The pragmatic functionality of atonic double-object clitic clusters in fourteenth-century Florentine

Throughout the thirteenth century in the dialect of Florence the order of clitic pronouns in double-object clusters in which the dat(ive) was first- or secondperson singular or plural was acc(usative)–dat. During the fourteenth century variation in the order arose so that both the acc–dat and the dat–acc order were possible. By the fifteenth century, however, the variation was resolved in favor of dat–acc, the pattern found today in Standard Italian, derived essentially from late Medieval Florentine. Expanding upon Aski (forthcoming), this article offers a pragmatic-driven account of the order of double-object proclitic clusters found in fourteenth-century Florentine texts of a variety of genres, which were collected from the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) on-line database. The results of our analysis confirm Aski's (forthcoming) observation that the primary factor governing the order alternation is topicality of the referent of the first clitic, but additional structural and semantic factors were found to be operative as well. Although this is an exhaustive textual examination of a medieval morphosyntactic phenomenon, the conclusions remain tentative, since pragmatic properties are always co-determined by contextual and situational factors that are difficult if not impossible to reconstruct.