RESEARCH POSTER PRESENTATION DESIGN © 2015 www.PosterPresentations.com SIGMATIC II PERSON ENDING Here we are in a very debated theme of Venetian historical morphology, that is the persistence of the sigmatic II person ending within the verb system. The persistence, in this dialect, of the final -s in the II person is a known fact, which is still detectable, in some contexts, in Modern Venetian. This maintenance seems not to have been described throughout its historical trajectory. LATIN OUTCOMES IN VENETIAN This specific question may be important, since it may be linked to the question of the outcomes of the masculine and feminine accusative plural –s, which is the same reflected in the –s plural forms of the Western Romania and – but the debate is still on – in –i and –e plural forms of the Eastern Romania (Italo- and Daco-Romance). As long as the Venetian has never had sigmatic plurals, we consider important to compare this lack with the presence of –s in the verb morphology. This study proposes not to solve the issue itself but to clarify the borders for the maintenance of the sigmatic morpheme in the oldest documented phase of Venetian: STARTING FROM THE MEDIEVAL VENETIAN, WHAT HAVE BEEN THE DIFFERENT MOPHO-PHONOLOGICAL CONTEXTS IN WHICH THERE HAS BEEN THE MAINTENANCE OF THE FINAL –S? TODAY VENETIAN LANGUAGE Among the North Italo-Romance varieties, the venetian emerges, in modern synchrony, for a particularity: it is still presenting some traces of –s in the final position, even if it is circumscribed to the verb system only. The Venetian verb morphology , as a matter of fact, does not show any final – s, which re-appears only on some interrogative II person forms, with an enclitic subject –tu: Sis tu? Are you? Sas tu? Do you know? Gas tu? Do you have? Vus tu? Do you want? Today, the native speakers of Venetian consider a) vustu? > old form, but very Venetian: OK b) cantistu? > too old form, incorrect: NO it co-exists with ti pol? Do you want? (do you sing? > to sing is a polysyllabic verb in Ven.) -s interrogative form: monosyllabic verbs vs. polysyllabic verbs SO, ARE THEY RESIDUAL FORMS? Stated what is above, it can be interesting to verify if those sigmatic elements are residual forms, coming from a previous phase of the Venetian, in which, somehow, there could have been a more conspicuous presence of the final –s within the verb system. We circumscribe the research only to the verb system, as a sigmatic plural has never existed. a) Pellegrini (1990) stated that there must have been a sigmatic plural in the Venetian language, in a very ancient stage. The almost absent umlaut might be a sign for an ancient sigmatic plural, which may have inhibited the outcome in –i, responsible for the umlaut itself. We do not have any textual confirmation, except from an unicum: Presis > -s plural for ‘prices’, in a 1349 letter in Lettere di Mercanti a Pignol Zucchello : but written in Crete (Venetian Candia), by a non-Venetian writer – philological inconsistency of the form. b) A contrastive Venetian – Italian, dated 1876 (Nazari), prescribed an –s form for II person in the question, with the enclitic subject –tu. c) Rohlfs (1967) states that in the Old Venetian the Latin final –s of the II person singular has relatively well conserved. WHAT AND WHY ? METHOD S MONOSYLLABIC VS. POLYSYLLABIC REFERENCES CONCLUDING ON THE DIACHRONIC LINE BOZZOLO , CARLA e ORNATO , EZIO (1983): Pour une histoire du livre manuscrit au moyen age. Trois essais de codicologie quantitative, Paris, Centre National de la Recherche Scietifique. FRANCESCATO , GIUSEPPE (1982): Udine: la lingua, Udine, Casamassima. IORIO-FILI, DOMENICO eBOCCELLARI, ANDREA (2005): GATTOWeb – Gestione degli Archivi Testuali del Tesoro delle Origini. Corpus OVI dell’Italiano Antico, Istituto Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, http://gattoweb.ovi.cnr.it/(S(yh3vy1555jounm55i4 h45x45))/CatForm01.aspx. Consultato da febbraio a maggio 2016. We have then proceeded to a systematic research of the II person sigmatic forms in the history of Venetian, so that some morphological and phonological reflections can be done. The researching method is inspired from the one of quantitative codicology, theorized by Bozzolo and Ornato (1983), and consists in considering every single form as a speaker performance (parole), expression of an almost definite system (langue). So the research that we conduct does not consist in finding the specific features of a particular form, but rather to classify a definite number of parameters. The period analysed is the Medieval Venetian, XIII-XIV centuries, detectable from the big quantity of Late Middle Age documents: because of that we restricted the research within the GattoWeb database: after having checked the texts, we made up a corpus of 13 items. Corpus: Enrico Castro enrico.castro@phd.unipd.it The sigmatic II person ending in Old Venetian II CreteLing Summer School 2018 – Rethymnon, July 16 th - 27 th Testo Autore Datazione Nome breve Edizione di riferimento 1 Proverbia quæ dicuntur super natura feminarum Sconosciuto fine XII sec. Proverbia (Contini, 1995) 2 Disticha Catonis Sconosciuto XIII sec. Disticha (Tobler, 1883) 3 Panfilo veneziano Sconosciuto XIII sec. Pamphilus (Haller, 1982) 4 Raccolta di testi veneziani del Duecento e dei primi del Trecento Vari e sconosciuti 1253 - 1321 Testi veneziani (Stussi, 1965) 5 Lettere Venezia 1309 Sconosciuti 1309 Venezia 1309 (Stussi, 1996) 6 Cronica deli imperadori Sconosciuto 1301 Cronica (Ceruti, 1878) 7 Atti del Podestà di Lio Mazor + Appendice Sconosciuto 1312 - 1313 Lio Mazor (Salem, 2007) Appendice (Levi, 1904) 8 Trattato de Regimine Rectoris Fra Paolino Minorita 1313 - 1315 Minorita (Mussafia, 1868) 9 Manoscritto Mercantile Zibaldone da Canal Sconosciuto I quarto XIV sec. Zibaldone (Stussi, 1967) 10 Legenda de Santo Stadi Franceschino Grioni prima del 1321 Grioni (Monteverdi, 1930) 11 Vangeli veneziani Sconosciuto I metà XIV sec. Vangeli (Gambino, 2007) 12 Tarifa zoè noticia dy pexi e mexure di luogi e tere che s’adovra marcadantia per el mondo Sconosciuto dopo il 1345 Tarifa (Cessi & Orlandini, 1925) 13 La Legenda di glorioxi apostoli misier sen Piero e misier sen Polo Sconosciuto II metà XIV secolo Apostoli (Brusegan Flavel, 2005) We have analysed in an excel sheet every single found form: conjugation, accent, etc ... . We collected 895 forms (token) in total. ATON VS. TONIC ENDINGS In total we can detect 213 types. 127 are TONIC ( 60% ) 86 are ATON Tonic > Aton endings But the typology must be ameliorated: a) There are some –s that are not real endings: dis (you say), cognos (you know), savres (you would know). X b) The indicative future must be considered somehow monosyllabic, because of their construction: infinite + tonic às (coming from latin HABERE). O We have only 18 forms with a –tu. Even if the enclisis could appear fundamental in synchrony for the maintenance of the final –s, at this stage of diachrony the exiguity of its presence (8%) makes us conclude that the sigmatic ending is not yet phonological protected by the enclitic subject. So, not only we do not have any difference between forms with and forms without the enclisis of –tu, but also the difference between endings in monosyllabic forms and polysyllabic forms is deleted, simplifying into tonic and aton endings, relatively. Even if the quantitative difference is not so heavy, we can still detect a tendency: a) the final –s of the II person is maintained more frequently if in tonic syllables. b) the enclisis is not a key factor for the –s persistence. THE TONIC ENDINGS As stated above, the only tonic endings are monosyllabic. The found forms are the so-called verbs with weak root, that built particular conjugation schemes. das you give stas you stay vas you go sas you know fas you do a) They have a very strong analogy one another. b) The final –s itself, without the vowel which can be the thematic one, is re-analysed as a desinential morpheme for the II person singular: it is enough, alone, to vehicle the grammar meaning of II person singular. c) So the presence of a tonic root must be a condition for this re-analysis: because of its iconicity, it is re-activated. The confirmation comes from the imperfective: The only sigmatic forms for the imperfetto is for forms of those atematic /weak verbs: diseves you used to say faves you used to do savis you used to know So on the diachronic line we can detect 4 different stages for the maintenance of fianal -s: affirmative interrogative polysyllabic monosyllabic Medieval yes yes yes yes ‘700/’800 - yes yes yes ‘900 - yes - yes Tomorrow? - - - - LAUSBERG , HEINRICH (1971a): Linguistica romanza, vol. I – Fonetica, Milano, Feltrinelli. LAUSBERG , HEINRICH (1971b): Linguistica romanza, vol. II – Morfologia, Milano, Feltrinelli. LEPSCHY , GIULIO C. (1983): Clitici veneziani, in Linguistica e dialettologia veneta. Studi offerti a Manlio Cortelazzo dai colleghi stranieri, a cura di G. Holtus e M. Metzeltin, Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag, pp. 71 – 77. LOPORCARO , MICHELE (2009): Profilo linguistico dei dialetti italiani, Bari, Laterza. MAIDEN, MARTIN (2016a): Inflectional morphology, in The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages, a cura di Adam Ledgeway e Martin Maiden, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 497 – 512. MANIACI, MARILENA e ORNATO , EZIO (1993): Che fare del proprio Corpus? Costituzione e descrizione di una popolazione di libri a fini statistici, in «Gazette du livre médieval», XXII, pp. 27 – 37. MARCATO , CARLA (2002): Il veneto, in I dialetti italiani. Storia, struttura, uso, a cura di Manlio Cortelazzo, Carla Marcato, Nicola De Blasi, Gianrenzo P. Clivio, Torino, Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, pp. 296 – 328. PELLEGRINI, GIOVAN B ATTISTA (1977): Dialetti veneti antichi, in Id., Studi di dialettologia e filologia veneta, Pisa, Pacini, pp. 32 – 88. PELLEGRINI, GIOVAN B ATTISTA (1990): Breve storia linguistica di Venezia e del Veneto, in «Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti», CXLVIII, pp. 219 – 235. 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