On the syntax of dependency in late sixteenth-century Europe

Abstract

The need for studies on the history of dependency linguistics has been recently pointed out, aiming at tracing back to the origin of hierarchical grammatical relations and dependency-oriented approaches before the advent of the most renowned Tesnière’s model (Imrényi/Mazziotta 2020a). This study investigates on the emergence of the concept of syntactic dependency in missionary linguistics, focusing on the role of Jesuit grammarians on the development of the notion of subordination. In particular, the analysis concentrates on the first grammar of the indigenous South American language of Aymara, written by the Italian missionary Ludovico Bertonio at the end of the sixteenth century. I will focus on the second part of the grammar, which is devoted to syntax, by dwelling upon the innovative syntactic metalanguage that is shared by all the Jesuit grammarians working at the same school of Juli near Lake Titicaca in the Andes Mountains. Although these Jesuit grammars still lack a systematic theory of dependency, Bertonio uses the term dependencia and is aware of the verb centrality in constructing the whole sentence, differently from the more traditional approach in terms of binary subject-predicate division of the clause. Moreover, he extends the traditional word-based notion of determination (and government) (cf. Luthala 2020: 43; Colombat 2020) to the relationship between two different sentences, i.e. the main or independent clause (oración determinante) and the dependent clause (oración determinada), which are described as pertaining to different levels of dependency. Thus, contrarily to what previoulsy assumed (Percival 1990; Auroux 2008; Graffi 2019, 2021), an earlier distinction between linear order and structural order seems to emerge before that the concept was refined within the syntactic analysis of Port-Royal grammarians.