Extended Prepositions in Neo-Aramaic, Kurdish and Italian

In late Eastern Aramaic an extended form of prepositional phrase can be used, when the nominal governed by the preposition is definite. A 3rd-person suffix pronoun attached to a preposition anticipates the definite nominal (a noun phrase, a demonstrative or an independent pronoun), which is then introduced either by the preposition, repeated again, or by the determinative pronoun d-. Neo-Aramaic (NA) extended prepositions share a number of features with the “construed prepositions” of Central and Southern Kurdish. Nevertheless, the allomorphic distribution of Kurdish construed prepositions and NENA extended prepositions are opposite: NA extended prepositions are used before nominals, whereas Kurdish construed prepositions are used before pronominal suffixes. In Old Italian we find forms of prepositions followed by the proleptic pronoun “esso”, which agrees in gender and number with the following noun. In early authors, paradigms also occur, in which there is no agreement of the pronoun esso with the personal pronoun or the noun governed by the preposition. Phonetic wear, the tendency of contiguous morphemes to coalesce, a structural tendency of nominal and verbal forms to neutralize the gender and number agreement with a governed element, strategies to express definiteness in competition with each other may all have been factors operative in favouring the emergence and in determining the destiny of the extended prepositions in contact languages such as Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic, but also in a geographically distant but structurally quite close language such as literary Italian.