Storie e linguaggi

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This paper offers a critical discussion of reactions to the GIA (Grammatica dell’italiano antico), addressing the following themes: the position of the work with respect to the Saussurian dichotomies langue/parole, internal/external, synchrony/diachrony; the issue of defining the corpus; the relationship between ancient and modern Italian; the dialectic between system and variation; and the difficult balance between linguistics and philology. In the light of the discussion, the GIA appears to be a solid, valuable and fruitful work.

In this article I discuss the role of dialectal variation in the description of languages of the past. Taking into consideration the methodological problems faced by the project GraVO, Grammatica del veneto delle Origini (‘A grammar of Old Venetan’), I argue that the inclusion in the corpus of texts coming from different areas can be an advantage, because the analysis of the expected dialectal variation allows us to reach a better definition of the different varieties and a more fine-grained description of their grammars. The discussion is based on three different morphosyntactic phenomena: negative concord, expletive subjects and lexical prepositions.

The chapter critically evaluates the pros and cons of using the theory of argument structure in the analysis of Italian verbs. First, we highlight the strengths of the theory. Second, we address two of its weaknesses: the distinction between arguments and adjuncts, and the optionality in the syntactic realization of arguments. We argue that these weaknesses can be overcome by adopting a semantic perspective. In particular, we propose that, unlike adjuncts, arguments play a role in determining the meaning of the verb in the context of use, and that syntactic optionality is driven by either pragmatic or lexical semantic defaulting.

The aim of this paper is to examine how and to what extent a synchronic approach may combine with a diachronic appro ach in the grammatical description of Old Italian, by taking a specific case study as a starting point. The focus is on trivalent verbs classifiable as ditransitives. Within the typological framework, a class of prototypical ditransitives may be identified, made up of verbs denoting an event of physical transfer (the possession of an object (Theme) passes from an Agent to an animate Recipient, as for ‘to give’). In Old Italian the Recipient was generally expressed by a prepositional construction introduced by a (an indirect object, in grammatical terms), as well as is in Modern Italian. At the same time, some non-prototypical ditransitives showed alignment types and constructions which do not occur in Modern Italian: more precisely, they admitted the expression of the Recipient as a direct object. The analysis of the patterns of syntactic variation in the oldest Italian texts and a comparison with the Latin situation provide evidence for the fact that parameters related to historical and cultural diversity and diachronic considerations may be relevant to the interpretation of synchronic data concerning argument structure. As a consequence, they should be integrated into a grammar of Old Italian.

This paper aims to extend to Old Italian Giusti and Iovino’s (2016, 2019) comparative taxonomy of Latin and Modern Italian psychological verbs. According to their analysis, Latin presents seven classes of psychological verbs distributed across transitive, unaccusative and unergative patterns. Each class can be direct or inverse based on the argument realised as external in syntax (Experiencer or Stimulus respectively). The seventh class is impersonal. There is a substantial correspondence among verb classes in Latin, Old and Modern Italian but an important exception can be observed: Latin inverse unergatives interest and refert ‘interest’ are found neither in Modern Italian (where importare and interessare can be transitives, unaccusatives and impersonals but not unergatives) nor in Old Italian (where the corresponding verb calere is unaccusative). Furthermore, semantic diachronic changes concerning some psychological verbs are considered, such as fidare/fidarsi ‘trust’ and diffidare/diffidarsi ‘mistrust’; preoccupare ‘worry’; interèssere > interessare, importare ‘interest’, showing how the semantic changes, hand in hand with the syntactic ones, motivate the wide intra- and interlinguistic variation of psychological verbs.

As observed by Cardinaletti-Giusti (2019), Italoromance varieties present a wide variation of forms and positions of pronominal possessors in the nominal expression. The paper adopts a general linguistic approach informed by the advances of theoretical linguistics, the Protocol Approach (Giusti 2021 and references therein) establishing diagnostics to detect the wide variation that characterizes Old Italian and modern Italian dialects from other Romance languages. The variation will be shown to regard the pronominal vs adjectival status (which varies diachronically), the strong, weak or clitic forms of the possessor (which vary diatopically), the co-occurrence of the possessor with a definite article (which varies diachronically, diatopically and across nominal classes), and the position of the possessor with respect to the head noun (which varies diatopically). A highlight of the paper is the representation of the features on maps, visually representing the protocollar diagnostics on the Italian territory.

In this article we discuss evidence which suggests that the different uses of che in Modern and Old Italian (invariant relative complementizer, finite complement clause complementizer, interrogative and exclamative modifier, and (in Old Italian) inanimate relative pronoun) cannot be analysed as one and the same element. Each of these uses displays some property that distinguishes it from the others.

In contemporary Italian, the particle ne? has the function of introducing the elements of ne- gative correlative constructions. A diachronic survey of its distribution shows, however, that in old Italian varieties it had multiple functions, which continued, with different degrees of productivity, the properties of the Latin ancestor nec. This study argues that the particle was targeted by a process of semantic weakening, which led it to specialize for the correlative uses, and that this process was triggered by the changes that affected the syntax of negation from Latin to Old Italian.

Though ‘frozen’ in monological written texts, some grammatical constructions still show traces of the dialogical prototypical situation of the utterance, based on face-to-face oral interaction between speaker and hearer. Pre-concessives are a good example of this kind of constructions, because they imply a (potential) dialogical-polyphonic interplay between the sender’s and other people’s voices. In this perspective, the paper describes some paratactic correlative structures used in contemporary and Old Italian to express pre-concessives, and presents what seem to be happened in between to a couple of discourse markers involved in these constructions. In particular, the Old Italian admission marker bene (situated in the first part of a pre-concessive) is absent in contemporary Italian: it firstly became a formative of the concessive subordinating conjunctions benché and sebbene, and from the beginning of the 17th century combines with sì in bensì as an objection marker (situated in the second part of a pre-concessive); but in the next century bensì also occurs as an admission marker in the first part of these constructions, where by the end of the 17th century we can also find sì alone (absent in Old Italian), which maintains this function until today.

In this article I discuss some syntactic and interpretive aspects of non-canonical interrogative clauses in Old and Modern Italian, underlining analogies and differences with respect to canonical interrogative clauses on the one hand and with exclamative clauses on the other. I will show that the interpretive shades of the utterance have precise syntactic correlates in the different structural position occupied by the wh-operator within the left periphery of the clause. Moreover, I will point out that the basic interpretive property of non-canonical interrogatives is that their illocutionary function does not correspond to the elicitation of an informative answer from the addressee. More precisely, I will propose that, although they both involve the expression of the speaker’s bewilderment caused by an unexpected state of affairs, non-canonical wh-questions and wh-exclamatives are to be clearly distinguished with respect to their illocutionary force: while non-canonical wh-questions constitute directive speech acts which express the implicit request for the hearer to provide a plausible account for the contingent situation, wh-exclamatives are more akin to assertions, and rather aim at expressing the speaker’s surprise about the clash between the expected state of affairs and the actual one.

The present study analyzes the diachronic evolution of the verb immaginare, specifically focusing on the emergence of the deverbal discourse marker immagino, and proposes to subdivide its development in three stages: extension, reanalysis and adaptation. The proposal builds on concepts established by grammaticalization research as well as on ideas circulating and discussed within diachronic construction grammar. The data stem from collections and individually analyzed texts ranging from Classic to Late and Medieval Latin and from Old to Modern Italian.

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