L'estensione dell'ausiliare perfettivo avere nell'antico napoletano: Intransitività scissa condizionata da fattori modali

This paper explores the distribution of the perfective auxiliaries avere 'have' and essere 'be' in early Neapolitan, focusing on the limited distribution of avere with verbs of the unaccusative class. In contrast to some previous studies that have characterised the gradual extension of avere in terms of a semantic continuum of unergativity/ unaccusativity, the results presented here demonstrate, partly in accord with Formentin
(2001), that the initial spread of avere is largely driven by modal factors. More specifically, there is shown to operate in early Neapolitan a core system of lexicallyconditioned split intransitivity, which variously aligns the sole argument (S) of an intransitive predicate with the subject (SA, and hence auxiliary avere) or object (SO, and
hence auxiliary essere) of a transitive construction. In a more restricted number of cases, however, there obtains a split which cannot be adequately explained in terms of lexical conditioning factors, inasmuch as the choice of auxiliary clearly proves sensitive to a realis/irrealis modal distinction. In particular, the spread of avere with unaccusatives in early texts appears quite consistently to affect only those clauses marked as [+irrealis],
typically containing a verb in the subjunctive or conditional. It is argued that such a limited extension of the avere auxiliary in early Neapolitan, as well as the identification of a similar distributional pattern with auxiliary aviri in early Sicilian, be assimilated to similar cross-linguistic patterns of intransitive/ergative splits which grammaticalise active/inactive or ergative/absolutive marking in accordance with modal distinctions