Asymmetries in path encoding in Sicilian: A diachronic overview
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | This paper proposes a description of the encoding of path within the system of the spatial relations in present-day Sicilian, with a retrospective glance to the diachronic developments of that system. Two features characterize the spatial relations in present-day Sicilian: (a) consistent with a cross-linguistic tendency, the relation between source and direction is asymmetric, as the latter receives a richer and more fine-grained expression; moreover, direction may conflate into locative expression; (b) in contrast with a cross-linguistic tendency, which predicts a lower degree of autonomy for path, this role has a dedicated preposition and makes use of a non-prepositional strategy, namely a reduplicative construction expressing the spatial extension through which the event is brought about. The diachronic development of present-day system has been reconstructed by means of the scrutiny of corpus data from 14th to 19th centuries. This analysis has shown a substantial consistency in the encoding of spatial relations over time, although a certain degree of variation of the linguistic means expressing them. |