Quantification in Old Italian

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Guido Mensching; Professorin Dr. Cecilia Poletto
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2014 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 256240798

The aim of the project, implemented in April 2015, is to analyze the Old Italian (OI, =Old Florentine) quantifier system. This system is known (i) to diverge from the Modern Italian system and (ii) to display phenomena that are of a general theoretical interest. In the first part of the project (ending in March 2017), we have extracted around 4.200 examples containing the quantifiers niente, neuno, alcuno, veruno, tutto, nullo, nessuno from the OVI Corpus of Old Italian. These data were fed into data tables, classified, and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. To give only a few examples of our results, which we presented in a large number of talks and one published article, we were able to analyze the use of cosa 'thing' as a kind of light noun combining with several quantifiers; alcuno 'some(one)' functioned as a negative polarity item in OI and interacted with negation and negative quantifiers in an intricate way. Our investigation of negative elements or n-words has shown that they can have different interpretations according to different structural positions. To understand these properties, we had to reexamine the mechanisms of negation in OI. In this context, we managed to show, among others, that what is usually described as Old Romance optional negative concord is only apparent in OI.As for the database under construction, we classified all data along a grid of certain syntactic and semantic properties of the quantifiers and the sentences in which they are embedded; these properties are expressed by a series of labels (tags). We have initiated a cooperation with G. Di Nunzio of the University of Padua, who is implementing our tagset into the database system used for the Syntactic Atlas of Italy (ASIt), and we are beginning to export our data to this system.The prolongation of the project aims at completing the empirical overview we started acquiring by gathering around 7.500 samples of the remaining quantifiers (mainly molto, parecchio; distributive quantifiers such as ogni, chiunque, ciascun, catun; and existential quantifiers of the type qual-X) and to implement them into the ASIt database system, together with the data we already have (goal 1). Thanks to the specific tagging we developed, these data will be evaluated to answer a large series of research questions concerning the syntax, the semantics and the pragmatics of OI quantifiers (goal 2). From the theoretical point of view, we aim at analyzing the internal structure of OI QPs, including issues of word-order alternations and discontinuity (goal 3), and at analyzing the internal structure of Q heads and the evolution of the OI quantifier system in general across the three periods we have defined (goal 4). Finally, we will investigate whether (and how) OI Qs can be analyzed compositionally (goal 5), and what changes have occurred so as to yield the MI system (goal 6).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Italy
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Giorgio Maria di Nunzio