Passive Periphrases in Old Italian (Plenary talk)

Discussion of the distribution, incidence and tense-aspectual restrictions on the occurrence of passive (and impersonal) periphrases in some early Italian vernaculars from different areas: Old Venetian, Old Lombard, Old Neapolitan and Old Logudorese Sardinian. Investigation of the passive patterns exemplified by the continuators of Latin esse 'be', venire 'come', fieri 'become', facere 'make/do' in auxiliary function + the past participle of a lexical verb, some of the 'new' tools which became available in the transition to Romance to express agent defocusing and O orientation as well as to encode aspectual distinctions originally conveyed in Latin by an inflectional ending, the mediopassive -r suffix and a syntactic construction, esse 'be'+ the past participle of the lexical verb, respectively in imperfective and perfective functions.