9. Passives of ditransitives: the gradual rise of a Recipient passive in Italian
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Anna Giacalone Ramat
Abstract
This chapter investigates the properties and the diachronic development of a poorly described Italian construction, vedersi ‘to see oneself’ followed by the infinitive, with the aim of defending its Recipient passive interpretation. According to the recent typological literature (Malchukov, Haspelmath, and Comrie 2010), Italian, as a language that follows an indirective coding pattern, should not allow the passivization of the Recipient argument in ditransitives. The case under scrutiny represents a special strategy whose motivations are to be searched for, on the one hand, in the tendency for Recipients to take the subject role in passivization (Haspelmath 2015), and on the other at the pragmatic level in a response to the need for expressing the (mostly negative) subject affectedness. The diachronic analysis illustrates the grammaticalization path of vedersi + infinitive leading from the reflexive construction, in which vedersi has a perceptive meaning, to a Recipient passive construction through texts from Old to Modern Italian. The semantic expansion of the Recipient construction beginning in the late 19th century, through its ability to attract a variety of ditransitive predicates, is illustrated with corpus-based examples. The earlier but parallel development of a Theme passive in the construction vedersi + past participle (Giacalone Ramat 2017) confirms the main lines of change and suggests a new assessment of passivization patterns in Modern Italian.
Abstract
This chapter investigates the properties and the diachronic development of a poorly described Italian construction, vedersi ‘to see oneself’ followed by the infinitive, with the aim of defending its Recipient passive interpretation. According to the recent typological literature (Malchukov, Haspelmath, and Comrie 2010), Italian, as a language that follows an indirective coding pattern, should not allow the passivization of the Recipient argument in ditransitives. The case under scrutiny represents a special strategy whose motivations are to be searched for, on the one hand, in the tendency for Recipients to take the subject role in passivization (Haspelmath 2015), and on the other at the pragmatic level in a response to the need for expressing the (mostly negative) subject affectedness. The diachronic analysis illustrates the grammaticalization path of vedersi + infinitive leading from the reflexive construction, in which vedersi has a perceptive meaning, to a Recipient passive construction through texts from Old to Modern Italian. The semantic expansion of the Recipient construction beginning in the late 19th century, through its ability to attract a variety of ditransitive predicates, is illustrated with corpus-based examples. The earlier but parallel development of a Theme passive in the construction vedersi + past participle (Giacalone Ramat 2017) confirms the main lines of change and suggests a new assessment of passivization patterns in Modern Italian.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Preface V
- Contents VII
- List of abbreviations IX
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Part 1: The nature of ditransitive arguments: the contribution of diachrony
- 1. How do ditransitives change? 1
- 2. Roles and grammatical relations in synchrony and diachrony: the case of the indirect object 19
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Part 2: Ditransitive verbs and construction alternation
- 3. The spread of the ad construction in Merovingian Latin: identifying semantic paths in the domain of ditransitives 61
- 4. Old Italian ditransitive constructions: between alternation and change 97
- 5. The emergence of the dative alternation in Dutch: towards the establishment of a horizontal link 137
- 6. Attraction and differentiation in the history of the English dative and benefactive alternations 169
- 7. The ditransitive alternation in the history of German: the case of verkaufen (‘sell’) 197
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Part 3: Ditransitives between stability and further developments
- 8. The diachrony of ditransitives in Vedic Sanskrit 231
- 9. Passives of ditransitives: the gradual rise of a Recipient passive in Italian 259
- 10. ‘Hit’ semantics and physical sensations: on the development of spontaneous event constructions with Spanish dar ‘give’ 285
- Subject Index 313
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Preface V
- Contents VII
- List of abbreviations IX
-
Part 1: The nature of ditransitive arguments: the contribution of diachrony
- 1. How do ditransitives change? 1
- 2. Roles and grammatical relations in synchrony and diachrony: the case of the indirect object 19
-
Part 2: Ditransitive verbs and construction alternation
- 3. The spread of the ad construction in Merovingian Latin: identifying semantic paths in the domain of ditransitives 61
- 4. Old Italian ditransitive constructions: between alternation and change 97
- 5. The emergence of the dative alternation in Dutch: towards the establishment of a horizontal link 137
- 6. Attraction and differentiation in the history of the English dative and benefactive alternations 169
- 7. The ditransitive alternation in the history of German: the case of verkaufen (‘sell’) 197
-
Part 3: Ditransitives between stability and further developments
- 8. The diachrony of ditransitives in Vedic Sanskrit 231
- 9. Passives of ditransitives: the gradual rise of a Recipient passive in Italian 259
- 10. ‘Hit’ semantics and physical sensations: on the development of spontaneous event constructions with Spanish dar ‘give’ 285
- Subject Index 313
