Greek-Romance Language Contact in Southern Italy

Greek and Romance dialects in southern Italy have been in intensive contact with one another for centuries, leading to convergence in their grammars in many key respects that are too striking to be dismissed as accidental. This volume investigates fundamental research questions relating to the exact nature of these Greek and Romance contact grammars, which present a unique opportunity to study, test, and challenge theories of contact-induced morphosyntactic change. They serve as an experimental laboratory in which minimal grammatical differences between two highly homogeneous linguistic systems can reveal what precisely may vary and which linguistic mechanisms underpin that variation. Moreover, Greek and Romance have been spoken alongside each other for centuries in two separate linguistic 'islands' of southern Italy which have themselves never been in contact with one another: this allows a valuable comparison between different outcomes and scenarios of linguistic change and variation involving the same phenomena and the same language families across two otherwise very similar contact situations. Despite a wealth of phonetic and lexical research, there is still remarkably very little known about the morphosyntax and the potential areas of contact and interference between these two linguistic groups. These scarcely investigated areas of variation and contact are explored in detail in this book through a series of case studies from the nominal, sentential, and clausal domains, with the aim of presenting the first integrated and comparative account of Greek and Romance morphosyntactic contact in southern Italy. By bringing together the best in traditional dialectological scholarship with the state-of-the-art in formal analysis, the interpretation and assessment of the Greek and Romance linguistic evidence presented in this book makes a fundamental contribution to current linguistic theories and to the understanding of microvariation and the mechanisms and processes involved in contact-induced language change.

Adam Noel Ledgeway is Professor of Italian Linguistics at the University of Bergamo, and before that was Professor of Italian and Romance Linguistics at the University of Cambridge (1996-2024). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and Member of the Academia Europaea. His research interests include the comparative history and morphosyntax of the Romance languages, Italian dialectology, Latin, Italo-Greek, syntactic theory, linguistic change, and language contact. Norma Schifano is Assistant Professor in Italian and Comparative Romance Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. Before taking up her current post, she worked at the Universities of Oxford, Manchester, and Birmingham. Her research interests include Italian and Romance comparative morphosyntax (diachronic and synchronic), language contact, language documentation of linguistic minorities and migrant communities, participatory research and research ethics, and pedagogical linguistics. Giuseppina Silvestri is Continuing Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to joining UCLA, she held a research associate position at the University of Cambridge. Her research centres on language variation and change, particularly in low-resource languages, and the interfaces between phonology-syntax and between syntax-semantics. In addition, her work includes applying Natural Language Processing techniques to unstructured data.