A Linguistic History of Italian offers a clear and concise explanation of why modern Italian grammar has become the way it is. It focuses on the effects of historical changes on the modern structure of Italian, revealing patterns and structures which are not always apparent to those who are only familiar with modern Italian. Although the book concentrates on the internal history of the language, the emergence of Italian is considered against the wider background of the history of italian dialects, and other external factors such as cultural and social influences are also examined.<B. Read more...
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Preface
Abbreviations and symbols
1 Introduction
1 Perspectives and aims
2 The emergence of Italian
2.1 The dialectal background
2.2 Some observations on linguistic variety in ancient Italy
2.3 From Florentine dialect to Italian
3 Chronology and historical sources
3.1 Chronology
3.2 Early texts
3.3 'Proto-Romance' and 'Classical Latin'
4 A note on phonetic transcription
5 Some concepts in linguistic change
5.1 Variation
5.2 Hypercorrection
5.3 Sound change and allomorphy
5.4 A note on the 'phoneme' 5.5 Morphologization and grammaticalization5.6 Analogy
5.7 The emergence of 'analytic' structures
5.8 Written and spoken language
2 History of the sound system
0 Introduction
1 The prosodic system
1.1 The syllable
1.2 Stress
1.2.1 Stress in Italian
1.3 Length
2 Vowels
2.1 Loss of vowel length, and expansion of aperture distinctions
2.2 Loss of Latin diphthongs
2.3 Stress and vowel quality
3 Consonants
3.1 Loss of [h]
3.2 Emergence of the voiced fricative [v]
3.3 Postconsonantal [I]>
[j]
3.4 Emergence of the palatal and affricate consonants
3.5 Voicing. 4 Major vowel changes4.1 Major vowel changes, and their morphological effects
4.2 Diphthongization of low mid vowels
4.3 Other developments of the low mid vowels
4.4 The evolution of [aw]
4.5 Anaphonesis
4.6 Unstressed vowels
4.6.1 Asymmetrical merger of Tuscan unstressed vowels
4.6.2 Rounding and backing of front vowels
4.6.3 Raising of unstressed [a]
4.6.4 Deletion of unstressed vowels
4.6.4.1 Syncope of the penultimate vowel of proparoxytones
4.6.5 The prosthetic vowel [i]
5 The glides [j] and [w], and their effects
5.1 The fate of [w]. 8.1 Syllable-initial strengthening8.2 Regressive assimilation of consonants
8.2.1 Assimilation and the problem of rafforzamento sintattico
9 Syllable-final weakening
10 The word-final consonants
11 Dissimilation and metathesis
11.1 Dissimilation
11.2 Metathesis
12 The phonetic sources of inflectional -e and -i
13 A note on 'learnè€d' phonology
3 Structural evolution of nouns, adjectives and verbs
0 Structure of words
0.1 The example of the adverb
0.2 The paradigmatic dimension
1 Inflectional morphology of the noun and adjective
1.1 Declension
1.2 The case system.
