Abstract
Indefinites display a great functional variety and they give rise to different pragmatic effects. We focus on free choice indefinites and in particular on the Italian qualsiasi. Our aim is to reconstruct the grammaticalization path of this item and understand how diachronic data might shed some light on existing semantic theories of free choice. We employ corpus-based tools to build a database containing occurrences of qualsiasi from its origin and early forms to its current usage. We show that qualsiasi emerged from a particular unconditional construction and we outline the different stages which led to its grammaticalization. We analyze the compatibility of our diachronic study with formal accounts of free choice inferences, with a focus on Alternative Semantics analyses for indefinite pronouns and so-called grammatical theories of free choice. Our work shows that an integration between formal semantics and historical linguistics is fruitful and worth pursuing.
Highlights
Most languages show a fairly uniform morphosyntactic behaviour of indefinite expressions.1 For instance, indefinites are either derived from interrogative structures by means of an indefinite marker, or they are formed from an indefinite marker together with a general ontological-category noun
We have examined the diachronic distribution of qualsiasi and its combination with the indefinite article un between the end of the 1700s and the year 2019
A free choice indefinite was analyzed as a set of exhaustified propositional alternatives which were conventionally associated with the [∀] operator
Summary
Most languages show a fairly uniform morphosyntactic behaviour of indefinite expressions. For instance, indefinites are either derived from interrogative structures by means of an indefinite marker (e.g. the Latin quidam, ‘someone’), or they are formed from an indefinite marker together with a general ontological-category noun In Haspelmath’s (1997) terms, this amounts to the distinction between specificity versus non-specificity. Another important function, exemplified in (1a), is the Free Choice function (FC):. We investigated the whole expression qual si sia, from which the compound forms were originated according to the Italian historical dictionary by Battaglia and Barberi Squarotti (2002). The presence of the wh-element qual might suggest that the first environment in which qual appeared together with si and sia was a direct or indirect interrogative clause like (2), from a letter of Michelangelo Buonarroti:. (2) Non so qual si sia meglio, o ’l mal che giova, o ’l not know which CLITIC is.SUBJ better or the evil that benefits or the ben che nuoce. In this regard, might provide an interesting insight
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