Unusual agreement targets in Ripano

Abstract

Abstract The Italo-Romance variety of Ripano, spoken in the southern Marche region of Italy, exhibits a wide range of unusual agreement targets, including interrogative words, conjunctions, and even nouns. Yet despite agreement morphology being attested on items belonging to nearly every part of speech in Ripano, there is no class (other than verbs) where agreement is found on all lexical items. The typologically rare phenomenon of agreement between arguments is attested in the speech of some individuals, but the acceptability of such structures is subject to intra-speaker variation, being more widespread in older speakers and speakers of rural varieties. In this comprehensive overview, the controllers, targets, domains, features, and values involved in the extensive agreement system of Ripano are examined, drawing on qualitative and quantitative analyses of data collected during interviews with ten native speakers of urban and rural Ripano.