Paragrafematica. Accenti, punti, apostrofi e altri segni diacritici nella storia dell'ecdotica italiana e romanza

This Ph.D thesis is a research on a particular aspect of the romance philology, and above all of the Italian one: the use of special diacritical marks - except the punctuation - on the edition of old Italian and vernacular texts. This argument had never been dealt in a systematic way until now, perhaps because it is considered marginal and instrumental. The work reconstructs the history of the several and different solutions adopted by the philologists and critic editors in order to represent particular graphic-phonetic and textual phenomena, from the first scientific editions of the nineteenth century to the current ecdotic proposals that regard both the literary texts and the documentary ones. After a necessary reference to the most important examples of the use of diacritical signs in the classical philology, and in the first printed editions of old Italian texts, the work draws attention to the early and surprising interest showed by the Italian philology of the nineteenth century, and just before by the French and German philology, for questions concerning the use of particular signs, especially in connection with the linguistic characteristics of texts, that don’t correspond to the standard Italian, towards questions concerning the use of diacritical marks. The next section surveys the main systems of transcription worked out on the twentieth century (the crucial moments are the Nuovi testi fiorentini by Arrigo Castellani, the Poeti del Duecento by Gianfranco Contini, the Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini by d’Arco Silvio Avalle). The main section of the work shows the different solutions adopted from the Italian ecdotic tradition in order to represent particular graphic-phonetic and textual phenomena (for example raddoppiamento sintattico or syntactic doubling, assimilation, enclisis, editorial additions and expunction, etc.). Finally are examined some graphic devices, mainly of the nineteenth-century, consolidated from the tradition, but inappropriate, because they are anachronistic compared with old Italian. The work is completed by a synopsis of the different techniques of graphic representation of homographs adopted on the editions of old Italian texts.

La tesi costituisce un’indagine storico-critica su un particolare aspetto dell’ecdotica romanza, e soprattutto italiana: l’uso di segni diacritici o paragrafematici (ad esclusione di quelli specificamente interpuntivi) nell’edizione di testi volgari antichi; un aspetto al quale è stata riservata finora scarsissima attenzione, forse, perché ritenuto marginale e strumentale. Il lavoro è dedicato in buona parte a ricostruire la storia delle varie soluzioni editoriali adottate dai filologi e dagli editori critici in ordine all’individuazione, alla distinzione e alla rappresentazione di particolari fenomeni grafico-fonetici e testuali, a partire dalle prime edizioni scientifiche dell’Ottocento per arrivare alle proposte ecdotiche più recenti, con attenzione sia ai testi letterari che a quelli di tipo pratico e documentario, anche ‘dialettali’.