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This chapter investigates the mechanisms of null subject licensing in direct interrogatives, an environment which is generally neglected in investigation into null subjects, using data from a range of early Romance and Germanic languages considered to be asymmetric pro-drop languages, i.e. languages in which null subjects are favoured in main clauses. We find that there is subtle variation between the languages in question, but that two factors in particular – interrogative type and person – are crucial in conditioning this variation, and we sketch analyses based on the differential availability of Agree relations with left-peripheral elements. Therefore, null subjects in main interrogative clauses are licensed in two slightly different manners in the two language families – a fact which we show follows from differences in the structure of their left periphery and in agreement morphology

This paper provides a corpus-based analysis of compounding in Old Italian. The semantic and formal properties of compound words attested in Old Italian are described and discussed through the theoretical tools provided by Construction Morphology. The analysis confirms that compounding is exploited since the earliest attestations of the language. It reveals that Old Italian compounds are mostly right-headed endocentric or exocentric: particularly, endocentric [ADV-Y]Y, [A-N]N|A and exocentric [V-N]N are the most productive schemas. Moreover, this study highlights a significant influence of Latin on Italian compounding, whereby many Old Italian compounds are Latin loanwords and calques which served as a model for the creation of new native compounds.

Lexicological and lexicographical studies on multiword expressions in Romance languages have significantly increased in recent years. Even though some attention has been paid to Multiwords functioning as adjectives and adverbs, the structural and the functional relation between them has not been clarified yet. Employing both a qualitative and quantitative approach, this corpus-based investigation aims at exploring the diatopic distribution and the evolution of Romance multiword lexemes having the form of a prepositional phrase and the function of an adjective or/and an adverb (or both functions). According to data taken from corpora of Latin, Old Italian, Old Spanish and Middle French, this contribution investigates the relationship between the different degrees of schematicity and the productivity of this kind of multiword lexemes in order to highlight the evolutional path and the diachronic/diatopic principles engaged in the multiword modifying system across the different Romance languages taken into consideration.

This paper examines the synchronic competition and diachronic substitution of three Latin temporal expressions: tum, tunc (‘at that time’, ‘then’), and later dumque (originally, ‘while-and’), and its Old Italian outcome dunque (‘then’). Besides providing a new path of development and a new etymology for Italian dunque, we describe in detail the steps by which these forms gradually replaced one another and examine the factors at play in their renewal, showing that such forms all display a similar inference-driven functional expansion from propositional to discourse-organizational meanings. However, their subsequent development led to a functional similarity that is only partial, as is often the case in semantic–pragmatic cycles. While discussing the nature of this cycle, we focus on the speaker’s role in this type of change, which in our view can be summarized in the speaker’s cyclical application of recurrent functional principles: phonetic efficiency, analogy, and regularity in semantic change.

It. ostare ‘obstruct, hinder’ is considered a borrowing from Lat. obstare. However, some Old Italian occurrences bear the meaning ‘take off, remove’, which is far from the Latin sense. After an introductory section (§1), in which methodological problems are discussed, the article analyses the occurrences of o(b)stare derived from the OVI databases (§2), containing Old Italian texts. A final section focusses on the origin of the verb and its meanings (§3).

This paper aims at showing how today’s databases could change the traditional relationship existing between Philology and historical Lexicography, with specific reference to Old Italian lexicography and OVI dictionary (TLIO) and databases. Through the analysis of some Old Italian words meaning ‘beginning’ ((in)cominciamento, (in)comincianza, inizio), this paper presents a new philological method to manage the Corpus OVI extensive documentation: while traditional historical lexicography operates by identifying ancient occurrences of a particular word and, on this ground, by interpreting and defining their meaning, the «new» corpus-based (or, more likely, corpus-driven) historical lexicography can go further, placing that word inside the structure of ancient lexicon, that is, inferring from the documentation the distribution and the (possible) specificity of the lexeme. Relying on a study carried out by Cosimo Burgassi and by myself, this paper introduces some new interpretative categories targeting the study of words’ (in the case in point, Romance words’) history, such as «Rate of Connotation» (‘quoziente connotativo’) and «latent Latinism» (‘latinismo latente’).