Verbum – Analecta Neolatina

Monika Frazer-Imregh: Életmód, asztrológia és mágia a reneszánszban

Martina Halápi — 2025-07-10

Monika Frazer-Imregh: Életmód, asztrológia és mágia a reneszánszban. Budapest: Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem – L’Harmattan, 2022, 254 pp.

Per i 70 anni di Giampaolo Salvi

Imre Szilágyi — 2025-07-10

Nei giorni 1–2 febbraio 2024 presso l’Università degli Studi Eötvös Loránd si è svolto il convegno internazionale organizzato in onore del professore ordinario dell’ateneo, Giampaolo Salvi, in occasione del suo settantesimo compleanno. Vi hanno partecipato i suoi amici, colleghi e allievi, rappresentando vari campi della linguistica italiana. Il team organizzativo comprendeva Dávid Falvay, successore di Giampaolo Salvi nell’incarico di direttore del Dipartimento di Italianistica, Alma Huszthy, Imre Szilágyi e Bálint Huszthy, docenti dello stesso dipartimento e György Domokos del Dipartimento di Italianistica dell’Università Cattolica Péter Pázmány.

Nei due giorni del convegno intitolato S.A.L.V.I. (Sintassi Analisi Linguistica Variazione Italianistica) i relatori hanno presentato al festeggiato i seguenti interventi.

Il giovane Giampaolo Salvi e le sue prime opere di linguistica

Lorenzo Renzi — 2025-07-10

Finiti gli studi medi superiori in Canton Ticino nel 1974, Giampaolo si trasferisce a Padova dove, fruendo di una borsa di studio, si iscrive alla Facoltà di Lettere.

Morfosintassi, semantica, concettualizzazione: costanti e varianti nell’uso dell’articolo definito

Paolo Acquaviva — 2025-07-10

The definite article is traditionally identified with the linguistic expression of a definite description. In grammatical systems akin to those of Western European languages, the only variation would lie in the presence or absence of the article in generics (water / l’acqua). This simplistic approach has sidelined a whole range of alternative uses of the article, known but kept aside as irrelevant. This study systematically overviews this variation space. The reading as definite description or generic is its core, where variation is driven deterministically by the nominal’s denotation and by the morphosyntax of the relevant language. But the function of uniquely identifying the referent in the pragmatic and encyclopaedic context underlies more uses of the article. They outline a broader variation space, which seems arbitrary only because the relevant factors are not just strictly grammatical but also communicative.

Avverbi posizionali in italiano

Giuliano Bernini — 2025-07-10

On the basis of the KIParla corpus, a survey is made of the use of positional adverbs forming complex prepositional phrases that anchor the situation described in a sentence in a deictic reference field oriented towards a territorial conceptualization. Positional function is performed by deictic locative adverbs with the speaker as orīgo and by the adverbs su ‘up’ and giù ‘down’ along a vertical dimension to which the speaker associates the situation described in the sentence on the basis of a point of view. This can be given in the discourse, pragmatically implied or considered shared with respect to the territory being spoken about with reference to its morphology or to the geographical continuum between the north and south poles. It is not possible to determine whether in the use of positional adverbs greater specific weight can be attributed to the discourse conditions or the speakers’ regional varieties with a dialectal substratum with ground-oriented deixis systems.

La posizione dei pronomi clitici nella ristrutturazione: variazione diatopica e diacronica in italo-romanzo

Anna Cardinaletti — 2025-07-10

In Italian and Italo-Romance dialects, the position of clitic pronouns in restructuring sentences is subject to variation. Like Italian, the northern, Tuscan, and median Italo-Romance dialects show both cliticization on the finite verb (clitic climbing) and enclisis on the infinitival verb, while the southern dialects have mandatory clitic climbing. Some differences between the AIS data, dating back to one century ago, and the contemporary dialectal data with regard to clitic climbing in northern dialects are attributed to the data collection methods and not to a recent diachronic change extending climbing towards the North. A new data collection method, specially designed to detect optionality, provides a more nuanced picture of language variation and suggests that the innovation of enclisis is starting to affect the southern Italo-Romance dialects.

Andare ausiliare del passivo deontico

Guglielmo Cinque — 2025-07-10

The Italian auxiliary andare ‘go’ is ambiguous between a purely passive usage and a modal (deontic) passive one. The two uses differ with respect to a number of properties, which are examined here. The pure passive usage is more constrained than the modal (deontic) usage as it is possible with only few verbs (of ‘loss’ and ‘disappearance’), and unlike the ordinary passive construction does not admit an agentive phrase. In this article particular attention is dedicated to the second, modal (‘deontic’) passive, usage.

Micro-variazione dell’accordo con soggetti post-verbali

Patrizia Cordin — 2025-07-10

This work aims to describe the micro-variation in the sentences with post-verbal subjects in the dialectal varieties of southern Trentino. Like many other northern Italian varieties, the dialects of this area possess subject clitics, which appear in proclitic position in declarative constructions with a pre-verbal third-person subject and usually do not appear in sentences where the subject follows the verb. Thanks to a field survey and an online collection of oral data, it has been possible to observe the micro-variation present in the area, where numerous realizations deviate from the structure described as canonical for verb-subject (VS) order sentences. This work highlights those elements that induce speakers to produce VS constructions with the clitic that realizes verbal agreement. Furthermore, the comparison between the data collected in the two surveys, the field one and the online one, shows that only a high number of data points allows for the capture of aspects that provide a comprehensive view of the phenomenon in question.

Le varietà linguistiche del Codice Castaldo (VBA G275 inf)

György Domokos — 2025-07-10

In the mid-16th century, the Count of Cassano, Giovanni Battista Castaldo was commissioned by King Ferdinand of Habsburg to take over Hungary from Queen Isabella Jagellone, who was forced to leave the country and retreat to Silesia. When Castaldo’s army, consisting of Spaniards, Hungarians, German speakers and Italians entered Transylvania, the language situation became even more complicated. The documents of the expedition (which also included the killing of Archbishop György Martinuzzi) are collected in a miscellaneous codex that ended up in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, known as the Castaldo Codex. The languages and varieties recorded in the documents are a faithful mirror of the linguistic situation in this part of the world around 1550. Through transcribed and analysed portions of the text, an attempt is made to show how the analysis of language varieties can help historical research.

Lexical vs. compositional Agency: The role of the context in licencing Agency

Elisabetta Ježek — 2025-07-10

In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of verbs based on their compositional behaviour regarding Agency. The taxonomy comprises three primary classes: agent-selecting verbs, non-agent-selecting verbs, and verbs that are lexically underspecified regarding Agency. We describe the semantic and syntactic characteristics of each class using evidence from corpora and considering the potential influence of coercive phenomena in semantic composition, which may be prompted by contextual cues such as agent-oriented or patient-oriented adverbials (intentionally, accidentally). Our analysis focuses on Italian, but the conclusions generally apply to other languages as well.

Codifica, inferenze ed aspetti (non?) vero-funzionali nei periodi ipotetici

Marco Mazzoleni — 2025-07-10

In the cooperative process of meaning construction the addressee’s contribution is relevant, with an interpretative work that appears more evident when there is a gap between the “sentence meaning” and the “speaker meaning”, i.e. in the area of discourse implicits that derive from inferential processes, and which at least in some cases depend on the interaction between the linguistic forms used by the sender on the one hand and the encyclopedic knowledge and conceptual structures generally shared between the interlocutors on the other. In this contribution I intend to address with this perspective two relevant issues in the area of conditional constructions: the status of conditional perfection and that of counterfactuality, also trying to verify if and how the inferential processes involved (which in both cases deal with truth-functional aspects) can be identified with the particularized or generalized conversational implicatures of the Gricean tradition.

La sintassi dell’infinito preceduto da un determinante: presente e (un po’ di) storia

Imre Szilágyi — 2025-07-10

In this paper we present the syntax of the construction called infinitive preceded by a determinant both in modern Italian and in the Florentine language of about four centuries ago. During the syntactic analysis concerning modern Italian, we describe the various syntactic criteria on the basis of which the three structural subtypes can be identified, and we also seek the answer to the question whether examples can be found that contradict the syntactic theory exposed. As regards the analysis of the construction in the stage examined of the Old Florentine language, we show, on the one hand, that the subtypes identified in Modern Italian can also be traced to this stage of the language. On the other hand, we illustrate with various examples that some syntactic changes occurred over time, particularly in the expression of the subject and the direct object of the infinitive.

Segmentazione testuale in lettere di cancelleria dell’età premoderna

Judit W. Somogyi — 2025-07-10

In Italy, many messages (or parts of messages) in the course of political and diplomatic communication in the 15th and 16th centuries were sent in ciphered form to their recipients. As part of the monoalphabetic procedure, which was widely used at the time, in addition to the replacement of graphemes, some of the writing features of the text were often modified in the encoding process to prevent code breaking. Some of these changes concerned markings indicating the logical and morpho-syntactic structure of the text, for example, the encoded version was usually written without spaces and punctuation marks. In the course of decoding the text reduced in this way, the structural features had to be reinserted, since their absence significantly impeded the interpretation of the text to correspond to the sender’s intention. This study examines Italian-language manuscripts written in cipher form with focus on the occurrence of text segmentation elements aimed at representing the structural characteristics of the script, i.e. facilitating and guiding the interpretation.