Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

The paper deals with paradigms of subject clitics (SCls) in northern Italian and Occitan dialects. Etymologically, SCls are nominative pronouns that, in present-day dialects, are bound to the inflected verb.

Paradigms of subject clitics are often defective and exhibit systematic patterns of syncretism which emerged in a relatively short diachronic span (from the 16th c. onwards). Gaps and syncretisms are sensitive to person distinctions. Previous studies revealed some robust trends in the form of implicational statements, which lend themselves to an analysis in terms of feature geometries. However, before adopting accounts hinging on grammatical features, it is worth examining (and, if possible, discarding) alternative hypotheses: H₁) external, purely historical explanations; H₂) analogical ‘morphomic’ schemas.

The paper aims to address the above hypotheses on the basis of statistical evidence based on a dataset of approximately 200 dialects. To address H₁, I will show that the geolinguistic distribution of variants does not support an explanation entirely based on external factors. As for H₂, I will elaborate on the correlation between the number (and shape) of distinctive exponents in the SCls and verbal paradigms to show that analogical/‘morphomic’ schemata cannot account for the emergence and diffusion of the attested patterns.