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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Aski, Janice M., author.

Russi, Cinzia, Author.

Series:

Studies in language change ; Volume 13.

Studies in Language Change, 2163-0992 ; Volume 13

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Italian language--Clitics.

Italian language.

Italian language--Pronoun.

Iconicity (Linguistics).

Italian language--Grammar, Historical.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (206 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

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

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

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

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781501500985

1501500988

9781614516392

1614516391

OCLC:

951149579