Translation and grammaticalization in 17th-Century Neapolitan:A comparative Romance analysis

Abstract

This study explores grammaticalization in 17th-century Neapolitan through a comparative analysis with Italian, focusing on perfect auxiliary selection and possessive adjective position. The research aims to position these features of Neapolitan along the Romance Grammaticalization Cline and assess the utility of translation corpora for comparative grammaticalization analysis. The corpus used for analysis includes the Neapolitan literary text Lo Cunto de li Cunti and its Italian translation. Through a quantitative and qualitative approach, the study examines how Neapolitan's preference for certain auxiliary forms and syntactic structures suggests a more advanced stage of grammaticalization compared to Italian. Specifically, Neapolitan shows a tendency toward reduced variability in auxiliary selection, favoring avere over essere, and a marked preference for postnominal possessive adjective position. The findings support the hypothesis that 17th-century Neapolitan exhibited more grammaticalized structures than Italian in certain respects. Additionally, the study demonstrates the viability of using translation as a methodological tool in historical linguistics to analyze language change in synchrony. The results offer new insights into the grammaticalization process in Romance languages and raise questions about the influence of translation practices on linguistic analysis.