Storia di una perifrasi: prendere a+ infinito

Abstract

The long life of the inchoative periphrasis prendere a+ infinitive in the history of Italian shows specific stages of the event  unfolding. The construction is attested since the oldest documents and regularly shows animate human subjects . The most significant  change is represented by the possibility of inanimate subjects which is attested only at the end of the19th century. In Modern Italian the periphrasis prendere a tends  to assume a literary character, is found in literary prose while it is absent in corpora of spoken Italian (Ballarè, Fiorentini, Miola 2024). The notion of phasal verbs and periphrases as autonomous semantic component  whose function is to focus on specific phases of the event (Bertinetto 2023) may suggest new interpretation for this type of construction..