Partitive Determiners, Partitive Pronouns and Partitive Case by Petra Sleeman Giuliana Giusti

Author:Petra Sleeman, Giuliana Giusti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2021-11-10T17:14:59.924000+00:00

4.2 Methodology and goals of the analysis

Our study is based on occurrences extracted from the most representative database of Early Italian: the OVI corpus. This resource has been developed by the Italian National Research Center (CNR). The corpus consists of 2335 texts prior to 1375, representing the whole collection of early Italian texts made accessible by the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (Italian Dictionary Institution). The corpus is periodically updated and consisted of around 29.208.359 tokens when updated on 31 August 2020. It can be accessed at the link:

http://gattoweb.ovi.cnr.it/(S(50yvze55udnhcw45bk4jqhq1))/CatForm01.aspx (last accessed on 25 April 2021).

The corpus can be searched by word forms, and only partially by lemmas. Thanks to this resource, we have been able to consider the very early phase of written Italian for what concerns the development of the partitive article, and also had the possibility of observing texts from different geographical areas.

Unfortunately, the lemma search could not be implemented for our type of query. Hence, we searched the corpus by forms, and looked for all occurrences of di, and for all occurrences consisting of di plus various possible forms of the definite article. Out of the occurrences resulting from this search, we selected only those in which di is used to introduce an argument of a verb, the direct object or the subject. In particular we kept distinct such constructions from constructions in which di indicates nominal dependency (notably, this latter function covers most occurrences). The same operation was needed with the forms composed by di plus the definite article. We tried to gather a number of sentences large enough to examine in detail the distribution and the functions of the mentioned structures, so that, in spite of the yet infrequent occurrence of the construction, which was starting to emerge at the time of the texts we surveyed, we are able to base our considerations on a quantitative analysis.

We examined every different form in association to specific elements of the context; for example, looking for elements in object position, we selected only occurrences in which the construction appeared after a verb. In this way we reduced the number of contexts that we had to examine and were able to search the entire corpus. We selected in total 167 occurrences, that we summarize in Table 6. The percentage column indicates the percentage of constructions with definite article over the total, and the percentages in which di plus definite article can have an indefinite reading with specific types of noun and in the total occurrences with definite article.

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