Truncated vocatives in Romanesco

Abstract This paper addresses vocative truncation in Romanesco (Italo-Romance), which has been described as conditioned by a host of constraints at different structural levels. We crowdsourced the data collection with an online questionnaire devised to ask the three research questions whether the acceptability of truncation depends on (a) grammatical number, (b) the individual lexical items, and (c) speaker’s age. Respondents’ ratings on a 5-point Likert scale were analysed by means of Random Forests and Conditional Inference Trees. The results confirmed the significance of number and lexeme as conditioning factors.