1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910797799303321

Autore

Aski Janice M.

Titolo

Iconicity and analogy in language change : the development of double object clitic clusters from medieval Florentine to Modern Italian / / Janice M. Aski, Cinzia Russi

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berlin, [Germany] ; ; Boston, [Massachusetts] : , : De Gruyter Mouton, , 2015

©2015

ISBN

1-5015-0098-8

1-61451-639-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (206 p.)

Collana

Studies in Language Change, , 2163-0992 ; ; Volume 13

Disciplina

455/.92

Soggetti

Italian language - Clitics

Italian language - Pronoun

Iconicity (Linguistics)

Italian language - Grammar, Historical

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Acknowledgements -- Table of contents -- List of tables -- List of abbreviations -- Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Origins, earliest attestations and forms of the Romance personal clitic pronouns -- Chapter 3. The theoretical approach -- Chapter 4. Pragmatic functionality of clitic order in fourteenth-century Florentine -- Chapter 5. The demise of the ACC-DAT order and the fixation of the DAT-ACC cluster -- Chapter 6. Conclusions -- References -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

This book examines the alternation between accusative-dative and dative-accusative order in Old Florentine clitic clusters and its decline in favor of the latter. Based on an exhaustive analysis of data collected from medieval Florentine and Tuscan texts we offer a novel analysis of the rise of the variable order, the transition from one order to the other, and the demise of the alternation that relies primarily on iconicity and analogy. The book employs exophoric pragmatic iconicity, a language-external iconic relationship based on similarity between linguistic structure and the speaker/writer's conceptualization of



reality, and endophoric iconicity, a language-internal iconic relationship where the iconic ground is construed between linguistic signs and structures. Analogy is viewed as a productive process that generalizes patterns or extends grammatical rules to formally similar structures, and obtains the form of the analogical relationship between the masculine singular definite article and the third person singular accusative clitic, which shared the same phototactically constrained distribution patterns. The data indicate that exophoric pragmatic iconicity exploits and maintains the alternation, whereas endophoric iconicity and analogy conspire to end it.