QUALI FATTORI ACCELERANO IL PASSO DELLA GRAMMATICALIZZAZIONE? Un’indagine su quattro varietà romanze non-standardizzate

A recent proposal put forward in linguistic typology and particularly in grammaticalization studies suggests that, since grammaticalization is essentially a gradual process, languages of the same linguistic family may grammaticalize at a different speed. This contribution focuses on four Romance minority and non-standard languages spoken in Italy: Ligurian, Lombard (especially its Western dialects), Tuscan (especially its Florentine and peri-Florentine dialects), and Sardinian. Their pace of grammaticalization is observed with respect to the diachronic development of three grammatical domains: demonstratives, negation, and presence/absence of a non-periphrastic perfect. Drawing upon data from grammatical descriptions, linguistic atlases, and the typological literature, it is shown that for the grammatical sub-systems at issue Lombard consistently grammaticalizes faster than Ligurian, and the latter is faster than Tuscan and Sardinian. Taking into consideration the pace of grammaticalization of other major and minor Romance languages, language contact and a smaller size of the speaker community appear to favour grammaticalization’s rhythm, while scripturalization is responsible in slowing it down.