Valla a capire la gente ! About the extraordinary use of the andare/venire + infinitive periphrasis in Italian

Abstract

Several studies have already been devoted to the extraordinary use of aller + infinitive and venir + infinitive in French. In the Italian area, the periphrasis obtained with andare and venire, which also produce, by grammaticalization, a modal value, have been largely overlooked. This paper aims at demonstrating the wideness of the extraordinary use in Italian, describing its properties, the sentential modalities able to increase this value, as well as syntactic structures in which the construction appears and the negativity underlined by the context. We clarify the meaning of this periphrasis as a “crossing of a limit”, that can be understood, according to two contextual acceptions, as a “deontic/axiological limit” or an “epistemic limit”. The opposition between andare and venire regarding to the deictic parameter is also shown, in order to illustrate the different meanings of these periphrasis when an auxiliary or the other is convocated.

Keywords

• grammaticalization
• periphrasis
• extraordinary value
• andare a+ infinitive
• venire a + infinitive