Contact-induced change in personal pronouns : some Romance examples

Several instances of changes in the system of personal pronouns observed in Italo-Romance dialects are reviewed, asking the questions a) whether they are contact-induced, and b) how it can be demonstrated that they are. The questions are particularly thorny for changes boiling down to the simplification of case contrasts like the ones considered here (§§2-4), since this cross-linguistically frequent type of diachronic development is part and parcel of a common Romance drift that shaped, among others, the standard language which Italo-Romance dialects are in contact with. The conclusion reached here (§5) is that external evidence (i.e. socio-historical evidence from language use, migrations etc.) is necessary, in order to pin down the contact-induced nature of such changes, for this specific grammatical domain within this specific historical context. While in most of the cases discussed here the contact language is standard Italian, some of the examples involve contact with other Romance dialects co-occurring within one and the same verbal repertoire. In §6, one such example is discussed in detail, since the contact-induced reshaping of gender-marking in personal pronouns in Lurese (a northern Sardinian dialect) eloquently shows that contact-induced change does not reduce to mechanical replica but may result in reshaping of the system along lines hardly predictable from structural comparison of the model and replica languages.