philology and linguistics: when data meet theory. two case studies ii: the case of the placiti...

II: THE CASE OF THE PLACITI CASSINESI

By ADAM LEDGEWAY

University of Cambridge

1. INTRODUCTION

What follows is a case study from my own previous research which is exemplary indemonstrating the mutual benefits of a conversation between linguistics and philology. In thisstudy, linguistic theory throws light on the interpretation of one of the earliest Romance textswhich, in return, offers valuable early evidence for current ideas about the fine structure of theclause.

2. MAPPING THE FINE STRUCTURE OF THE LEFT PERIPHERY

One area of considerable interest in much recent syntactic research has been theinvestigation of the fine structure of the clause (Cinque 1999; Beninca & Munaro 2010).Deliberately keeping technical details to a minimum,6 I begin by observing that traditionalassumptions within generative syntax regarding the structure of the clause in a typical SVOlanguage identify the confines of the clause with the preverbal subject position situated atthe left edge of the sentential core (IP) and the complement or adjunct position situated atthe right edge of VP (O or X in 1a). However, in recent years research within generativesyntax has been increasingly directed towards the investigation of the fine structure of theleft periphery, the syntactic space immediately to the left of the sentential core (1b),culminating in the seminal work of Rizzi (1997) which has given rise to a widely acceptedview of the fundamental cartography of the C(omplementiser)-domain (for detaileddiscussion, see Ledgeway 2005, 2010, forthc. a: §4.4). In particular, the left periphery,defined in classical generative syntax in terms of a simple C(omplementiser)P and itsassociated Spec(ifier) and head positions hosting wh-phrases and subordinators (1c),respectively, is now conceived as a split domain, hierarchically articulated into several fieldsand associated projections (1d):

(1) a [Core [IP S (Aux) [VP V O (X)]]]b [Periphery … [Core [IP S (Aux) [VP V O (X)]]]]c [Periphery wh-phrase, Comp [Core [IP S (Aux) [VP V O (X)]]]]d [Periphery {Comp} {Top} {Foc} {Comp} [Core [IP S (Aux) [VP V O (X)]]]]

Revealing in this respect are Italian examples such as (2b), where three of the constituents ofthe sentential core in (2a) have been fronted to the left periphery, two conveying old ⁄giveninformation under topicalisation, and the other under contrastive focalisation to correct aprevious assertion.7

6Abbreviations used in this article are: Adjn: adjunct (= non-argument); Adv: adverb; Aux: auxiliary; cl: clitic;Comp: complementiser (= conjunction, subordinator); CP: complementiser phrase (= clausal left periphery hostingconjunctions and fronted constituents); Foc: focus; inf: infinitive; IP: inflectional phrase (= sentential core); O: object,obl: oblique case; S: subject; Spec: specifier (= modifier) position; Top: topic; V: verb; Ø: null ⁄ implicit subject; and=: cliticised to.

7In these and the following examples topicalised constituents are indicated by underlining and (contrastively)focalised constituents are indicated by small capitals.

LEDGEWAY – PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS: WHEN DATA MEET THEORY 213

(2) [Periphery… [S (cl) V Adv O Adjn]]a [[Ugo prepara sempre la pasta a mezzogiorno]]

Ugo prepares always the pasta at middayb [Ugoi la pastaj, SEMPRE [Øi ⁄ luii laj prepara a mezzogiorno]]

Ugoi the pastaj always Øi ⁄hei it= prepares at midday

Evidence like this from Italian suggests that the relevant left-peripheral positions seen in (2b)must be reconceived as distinct pragmatico-syntactic spaces along the lines of Beninca &Poletto (2004), according to which we can identify from left to right at least two fields termedTopic and Focus, respectively. Not only is this demarcation between Topic and Focus justifiedat a pragmatico-semantic level, in that elements appearing in the Topic field are generallyinterpreted as ‘old’ or ‘given’ information whereas the Focus field is typically associated withinformationally ‘new’ elements, but also it finds confirmation at the syntactic level. Forinstance, when they co-occur, fronted constituents must occur in the strict order Topic +Focus and, whereas elements appearing within the Topic field often call for a resumptivepronominal (clitic) where available, those appearing within Focus typically prove incompat-ible with a pronominal copy. Moreover, we observe that topic is a recursive syntactic categoryallowing several reiterations within a given utterance, whereas focus is restricted to just oneoccurrence per utterance.

Robust evidence like this demonstrates that topicalised and focused constituents targetdistinct spaces within the left periphery, forcing us to recognise a hierarchical representation ofthe C-domain articulated into several fields and associated projections along the lines of (3):

(3) [CP Comp [TopP Top [FocP Foc [Core …]]]]

In addition to the Topic and Focus fields highlighted above, further research has revealed thatthese fields are, in turn, closed off upwards by a higher complementiser position (generallytermed Force in the literature) marking the illocutionary force of the clause and hosting suchitems as the French ⁄Spanish and Italian finite declarative complementisers que and che ‘that’,and downwards by a complementiser position (generally termed Fin(iteness) in the literature)specifying themodality and ⁄or finiteness of the clause (Rizzi 1997) and hosting such items as theFrench ⁄Spanish and Italian infinitival complementisers de and di ‘of’, as schematicised in (4).

(4) [Periphery que ⁄ cheComp1 + Topic + FOCUS + de ⁄diComp2 [Core…]]

Indeed, many southern Italian dialects present dual finite complementiser systems whichappear to exploit both the higher and lower complementiser positions within the left periphery(Ledgeway 2004, 2005, 2009, forthc. b), contrasting an indicative ⁄declarative complementiser(QU(I)A ‘because’ >) ca that lexicalises the higher complementiser position, and thereforeprecedes topics and foci (5a), and a subjunctive ⁄ irrealis complementiser (QUOD ⁄QUID ‘because’>) cu ⁄ che that lexicalises the lower complementiser position, and therefore follows topics andfoci (5b):

(5) a aggiu tittu ca la Lia ene (Salentino)I.have said that the Lia comes‘I said that Lia is coming’

b oyyu lu libbru cu lu ccatta lu Maryu (Salentino)I.want the book that it= buys the Mario‘I want Mario to buy the book’

TRANSACTIONS OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY 109, 2011214

3. PLACITI CASSINESI

I now turn to the area of Romance philology and, in particular, the Placiti cassinesi (Bianchiet al. 1993: 211–212), four brief, formulaic, sworn declarations composed in Campaniabetween 960 and 963 and generally taken to represent the first documented attestations of thevernacular within the Italian peninsula. Below is reproduced the first of these, the Placitocapuano from March 960, which relates to a land dispute between the Abbot of Montecassinoand Rodelgrimo who claimed, through inheritance, ownership of the lands which the abbotmaintained had been the property of the monastery of St. Benedict of Montecassino for thirtyyears. In the absence of any official documentation of ownership, the judge ordered the abbotto produce three witnesses to authenticate his claim, each of which was reported to havesworn the oath in (6):

(6) Sao ko kelle terre, per kelle fini que ki contene,I.know that those lands for those confines that here containstrenta anni le possette parte sancti Benedictithirty years them= possessed party saint.OBL Benedict.OBL

‘I know that, those lands, within those borders which are contained here [in the document ⁄map before me], have belonged for thirty years to the part [=monastery] of St. Benedict [ofMontecassino].’

Although a very short text, the Placito is not without its problems, raising a number ofqualitative and interpretive issues for the philologist. In particular, given the extremely briefand formulaic nature of the text, it is legitimate to question the value, if any, of the linguisticevidence that such a short piece can genuinely offer the historian of the language. Anotherunresolved issue concerns the correct reconstruction of the pragmatico-semantic interpre-tation of the fronted constituents stacked up at the beginning of the embedded clause(namely, kelle terre, per kelle fini …, trenta anni), our reading of which is without doubtgreatly hindered by the limited nature of our textual evidence. This is a frequent problemfaced by philologists reading early texts, which in many cases only offer a rather briefglimpse of the language and whose linguistic physiognomy is often deliberately limited bythe specific style and register of the text type. A final observation concerns the appearance ofthe complementiser ko ‘that’ in (6). Contrary to our expectations in light of the discussion ofdual complementiser systems above (cf. 5a–b), the epistemic main clause predicate sao ‘Iknow’ selects for an indicative clausal complement headed, not by the expected indicativecomplementiser ca, but by the subjunctive complementiser ko. How are we then to interpretthe appearance of ko in this instance? Is it an example of a scribal error, or should it betaken at face value? As we shall see below, a consideration of this question in light of ourpreceding discussion of the fine structure of the left periphery provides an illuminatingsolution.

4. PUTTING THEORY AND DATA TOGETHER

I shall now put together the results of the discussions of the previous sections regarding thefine structure of the left periphery of the clause (§2) and the philological evidence of thePlacito capuano (§3) to show how the relevant linguistic and philological facts can profitablycomplement one another. We begin by observing how, despite only providing a glimpse of theearly vernacular, the Placito is of immense interest both to the historian of the language andthe historical linguist since, although a very short text, it nonetheless is astonishingly rich inlinguistic evidence.


More specifically, it is quite remarkable that such a short text, and the first one from theItalian peninsula no less, should provide such extensive early evidence of the fine structure ofthe left periphery and, above all, incontrovertible proof for the existence of the two left-peripheral fields postulated in §2, which, in turn, hold the key to a proper pragmatico-semantic interpretation of the fronted constituents stacked up at the beginning of theembedded clause. In particular, the rigid ordering of the Topic+ Focus fields postulated in §2,together with our observations regarding the potential recursiveness of topics but not focus,allows us to infer that the left periphery of the embedded clause hosts two thematicisationswithin the Topic field, namely kelle terre (picked up by the resumptive clitic pronoun le‘them’) and per kelle fini que ki contene, and a contrastive focus trenta anni within the Focusfield, as illustrated in (7).

(7) Sao ko [TopP kelle terre, per kelle fini, que, ki, contene, [FocP TRENTA

I.know that those lands for those confines that here contains thirtyANNI [Core le possette parte sancti Benedicti]]]years them= possessed part saint.OBL Benedict.OBL

Turning now to the unexpected used of the complementiser ko (< QUOD) rather than ca, thistoo finds a principled explanation in terms of the structural organisation of the complementclause. As demonstrated in Ledgeway (2004, 2005), in the early dialects of southern Italy,including those of Campania, the distribution of the two complementisers co ⁄ che (<QUOD ⁄QUID) and ca (< QU(I)A) is not quite as neat as the traditional descriptions reviewed in §2would lead us to expect. Whereas all types of subjunctive clause are introduced by che,indicative complement clauses are headed either by ca or che. Simplifying the facts somewhat(for detailed discussion, see Ledgeway 2005: §3), it will suffice to note here that either ca (8a)or che (8b) are employed when the left periphery of an embedded indicative clause does notcontain any topics or foci, whereas che alone is found in the presence of fronted topics ⁄ foci(8c):

(8) a Homero […] dice a li suoy libri ca [Core foro nave MCLXXXVI]Homer says to the his books that were ships MCLXXXVI(old Neapolitan, Libro de la destructione de Troya 115.35)‘Homer […] says in his books that there were 1186 ships’

b purriase ben dicere che [Core fo causa multo legiere] (ib.53.16)could=self well say.IN that it.was cause very light‘it could indeed be said that there was very little reason for it’

c Considerava che [TopP a quista insula de Colcosa […], [Corehe.considered that to this island of Colchisnon se nce poteva gire se non pernot one= there= could go.INF if not formare]] (ib. 51.26–7)sea‘He thought that, this island of Colchis […], was only accessible by sea’

In view of these distributional facts, it is possible to argue that old Neapolitan had just oneindicative complementiser ca generated in the lowest complementiser position (Comp2)which, whenever raised to the higher complementiser position (Comp1), as provesobligatory whenever topics or foci are present, is morphologically spelt out in the formche (namely, caComp1 � cheComp2). In short, the overt form assumed by indicative co ⁄ che is


interpreted as nothing more than the surface morphological reflex of raising ca from its baseposition to the higher complementiser position within the left periphery. Indeed, thisanalysis is directly supported by recomplementation examples such as (9) where both higherand lower complementiser positions on either side of a fronted focus are overtly lexicalised.Crucially, such examples highlight that, while the higher complementiser invariably surfacesin the morphological form co ⁄ che, the lower position is always spelt out as ca, and nevervice versa.

(9) Et ey manifesta cosa [Comp1 che [FocP homo che se aveand it.is obvious thing that man that self= hasa defendere a la to defend.INF to thepatria soa intre li amici e li canussienti suoy [Comp2 cha

fatherland his among the friends and the acquaintances his that[Core ave a chesta parte gran prerogativa e gran avantayo]]]]has at this part big prerogative and big advantage(old Neapolitan, Libro de la destructione de Troya 126.2–4)

‘And it is abundantly clear that, a man who has to defend himself in his own countryamong his friends and acquaintances, has in this respect considerable privilege andadvantage.’

In this light, we can now return to the apparently erroneous selection of ko in the Placitoin (6). It turns out after all that the use of ko here is not a scribal error or a singularmistake, but reflects the availability and use of two different complementiser positionsdetermined by the informational structure of the embedded clause (cf. 10a) which, as wehave seen, contains a contrastively focused constituent TRENTA ANNI ‘(for) thirty years’preceded by the two topicalised constituents per kelle fini que ki contene ‘within thoseborders that are contained here’ and kelle terre ‘those lands’. It is the activation of theseTopic-Focus fields in the embedded left periphery which is directly responsible for thepresence of ko, inasmuch as the complementiser ca is forced to move to the highercomplementiser position in the presence of fronted topics or foci where it is spelt out as ko(10b). It now comes as no surprise therefore that the complementiser ca (or its graphicvariant ka) should not be employed in (6).

(10) a [LeftPeriphery ko ⁄ che Topic + FOCUS c(h)a [Core…b Sao [LeftPeriphery ko kelle terra, per kelle fini que ki contene TRENTA ANNI Øka [Core…

This last example also highlights the dangers of dismissing too hastily the linguisticattestations offered to us by even the most meagre of philological evidence. In this particularcase, the Placito capuano provides an invaluable early example of the ca � che alternation,which is not attested again in our textual record for the Campania region for at least another350 years. Thanks however to this early attestation, we can conclude with confidence that therelevant complementiser alternation and associated positions licensed by the absence ⁄pres-ence of fronted topics and foci, otherwise richly attested in texts from the fourteenth centuryonwards (Ledgeway 2004, 2005; Vincent 2006), must date back to at least the tenth century.Of course, it might be objected that the linguistic evidence of the texts is so formulaic that its


value for the linguist is questionable on a number of counts.8 Indeed, a comparison of thePlacito capuano with the other three Placiti cassinesi produced three years later in the nearbylocalities of Sessa Aurunca and Teano reveals such an extraordinarily high level of structural,discourse and lexical uniformity across all four texts that it would be naıve to imagine that allfour sworn oaths represent authentic testimonies of the spontaneous spoken vernacular of thetime.

On the contrary, given the nature of the four oaths, which all had the specific purposeof persuading the court that a set of disputed lands had been in the possession of a givenmonastery for thirty years and consequently a legitimate part of the latter’s estate, it ismore than likely that the illiterate peasants enlisted by the Church to serve as‘independent’ witnesses, presumably under the promise of personal financial reward, weregiven very precise instructions regarding what they were required to swear under oath.Nonetheless, it would be rash to disregard the evidence of these four short, highlyformulaic written testimonies on these grounds alone; rather, given the Church’s deliberateefforts to put authentic-sounding words and structures of the vernacular in the mouths oftheir witnesses, it is still possible to see in the language of these four texts a deliberatehypercharacterisation of some of the most salient traits of the spoken language of the timesuch as the fronting of topicalised and focused constituents, which still constitutes to thisday a characteristic feature of the spoken, rather than written, registers of Romance (cf.Duranti & Ochs 1979).

5. CONCLUSIONS

Although modern linguistics as a discipline developed in large part out of the philologicalstudy of texts, it is a striking characteristic of contemporary research in both Linguistics andPhilology that the traditional link between the two disciplines is often not as strong andprominent as it might be. To be sure, philological analyses that fail to take account of themost enlightening ideas and principles of linguistic theory risk overlooking and ⁄ormisconstruing the relevance of all or part of the available textual evidence they are so atpains to correctly reconstruct, evaluate, and interpret. By the same token, linguistic analyseswhich are blindly driven by theory-internal considerations with little or no real interest inactual data such as those offered by textual corpora run the risk of presenting a largelyidealised and, by definition, necessarily selective representation of the available linguisticevidence. The result is a partial theory which is only capable of accounting for a subset of theavailable data that largely ignores the imperfections and irregularities characteristic ofauthentic linguistic productions.

The discussion of the preceding sections, by contrast, has demonstrated that when theoryand philological evidence are considered together, the results of traditional philological andlinguistic scholarship can be considerably enhanced. More specifically, we have seen thatcurrent theoretical assumptions about the design and architecture of the left periphery of theclause provide us with some novel and powerful tools to shed light on the interpretation andlinguistic choices of one of the earliest Romance texts. At the same time, the Placito capuanoprovides independent and robust evidence for these same syntactic assumptions. In short, andas abundantly demonstrated in this case, linguistics and philology should complement eachother to produce enlightening results, rather than be seen as alternatives to be pursued inisolation from each other.

8Indeed, it is no accident that the Placito capuano, like many early attestations of the Romance vernacular, isembedded within passages of dense Latin prose.


Department of ItalianFaculty of Modern and Medieval LanguagesUniversity of CambridgeCambridge CB3 9DAEmail: [email protected]

References

BENINCA, PAOLA & MUNARO, NICOLA (eds), 2010. Mapping the Left Periphery. The Cartography of SyntacticStructures. Volume 5, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

BENINCA, PAOLA & POLETTO, CECILIA, 2004. ‘Topic, focus, and V2. Defining the CP sublayers’, in Luigi Rizzi (ed.), TheStructure of CP and IP. The Cartography of Syntactic Structures. Vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 52–75.

BIANCHI, PATRICIA, DE BLASI, NICOLA & LIBRANDI, RITA, 1993. I’ te vurria parla. Storia della lingua a Napoli e inCampania, Naples: Tullio Pironti.

CINQUE, GUGLIELMO, 1999. Adverbs and Functional Heads. A Cross-Linguistic Perspective, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

DURANTI, ALESSANDRO & OCHS, ELINOR, 1979. ‘La pipa, la fumi? Un studio sulla dislocazione a sinistra nelleconversazioni’, Studi di grammatica italiana 8, 269–301.

LEDGEWAY, ADAM, 2004. ‘Il sistema completivo dei dialetti meridionali: la doppia serie di complementatori’, Rivistaitaliana di dialettologia 27, 89–147.

LEDGEWAY, ADAM, 2005. ‘Moving through the left periphery: the dual complementiser system in the dialects ofsouthern Italy’, Transactions of the Philological Society 103, 336–396.

LEDGEWAY, ADAM, 2009. ‘Aspetti della sintassi della periferia sinistra del cosentino’, in Diego Pescarini (ed.), Studi suidialetti della Calabria. Quaderni di lavoro ASIt No. 9, Padua: Unipress, 3–24.

LEDGEWAY, ADAM, 2010. ‘The clausal domain: CP structure and the left periphery’, in Roberta D’Alessandro, AdamLedgeway & Ian Roberts (eds), Syntactic Variation: The Dialects of Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,38–51.

LEDGEWAY, ADAM, Forthcoming a. From Latin to Romance: Morphosyntactic Typology and Change, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

LEDGEWAY, ADAM, Forthcoming b. ‘Reconstructing complementiser-drop in the dialects of the Salento: a syntactic orphonological phenomenon?’, in Theresa Biberauer & George Walkenden (eds), Proceedings of the XII DiachronicGenerative Syntax Meeting, 14–16 July 2010, Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

RIZZI, LUIGI, 1997. ‘The fine structure of the left periphery’, in Liliane Haegeman (ed.), Elements of Grammar,Dordrecht: Kluwer, 281–337.

VINCENT, NIGEL, 2006. ‘Il problema del doppio complementatore nei primi volgari d’Italia’, in Alivse Andreose &Nicoletta Penello (eds), LabRomAn: Giornata di lavoro sulle varieta romanze antiche, Padua: University of Padua,27–42.


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