Secondary Functions of Tenses in Italian Comedies of the XVI Century

Abstract

At its present stage, the Italian language of informal communication seems to demonstrate a lot of innovations. For example, the colloquial use of verb tenses is limited to Presente Indicativo, Passato Prossimo or Passato Remoto, Imperfetto, and Trapassato Prossimo. The obvious simplification of the verb system eventually expands the functions of each tense. However, a diachronic analysis may prove that this process is not as innovative as it seems. This research featured Italian comedies of the XVI century, which saw the emergence of a unified state language. The comedies provide a valuable research material: in pursuit of comic effect, their texts often imitated the contemporary colloquial speech. As a result, they yield a lot of valuable examples of everyday communication of previous centuries. Characters that portrayed lower-class people often used tenses in their secondary functions, e.g., they replaced the subjunctive with the indicative, used the present to indicate the near future, formulated polite requests with the help of the imperfect, the functions of the future tense were narrowed down to an epistemic modality, etc. Therefore, the modern Italian language is not developing new constructions: it is undergoing a re-standardization, where colloquial phenomena are gradually becoming a norm. The prescriptive norm is being replaced by a descriptive one, which reflects the actual speech of native speakers.