Antecedenti «difficili», antecedenti «facili»: sulle riprese anaforiche nella Composizione del mondo di Restoro d'Arezzo

The first original encyclopedia in vernacular Italian – the Composizione del mondo by Restoro d’Arezzo – remains to this day a poorly studied work, particularly in terms of textual analysis. This contribution aims to deepen a particular aspect of Restoro’s prose textuality – the system of anaphoric references – which exhibits a specificity deriving from the diverse requirements underlying the structuring of an ancient scientific text. By observing the contextual and non-contextual factors that make an antecedent more or less accessible in the textual circuit in relation to the markedness of the pro-forms used in anaphoric references, it was noted that didactic explicitness requirements have led to the prevalence of hyper-signaled anaphoric chains, but with an important exception constituted by human, humanized, and animated referents. In the latter case, the choice of pro-forms seems instead to be determined by the author’s epistemological choices. This study aims to contribute – in the form of material analyzed from a textual perspective – to the study of pre-Galilean vernacular scientific prose. Furthermore, we have attempted to propose some of the directions that we believe are important to keep in mind in transferring the notions and methods of modern textual linguistics to old texts.