Università degli Studi dell’Aquila Dipartimento di Scienze Umane

Corso di Laurea in Lingue e Mediazione Culturale

Tesi di Laurea

Enzo Santilli

Italian Comparatives: a Case of Overabundance?

Relatrice prof.ssa Anna Maria Thornton

La relatrice Il candidato

…………………………………… ….. …………………………………… ….. (Matricola: 177108)

Anno Accademico 2013/2014

La stesura di quest’opera

è dedicata alla memoria di Anna Maria Ciuffetelli,

che non se ne doveva andare.

Contents

I. WHAT IS OVERABUNDANCE 1

1.1. A canonical approach to linguistic typology 2 1.2. Overabundance 8

II. WHAT IS COMPARISON 13

2.1. Morphological approach: comparison vs. gradation 13 2.2. Typological approach: establishing universals for comparison 16 2.2.1. Hundreds of languages, several ways to express comparison 16 2.2.2. Temporal sequencing and universals 22

III. COMPARATIVES FROM LATIN TO ITALIAN 25

3.1. Evolution of comparative formation from Latin to Romance languages 26 3.2. Grammars and grammarians 30 3.3. Plausible and pure organic comparatives 42

IV. PIÙ BUONO / MIGLIORE: A CASE STUDY 45

4.1. Introduction 45 4.1.1. The looming and fascinating presence of relative superlatives 47 4.2. Più buon 51 4.2.1. Più as an invariable comparative adjective and as an adverb of time 52 4.2.2. Idioms and overabundance 53 4.3. Più buone, più buona, più buono, più buoni 59 4.3.1. A relevant number of items 60 4.3.2. Taste (food & non-food) 63 4.3.2.1. Taste: no tokens with synthetic comparatives 64 4.3.2.2. Taste: only relative superlatives 65 4.3.2.3. In vino overabundance 68 4.3.3. Kindness (human & non-human) 72 4.3.3.1. Kindness: no tokens with synthetic comparatives 73 4.3.3.2. Kindness: only relative superlatives 74 4.3.3.3. Fake overabundance 77 4.3.3.4. Phantom overabundance 80 4.3.3.5. Tutti 83 4.3.3.6. A drop of overabundance 85 4.3.4. ‘Other’ 88 4.3.4.1. The Index of Overabundance for Comparatives 89

V. CONCLUSIONS 95

REFERENCES 105

APPENDIX 109

TABLES A.I – PIÙ BUONO 109 TABLE A.I.1 – PIÙ BUON 1 – 39 109 TABLE A.I.2 – PIÙ BUONE 1 – 43 113 TABLE A.I.3 – PIÙ BUONA 1 – 119 118 TABLE A.I.4 – PIÙ BUONO 1 – 167 131 TABLE A.I.5 – PIÙ BUONI 1 – 186 148

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I. What Is Overabundance

Aver modi diversi di significar molte cose diverse, è la ricchezza delle lingue; aver più modi di significar una cosa stessa, non è ricchezza, ma sopraccarico, non è libertà, ma impaccio; e impaccio tale, che l’uso tende naturalmente e di continuo a liberarsene1.

(Alessandro Manzoni)

This quote from Alessandro Manzoni’s Della lingua italiana (1840) (quoted and translated by Thornton 2012b: 199) gives us a first, relevant, picture of what I am going to discuss in this work: how do speakers behave when there are two possible ways of saying the same thing? How and when do the possible options appear and alternate? Was Manzoni right when he said that having more ways of meaning one and the same thing is such a hindrance that usage naturally and continually tends to get rid of it? Several questions, to which I will try to find an answer during this inquiry, but that need to be contextualized since the beginning, in order to avoid any misunderstanding and in order to give also to the reader who is not strictly used to linguistics the chance to understand what I shall talk about from this point further. To do this, I will explain in this chapter what is overabundance, how this term is bounded to the concept of ‘canonical approach’ in linguistics, and how it got its relevance in linguistics; but first, it will be useful to understand what we mean by ‘canonical’.

1 ‘Having different ways of meaning many different things, that’s the richness of languages; having

more ways of meaning one and the same thing, that’s not richness, but overload, it’s not freedom, but hindrance; and such a hindrance, that usage naturally and continually tends to get rid of it.’ (translated by Thornton 2012b: 199).

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1.1. A canonical approach to linguistic typology Following Chomsky’s suggestion that we should aim to define the notion of ‘possible human language’, Greville G. Corbett (2005, 2007a, 2007b) asserts that part of this enterprise is to define what is a ‘possible word’ (2007b: 21). He focuses his efforts on linguistic typology (the science that classifies languages according to their structures), and recommends a canonical approach when describing some linguistic phenomena (Corbett 2005: 25) upon which we stumble when analyzing a given language. According to Corbett, we should be able to “build theoretical spaces of possibilities”, then understand “how this space is populated” (Corbett 2005: 26), and finally analyze which phenomena happen within it. According to the way they behave, these phenomena can give us what Corbett calls “canonical instances, that is, the best, indisputable, clearest” instances (Corbett 2007a: 9), be the given phenomenon what is considered to be a regular behavior of the languange or an irregularity as well. Thus, it is important to understand that our theoretical space involves both canonical instances and non-canonical instances because, as we will see later, we can apply the canonical approach to define the space of both canonical and non-canonical phenomena. Once we have defined our space of possibilities, the canonical approach allows us to define canonical instances, even if the “canonical instances (the best examples, those more closely matching the canon) may well not be the most frequent. They may indeed be extremely rare, or even non-existent” (Corbett 2005: 25).

In fact, we establish what is canonical and what is non-canonical by assigning criteria of canonicity to any particular phenomenon according to what we consider to be the best, clearest, indisputable instance of that phenomenon. Once this has been done, we can start working on what happens inside our space, then considering non-canonical or less canonical all those occurrences that are the realization of the same phenomenon in a different way. For example, Corbett (2005: 27-31, Appendix) analyzes agreement and all the criteria which make agreement canonical. Just to quote one, he argues that in relation to the controller an important criterion is that “controller present > controller absent, where ‘>’ is to be read as ‘is more canonical than’” (2005: 28). So, if a language as Russian in example (1) shows a controller in agreement (thus respecting our criterion),

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(1) ty čitaeš’

you read.2SG ‘you are reading’

Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian (2) does not, because it is a pro-drop language, and therefore no controller is overtly present:

(2) čitaš read.2SG ‘you are reading’

Thus, according to Corbett’s criterion, the example taken from Russian is more canonical than the one taken from Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian. Let’s try to understand why. I took this very example because it is very helpful to clarify what we mean when we talk about ‘best, indisputable and clearest instances’: it is easy to understand how the presence of a controller makes our sentence clearer if compared to a sentence which does not show it; we have one more element (the controller, indeed) to understand that agreement is happening. So, we choose to “treat as canonical what is sometimes called ‘grammatical agreement’ rather than ‘anaphoric agreement’” (Corbett 2005: 28) because even if anaphoric agreement is very common in pro-drop languages, grammatical agreement better calibrates our inquiry due to its evident clearness.

This example with agreement is strictly related to syntax; Corbett focuses his

attention on morphology as well, especially in his papers from 2007, where he analyzes suppletion (2007a) and syncretism (2007b). In order to apply canonicity in morphology, we must start from the idea that, for a given language, a canonical paradigm could exist. In order to do that, we “first have to establish the morphosyntactic features and their values” (Corbett 2005: 33) for every word class of the given language, and once the features and their values are established, “these should ‘multiply out’, so that all possible cell in a paradigm exist” (Corbett 2007a: 9). At this point, we have a first hint to define what a paradigm should have to be canonical: completeness. This means that once we have assumed a

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certain number of features and values, once we have ‘multiplied out’ all the possible combinations, we can theorize how a paradigm should appear, or, to use Corbett’s words, if, for example, “a language has five cases and three numbers in its nominal system, a noun paradigm should have fifteen cells” (Corbett 2007b: 23). So, if a language, for example, has two cases and two numbers in its nominal system, the paradigm of a noun should have four cells. In this language, the paradigm shown in (3) is canonical.

(3)

Completeness apart, Corbett argues that in order to have a canonical paradigm

“we might expect that for any given lexeme, […] each form will be different (distinctiveness), the stem will be predictable, and the inflections will be predictable” (Corbett 2005: 33). To be canonical, a paradigm must show at least these three fundamental peculiarities: completeness, distinctiveness, predictability. In the following paper, Corbett refines his theory by adding a fourth property of a canonical paradigm: it has to be consistent (Corbett 2007a: 9). In order to establish if our paradigm is consistent we must do a double work of comparison both within the paradigm and between lexemes. Thus, at a first level (comparison across the cells of a lexeme) all cells of our paradigm must:

1. Have the same composition and structure: if we have a form which consists

of a stem and a suffix, this structure must be the same in every cell. 2. Have absolute identity in terms of lexical material. In other words, the stem

should remain the same in every cell. 3. Show differentiation in terms of inflectional material: our affix should be

different in every cell.

“The outcome for such a lexeme” – Corbett says – “is that every cell in its paradigm will realize the morphosyntactic specification in a way distinct form that of every other cell” (2007a: 10). Example (4) shows a canonical paradigm according to the criteria of consistency:

Number 1 Number 2

Form 1 Form 2 Case 1

Form 3 Form 4 Case 2

The paradigm is complete. It is canonical

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(4)

(Corbett 2007b: 24)

The paradigm in (4) shows the same composition and structure of the cells, same lexical material and different inflectional material. It is canonical.

At a second level of comparison (lexemes with lexemes within the given language), we do not analyze the canonicity of a paradigm, but of the system itself. In this case, our criteria will be:

1. The composition and structure of each cell must remain the same. 2. The lexical information must be obviously different. 3. The inflectional material must be identical. (5)

(Corbett 2007b: 24)

Both lexemes represented in (5) show the same cell structure, different lexical information and identical inflectional material, and “the outcome is that every cell of every lexeme is distinct” (2007a: 10). In this case the system is canonical. Now we can re-connect and find a sense to what Corbett says when he talks of “build theoretical spaces of possibilities” and “understand how this space is populated”. If the paradigm of a given lexeme respects the criteria we have drawn for our space of possibilities, and therefore it realizes the expected outcomes at both levels of comparison, it is canonical, i.e. “it achieves the maximum morphological bang for a minimal phonological buck” (2007a: 10). The “maximum morphological bang” must be seen in terms of predictability: a

DOG-a DOG-i

DOG-e DOG-o

DOG-a DOG-i CAT-a CAT-i

DOG-e DOG-o CAT-e CAT-o

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canonical paradigm is so predictable that it could be explained even with item-and-arrangement morphology. FIGURE 1. gives us a graphic summary of what Corbett asserts.

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FIGURE 1. – CANONICITY OF PARADIGMS.

Canonical Paradigm

CompleteEvery cell contains a form. If not, non-canonical

Consistent: Distinctive and Predictable

Some rules must be respected at both levels of comparison between cells of a same paradigm and lexemes of a same

word class

Comparison across cells

Same composition/ structure

Fused exponencePeriphrasis

Same lexical material

AlternationSuppletion

Different inflectional

material

SyncretismUninflectability

Comparison across lexemes

Same composition/ structure

DefectivenessOverdifferenti

ationAnti-

periphrasis

Different lexical

material

Homonymy

Same inflectional

material

Inflectional classes

HeteroclisisDeponency

If not, non-canonical

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FIGURE 1. is a graphic representation of what we have been saying with words until now. Once we assume which are the criteria that a paradigm should respect in order to be canonical, we can establish when a phenomenon is non-canonical according to which criterion of canonicity is not respected. However, our irregularities, our non-canonical phenomena, can appear with a certain frequency (since, as we are invited to remember, what we consider canonical may indeed be extremely rare, or even non-existent). Thus, as we do for the canonical phenomena, we can apply the canonical approach to non-canonical instances as well, because non-canonical instances realize their own space of possibilities, a space that can be defined with a canonical approach. Corbett talks about cases like these in both his papers from 2007 (suppletion in 2007a, and deponency and syncretism in 2007b), where we see how some criteria of canonicity can be established for the analyzed phenomena. FIGURE 1. does not list an additional non-canonical phenomenon which, as we will see later in this section, once some criteria of canonicity have been established, can find its place in the “theoretical space” we are dealing with.

1.2. Overabundance Basing her arguments on Corbett’s work, Anna M. Thornton (2011, 2012a, 2012b) introduced to the linguistic community another case in which a sort of irregularity can be considered, in fact, a non-canonical behavior of the paradigms: overabundance.

Already in his paper from 2005, Corbett tells us that “we might expect that for any given lexeme […] the stem will be predictable, and the inflections will be predictable” (Corbett 2005: 33). Thus, ‘predictable’ means that, in order to have a canonical paradigm, every single cell of the paradigm must show the same stem and different inflectional material. However, it can happen that “a cell in a paradigm is filled by two or more synonymous forms which realize the same set of morpho-syntactic properties, as in the case of the two English past tense forms burnt and burned” or in the Italian triplet apparve / apparse / apparì ‘appear:3SG.PRF’ (Thornton 2011: 360). In instances like these, a paradigm lacks the property of being ‘predictable’, then we have an irregularity and then we are not in the realm of canonicity any more. This phenomenon is what Thornton calls

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‘overabundance’2, and our two or more forms that realize the same cell will be called ‘cell-mates’ (2011: 360). The labels ‘doublet(s)’ and ‘triplet(s)’ show some problems in terms of terminology because they have been already used for indicating other phenomena that are conceptually similar to overabundance but not the very same3. In this work I will use both ‘cell-mates’ and ‘doublet(s)/triplet(s)’ with no distinction.

One may wonder why Corbett did not list this phenomenon in his papers;

Thornton clearly explains that Corbett’s matrix, to which we gave a graphic identity in FIGURE 1., “assumes UNIQUENESS OF REALIZATION, i.e. it assumes that a single cell will be filled by a single inflected form” (Thornton 2011: 360). But overabundance is a real matter and it interacts with all the criteria listed in FIGURE

1. at the “comparison across cells” level. Indeed, overabundand cells can deviate from canonical behavior by showing forms realized with different composition/sctructure (example (6)) and different lexical material (7), or showing forms with different inflectional endings (8):

(6) Different composition structure: Dutch drukste / meest drukke

‘busy:SUPERL’ (7) Different lexical material: English wharfs / wharves (8) Different inflectional material: Latin fēcĕrunt / fēcērunt / fēcēre

‘do:3PL.PRF.IND’ (Thornton 2011: 361, TABLE 16.3)

From these few examples we can see how overabundance is an existing phenomenon in different languages and, even if it is possible to deal with it only by adding a third dimension to Corbett’s matrix, it is worth to be studied.

Following Corbett’s approach, even if overabundance is a non-canonical

phenomenon, we can apply the canonical approach to define the space of overabundance (and this can be done for each one of the non-canonical

2 For further details about the choice of this label and its previous use in Italian grammaticography, see Thornton (2012: 458-459). 3 For a wider analysis, see Thornton (2011: 359-360).

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phenomena listed in FIGURE 1). In fact, if a paradigm shows two or three cell-mates, and these “can be used interchangeably, with the choice of one or the other form subject to no condition” (Thornton 2011: 362), our overabundance is canonical. It means that two forms should be able to appear in the same context without any semantic or syntactic restrictions; in more simple words we could translate this with “where you find A, you could find also B”. This is the first criterion that Thornton establishes for canonical overabundance, the criterion of condition: “no condition > conditions (where > = ‘more canonical than’) (Thornton 2011: 362). At this point, as Corbett points out, we need to “turn to real language” (Corbett 2007b: 25) and keep in mind that what we consider canonical may indeed be extremely rare, or even non-existent. The example we made above for agreement and pro-drop languages seems exhaustive enough, to me. To turn to real language means deal with numbers, tokens, instances and queries, that generally are done on a corpus or a set of corpora. In numbers, after establishing if two or more forms appear in the same context with no conditions, we say if overabundance is realized or not with reference to the cell-mates frequency ratio: it is obtained by dividing the number of occurrences of the most frequent form by the number of occurrences of the less frequent one. The more the ratio will be close to 1:1, the more overabundance can be considered as canonical (Thornton 2012: 460).

In two papers, Thornton (2011, 2012a) analyzes the results obtained by

querying the la Repubblica Corpus (1985-2000) and the LIP Corpus, and analyzes how overabundance behaves in the paradigm of Italian verbs, how doublets and triplets are distributed according to conditions relating to factors of variations (diachronic, diatopic, diaphasic and diastratic conditions) and to the levels of linguistic analysis (phonological, syntactico-semantic, pragmatic and morphological conditions). Her research shows well enough how each of these conditions has (or has not) a certain influence on the speakers’ attitude to choose certain forms rather than others, how overabundance is more or less canonical according to each factor and how it is related to inflectional classes. For what concerns Italian verbs, in fact, it seems that overabundance “is sensitive to inflectional class, being restricted to non-1st conjugation verbs” (Thornton 2011: 379). But the important aspect which emerges from Thornton’s work is that

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overabundance really is a phenomenon which constantly finds its realization in the Italian language, especially in verbal inflection.

At the end of this introductive chapter, and taking the cue from Thornton’s data, we are already able to give a first answer to one of the questions we asked above: was Alessandro Manzoni right when he asserted that “having more ways of meaning one and the same thing is such a hindrance that usage naturally and continually tends to get rid of it”? Apparently, at least for what concerns verbs, he was not, if we consider how some of the Italian verbal paradigms are still well-grounded in showing cell-mates that are strongly close to a canonical overabundance4 (Thornton 2011: 362-378; 2012a). It is true that Alessandro Manzoni himself, with his work of refining the different versions of his world-wide appreciated I Promessi Sposi [The Bethroted], gave a strong contribution to the elimination of several verbal forms that were way more frequent in the 19th century than nowadays. Manzoni wrote in a century where national identities were struggling to find concreteness, and in some cases the language was one of the few elements which really unified an entire population. So, while creating their literary masterpieces, authors were giving a special care to the form of the language; they used their literary texts to shape the language, and consequently the national identity. It shall not surprise if, during those same years, the Grimm brothers from Germany were doing the same cultural work with their fairy tales. In this sense, and considering how strong the impact that Manzoni’s novel had on the Italian people’s way of talking has been, his quote can arguably make sense. Data show that after he had arbitrarily cut some forms (e.g. veggo in favor of vedo ‘see.1SG.PRES’)5, the dumped forms slowly decreased in standard Italian, until some of them finally disappeared. But the language does not evolve only according to what Thornton calls “conscious normative interventions” (2012b: 203), and in the contemporary usage of language the forms spared from the

4 Strongly but not completely. In fact, in Thornton (2012a: 461) we see that some doublets that are realized by the inflected forms of very common verbs such as devo/debbo ‘do:1SG.PRES.IND’, possiedono/posseggono ‘possess:3PL.PRES.IND’ show a respectable ratio (9.7:1 the first, 1.6:1 the latter) in terms of canonical overabundance. On the other hand there is no such an instance in the corpus inquired by the author realizing a ratio of 1:1, with the only exception of languano / languiscano ‘languish:3PL.SUB’, that are two hapaxes in la Repubblica corpus. 5 For a more exhaustive analysis, see Thornton 2012a.

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prescriptive guillotine of a single man (e.g. siedo with seggo ‘sit.1SG.PRES’), have not been dumped by usage. Apparently, Manzoni confused the meaning of ‘usage’, meant as the collective usage of the language which determines what in a language stays and what goes, with the meaning of ‘personal mission to make a language less hindered according to precise formal choices’. The aim of shaping the identity of a nation by means of its language failed because, arguably, the author did not realize that a national identity is, in the first place, a collective identity. In this sense, one can say that Manzoni tried to conceal personal choices behind the mirror of linguistic usage, being really confident on the fact that the work of a single man could influence the consciousness of an entire population. The author tried to manipulate usage by proposing precise rules, and thanks to his normative interventions, language changed indeed. The point about which Manzoni was wrong was another: the one we quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Does language really get rid of the hindrance of having more ways of meaning one and the same thing? No, if we consider that doublets which were spared from Manzoni (because they simply did not occur in his texts) are still in usage, and represent cases of overabundance.

In this work, I will try to further understand to what extent usage tends to get rid of some forms, and I will do that trying to establish if overabundance is realized between comparative forms in Italian. In the next chapter, indeed, we will see what is comparison, how it is realized and how it has been explained by scholars in the recent years.

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II. What is Comparison

The concept that the human mind is able to take two or more elements and put them on different steps of the same scale is easily understandable, as well as the fact that this act can be expressed by language. In order to express this conceptual gap between elements, we use linguistic entities – mostly adjectives and modifiers – to quantify the extent which this gap refers to. This cognitive and linguistic act is called comparison, and if we want to express it with words we need some linguistic entities to appear in a sentence, having a degree assigned to them and with the function of comparing our elements. We are now going to see how comparison has been studied and explained to us following two different approaches that have taken interest in this issue in the last decades: the morphological one and the typological one.

2.1. Morphological approach: comparison vs. gradation In a strictly grammatical way, a first difference should be drawn between the terms ‘comparison’ and ‘gradation’. At this purpose I will consider some lines from the Comparison and gradation chapter written by Pierluigi Cuzzolin and Christian Lehmann for the Morphologie/Morphology handbook (Cuzzolin & Lehmann 2004). They state that “both comparison and gradation presuppose an entity that some property, state, or, more rarely, a more or less dynamic state of affairs applies to” (Cuzzolin & Lehmann 2004: 1212). We can measure this state of affairs by using a ‘parameter’ and then gradation will be the “stepwise modification of the extent to which the parameter applies to the entity”, while comparison “assesses this extent with respect to some standard”. In terms of grammar, thus, comparison is “the formal modification of some predicative word – most often an adjective – representing a parameter of gradation or comparison, according to the extent to which it applies to its argument, relative to some standard” (Cuzzolin & Lehmann 2004: 1212).

Thus, we have an adjective which can be used to compare two or more elements, but which can also vary formally to express the degree at which a

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property applies to an element. The authors give us a very clear explanation of the difference between comparison and gradation, therefore I will limit myself to report their definitions in a possibly more schematic way. Re-elaborating what they argue, we can say that in gradation three degrees are traditionally recognized:

- the positive degree: the adjective appears in its standard, unaltered form and has no function of comparison;

- the comparative degree: the adjective may appear in its comparative form or along with comparative particles and has the function to establish a comparison between a standard element and a compared element;

- the superlative degree: the adjective describes our compared element at a high level (possibly the highest). Superlative degree recognizes a difference between the highest degree in comparison (when the compared element is at the highest level in a group of elements), and the highest degree in gradation (when the adjective describing our element wants to emphasize the semantic meaning it brings at a very high level). The former is called ‘relative superlative’, the latter ‘absolute superlative’ (Cuzzolin & Lehmann 2004: 1213).

Still following Cuzzolin & Lehmann’s plain explanation of the matter, I illustrate here their classification of which elements can be identified in a comparative construction:

- the element which is compared, the ‘comparee’, or ‘topic of comparison’; - the element which serves as ‘standard of comparison’; - the element, called ‘pivot’ or ‘marker of comparison’, that introduces the

standard of comparison; - the predicate that represents the parameter of comparison.

(1) John is smart-er than Sam

comparee predicate-CMPR pivot standard (Cuzzolin & Lehmann 2004: 1212)

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In cases of superlatives, a standard is not required in the sentence because it is logically presupposed, as it happens in the example I thought he lived in a cleaner house rather than I thought he lived in a house that was cleaner than the house he has. In those languages that form comparative structure with juxtaposition of two positive adjectives, instead, no pivot will appear. An example from Samoan can clarify the point:

(2) Samoan Ua loa lenei va’a, ua puupuu lena be long this boat be short that ‘This boat is longer than that.’

(Cuzzolin & Lehmann 2004: 1212)

The comparative degree can be expressed in three ways: we can have a ‘comparison of majority’ when “from a cognitive point of view”, we describe “entities that are larger, smaller” of other entities, while in ‘comparison of minority’ these entities can be, for example, “less large, less small and so forth” (Cuzzolin & Lehmann 2004: 1213). Of course the authors mean that these entities are what they call the ‘comparee’, our ‘topic of comparison’, the element which we want to compare to something else; and by doing that we cognitively confer to the comparee a value of majority (e.g. “bigger”) or minority (e.g. “less large”) in relation to the standard. The last way to make comparison is what they call ‘comparison of equality’, which “ascribes to the comparee the same value of the parameter of comparison as to the standard” (Cuzzolin & Lehmann 2004: 1213). Some simple examples, taken from that same book, are illustrated below:

(3) Comparison of majority: That box is smaller than this. (4) Comparison of minority: Your book is less interesting than hers. (5) Comparison of equality: My sister is as pretty as you.

(Cuzzolin & Lehmann 2004: 1213) Finally, they let us know that “whereas comparison of majority is expressed by morphological processes in several languages, apparently comparison of minority is expressed only lexically. This implies that there is no affix meaning ‘less’

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parallel to that of majority ‘more’” (Cuzzolin & Lehmann 2004: 1213), with few exceptions. The grammatical way to approach this subject is the most common and known. Let’s now see how, considering hundreds of languages from a typological point of view, our inquiry can be explained from a different perspective.

2.2. Typological approach: establishing universals for comparison

Leon Stassen, in his chapter Comparative Constructions in the Language Typology and Language Universals handbook (Stassen 2008), approaches the topic from a typological point of view. He considers comparison in terms of cognition, arguing that the human mind can cognitively recognize what he calls ‘comparison of equality’ or ‘comparison of inequality’ (Stassen 2008: 993). In this way, the grammatical aspects of comparison of majority and minority, and both the comparative and superlative degree of comparison, are all included into the comparison of inequality concept on one side, while on the other side we have comparison of equality. But even if the terminology differs, the idea remains: Stassen agrees with Cuzzolin & Lehmann in saying that to make comparison we need a predicative scale and two objects, identifiable in the object of comparison (the comparee NP) and the standard of comparison (the standard NP).

2.2.1. Hundreds of languages, several ways to express comparison

In his study on 110 different languages, Stassen examines the behavior of the standard NP and categorizes different types of comparison according to how comparison is constructed. All the examples which follow are taken from the author’s work (Stassen 2008: 994-996).

Following Stassen’s research we can list ‘fixed-case comparatives’ when the

standard NP is always in the same case regardless of the case of the comparee NP; and ‘derived-case comparatives’ when the standard NP derives its case assignment from the case of the comparee NP. Latin allows both options, as we can see in examples (6) and (7).

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(6) Fixed-case:

Latin (Indo-European, Italic) (a) Brutum ego non minus Brutus-ACC1 1SG.NOM not less amo quam Caesar love.1SG.PRES than Caesar-NOM ‘I love Brutus no less than Caesar (loves Brutus)’ (b) Brutum ego non minus Brutus-ACC 1SG.NOM not less amo quam Caesarem love.1SG.PRES than Caesar-ACC ‘I love Brutus no less than (I love) Caesar’

(7) Derived-case: Latin (Indo-European, Italic) Brutum ego non minus

Brutus-ACC 1SG.NOM not less amo Caesare love.1SG.PRES Caesar-ABL

It has to be said that the sentence in example (7) shows an ambiguity in meaning as Stassen himself points out (Stassen 2008: 994), and as Lucio Ceccarelli and Pierluigi Cuzzolin seem to confirm2. To quote Stassen, the sentence “is ambiguous between the readings of (6a) and (6b)3”, and according to Ceccarelli, “è noto che l'uso dell'ablativo come secondo termine di paragone sia piuttosto limitato, soprattutto nella prosa classica, anche (ma non solo) perché, data l'estensione dei

1 In this work of mine, Leipzig Glossing Rules are used to gloss lexemes. These ones are slightly different from the ones used by Stassen. However, in order to give the most accurate reference to the author’s work, I did not modify any of his glosses. 2 In personal communications to Anna M. Thornton who shared them with me. 3 Original example numbers are (2a) and (2b).

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compiti dell'ablativo, spesso potrebbe risultare appunto ambiguo4”, as it happens in the example. Fixed-case comparatives can be divided into ‘direct-object comparatives’ and ‘adverbial comparatives’. Direct-object comparatives present the standard NP constructed as the direct object of a transitive verb with the meaning ‘to exceed’ the comparee NP, for this reason they can be called ‘exceed comparatives’ as well. This construction includes two predicates, as shown in example (8).

(8) Fixed-case, direct object: Duala (Niger-Kordofanian, North-West Bantu) Nin ndabo e kolo buka nine this house it big exceed that ‘This house is bigger than that’ Adverbial comparatives have an invariable standard NP constructed in a case with a locational/adverbial function, and, depending on the nature of this function, they can be ‘separative’ (9); ‘allative’, i.e. “when the standard NP is constructed as the goal of a movement […] or as a benefactive (“for”)” (Stassen 2004: 994), example (10); or ‘locative comparatives’ (11). In the first case the standard NP is the source of movement, in the second it is the goal of movement, in the third one it encodes the location in which an object is located.

Fixed-case, adverbial: (9) Separative:

Mundari (Austro-Asiatic, Munda) Sadom-ete hati mananga-i horse-from elephant big-3SG.PRES ‘The elephant is bigger than the horse’

4 Translation by me: ‘it is known that the usage of ablative case as standard of comparison was quite limited – especially during the classic era of Latin literature – also (but not only) because the wide number of functions that the ablative case had could generate ambiguity’.

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(10) Allative/Benefactive: Breton (Indo-European, Celtic)

Jazo bras-ox wid-on he big -CMPR for-me ‘He is bigger than me’

(11) Locative: Tamazight (Afro-Asiatic, Berber)

Enta ihengrin foull i he tall.3SG.MASC upon me ‘He is taller than me’ Derived-case comparatives can be further subdivided as well: we have a ‘conjoined comparative’ when the comparative construction consists of two structurally independent clauses, one of which contains the comparee NP, while the other one contains the standard NP. The other case is that of the ‘non-conjoined comparative’ which differs from the former because the construction does not have the form of a coordination. Coordination can be found, in fact, in the two subcategories of conjoined comparative, which both express the predicate twice by antonymy (“good – bad”, “strong – weak”) (12) or positive-negative polarity (“good – not good”, “strong – not strong”) (13). In the case of non-conjoined comparative (14), instead, a particle is needed to accompany the standard NP (e.g. than in English, what Cuzzolin & Lehmann call ‘pivot’). This last case seems to be restricted to Europe (Stassen 2008: 993-995).

Derived case, conjoined: (12) Antonymous particles:

Kobon (Papuan) U kub u pro this big that small ‘This is bigger than that’

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(13) Positive-negative polarity: Menomini (Algonquian)

Tata’hkes-ew nenah teh kan strong-3SG I and not ‘He is stronger than me’

(14) Derived case, non-conjoined: Hungarian (Uralic) Istvan magasa-bb mint Peter Istvan-NOM tall-CMPR than Peter-NOM ‘Istvan is taller than Peter’

(Stassen 2008: 994-995, original examples n° (2) – (10)) Figure 1. provides a graphic synthesis of what is argued by Stassen.

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FIGURE 1. – TYPES OF COMPARATIVES.

A final way to make comparison, Stassen continues, can be added to the former

examples. This is mainly frequent in European languages and can be realized by adding affixes to the positive form of the adjective (e.g. -er in English, -ĭor in Latin, -bb in Hungarian) or by using special adverbs (more in English, più in Italian), instead of marking the predicate. This phenomenon is particularly frequent in languages that have a particle comparative construction (Stassen 2008: 995) and it is a relevant issue which concerns our inquiry: as we will see in the next chapter, Latin affix -ĭor has evolved in the Italian -ore, resulting in the co-existence, for some adjectives carrying a degree of comparison, of forms that realize comparison with that affix and forms that do the same thing with the adverb più.

Comparatives

Fixed-case

Direct object

(exceed)Adverbial

Separative Allative Locative

Derived-case

Conjoined

Antonymous

adjectives

Positive-negative polarity

Non-conjoined

(particle)

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2.2.2. Temporal sequencing and universals

Contrasting different types of comparatives has led Stassen to the conclusion that

the typology of comparative constructions is derived from (and derived by) the typology of ‘temporal sequencing’. That is, the type(s) of comparative construction which a language may employ is argued to be limited by the options which the language has in the encoding of (simultaneous or consecutive) sequences of events.

(Stassen 2008: 995) This temporal sequencing (in this case, simultaneous coordination) is evident in the case of conjoined comparative (examples (12) and (13)). But considering that even for the other cases a correlation with temporal sequencing can be established, Stassen draws up three universals. One of these universals (‘universal (a)’ in the original work) is about adverbial comparatives, but considering that it introduces the notion of deranking, and considering that as we will see soon deranking is possible in European languages as well, I guess it could be interesting to understand what this universal is about. It states:

If a language has an adverbial comparative, then that language allows deranking5 (i.e. non-finite subordination) of one of the clauses in a temporal sequence, even when the two clauses in that sequence have different subjects.

5 According to what is said by Sonia Cristofaro on the wals.info website (2011: CH 128) “The notions of balancing and deranking were originally introduced by Stassen (1985). A balanced verb form is one that can occur in an independent declarative clause, e.g. an indicative verb form” whilst “A deranked verb form is one that cannot be used in independent declarative clauses.” One example for this in Italian could be Finita la partita, Enzo iniziò a studiare (‘Ended the match, Enzo began to study’). In this case, the clause Finita la partita is not independent because it is subordinate to the main clause Enzo iniziò a studiare. The verb finire ‘to finish/to end’, here appearing in its past participle form finita ‘finished/ended’ does not appear in an independent declarative clause, so it is deranked.

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(15) Naga (Tibeto-Burman, Tibeto-Burman)

(a) A de kepu ki themma lu a I words speak on man that me vu -we strike -INDIC ‘As I spoke these words, that man struck me’

(b) Themma hau lu ki vi -we man this than on good -INDIC ‘This man is better than that man’

(Stassen 2008: 996, original example n° (13)) In (15b) we see that Naga uses benefactive comparative, thus adverbial, and then this language gives us the possibility to test universal (a). In (15a), indeed, we can see how the clause ‘that man struck me’ perfectly makes sense by itself, having an independent declarative function. The clause translatable as ‘as I spoke these words’ evidently shows deranking because it is a non-finite subordinate clause related to the main clause, and it does not make sense if decontextualized from the whole sentence. Thus, it is clear that Naga allows deranking even if the two clauses have different subjects (A ‘I’ and themma ‘man’).

Working on universals led Stassen to claim that “the typology of comparative

construction is modeled on the typology of temporal sequencing, so that, in effect, comparative constructions appear to be a special case of the encoding of temporal sequencing” (Stassen 2008: 996). Examples (15a-b) seem to confirm his theories but in this work we don’t have all the necessary elements to confirm if this claim can be considered trustworthy or not, especially for the small number of examples we are given. However, the theme is worthy of interest and, if further deepened, it could reveal to the linguistic community useful data regarding the still foggy world of comparison.

At this point, we have understood which is the matter of this study (overabundance) and in which area of the language we want to verify its existence (comparison). Despite the temptation of analyzing soon some data, I

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think that we should first know something more about our elements, i.e. which are the possible candidates for our research, how they evolved during history, and how grammarians have looked at them in the last 150 years.

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III. Comparatives from Latin to Italian

Before starting to study the case itself, it is useful to understand how Italian grammarians looked at the comparative structure and at how possible overabundant forms related during history1. The main topic of this chapter won’t be comparison in its whole completeness, but how the presence of synthetic forms along with analytic ones has been explained by Italian grammars in the course of time, because the relationships (we will see if it is a relationship of overabundance or not) between these two types of forms will be the topic of my research on the corpus. The consideration of how cell-mates in comparatives relate to each other has, in this sense, for sure seen a diachronic evolution. In this chapter we will see at first how Latin comparative structure evolved during centuries and, once established which is the legacy of this evolution in the modern language, we will look at the ways to approach and explain the analytic/synthetic forms relationship according to different grammars’ point of view. At the end of the chapter, finally, we will be able to identify which doublets are eligible to be studied and which ones are not.

1 It’s interesting to see how some of these grammarians already used the term sovrabbondanza ‘overabundance’ to refer to paradigmatic cells or full lexemes presenting doublets. Anyway, as far as we know, no one ever used this term when talking about comparison or comparatives. To deepen the subject, see Thornton 2012a.

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3.1. Evolution of comparative formation from Latin to Romance languages

According to Fucecchi and Gaverini (2009: 162), Latin comparative was originally formed by taking away the suffix from the genitive form of the adjective2 and then adding the suffix -ĭor to the remaining root:

(1) adj. ALTUS > ALT-Ī > ALT-ĬOR

tall.M.SG.NOM. tall-M.SG.GEN tall-M.SG.COMP. ‘tall’ ‘tall’s’ ‘taller’

(2) adj. PIGER > PIGR-Ī > PIGR-ĬOR lazy.M.SG.NOM. lazy-M.SG.GEN. lazy-M.SG.COMP. ‘lazy’ ‘lazy’s’ ‘lazier’

(3) adj. VĒLŌX > VĒLŌC-IS > VĒLŌC-ĬOR fast.M.SG.NOM. fast-M.SG.GEN. fast-M.SG.COMP. ‘fast’ ‘fast’s’ ‘faster’

(4) adj. ĀCER > ĀCR-IS > ĀCR-ĬOR bitter.M.SG.NOM. bitter-M.SG.GEN. bitter-M.SG.COMP. ‘bitter’ ‘bitter’s’ ‘more bitter’

In comparison of majority, when the interested lexeme had a vowel before the suffix, adverbs MAGIS and PLUS were placed before the adjective itself in order to realize comparison with a periphrastic (what I shall call here ‘analytic’) form: e.g. MAGIS ARDUUS (Lee 2011: 87). However, in common usage, things had to be different: indeed, apparently analytic comparative forms showing adjectives with a consonant before the suffix gained popularity, and eventually replaced synthetic forms, i.e. the ones which realized comparison with a suffix. For instance, in the chapter Comparative and superlative, in New Perspectives in Historical Latin Syntax (Cuzzolin 2011), Pierluigi Cuzzolin quotes MAGIS CARUS as an attested form (Cuzzolin 2011: 522). Anyway, it is known how it is hard to establish with perfect accuracy how Latin forms behaved in diachronic, diastratic and diatopic way during that chaotic period when standard Latin was struggling to remain alive, and the rising Romance languages where doing the same to find their identities (I-

2 In Latin there are two classes of adjectives. For the first class, genitive forms display the suffix -ī for masculines and neuters, -ae for feminines. For the second class the suffix is -is for all genders.

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VII sec. AD). And if we want to find a first, and still unsatisfactory, answer, the only thing we can do is to refer to (very) few texts of ancient grammarians who aimed to re-establish the ancient grammatical model3. The point is, the cohabitation in the speakers’ awareness of both analytic and synthetic forms, or how or when one took predominance over the other, is not easily identifiable at an absolute chronological moment. In a simpler way, at some point speakers have more or less arbitrarily started using analytic forms, and in many cases these forms have displaced the ancient synthetic ones and have persisted until today.

An accurate analysis of the process, though it still does not clarify our doubts, can be read in the Grammatica storica dell’italiano, by Pavao Tekavčić (Tekavčić 1972, vol.2 Morfosintassi: 143-168). Here, the author seems to confirm the idea that this switch has been caused principally by sociolinguistic rather than phonological or morphological factors, which interested comparison in all of its forms and deeply modified it in a slow but inexorable process. According to Tekavčić, the causes that led to the replacement of synthetic comparatives by analytic ones where the following:

a. A tendency to affectivity and expressivity: the intensity expressed by a specific signal is more plastic and effective.

b. A tendency to regularization: the superlative adjective, for example, now realized by adding, at the positive degree, a single signal for all the adjectives, is more regular and simpler than the synthetic superlative, in which the signal (the infix) appears in different variants (-issim, -rim, -lim, -im4).

c. The symmetric model of comparison of minority. d. The general tendency of late spoken Latin towards analyticity.

(Tekavčić 1972: 148-149)

3 One example above all: that touching Appendix Probi (III sec. AD) in which an anonymous Roman master tries to teach which correct forms must be used instead of the vulgar ones (e.g. AURIS not AURICLA). Vain attempt, if we consider how most forms have resulted nowadays. For a deeper focus on the Appendix Probi and on the born and evolution of Romance languages, see Le origini della lingua e della letteratura italiana, by Aurelio Roncaglia (2006). 4 Some examples could be: CLEMENTISSIMUS ‘clement.M.SG.SUP.’, PULCHERRIMA ‘beautiful.F.SG.SUP.’, FACILLIMUM ‘easy.N.SG.SUP.’, MAXIME ‘maximum’. The last form was used only to form analytic superlatives like MAXIME ARDUUS ‘hard.M.SG.SUP.’.

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The reader can see how Tekavčić, despite his analytical presentation, talks about ‘tendency’ in three points (a., b., d.) and of analogy in point c. Both the processes of analogy and tendency toward a new usage are known for being long ones, which generally happen slowly and evolve for centuries, never showing a real starting and ending point and, sometimes, being alive until today. In the dedicated literature we are not able to find a single, discriminating, incontrovertible factor that will explain how and when Latin speakers chose analytic forms to detriment of the synthetic ones, because, for what concerns this phenomenon, literature seems to agree on the fact that such a mutation happened due to several factors, some of which may be unclear even today.

Moreover, Latin’s structure does not help us in this way. Latin was an ‘intermediate’ language, in the sense that it was not a purely synthetic language (the same way no Romance language is today a purely analytic one), and so we cannot predict how a form takes control over another. But a diachronic transition from a synthetic language structure to an analytic one is still evident on that hypothetical line which bonds Latin to Romance languages; and if Italian – and any other Romance language, as well – and Latin aren’t placed on the two antipodes of that line, they are surely both part of that process. It would be more suitable to say that Latin and every Romance language are two points on that theoretical line which goes from a purely synthetic language to a purely analytic language, but they aren’t placed on the two extremities (Lee 2011: 72). There is not, on this line, any recognizable intermediate point that witnesses when Latin stopped being the pancontinental language of Europe and the single Romance varieties began independent languages. At this purpose, on the problem of the origins, I think that a quote from Aurelio Roncaglia is exhaustive enough to clear the point:

Certo, inavvertitamente o consapevolmente, ogni generazione può aver lasciato cadere qualche arcaismo ed introdotto qualche neologismo, di pronuncia o di lessico, di forma o di costrutto; […] ma in nessun punto ci sarà dato trovare una frattura tra due generazioni contigue, l’una avente come lingua materna il latino e l’altra l’italiano (o il francese, lo spagnolo ecc.). Tra padri e figli non è, non può essere mai venuta meno l’intercompresione, la coscienza di parlare una stessa lingua. Da questo rispetto, nulla permette di dare al termine “origini” un

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contenuto puntuale: ogni punto, considerato rispetto a quello precedente, risulta ad esso collegato da una sostanziale continuità5.

(Roncaglia 2006: 2)

And on this timeline where Latin and Romance languages find their places, synthetic comparatives from Latin evolved toward analytic neo-Latin comparatives, arguably for the reasons and in the ways we listed above. We said that it is not possible to exactly establish how and when this evolution started6, but in this case we can see how it resulted in different places: TABLE 1. shows that lateral areas of Roman influence have chosen the adverb MAGIS, while the central areas preferred the adverb PLUS.

TABLE 1. EVOLUTION OF COMPARATIVE IN ROMANCE LANGUAGES

MAGIS ALTUM > sp. más alto, port. mais alto, rom. mai înalt ALTIOR > PLUS ALTUM > fr. plus haut, occ. plus alt, it. più alto.

(Lee 2011: 87)

This must not surprise us. According to Matteo Giulio Bartoli (1925), generally lateral areas tend to conserve more ancient forms with respect to central areas; this would mean that the construction with MAGIS arguably was born before the construction with PLUS, but there are no evident elements to confirm this claim. What we know is that at some point “il comparativo organico sparisce, lasciando

5 Translation by me: ‘Of course, accidentally or consciously, each generation may have left some archaism behind and introduced some neologism of pronunciation or lexicon, form or meaning; […] but in no point we will find a rift between two consecutive generations, one speaking Latin as mother tongue and the other speaking Italian (or French, or Spanish, etc.). Among fathers and sons, now or ever in the past, mutual understanding, the awareness of speaking the same language, has never stopped. From this point of view, nothing allows us to assign to the term “origins” a precise meaning: every point, if considered with respect to the previous one, results as being linked to it with a substantial continuity’. 6 But Tekavčić points out that already Plautus and Terence – about 200 BC – used MAGIS

occasionally, with the adjectives ARGUTUM, SEVERUS, CONTINENS (1972: 149).

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poche tracce in aggettivi particolarmente frequenti (it. maggiore, peggiore)”7 (Tagliavini 1972: 256), so in vulgar Latin, analytic forms were commoner, except for the few exceptions listed in (5):

(5) MELIOREM > It. migliore ‘better’

PEIOREM > It. peggiore ‘worse’ MAIOREM > It. maggiore ‘bigger’, ‘older’ MINOREM > It. minore ‘smaller’, ‘younger’ This will be essentially relevant in order to choose our element of analysis, and we will talk about this in the next section. I will proceed now to show how this relationship between synthetic and analytic forms has been considered by grammarians in the last century, and how it has changed during years.

3.2. Grammars and grammarians

In his Grammatica italiana dell’uso moderno, Raffaello Fornaciari (1882: 67-69) particularly focuses on the original suffixed formation of comparatives. He states that a certain number of modern comparatives ending in -iore (-ore) derives from Latin comparatives. Then he gives us some examples8:

(6) a. migliore = più buono ‘better’

peggiore = più cattivo ‘worse’ maggiore = più grande ‘bigger’, ‘older’ minore = più piccolo ‘smaller’, ‘younger’ (6) b. superiore = più alto ‘superior’, ‘higher’

inferiore = più basso ‘inferior’, ‘lower’ esteriore = più esterno ‘exterior’, lit. ‘more external’ ulteriore = più inoltrato ‘further’, lit. ‘more forward’ interiore = più interno ‘interior’, lit. ‘more internal’ anteriore = più avanzato ‘anterior’, lit. ‘more advanced’ posteriore = più addietro ‘posterior’, lit. ‘more back’

7 Translation by me: ‘The organic comparative disappears, leaving few traces in particularly frequent adjectives (it. migliore ‘better’, peggiore ‘worse’)’. 8 Separation in two subgroups is mine and it is not observed in the original text.

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Besides, he adds seniore = più vecchio ‘elder’ and giuniore = più giovane ‘younger’ to distinguish two men having the same name. E.g., Plinio il giuniore ‘Pliny the Younger’. However, these two elements are mentioned outside of the list probably because they were already obsolete forms at the time the grammar was written. Moreover, several grammars point out that the forms in (6b) generally change the comparative preposition (a instead of di) (Regula & Jernej 1975: 127; Lepschy & Lepschy 1981: 104; Dardano & Trifone 1997:137), as in (7):

(7) prep. a instead of di Il tuo stipendio è superiore al suo ‘Your salary is higher than his’ Il tuo stipendio è maggiore del suo ‘Your salary is higher than his’ Losing their original meaning, they can be intended in modern standard Italian as simple qualifying adjectives, even if their original meaning lies in an ancient Latin comparative form. One may wonder, at this point, how could be possible that forms belonging to the same word class (adjectives) and having the same original linguistic function (comparison) have ended in different meaning. To dispel the doubt we can make reference to Tagliavini (1972: 325-332), when the author talks of the so-called superstrato culturale latino ‘Latin cultural superstratum’. It involves all those elements that re-entered in Romance languages from Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire and the crumbling of Latin’s unity, mainly due to the literary prestige that Latin never lost, sometimes with a subtle change in meaning. Among the other elements, Tagliavini lists the organic comparatives priore ‘prior’, posteriore ‘posterior’, senior ‘senior’, ulteriore ‘ulterior’ (Tagliavini 1972: 328). These are words that Latin loaned to Romance languages not as the result of the normal process that brings a ‘daughter’ language to take elements from a ‘mother’ language, but, as the author says, as “un ramo dello stesso fiume, il quale si viene a ricongiungere al corso principale per portare acqua della stessa sorgente, ed è quindi un filone più facilmente amalgamabile, ma più difficilmente identificabile”9 (Tagliavini 1972: 325).

9 Translation by me: ‘a branch of the same river, which rejoins the main flow to bring water from the common spring, and that is therefore a vein more easily amalgamable, but more hardly identifiable at the same time’.

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The vagueness that permeates these forms can be seen in a random example taken from the la Repubblica corpus (1985-2000), where we have a sentence like: In Gelmetti tutto diventa esteriore, scandito, fragoroso10. If scandito can be considered past participle of the verb scandire (‘to spell, to beat [the rhythm]’), fragoroso is beyond any doubt an adjective placed at the end of a sequence of words that are qualifying how Gianluigi Gelmetti’s music sounds: esteriore, scandito, fragoroso. And we do not know at which level of depth, if so, the comparative meaning in esteriore lies.

More than half a century after the publishing of Grammatica italiana dell’uso

moderno, La grammatica italiana by Salvatore Battaglia and Vincenzo Pernicone (1954: 166-175) is printed. It is a work that shows a different and more accurate knowledge of the subject, the approach to the subject is way more academic than the previously examined grammar and what is written in here will be reused in following works by other grammarians (above all Fogarasi 1969). The authors seem to be well aware of the need to consider forms in (6a) and (6b) as slightly different. In fact, only the forms maggiore, minore, migliore and peggiore are used as examples for specific adjectives that form their comparative not using the adverb più, and they place these cases under the category of comparativi organici ‘organic comparatives’, i.e., synthetic forms. ‘Organic’ is arguably referred to the inner comparative value of the lexeme; we can deduct that the word organici means: these words carry value of comparison inside their structure in an independent, and still functional, organic way, with no need of adverbs. Even if this label can be considered outdated for contemporary terminology, it will be used in this chapter to be coherent with the considerable number of grammarians who used it in their works (Battaglia & Pernicone 1954; Fogarasi 1969; Regula & Jerney 1975; Serianni 1988; Dardano & Trifone 1997). An interesting line of the authors’ thought about organic comparatives is that Italian embraced these organic forms together with the analytic ones (thus allowing the interpretation of the word organici as ‘synthetic’11), but slowly lost awareness of the comparative degree in organic forms. Indeed, it is – or rather, it

10 Translation by me: ‘In Gelmetti everything becomes exterior, spelled, resounding’. 11 But in the original chapter (Battaglia & Pernicone 1954, 173) it’s written: “Alcuni aggettivi […] hanno tuttavia altre forme uniche, dette appunto “organiche” e “sintetiche”, ‘Nevertheless some adjectives […] have unique forms, indeed called “organic” and “synthetic”’.

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was – common to find erroneous expressions such as più migliore and più peggiore because the inner comparative degree of the synthetic forms could not be comprehended by a scarcely literate speaker (Battaglia & Pernicone 1954: 173-174). At the beginning of the last sentence I stressed was because of diachronic and diastratic factors: these erroneous forms are still more common in scarcely literate social classes, but these classes count a small number of members nowadays while they were more numerous decades ago12 (De Mauro 1963: 53-63). Mistakes such as più migliore and più peggiore are normally avoided and they do not need to be explained in modern grammars anymore. Indeed, in a corpus of spoken language embracing the years 1990-1992 (LIP 199313) these erroneous forms never appear14, and in a corpus of written, mostly journalistic, texts (la Repubblica corpus 1985-2000) they appear in most cases15 only in reported speech by non-native speakers (8) or in metalinguistic contexts (9), that is when saying ‘this form is a mistake’.

(8) […] 50 anni, 36 dei quali vissuti in Italia. “Soldi per andare via da

qui? È molto bellissimo, la cosa più migliore che poteva essere”. ‘[…] 50 years, 36 of which spent in Italy. “Money to go away from here? It is very beautiful, the best thing it could happen”.’

12 In his Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita (1963), Tullio De Mauro analyzes how illiteracy has decreased during the first century of unified Italy in some classes. It results that in the most illiterate classes – farmers, day laborers, construction workers – 53.3% of the members were illiterate in 1931 but thanks to foreign and internal migration, unified bureaucratic structures and draft, and the influence of school, press, radio, cinema and television, this number decreased along with the total number of illiterate people. According to De Mauro’s researches, in 1861 (year of unification) 78% of the Italian population was illiterate, in 1961 the percentage had decreased to 8.4%, and the Italian National Statistical Institute (ISTAT. 2001. Table 7.1.1: Illiterates aged 6 and over by sex at census years - 1861 - 2001) states that in 2001 only 1.5% of the whole population was illiterate. 13 LIP can be consulted on the BADIP website at the following link: http://badip.uni-graz.at/. 14 It has to be said, by the way, that we are talking about a very small corpus (about 500.000 tokens). 15 Surprisingly, two occurrences seem to show mistakes made by journalists:

1) […] nonché dalle future economie di scala e da un più migliore posizionamento […] – Article by Edoardo Borriello.

2) Altrimenti può diventare ben più peggiore dell’antico. Article by Beniamino Placido.

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(9) Però, permette: non si dice “più migliore” ma semplicemente migliore.

‘However, I beg your pardon: one does not say “più migliore”, but simply migliore’. With reference to the examples used by Fornaciari in (6b), Battaglia and Pernicone describe these as ‘forms that could be considered as organic comparatives’, but without giving us any other explanation of their choice. We do not know why they split (as I did in (6)) Fornaciari’s list in one list containing maggiore, minore, migliore, peggiore that they call “organici” and “sintetici”, and they put in another one anteriore, posteriore, inferiore, superiore, interiore, esteriore without labeling them. Hence, considering that this group of elements still has not a name, for the sake of conciseness, I will call them ‘plausible organic comparatives’ to distinguish them from the ones listed in (6a), or ‘pure organic comparatives’. The only clue Battaglia and Pernicone give us is that if pure organic comparatives govern the preposition di (e.g. Lui è migliore di te, ‘He’s better than you’), plausible organic comparatives require the preposition a (e.g. Essere superiore a qualcuno, ‘To be superior to somebody’). Finally, the last and maybe most interesting point in the authors’ description is that they argue that the adverbs meglio ‘better’ (e.g. La meglio gioventù, from the title of the famous collection of poems written by Pier Paolo Pasolini) and peggio ‘worse’ are natural substitutes of the pure organic comparatives migliore and peggiore in the Tuscan variety, thus giving us possible triplets (più buono – migliore – meglio). Summarising, we can represent Battaglia and Pernicone’s view as shown below:

- Pure organic comparatives: maggiore, minore, migliore, peggiore. - Plausible organic comparatives: anteriore, posteriore, inferiore, superiore,

interiore, esteriore. - Adverbs substituting pure organic comparatives in Tuscan variety: meglio

(substitutes migliore), peggio (substitutes peggiore).

Very few words on the subject are spent in three grammars published astride a decade, that is: Grammatica italiana del Novecento by Miklós Fogarasi (1969: 206-213), Grammatica italiana descrittiva su basi storiche e psicologiche by Moriz Regula and Josip Jernej (1975: 124-128), and La lingua italiana by Anna Laura Lepschy

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and Giulio Lepschy (1981: 102-105). However, some points are interesting and fresh if compared to the previous works, and will turn out to be useful for my work on the corpus. In Fogarasi most of the work is manifestly inspired by Battaglia and Pernicone’s grammar, so it’s hard to find something new to analyze. However, the lack of a real explanation in Battaglia and Pernicone of a reason for considering the comparatives in (6b) as different from the ones in (6a) is here partially filled. Fogarasi rejoins the original group of Fornaciari stating that the choice of one or another form is not always indifferent: it depends on the stylistic contest. This is an interesting clue for the work on the corpus, and is somehow linked to what Thornton says about conditions in overabundance (see 1.2.). Indeed Fogarasi maintains that più grande and maggiore are equivalent (in terms of grammaticality) when talking about age (e.g. Lui è più grande/maggiore di te ‘he’s older than you’) but not when talking about size (e.g. Questo edificio è più grande ‘this building is bigger’, but not *Questo edificio è maggiore) (Fogarasi 1969: 211), as shown in TABLE 2.

TABLE 2.

SEMANTICALLY CONDITIONED EQUIVALENCY BETWEEN PIÙ GRANDE/MAGGIORE

SEMANTIC AREA POSITIVE DEGREE COMPARATIVE DEGREE

AGE grande ✓più grande ✓maggiore

SIZE grande ✓più grande * maggiore

Regula and Jernej (1975: 121-129) still maintain the expression ‘organic

comparatives’ but supporting Battaglia & Pernicone’s idea that the only authentic (i.e. what I called ‘pure’) organic comparatives are migliore, peggiore, maggiore, minore and adding in the group più (positive degree molto ‘very’, comparative degree in organic form più ‘more’, superlative degree il più ‘the most’). The authors agree with Fogarasi when they say that the choice between an organic or analytic form is not always indifferent – they actually use the same identical words16 – but at least they give us an explanation for that. They argue that

16 In both texts we can read: “La scelta fra i due tipi non è sempre indifferente” ‘the choice between the two types is not always indifferent’ (Fogarasi 1969: 213; Regula & Jernej 1975: 127).

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organic forms are always used in figurative meaning when indicating personality qualities (eg. Nessuno è migliore di lui ‘nobody is better than him’) while, again as in Fogarasi, organic and analytic forms are equivalent when talking about age. One last point of agreement between these two grammars is that they both argue that the adverbs meglio and peggio can occur in place of migliore and peggiore in Tuscan, as Battaglia and Pernicone already pointed out. In 1981, Lepschy and Lepschy abandon the terminology ‘organic’ describing synthetic forms simply as ‘deriving from Latin forms’. They admit in this category only the forms listed in (6a).

In 1988 Luca Serianni published a very important work under the simple name of Grammatica italiana (Serianni 1988); this work, very detailed, seems to embrace notions coming from all former traditions and supplies many examples of the use of comparative structures. The most important point I can relate to is the clear differentiation that the author states between what I called pure organic comparatives (group (6a)) and plausible organic comparatives (group (6b)). Serianni states that if pure organic comparatives migliore, peggiore, maggiore, minore can clearly relate to positive forms buono, cattivo, grande, piccolo, plausible organic comparatives superiore, inferiore, esteriore, ulteriore, interiore, anteriore, posteriore can’t, because of the diachronic evolution of Italian. Indeed, they have lost their aspect of intensification of a quality that a pure organic comparative should express. Thus:

Così interiore non vuol dire ‘che sta più dentro’, ma semplicemente ‘interno’ (in senso astratto: «un carattere sottomesso a una disciplina interiore», Calvino)17

(Serianni 1988: Chap. V, §83, 186)

Plausible comparatives cannot be related to positive degree forms anymore in modern Italian. If it is true that for a pure organic comparative we can admit the sequence:

POSITIVE ANALYTIC COMPARATIVE SYNTHETIC COMPARATIVE buono più buono maggiore

17 Translation by me: ‘Hence interiore does not mean ‘that is placed more internally’, but simply ‘internal’ (with abstract meaning: «a character subdued to an interior (interiore) discipline», Calvino)’.

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the same organization in forms is not true for plausible organic comparatives, not anymore, because they have lost their comparative meaning during time, maintaining only the qualifying aspect. It was arguably possible for them to be considered as organic comparative expressions of positive forms at Fornaciari’s time, when, as De Mauro (1963: 41, 93) usefully relates, the problem of the teaching of Italian language at school lied “nell’insegnamento meramente formalistico”18. The point here is that according to De Mauro, who used as reference a report written by the administrative official Camillo Corradini in 1910 on the Italian school system, grammar was taught only for theoretical purposes, and in primary school it was still way far from the actually spoken language. From De Mauro’s work it is understandable that teachers felt the need to maintain the bond with the glorious ancient Latin language, encouraged in this by immature scholastic programmes, slaves of their times (let’s not forget that all the first part of the 20th century still lived with the romantic wrecks of exoticism, classicism, nationalism, etc.). As a consequence, to teach Italian – which was supposed to be one of the strongest peculiarity of the newborn Italian nation – was felt mainly as the teaching of a science with strict rules rather than the teaching of a language which, of course, is not made only of rules. So, if at the beginning of the last century the forms in (6b) could be considered as linked to positive forms, today this connection is unacceptable for obvious reasons: they are not felt as comparatives when they are used. Not anymore. This is why I labeled them as plausible, because they technically derive their forms from the same source (classic Latin) of the pure ones, but they are not pure organic comparatives because speakers are conscious of the fact that they do not express the comparative degree in terms of meaning. A clear example of this different way to feel the language is the superlative infimo ‘lowest’: it does not mean, as a grammatical rule for superlatives wants, ‘which is placed extremely down19’, but something that is paltry, dishonorable, or made in a very bad quality (Serianni 1988: Chap. V, §83, 186).

18 Translation by me: ‘in a merely formalistic teaching’. 19 Dante uses infimo in the Divine Comedy (Paradise; XXXIII, 22): “L’infima lacuna De l’universo”, ‘the lowest gap in universe’, and it is not clear which meaning he gives to the word, if metaphoric or descriptive. But considering that he is talking of hell, considering the ambiguity which permeates the Comedy in its entirety and considering the enormously vast knowledge of language

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The chapter Le frasi comparative by Adriana Belletti, in Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione (Belletti 1991), looks at the subject with a syntactic approach, and comparative clauses are treated as a part of subordination. Such an analysis was however already considered by Serianni (1988: Chap. XIV, §§215-236, 515-520). Comparative clauses are explained as Prepositional or Noun Phrases in a subordinate clause expressing comparison with respect to a constituent of the main clause. For my study’s purposes, I shall focus on what Belletti (1991) calls ‘intrinsically comparative adjectival forms’ in ‘other types of comparative structures’ (Belletti 1991: 850). Interesting points in the author’s analysis are:

the introduction of a semantic extension for one element of two doublets: più

buono can, indeed, be replaced by più bello ‘more beautiful’ (10) or più bravo ‘more capable’ (for what concerns animated nouns) (11) in its cell-mate correlation with migliore; the same phenomenon happens with peggiore that can be substituted with the periphrastic forms più brutto ‘uglier/worse’ (12) and meno bravo ‘less capable’ (for what concerns animated nouns) (13);

(10) Il suo ultimo film è migliore di quanto non pensassimo. ‘His/her last movie is better than we thought.’ Il suo ultimo film è più bello di quanto non pensassimo. ‘His/her last movie is more beautiful than we thought.’

(11) Mario è migliore di Giovanni a disegnare. ‘Mario is better than Giovanni at drawing.’ Mario è più bravo di Giovanni a disegnare. ‘Mario is better/more capable than Giovanni in drawing.’

(12) Il suo ultimo libro è peggiore di quanto non pensassimo. ‘His/her last book is worse than what we thought.’ Il suo ultimo libro è più brutto di quanto non pensassimo. ‘His/her last book is worse than what we thought.’

and rhetoric that Dante had, in my humble opinion this could be a case in which both meanings are expressed.

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(13) Mario è peggiore di Giovanni negli sport.

‘Mario is worse than Giovanni in playing sports’. Mario è meno bravo di Giovanni negli sport. ‘Mario is worse/less capable than Giovanni in playing sports’.

In other words, according to what Belletti says, it seems that migliore is a synthetic comparative which realizes suppletion by invading the paradigms of BRAVO, BELLO, and BUONO. The theory is intriguing: it would be interesting to see if these forms really realize suppletion, that is one of the non-canonical phenomena we have talked about in 1.1., but considering that suppletion is not matter of study for this work, it will not be analyzed here.

synthetic forms can be followed by the same comparative structures following analytic forms, as in (14).

(14) Antonio è un medico migliore/più bravo di suo cognato. ‘Antonio is a better/more capable doctor than his brother-in-law.’ From the last example we can see how più bravo can, in this case, substitute migliore, and therefore how this form can replace più buono in a hypothetical overabundance relationship with migliore. This is a case in which più bravo is not equivalent to più buono, it is a case where più bravo is the correct form and più buono is not correct. What we see in (14) forces us to ask: if until now we have seen that più buono/migliore form a doublet, how is it possible that in this sentence più bravo can completely replace migliore? Actually, the answer is simple enough, because in prenominal position the adjective buono gains the same meaning of bravo (15a). Therefore, it seems coherent that if in comparative structure migliore is cell-mate with più buono, and in prenominal position the adjective buono can be substituted by bravo, in this circumstance migliore can appear along with più bravo (15d) instead of più buono (15c).

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(15) (a) Antonio è un buon/bravo medico.

(Belletti, 1991: 850-851) (b) Antonio è un medico migliore di suo cognato.

‘Antonio is a better doctor than his brother-in-law.’ (c) Antonio è un medico * più buono di suo cognato. (d) Antonio è un medico ✓più bravo di suo cognato.

‘Antonio is a more capable doctor than his brother-in-law.’

In her work, the author does not make any reference to a similar phenomenon that, in my opinion, reveals a similar behavior. In fact in prenominal position the adjective buono can gain the same meaning of the adjective bello as well (16a), with the same development in comparative construction that we have seen in (15) for the pair migliore/più bravo.

(16)

(a) Il suo ultimo film è un buon/bel film. ‘His last movie is a good/beautiful movie.’

(b) Il suo ultimo film è migliore del suo primo film. ‘His last movie is better than his first movie.

(c) Il suo ultimo film è *più buono del suo primo film. (d) Il suo ultimo film è ✓più bello del suo primo film.

‘His last movie is more beautiful than his first movie.’

Also in this case, it seems that we are facing a case in which in comparative structure migliore behaves as a doublet with the unexpected form più bello rather than the expected form più buono. Anyway, we do not know if they may really be cell-mates according to all the criteria of overabundance, or if forms like più bello and più bravo are expected only because più buono is agrammatical. Whatever is the answer, this remains a very interesting phenomenon, that deserves some further in-depth analysis. Finally, the author talks about the possible extension of comparative meaning to the adverbial forms meglio and peggio but not considering the diatopic distinction between standard Italian and the Tuscan variety. If this is true – if today’s Italian accepts these two forms as equivalents of migliore and peggiore – can be verified

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only analyzing corpora, along with the curious distribution which affects più buono/più bello/più bravo and più cattivo/più brutto/meno bravo.

Maurizio Dardano and Pietro Trifone in their La lingua italiana (Dardano & Trifone 1997: 134-137) basically go along with Regula and Jernej. They add in the ‘organic comparatives’ group the pair molto/più and stress the prevalence of organic forms in figurative clauses, as Regula and Jernej already argued (Regula & Jernej 1975: 127). As for Serianni, they stress that anteriore, esteriore, inferiore, interiore, posteriore, superiore, ulteriore do not have a corresponding adjective of positive degree, as happens for the forms in (6a). Moreover, another form – already mentioned by Serianni – is inserted in the original (6b) group described by Fornaciari: citeriore, which could be translated as di qua da ‘on this side of’ (Serianni: Chap. V, §83, 186)20 and, as the Treccani online dictionary reports, is usually used to refer to “determinazioni geografiche del mondo antico (Spagna citeriore, Gallia citeriore), e in denominazioni amministrative ora disusate, come Calabria citeriore, Abruzzo citeriore”21. In the corpus that I will use for my data analysis (la Repubblica corpus 1985-2000) this term occurs only twice:

(17) Curare una piazza come l’Asia citeriore non è uno scherzo.

‘To cure a public opinion like the one of citerior Asia is not a joke.’ (18) Nell’anno di disgrazia 1638, quando la Calabria citeriore fu

sconvolta […] ‘In the year of disgrace 1638, when citerior Calabria was shocked […]’

In (17) the term is obviously used with ironic meaning: the journalist speaks of a fictitious politician who must do propaganda around the world and, among various destinations, he must pay attention to the needs of this Asia citeriore, with a clear allusion to the ancient Roman colonization. On the other hand (18) refers to the historical inner part of the Italian region of Calabria that was devastated by an earthquake in 1638, but the term seems to be used for merely stylistic reasons.

20 But, Wikipedia: nearer, sooner. Web link: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/citerior. 21 Translation by me: ‘Geographic denominations of the ancient world (Spagna citeriore, Gallia citeriore) and in administrative denominations now outdated (Calabria citeriore, Abruzzo citeriore)’. Definition can be found here: http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/citeriore/.

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Therefore, considering the very low frequency of this word and its collocation in a very refined register, it will not be object of my analysis.

As for Grande grammatica di consultazione, in Nuova grammatica italiana (Salvi &

Vanelli 2004: 169-171), Giampaolo Salvi and Laura Vanelli follow a syntactic approach to grammar, but giving the reader useful hints about paradigmatic inflection theories. It is interesting to see how they talk about morpho-syntactic values of gender and number in adjectives and nouns, even if some points appear to be poorly treated.22 From the text (Salvi & Vanelli 2004: 168) it emerges that it will be useful in terms of distribution to consider a new aspect of adjectives’ behavior: the fact that some adjectives have apocopated allomorphs when preceding particular elements. We could have, for example L’Italia esprime un miglior (instead of migliore) calcio rispetto alla Spagna ‘Italy expresses a better soccer than Spain’. Referring to our organic comparatives, they are explained as elements “che esprimono lessicalmente il grado comparativo23”, so they call them lessicalizzati ‘lexicalized’. Only migliore, peggiore, maggiore, minore are considered lessicalizzati, the synthetic forms listed in (6b) are not mentioned at all.

3.3. Plausible and pure organic comparatives After this overview on the main grammars that have described the various aspects of comparison in Italian during the last century and a half, it is clear that moving through history from older to more recent works, Italian grammarians have developed a consciousness of how organic comparatives must be considered, and diversified. For what we have seen so far, we can follow Serianni’s and Dardano & Trifone’s theory and divide comparatives according to their synthetic forms in two groups. In GROUP A, comparative forms which can relate to positive forms are listed; here we can find what I called pure organic comparatives. In GROUP B, we have plausible organic comparatives, that are those comparatives which could be considered as linked to positive degree forms if viewed under a purist (and outdated) grammatical approach to language (that De Mauro labels as ‘formalistic’ (1963: 93)), which however clashes with a semantic reality that does not allow such forced connections. This semantic difference that distinguishes 22 For example, they consider “nouns carrying in most cases intrinsic gender value”; this is not true, because gender is always an inherent, fixed value in Italian nouns. 23 Translation by me: ‘that lexically express the comparative degree’.

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comparatives of one group from the others cannot be ignored anymore when talking about comparison in terms of grammar because it is a difference that, as we already said, is clearly felt by speakers. Hence, I recommend to categorize synthetic comparatives of Italian as follows:

GROUP A. CLEAR RELATION BETWEEN SYNTHETIC FORMS AND POSITIVE DEGREE ADJECTIVES

POSITIVE DEGREE

ANALYTIC COMPARATIVE FORM

SYNTHETIC COMPARATIVE FORM

buono più buono migliore

cattivo più cattivo peggiore grande più grande maggiore

piccolo più piccolo minore

GROUP B.

NON-CLEAR RELATION BETWEEN SYNTHETIC FORMS AND POSITIVE DEGREE ADJECTIVES

POSITIVE DEGREE

ANALYTIC COMPARATIVE FORM

SYNTHETIC COMPARATIVE FORM

NOW ADJECTIVE

alto più alto superiore

basso più basso inferiore

esterno più esterno esteriore

inoltrato più inoltrato ulteriore

interno più interno interiore avanzato più avanzato anteriore

-- (di dietro) più addietro posteriore

-- (al di qua di) più al di qua di citeriore

If it is true that we have overabundance when a cell of a paradigm of a given

lexeme is filled by two or more forms which realize the same set of morpho-syntactic properties (Thornton 2011: 359), then the doublets più buono/migliore, più cattivo/peggiore, più grande/maggiore, più piccolo/minore are the only ones we can consider as valuable candidates for a research on a corpus. The same could not be said for the forms listed in GROUP B, due to their semantically precarious relation to a positive degree adjective. Indeed, analytic comparative forms listed

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in GROUP B. show a link to the forms expressing positive degree, but this cannot be said for the synthetic comparative forms of that group. If we accept that plausible organic comparatives are felt as simple qualifying adjectives (not comparatives) nowadays, it means that they do not realize the same set of morpho-syntactic properties of the analytic forms, so they cannot fill the same cell of analytic forms in any lexeme, as happens for pure organic comparatives.

What I am saying here about the semantic opacity of plausible organic comparatives was already said, in simpler words, by Serianni in his Grammatica italiana. Referring to the fact that the elements listed in (6b) do not seem to clearly refer to an adjective carrying positive degree, he said:

Per la mancanza di un grado positivo a cui fare riferimento molti di questi aggettivi hanno finito col perdere in tutto o in parte i tratti semantici del comparativo di maggioranza e del superlativo24.

(Serianni 1988: Chap. V, §83, 186)

In GROUP. B., actually, we can see that some positive degree adjectives are listed. This does not means that Serianni was wrong, but only that he was saying something similar to my point from another perspective. The ‘lack of a positive degree’ could be interpreted as the fact that plausible organic comparatives cannot be related to any Italian positive degree form; we do not have, for example, the form *SUPERO for SUPERIORE. GROUP B. must be read in another way: if in GROUP A., a correlation between positive degree, analytic comparative and synthetic forms is clear, in GROUP B. we have a clear correlation between positive degree and analytic comparative forms, that may arguably have been related to the synthetic comparative forms in the past, but that now are no more. In the next chapter I am going to analyze data in order to understand if – and, if so, to what extent – what could be possible at a theoretical level finds its application to reality when we, quoting Corbett again, “turn to real language”.

24 Translation by me: ‘For the lack of a positive degree to make reference to, these adjectives completely or partially lost the semantic values of comparison of majority and superlative’.

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IV. PIÙ BUONO / MIGLIORE: a Case Study

4.1. Introduction

In this work of mine, to turn to real language means analyzing data from an online corpus. I have chosen la Repubblica corpus (1985-2000), for it is a very large corpus (approximately 380 million tokens1 including punctuation marks, ±330 million of word-tokens according to Davide Ricca2) that embraces a period of time – 16 years – perfectly suitable for the purposes of a synchronic study.

At the end of chapter 3, I pointed out that eligible doublets for my research are the forms (and shapes thereof) which fill the cells of the comparatives PIÙ

BUONO/MIGLIORE, PIÙ CATTIVO/PEGGIORE, PIÙ GRANDE/MAGGIORE, PIÙ PICCOLO/MINORE. In this chapter I will analyze the behavior of the doublet PIÙ BUONO/MIGLIORE, how each form and shape of both elements distributes and in which cases, if any, they do fill an overabundant cell. In order to do that, I will identify the contexts – or, more precisely, semantic areas – in which both elements of this doublet may appear, then I will verify how our elements distribute, searching the corpus to discover if a synthetic comparative appears in contexts comparable to the ones in which an analytic comparative does. Logically, the more two forms of a doublet will be in contrastive distribution in a given context, the more they will be supposed to realize the same set of morpho-syntactic properties, and thus the more likely they will be in a state of overabundance in the given context. First of all, it will be useful to understand which is the amount of tokens we have at our disposal. An overall summary, including forms and shapes of the doublets I will not analyze in this work (due to space restrictions), is shown in TABLE 1.

1 As stated in the “Corpus Description” web page, that can be consulted at the following link: http://sslmit.unibo.it/repubblica 2 In a personal communication to Anna M. Thornton who shared it with me.

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However, it has to be said that the table shows only raw data, the result of a simple query obtained by searching our forms, forms that may appear in very different syntactic and semantic contexts, several of which are not involved in comparison at all, or are involved in comparison in a way that does not embrace the aim of this study. A clear example of this inconvenience is shown in the case of più buon, shape of PIÙ BUONO, where only few tokens, 11 out of 39 (28,2%), carry those values of comparison suitable for our purposes (see Appendix – TABLE

A.I.1, items 1 – 11).

Anyway, the total number of our tokens is way higher (a more accurate number will be given in 4.3.1.), and the items to analyze will be about three hundred. The analytical work in this research consists in establishing in which syntactic and semantic contexts what we have called analytic comparatives appear and, if in the same contexts synthetic comparatives are found, seeing if such analytic and synthetic forms establish overabundance. In order to do that, we will proceed in this way: for what concerns the items of forms that appear less than two hundred times, such as più buono, più buon, più buona, più buoni and più buone, I will analyze every token. For what concerns migliore, miglior and migliori, they have a very large number of tokens; therefore to analyze all of them would exceed the limits of this work. Thus, I will analyze all the tokens given by the forms and shapes of PIÙ BUONO and verify if in the semantic areas in which they appear any shape or form of MIGLIORE appears as well.

4.1.1. The looming and fascinating presence of relative superlatives

Another preliminary aspect of this analysis that deserves a particular attention is that several of our tokens are predicates with the predicate representing a parameter of comparison that carries relative superlative degree of comparison. This is quite an issue, because this thesis focuses on overabundance between doublets that express comparison between two entities (comparatives), not between an entity amongst a group (relative superlatives). A very fascinating thing is that a quick research on their behavior gives the idea that superlatives seem to act differently from comparatives in terms of overabundance; thus, even if they will not be taken into account for this research, they may be a possible starting point for further studies. For this reason, few examples of superlative’s behavior will be given during the next pages, but before that I think it will be

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useful to understand what a relative superlative is, and how it differs from a comparative.

We have already given a definition of it, quoting Cuzzolin & Lehmann (2004: 1213) in 2.1.:

the superlative degree: the adjective describes our compared element at a high level (possibly the highest). Superlative degree recognizes a difference between the highest degree in comparison (when the compared element is at the highest level in a group of elements), and the highest degree in gradation (when the adjective describing our element wants to emphasize the semantic meaning it brings at a very high level). The former is called ‘relative superlative’, the latter ‘absolute superlative’

(Cuzzolin & Lehmann 2004: 1213) Serianni’s Grammatica italiana (1988: Chap. V, §§60-82, 180-186) helps to clear the point. The author says:

Il grado superlativo esprime il massimo livello possibile di intensificazione della qualità posseduta, in relazione ad altre grandezze, persone, cose (superlativo relativo), oppure in senso assoluto (superlativo assoluto)3.

(Serianni 1988: Chap. V, §60, 180) Beyond the entity of the standard (one element for comparatives, all the elements of a given group for relative superlatives), another difference between comparatives and superlatives lays in the fact that the latter are generally introduced by the definite article (il, lo, la, i, gli, le ‘the’) and, if shown, the standard is introduced by the preposition di ‘of’ (in one of its shapes), or by the prepositions tra and fra ‘among’. Below, some examples taken from the very same Grammatica italiana:

- il più bravo di tutti i colleghi ‘the best of his colleagues’

- tra i colleghi, il più bravo

3 Translation by me: ‘Superlative degree expresses the highest possible level of intensification of the possessed quality, in relation to other sizes, people, things (relative superlative) or in an absolute way (absolute superlative).’

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‘among his colleagues, the best’ (Serianni 1988: Chap. V, §60, 180)

Actually, during my research I noticed that when the standard is omitted, the role of the pivot can be performed by the particle che. In Italian this particle has two main functions: it can be a conjunction (‘that’), or a relative pronoun (‘that’, ‘which’, ‘who’). Well, it seems that in comparison it acquires a third function, that of introducing the standard of comparison when it is an adverb of place, such as altrove ‘elsewhere’ (1), or an adverb of time. In other words, what Cuzzolin & Lehmann (2004: 1212) call ‘pivot’. The most common adverb of time that can appear introduced by che is mai ‘ever/never’, and we have an example in (2). Anyway, our corpus gives tokens with other adverbs of time as well (even if fewer in number) such as prima ‘before’ and allora ‘then/in that moment’. Examples of these two other cases are given in (3) and (4).

(1) Adesso va dicendo che gli intellettuali sono addomesticati perché qui c'era un comunismo più buono che altrove

‘now he says that the intellectuals are domesticate because here there was a kinder Communism than elsewhere’

(A.I.4 – PIÙ BUONO, item 74) (2) [Bush] si è detto più convinto che mai di poter fare luce negli angoli

bui della nostra nazione ‘[Bush] was more convinced than ever in making light on the dark angles of our nation’.

(A.I.3 – PIÙ BUONA, item 39) (3) E qui nasceva la piccola rimonta dei romani favorita da un Ferri più

lucido che prima. ‘And here the come back of romans was starting, facilitated by a Ferri more lucid than ever.’

(4) Dunque anche la politica oggi è molto più forte che allora? ‘So, politics as well is now stronger than at the time?’

Pavao Tekavčić (1972: 160-163, 642-643) says something about the use of che in comparison. Summarizing, he points out that che appears in three cases: 1) when two qualities refer to the same noun (e.g. Laura è più simpatica che bella ‘Laura is more pleasant than beautiful’); 2) when the comparee is excluded from the standard (e.g. we can say Carlo è più forte che Mario ‘Carlo is stronger than Mario’,

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but we cannot say *Carlo è il più forte che tutti ‘Carlo is stronger than everyone’); 3) in clause coordination. With reference to the last point, the author observes:

E. Alarcos Llorach constata, con molta acutezza, che questo morfema, omofono sia al relativo sia alla congiunzione, non si può identificare né con il primo né con il secondo, perché il termine da esso introdotto non equivale né a una proposizione attributiva relativa né a una proposizione funzionalmente trasposta in oggetto o complemento. Il morfema che, introduttore del complemento di comparazione, ha la funzione di coordinare i due termini della comparazione, si tratti di comparazione di uguaglianza o di non-uguaglianza. […] Per conseguenza, accanto al relativo (che1) e alla congiunzione (che2) esiste anche il morfema introduttore del complemento di comparazione, che allora è il che3. Le deduzioni dell’Alarcos Llorach si riferiscono allo spagnolo, ma valgono pienamente anche per l’italiano4.

(Tekavčić 1972: 642-643)

Point 3) listed above seems to be the most useful to understand why we have che in examples (1) – (4) but, unluckily, the author does not give us any example to relate. What we know, anyway, is that che may appear as a pivot when introducing a verb or an adverb of time, and that grammars have not focused on this topic enough to give a clear explanation of why this happens. It is a very interesting phenomenon, and it would be wise to deeply study it in the future. Now, turning back to the relationships between comparatives and relative superlatives, sometimes, continues Serianni quoting Tekavčić, we might have ambiguity between a comparative and a superlative. In fact:

Il numero di persone, cose, concetti messi a confronto, necessario perché nel superlativo relativo sia mantenuta l’idea di “totalità”, deve essere almeno superiore a due: se diciamo “Mario è il più bravo dei due piloti” non abbiamo

4 Translation by me: E. Alarcos Llorach points out, with notable accuracy, that this morpheme, that is homophonous both with the relative pronoun and the conjunction, cannot be identified neither as the former nor as the latter, because the term it introduces is equivalent neither to an attributive relative clause nor to a clause that is functionally transposed in subject, object or complement. The morpheme che, which introduces the comparer, has the function of coordinating the two terms of comparison, be it in a comparison of equality or non-equality. Consequently, beside the relative (che1) and the conjunction (che2), we have the morpheme introducing the comparer, that is che3. Alarcos Llorach’s deductions refer to Spanish, but they are fully true for Italian as well.

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propriamente un superlativo relativo (‘ A è più bravo di tutti i B ’), ma un comparativo di maggioranza (‘ A è più bravo di B ’). Per questo motivo, secondo TEKAVČIĆ 1980: II 123, un sintagma come Mario è il più forte rimane sospeso tra l’idea di comparativo e quella di superlativo finché non interviene un secondo termine per il comparativo (dei due) o per il superlativo (di tutti)5.

Serianni (1988: Chap. V, §61, 181)

Now that we have decided how to pick our data, and now that we know that we must pay attention to the presence, behavior and possible ambiguity in deciphering the real essence of relative superlatives, we can finally start our work on the corpus.

4.2. Più buon Let us start our analysis by examining the behavior of the form which presents the smallest number of tokens: più buon (‘better’, carrying masculine value for the feature of gender and singular value for the feature of number), shape of più buono. By analyzing all of its 39 tokens (the full list is in Appendix – TABLE 1. PIÙ BUON, from now on A.I.1) we see that the particle più, that is supposed to be the pivot of our analytic comparative form, actually appears in three different roles:

a) As a marker of comparison (11 items; A.1.1: 1 – 11) b) As an invariable comparative adjective (20 items; A.I.1: 12 – 31) c) As an adverb of time (8 items; A.I.1: 32 – 39)

So, the majority out of the total number of items – 28 out of 39 – is involved in comparison in a way that does not interest our research (b) or is not involved in comparison at all (c).

5 Translation by me: ‘The number of people, things, concepts compared – necessary for maintaining the idea of “totality” in relative superlative – must be at least higher than two: if we say “Mario is the best among the two pilots”, we don’t properly have a relative superlative (‘ A is the best among all the B ’), but a comparative of majority (‘A is better than B ’). For this reason, according to Tekavčić 1980: II 123, a sentence like Mario is the strongest remains suspended between the idea of comparative and the idea of superlative until a second term appears to introduce a comparative (of the two) or a superlative (of everyone).

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4.2.1. Più as an invariable comparative adjective and as an adverb of time

When più has the meaning of invariable comparative adjective (b), it appears before a noun phrase in which buon constitutes a member of the phrase and carries a simple positive degree. Many of these cases represent idiomatic expressions of the Italian language; in fact buon senso (5) means ‘common sense’, buon gusto (6) ‘good taste/tastefulness’ (even metaphorical), buon umore (7) ‘good mood’6.

(5) Le donne hanno più buon senso degli uomini ‘Women have more common sense than men’

(6) Con più buon gusto, rispettando di più l'antico e, nello stesso tempo, creando il moderno

‘With more good taste, by respecting more what is antique and, at the same time, by creating what is modern’

(7) Tutte le reti televisive andranno a gara per sfoggiare più buon umore, più allegria, più trasgressività.

‘All the television networks will compete to show off more good mood, more cheerfulness, more transgression’

(A.I.1: 16, 28, 30)

Example (7) is the best for giving us an idea of the reason why we cannot consider the tokens with più as an invariable comparative adjective introducing a noun as eligible for our research. In this particular example, più appears three times in the same sentence, always working as an adjective of the following nouns (buon umore ‘good mood’, allegria ‘cheerfulness’, trasgressività ‘transgression’) not as a marker of comparison.

6 It has to be said that polyrhematic forms such as buon senso, buon gusto and buon umore are so well-established in Italian language that they are considered correct even in their graphically univerbated forms buonsenso, buongusto and buonumore. Univerbation is such an attested phenomenon in Italian language that both the respectable Treccani online dictionary and Grande Dizionario Italiano dell’Uso list and give a definition of all three univerbated forms. For a deeper analysis on univerbation, related to pronoun idioms, see Voghera (2004: 65).

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When più has the value of adverb of time (c), it modifies a verb by meaning ‘anymore’. In this case as well, it mainly appears along with idiomatic phrases, such as non corre buon sangue and (fare) buon viso a cattivo gioco. The latter literally means ‘to show a nice face in a bad game’ and it has a corresponding idiomatic realization in English language as ‘to grin and bear’. Buon sangue, instead, is a little more complicated for a non-native speaker of Italian: basically, when it appears with the verb correre ‘run’ in its negative form non correre ‘do not run’, it constitutes an Italian idiom meaning that two or more persons do not get along with each other. E.g. fra me e Mario non corre buon sangue means ‘I do not get along with Mario’ and fra me e Mario non corre più buon sangue means ‘I do not get along with Mario anymore’. Some instances of the adverbial function of più are given in the examples (8) and (9):

(8) C’è chi dice che tra i due non corra più buon sangue ‘Someone says that the two guys are not getting along anymore’

(9) […] dal ministro del Tesoro questa volta non si aspetta più buon viso a cattivo gioco

‘[…] from the Ministry of Finance, this time, it is not expected to grin and bear anymore’

(A.I.1: 34, 38) Differently from what happens in (b), here più is not involved in comparison at all, thus all the tokens showing the sequence V. + Adv. – along with the ones showing the sequence Adj. + N. – will not be considered in this study, although they will be all listed in the Appendix tables.

4.2.2. Idioms and overabundance

Finally, the third context in which più appears together with buon is the one that interests us: as a marker of comparison (a). It is intriguing that, also in this third context, we run – among the other tokens – into another sequence of words that seems to be an idiomatic phrase: a buon mercato ‘cheap/low-cost’, that appears 5 times. Until now we have encountered idioms in each one of the contexts where più can appear, thus I think it would be wise to define what an idiom is, and how we establish if a sequence of words is an idiom or not.

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Miriam Voghera (2004: 56-69) clearly describes what is an idiom. What the Italian dedicated literature agrees on calling parole polirematiche (a literal translation should be ‘polyrhematic words’) is described by Voghera as “combinazioni di parole che sono sentite dai parlanti nativi come un’unica unità lessicale” (‘combinations of words that native speakers of a given language feel like being a single lexical entity’). She argues that in order to understand to what extent an idiom can still be considered as a sequence of independent words rather than a crystalized, unique, form, four tests must be applied: a) head inflection, b) insertion of modifiers in the head, c) pronominalization of the head, d) topicalization and dislocation of the head. At this point, in order to see if our sequence of words is an idiom or still a sequence of independent words, we should apply to it Voghera’s tests. The more these four tests will give a positive result (e.g. head inflection: yes, insertion of modifyers in the head: yes, etc.), the more the sequence of words will be seen as a sequence of separated, independent, words, and not as an idiom. The problem is that the author applies this method to idioms that have a head (e.g., the noun in a noun phrase), whilst our sequence, a buon mercato, does not. Our idiom is what linguists call “esocentric”, that is an idiom which does not show a head or, rather, whose all elements must be considered as a head. For this reason, if we want to apply test a), we need to search in the corpus for tokens that show inflection in all parts of our element, e.g. a buoni mercati ‘cheaper (plural)’. With a buoni mercati, the query gives no results, so in this case test a) does not work. However, our heads can vary not only in number, but also in gradation. Hence, it would be wise to search for tokens that show head inflection in gradation (and number, as well), such as: a più buon mercato, a più buoni mercati, a miglior mercato, a migliore mercato, a miglior mercati, a migliori mercati. The query gives as a result 6 tokens for a più buon mercato (5 showing più buon as a comparative, 1 showing più buon as a relative superlative), 3 tokens for a miglior mercato, no tokens for all the other instances. Test b) requires us to insert a modifier in the middle of the sequence. Both the queries a molto buon mercato and "a" "buon" [] {1} "mercato"7 give no result, so test b) does not work, or it works in very few cases (6 again) if we want to consider the sequence a più buon mercato as one that shows the particle più as a modifier of the head. For test c) we will replace the noun mercato ‘market’ with

7 The query must be read in this way: find all the tokens which contain: “a”, followed by “buon”, followed by any word ([] {1}), followed by “mercato”.

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the demonstrative pronoun quello ‘that’. By searching *a quello buono [di mercato] (lit. ‘*to that good [of market]’) gives zero results, so this third test does not work. The fourth and final test d) can be done by switching the position of the adjective buon and the noun mercato: thus, we search for a mercato buono, and again we have no items as the result of our query. According to Voghera’s tests, it comes out that this sequence of words is very close to being a real idiom, because of the very small number of instances that demonstrate the contrary. Being a real idiom means that the sequence is felt “like being a single lexical entity”, in other words, like a single word. This concept is important because it allows us to apply one more test to our sequence in order to be sure of its strong indivisibility, the so called test dell’interrompiblità ‘interruptibility test’. The concept of interruptibility is explained in the textbook Linguistica generale (Basile, Casadei, Lorenzetti, Schirru, Thornton 2010: 281-283). According to the authors, we have “non interrompibilità” ‘non-interruptibility’ when:

in una parola sono identificati più elementi, per esempio due, tra questi non è possibile inserire nuovo materiale linguistico, e non è possibile effettuare una pausa tra i due, o terminare una sequenza dopo il primo o cominciarla con il secondo.8

Thus, if our sequence is an idiom, it should not be interruptible. If we consider the particle più as something that interrupts the sequence a buon mercato, we may consider the sequence a più buon mercato not only as involved just in the head inflection and insertion of modifiers tests, but also in the interruptibility test because, that is undeniable, più interrupts it. Let us now see what happens if we move our particle outside the sequence. If we search for più a buon mercato, we see that the number of tokens found (281) strongly increases. 281 non-interrupted sequences versus 6 interrupted sequences means that non-interrupted sequences establish, in terms of frequency, a ratio of 36.33:1 with the interrupted sequences. This is a further prove that the sequence a buon mercato strongly tends to act like an idiom rather than a sequence of independent words. Of course, we cannot consider it as a pure idiom because we have a small number of instances asserting the opposite. And a small number is not equal to zero. In conclusion, we can say

8 Translation by me: ‘in a word, some elements are identified, for example two, it is not possible to insert new linguistic material in between these ones, and it is not possible to realize a pause between the two, or ending a sequence after the first or starting a sequence with the second.’

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that after we applied some tests to our sequence in order to see if it is an idiom or a sequence of independent words, we deduced that it is very close to be a pure idiom, even if the elements that appears in it are still not fully crystalized in a single lexical identity. A graphic summary of the evident tendency to idiomaticity of a buon mercato is shown in TABLE 2.

TABLE 2. IDIOMATICITY OF A BUON MERCATO

TEST SEARCHED SEQUENCE NUMBER OF TOKENS

FOUND

HEAD INFLECTION

a buoni mercati 0 a più buon mercato 6

a più buoni mercati 0

a miglior mercato 3

a migliore mercato 0

a miglior mercati 0

a migliori mercati 0

INSERTION OF MODIFIERS IN THE HEAD

a più buon mercato 6

a molto buon mercato 0

"a" "buon" [] {1} "mercato"

0

PRONOMINALIZATION OF THE HEAD a quello buono [di

mercato] 0

TOPICALIZATION AND DISLOCATION OF THE

HEAD AND a mercato buono 0

INTERRUPTIBILITY a più buon mercato 6

più a buon mercato 218

Still with reference to TABLE 2., we see that the idiom containing our analytic comparative form appears 3 times showing the synthetic form as well. Examples (10) – (12) show how analytic and synthetic comparatives can be found in a similar context in the same corpus.

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(10) Comunque, il progetto prevede anche altre forme di sponsorizzazione meno clamorose e, ovviamente, a più buon mercato.

‘However, the project contemplates other forms of sponsoring as well, less blatant and, of course, cheaper.’

(11) Profittare dei prezzi giapponesi a miglior mercato ‘To profit from Japanese cheaper prices’

(12) Le sostanze più consumate sono le più accessibili e a miglior mercato come alcol, cannabis […] ‘The most used substances are the more accessible and cheaper ones, such as alcohol, cannabis […]’

A similar analysis for the remaining three items of TABLE A.I.1 showing the heads panteista, gioco and cristiano can be done for examples (13) – (15), listed below:

(13) […] interessato alla gente ma lieto di far parte di un élite piuttosto esclusiva, buon cattolico ma ancor più buon panteista ‘[…] interested to people but glad to be part of a quite exclusive élite, good catholic but even better pantheist’ (A.I.1: 8) (14) le luci di scena di Pino Pinori fanno spesso più buon gioco9 del mandolino ‘Pino Pinori’s stage lighting often plays a better game than the mandolin’ (A.I.1: 2) (15) Sarà più buon cristiano chi fa grossi commerci abusivi, oppure piccoli traffici illeciti? ‘Who is a better Christian, the one who makes big illegal trades, or small illegal trades?’ (A.I.1: 1) If it is true that for example (13) we do not find any token for miglior panteista in the corpus, here più buon panteista can be considered as having function of comparison because it can intuitively be replaced by miglior panteista without compromising the meaning of the sentence. On the other hand, we have to

9 It has to be said that if fare buon gioco is an idiom (Voghera’s tests should be applied to establish it), the sequence fare più buon gioco should be seen as one that shows head inflection in gradation of the head buon. For the sake of conciseness I avoided to analyze the sequence as I did for a buon mercato and I have considered it only in the perspective of the search of overabundance.

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admit that this is a borderline case, because più may be seen as a simple invariable comparative adjective qualifying the NP buon panteista10. Examples (14) and (15) seem to be clearer: in fact, la Repubblica corpus contains 18 tokens for miglior gioco and 4 tokens for miglior Cristiano, all of which meaning ‘better’, as for più buon. I have picked one of each, and listed them in examples (16) and (17): (16) Il gol era conferma del miglior gioco del Perugia.

‘The goal was a proof of Perugia’s better game.’ (17) Pfister gli rispondeva che non c’era mai stato miglior cristiano di lui.

‘Pisfter answered him that there had never been a better Christian than him’.

One last token (18) carries without any doubt a value of relative superlative comparison:

(18) xe el più buon omo del mondo. ‘is the kindest man on earth.’

(A.I.1: 10) In (18) we have a sentence in Venetian dialect meaning ‘he is the best/kindest man on earth’, so we have gradation at some degree, but here più buon is a relative superlative, not a comparative, because our man is the ‘kindest’ with respect to ‘the rest of the world’. Indeed, example (18) is helpful to focus on two points. First, we have to consider that some of our tokens may appear in a sentence in one of the many Italian regional varieties. Second, that the relative superlative forms can be present at any level of analysis and must be strongly considered, even if it is a dialectal context.

In conclusion, for what concerns più buon, we have seen that it appears 39 times in la Repubblica corpus. In 31 out of 39 tokens it does not give us relevant data for our purpose because più operates as an adverb modifying a verb or as an adjective modifying a noun phrase that includes buon in its constituents. The

10 However, considering the presence of some tokens showing miglior cristiano, the ambiguity could be solved in favor of più buon = comparative.

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remaining 8 tokens show più buon carrying comparison at some degree, with più working as a marker of comparison. In these tokens, the whole analytic form più buon can be replaced with migliore with a high probability. Thus, we may dare to establish a first generalization, that is that when più buon carries degree of comparison, it may establish overabundance with its cell-mate miglior.

4.3. Più buone, più buona, più buono, più buoni Although its behavior is very interesting and it gives us the feeling that an analytic comparative can easily establish overabundance with its synthetic cell-mate, più buon is actually an exception. Indeed, a different reality comes to our eyes when we analyze our other four comparatives, that are:

- più buone; ‘better’ carrying feminine value for the feature of gender and plural value for the feature of number. Full list in Appendix – TABLE 2. PIÙ

BUONE, from now on A.I.2; - più buona; ‘better’ carrying feminine value for the feature of gender and

singular value for the feature of number. Full list in Appendix – TABLE 3. PIÙ BUONA, from now on A.I.3;

- più buono: ‘better’ carrying masculine value for the feature of gender and singular value for the feature of number. Full list in Appendix – TABLE 4. PIÙ BUONO, from now on A.I.4;

- più buoni; ‘better’ carrying masculine value for the feature of gender and plural value for the feature of number. Full list in Appendix – TABLE 5. PIÙ

BUONI, from now on A.I.5. They all behave approximately in the same way, but not in the same way as più buon does, and this is the reason why I will analyze all of them in the same section. But before I start demonstrating what I have said until now, I think it would be useful to understand which is the amount of data we have at our disposal, how they distribute in semantic areas, and which peculiarities we will need to be aware of.

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4.3.1. A relevant number of items

The four comparatives appear in la Repubblica corpus in a total of 515 tokens. Of these, 436 show più having function of marker (84.66% of the total) and in 292 (66.97%) of these cases they are comparatives rather than relative superlatives. According to the semantic areas which they refer to, our 292 comparative forms can be grouped in three main categories: taste (62 items, 21.23% of total comparatives), kindness (199 items, 68.15% of total comparatives) and other (31 items, 10.62% of total comparatives). This third group will gather all the semantic areas in which one of our analytic comparatives describes neither taste nor kindness. Summarizing, an analytic comparative is mainly attested when describing properties related to taste (or, in some cases, to food’s healthy nutritional properties) of an entity, or to the entity’s morally positive aspect. A further categorization can be done within the two main areas, for taste can be related both to a food or beverage (56 items, 90.32% of total taste-related items) and to a non-food element (6 items, 9.67% of total taste-related items); and kindness can be related both to a human being (158 items, 79.39% of total kindness-related items) and to a non-human subject (41 items, 20.60% of total kindness-related items). The same categorization I made for comparatives is done for all those cases when the analytic form is not a comparative, but rather a relative superlative, and it is shown in TABLE 3. The table gives a graphic summary of what has been said above, and will help the reader to understand better how many tokens we are supposed to handle and how many of these, according to their degree of gradation, are useful for our enquiry for each semantic area.

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The data illustrated in TABLE 3. inspire some reflections. First, differently from più buon, our four comparatives tend to occur more often in comparison than in non-comparison. Second, the comparative forms are higher in number than the superlative forms, which however represent a considerable part of the total amount: 147 relative superlatives vs. 292 comparatives means 33.48% of the total. This aspect is very important for the purposes of this work, because here I am going to analyze only the behavior of the comparative forms – that is the topic of this thesis – but eventually contrasting it with the behavior of the relative superlative forms in the future, in order to see if we have more chances of overabundance when dealing with relative superlatives than with comparatives. Finally, we see that the tokens related to kindness are higher in number than the tokens related to taste and, for what concerns the semantic area of kindness, that più buona is the only comparative showing more forms non-human related than human related.

It has to be said, by the way, that this vast difference is slightly deviating because of the limits of a corpus. In fact, it can happen that a famous quote from a relevant person or a well-established sentence in the language may be repeated over and over in the corpus, thus increasing the total number of our tokens, but lowering the number of different noun phrase heads that we have at our disposal. In this way, the total number of data for a given semantic area of a given comparative form may be less diversified than other ones. This is the case, for example, of the 13 tokens for più buona showing ‘America’ as NP head (A.I.3: 30 – 42). The toponym recurs with such a high frequency because the goal of having ‘a kinder America’ was one of the former U.S. president George Bush senior’s aims for his presidential term. In his inaugural address, given on January 20th, 1989 he said:

America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world. My friends, we have work to do11.

11 The full speech can be read here: http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres63.html (Accessed on 11.10.2014)

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Given the worldwide importance of a U.S. president’s address, the idea of a kinder America – translated in Italian as un’America più buona – has been strongly debated by every media and, of course, quoted. In this particular case, so, we see that a presidential address affects the 50% of the total number of tokens for the semantic area of kindness (non-human) of one of our analytic comparative forms. Even more items, 16 (A.I.5: 88 – 103), are affected by a widespread idiomatic expression in all the Western culture: ‘around Christmas time everyone behaves’ or ‘during Christmas time we are all on our best behavior’, mainly translated in Italian as a Natale siamo tutti più buoni. A sentence expressing this moral attitude appears in 16,84% of tokens when we are analyzing comparatives in the semantic area of Kindness (human) for the analytic form più buoni. To be honest, this is not an impressive number in absolute terms but, along with the case of a kinder America, it is something that influences the distribution of our tokens and that must necessarily be taken into account.

Now that some important preliminary matters have been discussed, we can start analyzing the behavior of our four forms in the semantic area of taste, and see if in this context overabundance is realized.

4.3.2. Taste (food & non-food)

The semantic area of taste is the one which gives us the most vivid results in terms of establishing whether analytic and synthetic form establish overabundance or not. This will be illustrated later, now let us see which is the amount of data for this category and how they distribute. With respect to the data in TABLE 3., if we count only the tokens that realize a comparative analytic form (thus excluding the relative superlative ones), we see that:

- We have 62 tokens related to the semantic area of taste, that is 21.23% of the total number of purely comparative tokens.

- Of these, 90.32% (56 tokens) are related to food, 9.67% (6 tokens) are related to non-food;

- più buono is the form which provides the highest number of tokens in this semantic area, with 43.54% of the total (27 tokens), followed by più buona (27.41%, 17 tokens), più buoni and più buone (14.51% and 9 tokens each).

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To summarize, we are talking about a semantic area which covers little more than 1/5 of our corpus, whose tokens are mainly related to edible entities and whose major exponents are those forms that carry singular value for the feature of number. However, even if più buono and più buona are better represented than their plural counterparts, the behavior of all our four elements in the end will be shown to be exactly the same: they do not realize overabundance.

4.3.2.1. Taste: no tokens with synthetic comparatives In fact, a considerable number of NP heads for each of our forms, if searched in the corpus along with a synthetic comparative appearing before or after our NP head at a distance of minimum 0 to maximum 5 words12, gives as a result not a single token with the expected synthetic comparatives miglior/migliore/migliori. Sometimes a synthetic form is indeed found; however, considering that it is not a comparative but a relative superlative, the NP head will be listed among the ones that do not show synthetic comparatives. This happens indifferently for each comparative form, and the items that are affected from this phenomenon show the following NP heads:

- For più buone: arance ‘oranges’ (A.I.2: 1), cipolle ‘onions’ (A.I.2: 2), merci ‘goods’ (A.I.2: 5), pesche ‘peaches’ (A.I.2: 6), pizze ‘pizzas’ (A.I.2: 7);

- For più buona: Coca-Cola (3 items, A.I.3: 4 – 6), frutta ‘fruit’ (2 items, A.I.3: 7 – 8), mela ‘apple’ (A.I.3: 9), minestra ‘soup’ (A.I.3: 10), minestra riscaldata13 ‘reheated soup’ (2 items, A.I.3: 11 – 12), Nutella (A.I.3: 13), specialità ‘speciality’ (A.I.3: 14), roba (drug related) ‘dope’ (A.I.3: 17);

- For più buono: Chinotto (A.I.4: 6), Krug (A.I.4: 7), Parmigiano reggiano ‘Parmesan cheese’ (A.I.4: 13), pranzetto ‘little lovely meal’ (A.I.4: 15),

12 An example of such a query should be: "mandarini" [] {0,5} "migliori" | "migliori" [] {0,5} "mandarini". 13 This is an Italian idiom often used when referring to something that one has already experienced in his/her life and that now gives the idea of something repetitive, monotonous, boring. E.g.: la minestra riscaldata non piace a nessuno ‘nobody likes a reheated soup’ means that nobody wants to experience something (or someone) already experienced, that now has lost newness and originality. It has to be said, anyway, that given the deeply metaphorical meaning of this idiom, it should not be included in the list. I include it all the same, mainly for reasons of completeness, due to its evident semantic derivation from a really existing food.

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prodotto ‘product’ (2 tokens, A.I.4: 17 – 18), qualcosa ‘something’ (A.I.4: 19), Toblerone (A.I.4: 21), yogurt (A.I.4: 26);

- For più buoni: formaggini14 (A.I.5: 1), mandarini ‘tangerines’ (A.I.5: 2), pasticcini ‘pastry’ (A.I.5: 3), risotti (A.I.5: 7), yogurt (A.I.5: 9).

The above list shows that the behavior is the same for all of the four forms, with no differences between natural foods (e.g. cipolle ‘onions’, mela ‘apple’, mandarini ‘tangerines’), metaphorical foods (minestra riscaldata ‘reheated soup’), foods known through their commercial brand names (Nutella), countable and uncountable nouns (pizze ‘pizzas’, frutta ‘fruit’), and non-food (roba ‘dope’). All the NP heads listed above – appearing in a total of 31 tokens – constitute 50% of the total number of tokens related to taste, and not a single one occurs in the corpus along with a synthetic comparative migliore/migliori. Such an amount should be already enough to state that, when we are talking of a comparative related to taste, overabundance is very unlikely.

4.3.2.2. Taste: only relative superlatives And the amount of cases which do not realize overabundance is destined to increase if we count all the NP heads that appear with a corresponding synthetic form which is not a comparative, but a relative superlative. This is the case of the NP heads listed below:

- For più buone: marche ‘brands’ (A.I.2: 3), mele ‘apples’ (A.I.2: 4), sigarette ‘cigarettes’ (2 tokens, A.I.2: 8 – 9);

- For più buona: acqua ‘water’ (A.I.3: 1), carne ‘meat’ (2 tokens, A.I.3: 2 – 3), eroina ‘heroine’ (2 tokens, A.I.3: 15 – 16);

- For più buono: caffè ‘coffee’ (5 tokens, A.I.4: 1 – 5), latte ‘milk’ (A.I.4: 8), miele ‘honey’ (A.I.4: 9), olio ‘oil’ (A.I.4: 10), pane ‘bread’ (2 tokens, A.I.4: 11 – 12), piatto ‘dish’ (A.I.4: 14), pranzo ‘meal’ (A.I.4: 16) tartufo ‘truffle’ (A.I.4: 20);

- For più buoni: pomodori ‘tomatoes’ (A.I.5: 4), prodotti ‘products’ (2 tokens, A.I.5: 5 – 6), tartufi ‘truffles’ (A.I.5: 8).

14 Small, single-packed and triangle-shaped pieces of processed cheese. I would like to thank Anna M. Thornton for having enlightened me about the fact that Formaggini used to be also round-shaped long time ago, and today is still possible to find round-shaped specimens in some supermarkets.

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As happened for the NP heads listed in 4.3.2.1., these NP heads distribute in the most various food categories as well: we have elements belonging to the realm of natural foods (e.g. meat ‘carne’, tartufi ‘truffles’), countable and uncountable nouns (mele ‘apples’, acqua ‘water’), and non-food (sigarette ‘cigarettes’, eroina ‘heroine’), indifferently distributed among all our four analytic comparatives. Examples (19) – (34) show a sequence of cases in which the phenomenon of having only relative superlative synthetic forms related to the NP head is verified. The items have been selected in an attempt to pick one for every analytic comparative and one for every food category (e.g. food, non-food, countable, non-countable etc.):

(19) Le mele, nonostante quelle di queste valli siano inconfondibili, pagano lo scotto di essere sì più buone, ma anche più care.

‘The apples, despite the ones of these valleys are unique, pay the price of being of course tastier, but more expensive as well.’ (A.I.2: 4)

(20) Ma io non conosco le sue mele, e quelle che mangio mi sembrano le migliori del mondo. ‘But I don’t know his apples, and the one I eat they seem the best in the world to me.’

(21) Si risparmia e sono [sigarette] più buone rispetto a quelle lavorate. ‘One saves money and [these cigarettes] are cheaper and tastier than the commercial ones.’ (A.I.2: 9)

(22) Per il “bright” la qualità più pregiata, quella che finisce nella sigarette migliori e più vendute, non daranno più di 400 mila lire al quintale.

‘For the “bright”, the finest kind, the one that goes in the best and best-selling cigarettes, they won’t give more than 400 thousand liras per 100 kilos.’

(23) Cremonini assicura che la carne di spalla è addirittura più buona. ‘Cremonini guarantees that the chuck meat is even tastier.’ (A.I.3: 2)

(24) “La carne migliore sarebbe quella dell’uomo”, ha ammesso, scherzando, Cestaro.

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‘The best meat is the human one”, Cestaro, joking, has admitted.’

(25) Sapremmo che il miele del maestro è più buono di quello del capostazione... ‘we would know that the teacher’s honey is tastier than the station master’s one…’ (A.I.4: 9)

(26) […] gli apicoltori nostrani […] producono il miglior miele del mondo.

‘[…] local beekepers […] produce the best honey in the world.’

(27) l'acqua dei tedeschi […] è più buona di quella di Firenze. ‘Germans’ water […] is tastier than the one in Florence.’ (A.I.3: 1)

(28) Non c’è nessuno che entra chiedendo semplicemente qual è l’acqua migliore? ‘There is no one who simply enters asking which water is the best?’

(29) dice che l'eroina è pericolosa perché "è più buona del tuo miglior amplesso moltiplicato per dieci" ‘says that heroine is dangerous because “it is tastier than your best sexual intercourse multiplied for ten times”.’ (A.I.3: 15)

(30) E l’attività di base più diffusa è lo spaccio e il consumo di eroina, la migliore della provincia a quanto si dice. ‘And the most common basic activity is dealing and consuming heroine, the best in the province according to what is said.’

(31) “I nostri [tartufi] sono più brutti, ma più buoni, abbiamo gli alberi più adatti a favorirne la crescita".

‘ “Our truffles are uglier, but tastier, we have the most appropriate threes to foster their growth” ’ (A.I.5: 8)

(32) Nella Roma antica i tartufi migliori finivano sulla tavola di Messalina, dell’imperatore Claudio e di Lucullo. ‘In ancient Rome the best truffles ended up on the table of Messalina, emperor Claudius and Lucullus.’

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(33) Ma, se i pomodori degli orti privati sono probabilmente più buoni, sono pochi. ‘But, if tomatoes from private vegetable gardens are probably tastier, they are few.’ (A.I.5: 4)

(34) E io mi alzo al mattino presto per comprare al bazar i pomodori migliori.

And I wake up early in the morning in order to buy the best tomatoes at the bazar.’

Examples (19) – (34) show quite clearly that when related to taste, we can face instances of having analytic comparatives and synthetic relative superlatives. Again, overabundance is not realized. Beyond the few examples I listed, if we sum the total number of the tokens listed in this section to the ones listed in 4.3.2.1, we see that our analytic comparatives do not realize overabundance when modifying 57 out of 62 items. It means that 91.93% of the tokens of analytic comparatives più buono, più buona, più buoni, più buone do not realize overabundance with the corresponding synthetic form, due to the fact that no synthetic form appears with the same NP head when we query the corpus, or because the synthetic form is a relative superlative.

4.3.2.3. In vino overabundance The remaining 8.06% includes the remaining 5 items of our total amount. They are all contained in A.I.4 PIÙ BUONO, but they are poorly diversified. In fact, the only two NP heads in combination with which analytic and synthetic comparatives realize overabundance are vino ‘wine’ for food (4 tokens, A.I.4: 22 – 25, examples (35) – (36)) and sapore ‘flavor/taste’ for non-food (A.I.4: 27, examples (37) – (38)). Moreover, the latter case is an ambiguous one, because example (37) talks about the taste of the victory after prevailing in a sport league, whilst the corresponding synthetic form in (38) clearly refers to food.

(35) "Il mio vino è più buono del tuo" ‘ “My wine is tastier than yours” ’ (A.I.4: 24)

(36) se il vino è migliore di quello già in produzione la piantina può essere moltiplicata. ‘If the wine is better than the one already in production, than the plant can be multiplied.’

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(37) Per Treviso è stato invece il secondo titolo, dopo quello del '92.

Avrebbe un sapore più buono, se un'aggressione a Franco Lauro, telecronista della Rai, non avesse fatto confinare la festa e l'inciviltà. ‘For Treviso it has been the second title instead, after the one of ’92. It would have even a tastier flavor, if an aggression to Franco Lauro, a Rai’s newscaster, wouldn’t have made celebration and incivility bound.’ (A.I.4: 27)

(38) Poi vengono le preoccupazioni per un migliore sapore del cibo, che hanno spinto un’organizzazione di professionisti […]

‘Then come the concerns about a better flavor of the food, that pushed an organization of professionals […]’

So, if we exclude the NP head sapore ‘flavor’, in combination with which più buono can be replaced by migliore but only if the NP head is a real food15, the only NP head appearing with both a synthetic and an analytic comparative is vino ‘wine’. TABLE 4. shows to what extent the forms that modify this NP head realize overabundance and, as the reader can see, the ratio in this case is equal to 1:1.75. So, at least for this instance, we can say that a quasi-canonical overabundance is realized.

TABLE 4. – OVERABUNDANCE (VINO)

ANALYTIC COMPARATIVES N. SYNTHETIC COMPARATIVES N. RATIO

SG. vino più buono 4

vino migliore 4

1:1.75

miglior vino 0 migliore vino 0

PL. vini più buoni 0

vini migliori 3

miglior vini 0

migliori vini 0

TOT. ANALYTIC COMPARATIVES 4 TOT. SYNTHETIC COMPARATIVES 7

15 Beyond cibo, the only entity in the corpus that appears along with sapore and MIGLIORE is frutta in the token: […] lasciamo estinguere le centinaia di specie [di frutta] che hanno minor resa ma miglior sapore (‘we let that hundreds of species [of fruit] that give less profit but a better taste estinguish’).

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However, this NP head appears only in the 6.45% of the total number of the items related to taste, and it is the only one with which più buono and migliore realize overabundance out of the different 49. 1 NP head out of 49 means that only 2.04% of all the possible NP heads appears with a comparative that realizes overabundance. A percentage way too low to admit the existence of this phenomenon in the semantic area of taste. A graphic representation of what has been said above is shown in TABLE 5.

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4.3.3. Kindness (human & non-human)

With its 199 items, the semantic area of kindness provides to our research 68.15% of the total amount of relevant tokens. However, the high variety of NP heads makes the research more difficult, mainly due to the diverse semantic aspects that the synthetic comparatives migliore and migliori may represent. This will be the crucial point of this research, and we will come back on this later; for now – as I did for the semantic area of taste – it will be wise to understand of how many tokens we are talking about. TABLE 3. above tells us that:

- We have 199 tokens related to the semantic area of kindness, that is 68.15% of the total for purely comparative tokens.

- Of these, 79.4% (158 tokens) are related to human entities, 20.6% (41 tokens) are related to non-human entities;

- più buoni is the form which provides the highest number of tokens in this semantic area, with 48.74% of the total number (97 tokens), followed by più buono (27.14%, 54 tokens), più buona (19.1%, 38 tokens) and più buone (5,02%, 10 tokens). So, once more più buone is the comparative presenting the fewer items.

- The most recurring NP head is tutti, which appears along with più buoni in 50 different tokens. It represent 51.54% of the total number of tokens with più buoni and, if we consider all of our four analytic comparatives, 25.12% of the total amount of eligible tokens related to kindness.

Summarizing, we are talking about a semantic area which involves about the 4/5 of our corpus, whose tokens are mainly related to human entities and whose major providers are those forms carrying masculine value of gender, and the most frequent NP head is tutti, that appears with più buoni.

While we were analyzing the semantic area of taste, we discovered that according to how the relationships between analytic and synthetic forms were established, we could gather our items in two groups. In the first one (see 4.3.2.1.) we have all those NP heads which are not found along with synthetic forms when the corpus is queried; in the second group (see 4.3.2.2.) we have those NP heads which actually appear along with a synthetic form, that however is not a comparative but a relative superlative.

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In the semantic area of kindness, we have NP heads not appearing with synthetic comparatives or appearing only with relative superlative as well, so a similar classification will be done for this semantic area, in sections 4.3.3.1. and 4.3.3.2. But before doing that, it has to be said that the tokens of this semantic area often do not show an overt, clear NP head. Often it is what we may call a “zero NP head” so, in order to have something for querying the corpus, I search for the whole sentence, with at least a verb form, and substitute the analytic comparative form with the synthetic one. For example, in A.I.5, item 20 tells us that la montagna rende [noi/tutti] più buoni (the mountain makes [us/everyone] kinder). Here, the NP head is impersonal, and it can be omitted thanks to a property of Italian language; so in this case, and in other cases like this, I will search for the whole la montagna rende migliori.

4.3.3.1. Kindness: no tokens with synthetic comparatives Therefore, this section gathers all those tokens not giving results when searched with a synthetic comparative. It lists:

- For più buone: bambine ‘little girl’ (2 tokens, A.I.2: 10 – 11), soldatesse ‘soldier (woman)’ (A.I.2: 15), streghe ‘whitches’ (A.I.2: 16), classifiche ‘charts’ (A.I.2: 18);

- For più buona: sindaca ‘mayor (woman)’ (A.I.3: 27), Authority (A.I.3: 43), C.I.A. (A.I.3: 44), mamma Rai-Tv16 ‘mum Rai-Tv’ (A.I.3: 48), terra ‘Earth’ (2 tokens, A.I.3: 51 – 52), Torino (A.I.3: 53);

- For più buono: buono ‘good person’ (A.I.4: 29), Casale (A.I.4: 30), De Concini (A.I.4: 36), Di Pietro (A.I.4: 37), ebreo ‘Jewish’ (A.I.4: 38), Fagioli (A.I.4: 39), Fausti (A.I.4: 40), Fossa (A.I.4: 41), Gilgamesh (A.I.4: 45), Guglielmi (A.I.4: 46), Lorenzo (A.I.4: 53), McEnroe (A.I.4: 55), Noriega (A.I.4: 56), papa ‘pope’ (2 tokens A.I.4: 57 – 58), poveraccio ‘poor devil’ (A.I.4: 59), presidente ‘president’ (A.I.4: 60), presidente federale ‘federal president’ (A.I.4: 61), Saddam Hussein (A.I.4: 62), Superbone (A.I.4: 63), bombardamento ‘bombing’ (A.I.4: 73), Occidente ‘West’ (A.I.4: 80), Superenalotto17 (A.I.4: 81). Plus the sentences with null or indefinite subject: chi si sente in pericolo non diventa più buono ‘the one who feels in danger does not become kinder’

16 The Italian national broadcasting television, often nicknamed Mamma Rai ‘Mum Rai’. 17 A popular Italian betting game, similar to Lotto.

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(A.I.4: 33), sono diventato più buono ‘I have become kinder’ (A.I.4: 48), giuro che sarò più buono ‘I swear I will be kinder’ (A.I.4: 49), prometto che sarò più buono ‘I promise I will be kinder’ (A.I.4: 51), lo ritroveremo ancora più buono ‘we will find him even kinder’ (A.I.4: 54), ti sentivi più buono ‘you felt kinder’ (A.I.4: 64), se diventi ricco sei più buono ‘if you become rich you are kinder’ (A.I.4: 65), ti sentirai più buono ‘you will feel kinder’ (A.I.4: 66), sarai più buono o più cattivo? ‘will you be kinder or meaner’? (A.I.4: 67);

- For più buoni: bambini attori ‘children actors’ (A.I.5: 12), croati cattolici ‘Catholic Croatians’ (A.I.5: 15), eredi ‘heirs’ (A.I.5: 16), forcaioli ‘reactionaries’ (A.I.5: 17), Kaarpasi (A.I.5: 30), la sinistra ‘the left wing’ (A.I.5: 31), Mafiosi (A.I.5: 33), mammà e papà ‘mummy and daddy’ (A.I.5: 34), minorenni ‘minors’ (A.I.5: 35), quelli ‘the ones’ (2 tokens, A.I.5: 46 – 47), quelli che fanno professione e pratica di altruismo ‘the ones who declare themselves altruistic and are altruistic’ (A.I.5: 48), i ricchi e i potenti ‘the rich ones and the powerful ones’ (A.I.5: 49), senegalesi ‘Senegaleses’ (A.I.5: 50), sequestratori ‘kidnappers’ (A.I.5: 51), Sordi e Gassman ‘Sordi and Gassman’ (A.I.5: 52), dinosauri ‘dinosaurs’ (A.I.5: 105), marziani ‘Martians’ (A.I.5: 106). Plus the sentences with null or indefinite subject: rende più buoni ‘it makes one/people kinder’ (A.I.5: 20, 28), per sembrare più buoni ‘to seem kinder’ (A.I.5: 25), fanno sentire più buoni ‘they make one feel kinder’ (A.I.5: 27), ci si sente anche più buoni ‘people feel even kinder’ (2 tokens, A.I.5: 21), se vogliamo essere più buoni ‘if we want to be kinder’ (A.I.5: 37).

The items listed above are 68, and they embrace with no difference the categories of humans, non-humans and sentences showing a null pronoun. Such a number is equal to 34.17% of the total tokens related to kindness; this means that more than 1/3 of the total tokens for this semantic area does not appear along with a synthetic comparative.

4.3.3.2. Kindness: only relative superlatives As happened for taste, the percentage increases when we add to the NP heads listed in 4.3.3.1 all those items which actually appears with some form of MIGLIORE, but it is always and only a relative superlative. Is this the case of the items listed below:

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- For più buone: famiglie ‘families’ (A.I.2: 12), signore ‘ladies’ (A.I.2: 14), discoteche ‘clubs’ (A.I.2: 19);

- For più buona: bambina ‘little girl’ (A.I.3: 18); - For più buono: cavaliere ‘knight’ (2 tokens, A.I.4: 31 – 32), Craxi (A.I.4: 34),

garante ‘warrantor’ (A.I.4: 44); - For più buoni: giudici ‘judges’ (A.I.5: 19); stranieri ‘foreigners’ (A.I.5: 53).

This group as well, despite the fact that it gathers fewer NP heads, comprises both human and non-human NP heads, proving once more that the distribution of a given behavior is not influenced by the entity to which the NP head refers. Below, some examples of NP heads appearing only along with a synthetic relative superlative are given:

(39) […] a 23 anni sei già passato nella categoria vecchi. [Le discoteche]: inutile dipingerle più buone o più cattive di quello che sono.

‘[…] you are 23 and you have already moved to the ‘old men’ category. [Clubs]: useless to picture them kinder or meaner than what they are.’ (A.I.2: 19)

(40) Gianni de Michelis, noto anche per il suo libro sulle migliori discoteche in Italia ‘Gianni de Michelis, known as well for his books on the best Italian clubs.’

(41) […] quei caratteristici singulti che facevano sentire migliaia di signore più svuotate e più buone. ‘[…] those typical hiccups that made thousands of ladies feel more empty and kinder.’ (A.I.2: 14)

(42) Così le migliori signore esclamavano: “diviiino!” ‘So the best ladies cried out: “diviiine!”’

(43) [Un garante] Più imparziale di Scalfaro, più liberaldemocratico di Berlusconi e Fini, più coerente di D'Alema e Prodi, più buono di Veltroni. ‘[A warrantor] more impartial than Scalfaro, more Liberal Democrat than Berlusconi, more coherent than D’Alema and Prodi, kinder than Veltroni.’ (A.I.4: 44)

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(44) A.M. Best […] è […] il miglior garante dell’interesse collettivo ‘A.M. Best […] is […] the best warrantor for the common interest’

(45) […] gli avvocati del giocatore sei mesi (il minimo): ma i giudici sono stati addirittura più buoni ‘[…] the player’s lawyers [asked] six months (the minimum): but the judges have been even kinder’ (A.I.5: 19)

(46) E sono anche d’accordo che nelle sedi più esposte siano invitati i giudici migliori, i giudici più esperti. ‘And I also agree that in the most exposed seats should go the best judges, the most experienced judges.’

The 9 NP heads listed above constitute 4.52% of the total number of items for the semantic area of kindness. It is not a very high number, but if added to the results given by the ones listed in 4.3.3.1., we have a total of 39.19% of the tokens appearing whith analytic comparatives which do not realize overabundance with the corresponding synthetic forms. Moreover, examples (39) – (46) show us another phenomenon. In fact, here it is clear that the forms of MIGLIORE not only appear as relative superlatives, but they lose their semantic value of ‘kind’, gaining a more generic meaning of ‘being better’, not necessarily ‘more kind’. It seems that while PIÙ BUONO tends to describe in most cases a ‘good element’ in terms of being a gentle, kind, good-hearted individual (or non-living thing), MIGLIORE principally qualifies someone or something as ‘better’ or ‘the best’ in a wider semantic sense. That is, MIGLIORE is someone who is the best in everything or in a given role, whilst PIÙ BUONO is someone who is a nice person primarily. The contrast is obvious in each of the examples I gave above. If our NP heads (discoteche ‘clubs’, signore ‘ladies’, garante ‘warrantor’, giudici ‘judges’) are all described as kinder in examples (39), (41), (43), (45), in (40), (42), (44), (46) they become more generally ‘the best’ in doing what they are supposed to do in their lives. Clubs in (40) are the ones that arguably play the best music and where people have more fun; the ladies in (42) are meant as the one belonging to the upper-classes; the warrantor (44) was the most reliable among all the other ones for what concerns the common insterest, and the judges in (46) are those who are more capable (and experienced, as the example itself says) in administering justice.

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This point will be pivotal form this point further. In fact, the remaining 60.8% of items we still have to analyze presents corresponding tokens showing a synthetic comparative that is not a relative superlative. At a first sight, we could state already that for this 60.8% of cases we have overabundance, but more genuinely we have to admit that in most cases only a ‘fake’ or ‘phantom’ overabundance is realized instead. ‘Fake’, because sometimes our items admit, in place of the analytic comparative, a synthetic comparative, but this completely loses its semantic meaning of ‘being kinder’. Here the overabundance is fake because even if in the same context analytic and synthetic forms of PIÙ BUONO and MIGLIORE are found, they do not mean the same thing, hence they cannot be considered forms of the same cell of a paradigm, and this is a fundamental aspect to establish if two forms are cell-mates realizing overabundance. Fake overabundance will be discussed in 4.3.3.3. In 4.3.3.4. I will gather all those items showing an NP head that in the corpus comes along with both an analytic and a synthetic comparative, but it is still not clear if overabundance is realized or not, due to the meaning carried by the synthetic form in the given circumstance. Considering that here overabundance is something that lingers, something that we do not really know if it is happening or not, this group has been labelled as the one of ‘phantom overabundance’. In the last group, listed in 4.3.3.6., all the cases of clear, unequivocal overabundance will be analyzed.

4.3.3.3. Fake overabundance

The group of fake overabundance gathers all those items showing NP heads that in our corpus appear qualified as ‘kinder’ than something else by an analytic comparative but that, once accompanied by a synthetic comparative, stop being ‘kinder’ and become more generally ‘better’ than the standard. In this group we can list:

- For più buone: none; - For più buona: gente ‘people’ (5 tokens, A.I.3: 19 – 23), America (13 tokens,

A.I.3: 30 - 42), città ‘city’ (A.I.3: 45), curva18 ‘stand’ (A.I.3: 46), faccia ‘face’

18 In Italy, curva (literally: ‘curve’) is each of the stands of a football stadium placed behind the two goal areas that generally has a curved shape. During the years, its meaning has extended to signify both the stand and the ensemble of the most passionate supporters, who usually take place there to watch the match.

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(A.I.3: 47), moda ‘fashion’ (A.I.3: 49), pubblicità ‘advertising’ (A.I.3: 50), Tv ‘television’ (A.I.3: 54), vita ‘life’ (A.I.3: 55);

- For più buono: arbitro ‘referee’ (A.I.4: 28), D’Alema (A.I.4: 35), fratello (2 tokens, A.I.4: 42 – 43), io ‘I’ (3 tokens, A.I.4: 47, 50, 52), blocco ‘block’ (A.I.4: 72), comunismo ‘Communism’ (A.I.4: 74), Fisco ‘revenue’ (2 tokens, A.I.4: 75 – 76), governo ‘government’ (A.I.4: 77), mondo ‘world’ (2 tokens, A.I.4: 78 – 79).

- For più buoni: gli altri ‘the others’ (2 tokens, A.I.5: 10 – 11), calciatori ‘football players’ (A.I.5: 13), cattolici ‘Catholics’ (A.I.5: 14), giovani ‘young people’ (A.I.5: 18), leader politici ‘political leaders’ (A.I.5: 32), musulmani ‘Muslims’ (A.I.5: 36). Plus the sentences with null or indefinite subject: poter essere più buoni ‘to be able to be kinder’ (A.I.5: 24), bisognerebbe essere più buoni ‘one should be kinder’ (A.I.5: 26); dobbiamo essere più buoni ‘we must be kinder’ (A.I.5: 39), una volta eravamo più buoni ‘once we were kinder’ (A.I.5: 40), siate più buoni ‘[you] must be kinder’ (A.I.5: 104).

Below, some examples extracted from the corpus:

(47) Bush la ripete ad ogni occasione, in questi giorni di festa in suo onore, insieme all'impegno a creare un'America più buona e gentile

‘Bush repeats it in every circumstance, in these days of celebration in his honor, together with the commitment of making a kinder and gentler America.’ (A.I.3: 30)

(48) Promettendo un'America più buona e generosa, il presidente aveva offerto al Congresso un'amichevole mano tesa nel suo discorso di inaugurazione

‘by promising a kinder and more generous America, the president had offered to the congress a friendly outstreched hand in his inaugural address’ (A.I.3: 32)

(49) Lo ha detto anche George Bush, nel discorso inaugurale della sua presidenza: è arrivata l'ora di un'America più buona e più giusta ‘George Bush has said it as well, during the inaugural address of his presidency: it’s time for a kinder and fairer America’ (A.I.3: 36)

(50) Questi primi 12 mesi sono stati un trionfo ha detto, siamo davvero riusciti a rendere l'America più buona e più dolce

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‘These first 12 months have been a triumph he has said, we have been really able to make America kinder and sweeter.’ (A.I.3: 40)

(51) Ma ieri Bush ha chiesto al congresso di aiutarlo a costruire un’America migliore, e ha dovuto cominciare a chiarire i suoi programmi

‘But yesterday Bush has asked to the Congress to help him to build a better America, and he had to start to clarify his programs’

(52) Dietro lo scherzo resta l'ammirazione di un fratello vescovo per un fratello che sento più buono e più santo. ‘Behind the joke, remains the admiration of a brother bishop for a brother that I feel being kinder and holier.’ (A.I.4: 42)

(53) E se agli occhi di Elena il fratello migliore e quello peggiore sono destinati a scambiarsi […] ‘And if to Elena’s eyes the better brother and the worse brother are destined to exchange […]

(54) PREMIO AI [CALCIATORI] PIÙ BUONI. LONDRA - L'Europeo sarà ricordato anche per due nuove regole volute dall' Uefa ‘PRIZE FOR THE KINDER [FOOTBALL PLAYERS]. LONDON – The European championship will be remembered for two new rules wanted by Uefa’ (A.I.5: 13)

(55) […] a tutti […] piacerebbe che ci fossero arbitri migliori (e calciatori migliori, e dirigenti migliori, tifosi migliori, giornalisti migliori) ma credo che la professionalità […] non abbia molto da spartire col professionismo.

‘[…] everyone […] would like to see better referees (and better football players, and better managers, better supporters, better journalists) but I think that competence has little to do with professionalism.’

Let us focus one moment on examples (47) – (50). They all refer to the Bush’s presidential address we already quoted in 4.3.1., and that is quoted again below:

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America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world. My friends, we have work to do.

Here, the original English word ‘gentler’, from the sentence ‘It is to make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world’, has been translated into Italian by means of four different adjectives: gentile ‘gentle’, generosa ‘generous’, giusta ‘fair’ and dolce ‘sweet’. Beside the mistake in the translation (‘gentle’ was supposed to qualify the face of the world, not America), the four interpretations give a clear idea of the moral quality that America should have: she has to be kind in the first place, and then gentle, or generous, or fair, or sweet. These four adjectives strengthen the message in a pragmatic way, and are carefully chosen to appear next to ‘kinder’, as if to say that ‘kinder’ means ‘gentler’, ‘more generous’, ‘fairer’ and ‘sweeter’ as well. When the synthetic comparative migliore is used, instead, we do not have anything like this: un’America migliore, according to examples (51), does not need to be ‘gentler’ as well, she can only be built on political programs. The point is that in most cases PIÙ BUONO means one thing, whilst MIGLIORE another, and if the two forms have ever meant the same thing during history, from these examples it appears quite clear now that they are taking different semantic paths. The same contrast can be found in all the other examples I listed: in (52) the brother is ‘kinder’ and ‘holier’, in (53) all we know is that he is better than the other one; in (54) only the football players who respect the fair play will get the prize, in (55) we want ‘better’ football players in doing their job. Thus, the phenomenon benefits of a certain frequency, and it is so frequent that involves 51 of our tokens, that means 25.63% of the total related to kindness. A number that, summed to previous 39.19% obtained in 4.3.3.2. and 4.3.3.3., gives us 64.82% of the total tokens showing an analytic comparative degree in the semantic area of kindness not realizing overabundance.

4.3.3.4. Phantom overabundance Sometimes, the forms of MIGLIORE lie between the meaning of being simply ‘better’ and the suggestion that being better also implies being ‘kinder’. These are those cases when MIGLIORE still does not mean the same as PIÙ BUONO but rather seems to be a hyponym of it. In cases like these, it is hard to establish if there is overabundance or not because we need to remember that we have overabundance

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when two or more forms realize the same set of morpho-syntactic properties, but in order to fill a common cell, they need to be synonyms in the first place. If they are not synonyms, they only realize what I called ‘fake overabundance’. If the synonymy is vague, than overabundance is vague as well, it is not completely realized, it can only be glimpsed, like a phantom. A phantom overabundance. The items subjected to this phenomenon are grouped below:

- For più buone: persone ‘persons’ (A.I.2: 13), bombe ‘bombs’ (A.I.2: 17); - For più buona: persona ‘person’ (3 tokens, A.I.3: 24 – 26), umanità

‘humanity’ (A.I.2: 28); - For più buono: uomo ‘man’ (4 tokens, A.I.4: 68 – 71); - For più buoni: Indiani ‘Indians’ (A.I.5: 29), ci (noi) ‘us’ (2 tokens, A.I.5: 39,

41), partner ‘partners’ (A.I.5: 43), politici ‘politicians’ (A.I.5: 44), poliziotti ‘policemen’ (A.I.5: 45). Plus the sentences with null or indefinite subject: per sentirsi più buoni ‘in order to feel kinder’ (A.I.5: 22), si esce più buoni ‘one comes out kinder’ (A.I.5: 23), eravamo più buoni ‘we were kinder’ (A.I.5: 42).

Let us now see some instances of phantom overabundance, keeping in mind that, for the sake of clarity and completeness, I translated the synthetic forms both with ‘better’ and ‘kinder’. The reader will choose which one fits better in each circumstance.

(56) Vorrei […] che le persone fossero più buone, come dice il mio amico Wojtyla, perché la cosa brutta è male e la cosa bella è il bene ‘I would like […] for people be kinder, as my friend Wojtyla says, because the ugly thing is bad and the beautiful thing is good’

(A.I.2: 13) (57) Ma la cosa più bella è che tanti sembrano decisi a diventare persone

migliori, migliori di quanto non fossero prima di tutto questo. ‘But the most beautiful thing is that many people are determined to

become better/kinder people, better/kinder than they were before all this started.’

(58) Come a dire: raffreddiamo le spinte egoistiche del Mercato e

l'umanità diventerà sempre più buona.

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‘As to say: let’s dampen the egoistic pushes of the Market and humanity will become kinder.’ (A.I.3: 28)

(59) Giustamente gli uomini di fede religiosa, i moralisti, tutti coloro che sperano in un’umanità migliore, la condannano. ‘Of course the man of religious faith, the moralists, all the ones who hope in a better/kinder humanity, condemn it.’

(60) Ma che cosa vuoi farne della tua religiosità? Vuoi ispirartene per diventare più buono, più gentile? È molto bello. ‘What do you want to do with your religiosity? To take inspiration in order to become a kinder, gentler man? That is so sweet.’ (A.I.4: 69)

(61) Ho capito tardi che il suo lavoro aveva a che fare con la filologia e anche che lui, moralmente, era migliore di me. ‘I have understood too late that his job had to do with philology and also that he, morally, was a better/kinder man than I was.’

(62) perciò i miei poliziotti sono più buoni e i miei criminali più cattivi che in altri film. ‘for this reason my policemen are kinder and my criminals are meaner than in other movies. (A.I.5: 45)

(63) del resto i poliziotti non sono migliori degli altri: lo sa che di notte ci fermano sulle strade e per perquisirci ci spogliano nudi?

‘after all policemen are not better/kinder than the others: do you know that at night they stop us on the street and in order to search us they undress us?’

As happened for the examples of fake overabundance, here some other elements occur along with the analytic comparatives in order to emphasize the moral quality of the comparee: in (58), in order to be kinder, we need to ‘dampen the egoistic pushes’; in (60) the ‘kinder man’ is ‘gentler’ as well; in (62) there is a clear opposition between good and evil, and so on. So, where does the difference between the two groups lie? It lies in the fact that here the meaning of MIGLIORE is more ambiguous. We do not know, by only reading the context, if MIGLIORE only means being ‘better’, or being ‘kinder’, or being both. The most clear examples of this are (59), and (61). In the first instance, we have ‘men of religious faith’ that want an umanità migliore, and we know that Christian religion predicates of being

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kinder, so according to their precepts, these men should want a humanity that is ‘kinder’ in the first place, in order to be ‘better’. In (61), instead, it is explicitly specified that the man was morally better than our subject. The point is: what does it mean ‘being morally better’? Does it really means ‘being kinder’, at least? The question is intriguing, but arguably too philosophical for a thesis in linguistics. What is sure is the fact the semantically speaking, cases like these do not let us understand if a synthetic comparative expresses the same meaning of the corresponding analytic form, thus for cases like these it would be too bold stating that we have overabundance with 100% of certainty. In numbers, the total tokens listed in this section reach the number of 19, that is 9.55% of the total amount for what concerns the semantic area of kindness. Therefore, at this point of our research, we have a 64.82% of our items not realizing overabundance, plus another 9.55% that, if so, realizes it in a very covert way. We are now at 74.37% of the corpus for this semantic area, and we have not encountered cases of certain overabundance.

4.3.3.5. Tutti A special mention should be reserved for the NP head tutti ‘everyone’ that, appearing 50 (A.I.5: 54 – 103) times with the comparative più buoni, constitutes alone 25.12% of the NP heads involved in the semantic area of kindness. By querying the corpus, this NP head does not show anything new. It appears 14 times along with a synthetic comparative: 7 times the synthetic comparative realizes a fake overabundance with the corresponding analytic form più buoni; 7 times a phantom overabundance is established. Below, we have one example (64) taken from TABLE A.I.5 showing an analytic comparative, one example showing fake overabundance (65) and one example showing phantom overabundance (66):

(64) per andare a toccare le corde più ruffiane, che spanda profumi natalizi, che incoraggi una lettura mistificatoria e che faccia sentire migliori e più buoni; che come ciellino dai ciellini, magari in mala fede, venga recepito

‘in order to touch the most boot-licking chords, spreading Christmas odors, encouraging intentionally misleading reads and that makes

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everyone feel better and kinder; that is acknowledged like a ciellino19 by ciellini, arguably in bad faith.’ (A.I.5: 58)

(65) I nipoti della Wehrmacht sono bravi, rispettati, pacifici europei assolti ormai dalle colpe dei padri, come lo siamo noi italiani, tutti migliori di quei mentecatti di hooligans inglesi.

‘The nephews of Wehrmacht are good ones, respected, pacific Europeans absolved by the faults of their fathers, as we Italians are, all better than those imbecile English hooligans.’

(66) Woodstock ci ha resi tutti migliori. ‘Woodstock has made all of us better/kinder’.

All three examples are clear enough to confirm what I have said until now about fake and phantom overabundance. In (64) we have a splendid example of the fact that PIÙ BUONO and MIGLIORE are losing, if they ever had it, their condition of synonymy. By appearing together in the same sentence, in fact, they testify that the writer is talking about two different qualities, or it would not have any sense to repeat the same concept twice, with two adjectives bounded by a copulative conjunction. You can say “they are kinder and kinder” or, “they are better and better”, but the meaning of the sentence will be “as the time passes, they are getting better/kinder and better/kinder”. Here, instead, the two terms are presented to say that migliori has a meaning, più buoni another. In (65) we can deduct that Italian supporters are better ‘in acting like a supporter’ than their English colleagues, there is no mention to the fact that being a better supporter also means being a kinder supporter, so here we have a case of fake overabundance. Finally, the Woodstock example (66), about the phenomenon of phantom overabundance. Woodstock is considered in the modern culture as the festival of the “three days of peace, love, and music”, and if – according to the interviewed person – it made us tutti migliori, it arguably made us kinder persons as well. In order to be fully clear and complete, it has to be said that 16 out of these 50 items involved tutti in the idiomatic expression we have talked about in 4.3.1.: a

19 The term ciellino refers to a militant of Comunione e Liberazione ‘Communion and Liberation’, a lay ecclesial movement with political interests founded in 1954. The acronym of the movement’s name, CL /t͡ʃiːɛlle/, is at the origin of the term, and is sometimes used with denigrating meaning.

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Natale siamo tutti più buoni ‘around Christmas time everyone behaves’. Searching a similar context in the corpus replacing più buoni with migliori, gave no results.

4.3.3.6. A drop of overabundance Finally, some overabundance. The only token showing an NP head modified by an analytic comparative that seems to realize a full overabundance with its corresponding synthetic comparative is number 29 in A.I.3, quoted in example (67):

(67) C'è un tocco di sentimentalità cristiana nell'assumere che la vittima sia necessariamente elevata dalla sofferenza. Che diventi automaticamente più buona. Non è così. Chi è stato discriminato, può discriminare a sua volta. ‘There is a touch of Christian sentimentality in assuming that the victim is necessarily elevated from the suffering. That [he/she] automatically becomes kinder. It’s not like that. Who has been discriminated, can himself discriminate.’ (A.I.3: 29)

(68) Con estremo disprezzo, il gangster costringe il giovane macedone a cantare una canzone mentre gli violenta la ragazza; ma la vittima

non è migliore del carnefice e le parti si rivolteranno. ‘With extreme disdain, the gangster forces the young Macedonian to sing a song while he is raping his girlfriend; but the victim is not kinder than the torturer and the roles will invert.’

In (68) we have all we need to point out that overabundance is realized: the synthetic form appears comparing the same NP head found with the analytic form, the synthetic is a comparative and not a relative superlative, and it is a synonym of the analytic form. In fact, the meaning of migliore seems clear enough here: even if it is not directly specified, the torturer is a mean person, and the victims arguably are – at least before the violence – kinder than him. When the situation reverses, one of the victims stops being ‘kinder’, and becomes ‘mean’ as well, because he is not ‘più buono’ than the torturer. Thus, in this case, the comparatives migliore and più buono really seem to behave like cell-mates of a same lexeme, appearing both in the same context. And giving us a case of overabundance.

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However, despite the fact that in the corpus the two forms give us a perfect ratio of 1:1, as shown in TABLE 6., our doublets appear in this context only once, hence the number is close to irrelevance. Moreover, once more we are talking about an exception rather than an attested phenomenon: this item is the only one with which analytic and synthetic comparatives realize overabundance. 1 token out of 199 means that only 0.5% of the tokens at our disposal for this semantic area show an NP head in combination with which analytic and synthetic forms realize overabundance. A drop in the ocean. Thus, as it happened for the semantic area of taste, we must record that the semantic area of kindness as well displays overabundance between analytic and synthetic comparatives at a very low degree.

TABLE 6. – OVERABUNDANCE (VITTIMA)

ANALYTIC COMPARATIVES N. SYNTHETIC COMPARATIVES N. RATIO

SG. vittima più buona 1

vittima migliore 1

1:1

miglior vittima 0

migliore vittima 0

PL. vittime più buone 0

vittime migliori 0

migliori vittime 0

miglior vittime 0

TOT. ANALYTIC COMPARATIVES 1 TOT. SYNTHETIC COMPARATIVES 1

TABLE 7. shows a graphic summary of the complessive behavior of our four forms in the semantic area of kindness.

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4.3.4. ‘Other’

The last category of our corpus is the one I called ‘other’. It gathers all those items showing an NP head and an analytic comparative that do not refer to the semantic areas of food or taste. Below, the full list:

- For più buone: cose ‘things’ (A.I.2: 20), notti ‘nights’ (A.I.2: 21), scuole ‘schools’ (A.I.2: 22);

- For più buona: aria ‘air’ (2 tokens, A.I.3: 56 – 57), carta ‘paper’ (A.I.3: 58), commedia all’italiana ‘Italian-style comedy’ (A.I.3: 59), esperienza comune ‘common experience’ (A.I.3: 60), lingua ‘language’ (A.I.3: 61), natura morta ‘still life’ (A.I.3: 62), parte sommersa della città ‘submerged part of the city’ (A.I.3: 63), ragione ‘reason’ (4 tokens, A.I.3: 64 – 67), vita ‘life’ (A.I.3: 68);

- For più buono: capitale diffuso ‘common capital’ (A.I.4: 82), partner (A.I.3: 83), piano ‘plan’ (A.I.4: 84), pilota ‘pilot’ (A.I.4: 85), prodotto ‘product’ (A.I.4: 86), prodotto di marca ‘brand product’ (A.I.4: 87), ristorante ‘restaurant’ (2 tokens, A.I.4: 88 – 89), tutto ‘everything’ (A.I.4: 90);

- For più buoni: cavi ‘cables’ (A.I.5: 107), mesi ‘moths’ (A.I.5: 108), piedi ‘feet’ (3 tokens, A.I.5: 109 – 111), playmaker (A.I.5: 112).

The above list tells us that the number of our items is relatively small with respect to the total amount (31 tokens, 10.62% of the total). Moreover, it is interesting that beside pilota ‘pilot’ and ‘playmaker’, all the tokens refer to non-living entities. Più buona is the form which provides the highest number of tokens in this category, with 41.93% of the total number (13 tokens), followed by più buono (9 tokens, 29.03%), più buoni (6 tokens, 19.35%) and più buone (3 tokens, 9.67%). The most recurring NP head is ragione ‘reason’, although it appears in a più buona ragione that, rather than a real comparative, seems to be a variant of the more widespread idiom a maggior ragione ‘a fortiori’. Despite that, I will treat the item as a normal comparative, as we did for the other idiom a buon mercato in 4.2.2. The behavior of these tokens is very various: some NP heads never show up along with a synthetic comparative, some others only appear with relative superlatives, and some others may come along with an analytic comparative that realizes overabundance at some degree with the corresponding synthetic comparative. In

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fact, for the majority of our elements, both relative superlative and comparative analytic forms can be found. So, as we did for the semantic areas of taste and kindness, we first have to exclude all those tokens showing an NP head that never appears with a synthetic comparative, that is:

- For più buone: none; - For più buona: commedia all’italiana ‘Italian-style comedy’ (A.I.3: 59),

esperienza comune ‘common experience’ (A.I.3: 60), lingua ‘language’ (A.I.3: 61), natura morta ‘still life’ (A.I.3: 62), parte sommersa della città ‘submerged part of the city’ (A.I.3: 63);

- For più buono: capitale diffuso ‘common capital’ (A.I.4: 82), prodotto di marca ‘brand product’ (A.I.4: 87), tutto ‘everything’ (A.I.4: 90);

- For più buoni: cavi ‘cables’ (A.I.5: 107), playmaker (A.I.5: 112). These 10 items constitute 32.26% of the total number of tokens for the category ‘other’, not realizing overabundance. The percentage increases to 41.93% if we add the three tokens showing notti ‘nights’ (A.I.2: 21) and ristorante ‘restaurant’ (2 tokens, A.I.4: 88 – 89), that appear in the corpus only along with synthetic relative superlatives. The remaining 18 items, that are 58.07% of the total amount for the category ‘other’, realize overabundance at some extent.

4.3.4.1. The Index of Overabundance for Comparatives Generally, the ratio value should be enough to establish if two elements realize overabundance, but the case of comparatives presents one more problem: the presence of synthetic relative superlatives. The point is that if we have, for example, a form appearing in a given context along with a given NP head twice, and we search on the corpus for its corresponding synthetic form, we may find a small or a high number of tokens presenting the expected synthetic form. Our synthetic form, however, may not appear only as a comparative but it could be a relative superlative as well. For this reason, I think that once we find “the other form subject to no condition” (Thornton 2011: 362), and once we establish which ratio exists between the number of analytic and synthetic forms, our job is not finished yet. I think that an important element to take into account is, for

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comparison at least, the number of synthetic comparative forms in relation with the number of synthetic relative superlative forms. Let’s make a practical example: the item containing pilota ‘pilot’ as NP head appears in la Repubblica corpus once along with the analytic comparative più buono (A.I.4: 85), and 3 times in la Repubblica corpus along with the synthetic comparative migliore, so the ratio value is 1:3. On the other hand, the item containing aria ‘air’ as NP head appears twice along with the analytic comparative più buona (A.I.3: 56 – 57) and 12 times in la Repubblica corpus along with the synthetic comparative migliore, and their ratio is 1:6. By looking only at ratio values, one may argue that comparative doublets are more overabundant when they come along with the NP head pilota, but if we pay attention to the results of the corpus, the answer will be different. In fact, when searched along with pilota, migliore is a comparative only 3 out of 13 times (the remaining 10 tokens are relative superlatives), whilst for what concerns aria we have the considerable number of 12 comparatives out a total of 14 total tokens of migliore (so, 2 relative superlatives), which gives to the second NP head a higher index of overabundance. If we would like to represent this with a formula (FORMULA 1.), we might say that for what concerns comparatives, the index of overabundance for comparatives (I.O.C.) is obtained by multiplying the result of the ratio value (R1) between analytic and synthetic forms, for the result of the ratio value (R2) between syntetic comparatives and the total number of tokens (which is the sum of all our comparatives and relative superlatives) obtained by the query, expressed in percentage.

FORMULA 1. – CALCULATION OF THE INDEX OF OVERABUNDANCE FOR COMPARATIVES I.O.C. =

*

= R1 * R2 (in %)

If we apply the formula to both elements, as explained in examples (69) and (70):

(69) BUONO / Aria

I.O.C.= * = 0.16 * 0.857 = 0.16 * 85.7 = 13.7

(70) BUONO / Pilota

I.O.C.= * = 0.33 * 0.23 = 0.33 * 23 = 7.6

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We have in the case of aria a higher I.O.C. than the one in the case of pilota, even if pilota has a better ratio, so in the first case we have a more canonical overabundance than the second one. TABLE 8. gives a graphic summary of what has been said above.

TABLE 8. – ARIA VS. PILOTA

N° NP-

HEAD COMPAR.

FORM

NUMBER OF

ANALYTIC COMPARATIVES

NUMBER OF

SYNTHETIC COMPARATIVES

R1

RATIO COMPAR.

/ TOTAL

R2 IN

PERCENTAGE I.O.C.

1. Aria più

buona 2 12 1:6 12/14 85.7% 13.72

2. Pilota più

buono 1 3 1:3 3/13 23.07% 7.61

If we apply the I.O.C. formula to all of our remaining items, we have the results shown in TABLE 9. The table shows that our forms can realize very different indexes of overabundance that go from a minimum of 0.25 for analytic and synthetic comparatives appearing along with the NP head cose to a maximum of 80 for the NP head ragione. Considering that the higher is the index, the most canonically our forms will realize overabundance in comparison, we may establish some ‘windows of overabundance’ that will tell us to what extent two forms, in combination with a given NP head, will be overabundant. Thus, if we have an index that goes from 0.01 to 9.99 we will have a low overabundance, with an index that goes from 10.00 to 49.99 we will have a medium overabundance, with an index that goes from 50.00 to 99.99 we will have a high overabundance and only with an index equal to 100 a perfectly canonical overabundance will be realized.

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From the data shown in TABLE 9., we see that even when we work outside the semantic areas of taste and kindness, overabundance is poorly realizable. Of our 31 different tokens, 10 (32.2%) appear along with analytic and synthetic forms that do not realize overabundance because a synthetic comparative is not found in contexts comparable to those in which we have an analytic comparative, 3 (9.6%) only appear with relative superlatives, 7 (22.6%) appear along with analytic and synthetic forms that realize a low overabundance, for 6 (19.3%) we have a medium overabundance and for 5 (16.1%) a high overabundance. However, a total of 58.07% of the items for this semantic area appears along with analytic and synthetic forms that realize overabundance at some extent, and this lets us think that this phenomenon is more possible to happen when the semantic area does not involve taste or kindness.

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V. Conclusions

We have started these pages explaining how, following Chomsky who suggested to define the notion of ‘possible human language’, Greville G. Corbett (2005, 2007a, 2007b) aims to accomplish part of this enterprise by defining what is a ‘possible word’. In order to do that, he proposes a canonical approach, according to which we must “build theoretical spaces of possibilities”, understand “how this space is populated” (Corbett 2005: 25), and finally analyze which phenomena happen within it. The phenomena happening inside our space can give us “the best, indisputable, clearest” instances (Corbett 2007a: 9) – in this case they are canonical –, otherwise we have some irregularities. For what concerns morphology, the idea of a ‘possible word’ is strictly related to the concept of an ideal paradigm. For this reason, a graphic summary of canonical paradigms and non-canonical phenomena that may appear in word paradigms has been given in Chapter I.1, FIGURE 1, according to Corbett’s points. However, our irregularities may be analyzed as well, mainly because these may be even more attested than the canonical instances, and so a canonical approach can be applied to non-canonical instances as well, in order to define how they occupy the theoretical space of possibility we have at our disposal.

This is the case of overabundance, a non-canonical phenomenon studied by Thornton (2011, 2012a, 2012b) that is realized when two or more synonymous forms “realize the same set of morpho-syntactic properties” (Thornton 2001: 360), as in the case of the two English forms burnt and burned. In her papers, the author shows that such a phenomenon exists, and proposes some criteria to establish if two forms realize overabundance. One of these is that we have canonical overabundance when two forms “can be used interchangeably, with the choice of one or the other form subject to no condition”, where “no condition > conditions (where > = ‘more canonical than’)” (Thornton 2011: 362). “A corollary of this criterion”, the author continues, “is that the two (or more) forms should have approximately the same frequency of occurrence” (Thornton 2011: 362). This refers to the ratio between the two forms: of course, the more this ratio will be

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close to 1:1, the more the cell of our paradigm in which we find two overabundant forms will be overabundant. Considering that our two forms, if overabundant, share a common cell of a paradigm, the author suggested to call these ‘cell-mates’, replacing the previous – and more confusing – terminology that used the terms ‘doublet(s)’ and ‘triplet(s)’.

As the title explains, the aim of this thesis was to ascertain if such a phenomenon is realized also between comparative forms, so in Chapter II we saw what comparison is and how it has been illustrated in the last decades, taking as benchmark both the works of Cuzzolin & Lehmann (2004), that analyze comparison from a morphological point of view, and Leon Stassen (Stassen 2008: 993-997), who has approached the matter from a typological point of view, by analyzing how comparison is realized in 110 different languages. Thanks to his work, we recognize at least seven different ways to express comparison, of which we gave a graphic summary in Chapter II.1, FIGURE 1.

After we understood what is comparison, we moved to the matter of our study:

comparatives in the Italian language. We looked at the evolution of comparatives from Latin to Italian, and we saw that during centuries the original Latin forms that expressed comparison with morphologic material such as affixes (called ‘organic’ or ‘synthetic’), slowly disappeared in favor of those periphrastic forms (or ‘analytic’), that expressed comparison by adding the adverb MAGIS or PLUS

before the adjective at its positive degree form. Four original organic forms survived in usage, and they were MIGLIORE ‘better’, PEGGIORE ‘worse’, MAGGIORE

‘bigger/older’ and MINORE ‘smaller/younger’. Other forms carrying an original comparative value re-entered the language only in a second moment, due to the prestige of Latin language, but having arguably already lost their original comparative meaning. Italian grammars have always been conscious enough about this problem, but considering that a definition for these two groups has never been given, in 3.3. I proposed to call the original Latin forms that survived in usage ‘pure organic comparatives’, while the ones that re-entered in a second moment ‘plausible organic comparatives’.

For the research on corpus, I have chosen the lexeme MIGLIORE, whose corresponding analytic form is PIÙ BUONO.

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The modus operandi of the research, explained in 4.1., consists in finding all those tokens containing an analytic comparative form, then identify the semantic areas in which they are involved, and finally verify whether in the same semantic areas synthetic forms appear. Of course, the more analytic and synthetic forms have been found as appearing in contrastive distribution in a given context, the more in that context we had overabundance. A first hurdle to overcome has been the data selection: in fact, by only querying the corpus for strings corresponding to our analytic forms, we had 554 tokens, but a considerable number was not suitable for our purposes. In fact of these 554, 107 (19.32%) were not involved in comparison at all because in these the particle più generally has the function of invariable comparative adjective or adverb of time. More important, a very high number of our analytic forms (147, 26.53% of the total tokens) were not comparatives, but relative superlative, thus even if they realized comparison at some degree, they have not been considered as relevant for this study. The remaining 300 items (54.15% of the total tokens) showed a comparative analytic form, and these have been the tokens we have worked with. Being a shape of the form più buono, we have treated separately più buon, and discovered that this form is often used in idioms (that may indifferently appear with più being adjective, adverb or marker) and, above all, that this shape realizes overabundance with its corresponding synthetic form miglior. However, the behavior of più buon resulted in being an exception, because the remaining four forms più buono, più buoni, più buona and più buone say the opposite. Several times, we do not find any synthetic form in the same context or if we find it, it is a relative superlative. However, these forms appear 292 times as comparatives mainly in the semantic area of taste (food related and non-food related) and kindness (human related and non-human related). Querying the corpus for the supposed cell-mates migliore and migliori gave disappointing results: in fact the only cases in which analytic and synthetic comparatives realize overabundance are when they appear along with the NP heads vino ‘wine’ and vittima ‘victim’. However, something interesting seems to happen in the particular case of the semantic area of kindness where, leaving aside those instances in which we do not have tokens with synthetic comparatives or we have tokens showing only

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synthetic relative superlatives, the phenomena of what I called ‘fake’ and ‘phantom’ overabundance happen. In the first case, a synthetic comparative form appears where an analytic comparative does, but losing its meaning of ‘being kinder’, hence we cannot say that overabundance is realized because the two elements lose the property of being synonyms, that is fundamental to realize the same set of morpho-syntactic values in a same cell. Phantom overabundance is realized instead when there is not a clear evidence that the synthetic form has lost its semantic value of kindness but on the other hand we are not sure that it is expressing it. In both cases we cannot say that a real overabundance is realized. A third context is the one that I have called ‘other’, because here the analytic forms are related neither to taste nor kindness. This context, despite the fact that it presents the smallest number of tokens (only 31), seems to be the more proliferating in terms of overabundance. In fact, in this semantic area we can see overabundance realized in 58.07% of cases. The number is interesting, if compared to 6.45% of the semantic area of taste and to 0.5% of the semantic area of kindness. Starting from Thornton’s statement that two forms realize overabundance when they “can be used interchangeably, with the choice of one or the other form subject to no condition” (Thornton 2011: 362) and having a ratio more possibly close to 1:1, I suggested – considering the relevant number of relative superlatives – to insert in the formula to establish overabundance between comparatives a third element. It is the percentage of comparatives with respect to the total amount of tokens we get with our queries (R2) which, if multiplied for the result of the ratio value (R1) between analytic and synthetic forms, gives us what I called the Index of Overabundance for Comparatives (I.O.C.). Beside the poorly exciting results given by the tokens showing analytic and synthetic comparatives and realizing overabundance in the three semantic areas (that we have graphically represented in 4.3.2.3., 4.3.3.6. and 4.3.4.1), I think that a clearer idea of the extent of this phenomenon in comparison could be given only by an overall table showing the percentage of tokens presenting an NP head with which analytic and synthetic comparative forms realize overabundance. This has been done in TABLE 1.

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From the data shown in TABLE 1. we see that only in 10% of the cases, analytic

and synthetic comparatives realize overabundance. Hence, we may conclude that in Italian language overabundance is very unlikely to be realized when dealing with comparison, for what concerns the elements PIÙ BUONO and MIGLIORE, independently by the forms and shapes they display. However, if the distribution of our elements is not conditioned by semantical factors, i.e. in contexts not related to ‘taste’ or ‘kindness’, overabundance appears to be more likely realized. In the case of the doublets PIÙ BUONO/MIGLIORE, these may be erroneously considered as synonyms, as different forms realizing the same set of morpho-syntactic values and freely interchangeable within a sentence, but the results of our research testify that this is not true. Certainly, it would be interesting to see what happens when we work with relative superlatives. Examples (1) – (3) show indeed how these forms apparently realize overabundance with more ease than comparatives, even if the meaning of both analytic and synthetic forms does not seem properly identical in every instance.

(1) Taste: (a) Ma i Guaycurù non capiscono. Perché?, esclamano, la carne umana è la

più buona che ci sia! ‘But Guaycuru people do not understand. Why?, they utter, human meat is the tastiest!’ (A.I.3: 71)

(b) la carne frollata è la migliore. ‘high meat is the best’

(c) Ecco, l'unica cosa che c' è in comune tra l'Italia e il Giappone è il cibo più buono, anche se sono di gusti molto diversi ‘So, the only common thing between Italy and Japan is the best food, even if they have very different tastes’ (A.I.4: 91)

(d) Qui c’è la gente simpatica e il cibo migliore del mondo. ‘Here there is the most likely people and the best food in the world.’

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(2) Kindness: (a) Buono, "uno degli uomini più buoni che abbia mai conosciuto" dice

Salvo Andò. ‘A good man, “one of the kindest man I’ve ever met” says Salvo Andò.’ (A.I.5: 149)

(b) Lo ritengo uno degli uomini migliori di questo paese – ha detto – […] ‘I consider him one of the best men in this Country – he said – […]’’

(c) Credo che il mondo abbia perso una delle persone più buone e umane. Diana era veramente speciale e unica. ‘I believe that the world has lost one of the kindest and most human persons. Diana really was special and unique.’ (A.I.2: 32)

(d) Era sempre allegro, una delle persone migliori che abbia mai conosciuto. ‘He was always joyous, one of the best persons I’ve ever met.’

(3) Other: (a) La notizia più buona l'ha portata Boniek. Anche se non sarà al massimo,

vuole scendere in campo. ‘The best piece of news has been brought by Boniek. Even if he is not at his best, he wants to take the field.’ (A.I.3: 90)

(b) La notizia migliore della settimana è quella classica: uomo morde cane. ‘The best piece of news of the week is the classic one: man bites dog.’

(c) Ho una rosa di sette giocatori. I più buoni se ne sono andati altrove a guadagnare cifre decenti ‘I have a shortlist of seven players. The best ones have gone elsewhere to gain decent amounts.’ (A.I.5.: 154)

(d) Ha i tre giocatori migliori d’Europa, i tre olandesi. He has the three best players in Europe, the three Dutch

One may wonder if, given examples (1) – (3), overabundance is more canonical when dealing with superlatives. We cannot decide if this is true or not; for sure, a

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quick look at the corpus seems to support the theory. A theory that, however, is promptly proved wrong by the data in TABLE 3. and TABLE 4. Here, I’ve verified if the forms that realize overabundance when modifying the NP heads vino ‘wine’ and vittima ‘victim’ as analytic and synthetic comparatives give similar (or more canonical) results when appearing as relative superlatives. Surprisingly, they do not, and at least for what concernes the NP heads vino and vittima, overabundance is more canonical when they come along with comparatives than with relative superlatives.

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Independently from the fascinating behavior of relative superlatives, that deserves to be deeply studied, for what concerns comparative forms the results of my research on corpus seem to give incontrovertible answers. The non-canonical phenomenon of overabundance is well attested in some aspects of the Italian language, for example in verbal inflection, but it does not touch comparison. Probably, the main reason of this can be found in the fact that analytic and synthetic forms – despite what the literature asserts – do not mean, or do not mean anymore, the same thing. Arguably, this is the most interesting discovery of this research, if we consider how grammars believed, until recent days, that the two forms are freely intercheangeable. Contemporary usage in the Italian language reveals the opposite. If this happens as a result of the fact that “usage naturally and continually tends to get rid” of the hindrance of “having more ways of meaning one and the same thing” we do not know, because such an evolution can be fully understood only after a very extended time lapse. However, such an evolution is happening for real, letting us wonder how, and to what extent, analytic and synthetic comparatives will keep on walking on diverging semanthic paths. Ai posteri l’ardua sentenza.

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References Bartoli, Matteo Giulio. 1925. Introduzione alla neolinguistica. Geneva: Olschki. Basile, Grazia, Federica Casadei, Luca Lorenzetti, Giancarlo Schirru, Anna M. Thornton. 2010. Linguistica generale. Roma: Carocci. Battaglia, Salvatore and Vincenzo Pernicone. 1951. La grammatica italiana, 2nd edn. 1954. Torino: Loescher: Chiantore. Belletti, Adriana. 1991. Le frasi comparative. In Renzi, Lorenzo and Giampaolo Salvi (eds.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. 2. Bologna: Il Mulino. 832-853. Corbett, Greville G. 2005. The canonical approach in typology. In Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, Adam Hodges and David S. Rood (eds.), Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: Benjamins. 25-49. Corbett, Greville G. 2007a. Canonical typology, suppletion and possible words. In Language, 83. 8-41. Corbett, Greville. 2007b. Deponency, Syncretism, and What Lies Between. In “Proceedings of the British Academy”, 145. 21-43. Cristofaro, Sonia. 2013. Utterance Complement Clauses. In Dryer, Matthew S. and Martin Haspelmath (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at: http://wals.info/chapter/128) Cuzzolin, Pierluigi and Christian Lehmann. 2004. Comparison and gradation. In Booij, Geert, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan, Stavros Skopeteas in collaboration with Wolfgang Kesselheim (eds.), Morphologie / Morphology, Ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung / An International Handbook on Inflection and Word-Formation, 2. Halbband / Volume 2. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. 1211-1219.

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Cuzzolin, Pierluigi. 2011. Comparative and superlative. In Baldi, Philip and Pierluigi Cuzzolin (eds.), New Perspectives in Historical Latin Syntax, Volume 4: Complex Sentences, Grammaticalization Typology. Berlin: de Gruyter. 549-660. Dardano, Maurizio and Pietro Trifone. 1997. La lingua italiana. Bologna: Zanichelli. De Mauro, Tullio. 1963. Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita. Bari: Laterza. Fogarasi, Miklós. 1969. Grammatica italiana del Novecento, [2nd. edn. 1983]. Roma: Bulzoni. Fornaciari, Raffaello. 1882. Grammatica italiana dell’uso moderno. Compendiata e accomodata per le scuole. Firenze: Sansoni. Fucecchi, Marco and Luca Gaverini. 2009. La lingua latina. Fondamenti di morfologia e sintassi. Firenze: Le Monnier. Lee, Charmaine. 2011. Linguistica romanza. Roma: Carocci. Lepschy, Anna Laura and Giulio Lepschy. 1981. La lingua italiana. Storia, varietà dell’uso, grammatica. Milano: Bompiani. Regula, Moritz and Josip Jernej. 1975. Grammatica italiana descrittiva su basi storiche e psicologiche. Bern/Mũnchen: Francke. Roncaglia, Aurelio. 2006. Le origini della lingua e della letteratura italiana. Torino: UTET. Salvi, Giampaolo and Laura Vanelli. 2004. Nuova grammatica italiana. Bologna: il Mulino. Serianni, Luca. 1988. Grammatica italiana: Italiano comune e lingua letteraria: suoni, forme costrutti. Torino: UTET.

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Stassen, Leon. 2008. Comparative constructions. In Haspelmath, Martin, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, Wolfgang Raible (eds.), Language Typology and Language Universals / Sprachtypologie und sprachliche Universalien / La typologie des langues et les universaux linguistiques, An International Handbook / Ein internationales Handbuch / Manuel international, vol. 2. Berlin: de Gruyter. 993-997. Tagliavini, Carlo. 1949. Le origini delle lingue neolatine, [6th edn. 1972]. Bologna: Pàtron. Tekavčić, Pavao. 1972. Grammatica storica dell’italiano, vol. 2: Morfosintassi. Bologna: Il Mulino. Thornton, Anna M. 2011. Overabundance (multiple forms realizing the same cell): a non-canonical phenomenon in Italian verb morphology. In Maiden, Martin, John Charles Smith, Maria Goldbach and Marc-Oliver Hinzelin (eds.), Morphological autonomy: perspectives from Romance inflectional morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 358-381. Thornton, Anna M. 2012a. La sovrabbondanza nei paradigmi verbali dell’italiano contemporaneo. In Patricia Bianchi, Nicola De Blasi, Chiara De Caprio, Francesco Mountuori (eds.), La variazione nell’italiano e nella sua storia. Varietà e varianti linguistiche e testuali, vol. II. Firenze: Franco Cesati. 183-207. Thornton, Anna M. 2012b. Reduction and maintenance of overabundance. A case study on italian verb paradigms. In Word Structure, vol. 5, issue 2. 457-468. Voghera, Miriam. 2004. Polirematiche. In Grossmann, Maria and Franz Rainer (eds.), La formazione delle parole in italiano. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 56-69.

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INTERNET RESOURCES: ISTAT Illiterates aged 6 and over by sex at census years - 1861 – 2001. 2001 http://seriestoriche.istat.it/fileadmin/allegati/Istruzione/tavole/Tavola_7.1.1.xls

LIP corpus (1993) http://badip.uni-graz.at/index.php?option=com_badip&view=vsearch&Itemid=9&lang=it

la Repubblica corpus (1985-2000) http://sslmit.unibo.it/repubblica

Treccani: http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/citeriore/

Wikipedia: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/citerior

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Ringraziamenti (e un’apologia)

Spesso sono stato accusato di esser privo del dono della sintesi, e forse alcune parti di questo lavoro – di per sé già meno sintetico di molti altri suoi pari – ne danno testimonianza. Per questo mi sarei dovuto ripromettere di essere breve almeno nei ringraziamenti, laddove la chiarezza stilistica e il rigore sintattico sono vincolati alla sola intrapredenza di chi scrive. Mi duole ammettere, tuttavia, che neanche stavolta riuscirò a farla breve, per due ragioni principali: la prima è che leggo ringraziamenti in tesi di laurea che sfiorano l’indecenza per pigrizia e vuotezza contenutistica, sovrabbondanti (sic!) di luoghi comuni e frasi fatte che, in genere, non aumentano la già poca dignità delle opere che li contengono. Quindi di fronte alla duplice opzione di scelta fra il non scrivere niente onde esser sicuro di evitare penose figure, o decidere di farlo con la consapevolezza che non sarà né rapido né indolore, ho scelto la seconda. L’altra motivazione per la quale vergo questi ringraziamenti è più propriamente personale, e si giustifica col fatto che questa mia tesi è il frutto di un percorso

maledettamente lungo.

Un percorso zeppo di buche ed ostacoli, scavate e issati da me così come da altri. Un percorso fatto di intermittenze, crisi di coscienza, ripensamenti, abbandoni, ritorni e prese di posizione che, conti alla mano, è durato nove anni. Nove anni sono tanti per una triennale, e difficilmente possono essere giustificati se non con l’ammissione di aver perso tempo in inutili distrazioni. Pare però che l’intelligenza di una persona, oltre che da fattori genetici, si coltivi mantenendo attive le connessioni celebrali, e che queste possano essere allenate solo con l’esperienza. Cioè col vivere la vita. In questi nove anni, non lo posso negare, ho vissuto un sacco di vita, dedicandomi alle attività più variegate e allacciando rapporti con un considerevole numero di persone. Ognuno ha contribuito in qualche modo a farsì che mi ritrovassi dove mi trovo adesso ed è per questo, soprattutto per questo, che quantomeno per una questione di decoro non posso esimermi dal rendere credito a chi, consapevolmente o inconsapevolmente, mi ha dato qualcosa che alla fine s’è rivelato utile affinché concludessi questo ciclo. Oltre che vorticoso, bucato ed ostacolato dunque, irto e intenso, come ogni sano percorso pieno di buche e ostacoli ha il sacrosanto diritto di essere.

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Do inizio, pertanto, alla gran giostra della gratitudine, con premessa e promessa di non scadere in qualche cliché e di non spendere più diquattro-cinque righe per individuo o gruppo di individui, e nella speranza che il messaggio possa essere quanto più diretto e appropriato possibile. Proprio perché solo gli stupidi non cambiano mai idea, debbo concedermi al cliché di ringraziare per primi i miei genitori. Perché loro sono l’esempio vivente di come si può far studiare un figlio rinunciando praticamente a tutto ma non alla dignità, e a loro che hanno fatto il sacrificio più grande va il mio ringraziamento più grande. Per quanto qualche testo lo sconsigli, non posso esimermi dal ringraziare la mia relatrice, la professoressa Anna M. Thornton. Mi ha saputo accettare, capire, stimolare, soprattutto sopportare; offendere con la giusta dose di sarcasmo per non far mai venir meno quel rispetto dettato da quella piccola speranza che, lo so, in fondo ha sempre riposto in me. È stata una splendida insegnante ed una egregia relatrice, ma soprattutto ha saputo essere un’impareggiabile consigliera. Con lei ho capito che a differenza di molti altri laureandi che si erano imbattuti in un relatore, io avevo trovato una mentore. Grazie a lei ho capito che tutto è questionabile, e nulla impossibile. Per descrivere qello che ha fatto Maria Grazia per me non basterebbe un’altra triennale ed una tesi in sociologia della coppia. Troppo riconoscente ed imbarazzato per entrare nei dettagli e svilire con parole quello che mi è stato dato da lei in termini di incoraggiamento, dirò solo che in questi anni è stata la mia più grande motivazione, il mio primo punto di confronto. Una grande donna che è stata spesso né di dietro né di fianco, ma davanti, ad un piccolo uomo, come unica luce quando tutto il resto era solo oscurità. Matteo e Vittorio. L’idea era quella di ringraziarli separatamente per concedere loro il giusto tributo, ma scrivendo mi son reso conto che, seppur per motivi diversi, entrambi sono gli elementi che, semmai dovessi aver bisogno di specificarlo ulteriormente, mi sentirei di definire amici. Sodale da una vita il primo, compare di gioventù il secondo. Due persone speciali, che ci sono sempre state nonostante qualche momento d’abbandono, con le quali ho avuto l’onore di condividere quella che forse ritengo l’esperienza più speciale che abbia mai vissuto. Finita la quale, ne è iniziata una nuova e più sincera. Assieme a loro ringrazio le loro compagne, fortunate ad averli scelti. Un po’ meno a doverli sopportare.

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Negli stessi termini devo nominare Roberto e Francesco, che ho conosciuto durante la mia esperienza accademica aquilana. Roberto è quello che chiamo bro, e questo basti e avanzi per descrivere cosa ci lega. È sempre stato oltre che un ottimo amico un elemento del quale ho rispettato l’intelligenza, e infatti è con lui che mi sono confrontato quando volevo discutere o litigare di musica, società e soprattutto politica. Francesco l’ho conosciuto da poco ma fra noi c’è stato subito feeling, è in grado di colmare tutte le mie lacune di ciò che lui chiama vasta subcultura. Personalità tormentata come quella di chi scrive, è stato forse il miglior confidente che potessi sperare di incontrare. Elenco poi, in ordine sparso e senza pretesa di gerarchia: tutti i compagni dell’UDU, che mi hanno fatto tornare a sperare nel fatto che qualcuno, in questo Paese, si sappia ancora battere per il diritto allo studio. Per avermi trasmesso una parte di cultura di cui farò sempre tesoro ringrazio le professoresse e i professori Bernal, Biscetti, Cicchetti, Elia, Falcone, Flores, Hans-Bianchi, Staiti dell’Università dell’Aquila, e i professori Brennan e O’Leary della University of Leeds. Una menzione speciale devo dedicarla alla professoressa Ferrari, la quale oltre che in termini accademici mi ha aiutato tantissimo in termini umani. Che se ne siano resi conto o meno, in questi anni sono stati fondamentali alla mia crescita come uomo e come studioso anche mio fratello, tutti i coinquilini con cui ho vissuto a Roma, Leeds, L’Aquila pre e post-terremoto; il personale di segreteria ed in particolar modo le signore Maura Muci e Anna Ciuffetelli, alla cui indegnamente spezzata vitalità va la dedica per questo lavoro. Alla città di L’Aquila, con le sue infinite contraddizioni e meraviglie; tutte le persone con cui ho collaborato negli organi accademici, tutti coloro con i quali ho suonato con particolare riferimento a Jacopo ed Alessandro, le mie nonne, la gente con cui ho allacciato rapporti più o meno profondi e duraturi in Marisca e in dipartimento, le case produttrici di energy drink e birra, Wikipedia (ahimé), il mio infaticabile pc Jack II, Noam Chomsky, Tullio De Mauro e Luca Serianni; Billie Joe Armstrong e i Green Day, i Ministri, i Bad Religion, gli Aerosmith, il cast di How I Met Your Mother, i Cavalieri dello Zodiaco, e l’omino con le buste della spesa a piazza Tienanmen. Se alla fine della storia il vero ringraziamento dovrei farlo principalmente a me stesso per aver trovato il coraggio, a ventisei anni, di riprendere a studiare e di farlo meglio di molti altri, non posso non ammettere che tutte le figure di sopra elencate siano state tasselli fondamentali per comporre il grande e artificioso mosaico che s’è rivelata essere questa mia triennale.

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Voi mi avete dato la possibilità di vivere le più diversificate esperienze di vita, di mantenere vitali (diciamo pure resuscitare) le mie connessioni celebrali, senza di voi non avrei potuto trovare la mia strada, che è quella del sapere. L’unico modo di cui dispongo per sentirmi libero, e governare le mie stelle.

Sapiens Dominabitur Astris