Tópicos de ontem, tópicos de hoje: o tratamento da mesóclise e do infinitivo pessoal nas gramáticas de português para italianos (sécs. XIX)

Abstract

The current practice of didactics of the Portuguese language reveals how the Italian student finds special learning difficulties in some areas where Portuguese diverges greatly from Italian. Among these areas, the infinitivo pessoal and the mesóclise or tmesi stand out, peculiarities of the Portuguese language absent in the language of Dante. This article intends to adopt a diachronic perspective, proposing a journey through the first grammars from Portuguese to Italians, published in the nineteenth century, choosing as terminus ad quem the First World War. The questions to which this article will try to give an answer are three: 1) can the grammars of this first period give said difficulties an effective answer from a didactic point of view? 2) with the variability of the nature of grammars also varies the awareness that certain aspects of the Portuguese language represent a special and specific degree of difficulty for the Italian student? 3) Does the way these difficulties are made explicit or analysed also vary? From the answer to these questions depends on the possibility of understanding and evaluating to what extent the teaching methods of Portuguese for Italian speakers took account, already in XIXº century, the specificities of the learner and had as objective to obtain an advanced and exhaustive linguistic competence.