Resumen de N Morphology and its Interpretation: The Neuter in Central Italian Varieties and its Implications

Ludovico Franco, Maria Rita Manzini, Leonardo Maria Savoia

• In this work we will characterize Romance N class morphology as endowed with asemantic content, providing evidence about the active involvement of N class at the syntaxsemanticinterface. We will argue that the so-called neuter of Central Italian dialects involvescoding of the mass/count distinction by N class morphology. The mass vs. count contrast can beinterpreted as the reflex of a more primitive property, which opposes non-individual content toinstances of individual denotation, since the -o ‘neuter’ inflection of Central Italian varieties iscompatible not only with mass nouns but also with eventive contents and with the invariableinflections found with perfect participles of unergative/transitive verbs. We will show that Mass vs.count semantic content associated to and encoded through N class is available in other Indo-European languages and in genetically unrelated languages and we will support the idea that N classcan function as a classifier.