Project 11

Constructions beyond the sentence: text-structuring in (esp.) sixteenth-century historiographical texts

The project aims to apply the constructionist approach to units larger than the sentence, in particular in the analysis of sixteenth-century Italian historiographical texts such as Machiavelli’s Istorie fiorentine (1525) and F. Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia (1561). The text-structuring devices employed in these texts have not received much attention in previous research, since analyses tend to rely on modern editions, in which these texts appear typographically subdivided into smaller units, i.e. into chapters and paragraphs, but these subdivisions had only been introduced in 19^th century editions, while the original versions, i.e. the 16th century prints, were nearly completely devoid of such typographic text-structuring devices. The analyses proposed so far give reason to assume very close relationships between linguistic forms and text structuring functions, i.e. originally, text structuring (foreground vs. background; narration vs. comment; discourse-topic shift etc.) seems to be expressed by certain recurrent lexicogrammatical patterns, which vary however considerably in size and complexity.

Traditionally, such lexicogrammatical patterns have been described as stylistic devices and often treated independently from one another. However, at least some of them seem to be related (e.g. coniunctio relativa + subordination + passive + present tense: [Le quali cose] [mentre che] … [si trattano]). Since one of the advantages of CxG as a theoretical framework is that the mechanisms developed to describe standard syntactic phenomena can be extended to higher levels of linguistic organization and since previous work has clearly shown that linguistic conventions also exist at such higher levels, e.g. complexes of clauses revolving around the same discourse topic, it seems reasonable to assume the existence of constructions that function as schematic frames for the organization of discourse and whose details (grammatical structure, lexical elements etc.) can be described in a systematic way. Since Machiavelli’s Istorie fiorentine and Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia present highly complex syntactic “architectures”, it seems thus promising to analyze these texts in the analytical framework of CxG.

This project is done by Chiara Trombetta and is supervised by Prof. Dr. Ludwig Fesenmeier and Prof. Dr. Mechthild Habermann.