Chapter published in:
Possession in Languages of Europe and North and Central Asia
Edited by Lars Johanson, Lidia Federica Mazzitelli and Irina Nevskaya
[Studies in Language Companion Series 206] 2019
► pp. 365–392

Competing possessive constructions in Late Latin documents from Italy

| Università degli Studi di Firenze
This paper illustrates the grammaticalisation of the preposition de as a genitive marker through the analysis of Early Medieval notary deeds written in northern and central Italy (Codice diplomatico longobardo, CDL). In Classical Latin, de is used mainly as a verbal adjunct; its usage at the noun phrase level is sporadic and semantically determined, conveying mainly the meaning of ‘source’. By the time of the CDL documents, de has a more grammaticalised status and a higher frequency, but has not yet affected the expression of kinship and ownership. Semantic factors such as the prototypicality of the possessive relation and the degree of animacy of the modifier can motivate this concurrence between the synthetic and the analytical pattern of adnominal possession.
Keywords: Late Latin documents, , grammaticalisation, preposition as a genitive marker, synthetic and analytical pattern of adnominal possession
Published online: 05 March 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.206.16val
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