Language variety as a linguistic subsystem: typological implications
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.2785-0943/19725Keywords:
language variety, corpus-based typology, multivariate statistical analysis, ItalianAbstract
This paper emphasizes the importance of language variety in typological linguistics and its role in understanding inter- and intralingual variation. Adopting a corpus-based perspective, the paper explores the covariation structure that links linguistic phenomena and social information, revealing distinct linguistic subsystems within a language. Two case studies of sociolinguistic variation in Italian illustrate how language varieties emerging from the data can carry micro-typological meaning. The first study empirically tests the co-existence of ‘neo-standard Italian’ and the traditional literary standard in speakers’ usage, while the second is a phonological analysis of the allophony of /r/ in Italian spoken by a bilingual community in South Tyrol (Italy). The analysis indicates that the integration of language varieties into typological research allows for a more complex representation of the hierarchical structure of linguistic phenomena.
Downloads
References
Auer, Peter. 1997. Co-Occurrence Restrictions between Linguistic Variables: A Case for Social Dialectology, Phonological Theory and Variation Studies. In Hinskens, Frans L. & Van Hout, Roeland & Wetzels, W. Leo (eds.), Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, vol. 146, 69. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. (doi:10.1075/cilt.146.05aue)
Ballarè, Silvia. 2020. L’italiano neo-standard oggi: stato dell’arte. Italiano LinguaDue 12(2). 469–492. (doi:10.13130/2037-3597/15013)
Ballarè, Silvia & Inglese, Guglielmo. 2023. Analyzing language variation: Where sociolinguistics and linguistic typology meet. In Ballarè, Silvia & Inglese, Guglielmo (eds.), Sociolinguistic and Typological Perspectives on Language Variation, 1–27. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
Beaman, Karen V. & Sering, Konstantin. 2022. Measuring change in lectal coherence across real- and apparent-time. In Beaman, Karen & Guy, Gregory R. (eds.), The coherence of linguistic communities: orderly heterogeneity and social meaning, 87–105. New York: Routledge.
Beaman, Karen V. & Guy, Gregory R. (eds.). 2022. The coherence of linguistic communities: orderly heterogeneity and social meaning (Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics). New York, NY: Routledge.
Beavers, John & Levin, Beth & Tham, Shiao Wei. 2010. The typology of motion expression revisited. Journal of Linguistics 46(3). 331–377.
Benedetti, Marina & Ricca, Davide. 2002. The systems of deictic place adverbs in the Mediterranean: Some general remarks. Mediterranean languages. Papers from the MEDTYP workshop, 13–32. Bochum: Brockmeyer.
Bernini, Giuliano. 2010. Word classes and the coding of spatial relations in motion events: A contrastive typological approach. In Marotta, Giovanna & Lenci, Alessandro & Meini, Linda & Rovai, Francesco (eds.), Space in Language. Proceedings of the Pisa International Conference, 29–52. Pisa: ETS.
Berruto, Gaetano. 1987. Sociolinguistica dell’italiano contemporaneo. Roma: La Nuova Italia Scientifica.
Berruto, Gaetano. 2004. Sprachvarietät - Sprache (Gesamtsprache, historische Sprache). . In Ammon, Ulrich & Dittmar, Norbert & Mattheier, Klaus J. & Trudgill, Peter (eds.), Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Wissenschaft von Sprache und Gesellschaft, vol. 1, 188–195. 2nd edn. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
Berruto, Gaetano. 2009. Identifing dimensions of linguistic variation in a language space. In Auer, Peter & Schmidt, Jürgen Erich (eds.), Language and Space. An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation. Vol. 1. Theories and Methods, 226–241. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. (doi:10.1515/9783110220278.226)
Berruto, Gaetano. 2012. Sociolinguistica dell’italiano contemporaneo. Roma: Carocci.
Berruto, Gaetano. 2017. What is changing in Italian today? Phenomena of restandardization in syntax and morphology: an overview. In Cerruti, Massimo & Crocco, Claudia & Marzo, Stefania (eds.), Towards a New Standard, 31–60. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. (doi:10.1515/9781614518839-002)
Berruto, Gaetano. 2019. La nozione di ‘varietà di lingua’: una categoria obsoleta? In Bidese, Ermenegildo & Casalicchio, Jan & Moroni, Manuela Caterina (eds.), La linguistica vista dalle Alpi: teoria, lessicografia e multilinguismo: studi in onore di Patrizia Cordin = Linguistic views from the Alps: language theory, lexicography and multilingualism: studies in honor of Patrizia Cordin (Studia Romanica et Linguistica 57), 213–236. Berlin: Peter Lang.
Bertinetto, PierMarco & Loporcaro, Michele. 2005. The sound pattern of Standard Italian, as compared with the varieties spoken in Florence, Milan and Rome. Journal of the Phonetic Association 35(2). 131–151.
Biber, Douglas & Conrad, Susan. 2009. Register, Genre, and Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (doi:10.1017/CBO9780511814358)
Blommaert, Jan. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. 1st edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (doi:10.1017/CBO9780511845307)
Canepari, Luciano. (1986). Lingua italiana nel Veneto. CLESP.
Cerruti, Massimo. 2009. Strutture dell’italiano regionale: morfosintassi di una varietà diatopica in prospettiva sociolinguistica (Spazi comunicativi 7). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Cerruti, Massimo. 2017. Changes from below, changes from above: relative constructions in contemporary Italian. In Cerruti, Massimo & Crocco, Claudia & Marzo, Stefania (eds.), Towards a New Standard, 61–88. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. (doi:10.1515/9781614518839-003)
Cerruti, Massimo & Crocco, Claudia & Marzo, Stefania (eds.). 2017. Towards a New Standard: Theoretical and Empirical Studies on the Restandardization of Italian. De Gruyter. (doi:10.1515/9781614518839)
Cerruti, Massimo & Vietti, Alessandro. 2022. Identifying language varieties: Coexisting standards in spoken Italian. In Beaman, Karen V. & Guy, Gregory R. (eds.), The Coherence of Linguistic Communities. Orderly Heterogeneity and Social Meaning (Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics), 262–280. New York: Routledge.
Chafe, Wallace L. 1982. Integration and Involvement in speaking, writing, and oral literature. In Tannen, Deborah (ed.), Spoken and written language: Exploring orality and literacy, 35–53. Norwood: Ablex.
Comrie, Bernard & Dryer, Matthew S. & Gil, David & Haspelmath, Martin. 2013. Introduction (v2020.3). The world atlas of language structures (online). Zenodo. (Ed. Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin.) (doi:10.5281/zenodo.7385533)
Comrie, Bernard & Kuteva, Tania. 2013. Relativization on Obliques. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (v2020.3). Zenodo. (Ed. Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin.) (doi:10.5281/zenodo.7385533)
Cordin, Patrizia. 2001. I pronomi riflessivi. In Renzi, Lorenzo & Salvi, Giampaolo & Cardinaletti, Anna (ed.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. I, 607–617. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Da Milano, Federica. 2015. Italian. In Jungbluth, Konstanze & Da Milano, Federica (eds.), Manual of Deixis in Romance Languages, 59–74. De Gruyter. (doi:10.1515/9783110317732-006)
Dahl, Östen. 1990. Standard Average European as an Exotic Language. In Bechert, Johannes & Bernini, Giuliano & Buridant, Claude (eds.), Toward a Typology of European Languages (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology), 3–8. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Diessel, Holger. 2013. Distance Contrasts in Demonstratives. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (v2020.3). Zenodo. (Ed. Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin.) (doi:10.5281/zenodo.7385533)
Docherty, Gerard J. & Foulkes, Paul. 2014. An evaluation of usage-based approaches to the modelling of sociophonetic variability. Lingua 142. 42–56. (doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2013.01.011)
Dryer, Matthew S. 2013a. Order of Demonstrative and Noun. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (v2020.3). Zenodo. (Ed. Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin.) (doi:10.5281/zenodo.7385533)
Dryer, Matthew S. 2013b. Relationship between the Order of Object and Verb and the Order of Relative Clause and Noun. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (v2020.3). Zenodo. (Ed. Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin.) (doi:10.5281/zenodo.7385533)
Dryer, Matthew S. 2013c. Relationship between the Order of Object and Verb and the Order of Adposition and Noun Phrase. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (v2020.3). Zenodo. (Ed. Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin.) (doi:10.5281/zenodo.7385533)
Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). 2013. WALS Online (v2020.3). Zenodo. (doi:10.5281/zenodo.7385533)
Engstrand, Olle & Frid, Johan & Lindblom, Björn. 2007. A Perceptual Bridge Between Coronal and Dorsal /r/. In Solé, Maria-Josep & Beddor, Patrice Speeter & Ohala, Manjari (eds.), Experimental Approaches to Phonology, 175–191. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (doi:10.1093/oso/9780199296675.003.0012)
Galatà, Vincenzo & Spreafico, Lorenzo & Vietti, Alessandro & Kaland, Constantijn. 2016. An acoustic analysis of /r/ in Tyrolean. INTERSPEECH 2016, 1002–1006. San Francisco, USA. (doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2016-418)
Gerdes, Kim & Kahane, Sylvain & Chen, Xinying. 2021. Typometrics: From Implicational to Quantitative Universals in Word Order Typology. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics. Open Library of Humanities 6(1). (doi:10.5334/gjgl.764)
Ghyselen, Anne-Sophie & De Vogelaer, Gunther. 2018. Seeking Systematicity in Variation: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations on the “Variety” Concept. Frontiers in Psychology 9. (doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00385)
Grandi, Nicola. 2019. Che tipo, l’italiano neostandard! In Moretti, Bruno & Kunz, Aline & Natale, Silvia & Krakenberger, Etna (eds.), Le tendenze dell’italiano contemporaneo rivisitate, 59–74. Milano: Officinaventuno.
Grandi, Nicola. 2022. La variazione tra le lingue e nelle lingue. In Grandi, Nicola & Mauri, Caterina (eds.), La tipologia linguistica. Unità e diversità nelle lingue del mondo, 121–173. Roma: Carocci.
Gumperz, John. 1968. The Speech Community. In Sills, David L. (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 381–386. London: Macmillan.
Guy, Gregory R. 2013. The Cognitive Coherence of Sociolects: How Do Speakers Handle Multiple Sociolinguistic Variables? Journal of Pragmatics 52. 63–71.
Guy, Gregory R. & Hinskens, Frans. 2016. Linguistic coherence: Systems, repertoires and speech communities. Lingua 172–173. 1–9. (doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2016.01.001)
Guy, Gregory R. & Oushiro, Livia & Mendes, Ronald Beline. 2022. Indexicality and coherence. In Beaman, Karen & Guy, Gregory R. (eds.), The coherence of linguistic communities: orderly heterogeneity and social meaning, 53-68. New York: Routledge.
Hall, Kathleen Currie. 2013. A typology of intermediate phonological relationships. The Linguistic Review. De Gruyter Mouton 30(2). 215–275. (doi:10.1515/tlr-2013-0008)
Haspelmath, Martin. 2018. How comparative concepts and descriptive linguistic categories are different. In Van Olmen, Daniël & Mortelmans, Tanja & Brisard, Frank (eds.), Aspects of Linguistic Variation (Trend in Linguistics 324), 83–114. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. (doi:10.1515/9783110607963-004) (Accessed May 29, 2023.)
Haspelmath, Martin. 2023. Comparing reflexive constructions in the world’s languages. In Janic, Katarzyna & Puddu, Nicoletta & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.), Reflexive constructions in the world’s languages (Research on Comparative Grammar 3), 19–62. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Haspelmath, Martin & Michaelis, Susanne. 2017. Analytic and synthetic: Typological change in varieties of European languages. In Buchstaller, Isabelle & Siebenhaar, Beat (eds.), Language variation – European perspectives VI: Selected papers from the 8th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 8), Leipzig 2015, 3–22. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hinskens, Frans & Guy, Gregory R. (eds.). 2016. Coherence, covariation and bricolage. Various approaches to the systematicity of language variation. Thematic issue of Lingua 172/173.
Horvath, Barbara & Sankoff, David. 1987. Delimiting the Sydney Speech Community. Language in Society 16. 179–204.
Hudson, Richard Anthony. 1980. Sociolinguistics (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hymes, Dell. 1967. Models of the interaction of language and social setting. Journal of Social Issues 23(2). 8–28.
Iacobini, Claudio & Vergaro, Carla. 2012. Manner of motion verbs in Italian: semantic distinctions and interlingual comparisons. In Ferreri, Silvana (ed.), Lessico e lessicologia, 71–87. Roma: Bulzoni.
Iskarous, Khalil & McDonough, Joyce & Whalen, D. H. 2012. A gestural account of the velar fricative in Navajo. Laboratory Phonology 3(1). 195–210. (doi:10.1515/lp-2012-0011)
Kaland, Constantijn & Galatà, Vincenzo & Spreafico, Lorenzo & Vietti, Alessandro. 2016. /r/ as language marker in bilingual speech production and perception. INTERSPEECH 2016, 515–519. San Francisco, USA. (doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2016-418)
Kaland, Constantijn & Galatà, Vincenzo & Spreafico, Lorenzo & Vietti, Alessandro. 2019. Which Language R You Speaking? /r/ as a Language Marker in Tyrolean and Italian Bilinguals. Language and Speech 62(1). 137–163. (doi:10.1177/0023830917746551)
Keenan, Edward L. & Comrie, Bernard. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and Universal Grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8. 63–99.
Kiparsky, Paul. 2015. New perspectives in historical linguistics. In Bowern, Claire & Evans, Bethwyn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics, 64–102. London, New York: Routledge.
Klein, Wolfgang. 2004. Varietätengrammatik. In Ammon, Ulrich & Dittmar, Norbert & Mattheier, Klaus J. (eds.), Soziolinguistik. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Wissenschaft von Sprache und Gesellschaft, 1163–1172. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Koplenig, Alexander & Meyer, Peter & Wolfer, Sascha & Müller-Spitzer, Carolin. 2017. The statistical trade-off between word order and word structure – Large-scale evidence for the principle of least effort. PLOS ONE 12(3). e0173614. (Ed. Smith, Kenny.) (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0173614)
Kortmann, Bernd (ed.). 2004. Dialectology meets typology: dialect grammar from a cross-linguistic perspective (Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 153). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Krämer, Martin. 2009. The phonology of Italian (Oxford Linguistics). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Kristiansen, Tore & Coupland, Nikolas (eds.). 2011. Standard languages and language standards in a changing Europe (Standard Language Ideology in Contemporary Europe 1). Oslo: Novus Press.
Labov, William. 1966a. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Labov, William. 1966b. The linguistic variable as structural unit. Washington Linguistics Review 3. 4–22.
Levshina, Natalia. 2015. How to do Linguistics with R. Data exploration and statistical analysis. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Levshina, Natalia. 2019. Token-based typology and word order entropy: A study based on Universal Dependencies. Linguistic Typology. De Gruyter Mouton 23(3). 533–572. (doi:10.1515/lingty-2019-0025)
Levshina, Natalia. 2022. Corpus-based typology: applications, challenges and some solutions. Linguistic Typology. De Gruyter Mouton 26(1). 129–160. (doi:10.1515/lingty-2020-0118)
Lindau, Mona. 1985. The story of /r/. In Fromkin, Victoria (ed.), Phonetic linguistics: essays in honor of Peter Ladefoged, 157–168. Orlando: Academic Press.
Maddieson, Ian. 1988. Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mauri, Caterina & Ballarè, Silvia & Goria, Eugenio & Cerruti, Massimo & Suriano, Francesco. KIParla corpus: A new resource for spoken Italian. In Bernardi, Raffaella & Navigli, Roberto & Semeraro, Giovanni (eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, vol. 2841, 1–7. CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
Milroy, James & Milroy, Lesley. 1997. Varieties and variation. In Coulmas, Florian (ed.), The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, 47–64. Oxford: Blackwell.
Paradis, Johanne. 2007. Early bilingual and multilingual acquisition. In Auer, Peter & Wei, Li (eds.), Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication, 15–44. Mouton de Gruyter. (doi:10.1515/9783110198553.1.15) (Accessed April 30, 2024.)
Parenti, Alessandro. 2001. Sulla semantica dei dimostrativi. Archivio Glottologico Italiano 86(2). 174–193.
Pulgram, Ernst. 1964. Structural comparison, diasystems, and dialectology. Linguistics 2(4). 66–82. (doi:10.1515/ling.1964.2.4.66)
Renwick, Margaret & Ladd, Robert D. 2016. Phonetic Distinctiveness vs. Lexical Contrastiveness in Non-Robust Phonemic Contrasts. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 7(1). 19. (doi:10.5334/labphon.17)
Sankoff, David. 2004. Variable Rules. In Ammon, Ulrich & Dittmar, Norbert & Mattheier, Klaus J. & Trudgill, Peter (eds.), Soziolinguistik. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Wissenschaft von Sprache und Gesellschaft, vol. 2, 1150–1163. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter. (doi:10.1515/9783110171488.2.7.1150)
Schnell, Stefan & Schiborr, Nils. 2022. Crosslinguistic Corpus Studies in Linguistic Typology. Annual Review of Linguistics 8. 171–191. (doi:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031120-104629)
Scobbie, J. M. 2006. (R) as a Variable. In Brown, Keith (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), 337–344. Oxford: Elsevier. (doi:10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/04711-8)
Siewierska, Anna. 2013. Gender Distinctions in Independent Personal Pronouns. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (v2020.3). Zenodo. (Ed. Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin.) (doi:10.5281/zenodo.7385533)
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. 2009. Typological parameters of intralingual variability: Grammatical analyticity versus syntheticity in varieties of English. Language Variation and Change 21(3). 319–353. (doi:10.1017/S0954394509990123)
Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Lexicalisation patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In Shopen, Timothy (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, 36–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. MIT Press.
Vietti, Alessandro. 2017. Italian in Bozen/Bolzano: the formation of a “new dialect.” In Cerruti, Massimo & Crocco, Claudia & Marzo, Stefania (eds.), Towards a new standard: theoretical and empirical studies on the restandardization of Italian, 176–212. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Vietti, Alessandro. 2019. La varietà di lingua come insieme di tratti coerenti: verso una caratterizzazione empirica. Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia 43. 11–32.
Vietti, Alessandro & Mereu, Daniela. 2023. Mid vowels at the crossroads between standard and regional Italian. Sociolinguistica 37(1). 17–39. (doi:10.1515/soci-2022-0033)
Vietti, Alessandro & Spreafico, Lorenzo. 2016. Lo strano caso di /r/ a Bolzano: problemi di interfaccia. In Iacobini, Claudio & Voghera, Miriam & Savy, Renata (eds.), Livelli di analisi e fenomeni di interfaccia, 263–281. Roma: Bulzoni.
Vietti, Alessandro & Spreafico, Lorenzo. 2018. Sprachkontakt in der Phonologie bilingualer Sprecher des Tirolischen. In Rabanus, Stefan (ed.), Deutsch als Minderheitensprache in Italien. Theorie und Empirie kontaktinduzierten Sprachwandels (Germanistische Linguistik), vol. 239–240, 49–78. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.
Villena-Ponsoda, Juan-Andrés & Vida-Castro, Matilde. 2020. Variation, identity and indexicality in southern Spanish: On the emergence of a new variety in urban Andalusia. In Cerruti, Massimo & Tsiplakou, Stavroula (eds.), Intermediate Language Varieties: Koinai and regional standards in Europe (Studies in Language Variation), vol. 24, 149–182. Amsterdam: Benjamins. (doi:10.1075/silv.24.07vil)
Wälchli, Bernhard. 2009. Data reduction typology and the bimodal distribution bias. Linguistic Typology 13(1). 77–94. (doi:10.1515/LITY.2009.004)
Walker, James A. & Hoffman Michol F. & Meyerhoff, Miriam. 2022. What’s in a Lect? Coherence in Phonetic and Grammatical Variation. In Beaman, Karen & Guy, Gregory R. (eds.), The coherence of linguistic communities: orderly heterogeneity and social meaning, 71–86. New York: Routledge.
Weinreich, Uriel. 1954. Is a Structural Dialectology Possible? WORD 10(2–3). 388–400. (doi:10.1080/00437956.1954.11659535)
Weinreich, Uriel & Labov, William & Herzog, Marvin I. 1968. Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change. In Lehmann, Winfred P. & Malkiel, Yakov (eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics. A Symposium, 97–195. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Wiese, Richard. 2011. The Representation of Rhotics. In Oostendorp, Marc & Ewen, Colin J. & Hume, Elizabeth & Rice, Keren (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, 1st edn, 1–19. Wiley. (doi:10.1002/9781444335262.wbctp0030)
Wiesinger, Peter. 1990. The Central and Southern Bavarian dialects in Bavaria and Austria. In Russ, Charles (ed.), The dialect of modern German: a linguistic survey, 438–519. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Alessandro Vietti, Massimo Cerruti
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
