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THE FUNCTIONING OF THE PRONOUN FORM GLI IN THE 16TH-CENTURY ITALIAN LANGUAGE // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2018. Issue 5 (194). P. 9-14

The article focuses on the polifunctional pronoun form gli and its patterns of use in the 16th-century Italian. In Old Italian, as a result of phonetic changes, this form became virtually universal, as it performed various subject, direct object and indirect object functions and co-occurred with other developments of the Lat. ille. In Modern Italian gli has several uses, but they are not stylistically equal: gli as the indirect object masculine singular pronoun is normative, gli as the indirect object plural form is colloquially marked, and gli as the indirect object feminine singular pronoun is regarded as a vulgarism. The 16th century, in a way, was a transition period when certain uses of gli that later became obsolete are only present in comic genres and in the writings by semiliterate authors. Another interesting feature is the growing discrepancy between the dialect of Florence and the codified norm. The reduction of superfluous uses of gli in the 16th-century Italian has not been dealt with specially before. The present piece of research aims at assessing the way the functions of gli were gradually being reduced and differentiated stylistically, which becomes evident when one confronts prose and verse writings belonging to different genres and to authors from different regions of Italy.

Keywords: Italian language, history of Italian, personal pronouns, grammatical synonymy, language norm

THE COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR BY G. M. ALESSANDRI AS A PIECE OF EVIDENCE REGARDING LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL CONTACTS BETWEEN ITALY AND SPAIN IN THE XVI CENTURY // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2018. Issue 8 (197). P. 62-68

The present paper is devoted to a little-known XVI-century piece of linguistic writing – the comparative grammar of Italian and Spanish (“Il paragone della lingua toscana et castigliana”, “The comparison of Tuscan and Castilian languages”, 1560) by Giovanni Mario Alessandri, a Naples-born courtier. The grammar was meant both for the Spanish nobles eager to learn Italian and for the Italians who pursued a career at the Spanish court. In many ways “Il paragone” stands apart from the bulk of the Italian grammatical treatises of that epoch. Alessandri does not cite classic authors like Boccaccio or Petrarch to support theoretical points although it is on such XIV-century literary basis that the Italian language norm is based. The grammar contains a number of interesting comments of sociolinguistic nature, like those regarding social hierarchy and its impact on language use (the use of “Vostra Signoria”, for instance). It also gives an idea of how the ideology of Counter-Reformation could influence grammaticography in the Romance world (hence the frequent appeals to the authority of Catholic church – quite a queer feature for a grammatical treatise). G. M. Alessandri’s views on language have much in common with those of B. Castiglione, G. Trissino and other XVI-century Italian theorists of “courtly” language.

Keywords: history of Italian, history of Romance linguistics, grammaticography, XVI-century Italian language, questione della lingua, language norm