‘Vajiti e facitimi u piaciri’: morphosyntactic and pragmatic reflections on an imperativein Extreme Southern Italian dialects

Abstract

This study examines the form vajiti, attested in Extreme Southern Italian dialects as the second-person plural imperative of the verb “to go”, resulting from the univerbation of the second-person singular va and the second-person plural jiti. The analysis shows that vajiti originates from a pseudo-coordination structure, in which va undergoes progressive grammaticalization to the point of losing its lexical meaning. While in some cases the unit retains a fully verbal use, in others the grammaticalization process allows vajiti to develop new functions, including that of a directive marker – characteristic of pseudo-coordinated constructions – and that of a pragmaticalized interjection. This study provides a typological and comparative framework, highlighting analogous phenomena in other Romance and non-Romance languages and outlining a functional continuum ranging from a full verb to a directive marker and ultimately to an interjection.