The Verbal Morphology of the North-Eastern Lombard Dialects

Based on dialect data of the ALD-II (Linguistic atlas of Dolomitic Ladinian and neighbouring dialects, 2nd part), which was published at the end of 2012, this survey tries to offer a description as complete as possible of the verbal morphology of the north-eastern Lombard dialects, including aspects of phonetics and morphosyntax and, in this way, to find explanations for a number of phenomena which have not been considered yet. The core area of this research with 19 ALD inquiry points is located in the northern part of the province of Brescia (Lake Iseo, Valcamonica, Val Trompia, Val Sabbia, Lake Garda). In addition, another 19 local dialects (locolects) of neighbouring ALD inquiry points in the provinces of Bergamo, Sondrio, Trento, Verona and of the Puschlav valley in the canton of Grisons (Switzerland) as well as the dialect of the town of Brescia and the standard form of Italian have been included in the analysis. These 40 points of measurement are distributed in a territory of about 2,300 km2. In the surveyed area there is a linguistic transitional zone where features of Lombard and Venetian come together. For this reason, it is particularly interesting to examine this contact zone by using both qualitative and quantitative methods. In the first part of this book, the dialects in question are described with particular consideration of the verbal morphology and of their position within the northern Italian language systems. This description contains, above all, examples of the dialect data collected within the scope of the ALD-II project. Particularly in this chapter of the book the verbal forms of the indicative and conjunctive in the present and imperfect tense, the future, the conditional and the imperative as well as the infinitive and the perfect participle are analysed in detail. Personal pronouns (stressed pronouns, clitic subject and object pronouns), verb modifier adverbs, and the phrasal negation are also considered. The descriptive part of this book mentioned above also represents the basis for the quantitative analysis of the dialect data, which precedes a dialectometrical analysis. In dialectometry, geolinguistic data of linguistic atlases is analysed with the help of taxometric classification methods. Jean Séguy (1973) is considered the founder of dialectometry in the domain of the Romance geolinguistics while since the 1970s Hans Goebl (University of Salzburg) has developed it further and perfected this discipline. This method starts from a large amount of various linguistic phenomena whose occurrences in single inquiry points are compared with all the others. Based on the similarity values gained this way, it is possible to recognize dialect classes (geotypes) and to visualize spatial structures. A main aim of the dialectometrical analysis in my work is the identification of the area in which the dialect of the province capital Brescia has a major linguistic influence. It consists of the south-western part of my area of research with the Val Trompia, the southern part of the Valcamonica, and the eastern shore of Lake Iseo. This more innovative area is compared with the more conservative eastern part which consists of the villages around Lake Garda as well as the Trentino survey points. In this book, the qualitative description of the verbal morphology of this dialect area with its rich variation is combined with quantitative results of dialectometry, which specify and complete the 1 traditional division of the dialect area research and provide a new prospect of the dialects analysed within their geographic embedding. 2