The infinitive subjunctive with obscure reference in modern Italian through the eyes of native speakers

Abstract

The paper uses the perspective of native speakers to present an aspect of the topic of the infinitive subjunctive in modern Italian that cannot be extracted through sentence grammar. The study is based on a corpus extracted from the pages of three novels – contemporary Italian fiction – and on a questionnaire distributed to twenty native speakers. Through a linguistic analysis of the informants’ responses to the questionnaire created for this purpose, their point of view is interpreted with regard to the phenomenon under study. The main aim of the study is to get at the strategies that native speakers use in interpreting linguistic facts, and to try to answer the question why the violation of syntactic norms does not interfere with the comprehension of the text.