Distribution and Function of Partitive articles in Romance (DiFuPaRo): a microvariation analysis

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Cecilia Poletto
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2017 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 361314741

The aim of the project is to provide a detailed description of the spatial distribution of different types of partitive articles (PAs), i.e. elementslike French du/des and Italian del/dei, in several Gallo- and Italo- Romance varieties, in Switzerland and Northern Italy: Standard French/Italian, colloquial (Swiss) French, Francoprovençal (FrPr) andNorthern Italian dialects (NID). Our research objective is to describe the place and function of PAs, typologically highly marked and yet quite neglected elements (besides some work on Standard French and Italian), inside the respective Romance systems of nominaldetermination: what are their morphological properties, what do they encode, where are they found in the sentence, how do they interact with NP-internal (e.g. quantifiers) and -external (e.g. negation) functional elements? The answers to these overarching questions willbroaden our understanding of nominal determination and quantification in Indo-European languages (more specifically Romance), particularly with respect to established typologicalclassifications like that in Chierchia 1998c (Romance languages as number-marking languages without classifiers) and the fundamental role and syntactic locus (Heycock/Zamparelli 2005, Borer 2005, Ihsane 2008, Mathieu 2014) of the count-mass distinction in the internal structure of nominals and (communicative) conceptualization (Champollion/Krifka 2016). To answer these questions, we will mainly exploit existing databases, first, in Switzerland (OFROM: for colloquial Swiss Frenchs: Corpus oral de français de Suisse romande, ALAVAL for Francoprovençal: Atlas linguistique audiovisuel du francoprovençal valaisan) and, second, in Italy (direction in Germany) for Northern Italy (ASIt: Atlante sintattico d'Italia), completed by fieldwork in Switzerland and Northern Italy, to set up a common database givinginsights systematically into the linguistics properties and geographical distribution of different types of PAs in the Romance varieties under investigation. We will also tackle a fundamental question of typology, on the level of microvariation: Why do we find them where we do?, and propose first formal analyses of the internal structure of nominals with PAs in Romance. We believe that this first detailed comparative investigation into the observable microvariation around partitive articles in closely related languages/varieties helps us understand the precise function(s) of these elements and will establish working tools(tagset, database) for subsequent research into more Romance varieties (Francoprovençal, Occitan, Central/Southern Italian dialects, cf. Cardinaletti/Giusti 2016). As this research project focuses on investigating non-standard endangered varieties, its importance liesalso in documenting unknown features of Romance varieties used in informal contexts only, which are highly relevant to understand issues of language contact (e.g. distribution of grammatical features in space, Bickel 2007).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Elisabeth Stark