This volume is a collection of grammar sketches from several Italo-Romance varieties. The contributions cover various areas of linguistics (phonology, morphology, syntax) and are organized in sections according to the customary geolinguistic classification. Each chapter provides the description of a salient phenomenon for a given language, based on novel data, as well as the state-of-the-art knowledge on that phenomenon. The articles are in-depth studies carried out by prominent experts as well as promising young scholars. The theoretical apparatus is kept to a minimum in order to make the book accessible to scholars without specific expertise. For the same reason, hypotheses and formalisms are introduced gradually, only if necessary for the description of the data.

The following chapters represent a selection of Proceedings of the 11th Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting hosted by the Department of Romance of Romance Studies of the University of Vienna on 4-6 July 2016.

Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.

The Romance languages offer a particularly fertile ground for the exploration of the relationship between language and society in different social contexts and communities. Focusing on a wide range of Romance languages – from national languages to minoritised varieties – this volume explores questions concerning linguistic diversity and multilingualism, language contact, medium and genre, variation and change. It will interest researchers and policy-makers alike.

The immense linguistic wealth of Italy, reflecting her varied and multicentered history, is represented not only by its literary language -- the medium forged by Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, and adopted by countless other great writers -- but also by its many regional and local dialects, often so different from common Italian as to constitute in practice separate languages. The object of this book is to describe and, in as much as possible, account for the linguistic fragmentation of modern Italy, keeping in mind both diatopic and diastratic variation, along with diachrony and synchrony. Numerous maps serve as concrete illustration.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in linguistic phenomena whose formal manifestation and underlying licensing conditions represent the convergence of two or more areas of the grammar, an area of investigation particularly invigorated in recent generative research by developments such as phase theory (cf. Chomsky 2001; 2008) and the cartographic enterprise (cf. Rizzi 1997; Cinque 1999). In this respect, the dialects of Italy are no exception, in that they present comparative Romance linguists and theoretical linguists alike with many valuable opportunities to study the linguistic interfaces, as highlighted by the many case studies presented in this volume which provide a series of original insights into how different components of the linguistic system – syntactic, phonetic, phonological, morphological, semantic and pragmatic – do not necessarily operate in isolation but, rather, interact to license phenomena whose nature and distribution can only be fully understood in terms of the formal mapping between the interfaces.