Nouns as agreement targets in Romance: inflection and derivation

Agreeing nouns, in Italian and the other standard Romance languages, may show gender agreement via derivational morphology, though such cumulation of derivation and inflection is not a necessary condition for a noun to agree. After discussing this issue in the first part, the paper moves on to focus on derivation in the absence of overt derivational morphology (i.e. conversion) and its role in noun agreement in two Romance varieties, Asturian and Ripano, which each display quite rare agreement phenomena that are in fact mirror-images of each other. In the former, lexemes such as hermanu ‘brother’ agree either as nouns or as denominal adjectives, while in the latter words such as freddu ‘cold’, callu ‘hot’ agree either as adjectives or as deadjectival nouns. Discussion of such evidence at the fringes of noun morphology and morphosyntax in Romance shows that careful scrutiny of variation across this well-known language family is bound to reveal many more typologically interesting phenomena than its position at the core of Standard Average European would lead one to suspect.