I costrutti preconcessivi dalle Origini all’italiano contemporaneo

Though ‘frozen’ in monological written texts, some grammatical constructions still show traces of the dialogical prototypical situation of the utterance, based on face-to-face oral interaction between speaker and hearer. Pre-concessives are a good example of this kind of constructions, because they imply a (potential) dialogical-polyphonic interplay between the sender’s and other people’s voices. In this perspective, the paper describes some paratactic correlative structures used in contemporary and Old Italian to express pre-concessives, and presents what seem to be happened in between to a couple of discourse markers involved in these constructions. Inparticular, the Old Italian admission marker bene (situated in the first part of a pre-concessive) is absent in contemporary Italian:it firstly became a formative of the concessive subordinating conjunctions benché and sebbene, and from the beginning of the 17th century combines with sì in bensì as an objection marker (situated in the second part of a pre-concessive); but in the next century bensì also occurs as an admission marker in the first part of these constructions, where by the end of the 17th century we can also find sì alone (absent in Old Italian), which maintains this function until today.