Avverbiali per ‘ieri sera’, ‘ieri’ e ‘domani mattina’ nel Piemonte meridionale e nella Liguria occidentale

This paper examines two semantic shifts in the temporal deixis system of the Romance varieties spoken in southern Piedmont and western Liguria. The first concerns the development of adverbial forms derived from seram, which in several dialects have evolved from the meaning ‘evening’ to expressing ‘yesterday evening’, and in some areas further to the more general value of ‘yesterday’. The second process involves adverbials derived from the periphrases ‘the morning/at morning’, which gave rise to markers meaning ‘tomorrow morning’. Through extensive fieldwork (2022-2025) complemented by data from AIS, ALI and ALF, the study reconstructs the geo-linguistic distribution of these forms across Occitan, Piedmontese, and Ligurian varieties, identifying common patterns among these dialectal groups. The analysis discusses the degree to which these developments can be interpreted as instances of grammaticalization, assessing them against established criteria (extension, desemanticization, decategorialization, phonetic erosion). While the phenomena do not properly fulfil all canonical diagnostic criteria, they nonetheless reveal a shared tendency toward semantic reinterpretation. The paper discusses some diachronic aspects involving the birth and the spread of these temporal adverbs, whose development mirrors broader cross-linguistic tendencies linking ‘evening/night’ with the past and ‘morning’ with the idea of future.