ABSTRACT
One of the most well-known cases of language contact within Italo-Romance concerns the influence of Greek on the Romance dialects of southern Italy. One has only to think of the many articles and monographs written by Gerhard Rohlfs on the topic that variously highlight the supposed influence of Greek on the lexical, morphological and syntactic structures of the Romance dialects. The traditional account of the complementation system of the dialects of southern Italy leaves us, therefore, with very little, if any, doubt regarding the precise distribution of the dual series of complementizers. The southern dual complementizer system is to be interpreted as the reflex of an underlying Greek structure on the regional Latin spoken in southern Italy, namely an example of what Rohlfs aptly termed spirito greco, materia romanza. Despite the different regional origins of the eleven texts examined, they appear to behave in a surprisingly homogeneous fashion with respect to the distribution of both complementizers.
