Abstract
The papers gathered in this issue of LeL were originally presented as talks at a workshop on Sardinian Morphology during the 8th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting, held in Cagliari in September 2011. The versions presented here are the extension of the research and the elaboration of the cues and observations which were provided on this occasion. Sardinian morphology is a field of inquiry on which there are several studies in the tradition of Romance (historical) linguistics and dialectology, capitalizing on first-hand field-work. However, the rich array of cross-dialectal variation, in morphology and elsewhere, revealed by research in this descriptive tradition has gone largely unperceived by general linguists, partly due to the paucity of studies in this area whose problematic horizon intersects with hot topics in current theoretical morphology. The present collection of papers is an attempt to take a step towards increasing the visibility of Sardinian morphology for fellow-linguists working in morphological theory, on the Romance languages and beyond. All the papers collected here, albeit coming from partially different theoretical backgrounds, share the effort to place their respective research objects in a theoretical perspective. Thus, if they all give high relevance to a careful description of phenomena, in none of them does the relevance accorded to the empirical data and their description in any way subtend the assumption that observation can be free of theory-ladenness (in the sense of Hanson’s1958 Patterns of Discovery).
Loporcaro, M