Meaning and grammar seminar

Speaker: Jessica Rita Messina (Università degli Studi di Padova)

Title: Functional items in Arbëreshë NPs

Abstract: This contribution aims to analyse the morpho-syntax of some NP functional items (determiners, finite inflection, pre-adjectival and pre-genitival linkers) of the Arbëreshe of Piana degli Albanesi (Palermo, Sicily) as indicators of language variation in a multilingual setting. After five centuries of intimate contact with Italo-Romance varieties (local dialects and Standard Italian), it is observable a morpho-syntactic reorganization within arbëreshë DPs, in terms of lexicalization of Definiteness: alongside regularly morphologically integrated borrowed Ns (cfr. Turano 2004, 2012; Savoia 2015), in which definiteness is realized by means of finite morphology (i.e. “enclitic Article”), several Romance DPs have been incorpotated without any morpho-syntactic adaptation (një çellularë / çellular-i ‘a mobile phone’/ ‘the mobile phone’ vs. një makina / ‘a makina ‘a car’/ ‘the car’). Their systematic and normed-like use seems to have led to a parallel structure, alternative to the albanian one, increasingly selected by speakers as a tool of Definiteness lexicalization (i.e. pre-posed Article). Moreover, the data on linkers and PPs show a general trend concerning a new distribution of Definiteness properties which apparently involves the whole Nominal domain. Overall, it is detectable an ongoing semantic and syntactic reanalysis of finite morphology/linkers (D category) as functional heads of an higher projection: the Upward Reanalysis (Roberts & Roussou 2003) suggests that Language contact produces more relevant changes in the external layers of phases