Experimentally testing agreement patterns in pragmatic uses of chillo in Neapolitan

In Neapolitan, the (originally distal demonstrative) pronoun chillo ‘that (one)’ shows two pragmatic uses: 1) it can be used in its neuter form as a discourse-related expletive, or 2) it can double and agree with the semantic subject. The formal distinction between these two uses (i.e. expletive vs. doubling use) has been reported to be unstable in actual spoken use, however. The present paper therefore investigates these agreement patterns experimentally. Ten Neapolitan speakers were asked to translate sentences containing the two types from regional Italian to Neapolitan. The resulting agreement was investigated acoustically, by comparing the formants of the vowels produced in the forms chillo to those of /e/ and /i/ from non-target words. The results showed that speakers often produce a masculine (rather than a neuter) form also for the discourse expletive use. This raises questions about the stability of the distinction between the two pragmatic uses of chillo.