Volume 26, Issue 1

The goal of this paper is to offer an overview of the grammatical and lexical properties of spatial categories in Aquilan, an Italian dialect. The paper shows that spatial prepositions (e.g. a ‘at/to’, ‘nfronte a ‘in front of’), pronouns and indexicals (e.g. pe‘nfronte lit. ‘to in front (of a place)’, loc’arrete ‘there behind’, respectively) share two key properties. The first, a lexical property, is their ability to refer to the location of discourse referent, whence the “spatial” label. The second, a grammatical property, is their similar distribution in sentences and discourse contexts. The paper thoroughly presents these Aquilan data and sketches, as a theoretical analysis that connects these categories into a unified account.

The present article discusses how the combination of structural (qualitative) and algorithmic (quantitative) perspectives provides valuable insights into geolinguistic patterning and variability, and hence testifies to the importance of the integrating approach in addressing geolinguistic complexity. In doing so, it shows how language is constantly modulated in the form of innovations that emerge in structurally layered and causal formations, dictated by a subtle interplay between system-based and system-external properties. A case that accounts for this kind of geolinguistic complexity is provided by this data-driven study on Berber (Afro-asiatic), which shows how certain phonological and morphological innovation processes triggered by the vocalisation of the liquids /r/, /ṛ/, /rr/ and /ṛṛ/ in Rif Berber (North, Northeast, and Northwest Morocco) create language variation and change. Furthermore, the Berber data examined demonstrate the significant role of certain system-internal factors, such as economy and code conformity, in the diffusion of new phonetic, phonological, and morphological items. In order to better understand the intricacy of the various vocalisation phenomena addressed in the study, the results of the qualitative analysis (synchrony and diachrony) are also contrasted with the algorithmic results ensuing from computing geolinguistic distances by means of the Levenshtein distance calculating method with phone strings tokenised in pair-wise alignments (pondered variables).

This paper presents the results of a preliminary study of documentation and description of Sammarinese, a peripheral variety of Romagnol spoken in the Republic of San Marino. Despite having been the country’s primary oral language for almost 1,000 years, Sammarinese is on the verge of extinction today as universal education and economic development have caused language shift to Italian beginning from the 1960s. A corpus of primary oral language data was collected from 17 informants in the form of semi-structured interviews with the goal of creating an archive of oral language histories in Sammarinese. These data, together with a corpus of vernacular and folkloric literature, served as the database for a descriptive analysis of some of the major phonological and morphosyntactic traits of the language. The results confirm Sammarinese’s status as a borderline Romagnol variety. However, the findings also reveal a language that stands apart from neighboring varieties due to complex historical and geographical factors, including a Celtic substratum from the pre-Roman and Roman times, a Byzantine Greek heritage and Lombard/ Germanic influence from the second half of the first millennium, and a geographic position that resulted in linguistic isolation from the vernaculars spoken in the Central Romagnol plain.

The article deals with the influence of colloquial syntax on the spontaneous non-prepared media discourse of professional presenters. It presents a syntactic analysis of radio program broadcasts on two Maribor radio stations, i.e. the commercial station Radio City and the Slovene public station Radio Maribor. Specifically, the paper focuses on typical syntactic colloquial features, i.e. incomplete syntactic patterns, interruptions, repetitions and corrections.

The argument put forward in the present article is that many Polish dialectal plant names do not have folk roots. The only way to ascertain the true origin of a given name is by analysing the history of the dialectal name and related names in other languages. Such an analysis leads to the conclusion that Polish dialectal names have various origins. Some of them are truly dialectal, i.e. they originate from Polish dialects, while others are colloquial, non-dialectal native names that have been adapted by particular dialects. Yet others are relatively new loanwords and new calques, while another group originates from Old Polish forms no longer in use in non-dialectal Polish. The latter do not comprise a homogeneous category. Instead, they fall into three subcategories: Polish names originating from the Polish language or inherited from Old Slavic, old loanwords employed in Old Polish and no longer in use today except in Polish dialects, and finally, an often misclassified group of names comprising old calques. In the summary of the present study the author emphasises the importance of a diachronic and comparative approach to analysing dialectal plant names. She highlights the existence of numerous calques, especially old ones, whose presence had previously been overlooked due to their native and sometimes almost entirely dialectal character. Therefore, a superficial, synchronic analysis would not reveal their long and rich history or the fact that they also have counterparts in non-Slavic languages, indeed often have ancient roots.

The Northern Aukštaitian dialect of Panevėžys of the Lithuanian Language is interesting in synchronic, diachronic, typological, and ethnogenetic aspects; its idioms bear some witness to contacts of Lithuanian and Semigalian languages (Kačiuškienė 2009). The secondary types of pitch accents of the Northern Aukštaitian dialect of Panevėžys were discussed in Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 24 (Kačiuškienė 2016). The auditory and instrumental research proved that two secondary types of pitch accents contrast in the pure and mixed diphthongs of the forms of some dialectal verbs and denominative words in the Northern Aukštaitian dialect of Panevėžys of the Lithuanian Language. This is a distinctive opposition. It is possible that the opposition relates to Proto-Baltic accentuation paradigms. The secondary types of pitch accents have different acoustic properties. The most distinct are the quantitative characteristics of diphthongs and characteristics of the fundamental pitch. The detailed analysis of the prosodic system of the Northern Panevėžys dialect in the present article is based on the data of the author’s native dialect and the instrumental and auditory research (see (Kačiuškienė 2006)). The results of the research of the Northern Aukštaitian dialect of Panevėžys are important to the comparative and historical dialectology of the Baltic languages; they can be used in typological research and in the classroom as teaching materials.

The article presents the research findings on the use of various social varieties of the Slovenian language, i. e. Standard and Non–standard language, by the students studying Slovenian language and literature in Maribor. A brief introduction is followed by a description of language culture and its efforts to improve the subject matter and the importance of the norm in a language with rich social language varieties use. The research indicates the largely positive attitude of young people to the use of their own dialect in different language situations thus shifting the society’s traditionally negative attitude towards the use of dialectal language, perceiving it as a value and as an indicator of one’s personal and national identity. General dialectal characteristics are distinguished in non-formal communication and the informants' switching between the Standard language and the dialect in non-formal communication is a rare occurance, showing that the environment of schooling and the field of study are not prevailing influence factors in choosing a specific social language variety.