South by Southeast. A syntactic approach to Greek and Romance microvariation

This article argues for the relevance of parametric syntax in the contrastive analysis and historical classification of varieties that are closely intertwined geographically, genealogically and sociolinguistically. We show that Longobardi and Guardiano’s (2009) Parametric Comparison Method, already successfully applied to the macroclassification of a number of scattered Indo-European languages (Longobardi et al 2013), can analyze microvariation equally successfully. Just by departing from the nominal syntactic database used for the core Indo-European languages and improving on it, the nominal syntax of several contemporary Romance and Greek varieties could be revealingly analyzed. On this basis, we are able to move towards sketching a reliable picture of the history and the geocultural factors that shaped linguistic diversity in the South-Central and East Mediterranean up to the Black Sea. The analysis attempts to lay down some grounding problems, tools, and hypotheses for a novel quantitative framework in the study of syntactic dialectology.