Marco Mazzoleni

The pragmantax of some Italian conditionals

Abstract In Italian, thematic or resumptive conditionals, ‘Dutchman Sentences’, conditional inducements and deterrents, and conditional speech acts can only be found as indicative conditionals, and (almost) never as subjunctive conditionals. In the present paper, I argue that this morphosyntactic constraint on four types of ‘pragmatic’ conditional depends on the interrelation between their specific pragmatic features and the semantics of mood choice in the standard Italian conditional system of moods and tenses, which will be analyzed, together with the basic meaning of se (‘if’), in a neo-Gricean fashion.

Costrutti concessivi fattuali in italiano antico

Conceived within the frame of the ItalAnt project for the realization of a grammar of Old Italian (intended as corresponding to the variety used in Florence in the 13 t h century), this paper deals with the semantic area of concessive constructions. The basic morphosyntactic structures of contemporary Italian - consisting in hypotaxis with subordinating conjunctions (plus sometimes added adverbials), and in parataxis with coordinating conjunctions and/or adverbial elements - correspond to those documented in Old Italian, with the exception of «parahypotaxis». The label is traditionally adopted to name sequences of «dependent clause + main clause» where the last is introduced by a coordinating conjunction like e («and») or ma («but»); in this way a correlative structure is formed, parallel to the one which may be found in more common sequences of «dependent clause + main clause» where the last contains an adverbial not coordinating element. Between the two diachronic strata of Italian there are instead deeper differences with respect to the morpholexical elements adopted to express the semantic relationship, especially in hypotaxis: the basic form is avvegna che (unknown in contemporary Italian), while tutto che, ancor che and the nowadays main written subordinating conjunction benche appear only rarely, and the other «modern» forms sebbene, quantunque, etc. are not attested. Stronger although not perfect correspondences may be found in paratactic structures, where the second coordinate clause is introduced by the coordinating conjunctions e and ma and/or contains the anaphoric adverbials non ostante questo, con tutto cio, tuttavia and pur.