Abstract
Abstract This paper deals with the distribution of adnominal ille in Late Latin. While the literature on the topic is substantial, the aim of the paper is not to seek attestations of ille which foreshadow its article or article-like function, but simply to look for some functional properties that allow for its future development as a marker of definiteness. Moreover, this paper aims at considering the distribution of ille in the context of the propositional structure taken as a whole. The Peregrinatio Aetheriae is first analysed, as a privileged text for looking at a redundant use of adnominal ille. In this text, the frequency of occurrences of adnominal ille appears to be linked to the frequency of presentative structures: in particular, ille is often found within post-verbal noun phrases which, even while fulfilling the subject function, combine a predicative and/or rhematic function with the argumental one, precisely as in existential and presentative structures. The hypothesis may thus be suggested that ille occurs as a marker of nominative nominals which occur in “atypical” combinations of syntactic and pragmatic functions and in correlation with a marked linear order. In a second step, this analysis is checked against a further corpus, drawn from St. Augustine’s Confessiones where, again, ille is found either as a marker of nominals which, in addition to functioning as arguments, have a predicative and rhematic value, or as a marker of nominals which occur in propositional structures where other nominal (or adjectival) elements are involved as predicates as well.
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