Sigmatic plurals in Romance varieties spoken in Italy and their interaction with -i plurals

Abstract

In Sardinian, Friulian, Rhaeto-Romance, Occitan (not considered in this work) and Franco-Provençal varieties spoken in peripheral Italian areas, the -i inflection is not totally eradicated but interacts with plural -s. The coexistence of -s and -i reflects syntactic constraints. Specifically, -i is in complementary distribution with -s or it combines with –s, giving rise to a duplicated lexicalization of plurality. In any event, it is specialized for a subset of the morpho-syntactic contexts. The distribution of -i generally involves the D domain, i.e. determiners and clitics. In some cases, -i is limited to the D elements. Different agreement systems on D and on N emerge, recalling partial or asymmetric agreement phenomena known in literature. Moreover, in the relevant varieties (-)i is in turn the inflection of the dative clitic; this suggests that (-)i is endowed with a slightly different content from plural -s, that, on the contrary, shows no connection with dative.

Possessives, from Franco-Provençal and Occitan Systems to Contact Dialects in Apulia and Calabria

“…Possessives seem to question this generalization, given that, in many Gallo-Romance varieties, they can replace determiners subsuming the entire burden of reference. This possibility closely recalls the phenomena concerning the distribution of plural inflection within the DP in some Romance varieties discussed by Costa and Figueiredo Silva (2002) and for Italian and Rhaeto-Romance varieties by Manzini and Savoia (2005), Baldi and Franco (2018), (Manzini et al 2019(Manzini et al , 2020 and (Savoia et al 2018(Savoia et al , 2019. In both cases, we see that referential properties can assume different types of inflectional exponent and a different distribution between the head element and the noun.…”

“…In the literature (Picallo 2008;Fassi Fehri 2015 on Arabic;Kramer 2015) at least two functional projections are required-roughly gender and number. Following Savoia 2014, 2018) and (Savoia et al 2018(Savoia et al , 2019, the internal organization of the noun includes a category-less lexical root √ (Marantz 1997), that, in keeping with Higginbotham (1985), is understood as a predicate. The root merges with the inflectional elements endowed with interpretive content (gender, number, etc.…”

“…(12b)), the possessive takes the ending -a. We can treat -a as an exponent associated with a rich set of referential properties, as discussed in (Savoia et al 2018(Savoia et al , 2019Manzini et al 2020), assigning the structure in (29) to the combination noun+clitic, where the undersigned y and x indicate the two arguments associated with the kinship term.…”

Phenomena of Contact and Mixing in the Arbëresh Dialects of San Marzano di San Giuseppe in Salento and Vena di Maida in Calabria

“…We pursue a different approach to morphology, whereby morphology is part of the syntactic computation and there is no specialized component for the morphological structure of words (Manzini and Savoia 2017a, 2017b, 2011aSavoia et al 2018Savoia et al , 2019Manzini et al 2020aManzini et al , 2020b)-a direction that is now also being pursued by other authors, such as Collins and Kayne (2021). The lexical elements, including morphemes, are fully interpretable and contribute to realizing the syntactic structure.…”

Derivational Relators in Italian

“…The different flavors these suffixes are able to encode are a matter of pragmatic inference, something beyond our core syntactic module. Crucially, based on Borer (2003Borer ( , 2014 and Savoia et al (2017Savoia et al ( , 2018, we assume that the same lexical content can be expressed by inflectional and derivational morphemes, both cross-linguistically and intra-linguistically. 4 In other words, the very same content can be expressed inflectionally (e.g., in languages with case paradigms), and derivationally, as will become clearer below.…”