La lingua delle cronache volgari dell'età carrarese

This doctorate thesis in Romanist studies, is entitled The language of vernacular chronicles of the age of Carraresi, and it is a linguistic description of four chronicles composed in Padua during the first half of the 14th century and the first years of 15th: The history of the borders war by Nicoletto d'Alessio, The Carrara's chronicle by Gatari, the B and D versions of Gesta Magnifica Domus Carrariensis. These chronicles focus on the seigniory of the Carrara in Padua. In this work the texts are studied in all their linguistic levels: the graphic, the phonological, the morphological, the syntactical and the lessical one. The method which has been used is that inherited from the tradition of historical grammar, id est a selection of a large number of phenomena for all levels, illustrating the results of the observation of each of them. By the comparison, for every linguistic passage, of the results relevant to every text, the linguistic similarities and differences among the different chronicles are immediately in relief. From this analysis it turns out that there are important differences among each text, because each of them have been influenced in a different way from the different linguistic models of reference: the Medieval Latin of changery-ecclesiastic tradition, the local vernacular language, the most important literary languages, which are Tuscan and French, and Venetian, the vernacular language of the leading local state. This fact marks an important change in the approach to this type of texts. The historians of italian language have given less importance to chronicles until now, not only for their length, but also because of their particular kind of language, defined as "hybrid language" by first studies of them, definition which more suggests the lost of local vernacular language than the linguistic variety which characterizes chronicles. In this thesis, the syntactical level is the more in-depth studied aspect, for a specific reason. A parallel aim of this thesis is giving some contributions to the knowledge of the syntax of ancient Italian prose. For this purpose it has been used a contrastive method with the contemporary Italian, highlighting the specific features of ancient Italian, and also using the most recent concepts of linguistic science, which has been applicated only in a partial way on ancient Italian texts until now.