Sincretismo compensativo ed esponenza semiseparata in alcuni paradigmi verbali del dominio italoromanzo centromeridionale

The inflectional system ofthe central-And-southern Italo-Romance dialects show a series of instances of formal neutralisations of the Tense-Aspect-Mood oppositions involving the "passato remoto", the imperfect indicative, the imperfect subjunctive, and the conditional Such syncretism patterns typically (and often exclusively) involve the paradigm cells of the first and second person plural; moreover, they are so multiform (with respect to the couples or triples ofTAM values involved in the different instances) that they cannot be adequately described in terms of morphosyntactic properties. These facts indicate that the phenomena in question can be considered as examples of "compensatory" syncretism, which, in turn, is interpretable as a consequence of a cross-linguistic tendency to avoid morphs uniquely associated with significantly rare paradigm cells. This interpretation is corroborated by the fact that, in other paradigms observable in the same Romance subgroup, the absence of some TAM neutralisations is often accompanied by the presence of "'semi-separate" exponents, i.e. complex, segmentable endings, precisely in correspondence with the 1st and 2nd plural cells. In sum, the observed phenomena fit well into the framework of the hypothesis of a general tendency to reduce disequilibria in the frequency distribution of morphological exponents.