Tracce di distinzione tra neutro e maschile sull’articolo indefinito in italo-romanzo

The distinction of three target genders in central-southern Italian dialects is a matter of debate between those who advocate in particular for the contrast between the N(euter) – hosting only mass nouns – and the M(asculine) an analysis in terms of grammatical gender and those who prefer to consider the nouns traditionally labelled as neuter a subclass of masculine defined semantically as [–count]. In this debate, one argument to support the first (morphosyntactic) analysis over the second (semantic) has been the establishment of a N ≠ M contrast on the indefinite article in some dialects of the area: Agnonese [nə ˈmɔi̯lə] ‘a honey’ ≠ [nu ˈmiu̯rə] ‘a wall’. Loporcaro (2018: 159) charts what was known about the topic up to that point, listing eight Italo-Romance points, half of which present a fully functional N ≠ M contrast on the indefinite article – the case exemplified above with Agnonese – while in the other half there are lexically fixed residues, an indication that the opposition existed in the past. Since then, the empirical picture has become richer, thanks to a series of new acquisitions that this article reviews, proposing a classification of the different types of N ≠ M contrast (functional or residual; dependent or not on phonological and/or lexical factors; concomitant or not with an N ≠ M contrast on other agreement targets, etc.) and reiterating its centrality in the debate on the status of the neuter in central-southern Italian, given that the co-occurrence with the indefinite article is generally incompatible with non-countability, which is not reconcilable with a purely semantic analysis of the class of nouns in question and is instead perfectly in line with an analysis in terms of gender class.

Si riconsidera qui l’opposizione fra n(eutro di materia), ospitante nomi di massa, e (m)aschile alla luce della sua manifestazione sull’articolo indefinito in alcuni dialetti italiani mediani e alto-meridionali: p.es. agnonese [nə ˈmɔi̯lə] ‘un.n miele’ ≠ [nu ˈmiu̯rə] ‘un.m muro’. Grazie a nuove indagini mirate, agli otto punti censiti in Loporcaro (2018, 159) se ne sono aggiunti altri otto, qui considerati da un lato classificando i modi in cui ricorre la suddetta opposizione (funzionale o residuale; dipendente o meno da fattori fonologici e/o lessicali; concomitante o meno con opposizione sugli altri bersagli dell’accordo), dall’altro ribadendo la centralità di tali dati per il dibattito sullo statuto del neutro di materia: la nascita di forme neutre di articolo indefinito, infatti, che non sogliono ricorrere coi nomi massa, non può esser spiegata da chi nega al neutro lo statuto di genere distinto dal maschile propugnando un’analisi alternativa dei nomi neutri come sottoclasse puramente semantica, definita come [–numerabile], del maschile stesso.