DEITTICO, ARTICOLO ‘ARTICOLOIDE’. MULTIFUNZIONALITÀ DEI DIMOSTRATIVI NEL CHRONICON VULTURNENSE

Abstract

The study of Latin demonstratives in early medieval texts has mainly focused on the diachronic reconstruction of the formation of the article from the demonstrative. The studies have therefore focused exclusively on ille and ipse as precursors of the definite articles of the Romance varieties and on the search for late Latin and early medieval Latin texts in which demonstratives could have had an article or 'articoloid' function. The loss of the deictic trait has often been associated with its high frequency in these texts. A fine-grained analysis of the values of all Latin demonstratives in a “roborated” chronicle, i.e., a chronicle composed of properly historiographical and documentary parts, written around 1115, reveals an interesting semantic stratification in which the same linguistic element can have traits belonging to different phases of its history or specialise as a distinctive element of a specific textual typology.

Keywords

• latin-romance transition
• medieval chronicles
• medieval latin
• ancient italian
• demonstratives
• article
• deixis