Variation and change in morphology and syntax. Romance object agreement

The paper argues for a polycentric view of language change: change can be motivated either externally (via contact) or internally (pace e.g. Milroy 1992:88, Thomason 2003:689, who equate change with contact), and, in the latter case, it can arise within any structural component (pace Longobardi 2001:278 and much current research in minimalism, claiming that syntax is never the primary locus of syntactic change). Within each component, as Ohala (1989) shows for phonology, ‘change is drawn from a pool of synchronic variation’. To illustrate, I will draw examples from the empirical domain of Romance object-agreement phenomena. While past participle (= PtP) agreement with direct objects in perfective periphrastics was investigated extensively, the main focus of such investigation is on the syntax of (object-)agreement as well as – on the diachronic side – on its progressive reduction over time, eventually resulting in complete loss (as in Spanish or Romanian). In this paper I will focus instead on (variation in) the morphology of object agreement, showing that changes affecting the inflectional signantia of agreement interact in some respects with changes in the syntactic rule but are in some other respects independent from it. In varieties such as French or Neapolitan, sound change eroded the inflections inherited from Latin, resulting in non-canonical (wrt. to Principle III of Corbett 2003, 2005) expression of agreement. While this fact was often held responsible for the retreat of (the syntactic rule of) agreement in French, it will be shown that this traditional view is unwarranted since the loss of agreement – as testified by cross-linguistic variation – proceeds independently on the syntactic and the morphological dimensions. This is not to deny that there is an interplay between the two. In some dialects, in fact, this interplay even results in counterexamples to the principle of ‘morphology-free syntax’ (Zwicky 1996), as PtPs belonging to different morphological classes behave differently wrt. agreement. (Since this difference crucially depends on the PtP stem, such evidence militates in favour of a word-and-paradigm model of morphology.) The search for data from Romance PtP agreement that may be of interest for a theory of morphology and morphological change will be concluded by an inventory of the options for the expression of non-agreement: this is most often syncretical with msg, more seldom with neutral agreement (in central Italian varieties which display neuter as a target gender, not just as a controller gender as opposed to Romanian, cf. Corbett 1991:152) and even more seldom relies on a dedicated exponent. Corbett, G.G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corbett, G.G. 2003. Agreement: the range of the phenomenon and the principles of the Surrey Database of Agreement. Transactions of the Philological Society 101.155-202. Corbett, G.G. 2005. The canonical approach in typology. In: Z. Frajzyngier, A. Hodges & D.S. Rood (eds.), Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 25-49. Longobardi, G. 2001. Formal Syntax, Diachronic Minimalism, and Etymology: The History of French Chez. Linguistic Inquiry 32.275-302. Milroy, J. 1992. A social model for the interpretation of language change. In: M. Rissanen et al. (eds.), History of Englishes: New Methods and interpretations in historical linguistics. Berlin, 72-91. Ohala, J. J. 1989. Sound change is drawn from a pool of synchronic variation. In: L.E. Breivik & E.H. Jahr (eds.), Language change. Contributions to the study of its causes. Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 173-98. Thomason, S. G. 2003. Contact as a Source of Language Change. In: B. D. Joseph & R.D. Janda (eds.), The Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Malden, MA – Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 687-712. Zwicky, A. 1996. Syntax and phonology. In: K. Brown & J. Miller (eds.), Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories. Oxford: Elsevier, 300-5.