The new ne: an incipient restandardization process in contemporary Italian

1 Introduction: Italian between standard, neo-standard and further restandardization

Along with a set of stressed personal pronouns (io, tu, noi etc.), Italian exhibits a set of clitics, i. e., unstressed forms of pronouns and of adverbs of place that can precede (if proclitic) or follow (enclitic) the verb.^[1]

From the diachronic point of view, clitics were grammaticalized in all Romance languages from former stressed pronouns (e. g., French 3rd singular masculine subject clitic il < Latin ille ‘that’; Italian 1st singular direct and indirect object clitic mi < Latin me/mihi ‘1sg.acc/1sg.dat’) and locative adverbs (Italian locative vi < Latin ibi ‘there’; Italian ne < Lat. inde ‘from there’, for ne’s functions see below, Section 2). The emergence of clitics is a process that took place in all Romance languages as far as direct and indirect object clitics are concerned; clitics for subjects and other obliques are less widespread (Vincent 1997, Heap et al. 2017, Ramat and Ricca 2016: 59–60).

Standard Italian does not have subject clitics, but nonetheless it displays a very rich, and intricate, clitic microsystem (Berruto 2017: 44–45). Given its richness, this paradigm has been involved in a number of restandardization processes since the 1960s (Berruto 2017: 43–47). This paper deals with an incipient overextension of functions of the clitic ne, a process that has been noticed, and seems to have started, only in recent years, and only in some registers of the language, as we will see.

Before delving into the phenomenon, and in order to understand its sociolinguistic correlates, it is important to also bear in mind that today’s Italian witnesses the co-existence of two different standard varieties (Cerruti 2021, Cerruti and Vietti 2022). On the one hand we have the variety described in prescriptive (school) grammars, which is (ideally) taught in schools by teachers, is characterized by the presence of literary features typical of the works of Alessandro Manzoni, Gabriele d’Annunzio and the like, and is nowadays restricted only to few, usually very formal, communicative domains. This variety is usually labelled standard Italian (as opposed to neo-standard Italian, see below), italiano scolastico (‘school Italian’, Antonelli 2011) or ‘old’ Standard (Ballarè and Miola 2021). On the other hand, the variety normally spoken and written in mid-highly formal contexts by educated speakers now includes originally sub-standard (or, better, non-standard) features. This variety was observed and described by linguists and sociolinguists only since the middle 1980s and is variously labelled italiano tendenziale (‘tendential Italian’, Mioni 1983), italiano dell’uso medio (‘average Italian’, Sabatini 1985), neo-standard Italian (especially after Berruto 1987), italiano giornalistico (‘journalistic Italian’, Antonelli 2011).

The functions of ne we will concentrate upon in the following Sections are only very cursorily mentioned in Ballarè’s (2020) detailed account of the research concerning the neo-standard and its features (p. 483), and in De Santis (2021: 82). Nor is the development of what we might call a ‘new ne’ a feature of standard Italian: it might rather be regarded as a “trajectory of variation” (Ballarè 2020: 482) or as a change in progress that might eventually lead to a further restandardizaton of the clitic paradigm.

The aim of this work is to offer evidence for the use of the new ne and to discuss this ongoing change from the internal-linguistic and sociolinguistic point of view. What follows will be organized in three Sections. In Section 2 we describe the clitic paradigm of standard Italian and the restandardization processes in which this paradigm has been involved with the emergence of neo-standard Italian. Different functions of ne will also be tackled, including those that, according to the existent literature, are displayed by the clitic in standard, neo-standard and contemporary Italian. In Section 3 new cases of the overextension of ne are presented and discussed, drawing on data from four corpora of contemporary Italian. Section 4 briefly concludes the paper.

2 The clitic paradigm in Italian

Table 1 illustrates the clitic paradigm of standard Italian. It consists of thirteen different exponents, many of which are polysemic:

Some further qualifications are in order. Locative vi is stylistically more elevated than locative ci; while loro exhibits a different syntactic behavior with respect to all other exponents of the paradigm so that it is usually considered a weak (rather than a proper clitic) pronoun (Cardinaletti 1991, Cardinaletti and Starke 1999). Moreover, almost all clitics have allomorphs that have to be used when they appear in a cluster, but this does not hold for ne, which is the focus of the present paper: therefore, these issues will not be deepened further in this Section (see Wanner 1977, Evans et al. 1978, Lepschy and Lepschy 1981: 181–182).

After the 1960s, with the spread of Italian over all other local languages as the everyday-spoken variety and the subsequent development of neo-standard Italian (see previous Section), the actual use of clitics varied and the paradigm underwent a number of innovation processes that ultimately led to its reduction and simplification (Berretta 1985: 209). In particular, loro has dropped out of oral (and perhaps also written) use and gli is normally overextended for plural (feminine and masculine) datives. Gli is also used instead of feminine singular datival le, although in casual speech and in journalistic prose the occurrence of the former instead of the latter is less pervasive (cf. Cerruti & Vietti 2022: 274). Locative (adessive/allative) vi has virtually disappeared (Berretta 1985: 200, Russi 2008: 59), ci, on the other hand, is well attested as a locative, and may also be used to pronominalize instruments, comitatives, non-human datives (Pescarini 2015: 497), and also dative accusatives (i. e., the second valency of intransitive bivalent verbs introduced by the preposition a, see below). Furthermore, it is very frequently fixed, as a desemantized particle, on verbs (when functioning as the so-called ci attualizzante, ‘actualizing ci’, see Berretta 1984, Sabatini 1985: 160–161, Berruto 1987: 76).

These changes can be visualized in Table 2, which shows the clitic paradigm utilized in neo-standard (spoken) Italian, restandardized along the lines sketched above.

The items put in parentheses are out, or virtually out, of the system, i. e. are scarcely, if at all, used in the variety at issue.

3 Data set and methodology

In order to assess the extent of the further overextension of ne’s use in contemporary Italian, we selected a number of bivalent non-transitive verbs and tested their occurrence with an argumental ne in different corpora of Italian. The verbs have been chosen among the list of bivalent verbs with an “a-Objektoid” (i. e., what we call here a datival accusative for the sake of simplicity) provided by Siller-Runggaldier (1996: 389–390). From this list, only verbs belonging to the Italian Vocabolario di Base (‘basic lexicon’, De Mauro 1980: 149–183) have been put under scrutiny. Therefore, the results will involve the most used items of the list. The total number of tested verbs was 70.^[5]

Four corpora for contemporary Italian were selected, namely CORIS, Repubblica Corpus, RIDIRE, and KIParla. The main criterion that guided the selection was to capture as much as diaphasic/diamesic variation as possible. CORIS and La Repubblica Corpus represent written Italian: in particular, CORIS is a POS-tagged, monitor corpus started in 1998 and consisting of six subsections whose registers range from academic prose to fiction books to private letters (see Rossini Favretti et al. 2002); La Repubblica Corpus also is POS-tagged and consists of texts published between 1985 and 2000 on the prominent Italian newspaper La Repubblica (Baroni et al. 2004). They contain more than 150 and 380 million tokens respectively. RIDIRE contains 1.5 billion tokens extracted between 2009 and 2013 from the Italian web. It is POS-tagged and annotated, and has twelve sub-domains that are meant to “sufficientemente rappresent[are] l’italiano nell’insieme delle sue varietà d’uso” (‘sufficiently represent Italian in all of its varieties’, Moneglia & Paladini 2010: 21), at least in its written, online use. Lastly, KIParla (Mauri et al. 2019) is a corpus of spoken Italian containing more than one million tokens subdivided in more than 100 hours of conversations collected in Bologna and Turin from a various range of speakers. The main goal of KIParla is to capture diatopic and diaphasic variation in today’s Italy. Given their nature and the text they include, the corpora we utilize will be representative of the following varieties: CORIS and La Repubblica mainly represent standard and neo-standard Italian, since a large part of them consists of journalistic prose or other formal written genres. RIDIRE will be more prone to show data of the variety used on the web (so-called italiano digitato). Spoken Italian, a variety generally regarded as less formal than those previously mentioned, will be preferably accessed through KIParla data.

Every basic lexicon verb on Siller-Runggaldier’s list has been tested in relation to the occurrence with a datival accusative pronominalized with ne. All occurrences were manually scrutinized and annotated for the function served by ne. When at least one occurrence of datival accusative ne in at least one corpus was found, we also tested the occurrence of vi and ci as clitic pronouns for datival accusatives. Again, all occurrences were manually annotated and scrutinized. When the occurrences of the datival accusative function for a single clitic were more than 100, the number 100 is reported in Table 3.

Occurrences have been extracted for finite mood verbs, and infinitives and gerunds. For finite mood verbs all occurrences with up to three words separating the proclitic and the verb form have been extracted. Italian indefinite moods have enclitics only and the construction [verb form + enclitic(s)] is graphically written as a single word, so that no separating words can be found in between. For pronominal verbs, only forms involving the clitic se have been counted in Table 3, for reasons that will be discussed in Section 3.2.

The comparison of occurrences of the three items might nonetheless give an idea of the extent to which ne is used as one of the clitics (or the only clitic) that may pronominalize the second argument of any of the verbs at issue.

4 Conclusions

The data offered here accounted for an incipient restandardization process involving the clitic ne in contemporary Italian. Ne may today be utilized, along with ‘more (neo-)standard’ variants vi and ci, as a substitute for datival accusatives, that is second verbal arguments introduced by a. The variant is still marginal but its spread is apparently continuous. It originated in refined and educated varieties and has moved ‘downwards’ into journalistic prose and also into formal speech. We speculated about some of the reasons favoring the spread of the new function of ne, mainly due to the ousting of locative vi from the clitic paradigm – considered too obsolete – and of locative ci – considered too low-prestige – from the formal varieties. The ongoing change at issue here is then to be regarded as one of the examples of change from above taking place in today’s Italian (see also on this issues Renzi 2012, Cerruti et al. 2017).

As further developments for the present research, we may suggest exploring the fixation of the new ne on other verbs, and especially its use as a substitute and pronominalizer not only for datival accusatives, but also for other complements, as illustrated by (21), involving a comitative, and (22), involving a second argument introduced by per with the complex verb provare attrazione ‘to be attracted’.

Finally, also delving into the diachrony of Italian might be of interest: it might be possible that the new uses of ne discussed in this paper appeared before the development of the neo-standard variety. However, no example of 3rd person datival ne has been found in Cardinaletti’s (2010: 429–431) examination of oblique clitics in Ancient Italian.