THE COMPARATIVE GRAMMAR BY G. M. ALESSANDRI AS A PIECE OF EVIDENCE REGARDING LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL CONTACTS BETWEEN ITALY AND SPAIN IN THE XVI CENTURY
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2018-8-62-68
The present paper is devoted to a little-known XVI-century piece of linguistic writing – the comparative grammar of Italian and Spanish (“Il paragone della lingua toscana et castigliana”, “The comparison of Tuscan and Castilian languages”, 1560) by Giovanni Mario Alessandri, a Naples-born courtier. The grammar was meant both for the Spanish nobles eager to learn Italian and for the Italians who pursued a career at the Spanish court. In many ways “Il paragone” stands apart from the bulk of the Italian grammatical treatises of that epoch. Alessandri does not cite classic authors like Boccaccio or Petrarch to support theoretical points although it is on such XIV-century literary basis that the Italian language norm is based. The grammar contains a number of interesting comments of sociolinguistic nature, like those regarding social hierarchy and its impact on language use (the use of “Vostra Signoria”, for instance). It also gives an idea of how the ideology of Counter-Reformation could influence grammaticography in the Romance world (hence the frequent appeals to the authority of Catholic church – quite a queer feature for a grammatical treatise). G. M. Alessandri’s views on language have much in common with those of B. Castiglione, G. Trissino and other XVI-century Italian theorists of “courtly” language.
Keywords: history of Italian, history of Romance linguistics, grammaticography, XVI-century Italian language, questione della lingua, language norm
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Issue: 8, 2018
Series of issue: Issue 3
Rubric: THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS
Pages: 62 — 68
Downloads: 1245