Iconicity and Analogy in Language Change: The Development of Double Object Clitic Clusters from Medieval Florentine to Modern Italian

Description

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 phonotactically constrained distribution patterns. The data indicate that exophoric pragamatic iconicity exploits and maintains the alternation, whereas endophoric iconicity and analogy conspire to end it. Table of contents Acknowledgements List of tables List of abbreviations Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1 Objectives of the study 1.2 Texts and tokens in our Florentine corpus 1.3 Organization of the book Chapter 2. Origins, earliest attestations and forms of the Romance personal clitic pronouns 2.1 Origins 2.2 Earliest attestations 2.2.1 Outside Italy 2.2.2 Italy: non-Tuscan vernaculars 2.2.3 Tuscan vernaculars 2.3 Forms 2.3.1 Third person acc forms 2.3.2 First and second person dat forms 2.3.2.1 First person plural no and ne 2.3.2.2 Second person plural vo 2.3.2.3 Forms found in clusters 2.4 Double object clitic clusters in Old Romance 2.4.1 Outside Italy 2.4.2 Italy: non-Tuscan vernaculars 2.5 Double object clitic clusters in thirteenth-century Tuscan vernaculars 2.5.1 Previous accounts 2.5.2 OVI data for thirteenth-century Tuscan vernaculars 2.6 Double object clitic clusters in fourteenth-century Tuscan vernaculars 2.7 Summary Chapter 3. The theoretical approach 3.1 The cognitive/functional aspects of variation and change 3.2 Analogy vs. Iconicity 3.3 Cognitive/functional features of clitic order alternation and change 3.3.1 Iconicity 3.3.2 Analogy 3.4 Grammaticalization of the dat-acc order 3.5 Explanation of language variation and change in a cognitive/functionalist approach Chapter 4. Pragmatic functionality of clitic order in fourteenth-century Florentine 4.1 Previous approaches 4.2 The methodology of the present study 4.3 Significant structural features 4.4 Exophoric pragmatic iconicity: Empathy vs. Urgency 4.4.1 Empathy 4.4.2 Urgency 4.5 Empathy and urgency: Token analysis by text 4.5.1 Il Filocolo (Giovanni Boccaccio, 1338) 4.5.2 Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (Giovanni Boccaccio, 1344) 4.5.3 Il Corbaccio (Giovanni Boccaccio, 1355) 4.5.4 Decameron (Giovanni Boccaccio, 1370) 4.5.5 Lettera di Gherardino di Niccolò Gherardini Giani a Tommaso di Piero di messer Rodolfo de’ Bardi (1375) 4.5.6 Frammenti del libro segreto di Simone di Rinieri (1380) 4.6 Clusters with dire ‘to tell, to say’, dirò ‘I will tell you’ and credere ‘to believe’ 4.7 Formulaic and/or idiomatic expressions 4.8 Summary of results and other considerations Chapter 5. The demise of the acc-dat order and the fixation of the dat-acc cluster 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Endophoric structural iconicity: Causatives, convenire ‘to suit; to be advisable’, parere ‘to seem’ 5.3 Morphological constellations and analogy: The relationship with the masculine singular definite article 5.4 Other analogical pressures: Phonotactics, morphological structure, and clusters with reflexives 5.5 Language external factors: Borrowing from Tuscan vernaculars 5.6 Summary and conclusions Chapter 6. Conclusions 6.1 Summary of the analysis and issues for further research 6.2 Implications of this analysis: Language change, iconicity, and analogy References Index