Il genere in movimento: mutamento in corso nel dialetto di Molfetta (Bari)

While grammatical gender has become simplified through losing the neuter from Latin into the better-known Romance languages, several Romance varieties ended up with more-than-binary gender systems instead, in which two further gender values, both the heirs of the Latin neuter, exist alongside masculine and feminine. Late Latin and Medieval Romance evidence shows that the trend towards a binary gender system is a centuries-long one: we analyse the manifestations of this long-term drift in one Italo-Romance dialect from the four-gender area of Central-Southern Italy, viz. Molfettese, spoken in the province of Bari, information on whose gender system is available from the early 20th century. We ran fieldwork in Molfetta one century later and are now in the position to evaluate the changes that occurred in the meantime. While the four-gender system is still there, the two gender values which are not shared with standard Italian are presently merging into the masculine. Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods and considering both production and perception, we analyse the various facets of this process in terms of loss of lexical and syntactic productivity and consistency of marking across agreement targets. We also show that the change is progressing across the lexicon and the community, with some speakers at the vanguard, and finally show that their behaviour with respect to the on-going change can be effectively captured via scalar acceptability judgments and statistically modelled employing ordinal regression (cumulative link mixed models).