Tipicità delle costruzioni presentative per l’italiano neostandard

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the distribution of presentative constructions in contemporary Italian and to verify whether their occurrence depends on language external factors. Presentative constructions have been studied particularly by Italian linguists during the Eighties, and were defined as being 'typical' of so-called Neostandard Italian. The analysis is based on three corpora of contemporary Italian, viz. two oral corpora (LIP and CLIPS) and one written corpus (CORIS/CODIS).Counter to expectations, presentative constructions are far from frequent in contemporary Italian and therefore cannot be considered as being 'typical' of Neostandard Italian. They are, however, attested both in written and oral Italian, with a clear preference for the latter context, in which they are evenly distributed in formal and informal registers. We conclude by discussing the differences between the linguistic phenomena traditionally included into the 'feature pool' of Neostandard Italian.

Italian wh-questions and the low periphery

“…7 The consistency of the CLIPS corpus in terms of graphic words is not provided in the documentation attached to the corpus. However, Marzo and Crocco (2015) counted 19,310 graphic words in the 24 dialogues produced by speakers from Florence, Milan, Rome and Naples. Extrapolating from these data, we can estimate the total amount of graphic words (90 dialogues collected in 15 Italian cities) to ca.…”

Non-prototypical clefts

“…PCSs are sentence-focus structures (Cruschina 2012a(Cruschina , 2015b, where "an NP coding a discourse-new entity functions simultaneously as the complement of a presentational verb and as the subject of a regular predication" (Lambrecht 2000, 655;see also De Cesare 2007;Marzo and Crocco 2015). This implies that the DP referent cannot be an (aboutness) topic, even in the cases in which it can be discourse given, and that the pseudo-relative CP does not convey background information presupposed by the speakers.…”

“…In general, PCSs have a discourse-internal function, in that they introduce a new proposition into the context as relevant and pertinent to the discourse (see, among others, Berruto 1986and Berretta 1995for Italian, and Lambrecht 1988, 1994. This function is indeed characteristic of the narrative and spoken language (Berruto 1986;Marzo and Crocco 2015). In this section, I present some more specific contexts of use and the range of interpretations that PCSs may be used to express.…”

“…There's the cat that is hungry.] (Berretta 1995: 212) PCSs have received some attention in the linguistic literature, even though they have been labelled differently depending on the alleged primary aspect or function of the construction: ci presentativo or presentational ci-sentences (Berruto 1986;Berretta 1995;Cruschina 2012aCruschina , 2016Marzo and Crocco 2015), ci focalizzante 'focalizing ci' (De Cesare 2007), or c'è clefts . These studies have all described and examined PCSs in comparison with either existentials (Berruto 1986;De Cesare 2007;Cruschina 2012a) or clefts .…”

“…The data discussed in this paper come from different sources: previous literature, corpora, but also personally collected real-life examples. Unlike existentials and clefts, the use of which is not restricted to specific registers or varieties of Italian, PCSs seem to be limited to the spoken language and are thus scarcely attested in corpora (Marzo and Crocco 2015). This makes it difficult to carry out quantitative analyses (see Karssenberg et al 2017 for a qualitative analysis of corpus examples).…”