The volume investigates the syntax of articles in the medieval Italo-Romance varieties of Lombardy and Veneto, drawing on a corpus of texts dating from the 13th to 15th centuries.
The emergence of the article represents one of the most significant functional developments in the Romance nominal system and provides an indicator of broader processes of grammatical optimization. The study focuses on the syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic factors that guided the grammaticalization of definite, indefinite, and partitive articles in these varieties.
Quantitative analysis reveals a gradual generalization and an increased frequency of article use at the expense of bare noun phrases, albeit with important restrictions.
Consistent with models proposed by grammaticalization theory, the variation in article use reflects pressures embedded in a wider process of linguistic change, driven by functional and cognitive mechanisms.
