Nominativo e Accusativo nelle lingue dell’Italia antica diverse dal Latino

This paper is part of a group inquiry, developed in the late 90s of the 20th c., concerning the hypothesis that the true unmarked Case in Latin was Accusative rather than Nominative, and deals particularly with the ‘comparative dimension’ of that hypothesis, i.e. the syntactic situation of other italic languages. The italic evidence of the contexts where, according to the promoters of the research, the so-called default Accusative would occur is thus surveyed and, discussing its archaeological and antiquarian contexts in individual cases, the author shows that all that evidence can be traced back to ‘elliptical constructions’ (i.e. occurrences of phonologically null but syntactically active Verbs) or to other well known syntactic phenomena, suggesting that this was the situation in Latin as well. Other examples of ‘non canonical’ Accusative in italic languages are then reviewed and recognized as instances of Preposition incorporation onto Verbs of different types or as particular cases of predicative small clauses in argumental (accusatival) contexts. The paper ends by examining various examples of nominals in ‘absolute’ use and noticing that they evenly occur in Nominative, which thus proves to be the true unmarked Case, also utilized by italic languages for ‘asyntactical’ uses: the final theoretical suggestion concerning the conditions for licensing those Nominative in non structural contexts (i.e. the direct lexical insertion in an utterance ‘root’ functional structure), can also apply beyond italic languages, accounting in the first place for some particular epigraphic Latin evidence and then seeking for a more general value.