Splitting and clustering grammatical information (Leiden University)
This project focuses on a striking parallelism between two macro-groups of languages: southern Italian (Romance) dialects and the so-called split-ergative languages, like Basque, Georgian, Dyirbal, Hindi/Urdu, and many others. Surprisingly, these two groups of languages, which have otherwise very little in common, both organize the grammatical material in a very peculiar fashion, by grouping some elements together to the exclusion of others.