Periferia testuale e periferia discorsiva nella grammaticalizzazione di verbi tra latino e lingue romanze: eccetto vs. prego

This study deals with two types of change affecting some Latin verbs which give rise to prepositional forms in the first case, and to functional markers in the second case. The first process involves Italian forms as durante, eccetto, French durant, pendant, Spanish, durante, excluso. These forms exemplify several processes of grammaticalization and recategorization from verb to preposition. In the second process, verbs such as prego, guarda, dai, become functional signals through pragmaticalization and co-optation. Both processes involve the notion of periphery: forms as durante, eccetto have their origin in Latin as participles of ablative absolute, that is, in the syntactic periphery of the clause. Functional signals originate from propositional elements, such as prego, dai, that acquire a pragmatic, procedural and inter-subjective function. This change enables them to move to the pragmatic periphery of the utterance, between text and interaction. For both changes considered the concept of periphery seems critical: periphery tends to generate fossilizations, of morphosyntactic type on one side and pragmatic on the other. These processes mainly intertwine the diachronic to the diaphasic dimension of variation; while grammaticalization affects the text, pragmaticalization takes place through dialogic / pragmatic processes.