Attrition in the verb system of Italian in Australia

This article reports on an investigation into the loss of morphology expressing temporality in the Italian of second generation Italo-Australians. The purpose of the study is to verify whether the loss of Italian tense and aspect morphology proceeds from marked to unmarked, where markedness is defined on the basis of formal and semantic criteria. Italian language samples are elicited through interviews with first and second generation Italo-Australians, and speakers are placed on an attritional continuum along which the verb forms are compared. The explanations for the patterns of loss identified in the data involve a combination of factors, such as markedness principles, universal or general characteristics of spoken language and interlinguistic influence of dialect.