Connettivo disgiuntivo e “general extender”. Considerazioni diacroniche e terminologiche su 'piuttosto che' nell’italiano neostandard

Over the last decades, the Italian phrase A piuttosto che B, which normally expresses a choice (‘A rather than B’), has been increasingly used in oral productions with a disjunctive meaning (‘either A or B’) and this use is nowadays regarded as a feature of the so-called “neo-standard” Italian. Owing to its apparent lack of logical consistency this use has been severely deprecated by some linguists, but on account of its widespread use, it can safely be regarded as a component of “neo-standard” Italian both as a disjunctive connective and as a “general extender”. This paper aims at retracing the origins of this innovation and the ways the phrase has acquired a disjunctive meaning. The paper takes into consideration the three main reasons put forward to justify the rebuttal by some linguists (the “grammatical tradition”, the possible ambiguity, and an “aesthetic” intolerance), and shows the weakness of each of them. Diachronically, an important step in the evolution has been the generalization of the syntagm piuttosto che, whose two elements were previously separated (piuttosto A che B), in a construction that stressed the comparative value of the expression. After the grammaticalization of the syntagm, a phenomenon of “semantic bleaching” took place and opened the way to innovations. Moreover, the frequent use of the phrase in a list of several items, not just two, seems connected with an ancient tendency towards serialisation in rhetorical uses of such construction. Given that the innovation spread from Northern Italy, it seems that some kind of diatopic intolerance plays also a role in the rebuttal.