Movement triggers and the etiology of grammaticalization: The case of Italian postposition fa

This work deals with the Italian particle fa “ago”, which together with expressions of time measure localizes an event in a certain point preceding the moment of elocution. The aim is to show how the particle developed from Old Italian to present, assuming that fa was originally the 3rd person singular of the verb fare “to make/to do”. Drawing on historical data, I suggest an analysis based on movement, arguing for a movement-driven grammaticalization process responsible for the origin of this particle/adposition. This process is interesting because, on the one hand it confirms the prediction of standard theoretical views on grammaticalization (Roberts and Rousseau 2003), so that the mechanism of grammaticalization is the gradual loss of movement, and on the other hand it challenges these views because the items moved leftward in the process are not targets of grammaticalization, suggesting a parasitic etiology of the process that turns light verbs into particles.