The position of Piedmontese on the Romance grammaticalization cline

Abstract

AbstractThe paper focuses on the pace of grammaticalization in (a number of varieties of) Piedmontese, a northwestern Italo-Romance language (which includes a regional koiné and several dialectal varieties), and compares it to the geographically closest languages conventionally discussed in the literature on the Romance grammaticalization cline (RGC): French and Italian. I examine the speed of grammaticalization in Piedmontese with respect to four grammatical domains previously analyzed for national languages in the literature on RGC, namely perfective auxiliaries, indefinite articles, demonstratives, and negation. The data show that Piedmontese varieties are on a par with, or even slightly ahead of, French along the Romance grammaticalization cline. While helping to explain why some languages appear to be more grammaticalized than others within the same genealogical family, these findings contribute to advancing our understanding of the role of language-external factors in the grammaticalization process: contact with other languages and the strength of social ties among speakers appear to be more important in favoring grammaticalization than early urbanization or the size of the speaker community.