From Need to Necessity
A Syntactic Path to Modality
Abstract. We trace the evolution of the Italian verb bisogna from a lexical verb expressing need in Old Italian to a modal verb of necessity in Modern Italian (cf. Benincà & Poletto 1993, 1994, 1996). According to the standard view (Roberts 1985; Pollock 1989) loss of its theta-role content turns a lexical verb into an auxiliary. Our own view is that theta-roles are not lexical primitives but are construed at the interface on the basis of the formal features of a lexical item and the syntactic level which construal targets. We assume that the lexical content of bisogna has remained constant throughout history, and suggest that a morphosyntactic change in the grammar has resulted in the assignment of theta-roles to bisogna on a different level in the modern language than in the old language.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Dell’Oro, Francesca
2022.
Verbs of motion and intermediate source domains of modality: the understudied case of Italian occorrere ‘to be necessary, to be needed’.
Folia Linguistica 56:s43-s1
► pp. 65 ff.
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