future time with respect to a refer-
(unlike the indicative) is stressed on the root in first and
ence point in the past.11 These structures are transformed
second persons plural: e.g. Sisco, Corsica (Chiodi-Tischer
early (for remnants of the analytic type in medieval north-
1981): 1PL.PRS.IND kanˈtɛmu, PRS.SBJV ˈkantimu, 2PL.PRS.IND
ern Italy, see §13.3.2.1; also §19.3.2.3.1.1 for Occitan,
kanˈtade, PRS.SBJV ˈkantide.
§23.3.5.4 for Portuguese) into synthetic forms in which the
The subjunctive morphology of Surselvan past tenses
continuant of the infinitive and that of auxiliary HAVE
shows formation of a novel kind of imperfect subjunctive
become fused, and often drastically phonologically
by analogically grafting the present subjunctive marker -i-
estranged from the independently surviving continuants
onto the imperfect indicative: e.g. 3SG.PRS.IND fa ‘does’, 3SG.PRS.
of the infinitive and the verb HAVE (see e.g. Maiden
SBJV fetschi and 3SG.IPFV.IND fageva, 3SG.IPFV.SBJV fagevi. The Sur-
2011b:264f.; §46.3.2.2). Given that stress falls on the continu-
selvan ‘conditional’ (actually the form cognate with the
ant of the auxiliary, what was originally the infinitive loses
general Romance ‘imperfect subjunctive’, and derived
its autonomous stress and undergoes various kinds of
from the Latin pluperfect subjunctive; cf. Spescha 1989:615
phonological change affecting unstressed syllables (particu-
for its uses), may also take this -i (e.g. fagess and fagessi). The
larly deletion of unstressed vowels), often resulting in con-
-i marks ‘indirect speech’: in indirect speech in the present,
sonant clusters which are, in turn, subject to assimilatory
assertions in the subordinate clause must be in the present
and other adjustments. The result is often a novel root-
subjunctive (probably following a German syntactic model).
allomorph, associated specifically with the future and
Correspondingly, the present tense subjunctive marker has
been extended to the imperfect indicative and conditional
as a marker of indirect speech there too, where the main 11
For a discussion of whether the Romansh future forms represent
verb is in the past (cf. Spescha 1989:619f., 631f.; Haiman and borrowings from neighbouring Romance languages, see Haiman and
Benincà 1992:103). Benincà (1992:87f.).
505
MARTIN MAIDEN
Table 27.9 French future forms (compared with the present indicative of avoir)
Present indicative of avoir ‘have’

1SG 2SG 3SG 1PL 2PL 3PL
HABEO HABES HABET HABEMUS HABETIS HABENT
ai as a avons avez ont
Futures historically combining infinitive + present indicative of ‘have’
UENIRE HABEO UENIRE HABES UENIRE HABET UENIRE HABEMUS UENIRE HABETIS UENIRE HABENT
viendrai viendras viendra viendrons viendrez viendront
INF UENIRE > venir ‘come’
UIDERE HABEO UIDERE HABES UIDERE HABET UIDERE HABEMUS UIDERE HABETIS UIDERE HABENT
verrai verras verra verrons verrez verront
INF UIDERE > voir ‘see’
Table 27.10 Future tense forms of Val Puter

of aˈvɛr ‘have’
PRS.IND ɛ eʃt ɔ aˈvɛns aˈvɛs ɛm
PRS.SBJV
of aˈvɛr ˈeɟa ˈeɟast ˈeɟa ˈeɟans ˈeɟas eɟan
Future of fer ‘do’ faˈro faˈrost faˈro faˈrons faˈros faˈron
Second future of fer faˈreɟa faˈreɟast faˈreɟa faˈreɟans faˈreɟas faˈreɟan
conditional. French offers some fairly extreme examples, as apparently a continuant of the present subjunctive of aver
shown in Table 27.9. ‘have’ (Table 27.10). Its function in contrast to the other
The (originally phonological) estrangement of the future synthetic future is, according to Ebneter (1973:32, 36f.),
and conditional stem from the infinitive may set the scene ‘suppositive’, expressing a subjective perspective on a
for other, purely morphological manifestations (for Occitan, more distant, less certain event.13
see particularly Esher 2012a,b; 2013), especially the wide- The PN desinences of the conditional usually continue the
spread generalization of a single theme vowel. Thus, for imperfect indicative of HABERE (HABEBAM etc.), but over vast
example, in western Friulian the theme vowel /a/ enters areas (Iberian peninsula, Occitan, many Italo-Romance var-
all future and conditional stems (e.g. Maniago 3SG.FUT klama ieties) this is in the drastically reduced form /ˈia/, which in
ˈra, COND klamaˈres, FUT metaˈra, COND metaˈres, FUT sintaˈra, most places is identical to the desinence of the non-first
COND sintaˈres; INF klaˈmaː ‘call’, ˈmeti ‘put’, sinˈti ‘feel’), while conjugation imperfective indicative (Table 27.11).
in Ascrea (Lazio) /e/ is generalized (3SG FUT mannerˈra, COND In Tuscan, and sporadically elsewhere in Italo-Romance (see
mannerˈria, FUT wederˈra, COND wederˈria, FUT sallerˈra, COND Rohlfs 1968:342f., Maiden 2001b), the conditional PN desinence
sallerˈria; cf. INF manˈna ‘send’, ˈwede ‘see’, salˈli ‘go up’).12 comes from a (more or less phonologically reduced) form of
Future and conditional are marked by what become novel the preterite of HABERE (Table 27.12).
desinences containing /r/ (originally the ending of the Some Italo-Romance dialects intermingle conditional
infinitive). Person and number marking of the future is endings derived from the imperfect indicative of HABERE
universally derived from the present indicative of Lat. HABERE ‘have’ with others derived from the preterite or the imper-
‘have’, albeit quite often in radically altered form. However, fect subjunctive. For examples, see §13.3.2.1 for Venetan,
in the Romansh of Val Puter we encounter a second set of §14.3.2.2 for Corsica, and particularly §§15.2.2 and 16.3.2.2
future forms derived from the infinitive with what is for central and southern Italy; also Maiden (2001b:15-18) for
12 13
Data from Iliescu (1972) and Fanti (1939). See also Haiman and Benincà (1992:87).
506
Table 27.11 Castilian imperfect of haber, and conditionals

HABEBAM HABEBAS HABEBAT HABEBAMUS HABEBATIS HABEBANT

Imperfect of haber había habías había habíamos habíais habían
UENIRE UENIRE UENIRE UENIRE UENIRE UENIRE
HABEBAM HABEBAS HABEBAT HABEBAMUS HABEBATIS HABEBANT
Conditional vendría vendrías vendría vendríamos vendríais vendrían
INF UENIRE > venir ‘come
Table 27.12 Tuscan preterite of avere, and conditionals

HABUI HABUISTI HABUIT HABUIMUS HABUISTIS HABUERUNT

Preterite of avere ebbi avesti ebbe avemmo aveste ebbero
UENIRE UENIRE UENIRE UENIRE UENIRE UENIRE
HABUI HABUISTI HABUIT HABUIMUS HABUISTIS HABUERUNT
Conditional verrei verresti verrebbe verremmo verreste verrebbero
INF UENIRE > venire ‘come’
further description and an interpretation of the ‘morpho- value, and innovatory (and usually arrhizotonic) forms
mic’ significance of the patterns of distribution of these which appear in periphrases requiring a past participle (cf.
rival endings. Some northern Italo-Romance (e.g. Lombard) §16.3.2.2). In Portuguese there are some verbs for which
varieties, and Friulian, display only the endings of the ‘long’ (innovatory) past participles are used in perfective
imperfect subjunctive in the conditional (cf. §§10.3.2.1, periphrases (§§24.4.9, 43.2.1), while older, shorter, forms
13.3.2.1; also Parry 1990). appear in passive periphrases (see §14.3.2.2 for the creation
of novel, alternative ‘short’ forms of past participles princi-
pally in first conjugation verbs in Tuscan and Corsican
dialects, e.g. cerco ‘sought’ for cercato).14 For ‘morphomic’
27.7 Non-finite forms characteristics of past participles, and the relation in Roma-
nian between past participles and possible survivors of the
Latin ‘supine’, see §43.2.1.
All Romance languages have an infinitive, derived from the
Virtually all Romance languages preserve a reflex of the
Latin imperfective infinitive in -RE, and usually (given vari-
(ablative singular form of) the Latin (ablative) gerund (CAN-
ous local phonological variations) ending in ‑r(e) (e.g. Pt
TANDO, FACIENDO, DORMIENDO). The original structure (root +
cantar, fazer, Fr. chanter, faire, Srs. cantar, far, It. cantare, fare,
stressed theme vowel + NDO) is well preserved cross-
Ro. cântare, facere (see §8.4.6.5 for the distinction between
linguistically, given local phonological adjustments (Pt. can-
‘long’ and ‘short’ infinitives in Romanian). All varieties
tando, fazendo, dormindo; Cat. cantant, fent, dormint; Fr. chan-
inherit from Latin a ‘past participle’: this was usually ar-
tant, faisant, dormant; It. cantando, facendo, dormendo; Ro.
rhizotonic and stressed on the theme vowel but, especially
cântând, făcând, dormind): the final vowel of Srd. -ende (e.g.
in third conjugation verbs, they were often rhizotonic (and
Nuo. faˈkɛnde) is probematic (but see Lausberg 1966:§816).
shorter) and characterized by distinctive root allomorphs, a
Some Gascon varieties have rhizotonic gerunds in third
situation broadly continued to this day: e.g. CANTATUM, FACTUM,
conjugation verbs with rhizotonic infinitives (cf. Rohlfs
SCRIPTUM, DORMITUM > Pt. cantado, feito, escrito, dormido; Fr.
1970:202); see also §19.3.2.3.1 for incorporation of forms of
chanté, fait, écrit, dormi; Srs. cantau, fatg, scret, dormiu; It.
the infinitive into the gerund in dialects around Toulouse. In
cantato, fatto, scritto, dormito; Dal. kanˈtut, fat, [ . . . ], Ro.
some respects the gerund is a morphological ‘outlier’ (and
cântat, făcut, scris, dormit (see §17.3.2 for the generalization
of rhizotony in Sardinian third conjugation past participles).
Splits sometimes arise between (usually more conservative) 14
Only the few such forms which have entered into the standard lan-
rhizotonic forms having a principally resultative or stative guage have distinctive resultative/stative interpretations.
507
MARTIN MAIDEN
in many varieties rather rarely used: cf. e.g. Haiman and Table 27.13 Portuguese and Nuorese inflected infinitives
Benincà 1992:80, failing to undergo changes which affect the
remainder of the paradigm, notably in Daco-Romance). Pt. fazer fazeres fazer fazermos fazerdes fazerem
Maiden (2011d) shows that Romanian gerunds tend to be Nuo. faˈkɛrɛ(pɔ) faˈkɛrɛs faˈkɛrɛt fakɛˈremus fakɛˈrɛʣɛs faˈkɛrɛn
‘out of step’ with otherwise general levelling-out of conson-
antal alternations in root allomorphs (cf. ORo. PRS.1SG văz, 3SG seems particularly probable (cf. Vincent 1997c:174). Appar-
vede; SBJV.3 vază; GER văzând > modern văd vede vadă; văzând) and ently on the model of the infinitive, old Neapolitan shows
are even a locus of creation of unprecedented root allomorphs occasional cases, marginally encountered also in some Portu-
involving, for example, the ‘PYTA’ root (see §43.2.2) . Indeed, guese dialects of the western Algarve, of ‘inflected gerunds’
there are places where the gerund displays florid morpho- (e.g. ONap. portandomo ‘carry.GER.1PL’), and even of ‘inflected
logical eccentricity: in Aromanian, it presents the optional past participles’ and ‘inflected present participles’.
additional affix -alui (e.g. kɨnˈtɨndalui ‘singing’; see, e.g. Nevaci
2006:175-77); in Megleno-Romanian, where the gerund is,
perhaps significantly, ‘very rare’ (see Atanasov 2002:234f.),
we find it optionally bearing such curious appendages as 27.8 Inflection classes
-əre̯a, -urle̯a, and even, in one locality, ˈe̯aiki, borrowed from
Macedonian (see Capidan 1925:170f.). A peculiar (but surely Many modern varieties show (reflexes of) three distinct
coincidental) echo of such developments occurs in Sardinian types of ending in the singular of nouns and adjectives,
(cf. Wagner 1938-9:149-51), where old and modern rural Cam- namely -a, mainly associated with feminine gender (e.g.
pidanese and varieties of southern Barbaricina offer gerunds Sp. puerta, Fr. porte, Srs. porta, It. porta ‘door’, Vgl. ˈpwarta,
of the type anˈdandoro ‘going’ or faˈɛndoro ‘doing’ (Baunei), Ro. poartă ‘gate’), -o/-u, mainly associated with masculine
perhaps influenced by the /r/ of the infinitive. gender (e.g. Sp. dedo, Fr. doigt, Srs. det, It. dito, Vgl. dit, Ro.
The boundary between ‘finite’ and ‘non-finite’ is interest- deget(u) ‘finger’) and -e which does not distinguish gender
ingly blurred by the occasional emergence of non-finite (e.g. Sp. M can ‘hound’, F flor ‘flower’, Fr. M chien ‘dog’, F fleur,
forms bearing desinences showing agreement for person Srs. M tgaun, F flur, It. M cane, M fiore, Vgl. M fjau̯r, M kuŋ, Ro. M
and number with the subject of the verb.15 The most prom- câine ‘dog’, F floare). These endings (or their local phono-
inent case is the ‘inflected infinitive’ (cf. §4.2.3), found in logical reflexes) preserve, respectively, the characteristic
Portuguese and Galician, central (principally, Nuorese) Sar- markers of the Latin first (e.g. ACC PORTAM), second (e.g. ACC
dinian, and (for the plural) in old Neapolitan until the mid- DIGITUM), and third (e.g. ACC CANEM, FLOREM) declension classes.
eighteenth century (e.g. faremo ‘do.INF.1PL’; see Ledgeway In languages such as French, Occitan, Romansh, many mod-
2009a:585-90) and probably at one time more extensively ern Romance varieties of northern Italy, and Vegliote, dele-
in southern Italy (cf. Loporcaro 1986; 1995b). Thus for Pt tion or other neutralization of the distinction between final
fazer, Nuo. ˈfakɛrɛ (Table 27.13). unstressed -e and -o means that all that is left of the old
While these Romance structures are always transparently inflection class distinctions is the opposition between first
analysable as comprising infinitive + PN desinences, it declension maintaining a final vowel and non-first declen-
remains uncertain whether they emerged directly by affix- sion lacking one, as in French porte ([pɔʁtə] in conservative
ation of PN desinences to infinitives or whether they are, pronunciations) vs doigt ([dwa]), fleur ([flœʁ]). As in Latin,
wholly or in part, the result of reanalysing Latin synthetic inflection class membership of this kind is arbitrary,
verb forms such as the imperfect subjunctive (see Maurer although the opposition between feminine first declension
1968 for Portuguese), or certain forms of the pluperfect indi- morphology and masculine second declension morphology
cative (see Loporcaro 1986; Ledgeway 2007c; 2009a:588f.), as can be exploited in derivation to mark sex, and in adjectives
comprising an infinitive + PN desinence. All Latin imperfect to distinguish masculine and feminine gender: cf. BONUM
subjunctives were indeed analysable as containing a form FILIUM ‘good son’ vs BONAM FILIAM ‘good daughter’ > Sp. buen
identical to the infinitive + PN desinence (e.g. FACERE (INF): hijo vs buena hija, It. buon figlio vs buona figlia. Remnants of
FACERET (IPFV.SBJV 3SG), FACERETIS (2PL)), as were all Latin pluperfect inflection class distinctions are otherwise relatively unim-
indicatives lacking PYTA root, given certain regular phono- portant in modern Romance grammars save in some var-
logical adjustments.16 The affiliation of the Sardinian ieties where formation of the plural may be, in part, a
inflected infinitive with the Latin imperfect subjunctive function of the identity of the singular desinence (see
Ch. 42; for further discussion of remnants of inflection classes
15 in nouns and adjectives see e.g. Maiden 2011a:159-63). For the
For some examples of the use of such forms, see e.g. Ledgeway
(2011a:293f.). modern partition of nouns and adjectives into classes as a
16
They are not necessarily identical in respect of stress. function of their number morphology, see Ch. 42.
508
Table 27.14 Examples of conjugation class distinctions and neutralizations in Romancea

LATIN
LATIN FORMS CONJUGATIONS SP . OCC . ( BARÈGES ) IT . RO .
I CANTÁRE cantár kanˈta cantáre cântá

Infinitive II HABÉRE habér ɛ avére aveá
III UÉNDERE vendér ˈbene véndere vínde
IV DORMÍRE dormír druˈmi dormíre dormí
I CANTÁTIS cantáis kanˈtat cantáte cântáți
2PL.PRS.IND II HABÉTIS habéis ɛt avéte avéți
III UÉNDITIS vendéis beˈnet vendéte víndeți
IV DORMÍTIS dormís druˈmit dormíte dormíți
I CANTÁSSET cantáse kanˈtɛsje cantásse cântáse
3SG.PST.PFV.SBJV II HABUÍSSET hubiése ˈɔsje avésse avú(se)se
III UENDIDÍSSET vendiése beˈnusje vendésse vândúse
IV DORMÍSSET durmiése drumiˈɣusje dormísse dormíse
I CANTÁBAT cantába kanˈtabe cantáva cântá
Imperfect indicative II HABÉBAT había ɛi̯ avéva aveá
III UENDÉBAT vendía beˈnibe vendéva vindeá
IV DORMIÉBAT dormía druˈmibe dormíva dormeá
I CANTÁTUM cantádo kanˈtat cantáto cântát
Past participle II HÁBITUM habído ɛu̯t avúto avút
III UÉNDITUM vendído beˈnyt vendúto vândút
IV DORMÍTUM dormído druˈmit dormíto dormít
I CANTÁNDO cantándo kanˈtan cantándo cântând
II HABÉNDO habiéndo ɛn avéndo având
Gerund (ablative)
III UENDÉNDO vendiéndo beˈnen vendéndo vânzând
IV DORMIÉNDO durmiéndo druˈmin dorméndo dormínd
a
I indicate stress in orthographic representations by acute accents. Horizontal lines mark distinctions of conjugation
class; their absence indicates neutralization.
In all Romance languages almost every verb belongs to Romance): Latin third conjugation verbs had stress on the
one of a number (usually three or four) inflection classes root in the infinitive and throughout the present indicative.
(‘conjugations’). This division is largely inherited from Despite the historical absence of any motivation for con-
Latin. The conjugation class of a Romance (and Latin) verb jugation classes, these substantially persist in Romance,
is a function primarily of its ‘theme vowel’, a referentially albeit with extensive partial neutralizations (Table 27.14).
empty formative which appears in parts of the paradigm Across Romance, at least three conjugational distinctions
intermediate between lexical root and desinence: /a/ for are preserved in the infinitive, and at least two in some part
first conjugation, /e/ (continuing Latin Ē) for the second, /e/ of the remainder of the paradigm.17 Only Daco-Romance
(continuing Latin unstressed Ĕ and Ǐ) also for the third, and (§8.4.6.1) preserves root stress throughout the present of
/i/ (continuing Latin ī) for the fourth. Class membership is third conjugation verbs.18 The stress-based distinction
arbitrary, although in most Romance languages the sole, or between second and third conjugation infinitives is more
predominant, productive class is the first conjugation (in
old Romanian and in modern Istro-Romanian the fourth 17
See Maiden (2011a:204). The dialects of Cosenza and province come
conjugation has this role: cf. Iordan 1935:50-64; Pușcariu very close to having only two classes in the infinitive, and indeed have only
two outside the infinitive (see §16.3.2.2).
1926). A further correlate of conjugation class involves 18
But see Maiden (2011a:204) for Friulian and older stages of other
stress (phonologically automatic in Latin, distinctive in Romance languages; also §20.4.2 for Francoprovençal.
509
MARTIN MAIDEN
widely preserved, but neutralized in Ibero-Romance (exclud- A case of type (i) involves the gerund. A widespread,
ing Catalan) in favour of the second conjugation ending, and ancient situation is one in which the reflex of prevocalic
in Sardinian in favour of the rhizotonic third conjugation unstressed theme I of the fourth conjugation -IENDO has
type (see §17.3.2). generally been eliminated from fourth conjugation verbs,
Neutralizing sound changes have regularly effaced apparently on the model of the second and third conjuga-
conjugation-class distinctions. Thus the regular merger tions: e.g. Italian first conjugation cantando vs volendo
(outside Sardinian, cf. §25.1.1) of Latin unstressed short Ĭ ‘wanting’, perdendo ‘losing’, dormendo ‘sleeping’. Yet vari-
and Ĕ compromises the distinctness of theme vowels in the ous languages (e.g. Galician-Portuguese, some varieties of
second and third person singular present indicative, already Aragonese, Catalan, Gascon, Istrian, Nuorese, Genoese,
neutralized in the third person singular between the third Friulian) have analogically introduced the theme vowel
conjugation and the fourth conjugation, by eliminating the /i/ into the fourth conjugation gerund, thus distinguish-
distinction with the second conjugation: compare Lat. CAN- ing it from other non-first conjugation verbs (e.g. Cat.
TAT; TENET ‘holds’; PERDIT ‘loses’, DORMIT ‘sleeps’ with Sp. canta vs perdent vs dormint, Pt. perdendo vs dormindo).
tiene, pierde, duerme. For type (ii), some languages are distinguished by the
Although infinitives are the most conservative with emergence of types of root structure associated with conju-
regard to conjugation class distinctions, this is not neces- gation class (unprecedented in Latin). Among non-first con-
sarily true of other ‘non-finite’ forms. Some varieties do jugation verbs in Portuguese and Galician, Spanish, and
maintain a fairly robust three-way system in the past par- Catalan, if the vowels /i/ or /u/ occur in at least some of
ticiple (e.g. Catalan, French, Occitan, Italian, Romanian: e.g. the non-PYTA cells (see §43.2.2 for this term), then the verb
Cat. cantat vs sabut ‘known’, perdut vs dormit; Ro. cântat vs must belong to the fourth conjugation, in theme /i/; if only
căzut ‘fallen’, pierdut vs dormit), but there are many varieties mid vowels occur in the relevant cells, then the verb must
where distinctions between non-first conjugation verbs, belong to the conjugation class in thematic /e/: cf. Sp. querer
robust in the infinitive, are neutralized in the past parti- ‘want’, correr ‘run’ which show high vowels nowhere in the
ciple, e.g. Ibero-Romance where non-first conjugation past paradigm (again, excluding PYTA forms) vs conducir ‘drive’,
participles show the generalized theme vowel /i/ (Sp. can- freír ‘fry’, pedir ‘ask for’, recibir ‘receive’, escribir ‘write’, subir
tado vs tenido, perdido, dormido) or southern Italy where they ‘go up’, vivir ‘live’ which all have a high vowel in the root in
frequently show [u], e.g, manˈnaːt ‘sent’ vs təˈnuːt, some (non-PYTA) part of the paradigm (e.g. 1SG.PRS.IND frío,
kanuʃˈʃuːt ‘known’, ðurˈmuːt in Nova Siri (Lausberg 1939). pido). Spanish shows a strong tendency to hypercharacterize
The gerund may be the locus of complete levelling of the root of fourth conjugation verbs by generalizing in it a
theme vowel distinctions. This is true in many Gallo- high vowel /u/ or /i/ (e.g. modern recibir, subir for older
Romance varieties, for example French, Francoprovençal, recebir, sobir); for an overview see, e.g. Penny (2002:185-90);
and some Occitan varieties (see e.g. Fouché 1967:234; Barbato (2012a); also Togeby (1972) and Bustos Gisbert (1992);
Iliescu and Mourin 1991:233; Quint 1996), where the same for Catalan see Wheeler (forthcoming). The origin of this
theme vowel has spread to all four conjugations (e.g. Fr. association between high non-mid vowels and fourth conju-
chantant ‘singing’, voulant ‘wanting’, perdant ‘losing’, dormant gation is one of the most problematic in the morphological
‘sleeping’), a development paralleled (in favour of theme /a/) history of Ibero-Romance (see also Williams 1938:208-14;
in much of northern Italy (see Pelliciardi 1977; Rohlfs Malkiel 1966; Menéndez Pidal 1982:§105). This association
1968:366; Castellani 2002) and some varieties of Romansh between the identity of the root vowel and the theme
(Lutta 1923; Lausberg 1966:§819). Many central and southern vowel certainly has no synchronic phonological motivation.
Italian dialects show originally non-first conjugation *-ˈɛndo Another, more widespread example of a systematic link
in all conjugations (Fanti 1939; Rohlfs 1968:366; Chiodi- between conjugation class and the nature of the root
Tischer 1981; Gioscio 1985), as do some Sardinian varieties involves the first conjugation: this class tends to resist
(particularly Campidanese, Wagner 1938-9:152), and Valais and expel root allomorphy. Across Ibero-Romance (with
(Francoprovençal, Bjerrome 1957:35, 89f.). Yet we shall see Catalan), Occitan, Romansh, Ladin, Friulian, and Italo-
shortly that the gerund may also be a locus of creation of Romance, the historically expected palatalization of root-
conjugation class distinctions. final velars (see §39.3) before desinences containing front
Against the overall tendency to reduce conjugation vowels is absent in the first conjugation, so that there
class distinctions are three (relatively rare) types of is no root allomorphy associated with palatalization
innovation: (i) (re)introduction of distinctions previously (in contrast, there is never any sign of such resistance in
neutralized; (ii) emergence of novel manifestations of the non-first conjugation verbs). Thus the present subjunctive
conjugational distinction (involving root allomorphy or its reflexes of first conjugation ROGARE ‘ask’, PACARE ‘pay’,
absence); and (iii) emergence of new conjugation classes. *tokˈkare ‘touch’ (where [ɡ] before a front vowel is indicated
510
variously by gu or gh, and [k] by qu or ch): Pt. rogue, rogues, One respect in which some Romance languages might be
rogue, roguemos, rogueis, roguem; Sp. ruegue, ruegues, ruegue, said to acquire new conjugation classes involves the emer-
roguemos, roguéis, rueguen; Cat. pagui, paguis, pagui, paguem, gence of ‘augments’—a phenomenon described in more
pagueu, paguin; Lgd. toque, toques, toque, toquem, toquetz, detail in §43.2.4 and in Maiden (2004c; 2011b:259-63). Most
toquen; It. tocchi, tocchi, tocchi, tocchiamo, tocchiate, tocchino. Romance languages (excepting Portuguese, Galician, Span-
So exceptionless over such a vast area is the phenomenon ish, and Sardinian) display in most but not all fourth conju-
that one may speculate (as does Maiden 1992:n.21) gation verbs an affix (‘augment’), historically comprising a
that palatalization was blocked ab initio in the first Latin third or fourth conjugation theme vowel + a reflex of
conjugation. the old ingressive affix ‑SC-. This semantically ‘empty’ elem-
The first conjugation is also tendentially resistant to ent appears at least in the singular and third person plural
vocalic allomorphy. For modern standard Italian and forms of the present tense and of the imperative, while in
French, for example, no first conjugation verb which some Gallo-Romance varieties (French and, originally, Fran-
might historically have been expected to show vocalic allo- coprovençal) it appears in all originally imperfective cells of
morphy does so, or at any rate none does so obligatorily. the verb paradigm (minus the infinitive): cf. Fr. INF finir
While such alternations remain abundant in modern French ‘finish’, partir ‘leave’, 1PL.PRS.IND finissons, partons 3PL.PRS.IND
non-first conjugation verbs (as 3SG.PRS meut – 1PL.PRS mouvons finissent, partent; It. INF finire, partire, 1PL.PRS.IND finiamo, par-
‘move’; 3SG.PRS boit – 1PL.PRS buvons ‘drink’; 3SG.PRS doit – 1PL.PRS tiamo 3PL.PRS.IND finiscono, partono. The type represented here
devons ‘owe’), they have been eliminated from the first by finir(e) represents the majority type of fourth conjuga-
conjugation (thus OFr. 3SG.PRS treuve – 1PL.PRS trouvons ‘find’, tion verb with augment, partir(e) the minority type lacking
3SG.PRS leve 1PL.PRS lavons ‘wash’; 3SG.PRS parole – 1PL.PRS parlons the augment.
‘speak’; 3SG.PRS espoire – 1PL.PRS esperons ‘hope’ > Fr. trouve In a subset of Romance languages (southern Basilicata in
– trouvons, lave – lavons, parle – parlons, espère – espérons). Italy, Corsican, Romansh, Ladin, Istrian, Dalmatian, Daco-
The exception is the pattern [e] vs [ə] (1SG.PRS achète [aʃɛt] Romance), historically displaying the augment in the fourth
‘buy’ – 1PL.PRS achetons [aʃətõ] or [aʃtõ]), itself sometimes conjugation, there emerges a broadly parallel subdivision
subject to levelling in popular French. Modern Italian has within the first conjugation, involving an ‘augment’ derived
wholly eliminated historically expected diphthongal and from a continuant of the Greek iterative-intensive affix -ØÇ-
other vocalic alternations from first conjugation verbs, in (see §§43.2.4, 8.4.6.2, 17.3.2.1). It is a noticeable characteris-
favour of one alternant or another, e.g. 1SG.PRS nuoto ‘swim’, tic of this augment, in the Matera–Bari–Taranto area of
vieto ‘forbid’, suono ‘sound’, nego ‘deny’, levo ‘remove, raise’ southern Italy (cf. Lausberg 1939:156), in Corsican, old Ven-
vs 1PL.PRS nuotiamo, vietiamo, suoniamo (vestigially, also so- etian, modern Istrian, and Ladin, that it is typically associ-
niamo), neghiamo, leviamo. ated with verbs having polysyllabic lexical roots, although
Castilian shows both elimination of alternation and in Romanian the division between augmented and non-
extension of alternation into previously invariant verb augmented verbs is generally unpredictable, first conjuga-
roots (see Penny 2002:183f.), but elimination appears prin- tion verbs being more or less equally divided between them.
cipally characteristic of first conjugation verbs (e.g. 1SG.PRS. Type (iii), the emergence of new conjugation classes
IND entrego [OSp. entriego] ‘hand over’, 1PL.PRS.IND entregamos), characterized by new thematic vowels, seems always to be
with few such examples from other conjugations. In the attributable to the historical effects of sound change. For an
Aragonese of Baja Ribagorza all first conjugation verbs example from first conjugation verbs in Francoprovençal,
have invariant, non-diphthongized roots (Arnal Purroy see §20.2.1. Romanian has what I will call a ‘fifth conjuga-
1998:355, 356; see also Alvar 1948:96; Nagore Laín tion’, in that verbs of the relevant class have the theme
1986:137f.; Mott 1989:73). In nearly all Portuguese verbs vowel /ɨ/, displaying exactly the same paradigmatic distri-
original high mid vowels [e] and [o] have been opened to bution as fourth conjugation /i/. This new conjugation class
[ɛ] and [ɔ] in rhizotonic forms. In Galician, however, this equally shows a subdivision between augmented and un-
change does not affect the first conjugation, where verbs augmented forms (see above). Compare fourth conjugation
with high mid vowels in the root maintain historically unaugmented fugi ‘run’ and augmented iubi ‘love’, on the
expected patterns of vocalic invariance (see Porto Dapena one hand, with ‘fifth conjugation’ unaugmented omorî ‘kill’
1973; Maiden 1991b). I leave open here the difficult question and augmented urî ‘hate’, on the other. Note that both î and
of why the first conjugation should behave in this differen- â stand for /ɨ/. Table 27.15 gives just present and non-finite
tiated way: for some speculations, mainly regarding modern forms, but the patterns are replicated throughout the inflec-
Italian but extensible to other Romance languages, compare tional paradigm.
Burzio (2004), Say and Clahsen (2002), Veríssimo and Romanian has several dozen verbs like urî, and a good
Clahsen (2009), Maiden (2009a). many like omorî. What we see is an effect of a historical (but,
511
MARTIN MAIDEN
Table 27.15 The Romanian ‘fifth’ conjugation compared Table 27.16 Istro-Romanian fourth conjugation verbs and
with the fourth novel conjugation verb in theme /ɛi ̯/
FOURTH CONJUGATION FIFTH CONJUGATION
Fourth conjugation verb (and ‘augment’)
INF fugi iubi omorî urî INF koˈsi ‘reap’
PST.PTCP koˈsitu
GER fugind iubind omorând urând
PST.PTCP fugit iubit omorât urât GER koˈsinda
PRS
1SG fug iubesc omor urăsc PRS koˈses koˈseʃ koˈsɛ koˈsim koˈsiʦ koˈses
2SG fugi iubeşti omori urăşti Verb in theme /ɛi /̯ (and ‘augment’)
3SG fuge iubeşte omoară urăşte INF koˈpɛi ̯ ‘dig’
PST.PTCP koˈpɛi t̯ u
1PL fugim iubim omorâm urâm
2PL fugiţi iubiţi omorâţi urâţi GER koˈpɛi n̯ da
3PL fug iubesc omoară urăsc 1SG 2SG 3SG 1PL 2PL 3PL
PRS koˈpes koˈpeʃ koˈpɛ koˈpɛi m ̯ koˈpɛi ʦ
̯ koˈpes
crucially, long morphologized and no longer phonologically Istro-Romanian presents a novel theme vowel /ɛi /̯ (see
predictable) rule of centralization of front vowels after e.g. Kovačec 1971:145; 1984:574). This has identical paradig-
original *[rr] (later > [r]), acting on what were originally matic distribution to that of the inherited theme vowel /i/
fourth conjugation verbs and affecting not only [i] but also, of the fourth conjugation and, like the latter, alternates with
as is apparent above, yielding [ə] (ă) from [e]19 (see e.g. the ‘augment’ (here -ˈes, -ˈeʃ, -ˈɛ; see Table 27.16). The origins
Densusianu 1961:20, 23f., 29; Rothe 1957:20, 108f.; Schulte of this new class are problematic (cf. Puşcariu 1926:170f.),
2005; Renwick 2014:51f.). although what is involved is probably explicable, historically,
as a phonological adaptation of the Croatian thematic vowel
/a/ into Istro-Romanian fourth conjugation verbs (Maiden
2013d offers an account).
19
See (Maiden 2009c) for the ‘heteroclite’ infiltration of first conjugation Here, as in so much else of Romance inflectional morph-
morphology into parts of the paradigm of verbs of the omorî type (and,
dialectally, into other verbs historically subject to centralization of front
ology, not only are inherited complexities not ‘simplified’,
vowel desinences). but they are liable to become yet more complex.
512
CHAPTER 28
Derivational morphology
FRANZ RAINER
28.1 Introduction volume of Solà et al. (2002) on Catalan; Rainer (1993), Bosque
and Demonte (1999, III), and Pharies (2002) on Spanish;
Rio-Torto (2013) on Portuguese.
The concept of ‘derivation’ is ill-defined like most key con-
The present chapter is organized as follows. Section 28.2
cepts of linguistics. It is occasionally used as a synonym of
shows where (Romance) derivational patterns come from and
‘word formation’, but most of the time it has the narrower
§28.3, where they go to. At the same time, these diachronic
sense of ‘word formation by means of affixes’. In the present
sections are intended to show why the boundaries between
chapter, it is meant to also include ‘non-canonical’ pro-
derivation, inflection, compounding, and syntax are necessar-
cesses such as conversion, reduplication, backformation,
ily fuzzy. Section 28.4 presents a succinct overview of the
or clipping—in short, all word formation except compound-
most important semantic categories of affixation in Romance.
ing and blending (for which see Ch. 29).
It is followed in §28.5 by a section of ‘non-canonical’ means of
Romance derivation is a vast and well-researched area.
derivation. The last two sections are dedicated to two prob-
The amount of relevant data and scholarly literature that
lems of allomorphy, viz. the fate of the so-called ‘third stem’ in
has accumulated since the first half of the nineteenth century
Romance derivation and interfixes.
is immense, far beyond the reach of any single researcher. It
would therefore be highly desirable to have modern synthe-
ses on as many varieties as possible, including dialects and—
the biggest lacuna—the early stages of Romance. For the time
being, it is still advisable from the historical-comparative 28.2 Where derivational patterns
perspective to start with Meyer-Lübke’s classic manual come from
(1890-1902, II; French translation 1895), even though on
many points it no longer reflects the current state of the Even in the restricted sense of ‘word formation by means of
art in etymology and word formation. For a succinct, up-to- affixes’ a neat demarcation of derivation from other pro-
date overview one may start with Lüdtke (1996), an article cesses of word formation is not possible. Boundaries are
couched in Coseriu’s theory of word formation, later notoriously fuzzy with respect to inflection, compounding,
extended to book length in Lüdtke (2005; Spanish translation and syntax. This comes as no surprise to historical linguists,
2011). As for the individual languages, the fourth volume of of course, who routinely observe migrations from one
Müller et al. (2015-16) provides synchronic overviews of art- domain to the other over time.
icle length written in English on many Romance languages, as Romance has contributed to the general morphological
well as diachronic articles on the transition from Latin to literature the classic example of a syntactic construction
early Romance, on the evolution from old to modern French, turned into a derivational suffix, viz. manner and sentential
and from Latin to Romanian. For those who read German and adverbs in ‑men((te)) (cf. Karlsson 1981; Detges 2015).
Romance languages, more substantial manuals are available Throughout Latinity, MENTE, the ablative singular of the fem-
on single varieties: Graur and Avram (1978) and L. Vasiliu inine noun MENS ‘mind’, was used in conjunction with an
(1989) on Romanian; Meyer-Lübke (1890), Rohlfs (1969a), and adjective in order to form attitudinal adverbials such as
Grossmann and Rainer (2004) on Italian; Emmi (2011) on MENTE PLACIDĀ ‘with (a) mind.ABL calm.ABL.FSG’. In early Romance
Sicilian; Wagner (1952) and Pinto (2011) on Sardinian; Siller- (with the exception of Romanian and Sardinian; for the
Runggaldier (1989) on Ladin; Adams (1913) on old Occitan; presence of -mente in earlier stages of southern Italian dia-
Nyrop (1908) and Meyer-Lübke (1966) on French;1 the first lects, see Ledgeway 2003b:137-8, n.21; 2009a:720-22) this
1
The available Gallo-Romance manuals have the considerable disadvan- other important lexicographical projects finished more recently such as
tage of dating back to pre-FEW times, and they do not take into account Tobler-Lommatzsch on old French or the Dictionnaire du moyen français.
This chapter © Franz Rainer 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 513
FRANZ RAINER
construction already appears at a more advanced stage of compounding, and the fact that many compound members
grammaticalization: the adjective exclusively occurred in were not borrowed along with the compounds themselves.
prenominal position (which in itself seems to suggest that As a consequence, these compounds often became fully or
this is an early phenomenon as it shows the Latin unmarked partially opaque for Romance speakers without knowledge
prenominal position, which becomes marked in (later) of the classical languages. Few French speakers, for
Romance), and the construction adjective + -mente, written example, will be able to spontaneously decompose Fr. héli-
as one word, had been generalized beyond the initial attitu- coptère ‘helicopter’, coined in 1861 by Gustave Ponton
dinal function, as in SOLAMENTE ‘one by one’ (eighth century, d’Amécourt on the basis of Greek word formation, into
Reichenau Glosses, 1561a). At that point, we may consider hélico- and -ptère and see how these two constituents are
-mente to have become a suffix semantically divorced from related to the concept expressed. They may recognize the
the noun mente. Nevertheless, -mente has remained a some- relationship between hélico- and hélice ‘helix; propeller’, but
what atypical suffix in Romance, retaining properties that few will relate the word to the small series of words ending
betray its phrasal origin: in all Romance languages the suffix in -ptère ‘wing’ of the type coléoptère ‘beetle’.
selects the feminine form of the adjectival base, a fact that However, under more favourable circumstances, some for-
reflects the original agreement between adjective and head eign compound types have been reanalysed against a native
noun, and in some, such as Spanish, the adjectival base background, giving rise to patterns more akin, from a
receives a lexically determined secondary stress (cf. inesper- Romance perspective, to derivation than to compounding.
ado ‘unexpected’ ! inesperadamente ‘unexpectedly’ vs. rápido Höfler (1972) described in great detail how the neo-Latin
‘swift’ ! rápidamente ‘swiftly’), a prosodic contour typical of compound type DAEMONIOMANIA was integrated into French
compounds, but not derivatives. The possibility observable in through loan translations, eventually yielding formations
some Romance languages of deleting one occurrence of the on a native base in the second half of the eighteenth century
suffix under conjunction (cf. Sp. rápida e inesperadamente (cf. bureaumanie ‘bureaucracy’, 1765). Second constituents of
‘rapidly and unexpectedly’), on the contrary, does not seem the type ‑manie have an unclear status in French: there is a
to be a case of ‘persistence’ of an older stage of the language corresponding noun manie ‘mania’, but no productive process
but a learnèd innovation of the Middle Ages. of forming noun–noun compounds with the head to the right.
The pathway leading from compounding to derivation is The second element -mane of the corresponding adjective
less trodden in Romance than in Germanic, essentially bureaumane ‘bureaucrat’ is even closer to suffixal status,
because of the precarious status of compounding in the since **mane is not even a free form. Furthermore, -mane
older stages of Romance (most Latin patterns of compound- semantically comes close to what can be called ‘dispositional’
ing had disappeared, while patterns newly created in suffixes, such as the -iego of Sp. mujeriego ‘fond of the ladies’.
Romance through univerbation are hard to distinguish But one could even argue that the very question of
from syntactic constructions). Nevertheless, one can cite a whether bureaumane is a compound or a derivative is idle,
number of examples of prepositions and adverbs turned since in reality it constitutes some kind of substitutive word
into prefixes. French sous ‘under’ (< Lat. SUBTUS), for example, formation of the type Xmanie ‘Xmania’ $ Xmane ‘prone to
is best considered as a compound member in sous-tasse Xmania’. Substitutive relationships of this kind, which do
‘saucer (lit. under-cup)’, and probably also in sous-officier not fit into the traditional dichotomy of compounding and
‘non-commissioned officer (lit. under-officer)’, while in derivation, are particularly frequent in the neoclassical
sous-utilisation ‘insufficient utilization (lit. underutilization)’ layer of the lexicon. Here is another telling example (cf.
it should be considered as a prefix, since the sense ‘insuffi- Rainer 2007). Lat. AGRICOLA ‘farmer’, lit. ‘field labourer’, was
cient’ is not attested with the preposition sous. A case of an borrowed into French as agricole and first converted into an
adverb that has evolved into a prefix is Lat. MALE ‘badly’, as in adjective, as in nation agricole ‘farming nation’. Now, since a
MALE SANUS ‘mad’, which must be granted an affixal status in farming nation has a special relationship to agriculture,
formations such as It. malcontento ‘discontent’, Sp. malsano nation agricole could also be interpreted as ‘nation dedicated
‘unhealthy’ (cf. Buenafuente de la Mata 2010; Moyna 2011). to agriculture’, nation dédiée à l’agriculture. By way of this
The boundary is also notoriously fuzzy between affix- reanalysis, due to the Physiocrats, agricole came to be inter-
ation and learnèd composition (Fr. composition savante). preted as the relational adjective of agriculture: Xculture $
Like other European languages, the Romance standard lan- Xcole ‘of Xculture’. The reanalysis became apparent when
guages have borrowed thousands of compounds from Latin the adjective was combined with head nouns that no longer
and Greek (the latter mostly via (Neo-)Latin) that did not fit permitted an active reading: produit agricole = produit de
the mould of Romance word formation. The biggest obs- l’agriculture ‘product of agriculture’ 6¼ **produit qui cultive
tacles were the right-headedness of the original com- les champs ‘product that toils the fields’. Note that this
pounds, as opposed to the left-headedness of Romance relational use did not exist in Latin.
514
DERIVATIONAL MORPHOLOGY
A fourth source of derivational affixes is inflection. There speech, but absent from the children’s own mutilated
are at least two notorious cases in Romance, the present forms. Another example of ‘exaptation’ is the origin of the
participle and the so-called ‘long infinitive’ of Romanian use of the Latin distributive suffix -(E)NUS as an ordinal suffix
(cf. §§8.4.6.5-6). In Latin, the present participle in -NS, -NTIS in some western Romance varieties (cf. Lat. NOUENI ‘nine . . .
was an integral part of the verb paradigm. As such, it was each’ vs Sp. noveno ‘ninth’). According to Jaberg (1965), the
fully productive and endowed with a syntactic potential distributive suffix had been replaced by analytic construc-
identical to that of the base verb: PATRIAM AMARE ‘to love the tions in colloquial Latin, such that its meaning therefore
fatherland’ CIUIS PATRIAM AMANS ‘(a) citizen loving his father- was no longer correctly understood by speakers. But it was
land’. In the passage to Romance, the present participle still there as a kind of empty morph that eventually could be
dropped out of the verb paradigm, lost its syntactic poten- endowed with the new ordinal meaning, which probably
tial and became a derivational category. In Italian, for irradiated from NOUENA, the name of a funeral service held
example, amante requires the preposition di ‘of ’: un cittadino on the ninth day after death.
amante della patria. Repeated attempts to revive the syntac-
tic potential of the Latin ancestor remained confined to the
literary or bureaucratic language. (If, on the contrary, it is
possible to say un citoyen aimant la patrie, this is because in 28.3 Where derivational patterns go to
French the present participle formally merged with the
Latin gerund.) The Latin infinitive was also part of the Just as derivation is continually enriched by newcomers
verb paradigm, and continues as such in Romance, including originating in syntax, compounding, inflection, or even
old Romanian. In modern Romanian, by contrast, the ‘long ‘junk’, it also continually loses patterns at the other end.
infinitive’ in -re is almost exclusively used as an action noun: A derivational pattern can ‘die’ in several ways: it can
a sosi ‘to arrive’ ! sosire ‘arrival’. In most other Romance become unproductive and its members may eventually
languages, the infinitive can be nominalized productively, drop out of the language; its members can remain part of
retaining its imperfective verbal semantics and generally the language but become opaque, i.e. simplex words; or a
also the verbal syntax (cf. Sp. el aceptar la realidad tal cual es, pattern can migrate to other ‘components’ of grammar, viz.
lit. ‘the accepting the reality as it is’), though occasionally it inflection or syntax (I know, however, of no derivational
also shows a mixed behaviour, very much like the English pattern becoming a compounding pattern).
gerund. Some lexicalized infinitives can also function as The classic handbooks on the history of Romance word
nouns, e.g. Fr. dîner ‘dinner’ ( dîner ‘to dine’), Sp. cantar formation, first and foremost Meyer-Lübke (1890-1902, II),
‘poem’ ( cantar ‘to sing’), but this nominal use does not essentially focus on those Latin patterns that have survived
constitute a productive derivational pattern of action in Romance and those newly created in Romance. It would
nouns. be equally enlightening to collate a list of patterns of Clas-
Last but not least, derivational patterns can also come sical Latin that got stuck in the bottleneck of late Latinity or
into being by instilling meaning into previously meaning- early Romance in order to determine the causes of their loss
less forms, a process called ‘adaptation’ by Ludwig (1873), (cf. Cooper 1895).
‘secretion’ by Jespersen (1922), and eventually ‘exaptation’ Many rare affixes suffered this fate, of course. What is
by Lass (1990). One interesting example from Romance is more surprising is that some highly productive derivational
the emergence of partial reduplication of the type mère categories of Classical Latin, represented by hundreds of
‘mother’ ! mémère ‘granny’, bête ‘silly’ ! bébête ‘somewhat members, were also greatly reduced, e.g. relational adjec-
silly’ in French (cf. Rainer 1998), the only Romance language tives. As a norm, these only survived in old Romance var-
with a productive derivational pattern of partial reduplica- ieties in nominalized form, either as isolated words (e.g. Lat.
tion. Its origin clearly has to be sought in baby talk. Small DIURNU(M) ‘daily’ > Fr. jour ‘day’, Lat. DOMINICU(M) ‘of the Lord’ >
children in all languages tend to make words easier to Sp. domingo ‘Sunday’) or as new nominal patterns (e.g. Span-
pronounce by simplifying them through vowel and/or con- ish place nouns of the type esparragal ‘asparagus field’,
sonant harmony, among other techniques, which is why melonar ‘melon field’, whose suffixes correspond to Lat.
their language contains numerous words with (partially) -ALIS and -ARIS respectively). The prominent position of rela-
repeated syllables of the type dodo ( dormir ‘to sleep’), tional adjectives in modern Romance languages is a conse-
Mimi ( Émile). French reduplication as a word-formation quence of relatinization (cf. Lüdtke 1995).2
process emerged, at some stage of the Middle Ages, when
adults who interact with children started repeating such 2
The term ‘relatinization’ is used here to cover not only borrowings
words and creating new ones of their own, attaching to from Latin at all its stages, including medieval and Neo-Latin, but also
them hypocoristic connotations typical of child-directed latinate formations taken from other European languages.
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Another thriving Latin type of word formation reduced to part of syntax. To be precise, one would have to say that the
inconspicuous remains in Romance is constituted by loca- prefix super-, which continues to be used as a prefix, has
tive ‘preverbs’, i.e. prefixes and particles expressing pos- developed a new use as an adverb.
ition or direction. The meaning of Latin verbs could be
modulated productively by a rich set of such preverbs: IRE
‘to go’ ! AB-IRE ‘to go away’, EX-IRE ‘to leave’, IN-IRE ‘to enter’,
PRAETER-IRE ‘to go by’, RED-IRE ‘to go back’, TRANS-IRE ‘to go
28.4 The main semantic categories
across’. This system appears already heavily reduced in of Romance affixation
older Romance varieties and, contrary to what we observed
with relational adjectives, has not been restored to its The meanings expressed through affixes generally comprise
former glory in the process of relatinization (cf. Lüdtke categories and relations that are of particular relevance to
1996:247-52). Partially, though, this loss has been compen- human beings, which is why we find a good deal of cross-
sated by a vigorous expansion of the role of particle verbs of linguistic overlap. Here, I would like to present a brief
the type It. andare fuori ‘to go out’, andare via ‘to go away’, outline of the most important categories of Romance affix-
andare giù ‘to go down’, andare su ‘to go up’, which were still ation, highlighting at the same time some noticeable differ-
a rather marginal phenomenon in Latin (cf. FORAS IRE ‘to go ences among the Romance languages and with respect to
out’; cf. Iacobini 2015). Latin. The outline will treat prefixation and suffixation
Derivational patterns can also disappear by shifting to the separately, since they express very different meanings.
domain of inflection, though this is a relatively rare phe-
nomenon in Romance as well as cross-linguistically. In the
history of Romance, an interesting case is constituted by the 28.4.1 Prefixation
fate of the Latin inchoative suffix -SC-, as in RUBĒRE ‘to be red’
! RUB-ESC-ERE ‘to turn red’ (cf. Maiden 2004a; Meul 2013). The main semantic functions of prefixation in modern
While this suffix remained derivational in Portuguese, Span- standard Romance languages are illustrated in Table 28.1,
ish and Sardinian, it developed into an inflectional ‘aug- which is a simplified version of Iacobini’s (2004) semantic
ment’ in the remaining Romance varieties, with southern classification of Italian prefixes. As is immediately apparent,
Italo-Romance occupying an intermediate position. In Span- most prefixes are internationalisms that were reintroduced
ish, for example, -ecer is still a derivational suffix, though an into the language in the process of relatinization. Modern
unproductive one, present in change-of-state verbs such standard languages therefore resemble Latin much more
as anochecer ‘to get dark’ ( noche ‘night’) or recrudecer than do their own older stages or Romance dialects, where
‘to worsen’ ( crudo ‘harsh’). On the contrary, in Catalan the number of prefixes has been extremely reduced. Pinto
‑eix-, as in serv-eix-o ‘I serve’ (infinitive: serv-ir), has become (2011:110), for example, states that only three Latin prefixes
an empty morph whose distribution in the verbal paradigm have been used uninterruptedly in Sardinian, viz. a(d)-, (i)s-
is ‘morphomic’ in the sense of Aronoff (cf. §43.2.4) and is (< EX-) and in- applied to verbal bases. Other varieties, of
determined by purely intra-inflectional regularities. Some- course, have conserved more prefixes, e.g. DIS-, RE-, TRANS-.
thing similar also happened to the Latin suffix -IDI(ARE). But even such a highly frequent Latin prefix as negative
Affixes can also move from derivation towards syntax. In IN- disappeared from popular speech and has only been
Romance, some cases of prefixes turned into adverbs are re-established in the process of relatinization (Romanian
attested. The ancestor of the French adverb très ‘very’, for
example, was the Latin prefix TRANS-, preserved as such in Table 28.1 Semantic classes of prefixes in Italian
tressaillir ‘to shiver’, trépasser ‘to pass away’. Until the nine-
teenth century, très still used to be attached to its base with MEANING EXAMPLES
a hyphen (e.g. votre très-humble serviteur ‘your very humble

Location sotto- sopra- circum- retro-
servant’), and even today it continues to be restricted to a
Time pre- post- ex- neo-
position to the left of its base, as was Latin TRANS- (cf. il est
Negation in- a- anti- s-
très aimé ‘he is very loved’ vs ils l’aiment beaucoup/**très ‘they
Quantity macro- mini- super- semi-
love him very much’). A similar process of ‘debonding’
Multiplicity multi- pluri-
currently in progress affects the Spanish prefix super-,
Repetition ri-
which has come to be used in typically adverbial construc-
Ingressivity ad- in- s-
tions such as super pero super bueno ‘really good’ (lit. ‘super
Reflexivity auto-
but super good’). As this latter example shows, it is some-
Reciprocity co- inter-
what misleading to say that the prefix as such has become
516
opted for the prefix ne- of Slavonic origin; cf. Cat. insegur vs embarquer can nevertheless be derived in two steps if virtual
Ro. nesigur ‘unsure’). Section 28.2 has already alluded to the intermediate stages of derivation are admitted (barque !

rise of new prefixes by way of grammaticalization and §28.3 barquer ! embarquer). For all these positions there is also a
to the fate of so-called Latin ‘preverbs’. variant in which the theme vowel of the verb, e.g. the -a- in
Sp. em-barc-a-r, is considered as a derivational suffix. There
are also linguists who regard verbs such as embarquer as
28.4.2 Excursus on ‘parasynthesis’ derived from a prepositional phrase en barque, even in
synchrony. Last but not least, a group of morphologists
Many Romanists believe that their languages contain a assimilates parasynthetic formations to cases of circumfixa-
special type of derivation called ‘parasynthesis’ (cf. tion, i.e. the attachment of a discontinuous affix. The differ-
Serrano-Dolader 2015), usually defined as the simultaneous ence between this last position and the traditional one is
attachment of a prefix and a suffix. The staple example used that a circumfix is a single affix, while the notion of para-
to illustrate this process since Darmesteter (1875:79f.), who synthesis implies that the prefix and the suffix can be
introduced the concept of parasynthesis in Romance identified synchronically with an independently identifiable
philology, has been the French verb embarquer ‘to embark’, prefix and suffix of the language. The discussion is far from
which is said to be formed by the simultaneous being settled and cannot be further developed here.
attachment of en- ‘in-’ and -er ‘INF’ to barque ‘ship’, witness The issue is further complicated by the fact that other
the impossibility of deriving the verb in two successive patterns share with our staple verb the property of imply-
steps (cf. barque ! **embarque ! embarquer; barque ! ing, at first sight at least, the simultaneous application of
**barquer ! embarquer). word-formation patterns. A verb such as Sp. salpimentar ‘to
In reality, parasynthetic formations of this kind are quite season’, for example, is derived from sal ‘salt’ and pimienta
common also in other languages. Take a verb such as Ger. ‘pepper’, but there is no compound **salpimienta, nor is
verdeutschen ‘to translate into German’ ( deutsch ‘Ger- there a verb **pimentar. Besides aniñado ‘childlike’, from
man’), which cannot be derived in two steps either: deutsch niño ‘child’, there is no **aniño, nor **niñado, besides tetra-
! **verdeutsch ! verdeutschen; deutsch ! **deutschen ! sílabo ‘tetrasyllabic’, from sílaba ‘syllable’, no **tetrasílaba,
verdeutschen. The only thing special about Romance is its nor **sílabo. Students of Germanic languages might want
terminology (Slavonicists, for example, call analogous for- to add ‘synthetic compounds’ of the type churchgoer (vs
mations ‘prefixal-suffixal’). Greek grammarians meant by **churchgo, **goer, in the relevant sense) or blue-eyed (vs
parasýnthesis a process of derivation – more rarely compos- **blue-eye, **eyed). Among specialists in these languages
ition – based on a compound, and its product, parasýntheton. the analysis of such formations is no less controversial
This is the way in which these terms have generally been than that of parasynthetic formations in Romance. To com-
used outside Romance linguistics, as well as by Darmesteter plicate matters further, one could mention in this context
himself. For him, embarquer was a parasynthétique because he the phenomenon of ‘affix coalescence’: is -aiolo in It. pizzaiolo
considered prefixes such as en- to be prepositions, and ‘pizza chef ’ one unanalysable suffix, or is it somehow com-
hence **embarque as a composé ‘compound’. However, in posed of agentive -aio and diminutive -olo, despite the non-
the course of the twentieth century, the majority of existence of **pizzaio? My impression is that an in-depth
Romance morphologists opted for treating prefixation as a study of the mechanisms operative in affix coalescence, or
kind of affixation and no longer as compounding. This is reanalysis more in general, might be a more fruitful way of
how the definition of parasynthetic formations inadvert- tackling the whole problem of parasynthesis than the purely
ently changed to the one given at the beginning. synchronic treatments that have prevailed up to now. But
Parasynthetic verbs have received a number of different I must leave this hint as food for thought to the reader.
theoretical interpretations beyond the traditional position
of a simultaneous attachment of a prefix and a suffix. Some
interpret the infinitive ending -er as an inflectional ending
28.4.3 Suffixation
and consequently deny the very existence of parasynthesis:
for them, embarquer is simply a prefixed verb, very much The following classification of suffixes is based, in the first
like English embark. Others accept the inflectional status of instance, on the part of speech of the derivative, and sub-
the infinitive ending, but try to save the parasynthetic sequently on the part of speech of the base, and finally
analysis by postulating a ‘zero morpheme’ between the proceeds on the basis of semantic criteria. This method
stem and the infinitive ending, or by considering **barquer resembles that applied by Meyer-Lübke (1890; 1966), who
as derived through conversion. Still others accept the established this kind of classification in Romance linguistics,
conversion/zero morpheme assumption, but think that probably inspired by Kluge (1886).
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FRANZ RAINER
Table 28.2 Semantic classes of suffixed nouns in Italian

DENOMINAL NOUNS DEVERBAL NOUNS DE - ADJECTIVAL NOUNS
Status nouns Action nouns Quality nouns

cardinal-ato ‘cardinalship’ affonda-mento ‘sinking’ bell-ezza ‘beauty’
Agent nouns Agent nouns Attributive nouns
fior-aio ‘florist’ caccia-tore ‘hunter’ elegant-one ‘dandy’
Instrument nouns Instrument nouns
dit-ale ‘thimble’ lava-trice ‘washing machine’
Place nouns Place nouns
libr-eria ‘bookshop’ lava-toio ‘wash house’
Feminine nouns
duch-essa ‘duchess’
Collective nouns
soldat-esca ‘troops’
Evaluative nouns
uccell-ino ‘baby bird’
uccell-one ‘big bird’
uccell-accio ‘ugly bird’
In Romance, nouns boast the most articulate array of cântat ‘singing’, Sp. lavado ‘washing’, It. nuotata ‘swim’,
suffixes. The central derivational categories, illustrated in Fr. arrivée ‘arrival’) has long been disputed, but eventually
Table 28.2 with Italian examples, were already the most the hypothesis has prevailed that links them to the Latin
important ones in Latin, and in fact are so cross- action nouns of the type CURSUS ‘run’ (cf. Collin 1918; Alsdorf-
linguistically (cf. Bauer 2002:40). That means that most of Bollée 1970; Georges 1970), with some influence from nom-
these categories have remained stable from Latin to inalized participles. A Romance innovation is constituted
Romance, though individual suffixes often witnessed by the French suffix -age, which goes back to -ATICU(M) (cf.
important changes. Fleischman 1977; Uth 2011). Romanian has conserved action
The first line of Table 28.2 contains the three types of nouns in -TORIA(M) (e.g. Ro. a vâna ‘to hunt’ ! vânătoare
‘transpositional’ categories. As abstract nouns in general, ‘hunting’).
they suffered heavy losses in the deeply rural society of the Feminine nouns, collective nouns, and evaluative nouns
early Middle Ages, partly through concretization (e.g. MAN- are sometimes grouped together as ‘modificational’ cat-
SIONE(M) ‘stay’ > Fr. maison ‘house’). It is believed that of the egories. In the category of feminine nouns, the central suffix
hundreds of quality nouns in -ITATE(M) only BONITATE(M) ‘good- -TRIX disappeared as a productive derivational pattern,
ness’ and a few more were handed down directly to but has later been reintroduced in Italian (e.g. cantatrice
Romance (e.g. Ro. bunătate, It. bontà, Pt. bondade). All the ‘singer’) and French (e.g. animatrice ‘organizer, presenter’;
others were reintroduced in the process of relatinization. cf. Lindemann 1977), while Spanish, among other varieties,
The whole category of quality nouns underwent heavy created a suffix -dora in the Middle Ages by extending
changes in the passage to Romance (a detailed account, the ‘motional’ suffix -a to -dor. A Latin suffix that has
unfortunately, remains a desideratum). Among action gained popularity in Romance is -ISSA (cf. Ro. preoteasă
nouns, -IONE(M) suffered heavy losses, but has been restored ‘priestess’), and probably we have to see the feminine suffix
in the process of relatinization. -MENTU(M) became the cen- -IA (cf. AU-US ‘grandfather’ vs AU-IA ‘grandmother’) behind the
tral suffix in Romance, and rhizotonic action nouns derived puzzling feminine nouns in -deira (< ‑TOR‑IA) of Portuguese
by conversion also witnessed a spectacular rise, as we will (e.g. vendedor ‘salesman’ vs vendedeira ‘saleswoman’) and
see in §28.5. The same is true for the suffix -NTIA, that related suffixes in other Romance varieties. The category
originated from a coalescence of the present participle of collective nouns has notably gained in importance in
and the suffix -IA (cf. Malkiel 1945). The origin of Romance Romance (cf. Baldinger 1950 on French), and augmentative
action nouns, masculine and feminine, which are formally nouns of the type It. nasone ‘big nose’ are a Romance innov-
identical in synchrony with the participial stem (e.g. Ro. ation (the Latin predecessor -ONE(M) formed pejorative
518
personal nouns, such as NASO, -ONIS ‘person with a big nose’). were beaten black and blue’ (lit. ‘they were shattered with
The same is also true, by and large, for pejorative suffixes the hefty blows’; 1560, F. Cervantes de Salazar). Beginning
(cf. Jaberg 1901). Diminutives, on the contrary, already with the Renaissance, this suffix acquired a series of add-
constituted a thriving category in Latin and continue to do itional senses through metaphorical and metonymic exten-
so in Romance (cf. Hasselrot 1957), with the notable excep- sions (cf. balazo ‘shot; bullet wound’ bala ‘bullet’,
tion of modern French (cf. Hasselrot 1972; Böhme-Eckert pinochetazo ‘Pinochet’s coup’).
1986), where the category has slumped. Romance evaluative Derived adjectives are much less varied semantically, in
suffixes of all kinds are famous for their semantic and Romance as well as cross-linguistically. Denominal adjec-
pragmatic versatility (cf. Hummel 2015). tives may be divided into relational and qualifying adjec-
Agent, instrument, and place nouns can be both deverbal tives. As has already been anticipated in §28.3, the category
and denominal. Among the deverbal patterns, the central of relational adjectives witnessed a spectacular increase
suffix was constituted by -TOR, which was exclusively agent- during the process of relatinization. Some, nevertheless,
ive in Latin, but now also forms instrument nouns in all were transmitted through the popular channel, e.g. Sp.
Romance languages and in some even place nouns (cf. Cat. -uno (cf. Malkiel 1950; 1959c), which starting from Lat.
menjador ‘dining room’). Contrary to a widely held belief, APRUNUS ‘of a boar’ ( APER ‘boar’) has created in Spanish
however, this was the result not of semantic extensions but and Portuguese a ‘semantic niche’ of adjectives relating to
of the homonymization of -TORE(M) and the instrumental- animals by way of analogical extension (cf. Sp. perruno
locative suffix -TORIU(M), as well as other factors such as perro ‘dog’, Pt. cabrum cabra ‘goat’). Qualifying adjectives
borrowing (cf. Rainer 2011). Occitan and Catalan have con- essentially express possession (e.g. It. ‑oso, -ato, -uto),
tinued both the nominative form -TOR (> -aire) and the resemblance (e.g. It. -oso, -oide; on the diffusion of -esco
accusative form -TORE(M) (> -dor) (e.g. pescaire, pescador ‘fish- from Italy, cf. Malkiel 1972) or, more rarely, disposition
erman’). Instrument nouns with this same suffix also arose (e.g. Sp. chocolatero ‘keen on chocolate’). Deverbal adjec-
through ellipsis (e.g. Sp. [máquina] locomotora ‘locomotive’) tives can have an active (e.g. It. -nte, -ore, -ivo, -orio; also
in the wake of the Industrial Revolution (cf. Rainer 2009). -evole < -IBILE(M)) or a passive meaning, the latter coupled
Latin instrumental and locative suffixes continued in with an additional meaning of potentiality (most promin-
Romance were -ACULU(M) (e.g. GUBERNACULU(M) ‘helm’ > Fr. ently descendants of Lat. -BILIS; but cf. also Sp. -dero <
gouvernail) and -TORIU(M) (RASORIU(M) ‘razor’ > It. rasoio, Fr. -TORIU(M), as in pagadero ‘payable’, and -dizo < -TICIU(M), as
rasoir, CACATORIU(M) ‘toilet’ > It. cacatoio). In Sardinian, this in puente levadizo ‘drawbridge’). Romanian borrowed the
-TORIU(M) also developed a temporal meaning (e.g. kenadorzu suffix -eţ from Slavonic; cf. a citi ‘to read’ ! citeţ ‘readable’.
‘lunch time’). Denominal agent nouns were preferably Finally, de-adjectival adjectives are dominated by only two
formed with -ARIU(M) in Latin and continued to do so in categories, intensification and evaluation. The Latin super-
Romance. Later on, the loan suffix -ISTA witnessed a spec- lative suffix ‑ISSIMUS has been reintroduced in some
tacular rise. Romanian has also borrowed suffixes from Romance languages in an elative function during the pro-
Hungarian (e.g. arc ‘bow’ ! arcaş ‘archer’) and Turkish cess of relatinization. As in Latin, in Romance evaluative
(e.g. barcă ‘boat’ ! barcagiu ‘ferryman’). De-adjectival suffixes can also be added to adjectives, with meanings
attributive nouns of the type It. elegantone ‘dandy, elegant changing between attenuative, intensive, meliorative, and
man’ already existed in Latin, but are rarer in Romance than pejorative (e.g. Cat. petit-et ‘very small’, blanqu-et ‘whitish’,
in Germanic or Slavonic languages (but cf. Sp. rojeras ‘com- ampl-ot ‘very wide’).
mie’ rojo ‘red’). -ARIU(M) has also been continued in its The suffixed verbs of Romance also instantiate the most
locative sense (GRANARIU(M) ‘granary’ > It. granaio ‘granary; typical cross-linguistic derivational categories. Denominal
barn’). The locative suffix of libreria ‘bookshop’ and similar verbs can be derived by means of the descendants of the
formations, on the contrary, is a Romance innovation due to Latin suffix (of Greek origin) -IDIARE, which has both a popu-
‘affix telescoping’ of the type Fr. (tuile ‘tile’ ! tuil-ier ‘tile- lar (e.g. It. -eggiare, Fr. -oyer, Sp. -ear) and a learnèd outcome
maker’ !) tuil-er-ie ‘tilemaker’s shop’ > tuil-erie ‘tile works’. (e.g. It. -izzare, Fr. -iser, Sp. -izar). In many of their uses, these
Apart from the central derivational categories repre- derivatives are in competition with denominal verbs
sented in Table 28.2, there are many more patterns that derived via conversion. The semantic richness of denominal
cannot be enumerated here. Some of these are Romance verbs constrasts with the straightforward semantics of
innovations, such as the Spanish suffix -azo ‘blow’, a typo- de-adjectival verbs; most of these are either causative (e.g.
logically rare derivational meaning. It probably arose by It. sterilizzare ‘to sterilize’) or inchoative (e.g. It. rosseggiare
way of a reanalysis of palazo (cf. Rainer 2010:22f.; pace ‘to redden’). These verbs, too, are in competition with con-
Malkiel 1959a): dióme con un palazo ‘he beat me with a big verted verbs (e.g. Fr. noircir ‘to blacken’, rougir ‘to blush’).
stick’ (1524, Gil Vicente) > estaban molidos de los palazos ‘they Other meanings (e.g. It. zoppicare ‘to limp’ zoppo ‘lame’)
519
FRANZ RAINER
are rare. Last but not least, Romance languages have a great conversion, i.e. absence of a formal marker and shift of
number of suffixes adding frequentative, attenuative, or part of speech. Nevertheless, many linguists would
pejorative shades of meaning to a base verb (e.g. It. saltare probably prefer classifying such shifts as mere syntactic
‘to jump’ ! salterellare ‘to hop’, mangiare ‘to eat’ ! mangiuc- transpositions (Spanish dictionaries, anyway, fail to register
chiare ‘to nibble’, scrivere ‘to write’ ! scribacchiare ‘to scrib- an adjective entonces). A further source of uncertainty is the
ble’; cf. Grandi 2008). status of the thematic vowel in Romance verbs. Those who
Adverbial derivation has been deeply restructured in consider it as derivational in nature will analyse denominal
Romance (cf. Lüdtke 1996:263; Hummel 2010). The Latin verbs like Pt. lider-a-r ‘to lead’ ( líder ‘leader’) as cases of
adverbial suffix -(I)TER died out, while ‑E only survives as a affixation, while those who only grant it inflectional status
suffix with Romanian adjectives in -esc (e.g. frățesc will classify the same verbs as instances of conversion. Last
‘brotherly’ ! frățeşt-e). Since these base adjectives are but not least, it is often unclear in Romance whether a shift
denominal, a denominal adverbial suffix -eşte (e.g. frăț-eşte in part of speech is the result of the application of a pro-
‘like a brother’) has been created by ‘affix telescoping’. Latin ductive pattern of conversion or of an individual lexical
adverbs in -Ō and -UM survived, giving rise to a pattern of change. This is especially true in relation to nouns and
converted adverbs in many Romance varieties, most prom- adjectives, whose frontier is notoriously porous in
inently in Romanian and southern Italian dialects, but to a Romance. Caníbal, for example, originally was only a noun
certain degree also elsewhere (e.g. Sp. me alegro infinito, lit. ‘I in Spanish, just like cannibal in English or Kannibale in
rejoice infinitely’). Adverbs in -mente (Fr. -ment) were a German, but can now also be used as an adjective (e.g.
Romance innovation (cf. §28.2). costumbres caníbales ‘cannibalistic habits’). The status of
such shifts awaits an in-depth treatment.
One pattern of conversion that witnessed a spectacular
rise in medieval Romance was that of rhizotonic action
nouns (‘Postverbalia’, as they were formerly called). Their
28.5 ‘Non-canonical’ types of word origin has to be sought in a small set of Latin verb/noun
formation pairs such as CANT-ARE ‘to sing’/CANT-US ‘singing, song’, the
latter originally derived from CANERE ‘to sing’, for masculine
As in most languages of the world, affixation and com- nouns, and PUGN-ARE ‘to fight’/PUGN-A ‘fight’ for feminine
pounding are also the two central types of word formation nouns. On the basis of such models, Romance languages
in Romance. The present section will be dedicated to a brief developed long series of masculine or feminine action
treatment of the remaining ‘non-canonical’ types of deriv- nouns, whose expansion was only contained as a conse-
ation (reduplication has already been treated in §28.2). quence of the massive relatinization of the category of
Among these, conversion is by far the most important action nouns. Formally, for example with respect to diph-
one. It is normally defined as derivation without a formal thongization, these nouns show the same behaviour as the
marker—or marked by a ‘zero morph’, as some prefer—but rhizotonic forms of the inflectional paradigm. Spanish and
the concept remains notoriously fuzzy (cf. Kerleroux 1996; Portuguese are special in that, beside the masculine pattern
Bauer and Valera Hernández 2005). In order to distinguish in -o (e.g. Sp. acuerdo ‘agreement’ acord‑ar(se) ‘to agree’)
conversion from cases of semantic extension such as and the feminine pattern in -a (e.g. Sp. siembra ‘sowing’
metaphor or metonymy, most morphologists additionally sembr–ar ‘to sow’), they have developed a third pattern of
require the process to shift the base into another part of masculine action nouns ending in -e of the type Sp. cierre
speech. This requirement, however, is in itself problematic, ‘closure’ ( cerr-ar ‘to close’; cf. also the Spanish ternary
since semantic extension and derivation often fulfil identi- alternation between costo, costa(s), and coste ‘cost, price’).
cal functions of lexical enrichment (cf. Koch 2014). Why Malkiel (1959b:106) postulated three sources for this new
should the relationship between Lat. PIRUM ‘pear’ and PIRUS pattern: the Hispano-Latin pair lindar ‘to border’/linde ‘bor-
‘peartree’ or Nap. mela ‘apple’ and milo ‘apple tree’ be clas- der’ (< LIMITARE/LIMITE(M)), loanwords from Gallo-Romance
sified as semantic extension (note that -UM/-US and ‑a/-o are and Catalan, and Arabisms.
merely inflectional endings) but the one between Fr. poire Rhizotonic action nouns have occasionally been analysed
‘pear’ and poirier ‘pear tree’ as a case of derivation? The as backformations, because the action noun is shorter than
demarcation with respect to syntax is equally problematic. the infinitive (cf. Fr. chasse ‘hunting’ chasser ‘to hunt’).
In the Spanish noun phrase el entonces presidente ‘the then Such an analysis, however, is unwarranted, if we consider
president’, the adverb entonces ‘then’ appears in a typically the base of word formation to be a derivational stem and
adjectival position, and therefore fulfils both criteria for not the infinitive, i.e. the conventional citation form of
520
verbs in Romance. Real backformations, of course, also exist 28.6 The fate of the Latin ‘third stem’ in
in Romance. In fact, they could even be more frequent there Romance derivational morphology
than in other languages, since the huge number of Latin
complex words borrowed without their bases a priori
constitute a fertile ground (a comprehensive analysis, Latin verbs had three stems, the infectum, the perfectum,
unfortunately, is required). Backformation consists in and one that Aronoff (1994) proposed to simply call the
reconstructing a derivational stem—that may be etymo- ‘third stem’ because it covered a heterogeneous set of
logically incorrect—on the basis of a complex word. In inflectional and derivational categories not amenable to a
Spanish, for example, a verb legislar ‘to legislate’ has been unitary semantic characterization. In the case of the verb
AMARE ‘to love’, for example, these three stems were AMA-,
backformed on the basis of the Latinism legislación ‘legisla-
AMAU-, and AMAT- respectively. In inflection, the third stem
tion’, by analogy with the long series of pairs of the type
educar ‘to educate’/educación ‘education’. occurred in the supine (AMAT-UM), the past participle (AMAT-
US), and the future participle (AMAT-URUS), while in deriv-
Though the result of backformation most of the time is
shorter than the input, it must not be confused with clip- ation it showed up in derived nouns, adjectives, adverbs,
ping. Clipping is a cover term for a heterogeneous set of and verbs:
processes applied to reduce the length of words. It is an
output-oriented process that preferably yields a form iden- (1) Agent nouns: AMAT-OR ‘lover.M’, AMAT-RIX ‘lover.F’
tical with the unmarked phonological word of the language Action nouns: AMAT-IO ‘love’, PLAUS-US ‘applause’,
SCRIPT-URA ‘writing’
(cf. Thornton 1996). That is why the shape of clipped words
varies considerably. In French the minimal word is mono- Adjectives: ACT-IUUS ‘active’, AMAT-ORIUS ‘of love’, CORRUPT-
IBILIS ‘liable to decay’
syllabic, in Spanish disyllabic and trochaic: Fr. professeur !
prof vs Sp. profesor ! profe ‘teacher’. Clipping is also some- Adverbs: CERTAT-IM ‘eagerly’
times referred to as ‘shortening’ or ‘truncation’. This latter Verbs: CURS-ARE ‘to run to and fro’, CURS-ITARE ‘to bustle
term, however, is better reserved for shortening triggered about’, CAENAT-URIRE ‘to want to eat’
by suffixation (or any other morphological process, for that Not all derivational suffixes, however, required the third
matter). Just like interfixation (see §28.7), truncation is stem: AM-OR ‘love’ and AM-ICUS ‘friend’, for example, are based
sometimes due to prosodic output optimization. It seems on the infectum, and so is the present participle AMA-NS
plausible to assume, for example, that the idiosyncratic ‘loving’, which was still an inflectional category in Classical
truncation of -alí observable in Sp. jabato ‘young wild boar’ Latin.
( jabalí ‘wild boar’) was due to the desire to make the This complex system of stem selection, which had
output fit better into the series of trisyllabic designations of remained remarkably stable throughout Latinity, collapsed
young animals in -ato such as cervato ‘fawn’, lobato ‘wolf cub’, during the early Middle Ages (cf. Meyer-Lübke 1890-1902,
lebrato ‘leveret’. II:§485; Maiden 2013c; §43.3). The collapse can be attributed
The type of clipping exemplified by words like prof(e) is to a ‘conspiracy’ that involved the disappearance of several
typical of certain sociolects, e.g. school slang. In many relevant inflectional and derivational categories, phono-
languages, speakers of slang resort to even more artificial logical processes, processes of reanalysis, semantic drift,
means of changing the shape of words in order to foster in- and lexical loss, which together caused the system to
group identity or hinder comprehensibility to outsiders. become opaque. As a consequence, speakers were led to
French argot, for example, has seen come and go several reanalyse derivatives as based on the stem of the infectum
such word games since the nineteenth century, e.g. largonji (or its Romance descendant): AMAT-OR > AMA-TOR. While this
( jargon), loucherbem ( boucher ‘butcher’), or verlan ( (à) reanalysis remains covert in derivatives from most verbs of
l’envers ‘backwards’). The names of these word games allow the first conjugation, a neologism such as old Italian leggi-
us to get an idea of the rules and processes involved. tore ‘reader’ ( leggere ‘to read’) makes it apparent: a
According to Fradin et al. (2009), verlan is based on the derivative based on the third stem would have resulted in
instruction to begin a word with a phoneme distinct from lett-ore (cf. the past participle letto ‘read’ < Lat. LECTU(M)).
the first one, while the rest is said to follow from independ- Had this popular tendency prevailed, the new system of
ent general constraints. In the word game called javanais, deverbal derivation would have been maximally simple
the sequence ‑avis inserted into the syllables of the base from a formal point of view in the Romance languages.
word (e.g. bavonjavour bonjour ‘good day, hello’). A word However, simplicity was spoiled by the process of relatini-
game similar to verlan practiced in some Spanish-speaking zation undergone by the Romance languages as soon as they
countries is resve ( (al) revés ‘the other way round’). started being used in writing. Derivatives based on the third
521
FRANZ RAINER
stem, such as It. lett-ore ‘reader’ (< Lat. LECT-ORE(M)), lett-ura 28.7 Interfixes
‘reading’ (< Lat. LECT-URA(M)), possess-ore ‘possessor’ (< Lat.
POSSESS-ORE(M)), possess-ivo ‘possessive’ (< Lat. POSSESS-IUU(M)),
The notion ‘interfix’ is mostly used in Romance linguistics
poured in by the thousands. This massive influx of latinisms,
to refer to a meaningless morph inserted between base and
however, did not lead to a simple restoration of the Latin
suffix, as in Fr. goutt-el-ette ‘droplet’ ( goutte ‘drop’), It.
system described above. A new system sui generis emerged
temp-or-ale ‘temporal’ ( tempo ‘time’), or Sp. balcon-c-ito
(cf. Rainer 2001:386-89).
‘small balcony’ ( balcón ‘balcony’). Since interfixes of this
At the most spontaneous level of language use the
kind are particularly well represented in Romance and have
innovative Romance pattern based on the present stem—
been the subject of thorough theoretical discussion, they
the Romance descendant of the infectum—prevailed, but
merit a special section in a treatment of Romance
neologisms coined according to this pattern often had to
derivation.
face a long struggle against the synonymous latinisms
As Malkiel (1958:116-61) has shown, interfixes may arise
newly introduced into the language. Leggitore, for example,
in many different ways. The interfix of Sp. pan-ad-ero
eventually gave way to its latinate rival lettore in the
‘baker’, for example, was the result of ‘affix telescoping’,
sense ‘person reading’. In such cases, from a synchronic
when the original base panada dropped out of the language
perspective, the latinism can be said to block the corres-
and the derivative was therefore directly referred to pan
ponding regular formation. But there was another, more
‘bread’. Interfixes may also arise in the process of borrow-
interesting consequence of the massive influx of third-stem
ing, as did the interfix -et- of pel-et-ero ‘furrier’, an adapta-
latinisms.
tion of OFr. peletier, synchronically referred to piel ‘fur’ in
Very often more than one third-stem derivative of some
Spanish. The interfix -t- of Fr. bijou-t-ier ‘jeweller’ ( bijou
Latin verb was borrowed. Alongside possedere ‘to possess’,
‘jewel’), in turn, arose when the final -t of French words such
for example, Italian also received the nouns possessore
as pot ‘pot’ became mute and a derivative like potier ‘potter’
‘possessor’ (which ousted posseditore, used by Dante), pos-
therefore could be resegmented as po-tier instead of pot-ier.
sessione ‘possession’, and possesso ‘possession, ownership’,
A fourth major source of interfixes is constituted by stem
as well as the adjectives possessivo ‘possessive’ and posses-
extensions that have lost their original function, as in It.
sorio ‘possessory’. However, Italian did not take the Latin
temp-or-ale, whose -or- reflects the stem extension of Latin
past participle POSSESSUS ‘possessed’, using in its place regu-
TEMPUS, -ORIS.
larly formed posseduto. Due to this discrepancy in the
The same factor was also operative in the rise of the
treatment of the past participle and derivational categor-
interfix -u-, which I would like to treat in some detail
ies (which can also be found in many other cases), the
because it allows us to illustrate two fundamental mechan-
formal link between inflection and derivation was severed,
isms that allow interfixes to proliferate (cf. also Lázaro
but at the same time speakers established direct links
Carreter 1972). In Latin derivatives based on nouns of the
among the latinate third-stem derivatives. They arrived
fourth declension a suffix had to be attached to the stem
at the generalization that, if this third stem was available
in one of the relevant categories, it could also be extended extension -U-, contrary to what we observe in the second
as a rule to the other categories by simple proportional declension: hence, FRUCT-U-OSUS ‘fruitful’ ( FRUCTUS, -US
analogy. Thornton (2015, esp. §3.7) has assembled a size- ‘fruit’) vs UENT-OSUS ‘windy’ ( UENTUS, -I ‘wind’). But the
able number of neologisms from the twentieth century fourth declension merged with the second, and therefore
that show how easily writers nowadays pass from collisione the rationale behind the use of the -u- contained in many
‘collision’ to collisore ‘collider’, from aversione ‘adversion’ to adjectives borrowed in the process of relatinization became
aversivo ‘adversive’, from recensione ‘review’ or recensore opaque: from an Italian perspective, for example, it must
‘reviewer’ to recensorio ‘reviewing (ADJ)’, etc. (Note that remain mysterious why frutt-u-oso ( frutto) has an interfix
these derivatives cannot be derived from a participial -u- but not vent ‑oso ( vento). One might surmise that, as a
stem: collisione and aversione have no base verb synchron- consequence, the interfix became unproductive in Italian,
ically, and the past participle of recensire is recensito) For but this was not the case (cf. Rainer 1999). On the one hand,
some of Thornton’s examples it may well be possible to the interfix can be seen to be inserted analogically in neolo-
find (neo-)Latin or modern foreign models on closer gisms whose base closely resembles that of some estab-
inspection, but overall there can be no doubt that this lished model with -u-, either formally or semantically: in
kind of derivation must now be granted synchronic prod- that way, for example, brevett-u-ale ‘patent’ (ADJ) ( brevetto
uctivity in Italian, and probably also in other Romance ‘patent’ (N)) was coined in analogy to a small series of
languages. adjectives with a base ending in -ett-, such as intellett-u-ale
522
‘intellectual’ (< Lat. INTELLECT-U-ALIS), concett-u-ale ‘conceptual’ disyllabic bases are vowel-initial. The interfix in these
(< Lat. CONCEPT-U-ALIS). But in other cases we observe that the cases serves the purpose of providing a disyllabic base,
selection of the interfix is conditioned by its presence in one which in Occitan is the optimal shape with a certain type
or more derivatives of the same word family, i.e. with the of derivatives in -ièr/-ièra. Other cases of interfixation have
same stem, but a different suffix. The -u- of the verb sess-u- a dissimilatory motivation, for example the -el- of Fr. gout-el-
are ‘to sex’, for example, is clearly due to sess-u-ale ‘sexual’, ette and similar formations, which allows avoiding an imme-
though this adjective is not its morphosemantic model. The diate repetition of /t/ (e.g. odd goutt-ette). As a third fre-
same explanation, by the way, applies to sess‑u-ologia ‘sex- quent function we could mention that of providing a
ology’. In such cases, we could also say that speakers have (universally preferred) consonantal onset, as in bijou-t-
extracted a new derivational stem sessu- from sessuale. ier ‘jeweller’. Roché prefers not to consider such epen-
As noted above, in some cases interfixes are simply relics thetic consonants as interfixes and restricts the latter
of older stages of a language, with no discernible synchronic notion to cases of stem optimization, but it might be
function. However, it has been demonstrated (Roché 2015) preferable to keep the term ‘interfix’ as a cover term for
that at least a subset of interfixes in Romance can be the admittedly quite heterogeneous array of morphs that
endowed with a synchronic function, viz. that of creating share the properties of being devoid of meaning and of
an optimal output or stem in prosodic and segmental terms. occurring at a morpheme boundary, and to delimit
For example, of 207 Occitan derivatives in -ièr/-ièra with an the different subtypes more clearly than has been done
interfix, 199 have a monosyllabic base, and 7 of the 8 up to now.
523
CHAPTER 29
Compounding
29.1 Theoretical bases head as the constituent that straightforwardly gives its
category and semantics to the whole compound (a beau
frère is a noun, just because frère is a noun, while beau is
29.1.1 What is considered a compound an adjective; Allen 1978). The morphological features are
and what is its head? expected to percolate from the head as well. Some scholars,
in fact, claim that the head must be identified only on
The structure which could best represent a compound,
formal grounds. According to Kageyama (2008), for
according to Guevara and Scalise (2009), is as follows,
example, the head should be defined as a category deter-
where X, Y, and Z represent words belonging to a major
minant. Consequently, the head is the constituent which
lexical category, and r the grammatical relation that holds
transmits the information to the entire compound, includ-
between the two constituents:1
ing categorical subcategorization features and gender in
languages that require it.
(1) [X r Y] Z
According to (3b), the head can be identified on semantic
It can be said that two constituents are united by some grounds. Bloomfield (1933:235), for example, claims that an
type of grammatical relation that can vary depending on endocentric compound (see below) denotes a hyponym of
the type of compound: ‘r’ in the three Italian examples its head: Cat. pastadents paste.teeth ‘toothpaste’ is a kind of
below is always different:2 paste and therefore pasta is the head.
The third approach is, among others, that of Namiki
(2) (1994:270), who claims that in order to identify the head
capostazione ‘station master’ master (of ) the station one needs both formal (categorial) and semantic informa-
nave traghetto ‘ferry boat’ ship (which is also) a ferry tion: Sp. agua oxigenada, lit. ‘water oxygenated’ (‘hydrogen
discorso fiume ‘long running a discourse (as long as) a river peroxide’) is a noun and it is a (kind of) water.
speech’ The position of the head can vary cross-linguistically, as
exemplified here from Catalan compounds (heads
A prototypical compound consists of two constituents, of underlined):
which one is more salient and has traditionally been called
the ‘head’ in accordance with several criteria: (4) head to left filferro thread.iron ‘iron wire’3
head to the right malcostumar badly.habituate.INF ‘to spoil’
(3) a. The head is categorial. two heads fisicoquímic physical.chemical
b. The head is semantic. ‘physico-chemical’
c. The head must be categorial and semantic. no heads aigua-sal water.salt ‘pickle’
According to (3a), in an example such as Fr. beau frère The first three types of compound are called endocentric,
‘handsome brother, brother-in-law’ (conventionally spelt the last one exocentric.
beau-frère with the latter meaning), we can identify the Namiki, among others, claims furthermore that the head
is the ‘locus of inflection’, and this seems to be true in the
unmarked case, whether the compound has only one head
1
See e.g. Lieber and Štekauer (2009b) and Scalise and Vogel (2010b). (5a) or two (5b):
2
The languages discussed here are French, Italian, Portuguese, Roma-
nian, Spanish, and Sardinian. The data are drawn mainly from the following
sources: Scalise (1992), Scalise and Masini (2013), and CompoNet. Latin data
are drawn from Oniga (1992) and Brucale (2012). Catalan, Portugese, and
3
Romanian from Bernal (2012), Rio-Torto and Ribeiro (2012), and Grossmann For every example we will provide literal translations followed, where
(2012), respectively. necessary, by tranlsations within single quotes.
524 This chapter © Francesca Forza and Sergio Scalise 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
COMPOUNDING
(5) a. capostazione (SG) ! capistazione (PL) head/s station (9) It. bar ristorante ‘bar (and) restaurant’
‘station master(s)’ It. divano letto ‘sofa (and) bed’
b. studente lavoratore (SG) ! studenti lavoratori (PL)
student/s worker/s ‘student worker(s)’ In attributive compounds, the non-head is an adjective
and works as an attribute (10a); if the non-head is a noun
It has been shown, however (Guevara and Scalise 2009), (always with attributive function) the compounds are called
that the head is not always the locus of inflection. To this appositive:
otherwise interesting generalization there are counter-
examples such as the following Italian example: (10) a. It. cassaforte case.strong.SG ‘safe’
b. It. guerra lampo war lightning ‘blitzkrieg’
(6) pomodoro (SG) ! pomodori (PL) ‘tomato(es)’
Finally, among Romance compounds there are also so-
This word consists of three constituents, pomo di oro, lit. called learnèd compounds. These are formed by one or two
‘apple of gold’, where the head is the first constituent. bound forms (called semi-words in Scalise 1983) of mostly
However, this internal structure has become opaque to Greek or Latin origin,4 witness the following French
most speakers such that it is treated as a simple word, examples:
with inflection occurring to the right of the whole com-
pound and not on the head, pomo, just as in simple words, (11) semi-word + word agro-alimentaire ‘agro-alimentary’
e.g. lupo ! lupi ‘wolf(/‑ves)’. Furthermore the ‘same’ word + semi-word océanographe ‘oceanographer’
compound can be treated in different ways across semi-word + semi-word anthropomorphe ‘anthropomorph’
Romance:
In the combination word+semi-word a linking element
(7) It. uomini rana men frog ‘frogmen’ (LE) appears, which is systematically -o- if the semi-word is
Sp. hombres ranas men frogs ‘frogmen’ of Greek origin, and -i- if of Latin origin:
In conclusion, while the hypothesis that the head is the (12) It. musica +logo ! musicologo ‘musicologist’
locus of inflection cannot always be verified, the proposal It. colore+ficio ! colorificio ‘paint factory’
that a head is at the same time a categorial head and a
semantic head proves in general quite reliable.
29.2 Latin and Romance compounds
29.1.2 Classification of Romance compounds Romance compounds differ in several respects from Latin
in a cross-linguistic framework compounds, some predictable and others not. Here follows a
non-exhaustive list of relevant differences.
First, compounding in Latin was not a highly productive
Here we adopt the account of Scalise and Bisetto (2009), process; in general, formation of new words was mainly
where three basic grammatical relations between the con- performed by derivation. In fact, according to Brucale
stituents of a compound are identified: subordination, (2012:94) a substantial number of Latin compounds are
coordination, and attribution. In subordinate compounds hapax legomena, characterized by highly contextual
the two constituents are unified by a relation of comple- dependent semantics. Latin compounds seem to be tied to
mentation: the non-head is a sort of complement: particular stylistic registers, such as religious or legal texts,
alongside archaic poetry or comedy, as shown in the follow-
(8) It. capostazione head.station ‘station master’ ing examples:
It. lavapiatti wash.dishes ‘dish washer’
Coordinates are compounds in which the two constitu-

ents are linked by a relationship of coordination. Neither 4
Labels such as sN, sA, below, stand for ‘semi-word Noun’, ‘semi-word
constituent is hierarchically inferior to the other, including Adjective’, respectively, namely a bound form which nevertheless is of the
with respect to semantics. category N or A.
525
(13) MALE-UOLUS ‘ill-disposed, malevolent’ < MALE ‘badly’ + UOLO ‘want’

HORR-I-SONUS ‘sounding dreadful’ < HORROR ‘horror’ + LE + SONUS ‘sound’
FOR-CEPS ‘a pair of tongs, pincers, forceps’ < FORMUS ‘warm’ + CAPIO ‘take’
NAU-FRAG-IUM ‘shipwreck’ < NAUIS ‘ship’ + FRANGO ‘break (in pieces)’ + SUF
LUC-I-FER ‘light-bringing’ < LUX ‘light’ + LE + FERO ‘bring’
BELL-I-GERO ‘to wage war’ < BELLUM ‘war’ + LE + GERO ‘bring’
CALE-FACIO ‘to make warm’ < CALEO ‘to be warm’ + FACIO ‘make’
Romance compounds, on the contrary, even if not as The third main difference between Latin and Romance
productive as in Germanic (Delfitto and Melloni 2009), exhibit compounds is that input elements of Latin compounds are
various very productive types (e.g. VN compounds) and fur- very rarely autonomous words. According to Brucale
thermore they do not have any specific semantic or context- (2012:104), ‘the basic structure of a radical Compound is
ual restrictions. In fact, the reading of Romance compounds XY Suff (where X is normally a shortened noun or adjective,
(except for lexicalized ones) is in general compositional, as Y is typically a verbal root, and the suffixal ending can be
can be easily seen in the following examples: overtly or covertly expressed’:
(14) Cat. alta tensiò ‘high tension’ (19) SACRIFICIUM ‘sacrifice’ < SACER ‘sacred’ + FACIO ‘do/make’ + SUF
Fr. autoroute car.road ‘motorway’ In fact, the most common kind of Latin compound is the
It. gentildonna ‘gentlewoman’ so-called ‘synthetic’ subordinate compound. Its salient char-
Pt. escola primaria school primary ‘primary school’ acteristics include the presence of a deverbal word as the
Ro. secretar trezorier ‘secretary treasurer’ second constituent, with a suffixal output. While parasyn-
thetic verbal formations in Romance compounds are quite
Second, the majority of Latin compounds are subordinate common in derivation (cf. §28.4.2), this structural pattern is
compounds (15), whereas Romance compounds are well not so frequent in compounding. However, it seems to be
distributed across the three major classes. Latin also dis- cross-linguistically attested:
plays some attributive compounds (16), while coordinate
compounds are quite rare and not productive (17). Further- (20) Eng. blue-eyed
more, it seems that there are no coordinate exocentric Lat. ALBICAPILLUS white.hair ‘white-haired’
compounds in Latin. The following are examples of these
three major classes of compounds: A fourth distinction between Latin and Romance com-
pounds concerns verbal structures. While verbs play a cru-
(15) LUCIFER light.bring ‘light bringing’ cial role as input categories in Latin compounding, their
ARMIGER weapon.bear ‘bearing weapons’ contribution as output categories is minimal (Flobert
1978:85). There are some lexicalized, opaque VV formations
(16) LONGAEUUS long.age ‘aged’ such as the following:
MAGNANIMUS great.mind ‘great hearted’
(21) MANDO MANUS ‘hand’ + *duo ‘place’: ‘to commit’
(17) SACROSANCTUS sacred.saint ‘sacrosanct’ LITIGO LIS ‘quarrel’ + AGO ‘conduct’: ‘to quarrel’
DULCACIDUS sweet.sour ‘sourish-sweet’
Some types of compound are lexically constrained:
The only coordinate compounds attested seem to be of
the AA type; the only case of NN in our data is tragicomoedia (22) PACIFERO peace.carry ‘to keep peace’
‘tragicomedy’. UOCIFERO voice.carry ‘to cry out/aloud’
Among Romance compounds, by contrast, there are many
coordinate compounds, both endocentric and exocentric, According to Brucale (2012:115), ‘in the generally unpro-
and they are productive: ductive area of verbal compounding it is possible to isolate a
region of productivity made up of causative compounds
(18) Endocentric Exocentric with FACIO “to do, make” as second member (both in its
Pt. surdo mudo deaf dumb médico paciente ‘doctor “root” and “full-word” instantiations)’. This pattern is pro-
‘deaf-mute’ patient (relationship)’ ductively used in Latin compounds to form verbs conveying
Ro. bufet-restaurant ‘buffet- centru-stânga ‘centre- a causative/factitive meaning based on states or adjectives,
restaurant (carriage)’ left’ but is not found in Romance compounds:
526
COMPOUNDING
(23) CALEFACIO be.warm.make ‘make warm’ Romance compounds are not restricted to specific stylistic
AMPLIFICO wide.make ‘widen’ registers, their basic forms are words, they do not exhibit
parasynthetic compounds, and the head is, as a rule, to
In nominal compounding another difference between the left.
Romance and Latin compounds is that the order is different
in the two varieties. Compounds where verb and noun are
present in a syntactic relationship differ in the sense that
Latin has NV order (24), while in Romance compounds the 29.3 Overview of compounding in some
order is VN (25). This change of order is explained by the Romance languages
fact that higher-register Classical Latin was predominantly
SOV, while Romance languages are SVO (see §62.2).
29.3.1 Spanish
(24) ARTIFEX art.make ‘artist’ Spanish does not display very productive compounding,
TIBICEN flute.play ‘flute player’ with the already noted exception of VNs. The input words
of Spanish compounding come from the major lexical cat-
(25) Cat. espantasogres scare.mothers-in-law ‘party pooper’ egories: A, N, and V.5 Of these, A and N show the widest
Fr. baisemain kiss.hand ‘hand kissing’ distribution. Nevertheless, V plays the main role in the most
important pattern in Spanish, VN. Unsurprisingly, Spanish
A further distinction between Latin and its daughter exhibits a modified-modifier structure in terms of headed-
languages is represented by lexical categories. Oniga ness, with the important exception of learnèd compound-
(1992) points out that the logically possible combinations ing. According to the classification adopted in this chapter,
of A, N, and V are nine, but just six of them can be the first Spanish shows all the types of compounding.
and the second constituent in compound structures: Regarding coordination, the endocentric (and therefore
two-headed) NN type is a highly productive process, albeit
(26) Structures Examples Impossible structures restricted to a few semantic areas.
AA SOLLI-CITUS whole.move **NA
‘prompt’ (27) escritor periodista ‘writer-journalist’
AN MAGN-ANIMUS big.soul **VA
‘magnanimous’ AA coordinate compounds, on the other hand, represent
NN ALI-PES wing.foot ‘wing- **VN one of the most productive patterns in Spanish
footed’ compounding.
AV DULCI-FER sweet.bring ‘pro-
ducing sweetness’ (28) blanco-amarillento ‘white-yellowish’
NV ARMI-GER weapon.bring
‘bearing weapons’ Attributive endocentric NN compounds are very
VV CALE-FACERE be.warm.make ‘to productive:
make warm’
(29) empresa fantasma firm ghost ‘phantom company’
While the absence of VA compounds has a distributional
These forms, as elsewhere in Romance, involve a some-
explanation (adjectives modify nouns not verbs), the absence
what metaphoric interpretation of the second constituent.
of NA and VN compounds can be explained by the fact that
There are also endocentric NA compounds, though rela-
Classical Latin was predominantly an SOV language.
tively unproductive:
To sum up, compounding is not a very productive mor-
phological process in Latin, and is apparently bound to
(30) agua oxigenada water oxygenated ‘hydrogen peroxide’
certain stylistic registers (such as legal or religious texts).
The basic units of Latin compounding are bound and not
free forms, as is generally the case in Romance. There are
very few coordinate compounds. A very common structure
is the so-called parasynthetic structure: the head is regu- 5
In Spanish, as in other Romance languages there are also [NPN] con-
larly to the right, and the order of the constituents is structions (e.g. barco de vapor, lit. ‘boat of steam’, ‘steamboat’) whose status
consistent with the basic syntactic order. By contrast, as compounds has been questioned (Kornfeld 2009).
527
As a marked order in relation to the usual Romance (38) hispano-hablante ‘Spanish-speaking’

noun–adjective order, there are also AN attributives where drog-adicto ‘drug-addict’
N is the head:
Spanish learnèd compounding yields adjectives by means of
(31) medianoche middle.night ‘midnight’ two patterns. These patterns tend to be right-headed. The first
bajamar low.sea ‘low tide’ is NsA and predominantly realizes Latinate -o adjectival
themes (e.g. -fugo, -fero, -voro) that present the Latinate
A noun–adjective endocentric metonymic type is also stressed -i- linking element
found in Spanish:
(39) centr-í-fugo ‘centrifuge’
(32) cabezadura head.hard ‘obstinate person’ calor-í-fero ‘heat-producing’
casco azul beret blue ‘blue beret insect-í-voro ‘insectivore’6
(member of UN forces)’
The second pattern consists in a semi-word+A:
An interesting kind of construction concerns subordin-
ate compounds that have a linking element, which are (40) aero-naval ‘aero-naval’
very similar to those in (32) but structurally very filo-americano ‘Americanophile’
different.
Hybrid learnèd nouns are also produced by means of two
(33) boqu-i-abierto mouth.i.open ‘open-mouthed’ patterns. The first one involves the structure N+semi-word,
pel-i-rrojo hair.i.red ‘red-haired’ with a bound nominal stem in the head position (41a), and
the second noun-forming learnèd pattern is semi-word+N,
Some of these compounds can undergo a metaphoric with a native noun in the head position (41b).
drift:
(41) a. dialect-o-logía ‘dialectology’
(34) boqu-i-sucio mouth.i.dirty ‘slanderous’ b. bio-rritmo ‘biorhythm’
In this case, it has been shown (Fábregas 2005) that no As we shall see, Spanish patterns are very close to those
relationship of attribution holds between the constituents, found in Italian.
but that the first is the delimiter (in an argumental sense) of
the other. A similar pattern is found in Sardinian (cf.
§29.2.7). 29.3.2 Catalan
The most important representative type of subordinate
compounding is represented by the VN exocentric type: In Catalan, as elsewhere, only major lexical categories (N, V, A,
and Adv) enter into compounding processes. The most product-
(35) mata-fuego kill-fire ‘fire extinguisher’ ive type of Catalan compound is represented by nominal cat-
egories, especially nouns: [NA]N, [NPN]N, [AN]N, [VN]N,
Another kind of subordinate endocentricity is repre- [VV]N. It is however possible to find the combination [AA]A, as
sented by NN, when the first constituent is the head: this well as [AN]A, whereby A = ‘colour adjective’ gives rise to another
type is less productive than the previous one: adjective. A relatively small number of Catalan verbal com-
pounds can also be found ([NV]V and [AV]V), but the type is
(36) artículo viaje item travel ‘travel item’ not productive. The adverbial category must occur as the first
gas ciudad gas city ‘natural gas’ constituent, an exception being [Adv Adv]Adv. Similarly, in
some cases the compound constituents are derivatives, such as
Observe that this type displays some cases of marked benestante ‘well-to-do’, whose structure is [Adv [VSUFN/A]]N/A.
order, such as: The syntactic head in Catalan tends to occur to the left.
Nevertheless, there are two main counterexamples. As in the
(37) telenovela television.novel ‘soap opera’ rest of Romance, in learnèd compounds the head occurs to the
autopista car.way ‘motorway’
6
The exception is posed by the Greek adjectival theme -fago, which
Spanish displays a small group of formations headed by includes the linking element ‑o-, but which is not as productive as its
argumental adjectives which select a nominal complement. Latinate equivalent -voro.
528
COMPOUNDING
right, both in Latinate (fratricidi ‘fratricide’) and in Greek (geo- nominal or adjectival. The head constituent in French com-
logia ‘geology’) bound forms. A second kind of right-headed pounds is normally on the left (with the usual exception
form is represented by verbal compounds with an adjective coming from learnèd compounds):
or an adverb as their first constituent: carcomprar dear.buy.INF
‘to pay too much for’, malacostumar badly.accustom.INF ‘to spoil’. (46) timbre-poste stamp-post ‘postage stamp’
In Catalan we find all three types of relationship among lit bateau bed boat ‘cabin bed’
constituents: subordinate compounds, appositive/attributive gris perle grey pearl ‘pearl grey’
compounds, and coordinated compounds. With respect to
headedness, in all three categories we find both endocentric The three major classes of compounds are well attested
and exocentric compounds. with both endocentric and exocentric constructions:
Subordinate compounds are characterized by left-
headness or no head: (47) Subordinate maître-à-danser master-to-dance.INF
endocentric ‘dancing teacher’
(42) [NN]N vagó restaurant ‘restaurant coach’ Subordinate coupe-papier cut-paper ‘paper knife’
[VN]N pica-soques peck-trunks ‘green woodpecker’ exocentric
Attributive année lumière year light ‘light year’
Observe that the reverse pattern is found with learnèd endocentric
compounds belonging to the subordinate category. See the Attributive rouge-gorge red-throat ‘robin’
following examples with different combinations of strata: exocentric
Coordinate avion-citerne aeroplane-tanker ‘air
(43) [sNsN]N hemeroteca Grk. day.store ‘newspaper library’
endocentric tanker’
[NsN]N verbívor Lat. word.LE.eater ‘word eater’
Coordinate Bosnie-Herzégovine ‘Bosnia
exocentric Herzegovina’
Attributive/appositive compounds are mainly left-
headed, but other options are found:
Coordinate compounds can be viewed semantically as
two-headed but the syntactic-categorial prominence
(44) [NA]N porc senglar pig wild boar ‘wild boar’
comes from the lexeme in the canonical head position,
[NA]N gat vell cat old ‘old fox’
the left: avion-citerne, or example, is made up by a mascu-
[NA]A camacurt leg.short ‘short-legged’
line noun plus a feminine noun, but the whole compound
is masculine, and the same is true with bracelet montre
In coordinate compounds, it is possible (as expected) to
bracelet watch ‘wristwatch’.
have endocentric, two-headed compounds:
In French, as in the other Romance languages, the most
productive pattern is VN headless compounds:
(45) [NN]N glaç-desglaç ice-melting ‘frost-defrost’
[AA]A agredolç ‘sour-sweet’
(48) [VN]N porte-plume carry-feather ‘pen holder’
[VN]N tire-bouchon pull-cork ‘corkscrew’
Learnèd hybrid compounds display a high degree of product-
ivity, above all those employing a Catalan word combined with a
But the object of the verb can also be an NP:
semi-word. We find an overwhelming number of nouns and, to a
lesser extent, adjectives (most of which also imitate learnèd
(49) trompe-la-mort trick-the-death ‘death dodger’
constructions by forming coordinate compounds with a linking
trompe-l’œil trick-the eye ‘trompe l’œil’
vowel); no verbal compounding patterns are productive today.
There is a significantly high number of compound types
involving the category of adverb (50a). Also frequent are
29.3.3 French structures with an embedded prepositional phrase (50b):
The lexical categories involved in French compounding are (50) a. [VAdv]N passe-partout pass-everywhere
the major ones (N, A, V, P).7 The output, however, is mainly ‘all-purpose’
[AdvN]N mal-être badly-being ‘depression’
7
[AdvAdv] avant-hier before-yesterday ‘the day before
Villoing (2012) considers as productive compounds only those formed
with N, A, V. In fact, according to Fradin (2009), an expression such as sans Adv yesterday’
papiers (PN), ‘(person) without documents’, is not a compound. [AdvA]A bienheureux well.happy ‘blessed’
529
b. arc-en-ciel arc-in-sky ‘rainbow’ 29.3.4 Italian

vol-au-vent fly-in-wind ‘vol au vent’
dent de lion tooth of lion ‘dandelion’
The categorical output in Italian composition is usually a
prise de courant capture of current ‘socket’
noun ([NA]N, [AN]N, [VV]N).
langue de serpent tongue of snake ‘forked tongue’
(53) camera oscura ‘dark room’
Learnèd compounds are also very productive in French altoforno high.oven ‘smelting furnace’
and can be formed from two semi-words or a semi-word and bagnasciuga wet(V).dry(V) ‘(fore)shore; wind and
a word. The compound is generally an N or A: water line’
(51) sNN cromosphère ‘chromosphere’ Only AA compounds produce adjectives (54a), together
sNA biodégradable ‘biodegradable’ with [AN]A, but only when A is a colour adjective (54b):
sNsA ignifuge ‘fireproof ’
sNsN anthropomorphe ‘anthropomorphic’ (54) a. agrodolce ‘bittersweet’
b. verde rame ‘copper green’
Among the cases of learnèd compounds there are cases of
derived constituents. No verbs are formed through composition: in fact, the
formation of new verbs can only be achieved through der-
ivation. In exocentric composition, the default category is a
(52) [[sN] [[N] + SUF] ]A
noun.
cerébrospinal ‘cerebrospinal’
The lexical categories involved in this type of compos-
bucco-dentaire buccal.dental ‘oral’
ition are N, V, A, and P. Adv is seldom found, and then only
in non-productive patterns.
A vowel is often observed between the components of In addition to typical structures consisting of two lexical
learnèd compounds: the vowel -i- is Latin-specific and the categories such as [NN] and [AA], there also occur some
vowel -o- is Greek-specific, but the latter is also found at instances of derived constituents:
component boundaries in words of French origin (franco-
allemand ‘Franco-German’, anglo-saxon ‘Anglo-Saxon’) and (55) crocerossina cross.red.DIM ‘Red Cross nurse’
Latin origin (cérébro-spinal ‘cerebrospinal’, génito-urinaire [[[croce][rossa]] +ina]
‘genito-urinary’). ferroviario iron.road.SUF ‘relating to the railway’
As for inflection, the generalization discussed in §29.1.1 [[[ferro][via]]+ario]
that the head constitutes the locus of inflection seems to
hold, albeit with some exceptions. Subordinate [NN] com- On the whole, the structures of Italian compounds are
pounds take the plural morpheme usually on the first neither very complex nor recursive (with the exception of
constituent (timbres-poste ‘stamps’). Coordinate NN and coordinated semi-words: (una produzione) franco-anglo-te-
AA compounds (bracelets-montres ‘wristwatches’, clairs- desca, lit. ‘(a) Franco-Anglo-German (production)’
obscurs ‘chiaroscuro (PL)’) take the plural morpheme on In terms of classification, in Italian we find subordinate,
both constituents, since both can be considered to be a coordinate, and attributive/appositive compounds. All
head. three major classes include both endocentric and exocentric
By contrast, appositive [NN] compounds (bateaux-mouches compounds:
‘river boats’) take the plural morpheme usually on both
constituents (even though only bateau ‘boat’ is the head, a (56)
bateau mouche is not a mouche ‘fly’). The same holds true of subordinate endocentric capostazione head.station ‘station
[NA] compounds (natures-mortes ‘still lives’). master’
[VN] compounds often exhibit a plural morpheme on the subordinate exocentric portalettere carry.letters ‘postman’
second constituent (brise-coeurs break-hearts ‘heart- attributive endocentric acqua santa water holy ‘holy water’
breaker’), but it is a sort of ‘false’ plural, since the inflec- attributive exocentric buona lana good wool ‘rascal’
tional morpheme has scope only over the second coordinate endocentric prete priest worker ‘worker
constituent and not the whole compound (cf. un brise- operaio priest’
coers). Some VN compounds are invariable (réveille-matin, coordinate exocentric dormiveglia sleep.be.awake
lit. wake-morning ‘alarm clock’). ‘drowsiness’
530
COMPOUNDING
Learnèd compounds generally involve subordinate There are three kinds of learnèd compounds: some con-
compounds: sist of two semi-words (a), others of a semi-word and a word
(b), and some of a word and a semi-word (c).
(57) callifugo ‘corn plaster’
insettivoro ‘insectivorous’ (60) a. idrovora ‘water pump’
b. anemometro ‘anemometer’
In Italian we find the following exocentric compounds: c. colorificio ‘paint factory’
(58)
The output is normally a noun (there are rare cases with
[PN]N sottoscala under.stair ‘space under the stairs’
adjectives). On a par with other Romance varieties, Italian
[VN]N portalettere carry.letters ‘postman’
has two linking elements in conjunction with learnèd com-
[VV]N saliscendi go.up go.down ‘latch; dumbwaiter’
position. If Word2 is a Greek semi-word (musica+logo !
[NA]N pellerossa skin.red ‘redskin’
musicologo ‘musicologist’), the linking element is -o-,
[VAdv]N buttafuori throw.out ‘bouncer’
whereas if Word2 is a Latinate semi-word (colore+ficio !
colorificio ‘paint factory’) the linking element is -i-. It some-
In endocentric compounds, the head is generally on the left:
times happens that different linking elements are present,
such as -e- in terremoto ‘earthquake’, where -e- is a residue of
(59) acqua santa water holy ‘holy water’
the Latin genitive ending -AE.
carro armato chariot armed ‘tank’
In Italian there are structures that can be called phrasal
parola chiave word key ‘key word’
compounds such as [N [PN]] (e.g. coda di cavallo, lit. tail of
horse ‘ponytail’). These structures are productive but their
Coordinate compounds can be said to have two semantic
status as compounds is questionable, as seen above for
heads, yet the constituent located in the canonical head
French.
position on the left seems to have syntactico-categorial
Italian composition is quite productive. Of course, not all
prominence. In nave traghetto ‘ferry boat’, for example, the
types of compounds are equally productive. The most pro-
whole compound is feminine, just as nave ‘ship’ is feminine
ductive are [VN]N exocentric compounds. However, NN
while traghetto ‘ferry’ is masculine. However, there are
coordinate compounds and NN and NA attributive/apposi-
counterexamples, and one can find the head to the right
tive compounds are also productive. As far as subordinate
especially in learnèd compounds both Latinate (e.g. terre-
compounds are concerned, they are not infrequent but, in
moto ‘earthquake’) and Greek (e.g. antropologo ‘anthropolo-
our data, are typically linked to specific lexical forms. It can
gist’), in loan compounds (like scuola bus ‘school bus’), in AN
therefore be reasonably claimed, unlike for Germanic, that
structures of non-recent coinage (e.g. gentildonna ‘gentle-
Italian is less productive only in the case of NN subordinate
woman’), and recently coined structures (e.g. gasdinamica
compounds.
‘gas dynamics’), which might represent a new pattern in
Italian composition.
In general, inflection tends to affect principally the head
of the compound, whether on the right or the left. There are
cases in which both elements inflect, as with casseforti, lit.
29.3.5 Portuguese
‘chests.strong.PL (safes)’. Furthermore, in some NN coordin-
ate compounds both constituents are inflected (studenti In Portuguese compounding, the predominant output cat-
lavoratori ‘students workers’). Exceptions are possible, and egory involves nouns, followed by adjectives. Verbs are less
they can be explained through lexicalization processes (as frequent and adverbs only present residual cases. As in
in the case of pomodori above). Alternatively, the exception Romance more generally, the position of the head is mainly
can be due to the particular nature of the head noun; for on the left.
instance, uncountable and event nouns do not have a plural:
acqua santa water holy ‘holy water’, trasporto latte transport (61) a. [NN]N palavra-chave word-key ‘keyword’
milk ‘milk transportation’. b. [NA]N energia nuclear energy nuclear
Finally, in some cases the plural is a distinction affecting ‘nuclear energy’
just the second constituent and not the whole compound c. [N[PN]]N bilhete de identidade ticket of identity
(lavapiatti ‘dish-washer(s)’). In terms of gender, in Italian ‘identity card’
exocentric composition the default gender is masculine d. [N[PV]]N ferro de engomar iron of starch.INF
(e.g. bagnasciuga ‘(fore)shore’). ‘flat iron’
531
Though less numerous, we also find right-headed endo- Attributive exocentric compounds are mainly of two
centric compounds: types:
(62) a. [AN]N curta-metragem short-metrage ‘short (69) [NA]N pele vermelha skin red ‘redskin’
film’ [AN]N puro sangre pure blood ‘thoroughbred’
b. [AdvA]N malcriado badly.raised ‘badly behaved’
The most productive patterns in Portuguese are [VN]N,
The constituents can be both full forms (63a) or, in the [NN]N, [NA]N, and [[N[PrepN]]N:
case of learnèd compounds (63b), semi-words.
(70) [VN]N corta-papéis cut-papers ‘paperknife’
(63) a. bilhete de identidade ticket of identity ‘identity card’ [NN]N turma-piloto class-pilot ‘pilot class’
[NA]N batata-doce potato-sweet ‘sweet potato’
b. curta-metragem ‘short film’
[[N[PN]]N caminho-de-ferro way-of-iron ‘railway’
Once again compounds can be divided into three classes:
coordinate, subordinate, and attributive/appositive com- These patterns can also be exocentric:
pounds. Within this classification, all three classes present
both endocentricity and exocentricity. Coordinate com- (71) [NN]N gato-sapato cat-shoe ‘maltreatment, humiliation’
pounds can be, as predicted, two-headed: [N[PN]]N barriga-de-freira tummy-of-nun (a type of
sweet)
(64) [NN]N trabalhador-estudante worker-student [NA]N sangue-frio blood-cold ‘cold blood’
‘student-worker’ [NA]N cabeça-rapada head-shaved ‘skinhead’
surdo-mudo deaf-mute ‘deaf and mute’ [NN]N: banho-maria ‘bain-marie’
[NproperNproper]N: (a pêra) maria-antónia ‘maria-
On the other hand, exocentricity is expected in antónia (pear)’
cooordinates:
The structures [[N [PV]]N, [VAdv]N, and [AN]N are not
(65) [V(CONJ) V]N pára-arranca ‘stop-start’ productive.
Subordinate endocentric compounds are basically of two (72) [VAdv]N fala-barato speak-cheap ‘gasbag’
types: [N [PV]]N ferro de engomar iron of starch.INF ‘flat iron’
[AN]N alta-fidelidade ‘high-fidelity’
(66) [NN]N mapa mundo map world ‘map of the world’
[N[PN]]N acelerador de partículas accelerator of par- In Portuguese too the default category of exoncetric
ticles ‘particle accelerator’ compounding is a masculine noun (e.g. in 67 the exocentric
abre-latas ‘tin opener’ is masculine even though the first
Subordination in Portuguese compounding replicates the constituent is a verb and the second a feminine noun).
pattern already seen in other Romance languages:
(67) [VN]N abre-latas open-cans ‘can-opener’ 29.3.6 Romanian

Modification/attribution may be expressed by an adjec-
tive (68a, 68e), a noun (68b), a prepositional phrase (68c), a In Romanian, compounding is not the most common word-
numeral (68e), and an adverb (68f): formation process. Although there are several patterns for
forming compounds, only nominal and adjectival com-
pounding are fully productive. Romanian verbal compounds
(68)
are rare and the process is no longer productive. Most
a. [NA]N arroz doce rice sweet ‘rice pudding’ Romanian compounds exhibit a head–modifier structure
b. [NN]N cartão-jovem card-youth ‘youth card’ or otherwise a coordinate or exocentric structure. Com-
c. [N[PN]]N chapéu-de-chuva hat-of-rain ‘(type of) umbrella’ pounds of learnèd origin, as in other Romance languages,
d. [NumN]N terceiro mundo ‘Third World’ together with a few constructions formed according to non-
e. [AN]N alto-relevo ‘high relief ’ native models, are right-headed. The main categories
f. [AdvA]A bem-humorado well-humoured ‘good humoured’ involved in compounding are A and N.
532
COMPOUNDING
Romanian presents the three types of compound. In each (80) ceas-brăţară watch-bracelet ‘wrist watch’
class, we find headed and headless compounds. In the case coborâre-femei descent-women ‘women’s downhill’
of endocentric coordinates, the categories involved are
mostly nouns and adjectives. However, right-headed compounds are attested in non-
native forms:
(73) finisor-asamblator ‘finisher assembler’
general-magistrat ‘general [and] magistrate’ (81) bloc-cauciuc block-rubber ‘rubber block’
Note that in colloquial language VV compounds are found: A feature that crucially distinguishes Romanian from the
other Romance languages is the limited productivity of
(74) headless VN subordinate compounds. The majority of com-
furgăsi steal.find ‘to find and take “accidentally on purpose”’ pounds of this kind are made up of metaphorical derogatory
furlua steal.take ‘take “accidentally on purpose” ’ epithets:
It might be added that the first element is the bare root of (82) linge-blide lick-dishes ‘sponger’
the verb a fura ‘to steal’, and only the second element is papă-lapte eat-milk ‘milksop’
inflected
There are also coordinate compounds with no head: Within the classification of subordinate compounds, it is
possible to find learnèd formations which, as in other
(75) toamnă-iarnă ‘autumn-winter’ Romance varieties, are right-headed.
sud-est ‘southeast’
(83) balneologie ‘balneology’
As expected, attributive compounds are also character- litografie ‘lithography, lithograph’
ized by an adjectival-nominal category.
Sometimes, compounds contain a learnèd form and a
(76) peşte-auriu fish-golden ‘sunfish’ native form:
vinars wine.burnt ‘brandy’
(84) casnic ‘household’ in electrocasnic ‘home appliance’
In appositive compounds, namely NN compounds, the
In learnèd compounding, linking elements display pat-
head constituent, which occurs to the left in accordance
terns analogous to those of the other Romance languages
with the head–modifier pattern of the language, identifies
analyzed here: usually the initial combining forms of Greek
the entity designated by the compound, whereas the non-
origin end in -o, those of Latin origin in -i, but there are also
head qualifies it.
learnèd forms, of both Greek and Latin origin, which present
other vowels or consonants in final position (e.g. Grk. deca-,
(77) câine-lup dog-wolf ‘wolfhound’
tele-, pan-, poli-; Lat. acu-, balneo-, carbo-, genu-).
pasăre-muscă bird-fly ‘hummingbird’
There are, however, counterexamples with the opposite

order:
29.3.7 The case of Sardinian
(78) prim-ministru ‘prime minister’ Among the dialects of Italy, Sardinian displays some inter-
rea-voinţă ill-will ‘malevolence’ esting patterns. One of the most interesting types of com-
pound is that which Sardinian shares with Spanish,8 the
Finally, this type of compound may also display exocen- subordinate NA compound with a linking element and
tricity, especially in metonymic compounds, in a formation somehow delimitative interpretation. In the present section
which is widespread across Romance and beyond. we show that this compound, though apparently appositive,
is actually of the endocentric subordination type, so that the
(79) barbă-albastră beard-blue ‘bluebeard’ modifier works as a specification of the head.
cap-sec head-dry ‘blockhead’
Concerning subordinate relationships between constitu- 8

This compound seems to be found also in Corsican (Durand 2003) and,
ents, NN are predominant. In general, these formations are to some degree, in the dialects of southern Italy (Telmon and Maiden
left-headed: 1997:119).
533
The N-i-A structure is one of the most characteristic in (88) a. gaˈvinu ˈɛsti koŋkiiˈmannu (NCpd.)
Sardinian, at least in central-northern varieties (Nuorese, Gavinu.M is head-i big.M
Logudorese, Arborense, and northern Campidanese). In ‘Gavinu is big-headed.’
these compounds, A is higher-ranked from a morphosyn-
b. gaˈvinu ˈɛsti oɣiiˈðrottu (NCpd.)
tactic point of view, as it assigns the category and the
Gavinu.M is eye-i crossed.M
inflectional features to the whole compound. This is also
‘Gavinu is cross-eyed.’
true from a semantic point of view, since the adjective
denotes a quality about which the name expresses a
(89) a. gɔˈnarja ˈɛsti koŋkiiˈmanna (NCpd.)
specification or narrowing. Observe the difference
Gonaria.F is head-i big.F
between (85) and (86). Northern Campidanese has an
‘Gonaria is big-headed.’
attributive compound with no head, but southern Campi-
danese shows quite different a structure (Pinto et al. b. gɔˈnarja ˈɛsti oɣiiˈðrɔtta (NCpd.)
2012:52).9 Gonaria.F is eye-i crossed.F
‘Gonaria is cross-eyed.’
(85) gaˈvinu ˈɛsti kamb-i-ˈloŋgu (NCpd.)
Gavinu.MSG is leg.F- LE -long.MSG (90)
‘Gavinu is long-legged.’
a. gaˈvinu ɛ gɔˈnarja ˈfunti koŋkiiˈmannus (NCpd.)
Gavinu.M and Gonaria.F are head-big.MPL
(86) gaˈvinu ˈɛsti kamba-ˈlɔŋga (SCpd.)
‘Gavinu and Gonaria are big-headed.’
Gavinu.MSG is leg.FSG-long.FSG
‘Gavinu is long-legged.’ b. maˈria ɛ gɔˈnarja ˈfunti koŋkiiˈmannas (NCpd.)
Maria.F and Gonaria.F are head-big.FPL
In southern Campidanese the adjective shares the inflec- ‘Maria and Gonaria are big-headed.’
tion of the noun constituent of the compound, and does not
get inflected according to its syntactic contest. In other On the other hand, internal agreement between the noun
words, the compound is exocentric. and adjective is found today in southern Campidanese,
which in turn lacks compounds with the -i- element. The
(87) noun is not inflected according to the external entity it
refers to.
a. gavinu ɛ gɔˈnarja ˈfunti oɣiˈðrɔttus (SCpd.)
Gavinu.M and Gonaria.F are eye-i cross.MPL
‘Gavinu and Gonaria are cross-eyed.’ (91) a. gaˈvinu ˈɛsti oɣuˈðrottu (SCpd.)
Gavinu.M is eye-i crossed.M
b. gaˈvinu ɛ gɔˈnarja ˈfunti koŋkiiˈmannus (SCpd.) ‘Gavinu is cross-eyed.’
Gavinu.M and Gonaria.F are head-i big.MPL
‘Gavinu and Gonaria are big-headed.’ b. gaˈvinu ˈɛsti kɔŋkaˈmanna (SCpd.)
Gavinu.M is head-i big.F
In these examples, the compound [oɣiˈðrottu] ‘Gavinu is big-headed.’
refers to the external referent or the subject of predi-
cation gaˈvinu/gɔˈnarja. According to Allen’s (1978) ‘is Phonologically, the -i- element is integrated into the
a’ test, a [oɣiˈðrottu] is ‘someone who is characterized A constituent, in such a way that the first constituent has
by being [oɣiˈðrottu]’, i.e. ‘cross-eyed’ and not a no formal autonomy (e.g. koŋki- ‘head’ never occurs alone)
‘crooked eye’. Thus, the semantic head cannot be but only appears in combination with the adjectival head.
[ˈoɣu] but must be external (‘someone who has the Thus, even from a morphological point of view, it appears as
characteristic X’). a subordinate constituent; the -i- element is a morpho-
At a morphosyntactic level, it can be observed that the logical linker which marks the dependent member of the
N is inflected according to the features of the word it refers compound.
to (Pinto et al. 2012:62): These patterns are true and clearly distinguishable: one,
in southern Campidanese, is an attributive compound
where the head is not present, and the other, in northern
Campidanese, is a subordinate where the head is present,
and the A is a delimitative modifier. This latter type is found
9
In the following examples, we adopt a very broad transcription. nowhere else in Romance but in Spanish.
534
COMPOUNDING
29.4 Reduplication in Romance Phoneme reduplication involves only sounds with a

grammatical meaning, but no bigger units. This involves a
segmental change which does not correspond to any specif-
29.4.1 Why reduplication? ically meaningful process. In particular, phoneme redupli-
cations are iterated forms, possibly with some segmental
Reduplication in Romance languages is not a very frequent
change, which do not serve any grammatical function or
phenomenon. Here we cover the main instances of redupli-
add any particular meaning.
cation, since it puts together free forms in morphology.
Before proceeding, however, a terminological clarification
(94) ciao ciao ‘bye-bye’ (It.)
is necessary. First, we do not claim that reduplication is a
tchau ‘goodbye’ tchau tchau (BrPt.)
kind of compounding, but rather treat it as an iteration of
morphological units that gives rise to a word.10 Romance
Observe that the reduplicated form has the same mean-
languages tend to basically show just full iteration of gram-
ing as the non-reiterated form.12 Baby-talk (as in English
matical units, termed ‘full reduplication’. Furthermore, they
choo-choo) and onomatopoeia are also to be ascribed to this
display reduplication as an instance of non-compositional
group. French offers several examples of ‘baby-talk’: dada
semantics just like ‘strict’ compounds.
‘horse’ (standard cheval), tati ‘aunt’ (standard tante), tonton,
A question regarding full reduplication is whether the
‘uncle’ (standard oncle), dodo ‘beddy-byes’, bobo ‘hurt, pain’.
root or the stem is reduplicated. In Romance it is the stem
Moreover, it displays hypocoristics for names, e.g. Zinedine
that is iterated, i.e. the root plus the thematic vowel:11
Zidane becomes Zizou.
Catalan displays extensive phoneme iteration:
(92) fugg-i fugg-i fugg-i (It.)
escape-TV escape-TV escape-TV
(95) bub-bub ‘sound of a barking dog’
‘escape’ ‘stampede’
bum-bum ‘drumming sound’
Partial reduplication in Romance is very infrequent.
At the other extreme, on a systemically higher level than
French displays some cases in examples like (93):
morphology, identical words or phrases can be juxtaposed.
Its syntactic status might be called an apposition or a
(93) fille ‘girl’ fi-fille ‘little girl’ (Rainer 1998:279)
coordination of structures. This type does not serve lexical
or inflectional purposes, and does not form new words.
This CV reduplication possibly originated in language
Among such reduplicating phenomena, repetitive syntactic
typically produced by the child. As we cannot find sufficient
operations (e.g. Eng. very, very good) are found, together with
empirical support for partial reduplication, we shall not
what could be called contrastive iteration (e.g. Eng. coke-
consider it further as a core Romance phenomenon (but
coke; cf. Ghomeshi et al. 2004). This iteration used for con-
see §28.2).
trast is pervasive in the languages of the world, including
Full reduplication is the iteration of morphemic units;
Romance, and it conveys the meaning of the reality and
partial reduplication is the iteration of phonological units
originality of a special entity, typically a product, as
with a morphological and semantic meaning.
opposed to another.
(96) vino un vino vino (It.)

29.4.2 What reduplication is not: iteration wine a wine wine
of phonemes and iteration of phrases ‘wine’ ‘a well made wine’
In Romance there are at least two other types of iteration of The morphological status of this construction is not at all
linguistic units, i.e. iteration within the phonological com- proved. It seems to be a construction at the border between
ponent and iteration within the syntactic component. These syntax and morphology, similar to phrasal compounds.
involve respectively phoneme reduplication and repetition As for the simply augmentative repetition, the iteration
(following the terminology in Forza 2011), which have to be of phrases with an augmentative meaning is also one of the
distinguished from reduplication tout court. most common cases of iteration in the world’s languages
(Forza 2011).
10
We treat reduplication as a process below the X level (following Forza
12
2011). Cf. Dicionário da língua portuguesa contemporânea da Academia das Ciên-
11
These forms might actually be imperatives. cias de Lisboa (2001:3523).
535
(97) piano ‘slow’ piano piano ‘very slow’ (It.) phonological sequence subsequently acquires formal fea-
Il est beau, beau, beau, mon pays. (Fr.) tures, becoming a noun.
‘It is nice, nice, nice, my country.’ Sardinian shows one of the most productive patterns of
luego luego soon soon ‘immediately’ (coll. Mex. Sp.) reduplication. It shows a VV reduplicative process that is
called ‘imperative reduplication’ (Floricic 2012):
In Italian, we see the iteration of an adverb, as well as in
colloquial Mexican Spanish (though not in other varieties of (101) linghe-linghe lick-lick (Srd.)
Spanish to the best of our knowledge), and in French we lughe-lughe shine-shine (Srd.)
observe the iteration of an adjective.
Another case of non-morphological iteration is repre- This form is called imperative following Floricic (2012),
sented by the finite verb iteration in European Portuguese who demonstrates that the two constituents are in the
(which is present neither in Brazilian Portuguese nor in imperative (we will not expand on the morphophonological
other Romance languages on a productive scale). This pat- explanation here, but refer to Floricic 2012, Maiden 2007a;
tern is attested in European Portuguese dialects and is also 2008c).
found in standard Portuguese, and expresses emphatic It is interesting that such reduplicative forms enter a
affirmation in the context of denial of a previous statement recursive process whereby they become part of a tripartite
or expressed presupposition (Martins 2007). compound, showing a behaviour typical of formations
below the word level.
(98) a. O João não comprou o carro, pois não? (Pt.)
the João not bought the car then not (102)
‘João didn’t buy the car, did he?’
a. lissia-lissia-ebra [ˈlissjaˈlissjaˈɛβra] (Srd.; cf. infinitive
b. Comprou, comprou slide-slide-grass lissiai ‘to slide’)
he.bought he.bought ‘blindworm’
‘Yes, he did.’
b. pei-traga-traga [ˈpɛj ˈδraɣa ˈδraɣa] (Srd.; cf. infinitive
feet-drag-drag tragari ‘to drag’)
29.4.3 Morphological processes of iteration ‘with dragging feet’
Observe that the verb can be both the head (102a), and
In this section we take into account the processes where the modifier (102b).
morphemes are iterated. The number of attested cases is, as
On the whole, Romance does not seem to display pro-
already noted, quite limited. Morphological reduplication
ductive reduplication as a word-formation process, except
can be said to the doubling of a morphological category such
in a very small set of contexts. The iteration of phonemes
as root or a stem, for example:
as well as the iteration of phrases in an emphatic sense
(99) lecca lecca lick.lick ‘lollypop’ (It.) is quite widespread, whereas morphological processes are
restricted, normally to the iteration of a verb stem to yield a
In Italian, the stem lecca, a verbal base, is iterated to give noun. Moreover, it is often the case that the iconic iteration
rise to a noun: we therefore have a category shift, a very of some sounds, such as cin cin ‘cheers’, gets formally codi-
formal phenomenon that is normally carried out by suffixes fied in morphology and, as a new structure, enters word
and is also quite expected in compounding (as in endocen- formation and even syntax.
tric coordinate V V formations above).
European Portuguese also displays non-transparent for-
mations such as:
(100) piri piripiri beak.sage ‘maleguetta pepper’ (EuPt.) 29.5 Summary

Observe that onomatopoeic and therefore iconic iteration
can be grammaticalized into morphological elements. For As expected, Romance languages display more commonal-
example, EuPt. tchim-tchim (Dicionário da língua portuguesa ities than differences. In particular, compounding shares a
contemporânea da Academia das Ciências de Lisboa 2001:3523) number of features across Romance which, crucially, are not
is used to propose a toast with wine or champagne. Never- found in Latin. The most salient shared feature is the pos-
theless, the phrase fazer tchim-tchim ‘to toast’ shows how the ition of the head. Albeit to different degrees, the head in
536
COMPOUNDING
Romance is typically positioned on the left, when present. type: [NA]N. The pale face type has been considered by some
Indeed, the foregoing discussion has shown that the head is authors (e.g. Booij 2007) as endocentric on the grounds that
not typically found on the right, at least in compounding. In the semantic shift can be explained in terms of metonymy.
fact, in the early 1980s a strong hypothesis was proposed: However, it should be noted that these compounds are not
that the head in compounds is to be identified with the problematic only as regards their semantics: formal fea-
right-hand constituent (Lieber 1980; Williams 1981). Never- tures, such as gender and number, in fact, do not percolate
theless, already by the mid-1980s (especially on the basis of from the constituents, making this type wholly exocentric.
the study of Romance languages within the Lexicalist frame- Interestingly, in the CompoNet database this type of com-
work; cf. Scalise 1983; Corbin 1997) it was demonstrated that pound is found not only in Romance but also in several
in some languages the head can also be the left-hand con- fusional languages (e.g. Bulgarian, English, Greek, Russian)
stituent: a consequence of this refinement is that the pos- as well as in some agglutinative languages (e.g. Turkish,
ition of the head could be a good candidate for a genuine Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese), not to mention in an isolat-
universal parameter, where compounding seems to reflect ing language (Chinese).
the dominating syntactic order (Guevara and Scalise 2009). Still within the noun–adjective compound type, there is
Learnèd compounding shows very similar characteristics one structure found in Spanish and Sardinian but not in the
across Romance, inasmuch as it is almost entirely charac- rest of Romance. This type is the N-i-A subordinate endo-
terized by a synthetic N V compounding structure. More- centric compound, where this structure is productive (as in
over, it is a general tendency for these languages to combine Spanish and in Corsican). As pointed out above, in contrast
non-native strata with native words. to its NA attributive metonymic counterpart, this com-
The non-native elements that enter learnèd compounding pound is preferably used as an adjective (Zamboni
are not free. Within learnèd compounding, a similar behav- 1990:97). Furthermore, different morphological conditions
iour is found across Romance in the linking elements that in structures with and without the -i- element apply: Span-
tend to be -o- with Greek roots and -i- with Latinate roots. ish and Sardinian mark inflection on the right, whereas
Another common phenomenon in the sample studied Italian and other Romance languages with the NA meto-
here is represented by the high incidence of exocentricity. nymic do not, either on the right or on the left.
In fact, Romance tends not only to create different kinds of In terms of differences, the main distinction within
compounding (such as dvandva and metonymic com- Romance studied here is represented by the patterns of
pounds) but to use endocentric constructions very product- Romanian as compared to those of the other languages.
ively, as in the pervasive case of VN compounds. Romanian has VV compounding, but rather unproductive
The categories most frequently involved remain constant VN compounding.
across languages, with N and A the most frequent input and Finally, we have seen that Romance does not particularly
output categories. With the exception (albeit marginal) of favour reduplication. The main iterations are of phono-
Romanian, Romance languages tend not to form verbs logical or syntactic nature. While morphemes may be iter-
through compounding. Yet the most pervasive compound ated leading to the change of a formal feature, typically a
across our corpus is not the subordinate but the attributive category shift, such instances are quite rare and lexicalized.
537
C. Syntax
CHAPTER 30
The structure of the nominal group

GIULIANA GIUSTI
30.1 Nouns ‘sea’ becomes feminine in French la mer and Romanian

marea and masculine in Italian il mare and Spanish el mar.1
Romanian has a nominal class traditionally considered ‘neu-
The Noun (N) is the pivotal element (the head) of the
ter’ but these nouns are masculine in the singular and
nominal group (NGr). It provides the descriptive content
feminine in the plural, of which the reflex of TEMPUS (viz.
(denotation), which can be further specified by arguments
timp (MSG)/timpuri (FPL) is an example; cf. §§8.4.3.2, 42.4, 57.3).
(usually a second NGr: Srd. sa makkina de Juanne ‘the car of
Italian has a small class of nouns (see §§14.3.1.1, 42.4.2) that
Juanne’) and/or by modifiers (adjectives (Adj): Pt. moça
has masculine singular in -o and feminine plural in -a con-
inglesa). I will call the transfer of gender and number fea-
tinuing Latin neuter in -A. The competing analyses by
tures from N to Adj ‘concord’, to distinguish it from ‘agree-
Acquaviva (2008) and Thornton (2011) agree that there is
ment’, which is the relation between N and the second
no reason to appeal to a neuter gender in such cases. In
nominal group (NGr2) often resulting in (overt or covert)
Spanish, there is a special pronominal form lo for ‘abstract’
genitive case assignment.
objects traditionally considered neuter: Sp. lo de mi padre
In order for the NGr to have reference, N combines with a
‘the matter of (= regarding) my father’ vs el de mi padre ‘the
determiner: Cat. els/aquells/alguns estudiants ‘the/those/
one of (= owned by) my father’. The same lo/el, -o/-u distinc-
some students’. The presence of overt determiners in
tion is found in Asturian and in central and upper southern
Romance is so overwhelming, compared to Latin, that it is
Italian dialects to express mass as opposed to count inter-
reasonable to assume that the Romance NGr comprises two
pretation (Ast. fierro/fierru, CIt.R. ferro/ferru ‘iron/clothes
syntactic layers: the denotational, which contains argu-
iron’; Rohlfs 1968:133f.; Hall 1968:480f.; Paciaroni and
ments and modifiers of N, and the referential, which must
Loporcaro 2010).
be present if the NGr is an argument:
The expression of plural number broadly divides the
Romance languages into two areas (see §§6.5.1, 42.2): the
(1) [referential layer Det [denotational layer (Adj) N [NGr2]]]
western part (Portuguese, Spanish, French, Catalan, Occitan,
and Sardinian) has -s; the remainder (Italo-Romance and
Daco-Romance) bundles number together with gender,
30.1.1 Functional features on nouns forming a unique morpheme (cf. Passino 2009). Friulian
displays a mixed system (Benincà and Vanelli 1978). Some
Gender, number, and case are the functional features that languages have further obscured the original formation of
appear in nominal structure cross-linguistically. The differ- the plural, but the underlying phonological representation
ences reside in their realization on N and Adj. preserves it: e.g. the sigmatic plural in French preserved in
Latin is traditionally analysed as having five nominal the orthography and in some sandhi environments (liaison;
classes (only three of them really productive), and three §40.3.2); or the metaphonetic plural in Pie. təʧ, tiʧ (‘roof/s’)
genders: feminine, masculine, and neuter. The N(oun) is (Renzi 1985:197f.).
lexically specified for gender, but not necessarily inflected Case morphology is generally lost in Romance (Ch. 56).
for it; its gender often surfaces on the adjective: cf. bonus Old French displays the sujet/régime (subject/oblique) dis-
agricola (‘good.MSG farmer’, Sen. Ben. 7,32,1), populus alba tinction, mostly on masculine nouns, which have one form
(‘poplar white.FSG’, Plin. N.H. 17,242). for the singular subject and plural oblique (-s) and another
Romance nominal classes are extremely varied and little- for the plural subject and singular oblique (zero). This pat-
studied (for Spanish, cf. Harris 1991). Latin neuter is recate- tern was soon lost in favour of the oblique form in all cases,
gorized in Romance as either masculine or feminine (but see
Ch. 57); e.g. TEMPUS ‘time’ becomes masculine throughout 1
But it remains feminine in some lexicalized expressions such as hacerse
Romance probably due to its -US ending (cf. §42.4.1), MARE a la mar ‘to set sail’, en alta mar ‘in the open sea’.
This chapter © Giuliana Giusti 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 541
GIULIANA GIUSTI
with the result that -s is reanalysed as the plural ending. are not (always) inserted for interpretive reasons, but also to
Many Romance varieties have a prepositional accusative, realize argumenthood, correlated to case (Giusti 1993; 1997).
sensitive to [human] and [definite]/[specific] features. (see
for Spanish, Brugè and Brugger 1996; for Romanian, Dobro-
vie-Sorin 1994:ch. 6; for Sardinian, Jones 2003:65-8; for a 30.1.2 Object-referring nouns
cross-Romance perspective, Roegiest 1979). Romanian dis-
tinguishes direct cases (nominative/accusative), oblique
These refer to individuals that can be countable (4) or
cases (genitive/dative) mostly on the determiner ‘băiatul
uncountable (mass nouns) (5). Their denotation does not
‘boy=the.NOM/ACC’ vs băiatului ‘boy=the.GEN./DAT’, and voca-
require any further specification but can be modified by
tive: Mario! (VOC) vs Maria (NOM). Central Italian dialects
adjectives (which concord for gender and number according
have an allocutive marker a/o (Rome a’ scemo! ‘you idiot’),
to their inflection), relative clauses (which display an overt
which does not trigger syntactic doubling, unlike the prep-
or covert pronoun), and nominal groups (which receive
osition a (cf. D’Achille 2001). These dialects also present
possessive marking):
truncated vocatives for proper names with or without a
vocative marker (Sic. (a) Giulià ‘Giuliana!’) (cf. also §55.3.3).
(4) a. [ref.layer [Det la/una] [denot.layer [N borsa] [Adj bianca]]] (It.)
This sketch of the realization of inflectional morphology
the.FSG/a.FSG bag.FSG white.FSG
gives the flavour of the processes in progress in the change
between Latin and Romance: namely, reduction of the nom- b. [ref.layer [Det la] [denot.layer [N borsa]
inal classes; reduction of gender specifications; elimination or the.FSG bag.FSG
radical reduction of overt case morphology, basically con- [rel.clause che ho comprato]]] (It.)
fined to the highest functional element (determiner and/or that I.have bought
case marker); and preservation of feature-sharing between
c. [ref.layer [Det una] [denot.layer [N borsa]
the noun and its modifiers (adjectives and determiners).
a.FSG bag.FSG
Nominal class is part of the lexical specification on the
[NGr2 di pelle/di Maria]]] (It.)
noun. Gender is either lexically specified or part of the
of leather/of Mary
descriptive content (intension) (Picallo 1991). Number is
part of the referential index (extension) (Delfitto and
Schroten 1991; Bouchard 1998). Case makes the nominal (5) a. [ref.layer [Det il] [denot.layer [N cacao] [Adj brasiliano]]] (It.)
group part of a higher predication; it must therefore be the.MSG cocoa.MSG Brazilian.MSG
peripheral (Giusti 1993; 2002). If we distribute these features b. [ref.layer [Det il] [denot.layer [N cacao]
across the ‘functional spine’ of the nominal group, we can the.MSG cocoa.MSG
order them as in (2): [rel.clause che ho comprato]]] (It.)
that I.have bought
(2) [Left.Periphery case [Extension number [Intension gender [class
N]]]] c. [ref.layer [Det il] [denot.layer [N cacao]
the.MSG cocoa.MSG
The Latin N, inflected for its nominal class, is bundled [NGr2 di montagna/di Maria]]] (It.)
together with all these functional features, namely gender, of mountain/of Mary
number, and case (3a). This richness in inflection correlates
with a certain freedom of order. The function of signalling The intension of object-denoting nouns can be modified
argumenthood, performed in Latin by case morphology, is by descriptive adjectives including Quality > Size > Shape >
taken up in Romance by the determiner, hosting overt or Colour > Origin, in this order:2
covert case. The case feature is thus separate from N (3b).
This correlates with a fixed position of N and the obligatory (6) a. una bella grande tonda mela rossa inglese (It.)
presence of a determiner. Gender and number appear redun- a nice large round apple red English
dantly on the determiner that realizes (overt or abstract) case:
b. una bella mala manna tunna orrubia inglesa (Srd.)
(3) a. [[[N]gender]number]case] (Latin) a nice apple large round red English
b. [[[case]gender]number] .... [[[N]gender]number]]] ‘a nice large round red English apple’
(Romance)
2
In practice, there are unlikely to be more than two adjectives modify-
The microvariation in the distribution of articles, pre- ing the intension. The examples in (6) are for this reason quite difficult to
sented at many points in this chapter, shows that articles judge.
542
THE STRUCTURE OF THE NOMINAL GROUP
The extension of object-denoting nouns is established by But contrary to what is claimed for English by Grimshaw
determiners (articles, demonstratives, and quantifiers), and (1990) or Davis and Dubinsky (2003), plural number and the
can be further specified by one or more adjectives in the insertion of a determiner other than a definite article does
following hierarchy: quantity > numeral > anaphoric > not produce total ungrammaticality in Romance. Plural
intensional. Basically across Romance, N follows these number can convey repeated process interpretation;
modifiers: while a demonstrative is compatible with a discourse-
anaphoric interpretation (the aforementioned process) or
(7) a. le molte altre suddette presunte apparizioni di a qualitative interpretation (a process of a certain type)
Brian dopo la sua morte (It.) (see Picallo 1991 for Catalan; Brito and Oliveira 1997 for
Portuguese).
b. as muitas outras mencionadas presumíveis apari-
When quantifiers and demonstratives induce result inter-
ções de Brian depois da sua morte (Pt.)
pretation, the internal argument is not required:
‘the many other mentioned alleged appearances of
Brian after his death’
(10) a. le ultime due brutali invasioni americane (del-
The position of N may vary across the Romance domain l’Iraq) (It.)
as well as inside one and the same language, but the hier- the last two brutal invasions American (of.the Iraq)
archy of the modifiers is substantially the same (cf. §30.2), if
b. quest’altra possibile assegnazione generosa (di
we abstract away from marked orders triggered by dis-
sovvenzioni) (It.)
course pragmatic features (cf. §30.5).
this other possible assignment generous (of
subsidies)
30.1.3 Event/result nouns The intension of event nouns with process interpretation
can be modified by the following adjectival hierarchy: Sub-
These nouns are often derived from, or share the same root ject oriented > Time > Manner > Agent/Theme:
as, a verb. They can denote a(n instance of a) process or a
result. The semantics inherited from the verb makes it (11) a. a estúpida repentina reação violenta americana aos
possible for N to establish thematic relations that are par- protestos (BrPt.)
allel, although not identical, to the requirements of the
b. la stupide soudaine réaction violente américaine
verb: nouns denoting a process have obligatory internal
aux protestations (Fr.)
arguments, while nouns denoting a result have optional
the stupid sudden reaction violent American to.the
arguments across languages (Grimshaw 1990). In Romance
protests
most deverbal nouns are ambiguous between the two read-
‘the stupid sudden violent American reaction to
ings; for this reason the agent role and, more crucially, the
the protests’
patient role can apparently be optional:
(8) a. la terrible invasió (aliena) (de la Terra) (Cat.)

the terrible invasion (alien) (of the Earth)
30.1.4 Relational nouns
b. teribila invazie (extraterestră) (a Pământului) (Ro.)
Relational nouns have a mandatory argument. The prototyp-
terrible=the.F invasion (alien) (A=the.F Earth=the.M)
ical case involves kinship terms, whose denotation can only be
determined if the denotation of the argument is provided.
The two readings can be disentangled by the insertion of
Romance presents considerable microvariation in this regard.
a temporal modifier that forces the process reading. In this
In some languages (e.g. Spanish, Italian, and Sardinian),
case the internal argument must be realized; the number is
kinship terms may appear with a definite article and a null
preferably singular, and determiners other than articles
argument, anaphoric to a third person referent in the dis-
give a result reading:
course (12a); in other languages (e.g. French, Portuguese)
this is not possible (12b). In Catalan, this is only possible if
(9) a. la/?una frequente espressione **(dei propri senti-
an overt dative clitic is present (12c):
menti) (It.)
the/a frequent expression (of one’s feelings)
(12) a. Conozco a la madre/hermana/abuela/tía/prima.
b. ??le/**molte frequenti espressioni dei propri senti- (Sp.)
menti (It.) I.know ACC.MRK the mother/sister/grandmother/
the/many frequent expressions of one’s feelings aunt/cousin
543
GIULIANA GIUSTI
b. Je connais sa /**la mère/sœur/grand-mère/tante/ of the possessive: vabbo ‘[my] dad’ a proper name with a
cousine. (Fr.) covert first person singular possessor; vabbitu ‘dad=your’ the
I.know his/her/the mother/sister/grandmother/ same noun here inflected for the second person singular
aunt/cousin features of the possessor (or bearing an enclitic possessive);
and lo padre (lit. ‘the father’) ‘his dad/father’, a common
c. Li conec la mare/germana/àvia/tia/cosina. (Cat.)
noun with a covert third person singular possessor and an
to.him=I.know the mother/sister/grandmother/aunt/
overt article.
cousin.F
Covert possessives are also found with personal posses-
‘I know his/her/their mother.’
sions, body parts, and clothes:
Despite the fact that possessives must be preceded by a
determiner in Italo-Romance (It. **(la/una) mia amica ‘(the/ (13) a. Ha cambiato la macchina, il cellulare, il computer,
a) my friend’) and Sardinian (**(s’/un’) ammiga mia ‘(the/a) gli occhiali. (It.)
friend my’), with kinship terms they appear to be in com- She.has changed the car, the phone, the computer,
plementary distribution with the definite article: It. (**la) the glasses
mia sorella ‘(the) my sister’ (cf. Rohlfs 1969a:§656), Srd. (**su) ‘She changed her car, phone, computer, glasses.’
frate tuo ‘(the) brother your’. In Italian, this does not hold if
b. J'ai mal à la tête/à la gorge/au genou. (Fr.)
the prenominal possessor is the third person plural pro-
I.have pain at the head/at the throat/at.the knee
noun loro: **(la) loro madre ‘their mother’, and if the
‘I have a headache/a sore throat./My knee aches.’
kinship term is affected by any morphological process
(inflection, derivation, or compounding): It. **(le) mie sor- c. He perdut el cap/les sabates/els guants. (Cat.)
elle ‘(the) my sisters’, **(il) mio fratellino ‘(the) my brother. I.lost the head/ the shoes/ the gloves’
DIM’, **(il) mio bisnonno ‘(the) my grand-grandfather’, or is ‘I lost my head/my shoes/my gloves.’
modified by an adjective: **(la) mia cara zia ‘(the) my dear
aunt’. In the rest of Romance, possessives do not display a
special behaviour when combined with kinship terms: in 30.1.5 Proper names
Portuguese the article is optional: Pt (a) minha irmã ‘(the)
my sister’; in Catalan it is obligatory: Cat. la meva germana
Proper names are directly referential, do not have descrip-
‘the my sister’.
tive content, and do not combine with number. In some
Some varieties exhibit what looks like an enclitic form of
Romance varieties they do not co-occur with a determiner
the pronominal possessor that could be viewed as an agree-
(14a), unless they are reinterpreted as object-referring
ment inflection on N for the person features of its argu-
nouns (14b,c):
ment: southern and central Italo-Romance babbeto
‘dad=your’, sorema ‘sister=my’. Romanian shows postnom-
(14) a. Je connais Marie et Jean. (Fr.)
inal possessives following an N, exceptionally with no art-
‘I know Marie and Jean.’
icle: maică-ta ‘mother=your’, frate-meu ‘brother=my’
(Lombard 1974:154). In this case the possessive is incorpor- b. Je connais deux Maries et un Jean, mais aucun
ated into N as shown by the fact that the definite article Gérard. (Fr.)
inflected for oblique case ‑ii appears on the possessive: soră- ‘I know two Maries and one Jean, but no Gérard.’
sii (sister=his/her=the.FSG.OBL) ‘of his/her sister’ (Avram and
c. Cette Marie est beaucoup plus sympathique que
Coene 2008:380), and not on the noun; cf. surorii sale ‘sister
l’autre. (Fr.)
(=the).FSG.OBL his/her.FSG.OBL’.
This Marie is much nicer than the other one.’
Kinship terms may also behave like proper names (no
article and optionally followed by a possessive, see §30.1.5): However, the ban on the presence of a determiner is not
Anc. Riva nona (tua) ‘arrives granny (your) (= (your) granny’s general. In Latin, demonstratives or possessives often co-
coming)’. Microvariation regards single kinship terms, e.g. occur with a genuine proper name conveying discourse
Anc. **(mi) madre (my.WEAK mother) vs mama (mia) ‘mum my. pragmatic function: Atilius hic Gauianus, lit. ‘Atilius this
STRONG’; **(mi) padre ‘my.WEAK father’ vs papà (mio) ‘dad my. Gauianus.’ Cic., Sest. 73). In Romance a demonstrative or
STRONG’, CIt. mia madre ‘my mother’ vs la mia mamma ‘the my possessor can also express speaker’s attitude (15a,b) or
mum’ vs NIt. mia mamma ‘my mum’. anchor the proper name to the context (15c):
Different strategies can be found even with the same
lexical item: Trodica di Morrovalle (Macerata) has three (15) a. Très tendance, cette Marie-Antoinette! (Fr.)
different constructions with ‘father’ according to the person Very trendy, this Marie-Antoinette!
544
b. Peppe meo travagghia in Palermo. (Msl.) here (Table 30.1). The hierarchy makes no claims to exhaus-
Peppe my works in Palermo. tivity, but represents the main types of direct modification
adjectives occurring with object referring nouns.
c. Ho conosciuto un ragazzo di nome Mario . . . Questo
The Latin N is bundled together with all its functional
Mario è proprio simpatico. (It.)
features including case, which is the highest feature in the
‘I have met a boy named Mario. This Mario is really
structure (cf. 1). Richness in case morphology correlates with
nice.’
lack of articles and relative freedom of positioning N with
Possessive adjectives may be postnominal or prenominal respect to its modifiers (17a). The Romance N is only bundled
according to the general positioning of possessives in differ- with number and gender (3b). This correlates with the pres-
ent varieties. (see Rohlfs 1969a:§§427-33, for Italian dialects): ence of a determiner and with a more fixed position of N (17b):
(16) a. Gianni mio/Maria nostra /Mario tuo (C-SIt.) (17) a. [extension [Adj [intension Adj {N} [ Adj
Gianni my/Maria our/Mario your Det/{N} {N} {N}...]]]] Latin
b. il mio Gianni/la nostra Maria/il tuo (N/SIt.)
b. [extension [Adj. [intension Adj {N} [ Adj
(caro) Mario
Det {N}...]]]] Romance
the my Gianni/the our Maria/the your dear Mario
The only exceptions to (17b) are proper names in those
In those languages where prenominal possessives must
languages in which they are not preceded by an article, and
be preceded by a determiner, a definite article is mandatory
Romanian definite expressions where the article is suffixed
with a prenominal possessive.
to N (e.g. fetele ‘girls=the (= the girls)’).
An interesting range of micro-variation across dialects
The hierarchically ordered adjectives in Table 30.1 have
and styles (Rohlfs 1969a:§653) is found in respect of the
appositive function (‘direct modifiers’): Fr. un joli gros ballon
definite article before proper names: northwestern Italian
rouge ‘a beautiful big ball red’. I present them according
dialects, Salentino, Catalan, and Portuguese generalize art-
to macro-classes in §30.2.2-4. Other adjectives can be
icles to all forenames (Pt. a Maria, o João); northeastern
Italian dialects and Tuscan insert the article only with
feminine forenames (la Maria vs Toni). Catalan varieties Table 30.1 Hierarchy of direct modification
have a dedicated article for names, derived from Lat. DOMINUS
Demonstrative Extensional hic, iste, ille,
‘master’, e.g. en Pere ‘Pere’ vs el noi ‘the boy’, with micro-
interpretation (this, that)
variation in forms across dialects (cf. §46.3.1.1). Italian
Quantifier aliqui, ullus
employs the article before family names if the referent is
(some, any)
plural, referring to the whole family (i Rossi) or when the
Numeral unus, duo, ultimus . . .
referent is feminine (la Rossi). A definite article preceding
(one, two, last)
the family name for singular referents is still used in high-
Anaphoric idem, ipse
style Italian, with reference to distinguished figures of the past,
(same, self)
especially in the literary discourse (il Manzoni, l’Alighieri) or in
Evaluative bonus, malus, . . .
bureaucratic style. In European Portuguese the article before
(good, bad)
a name indicates that the speaker has familiarity with the
Dimension longus, latus, . . .
referent: o Jorge, for this reason it is less common with full
(long, wide)
names: (o) Jorge Sampaio (Brito 2003:347); in Brazilian Portu-
Age nouus, uetus, . . .
guese it is subject to diatopic variation: in São Paulo the
(new, old)
article is obligatory, while in the northeast it is not used.
Physical property aridus, crudus, . . .
(dry, raw)
Colour niger, uiridis, . . .
30.2 Adjectives (black, green)
Origin/agent Intensional Picenus, Claudianus . . .
interpretation (Picenian, [by/of]
As noted earlier, adjectives can modify the intension or the
Claudius)
extension of the nominal group in a hierarchy that is fixed
Composition/ ferreus, epidicticus . . .
cross-linguistically (Seiler 1978:318; Hetzron 1978; Dixon
type ([of iron] epideictic)
1982; Cinque 1994). Table 30.1 sketches the hierarchy with
Goal/destination olearius,
Latin examples, as proposed by De Sutter (1986), elaborated
([for] oil)
in Giusti and Oniga (2007), and adapted for our purposes
545
GIULIANA GIUSTI
predicates, or have restrictive function (‘indirect modi- indirect modification) ‘the visible stars’ (§30.2.5). Accord-
fiers’): Fr. les lettres arrivées hier ‘the.PL letters.F arrived.FPL ingly, nouns modified by a relational adjective, which is
yesterday’. Many adjectives can have either function. never an indirect modifier, must be plural: la balarines/
I present the differences across Romance between direct **balarina classiches ‘the classic dancers’.3
and indirect modifiers in §30.2.5. A different type of defective concord appears in Spanish
and Portuguese singular noun coordination: Pt. o presidente e
amigo comeram juntos. ‘The president and [his] friend ate.3PL
30.2.1 Functional features on adjectives together’ (cf. Villavicencio et al. 2005; Demonte and Pérez-
Jiménez 2012). A prenominal modifier concords for gender
Latin adjectives inflect for the gender, number, and case and number with the first noun, a postnominal modifier can
features of the noun (I call this feature-sharing process either concord with the second noun, or be plural: Sp. la
‘concord’). With few exceptions, in modern and old lengua y cultura catalana(s) ‘the language and culture Catalan
Romance, neither noun nor adjective display case morph- (.PL)’, su escasa flora y fauna acuática(s) ‘its scarce flora and
ology. In Romanian, articles, demonstratives, and quanti- fauna aquatic(.PL)’. Demonte and Pérez-Jiménez (2012) claim
fiers still display case while nouns and adjectives do so only that when plural is chosen, the adjective is interpreted as an
in the feminine singular (see §8.4.3.1): fetelor frumoase ‘girl. indirect modifier. This is however at odds with the many
PL=the.PL.DAT beautiful.PL’, acestor fete frumoase ‘this.PL.DAT examples they give of relational adjectives; cf. catalanas and
girl.PL beautiful.PL’, fetelor acestora frumoase ‘girl.PL=the.PL.DAT acuáticas, which cannot be indirect modifiers (§30.2.2).
this.PL.DAT beautiful.PL’. The proposal in (3b) that case in
Romance is split from N, combined with the assumption
that adjectives concord with N and not with Det across 30.2.2 Relational adjectives
languages, directly correlates the change in adjectival
morphology with the change in nominal morphology.
Relational adjectives are situated in the lower portion of the
Apparent exceptions to full gender and number concord
hierarchy and include classificatory adjectives (composition
occur in Wallon and Ladin.
and goal/destination) and thematic adjectives (origin/
In Wallon (cf. Remacle 1952; Bernstein 1991), predicate
agent). In Latin these adjectives are predominantly post-
adjectives do not inflect (single strike-through indicates
nominal (cf. Marouzeau 1922:17; Langslow 2012) as in
lack of overt realization): Èle sont totes pitites ‘they.F are
Romance. But prenominal relational adjectives are possible
all.F.PL little.F.PL’; I sont/il est neûr ‘they.M are/it.M is black’.
and not necessarily contrasted or dislocated (Iovino 2012,
Prenominal plural feminine adjectives drop final -s when
pace Langslow 2012): in illo epidictico genere (Cic., Orat., 42) ‘in
the following element starts with a consonant, but have the
that epideictic gender’. These orders are not possible in
overt feminine marker -ès which does not surface in French.
most Romance languages, e.g. It. il genere epidittico, **l’epidit-
This marker appears on each stacked adjective and on the
tico genere ‘the epidictic genre’, including Walloon, which
article, but not on the noun dès bèlès bounès bièsses ‘some
otherwise requires prenominal adjectives (Bernstein 1991,
beautiful good beasts’. In coordinated adjectives it only
quoting Remacle 1952): lu peûpe italyin ‘the Italian people’.
appears on the second conjunct dès bèles èt bounès bièsses
Old Italian still displays some residual optionality (Giusti
‘some beautiful and good beasts’. Bernstein (1991) proposes
2010c; Giorgi 2010). Only in Istro-Romanian (Zegrean 2012)
that ‑ès is a number morpheme detached from N, that
are most of these adjectives mandatorily prenominal (18a).
encliticizes onto the coordinative constituent, and is there-
A few exceptions are adjectives of Romance formation espe-
fore not part of adjectival inflection.
cially in fixed expressions (18b). In (18c) the meaning is the
Ladin determiners and prenominal adjectives do not con-
same, the only difference is the different morpheme on the
cord for feminine plural: la picola ceses ’the.FSG small.FSG
adjective:
house.FPL’ (Haiman and Benincà 1992; Rasom 2006; §11.5.1).
Postnominal adjectives are always plural; the noun followed
(18) a. grumbo vręme, osnova šcola (IRo.)
by a postnominal adjective may be either singular or plural:
bad weather, primary school
la cesa/ceses picoles. This defective concord only occurs with
feminine nouns and adjectives with plural -s. Masculine b. besęreca catolica, porcu div’lu (IRo.)
nouns and adjectives with plural -i and feminine nouns church catholic, pig savage
with plural -e do not display it. Rasom (2006) notes that ‘Catholic Church, wild boar’
the two possibilities arising with postnominal adjectives
have a different interpretation: la steiles visiboles (individual 3
This phenomenon cannot be directly explained by the proposal in (2).
level/direct modification) vs la steila visiboles (stage level/ See Rasom (2006) for a different explanation.
546
c. ur taljanski fečor vs ur fečor taljan (21) a. la ripresa economica americana, **la ripresa
an Italian boy vs a boy Italian americana economica (It.)
the recovery economic American, the recovery
With event nouns, relational adjectives take semantic American economic
roles, usually agent but also theme of unaccusative nouns ‘the American economic recovery’
(19a). They cannot have a patient or locative role (19b); in
b. les lignes parallèles colorées, les lignes colorées
contrast to possessive adjectives which can have the patient
parallèles (Fr.)
(but not the locative) (19c):
the lines parallel coloured the lines coloured
parallel
(19) a. l’invasione italiana dell’Albania, lo sbarco ameri-
‘the coloured parallel lines’ ‘the parallel coloured
cano in Normandia (It.)
lines’
the invasion Italian of Albania, the landing Ameri-
can in Normandy
‘the Italian invasion of Albania, the American land- 30.2.3 Descriptive adjectives
ing in Normandy’
b. **la cattura italiana da parte dei tedeschi, **lo At the intermediate area of the hierarchy represented in
sbarco normanno (It.) Table 30.1, we find descriptive adjectives relating to value,
the arrest Italian by the Germans, the landing size, shape, and colour, which can be prenominal or post-
Norman nominal, with the tendency for those lower in the hierarchy
c. la loro cattura da parte dei tedeschi (It.) (e.g. colour) to be postnominal, while higher ones (e.g. size)
‘their arrest by the Germans’ are more freely placed: Ro. o casă roşie vs **o roşie casă ‘a red
house’, o mare pădure/o pădure mare ‘a (big) forest (big)’. If
Another difference between possessive and relational adjec- more than one adjective modifies the noun, the tendency is
tives is that the latter cannot be the antecedent of an to have one preceding and one following the noun: It. la
anaphor:4 piccola casa bianca ‘the small white house’. In some lan-
guages, a few adjectives have a reduced form which can
(20) a. la loro opinione di se stessi, la sua opinione di sé only occur in prenominal position: Sp. el gran palacio/el
(It.) palacio grande ‘the big palace’.
(the) their opinion of themselves, (the) his/her Descriptive adjectives are either direct or indirect mod-
opinion of self ifers (cf. §30.2.5). Since indirect modification is freely
ordered in postnominal position, the order appears to be
b. **l’opinione italiana di se stessi, **l’opinione pre- free, as in (21b).
sidenziale di sé (It.) Direct modification adjectives in postnominal position
the opinion Italian of themselves, the opinion appear in the inverse order in all Romance languages; e.g.
presidential of self a descriptive adjective like ‘big’ is higher than a relational
‘the Italian opinion of themselves, the presidential adjective like ‘poisonous’ (cf. It. un ragno velenoso grande lit.
opinion of himself/herself ’ ‘a spider poisonous big’). A possible exception is Sardinian:
un arrontzolu mannu vellenosu lit. ‘a spider big poisonous’
Genuine relational adjectives cannot be predicative: Ro. (Jones 2003: 53; see also 6b above).
#această centrală e nucleară ‘this power plant is nuclear’,
#invazia a fost italiană, ‘the invasion was Italian’. The only
possible interpretation of these predicative adjectives is as 30.2.4 Determiner-like adjectives
manner modifiers.
Cinque (2010) observes that when two relational adjec-
Demonstratives are modifiers in the referential layer, but
tives are present, their order in postnominal position is
there are many other items that are clearly adjectives but
obligatorily inverted (21a), differently from descriptive
contribute to establish the referential index of the noun
adjectives, which apparently display free order in (21b) (cf.
specifying quantity, number, or its relation to an antecedent;
Bouchard 1998; Knittel 2005:198):
for this reason they are defined here as ‘determiner-like’
adjectives.
4
In some Slavonic languages this is possible (cf. Corbett 1987). I do not These adjectives follow the determiner and precede the
know whether this possibility was available in Latin. noun: Sp. estos otros / varios / numerosos / muchos / diferentes
547
GIULIANA GIUSTI
problemas ‘these other / various / numerous / many / various (22) a. [[Adjdirect mod. N Adjdirect modification] Adjindirect modi-
problems’. They are generally prenominal, e.g. Sp. **Estos fication] (Romance)
problemas otros/muchos, although some can be postnominal:
Sp. Estos problemas varios / diferentes / numerosos ‘these various / b. [Adjindirect mod. [Adjdirect mod. N Adjdirect mod] Adjindir-
different / numerous problems’. They can co-occur with ect mod] (Latin)
determiner-like adjectives of different classes in apparently

free order: EuPt. os seus dois últimos livros ‘the his / her two There are a number of constructions that help to distinguish
last books’; os seus últimos dois livros ‘the his / her last two between direct and indirect modifiers. Only adjectives that
books’ (Brito 2003). In Italian, however, the different orders can be predicates can be indirect modifiers; for example
give different interpretations: gli altri tre ragazzi ‘the other relational adjectives and determiner-like adjectives cannot
three boys’, i molti altri ragazzi ‘the many other boys’ are while descriptive adjectives can (cf. §§30.2.2-4). Past parti-
unmarked orders, with ‘other’ preceding a cardinal and ciples are in general only indirect modifiers: Ro. scrisorile
following a vague numeral. The reverse orders are possible: sosite (ieri) ‘letters=the arrived yesterday’ vs **(ieri) sositele
i tre altri ragazzi ‘the three other boys’, gli altri molti ragazzi scrisori ‘yesterday arrived=the letters’; likewise are adjectives
‘the other many boys’, with a different scope interpretation. with a complement or an adverbial modifier: It. questi genitori
A similar contrast is found with ordinal and cardinal (veramente) orgogliosi (dei figli) ‘these parents (really) proud (of
numerals, e.g. It. i primi tre concorrenti ‘the first three com- their children)’ vs questi (**veramente) orgogliosi (**dei figli)
petitors, namely the first, the second and the third’, but i tre genitori ‘these (really) proud (of their children) parents’.
primi concorrenti ‘the three first competitors, namely those Less clear is the case of coordinated adjectives, which
that have collectively scored the highest score’. must be postnominal in modern Italian, but not in other
Some of these adjectives force definite or indefinite inter- Romance languages or in old Italian: It. **i bravi e buoni
pretations and are therefore only compatible with definite bambini/i bambini bravi e buoni ‘the good and well-behaved
or indefinite articles, irrespective of their prenominal or children’, la sua sancta e buona vita lit. ‘the his holy and good
postnominal position: It. la/ **questa/ **una {seguente} conclu- life’ (Cronica fiorentina, p. 84, line 25). Prenominal coordin-
sione {seguente} ‘the/this/a {following} conclusion {follow- ated adjectives in Romanian must both display the definite
ing}’, Ro. o/ **această {anumită} concluzie {anumită} ‘a/this article: buna şi frumoasa fată ‘good=ART and beautiful=ART girl
{particular} conclusion {particular}’, **concluzia anumită (= the good and beautiful girl)’. In French and Romanian, but
‘conclusion=the particular’, **anumita concluzie ‘certain=the not in Italian, degree adverbs can also appear in prenominal
conclusion’. modifiers: It. un (**molto) bel cavallo but OIt. uno molto bello
palafreno (Nov. 33, p. 205, l. 5), Fr. un (très) beau cheval; Ro. un
(foarte) frumos cal ‘a very beautiful horse’.
30.2.5 Direct vs indirect modification As anticipated in (22b), even if Latin displays a preference
for postnominal indirect modification, e.g. Lat. homines bellico-
The hierarchy in Table 30.1 does not capture the different sos populi Romani inimicos ‘bellicose men hostile to the Roman
kinds of ambiguities arising between prenominal and post- people’ (Caes., B.G., 1, 10, 2), it shows considerable freedom. In
nominal positions. An adjective like ‘visible’ can be inter- this example two past participles are coordinated and the
preted as a permanent property (individual-level) or as a second has an agentive argument: illam suam [coord non [Adj1
temporary property (stage-level). In Romance the prenom- sopitam] sed [Adj2 suspicione aliqua retardatam]] consuetudinem rei
inal position is limited to the individual-level interpret- publicae bene gerendae (Cic., Sest. 67) ‘that.FSG.ACC his.FSG.ACC not
ation, e.g. Sp. las visibles estrellas de Andrómeda ‘the visible estinguished.FSG.ACC but suspicion.FSG.ABL some.FSG.ABL delayed.
stars of Andromeda’, while the postnominal position is FSG.ACC habit.FSG.ACC thing.FSG.GEN public.FSG.ACC well managing.
ambiguous las estrellas visibles de Andrómeda ‘the visible FSG.GEN (= that unextinguished but by some suspicion delayed
stars of Andromeda/the stars of Andromeda visible (now)’. habit of his of correctly managing the public affairs)’.
Cinque (2010) proposes that the individual-level interpret- Wallon and Istro-Romanian are unlike the rest of
ation is obtained when the adjective is inserted as a direct Romance. Wallon only allows prenominal indirect modifiers
modifier of a functional projection of N, the stage-level (Bernstein 1991:106; Bouchard 2002:194; Cinque 2010:136):
interpretation when the adjective is the predicate of a Wal. dès r’tchâfés crompîres (cf. Fr. des pommes de terre réchauf-
reduced relative clause. In most of Romance both these fées) ‘some reheated potatoes’. Istro-Romanian allows indir-
positions follow the noun, leading to ambiguity (22a). In ect modification in either position: {uscåte} lęmne {uscåte}
Latin both positions are possible for both types of modifi- ‘dried wood’ (Zegrean 2012).
cation: the ambiguity arises not only in postnominal but In Romanian, the ‘adjectival article’ cel (cf. §8.4.5) is the
also in prenominal position (22b): overt introducer of indirect modification. In fact, it is
548
incompatible with determiner-like and relational adjectives adjectives) except articles. In Romance, all of these have
(Cornilescu 1992; Giusti 1993; Coene 1994; Cinque 2004a), basically retained the same distribution, and mutatis mutan-
which can only express direct modification: dis the same functional properties (abstracting away from
semantic or pragmatic change). Most determiners have also
(23) privirea (**cea) ultimă, invazia (**cea) italiană, preserved what are usually considered adjectival properties:
sight=the (the) last, invasion=the (the) Italian (i) they concord with N; (ii) it is possible to have more than
‘the last sight’ ‘the Italian invasion’ one determiner-like adjective in a nominal group; (iii) there
privirea (cea) înlacrimată (Ro.) is a certain degree of freedom in positioning determiners
look=the (the) tearful with respect to the noun. Therefore, these properties
‘the tearful look’ cannot be taken to distinguish determiners from adjectives
in Romance, or to differentiate Latin determiners from
Many cases of N-Dem-A in Latin, e.g. uitam illam tran- Romance determiners.
quillam (lit. ‘life that tranquil’) ‘that uneventful life’ (Cic.,
Clu., 153), can be analysed as instances of indirect modi-
fication. In fact, in a corpus of 259 examples including
Dem, N, and A, Iovino (2012:94) notes not only that this
30.3.1 Inflectional properties of determiners
order is rather rare (6%) if compared with N-A (50%) and
N-Dem (20%), but also that the only demonstrative Determiners are similar to adjectives in that they concord
appearing in this order is ILLE ‘that’, and that all adjectives with N. For example, the defective inflection of feminine
following ILLE are compatible with the interpretation of plural in Ladin and Wallon (§30.2.1) is also shared by deter-
indirect modifiers. miners. However, in Latin the inflectional morphology of
The position of N among direct modifiers (Table 30.2) demonstratives and other determiners is already not com-
displays microvariation. On the one hand, Romanian places pletely identical to adjectival inflection: the neuter singular
N very high, in definite nominals as high as the Det(ermi- nominative/accusative ends in a ‘plosive’ (-k, -d): HOC, ID,
ner) position. Sardinian places N above all descriptive adjec- ILLUD, QUID (‘this.NSG’, ‘it.N.SG’, ‘that.N.SG’, ‘what.N.SG’), and the
tives except evaluative bello ‘handsome, pretty’. On the genitive singular ends in -IUS for all genders HUIUS, EIUS, ILLIUS,
other hand, Walloon places N very low in the structure CUIUS ‘this.GEN.SG’, ‘he/she/it.GEN.SG’, ‘that.GEN.SG’, ‘whose’. This
only preceding relational adjectives, and Istro-Romanian inflectional pattern is not found on adjectives, e.g. Lat.
places N only before relational adjectives of Romance origin. BONUS/BONUM/BONA ‘good.NOM.M/N/F.SG), BONI/BONAE ‘good. GEN.
The whole area of direct modification including the noun SG.M+N/F ’; ACER/ACRIS/ACRE ‘happy.M/F/N.NOM.SG.’; ACRIS ‘happy.
appears at the left of indirect modification in most of M/F/N.GEN.SG’. This distinction remains in Romanian, where,
Romance, except Walloon and Istro-Romanian; the former unlike most forms of adjectives, demonstratives and quan-
has indirect modification always at the left of direct modi- tifiers display overt oblique plural morphology: tuturor aces-
fication, the latter displays some optionality. tor băieţi ‘all.OBL.PL this.OBL.PL boy.PL’, tuturor băieţilor acestora
‘all.OBL.PL boy.PL=the.OBL.PL this.OBL.PL (= to all these boys)’.
This is not the case with adjectives: băieţilor frumoşi/**frumo-
Table 30.2 Position of N with respect to direct and indirect sor ‘boy.PL=the.OBL.PL. beautiful.PL/beautiful.OBL.PL’.
modification These inflectional properties show that demonstratives
LAT . IRO . WAL . RO ./ OTHER and quantifiers are special types of nominal modifiers both
SRD . in Latin and in Romanian. They do not justify the assump-
tion of any dramatic change either in the lexical/functional
Direct High/ Low Low High Middle nature of these elements or in the functional structure of
modification Middle/Low the nominal group, given that Romanian is an article lan-
Indirect Right/Left Right/ Right Left Left guage, undoubtedly with a fully developed functional struc-
modification Left ture, like all other Romance languages.
A different kind of evidence is found in the inflection of
the distal demonstrative in Italian and Romanian which has
the same inflection as the definite article (Table 30.3). This
30.3 Determiners inflection makes it different from any other determiner or
adjective, including the other demonstrative questo/acest
Latin displays all types of so-called determiners (demon- ‘this’. In Italian, this is apparent in the masculine singular
stratives, quantifiers, possessives, and determiner-like -l/-lo and plural -i/-gli. In Romanian it is apparent in the
549
GIULIANA GIUSTI
Table 30.3 Inflection of definite article, distal and proximal demonstratives in Italian and Romanian
art. il ragazzo i ragazzi la ragazza le ragazze

que+art. quel ragazzo quei ragazzi quella ragazza quelle ragazze
quest- questo ragazzo questi ragazzi questa ragazza queste ragazze
art. lo scolaro gli scolari la scolara le scolare
que+art. quello scolaro quegli scolari quella scolara quelle scolare
quest- questo scolaro questi scolari questa scolara queste scolare
–art. băiatul băieţii fata fetele
ace+art. acel băiat acei băieţi acea fată acele fete
acest- acest băiat aceşti băieţi această fată aceste fete
missing -l- of the feminine singular acea and of the mascu- b. amândoi aceşti băieţi, **doi aceşti băieţi (Ro.)
line plural acei (cf. Campos 2005). entrambi questi ragazzi **due questi ragazzi (It.)
Cardinaletti and Giusti (2015) claim that the Italian distal ‘both these boys’ ‘two these boys’
demonstrative is an uninflected determiner (que), which
must cooccur with an overt article to compensate for the Universal quantifiers can/must be postnominal in
lack of concord (24a), unlike the proximal demonstrative (most) Romance languages when they are combined
questo, which has full inflection of its own and, for this with a personal pronoun: It. noi tutti/tutti noi, Pt. todos
reason, is incompatible with an article (24b). This analysis nos/nos todos, Fr. nous tous/**tous nous; Ro. noi toţi/**toţi
can be extended to Romanian acel/acest: noi. Romanian, and old French, can invert the position of
Q also when it is followed by an unmodified N: Ro. copiii
(24) a. [Det [que/ace]+art. [ . . . ]] (It. / Ro.) (??frumoşi)toţi ‘boys=the (??beautiful.PL) all’ (cf. Giusti
1997), OIt. i Ciciliani tutti ‘the Sicilians all’ (Nov. I, line
b. [Det questGend.Num/acestGend.Num (**art.) [ . . . ]]
51; Giusti 2010b:394).
The position of determiners is more fixed in Romance
Since distal and proximal demonstratives have the same
than in Latin, but it is freer than the position of the article,
distribution, their different morphology does not justify the
which is the canonical element that occupies the functional
assumption that one is more or less functional than the other.
head Det(erminer), and the only one in this position accord-
Co-occurrence of a determiner and a determiner-like
ing to Giusti (1993; 1997; 2002). If the syntactic category Det
modifier is common in Latin. The unmarked order is the
were an innovation in Romance, and if determiners had
same as in Romance: Omnes eas ciuitates ‘all those cities’
shifted to this category, we would expect a uniform
(Caes., B.G., 2,32,1); his tantis malis ‘[to] these many misdeeds’
article-like behaviour of all determiners, contrary to fact.
(Cic., Sest., 35), illam primam libidinis iniuriam ‘that first [of]
violent desire crime’ (Cic., Clu., 188); huius condicionis meae
‘[of] this condition [of] mine’ (Cic., Mil., 79). Most of these co-
occurrences remain possible in Romance. For example a
30.3.2 Demonstratives
possessive adjective can co-occur in almost all Romance
languages with an article or a demonstrative: It. un/questo Latin has a complex system: HIC, ILLE, ISTE (spatial collocation),
libro mio, Cat. un/aquest llibre meu, Sp. un/este libro mío, Ro. o/ IPSE, IDEM, IS (discourse collocation) (cf. Carlier and De Mulder
această carte (de-)a mea ‘a/this book of mine’. Modern French 2010). Romance has only the spatial dimension, often
is a notable exception un/ce livre à moi ‘a/this book to me’ vs reduced to a binary system (cf. §§54.1.1-2): OFr. cil/cist, It.
**un/ce livre mien ‘a/this book mine’. quello/questo, Ro. acest/acel; the tripartite system survives in
Demonstratives and quantifiers can also co-occur, with Sp. este/ese/aquel, Pt. este/esse/aquele, written (formal) Cat.
interesting restrictions of order; for example the numeral (and Vlc.) aquest/aqueix/aquell, where the medial form
‘two’ and the universal dual quantifier ‘both’ display oppos- derives from IPSE (Harris 1978a:71), and in Tsc. questo/co-
ite orders with respect to the demonstrative in Romanian desto/quello where the proximal and the medial forms derive
and Italian: from ISTE. The discourse function of IPSE/IDEM has been taken
up by determiner-like adjectives derived from them (such as
(25) a. aceşti doi băieţi **aceşti amândoi băieţi (Ro.) It. stesso, medesimo, Sp. mismo, Fr. même) and also by some
questi due ragazzi **questi entrambi ragazzi (It.) new determiner-like adjectives which despite their partici-
‘these two boys’ ‘these both boys’ pial form are very high in the nominal structure and cannot
550
be predicates: It. il problema è **(il) suddetto/medesimo ‘the The order observed in Spanish (art.-(A)-N-(A)-Dem) is not
problem is (the) above-mentioned/same’. attested in Iovino’s corpus of Latin. Batllori and Roca (2000)
Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, and Romanian may also have note that postnominal demonstratives are not found in old
postnominal demonstratives with two similarities: they co- Spanish and conclude that this order is an innovation in
occur with a definite article and precede indirect modifica- modern Spanish. The second position in Romanian is also
tion. However, they can be preceded by direct modification very different from Latin, in that it can never be preceded
in Spanish and Catalan, but not in Romanian (26a,b). In this by an adjective, although prenominal adjectives can quite
language a postnominal demonstrative is compatible only naturally be inflected with the definite article: Ro. băiatul
with indirect modification following it (26b-c): acesta frumos ‘boy=the this nice’/frumosul (**acesta) băiat
‘nice=the this boy (= this nice boy)’ (Giusti 1993; 1997).
(26) a. la reacción {alemana} esta/esa {**alemana} (Sp.) Furthermore, only ILLE ‘that’ can be second between N and
Adj (§30.2.5), while in Romanian both acel ‘that’ and acest
b. reacţia {**germană} aceasta {??germană} (Ro.)
‘this’ can be postnominal.
‘this German reaction’
c. reacţia aceasta violentă (Ro.)
reaction=the this violent
30.3.3 Articles
‘this violent reaction’
Articles mark a substantial change between Latin and
A demonstrative can combine with a locative adverb that Romance (cf. §46.3.1.1). Nominal arguments may appear
may/must be separate from it, but is strictly related to it: It. with no determiner in Latin, while in Romance null deter-
questo libro qui/**lì ‘this book here/there’, quel libro lì/**qui miners are only possible in the indefinite interpretation of
‘that book there/here’. French has a single demonstrative plural count nouns and singular mass nouns in argument
that can optionally combine with two different locatives ce positions: Cat. llegiré (les/unes) novelles ‘I will read (the/some)
livre-ci/là (cf. §§54.1.1.-2 for their pragmatic interpretation), novels’ with the exception of the preverbal subject position:
but old French displays the opposition cist/cil. Brugè (1996; Cat. **(els/uns) ordinadors es van espatllar ‘(the/some) com-
2002) claims that across languages demonstratives are posi- puters break’. French has no null determiner, employing
tioned quite low in the structure of modifiers and are then instead the so-called ‘partitive article’ (also found in Italian)
moved to the referential layer. The postnominal demon- formed by de ‘of ’ + definite article (cf. §6.4.2): Fr. Je lirai des
strative in Spanish and Catalan is in the same position as the romans ‘I will.read of.the.PL novels’, or the bare de in the
distant locative. This suggests that the distant locative can complement of uninflected quantifiers like beaucoup (‘a lot’)
be taken to reflect the underlying position of the demon- or pas (‘no/not’): Je lirai beaucoup de romans ‘I will.read a.lot
strative even in languages like Italian or French where of novels’; Je ne lirai pas de romans ‘I NEG=will.read not of
demonstratives are always prenominal (also cf. Bernstein novels’. Renzi (1985:191f.) reports that this is an innovation
1997): limited to Gallo-Romance, and extended to Tuscan through
contact with old French. However, Ledgeway (2009a:189f.)
(27) a. [Det [art. el] [cuadro redondo [este de aquí ]]] (Sp.) reports it to be also present in old Neapolitan. It originally
consisted of the element de only later inflected with what
b. [Det [este] [cuadro redondo [ este de aquí]]] (Sp.)
looks like the definite article (Carlier 2007). The indefinite
c. [Det [questo] [quadro tondo [questo qui]]] (It.) usage of de, with mass nouns is already found in late Latin de
this painting round here sancta cera super eam posui ‘of holy wax on her I.put’ (Greg. of
‘this round painting’ Tours, Iul. 24, p. 575,9), with mass nouns referring to edibles
in old Portuguese, old Spanish, Dalmatian, Sardinian, and
The position of demonstratives, numerals, quantifiers, southern Italian dialects, but not Romanian. However, only
and possessives, is prevalently prenominal in Latin in French, Occitan, and Italian was this use extended to
(Marouzeau 1922; Iovino 2012:37-44). In Iovino’s corpora of plural count nouns, and further inflected with the definite
simple and complex nominals, 75-80% of the demonstra- article (cf. Cardinaletti and Giusti 2015).
tives are leftmost: huic uni crimini ‘to this one crime’ (Cic., There is no direct correlation between the presence of
Clu., 48). In complex nominals the remaining 20-25% are in the indefinite plural determiner and the presence of the
second position, most of them are preceded by an adjective indefinite clitic pronoun Fr./Cat. en, It. ne. Nor is there a
of any class, but very rarely by the noun: singularis illa direct correlation between the possibility of a null plural
integritas prouincialis (lit. ‘special that honesty provincial’) indefinite and the absence of an overt indefinite formed by
‘that special provincial honesty’ (Cic., Sest., 13) (cf. §30.5). de, or plural ONE. There is at most the implication that only
551
GIULIANA GIUSTI
Table 30.4 Distribution of indefinite clitic and indefinite determiners

FR . IT . OFR . OIT . SITR . CAT . PT . SP . RO .
en/ne + + + + + + – – –
de+art. + + – – – – – – –
Ø – + + + + + + + +
un(o)s – – + – – + + + –
languages with the indefinite/genitive clitic have the indef- numerals are ambiguous, while alcuni ‘some’ is not: (i)
inite determiner derived from the genitive preposition (but molti/pochi/tre libri ‘the many/few/three books’, (**gli) alcuni
this may just be fortuitous) (Table 30.4). libri ‘the some books’.
In old Romance, there are few exceptions to the general Existential quantifiers select indefinite nominals, which
rule that definite descriptions must be introduced by a have a null determiner or a marker of indefiniteness like de
definite article. Occurrence of a universal quantifier can ‘of ’ in French: plusieurs enfants/beaucoup d’enfants several/
dispense with a definite article (Buridant 2000:165; Giusti many (of) children’. Universal quantifiers take definite nom-
2010b:387), e.g. OIt. tutte (le) buone cose ‘all (the) good things’ inals, which must have a definite article: Ro. toate zilele ‘all
(Sommetta par. 31), OFr. De tutes dames ki i sunt ‘of all (the) days=the’, Fr. tous les jours ‘all the days’. In Ladin the feminine
women that are there’ (Rosei, 112), tous les uit jours ‘all the singular ‘one’ selects an indefinite singular nominal intro-
eight days’ (FilleCP, 15, 406). A prenominal possessor may duced by an indefinite article [Q øna [NGr na skwadra]] ‘one [a]
dispense with a definite article (Giusti 2010a: 367): OIt. sua team’ (Haiman and Benincà 1992). The universal/existential
materia e llo suo officio ‘its argument and the its use’ (Bru- distinction is irrelevant to the Q vs Adj nature of a quantity
netto, Rettorica p.4, l. 6,). Coordinated structures have main- item. Romanian has two ways of expressing universal dual
tained the property of dispensing with articles throughout quantity: [Q amândoi [NGr băieţii]] ‘both boys=the’, [NGr [Adjam-
Romance: It. marito e moglie, Fr. mari et femme ‘husband and bii] băieţi]] ‘both=the boys’ (Giusti 1997).
wife’ (Heycock and Zamparelli 2003). Being external to the nominal group, quantifiers can
Renzi (1985:144-6) locates the crucial point of formation of appear in discontinuous positions. This construction usually
the definite article in the sixth century, a period of social and called ‘floating’ only affects subjects in Romance: Fr. les
political upheaval, where contacts were certainly not as enfants sont tous arrivés ‘the children have all arrived’, It. i
frequent and easy as they had been. The origin of the article bambini sono {tutti} arrivati {tutti} ‘the children have {all}
is therefore surprisingly homogeneous, ILLE in most of arrived {all}’, and not objects: Fr. **j’ai vu les enfants hier
Romance, IPSE in Sardinian, old Occitan, and some varieties tous, It. **ho visto i bambini ieri tutti ‘I have seen the children
of Catalan (Aebischer 1948; Bauer 2007; Selig 1992; Naudeau yesterday all’. Sportiche (1988) claims that this asymmetry
1982; Ledgeway 2012a:95-110). Furthermore, the syntactic is due to the fact that the floating construction is the result
behaviour of the article is surprisingly similar across of movement of the subject from a VP-internal position to a
Romance, especially if compared with the microvariation preverbal position within the Infl(ectional) domain of the
found inside individual languages. These two observations sentential core (cf. §31.1). In Giusti (1990), I extend this
suggest that the structure allowing such a development was proposal to object clitics: Li ho visti tutti ‘them= I.have seen
well-established before the sixth century. Thus, the syntactic all‘. Some Romance languages have an indefinite object
innovation leading to the formation of the article cannot be clitic which can appear with a distant existential quantifier:
the development/enrichment of functional structure, but Ne ho visti alcuni ‘of.them= I.saw some/nice’. The floating
just the overt realization of a feature in the Det(erminer) construction differentiates quantity adjectives from quanti-
position, namely case, which is no longer associated with N. fiers. For example, in Romanian, clitic extraction is possible
from the quantifier (amândoi) but not from the adjective
(ambii): I-am văzut pe amândoi/**ambii (cf. Giusti 1997).
30.3.4 Quantifiers
Quantification can be expressed by many lexical items

(Giusti 1991; Cardinaletti and Giusti 2006), including 30.4 Possessives
adverbs, nouns, adjectives, and quantifiers. In some cases
the same root is ambiguous between a quantifier and an Possessive adjectives and possessive nominal groups have
adjective categorization. It. molti, pochi ‘many, few’ and many properties in common.
552
30.4.1 Possessive adjectives According to Cardinaletti and Starke (1999) neither weak
nor clitic pronouns can be stressed or coordinated. It is
therefore difficult to decide whether the phonologically
Possessive adjectives are at the same time pronominal (in
deficient possessive is clitic or weak: Sp. **mis y tus libros
that they refer to an antecedent) and adjectival (in that they
‘my and your books’. However, it is different from the
concord for gender and number with the noun). This dual
possessive proclitic found on kinship terms (§30.1.4) and
nature as arguments and modifiers allows two basic posi-
from clausal clitics, in that it does not need an overt host,
tions at the extremes of the hierarchy of direct modifica-
and can procliticize on different categories (N or Adj).
tion. This is already the case in Latin, where the two
Literary Romanian presents some residual possessive
positions interact with a large degree of freedom in the
enclitic pronouns on common nouns: cartea-mi ‘book=my’,
placement of N. The low position after relational adjectives
which have not been productive since the seventeenth
is often, but not necessarily, postnominal: erilis noster filius
century (cf. Cornilescu 1994).
‘master.ADJ our son (=our master’s son)’ (Pl., Epid., 20); ad
campestres exercitationes suas ‘to field practices his (= to his
field practices)’ (Suet., Nero, 10). The high position before
quantitative adjectives and immediately after a demonstra-
tive is often, but not necessarily, prenominal: sua tanta 30.4.2 Genitive possessives
eloquentia ‘his great eloquence’ (Cic., Orat., 100), haec mea
oratio ‘this my speech’ (Cic., Sest., 31). The high and low Romanian has maintained an oblique (dative) case, valued
positions are maintained in most of Romance, albeit subject as genitive only when it immediately follows a (nominal
to preference, e.g. It. la {mia} vecchia scuola elementare {mia} marker homophonous to the) definite article. Note that the
‘the {my} old school elementary {my}) ‘my old primary same restriction applies to a possessive adjective: băiatul
school’. Giusti (2008) analyses the low and the high position Mariei/meu ‘Maria’s/my boy’, **acest băiat Mariei/meu ‘this
as being parallel to the VP-internal and canonical preverbal boy [of] Maria’s/ [of] mine’. If there is no definite article, or
(Infl-related) position of subjects. In other words, possessive if the possessor is not immediately adjacent to it, a genitive
adjectives are like arguments that are generated together marker (originally) a < AD ‘to, at’ inflected for the definite
with their selecting head (where they are assigned the article concording for gender and number (not case) with
appropriate theta-role) and must/can be moved to a higher the selecting N, is inserted: un băiat al Mariei/ al meu ‘a.M.SG
position where they are assigned case. This is in line with boy.MSG a.art.MSG Maria.GEN’: băiatului acestuia al(**ui) Mariei/
the generally accepted observation that possessives func- al(**ui) meu ‘boy.art.MSG.GEN this.MSG.GEN a.art.MSG Maria.GEN’.
tion as ‘subjects’ of the nominal group. A strict adjacency restriction applies, as shown by the fact
In §30.2.2, I noted that possessive adjectives, in contrast that the second conjunct must display the possessive
to relational adjectives, can bind anaphors: Fr. son admiration marker: parinţii Mariei şi **(ai) Rodicăi ‘parents=the.M.PL
pour soi-même ‘his/her admiration for himself/herself ’. This Maria.GEN.SG and a=the.M.PL Rodica.GEN.SG her (= Mary and
shows that possessive adjectives have a referential value Rodica’s parents)’ (cf. Cornilescu 1994; Dobrovie-Sorin 1994).
like personal pronouns, while relational adjectives do not. The genitive marker a is uninflected before quantified nom-
Parallel to personal pronouns, possessives have developed inals preţul a patru cărţi ‘price=the a four books (= the price of
the deficient/strong opposition in many Romance lan- four books)’ vs preţul celor patru cărţi ‘price=the the.GEN.PL four
guages (cf. Lyons 1986; Cardinaletti 1998). Like all weak books (= the price of the four books)’ (Lombard 1974:105). For
pronouns, weak possessives are attracted to the higher por- another discussion of these facts, see §8.5.1.2.
tion of the functional structure, while strong pronouns Non-prepositional genitive is found with some special
remain in what is presumably their underlying position: nouns, such as casa ‘home’ which can occupy the Det pos-
Sp. mi libro ‘my.WEAK book’/el libro mío ‘the book my.STRONG’. ition, e.g. OIt. casa il conte ‘house the count (= the count’s
The prenominal weak possessive may have no gender or house)’ (Longobardi 1996; Delfitto and Paradisi 2009); and
number morphology: Ven. el/i me libro/libri ‘the.MSG/PL my.WEAK more productively in the cas régime absolu ‘bare oblique case’
book.MSG/PL’. Venetan also shows that a weak possessive is not in old French (Buridant 2000:91-96): OFr. el ventre la balaine
necessarily in complementary distribution with the deter- ‘in.the belly [of] the whale’ (ElieSG, 3607), la fille son oste ‘the
miner. On the other hand, the complementary distribution daughter [of] his host (Erec,744). This construction has many
with an article is not a guarantee of weak status: BrPt. minha restrictions: (i) the relation between N1 and N2 is preferably
amiga ‘my friend’ vs uma amiga minha ‘a my friend (= a friend of inalienable possession or kinship; (ii) N2 is preferably
of mine)’, where the possessive has the same form in different human; (iii) N1 has a definite article and is not modified
positions, and the prenominal (presumably strong) posses- by any adjective; (iv) N2 is adjacent to N1. This is reminis-
sive dispenses with the definite article. cent of genitive case assignment in Romanian, which is also
553
GIULIANA GIUSTI
incompatible with any direct modification băiatul Mariei b. le GRANDI(SSIME) sue ultime grandi belle mele rosse (It.)
(boy=the:Maria.GEN) ‘Mary’s boy’ vs băiatul frumos **(al) Mariei the large(.SUPERL) his last beautiful apples red
‘boy=the beautiful a.art Maria.GEN (= Mary’s beautiful boy)’.
c. le ROSS(ISSIM)E sue ultime belle grandi mele rosse (It.)
Non-prepositional genitive is also found in Asturian and
the red(.SUPERL) his last beautiful large apples
colloquial Spanish, with the further condition that the two
nouns have the same specification for (in)definiteness: Ast. d. le ULTIM(ISSIM)E sue ultime belle grandi mele rosse (It.)
un cistu cerece ‘a basket [of] chickpeas’, Sp. unas cestas man- the last(.SUPERL) his beautiful large apples red
zanas ‘some baskets [of] apples’, las cestas las manzanas ‘the
baskets of the apples’; and in southern Italo-Romance, espe- These marked orders can be analysed by assuming that the
cially with kinship terms and the noun casa (cf. Silvestri referential layer is composed of more than one position.
2012). In particular, in Italian it appears that between Det and a
In Wallon, genitive is expressed with a preposition as in high possessive adjective delimiting the denotational layer,
French, e.g. Wal. on bokèt d’ bwès (cf. Fr. un morceau de bois) ‘a we can find an adjective of any type, provided it is empha-
piece of wood’; but in cases in which the possessor is a sized (I proposed that it carries the discourse feature
proper name, Remacle (1952:88) highlights three diachronic ‘contrast’).
stages: a first stage with a prenominal possessive immedi- Latin has a parallel structure, except that this contrast
ately after the definite article: lu Pîron tchan ‘the Pîron field’; position is situated above Det (Giusti and Iovino 2010). It can
an intermediate stage of cas régime absolu ‘bare oblique case’: host any class of modifier; relational: equestria haec spolia
lu tchan Pîron ‘the field Pîron‘, and a final stage with a ‘horse.Adj these remains (= these remains of horses)’, Liv.,
complex preposition formed by de ‘of ’ + à ‘to’: lu tchan d-à 8,7,13); descriptive: pulcherrimam hanc urbem ‘beautiful.SUPERL
Pîron ‘the field of-to Pîron (= Pîron’s field)’. this city’ (Tac., Hist., 1,84,4); numeral: de tribus his generibus
‘about three these kinds’ (Cic., Rep., 3,47); possessive: noster
hic populus ‘our this people’ (Cic., Rep., 3,18). The difference
between Romance and Latin is therefore the position of the
30.5 The left periphery of the left periphery with respect to Det, as in (30):
nominal group (30) a. [LeftPer.Det [contr.Adj [denot.layer . . . N . . . ]]] (Romance)
b. [[LeftPer.contr.Adj [Det [denot.layer . . . N ]]]] (Latin)
At different points in this chapter, I have mentioned parallel
properties between the nominal group and the verbal group Giusti and Oniga (2007) and Giusti and Iovino (2010)
or the clause (see Ch. 31). Parallel to the verb, the noun can suggest that the Latin left peripheral position creates dis-
have arguments. Parallel to the clause, its ‘subject’ is continuous orders (so-called hyperbata). In (31a) magna con-
attracted to a position immediately lower than the left cords with premia in the direct modification position, then it
peripheral layer. This section briefly discusses another less moves to the left periphery of the nominal group and from
obvious parallel; namely, the possibility of the left periph- there it is further displaced to a Topic position within the
eral area of the nominal group being composed of more left periphery of the clause immediately lower than the
than one position hosting Det and discourse pragmatic position of the relative pronoun cui. A similar analysis applies
features, also interacting with extractions from the nominal to the distant position of the genitive nominal auaritiae
group. in (31b):
Giusti (1996; 2006) discusses marked cases where the
direct modification hierarchy (28) is apparently violated, (31) a. [CP cui [Adj magna] [Infl Pompeius [VP [NGr [Adj magna]
as in (29): whom.DAT great.ACC Pompey.NOM
praemia]] tribuit]]]
(28) Det > Possessive > Numeral > Quality > Dimension > prizes.ACC attributed
Shape > N > Colour > ‘to whom Pompey gave great prizes’ (Caes. B.G. 3.4)
le sue ultime belle grandi tonde mele rosse (It.) b. ut [NGr2 auaritiae] [ pellatur etiam
‘[the] her last beautiful large round red apples’ so.that self-seeking.GEN be-eliminated even
[NGr1 [NGr2 auaritiae] minima suspicio]]
(29) a. le BELL(ISSIM)E sue belle ultime minimal.NOM suspicion.NOM
the beautiful(.SUPERL) his last ‘so that even the slightest suspicion of self-seeking
grandi mele rosse (It.) may be eliminated’
large apples red (Cic., Off. lib. 2, cap. 21, §75, p. 80, lin. 21)
554
Extraction from the nominal group is found in Romance b. **[Adj Tua] ho conosciuto [NGr [Adj tua]
(e.g., Italian) with possessive prepositional constituents your.F.SG. I.have met
(PPs) and clitic ne (32d), but not with adjectives (33): sorella].
sister
(32) a. [PP di chi] conosci tutti [NGr gli amici [PP di chi]]?
of whom [do you] know all the friends Extraction of a genitive is impossible in Romanian, with
or without the insertion of the inflected possessive marker
b. Gianni, [PP di cui] apprezzo [NGr la grande generosità al: **Ion, (al) cărui îl apreciez talent ‘Ion, (al=art) who.MSG.GEN
Gianni, of whom I.appreciate the great generosity it.M I.appreciate talent.M’.
[PP di cui]] The different ordering of the Det(erminer) and the
c. Solo [PP di GIANNI] sono riuscita a conoscere contrast position in (31) cannot be the (only) grounds
only of Gianni I.was able to meet for the possibility or impossibility of extracting an adjec-
[NGr tutte le amiche [PP di Gianni]] tive or an argument. It is more reasonable to suppose that
all the friends the different licensing conditions for modifiers and geni-
tive case assignment interact considerably in this respect.
d. [Ne] hanno appena annunciato [NGr il The fact that adjectives concord with N and that N does
of.him= they.have just announced the not have case morphology in Romance, ‘freezes’ the
matrimonio [PP ne] [pp con un’ereditiera] adjective in the NGr. As regards possessive NGr, it appears
marriage with an heiress that extraction is only possible with the insertion of a
possessive marker, such as the preposition di ‘of ’ in Ital-
(33) a. **[AdjSimpatica] ho conosciuto [NGr la ian. The inflected possessive marker a in Romanian, con-
nice.F.SG. I.have met the cords for gender and number with the selecting N and
[Adj simpatica] sorella di Gianni]. therefore behaves like adjectives, remaining ‘frozen’
sister of Gianni inside the NGr.
555
CHAPTER 31
The structure of the clause

31.1 Overview of clause subject Radu situated to its left in the dedicated preverbal
subject position:1
The positions indicated in the linear template in (1) exem-
(3) [Infl Subject Aux [VP Adverb Verb Object(s)
plified from Calabrian reflect the standard idea that the
Radu a tot câştigat bani
clause begins with the verb phrase (VP), in which the lexical
Adjunct(s)]]
verb (fumava) is first combined with its complements
la pocher. (Ro.)
(i sigarette) and then with any optional adjunct elements
‘Radu has continuously won money at poker.’
(a sira). This complex constituent is, in turn, combined
with any pre-VP-adverbs (mancu) under whose scope it
The confines of the sentential core can therefore be iden-
falls and, ultimately with the subject (Cicciu).
tified with the preverbal subject position situated at the left
edge of the Infl domain and the complement or adjunct
(1) [VP Subject Adverb Verb Object(s) Adjunct(s)]
position situated at the right edge of VP (4a). To this, we
Cicciu mancu fumava i sigarette a sira. (Cal.)
can add a further layer of structure, the so-called higher left
Cicciu not.even smoked the cigarettes the evening
periphery (LP) of the clause which includes the rich syntactic
‘Cicciu didn’t even smoke cigarettes in the evening.’
space immediately to the left of the of the sentential core
(4b) which hosts, among other things, complementizers (viz.
We thus see that the traditional semantic notions of sub-
subordinators) and topicalized and focused elements, as
ject (AGENT) and object (UNDERGOER) are unambiguously mapped
illustrated in the expanded version of (3) in (5):
onto two distinct positions to the left and right of the tran-
sitive verb, respectively. With intransitives, by contrast, the
(4) a. [Core [Infl S (Aux) [VP (S) V O (X)]]]
grammatical subject can be aligned with either of these
b. [LP Comp Top/Foc [Core [Infl S (Aux) [VP (S) V O (X)]]]]
positions in accordance with its semantic interpretation,
allowing us to distinguish between unergative and unaccusa-
(5) [LP Comp [Infl Subject Aux [VP Adverb
tive intransitive subjects (see §50.2): the former have an
Cred că Radu a tot
agentive interpretation and are to all intents and purposes
‘I.believe that Radu has continuously
identical to transitive subjects, bar the presence of an object,
Verb Object(s) Adjunct(s)]]]
occurring in preverbal position (2a), whereas the latter are
câştigat bani la pocher. (Ro.)
interpreted as UNDERGOERS and consequently pattern with
won money at poker.’
objects typically occurring in the postverbal position (2b).
(2) a. Cicciu mancu fumava. (Cal.) 31.2 Sentential core

Cicciu not.even smoked
‘Cicciu didn’t even smoke.’ 31.2.1 Lower left periphery
b. Supru fuocu fumava na cassarola. (Cal.)
On a par with the fine structure of the higher left periphery
on.the fire smoked a pot
of the clause discussed in detail below in §31.3 (see also §34),
‘On the stove a pot was steaming away.’
The sentential core, however, extends beyond the lexical

VP to include an Infl(ectional) domain, the locus of verbal 1
Other elements hosted within the Infl domain discussed elsewhere in
inflection hosting such elements as the perfective auxiliary the volume are subject clitics (Ch. 47), object clitics (Ch. 48), and negation
a in (3) which licenses through subject-verb agreement the (Ch. 51).
556 This chapter © Silvio Cruschina and Adam Ledgeway 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE CLAUSE
the VP also makes available an extended lower left periph- b. Que ’m harta, lo ton ahar. (Gsc.)
ery composed of a series of disourse-related positions avail- that =me satisfies the your matter
able to host topicalized and focused constituents (6a; cf. ‘I’m satisfied with this matter of yours.’
Belletti 2001; 2004b; 2005; Poletto 2006a; 2007; 2010:71f.,
73f.; 2014). Exemplifying from old Tuscan, we can therefore
As indicated by the question-answer pairs in (7), the
identify within the clausal structure two left peripheries
postverbal lexical subject en Pere variously receives an infor-
(LP), a higher one (LP1) related to the clausal superordinate
mationally focused (7a) and a topicalized (7b) reading, con-
functional structure and a lower one (LP2) related to the
veying, new and old information, respectively. Identical
subordinate VP domain, whose left edges offer competing
considerations hold for the contrastively focused and top-
topic and focus positions, as illustrated by the higher and
icalized readings of the Gascon postverbal subjects in (8a,b).
lower positions of the focused quantifier tutto ‘everything’
Significantly, in both (7b) and (8b) the topicalized interpret-
in the near minimal pair (6b,c):2
ations are further marked at the prosodic level by an inton-
ational pause (orthographically by a comma) between the
(6) a. [LP1 _____ [Infl Aux [LP2 _____ [VP V ]]]]
participle and the postverbal subject.
b. [LP1 quando TUTTO [INFL ebbe [LP2 _____ [VP dato tutto]]]] In view of the marked status of postverbal subjects which
when all he.had given receive a focused or topicalized reading, it is natural to inter-
(OTsc., Nov.) pret this pragmatic effect as a direct reflex of a particular
structural configuration which licenses the observed inter-
c. [LP1 ch’ _____ [Infl avea [LP2TUTTO [VPdonato tutto]]]]
pretations. In the particular cases at hand, we take the appar-
that he.had all given
ently low position of the subject to indicate that it has moved
(OTsc., Nov.)
to a focus or topic position in the lower left periphery.4
‘[ . . . ] when/that he had given everything’
(9) a. [Ha sopat/vingut [LP2 [Top/Foc en Pere/en Pere]
By assuming within the sentential domain two left per-
[VP en Pere sopat/vingut]]]
ipheries at the level of the clause and the VP, we can explain
a certain degree of optionality and variation in the syntactic b. [ . . . domandat/harta [LP2 [Top/Foc lo ton ahar/JO]
distribution of topicalized and focused constituents in old [VP lo ton ahar/jo domandat/harta]]]
and modern Romance and across its many diatopic var-
ieties. Consider, for instance, the examples of postverbal Evidence that the postverbal subject occupies a low pos-
subjects in (7, 8).3 ition in the clausal structure is provided by examples like
(10), where the subject clearly precedes the verbal (prepos-
(7) a. Qui ha sopat / vingut? — Ha sopat / itional) complement which has remained in situ within the
who has dined come has dined VP. At the same time, the obligatory position of the lexical
vingut en Pere. (Cat.) subject to the right of adverbs like bene ‘well’, which mark
come the Pere the left margin of the VP (cf. §31.2.2.1), demonstrates that
‘Who dined/came? — Pere dined/came.’ the subject sits immediately above the VP in the lower left
b. Què ha fet en Pere? — Ha periphery.
what has done the Pere has
sopat / vingut, en Pere. (Cat.) (10) Spiegherà (**Maria/**MARIA) bene(,) Maria/MARIA
spoken come the Pere will.explain Maria well Maria
‘What did Pere do? — Pere, he dined/came.’ al direttore.5 (It.)
to.the manager
(8) a. Que l’ac èi domandat JO. (Gsc.) ‘MARIA will/Maria, she will explain (it) correctly to the
that this= I.have asked I manager.’
‘It was me who asked for it.’
If we replace the verb in (10) with a predicate that selects
for a direct object such as conoscere ‘to know’, the structure
2
In what follows we indicate topicalized consituents with underlining,
4
contrastively focalized constituents with small capitals, and all other types The underlying base position of displaced constituents is indicated
of focus (e.g. informational) with bold. with strikethrough.
3 5
See Cardinaletti (1997; 2004), Cecchetto (1999), Villalba (2000), Belletti On the mildly deviant nature of V+S+PP sentences with informationally
(2001; 2004b; 2005a), Ordóñez (2007), González i Planas (2009), López (2009). focused subject, see Belletti (2004b).
557
proves ungrammatical (11). This has been explained by b. (**Chi rispose al telefono?) — CARLO rispose
Belletti (2004b; 2005) as a case-licensing intervention effect: who replied to.the telephone Carlo replied
whereas with a prepositional complement such as (10) the al telefono, non io. (It.)
object is case-licensed locally by the immediately governing to.the telephone not I
preposition (viz. [PP P[+Case] [NP OBJ[+Case]]]), in (11) the licensing ‘(Who answered the phone? —) It was Carlo who
verb is situated just above the postverbal subject from where answered the phone, not me.’
it cannot case-mark its complement because of the interven-
ing subject (viz. . . . V[+Case] [Top/Foc SUBJ [VP [NP OBJ[_Case]]]]. Although many modern Romance varieties appear to
parallel Italian in licensing contrastive focus in the higher
(11) Conosce (**Maria/**MARIA) bene **Maria/MARIA il left periphery, informational focus is not invariably licensed
knows Maria well Maria the in the lower periphery in all varieties, including in medieval
direttore. (It.) Romance (cf. §§31.3.3-4).6
manager Finally, another significant difference, this time between
‘Maria knows the manager well.’ old and modern Romance, concerns the position of constitu-
ents of the VP in participial and infinitival clauses in con-
This explanation, in turn, provides an immediate account junction with perfective auxiliary and restructuring
of why Romanian and Spanish are widely reported (Dobro- predicates, respectively. Whereas in modern Romance all
vie-Sorin 1994; Motapanyane 1989; Zagona 2002:214-16; constituents standardly remain within the non-finite VP, in
Sheehan 2006; Gutiérrez-Bravo 2007; Corr 2012; Pană old Romance such constituents could frequently precede
Dindelegan 2013b:119-25; Vasilescu 2013c; Zafiu 2013b), in the participal and infinitival verb (14a-d), a fact which
contrast to Italian and French, to license VSO orders (cf. Poletto (2006a, 2007, 2010, 2014) has convincingly inter-
§§34.3.1, 62.3), since they also employ the prepositional preted as a case of Verb Second (cf. also Ledgeway
accusative (cf. §56.3.2.4) to mark (typically specific, ani- 2009a:761-5): in the same way that the higher left periphery
mate) direct objects with the prepositions a ‘to, at’ and pe is characterized by a V2 requirement, this same require-
‘on’, respectively (12c,d). It follows that in VSO sequences ment is claimed to percolate down to the lower left periph-
the object is always case-licensed in Romanian and Spanish ery which also regularly attracts the non-finite verb and any
by a governing preposition (presumably covert in the case pragmatically salient constituents. It follows that when V2
of non-specific and/or inanimate objects), which is unavail- was lost in the higher periphery, it was correspondingly lost
able in Italian and French (12a,b). in the lower periphery.
(12) a. Maria conosce bene il direttore. (It.) (14) a. avea [LP [Foc TUTTO]
b. Marie connaît bien le directeur. (Fr.) he.had all
c. Maria îl cunoaşte bine pe director. (Ro.) dispeso [VP dispeso tutto]] (OIt., Nov.)
d. María (le) conoce bien a- l director. (Sp.) spent
Maria him= knows well on/to the manager ‘he had squandered everything’
‘Maria knows the manager well.’
b. si’ st [LP [Top a Deu] aturnét [VP aturnét a Deu]]
so is to God turned
Although there is a strong parallelism between the dis-
(OFr., Vie de S. Alexis)
course functions of the lower and higher peripheries, the
‘thus he has turned to God’
lower and higher focus positions are not necessarily inter-
changeable. In standard Italian, for example, the former c. m fas [LP [Foc e chaitiveza]
usually aligns with informational focus (13a), while the me= you.make in captivity
latter licenses a contrastively focused reading (with con- star [VP star e chaitiveza]] (OOcc., Boecis)
comitant marked intonational contour), typically correcting stay.INF
a previous assertion (13b). ‘you keep me in captivity’
(13) a. Chi rispose al telefono? — Rispose Carlo

who replied to.the telephone replied Carlo
al telefono (,**non io). (It.)
6
to.the telephone not I Cf. Vanelli (1986; 1999), Jones (1993:332-5), Benincà (1995; 2006),
Lombardi and Middleton (2004), Cruschina (2006; 2008; 2010a; 2012a),
‘Who answered the phone? — Carlo answered the Bentley (2007; 2008a:89-91), Poletto (2007; 2010; 2014), Mensching and
phone.’ Remberger (2010a,b), Zanini and Damonte (2010).
558
d. vulemo [LP [Top de cheste cose] [Foc VUI] (18) Allora non mi amava (**già / più)
we.want of these things you then not me= he.loved already / anymore
incarricare [VP incarricare vui de cheste mica (**più) già più. (It.)
entrust.INF not anymore already anymore
cose]] (ONap., Lettera del re Luigi d’Angiò‑Taranto e di ‘He already stopped loving me by then.’
Giovanni I)
‘we want to entrust you with these matters’ Facts like these suggest that different adverb classes are
distributed in a strictly ordered sequence, in turn mir-
rored by a rigidly fixed sequence of functional predicates
31.2.2 Inflectional domain (auxiliaries). This transparent semantic relationship
between the fixed order of adverbs on the one hand and
functional predicates on the other provides evidence that
The Infl(ectional) domain identified in (3) is commonly
each adverb lexicalizes the modifier position of a
interpreted as a general label for the rich inflectional area
semantically-associated functional category. The result is
of the sentential core made up of a series of auxiliary/
a highly articulated clause structure, considerably richer
functional verb positions dedicated to marking various tem-
in functional projections than has been traditionally
poral, aspectual, modal, and voice distinctions ranging over
assumed.
the VP, which can also be identified by the semantically
corresponding adverbial modifiers they license (Cinque
1999). Consider, for example, the following near- 31.2.2.1 Adverb classes and positions
synonymous pairs where the VP is variously embedded
under the predicates continuar/tornar ‘to continue/return’ On the basis of evidence like that just reviewed, we
and the adverbs todavía/ntorna ‘still/again’, both of which assume that different adverbs and their associated func-
can be assumed to lexicalize dedicated functional positions tional projections making up the inflectional core of the
encoding continuative/repetitive aspect, under whose clause can be broadly divided into two ‘spaces’ termed the
scope the verb and its arguments fall: Lower Adverb Space (LAS) and the Higher Adverb Space
(HAS):7
(15) a. Ana continúa [VP tocando el piano]. (Sp.)
Ana continues playing the piano (19) [Core [HAS S Adv . . . [LAS Adv . . . [VP Vlexical O]]]]
b. Ana todavía [VP toca el piano]. (Sp.) As illustrated from French and Portuguese, the HAS (20a)
Ana still plays the piano chiefly comprises modal categories variously spelt out by
‘Ana carries on playing the piano.’ speaker-oriented adverbs marking such categories as evi-
dential and volitional modality, whereas the LAS (20b) prin-
(16) a. Torna a [VP tronar]. (Cat.) cipally includes aspectual functional positions lexicalized by
it.returns to thunder.INF adverbial classes including terminative and perfective
b. Ntorna sta [VP trona]. (Lec.) aspects, with temporal positions variously scattered across
again PROG it.thunders both spaces.
‘It’s started thundering again.’
(20) a. MoodSpeechAct . . . > MoodEvidential . . . > TPast >
This does not exhaust all possibilities, witness the vari- sincèrement apparemment alors
ations on (15a) given in (17) in which the VP is embedded sinceramente aparentemente então
under several functional predicates. sincerely apparently then
MoodIrrealis > MoodVolitional > AspHabitual
(17) Ana ha debido poder intentar continuar peut-être exprès d’habitude (Fr.)
Ana has had.to be.able.INF try.INF continue.INF talvez de propósito usualmente (Pt.)
[VP tocando el piano]. (Sp.) perhaps generally usually
play.INF the piano
‘Ana had to be able to try to carry on playing the piano.’
To these observations, we can add that adverbs occur

cross-linguistically in a rigidly fixed order, witness the rep- 7
For discussion of the full range of evidence, see Cinque (1999; 2002;
resentative ordering restrictions illustrated in (18): 2004b; 2006), Ledgeway (2012a:§4.3; forthcoming d).
559
b. Neg > TAnterior > AspTerminative > AspPerfect > highlights how both orders are equally possible in that
pas déjà plus toujours language, an observation which leads us to hypothesize
não já mais sempre that the unexpected linearization mai + più in (22b) is
not already any more always derived from the regular underlying order più + mai through
AspCompletive > Voice incorporation of mai into the adverb più ( . . . non ha più mai
complètement bien (Fr.) vinto ) . . . non ha [[mai] più] mai vinto; cf. Cinque 1999:9f.).
completamente bem (Pt.)
completely well (23) À partir de ce moment, il n’ a plus
to leave from this moment he not has more
Excluding marked word orders such as topicalization and jamais/ jamais plus gagné. (Fr.)
focalization, this straightforwardly explains the strict never never more won
ordering of adverbs in examples such as (21a,b), and why ‘Since then, he’s never won again.’
higher adverbs precede those generated in the LAS:
At the appropriate level of abstraction, the relevant dif-
(21) a. [HAS Elle débitait apparemment alors [LAS déjà ference between Italian mai and French jamais is that the
she said apparently then already former, but not the latter, must obligatorily incorporate
toujours [VP débitait des bêtises monstres]]]. (Fr.) into più/plus. This same solution can be applied to the
always some stupidities monsters. competing orders in (24a), with the latter derived from
‘She apparently in those days was already always incorporating ancora ‘yet’ into mica ‘not’, a possibility once
coming out with ridiculous nonsense’ again replicated for French (24b).
b. [HAS Eu felizmente [LAS já faço sempre
(24) a. Non ho mica ancora / [[ancora] mica] ancora
I fortunately already I.do always
[VP capito] (It.)
bem [VP faço o back-up dos arquivos]]]. (Pt.)
well the back-up of.the files b. Je n’ ai pas encore / [[encore] pas]
‘I fortunately already always back up my files I not I.have not yet yet not
properly.’ encore [VP compris]. (Fr.)
understood
The individual adverbs given in (20a,b) are to be under- ‘I haven’t yet understood.’
stood as representative of a much wider selection of adverbs
from the same class including, for example, TAnterior: então
‘then’, (não . . . ) ainda ‘(not . . . ) yet’; Voice: manner adverbs
in ‑mente and measure adverbs (e.g. muito ‘much’). In this
31.2.2.2 Verb positions
respect, it is interesting to compare the differential behav- Not only can the Infl domain be lexicalized by distinct
iour of the adverbs ‘always’ and ‘(n)ever’ across Romance auxiliaries (cf. epistemic use of Catalan auxiliary deure
which, despite lexicalizing opposite values of a perfect ‘must’ to express supposition in (25a)) but, in the absence
aspectual position, and hence in complementary distribu- of the latter, may be overtly filled by the raised lexical verb
tion, display differing orders in conjunction with the higher where its finite inflectional features can be licensed, as with
terminative aspectual adverb più ‘any more’: the epistemic use of the future in substandard Catalan
(Badia i Margarit 1962, I:391) to express supposition in (25b).
(22) a. Lui non ha più sempre /**sempre
he not has any more always always (25) a. [Infl Deu [VP tenir raó]]. (Cat.)
più vinto, da allora. (It.) he.must have.INF reason
anymore won from then
b. [Infl Tindrá [VP tindrá raó]]. (coll. Cat.)
‘Since then, he hasn’t always won any more.’
he.will.have reason
b. Lui non ha **più mai / mai ‘He must be right.’
he not has any more never never
più vinto, da allora. (It.) Traditional broad-brush approaches to Romance verb
anymore won from then placement, which take all varieties to pattern uniformly in
‘Since then, he has never won any more.’ exhibiting overt verb raising as in (25b), fail to recognize a
number of significant differences across the different
However, a comparison with the corresponding French Romance varieties. Thus, although it is true that the
structures with plus ‘anymore’ and jamais ‘(n)ever’ in (23) Romance finite lexical verb invariably vacates the VP,
560
witness its position to the left of ‘completely’ situated at the c. [HAS Pot probabil (pot) sigur
right margin of the LAS in (26a-c), it lexicalizes different they.can probably they.can surely
positions within the Infl domain across Romance, as illus- [LAS deja spune asta despre mine]]. (Ro.)
trated by its differential position with respect to distinct already say.INF this about me
adverb classes. For example, in Spanish the finite verb ‘They probably can certainly already say this about
appears to target a rather low position to the right of the me.’
continuative aspectual adverb ‘still’, whereas in Italian it
d. [HAS Puedo afortunadamente (puedo) tal vez
raises slightly higher to the clause-medial position associated
I.can fortunately I.can perhaps
with habitual aspect, hence to the right of irrealis modal
(puedo)[LAS ya descansarme]]. (Sp.)
adverbs such as forse ‘perhaps’, whereas in French it occupies
I.can already rest.INF=me
the highest available position above all adverb classes.
‘I fortunately can perhaps already take a rest.’
(26) MoodIrrealis AspContinuative
(28) a. [HAS Indubitabil preţurile (pot) [LAS adesea
a. Tal vez todavía entiendo
Undoubtedly prices=the can often
b. Forse capisco ancora capisco
pot devia considerabil]]. (Ro.)
c. Je comprends peut-être compr. encore compr.
can deviate.INF considerably
I understand perhaps underst. still
‘Undoubtedly prices may frequently diverge
AspCompletive [VP . . . ]
considerably.’
completamente entiendo(Sp.)
completamente capisco (It.) b. [HAS Tal vez (quiere) [LAS todavía quiere
complètement compr. (Fr.) Perhaps he.wants still he.wants
underst. completely dormir]]. (Sp.)
‘Maybe I still completely understand.’ sleep.INF
‘Perhaps he still wants to sleep.’
In terms of the highly articulated functional structure of
the clause outlined in §31.2.2.1, we can interpret a number
Finite lexical verbs, on the other hand, show a more
of surface differences across Romance — although we limit
varied behaviour. In French they continue to occupy the
our comparison here to Italian, French, Romanian, and
highest position within the HAS (29a; Rowlett 2007:106f.),
Spanish — in terms of the differential position of the verb
whereas in Romanian and Spanish they typically lexicalize
in relation to different adverb classes.8 For instance, finite
the LAS (29c,d).10 Italian, by contrast, represents an inter-
auxiliaries in most Romance varieties typically target a
mediate case (29b) with the finite lexical verb targeting a
variety of distinct head positions within the HAS (27a-d),9
clause-medial position (AspHabitual) at the right margin of
although in Romanian and Spanish they also present the
the HAS (Cinque 1999:31, 110f., 180 n. 80; Ledgeway and
option of occurring in the LAS (28a,b):
Lombardi 2005:87f.):
(27) a. [HAS Ho francamente (ho) forse (ho) stupidamente
(29)
I’ve frankly I’ve perhaps I’ve stupidly
[HAS . . . [V-Medial [LAS . . . [VP V . . . ]]]]
(ho) [LAS bevuto troppo]]. (It.)
a. Elle connaît peut-être **connaît déjà **connaît la recette. (Fr.)
I’ve drunk too.much
b. Lei **conosce forse conosce già ?conosce la ricetta. (It.)
‘I’ve frankly perhaps drunk too much.’
c. Ea **ştie poate ?ştie deja ştie reţeta. (Ro.)
b. [HAS J’ai sincèrement (j’ai) probablement d. Ella **conoce tal vez ?conoce ya conoce la receta. (Sp.)
I’ve sincerely I’ve probably she knows perhaps knows already knows the recipe(=the)
(j’ai) [LAS trop exagéré]]. (Fr.) ‘Perhaps she already knows the recipe.’
I’ve too.much exaggerated
‘To be honest I probably went too far.’ These same assumptions about the fixed positions
of adverbs allow us to plot the differential position of
8
See Lois (1989), Pollock (1989), Belletti (1990:44f.), Kayne (1991), Cinque
(1999:152), Cornilescu (2000b:89-92), Alboiu and Motapanyane (2000:22-4),
10
Tortora (2002; 2010), Zagona (2002:162-4, 168-70), Ledgeway and Lombardi Lois (1989), Cinque (1999:152), Ledgeway and Lombardi (2005:86-9, 102
(2005:103-6), Fedele (2010), Schifano (2011; 2015), Ledgeway (2012:§4.3.2; n. 12), Monachesi (2005:178), D’Alessandro (2010:35f.). According to Cyrino
forthcoming d). (2010b), verb movement in Brazilian Portuguese also appears to target the
9
Cinque (1999:49f.), Ledgeway and Lombardi (2005:87), Monachesi LAS (in Cyrino’s analysis, the lower T2 position above adverbs like bem
(2005:134, 208). ‘well’).
561
non-finite verbs such as the active participle in the follow- d. Mi dispiace [HAS parlargli francamente
ing examples:11 me=it.displeases speak.INF=him frankly
(**parlargli) [VP parlargli così]]. (It.)
(30) [HAS [LAS AspPerfect VoiceManner [VP . . . ]]] speak.INF=him thus
a. j’ai **mangé toujours **mangé bien mangé. (Fr.) ‘I regret frankly speaking to him like that.’
b. ho mangiato sempre mangiato bene **mangiato. (It.)
c. am mâncat mereu **mâncat bine **mâncat. (Ro.)
d. he comido siempre **comido bien **comido. (Sp.) 31.2.2.3 Summary and conclusions
I’ve eaten always eaten well eaten
In light of the discussion above, Table 31.1 captures the
‘I’ve always eaten properly.’
essential surface differences across Romance in a highly
simple way in terms of the possible clausal positions/spaces
In contrast to the finite verb in (29a), the active participle
targeted by different verb forms.
stays very low in the clause within the LAS to the right of
In the literature there is no general consensus regarding
the manner adverb ‘well’ just above the VP (30a), whereas in
the correct interpretation of verb placement in different
Romanian and Spanish the active participle, unlike the
clausal positions (for an overview, see Schifano 2011; 2015),
finite verb in (30c,d), occupies the highest available position
although traditionally there have been many attempts to
in the HAS beyond the perfective aspectual position spelled
relate the extent of displacement to the richness or other-
out by the ‘always’ adverb (30c,d). In Italian, by contrast, the
wise of the inflectional Agr(eement) of the verb (Roberts
position of the active participle displays greater freedom,
1985; Lightfoot and Hornstein 1994; DeGraff 1997;
occurring at least above ‘well’ and possibly above ‘always’ in
Rohrbacher 1997; Vikner 1997), witness Baker’s (1985;
the HAS (30c).
1988b:13) Mirror Principle and Bobaljik’s (2002) Rich Agree-
Similar types of variation are also found in conjunction
ment Hypothesis. Admittedly, this view finds some initial
with the infinitive. On a par with the active participle, the
support in the Romance data where we have observed that
French infinitive remains in a low position within the LAS
auxiliary verbs, presumably the richest inflectional forms of
(31a; Engver 1972; Belletti 2006b; Rowlett 2007:108-10), a
all, may raise to the HAS in all Romance varieties. However,
pattern also replicated in Romanian and Spanish (31b,c;
a brief glimpse of the results in Table 31.1 suffices to invali-
Ledgeway and Lombardi 2005:89-91), whereas Italian infini-
date such an approach, inasmuch as all the Romance var-
tives (31d) occur in the highest available position within the
ieties we have examined are what may be termed
HAS (Belletti 1990:70-76; Cinque 1999:143-6):
inflectionally rich languages, yet they display some quite
marked differences in the range of positions lexicalized by
(31) a. Il faut [LAS le loger bien
finite and non-finite lexical verbs. This conclusion is further
it.is=necessary him= accommodate.INF well
substantiated by the observation that modern French
(loger) [VP loger . . . ]]. (Fr.)
(where much of the apparently rich inflection of the verb
accommodate.INF
is in reality merely orthographic) shows in speech higher
‘He must be given proper accommodation.’
verb movement of finite lexical verbs to the HAS than all
b. promisiunea de a [LAS nu (vorbi) mai vorbi other varieties.
promise=the of to not talk.INF more talk.INF A more viable explanation for the variable placement of
niciodată [VP vorbi cu el]]. (Ro.) Romance verb forms is to be sought in relation to their
never with him differing aspectual, modal, and temporal functions and
‘The promise of never speaking with him again.’ interpretations.12 Compelling evidence for this semantically
driven view of verb placement is to be found in Italian
c. está cansada de [LAS (hacer) siempre
contrasts like (32a,b), where the active interpretation of
she.is tired of do.INF always
the participle correlates with a higher position than that
hacer [VP hacer los mismos papeles]]. (Sp.)
of its passive counterpart (Cinque 1999:102f., 147f.). How-
do.INF the same roles
ever, temporal interpretation is also relevant here: whereas
‘She is tired of always playing the same roles.’
the lower position of the passive participle proves gram-
matical in generic temporal contexts such as (32b), it is
12
See, however, Schifano (2011; 2015) for convincing arguments why
Romance verb movement cannot be considered semantically driven, but
11
Lois (1989:34, 40), Cinque (1999:45-9, 146-48), Abeillé and Godard should be related to the varying degrees of paradigmatic instantiation of
(2003), Monachesi (2005:134-6). mood, tense, and aspect in different Romance varieties.
562
Table 31.1 Typology of Romance verb placement

HAS CLAUSE - MEDIAL POSITION LAS
FR . IT . RO ., SP . FR . IT . RO ., SP . FR . IT . RO ., SP .
VAux + + + – – + – – +
Vlexical + – – – + (+) – (+) +
VActivePtP – + + – + – + + –
VInfinitive – + – – – – + – +
excluded in examples like (32c) where the specific temporal functional predicates marking various aspectual and
reference of the clause licenses and requires a higher pos- modal categories have long been recognized to exhibit a
ition of the passive participle. rule of restructuring. Accordingly, an underlying biclausal
structure may apparently undergo a process of clause union
(32) a. Hanno [LAS sempre accolto bene to yield a surface monoclausal configuration headed by a
they.have always received well complex derived predicate (34).13
(**accolto) [VP il suo spettacolo]]. (It.)
received the his performance (34) [Aux + [VInfinitival]] ) [Aux + VInfinitival]
‘They always received his performance well.’
The increased dependency and integration induced by
b. Il suo spettacolo è stato [LAS sempre
this clausal restructuring and subsequent union produces
the his performance is been always
an extreme case of interlacing (Lehmann 1988b) between
(accolto) bene (accolto) [VP . . . ]]. (It.)
matrix and dependent infinitival clauses, effacing surface
received well received
clausal boundaries and licensing a range of local phenom-
‘His performance was always well received.’
ena (so-called transparency effects) assumed to hold exclu-
c. Ieri il suo spettacolo era stato sively of simplex (monoclausal) structures including: (i)
yesterday the his performance was been clitic climbing (35a); (ii) selection of perfective auxiliary
[LAS accolto bene (**accolto) [VP . . . ]]. (It.) according to the dependent infinitive (35b); (iii) long object
received well received preposing in passive se/si constructions (35c); and (iv) the
‘His performance was received well yesterday.’ impossibility of cleft sentence formation (35d), since the
infinitive forms a constituent with the functional predicate.
Similarly, in many southern Italian dialects (cf. Ledgeway
2009b; Ledgeway and Lombardi 2014; §16.4.3.4) the lexical (35) a. [¿Cuándo s’ habíen de facerse les
verb targets a higher modal position in irrealis contexts when self= had of do.INF the
(33b) than in realis contexts (33a): fiestes?] (Ast.)
feasts
(33) a. (Tice ca) [HAS l’Anna [LAS (u sapìa) ‘When were the celebrations due to take place?’
He.says that the.Anna it= knew.IND
già u sapìa [VP sapìa]]]. (Sal.) b. [Me soi pogut pas dormir]. (Lgd.)
already it=knew me= am been.able not sleep.INF
‘(He says that) Anna already knew.’ ‘I wasn’t able to get to sleep.’
b. Speru cu [HAS u sape [LAS già c. [I commenti non si riescono/**riesce a

I.hope that it= he.knows already the comments not self= succeed.3PL/3SG to
(**u sape) [VP sape]]]. (Sal.) postare i commenti sul blog]. (It.)
it=he.knows post.INF on.the blog
‘I hope that he already knows it.’ ‘The comments cannot be posted on the blog.’
13
31.2.3 Restructuring See e.g. Aissen and Perlmutter (1983), Hernanz and Rigau (1984),
Picallo (1990), Rochette (1990), Kayne (1991), Bok-Bennema and Kampers-
Manhe (1994), Bonneau and Zushi (1994), Martins (1995), Kornfilt (1996),
Roberts (1997), Monachesi (1998), Remberger (2006:191-216; 2008), and for
Following the seminal work of Rizzi (1976a,b; 1978), exhaustive comparative treatments Cinque (2003; 2004b; 2006). Cf. also
Romance infinitival complements following a class of §§61.3.3.2.1.6, 62.1, 63.2.2.
563
d. **[Es quejar con Marcos que understood as disparate syntactic phenomena whose distri-
it.is complain.INF with Marcos that bution operates independently of the bi-/monoclausal dis-
[me quiero quejar con Marcos]]. (Sp.) tinction (for detailed discussion, see Cinque 2006:157-62).
me=I.want Such is the case of clitic climbing (cf. 35a, 36b), which
‘Complain to Marcos is what I want to do.’ notably displays a considerable degree of variation both
within the same language (cf. northern vs central-southern
Revealing in this respect is the distribution of clitic Italian varieties) and across different Romance varieties (cf.
climbing with a verb such as Sardinian torrare ‘to return’ Italian vs modern French; Kayne 1991).
(Jones 1988a:177). When the clitic surfaces on its associated By the same token, the approach assumed here makes
infinitive, as in (36a), torrare is interpreted as a lexical verb some strong predictions of its own that make immediate
of motion yielding the reading ‘I will return to do it’, sense of a number of empirical facts. The most notable of
whereas when it climbs, as in (36b), torrare is necessarily these is the strong prediction that when two or more so-
interpreted as an exponent of iterative aspect yielding the called restructuring predicates co-occur, they will linearize
interpretation ‘I will do it again’. As an aspectual predicate, in strict accordance with the fixed order of functional pro-
torrare patterns identically to other restructuring verbs jections outlined in the simplified maps of the HAS/LAS in
yielding a monoclausal structure, whereas in its lexical use (20a,b). For example, extrapolating the representative
its behaviour is identical to that of other main verbs which sequence of restructuring verbs from the partial map of
necessarily occur in a biclausal construction. functional categories and associated restructuring verbs
sketched in (38), we are led to expect that such predicates
(36) a. [ Torro [a lu fakere]] (Srd.) can only occur in the indicated order, as is indeed borne out
b. [Lu torro a fakere] (Srd.) by the various permutations in (39a–e).
it= I.return to it=do.INF
(38) [ModEpistemic/Alethic deber/devoir/dovere/poder/pou-
However, the evidence of a richly articulated clause voir/potere [AspHabitual soler(e) [AspPredispositional tend(e)-
structure composed of a universally fixed order of func- r(e) [AspRepetitive tornar(e)/volver [ModVolition voler(e)/
tional positions specialized in licensing such categories as vouloir/querer [AspTerminative cesar/cesser/smettere
mood, tense, and aspect variously lexicalized by adverbs [AspContinuative(I) continuar(e)/continuer [AspDurative/Pro-
and auxiliaries (cf. §§31.2.2, 31.2.2.1), provides us with a gressive (e)star(e) [ModObligation/Ability deber/devoir/do-
highly natural alternative account of restructuring (Cinque vere/poder/pouvoir/potere [AspFrustrative/Success lograr/

2003; 2004b; 2006). In particular, the content of these verbal réussir/riuscire [ModPermission poder/pouvoir/potere
positions can be lexicalized in two ways: either through [AspConative procurar/provare [Causative fa(i)re/hacer/
movement of a lexical verb raised from the VP (cf. fazer [AspInceptive empezar/commencer/cominciare
§31.2.2.2) or through base generation of an auxiliary dir- [AspAndative an(d)ar(e)/ir [AspContinuative(II) seguir
ectly in the relevant position. The latter case obtains in [AspCompletive finir(e)/terminar/ acabar [VP V . . .
conjunction with those functional predicates that have
traditionally been termed restructuring verbs, which can (39) a. Solia començar a (**començava a soler)
now be simply understood to represent distinct lexicaliza- was.wont begin.INF to began to be.wont
tions of the different functional positions in the higher and treballar a les sis. (Cat.)
lower adverb spaces above the VP: work.INF at the six
‘He would begin working at six.’
(37) [HAS (Aux) [LAS (Aux) [VP VInfinitival . . . ]]]
b. Il tend à vouloir (**veut tendre
he tends to want.INF wants tend.INF
There is then no restructuring process proper along the
à) toujours parler. (Fr.)
lines of (34); rather, as athematic predicates all so-called
to always speak.INF
restructuring verbs invariably enter into a monoclausal
‘He tends to want to always speak.’
configuration with their associated infinitival complement
(cf. 37), the syntax of which they come to inherit and govern c. Torna començar (**comença a tornar) a
(cf. the Heir-Apparent Principle of Harris and Campbell returns begin.INF begins to return.INF to
1995:193) by virtue of lexicalizing one of the various func- s’ interessar a sa cultura. (Lgd.)
tional positions of the inflectional domain. On this view, the self= interest to its culture
absence vs presence of transparency effects are not licensed ‘(The people) are beginning again to get interested
by particular structural configurations but, rather, are to be in their own culture.’
564
d. Tendem a querer continuar (**querem This approach to restructuring also does away with the
they.tend to want.INF continue.INF they.want traditional stipulations and assumptions that Romance
continuar a tender) a frequentar aquele restructuring predicates form an arbitrary class of verbs
continue.INF to tend.INF to frequent.INF that with special properties (cf. Moore 1994; Roberts 1994);
lugar. (Pt.) restructuring falls out as a concomitant of the independ-
place ently motivated theory of a richly articulated clausal struc-
‘They tend to want to continue going to that place.’ ture. It thus follows in a principled manner that the class of
restructuring verbs is exclusively made up of those predi-
e. Cesó de continuar (**continuó cesando
cates whose meanings can be directly mapped onto the
he.stopped of continue.INF continued stopping
modal, temporal, and aspectual positions of the inflectional
de) maldiciendo. (Sp.)
domain of the sentential core, without there being any need
of cursing
to attribute special properties to such verbs.
‘He stopped continually swearing.’
Analogously, we also now have a principled explanation

for the observation (Salvi 2001b:520-21) that only a very
limited class of adverbs may intervene between infinitive 31.3 Higher left periphery
and restructuring verb. More specifically, only those adverbs
which lexicalize functional positions situated in the space The higher left periphery (henceforth simply left periphery)
between the functional position lexicalized by the restruc- is the leftmost part of the sentence where two fundamental
turing verb and the derived position of the infinitive can kinds of information are encoded. On the one hand, it
intervene between the two. Consequently, taking an interfaces with the sentential core and its propositional
example such as (40a), we see that the functional predicate content, determining (or reduplicating) properties such as
vuole ‘wants’ lexicalizes the ModVolitional position whereas finiteness and modal specifications. On the other, it contains
the infinitive ricopiare ‘to write up’ is situated somewhere those elements that substantiate a direct link between the
in the LAS above Voice, as witnessed by its position to the sentence and the discourse. Whether expressed by morpho-
left of the manner adverb bene ‘well’. It follows that any logical or syntactic means, it is generally at the level of the
adverbs generated in positions higher than ModVolitional left periphery that information is encoded which allows us
such as normalmente ‘normally’ (= AspHabitual) must precede, to distinguish a declarative from an interrogative and other
but significantly cannot follow, vuole (40b). By contrast, a clause types. In most Romance languages, moreover, some
lower adverb such as sempre ‘always’ (= AspPerfect) is correctly types of constituent whose position is highly dependent on
predicted to be able to occur between vuole and ricopiare or discourse and information-structure properties (e.g. topics,
follow the latter if the infinitive lexicalizes a position within foci) typically appear within this part of the clause (see
the LAS to the right of AspPerfect (40c). §34.2). The left periphery therefore includes different
types of complementizer (subordinators), and often hosts
(40) a. Gli appunti, Ugo [ModPVol. li vuole topic and focus constituents giving rise to marked word
the notes Ugo them= wants orders. In some varieties it also includes sentence particles
[LAS ricopiare bene [v-VP ricopiare ]]]. (It.) with illocutionary or emphatic values.
recopy.INF well
‘Ugo wants to write up his notes properly.’
b. Gli appunti, Ugo normalmente [ModPVol. li 31.3.1 Complementizers
the notes Ugo usually them=
vuole (**normalmente) [LAS ricopiare
The distinction between finite and non-finite clauses is
wants usually recopy.INF
generally marked on the verb form, but is also encoded on
bene [VP ricopiare ]]]. (It.)
the complementizer in a number of instances (see also
well
§§16.4.3.3, 63.2.1.2). Although there is already evidence of
‘Ugo usually wants to write up his notes properly.’
complementizers in Latin (Vincent 1998a; Salvi 2004;
c. Gli appunti, Ugo [ModPVol.li vuole [LAS Ledgeway 2012a:150-58), it is only with the rise of the
the notes Ugo them= wants Romance languages that a fully-fledged complementizer
(sempre) ricopiare (sempre) bene system develops, contrasting finite complementizers from
always recopy.INF always well Latin QUOD/QUID ‘that’ and QUIA ‘because’, and infinitival com-
[VP ricopiare ]]]. (It.) plementizers derived from the prepositions DE ‘(down) from’
‘Ugo always wants to write up his notes properly.’ and AD ‘to(wards)’:
565
(41) Jean m’ a dit de vous (45) a. Credo che il tuo libro, loro lo
Jean me= has said of you= I.believe that the your book they it=
informer qu’ il viendrait plus tard. (Fr.) apprezzerebbero molto. (It.)
inform.INF that he come.COND more late appreciate.COND much
‘Jean told me to inform you that he would come later.’ ‘I believe that they would appreciate your book a lot.’
b. Credo, il tuo libro, di apprezzarlo molto. (It.)
The distinction between finite and non-finite comple-
I.believe the your book of appreciate.INF=it much
mentizers is widespread, but other distinctions exist: var-
‘I believe I appreciate your book a lot.’
ieties such as Romanian (42) and southern Italian dialects
(43) present dual-complementizer systems which encode c. Sunt sigură că pe Ion l-am
different modal values (for detailed bibliography, see I.am sure that ACC Ion him=I.have
Ledgeway 2012a:169-76). These varieties distinguish văzut de anul trecut. (Ro.)
between an indicative/declarative complementizer and a seen of year=the past
subjunctive/irrealis complementizer:14 ‘I’m sure that I saw Ion last year.’
d. Vreau mâine să meargă la meci. (Ro.)
(42) a. Ioana ştia că va lua examenul. (Ro.)
I.want tomorrow that he.go to match
Ioana knew that will take.INF exam=the
‘I want him to go to the match tomorrow.’
‘Ioana knew she would pass the exam.’
b. Sper să plece mâine la Londra. (Ro.) Similar ordering restrictions have been described for
I.hope that leaves.SBJV tomorrow to London languages that do not exhibit a split system. In these var-
‘I hope she will leave for London tomorrow.’ ieties the complementizers are lexically identical but still
show a different distribution on the basis of their specific
(43) Maria nu sta pinsava ca se putia fare function and according to the clause type in which they
Maria not PROG thought that self= could do.INF appear (Poletto 2000; 2001; Benincà 2001b). Recomplemen-
tardu e ncignau cu cogghie ddo fiuri. (Sal.) tation phenomena involving complementizer doubling
late and started that she.collects two flowers around constituents fronted to the left periphery are
‘Maria didn’t think it could get late, and started to attested in both old (46a) and modern (46b) Romance (cf.
pick flowers.’ §§62.2, 63.2.1.3), and highlight further the need to recognize
two complementizers and associated positions despites
The subjective/irrealis complementizer is generally used their apparent homophony:16
in place of infinitival clauses, especially in subordinate
clauses whose subject is identical to an argument of the (46) a. Je te adjure par le vray Dieu que ta
main clause, and in jussive/optative clauses that are asso- I you= beseech by the true God that your
ciated with the subjunctive mood (at least where this mood fille Tarsienne, que tu ne la donnes a
is morphologically available).15 These complementizers daughter Tarsienne that you not her= give to
exhibit different syntactic behaviours, insofar as they mariage a autre que a moy. (OFr.)
appear in different positions with respect to co-occurring marriage to other than to me
topics and foci (44): topics and foci can follow finite declara- ‘I beseech you before God that you may give your
tive complementizers (45a,c), but can only precede non- daughter in marriage to me alone.’
finite and modal complementizers (45b,d; Rizzi 1997:288;
b. Dixeron que a este home que non
Ledgeway 2012a:170):
they.said that to this man that not
o maltratemos. (Glc.)
(44) [LP Comp1 [Top [Foc [Comp2 [Infl . . . ]]]
him= we.ill.treat
‘They said that we should not treat this man badly.’
16
See Uriagereka (1995a) for Galician; Rodríguez Ramalle (2003), De-
monte and Fernández-Soriano (2005; 2009), Villa-García (2012a; 2012b;
14
In colloquial varieties of Romanian, both complementizers may even forthcoming), González i Planas (2013) for Spanish; Mascarenhas (2007),
co-occur in irrealis clauses (for further discussion, see §8.5.2.4). Ribeiro and Torres Morais (2012) for Portuguese; Paoli (2003a; 2007) for
15
See Ledgeway (2013b) and §63.3 for the distribution of infinitives Ligurian and Turinese; Ledgeway (2004a, 2005), Manzini and Savoia (2005;
according to specific predicates and in comparison with Italo-Greek 2011a), Vincent (2006a), D’Alessandro and Ledgeway (2010a) for central-
dialects. southern Italo-Romance; and Dagnac (2012) for Picard.
566
Although to a lesser extent than Germanic, omission of in many northern Italian dialects and in colloquial French,
the complementizer is also found in Romance under specific where the complementizer co-occurs with the wh-phrase
conditions: it is always optional and is generally limited to not only in embedded interrogatives but also in root wh-
null subject languages and to irrealis subordinate clauses questions (Poletto 2000; Paoli 2003a; Parry 2003). This obser-
(Torrego 1983; Poletto 2001; Brovetto 2002; Giorgi and vation highlights how, although complementizers play an
Pianesi 2004; Cocchi and Poletto 2007; Llinàs-Grau and essential role in encoding the illocutionary force of the
Fernández-Sánchez 2011; Manzini and Savoia 2011a): clause, they are not solely responsible for clause typing.
As subordinate conjunctions, complementizers typically
(47) a. Solicito (que) me seja concedida uma introduce subordinate clauses. However, root clause com-
I.request that me= be.SBJV.3SG granted a plementizers are also very commonly found in Romance, in
bolsa. (Pt.) declarative, exclamative, and interrogative sentences, in
bursary both standard and non-standard varieties. Among the
‘I request a bursary be granted to me.’ Romance languages, Gascon stands out for its peculiar prop-
erty of employing the finite complementizer (so-called
b. Tutti credono (che) sia una spia. (It.)
enunciative que ‘that’) in neutral affirmative root clauses
all believe that be.SBJV.3SG a spy
(Campos 1992; cf. 51 below, and §§46.3.3 and 53.21), while in
‘Everybody thinks he’s a spy.’
other varieties the presence of the finite complementizer is
typically related to a specific function (e.g. quotative,
Independently of the systems described above, a distinct
explicative, jussive, optative, exclamative) or contributes a
complementizer introduces embedded yes/no questions in
special semantico-pragmatic value to the clause (e.g. strong
Romance:
assertion or negation of a previous presupposition) both in
declaratives and interrogatives. Moreover, the finite com-
(48) a. Em va preguntar si volia sortir. (Cat.)
plementizer may follow certain adverbs or (semi‑)grammat-
me= goes ask.INF if I.wanted exit.INF
icalized verbal or adjectival forms in structures that have
‘He asked me if I wanted to go out.’
been analysed as monoclausal:17
b. Me preguntó si había llegado a las tres. (Sp.)
me= he.asked if he.had arrived at the three (50) a. Sigur că va veni. (Ro.)
‘He asked me if he had arrived at three.’ surely that will.3SG come.INF
‘Of course s/he’s coming.’
In almost all Romance languages, this interrogative com-
b Capace che viene anche lui
plementizer is the only element in the left periphery that
possible that comes also he
marks the subordinate clause as an indirect yes/no ques-
alla festa. (central-southern It.)
tion. The main finite complementizer, however, is not
to.the party
always (and not necessarily) ruled out: in some Spanish
‘He may well come to the party too.’
varieties and in colloquial Catalan, it can occur alongside
the interrogative complementizer in the order que + si (49a).
In addition to the modal values of the subordinate clause,
In the same varieties, the finite complementizer can also
the complementizer may encode or reduplicate other fea-
precede the wh-phrase of an embedded wh-interrogative
tures. Although cross-linguistically not so common, some
(49b) (Plann 1982; Brucart 1993; Rivero 1994a; Villalba
languages display complementizer agreement (cf. e.g.
2002; Etxepare 2008; Demonte and Fernández-Soriano
Haegeman 1992 for Flemish). Even though no such phenom-
2009; Rigau and Süils 2010; Dagnac 2012):
ena have been attested in Romance, the que/qui ‘that’ alter-
nation in French relative clauses, which depends on the
(49) a. Em va preguntar que si volia sortir. (Cat.)
me= goes ask.INF that if I.wanted exit.INF
‘He asked me if I wanted to go out.’ 17
See Bonami et al. (2004:149), Grevisse and Goosse (2008:§1121) for
French; Hill (2007; 2011; 2012) for Romanian; Pietrandrea (2005), Giacalone
b. Preguntaste que quiénhabíallegado a las tres. (Sp.) Ramat and Topadze (2007), Giorgi (2010), Cruschina (2015) for Italian. In
you.asked thatwho had arrivedatthethree several Romance varieties, grammaticalization between the element pre-
ceding the complementizer and the complementizer itself seems to be
‘You asked who had arrived at three.’ complete, producing an adverb with an evidential or epistemic value
(Travis 2006; Olbertz 2007; Cruschina and Remberger 2008; Cruschina
2015). See also Martins (2013) and Poletto and Zanuttini (2013) on polarity
This co-occurrence of complementizer and wh-phrase, adverbs/particles followed by an embedded sentence introduced by the
which is not possible in standard Romance, is very common declarative complementizer in emphatic replies.
567
syntactic function of the relative complementizer (object vs b. Si viene mi madre, que el tabaco
subject), has been regarded as agreement in the comple- if comes my mother that the tobacco
mentizer system (Kayne 1976; Rizzi 1990; Taraldsen 2001; es tuyo. (Sp., instructive)
2002; Sportiche 2011). A similar alternation is found in is yours
Vallader, the Ræto-Romance variety spoken in the Enga- ‘If my mother comes, (we must tell her that) the
dine, where cha has the same function as Fr. que, and tobacco is yours.’
alternates with chi, which instead mirrors Fr. qui (Haiman
c. Si li vo’ fa’ ocche li facce. (Arl., optative)
and Benincà 1992; Taraldsen 2001; 2002; see also Parry 2007a
if it= wants do.INF ocche it= do.SBJV.3SG
on similar alternations in early Italo-Romance varieties).
‘If he wants to do it, let him do it.’
d. Ca n’ gi venghe a la casa
31.3.2 Illocutionary force, clause types, and ca not there= I.come to the house
sentence particles te! (Arl., negation of a presupposition)
your
‘Don’t worry, I’ve no intention of coming to your
Complementizers play a fundamental role in encoding place!’
clause type, especially embedded sentences, but other
devices such as specific syntactic configurations may be Similarly, several studies have highlighted the special
decisive in a greater range of contexts, including interroga- functions and values of certain emphatic particles that
tive and exclamative root clauses. In addition, the presence have been linked to illocutionary force, emphatic assertion,
of discourse particles may contribute a specific semantic or focus, or polarity (Jones 1993; Hernanz 2006; 2010; Hernanz
illocutionary value to the sentence (for a full discussion of and Rigau 2006; Hinzelin 2009; Hinzelin and Remberger
illocutionary force, see Ch. 53). 2009; Remberger 2011a; Rigau 2012; Batllori and Hernanz
2013; Poletto and Zanuttini 2013). These particles are com-
mon in Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, and Sardinian, and are
31.3.2.1 Declaratives mostly, though not uniquely, derived from Latin SIC ‘thus’,
Romance neutral root declarative clauses do not generally BENE ‘well’ and IAM ‘already’. They are predominantly found
present any special marking. As already noted, a well- in root clauses, but are also admitted in embedded clauses
known exception is Gascon, where the complementizer that have a fully-fledged left periphery.
appears in affirmative root clauses to mark them as declara-
tive (see 51; Rohlfs 1970; Campos 1992; also §53.2.1),18 while
in other varieties complementizers in root clauses signal a
31.3.2.2 Interrogatives
special function or value of the clause (see 52; Rivero 1994a;
Extepare 2008; 2010; D’Alessandro and Ledgeway 2010a): In virtually all Romance languages, intonation alone
would be sufficient to distinguish between a declarative
(51) Miqueu que pren lo car tot diluns matin and an interrogative sentence. However, a relatively large
Miqueu that takes the bus every Monday morning number of interrogative marking strategies are found
e que torna a casa tot dissabte. (Gsc.) (almost always in addition to a marked prosodic pattern),
and that returns to home every Saturday including inversion phenomena, specific word order
‘Miqueu takes the bus every Monday morning and arrangements, and interrogative particles (cf. also
returns home every Saturday.’ §53.3.3). A complementizer or a complementizer-like
element introduces yes/no questions in central Catalan,
(52) a. Oye, que el Barça ha ganado in central-southern Italian dialects, and in Sardinian
listen that the Barça has won (Hualde 1992; Wheeler et al. 1999; Rigau and Prieto 2005;
la Champions. (Sp., quotative) Prieto and Rigau 2007; Rohlfs 1969a; Garzonio 2004;
the Champions Damonte and Garzonio 2009; Cruschina 2012a; Lusini
‘Hey, Barça won the Champions League.’ 2013), with functions ranging from mere interrogative
marking to the expression of more subtle and additional
semantic values of the question such as a request for a
confirmation on the basis of a strong presupposition,
18
Recent studies have analysed it as an evidential modal marker (Pusch
contrast against expectations, a rhetorical effect, or an
2000; 2003a). element of surprise:
568
(53) a. Ca chini u dìcia? (Cal., rhetorical) (54) a. Unde (**Ion) s-a dus (Ion)? (Ro.)
Q who it= says where Ion self=has led Ion
‘Who says that? ‘Where did Ion go?’
b. O icché tu sta’ facendo? (Flo., surprise/disproval) b. Où est (**Marie) allée Marie? (Fr.)
Q what you stay doing where is Marie gone Marie
‘What are you doing?’ ‘Where did Marie go?’
c. Que vindràs a Barcelona? No em pensava
Considerable variation is found with embedded wh-
Q you.will.come to Barcelona not me= I.thought
questions (Rizzi 1996; Barbosa 2001). In Catalan, Romanian,
pas que ens acompanyessis.
and peninsular Spanish there is no root/embedded asym-
not that us= you.accompanied.SBJV
metry (55a,b): the inflected verb must be strictly adjacent to
(NCCat., contrary to expectations)
the fronted wh-phrase in matrix as well as in embedded
‘Are you coming to Barcelona? I didn’t think you
clauses. In Italian, the adjacency requirement is more
were coming with us.’
relaxed: judgments are still shaky in embedded questions
in the indicative (56a), but grammaticality certainly
The presence of these elements generally imposes syn-
improves in conjunction with the subjunctive (56b; Rizzi
tactic restrictions, especially on the position of the subject.
1996:80). In Portuguese (57a) and French (57b), by contrast,
Sardinian a (< Lat. AUT ‘or’), for example, is incompatible
the subject of embedded questions can either intervene
with a preverbal subject or a fronted constituent (Jones
between the wh-phrase and the inflected verb or appear in
1993; Mensching and Remberger 2010a; Mensching 2008b;
an inversion structure (57):
Remberger 2010). Sets of sentence particles with specialized
functions related to the left periphery have been described
(55) a. No sé qué (**Maria) compró (Maria). (Sp.)
for interrogatives, both yes/no questions and wh-questions,
not I.know what Maria bought Maria
in Florentine (Garzonio 2004) and in Venetan dialects (cf.
‘I don’t know what Maria bought.’
Munaro and Poletto 2003; 2008; Obenauer 2004),19 while the
particle se ‘if ’ introduces embedded wh-questions in some b. Nu ne-a spus unde (**Ion) s-a dus
Catalan and Occitan dialects, preceding the interrogative not us=has told where Ion self=has led
wh-phrase (cf. Rigau and Suïls 2010). (Ion). (Ro.)
In most Romance varieties wh-questions involve fronting Ion
of the wh-phrase from its base position to the left periphery. ‘He didn’t tell us where Ion went.’
In this syntactic configuration, the subject cannot intervene
between the wh-phrase and the inflected verb, insofar as the (56) a. Tutti si domandano che cosa (??il
wh-phrase must stand adjacent to the verb (54).20 This all self= wonder what thing the
interrogative structure has been explained with reference direttore) ha detto (il direttore). (It.)
to the focal and quantificational nature of wh-phrases, and manager has said (the director)
has been analysed as a residue of the V2 syntax of medieval
b. Tutti si domandano che cosa (il
Romance involving verb movement to the vacant comple-
all self= wonder what thing the
mentizer position, namely, to a position right-adjacent to
direttore) abbia detto (il direttore). (It.)
the fronted wh-phrase (e.g. Torrego 1984; Ambar 1992; Rizzi
manager has.SBJV said (the director)
and Roberts 1989; Rizzi 1996; Raposo 1994; Uriagereka
‘Everyone wonders what the manager said.’
1995b):
(57) a. Sabes quando (a Maria) chegou
19
The relation between some of these particles and the left periphery you.know when the Maria arrived
has been the subject of controversy, esp. when they occur in sentence-final (a Maria)? (Pt.)
positions (cf. Cardinaletti 2011). the Maria
20
The rigidity of this constraint depends on the D(iscourse)-linking
nature of the wh-phrase. The adjacency requirement may in fact fail with ‘Do you know when Maria arrived?’
D-linked wh-phrases (Cinque 1990b; Rizzi 1990; 2001a,b; Barbosa 2001;
Zubizarreta 2001), and some types of wh-phrase such as the equivalents of b. Je me demande où (Marie)
why need not stand strictly adjacent to the verb (Rizzi 2001a). At the same I me= wonder where Marie
time, subject inversion obtains in interrogative structures where adjacency est allée (Marie). (Fr.)
is obligatory, especially in non-null subject languages like French where
several types of interrogative inversion exist (see e.g. Kayne 1972; Rizzi and is gone Marie
Roberts 1989; Jones 1996). ‘I wonder where Marie went.’
569
In most Romance languages, the absence of wh- individual languages. Despite this complexity, we observe
movement is also an option, but it is interpreted as an that many of the syntactic strategies used to mark inter-
echo question. However, in French and in Portuguese in rogative sentences are also employed for exclamatives,
situ wh-questions are simply syntactic variants of ordinary most of which involve the left periphery of the sentence.
wh-questions, especially in the colloquial language (see These include intonation, root complementizers, fronted
Ambar et al. 2001; Kato and Mioto 2005; Kato 2013): wh-phrases, sentence particles, and marked word orders
(Radford 1982; Vinet 1991; Benincà 1996; Gutiérrez-Rexach
(58) a. Tu vas où? (Fr.) 2001; Hernanz 2001; Ambar 2002; Villalba 2003; Castroviejo
you go where 2006; 2008; 2010; Munaro 2006; 2010; Demonte and
‘Where are you going?’ Fernández-Soriano 2009; Ledgeway 2010b). A crucial differ-
ence between exclamative and interrogative sentences,
b. O João viu quem? (Pt.)
however, concerns the position of wh-phrases: while
the John saw who
wh- in situ is (optionally) possible in the wh-questions of
‘Who did John see?’
some Romance languages (61), it is never possible in root
wh-exclamatives (62):
In some northeastern Italian dialects, in addition to wh- in
situ, we also find wh-doubling, namely, the occurrence of a
(61) a. Que livro comprou o João? (Pt.)
wh-phrase in situ together with a (morphologically differ-
what book bought the João
ent) fronted counterpart (Munaro 1999; Pollock, Munaro
and Poletto 2001; Poletto and Pollock 2004a; 2004b; 2009; b. O João comprou que livro? (Pt.)
Manzini and Savoia 2011b). the João bought what book
‘Which book did João buy?’
(59) a. S’ a-lo fat che? (Ils. VR)
what has=he done what? (62) a. Que (belo) livro (que) o João comprou! (Pt.)
‘What did he do?’ what nice bought that the João bought
b. Ndo e-lo ndat endoe? (Ils. VR) b. **O João comprou que (belo) livro! (Pt.)
where is=he gone where the João bought what nice book
‘Where has he gone?’ ‘What a nice book João bought!’
Among those Romance languages that require wh-

movement in ordinary wh-questions, Romanian is the only
one to allow multiple wh-fronting (Dobrovie-Sorin 1990;
31.3.2.4 Imperatives
1994; Comorovski 1996; Alboiu 2002; Cornilescu 2004): Imperative sentences do not face the same problems of
analysis as exclamatives. For example, true imperatives
(60) a. Cine ce a scris? (Ro.) and suppletive imperatives are clearly different morpho-
who what has written syntactically (see further Ch. 53, and Rivero 1994b; Rivero
‘Who wrote what?’ and Terzi 1995; Zanuttini 1997), but it is universally
accepted that they express a unique semantic and prag-
b. Pe care cine l-a văzut? (Ro.)
matic type. Syntactically, in particular, the left periphery
ACC which who him=has seen
is involved in the encoding of the imperative clause type in
‘Who saw which one?’
a number of ways. True imperatives in the majority of
Romance languages (63a, 64a), and positive suppletive
imperatives (65a) with a subjunctive form in some varieties
31.3.2.3 Exclamatives (e.g. Spanish and Catalan), are characterized by enclisis of
The availability of diverse structural configurations that can object clitic pronouns and have been analysed as resulting
be associated with the expression of exclamative force, from verb movement to the vacant complementizer pos-
coupled with the frequent difficulty of isolating the syntac- ition (Rivero 1994b; Rivero and Terzi 1995; Graffi 1996;
tic and semantic properties that separate exclamatives from Zanuttini 1997). In addition, in suppletive imperatives con-
other clause types, make it difficult to provide valid gener- structed with third person subjects and the subjunctive
alizations or a uniform characterization of exclamatives (also known as exhortatives, jussives, or non-deictic
from a syntactic point of view. This problem holds not imperatives), the verb is preceded by the complementizer,
only for Romance as a language family but also within the subject is postponed, and clitics are preposed (63b, 64b,
570
65b; cf. Hualde 1992; Rivero 1994b; Rivero and Terzi 1995; c. Mi trasi! (NESic.)
Zanuttini 1997; Poletto 2000).21 In Spanish the subject of this that enter.3SG
construction (65b) can be interpreted as a second person ‘Come in!’
(viz. a deictic imperative) when que ‘that’ has a quotative
function: Finally, sentence particles may also be found in impera-
tive clauses. An example is ma in Badiotto, a Raeto-Romance
(63) a. Fallo entrare! (It.) variety:
make.IMP.2SG=him enter.INF
‘Have him shown in!’ (67) Màngel ma che spo crësceste! (Bad.)
eat.IMP.2SG=it ma that then grow
b. (Che) lo facciano entrare! (It.)
‘Eat it and you’ll grow!’
that him= make.SBJV.3PL enter.INF
‘Let them show him in!’
Among the particles used in imperatives in these var-
ieties, some are unique to clauses with imperatival illocut-
(64) a. Canteu-la vosaltres ara! (Cat.)
ionary force, while others are also employed in other clause
sing.IMP.2PL=it you.PL now
types (Poletto and Zanuttini 2003; 2010).
‘You sing it now!’
b. Que la cantin els nois! (Cat.)
that it= sing.SBJV.3PL the boys 31.3.3 Verb Second in old and modern
‘Let the boys sing it!’ Romance
(65) a. ¡Entréguenme los ensayos ahora mismo! (Sp.)
hand.in.SBJV.3PL=to-me the essays now same The label Verb Second (V2) describes the transitional phase
‘Hand in your essays to me right now!’ between the predominant SOV order of Classical Latin and
the SVO order of modern Romance (see §62.5), and is par-
b. ¡Que me entreguen los ensayos ahora ticularly well attested in medieval Gallo-Romance, northern
that me= hand.in.SBJV.3PL the essays now Italian, and Raeto-Romance varieties (see Price 1971; Vanelli
mismo! (Sp.) 1986; 1999; Adams 1987a; Roberts 1993; Benincà 1995; 2006;
same Vance 1997; Salvi 2000; 2001c; 2004; 2011; Ferraresi and
‘They must hand in their essays to me right now!’ Goldbach 2002; Kaiser 2002; 2002-03; Ledgeway 2007a;
2008a; 2012a; Poletto 2014). The situation is more controver-
As can be seen, the presence of the complementizer is sial for old Ibero-Romance languages, with scholars contrast-
obligatory in most varieties (64b, 65b), but it is optional in ing two opposite views: on the one hand, those who claim
others such as Italian (63a). Some Raeto-Romance varieties that old Spanish and old Portuguese have a V2 syntax
(e.g. Vallader and Friulian), on the other hand, seem to (Fontana 1993; 1997; Ribeiro 1995; Cho 1997; Danford 2002;
always exhibit an overt complementizer in imperatives Fernández-Ordóñez 2009) and, on the other, those advocat-
irrespective of the type (Zanuttini 1997:144; Poletto ing that old Ibero-Romance does not exhibit a V2 word order
2000:134). It should also be noted that those varieties dis- (Wanner 1989; Kaiser 1999; Bossong 2006; Martins 2002; Fiéis
playing a dual complementizer system (§31.3.1) employ the 2003; Eide 2006; Sitaridou 2006; 2011; Rinke 2007; 2009).22
subjunctive/irrealis complementizer in the contexts of non- During the V2 stage, the left periphery becomes crucial in
deictic (third person) and suppletive imperatives (Rohlfs two ways. First, the finite verb is assumed to occupy a
1968:§610; Zanuttini 1997; Ledgeway 1998; Damonte 2005): higher position than it does in root clauses in modern
Romance (usually taken to raise to the vacant complement-
(66) a. Să plece imediat! (Ro.) izer position), and second, one or more constituents char-
that leave.SBJV.3G immediately acterized by a special pragmatic interpretation (topic or
‘He must leave immediately!’ focus) can be fronted to a preverbal position (68a). During
b. Cu ffazza cce bbòle! (Sal.) this same V2 stage the use of an expletive particle si/sì
that do.SBJV.3SG what wants deriving from Latin SIC ‘thus, so’ is also frequently attested
‘Let him do whatever he wants!’ in the left periphery of mainly root clauses (68b).
21 22
Negation affects verb placement and hence the position of the clitics V2 is not the most common word order in early Sardinian, which
(Rivero 1994b; Rivero and Terzi 1995; Zanuttini 1997). shows a VSO order (Lombardi 2007b).
571
(68) a. sì fuorti cuolpi li donava (ONap.) In addition to these language-specific legacies, other
such strong blows to.him= he.gave more general syntactic configurations have been viewed
‘he gave him such strong blows’ as residues of medieval Romance V2. In wh-questions, the
fronting of the wh-phrases in modern Romance seems to
b. Spissi cuolpi mortali sì le dava (ONap.)
occur at the same time as verb raising, resulting in strict
frequent blows mortal sì to.him= he.gave
adjacency between the two elements (Rizzi 1996). Verb
‘He struck him with many deadly blows’
raising to the complementizer position has also been advo-
cated as the key explanation for the different word orders
Reflexes of SIC have received different analyses in the
and ordering restrictions that characterize certain conces-
literature, and the functions that have been attributed to
sive and conditional clauses in a number of Romance var-
it go from marker of topic continuity, expletive focus, to the
ieties (Rizzi 1982; Munaro 2010).
lexicalization of the complementizer position that satisfies
the V2 constraint as an alternative to verb movement
(Fleischman 1991; van Reenen and Schøsler 1993; 2000; 31.3.4 Topic and focus in the left periphery
Benincà 1995; Ribeiro 1995; Vance 1995; Poletto 2005; Be-
nincà 2006; Ledgeway 2008a).
The relatively free word order that characterizes Romance
Enclisis to the finite verb, especially, though not exclu-
languages has found a sound explanation in the recognition
sively, when it occurs in sentence-initial position (Benincà
of information structure and discourse properties as the key
1995; Fischer 2002), is a further significant property associ-
factors responsible for word order variation. All major con-
ated with V2 in medieval Romance. V2 syntax and enclisis
stituents are apparently able to appear within the sentence
have survived in some modern Romance varieties, though
in positions other than those typically recognized as
apparently independently from one another: V2 has been
unmarked. However, this syntactic flexibility is not free
preserved in some Romansh dialects (69), almost certainly
but, rather, subject to pragmatic conditions according to
under the influence of German contact (Haiman 1988; Hai-
whether the information provided is topical or focal. This
man and Benincà 1992), while enclisis survives in western
view has also been extended to Latin, on the basis that
peninsular Ibero-Romance (70) (for its distribution and
pragmatic motivation lies largely behind the free order of
restrictions, see Campos 1989; Martins 1994; 2005a;
the constituents in the clause (Salvi 2004; Devine and
Uriagereka 1995a; Barbosa 1996; 2000; Raposo and
Stephens 2006; Ledgeway 2012a:ch. 5). The pragmatic nature
Uriagereka 1996; 2005; Raposo 2000; González i Planas
of the fronted constituents in medieval Romance has also
2007; Viejo Fernández 2008; Fernández-Rubiera 2009):23
been a central issue in the studies and accounts of V2
syntax. It is generally acknowledged that, from a pragmatic
(69) a. Ed aschia fa el il patg cul nausch. (Srs.)
viewpoint, the fronted elements corresponded to discourse-
and so makes he the pact with.the devil
related notions such as those of topic and focus. Topic and
‘And so, he makes the pact with the devil.’
focus are in fact the pragmatically salient elements that
b. Eir in Grischun vains nus industrias chi . . . (Put.) determine marked word orders by occurring in designated
even in Grisons have we industries that structural positions within the clause. In medieval Romance
‘Even in Grisons, we have industries that . . . ’ the precise characterization of a fronted constituent is not
always unambiguous, and may sometimes remain open to
(70) a. (Eu) vi-a ontem. (Pt.) two or more interpretations. Clearly distinct properties
I saw=her yesterday differentiate topics and foci in modern Romance, both syn-
‘I saw her yesterday.’ tactically and prosodically (Rizzi 1997; Zubizarreta 1998;
Frascarelli 2000; Frota 2000; Benincà 2001b; D’Imperio
b. Les pataques, téoles tayaes. (Ast.)
2002; Bocci 2013). The syntactic differences include first of
the potatoes I.have=them cut
all the presence of a resumptive clitic attached to the verb
‘I have cut the potatoes.’
under topicalization, provided such a clitic is available in
c. Dixonos que queria ir. (Glc.) the language, a property incompatible with focalization.
he.told=us that he.wanted go.INF The syntactic construction is hence known as ‘clitic left
‘He told us he wanted to go.’ dislocation’ (Cinque 1977; 1990b), which is very common
in all Romance languages and is not unknown in (later)
Latin (see Salvi 2004). The dislocated constituent is gener-
23
Enclisis on finite verbs is also found in some northern Italian dialects ally an argument of the verb that is syntactically separated
such Borgomanerese (Tortora 2002; 2014a). from the rest of the clause by displacement from its
572
canonical position to a preverbal, clause-external position Foci also appeared within the left periphery of the sen-
(or, under the appropriate pragmatic conditions, to a post- tence in medieval Romance (cf. 6b,c), in compliance with the
verbal position under so-called clitic right dislocation; cf. requirements imposed by a V2 syntax, or independently
§§34.4.1-2):24 according to those that deny the existence of V2 in certain
medieval Romance varieties. A switch towards the realiza-
(71) a. Sus la plaja, i passe tion of the focus constituent in clause-internal postverbal
on the beach there= I.spend position has since affected Romance (cf. discussion of the
pas jamai lei vacanças. (Prv.) lower left periphery in §31.2.1). This tendency is stronger in
not ever the holidays French and in some northern Italian dialects like Turinese,
‘I never spend my holidays on the beach.’ where the focus constituent is always realized in a clause-
internal position, in the shape of postverbal focalization or
b. La Maria, al Pere, del llibre,
cleft sentences (Belletti 2005c; Paoli 2003a). Wh-phrases are
la Maria to.the Peter of.the book
an evident exception, representing the focal category most
li’n va parlar. (Cat.)
resilient to this trend, although even wh-phrases are often
to.him=of.it= goes talk.INF
realized in situ in colloquial French and European Portu-
‘Maria talked to Pere about the book.’
guese (cf. 58a,b).
In addition to wh- and quantifier-phrases, other focal
Another important difference between topics and foci
constituents may still be fronted in other Romance var-
in Romance concerns a uniqueness restriction which limits
ieties, but are limited to specific kinds of focus or particular
the number of foci to one per sentence, whereas topics
interpretations. One category that has been attributed focal
may have multiple realizations. A consequence of this
properties is quantifiers and quantified phrases (72a), which
restriction involves wh-phrases: topics are compatible with
are also commonly fronted in Romance (Benincà 1988:141f.;
wh-phrases, whereas foci are not, presumably because wh-
Vallduví 1992a; Raposo 1994; Raposo and Uriagereka 1996;
phrases correspond to the focus of the interrogative sen-
Zubizarreta 1998:102f.; Alboiu 2002; Quer 2002; Benincà and
tence. As for the position in which they occur, we can
Poletto 2004; Cornilescu 2002; 2004; Cruschina 2012a). As for
further observe that while topics exhibit a more homoge-
other categories, the focus may be realized in the left
neous behaviour across Romance, focalization is subject to a
periphery when the focal constituent is characterized by a
greater degree of variation, especially if a diachronic per-
contrastive interpretation (72b), a situation which appears
spective is taken into consideration. Topics tend to occur at
to hold of most Romance languages.27 The robustness of this
the beginning of the sentence, in a preverbal position, even
evidence has been used as the empirical basis for the claim
in those Romance languages like French with a more rigid
(e.g. López 2009) that focus fronting in Romance is to be
syntactic structure. Other constituents, including an
exclusively related to contrast. Contrastive focus fronting is
additional topic, may precede or follow, but a focus or a
also possible in Brazilian Portuguese (Mioto 2003), while
wh-phrase would normally occur after the topic(s).25
there is no agreement on its availability in European Por-
According to some analyses, all preverbal subjects in null
tuguese, apparently as a consequence of variation across
subject languages are left-dislocated to the left periphery of
speakers (Duarte 1987; 1997; Ambar 1992; 1999; Martins
the sentence (Contreras 1991; Barbosa 1995; 2001; Alexiadou
1994; Barbosa 1995; Costa 1998; Costa and Martins 2011).
and Anagnostopoulou 1998; Solà 1992).26
On the other hand, in European Portuguese fronting obtains
in evaluative or affective structures (72c), also termed syn-
24
Other types of topic or topicalization are possible in Romance such as tactically marked focus in Raposo (1994; 1995; 2000),
hanging topics and left dislocation (Villalba 2000; Benincà 2001b; Benincà although the relation between these structures and focal-
and Poletto 2004b); see Frascarelli and Hinterhölzl (2007) for more subtle
distinctions. ization is not uncontroversial (Costa 1988; Ambar 1999;
25
According to Rizzi (1997), a topic can follow a fronted focus in Italian, Costa and Martins 2011). Recent studies have also high-
but these judgements are not shared by all native speakers (see Frascarelli lighted how in those languages admitting focus-fronting
2000; Benincà 2001b; Benincà and Poletto 2004b). A similar lack of consen-
sus characterizes Catalan, where adjacency to the verb is considered a strict with constituents other than wh- and quantifier phrases,
requirement in focus fronting structures by many Catalan speakers (see e.g. this focalization strategy is not exclusively limited to the
Quer 2002a:254, n.3), although examples of the focus-topic order are given contrastive interpretation. In this respect, the less restrict-
in Vallduví (1992b; 1992c; 1995). In contrast, the adjacency requirement is
well established in the literature on focus fronting in Romanian (Alboiu ive Romance varieties appear to be Sicilian (72d) and
2002; 2004; Cornilescu 2004) and in Spanish (Hernanz and Brucart 1987;
Zubizarreta 1998; 1999; Zagona 2002).
26 27
For an opposing view, see Belletti (1990), Cardinaletti (1997; 2004), Cf. Benincà (2001a), Rizzi (1997), Frascarelli (2000), Belletti (2004b) for
Costa and Duarte (2002), Costa (2004), Gutiérrez-Bravo (2007), Sheehan Italian; Zubizarreta (1998; 1999), Zagona (2002) for Spanish; Motapanyane
(2006), and López (2009). (1998), Alboiu (2002) for Romanian; and Quer (2002a) for Catalan.
573
Sardinian (72e), where the focus of a sentence is typically d. Sissi, cuntenti sugnu! (Sic.)
realized preverbally, irrespective of its specific interpretation yes glad I.am
(Jones 1993, forthcoming; Cruschina 2006; 2010a; 2012a; ‘Yes, I am glad!’
Bentley 2007; 2008b; Mensching and Remberger 2010a):
e. A domo mea venis. (Srd.)
(72) a. Nimic nu ştie Petre. (Ro.) to house my you.come
nothing not knows Petre ‘You come to my house.’
‘Petre doesn’t know anything.’
With respect to these and other varieties, recent studies
b. IL TUO LIBRO ho letto (, non il suo). (It.)
have demonstrated that pragmatic values other than con-
the your book I.have read (, not the his)
trast can trigger focus fronting, such as surprise or mirativ-
‘I read YOUR BOOK, not his’
ity, or emphasis on the propositional truth, viz. verum focus
c. Muito vinho o João bebeu! (Pt.) (cf. Brunetti 2004; 2009a; 2009b; Cruschina 2006; 2012a;
much wine the João drank Leonetti and Escadell Vidall 2009; 2010; Mensching and
‘João drank a lot of wine!’ Remberger 2010a; Paoli 2010; Jones forthcoming).
574
D. Semantics and Pragmatics

CHAPTER 32
Lexical stability and shared lexicon

S T E V E N N. D W O R K I N
irrelevant to its survival. This chapter will deal mainly

32.1 General issues
with the uninterrupted continuation through direct oral
transmission of the vocabulary of spoken Latin, which in
The concept of stability in language change is fraught with quantitative terms today constitutes only a small part of the
difficulties. Certainly, stability in this context cannot be lexical stock of any Romance language. I will take as my
equated with immutability. Change over time is one of the starting point the writings of Arnulf Stefenelli (esp. 1992,
few absolute linguistic universals. Yet whereas change in 1996, and 2011), the only Romanist of the last generation
form and (often) in function is the norm, grammatical or who has systematically investigated this topic. I shall dis-
lexical categories and structures often display a high degree cuss here both pan- and widespread Romance lexical sur-
of relative stability. Nichols (2003:283f.) states that linguis- vivals (respectively panromanisch and interromanisch in
tic elements exhibit different kinds of stability, a trait that Stefenelli’s terminology) as well as lexical survivals in only
she defines as displaying more resistance to change, loss, or one or two languages (Stefenelli’s teilromanisch category).
borrowing, and which does not lend itself to precise A word will count as a lexical survival if documented in
quantification. Romance, even if it later became obsolete or fell into disuse
The study of lexical stability in the Romance languages in individual languages.
poses a number of methodological problems, and the con- I shall limit the scope of this study to the survival of the
cept itself is open to various interpretations. The lexicon is signifier, and leave aside the slippery problem of semantic
that facet of a language’s symbolic system that is open- stability and semantic change over time (see Ch. 33). Change
ended, changes most easily, and is perceived as the least in the semantic range of a lexical item is the norm. It is
stable. In contrast to a language’s phonological, morpho- often difficult to determine on the basis of extant written
logical, and syntactic components, the lexicon is more documentation the full semantic range in the spoken lan-
prone to changes brought about by non-linguistic circum- guage of a word in the past. Are contemporary secondary
stances, such as population movements and social, political, and tertiary meanings recent developments in the semantic
and cultural transformations. On a pan-Romance scale, lex- history of the lexical item at issue, or do they reflect the
ical stability can refer to those orally transmitted Latin semantic range of the Latin starting point? Romance ety-
lexical items that have come down into most (if not all) of mology has not traditionally paid adequate attention to the
the modern Romance languages. One might argue that the description and analysis of the full semantic scope of the
survival of any Latin lexical item in only some languages (or spoken Latin bases underlying the inherited lexicon. It
even in just one) represents an instance of individual lexical starts from the meanings of the Latin base as preserved in
stability with regard to the language(s) whose lexicon still written Latin. One of the innovations of the new Dictionnaire
contains the word at issue (for examples and discussion, étymologique roman (hereafter DÉRom, discussed in greater
see §32.4). That is to say, the analyst can attempt to assess detail below) is the effort to reconstruct, using the com-
lexical stability at the level of the Romance languages as a parative method, the semantics of the proto-Romance (the
whole or at the level of individual languages. glottonym consistently used in the DÉRom) starting point. It
With the exception of Latinisms, I shall not discuss sys- assumes that meanings that are widespread in the Romance
tematically as examples of lexical stability and shared lexi- reflexes were present in the relevant base and are not later,
con the continued survival of neologisms that entered the independent developments reflecting such cognitive cross-
Romance languages as loanwords or through the various linguistic processes as metaphor and metonymy. As Rankin
morphological processes of lexical creation, such as prefixal (2003:196) rightly claims, it is perfectly reasonable to recon-
and suffixal derivation, infixation, compounding, sound struct polysemy at the level of a protolanguage. This type of
symbolism, and lexical blends. The origin of a word is semantic reconstruction has not received the attention it
usually opaque to speakers and is in most instances deserves from specialists in Romance diachronic lexicology;
This chapter © Steven N. Dworkin 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 577
STEVEN N. DWORKIN
for a first step in this direction, based on the findings of the 2013], all presented in phonemic transcription rather than
DÉRom, see Buchi (2012). in the traditional orthography of the written Latin equiva-
Most studies of the survival rate in Romance of inherited lents, capture some degree of regional variation within
Latin lexicon start with documented written Latin as pre- proto-Romance. I find the chronological limits of the term
served, for example, in such compilations as the (still unfin- ‘proto-Romance’ as used in the currently available DÉRom
ished) Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, with its over 50,000 entries, entries vague and ambiguous, since the DÉRom tends to use
and determine which lexical items have survived into it in two senses: (1) the once spoken ancestral language
Romance through oral transmission (as opposed to later from which daughter languages descend; (2) the language
integration as learnèd borrowings, usually from written reconstructed by the comparative method which represents
Latin sources). However, it is unlikely that the vast and the ancestral language from which the compared languages
rich lexicon of the various written registers of Latin truly descend. Buchi (2013) has proposed a chronological nuan-
reflects the narrower range of the lexicon of spoken Latin, cing of the label ‘proto-Romance’, dividing it into five
the actual source of the Romance languages (cf. §1.2). Obvi- periods. A word documented in only a few medieval or
ously, spoken and written Latin are different language modern varieties of Romance (for examples, see below)
levels within the same diasystem. Numerous recorded may have enjoyed a far wider, but unrecorded, geographic
Latin words have not survived in any Romance language. distribution in an earlier period in other Romance lan-
Does that mean that at some point in the linguistic history guages, and, if not a local innovation, must have existed at
of the Roman empire they had fallen into disuse in the the level of proto-Romance (understood as the spoken
spoken language and were unknown and incomprehensible regional and social varieties of the Roman empire prior to
to illiterate speakers (the overwhelming majority of the the splitting off of Sardinian in the second century AD).
population)? On the other hand, to quote Adams A few comments are necessary regarding the concept of
(2013:777), ‘[m]any Latin terms that were to survive in ‘pan-Romance lexical survival’. A word does not need to
Romance languages are not attested at all in Latin texts, have left a reflex in every Romance variety to qualify as a
or alternatively hardly make an appearance.’ One can pan-Romance survival. The absence of a word only from
attempt to reconstruct the lexicon of proto-Romance (a varieties of Romanian does not mean that the word did not
glottonym used by several eminent Romanists such as Rob- form part of the original Romance varieties of the province
ert de Dardel, Robert A. Hall, Jr, and by DÉRom) by applying of Dacia, but means instead that it was replaced at some
the comparative method to that portion of the Romance point in that long period before the attestation of the first
lexicon that entered (almost) all the Romance languages Romanian texts in the sixteenth century. Contact between
through oral transmission. In terms of lexical stability, the the spoken continuations of Balkan Latin and such diverse
survival or stability of the reconstructed proto-Romance languages as Greek, Turkish, Hungarian, Albanian, and vari-
lexicon would be a misleading 100%. Reconstruction cannot ous south Slavonic languages could easily have led to
necessarily capture the full dynamics of lexical rivalries that numerous instances of lexical loss in the stratum of
lead to lexical change and the regional and social variations inherited Latin vocabulary and replacement in the form of
that may have occurred in the spoken language of the borrowings. In separate enquiries Fischer (1964) and Sala
Roman empire, nor can it recover those authentic (proto-) (2005:33) claim that c.200 inherited Latin words exist in all
Romance lexical items that may have fallen into disuse Romance languages except Romanian. A study on the same
before the appearance of the first texts. topic by Gossen (1982) offers a higher figure. Concrete
Nevertheless, reconstruction can yield useful insights. examples will be presented and discussed below. A handful
This is the approach taken by the DÉRom, directed by Éva of such items are attested in Latin inscriptions from the
Buchi (Nancy) and Wolfgang Schweickard (Saarbrücken). Balkans and others entered Albanian as Romance loanwords
Inspired by the methodological considerations in Chambon (e.g. BESTIA ‘animal’ > Alb. bishë, MULUS ‘mule’ > Alb. myll, OLIUA
(2007), they applied the comparative method to a list of ‘olive tree’ > Alb. ullí, RAPUM ‘turnip’ > Alb. rrepë ; cf. Gossen
c.500 pan-Romance survivals compiled by the Romanian 1982:18f. and passim; Haarmann 1978:63-8, 200-271).
linguist Iancu Fischer (1969) in order to determine the For the purposes of this study I have divided Romance
underlying proto-Romance lexical base, which they then Europe into the following geolinguistic territories: Gallo-
correlated with the written Latin form as presented in Romance, Ibero-Romance (which will here include Catalan
REW3. This use of comparative reconstruction in Romance as well as Galician, Portuguese, Spanish), Italo-Romance,
etymology aroused the ire of Alberto Varvaro and led to a Raeto-Romance (used here merely as a convenient cover
methodological debate between him and the directors of the term for Romansh, Ladin, and Friulian), and Daco-Romance.
DÉRom (see Varvaro 2011a,b and Buchi and Schweickard Although examples from Dalmatian/Vegliote will be
2011a,b). The reconstructions undertaken so far [September offered, the absence of a Latin base from the attested
578
LEXICAL STABILITY AND SHARED LEXICON
lexicon of this sparsely documented language will not dis- replacement of this vocabulary through borrowings and
qualify it from being considered as a pan-Romance lexical internal lexical creations. Various specialists (Wagner 1997
survival. If a given Latin word has left at least one orally [1951]:97-149; Blasco Ferrer 1984a:32-41) have characterized
transmitted reflex in any Romance variety found in each of the lexicon of Sardinian as ‘conservative’ or ‘archaic’. I shall
these territories, it will be considered as a pan-Romance present below selected examples of inherited Latin vocabu-
lexical survival. It will be assumed that the word may have lary that have survived only in Sardinian or in Sardinian
earlier enjoyed in the spoken language a wider, but fortuit- and a handful of other regions. However, Koch (2004) has
ously undocumented, diffusion. shown that the Sardinian lexicon offers a significant num-
On the basis of his survey of the REW and the later ber of innovations both on the onomasiological and
(consequently more up-to-date) FEW, Stefenelli claims that semasiological side. I would also advocate avoiding the
slightly over 7,000 attested Latin words survive through oral label ‘archaic’ to characterize the lexicon of a Romance
transmission in the Romance languages. The raw number of language that has preserved older lexical elements. Archaic
survivals increases to c.9,000 if the reconstructed asterisked implies a comparison with a norm that involves the loss of
forms posited in the REW and FEW are included. The The- the items in question. For speakers of Spanish, who use such
saurus Linguae Latinae contains some 50,000 lexical items continuations of early layers of Latinity such as tomar ‘to
(Stefenelli 2011:568). Munteanu Colán (2008:21f.) claims take’ and matar ‘to kill’ (assuming derivation from AESTUMARE
that 1,300 Latin bases recorded in the REW survive in all and MACTARE respectively), these high-frequency verbs are
the Romance languages, 4,000 live on in several Romance certainly not archaic elements of their active vocabulary.
languages, and whereas some 1,500 have survived in only Indeed, some innovations from the centre found their
one Romance language, the number of Latin words that live way into the peripheral areas. Bartoli quotes as an example
on in only a subset of the Romance languages far exceeds of a conservative retention in the Iberian Peninsula the
those that have come down into all the Romance languages. survival of the descendants of CLat. FABULARI ‘to speak, con-
The survival rate of the Latin lexicon is fairly low if REW and verse’, namely OSp. fablar, Pt. falar ‘to speak’ (in contrast to
FEW figures are used in comparison to the Thesaurus Linguae Cat. parlar; OSp, parlar is a late medieval Gallicism). In Gallo-
Latinae inventory, which is based on the enormous written Romance and regions of Italo-Romance this verb was ousted
Latin corpus. In order to study lexical stability and lexical by the descendants of the innovation PARABOLARE, namely Fr.
change in the transition from Latin to the Romance lan- parler and It. parlare (alongside which see It. favolare ‘to tell
guages, Stefenelli (1992; 1996; 2011) examined the fate of the tales’). Yet the existence in Spanish and Portuguese of the
1,000 most frequent lexemes (limiting himself to nouns, nouns palabra/palavra ‘word’, descended from the noun PAR-
adjectives, and verbs, while omitting function words), ABOLA indicate the presence of this family in the spoken Latin
based on the Latin frequency dictionaries of Gardner of the Iberian Peninsula. Although tiesta did not dislodge
(1971) and Delatte et al. (1981). cabeza (< CAPITIA ‘opening for the head in a tunic’, a derivative
The retention of specific items of the inherited Latin of CAPUT) as the designation for ‘head’ in Spanish, its pres-
vocabulary only in a given language or group of languages ence through the fifteenth century demonstrates that this
should not be taken to mean that the language has a con- innovative metaphoric use of Lat. TESTA ‘earthenware pot’,
servative lexicon. On this point, Matteo Bartoli (1925) which struck root in Gallo-Romance and in parts of Italo-
argued that the peripheral or lateral areas of the Romània Romance (Fr. tête, It. testa) entered the spoken language of
(the Iberian Peninsula to the west, Dacia to the east), as well the Iberian Peninsula (for numerous additional examples
as isolated areas (such as Sardinia and the Alpine regions), from Spanish and Portuguese, see Dworkin 2012:54-8).
often retained lexical items that were replaced by innov- Several other broad questions merit consideration here.
ations arising in and spreading from the linguistic centre of The study of lexical stability should include, for compara-
the Empire (Italy, Gaul). Linguistic areas deemed lexically tive purposes, the other side of the coin, namely lexical loss,
conservative also display numerous instances of lexical both at the pan-Romance level (i.e. Latin words that have
innovation in the form of neologisms, be they borrowings failed to survive in any Romance language) and inherited
or internal creations, and areas noted for lexical innov- Latin vocabulary that fell into disuse after being docu-
ations also (although perhaps to a lesser extent) retain mented at some earlier stage of a specific Romance lan-
words that have not survived elsewhere. The labels ‘conser- guage. Is there a correlation between lexical stability and
vative’ and ‘innovative’ with regard to a language’s lexicon loss? Do languages that show a high number of neologisms
have at best a relative value and cannot be used as an tend to lose inherited vocabulary at a higher rate, and
absolute defining characteristic. At best the linguist can consequently display a lower rate of lexical stability as
speak only of tendencies towards a higher or lower rate of defined for the purposes of this study? Are there semantic
retention of the inherited Latin lexicon, or of the fields, either at the pan-Romance level or at the level of
579
STEVEN N. DWORKIN
individual Romance languages, that show a high degree of burnt wood’, CARO(NIS) ‘flesh, meat’, CARPINUS ‘hornbeam’, CAR-
lexical stability (e.g. numerals, basic colour terms, (visible) RUM ‘cart, chariot’, CASA ‘cottage, rustic dwelling’ > ‘house’,
body parts, kinship terms, domestic animals)? Are there CASEUS ‘cheese’, CASTANEA ‘chestnut (tree)’, CATENA ‘chain’, CATTUS
fields subject to much change by lexical replacement ‘cat’, CAUDA ‘tail’, CENA ‘evening meal’, CERA ‘wax’, CERUUS ‘deer,
through neology and borrowing (cf. Haspelmath and stag’, CHORDA ‘cat gut, string of a musical instrument’, CIPPUS
Tadmor 2009)? To what extent is grammatical category a ‘gravestone’, CIUITAS ‘city’, COHORS ‘cohort’, COMA ‘hair on the
factor in lexical stability? I can treat only some of these head’, CORNU ‘horn’, CORONA ‘crown’, CORRIGIA ‘shoelace; rein
questions in what follows. The reader interested in a broad (horse)’, CORUUS ‘raven, crow’, COSTA ‘rib’, COXA ‘hip’, CRISTA
overview (with abundant bibliography) of lexical loss can ‘crest (animal, bird)’, CUBITUS ‘elbow’, CULUS ‘arse’, CUNEUS
turn to Dworkin (2011:598-605). ‘wedge’, CUPPA ‘cup, goblet’ , DECEM ‘ten’, DENS ‘tooth’, DEUS
‘god’, DIES ‘day’, DIGITUS ‘finger’, DOLOR ‘pain, sorrow’, DOLUS
‘trick’, DOMINUS ‘master’, DORSUM ‘back’, DUO ‘two’, ERICIUS ‘hedge-
hog’, FABA ‘bean’, FALX ‘scythe’, FAMES ‘hunger’, FARINA ‘flour’,
32.2 Pan-Romance survivals FASCIA ‘band, bandage’, FEBRIS ‘fever’, FEBRUARIUS ‘February’ , FEL
and shared lexicon ‘bile’, FENESTRA ‘window’, FAENUM ‘hay’, FERRUM ‘iron’, FERUS ‘wild
animal’, FILIUS ‘son’, FILUM ‘thread’, FLAMMA ‘flame’, FLOCCUS ‘flock
I shall take as a starting point for the analysis of pan- of wool’, FLOS ‘flower’, FOCUS ‘fire’, FOLIUM ‘leaf ’, FOLLIS ‘bellows’,
Romance lexical stability the c.500 pan-Romance etyma FONTANA ‘fountain’, FORMICA ‘ant’, FRATER ‘brother’, FRAXINUS ‘ash
reconstructed by DÉRom on the basis of the application tree’, FRONS ‘forehead’, FRUCTUS ‘fruit’, FUMUS ‘smoke’, FURCA
of comparative reconstruction to the appropriate ‘pitchfork’, FURTUM ‘theft’, FUSTIS ‘stick, staff, club’, FUSUS ‘spin-
Romance cognates. As noted above, this list follows dle’, GENER ‘son-in-law’, GENUCULUM ‘knee’, GINGIUA ‘gum’, GLANS
Fischer (1969) and is certainly not complete; Fischer ‘acorn’, GRANUM ‘grain, seed’, GULA ‘throat’, GUSTUS, ‘taste’, GUTTA
based his compilation on those items marked in the ‘drop’, HEDERA ‘ivy’, HERBA ‘grass’, HIBERNUS ‘winter’, HOMO ‘man,
third edition of Ernout and Meillet’s Dictionnaire étymo- person’, HOSPES ‘host’, IOCUS ‘game’, IUDEX ‘judge’, IUGUM ‘yoke’,
logique de la langue latine as ‘pan-Romance’. It does not IUNIPERUS ‘juniper tree’, LA(M)BRUSCA ‘wild vine’, LAC ‘milk’,
include bases that survived in all but one Romance lan- LACRIMA ‘tear’, LACUS ‘lake’, LANA ‘wool’, LAR(I)DUM ‘lard’, LAURUS
guage. As a matter of convenience I am presenting here ‘laurel’, LENS ‘lentil’, LEPUS ‘hare’, LEX ‘law’, LICIUM ‘leash’, LIGNUM
the classical Latin equivalents of the proto-Romance ‘piece of wood’, LINGUA ‘tongue’, LINUM ‘flax, linen’, LOCUS
etyma reconstructed by the authors of the DÉRom ‘place’, LUMEN ‘light’, LUNA ‘moon’, LUPUS ‘wolf ’, MAGISTER
entries. Inclusion of the classical Latin ‘corrélat écrit’ ‘teacher’, MAIUS ‘May’, MALLEUS ‘hammer, mallet’, MANICA ‘long
(‘written correlate’) is obligatory in all DÉRom entries. sleeve of the tunic’, MANUS ‘hand’, MARE ‘sea’, MARMOR ‘marble’,
The glosses correspond to the primary meanings docu- MARTIUS ‘March’, MEDULLA ‘marrow’, MEL ‘honey’, MENS ‘mind’,
mented in written Latin. I have divided the material MENSA ‘table’, MENTA ‘mint’, MERULA ‘blackbird’, MILIUM ‘millet’,
according to grammatical category (omitting function MILLE ‘one thousand’, MOLA ‘millstone’, MONS ‘mountain’, MORUM
words). Articles completed by the end of 2013 are due ‘mulberry, blackberry’, MUCCUS ‘snot’, MULIER ‘woman’, MUNDUS
to appear in Buchi and Schweickard (2014). ‘world’, MURUS ‘wall’, MUSCA ‘fly’, MUSTUM ‘must’, NAPUS ‘turnip’,
NARIS ‘nostril’, NASUS ‘nose’, NIX ‘snow’, NODUS ‘knot’, NOMEN
‘name’, NOUEM ‘nine’, NOX ‘night’, NUX ‘nut’, OCTO ‘eight’, OCULUS
32.2.1 Nouns in DÉRom list ‘eye’, OLLA ‘jar, pot’, OSSUM ‘bone’, OUUM ‘egg’, PAGANUS ‘country
dweller’, PALEA ‘chaff ’, PALMA ‘palm’, PALUS ‘stick’, PANIS ‘bread’,
ACETUM ‘vinegar’, AER ‘air’, AGER ‘field’, ALLIUM ‘garlic’, ALTARE PARENS ‘parent’, PARIES ‘wall’, PARS ‘part’, PASCHA ‘Passover; Eas-
‘that which was placed on the altar; altar’, AGNELLUS ‘lamb’, ter’, PASSER ‘sparrow; small bird’, PASSUS ‘step, pace’, PASTOR
ANGELUS ‘angel’, ANIMA ‘wind, breath, soul’, ANNUS ‘year’, APRILIS ‘shepherd’, PAUO ‘peacock’, PAX ‘peace’, PECCATUM ‘hobble; sin’,
‘April’, AQUA ‘water’, AQUILA ‘eagle’, ARANEA ‘spider’, ARATRUM PECTEN ‘comb’, PECTUS ‘chest’, PEDUCULUS ‘louse’, PELLIS ‘skin’, PE(N)
‘plough’, ARBOR ‘tree’, ARCUS ‘arc’, AREA ‘level or open space’, SUM ‘weight’, PERSICA ‘peach’, PETRA ‘stone’, PILUS ‘skin hair’, PINNA
ARGENTUM ‘silver’, ARMA ‘weapons’, ASINUS ‘ass’, ATRIPLEX ‘orach (a ‘feather’, PINUS ‘pine’, PIRUM ‘pear’, PISCIS ‘fish’, PLANTAGO ‘plan-
kitchen vegetable)’, AUGUSTUS ‘August’, *BABA ‘slaver’, BALTEUS tain’, POMUM ‘any kind of fruit’, PONS ‘bridge’, POPULUS ‘people’,
‘girdle’, BARBA ‘beard’, BOS ‘ox’, BRACAE ‘breeches, trousers’, PORCUS ‘pig’, PORRUM ‘leek’, PORTA ‘gate’, PRETIUM ‘price; reward’,
BRACHIUM ‘arm’, BRUMA ‘fog, mist’, BUCCA ‘cheek’ > ‘mouth’, PUGNUS ‘fist’, PULEX ‘flea’, PULPA ‘flesh’, PULUIS ‘dust, powder’,
CABALLA ‘mare’, CABALLUS ‘(pack) horse’, CAELUM ‘sky’, CAMISIA PUTEUS ‘well’, QUADRAGESIMA ‘forty day period’, QUATTUOR ‘four’,
‘shirt’, CAMPUS ‘field’, CANIS ‘dog’, CANNABIS ‘hemp’, CAPISTRUM QUINQUE ‘five’, RADIUS ‘ray, spoke’, RAMUS ‘branch’, RAPUM ‘turnip’,
‘halter’, CAPRA ‘(she-)goat’, CAPUT ‘head’, CARBO ‘burning or REN ‘kidney’, RIPA ‘bank, shore’, RIUUS ‘river’, ROTA ‘wheel’,
580
SABBATUM ‘Saturday’, SACCUS ‘sack, pouch’, SAGITTA ‘arrow’, SAL FRANGERE ‘break, smash’, FRICARE ‘rub’, FRIGERE ‘roast, fry’, FUGERE/
‘salt’, SALIX ‘willow’, SALUIA ‘sage (herb)’, SA(M)BUCUS ‘elder FUGIRE ‘flee’, FUTUERE ‘fuck’, GEMERE ‘groan’, HABERE ‘have’, INUITARE
(tree)’, SANGUIS ‘blood’, SEBUM ‘suet, grease’, SEPTEM ‘seven’, ‘invite, entertain’, IACERE, ‘lie down’, IEIUNARE ‘abstain from’,
SERPENS ‘serpent’, SERUUS ‘servant’, SEX ‘six’, SIGNUM ‘sign’, SINUS IOCARE ‘play’, LAUDARE ‘praise’, LAUARE ‘wash’, LAXARE ‘loosen’,
‘breast’, SITIS ‘thirst’, SOCER ‘father-in-law’, SOMNIUM ‘dream’, LEUARE ‘raise’, LIGARE ‘bind’, LUCERE/LUCIRE ‘shine, be bright’,
SOMNUS ‘sleep, slumber’, SOROR ‘sister’, SORS ‘fate, chance’, SPATHA LUCTARE ‘struggle, strive’, MASTICARE ‘chew’, ME(N)SURARE ‘meas-
‘spatula’, SPICUM/SPICA ‘ear of grain’, SPINA ‘thorn’, STELLA ‘star’, ure’, MINUERE/*MINUARE ‘make smaller’, MIRARE ‘stare with won-
STUPPA ‘tow’, TAURUS ‘bull’, TEMPUS ‘time’, TERRA ‘earth, land’, der’, MOLLIARE ‘soften’, MO(N)STRARE ‘show’, *MORERE / *MORIRE
TESTA ‘earthenware pot’ > ‘head’, TILIA ‘linden tree’, TITIO ‘fire- (CLat. MORI) ‘die’, MULGERE ‘milk’, MUTARE ‘change’, NASCERE ‘be
brand, torch’, TRES ‘three’, TURDUS ‘thrush’, TURTUR ‘turtledove’, born’, NOMINARE ‘name’, NUTRIRE ‘feed’, OBLITARE ‘forget’, ORARE
TUSSIS ‘cough’, ULMUS ‘elm’, UMBILICUS ‘navel’, UNCTUM ‘ointment, ‘pray’, ORDIRE ‘begin, commence’, PARERE ‘appear’, PLACERE
oil’, UNDA ‘wave’, UNGULA ‘fingernail’, UNUS ‘one’, URSUS ‘bear’, ‘please’, PLUERE/PLOUERE ‘rain’, PONERE ‘place, put’, POSSE/POTERE
URTICA ‘nettle’, UTER ‘wineskin’, UACCA ‘cow’, UADUM ‘ford’, UALLIS ‘be able’, PRAEHENDERE ‘grasp, seize’, QUAERERE ‘seek’, RADERE
‘valley’, UAS/UASUM, ‘vesssel, dish’, UENA, ‘vein’, UENTUS, ‘wind’, ‘scratch, scrape’, RESPONDERE ‘answer’, RODERE ‘gnaw’, RUGIRE
UERMIS ‘worm’, UERRES ‘boar, swine’, UESPA ‘wasp’, UESSICA ‘blad- ‘roar’, RUMIGARE ‘ruminate’, RUMPERE ‘break’, SALIRE ‘go up’, SALU-
der’, UESTIMENTUM, ‘clothing’, UICES/UICIS ‘change, alternation’, TARE ‘greet’, SCRIBERE ‘write’, SEDERE ‘be seated’, SENTIRE ‘feel’,
UICINUS ‘neighbour’, UIDUA ‘widow’, UIDUUS ‘widower’, UIGINTI, SIBILARE ‘whistle’, SONARE ‘sound’, SPARGERE ‘scatter’, STARE
‘twenty’, UILLA ‘country-estate, farm’, UINEA ‘vine’, UINUM ‘stand’, SUDARE ‘sweat’, SUFFLARE ‘blow’, TALIARE ‘split, cut’, TEN-
‘wine’, UIRGA ‘green twig’, UITA ‘life’. DERE ‘stretch’, TENERE ‘hold’, TEXERE ‘weave’, TONARE ‘thunder’,
TORNARE ‘turn’, TORQUERE ‘twist’, TREMULARE ‘tremble, shake’, TUS-
SIRE ‘cough’, UNGERE ‘anoint’, UADERE ‘go’, UENDERE ‘sell’, UENIRE
32.2.2 Adjectives in DÉRom list ‘come’, UIDERE ‘see’, UINDICARE ‘lay a legal claim’, UOLARE ‘fly’.
ACER/*ACRUS ‘sharp, cutting’, ALBUS ‘white’, ALTER ‘other (of

two)’, ASPER‘rough’, BONUS ‘good’, CALDUS ‘warm, hot’, CRASSUS/
GRASSUS ‘fatty, greasy’, CRUDUS ‘raw’, CURTUS ‘short’, DIRECTUS
32.3 Lexical stability, shared lexicon,
‘straight’, DULCIS ‘sweet’, FORTIS ‘strong’, GRAUIS ‘heavy’, GROSSUS, and semantic fields
‘fat, thick’ INTEGER ‘whole, complete’, IUUENIS ‘young’, LARGUS
‘ample’, LATUS ‘wide’, LONGUS ‘long’, MACER ‘thin’, MASCULUS I shall illustrate from selected semantic fields instances of
‘male’, MATURUS ‘ripe’, METIPSE ‘same’, MINUTUS ‘small’, MOLLIS widespread lexical stability and shared lexicon in the
‘soft’, MUTUS ‘inarticulate, dumb’, NIGER ‘black’, NOUUS ‘new’, Romance languages. Emphasis here will be on the survival
PLENUS ‘full’, PRIMARIUS ‘first’, PRIMUS ‘first’, RANCIDUS ‘stinking, of the Latin base; individual details of formal develop-
rancid’, RECENS ‘new, fresh, young’, ROTUNDUS ‘round’, SANUS ment will be ignored. In some varieties of Romance, the
‘healthy’, SICCUS ‘dry’, SURDUS ‘deaf ’, TARDIUUS ‘tardy’, TENER ‘ten- local reflex of the Latin word in question, although
der’, TRISTIS ‘sad’, UERUS ‘true, genuine’, UETULUS/UECLUS ‘old’, extant, is losing ground to other forms. Exemplification
UIRIDIS ‘green’, UIUUS ‘alive, lively’, UINACEUS ‘pertaining to is not intended to present every attested Romance reflex
wine or grapes’. of the relevant Latin base. For those bases for which
I have offered no Romance descendants, the reader may
consult the appropriate entries in REW3, FEW, Pfister
32.2.3 Verbs in DÉRom list and Schweickard (1979- ), and DÉRom. Romance forms
will be presented in their respective standard orthog-
ADIUTARE ‘help’, ARARE ‘plough’, AUDIRE ‘hear’, AUSCULTARE ‘listen’, raphies insofar as possible. Friulian forms follow
BATTUERE ‘beat’, BIBERE ‘drink’, BLASPHEMARE/BLASTIMARE ‘curse, the headwords in Pirona et al. (1992). Romansh spellings
insult’, CABALLICARE ‘ride’, CACARE ‘shit’, CADERE ‘fall’, CANTARE follow Decurtins (2012) and Sardinian spellings follow
‘sing, chant’, CERNERE ‘separate, sift’, CINGERE ‘gird’, CIRCARE ‘go Pittau (2000-2003).
about, wander through’, CLAMARE ‘shout’, CLAUDERE ‘close’, COG-
NOSCERE ‘know’, COLLIGERE ‘bind, tie together’, COMPARARE ‘pro-
vide, furnish, get ready’, COMPREHENDERE ‘grasp, seize’, CONSUERE
32.3.1 Numerals
‘sew together', COQUERE/COCERE ‘cook, bake, boil’, CREDERE
‘believe’, CRESCERE ‘grow’, CURRERE ‘run’, DARE ‘give’, DICERE ‘say, The numbers ‘one’ to ‘ten’ have remained stable. Orally
tell’, DISCARRICARE ‘dismount’, DOLERE ‘be in pain’, DORMIRE ‘sleep’, transmitted reflexes of UNUS, DUO, TRES, QUATTUOR, QUINQUE, SEX,
DUCERE ‘lead’, ESSE/*ESSERE ‘be’, EXIRE ‘go out’, FACERE ‘make, do’, SEPTEM, OCTO, NOUEM, DECEM live on in all Romance languages.
581
STEVEN N. DWORKIN
The numerals ‘eleven’ to ‘sixteen’, UNDECIM, DUODECIM, TREDECIM, the number system of early spoken Daco-Romance prior to
QUATTUORDECIM, QUINDECIM, SEDECIM, have also survived in various the introduction of the Slavonicism, and it does survive in
guises. Whereas the Italian, Sardinian, and Romansh Aromanian. In short, although the Romance languages have
reflexes, respectively, undici, dodici, tredici, quattordici, quin- greatly innovated with regard to the internal syntactic
dici, sedici; undiki, doiki, treiki, battordiki, bindiki, seiki; endisch, structure of their numerals, they continue the raw lexical
dudisch, tredisch, quitordisch, quendisch, sedisch are morpho- material inherited from spoken Latin.
logically transparent, the French, Spanish, and Portuguese
cognates are synchronically opaque and unsegmentable,
respectively: onze, douze, treize, quatorze, quinze, seize; once,
32.3.2 Kinship terminology
doce, trece, catorce, quince; onze, doze, treze, quatorze, quinze.
OSp. seze and OPt. seze were replaced by diez y seis lit. ‘ten Basic kinship terminology also shows a high degree of
and six’ and dezasseis lit. ‘ten and six’ respectively. This same lexical stability and shared lexicon. With the exception of
opaqueness is seen in Catalan and several Italo-Romance Romanian, all the Romance languages continue to use orally
varieties (Price 1992:454-7). The Latin SEPTEMDECIM ‘seven- transmitted reflexes of MATER ‘mother’ and PATER ‘father’: Fr.
teen’, DUO DE UIGINTI ‘eighteen’, UNUS DE UIGINTI ‘nineteen’ (lit. mère/père, Occ. maire/paire, Sp., It. madre/padre, Pt. mãe/pai
‘two from twenty’, ‘one from twenty’) gave way to various (also OPt. madre/padre), Cat. mare/pare, while Romanian,
forms involving the addition of ten + seven, ten + eight, ten + Vegliote, and many southern Italian dialects turn to Lat.
nine. Romanian uses the raw materials provided by spoken TATA ‘father’ and MAMMA ‘mother’, the documented products
Latin, but has created its own unique structure possibly of child language (e.g. Vgl. tuota, Ro. tată, mamă). Reflexes of
based on surrounding Slavonic models: e.g. unsprezece FILIUS, FILIA and their diminutives have survived in all
‘eleven’ lit. ‘one over ten’ where spre is from SUPER (but in Romance languages as the designations for ‘son’ and ‘daugh-
everyday speech these are less transparent: unşpe, doişpe, ter’: Fr fils/fille, Sp. hijo/hija, Cat. fill/filla, Pt. filho/filha, Ro. fiu/
treişpe, paişpe, cinşpe, şaişpe, şapteşpe, optşpe, nouăşpe). The fiică (the latter is a diminutive, FILIA survives directly in e.g.
Latin decads from twenty to ninety, UIGINTI, TRIGINTA, QUADRA- fie-mea/ta/sa ‘daughter=my/your.SG/his,her’). The labels for
GINTA, QUINQUAGINTA, SEXAGINTA, SEPTUAGINTA, OCTOGINTA (replaced by ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ pose some analytical problems. Lat.
OCTAGINTA), NONAGINTA underlie (with various formal and ana- FRATER ‘brother’ and SOROR ‘sister’ have survived respectively
logical adjustments) the corresponding Romance numerals: as Fr. frère, Occ. fraire, Vgl. frutro, SIt., Ro. frate, and Fr sœur,
Fr. vingt, trente, quarante, cinquante, soixante, OFr. septante, Occ sòrre, OSp. seror(a) (> Basque serora ‘spinster who looks
huitante/octante, nonante (the French of Belgium and Switz- after the church’), OIt. suora (but still used in modern Italian
erland has preserved septante and nonante, respectively, with the meaning ‘nun’), Rms. sour, Frl. sur, Srd. sòrre, Vgl.
whereas huitante/octante is rare; cf. Bauer 2004:26f.), Sp. saur, Ro. soră. Italian has had recourse to forms based on a
veinte, treinta, cuarenta, cincuenta, sesenta, setenta, ochenta, diminutive of FRATER/SOROR, namely fratello and sorella. Sp.
noventa, Pt. vinte, trinta, quarenta, cinqüenta, sessenta, setenta, hermano/hermana, Pt. irmão/irmã, Cat. germá(n)/germana
oitenta, noventa, It. venti, trenta, quaranta, cinquanta, sessanta, reflect lexical reduction of Lat. FRATER GERMANUS/SOROR GERMANA
settanta, ottanta, novanta (paradigms from Catalan, Sardinian, ‘brother/sister born of the same parents’. Consequently,
and Surselvan available in Price 1992:461). In some varieties these forms provide evidence of the survival in the spoken
(French, Occitan, southern Italian dialects e.g. Sicily, Latin of the Iberian Peninsula of FRATER and SOROR (OSp. fray
Abruzzo, Apulia; cf. Bauer 2004:29), such items as QUADRA- and sor, as religious titles, are medieval Gallicisms).
GINTA, SEXAGINTA, OCTOGINTA, were replaced (at least in part) by a The history of the designations for ‘uncle’ and ‘aunt’ is
vigesimal system; cf. Fr. soixante-dix ‘seventy’ (lit. ‘sixty- more complex. Lat. AUUNCULUS ‘mother’s brother’ lived on as
ten’), quatre-vingts ‘eighty’ (lit. ‘four-twenties’), quatre-vingt- Fr. oncle (whence Eng. uncle and Ger. Onkel), OPrv. a(v)oncle,
dix ‘ninety’ (lit. ‘four-twenty-ten’). This pattern was more OCat. avoncle/avonclo, ModCat. oncle., Ro. unchi (Pfister and
widespread in the numeral system in old French, and also Schweickard 1979- :31, 2673). The Hellenisms THIUS, THIA
found vestigially in other Romance speaking regions; see underlie It. zio/zia, Sp. tío/tía, Pt. tio/tia, Srd. tiu, tia. Since
Price (1992:463-9) and Bauer (2004:26-31). For these same the medieval period Catalan has opposed oncle to tia (a
numbers, Romanian (cf. §8.4.7) uses a system involving similar split is seen in Occitan and Gascon); modern tio is a
multiples of inherited zece ‘ten’ (plural zeci), e.g. douăzeci, Hispanism. In Dworkin (2012:62) I raised the possibility that
‘twenty’ (lit. ‘two.tens’), treizeci ‘thirty’ patruzeci ‘forty’, etc. the Greek base directly and independently entered the
Latin CENTUM ‘one hundred’ survived in all Romance lan- spoken Latin of the Italian and the Iberian Peninsulas.
guages except Romanian, where ‘100’ (and its multiples) is A semantic evolution of Lat. BARBA ‘beard’ > ‘uncle’ (due to
expressed by the Slavonic borrowing sută, plural sute. the association of the beard with the male authority of the
Nevertheless, reflexes of CENTUM may have formed part of father’s brother in some kinship systems) underlies the
582
designation of ‘uncle’ in varieties of northern Italo- konnadu, Rms. quinau, Frl. cugnat, Vgl. komnut, Ro. cumnat.
Romance, Ladin, Friulian, and Vegliote (see DÉRom, s.v. Tappolet (1895) remains a valuable source of pertinent data.
barba, and Pfister and Schweickard 1979- : 43, 1171-7).
Latin AMITA ‘father’s sister’ underlies OFr. amte (the source
of Eng. aunt), numerous forms found in northern Italian
32.3.3 Colour terms
varieties such as Pie. magna (Pfister and Schweickard
1979- :13, 815-23) and Frl. agne, Rms. onda. The bulk of the Latin colour vocabulary did not continue into
Latin AUUS/AUA ‘grandfather/grandmother’ (AUUNCULUS is a Romance. Only three Latin primary chromonyms, NIGER
derivative of AUUS) underlies Italian avo/ava (today limited ‘black’, UIRIDIS ‘green’, ALBUS ‘white’, have survived widely: Fr.
to the written and juridical language, but there with the noir, Sp./Pt. negro, Cat. negre, Rms. ner, It. nero, Frl. neri, Ro.
meaning ‘forefather, ancestor’), OSrd. a(u)u/abu, as well as negru (Srd. ni(g)ed.d.u continues Lat. NIGELLUS, DES, 2, 166b); Fr.,
various reflexes in northern Italian varieties, Ladin and Occ., Cat., Frl. vert, Sp., Pt., It., Ro. verde. In contrast to the first
ARo. aus (Pfister and Schweickard 1979- : 31, 2674-8). two terms, the semantic history of ALBUS is more complex. It is
Derivatives of AUUS have survived elsewhere in the documented as a chromonym in Ro. alb, Vgl. jualb, Rms. alv,
Romance languages. The diminutives ?AUULUS/AUULA (the OSp., OPt. alvo, OSrd. albu/alvu, and indirectly in such Spanish
latter documented in African Latinity) underlie OIt. àvolo and Italian toponyms as Peralba, Vialba, Pietralba, Montalvo
(also in northern dialects and old Tuscan, including Flor- ((Pfister and Schweickard 1979- :9, 16). As a colour term
entine; Pfister and Schweickard 1979- :31, 2668-73). Opin- ALBUS was replaced by the Germanic *blank, the source of Fr.
ions are divided as to whether ?AUULUS/AUULA or AUIOLUS/ blanc, Sp. blanco, Pt. branco, It. bianco, Lad./Frl. /blank/. Given
AUIOLA are the starting point for Sp. abuelo/abuela, OPt. the presence with the meaning ‘white’ and the relative vital-
avoo/avoa (modern avô/avó) ‘grandfather/grandmother’, ity of vernacular descendants of ALBUS in the Iberian Peninsula
and OFr. aïel/aïeule, modern aïeul ‘grandfather’ (though and in Italian toponyms, one cannot rule out the possibility
less common in this sense than grand-père) ‘ancestor’ (see that the aforecited Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian cognates
Malkiel 1981-3). Latin *AUIUS/AUIA (the latter in Plautus) of blanc are early Gallicisms rather than the local vernacular
have been invoked to account for OFr. aive, OPrv. Cat. avi/ descendants of an early Germanic loan in spoken Latin
avia, as well as scattered northern Italian forms, Srd. avu/ (Dworkin 2012:69f; also Pfister and Schweickard 1979- :Ger-
ava (DES, I, s.v. avu, Pfister and Schweickard 1979- : 31, manismi, fasc. 6, 1053-5); Srd. biancu is an Italianism (DES).
2655-6). Does Sp. ayo ‘tutor’ also continue this base Substantivized ALBUS and ALBA have survived widely with vari-
(Corominas and Pascual 1980-91, s.v. ayo; Malkiel 1981-3) ous meanings referring to (originally white-coloured) cloth-
or is it of Gothic origin, as argued by Gamillscheg (1934)? ing, trees, animals, birds (numerous examples in Pfister and
Latin NEPOS lives on in most languages, but with a meaning Schweickard 1979- : FEW, and DES). Feminine ALBA has sur-
split that is found in other kinship systems: Sp. nieto/nieta, vived with the meaning ‘dawn’ in all Romance languages
Pt. neto/neta, Cat. net/neta ‘grandson/granddaughter’ versus except Romanian. Most other Latin colour terms have sur-
Fr. neveu/nièce, Cat. nebot/neboda ‘nephew/niece’. Ro. nepot/ vived only in scattered Romance languages (e.g. COCCINUS
nepoată and Italian ambigeneric nipote have both meanings. ‘scarlet red’ in Rms. tgietschen and ARo. coațin, MELLINUS ‘yellow’
Sp. sobrino/sobrina, Pt. sobrinho/sobrinha ‘nephew/niece’ con- in Rms. mellen and Srd. mé(li)nu—specifically with reference to
tinue Lat. (CON)SOBRINUS/(CON)SOBRINA ‘maternal cousin.M/F’. Lat. a horse’s coat—RUSSEUS ‘reddish’ in Sp. rojo ‘red’, RUBEUS ‘red’ as
SOCER/SOC(E)RA ‘father-/mother-in-law’, GENER ‘son-in-law’, Fr. rouge ‘red’, Sp. rubio ‘blond’, Pt. ruivo ‘strawberry blond’),
NURUS ‘daughter-in-law’, whose form was altered under the or have fallen into disuse. This semantic field has been
influence of SOC(E)RA, live on widely in Romance: OFr. suevre, receptive to borrowings (cf. Fr. bleu, of Germanic background,
Occ., Cat. sogre, Sp. suegro, Pt. sogro, It. suocero, Ro. socru; the Sp./Pt. azul, It. azzurro ‘blue’ all Arabisms) and to internal
corresponding feminine forms designate the ‘mother-in creations (e.g. Sp. amarillo, Pt. amarelo ‘yellow’ < AMARELLUS,
law’. Fr., Occ., Cat. gendre, Sp. yerno, Pt. genro, It. genero, Srd. diminutive of AMARUS ‘bitter’, Pt. vermelho, OSp. bermejo
benneru, Frl. dzinar, Ro. ginere denote ‘son-in-law’, while OFr. ‘(bright) red’ < UERMICULUS ‘small worm that gives a red dye’).
nuere, Occ., Cat., Pt. nora, Sp. nuera, It. nuora, Srd. nora, Ro. Kristol (1978) is an excellent source for data and analysis of
noră name the ‘daughter-in-law’. In French, suevre and nuere Romance colour terms.
have completely disappeared in the face of competition
from belle-mère ‘mother-in-law’ (also ‘stepmother’) and bru
alongside belle-fille ‘daughter-in-law’; also ‘stepdaughter’.
32.3.4 Body parts
Latin COGNATUS ‘blood relation’ took on the meaning
‘brother-in-law’ in all areas outside Gallo-Romance: Occ. Many Latin designations for body parts and major organs
cunhat, Cat. cunyat, Pt. cunhado, Sp. cuñado, It. cognato, Srd. have come down into most Romance languages (see now
583
STEVEN N. DWORKIN
Adams 2013:777-91). This is a semantic field in which, cross- through Greek into Latin) SABBATUM/SAMBATUM and the Chris-
linguistically, borrowing is rare (e.g. It. guancia ‘cheek’ of tian DOMINICUS have survived widely (albeit with different
Germanic origin, Ro. obraz, a Slavonic loan; for additional genders, e.g. It. domenica, Ro. duminică (F) vs Fr. dimanche,
examples, see Krefeld 1999:263f.). The following Latin bases Pt./Sp. domingo (M); It. sabato, Pt./ Sp. sábado, Fr. samedi (M) vs
have left widespread descendants in the Romance lan- Ro. sâmbătă (F)) as the designations for ‘Saturday’ and ‘Sun-
guages: AURICULA ‘ear’, BARBA ‘beard; chin’, BRAC(C)HIUM ‘(fore) day’ respectively, rivalling, since the time of Tertullian (AD
arm’, BUCCA ‘cheek’ > ‘mouth’, CAPUT ‘head’, CARO ‘flesh’, COR 160-225), the pagan SATURNI DIES and SOLIS DIES (for details, see
‘heart’, CORPUS ‘body’, COXA ‘thigh’, CILIUM ‘eyebrow’, CUBITUS Wartburg 1949). Unique to Sardinian is the term kenápura
‘elbow’, CULUS ‘arse’, DENS ‘tooth’, DIGITUS ‘finger’, GENUNCULUM ‘Friday’ < CAENA PURA ‘meal requiring abstinence from certain
‘knee’, GINGIUA ‘gum’, GULA ‘throat’, LINGUA ‘tongue’, MANUS foods’ (lit. ‘pure dinner’) introduced as a calque of a Greek
‘hand’, NARES ‘nostrils’, NASUS ‘nose’, OCULUS ‘eye’, OS ‘bone’, phrase by Jews from Africa (DES, I, 328, Wagner 1951:72).
PELLIS ‘skin’, PES ‘foot’, PUGNUS ‘wrist’, SINUS ‘breast’, UNGULA Some varieties of Romansh employ mesjamna ‘Wednesday’,
‘fingernail’, UENTER ‘belly’. lit. ‘middle of the week’ (a calque on German Mittwoch?; see
Most of these items have retained their original spoken Decurtins 2012: s.v. mesjamna), as does Vgl. missédma ‘Wed-
Latin meaning. Although Ro. bucă can still mean ‘cheek’ nesday’ and various northern Italian dialects (see REW3
Slavonic obraz is the preferred term; today bucă is mainly 4090). In the Vegliote and Italian dialect examples the sec-
‘buttock’. Given that Fr. bouche, Occ., Cat., Vgl. buka, Srd., ond element continues the Hellenism HEBDOMAS/HEBDOMADA
Rms. bucca, Frl. buke, Sp., Pt. boca, It. bocca all mean ‘mouth’, (see below).
it seems reasonable to claim that the semantic shift In like fashion, the Latin names of the months—IANUARIUS,
occurred in the spoken Latin of the empire; indeed, BUCCA FEBRUARIUS, MARTIUS, APRILIS, MAIUS, IUNIUS, IULIUS, AUGUSTUS, SEPTEM-
is already found with the meaning of ‘mouth’ in Petronius BER, OCTOBER, NOUEMBER, DECEMBER—display pan-Romance stabil-
(cf. §1.5). In Romanian the reflex of GULA, namely gură, ity. A handful of Romance varieties have opted for local
acquired the meaning ‘mouth’; cf. coll. Fr gueule, docu- innovations, e.g. Rms. zerkladur ‘June’ (cf. zerklar ‘to weed,
mented with the meaning ‘mouth’ in the twelfth century; hoe’; Decurtins 2012: s.v. zerkladur) and fenadur ‘July’ (cf.
elsewhere the progeny of GULA retained its original meaning. fenar ‘to stack hay’; Decurtins 2012: s.v. fenadur); also Srd.
The descendants of COR preserved the meaning ‘heart’, while ladáminis ‘October’ < LETAMEN ‘manure’, lampada ‘June’ (DES II,
in Romanian inimă < ANIMA ‘soul, spirit’ took on this meaning 7), tréulas ‘July’ (see DES II, 515), and cabidanni ‘September’,
(note also Srd. anima ‘stomach’ (DES I, 90); see also Pfister lit. ‘beginning of the year’.
and Schweickard 1979- :15:1319 for other anatomical uses in The names for the seasons in spoken Latin have fared well
Italo-Romance of reflexes of ANIMA). Romanian also stands in Romance. While HIEMS ‘winter’ fell into disuse, adjectival
apart in its choice of picior both ‘foot’ and ‘leg’ < PETIOLUS, a HIBERNUS ‘pertaining to winter’, acquired substantival func-
diminutive of PES ‘foot’. The metaphoric use of TESTA ‘earth- tion through reduction of the syntagm (TEMPUS) HIBERNUM and
enware pot’ (a meaning preserved in Neapolitan where testa survived on a pan-Romance scale (see REW3, 4126.). The
only means ‘pot, vase’ alongside capo (F) ‘head’) with the label for ‘summer’, AESTAS/AESTATIS, lives on in most Romance
meaning ‘head’ is widespread: Fr. tête, OSp. tiesta, It. testa, languages except Romanian, Spanish, and Portuguese, in
Vgl. tiasta. Zauner (1894) is a useful source of relevant data which members of the family of Lat. UER ‘spring’, namely
on Romance names for parts of the body. vară, verano, verão have triumphed (Pfister and Schweickard
1979- :6, 1139-48; FEW 24). In medieval Spanish verano meant
‘spring’, a meaning retained by Srd. veranu (DES II, 571). Sp.,
32.3.5 Calendar terms Pt. estío, OPrv., Cat. estiu ‘summer’ bespeak the presence of
(TEMPUS) AESTIUUM in the spoken Latin of the Iberian Peninsula
The Latin names of the days of the week have survived on a and southern Gaul. To designate the transitional season
pan-Romance scale, although the syntactic relationship known as ‘spring’, Lat. UER combined widely with the adjec-
between the elements (the name of the relevant pagan tive PRIMUS ‘first’: Ro. primăvară, It., Sp., Cat., Pt. primavera,
god and the noun DIES ‘day’) shows considerable variation OFr. primevoir. The Latin simplex also came into Romance
which goes back to spoken Latin, e.g. Fr. lundi, It. lunedì vs with its original meaning: OFr., OPrv. ver, Vlc. ver, ONap.,
Cat. dilluns vs Sp. lunes, Ro. luni. Portuguese chose to retain ORmg. vera (FEW 14, s.v. VER). Lat. AUTUMNUS ‘autumn’ has also
the Christian system (proposed in the writings of St August- thrived: Fr. automne, Occ. auton, Pt. outono, Sp. otoño, OCat.
ine and Cesarius of Arles) for the names of the weekdays: autumne (ousted in the modern language by the neologism
segunda feira ‘Monday’, terça feira ‘Tuesday’, quarta feira tardor/tardó), Srd. attungiu/attunzu, It. autunno, Ro. toamnă
‘Wednesday’, quinta feira ‘Thursday’, sexta feira ‘Friday’ (lit. (FEW 24, s.v. AUTUMNUS, Pfister and Schweickard 1979- :31,
‘second, etc. feast(day)’). The Hebraism (transmitted 2593-4; Colón 1976:223-39).
584
The designation for various periods of time display a high scale, e.g. LUPUS ‘wolf ‘ > Fr. loup, Occ. lop, Cat. llop, Sp., Pt. lobo,
degree of stability. Descendants of Lat. ANNUS ‘year’ are found It. lupo, Rms. luf, Frl. lof, Ro. lup; UULPES (or its diminutive
in all Romance languages. Almost all languages continue to UULPICULA) ‘fox’ > OFr. goupil (replaced by renard of Germanic
use the progeny of MENS to designate ‘month’; Romanian uses origin), Occ. voulpilh, OCat. volpell, OSp. gulpeja/vulpeja
lună , the word for ‘moon’, to label this time period. Reflexes (ousted by etymologically obscure zorro), It. volpe, Rms.
of SEPTIMANA entered all the Romance languages. In Sardinian, uolp, Frl. bolp, Ro. vulpe; URSUS > Fr. ours, Occ. ors, Cat. os, Sp.
settumana week’ has been displaced by chida, of disputed oso, OPt. osso (replaced by Latinate urso), It. orso, Rms. uors,
origin (DES II, 348); orally transmitted reflexes of the Hel- Ro. urs. The Latin names for some common insects have also
lenism HEBDOMADA (attested since the time of Varro) turn up fared well; witness FORMICA ‘ant’ > Fr. fourmi, Occ., Cat., Pt.,
in Vgl. jedma ‘week’, OIt. edima, Rms. jamna ‘week’, OIt. Srd. formiga, Sp. hormiga, It. formica, Rms. furmicla, Vgl. for-
domada ‘weekly lesson’, OFr. domée ‘Sunday Mass’, OGlc. maika, Ro. furnică; PEDUCULUS ‘louse’ > Fr. pou, Occ. pezolh, Cat.
domaa ‘week’, Cat. doma ‘type of ecclesiastical office held poll, Sp. piojo, Pt. piolho, It. pidocchio, Srd. preducu, Frl. pedoli,
on a weekly basis’ (REW3, 4090, FEW 4, s.v. HEBDOMAS). Both DIES Rms. plugl, Ro. păduche; PULEX ‘flea’ > Fr. puce, Occ. piuze, Cat.
‘day’ (or substantivized DIURNUS, originally ‘daily’) and NOX pussa, Sp., Pt. pulga, It. pulce, Srd. puliche/pulighe, Rms. pilesch,
‘night’ have survived in all the Romance languages Frl. puls, Ro. purice. APIS ‘bee’ (especially its diminutive API-
(although in French and Italian di is restricted to day CULA) and MUSCA ‘fly’ also fared well: e.g. OFr. eis, It. ape, Vgl.
names, e.g. lundi, lunedì and lexicalized Fr. midi ‘midday’, It. uv, Frl. ave: Sp. abeja, OOcc. abeilla (> Fr. abeille) Tsc. pecchia;
mezzodì ‘midday’, oggidì ‘nowadays’, buondì ‘good day’), as Occ., Cat., Sp., Pt. mosca, Fr. mouche, Ro. muscă.
have the Latin terms for ‘today’ and ‘yesterday’, HODIE and
HERI respectively (although OPt. eire was replaced by ontem in
the medieval language). Latin CRAS ‘tomorrow’ lived on as
OSp., OPt. cras (ousted by mañana and amanhã respectively < 32.4 Relic words
*maˈnjana), Srd. cras(a)/cras(i), SIt. (some parts of Campania)
krai; elsewhere prefixed derivatives of MANE ‘morning’ (Fr. Words that have survived in only one or two languages
demain, It. domani), acquired this meaning. (Stefenelli’s teilromanisch category) represent the other
side of lexical stability. One might reasonably expect that
such items are found more often in isolated regions of the
32.3.6 Domestic and wild animals Romània, e.g. Sardinia, Romania, the Alpine regions of
Switzerland and northern Italy, or in areas colonized in
The Latin signifiers for many domestic and domesticated the earliest days of Roman expansion, such as Sardinia and
animals have remained stable. Selected examples include: the Iberian Peninsula, territories that have preserved
AGNUS/AGNELLUS > Fr. agneau, Occ. agnel, Gal. anho, Cat. anyell vocabulary from earlier chronological layers of Latin.
(rivalled today by be and xai; see DECat I, 338), It. agnello, Frl. Many of the relevant orally transmitted lexical items listed
agnel, Ro. miel; BOS > Fr. boeuf, OPrv. bou, Pt. boi, Sp. buey, It. here entered other Romance languages as late medieval or
bue, Ro. bou; CABALLUS > Fr. cheval, Occ. caval, Cat. cavall, Sp. early modern Latinisms. Blasco Ferrer (1984a:34-9) lists 59
caballo, Pt. cavalo, It. cavallo, Ro. cal; CANIS > Fr. chien, Occ., OSp. Latin bases that have survived either only in Sardinian or,
can (ousted in Spanish by perro; see Dworkin 2012:38f.), OCat. more often, in Sardinian and other isolated or lateral areas
ca(n) (alongside gos), Pt. cão, It. cane, Frl. can, Ro. câine; CAPRA > of the former empire. In many instances the word has
Fr. chèvre, Occ., Cat., Sp., Pt. cabra, It. capra, Frl. ciavre, Ro. retained its original meaning in Sardinian, whereas it has
capră; CATTUS > Fr. chat, Occ., Cat. gat, Sp., Pt. gato, It. gatto, Frl. acquired new meanings elsewhere in the Romània. I offer
giat, Ro. cătușă (which today, as plural cătușe, means ‘hand- here selected examples of items limited to Sardinian or
cuffs’; the common word for ‘cat’ is pisică); PORCUS > Fr., Occ., southern Italian varieties: ACINA > ácina ‘grape’, CONIUGARE >
Cat., Ro. porc, Pt., It. porco (although today maiale is the usual cojubare ‘to get married’ (flanked by coyubiu ‘marriage, wed-
word for the animal), Sp. puerco, Vgl. puark, Rms. piertg; ding’), DOMUS > domu ‘house’, EXCITARE > ischitare ‘awaken’ (DES
TAURUS > OFr. tor, Occ., OCat. taur, Pt. touro, It., Sp. toro, Ro. I, 658), *EXTUTARE > istut(t)are ‘extinguish a fire’ (DES II, 537),
taur; UACCA > Fr. vache, Occ., Cat., Pt. Sp. vaca, It. vacca FERRE > ferrere ‘carry, lead’, FRATUELIS > fratile ‘cousin’ (DES I,
(although mucca is the preferred term in the modern lan- 543), FURFUR > fúrfure ‘chaff, bran’, IUBILARE > jubilare ‘shout’,
guage), Ro. vacă. In the Latin of the Iberian Peninsula the NARRARE > narrere ‘say, tell’ (detailed discussion in DES II, 156f),
phrase AGNUS CORDUS ‘lamb born late in the year’ was replaced POLLEN > póddine ‘bran, chaff ’. Some words survive only in
by *korˈdarju, the source of Sp. cordero, Pt. cordeiro (Cat. varieties of Sardinian and Romanian, two territories that
corder may be a Hispanism). The spoken Latin designations split off early from the Roman empire, e.g. HAEDUS > Srd. edu,
for certain wild animals have survived on a pan-Romance Ro. ied ‘kid’ (reflexes of the diminutive HAEDIOLUS appear in
585
STEVEN N. DWORKIN
various northern Italian and Raeto-Romance varieties, the Iberian Peninsula by the first waves of Roman occupiers,
REW3, 3973), NEMO > nemos ‘nobody’, Ro. nime, nimeni while the others represent retentions of words eventually
Sala (2005:32) claims that Romanian has preserved in its replaced by neologisms elsewhere in the Romània: Sp. ace-
inherited lexicon approximately 100 Latin words that have char (OSp. assechar), Pt. asseitar ‘lie in wait for, ambush’ <
not survived in any other Romance language. Haarmann CL. ASSECTARI, Sp. ajeno, Pt. alheio ‘of another’ < ALIENUS, Sp. asar,
(1978:93-105) offers 141 such items, and also adduces Pt. assar ‘roast’ < ASSARE, Sp. atar ‘bind’ < APTARE ‘to fit, accom-
numerous Romanian words of Latin origin that have orally modate, adjust’, Sp. ave, Pt. ave ‘bird’ (also OCat. au, Srd. ae
transmitted cognates in only one or two other Romance ‘bird; eagle’) < AUIS ‘bird’, Sp. barrer ‘sweep’ < UERRERE, cabeza,
languages. I offer here selected examples from the data in Pt. cabeça ‘head’ < CAPITIA ‘hole in a tunic through which the
Sala (2005) and in Haarmann (1978): ADIUTORIUM > ajutor ‘help’ head passes’ Sp. centeno, Pt. centeio ‘rye’ < CENTENUM ‘a kind of
(but cf. OFr. aitoire/aitour), CANTICUM > cîntec ‘song’, DISMERDARE > grain’, Sp. cieno ‘mud, slime’ < CAENUM ‘dirt, filth, mud’, comer
dezmierda ‘caress’, HORRERE > urî ‘hate, loathe’, LIBERTARE > ierta ‘eat' < COMEDERE ‘eat up entirely’, Sp. cojo, Pt. coxo ‘lame’ < COXUS
‘forgive’, LANGUIDUS > lînced ‘weak, feeble’, LINGULA > lingură ‘id.’, Sp. hablar ‘speak’, Pt. falar < FABULARI (cf. also the hapax
‘spoon’, MAS/MARIS ‘male’ > mare ‘big, great’, OUIS > oaie legomena OOcc. faular and OBol. fablança (see FEW III, 345-6))
‘sheep’, PUTRIDUS > putred ‘rotten’, TRAIECTA > treaptă ‘step, stair’. , Sp. feo, Pt. feio ‘ugly’, < FOEDUS ‘repugnant’, Sp. heder, Pt. feder
Stefenelli (1979), Diekmann (1987), and Liver (2012:72-86) ‘stink’ < F(O)ETERE, Sp. lamer, Pt. lamber ‘lick (cf. Srd. làmbere) <
list a number of Romansh lexical items that they claim are LAMBERE ‘lick’, Sp. lejos ‘far’ < LAXUS, OSp. madurgar (modern
exclusive to that linguistic domain or that are found only in madrugar), Pt. madrugar ‘get up early’ < *maturiˈkare (MA-
scattered other Romance languages. Their examples include TURUS ‘early’), Sp. medir ‘to measure’ < CLat. METIRI, Sp. preg-
the survival of Lat. ALGERE > (a)ulscher ‘freeze’, ARATIO > araziun untar, Pt. perguntar ‘ask, question’ < PERCUNTARI, OSp. pescudar
‘ploughing’ (also Francoprovençal, see FEW 135, s.v. ARATIO), ‘investigate’ < PERSCRUTARI, Sp. pierna, Pt. perna ‘leg’ < PERNA
CONSUESCERE > cudescher ‘become accustomed’, CODEX > cudisch ‘ham’, Sp. porfía ‘stubborness; dispute, challenge’ < PERFIDIA
‘book’, DIU > ditg ‘long’, INCIPERE > entscheiver ‘begin’ (also Ro. ‘betrayal’ , Sp. recudir ‘respond, recount’ < RECUTERE, Sp. rostro,
începe), LINERE > lenar ‘bedaub’ (also OFr. liner; see FEW 5, s.v. Pt. rosto ‘face’ < ROSTRUM, trigo ‘wheat’ < TRITICUM ‘id.’, Sp.vacío,
LINERE), NATURA > nadira ‘vagina’ (also Francoprovençal), NIMIA > Pt. vazio ‘empty’ < UACIUUS; for additional examples and fur-
memia ‘too much’, QUIESCERE > quescher ‘be silent’, UIX ‘scarcely, ther discussion, see Dworkin (2012:46-9). A careful etymo-
hardly > vess ‘difficult, hard’, SARIRE ‘weed’ (Friulian, northern logical analysis of the lexicon of the Romance varieties of
Italian, Francoprovençal), TRANSFUNDERE ‘baste’ (Romansh, Asturias, Leon, and Upper Aragon is sure to yield further
Ladin), and INTELLEGERE ‘understand’ (both in Romansh and lexical relics of the Latinity of the Iberian Peninsula.
Romanian), CANTICUM ‘song’ (Ladin, Friulian, and Romanian). Colón (1976:144f.) lists several Latin bases that, in his
There seem to be fewer inherited lexical items that have view, left orally transmitted reflexes only in Catalan: CATAR-
survived only in Gallo-Romance, an area open to lexical RHUS > cadarn ‘head cold’ (also widespread thoughout south-
innovations in the form of neologisms. Among the examples ern Italy, Pfister and Schweickard 1979- :110, 1418-27),
found in Stefenelli (1981:103f.) are SUSPICARI > OFr. soschier CONFIGERE > confegir ‘join together’, CONGEMINARE > conjuminar
‘suspect’, DOCERE > OFr. duire ‘teach’ (which coincided with ‘arrange, adjust’, DELIRIUM > deler ‘strong desire’, IGNORARE >
OFr. duire ‘lead’ < DUCERE), DIMIDIUS > demi ‘half ’, IUXTA > OFr. enyorar ‘miss, feel nostalgia for’ (borrowed into modern
joste ‘beside, next to’, PARUUS > OFr. pare ‘little’, RES ‘thing’ rien Spanish as añorar), INDAGARE > enagar ‘incite’, ODIARE > ujar
‘nothing’ (borrowed into Catalan and old Spanish as ren, and ‘tire’, PACIFICARE > apaivagar ‘pacify’, REPUDIARE > rebutjar ‘reject’,
also found in Piedmontese dialects (reŋ) as as simple marker *tardaˈtjone > tardaó ‘autumn’ (alongside more common
of sentential negation like ModFr. pas), UIRIDARIUM > OFr. tardor/tardó; see DECat 8: 309f).
vergier, OOcc. vergel ‘garden, orchard’ (whence Sp. vergel, Da Silva Neto (1952:269f.) offers a handful of examples
Pt. vergeu), TAMDIU ‘so long’ > Fr. tandis (with addition of of words that live on through oral transmission only in
adverbial -s), SOLLICITARE > soucier ‘worry’, FARCIRE > farcir Portuguese (and, in some cases, in neighbouring Galician
‘stuff ’, INFANTIA > enfance ‘childhood’, CLAMOR > clameur and varieties of Asturian), e.g. Pt. eido ‘place’ < ADITUS, OPt.
‘shout, noise’, REDEMPTIO > rançon ‘ransom’. fornigar ‘fornicate’ < FORNICARE (also OSrd. forricare, DES, I, s.
The following Spanish and Portuguese words either have v. forricare), OPt. forniço < FORNICIUM (also OSrd. forrithiu), Pt.
no orally transmitted cognates outside the Iberian Penin- colmo, Ast. cuelmo ‘stem’ < CULMUS ‘stalk, stem’, Glc. domear
sula or have congeners only in Sardinian, Sicilian, and/or ‘tame’ <DOMINARE (cf. Sp. domar ‘tame’ < DOMARE), Pt., Glc.
central and southern Italo-Romance, all territories where adro ‘patio, churchyard’ < ATRIUM ‘entrance room’ (see also
Latin was introduced several decades before the arrival of FEW 25: 689-91), Glc. asomade/asemade ‘suddenly, finally’ <
the Romans in the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC. Many of these SUMMATIM ‘slightly, summarily’, Glc. con ‘large rock’ < CONUS
items in all likelihood go back to Latin bases brought into ‘cone’.
586
32.5 Latinisms There are instances in which a Latinism is found in only

one Romance language or territory. Reflexes of PRETIUM
The entry into those Romance languages with a strong liter- ‘price, reward’ came into most Romance languages through
ary tradition during the late medieval and early modern oral transmission: Fr. prix, Pt. preço, Cat. preu, It. prezzo, Ro.
periods of hundreds of borrowings from written Latin preţ. However, in Spanish the sole reflex of PRETIUM is learnèd
changed permanently the lexical makeup of French, Spanish, precio, a noun abundantly documented in medieval Spanish
Catalan, Italian, and Portuguese. Indeed, the number of Lat- (prez is a Gallicism; see Malkiel 1957). On the surface Sp.
inisms far exceeds the number of words inherited directly dulce ‘sweet’ has the appearance of a Latinism, in contrast to
from spoken Latin. The majority of these neologisms first Fr. doux, OOcc. dulz, Pt. doce, OSp. (rare) duz, Cat. dolç, It.
entered the written language as part of the lengthy process dolce, Ro. dulce; for differing analyses of the Spanish adjec-
of linguistic elaboration, from where, with the spread of tive, see Bustos Tovar (1974:423), Malkiel (1975), and
literacy, they entered various strata of the spoken language. Hartman (1980). Latinate Pt. urso ‘bear’ (first documented
Some Latinisms may have entered through the spoken lan- only in the nineteenth century) ousted OPt. usso and the less
guage of the liturgy and the oral use of Latin in university and frequent osso, the orally transmitted descendants of URSUS.
some (medical, legal) professional circles. Once integrated Fr. pâle (OFr. palle/palde), Occ. palle ‘pale’ reflect oral trans-
into the host language, Latinisms show a high degree of mission of PALLIDUS, whereas Pt., Sp. pálido, Cat. pallid, It.
lexical stability or retention, and many have filtered down pallido, Ro. palid are Latinisms. Latin FORNICARE and FORNICIUM
into the active vocabulary of speakers. Others are restricted came through oral transmission into old Sardinian as for-
in oral and written use to specific technical registers or to ricare and forrithu (Pittau 2000-2003, s.vv.).
poetic and other specific literary registers. The overwhelming Often the introduction of a Latinism into the written
majority of the Latinisms recorded in Reinheimer Rîpeanu language is an individual act, repeated independently
(2004) appear in all the Romance languages surveyed for her by numerous writers who sought to elaborate the
compilation—Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian, Romance languages as languages fit for scholarly and
and Romanian—thus forming part of the modern shared literary use on a par with Latin. Most Latinisms are the
lexicon. It is difficult to determine in many cases whether a result of a deliberate action. Not all such experiments
specific Latinism was borrowed from written Latin independ- struck root. The following items found in the Latinate
ently in each of the host languages or whether it was first poetry of the Spaniard Juan de Mena (1411-56), though
introduced into one language, say French, a major scholarly documented sporadically in other late medieval and
vernacular in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and then early modern writers, did not survive: pigro, ficto, vaní-
transmitted as Gallicisms into other Romance and non- loco, fruir, corusco, superno, belígero, bello, nubífero, cla-
Romance European languages. This situation is particularly rífico, longevo, murices, vulto, circuncingir; for further
true for Romanian, in which many apparent Latinisms are, in examples and discussion of failed Latinisms in Spanish,
reality, borrowings from French and Italian. see Dworkin (2012:176-8).
587
CHAPTER 33
Onomasiological differentiation
INGMAR SÖHRMAN
33.1 Introduction where an intensifying prefix vero- is combined with -dunum

with the possible meaning ‘very strong fortress’ (Guyon-
varc’h 1974:ch.13). Toponyms that include ethnonyms such
The focus of onomasiology is concepts and how they are
expressed in a certain language or across several languages; as Godos (south of Zaragoza) as well as Revillagodos (close to
it is the discipline concerned with what a given notion is Burgos) and Godones (Galicia) are also testimony to the
called and how it is lexically encoded in a language, inas- ancient people, the Goths, who dominated Spain c.550–711.
much as ‘[t]he history of ideas is embodied in the history of The name ‘Ligurian Sea’ (It. Mare Ligure, Fr. Mer Ligurienne)
the words used to express them’ (Buck 1949:v). It can be indicates the existence of a people along its shores, the
seen as the other side of semasiology, which is the study of Ligurii, which have disappeared into the mist of history.
the meaning of words; onomasiology focuses on how Legends of a true, believed, or invented origin are important
notions are expressed in human languages. Kurt Baldinger for the creation of a prestigious historical background.
(1964:250) defined onomasiology as that which ‘examines In Normandy we find name variants such as Champlong vs
the designations of a specific concept, i.e. a multitude of Longchamp. Both mean ‘long field’, but in the latter some
expressions that together form a whole’. linguists (Walter 1986; 1988:56-9; Vincent 1984) see a Ger-
Onomasiology was first developed in relation to Romance manic influence manifested in the adjective + noun word
by Adolf Zauner (1902) and later by linguists belonging to order (the opposite of modern Romance), although others
the Wörter und Sachen (Words and Things) School, such as (cf. Ledgeway 2012a:chs 3, 4) point out that the adjective +
Rudolf Meringer and Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke (cf. Iordan and noun order is not infrequent in medieval Romance (e.g. OFr.
Orr 1970). These two also founded the journal Wörter und la blanche barbe ‘the white beard’, OIt. il romano imperatore
Sachen. Hugo Schuchardt (1922) played a vital role in devel- ‘the Roman emperor’) cf. also Caudebec (Caudebec-en-Caux,
oping this branch of linguistics: ‘to achieve an all-round Normandy), from Scandinavian kald bekkr ‘cold stream’.
advance, it is not enough that the study of things and the There is also the complication of having to know two or
study of words should stand side by side, even in complete three names for one place depending on the language you
readiness to give mutual assistance, they must be inter- use or with whom you are talking. It is not easy to see that
woven, and must lead to results of a twofold character. Vitoria (in Spain) and its Basque name Gasteiz (of disputed
[ . . . ] Thus, in relation to the word, the thing is a primary etymology) is one and the same, or that French Quimper and
and stable factor’ (Iordan and Orr 1970:124f.). Breton Kemper are two ways of writing the same toponym,
The term ‘onomasiology’ comes from Grk. OÇø – ‘(I) or that in southern Italy the city of Lecce is known in the
name’ from ZÆ ‘name’. There is often a certain confusion Griko (indigenous Greek dialect) as u Luppíu. In Romania the
place known in Romanian as Cluj is also Hng. Kolozsvár and
with ‘onomastics’, which is the part of onomasiology dealing
Ger. Klausenburg. These names all reflect the fact that
with the names of people and places. Toponyms may refer
speakers of languages other than those which are dominant
to the person in honour of whom a town has been built, e.g.
today have been, and often still are, present and that they
Sp. Zaragoza < Lat. CAESAR AUGUSTA, or to a geophysical situ-
have influenced the local toponomy. Furthermore names
ation, e.g. Surselva (cf Lat. SUPER + SILUAM) ‘Overwood’, the can be reused, as is often the case in the Americas (e.g. Paris
uphill region on the other side of the wood near Flims in (Texas), and of course all the Spanish toponymy in Latin
the Grischun Canton (Grisons, Grigioni, Graubünden) in America: Cartagena (Colombia), Santiago de Chile).
Switzerland, while the ‘Underwood’ region is Sutselva (cf. An eponym is a word formed after a person or people in
Lat. SUBTUS + SILUA). Toponyms are often of Latin origin, but a some way connected to a particular phenomenon. For
good few use earlier or later historical realities such as the instance, a fairly widespread word for a special kind of tie or
Celtic Lug-dunum ‘Lug’s (a Celtic god) fortress’ which is scarf is It. cravatta, Fr. cravatte, Sp. corbata, Ro. cravată; all are
found in Lyon and in other similar toponyms such as Verdun based on the scarf that Croatian cavalrymen wore, and thus
588 This chapter © Ingmar Söhrman 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
ONOMASIOLOGICAL DIFFERENTIATION
the very ethnonym for Croatian has provided these lexemes, ordinateur, Sp./Cat. ordenador. Galician has both computadora
even though there is some doubt regarding the precise and ordenador, highlighting how this language vacillates
phonological development. And the Parisian mayor Eugène between Portuguese and Spanish linguistic models. Many
Poubelle who introduced refuse bins to Paris saw his sur- languages in the world seem to have used the English word
name turned into the general name of these bins, poubelle computer, but some tend to be more restrictive when it
‘(dust)bin’. comes to importing loanwords. It seems that the habit of
For an idea of how Romance vocabulary is testimony to saying numbers aloud when counting is the reason why Lat.
history and historical realities it is illuminating to look at COMPUTARE comes to mean both ‘count’ and ‘tell’, since there
notions that have to do with everyday life such as the verb was no real semantic difference at one time. A result of this
‘eat’. The basic Latin lexeme was EDERE. The Ibero-Romance unified notion is that as time went by telling and counting
languages used it in a prefixed form CUMEDERE, where CUM- is became two different activities; there must have occurred a
an intensifying prefix, whence Sp./Pt. comer, while French, moment when a differentiation was felt necessary and they
Catalan, Occitan, Italian, and Romanian continue a collo- became morpholexically separated, at least in some var-
quial (and more colourful) Latin term MANDUCARE ‘to chew, to ieties (cf. Sp. contar and Cal. cuntà ‘to count’ and ‘to tell’),
stuff oneself ’ (cf. the meaning of ModFr. bouffer, It. abbuf- such that in old French we find compter ‘count’ and conter
fiarsi), giving the modern forms Fr. manger, Cat. menjar, Arn. ‘tell’ (cf. ModFr. raconter ‘tell’).
minjar, Occ. manjar, It. mangiare (which is a Gallo-Romance In order to illustrate similarities and differences across
loan from manger, though an indigenous residue is still the Romance languages and the reasons for these, this
found in ModIt. derivative manicaretto ‘fine meal’), and Ro. chapter reviews representative lexical examples taken
mânca ‘eat’. However, this lexeme, in substantivized form, is from the following semantic fields: verbs of motion, verbs
also found in Pt. o manjar and Sp. el manjar ‘delicacy, food’. and nouns of meteorological activity, body parts, specific
When major cultural (and technical) changes take place, designations for human beings, flora and fauna, urbaniza-
new phenomena appear, and with them the need for new tion, and examples of adverbial and pronominal spatial
names or for the ‘recycling’ of already used ones where the expression. These fields are chosen as they relate to basic
semantic content is replaced or extended. With the early human needs and routine activities. In these semantic fields
rise of Christianity the word ‘temple’ needed to be replaced, one is likely to find similar-sounding words with a common
especially since the first Christian churches were very insig- origin in Latin, but this is not always the case; we will
nificant secret meeting places; the Grk. KŒŒºØÆ ‘meeting discuss the reasons for these lexical discrepancies and the
place’ and later ‘parish’, thus gave the Lat. ECCLESIA(M) > Fr. existence of a common Romance core vocabulary. Only
église, It. chiesa, Pt./Glc. igreja, and Sp. iglesia. Surselvan (and those synonyms relevant to the discussion are included.
other Raeto-Romance varieties) as well as other Romance
languages such as Dalmatian and Romanian have opted for
another originally Greek word which gave Lat. BASILICA ‘an
oblong building that belongs to the king/Lord’ < Grk.
βÆºØŒÆ < βÆØºØŒ ‘a long building, court’ < Grk. 33.2 Motion and meteorological
βÆØºı ‘king’, i.e. ‘the Lord’s house’. This is the source of activity
Ro. biserică, IRo. baserike, Vgl. basalka, and Srs. basegla. BASILICA
has also been integrated into the other Romance languages Two conceptually basic activities are human motion and
but with the meaning of a specific kind of oblong church meteorological events. In relation to the former, the main
(viz. ‘basilica’). characteristic of Romance verbs is that they tend to express
Many languages have imported the word for ‘computer’ both activity and direction, but not mode (e.g. ‘on foot’, ‘by
from English—and English has of course taken it from an car’, ‘on bike’, ‘crawling’), unlike Germanic languages, which
agentive derivative of Lat. COMPUTARE ‘to reckon, count’. In add particles to various verbs expressing mode, cf. Frl. jessî,
Italian and Romanian we find the Latinate English loan Fr./Occ./Cat. sortir and some of its possible English equiva-
computer ̶ It. il computer, Ro. computerul ‘the computer’), lents such as go out, walk out, run out, crawl out, rush out, steam
although there is also calculator in Romanian < Lat. CALCULARE out, where the direction is indicated by the particle. This
‘to calculate’ < CALCULUS ‘small stone’ < CALX ‘stone’, which also means that, at least theoretically, the Romance languages
referred to the ‘counting stone’ used in ancient Rome. In need more verbs, as the direction is expressed lexically and
Latin America there is Sp. computadora (F) or computador (M), not through a particle, cf. Eng. go in, go out, go up, go down vs
the latter being also the Portuguese word, while European Fr. entrer, sortir, monter, descendre; Sp. entrar, salir, subir, bajar;
Spanish, Catalan, and French have opted for agentive forms It. entrare, uscire, salire, scendere; Ro. intra, ieşi, urca, coborî.
derived from Lat. ORDINARE ‘to set in order, arrange’, viz. Fr. Consequently, from a contrastive perspective, in Germanic
589
INGMAR SÖHRMAN
languages such as English one can say ‘go out’, and also Romance languages have the same combination of the
‘creep out’, ‘hop out’, ‘run out’, ‘saunter out’, ‘slide out’, ‘roll vowel /i/ and a labial fricative /f/ or /β, w/, and a lateral
out’, ‘ski out’, ‘limp out’, etc., but in Romance one uses a /l/, modulo the different orders, e.g. Pt./Sp. silbar, Fr, siffler,
single verb (e.g. Fr. sortir) for the direction (equivalent to Lad. (Gardena) sciblé. Although all these Romance words
Eng. ‘out’) in all cases, and only expresses the mode if originate from Latin SIBILARE, ‘to hiss, whistle’, this does not
particularly needed (hence Fr. sortir en courant/en glissant/ explain the phonological resemblance with other languages
en saut(ill)ant/à pas de loup/en boitant/comme une bolide, etc., which do not share a common lexical origin for this mean-
‘run out/slide out/hop out/pad out/limp out/rocket out’, ing. Romanian a fluiera (of disputed etymology) also reflects
etc.). Although these Romance verbs of motion must be the same phonemes, but lacks the /s/, whereas in It.
regarded as part of the core vocabulary, there are also fischiare, a denominal derviation from Lat. FISTULA ‘pipe’, the
interesting differences among the languages, such as It. /l/ has disappeared, although this is due to a regular phono-
salire, which means ‘go up’ and is equivalent to Sp. subir logical change (cf. FLUMEN > It. fiume ‘river’).
rather than its Spanish near-homonym salir, which means
‘go out’, not to mention the cognate Romanian form sări
which preserves the original meaning of ‘jump’, as does the
33.2.1 Verbs of motion
more stylistically elevated Fr. saillir ‘to jut out, project out-
wards’, all from Lat. SALIRE ‘jump’. To ‘reach’ a place is a fundamental human activity, and in
Although Romance appears to be more direction-oriented older times transport on water was a useful means of
while Germanic is more concerned with expressing the motion. Consequently, getting ‘to the river bank’, literally
precise mode, it is possible (though generally more marked) AD RIPAM, gives rise to the verb ‘to arrive’ (French loanword in
in Romance to express both direction and mode as in Ger- English), namely *arriˈpare > Sp. arribar ‘to arrive in a port’,
manic, witness the use of Sp. saltar ‘jump’ with two preposi- Fr. arriver, Occ./Cat. arribar, It. arrivare (probably a northern
tions in such collocations as saltar por encima la valla ‘to jump Italian loan) ‘to arrive’, although there is also giungere in
across (and) over the fence’, although there is always the (more formal/literary) Italian and a ajunge in Romanian
(less marked) possibility of reducing the utterance to atra- (< Lat. (AD) + IUNGERE ‘to unite’); Romanian has also inherited
vesar la valla ‘to cross the fence’, which just expresses the a sosi ‘to arrive’ from Grk. Çø. This idea of ‘uniting’ as a
idea that the fence has been traversed but not how this was metaphor for ‘arriving’ is reflected in Lad. unì (originally ‘to
done. unite’) and also in Sp. llegar and Pt. chegar, which both come
When we label things we also tend to show our attitude from Lat. PLICARE ‘to fold’. The underlying idea in these cases
towards the referent. In the Middle Ages there was an perhaps being joining or folding up a corner of a sail with
implement of torture called in medieval Latin TRIPALIUM another when coming into port, hence ‘arriving’. Con-
which had three stakes < Lat. TRIPALIS, with a derived verb versely, the metaphor of folding and unfolding tents to set
tripaliare. This torture became a metonym for the daily up camp perhaps explains the Ro. a pleca ‘to leave’ (again <
duties that were considered ‘labour, hard work’, still evident PLICARE); cf. Mod.Fr. plier bagages (lit. ‘to fold luggage’) mean-
in the English travail (from old French) and Italian travaglio ing ‘to pack up and go’, as well as Cat. plegar (de la feina) = ‘to
‘labour pains’, and this etymon gives the generic word for finish work, knock off ’ (Rohlfs 1971:138).
‘work’ in many varieties, e.g. Fr. travail, Occ. trabalh, Cat. In several Romance languages Latin UENIRE ‘come’ is also
treball, Sp. trabajo, Pt. trabalho. Although, as just observed, we used with the meaning of ‘to arrive’ or, at least, ‘to come
find the word travaglio ‘labour pains; anguish; travail’ in forward’ (Courtenay 1980:354). Thus, Romance reflexes of
Italian (and the verb travagliare ‘to afflict, torment’), the UENIRE typically refer to arriving at the deictic centre associ-
Italian for ‘work’ is LABOREM ‘toil; effort’ > lavoro (the inter- ated with the speaker, although in some Ibero-Romance
vocalic ‘v’ here also suggests a Gallo-Romance, or at any rate varieties this can also be expressed by reflexes of Lat. IRE
‘northern’, origin), the reflex of which in French, labour, still ‘go’. For example, in response to a call at the door an Italian
means ‘ploughing’. In Romanian the word for ‘work’ is in will say Vengo! lit. ‘I come’ or, as in Fr. J’arrive, Arrivo! lit. ‘I
origin more focused on what can be earned or gained, arrive’, whereas a Spaniard will say (Ya) voy, lit. ‘(Already)
namely, a lucra < Lat. LUCRARI ‘to gain, earn, acquire’ (cf. also I go’.
derived nominal lucrare ‘profit’). Romanian muncă ‘work’ The notion of ‘going’ is variously expressed by reflexes of
originally means ‘torture’, which confirms the mainly nega- IRE ‘to go’, AMBULARE ‘to walk’ (and later ‘to travel’; see esp.
tive conception of daily work as pain. Pfister and Schweickard 1979- :744-50, but also Adams
Another type of wordformation involves onomatopoeia, 2013:804-10), and UADERE ‘to walk, pace’. Thus, in the infini-
such as Pt. cri cri cri ‘the sound of a cricket’. The verb tive we find Pt./Sp ir, Lad. (Gardena) jì, Srs. ir, SIRo. ire/iri vs
meaning ‘whistle’ illustrates this well because most Cat./Occ. anar, It. andare, Fr. aller. In Classical Latin the
590
monosyllabic forms of IRE (e.g. 2SG.IMP I ‘go!’, IS ‘you go’, IT intensified form of this verb represented by an infix
‘(s)he goes’) were already seldom used and thus subject to *neviˈkare. It is cognitively intriguing that nouns for
suppletion (Adams 2013:792; Maiden 2004a) with Lat. UADERE ‘snow’ show a greater range of differentiation than do the
in many of the languages such as It. vai ‘you go’. Actually corresponding verbs. Romanian, for instance, has three
only Portuguese, Galician, and some southern Italian dia- words for ‘snow’: zăpadă (of Slavonic origin) which is the
lects have kept the original first and second persons plural most common, nea (< NIUEM ‘snow’; cf. ARo. neao and IRo.
forms of the present indicative of IRE (cf. Pt. imos, ides, but nęwu), and in western Romania omăt, possibly also of Sla-
alongside imos there is also vamos which is the more com- vonic origin (Vinereanu 2009:595).
mon form; Adams 2013:792). Romanian has opted for other Considerable variation is also found with the concept ‘to
lexemes, namely, a merge from MERGERE ‘to plunge; sink’ and blow’ in conjunction with reflexes of Lat. UENTUS ‘wind’. Span-
the reflexive a se duce ‘to take oneself, go’ (< Lat. DUCERE ‘to ish often uses the idiom corre aire ‘air runs’ to express that
lead, bring’). ‘the wind is blowing’, Romanian opts for bate vântul, lit. ‘the
wind is beating’, whereas French employs the simple copula
il y a ‘there is’ (e.g. il y a du vent). Italian uses two different
verbs with the noun ‘wind’ vento, tirare ‘to pull’ and soffiare ‘to
33.2.2 Verbs and nouns of meteorological
blow’, although the default expression is tira vento.
activity
In Romance, as in many other languages, the word for

‘weather’ is the same as that for ‘time’. In Latin TEMPESTAS 33.3 Nouns
(bad) weather’ is a derivate of TEMPUS ‘time’, and we find this
latter word in most Romance languages: e.g. Pt./It. tempo, 33.3.1 Body parts
Sp. tiempo. Fr. temps, Prv. tèms, Frl. timp. Although Romanian
has two words, timp and vreme (the latter of Slavonic origin), The lexical expression of some body parts clearly show
for this notion, both have this dual reference. In this sense cognitive differences in how different cultures have united
vreme is more restricted, and it is mainly used in certain or separated these concepts. While Germanic cultures have
locutions such as vremuri grele ‘hard times’, a ţine pasul cu separated the words for ‘physical outgrowths’ such as ‘fin-
vremea ‘be up to date’, and vremurile s-au schimbat ‘times gers’ and ‘toes’, Latin expressed them as one lexical cat-
have changed’, while timp is more frequent as a general egory DIGITUS, sometimes adding PEDIS ‘of the foot’ to
expression: n-am timp ‘I don’t have time’, a avea timp destul differentiate ‘toes’ from ‘fingers’. In Portuguese and Spanish
‘to have enough time’. In the sense of ‘weather’ timp is we find dedo, in Catalan dit, and in Occitan det, for both
mostly restricted to certain expressions, while the lexeme concepts. Some languages may add ‘of (the) foot’ as Fr.
vreme (of Slavonic origin) is the more commonly used. doigt de pied, It. dito del piede, and Ro. deget de la picior, but
In south Slavonic languages this lexeme (Bulgarian and this is mostly not obligatory if the context makes the ref-
Serbian dhtvt as well as Croatian vrijeme) also has both erent clear, with the exception of Surselvan, where det-pei is
meanings. Only some Ræto-Romance varieties lexically dis- almost always used for ‘toe’. It is also interesting to note
tinguish between the two concepts, cf. Srs. aura ‘weather’ vs that even those Romance languages that do not lexically
temps and peda ‘time’, Vld. aura vs temp/peida. distinguish between ‘finger’ and ‘toe’ almost always have
While concepts such as ‘rain’ prove straightforward (cf. distinct terms for the individual ‘fingers’ or ‘toes’, e.g. Fr.
Lat. PLUUIA > Pt. chuva, Sp. lluvia, Cat. pluja, Fr. pluie, Lad. plöia, pouce ‘thumb’ vs gros orteil ‘big toe’, auriculaire (alongside
It. pioggia (but usually la piova in old Tuscan), and Ro. ploaie), petit doigt) ‘little finger’ vs petit doigt du pied/petit orteil ‘little
the languages of regions particularly exposed to ‘snow’ are toe’, It. pollice ‘thumb’ vs alluce/ditone ‘big toe’ (a ditone can
liable to have several terms distinguishing different var- never be a ‘big finger’ or the ‘thumb’), but il mignolo ‘little
ieties and this is true of Romansh and Dolomitic Ladin; cf. finger’, and also ‘little toe’ (also il mignolo del piede). In
Srs. neiv, bischa ‘snow’, while ‘much snow’ is nevada, nevaglia, Catalan we find polze ‘thumb’ vs dit gros del peu ‘big toe’
tatschada, and ‘hard-frozen snow’ is samada. However, in the and menovell/dit petit ‘little finger’ vs dit petit (del peu) ‘little
rest of Romance the lexical variety of verbs and nouns for toe’, and in Romanian degetul mare de la mână ‘thumb’ vs
‘snow’ is more restricted. Only central Italo-Romance nengue degetul mare de la picior ‘big toe’ and degetul mic (de la mână)
and Ro. ninge seem to descend directly from Lat. NINGUERE ‘to ‘little finger’ vs degetul mic (de la picior) ‘little toe’. These
snow’. For other varieties we have to postulate a protoform specifications always concern the toes, which shows that
*neˈvare that has given Pt./Sp./Cat. nevar, Srs. neivar, Frl. the basic semantic value of these lexemes is ‘finger’. In
neveâ, while Fr. neiger and It. nevicare must be the result of an French there is also the possibility of using a different
591
INGMAR SÖHRMAN
word, orteil, as in Germanic languages, although the origin is 33.3.2 Designations for human beings
Latin (Lat. ARTICULUS, dim. of ARTUS ‘limb’, influenced by Gaul-
ish ortiga).
To designate young human beings there are two possibil-
In most Romance languages there is a lexical difference
ities. One is to use a lexeme that expresses ‘small’ or ‘young’
between ‘foot’ and ‘leg’: It. piede–gamba, Sp. pie–pierna, Prv.
and then mark these by suffixation, as in Frl. fantat ‘boy’ vs
ped–cambo, Fr. pied–jambe. However, Romanian expresses
fantate ‘girl’ or Cat. noi vs noia. The other option is to use
both notions with picior, and although the origin is Latin
different lexemes as in French garçon vs ( jeune) fille or in
(< PETIOLUS ‘stalk’), the cognitive classification, i.e. the lexical
Romanian băiat vs fată. Most Romance languages have
unification, is probably due to Slavonic influence given that
chosen the first option, including Pt. menino/menina, Sp.
most Slavonic languages use one term for the two notions
chico/chica, Bad. jonn/jona. There may also be further lexical
(cf. noga ‘leg/foot’ in almost all Slavonic languages). If
differentiations according to age and gender; for instance, a
necessary, however, Romanian can express the difference
young male adolescent in Italy is often referred to as a
lexically, e.g. crac ‘leg’ vs laba (piciorului) ‘foot’. Romanian
giovanotto, but one would never refer to his female counter-
mână (< Lat. MANUS ‘hand’) is also commonly used to mean
part as a giovanotta, which would have pejorative and ironic
both ‘hand’ and ‘arm’, again under Slavonic influence,
overtones (e.g. ‘big, strapping and coarse female adoles-
although braţ (< BRACCHIUM) ‘arm’ is also current.
cent’). Similarly, while there is in French fillette ‘(little)
Other languages have developed interesting metaphor-
girl’ (lit. ‘girl.DIM’), there is no direct masculine equivalent.
ical usages which have also affected the vocabulary of
In Surselvan there is not only mat vs matta but also giuven vs
body parts. For example, most western Romance languages
giuvna; similarly in Spanish, alongiside the already observed
and Romanian continue to use reflexes of Latin CAPUT ‘head’
chico/chica, there is muchacho/muchacha (Söhrman 2000),
or its derived form CAPITIUM, plural CAPITIA > Pt. cabeça, Sp.
which refers to a ‘teenager.M/F’ rather than ‘boy’/‘girl’
cabeza, Cat./Occ. cap, Frl. cjâf, Srs. tgau/cavazzai, Ro. cap,
while niño/niña are used for small children, or as affective
IRo. cåpete, but derivatives of Latin TESTA ‘pot’ are also used
terms.
(see below). The whole of the upper south of Italy use a
An interesting case comes from words taken from an ad-
reflex of CAPUT, which across the south is feminine (and not
or substratum such as Sp. chaval/chavala ‘young boy/girl’
masculine as in Tuscan-Italian il capo), e.g. Nap. ’a capo/
(Söhrman 1992), originally a Romani loanword chavo/chava
Cal. a capu ‘the.F head’, although large parts of Abruzzo
that entered many European languages in the nineteenth
employ coccio (< Lat. COCTUM < COQUO ‘cook’, originally
century. We find this lexeme in Cat. xava, xabalet, xaveia,
(burned) ‘earthenware pot’). In dialects of the far south
chabal (Wagner 1924:103), Pt. chaval(o), and in the region of
(e.g. southern Calabrian and Sicily) we find reflexes of
Bologna in words such as čȧi ‘farmer’ and čȧia ‘country
TESTAM, in turn borrowed from northern Italy, as well as
woman’, as well as in some dialects of northern Italy in
in Fr. tête, Occ. tèsta (though cf. also cap above), and It.
the form ciavio ‘man’ and giava ‘woman’ (Tagliavini and
testa. These all represent metaphorical uses of Lat. TESTAM
Menari 1938:253). In French the word romanichel (Dauzat
‘jug; shell’, a meaning preserved to this day in Campania
et al. 1969:655) used to exist as a compound of romani +
(e.g. Neapolitan) where testa refers to an ‘earthenware pot,
chel ‘gypsy man’ (cf. Mérimée 1960[1845]:86).
vase’ (Ledgeway 2008d). French nevertheless also displays
Apart from some learnèd derivates (e.g. Fr. viril(ité) ‘viril
many originally metaphorical uses of cap, such as ‘prom-
(ity)’), Lat. UIR ‘man’ (as opposed to ‘woman’) leaves no trace
ontory’, as well as the idiom de pied en cap ‘from head to
foot’. The latter must, however, be a later learnèd loan or in Romance, where the general word for ‘man’ comes from
HOMO ‘man(kind)’ (as opposed to ‘animal’), either continuing
a borrowing from neighbouring Occitan, since the indigen-
ous outcome of CAPUT is chef (M), which apart from the the latter nominative case (e.g. It. uomo, Srs. um) or the
lexicalized couvre-chef ‘hat, headgear’ (lit. ‘cover-head’) accusative HOMINEM (e.g. Pt. homem Sp. hombre, Fr. homme);
and chef ‘head (as a religious relic)’, e.g. le chef de Saint some varieties show reflexes of both case forms, where the
Jean ‘the head of St John’, is now limited to metaphorical nominative has grammaticalized as the impersonal pronoun
uses, namely ‘boss, chief ’ (cf. ModIt. capo). Spanish and and the accusative as the lexical term (Smith 2011a), e.g. Fr.
Italian also have direct descendants of Lat. CAPUT, cf. Sp. on vs homme, Cat. hom vs home. Romanian represents the
cabo ‘headland; tip; end; corporal’, and there are also exception here, in that om continues its original meaning of
numerous metaphorical uses of ModIt. capo ‘boss, chief ’ ‘man, person’ (cf. femeia aceea este un om fericit ‘that woman
(cf. capostazione ‘station master’), although it can still have is a happy person’), while ‘man, male species’ is expressed
the original anatomical reading ‘head’, especially in liter- synecdochically by focusing on a typical physical character-
ary registers (e.g. scrollare il capo ‘to shake one’s head’, istic of a man, namely his beard, hence bărbat < Lat. BARBATUS
levare il capo ‘to look up’). ‘bearded (one)’ (cf. also Lad. berba, Frl. barbe, and NItR. barba
592
(< Lat. BARBA ‘beard’) meaning ‘uncle’). Romance words for the word for ‘plant’, namely Lat. PLANTAM ‘plant; a young tree’
‘woman’ (often including the concept of ‘wife’) sometimes > Srs. plonta, Tsc. pianta ‘tree’, while in Ladin lën (Gardena)
come from Lat. FEMINAM ‘woman’, e.g. Fr. femme, Srs. femna and (Badia) lëgn, originally indicating the material of which
(though rarely used), Srd. femina, SItR. femmina/fimmina trees consist (< Lat. LIGNUM ‘wood’), have come to indicate
(note that Ro. femeie ‘woman’ < FAMILIAM ‘family’)—though synecdochically also the ‘tree’. The concept ‘wood’ is
Pt. fêmea and Sp. hembra now mean ‘female’—and sometimes expressed differently across Romance: while Ro. lemn and
from MULIER(EM) ‘lady; wife’ or DOMINAM ‘mistress’, e.g. Pt. It. legno have kept reflexes of Lat. LIGNUM, Pt. madeira and Sp.
mulher/Sp. mujer ‘woman; wife’, Srs. dunna ‘woman, lady’, madera come from a metaphorical use of Lat. MATERIAM, i.e.
Cat. dona ‘lady’ (but muller ‘wife’), It. donna ‘woman’ (but the material (wood) that is used for construction. Cat. and
moglie ‘wife’), Fr. dame ‘lady’. Also widespread as terms and Occ. fusta derives from FUSTIS ‘(walking) stick’, and Fr. bois is
titles of reverence (‘mister/sir, madam/lady’) are reflexes probably of Frankish origin (cf. busk, and Ger. Busch ‘bush,
of SENIOREM ‘elder’, e.g. Cat. senyor/-a, It. signore/-a, Occ. shrub’). The latter French term also means ‘wooded place’
senhó/-ra, Pt. senhor/-a, Sp. señor/‑a, (cf. also Fr. Le Seigneur (cf. Lat. SILUA), and the same Germanic loan is also used in
‘the Lord’, as well as monsieur ‘my sire > mister’ < SE(N)IOR many other Romance languages with this meaning: Pt./Sp.
(NOM) on a par with Cal./Occ. ségnu/sénher ‘master!’), and bosque, Cat. bosc, It. bosco, while Surselvan has opted for
DOMINUM/DOMINAM ‘master/mistress’, e.g. Fr. madame lit. another Germanic loan, uaul (< Ger. Wald).
‘(my) lady/mistress’, Ro. domn/doamnă, SItR. don/donna, Sp. When we label something we also structure it conceptu-
don/doña, which have also been grammaticalized as articles ally, insofar as we decide what belongs to a certain category
(viz. en/na) before proper names in some Catalan varieties and what does not. In English, as in all Germanic languages,
(cf. §46.3.1.1). there is but one word for melon as a hyperonym and its
hyponyms, e.g. gala melon vs watermelon, for what in all
European Mediterranean languages is expressed by two
33.3.3 Flora and fauna different words. How well they are mentally connected is
another question. In Portuguese there are different words
The discovery of the American continent brought new fruits for the two concepts, namely, melão ‘melon’ and melancia
and animals to the European languages, but the words for ‘watermelon’, and there also exist the synonyms meloeiro vs
them, if borrowed from indigenous languages, tended to be sandia, distinctions in turn largely reflected in Glc. melon/
phonologically adapted. First they were brought back meloeiro vs sandia, Sp. melón vs sandía (Murciano also has
through Spanish and Portuguese, and then they were melón de agua, lit. ‘melon of water’), and Cat. meló vs síndria/
phonologically adapted to other languages. The Nahuatl meló d’aigua. French contrasts melon and pastèque, although
word for ‘tomato’ was tomatl, but the cluster /tl/ was alien there also exists a term melon d’eau (lit. ‘melon of water’),
to Spanish and Portuguese pronunciation, so that it became and this corresponds perfectly to Occitan usage: melon vs
tomate, and from these languages come Cat. tomaca, toma- melon d’aiga/pastèca. Finally, Italian offers some quite con-
quet, tomate, Fr. tomate, Occ. tomata. Another way to deal siderable variation. While ‘gala melon’ is generally melone
with this new fruit was to create new terms that described (sometimes further specified as melone di pane, lit. ‘melon of
the referent, such as It. pomodoro ‘apple of gold’ < pomo d’oro bread’ or melone giallo, lit. ‘melon yellow’), the term for
or maybe pomo d’amore ‘apple of love’ (cf. Fr. pomme d’amour, ‘watermelon’ constitutes a locus classicus of regional differ-
Ger. Liebesapfel). This latter explanation may be just a popu- entiation in the lexicon of standard Italian: anguria (north),
lar etymology and which way round the development went cocomero (centre), and melone d’acqua (south). This picture is
is unclear. In Romanian we find a roşie < RUSSU ‘red’, or further complicated by other smaller-scale variations,
perhaps ROSEUS ‘red’, the full form being pătlăgea roşie (cf. including pasteca in Liguria (cf. French and Occitan), and
pătlăgea vânătă ‘purple squash’, i.e. ‘aubergine’). In Ladin the fact that in some parts of eastern Sicily cocomero means
(Val Badia) we find both variants, pomodoro, tomata, and in ‘cucumber’ (It. cetriolo) whereas ‘watermelon’ is popone.
Val Gardena there is also a possible reference to paradise, Romanian, however, has pepene for both types of melon
paradais, used alongside pomodor. and differentiates them by adjectival modification: pepene
More interesting is how surrounding flora and fauna are galben ‘yellow melon’ vs pepene verde ‘green melon’.
named. Lat. ARBOR ‘tree’ is used in most Romance languages, The horse was introduced into Europe some 3,500 years
Fr./Occ. arbre, Pt. árvore, Sp árbol, and It. albero. In Romanian ago and spread to all parts of the continent, becoming an
beside the common word pom < Lat. POMUM ‘fruit tree, fruit’, emblematic and much-needed animal for both noblemen
we find a word of possible Dacian origin, namely, copac, and farmers. However, the Classical Latin lexeme EQUUS was
alongside arbore, a learnèd neologism which is less used. In replaced by late Latin CABALLUS ‘working horse; castrated
Surselvan and in parts of central Italy ‘tree’ is expressed by horse’, whereas the feminine form EQUA ‘mare’ has been
593
INGMAR SÖHRMAN
kept except in French, Raeto-Romance, and Italo-Romance ‘hostel, guesthouse’, Fr. hôtel ‘hotel’, and the same Latin root
(see also §1.5), where we find either the feminine form of in HOSPES (ACC. HOSPITEM) ‘host, guest; stranger’ has given rise to
CABALLUS (Occitan, Surselvan, and Friulian) or a reflex of words for inns, taverns, and hotels such as Pt. hospedagem,
IUMENTAM ‘beast of burden’ (French, Italian). Thus, in Portu- hospedaria, Sp. hospedería, Srs. ustria, and It. osteria.
guese we find cavalo vs égua, Glc. cabalo vs égoa, Sp. caballo vs Since only very important cities, such as Rome and Ath-
yegua, Cat. cavall vs egua/euga, Occ. cavall (cavaluco) vs èga, ens, could be referred to with the term URBS, one might
Ro. cal vs iapă, but Srs. cavagl vs cavalla, Frl. cjaval/čhaval vs expect that the other Latin word for city or town, OPPIDUM,
cjavala/čhavalâ, Fr. cheval vs jument, It. cavallo vs giumenta (or should continue in Romance. Yet, in a world full of warfare
cavalla). However, the feminine forms of CABALLUS in Pt. and insecurity one of the main purposes for staying
cavala, Glc. cabala, Sp. caballa, and Cat. cavalla mean ‘mack- together was defensive, and this is probably why it was
erel’ and etymologically the name referred to ‘flying fish’ the lexeme CIUITAS ‘citizenship, inhabitants of a city’ which
possibly because it jumps out of the sea, resembling in some won out to become the most widespread Romance word for
sense a jumping horse. town: CIUITAS was originally the social body of the citizens
(CIUES), who were bound together by law which gave them
responsibilities as well as the rights of citizenship and
33.3.4 Urbanization security. In Romance languages Lat. CIUITAS (acc. CIUITATEM)
has thus given Pt./Glc. cidade, Sp. ciudad, Cat. ciutat, It. città,
In ancient Rome people generally lived in a DOMUS ‘town Frl. citât, Grd. zità, Bad. cité, Egd. citted. In French we find the
house’ and in the country in a UILLA ‘country estate, farm- word cité, but with the more restricted meaning ‘old town’,
stead’. As the empire expired, society changed radically and as well as new meanings such as ‘(council) housing estate’,
the often sumptuous country UILLAE with surrounding CASÆ whereas in Romanian cetate survives in its original meaning,
‘huts, hovels’ for the servants and workers became new ‘fortress’. The Romanian word for ‘town’ is oraş < Hng. város
centres for people who had left the city, or URBS, a lexeme (originally from Persian var ‘castle’). Surselvan also stands
that mostly referred to Rome. There grew up new states and out in that it uses the word marcau for ‘town’, which used to
independent regions all over Europe. In French UILLA > ville mean (and still can) ‘marketplace’.
came to stand not only for the original country house, but
increasingly for all the houses that constituted the commu-
nity on and around the (country) estate, and today it is the
usual word for ‘town’ or ‘city’ (cf. also Prv. vila with the same 33.4 Directional particles/prepositions
meaning). Not too dissimilar is the outcome in Spanish,
where UILLA > villa means ‘borough’ or ‘small town’. In Italian We have seen (§33.2.1) that Romance languages tend to
the word villa still means ‘detached house, villa’, and has include the idea of direction in motion verbs, but this by
been borrowed into other languages with the same meaning no means excludes the use of prepositions to indicate the
(cf. Fr. villa, Ro. vilă). The word casa, in the Middle Ages often direction, as can be seen in expressions such as Sp. saltar por
in plural casas, took the place of DOMUS, which only survives la ventana ‘jump through/out of the window’. Many lan-
in Sardinian domo ‘house’ and in learnèd forms such as It. guages also have also more specific expressions that refer
duomo ‘cathedral’, i.e. ‘house of God’, and continues today in to the geophysical environment such as downhill, upstream,
Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Surselvan, Dolomitic Ladin, and such that alongside basic en haut ‘up’, en bas ‘down’, French
Romanian. As noted above, while the gentry lived in UILLÆ, also has en aval ‘downstream’ (lit. ‘to vale’), amont ‘upstream’
most people in the country lived in a CASA ‘hut, hovel’, the (lit. ‘to mount’). Quite remarkable in this perspective is the
status of which was ameliorated as the new UILLÆ ‘towns’ development of Surselvan, where there has emerged a very
sprung up, giving rise to the semantic shift from ‘hut’ to special system. The basic directions refer to where the
‘house’. In French CASA has grammaticalized as the prepos- speaker is on the mountain slope, and in a macro-
ition chez ‘at the house of; apud’, a development shared in perspective, this also includes the river and its direction,
part by Catalan, which distinguishes between the lexical which means that si ‘uphill’ on this general macro-level also
noun casa ‘house’ and the preposition ca ‘at the home of ’ covers ‘upstream’ possibly because that the river’s source is
(e.g. can Pere ‘at Pere’s house’). Latin MANSIO ‘stay, sojourn; up in the mountains and the river runs downwards, giu. This
(later) room, mansion’ has thus supplied the modern French macro-perspective refers only to things that cannot be seen
word for ‘house’ maison (cf. Sp. mesón ‘inn, tavern, restaur- and that are believed to be far away. Thus in the Surselvan
ant’). The Latin nominalized adjective HOSPITALEM ‘of guest/ villages people say giu Turitg ‘downstream to Zürich’,
host, friendly’ has given rise to words for different kinds of although this city is situated northwest of the Rhine valley
houses such as Occ. ostal/ostau ‘house’, Sp. hostal, It. ostello (Surselva) and north is normally perceived as up and south
594
hilltop hilltop
si si
entasi orasi
en/enta o/ora
giu
entagiu oragiu
River Rhine
giu
Fig. 33.1 Macro-perspective (Surselvan)
River Rhine
as down; but because one has to follow the paths along the Fig. 33.2 Micro-perspective (Surselvan)
river downstream to get out of the valley before one can
turn north and then west to reach one’s destination, the
general idea is consequently that one goes downstream. perspective which is similar to the micro-perspective, with
Nowadays one may also hear a Turitg ‘to Zurich’. As a even greater precision, so that one can express the differ-
graphic illustration of how the directions are perceived on ence between ‘uphill’ and ‘uphill at the very end of the
this macro-level, see Fig. 33.1 (Söhrman 1990). village’, sisum vitg, and the contrary direction giudem vitg
When things get closer and the speaker can see or at least ‘downhill at the very end of the village’ (Spescha 1989r:511;
feel mentally well acquainted with the places, si becomes Söhrman n.d.).
more related to the hilltops and giu to what is further down, To complicate the perspective we must also consider
while en/enta indicate something upstream and o/ora means what can be found on the other side of the river; to do
downstream. As can be seen in Fig. 33.2 there are combined this the preposition vi is used, but it may also signify things
forms: oragiu, entagiu, orasi, oragiu. This means that something that are close to us and on the same level as we are. The
further down the hillside is situated oragiu if it is downstream speaker might thus explain his way by saying mondel vi ed
from the speaker. Thus, la basegla ei oragiu is ‘the church is oragiu ‘I go to the other side of the river and then further
further down and downstream’ but la basegla ei entasi tells us down (from where we are now) downstream’. One could
that the church is uphill but in the upstream direction. then say either lein ir si Trun ‘Let’s go up to Trun’, but if this
If the speaker is talking about a place in the same village is a place where one knows many people and to which one
the cognitive perception of where places are becomes even often goes, one can use lein ir entasi Trun and show that it is
more detailed, and one could talk of a micro-micro- not only higher up but also upstream (Söhrman 1990).
595
CHAPTER 34
Information and discourse structure

SILVIO CRUSCHINA
34.1 Introduction 34.2 Topic, focus, and sentence types
Information structure is generally defined as the way in Topic and focus are central notions in information structure
which linguistic expressions interact with discourse func- which are generally defined as those elements in the sen-
tions, so that the information conveyed within the sentence tence that represent old and new information, respectively.
is packaged in accordance with given discourse contexts This definition is inadequate. Two levels of the old/new
and with the mental states of the interlocutors (Halliday distinction must be distinguished for topic and focus to be
1967; Chafe 1976; Prince 1981; Lambrecht 1994). Discourse attributed unambiguous meanings: referential and rela-
functions such as focus and topic can indeed have an impact tional (Lambrecht 1994; Gundel and Fretheim 2004;
on linguistic expressions, interacting with other general Cruschina 2012a). The referents denoted by the sentence
principles governing the grammar of a language. This constituents may be interpreted as given or new by the
impact may be manifested in different ways and at different interlocutors according to whether they have already been
levels: morphological, syntactic, and prosodic. All Romance mentioned in the discourse, are presented for the first time,
languages exploit syntax for the linguistic realization of or are introduced as new into the conversation in relation
information structure, and thus various permutations of to some events or activity. In a referential sense, thus, the
the unmarked word order are possible in accordance with givenness/newness distinction pertains to the relation
the discourse properties of the sentential constituents.1 between linguistic structures and the mental states of the
This flexibility is therefore not arbitrary, but is the result interlocutors. Elements conveying such a type of old infor-
of the interplay between syntax and pragmatic conditions mation are said to be topical, active, familiar, or identifiable
with the primary role of indentifying the information pro- (Gundel et al. 1993; Lambrecht 1994). The relational given-
vided by the constituents as topical or focal. Similar prag- ness/newness distinction, by contrast, refers to the
matic motivations, together with the deriving constraints, speaker’s assessment of the relation between the constitu-
seem to lie behind the apparently free word order of Latin ents of a sentence in a given discourse context, so that the
and old Romance (Salvi 2004; 2005; 2011a; Benincà 2006; topic identifies what the sentence is about, while the focus
Devine and Stephens 2006; Ledgeway 2012a).2 Prosody also or comment is what is predicated of the topic. The two
plays an important role in the realization of information levels of information structure correlate with one another,
structure in Romance, and different prosodic patterns are but they should not be equated. In a relation sense, all topics
generally associated with specific syntactic constructions or are established as given and are somehow (even if only
syntactically marked constituents. indirectly) related to the discourse. However, important
distinctions become necessary when the referential level
is also taken into account. A referentially new (or newly
introduced) topic corresponds to the theme/topic of the
conversation, and the assertion will establish an aboutness
1
Syntactic studies have also argued for the existence of a discourse relation between the topic and comment predicate
domain, including topic and focus positions, at the left periphery of the (Reinhart 1981). I will call this type of topic Aboutness
nominal group (or DP; Giusti 1996; 2005; 2006; Bernstein 2001). Only sen- Topic (ATop), while I will call the topic that is referentially
tential information and discourse structure will be discussed in this
chapter. given Referential Topic (RTop). Topics of the latter type are
2
Some sentence particles may have an emphatic function related to in fact those constituents that convey old and anaphoric
focus or topic in some Romance languages, but these are not focus or topic information, and that are restated by the speaker from the
markers proper. Sometimes they simply strengthen a specific information
structure, while others only indirectly reflect specific discourse properties. previous discourse; they may restore the Aboutness Topic of
In this chapter I will not discuss sentence particles further (cf. §31.3.2). the previous utterance, serving the function of Continuity
596 This chapter © Silvio Cruschina 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
INFORMATION AND DISCOURSE STRUCTURE
Topics. As will be discussed in §34.4, this distinction proposition contained in the answer conveys new informa-
becomes highly relevant when differentiating specific tion. Once again, the terminology used in the literature to
types of dislocation. refer to this type of sentence characterized by a neutral
Similarly, all foci are new in relation to the rest of the information structure is varied: ‘event-reporting sentences’,
sentence, coinciding with the assertive part of the utterance ‘thetic predications’, ‘rhematic sentences’, ‘wide- or broad-
or with the constituent that is highlighted against a back- focus sentences’. Following Lambrecht’s (1994) distinctions
ground. In general, focus constituents are also new from a based on the extension of the focus, I will call this type of
referential point of view, but this is not always the case. structure ‘sentence-focus’, whose main distinctive feature,
A referentially new focus expression will be referred to as as the term suggests, is that the focus embraces the whole
‘information focus’, which identifies the most informative sentence. We will then turn to predicate-focus and
part of the sentence with respect to a presupposed or argument-focus structures, where the focus covers the
informatively irrelevant background, and which often cor- predicate and an argument of the verb, respectively.
responds to a missing argument in a presupposed open
proposition. Other types of focus, however, can denote an
entity which is already active or identifiable in the dis-
course: the new information is thus constituted by the 34.3 Sentence-focus structures
relation between this entity and the presupposition. Con-
trastive focus, in particular, need not convey referentially Sentence-focus structures exhibit what is known as the
new information, and is typically highly dependent on the natural or unmarked word order of the language, which is
previous discourse in that it requires an antecedent with predominantly SVO in modern Romance. The principal
respect to which an explicit contrast is set by the speaker. exceptions here are Spanish and Romanian, for which it is
Topic and focus are clearly distinct categories in often claimed that VSO is the most frequent and natural
Romance, both syntactically and prosodically (see e.g. order in sentence-focus declaratives (cf. also §§31.2, 62.3).
Rizzi 1997; Zubizarreta 1998; Frascarelli 2000; Frota 2000; In spite of the controversies surrounding unmarked word
Benincà 2001b; D’Imperio 2002; López 2009; Bocci 2013). The order in Romance, it would be incorrect to equate sentence-
syntactic differences include clitic resumption, maximum focus structures and unmarked word order. As will be
number per sentence, and compatibility with wh-phrases shown in the following sections, syntactically marked con-
in interrogative sentences. Dislocated topics can be figurations may indeed be associated with a sentence-focus
picked up by a clitic attached to the verb, at least when structure.
the relevant clitic is available; they may co-occur with
other topics within the same sentence, and are compatible
34.3.1 Unmarked word order
with wh-phrases. On the other hand, there can only be one
focus per utterance; foci are incompatible with resumptive
clitics and cannot co-occur with wh-phrases.3 Prosodically, Representing the most natural word order of a language,
the main prominence of a sentence is always associated sentence-focus structures are typically characterized by the
with the focus and never with the background, which may absence of presuppositions and the lack of special syntactic
include possible dislocated topics, although this does not marking.4 Moving away from the predominant SOV order of
mean that the background has to be completely de- Classical Latin higher registers, and through the V2 stage of
accented. medieval Romance, today the majority of the Romance
Before reviewing the properties of topicalization and languages show an unmarked SVO order:
focalization constructions in Romance, we will discuss the
information structure of unmarked sentences. This is the (1) a. Gianni ha comprato la casa. (It.)
order that obtains in out-of-the-blue contexts, when a sen- Gianni has bought the house
tence is uttered to report an event, in the absence of, or
b. En Pere va comprar la casa. (Cat.)
without reference to, a previous discourse, e.g. in response
the Pere goes buy.INF the house
to the question ‘What happened?’. In this context, the whole
‘Gianni/Pere bought the house.’
3
Examples and a more detailed discussion will be provided in §34.4.
Other differences between topics and foci include sensitivity to Weak Cross-
4
Over (Rizzi 1997), distribution with respect to other elements within the Sentence-focus structures are traditionally described as topic-less.
left periphery (Rizzi 1997; 2001a; Ledgeway 2005; 2012a:ch.4; see also However, according to some scholars all sentences have a topic, and the
§31.3.4), and availability in subordinate clauses with a structurally reduced topic of sentence-focus sentences is the spatio-temporal location of the
left periphery (Haegeman 2012). event, viz. the so-called stage topic (Gundel 1974; Erteschik-Shir 1997).
597
SILVIO CRUSCHINA
Another word order that is associated with sentence-focus The examples in (4) cannot be interpreted as instances of
structures, and that is therefore sometimes considered the sentence-focus structures, in the sense that the whole sen-
unmarked order, is VSO. The acceptability and the unmarked- tence cannot fall within the focus domain. They are therefore
ness of this order vary considerably across Romance. VSO is infelicitous in out-of-the-blue contexts. In Italian, but not in
recognized as a possible unmarked order of Spanish and Catalan, narrow focus on the subject, with the consequent
Romanian by many scholars. More specifically, both SVO destressing and ‘marginalization’ of the following object, can
and VSO are considered as perfectly natural word orders in rescue the VSO example, but this structure would clearly be
Spanish declarative sentences (2), although the VSO order (2b) marked both prosodically and interpretively (Cardinaletti
is not equally admitted by all speakers and its acceptability 2001; 2002; López 2009; Cruschina 2010a; cf. §34.4.2).
seems to vary not only with respect to the type of predicate
and subject involved in the sentence, but also in accordance
with diatopic and idiolectal variation (Hernanz and Brucart 34.3.2 Verb–subject inversion
1987; Ordóñez 1997; 1998; 2000; 2007; Zubizarreta 1998; Ordó-
ñez and Treviño 1999; Zagona 2002; Gutiérrez-Bravo 2007).
Although Romance syntax can formally and explicitly
SVO is thus less constrained, more frequent and productive,
emphasize the contrast between sentence types, there is
and hence the genuine unmarked word order in Spanish.
no strict one-to-one correspondence between information
Similarly, a number of studies that have investigated word
structure and syntactic word order, and a degree of ambi-
order in Romanian have claimed that in a SVO order the
guity is still possible. The SVO sentences in (1, 2a, 3a) can
subject is interpreted as a topic (3a), while the unmarked
therefore also be interpreted as predicate-focus structures:
word order is VSO (3a) (Dobrovie-Sorin 1994; Cornilescu
the only difference would concern the interpretation of the
2000b; Alboiu 2002; Hill 2002). Nevertheless, it seems that
subject, which is a topic in predicate-focus structures and
SVO is still the dominant and most common word order in
part of the focus in sentence-focus structures.5 Prosody may
Romanian too (Ledgeway 2012a:68-70; Zafiu 2013b):
help to distinguish between sentence types, but syntactic
means also exist: phenomena of subject–verb inversion and
(2) a. María compró un coche. (Sp.) other strategies are commonly employed in Romance to
María bought a car guarantee the unambiguous interpretation of the construc-
b. Compró María un coche. (Sp.) tion as sentence-focus. In a class of sentences, the contrast
bought María a car between sentence-focus, characterized by the lack of an
‘María bought a car.’ (overt) topic, and predicate-focus, where the subject is in
fact a topic, is formally marked. This class includes sen-
(3) a. Ion a citit două cărţi. (Ro.) tences with unaccusative verbs (5a, 6a,b) or with other
Ion has read two books (unergative) verbs characterized by special properties
b. A citit Ion două cărţi. (Ro.) such as the presence (overt or null) of a locative/goal
Has read Ion two books argument (5b) (Benincà 2001a; Calabrese 1992; Saccon
‘Ion read two books.’ 1993; Pinto 1997; Tortora 1997; 2001; Sheehan 2006; 2010),6
5
Some scholars have argued that all preverbal subjects must be ana-
VSO is possible in Portuguese, though not so readily in
lysed as syntactic topics (Contreras 1991; Solà 1992; Barbosa 1995; 2001;
answers to the question ‘What happened?’, where the most Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou 1998), but this view is rejected by many
natural order remains SVO (Duarte 1987; 2003b; Ambar others, who claim that preverbal subjects may, but need not, be left-
dislocated (Belletti 1990; Cardinaletti 1997; 2004; Costa and Duarte 2002;
1992; Costa 2004); but it is not available, or is highly mar-
Costa 2004; Rizzi 2006; Sheehan 2006; Gutiérrez-Bravo 2007; López 2009).
ginal, in other Romance languages such as Italian and Cata- 6
With some clause types, a constraint on a co-occurring complement
lan (4), where VSO would only be natural if the object were operates, so that the presence of other constituents in the sentence forces
an SVO order in Catalan and Italian (Benincà 2001a; Belletti and Shlonsky
right-dislocated and resumed by a clitic (Belletti and
1995; Leonetti 2010):
Shlonsky 1995; Belletti 2001; 2004b; Sheehan 2006; López
(i) (En Pere) ha arribat (?? en Pere) a Roma. (Cat.)
2009; Leonetti 2010; see also Giurgea and Remberger 2012b): the Pere has arrived the Pere to Rome
(ii) (Piero) è arrivato (?? Piero) a Roma. (It.)

(4) a. ** Ha comprato Gianni la casa. (It.) Piero is arrived Piero to Rome
has bought Gianni the house ‘Pere/Piero arrived in Rome.’
This constraint does not hold in languages like Spanish and Romanian,
b. **Va comprar en Pere la casa. (Cat.) where VSO is independently possible in sentence-focus structures
goes buy.INF the Pere the house (Zubizarreta 1998; Leonetti 2010). Moreover, Belletti (2004b) observes
598
as well as existential (and pseudo-existential) sentences (5c) factors must be taken into account. With respect to prosody,
and special types of presentational constructions (6c) several studies have shown that distinctive properties may
(Lambrecht 1994; 2000; 2001; 2002; Leonetti 2008; be associated with the two types, and may thus remove
Cruschina 2012b; Bentley et al. 2015; Villalba 2013). These potential ambiguities and ensure a formal contrast,
inversion constructions are also possible in a non-null sub- although not always (Zubizarreta 1998; Frota 2000; D’Im-
ject language like French, which would sometimes—though perio 2002; Hualde 2002; Nespor and Guasti 2002; Donati and
not always, and especially in high registers—use the exple- Nespor 2003; Avesani and Vayra 2004; Face and D’Imperio
tive pronoun il ‘it’ in the (preverbal) subject position (6b) 2005; Bocci and Avesani 2006; Frota et al. 2007; Bocci 2013;
(Bonami et al. 1999; Abeillé and Godard 2000; Marandin Fernández-Soriano and Vanrell 2013). On the one hand, in
2001; Lambrecht 2000; 2001; 2002).7 all Romance languages phrasal stress and tonal events play
a crucial role in the expression of focus and in the distinc-
(5) a. Ha arribat en Pere. (Cat.) tion between sentence types (wide/broad focus vs narrow
has arrived the Pere focus). The differences in prosodic marking correlate
‘Pere arrived.’ nicely with syntactic differences in the overt signalling of
the sentence type. On the other, the precise phonological
b. Telefonou a Maria. (Pt.)
properties, including pitch accent types, are different from
telephoned the Maria
language to language, making it difficult to draw general-
‘Maria has telephoned.’
izations that could encompass all Romance languages (for
c. C’ è un gatto in giardino. (It.) further discussion, see Ch. 26).
there= is a cat in garden
‘There’s a cat in the garden.’
(6) a. Alors sont entrés tous les élèves

34.4 Predicate-focus structures and
then are entered.MPL all the pupils
de Marie. (Fr.)
topicalization constructions
of Marie
‘Then all Marie’s students came in.’ The analysis of sentence-focus structures in the previous
section has shown that subjects need not be topics. In this
b. Il est venu trois femmes. section it is shown that at the same time preverbal topics
it is come.MSG three women need not be subjects. This is true of so-called quirky sub-
‘Three women came.’ jects, which may well act either as syntactic subjects (at
c. Y a le téléphone qui sonne. (coll. Fr.) least in some Romance varieties) or as topic expressions
there= has the telephone that rings when they occur in preverbal position (Cardinaletti 1997;
‘The phone is ringing.’ 2004); but it is especially so in topicalization constructions
in which a constituent is topicalized in sentence-initial
Most of these syntactic constructions, however, can also position. Several topicalization constructions are available
be used to mark the subject as the sole focus of the sentence in Romance, but the most widespread is certainly clitic left-
in the postverbal position of an argument-focus structure dislocation (ClLD), which is already frequently attested in
(cf. §34.5.1; see §53.3.1 for the VS order in interrogative medieval Romance and whose first occurrences can be
sentences), showing once again that the correspondence traced back to late Latin, or even to Classical Latin, although
between information structure and syntax is not always in the latter the topic was resumed by a strong pronoun
unambiguous, and that other pragmatic and prosodic (Sornicola 1984; Salvi 2004; 2005; 2011a; Benincà 2006;
Bouzouita 2008; Ledgeway 2012a:ch. 4).
ClLD needs to be distinguished from hanging topic left-
dislocation (HTLD), which also involves a topic expression at
another asymmetry: in Italian the VSPP order in sentence-focus structures the beginning of the sentence. HTLD and, in particular, ClLD
is (more) acceptable.
7
are typical of predicate-focus structures, where the
Special morphosyntactic properties are associated with these sen-
sentence-initial topic expression serves the function of
tences in some Romance varieties, such as the lack of subject–verb agree-
ment (Burzio 1986; Saccon 1993; Lambrecht 2000; Bentley et al. 2015). It ATop. Topic elements may also occur at the end of the
must also be noted that in several Romance languages, especially those sentence as instances of clitic right-dislocation (ClRD). This
with copula HAVE, the nominal constituent of existential sentences syntac-
construction is, however, different from ClLD in many
tically behaves as an object: it would thus not be entirely correct to speak of
VS order for existentials in these varieties (see further Ch. 52). respects, first of all because it involves RTops and occurs
599
SILVIO CRUSCHINA
more frequently with argument-focus structures than with Ever since Cinque (1983; 1990b), ClLD has been kept separ-
predicate-focus structures. ate from another type of left-dislocation construction: hang-
ing topic left-dislocation (HTLD). Both ClLD and HTLD involve
an ATop, but the two constructions have different syntactic
34.4.1 Clitic left-dislocation (ClLD) and properties (Benincà 2001a; Sauzet 1989; Villalba 2000; López
hanging topic left-dislocation (HTLD) 2009; see De Cat 2007 for an apparently different behaviour in
spoken French).10 First, hanging topics are always specific
indefinite or referential definite NPs, and cannot be preceded
As the name suggests, ClLD is characterized by the disloca- by prepositions. They must be resumed, but not necessarily
tion of the topic expression to clause-initial position, and by by a clitic: strong pronouns and epithets can also serve as
the presence within the sentential core of a coreferential resumptive elements (10a). On the other hand, ClLD topics
clitic. When available, the resumptive clitic is obligatory in (11a,b) cannot be resumed by a strong pronoun or an epithet,
most Romance varieties (7, 8a), but in some languages (e.g. and are not subject to categorial restrictions: definite, specific
Italian) its presence may depend on the grammatical func- and non-specific indefinites NPs, APs, PPs, and full clausal
tion of the preposed topic, proving obligatory only with constituents can all equally undergo ClLD:11
direct objects (8b) (Benincà 2001a; Cinque 1977; 1990b;
Vallduví 1992b; De Cat 2007; Abeillé et al. 2008; López 2009; (10) a. Peire, ai pas jamai parlat amb el. (Occ.)
Cruschina 2010a; Leonetti 2010).8 In Portuguese, the clitic may Peire I.have not never talked with him
be dropped with a dislocated direct object, giving rise to what ‘Peire, I’ve never talked to him.’
has been analysed as a different construction, namely, topic-
alization or left-dislocation (9a), which coexists with ClLD (9b; b. Amb Peire, li ai parlat. (Occ.)
Duarte 1987; Raposo 1994; 1998; Barbosa 2001):9 with Peire to.him= I.have talked
‘I’ve talked to Peire.’
(7) a. Ese libro, Luís **(lo) ha comprado
this book Luís it= has bought (11) a. Mario, de so sorela, el ghe ne parla
para María. (Sp.) Mario to his sister SCL= of.her= speaks
for María sempre. (Pad.)
‘Luís bought this book for María.’ always
‘Mario is always talking about his sister.’
b. Cartea, **(o) cumpărasem demult. (Ro.)
book it= I.had.bought long ago b. La Maria i jo, aquest any, a la
‘I had bought the book long ago.’ the Maria and I this year to the
mar, hi hem anat pocs cops. (Cat.)
(8) a. A la Maria, ** (li) he donat dos llibres. (Cat.) sea there= have gone few times
to the Maria to.her= I.have given two books ‘Maria and I, we’ve only been to the seaside a few
‘I gave Maria two books.’ times this year.’
b. A Maria, (le) ho regalato due libri. (It.) Another important difference concerns the number of
to Maria to.her= I.have given two books topics within the same utterance. More than one dislocated
‘I gave Maria two books.’ element is allowed with ClLD (11), but not with HTLD. It is
widely acknowledged, though, that when more ClLD topics
(9) a. Esse livro, o Luís comprou para a Maria. (Pt.) are present in the left periphery of the sentence, only one
b. Esse livro, o Luís comprou-o para a Maria counts as ATop, while the others are instances of RTops.
this book the Luís bought =it for the Maria Finally, HTLD is a root phenomenon, while ClLD can also
‘Luís bought this book for Maria.’
10
Some scholars have suggested that the two constructions are also
different interpretively. Cinque (1983:95) proposes that HTLD encodes new
or unexpected topics, while Villalba (2000) claims that HTLD involves
8
Clitic resumption should not be confused with clitic doubling, i.e. the discourse topics but not sentence topics.
11
co-occurrence of the clitic with the corresponding core-internal constitu- Indefinite expressions frequently introduce new referents into the
ent (see Ch. 48). discourse, and consequently are expected to be less easily topicalized.
9
This property might correlate with the possibility of null objects in Nonetheless, indefinite topics, including non-specific and bare plurals, are
both European and Brazilian Portuguese, a property that across Romance is in fact possible in Romance: ‘[t]he connection to the previous discourse
only shared by some Spanish varieties such as Quiteño Spanish (Raposo context is necessary for a felicitous ClLD, but it can be very subtle and
1986; 1998; Suñer and Yépez 1988; Farrell 1990). indirect’ (Rizzi 2006:219; see also Leonetti 2011; 2013).
600
occur in embedded clauses.12 On the basis of these syntactic and some fine-grained analyses have shown that these
differences and of further tests, including connectedness, functions seem to comply with a fixed order of occurrence
reconstruction, and sensitivity to islands, it is generally within the left periphery (Benincà and Poletto 2004b; Fras-
assumed that while ClLD applies to a constituent of a sen- carelli and Hinterhölzl 2007).
tence, HTLD does not.
Every argument of the clause can be dislocated, but a
restriction on ClLD must be mentioned: finite verbs, auxil- 34.4.2 Clitic right-dislocation (ClRD)
iaries, and functional elements of the extended verbal pro-
jection cannot be dislocated. Non-finite VPs, on the other
Topics are not always placed clause-initially. ClRD is a top-
hand, can be left-dislocated and connected to the core of the
icalization construction that is syntactically very similar to
sentence through a second occurrence of the same verb in a
ClLD, except for the fact that the topic is positioned at the
fully inflected form and in its regular position (12) (Benincà
end of the clause (Benincà 2001a; Cecchetto 1999; Vallduví
2001a:205; Vicente 2007; 2009:159):
1992b; Villalba 1999; 2000). Any type of constituent that can
undergo ClLD can also undergo ClRD. Similarly, a resump-
(12) a. Mangiare, mangio poco. (It.)
tive clitic also appears within the core of a sentence featur-
eat.INF I.eat little
ing ClRD (14), although in some varieties the clitic may be
‘As for eating, I don’t eat much.’
omitted even with direct objects (14b):
b. Leer, Juan ha leído un libro. (Sp.)
read.INF Juan has read a book (14) a. I vau sovent, al cinema. (Occ.)
‘As for reading, Juan has read a book.’ there= I.go often to.the cinema
‘I often go to the cinema.’
Adjectival predicates and past participles (or the supine
b. (L’) ha letto Mario, il giornale. (It.)
in Romanian) may also occur in similar constructions char-
it= has read Mario the newspaper
acterized by the repetition of the dislocated element
‘Mario read the newspaper.’
(Cinque 1990b). In several varieties, a preposition can pre-
cede the dislocated predicate such as de ‘as for’ in Romanian
The clitic-less version of ClRD (14b) has been analysed as
(13) (Zafiu 2013b). Interestingly, non-finite and adjectival
a different construction altogether under the name of ‘mar-
predicates can only be dislocated to the left, but not to the
ginalization’, but this construction seems to be present only
right of the sentential core:
in Italian, and not in Catalan, Spanish, or Portuguese, nor in
many Italian dialects (Frascarelli 2000; Cardinaletti 2001;
(13) De frumoasă, e frumoasă. (Ro.)
2002; López 2009; Cruschina 2010a).13 Another structure
as for beautiful.FSG is beautiful.FSG
that should not be assimilated to ClRD is ‘afterthought’
‘As far as beauty is concerned, she is beautiful.’
(Grosz and Ziv 1998; Villalba 2000), despite the fact that
the interpretive properties of ClRD have often been
Adverbs and adverbial PPs can also be dislocated to the
described in similar terms.
left periphery of the sentence, without being connected to
Despite many similarities, ClLD and ClRD must be distin-
the sentence core by means of a clitic or another resump-
guished from an interpretive point of view. Only RTops are
tive element. These elements have been analysed as scene-
allowed with ClRD, i.e. old information topics that are ana-
setting topics, which set the spatial or temporal framework
phorically and directly related to an antecedent present in
within which the main predication holds (Benincà and
the discourse. The relation between ATops and the previous
Poletto 2004b), or as the result of dislocation operations
discourse is instead much weaker, involving non-active
other than ClLD such as ‘simple preposing’ of adverbs or
topics that are referentially new or newly introduced and
PPs, which show properties distinct from both the topical-
that are only indirectly linked to the context or to the
ized and the focalized counterparts (Cinque 1990b; Rizzi
conversation. Being already active in the discourse, RTops
1990; 2004b; Cruschina 2010a). ClLD topics may be associ-
are actually optional, since the corresponding resumptive
ated with other specific pragmatic functions, yielding par-
clitic would be sufficient to restore the missing argument in
tial topics (in the sense of Büring 1997), contrastive topics,
the proposition. In contrast, ATops are an essential part of
or list-interpretation topics (Benincà and Poletto 2004b),
the sentence and cannot be omitted without radically
12 13
See Ledgeway (2004a; 2005; 2010a) for some counterexamples to this For marginalization in wh-questions, see Antinucci and Cinque (1977)
claim. and Calabrese (1982; 1992).
601
SILVIO CRUSCHINA
affecting the content of the proposition. The fact that ClRD situation is different in modern Romance, where postverbal
is restricted to RTops does not imply that RTops are in turn focalization has become predominant—in some varieties
restricted to ClRD. Indeed, ClLD may involve both ATops and more than in others, as will be shown—while FF is restricted
RTops, which can co-occur in the left periphery of the to argument-focus structures associated with specific prag-
sentence. matic and interpretive conditions. Contrast seems to be the
The sentence type featuring ClRD, and RTops in general, most widespread feature associated with FF in Romance (cf.
is more commonly an argument-focus structure, which may §34.5.2). However, the availability and indeed the frequency
in turn be conceived of as being embedded within a of sentence-initial focalization also depend on the category
predicate-focus structure that functions as the comment of the focused expression. One such category is wh-phrases
to a previous ATop. This ATop may or may not be repeated in interrogative sentences, which are fronted in all
in the current sentence as an RTop (e.g. cinema in (14a)). Romance languages, although they can optionally stay in
Yes/no questions seem to constitute an exception to the situ in some varieties such as French, Portuguese, and some
correlation between ClRD and RTops, representing the only dialects of northern Italy (cf. §53.3.2). Moreover, in some
context in which a ClRD topic can be an instance of ATop, Romance languages the pragmatic conditions that allow FF
rather than of RTop: are more relaxed, in the sense that FF is also possible in
non-contrastive contexts (cf. §§34.5.3-4).
(15) a. L’as pagat lo capel? (Occ.)
it=you.have paid the hat
‘Did you pay for the hat?’ 34.5.1 Postverbal focalization
and cleft sentences
b. Lo prendiamo un caffé? (It.)
it= we.take a coffee
‘Shall we have a coffee?’ Postverbal focalization is the most common syntactic con-
figuration associated with argument-focus structures in
Question (15a) can be put to someone wearing an odd hat, modern Romance, irrespective of the grammatical function
while (15b) is a very common way of expressing a sugges- of the focus constituent (Belletti 1999; 2001; 2004b; Costa
tion. Both sentences exemplify cases in which the right- 2000; 2004)—see e.g. the information focus in (16B). This
dislocated constituent need not be given in the context, but configuration is commonly referred to as focus in situ;
can simply be inferred from the situation or indirectly however this term does not seem to be appropriate in all
linked to the context (see Crocco 2013; see also Ledgeway cases. First of all, it is true that subjects can be focalized in
2009a:795 for a different analysis). their preverbal position, but they can also be postposed to
the verb for focusing effects in VS structures that are simi-
lar, if not identical, to the verb–subject inversion construc-
tions discussed in §34.3.2 (either position can be viewed as
34.5 Argument-focus structures the in situ position under the assumption that subjects
originate within the VP). Second, if a constituent other
and focalization constructions than the direct object is focalized in the postverbal position,
this is generally adjacent to the verb, and any element that
In Romance two positions are associated with the focus would normally precede it in the unmarked order would be
constituent in argument-focus structures: a postverbal pos- dislocated. This holds true in Catalan and in Italian (16B'),14
ition within the sentential core (cf. §31.2.1), and a preverbal but crucially not in other varieties such as Spanish, Portu-
position within the (higher) left periphery of the clause, guese (17), and Romanian (18), where the VOS order, with
generally but not always adjacent to the verb (cf. §31.3). narrow focus of the subject, is possible even if the object is
The Romance languages differ with respect to the place- part of the presupposition together with the verb (Belletti
ment of the focus constituent and the possible interpret- and Shlonsky 1995; Zubizarreta 1998; Alboiu 2002; Costa
ation associated with the preverbal position in Focus 2004; López 2009; Leonetti 2010):15
Fronting (FF) constructions. The left-peripheral focus pos-
ition seems to be more freely available in Latin and in 14
VOS is not invariably excluded in Italian, but seems to be subject to a
medieval Romance: even though for obvious reasons it is definiteness restriction (Belletti and Shlonsky 1995; Pinto 1997), as well as
difficult to define its precise interpretive properties, to idiolectal variation. The same order becomes more acceptable when the
sentence-initial focus does not appear to be limited to a focalized subject bears contrastive focus (Calabrese 1992).
15
Romance languages differ to varying degrees with respect to the
specific reading of the focus expression such as contrast (see strength of the requirement that given constituents (viz. RTops) undergo
e.g. Skårup 1975; Vanelli 1986; 1999; Benincà 2006). The either ClLD or ClRD. This requirement is very strong is some varieties such
602
(16) A: Chi ha rotto il vaso? (It.) contrast. However, some Romance varieties such as French
who has broken the vase (20, 21) and some northern Italian dialects (22) have a
‘Who broke the vase?’ preference for postverbal focalization even in contrastive
contexts (Lambrecht 1994; 2001; Zubizarreta 2001; Paoli
B: L’ha rotto Maria, il vaso. (It.)
2003a; Belletti 2006a):16
it=has broken Maria the vase
‘Maria broke it.’
(20) A: Qui a parlé? (Fr.)
B': ?? Ha rotto il vaso Maria. who has spoken
has broken the vase Maria ‘Who spoke?’
B: C’ est Jean (qui a parlé).
(17) A: Quem é que partiu a janela? (Pt.)
it is Jean who has spoken
who is that broke the window
‘It’s Jean (who spoke).’
‘Who broke the window?’
B: Partiu (a janela) o Paulo. (21) C’ est JEAN qui a parlé, pas Paul. (Fr.)
broke the window the Paulo it is Jean who has spoken not Paul
‘Paulo broke the window.’ ‘It’s Jean who spoke, not Paul.’
(18) A: Cine a venit acasă? (Ro.) (22) (**IL GELATO) a l’ ha catà IL GELATO, nen
who has come home the ice-cream SCL= has bought the ice-cream not
‘Who came home?’ la torta. (Tur.)
the cake
B: A venit acasă mama.
‘It’s the ice-cream that he bought, not the cake.’
has come home mother=the
‘Mother came home.’
It is generally assumed that clefts do not simply encode
plain information focus, but convey an exhaustive inter-
These data suggest that the postverbal focus does not
pretation (Lambrecht 2001). However, the French examples
always occur in its original place: a dedicated clause-
show that postverbal focalization in this language is gener-
internal position is presumably the target of postverbal
ally instantiated by cleft sentences, and that this construc-
focalization irrespective of its grammatical status (Belletti
tion is also used for information focus (20) or for contrastive
2001; 2004b; cf. also §31.2.1). A similar analysis has been
effects (21).
extended to wh-in-situ in French and in Portuguese, in light
In wh-questions clefts may feature a preverbal focus (viz.
of the assumption that the wh-phrase represents the argu-
the wh-phrase), yielding an interrogative strategy that is
ment focus of an interrogative sentence (Kato 2003; 2013).
very common in many Romance varieties (cf. (17A) above,
The same focus position is presumably involved in cleft
and (23)) (see Lusini 2013 for Italian dialects), but preverbal
sentences (19), another construction available in all
focalization with declarative clefts is not acceptable in
Romance languages (with the exception of Romanian), and
French (24), as well as in many other Romance languages.
for this reason clefts can be legitimately included among the
By contrast, preverbal focalization with clefts is possible
syntactic structures resorting to postverbal focalization:
(and sometimes preferred) only in those Romance varieties
where the preverbal focus position is generally much more
(19) É este carro que o João quer vender. (Pt.)
active, such as Sardinian and Sicilian, as well as some Cata-
is this car that the João wants sell.INF
lan dialects (25):17
‘It’s this car that João wants to sell.’
As will be discussed in the next section, an interpretive

property typically associated with FF in Romance is
16
As will be discussed in §34.5.4, FF is not invariably absent in French
as Sicilian and Catalan, where all non-focal material must be dislocated and but is commonly possible in the spoken language. It should also be noted
resumed by a clitic (cf. Vallduví 1992c; 1995; Cruschina 2010a; 2012a), but that clefts can be used contrastively not only in French but also in other
admits some exceptions in others such as Italian (cf. §34.4), while it proves Romance languages.
17
somewhat weaker in Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian (cf. Zubizarreta Both in Sardinian and Sicilian cleft questions are possible, but FF
1998; López 2009; Leonetti 2010) where given constituents may, but need would be more naturally used in the declarative contexts in which clefts
not, undergo ClLD or ClRD. For other related differences concerning proso- would be used in other Romance languages, especially if the focus expres-
dically driven movement, scrambling, and object shift, see López (2009). sion is a constituent other than the subject or the direct object.
603
SILVIO CRUSCHINA
(23) Chi xe che ti ga visto? (Vnz.) sentence-focus structures, provided that it is acknowledged
who is that SCL.2SG have seen that in no case do they report a new event: instead, they
‘Who did you see?’ introduce a new entity of which something is predicated.
(24) a. C’ est le champagne que j’ aime. (Fr.)

it is the champagne that I love
34.5.2 Contrastive-focus fronting
‘Champagne is what I like.’
It is generally acknowledged that contrast is the interpret-
b. ** Le champagne est ce que j’ aime. (Fr.)
ive effect associated with FF in Romance, to the extent that
the champagne is it that I love
in many analyses contrast is considered to be a necessary
requirement for FF to obtain. This observation has led to the
(25) a. (A Giuvanni) jè (?? a Giuvanni)
claim that the focus of a sentence must appear in a post-
ACC.MRK Giuvanni is ACC.MRK Giuvanni
verbal position, and can only be fronted if it bears a con-
ca vitti. (Sic.)
trastive interpretation:18
that I.saw
‘It’s Giuvanni that I saw.’
(27) CU TRENUL merg la mare, nu cu
b. (Na Maria) és (na Maria) que with train=the I.go to sea, not with
the Maria is the Maria that maşina. (Ro.)
vendrà demà. (Maj.) car=the
come.FUT.3SG tomorrow ‘It is by train that I go to the seaside, not by car.’
‘It’s Maria who will come tomorrow.’
Cross-linguistically, different languages show that the
In the same way in which languages like Italian apply VS fronted focus is always adjacent to the verb. This is, how-
inversion in order to focalize the subject, French resorts to ever, controversial in Romance. On the one hand, adjacency
clefts or to constructions akin to cleft, possessive, or exist- between fronted focus and finite verb is a strict requirement
ential sentences to avoid focus-initial SV structures, which in Romanian and in Spanish (28a), as unanimously acknow-
have the focalization function of introducing a new referent ledged in the literature (Alboiu 2002; 2004; Cornilescu 2002;
into the discourse. These are the same structures that are 2004 for Romanian, and Hernanz and Brucart 1987;
used in sentence-focus structures, and are also found in Zubizarreta 1998; 1999; Zagona 2002 for Spanish). On the
Italian and Catalan (cf. §34.3.2): other, the interposition of a topic or the subject of the
sentence between the contrastively fronted focus and
(26) a. J’ai une voisine qui fume. (Fr.) the verb is considered possible in Italian (28b) (Rizzi 1997)
I have a neighbour who smokes and Catalan (Vallduví 1992b,c; 1995). These judgements,
‘My neighbour smokes.’ however, are not shared by all speakers, highlighting pos-
sible dialectal variation (cf. Quer 2002a:254, n.3; Frascarelli
b. Hi ha la Maria molt enfadada / al 2000; Benincà 2001b; Benincà and Poletto 2004b):
there= has the Maria very angry.FSG / to.the
telèfon/ que espera. (Cat.) (28) a. ** CON MARIA, Pedro habló, y no con Marta. (Sp.)
phone/ that waits with Maria Pedro spoke and not with Marta
‘Maria is very angry/at the phone/waiting.’
b. Credo che domani, QUESTO, a Gianni
I.believe that tomorrow this to Gianni
These constructions, termed ‘presentational’ in
gli dovremmo dire. (It.)
Lambrecht (1994; 2002) and in Cruschina (2012b) but ‘event-
to.him= we.should say.INF
ive existentials’ in Leonetti (2008) and Villalba (2013), have
‘I believe we should tell Gianni this tomorrow.’
in fact an ambiguous or polyvalent focus structure. They are
argument-focus in that they introduce an information
18
focus, but at the same time they can be said to be Contrastive focus, however, need not be fronted; it can also stay in
situ. The apparent optionality of FF remains an open problem in current
predicate-focus to the extent that the focus constituent linguistic theory, where it is generally claimed that movement is triggered
functions as the topic of a following predicative constituent. by a specific interpretation. Recently, Bianchi and Bocci (2012) and Bianchi
On the other hand, given that both the information focus (2013) have shown that the preverbal and the postverbal focus positions are
not completely equivalent and that certain contexts allow focalization to
and the predicative constituent denote new information, it one position but not the other, according to two distinct interpretations of
would also be reasonable to consider these constructions as the focus structure.
604
It is undoubtedly true that most Romance languages (30) A: Unni ti nni jisti
employ FF as a syntactic strategy to mark contrastive focus. where you= there.from= you.went
However, the situation is controversial for European Portu- airi sira? (Sic.)
guese, since there is no agreement on the availability of yesterday evening
contrastive FF in this language. Some scholars (e.g. Martins ‘Where did you go last night?’
1994) assume that contrastive FF is possible, while others (e.g.
B: Au cinema jivu.
Duarte 1987; 1997; Ambar 1992; 1999; Barbosa 1995; Costa
to.the cinema I.went
1998) claim that it is ungrammatical. A recent study shows
‘I went to the cinema.’
that contrastive FF is not categorically rejected by all speakers,
and that a degree of variation must be acknowledged between
(31) A: Comporatu l’ as? (Srd.)
a group of speakers that accept it and a group of speakers that
bought it= you.have
judge it ungrammatical or marginal (Costa and Martins 2011).
‘Did you buy it?’
In contrast, contrastive FF seems to be generally available in
Brazilian Portuguese (Mioto 2003). A second problem concerns B: Emmo, comporatu l’ appo.
the precise interpretive value associated with this fronting yes bought it= I.have
construction. Recent work has highlighted that in those lan- ‘Yes, I did buy it.’
guages that admit FF with constituents other than wh- and
quantified phrases, this focalization strategy is not exclusively With respect to verbal predicates, an important differ-
limited to the contrastive interpretation. ence emerges between these two Romance varieties: VP-
fronting is possible in Sardinian (31) as one of the most
distinctive aspects of its syntax, but is not available to the
34.5.3 Information-focus fronting same extent in Sicilian.19 The complete lack of a contrastive
meaning, as well of any other special interpretation, is
witnessed by the occurrence of FF in question–answer
Among the Romance languages, modern Sardinian and Sicilian
pairs, as the most common and neutral answering strategy
stand out for certain peculiar word order patterns, whereby
(30, 31). Postverbal focalization is still an option both in
the verb appears sentence-finally. These structures have been
Sardinian and in Sicilian. Yet FF is strongly preferred in
analysed as involving the fronting of the focus expression to
many cases, e.g. with quantifiers and with copular sen-
the left periphery of the sentence. The crucial property of FF
tences, as well as to unambiguously mark a sentence as an
in these two varieties is that it can express contrastive focus,
argument-focus structure (recall that postverbal focaliza-
as other Romance languages, but also non-contrastive, infor-
tion would give rise to ambiguous sentence types; cf.
mation focus. As a consequence, FF appears in a broad series of
§§34.3.2, 34.5.1).
environments involving argument-focus structures: its focal
The Sardinian and Sicilian data provide comparative evi-
nature is a sufficient condition for the focus expression to be
dence in favour of the view that contrastive FF and infor-
fronted. Whether this property is a residue from medieval
mation FF are two distinct syntactic phenomena. The
Romance or directly from Latin or instead a more recent
contextual distribution, as well as the varied distribution
language-internal development is debatable and difficult to
across Romance noted above, already suggest that informa-
evaluate (Cruschina 2011; 2012a). Both in Sardinian and in
tion FF is different from contrastive FF with respect to its
Sicilian FF obtains in a variety of syntactic contexts that
pragmatic and interpretive features. Moreover, specific syn-
include declaratives, exclamatives, and interrogatives, and
tactic properties discriminate between the two fronting
applies to a wide range of syntactic constituents, especially
but not exclusively predicative phrases (Jones 1993; 2013;
Cruschina 2006; 2010b; 2012a; Bentley 2007; 2008b; Cruschina 19
On a par with topicalization and dislocation constructions, finite verb
and Remberger 2009; Floricic 2009; Mensching and Remberger forms and auxiliaries cannot be fronted in Romance, and in fact only non-
2010a; Remberger 2010): finite verb forms (infinitives, past participles, and gerunds) can be focalized
and fronted in Sardinian, together with their complement if present. FF in
Sicilian is possible with infinitives, but not with past participles. This
(29) a. Troppu grassu est Juanne. (Srd.) difference is presumably due to language-internal reasons and is thus
too fat is Juanne independent from FF as a syntactic operation (Cruschina and Remberger
‘Juanne is too fat.’ 2009). In most Romance languages, narrow focus on finite verbs can be
obtained through intonation, by assigning an emphatic focal stress to the
b. A frevi javi. (Sic.) verb form. This pitch accent on the finite verb emphasizes the truth value
of the proposition (Höhle 1992; Krifka 2007). According to some analyses
the fever has (e.g. Giurgea and Remberger 2012a) verb movement to a lower position
‘S/he has a temperature.’ within the left periphery is involved in these cases.
605
SILVIO CRUSCHINA
types. First, while a contrastive focus can be separated from 34.5.4 Mirative fronting, verum-focus
the verb, a purely information focus cannot, and strictly fronting, and QP fronting
needs to be adjacent to the verb. Secondly, an information
focus cannot be fronted to the left periphery of an embed-
ded clause: it can only be fronted to the left periphery of the Even when it is not contrastive, the fronted focus in Sardin-
root clause.20 On the contrary, contrastive FF can occur in ian and Sicilian is not always an instance of information
embedded clauses (Cruschina and Remberger 2009; focus. An ‘exclamative flavour’ has often been associated
Cruschina 2012a; see also Paoli 2010). Another significant with this construction, whereby the fronting of the focal
difference between contrastive FF and information FF constituent creates a value of unexpectedness and surprise.
emerges at the prosodic level. This difference does not Cruschina (2012a) uses the term ‘mirative fronting’ for this
primarily concern the pitch accent associated with the type of FF related to new information which is particularly
focus expression, but relates instead to intonational treat- surprising or unexpected. Mirativity is a recurrent inter-
ment of the material following the fronted element, which pretive trait of FF in Sicilian, but it is also a widespread
shows postfocal compression in the case of contrastive FF, focusing effect of FF in Sardinian (Jones 2013). The focus of
but not with information FF. sentences characterized by mirative fronting shares a num-
Other Romance varieties appear to be less restrictive with ber of syntactic properties with fronted information focus:
respect to FF. Romanian (Zafiu 2013b), Brazilian Portuguese it is mainly a root phenomenon, which proves highly mar-
(Kato and Raposo 1996), many southern (see e.g. Ledgeway ginal in embedded sentences, and it must stand strictly
2009a:784-90) but also some northern Italian dialects (see adjacent to the verb. Unlike fronting of information focus,
Paoli 2010), Asturian (Viejo Fernández 2008:255), and some under the appropriate conditions mirative fronting can
varieties of Spanish, Occitan, and Catalan allow non- occur in out-of-the-blue-contexts and in answers to ques-
contrastive FF (Sauzet 1989; González i Planas 2010:66; tions that would usually trigger a sentence-focus reply (e.g.
Zafiu 2013b; Fernández-Soriano and Vanrell 2013): ‘What happened?’):
(32) Oameni pricepuţi au şi ei. (Ro.) (34) a. A machina ci arrubbaru au

people skilled have also they the car to.him= they.stole to.the
‘They too have skilled people.’ dutturi! (Sic.)
doctor
(33) A: ¿Qué comió Miguel? (Ast.) ‘They stole the doctor’s car!’
what ate Miguel b. Unu figumoriscu at mandigadu Giuanne! (Srd.)
‘What did Miguel eat?’ a prickly.pear has eaten Giuanne
B: Les pataques comió Miguel. ‘Giuanne has eaten a prickly pear!’
the potatoes ate Miguel
‘Miguel ate potatoes.’ From this property a significant difference between infor-
mation focus and mirative focus follows: while information
When compared with contrastive FF, the prosodic differ- FF gives rise to a clear articulation of the sentence into a
ences are very similar to those mentioned above for infor- focus expression and a presupposition derivable from the
mation focus, supporting the idea that contrastive and non- context, mirative fronting is not always dependent on a
contrastive FF must be kept distinct. However, it has preceding discourse which may delimit a narrow focus.
recently been shown that non-contrastive FF does not Although a clearly demarcated binary pragmatic structure
necessarily mean fronting of information focus. Values is missing, especially from a referential point of view (cf.
other than contrast can be associated with the fronting §34.2), the prosodic and syntactic highlighting of the
configuration, apparently also in contexts that would typ- fronted expression signals its prominence with respect to
ically trigger information focus such as question–answer the rest of the sentence, which is therefore marked as the
pairs (cf. 33). These values are examined in the next section. background in relational terms.21
21
The event reported in sentences with mirative fronting could there-
fore be seen as all new, casting doubt on why it should be treated as a case
of fronted argument-focus. Note, however, that a widely recognized seman-
20
A similar root-embedded asymmetry has been noted and discussed for tic property of (narrow) focus is the introduction of a set of alternatives
medieval Romance, where FF is not invariably excluded in embedded (Rooth 1985; 1992). This set of alternatives is open and indeterminate with
contexts, but seems to be limited to complement clauses dependent on information focus, while a typically explicit alternative (viz. an antecedent)
‘bridge verbs’ (Benincà 2006; see also Ledgeway 2004a; 2005; 2007a; 2008a). is required with contrastive focus. Along these lines, it could well be that
606
Mirative fronting is also possible in other Romance varieties It is not clear whether mirative fronting and verum FF
and, as a consequence of its interpretation, is generally associ- should been seen as two different approaches to the same
ated with an exclamative nuance conveying an element of sur- empirical phenomenon, or rather two similar and closely
prise or unexpectedness (Hernanz 2001; 2006; Brunetti 2004; related phenomena with some distinct properties. The
2009a,b; Gallego 2007; 2010; Paoli 2010; Jiménez-Fernández and interpretive effect associated with these structures would
Frascarelli 2013, Mar Vanrell et al. forthcoming 2013):22 go in favour of a possible convergence—an emphatic excla-
mative or evaluative interpretation is also often associated
(35) a. Non ci posso credere! Due bottiglie with verum focus—but the origins of this interpretive value
not to.it= I.can believe.INF two bottles seems to be different: it is linked to the fronted element
ci siamo bevuti! (It.) with mirative fronting, while it stems from focalization on
us= we.are drunk the polarity of the sentence with verum FF.
‘I can’t believe it! We drank two bottles!’ A similar type of fronting with analogous interpretive
values is found in European Portuguese, although the
b. Un anillo de diamantes brilla hoy en
descriptive generalizations are not unanimous. On the one
a ring of diamonds shines today in
hand, this fronting phenomenon has been assimilated, or
su dedo! (Sp.)
indeed reduced, to QP fronting (Costa 1998; Barbosa 2000;
her finger
2001). On the other, it has been grouped together with those
‘Today she sports a sparkling diamond ring (on her
affective constructions that trigger proclisis, under the
finger)!’
name of ‘syntactically marked focus’ (Raposo 1994; Raposo
c. Fam tenc! (Maj.) and Uriagereka 1996). A characterization of this construc-
hunger I.have tion that more closely resembles mirative or verum focus is
‘I am hungry!’ given in Ambar (1999), where it is called the ‘evaluative
construction’ and described as a type of fronting that
Similar fronting phenomena in Spanish (36) have been involves an emphatic or evaluative expression (generally
analysed as involving verum focus, viz. focus on the polarity bound to gradable and scalar lexical items) and that nor-
of the sentence. According to this view, the fronting of a mally features an exclamative aspect expressing the
constituent is not directly related to the focalization of part speaker’s evaluation of a give state of affairs:
of the sentence, but is instead a mechanism that introduces
focus on the polarity and truth value of the sentence (Leo- (37) a. Muitos livros lhe ofreceu o Pedro! (Pt.)
netti and Escandell Vidal 2009; 2010). This analysis has also many books to.him= offered the Pedro
been applied to Sardinian FF, especially to its occurrences in ‘Pedro offered him many books!’
yes/no questions (Mensching and Remberger 2010a; Jones
b. Linda casa lhe comprou o pai! (Pt.)
2013; cf. also §53.5.2.2):
beautiful house to.him= bought the father
‘His father bought him a beautiful house!’
(36) a. Algo debe saber. (Sp.)
something must.2SG know.INF
It is worth noting that a type of non-contrastive fronting
‘S/he must know something.’
is also available in French.23 Interestingly, the properties
b. Pues a eso me refiero. (Sp.) associated with this construction are, once again, similar to
little to this me= I.refer those found with mirative fronting or verum FF in other
‘Well, that’s what I am talking about.’ Romance languages: expression of the speaker’s attitude
(surprise, admiration, disgust, justification, etc.), unclear
focus-presupposition partition of the sentence (it generally
mirative fronting gives rise to a set of alternative propositions that only involves narrow focus, but could be found in out-of-the-blue
differ from one another with respect to the denotation of the fronted contexts), and unavailability in embedded sentences
expression. These propositions are ordered along a scale of (un)likelihood
or (un)expectedness, which is at the basis of the speaker’s evaluation of the (Abeillé et al. 2008):
event as surprising or unexpected. This analysis would confirm the focal
nature of the mirative focus (see Bianchi et al. 2015).
22
With exception of Jiménez-Fernández and Frascarelli (2013), these
scholars do not use the term mirativity to describe the interpretive prop-
erties associated with fronting, but they do recognize that these are FF
23
structures and that surprise and unexpectedness are the main resulting Contrary to some descriptions, contrastive focus fronting is also
effects. For analogous structures in Spanish, Gallego (2010) adopts the term accepted by many French speakers, although clefts would be preferred
‘weak focus’. especially in more careful registers of the language.
607
SILVIO CRUSCHINA
(38) a. Trois heures, il avait de retard, le train. (Fr.) operators that trigger proclisis on the finite verb (Raposo
three hours it had of delay the train 1994; Raposo and Uriagereka 1996). In particular, Costa
‘The train had a three hour delay.’ (1998) explicitly acknowledges many similarities between
European Portuguese QP fronting and FF in Italian. On the
b. A une sorcière tu ressembles! (Fr.)
other hand, it has also been claimed that, despite the many
to a witch you resemble
similarities, QP fronting should be considered a phenomenon
‘You look like a witch!’
independent from FF, and that preverbal quantifiers target a
distinct position within the left periphery, with syntactic
If the extension of non-contrastive FF in Romance is still
fronting being attributed exclusively to their lexical inter-
subject to discussion and ongoing research, all studies investi-
pretive properties and operator status (Poletto 2000;
gating word order phenomena agree that one type of fronting
Damonte and Poletto 2010). As for the relation between QP
that is even more common than contrastive FF is QP fronting:24
fronting and contrastive FF, it is important to note that the
former can be associated with a contrastive interpretation,
(39) a. Nimic nu ştie Petre. (Ro.)
but the association is not a necessary condition for fronting
nothing not knows Petre
to obtain, as shown by the fact that different prosodic pat-
‘Petre doesn’t know anything.’
terns distinguish the two readings (Quer 2002a).
b. Alguns clients deurem fer, oi, A similar controversy concerns the presence of focalizing
some customers must.FUT.1PL do.INF right adverbs or particles (elements equivalent to English ‘(not)
avui? (Cat.) even’, ‘also’, ‘only’), which considerably favour fronting
today (Calabrese 1992; Brunetti 2004; Cruschina 2012a):
‘We’ll probably get some customers today, right?’
(40) a. Nemmeno un bicchiere d’ acqua ci
However, not all scholars agree on the relation between not.even a glass of water to.us=
QP fronting and FF. On the one hand, quantifiers have hanno dato! (It.)
quantificational and operator properties similar to foci they.have given
that would justify the assimilation of the two types of ‘They didn’t even give us a glass of water!’
fronting. In European Portuguese, QP fronting is generally
b. Persino Maria ha invitato alla festa! (It.)
grouped together with the fronting of other (focal) affective
even Maria has invited to.the party
‘He even invited Maria to the party!’
24
See e.g. Raposo (1994), Raposo and Uriagereka (1996), Barbosa (2000;
2001) for Portuguese; Benincà (2001a), Cinque (1990b) for Italian; These sentences are interpretively similar to sentences
Zubizarreta (1998), Leonetti and Escandell Vidal (2009) for Spanish; with mirative fronting, but again, it can be argued that in
Vallduví (1992a) for Catalan; Alboiu (2002), Cornilescu (2004) for Romanian;
see also Quer (2002a) and Cruschina (2012a). these contexts fronting is motivated by independent prop-
Resumptive (or anaphoric) preposing is another type of fronting con- erties, similar or related to QP fronting, or that the mirative
struction that is traditionally considered an instance of FF, rather than value derives from the lexical meaning.25
topicalization, as witnessed by the fact that the fronted constituent is
incompatible with clitic resumption, has to be adjacent to the verb, triggers In sum, it is clear that, despite the terminological and
subject–verb inversion, and is incompatible with any other instance of wh- theoretical divergences, fronting in Romance is not uniquely
or focus movement: related to contrast and is more widespread than is generally
(i) La stessa proposta fece poi il partito di maggioranza. (It.) thought. It is not always easy to capture and describe the
the same proposal made then the party of majority subtle differences between FF types, which are generally spe-
‘The majority party then made the same proposal.’
cific to the spoken colloquial register, but recent research has
(ii) Dije que terminaría el libro, y el libro
I.said that I.would.finish the book and the book paved the way for a more careful and accurate investigation
he terminado. (Sp.) into their distinctive properties and characteristics on a com-
I.have finished parative level.
‘I said that I would finish the book, and finish the book I did.’
This construction mostly involves definite DPs. The fronted element
must anaphorically resume an identical or inferentially linked phrase in
25
the immediately preceding discourse. Demonstratives or lexical items Quantifiers give rise to quantificational scales and, similarly, focaliz-
meaning ‘same’ typically help this anaphoric function (Benincà 2001a; ing adverbs have scalar meanings (Krifka 2007). The corresponding con-
Cinque 1990b; Benincà and Poletto 2004b; Cardinaletti 2009; Leonetti and textual alternative propositions introduced by focalization would therefore
Escandell Vidal 2009). Due to its anaphoric nature, it is obvious that the hold in an implicational relation. This might explain why sentences with
fronted expression never conveys referentially new information, and that a fronted quantifiers or with focalization adverbs readily license a mirative
pragmatic binary partition of the sentence only exists at the relational interpretation, although the extent to which this interpretation is related
level. to the fronting operation remains an open question.
608
E. Sociolinguistics
CHAPTER 35
Sociolinguistic variation
M A R I C. J O N E S , M A I R P A R R Y , AND LYNN WILLIAMS
35.1 French see Estival and Pennycook 2011), and was prominent in the
thinking of the grammarians and linguistic commentators
of the seventeenth century, sets the written language, seen
35.1.1 Context as ‘ideal’ or ‘true’ French, above the ‘lesser’ spoken lan-
guage. France therefore emerged into the modern period
In 1996, the French sociolinguist Françoise Gadet wrote that,
with a strong normative linguistic tradition, with French-
at that time, French variationist sociolinguistics barely
speakers perceiving their language as uniform and domin-
existed (1996:89). This comment, made three decades after
ant (Gadet 2007:208). The national preoccupation with lan-
Labov’s (1966) seminal variationist work had revolutionized
guage is greater than that of France’s European neighbours.
the study of the interaction between language and society
Indeed, despite France’s numerous immigrant and regional
within the Anglo-Saxon world, indicates clearly the way in
languages (acknowledged in Cerquiglini’s 1999 report which
which, within France, sociolinguistics has followed its own
bears no less a title than ‘The Languages of France’), French
trajectory. This section provides an overview of the main
is enshrined in the 1958 Constitution as the Republic’s only
trends in contemporary French sociolinguistics. For reasons
language.
of space, it focuses mainly on studies of Hexagonal French.1
Examples are illustrative, rather than exhaustive, and ref-
erences are necessarily selective.
The way in which speech varies according to social 35.1.2 Variationist studies
parameters frequently enjoys a high degree of salience
within a speech community and, from the sixteenth century Studying the (inherently variable) spoken language seems
onwards, metalinguistic comment on French regarding age- to have held relatively little appeal within France, possibly
and social class-based phonological and lexical variation is as a result of this normative mindset. Moreover, when
plentiful (Tory 1529; Pillot 1550; de la Ramée 1572; Estienne sociolinguistic research began in earnest within France,
1579). More systematic studies of French sociolinguistic Labovian variationism did not prove as popular as within
variation also appear from a relatively early date (Nisard the Anglophone world. This is not to say that no French
1872; Bauche 1920; Martinet 1945). More recently, interest sociolinguistic studies have been undertaken within the
in linguistic diversity with regard to age- and register- Labovian framework (cf. Lefebvre 1991; Taylor 1996;
governed variation has resulted in the publication of popu- Reichstein 1960; Laks 1977; Chauvin 1985) and, more
lar ‘dictionaries’ (Merle 1989; Colin et al. 1994; Goudaillier recently, the Phonologie du français contemporain project
1997). (Durand et al. 2009b), which is using Labovian methodology
In France, language has served as a major building block to compile a large reference corpus of spoken French from
of nationhood. A consequence has been the imposition on throughout the French-speaking world to facilitate the sys-
the French mindset of an ‘ideology of the standard’ (Milroy tematic study of phonological phenomena such as liaison.
and Milroy 1985) which may be interpreted as the formation Labovian-style analysis of the French of Canada has been
in society of ‘definite ideas about what is “correct” in lan- undertaken by North American linguists (see e.g. the work
guage use’, including the belief that ‘all people should use of Raymond Mougeon, France Martineau, Gillian Sankoff,
language in the same “correct” way’ (Devitt 1989:1). This Terry Nadasdi, and Hélène Blondeau).2 However, most vari-
ideology, which received explicit backing from institutions ationist work on Hexagonal French has been undertaken by
as diverse as the Salons and the Académie Française (although sociolinguists from the UK (see, for example, the work of
1 2
Because of its shape, the mainland part of Metropolitan France is often For a useful overview of significant 20th-c. sociolinguistic studies of the
referred to as the ‘Hexagon’. French of Canada, see Mougeon (1996).
This chapter © Mari C. Jones, Mair Parry, and Lynn Williams 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press 611
Nigel Armstrong, Kate Beeching, Aidan Coveney, David 1965; François 1973; Gadet 1992). However, given the evi-
Hornsby, Anthony Lodge, Tim Pooley, and Zoe Boughton).3 dence of divergent norms within the same city (see §35.6),
Sociolinguistic studies of Hexagonal and extra-Hexagonal questions have been raised as to whether the term français
French have focused on variables such as the following. populaire is still appropriate (Gadet 2003b; Jamin et al. 2006;
Phonology: realization of r (broadly speaking [r] vs [ʁ]); Hornsby and Jones 2013).
presence or absence of schwa deletion (la fenêtre [laf(ə)nɛtʁ] A noticeable consequence of the ideology of the standard,
‘the window’); deletion of [ʁə] and [lə] when part of a word- with its lack of focus on the spoken language for its own
final consonant cluster (centre [sɑ̃t(ʁə)] ‘centre’, possible sake, has been that corpora of spoken Hexagonal French are
[pɔsib(lə)] ‘possible’); neutralization of the opposition less well established and less numerous than those of Fran-
between front and back a (patte [pat] ‘paw’– pâte [pɑt] ce’s European neighbours. Longer-standing and more exten-
‘pasta’); realization of nasal vowels (e.g. merger of [œ̃] sive corpora exist of the written language, a well-known
with [ɛ̃] in words such as brun [bʁœ̃] ‘brown’); presence of example being FRANTEXT. For the French of France, the
optional liaison (tu as attendu [tyazatɑ̃dy] or [tyaʔatɑ̃dy] best-known include the Groupe Aixois de Recherche en Syntaxe
‘you have waited’). Morphosyntax: use of the indefinite corpus (GARS/CORPAIX); the Étude Linguistique de la Commu-
personal pronoun on ‘one’ in place of the first person plural nication Parlée corpus (ELICOP); the Corpus de Référence du
pronoun nous; auxiliary selection in compound tenses; Français Parlé (CRFP) and the Corpus de Langue Parlée en
absence of the preverbal negator (i.e., the passage from Interaction (CLAPI). For extra-Hexagonal French, see e.g.
Jespersen-style stage II to stage III negation: il ne vient Canada: the Ottawa-Hull Corpus and the Corpus de français
pas – il vient pas ‘he does not come’; cf. §51.2.1); left- parlé au Québec; Belgium: the VALIBEL corpus and the Langue
dislocated subject doubling (Moi, je le vois Pierre lit. ‘1SG, et Communication corpus (LANCOM).
I him= see Pierre’); use of tenses such as the analytic and
synthetic future and past forms (e.g. je chanterai ‘sing.FUT.1SG’
vs je vais chanter lit. ‘I go sing.INF’, je chantai ‘sang.PST.1SG’ vs
35.1.3 Sociolinguistic models and categories
j’ai chanté ‘I.have sung’); the syntax of interrogative con-
structions, where the position of the constituents in the Jones and Hornsby (2013) brings together sociologists and
surface structure can vary considerably, namely wh-SV-cl; sociolinguists to reflect on whether the relative absence of
wh-V-cl, wh-V-NP, wh-E-S-V, S-V-wh, wh-S-V (where E = the methodological cross-fertilization between France and the
interrogative sequence est-ce que lit. ‘is-this that’; cf. §53.3). Anglo-Saxon world can be attributed simply to scepticism
Although studies of upper class speech exist (cf. Lyche on the part of French sociolinguists towards Anglo-
and stby 2009) most studies of socially marked French, American approaches or to genuine problems of application
whether variationist or not, have concentrated on the lower in the European Francophone context, created by a funda-
end of the social scale, focusing most notably on français mental difference in the French social model. One major
populaire, a nationally homogeneous sociolect, broadly cor- factor worth highlighting is the near-taboo surrounding
responding to working-class Parisian usage. Its features social class in post-Revolutionary France (Castellotti and
include non-standard pronunciation (e.g. [ɛ] > [a]: personnel De Robillard 2001:46), which has probably militated against
[paʁsɔnɛl] ‘personal’; [o] > [w]: poète [pwɛt] ‘poet’; [ɑ̃] > [ɔ̃]: its use as an analytical category in French sociolinguistics.
enfant [ɔ̃fɔ̃] ‘child’; [k] > [kj]: cinquième [sɛ̃kjɛm] ‘fifth’); pres- Interestingly, although the category also disappeared from
ence of ‘false’ liaisons (cinq amis [sɛ̃kzami] ‘five friends’); French political and sociological discourse at the end of the
variable schwa deletion (see above)); non-standard morpho- twentieth century, it is now returning (Chauvel 2001;
syntax (including absence of the preverbal negator (see Bouffartigue 2004). French studies of social inequality and
above); differences in word order (e.g. more dislocation stratification were undertaken before this, but with social
(see above)); differences in the distribution of the subjunct- groupings such as ‘position’, ‘layer’ and ‘environment’ used
ive and of certain tenses (e.g. the conditional); non- as thinly-disguised euphemisms for ‘social class’ (Paveau
observance of feminine gender agreement; and a distinctive 2008; Coveney 2013:70). Lambert (2013) finds that data
lexis (e.g. patte ‘paw’ for standard jambe ‘leg’; toubib for from large-scale sociological surveys provide little evidence
standard médecin ‘doctor’; bagnole for standard voiture ‘car’; of French exceptionalism with respect to the processes of
boulot for standard travail ‘work’; cf. Bauche 1920; Guiraud social stratification in other western countries. Moreover,
although France’s National Institute of Statistics has created
its own tool for measuring social classification using cat-
3
Sociolinguistic work on the French of Belgium includes Thiam (1995) egories which, as Hornsby and Pooley (2001) discuss, do not
and Hambye (2009); for Switzerland, see Singy (1996); Prikhodine (2011); for
Africa, Dumont and Maurer (1995); Knutsen (2009); and the journal Le correlate well with Labovian methodology, British linguists
Français en Afrique. investigating social stratification have shown that these
612
SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION
categories can be re-cast into the three broad Labovian focus of studies in other areas of the French sociolinguistic
classes (typically as ‘upper’, ‘intermediate’, and ‘popular’) tradition. For example, language revitalization has been
without too much difficulty (Coveney 2002; 2013:70). For all deconstructed as a set of social as well as linguistic pro-
the taboo surrounding the category of social class, it still cesses (Costa 2010a,b; 2013; Costa and Gasquet-Cyrus 2012;
seems relevant for the analysis of contemporary French 2013) and the ‘manufacture’ of regional sociolinguistic iden-
society (Coulangeon 2013). Indeed, many factors cited tities has also been analysed in terms of negotiation with a
against the use of this category in the literature on French linguistic ‘other’ (Blanchet 2002a, b; Bulot 2006c; 2013; Jones
(shifting class boundaries, growth of the middle classes, and Bulot 2009).
increased time in education), are common to many of Fran-
ce’s European neighbours, as are other so-called centraliz-
ing forces cited as factors behind the increasing
35.1.4 Regional sociolinguistic variation
homogenization of French speech (internal economic
migration, enhanced communication links, better transport The sociolinguistic correlates of regional dialect levelling
infrastructure) (Lodge 1993:227; Durand et al. 2013:66). Paris have drawn attention on both sides of the Channel. Again,
does, however, exert more control over the French educa- the French case does not seem particularly exceptional.
tion system than London on the British system: the post-18 However, France is notable for the near total absence of
school-leaving baccalauréat examinations are uniform localized urban speech varieties. Put simply, the significant
throughout France and secondary school teachers are levelling that occurred during the twentieth century has led
selected via national competitions based on a single to the emergence of a regionally unmarked supralocal norm
national curriculum and assessed via a Paris-based examin- in the historical territory of the langue d’oïl. Consequently,
ation board. It is therefore indeed possible that this according to some linguists, variation in French is fast
arrangement serves to privilege and diffuse a single linguis- coming to represent that which occurs when a range of
tic norm (Durand et al. 2013:67). linguistic resources shared by the whole community of
Labovian variationist sociolinguistics has been criticized speakers (of all social backgrounds) is used ‘to achieve
for implying an overly-consensual, simplified, model of different stylistic effects in various situations of communi-
society and social identity (Schiffrin 1996; Coupland 2007). cation’, more than to ‘serve as indicators of a social dialect’
Speech is often portrayed as largely homogeneous, apart (Pooley 2013:201). As one example, variable schwa deletion
from a few ‘weak’ points which vary according to a given in monosyllabic words preceded by a single consonant
social parameter: the corresponding linguistic forms serv- ([sɛdɑ̃ləbyʁo] / [sɛdɑ̃lbyʁo] ‘it is in the office’) was found
ing as fixed points by which a given social variety may be by Hansen (2000) to be linked more with, respectively,
identified. However, the framework does not explore why scripted and unscripted speech styles than with consider-
individuals belonging to the same social group may speak ations of social class.
differently, nor why members of socially different groups Some pockets of resistance to these centralizing trends
may speak similarly. Crucially, it also fails to acknowledge remain in the south of France (Rittaud-Hutinet 2001; Durand
that every speaker represents a possible site of interaction et al. 2013) and in the Hexagon’s northern and eastern
for a number of extralinguistic factors (age, gender, class, periphery (e.g. the Cotentin Peninsula and the Nord Pas de
education, etc.), which interface with one another during Calais; cf. Walter 1982; Tyne 2003:163; Hornsby 2006; Pooley
the production of speech (Gadet and Tyne 2012). Therefore, 2006:366f.—although cf. Boughton 2013). However, diver-
although for many Anglophone scholars the terms ‘Labo- gence from this so-called Oïl French, whose phonological
vian’ and ‘variationist’ are virtually synonymous, this is not features differ from ‘standard’ or ‘reference’ French is
the case within the Hexagon. becoming something of a rarity in much of the historical
The study of linguistic varieties based on interaction Oïl territory, especially for speakers born after 1965. Indeed,
rather than on abstraction is prevalent in the specifically the supralocal norm also seems to be spreading into the
French sociolinguistic framework of L’Imaginaire linguistique north of the historical Oc territory (Pooley 2006:385f.). Poo-
(Houdebine 1996), whose stated aim is to explore ‘the ley’s (p. 360) list of Oïl French features includes the neutral-
speaker’s relationship with the language and with its realization of certain vowel oppositions (e.g [a]–[ɑ] (see above);
ization (usage)’ (Houdebine 1995:239) by relating the central and [e]-[ɛ] in open syllables (fée/fait ‘fairy/done’); [ø]-[œ] in
extralinguistic parameters of Labovian sociolinguistics to closed syllables (jeûne/jeune ‘fasting/young’); [œ̃ ]–[ɛ̃] [brun/
more subjective factors (e.g. context, diglossia/bilingualism, brin ‘brown/sprig’]); non-realization of final schwa (père
speaker attitudes) and which seeks to achieve descriptive [pɛʁ(ə)] ‘father’); maintenance of the [ɔ]–[o] opposition in
adequacy by considering negotiation rather than correl- closed syllables (hotte/ôte ‘basket carried on one’s back/(s)
ation. Similarly complex strategies of interaction form the he.removes’); realization of [ə] according to the ‘northern’
613
system as defined by Armstrong and Unsworth (1999); dele- to the salient morphosyntactic variable of interrogative
tion of word-final [ʁə] and [lə] (see above); realization of r as structures (see above) (cf. Coveney 1997) and to some
the uvular approximant ([ʁ]). instances of lexical variation (e.g. voiture/bagnole ‘car’;
Recent studies of levelling of Oïl-divergent features Armstrong 2013:84-8).
include for eastern France Armstrong (2001a); Boughton
(2005); for western France Boughton (2001; 2003; 2005); for
northern France Girard and Lyche (2003), Hornsby (2006);
35.1.6 Variation and the banlieue
for southern France Armstrong and Unsworth (1999),
Violin-Wigent (2009), Pustka (2009), Armstrong and Pooley A striking exception to Oïl levelling is found in the variety of
(2010). Although similar processes of linguistic convergence French spoken in the suburbs of Paris and other major
have been found elsewhere in Europe (Hinskens et al. 2005), French cities, characterized by large numbers of immigrants
‘[n]owhere else in western Europe are phonological regio- and a population significantly younger than the national
lectal features levelled to such a degree over such a large average (Dikeç 2007; Tissot 2013). Hornsby and Jones (2013)
area’ (Pooley 2006:286; cf. Armstrong and Blanchet 2006). view the interrelationship between language and space as a
further contrast between the urban sociolinguistic profiles
of France and the Anglo-Saxon world and discuss the con-
35.1.5 Hyperstyle variation trasting connotations evoked by the French term banlieue
(= social deprivation, multiculturalism, lower-class) and
The levelling of French pronunciation in the historical Oïl British/American suburb (= affluence, ‘white Anglo-Saxon
territory means that, within the Hexagon, sociolinguistic Protestant’, middle-class). Haussmann’s redesign of Paris
variation has been largely displaced to morphosyntax and in the wake of the 1848 uprisings (see Harvey 1985:103)
the lexis. Recent studies include: Gadet (1996, 1997; 1998); brought profound structural change and unprecedented
Armstrong (1998; 2002; 2013); Coveney (2000; 2003a, b; 2007; social segregation via displacement of much of the working
2013); Fonvielle and Hug (2000); Beeching (2009; 2012); class population from the inner city—leading to a physical
Courbon (2009); Zribi-Hertz (2011:6f.). This is not to say separation between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The isola-
that no social or regional differences of pronunciation tion of the banlieue has led to linguistic divergence, charac-
exist (Armstrong and Boughton 2009; cf. Mettas 1979), but terized by linguistic features which, unlike the Oïl-levelling
the latter in particular are certainly significantly dimin- discussed above, are associated with low-status speakers
ished compared to previous generations (Boughton 2013). (Jamin 2005; 2007; 2009; Fagyal 2003; 2007; 2010; Trimaille
Variable phonological features that remain in French such 2008). These include glottalization of pre-pausal [ʁ] (ta mère
as variable schwa deletion (Hansen 2000; Massot 2002), the [tameʁ̝ʔ] ‘your mother’); closure of [ɔ] before [ʁ] and [l] (la
realization of optional liaison (Durand et al. 2009b), and the mort [lamoʁ̝ʔ] ‘the death’, la police [lapolis] ‘the police’);
deletion of word-final [ʁə] and [lə] (Laks 1977) (see above), palatalization and/or affrication of the dental stops [t] and
together with fast-speech phenomena such as the pronun- [d] before the high vowels [i] and [y] (tu dis [ʧyʤi] ‘you say’)
ciation of expliquer [eksplike] ‘to explain’ as [esplike], are and of the velar stops [k] and [g], including when final (la
therefore now available to all speakers, precisely because gare [lagjaʁ], [lajaʁ] ‘the station’; donc [dɔ̃k ʃ ] ‘therefore);
they have no regional or social connotations. As such, any shift of tonic stress to a prefinal syllable (MARdi for marDI
variation that still occurs may be interpreted as a marker of ‘Tuesday’) and syncope of unstressed vowels ( j(ou)(eu)r de
style rather than of social dialect. Indeed, Lodge (1993; 1999) foot lit. ‘player of fooball’, Z(i)dane, i(l) f(ait) ses lacets lit.
considers stylistic variation to be more evident in French ‘Zidane, he does up his laces’).
than in many other languages (cf. Zribi-Hertz 2011 and Many of these emergent phonetic forms appear to have
Massot and Rowlett 2013 for a discussion of diglossia arisen from contact between indigenous working-class and
between different varieties of style-indexed French). immigrant groups. Moreover, these features are being
Since speakers typically vary their style according to the adopted and their frequency exaggerated by young
specific social range of people with whom they interact second-generation immigrants of north African parentage
regularly, hyperstyle (Coveney 1996; Armstrong 2013), precisely in order to index a particular social identity (Jamin
where the whole speech community varies its speech in 2005:233f.; cf. Labov 1963). And yet, linguistic features
the same way, should be rare. Armstrong explains its pres- observed in the Paris banlieue appear to have minimal
ence in French, where it is certainly manifest in the context impact on the speech of the city itself and, although Candea
of variable schwa deletion and the realization of optional et al. (2012) raise the question of whether these features
liaison, via the salience that these features are given by the will, in due course, become more commonplace in main-
French education system. He adds that the same could apply stream society as part of the general informalization of
614
phonetic ‘norms’ (cf. Boughton 2007), at present there is no closely related can be more different from Florentine/
indication that they are likely to do so soon (Gadet 2003a:87; Tuscan-based Italian than are, say, Spanish or Romanian.
Hornsby and Jones 2013). The social changes wrought by political unification, involv-
The particular social ‘mix’ of the banlieue and the prom- ing mass internal migration into the cities from rural areas,
inence of its linguistic features within French society (even and from the impoverished south to the more industrial
though most people do not use these forms) seem to have north (especially the north-west), were accompanied by
had a hand in the change in meaning undergone by the term major advances in education, literacy, technology, and com-
‘youth language’ within French sociolinguistics. The clear munication, all of which revolutionized the linguistic
generational connotations developed first into a localized, behaviour of Italy’s inhabitants, but there remain pro-
(banlieue) meaning and have subsequently even become nounced regional differences (Parry 2011). The focus here
associated with ethnicity–despite the fact that most young will be on sociolinguistic variation within Italy and Switz-
banlieue dwellers do not speak their ‘heritage’ language erland (Ticino) (for further bibliography, including studies
(Trimaille and Billiez 2000; Trimaille 2004; Pooley 2008; of variation regarding minority languages, emigrant and
Gadet 2013a). new immigrant communities, code-switching and mixing,
Whether inside or outside the banlieue, the sociolinguis- sectorial languages, and matters of identity and perception,
tics of the city (effects of urbanization, rural exodus, post- see Còveri 1977; Zuanelli Sonino 1989; Mioni 1992; Berruto
colonial migration etc.) forms a current focus of research. 2002; Parry 2010c; Cerruti 2013).
Studies include Bulot (2001; 2006a; 2009b; 2011), Armstrong Tullio De Mauro’s seminal Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita
(2001b), Armstrong and Jamin (2002), Gasquet-Cyrus (2004; (1963) was a ground-breaking sociolinguistic analysis of the
2009), Trimaille and Billiez (2007), Bierbach and Bulot factors that brought about the major language shift
(2007), Ledegen and Bulot (2008), Pooley (2009), and Gadet whereby the mainly written code of a small elite, based on
(2013a). In their study of the sociolinguistic correlates of the fourteenth-century Florentine, became within a century a
gentrification of Marseille, Trimaille and Gasquet-Cyrus widely spoken language.4 Nowadays the percentage of
(2013) relate the phenomenon of Oïl levelling to the con- monoglot dialect speakers among the population of Italy
struction of regional versus global (or glocal) identity, indi- (approximately 5%) is much lower than the percentage of
cating the role that can be played in such matters by Italians able to use Italian at the time of Unification
linguistic features. This power of language to index an (approximately 10%). Yet, ironically, the precarious status
(often changing) identity has been studied in many different of most of today’s dialects does not prevent their being a
types of French-speaking community: urban (Bulot and significant stylistic resource where least expected, namely
Tsekos 1999); youth (Trimaille 2005; Blondeau 2008); in the electronic communications of young people.
regional (Bulot 2006c; Ayres-Bennett and Jones 2007; Perceptive overviews of sociolinguistic variation in Italy
Armstrong 2008); and immigrant (Bulot 2009a). Studies of are found in two updated profiles: Berruto (2012) and
code-switching are also shot through with such questions D’Agostino (2012). Much important work stems from a
(Poplack 1987; 1988; Myers-Scotton 1993; Jones 2005; cross-fertilization with the long-standing tradition of dia-
Poplack et al. 2012). In Heller et al. (2005) and Duchêne lectology, which in Italy, unlike in the Anglo-Saxon world,
(2012), linguistic identity is related to the commodification has always shown a keen social awareness (Berruto 1977;
of language in the workplace. Sornicola 2002; D’Agostino and Ruffino 2005). References to
linguistic variation go back to the Middle Ages: Dante, for
example noted both diatopic and diachronic variation; Ben-
edetto Varchi identified four sociolinguistic levels in Renais-
35.2 Italo-Romance sance Florence (Alinei 1981:157f.), but the twentieth century
brought systematic studies such as Terracini (1937), which
The development of sociolinguistics in Italy, whilst particu- showed the impact of sociological variables, prestige fac-
larly receptive to new ideas from abroad, has been much tors, and speaker allegiances on linguistic variation and
influenced by the historical events that have determined change within an alpine community. The Labovian, formal
the various internal divisions, both social and linguistic. and quantitative, approach was thus welcomed in a country
Italy has always been a profoundly multilingual country, where so-called ‘dialects’ are still spoken by approximately
whose linguistically fragmented regions were unified barely half the population and where, in addition to recent
a century and a half ago and which has recently experienced arrivals, there is a history of long-established immigrant
significant immigration from abroad. The many regional
dialects of Italy (dialetti) are not varieties of Italian but 4
For its significance and useful updates, see Lo Piparo and Ruffino
parallel developments from spoken Latin, which though (2005).
615
languages. The sociolinguistic relationship of the dialects to the other code(s) depend on social factors such as age, level
Italian has evolved from being typically diglossic (see Mul- of education, occupation, type of community, and social
jačić 1997: the dialects as L varieties, except in some regions, networks. Statistical analysis of the declared choice of Ital-
where dialect performed some H functions) to a situation of ian / Italian and dialect/dialect within the family (ISTAT
dilalia (Berruto 1987b; see also §36.3.1). 2007) confirms that level of education, inextricably linked
The dialects are crucially involved in language variation with age, is the most significant macro-sociological variable
in Italy: from a macrosociolinguistic viewpoint dialect is still (Dal Negro and Vietti 2011). Interestingly, ALS analyses
present in the repertoire of all communities, offering lan- reveal that these two variables affect performance in Italian
guage choices governed by user- and use-based variables, more than in Sicilian: the young and the more educated
while from a microsociolinguistic perspective the trad- have less regionally-marked Italian than older and less
itional dialects leave their mark on the structure of the educated speakers, but retain local dialect pronunciations
national language, which is gradually replacing them even (D’Agostino and Pennisi 1995:202f.).
in the most informal domains and producing new dialects of The spread of Italian into all domains produced in bilin-
Italian, e.g. Piedmontese/Lombard/Calabrian/Sicilian etc. guals a rich area of interference and variation between
regional Italian. In most communities where the indigenous the two poles of standard Italian and local dialect.6 This
variety is not, or not recognized as, Italo-Romance, e.g. Val continuum has been segmented on the basis of feature-
d’Aosta, Friuli, Sardinia (but not the Alto Adige), the actual clustering into named varieties, e.g. ‘regional’ Italian,
sociolinguistic (dilalic) relationship of the minority lan- ‘popular’ Italian, ‘dialect koine’/‘urban dialect’, with much
guage to Italian is similar to that of the dialects, albeit discussion of the interrelationship between the different
sometimes complicated by the added presence of an Italo- levels, their characteristics and related implicational scales
Romance dialect, e.g. Piedmontese, Francoprovençal (and (e.g. Berruto 1987a; D’Agostino 2007). Sabatini’s (1985) l’ita-
French) are spoken in the Val d’Aosta.5 liano dell’uso medio (i.e., of medium formality) prefigured
The variationist approach has inspired innovative atlas Berruto’s (1987a) italiano neo-standard (new standard), but
surveys investigating both traditional dialects and new in spoken use these varieties are always regionally marked,
regional varieties of Italian, e.g. NADIR (Nuovo Atlante dei at least in intonation and pronunciation, although less so
Dialetti e dell'Italiano Regionale, see Sobrero et al. 1991), and than italiano popolare (substandard Italian).7
ALS (Atlante Linguistico della Sicilia). ALS publications, from This last variety, the historical product of a poor grasp of
Ruffino (1995) onwards, build on research undertaken by Italian, shows heavy dialect interference on all levels and
the Osservatorio linguistico della Sicilia (Lo Piparo et al. 1990), stigmatized morphosyntactic features, which are not all
in which sensitivity to sociological variability and ethno- dialectal in origin. Everyday use of the traditional norm
graphic considerations, inform data collection, multivariate inevitably led to the absorption of morphosyntactic charac-
analysis, and interpretation (D’Agostino and Pennisi 1995). teristics previously excluded from formal discourse, e.g. left
For instance, language choice is found to depend not only on and right dislocations, increased use of personal pronouns
the degree of dynamism of speakers’ home-towns (Ruffino and demonstratives, spatial adverbs, including the seman-
1990), but also on whether the surrounding area is forward- tically bleached clitic ci ‘there’ (e.g. c’hai tempo? ‘have [lit.
looking or not (D’Agostino and Pennisi 1995:203). there=you.have] you got time?’), cleft constructions, Quand’è
che vieni? ‘When is it that you are coming?’, the use of che
‘that’ as an all-purpose clause-linker (e.g. l’ufficio che ci lavoro
35.2.1 Sociolinguistic variables lit. ‘the office that there=I.work’, vieni che parliamo ‘come
that we.talk’), use of indicative for subjunctive in certain
In Italy the primary dimension of variation is diatopic, the contexts, while many erstwhile colloquial lexical items
diverse dialects interacting everywhere with diastratic, dia- became generally acceptable, e.g. scocciare ‘annoy’ (for dar
phasic, and diamesic variation (cf. §36.3.1; and especially fastidio), fregare ‘deceive’ (for ingannare), casino ‘confusion’
Trumper and Maddalon 1982; Berruto 1987a, for influential for confusione. Despite the blurring of boundaries between
classifications of resulting varieties). Both language choice levels, some features remain stigmatized, e.g. whereas the
and the extent of each code’s influence on the structure of pronoun gli ‘to him’ is now perfectly acceptable for plural
5
For different types of ‘Italian’ repertoires and more complex situations,
6
see Mioni (1989), Dal Negro and Molinelli (2002), Iannàccaro and Dell’Aquila ISTAT (2007) figures show that, although ‘dialect only’-speakers within
(2011). In 1999 the Italian state recognized twelve ‘historical’ minority the family are ever fewer, the category ‘Italian only’ has levelled out, while
language groups: Albanian, Catalan, Croatian, Francoprovençal, French, the use of both is rising.
7
Friulian, German, Greek, Ladin, Occitan, Sardinian, Slovene, although not For the features of italiano popolare, see e.g. Berruto (1987a:105-38), Tosi
without controversy (see Ch. 37). (2001:48-52).
616
reference (instead of loro), and less acceptable for feminine English, especially regarding pronunciation and among the
singular reference, the use of ‘popular’ ci lit. ‘there’ for third young.
person dative reference is irremediably ‘substandard’ (cf. Variationist studies of regional Italian focused initially on
§14.3.1.3). Nowadays the diamesic distinction between phonetic variables, e.g. Giannelli and Savoia (1978) chart the
spoken and written Italian, highlighted by Trumper and diastratic and diaphasic variation of the distinctive conson-
Maddalon (1982; 1990), who noted that the absence of a antal variants of Tuscan Italian ([k > x/h/0], [p > ɸ], t > θ], cf.
spoken norm differentiated the Italian sociolinguistic situ- §14.2.2.1, §40.2.2.1.2); Rizzi (1989) correlates consonantal
ation from that of countries like France and Britain, is being variants in Bologna with the variables of age, sex, level of
increasingly eroded in new types of digital communication education, and occupation, while Trumper and Maddalon
(see below). (1990) focus on urban centres in the Veneto; Bernini (1990)
As a consequence of improving educational attainment, notes the implicational hierarchy of regional phonological
ever more flexible sociolinguistic norms and loss of stigma traits in the Italian of the Bergamo area, relating the inci-
regarding the dialects, the range of varieties of Italian is dence of the most stigmatized variants resulting from the
narrowing, with colloquial and non-standard features deaffrication of Italian affricates [ʤ > ʒ], [tʦ > θθs], and [dʣ
occurring in the speech of educated people, while substand- > ððz] to age and socio-economic group. Highlighted also is
ard varieties become less marked. However, there is com- the opposite, less frequent, tendency for the least educated,
pensatory expansion of diaphasic variation and in some especially youngsters, to produce tense, devoiced variants
contexts conscious code-switching and mixing (Sobrero of /ʤ/, notably in contexts where Italian has [dʤ], as a
2006). The dialects meanwhile are becoming more Italian- hypercorrect reaction to dialect influence.
ized, in some areas by-passing a regional dialect-koine Qualitative studies involving fewer informants permitted
stage, since improved communications encourage small the analysis of morphosyntactic and syntactic variation.
communities to be more nationally oriented (Sobrero Trumper (1996) reveals that only some Calabrian features
1997; Grassi 2001). correlate directly with socio-economic and educational sta-
The dialects’ influence on Italian affects all linguistic tus, such as avoidance of the infinitive (as in Balkan lan-
levels, particularly intonation (no ‘standard’ intonation guages), e.g. ero contento che andavo ‘I was happy that I went’
exists) and phonology (e.g. northern Italians may often fail (instead of ero contento di andare ‘I was happy to go’), and
to pronounce long consonants, e.g. gatto [ˈgaːto] ‘cat’ auxiliary selection, e.g. abbiamo sceso dal treno ‘we have got
(§14.2.2); southerners often voice post-nasal obstruents, off the train’ (instead of siamo scesi dal treno lit. ‘we are
e.g. sempre [ˈsɛmbre] ‘always’; cf. §§15.2.1, 16.2.2.2) with alighted from the train’), whereas spoken use of non-
morphology less affected (Lepschy and Lepschy 1988; standard relative clauses and lack of the subjunctive
Sobrero 1988; Telmon 1993; 1994; D’Achille 2002). Italian is similar, regardless of educational background. Indeed,
influence on the dialects affects mainly morphology, syntax, Alfonzetti (2002) rejects too facile a distinction between
and lexis, e.g. Cai. [uj pjɒʒ ɛɹ ˈmɒɲɛ] lit. ‘it=to.him= pleases ‘colloquial’ Italian and italiano popolare, demonstrating that
the aunts (= he likes his aunts)’ may become, with verb and features which may be condemned in writing often pass
subject clitic agreement: [ij ˈpjɔʒu ɛl ˈʣie] ‘they=to.him unnoticed in speech: non-standard relative clauses (using
please the aunts’. the simple complementizer che ‘that’ instead of a case-
In Tuscany and Rome the situation is complex, due to marked relative pronoun e.g. tuo cugino, che gli (for standard
their dialects’ close structural affinity with Italian: D’Achille a cui ‘to whom’) avevo fatto due favori lit. ‘your cousin that to.
and Giovanardi’s (1995) analysis of the changing diastratic him= I.had done two favours’) are not rare in educated
distribution of dialectal features in the Roman continuum speech (cf. §64.4). Correlation of regional morphosyntactic
finds that whereas regional phonological traits are perco- variants with age and educational level in Piedmontese
lating up the social scale, e.g. the characteristic deaffrica- Italian by Cerruti (2009) confirms the sociolinguistic rele-
tion of intervocalic /ʧ/ > [ʃ], lengthening of intervocalic and vance of implicational scales of variables. All responses
post-pausal /ʤ/ and /b/ (the latter also pre-liquid), feature reflexive use of morphologically non-reflexive
e.g. problema [proˈbːlema] ‘problem’, ragione [raˈʤːone] third person pronouns lui ‘he’, lei she’ including as direct
‘reason’, and the ‘affrication’ affecting /ns, ls, rs/ (e.g. senso objects (e.g. lei vede solo lei (for standard sé ‘her-/himself ’) in
[ˈsɛnʦo] ‘sense’), standard morphological ones are spread- concorso ‘she sees only her(self) in the running’), reinforce-
ing downwards reflecting improved education and more ment of demonstratives by spatial adverbs (questa macchina
emphasis in schools on grammatical and written correct- qui ‘this car here’), non-standard pronominalization of verbs
ness than on pronunciation (see also Stefinlongo 1985; (osarsi ‘dare.INF=REFL’), and negative imperatives with stare
Volkart-Rey 1990; Bernhard 1999). Cerruti (2011:19-21) ‘stay’ (e.g. non stare a cucinare ‘don’t (bother to) cook’, irre-
also notes that style variation is less common than in spective of age or education, but the omission of the
617
preverbal negative non in contexts such as non . . . niente (2002). In Puglia, the size of towns, as well as the strength
‘nothing’/mica ‘at all’, nessuno ‘nobody’, shows diastratic of network ties and social class, influences the ratio of
variation depending on the identity of the negator involved Italian, dialect and code-switching/mixing (Tempesta
(diaphasic variation was presumed, but not tested). Note- 2000). In Palermo, where the city dialect until recently
worthy, but not unexpected given the increasing democra- projected a particularly negative image, language choice is
tization of Italian, is that the most persistent non-standard governed by mental maps and speaker attitudes (D’Agostino
forms match tendencies found in other contemporary geo- 1996), but attitudes among the young are changing
graphical varieties, tendencies seemingly favouring less (D’Agostino 2010).
marked structures that do not clash with the Italian linguis- The significance of the age variable for changing patterns
tic system. Sociolinguistic studies of intonation are rare, but of language use has focused much attention on the linguistic
see Interlandi and Romano (2003). behaviour of young people (see bibliographies in Còveri
Regarding the dialects, variationist studies describe koi- 1988; Cortelazzo 1994; Radtke 1993; Marcato 2006). Urban
neization tendencies in the direction of Italian, especially studies such as Klein (1995), De Blasi and Montuori (2006) in
among younger speakers, e.g. Parry (1991a), Cravens and Naples, Christoffersen (2003) in Palermo, Ruggiero (2004) in
Giannelli (1995), Del Puente (1995), Tufi (2005). In Campania Turin, reveal significant variation in dialect use and func-
age, class, and register combine with syntactic and semantic tion. Sicilian youngsters vary in dialect competence depend-
variables to influence the changing distribution of perfect ing on their socio-educational level and on whether they
auxiliaries (Cennamo 2001d). come from Palermo or a small town, the former being more
The impact of gender on language performance and inclined to switch to Italian and use Italianisms, e.g. eru ‘I
choice is often less significant than that of other sociological was’ (Sic. era ~ It. ero), mi piaçiribbi ‘I would like’ (Sic. mi
variables, although many studies confirm the Labovian find- piaçissi ~ It. piacerebbe), frateddu ‘brother’ (Sic. frati ~ It.
ing that women in western industrialized societies favour fratello) (Amenta and Paternostro 2006).
more prestigious language codes and forms (e.g. Italian and Language use in electronic forms of communication (e.g.
Italianized dialect) and engage more frequently in hyper- Pistolesi 2004; Fiorentino 2005; Fusco and Marcato 2005;
correction (Rizzi 1989; Parry 1991a; Maturi 2002:258). Spe- Marcato 2006) shows an unexpected use of dialect by young-
cific studies include Berretta (1983), Marcato (1988; 1995), sters who often lack native competence, but who use dialect
and Fresu (2006). Chini (2009) confirms subtle gender dif- for expressive, non-conformist, or localizing purposes
ferences regarding language choice in immigrant commu- (Berruto 2006; Moretti 2006). As well as combining proper-
nities, with other factors intervening, such as degree of ties of spoken and written mediums, computer-mediated
integration. Indeed, Sornicola (2009) queries the independ- communication is developing specific characteristics: espe-
ent validity of the gender variable, given that life-history cially a mix of registers, as emerges from a quantitative
and socio-cultural environment often prove more lexical analysis (Algozino 2011) comparing selected compo-
significant. nents of three digital corpora: NUNC Newsgroup UseNet Cor-
In the twentieth century and especially during the post- pora, Lessico di frequenza dell’Italiano Parlato (spoken Italian of
Second World War economic boom, mass migration to the medium-low formality), and Athenaeum (university-based
cities from the surrounding hinterland and from other parts written Italian of medium-high formality). Although both
of Italy, e.g. from the south to the ‘industrial triangle’ of the newsgroup sub-corpora analysed (NUNC-A dealing with
Turin, Milan, and Genoa, brought many dialects into close cultural, political or scientific topics, NUNC-B involving less
contact, some mutually intelligible, some not. The urban serious matters) showed a clear preponderance of middle-
context encouraged dialect-convergence on the one hand ranking lexical items, they differed as expected in the inci-
and on the other a gradual shift towards Italian, not least dence of formal and informal items, but only slightly, with
because of more ‘mixed’ marriages, which in the generally both registering similar percentages of each type, unlike the
anti-dialect climate (educational and political, especially other two corpora.
during Fascism) contributed to loss of generational trans-
mission (De Mauro 1963; Radtke 2000). Indeed, the most
significant factor favouring dialect use by youngsters is
35.2.2 Historical sociolinguistic variation
hearing parents speaking dialect together (Ruggiero 2004).
Other urban studies include Bombi and Fusco (2004), De Valuable information on linguistic variation may be gleaned
Blasi and Marcato (2006), D’Achille and Viviani (2003). from a range of textual sources and, as noted in D’Achille’s
Social network analysis afforded a more nuanced picture excellent (2008) overview, geographical context is crucial.
to complement correlational studies based on the trad- The interaction between diastratic and diaphasic variation
itional demographic variables, e.g. Klein (1989), Vietti emerges clearly in studies of the interrelationship between
618
regional dialects and the spreading Florentine/Tuscan var- immigrant, as a marker of identity (Boario 2008), while the
iety, especially after its promotion to literary norm in the typically Sicilian suffix ‑uso (e.g. incazzuso ‘pissed off ’, me-
sixteenth century.8 The nineteenth-century Roman poet talluso ‘heavy metal (music)’ (ADJ)) is spreading among north-
G. G. Belli satirizes common hypercorrections in lower- ern youngsters (Cortinovis and Miola 2010).
class attempts at parlà cciovile ‘polite talk’, e.g. penda for
penna ‘pen’ (a reaction to dialectal [nd] > [nn]; Trifone 1992;
see also Trifone 2006). For Neapolitan, De Blasi (2002:109)
distinguishes plebeian and refined dialect types, with dia- 35.3 Spanish
stratic variation affecting pronunciation (e.g. plebeian [r] <
[d], [l], e.g. ramme nu sordo ‘give=me a penny’ vs damme nu The focus of sociolinguistic studies in Spain has varied
soldo), morphology, e.g. the form of definite articles (e.g. ’o depending on whether these were conducted in bilingual
vestito ‘the dress’, ’e peccerelle ‘the children’ vs ’u vestito ‘the areas. In the Catalan- and Galician-speaking regions (Badia i
dress’, ’i piccerelle), and lexis (e.g. tata ‘daddy’ vs papà). Dia- Margarit 1969; 1982; Vallverdú 1970; 1979; Ninyoles 1977;
stratic variation persists today in the choice of code and in 1978; Alonso Montero 1973; García González 1985; Varela
the type of Italian used: the most marked phonological Puñal 1980), the dominant trend has been to adopt/adapt
features include stress retraction in diphthongs [ˈbuono] the contributions of Ferguson (1959), Haugen (1966),
‘good’; palatalization of the sibilant before non-dental plo- Mackey (1967), and Fishman (1967; 1973; 1974) to explore
sives and fricatives (e.g. [sperà [ʃpəˈra] ‘to hope’); ‘affrication’ the nature of societal bilingualism and level of language
of [ns/ls/rs] clusters (e.g. penso [ˈpɛnʦo] ‘I think’), which loyalty, or to develop and implement policy in support of
unlike in Rome is avoided by educated speakers; voicing of the local language and nationalist movement. Latterly,
voiceless consonants after nasals, e.g. tempo [ˈtɛmbo] ‘time’, attention has also been given to language contact in these
as well as hypercorrect forms, e.g. camomilla [kamboˈmilla] areas, as well as along the Portuguese border (Blas Arroyo
‘camomile’ for local [kammoˈmilla], due to dialectal [mb] > 2008; 2011; Clements et al. 2011). In contrast, studies in
[mm] (De Blasi 2002:121). Dictionaries may also provide monolingual Spain and in Spanish America have been
lexical and phonological evidence of class-based variation, almost exclusively Labovian in nature. The earliest are by
e.g. Boerio (1856) attributes forms exhibiting aphæresis, Alvar (1972) in Las Palmas, Fontanella de Weinburg (1974) in
syncope, and metathesis to the idioti ‘the uneducated’ Buenos Aires, Perissinotto (1975) in Mexico City, Martínez
(Marcato 2005). For sociolinguistically sensitive accounts of Martín (1983) in Burgos, López Morales (1983) in San Juan de
the Ticino and Venice respectively, see Bianconi (1990) and Puerto Rico, Etxebarria Aróstegui (1985) in Bilbao, Williams
Ferguson (2007). (1987) in Valladolid, Alba (1990) in Santiago (Dominican
Republic), Caravedo (1990) in Lima, and Samper-Padilla
(1990) in Las Palmas.
35.2.3 Recent standardizing This clear division between bilingual and monolingual
and convergence trends Spain mostly continues. In fact, so dominant have these
approaches been that the language of individual speakers
and the function of social networks have hitherto received
Alongside the re-standardization of Italian to include erst- scant attention (for notable exceptions, see Villena Ponsoda
while colloquial features, new regional standards are form- 1996; Cameron 2005; Niño-Murcia and Rothman 2008).
ing due to the greater frequency and acceptance of Indeed, what has been done in terms of application of
morphosyntactic regionalisms in higher registers (Berruto network theory and social dialectology, with their attend-
1987a:19; Cerruti 2009; 2011). Recently, some convergence ant focus on such processes as norm enforcement, accom-
has also been noted among regional varieties, especially modation and koineization, has largely been restricted to
among young users, as heavily marked features become the history of Spanish (López García 1985; Penny 2000;
rarer and some spread beyond their region of origin Tuten 2003; Williams 2013).
(Berruto 2012:57-60; Calimani 2009; Cerruti 2011; Cerruti
and Regis 2014), e.g. syntactic doubling (§§14.2.5, 40.3.1),
absent from northern pronunciations, but characteristic of 35.3.1 Phonology
the standard and also of centre and southern dialects, is
surprisingly used by some young Turinese, both native and In Spanish, variation affects mostly consonants, especially
in the syllabic coda. With the exception of intervocalic /d/,
8
Bruni (1992/1994) offers comprehensive regional accounts of the dis- which is weakened or elided throughout the Spanish-speaking
semination of Italian. world (e.g. cansado ‘tired’ [kanˈsaδo~kanˈsaδo~kanˈsao]), only
619
the phonetically most innovative dialects weaken or sporad- 35.3.2 Morphosyntax

ically elide consonants in the syllabic onset. The implosive
consonants commonly affected are /s/, /n/, /l/, and /r/,
Spanish morphosyntax exhibits variability along social and
although how these interact with independent variables dif-
geographic axes. Obvious examples are:
fers according to speech community. For example, neutraliza-
tion of implosive /l/ and /r/ occurs and is stigmatized in a. Clitics: Variability has its epicentre in Valladolid,
Andalusia and the Caribbean, but whereas rhotacization is Spain, manifesting itself in non-standard use of la
favoured in Andalusia (e.g. falta ‘lack’ pronounced [ˈfarta]), (laísmo) and lo (loísmo) as indirect objects, as well as
lateralization (puerta ‘door’ pronounced [ˈpweļta]) is preferred of le (leísmo) as animate and inanimate direct object
in the Caribbean (Alvar 1990; Alba 2004; López Morales 2004). (Klein-Andreu quoted in Tuten 2003; see also
Also weakened/elided are the implosive consonants of §22.3.1.4). Since 1925 leísmo, when it refers to human
learnèd clusters such as /ks/, /kt/, /kθ/, /gn/ (e.g. taxi ‘taxi’ direct objects, has been accepted by the Real Academia
pronounced [ˈtaksi~ˈtaγsi~ˈtasi]; lección ‘lesson’ pronounced Española (RAE) (Narbona 2004). These non-
[lekˈθjon~leˈɣjon~ leˈθjon], although the clusters themselves etymological forms probably spread from Valladolid
rarely appear in the speech of the lower social classes, even in to Madrid during the second half of the sixteenth
formal styles (Williams 1987; 1997). century and from there to parts of the New World
The segment studied most is /s/, which functions as an without establishing themselves in other regions of
isogloss (it separates conservative and innovative regions) Spain such as Aragon and Andalusia, which retain the
and, in word-final position, as a marker of number and etymological system based on distinctions of case
person. In Spain, implosive /s/ is retained in the centre (Williams 2013). There is some evidence of leísmo in
and north, mostly aspirated in the Canaries and city of Spanish America today, but it is not clear whether this
Córdoba, and frequently elided in western Andalusia is vestigial or a more recent acquisition (Menéndez
(mosca ‘fly’ [ˈmoska~ˈmohka~ˈmokka]). While elision is Pidal 1964). What does seem clear is that, in some
most frequent in word-final position, aspiration is preferred places (notably, Mexico City), it may refer to women
internally. Morphosyntactic redundancy (number is also and have a singularly deferential value, being
marked by determiners and verb inflections, and person, employed in connection with the Virgin (Flores
optionally, by subject pronouns) means that elision is Cervantes 2002).
equally likely whether /s/ is a grammatical marker or not. b. Expression of subject pronouns: This is frequent in
Finally, the behaviour of /s/ seems stable in those commu- insular Caribbean Spanish in the speech of all social
nities where it is a variable. While a speaker’s education classes (Alba 2012). Elsewhere, as Carbonero Cano
correlates closely with retention/weakening of this seg- (2003) notes, its use is mostly emphatic or to disam-
ment, there appears to be no appreciable difference in the biguate, especially in the imperfect, where inflections
way it is used by sexes or different age groups (Samper- are identical in the first and third person singular of
Padilla 2012). In Spanish America, /s/ has been studied in the indicative and subjunctive. For a summary of the
detail in the Caribbean, where it indexes regional identity. different frequencies of subject expression according
However, there are significant differences even within this to person in Madrid, Buenos Aires, and San Juan de
area. According to Alba (2012), deletion is more frequent in Puerto Rico, see Correa and Rebollo (2012).
the Dominican Republic than in Cuba or Puerto Rico, which c. Personal vs impersonal existential haber ‘have’ (había(n)
prefer aspiration. Curiously, the situation is reversed in muchas personas en la calle ‘there were (lit. ‘had.3SG(/PL)’)
the media. Whereas Cuban and Puerto Rican presenters many people in the street’): This feature is found
aspirate in line with their educated compatriots, Dominican especially in the Spanish region of Valencia and is
presenters retain /s/ almost invariably, thereby reflecting common in Spanish America even among educated
the linguistic insecurity that characterizes Dominican individuals. Speakers interpret in such sentences per-
speakers.9 sonas ‘people’ as the subject rather than the direct
object of impersonal haber, particularly when the NP
accompanying haber is human or there is a numeral or
quantifier that reinforces the idea of plurality
(Bentivoglio and Sedano 2011).
d. ‘Dequeísmo’; ‘queísmo’: While the former involves inser-
9
The bibliography on the sociolinguistics of Spanish phonology and tion of the preposition de ‘of, from’ before the comple-
morphosyntax is vast. Comprehensive lists are found in Samper-Padilla
(2008; 2011), Bentivoglio and Sedano (2011), Serrano (2011), and Lipski mentizer que ‘that’ in contexts where the standard
(2011). does not require it (creo de que tienes razón lit. ‘I believe
620
of that you are right’), the latter involves its deletion (possessive). Complex too is the pragmatic use of T/V. As
where it is normally expected (Juan se da cuenta (de) que Gardener-Chloros (2007:106f.) notes, ‘the pattern of T/V
no es inteligente lit. ‘John self= gives account (of) [= usage by a particular individual serves as an “Act of Iden-
realizes] that he is not intelligent’). Both phenomena tity” ’. Nevertheless one can say that forms expressing
occur throughout the Spanish-speaking world and in intimacy/solidarity/reciprocity are fast replacing those
the language of all social classes. Dequeísmo (cf. indicating deference/distance/power, particularly among
§22.4.3.3) is more common in Spanish America than younger speakers in places like Madrid and Mexico City.
in Spain and more socially accepted there, at least in For more detail, see §55.2.3.3, Carricaburo (1997) and Uber
some countries (Bentivoglio and D’Introno 1977; (2011).
Caravedo 1996). Nevertheless, Almeida (2009) claims
that in many communities its frequency remains low.
Queísmo, on the other hand, is common everywhere, 35.3.4 Standards and norms
perhaps because deleting phonetic material is gener-
ally considered more acceptable than adding it. This 35.3.4.1 National norms
may explain why the RAE accepts deletion of the There are circa 425 million native speakers of Spanish today
preposition in the phrases antes/después (de) que, lit. spread across twenty countries and the US dependency of
‘before/after (of) that’. Insertion of de seems to be Puerto Rico. Only around 47 million reside in Spain.10 This
favoured after transitive verbs of knowing and report- means that the centre of gravity of Spanish has shifted
ing like creer ‘to believe’ and decir ‘to say’; deletion is dramatically from the Old to the New World. Nevertheless,
common if the verb is pronominal (e.g. darse cuenta the prestige of peninsular Spanish—especially the conser-
(de) que). Not all scholars agree, however, on whether vative variety radiating from Madrid—remains high, at least
dequeísmo has grammatical or pragmatic implications. in some countries (see Alba 2004:314-25 for how Dominicans
While García (1986; quoted in Carbonero Cano 2003), view the issue). There are several reasons for this. Spain is
Bentivoglio and D’Introno (1977), and Serrano (2007; the birthplace of Spanish and home of a rich literature.
2011) argue that, in some dialects, the addition of de Though no longer able to act as guardian of the language
can imply a change of meaning (e.g. García argues that in the strictest sense, the RAE, with its headquarters in
it can weaken the assertion of both matrix and Madrid, still plays a significant role in the production of
dependent clauses), others, like Almeida (2009), find grammars, dictionaries, orthographies, and diachronic and
no change. contemporary data bases (CORDE or Corpus diacrónico del
español and CREA or Corpus de referencia del español actual).
However, the pre-eminence of peninsular Spanish has not
35.3.3 Forms of address gone unchallenged. Spanish American academics often rail
against the air of superiority of the RAE, which, they claim,
persists in trying to punch above its weight in matters
The situation in Spain (Andalusia and the Canaries linguistic despite the existence of another twenty-one acad-
excepted) is different from that of Spanish America. Spain emies. These scholars object that the standard proposed by
has a symmetrical address system with intimate and defer- the RAE often clashes with their national norm; that the
ential second person singular (T/V expressed as tú vs usted) Asociación de las Academias de la Lengua Española ‘Association
and plural (T/V expressed as vosotros/as vs ustedes) forms; of the Academies of the Spanish Language’ has its seat in the
Spanish America, on the other hand, has an asymmetrical RAE’s own premises in Madrid; that it is administered by
system with T/V forms in the singular (tú/vos vs usted), but academics drawn from the RAE; that its general meetings
no separate intimate plural form. Here ustedes performs are presided over by the King of Spain. Perhaps the most
both T and V functions. For this and other reasons, Pountain strident of these is Uruguayan Ricardo Soca, who founded in
(2003) concludes that person deixis is encoded in a system 1996 La Página del idioma español11 ‘The page of the Spanish
that is essentially unstable. language’, a website devoted, among other things, to resist-
In addition to being asymmetrical, the situation in Span- ing the alleged continued hegemonic aspirations of the RAE.
ish America is complex. Broadly speaking, there are three Less strident, though not dissimilar in his views, is the
geographic divisions: those which employ tú as the singu- Galician linguist, José del Valle (2007a:96), who claims that
lar form expressing intimacy/solidarity; those which use
vos for this purpose (voseo areas); and those which use both 10
see Centro Virtual Cervantes <http://cvc.cervantes.es/lengua/anuario/
tú and vos. In voseo areas, the pronouns used are: vos anuario_12/i_cervantes/p01.htm>, accessed 3 Feb. 2014.
(subject/prepositional), te (object/reflexive), and tu/tuyo 11
<http://www.elcastellano.org>.
621
successive Spanish governments have mobilized various with that of Madrid. Linguistic insecurity, then, has led
linguistic and cultural entities, including the RAE with its educated young urban Murcians and Granadans to embrace
emphasis on hispanofonía, in order to strengthen and legit- features of Madrid speech such as distinction of /s/ and /θ/
imize their influence in Latin America. Focusing on the (cereza ‘cherry’ pronounced [θeˈreθa] not [seˈresa]), the
corpora produced by the RAE, Lara (2007:175-80) laments voiceless post-alveolar/prepalatal affricate /ʧ/ (coche ‘car’
that 50% of the texts on which, for instance, CREA is based pronounced [ˈkoʧe] not [ˈkoʃe]), and the voiceless velar
are by Spanish authors. So inflated a proportion is fair fricative /x/ (caja ‘box’ pronounced [ˈkaxa] not [ˈkaha]).
neither culturally nor demographically and betrays a lack However, features firmly embedded in southern speech
of commitment to the development of data bases able to and that therefore index local identity are not abandoned.
inform the academy’s dictionary of Americanisms. The RAE, This applies to elision of /s/ in the syllabic coda, which, in
Lara continues, aims to prevent fragmentation of the Span- word-final position, marks number in the nominal and
ish language – feared since at least 1898, when Spain lost adjectival systems and person in the conjugation, for two
Cuba, its last American colony – by presenting itself as the reasons. Retention of /s/ would require restructuring of the
guardian of linguistic unity, but it does this by recommend- ten-vowel system of eastern Andalusia (resulting from the
ing variability that tends to be limited to Castile or, more loss of final /s/ and /n/, with attendant phonologization of
accurately, Madrid. originally allomorphic variants) and be interpreted as a
The reality, however, is that Spanish is today polycentric. betrayal of local identity. In other words, convergence
As Coseriu (1982:42) argued, Madrid may be the capital of with the national standard affects those features that do
Spain, but it is no longer the capital of Spanish. This priv- not require systemic reorganization or are not imbued with
ilege it now shares with Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Bogotá, covert prestige.
and others. So instead of seeking a single standard, Lara The situation in western Andalusia is different. Seville has
insists, the RAE should accept that Spanish needs to refresh been dominant there since at least the late fifteenth cen-
itself in the oral and written traditions of each of the tury. In fact, during the Golden Age it became the wealthi-
countries where it is spoken. In this way the centrifugal est, most dynamic city in the Peninsula, quickly coming to
character of speech will find a natural corrective in the rival Toledo, Madrid, and Valladolid as a centre of linguistic
normally centripetal character of writing. prestige. Seville’s innovative phonetics apparently began to
diverge seriously from that of the conservative centre and
north during the late Middle Ages. And even though it
35.3.4.2 Regional norms entered decline in the seventeenth century, the city never
The migratory effects of urbanization and industrialization, ceased to influence its hinterland (Hernández-Campoy and
the recent increase in literacy, as well as the rise of the Villena Ponsoda 2009). Today, of course, the prestige of its
media, have contributed not just to linguistic levelling and speech is bolstered by the fact that Seville shares salient
convergence, but also, in Spain, to divergence. Traditionally, features (seseo or neutralization of /s/ and /θ/ in favour of
it has been customary to divide Spain into two main dialect /s/, ustedes as the only second-person plural form of
blocks: a conservative centre and north, with Madrid as the address, an etymological clitic system that rejects laísmo
main source of diffusion, and an innovative south, where and only rarely accepts leísmo) with the Canaries and the
Seville performs a similar role (Menéndez Pidal 1964). This whole of Spanish America. In an age when Spanish Ameri-
same dichotomy has been assumed to obtain more or less in can soap operas occupy important slots on Spanish televi-
Spanish America, where, it is held, the Caribbean received sion, this shared linguistic behaviour is surely not without
the influence of Seville (via the Canaries) and the former importance. Consequently, unlike Granada, Seville does not
viceroyalties of Mexico City and Lima that of Madrid (for a have to pander to the centre and north, but is free to
more nuanced interpretation, see Williams 2013). diverge. Broadly speaking, this means that Spain is divided
However, recent research (Hernández-Campoy and into three large dialect blocks: a conservative centre and
Jiménez-Cano 2003; Villena Ponsoda 2006; Hernández- north, an innovative southwest, and an interdialectal area
Campoy and Villena Ponsoda 2009; Hernández-Campoy whose variety is taking root in eastern Andalusia, Murcia,
2011) proposes a tripartite division rooted in the three Extremadura, and La Mancha, as well as in Castilian towns
historically separate domains of Castile, Seville, and Gran- to the south of Madrid. The situation, however, is fluid. Just
ada/Murcia. Although Granada has never been subject to as eastern Andalusia is influenced by Madrid and the north,
the influence of Seville, it has also never been sufficiently so too are these influenced by the south (Cestero Mancera
important to stand on its own as a centre of prestige. et al. 2008:103), the most obvious example of convergence in
Murcia’s is a similar story, as are those of urban Extrema- this direction being, perhaps, the weakening/elision of
dura and La Mancha, whose language is likewise converging intervocalic /d/. Despite their location several hundred
622
miles from the Peninsula, the Canaries, traditionally a lin- negotiate their identity in an endless series of speech
guistic satellite of Seville, seem open to influence from the acts (Villena Ponsada 1994; Niño-Murcia 2011); that the
north, at least in the areas of grammar and lexis. This, at different independent variables proposed by Labov (social
any rate, is how Samper-Padilla (2008:166;172) accounts for class, age, sex, etc.) are not static and discrete but often
the presence of leísmo in the language of young Canarians, intersect (see Cameron 2011, although Labov 1990 also
who seem to acquire it from the media, which project demonstrates awareness of this); and that studies in appar-
mostly Madrid/northern norms. ent time can be considerably less reliable than those con-
Except for the pan-Hispanic investigation of the norma ducted in real time (Lastra and Butragueño 2006).
culta ‘educated norm’ led by Lope Blanch (1986), the socio- Nevertheless, the lead researchers on this project argue
linguistic study of Spanish has traditionally lacked coordin- that earlier sociolinguistic surveys have rarely shared pre-
ation. Hence the creation of the Proyecto para el estudio cisely the same theoretical or methodological criteria,
sociolingüístico del español de España y de América (PRESEEA) making it difficult to compare findings. The objective of
‘Project for the sociolinguistic study of the Spanish of Spain PRESEEA is to standardize, with unusual exactness, the
and America’. Launched in 1996, this massive undertaking collection and analysis of data across the forty teams of
aims to gather a huge oral corpus of Spanish from the major linguists currently involved. Thus, in addition to gathering
cities of Spain and Spanish America and to provide open data on variable aspects of language of interest to linguists
access to it on the PRESEEA webpage in both document and of almost all persuasions, these teams will generate results
audio form (Moreno Fernández 2006; Cestero Mancera that are amenable to scientific comparison. More import-
2011). The project, which develops and expands upon the antly, however, they will subject to rigorous analysis the
earlier study of the Spanish norma culta, adopts a basically basic tenets of sociolinguistic theory, especially the valid-
Labovian theoretical model (Samper-Padilla 2012). Now, this ity of the social constructs hitherto used in the study of
may seem strange given that this model has had its share of linguistic variation. It is anticipated that sociolinguists
detractors. Scholars have argued quite rightly, for example, working on Spanish will then be able to move forward in
that the city is a linguistic market in which individuals a vastly more informed way.
623
CHAPTER 36
Diglossia
JOHANNES KABATEK
36.1 Introduction the reference point for the use of the term ‘diglossia’ in
modern sociolinguistics is the already mentioned paper by
Charles Ferguson, ‘Diglossia’, in which he offers the follow-
With traditional roots as a concept referring to the specific
ing classic definition:
language situations of Greek and Arabic (see Fernández
2005), the term ‘diglossia’ in modern linguistics is generally
DIGLOSSIA is a relatively stable language situation in which, in
attributed to Charles Ferguson, who discussed it in a land- addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may
mark paper (Ferguson 1959). It is traditionally used for the include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent,
description of sociolinguistic situations in which two var- highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed
ieties of one language or two different languages are used in variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written
the same territory for different purposes. Generally, though literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech com-
not necessarily, one of the varieties or languages is used in munity, which is learned largely by formal education and is used
supra-regional communication and writing (traditionally for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by
also called H(igh)-variety), and the other, the local variety any section of the community for ordinary conversation.
(or L(ow)-variety), is dominant in oral, informal communi- (Ferguson 1959:336)
cation The concept of diglossia as a term describing social
Ferguson’s definition was based on the description of four
aspects of multilingualism and multidialectalism is thus
prototypical cases, including one case in the Romance area,
related to the general question of sociolinguistic variation
the diglossia between creole and French in Haiti. His aim
(Ch. 35), as well as to the issue of standardization (Ch. 37).
was not to offer an overall description of any imaginable
From a historical point of view, several phases in the evo-
situation of coexisting language varieties, but rather to
lution of the Romance languages are marked by diglossic
illustrate one particular type of coexistence, in which two
situations, such as the Latin–Romance diglossia in the Mid-
clearly differentiated varieties of one language are used for
dle Ages (Ch. 2). This chapter will briefly introduce the
different communicative uses, as in the case of Swiss Ger-
historical evolution of the concept of diglossia in linguistics,
man and standard German in Switzerland. In Fergusonian
especially Romance linguistics, showing that the term can
diglossia, the situation is stable; the two varieties are his-
be understood in either a wider or a narrower sense. I will
torically related (they are varieties of one language); and
then establish some general aspects according to which
the H-variety, used for writing and formal purposes, is more
diglossic situations in the Romània might be classified
elaborated than the L-variety, which is restricted to infor-
(§36.2). The main part of the chapter is dedicated to the
mal communication.
description of certain types of historical (§36.3) as well as
Following Ferguson’s conception, other authors criticized
present-day diglossic situations in different Romance-
his definition above all because of claims that, due to its
speaking areas (§36.4). In the final section (§36.5), I will
restrictions, it was not suitable as a general conception for
offer a brief outlook on methodological and empirical issues
the description of the coexistence of languages and var-
for future research.
ieties. In current research, some scholars distinguish
between a ‘narrow’ conception of diglossia in a Fergusonian
sense and add new terms for the description of other situ-
ations (Berruto 2007), while others have preferred to main-
36.2 The evolution of the concept tain the term but widen it for the description of virtually
of diglossia any situation of coexistence of languages and varieties.
Among other points, the aspects that were criticized or
Even if there is a long tradition of the term being used for further differentiated in subsequent discussions of the Fer-
the description of linguistic situations (Kremnitz 1996:209), gusonian conception were the idea of diglossia being stable,
624 This chapter © Johannes Kabatek 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
DIGLOSSIA
the restriction to varieties of one and the same language, from the phenomena themselves and ask which theoretical
the restriction to two and only two varieties, and the idea of conceptions might be useful for the description of diglossia
diglossia also being a matter of grammatical complexity. or polyglossia in the Romance area.
One of the canonical modifications is that of Joshua Fish- Diglossia in a narrow sense is a particular historical con-
man, who, adopting a criticism formulated by Gumperz stellation of language variation. Language variation in general
(1962), proposed to give up the restriction that the two can be considered under a universal, genetic view or under an
varieties implied in a diglossic situation should be kin var- empirical view describing historical or current situations.
ieties of the same language. According to Fishman, diglossia Universally, language variation can be accounted for by
could comprise a wide range of possibilities between genet- two major tendencies of human speech: on the one hand,
ically related varieties and different languages. His main apart from the obvious function of language to communi-
contribution, however, consisted in a distinction and com- cate with others about something, there is the universal
bination of two dimensions—the social function of the var- tendency to mark social identity. Social identity means
ieties/languages on the one hand, and the degree of identification with a particular group and distinction from
competence people have in the respective community other groups. On the other hand, even within the same
(bilingualism, with broad knowledge of both varieties, vs social group, communication is organized along a line
group-specific usage of both varieties) on the other. The between everyday informal communication and formal
term ‘bilingualism’, originally the Latin equivalent for the communication. Variation thus seems to be not accidental
Greek term ‘diglossia’, is thus used to introduce a distinction but genetically necessary (Labov 2011). The two universal
between social bilingualism and situations where two dif- necessities of linguistic differentiation are the ones Halliday
ferent groups in one territory use two different languages et al. (1964) called ‘variation according to user’ and ‘vari-
or varieties (i.e. ‘diglossia without bilingualism’). Whereas ation according to usage’.
diglossia is used for situations where a high-prestige H- Variation ‘according to user’ leads to group-specific dif-
language or variety coexists with a low-prestige L-language ferentiation. From the beginning of human settlement, the
or variety, bilingualism is also suitable for situations in local or spatial dimension is the most important one, and
which two equivalent forms of a language are employed. within the Romance languages, locally identifiable dialects
Discussing the different types of combination of diglossia present by far the most differentiated range of varieties.
and bilingualism, Fishman also mentions the case of com- Other group-specific phenomena not necessarily linked to
pletely monolingual and monovarietal situations without space are generational, sexual, religious, or other differ-
the existence of either bilingualism or diglossia. He states, ences. In Romance philology, the spatial dimension of vari-
however, that such situations will be difficult to find in ation is traditionally referred to as ‘diatopic’ variation, and
reality, and that ‘[a]ll communities seem to have certain the group-specific variation is called ‘diastratic’ variation.
ceremonies or pursuits to which access is limited, if only on Variation ‘according to usage’ is, following a term coined
an age basis’ (Fishman 1967:87). by Eugenio Coseriu (1980), traditionally called ‘diaphasic’
In the following years, several attempts were made to variation. Since the 1980s, attempts have been made to
give more general definitions of diglossia: while some relate ‘variation according to usage’ to a universal dimen-
authors, like Martinet (1982), rejected the notion in general, sion Koch and Oesterreicher (1985) called ‘immediacy’ (Ger.
others tried to offer comprehensive theories able to account ‘Nähe’) and ‘distance’ (‘Distanz’). The crucial importance of
for virtually any kind of multilingual or multivariational this dimension for the differentiation of text traditions or
setting, introducing terminological distinctions between genres has also been demonstrated empirically in corpus
diglossia with and without kinship of the contact languages, linguistics (Biber 1993; Biber et al. 2006). Koch and Oester-
or adding further terms like polyglossia (with more than reicher show that the continuum of different text traditions
two varieties), dilalia (Berruto 1989, see below) or diaglossia (‘discourse traditions’ in Koch’s terminology: see Koch
(Auer 2005, see below). Within Romance linguistics, several 1997a) between immediacy and distance is closely related
authors related the term to specific Romance situations, to a medium differentiation between spoken and written
often combining it with the Romance terminological and language in societies with literacy. They also hold, following
conceptual tradition of dialectology and variational linguis- Coseriu, that there is a relationship between this universal
tics in the sense of Flydal (1951) and Coseriu (1980). dimension and the whole configuration of varieties in the
An enormous number of publications on the issue of ‘architecture’ (Flydal 1951) of a historical language: a diato-
diglossia are now available (see Fernández 1993, an exhaust- pic variety (a dialect) can function as a diastratic variety
ive bibliography covering only the publications 1960-90). It (e.g. the frequent connotation of French spoken varieties or
will obviously not be possible to give a comprehensive patois as indicators of lower classes), and a diastratic variety
review here. Instead, it will be more convenient to depart may function as a register or style (e.g. when French argot
625
JOHANNES KABATEK
‘slang’ is associated with colloquial or informal speech). In the most privileged for the study of different constellations
Koch and Oesterreicher’s model (2011), there is a general of diglossia. In this section, rather than offering an exhaust-
relationship between variational markedness and the ive insight into the history of diglossic situations in the
dimension of immediacy and distance: a strong dialectally Romance area, a short overview of some of the most import-
or sociolectally marked variety and low registers are asso- ant periods in the history of Romance diglossias will be
ciated with immediacy; a high register variety not dialect- combined with an attempt to show that they might be
ally or socially marked (generally the ‘roof language’ or systematically ordered alongside a scheme of historical
‘standard language’ in a community, see Ch. 37) is generally emergence (Auer 2005). This does not mean that there is
associated with distance. only one panchronic line on which the different situations
Diglossia in a narrow sense is the historical result of a are situated on a more or less advanced position; rather, it
rather particular evolution of these general principles in a means that there were some crucial historical and cultural
particular community. Diglossia in a wider sense— moments in the history of the last millennium that have had
understood as the linguistic organization of immediacy considerable impact on Romance (and other) languages and
and distance in virtually any linguistic community—is a varieties in Europe and beyond, such as the emergence of
general phenomenon whose description in the area of written vernaculars in the Middle Ages, book printing, col-
Romance will not be limited to some particular Fergusonian onization, the creation of national states, the Enlightenment
situations, but must be extended to the Romance-speaking and the French Revolution, Romanticism, or globalization.
world as a whole. Considered in this more general sense, I will leave aside the diglossic situations that gave rise to
there is no reason to establish a fundamental difference the different Romance languages when Latin entered into
between diglossia with related or even closely related var- contact with a whole range of languages. Nevertheless,
ieties (‘in-diglossia’, Kloss 1976, also called ‘endoglossia’) we should keep in mind that the traditional terms ‘substra-
and diglossia implying different languages (‘out-diglossia’, tum’, ‘superstratum’, and ‘adstratum’ used to describe the
or ‘exoglossia’). In fact there is a continuum between both, different influences on Latin are but generalizations for
and mere ‘distance’ is not a criterion for establishing a clear different configurations of language contact. They imply
limit between a dialect and a language. Some strongly dif- long-term or short-term diglossic coexistence of languages.
ferentiated regional varieties in Italy are generally con- Latin was most often the H-language with a prestigious
sidered to be dialects, whereas in a case like Galician and pressure that in many regions sooner or later (leaving
Spanish the status of two different languages is generally aside some exceptional cases like Basque) led to the extinc-
not doubted. Thus, other historical reasons than distance tion of the L-language.
must be responsible for the distinction, and I will use the The result of the Romanization of vast regions in Europe
term ‘variety’ as a general notion without distinguishing its (and originally also in north Africa) is the emergence of a
status unless necessary. I will also refer both to cases with spoken continuum of varieties that would be the origin of
two clearly distinguishable varieties and to cases in which the Romance languages. After the decline of the Roman
more than two varieties can be identified (polyglossia). Empire, these ‘primary dialects’ in the sense of Coseriu
Within the vast Romance-speaking world, diglossia and (1980) evolve in the different Romance speaking areas
polyglossia might be associated with a series of types that under the roof of written Latin.
are the results of historical evolutions and constellations in The Romance languages thus emerged in a diglossic
part parallel in the whole area. As Auer (2005) claims, environment. Ferguson’s narrow conception of diglossia as
sociolinguistic situations in Europe (and, we may add, in a stable situation already referred to this occurrence when
the whole world where European languages are spoken) he mentions ‘Latin and the emergent Romance languages
roughly derive from some general historical constellations during a period of some centuries in various parts of Eur-
that I will consider in the following section. ope’ (Ferguson 1959:337). Latin was used as a relatively
stable written language while its spoken varieties became
more and more distinct among themselves (see Ch. 2). The
36.3 Diglossia in the history emergence of the Romance languages illustrates two fac-
of the Romance languages tors. First, a long-lasting and rather stable Fergusonian
diglossia may come to an end. And, second, such changes
36.3.1 The history of Romance languages
of stable coexistences might be (or tend to be) indirect,
and varieties in Europe paradoxical consequences of other evolutions. The latter
can be seen in the arrival of a new spelling ideal after the
Due to its widespread extension and its detailed historical Carolingian Renaissance (§2.9) and the unification of
documentation, the Romance language family is probably Latin pronunciation opening the gap between the local
626
DIGLOSSIA
vernacular and Latin. This indirectly stirs a new diglossic not only sporadically written but become part of an Ausbau
consciousness reflected in the creation of the first written process (‘process of elaboration’: Kloss 1967) which leads to
texts in which a Romance variety is clearly differentiated the creation of series of texts in several domains: charters,
from Latin. Examples are the old French Strasbourg Oaths or chronicles, juridical and administrative as well as literary
the old Spanish Glosas emilianenses. Before, the diglossia had texts begin to appear first in southern France, followed by
lasted for several centuries without significant changes, but the Iberian Peninsula, northern France, and Italy as a con-
the intervention of a centralized institution—the Carolin- sequence of the transformational processes linked to the so-
gian Empire and the Catholic Church—and its modification called Renaissance of the twelfth century (Haskins 1927; cf.
of the H-variety led to the side-effect of the emergence of also §§3.2.2-3). The creation of elaborated Romance written
writings in the L-variety. Similar kinds of indirect effects languages is a complex process where not only does the
can be observed in several subsequent moments in the formerly spoken language undergo a transformation of the
history of Romance. medium (‘Verschriftung’ in the sense of Oesterreicher 1994;
However, the emergence of written Romance does not, at cf. §3.2), but new text genres are created in Romance, and
the beginning, substantially alter the diglossic situation models from the contact language are adopted (generally
between Latin and Romance; rather, it renders it conscious from Latin but also, in the case of Spanish, from Arabic: see
and explains the appearance of some of the first Romance Corriente Córdoba 2004; García González 2008). This elabor-
documents. It should be noted that this does not occur ation process (or Verschriftlichung in the sense of
simultaneously in all regions; instead the new consciousness Oesterreicher 1994), through which the spoken vernaculars
arrives noticeably later in some areas than in others (see are used for purposes of communicative distance, establishes
§§2.9, 3.1). Its effects are immediately present in France a new diaphasic differentiation within the vernacular and
after the Council of Tours (813), whereas in Spain, this is creates an inner diglossia, a ‘Type-A repertoire’ in the sense
the case more than two centuries later, only after the of Auer (2005:9). As Auer points out, this type of diglossia is
Council of Burgos (1080), in which the Roman Rite for the close to Ferguson’s narrow original conception, with func-
Mass supersedes the former Mozarabic Rite. tional differentiation within the same language giving rise to
In a general European historical-typological perspective, one written and another spoken variety. However, during
the Latin–Romance diglossia corresponds to Auer’s ‘Type the first centuries of emergence of Romance written lan-
Zero Repertoire’ (Auer 2005:5), a situation in which an guages, this ‘Type-A repertoire’ still coexists with the Latin–
exoglossic standard language (Latin) coexists with spoken Romance diglossia, allowing the possibility of a triglossia
varieties (see also Koch 2003 for a Romance perspective). with Latin and written Romance as H-varieties and spoken
However, the fact that the spoken Romance varieties are Romance (or, in some areas, another vernacular, Greek,
considered exoglossic with regard to Latin is only the case Basque, Breton, etc.) as an L-variety. Furthermore, the use
after the Carolingian reform: before, spoken Romance and of Latin and Romance in writing is not parallel but clearly
written Latin seem to have been considered just as two stratified. As Gumbrecht (1990:54) stated, a ‘didactic gap’
different medial instances of the same language. This is (didaktisches Gefälle) between Latin and Romance writing is
another example that shows that the distinction between installed: after the establishment of universities and the
language and dialect is a matter rather of consciousness ‘Bolognese Renaissance’ (Kabatek 2005b), some communica-
than of objective distance. tive functions of writing are delegated to the new Romance
The places and the text types where written Romance languages, while a newly established, more classical Latin
emerges (monastic centres, chancelleries) are not without increasingly becomes the language of higher education, sci-
significance. Clearly differentiated Romance appears in ence, and academic writing.
oaths, in religious texts, in glosses, and it frequently appears In several Romance areas, a parallel process to the medi-
in a Latin surrounding, which shows a clearly functional eval emergence of written Romance can be observed in the
markedness of Romance texts showing immediacy or testi- nineteenth century. Several primary dialects had begun
mony of orality. The first texts are clearly marked by dia- their way towards written elaboration, but this path was
lectalism. They show, however, tendencies towards altered due to competition with other supraregional lan-
koineization. Only a few local Romance varieties appear in guages, as in the case of Occitan (Martel 2003), where
written texts, and in the first local scriptae, supraregional French became the H-language in the late Middle Ages and
criteria linked to power and prestige centres already prepare was officially superposed on the regional language from the
a selection of particular norms (Kabatek 2013, and Ch. 37). sixteenth century onwards. Other examples are languages
From the late twelfth century onwards, in different Euro- like Galician (Mariño Paz 2008), Asturian (Kabatek 2003), or
pean regions, a new diglossia is added to the diglossia Sardinian (Blasco Ferrer 1984a), which, after flourishing as
between Latin and Romance. Local Romance languages are written languages, lost prestige and were only used as
627
JOHANNES KABATEK
spoken vernaculars with restricted written usage from the disappears as the Romance languages become established
late Middle Ages onwards. When in the nineteenth century as dominant written languages. For instance, in 1539,
national languages such as French, Spanish, or Italian initi- French is declared the official language of juridical docu-
ated a process of further generalization throughout the ments in France. In the first half of the sixteenth century,
national territory affecting those regions where another the relationship between Latin and French books printed in
language or regional variety was still alive at the spoken the French-speaking area is almost inverted, and from the
level, these local languages or varieties emerged as written second half of the century onwards, French becomes the
languages (with more or less historical tradition) and started clearly dominant language in printing. Religion is an
establishing alternative written H-varieties that were added important factor in the diffusion of the vernacular, and
to the existing national standards. In some cases, such as within one century, Latin is abandoned or becomes minor-
Asturian, this romantic revival hardly created stable tradi- itarian in almost all possible discourse traditions (Rey et al.
tions, but in others, such as Occitan or Galician, written 2007:468-86). In other Romance areas, similar evolutions
traditions persisted and even led, as in the case of Galician can be observed.
or Catalan, to official status in recent times (see §36.4.3). Following the increase of book printing in Romance lan-
From the two cases of the medieval and the ‘late’ emer- guages and the first wave of colonial expansion, conscious
gence of Romance written varieties, three general prin- debates on the role of the written language spread from Italy
ciples can be derived. First, counter to the Fergusonian to France and the Iberian Peninsula. A central question of
assumption of stability, changes in diglossic situations may these debates is the relationship between the spoken and the
occur quite quickly. The almost immediate effect of the written language; and an opposition can be observed
Carolingian spelling reform on the emergence of the first between those who defend a written language more or less
sporadic instances of Romance is a striking example of this. oriented in oral speech and those who uphold an etymo-
Second, the possibility of rapid change does not contradict logical, Latinizing writing. Thus, a visible gap between the
the fact that the spread of this kind of historical impact to spoken and the written language and a consciously created
other areas can be a long-lasting process, as in the case of inner diglossia is established. The latter situation was more
the late arrival of the Carolingian reform in areas of the successful in France than in Spain or Italy, underlying a
Romània such as the Iberian Peninsula (§2.9). Third, the stronger inner differentiation between written and oral lan-
dynamics are somehow cyclic: the Romance languages are guage in France, and further reinforced by the phonetic and
originally the L-varieties of a diglossia between written morphosyntactic evolution of French in comparison to the
Latin and spoken Latin (later, Romance). When in later other Romance languages (see Chs 5, 17). This conscious
centuries the Romance languages become standardized establishment of an inner diglossia, following the desire for
(see Ch. 37), a new diglossia emerges between standard a differentiation between immediacy and distance, is accom-
Romance (e.g. standard Italian) and the vernacular varieties panied by institutional rules with the aim of stabilizing the
(Clivio et al. 2011:157). In the case of ‘late standardization’ of written language. The Spanish grammarian Nebrija claims in
so-called Romance minority languages (minority in rela- 1492 that he writes his Castilian Grammar with the purpose
tionship to the earlier established national standards), this that, from that moment onwards, everything in the Spanish
cyclicity leads to the establishment of new regional stand- language should remain ‘in the same tenor’, believing that
ard languages, with the side-effect of the creation of new the language had reached an evolutionary peak and that
inner diaphasic differences within the minority language stabilization would be necessary in order to avoid decay.
and a diglossic gap between its standard and the local This idea of stability gains importance during the follow-
spoken varieties (Kabatek and Pusch 2009; Pusch and ing centuries, and the conscious establishment of a bon usage
Kabatek 2011). This kind of cyclic movement is, however, (‘correct usage’) in France in the seventeenth century in
by no means a necessity. In most Romance areas, there is no addition to the foundation of academies with the declared
emancipation of spoken vernaculars as written varieties, task of codifying the language (Italy 1583, France 1635, Spain
and while the written language adopts features from the 1713) stabilizes, to a certain degree, the written language
spoken language, the latter shows convergence with the and apparently unties it from the evolution of the spoken
standard language and tends to lose dialect features. language. The historiography of the Romance languages
Referring back to the Middle Ages, the triglossic situation tends to interpret this ‘fixing point’ of the language evolu-
between spoken Romance, written Romance, and written tion as the moment when the fundamental structures of the
Latin is more or less stable until the Renaissance. However, modern languages are firmly established, polymorphism is
thanks to the printing press and the resulting increased greatly reduced, and further changes are basically limited to
diffusion of written texts, beginning in the second half of lexical innovation (Cano Aguilar 1988:255). However, one of
the fifteenth century, the Latin–Romance diglossia the tasks of recent linguistic historiography is to separate
628
DIGLOSSIA
the metalinguistic discourse on language evolution from the different regions during the last two centuries. First, the
facts. And even if a certain stability of written traditions in emergence of intermediate spoken regional varieties or ‘re-
several Romance languages can be traced back to their giolects’ between the primary dialects and the standard
‘classical’ periods until the seventeenth century, changes language; second, the possibility of the loss of the primary
are not only occurring on all levels until the present but dialects with the survival of only regional accents. The first
can also be identified even within the written traditions, in of these situations is referred to as ‘diaglossia’ and ‘type C’ by
particular if the view on history includes everyday informal Auer 2005 (following Bellmann 1998). ‘Diaglossia’ and ‘dila-
written texts (Hafner and Oesterreicher 2007). lia’ may also coexist in the same territory. According to
The inner diglossia within the Romance languages is basic- territorial, social, and individual criteria, there can be a
ally limited to a traditional Fergusonian difference between continuum of possible intermediate realizations between
the spoken and the written language. The divergence between the primary dialect and the standard. This continuum of
these varieties is enhanced by the aforementioned establish- realizations does not exclude a discrete separation between
ment of distance starting in the Renaissance. Additionally, standard and dialect among the speakers. In some situations,
since the written languages are based on the dialects of within the continuum there are clear differentiations or
certain geographical regions—Paris, Tuscany, Madrid, or Lis- ‘zones of density’, according to Berruto (1989), or ‘grades’
bon, for example—they sometimes contrast starkly with the (Stehl 2012; see also Kabatek 1996:31-7). The more the inner
peripheral dialects and regional languages. This is why the differentiation is stratified, the more the speakers might
Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, with its ideal of switch between the different varieties (Berruto 2005:89;
equality and education, alleges the unjust existence of a 2007).
linguistic gap between different languages, postulating two Levelling of local dialects and even dialect loss seem to be
ways of resolving it: education in the vernacular is proposed the latest stage of the general European evolution. The
as a possible solution in some regions, while in others, the result is a new inner diglossia, where the difference between
‘abolition’ of language variation is the target. The most the spoken and the written variety is more a supraregional
extreme case in European history is the Jacobin language distinction between immediacy and distance, between col-
policy during the French Revolution. This policy associates loquial spontaneous speech and the standard in its written
the ideal of liberty, equality, and national unity with complete as well as in its spoken realization. The conservative char-
unification of diversity within the society in order to combat acter of the written language and the retraction of dialects
injustice; this process includes linguistic unification and the has led to a situation of particularly marked inner diaphasic
abolition of diatopic, diastratic, and diaphasic varieties diglossia. In the case of France, for example, a series of
(Schlieben-Lange 1996). Of course, this project was completely linguistic features appear only in writing or in highly elab-
unrealistic, but it helped to connect the idea of a modern orated spoken registers, while others are typical of informal
democratic state with the necessity of a unified standard spoken registers. Several authors have discussed this
language taught to everyone as a written and spoken lan- diglossia between immediacy and distance (see Koch
guage. Even in France, this ideal was far from reality at the 1997b; Gadet 2007; Massot 2010; Koch and Oesterreicher
moment of its conscious formulation (only with the introduc- 2011; Zribi-Hertz 2011).
tion of a general education starting in 1882 does it become an Dialect loss seems to be stronger in France or Portugal
increasing reality). Nevertheless, it remains until the present than in Italy, though, there are even counter-movements
the dominant linguistic model for a modern state, and it that can be observed, as in Spain (see §36.4). However, the
establishes the inner diglossia not only as a diglossia between observation of dialect loss must always be carefully ana-
speaking and writing but also as a diglossia between the lysed; sometimes, it is only the observer’s paradox that
written standard and the spoken standard (or close to stand- leads to an apparent inexistence of dialects. In some cases
ard) variety in relation to spoken local varieties. dialects are preserved not as varieties of active first-
This is what Auer (2005) describes as another common language acquisition but, rather, as passively acquired dia-
European constellation of diglossia, ‘type B’ diglossia in his lects activated later in life.
terminology. In Romance linguistics, the term ‘dilalia’ was
proposed for this kind of situation (Berruto 1989) and
described in the case of Italian in particular. In this case, a
36.3.2 The history of Romance languages and
common written standard language coexists with spoken
local dialects and with a more and more extended spoken
varieties beyond Europe
standard language.
Parallel to the expansion of a spoken standard-oriented It is not possible to simply extend the general typology of
language, two further evolutions can be observed in historically determined European language situations to the
629
JOHANNES KABATEK
Romània noua; but we can to a certain degree distinguish Portuguese expand in their respective countries. In the
certain colonial and postcolonial scenarios that roughly nineteenth century, this adoption of the language of the
correspond to more general types (see also Schon 2013). colonizers as national languages of independent states is
The first stage of colonization, beginning with the arrival already being discussed as problematic, and first attempts at
of the Spaniards in America in 1492, leads to an immediate showing or establishing differences can be observed. How-
diglossia between the languages of the colonizers and the ever, both in the former Spanish colonies and in Brazil, with
different indigenous local languages. This diglossia is mainly the foundation of national academies at the end of the
a diglossia without bilingualism, with the conquerors speak- century, a clear orientation towards the standards of the
ing Spanish and the indigenous population continuing to European motherlands still can be seen. This changes dur-
speak their respective languages, only maintaining reduced ing the twentieth century, when the diglossia between the
contact through translators like the famous Malinche, a written European standard and the obviously diverging
translator between Spanish and Nahuatl after the Mexican spoken language is increasingly considered to be an obstacle
conquest. for education in Brazil (Mattos e Silva 2004); recent descrip-
This first stage, a trade colony, can be taken as an tions of Brazilian Portuguese are based on an autochthon-
instance of a type of colony that may last only for a short ous Brazilian written standard. In a similar way, but with
period, but it can also become an established, stable situ- fewer differences between the European and the American
ation. The Spanish conquest is immediately followed by a standards in the Spanish-speaking countries, the diglossia
second stage, the ‘domination colony’, with the aim of full between a European standard and the local reality has been
territorial control and the overall expansion of the Chris- replaced by a commonly accepted view that considers Span-
tian religion. In the sixteenth century, missionaries from ish as a ‘pluricentric’ language, with several regional stand-
several orders, especially Jesuits, chose a few so-called len- ards that coexist in a horizontal equality (Oesterreicher
guas generales (general languages) based on indigenous lan- 2002; Lebsanft et al. 2012).
guages for the teaching of the Christian doctrine. While A completely different constellation was the result of the
many of the other indigenous languages disappear, some second phase of colonization, with the French expansion to
of the lenguas generales are expanded beyond their original North America and Africa (we will leave aside, for reasons of
territories, and the diglossia between the Spanish and the space, other colonizations such as the Spanish and Portu-
indigenous language is stabilized and maintained, in some guese expansions in Africa and Asia). In North America,
areas, until the present. French colonization is a ‘New England type colonization’
The Spanish colonization almost immediately establishes (Osterhammel 1995; Schon 2013), a type of ‘settlement col-
urban centres, universities, and book printing in the New ony’ marked by the transposition of locally marked French
World, creating an urban culture in the capitals of the newly varieties to a new territory and a diglossia between these
established vice-kingdoms in close contact with Spanish varieties and the European French written standard. More
cities. By contrast, the Portuguese colonization of Brazil recently, the written standard introduced some Canadian-
was more like the Greek colonization of the Mediterranean isms; but a strong unity with the European standard is still
coasts in the ancient world; the Portuguese concentrated on maintained, and a diglossia exists between the written
trade, and established their centres mainly in the Atlantic standard and the spoken varieties. At the same time, Canada
harbours, maintaining a long-term trade colony. While in has currently become an interesting case with two officially
Brazil this creates a rather long-lasting diglossia without monolingual regions in one country (besides the officially
bilingualism (Portuguese or Dutch of the colonizers in the bilingual region of New Brunswick), established in order to
centres on the coast, indigenous languages and línguas gerais avoid diglossia and language mixture. This is, however,
(‘general languages’) in other areas and in the interior), in more a political ideal than a descriptive truth throughout
the Spanish colonies, the urban centres of the interior, in the country, where diglossic situations occur with both of
addition to a more ‘Roman’ organization of society, allow the national languages in both possible positions and mixed
for a more intensive Hispanization. It seems, however, that forms exist such as so-called Joual in Quebec or Chiac in
Hispanization, in spite of several royal decrees postulating New Brunswick, colloquial French varieties marked by
the extinction of the indigenous languages mainly in the Anglicisms (Pöll 2011:112).
eighteenth century, is not very efficient. This follows, most In Africa, French colonization has led to different types of
notably, the independence of the American countries in the diglossia and polyglossia: the first period of French con-
early nineteenth century with the adoption of the ideas of a quests is marked by trade colonialism, but there are also
modern nation with one national language framed during aspects of territorial dominance. The diglossia in many so-
the French revolution; furthermore, Spanish as well as called francophone African countries used to be between
630
DIGLOSSIA
standard French as a written language, French as a spoken • functional complementarity;

language of the colonizers and the upper class, and local • standardization;
languages (Biloa 2004). In northern Africa, French used to be • type of acquisition;
employed as a prestige language in the Maghreb states; • prestige.
however, Maghrebine Arabic has recently become more
Several of these continua are further subdivided. Lüdi
prestigious in Morocco and Tunisia, while French has
(1990) offers an application to current diglossic and poly-
increasingly become marginal or only a second language
glossic situations in France. It would be an interesting task
in a situation marked by an inner-Arabic diglossia. In recent
to extend this application across the Romance languages.
times, the presence of French as trade language or as supra-
Since any situation of coexisting varieties is determined
national prestige language in several African countries has
by history, the following section is somehow a continuation
been threatened by an increasing presence of English.
of the previous one; but instead of distinguishing historical
A completely different type of colonization must also be
phases, I will concentrate briefly on some tendencies
mentioned: the planter society, with a massive presence of
observable in current situations. Probably the most import-
slaves that often led to the emergence of creole languages
ant evolution of the last decades concerns the effects of
(see Ch. 24). Romance-based creoles can be found in the
globalization and the increase of communication following
Caribbean, North and South America, Africa, the Atlantic
several technological innovations. It is commonly argued
Ocean, the Indian Ocean, and in several parts of Asia. The
that the consequences of this tendency are, above all,
result of the original polyglossic situation between African
massive language death and dialect levelling. On the other
languages, indigenous languages, and the languages of the
hand, the other side of the coin of this tendency towards
European colonizers were rapidly emerging creole continua
universalization is particularization, the stress on local
between the European ‘acrolect’ as H-variety and the local
identities, and the emergence of new languages and var-
creole as L-variety. Current creole situations are still gen-
ieties or the increase of the status of former L-languages or
erally marked by this constellation. However, depending on
varieties. The massive political changes in the former ‘sec-
the presence and status of the European acrolect, in some
ond world’ and the breakdown of apparent unity has
regions, creoles are official languages and the acrolect is
caused local varieties to emerge in the Baltic states and
reduced to the language of a minority (e.g. Cape Verde,
the former Yugoslavia, for example, as well as in Romance-
Haiti), while in others, almost the whole population is bilin-
speaking areas such as the Republic of Moldova, where the
gual (e.g. Martinique, Klingler 2003a; see also §§24.2.1,
former diglossic situation between dominant Russian and
24.3.1).
the local, majoritarian Romanian (artificially considered as
a separate language under the name of limba moldovenească
‘Moldavian language’) was almost inverted after the dissol-
ution of the Soviet Union, and Romanian is now the official
36.4 Current dynamics in Romance
language.
variation and diglossia
36.4.1 The impact of globalization: universalism 36.4.2 Levelling

and particularism
As already mentioned, dialect levelling and the reduction of
For the current description of diglossic sociolinguistic set-
dialect diversity can be observed all over Europe to different
tings, it is preferable not to depart from discrete categories
degrees since the creation of national states and linguistic
but rather to establish a series of continuous parameters
unifications (Auer et al. 2005a:11). In recent decades, the
that allow for the description of the whole range of possible
presence of standard languages in all strata of society and
situations. Lüdi (1990), in an influential attempt within
the reduction of dialect diversity have been increased by
Romance linguistics developed in the 1980s, proposes such
modern communication (Loporcaro 2009:176-82). This is not
a set of parameters. Lüdi’s dimensions allow for unlimited
uniform in all countries, but wherever Romance languages
combinations in every individual situation as well as for the
are spoken, it has become difficult to find speakers who
description of dynamic evolutions of such situations. He
ignore the standard language. Furthermore, the increasing
distinguishes (p. 321) six different continua:
use of the standard leads to the reduction of dialect features
• linguistic distance between the varieties or languages and to a general tendency towards levelling, noteworthy in
in contact; France, remarkable in Italy, and present in other countries
• types of communities; as well.
631
JOHANNES KABATEK
36.4.3 The revival of languages languages also leads to creation processes of a new inner
diglossia. The entry of formerly spoken varieties into the
whole range of prestige discourse traditions (including offi-
The tendency towards the revival of languages is a global
cial usage, administration, mass media) is also accompanied
one; it is linked to local political evolutions like the end of
by the massive creation of new linguistic means. New elem-
Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, as well as to a general coun-
ents can be direct adoptions from the contact language or as
termovement against globalizing unification. The cases of
well, in an identity-creating process, proper elements that
Quebec French and Catalan in Spain are striking. Quebec
show a tendency of avoiding adoptions.
French as the only official language of Quebec served as a
An interesting phenomenon linked to this diaphasic dif-
model for Catalan sociolinguists in the 1970s, and the evo-
ferentiation is the fact that in emancipation processes L1
lution in Catalonia served as a model for many other regions
speakers of the former dominant language participate and
in Europe and abroad. Catalan, after a short period of co-
change their usage (generally or temporarily) to the emer-
official status in the 1930s, had lost this status during the
gent or emancipating language. These ‘new speakers’ might
Franco regime. Only from the end of the 1970s onward did
be marginal in some cases, but in others they are dominant
an emancipation process take place that made the former
in the creation of standard models, such as the new
L-language Catalan become equally accepted as Spanish,
speakers of Basque in the Basque country; the neofalantes
achieving even the status of a dominant language in some
(‘neo-speakers’) in Galicia, with Spanish background; the
areas and sectors of the society. This rapid emergence was
new speakers of Breton, with French background; or the
also due to the high prestige of Catalan in dominant social
new speakers of Raeto-Romance, with Swiss German back-
groups. There is currently a debate on Catalan independ-
ground. Generally, these speakers are phonetically marked
ence, and there is no doubt that Catalan would be the
by their L1, but they have fewer problems in adopting a
dominant language of a new Catalan state, with a clear
newly created standard language, as they do not feel any
inversion of the traditional diglossia. This inversion is also
conflict with a dialect form of the same language.
possible because Catalan, even in times of clear Spanish
Another phenomenon paradoxically linked to the eman-
domination, had high ‘covert prestige’ (Trudgill 1974),
cipation of regional languages is dialect levelling; and diver-
which means that it was highly esteemed within its domains
sification of linguistic situations implies also, on another
even without having the overt prestige of an official lan-
level, unification processes. In the Catalan-speaking area,
guage. However, even if a certain Catalan dominance is
for instance, levelling and convergence with the standard
gradually replacing the traditional diglossia, the future sta-
can be observed in western Catalan areas since the emanci-
tus of Spanish—the language of half the population in the
pation and acquisition of official status of Catalan (Kabatek
Catalan-speaking area of Spain—is by no means clear, and
and Pusch 2009).
due to its international prestige it will probably remain an
H-language.
The Catalan situation served as a model for other Spanish 36.4.4 Creating bilingualism
bilingual regions such as the Basque Country and Galicia,
but it has also strongly influenced debates on minority
In some regions, contact with adjacent bilingual regions has
languages in other regions (Coluzzi 2007). In Sardinia, for
led to the adoption of a bilingual discourse, even if the local
instance the Catalan model is presented as the ideal
language situation is only a slightly differentiated spoken
example of emancipation of a local language, and in several dialect closely related to the standard language. This is the
Latin American states, recent language policies establishing case of Aragonese, a dialect spoken in some valleys of the
rights for indigenous languages show influences from the Pyrenees, where the local varieties are preserved without
Catalan model. But there is a considerable difference any unity, but urban groups outside these territories, gen-
between those regions where the local language movement erally ‘new speakers’, defend an ‘Aragonese language’ in an
is accompanied by economic power (as in Catalonia or in the attempt to create a bilingual situation. Similar tendencies
German-Italian bilingual situation in South Tyrol/Alto can be observed in Asturias, where an ‘Asturian language’ is
Adige) and those where dominant sectors of society prefer defended on the basis of a rather lively dialect diversity, or
to continue using the traditional dominant language (as in in Upper Brittany, where the local spoken French entered
Galicia, Sardinia, or the bilingual regions of Mexico). into writing as the ‘Gallo’ language (Radatz 1997). In Spain,
The emancipation of languages is a complex process that the general tendency to foster regional diversity has led to
cannot be reduced to simply changing the roles of languages higher acceptance of the spoken dialects also in regions
in a society (Blauth-Henke and Heinz 2011). The rise of without an open bilingualism. Thus, younger speakers are
632
DIGLOSSIA
using varieties close to the spoken dialect in Andalusia Hybrid mixtures can also be frequently found where there
(Narbona 2009) and the Canary Islands in formal situations, is urban language contact (Bombi and Fusco 2004), where
and local accents are even consciously employed in the the coexistence of different languages (local, colonial,
mass media. The marking of identity seems to be the basic migration languages) leads to sometimes complex polyglot
target of these phenomena. ‘glossotopes’ (Krefeld 2004).
36.4.5 Hybrids and their function
In other cases, identity marking does not feature at the

36.5 The future of research on diglossia
beginning of the creation of varieties, but is instead a in Romance
consequence of existing divergence. This seems to be par-
ticularly the case when language mixture occurs in situ- As we have seen, diglossia, especially in its wider sense, is a
ations of recent migration or in certain postcolonial crucial term for the historical as well as the present-day
settings. Examples can be found in very different areas in description of Romance languages and varieties. A central
the Romance-speaking world, like the English–Spanish mix- empirical task for present research is to observe the dynam-
ture in the US (Torres 2011; Otheguy and Zentella, 2012), the ics of linguistic diversity between levelling and differenti-
mixture between Guaraní and Spanish in Paraguay termed ation. It is impossible to predict future evolution, but
Jopará (Gynan 2011), the hybrid English–Spanish Yanito in current tendencies can be observed and can allow resulting
Gibraltar (Levey 2008), or the mixture between French and inferences. An interesting emerging field of research is
Wolof in Senegal, Francolof or Wolof urbain. Even if they mathematical modelling of language contact situations,
can be named (frequently with ‘hybrid’ names), these mix- including the evolution of diglossia; but close collaboration
tures of languages are not necessarily stable entities and between sociolinguists and model-builders is necessary
might consist of an actual blend of two languages that in order to avoid naïve simplifications (see Kabatek 2012;
presupposes knowledge of both of them; however, these Kabatek and Loureiro-Porto 2013). Another recent field of
hybrids might also function as expressions of a double research is the study of so-called ‘linguistic landscapes’, in
identity and the creation of a postcolonial ‘third space’ which the visibility of languages and varieties in a commu-
(Bhabha 2004). They are sometimes part of complex poly- nity is described. Even if some of the numerous recent
glossic settings, as in the city of Dakar, where different publications do not reach beyond pure descriptions of the
African languages—spoken local French, spoken standard public presence of written languages, there are fortunate
French, and Francolof—coexist with written varieties of exceptions that shed light on the whole linguistic reality
French and Wolof. Hybrid mixtures are typical for territor- behind the surface of the visible ‘landscape’ (see e.g. Pons
ial coexistences of languages or for frontier situations. Rodríguez 2012, on Seville).
633
CHAPTER 37
Standardization
C H R I S T O P H E R J. P O U N T A I N
37.1 Introduction of extinction and as local communities seek to assert their

identity, encouraged by the United Nations Declaration on
the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic,
The term ‘standard’ language is generally used to refer to a
Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1992) and the Council
codified set of linguistic forms and structures (the product
of Europe’s European Charter for Regional or Minority
of corpus planning) which enjoy some kind of official rec-
Languages (1992). Another powerful ally has been the
ognition and promotion (status planning). Although it is
growth of the internet and the freedom of information
today closely associated with a language’s national or offi-
that this has promoted: a measure of this is that, as of
cial status, standardization can take place independently of
June 2013, 28 currently spoken Romance languages and
official adoption, as, for example, in the case of Friulian,
three Romance creoles had their own Wikipedias. In order
which has a long history of standardization (see §37.5). It is
of number of articles, the languages are (the English names
practically impossible for codification to be exhaustive: it
typically focuses on spelling and pronunciation, words and are given): French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan,
their meanings, morphological forms and, less frequently, Romanian, Galician, Occitan, Piedmontese, Haitian (creole),
basic syntax; it is first and foremost concerned with formal Aragonese, Lombard, Sicilian, Asturian, Neapolitan, Wallon
written register. The standard language is taught to chil- (to be distinguished from Belgian French, which is not
dren in schools and to foreign learners, used in official considered separate from French), Venetian, Tarantino,
documents and generally adopted by the publishing and Corsican, Norman, Romansh, Ladino (= Judaeo-Spanish),
broadcasting media. Ligurian, Friulian, Sardinian, Extremaduran, Emilian-
To fit it for sophisticated written expression, the creation Romagnol, Papiamentu (creole), Mirandese, Zamboanga
of a standard language also involves an ongoing process of Chavacano (creole), and Aromanian. However, this list, inter-
elaboration. Kloss (1967) makes a distinction of kind esting though it is as an indication of aspirations, is emphat-
between such elaborated languages (Ausbau) and what we ically not an exhaustive list of the Romance languages which
might regard as distinguishable naturally occurring spoken have undergone some degree of standardization. At the
languages (Abstand). Histories of individual Romance lan- same time, standardization of most of these languages is
guages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) are actually the his- only partial in the sense that a complete set of instruments
tories of the elaboration of standard languages. of standardization (see §37.3) has not to date been produced.
An important advantage of a standard language for a Some of these language names (see also §37.2.5) are roofing
political or social group is its consistency, and as such it terms for languages which are actually distinguished
through the production of different instruments of stand-
can be used as a political tool to achieve national or even
ardization: ‘Norman’, for example, which includes the Chan-
international cohesion: the official imposition of French
nel Islands Romance languages, has three different standard
across France has often been seen as a crucial contribution
spellings (mainland Norman, jèrriais and dgèrgnésiais) and the
to the creation of a strong centralized state (Spolsky
Norman Wikipedia gives a constant stream of alternatives
2004:64-7). The development of a standard language has representing the considerable variation amongst these at all
also been used as a strategy to secure the survival of minor- linguistic levels. Finally, we may note that the list does not
ity speech communities: a particularly successful case is include all officially recognized Romance languages: for
that of Galician (see §§37.2.3, 37.6), where the standard example, Aranese (most closely related to the Gascon var-
acts as a protective ‘roof ’; this, however, is usually at the ieties) is co-official with Spanish and Catalan in the Vall
expense of the pre-existing variants, which as a conse- d’Arán in the Catalan Pyrenees.
quence are suppressed or ‘satellized’ (Green 1993:11). Such Whatever the motivation for the creation of a standard, it
protective standardization has burgeoned in recent times as is essential to its success that it should be accepted and
concern has grown about languages which are under threat cultivated by members of a speech community and that it
634 This chapter © Christopher J. Pountain 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
STANDARDIZATION
should become an ideal to which educated members of the The manner of the emergence or creation of a standard
speech community aspire in both their writing and their varies very considerably from Romance language to
formal speech (though such aspirations may not necessarily Romance language. Nonetheless, this chapter will attempt
be successful: see Milroy and Milroy’s 1985:22f. remarks on to make generalizations and to identify some general
the ‘ideology of the standard’). trends. It will broadly follow the main stages in the lifecycle
It is important to distinguish the notion of a standard of a standard identified in the classic accounts of Haugen
language from that of a linguistic norm (a set of linguistic (1972) and Joseph (1987:22f.): the emergence of a favoured
variants which are emulated usually because of the prestige variety as the basis of the standard, the nature of its codifi-
of their users). While a norm may be adopted as the basis of cation, acceptance of the standard, and the response of the
a standard language (for example, the nineteenth-century standard to ongoing linguistic change.
standardization of Occitan by the Félibrige movement was
based on the Rhône dialect: see §37.6), a norm is followed as
a result of consensus, without necessarily any explicit
codification or legislative imposition, or any elaboration.
37.2 The choice of a basis for
Trumper (1993:310-12), discussing the notion of a ‘spoken
standard’ for Italian, reviews a number of attempts to iden-
the standard
tify a supra-regional spoken norm, or ‘common Italian’; but
even if such an aspirational norm exists, it cannot be con- 37.2.1 Identification with a geographical
sidered to be a codified standard. On a smaller scale, Sala variant
(1965) reports on the formation of a Bucharest Judaeo-
Spanish norm, which similarly is not a standard, not least In the case of languages which have a long history of official
because of its lack of any literary dimension. usage and approval, it is often suggested that the standard
The eventual standard is never simply equatable with a ‘emerged’ from the vernacular of an identifiable geograph-
pre-existing norm because of the elaboration which is an ical region. The clearest case is that of French. Due to a
essential part of the standardization process; but there are constellation of inter-related factors (the close links
also many examples in Romance of standards which have between the French monarchy and the Abbey of Saint-
been developed in a deliberately eclectic way (see §37.2.3), Denis, where the royal court was held, the foundation of
especially in recent times. Nonetheless, the emergence of a the University of Paris in 1231, the establishment of the
prestigious norm is in many cases a pre-condition of courts of law in Paris in the thirteenth century, and the
standardization. political dominance of the north achieved by the success of
Standardization is therefore the very antithesis of the the Albigensian crusade in 1213), the Romance vernacular of
variation and change that is apparent in all natural human Paris acquired great prestige as the language of the King and
languages: the process of codification usually restricts the the politically powerful, and was gradually adopted beyond
number of admissible variants very severely. Since con- the Île de France from the twelfth century onwards (Lodge
formity with the standard language defines prescriptive 1993:95-104), culminating in the Ordinance of Villers-
‘correctness’ and encourages the notion that a linguistic Cotterêts (1539), which provided for all legal and official
variant which has been adopted in the standard is somehow business in the Kingdom being conducted in ‘langage ma-
‘better’ than one which has not, e.g. Fr. je ne sais pas ‘I don’t ternel françois’ (‘French mother tongue’). Spanish is simi-
know’ (standard) vs je sais pas (non-standard with omission larly strongly associated with Castile (and indeed still
of the preverbal negator ne, but very frequent), standard- retains the alternative name of ‘Castilian’), more specifically
ization tends to imply the view that language change is the city of Burgos, which was the centre of, first, an inde-
inherently ‘bad’; conversely, the standard often includes pendent county and then, from the eleventh century, of a
variants which are becoming less used and therefore kingdom. Castilian, together with other northern Iberian
regarded as archaic. Consciousness of a standard is there- peninsular varieties, subsequently spread southwards with
fore a powerful factor in the formation of speaker attitudes, the resettlement of reconquered territories and the conse-
and the imposition of a standard may arrest or otherwise quent obliteration of other languages. As a result of this
influence change: it is claimed, for example, that the voseo process, it became a diasporic language (a language spoken
second person singular pronoun and verb forms which are over a wide geographical area, typically a language of
widespread in spoken Latin American Spanish were eradi- empire, see §37.7), and this, coupled with the itinerant
cated in educated usage in Chile as a result of an educational nature of the royal court, meant that there was no
system which followed Bello’s (see §37.7) censuring of these unequivocal metropolitan norm, so producing a situation
forms in the early nineteenth century (Kany 1951:67). which was very different from that of French. The output of
635
the royal scriptoria in Toledo and Seville during the reign of 1995:6-10). Thus although modern standard Italian may be
Alfonso X (r. 1252-84) and immediately after, which are said to be based on Florentine, this is very far from being
often considered to mark an incipient standardization of the modern Florentine vernacular. Dissociation of the liter-
Castilian, cannot be straightforwardly associated with the ary language from everyday spoken language was not in
Castilian of any one location (Fernández-Ordóñez 2005:403- itself unusual: similar remarks could be made about French
39). By the sixteenth century, both Toledo and Seville had in some provincial areas of France until the imposition of
developed prestigious norms, but from the time that Philip compulsory primary education by the Third Republic in the
II established his capital in Madrid in the mid-sixteenth late nineteenth century. But other Romance varieties, often
century, it is likely that the basis of the standard was the with their own written traditions, lasted much longer in
educated usage of that city (Penny 2000:199); however, the Italy, and have continued in active use to the present day;
ancient prestige of Old Castile continues to be reflected in also, Latin continued to be used for relatively longer in
the high regard in which the speech of its cities, especially official domains (Pountain 2011:614f.), and discussion and
Valladolid, is held (Williams 1987:19-21). A somewhat simi- debate about the choice of Italian standard (the questione
lar story to that of Castile may also be told for medieval della lingua) is of a level unknown elsewhere in the
Portugal and the Crown of Aragon. The Portuguese King Romance-speaking world (Steinberg 1987). The question
Afonso III (r. 1248-79) and the Aragonese King James I (r. has often been raised as to whether supraregional koinai
1213-76) replaced Latin as their chancery languages with have existed in Italy, and is a topic of lively current schol-
Romance vernaculars based broadly, so far as can be judged, arly discussion (Vincent 2006). What is perhaps of more
on Lisbon and Barcelona respectively (although it is often immediate comparative interest from the point of view of
pointed out that many medieval writers of ‘Catalan’ were standardization is the longer existence in Italy than else-
not from Barcelona: Ramón Llull (1232?-1315/16), whose where of a number of written languages (scriptae) which
vast prose output played an important role in the elabor- served as languages of administration or as vehicles for
ation of medieval Catalan, was Majorcan). The creation of literary expression. For example, Ferguson (2003) traces
these early standards led inevitably to the eclipse of other an unbroken tradition of written Venetian from the thir-
Romance languages within the same political domain which teenth century with evidence of the establishing of what he
had enjoyed a period of use as chancery languages. Admin- calls a ‘stable koiné’ in the fourteenth and fifteenth centur-
istrative Occitan (to be distinguished from literary Occitan, ies, although serious written registers were abandoned from
see §37.2.2), originally encouraged by the Hospitalers and the sixteenth century.
Templars, had as its base the vernacular of the Toulouse area Romanian is again a case apart. We have virtually no
and persisted until the fifteenth century; Galician, separated direct knowledge of any of the Daco-Romance varieties
politically from its southern varieties in Portugal, despite its before the sixteenth century: they were vernaculars of low
prestige as a medium of lyric poetry cultivated by no less a prestige, and their speakers occupied an area at the meeting
figure than Alfonso X of Castile (see above), was replaced by point of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian
Castilian for official purposes; and the same fate befell Cata- empires in which political boundaries were volatile, so
lan, though at a much later date than is often realized— there was no developing association between language and
Catalan was increasingly overshadowed by Castilian follow- state of the kind that we can see in France, Spain, or
ing the union of the Castilian and Aragonese crowns in the Portugal. Romanian speakers therefore had to claim a status
late fifteenth century, but was not formally prohibited in for their language in much the same way as we see linguistic
official use until 1714 (Galmés de Fuentes 2001). minorities doing today (see §37.5): this process may be said
The development of standard Italian, however, offers a to have begun in 1791, when the Romanian Transylvanians
very different scenario. Its geographical basis was Floren- demanded their rights as an ethnic and linguistic group in
tine, because of both the financial muscle of Florence (Tus- the Supplex Libellus Valachorum. The nineteenth-century lan-
can was used extensively as the language of book-keeping) guage planning which took place in Wallachia and Moldavia,
and the prestige of the Florentine-based literary language which as the United Principalities formed the basis of the
which was cultivated and elaborated by Dante, Petrarch, modern Romanian state, followed on from the work of Ion
and Boccaccio in the course of the fourteenth century; two Heliade Rădulescu (1802-72), engaging in a programme of
centuries later, though by then archaic, it was favoured as elaboration in which there was an acute consciousness of
the literary standard by Bembo, and was adopted as the the Romance nature of Romanian, to such an extent that it
basis of the national language which only began to be might almost be thought of as a process of relatinization,
actively diffused and imposed through education following sourced especially from the learnèd vocabulary of Italian
the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century (Maiden and French (Close 1974).
636
STANDARDIZATION
37.2.2 Literary standards especially, in this case, Italian—though he is wary of what

he terms un purismo contrapproduttivo (‘a counterproductive
purism’). An example of the latter is the determination of an
We have knowledge of several literary koinai in the Middle
equivalent of It. conservazione ‘conservation, preservation’,
Ages, the vehicles of the tradition of lyric poetry originating
which has the three Romansh forms cunservazion, conserva-
with the troubadours of Provence. Into this category fall
ziun, and conservazion. Prioritizing the principle of migliore
Occitan and Galician; the possibility of a thirteenth-century
ladinità would suggest the creation of a form cunservaziun,
literary koiné originating with the ‘Sicilian School’ of poets
which, however, exists in no variety and would appear
has also been entertained (Migliorini 1978:130-47). These
ridiculous; hence the majority prefix and suffix are pre-
literary languages, which were eclectic and heavily elabor-
ferred, to give conservazion. The insistence on distantiation
ated, were again elitist norms, and lasted as long as the
is sometimes much more extreme: Tosco (2012:257), dis-
genres for which they were the means of expression, and
cussing Piedmontese, expresses the view that ‘[t]he basic
they must be distinguished from the vernaculars of these
rule of Ausbauization is to stress diversity with the compet-
areas.
ing varieties. If needed, diversity can be downright
As we have seen most dramatically in the case of Italian,
invented. At the same time, internal differences must be
the existence of a literature in a language may lend it
eliminated, or at least reduced.’
prestige. However, while literary language has often served
Such policies are evident in many modern standardiza-
as a reference for instruments of standardization, perhaps
tions, though they have not necessarily been applied in
most famously the first dictionary of the Real Academia
exactly the same way. Fabra’s Catalan standard (Badia i
Española, the Diccionario de autoridades, so called because it
Margarit 1975:87-92) was based on eastern Catalan, most
took as authoritative the works of the ‘best’ writers of the
obviously the usage of Barcelona, with whose middle class
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there is sometimes an
the economic power that spurred the Catalan renaixença lay,
uneasy relation between the model which literature
but the spelling system reflected a concern to cater for a
appears to offer and the development of a standard. Seco’s
number of phonemic distinctions made in western, but not
Diccionario de dudas (1986:163), the precursor of the Real
eastern, Catalan, with the result that, despite the lack of
Academia’s Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, observes that
economy for eastern speakers, it could be adopted by the
while laísmo (the use of la as a feminine indirect object clitic
Catalan-speaking population in general. Catalan spelling
pronoun in Spanish; the standard is le) is practised by a
thus represents the distinction between unstressed /a/
number of writers and is of long standing in the language,
and /e/ (pare ‘stop.3SG.SBJV’: ECat. [ˈpaɾə] but WCat. [ˈpaɾe];
its use is nevertheless to be deprecated puristically.
casa ‘house’: ECat [ˈkazə] but WCat. [ˈkaza] or [ˈkazɛ]) and
between /o/ and /u/ (posar ‘to put’: ECat. [puˈza] but WCat.
[poˈza]; suar ‘to sweat’: ECat. and WCat. [suˈa]). Distantiation
37.2.3 Eclectic standards has been a very powerful principle in Catalan language
planning, and is reflected in Fabra’s explicit policy of
While in more recent times particular geographical var- depuració ‘purification’, as a result of which many Castilian
ieties have also sometimes formed the basis of standardized loans in standard Catalan were replaced by words gleaned
languages, there is often a high degree of eclecticism. This is from the medieval Catalan language. Thus, for example, he
easier to quantify, since we have more detailed knowledge recommended that bústia, used in medieval Catalan with the
of dialect geography and even the explicit comments of meaning of ‘box’ (a meaning now rendered by ModCat.
language planners. For example, Schmid (2000) gives an capsa) should replace Cst. buzón ‘mailbox’, and that vaga,
insight into various types of motivation at work in such formerly meaning ‘rest from work’, should replace Cst.
eclectically based standardization in connection with the huelga ‘strike’ (buzón and huelga had been adopted by Catalan
Rumantsch Grischun he developed for Romansh in 1982 at speakers as they had been developed in Castilian in order to
the invitation of the Lia Rumantscha (on the basis of which name these new concepts). Galician also offers a very clear
he was in 1988 invited to propose a standard for Dolomitan example of distantiation at work, in this case from both
Ladin). Where there are phonetic variants, the one that is Spanish and Portuguese, producing a remarkable eclecti-
most widely diffused (the highest common factor) is pref- cism. For this reason, the standard has tended for the
erable, since it will have the greatest chance of acceptance. most part to follow the pronunciation of the central ver-
In morphology, he prioritizes transparency and avoidance naculars but the morphology of the southwestern vernacu-
of ambiguity. He also mentions a criterion of migliore ladinità lars, with the result that it is not straightforwardly
(‘best Ladinity’), i.e. the favouring of features which identifiable with any one of these spoken varieties. But
distinguish Ladin from other languages (distantiation)— distantiation has not extended to admit as standard the
637
gheada (pronunciation of /ɡ/ as [x] or [h], e.g. amigo ‘friend’ linguistic tradition. For example, Wallon has had official
as [aˈmixo]), perhaps because of its low prestige within Gal- recognition in Belgium since 1990, as a result of which
icia, although it is a well-known and widespread phenom- there has been a certain amount of corpus planning activity,
enon in the western parts of Galicia. The favouring of including the beginnings of a grammar (Hendschel 2012).
morphological transparency is also apparent in Galician: The introduction to this articulates the difficulties of mak-
although, as already noted, the morphological forms of mod- ing choices among the many variants observable, conclud-
ern standard Galician are generally those of the southwest, ing: ‘I consider that my role is that of setting out and
southwestern irmán is ambiguous between ‘brother’ and clarifying the variety of existing forms. It is up to readers
‘sister’, and so lacks transparency. The standard therefore to make their choice in this matter, and similarly among the
differentiates these notions by using irmá, a form not usual in various dialectal forms.’ The polynomic approach is typical
the southwest, for ‘sister’ (Fernández Rei 1990:163-89). of endangered Gallo-Romance local varieties, and such
inclusiveness is reflected in the many regional languages
into which Hergé’s Tintin albums have been translated,
37.2.4 Polynomic standards apparently in sympathy with the promotion of local feelings
(the Casterman website1 nostalgically refers to the speakers
The difficulties of finding a common standard for a group of of these languages as ‘old people, lovers of local traditions,
related varieties are not to be underestimated, since there is or defenders of a regional identity which has been chal-
the danger that eclecticism, especially to the extreme lenged by modern centralism’). The provision for Wallon is
observed in Galician, will satisfy no one, and that the new especially striking: one album, Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, has
standard will therefore not gain the acceptance which is been translated into no fewer than five different Wallon
needed for its success (see §37.6). Campaigns by the Partito versions (wallon de Liège, wallon d’Ottignies, wallon de Nivelles,
Sardo d’Azione to give Sardinian official status within Sar- wallon namurois and wallon-picard de la Louvière).
dinia date from at least the 1970s (this was granted in 1997);
however, because of the difficulties of reconciling the two
major varieties, Logudorese and Campidanese, a unified 37.2.5 Language names
standard has been slow to emerge, and most such attempts
are described as ‘experimental’. Only very recently has a
notion of what has been designated limba sarda comuna The existence of a language name, or glottonym, is no
(Common Sardinian Language) evolved and a grammar pub- guarantee of standardization: this is the case for a number
lished (Porcheddu 2012). of southern Italian regional languages (e.g. Neapolitan,
The tension between the need to create a unified stand- Sicilian) which, despite the vigorous maintenance of a
ard and the need to reflect the realities of actual usage, closely related set of linguistic varieties on a number of
coupled with the issue of distantiation, has been the basis of levels, have neither standardized forms nor official status.
a bitter (and apparently unresolved) polemic in Corsica, Indeed, use of a language name does not even imply the
where political factors have complicated the issue. existence of a readily identifiable Abstand language:
A campaign to get Corsican included in the provisions of ‘Emilian-Romagnol’, which appears on the Wikipedia list,
the Loi Deixonne, which allowed the teaching of regional is in reality a group of Romance varieties defined only by
languages in French state schools, succeeded in 1974 as a their geographical location in the Emilia-Romagna region
result of demonstrating, first, that Corsican was sufficiently created by the Italian constitution of 1948. Neither does the
different from Italian not simply to be considered an Italian use of a different glottonym imply the existence of a differ-
dialect and that, secondly, it had a degree of elaboration ent standard. We have already noted how the terms ‘Span-
which would enable it to be considered a ‘proper’ (i.e. ish’ (español) and ‘Castilian’ (castellano) both refer to what is
Ausbau) language (Jaffe 1999:144). However, this had pro- universally recognized as the same language, though these
duced a distantiated standard which was rather different terms have different political connotations, castellano tend-
from many actual varieties, and Thiers (1993) has argued ing to be used in contexts where association of the language
strenuously for a polynomic standard (i.e. one which would with the Spanish state is not favoured, especially in regions
admit a number of variants). of Spain where other languages have co-official status.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that polynomic stand- ‘Moldovan’ (limba moldovenească ‘Moldovan language’) and
ardization has been favoured in situations where language ‘Romanian’ (limba română ‘Romanian language’) are also
shift is very advanced and the sense of speech community is
principally associated with local cultural heritage, coupled 1
<http://bd.casterman.com/catalogues_list.cfm?CategID=819&OwnerId=
with an academically informed awareness of a written 805>.
638
STANDARDIZATION
generally considered to be synonymous in the sense that language), a dictionary (which can be taken as a list of
Romania and Moldova share a common written standard approved words and approved usages), and a grammar.
(there was brief asynchronism in the adoption of a revised Additionally, many language planning bodies will make ad
orthography: see §8.3), even though there are differences in hoc rulings on the admissibility of words, morphological
the spoken language at the level of phonetics and lexis, forms, and grammatical structures, and give answers to
features which usually characterize local spoken varieties questions which are raised about usage. The focus for such
of the ‘same’ language (cf. BeFr. septante ‘seventy’ corres- activity is usually an officially sanctioned academy or insti-
ponding to hexagonal Fr. soixante-dix, or the seseo or lack of tute, but despite the fact that a line of descent can be traced
opposition between /s/ and /θ/ in many parts of the from the first of these, the Accademia della Crusca, founded
Spanish-speaking world). Crucially, the common official in 1582, they are today very different kinds of institution.
standard is accepted by native speakers, and the Moldovan A description of the corpus planning work of the Real
constitution explicitly speaks of moldovenească ‘Moldovan’ Academia Española (RAE), founded in 1713 in imitation of
and română ‘Romanian’ as being primarily adjectives of the Académie Française, makes a good point of reference.
national affiliation rather than markers of linguistic differ- This is not the only academy in the Spanish-speaking
entiation. The enthusiasm for the separateness of Moldovan world—each country in which Spanish is a de jure or de
which has given rise to a bitter discussion on Wikipedia (see facto official language (including the United States) has its
§37.1) is on closer inspection largely associated with the own academy which together form the Asociación de Aca-
continuing use of Cyrillic script for Moldovan in the break- demias de la Lengua Española—but it undertakes publica-
away area of Transnistria. tions on their behalf. All these bodies have eminent
The situation regarding ‘Catalan’ (català) and ‘Valencian’ academic linguists among their members to whom the
(valencià) is more delicate (Sempere 1995). There are dif- task of keeping the instruments of standardization up to
ferent language-planning bodies, the Institut d’Estudis date is entrusted. These all have quite recent editions: the
Catalans for Catalan and the Acadèmia Valenciana de la latest Ortografía was published in 2010. The 23rd edition of
Llengua for Valencian, which broadly agree on a common- the dictionary was published by the Real Academia and the
ality. The Valencian body is particularly careful with its Asociación de Academias in 2014, and additions and emend-
language: it says that Valencian is to be understood both as ations are published online. The morphology and syntax
the general language that is shared with the rest of the sections of a new Grammar were published in 2009, and a
former Crown of Aragon and as the language of the Comu- phonetics/phonology volume added in 2011. There is also a
nitat Valenciana. It is instructive to look at a particular Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (published in 2005 and
difference between Catalan and Valencian, the form of maintained online) which addresses particular questions
demonstratives. In Catalan the ‘full’ forms aquest/aqueix of usage.
‘this / this/that (addressee-oriented)’ are preferred, while However, even when an academy or similar institution
in Valencian the ‘reduced’ forms este/eixe are more usual. exists, the focus of standardization may lie elsewhere. The
The Institut d’Estudis Catalans’ Gramàtica de la llengua cata- Académie Française, founded by Richelieu in 1635, was
lana accordingly lists aquest/aqueix first, though with este/ originally charged with producing a dictionary, a grammar,
eixe as an alternative (p.142), while the Gramàtica normativa a rhetoric, and a poetics of French, but while the various
valenciana (Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua 2006:132) editions of its dictionary span the period 1694-1935, the
gives the priorities in reverse. However, despite such aca- only grammar, which it produced in 1932, was ineffectual
demic reasonableness, the issue of nomenclature is a pol- (the rhetoric and poetics were never produced). Dictionar-
itically charged issue in Valencia itself, where there is ies such as Littré, Robert, and the Trésor de la Langue Fran-
suspicion of Catalan linguistic imperialism and an insist- çaise (Imbs 1971-94), and the grammar Le Bon Usage (Grevisse
ence by some speakers that local forms have not been and Goosse 2008) have instead served as the principal stand-
adequately represented in the standard which is being ard reference documents for French.
imposed through the educational system.
37.4 Elaboration
37.3 The nature of codification
The emerging medieval Romance standards underwent con-
The instruments of standardization are generally considerable elaboration as they came to be used in preference
sidered to be the provision of an orthographical system to Latin in written documents. Use of the vernaculars
(to achieve consistency in the representation of the extended only gradually to different text types, so that,
639
for example, while they were used first of all in legal recent success of Asturian, which in the late 1970s had
documents which were intended to be read aloud and in relatively few speakers and a rather weak official status in
exegetical religious texts, and then for secular literature, Asturias: the Asturian Statute of Autonomy simply provided
use in what might be characterized as an academic context for the protection of Asturian, unlike, for example, the
came considerably later (Descartes’s Discours de la Méthode of Catalan Statute, which declared Catalan the language of
1637 is usually reckoned to be the first philosophical text Catalonia and the preferred language. Despite this, the
written in French). The main source of elaboration through- Asturian autonomous government has consistently pro-
out this period was ‘learnèd borrowing’ of lexis from Latin vided for and funded the promotion of Asturian: it is now
and to a lesser extent Greek and the imitation of the com- taught extensively in primary and secondary schools in
plex syntax of Latin (see Pountain 2011). In more recent Asturias, and is offered as an academic subject by the Uni-
times, the Romance languages have sometimes used other versity of Oviedo; the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana,
Romance languages as a resource for elaboration. Romanian established in 1980 by the Asturias autonomous govern-
drew extensively on French and Italian lexis (§37.2.1 and ment, has defined the standard through an orthography, a
Sala 2005:100-101); Judaeo-Spanish was heavily influenced dictionary, and a grammar. This initially led to a much
by French because of the educational work of the Alliance greater awareness of Asturian and a presence of Asturian
Israélite Universelle (Harris 1994:206-8), and Romance- in the media, although recently there have been signs that
lexified creoles have looked to their neighbouring stand- this upsurge of involvement has levelled out.2 In post-
ardized Romance languages (French in the case of Haitian, dictatorship Spain the official encouragement of languages
Spanish in the case of Papiamentu; see Ch. 24) in the process other than Spanish has proceeded apace, spurred on by the
of decreolization which has gone hand in hand with the example of Catalan, Galician, and Basque, with the result
creation of a standard (Green 1988b:471). Threatened lan- that new standards have emerged in some areas (Asturian,
guages, however, as we have seen in the case of Catalan and also Aragonese, Extremaduran, Murcian).
(§37.2.3), have tended to pursue a policy of distantiation By contrast, the Italian and French governments have
from the perceived dominant language (with which there notoriously dragged their feet in providing for the main-
is nevertheless a high degree of bilingualism and hence tenance of languages which, particularly in the case of Italy
from which there is often subconscious syntactic calquing (where they are traditionally known as dialetti ‘dialects’), are
which serves as an elaborative mechanism). There has also quite widely spoken (see Coluzzi 2007). Catalan, French,
been a very general resistance to Anglicisms, which has Francoprovençal, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan, and Sardinian
provoked the coining of neologisms or words resurrected were recognized at national level in Italy in 1999, and
from earlier stages of the language. The Académie Fran- some protection has been afforded more recently by legis-
çaise has a notoriously intolerant attitude towards Angli- lation at local level to Piedmontese, Ladin, and Venetian; in
cisms and has, for example, introduced the neologisms Sardinia, Sardinian, Sassarese, Gallurese, and Catalan are co-
logiciel and courriel to render Eng. software and e-mail official in defined areas. As an example of what this implies,
(courriel, ironically, is a Québécois neologism, a portman- we may examine in more detail the fortunes of Friulian, for
teau word uniting courri(er) ‘mail’ and él(ectronique) ‘elec- which a literary koiné has existed since the sixteenth cen-
tronic’). In Spanish, patrocinio (Peninsula) and auspicio tury and for which there has been a considerable amount of
(America) ‘patronage’ have been promoted by the RAE in unofficial modern standardizing activity since Jacopo Piro-
the face of the widely used calque esponsorización ‘sponsor- na’s first Friulian–Italian dictionary of 1871. Such an influ-
ship, sponsoring’. ential figure as Pier Paolo Pasolini was a member of the
Agreement on technical terminology is an important Friulian Academiuta, founded in 1945. The language has
issue because of its precise significance, and many stand- been recognized officially at a local level only since 1981,
ardizing authorities have departments which deal with this: when the regional laws of Friuli–Venezia Giulia provided for
for example, TERMCAT was created by the Generalitat de its protection and esteem (tutela e [ . . . ] valorizzazione); in
Catalunya and the Institut d’Estudis Catalans in 1985. 1996 the dimension of promotion (promozione) within a
defined geographical area was added, and the most recent
legislation (2007) established the right of citizens to use
Friulian in dealings with the local government; schools
37.5 Support
It is quite clear that the success of a standard, in terms of 2

La Nueva España, 12 June 2012, reported a reduction in growth of take up of
both corpus and status planning, is heavily dependent on Asturian in schools: <http://www.lne.es/sociedad-cultura/2012/06/19/en
official backing and especially funding. This accounts for the senanza-lengua-asturiana-claro-peligro-estancamiento/1258686.html>.
640
STANDARDIZATION
must offer courses in Friulian, though parents may opt out. of Aromanian Language and Culture held in Freiburg: an
Standardizing activity accordingly has received a boost: the account of the practical issues involved is given in Cunia
Agjenzie Regjonâl pe Lenghe Furlane is now charged with (1999).
establishing the official orthography and the certification of
competence in Friulian, and in 2011 it launched an updated
version of the online bilingual dictionary (Grant dizionari
bilengâl talian–furlan) begun by the Centri Friûl Lenghe 37.6 Acceptance
2000. Similar remarks could be made about Dolomitan
Ladin, which is most strongly protected in the province of Standardization usually requires speakers to accept variants
Bolzano, and about Piedmontese, which was recognized as they might otherwise reject, and Posner (1993:55) observes
the regional language of Piedmont by its parliament in 2004, that standardization which rides roughshod over the intu-
and which also has a long tradition of dictionaries and itions of native speakers will not ultimately be successful.
grammars (most recently Gribaudo 1996; Grosso 2002). Yet, as we have seen, an important motivation for stand-
Many standardizations, however, remain at an informal ardization is language maintenance, so speakers may be
level, in the sense that while instruments of standardization inclined to waive their objection to decisions on a new
have been produced by enthusiasts, they have no official standard in the interests of the survival of what they can
status. Unofficial ‘academies’ (essentially associations for accept as their language. This delicate balance often seems
the defence of a local variety) have also been formed: the to be controlled by political aspirations and popular atti-
Académia Ligùstica do Brénno, for example, was founded by tudes. The eclectic corpus planning of Galician (see §37.2.3)
five enthusiasts in 1970 for the promotion of Genovese seems to have enjoyed remarkable success not only because
(Ligurian) and has developed an orthography (Bampi of the aspirations of Galicia to autonomy but also because of
2009), an Italian–Genovese dictionary (Bampi 2008), and the broad acceptance of this new standard by speakers:
part of a grammar. In some cases, the production of instru- Beswick (2002:265f.) reported that all her respondents
ments of standardization may be nothing more than the agreed that the standard, not any dialectal form, should be
initiative of one individual, such as Brunelli’s (2005) gram- taught throughout Galicia. By contrast, Rumantsch Grischun
mar of Venetian. (see §37.2.3) was widely resisted despite the growth of use of
Support for speech communities which cross national Romansh in literature and the media which it facilitated
boundaries is a particularly complex issue. Modern with the backing of the Lia Rumantscha. The reason for this
speakers of the Francoprovençal group of varieties, a rejection can be seen to be the political structure of the
name originally given by Ascoli (1878) to distinguish them Swiss canton of Grisons, where municipalities have the right
from the langue d’oïl and the langue d’oc, appear to share to decide the language of instruction in their schools: a
some such sense of speech community, given formal number of municipalities rejected Rumantsch Grischun in
expression by the Aliance Culturèla Arpitana, founded in favour of their own localized varieties, even though the
2004 in Lausanne, despite the fact that their local varieties canton to which they belonged had accepted it.
have for many centuries gone by individual names and are The absence of a strong sense of speech community,
not always mutually comprehensible. Only the Francopro- coupled with major differences between widespread local
vençal of the Val d’Aosta (Valdôtain) currently enjoys some varieties, militates against the creation of a unitary stand-
protection at local level. It has no official orthography, ard. Occitan was ironically one of the first unofficial
dictionary, or grammar, although there are such potential Romance varieties to be revived, by the Félibrige movement
candidates as Chenal and Vautherin (1967-82), and Stich which was founded in 1854 by Gabriel Mistral and a small
(2003); the latter has been designed as a ‘roofing’ orthog- group of enthusiasts (just the same kind of process observed
raphy for all the Francoprovençal varieties. The Aromanian more recently for more vigorously preserved languages
speech community, stretching over Greece, Macedonia, such as Ligurian and Aromanian, discussed in §37.5). They
Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania, is perhaps more strongly created a new and well-regarded literary medium, and
felt since, apart from the obvious continuity with Roma- under their auspices an orthography which reflected pro-
nian, it is in marked contrast to the surrounding languages nunciation, based on French and suiting Provençal, and a
of the Balkans and because the Vlachs constituted an ethnic dictionary, the Tresor dóu Felibrige, which included lexical
as well as a linguistic group. The language has some official variants from a number of the Occitan areas, were pro-
status in Macedonia, and Aromanians are recognized as a duced. The Mistralian standard was rivalled in the mid-
cultural minority in Albania. Work on a standard orthog- twentieth century by the work of Louis Alibert, who pub-
raphy distinct from that of Romanian was begun at a 1997 lished a grammar (1935) and a dictionary (1965) which
symposium arranged by one of the International Congresses explicitly followed the Languedocian varieties: these had
641
the advantage of being central geographically and thus moved the metropolitan norm or the diasporic variant (or
more likely to represent a common factor linguistically. both) in different directions. However, the degree of differ-
This standard has been promoted by the Toulouse-based ence necessary for the constitution of a different Abstand
Institut d’Estudis Occitans, founded in 1945; this body also entity is difficult to determine objectively, and is inevitably
undertakes elaborative work, proposing new technical bound up with the prestige and political backing which the
vocabulary. It also sponsors the ‘classical’ spelling system new candidate enjoys, as well as with the perception of a
based on the medieval language, which is etymological speech community by speakers.
rather than phonemic in conception (see Schlieben-Lange The French- and Spanish-speaking worlds offer a particu-
1993). However, speakers of the Rhône varieties (Provençal larly interesting contrast. While French has for some time
and Niçard) tend still to follow the Mistralian standard (cf. adopted an uncompromising single standard, Spanish has
Bayle 1980), and there is generally a sense of the existence an acknowledged polynomic standard which is aimed at
of many different varieties and a need for local reference maintaining the unity of the Spanish-speaking world: the
works: for example, Reichel’s Auvergnat–French dictionary declaration on the RAE’s website is worth quoting:
(2005), published with the support of the Auvergne region,
which uses the Écriture Auvergnate spelling system which is The Spanish norm does not have a single axis, that of its Spanish
more suited to this variety. realization, but is polycentric in nature. The various kinds of usage
in the linguistic regions are therefore considered fully legitimate,
with the sole condition that such usages are general amongst the
educated speakers of their area and do not lead to a break-up of
the system as a whole, that is to say, endanger the unity of
37.7 The challenge of change and the language. <http://www.rae.es/rae%5CNoticias.nsf/Portada4?
ReadForm&menu=as.nsf/>
diaspora
We have already (§37.2.5) encountered the issue of eclectic
Standardization, as we have seen, favours immutability, and vs polynomic standardization with regard to the defence of
if a standard does not make some accommodation to endangered languages; this, however, as the response to
change, there comes a point at which the spoken language diversity of the modern Romance language with the largest
may constitute a different Abstand entity. Also, diasporic number of native speakers, is at the other end of the scale.
languages are naturally subject to geographically based The seeds of the Spanish attitude seem to lie in the thinking
variation, or dialectalization, and tend to fragment with of a number of influential nineteenth-century Spanish
time, as had happened to Latin by the end of the first American linguists, beginning with Bello (1981[1847]; see
millennium. Spanish, Portuguese, and French are the most §37.1). Despite the recent political emancipation of the
obvious examples; but conspicuous variation is also evident former colonies from Spain, Bello saw that adopting the
in modern Italian, which, as we have seen (§37.2.1), has been peninsular Spanish standard was in fact a means of main-
generalized within Italy rather more recently. As well as the taining a sense of Spanish-American unity among the vari-
inevitable introduction of regional features, many of which ous newly created republics: he explicitly drew the parallel
can be attributed to contact influence from local languages, with the trajectory of Latin and the Romance languages
the standard has been vernacularized for everyday purposes (Pountain 2012:53). Subsequently, a cooperative spirit
of informal oral communication, producing a series of codes among the national academies (see §37.3) encouraged a
often referred to collectively as italiano regionale (‘regional widely shared sense of speech community.
Italian’). A simple example, paralleled in the spoken registers The standardizing trajectory of Spanish is also in marked
of several other Romance languages, is the adverbial use of contrast to that of the Portuguese-speaking world. Since
adjectives (e.g. parla rapido for parla rapidamente ‘s/he speaks the early twentieth century, when Brazilian political inde-
fast’), which is characteristic of the italiano regionale spoken pendence from Portugal had long been consolidated and
by southerners. Because such a register is not provided for in the modernista movement celebrated Brazil’s cultural ori-
the standard (and this is broadly true of standards every- ginality by increasingly reflecting features of everyday
where, which are primarily concerned with the written lan- speech in literary language, there has been a clear feeling
guage), the question has been raised as to whether a ‘neo- among many Brazilians that their language is different
standard’ is emerging (Berruto 1990, discussed in Maiden from that of European Portuguese; indeed, many linguistic
1995:266f.), and this presents Italian language planners with features on every level (phonetic/phonological, morpho-
the same kind of issues as we will discuss below. logical, syntactic and lexical) can be held up as objective
The demand for the identification of a differential stand- markers of this difference (for detailed discussion, see
ard may be the result of linguistic changes which have Ch. 23). An obvious example is the position of clitic
642
STANDARDIZATION
pronouns. Written Brazilian Portuguese favours general- Quebec speakers held their vernacular in low esteem and
ized proclisis with finite verbs while European Portuguese followed the metropolitan standard in writing and
retains a number of contexts in which enclisis is main- education—an attitude formally espoused by the Quebec
tained, thus BrPt. João se levantou, lit. ‘João self=raised’ but language planning body, the Office Québécois de la Langue
EuPt. O João levantou-se lit. ‘the João raised=self (= João got Française. However, the establishment of French in 1977 as
up)’. The reasons for the strength of the claims for a the sole official language of Quebec seems to have had the
Brazilian standard must be sought in the history of lan- effect of increasing speakers’ regard for local usage. Recent
guage planning as well as in political circumstances. Portu- dictionaries have presented Quebecisms in a more positive
guese does not have, and has never had, a single well- way (Baggioni 1998), and the language of the Quebec broad-
defined standard. Portugal and Brazil each have their own casting media has become increasingly closer to the ver-
language-planning bodies, respectively the Comissão Nacio- nacular (Lüdi 1992:163f.; contrast, however, the view of
nal da Língua Portuguesa and the Academia Brasileira de Barbaud 1998, who regards a differential Quebec standard
Letras. Neither has produced a comprehensive set of instru- as a ‘myth’ and describes the current linguistic situation in
ments of standardization: the latter has produced a diction- Quebec as diglossic).
ary though the former has not, while grammar is
informally standardized through respected publications
such as Cunha and Cintra (1984), and there are still differ-
ences in spelling between European and Brazilian custom, 37.8 Final observations
despite the 1990 Novo Acordo on spelling. Yet looked at
objectively, the same order of difference affects many dia- The Romance languages offer a large number of standardiza-
sporic languages: Latin American Spanish differs signifi- tion types and scenarios at various points in their histories.
cantly from peninsular Spanish in not having a second Thanks to recent more acute interest in the preservation and
person plural familiar form (corresponding to peninsular promotion of endangered languages, standardization is a
vosotros/as), and Argentine Spanish has a distinctive second lively current issue, and it will be interesting to see how
person singular familiar pronoun and corresponding verb many of the varieties discussed above fare over, say, the
form (vos hablás, as opposed to the majority tú hablas, both next half century, for which time the global prediction is
meaning ‘you speak’). But these are admitted into the one of massive language death (Moseley 2010). Although the
polynomic Spanish standard, and there appears not to be modern context is rather different in terms of the linguistic
the same linguistic secessionist feeling among, say, Argen- awareness of language planners, and the availability of public
tine speakers as exists in Brazil. education and electronic media for the dissemination of
Confirmation of the importance of speaker attitudes standards, the study of modern standardizations may encour-
alongside political considerations also comes from Quebec age a reappraisal of the formation of the national Romance
French. Here a long period of political separation from standards which are often the sole focus of investigation in
France, coupled with similarly long proximity to English Romance linguistics. Finally, it will also be interesting to see
and its influence, have driven spoken Quebec French away to what extent the unity of the diasporic Romance languages
from the metropolitan European norm. Yet until recently can be maintained through language planning.
643
PART V
Issues in Romance Phonology

CHAPTER 38
Diphthongization
MARTIN MAIDEN
38.1 The data Stressed open syllable diphthongization (SOSD) charac-

terizes Oïl dialects (northern Gallo-Romance), most dialects
Romance diphthongs are largely innovations with respect of northern Italy (Piedmont, Liguria, much of Lombardy,
to Latin. Classical Latin had three, AE (/ai /̯ ) , OE (/oi /̯ ), and AU Emilia, and Trentino) and Florentine (hence also Italian),
(/au̯/), the first two of which monophthongized in Romance, together with most of western Tuscany and parts of Umbria
usually as /ɛ/ and /e/ respectively: e.g. LAETUM, POENAM > It. lieto (Perugia, Gubbio). General stressed syllable diphthongiza-
(< *ˈlɛtu) ‘happy’, pena ˈpena ‘pain’.1 Only AU survived as a tion (GSSD) is found in Castilian, possibly eastern Catalan
diphthong into Romance, persisting into modern times in (see below), northeastern Gallo-Romance (Wallon), Rovi-
Romanian, Vegliote, dialects of Sicily and the far south of gotto (northeastern Italy), Friulian, and Vegliote. In Roma-
mainland Italy, central and western Romansh, and Gascon, nian it affects original /ɛ/ but not back vowels.4 Metaphonic
and as oi or ou in Portuguese (the latter having monophthon- diphthongization (MD) is best represented today in central
gized as /o/ in many modern varieties) (e.g. AURUM ‘gold’ > Vgl. and southern Italy, but recurs in Alpine Piedmontese and
jaur; Pt. ouro, oiro). Elsewhere it monophthongized, becoming Lombard, and in Romagna.
/o/ or /ɔ/ (e.g. Cst. oro, Cat. or, Fr. or, It. oro), or as /a/ in SOSD does not preclude diphthongization in closed syl-
Sardinian (LAURUM > ˈlaru ‘bay’), but these monophthongiza- lables: most varieties affected (except Tuscan) also show
tions demonstrably postdate various major Romance sound diphthongization in closed syllables before palatal conson-
changes, including the diphthongization of mid vowels dis- ants. Moreover, there is overlap, notably in northern Italy,
cussed below; see further Lausberg (1965:§§241–8). between SOSD and MD. The modern reflexes of the diph-
The Romance diphthongizations are too numerous and thongs have undergone numerous local modifications
varied even to outline here.2 In any case, their development (cf. Loporcaro 2011b:123f.). Castilian shows /we/, rather
has, mainly, straightforward historical phonological explan- than /wo/, with apparent fronting; the same sound is prob-
ations. While I shall touch on a number of major patterns, ably what underlies /ø/ in modern French and various
the focus will be on a type whose effects are geographically northern Italo-Romance dialects. In many Italo-Romance
widespread, so-called ‘opening’ diphthongization, involving varieties the outcome is /e/, /o/ or /i/, /u/ (for western
diphthongs which increase in aperture and expiratory Tuscany and Corsica see e.g. Dalbera-Stefanaggi 1991:539f.).
energy in the course of their articulation.3 The effects of In parts of southern Italy we find not /je/ and /wo/, with
such diphthongization may be found, in alternation with initial glides, but /iə/ or /ie/ and /uə/ or /uo/ (see e.g.
non-diphthongized forms, in many Romance languages: e.g. Ledgeway 2009a:56f. on the synchronically and diachronic-
It. muore ‘die.3SG.PRS’ vs moriva ‘die.3SG.IPFV’, morto ‘dead’ and ally variable realizations of metaphonic diphthongs in Nea-
tiene ‘hold.3SG.PRS’ vs teneva ‘hold.3SG.IPFV’, tengo ‘hold.1SG.PRS’; politan, or Silvestri 2009 for variable realizations of the
Cst. muere ‘die.3SG.PRS’, muerto ‘dead’ vs moría ‘die.3SG.IPFV’, metaphonic diphthong according to phrasal stress and
and tiene ‘have.3SG.PRS’ vs tenía ‘have.3SG.IPFV’. Such diph- focus type in Verbicarese). Eastern Catalan has /e/, which
thongs emerge from proto-Romance stressed low mid may reflect original /je/ (see e.g. Maiden 1988a:29, but also
vowels /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ which, in turn, evolved from Latin Sánchez Miret 1998:235f., n.99).5 Metaphonic diphthongization
short Ĕ and Ŏ (see further §25.1). They mostly occur in one is usually accepted to be one manifestation of a more general
of the distributional types shown in Tables 38.1–38.3. assimilatory effect, metaphony, exercised by following, gener-
ally word-final, /i/ and /u/ on preceding stressed vowels. In
4
Absence of diphthongization in back vowels is generally attributed to
1
See further Adams (2013:71–89) for Latin. early merger of Ō and Ŏ as /o/ (see further §25.1).
2 5
A useful survey is Sánchez Miret (1998). For a ‘microcosmic’ exempli- The evidence involves an inversion of openness values (/ɛ/, /ɔ/ > /e/,
fication of multiple recent sources of diphthongization, see e.g. Ledgeway /o/; /e/, /o/ > /ɛ/, /ɔ/) possibly explicable by assuming that the low mid
(2009a:53f.) on Neapolitan. vowels were diphthongs when the high mid vowels lowered. See e.g.
3
‘Opening’ diphthongization is also called ‘falling’ diphthongization. Dalbera-Stefanaggi (1991:541), but also Loporcaro (1988a:68–73; 2011b:691).
MARTIN MAIDEN
Table 38.1 SOSD (stressed open syllable diphthongization) Table 38.3 Metaphony and MD (metaphonic
in proto-Romancea diphthongization) in Romance
Italian Servigliano (Marche), with metaphonic raising of high and
open syllables closed syllables low mid vowels (Camilli 1929)
PĔTRAM pietra ‘stone’ SĔPTEM sette ‘seven’ SG PL
PĔDEM piede ‘foot’ PĔLLEM pelle ‘skin’
RŎTAM ruota ‘wheel’ MŎRTUUM morto ‘dead’ M ˈspusu ˈspusi ‘spouse’
NŎUUM nuovo ‘new’ ŎS(SUM) osso ‘bone’ F ˈsposa ˈspose
M ˈkwistu ˈkwisti ‘this’
Milanese F ˈkwesta ˈkweste
open syllables closed syllables
M ˈmortu ˈmorti ‘dead’
PĔTRAM ˈpedra ‘stone’ SĔPTEM sεt ‘seven’
F ˈmɔrta ˈmɔrte
MĔL (> *ˈmεle) mel ‘honey’ PĔLLEM pεl ‘skin’
CŎR (> *ˈkɔre) kør ‘heart’ CŎRNU kɔrn ‘horn’ M aˈpertu aˈperti ‘open’
PLUUIT (> *ˈplɔve) pløf ‘it rains’ ŎS ɔs ‘bone’ F aˈpɛrta aˈpɛrte
M ˈaltu ˈalti ‘high’
Bonifacio (archaic Genoese)b F ˈalta ˈalte
FĔBREM ˈfivra ‘fever’ Ischia (Bay of Naples), with metaphonic diphthongization of
PĔDEM ˈpia ‘foot’ low mid vowels (Freund 1933)
BŎUEM bjo ‘ox’ CŎRNU ˈkɔrnu ‘horn’ SG PL
SŎNAT ˈsjona ‘it rings’ PŎSSUM ˈpɔsu ‘I can’
M ˈsurdə (< *ˈsordu) ˈsurdə (< *ˈsordi) ‘deaf ’
French F ˈsau̯rdə ˈsau̯rdə
open syllables closed syllables (< *ˈsorda) (< *ˈsorde)
PĔTRAM pierre ‘stone’ SĔPTEM sept ‘seven’ M ˈissə (< *ˈessu) ˈissə (< *ˈessi) ‘he/they’
PĔDEM pied ‘foot’ DĔNTEM dent ‘tooth’ F ˈɛssə (< *ˈessa) ˈɛssə (< *ˈesse) ‘she/they’
FŎCUM feu ‘fire’ CŎRNU cor ‘horn’
M ˈvwostə ˈvwostə (< *ˈvɔstri) ‘your’
BŎUEM bœuf ‘ox’ ŎS(SUM) os ‘bone’
(< *ˈvɔstru)
a
By ‘open’ we understand a syllable that does not end in a F ˈvɔstə (<*ˈvɔstra) ˈvɔstə (< *ˈvɔstre)
consonant. /Cr/ clusters also generally leave a preceding syllable M purˈʧjeddə purˈʧjeddə ‘piglet’
‘open’, but see Loporcaro (2011a:91f.). (< *porˈkɛllu) (< *porˈkɛlli)
b
Bottiglioni (1928). Note that here the back vowel yields the F purˈʧɛddə purˈʧɛddə
diphthong /jo/.
(< *porˈkɛlla) (< *porˈkɛlle)
M kajəˈnɛtə kajəˈnɛtə ‘brother-in-law’
Table 38.2 GSSD (general stressed syllable diphthongization) in (< *kogˈnatu) (< *kogˈnati)
Romance (in all stressed syllables regardless of syllable structure) F kajəˈnatə kajəˈnatə ‘sister-in-law’
(< *kogˈnata) (< *kogˈnate)
Castilian
Open syllables Closed syllables
PĔTRAM piedra ‘stone’ SĔPTEM siete ‘seven’
PĔDEM pie ‘foot’ DĔNTEM diente ‘tooth’
FŎCUM fuego ‘fire’ CŎRNU cuerno ‘horn’ most of Italy metaphony affects all mid vowels, more rarely
BŎUEM buey ‘ox’ ŎS(SUM) hueso ‘bone’ also /a/ (cf. Maiden 1987). High mid vowels are invariably
raised (/e/, /o/ > /i/, /u/), while /a/ generally yields /ɛ/
Vegliote
open syllables closed syllables (sometimes /je/). Low mid vowels may also undergo metapho-
PĔTRAM pitra ‘stone’ PĔLLEM pial ‘skin’ nic raising to /e/, /o/, but the geographically most widespread
DĔCEM dik ‘ten’ DĔNTEM diant ‘tooth’ outcome is diphthongization, as /je/ and /wo/.
FŎCUM fuk ‘fire’ CŎRNU kuarn ‘horn’
BŎUEM bu ‘ox’ ŎS(SUM) vuass ‘bone’
Romanian
38.2 The problem
PĔTRAS pietre ‘stones’ SĔPTEM şapte (dial. şepte) < *ˈsjepte ‘seven’
PĔRIT piere ‘he dies’ FĔRRUM fier ‘iron’
The resemblance between these opening diphthongs across
FŎCUM foc ‘fire’ CŎRNU corn ‘horn’
BŎUEM bou ‘ox’ ŎS(SUM) os ‘bone’ Romance languages prompts the suspicion that they are
cognate. The nature of their relationship, however, is
648
DIPHTHONGIZATION
controversial. I shall not retrace the long history of the ques- Table 38.4 Diphthongization in stressed open syllables in
tion (see e.g. Sánchez Miret 1998; Purczinsky 1970), but rather Bolognese and Vegliote
focus on three relatively recent positions: Maiden (1988a),
BOLOGNESE
Sánchez Miret (1998), and Loporcaro (2011b):
*ˈtela > ˈtai ̯la ‘canvas’ *aˈmore > aˈmau̯r ‘love’
(i) SOSD, GSSD, and MD have a common origin, in me-
*ˈveskovu > ˈvaʃkuf ‘bishop’ *ˈplombu > pjæmp ‘lead’
taphony (Maiden).
(ii) SOSD and GSSD have a common origin, but no con- VEGLIOTE
nection with metaphony (Loporcaro).

*ˈripa > raipa ‘bank’ *ˈkrudu > kroit ‘raw’
(iii) SOSD, GSSD, and also (so-called) MD have a common
*ˈmille > mel ‘thousand’ *ˈbruttu > brot ‘ugly’
origin, but none of them have a connection with
*ˈpera > paira ‘pear’ *ˈkroke > krauk ‘cross’
metaphony (Sánchez Miret).
*ˈpeske > pask ‘fish’ *ˈmonte > muant ‘mount’
Position (i) is denied by, for example, Loporcaro
(2011b:135), but we shall see that it still has much in its
favour.6 Positions (ii) and (iii) maintain that some or all of
the patterns (either just SOSD and GSSD or SOSD, GSSD, and postulating an unattested initial stage */ɛə̯/, */ɔə̯/, with
MD) originate in open syllables and, more specifically, that subsequent modifications leading to opening diphthongs.9
they are the spontaneous result of vowel lengthening, given Two observations are in order at this point. One is that an
that Romance vowels may be, or were, longer in stressed opening diphthong is an unexpected, albeit not impossible,
open syllables than in stressed closed syllables (e.g. Italian consequence of vowel lengthening. The other is that the
palla ˈpalla ‘ball’ vs pala ˈpaːla ‘spade’; cf. Loporcaro 2011a:52). nature of the initial stages of the opening diphthongs is prob-
It is undoubtedly the case that lengthened vowels may diph- ably beyond our observation; the observable realizations have
thongize particularly in stressed open syllables through a protean quality (see §38.2.3) from which it is frustratingly
reduction in articulatory energy over the duration of the difficult to descry precisely what underlies them historically.
vowel, such that the end part of the vowel closes to a glide. In what follows, emphasis will be placed on what we can infer
The usual result is a closing diphthong, as is encountered in from the modern patterns of distribution of the diphthongs
French and other northern Gallo-Romance dialects, Franco- and their variant realizations, and here the Romance varieties
provençal, Romansh, Friulian, the dialects of much of north- of Italy have a particularly important place.
ern Italy, coastal areas of southeastern Italy, and Vegliote.7
Most commonly affected are high vowels and especially /e/
and /o/.8 Table 38.4 shows diphthongization in stressed open
syllables in Bolognese (northern Italy) and Vegliote. 38.3 The diphthongs in Italy
It is precisely the characteristically ‘closing’ nature of
Romance stressed open syllable diphthongizations that led 38.3.1 Tuscan
Schürr to deny that the opening diphthongs from /ɛ/ and
/ɔ/ could be the result of ‘spontaneous’ diphthongization of Two sets of facts about Tuscan have been adduced as evi-
this kind. Given that it is generally agreed that metaphony dence for the ultimately metaphonic origin of SOSD. First,
can produce opening diphthongs, Schürr consistently that in the southeastern medieval dialects of Arezzo and
argued for a metaphonic origin for diphthongs of this Borgo Sansepolcro, of Urbino in the Marche, Città di Castello
kind, but adduced no proof that an opening diphthong and Viterbo, in adjacent areas of Umbria (and the late
could not arise through vowel lengthening. Indeed, nineteenth-century dialect of Città di Castello for /wɔ/;
Sánchez Miret (1998:117) devises a scenario in which pre- Bianchi 1888), the diphthongs occurred exclusively in
cisely this could happen, even though it relies heavily on stressed open syllables but, almost equally exclusively,
only in environments which would, historically, have
ended in metaphonizing /i/ and /u/ (> /o/) (e.g. OArt.
6
Both positions (i) and (ii) were first formulated, at different times, by nova ‘new.FSG’ vs MSG nuovo; dede ‘gave.3SG.PRT’ vs 1SG diedi
Hugo Schuchardt (see Purczinsky 1970:492f.) but grossa ‘big.FSG’ vs grosso MSG, grossi MPL, bello ‘beautiful.
7
In some eastern Romansh varieties (cf. Lutta 1923:88–90, 313; Grisch MSG’ vs belli MPL, omo ‘man’ < HOMO). Second, that there exist in
1939:24–8) the offglide becomes a consonant, creating so-called ‘hardened’
diphthongs: e.g. Egd. *ˈtela > *ˈtei̯la > ˈtegla ‘canvas’. See also §20.2.5 for Tuscan (hence Italian) words such as bene ˈbɛne ‘well’
Francoprovençal.
8
French and some northern and southern Italo-Romance varieties (see
e.g. Sánchez Miret 1998:217; Loporcaro 2011b:138) show raising and front-
ing of /a/ to /ɛ/ in open syllables (e.g. MARE > mer ‘sea’), possibly via a 9
Sánchez Miret (1998:117f.,135) cites diphthongs from Portuguese and
diphthongal stage (*/ae̯/). French dialects.
649
MARTIN MAIDEN
(adverb) < BĔNE and nove ˈnɔve ‘nine’ < NŎUEM lacking a lumping together the two conditions, can be conceived as a com-
predicted diphthong. For Schürr (e.g. 1965a; 1970b:32–141; promise between the two, which fits well with the geolinguistic
1972), the old Aretine situation preserves an intermediate position of the dialect.
phase in the historical reorganization of originally meta- In fact, what we see in old Aretine does not look in the
phonic diphthongs, such that they become restricted to least like a ‘compromise’. But equally it looks like nothing
open syllables. Words that lack expected diphthongs one would expect to see in the face of incoming innovatory
allegedly do so because, historically, they lacked the condi- ‘syllabic isochrony’. The distribution of diphthongization is
tioning environments for metaphony in any part of their too neat: diphthongs are wholly absent in closed syllables
inflectional paradigm (BĔNE and NŎUEM, for example, were and almost exclusively limited to (formerly) metaphonizing
morphologically invariant). The inference is that morpho- environments in open syllables. On either Schürr’s or
logical analogy played a facilitating role in the generaliza- Loporcaro’s account an indigenous, familiar pattern of me-
tion of the diphthongs, words which already possessed, at taphonic diphthongization apparently gets partially aban-
least somewhere in their inflectional paradigm, a metapho- doned in the face of an innovation from outside. But in such
nizing environment being more apt to generalize the diph- circumstances one would expect something far ‘messier’:
thong into non-metaphonic environments than those which lexically sporadic retention of the ‘native’ diphthong in
lacked metaphony. For Schürr, the driver behind SOSD was closed syllables and equally sporadic innovatory spread of
‘syllabic isochrony’, a general shortening of long vowels in the diphthong outside the metaphonic environment in open
closed syllables, and lengthening of short vowels in stressed syllables. In Arezzo we have, not a ‘compromise’, but, curi-
open syllables, which he believed to have radiated outwards ously, something that looks more like abject ‘surrender’ in
from central Gaul. In this process, the distinction between closed syllables and heroic ‘resistance’ in open syllables. But
the metaphonic diphthongs and the corresponding monoph- would speakers really behave in this kind of rigidly differ-
thongs /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ was reanalysed as one, respectively, entiated way in the face of an innovation? The problem is
between long and short vowels, the diphthongs being that a principle, ‘syllabic isochrony’, predicted to act equally
expelled from all closed syllables, and extended to all stressed (albeit with opposite effects) on open and closed syllables
open syllables. has actually only acted on the latter. Schürr (1980:59) says
Now the old Aretine facts actually, and plainly, suggest that the diphthongs had been evicted from closed syllables
that metaphony of low mid vowels was itself originally because they had become ‘intolerable’ there; but the only
restricted to open syllables, and they thereby constitute a evidence that they were ‘intolerable’ is the very fact that
significant potential bridge between Tuscan SOSD and me- there are no diphthongs in closed syllables. One remains
taphony. The flaw in Schürr’s analysis is that he insists (e.g. puzzled as to how something previously perfectly ‘tolerable’
1970a:397; 1972:317f.) on viewing old Aretine as an ‘inter- could have been transformed into something completely
mediate’ stage in the passage from metaphonic diphthong- ‘intolerable’ by external forces.
ization to SOSD. For most of his career Schürr subscribed to The true significance of the old Aretine data is simply
two propositions about metaphony: that it was alien to that there existed in Italy (and, indeed, in territory adjacent
Tuscany and that it operated in open and closed syllables to the modern area of SOSD) dialects in which the diph-
alike. He ultimately allowed (1972:320f.) that metaphonic thongs were restricted to open syllables in metaphonic
diphthongization might have been indigenous in Tuscany, environments. This point was continually missed by
but continued to assume the second view and was therefore Schürr’s most dogged opponent, Arrigo Castellani, who
forced to find an explanation of how the diphthongs were devoted his efforts to asserting that the old Aretine type
‘expelled’ from closed syllables.10 Some of the difficulties originated outside Tuscany (see e.g. Castellani 1980a:144,
which, as we shall see, apply to Schürr’s explanation actu- 166; 1980b:415) and that its diphthongization pattern was
ally apply even to Loporcaro’s rebuttal (2011b:122f.) of that therefore irrelevant to Tuscan SOSD, the latter being, he
explanation: held, an independent, indigenously Tuscan phenomenon.11
The OAretine pattern lends itself equally to an interpretation What Castellani never asked is why such a system could not,
diametrically opposed to Schürr’s. If one assumes that open syl- historically, have underlain Tuscan.
lable diphthongization and metaphony arose as two distinct pro- Equally, there is no reason to treat old Aretine as a
cesses [ . . . ], in different areas—the former in central Tuscany, the ‘compromise’ between different systems, or as any kind of
latter both north and south-east of Tuscany—then OAretine,
11
He offers no account of how such a state of affairs, wherever it
10
Russo and Sánchez Miret (2009:186) rightly cite the incidence of the developed, could have emerged. See also Schürr (1972:320). Russo and
diphthong in Tuscan place names such as Siena or Fiesole as evidence for the Sánchez Miret (2009:188), who subscribe to Castellani’s view, equally over-
indigenous nature of the diphthongs. look this problem.
650
DIPHTHONGIZATION
‘transitional phase’. It may indeed be significantly ‘transi- and nove to their frequent appearance in ‘non-prepausal’
tional’ from a geographical point of view (it lies midway position (e.g. nove giorni ‘nine days’, bene fatto ‘well done’).14
between Tuscan dialects with generalized open syllable His point (2011b:692) is not that in this position bene and
diphthongization and central and southern dialects with nove are ‘unstressed’ but that the process of open syllable
metaphony in closed as well as open syllables) but it is not lengthening which, he believes, gives rise to the diph-
‘transitional’ diachronically. Rather, it represents a primi- thongization is sensitive to phrasal stress and particu-
tive stage from which both the Tuscan type of diphthong- larly liable to occur immediately before a pause. There is
ization and generalized metaphonic diphthongization could certainly evidence for diphthongization processes sensitive
have evolved. to prepausal position (cf. Ledgeway 2009a:51; Loporcaro
The notion that metaphony was originally sensitive to 2011a:76f.), but that bene could owe its monophthong to
syllable structure receives further support from various quar- non-prepausal occurrence is counterintuitive, for this is a
ters. In Italo-Romance, if metaphony appears in closed syl- word commonly used as an interjection (meaning ‘well
lables, then it equally appears in open syllables, but not vice (done)!’, ‘good!’) and therefore frequently found ‘free-
versa. Most of the evidence comes, significantly, from me- standing’, prepausally. The issue is whether bene is signifi-
taphony of low mid vowels (especially /ɔ/), and is found today cantly less frequent in that position than words which do
in dialects of northern Puglia and particularly the Gargano undergo diphthongization. We have no direct access to
Peninsula.12 See, for example, De Angelis (1921:49); Stehl medieval speech, but we may identify ‘pauses’ in texts by
(1980:58, 97); AFP point 7 (Ischitella); Maiden (1988a:20f.); the presence of commas, full stops, exclamation marks,
Carosella (1997:156–8; 1999:123, n.84).13 Closer to Tuscany, question marks, semi-colons, or colons. That punctuation
we find dialects in Lazio (Vignoli 1925:11f., 14f.; Maccarrone marks may be introduced by editors (or copyists) does not
1915; Maiden 1988a:21) where metaphony of low mid vowels vitiate this method; it provides an unbiased indication of the
triggered by /u/ tends to be blocked, always in closed rather likely location of pauses. What emerges on this basis from
than open syllables. the OVI corpus is that bene is overall more frequent pre-
The scenario that suggests itself is one in which open- pausally than other items subject to diphthongization, such
syllable diphthongizing metaphony of low mid vowels as viene, nuovo, buono, and, most importantly, almost never
followed one of two complementary diachronic paths: in significantly less so (Table 38.5).15
one—found in most of Italy—the identity of the unstressed For modern Italian, the CLIPS (Corpus di italiano parlato)
vowel remains paramount and constraints on syllable struc- database of ‘dialogues’ from Florence, Perugia, and Rome
ture are relaxed, so that the diphthongs penetrate closed shows, out of 63 tokens of bene, at least 60 that are pre-
syllables (see Maiden 1987); in the other, observable in pausal. Unless the spoken language at the time of diph-
Tuscany, syllable structure gains the upper hand while thongization was unaccountably different in this respect
the identity of the unstressed vowel becomes irrelevant, from anything now observable, the notion of a predomin-
so that the diphthong ‘overflows’ into stressed open antly ‘non-prepausal’ bene seems unlikely and its lack of a
syllables generally. diphthong cannot be thus explained.
The view that forms like bene and nove support the me-
taphonic hypothesis has been repeatedly rejected by Table 38.5 Percentage incidence of bene, viene, nuovo, -a,
scholars such as Castellani, Serianni (1999:109), or, most -i, -e, buono-a, -i, -e in ‘prepausal’ (as opposed to ‘non-
recently, Loporcaro. Note at the outset that the argument prepausal’) position in medieval Tuscan texts (OVI)
is unaffected by the regional, or medieval, existence of
BENE VIENE NUOVO BUONO
diphthongs in biene or nuove, or in morphologically invari-
ant place names such as Fiesole, because it is undisputed that Trattati di Albertano da Brescia 19 3 5 10
the general tendency is for all Tuscan low mid vowels in (Pisan 1288)
open syllables to diphthongize. The point, rather, is that Novellino (c.1300) 16 0 33 12
absence of diphthongization tends to imply the historical Boccaccio (Decameron, 1370) 25 20 3 4
absence of a metaphonizing environment. Loporcaro Franco Sacchetti (late 14th c.) 37 10 12 12
(2011b:122) attributes the absence of the diphthong in bene
12 14
In Puglia (cf. Melillo 1926; Stehl 1980:37; Maiden 1988a:20; Carosella See also Castellani (1970:169) (and Sánchez Miret 1998:171f.).
15
1999:120, n.71) there are also signs of resistance to metaphony of high mid These counts include a few instances of the noun bene, meaning
vowels in closed syllables. ‘goodness’. So far as I can ascertain, the noun is always identical to the
13
Especially before final /u/. By the time metaphony penetrated closed adverb, in respect of its stressed vowel, in medieval texts and in modern
syllables, final /u/ had probably opened to /o/ (see Maiden 1987). dialects.
651
MARTIN MAIDEN
Any account of why nove ‘nine’ (< NŎUEM) does not diph- Sánchez Miret 2009:171, 186) that the lack of a diphthong
thongize must explain why dieci ‘ten’ (< DĔCEM) does. This somehow reflects the fact that the Latin nominative and
asymmetry is robustly replicated both across Tuscan dia- accusative was MEL, and its genitive, dative and ablative
lects (cf. AIS map 288) and throughout the history of Tuscan. forms had the root MELL- (e.g. genitive MELLIS), and that it
Were the absence of the diphthong in ‘nine’ due to the therefore contained a closed syllable which inhibited diph-
frequent appearance of this numeral in non-prepausal pos- thongization, carries little conviction. The etymon is clearly
ition, we should expect, contrary to fact, the same behav- MEL, to which has been added the third declension inflexion-
iour of ‘ten’. The onus would be on proponents of the ‘non- class marker -e, yielding *ˈmɛle (cf. SAL ‘salt’ > *ˈsale). Melle is
prepausal’ account of nove to explain why dieci was signifi- indeed occasionally attested in old Tuscan, but Castellani
cantly more likely to appear pre-pausally, and therefore implies an implausible scenario in which mele is differen-
more liable to diphthongize. It is hard to see how: both tially influenced by melle in respect of its vowel but not of its
are numerals, and both equally liable to be uttered in consonant. Above all, one would expect the reflex of neuter
isolation.16 FEL, FELLIS ‘bile’, to behave identically to MEL, MELLIS in respect
In fact, the distinction between nove and dieci supports of diphthongization, but it does not: virtually everywhere in
the view that the Tuscan diphthongs are linked to metaph- modern Tuscany we find diphthongized fiele (cf. AIS 140, ALI
ony: the former lacks a metaphonizing environment, the 345), and the same is largely true in medieval texts. For
latter ends in -i. While the final -i of dieci is historically example, in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Florentine
problematic (one expects diece from DĔCEM), what matters is (OVI) we find only two instances of miele vs 154 of mele, while
simply that it does end in -i, and that there is evidence there are 60 attestations of fiele vs 17 of fele. Note, crucially,
across central and southern Italo-Romance for its having that while miele is exclusively a mass noun, fiele, in addition
done so historically. In most of Lazio, Abruzzo, Campania, to meaning ‘bile’, is also a count noun meaning ‘gall bladder’
and Basilicata, we find for ‘nine’ and ‘ten’ the type repre- (and one that really is used in the plural, especially in
sented by ˈnɔve vs ˈdiɛʃ i, (Serrone), ˈnoːvə, ˈðiːeʧ (Ripacan- medical remedies).
dida). In short, we find in much of upper southern Italy Space does not allow discussion of other old Tuscan
exactly the same asymmetry in respect of diphthongization examples, such as rota vs ruota ‘wheel’, fora vs fuori ‘outside’,
between the two numerals as we find in Tuscany, and in omo vs uomo in old Pisan, piove vs piuove ‘it is raining’.17
the south the difference can have no other explanation Suffice to say here that they all show a significantly high
than metaphony. Moreover, in those central Italian dialects incidence of non-diphthongization in words which origin-
(including Tuscan) where final /e/ and /i/ usually remain ally lacked metaphonizing environments. Tuscan excep-
distinct, there is a very strong correlation between tions to diphthongization show that the diphthong is most
the presence of final -i and the diphthong in ‘ten’: the type likely in forms whose paradigms originally possessed a
**ˈdɛʧi is nowhere to be seen in the AIS data for the relevant metaphonizing environment. The view that Tuscan SOSD
areas, absence of the diphthong systematically implying originates in metaphony, restricted ab origine to open
final /e/. The distinction between nove and dieci is exactly syllables, and that the spread of the diphthong in open syl-
consistent with the notion that the diphthong is originally lables is particularly facilitated by its prior presence
metaphonic. somewhere in the inflectional paradigm, is consistent with
The word for ‘honey’ (< *ˈmɛle < MEL) is a mass noun and these data.18
therefore not one that normally takes a plural. For lack of a
plural it is, in effect, an invariant having potential input to
diphthongization but lacking metaphonizing environments. 38.3.2 Northern Italy
Modern Tuscan dialects and the historical record show a
significant tendency for this word to lack the diphthong. In The distribution of SOSD in northern Italy is also strongly
medieval Tuscan texts (OVI), mele vastly outnumbers miele, indicative of a metaphonic origin. As in Tuscan, the diph-
and the proportion of mele to miele vastly exceeds that of, thongs are most robustly present where unstressed /i/ and
say, pede ‘foot’ to piede. In the modern dialects, ˈmɛle (AIS /u/ originally followed, rather less so elsewhere, but the
map 1159; ALI 342) is still widely attested (see Rohlfs
1966:103f.). The argument (Castellani 1980c:167; Russo and 17
These data demonstrably predate the elimination of the diphthong
after i found in modern Tuscan.
18
Further respects in which SOSD and metaphony resemble each other
16
Castellani claims (1980c:170) that nove is ‘less widespread, less popu- are that both tend to be blocked in proparoxytones (e.g. Tuscan pecora
lar’ than dieci, and that ‘legal, administrative (and also commercial) Latin’ ‘sheep’ < PĔCORA), regardless of syllable structure, and that both are occa-
bore on the pronunciation of the former rather than the latter (see also sionally ‘asymmetrical’ in applying to front rather than back vowels. See
Russo and Sánchez Miret 2009:187). This argument defies belief. Maiden (1988a; 1991a:128; 1995:37f.). See also Loporcaro (2011a:73).
652
DIPHTHONGIZATION
exceptions are more closely correlated with specifically and with (typically northern Italian) metaphony in closed
non-metaphonizing final vowels, and especially with /a/. syllables (aˈpɛrtu ‘open.MSG’, aˈpierti ‘open.FPL’, ˈgrɔssu ‘big.
In areas of Piedmont and Lombardy roughly bounded by MSG’, ˈgruossi ‘big.FPL’). Now palatal consonants have a pos-
Lake Maggiore, Cuneo, Turin, Milan, and Biella the environ- ition of articulation closest to that of /i/: closed syllable
ment for diphthongization appears to have spread from diphthongization happens in exactly that consonantal
high to ‘non-low’ vowels. While diphthongization of /ɛ/ environment most akin to the environment for metaph-
has become fairly general in stressed open syllables, that ony.21 In short, we have in northern Italo-Romance evi-
of /ɔ/ may be blocked before /e/ and is frequently blocked dence for diphthongization which begins in metaphonic
before /a/. Thus Valle Mesolcina (where /wo/ > /e/): fek environments in open syllables, and thence extends to
‘fire’ (< *ˈfɔku); nef ‘new’ (< *ˈnɔvu, i); mef or mɔf ‘move.3SG’ other open syllables preceding high vowels and/or to closed
(< *ˈmɔve); pjef or pjɔf ‘(it) rains’ (< *ˈplɔve); ˈʃkela or ˈʃkɔla syllables before palatal consonants or metaphonizing
‘school’ (< *ˈskɔla); ˈrɔda ‘wheel’ (< *ˈrɔta); ˈmɔla ‘whetstone’ vowels.22
(< *ˈmɔla); ˈnɔda ‘swims’ (< *ˈnɔta). The ALI data for Alpine Northern Italo-Romance also shows the role of morph-
Piedmont and Lombardy confirm this picture.19 In some of ology in the diffusion of the diphthong. It is surely no
these varieties the same developments percolate into closed coincidence that nearly all cases of blockage of diphthong-
syllables as well, but this time in what would originally ization before /a/ occur in feminine nouns which historic-
have been a metaphonic environment. Thus Mesolcina ally lacked alternating masculine forms containing
(Camastral 1959:123f.): kel ‘neck’ (< *ˈkɔllu), kern ‘horn’ potential metaphonizing environments; feminine adjectives
(< *ˈkɔrnu), sen ‘sleep’ (< *ˈsɔmnu); see further Maiden which alternate for gender (cf. AIS map 1579) usually show
(1988:12). Some Ladin dialects similarly show exceptionless the generalized diphthong. Although diphthongization of
diphthongization in open syllables in originally metapho- /ɔ/ is more extensive than that of /ɛ/ in the north, it may
nizing environments, almost exceptionless diphthongiza- be significant that, for example, at Villafalletto (Cuneo)
tion before unstressed /e/ and /o/, but frequent absence reflexes of *ˈmɛle ‘honey’ (AIS map 1159), *ˈfɛle ‘bile’ (AIS
of the diphthong before /a/ (cf. Heilmann 1955:58; Kramer map 140), and DECEM ‘ten’ (AIS map 288) lack signs of diph-
1977:76–9; Maiden 1988a:18). For similar examples in French thongization. These are precisely forms that would have
see Spore (1972:72–9). been, or would have tended to be, morphologically invari-
The scenario which these Romance varieties all suggest is ant.23 See Kramer (1977:76) and Heilmann (1955:58) for
one in which diphthongization of low mid vowels is origin- similar observations on Ladin.
ally triggered, as we have suggested for central Italy, in Reviewing SOSD in central and northern Italo-Romance,
open syllables by final unstressed vowels. Unlike what we we see that the phenomenon sits comfortably with a meta-
observe for central Italy, however, the triggering environ- phonic origin. There is evidence that metaphony of low mid
ment seems to have expanded from from high non-mid to vowels was originally limited to open syllables; thence, at
high vowels.20 I mentioned earlier that dialects with SOSD least in northern Italy, the diphthong appears to have pene-
do not necessarily limit diphthongization to open syllables. trated other stressed open syllables, initially where the final
Diphthongization tends to occur in closed syllables before unstressed vowel was non-low. In this process, morpho-
palatal consonants in various Gallo-Italian varieties with logical factors may have played a role, for words in which
SOSD (see Maiden 1987:48; 1988a:25). Spoerri (1918:400) /ɛ/ or /ɔ/ alternated paradigmatically with the metaphonic
and Sganzini (1928:157f.) indicate that metaphonic diph- diphthongs were more prone to diphthongization. Since in
thongization is specifically facilitated in the environment Tuscany we see signs of morphological, but not phono-
of an intervening palatal consonant. The dialect spoken in logical, intermediacy in the diffusion of the diphthong, it
Trecchina on the Gulf of Policastro (Basilicata), transplanted may be that the phonological relaxation on the conditioning
from northwestern Italy probably in the twelfth century environment originated in the north and that its effects, but
(Rohlfs 1941; Pfister 1991), significantly unites diphthong- not its causes, were imitated in Tuscany. In the north, too,
ization in closed syllables before palatal consonants (ˈviecca metaphonic diphthongization was able sometimes to pene-
‘old.FSG’, ˈtieʃ ʃə ‘weave.3SG.PRS’, ˈkuoʎə ‘gather.INF ’, ˈuoccə trate closed syllables. Overall, across Italy there is a
‘eye’) with SOSD (ˈcuovə ‘(it) rains’ < *ˈplɔve, ˈfuora ‘out’ <
*ˈfɔra, ˈnuova ‘new.FSG’ < *ˈnɔva, ˈtienə ‘hold.3SG.PRS’ < *ˈtɛne)
21
It may be, indeed, that as suggested e.g. by Barbato (2012b) for
Spanish, at the time of the diphthongization the consonants which subse-
19
See also Ascoli (1873:277); Salvioni (1886:202); Toppino (1905); Spoerri quently became palatals actually contained a front glide.
22
(1918); Maiden (1988a:14–19); Sánchez Miret (1998:195f.). For Sánchez See Maiden (1987) for discussion of the notion that the diphthongs
Miret’s interpretation of these facts, see also §38.2.3. were somehow ‘expelled’ from closed syllables in these varieties.
20 23
See also Rohlfs (1941:85). See, however, my observations above on *ˈfɛle in Tuscan.
653
MARTIN MAIDEN
seamless continuity and complementarity between meta- An obvious problem for Sánchez Miret is that in most
phonic diphthongization and SOSD.24 central and southern Italian dialects with metaphonic diph-
thongization, it occurs equally in open and closed syllables,
but not in open syllables in non-metaphonic environments.
38.3.3 Central and southern Italy If the diphthongization is a function of vowel duration, and
given that the vowels in stressed open syllables are system-
atically longer than in closed, then diphthongs in closed
It is generally accepted that in Italy metaphony generated
syllables before /i/ and /u/ should imply their presence in
opening diphthongs. Sánchez Miret (1998) dissents, how-
all stressed open syllables, regardless of the identity of the
ever, claiming that allegedly ‘metaphonic’ diphthongs are
following final vowel. This is simply not the case in central
a theoretically impossible output of metaphony and there-
and southern Italy. Sánchez Miret’s answer (1998:211)
fore not metaphonic. Rather, he believes, /je/ and /wo/ can
places unbearable weight on morphological analogy: having
arise from ‘spontaneous’ diphthongization due to vowel
become established in open syllables before /i/ and /u/, the
lengthening in stressed open syllables, and also that such
diphthongal alternants allegedly become ‘morphologized’
lengthening is correlated with the degree of closure of the
as markers of the morphosyntactic categories associated
following unstressed vowel, vowels tending to be longer
with these desinences (plural and masculine singular in
(hence more prone to diphthongize) before unstressed /i/,
nouns and adjectives, second person singular in verbs),
/u/ than before /a/.
and are correspondingly transferred into closed syllables
This view leads Sánchez Miret (1998:195f.) to an account
in these morphological environments. The model of the
of the blockage of open syllable diphthongization before /a/
(identical) morphological distribution of metaphonic alter-
in northern Italy very different from that proposed above.
nation of high mid vowels is also invoked. It is claimed, in
His hypothesis that final /a/ blocks ‘spontaneous’ open
effect, that morphological analogy has the power exactly to
syllable diphthongization rests, however, on two rather
replicate effects which elsewhere are purely the result of
inconclusive experimental studies on Spanish (1998:200f.).
regular sound change.
By his own admission, the experimental data available for
Now it is prima facie odd that a syllable structure appar-
modern Italian do not allow any clear conclusions on this
ently resistant to diphthongization should then so eagerly
issue, nor does he offer any relevant data for metaphonizing
host diphthongs merely under morphological pressure, and
dialects (still none are provided in Russo and Sánchez Miret
it is equally odd that such morphological pressure should
2009:166). The principal problem with Sánchez Miret’s
remain so exquisitely sensitive to the identity of the final
approach, however, is that it subjugates data to theory.25
unstressed vowel: singular *ˈdɛnte, plural *ˈdɛnti, ‘tooth’
It is indeed puzzling that an assimilatory process should
never become **ˈdjente, ˈdjenti, for example, on the analogy
produce a diphthong whose onset appears to be assimilated
of the type represented by singularˈljettu, plural ˈljetti, ‘bed’
to the vowel of the following syllable but whose continu-
(< *ˈlɛttu, *ˈlɛtti), even though both are masculine nouns,
ation fails to be raised to the same degree, and it is unsur-
and this is obviously because the diphthong remains dir-
prising that the theoretical models of assimilation that
ectly correlated with the presence of final /u/, not with
Sánchez Miret surveys do not predict this outcome. How-
morphosyntactic features. Sánchez Miret (1998:209f.) cites a
ever, the Italo-Romance facts proclaim clearly, and beyond
number of examples from central Italian dialects in which
peradventure, that a diphthong is a possible result of me-
morphological analogy does indeed lead to analogical cre-
taphony of low mid vowels. Diphthongization in metapho-
ation of metaphonic alternation, but such cases are pre-
nizing environments is, overwhelmingly, the exact
cisely sporadic and come nowhere near affecting the
counterpart of metaphonic raising of /e/ and /o/ (and in
entire lexicon. The incidence of diphthongization in closed
some places of /a/); it is also in a close complementary
syllables in central and southern Italy is of an utterly dif-
relationship, geographically and sometimes even within
ferent kind: it is systematic and shows none of the sporadi-
the same dialect, with undisputedly metaphonic raising of
city of occurrence, or insensitivity to phonological
/ɛ/ and /ɔ/ to /e/ and /o/ (see e.g. Loporcaro 2011b:132f.).
environment, that one would expect of a morphologically
driven change.
24 The notion that the diphthongs are introduced into
For the notion that metaphony and open syllable diphthongization
are organically linked by some kind of ‘metacondition’, see also Van closed syllables on the analogy of patterns of morphological
Coetsem and Buccini (1990). alternation associated with metaphony and open syllable
25
Russo and Sánchez Miret (2009:188f.) deny the metaphonic nature of diphthongization of low mid vowels makes the prediction
the diphthongs because what is involved ‘does not correspond to the
definition of metaphony’. A better conclusion might be that their ‘defin- that non-alternating, invariant words should tend not to
ition of metaphony’ is faulty. diphthongize in closed syllables. Actually, such words show,
654
DIPHTHONGIZATION
or do not show, diphthongization in central and southern of Agnone (Molise) some vowels are generally subject to
Italy as a strict function of the (original) identity of the final diphthongization in ‘prepausal’ position (cf. also Loporcaro
unstressed vowel. Compare the (morphologically invariant) 2011a:76f.), but not elsewhere, e.g. the diphthongization of
reflex of Lat. CĔNTUM ‘100’ with that of Lat. UĔNTUS ‘wind’, as stressed /i/ in ˈʃta mm a ssənˈdi ˈvuo̯nə, lit. ‘stand and listen
illustrated by AIS maps 304 and 399.26 Across central and to me well’ vs prepausal ˈʃta mm a ssənˈdojə ‘stand and
southern Italy there is a virtually perfect place-by-place listen to me’. Now, both the raised vowel and the diphthong
match, such that diphthongization in one of these words appear as reflexes of metaphony of low mid vowels, but the
implies diphthongization in the other and metaphonic rais- diphthong only appears prepausally (e.g. ɲɲa tə ˈsiə̯ndə
ing in one implies metaphonic raising in the other.27 Nor ‘how do you feel?’), the raised vowel occurring elsewhere
can we argue that, for some reason, ‘numerals’ in particular (e.g. n də ˈsendə ˈvuo̯nə ‘you don’t feel well’). Loporcaro
generally participate in the extension of the diphthong, concludes that ‘this can only mean that metaphony first
because there is no diphthongization in the reflex of SĔPTEM caused raising of proto-Romance /ɛ/ (as well as /ɔ/) to [e]
‘seven’, and there is only diphthongization in that of ŎCTO (and [o]), which subsequently diphthongized’. But it could
‘eight’ (AIS map 287) in parts of Calabria and Salento (see e.g. equally mean that both the monophthong and the diph-
Leonard 1978:70) where final /o/ raised to /u/ and generally thong were possible outputs of metaphony, and that the
triggered metaphony/diphthongization. In short, the distri- diphthong, to use Loporcaro’s own words, ‘got “caught”
bution of diphthongization in central and southern Italian [ . . . ] in the overall pattern of sensitivity to sentence stress’.
closed syllables shows a characteristically ‘metaphonic’ sen- It is possible, in fact, that the earliest stages of metaphony of
sitivity to the identity of the final vowel, not to particular low mid vowels should be viewed in terms of a kind of
morphological categories. tension between the input to, and the assimilatory teleology
A glance at the linguistic atlases (e.g. AIS, ALI) shows the of, metaphony: the process is triggered by maximally closed
diphthong in a relation of compact geographical comple- vowels and should correspondingly lead to maximal assimi-
mentarity with the raising to /e/ and /o/. Not only do lation, but this involves maximal deviation from the input.
neighbouring dialects show one or the other outcome, but The different outputs of metaphony of low mid vowels,
diphthong and raised vowel can coexist within the same principally the diphthongs and raising, are perhaps cognate,
dialect. In discussing the relationship between metaphonic alternative resolutions of this tension. For a further theor-
diphthongization and metaphonic raising, a prudent agnos- etical discussion of what might have been involved, see
ticism is in order about its earliest phases. What is clear, as Maiden (1991a:130-41).29
we have seen, is that there is a close connection between the
two effects, but it need not follow that one historically
precedes the other. Schürr (1970b:24f.) held that raising is
a secondary effect of metaphonic diphthongization; 38.4 Opening diphthongs across
Loporcaro (2011b:132f.) holds the reverse.28 In the dialect the Romance languages
26
Silvestri (2009:176f.) observes that in Verbicaro (Calabria) the word GSSD too is in principle interpretable as a more extreme
for ‘hundred’, like that for ‘ten’ and certain others, fails to show metaphony
extension of the metaphonic diphthong. The varieties show-
when used as an approximative classifier. It is hard to know whether such
forms really represent a historical failure of metaphony to operate (per- ing GSSD might be said originally to have had metaphonic
haps due to absence of phrasal stress) or, as is also possible, original diphthongization, and to have undergone a simplification in
metaphonic raising (rather than diphthongization) to /e/ and /o/ which
the conditioning environment for metaphony which ultim-
has subsequently been subject to local lowering of high mid vowels back to
/ɛ/ and /ɔ/. ately favoured the replacement of every instance of /ɛ/ and
27
Silvestri’s assertion (2009:179f.) that ‘in general’ southern Italian /ɔ/ by a diphthong. However Loporcaro (2011b:128–30)
reflexes of CĔNTUM lack a metaphonic vowel is not borne out by the AIS
identifies a number of objections to such a notion.
map, 304, which she cites, nor by the even more detailed coverage provided
by the (unpublished) ALI responses for this word (except for some points in Romanian shows both the inherited Romance diphthong
eastern and southern Salento).
28
/je/ but also a different, and more recent, diphthongization,
See also Merlo (1920:232), Weinrich (1958:41f.), Leonard (1978:206
affecting all stressed mid vowels, such that under certain
n27). The Italo-Romance treatment of the borrowed (non-metaphonic)
diphthong in the agentive suffix -iere (e.g. It. barbiere ‘barber’), borrowed
from Gallo-Romance, supports this view, for in parts of southern Italy with
metaphonic raising to /e/ this suffix equally shows /e/. Loporcaro that of the diphthong in the borrowed suffix, are generally identical,
(2011b:695) takes this as evidence that /e/ underlies the diphthong, but including in respect of monophthongization. See also LEI ‘barbiere’, s.v.
BARBA.
these facts actually suggest that the diphthong can become /e/. Compare
also, for southern Italy, AIS map 163 (piedi ‘feet’) showing metaphony, and 29
Barbato (2013a:336) tentatively revives an idea of Millardet’s (1910b)
map 244 showing reflexes of the agentive suffix -iere in the word for that the opening diphthong is a kind of dissimilation in metaphonizing
‘butcher’: from locality to locality, the outcome of metaphony of /ɛ/, and environments.
655
MARTIN MAIDEN
circumstances these become opening diphthongs ea (/e̯a/) Table 38.6 Opening diphthongs in Romanian
and oa (/o̯a/), in both open and closed syllables. This pat-
SG PL SG PL
tern, which causes prominent morphophonological alterna-
tion in inflectional paradigms, can be illustrated from des M des deşi porc porci
‘thick’ and porc ‘pig’ (Table 38.6). F deasă dese (older dease) poarcă poarce
Loporcaro (2011b:129) convincingly rebuts a common
view that these diphthongs are conditioned by the following
unstressed vowel, and argues that ‘since [e̯a] and [o̯a] devel-
oped by default, then the complementary context must
have been positively specified in the phonological rule Table 38.7 Romanian opening blocked by high vowels?
which must have accounted for the allophones prior to LOWERING , BLOCKED DIPHTHONGIZATION
diphthongization’. The clearly older diphthong /je/ is itself BY HIGH VOWELS ?
input to this process (yielding ia /ja/), as is shown by piatră
‘stone’ (PL pietre), F fiartă ‘boiled’ (M fiert ‘boiled’), a fact which NĬGRU(M) ‘black’MSG > *ˈnegru > *ˈnegru > ˈnegru
leads Loporcaro to conclude that the diphthong /je/ is prior NĬGRA(M) FSG > *ˈnegra > *ˈnɛgrə > ˈne̯agrə
to the application of metaphony. The problem is that it is
impossible to tell whether what we have in Romanian is
‘metaphony’ at all, at least if we understand the process as
an assimilatory raising of stressed vowels. It is equally pos- Table 38.8 Romanian opening and subsequent metaphonic
sible that proto-Romance stressed high mid vowels /e/ and closure of high vowels?
/o/ have been subject to a general, spontaneous process of LOWERING ? METAPHONIC DIPHTHONGIZATION
lowering, blocked where high vowels followed (Table 38.7). RAISING TRIGGERED
We cannot wholly exclude a ‘raising’ analysis, but it BY HIGH VOWELS ?
requires an additional purely hypothetical stage in which
original high mid vowels were all lowered, and then subject *ˈnegru > *ˈnɛgru > *ˈnegru > ˈnegru
to metaphony. An example is shown in Table 38.8. *ˈnegra > *ˈnɛgra > *ˈnɛgrə > ˈne̯agrə
Considering diphthongization in Ibero-Romance,
Loporcaro (2011b:693) also cites forms from conservative
varieties of Astur-Leonese, such as puirtu ‘port’ and fuibu
‘fire’ (cf. Cst. puerto, fuego), as evidence of the ‘original
Table 38.9 Metaphonic raising in Castilian
distinctness’ of metaphony from generalized diphthongiza-
tion, since the diphthong appears to be input to metaphonic SPECULUM > *esˈpɛil̯ o > espejo ‘mirror’
raising. What these data may show, however, is that the PECTUM > *ˈpɛi ̯to > pecho ‘chest’
metaphonic process persists for long enough, in these var- *ˈnɛrvju > *ˈnɛrvjo > nervio ‘nerve’
ieties, to be able to apply to its own output; they do not UENI > *ˈvɛni > ven ‘come!’
mean that the diphthongs from /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ could not OCULUM > *ˈɔ̯i ̯lo > ojo ‘eye’
originate in metaphony. After all, there are regions in the NOCTEM > *ˈnɔi ̯te > noche ‘night’
Romance world, such as southeastern Salento (Grimaldi
2003; Loporcaro 2011b:133f.), and Logudorese Sardinian
(Loporcaro 2011b:127), where metaphonic raising of low
mid vowels continues to be a live process which even carries Catalan, northern Italy, and Romansh) almost exactly the
over into local spoken Italian. same set of environments and conditions involve excep-
More problematic is Castilian, where before original tional diphthongization of low mid vowels in closed syl-
unstressed /i/, or yod (on this point see particularly lables (see also Lausberg 1965:§205) (Table 38.10).
Barbato 2012b), we find not the diphthong, but /e/ and /o/ So in much the same environments where Castilian
(cf. also Penny 2002:51–4) (Table 38.9). raised, French (with Occitan and Catalan) diphthongized.
These facts appear to suggest that metaphony, producing That the historically intervening stage in Gallo-Romance
raising of low mid vowels, must have operated prior to, and was indeed a diphthong is shown by Occitan, where the
therefore have removed the potential input to, diphthong- palatal environment is indeed the primary locus of diph-
ization of low mid vowels. The latter must, therefore, be thongization (lieit, cueit, uelh). The resemblance is unlikely to
independent of metaphony. Things look different, however, be coincidental, and it involves environments which are in
from a comparative perspective. In French (and Occitan, articulatory terms very similar to /i/. Indeed, in Occitan an
656
DIPHTHONGIZATION
Table 38.10 Diphthongization before original yod in French scenario according to which the diphthongs originated in
open syllables and then percolated into closed. If we follow
LĚCTUM > *ˈlɛi̯tu > *ˈljei̯t > lit ‘bed’ Dalbera-Stefanaggi (1991:542f.), Corsican imported from
*ˈnɛptja > *ˈnjetja > nièce ‘niece’ Tuscany the diphthongs (later monophthongized as /e/
TĔRTIAM > *ˈtjertja > tierce ‘third hour’ and /o/) in stressed open syllables, thereafter introducing
NŎCTEM > *ˈnɔi ̯te > *ˈnweit̯ > nuit ‘night’ them into closed syllables: e.g. ˈpedɛ ‘foot’ < ˈpjɛde, ˈlettu
ŎCULUM > *ˈɔilu > *ˈweʎu > œil ‘eye’ ‘bed’ < ˈlɛtto, ˈrota ‘wheel’ < ˈrwɔta, ˈkottu ‘cooked’ < ˈkɔtto.
additional locus of diphthongization (Lausberg 1965:§200)

appears to be /w/ or /u/ in immediate contact with the
vowel, in other words an environment similar, in articula- 38.5 Coincidence or historical unity?
tory terms, to /u/; cf. also Schürr (1970b:47a) for parallels in
old and modern Romagnol.30 We may have here yet At bottom, the issue is how much historical unity can be
another, cross-linguistic example of the correspondence inferred from a type of diphthongization widely observed
between diphthongs and raised vowels under metaphoniz- across the Romance languages. Are the resemblances
ing conditions. But precisely this observation should make merely coincidental? A common origin for SOSD and GSSD
us hesitate before ruling out a metaphonic origin for the in metaphony cannot be ruled out, and there are no insu-
Castilian diphthongs. One finds a strikingly similar situ- perable conceptual barriers to the notion of a process which
ation for reflexes of /ɛ/ in some varieties of Ladin (Kramer begins under metaphonizing conditions, then spreads into
1977:63), except that it is nearly the mirror image of what new phonological environments before ultimately being
one observes in Castilian: here we find the diphthong reanalysed as a wholesale replacement such that /ɛ/, /ɔ/ >
before palatals (and velars) and in metaphonizing envir- /je/, /wo/ across the board, a process probably facilitated in
onments (but also generally in open syllables), but a places by morphological analogy. Moreover, we have seen
monophthong /e/ elsewhere. Again, the impression that that, especially in the varieties of Italy, Switzerland, and
diphthong and monophthong are intimately linked facets France, such a notion is not only possible but fits well with
of the same phenomenon seems inescapable. Metaphony the patterning of exceptions to diphthongization. Such his-
can produce both diphthongs and raised vowels where the torical ‘unification’ of Romance languages in respect of the
input is a low mid vowel, and for Castilian it is at least opening diphthongs is, of course, a matter for empirical
conceivable that an initial effect was the diphthong— demonstration, not an inherently desirable end in itself,
subsequently subject to generalization to all low mid but I submit that it is plausible. If it is correct, then a
vowels—while, under persisting metaphonizing conditions, common (and presumably ancient) ancestry for the diph-
the diphthong further underwent monophthongization. thongs in metaphony would historically unify the Romance
See also Barbato (2012b). languages along another dimension: if Tuscan diphthong-
Finally, while GSSD is not generally found in the Italo- ization is indigenous and the diphthongs are of metaphonic
Romance area, Corsica does provide some evidence for the origin, then Tuscan loses its curious position among main-
land Italo-Romance dialects as the ‘odd man out’ that never
developed metaphony. On the other hand, varieties such as
30
Sánchez Miret (1998:223, 225) accounts for these facts in terms of Portuguese and Sardinian, which have metaphonic raising
(original) glides preceding the consonants and producing lengthening of of low mid vowels but no inherited opening diphthongiza-
the stressed vowel (thence diphthongization). But in e.g. Occitan we would
have to believe that the lengthening in these cases was greater than in open tion, are no longer so sharply differentiated from varieties
syllables (where no diphthongization occurs). having GSSD or SOSD.
657
CHAPTER 39
Palatalization
LORI REPETTI
39.1 Introduction palatalization of consonants—including velar stops

(§39.3.1) and non-dorsal consonants (§39.3.2)—before a
front vowel is addressed, and the morphological conse-
The term ‘palatalization’ refers to many different phono-
quences discussed (§39.3.3). The widespread palatalization
logical processes, including a change in place of articulation
processes involving consonant clusters will be addressed
of a consonant to a more palatal position (e.g. /t/ > /ʧ/) and
in §39.4, where I begin with a discussion of consonant + /l/
the acquisition of a secondary palatal articulation (such as
clusters (§39.4.1), and move on to palatalization involving
/t/ > /tj/). In the Romance tradition this term also includes
velar stops + coronal consonants (§39.4.2), and palataliza-
dental affrication. Dental affricates (/ʦ/ and /ʣ/) are found
tion of geminates /ll/ and /nn/ (§39.4.3). All Romance data
(or posited to have arisen) in the same contexts in which we
come from Rohlfs (1966), Maiden (1995; 2011b), Chițoran
find palatal consonants resulting from palatalization. Des-
(2002), Bateman (2007), and Loporcaro (2011b), unless
pite the fact that palatalization refers to a change in place of
otherwise noted.
articulation, and affrication to a change in manner, I follow
the Romance tradition and use the term ‘palatalization’ for
both since they take place in the same environment. In this
chapter I will take a historical perspective, although pro-
ductive palatalization processes will also be addressed. For a 39.2 Latin yod
comprehensive, cross-linguistic study of palatalization, see
Bhat (1978), Bateman (2007), Kochetov (2010); and for a Latin unstressed, prevocalic front vowels I and E were asyl-
recent account of palatalization within a generative frame- labic in classical poetry and were regularly pronounced as a
work, see Calabrese (2005). palatal approximant [j] (yod) in late Latin (Kent 1932:108;
Romance languages have a rich series of palatal conson- Elcock 1960:37; Allen 1965:51). In word-initial position, Latin
ants, including (but not limited to) [ʃ, ʒ, ʧ, ʤ, ʎ, ɲ] (see prevocalic I could also be syllabic, while in intervocalic
§25.2.3); however, Latin had only the palatal glide [j] (Kent position it was a geminate (Allen 1965:37-40; Väänänen
1932:60). One of the striking phonological changes that 1974:115; Posner 1996:111). This yod is the only palatal
Latin underwent in its evolution over the centuries is the segment in the Latin inventory, but it was involved in the
introduction of a new series of palatal(ized) consonants. introduction of a new series of palatal segments in all
Where did the palatal consonants come from? What did Romance languages. As early as the second century AD,
they evolve into? These are some of the questions that Latin yod was participating in various palatalization pro-
will be addressed below. While most studies of palataliza- cesses (Tekavčić 1974:151; Väänänen 1974:116).
tion are organized by ‘targets’ and ‘triggers’, I will follow the Consonant + yod clusters evolved into new palatal seg-
Romance tradition and focus on the sequences of segments ments [ʃ, ʒ, ʧ, ʤ, ʎ, ɲ], as well as dental affricates [ʦ, ʣ].
that participate in the palatalization process. These seg- Other novel fricatives such as [θ, ð, x] later developed in
ments/clusters are sometimes identified by the target (‘pal- some places from these palatal fricatives and (palatal and
atalization of velars’) and sometimes by the trigger dental) affricates. In Table 39.1 we see a sample of the new
(‘palatalization by yod’). segments introduced through palatalization of consonant +
This chapter is organized as follows. I begin by examin- yod clusters, often with intermediate stages, described in
ing cases of palatalization involving Latin yod, a pan- more detail below.
Romance process resulting in myriad changes in the In the following subsections, I address the treatment of
phonological system of all Romance varieties and affecting the various Latin consonant + yod clusters, as well as the
the morphological system as well (§39.2). In §39.3, the morphological consequences of palatalization by yod.
658 This chapter © Lori Repetti 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
PALATALIZATION
Table 39.1 New Romance segments While some claim that /ʦ/ derives from /ʧ/ through
depalatalization, Calabrese (2005:337f.) shows that this is
[ʧ] Sic. [ˈsatʧu] < SAPIO ‘know.1SG’ not necessarily the case.
[ʤ] OIt. [ˈfudʤa] < FUGIAT ‘flee.3SG.SBJV’ Spanish provides an interesting case study: the /tj/
[ʦ] Ro. [puʦ] < PUTEUM ‘shaft; well (N)’ and /kj/ clusters first developed into the affricates /ʦ/
[ʣ] It. [ˈmɛdʣo] < MEDIUM ‘half ’ and /ʧ/, which then merged to /ʦ/ (or /ʣ/ after
[ʃ] Tsc. [ˈbaʃo] < BASIUM ‘kiss’ intervocalic voicing) (Penny 1991:54). This affricate later
[ʒ] Fr. [ʁaʒ] < RABIEM ‘rage’ evolved into the dental sibilant [s̪], which is now real-
[ɲ] Pt. [ˈviɲɐ] < UINEAM ‘vineyard’ ized as [θ] or [s] in different varieties of Spanish (Penny
[ʎ] Cat. [ˈpaʎə] < PALEAM ‘straw’ 1991:86-90). Spanish dialects are often identified on the
[θ] Cst. [ˈbraθo] < BRACHIUM ‘arm’ basis of their pronunciation of the coronal fricative(s):
[ð] Ven. [ˈmɛðo] < MEDIUM ‘half ’ seseo dialects (parts of Spain, most of Latin America) are
[x] Sp. [ˈxweɣo] < IOCUM ‘game’ those which have only [s], ceceo dialects (parts of Anda-
lusia and Central America) pronounce coronal fricatives
with an apical articulation, while distinción (central and
39.2.1 /tj, kj/
northern parts of Spain) refers to a situation in which
both [s] and [θ] are present, the former being the
In terms of the chronology of the palatalization of the descendant of Latin /(s)s/ and the latter the result of
consonant + yod sequences, the cluster /tj/ was affected palatalization (Lapesa 1959; Harris 1969; Lloyd 1987;
first, followed by /kj/, as evidenced by the fact that mis- Penny 1991; Hualde 2005).
spellings of /tj/ occur earlier than those of /kj/, and by In many Romance varieties, the new segments were real-
cases of voicing of intervocalic /tj/ but not of /kj/ (Tuttle ized as long in intervocalic position. In fact, consonant
1986:319; Loporcaro 2011b:144). The two sequences were lengthening is attested with all consonant + /j/ clusters
regularly confused by the third century AD (Elcock 1960:66; (except /sj/). Evidence comes from modern Romance
Posner 1996:111); however, they have remained distinct in varieties which retain the geminate (2a),2 stressed vowel
many Alpine Romance varieties (Tuttle 1986). Palatalization evolution (2b), and the lack of intervocalic voicing (with
of these clusters is attested in all Romance languages. Both /kj/, but not with /tj/) (2c) (Loporcaro 2011b:144).
clusters first evolved into an affricate (/ʧ/ or /ʦ/), which
either remains to this day or changed into various fricatives (2) a. PLATEAM > It. [ˈpjatʦa] ‘square’, GLACIEM > It. [ˈgjatʧo]
illustrated below (1).1 ‘ice’;
b. Frignanese (northern Italy): Ŭ/Ō > [uː] in an open
(1) a. /tj/ > [ʧ] It. [ˈgotʧa] < *ˈgottja ‘drop’ syllable (SŌLEM > [suːl] ‘sun’), and [ɔ] in a closed
[ʦ] It. [ˈpotʦo] ‘well (N)’, Ro. [puʦ] ‘shaft’ < PUTEUM syllable (*ˈkuppa > [kɔp] ‘tile’); crucially Ŭ/Ō before
[ʣ] Cal. [ˈgradʣja] < GRATIAM ‘grace’ the segments in (1) evolve as if in a closed syllable:
[s] Mil. [pos] < PUTEUM ‘well (N)’ PUTEUM > [pɔs] ‘well (N)’ (Uguzzoni 1975; 1976);
[z] Pt. [rɐˈzɐ̃w̃] < RATIONEM ‘reason’ c. FACIO > Pt. [ˈfasu] (**[ˈfazu]) ‘make.1SG’.
[ʒ] Rmg. [staˈʒoŋ] < STATIONEM ‘season’
[θ] Cst. [ˈpoθo] < PUTEUM ‘well (N)’
Within the same language we sometimes find two differ-
b. /kj/ [ʧ] It. [ˈbratʧo] < BRACHIUM ‘arm’
ent evolutions of the same cluster (e.g. in Italian both
[ʦ] Ro. [braʦ] < BRACHIUM ‘arm’
pejorative suffixes -[ˈatʧo] and -[ˈatʦo] derive from Latin
[ʃ] Busto Arsizio (WLmb.) [ˈbraʃu] <
‑ACEUM) due to the influence of neighbouring dialects
BRACHIUM ‘arm’
(Maiden 1995:51-5).3
[s] Lmb. [bras] < BRACHIUM ‘arm’
[θ] Ven. [ˈjaθo] < GLACIEM ‘ice’ (Zamboni
1974:37)
1
A unique affricate, [tθ], is posited for medieval Sardinian, since many
words with original /kj/ and /tj/ are represented in medieval documents
with <th>: FACIO > fatho ‘do.1SG’, PLATEAM > platha ‘square’. Words derived from
2
these forms are pronounced today with an interdental fricative in Nuorese Some consonants in Italian are always realized as geminates in inter-
([ˈfaθo], [ˈpraθθa]), with a geminate /tt/ in Logudorese ([ˈfatto], [ˈpratta]), vocalic position: /ʦ, ʣ, ʃ, ɲ, ʎ/ (Chierchia 1986).
3
and with a dental affricate in Campidanese ([ˈfatʦu], [ˈpratʦa]) (Blasco See Thornton (1995) for a discussion of the /(t)t/ ~ /(t)ʦ/ alternation
Ferrer 1984a:78f., 272; Loporcaro 2011b:148). in Italian today.
659
LORI REPETTI
39.2.2 /gj, dj, j/ different sounds correspond to the [j] in (6e), including the
fricatives [ʃ] (in Buenos Aires) and [ʒ] (in parts of Andalusia,
Extremadura, and Latin America) (Hualde 2005).
Word-initial and intervocalic yod generally merged with
Various outcomes of the same cluster are often found within
Latin /gj/ and /dj/ (as well as /g/ + front vowels; see
an individual language. In Italian, we find both [ʤ]/[ʣ]
§39.3.1.1). Evidence for the early merger of /gj, dj, j/
([ˈradʤo] ‘ray’/[ˈradʣo] ‘rocket’ < RADIUM), the former being
comes from ancient (mis)spellings in which the three are
the native form and the latter either a Latinized pronunciation
confused, and modern varieties in which the heirs of the
or a borrowing from northern dialects (Rohlfs 1966:391). In
three are identical (Väänänen 1974:116; Loporcaro
Romanian, /gj, dj, j/ evolve into [z] (< /ʣ/) ([mjez] ‘core’ <
2011b:144f.). The first step of the merger resulted in /j/,
MEDIUM), and [ʒ] before a back vowel ([ʒɔk] ‘game’ < IOCUM). The
attested in modern Romance varieties such as Sicilian (3).4
different outcomes in Spanish (for example, [ˈjaθer] < IACERE ‘to
lie’, [ˈxweɣo] < IOCUM ‘game’, [peˈor] < PEIOREM ‘worse’) may be due
(3) Latin > Sicilian
to the influence of the following vowel, to the position of the
FUGIO > [ˈfuju] ‘flee.1SG’
segment relative to word stress, and/or to dialect borrowing
HODIE > [ˈɔji] ‘today’
(Menéndez Pidal 1962:124; Loporcaro 2011b:146).
IOCUM > [ˈjɔku] ‘game’ / PEIUS > [ˈpɛju] ‘worse’
The next step was that /j/ became an affricate, either [ʤ]
(4) or [ʣ] (5).5 39.2.3 /sj/
(4) Latin > Italian
Latin /sj/ evolved into a palatal fricative [ʃ] (Ro. [ˈroʃu]
FUGIAT > OIt. [ˈfudʤa] ‘flee.3SG.SBJV’
<ROSEUM ‘red.MSG’), which was voiced intervocalically in
HODIE > [ˈɔdʤi] ‘today’
some Romance varieties (Lig. [ˈbaʒu] < BASIUM ‘kiss’). In
IOCUM > [ˈʤɔko] ‘game’ / PEIUS > [ˈpɛdʤo] ‘worse’
Tuscan and some other central Italo-Romance varieties we
(5) Latin > Logudorese Sardinian (Blasco Ferrer 1986:38)6 find short /ʃ/ ([ˈbaʃo] < BASIUM ‘kiss’), along with a handful of
DEORSUM > [ˈʣɔsso] ‘down’ examples of intervocalic voicing of the palatal ([faˈʒano]
IANUARIUS > [ʣanˈnarʣu] ‘January’ < PHASIANUM ‘pheasant’). The voiceless/voiced outcomes
might be due to the influence of nearby northern dialects
Numerous changes affected these affricates, which deaf- which regularly voiced intervocalic voiceless consonants, or
fricated to [ʒ] (6a) and [z] (6b), eventually giving rise to [x] to a Tuscan trend towards sporadic (not generalized) inter-
(6c), [ð] (6d), and [j] (6e). vocalic voicing (Rohlfs 1966:403-6; Castellani 1980d; Maiden
1995:51, 61-3; Aski 2001). The Tuscan outcomes (short /ʃ/
(6) /gj, dj, j/ > a. [ʒ] Cat., Ro. [ʒɔk], Pt. [ˈʒogu] < IOCUM and /ʒ/) are adapted into Italian as short affricates (/ʧ/ and
‘game’ /ʤ/): Tsc. [ˈbaʃo] ~ It. [ˈbaʧo] ‘kiss’; Tsc. [faˈʒano] ~ It. [fa
b. [z] Gen. [ˈmɛzo] ‘half ’, Ro. [mjez] ˈʤano] ‘pheasant’. This Tuscan ~ Italian difference is due to
‘core’ < MEDIUM the mapping of Tuscan short palatal fricatives in inter-
c. [x] Sp. [ˈxweɣo] < IOCUM ‘game’ vocalic position to Italian affricates, but Tuscan long palatal
d. [ð] Ven. [ˈmɛðo] < MEDIUM ‘half ’ fricatives were faithfully maintained: Tsc. = It. [ˈpeʃ ʃe] ‘fish’
(Zamboni 1974:39) ([ʒʒ] does not exist in Tuscan) (Rohlfs 1966:403-7; Maiden
e. [j] Sp. [jaˈθer] < IACERE ‘to lie’ 1995:50f.).
In some Ibero- and Gallo-Romance languages, metath-
The Spanish glide [j] in (6e) derives from the fricative /ʃ/ esis of the /sj/ cluster gave rise to /js/ (MA(N)SIONEM > OFr.
< /ʒ/ (Lloyd 1987), and across the Spanish-speaking world, maison ‘house’). The glide often assimilated to the vowel,
as in ModFr. [mɛˈzɔ~] ‘house’, Sp. [meˈson] ‘inn’. In Portu-
guese, the metathesized glide and a palatal fricative are
4
The /j/ found in modern Romance varieties might have had an present ([ˈkejʒu] < CASEUM ‘cheese’) although the chron-
uninterrupted history from Latin, or it might have evolved from an inter- ology of changes is still hotly debated (Rini 1991;
mediate affricate (Loporcaro 2011b:144f.).
5
Loporcaro (2011b:146) posits an intermediate stage in which /j/
Torreblanca 1992).
became [ɟ] in some dialects (attested today in the dialect of Soglio, Val In some languages (the south of Italy and Sardinia, with
Bregaglia, Switzerland: IUNIUM ‘June’ > [ɟyɲ]), which subsequently evolved lexical remnants in central Italo-Romance varieties), palat-
into [ʤ].
6
The affricate [ʥ] is also found in some Logudorese dialects in initial
alization of /sj/ is absent; instead the glide was deleted:
position, and it is generalized intervocalically (Blasco Ferrer 1988a:89). [ˈkasu] < CASEUM ‘cheese’ (Rohlfs 1966:406-9).
660
PALATALIZATION
39.2.4 /pj, bj, vj/ As with other clusters, some languages have more than
one outcome. For example, in French we find the usual
/ʃ/ ([saʃ] < SAPIAT ‘know.3SG.SBJV’) alongside the less frequent
Palatalization of labials is relatively rare cross-linguistically.
/ʒ/ ([saʒ] < *ˈsapju ‘wise’) which both derive from /pj/.
Bateman (2007) surveys over 100 languages and establishes
an implicational hierarchy of palatalization whereby palat-
alization of labials depends on coronal and dorsal palatal-
ization. Hock (2006) argues for a constraint against
palatalized labials, and he catalogues strategies used to 39.2.5 Sonorant consonant + /j/
avoid palatalized labials, including no change (or gemin-
ation of the consonant preceding yod)7 (7a, 8a), glide The sonorant consonants were also affected by a following
metathesis (with optional assimilation of the metathesized yod. /nj/ and /lj/ clusters were palatalized to [ɲ] (UINEAM >
glide to the preceding vowel) (7b, 8b), and change to a (non- Fr. [ˈviɲə], Sp. [ˈbiɲa], Cat. [ˈviɲə], Pt. [ˈviɲɐ], It. [ˈviɲɲa]
palatalized) labial + palatal consonant (7c, 8c).8 These strat- ‘vineyard’) and [ʎ] (PALEAM > Cat. [ˈpaʎə], Pt. [ˈpaʎɐ], It.
egies are all found in Romance. [ˈpaʎʎa] ‘straw’), respectively. These palatal sonorants may
have undergone further changes to become an affricate, a
(7) /pj/ a. [pj] Sp. [ˈapjo] < APIUM ‘celery’, It. [ˈsappja] < fricative, a nasalized glide, or /j/, which was deleted in some
SAPIAT ‘know.3SG.SBJV’ cases (11).
b. [jp] Pt. [ˈsajbɐ] < SAPIAT ‘know.3SG.SBJV’
c. [pʧ] OPrv. [ˈsapʧa] < SAPIAT ‘know.3SG.SBJV’ (11) /nj/ > [ɲ] > [ʤ] > [ʒ] Fr. [lɛ̃ʒ] < LINEUM ‘linen’
(Lausberg 1965:§473; Paden 1998:158) [j̃] Pt. [ˈvij̃ɐ] < UINEAM ‘vineyard’
(Shosted and Hualde 2010;
(8) /bj, vj/ a. [bj] Sp. [ˈraβja], It. [ˈrabbja] < RABIAM Perini 2002:13)
‘anger’ [j] > [Ø] Ro. [ˈvie] < UINEAM
b. [jb]/[jv] Pt. [ˈrajvɐ] < RABIAM ‘anger’, Vnz. ‘vineyard’
[ˈgeba] < CAUEAM ‘cage’ /lj/ > [ʎ] > [ʒ] > [ʃ] > [x] Sp. [ˈpaxa] < PALEAM
c. [bʤ] Borno (Brescia) [bʤulk] < *bjulk ‘straw’
‘yokel’, Egd. [ˈrabʤa] < RABIEM ‘anger’, [j] Fr., Ro. [paj] < PALEAM ‘straw’
OPrv. [robʤe] < RUBEUM ‘red’ (Paden
1998:157) The fate of /rj/ is slightly less complicated. In most
Romance varieties the cluster underwent metathesis, with
Latin labial plus yod clusters correspond to palatal occasional coalescence of the glide and the preceding
consonants in some Romance languages: [ʧ, ʃ] (9) and vowel (12a), while in Italo-Romance varieties we find
[ʤ, ʒ] (10). While this may appear to be a case of labial loss of the rhotic element (12b), or loss of the /j/ (12c),
palatalization, there is evidence (medieval spellings, with cases of gemination of the /r/ (12d) (Maiden
vowel evolution, cognate forms in nearby varieties) 1995:55f.).
that the modern palatal consonants arose from inter-
mediate structures such as those in (7c) and (8c) (12) /rj/ a. [jr] AREAM> Pie. [ˈajra] ‘threshing floor’, FER-
(Bateman 2007). RARIU> Sp. [erˈrero] ‘blacksmith’
(9) /pj/ a. [ʧ] Sic. [ˈsatʧu] < SAPIO ‘know.1SG’ b. [j] MORIO(R) > Tsc. [ˈmwɔjo] ‘die.1SG’
b. [ʃ] Fr. [saʃ] < SAPIAT ‘know.3SG.SBJV’ c. [r] MORIO(R) > Laz. [ˈmɔro] ‘die.1SG’
d. [rr] MORIO(R) > NCal. [ˈmɔrrə] ‘die.1SG’
(10) /bj, vj/ a. [ʤ] Sic. [ˈgadʤa] < CAUEAM ‘cage’
b. [ʒ] Fr. [ʁaʒ] < RABIEM ‘anger’ The different evolution of /rj/ vs the other coronal son-
orant consonants is not surprising, since rhotic palataliza-
tion is cross-linguistically uncommon (Hall 2000; Hock
2006:438; Bateman 2007).
As is often the case, Sardinian exhibits unique changes.
Yod following a coronal sonorant was affricated in Sardin-
7
/v/ became a stop when lengthened: /vj/ > [bbj] (Rohlfs 1966:386). ian varieties, often leaving the sonorant consonant intact
8
The process exemplified in (7c, 8c) is also found in cases of a labial
consonant plus the /j/ that resulted from diphthongization: Mdv. [ˈpʧeli] <
(except in /lj/ clusters), as illustrated in the following Sar-
PELLEM ‘skin’, [ˈbʤini] < BENE ‘well (ADV)’ (cf. §8.2.2). dinian data (Martelli 1989).
661
LORI REPETTI
(13) /nj/ UINEAM > Log. [ˈbinʣa], Cpd. [ˈbinʤa] front vowel (see §39.3.1) after the root /fug/ in all forms of
‘vineyard’ the present indicative; therefore, we expect the correspond-
/lj/ MULIEREM > Log.-Nuo. [muˈʣɛre] ‘wife’ ing Italian forms to contain a palatalized consonant [ʤ].
/rj/ FEBRUARIUM > Log. [freˈarʣu], Cpd. [friˈarʤu] However, a non-etymological [g] was introduced into the
‘February’ paradigm, creating a [ʤ]/[g] alternation that mirrors
the pattern described above. Namely, the first singular
Finally, palatalization of /m/ is rare for a number of and third plural forms have a palatal consonant [ʤ] in
reasons: sonorant palatalization is less common than the root, while the other forms have a non-palatal (non-
obstruent palatalization, labial palatalization is rare, and etymological) root consonant [g] (Maiden 2011b:219; also
/mj/ is an uncommon cluster. In most Romance varieties, §43.2.3).
the cluster was unchanged (or underwent gemination)
(14a), metathesized (14b), or lost the palatal element (14c).
Interesting are the cases in which the modern reflexes have 39.3 Consonant + front vowel
a palatal segment: [mɲ] (14d), [ɲ] (14e), [mʤ] (14f), [ṽʒ]
(< [nʤ]) (14g) (Lausberg 1965:§478; Bateman 2007).9 The
palatalization
forms in (14d,f) are similar to the cases of the labial + /j/
clusters illustrated in (7c) and (8c), in which the yod under- In this section I discuss palatalization of consonants before a
goes palatalization, leaving the labial contact intact. front vowel. I begin with velar stops before a front vowel
(§39.3.1), followed by non-dorsal consonants + front vowel
(14) /mj/ a. [mj] Sp. [benˈdimja], It. [venˈdemmja] < UIN- (§39.3.2), and I review the morphological effects of this
DEMIAM ‘grape harvest’ process in §39.3.3.
b. [jm] Pt. [vĩˈdimɐ] < UINDEMIAM ‘grape harvest’
c. [m] Vnz. [venˈdema] < UINDEMIAM ‘grape 39.3.1 Velar stop + front vowel
harvest’
d. [mɲ] Occ. [venˈdemɲa] < UINDEMIAM ‘grape
The velar stops /k, g/ immediately followed by a front
harvest’ (Jensen 1999:284)
vowel underwent palatalization in about the fifth century
e. [ɲ] Lig. [venˈdeɲa] < UINDEMIAM ‘grape har-
AD in nearly all of Romance (Väänänen 1974:118f.). I discuss
vest’, Sic. [ˈsiɲɲa] < SIMIAM ‘monkey’
/gi, ge, gɛ/ and /ki, ke, kɛ/ sequences in §39.3.1.1 and
f. [mʤ] Egd. [vinˈdemʤa] < UINDEMIAM ‘grape
§39.3.1.2, respectively, followed by /kw, gw/ + front vowel
harvest’
(§39.3.1.3), and velar stops before Latin A (§39.3.1.4).
g. [ṽʒ] Fr. [sɛ̃ʒ] < SIMIUM ‘monkey’
39.3.1.1 /gi, ge, gɛ/

39.2.6 Morphological consequences A chronology of the changes undergone by /gi, ge, gɛ/ is
of palatalization by yod similar to that described in §39.2.2 for /gj, dj, j/. In fact, in
most Romance varieties the outcomes of /g/ + front vowels
Some morphological consequences of palatalization by yod merged with those of /gj, dj, j/ (although the latter series
can be found in the Romance verb system (see §27.8). Since palatalized first; Väänänen 1974:117). For example, in
many Latin verbs contained a root-final yod in the first French all of these clusters resulted in [ʒ] (15), and in
person singular form or in the first person singular and Neapolitan [j] (except in strengthening contexts, where we
third plural forms of the present indicative, it is not sur- find [ggj]) (16).
prising to find Romance roots which underwent palataliza-
tion in these forms only. For example, OIt. [ˈsɛdʤo] < SEDEO (15) Latin > French
‘sit.1SG’ with a palatal consonant in the root vs [ˈsjɛdi] < SEDES GENTEM > [ʒɑ̃] ‘people’ DIURNUM > [ʒuʁ] ‘day’
‘sit.2SG’ without one (Maiden 1995:133). What is surprising is GENESTAM > [ʒəˈnɛ] ‘broom’ IOCUM > [ʒø] ‘game’
that verbs with a different etymology develop root allo- (16) Latin > Neapolitan
morphs distributed in a way that mirror these paradigms. GENERUM > [ˈjɛnnərə] ‘son-in-law’ HODIE > [ˈɔjə] ‘today’
For example, the Latin verb FUGIO, FUGERE ‘flee’ had a yod or GENESTAM > [jəˈnɛstə] ‘broom’ FUGIO > [ˈfujə] ‘flee.1SG’
9
The palatalized bilabial nasal in northern Transylvania and part of In some varieties such a merger did not take place. In
northern Moldova is [mnj] (Bateman 2007:109f.). Romanian, /gi, ge, gɛ/ sequences resulted in an affricate
662
PALATALIZATION
[ʤ], while /gj, dj, j/ generally evolved into a fricative [z] or In most of Romance, the outcomes of /ki, ke, kɛ/
[ʒ] (see §39.2.2) (17). It should be noted that the eastern sequences merged with the outcomes of /kj, tj/, although
Romance palatalizations are thought by some to be histor- the latter had undergone palatalization earlier than the
ically independent of and subsequent to the western former (Väänänen 1974:119). For example, we find [θ] in
Romance palatalizations (see e.g. Skok 1926). In Raeto- European Spanish and [ʧ] in Italian in both contexts (see
Romance varieties, the former are now pronounced with a §39.2.1).
fricative [ʒ], and the latter with a glide [j] (18) (Loporcaro
2011b:147). (20) Latin > European Spanish
PACEM > [paθ] ‘peace’ BRACHIUM > [ˈbraθo] ‘arm’
(17) Latin > Romanian CAELUM > [ˈθjelo] ‘sky’ PUTEUM > [ˈpoθo] ‘well (N)’
GENERUM > [ˈʤinere] ‘son-in-law’ MEDIUM > [mjez] ‘core’
LEGEM > [ˈleʤe] ‘law’ IOCUM > [ʒɔk] ‘game’ (21) Latin > Italian
PACEM > [ˈpaʧe] ‘peace’ BRACHIUM > [ˈbratʧo] ‘arm’
(18) Latin > Raeto-Romance (lower Engadine variety of CAELUM > [ˈʧɛlo] ‘sky’ *ˈguttja > [ˈgotʧa] ‘drop’
Sent)
GENERUM > [ˈʒɛndɐr] ‘son-in-law’ DEORSUM > [jo] ‘down’ However, in Romanian they did not merge. We find
GELARE > [ʒɛˈlar] ‘to freeze’ IACET > [ˈjaʒɐ] ‘lie.3SG’ /kj/ > [ʦ] (FACIEM > [ˈfaʦə] ‘face’), but /ki/ > [ʧ] (CIUITATEM >
[ʧeˈtate] ‘castle’), supporting the proposal that /kj/
Palatalization of velar stops before a front vowel is palatalized earlier than /ki, ke, kɛ/, if we assume
attested in all Romance languages except some varieties of that [ʦ] evolved from [ʧ] (Posner 1996:113; see also Skok
Sardinian (19) and Dalmatian (see §§9.2, 39.3.1.2) (Elcock 1926).
1960:67; Väänänen 1974:118; Loporcaro 2011b:147). It fol- As with /gi, ge, gɛ/, palatalization of /k/ + front vowel
lows that Sardinian /gj, dj, j/ sequences did not evolve in sequences is attested in all Romance languages except some
the same way as /g/ + front vowels. varieties of Sardinian (22) and Dalmatian (see below). In
Sardinian the heirs of /ki, ke, kɛ/ did not merge with
(19) Latin > Logudorese-Nuorese Sardinian those of /kj, tj/ (see n. 1).
GENERUM > [ˈgɛnneru] ‘son-in- IUGUM > [ˈjuvu] ‘yoke’
law’ (22) Latin > Logudorese-Nuorese Sardinian
GELARE > [geˈlare] ‘to freeze’ DEORSUM > [ˈjɔʃ ʃɔ] CENAM > [ˈkɛna] ‘dinner’
‘down’ CENTUM > [ˈkɛntu] ‘hundred’
CIMICEM > [ˈkimige] ‘bed bug’
The forms in (19) suggest that palatalization of /gj, dj, j/
sequences preceded palatalization of /g/ plus front vowel; Dalmatian (in particular the dialect of Veglia) appears to
however, the Raeto-Romance data (18) might suggest the confirm Bateman’s (2007:62-7) claim that high front vowels
opposite order (Loporcaro 2011b:147). (Consonant + /gi, ge, are the best palatalization triggers. Palatalization of velar
gɛ/ sequences are discussed in the next section.) stops is attested before [i] ([ˈʧiŋko] < *ˈkinkwe < QUINQUE
‘five’; [ˈspiraʧ] < ASPARAGI ‘asparagus’) and [y] ([ʧol] < *kyl <
CULUM ‘buttocks’), but not before other front vowels ([ˈkajna]
39.3.1.2 /ki, ke, kɛ/ < CENAM ‘dinner’, [karˈvjale] < CEREBELLA ‘brains’) (Ive 1886;
There is an interesting asymmetry in the evolution of Väänänen 1974:118; Bartoli 2000:429–31).10
voiced vs voiceless velar stops before front vowels. The Consonant + velar stop + front vowel sequences often
voiceless velars resisted palatalization longer than the show a unique set of changes. In Italian, for example, velar
voiced ones. Evidence comes from Latin borrowings into stop + front vowel sequences result in a palatal affricate
Germanic and Celtic in which the voiced velar is palatalized (LEGEM > [ˈledʤe] ‘law’, PACEM > [ˈpaʧe] ‘peace’), and this is
but the voiceless one is not, and from medieval spellings what we generally find when these sequences are preceded
(Loporcaro 2011b:147f.). by a consonant (23a); however, there are some deviations
The /ki, ke, kɛ/ sequences initially evolved in Romance from this pattern (23b) (Rohlfs 1966: 362f., 377-9; Maiden
languages in one of two ways: through the formation either 1995:58f.).
of a palatal affricate [ʧ] (CERUUM > It. [ˈʧɛrvo] ‘deer’) or of a
dental affricate [ʦ] (CERUUM > OFr. /ʦɛrf/ > ModFr. [sɛʁ] 10
In other Romance varieties, rounded front mid vowels are also
‘deer’). The issue of whether one affricate changed into involved in palatalization: Bagolino (Brescia) *kɔre > *kœr > [ʧœr] ‘heart’;
the other is still unresolved (Posner 1996:113). cf. CULUM > *kyl > [ʧyl] ‘buttocks’ (Tuttle 1997a:30).
663
LORI REPETTI
(23) (a) velar stop > (b) velar stop >

palatal affricate other outcomes
39.3.1.3 /kw, gw/ + front vowel
/rg/ + front ARGENTUM > – Sequences involving a velar stop plus labiovelar glide (/kw,
vowel [arˈʤɛnto] ‘silver’ gw/) followed by a front vowel also underwent palataliza-
/rk/ + front CARCEREM > – tion in some Romance varieties. This is often referred to
vowel [ˈkarʧere] ‘prison’ as a ‘secondary palatalization’ since it occurred after the
/lg/ + front INDULGERE > COLL(I)GERE > loss of the labiovelar element (/kwi/ > /ki/ > /ʧi/). These
vowel [inˈdulʤere] [ˈkɔʎʎere] sequences did not undergo palatalization in most Romance
‘to indulge’ ‘to gather’ languages: witness the various reflexes of the Latin relative/
/lk/ + front DULCEM > [ˈdolʧe] – interrogative paradigm QUI- [kwi]- (e.g. Fr. qui/que [ki/kə]
vowel ‘sweet’11 ‘who/that, what’, It. chi/che [ki/ke] ‘who/that, what’, Sp.
/ng/ + front EXPINGERE > EXPINGERE > quién/que, qué [kjen/ke] ‘who/that, what’). However, we do
vowel [ˈspinʤere] [ˈspeɲɲere] find some lexical items in which the /kw/ sequence was
‘to push’ ‘to turn off ’ reduced very early and therefore did participate in wide-
/nk/ + front CANCELLUM > – spread Romance palatalization (It. [ˈʧiŋkwe], Sp. [ˈθiŋko/
vowel [kanˈʧello] ‘gate’ ˈsiŋko], Pt. [ˈsiŋku], Fr. [sɛ̃k]< *ˈkinkwe < QUINQUE ‘five’).
More generalized palatalization of these sequences is
The unexpected forms in (23b) all involve a sonorant con- attested in Romanian, Dalmatian, southeastern varieties of
sonant plus a voiced velar: /lg, ng/ + front vowel (note that Italo-Romance, Sicilian, Sardinian, Friulian, and Romansh
/rg/ + front vowel sequences evolve as expected). Clusters (e.g. QUI- > Dal., Pug., Lad., Srd. [ʧi] ‘who’, Ro. [ʧe] ‘what’;
involving /lg/ + front vowel that underwent the expected Wolf 2012).
palatalization, such as INDULGERE > [inˈdulʤere] ‘to indulge’,
are not considered to be part of the native lexicon (Rohlfs
1966:377), while those that resulted in a palatal lateral, such as
39.3.1.4 Velar stop + A
COLL(I)GERE > [ˈkɔʎʎere] ‘to gather’, are indigenous forms. I have In some Gallo-Romance varieties we find palatalization
found no explanation for this anomalous pattern. /ng/ + front of velar stops before Latin A. This process is evident in
vowel sequences usually follow the expected evolution, northern Gallo-Romance (although not Picard and Norman
resulting in [nʤ]; however, there is one exceptional form in dialects), Raeto-Romance, and formerly in northern Italo-
Italian, [ˈspeɲɲere] ‘to turn off ’ < EXPINGERE, possibly due to the Romance (OVnz. chian < CANEM ‘dog’) although today only
influence of related varieties in which the palatal nasal is the remnants survive in place names (Vic. Chiampo [ˈʧãɱpo] <
usual outcome (old Florentine, eastern Tuscan, and most CAMPUM ‘field’) and individual lexical items (Valfurva, upper
of southern Italo-Romance), as in OFlo. [ˈpjaɲɲere] ‘to cry’ Valtellina [ˈcau̯ra] < CAPRAM ‘goat’; Tuttle 1997a:29; Loporcaro
< PLANGERE (cf. It. [ˈpjanʤere]) (Maiden 1995:58). 2011b:149). We can assume that the low vowel had an
Latin words with /sk/ + front vowel sequences underwent anterior articulation in those varieties which exhibit palat-
the usual palatalization process, but the palatal feature of alization in this context. Furthermore, this process must be
the affricate spread to the preceding /s/: CRESCERE > *ˈkre- more recent than palatalization of velar stops before high
sʧere > *ˈkreʃʧere. The cluster then underwent assimilation: and mid front vowels, given its limited distribution and
[ˈkreʃʃere] ‘to grow’ (Maiden 1995:59). Latin words of Bateman’s (2007:64) implicational hierarchy of palataliza-
learnèd origin retain the velar stop (SCHEDAM > [ˈskɛda] tion triggers: ‘if lower front vowels trigger palatalization,
‘card’), as do Longobard loan words ([ˈzgɛrro] < Lgb. skarrjo then so will higher front vowels.’
‘captain’, [skerˈʦare] < Lgb. skerzon ‘to joke’; note that the In this context, the velar stop affricated to [ʧ]/[ʤ] and
/s/ has the same voicing as the following consonant). then de-affricated to [ʃ]/[ʒ] in both stressed and
Palatalization of velars is productive in varieties of unstressed position. The affricate is attested today in
spoken French, such as Acadian, where we find palataliza- some varieties of Friulian (24) (but not in central and
tion of voiceless and voiced velars before front vowels, with northern Friulian, where we find [c]; Francescato 1966),
varying degrees of regularity: qui [ʧi] ‘who’, anguille [ãˈʤij] and the old French affricate is fossilized in some borrow-
‘eel’ (Lucci 1972:95-101).12 ings into English (e.g. chant, jamb), while modern French
exhibits a fricative (25).
11
Literary forms such as [ˈdolʦe] are due to the early influence of (24) Latin > Friulian
French and Provençal literature (Rohlfs 1966:378).
12
See Krämer (2009:56-68) for a report on the productivity of velar CANTAS > [ˈʧantis] ‘sing.2SG’ CABALLUM > [ʧaˈval] ‘horse’
palatalization in modern Italian. GAMBAM > [ˈʤambe] ‘leg’ GALLINAM > [ʤaˈline] ‘hen’
664
PALATALIZATION
(25) Latin > French ‘say.2SG’) while the first person singular form does not
CANTAS > [ʃɑ̃t] ‘sing.2SG’ CABALLUM > [ʃəˈval] ‘horse’ ([zik] < DICO ‘say.1SG’), a common pattern in Romance lan-
GAMBAM > [ʒɑ̃b] ‘leg’ LARGAM > [laʁʒ] ‘wide.FSG’ guages (Maiden 2011b).
Front vowel palatalization also plays a morphological
role in the nominal system of most of Romance. Languages
39.3.2 Non-dorsal consonant + front vowel with velar palatalization before A display alternations in
masculine/feminine pairs, in which the final /o/ of the
masculine form did not trigger palatalization of the preced-
Coronal consonants followed by a front vowel, in some
ing root consonant, while the feminine suffix /a/ did: Fr.
cases, resulted in a palatal consonant. There is a handful
[sɛk]/[sɛʃ] < SICCUM/SICCAM ‘dry.M/FSG’. In Romance morpho-
of examples of Latin /si/ which palatalized to Italian [ʃ], as
logical systems that mark number in the nominal paradigms
in SIMIAM > [ˈʃimmja] ‘monkey’, UESSICAM > [veʃˈʃika] ‘bladder’
with a vowel (/i/ MPL and /e/ FPL, as opposed to /s/ PL), velar
(but there are numerous non-palatalized forms: [si] < SIC
palatalization is rare (see §42.3; Maiden 2011b:220f.). For
‘yes’, [siˈnistra] < SINISTRAM ‘left’). We also find palatalization
example, in Italian we generally find non-palatalized singu-
of /lli/ (and /li/) sequences (see §39.4.3 for more on palat-
lar/plural alternations like [ˈbaŋko]/[ˈbaŋki] ‘desk/desks’,
alization of geminate /ll/) in old and modern Tuscan var-
with a handful of pairs like [aˈmiko]/[aˈmiʧi] ‘friend.M/
ieties (CABALLI > OSen. cavagli ‘horses’, CAPILLI > ModCrt. capeglie
friends.M’, and no cases of palatalization with feminine
‘hair’), as well as in other central and southern varieties of
plural /e/: [aˈmika]/[aˈmike] (**[aˈmiʧe]) ‘friend.F/friends.F’
Italo-Romance (Rohlfs 1966:326-8). In Italian, the palatal
(although in old Italian we find very rare palatalized fem-
lateral resulting from /lli/ is found in isolated forms, such
inine plural forms like amice, where <ce> generally repre-
as [ˈeʎʎi] ‘he’ and [ˈbɛʎʎi] ‘beautiful.MPL’ (used prevocalic-
sents [ʧe]; Rohlfs 1968:45).
ally and in certain other phonological contexts), while in
Only in Romanian is velar palatalization in noun para-
other forms the palatal lateral (from /li/) may have devel-
digms regular, triggered by inflectional suffixes /i/ MPL
oped into a glide and been deleted (*ˈvwɔʎʎi > [vwɔj]
and /e/ FPL. These vowels palatalize the preceding velar
‘want.2SG’; 1995:59), as it did throughout northern Italy
consonant resulting in a palatal affricate; the /i/ is de-
(CAPILLI > [kaˈvej] ‘hair’, GALLINAM > [gaˈina] ‘hen’; Rohlfs
syllabified leaving a secondary palatal articulation on the
1966:327). (Note also Romanian [kaj] < CABALLI ‘horses’,
affricate, while /e/ is retained: [koˈleʤj]/[koˈleʤe] ‘col-
[gəˈinə] < GALLINAM ‘hen’.)
leagues.M/colleagues.F’ (cf. [koˈleg]/[koˈlegə] ‘colleague.M/
Despite its limited productivity in the past, palatalization
colleague.F’) (Bateman 2007; Chițoran 2002; Maiden
of coronal consonants followed by a front vowel is product-
2011b:220). Palatalization by inflectional /i/ (but not /e/)
ive in many Romance languages today. For example, in
is also found with root-final coronal consonants, resulting
regional varieties of spoken French, such as Acadian French
in an affricate or fricative with a secondary palatal
(Lucci 1972), we find palatalization of /t, d/ before yod
articulation ([bəˈjat]/[bəˈjeʦj] ‘boy/boys’, [jed]/[jezj] ‘kid/
(canadien [kanaˈʤɛ̃] ‘Canadian’, amitié [amiˈʧe] ‘friendship’;
kids’) or in a palatal sonorant ([an]/[aɲ] ‘year/years’).
Lucci 1972:34), and in Brazilian Portuguese /t/ and /d/
Labials receive a secondary palatal articulation only:
regularly affricate to [ʧ] and [ʤ] before /i/: tia [ˈʧiɐ]
[lup]/[lupj] ‘wolf/wolves’, [rob]/[robj] ‘slave/slaves’
‘aunt’, dia [ˈʤiɐ] ‘day’ (Perini 2002:16f.).
(Bateman 1997:90-94; Chițoran 2002; Maiden 2011b:220;
Spinu et al. 2012). Labial consonants in the Moldovan
dialect become palatal fricatives with a secondary palatal
39.3.3 Morphological consequences
articulation ([karˈtof]/[karˈtoʃ j] ‘potato/potatoes’) or a
of front vowel palatalization non-labial stop with a secondary palatal articulation
([plop]/[plokj] ‘poplar/poplars’) (Bateman 2007:90-94). In
Just as with palatalization by yod (see §39.2.6), there are Romanian, palatalization of a consonant spreads to the pre-
morphological consequences of front vowel palatalization ceding /s/ in a cluster, as in [prost]/[proʃtj] ‘stupid.MSG/
in the Romance morphological system (see §27.8). It is seen stupid. MPL’ (note that final /t/ preceded by a vowel
most clearly in verbal and nominal inflection. Within verb palatalizes to [ʦj ]) (Bateman 2007:80).
paradigms, Latin 2SG, 3SG, 1PL, 2PL suffixes /IS, IT, IMUS, ITIS/, Palatalization caused by /i/ plays a morphological role in
respectively, often triggered palatalization of the preceding noun and adjective paradigms in other Romance languages
velar consonant, so that in Romanian, for example, the as well: Lmb. [an]/[aɲ] < ANNUM/ANNI ‘year/years’, Lad. [nes]/
second person singular form of the present indicative of [neʃ] < NASUM/NASI ‘nose/noses’ (Rohlfs 1968:47; see also
the verb ‘say’ has a palatalized consonant ([ziʧ] < DICIS §42.6.1).
665
LORI REPETTI
39.4 Consonant + consonant palatalization These clusters then underwent other changes: the lateral
developed into yod (Italo-Romance) (28a), the yod palatal-
ized to an affricate (Gallo-Romance) (28b), the cluster
In this section I review other palatalization processes
became an affricate or fricative (Italo-Romance, Ibero-
involving consonants as both trigger and target.
Romance, in particular Leonese, Galician, and Portuguese)
(28c), the obstruent was eliminated (Italo-Romance, Ibero-
39.4.1 Consonant + /l/ Romance) (28d), or, surprisingly, the cluster evolved into a
palatal nasal (southern Italo-Romance) (28e).
Another source of palatal consonants comes from changes (28) a. Italian

to consonant plus /l/ clusters (including original Latin con- CLAMARE > [kjaˈmare] PLENUM > [ˈpjɛno]
sonant + /l/ clusters, as well as those derived through ‘to call’ ‘full’
syncope).13 Repetti and Tuttle (1987) propose that the lat- GLACIEM > [ˈgjatʧo] ‘ice’ *ˈblondu > [ˈbjondo]
eral consonant of these clusters originally palatalized to [ʎ], ‘blond’
beginning with /kl/ and /gl/ clusters, and this change then FLOREM > [ˈfjore] ‘flower’
spread to other clusters. Evidence for this chronology comes
from medieval documents as well as modern varieties, such b. Chevroux variety of Francoprovençal (Repetti and
as Romanian, where /kl/ and /gl/ clusters underwent Tuttle 1987:85f.)
changes, while /pl, bl, fl/ clusters did not. CLAUEM > [kʎaf] ‘key’ PLANTAM > [ˈpʧãnta]
‘plant’
(26) Latin > Romanian GLACIEM > [ˈjase] ‘ice’ *ˈblanku > [bjã] ‘white’
/kl/ CLAMARE > [kʲeˈma] /pl/ PLENUM > [plin] ‘full’ FLAMMAM > [ˈfʧamna]
‘to call’ ‘flame’

AUNC(U)LUM > TEMPLAM > [ˈtɨmplə] c. Ligurian
[ˈuŋkju] ‘uncle’ ‘temple’ CLAMARE > [ʧaˈma] ‘to call’ PLENUM > [ʧin] ‘full’
/gl/ GLACIEM > [ˈgʲe̯aʦə] /bl/ BLANDUM > [blɨnd] GLACIEM > [ˈʤasa] ‘ice’ *ˈblanku > [ˈʤaŋku]
‘ice’ ‘mild’ ‘white’
UNG(U)LAM > AMB(U)LARE > FLOREM > [ˈʃura] ‘flower’
[ˈuŋgje] ‘nail’ [umˈbla] ‘to walk’
/fl/ FLOREM > [ˈflo̯are] d. European Spanish
‘flower’ CLAUEM > [ˈʎaβe] ‘key’ PLORARE > [ʎoˈrar] ‘to cry’
SUFFLARE > [suˈfla] GLANDEM > [ˈlandre] *ˈblanku > [ˈblaŋko]
‘to blow’ ‘acorn’ ‘white’
FLAMMAM > [ˈʎama] ‘flame’
Palatalization of the lateral in velar stop + /l/ clusters was e. Salentino (Rohlfs 1966:241-55)
extended to the labial clusters in parts of Italo-Romance, GLANDEM > [ˈɲanna] BETULAM > *ˈbleta >
Daco-Romance (Aromanian and sporadically in Megleno- ‘acorn’ [ˈɲɛta] ‘birch’
and Istro-Romanian), and Ibero-Romance (where the palatal FLECTAM > [ˈɲɛtta] ‘braid’
lateral is still found after voiceless obstruents in upper
Aragon; Lloyd 1987:225), as well as in Francoprovençal (27) The European Spanish data in (28d) deserve more discus-
(Loporcaro 2011b:150). sion. Penny (1991:60-64) points out that in Spanish, clusters
with voiceless obstruents (muta cum liquida) generally
(27) Ruffieu-en-Valromey (Rhône-Alpes; Repetti and assimilated to the palatal lateral;14 however, many words
Tuttle 1987:83f.) retain the cluster (PLATEAM > [ˈplaθa] ‘square’; FLAMMAM >
CLAUEM > [kʎɑ] ‘key’ PLUMBUM > [pʎõ] ‘lead’ [ˈflama], alongside [ˈʎama] ‘flame’), others developed an
GLANDEM > [(ɑ)ˈgʎɑ̃] ‘acorn’ *ˈblanku > [bʎɑ̃] ‘white’ affricate (*ˈplattu > [ˈʧato] ‘snub-nosed’), and the /f/ of an
FLATUM > [fʎɑ] ‘breath’ /fl/ cluster was sometimes lost (FLACCIDUM > [ˈlaθjo] ‘limp’;
Menéndez Pidal 1962:126). Furthermore, in different
13
In some areas, postconsonantal /l/ is maintained (Frl. [kla:f] < CLAUEM
‘key’, [glant] < GLANDEM ‘acorn’, [plan] < PLANUM ‘flat’, [blaŋk] < *ˈblanku
‘white’, [fla:t] < FLATUM ‘breath’) or becomes /r/ (Abr. CLIMAM > [ˈkrimə] 14
We also find the merger of voiceless stop + /l/ clusters (but not FL),
‘inclination’, GLACIEM > [ˈgratʧa] ‘ice’, PLATTUM > [ˈprattə] ‘flat’, *blanku > resulting in [kj] (Neapolitan and other southern Italian varieties), [c] (Pug-
[ˈbraŋgə] ‘white’, FLUMEN > [ˈfrumə] ‘river’; Rohlfs 1966:241-55). liese and Salentino), and [ʧ] (Ligurian (28c) and southern Sicilian).
666
PALATALIZATION
positions these clusters evolved in unique ways. Post- (30) FACTUM > a. Lmb. [faʧ], Sp. [ˈeʧo] ‘fact’
consonantally, /pl/ > [ʧ] (AMPLUM > [ˈanʧo] ‘broad’), and b. Fr. fait [fɛ] ‘fact’
intervocalically, /kl, gl/ merged with the outcome of /lj/
(OC(U)LUM > [ˈoxo] ‘eye’, TEG(U)LAM > [ˈtexa] ‘tile’; cf. FILIUM > (31) COXAM > a. Lig. [ˈkøʃa], Pt. [ˈkoʃɐ] ‘thigh’
[ˈixo] ‘son’). This merger occurred in many Romance lan- b. Fr. [kɥis] ‘thigh’, Sp. [ˈkoxo] ‘lame’
guages: OC(U)LUM/PALEAM > Fr. [œj]/[paj], Cat. [uʎ]/[ˈpaʎə], Pt.
[ˈoʎu]/[ˈpaʎɐ], Ast. [ˈweʧu]/[ˈpaʧa] ‘eye/straw’. As for the Sequences involving a postvelar nasal evolved into /jn/
voiced series, we find the /bl/ cluster generally maintained (attested in central and southern Italo-Romance) (32a), and
(BLITUM > Sp. [ˈbleðo] ‘amaranth’, BLANDUM > Sp. [ˈblando] then /ɲ/ (32b) (Rohlfs 1966:23-5; Loporcaro 2011b:149).
‘gentle’), and the /gl/ cluster simplified to /l/ (*gliˈrone >
Sp. [liˈron] ‘dormouse’; Menéndez Pidal 1962:126f.). (32) /gn/ >
The situation described for Spanish is similar to most a. [jn] LIGNAM > Isc. [ˈlejnə] ‘wood’
Romance varieties: a uniform evolution for a particular b. [ɲ] PUGNUM > Sp. [ˈpuɲo], Pt. [ˈpuɲu], Cat. [puɲ],
cluster in a particular dialect is rarely attested. Many evo- It. [ˈpuɲɲo] ‘fist’
lutionary paths are attested for each cluster in any single
variety, depending in part on the position of the cluster in Up to this point, we have mainly investigated palataliza-
the word (word-initial vs intervocalic, as in Fr. CLAUEM > [kle] tion processes in which the trigger comes after the target
‘key’ vs OC(U)LUM > [œj] ‘eye’), whether the word had a (e.g. consonant + yod results in palatalization of the conson-
learnèd or popular transmission (as in It. [ˈklima] < CLIMAM ant). The cases illustrated here show that the trigger can
‘climate’ vs [ˈkjave] < CLAUEM ‘key’; Pt. [ˈklaru] < CLARUM ‘clear’ also be before the target (e.g. yod + consonant results in
vs [ˈʃamu] < CLAMO ‘call.1SG’), and doublets attributed to palatalization of the consonant).16
regional influences (as in Tsc. [ˈveggja]/[ˈveʎʎa] < UIG(I)LIAM Palatalization of velar stop + coronal consonant clusters
‘vigil’) or dialect borrowing (as in Sp. [ˈʧopo] < *ˈploppu < was not universal, and in some languages the cluster under-
POPULUM ‘black poplar’ vs [ʎoˈrar] < PLORARE ‘to weep’; Lloyd went assimilation (33a), the velar stop was deleted (33b), or
1987:225f.). the velar stop was labialized to a glide (33c) or another
consonant (33d) (Rohlfs 1966:368f.).
39.4.2 Velar stop + coronal consonant (33) a. LIGNUM > Srd. [ˈlinnu] ‘wood’; FACTUM > It. [ˈfatto]
‘fact’; AXEM > It. [ˈasse] ‘plank’
b. LIGNAM > Sora [ˈlena] ‘firewood’
Another context in which palatalization occurs involves a
c. LIGNAM > SItR. [ˈliwna] ‘firewood’
Latin velar stop followed by a coronal consonant, primarily
d. LIGNUM > Ro. [lemn] ‘wood’; FACTUM > Ro. [fapt] ‘fact’;
/gn/, /kt/, /ks/ sequences (although other sequences
COXAM > Ro. [ˈkwapsə] ‘thigh’
derived through syncope undergo similar processes:
FRIG(I)DUM > *ˈfrigdu ‘cold’). The first step in the process
15
As in other contexts, there may be more than one out-
appears to be a change of the velar stop to a palatal glide: come within the same language: Ro. [ˈkwapsə]/[ˈfrasen] <
FACTUM > Fr. fait ‘fact’, LAXARE > Fr. laisser ‘to leave’, perhaps due COXAM/FRAXINUM ‘hip/ash tree’, It. [ˈasse]/[ aʃˈʃella] < AXEM/
to restrictions on coda consonants (Elcock 1960:376; Maiden AXILLAM ‘plank/armpit’ (Baglioni 2001).
1995:56). The glide often affected the quality of the preceding
vowel (29a), and may have been absorbed by it (29b).
39.4.3 /ll, nn/
(29) FACTUM > *ˈfajto > a. Pt. [ˈfejtu] ‘fact’
b. Sp. [ˈeʧo] Latin intervocalic geminate /ll/ and /nn/ underwent palat-
alization to [ʎ, ɲ] in parts of Ibero-Romance and Italo-
The velar stop + coronal obstruent clusters often devel- Romance (Rohlfs 1966:326-8, 334-6; Baker 2004).17
oped into a palatal obstruent (30a)-(31a), which evolved into
other fricatives (31b), or was deleted (30b). 16
Another example of the trigger preceding the target can be found
scattered throughout northern Italy: /i, y, j/ preceding a nasal results in [ɲ]:
j̃
LINUM > [liɲ] ‘linen’, UNUM > *yŋ > [vøɲ] ‘one’, BENE > *be ŋ > [beɲ] ‘well’ (Tuttle
1997: 31; see §39.3.2.)
15 17
Palatalization did not take place with labial stop + coronal consonant The Venetian elle evanescente, i.e. the pronunciation of /l/ as a lax
clusters. Instead, we find assimilation (SUBTU > It. [ˈsotto] ‘under’), with dorso-palatal approximant [ḙ], or the deletion of /l/ ([ˈgondoḙa]/[ˈgondoa]
subsequent degemination (SEPTEM > Pt. [ˈseti] ‘seven’), or gliding of the labial ‘gondola’), may be an extension of the palatalized outcome of /ll/ to
(CAPTIUUM > Sp. [kawˈtiβo] ‘captive’). singleton /l/ (Pellegrini 1977:77; Tomasin 2010).
667
LORI REPETTI
(34) CABALLUM > Cat. [kəˈβaʎ], Cst. [kaˈβaʎo] ‘horse’ In other Romance languages, these geminates did not
ANNUM > Cat. [aɲ], Sp. [ˈaɲo] ‘year’ palatalize; instead, they remained unchanged (PELLEM > It.
[ˈpɛlle] ‘skin’, ANNUM > [ˈanno] ‘year’), degeminated (PELLEM/
The pronunciation of the modern reflex of Latin /ll/ is ANNUM > Ro. [ˈpjele]/[an], Pt. [ˈpɛlɨ]/[ˈanu]), or changed in
a defining characteristic of Spanish varieties. In much of other ways (PELLEM > Sic. [ˈpeɖɖi] ‘skin’, SPATULAM > *ˈspalla >
Latin America and parts of Spain, the /ʎ/ phoneme no Veru (Corsica) [ˈspada] ‘shoulder’, UITELLUM > Bergiola Mag-
longer exists, having been replaced by a non-lateral seg- giore, Garfagnana [viˈtæðo] ‘calf ’; Cravens 2002:100).
ment, thereby merging with the reflexes of Latin /gj, dj, j/ In Catalan and in some Asturian-Leonese dialects, we find
(see §39.2.2.). These so-called yeísta dialects contrast with palatalization of word-initial /l/, and in the latter we also
those which maintain the palatal lateral and, therefore, a find palatalization of word-initial /n/ (Cat. [ˈʎunə] < LUNAM
distinction between forms such as calló [kaˈʎo] ‘became. ‘moon’; Ast.-Leo. [ˈɲwestro] < NOSTRUM ‘our’; Lloyd 1987:246f;
silent.3SG’ vs cayó [kaˈjo] ‘fell.3SG’ exist (Lloyd 1987:344f.; Cravens 2002). This palatalization may be taken to reflect an
Penny 1991:93). The palatal nasal is much more resistant early strengthened articulation of word-initial sonorants, as
to change, although there are Romance varieties, such as shown also by the general Ibero-Romance articulation of
Portuguese, in which this segment loses its coronal initial /r/ as a trill (Lloyd 1987:244-7), a proposal supported
articulation to become a nasalized glide / ȷ ̃/ (Perini by evidence from northern and southern varieties of Italo-
2002:13). Romance (Rohlfs 1966:216, 219; Cravens 2002).
668
CHAPTER 40
Sandhi phenomena
RODNEY SAMPSON
40.1 Introduction adjacent to a vowel of greater sonority, Sp. (with

word stress indicated here and in (ii) by an acute
accent) cási olvidádo [jo] ‘almost forgotten’, engáño
Sandhi phenomena are richly represented in Romance, and
humáno [ow] ‘human deceit’; puéde andár ‘he can
arise principally from the lack of isomorphism between
walk’ [e̯a] (Navarro Tomás 1968:§69). Word-
syntactic and prosodic domains. Many phonological pro-
internally, approximantization occurs but variably,
cesses, often syllable-based, operate freely both within
e.g. morpheme-final /i/ approximantizes more read-
and across grammatical boundaries, creating both internal
ily than /u/ before stressed suffixes, /labi/+/al/ [j]
and external sandhi. A further contributory factor has
‘labial’ but /aktu/+/al/ [u] ‘present-day’ (Cabré
been cliticization, especially in verb and noun phrases,
Monné and Prieto 2006). French has approximanti-
the resultant unstressed satellites being subject to the
zation word-internally before a derivational or
typically reductive phonological changes undergone by
inflectional suffix, contribuable [ɥa] ‘tax-payer’, elle
unstressed syllables. Romance sandhi mainly involves seg-
l’envia [ja] ‘she envied him/her’, but not usually
mental modification which may be conditioned phonolo-
between lexical words je contribue après [ya] ‘I am
gically (§40.2) or morphosyntactic-lexically (§40.3). These
contributing afterwards’, j’envie Alain [ia], where hia-
I consider before addressing suprasegmental sandhi phe-
tus remains (Picard 2003).
nomena (§40.4) which show variable causation. Predict-
(ii) Fusion: vowels of identical quality simplify to a sin-
ably, not all sandhi types fall neatly into one or other of
gle vowel maintaining the original quality, Sp. cási
these categories.
imposíble ‘almost impossible’, cuárto oscúro ‘dark
room’ where the fused vowels [i] [o] have no extra
duration, Fr. il va à Paris ‘he’s going to Paris’ with [aː]
40.2 Phonologically conditioned sandhi in allegro speech.
(iii) Coalescence: vowels of different qualities merge and
yield a vowel of a new quality, Pt. a armada [ɐɐ] ! [a]
Attention falls in turn on vowel-edge and consonant-edge
‘the armada’, casa antiga [ɐɐ͂] ! [ã] ‘old house’, lã azul
phenomena.
[ɐ͂ɐ] ! [ã] ‘blue wool’, lã antiga [ɐ͂ɐ͂] ! [ã] ‘old wool’
(Mateus and D’Andrade 2000:146).
40.2.1 Vowel-edge phenomena (iv) Deletion: in unlike vowel sequences, -V1#V2-, one
vowel, typically V1, may be elided. Deletion of the
40.2.1.1 Vowel hiatus final vowel in proclitics appears in many Romance
varieties, variably in It. la erba ! l’erba ‘the grass’ but
Although vowel hiatus may be preserved, it is commonly
quest(o) amico ‘this friend’, and categorically in Fr. de
resolved through syllabic reduction, leaving a single nucleus
avenir ! d’avenir ‘promising’, Ro. mă a văzut ! m-a
of some sort. Reduction may be categorical or variable; in
văzut he has seen me’ (cf. §40.3.3). It is also not
the latter case, it is more usual in rapid, informal speech
uncommon in rapid speech with the final unstressed
styles. Contexts where at least one vowel is unstressed are
vowel of closed-set forms within a phonological
especially liable to reduction. Five sandhi outcomes destroy-
phrase, It. quando era ! quand’era when he was’
ing vowel hiatus occur (cf. Casali 1997; 2011):
(such elision also characterizes more conservative
(i) Synalepha: one vowel becomes a glide or approxi- written usage), Nuo. fippo istáu andáu ! fipp’ ist’
mant to yield a diphthong. High unstressed vowels andáu ‘I had gone’ (Pittau 1972:30), and less often
are especially prone to approximantization, whereas with lexical items, Cal. huri o spini ! [ˈçuroˈspinə]
non-high unstressed vowels become glides when ‘flowers or thorns’ (Falcone 1976:32).
This chapter © Rodney Sampson 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 669
RODNEY SAMPSON
(v) Epenthesis of some non-vocalic segment: this occurs phrasal-stress related modifications can be found in the
within now lexicalized morphemes in many Italo- quality of mid, nasal, word-final vowels in varieties from
Romance varieties where especially [v] or [g]/[γ]/[j] the Vendée in western France. To the left of the phrasal
appear: It. rovina < RUINAM ‘ruin’, ugola < U(U)ULAM stressed syllable (i.e. the final syllable of the phonological
‘uvula’ (Rohlfs 1966:§339). Sandhi alternations phrase), [ẽ], [õ] appear but phrase-final componentialized
appear in Lengadocian where northern varieties forms occur, [do pẽ "bʎã] ‘some white bread’ vs [do "pan]
insert [z], a[z] Albi ‘to Albi’ and southern varieties ‘some bread’, [la mezõ "bʎãʃ] ‘the white house’:[in me"zaŋ]
[n], a[n] aquó to it/that’ (Alibèrt 1935:30), and in ‘a house’ (Svenson 1959:39).
Clv. postpausal [ˈɔttə] ‘eight’ ! postvocalic [nu
40.2.1.2.2 Postpausal
ˈγɔttə ˈjwornə] ‘an eight days (a week)’ (Gioscio
1985:92, 131). Words with onsetless initial syllables are commonly found
across Romance. However, onset creation or strengthening
may occur postpausally although variably rather than cat-
40.2.1.2 Vowel-edge sandhi adjacent to pause egorically in varieties affected. In French, a glottal stop may
be found highlighting a following vowel-initial word, usu-
40.2.1.2.1 Prepausal
ally preceded by a pause, les Russes | [ʔ]ont gagné ‘the Rus-
Word-final stressed vowels are disfavoured prepausally in sians have won’, le verbe | [ʔ]‘acheter’ ‘the verb “to buy”’
Sardinian and many central-southern Italo-Romance var- (Malécot 1975; Nève de Mévergnies 1985). Postpausal forms
ieties, though not standard Italian. When prepausal, beginning with approximants in Castilian show variable
vowel-final oxytones may be repaired through paragoge, consonant epenthesis in emphatic speech styles, hierba
commonly with -[e] in central varieties and -[nə] in upper [ˈjeɾβa] ‘grass’, hueso [ˈweso] ‘bone’ ! [ˈɟeɾβa], [ˈɡweso]
southern and -[ni] in extreme southern varieties. In Floren- (Navarro Tomás 1968:§§65,119).
tine, this occurs with all prepausal oxytones except nouns,
[si] ‘yes’, [anˈdɔ] ‘he went’ ! prepausal [ˈsie], [anˈdɔe] ‘he
went’ (Giannelli and Cravens 1997:299; Giannelli 2000:47, 40.2.2 Consonant-edge phenomena
n.129). Nouns were formerly affected, OFlo. virtúe ‘virtue’
(Rohlfs 1966:§335). CV paragoge may occur either with
40.2.2.1 Left-edge sandhi
oxytones ending in -[e], to prevent identical vowel Two types are considered, resulting from lenition and syl-
sequences violating the Obligatory Contour Principle, Flo. labically conditioned vowel prosthesis.
[perˈke] ‘why, because’, [ikˈke] ‘what’! [ikˈkene], [per
40.2.2.1.1 Lenition
ˈkene], or as a general prepausal process with oxytonic
verb infinitives and occasional nominals, Cpd. [bi] ‘to see’, In many varieties of early Romance, intervocalic obstruents
[di] ‘day’ ! [ˈbiɾi], [ˈdiɾi] (Bolognesi 1998:66f.). (simplex or initial in tautosyllabic clusters) underwent len-
Prepausal stressed vowels may show quality change. In ition. For stops, there was weakening along a parameter:
French, where oxytony is normal, high vowels are often voiceless stop > voiced stop > voiced fricative > Ø (see
realized devoiced when utterance-final and sometimes further §25.2.5). Fricatives, only voiceless in Latin, under-
accompanied by variable degrees of off-gliding friction, went weakening by voicing. Sonorants could be affected by
[i (̥ ç)] etc., oui ‘yes’, entendu ‘okay’, c’est tout ‘that’s all’. qualitative weakening, but rarely. Where lenition operated,
Stress-related quality change is found in a number of weakening occurred within and across grammatical bound-
central-southern Italian varieties, whereby unstressed aries within intonational phrases, resulting in sandhi vari-
word-final vowels show distinct realizations depending on ation between postvocalic word-initial obstruents and those
their location relative to primary phrasal stress (here appearing elsewhere. In most western Romance varieties,
marked as ["]) within the clitic group or phonological the strong (i.e. not postvocalic) sandhi variant was subse-
phrase, Agnone (northern Molise) /ˈsanda/ ‘holy.FSG’ ! quently generalized, e.g. Lat. /p/ > Fr. intervocalic la paix
(final-vowel weakening) [la ˈtɛrra "sandə] ‘the Holy Land’ [lapɛ] ‘the peace’ (< ILLAM PACE(M)) like postconsonantal en
but no weakening to the left of the phrasal stress [ˈn ʦanda paix ‘in peace’ (< IN PACE), unlike lenited SAPERE > savoir
"peaʧə] ‘in holy peace’ (Loporcaro 2011a:76f). Use of [savwaʁ] ‘to know’. However, in central and upper southern
unweakened -[a] in the final syllable of words appearing to Italo-Romance, Corsican, and Sardinian, word-initial lenited
the left of the phrasal stress may be generalized to all lexical forms have remained giving synchronic external sandhi, e.g.
forms regardless of morphological and etymological consid- Flo. [ˈkaːni] ‘dogs ! lenition in due cani [ˈdue ˈhaːni] <
erations, Nap. [faˈʧimmə] (< FACIMUS) ‘we do’! [faʧimman- DUO CANES ‘two dogs’, but postpausal cani [ˈkaːni] ‘dogs’. In
ˈʧellə] ‘let’s do it for him’ (= It. facciamoglielo). Comparable these Romance varieties, a further sandhi form has
670
SANDHI PHENOMENA
developed complementing lenition in certain historically Table 40.2 Strong and weak (lenited) variants in Corsican
postconsonantal contexts. As this is now no longer phono- (Veru)
logically conditioned, it is considered later (§40.3.1).
STRONG WEAK
Lenition of two types occur. The first shows both voicing
and opening (i.e. decreasing degrees of supralaryngeal con- /t/ [int'tarra] ‘on earth’ [a 'tarra] ‘the ground’
striction). The second involves just one of these effects: (i) /s/ ['ssikuru] ‘sure!’ ['era zi'kuru] ‘he was sure’
opening through fricativization (spirantization) but without /ɡ/ [iŋɡ'ɡɔla] ‘in one’s [a'βɔla] ‘the throat’
phonation change; (ii) some degree of voicing accompany- throat’
ing detensing but without opening (Weinrich 1969:128-43;
Giannelli and Cravens 1997).
40.2.2.1.1.1 LENITION WITH VOICING AND OPENING in most contexts where a morpheme-final unstressed vowel
precedes; elsewhere, there is a non-lenited variant. The
In Sardinia and Corsica, lenition affects all types of obstru-
broad pattern is: all strong variants have added tenseness/
ent and, in a few Sardinian varieties, sonorants. Sandhi
length; weak voiceless fricatives are realized voiced; voiced
patterns show diatopic variation in both islands. In Sardinia,
stops are fricativized (cf. also §14.2.2.1). The west-central
northeastern varieties (Gallurese) display few weakening
Corsican dialect of Veru presents the following data (Dal-
effects, but elsewhere three types of sandhi-creating pro-
bera-Stefanaggi 1991:266, 271f., 274f.) (Table 40.2).
cess operate (Pittau 1972; Virdis 1978; Jones 1988b:320f.):
(a) voiceless stop > voiced fricative 40.2.2.1.1.2 LENITION WITH FRICATIVIZATION OR DETENSING
(b) voiced stop > voiced fricative > Ø WITH VOICING
(c) voiceless fricative > voiced fricative
Firstly, lenition with fricativization (or spirantization) but
Type (a) occurs in central-western and southern varieties without phonation change appears in most but not all non-
only (Logudorese and Campidanese); (b) appears in all var- standard Tuscan varieties and is particularly active in Flor-
ieties, although only central-eastern varieties (Nuorese) entine. Commonly known as the gorgia toscana (‘Tuscan
remain at the voiced fricative stage; (c) is found in all throat’), it operates systematically on simplex intervocalic
varieties (Table 40.1). voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/ within the intonational phrase,
Affricates, which are later Romance creations in Sardin- giving Flo. di pepe [di ˈϕeːϕe] ‘of pepper’, la terra [la ˈθɛr(r)a]
ian, are only affected in varieties that are largely free from ‘the earth’, la casa [la ˈhaːsa] ‘the home’ (Giannelli and
weakening in inherited Latin lexicon, Sas. [ˈʦeru] ! [u Savoia 1978) with sandhi stop variants [p], [t], [k] in post-
ˈʣeru] ‘(the) sky’; [ˈtšaßi] ! [aˈʤaßi] ‘(the) key’ (Contini pausal and postconsonantal contexts. Diatopically, lenition
1986:525-8). does not operate uniformly across Tuscany. All three stops
Sonorant lenition occurs in a few varieties with parallel are affected in Siena, but in Lucca and Pisa-Livorno prov-
weakening intramorphemically. Only /l/ and /n/ are inces /k/ ! [h] and even [Ø], whereas /p/ and /t/ are more
affected, and give a glottal stop or pharyngeal fricative: seldom affected. Whilst attention has often been focused on
Sarrabus (SESrd.) [ˈlũʔã] ‘moon’ ! [sa ˈʔũʔã] ‘the moon’, lenition fricativization affecting voiceless stops, comparable
[ˈnou] ! [ˈannu ˈʔõũ] ‘new year’ (Böhne 2003:20, 71, 282; weakening occurs in Florentine with the affricates /ʧ/, /ʤ/
Contini 1987:485f.). ! [ʃ], [ʒ], la cena [la ˈʃeːna] ‘the dinner’, la gente [la ˈʒɛnte]
In Corsica, lenition operates with onsets containing only ‘the people’, alternating with [ʧ], [ʤ] postpausally and post-
one consonant (also tautosyllabic /gr/-, /gw/-, /fr/-, /fj/-) consonantally. Also, Florentine voiced stops variably frica-
tivize in leniting contexts, [ˈgatta] ! [la ˈγatta] ‘the she-cat’,
Table 40.1 Strong and weak (lenited) variants in Sardinian [ˈdɛnti] ! [i ˈðɛnti] ‘the teeth’ (Giannelli 2000:29). Tuscan
voiceless stop fricativization, though an unusual process in
WEAK
STRONG Romance, doubtless represents a Romance development.
NUORESE LOGUDORESE - CAMPIDANESE Earlier claims of possible Etruscan substratum influence
have been shown to be implausible (Izzo 1972; Sala 2013).
(a) [ˈtɛrra] [sa ˈtɛrra] [sa ˈðɛrra] ‘(the)
Fricativization also operates in southern Italian dialects
land’
but only on voiced obstruents /ɡ/, /ɟ/, /d/ and /b/~/v/
(b) [ˈdɔmɔ] [su ˈðɔmɔ] [su ˈɔmɔ] ~ [ˈɔmu] ‘(the)
(original /b/ having often systematically passed to /v/
house’
below the Rome–Ancona line; Rohlfs 1966:§150) giving
(c) [ˈsɔlɛ] ~ [su ˈzɔlɛ] [su ˈzɔlɛ] ~ [ˈzɔri] ‘(the)
external sandhi; Clv. /v/ ! [lu ˈvratʦə] ‘the arm’,
[ˈsɔli] sun’
[ˈmbratʦə] ‘in one’s arms’ (< (IN+) BRACCHIUM), /ɡ/ ! [la
671
RODNEY SAMPSON
γadˈdinə] ‘the hen’, [ŋɡrasˈsa] ‘to fatten’ (< GALLĪNAM, IN-GRASS- The second type is ‘strong’ /rr/-. In some Romance var-
ĀRE) (Gioscio 1985:46-8). ieties, word-initial rhotics have a strongly trilled articula-
Secondly, lenition through detensing accompanied by tion which may cause them to be reinterpreted as
variable degrees of voicing from partial to complete affects geminates. Geminates usually being heterosyllabic, their
simplex voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/ in a central-southern presence word-initially can trigger vowel prosthesis in all
Italo-Romance area approximately from southern Tuscany but postvocalic contexts. Some varieties have lexicalized
down to most of Basilicata and parts of northern Calabria. prosthetic forms, e.g. ARo. (postvocalic) lume araŭă ‘bad
Neapolitan coronal /t/ in tanno [ˈtannə] ‘then’, for example, people’ < REAM, cf. Ro. rea (Papahagi 1974: s.v. arăŭ), cf. the
has sociolinguistically variable realizations [t],[t̬],[d̥],[d] in lexicalized ethnic name Aromân (ARo. Ar(ă)măn) ‘Aroma-
lenition contexts. Contrasts between underlying voiceless nian’ < ROMĀNUM. But sandhi variation continues in Gascon
stops and corresponding voiced stops are preserved as the dialects; Bagnère-de-Luchon has postpausal [arˈrozo] ‘rose’
latter become fricatives in leniting contexts, as in southern but postvocalic [jo rˈrozo] ‘a rose’ (Sarrieu 1904:509f.).
Italo-Romance dialects (e.g. Calvellese above): Nap. /b/, /d/, The third type comprises other heterosyllabic onsets. In
/ɡ/ ! [v], (*[ð] >) [ɾ], [γ], e.g. [o ˈvasə] ‘the kiss’, [o ˈɾɛntə] varieties where unstressed word-initial onsetful syllables #C
‘the tooth’, [o ˈγallə] ‘the cock’ showing sandhi variation (V)C- have undergone vowel syncope, prosthesis may
with postpausal and postconsonantal stop realizations, enable syllabification with heterosyllabic onsets of level
nun danno [nun'dannə] ‘they do not give’, etc. (Ledgeway and, especially, falling sonority, in accordance with the
2009a:86f., 91-9). Sonority Sequencing Principle. Liquid-initial complex
onsets are particularly susceptible to prosthesis and, histor-
40.2.2.1.2 Prosthesis
ically, probably represent the starting point for the process.
When word-initial heterosyllabic onsets develop, syllabifi- Formerly prosthetic forms with syncopated falling sonority
cation is possible when a vowel-final word precedes, -V#CC liquid-initial onsets may later be lexicalized: (postvocalic)
(C)- ! -VC#C(C)- with re-assignment of the first onset Put. eau arcugnuosch ‘I recognize’ (< RE-COGNŌSCO). But sandhi
consonant to coda position. In postpausal or postconsonan- is preserved in northern French varieties: Picard (Mesnil-
tal contexts, however, resyllabification is problematic. One Martinsart) /mn+e/ ‘to lead’ ! postpausally [emne s vɑk]
repair strategy is vowel prosthesis which, as in postvocalic ‘to lead one’s cow’ and postconsonantally [i fœ ll emne] ‘it is
contexts, enables the first onset consonant to be resyllabi- necessary to lead it’ but not postvocalically [o mnõ] ‘we
fied (cf. below for the parallel use of epenthesis for unsylla- lead’ (Flutre 1955). Similarly, Piedmontese has [dez əvˈziŋ]
bifiable word-final codas). Historically, three major types of ‘ten neighbours’ vs postvocalic [tre vˈziŋ] ‘three neigh-
vowel prosthesis have operated in Romance and, in many bours’, showing the same vowel [ə]- as appears in s impure
varieties, at least one type remains productive or has left prosthesis, see above (Clivio 1971).
traces in external sandhi (Sampson 2010).
The first type is /s/+consonant (s impure). Onsets of this
40.2.2.2 Right-edge sandhi
type, which were heterosyllabic in Latin and have remained
so when word-medial as in It. pas.ta ‘pasta, dough’, under- Right-edge consonants show sandhi resulting either from
went prosthesis in word-initial position in imperial times assimilatory processes or repair of unsyllabifiable conson-
across virtually all Romance varieties. In postpausal or ant sequences preceding or across grammatical boundaries.
postconsonant contexts, a front vowel /i/ or /e/ was
40.2.2.2.1 Assimilation-based sandhi
inserted. In Ibero-Romance and French, later lexicalization
of prosthetic forms has occurred, destroying sandhi vari- Assimilatory processes relating to phonation, place of
ation, but prosthesis remains a productive process in articulation (POA), and manner of articulation (MOA)
Castilian and Catalan for nativizing neologisms: Cst. spot apply widely in Romance. These typically act regressively
[esˈpo(te)] ‘publicity spot’, scooter [esˈkuteɾ] ‘scooter’, Cat. and may operate singly or in combination.
slip [əzˈlip] ‘pants’, stop [əsˈtɔp] ‘stop’. In Piedmontese there
40.2.2.2.1.1 PHONATION
is sandhi variation: [dez əsˈtɛile] ‘ten stars’ but postvocalic
[na ˈstɛila] ‘a star’ (Clivio 1971). Historically prosthetic vari- Right-edge coda obstruents commonly undergo voicing
ants are now generally lexicalized in central-northern Sar- assimilation creating sandhi variation. Word-finally and
dinian, Nuo. iskíre ‘to know’, ispáu < It. spago ‘string’, but especially prepausally, voiced obstruents may devoice, a
variable sandhi appears in postpausal polysyllables like process interpretable as a form of weakening (Harris 2009)
(i)speráre ‘to hope’ (Pittau 1972:25). In Italian, the process has or perhaps as phonation assimilation to silence. Devoicing is
ceased to be productive but has left occasional semi-archaic found in Catalan, Occitan, in northeastern Gallo-Romance,
residues, e.g. per iscritto ‘in writing’ beside usual per scritto. central dialects of northern Italy, and Raeto-Romance, and
672
SANDHI PHENOMENA
creates sandhi in stems ending in underlying voiced obstru- domain, propose that vowel-final prefixes like a- be viewed
ents: Cat. /ʎob/ ! llop [p] ‘he-wolf ’, lloba [β] ‘she-wolf ’, as independent words. However, Loporcaro (2000:151f.)
/miʤ/ ! mig [ʧ] MSG / mitja [ʤ] FSG ‘middle’, /ɡriz/ ! gris demonstrates that /s/ voicing is not conditioned prosodi-
[s] MSG, grisa [z] FSG ‘grey’; Bgm. (Lmb.) /ɡɔb/ ! [ɡɔp] MSG, cally here but rather is blocked by the presence of an
['ɡɔba] FSG ‘hunchbacked’, /mɛz/ ! [mɛs] MSG, ['mɛza] FSG immediately preceding morpheme boundary.
‘middle’ (Bernini 1987:85); Put. /ʃkrikv/ ! [ʃkrikf] ‘I write’, Internal and external sibilant sandhi through voicing
['ʃkriɡva] ‘he writes’, /ʣ/ ! [mɛʦ] MSG, ['mɛʣa] FSG ‘middle’ neutralization, POA assimilation and deletion appears in
(Walberg 1908). In northern Gallo-Romance (langue d’oïl), Portuguese. A four-way sibilant contrast operates syllable-
including the variety that formed the basis of modern initially, [s, z, ʃ, ʒ], as in cinco, zinco, chinco, gingo ‘five’, ‘zinc’,
French, word-final obstruent devoicing was formerly a gen- ‘I rebuke’, ‘I sway’ respectively, but just a two-way contrast
eral process but now is only evident in sandhi in north- in codas within morphemes: [ʃ] before voiceless consonants,
eastern varieties, Liège /lɛːd/ FSG (cf. [lɛːdœːr] ‘ugliness’) ! [ʒ] before voiced consonants. This distributional restriction
[lɛːt] MSG ‘ugly’ (Francard and Morin 1986). In standard in codas gives internal sandhi with preconsonantal sibilant-
French, morphologized sandhi remains in liaison, grand [t] final prefixes, e.g. des- ‘dis-’ ! despegar [ʃ] ‘to unglue’,
homme MSG ‘great man’ but grande [d] FSG ‘great’ (see §40.3.2). desdizer [ʒ] ‘to unsay, deny’, while prevocalically a further
Within the phonological phrase, word-final obstruents variant [z] is found, desaprovar ‘to disapprove’. The same
may assimilate in voicing to a following word-initial seg- pattern recurs in external sandhi, as in rapaz [ʃ] francês
ment. Catalan has categorical voicing assimilation before ‘French boy’, rapaz [ʒ] grego ‘Greek boy’, rapaz [z] espanhol
consonant-initial words within the phonological phrase: ‘Spanish boy’, but before words with an initial sibilant, the
/sɛt/ ‘seven’ ! [sɛd ˈgosus] ‘seven dogs’, /pɔd/- (cf. pod-er preceding coda sibilant is deleted, rapaz [ʀɐ'pa] japonês/
‘to be able’) ! [pɔt kənˈta] ‘he can sing’. Prevocalically, sincero ‘Japanese/sincere boy’, though this is not directly
there is also voicing assimilation but only with sibilant paralleled in internal sandhi, descerrar [dɨʃs]- ~ [dɨʃ]- ‘to
fricatives, gos /gos/ ! gos[z] enorme ‘enormous dog’, but open’ (Mateus and D’Andrade 2000:145, n.14). External sandhi
/sɛt/ ! set [t] anys ‘seven years’ (Wheeler 2005:145-49). No deletion also occurs before word-initial, [ʀ]- os reis ’the kings’,
such assimilation occurs within the clitic group or phono- except in very formal speech styles, mirroring prerhotic
logical word, tus-hi [ˈtusi] ‘cough.IMP.2SG=there!’. Romanian sibilant deletion in Spanish and Catalan (Navarro Tomás
shows variable voicing assimilation preconsonantally, yield- 1968:§107; Recasens 1993:52).
ing sandhi forms in two contexts: (i) final obstruents pre-
40.2.2.2.1.2 NASAL SANDHI
ceding a word-initial obstruent, pod /pod/ ‘bridge’ (cf. poduri
‘bridges’) ! [pot] frumos ‘beautiful bridge’, and with clitics, POA assimilation with right-edge nasals is widespread, espe-
e.g. nu-şi dă seama [nuʒˈdəˈse̯ama] ‘he doesn’t realize’; (ii) cially preceding obstruents; Sp. prefixal, en- factitive !
voiceless obstruents before sonorants, os /os/ ‘bone’ (plural emborrachar [em]- ‘to intoxicate’ (borracho ‘drunk’), engordar
oase ['o̯ase]) ! [oz] lung ‘long bone’ (Avram 1986:565). [eŋ]- ‘to fatten’ (gordo ‘fat’), external sandhi, con [m] Pedro
Sibilants present notable cases of phonation-based san- ‘with Pedro’, con [ŋ] Carlos ‘with Carlos’; Clv. [ˈpjettə] ‘chest’
dhi. In standard Italian, although the sibilants /s/, /z/ ! [ˈmbjettə] ‘on one’s chest’, [kaˈtenə] ‘chain’ ! [ŋɡatəˈna]
contrast intervocalically within morphemes (for Tuscan/ ‘to chain up’. Before sonorants, assimilation is less common:
Central speakers), they undergo neutralizing voicing assimi- Sp. enmelar [enm]- ‘to sweeten’ (cf. miel ‘honey’), con Luís [nl]
lation preconsonantally both within morphemes and across ‘with Luís’, but Nap. don Luigi [dɔll], san Rafaele [sarr] ‘St
word-internal morpheme boundaries; thus, prefixal (di)s- Raphael’ (Bafile 2003a:154). Arlésien Occitan generalizes
preconsonantally has internal sandhi variants, [(di)s]- dis- coda velar [ŋ], impoussible, independènto ‘independent’, in-
fare ‘to undo’, spiacevole ‘unpleasant’ and [(di)z]- disgrazia mènso immense’ [iŋ], with sandhi variation arising from
‘misfortune’, snazionalizzare ‘to denationalize’, with [(di)z] prevocalic [n] (Coustenoble 1945). French en- abessive/fac-
appearing prevocalically disonesto dishonest’. In northern titive has internal sandhi with vowel nasalization and either
Italian also, where standard Italian intervocalic /s/ is nasal consonant deletion preconsonantally, enlever [ɑ͂l(ə)ve]
always voiced intramorphemically, identical internal sandhi ‘to remove’, or preservation prevocalically, enivrer [ɑ͂nivʁe]
occurs with sibilant-final prefixes. In both Italian varieties, ‘to intoxicate’. External sandhi, e.g. bon [bɔ͂] MSG ‘good’ vs bon
stem-initial /s/ after vowel-final prefixes is voiceless, aso- ami [bɔn] ‘good friend’, is bound up with liaison (§40.3.2).
ciale [s] ‘asocial’. The different voicing outcome of inter- Learnèd lexicon often reflects sandhi patterns found in
vocalic word-medial northern Italian /s/ has raised Latin, notably with POA and MOA assimilation before son-
theoretical controversy. Nespor and Vogel (1986:125-9) orants: e.g. IN- ! It. illegale [ill] ‘illegal’, irreale [irr] ‘unreal’,
and Nespor (1994:173), using intervocalic /s/ voicing as a immoderato [imm] ‘immoderate’; Fr. illégal [il(l)], irréel [iʁ(ʁ)],
criterion for defining the phonological word as a prosodic immodéré [im(m)]- with variable gemination (exceptions,
673
RODNEY SAMPSON
Table 40.3 Sandhi outcomes for /trɛs/ ‘three’, /ˈbattɔr/ [komˈpjuθe] ‘computer’, [ˈdɔbermã] ‘doberman’ (with vowel
‘four’ nasalization). Sandhi alternation appears in (a) forms with
[e] deletion prevocalically cognac invecchiato [ˈkɔɲɲakk
/ TRƐS / /' BATTƆR /
invekˈkjaθo] ‘old cognac’, and with (b) forms with gemin-
[trɛs ˈkanɛzɛ] ‘three dogs’ [ˈbattɔs ˈkanɛzɛ] ‘four dogs’ ation of a following word-initial consonant, doberman catti-
[trɛr ˈɣattozo] ‘three cats’ [ˈbattɔr ˈðomozo] ‘four houses’ vissimo [ˈdɔbermã kkattiˈvissimo] ‘very vicious doberman’
[trɛl ˈlittrozo] ‘three litres [ˈbattɔn ˈnukɛzɛ] ‘four walnuts’ (Bafile 2003a:163, 166). However, educated standard Italian
[trɛf ˈfizozo] ‘three sons’ [ˈbattɔf ˈfizozo] ‘four sons’ speakers nowadays may have either no paragogic vowel or
just a weak vocalic post-consonantal release akin to an
‘excrescent’ vowel (Repetti 2012). Sardinian underlying
word-final consonants are also prohibited prepausally. In
e.g. immangeable [ɛ͂] ‘uneatable’, are rare); Sp. ilegal, irreal [ir] this context, they receive a paragogic vowel whose quality
but inmoderado without assimilation. is identical to that of the preceding vowel: Nuo. issu finit[i]
Complex assimilation sandhi. Neutralizing patterns ‘he finishes’, issos sun[u] ‘they are’, but paragoge is variable
involving combinations of POA, MOA, and voicing assimila- with word-final /s/, [ˈfeminaz(a)] ‘women’ (Pittau 1972:17).
tion are found in Sardinian. In this variety, only /s/, /t/, /n/, After paragoge, underlying word-final /s/ shows regular
/r/ are permitted word-finally. Of these, /n/, /s/ and /r/ intervocalic sibilant voicing, Nuo. panes ! [ˈpanɛzɛ] ‘loaves’,
show notable external sandhi patterns when not prepausal and in dialects where intervocalic voiceless plosives under-
(for prepausal outcomes, see §40.2.2.2.2). Word-final /n/, went voicing historically, underlying final /t/ also voices
e.g. Nuo. in, kin, non, sun, an ‘in’, ‘with’, ‘not’, ‘they are’, after paragoge, Cpd. bènidi [ˈbɛnidi] ‘he comes’ (Virdis 1978:
‘they have’, undergoes POA assimilation before stops, kin 40). For syllabificational reasons, in many northern Italian
[ŋ] casu ‘with cheese’, an [m] prantu ‘they have wept’, but varieties of Emilia-Romagna word-final coda sequences
total assimilation elsewhere: in [ll] lettu ‘in bed’, non [rr] rides occurring prevocalically may be prohibited preconsonan-
‘do not laugh’, non [ff] facas ‘do not make!’ (Pittau 1972:97f.). tally or prepausally. In these contexts, a paragogic or anap-
Word-final /r/ and /s/ in morpheme-final and word-final tyctic vowel is inserted. Travo (Emilia) /pɛrl+Ø/ ‘I speak’ !
contexts neutralize (Table 40.3), although resultant sandhi [ˈpɛrla'dɛzi] ‘I’m speaking slowly’ but anaptyxis in [ag
patterns vary across the island (cf. Contini 1986:487-95). For ˈpɛralme] ‘I’m speaking to him’ (Zörner 1989:112-14, 224).
Nuorese, the external sandhi pattern for /r/ and /s/ is: Individual dialects display both repair strategies; Coli (Ro-
magna) has anaptyxis in rising sonority codas, [ˈmaːɡər]
[s] before word-initial voiceless obstruents except [f] and
‘thin’ and paragoge after falling sonority codas, [ˈnervə]
[ʦ];
‘nerve’ (Repetti 2000b).
[r] before other word-initial obstruents including [ʦ], also
Within the phonological phrase, where adjacent words
[j], [m] and [r];
present coda+onset sequences that are impermissible, there
total assimilation before word-initial [l], [n];
is repair through either vowel epenthesis or consonant
variable total assimilation in allegro speech before word-
deletion.
initial [f].
First, in French, schwa is commonly inserted between
Parallel outcomes appear in internal sandhi with prefixal adjacent words which present consonant sequences not
(or prosthetic) dis-, is-: dispiákere ‘to displease, dirgrássia found word-internally, /uʁs/ ‘bear’ ! quel ours [uʁs] ‘what
‘misfortune’; isperare ‘to hope’, irdentare ‘to remove teeth’ a bear!’, ours[ə] blanc ‘polar bear’ (lit. ‘bear white’), /maʧ/
(< *esdenˈtare). ‘match’ ! match [maʧ] affreux ‘terrible match’, match[ə] nul
‘draw’. In Alguerès, epenthetic [i] appears where a coda
sequence or simplex obstruent (except /s/) precedes an
40.2.2.2.2 Syllabification-based sandhi
onset consonant between words and in compounds,
Unsyllabifiable word-final coda consonants appearing in /aˈmik/ ‘friend’ ! [aˈmikiˈmeu] ‘my friend’, /set/ ‘seven’
preconsonantal or prepausal contexts may be repaired by ! [ˈsetiˈsenʦ] ‘seven hundred’ (Loporcaro 1997c).
paragoge. Many central-southern Italo-Romance varieties The second type of repair is through consonant deletion.
have a canonical vowel-final lexical word form, so Lengadocian has interconsonantal obstruent deletion, cort
consonant-final loanwords and neologisms require repair. moment [kurmuˈmen] ‘brief moment’, pòrcs negres [pɔrˈne-
Florentine displays a double pattern: (a) word-final obstru- gres] ‘black pigs’ (Alibèrt 1935:32); similarly, in informal
ents or /m/ geminate and insert [e], cognac [ˈkɔɲɲakke], styles, Catalan offers, arcs [arks] ‘arches’ ! arcs [arz] baixos
ticket [ˈtihette], bus ['busse], tram [ˈtramme]; (b) word-final ‘low arches’, serps [serps] ‘snakes’ ! serps [serz] grans ‘big
sonorants except /m/ are usually deleted, [go] ‘goal’, snakes’ (Jiménez 1999:193).
674
SANDHI PHENOMENA
40.3 Morphosyntactically and lexically (1) Word1 is a closed-set form; RF is morpholexically

conditioned sandhi conditioned and irregular:
(a) certain closed-set monosyllabic forms, a ‘to’, da
‘from’, etc. (but not di ‘of ’, le ‘the.FPL’), da Lucca
Three sandhi types are considered. The first two, confined [da lˈlukka] ‘from Lucca’;
to a subset of Romance varieties, are manifested in word- (b) a few paroxytonic closed-set forms, (d)ove
initial onsets. The third concerns clitics, which, almost ‘where’, qualche ‘some’, etc. qualche volta [ˈkwalke
unknown in Latin, have developed in all Romance varieties vˈvɔlta] ‘sometimes’.
and display major sandhi variation. (2) Word1 is an oxytonic lexical form; RF is phonologic-
ally conditioned and regular:
(a) monosyllables, do, può, etc. ‘I give’, ‘he can’, può
40.3.1 Raddoppiamento fonosintattico cantare [ˈpwɔ kkanˈtaːre] ‘he can sing’;
(b) polysyllables, verrà domani [verˈra ddoˈmaːni]
Raddoppiamento (or rafforzamento) fonosintattico (RF) ‘phono- ‘he’ll come tomorrow’.
syntactic doubling (or strengthening)’ is a process of forti- RF may sometimes be blocked, notably with type (2).
tion which operates, subject to constraints, between two Various factors are relevant, including: the presence of a
adjacent words, where word1 is vowel-final and word2 has long (bimoraic) final vowel in word1, as in [finˈiː ˈbɛːne] ‘I
an onset. The domain for its application depends on the finished well’ (with fusion of underlying final -/ˈii/), where
type of RF involved (see below): type (1) applies only the vowel’s exceptional bimoraicity obviates the need for a
between words entering into a local syntactic relation, e.g. coda (see below); the presence of a recently apocopated
modifier-head, whereas type (2) operates between adjacent form, da’ ‘give.IMP.2SG’, (un) po’ ‘(a) little’ (< dai, poco); the
words irrespective of their syntactic relationship. RF modi- presence of an intervening pause [parˈlɔ || ˈbɛːne] ‘he spoke
fies the onset of word2 , strengthening initial simplex con- well’; and glottal stop insertion between word1 and word2
sonants (excluding approximants) or the opening segment (Pratelli 1970; Absalom et al. 2002).
of tautosyllabic onsets. RF is found in almost all central- The presence of two distinct triggers for RF here has
southern Italian varieties including standard Italian (but not prompted attempts to find a unified interpretation for its
northern Italian varieties), Corsican, and Sardinian, and causation. One approach, based on the bimoraicity of Italian
may cause either gemination, as in standard Italian, vino stressed syllables when not prepausal, views RF type (2) as
[v]- ! più vino [vv]- ‘wine/more wine’, or gemination and prototypical. RF is taken to represent a repair strategy for
quality change, as in southern Italian varieties with under- monomoraic short stressed final syllables in oxytones like
lying voiced obstruents, e.g. Nap. vino [ˈviːnə] ‘wine’ ! verrà by inserting a moraic coda consonant (Vogel 1978;
cchiù [bb]ino ‘more wine’. Chierchia 1986). Recent phonetic studies have in fact
RF complements lenition (§40.2.2.1), in that both sandhi observed glottalization (creaky voice or glottal stop) in
processes operate on word-initial consonants in postvocalic prosodic-domain final stressed open syllables, interpretable
contexts. As such consonants can also display further sandhi as moraic coda creation (Vayra 1994; Stevens and Hajek
variation in postpausal or postconsonantal contexts, four 2006). But RF type (1) poses difficulties; (1a) monosyllables
variants are theoretically possible, but at most three are might be viewed as stressed (Basbøll 1989), but (1b) paroxy-
found as a result of partial levelling (Pittau 1972; Dalbera- tones remain problematic. An alternative view, supported
Stefanaggi 1978; 1991; Gioscio 1985; Contini 1987; Giannelli by cross-dialectal and diachronic data, identifies an origin-
and Cravens 1997) (Table 40.4). ally assimilatory basis for RF, as in tre case [trekˈkase] < TRES
Significant differences in the conditioning factors for RF CASAS, canterà bene -[rabˈbɛ]- < CANTARE-HA(BE)T BENE ‘he will sing
are found diatopically. In standard Italian, RF occurs in two well’. Only later, as final consonant deletion caused
distinct context types:
Table 40.4 Word-initial consonant sandhi forms

##___ C ___ [+ RF ] [+ LEN ]
Florentine /ˈkasa/ [k]asa ‘house’ in [k]asa ‘at home’ più [kk]ase ‘more houses’ la [h]asa ‘the house’
Lucanian /kaˈtena/ [k]atena ‘chain’ n[ɡ]atenà ‘to chain’ le [kk]atene ‘the chains’ la [k]atena ‘the chain’
C. Corsican /ˈpane/ [pp]ane ‘bread’ un [pp]ane ‘a loaf ’ trɛ [pp]ani ‘three loaves’ u [p]ane ‘the bread’
Nuorese /ˈkane/ [k]ane ‘dog’ kin [k]anese ‘with dogs’ e [kk]anese ‘and dogs’ su [k]ane ‘the dog’
675
RODNEY SAMPSON
restructuring of underlying forms, destroying the phono- words, where word1 has no coda consonant prepausally or
logical transparency of the assimilation, did oxytonic stress preconsonantally and word2 begins with a vowel or an
come to be reinterpreted as the strengthening factor approximant. For example, grand ‘big, tall’ ! (prepausal)
(Loporcaro 1997a). RF type (1), which originates in word- c’est grand [sɛ ɡʁɑ͂] ‘it’s big’, (preconsonantal) grand chat
final consonant assimilation, would therefore be historically [ɡʁɑ͂ ʃ a] ‘big cat’ but (prevocalic) grand œuf [ɡʁɑ͂tœf] ‘big
prototypical. egg’, (pre-approximant) grand oiseau [ɡʁɑ͂twazo] ‘big bird’
In other varieties showing RF, context types (1) and (2) with liaison [t]. But pre-approximant liaison is lexically
identified above operate as follows: conditioned, cf. grand oui [ɡʁɑ͂wi] ‘big yes’.
Liaison does not occur before h aspiré words (words his-
RF context Variety torically beginning with [h] (no longer pronounced), which
type still behave phonologically as if consonant-initial; see fur-
(1) + (2) Tuscany (not northwest and southeast), Ro- ther §18.4.1.5.4) like hibou ‘owl’, les hiboux [le (ʔ)ibu] not **
manesco (Tuscan-based), Corsican, [lezibu] ‘the owls’, and certain numerals, e.g. onze/onzième
Sassarese-Gallurese (northern Sardinia) ‘eleven/eleventh’. These forms also block elision, le hibou
(1) alone Southern Marche, central/southern Umbria, ‘the owl’, le onze mai ‘the eleventh of May’, not **l’hibou,
Lazio, southern Italy, Logudorese, **l’onze.
Campidanese When liaison consonants (LCs) appear, they normally
(2) alone Not found form the onset of word2 through enchaînement (resyllabifi-
(almost) no Southeast Tuscany, northern Umbria across cation of a coda consonant to form the onset of a following
RF to central-northern Marche onsetless syllable; see further §18.4.1.5.4), as in grand œuf
[ɡʁɑ͂.tœf]. However, liaison without enchaînement may occur,
Context type (2) is thus confined to a limited area, con- particularly in the scripted speech of politicians, academics,
firming its likely later origins. The area where RF is largely and media journalists: j’avais un rêve [ʒa.vɛz.ʔœ͂.ʁɛv] ‘I had a
or wholly abandoned forms a transitional zone adjacent to, dream’, uttered by President Giscard d’Estaing in 1981,
and influenced by, nearby northern Italian varieties where where a coda LC occurs and a glottal stop occupies the
geminate consonants have been regularly simplified, e.g. following onset position (Encrevé 1988:32). ‘Potential’ LCs
Gubbio (Umbria) [tre ˈkɛni] ‘three dogs’ (Moretti 1987:66; may even be heard before a consonant-initial word2: ce qui
Loporcaro 1997b:45f.). est [t] possible ‘what is possible’ said by President Chirac in
Triggers for RF type (1) vary diatopically. In Tuscany, (d) 2002 (Morin 2005:15). Spelling influence is probably a con-
ove ‘where’ and come ‘as’ systematically cause RF in Florence tributory factor, though quand with [t] preconsonantally has
but not in Siena before finite verb forms, Sen. [ˈdoveˈvai] existed in Parisian speech since the eighteenth century
‘where are you.SG going?’ but Flo. [vɔdˈdove tˈte] ‘I’m going (Morin 1990).
where you (are) (= to your house)’ (Giannelli 1997:299). In Historically, LCs represent word-final consonants pro-
some upper southern Italian varieties, feminine plural pre- nounced in all contexts, but between the thirteenth and
nominal determiners (e.g. articles, quantifiers) act as a sixteenth centuries they were progressively deleted, first
trigger, Nap. ’e case [ekˈkasə] ‘the houses’ vs ’a casa [aˈkasə] preconsonantally and then prepausally, leaving only pre-
‘the house’, as do the corresponding forms for uncountable vocalic allophones, a reduced set of which now appears as
(mass) nouns, [opˈpanə] ‘(the) bread’ vs [oˈpanə] ‘the loaf of possible LCs in French. Commonly occurring are [z], [t] and
bread’. RF type (2) does not operate at all in southern Italian [n]. The first two, like other LCs, often represent the other-
varieties, Sal. [lu toˈtɔ ˈvɛːne kraj] (= Tsc. It. [toˈtɔ vˈvjɛːne do wise ‘silent’ final consonant of a word-stem but they also
ˈmaːni]) ‘Totò is coming tomorrow’ (Fanciullo 1986:83). In function as morphological markers: [z] can indicate plural-
Corsican, both types of RF apply, (type 1) [trɛpˈpekuri] ity in nominals and second person in verbs, while [t] marks
‘three sheep’, [emˈmɛ] ‘and me’ (Dalbera-Stefanaggi third person in verbs. This morphological function leads
1991:358f.) and (type 2) [saˈrakkardiˈnale] ‘he must be a speakers sometimes to reinterpret these LCs, especially [z],
cardinal’ (Bottiglioni 1933:265). as mobile affixes (always rightwards from the structural or
pragmatic head), des chefs d’État [z]africains ‘some African
heads of state’, c’est quoi, comme [z]arbres ? ‘what sort of trees
40.3.2 Liaison are they?’; ils ne veulent pas [t]aller à l’école ‘they do not wish
to go to school’ (Morin and Kaye 1982:321, 324; Morin
Liaison is an external sandhi process found in French and 2005:10). The nasal LC is only found after forms ending
most non-standard varieties in northern France. It involves preconsonantally in a nasal vowel; in liaison contexts, the
consonant epenthesis between two syntactically related nasal vowel remains nasal in closed-set forms only: mon ami
676
SANDHI PHENOMENA
[mɔ͂nami] ‘my friend’ but bon ami [bɔnami] ‘good friend’. idiosyncratic patterns. The numeral vingt ‘twenty’ has the
Other LCs, [ʁ], [p], and [ɡ], occur rarely. LC [t] both prevocalically in vingt [t]ans ‘twenty years’ (for
A complex range of factors, structural and sociolinguistic, some speakers, also vingt[z] ans with plural affixal [z]) and
condition the appearance of liaison. preconsonantally in compounds, vingt[t]-sept ‘twenty-seven’
though not in quatre-vingt[Ø]-sept ‘eighty-seven’.
40.3.2.1 Morphosyntactic
Durand and Lyche (2008:54, 59), using the extensive Phonologie 40.3.2.4 Sociolinguistic
du français contemporain corpus, identify four sites where liaison Diaphasically, the incidence of liaison usually correlates
occurs categorically. Sites (i)-(iii) involve clitic groups where with degree of situational formality: more elevated registers
liaison operates between clitics or between clitic and a lexical and styles of speech typically contain more variable LCs.
host, site (iv) comprises lexicalized forms (all examples are Diachronically, in recent times possible liaison contexts like
drawn from the Phonologie du français contemporain corpus). NSG + A have been practically abandoned. Diatopically, liaison
(i) determiner + vowel-initial word in a noun phrase: in certain variable contexts was found more often in southern
les [z]enfants ‘the children’, les [z]autres vaches ‘the French speakers’ usage than amongst their northern counter-
other cows’ parts (Durand and Lyche 2008:47f.). Dialectally, non-standard
(ii) proclitic + another proclitic/verb (ils ‘they.MPL’, elles northern varieties generally show less use of liaison than in
‘they.FPL’, on ‘one’ (pronoun), nous ‘we/us’, vous ‘you’, standard French, reaching down to near-absence as in Ranrupt
en ‘in’ or partitive/abessive pronoun): (Lorraine) where only prenominal determiners are involved
elles [z]en [n]ont ‘they have some’ (Aub-Büscher 1962). Beyond metropolitan France, Canadian
(iii) verb + enclitics: French also has /l/ as a variable LC, especially after ça ‘that’,
allez-vous-[z]en! ‘go away!’ ça [l]arrive souvent ‘that happens often’, evidently through
(iv) compounds and set phrases: analogical generalization from the subject clitic elle ‘she’
de temps [z]en temps ‘from time to time’ which appears prevocalically as variable [a] or [al], [a(l) ariv]
‘she arrives’. Further limited generalization has also occurred,
Other sites show frequent but variable liaison. These include: si vous [l]êtes satisfait ‘if you are satisfied’ (Morin 1982).
(v) lexical adjective + noun: Liaison has long posed major descriptive problems for
petit [t]avantage ‘small advantage’ but ‘gros phonological theory. Contentious and ongoing issues
Øimmeuble ‘big building’ include the formal representation of LCs (epenthetic, under-
(vi) adverb + adjective: lying, floating, affixal, suppletive), the relationship between
très [z]évident ‘very obvious’ but très Øâgée ‘very old’ liaison and other linking phenomena e.g. the occurrence of
(vii) preposition + complement: schwa, and the nature of the domain within which liaison
dans [z]un camping ‘in a campsite’ but dans Øune occurs (cf. Côté 2011:2692-2705).
soirée ‘in an evening show’
40.3.3 Clitics
40.3.2.2 Phonological
In sites (vi) and (vii), liaison appears more frequently after Two broad contexts are considered: clitic pronouns in verb
monosyllabic forms than polysyllables, e.g. très ‘very’ more phrases, and determiners in noun phrases including noun
frequently than vraiment ‘really’, en ‘in’ more frequently phrases within prepositional phrases.
than envers ‘towards’, etc. Tranel (1981:220f.) also reports
non-liaison for (i) with plural adjectives with consonant-
40.3.3.1 Sandhi in verb phrases
final stems, les autres années [lezotʁane] ‘the other years’,
nouvelles exécutions [nuvɛlɛɡzekysjɔ͂] ‘new executions’. Cliticized direct object (DO) and indirect object (IO) personal
pronouns are found in verb phrases in almost all Romance
(see further Ch. 45) and, in some varieties, locative clitics
40.3.2.3 Lexical also occur (e.g. Fr. y ‘(to) there’, en ‘from there’). Subject
Other things being equal, the frequency of variable liaison clitics, which are rarer in Romance, show more limited
correlates with the relative frequency of word1. Inflected sandhi effects and are not considered further here (though
forms of être ‘to be’ enjoy higher frequency than those of see Ch. 47 for detailed discussion). Object pronouns are
avoir ‘to have’ and show liaison more consistently (Durand mainly proclitic but can occur enclitically, especially when
and Lyche 2008:47f.). Individual items also show hosted by positive second person imperatives and, less
677
RODNEY SAMPSON
generally, non-finite verb forms. Combinations of clitics, văzând ‘seeing’ ! văzându-mă ‘seeing me’, and second per-
usually ordered IO + DO, yield further cases of sandhi. son singular imperatives have syllabic [i], vezi! [vezj] ‘see!’!
Various processes already noted give rise to clitic sandhi, vezi-ţi de ale tale ['veziʦʲ deˈaleˈtale] lit. ‘see for yourself
notably: (a) vowel weakening; (b) liaison; (c) resyllabifica- about your things’, i.e. ‘mind your own business!’. In Cata-
tion; and to these may be added: (d) consonant gemination; lan, orthographic final -t of present participles and -r of
and (e) restructuring. oxytonic infinitives are realized phonetically only when a
vowel-initial clitic follows: havent [əˈβɛn] ‘having’ ! havent-
(a) Weakening is commonly found with right-edge clitic
ho [əˈβɛntu] ‘having it’ but havent anat [əˈβɛnəˈnat] ‘having
vowels in prevocalic contexts and may result in ap-
gone’; haver [əˈβɛ] ‘to have’ ! haver-ho [əˈβɛɾu] ‘to have it’,
proximantization or deletion, Cat. ho ‘it’ ! ho imita
but haver anat [əˈβɛəˈnat] ‘to have gone’, reconèixer-ho [rəku
[wiˈmitə] ‘he imitates it’ but ho tira [uˈtiɾə] ‘he throws
ˈnɛʃəw] ‘to recognize it’ (Mascaró 1986:103; Wheeler
it’, Ro. m-a văzut [m] ‘he has seen me’ but mǎ vede ‘he
2005:361). In Portuguese inflected verb forms, final
sees me’ [mə]. In Portuguese, vowel elision affects
unstressed -/e/ ! [j] before a vowel-initial enclitic, disse-o
clitic sequences -V1 + V2- ! V2, te+as ! tas [tɐʃ]
[ˈdisju] ‘he said it’, passe-a [ˈpasjɐ] ‘pass it’; elsewhere, vowel
‘them.FPL to you’, etc. Syncretism appears in lhe/lhes
elision occurs, disse o Júlio [ˈdisuˈʒulju] ‘Júlio said.’ (Mateus
(IO.3SG/PL) + clitic ! lho, lha, etc. However, speakers in
and D’Andrade 2000:147).
practice usually avoid combinations with lhes, e.g. dá-o
a eles ‘he gives it to them’ rather than dá-lho. See
further §45.4.4.
(b) Clitic liaison is categorical prevocalically within the 40.3.4 Sandhi in (preposition +) noun phrase
clitic group in French (cf. §40.3.2), nous, vous, les, en as
in allez-vous-en [vuzɑ͂] ‘go away!’, but allez-vous en 40.3.4.1 Article + noun
[vuɑ͂] prendre ‘are you going to take some?’.
Articles appear proclitically in all Romance varieties (except
(c) For repair of unsyllabifiable consonants within the
definite articles in Romanian), and show sandhi phenomena
clitic group, see §45.3.3.
frequently resembling those found with clitic pronouns.
(d) Consonant gemination, triggered by RF (§40.3.1), is
Vowel elision is widespread in proclitic feminine singular
found in Italian enclitic pronouns after monosyllabic
forms, originally in -A, in prevocalic contexts: Put. la/una
second person singular imperatives, /mi/ ! dammi
[la/yna] rösa ‘the/a rose’ but l’/un’ [l/yn] ura ‘the/an hour’;
[mm] ‘give me!’ but mi da [mi 'da] ‘he gives me’.
Cat. la/una [l‰/un‰] rosa, l’/un’ [l/un] ora; Nuo. sa/una [sa/
Gemination also appears in northern French var-
una] rosa, s’/un’ [s/un] ora. Where feminines show elision,
ieties. Forms like je l’ai vu [ʒœllevy] ‘I have seen
masculine singular articles may do likewise prevocalically,
him’, attested from the seventeenth century, con-
Nuo. s’amico [sa'miku] ‘the friend’ vs su muro [su'muru] ‘the
tinue to appear in standard French alternating with
wall’.
post-consonantal non-geminate forms, Pierre l’a vu
Proclitic articles lacking an underlying vowel may show
‘Pierre saw him’. Non-standard varieties, especially
sandhi prosthetic forms preconsonantally: Put. (l’ami), il mür
Picard, also show the geminated form, both proclit-
[il'myr], plural ils amis, mürs [ilzaˈmis], [ilzˈmyrs], Cat.
ically sans lli-avoir [ll] (IO.3SG) d’maindé ‘without having
(l’amic), el mur [əlˈmur], plural els amics, els murs [əlzaˈmiks],
asked him/her’, and enclitically in second person
[əlzˈmurs]. If /l/ is taken to be the underlying form of the
singular imperatives, tiens-toi! [tje͂tte] ‘stand!’, dis-
Italian masculine singular definite article as in l’amico ‘the
moi-le! [dimelle] ‘tell me it!’ (Morin 2007). The trigger
friend’, there are two sandhi forms, [lo] before heterosylla-
for these geminated sandhi forms remains uncertain.
bic onsets lo specchio ‘the mirror’ and [il] elsewhere il muro;
(e) Restructuring occurs in Portuguese within clitic
and masculine plural /i/ as in i muri ‘the walls’ has sandhi
groups where final /s/, /r/, or nasal vowel precedes
[ʎi] before word-initial vowels and heterosyllabic onsets, gli
a vowel-initial clitic, nos+o ! no-lo ‘it to us’, fazer+as !
amici, gli specchi ‘the friends’, ‘the mirrors’. Comparable
fazê-las [fɐ'zelɐʃ] ‘to do them’, fazem+os ! fazem-nos
sandhi variation appears in the masculine singular indefin-
['fazɐ͂nuʃ] ‘they do them’. Historically, the sandhi
ite article (and related forms, e.g. nessuno ‘not one’, alcuno
forms arose from consonantal assimilation, -s, -r # l-
‘some’, taluno ‘some, such’, niuno ‘not one’, etc.) ! [uno]
> ll > l and -N # l- > nn > n (with nasality also preserved
before heterosyllabic onsets, uno specchio ‘mirror’ and [un]
on the preceding vowel).
un muro, amico ‘a wall’, ‘a friend’ elsewhere. In French,
In verb + enclitic groups, the right edge of a verb host may liaison operates with plural les ! prevocalic [lez] acteurs/
display sandhi variation. Preceding a consonant-initial actrices ‘the actors/actresses’ vs preconsonantal [le] garçons/
enclitic, Romanian present participles show [u]-epenthesis, filles ‘the boys/girls’.
678
SANDHI PHENOMENA
40.3.4.2 Preposition + noun phrase and also standard northern Italian when an oxytonic word
precedes a word stressed on its first syllable. Primary stress
In prepositional phrases, sandhi phenomena are found
on word1 retracts to the initial syllable in bisyllabic words
between preposition and following determiner along two
and to the first syllable to the left carrying secondary
parameters:
stress in polysyllables: NIt. metà torta ! [ˈmeta ˈtɔrta]
‘half a cake’, onorò Dante ! [ˈonoro ˈdante] ‘he honoured
(1) Relative susceptibility of post-prepositional deter-
Dante’ (Nespor and Vogel 1979; 1986:174-7); Tsc. lo mangiò
miners to sandhi modification
lui ‘he ate it’, si sentì male ‘he felt bad’ ! lo mángio lui, si
definite article > indefinite article > demonstrative >
sénti male (Giannelli 2000:32f.). Stress retraction operates
other closed-set form
subject to constraints: the words with adjacent primary
stresses must belong to the same phonological phrase;
Portuguese has sandhi forms for all types: em ‘in’ !
it occurs preferentially when the second word is
(+article) no ‘in the’, num ‘in a’, (+demonstrative) naqueste
phonological-phrase-final so its stressed syllable carries
‘in this’, (other) noutro ‘in another’. However, most Romance
phrasal nuclear stress—thus, metà ‘half ’ is more susceptible
varieties have sandhi only with preposition + (especially
to stress retraction in metà torta than in metà torta mar-
definite) article (see Table 40.5). In French, the only sandhi
gherita ‘half (of the) sponge cake’; stress retraction is more
forms found are masculine singular du and plural des ‘of the’
probable in contexts where the second word is the phrasal
and masculine singular au, masculine plural aux ‘to the’,
head, e.g. in metà torta rather than in città sporche ‘dirty
while Castilian has just the masculine singular forms del
cities’. The relationship between stress retraction and RF
‘of the’ and al ‘to the’.
(§40.2.1) is noteworthy. Nespor and Vogel (1979) claim the
two rules operate in complementary fashion, with Italo-
(2) Relative susceptibility of predeterminer prepositions to
Romance varieties that undergo stress retraction never
sandhi processes
showing RF and vice versa. However, standard Italian and
(Latin etyma are cited; ‘0’ indicates no reflex of the
Tuscan display both rule types, e.g. Flo. si sentì male sur-
form)
facing as [si ˈsentimˈmaːle] with stress retraction operating
after RF.
Table 40.5 Preposition + determiner sandhi
Second, in central-southern Italian, Sardinian, Balearic
PER / Catalan, and Pyrenean varieties, rightward stress for-
AD DE DA > IN > CUM SU ( RSUM ) PRO warding (SF) appears in enclitic phrases, particularly
‘ TO ’ ‘ OF ’ ‘ FROM ’ ‘ IN ’ ‘ WITH ’ ‘ ON ’ ‘ FOR ’ verbal enclitic phrases. Whereas the original primary
stress location in the verb host is usually preserved in
Puter + 0 + + + + + encliticized forms in Romance—cf. It. imperative telèfona!
Italian + + + + (+) + (+) ‘telephone!’ ! telèfonamicelo! ‘tell it to me there over
Portuguese + + 0 + 0 + the phone!’ (Lepschy and Lepschy 1977:91)—stress for-
Catalan + + 0 0 0 warding relocates stress postlexically onto an enclitic
despite the fact that clitics are normally unstressed
forms. Three different SF patterns occur (see also
Put.: a + (i)l ! al ‘to the, cun+(i)l ! cul ‘with the’, per+(i)l
§45.3.1), giving:
! pel ‘for the’.
Pt.: de + o ! do ‘of the’, em + o ! no ‘in the’, por + o ! pelo
(i) paroxytones when two enclitics are present: Nap.
‘for the’.
[ˈpiʎʎa] ‘take!’! [piʎʎaˈtellә] ‘just take it’ with
Italian bracketed sandhi forms: col(la), etc. ‘with the’ is
‘ethic dative’ te, and similarly with monosyllabic
recessive now, whilst pel(la), etc. ‘for the’ is very unusual.
imperatives da ‘give!’ ! dammìllo give me it!’,
although proparoxytones are permissible as vari-
ants when just one enclitic is present, [ˈassәmә] ~
[asˈsamә] ‘leave/let me!’ (Loporcaro 2000:137;
40.4 Suprasegmental sandhi Ledgeway 2009a:34f.);
(ii) paroxytones when any enclitics are present: cat-
Suprasegmental sandhi arises from movement in primary egorically (Castellamare di Stabia, southern Campa-
stress location within the word or clitic group in some nia) [ˈpiʎʎә], [piʎˈʎallә] ‘take it!’, [piʎʎaˈtellә] or
Romance varieties. Two directional types occur. First, left- variably (Clv.) [ˈlɛvalә] ~ [lәˈvallә] ‘remove it’, (Srd.)
ward stress retraction occurs in standard Italian and Tuscan [ˈbokinalu] ~ [bokiˈnalu] ‘call him’ and [ˈnarramilu] ~
679
RODNEY SAMPSON
[narraˈmilu] ‘tell me it’ (Gioscio 1985:82; Pittau Patterns (i) and (ii) may be interpreted as stress
1972:20f.; Jones 1988b:327); shifting caused by prosodically aligning ‘heavy’ enclitic phrases
(iii) oxytones systematically (Maj. Cat.) donè’m, seu-tè, (i.e. with at least two enclitics) with the phonological word
anar-sè’n ‘give me!’, ‘sit down!’, ‘to go away’ (= stand- which normally has proparoxytonic or, more especially, paroxy-
ard Cat. dóna’m, asséu-te, anár-se’n), Luxey (Gsc.) [əs tonic stress. Pattern (iii) is curious since the varieties concerned
ˈpiœ] ‘look.IMP.2SG’ ! [əspiœˈla] ‘look at her!’, do not show systematic French-style oxytonic word stress,
[əspiœˈlœs] ‘look at them!’ (Veny 1987:94; Séguy which suggests the involvement of morphological factors
1954-74: vol. VI, map 2250, point 664). which remain uncertain (Ordóñez and Repetti 2006).
680
CHAPTER 41
Writing Systems
THOMAS FINBOW
41.1 Introduction (Ac. 1.5) mention variation from canonical sound values,
indicating conditioned sound changes not reflected in writ-
ing, e.g. m = /Ṽ / or Ø in word-final position; ns as /s/
‘Romance’ has been described as a metalinguistic category
(Herman 2000).
based upon ‘scriptolinguistic’ criteria, rather than purely
Latin diacritics include the silicus (Isidore, Etymologiae
linguistic factors (Emiliano 1991:234; 1999; 2003a:18). This
1.27.29; Velius Longus, De Orthographia (Keil 1855, VII, 80;
definition emphasizes that not only language-internal
Oliver 1966:149); Gaius Marius Victorinus (Mariotti
issues but also non-linguistic matters must be considered
1976:§4.2); Fontaine 2006; Steffens 1903-7: pl. 101; Sandys
in distinguishing Romance from Latin, and often also when
1910:768)), and the apex (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 1.7.2f).
subcategorizing written Romance varieties. Among such
Auxiliary systems include suspension and contraction
external factors, writing systems and representational
abbreviations, Tironian notes, sense- and breathing-based
norms occupy prominent positions. Conventional graphic
punctuation (Parkes 1992:13f.; Müller 1964; Wingo 1972), the
systems are crucial for any investigation of a Romance
diastole, and the hyphen (Saenger 1997a:85). This system
variety that focuses on a period prior to the invention of
represents the historical departure point for the represen-
sound recording and other reproduction technologies in the
tational systems used in most Romance languages.
mid-nineteenth century. Extrapolation from such culturally
determined representational conventions into the linguistic
domain has always been an important part of Romance
scholarship. 41.3 Late Latin and early Romance
Ideas about the graphic and the oral mediums’ relations

have profoundly influenced accounts of Latin’s diachronic
41.2 The Latin alphabet evolution and the development of Romance. Broadly, two
theoretical positions exist: ‘two-norm’ models (Wright
The classic Latin alphabet comprises twenty-three graph- 1982:1) and a ‘single-norm’ hypothesis (Wright 1976b;
emes standing in fairly direct relations to phonemes 1982; 1991; 2002).
(Vincent 1988a:28). Inherited from the western Greek trad-
ition, one Latin grapheme (X) represents a sequence, and
three characters (C K Q[+U]) represent /k/ (ultimately a 41.3.1 Two-norm hypotheses
reflection of the alphabet’s western Semitic origin).
Digraphs represent diphthongs and geminate consonants. Historically, models have predominated in which learnèd
For writing Greek loanwords, the Romans added the Greek and vernacular Latin are conceived as independent systems,
letters y and z (/y/ and /ʣ/), and elaborated a series of e.g. Berschin and Berschin (1984). Typically, bilingualism
digraphs for aspirated voiceless consonants (Wallace 2011) (Muller and Taylor 1932; Pei 1932; Grundmann 1958), trilin-
(Tables 14.1–14.4). gualism (Menéndez Pidal 1926), or diglossia (Ferguson 1959;
Despite Latin spelling’s original broadly phonemic basis Lüdtke 1964; 1968; Pei 1976) are invoked to relate literary
(Bassols de Climent 1967; Allen 1965; Harvey 1990; Wallace and popular varieties and to explain why no clear concep-
2011), Velius Longus distinguishes orthographia and orthoe- tual distinction existed before the Carolingian period (e.g.
peia, showing that spelling and pronunciation were not Muller 1923; Koll 1958a,b; Wright 1982:1-3).
isomorphic (Keil 1855, VII 71.8-12, 72.2-4; Wright 1982:56). Two-norm models assume that alphabets’ grapho-
Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria 1.7.29;9.4.40), Velius Longus phonemic correspondences are reasonably direct, especially
(Keil 1855, VII 54.1-13, 75.15; Kremer 1976:60), and Cicero in early phases (Harvey 1990:187; also 1991; 1992).
This chapter © Thomas Finbow 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press. 681
THOMAS FINBOW
Table 41.1 Latin alphabet: single graphs representing consonantal segments/sequences (on G < Z, see Hempl 1899)
B C D F G (< Z) H K L M N P Q R S T X
/b/ /k/ /d/ /f/: [f], /ɡ/: [ɡ] /h/ /k/ /l/: [1], /m/ /n/: [n], /p/ /kw/ /r/ /s/ /t/ /ks/
[ç ] [ŋ]/_n (/_a) [ɫ] [ŋ]/_Cvelar (>/k/)
[m]/_Cbilabial
Table 41.2 Latin alphabet: digraphs expressing consonantal segments

BB CC DD FF GG LL MM NN PP QU GU RR SS TT
/bː/ /kː/ /dː/ /fː/ /ɡː/ /lː/ /mː/ /nː/ /pː/ /kw/>/k u/̯ /ɡw/>/ɡu̯/ /rː/ /sː/ /tː/
Table 41.3 Graphs representing vocalic segments

A (Á) E (É) I (Í) O (Ó) U (Ú) AE AU OE (EU)
/a(ː)/ /e(ː)/ /i(ː)/, ([ı]), /j/ /o(ː)/ /u(ː)/, ([ʊ]), /w/ /ai ̯/ /au̯/ /oi ̯/ /eu̯/
Table 41.4 Graphs developed for writing Greek loans or borrowed from Greek
Y Z RH CH PH TH
/i(:)/ (< [y(ː)]) [ʣ] /r/ (< [r]) /k/, (< [kh], [x]) /f/, /p/ (< [ph]) /t/ (< [th], [θ])
˚
Orthographic variation has therefore been studied with style and simultaneously reducing illiterates’ understanding
considerable success as evidence for diachronic evolution, of what they heard read aloud. Such structural differenti-
e.g. cupa (CUPPAM) ‘cup’, ueclus (UETULUS) ‘old’, cingidur (CINGITUR) ation was already approaching a crisis between the sixth
‘is girded’, and minsis (MENSES) ‘months’ indicate loss of con- and seventh centuries (Herman 1992; Banniard 1992; 2001a,
sonant gemination (cf. Sp., copa /ˈkopa/, Pt., copo /ˈkopu/, b; 2002:81-5), when the Carolingians’ classicizing liturgical
Fr. coupe /kup/) and /m/ > Ø word-finally; post-tonic vowel reform elevated written style beyond illiterates’ native
syncope (+ /t/ > [k]/_l); intervocalic stop voicing, and mer- competence. Already precarious, ‘vertical communication’,
ger of /ı/ (</i/) with /e/ (< /eː/), respectively. i.e. public reading aloud (Banniard 1992), broke down irre-
Typically, such deviation from Classical norms is attrib- trievably. Accordingly, afterwards, the vernacular was per-
uted to declining educational standards with failure to ceived as a separate language to Latin, which stimulated
impart the learnèd variety properly (Riché 1962). Conse- writing the former differently, although based largely on
quently, vernacular features, especially phonology, misled pre-existing late Latin conventions (Banniard 1991a,b; 1993;
writers, sporadically inciting mistakes. Conversely, trad- 1996). Canon seventeen of the Council of Tours (813) has
itional features present in texts yet absent from medieval been interpreted as recording this event (although see
Romance have been interpreted as evidence for oral pres- §41.3-2). Consequently, two-norm theories believe that ver-
ervation (Walsh 1991; Dworkin 1995). Learnèd pronunci- nacular writing followed conceptual separation.
ation has been invoked to explain some vernacular forms’
partially inhibited (semi-learnèd) evolution, e.g. PENSARE
/penˈsaːre/ > Sp. pensar /penˈsaɾ/ ‘to think’ (semi-learnèd
41.3.2 The single-norm hypotheses
/ns/ > /ns/) vs pesar /peˈsaɾ/ ‘to weigh’ (/ns/ > /s/).
The resulting theories typically emphasize how cumula- Wright argues that the terms ‘Latin’ and ‘Romance’ are
tive effects of diachronic change transformed vernacular anachronisms until around the twelfth century, when two
Latin into Romance, especially the impact of sound changes different written traditions are clearly distinguishable. Only
on inflectional morphology. Loss of vowel quantity, syncope then can our twofold metalinguistic distinction apply to
and apocope (Herman 1992) distanced popular varieties western Romanophone communities (Wright 1992; 1993b).
from the learnèd variety, complicating mastery of literary Earlier, Romanophones were ‘complexly monolingual’, i.e.
682
WRITING SYSTEMS
all variants, written or oral, belonged conceptually to a For some words, medieval Latin pronunciation certainly
‘Latin-Romance’ ‘ensemble’ (Wright 1992:883; 1993b:207f.; influenced vernacular phonology. For example, intervocalic
Emiliano 1999:20, n.54). Linguistic structures conceived /t ɡ/ in Sp. litigar /litiˈɡaɾ/ ‘go to law’ vs /d/ (< [t] / V_V) and
today as belonging to separate languages (Latin or Ø (< [ɡ] / V_V) in lidiar /lidiˈaɾ/ [liˈðjaɾ] ‘fight’ betrays the
Romance) were classified in styles or registers of a single former as a borrowing of medieval Lat. litigare /litiˈɡare/,
language: some more formal, others less so; some in con- confirmed by the first attestation of litigar in the fifteenth
temporary oral usage, others predominantly employed in century (Wright 1976a:13f.). However, Wright questions
writing but passively understood. Latin’s retarding phonological influence in generating so-
Wright criticizes Romance philologists for underestimat- called semi-learnèd forms, e.g. Sp. siglo ‘century’ (semi-
ing the degree of divergence and complexity that written learnèd) < SAECULUM, i.e. /ɡl/ </kl/ < posttonic /kul/, rather
and oral modalities can tolerate. Cross-culturally, writing than **/ˈsexo~ˈsixo/, (cf., popular ojo ‘eye’ < OCULUM, conejo
primarily aims to convey propositional content; reflections ‘rabbit’ < CUNICULUM); and espíritu ‘spirit’ instead of **/esˈpiɾdo/
of linguistic structure are ontologically secondary. Thus, a < SPIRITUS, i.e. intervocalic /d/ < /t/ /; /o/ < /u/ word-finally;
given writing system may represent important linguistic deletion of intertonic /i/. For Wright, variationist models
structures poorly, e.g. Arabic script for Turkish or medieval involving selection between competing, semantically
Ibero-Romance (see §41.5.1, §41.2). ambiguous, synchronic variants are preferable to traditional
Even if alphabets initially favour direct grapho-phonemic dialect/language-mixing models if no conclusive evidence
relations, once an orthographic tradition arises, writers exists for learnèd pronunciation before the Carolingian
usually reproduce canonical forms rather than reflect lin- Reforms (Wright 1976b:179; 1982:x-xi, 51-8, 78-98; 2002).
guistic changes of which they may not even be aware, and Thus, for Wright, ‘Latin’ phonology is essentially what Hall
incorporate differences noticed into existing representa- (1950; 1976), Lüdtke (1964:15; 1968), and others recon-
tional and operative models (Herman 1992; Emiliano 1995; structed for so-called ‘proto-Romance’.
2003a:46-54). Approximation to the norm denotes a writer’s Thus, given conservative written models and centuries of
control and acceptance of the representational system. phonological evolution, by early medieval times many written
Roman texts changed little because cultural norms demand- desinences were probably homophones or unpronounced,
ing traditional orthography, vocabulary, and syntax treated as part of traditional spelling. Perhaps a few phono-
remained largely constant. Such constituents can be learnt logically robust inflections survived (Herman 1992:181–4),
through formal instruction (Lüdtke 1964:5, 14) but, Wright similar to s~ʃ, VCCe /_#, þe~ye, and -(e)th in English (ye olde
argues (1982:50), normatively correct spelling does not guar- tea ʃhoppe openeth [ji͡jˈo͡wɫdi͡jˈtʰi͡jˈʃɒpi͡jˈo͡wpənəθ]), e.g. genitive
antee conservative phonology, e.g. ModEng. orange /ˈɒɹınʤ/, plural -ORUM/-ARUM */ˈoɾo/, */ˈaɾo/, e.g. PORTA ‘door’ [ˈpweɾta] ~
night /nɑjt/, Featherstonehaugh /ˈfæn.ʃɔ/. Purely graphic PORTARUM [poɾˈtaɾo], passive -ITUR */edoɾ/, e.g. AMABITUR ‘is loved’
morphology is not uncommon (Catach 1973; 1988; 1995; [amaˈβiðoɾ] (Green 1991:85), dative/ablative plural -IBUS
1996), e.g. the French homophones /ˈʃãt/: chante.1/3SG.PRS, */ebos/ (Wright 1982:42;169f.; 1994e:132).
chantes.2SG.PRS, chantent.3PL.PRS ‘sing’ (Wright 1982:50). According to Wright, the crucial factor in rupturing ver-
Consequently, we cannot automatically equate written tical communication was a novel spelling pronunciation
variation with oral variation (e.g. Wright 1994e, Emiliano introduced by Alcuin of York, based on direct grapho-
2003c:50, and Pensado 1991 on Menéndez Pidal’s ‘Leonese phonemic correspondences as in Insular vernaculars. Oral
Vulgar Latin’, 1926:§§95, 109; and Lapesa’s ‘Romancified resurgence of inflections previously only written, plus
popular Latin’, 1980:§40). Equally unadvisable is the com- unfamiliar lexis and obsolete syntax, hampered comprehen-
mon convention (not employed in this volume) of repre- sion considerably amongst the uninitiated, e.g. pre-reform:
senting unattested reconstructions between Latin and UIRIDIARIUS = [veɾˈʤjeɾ] ‘garden’; IACIT [ʤist] ‘lies’ > post-
Romance orthographically rather than in phonemic/phon- reform: UIRIDIARIUS = [vi.ɾi.diˈa.ɾi.us] (+[veɾˈʤjeɾ]); IACIT [ˈja.kit]
etic transcription often without -M, e.g. POPULU ‘people’ > (+[ʤist]).
Fr. peuple, Pt. povo, Sp. pueblo, It. popolo (Wright 1994b:55). Nevertheless, reformed Latin’s direct grapho-phonemic
This convention results directly from belief in Latin’s direct relations offered a solution for producing comprehensible
grapheme–phoneme correspondences, e.g. ‘*comperare ‘to texts for the un-Latinate: graphemes’ reformed Latin sound
buy’ (CLat. COMPARĀRE) > comprar’ (Lloyd 1987:201, cited by values could represent vernacular sounds, e.g. [veɾˈʤjeɾ]
Wright 1994b:53), see also Wright (1994b:50-52), and *BAISU ‘garden’, ‘grove’ ! vergier, [ʤist] ‘lies’ ! gist, and could
‘kiss’ for /ˈbasiu/ > */ˈbajsu/ (Cano Aguilar 1988:71, cited in elicit vernacular utterances, especially useful for non-
Wright 1994b:54). However, as conventional written forms, Romance speakers, e.g. Louis the German for the Strasbourg
COMPARARE and BASIUM can represent either the innovative or Oaths (Wright 1982:122-6), or lectores abroad, e.g. San Millán
conservative variant. and Silos glosses (Wright 1994d:218f.; Emiliano 1993;
683
THOMAS FINBOW
Stengaard 1991; Blake 1998). Possibly Germanic liturgical Rejecting grapho-lexemic correspondences, Wright
performances inspired the Saint Eulalia Sequence (Wright (1993c; 1994c; 2004b), Penny (1998; 2003) and Pensado
1982:129-35). (1998) maintain the term ‘logography’, understood as read-
Thus, Wright proposes that conceptual separation fol- ing by immediate recognition of lexemes’ graphic represen-
lowed the development of vernacular writing (see also tation. Such word-recognition logography contrasts with
Lloyd 1991; Janson 1991). Different written representations phonographic word recognition that progresses grapheme
rendered linguistic variance more explicit and, com- by grapheme, creating phoneme chains from extracted
pounded by incomprehension, increasingly reified an exist- sound values and triggering lexical access when a known
ing incipient conceptual distinction, often expressed form is produced (see also Azcoaga 1988:240-48, 257;
adjectivally or adverbially, e.g. rusticus ‘rustic’, humilis Emiliano 2003a:32-4; Saenger 1982; 1997a).
‘low’, ‘simple’, latine ‘in a Latin manner’, romanice, vulgarice Critics of logography and reading Latin as Romance (e.g.
‘in a Roman/popular manner’ (Koll 1958a,b; Müller 1963), Cabrera 1998:9; Ariza Viguera 2004:317; Gil 2004:151;
until it became full separation. Varvaro 2013a) typically do not distinguish between the
Orthodox Christianity’s use of Greek and Old Church proponents of logography with grapho-lexemic correspond-
Slavonic, rather than Latin (post-Carolingian or otherwise), ences and supporters of logography without grapho-
meant that Daco-Romance did not participate in the socio- lexemic correspondences, treating all as the former. Conse-
cultural upheaval and related linguistic changes that quently, doubts regarding the notion that ancient Latin
affected western varieties. Ibero-Romance-speaking Jews’ texts, e.g. Vergil, were read logographically—as langue d’oïl
use of ladino (< latinus), whose liturgical language was Heb- by Gregory of Tours but as Italo-Romance by a contempor-
rew (Wright 1993a,b; 1992; cf. §22.1), and the retention of ary at Montecassino (Varvaro 2013a:44f.)—apply only to
ladin in isolated Alpine and Apennine communities and the Emiliano’s or Blake’s logography. Wright specifically
Dalmatian coast where relations were principally with Ger- favours UXOR = [oˈʃoɾ], MULIER = [moˈʎeɾ], [muˈʒeɾ] over UXOR
manic, Slavonic, and Albanian populations (Müller 1963:41), = [moˈʎeɾ], [muˈʒeɾ] ‘wife’, (2005:142), as in his other pub-
further indicate ecclesiastical Latin’s crucial role in reifying lished transcriptions (e.g. Wright 1982:170; 1983; 1993d;
the conceptual separation. Müller (1963:39f.) also notes la- 1999:515). Thus, despite singling out logography, Varvaro
tinus to denominate inhabitants of central and southern (2013a) actually questions the whole single norm hypothesis
Italy, e.g. in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia I.VIII and Divina in favour of a vision in which ‘[g]radually individual com-
Commedia, Purgatorio 9:58; also Inferno 27:33; 29:88; 91. munities became aware that they spoke something differ-
ent from the Latin used by the learnèd and the Church’
(p. 51). However, see Wright (1982) and other research,
some independent of and some inspired by Wright’s ideas
41.3.3 Logographic Latin
(e.g. Janson and Tsonope 1991; Janson 1991; 1995; 2002;
Lloyd 1991), on why such a vision is problematic. Other
Emiliano (1993; 1995; 1991) proposes that synchronic vari- critics of complex monolingualism (e.g. Montaner Frutos
ation between traditional and innovative spellings suggests 2012) favour a more nuanced diglossic interpretation
that some late Latin spellings were logograms interpreted (‘spectroglossia’)
by ‘grapho-lexemic correspondences’, e.g. PERCUSS- /feɾ/-,
/hiɾ/- ‘injure’; OCCID- /mat/- ‘kill’. Other traditional spellings
maintained some grapho-phonemic relations with the lex-
ical item represented, e.g. FEC- /fiʣ/-, /hiʣ/- ‘do, make’; 41.4 Textual zones for developing
HABU- /owb/- ‘have’; -ERIT -/(j)eɾ(e)/ ‘3SG FUT SBJV’ (see also Romance
Emiliano 1999; 2003c). Innovative (phonographic) spellings
replace traditional (logographic) forms as medieval Latin Romance and Latin, as understood today, are constructs,
and the vernacular separate. To grapho-phonemic and ‘discourse traditions’ (Kabatek 2001; 2005a,b; 2008) or scrip-
grapho-lexemic correspondences, Blake (1991a,b; 1992; tolinguistic ‘modalities’ (Emiliano 2003b:232; 2003c) that
1995; 1998) adds unwritten morphosyntactic insertions, have developed from an earlier scriptolinguistic situation
e.g. Val Nuni = /ˈba.ʎe.de.muˈɲoʦ/ ‘valley of Muñoz’ (the without such a rigorous metalinguistic dichotomy. Many
writer indicates the morphosyntactic relation traditionally, developments associated with later Romance appear first
with -i, read as the contemporary vernacular equivalent, i.e. in lexical and syntactic glosses, e.g. Ibero-Romance: San
/de/ ‘of ’). Stengaard (1991) interprets the alphabetic glosses Millán de la Cogolla and Santo Domingo de Silos (tenth/
in Codex Emilianense 60 as a system for rearranging Latinate eleventh century, Navarre); Raeto-Romance: Würzburg
syntax into Romance patterns. Manuscript (tenth/eleventh century, St Gallen), Einsiedeln
684
WRITING SYSTEMS
Homily (eleventh century). The earliest unambiguously ver- Romanization: (1) avoid ‘silent’ letters (though see below); (2)
nacular texts are typically non-literary documents (see avoid unpredictable grapho-phonemic correspondences; and (3)
§3.2), generally juridical, e.g. northern France: the Stras- restrict grapho-phonemic variability. The resulting conventions
bourg Oaths (846) and the Jonas fragment (late ninth/ differ from reformed Latin, owing to phonological contrasts
early tenth century); from Catalonia: the grievances of Gui- largely absent in medieval Latin, e.g. affricate and palatal phon-
tard Isarn of Caboet (1080/95) (Rabella i Ribas 1997), and the emes; front rounded, nasal, and central vowels. Innovative
oath of peace and truce of Count Pere Ramon of Pallars graphemes are often analogical adaptations, e.g. Occ. nh
Jussà (c.1098) (Moran i Ocerinjauregui 1993; 1994; Moran i /ɲ/ and lh /ʎ/, presumably following ch /k/; likewise, ch
Ocerinjauregui and Rabella i Ribas 2001; 2004); for Galician- /k/ ! gh /ɡ/. However, models and reference points were
Portuguese: the pact of Gomes and Ramiro Pais (c.1169/ borrowed, e.g. in-line diacritics in multi-graphs attempting
1173-5) (Souto Cabo 2004:582); the will of Pedro Fafes to represent certain articulatory aspects of the represented
(1210) (Emiliano 2003b), the will of Afonso II of Portugal segment (Table 41.5).
(1214), the notícia de torto of Lourenço Fernandes da Cunha Broad domains are distinguishable amongst Romance writ-
(c.1214) (Emiliano and Pedro 2004); for Castilian: the treaty ing systems based on norms selected to represent the out-
of Cabreros (1206) (Wright 2000), the 1207 cortes of Toledo comes of certain phonological processes, e.g. palatalization
(Wright 2002:282). In the Italo-Romance area, early texts and diphthongization (cf. Chs 38, 39). These zones are estab-
include the twelfth-century sermones subalpini from Pied- lished through direct historical influence, e.g. in Iberia, French
mont (with strong Occitan influences); from the Tuscan and Occitan models were influential during the twelfth cen-
region, the carta navale pisano/carta di Filadelfia (late twelfth tury (Wright 1982:190-207; Morala Rodríguez 1996; 1997;
or early thirteenth century) (Baldelli 1973; 1988), the mem- Ciérbide Martinena 1998). When Romania abandoned the
oriali bolognesi (public registry from 1265) and a fragment Cyrillic alphabet, French and Italian provided models.
from a Florentine banker’s accounts (1211). In Sardinia, In a western, Gallo-Iberian zone, qu, gu: /k ɡ/ /_ i, e (and,
various condaghi, legal documents dealing with property since 2010, /kw/, /ɡw/ in Portuguese); ch is /ʧ/, e.g. Span-
ownership, e.g. the condaghe of San Pietro di Silki, San Nicola ish, Galician, Asturian (OPt., OFr. /ʧ/ > ModPt., ModFr., [ʃ]),
di Trullas, San Michele di Salvonnor (Merci 2001; Virdis and ç has been used (Spanish) or is still employed (Portu-
2003b; Fois and Maxia 2009). Literary works in Romance guese, Catalan, French, Occitan, northern Italo-Romance)
generally occur later than non-literary texts, although not- for /ʦ/~/s ̺s/, often contrasting with z (/ǳʣ/~/z ̺z/). In an
ably early verse includes the old French Sequence of Saint eastern, Italian (and, by direct importation) Romanian group-
Eulalia (late ninth century), the Occitan Tomida femina frag- ing is defined by ch gh: /k ɡ/ /_Vfront. Italian z represents
ment (ninth/tenth century), Boecis (c.1000) and Cançó de [/ʦ/(ː)]~[ʣ(ː)], and in standard Italian, s /V_V can be [s] or
santa fe (1054/76), the Indovinello veronese, the Venetian [z], e.g. fuso: /ˈfuzo/ ‘melted’, /ˈfuso/ ‘spindle’, voicing is
Ritmo bellunese fragment (c.1183-96), and the Ritmo lauren- normal among northern Italians, while southerners gener-
ziano (1188-1207) (Segre and Ossola 2005; Castellani 1986; ally exhibit the voiceless variant. In Romanian, s is /s/, z is
see also Varvaro 2013a:52). always /z/ and /ʦ/ is ț. Romanian /ʃ/ is ș, in contrast with
Sabatini (1965b; 1968; 1978) highlights the dispositional sec- It. sc+i/e, reflecting a major historical source (Lat. -SCI-, -SCE-
tions in tenth-century central Italian notarial documents as /ski, e/), as with sg for /ʒ/ in Milanese, Piedmontese, and
textual domains less normatively regimented than the formu- Corsican. A similar historical motivation in Iberia led to x
laic invocatio and subscriptio, where a style develops foreshadow-
ing later Romance. Emiliano and Pedro (2004:4-11, 35f., 39f.)
Table 41.5 Some Romance multi-graphs
identify the notitia as a genre less subject to sociocultural
pressure for orthographic conformity. Such private documents SOUND SPELLING
registering personal opinion admit less formal written variants
without subsequent Latinizing, as the versions of Pedro Fafiz’s /ø/, /œ/ eu, oe, oeu, ö
will (1210) confirm occurred with public documents (Emiliano /y/ ü, y, iu
2003b; see also Frank 1994; Frank and Hartmann 1997).
/ew/, /ej/ ob, ec (Emiliano and Pedro 2004)
41.4.1 Selecting representational conventions /ɲ/ nn (> ñ), ny, ni, (i)gn(i), nh
/ʎ/ ll, (i)(l)l(i), ly, gl(i), lh
We cannot assume that all early Romance writing mirrors /ʦ/~/ʣ/, /ʧ/~ c + i/e, ç, z, cz ts, tz, ct, g+e/i, x, (i)(s)s,
speech faithfully (Varvaro 2013a:50). However, Emilano /ʤ/, /ʃ/~/ʒ/ t(i), ch, sg(i), sc(i), j
(1991:235) identifies three general principles for de-Latinization/
685
THOMAS FINBOW
for /ʃ/ in old (but not modern) Spanish, Portuguese, ciudad ‘city’ /θiuˈdad/, and homonym disambiguation, e.g.
Galician, Asturian, and Catalan (i)x, (analogously, Catalan Sp. tu ‘your’ (2SG), si ‘if ’ vs tú ‘you’ (2SG), sí ‘yes’ (also Galician,
has tx for /ʧ/ /#_, _#, V_V, e.g. txec [ʧɛk] ‘cheque’, l’esquitx Asturian, Sardinian); and (3), in the rest, a mixture of quali-
[əsˈkiʧ ] ‘the splash’, cotxe [ˈkɔʧə] ‘car’, etxo [eʧo] (a diminu- tative features, tonicity, and homonym disambiguation.
tive + pejorative suffix) (also -ig /_#, e.g. vaig [baʧ] ‘I go’.
Gn: /ɲ/ unites northern Gallo-, Raeto-, and Italo-
Romance. Portuguese adopted Occitan lh and nh. Catalan
selected ny, and Spanish ñ (as a representation of nn, and 41.5 Romance writing in other scripts
reflecting the fact that Lat. /nn/ > /ɲ/). In medieval and
modern regional Italo-Romance traditions, e.g. Milanese Today, only Judaeo-Spanish (see §22.2.4) and Transdnies-
(Nicoli and Gabiazzi 1983), /n/ is often written nn, because trian Moldovan (§8.3) are normally written in non-Latin
V+n typically indicates a nasal vowel. Raeto-Romance, scripts (in Hebrew and Moldovan Cyrillic, respectively).
Friulian, and Italo-Romance employ gli for /ʎ/. French, However, historically, Romance varieties have been written
Catalan, and Spanish selected il, ll respectively for /ʎ/ in scripts other than the Latin alphabet.
(ModFr. [j]).
41.5.1 Judaeo-Spanish/Ladino
41.4.2 Romance diacritic conventions
Iberian Jewish communities wrote Ibero-Romance in Heb-
Following late Latin conventions, early medieval writing rew script, generally using the solitreo semi-cursive style
used diacritics sparsely. Classical tachygraphy, such as Tir- (distinct from modern Hebrew Ashkenazi cursive), with
onian notes, and suspension and contraction abbreviations Hebrew and Aramaic words in square letter style
provided variant representations, mostly for syllabic mor- (Table 41.6). Printed Ladino is particularly associated with
phemes, e.g. 7 (et ‘and’), 9 (cum ‘with’) (Saenger 1997a:85), the Rashi typeface (an acronym for the eleventh-century
converting cenemic symbols into pleremes. Association Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki). Early Jewish typographers modelled
could involve character sequences, e.g. 9 = cun, con, com, Rashi on fifteenth-century Sephardic cursive to distinguish
cum, or /ko, um,n/, /kõ, ũ(m, n), -4 and -2 for rum /ɾo, u(m, the Talmudic text (in square Hebrew) from the commen-
n)/, us /u(s)/, /o(s)/ as -9, e.g. laurenti9 /lowˈɾẽʣu/ (Emiliano tary, frequently by the eponymous rabbi.
and Pedro 2004:11f.). Following the 1492 diaspora, Sephardic Jews continued
The commonest diacritics used in Romance writing writing and printing Ibero-Romance in Hebrew characters
(acute, grave, and circumflex accents, diæresis) originate although, from the nineteenth century, the Latin alphabet
in Ancient Greek symbols for pitch and hiatus (Johnson became commoner in western Europe and in Turkey, fol-
2004:243, 259, 315, 334; Bagnall 2009:262). The tilde (Sp., lowing Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s reforms. Some texts were
Gal., Ast., ñ) or til (Pt., ã, õ) developed from superscript printed in the Greek alphabet, although the printing presses
n/m in syllabic codas and the general abbreviation sign (–). working in Salonika until the Second World War used Rashi,
The cedilla (ç) arose from scribes unfamiliar with Visigothic with some texts from Bosnia and Bulgaria in Cyrillic
minuscule z interpreting the glyph as a digraph (c + sub- (Nezirović 1992:128; Smid 2002:17f.).
script z) representing etymological c plus affricate sound Vowel representation is an important issue in Judaeo-
value of z. Spanish spelling in Hebrew script because Hebrew spelling
Language-specific diacritics representing consonants conventions generally mark vowels sparingly. Matres lectio-
include Romanian ș and ț for /ʃ/ and /ʦ/ (cf. §8.3), n- for nis are employed, although the representational conven-
[ɲ] in Piedmontese and Ligurian, n̈ for [ŋ] in Cape Verde tions do not resolve all ambiguities, and fundamental
Creole, Catalan punt volat (ŀl /ll/), also in some Occitan structural differences between Semitic and Indo-European
varieties, e.g. Arn. s.h /sh/ vs sh /ʃ/, and the apostrophe mean that reduced vowel representation can create consid-
for Jersey French geminates (s’s /zː/, ss’s /sː/, t’t /tː/). erable ambiguity.
In modern Romance, diacritic usage conforms to three In Israel, the Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino promotes
types representing (1) articulatory differences or homonym broadly phonemic Latin-alphabet spelling without modern
disambiguation, without reference to the stress position, Spanish influence in Aki Yerushalayim. In Hispanic countries,
e.g. French (with uniform oxytonic word-stress) and Roma- Ladino is often written following modern Spanish ortho-
nian; (2) irregular tonic syllables, i.e. oxytones in /n s V/ graphic conventions, with some diacritics for phonological
/_#, and proparoxytones, e.g. Sp. rubí ‘ruby’, páramo ‘moor- variants. Representational issues generally involve choices
land’ vs pienso, -as, -an ‘think’ (PRES.IND.1/2SG,3PL) /ˈpiens/-, between etymological or phonetic/phonemic spelling, e.g.
686
WRITING SYSTEMS
Table 41.6 Ladino
Square
Hebrew ‫א‬ ‫ב‬ ‫ג‬ ‫ד‬ ‫ה‬ ‫ו‬ ‫ז‬ ‫ח‬ ‫ט‬
Rashi ‫א‬ ‫ב‬ ‫ג‬ ‫ד‬ ‫ה‬ ‫ו‬ ‫ז‬ ‫ח‬ ‫ט‬
Ladino
a bv gʤʧ d e ouw ʒz x t
IPA
Hebrew /t/
ʕ vb g d h uw z χ, ħ
IPA (CHeb /tˤ/)
Square
‫י‬ ‫כ‬ ‫ך‬ ‫ל‬ ‫מ‬ ‫ס‬ ‫נ‬ ‫ן‬ ‫ס‬
Hebrew
Rashi ‫י‬ ‫כ‬ ‫ך‬ ‫ל‬ ‫מ‬ ‫ם‬ ‫נ‬ ‫ן‬ ‫ס‬
Ladino nonfinal final nonfinal final nonfinal final

eij l s
IPA k m n
Hebrew
ji k, x l m n s
IPA
Square
‫ע‬ ‫פ‬ ‫ף‬ ‫צ‬ ‫ץ‬ ‫ק‬ ‫ר‬ ‫ש‬ ‫ת‬
Hebrew
Rashi ‫ע‬ ‫פ‬ ‫ף‬ ‫צ‬ ‫ץ‬ ‫ק‬ ‫ר‬ ‫ש‬ ‫ת‬
Ladino nonfinal final nonfinal final

IPA k r sʃ t
pf s
/ʔ/ /ʦ z/
Hebrew q sʃ t
(CHeb /ʕ/) pf r
IPA (CHeb /zˤ/)
[b]~[v]~[β], [z]/_Cvoiced as s or as z, and [ʃ]/_k as s or x; language and script were known and used in the medieval
spelling [j] etymologically, i.e. ModSp. ll, i, y, or phonologic- Christian kingdoms (Ubieto Arteta 1951:18f.,40; Fletcher
ally, e.g. y. 1989:82).1
Although not usually accounted aljamiado literature
proper, around seventy kharjas (final refrains of muwashshah
41.5.2 Aljamía poems) written in Arabic script are considered vernacular
Ibero-Romance’s earliest attestations (Stern 1953; García
Aljamía derives from CArb. al-jamiyyah ‘foreign (non-Arabic) Gómez 1975; Monroe 1975; Dronke 1978; Hitchcock 1980;
language’. Knowledge of Arabic grew rapidly in Iberia fol- Jones 1981-2; Armistead 2003). However, Whinnom (1981-2)
lowing the Muslim conquest in 711. In the mid-ninth cen- and Zwartjes (1994; 1997) consider kharjas a macaronic
tury, Paulus Alvarus harangued Cordoban youth for
cultivating Arabic literature rather than traditional Chris-
1
tian literary pursuits. In the eleventh century, infante Pedro Contrary to Hernández (2009), the subscription is not ‘rex/rey Pedro (a)
ben Xancho/Sancho’ aljamiado but actually an Arabic calque of the traditional
of Aragon’s Arabic signature ‫< ﺭﺵﻡ ﺏﻱﻁﺭ ﻩ ﺇﺏﻥ ﺵﺍﻥﺝﻩ‬ršm bytrh Latin formula: Signum Petri [filius] Sancii ‘mark of Pedro, (son of) Sancho/
ˀbn šˀnǧh>/ˈraʃam ˈbiːtraʔ ibn ˈʃaːnʒa/ indicates that Arabic Pedro Sanchez’ (Montaner Frutos 2011:51, n.219, 220).
687
THOMAS FINBOW
mixture of Andalusian Arabic and Ibero-Romance, rather for /s/ (CArb. /ʃ/), rather than ‫( ﺱ‬CArb. /s/), which often
than actual speech. corresponds to Latin ç, suggests an apico-alveolar articulation
Aljamiado developed into a systematic genre during the four- ([ʂ]) close to [ʃ] in articulatory terms for the latter former and
teenth and fifteenth centuries, e.g. Poema de Yuçuf (Menéndez a laminal articulation for the former ([s̺] < [ʦ]).
Pidal 1952), the mufti of Segovia’s ‘[s]ummary [ . . . ] of our holy
law and sunna’ (1462) (Wiegers 1994), and the works of the
Mancebo de Arévalo (c.1500) (Hegyi 1979; Naváez Córdoba 2003). 41.5.3 Romanian and Moldovan
However, most aljamía is from eastern Aragon during the six-
teenth century (López-Baralt 1985; Chejne 1993), an attempt to The earliest securely datable text in Romanian is a letter of
preserve Islamic culture and religion against mounting repres- 1521 from Neacșu Lupu of Dlăgopole (Câmpulung) to the
sion. In 1567, Philip II banned Arabic language and script. mayor of Brașov, Hans Benkner. From the late sixteenth
Following the Alpujarras revolt (1568-71), the moriscos (Muslims century, Romanian in Transylvania was sometimes written
forcibly converted to Christianity) were expelled between 1609 in the Latin alphabet (see §§8.3), but Old Cyrillic was general
and 1613. Aljamía persisted in North Africa and amongst some in Wallachia and Moldova until 1859, when the Latin alphabet
Sephardic communities. was introduced. Between 1830 and 1860, transitional alpha-
As with Ladino written in Hebrew script, ambiguous grapho- bets combining Cyrillic and Latin features were employed.
phonemic representations in aljamía can complicate identifica- From 1860 until the Romanian Academy’s 1881 reform, spell-
tion of lexical items. For instance, A. Jones (1988) criticizes García ing was extremely etymological (usually reflecting Latin
Gómez’s classic interpretations of aljamiado verse, e.g. García etyma), e.g. /om/ ‘person’ spelled homu (cf. Lat. HOMO) (ModRo.
Gómez (1959a,b) for palaeographic and interpretative errors. om), /vɨnt/ ‘wind’ written ventu (cf. Lat. UENTUS) (ModRo. vânt),
The fact that Ibero-Romance vocalic diversity exceeds /fɨntɨnə/ ‘spring’, ‘well’ as fontana (cf. Lat. FONTEM) (ModRo.
available symbols for vowels in Arabic script makes repre- fântână), and /ʦaɾə/ ‘land’ as tierra (cf. Lat. TERRA) (ModRo țară).
sentation problematic. Similarly, divergence between Arabic The present tense of ‘to have’ (/am/, /aj/, /are/, /avem/,
and Romance consonantal inventories means that, as in /aveʦʲ/, /au/) was spelled abiu, abi, abe, abemu, abeti, abu, (cf.
Ladino, multiple graphemes may represent Romance conson- Lat. HAB-) (Mallinson 1988:415). Reforms in 1881 reduced etymo-
ants, e.g. /t/: ‫( ﺙ‬CArb., /θ/), ‫( ﺕ‬CArb., /t/), ‫( ﻁ‬CArb., /tˤ/); /ɡ/: logical criteria drastically, expressing phonology more directly,
‫( ﻍ‬CArb., /ɣ/), ‫( ﻕ‬CArb., /q/), ‫( ﻙ‬CArb., /k/); /d/: ‫( ﺩ‬CArb., with Italian conventions influencing the representation of velar/
/d/), ‫( ﺫ‬CArb., /ð/), ‫( ﺽ‬CArb., /dˤ/), ‫( ﻅ‬CArb., /ðˤ zˤ/). palatal affricate allophones, i.e. /ʧ/: c /_e,i; /k/: c /_a,o,u; ch /_ e,i;
Conversely, certain Romance phonemes, e.g. /p/, /v/, /ʎ/, /ʤ/: g /_e,i; /ɡ/: g /_a,o,u; gh /_e,i. Unlike Italian, however,
/ɲ/, /ʧ/, /ʦ/, /ʣ/, have no clear Arabic graphemic correlate. Romanian does not usually indicate accent position, even when
‫ ﺏ‬/b/, ‫ ﺏ ~ ﻑ‬/b/~/f/, ‫ ﻝ ~ ﻥﻱ‬/l/(+/j/), ‫ ﻥ ~ ﭞﻱ‬/n/(+/j/), ‫ ﺝ‬/ʤ/; distinctive (see also §8.3). Another reform in 1904 removed fur-
‫ ﺱ‬/s/, ‫ ﺯ‬/z/ are used analogically, without the variant graphs ther etymological and diacritic features, e.g. ĭ (/j/ /_a,e,i,o,u_; /ʲ/
of other aljamías, e.g. Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, Sindhi (Table 41.7). word-finally when preceded by a consonant) vs i (/i/) > i, e.g.
However, Arabic representational criteria renders some Pecĭca /ˈpeʧka/, Mavrogheni /mavroˈgeni/ (place-names) (ModRo.
Ibero-Romance phonology perceptible, e.g. frequent use of ‫ﺵ‬ Pecica, Mavrogheni are ambiguous: /ˈpeʧka/~**/ˈpeʧika/,
Table 41.7 Aljamía

Grapheme ‫ز‬ ‫ر‬ ‫ذ‬ ‫د‬ ‫خ‬ ‫ح‬ ‫ج‬ ‫ث‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ب‬ ‫ا‬
Arabic
z r ð d x ħ ʤ, ʒ θ t b ʔ
IPA
Aljamia
z̺, ʐ r, ɾ d x, h ʒ, ʧ t b, v aː
IPA
Grapheme ‫ك‬ ‫ق‬ ‫ف‬ ‫غ‬ ‫ع‬ ‫ﻇ‬ ‫ﻃ‬ ‫ض‬ ‫ص‬ ‫ش‬ ‫س‬
Arabic
k q f ɣ ʢ zˤ, ðˤ tˤ dˤ sˤ ∫ s
IPA
Aljamia
k f, v g h, Ø d t d s̺, ʂ ∫, ʂ s̺, ʂ
IPA
Grapheme ◌ّ ◌ْ ◌ ◌ُ ◌َ ‫ي‬ ‫و‬ ‫ه‬ ‫ن‬ ‫م‬ ‫ل‬
Arabic No
َ
Geminate i u a j, iː w, uː h n m l
IPA vowel
Aljamia No
i, e u, o a, e j, i, e w, u, o h n, ɲ m l, ʎ
IPA vowel
688
WRITING SYSTEMS
/mavroˈɡeni/~**/mavroˈɡenʲ/); ŭ (/C/ /C_#, /i/ /i_# (vs /Cʲ/), 41.6 Levels of written representation
/w/ /_a,e,i,o_) > Ø, e.g. Mateiŭ /ma.te.i/ (given name, ModRom.
Matei), Hasdeŭ /hasˈdew/ (surname, ModRo. Hasdeu); etymo-
Romance writing conveys lexical and morphosyntactic informa-
logical ă, ĕ for /ə/, e.g. păsĕri ‘birds’ (cf. PASSER) > ă (ModRo. păsări);
tion by representing its phonemic structure with cenemic char-
etymologically determined â, ê, î, ô, û for /ɨ/ > î word-initially
acters. Allophonic variants are not usually expressed
and word-finally, and â elsewhere, e.g. român ‘Romanian’ (cf.
graphically, e.g. BrPt. /t d/ ! [ʧ], [ʤ] /_ V [+high, +front],
ROMANUS) (ModRo. român), vênt ‘wind’/vɨnt/ (cf. UENTUM) (ModRo.
written t, d; ModSp. /b d g/ ! [β ð ŭɣ] / _V, written b d g;
vânt), rîu /rɨw/ ‘river’ (cf. RIUUS) (ModRo. râu), fôntână ‘well’
phonetic strengthening of [j] (< /ʎ/, /j/) > [ʒ], [ʃ] / $_V in River
/fɨntɨnə/ (ModRo. fântână), adûnc ‘deep’/adɨnk/ (ModRo.
Plate Spanish, e.g. calle ‘street’ [ˈka.ʒe]~[ˈka.ʃe], ya ‘already’ [ʒa]~
adânc); é for /e̯a/, /e/, /ja/ > ea~e, ia, e.g. mirésă ‘bride’ /mir
[ʃa]. Similarly, gorgia toscana (§14.2.2.1), i.e. /p t k/![ç θ å], e.g. la
ˈe̯asə/ > mireasă; céle ‘those’ ([ʧele]~[ʧe̯ale]) > cele; ér /jar/ ‘again’
casa ‘the house’ = [laˈķaːza] ~ [laˈxaːza] ~ [laˈhaːza] ~ [laˈaːza]
> iar; ó for /o̯a/ > oa, e.g. popóre ‘peoples’ (ModRo. popoare), fórte
(Cravens 1991:63) is not reflected in standard written Italian.
‘very’ (cf. FORTIS) (ModRo. foarte).
Portuguese mid vowel alternation arising from metaphony is
In Moldova, Romanian Cyrillic was used until 1918 and a
unmarked, e.g. horroroso.MSG [o.xoˈɾo.zu] horrorosa.FSG [o.xoˈɾɔ.sa]
variant of Russian Cyrillic (without the letters ё, щ, ъ but
‘horrific’, ovo [ˈo.vu]/ovos [ˈɔ.vuʃ] ‘egg(s)’, ova [ˈɔ.va] ‘roe’; bebo
with non-Russian ӂ for /ʤ/) was used in the Moldovan
[ˈbebu] ‘I drink’/bebe [ˈbɛ.bɪ] ‘s/he drinks’. In Portugal before
ASSR (1924-40) and the Moldovan SSR (1945-89). After
1945 and in Brazil before 1971, a circumflex accent distinguished
Moldova adopted the Latin alphabet on independence in
noun/verb pairs, e.g. jôgo [ˈʒo.gu] ‘game’/jogo [ˈʒɔ.ɡu] ‘I play’; and
1991, minor orthographic divergences arose when the Mol-
homophones, e.g. /koɾ/: cor ‘heart’/côr ‘colour’, /ˈfoɾa/: fôra ‘s/he
dovan Academy of Sciences did not immediately adopt the
had been’ /fora ‘outside’ (all currently homographs).
Romanian Academy’s 1993 reversal of its 1953 reform
Morphophonemic alternation is typically expressed, e.g.
regarding â and î for /ɨ/ (see §8.3). As of 2010, both countries
c, g = affricate/fricative / _ i,e and = velar stop /_ a, o,u, e.g.
follow the same orthographic norms (Table 41.8).
ModIt. jaˈmiC-j ! amico /aˈmik/- + -/o// -/a/ ‘friend’ ~ amici
/aˈmiʧ/- + -/i/ ‘friends’. Modern Romance writing favours
41.5.4 Romance written in the Greek alphabet reflecting morphemes’ phonemic structure explicitly over
maintaining an invariant spelling, e.g. ModSp. nazco ‘I am
born’, nace ‘s/he is born’, rather than **naco /ˈnaθko/
Inscriptions and documents in which the Greek alphabet was
~**nazce /ˈnaθe/ (cf. Vachek 1982:47-9).
used to write Latin are not uncommon in antiquity, and local
As a result of representations reflecting historical condi-
elites in southern Italy, Sicily, and Sardinia, preserved Greek
tioned sound changes, most Romance varieties exhibit more
long after Byzantine administration ended (Sornicola 2012:33).
graphemes than velar phonemes, i.e. g+a,o,u, ~ gu,gh + e/i and c
Von Falkenhausen (2007) identifies eleventh-century Apulia,
+a,o,u ~ qu,ch + e/i. Sibilants also generally exhibit more graph-
Calabria, and Sicily as the richest areas of the Byzantine
emes than phonemes. For most Spanish speakers, s, c+e/i, z+a,o,
empire in terms of documentation (see also Coluccia 1992).
u represent /s/ ([ʂ θ s̺]), resulting from historical mergers
Greek script persisted long after Latin bureaucracy became
(Penny 1991:86-9). Modern Portuguese /s/ can be s (word-
generalized in the tenth century, for signatures in Greek char-
initially before a vowel), ss/x/sc/sç/xc (intervocalically), ç
acters appear in documents from Neapolitan monasteries until
(syllable-initially), c (/_i,e), s/z (before a word-boundary), and
the twelfth century (von Falkenhausen 2007:106; Coluccia 2007).
/S/ [voice] before a syllable boundary. Four graphemes
Salentine and Calabrian vernacular poetry and religious trans-
represent /j/ (</ʎ, j/) in yeísta Spanish: (h)i (word-initially
lations used the Greek alphabet for a considerable period (Distilo
before e: hierba [ˈjeɾ.βa] ‘grass’), i (/(C02)ˈV_, (C02)_ˈV, miedo
1983-7; 1986; Arnesano 2010; De Angelis 2010), e.g. a mid-fifteenth
[ˈmje.ðo] ‘fear’, reina [ˈrejna] ‘queen’), y (word-initially before
century ‘rhythmic confession’ (Pagliaro 1953), an alba or canzone
a vowel, and word-finally after a vowel: yunco [ˈjuŋ.ko] ‘reed’,
malamata (Distilo 2007), a thirteenth-century love poem by
rey [rej] ‘king’), and ll (at word-boundaries and intervocalically:
Nicolà da Puglia (the only named Greek/Salentine author), and
llamar [jaˈmaɾ] ‘call’, callarse [kaˈjaɾ.se] ‘be.silent’).
a recipe for preparing oysters written in a manuscript containing
a confessional (Pagliaro 1948; Distilo 1985; Arnesano 2008).
As with the continued use of Hebrew and Arabic script, the
use of Greek characters to transcribe Romance vernaculars 41.7 Developing written traditions
manifests a desire to maintain traditional scripto-linguistic
practices for reasons of prestige and identity, as well as the The interplay of prestige norms and desires to express local
practical result of Graeco-Romance bilingualism with restricted features stimulates modern innovation and has parallels in
access to literacy in Latin script. the emergence of Romance vernacular writing.
689
Table 41.8 Romanian and Moldovan

Romanian Transitional Romanian Moldovan
Phoneme
Cyrillic Alphabet Latin Alphabet Cyrillic Alphabet
A/a A/a A/a A/a /a/
Ƃ/б Ƃ/б B/b Ƃ/б /b/
B/B B/B V/V B/B /v/
G/g (/_a, o, u);
Г/г G/g Г/г /g/
Gh/gh (/_i, e)
Д/д D/d d Д/д /d/
є-/є- ie (/V—) or alternating with ia;

E/e E/e/ /e/
-E(-)/-e(-) otherwise e
Ж/ж Ж/ж j Ж/ж /ʒ/

S/s Ḑ/ḑ dz ДЗ/дз /ʣ/
З/з Z/Z z З/з /z/
ii (/—#);
И/и I/i И/и /i/
i elsewhere
Й/йa Ĭ/ĭ i (/—V,V—) Й/й /j/, /j/
I/i b
I/i i И/и /i/
Ƙ/к C/c (/—a, o, u);
K/k Ƙ/к /k/
Ch/ch (/—i, e)
Л/ᴫ L/l L/l Л/ᴫ /l/
M/M M/m M/m M/M /m/
H/H N/n N/n H/H /n/
O/o O/o O/O /o/+/a/
-O(-)/-O(-) ᵔ
П/п П/п P/p П/п /p/
P/P P/P R/r P/P /r/
C/C S/s S/s C/C /s/
T/T T/t T/t T/T /t/
Oy-/oy- Y-/y-
Y(-)/-y(-) -ȣ(-), U/u Y/y /u/
-Oy(-)oy(-)
Oy/ȣ
Ф/ф F/f F/f Ф/ф /f/
X/x X/x H/h X/x /h/
ω/w c O/o O/o O/o /o/
Щ/щ Ш/ш Şt/șt ШT/шT /∫t/
Ц/ц Ц/ц Ţ/ţ Ц/ц /ʦ/
ɥ/ᶣ ɥ/ᶣ C/c ɥ/ᶣ /ʧ/
Ш/ш Ш/ш Ş/ș Ш/ш /∫/
Ъ/ъ Ъ/ъ ă Э/э /ǝ/
î ( /#— , —#);
Ы/ы â, î, ĭ, ŭ ЬI/ьi /ɨ/
â elsewhere
Ьь ĭ i/c—# Ь/ь /C j/
Ѣ/ѣ ea ea Я/я /ea/
Ю/ю ĭu iu Ю/ю /ju/
ea ( /C—);
ĭa ИA/иa /ja/
-IA(-)/-ia(-) ia elsewhere
ĭe ie ИE/иe /je/
-IE(-)/-ie(-)
ĭa; ea ia, ea Я/я /ja/
Ѫ/ѫ Î/î Î/î Ы/ы /ɨ/
Ks/ks X/x KC/kc /ks/
Ψ/ψ Пs/пs Ps/ps ПC/пc /ps/
Ѳ/ѳ T/t, Ft/ft T/t T/T /t/,/θ/,/ft/
Ѵ/ѵ i; u I/i; U/u И/и, Y/y/ /i/,/y/,/v/
↥↑ Î/î /#–(m, n) Î/î ( /—m, n) ьih/m /ɨn, m/
Џ/џ Џ/џ G/g ( /—e, i) ӂ/ӂ /ʤ/
a In Romanian Cyrillic ю, ȣ, and w can also receive a breve.
b
И/и corresponds to η (eta) and I/i to i (iota), in Greek loans or borrowings via Greek. In native Romanian
words and Slavonic loans, и and i follow pre-1917 Russian norms, i.e., i/—V; и / elsewhere.
c The
/ ~ / : O/o distinction operates in native words and Slavonic loans.
d Romanian Cyrillic
/ ,Ψ/ψ, Ѳ/ѳ, Ѵ/ѵ = Gk. Ξ/ξ, Ψ/ψ, Θ/θ, Y/υ in loanwords.
WRITING SYSTEMS
Wright (1982:208-60; 1996; 2000; 2003:55, 59f.; 2004a,b) (‘Galician Association for the Language’), Academia Galega
emphasizes influential individuals’ support, for example da Língua Portuguesa (‘Galician Academy of the Portuguese
successive late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Cas- Language’), oppose the Castilian-based Normas Ortográficas
tilian chancellors stimulating or repressing traditional e Morfolóxicas do Idioma Galego (NOMIGa) ‘Orthographical
Latin-Romance, medieval Latin, and Romance. Leonese and Morphological Norms of the Galician Language’, and
chancellors favoured medieval Latin and encouraged Leo- promote closer ties with Portuguese. A deep dissatisfaction
nese vernacular writing less. Emiliano (2003a:56-75) dis- with writing according to norms that do not fully reflect
cusses several senior clerics’ roles in implementing the one’s native idiom accounts for why speakers of Campida-
Gregorian reforms in Portugal. Pope (1934:33, 35f.) proposes nese Sardinian reject Logudorese-based Limba Sarda Unifi-
the establishment of Paris as the primary royal centre, with cada ‘Unified Sardinian Language’ and have developed
its university where clerks for the expanding bureaucracy alternative standards, e.g. Limba Sarda Comuna ‘Common
were trained, as keys to the increased use of writing vernacu- Sardinian Language’ (see also §17.2), why so many Raeto-
lar and greater standardization in northern France. Iberian Romance-speakers express hostility towards standard ru-
parallels include the Toledan translators, the compilation of mantsch grischun (see also §12.1), and why Cape Verde Creole
the Siete partidas legal code under Alfonso X of Castile and speakers have not developed a single standard written
León (b. 1221, r. 1252-84), and Dinis of Portugal (b. 1261, r. variety.
1279-1325) founding a university in Lisbon and declaring the Two Portuguese orthographic norms existed before the
vernacular the royal court’s official language in 1290 and the Acordo Ortográfico of 1990. An initial reform in Portugal in
primary juridical and administrative vehicle in 1296. 1911 abandoned earlier pseudo-etymologizing tendencies
Except for Mauritian (Hookoomsing 2004), Haitian, and for more direct grapho-phonemic relations, though pre-
Papiamentu/Papiamento (Maurer 1991), most Romance cre- serving certain features felt to provide links to literary
oles are still developing standard orthographies. Cape Verde monuments. Proposed in 1937, the first Brazilian reform
Creole has a standard alphabet (ALUPEC, or Alfabeto Unificado in 1943 adopted the amended, post-1931 Portuguese
para a Escrita do Caboverdiano ‘Unified Alphabet for Writing norms, with a few exceptions, e.g. (1) proparoxytonic
Cape Verdean’) but no standard orthography as yet. Spelling nasal mid-vowels receive circumflexes, e.g. fenômeno efêmero
papiamentu in Bonnaire and Curacao but papiamento in Aruba [f ı ̃ˈnõm ı ̃nwjˈfẽmeɾu] ‘ephemeral phenomenon’, expressing
expresses users’ priorities: the former focuses on phonemic such vowels’ predominantly close phonetic quality expli-
representation (k: /k/, u: /u/); the latter emphasizes etymol- citly (cf. EuPt. fenómeno efémero [fəˈnõmənwiˈf ẽməɾu]). In
ogy (/k/: c /_a,o,u, qu /_e,i; /u/: o /_#). both varieties, acute accents normally indicate tonic open
Developing a region- or variety-specific orthography fre- vowels, i.e. é /ɛ/, ó /ɔ/ (vs ê /e/, ô /o/); (2) no distinctive
quently stimulates other varieties’ speakers to create alter- pretonic mid-vowel quality was marked (absent from Bra-
native systems, promoting linguistic Ausbau (Kloss 1967). zilian Portuguese), e.g. prègar [pɾɛˈɡaɾ] (< OPt. preegar
For instance, Mistral’s Provençal-based orthography motiv- [pɾɛ.eˈɡaɾ] < Lat. PRAEDICARE) ‘preach’ vs pregar [pɾəˈɡaɾ] ‘nail’
ated several regional literary koinés: Niçard and Provençal (< Lat. PLICARE ‘fold’) (= BrPt. [pɾeˈɡaɾ] ‘preach’, ‘nail’); mòlhada
(Mistralian), Vivaro-Alpine (Escolo doou Po norm), Auvergnat [mɔˈʎadɐ] ‘bunch (of keys, flowers)’ (< OPt. moolh- [mɔ.ɔˈʎ]- <
(Bonnaud’s Auvergnat littéraire et pédagogique, later, eicritürà *[maˈnukl]- (< MANIPULUM ‘handful’) vs molhada [mᵘˈʎadɐ]
euvarnhatà vunificada: see Bonnaud 1992). Gascon-Béarnais, ‘wet.FSG’ (< *[molliˈaːɾe] ‘wet’, ‘dampen’ < MOLLIS ‘soft’ (= BrPt.
Limousin, and Languedocian all possess distinct sub-norms [moˈʎadə] ‘bunch’, ‘wet’). Portugal abandoned these accents
within general Provençal. in 1945. (3) No etymological in-line diacritic letters were
In the 1940s, the Haitian social elite (e.g. Pressoir 1947) used for atonic close/open vowels (e.g. EuPt. adoptar [ɐðɔ
criticized the McConnell–Laubach orthography for Haitian ˈtaɾ] ‘to adopt’ vs adotar [ɐðuˈtaɾ] ‘to dower’), as Brazilian
Creole for the lack of distinctive representation for front, Portuguese lacks these alternations (e.g. adotar [adoˈtaɹ]
rounded vowels (particularly symbolic to kreyòl speakers), ‘adopt’, ‘dower’); see also Emiliano (2008) for controversies
the frequency of y and w (negatively associated with Ameri- relating to the 1990 Orthographic Accord’s suppression of
can English and Protestantism), and representing nasal these letters.
vowels with a circumflex (too divergent from standard
French) (Déjean 1982; Schieffelin and Doucet 1994;1998).
Modern Haitian òtograf kreyòl, designed in 1975 and
launched in 1979, draws on Pressoir and Lelio’s reform and 41.8 Stability, reform, and regulation
the McConnell–Laubach system.
Similar sociocultural motivations explain why Galician With the exception of Daco-Romance (see §41.4.3), medieval
reintegrationists, e.g. Associaçom Galega da Língua writers adapted late and medieval Latin conventions
691
THOMAS FINBOW
without establishing a standard. Latin etyma exercised con- reforms have significantly reduced etymological spelling
siderable influence on spelling from the thirteenth century elsewhere, e.g. Spanish (1844), European Portuguese (1911),
(Pope 1934:25-48), in part because of the twelfth-century Brazilian Portuguese (1943), Catalan (1913), Romanian (1881;
Renaissance’s impact on Latinity and the vernacular (Pope 1904).
1934:28; see also Wright 1982; 2002). Medieval Latin pronunci- The debate regarding the virtues of etymological versus
ation also influenced Romance, introducing consonant groups phonemic spelling in Romance has run for centuries. Neb-
previously eliminated or modified (Williams 1995; 1997). During rija’s Tratado de gramática de la lengua castellana (1492) and
the Renaissance and Baroque period, increasingly centralized Reglas de orthographia (1517) advocate spelling based on
bureaucracies fostered greater written standardization. Spell- pronunciation, with some etymological features. Many
ing increasingly reflected real or imagined Latin etymologies, sixteenth-century French writers, e.g. Jacques Pelletier in
consequently representing contemporary pronunciation less 1550, proposed reducing etymological spelling and intro-
directly, but making consultation more efficient as ever more duced graphic accents, e.g. ȩ̀, è, è, –e, ì, ȩ.
consistent use of visually distinctive quantities of space Several seventeenth-century commentators on Castilian
between words increased written words’ visual iconicity, mas- advocated direct grapho-phonemic mapping modelled on
sively accelerating eye movements and lexical access (Saenger Italian, e.g. Mateo Alemán’s Orthographia castellana (1609),
1982; 1989; 1990a,b; 1991; 1994; 1997a,b). Bartolomé Jiménez Patón’s Arte de la lengua española castel-
lana (1614), and Gonzalo Correas’ Arte de la lengua española
kastellana (1627) and Ortografía kastellana nueva i perfeta
41.8.1 Regulatory bodies (1630). However, the Real Academia Española favoured
etymological spelling in the first (1720) edition of its dic-
Groups debating literary and linguistic matters grew into acad- tionary and Ortographía de la lengua castellana (1741). Most
emies, e.g. Accademia della Crusca (1585), Académie française etymological features were revised in the mid-nineteenth
(1635), Real Academia Española (1713), and Academia Real das century, following calls for reform provoked by Bello and
Ciências (1779) (later Academia das Ciências de Lisboa). These García del Río’s Indicaciones sobre la conveniencia de simplificar
organizations produced grammars, compiled dictionaries, and la ortografía en América (1823). In response, the RAE norm
codified orthographies, contributing significantly to written received official recognition in 1844 (previously it was
norms’ standardization—although before the nineteenth cen- merely a recommendation). Relatively little has changed
tury, in practice considerable variation remained. since the 1854 Ortografía de la lengua castellana. However,
Later organizations for larger non-national varieties several Latin American countries implemented aspects of
modelled themselves on the national academies (e.g. Socie- Domingo Sarmiento’s Memoria (sobre ortografía americana)
tad Retoromantscha (1885), Academia Brasileira de Letras (1843), partly inspired by Bello and García del Río, e.g. /x/:
(1896), Real Academia Gallega (1906), Institut de Estudis g+e/i ! j (general ! jeneral), h ! Ø (hombre ! ombre), y /i j/
Catalans (1907), Lia Rumontscha (1919), Societat d’Estudis ! i (rey ! rei), /s/: x /_C ! s (texto ! testo). Chile returned
Occitans (1930), Institut d’Estudis Occitans (1945)), and stand- to the RAE norm only in 1927. Much twentieth-century
ardization followed similar patterns, e.g. Mistral’s Provençal debate has involved recognizing regional variants officially,
orthography, Cerlonge’s work on Valdôtain Francoprovençal, e.g. letter names (b/v: be alta/be baja, be/uve). In 1994, ch and
and Pompeu Fabra, Massó i Torrent and Casas i Carbo’s reform ll became letter combinations rather than separate letters
of Catalan orthography. More organizations appeared from for collation.
the late 1970s, e.g. Institut Ladin Micurà de Rü for Dolomitan Conventions for regional Romance orthographies often
Ladin (1976), the Seychelles Lenstiti kreol (1979), Academía de mirror national standards in which their target users are
la Llingua Asturiana (1980), Conselh de la Lenga Occitana typically already literate, e.g. Galician, Asturian, and Arago-
(1996/7), Conselh Generau d’Aran (1990/91), Fala i Cultura nese accentuation follows Spanish; Mirandese and Extrema-
(Vale de Jalama) (1992), Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino duran incorporate Portuguese conventions; Valencian
(1997), Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua (1998), Anstituto reflects local features but remains close to standard Catalan.
de la Llíngua Mirandesa (1999), Adjenzie Reġjonâl pe Lenghe However, in orthographies designed for monolingual creole
Furlane for Friulian, Academia Aragonesa de la Lengua (2013). speakers, biunique grapho-phonemic correspondences pre-
dominate, e.g. Haitian, ALUPEC, and Papiamentu (Maurer
1991). Mauritian creole’s Lortograf kreol morisien (Capooran
41.8.2 Spelling reform 2011; see also Capooran 2009; Police-Michel et al. 2012)
reduces variation to a subset of standard French represen-
Except for French, which has undergone little substantive tations, eliminating etymological spellings (Hookoomsing
orthographic change since the early nineteenth century, 2004).
692
WRITING SYSTEMS
Table 41.9 Supplementary Asturian graphemes

STANDARD VARIANT STANDARD VARIANT STANDARD VARIANT STANDARD VARIANT
ll ḷḷ f ḥ ch ts y yy
/ʎ/ [ʦ, ʥ, ɟ, ʨ, ʧ] /f/ [h x] /ʧ/ [ʦ] /j/ [kxʲ]
llingua ḷḷingua fuente ḥuente ocho otso trabayo trabayyu
[ ʎ̍ iŋgwa] [ ̍ʧ,ʨ,ʦiŋgwa] [ ̍fwente] [ ̍x,hwente] [ ̍oʧo] [ ̍oʦo] [tɾa ̍βaju] [tɾa ̍βakxʲu]
‘tongue’ ‘spring’ ‘eight’ ‘work’
parllar parḷḷar fuera ḥuera feichu feitsu muyer muyyer
[paɾ ʎ̍ aɾ] [paɾ ̍ɟ,ʤ,ʥaɾ] [fweɾa] [x,hweɾa] [ f̍ ejʧu] [ f̍ ejʦu] ̍ ujeɾ]
[m [mu ̍kxʲeɾ]
‘speak’ ‘outside’ ‘done’ ‘woman’
Despite trends towards reasonably direct grapho- facilitates access to genuine texts, providing legitimacy in
phonemic mapping, some regional Romance varieties have the face of prestigious established national standards.
developed orthographies that incorporate more traditional Some diasystemic models provide alternative graphemes
variants, following the principle that writing what one does for different phonological systems or divergent allophonic
not pronounce is generally considered preferable to pro- realizations common in dialect continua, e.g. Asturian dia-
nouncing what is not written (although note concepção ‘con- lectal graphs (Table 41.9).
ception’: BrPt. [kõsepiˈsɐ̃w̃] vs EuPt. [kõsɛˈsɐ̃w̃]). Thus, in Such graphemes maximize inclusivity and thus user num-
2010, the Academia de l’Aragonés replaced the Consello d’a bers (larger blocs are more likely to receive sponsorship and
Fabla Aragonesa’s phonemic grafía de Uesca and the Sociedat resist pressure from the national standard), as well as
de Lingüística Aragonesa norm (subset of traditional spel- avoiding potential representational polyvalence: if western
lings). Notwithstanding increased complexity, superficially Asturian speakers’ ts/ch corresponds to other varieties’ ll,
archaizing de-phonemicization can convert a region- or and others’ ts corresponds to ch elsewhere, misinterpret-
variety-specific orthography into a more flexible diasystem ation is likely. The fragmentation of the Latin-Romance
capable of incorporating linguistic differences with which tradition into many local traditions is largely attributable
grapho-phonemically transparent systems struggle. Such to applying representationally ‘shallow’ principles to differ-
systems also offer a historically authentic norm that ent phonological systems.
693
PART VI
Issues in Romance Morphology

CHAPTER 42
Number
MARTIN MAIDEN
42.1 Number in Latin and Romance with the numeral ‘zero’ (e.g. It. zero errori, Sp. cero errores, Ro.
zero greşeli ‘zero errors’). Borer’s perspectives (2005:86-135)
on plurals as involving ‘division’, rather than being a ‘func-
The Romance languages, like Latin, mark number inflection-
tion from the singular’, may help make sense of some of the
ally on nouns and on agreeing determiners, adjectives and
phenomena discussed in §§21.4.3 and 42.7.
pronouns (but see §11.5.1). In verbs, the system for marking
number (of the subject) is of a different kind, discussed in
§27.3.1 In Latin (unlike many Romance languages) the form
of the plural of nouns and adjectives was almost infallibly
predictable from that of the singular (cf. Maiden 2011a:164). 42.2 A rough typology of modern
The plural in the great majority of Romance nouns and Romance plural marking
adjectives continues the form of the Latin accusative plural,
marked by the desinence -S, except for neuters, which A crude but handy typology is that ‘the west is sigmatic, the
had the plural desinence -A. There is also some survival of east vocalic, and the north invariant’. By ‘west’ I mean the
the Latin masculine second declension nominative plural -I. Iberian Peninsula, western Occitan, French in its written
Table 42.1 illustrates the Latin situation as relevant to the form, Romansh, Friulian, Ladin, and Sardinian; by ‘east’,
development of Romance. Italo-Romance, Dalmatian, and Daco-Romance; by ‘north’,
The historical development of number marking in oïl dialects including spoken French, Francoprovençal, and
Romance is, in principle, simple. The distinction between northern Occitan. The ‘sigmatic’ type marks plural by -s, the
‘singular’ and ‘plural’ persists everywhere (we do not see vocalic type by -i, -e or -a, mainly according to inflectional
the systematic emergence of, say, a morphological ‘dual’, class and gender. In the ‘invariant’ type, singular and plural
but cf. §42.4) and the exponents of plurality continue almost are identical. For the (often complex) local details of plural
exclusively the inherited triad of desinences -S, -I or formation, see the relevant sections of Chs 8-24.
-A. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the result is that expres- The ‘sigmatic’ type affixes -s to the form of the singular;
sion of number is a domain where Romance languages are under certain phonological circumstances (varying accord-
often radically different not only from Latin but also from ing to language but principally involving cases where the
each other. singular ends in a consonant) this -s is preceded by an
What follows says little about the semantic underpin- unstressed vowel, whose identity depends on various
nings of the morphosyntactic expression of number, not phonological and other factors. In the ‘vocalic’ varieties -i
because they are straightforward but because there do not is the most frequent plural marker, marking masculine
appear to have emerged any systematic differences in this plural, in which case it alternates with singulars (historic-
respect between Latin and Romance or between Romance ally) in -u or -e (and, more rarely, in -a), and also serving as
languages (see e.g. Devine and Stephens 2013:250-92 for plural marker of feminines whose singulars (at least histor-
Latin). The rule of thumb that ‘grammatically plural ically) end in -e. Plural -e is limited to feminines, originally
means more than one’ is certainly inadequate, but usually those in singular -a. All of the foregoing applies to nouns
suffices. That it needs refinement may be seen, among other and adjectives alike. Plural -a, today limited to nouns and
things, from the fact that Romance languages require plural discussed in §42.4, alternates almost exclusively with mas-
culine singulars historically in -u.2 A further parameter,
1 cutting across those described, is root allomorphy (§42.6).
Past participles, supines, and other ‘nominal’ forms of verbs inflect like
nouns and adjectives, although Maiden (2009b:289-95) describes a tendency
for the originally 3PL preterite verb desinence -ră to penetrate Romanian
past participles. For Italian 3PL pronouns such as eglino ‘they’, with plural 2
See, however, Ledgeway (2009a:212-14), for plural -a in Neapolitan and
marker imported from the verb, see Maiden (1995:131). other southern Italian determiners and quantifiers.
MARTIN MAIDEN
Table 42.1 Number marking in Latin nominatives and accusatives

DECLENSION FIRST SECOND
Number SG PL SG PL SG PL
Gender feminine masculine neuter
Nominative FILIA ‘daughter’ FILIAE FILIUS ‘son’ FILII OUUM ‘egg’ OUA
Accusative FILIAM FILIAS FILIUM FILIOS OUUM OUA
DECLENSION THIRD
Number SG PL SG PL SG PL
Gender feminine masculine neuter
Nominative MULIER ‘woman’ MULIERES HOMO ‘person’ HOMINES MARE ‘sea’ MARIA
Accusative MULIEREM MULIERES HOMINEM HOMINES MARE MARIA
Table 42.2 ‘Sigmatic’, ‘invariant’, and ‘vocalic’ types

‘Sigmatic’
Pt. boa ‘good’ (F) boas bõ ‘good’ (M) bõs dente ‘tooth’ (M) dentes flor ‘flower’ (F) flores
Sp. buena (F) buenas bueno (M) buenos diente (M) dientes flor (F) flores
Cat. bona (F) bones bo (M) bons mes ‘month’ (M) mesos flor (F) flors
Occ. bona (F) bones bon (M) bons mes (M) messes dent (F) dents
Srd. bona (F) bonas bonu (M) bonos cane ‘dog’ (M) canes muzere ‘woman’ (F) muzeres
Egd. buna (F) bunas bun (M) buns verm ‘worm’ (M) verms val ‘valley’ (F) vals
‘Invariant’
Fr. [bɔn] (F) [bɔn] [bõ] (M) [bõ] [mwa] [mwa] [flœʁ] [flœʁ]
‘month’ (M)
‘Vocalic’
It. buona (F) buone buono (M) buoni dente ‘tooth’ (M) denti voce ‘voice’ (F) voci
Vgl. veˈtruna ‘old’ (F) veˈtrune veˈtrun (M) veˈtruni dia̯ nt (M) di ̯anʧ kal ‘street’ (F) ˈkal(e) (F)
Ro. bună ‘good’ (F) bune bun (M) buni [bunj] dinte (M) dinţi [dinʦj] floare ‘flower’ (F) flori
As a rule, the ‘vocalic’ plural desinences express number 42.3 The desinences -e and -i
cumulatively with gender (e.g. It., Ro. case ‘houses’, where -e
simultaneously expresses plural number and feminine gen-
Maiden (1996a) (also D’hulst 2006; Faraoni 2010) argues that
der), whilst the sigmatic indicates number ‘syntagmatically’
all Romance languages have a historically underlying ‘sig-
of any gender marker, placing -s to the right of any gender
matic’ system. The modern ‘vocalic’ feminine plural ending
marker (e.g. Sp. casas ‘houses’, vs singular casa with femin-
-e, on this account, results from a regular phonological
ine singular -a); cf. Gardani (2013:416f.) (Table 42.2).3
development *-AS > *-ai ̯ > -e.4 The phonological plausibility
4
The older view that the FPL ending -e continues Latin 1st declension
nominative plural -AE is incompatible with the facts listed below, but this
3
For an example from within the ‘vocalic’ domain (Lunigiana in Tus- does not mean that survival of this ending is everywhere and in every case
cany) of ordering of a plural marker before a feminine gender marker, e.g. impossible (cf. Tuttle 1990:91). Barbato (2010) makes the interesting observa-
la ˈdɔni̯a ‘the women’, see Loporcaro (1994); the appearance of this phe- tion that the phonological development of the feminine plural first person
nomenon is subject to quite complex syntactic constraints. singular possessive pronoun in some Italo-Romance varieties is best
698
NUMBER
of postvocalic /s/ becoming a glide is suggested by inde- Maiden (2000b) postulates a similar situation for early
pendent later developments in some Occitan and Sardinian Italo-Romance (cf. also Faraoni 2010:74; Formentin 2012:57;
dialects (see Maiden 1996a:191; Lieutard 2004a,b; Sauzet Gardani 2013:231), with nominative plural -i surviving in
2012:188f.). Postulation of a stage *-ai̯ helps explain (a) the some masculines, alongside a continuant of *-os. Crucial
general failure of Italo-Romance feminine plurals to show here, again, is the evidence of root allomorphy involving
expected palatalization of velars before front vowels (e.g. It. palatalization of root-final velars. The inherited, ‘popular’
amica ‘friend’ - amiche aˈmike, not **aˈmiʧe; cf. §39.3.1) and vocabulary of Italian and other Italo-Romance varieties
(b) the survival intact, in Vegliote and northern Italo- overwhelmingly lacks palatal alternation: this is true of all
Romance, of feminine plural -e, despite otherwise regular adjectives (e.g. It. fresco ‘fresh’ - freschi [ˈfreski]) and the vast
deletion of inherited word-final *-e (cf. Vgl. di̯ant ‘tooth’ majority of nouns (e.g. lago ‘lake’ - laghi [ˈlagi]). Most Italian
< *ˈdɛnte, but ˈmu̯aske ‘flies’ < *ˈmoskai̯ < *ˈmoskas). Parallel nouns and adjectives with palatal alternation for number
phonological processes applied to reflexes of the third are learnèd loans from Latin (or Greek via Latin), whose
declension (masculine and feminine) accusative plural -ES, palatalized plurals probably reflect the conventional pro-
yielding *-ei̯ and thence -i, e.g. DENTES > *ˈdɛntei̯ > It. denti, Ro. nunciation of Latin ci and gi as [ʧi], [ʤi]): cf. It. Magi [ˈmaʤi]
dinţi ‘teeth’, PELLES > *ˈpɛllei̯ > *ˈpɛlli > It. pelli, Ro. piei ‘hides’. ‘Magi’, vs maghi [ˈmagi] ‘wizards’. However, a nucleus of
The hypothesis of a generally ‘sigmatic’ origin for -i nouns of genuinely popular origin also shows palatalized
cannot, however, explain -i in continuants of Latin second plurals. This comprises two classes: words denoting persons,
declension masculines. This *-i is not the predicted outcome and words denoting entities characteristically occurring in
of Latin second declension accusative plural -OS, which groups, sets, or as a ‘mass’. Maiden (2000b) gives examples
should have yielded *-ui̯ > *-u (final *-u in turn > *-o in such as ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ (It. amici [aˈmiʧi], nemici
much of Italo-Romance; see e.g. Maiden 1996a:153f.).5 In [neˈmiʧi]; with similar forms in most dialects; see AIS 733/4;
fact, a second source of -i is Latin second declension mas- also Tuttle 1995); ‘Greeks’ (It. greci [ˈgrɛʧi]); ‘doctors’ (It.
culine plural nominative -I. Early Gallo-Romance continued medici, likewise in medieval texts and most dialects, cf. AIS
both nominative and accusative forms of masculines (see map 705); ‘monks’ (It. monaci, also widespread in southern
§27.2), with -I (> Ø) in nominative plurals, and -OS (> -s) in the dialects); ‘asparagus’ (It. asparagi [asˈparaʤi]); ‘silkworms’
oblique: OFr. M.NOM.PL MURI ‘walls’ > mur VS M.ACC.PL MUROS > e.g. AIS map 1160 for Marche and Umbria [ˈbaʧi]); ‘caterpil-
murs. See Sibille (2011) for retention of nominative plural -i, lars’ (AIS map 464 [ˈbruʃi] in Tuscany); ‘mushrooms’ (AIS
especially in determiners and pronouns, in old Occitan. map 621, Camaiore, Campori [ˈfunʤi] and corresponding
Remnants of this -i persist in some areas: Pyrenean Gascon forms over large areas of southern and northern Italy;
shows it principally in masculine adjectives: e.g. Couseran, ‘pigs’ (It. porci [ˈpɔrʧi] and similar forms throughout south-
Val d’Aran, and Donezan (Sibille 2011:239) boni cans ‘good ern Italy - cf. AIS map 1088).7
dogs’, podètz èsser contenti ‘you(MPL) may be happy’. Queyras The Italo-Romance picture is consistent with a scenario
(Hautes-Alpes), with most Occitan varieties of northwestern in which masculine nominative plurals in -i and (originally
Italy, has masculine plural determiners (and some adjec- accusative) plurals in -os (> -*oi̯) once coexisted. The lack of
tives) in -i: e.g. tuchi li omes ‘all the men’. Surselvan mascu- velar-palatal alternation in most modern Italo-Romance
line past participles in singular -u have plural -i (e.g. ludau plurals reflects an original -*oi̯ plural, which could not
‘praised’ – ludai), a survival of an earlier phase in which have triggered palatalization (together with the analogical
masculine plural predicative adjectives often showed -i influence of the non-palatalized singular). Generalization of
(Haiman and Benincà 1992:126f.). In Ladin and Friulian the masculine plural -i (from the nominative, and perhaps also
original presence of -i, alongside -s, as plural marker is from original third declension forms where it is the out-
today reflected in root allomorphy, the plural of some come of *-es) must postdate palatalization. Where we find
masculine nouns preserving the effects of palatalization of palatal alternation today, it continues original nominative
root-final consonants triggered by /i/ (cf. §§10.3.1, 11.4.1, plural forms in -i. The reasons why nominative plural forms
39.3): see Elwert (1943:129-49) for Val Fassa and Belardi are preserved in these cases are of two different kinds.
(1983) for Val Gardena.6 Given that nouns denoting persons are characteristically
subjects of sentences (cf. Smith 2011a:283), they frequently
compatible with -AE; readers will judge for themselves, however, whether his
overall dismissal (2010:49, 52) of Maiden’s (1996a) arguments is persuasive.
5
Note that the unstressed phonologically regular reflex of the 2PL pro-
7
noun UOS in Italo-Romance is vu or vo (Rohlfs 1968:161f.). Italian vi (pace Palatalization in ‘doctors’ and ‘monks’ is too widespread to be ascribed
D’hulst 2006:1324f.) and its congeners probably continue *ve (cf. Ro. vă < *ve). simply to ‘learnèd’ origin. In nouns denoting ‘sets’ etc., it is common for the
6
Hereafter, in examples presented ‘X – Y’, the first is singular, the palatalized alternant to have been analogically extended into the singular
second plural. (cf. Tuttle 1995).
699
MARTIN MAIDEN
figured in nominative case forms. Nouns whose referents Table 42.3 Romanian genus alternans
typically occurred in sets or as a mass had a much higher
MSG FPL
frequency of occurrence in the plural than other masculine
nouns, a fact which gave higher prominence to plural forms Acest scaun este înalt. Aceste scaune sunt înalte.
(nominative as well as accusative) than was normally the ‘This.M chair is high.MSG’ ‘These.F chairs are high.FPL’
case. Under this circumstance, the likelihood of a nomina- Acest zid este înalt. Aceste ziduri sunt înalte.
tive form surviving became greater than for most nouns, ‘This.M wall is high.MSG’ ‘These.F walls are high.FPL’
and this is probably why nouns of this type preserve what
was originally a nominative plural (see further Maiden
2000b; but cf. Faraoni 2010:7-75). Romanian masculine Table 42.4 Genus alternans in Treia (data after Loporcaro
plural -i probably has a similar double origin, although and Paciaroni 2011)
here the evidence of palatalization is uninformative MSG FPL
(cf. §39.3.1.1).
In conclusion, Romance masculine plural -i has two prin- u ˈvratʧu e ˈvratʧa ‘the arm/-s’
cipal sources: the phonetically regular reflex of third u ˈmuru e ˈmura ‘the wall/-s’
declension -ES, and second declension masculine nomina- u ʧerˈvellu e ʧerˈvɛlla ‘the brain/-s’
tive -I. u lenˈʦolu ˈɣrossu e lenˈʦɔla ˈɣrɔsse ‘the big sheet/-s’
u ˈʧɪʝʝu e ˈʧɪʝʝe ‘the eyelash/-es’
42.4 The remnants of Latin neuter ch. 6). While remaining restricted to inanimates, it came to
plural -A occupy significant portions of the lexicon (in Romanian,
hundreds of nouns belong to this class).9 The fact that it
has feminine gender entrains a typologically unusual effect,
42.4.1 Number and gender known as genus alternans (‘alternating gender’: Igartua 2006):
the opposition of gender becomes also one of number, so
Traces of neuter plural -A persist everywhere, but only in
that feminine plurals stand in opposition to masculine sin-
some regions as marking plural. Wherever it survived, it
gulars (Tables 42.3 and 42.4).
was ultimately reanalysed as a marker of feminine gender—
The historical data suggest that both singular and plural
in that it came to select distinctively feminine agreements.8
markers of genus alternans are subject to a particular mor-
This happens because of the ending’s formal identity to
phological constraint: they must unambiguously signal
originally first declension feminine singular -A(M) (e.g. FILIA(M)
their associated gender.10 In Romance generally, the only
‘daughter’). Since -A is a characteristically singular ending,
(nearly) unambiguous marker of masculine gender in the
surviving neuter plurals often become feminine singulars
singular is -u or its continuants (historically associated with
(historically, the opposite development also occurred: see
second declension nouns), and it is precisely nouns of this
Rovai 2012): e.g. NPL FOLIA ‘leaves’ gives a feminine singular
kind which can alternate with feminines in plural -a. In late
word for ‘leaf ’ in Pt. folha, Cat. folla, Fr. feuille, It. foglia,
Latin, nouns from other declension classes could also be
Ro. foaie.
involved only if, by chance, they had /u/ in their final
Survival of reflexes of -A as a (feminine) plural marker is
syllable, and therefore sounded like second declension mas-
robust today throughout Daco-Romance and much of cen-
culines. This is the case with certain neuter nouns the final
tral and southern Italo-Romance. There are traces in Dal-
syllable of whose root contains a /u/. For example, fourth
matian (Vegliote), Italian (Tuscan), and some northern
declension CORNU – CORNUA > It. corno – corna, Ro. corn – coarne
Italian dialects (notably Ligurian and Romagnol). For early
‘horn’, third declension CAPUT ‘head’ – CAPITA > *ˈkapu –
Gallo-Romance, see Spitzer (1941:344) and Chambon and
*ˈkapeta > Ro. cap – capete, OTsc. capo – capita. The most
Chauveau (2013). Wherever -A survived as a plural marker
significant examples are third declension neuters in -US,
(sometimes later transformed into -e, for reasons explained
such as NOM/ACC.SG TEMPUS ‘time’, CORPUS ‘body’ vs NOM/ACC.PL
shortly), it expanded analogically beyond originally neuter
nouns (for detailed documentation of the historical prod-
uctivity of such forms in Italo-Romance, see Gardani 2013: 9
This is the ‘default’ for inanimates in Romanian, although Maiden
(2011a:174) points out that neologisms, especially those with ‘unmarked’
plurals, are often masculine.
8 10
See Loporcaro et al. (2014), for survival of neuter as a distinct gender in See Formentin and Loporcaro (2012:228); Gardani (2013:347, 398);
old Italo-Romance and old Romansh. Maiden (2013e) for some counterexamples and their status.
700
NUMBER
TEMPORA, CORPORA. TEMPUS and CORPUS are actually bare roots of In Sicily, southern Corsica, and northern Umbria,
which, in the plural, TEMPOR- and CORPOR- are allomorphs (the plural -a has generally lost its association with feminine
result of historical sound changes including rhotacization of gender (Tuttle 1990; Maiden 1997a:72f.), becoming mascu-
intervocalic /s/). In late Latin, the singulars are reanalysed line like the corresponding singular, and even being
as comprising a root TEMP-, CORP-, and a ‘masculine’ ending extended into [+animate] nouns (e.g. Zicavo, Corsica avvu
-US; the plurals are correspondingly reanalysed as root ˈkatu ‘lawyer’ – avvuˈkata) as well as into words whose
TEMP-, CORP- + -ORA (assigned feminine gender). Note that singular desinence continues -e.
this is the source of the very productive plural ending
*-ora, whose reflexes are found extensively in southern
Italo-Romance dialects, and in Romanian -uri (earlier -ure):
e.g. Laz. ˈkorpu – ˈkɔrpora, Ro. corp - corpuri. 42.4.2 Lexically restricted remnants
In many varieties the analysis of -a as not only plural but
also feminine favours its replacement by a characteristically
of plural -A
feminine plural marker. The Romanian feminine plural de-
sinence, alternating with singular -ă, is -e, and from the In Vegliote (§9.3), Ligurian, Romagnol, and Tuscan, the
earliest records, and in all dialects, original plural *-a has historical remnants of feminine plural -A dwindle to a hand-
been replaced by -e: braţ ‘arm’ – braţe, corn ‘horn’ – coarne, ful of lexemes, many of them with referents occurring in
etc. Similarly, original *-ora > -ure (e.g. lucru ‘thing’ – lucrure, pairs or sets, or as a mass (e.g. ‘arms’, ‘eggs’). In Italian
pământ ‘land’ – pământure). In parts of Liguria, Tuscany, (rather more extensively in Tuscan dialects), this type per-
Umbria, Marche, Calabria, and Salento we also find genus sists in a couple of dozen items, usually but not always
alternans plurals in -e, e.g. Borgomaro (Liguria) [ˈbrasu] ‘arm’ – alongside morphologically ‘regular’ masculine plurals (e.g.
[ˈbrase]; Salento, ˈnitu ‘nest’ – ˈniture. MSG braccio ‘arm’ – FPL braccia, MPL bracci, MSG corno ‘horn’– FPL
Now in the history of Romanian there has been extensive corna, MPL corni, MSG dito ‘finger’ – FPL dita - MPL diti), but also
analogical generalization of plural -i at the expense of plural MSG uovo ‘egg’, strido ‘shout’ miglio ‘mile’ – FPL uova, strida,
-e (see e.g. Iordan 1938:10-17, 32-5, 40-42): roată ‘wheel’ – miglia: see especially Acquaviva (2008:126f.) and Thornton
roate > roată – roţi; gură ‘mouth’ – gure > gură – guri. One (2011:424-6). Where there is also a ‘regular’, masculine plural
might thus expect this change equally to affect genus alter- available, the feminine in -a tends to denote the ‘pair’ or ‘set’
nans plural -e, yet this is systematically not the case. The (e.g. of body parts), while the masculine plural in -i expresses
reason appears to be that -i is ambiguous as to gender, other ‘figurative’ or ‘non-set’ senses; but the extent to which
appearing equally in masculines and feminines (cf. bunic this semantic differentiation holds differs considerably from
‘grandfather’ – bunici and bunică ‘grandmother’– bunici). lexeme to lexeme (see Thornton 2011), not to mention from
The crucial role of clear marking of gender in both numbers region to region and from speaker to speaker.
in genus alternans is shown by cases where plural -e is Acquaviva argues that Italian -a plurals are ‘lexical
nonetheless replaced by -i. The ending of old Romanian plurals’, lying outside the inflectional paradigm of the cor-
-ure systematically gives way to -i: timp ‘time’ – timpure > responding masculine singular. Thus braccia is an independ-
timp – timpuri; corp ‘body’ corpure > corp – corpuri. This is ent, semantically idiosyncratic, inherently plural feminine
possible because nouns which have the additional plural noun, lacking a singular, and being derivationally related to
formative -ur- are all feminine, leaving gender marking masculine singular braccio. Braccia means, according to
uncompromised by introduction of -i. Principally in eastern Acquaviva (2008:158), ‘arm, as complex, with functionally
Romania, a few nouns whose roots contain stressed /a/ in non-distinct parts’ and in general Acquaviva discerns in
the singular, such as buzunar ‘pocket’ and mădular ‘limb’, such ‘lexical plurals’ the property of denoting ‘weakly dif-
have as genus alternans plurals buzunări and mădulări (cf. ferentiated entities’. Thornton (2011) challenges the seman-
standard Ro. buzunare and mădulare). Replacement of -e by tic generalization, arguing that many alleged lexical plurals
-i is here possible precisely because, again, marking of involve ‘overabundance’, such that the plural ‘cell’ of the
gender is not compromised: the introduction of -i is accom- inflectional paradigm simply contains more than one mem-
panied by introduction of an alternation between singular ber. However this may be, it is clear is that sporadic survival
stressed a (/a/) and plural stressed ă (/ə/), an alternation of genus alternans plurals in Italian and elsewhere compli-
uniquely distinctive of feminine nouns (see e.g. Maiden cates the analysis of noun morphology in ways unmatched
1997c).11 in Romance varieties where genus alternans remains strong
and productive. For the status of coexisting feminine and
11
The plural form is also that of the ‘genitive-dative’ singular in femin-
masculine plurals of some Romanian nouns, see Nedelcu
ines. See §8.4.3.1. (2013d:260).
701
MARTIN MAIDEN
42.4.3 Morphosyntactically singular plurals in Table 42.5 ‘Feminine singular plurals’, and masculine
Romansh plurals, in Engadinish
SINGULAR MEANING PLURAL MEANING
The survival of neuter plural -A has an unusual manifest- MSG FPL MPL
ation in Romansh (see also §57.3.2). The original alternation
between masculine singulars (in -U(M)) and plurals in -A has il bratsch la bratscha ils bratschs ‘the arm’
been transformed, in a few dozen words but with moderate il bös-ch la bös-cha ils bös-chs ‘the tree’
productivity, into an opposition between a masculine sin- il crap la crappa ils craps ‘the stone’
gular and a feminine singular, the latter nonetheless pre- l’öss l’ossa ils öss ‘the bone’
serving the plural meaning. Thus Surselvan: il daunt la daunta ils daunts ‘the finger’
il pêr la pera ‘the pair’
(1) Il crap ei dir
the.MSG stone.M is hard.MSG cancel that collective meaning, focusing on individual com-
‘The stone is hard.’ ponents of the plurality, notably in combination with
numerals (cf. Velleman 1915:103; Liun 1927:7; Vonmoos
(2) La crappa ei dira
1942:59): thus Egd. la bês-cha vo a pas-ch ‘the cattle.FSG go to
the.FSG stone.F is hard.FSG
graze’ vs il pur ho vendieu duos bês-chs ‘the farmer has sold
‘The stones are hard.’
two head.of.cattle.MPL’. These feminine singulars with plural
meaning occasionally develop morphological plurals of
The nouns affected typically denote body parts, plants, or
their own in -s, usually meaning ‘different sorts/examples
natural substances, although there are examples with
of ’ (Spescha 1989:253): Srs. las pumas dallas montagnas ‘the
[+human] reference, such as Srs. MSG schuldau ‘soldier’ – FSG
different sorts of tree of the mountains’ (cf. MSG pum ‘tree’ VS
schuldada ‘soldiers’. Plural meaning is expressed by a mor-
FSG puma ‘trees’).
phologically feminine singular form of the noun. In general,
The semantic relation between the masculine singular,
a morphologically regular masculine plural form also sur-
the feminine singular (with plural meaning), and the cor-
vives. Thus Upper Engadinish (after Scheitlin 1962:64)
responding masculine plural is often idiosyncratic. For
(Table 42.5).
example, DRG gives FPL ir a bratschas as the Engadine expres-
In effect, the feminine singulars with plural meaning
sion for ‘go arm in arm’, both MPL bratschs and FSG bratscha as
stand in a ‘derivational’ relationship to the masculine sin-
the forms for ‘arms’ used after numerals when this word
gulars. Some plurals of this kind indeed involve derivational
indicates units of measurement, or ‘armfuls of hay’, and
affixes: Srs. MSG pur ‘farmer’ FSG puraglia ‘farmers’; MSG utschel
only MPL bratschs in the senses of ‘signposts’, ‘clockhands’,
‘bird’ – FSG utschleglia ‘birds’ (Carisch 1852:27; Velleman
‘branches of a river’.
1915:109f.), although these forms may have pejorative con-
notations (Spescha 1989:254). Feminine singular nouns have
sometimes been reanalysed as ‘collective’ plurals, yielding 42.4.4 The nature and fate of plural -ora
in turn new, derived, masculine singulars (Gartner
1883:79f.). For example, muaglia ‘cattle’, a feminine singular
derived from Lat. NPL MOBILIA ‘moveable (possessions)’), yields Romance number desinences are almost exclusively mono-
MSG muagl ‘head of cattle’, while MSG fāf ‘bean’ has been morphemic and monosegmental. The novel type -ora
analogically forged from fāva ‘beans’ (< FSG FABAM). already stands out by being disyllabic, but what is not
These ‘plurals in the morphosyntactic guise of feminine normally appreciated is its exceptional morphological
singulars’ have ‘collective’ meaning (e.g. Ascoli 1883:439; structure. The usual account (e.g. Schön 1971:7, n.12, 67,
Tekavčić 1972/3:365; Spescha 1989:253; Liver 1989:132), but n.105; Maiden 2011a:172) has been that e.g. TEMPOR + A is
they are also the normal way of expressing plural for those reanalysed into two formatives: ˈtɛmp + ora. In reality, the
nouns.12 The primary function of the corresponding mor- reanalysis seems to have been ˈtɛmp + or + a, involving a
phologically ‘regular’ masculine plurals seems to be to double, syntagmatic, morphological marking of plural. We
have seen that in the history of Romanian, and some Italo-
Romance varieties, -ora becomes -ure, which in turn
becomes -uri. The fact that final -a, and then -e, are targeted
12
For (originally NPL) feminine singulars (e.g. Srd. ˈpira ‘pear, pears’) for analogical replacement by other plural desinences, leav-
with both individual and ‘collective’ meanings, in Sardinia and Basilicata
see §17.3.1; Lausberg (1939:139). In parts of Sardinia, this ‘collective’ usage ing -or-/-ur- intact, shows that -ora/-ure comprises two
includes some masculine singulars. formatives, not one.
702
NUMBER
The -ora plurals remain overwhelmingly restricted to nouns and adjectives in -e – -i, while some Romanian invari-
inanimate reference, and show genus alternans. However, in ant plurals are explicable by loss of singular -u, accidentally
Romanian and Aromanian there has been some extension of producing forms phonologically identical to their plurals, as
this ending into the plurals of inanimate feminine nouns. in ariciu ‘hedgehog’ – arici > modern arici – arici (Nedelcu
While in Aromanian there appears to be no restriction on 2013d:260).
such extensions, in Romanian (see Frâncu 1972) the phe- Phonologically induced invariance may have morpho-
nomenon is circumscribed (see Maiden 2014a for the logical repercussions. In northeastern Gallo-Romance,
reasons) to mass nouns, whose plurals designate ‘different invariance has been analogically generalized to all lexemes
sorts of X’, ‘objects made of X’: thus lână – lânuri ‘wool – which in, for example, French do show root allomorphy (e.g.
differents kinds of wool, woollen items’, mătase – mătăsuri Adam 1881:xlii for Lorrain; Remacle 1972:54 for Wallon;
‘silk – silks’. In southeastern Italy one encounters occasional Bonnotte 1896:192 for Picard).13 Many Italo-Romance var-
extension of *-ora into feminine nouns and into animates ieties show invariance in the word for ‘hand’ (AIS maps 151;
(cf. Loporcaro and Paciaroni 2011:418f.), a phenomenon 148): the type ˈmanu – ˈmanu seems once to have been
with occasional wider manifestations (at least in inani- widespread in central and southern Italy, and remains
mates) in medieval Italo-Romance (Gardani 2013:398f.). See detectable in Umbria and Lazio and some localities of Calab-
further §42.8. ria and Sicily. The invariance is phonological in origin (for
In varieties with a strong, productive genus alternans, the plural *-us > *-u; cf. Maiden 1996a; 2000b:177): fourth
continuants of *-ora and those of *-a seem equally well declension accusative MANUM – MANUS yielded *ˈmanu in
established. In modern Romanian, one cannot identify a both singular and plural (see also Rohlfs 1968:34f.). Else-
clear overall preference for one over the other, and dia- where (e.g. It. mano – mani), -i has been analogically
chronic shifts in either direction are common. Moreover, it extended into the plural of this word, but in parts of Lazio,
is usually impossible, given the singular, to predict which of Salento, and Calabria the inherited pattern of invariance
these two endings a noun takes in the plural (except that persists, ˈmano/ˈmanu having been replaced by ˈmani both
only -e is possible with the small minority of nouns not in plural and singular.
stressed on the last syllable of the root). Invariance may be an accidental effect of other morpho-
logical developments. In Venetan (Marcato and Ursini
1998:64; Ferguson 2007:115f.), feminines in singular -e gen-
erally have identical plurals, in -e, through analogical gen-
42.5 Invariance eralization of -e as a feminine plural desinence. Italian
number marking is effected primarily by alternation of
Invariance for number is rare. Where it exists, it is at the word-final unstressed vowels, so that words which lack
level of the inflectional morphology of the individual noun such vowels (e.g. through borrowing or phonological trun-
or adjective: in any utterance there is virtually always some cation) are invariant (e.g. SG/PL pulman ‘coach’, SG/PL oblò
other element, notably determiners, that expresses number: ‘porthole’; SG/PL foto ‘photo’, for fotografia/e). In Portuguese,
Fr. Une/La/Cette pomme est verte [yn/la/sɛt pɔm ɛ vɛʁt] ‘An/ Spanish, and Catalan, words whose singular already resem-
The/This apple is green’ – Des/Les/Ces pommes sont vertes bles a plural by ending in unstressed -Vs, are invariant: (Pt.
[de/le/se pɔm so͂ vɛʁt]) ‘Some/the/these apples are green’. SG/PL alferes ‘lieutenant’, Sp. SG/PL análisis ‘analysis’, Cat. SG/PL
Inflectional invariance has multiple causes. Where it is atles ‘atlas’).
dominant (northern Gallo-Romance), or common (Vegliote, Proper names (especially surnames) are widely invariant
much of Italy), it is normally the consequence of regular (e.g. Cat. els Riquer ‘the Riquers, the Riquer family’, It. gli
sound changes which have effaced the desinential distinc- Spataro ‘the Spataros’), although Romanian permits plural-
tion, particularly general loss of word-final /s/ (northern ization particularly in names bearing the suffix -escu (e.g.
France; see §18.4.2.1), deletion of final unstressed vowels Ceauşeştii ‘the Ceauşescus’) and in Occitan they can regularly
(Vegliote, §9.2; much of northern Italo-Romance, §13.2), and be pluralized (Alibèrt 1976:51).
merger of unstressed vowels as /ə/ (southern Italy, except The rules for forming plurals of compound words whose
the far south, §16.3.1.1). See Maiden (1996a:170-73) for the second element is a noun or adjective vary considerably (see
phonological motivation of the widespread survival of e.g. for Portuguese, Vázquez Cuesta and Mendes da Luz
vowel-final number marking in northern Italian feminines 1971:22-4; for Spanish, Butt and Benjamin 1994:22f.; for
such as ˈgamba ‘leg’ – ˈgambe or ˈgambi. Some sound Catalan, Wheeler et al. 1999:36; for French, Grevisse
changes have more restricted neutralizing effects: for
example, in the far south of Italy (Calabria, Salento, Sicily; 13
See also Barra-Jover (2012) for Provençal. For continued marking of
§16.2.1.2) raising of /e/ to /i/ effaces number distinctions in number on Wallon feminine adjectives, see §30.2.1.
703
MARTIN MAIDEN
1993:808-13; for Occitan, Alibèrt (1976:51f.); for Romanian, loss of final /s/, as in French *ʧəˈval ‘horse’ – *ʧəˈvals >
Nedelcu 2013c:278; Dinică 2013:614-16; see also Ch. 29 for *ʧəˈval – *ʧəˈvau̯s > cheval [ʃəval] – chevaux [ʃəvo].14 Occitan
general discussion). For the morphological constraints offers a proliferation of types of root allomorphy for num-
operative in Italian, requiring that plural can be marked ber, all of them, in the end, consequences of the phonolo-
on the second noun or adjective element of a compound gically differentiatory effects of a subsequently deleted final
only if the resultant form is a possible word form of the /s/. For a detailed description and typological survey see
inflectional paradigm of that element, and that the result especially Barra-Jover (2012), Sauzet (2011; 2012), Sibille
does not contradict general patterns of number and gender (2013) and §19.3.1.2. Briefly, in northern Occitan (where
marking, see Maiden (2008a). such effects are principally observable in feminines histor-
ically in -a – -as) we find that now-deleted final /s/ has been
responsible for differentiation of final vowel quality, length-
ening of final vowels in the plural, sometimes with conse-
42.6 Root allomorphy and suppletion quent stress shifts between singular and plural and even, in
certain localities (around Périgord), tonal distinctions: e.g.
42.6.1 Allomorphy from sound change Sant Julien de Crempse (Sauzet 2011): vākɔ̄ ‘cow’ – vākɔ̀, pɔ̄r
‘pig’ – pɔ̀r.15
Virtually all root allomorphy associated with number is an
effect of phonetic differentiation sensitive to the presence
of -s, -i, -e, or -a in the plural. The alternations involved are 42.6.2 Continuants of imparisyllabic
rarely unique to the morphological expression of number, nominatives
and rarely the sole marker of number. Vocalic alternations
for number (e.g. the effects on stressed vowels of metaph- Latin lacked root allomorphy specifically correlated with
ony by final -i in Italo-Romance; see §§13.2.2, 15.2.1.1, number, unless one takes certain nominative singular and
16.2.1.1.1) may be the sole number markers when final plural case forms in isolation from the remainder of the
vowel distinctions have been neutralized: Rmg. aˈmear paradigm—but it is sometimes just these forms that survive
‘bitter’ – aˈmer, Teramo ˈkrɔʧə ‘cross’ – ˈkruʧə, Nap. ˈmesə (see Maiden 2000b; Smith 2011a:283).16 At issue are continu-
‘month’ – ˈmisə. In Daco-Romance the palatalizing/affricat- ants of Latin ‘imparisyllabics’, where nominative singular
ing effects of /i/ may remain as sole marker of number in contained one syllable less than nominative plural (in add-
masculines: e.g. Ro. bunic ‘grandfather’ – bunici [buˈniʧ], brad ition to other, segmental and prosodic alternations). The
‘fir’ – brazi [brazʲ] (see §8.4.3). most prominent example is NOM.SG HÓMO ‘person’ – NOM.PL
In the Andalusian dialect of Granada, where vowels were HÓMINES, a type widely preserved in Daco- and Italo-Romance
laxed in closed syllables, and plural final /s/ consequently and Romansh (Ro. om - oámeni; It. uómo ‘man’ – uómini; Srs.
produced a vocalic alternation between singular and plural, um – úmens). In late Latin, a number of nouns in -a denoting
subsequent deletion of the /s/ leaves alternation in vowel (principally female) persons entered the ‘imparisyllabic’
quality, through lowering of vowel height, often harmonic- class, acquiring plurals in -anes (see Lausberg 1966:§591):
ally extended through the word, as sole marker of number e.g. NOM.SG AMITA ‘aunt’ – NOM.PL AMITAE > *ˈamita - amiˈtanes.
(see e.g. Alonso et al. 1950; Hooper 1976:36): peˈðaθo ‘piece’ This pattern has become associated with number marking
– pe̞ˈða̞θo̞ (cf. Cst. pedazo – pedazos). While modern Ibero- in Romansh, where various feminine nouns denoting per-
Romance tends to have a high degree of predictability in sons follow it: Srs. mátta – mattáuns ‘girl’, dúnna – dunnáuns
plural formation, this does not preclude root allomorphy, ‘girl’; for northern Italo-Romance remnants, see Rohlfs
some of it unpredictable. For example, Portuguese speakers (1968:41). In modern Aromanian (similar forms exist in old
(cf. Huback 2011) sometimes hesitate over the lexical dis- Romanian) we find masculine, as well as feminine, nouns in
tribution of the alternation between stressed -ão- and -ãe- in -ɨ (< -a) with plurals in -ˈɨɲ: e.g. ˈtatɨ ‘father’ – tɨˈtɨɲi̯ ‘par-
the plurals of words whose singulars contain -ão-: cf. histor- ents’; ˈlalɨ ‘uncle’ – lɨˈlɨɲi̯; ˈmumɨ ‘mother’ – muˈmɨɲi̯. This
ically regular irmão ‘brother’ – irmãos < GERMANUM – GERMANOS ending is also used (apparently without stress alternation)
and oração ‘oration’ – orações ORATIONEM – ORATIONES, but guar-
dião ‘guardian’ – guardiãos/guardiães. 14
For an even more unusual type of marking in French, where ‘liaison’-
The most extreme types of phonetically induced root marking [z] may even have acquired the status of a kind of mobile plural-
alternation occur in Gallo-Romance, and involve the surviv- marking affix, see §40.3.2.
15
ing effects of (subsequently deleted) final /s/: see further Lengthening of vowels is also the legacy of final /s/ in some north-
western Gallo-Romance varieties: see e.g. Lepelley (1974:102).
§§18.4.2.1, 19.3.1.2. Thus the (synchronically unpredictable) 16
In neuters this alternation also affected accusatives, e.g. TEMPUS
effects of vocalization of preconsonant /l/, and later – TEMPORA: see §42.4.
704
NUMBER
in the formation of plurals of family names, e.g. kaˈraʤaɲi̯ Number suppletion in lexical adjectives is practically
‘the Caragiu family’ (cf. Caragiu Marioţeanu 1975:234f.). unknown. However, in Megleno-Romanian, ‘small’ and
Tuttle (1982) discusses the role of this suffix in creating ‘big’ have plurals etymologically unrelated to their singulars
the type la ˈvaka ‘the cow’ – la ˈvakɐn found in nouns, (Atanasov 2009:maps 164, 165; Maiden 2014b). While the
pronouns, and adjectives in modern Italo-Romance singulars are common to other Daco-Romance varieties
dialects of Upper Mescolcina (with more restricted and (M mik, F ˈmikə ‘small’ and M/F ˈmari ‘big’: cf. Ro. MSG mic,
complex parallels in Val Bregaglia). Note also NOM.SG SÓROR FSG mică, and M/FSG mare), we find MPL miˈnuʦ, FPL miˈnuti
‘sister’ – NOM.PL SORÓRES > ARo. ˈsorɨ ‘sister’ – suˈrəri ̯. ‘small’ and MPL məʧˈkaʦ, FPL məʧˈkati ‘big’ (cf. Ro. M/FPL mici
and M/FPL mari). mik and ˈmari have no etymologically
corresponding plural forms, but miˈnuʦ/miˈnuti and
məʧˈkaʦ/məʧˈkati do have singulars whose meanings, how-
42.6.3 Suppletion ever, are not simply ‘small’ and ‘big’, but ‘composed of
small/large parts’, ‘finely/coarsely chopped’ (cf. their
The most extreme form of allomorphy for number, supple- Romanian cognates mărunt/măşcat). Briefly, words meaning
tion, is apparently unknown in Iberia and at best rare ‘composed of large/small parts’ may, precisely in the plural,
elsewhere. When it occurs (notably in Gallo-Romance), it be taken to refer to the size of the components of the
too is usually the result of sound change: this is true even of plurality: saying that a plurality is ‘made up of small/large
Fr. œil [œj] ‘eye’ – yeux [jø] (see e.g. Price 1971:69). The parts’ is equivalent to saying that the entities that consti-
French for ‘egg’ (< OUUM) might be described as ‘borderline tute it are themselves ‘small/large’, so that these adjectives
suppletive’: its singular is œuf [œf] and its plural either [ø] or may become effectively synonyms of ‘small’ and ‘large’, but
[œf]. The plural is pronounced identically to the singular only in the plural, and thereby become available to replace
([œf]), except that the allomorph [ø] has become specialized the etymologically expected plural forms. For further dis-
to the context of a preceding word-final [z]. This includes cussion of the mechanisms, see Maiden (2014b).
not only the preceding word-final prevocalic plural marker
[z] (under conditions of liaison see §18.4.1.5), but also after
numerals, provided that they end in [z]: deux œufs [dœz ø]
‘two eggs’, douze œufs [duz ø] ‘a dozen eggs’, but cinq œufs
[sɛ̃k œf] ‘five eggs’, vingt œufs [vɛ̃t œf] ‘twenty eggs’ (see
42.7 Mass nouns, set nouns, and
Swiggers 1985). As with œil, the origins of the suppletions ‘aberrant’ morphology
are phonological, but their diachronic survival owes some-
thing to the very high relative frequency of the plural not to By their nature, nouns denoting ‘mass’, non-countable
mention, in the case of ‘egg’, the association of the supple- entities lack plural expression. Where plurals exist, they
tive form of the plural with a specific phonological context. tend to mean ‘different sorts/instantiations of . . . ’: e.g. Sp.
Non-phonologically caused suppletion is extremely rare. queso ‘cheese’ – quesos ‘cheeses’. Romanian shows signs of
It is sometimes observed in third person pronouns, such as developing special morphological marking (in -uri) for the
French MSG lui vs MPL eux, or Italian MSG lui, FPL lei vs M/FPL loro, plurals of feminine mass nouns (see Maiden 2014a); indeed,
ultimately reflecting different case forms, of the singular the Romanian plural of brânză ‘cheese’, brânzeturi, shows an
and plural respectively, of continuants of Latin ILLE. For additional formative -et-, almost unique to the plural of this
number alternation in Italo-Romance stressed third person noun.
pronouns between reflexes of Latin ILLE and IPSE, see Cappel- Nouns whose referents are at once a whole yet in some
laro (2013; see also §44.2.2.2). Some Istro-Romanian nouns way divided, perhaps with component entities of a very low
show a kind of suppletion for number involving borrowing degree of individual salience and distinctness, are liable to
from Croatian: at issue are certain nouns commonly used in find expression as singulars in one language and plurals in
measure phrases, when they are preceded by a numeral another. ‘Hair (of the head)’ is singular in Romanian (păr)
from ‘five’ to ‘eight’ (see Kovačec 1966:65f.; Sala and Spanish (pelo) but plural in most Romance languages
2013:220f.). The numeral, too, must be Croatian, so that (Vgl. kaˈpei; It. capelli; also Cst. cabellos). The Romanian singu-
Croatian numeral and Croatian noun plural are mutually lare tantum mazăre noun ‘peas’ corresponds to plural forms
implicational: compare doi̯ ɑɲ ‘two years’, do ˈzile ‘two elsewhere (Cst. guisantes, It. piselli); Italian singulare tantum uva
days’, ʧinʧ ˈomir ‘five people’, ˈʃɑpte ˈkɑse ‘seven houses’, ‘grapes’ corresponds to plurals in Ro. struguri, Cst. uvas (note
with indigenous, Romance, forms, but ˈsedəm let ‘seven also Fr. SG un raisin ‘a grape’ vs SG du raisin ‘some grapes’ vs PL
years’, pet dən ‘five days’ with Croatian nouns and les/des raisins ‘types of grape’); the Romanian plurale tantum
numerals. icre ‘caviar’ or paste ‘pasta’ (Fr. PL pâtes) correspond to Italian
705
MARTIN MAIDEN
singular caviale, pasta, etc. Various lexical devices can indi- respect of their indefinite determiners particularly in Gallo-
cate the individual component of the mass: e.g. Ro. un bob de Romance (see Bach 2012). For example, the indefinite dual
mazăre ‘a pea’, lit. ‘a grain of peas’. meaning of ‘some pliers (= a pair of pliers)’ must be indi-
Nouns may have referents which inherently comprise a cated in some Occitan varieties (e.g. Languedocian) by unas
number of parts or events, and may thereby be expressed as tenalhas, using a plural form of the singular indefinite article
plural in some languages and not in others. The Italian plurale una, or by un parelh de tenalhas ‘a pair of pliers’, whilst ‘some
tantum noun nozze ‘wedding’ coexists with SG matrimonio, pliers’ (= ‘a number of pairs of pliers’) is indicated by a
alongside freely alternating lo sposalizio/gli sposalizi and cor- partitive plural construction de (las) tenalhas (see Buridant
responds to singulars in Sp. boda (< Latin neuter plural UOTA; 2002:62;115f. for old French parallels). The picture is further
but Spanish also has a plural in, e.g. noche de bodas ‘wedding complicated in the dialect of Mantua (northern Italy; see
night’), Fr. mariage (also plural noces), Ro. nuntă (a singular Bach 2012:77), where ‘scissors’ and ‘pincers’ are pluralia
analogically created from originally plural nunţi < NUPTIAS). tantum when definite (li furbˈsini ‘the scissors’, li ˈtnai ‘the
The motivation for such cross-linguistic differences is often pincers’), but when indefinite distinguish morphologically
unclear: ‘dawn’ is usually singular (Sp., It. alba, Fr. aube), but singular na furbsˈina, na ˈtnaia ‘a pair of scissors/pincers’
Romanian has the plurale tantum noun zori. Istro-Romanian from plural dle furbˈsine, dle ˈtnaie ‘some (pairs of) scissors/
ˈɣrɑbʎi ‘rake’ is plurale tantum (cf. Ro. sg greblă), perhaps pincers’.
because it is divided by its ‘teeth’, while originally singular Lexemes whose plurals are ‘unmarked’ (i.e. which denote
ˈpunte ‘bridge’ is reanalysed as feminine plurale tantum entities typically occurring in pairs or sets, thereby having
(Petrovici and Neiescu 1964:204f.), possibly because the ref- greater frequency of occurrence in the plural than in the
erent is normally a set of ‘stepping stones’ (cf. Ro. punte). singular; cf. Tiersma 1982) are cross-linguistically a locus of
There is often idiosyncrasy in encoding number on nouns morphologically aberrant behaviour. One quite common
whose referents characteristically occur as components of a effect is that the plural constitutes the ‘basic’ form, from
‘set’. For Italian plurals in -a see §44.4.2. Italian ala ‘wing’ –ali which speakers may then produce novel analogical singu-
and arma ‘weapon’ – armi show -i instead of expected -e (see lars. The phenomenon is occasionally attested in many
Maiden 1995:105; Gardani 2013:336, 437); reni [ˈreni] ‘kid- Romance varieties (e.g. French singular genou ‘knee’, for
neys, small of the back’ has both a different gender (femin- older genoil, is remodelled on the phonologically regular
ine) and a different stressed vowel from the (originally plural genoux), but it has a particularly high incidence of
learnèd) singular rene [ˈrɛne].17 Nouns indicating entities occurrence in Romanian, giving rise to interdialectal and
made up of non-separable pairs or sets are liable to be even intradialectal variation in respect of certain singulars
morphologically singular in one language and plural in and even affecting some words which do not obviously have
another. ‘Trousers’ are singular in French (un pantalon ‘a unmarked plurals. Byck and Graur (1967) detail dozens of
(pair of) trousers’, while in Spanish both PL pantalones and SG examples, which take many forms, but a typical case is
pantalón are in use, and Romanian and Italian have PL panta- where masculine plurals in -i originally alternating with
loni. ‘Scissors’ is a plurale tantum in French (ciseaux), and singular -e acquire novel singulars in -Ø (< -u). The situation
generally a plural in Spanish (tijeras) and Italian (forbici). can be seen in microcosm in Istro-Romanian (Table 42.6
The Romanian for ‘scissors’ can be fairly described as mor- is synthesized from Popovici 1914:71; Puşcariu 1926:140f.,
phologically chaotic, the reflex of Latin singular FORBICEM 144f., 150; Petrovici and Neiescu 1964:203; Kovačec
appearing variously as a masculine singular foarfece, appar- 1984:558;562f.; Sârbu and Frăţilă 1998; and Flora 2003).
ently sometimes reanalysed as a feminine plural foarfece Several of these examples show that root allomorphy is
coexisting with singular foarfece or giving rise to a novel also affected. The words ‘worm’ and ‘snake’ show the influ-
feminine singular foarfecă, plural foarfeci, the latter now ence of the plural in their stressed vowel: the ‘regular’
being the prescribed forms (cf. also Wild 1983:map 434 for reflexes of the relevant etyma in Istro-Romanian show
Megleno-Romanian). In old Tuscan (Gardani 2013:348, 397) alternation between /ɑ/ in the singular and /e/ in the
feminine nouns with meanings such as ‘fingernail’, ‘jaw’ plural (e.g. ˈɣʎɑrme – ɣʎerm, ˈʃɑrpe – ʃerp), but the remod-
sometimes show number invariance: e.g. unghia ‘fingernail’ elled singulars show the stressed vowel of the plural. In the
– unghia. singulars ˈʃoreʧ and ˈʃorek ‘mouse’, the latter manifests
Nouns with non-separable referents, and items charac- analogical introduction of a pattern of root-allomorphy
teristically occurring in pairs, show interesting behaviour in whereby singular /k/ alternates with plural /ʧ/ (or /ʦ/
according to dialect). Wild (1983:maps 104, 122, 159) gives
similar examples from Megleno-Romanian. In standard
17
We may include It. dio ‘god’ – dei where the form of the plural betrays
a learnèd origin and whose morphological irregularity is clearly motivated Romanian the only singular form of the word for ‘wether’
in a monotheistic culture. is re-formed berbec [berˈbek] (not etymologically expected
706
NUMBER
Table 42.6 Analogical reformation of singulars in Istro- Table 42.7 Masculine plural -ure in Istro-Romanian
Romanian
MSG MPL
ETYMON NORTHERN ISTRO - SOUTHERN ISTRO -
ROMANIAN ( ŽEJANE ) ROMANIAN
lup ˈlupure ‘wolf ’
puʎ ˈpuʎure ‘chicken’
*aˈrete -i aˈrɛte aˈret aˈrɛte ‘ram’ om ˈomure ‘husband’
*karˈbone -i kərˈbun kərˈbur kərˈbure ‘coal’ urs ˈursure ‘bear’
*ˈdɛnte -i ˈdinte dint ‘tooth’
*ˈljepore -i ˈʎepure ˈʎepur ˈʎepur ‘rabbit’
*ˈpeske -i peʃt ‘fish’
*ˈpureke -i ˈpureʧe ˈpureʧ ˈpureʧ ‘flea’
(1982:88f.) considers a possible German influence in the
*ˈsɛrpe -i ˈʃarpe ˈʃerpu ‘snake’
type la ˈvakɐn ‘the cows’ in the Italo-Romance of upper
*ˈsorike -i ˈʃoreʧ ˈʃorek ‘mouse’
Mesolcina. In Aromanian an ending -(e̯)aʣ (from Grk.
*ˈvɛrme -i ˈɣʎɑrme ˈɣʎermu ˈɣʎermu ‘worm’
-Üδå& ) marks the plural of some masculine nouns and adjec-
*verˈveke -i bɨrˈbeʧ ‘wether’
tives of Greek (or Turkish) origin with stressed final
vowels: e.g. kafiˈne ‘café’ – kafiˈne̯aʣ; ʧiʃmiˈʤi ‘bootmaker’ –
ʧiʃmiˈʤe̯aʣ but also indigenous dumniˈʣə ‘God’ – dumni
ˈʣaʣ (Caragiu Marioţeanu 1975:234f.; Saramandu 1984:434).
**[berˈbeʧe]); şoarec [ˈʃo̯arek] ‘mouse’ is frequently found Istro-Romanian displays possible morphological ‘cal-
dialectally instead of expected şoarece [ˈʃo̯areʧe], from quing’. The type SG -Ø – PL -ure, historically limited to
plural şoareci [ˈʃo̯areʧ]. A good number of the Italo-Romance inanimates and displaying genus alternans, has acquired
examples cited in Rohlfs (1968:14) of replacement of etymo- masculine gender in singular and plural alike, spreading
logically expected final -e by -o (e.g. It. sorcio (OTsc. sorco) into nouns with male animate reference, especially in the
‘mouse’ < SORICEM, ghiro ‘dormouse’ < GLIREM, OTsc. vermo dialect of Žejane (Kovačec 1966:64; 1971:88; Petrovici 1967;
‘worm’ < UERMEN) also seem to involve nouns with Hurren 1999:157) (Table 42.7).
‘unmarked’ plurals. In Žejane, historically genus alternans nouns in SG -Ø - PL -e
have also become masculine in singular and plural alike (e.g.
MSG kuˈʦit ‘knife’ – MPL kuˈʦite), and there are even examples
with human reference (e.g. MSG ɣospoˈdɑr ‘master’ – MPL
42.8 Borrowing and calquing ɣospoˈdɑre). Kovačec (1966:63f.) notes that nouns in disyl-
labic plural -ure correspond semantically to standard
Romance number marking is a ‘closed’ system owing virtu- Croatian masculine nouns in disyllabic plural -ovi, whilst
ally nothing to language contact, but there are exceptions. those in -e correspond to Croatian masculines in mono-
In southern Calabria, the Greek type ˈxɛri ‘hand’ – ˈxɛria syllabic -i, so that calquing of the distribution of the
has entered some indigenous words, such as fuˈmɛri plural endings on a Croatian model seems the likely
‘manure’ – fuˈmɛria (Rohlfs 1950:§100; 1968:37). Tuttle explanation.
707
CHAPTER 43
Morphomes
MARTIN MAIDEN
43.1 Romance morphomes 43.2 Four major morphomic patterns
Romance inflectional morphology appears to be haunted by 43.2.1 The ‘past participle’

some rather aggressive ghosts. Not only can paradigmatic
alternation patterns involving phonologically or function- The inflectional paradigm of almost all Romance verbs
ally motivated allomorphy doggedly persist long after their comprises a non-finite form generally called ‘past parti-
motivation is deceased, but those patterns may bring under ciple’. The label is infelicitous, since although the form
their sway historically quite unrelated varieties of allomor- (henceforth, PtP) is implicated in various periphrases
phy. Such patterns, most apparent in the verb, characteris- expressing past time (cf. Ch. 49, §58.2–3), it has no inherent
tically involve a ragbag of paradigm cells synchronically ‘past’ meaning; in fact, it has no unique, distinctive, func-
lacking any common set of distinguishing, morphosyntactic tion. ‘Past participles’ always span at least two major, dis-
or phonological, features. They may also display ‘coher- parate functions, as shown for English by Aronoff (1994):
ence’, in that exceptions to the patterns tend to be removed indeed, its English counterpart (termed ‘perfect participle’)
or resisted, and changes affecting any of the specified cells provides one of his principal illustrations of a ‘morphome’.2
equally affect all the others. The full range of uses of the Romance PtP cannot be illus-
As described, such phenomena surely qualify as ‘autono- trated here, but it is deployed, in combination with an
mously morphological’: they are systematic facts about the auxiliary (usually BE or HAVE), in a wide range of periphrastic
organization of Romance inflectional paradigms irreducible constructions expressing perfectivity (cf. §58.3) and passive
to anything outside the morphology by itself. These are (cf. §60.5). In a handful of Portuguese verbs (see e.g.
phenomena of the kind that Aronoff (1994), principally Loporcaro et al. 2004; Maiden 2013c:506–8) this dual role is
from a synchronic perspective, describes as ‘morphomes’, morphologically distinguished, the past participle showing
conceived as functions, lacking any inherent connection innovatory forms in active periphrases, in contrast to older
with a specific form or a specific meaning, which nonethe- forms preserved in the passive (cf. §23.4.9): thus prender
less serve systematically to relate form and meaning.1 In ‘take, arrest’ has PtP prendido in perfective periphrases and
what follows, after sketching some major morphomic ‘leit- preso in passive (and non-active) periphrases (see also
motivs’ in Romance historical morphology, I consider how Maiden 2013c:522) These examples stand out precisely
their ‘coherence’ throws light on the role and nature of because they are probably the sole clear case in Romance
morphomic structures in diachrony. I then suggest how where these different functions are distinguished: other-
the history of Romance morphology justifies recognizing wise, any morphological innovation affecting PtP in any of
autonomous morphological structure even in phenomena its functions equally affects it in all the others.3 Examples
seemingly lacking it. (1a), (2a), (3a) illustrate this for ‘I have seen/lost/read/
written/opened it’, and (1b), (2b), (3b) give passive ‘It is
taken/seen/lost/read/written/opened’. Forms in bold illus-
trate various morphological innovations with respect to the
Latin antecedents, which have nonetheless identically
affected PtP in both types.
1
For wider discussions of ‘morphomes’ and the relevance of (Romance)
historical morphology to understanding them, see e.g. Maiden (2005;
2011a:174–201; 2011b:223–63); Maiden et al. (2011a:1–4), Cruschina et al.
2
(2013b). For a more general theoretical viewpoint, see Stump (2001:esp. For discussion of the (long defunct) shared motivation of this parallel
ch. 6). For consideration of conjugation class, also definable as morphomic, between Romance and Germanic, see e.g. Maiden (2013c:504f.).
3
see §27.8. Benucci (1993:78f., n. 24) gives a possible northern Italian case.
708 This chapter © Martin Maiden 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
MORPHOMES
(1) a. Lo he
b. Es
g visto perdido leído escrito abierto. (Sp.).
fundamental obstacle to splits, and highlights their over-
whelming absence. Some other apparent counterexamples
are reviewed in §43.3.
(2) a. L’ho
g
b. È (or Viene)
visto perso letto scritto aperto. (It.)
43.2.2 Remnants of perfective morphology
(3) a. L-am
b. Este
g văzut pierdut citit scris deschis. (Ro.)
Latin finite verbs (and infinitives) distinguished ‘perfective’
and ‘imperfective’ stems. Third conjugation perfectives, in
particular, tended to show heterogeneous types of root
allomorphy, remnants of which (with various innovations;
The discrepancy between formal unity and functional cf. Maiden 2011a:176f.) survive extensively in Romance.
disparity is greatest in the Romanian ‘supine’. The gram- Table 43.2 contrasts reflexes of Latin third person singular
matical tradition, supported by a plausible but problematic present imperfective forms with those of third person sin-
assumption that it is the formal continuant of the Latin gular present perfective, for various modern Romance lan-
‘supine’ (see Maiden 2013c:511–15), has meant that the guages. Forms in parentheses show older perfective roots,
label ‘past participle’ is not conventionally extended to the since analogically eliminated.
supine. Nonetheless, it shares exactly the stem of the past The general historical characteristics of the continuants
participle and, more specifically, is always exactly identical of the perfective are most easily illustrated by taking one
to the masculine singular form of the past participle. There Latin verb, FACERE ‘make’, and exploring its reflexes in e.g.
is therefore no reason why the morphomic label PtP could Portuguese, French, and Romanian. I give just imperfect
not extend to it. PtP thus defined unites not only the usual indicatives to represent originally imperfective forms
array of functions associated with Romance past participles,
but also the irreducibly disparate range of functions (first
and foremost that of ‘verbal noun’) associated with the Table 43.2 Remnants of Latin perfective stem allomorphs
supine; its heterogeneity is discussed in more detail in
Lat. IPFV PFV IPFV PFV
§8.4.6.5 (also Maiden 2013c:515f.). It is all the more striking,
therefore, that nothing that has happened to either ‘past Lat. CONDUCIT CONDUXIT FACIT FĒCIT
participle’ or ‘supine’ in the history of Romanian has ever ‘leads’ ‘led’ ‘makes’ ‘made’
failed to happen to the other. Table 43.1 outlines the dia- Sp. conduce condujo hace hizo
chronic path from Latin. All Romanian forms listed show Fr. conduit conduisit fait fit
effects of some internal analogical change, undifferentiated (conduist)
for function. It. conduce condusse fa fece
The sole exception to the ironclad diachronic coherence Ro. conduce conduse face făcu
of PtP emerges in some northern and western Romanian (fece)
dialects (cf. Maiden 2013c:516f., 524), where the PtP of the
verb ‘be’, fost, may be replaced by analogical fiut, but solely Lat. HABET HABUIT PLACET PLACUIT
in the supine. This, like the Portuguese splits, is the very ‘has’ ‘had’ ‘pleases’ ‘pleased’
rare exception which both shows that there is no Sp. ha hubo place plació
(plogo)
Fr. a eut plaît plut
It. ha ebbe piace piacque
Table 43.1 Supine and past participle from Latin to Ro. are avu place plăcu
Romanian
LATIN ROMANIAN Lat. SCRIBIT SCRIPSIT TENET TENUIT
‘writes’ ‘wrote’ ‘holds’ ’held’
past participle supine past participle supine Sp. escribe escribió tiene tuvo
COGNITUM ‘known’ COGNITUM cunoscut cunoscut (escriso)
FACTUM ‘made’ FACTUM făcut făcut Fr. écrit écrivit (escrist) tient tint
POSITUM ‘put’ POSITUM pus pus It. scrive scrisse tiene tenne
TRACTUM ‘pulled’ TRACTUM tras tras Ro. scrie scrise ține ținu
709
MARTIN MAIDEN
Table 43.3 Continuants of Latin imperfectives Table 43.4 Continuants of Latin perfectives
LATIN PORTUGUESE FRENCH ROMANIAN LATIN PORTUGUESE FRENCH ROMANIAN
past indicative imperfect indicative present preterite

FACIEBAM fazia faisais făceam FECI fiz fis făcui
FACIEBAS fazias faisais făceai FECISTI fiziste fis făcuși
FACIEBAT fazia faisait făcea FECIT fez fit făcu
FACIEBAMUS fazíamos faisions făceam FECIMUS fizemos fîmes făcurăm
FACIEBATIS fazíais faisiez făceați FECISTIS fizestes fîtes făcurăți
FACIEBANT faziam faisaient făceau FECERUNT fizeram firent făcură
past indicative pluperfect indicative
FECERAM fizera
(Table 43.3), but the full set of continuants of original per- FECERAS fizeras
fectives (Table 43.4). FECERAT fizera
While the distributional pattern of formal identity in FECERAMUS fizéramos
continuants of the perfective stem is preserved, the histor- FECERATIS fizéreis
ical functional bond between them dissolves. Only preter- FECERANT fizeram
ites still express perfective aspect. The Romance imperfect past subjunctive imperfect pluperfect
subjunctives are aspectually neutral and lack any inherent subjunctive indicative
connection with past time-reference, while their formal FECISSEM fizesse fisse făcusem
cognate in Romanian, the pluperfect indicative, is also as- FECISSES fizesses fisses făcuseși
pectually neutral (see Maiden 2009b:303). The pluperfect FECISSET fizesse fît făcuse
indicative could be used as a past conditional in Latin, and FECISSEMUS fizéssemos fissions făcuserăm
this may have favoured its later development in many FECISSETIS fizestes fissiez făcuserăți
Romance varieties as a conditional or past subjunctive, FECISSENT fizessem fissent făcuseră
while in Portuguese and old Spanish it continues to express
anteriority in the past, but not perfectivity, later becoming future indicative/ future subjunctive
a second imperfect subjunctive in Spanish. A fusion of the present subjunctive
Latin perfect subjunctive and future perfect produced FECERO/IM fizer
in some varieties of sixteenth-century Romanian (with FECERIS fizeres
modern Istro-Romanian and Aromanian) a conditional FECERIT fizer
(e.g. fecere; cf. ORo. 3SG.PRT fece) limited to the protasis of FECERIMUS fizermos
conditional sentences whose apodosis contained a verb in FECERITIS fizerdes
the future, imperative, or present subjunctive (see Ivănescu FECERINT fizerem
1980:155f.), while in Portuguese and old Spanish it yielded a
future subjunctive (see Maiden 2001a).
Grammarians of Spanish regard continuants of the Latin Portuguese (like Spanish) the root contains /i/, yet this
perfective as showing an ‘affinity’ (whence the traditional vowel is etymologically explicable only in the first person
label pretérito/perfecto y tiempos afines or ‘preterite/perfect singular, where it is the result of early Romance sound
and related tenses’), yet this ‘affinity’ is, synchronically, not change (see e.g. Maiden 2011a:184f.), namely metaphonic
functional but purely morphological. This label (acronymi- raising of stressed /e/ before unstressed /i/ (i.e. FECI >
cally, ‘PYTA’) simply captures the fact that the relevant *fiki). In Ibero-Romance and Gallo-Romance, the metapho-
parts of the paradigm always share an identical root: it nic vowel is subject in several verbs to analogical general-
describes a ‘morphome’. Yet what is involved is an active ization but, as Table 43.4 shows, this affects all and only the
principle in the organization of Romance verb morphology: distinctive PYTA root-forms (for Portuguese fez, see below).
for centuries any morphological change affecting one of the In French, only stressed PYTA roots were initially affected
specified cells in any Romance language has always and (e.g. 3SG.PRT fist but 2SG.IPFV.SBJV fe(s)ist), not just in the third
identically affected all the others. person singular and plural preterite, but equally in the old,
This claim is powerful, falsifiable, and remarkably rarely also rhizotonic continuant of the Latin pluperfect indicative
false. Our sample of the reflexes of FACERE offers some exem- (cf. Fouché 1967:276, 336f.); a subsequent analogical change,
plification. Throughout the PYTA forms of French and chiefly from the fifteenth century onwards, and this time
710
MORPHOMES
extending the vowel to unstressed syllables, affects all, but Table 43.5 Italian preterite and
again only, PYTA cells. From FECI, FECISSET, etc. one predicts in imperfect subjunctive reflexes of FACERE
old French (see Fouché 1967:276) **fiz, **feisist, not fis, fesist.
PRT IPFV . SBJV
The actual outcome probably reflects an analogical change
modelled on verbs such as pris, presist ‘took’. Crucially, this 1SG féci facéssi
analogy too affects all PYTA cells. In French, PYTA also
provides a domain for defectiveness: for example the verb 2SG facésti facéssi
traire ‘milk’ (likewise, extraire ‘extract’, soustraire ‘subtract’, 3SG féce facésse
etc.) is defective in precisely these cells.
Sixteenth-century Romanian (see e.g. Frâncu 1997:137, 1PL facémmo facéssimo
338) still preserved the root fec- (< Lat. FEC-) in preterite, 2PL facéste facéste
pluperfect, and conditional (e.g. PRT.3SG fece; PLPF.3 fecese; 3PL fécero facéssero
COND.3 fecere). In modern standard Romanian, fec- has been
evicted by originally imperfective făc-. A further concomi-
tant of the distinctive PYTA root in Romanian (see Maiden
dialects of northwestern Iberia behave similarly, the PYTA
2009b:283), the theme vowel /e/, has also been replaced by
alternant optionally disappearing before stressed desi-
the theme vowel /u/ (characteristic of second and third
nences (see Penny 1969:132, 136). All these cases actually
conjugation verbs lacking distinctive roots), across the
confirm the overall ‘coherence’ of the PYTA morphome,
entire range of PYTA cells. There are no ‘intermediate’ or
since the domain of the postulated hypercharacterization
partial cases: fece- has been removed, ‘coherently’ and wher-
remains precisely ‘preterite and conditional (and old Italo-
ever it occurred, by făcu-. The theme vowel is also the locus
Romance conditional)’. It may be possible to subsume here
of an across-the-board innovation in some Ibero-Romance
another apparent systematic deviation from coherence,
varieties, most obviously Portuguese and Galician. If a
Aromanian. Here, the preterite retains the PYTA root
Portuguese verb has a distinctive PYTA root, then it is fol-
throughout, while the conditional has largely lost it.
lowed by stressed thematic [ɛ] (e.g. fiz[ɛ]sse, fiz[ɛ]ra, fiz[ɛ]r);
However, Maiden (2009b:279–81) points out that what
otherwise the thematic vowel (in second or third conjugation
distinguishes the two sets of forms is that the conditional
verbs) is [e] (e.g. bev[e]sse, etc., ‘drink’). The most likely source
is exclusively stressed on the desinence, whereas the pret-
for this vowel is dar ‘give’ < DARE (see Craddock 1983; O’Neill
erite has unstressed desinences.
2011), where [ɛ] is etymological. Its analogical extension has
Perhaps the sole systematic exception in Romance for
operated in such a way as to associate a unique characteristic
which no independent principled explanation exists con-
theme vowel exclusively with PYTA roots. For evidence of
cerns certain Aragonese dialects having distinctive PYTA
how the PYTA cells may also form a domain in Daco-
roots in the preterite, but not the imperfect subjunctive.4
Romance for morphological changes affecting the distribu-
Thus Panticosa (Nagore Laín 1986) has PRT.1SG estube ‘was’,
tion not of stem allomorphs, but of person and number
quisié ‘wanted’, tube ‘had’ vs IPFV.SBJV.1SG estase, querese, tenese.
desinences, see Maiden (2009b:289–95; also 2007b).
In addition, various western Ibero-Romance varieties some-
Systematic counterexamples to coherence are strikingly
times ‘miss’ the third person singular preterite in the ana-
rare. Characteristic of Italo-Romance is that the distinctive
logical generalization of metaphonic vowels through the
PYTA root has apparently wholly disappeared from the
PYTA root (see Table 43.4 for Portuguese). This suggests
imperfect subjunctive (Table 43.5).
that frequency (third person preterite forms are plausibly
In fact, the disappearance of the distinctive PYTA allo-
the most frequent PYTA verb forms) sometimes plays a
morph is ‘coherent’ in that it occurs in both preterite and
differentiatory role in the diffusion of morphological
imperfect subjunctive, albeit not in all cells of the former.
changes within the PYTA morphome. This is implicit, also,
Maiden (2000c) argues that what has really occurred is a
in Wheeler’s finding (2011) that the historical substitution
‘hypercharacterization’—modelled probably on the third
of original root-final sibilants by velars in Catalan PYTA
person singular preterite—of the PYTA root as being correl-
roots tends to affect the ‘least marked’ category (third
ated with an unstressed desinence, favouring its preserva-
person singular preterite) later than others.5
tion just where such a desinence is present, and its
replacement by the non-PYTA root elsewhere. This claim
is corroborated by, inter alia, the evidence of medieval Italo-
Romance dialects where the old conditional (continuing the 4
See O’Neill (2011) for problems with Maiden’s (2001a) attempted
Latin pluperfect indicative and characterized by unstressed explanation of these facts.
desinences) also preserved the PYTA root: e.g. fécera. Some 5
For lexical counterexamples, see Maiden (2001a; 2011a:186–8).
711
MARTIN MAIDEN
The L/U-pattern is a pervasive morphomic template,

43.2.3 The ‘L-pattern’ (‘U-pattern’) and only the barest sketch is possible here. For illustration
of the extent of its manifestations, and the status of
This is a distribution of root allomorphy in non-first conjuga- various real or apparent counterexamples, see Maiden
tion verbs characteristically affecting all and only cells of the (1992; 2005; 2011b:223–41; 2011d). Analogical extensions
present subjunctive together with that of the first person of the patterns (and eliminations of the alternation) are
singular present indicative: set out conventionally, the distri- overwhelmingly ‘coherent’. Any change affecting present
bution resembles a letter ‘L’.6 A variant, found mainly in subjunctive usually equally affects first person singular
central Italy and (for root-final velars) also in Daco-Romance present indicative (+ third person plural in U-pattern
(cf. §§14.3.2.1, 15.2.2, 22.3.2.3), includes the third person plural varieties) and vice versa. The exceptions in some of the
present indicative and is labelled ‘U-pattern’. The L/U-pattern above Italian examples involve the first and second
has two, chronologically and structurally different, but purely person plural present subjunctive: for discussion of why
phonological, causes. The older shows the palatalizing/affri- these two cells sometimes deviate from the general pat-
cating effects of proto-Romance yod on immediately preced- tern, see Maiden (2010; 2012). What needs to be underlined
ing consonants; the other reflects the effects of front vowels on is that such exceptions as there are align with no clearly-
preceding velars.7 The (morphologically accidental) paradig- defined feature bundle such as (present) subjunctive;
matic distribution of the conditioning environments for these rather, innovations typically embrace both the relevant
changes chanced to be in complementary distribution: yod cell(s) of the present indicative and those of the present
appeared just in the present subjunctive and first person subjunctive, which correspond to no ‘natural class’. The major
singular present indicative (with third person plural present apparent systematic counterexample, modern Gallo-Romance,
indicative in central Italo-Romance), while front vowels is addressed in §43.4.
appeared everywhere but the set of cells just cited. In Daco-
Romance there is a discrepancy with respect to third person
plural present, in that postconsonantal back vowels appeared 43.2.4 The ‘N-pattern’
in that cell while yod did not. Nearly all Romance languages
show the effects of both sound changes (Tables 43.6 and 43.7),
Placement of word-level stress in Latin depended purely on
so that there emerge phonologically disparate types of alter-
syllable structure and position. An accidental, systematic
nation which nonetheless fortuitously share a distributional
effect was that in verbs (except third conjugation present
pattern. Especially where the effects of yod were concerned,
indicative and infinitive, and some perfect indicative
the conditioning environment of the alternation rapidly
forms), stress fell on the lexical root in just the singular
disappeared. The original environment of the velar–palatal
and third person plural of the present, but to the right of the
alternation, however, often survives intact, although in all
root everywhere else. Substantial loss of the Latin phono-
languages where this is true there can be no question of
logical stress rule created a high degree of morphologiza-
continued automatic phonological conditioning, given exten-
tion of the stress pattern, root stress being a function,
sive examples of non-palatalized velars before front vowels. In
usually, of the set of cells 1SG.PRS 2SG.PRS 3SG.PRS 3PL.PRS—a
the following tables Tables 43.6 and 43.7 the top row is present
functionally arbitrary set arbitrarily labelled (Maiden
indicative, the bottom present subjunctive.
2011b:709, n. 32) the ‘N-pattern’, the remainder being
The L/U-pattern is a recurrent template for analogical
‘N-pattern complement’.8 The formal distinction between
innovation across Romance. Typically, velar alternants are
root-stressed N-pattern cells and non-root-stressed cells is
analogically introduced into verbs which had never con-
vastly amplified in the history of many Romance languages
tained velars (Table 43.8).
(cf. §§14.3.2.1, 22.3.2.3). In most (not Romanian: §8.4.6.1), the
One example where neither alternant originates in any
stress alternation pattern is analogically extended into the
kind of palatalization process involves reflexes of Latin POSSE
present indicative of third conjugation verbs where it had
‘be able’. This verb had two root allomorphs, POSS- and POT-,
not been present in Latin: but far more important are the
distributed differently from what we find in its Romance
effects of phonological changes sensitive to stress (particu-
descendants. Typically, the inherited root alternants POSS-
larly affecting vowel quality).9 This not only leaves
and POT- are analogically redistributed according to the
locally prevalent L-pattern or U-pattern (Table 43.9).
8
For the inadequacy of viewing this pattern as motivated by ‘marked-
ness’ (even though it represents the intersection of unmarked values for
6
For occasional inclusions of the gerund, see §43.4. tense, person, and number), see Maiden (2011b:258f.).
7 9
See §§39.2–3.1.2; also Lausberg (1965:§§387–95, 451–78); Loporcaro For an overview of phenomena involving stress and vocalic differenti-
(2011b:143–8); Maiden (2011b:223–33). ation, see e.g. Loporcaro (2011a:§1; 2011b:§1.1).
712
MORPHOMES
Table 43.6 L/U-pattern effects in the present tense historically produced by yod
Portuguese
Portuguese
te[ɲ]o ‘have’ tens tem temos tendes têm
te[ɲ]a te[ɲ]as te[ɲ]a te[ɲ]amos te[ɲ]ais te[ɲ]am
ve[ʒ]o ‘see’ vês vê vemos vedes vêem

ve[ʒ]a ve[ʒ]as ve[ʒ]a ve[ʒ]amos ve[ʒ]ais ve[ʒ]am
me[s]o ‘measure’ medes mede medimos medis medem

me[s]a me[s]as me[s]a me[s]amos me[s]ais me[s]am
Old French
va[ ʎ ] ‘am worth’ vaus vaut valons valez valent
va[ʎ]e va[ʎ]es va[ʎ]e va[ʎ]iens va[ʎ]iez va[ʎ]ent
tie[ɲ] ‘hold’ tiens tient tenons tenez tienent

tie[ɲ]e tie[ɲ]es tie[ɲ]e tie[ɲ]iens tie[ɲ]iez tie[ɲ]ent
Old Tuscan
va[ʎʎ]o ‘am worth’ vali vale valemo valete va[ʎʎ]ono
va[ʎʎ]a va[ʎʎ]i va[ʎʎ]a va[ʎʎ]amo va[ʎʎ]ate va[ʎʎ]ano
ve[ɲɲ]o ‘come’ vieni viene venimo venite ve[ɲɲ]ono

ve[ɲɲ]a ve[ɲɲ]i ve[ɲɲ]a ve[ɲɲ]amo ve[ɲɲ]ate ve[ɲɲ]ano
ve[dʤ]o ‘see’ vedi vede vedemo vedete ve[dʤ]ono

ve[dʤ]a ve[dʤ]i ve[dʤ]a ve[dʤ]amo ve[dʤ]ate ve[dʤ]ano
muoio ‘die’ muori muore morimo morite muoiono

muoia muoi muoia moiamo moiate muoiano
Old a Romanian
vădzu ‘see’ vedzi b vede vedem vedet‚i vădu
vadză vadză
t‚iu ‘hold’ t‚ii t‚ine t‚inem t‚inet‚i t‚inu

t‚ie t‚ie
saiu ‘jump’ sari sare sărim sărit‚i saru

saie saie
a The remaining forms of the subjunctive have been replaced by the present indicative.
b The alternants before /i/ have a different origin and development from that caused by yod.
extensive patterns of (originally phonological) root allo- following exemplification is limited to the present indica-
morphy (Table 43.10), with many cases of the analogical tive. It is essential to emphasize, however, that the N-
extension of such patterns into verbs where they are not pattern involves a subset of cells of the present indicative
etymologically justified (see Maiden 2011b:246), but also and subjunctive and imperative vs (usually) all the rest of
serves as a template for innovatory types of allomorphy the paradigm.
lacking unconnected with the original phonological pro- One can only hint here at the full range of the N-pattern
cesses (Tables 43.11–43.14). For reasons of space the as a distributional template for morphological innovations
713
MARTIN MAIDEN
Table 43.7 Phonological L/U-pattern effects of front vowels on velars
Spanish
digo ‘say’ dices dice decimos decís dicen
diga digas diga digamos digáis digan
crezco ‘grow’ creces crece crecemos crecéis crecen

crezca crezcas crezca crezcamos crezcáis crezcan
Italian
dico ‘say’ di[ʧ]i di[ʧ]e di[ʧ]amo (dite) dicono
dica dica dica di[ʧ]amo di[ʧ]ate dicano
leggo ‘read’ le [dʤ]i le [dʤ]e le [dʤ]amo le [dʤ]ete leggono

legga legga legga le [dʤ]amo le [dʤ]ate leggano
Romanian
zic ‘say’ zi[ʧ]i zi[ʧ]e zi[ʧ]em zi[ʧ]et,i zic
zică zică
împing ‘push’ împin[ʤ]i împin[ʤ]e împin[ʤ]em împin[ʤ]et,i împing

împingă împingă
Table 43.8 Non-etymological introduction of velar Table 43.9 Redistributed reflexes of Latin POSS-, POT-
alternants into L/U-pattern cells
Old Tuscan
Early modern Italian posso puoi può potemo potete possono
vengo vieni viene veniamo venite vengono possa possi possa possiamo possiate possano
venga venga venga veniamo veniate vengano
Romansh (Surmeir)
veggo vedi vede vediamo vedete veggono poss post pò pudagn pudez pon
vegga vegga vegga vediamo vediate veggano possa possas possa possan possas possan
valgo vali vale valiamo valete valgono Portuguese

valga valga valga valiamo valiate valgano posso podes pode podemos podeis podem
possa possas possa possamos possais possam
Spanish
valgo vales vale valemos valéis valen
valga valgas valga valgamos valgáis valgan
vengo vienes viene venimos venís vienen

venga vengas venga vengamos vengáis vengan across Romance (see Maiden 2004a,c; 2005; 2011b:241–58).
Table 43.11 shows N-pattern suppletion, where virtually
salgo sales sale salimos salís salen synonymous verbs of different etymology, meaning ‘go’,
salga salgas salga salgamos salgáis salgan were integrated into a single paradigm following that pat-
tern. Illustrated in Table 43.12 is first conjugation sughiţa
oigo ‘hear’ oyes oye oímos oís oyen ‘hiccup’ (< *subglutˈtjare), which in many Romanian
oiga oigas oiga oigamos oigáis oigan varieties (cf. Lombard 1955:339; Saramandu 1992:87) shows
partial influence of fourth conjugation înghiţi ‘swallow’
714
MORPHOMES
Table 43.10 N-pattern vocalic allomorphy due to sound Table 43.11 N-pattern suppletion involving reflexes of IRE
change (forms in j-, g-), UADERE (forms in v-), AMBULARE (forms in an(d)-,
all-) for ‘go’
Romanian
mor ‘die’ mori moare murim murit,i mor Calvello, Basilicata (Gioscio 1985)
plac ‘please’ placi place plăcem plăcet,i plac ˈvakǝ ˈvajǝ ˈvajǝ ˈjammǝ ˈjatǝ ˈvannǝ
mănânc ‘eat’ mănânci mănâncă mâncăm mâncat,i mănâncă
usuc ‘dry’ usuci usucă uscă m uscat,i usucă
Italian
Italian vado vai va andiamo andate vanno
muoio ‘die’ muori muore moriamo morite muoiono (medieval gimo gite)
siedo ‘sit’ siedi siede sediamo sedete siedono
odo ‘hear’ odi ode udiamo udite odono Catalan
devo ‘must’ devi deve dobbiamo dovete devono
vaig vas va anem aneu van
Old French
lef ‘wash’ leves leve lavons lavez levent
crief ‘burst’ crieves crieve crevons crevez crievent
peis ‘weigh’ peises peise pesons pesez peisent
parol ‘speak’ paroles parole parlons parlez parolent
Spanish
Table 43.12 N-pattern mixing in a Romanian verb
pierdo ‘lose’ pierdes pierde perdemos perdéis pierden
muero ‘die’ mueres muere morimos morís mueren PRS sughit ‘hiccup’ sughiţi sughite sughiţăm sughiţaţi sughit
juego ‘play’ juegas juega jugamos jugáis juegan IPFV sughite sughiţaţi
SBJV sughit sughită sughiţăm sughiţaţi sughită
Table 43.13 N-pattern distribution of the ‘augment’ from -SC-

(< INGLUTTIRE). Forms in the N-pattern cells show distinctive
inflectional characteristics of the latter verb, the remaining Catalan Surselvan Italian Romanian
cells being occupied by unambiguous continuants of *sub servéix ‘serve’ finéschel ‘end’ finísco tus,ésc ‘cough’
+glutˈtjare. servéixes finéschas finísci tus,és,ti
Table 43.13 shows this pattern for what was a Latin der- servéix finéscha finísce tus,és,te
ivational affix -SC- (preceded by a theme vowel), originally servím finín finiámo tús,im
limited to imperfective forms and expressing, broadly, servíu finís finíte tus,ít,i
‘ingressive’ meaning. The Romance reflex of this formative servéixen finéschan finíscono tus,ésc
(termed ‘augment’) became doubly unmotivated: loss of the
inflectional distinction of aspect between imperfective and
perfective forms meant that the augment was no longer
correlated with aspect, whilst the affix’s association with
ingressive meaning had independently faded. Consequently, (by regularizing the position of stress, or avoiding the
many verbs had two non-distinct stems: one with the alternations historically associated with alternating stress)
(unstressed) lexical root with the affix, the other without is vitiated, among other things (see Maiden 2004c:34–6;
it. For independent reasons, verbs with the augment 2011b:259–63; 2011c), by the fact that the augment is elim-
became associated with the fourth conjugation (character- inated from all N-pattern complement cells, thereby actu-
ized by theme vowel /i/), and the augment was generalized ally giving rise to a novel kind of allomorphy—even in
to most verbs in this class. Some varieties (Daco-Romance, verbs that would previously have shown no stem allomor-
Friulian, Ladin, Italo-Romance, Gascon, Catalan) system- phy. This type seems to have favoured in some languages
atized the variation between augmented and non- (southern Basilicata in Italy, Corsican, Ladin, Istrian,
augmented stems by using the N-pattern template, preserv- Dalmatian, and Daco-Romance) the emergence of the
ing the augmented form only in the N-pattern cells. Note same distribution for a second type of augment, associated
that any suggestion that this redistribution could be motiv- with the first conjugation (Table 43.14). Long evacuated
ated by a desire to remove allomorphy in the lexical root of distinctive meaning (it is originally the Greek
715
MARTIN MAIDEN
Table 43.14 N-pattern distribution of the identical lexical reference (see especially Maiden 2013c).
‘augment’ from Greek -ØÇ- Some southern Italo-Romance varieties display an ‘incoher-
ent’ split in the past participle: at issue are adjectival uses of
TURSI ( BASILICATA ) ROMANIAN
PtP, typically foregrounding the state resultant from the
matʦəˈkij ‘chew’ lucrez ‘work’ action expressed by the verb and showing some semantic
matʦəˈkijəsə lucrezi idiosyncrasy with respect to the lexical verb. Thus Mus-
matʦəˈkijətə lucrează someli in Sicily (data from S. Cruschina; cf. Ledgeway
2009a:229–33 for Neapolitan; Maiden 2013c:508–11;
matʦəˈkæmə lucrăm §58.3.1), where, for example, the verb ‘open’ has the innov-
matʦəˈkasə lucrați atory form (g)raputu ‘opened’ vs older apìərtu ‘open’:
matʦəˈkijənə lucrează
(4) a. Aviva (g)raputu u cancellu (Mus.)
he.had opened the gate
b. Fu (g)raputu u cancellu (Mus.)
iterative-intensive affix -ØÇ-), it spreads analogically to was opened the gate [by someone]
large numbers of first conjugation verbs and assumes an
N-pattern distribution. c. Truvà u cancellu apìərtu (Mus.)
The N-pattern may also be manifest beyond the conven- I.found the gate open
tional limits of the inflectional paradigm. Cruschina (2013)
shows that, in Sicilian, certain types of verb periphrasis The distinct, older form of the past participle may show
comprising two inflected elements, the verb ‘go’ inflected considerable semantic drift. Thus Sicilian (Leone 1980:126f.)
for person and number, followed by the particle a + lexical tinciutu ‘dyed’ vs tintu ‘bad’, and while both pirsuasu and
verb also inflected for person and number, exists only in the pirsuarutu may mean ‘persuaded’, only pirsuasu can mean
N-pattern cells. ‘wrong-headed’. Romanian has similar cases, where the
morphologically older form displays idiosyncratic meaning:
e.g. băut ‘drunk (imbibed)’ vs beat ‘drunk (inebriate)’, înțeles
43.2.5 Morphomes outside the verb ‘understood’ vs înțelept ‘wise’, strâns ‘squeezed’ vs strâmt
‘narrow’. See Maiden (2013c:521–4) for examples of how
semantically idiosyncratic derivational forms, despite hav-
The inflectional paradigm of the Romance noun and adjec- ing shared the stem of the past participle/supine in Latin
tive is far less complex than that of the verb, normally (cf. Aronoff 1994), deviate extensively from that stem in
displaying, at most, singular and plural forms (see Ch. 42) diachrony.
and thereby greatly reducing scope for detectable morpho- As for nouns, the otherwise unbreakable morphomic
mic structure. Yet the more complex nominal inflectional identity between the adnominal singular case form and
system of Romanian does show an enduring pattern of the plural in Romanian feminines (§§8.4.3.2, 43.2.5) col-
identity, in feminines, between adnominal singular case lapses when a specifically plural ending -uri is analogically
forms and the plural (see §8.4.3.). This is probably (see extended ultimately into about twenty feminines, without
Maiden 2014a) the result of an old, accidental, and phono- identically affecting the adnominal singular case form. The
logically motivated merger of the relevant desinences in result is, most unusually for Romanian, a nominal paradigm
first declension nouns, which in turn gave rise to an histor- comprising not two but three word forms (Table 43.15).
ically almost unbreakable morphomic pattern of identity in A characteristic of the affected words (cf. Maiden 2014a)
the subsequent evolution of Romanian morphology, of is that they are mass nouns, whose plurals usually mean
which a disparate variety of outcomes is illustrated in §8.4.3. specifically ‘kinds of ’ and nearly always bear additional
semantic idiosyncrasies with respect to the singular.
Reviewing such data, Maiden (2013c) suggests that the
coherent survival of morphomic phenomena is in effect a
43.3 Diachronic persistence complementary process to analogical levelling. Just as lev-
of morphomes elling in lexical roots provides a single form corresponding
to a single lexical meaning, so coherence minimizes and
The Romance data suggest an explanation for the wide- renders maximally predictable allomorphic mismatches
spread diachronic coherence of morphomes. A crucial factor between unity of lexical meaning and multiplicity of
appears to be that the word forms involved should have forms, in cases where allomorphy is not levelled out.
716
MORPHOMES
Table 43.15 Three-form Romanian feminines with plural that the velar-palatal alternation is sensitive to phono-
-uri logical environment, since apparently a replacement of
the ending -ind by -ând has automatically triggered selec-
ADVERBAL ADNOMINAL ( ADVERBAL AND ADNOMINAL )
tion of the velar alternant. Yet there is simply no independ-
SINGULAR SINGULAR PLURAL
ent motivation for replacement of fourth conjugation by
gheaţă gheţi ice gheţuri ice floes non-fourth conjugation endings, and certainly not particu-
greaţă greţi nausea greţuri morning larly in the gerund. The true development is the opposite:
sickness, attacks the velar alternant is introduced into the gerund morpho-
of nausea logically, on the analogy of the distributional pattern found
bunătate bunătăți goodness bunătățuri goodies, cakes in all other verbs with velar–palatal alternants, and it is
this which triggers selection of a corresponding non-front-
vowel desinence. The distributional pattern is genuinely
morphomic, yet speakers simultaneously display a sense of
Where the word forms involved are not synonymous, how- what constitutes a phonologically more ‘natural’ environ-
ever, there is little motivation to preserve the pattern of ment for the alternation, adjusting that environment by
identity. introducing -ând to suit the morphomic alternation. The
conclusion that the general phonological plausibility of
the velar-palatal in the environment of non-front vs front
vowels alternant plays an ancillary, but not determining,
role in supporting the alternation pattern is corroborated
43.4 Boundaries of morphomic by the fact that, while L-pattern alternations are extensively
phenomena subject to analogical levelling in favour of L-pattern com-
plement alternants in Daco-Romance, the alternation
The boundary between the morphomic and the non- between palatals and velars, correlated with front and
morphomic is not necessarily discrete, either synchronic- non-front environments, remains robust throughout his-
ally or diachronically, even though the most compelling tory (see Maiden 2011d).
morphomic examples are those where phonological and Central Italo-Romance inherited from Latin a handful of
functional conditioning can be absolutely excluded. verbs where historical yod also affected the gerund, produ-
Romance offers evidence of morphomic phenomena retain- cing there the same allomorph found in the ‘U-pattern’ (e.g.
ing some degree of their original conditioning environment OIt. gerund vegnendo ‘coming’ < UENIENDO; vegno ‘come.1SG.PRS.
and motivation, especially in phonology. For example, in IND’ < UENIO, etc.); overwhelmingly, this deviation from the
Italo- and Daco-Romance the U-pattern alternation of velars usual U-pattern is subsequently analogically eliminated (It.
and palatals remains strongly syntagmatically associated venendo). However, medieval Tuscan witnessed multiple
with the alternation between non-front and front vowels analogical extensions of the U-pattern root into gerunds
immediately following the root, and in this connection the (e.g. possendo for potendo ‘being able’, piaccendo for piacendo
example of the gerund is revealing. ‘pleasing’). What is striking about these changes is that they
The Daco-Romance U-pattern alternation for velars never involve the velar-palatal alternation (cf. Vanelli
includes the second and third conjugation gerund, whose 2010c:1467f.; Maiden 2013a:37): we never find, e.g. **pian-
desinence contains a non-front vowel and correspondingly ghendo [pjaŋˈgɛndo] ‘weeping’ for piangendo [pjaɲˈʤɛndo].
a root-final velar: zicând ‘saying’, împingând ‘pushing’. The While in old Italian there was no active phonological rule
fourth conjugation gerund ending, however, contains a palatalizing velars before front vowels, it nonetheless seems
front vowel (e.g. dormind ‘sleeping’). Now there is only one that speakers’ sense of the general phonological implaus-
fourth conjugation verb in everyday use showing U-pattern ibility of selecting a velar rather than a palatal alternant
alternation, namely fugi [fuˈʤi] ‘flee’ (cf. 1SG/3PL.PRS fug, SBJV before a front vowel impeded an otherwise widespread
fugă), and its gerund, unlike other velar-palatal alternant morphological innovation.
verbs, predictably has in standard Romanian a palatal alter- It is equally possible, in principle, for morphomes to have
nant (fugind [fuˈʤind]). In many dialects (cf. Maiden 2011d; some degree of extramorphological motivation on the func-
2013a:38–41), however, this verb has fugând [fuˈgɨnd], but tional side or, as J. C. Smith (2013) puts it, to be more or less
never **[fuˈgind] or **[fuˈʤɨnd].10 Prima facie, this suggests ‘overtly’ morphomic. Smith argues for a gradient notion of
morphomehood, where the relative semantic or functional
10
[fuˈʤɨnd] occurs in some Maramureș varieties, where it has a low- coherence of the collections of features constituting a mor-
level phonetic explanation. phomic domain may contribute to determining the
717
MARTIN MAIDEN
morphome’s diachronic behaviour. The Gallo-Romance PYTA Table 43.16 Realignment of the L-pattern in modern
morphome is more functionally coherent than the N-pattern, Gallo-Romance
on Smith’s account, because it is associated with a set, albeit
French
heterogeneous, of tense-aspect-mood categories (preterite peuxa ‘can’ peux peut pouvons pouvez peuvent
and imperfect subjunctive), defined as ‘prototypical categor- puisse puisses puisse puissions puissiez puissent
ies’ of verb morphology, whilst the N-pattern and L-pattern
also involve person, which ‘is not intrinsically (or essentially) vaux ‘am worth’ vaux vaut valons valez valent
vaille vailles vaille valionsb valiez vaillent
a category of the verb’ (J. C. Smith 2013:251). Smith’s argu-
ment suggests that it is in this light that we might view the viens ‘come’ viens vient venons venez viennent
fact that in Gallo-Romance the N-pattern, unlike PYTA (cf. vienne viennes vienne venions veniez viennent
§43.2.2), has not been productive of analogical innovations
and has indeed tended to fade away. The Gallo-Romance Occitan (St Augustin; Monteil 1997)
ˈ
ˈmwere ‘die’ ˈmweri mwer muˈrã muˈrɛ ˈmweru
N-pattern is indeed notably recessive, many of its medieval ˈmwerje ˈmwerji ˈmwerjo mwerˈjã mwerˈja ˈmwerju
manifestations having been analogically levelled out, espe-
cially in the first conjugation (cf. Fr. parle ‘speak.1SG.PRS’, ˈpwode ‘can’ ˈ pwodi ˈ pwo puˈ dɛ̃ puˈdɛ ˈpwodu
parlons ‘speak.1PL.PRS’; lave ‘wash.1SG.PRS’, lavons ‘wash.1PL.PRS’ ˈpese ˈ pesi ˈ pese puˈ dɛ̃ puˈdɛ ˈpesu
with Table 43.10). See Smith (2011b:320f.) for varieties of
ˈtine ‘hold’ ˈtini tɛ teˈnã teˈnɛ ˈtinu
Canadian and metropolitan French where this tendency ˈtenje ˈtenji ˈtenj teˈnjã teˈnja ˈtenju
operates outside the first conjugation. Smith (2013:255–61)
further distinguishes degrees of functional coherence a
Residually, puis.
between N-pattern and L-pattern in terms of their relative
b
For reasons why first and second persons plural of the present
subjunctive sometimes lack the alternant, see Maiden (2012).
‘unmarkedness’, developing the interesting hypothesis that
the content of the alternations involved is sometimes sensi-
tive to the degree of functional coherence of the morphome.
There are cases, notably in Gallo-Romance, where origin- Table 43.17 Gallo-Romance treatment of word-
ally morphomic phenomena have apparently been ‘replaced’ final vowels and consonants
by distributional patterns which are extramorphologically 1 SG . PRS . IND PRS . SBJV
motivated. Medieval Gallo-Romance still showed the
L-pattern firmly preserved, yet over recent centuries French early Romance *ˈmɔrdo ‘bite’ *ˈmɔrda
and Occitan (excluding some varieties of Gascon but includ- loss of -o *mɔrd
ing some eastern varieties of Catalan), have aligned original devoicing *mɔrt
L-pattern alternants just with ‘present subjunctive’ (cf. again deletion *mɔr
Smith’s argument that tense and mood morphomes are more French mɔʁ mɔʁdə
functionally coherent than morphomes related to person)
(Table 43.16). of the present subjunctive was -a, no present subjunctive
It is tempting to conclude that the above is just an ‘extra- root was ever word-final and, accordingly, no root-final
morphologically motivated’ simplification, aligning the consonant could undergo phonological processes affecting
alternation neatly with ‘present subjunctive’. Yet not only word-final consonants. In contrast, the ending of the first
does this adjustment (elimination from first person singular person singular present indicative was -o, subject to dele-
present indicative) fail to happen in virtually all other tion leaving preceding root-final consonants in word-final
Romance languages (indeed Maiden forthcoming b illustrates position (Table 43.17).
analogical reinforcements and expansions of the L-pattern), If Gallo-Romance varieties, in particular, lose the
but the change seems correlated with another phonologically L-pattern distribution, this need not be from any inclination
accidental characteristic of Gallo-Romance—the estrangement, to ‘make sense’ of the alternation by anchoring it in ‘present
in many verbs, of the first person singular present indicative subjunctive’.12 After all, this analysis forces us to ask why
root from that of the present subjunctive. Historically, final other Romance speakers manifested no such inclination.
unstressed vowels other than -a were generally deleted, whilst Rather, it may reflect a wholesale, but morphologically
most word-final consonants were later devoiced and often
deleted.11 Since (in non-first) conjugation verbs the desinence
12
This assumes that the set of forms called ‘present subjunctive’ is itself
a fully coherent extramorphologically motivated category. But is it? There
11
These phenomena occur elsewhere in Romance, but in a contiguous is danger of confusing the labels we give to classes of forms with their
area the centre, and bulk, of which is Gallo-Romance. motivation: see O’Neill (2013).
718
MORPHOMES
accidental, incidence of such alignment caused by sound frequently roots) came in some dialects to coincide phono-
change and providing, in turn, a model to which other verbs logically. This development created a new pattern of syn-
adjusted. The implication is that the cause of the ‘demise’ of cretism liable to override the N-pattern, even affecting such
the L-pattern is as arbitrary as its origin. In fact, the new ‘classically’ N-pattern suppletive verbs as ‘go’, so that in
shape adopted by original L-pattern alternation in Gallo- Lorrain and Haut-Limousin (see Hinzelin 2011:297f.) what
Romance is, despite appearances, practically as morphologic- is historically the third person plural of this verb has
ally accidental as the L-pattern itself. We have here a transi- replaced the historical (N-pattern complement) first person
tion not from a morphome to a ‘non-morphome’, but from plural form, while occasionally the N-pattern third person
one morphome to a slightly less ‘overtly’ morphomic one. plural has intruded into the ‘N-pattern complement’, by
Similar morphologically accidental effects of sound replacing the first person plural form.
change may account for some adjustments in the Gallo- The point is that in all these Gallo-Romance adjustments
Romance N-pattern. In many non-first conjugation verbs, of the N-pattern, what happens cannot simply be charac-
all and only the singular forms of the present indicative terized as ‘making sense’ of a ‘nonsensical’ situation, shift-
originally ended in unstressed vowels potentially subject to ing from the lawlessness of the morphomic to the ordered
deletion and exposing root-final consonants to modifica- tranquillity of the non-morphomic. Rather, one morphomic
tion, so that just those forms acquired a distinctive root pattern has modified into another, whose origins are also
allomorph (Table 43.18). more a matter of morphological accident than of extramor-
This pattern, where the singular present indicative cells phological motivation.
become divorced from the rest of the present (and from the
rest of the N-pattern), has also gained ground analogically.
The historically expected root vowel of the third person
plural present indicative of savoir is /ɛ/ (OFr. sevent), yet this 43.5 The case of the Romance future
has been ousted in favour of the vowel found in other plural and conditional
forms (and other tenses): savent. This tendency is more
widely observable in Acadian French (see e.g. Beaulieu and The foregoing indicates that even phenomena which at first
Cichocki 2008; 2009; Smith 2011b:312–23), and also in dia- appear entirely explicable by extramorphological condi-
lects spoken near the central Atlantic coast of France tioning deserve scrutiny for possible morphomic elements.
(Balcom et al. 2008:1), where the form of the first person An instructively problematic case is the synthetic future
plural present indicative, in -õ (an ending already charac- and conditional forms of Iberia, France, and northern and
teristic of the third person plural future and of the present central mainland Italy, derived historically from fusion of
of a number of high-frequency irregular verbs), tends to an infinitive with an auxiliary continuing the Latin present
penetrate all third person plurals, bringing with it an ‘N- indicative of HABERE ‘have’, for the future, and a past tense
pattern complement’ root allomorph and thereby destroy- form thereof, for the conditional (see Maiden 2011b:264f.;
ing the N-pattern: e.g. 3PL.PRS.IND puvõ ‘can’, avõ ‘have’, byvõ also §46.3.2.2). Thus modern Sp. vendrá ‘s/he’ll come’, hará
‘drink’ (all identical to first person plural). ‘s/he’ll do’, Fr. viendra, fera, or It. verrà, berrà ‘s/he’ll drink’
In other cases, the dissolution of the Gallo-Romance N- correspond to Latin syntagms UENIRE/FACERE/BIBERE HABET,
pattern involves analogical generalization of phonologically whilst conditionals such as Sp. vendría, haría, Fr. viendrait,
induced syncretisms, notably between first person plural ferait, or It. verrebbe, berrebbe correspond to UENIRE/FACERE/
present and third person present, whose endings (and BIBERE + HABEBAT/HABUIT.
Table 43.18. Present of French pouvoir ‘be able’, boire ‘drink’, finir ‘end’, savoir ‘know’
IND SBJV IND SBJV IND SBJV IND SBJV
pø pɥis bwa bwav fini finis sɛ saʃ

puvõ pɥisjõ byvõ byvjõ finisõ finisjõ savõ saʃjõ
puve pɥisje byve byvje finise finisje save saʃje
pœv pɥis bwav bwav finis finis sav saʃ
719
MARTIN MAIDEN
In many high-frequency verbs, regular sound changes a counterfactual meaning is produced. In this light, Vincent
caused the stem of the future and conditional to become (2013:136) issues a salutary warning against too hastily
estranged from the infinitive whence it historically derived, discerning morphomic structure in cases like the Romance
creating a distinctive stem common to both tense forms future and conditional:
(compare infinitives Sp. venir, hacer, Fr. venir, faire, It. venire,
bere). Yet there have also been numerous other purely [a]rguments for the existence of morphomes [ . . . ] must [ . . . ] show
the failure of the expected compositionality in pairs such as future
morphological innovations affecting the future conditional
and conditional. To show such failure it will not suffice to adduce
stem, across Romance, and it is overwhelmingly true that
new meanings for items which had previously expressed this
any change affecting the future stem identically affects content, but it will also be necessary to show that the new mean-
identically the conditional stem, and vice versa: for ings are not connectible to the old ones by deeper semantic
example, the diphthong found in the future and conditional principles.
of Fr. venir ‘come’ is analogically introduced from the pre-
sent) or further examples see Maiden 2011b:265f.; Maiden Actually, what it is no less important convincingly to show
and Smith 2014). Prima facie there is nothing ‘morphomic’ is that ‘expected compositionality’ or ‘deeper semantic prin-
here. The formal coherence could reflect a shared semantic ciple’ is really present and that, if it is, it suffices to deter-
characteristic, namely ‘futurity’, given that one of the prin- mine the morphological form (cf. also Esher 2013:109f.). The
cipal functions of the Romance conditional is to express obvious semantic candidate to explain the shared stem of
future time with respect to a reference point in the past the Romance future and conditional may be ‘futurity’ (but
(e.g. Sp. Dice que vendrá (FUT) ‘He says he’ll come’ vs Dijo que see Esher 2013:112–14), but what Iatridou actually seems to
vendría (COND) ‘He said he would come’). show is that future (or rather, future morphology) is a
However, one advantage of the rich comparative perspec- frequent cross-linguistic component in the grammatical-
tive provided by the Romance languages is that it can ization process by which conditionals are built. Note, how-
prompt one to question such seemingly straightforward ever, that it is not a morphological component of our
conclusions. If, in languages A and B, future and conditional Romance synthetic conditionals, despite Iatridou’s claims
stems showed identity, yet the semantic factor alleged to (2000:267) that it is: future and conditional share a stem,
underpin this identity in A could be shown to be absent in B, but there is not and never has been anything in the condi-
how safe would be our original claim about A?13 There tional analysable as distinctively conveying ‘future’ (see also
actually are Romance varieties where the synthetic condi- Esher 2013:111). Even if (like some other languages) the
tional no longer functions as future-in-the-past, yet stem Romance conditional did contain morphological traces of
identity persists. This is true at least of modern Italian (see future morphology, being a diachronic component is not
e.g. Maiden 1996b; Maiden and Robustelli 2007:286f.) and of the same as being a synchronic component. After all, future
some Pyrenean Occitan varieties (cf. Field 2003; Esher tense forms in Romance and beyond (see e.g. Fleischman
2013:105f.), so in the apparent absence of ‘future’ meaning 1982; §46.3.2.1) recurrently arise historically from construc-
in the conditional, one might argue that the phenomenon is tions including verbs of ‘obligation’ or ‘volition’, yet nobody
‘morphomic’. And if ‘morphomic’ here, how do we know would argue that ‘obligation’ or ‘volition’ is part of the
that it is not ‘morphomic’ everywhere, that what is uniting synchronic compositionality of ‘future’, or that speakers
the stem of the future and conditional in A is not simply an are somehow synchronically rerunning the cognitive infer-
arbitrary inherited morphological convention? ential processes by which future meaning was derived there-
The reply could be that even if conditional has lost the from. The onus must be just as much on those who appeal to
specific value of ‘future-in-the-past’, ‘futurity’ somehow the presence of a ‘future’ semantic component to show that
remains an inherent component of conditionals generally. it is really there in every use of the conditional, and the loss
Indeed, Iatridou (2000) finds that conditionals are repeat- of future-time reference in Italian synthetic conditionals in
edly, cross-linguistically, built out of past-tense morphology indirect speech remains a serious embarrassment in this
sometimes (but, note, not always) combined with future respect (notwithstanding Vincent 2013:135). And even if
morphology, and that in general ‘present counterfactual’ ‘future’ really were a component of all conditionals, the
conditionals can be analysed in terms of the addition of semantic account would still have to show that it is sufficient
futurity to a value represented by a feature (an ‘exclusion to determine the pattern of identity.
feature’) such that if the topic time is excluded a past There is another comparative fact which disturbs the
interpretation is yielded and if the topic world is excluded assumption that identity of form must reflect identity of
meaning: that there actually are exceptions to coherence,
13
See Maiden (2009b:303f.; 2011e:37f.) for further examples of this
albeit, it seems, only in Occitan (Auvergne, Limousin,
methodological point. Gascony, Languedoc). Some of these arise from sporadic
720
MORPHOMES
local phonological changes whose conditioning environ- themselves outside the inflectional paradigm. Aronoff
ment happens to occur in the conditional but not the future (1994:13) considers defining ‘morphology’ as encompassing
(see Esher 2012a:201, 252f.; 2013:98f.), but many subsequent ‘all translation into phonological substance, including that
splits (see e.g. Esher 2013:99–103) have no direct phono- of lexemic stems and free forms. On this latter account, the
logical motivation: e.g. Massat (eastern Pyrenees) 3SG.FUT fact that we say [pul] in English or [pisin] in French [for piscine
volguerà ‘want’ vs COND voldria. Esher (2012a:252f.) argues ‘pool’] are facts about morphology.’ This stance opens up the
that it can be no coincidence that morphological splits possibility that ‘lexemic stems and free forms’ could have
unique in the Romance world occur in the one area which ‘autonomously morphological’ aspects independently of lex-
also has phonological splits, and clearly the latter paved the ical or grammatical meaning. They can.
way for morphological splits. Presumably, if purely mor- Maiden (2008c) analyses ‘folk etymology’, in Romance
phological splits can occur, given a minor phonological and beyond, as conversion of opaque words into structures
impetus, this means that the shared semantic factor, what- that usually acquire the appearance of compounds, yet
ever it is, does not suffice completely to determine the comprise existing word forms divorced from their meaning:
formal identity of the stem in other Romance varieties. thus It. gelsomino ‘jasmine’, ultimately from Persian yāsamin,
That identity may yet be to some extent at least a matter where the element gelso is actually the word for ‘mulberry’,
of purely morphological convention. a plant wholly unconnected with jasmines; or regional
No conclusion on the Romance future conditional stem is Romanian cârpici for chirpici (originally from Turkish), a
possible here; but this is one major aspect of Romance type of brick, displaying the historically unrelated root of
historical morphology which nicely underscores the need cârpă ‘rag’. A different, more systematic type involves cre-
and scope for a careful scrutiny (see e.g. Esher 2013) of the ation of verb-initial compounds by using a verb element
relation between content and form in historical morph- specifically identical to second person singular imperative
ology, which does not over-hastily preclude either morpho- (see Maiden 2007a; 2008a for closer justification of this
mic or non-morphological considerations. claim). Thus in Italian the imperative of cavare ‘dig out’,
coprire ‘cover’, perdere ‘lose’, salire ‘go up’, scendere ‘go
down’, fare ‘make’, appears in cavatappi ‘corkscrew’, copri-
fuoco ‘curfew’, perdigiorno ‘idler’, saliscendi ‘latch’, falegname
43.6 Morphomes outside the inflectional ‘carpenter’, without the slightest involvement of ‘impera-
paradigms? tive’ (or any other grammatical) meaning. Such structures
are arguably ‘morphomic’ in requiring reference to mor-
Phenomena presupposing the separation of morphological phological form in abstraction from associated grammatical
structure from associated meaning may even manifest meanings.
721
CHAPTER 44
Tonic pronominal system:

morphophonology
CHIARA CAPPELLARO
44.1 Introduction aspect in the morphological evolution of third person pro-

nominal paradigms.
The structure of the chapter is as follows: §44.2 discusses
The grammatical notion of ‘person’ and how this is
aspects of person marking from Latin to Romance, in par-
marked in the world’s languages has received a great
ticular the emergence in Romance of the new grammatical
deal of attention in the past decade (cf. Bhat 2004; 2005;
category of ‘third person pronoun’. §44.3 offers data on
Siewierska 2004; Cysouw 2009). This chapter is concerned
paradigmatic types for first and second person pronouns.
with ‘independent person markers’ (Siewierska 2004:16f.)
§44.4 looks into the paradigm structure of third person
in Romance languages, i.e. free/full/tonic personal pro-
pronouns.
nouns that have the same distributional properties as
full NPs.1
The aim of this chapter is mainly descriptive. The data
provided here include standardized and non-standardized
varieties of Daco-Romance, Gallo-Romance, Ibero-Romance, 44.2 Aspects of person marking
and Italo-Romance. At the core of the investigation are from Latin to Romance
pronominal paradigms rather than individual forms, and
in particular their structural synchronic variation and dia- In this section I will address some preliminary issues, such
chronic development from Latin. as the emergence of third person pronouns in Romance
First and second person pronouns are treated separately (§44.2.1) and the genesis and development of morphological
from third person pronouns in this chapter on the basis of competition in the system of personal pronouns (§44.2.2),
one important empirical fact. Third person pronouns are a which is often the historical cause of pronominal paradig-
Romance innovation, since Latin had only first and second matic irregularity in Romance.
person pronouns (cf. §44.2). I will refer to this innovation as
the emergence of a new grammatical/conceptual category
in this chapter. 44.2.1 ‘Third person pronouns’: a Romance
From the analysis of the inflectional paradigms of the two
innovation
categories of pronouns (first and second person on the one
hand, and third person on the other) it will become clear
that the feature ‘case’ is more relevant to first and second There is a fact about the development of the pronominal
person forms. The degree of preservation of different case system from Latin to Romance that surprisingly has been
forms from Latin remains the most salient aspect in their overlooked. Although it is well known that Romance third
paradigmatic evolution (see Salvi 2011, and the discussion in person pronouns arise from Latin demonstratives ILLE ‘that’
Ch. 56). On the other hand, deviation from the paradigmatic and/or IPSE ‘-self, the very’,2 studies have failed to recognize
regularity found in Latin ILLE /IPSE is perhaps the most salient that the grammatical/cognitive category of ‘third person
pronoun’, distinct from both demonstratives and Latin
2
In Latin grammars IPSE is treated as an ‘emphatic or intensive’ adjec-
tive/pronoun, and distinguished from demonstratives. However, since IPSE
1
The notion of personal pronoun is complex and controversial. See, for turns out to be—with ILLE—one possible etymological source for Romance
example, Siewierska (2004:8f.) and Panagiotidis (2002:10f.) for two theoret- third person pronouns, it is also included under the label ‘demonstrative’
ically different approaches to the problem. here.
722 This chapter © Chiara Cappellaro 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
TONIC PRONOMINAL SYSTEM: MORPHOPHONOLOGY
personal pronouns, is just as much a Romance innovation as degree of referential accessibility. Firstly, then, what kind
that of the ‘definite article’.3 of category is it?
Latin did not have a system of third person pronouns, but
only first and second person forms (Leumann et al. 1977;
Ernout 1953). Reference to [–1, –2] was achieved through 44.2.1.1 The category ‘third person pronoun’
demonstrative forms, full NPs, or zero.4 This is not in itself It is held that there is no universal set of features that can
an extraordinary fact, since there are many languages in the define a third person pronoun (cf. Cysouw 1997). However,
world that have a system of personal pronouns consisting of some important observations—which are cross-
first and second person forms alone. In such languages, linguistically valid—have been put forward recently, for
specialized third person pronouns are not necessary, given example, the claim (Bhat 2004) that in the languages of
the availability of demonstrative pronouns. Bhat (2004:135) the world third person pronouns are either related (the
reports that 33 languages (out of the 225 included in his nature and closeness of any relationship will become evi-
corpus) do not display third person pronouns as such, but dent further on) or unrelated to demonstratives.6 This dis-
have demonstratives which can be used as third person tinction is the basis of a typological split.
pronouns. This is the case in Basque, for example, which On the one hand, there are those languages in which third
has three deictic forms which all function as third person person pronouns are unrelated to demonstratives and in
pronouns and demonstratives (Saltarelli 1988:213) as in which, therefore, they form part of the system of personal
Latin. pronouns. Bhat refers to these languages as ‘three-person
This asymmetry between third person pronouns on the languages’, in which the speech act is ‘a group afair, taking
one hand, and first and second person pronouns on the place among three or more individuals, with the speech
other, and the fact that third person pronouns are unneces- roles denoted by the pronouns of first, second, and third
sary in the presence of demonstrative pronouns (cf. Lyons person shifting among individuals as a conversation pro-
1977), have been accounted for in terms of their different gresses’ (2004:134).7
nature: first and second person pronouns denote individuals On the other hand, there are ‘two-person languages’ in
who participate in the speech act, and are therefore intrin- which a relation can be established between third person
sically deictic in nature. ‘The term “third person” is nega- pronouns and demonstratives. These are languages in which
tively defined with respect to “first person” and “second the speech act is perceived as a ‘two-way affair’ involving
person”: it does not correlate with any positive participant speaker and addressee, and in which this perception has
role’ (Lyons 1977:638).5 been encoded in the grammar by giving a separate status to
The new Romance category of third person pronoun not first (speaker) and second person (addressee) pronouns. For
only involved changes in form from Latin ILLE and/or IPSE (cf. these languages, the traditional view of third person as
§44.4) but also changes in meaning. The meaning of third being negatively defined with respect to first and second
person pronouns is here identified with their referential person (cf. Lyons 1977) is appropriate. Latin falls into this
power, i.e. their ability to allow the identification of their typology.
intended referent (the retrieval on the part of the hearer of What then is the position of Romance? In my interpret-
the mental representation of a referent). Their meaning can ation, it would still be labelled a ‘two-person language’,
only be defined by considering the cognitive referential where a ‘partial’ relationship exists between third person
space they encode (cf. the scale of referential ‘accessibility’ pronouns and demonstratives. The development of the
proposed by Ariel 1988; 2008) with respect to that of all new grammatical category ‘third person pronoun’ in
other referring expressions in a given system (in Saussur- Romance, therefore, did not involve, strictly speaking,
ean terms). Therefore, the emergence of the new category a typological change with respect to the distinction
of third person pronoun involves the development of a class between ‘two-person’ and ‘three-person’ languages, but a
of linguistic items that have the ability to mark a new movement along the cline towards the pole ‘three-person’
language.
3
The development of definite articles from Latin ILLE/IPSE, on the other Although both Romance and Latin can be ascribed to the
hand, has received greater attention: see for example Aebischer (1948), ‘two-person’ language type, they are significantly different
Renzi (1976), Harris (1980), Nocentini (1990), Selig (1992), Vincent (1997),
Sornicola (2007), Ledgeway (2012a:89-109), Adams (2013:482-527). in fact as regards reference to non-first and non-second
4
Zero is not considered as evidence for the existence of a category of a person [–1, –2]. Moreover, within Romance, one should not
category of 3rd person pronoun; zeroes (when available) mark in fact a
higher degree of accessibility of the referent than 3rd person pronouns.
5 6
This view has been put forward by several linguists in addition to For a full discussion see Bhat (2004:134f.).
7
Lyons (1977); e.g. Forchheimer (1953), Benveniste (1971:217), and Bhat’s study (2004:135) indicates that 2-person languages slightly out-
Mühlhäuser and Harré (1990:33) (see Bhat 2004:132 for a full discussion). number 3-person languages (126 vs 99).
723
CHIARA CAPPELLARO
be surprised to find further differences in the degree of and categorial/syntactic specialization from [+/–pronoun
‘affinity’—in both form and function—between third person +/–adjective] to [+pronoun –adjective], that is, it has
pronouns and demonstratives. The notion of ‘affinity’ is involved the loss of the adjectival function.
indeed a gradient one. I will explore the distinction between I suggest that the property of becoming specialized as
these two categories in Romance by looking at functional [+pronoun –adjective] had interesting consequences at the
and formal differences. level of paradigmatic structure in Romance. It involved an
FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENCE. When it comes to third person pro- increase in the lexical strength and autonomy of individual
nouns and demonstratives, the difference is not a simple forms within a paradigm (Bybee 1985). Such an increase is
matter of division of labour between deictic and anaphoric less compatible with the category ‘adjective’. More generally,
reference. These can perform both functions in Romance. I suggest that the property of being [+pronoun –adjective]
Rather, the choice between a third person pronoun and a favours some kinds of irregularity in nominal morphology,
demonstrative can be ‘attributed to differences in accessi- certainly in Romance, but perhaps also beyond Romance. For
bility and foregrounding (see Corblin 1987; Ariel 1988; example, suppletion and overabundance (i.e. the irregular
Tasmowski-DeRyck 1990)’ (Manoliu 2011:480). This is clearly phenomenon of multiplicity of forms which realize the
explained by Ariel (2008:50f.): same set of features (Thornton 2011), as in the case of Italian
sepolto/seppellito ‘buried’) appear to target (pro)nouns, but not
[For this, that, and it] it is not at all clear what that semantic
adjectives.8 Consider the (morphologically regular) develop-
difference would be, unless it was degree of activation. [ . . . ]
ment of demonstratives as compared to third person pro-
Calling the first two deictic and the third a personal pro-
nouns in Italian (Tables 44.1 – 44.3).9
noun does not really provide a semantic distinction
The third person pronouns lui, lei, loro in Table 44.2 are
between them, unless we are willing to claim that this or
monomorphemic and non-segmentable.10 Their paradig-
that only refer to the speech situation, whereas it only refers
matic relation is less transparent than that of demonstra-
to previously mentioned discourse antecedents. Such a
tives. Besides, as Table 44.3 illustrates, standard (formal)
claim would simply be wrong: both that and it only margin-
Italian displays overabundance or multiplicity of forms
ally refer exophorically. [ . . . ] Many referring expressions
(with human reference), which does not have parallels in
do not differ with respect to their conceptual content, but
the paradigms of adjectives, to my knowledge.11
they do signal a different activation degree nonetheless.
By ‘activation’ (Chafe 1976; Givón 1983; Ariel 1988; 2008)
is meant the relative degree of memory activation needed Table 44.1 Italian demonstrative questo ‘this’
by the addressee in order to retrieve the mental represen-
SG PL
tation of a referent. A referential marking scale (less active,
less accessible > more active, more accessible) has been M quest-o quest-i
proposed to represent this type of activation (cf. Ariel F quest-a quest-e
2008:44):
(1) Full name > long definite description > short definite
description > last name > first name > distal demonstra-
tives > proximate demonstratives > stressed pronoun > Table 44.2 Unmarked third person
unstressed pronoun > cliticized pronoun > verbal inflec- pronouns in Italian
tion > zero. SG PL
The referential marking scale in (1) is a language-specific

M lui
‘coded form-function system’ (Ariel 2008:53). However, loro
F lei
according to it, a cross-linguistic property of third person
pronouns (if present) is that they are higher accessibility
markers than demonstratives—meaning that they are pre- 8
There are, however, cases of suppletion in adjectives. See e.g. Börjars
ferred to demonstratives when the mental representation of and Vincent (2011), Maiden (2014).
9
the referent is more accessible and more easily retrievable. I am not claiming that paradigms for the 3rd person must display
morphological irregularities (see §44.4.1), but rather that there is a
FORMAL DIFFERENCE. Whereas both Latin and Romance demon- tendency for demonstratives to show a higher degree of morphological
stratives are [+/–pronoun and +/–adjective], Romance third regularity than 3rd person pronouns.
10
person pronouns are [+pronoun –adjective], i.e. they cannot 11
But see Kayne (2003) for a different analysis.
For a discussion of the emergence and diachronic evolution of over-
be modifiers. The development of the category of third abundance in the system of standard Italian personal pronouns see
person pronoun has involved both morphological change Cappellaro (2013).
724
Table 44.3 Subject pronouns with human A second person singular form ti (parallel to mi), unknown
reference in Italian in the modern language, was also found in the oldest docu-
ments as the complement of a preposition. In a text from
SG PL
1148 the tu form is already found in the same function,
M egli lui essi loro namely per tu aut per tuos missos ‘for you or for those sent
F ella essa lei esse loro by you’. This is a case of ‘junk’ being lost (in the sense of Lass
1990), but for instances of ‘refunctionalization’ of Latin case-
form oppositions in Gallo-Romance see Smith (2011a).
44.2.2 Morphological competition in the history

of Romance personal pronouns 44.2.2.2 Competition due to loss of semantic contrast
between IPSE and ILLE
Historically, at the base of much paradigmatic irregularity in All Romance varieties, to my knowledge, have developed a
Romance personal pronouns lies morphological competition, paradigm of independent markers for the third person, and
caused by: (i) loss of contrast in diachrony among Latin case in all cases, with no exception, such markers are reflexes of
forms which, with the gradual disappearance of overt mor- the Latin demonstratives ILLE and/or IPSE.
phological ‘case’, are evacuated of their original function (this In Classical Latin, the contrast between ILLE and IPSE is
scenario applies to both Latin personal pronouns and demon- clear. ‘Ille has both a distal and an anaphoric role. In the
stratives (ILLE/IPSE)); (ii) the loss of semantic contrast in most latter capacity it overlaps with is, which however falls out of
of the Romània between the two lexemes ILLE and IPSE, which the language, presumably for phonetic reasons. Ipse serves
‘compete’ as etyma for third person pronouns. instead to emphasize and contrast the relevant items in the
discourse’ (Vincent 1997:154). As Meader (1901:184) claims,
‘[t]he essential character of ipse in classical Latin is found in
44.2.2.1 Competition due to ‘case’ loss the fact that it almost invariably connotes a contrast [ . . . ].
This type of competition involves markers for all three per- In the classical Latinity this contrast is usually strong and
sons. The feature ‘case’ is lost but case forms persist. A well- the antecedent of ipse is consequently brought very prom-
known example in the structural history of Italian is compe- inently before the reader, while the object with which it is
tition between reflexes of Latin nominative/accusative egli contrasted, sinks into the background.’
‘he’ and ella ‘she’ and those of genitive/dative lui ‘him’ and lei The core semantics of IPSE is preserved as late as the
‘her’ (see e.g. D’Achille 1990 and references therein). seventh century (Meader 1901:165). Over time, however,
An example involving non-third person pronouns is mod- IPSE lost its ‘foregrounding capacity’ (in the sense of
ern Rossellonès in (2) (Fouché 1924:33f.), where the first Langacker 2007), i.e. the ability (not shared by ILLE) to (i)
person singular displays two forms, while the second singu- identify a referent that had been previously mentioned but
lar has only one form for all functions (Table 44.4). Jo is the had lost its cognitive space in the foreground and (ii) bring
only subject form in modern Rossellonès, and mi is pre- it back to focus (cf. Vincent 1997:159).
served as the oblique form. In old texts, however, there This loss of semantic contrast was crucial in determining
were instances of mi in all syntactic functions including the morphological competition between ILLE and IPSE which,
subject function (cf. Fouché 1924:34). Besides, competition together with the effects of the wider phenomenon of case
is not fully unresolved: according to Fouché (p. 34) both jo loss (as is the case of the competition between nominative
and mi are used as complements of a preposition, as in pobre case-forms and oblique case-forms in Italian egli/lui), is the
de jo! and pobre de mi! ‘poor me’; per jo puc pas compenre and basis of the morphological variation in third person pro-
per mi puc pas compenre ‘for me, I cannot understand’. nominal paradigms found in modern Romance.
There is evidence for the competition of the continuants
Table 44.4 First and second person pronouns in of IPSE/ILLE (with or without overt contrast) in medieval Italo-
Rossellonès Romance; see (2)-(5):
PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL (2) Genoese: Storia biblica (Cornagliotti 1988)
M F a. ‘[Z]ascunna de queste ( . . . ) iasèn
each.FSG of these.F sleep.PST.IND3PL
1 SUBJ jo nosaltros nosaltres
cun esso’
OBL mi
with him
2 tu vosaltros vosaltres
‘Each of them slept with him’
725
CHIARA CAPPELLARO
b. ‘[V]ive cun Elya, azò che cun Table 44.5 Standard Catalan (Badia i Margarit 1994:458)
live.PRS.IND3SG with Elias, so that with
SG PL
ello ( . . . ) convertissan li cor’
him convert.PST.SBJV3PL the.MPL heart.MPL M ell ells
‘He lives with Elias, so that with him they would F ella elles
convert the heart’
(3) Logudorese: Il Condaghe di San Pietro di Silki (253) (Delogu Table 44.6 Amaseno (Laz., Italy) (Vignoli 1920:68)
1997) SG PL
a. ‘Et ego canpaniaimende cun issos’
and I seek(justice).PST.IND1SG with them.M M isse̥ issi
‘And I sought to get the matter straight with them’ F (j)ẹssa (j)ẹsse̥
b. ‘Et ( . . . ) kertait cun illos’
and fight.PST.IND3SG with them.M Table 44.7 Filottrano (Mar., Italy) (Gasparetti 1999:71)
‘And he fought with them’
SG PL
(4) Sicilian: ‘Caternu’ dell’abate Senisio (Rinaldi 1989) M lu lora

a. ‘Appimu da illu miglara dui’ (290) F essa esse
have.PST.IND.1PL from him.SG thousand.PL two
‘We had two thousands from him’
Table 44.8 Standard Italian (subject function, human
b. ‘Et divi essiri pagatu lu reference, formal series)
and must.PRS.IND3SG be.INF pay.PST.PTCP the.MSG
SG PL
monasteriu da ipsu’ (109)
monastery.SG from him M egli essi
‘And the monastery must be paid by him’ F ella essa esse
(5) Florentine: Decameron (Day 1, nov. 6.6-7) (Branca 1976,
LIZ 4.0) There are also varieties, namely southern Salentino (cf.
a. ‘[E]gli udì alla messa uno Table 44.9), in which ILLE and IPSE have developed into two
he listen.PST.IND3SG to.the.FSG mass.FSG one.MSG distinct series of third person pronouns.
evangelio’
gospel.MSG Table 44.9 Alessano (Sal., Italy) (Cappellaro 2011)
‘He listened to a gospel at the mass’
SERIES < ILLE SERIES < IPSE
b. ‘[L]e quali esso nella memoria
the.FPL which.FPL he in.the.FSG memory.FSG SG PL SG PL
fermamente ritenne’ M iddu iddi issu issi

strongly keep.PST.IND3SG F idda idde issa isse
‘Which he strongly kept in his mind’
Third person pronominal paradigms are considered in 44.3 First and second person marking
detail in §44.4, but let us briefly see how competition can
be resolved in Romance. Overwhelmingly, paradigms con-
In Latin, personal pronouns (see Table 44.10) are inherited
tinue either ILLE or IPSE. See examples in Tables 44.5 and 44.6.12
Indo-European forms with cognates found in Greek and
There are also cases where continuants of ILLE and IPSE
Gothic, for example, and their paradigm is suppletive, par-
have merged into one suppletive paradigm, such as in the
ticularly in the singular.
Marchigiano dialect of Filottrano (Table 44.7) and standard
Maiden (2011a:159) observes that ‘[t]he partly suppletive
Italian (Table 44.8).
morphology of the Latin first and second person pronouns is
[ . . . ] generally perpetuated in Romance (e.g. the first person
12
Generally, the orthographic conventions given in the original sources singular pronoun NOM. EGO, ACC. MĒ > Sp. yo, me; Fr. je, me, It. io,
are maintained, unless otherwise specified. mi, Ro. eu mă; [ . . . ]’. Suppletion is in fact pervasive in the
726
Latin paradigm of personal pronouns, even with respect to against the typological hierarchy whereby ‘languages should
the feature ‘number’ (see for example NOM.SG EGO ‘I’, NOM.PL NOS have gender either in the third person only, as in English, or
‘we’ or ACC.SG ME ‘me’, ACC.PL NOS ‘us’) and is constantly per- in the second and third persons only [ . . . ] or in all three
petuated in Romance. There are sporadic instances of a persons [ . . . ]’ (the ‘3>2>1 hierarchy’ in Siewierska 2004:105f.).
tendency towards analogical levelling, such as the extension
of the ‘m’ segment from the first person singular (tonic Table 44.11 Pratola Peligna (Abr., Italy) (Giammarco
subject form and/or clitic non-subject form) to first person 1979:150)
plural forms in some varieties. For example the form musa(l)
PERSON CASE GENDER SINGULAR PLURAL
tros often found alongside the nosotros type in Alguerès
Catalan (Blasco Ferrer 1984b:118), Asturo-Leonese Cabrales 1 SUBJ M i ę̯ i ̯i ̯ə
(Álvarez Fernandez-Cañedo 1963:50), and Valencian dialects F i o̯ ̨i i̯ ə̯ niu̯ə
(Badia i Margarit 1994:459); or the first person plural form OBL M/F ?a
mai ̯ti (< *mos ‘we’ + ALTERI ‘others’) in the Piedmontese 2 SUBJ M/F tiu̯ə
variety of Sommariva Bosco (Toppino 1926:146).13 viu̯ə
OBL M/F ?
In the paradigm of Latin personal pronouns, number and a
case are the features marked alongside person (with the Not provided, but existent (cf. Giammarco 1979:150).
values 1 and 2 only). In the transition from Latin to
Romance, the feature ‘number’ persists unchanged in the In §§44.3.1–5 data are presented according to a simple
paradigm of pronouns (as is also the case for nouns and typology based on the number of case forms found in the
adjectives; see discussion in Ch. 41), and innovation regards singular (see schematic summary in Table Table 44.12–16).
case (loss/reduction or change in nature of the feature It is important to observe that the number of forms in these
itself),14 and marginally, but still surprisingly, gender. In types does not have to coincide with the number of cells
the central Italian dialect of Pratola Peligna, a system with (thus feature values). For example, the existence of syncre-
two forms for first person singular (iǫi ̯i ̯ə employed by tism cannot be ruled out a priori, but should be tested on an
female and i̯ei̯i ̯ə by male speakers) has been recorded individual basis.
(Table 44.11). In all Romance types, except II (cf. Table 44.13), first and
This distribution of gender in the first but not the second second person pronouns display the same morphological
person pronoun is very rare cross-linguistically, and is structure as in Latin (whereby first and second person
Table 44.12 Romance Type I

Table 44.10 Latin paradigm structure
PERSON SINGULAR PLURAL
PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL
1
1 Nominative EGO
NOS 2
Accusative
ME
Ablative
NOBIS
Dative MIHI Table 44.13 Romance Type II
Genitive MEI NOSTRI NOSTRUM PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL
2 Nominative TU 1
UOS
Accusative
TE
Ablative 2
UOBIS
Dative TIBI
Genitive TUI UESTRI UESTRUM

Table 44.14 Romance Type III
13 1
There are also traces of a very different trend; see e.g. some Ibero-
Romance varieties with a first person plural form loyotro, lit. ‘the.others’,
e.g. in Lepe (Huelva) (Mendoza Abreu 1985:103).
14
In this chapter no claims are advanced as regards the nature of this 2
feature in Romance as opposed to Latin, although for ease of description the
label ‘case’ is used for both.
727
CHIARA CAPPELLARO
Table 44.15 Romance Type IV Table 44.17 Salò (Lmb., Italy) (Razzi 1984:131)
PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL PERSON SINGULAR PLURAL
1 1 mé nóter
2 té vóter
2 Table 44.18 Rocchetta Tanaro (Pie., Italy) (Nebbia 2001:

xxxiv)
1 më nujac
Table 44.16 Romance Type V 2 të vujac
1 Table 44.19 La Gleize (Wal., Belgium) (Remacle 1952:194)

1 mi nos-ôtes
2 ti twèa vos-ôtes
2 a
Borrowed from French toi, described as a ‘polite form’ (Remacle
1952:194). Remacle notes the presence of a form tés-ôtes in Liège (cf. tu
n’ato in Naples discussed in Ledgeway (2009a: 274) and given in Table
44.53; cf. also tunatru, tuattru in Cosenza, tunautru, tujétru in Brindisi,
tujòtrǝ in Taranto Rohlfs 1968:132).
Table 44.20 Pragelato (Occ., Italy) (Talmon 1914:84)

pronouns have identical paradigm structures). Type I shows PERSON SINGULAR PLURAL
no case distinction. Type II shows near-complete neutral-
ization of case distinctions (a two-way distinction is found 1 mi nū
in the first person singular only). All other types display a 2 tụˉ vū
three- or four-way distinction showing several mapping
strategies between form and function. Table 44.21 Niçard (Occ., France) (Caire 1884:9)
44.3.1 Romance Type I

1 jeu nautre
2 tu vautre
This type is widespread in so-called ‘western Romance’
varieties (northern Italo-Romance, Gallo-Romance, and
Ibero-Romance). In some varieties, there is a high degree Table 44.22 Frencha
of formal symmetry between first person plural and second
person plural: cf. pronoun + ALTER ‘other’ in both the first and
second persons plural in Salò, Rocchetta, La Glaize, Niçard, 1 moi nous
and the nos/vos forms in Pragelato, French, and Sisterna 2 toi vous
(Tables 44.17–23). In others, however, we find an asymmetry a
Lorraine varieties (Adam 1881:66f.) also display a French-type structure.
whereby the second person plural, but not the first person
plural, displays pronoun + ALTER ‘other’ (Table 44.24-25). Table 44.23 Sisterna (Ast., Spain) (Fernandez 1960:56)
Forms can continue either Latin nominative case or
non-nominative case (the latter is widespread in northern PERSON SINGULAR PLURAL
Italo-Romance; Vanelli 1998b).

1 yóu nós
The pronoun + ALTER ‘other’ forms can often mark gender,
2 tú vós
see paradigms in Tables 44.26–31. There are paradigms
728
Table 44.24 Comoa (Lmb., Italy) (Locatelli 1970:29f.) Table 44.30 Cairo Montenotte (Lig., Italy) (2005:163)
PERSON SINGULAR PLURAL PERSON SINGULAR PLURAL
M F
1 mì nün
2 tì vialtar 1 mi nui
a
A parallel system is also found in the dialect of Milan (Pagani 1977:45f.). niòci niòtre
2 ti vui
vuiòci vuiòtre
Table 44.25 Valsesia (Pie., Italy) (Tonetti 1967[1894]:31)
1 mi noi Table 44.31 Tabarchino (Lig., southwetern Sardinia) (Toso

2 ti voijait 2005:107f.)
M F
Table 44.26 Castellinaldo (Pie., Italy) (Toppino 1913:5)
1 mi niotri niotre
nuìa
M F
2 ti viotri viotre
1 mi nujáć nujatṛe vuì
a
2 ti vujáć vujatṛe According to Toso (2005:108), the forms nuì and vuì ‘we’ and ‘you’ are
rare and are used mainly by elderly speakers in Calasetta.
Table 44.27 Vall D’Aran (Gsc., Spain) (Coromines

1991:79-81) where this form is found alongside the nos/vos form. The
PERSON SINGULAR PLURAL status of the type nos and vos + ALTER ‘other’ as inclusive or
M F non-inclusive varies. For example, in the Leonese dialect of
Ancares (Fernández González 1981:115) we find a difference
1 žúa nuzáti nuzátẹs between inclusive forms nos/vos and the exclusive forms
2 tǘ buzáti buzátẹs nosoutros/vosoutros and nosoutras/vosoutras. In (modern) Nea-
a
The forms given here are those indicated as ‘used in pronunciation’ by politan the forms with ‘other’ (viz. 1/2PL nuie/vuie ate) have
the author. an exclusive meaning which is accompanied sometimes by
derogatory nuances (Ledgeway 2009a:274). On the other
hand, there is no inclusive/exclusive difference between
Table 44.28 Baja Ribagorza (Cat., Spain) (Arnal Purroy nô/noaltris in Friulian (Zof 2008:84).
1998:289)
M F
44.3.2 Romance Type II
1 yo nusotros nusotras This type, with partial neutralization of case distinction and
2 tú vusotros vusotras asymmetries between first and second person, is mostly
found in Catalan and Occitan (Tables 44.32–36).
Table 44.29 Ansò (Ara., Spain) (Barcos 2007:68) Table 44.32 Catalan (Spain) (Badia i Margarit 1994:458)
M F
1 SUBJ jo
1 yo nusotros nusotras nosaltres
2 tu bos OBL mi
busotros busotras 2 tu vosaltres
729
CHIARA CAPPELLARO
Table 44.33 Majorcan (Cat., Spain) (Moll 1968:155) Table 44.38 Italian
PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL
1 SUBJ jo 1 SUBJ io
nosaltres noi
OBL me
OBL mi
2 SUBJ tu
voi
2 tu vosaltres OBL te
Table 44.34 Valencian (Cat., Spain) (Sanchis Guarner

1950:228f.)
PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL Table 44.39 Altamura (Pug., Italy) (Loporcaro 1988a:243)
1 SUBJ jo PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL

nosa(l)tres
OBL mi 1 SUBJ j Ii u
nu
OBL mai ̯
2 tu vosa(l)tres
2 SUBJ tuu u
wu
OBL tai ̯
Table 44.35 Rossellonès (Cat., France) (Fouché 1924:33f.)
M F
1 SUBJ jo Table 44.40 Pantelleria (Sic., Italy) (Loporcaro 2012a:750

nosaltros nosaltres
OBL mi PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL
2 tu vosaltros vosaltres 1 SUBJ ˈje

ˈn(j)aːʈSɪ
OBL ˈmɪːa
Table 44.36 Alguerès (Cat., northwestern Sardinia) 2 SUBJ ˈtʊ ˈv(j)aːʈSɪ
(Polomba 1906:19) OBL ˈtɪːa
1 SUBJ ió
mus altrus/nus altrus
OBL mi
2 tu vus altrus Table 44.41 Trani (Pug., Italy) (Sarno 1921:24)
Table 44.37 Limousin (Occ., France) (Ronjat 1937:48f.)
1 SUBJ jöiə
PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL nöuə
OBL möiə
1 SUBJ yau noû nautrei 2 SUBJ töuə
vöuə
OBL me OBL töiə
2 tu te vou vautrei
Table 44.42 Teramo (Abr., Italy) (Savini 1881:61)

44.3.3 Romance Type III
1 SUBJ ji(je̥)
nó(je̥)
OBL me̥(ne)
This type is widespread in Italo-Romance and is also found
2 SUBJ tú
in Megleno-Romanian. Generally, prepositions are followed vó(je̥)
OBL te̥(ne)
by non-subject forms (Tables 44.38–46).
730
Table 44.43 Macerata (Mar., Italy) (Paciaroni forthcoming) Table 44.47 Romanian (Vasilescu 2013b:381)
1 SUBJ io 1 SUBJ eu
nuaddri noi
OBL me DO mine
2 SUBJ tu IO mie nouă
vuaddri
OBL te 2 SUBJ tu
voi
DO tine
IO ţie vouă
Table 44.44 Calvello (Bas., Italy) (Gioscio 1985:62)
1 SUBJ iyə Table 44.48 Istro-Romanian (Croatia) (Pus̨cariu 1926:157f.)

nuyə
OBL me PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL
2 SUBJ to
vuyə
OBL te 1 SUBJ i ̯o
noi ̯
DO mire
IO mii ̯e no
2 SUBJ tu
Table 44.45 Sisco (northern Corsica, France) (Chiodi- voi ̯
DO tire
Tischer 1981:89)
IO ţii ̯e vo
1 SUBJ ẹyu
nǫi
OBL mę
2 SUBJ tu
bǫi
OBL tę Table 44.49 Spanish
M F
Table 44.46 Huma (MRo., Macedonia) (Atanasov 1990:205f.)
1 SUBJ yo
PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL OBL mí nosotros nosotras
PREP < CUM -migo
1 SUBJ i ̯o
noi ̯ 2 SUBJ tú
OBL mini
OBL ti vosotros vosotras
2 SUBJ tu
voi ̯ PREP < CUM -tigo
OBL tíni
44.3.4 Romance Type IV Table 44.50 Ancares (Leo., Spain) (Fernández González
1981:114–17)
Type IV, like Type V (§44.3.5), is heterogeneous as
regards the kind of ‘values’ or functions performed
M F
by distinct case forms, especially in the singular in
non-Daco-Romance (see forms that are associated only 1 SUBJ éu nos
with specific prepositions such as reflexes of CUM ‘with’ OBL mín
and AD ‘to, at’). nosoutros nosoutras
PREP < CUM migo
A subgroup of this type are varieties with subject versus 2 SUBJ tú vos
non-subject forms (with prepositions following non-subject OBL tín
forms), and a special ‘comitative’ form (< CUM ‘with’). See vosoutros vosoutras
PREP < CUM tigo
examples in Tables 44.49–55.
731
CHIARA CAPPELLARO
Table 44.51 Somiedo (Ast., Spain) (Cano González 1981:124) Table 44.55 Ampezzan (Lad., Italy) (Apollonio 1987:37f.)
M F
1 SUBJ ió
1 SUBJ you nos OBL mé nós, noṣoutre
OBL mí nusoutrus nusoutras PREP < AD mi me
PREP < CUM migu 2 SUBJ tu
2 SUBJ tú bos OBL té vós, voṣóutre
OBL tí busoutrus busoutras PREP < AD ti
PREP < CUM tigu
Table 44.56 Friuli (Italy) (Zof 2008:83f.)

Table 44.52 Aullène (southern Corsica, France) (Dalbera- PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL
Stefanaggi 2001:51f.)
1 SUBJ jo
OBL me nô, noaltris
1 SUBJ ˈeju PREP < AD mi
nˈno 2 tu
OBL mˈmε SUBJ
PREP < CUM ˈmeku ?a OBL te vô, voaltris

2 SUBJ tˈtu PREP < AD ti
ˈvo
OBL tˈtε
PREP < CUM ? ˈvosku
a
Not provided, but existent (cf. Dalbera Stefanaggi 2001:52, fn. 5).
Table 44.57 Baunei (Srd.) (Blasco Ferrer 1988a:110)
Table 44.53 Naples (Italy) (Ledgeway 2009a:271f.) 1 SUBJ/PREP<CUM ʤέo

PREP < ad mímmi nɔˊ so
C.O.P. mέ
1 SUBJ io, i’ 2 SUBJ/PREP <CUM túia
OBL me nuie nuieate PREP A tíe bɔˊ so, bosáttroso
PREP < CUM mico C.O.P. tέ
2 SUBJ tu, tu n’ato a
By analogy with kin túi, similarly to Campidanese.
OBL te vuie vuieate
PREP < CUM ticoa
a
For the use of tico in subject function see Ledgeway (2009a:274). 44.3.5 Romance Type V
Varieties displaying this paradigmatic type show the highest

degree of morphological differentiation (Tables 44.58–62).
Table 44.54 Gallura (Tsc., northern Sardinia) (Corda Alongside a ‘comitative’ form (< CUM ‘with’), we often find
1983:23) the existence of special forms with < AD ‘at, to’ (see Friulian
and Sardinian varieties in Tables 44.60–62).
1 SUBJ éu
OBL me nói
PREP < CUM mécu 44.3.6 Further issues
2 SUBJ tu
OBL te vói The space limitations of this chapter dictate that many
PREP < CUM técu relevant issues cannot be discussed or are only touched
upon. As regards first and second person marking, for
732
Table 44.58 Muro Lucano (Bas., Italy) (Mennonna Table 44.62 Urzulei (Srd.) (Blasco Ferrer 1988a:110)
1977:114f.)
1 SUBJ ʤέo
1 SUBJ i’ OBL mέ
nɔso
OBL mì PREP < AD mímmi
nù’
PREP < CUM mìch’ PREP < CUM méχus
C.O.P. mév’ 2 SUBJ túi
2 SUBJ tu OBL tέ
bɔˊso, bosáttero
OBL tì PREP < AD tíe
vù’
PREP < CUM tìch’ PREP < CUM téχus
C.O.P. tév’
Table 44.59 Feás (Glc., Spain) (Couceiro 1976:100f.) example, the following issues deserve further discussion
and analysis:
• the nature of the feature ‘case’ in Romance personal
1 SUBJ eu nós pronouns as opposed to Latin;
OBL me • the behaviour of prepositions (simple and complex);
C.O.P. min • the parameter of obligatoriness and tonicity;
PREP < CUM mijo • the use of possessives in lieu of personal pronouns
2 SUBJ ti vós (cf. detràs tuya ‘after your’ (lit. ‘behind your’) in Jaèn;
OBL te Becerra Hiraldo and Vargas Labella 1986:42; see also
C.O.P. ti Nedelcu 2013e:464 for Romanian).
PREP < CUM tijo • different morphophonology in postverbal pronouns in
interrogatives;
• development and status of ‘paragoge’ in monosyllabic
Table 44.60 Collina (Frl., Italy) (Scarbolo 1948:105) forms;
PERSON CASE SINGULAR PLURAL • address forms and their relation to non-address forms.
1 SUBJ iọ̯ ˊ
OBL mȩˊ
núọ, nu̯ái ̯triš
PREP < AD mí 44.4 Third person marking
PREP < CUM mío
2 SUBJ tu
Romance independent markers for the third person develop
OBL tȩˊ a
vu̯ái t̯ riš historically from Latin demonstratives ILLE and or IPSE
PREP < AD tí
(Tables 44.63 and 44.64).
PREP < CUM tío
Neuter (singular) forms like ILLUD survive in some areas of
a
The form vúọ. is purely allocutive (Scarbolo 1948:105). the Romània with [–human] reference (central and southern
Italo-Romance, Ibero-Romance), but generally third person
Table 44.61 Nuoro (Srd.) (Pittau 1972:81)
Table 44.63 Paradigm of ILLE
1 SUBJ dè(g)o
SINGULAR PLURAL
OBL mene
nóis
PREP < AD mimme M F N M F N
PREP < CUM mékus NOMINATIVE ILLE ILLA ILLUD ILLI ILLAE ILLA
2 SUBJ tue ACCUSATIVE ILLUM ILLAM ILLUD ILLOS ILLAS ILLA
OBL tene GENITIVE ILLIUS ILLIUS ILLIUS ILLORUM ILLARUM ILLORUM
bóis
PREP < AD tibe DATIVE ILLI ILLI ILLI ILLIS ILLIS ILLIS
PREP < CUM tekus ABLATIVE ILLO ILLA ILLO ILLIS ILLIS ILLIS
733
CHIARA CAPPELLARO
Table 44.64 Paradigm of IPSE syncretism put forward by Baerman et al. (2005), and thus
has significance beyond Romance.16
SINGULAR PLURAL
M F N M F N
NOMINATIVE IPSE IPSA IPSUM IPSI IPSAE IPSA 44.4.1 Non-canonical phenomena in Romance
ACCUSATIVE IPSUM IPSAM IPSUM IPSOS IPSAS IPSA third person markers
GENITIVE IPSIUS IPSIUS IPSIUS IPSORUM IPSARUM IPSORUM
DATIVE IPSI IPSI IPSI IPSIS IPSIS IPSIS 44.4.1.1 Canonical inflection
ABLATIVE IPSO IPSA IPSO IPSIS IPSIS IPSIS Within the canonical approach to inflection (Corbett 2005d;
2007a,b), a paradigm is fully canonical (morphologically regu-
lar) if consistent with the requirements given in Table 44.65.
These requirements imply two levels of comparison: one
pronouns tend to be strongly associated with human refer-
involves different cells in a single lexeme, and the other
ence (while demonstratives cover non-human reference).
regards different lexemes. In both levels, the composition/
The feature ‘case’ is never (to my knowledge) preserved
structure of cells should be the same and the outcome
to a higher degree in third person pronouns than in nouns
should be different for different reasons. In the first level
and adjectives (unlike first and second person forms). ‘Gen-
(different cells in one lexeme) the expectation is that in
der’ distinctions tend to be preserved, especially in the
each cell the stem be the same but inflectional material be
singular, but instances of gender syncretism in the singular
different; while in the second level (different lexemes
are found, for example, in Ligurian varieties (Tables 44.88,
belonging to the same morphosyntactic category) the
44.89) and Pratola Peligna (Table 44.111).
expectation should be that lexical material be different
‘Number’ is always preserved, and the tendency for pres-
and inflection be the same (cf. Corbett 2007a:10).
ervation of overt number marking is stronger in masculine
forms (i.e. masculine singular and masculine plural are
never syncretic). As regards number, varieties can be div- Table 44.65 Canonical inflection (Corbett 2007a:9)
ided into those having (or having had) (i) sigmatic plurals, C OMPARISON ACROSS C OMPARISON
(ii) vocalic plurals, or (iii) both (e.g. Raeto-Romance; cf. CELLS OF A LEXEME ACROSS LEXEMES
Haiman and Benincà 1992). Varieties with (ii) and (iii) will
receive particular attention here. COMPOSITION/STRUCTURE same same
While maintenance or reduction of case forms from Latin LEXICAL MATERIAL same different
was the basis of first and second person pronoun descrip- ( shape of stem)
tion, morphological (ir)regularities in paradigm structure INFLECTIONAL MATERIAL different same
(in particular syncretism, stem allomorphy and supple- ( shape of inflection)
tion,15 and overabundance) are at the basis of third person OUTCOME ( shape of different different
pronoun description. The data presented here are analysed inflected word)
by adopting a canonical approach to inflection (Corbett
2005d; 2007a,b).
Moreover, the existence of general tendencies in the
development of the paradigm structure for third person Deviation from canonical expectations results in non-
independent markers are highlighted in this section. In canonical phenomena within a paradigm, as Table 44.66
particular the prominence of the features [+male] [+plural] briefly exemplifies.
in (pro)nominal paradigmatic change. This finding comple- I focus here on the following types of paradigm structure,
ments observations on cross-linguistic patterns of but see Cappellaro (2011) for an in-depth description and
analysis of overabundant paradigms in Italo-Romance.
15
• Type I > non-syncretic and non-suppletive
The question of determining whether, in the case of Romance 3rd
person pronouns, we are dealing with stem allomorphy (same lexeme) or • Type II > syncretic but non-suppletive
suppletion (different lexemes) is not a trivial one. Cases where reflexes of • Type III > non-syncretic but suppletive
ILLE and IPSE have merged into one paradigm are clearly suppletive (cf.
• Type IV > syncretic and suppletive
Tables 44.7, 44.8). But in the case of reflexes of different Latin case forms
of single lexemes, it is more difficult to establish when/if the perception of
paradigmatic unity was lost (as in the case of Italian lei ‘she’ from *ilˈlaei
and elle ‘they.F’ from *ˈille). However, for purely descriptive reasons, I will 16
In this case, at least, telescopic and microscopic observations are
include cases of allomorphy under ‘suppletion’ in this chapter. synergic and complementary to one another.
734
Table 44.66 Deviations from canonical behaviour (based on Corbett 2007a,b; Thornton 2011)
CANONICAL PARADIGM NON - CANONICAL PHENOMENA
SYNTHETIC (every cell contains a single word form) PERIPHRASIS

DISTINCTIVE (every cell contains a different form) SYNCRETISM UNINFLECTABILITY
PREDICTABLE I (the form of the stem is predictable) SUPPLETION ALLOMORPHY
PREDICTABLE II (the form of the inflection is predictable) INFLECTIONAL CLASSES HETEROCLISIS DEPONENCY
COMPLETE (every cell contains a form) DEFECTIVENESS
UNIVOCAL (every cell contains only one form) OVERABUNDANCE
44.4.2 Type I Table 44.70 Ancares (Leo., Spain) (Fernández González

1981:114-17)
The paradigms included in this section show the highest SG PL

degree of morphological regularity. Table 44.67 summarizes M él élos
the main features of this paradigmatic type. élesa
F éla élas
a
Borrowed from Gallego (Fernández González 1981:116), syncretic for
gender.
Table 44.67 Type I paradigm and canonical inflection
Same lexical material ( shape of stem) YES Table 44.71 Vall D’Aran (Gsc., Spain) (Coromines 1991:79–81)
Different inflectional material ( shape of inflection) YES
SG PL
Uniqueness of realization YES
M ét eri
F éra eres
Paradigms of this type continue either ILLE (nominative/

accusative or genitive/dative case-forms) or IPSE (nomina- Table 44.72 Huma (MRo., Macedonia) (Atanasov 1990:206)
tive/accusative case-forms).
Paradigms developed from nominative/accusative ILLE are SG PL
given in Tables 44.68–74. M i ̯al i ̯el’
F i ̯a i ̯áli
Table 44.68 Sisco (northern Corsica, France) (Chiodi-
Tischer 1981)
Table 44.73 Camporeale (Sicily) (Savoia fw)
SG PL
M ęllu ęlli SG PL
F ęlla ęlle M ˈiɖɖu ˈiɖɖi
F ˈiɖɖa ˈiɖɖe
Table 44.69 Rossellonès (Cat., France) (Fouché 1924:34)
SG PL Table 44.74 Marebbe (RaeR., Italy) (Paoli fw)

M ell ellos
SG PL
F ella elles
M ël ëi
F ëra ëres
Paradigms from nominative/accusative IPSE are given in
Tables 44.75 and 44.76.
Modified paradigms from nominative/accusative ILLE (e.g. Table 44.75 Fermo (Mar., Italy) (Bonvicini 1961:49)
the chèl type (< ECCU ILLU(M)) largely attested in Piedmont and
SG PL
parts of Liguria) are given in Table 44.77.
M esso issu issi
Paradigms from genitive/dative ILLE (in particular the lu(i)
F essa esse
type < *ilˈlui) are given in Tables 44.78–80.
735
CHIARA CAPPELLARO
Table 44.76 Nuoro (Sardinia) (Pittau 1972:81) Table 44.81 Type II paradigm and canonical inflection
SG PL Same lexical material ( shape of stem) YES

M issu issos Different inflectional material ( shape of inflection) NO
F issa issas Uniqueness of realization YES
Table 44.77 Cairo Montenotte (Lig., Italy) (Parry 2005:163) Three patterns of syncretism can be observed in Romance
third person pronouns of this type (non-suppletive). The
SG PL first and by far the most widespread pattern is character-
M chèl chèii ized by gender syncretism in the plural (see A in
F chila chile Table 44.82). The second shows gender syncretism in the
singular (B). The third, which is attested in the Abruzzese
dialect of Teramo alone, shows gender syncretism in the
Table 44.78 Salò (Lmb., Italy) (Razzi 1984:131) singular and number syncretism in the feminine (C).
SG PL
Table 44.82 Patterns of syncretism in Type II third person
M lü lur pronouns
F lé lùre
A. B. C.
SG PL SG PL SG PL
Table 44.79 Bigarello (Lmb., Italy) (Tosi 1947:105) M a b M a b M a b
F c F c F
SG PL
M lü lọ̀r(i)
F lé lọ̀r(e)
The first pattern, A, is very common in paradigms which
have developed from genitive/dative ILLE [lui, lei, loro type].
Syncretism in these paradigms is likely to have emerged
Table 44.80 Villa di Chiavenna (Lmb., Italy) (Savoia fw) very early, since the loro type continues a masculine plural
*ilˈloro, syncretic for gender, and there is no trace of a
SG PL
reflex of feminine plural ILLARUM (Tables 44.83–85).
M ly lur
F le lεr
Table 44.83 Osimo (Mar., Italy) (Bellaspiga 1954:87)
Paradigms that continue Latin ILLE in the genitive/dative SG PL

case (< *ilˈlui, *ilˈlaei, *ilˈloro) deserve special attention. M lú
ló.ra
Regularity in these paradigms results from analogical F lía
change, since feminine plural forms of the lore and ler
types do not continue Lat. ILLARUM. In fact what has occurred
is that an originally masculine plural < *ilˈloro, syncretic for Table 44.84 Como (Lmb., Italy) (Locatelli 1970:29f.)
gender, underwent reanalysis and change. Rohlfs
SG PL
(1968:135f.) notes the plural luri/e forms were the result of
M lüü
a merger between tonic and clitic forms, and the feminine luur
F lée
plural lèr forms developed on the analogy of feminine sin-
gular forms.
Table 44.85 Collina (Frl., Italy) (Scarbolo 1948:105)

44.4.3 Type II
SG PL
M lúi ̯
Table 44.81 summarizes the inflectional properties of the lúọr
F lío
paradigms included in this section.
736
In Table 44.86, where the paradigm continues nominative/ vowels are generally neutralized (see Maiden 1991a:197; De
accusative ILLE, gender syncretism is the outcome of regu- Lollis 1901). It shows gender syncretism in the singular
lar sound change (Loporcaro et al. 2010; Loporcaro 2012a). combined with number syncretism in the feminine.
The paradigm found in Baunei and Urzulei in Table 44.87 The patterns of syncretism (A, B, and C) identified here
from the Ogliastra region has generalized the masculine appear to be in line with some cross-linguistic generaliza-
plural form, apparently for reasons unrelated to sound tions on syncretism put forward by Baerman et al. (2005).
change and it is the only example in my corpus of gender Paraphrasing Greenberg’s (1966:112) universal 37 (‘A lan-
syncretism in the plural in (non-suppletive) paradigms guage has never more gender categories in non-singular
continuing Latin IPSE. numbers than in the singular’), they claim that ‘we may
The second pattern of syncretism identified in the corpus find more distinct gender forms in the singular than the
(gender syncretism in the singular) is rarer. It is found in plural, but not more forms in the plural than the singular.
some Ligurian varieties, such as Tabarchino (and Genoese) [ . . . ] There are convincing counterexamples to this claim,
and Val Graveglia (Tables 44.88, 44.89). but it does describe a strong tendency’ (Baerman et al.
The third pattern of syncretism is extremely rare, in fact 2005:83).17
found in only one locality, namely Teramo (Table 44.90), and Pattern A is perfectly in line with their claim, and is in
is the result of regular sound changes involving metaphony fact the most widespread pattern of syncretism found in
triggered solely by -i (not by -u), where final unstressed Romance pronominal paradigms for the third person. The
counterexamples to this tendency found in Liguria, where
there is one singular form and two plural forms (Pattern B),
Table 44.86 Pantelleria (Sic., Italy) (Loporcaro 2012a)
are indeed extremely rare.
SG PL
All patterns of syncretism identified here maintain the
M ˈɪɖːʐʊ formal distinction between the features [+male +singular]
ˈɪɖːʐɪ and [+male +plural], as illustrated in Table 44.91.
F ˈɪɖːʐa
Table 44.91 Patterns of syncretism

Table 44.87 Baunei, Urzulei (Srd.) (Blasco Ferrer 1988a:110f.)
A. B. C.
M íssu M a b M a b M a b
íssos(o) F c F c F
F íssa
Table 44.88 Tabarchino (Lig., southwest Sardinia) (Toso In all patterns, masculine singular is formally distinct
2005:107) from masculine plural, and Pattern C, although rare, also
complies to this tendency in maintaining the formal dis-
SG PL tinction between masculine plural and all the other cells.
M liotri Generalization: patterns of syncretism maintain a formal
lé lù
F liotre distinction between masculine plural and masculine
singular.
Table 44.89 Val Graveglia (Lig., Italy) (Zörner 1986:89f.)

44.4.4 Type III
SG PL
M lujátri
lẹ Table 44.92 summarizes the inflectional properties of the
F lujátre
paradigms included in this section.
In order to analyse the patterns of suppletion in this
paradigmatic type, there is an important preliminary issue
Table 44.90 Teramo (Abr., Italy) (Savini 1881:61)
SG PL 17
The counterexamples discussed in Baerman et al. (2005) are also
M worth mentioning. The Nilo-Saharan language Fur has a distinction of
he̥sse̥ hisse ̥ human vs non-human gender in the plural but not in the singular (Jakobi
F
1990:102f., quoted in Baerman et al. 2005:83).
737
CHIARA CAPPELLARO
Table 44.92 Type III paradigm and canonical inflection However, I will focus here on the effects of language
contact. For example, in those paradigms which have both
Same lexical material ( shape of stem) NO the elo type (< Lat. NOM/ACC ILLE/ILLUM) and the lui type (< *il
Different inflectional material ( shape of YES ˈlui, *ilˈlaei, *ilˈloro) as in Campolongo di Cadore
inflection) (Table 44.94), there is strong indication that suppletion is
Uniqueness of realization YES/NO contact-induced, and the forms from *ilˈlui, *ilˈlaei, *ilˈloro
are the most innovative ones (Table 44.94).
to address. For most of the paradigms presented in this sec- Table 44.94 Campolongo (Ven., Italy) (De Zolt 1986:56)
tion, suppletion is contact-induced and it is possible to identify
borrowed vs older forms. That is, it is possible to reconstruct SG PL
the direction and overall dynamics of paradigmatic incursion. M li löre
There are cases in which suppletion need not be contact- F ela ele
induced, because we can posit a stage with ternary case
distinction in the evolution from Latin to Romance, in In origin, in fact, forms from *ilˈlui, *ilˈlaei, and *ilˈloro
which nominative, accusative, and genitive/dative forms were syntactically confined to the non-subject function,
coexisted (cf. La Fauci 1997:37–53; Zamboni 1998:137–42; unlike those from ILLE and ILLUM. Logically, therefore, in the
2000:93, 110–15; Loporcaro 2002b). In these instances sup- subject function the elo type came first, and the lui type came
pletion could date back to such a phase and be internally second in these paradigms. Besides, sources do sometimes
motivated rather than being the result of language contact. provide important information in this respect. Marcato and
This appears to be the case in Cassino (Table 44.93). Ursini (1988:152), for example, discuss the coexistence of
forms of the lui type with forms of the elo type in the Padua/
Venice area. They suggest that forms from *ilˈlui, *ilˈlaei, and
Table 44.93 Cassino (Laz., Italy) (Maccarrone 1915:27)
*ilˈloro are more prestigious, elo being considered ‘rustic’ in
SG PL
areas exposed to Venetian influence.
M issǝ Moreover, further significant evidence comes from the
lorǝ patterns of overabundance (clearly contact-induced) in
F ẹssa
Table 44.95 (a, c, e). which show old and new forms in
Table 44.95 Patterns of variation compared to patterns of suppletion

PATTERN OF VARIATION PATTERN OF SUPPLETION
a. Livinallongo (RaeR., Italy) (Pellegrini 1974:26f.) b. Sief (RaeR., Italy) (Savoia fw)
SG PL SG PL
M dâl dâi lori M dʌl ˈlori

F dâla dâle F ˈdʌla ˈdʌle
c. Contarina (Ven., Italy) (Pregnolato 1966:65) d. Gorizia (Frl., Italy) (Frau 1984:200)
SG PL SG PL
M lu lúri M lu lọˊri
F éla éle lúre F eˊ̣ la lọˊre
e. Valle (IRo., Croatia) (Ive 1900:100) f. Adria (Ven., Italy) (Zugni 1946:46)
SG PL SG PL
M jél lú(i) lóri M lù lùri

F jéla jéle F ẹ̀la ẹ̀le
738
variation. If we map patterns of variation onto patterns of Table 44.101 French

suppletion, the picture is extremely coherent.
Now, in the paradigms we are about to discuss, if the SG PL
evidence discussed above is considered, the suppletive cell M lui eux
(highlighted in bold in each paradigm) can be identified. F elle elles
There emerges a tendency for suppletion to follow the
patterns below.
Tables 44.96–98 show suppletion in the masculine plural cell. Table 44.102 Predazzo (Lad., Italy) (Zendrini 1947:20)
Tables 44.99–100 show suppletion in the masculine cells.
SG PL
Table 44.101 shows suppletion in the masculine singular
M él lö́ri
cell.18
F éla lö́re
Tables 44.102–104 show suppletion in the plural cells.
Tables 44.105–107 show suppletion in all cells but the
feminine singular cell.
Table 44.103 Rocca Pietore (Lad., Italy) (Gerardis 1948:79)
Table 44.108 shows suppletion in all cells but the feminine
plural. SG PL
M ẹl lọˊri
F ẹla lọˊre
Table 44.96 Ampezzan (Lad., Italy) (Apollonio 1987:37f.)
SG PL
M el lore Table 44.104 Sèrole (Pie., Italy) (Savoia fw)
F era éres
SG PL
M kial ˈlu:ɾ
Table 44.97 Vallesella (Lad., Italy) (Bianchi 1954:83f.) F kila ˈluɾatre
SG PL
M él lu̯ọˊre Table 44.105 Valle (Ven., Italy) (Mattarello 1942:32)
F éla ẹ́le
SG PL
M lú. i ̯ lọˊri
Table 44.98 Castellinaldo (Pie., Italy) (Toppino 1913:5) F éla lọˊre
SG PL
M kja.l lur. Table 44.106 Revine Lago (Ven., Italy) (Bagnariol 1948:63)
F kila kile
SG PL
Table 44.99 Campolongo di Cadore (Ven., Italy) (De Zolt M lù lọ̀ri

1986:41) F eˋ ̣la lọ̀re
SG PL
M li löre Table 44.107 Trieste (Frl., Italy) (Doria 1987:217, 336)
F ela ele
SG PL
M lu lori
Table 44.100 Filottrano (Mar., Italy) (Gasparetti 1999:71) F ela lore
SG PL
M lu lora
Table 44.108 Erto (Frl., Italy) (Savoia fw)
F essa esse
SG PL
M lui leͅur
18
Although from a modern synchronic perspective, there is three-way F lieͅ éͅ le
suppletion here.
739
CHIARA CAPPELLARO
Generalization: the masculine cells (masculine plural Table 44.113 San Giorgio del Sannio (Cmp., Italy) (Savoia
more often than masculine singular) appear to be the first fw)
to be affected by incursion; and the feminine cells (feminine
singular more frequently than feminine plural) appear to be SG PL
more resistant to incursion. M ˈisso
ˈlɔro
F ˈessa
44.4.5 Type IV (syncretic and suppletive)
Table 44.109 summarizes the properties of this paradig- Table 44.114 Altamura (Pug., Italy) (Loporcaro 1988a:243)
matic type.
SG PL
M jɪdː
Table 44.109 Type IV paradigm and canonical inflection lou̯r
F jεdː
Same lexical material ( shape of stem) No
Different inflectional material ( shape of inflection) No
Uniqueness of realization Yes Table 44.115 Trani (Pug., Italy) (Sarno 1921:24)
SG PL
M iddǝ
laurǝ
Two patterns of syncretism can be observed for these F eddǝ
paradigms: (i) gender syncretism in the plural and (ii) gen-
der syncretism in both singular and plural. The latter is rare
(cf. Tables 44.110). Table 44.116 Calvello (Bas., Italy) (Gioscio 1985:62)
Gender syncretism in the plural, on the other hand, is
much more widespread. The syncretic plural form is always SG PL
a reflex of the originally MPL *ilˈloro, both in paradigms with M iddǝ

lɔrǝ
singular forms from IPSE and in those with singular forms F eddǝ
from nominative/accusative ILLE (modified or non-
modified), as Tables 44.110–117 show.
Table 44.117 Valsesia (Pie., Italy) (Tonetti 1967[1894]:31)

Table 44.110 Vaglio Basilicata (Bas., Italy) (Savoia fw) SG PL
M ciéll
SG PL lor
F ciella
M
ˈɛddǝ ˈloːrǝ
F
Table 44.111 Cassino (Laz., Italy) (Maccarrone 1915:27) Table 44.118 Muggia (Frl., Italy) (Zudini and Dorsi 1981:39)
SG PL SG PL
M issǝ M lu
lorǝ lóur(áltri)
F ẹssa F ela
Table 44.112 Neapolitan (Ledgeway 2009a:272) Table 44.119 Lozzo (Ven., Italy) (Bragato 1945:48f.)
SG PL SG PL
M isso M lúi ̯
lloro i lu̯ọˊrẹ
F essa F eˊ̣la
740
Table 44.120 Lorenzago di Cadore (Lad., Italy) (Saccardo • masculine singular and feminine singular can be syn-
1942:54) cretic (Vaglio Basilicata);
• masculine singular and masculine plural are never
SG PL syncretic;
M lui • the feminine singular cell is the last to be targeted by
luore
F ela incursion;
• when the plural is syncretic (and suppletive), the plural
form is, diachronically, a non-feminine form (loro, issɔzɔ,
Table 44.121 Comacchio (Eml., Italy) (Savoia fw) louratri, i luore, luore).
SG PL In the third person paradigms discussed in §§44.4.2–5,
M ˈlεu I presented some generalizations that suggest the existence
ˈlaur
F ˈεilɜ of a difference between masculine and feminine cells in terms
of susceptibility to linguistic change (in Romance third person
pronouns). Within masculine cells, generally the plural cell is
There are instances of suppletion in all cells except the even more proactive than the singular one.
feminine singular (Tables 44.118–121). If one did not have This prominence of [+male, +plural] features in paradig-
evidence as to which are the older vs innovative forms, one matic change could be due to a markedness effect. It is often
might assume that the feminine singular cell is the one in the case, for example, that the word for ‘man’ displays ‘local
which a suppletive incursion has occurred. This highlights the markedness’ tendencies (Tiersma 1982). Third person pro-
importance of the data presented in this chapter, since these nouns in Romance indeed overwhelmingly refer to humans.
data allow a more subtle analysis of suppletive patterns. There are even examples of third person pronouns being
In summary, the main features of this paradigmatic type lexicalized with the meaning of ‘man, husband’ (Marebbe,
are the following: Paoli fw).
741
CHAPTER 45
Clitic pronominal systems:

morphophonology
DIEGO PESCARINI
45.1 Introduction b. Lo= do loro. (It.)

it= I.give to.them
This chapter focuses on some morphophonological proper- ‘I give it to them.’
ties of clitics and clitic combinations. Before addressing the
data, a brief remark on the notion of ‘clitic’ is in order. Although the above syntactic evidence leads us to postulate
A clitic is a function word which is not inherently stressed, a tripartite distinction between strong, weak, and clitic pro-
occupies a fixed position in the clause, cannot be coordin- nouns, it is worth noting that the Romance languages rarely
ated or contrasted, and cannot occur in isolation or in exhibit a tripartite morphological system in which a given set
predicative constructions. of morphosyntactic features (person, number, gender, case,
In the recent literature, a further distinction has been etc.) can be expressed by three different exponents: a weak, a
proposed to distinguish ‘clitic’ from another type of non- clitic, or a strong pronoun. This amounts to saying that
strong element, which is usually referred to as a ‘weak morphological systems always show a dichotomy between
element’ (Holmberg 1986; Cardinaletti 1998; Cardinaletti strong and non-strong elements (‘deficient’, in Cardinaletti
and Starke 1999; Egerland 2002). Like clitic pronouns, and Starke’s 1999 terms), while further syntactic distinctions
weak elements cannot occur in isolation or in predicative are neutralized at the morphological level.
position, and cannot be focalized or coordinated, but, unlike The chapter is organized as follows: §45.2 focuses on the
clitics, weak pronouns do not necessarily cluster with other morphology of clitic systems, §45.3 on some phonological
clitics and cannot be doubled. Sometimes, weak items are issues, and §45.4 deals with the morphophonology of clitic
morphologically ‘heavier’ than clitics, insofar as they can be combinations.
polysyllabic.
In Italian, for instance, the pronoun loro (< ILLORUM) with a
dative interpretation can be introduced by a or occur as a
bare element: 45.2 Morphology
(1) Parlo (a) loro. (It.) This section introduces some data and empirical general-
I.talk to them izations concerning the morphology of Romance clitics. In
‘I talk to them.’ particular, I will focus on aspects such as paradigmatic gaps,
patterns of syncretism, and allomorphic alternations. The
Without a ‘to’, loro cannot behave as a strong element: it following material is organized into four subsections:
must immediately follow the inflected verb, cannot be used §§45.2.1-3 are about object, subject, and possessive clitics,
in isolation, cannot be coordinated, etc. Unlike fully fledged respectively; §45.2.4 focuses on the so-called clitics ‘of aux-
clitics, however, loro has a peculiar behaviour: while clitics, iliary’, i.e. dummy clitic elements which, in certain vernacu-
like the 3SG gli (or its allomorph glie) in (2a), stand proclitic lars, precede HAVE/BE forms beginning with a vowel.
to the inflected verb, loro always follows the inflected verb,
as in (2b):
45.2.1 Object clitics
(2) a. Glie= lo= do. (It.)
to.him/her/them= it= I.give Object clitics derive from Latin pronouns and adverbial
‘I give it to him/her.’ particles such as INDE ‘thence’, *ˈinke ‘hence’, IBI, ‘there’.
742 This chapter © Diego Pescarini 2016. Published 2016 by Oxford University Press.
CLITIC PRONOMINAL SYSTEMS: MORPHOPHONOLOGY
The genitive/partitive clitic (Fr. en, It. ne) and the so-called te ‘you’.1 Romanian differs from the other Romance lan-
locative clitic (It. ci, Fr. y, Cat. hi) are sometimes referred to guages in displaying case morphology with first and second
as pro-PPs, instead of pro-nouns, as they stand for various person singular clitics (cf. §8.4.4.2).
types of prepositional phrases (see Kayne 1975). When number is expressed by a dedicated suffix (-s),
The cross-linguistic distribution of object clitics has plural pronouns still exhibit conservative thematic vowels
been captured by means of the following descriptive like Sp. nos < NOS ‘us’, os < UOS ‘you.PL’, los <ILLOS ‘they.M’, las
generalizations taken from Benincà and Poletto <ILLAS ‘they.F’. Conversely, where number and gender fea-
(2005:227): tures have been fused into a single exponent, plural forms
have undergone processes of analogical levelling and
(3) a. If a Romance language (Rl) has clitics, it has direct hybridization. First and second person plural clitics have
object clitics. taken the default vowel of singular pronouns (NOS > no > ne,
b. If a Rl has dative clitics, it has direct object clitics. in analogy with me, te, se, etc.) or, alternatively, they were
c. If a Rl has partitive or locative clitics, it has dative replaced by adverbial clitics deriving from Latin particles
clitics. like *inke > (n)ce, INDE > nde, ne, de, IBI > vi, HIC, etc. Although
d. If a Rl has subject clitics, it also has direct and indir- both etymological explanations are valid, in many cases the
ect object clitics. reconstruction remains opaque or controversial (Sornicola
e. There is no implication between locative/partitive 1991; Loporcaro 1995a; 2002a). In the same varieties where
and subject clitics. gender and number features are expressed solely by
f. Adverbial clitic forms for elements that are never the thematic vowel, third person accusative clitics have
selected by a verb are much rarer and imply the the same endings of nouns originally belonging to the
presence of argument clitics. Latin first and second declension, e.g. It. lo/li ‘him/them.M’,
la/le ‘her/them.F’.
The generalizations in (3a) and (3b) are based on data A few languages have developed a non-etymological
from the Raeto-Romance subgroup (Haiman and Benincà dative feminine pronoun. Italian exhibits an opposition
1992:126), in which some dialects do not display clitic between gli ‘to him’ and le ‘to her’, possibly by analogy
forms at all (as in Brigels and Camischollas), while others with the opposition between reflexes of ILLI and ILLAE in the
exhibit defective paradigms. The dialects of Ardez and accusative series. In laísta Spanish varieties such as Madri-
Remüs, for instance, have direct object clitics, but no dative, leño the dative form le(s) references masculine individuals,
locative or partitive clitic. while feminine referents are pronominalized by the accusa-
In some dialects of Comelico (an Alpine area in the Ven- tive clitic la(s), as shown in the following example:
eto region, northern Italy), object clitics show further gaps
in their paradigms: Tagliavini 1926 noticed that these dia- (4) A ella, la= dolía la cabeza. (Mad.)
lects have no reflex of 1PL NOS and 3DAT ILLI. Furthermore, To her her= hurt the head
several varieties do not display third person clitics at all ‘She had a headache.’
(see Paoli 2009).
Several languages (modern Spanish, Romanian, Portu- Various languages exhibit compound forms, i.e. clitic
guese) do not display locative or partitive forms (even if in pronouns resulting from the combination of two clitic
Spanish a trace of a locative y ‘there’ is argued to occur items. In Occitan (Ronjat 1937:§§505-6; Ahlborn 1946:59-61;
in existential hay (< ha ‘has’ + y ‘there’) ‘there is/are’, e.g. Rohlfs 1970:182), the dative clitic is often constructed by
hay pan ‘there is bread’). Dialects of the extreme south of combining the accusative clitic with i. The same holds for
Italy (e.g. province of Reggio Calabria), often lack the
locative clitic, but not the partitive one. Lastly, Friulian
exhibits traces of a partitive clitic, but no locative form is 1
According to Kayne (2000), third person clitics are formed by a root
attested. followed by an agreement ending, while oblique clitics are monomor-
phemic. Kayne (2000) and Cardinaletti and Repetti (2008) argue for a
Object clitics exhibit gender-, number-, and, especially in more radical analysis by assuming that oblique endings are epenthetic,
the third persons, case-morphology. In general, they are i.e. segments which are not part of the morpho-lexical representation of
formed by a person morpheme followed by a vowel (a clitic elements. However, the epenthetic status of these final Vs remains
rather obscure to me, in particular in the case of the Italo-Romance
thematic vowel, according to Harris 1994). It is worth dis- varieties which have never undergone a generalized and systematic loss
tinguishing between two types of thematic vowels: (i) agree- of final unstressed vowels. In fact, in these varieties, the default vowel
ment markers carrying morphosyntactic information; normally coincides with the expected evolution of Lat. -E in final,
unstressed position and, as a consequence, monomorphemic clitics can
(ii) oblique endings without morphosyntactic value, as in be viewed as regular reflexes of the Latin forms ME, TE, SE, INCE, INDE without
the case of first/second person pronouns, e.g. Sp. me ‘me’, postulating epenthesis.
743
DIEGO PESCARINI
the Catalan dialect spoken in Barcelona, where the third have replaced reflexes of NOS and ILLI, respectively (on Italo-
person dative clitic /əlzi/ ‘to them’ has been argued by Romance, see Rohlfs 1969a; Calabrese 1994; Loporcaro
Bonet (1991) to be a combination of the clitic əlz—which 1995a; 2002a). The syncretism due to the substitution of
corresponds to the accusative plural clitic—with an oblique the third person dative clitic with a locative form is par-
marker -i, identical to the so-called locative clitic (written hi ticularly frequent in French, Italian, and Catalan varieties
‘there’).2 The hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that in the (i.e. in all the areas in which the locative clitic is attested).
same dialect the genitive/partitive clitic (ə)n occurs
between the formatives əlz and i giving rise to the sequence (6) Díse =y. (Gsc.)
əlz-ən-i ‘to them of it’ (Bonet 1991). he/she.say =to.him/her/them
Diachronically, the explanation of the above compound ‘S/he talks to him/her/them.’
forms may reside in a previous stage of loísmo/laísmo,
namely, a stage in which the dative clitic was expressed by
One might wonder if the above syncretism is a conse-
an accusative exponent (see (4) and below). Later, loísta/
quence of palatalization, which, in a previous chronological
laísta varieties—which are attested in the same areas—
stage, made the regular reflex of ILLI become opaque and, in
developed a dative form combining the accusative-pro-dative
various dialects, homophonous with the ‘locative’ pro-PP.
clitic, e.g. Gsc. lous <ILLOS ‘(to) them’ with i, giving rise to the
The nature of the dative/locative syncretism, however, is
modern compound elements, e.g. lous y ‘to them’.
much more controversial and cannot result only from regu-
One might wonder whether the same analysis holds for
lar morphophonological processes. Manzini and Savoia
singular forms of the type li. Such forms, rather than being
(2002) and Rezac (2010) argue that the cause of the syncre-
regular reflexes of ILLI, may result from a previous
tism is syntactic in nature rather than phonological as,
accusative-pro-dative clitic (e.g. l(o)) combined with the
syntactically speaking, the third person dative clitic can be
oblique clitic y (hence, l’y rather than li). It seems to
considered a particular kind of locative clitic (for a prin-
me that this account can shed light on a series of irregular-
cipled explanation, I refer the interested reader to these
ities displayed in the same varieties when third person
works and references therein). In fact, it is worth noting
dative clitics are combined with other clitic elements
that third person dative and locative clitics tend not to co-
(see §45.4).
occur, and that the so-called ‘locative’ is in fact a pro-PP
In several northern Italian dialects, locative and partitive
referencing a number of prepositional complements includ-
clitics are compounds as well. In many Veneto dialects, for
ing non-human datives (see below).
instance, the genitive/partitive clitic is formed by a com-
A peculiar case of syncretism concerns reflexive forms.
bination of the locative clitic ghe /ɡe/ and the partitive
First and second person clitics are normally used with a
element ne (5a). The composite structure of the partitive is
reflexive interpretation, but in some varieties the third
synchronically evident, as in several Veneto varieties the
person reflexive is extended to other persons with an ana-
former item (ghe) disappears in combination with a dative
phoric function. Benincà and Poletto’s (2004c) data show
or locative clitic (Benincà 1994) (see (5b):
that the extension follows an implicational scale, whose
starting point is the first person plural pronoun and the
(5) a. ghene= magno do. (Pad.)
endpoint is the second person singular pronoun. In several
of.it/them= I.eat two
Valencian varieties, for instance, the third person exponent
‘I eat two of them.’
es replaces first and second person plural clitics but not first
b. te= (**ghe)ne= porto do. (Pad.) and second person singular clitics (Bonet 1991:138): see (7).
to.you= of.it/them= I.bring two This also happens in Vegliote: see §48.3.
‘I bring you two of them.’
(7) a. Es= posarem darrere. (Vlc.)
Penello (2004) reports cases of composite partitive forms self= we.will.put behind
which may be analysed as reduplicated forms of the usual ‘We will move behind.’
partitive ne/en (e.g. nin ‘of it/them’ in Romagnol dialects).
b. Es= poseu darrere. (Vlc.)
Clitic formatives are sometimes expressed by syncretic
self= you.put behind
exponents. Generally, reflexes of HINC (or *inke), INDE and SE
‘You(.PL) move behind.’
In some dialects, first and second person reflexives (either

plural or singular) are expressed by combining the first and
2
The plural dative clitic əlzi is often written els hi. second person clitic with the third person reflexive one:
744
(8) Va= sa= lavìi. (Bel.) (11) a. Nce/’a= rispunnetteno, a Maria. (Nap.)
you.PL= self= you.wash to.her= they.replied to Maria
‘You wash yourselves.’ ‘They replied to her (Maria).’
b. Nce/**’a= rispunnetteno â lettera. (Nap.)
Several clitic systems are sensitive to animacy or count-
to.it= they.replied to.the letter
ability. In general, third person pronouns referencing
‘They replied to it (the letter).’
countable, human entities are morphologically differenti-
ated from pronouns referencing inanimate or abstract
Besides cases of accusative for dative clitics, the Romance
entities, mass nouns, events, and phrasal antecedents. In
languages also display cases of leísmo, i.e. of dative for
the descriptive literature, the latter pronouns are referred
accusative forms when the referent is human. Table 45.1
to as neuter pronouns because they derive from Latin neu-
provides a comparison between the distribution of third
ter forms such as ILLUD ‘that’, HOC ‘this’ (on neuter in
person clitic forms in standard and leísta Spanish.
Romance, see Ch.57), attested in Catalan, Provençal, and
Lastly, an animacy-based restriction underlies the distri-
southern Italian dialects (9).
bution of dative clitics (< ILLI(S)), which are usually replaced
by the locative pro-PP (Fr. y, It. ci, Cat. hi) when denoting a
(9) Pròbo =m =oc! (Gsc.)
non-human entity, see (12) (Rigau 1982). The restriction is
Prove.IMP =to.me =it
active in all the Romance languages in which a locative clitic
‘Prove it to me!’
is present and, to the best of my knowledge, the evolution of
the Latin deictic ILLI(S) as a dative form restricted to a human
Elsewhere, ‘neuter’ elements are pronominalized by the
interpretation is still unaccounted for.
third person masculine clitic or, rarely, by the feminine one,
as in Romanian.
(12) a. A la meva filla, li= dedico
In many dialects of central and southern Italy (Vanelli
To the my daughter, to.her= I.devote
and Renzi 1997:110f.), the masculine and the neuter clitic
molt de temps. (Cat.)
(ILLUM VS ILLUD) are expressed by the a single, syncretic expo-
lot of time
nent (e.g. Nap. o) but the contrast is still visible as the neuter
‘As for my daughter, I devote lots of time to her.’
clitic, unlike the masculine one, triggers raddoppiamento
fonosintattico, ‘consonant doubling’ of the following word b. A això, hi= dedico molt de temps. (Cat.)
(cf. §§16.3.1.3.2, 40.3.1): Nap. [o sˈsatʧə] ‘I know that fact’ To this, there= I.devote lot of time
vs [o ˈsatʧə] ‘I know him’.3 ‘As for this, I devote lots of time to it.’
Animacy-related distinctions may give rise to patterns
of laísmo and loísmo, i.e. the extension of accusative forms to (13) a. A mia figlia, le= dedico molto tempo. (It.)
dative complements when the latter reference human To my daughter, to.her= I.devote lot.of time
entities. Such patterns are attested in Ibero-Romance ‘As for my daughter, I devote lots of time to her.’
(see (4) above), Gallo-Romance (10), and southern Italo-
b. A questo, ci= dedico molto tempo. (It.)
Romance (11).
To this, there= I.devote lot.of time
‘As for this, I devote lots of time to it.’
(10) Et pay lou= ditz. (Gsc.)
the dad to.him/her= says
‘Dad says to him/her.’
The following minimal pair shows that the accusative-

45.2.2 Subject clitics
pro-dative form ’a is allowed if the dative is human as in
(11a), otherwise, as in (11b), the only possible dative form is Paradigms of subject clitics exhibit systematic gaps. In their
ncə (Ledgeway 2000): seminal work, Renzi and Vanelli (1983) put forth a series of
descriptive generalizations in the form of implicational
statements capturing the cross-linguistic distribution of
3
In enclisis, the neuter clitic, unlike the masculine, does not trigger subject clitics in Italo-Romance, Provençal, and Raeto-
metaphony on the preceding dative clitic (in Neapolitan, when two pro- Romance varieties. For instance, they noted that, if a variety
nouns occur in enclisis, the leftmost one is stressed and subject to metaph- has at least one subject clitic, it is second person singular; if
ony; see §45.3.1): [maɲɲaˈtillə] ‘eat=it.COUNT’ vs [ʃkordaˈtellə] ‘forget=it.
UNCOUNT’ (Vanelli and Renzi 1997:110f; Ledgeway 2009a:306). In the
a variety has two subject clitics, they are second person
present-day dialect, however, the alternation is not systematic. singular and third person singular; if a dialect has three
745
DIEGO PESCARINI
Table 45.1 Distribution of third person clitics: standard vs leísta Spanish
Standard Spanish leísta Spanish

[Non-human] accusative ‘it.M/F’ lo/la lo/la
[Human] accusative ‘him/her’ lo/la le
Dative ‘to it/him/her’ le le
clitics, they are second person singular, third person singu- all persons, so that also first and second person pronouns
lar and plural; etc. The resulting scale of implications is as became clitic by means of a syncretic exponent which, at
follows: that time, appeared synchronically and diachronically
opaque. The best candidate was the first person singular
(14) 2SG < 3SG < 3PL < others pronoun, which for independent historical reasons had
been reduced to a ‘vocalic’ clitic, namely an onset-less and
The above implications are robust trends rather than ex- coda-less syllable.
ceptionless constraints. For instance, in a few Trentino dia- Another case of correlation between gaps and syncretism
lects third person clitics are attested despite the absence of a is exhibited by some Occitan dialects (Regis 2006; Benincà
second singular form (Manzini and Savoia 2005 I:118–19). 2014 and references therein). The first person singular sub-
In general, gaps in the distribution of subject clitics are ject clitic occurs only in enclisis, viz. in contexts of verb–
more frequent in proclisis. Moreover, etymological forms subject inversion such as main interrogative or exclamative
are better preserved in enclisis than in proclisis, as shown clauses. If present, the first person singular clitic (and, in
by the following minimal pair, in which the first person some dialects, the first plural clitic) is expressed by an
plural clitic alternates between the forms i (in proclisis) and expletive element,4 as in (16a) and (16b), or has the form
(n)os (in enclisis): of the subordinate complementizer ke as in (16c).
(15) a. i= durmin (Forni di Sotto, Frl.) (16) a. kuz ai =la da ćatà? (Prà del Torno, Occ.)
we= sleep what have =I to buy.INF?
‘We are sleeping.’ ‘What have I to buy?’
b. durmin =os? (Forni di Sotto, Frl.) b. soc minju =lo? (Rodoretto di Prali, Occ.)
Sleep =we what eat =I
‘Are we sleeping?’ ‘What will I eat?’
c. ki devu =ke salytà? (Rorà, Occ.)
Cardinaletti and Repetti (2008) argue that one form can
who must =I greet.INF?
be derived from the other by means of morphophonological
‘Who do I have to greet?’
processes, but some cases, such as (15), seem true cases of
suppletion.
In some dialects, a syncretic element—usually the onset-
The asymmetry in (15), in particular, is due to syncretism
less and codaless one derived from EGO—has been extended
(i.e. same form, different grammatical meanings). Calabrese
to other persons, giving rise to composite forms in which
(2011) points out that first singular, first plural, and second
the ‘vocalic’ formative (e.g. i) precedes the etymological
plural subject clitics—namely, the rightmost in the hier-
one. For instance, in the dialect of S. Michele al Tagliamento
archy (14)—are frequently expressed by a single syncretic
(Friulian, Benincà 1994:122) the second person singular
exponent, which usually coincides with a reflex of EGO ‘I’ (e.g.
clitic is expressed by the composite compound form i ti
i in (15a)). The reason for such an opacity might be dia-
‘you’. Similarly, several Lombard dialects exhibit a dummy
chronic in nature (Calabrese and Pescarini 2014): in the
clitic a preceding all other clitic forms (see Ascoli 1876:404;
early stages of the development of the subject clitic system,
Salvioni 1884:123).
there was resistance to cliticizing first and second person
Compound forms may be split by negation, which in some
pronouns. In fact, in several vernaculars first and second
vernaculars occurs between the vocalic and the other
personal pronouns were not attested as clitics in Renais-
sance varieties (cf. Poletto 1995 on Veneto dialects,
Cormany 2011 on Friulian), when the other pronouns had
already become clitic. We can then argue that, in certain 4
In (16a) and (16b) the clitic la/lo coincides with the expletive clitic used
dialects, there was analogical pressure to extend clitics to in impersonal constructions (see below).
746
formative, e.g. i no ti ‘you not’. Moreover, the vocalic clitic (19) a. U= ciov. (Carcare, Lig.)
does not normally undergo inversion: SCL= rains
‘It rains.’
(17) I= compri =tu? (S. Michele al Tagliamento, Frl.)
b. U= smija che chercun u jaggia.
you= buy =you
SCL= seems that someone SCL have.SBJV.3SG
‘Will you buy (anything)?’
scric na lettra. (Carcare, Lig.)
written a letter
In several dialects, the invariable ‘vocalic’ clitic is used as
‘It seems that someone has written a letter.’
an expletive in impersonal constructions. Elsewhere, the
expletive clitic coincides with the third person masculine c. U= j= è n matutin. (Carcare, Lig.)
singular clitic, as in French, or, in some Occitan varieties, SCL= there= is a boy
with the feminine form, as in (16a). ‘There is a boy.’
The distribution of expletives is constrained by a series of
d. U= s= diz pareg. (Carcare, Lig.)
syntactic factors, giving rise to a kaleidoscopic degree of
SCL= si= says so
variation. Expletives occur in combination with impersonal
‘We say it that way.’
verbs or in sentences with non-canonical subjects (i.e. with
postverbal or clausal subjects). The example in (18a) illus- e. U= bsogna parti. (Carcare, Lig.)
trates the co-occurrence of a non-agreeing subject clitic (the SCL= is.necessary leave.INF
3MSG u) with a postverbal plural subject, to be contrasted ‘It is necessary to leave.’
with (18b), where the preverbal subject co-occurs with an
agreeing plural pronoun (i). In other dialects, however, the distribution of expletives
is more constrained and, again, it can be captured with a
(18) a. U= caz er foie (Pontinvrea, Lig.) system of implications. In general, if a dialect has the exple-
SCL= drop the leaves tive in one impersonal context, it will be with a weather
verb; by contrast, if a dialect has an expletive with the
b. Er foie i= caz. (Pontinvrea, Lig.)
modal of necessity, it will have the expletive in all the
the leaves they= drop
other contexts. The resulting scale of implications is as
‘The leaves drop.’
follows (Renzi and Vanelli 1983; Pescarini 2014b):
However, the expletive nature of the clitic in (18a) is far
(20) weather verb < psych verbs < existential < impersonal
from straightforward. In fact, we know that third person
si < modal of necessity
postverbal subjects fail to control verb agreement in a
number of Romance varieties, with or without subject clit-
The syntax of vocalic clitics and the existence of compos-
ics. The pattern in (18a) may therefore follow from a gen-
ite forms led Poletto (2000) to hypothesize different classes
eralized constraint on agreement, rather than being a fully
of subject clitics, each occupying a dedicated syntactic pos-
fledged expletive construction.
ition. In particular, she notes that ‘vocalic’ clitics are char-
True expletive constructions are found, by contrast, with
acterized by a series of properties cross-linguistically: they
impersonal verbs. To account for the cross-linguistic distri-
never express gender and number distinctions, they never
bution of expletives, it is worth distinguishing different
follow negation, they must cluster with the complement-
types of impersonal construction:5 expletive clitics are
izer, and they may be omitted in coordination. According to
more likely to occur with weather verbs, as in (19a), while
these criteria, however, the term ‘vocalic clitic’ has assumed
they are less common in other impersonal contexts like
a narrow, possibly misleading meaning. In fact, there are
raising constructions, existential constructions, impersonal
subject clitic forms which are morphologically vocalic, but
si constructions, and in combination with the impersonal
they do not behave as ‘vocalic’ clitics à la Poletto. For
modal of necessity (19b-d). As shown below, in the Ligurian
instance, reflexes of ILLE such as u ‘he/it’ or i ‘they’ are
dialect of Carcare, all these contexts select for an expletive
often onsetless and codaless due to independent phono-
clitic:
logical processes of aphaeresis, vocalization and palataliza-
tion (see §45.3). Nonetheless, they do not always display the
prototypical behaviour of ‘vocalic’ clitics in the narrow,
5
syntactic sense illustrated above: they convey gender and
I am considering here both impersonal verbs, i.e. verbs that do not
project an external argument, and constructions in which the subject does number information, may follow negation, cannot be omit-
not occupy its canonical preverbal position (e.g. existentials). ted in coordination, etc.
747
DIEGO PESCARINI
Conversely, many Romance languages display cases of attested in Romanian (see §8.5.1.2), old Italian (Giusti
vocalic clitics (in Poletto’s sense), which cannot be con- 2010a), and modern southern Italian dialects (Egerland
sidered ‘subject’ clitics. Despite their pronominal origin, 2013; cf. also §16.3.1.4).
such clitic particles no longer express pronominal features
anymore, but have ended up conveying pragmatic mean- (23) a. ˈfijə =mə (Lanciano, Abr.)
ings. For instance, in the dialect of Padua (Benincà 1983a), son =my
the clitic particle a (< EGO? ‘I’) signals that the content of the ‘my son’
sentence is all new and unexpected information.
b. ˈmammə =mə (Lanciano, Abr.)
mum =my
45.2.3 Possessives ‘my mum’
c. ˈfretə =tə (Lanciano, Abr.)
Cardinaletti (1998) shows that, in Italian, although prenom- brother =your
inal and postnominal possessives are identical, they have ‘your brother’
different properties: the former cannot be contrasted,
coordinated, or modified. This led Cardinaletti to argue d. ˈʦiə =tə (Lanciano, Abr.)
that Italian prenominal possessives are weak (cf. 45.1). uncle =your
In other languages, like Spanish and French, the same ‘your uncle’
asymmetry is expressed morphologically by means of a dual
series of possessives, e.g. Sp. mi libro ‘my= book’ vs el libro mío Lastly, in literary Romanian, dative clitics (in particular,
‘the book my’ (see Lyons 1986 on the diachronic emergence first and second person clitics) may function as postnominal
of the dual series). Cardinaletti (1998), however, shows that possessives (Nicolae 2013b:341-3):
French and Spanish prenominal possessives are not weak
elements (as in Italian), but clitics, which can be doubled (24) Am pierdut stilou =mi. (Ro.)
and cannot co-occur with the definite article: have lost pen =my
‘I have lost my pen.’
(21) a. mon livre à moi (Fr.)
my book to me
‘my own book’
b. (**le) son livre (Fr.)
45.2.4 Auxiliary clitics
the his book
‘his book’ In various dialects, a dummy clitic formative appears in
front of vowel-initial forms of BE/HAVE. The term ‘auxiliary
Some languages, such as Italian dialects and old Gascon clitic’—originally due to Brandi and Cordin (1981)—is mis-
(Rohlfs 1970:187), display a triple system of possessives, leading, since such clitics are also found in combinations
exhibiting strong postnominal possessives, as in (22a), with lexical BE and HAVE.6
weak prenominal possessives, as in (22b), and, with singular In Occitan and western Italo-Romance dialects, the aux-
kinship nouns, clitic possessives, which do not co-occur iliary clitic is a reflex of ILLE and can be easily mistaken for a
with the definite article, see (22c): third person subject clitic (according to Parry 1994, it in fact
derives from a subject clitic form). In many dialects, how-
(22) a. el libro mio (Pad.) ever, l occurs with any auxiliary form beginning with a
the book my vowel, regardless of grammatical person (see Garzonio and
b. el me libro (Pad.) Poletto 2011). In the following Piedmontese dialect, for
the my book instance, the auxiliary clitic follows the 2SG clitic ti:
‘my book’
(25) Ti l= eri ndò. (Viola, Pie.)
c. me= mama (Pad.) you= l= are gone
my= mum ‘You had gone.’
‘mum’
6
In some dialects, the auxiliary clitic is found when the verb BE/HAVE
In several Romance varieties, the possessive clitic occur- functions as an auxiliary, while it is absent when the same verb has a lexical
ring with kinship nouns is enclitic. Enclitic possessives are function.
748
In many dialects the auxiliary clitic is synchronically (27) a. Il= me= le= donne. (Fr.)
analysable as part of the verbal root, as it never undergo he = to.me= it= gives
inversion in main interrogatives. ‘He gives it to me.’
Elsewhere, the auxiliary clitic derives from a locative
particle, which gave rise to forms such as /j, g, z/ after b. Donne =le =moi! (Fr.)
processes of palatalization and fortition (Rohlfs 1968:267; give.IMP =it =to.me
Benincà 2007a; Bertocci and Damonte 2007): ‘Give it to me!’
Although this might be a possible diachronic explanation,

(26) G= o magnà ben. (vic.)
this account does not hold synchronically, as the same
G= I.have eaten well
alternation is observed in non-standard varieties displaying
‘I ate well.’
the opposite order of clitics, e.g. coll. Fr. donne=moi=le. Fur-
thermore, it is worth noting that the same account cannot
explain why third person accusative clitics are not affected
45.3 Phonology by any enclisis/proclisis asymmetry.
Southern Italian dialects like Calvello (Gioscio 1985;
This section illustrates some phonological phenomena Kenstowicz 1991:181f.) behave like French, with the rele-
which can affect the morphological shape of clitics, while vant difference that in Calvello the sequence formed by a
I will not address here sandhi phenomena that, cross- lexical word and one or more clitics is not oxytonic as in
linguistically, do not give rise to systematic morphological French, but paroxytonic, i.e. the resulting sequence is
alternations. stressed on the penultimate syllable, regardless of whether
The structure of the section is as follows: after some it corresponds to a clitic or a verbal suffix (for principled
brief considerations on the interaction of stress and cliti- analyses, see Kenstowicz 1991; Bafile 1992; 1994; Peperkamp
cization (§45.3.1), in §45.3.2 I will focus on processes of 1995; Loporcaro 2000):
vowel loss (elision, apocope, syncope), while in §45.3.3
(28) a. ˈvinnə + lə ! vənˈni=llə (Clv., Bas.)
I will deal with phenomena of vowel insertion (prosthesis,
‘sell.IMP.2SG it’
epenthesis); the last subsection is about processes affect-
b. vənˈnitə + lə ! vənnə=ˈti=llə (Clv., Bas.)
ing the formative l, in particular aphaeresis, vocalization,
‘sell.IMP.2PL it’
and palatalization.
c. ˈra + mmə + lə ! ra=mˈmi=llə (Clv., Bas.)
‘give.IMP.2SG it to me’
d. manˈnata + mə + lə ! mannatə=ˈmi=llə (Clv., Bas.)
45.3.1 Stress ‘send.IMP.2PL it to me’
In present-day Neapolitan, stress shift is mandatory when
Clitic elements are not inherently (i.e. lexically) stressed, two enclitics co-occur, as shown in (29), while stress shift
although they might receive stress or dislodge primary with a single enclitic is mandatory when the host is propar-
stress in certain varieties and under certain circum- oxytone (as in Calvello), optional otherwise, see (30a) vs
stances. Furthermore, Peperkamp (1995; 1996) has con- (30b) (Ledgeway 2009a:34f.):
vincingly shown (contra Nespor and Vogel 1986) that,
when clitics combine, they form an autonomous prosodic (29) a. pɔrta =ˈti =llə (Nap.)
constituent—a metrical foot—which is given secondary bring.IMP =to.yourself =him/them.F/it.M
stress. ‘Fetch it/him/them for yourself!’
In languages like Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, clitics b. pɔrta =ˈte =llə (Nap.)
cannot receive stress. In French, by contrast, enclitics can be bring.IMP =to.yourself =him/them.F/it.M
stressed.7 One might wonder whether the allomorphy ‘Fetch her/them for yourself!’
exemplified below is caused by stress assignment, as argued
in Foulet (1924): (30) a. ˈfraveka + =la ! fravəˈkallə (Nap.)
make.IMP =it.F
‘Make it!’
7
b. ˈassə + =mə ! ˈassəmə / asˈsammə (Nap.)
The same happens in the Italo-Romance dialect of Viozene (Rohlfs
1966:442; Kenstowicz 1991:182f.): finir=lù ‘end.INF=it’, saver-lù ‘know.INF=it’,
let.IMP =me
portama=rù ‘we.take=it’. ‘Let me!’
749
DIEGO PESCARINI
Bafile (1992; 1994) points out that, both the root and the Furthermore, on the basis of data from medieval Italo-
penultimate clitic bear primary stress as the root vowel in Romance, Vanelli (1992; 1998b:179-85) has pointed out that
ˈpɔrtə is open (open mid vowels in Neapolitan are allowed the distribution of apocope is sensitive to the morpho-
only in syllables with primary stress) and the inner enclitic phonological nature of the preceding elements. Diachronic-
is subject to metaphony,8 which is typical of tonic vowels. ally, apocope is originally allowed when the clitic follows
Similar phenomena are attested in other Romance lan- another clitic element; later, it is allowed after monosyllabic
guages, where enclitics may dislodge stress. In Romanian function words and, lastly, it is allowed everywhere.
imperatives, for instance, the presence of an enclitic pro- The preceding factors have a strong impact on the mor-
noun may cause stress shift: in many people’s speech, phophonological shape of clitics as they give rise to a num-
the imperative form spúneţi! ‘say.2PL’ becomes spunéţi-l ber of inter- and intralinguistic variants. In dialects of
‘say.2PL=it!’. Piedmont, Lombardy, and Emilia-Romagna, for instance,
The preceding patterns follow from prosodic models in apocope is generalized: all clitic elements end up being
which clitics are integrated into the prosodic structure of a expressed by a single consonant, e.g. 2SG t < TU/TE, which
recursive Prosodic Word (Selkirk 1995). If more than one may be syllabified by means of a prosthetic/epenthetic
clitic occur, they are grouped under a metrical foot vowel (see below). Elsewhere, apocope is much more con-
(Peperkamp 1995; 1996; 1997), as shown in (31b): strained as it targets only reflexes of ILLUM.
In languages with optional apocope, the process is further
(31) a. [[host]PrW clitic]PrW constrained by syllabic and alignment constraints. For
b. [[host]PrW (clitic clitic)Ft ]PrW instance, apocope of the clitic is blocked if it would result
in an illicit syllabic configuration such as a complex coda.
Cross-linguistic differences emerge depending on whether
Let us consider sequences formed by an infinitive followed
stress is assigned only to the inner PrW (as in Italian, Spanish,
by an enclitic pronoun, both of which, in early Italian
etc.), to the outer PrW (as in French and in the dialect of
vernaculars, may undergo apocope. If apocope targeted
Calvello and, with a single enclitic, in Neapolitan), or, cyclic-
both the verb and the clitic, the resulting output would be
ally, to both the inner and the outer PrW, as arguably hap-
syllabically illicit because of a complex coda, e.g. **far(e)l(o).
pens in Neapolitan when two enclitics co-occur.
To prevent this, only the infinitive undergoes apocope, e.g.
far(e)=lo ‘do.INF=it’, while the clitic is apocopated only if
preceded by another enclitic:
45.3.2 Vowel drop (elision, apocope, syncope)
(32) voler(e) =ve =l(o) dir tuto (OVer.)
The occurrence of clitic elements may give rise to sequences want.INF =to.you =it say.INF all
of vowels triggering language-specific hiatus-resolution ‘to want to say it all to you’
strategies such as the insertion of a prosthetic consonant
or the desyllabification of one vowel (synalephe). More The pattern above means that the process is cyclical, i.e.
frequently, however, the vocalic ending of clitics is elided. apocope applies to the lexical word first and then to the
In varieties in which elision is optional, it is constrained by a outer prosodic constituents (Pescarini 2011; 2013).
number of factors, both morphological and phonological: Horne (1990) shows that, besides apocope, word-internal
singular endings are more readily elided than plural ones, processes of syncope can apply post-lexically to proclitic
and elision is favoured before unstressed syllables and sequences. Old French, for instance, exhibits two processes
before auxiliaries (see Garrapa 2011). targeting unstressed vowels: apocope, deleting final vowels
Besides prevocalic elision, many Romance languages with the exception of a (which becomes ə), and syncope,
exhibit apocope, namely loss of final vowels regardless of deleting unstressed vowels when they follow a syllable
the presence of a following vowel. Cross-linguistic variation bearing secondary stress. The following example shows
depends on both phonological and morphological factors: how apocope and syncope apply to the reflex of Latin
[–low] vowels are more likely to be dropped than a; apocope BONITATE(M) > /bonˈte/ (the asterisks signal secondary and
is favoured after a single sonorant; vowels carrying mor- primary stress):
phosyntactic meaning (e.g. number and gender) are
dropped less frequently than default thematic vowels, etc. *
* *
8
(33) BO N(I) TA T(E)
This metaphonic distinction between the masculine and feminine is no
longer very robust amongst most speakers, and the originally non- ↑ ↑
metaphonic form is generalized in most instances. See Ledgeway (2009a). syncope apocope
750
According to Horne (1990), the final vowel of the cluster is For similar phenomena regarding the morphology of sub-
subject to syncope as clitic clusters—according to analysis ject clitics, see Cardinaletti and Repetti (2008) on Piacentine
proposed in §45.3.1—correspond to a left-headed foot: (northern Italian) dialects.
In other dialects, however, prosthetic forms are found
*
adjacent to a nucleus. In particular, Vanelli (1998b) shows
* *
that prosthetic forms in early northern Italo-Romance are
(34) ne= m(e)= vidrent (OFr.)
found in the same phonological context where apocope is
NEG me= they.saw
allowed, namely V_C. Here, prosthesis cannot follow from
‘they did not see me’
syllabification principles. Pescarini (2011; 2013) argues that
in these cases prosthesis is a repair strategy preventing a
The same process targeted in particular the 3M clitic le(s),
misalignment when apocope began to target clitic elements
which underwent syncope after subject clitics—as in (35a)—
on the left edge of the syntactic/prosodic phrase: apocope
and other monosyllabic function words, including comple-
gives rise to the misalignment because a proclitic ends up
mentizers and negation (Foulet 1930:§217). In the same
being phonologically enclitic to the preceding word (37a).
contexts, the PL les is subject to a further process deleting
Prosthesis, in (37b), prevents the misalignment by blocking
the formative l, as shown in (35b).
the syllabification of the accusative pronoun with the pre-
ceding word.
(35) a. se je= l= puis fare (OFr.)
if I= it= can do.INF
(37) a. [la scriptura =l(o)]PPh [diso]PPh (OVer.)
‘if I can do it’
the scripture =it says
b. nuls hons ne s= doit escounter (OFr.)
b. [la scriptura]PPh [el= diso]PPh (OVer.)
no men not them=have.to listen.INF
the scripture it= says
‘nobody has to listen to them’
This hypothesis explains why prosthesis does not apply in
As a consequence of vowel deletion processes, the clitic,
enclisis, where no misalignment can result from apocope.
which is syntactically proclitic to the following word, ends
The above alignment constraint, however, is not manda-
up being phonologically enclitic to the preceding element.
tory: several Romance languages do allow proclitics to
In the following section I will argue that, to prevent such a
become phonologically enclitic to a preceding element, in
syntax/prosodic misalignment, several languages make use
particular if the preceding element is a monosyllabic func-
of prosthetic vowels preventing a proclitic from syllabifying
tion word. In Romanian, for instance, the 3M.SG (î)l occurs
with a preceding prosodic constituent.
without prosthesis after a dative clitic (see §45.4.5), the
negation marker, the complementizer, etc. (Monachesi
45.3.3 Vowel insertion (prosthesis/epenthesis) 1998a):
(38) a. Mihai nu =(**î)l aşteaptă. (Ro.)

Prosthesis can be regarded as a strategy repairing marked
Mihai not =him wait.for
syllabic configurations, which arise as a consequence of
‘Mihai does not wait for him.’
vowel deletion processes like apocope. In languages in
which apocope determined a systematic loss of final vowels, b. Cred că =(**î)l vede. (Ro.)
clitics were reduced to single consonants which syllabify with I.believe that =him see
either the preceding or the following element. Otherwise, the ‘I believe that he sees him.’
clitic is syllabified by means of a prosthetic vowel, as in the
following examples from the Catalan dialect spoken in Bar-
celona (Bonet and Lloret 2005) illustrating prosthesis and
epenthesis of ə with the first person plural object clitic /ns/
45.3.4 On l-: aphaeresis, vocalization,
in accordance with the phonological context:
and palatalization
(36) a. tìri [ns] ‘throw (to) us’ (Bcl.)
b. tirèu [nzə] ‘throw.PL (to) us’ In several dialects the formative l- of third person non-
c. tirèm [zə] ‘let’s throw (to) ourselves’ reflexive clitics undergoes aphaeresis. Before addressing
d. [əns] tira ‘he/she throws to us’ the data, it is worth noting that in many vernaculars the
e. [ənzə] salva ‘he/she saves us’ aphaeresis of l- is not a generalized phonological rule, but
751
DIEGO PESCARINI
rather a clitic-specific phenomenon targeting third person (41) Gnent u= i= pudra fe

formatives. Second, in some dialects l-dropping seems to nothing SCL to.him can.FUT make.INF
depend on morphosyntactic factors, rather than being a cambié idea. (Rmg.)
consequence of a morphophonological rule (see Manzini change.INF idea
and Savoia 2010). ‘Nothing will change his mind.’
In some dialects of Italy, aphaeresis is synchronically
productive and it may cause the lengthening of the follow- In almost all the Romance languages, processes of palat-
ing vowel (Loporcaro 1991), although Marotta (2002-3) alization have affected the morphology of the reflexes of ILLI,
argues that the following nucleus is doubled rather than beginning with prevocalic contexts where liV > ljV. I have
lengthened (see also Bafile 2008). The doubled/lengthened already mentioned that such changes may have led, in
vowel can be either the ending of the clitic, as in (39a) or, if various languages, to the ‘substitution’ of the etymological
the clitic has undergone elision, the beginning of the fol- (but synchronically opaque) reflex of ILLI with a syncretic
lowing word, as in (39b). exponent, si, ci, etc. It is worth noting, however, that sup-
pletion and allomorphy tend to target dative li more fre-
(39) a. lo= ˈbbruːʃo ! oː ˈbbruːʃo (Rmc.) quently than the homophonous accusative plural pronoun.
it= I.burn
‘I burn it.’
b. l= aʃˈʃugo ! aː ʃˈʃugo (Rmc.) 45.4 Cluster-internal phenomena
it= I.dry
‘I dry it (up).’
In what follows I address the morphophonological proper-
ties of clitic combinations. Arguably, part of the following
By contrast, in other dialects, aphaeresis (and elision)
morphophonological phenomena are surface effects due to
gave rise to a double series of allomorphs: a prevocalic one
the syntactic makeup of clitic clusters, which, for space
(l) and a set of preconsonantal elements (e.g. a, u, i), cf. (40a)
issues, will not be addressed here.
and (40b). Enclitics, on the other hand, undergo neither
The section is organized as follows: §45.4.1 contains some
aphaeresis nor elision, but their thematic vowel undergoes
preliminary considerations on the order of object and sub-
centralization, like other unstressed vowels, see (40c).
ject clitics; §45.4.2 focuses on the ordering of combinations
of object clitics; §45.4.3 addresses phenomena of contextual
(40) a. o= əppijjə (Nap.)
suppletion in cluster-internal position; §45.4.4 outlines
it= I.catch
mutual exclusion patterns; §45.4.5 deals with further puz-
‘I take it.’
zling alternation regarding the linking vowel of object clitic
b. l= akkattə clusters.
it= I.buy
‘I buy it.’
45.4.1 Order: generalities
c. əpijja =lə
catch =it
In declarative clauses, subject clitics precede object ones.9 In
‘Catch it!’
interrogative clauses, object pronouns remain proclitic,
while subject clitics may invert. Sometimes in old French
In northern Italian dialects, the absence of the formative l object clitics are also enclitic in inversion contexts, due to a
with reflexes of ILLUM is due to a different process, which strict application of the Tobler–Mussafia law, i.e. the prin-
determined the vocalization of l in coda positions, i.e. before ciple triggering enclisis in finite clauses which prevents
a consonant. This gave rise to phonologically conditioned object clitics from occurring in sentence-initial position
alternations like l /_V vs u /_C, found, for instance, in (for a formal analysis of the law, see Benincà 2006). In
several Alpine dialects. It is worth noting, however, that in
some dialects such alternation has been reanalysed as a 9
In the Carnic dialect spoken in Forni di Sotto (Frl.), a formative of 3rd
syntactically conditioned alternation, triggered by the pres- person subject clitics can be doubled after the object clitic (al mi ! al mi-l
ence of another clitic. In many vernaculars of Romagna, for ‘he me’) and the leftmost copy of l may be deleted (al mil ! a mi-l ‘he me’)
instance, the third person masculine singular subject clitic l giving the impression that the resulting order is object > subject clitic
(Manzini and Savoia 2005, 2009; Calabrese and Pescarini 2014). To the
becomes u in front of any object clitic, including vocalic best of my knowledge, this is the sole Romance variety exhibiting this
clitics like the third person dative i: pattern.
752
such cases, the resulting order is verb > object clitic > orderings have been captured by means of language-specific
subject clitic (Foulet 1930:§162): templates, setting the order of clitic elements regardless of
the position of the corresponding phrasal complements (see
(42) e savereíez =le =me =vus mustrer? (OFr.) e.g. Wanner 1977 on Italian; Bonet 1991 on Catalan). Tem-
and would it =to.me =you.PL show.INF plates account for the existence of opposite orders such as
‘and would you show it to me?’ those exemplified below:
Negation may either precede or follow subject clitics (46) a. Glie= lo= danno. (It.)
(Parry 2013b). In origin, all Romance varieties displayed to.him/her/them= it/him= they.give
the order subject clitic > negation, but around the fifteenth ‘They give it/him to him/her/them.’
century several northern Italian vernaculars began to dis-
b. Ils= le= lui= donnent. (Fr.)
play the opposite ordering: negation > subject clitic. In
they= it/him= to.him/her= give
Friulian, for instance, the second person singular subject
‘They give it/him to him/her.’
tu/te occurred before negation until the sixteenth century,
as shown in (43a), while in modern varieties the only pos-
(47) a. Le= si= parla. (It.)
sible order is negation > tu/te (43b):
to.her= one= speaks
‘One speaks to her.’
(43) a. Tu= no= havarès la bielle fie. (OFrl.)
you= not= have.FUT the nice girl b. Se= le= habla. (Sp.)
‘You will not have the nice girl.’ one= to.him/her= speaks
‘One speaks to him/her.’
b. No= tu= compre mai meil. (Barcis, ModFrl.)
not= you= buy never apples
The above scenario, however, changes if we assume the
‘You never buy apples.’
hypothesis that clitic ordering is not so rigid, as languages
may move from one ordering pattern to another.
In inversion contexts, preverbal negation behaves like an
First of all, it is worth noting that the above differences
object clitic element: it remains proclitic to the verb, which
between the modern languages mainly result from a limited
has crossed the position occupied by subject clitics:
number of diachronic changes which, in certain languages,
reversed the order of certain clitic combinations. In Italian
(44) N’= as =tu pas mangé? (Fr.)
and French, for instance, first and second person datives
not= have =you not eaten
followed third person accusative clitics until the end of the
‘Didn’t you eat?’
fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, respectively. Both orders
were allowed for some time in apparent free variation.10
Negation usually precedes object clitics. However, Parry
(1997b) reports some cases from Ligurian dialects in which
(48) a. che [ . . . ] voi la= mi=
the preverbal negative marker n is reduplicated after cer-
that you it.F= to.me=
tain object clitics (see also Manzini and Savoia 2005, III:295).
concediate (OTSC., Boccaccio, Filocolo 212)
It is worth noting that in these varieties, the negation
grant.SUBJ
marker is the postverbal one (nent), while preverbal n
‘that you grant it to me’
must be considered a clitic expressing negative spreading/
concord (Zanuttini 1997). b. se Egli me= la=
if He to.me= it.F =
(45) I= n= te= (n=) dan nent u libr. (Lig.) concede (OTsc., Boccaccio, Filocolo 72)
they= NEG= you= (NEG=) give NEG the book grants
‘They do not give you the book.’ ‘if He grants it to me’
(49) a. Je= le= te= comande. (OFr.)

I= it= to.you= order.INF
45.4.2 Order of object clitics ‘I order you to do so.’
It is normally assumed that object clitics are rigidly ordered 10

The Oxford Guide To The Romance Languages

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/5/2016, SPi

THE OXFORD GUIDE TO THE

OXFORD GUIDES TO THE WORLD’S LANGUAGES

Adam Ledgeway, University of Cambridge, and Martin Maiden, University of Oxford

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, James Cook University Paul Hopper, Carnegie-Melon University

The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages

The Oxford Guide to the Austronesian Languages

The Oxford Guide to the Uralic Languages

The Oxford Guide to the Afroasiatic Languages

The Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages

The Oxford Guide to the Atlantic Languages of West Africa

The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages

THE OXFORD GUIDE TO THE

In memoria di Alberto Varvaro

Detailed Contents xii

PART I: The Making of the Romance Languages

1. Latin as a source for the Romance languages 3

PART II: Typology and Classiﬁcation

4. A structural comparison of Latin and Romance 37

PART III: Individual Structural Overviews

8. Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Aromanian 91

12. Romansh (Rumantsch) 169

PART IV: Comparative Overviews

D. Semantics and pragmatics 575

PART V: Issues in Romance Phonology

38. Diphthongization 647

PART VI: Issues in Romance Morphology

42. Number 697

PART VII: Issues in Romance Syntax

46. Functional categories 761

PART VIII: Issues in Romance Syntax and Semantics

50. Split intransitivity 821

PART IX: Issues in Romance Pragmatics and Discourse

53. Illocutionary force 863

PART X: Case Studies

A. The nominal group 909

B. The verbal group 937

60. Voice 967

C. The clause 995

Series Preface xli

PART I: The Making of the Romance Languages

1. Latin as a source for the Romance Languages 3

PART II: Typology and Classiﬁcation

4. A structural comparison of Latin and Romance 37

7. Romance linguistic geography and dialectometry 73

PART III: Individual Structural Overviews

8. Romanian, Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Aromanian 91

8.4 Forms and functions of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs 95

10.2.2 Consonant system 142

12.4.3.3 Impersonal subjects and the syntax of ins 181

14.4 Syntax 221

16.4.3.1 Sentence organization 267

18.5.2.2 Forms and their functions 313

20.2.2 The twofold development of Latin stressed A in open syllables 353

21.5.1 Verbal clitics 377

23.2.1 Vowels 415

23.4.8 Sentential negation 435

PART IV: Comparative Overviews

25.2 Consonants 478

28.4 The main semantic categories of Romance afﬁxation 516

31. The structure of the clause 556

D. Semantics and pragmatics 575

34. Information and discourse structure 596