Chapter 6 Language contact and expressives in Italian
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Clara Cuonzo
Abstract
Considering data from spontaneous conversations among university students and sentences retrieved via the Twitter search engine, I investigate a case of linguistic contact in youth varieties of Italian. When the word fucking is transferred from English into Italian, it retains its ability to behave as an expressive adjective, an expressive degree-modifier and expressive adverb. I maintain this is a case of global copying (Johanson 2002), in which phonological content, semantic/ pragmatic meaning, and syntactic structure are all together copied from English into Italian. The data presented in this chapter provide initial evidence that the transfer of phonological content can co-occur with transfer of syntactic structures, something cannot be easily accounted for in approaches to language contact like Kuteva (2017) where there is a clear distinction between phonological content and syntactic structures.
Abstract
Considering data from spontaneous conversations among university students and sentences retrieved via the Twitter search engine, I investigate a case of linguistic contact in youth varieties of Italian. When the word fucking is transferred from English into Italian, it retains its ability to behave as an expressive adjective, an expressive degree-modifier and expressive adverb. I maintain this is a case of global copying (Johanson 2002), in which phonological content, semantic/ pragmatic meaning, and syntactic structure are all together copied from English into Italian. The data presented in this chapter provide initial evidence that the transfer of phonological content can co-occur with transfer of syntactic structures, something cannot be easily accounted for in approaches to language contact like Kuteva (2017) where there is a clear distinction between phonological content and syntactic structures.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Chapter 1 Introduction: Contact-related variation and change – crossing the boundaries within and between languages 1
- Chapter 2 Language contact and language attrition: Processes and constellations 39
- Chapter 3 Two modes of contact-induced change in minority languages: Phonology and syntax vs. inflectional morphology 65
- Chapter 4 Variation and change in comparative structures as an interaction of language internal and language external factors: Evidence from Asia Minor Greek 93
- Chapter 5 Linguistic reconstruction and creole emergence: The case of Upper Guinea creoles 119
- Chapter 6 Language contact and expressives in Italian 149
- Chapter 7 Digital code play as a sign of the multicompetent self in the internet discourse of Russian speakers in Italy 169
- Chapter 8 Sociolinguistic typology and language contact in Northern Italy 199
- Chapter 9 Dialect contact and koineization in Italy 225
- Chapter 10 Sociolinguistic norms on the usage of Italian within refugee centres in Italy 255
- Subject index 275
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Chapter 1 Introduction: Contact-related variation and change – crossing the boundaries within and between languages 1
- Chapter 2 Language contact and language attrition: Processes and constellations 39
- Chapter 3 Two modes of contact-induced change in minority languages: Phonology and syntax vs. inflectional morphology 65
- Chapter 4 Variation and change in comparative structures as an interaction of language internal and language external factors: Evidence from Asia Minor Greek 93
- Chapter 5 Linguistic reconstruction and creole emergence: The case of Upper Guinea creoles 119
- Chapter 6 Language contact and expressives in Italian 149
- Chapter 7 Digital code play as a sign of the multicompetent self in the internet discourse of Russian speakers in Italy 169
- Chapter 8 Sociolinguistic typology and language contact in Northern Italy 199
- Chapter 9 Dialect contact and koineization in Italy 225
- Chapter 10 Sociolinguistic norms on the usage of Italian within refugee centres in Italy 255
- Subject index 275
