Home > Catalogue > Quaderni Veneti > 7 | 2018 > Il Perfetto Composto negli Atti del podestà di Lio Mazor: condizioni testuali e diacronia
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Il Perfetto Composto negli Atti del podestà di Lio Mazor: condizioni testuali e diacronia

Francesca Valcamonico    Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italia    

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abstract

This short essay deals with the analysis of verb tenses’ functions in the language variety testified by the Atti del podestà di Lio Mazor. It is a series of judicial documents written at the beginning of the 14th century in a small village in the Venice Lagoon. They show an archaic state of language, in which the Simple Past is still productive, while nowadays in Northern Italy it has disappeared from the varieties spoken in the area, that use only the Present Perfect. In the 1980s, some typological studies on Romance languages identified in the expansion of the semantic functions related to the Present Perfect a diachronic process named aoristic drift. In this paper, we analyze the linguistic distribution between Present Perfect and Simple Past showed by the Atti in the light of the aoristic drift’s theory. We also integrate this theoric background by applying a refined textual analysis to the documents. The combination of linguistic theory and text analysis to investigate ancient language varieties is the innovative element of the present work, with respect to the traditional studies about aoristic drift.

Published
Nov. 12, 2019
Accepted
July 18, 2019
Submitted
June 21, 2019
Language
IT

Keywords: Present PerfectLio MazorMedieval textsAoristic drift

Copyright: © 2018 Francesca Valcamonico. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.