Marcatori conclusivi del discorso diretto in italiano antico

In this paper we deal with a specific subset of direct speech markers, to which little or no attention was has been drawn so far: the expressions which codify the ending of the direct speech (“marcatori conclusivi del discorso diretto”). We analyse these markers in Old Italian texts, occasionally comparing them with Latin or Old French equivalents. In the introduction (§1), we take into account some problems related with ancient literary texts, namely the practice of spoken-word reading and the lack of systematic punctuation marking that helps text segmentation. After that (§2), we classify the different strategies ancient writers had at their disposal to signal that a direct speech is over, hence that what follows has to be interpreted as the narrator voice; the markers are organized in an informational range, from the most explicit to the most implicit ones ("disse"; "quando ebbe detto"; "a queste parole"; "allora"; [Ø]). Thereafter (§3), we focus on two specific markers, the participial marker ("detto questo") and the “connector + finite tense” marker (quando ebbe detto questo) in a corpus of 9 texts. Though the meaning displayed by these two markers is roughly synonymic, their occurrence is not uniform among the analysed texts. The explanation of their distribution is that they belong to different Diskurstraditionen: “quando + finite tense” is an expression well attested in Romance narrations (the so called quand-Satz); on the contrary, detto questo appears to be dependent from Latin tradition.