Viaggio al termine dell’aoristic drift. Nuove evidenze dal perfetto composto nei volgari veneti antichi

The aim of this paper is to illustrate the phenomenon of the aoristic drift, namely the process of gradual aoristicization that the compound perfect (or present perfect) undergoes over time at the expense of the simple perfect (or past simple), by analysing a corpus of ancient Venetan texts from the early fourteenth to the late sixteenth centuries. After an overview of the current state of research on the subject, the paper presents the philological, linguistic, and textual criteria that guided the selection of the texts included in the corpus, as well as the categories used for the analysis of the verbal forms. The results obtained have identified certain peripheral structures of the language (specifically, the relative clause expressing anteriority and the periphrasis cominciare a + infinito) as carriers of the observed changes.