La distribuzione dei clitici come argomenti obliqui: il caso di parlare

The paper aims at identifying the criteria that govern the distribution of clitics as arguments, and in particular of the personal pronouns and of the particles ci, vi and ne, traditionally classified as adverbs. The distribution cannot be predicted based on the form of the corresponding noun phrase, but requires the identification of the involved grammatical or conceptual relation. The indirect object of ditransitive verbs is occupied by the dative form of a personal pronoun. Among spatial relations, Location and Goal take ci or vi, while Source takes ne. Prepositional object is the most complex case: The clitic is selected by the controlling verb just as the preposition is, but independently of it. Interestingly, the ontological type of the referent, primarily its being human or inanimate, is not relevant, which suggests that ci and ne share some critical properties with pronouns.
An interesting case is the alternance between the personal pronoun and ci in the expression of the addressee of the verb parlare, ‘speak’. Among the arguments of parlare, the speaker is systematically entrusted to the subject and the message to a prepositional phrase, while the addressee documents different forms, including the comitative expression. A detailed corpus-based analysis focuses on the alternance between the pronominal form and ci in both written and spoken texts. The conclusions are that the use of ci as a substitute for the prepositional forms is less recurrent than the use of atone and tonic pronominal forms in both written and spoken Italian; in particular, it is clearly more present in the spoken than in the written language and the occurrences obtained in the latter are taken either from interviews or, in the case of narrative texts, from direct or indirect speech. Finally, almost all occurrences of the clitic ci with parlare belong to the reduced construction, which does not express the content and entrusts the addressee to the comitative form.