Lo «stato di salute» del neutro di materia in area mediana: alcuni dati da cinque punti linguistici

Central-Southern Italo-Romance dialects differ from most standard Romance languages in the presence of more complex grammatical gender systems, with four values instead of two. In addition to the masculine and feminine gender, in fact, we have the so-called alternating neuter and the mass neuter, both coming from the Latin neuter. In Central Italy, the mass neuter is distinguished from the masculine by the contrast between final unstressed -/o/ vs. -/u/. This opposition is not always (and not everywhere) stable due to a series of phonological and morphological phenomena and, in part, also because of the pressure of standard Italian (in which -u, -o > -o). All this has, as can be expected, repercussions on the resistance of the opposition between masculine and neuter, a gender value which, moreover, has been eroded for some time according to a centuries-old dynamic that has affected all Romance languages. Using data collected through field investigations in five locations, distributed in three different regions of central Italy (Lazio, Umbria and Marche), we tried to illustrate what are the possible dynamics that lead to the simplification of the final unstressed vowel system and what kind of repercussions this has on the mass neuter marking. The results obtained, considering both the lexical and the syntactic dimension, show a significantly heterogeneous situation: some dialects, such as the Umbrian one of Foligno, display a rather advanced stage of erosion for the neuter while others, like Belmontese (spoken in the Marche region), reveal its still ongoing productivity.