Spazio e percorso in siciliano antico: analisi di un corpus

In ancient Sicilian, basic spatial relations are encoded by means of prepositional phrases introduced by "da" and "di" (origin), "a", "in" and "intra" (location and direction), "per/pir/pri" (path). This contribution offers a description of these encoding means based on the examination of a corpus of Sicilian texts of the 14th to 16th centuries. The analysis is carried out against a cognitive grammar theoretical background and takes into account the existing studies on spatial relations in the world languages. These studies brought to light some recurring patterns: for instance, direction tends to be encoded in a more articulated way than origin, while the encoding of path seems to be crosslinguistically less autonomous than that of the of other spatial relations. The data obtained from the scrutiny of the corpus allow us to observe the degree of consistency or deviation of ancient Sicilian from the general crosslinguistic tendencies, as well as the degree of continuity or discontinuity with other coeval Italo-Romance varieties and, in diachrony, with the Sicilian of the next centuries.