Abstract
Though the emergence of modality from verbs of motion is a well-attested phenomenon, the assessment of cross-linguistically valid pathways still remains a desideratum. In this paper I offer an outline of the pathway followed by the understudied Italian modal verb occorrere ‘to happen; to be necessary/needed’ (from Latin occurrere, originally ‘to run towards, into something or someone’). Based on the analysis of two large corpora, this paper reconstructs the emergence of the impersonal constructions ‘occorre + INF’ and ‘occorre che + SBJV’ vis-à-vis the personal one (‘to be needed’). The data and their analysis confirm the complexity of the pathway: in fact, the emergence of modality is strongly interlaced with the co-presence of the ancient meaning ‘to happen’, but also with the emergence of a deontic construction in which occorrere assumes the function of the auxiliary essere (‘to be’) as well as with the later evolution of another construction with negative polarity and in which occorrere is a telic metaphoric verb of motion. Though the pathway followed by Italian occorrere could be idiosyncratic in a cross-linguistic perspective, its in-depth study sheds new light on the question of how modality emerges and in particular on its source domains and their relations.
Aknowledgments
I wish to warmly thank Helena Bermúdez Sabel for the preparation of the corpora (lemmatization, querying, compilation of occurrences), Daria Zalesskaya for answering my questions on Russian and the two anonymous peer-reviewers for their helpful comments. I am very grateful to Johan van der Auwera who read and commented a previous draft of this paper, and to the editors of the journal who accepted the paper and carefully prepared it for publication. Last, but not least, I am also very thankful to the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University for its support which granted me access to bibliographic resources during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Research funding: This research stems from the SNSF project WoPoss (A World of Possibilities. Modal pathways over an extra-long period of time: the diachrony of modality in the Latin language) founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant agreement no PP00P1_176778, funder’s DOI: https://doi.org/10.13039/501100001711).
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