Abstract

The paper starts from the concept of ‘heavy’ connectives, introduced by Luca Serianni in his book Italiani scritti regarding the prepositional locutions that typically act as textual connectives in legal texts. On the basis of a perusal of recent normative texts, the most recurrent connectives are reviewed (the frequency and polyfunctionality of the preposition per stands out in particular), which are classified according to the logical-syntactic relationship they represent. The paper then focuses on the role of nominalization, which favors not only the prevalence of intraphrasal connectives over interphrasal ones, but also the abundance of connectives formed by prepositional locutions.