Negative Concord and language contact. A case study on the Arbëresh variety of Piana degli Albanesi

In this article we analyze how the Arbëresh variety spoken in Piana degli Albanesi, in Sicily, has changed its original strict Negative Concord system (as seen in Albanian) to a non-strict one under the influence of Sicilian and, more recently, Italian. After describing the peculiar language contact environment which is found in Piana, we propose an account of the variation based on the idea that Negative Concord, i.e. the presence of sentential negation with negative indefinites, is a Last Resort type operation, and that interlinguistic differences are based on the interaction between parameters regulating the position where negation is expressed and a hierarchy of relevant grammatical features. In our particular case, we claim that the change is a consequence of contact with varieties with adverbs with independent negative meaning merged higher than T, and without systematic Nominative/Accusative distinction.