Possessives, from Franco-Provençal and Occitan Systems to Contact Dialects in Apulia and Calabria
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This article discusses the possessive system in three Southern Italian villages, two of which are Franco-Provençal enclaves and the latter is an Occitan one, as a result of immigration processes dating back to the 12th century.
The Gallo-Romance varieties spoken in these small communities have obviously been influenced by the Italo-Romance varieties spoken in the territories around them, and contact phenomena emerge, in particular in the possessive system. Crucially, the pre-nominal non articulated possessive typical of Gallo-Romance varieties (Standard French included) overlaps with the articulated post-nominal possessive typical of Southern Italian dialects, probably influenced by the Spanish language in this regard.
The hybrid system which emerges is very interesting and certainly worth discussing. Furthermore, the analysis of possessives here proposed is not limited to the present varieties; specifically these data have been provided in order to shed light on universal properties concerning the syntax of possession; in particular the analysis represents an adaptation of Chomsky’s (2001) Phase theory, with the DP projection also considered to be a phase, thus pursuing and extending the line of thought originated by Abney (1987) on the strict parallelism between the extended projections CP and DP.
For the reasons which I have just outlined I certainly advise publication of the paper, though I would suggest the Authors (A’s henceforward) to make a few minor changes.
General comments:
First of all I would recommend A’s to make a thorough revision of the correspondence between examples and glosses, since – in my opinion – the very high number of examples provided has led to a few mistakes and typos here and there; I will signal a few in the punctual comments but there may be others.
Secondly, among the languages in contact in the discussed areas I would also mention Standard Italian, which is the variety learnt at school. Indeed the Standard Italian possessive system is different from both the Gallo-Romance and the Southern Italian systems, and the special treatment devoted to kinship terms may also be influenced by it.
Finally, I wonder why the interesting and promising parallelism drawn in Section 1 between genitive and dative systems, both featuring an inclusion relation, has been completely abandoned later on, and in particular in the syntactic analysis. Indeed forms like ‘a mia’ (to me), which are common in Southern Italian dialects (and I remember having found them also in some examples relating to the varieties under discussion here) may have both genitival and datival interpretations.
Punctual comments:
103: use (no uses)
116: partitive? (the article has never mentioned partitives… maybe dative?)
185: ‘except with kinship terms’… all of them? or just singular ones?
187: comntexts
194-5: it is not very clear: what does ‘covert correspondence’ exactly mean?
217: why is the article admitted in this example? Is it a Standard Italian influence? And is it possible with all common nouns, kinship nouns included?
366: share (not shear)
444 ff: errors in the glosses: (20a) my SHIRT / my BOOK; (20b) YOUR daughter; (20b’) YOUR sons
475-6: maybe A’s should provide an example of Def article with Indef quantifier. By the way, is something like ‘un libro mio’ possible in these varieties?
486: enclitic
547: a daughter of YOURS
fn 9: I agree; I also think that the possessive in ‘il libro mio’ in St.Italian has a Focus interpretation.
677: thje
716-7: is the sub-set the same in St. Italian and the varieties under discussion?
744: finally I see a principled explanation of why singular and plural kinship nouns behave differently. But I wonder why ‘i miei genitori’, which are highly definite and specific, do not pattern with singular nouns (e.g. in St. Italian they require the article). [see also 839-40].
771: parenthesis ( is to be placed after Matras.
818: predicatiove
997: ‘more differentiated’ (shouldn’t it be ‘less’?)
1041: or
1089: this example should be (38)
1141 (ii) [not (iii)].
Author Response
Please see attachment. Thank you.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is original and mostly well-written. There are various issues of formatting that need attention (tree diagrams, font size, italics etc.). Content-wise, the only suggestion I have is to better spell out the underlying geography of the dialects involved: it would add to the appreciation of your contribution to make it clear that you are dealing with two distinct languages (Franco-Provençal and Occitan) in two independent contact settings but all results in a strictly parallel evolution.
Author Response
Please see attachment. Thank you.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
This is an interesting study of the re-organization system of Gallo-Romance dialects spoken in the villages of Celle and Faeto. Unfortunately, the tree diagrams were completely illegible in the version I had to review thus parts of the analysis were not clear.
The paper can be published after revision. One important thing that in my opinion should be altered is the organization of the paper. For example, the paper starts with a very theoretical section which belongs to the analysis.
At the end of section 4, a table with all the date would be nice.
In section 5, because the tree structures were not legible it not clear why the proposed analysis is to be favored over Cardinaletti's, in fact it is not clear to me that Cardinaletti's system cannot capture the data. It reads as it if were rejected on theoretical grounds.
The part on contact could perhaps be elaborated upon.
6.2 belongs to section 7 I think.
Section 7 is very difficult tor read. So the idea is that one needs phases to explain the morphological asymmetry, how many phrase heads are D is a phase head and can NP be a phase? The structures introduced before play no role here and all of a sudden the possessor structure is re-introduced which we saw in section 1. I got very confused. One has the feeling that the author wants to make too many points at the same time and we don't have a clear roadmap.
Author Response
Please see attachment. Thank you.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
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