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Defective object clitic paradigms and the relation between language development and loss1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2013

SANDRA PAOLI
SANDRA PAOLI*
Affiliation:
The University of Oxford
*
Author's address: Centre for Linguistics and Philology, Walton Street, Oxford OX1 2HG, UK[email protected]
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Abstract

Through an investigation of morphologically defective pronominal object paradigms in a number of northern Italian dialects, this article offers a reflection on the relation between the development and the loss of linguistic items based on the reconstruction of the possible diachronic path that has led to the current situation. The paper sets out to achieve two objectives. First, it presents a detailed description of the peculiarities of the object clitic paradigm in the northern Italian dialects and places them within the wider Romance context. Secondly, it discusses and evaluates the way the processes of emergence and loss of linguistic items relate to one another, with specific reference to what appears to be a more general hierarchy operative in languages, the Referential Hierarchy (Silverstein 1976, Comrie 1981, and many others).

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 143 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[1]

The leave for the research presented here was funded by two grants from the John Fell Fund, reference 073/697 (Comelico) and 092/326 (Surselvan), which are gratefully acknowledged. Part of the data presented here appeared in Paoli (2009). I am greatly indebted to my Comelico informants and to the curators of the various libraries and archives. This article is only able to contain a small part of all the materials collected, but it is hoped that it can nevertheless give a glimpse of the linguistic value of these dialects. Special thanks also go to Giampaolo Salvi, Michele Loporcaro, Philomen Probert, Martin Maiden and Chiara Cappellaro for very helpful suggestions and bibliographical leads. The final version of this paper owes a great deal to the generous, perceptive and thought-provoking comments of four anonymous JL referees, and to the editorial team at JL. All errors remain, needless to say, my own responsibility.

References

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Surselvan

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