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Eolian morphosyntax: A comparative Romance perspective https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.116163 Cardullo, Sara Natalia Ledgeway, Adam The primary aim of this thesis is to document several key morphosyntactic characteristics of the southern Italo-Romance variety of Eolian, spoken in the archipelago of the Eolian Islands. Its recent origin and hybrid-style grammar, described in previous studies, leads to an exploration of its morphosyntactic similarities to the two macro-groups of southern Italian dialects, the upper southern and the extreme southern ones (USIDs and ESIDs, respectively). This framing has also guided the selection of the four phenomena studied in this project – in which the two groups tend to differ –, which include (a) the use of possessives with kinship terms, (b) the distribution of past tense forms, (c) finite and non-finite complementation, and (d) pseudocoordination. Each section consists of a description of data obtained through fieldwork and offers an analysis rooted in the cartographic framework. A comparative approach, applied to a broad range of Romance varieties, and an attention to diachrony, are fundamental for an understanding of the greater empirical and theoretical significance of Eolian, which in several cases yields data otherwise undocumented in the literature, along with novel insights applicable to other varieties. While dialect groups and language families undoubtedly eschew monolithic categorization, the process of comparison and generalization is embraced as a valuable tool to study variation in Romance. In Chapter 2, the unusual coexistence of postnominal possessives (u frate mia, lit. ‘the brother my’, fratema, lit. ‘brother-my’) and prenominal ones (me frate ‘my brother’), in Eolian found only with kinship terms, is interpreted as an ongoing change in progress, accelerated in recent years due to more intense contact with neighboring Sicilian varieties, where the prenominal type is used. This situation will be shown to parallel distinct contact scenarios featuring other eastern Romance varieties. In Chapter 3, the use of the synthetic past tense form (fice ‘I did’) with (present) resultative value, along with the observation that multiple reflexes of HABEO FACTUM (> aju fattu ‘I have done’) coexist in synchrony, prompts a revisitation of the diachrony of past tense forms in some southern Romance varieties. In Chapter 4, it will be shown that in always preceding left-dislocated constituents, Eolian’s two finite complementizers (ca/che ‘that’), taken together, constitute a conservative dual complementizer system that is distinct from heretofore documented modern Romance varieties. A greater use of non-finite complementation, with respect to both USIDs and Balkan-style ESIDs, is also witnessed. Chapter 5 will examine the two productive types of pseudocoordination found in Eolian (interpreted as a form of monoclausal subordination with two finite verbs, V1 and V2, often connected via a linking element, e.g. vaju a mmanciu ‘I go and eat’). While in the first type, the V1 (found with GO and COME, which inflects) is considered to be a functional head, in the second (found with RETURN, which is invariable), the V1 is argued to have grammaticalized to the point of becoming a ‘deficient’ aspectual adverb, due in part to its use with non-finite V2s, unexpected within Romance. University of Cambridge 2024-05-06 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng My PhD was funded by the Cambridge Trust (Cambridge International Scholarship) and the Arts & Humanities Research Council (OOC DTP), to which I am very grateful. My research was also supported by St John's College (Learning & Research Fund), the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages and Linguistics (Fieldwork Funding), the Italian Section (Graduate Bursary), and Intesa SanPaolo (Graduate Student Research Funding). https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/380597 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/ae72fd0f-a81c-4f3b-9ae2-67656fc7318b/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/960416d5-0015-42e7-855b-1548d90ce23b/download 5cf981f3e3a444cdb6f6709d78bd8fd8 http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved comparative Romance morphosyntax complementation Eolian Islands Italo-Romance dialectology past tense forms possessives pseudocoordination