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Soggetto e oggetto nell’italo-romanzo antico
No full textIn this paper we analyse the clause structure of old Italo-Romance, which, departing
from (late) Latin, is characterized by a ‘verb-second’ (V2) syntax, typical of the medieval
languages. In particular, we focus on Subject and Object, showing how the syntactic
distribution of these two grammatical relations is sensitive to discourse function,
and interfaces with pragmatic conditions (Focus, Aboutness Topic, Referential Topic)
and semantic properties (definiteness, specificity, identifiability) in the information
structure. With respect to the Subject, we observe how the tension between the definiteness
of the referent, on the one hand, and the ‘new’, non-presupposed information value,
on the other hand, determines free variation between pre- and post-verbal position.
This tension is less prominent in old Sicilian, where the ‘thematization’ of the Subject
in first position is no longer restricted to Aboutness Topics, but is extended also to
Referential Topics, thus anticipating the [SVO] order of Modern Italian. With respect
to the Object, we document the emergence of resumptive clitics, which first appear in
contexts in which the dislocated Object is a Referential Topic, and only later are they
generalized to Aboutness Topics, as is the case with Modern Italian
Cenni sull'incontro della tradizione celtica irlandese con la cultura latina nella Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis
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Postverbal subjects in old Italo-Romance
Get PDFIn the V2 syntax of old Italo-Romance, subjects can both be preverbal and postverbal in topical or focal function, except for unaccusative sentence-focus structures, where they are consistently postverbal. The VS order of presentational Foci is also found in classical and late Latin and in modern Italo-Romance, suggesting that patient/undergoer subjects are invariably postverbal over time. In the sentence-focus structure of some northern vernaculars, we document the emergence of an expletive subject pronoun, which, we claim, spells out anaphoric agreement (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987, Bentley 2018) with an implicit spatiotemporal Topic. In the written domain this Topic recurrently surfaces in the form of spatio-temporal adverbials, which provide the logodeictic coordinates in which all-new information sentences are embedded in narratives
The emergence and the reanalysis of the existential proform: Evidence from early Italo-Romance
No full textIn this article I claim that the emergence of the existential proform in early Italo-Romance is motivated by the overt marking of definiteness. The available data from a relatively large corpus of early Italo-Romance texts dating from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century suggest that the overt marking of definiteness, which differentiates Romance from its ancestor Latin, favours the establishment of an existential pattern where the encoding of non-canonical pivots (definite ones) is licensed by a locative anchor. From having the status of locative licenser of definiteness, the proform is thereafter reanalysed as an obligatory marker of the existential construction, and is progressively extended to all types of existential construction. © The Philological Society 2011
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