The development of the Latin gerund in Rhaeto-Romance

This dissertation aims to shed light on variation and change in the category of gerund in Ladin, Swiss Romansh and Friulan by tracing its development from Classical Latin and by contextualizing this diachrony within the central-eastern Alpine area. This work combines a solid overview of the current literature made of the existing grammars (for instance, Chiocchetti and Iori 2002; Zof 2008; Forni 2019) and the scientific production (for instance, Gruenert et al. 2008; Casalicchio 2013, but also De Roberto 2013; Vangaever 2018) with a multilevel empirical approach based on three corpora: a corpus of fieldwork data gathered through the administration of a translation task in the local Middle and High schools, a corpus of modern written texts incorporating newspaper articles, school texts, scientific articles and literary texts and lastly, a corpus of 17th-19th century texts. The final outcome allows the assessment of variation and contact-induced phenomena in synchrony drawing on the analysis of processes of change in diachrony.