Michele Colombo

SUMMARY: Several occurrences of some colloquial syntactic structures (left and right dislocation of direct object, che as a multipurpose conjunction) may already be found in Manzoni’s first draft of his novel, the so called "Fermo e Lucia". However, other types of informal constructions, such as dislocation of prepositional object and relative clauses with resumptive pronouns, become frequent only later, in the last edition of 1840-1842. The latter structures are all characterized by a high level of redundancy, which seems therefore the feature that Manzoni more strongly associates with breaking free from the tradition. On the other hand, parting from literary standards does not necessarily mean, as it is currently assumed, moving toward the spoken language, because some of the constructions that are used exclusively in the dialogues of the novel (right dislocation of direct object, cleft sentence) show a low level of redundancy, and some redundant structures are used by Manzoni just in narration.