Volume 37, Issue 1

The variety of Italian spoken in Bolzano (South Tyrol) represents a singular case in Italy, because it is not the result of a long-term contact between standard and Italo-Romance dialects but rather the outcome of a process of levelling and koineization. In such sociolinguistic scenario, it is interesting to study phonological variability in Bolzano Italian with the aim of understanding which language varieties have possibly played a role as models from a sociolinguistic point of view. The purpose of our exploratory study is to characterize this variety within the spectrum of variation between the standard and the regional norm. In our analysis, we will focus on the set of mid vowels as a window to understand which variety of Italian BI most closely resembles. Through a corpus-based analysis, we will investigate the phonological distribution of mid vowels (for both Italian and Tyrolean speakers), in order to explore whether it can be explained on the basis of a contextual or a lexical distribution.

Despite the presence of several cross-variety studies on spoken varieties of regional Italian, research on the intonational transition across geographically close varieties is still scarce. This article tackles this issue by providing a first cross-variety comparison of question intonation in three neighboring varieties of Italian spoken in Campania, namely Neapolitan, Salerno and Cilento Italian. The three varieties are chosen based on their position with respect to the isoglosses identifying the Eboli-Lucera line. Such comparison is made possible using the methodological protocol outlined by Gili Fivela et al. (2015) and specifically concerns yes-no, wh- and disjunctive questions. This explorative study aims at identifying intonational features differenced by frequency of occurrence across space, thereby providing a basis for further quantitative studies on spatial distribution. Based on a corpus elicited with a combination of Discourse Completion Task and reading task, we analyze the phonological features of question tunes in Cilento Italian, while also comparing them to their counterparts in Neapolitan and Salerno Italian. Results show that the three varieties present systemic, realizational and phonotactic differences as well as differences in the frequency of occurrence of tonal events. The intraregional variation across Campania Italian varieties hints at an intonational transition featuring a smooth geographic cline.

This paper deals with various aspects of the use of the subjunctive in spoken Italian. Firstly, a brief overview is provided of the interplay of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors underlying the selection of the subjunctive in various syntactic structures. Special attention is paid to the differences in subjunctive use in factual and non-factual contexts, pointing out that the former are less studied and less affected by normative injunctions than the latter. The focus then falls on factual contexts, in particular subordinate clauses which depend on factive and semi-factive governors. The investigation is based on KIParla, a corpus of spoken Italian consisting of different types of interactions with speakers of various origins and social backgrounds. It is argued that in the factual context at hand the subjunctive fulfills a specific set of functions, mostly related to the speaker’s stance towards the content of the subordinate clause. Finally, a statistical analysis is performed using conditional inference trees and random forests in order to uncover the linguistic and extra-linguistic conditioning of subjunctive use. The analysis shows that in the context under observation it is only linguistic factors that significantly condition mood selection; the use of the subjunctive is substantially insensitive to socio-stylistic and geographic variation, and therefore a socially shared pattern of variation has emerged.

The paper deals with an ongoing change in the clitic paradigm of contemporary Italian, namely the incipient overextension of functions of the clitic ne . In the standard variety ne can only stand for prepositional phrases consisting of di  + [noun phrase] and da  + [noun phrase], such as those found in genitival, partitive, and locative constructions or in passive ‘by’-phrases. In contemporary Italian, on the other hand, ne is increasingly appearing as a substitute of a  + [noun phrase] when used as the second argument of intransitive bivalent verbs, such as accennare (a) ‘to mention’, appassionarsi (a) ‘to get passionate (about)’, and sopravvivere (a) ‘to survive’. The latter use has not received much attention in the literature. This overextension is observed in a number of verbs, drawing on data from four corpora of written and spoken Italian, and is discussed as an incipient change from above, originating in formal registers of Italian and moving downwards into the neo-standard and (albeit rarely) colloquial varieties. The change seems to have been triggered and favored by the fact that the standard variants for that slot of the paradigm, namely locative vi and ci , are avoided because they are considered too obsolete or low-prestige respectively, and also by the fact that these clitics, when combined with others, especially in pronominal verbs, might be judged agrammatical by some speakers.

In 1994, in a thought-provoking paper focusing on the developments emerging in the renewed standard variety of Italian, Monica Berretta formulated a few previsions concerning the future admittance into the norm of a number of traits, in her own words, “features, or better, clusters of features that, in today’s Italian, appear more likely to succeed in establishing themselves in the ongoing process of language change, since they are both co-occurrent and typologically coherent [ my translation ]”. Those features included the incipient emergence of three negative constructions: i) a construction involving the negative operator mica (< Latin ‘crumb’), either in post-verbal position without a pre-verbal negative marker (e.g. Sono mica scemo ‘I am not a fool’) or ii) in pre-verbal position (e.g. Mica sono scemo ‘I am not a fool’) and iii) a sentential negation entailing the cleft construction non è che (‘it is not that’) + S (e.g. Questo intervento non è che c’entri molto con il programma del congresso… ‘It is not that this proposal is particularly relevant to the conference’s theme…’), which Berretta considered to be favoured in prognostic terms. In this paper, the occurrences of negative constructions within the KIParla corpus will be compared with the corresponding occurrences in a thirty-hour corpus extracted from the Teche Rai data base [www.teche.rai.it], dating back to the 60s, 70s and 80s of the twentieth century. It will be argued that the cleft construction non è che + S has hitherto prevailed at the expense of the others (involving the use of the negative operator mica ), that have specialised to express a few distinctive pragmatic and discursive functions.

This paper explores the theoretical question of linguistic coherence by investigating lexical variation in contemporary Italian. In order to tackle issues regarding the coherence of lexical choice, variation is investigated with methods from lexical lectometry, which approaches the structure of language varieties (i.e. lects) by studying aggregate-level lexical distances between them. Based on uniformity measures, as introduced by Geeraerts et al. (1999), we have calculated the internal and external uniformity of spoken and written traditional standard Italian (represented by the academic section of the CORIS corpus for written Italian and the formal parts of the KIP corpus for spoken Italian) and neo-standard Italian (represented by the ParlaTO corpus for spoken Italian and the newspaper section of the CORIS corpus). The results confirm the hypothesis that two standard norms coexist in contemporary Italian and that traditional standard Italian appears to be more coherent at the lexical level than neo-standard Italian. Yet the study also indicates that other forms of coherence exist in contemporary Italian, depending on the adopted theoretical and methodological framework.