| This project focuses on a striking parallelism between two macro-groups of languages: southern Italian dialects and the so-called split-ergative languages, like Basque, Georgian, Dyirbal, Hindi/Urdu. Surprisingly, these two groups of languages, which have otherwise very little in common, both organize the grammatical material in a very peculiar fashion, by grouping some elements (like for instance 1st and 2nd person pronouns or subjects) to the exclusion of others (3rd person subjects). This particular structuring of grammatical material is also known as a split in the grammatical information. Some subclasses are thus created that are usually not present in other languages. In these languages, splits occur in many areas: there are splits in number and person of the subject, splits in verb tense/aspect/mood, or even splits according to whether a sentence is subordinate or not. These splits are then reflected in the grammar in different ways, like, for instance, by selecting HAVE or BE depending on whether the subject is 3rd person (1b,d) or 1st/2nd person (1a,c), in Abruzzese, a southern Italian dialect: (1) a. So/si magnate be-1st sg/2nd sg eaten 'I have eaten' b. A magnate have-3rd eaten 'He has eaten' c. Seme/sete magnite be-1st pl/2nd pl eaten 'We have eaten' d. A magnite have-3rd eaten 'They have eaten' This project addresses the following four questions: Question 1: What is the function of splits in linguistic systems? Question 2: Why these splits and not others? Question 3: Which splits can combine and which ones cannot? Question 4: Do alternations in case, auxiliation, and the rest, reflect underlyingly the same operation? The four central questions will be tackled from three different perspectives: historical, micro-comparative and macro-comparative; each of these will be addressed by a dedicated subproject, to achieve different insights on the function and distribution of splits. |
