Chapter 4. Preterite indicative Pseudo-Coordination and morphomic patterns

This paper discusses the paradigmatic configuration (or ‘morphome’; Aronoff 1994) that Pseudo-Coordination (V1[TAM.Agr] a V2[TAM.Agr], as in Jivu a ffici la spisa. ‘I went to do the shopping.’) displays in the preterite indicative in Deliano: i.e. the ‘W-Pattern’ (Di Caro 2019a; Di Caro and Giusti 2018). In the first part, the suppletive nature of the preterite paradigm of the V2s licensing this construction is discussed. These V2s all feature perfective roots (i.e. PYTA roots; Maiden 2018), such as fici ‘I made/did’ and dissi ‘I said’, which are the ones allowed in the construction, and imperfective roots, such as facisti ‘you (sg.) made/did’ and dicisti ‘you (sg.) said’. In the second part, new data from a grammaticality judgement-based study on Pseudo-Coordination in Deliano are discussed, with reference to the emergence of the W-Pattern in a specific paradigm. The results clearly show that this morphome is consistently present throughout the sample (11-80 y.o. participants, N=140) and has a “psychological reality” (cf. Maiden 2018b: 1-10), in the sense that it does not seem to be affected by variables such as age or gender, or to be subject to ordering effects.