Indefiniteness and Specificity in Old Italian Texts

Abstract

The present study shows the necessity to assume, in the process of nominal determiner grammaticalization, an intermediate period between the early facultative marking of important referents and fully grammaticalized article systems. In this intermediate period, especially indefinite determiners seem to be distributed in a quite clearcut way according to the specificity of the referents introduced by the respective noun phrases. Statistical evidence for this is drawn from the distribution of the indefinites uno, alcuno, certo and bare noun phrases in a corpus of three Old Tuscan novella collections. Specificity, understood as the semantic property of non-varying, operator independent interpretation of the variable introduced by an indefinite noun phrase, which makes a continuous anaphoric reference to the respective discourse referent possible, is conceived as a phenomenon of information organization in texts. It seems to be, at this intermediate stage of nominal determiner grammaticalization, a lexical feature of indefinites rather than an effect of syntactic or pragmatic factors.