The Misunderstood Double Marking of Indirect Objects and New Infinitive Strategies in Unexpected Places: A Brief Study of Romance Variation

Abstract

Abstract Rohlfs (1968, 3 $632) discusses the normal marking of DOs that are [+human] with prepositions, usually a, in Southern Italian dialects, including the Calabrian varieties. I have already addressed a few brief comments to this topic in Trumper 1996.1 The phenomenon, which syntactically binds Southern and some Central dialects to Sardinian, to Corsican, to Ibero-Romance, and to Romanian, is also present, albeit with more restrictions, in Northern Italian dialects.2 Rohlfs is essentially correct when he states that the preposition used is not always a but sometimes da (“Gallo-Sicilian”), sometimes per, not only in Romanian (am viizut pe tine) but even in the Mediterranean “lingua franca” or sabir described in detail in Cifoletti (1989) with examples such as genti mirado per mi andar con ti“mi s’e visto andar via con te”: the example mi ablar per ti adduced by Rohlfs doesn’t exhibit this particular construction but only the generalized use of the preposition per to mark both IO’s (“io ti dico”: mi ablar per ti) and DOs (“io ti vedo”: mi mirar per ti), provided they be [+human]. The particular preposition used seems to be irrelevant; more important is the fact of marking a distinction between types of DO/ IO [+human] vs. [-human], not always with the restriction [+human] to the names of persons or the Pro-forms that substitute them, but often with an extension to kinship terms, occasionally to place names (personification?) and, usually to professions or roles.