La posizione del soggetto e dell’oggetto nel siciliano antico

This paper examines the position of the subject and of the object in a corpus of Sicilian texts dating from the14th-15th centuries. In the Verb-second syntax (V2) typical of the medieval Romance varieties, the preverbal position is available to any kind of syntactic category. Thus, the first position is not assigned exclusively to subjects with a Topic function, but can be occupied also by objects which are part of the Focus domain. However, in old Sicilian the SVo order is the most frequent among those licensed by the V2 syntax, whilst the oVS order is rarely attested. moreover, when the subject is a referential Topic, i.e. it has already been introduced into the discourse, or is identifiable within the co(n)text, thus manifesting the semantic traits of definiteness and specificity, it occurs prominently in preverbal position. By contrast, when the subject is in Focus, or is part of a predicate- or sentence-focus structure, it tends to occur in postverbal position. It thus seems that the VS order is restricted only to some specialized structures such as existential constructions and presentative sentences. These characteristics suggest that Sicilian is close to the typological features of modern Romance already in the early stage, anticipating the default, unmarked, SVo order of modern Romance, and restricting the marked VS order to thetic structures.