The Sicilian periphrasis aviri a + infinitive in contemporary Sicilian dialect

This article focuses on the periphrasis aviri a/da + infinitive in the contemporary sicilian. This construction has attestations since the ancient sicilian and it maintains its use still today, also due to the form’s polysemy that allows to express a temporal meaning and a modal one. Following a descriptive approach in the grammaticalization framework, we analyze the features and the meaning of the periphrasis. For the data analysis, we have used the answers supplied from a sample of informants to some traslating questions and the attestations of the form in some spoken passages collected within the inquiries carried out using the sociolinguistic questionnaire of the Atlante Linguistico della Sicilia (ALS). The data considered in this paper show how the productivity of the periphrasis in the contemporary Sicilian is confirmed by its use both in the translating questions and in the attestations of the form in the speech passages of our informants.