Topicalizzazione e pronomi clitici oggetto nell’italo-romanzo antico

This paper examines the pragmatic strategy of object topicalization in a corpus of old Italo-Romance texts, dating from the 13th to the 15th century. We claim that, at this early stage, preverbal topical objects are constrained in information-structural terms, undergoing discourse-driven conditions that are coded differently in the ‘verb-second’ (V2) syntax of medieval Italo-Romance. Precisely, when the object expresses a Referential/Given Topic, this is dislocated and anaphorically resumed by an enclitic pronominal form. On the contrary, when the object bears an Aboutness/Shift Topic function, this occurs within the clause without being clitic-resumed. Thus, the emergence of the pronominal clitic forms is found first with dislocated objects that are highly referential, i.e., they are ‘given’, presupposed and identifiable. By contrast, such clitic forms have not yet appeared in contexts, in which the object establishes a new topic, thus shifting from the local thematic chain of the discourse. Therefore, the data show that, at this stage, object clitics are not yet fully grammaticalized and generalized to all kinds of Topics, as is instead the case with modern Italo-Romance.