L’ordine delle parole nel Chronicon Vulturnense

Abstract

"Word Order in the Chronicon Vulturnense. The aim of this paper is to present a linguistic analysis of the Chronicon Vulturnense, a “roborated chronicle” written in Latin in the first half of the 12th century by a monk of the monastery of San Vincenzo at Volturno. The work, which is characterised by the repeated interweaving of chronological and documentary parts, offers interesting insights for the study of the interaction and co-presence of different linguistic repertoires in the written forms of the centuries immediately following the first attestations of vernacular Italian. In particular, the study of word order shows a tendency towards constructions with the verb in a final position in narrative parts and in a central position in documentary parts, while throughout the chronicle proper there is a high frequency of constructions with postverbal subjects, as occurs in many texts of ancient Italian. Keywords: medieval chronicles, latin-romance transition, medieval latin, word order, pragmatics, postverbal subject, ancient Italian "