Two principles shaping agreement paradigms have been implicitly assumed to constitute diachronic universals: (i) ergativity is assumed to be more likely to develop or be maintained in third than in non-third person; (ii) zeros are assumed to develop and be preserved more commonly in third than in non-third person. Estimating probabilities of diachronic change in a worldwide database and controling for areal diffusion effects, we find no evidence for (i). Principle (ii) receives no support either when examining how paradigms develop as systems, but we observe a weak cross-paradigm effect which is likely to be caused by frequency patterns during grammaticalization.

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Agreement is a syntactic mechanism involving morpho-syntactic categories such as person, number, gender. Since morphology provides the formal means for this syntactic mechanism to result in surface contrasts, the impact of morphology on agreement is usually limited to the (trivial) fact that the signalling of agreement stays and falls with (the contrast between cells of) the morphological paradigms whose cells are defined through distinct morpho-syntactic feature values. However, it sometimes happens that pure morphology (e.g. [contrasts in] inflectional classes) conditions change in agreement rules and/or in morpho-syntactic properties of the language such as, say, the number of genders occurring in the system. In this paper, I will review some such cases from lesser-known Romance varieties. Michele Loporcaro The impact of morphology on change in agreement systems¹Abstract: Agreement is a syntactic mechanism involving morpho-syntactic categories such as person, number, gender. Since morphology provides the formal means for this syntactic mechanism to result in surface contrasts, the impact of morphology on agreement is usually limited to the (trivial) fact that the signalling of agreement stays and falls with (the contrast between cells of) the morphological paradigms whose cells are defined through distinct morpho-syntactic feature values.However, it sometimes happens that pure morphology (e.g. [contrasts in] inflectional classes) conditions change in agreement rules and/or in morpho-syntactic properties of the language such as, say, the number of genders occurring in the system. In this paper, I will review some such cases from lesser-known Romance varieties.In ammentu de Pedru Depperu, su connoschidore prus mannu dessu lurisincu