Linguistic facts and cultural history. Disentangling the paths of the influence of Latin on Italian syntax in the Middle Ages (XIII-XV century)

The period from the 13th to 15th centuries is of crucial importance for Italian linguistic and cultural history. At the chronological boundaries of this period, two key moments in the history of Italian culture are to be found: the production of the first literary texts in Italo-Romance varieties and the development of Humanism. Latin played a fundamental role in the historical development of European literary culture. European literatures unavoidably developed their own canons and traditions vis-à-vis Latin models, whether they (partially) rejected or fully accepted them. It is generally maintained that Latin models strongly influenced the syntax and style of Italian writers in the Middle Ages and that the Latin models they followed changed over time: while in the 13th century, and partially in the 14th century, Italian writers mainly used models that could be traced back to the language and style of the authors of late Antiquity, 15th-century humanists were confronted more directly with Classical Latin authors. Nonetheless these assumptions have never been supported by a comprehensive study of specific syntactic and textual patterns in Latin and Italo-Romance texts. A study of selected syntactic and textual structures within a large corpus of Latin and Italo-Romance texts could significantly enhance our understanding of the cultural dynamics in the transition from Medieval to early humanistic models. This multidisciplinary project will focus on three syntactic patterns (complement clauses, absolute constructions and hypotaxis) in both Latin and Italo-Romance texts, and analyse them employing a functional-typological methodology, in which the impact of semantic and pragmatic factors over syntax and textuality (and more generally the interactions between these different levels of analysis) plays a crucial role. Each text will be interpreted in the light of the literary, social and cultural environment in which it was produced. Given the nature of the project, the team is made up of specialists from different fields: general linguistics, Latin linguistics, Italian linguistics, medieval history, and Italian and Latin medieval literature. Particular attention will be paid to the selection of the texts: the corpus will be established after a two-month collective discussion which will chiefly consider aspects of textual typology, and diatopic variation. The analysis will be conducted on works of the same textual typology, involving two separate corpora of literary and non-literary texts: an Italo-Romance corpus and a Latin corpus. The former will consist of texts written between the 13th and 15th centuries and will contain both translations from Latin and original texts. The latter will consist of two sub-groups: 1) texts written between the 1st century BC and the 6th century AD; and 2) texts written in Italy between the 13th and 15th centuries. The parallel analysis of syntactic (and textual) structures represents a reliable diagnostic tool that will enable us to establish the main models used by Italian authors in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. This study will shed light on a key research question: “To what extent did the cultural changes that occurred in the period under consideration affect the influence of Latin on the syntax of texts written in Italo-Romance varieties?” This question tackles one of the most debated issues in theoretical linguistics, i.e. the relationship between external and internal factors in language variation and change. Furthermore, the methodology developed for this project will be a useful tool for further investigations of other Romance languages, and for studies of cultural matters at the interface between history and linguistics. Finally, this research will also provide an open-access, annotated online database containing the data collected during the study. This database will facilitate further syntactic and textual studies on both Latin and Italo-Romance texts.