Parametric comparison and dialect variation. Insights from Southern Italy

This paper applies the Parametric Comparison Method (PCM) to the description of syntactic variation in the nominal domain in a representative subset of Romance dialects of Southern Italy. We observe that, in order to perform successfully at the level of micro-comparison, the method must be supplemented by parameters specifically targeting this level of resolution. We sketch some such (micro-)parameters, investigate their interaction with the observed surface patterns, and show that their distribution broadly matches the received wisdom about the dialectal structure of Italo-Romance.