chapter 1 The Distribution of Gender and Number in Nominal Expressions

Edoardo Cavirani

1 Introduction

Based on a literature survey and new data resulting from fieldwork, this paper offers a description of the pattern of variation displayed by certain Italian dialects concerning the realization of the f and pl morphosyntactic features in the nominal expression (henceforth DP). While in St. Italian all the elements of the DP show full gender and number concord (Cardinaletti & Giusti 2015), the varieties under concern display various patterns of partial concord, pl surfac- ing just on (language-specific) subsets of DP elements. Furthermore, the linear ordering of the f and pl phonological exponents apparently violates the Mirror Principle (Baker 1985), namely one of the most robust interlinguistic general- izations. Indeed, while the gender exponent generally precedes number (e.g.

Sp. lob-ROOT -oM -sPL ‘wolves’), in the varieties under analysis the phonological exponent of number occurs between the root and the exponent of gender (e.g.

Colonnatese don-ROOT -jPL -aF ‘women’). The data come from dialects spoken in Lunigiana (Figure 1.1), a geolinguistic domain extending over the borders between , Emilia and .1 Historical and geographical conditions (Pistarino 1984) fostered the devel- opment of the linguistic variability characterizing the area:

probably, no other region of the Peninsula can present the scholar with so many phonetic varieties in such a small area, as Lunigiana does; here the phonetic laws of a village differ, often fundamentally, from the ones of nearby villages. The origin of this endless variation can be found, with-

1 Lunigiana northwestern borders include the Ligurian districts of , , Vezzano Ligure, Santo Stefano , Arcola, , , , and Ortonovo. As for its northern and eastern borders, they coincide with the Tuscan districts of and (North) and Filattiera, , , Comano, and (East). The southern border crosses the - district, including only Carrara.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004354395_003 14 cavirani

figure 1.1 Lunigiana

out any doubt, in the encounter within this region of Tuscan, Ligurian and Emilian: indeed, it can be said that Lunigiana dialects represent the joining link between the above mentioned dialects, whose elements continuously clash against each other, the victory smiling alternatively to one or the other. Variability, then, together with the melting of different elements, constitutes the peculiar character of Lunigiana dialects […]. giannarelli 1913: 261

Because of this high degree of microvariation, Lunigiana takes on great impor- tance for both dialectologists and linguistic theorists. For dialectologists, the examination of the diatopic distribution of the relevant linguistic features rep- resents a precious tool for i) defining the internal borders of the Northern Ital- ian Dialects (NID) (and, more generally, the Western Romance) linguistic con- tinuum, thereby improving the dialects’ classification and enlarging the typo- logical database, and ii) reconstructing the diffusion of the diachronic changes that shaped such a continuum, whose stages are represented by the attested varieties. As for the theorists, microvariation can be thought of as an ideal lab- oratory to investigate the structure of the language faculty: since closely related varieties share many grammatical properties, the smallest features responsible for the observed variation can be identified (Kayne 2005; Barbiers 2012; Sloos & van Oostendorp 2012). As can be argued from the quote from Giannarelli (1913) given above, Luni- giana microvariation has been mainly approached from linguistically ‘superfi- cial’ perspectives, whose main goal is in line with the taxonomic and descrip-