Francesco Gardani | University of Zurich, Switzerland (original) (raw)

Books by Francesco Gardani

Papers by Francesco Gardani

Revue de Linguistique Romane, 2024

Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2024

Journal of Linguistics, 2023

Expletive subject clitics (ESCs) are pronominal elements that occur in impersonal contexts with w... more Expletive subject clitics (ESCs) are pronominal elements that occur in impersonal contexts with which no individual reference is associated. Their presence strikingly distinguishes northern Italo-Romance varieties from standard Italian. We target this structural incongruence by studying the occurrence of ESCs in present-day Opitergino, a virtually unstudied Venetan variety. We explore the question of whether, in the wake of a profound transformation in the sociolinguistic environment that occurred between the first half of the 20th century and early 2020 years, the contact between Opitergino and now-dominant Italian has induced change in the Opitergino ESC system. To test whether change has occurred and to what extent, we compare the results of an extensive online survey we conducted in 2022 with the baseline rules we extracted from speakers born before 1942. We observe that while the system is overall stable, a thread of change is ongoing and manifests in (a) rule weakening in declaratives and (b) erosion of the obligatoriness of ESCs in interrogatives. We argue that this change is likely to be an effect of contact, resulting in structural convergence but not in loss, and affected the part of the ESC system that features more optionality, namely, the domain of declarative clauses.

Gardani, Francesco, Michele Loporcaro & Alberto Giudici. 2021. In and around the Balkans: Romance languages and the making of multi-layered languages. Journal of Language Contact 14(1). 1–23. DOI: 10.1163/19552629-14010001 [Open Access], 2021

The languages of the Balkans are a rich source of data on contact-induced language change. The re... more The languages of the Balkans are a rich source of data on contact-induced language change. The result of a centuries long process of lexical and structural convergence has been referred to as a 'sprachbund'. While widely applied, this notion has, however, increasingly been questioned with respect to its usefulness. Addressing the linguistic makeup of the Balkan languages, the notion of sprachbund is critically assessed. It is shown that a) the Balkan languages and the Balkan linguistic exclaves (Albanian and Greek spoken on the Italian peninsula) share similar contact-induced phenomena, and b) the principal processes underlying the development of the Balkan languages are borrowing and reanalysis, two fundamental and general mechanisms of language change.

Loporcaro, Michele, Francesco Gardani & Alberto Giudici. 2021. Contact-induced complexification in the gender system of Istro-Romanian. Journal of Language Contact 14(1). 72–126. DOI: 10.1163/19552629-14010004 [Open Access], 2021

The paper provides the first description of the borrowing of Croatian collective numerals into No... more The paper provides the first description of the borrowing of Croatian collective numerals into Northern Istro-Romanian and explores the consequences of this borrowing for the morphosyntax of the recipient language. It argues that the collective numerals under examination, which are specified as nominative plural feminine in the Slavic model, took on a different structural specification in the Romance replica, in a way that led to a restructuring of the morphosyntactic system, introducing (sub)gender overdifferentiation on just two agreement targets and, thereby, a complexification in this area of grammar. The illustration of this change is placed against the background of the other contact-induced changes that grammatical gender has undergone in Istro-Romanian during the 20th century, which have led to the borrowing of two dedicated forms in distinct inflectional cells and the rise of two separate defective gender values, each the replica of one number value of the Slavic neuter.

Gardani, Francesco & Chiara Zanini. 2022. On the subitizing effect in language contact. In Ronit Levie, Amalia Bar-On, Orit Ashkenazi, Elitzur Dattner & Gilad Brandes (eds), Developing language and literacy: Studies in honor of Dorit Diskin Ravid, 263–293. Cham: Springer. , 2022

Numerical cognition is an essential component of our daily life. It is the ability to process num... more Numerical cognition is an essential component of our daily life. It is the ability to process numerical quantities. In language, symbolic representations of numerical quantities are encoded by numerals. In situations of language contact, numerals are often borrowed from one language into another (Haspelmath & Tadmor, Loanwords in the world’s languages: A comparative handbook. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2009), and it has been observed that high and more abstract numerals are more prone to borrowing than lower numerals (Matras, Yaron, Language contact (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009: 202). Linguists mainly explain the higher borrowability of high numerals in sociocultural terms, for example, because of “their association with formal contexts of use” and “through intensification of economic activity” (Matras, Yaron, Language contact (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009: 200). We propose an alternative explanation, informed by cognitive science, showing that low numerals are more resistant to borrowing than high numerals because they are more deeply anchored in cognition.

Gardani, Francesco. 2021. On how morphology spreads. Word Structure 14(2). 129–147. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.29101.51683 [Open Access], 2021

A language's grammar can be stratified, due to borrowing processes. While being a well-establishe... more A language's grammar can be stratified, due to borrowing processes. While being a well-established term in the linguistic literature, the term 'borrowing' is sometimes used in a non-uniform way, particularly when it applies to bound morphological formatives. A Stratal Effect is hypothesized, which, applying to varying extent, gives rise to at least three distinct, psycholinguistically motivated types of morphological transfer. A typology of morphological spread is proposed, which consists of three main types: strictly compartmentalized co-morphologies, partially compartmentalized co-morphologies, and morphological borrowing. The widespread view that affix borrowing can be either direct or indirect is questioned and it is argued that most likely, morphological borrowing is always an intermediate process, involving the extraction of formatives and their diffusion within the lexicon.

Gardani, Francesco. 2020. Borrowing matter and pattern in morphology. An overview. Morphology 30(4). 263–282. DOI: 10.1007/s11525-020-09371-5 [Open Access], 2020

Morphological inventories and structures of languages in contact can converge by means of either ... more Morphological inventories and structures of languages in contact can converge by means of either increasing formal similarity (MAT borrowing), or structural congruence (PAT borrowing), or a combination of both (MAT&PAT borrowing). In order to understand whether and how these borrowing types covary with specific grammatical features and modules of grammar, I propose a typology of MAT and PAT borrowing that distinguishes between functional and realization levels and covers all areas of grammar that can be affected by borrowing. I exemplify selected subtypes of borrowing with a number of crosslinguistic cases focusing on morphology and morphosyntax.

Gardani, Francesco. 2022. Contact and borrowing. In Adam Ledgeway & Martin Maiden (eds), The Cambridge handbook of Romance linguistics, 845–869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 2022

The study of language contact is of crucial importance to our understanding of the evolutionary d... more The study of language contact is of crucial importance to our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of language. A fundamental process and result of contact-induced language change is borrowing. This has rightly been considered one of the principal sources of language change, along with sound change and analogy and consequently it plays a decisive role in the field of contact linguistics. The Romance languages have the potential to contribute substantially to this area of investigation, since they have a wide geospatial distribution, a long history of contact with several typologically diverse languages, and are abundantly documented. However, this great potential has remained largely unexploited in one main respect: the Romance data have not been used in their entirety to test theories of contact-induced language change and in particular borrowing. The present chapter takes up this challenge and, by drawing on empirical evidence from a broad range of Romance varieties, aims to outline contact-induced grammatical change and provide a critical assessment of the state-of-the-art in research on borrowing as a key mechanism of contact-induced language change and variation.

Peter Arkadiev & Francesco Gardani (eds.), Complexities in Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 1–19.

This chapter overviews some of the foundational assumptions informing contemporary views on morph... more This chapter overviews some of the foundational assumptions informing contemporary views on morphological complexity and raises some of the central questions to be addressed in the volume’s chapters from different perspectives. We propose a new composite approach in terms of a set of complexities in morphology instead of a view of morphological complexity as a unified phenomenon. This, we argue, allows us to individuate different aspects e.g., syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic, inflectional vs. derivational, etc.) as logically independent variables of cross-linguistic variation requiring their own measures and analyses. A synopsis of the volume and of the individual contributions is also provided.

Gardani, Francesco. 2020. Morphology and contact-induced language change. In Anthony Grant (ed.), The Oxford handbook of language contact, 96–122. Oxford: Oxford University Press., 2020

and Keywords This chapter focuses on a wide range of phenomena occurring under the heading of con... more and Keywords This chapter focuses on a wide range of phenomena occurring under the heading of con tact-induced morphological change, including several degrees of morphological integra tion, non-integration (qua indeclinability or maintenance of original markers), and bor rowing. It also discusses three major types of mechanisms leading to morphological bor rowing: 'macro-mechanisms' are general psycholinguistic mechanisms of transfer con ceived in terms of source language vs. recipient language agentivity; 'meso-mechanisms' are conscious and unconscious techniques which are responsible for contact-induced lan guage change, such as 'Trojan horse structures'; 'micro-mechanisms' are local, concrete mechanisms, such as reborrowing and reanalysis. Cross-linguistic data are presented and discussed in light of the implications that contact-induced morphological change has for the theory of morphology.

Voga, Madeleine, Francesco Gardani & Hélène Giraudo. 2020. Multilingualism and the mental lexicon. Insights from language processing, diachrony, and language contact, 2020

The way in which the bilingual's two languages can co-exist and interact with each other is cruci... more The way in which the bilingual's two languages can co-exist and interact with each other is crucial for the study of language coactivation. This question has been tackled from the perspective of experimental psycholinguis-tics and that of language contact which can be brought together in the light of different, yet concomitant evidence related to multiple interactions between words from the two languages. Most of these interactions can be accounted for in terms of common and/or parallel morphological representations between the two languages. The two masked priming experiments using cross-script materials reported in this chapter corroborate and extend this hypothesis by showing that different 'levels' of morphological and/or etymological relatedness underlie different priming effects. The morphological priming pattern reflects an organisation of the lexicon based on 'cross-language derivational families', whereby morphologically complex L1 words automatically activate their base word in L2. Evidence that the opposite is not true suggests the existence of a looser link between L2 words and representations at the semantic-conceptual level, while still being compatible with evidence that translation primes induce significant effects in both L2-to-L1 and L1-to-L2 directions. Evidence from language contact supports the idea that the two languages do not behave in a strictly symmetric way. The more tenuous link between L2 vocabulary and a morphological/conceptual level is mirrored by the morphological integration of loan words into a matrix language, as a significant, preliminary step in the direction of a full conceptual integration. Further data from morphological integration in accordance with the cross-language priming data point to a view of the bilingual lexicon as a unified lexico-semantic architecture.

Gardani, Francesco, Franz Rainer & Hans Christian Luschützky. 2019. Competition in morphology: A historical outline. In Franz Rainer, Francesco Gardani, Wolfgang U. Dressler & Hans Christian Luschützky (eds), Competition in inflection and word-formation, 3–36. Cham: Springer., 2019

Competition between alternative ways of realizing a certain category or concept, is a cross-secti... more Competition between alternative ways of realizing a certain category
or concept, is a cross-sectional phenomenon and a perennial issue in linguistics. The present outline reviews approaches to competition in morphology across the history of linguistics, from Ancient Indian grammatical doctrines up to present-day morphological theories. After dealing with terminological and conceptual issues, the paper features the different guises in which rivalry of forms, rules, and schemas
has been assessed in language theories and grammatical traditions from Greek and Roman antiquity up to the nineteenth century. It then focuses on structuralist and generative viewpoints, the notion of blocking, the organization of the lexicon, e.g., in inheritance-based models and in Optimality Theory, and the regularity-irregularity
debate in psycholinguistics and computational linguistics. An overview
of the contributions to the volume closes the paper.

MORFOMI SOMMERSI IN PANTESCO O DELL'ARTE DI ARRANGIARSI IN MORFOLOGIA* 1. Introduzione

Gardani, Francesco. 2018. On morphological borrowing. Language and Linguistics Compass 12(10). 1-17., 2018

For virtually as long as linguists have studied contact‐induced grammatical change, the borrowing... more For virtually as long as linguists have studied contact‐induced grammatical change, the borrowing of morphological formatives and patterns has been considered a relatively infrequent phenomenon—a view which is reflected in all well‐known borrowability scales. Yet all those scales have been constructed from limited data sets, thus producing rather intuitive generalizations, for example, that inflection is more resistant to borrowing than derivation. In reality, we do not have a precise idea of the global extent of the phenomenon. In particular, the borrowing of compounding techniques is a virtually uninvestigated topic. In recent years, linguists have more intensively pursued a line of research that identifies in the study of contact‐induced change a source of evidence for the theory of grammar and aims to show that different degrees of borrowability reflect fine‐grained distinctions between subcomponents of morphology. The ever‐growing availability of comprehensive grammars and detailed case studies has supplied an adequate empirical basis to reach this goal.

Gardani, Francesco. 2017. Business negotiations. In Gerlinde Mautner & Franz Rainer (eds), Handbook of business communication. Linguistic approaches, 91–109. Boston & Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton., 2017

We demonstrate that Old Italian had a three-gender system within which the neuter still qualified... more We demonstrate that Old Italian had a three-gender system within which the neuter still qualified as a fully fledged gender value. To substantiate this claim, we adduce evidence showing that (a) Old Italian had three distinct sets of controllers, each of which selected a separate agreement pattern; (b) to each one of those three controller sets, including the neuter, nouns were assigned belonging to different productive inflectional classes and (c) the neuter still selected at least one dedicated agreement formative, thereby still displaying traces of its original status as a target gender. This novel evidence from Old Italian squares well with what is known about past stages of other Romance varieties. Also, we briefly address the consequences of our results both for a reconstruction of the Latin-Romance transition and, more broadly, for the theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the diachronic development of gender systems.