Measuring syntactic diversity in Southern Italy: a microparametric approach

This paper argues for the importance of syntactic comparison for the contrastive analysis and classification of languages closely intertwined geographically, genealogically and sociolinguistically. All such cases are well represented in Southern Italy, within Romance and between Romance and Greek. In this area, we collected syntactic data from the nominal domain in 8 Romance varieties (three in Sicily: Ragusa, Mussomeli and the Gallo-Italic dialect of Aidone; two in Calabria: Reggio Calabria and Verbicaro; one in Salento and one in Campania), and two Greek ones (Salento Greek and Southern Calabria Greek). To better delineate the internal structure of the two language groups, we extended our comparisons to a set of “standard” Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Rumanian), a set of Greek varieties (Standard Modern Greek, two varieties of Cappadocian Greek, Romeyka Pontic, Cypriot), and their ancestors (Latin and two varieties of Ancient Greek).