Costruzioni inaccusative nel Cinquecento

Abstract

To describe certain unaccusative verbs found in literary and epistolary texts from the sixteenth century, this essay begins by examining the different syntactic configurations of fuggire (e.g., sono fuggito, mi sono fuggito, ho fuggito) in Il libro del Cortegiano, the letters of Baldassarre Castiglione (1497-1529), and other Renaissance texts. The initial data emerging from this introductory observation are analyzed through the work of Elisabetta Ježek on the unaccusative verb constructions in Early Italian, which was the first to provide a diachronic description of this significant construction type. The essay aims to offer new data on the history of these constructions by drawing on various types of sixteenth-century texts (literary prose, poetry, letters, comedies), with particular attention to the most important linguistic change identified in Ježek’s study: the disappearance in modern Italian of the pronominal unaccusative construction (e.g., mi sono fuggito, fuggendosi), which was accepted (and prevalent) in Early Italian across all conjugations, unlike the simple construction, which was only allowed in compound and non-finite verbs (e.g., io sono fuggito, fuggendo).

The research also examines other unaccusative verbs and the two additional changes identified by Ježek. The essay concludes with a brief discussion on the expunction of the construction *si [>sì] è* (the verb essere preceded by sì, which should not be confused with reflexive forms) in the third version of Cortegiano, a form which appears in the second version.