Syntax in the letters of a merchant with a hybrid language. The Avignon corpus of the correspondence of Piero di Matteo Tecchini (1385-1386)

Abstract

This article focuses on a small corpus of letters by the medieval merchant Piero di Matteo Tecchini. Born into a Florentine family, he grew up in a Provençal and Catalan linguistic environment and is the author of hundreds of letters, today preserved at the Archivio di Stato di Prato. The wide variety of hands that wrote the letters signed with his name reveals the presence of a large commercial team supporting him, but many of his texts are linguistically hybrid. The letters written by his collaborators, in particular, are entirely in a generally Tuscan vernacular, while those written by Tecchini himself (whose handwriting has been confirmed through internal elements of the correspondence) show distinctly Catalan forms within an Italo-Romance framework. This work provides the edition of Tecchini’s letters related to the Avignon warehouse, consisting of six documents, all written, at the end of the 14th century, by the hand identified as that one of the merchant, and analyzes their syntax and textuality, focusing on those features related to the tendency for rapid production of practical texts.