Auxiliary selection in Southern Lazio. Some implications for Romance microvariation and its limit

Abstract

The understudied languages spoken in Southern Lazio are sometimes said to constitute a ‘transitional area’ between the better-studied varieties spoken in central Italy and those spoken in the upper-south of Italy. In various domains of grammar, the varieties of Southern Lazio exhibit hybrid properties found in both central and upper-southern varieties; however, these hybrid systems are neither well-documented nor well-understood. The focus of this paper is on one such domain, namely systems of auxiliary selection in the perfective. Based on original fieldwork data from 21 varieties from Southern Lazio, I show that while some properties of these auxiliary selection systems are familiar from elsewhere in (Italo-)Romance (e.g. sensitivity to tense, mood, and the person and number of the subject), other such properties are not found elsewhere in the Romance literature (e.g. sensitivity to the gender of the subject). The facts presented here warrant a revision to existing analyses – specifically, existing parameter hierarchies – of auxiliary selection in Romance, which I take up in the second part of the paper. A parameter hierarchy approach allows us to model certain implicational relations among clusters of microparameters found in Southern Lazio specifically, but it also provides a means to predict the existence