THE FUNCTIONING OF THE PRONOUN FORM GLI IN THE 16TH-CENTURY ITALIAN LANGUAGE
The article focuses on the polifunctional pronoun form gli and its patterns of use in the 16th-century Italian. In Old Italian, as a result of phonetic changes, this form became virtually universal, as it performed various subject, direct object and indirect object functions and co-occurred with other developments of the Lat. ille. In Modern Italian gli has several uses, but they are not stylistically equal: gli as the indirect object masculine singular pronoun is normative, gli as the indirect object plural form is colloquially marked, and gli as the indirect object feminine singular pronoun is regarded as a vulgarism. The 16th century, in a way, was a transition period when certain uses of gli that later became obsolete are only present in comic genres and in the writings by semiliterate authors. Another interesting feature is the growing discrepancy between the dialect of Florence and the codified norm. The reduction of superfluous uses of gli in the 16th-century Italian has not been dealt with specially before. The present piece of research aims at assessing the way the functions of gli were gradually being reduced and differentiated stylistically, which becomes evident when one confronts prose and verse writings belonging to different genres and to authors from different regions of Italy.