Sulla nascita dei nomi in -ata nella transizione latino-italiano

The issue of the rise of -ata action nouns, which are widespread in the Romance languages but unknown to Latin, has been intensively discussed. Two major hypothesis have been put forward to account for the emergence of this derivational pattern: according to the first one, -ata action nouns are participial nouns, obtained thorugh the ellipsis of a feminine, singular lexical head; according to the second one, -ata formations must be rather traced back to Latin -tus (<*-tu-) action nouns, belonging to the fourth declension, through their neuter -tum allomorphs. In this papers, new evidence is provided in support of the latter position. In particular, it is shown that the emergence of -ata nouns, both in Italian and in other Western Romance languages, is due to an overall reshaping of the nominalizing strategies in Late Latin, and seems to be connected to the loss of ground of the -tus (<*-tu-) suffix, originally devoted to nominalize intransitive (mainly stative and achievement) predicates, but gradually dismissed since homophonic with the past participle -tus (<*-to-) ending. Specific Latin contexts are presented which might have licensed the reanalysis of the plural forms of the -tum allomorphs into a singular, feminine lexeme. Beyond their etymological source, -ata nouns are also investigated with regard to their functional role in the domain of Romance nominalizations. Data from Latin and Old Italian show that -ata derivatives perfectly cover the semantic area nominalized by -tus (<*-tu-) action nouns, with special regard to the class of unaccusative predicates. The question of the relationship of -ata nouns with other nominalizing strategies is finally addressed, especially from the point of view of the interplay of the Aktionsart of the predicate and the semantic value of the resulting action noun.