Abstract (eng)
The aim of this thesis is to analyse the morphosyntactic developmental steps from Vulgar Latin to Italian on the basis of what is generally considered by researchers to probably be the first literary work of prose, Il Novellino. This work is not only regarded as the forerunner of the Decameron, but above all offers valuable insights for a better understanding of the volgare of the 13th century, and not least of today's Italian. As a mirror of the medieval zeitgeist, which was concerned with language and its development, this collection of one hundred short novellas, through its diversity of content and its stylistic ideal of brevitas, emphasises the meta-linguistic interest in the power of the word and the “bel parlare”. The morphosyntactic transitions from Vulgar Latin to Italian, also taking into account the distinction from Classical Latin, are first considered theoretically in this paper and then illustrated and analysed through specific novellas. In particular, the morphology of word derivations and compounds is analysed in more detail and the ancient sentence structure (e.g. the position of verbs and pronouns) and the use of tenses and moods are examined on a syntactic level. The selected ten novellas are organised into thematic blocks and differences and similarities of the semantically reflected language are revealed. In all observations at the word and sentence level, the proximity to the Latin mother tongue is clearly evident, whereby these morphosyntactic phenomena reveal an intermediate language between the Latin and Italian volgari.