Agnonese

Abstract

Agnonese is spoken in Agnone, a town of about 5,000 inhabitants in the province of Isernia (Molise). It belongs to the Upper Southern subdivision of Italo-Romance (cf. Loporcaro 2013: 143-153), a branch of the Romance language family. This sketch of Agnonese is meant as an aid for consulting the DAI database (http://www.dai.uzh.ch/): it introduces the notational conventions used in transcribing this variety, which lacks a normalized orthography, and then moves on to giving a synthetic overview of the morphology and morphosyntax of the dialect, in its aspects which are relevant to the description of agreement phenomena. As will become apparent in §2, the marking of morphosyntactic feature values on some agreement targets is presently undergoing change across the speech community, so that, as it comes to determiners and object clitic pronouns, individual subvarieties have to be described, that have been inferred through inspection of the dataset and have to be kept in mind when querying the database.