Le classi nominali con plurali in -a e in -ora in toscano antico: identificazione, consistenza e produttività

This study revisits the Old Italian nominal system, aiming to deepen our understanding of the inflectional classes featuring plurals in -a and -ora. Based on an exhaustive analysis of the Tuscan documentation collected in the TLIO Corpus, this paper provides a twofold contribution. First, by discussing a series of ambiguous cases, it quantifies the lexemes belonging to each of these classes – an operation never before undertaken for an Old Italo-Romance variety, at least not in these terms. Second, it documents the existence of an additional inflectional paradigm (-e/-a) that has eluded previous analyses. This paradigm serves as a further indicator of the expansive force of -a plurals during the transition from Latin to Italo-Romance vernaculars. Regarding gender – which in these classes almost always displays an alternating neuter value – the study highlights both new examples of plural neuter agreement (e.g., la braccia lunga ‘the long arms’) and cases of masculine agreement (e.g., li castella belli ‘the beautiful castles’), the latter being functional to the subsequent inflection class shift of many such nouns into the -o/-i class. Finally, the paper examines the productivity of the identified classes, measured according to the qualitative parameters established in theoretical morphology over the last two decades.