Diachrony and Dialects Grammatical Change in the Dialects of Italy

by Beninca, Paola; Ledgeway, Adam; Vincent, Nigel

• ISBN13: 9780198701781
• ISBN10: 0198701780
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-07-29
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Paola Beninca is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of Padua, and before that was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Milan, and researcher at the Centre for Italian Dialectology of the National Research Council in Padua. Her research interests include synchronic and diachronic Romance syntax and morphology, and the history of linguistics. Recent works include chapters of the Grammatica dell'Italiano Antico (ed. G. Salvi and L. Renzi, 2010) and the collection of papers Mapping the Left Periphery: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 5, which she co-edited with Nicola Munaro (OUP 2010). She has coordinated the on-line data-base ASIt ('Atlas of Italian Dialect Syntax').

Adam Ledgeway is Professor of Italian and Romance Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge. His research interests include Italian dialectology, the comparative history and morphosyntax of the Romance languages, Latin, syntactic theory and linguistic change. His recent publications include Grammatica diacronica del napoletano (Niemeyer 2009); Syntactic Variation: The Dialects of Italy (CUP 2010, co-edited with Roberta D'Alessandro and Ian Roberts); The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages Vol 1: Structures, Vol 2: Contexts (CUP 2011, 2013, co-edited with Martin Maiden and J.C. Smith); and From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change (OUP 2012).

Nigel Vincent is Professor Emeritus of General and Romance Linguistics at The University of Manchester, following retirement from the Mont Follick Chair in Comparative Philology, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Copenhagen, Pavia and Rome and an Erskine Fellowship at the University of Canterbury (NZ). His publications include The Romance Languages (with Martin Harris, 1988) and articles on morphosyntactic change, with special reference to Latin, Italian and the dialects of Italy. He co-directed with Mair Parry and Robert Hastings the AHRC-funded project Sintassi degli antichi volgari d'Italia (SAVI) (2000-2005).

Table of Contents

1. Similarity and diversity in the evolution of Italo-Romance, Nigel Vincent
Part I: Verbal Structures
2. The development of the southern subjunctive: Morphological loss and syntactic gain, Adam Ledgeway and Alessandra Lombardi
3. Perfective auxiliation in Italo-Romance: The complementarity of historical and modern cross-dialectal evidence, Michele Loporcaro
4. Passive and impersonal reflexives in the Italian dialects: Synchronic and diachronic aspects, Michela Cennamo
5. On the personal infinitive in Sicilian, Delia Bentley
6. Glimpsing the future: Some rare anomalies in the history of the Italo-Romance and Gallo-Romance future and conditional stem, and what they suggest about paradigm structure, Martin Maiden and John Charles Smith
7. Person endings in the old Italian verb system, Laura Vanelli
Part 2: (Pro)nominal Structures
8. Prosodic restructuring and morphological opacity: The evolution of Italo-Romance clitic clusters, Diego Pescarini
9. Subject clitics and macroparameters, Ian Roberts
10. Sicilian 1st and 2nd person oblique tonic pronouns: A historical and comparative examination, Rosanna Sornicola
11. Patterns of variation and diachronic change in Piedmontese object clitic syntax, Christina Tortora
12. Gender assignment and pluralization in Italian and the Veneto, John B. Trumper
13. Kind-defining relative clauses in the diachrony of Italian, Paola Beninca and Guglielmo Cinque
14. Synchronic and diachronic clues on the internal structure of 'where' in Italo-Romance, Nicola Munaro and Cecilia Poletto