Vieni anche te?

Abstract

In this paper we return to the question of the use of te, the Italian personal pronoun, as subject instead of complement. According to scientific literature, the diffusion of te in substitution of tu as the subject of the clause is attributed to the spoken variety of language. We aim at verifying this hypothesis and to further document the use of te as subject using existing corpora of both written and spoken language. The research considers old and new issues (for example the diffusion of the coordinative phrase io e te instead of io e tu, on which see Blasco Ferrer, 1992) and intends to represent the phenomenon in quantitative and qualitative terms. In the conclusions it is stated that the phenomenon, even better represented in the spoken versus the written, seems diachronically stable, and sensitive to diatopic factors. The most significant results of the current research consist in having evaluated the presence of the phenomenon separately in the different constructs in which it occurs, and in having identified other contexts of attestation.