Indefiniteness and Specificity in Old Italian Texts

Object of this study is the marking of nominal indefiniteness in Old Italian, more precisely Old Tuscan texts, in three collections of novellas. In this period of early Romance literacy, nominal Phrases can appear as bare singulars or bare plurals, but also with one or more functional elements preceding the noun. The elements discussed here will be these semantically indefinite determiners that can appear alone with a bare noun in a NP (_N), excluding hereby indefinite elements which are only able to appear in the second (or later) position of a NP (Det_N), like certo ( certain ) in Modern Standard Italian (un certo uomo , *certo uomo). The choice of the three corpus texts has been guided by the relative homogeneity of text types, i.e. the thematic and formal continuity as testified in the anonymous Novellino (written by 1280-1300) and the ever since canonical Decamer n by Giovanni Boccaccio (the major part of the novella is written in the second half of the 14 century) and, finally, the slightly epigonic Novellino by Masuccio Salernitano (written from 1450 to 1475/76). The anonymous Novellino is one of the earliest Italo-Romance narrative texts. The late 13 century marks the relatively late beginning (in the context of Romance languages) of the Italo-Romance writing tradition and therefore represents an important turning point in the emancipation of Romance languages from Latin domination. Boccaccios