Old Italian

This work focuses on a particular diachronic transformation of a syntactic category, that is the propositional negation. I consider a time span ranging from archaic Latin to modern Italian, passing through the ancient forms of medieval documents. I will show that some negative phenomena endured in different diachronic transformations, while others changed over time, confirming generalizations such as those formalized as espersen's cycle. rom this point of view, the change in the syntactic nature of the Latin negative morpheme n n was crucial: it started as a maximal pro ection and it became a head. This change caused the multiple negation constructions that still occur in Italian. inally, I will also discuss some negative phenomena occurring in odern Italian, which are not well studied.

Nel Medioevo il latino ha influenzato il volgare non solo nel lessico, ma anche nella sintassi. In quest’ottica lo studio delle interferenze sintattiche può offrire un valido contributo alla conoscenza dell’italiano antico. Nel volume si indaga l’impatto sul volgare di quattro costrutti non–finiti tipici della latinità: ablativo assoluto, perifrastica passiva, costruzioni gerundive e accusativo con l’infinito. Il corpus è costituito da testi toscani in prosa del Duecento afferenti a tipologie testuali di ogni livello, dai testi pratici alle opere letterarie. Il filo conduttore dei vari capitoli è stabilire, sulla base di criteri non soltanto formali, se un determinato costrutto volgare sia ereditario o frutto di imitazione, e nel secondo caso ricostruire le ragioni pragmatiche e stilistiche del latineggiamento.

Il presente contributo contiene un’edizione critica dei componimenti
"Dell’Amore di Gesù" e "Del Giudizio universale", due sermoni in versi
redatti in antico veronese e databili a fine Duecento/inizio Trecento. Il testo critico è corredato da criteri di edizione, apparato e note editoriali.

This article contains a critical edition of the texts "Dell’Amore di
Gesù" e "Del Giudizio universale", two sermons in verse written in Old
Veronese and dated between the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century. The critical text is accompanied by editorial criteria, apparatus and editorial notes.

Various scholars have supposed that Marco Polo dictated his travel memories to Rustichello da Pisa on the basis of the details supplied in the Devisement dou monde’s prologue. According to another hypothesis, Rustichello would have reworked notes taken by Marco during his stay in Asia. The economic historian Franco Borlandi assumes the existence of a primitive version of Polo’s report, structured as a trade manual. He remarks that Oriental names and words contained in the Devisement are not transcribed according to the Old French orthographic system, but according to the Italian one. In Borlandi’s opinion, this evidence would demonstrate that Rustichello used an exemplar written in a medieval Italian vernacular for his translation. However, the analysis of Chinese toponyms proves that Marco contributed orally to the composition of the text. Oriental words are written in an orthographic system that reflects Tuscan pronunciation, rather than Venetian. Rustichello adapted to his phonologic system words which he had heard pronounced by Marco.

Il presente contributo contiene un’edizione critica dei componimenti "Lodi della Vergine" e "Preghiere", due testi in versi di carattere dossologico redatti in antico veronese e databili a fine Duecento – inizio Trecento. Il testo critico è corredato da criteri di edizione, apparato e note editoriali. Il contributo continua l’edizione di altri testi trasmessi dagli stessi codici, uscita nel numero precedente della stessa rivista.

This article contains a critical edition of the texts "Lodi della Vergine" and "Preghiere", two texts in verse written in Old Veronese and dated to between the end of the 13th and the early 14th century. The critical text is accompanied by editorial criteria, apparatus and editorial notes. The article continues the edition of other texts transmitted in the same manuscripts, published in the previous issue of the same journal.

The two most frequent passive constructions of present-day Italian – the so-called periphrastic passive formed by the auxiliary essere 'be' + the past participle and the so-called si passivante or reflexive passive – differ from one another in both structural and semantic properties. However, if we look at the form and distribution of these two constructions in Old Italian, these differences appear to be much less pronounced. The aim of this article is to describe these differences and to sketch a reconstruction of the mechanisms that have led to the increasing differentiation between the two constructions throughout the history of Italian. We will show that this process can be described as a process of reinforcement of two prototypical associations between content and form (i.e., between a given configuration of semantic traits and a given construction) driven and determined by frequency.

This paper presents an analysis of the collocations of it. paura (fear) in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. The main goal of the research was to find out how this emotion is conceptualised in Boccaccio's masterpiece, which is considered a milestone of Italian literature. Following the theory of conceptual metaphors and linguistic research on emotions, as well as a qualitative approach to collocation, it has been shown that paura in Decameron is depicted as an independent and powerful entity that rules the subject experiencing it.

This article contains a historical-linguistic study on the vernacular rubrics of Seville Colombina manuscript 7-1-52. This is a 14th-century Franciscan codex copied in Northern Italy, containing didactic-religious texts and marked by linguistic hybridism: the reference corpus shows Veronese, Venetian or Venetian-like, Paduan and Emilian features. The article compares the linguistic phenomena present in the rubrics to the linguistic peculiarities of
the main texts copied in the manuscript; on such basis, some hypotheses are formulated concerning the dating and the localization of the rubrics. Furthermore, such comparison
allows to establish a connection between the linguistic material and the problem of transmission and reception of the copied texts. In particular, the chapter titles in our codex are postulated to be a volgarizzamento (vernacular translation) of the Latin rubrics in the
lost archetype; with such purpose, the other manuscript witnesses of the texts in our corpus are examined. Other issues taken into consideration are the stylistic value of Latin-like, Tuscan-like and markedly local features, and the possible reasons for translating the rubrics into a Northern Italian vernacular language.

«L’OVI [Opera del Vocabolario Italiano] e lo sviluppo delle discipline: la storia della lingua», in Attorno a Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio: la lingua italiana. I primi trent’anni dell’Istituto CNR Opera del Vocabolario Italiano 1985-2015. Convegno internazionale sotto l’Alto Patronato del Presidente della Repubblica, Firenze, 16-17 dicembre 2015, a cura di Lino Leonardi e Marco Maggiore (Supplemento 5 al Bollettino dell’Opera del Vocabolario Italiano), Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2016, pp. 261-271.

We demonstrate that Old Italian had a three-gender system within which the neuter still qualified as a fully fledged gender value. To substantiate this claim, we adduce evidence showing that (a) Old Italian had three distinct sets of controllers, each of which selected a separate agreement pattern; (b) to each one of those three controller sets, including the neuter, nouns were assigned belonging to different productive inflectional classes and (c) the neuter still selected at least one dedicated agreement formative, thereby still displaying traces of its original status as a target gender. This novel evidence from Old Italian squares well with what is known about past stages of other Romance varieties. Also, we briefly address the consequences of our results both for a reconstruction of the Latin-Romance transition and, more broadly, for the theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the diachronic development of gender systems.

In den historischen Beständen römischer Bibliotheken finden sich Dutzende von Flugschriften (avvisi a stampa), die laut der Frontispizien «Bernardino Beccari, libraio alla Minerva» zuzuschreiben sind. Beccari verfügte seit dem Jahr 1575 über ein Buchhandelsprivileg und brachte bis circa 1600 zahlreiche Flugschriften zum Druck. Die in unregelmäßigen Abständen, aber kontinuierlich veröffentlichten Flugschriften richteten sich an ein Publikum, das am aktuellen Zeitgeschehen interessiert war, weswegen sie dementsprechend sprachlich aufbereitet wurden. Sie stellen eine wichtige frühe Etappe bei der Herausbildung des Journalismus in Italien dar. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht an ausgewählten Beispielen die sprachlichen Besonderheiten dieser nichtliterarischen populären Textsorte: Beccaris Individualstil schlägt sich in zahlreichen rekurrenten Formulierungen nieder. Darüber hinaus ist deutlich zu erkennen, wie sich bei der sprachlichen Gestaltung der an einen großen Adressatenkreis gerichteten Flugschriften das Vorbild des Toskanischen immer deutlicher bemerkbar macht.

Se lo studio della sintassi può apparire ai non appassionati arida materia, il presente volume è volto a sfatare questa communis opinio. Vi sono raccolti sette saggi che mettono in luce svariati aspetti della frase complessa: dalla concitata “sintassi della guerra” delle cronache trecentesche alla lingua delle infuocate prediche del Savonarola, dal "cum inversum" stilema di apparizioni e visioni, all’idea del mondo rovesciato espressa nelle frasi concessive. Apparentemente eterogenei per gli argomenti linguistici affrontati, i sette capitoli che compongono il libro sono in realtà accomunati dalla ricca tipologia testuale su cui l’analisi è fondata (testi di prosa d’arte come la Vita Nova o il Decameron, ma anche testi di prosa media e di carattere pratico, come le lettere e i volgarizzamenti)
e dalle metodologie d'indagine, che adottano accanto ai principi della linguistica storica prospettive e procedure di analisi moderne.

The aim of this brief paper is to describe what prima facie seems a typological rarum in Old Italian. Specifically, we address the syntax of the temporal adverbial per addietro (lit. for at-back), which was commonly used in Old Florentine texts to encode the meaning [BEFORE]. Thus, it goes against the accepted generalization that spatial relations of front and back regularly express, respectively, anteriority and posteriority across languages when they are ‘shifted’ from space to time. We will give a possible syntactic explanation based on cartographic insights (Cinque, 2010; Svenonius, 2012) into the 'layered' configuration of spatial (and temporal) prepositions.

This article examines the care for the mother tongue in the Middle Ages. The starting point of this discussion is given by a Festschrift article by Sverrir Tómasson (Málvöndun á miðöldum, 1998). In the present article more examples are given of the care for the mother tongue in mediaeval Iceland. Moreover, the phenomenon is put into a wider cultural frame, namely that of the Western European Middle Ages. Examples of the care for the mother tongue are given both from the Germanic world (England, Germany and Denmark) and the Romance world (Italy). The main tenet of this article is that the care for the mother tongue, seen as a process of acquisition and adaptation of foreign concepts to a language/culture, is strongly tied, for what  concerns the Middle Ages, to the importance and wealth of the written tradition in Latin against that in the vernacular.

Der vorliegende Band geht auf die im Jahr 2003 an der Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck eingereichte Habilitationsschrift des Autors zurück. Dieser ist kurz darauf (2006) an die Freie Universität Bozen gewechselt, wo er seither an der Fakultät für Bildungswissenschaften (Abteilung Ladinistik, Brixen) für die universitäre Ausbildung ladinischer Grundschullehrer/innen und Kindergärtner/innen
zuständig ist.

Dopo una sintetica rassegna delle strategie evidenziali in uso nell’italiano contemporaneo (§2), si presenta una rassegna delle strutture evidenziali più comuni in italiano antico (§3); in un secondo momento si mostrano le correlazioni tra testualità, genere di discorso ed evidenzialità, soffermandosi in particolare sul materiale offerto dai cantari in ottave (§4).

Contenuto

Il Libro delle nuove e strane e meravigliose cose è una traduzione dell'Itinerarium di Odorico da Pordenone nella stesura di Guglielmo da Solagna, realizzata con ogni probabilità a Venezia attorno alla metà del secolo XIV. Viene qui presentato il testo edito criticamente in una versione di tale volgarizzamento di area toscana leggermente più tarda. Odorico da Pordenone (1270? - 1331), beato, è noto tra gli studiosi per il resoconto del suo viaggio in Estremo Oriente, viaggio di poco posteriore a quello di Marco Polo. Le memorie di questa esperienza sono custodite nell'Itinerarium, rapporto veridico e dettagliato di un viaggio reale attraverso paesi sconosciuti e affascinanti, un diario di viaggio e assieme un trattato geografico e commerciale.

This volume represents a new intervention by Alvise Andreose, the young and promising scholar in the field of Romance philological studies on The book of new, strange and wonderful things, a translation of the Itinerarium by the Franciscan monk Odorico of Pordenone (+1331) in the version of his companion, friar Guglielmo da Solagna, which in all probability was published around the middle of the XIV century in Venice. The curator of the edition carried out an indirect analysis on the text and history of the Itinerarium during its various vicissitudes throughout the centuries, creating an accurate biographical and bibliographical note on Odorico and a careful comparative analysis of the language and syntax among the eight witnesses who helped in the reconstruction, which has now been sufficiently approximated, of the original text. Odorico of Pordenone died in the convent of Saint Francis of Udine on January 14, 1331. He was seen by many as a follower of Marco Polo, who travelled in India and China, and who was the first to arrive in Borneo. Besides being a traveller, he was above all an indefatigable missionary, who left for the Orient to convert infidels, thus contributing to the work of evangelisation that the Inferior friars were carrying out in those lands, and showing a sufficiently complete picture of the state of Franciscan missions in the great Empire of the Yuan Dynasty. The description of his travels, which was widely diffused in medieval times, symbolically became the "image" of the time, in the public eye, of the itinerary Christians follow through the seductions of the world, to reach heavenly blessedness.