[Lexicog] Particularity of Neapolitan grammar - origin?

[Marco Baroni]

Hi there.

> There are really two issues here:
> 
> (1) Why the possessive marker precedes the possessed noun in standard 
> Italian, but follows it in Neapolitan.

Italian dialects are varieties that derive from Latin, not Italian, so they
  can be as different from Italian as the other Romance languages (although
of course dialects as they are spoken today will show many traces of
centuries of contact with a prestige variety). So, it is not surprising to
find even deep syntactic differences between Italian and a dialect (in this
case, Neapolitan seems closer to the default Latin construction, although I
think that this post-nominal possessive constructions were mantained just
with mamma (mother) and a few  other terms of this sort, where probabbly 
the N+poss
construction is very frequent). [But, closer to (my) home, many Northern 
Italian dialects are not pro-drop, and they have verb-negation 
constructions, so syntactically they look more like French than Italian...]

> (2) Why the possessive is written "solid" with the possessed noun in 
> Neapolitan.
> 
> I don't know anything about (1).  But as for (2), it's not clear to me 
> at least what the significance of writing the possessive marker without 
> a space is.  This could just be a matter of orthographic tradition (of 
> course, I'm not sure that Neapolitan _has_ an orthographic tradition).

Neapolitan does have a literary tradition, although I have no idea about
how standardized its orthography is. However, this is a feature it shares 
with standard Italian, where we
write proclitics with a space (lo fa: he  does it) and enclitics without
(fallo: do it). Personally, I always suspected that this is related to the
famous "prefix-suffix asymmetry", for which pre-root materials, in many
languages, tend to merge with the root less than post-root materials,
perhaps because of lexical access constraints. In Italian and, I suspect,
Neapolitan, there is also a lot more boundary phonology happening between
words and enclitics/suffixes than between proclitics/prefixes and roots.
So, while  it is a matter of orthographic tradition, I think that this
orthographic tradition is reflecting some deeper linguistic trend, in this
case.

Regards,

Marco



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