Partitive determiners in Piedmontese: A case of language variation and change in a contact setting

This paper addresses the use of partitive determiners in Piedmontese as a case in point for the interplay of language variation and change in Italo-Romance. Firstly, a brief diachronic account will be provided of the development of partitive determiners in Piedmontese, ranging from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; such an overview will rely upon the results of recent studies on this subject. Next, the behavior of partitive determiners in contemporary Piedmontese will be examined; we will draw primarily on some unpublished materials collected within the ALEPO research program (ALEPO stands for Atlante linguistico ed etnografico del Piemonte Occidentale, “Linguistic and Ethnographic Atlas of Western Piedmont”), which consist of both responses to a questionnaire survey and spontaneous speech data. The study will help to shed light on the similarities and differences not only between different varieties of Piedmontese, but also between such varieties and Italian. The main paradigmatic differences identified will be argued to relate to two different ways of categorizing the relationship between mass nouns and countable plurals, one in which quantification prevails over classification, and the other in which classification is foregrounded. This state of affairs will then be discussed against the backdrop of the sociolinguistic situation under scrutiny, paying special attention to the contact between Piedmontese and Italian (as well as with French up to the end of the nineteenth century) and to the “superposition” of both an official standard language (i. e., Italian) and a regional koine (based on the variety of Turin) over local varieties of Piedmontese.