Pro-forms in Existential Constructions of Early Italo-Romance Vernaculars

In this paper I consider existential constructions in a corpus of early Italo-Romance texts dating from the 13th to the 16th century. In my analysis, I put to test Freeze’s (1992) idea that all existential pro-forms are invariably locative, as existentials are locatives. My initial findings show that in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Tuscan the pro-form occurs in complementary distribution with a locative phrase, e.g.: Uno re fu nelle parti d’Egitto, ‘A king was in some parts of Egypt’ (Novellino, V) vs. Egli ci sono delle altre donne, ‘(Expletive) there are some other women’ (Boccaccio, Decameron, III, 3:13). This result would seem to corroborate the view that existential pro-forms are locative, assuming that, in the variety under consideration, a locative pro-form cannot co-occur with a locative phrase within the clause (La Fauci and Loporcaro 1993, 1997). If this assumption also holds true for fourteenth-century Sicilian, however, the existential pro-form is not locative in this variety, as it can co-occur with a locative phrase within the clause: chi fu in Sicilia grandi fami, ‘There was in Sicily great hunger’ (La conquesta di Sichilia, 18:25). The co-occurrence of the existential pro-form with a locative phrase also characterizes Modern Italian, as is shown in *(Ci) sono due gatti in giardino, ‘There are two cats in the garden’, where ci is existential, which differs from (*Ci) vado a casa, ‘I am going (*there) home’, where ci would clearly be locative. The contrast between, on the one hand, the early-Tuscan data and, on the other hand, the early-Sicilian and Modern Italian data suggests that existential pro-forms are not necessarily locative, and thus the locative analysis of existential constructions must be reconsidered. In the light of my findings, I note that in the early stages of the history of Italo-Romance, the existential pro-form exhibits geolinguistic discrepancies: whereas in Tuscan it appears to be the spell-out of a locative argument, in Sicilian it can be said to be a marker of existentiality which joins with the copula to spell out an existential predicate (Bentley, 2006). Diachronically, Tuscan – or at least thirteenth-century literary Tuscan - seems to be rather conservative, both because it adheres to Latin-type of existentials (where the pro-form never occurs, e.g.: est puellă in viā) and because it contrasts with Sicilian, which already exhibits the existential pattern of Modern Italo-Romance. These results challenge the traditional Tuscan-centred view of the origin of Modern Italian (see the debate between Renzi 2000 and Vincent 2004). The data and analysis proposed in my paper also appear to suggest that existential constructions are not locative by definition, begging for further research into the nature of existential pro-forms. Selected ReferencesBentley, Delia. 2006. Split intransitivity in Italian. Berlin-New York: Mouton de GruyterBranca, Giovanni (Ed.). 1980. Giovanni Boccaccio. Decameron. Torino: EinaudiConte, Alberto (Ed.). 2001. Il novellino. Roma: SalernoFreeze, Ray. 1992. Existentials and other locatives. Language 68 (3): 553–595La Fauci, N. and M. Loporcaro (1993). Grammatical relations and syntactic levels in Bornovese morphosyntax. In A. Belletti (Ed.), Syntactic Theory and the Dialects of Italy, 155–203. Torino: Rosemberg & Sellier. 1993La Fauci, N. and M. Loporcaro. 1997. Outline of a theory of existentials on evidence from Romance. Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata 26: 5–55Renzi, Lorenzo. 2000. “ItalAnt”: come e perché una grammatica dell’italiano antico. Lingua e Stile 35 (4): 717–729Rossi-Taibbi, Giuseppe (Ed.). 1954. La conquesta di Sichilia fatta per li Normandi. Palermo-Firenze: Editrice Leo OlschkiVincent, Nigel (2004). Il progetto SAVI: presentazione, procedure, problemi. In M. Dardano and L. Frenguelli (Eds.), SintAnt. La sintassi dell’italiano antico, 501–528. Roma: Aracne. 2004