Diachrony and Dialects

Paola Benincà is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of Padua, and before that was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Milan, and researcher at the Centre for Italian Dialectology of the National Research Council in Padua. Her research interests include synchronic and diachronic Romance syntax and morphology, and the history of linguistics. Recent works include chapters of the Grammatica dell'Italiano Antico (ed. G. Salvi and L. Renzi, 2010) and the collection of papers Mapping the Left Periphery: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Volume 5, which she co-edited with Nicola Munaro (OUP 2010). She has coordinated the on-line data-base ASIt ('Atlas of Italian Dialect Syntax').Adam Ledgeway is Professor of Italian and Romance Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge. His research interests include Italian dialectology, the comparative history and morphosyntax of the Romance languages, Latin, syntactic theory and linguistic change. His recent publications include Grammatica diacronica del napoletano (Niemeyer 2009); Syntactic Variation: The Dialects of Italy (CUP 2010, co-edited with Roberta D'Alessandro and Ian Roberts); The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages Vol 1: Structures, Vol 2: Contexts (CUP 2011, 2013, co-edited with Martin Maiden and J.C. Smith); and From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change (OUP 2012).Nigel Vincent is Professor Emeritus of General and Romance Linguistics at The University of Manchester, following retirement from the Mont Follick Chair in Comparative Philology, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has held visiting appointments at the Universities of Copenhagen, Pavia and Rome and an Erskine Fellowship at the University of Canterbury (NZ). His publications include The Romance Languages (with Martin Harris, 1988) and articles on morphosyntactic change, with special reference to Latin, Italian and the dialects of Italy. He co-directed with Mair Parry and Robert Hastings the AHRC-funded project Sintassi degli antichi volgari d'Italia (SAVI) (2000-2005).

This book examines morphosyntactic variation in the Romance varieties spoken in Italy from both a regional and historical perspective. It examines a range of phenomena, backed up by extensive empirical data, and will be a valuable resource not only for specialists in Italo-Romance but also for researchers in morphosyntactic change more generally

1: Nigel Vincent: Similarity and diversity in the evolution of Italo-Romance