Chapter 7

Partial subject paradigms and feature geometry in Northern Occitan dialects

In between the minority of Romance languages that have full paradigms of subject clitics (e.g. Standard French) and the unmarked null subject grammars (e.g. Spanish, Italian and most Occitan dialects), a continuum of transitional varieties shows between one and five nominative clitics. Unlike the better documented Northern Italian Dialects, Northern Occitan Dialects have nominative clitics paradigms which typically begin with distinct meteorological subjects. The shape and sequence of the partial nominative clitic paradigms maps the progressive diachronic introduction of contrasts using underspecified monovalent features organized hierarchically to reflect implicational dependencies, following Harley & Ritter’s (2002) Feature Geometry. Meteorological subject pronouns play a crucial role in this diachronic progression precisely because they lack morphological features and therefore can map onto non-referential subjects.