On triple auxiliation in Romance

Romance languages divide into three classes, as far as perfective auxiliation is concerned: as well as languages showing a binary contrast (e.g., French) and languages showing no contrast (e.g., Spanish), several varieties exist in which auxiliation displays three-way choices. Previous research on Romance auxiliaries has failed to recognize this empirical fact due to its focus on auxiliaries as morpho-lexical items, rather than on auxiliation as a syntactic phenomenon. Building on the approach to Romance auxiliation of Perlmutter (1989), this article proposes an analysis of triple auxiliation systems, as well as of systems which display variation in auxiliation, either free or sensitive to verb person. The rise of these mixed systems, like all other recorded changes in Romance auxiliation, is interpreted as one of the manifestations of the retreat of Proto-Romance active/inactive alignment and of the shift back to a more consistent accusative/nominative orientatio

Crossing Form and Function: First and Second Person Plural Imperatives in the Dialect of Mesocco

This paper proposes an explanation for the rise and fall of a 1pl imperative ending in the dialect of Mesocco, a Northern Italo-Romance variety from southern Switzerland. This ending cannot be explained with inherited 1pl morphology: rather, it is best accounted for by assuming the reanalysis of a 2pl imperative hosting a 1sg pronominal object clitic. This reanalysis, it is suggested, must have occurred in the syntactic context provided by the ‘ethical' dative construction. It has been prompted by several factors, among which the crucial one is functional in nature, viz. the pragmatic homology between 1pl imperative - unmarkedly inclusive in meaning - and the ethical dative construction with a 2pl imperative. Comparative evidence is also adduced from studies in linguistic typology, showing that similar crossovers between 1st and 2nd person plural morphology, although unattested in Romance (or, more precisely, in the better-known standard Romance languages), are not without parallels cross-linguistically. Finally, a functional motivation is provided for the deacquisition of this 1pl imperative form in the dialect of the younger generation

The natural phonological process V[+high] -> [+tense] and the vowel systems of some Southern Italian dialects

In the overwhelming majority of the languages of the world there exist only tense and no lax high vowels. Natural Phonology accounts for this observational data by postulating a process of tensing which has in its structural description a condition [!higher]. This process remains active und er the form of a prelexical paradigmatic constraint in all languages lacking [-tense] high vowels, and, conversely, must be suppressed during language acquisition by any child in whose mother tongue vocalic segments such as /ɪ ʊ/ and the like do occur. Italian, as is well known, belongs to the former, and most widespread, class. However, this paper argues that, while this holds true for Standard Italian (= SI) and for the dialects spoken in northern and central Italy, (at least some) southern Italian dialects actually have to be classed within the latter group. This postulated difference between SI and southern Italian dialects, in terms of retention vs. suppression of the tensing process, is confirmed by some pieces of evidence resulting from a comparison of bot h the paradigmatic and syntagmatic structures of the two varieties. In SI the operation of the process under discussion disallows: (a) [±tense] opposition between high vowels, and (b) the occurrence of sequences of glide + homorganic high vowel. Our starting assumption about southern Italian dialects predicts that they behave in just the opposite way: namely, both (a) and (b) should be allowed. And this is in fact what is observed, when these dialects are carefully examined

Distinctive features and phonological change: vowel fronting and gravity interactions in Altamurano

Altamurano (a southern Italo-Romance variety) displays a set of phonological processes and/or diachronic changes which are best explained with reference to the gravity of the vowels, glides and consonants involved. These processes (insertion and deletion of a labio-velar glide, back vowel fronting; cf. §1), for which I propose the overall label of gravity interactions, represent a counterpart to the often discussed coronal interactions. While the latter are neatly accounted for within Feature Geometry models (cf. e.g. Hume 1992, Clements & Hume 1995), Altamurano gravity interactions provide a challenge to some basic assumptions underlying mainstream research on phonological processes and change in Generative Phonology. In §2, it is demonstrated that a sensible account of the phonological processes at issue requires direct reference to the acoustic substance linguistic sounds are made of. After developing my account, I move on to discuss alternative analyses of the Altamurano data which have been recently put forward (§§3-4). In the Appendix, I discuss a further process of Altamurano, viz. open syllable diph-thongization, and, based on this discussion, briefly tackle the collateral issue of the relationship between dialectological fieldwork and theoretical speculation in phonology