Embedding Strategies in Early Venetan Vernaculars

The aim of this work is to shed some light on the categorial status and syntactic distribution of the subordinators como and, more specifically, quando as it emerges from some early Venetan texts dating back to the 13th and 14th centuries. The proposed analysis accounts for the semantic ambiguity of these embedding connectors in strictly structural terms. In particular, the pervasive interpretive ambiguity of come/como attested in the old Italo-Romance varieties considered here is traced back to a diachronic process of reanalysis affecting its categorial status from specifier to head, which reflects a well attested crosslinguistic tendency. This diachronic change in turn will be shown to be linked to the syntactic distribution of the temporal subordinator quando, which can be reduced to general underlying principles of phrase structure building, in the sense that the temporal vs hypothetical interpretive import of quando was determined by the particular syntactic configuration involved. The semantic ambiguity of the subordinating connectors analyzed here is explained then in strictly structural terms, adopting a cartographic approach to the functional articulation of the clausal left-periphery.