The new ne: an incipient restandardization process in contemporary Italian

Abstract The paper deals with an ongoing change in the clitic paradigm of contemporary Italian, namely the incipient overextension of functions of the clitic ne. In the standard variety ne can only stand for prepositional phrases consisting of di + [noun phrase] and da + [noun phrase], such as those found in genitival, partitive, and locative constructions or in passive ‘by’-phrases. In contemporary Italian, on the other hand, ne is increasingly appearing as a substitute of a + [noun phrase] when used as the second argument of intransitive bivalent verbs, such as accennare (a) ‘to mention’, appassionarsi (a) ‘to get passionate (about)’, and sopravvivere (a) ‘to survive’. The latter use has not received much attention in the literature. This overextension is observed in a number of verbs, drawing on data from four corpora of written and spoken Italian, and is discussed as an incipient change from above, originating in formal registers of Italian and moving downwards into the neo-standard and (albeit rarely) colloquial varieties. The change seems to have been triggered and favored by the fact that the standard variants for that slot of the paradigm, namely locative vi and ci, are avoided because they are considered too obsolete or low-prestige respectively, and also by the fact that these clitics, when combined with others, especially in pronominal verbs, might be judged agrammatical by some speakers.