ANALISI DELLA GRAMMATICHETTA DI L. B. ALBERTI: SPIE SINTATTICHE

The article focuses on the analysis of some significant aspects of Leon Battista Alberti’s Grammatichetta from the syntactic point of view. After a brief excursus on the cultural context from which the work emerges and after having outlined its structure and its fundamental features, the following sections are dedicated, following Poggiogalli’s (1999)’s method, to the analysis of the syntactic observations that are deducible from the work, with greater attention to what are defined as potential macro-syntactic “spies”, i.e. grammatical metalanguage, Alberti’s personal examples, some linguistic structures worthy of interest, such as the analysis of the “asseverativo” ‘conditional’ mood or the conjunction/pronoun che, and some passages from the pamphlet and from Alberti’s production which can reveal interesting elements of his syntactic analysis and, more specifically, the syntactic model the author had in mind while writing the Grammatichetta. Some key comparisons with authors of the Renaissance grammatical tradition, such as Bembo and Fortunio, are also offered to trace the elements of continuity and discontinuity of Albertian grammatical analysis. Finally, the last section is dedicated to some reflections on the concept of grammaticality, with a suggestive hypothesis on the reason for the absence of a specific section related to syntax in this work.