The Diachrony of Progressives in Venetan: A Syntactic Analysis

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the diachronic development of the Venetan progressive construction formed with drio (“behind”) and an infinitive. Although this construction has traditionally been described as a prepositional infinitive, I argue that its historical evolution calls into question the prepositional status of drio and the nominal nature of the infinitive it introduces. Building on minimalist assumptions about labeling and agreement, the analysis proposes that early stages of the construction involved a nominalized infinitive embedded under a PP, with nominalization arising through agreement rather than categorial recategorization. Diachronically, the loss of nominal layers and of overt determiner realization leads to the reanalysis of drio as an aspectual head and to the emergence of a purely verbal progressive structure in Modern (Central) Venetan. The paper further situates the Venetan pattern within a broader cross‐linguistic perspective, drawing parallels with Danish and Quebec French progressive constructions, and argues that the instability of nominalized infinitives provides a principled explanation for their loss. More generally, I propose that nominalization effects can be derived without recourse to costly recategorization operations and that minoritized languages such as Venetan offer particularly transparent evidence for diachronic change.