Some observations on the language of "Secchia rapita"

Abstract

The paper outlines how and how much the language contributes to the mixture of «grave e burlesco» in Alessandro Tassoni’s Secchia rapita, founding work of the heroicomic genre. The serious component – common to the contemporary poetry inspired by the linguistic models of Petrarch, Boccaccio and Tasso – is obtained thanks to the artificial word order and the cooccurence of different phonomorphological features (all legitimized by the codification of Bembo and the contemporary literary use); the burlesque component is obtained, in addition to the disproportion between the story and the epic metric-syntactic system, thanks to the use of a daily or parodic vocabulary