Search results for "Antico italo-romanzo"

Defocusing and agentive prepositions in Early Sicilian

2010

In early Italo-Romance two means code the agent in passive constructions: per ‘through’ and da ‘from’. Whilst similarities and differences have never been questioned, I claim that the analysis of prepositions’ semantics is essential to understand agent defocussing strategies. I propose a corpus-based investigation on Early Sicilian (14th century), conducted on Archivio testuale del siciliano antico (, University of Catania). My framework is Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1991; Luraghi 2003), which interprets prepositions as meaningful elements, expressing the spatial organisation among entities. The agentive value derives from the projection of these spatial relations onto an abstract domain:…