On ‘nd clitic in the Friulian variety of Romans d’Isonzo, some notes

Many varieties of Northern Italy present a locative clitic “supporting” the verb ‘to have’, either in its lexical or auxiliary form (e.g., Dello (BS) g ò la makina. ‘I have a car.’; g ò maiat la fröta. ‘I ate fruit’). This clitic has been variously analyzed as expressing the location where the possession relation ensues – for the lexical verb – or as expressing the temporal location of the event – for the auxiliary – (Benincà 2007, Paoli 2020). In this contribution I present new data from the Friulian variety of Romans d’Isonzo (GO), which, in the same environments, presents not the locative but the partitive clitic: A ‘nd ai fat la spesa. ‘I went grocery shopping’. This phenomenon is plausibly due to language contact with the neighboring Veneto varieties spoken in Friuli around Monfalcone and is interestingly shaped by the grammar of both languages: the Friulian variety of Romans d’Isonzo (as Friulian varieties in general) does not possess a dedicated locative clitic and, consequently, does not simply borrow the Veneto form of the locative clitic (ghe) but employs its own “endogenous” partitive clitic. Besides the pattern of crosslinguistic influence, it will be shown how this new datum (i) reveals that the Veneto pattern with ghe of the neighboring varieties is better analyzed as a sequence of [locative clitic + verb] and not as a single unique form of the verb ‘to have’, (ii) supports the proposal already in Penello (2004) that the locative and the partitive clitic share a common set of features. More in general, this shows how the analysis of microvariation data and the close interaction between different varieties is an invaluable source for theoretical linguistics, continuously shaping and refining the plausible set of analyses.