Introduction

On the metalanguage of the first Grammar of Aymara (1603)

This paper investigates the linguistic categories adopted by the Jesuit missionary Ludovico Bertonio in his early modern European description of the Andean language of Aymara. Like other missionary grammars in the Spanish colonial world, Bertonio’s linguistic work tends to impose traditional terms and classifications, familiar to Latin and Romance languages, to an indigenous language that is completely different in its typological structure from the IndoEuropean model and exhibits morphological and syntactic strategies that were entirely new at that time. Thus, in his description of noun declension, the missionary grammarian reduces the rich Aymara case system to only six case endings (caso…

The asymmetric Path-conflation pattern of GO and COME verbs in Aymara

This paper investigates the basic motion verbs sara ‘go’ and juta ‘come’ in Aymara, an indigenous language of the Andes, within the framework of Talmy’s lexical typology (Talmy 2000). In a crosslinguistic perspective, ‘come’ and ‘go’ are assumed to be deictically complementary and have been represented as a kind of Path-conflating verbs, i.e. verbs that include the deictic component of Path in their lexical semantics, which is respectively the direction ‘toward the speaker’ vs that ‘not toward the speaker’. Data from Aymara show in fact that ‘come’ and ‘go’ exhibit an asymmetrical Path-conflation pattern: ‘come’ does inherently entail deictic motion toward the speaker, whereas ‘go’ indicate…

Alle origini della deissi indoeuropea. Un approccio linguistico cognitivo

Gli studi di indoeuropeistica non sempre dialogano con le teorie linguistiche contemporanee e, in particolare, con le scienze cognitive (cfr. Melchert 2016). Tuttavia, il contributo che le seconde possono dare alla ricostruzione di fenomeni linguistici e culturali indoeuropei non è trascurabile. Non è d’altra parte meno rilevante l’apporto che la prospettiva storica può dare allo studio dei processi cognitivi umani, dall’acquisizione del linguaggio da parte dei bambini fino all’individuazione degli universali linguistici. Scopo di questo studio è discutere i risultati di una recentissima ricerca (Bartolotta 2018), che mostra il ruolo dell’indoeuropeo nella spiegazione degli universali lingu…

Modality and Injunctive in Homeric Greek: the case of counterfactual and epistemic constructions

Homeric unaugmented aorists and imperfects are the oldest verbal forms attested in Greek, which continue the so-called Indo-European ‘injunctives’. The latter were inflectionally underspecified as regards verbal categories such as tense or mood (Hoffmann 1967; Kiparsky 1968). Thus, the question arises as to how the attitude of the speaker towards the content of his utterance was expressed. The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of epistemic particles co-occurring with injunctives in the Iliad and the Odyssey, focusing in particular on past counterfactual constructions. Crosslinguistic studies have shown that such modal constructions reflect the universal semantic distinction betwe…

On the syntax of dependency in late sixteenth-century Europe

The need for studies on the history of dependency linguistics has been recently pointed out, aiming at tracing back to the origin of hierarchical grammatical relations and dependency-oriented approaches before the advent of the most renowned Tesnière’s model (Imrényi/Mazziotta 2020a). This study investigates on the emergence of the concept of syntactic dependency in missionary linguistics, focusing on the role of Jesuit grammarians on the development of the notion of subordination. In particular, the analysis concentrates on the first grammar of the indigenous South American language of Aymara, written by the Italian missionary Ludovico Bertonio at the end of the sixteenth century. I will f…

Grammatica latina e innovazione nella linguistica missionaria: il contributo di Ludovico Bertonio (1557-1625)

L’analisi delle prime grammatiche delle lingue native, scritte dai missionari allo scopo di standardizzare le innumerevoli varietà linguistiche con cui gli europei vennero a contatto durante il periodo della colonizzazione spagnola e portoghese in sud America, consente di gettare una nuova luce sull’evoluzione del pensiero linguistico all’inizio dell’era moderna. Questo lavoro si concentra in particolare sulla prima grammatica dell’aymara, l’Arte y Grammatica muy copiosa de la lengua aymara, scritta in lingua castigliana alla fine del Cinquecento (1596) dal missionario gesuita italiano Ludovico Bertonio e pubblicata a Roma nel 1603.

Spatial Frames of Reference in Old Latin

This paper investigates the spatial Frames of Reference (FoRs) in Old Latin within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics (cf. Talmy 1983; Levinson 2003; Levinson & Wilkins 2006). Differently from modern Indo-European languages, which are heavily based on the so-called relative or egocentric FoR, ancient Indo-European languages such as Vedic and Homeric Greek did not make use of such an egocentric orientation system at their earliest stage, since the relation between FIGURE and GROUND was not specified by imposing an external deictic observer’s viewpoint (cf. Bartolotta 2018; 2021). The historical-comparative analysis of the most ancient literary texts in the Indo-European tradition giv…

Embodiment e percezione dello spazio alle origini della cultura indoeuropea

La costruzione dell’identità scaturisce dall’esperienza corporea e dalla sua concreta rappresentazione nello spazio. Lo studio degli universali del linguaggio in relazione ai sistemi di coordinate spaziali utilizzati nelle lingue del mondo ha recentemente attirato l'attenzione della ricerca nell’ambito non solo linguistico, ma anche delle neuroscienze (Diessel 2013: 687; Kemmerer 2010). In particolare, la letteratura esistente sulla tipologia delle espressioni spaziali è tradizionalmente basata sull’assunto che il sistema di riferimento deittico o egocentrico in uso nelle lingue europee moderne costituisca un universale linguistico e culturale. Anche la tradizione filosofica, da Kant (1768)…