Le Desinenze Personali nella Morfologia Verbale delle Carte Cavensi (IX Secolo)

This paper aims to examine some aspects of the verbal inflectional endings found in a corpus of 9th-century legal documents produced in the Lombard duchy of Salerno, in the South of Italy. Compared to nominal inflection, verbal inflection endings display a stronger continuity with the Latin of previous stages. Nevertheless, different types of innovations are observable. On the basis of data from present indicative and subjunctive, two of them will be analysed: 1) innovative forms explicable in terms of well-known morpho-phonological processes and showing convergence with the Romance outcomes 2) innovative variants, that can be interpreted in different ways, diverging both from previous stages of the Latin and from the Romance outcomes. To interpret both these kinds of variation, a crucial role is played by external factors such as the cultural level of the authors of the documents and their capability to conform to the traditional linguistic models