Influssi inglesi sulla sintassi italiana : uno studio preliminare sul caso della perifrasi progressiva

This paper investigates the effects of linguistic interference on the diffusion of the progressive periphrasis in Italian, comparing its incidence in texts translated from English and original Italian texts. In particular, drawing on a debate started some years ago (cf. Durante 1981 and Bertinetto 1986), the paper aims to verify whether the increase in the frequency of the progressive periphrasis in Italian, can be attributed to the influence of translations from English, vis-à-vis a process of specialisation already under way within the Italian verb system. In order to do so, recourse is made also to the tools of corpus linguistics, which are employed for the quantitative analysis of small corpora created ad hoc. In the first stage of the analysis, data reveal that in contemporary (written) usage, the frequency of the progressive periphrasis is higher in English than in Italian original texts, while translations from English feature an intermediate frequency rate, thus supporting the starting hypothesis. In the second stage, the analysis is meant to verify the hypothesis that Italian has witnessed an increase in the use of the progressive periphrasis in the 1950s, as an effect of the translation of popular fiction – especially detective stories – and of film dubbing (Durante 1981). Also in this case, data seem to confirm this hypothesis: comparing novels translated in the 19th century and in the 1920s and 1930s, with detective stories translated in the 1950, it emerges that the frequency of the progressive periphrasis remains unvaried until the 1930s, while increasing significantly in the 1950s.