Persistence and renewal in the relative pronoun paradigm: the case of Italian (original) (raw)
In the course of the development of Romance languages from Latin, new relative pronouns of the type of Italian il quale were introduced, while the relative pronouns of Latin origin underwent various reductions of case marking as well as the weakening of gender and number distinctions, thus tending to become invariable markers. The renewal of relative pronouns in Romance languages deserves closer attention because relative pronouns are crosslinguistically a quite uncommon type (Comrie 1989:149). This paper attempts to reconstruct the conditions for the emergence in Romance languages of a relative pronoun reproducing the morphological properties of the Latin relative. The discussion focuses in particular on Italian. It is claimed that the il quale type was first used as a textual cohesion device to link a clause with a preceding one when they shared a participant. The data extracted from a corpus of Old Italian texts also suggests that non-restrictive uses of il quale were primary while restrictive ones were secondary. The il quale type seems to have entered the relative paradigm starting from the most accessible syntactic roles of Subject and Object and then to have spread down the hierarchy to the less accessible roles.