Neuter in Arbëresh dialects

Italian communities preserve, an inflection no longer surviving in standard and other varieties of Albania, where masculine morphology has replaced it. The coincidence between the neuter inflection –t occurring in nominative and accusative and the plural inflection –t characterizing North-Calabrian Arbëresh led Manzini and Savoia (2017a,b), Savoia and Baldi to connect this type of morphology with the interpretive properties associated with mass denotation. The relation between neuter and feminine morphology shows up also in the case of mass feminine nouns, which in turn agree with plural demonstratives and adjectives. It is no accident that in some Arbëresh systems the relevant sub-set of nouns while maintaining the inflection –t, agrees in the feminine. By and large, these phenomena can be accounted for by means of a more adequate treatment of gender and number properties, where syncretism is seen as the consequence of the morphosyntactic features associated with the inflectional exponents.