Persistenza del neutro nell'italo-romanzo centro-meridionale

A widely-held tenet of Romance historical linguistics has it that the tripartite gender system of Latin shrunk to a binary system (masculine vs. feminine) very early. We argue that the evidence from several modern central-southern Italo-Romance dialects is at odds with this reconstruction, since they display a four-gender system, featuring also two distinct successors of the Latin neuter: one is a target gender (selecting dedicated agreement forms), which has a neat semantic correlate as it only hosts mass nouns; the other is a controller gender with no dedicated targets, hosting the local counterparts of Italian nouns like il braccio/le braccia. Focusing on first-hand data from dialects of Marche and Lucania, and drawing on evidence available from literature on other central-southern varieties, we demonstrate that these nouns have a different status than in Italian. Within the framework of canonical typology, we show that they are best analysed as belonging to a non-autonomous gender. Special attention will be paid to the inflectional classes these nouns belong to and to the agreement patterns they select – particularly under resolution, with reciprocal and distributive pronominal expressions, and when modified through evaluative suffixes.