Relativization strategies and sociolinguistic variation in spoken Italian: a typological account
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2785-0943/20572Keywords:
relative clauses, sociolinguistic variation, language variation, spoken ItalianAbstract
In this paper I aim at describing and analysing relative clauses in a corpus of spoken Italian. In the first section, I provide an overview of the relativization strategies in Italian, also taking into account non-standard varieties; then, I briefly discuss the sociolinguistic characterization of the sub-standard area of contemporary Italian. In § 2, I introduce the selected corpus and its characteristics, also explaining the methodologies adopted for data extraction and annotation. Then, in § 3, the results of the analysis are presented. The distributions of the different strategies and the outputs of a statistical analysis show the different importance assumed by both linguistic and extralinguistic factors and enable the explanation of the observed variability. Finally, in § 4, some general conclusions are drawn.
References
Ackerman, Farrell & Irina Nikolaeva. 2013. Descriptive typology and linguistic theory: a study in the morphosyntax of relative clauses. Stanford: CSLI.
Alexiadou, Artemis, Paul Law, André Meinunger & Chris Wilder (eds.). 2000. The syntax of relative clauses. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Alfonzetti, Giovanna. 2022. La relativa non standard. Italiano popolare o italiano parlato?. Palermo: Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani.
Alisova, Tatiana. 1965. Relative limitative e relative esplicative nell’italiano popolare. Studi di filologia italiana XXIII. 299-333.
Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown & Greville G. Corbett. 2005. The Syntax-Morphology Interface. A Study of Syncretism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ballarè, Silvia. 2024. L’italiano colloquiale. In Silvia Ballarè, Ilaria Fiorentini & Emanuele Miola (eds.), Le varietà dell’italiano contemporaneo, 81-98. Roma: Carocci.
Ballarè, Silvia & Pierre Larrivée. 2021. Register impacts syntax: scaling the accessibility hierarchy of relatives. Italian journal of linguistics 33. 3-22.
Ballarè, Silvia & Guglielmo Inglese. 2022. The development of locative relative markers from typology to sociolinguistics (and back). Studies in language 46. 220-257.
Benincà, Paola, Mair Parry & Diego Pescarini. 2016. The dialects of northern Italy. In Adam Ledgeway & Martin Maiden (eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance languages, 185-205. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bernini, Giuliano. 1989. Tipologia delle frasi relative italiane e romanze. In Fabio Foresti, Elena Rizzi & Paola Benedini (eds.), L’italiano tra le lingue romanze. Atti del XX Congresso Internazionale della Società di Linguistica Italiana (Bologna, 25-27 settembre 1986), 85-98. Roma: Bulzoni.
Berretta, Monica. 1988. Varietätenlinguistik des Italienischen / Linguistica delle varietà. In Günter Holtus, Michael Metzeltin & Christian Schmitt (eds.), Lexicon der Romanistischen Linguistik. Italienisch, Korsisch, Sardisch, 762-774. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Berretta, Monica. 1993. Morfologia. In Alberto A. Sobrero (ed.), Introduzione all’italiano contemporaneo I, 193–245. Roma/Bari: Laterza.
Berruto, Gaetano. 1983. Italiano popolare e semplificazione linguistica. Vox Romanica 42. 38-79.
Berruto, Gaetano. 2012. Sociolinguistica dell’italiano contemporaneo (seconda edizione). Roma: Carocci.
Berruto, Gaetano. 2014. Esiste ancora l’italiano popolare? Una rivisitazione. In Paul Danler & Christine Konecny (eds.), Dall’architettura della lingua italiana all’architettura linguistica dell’Italia. Saggi in omaggio a Heidi Siller-Runggaldier, 277-190. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
Blake, Barry J. 2001. Case. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cerruti, Massimo. 2016. Costruzioni relative in italiano popolare. In Federica Guerini (ed.), Italiano e dialetto bresciano in racconti di partigiani, 77–116. Roma: Aracne.
Cerruti, Massimo. 2017. Changes from below, changes from above. Relative constructions in contemporary Italian. In Massimo Cerruti, Claudia Crocco & Stefania Marzo (eds.), Towards a new standard. Theoretical and empirical studies on the restandardization of Italian, 32-61. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Cerruti, Massimo & Silvia Ballarè. 2021. ParlaTO: corpus del parlato di Torino. Bollettino dell’Atlante linguistico Italiano 44. 13-38.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2020. The syntax of relative clauses: a unified analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Comrie, Bernard. 1989. Language universals and linguistic typology. Second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Comrie, Bernard & Tania Kuteva. 2013a. Relativization on Subjects. In Matthew Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), World atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/122. (Accessed 2024-10-25).
Comrie, Bernard & Tania Kuteva. 2013b. Relativization on Obliques. In Matthew Dryer & Martin Haspelmath (eds.), World atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/123. (Accessed 2024-10-25).
Cortelazzo, Manlio. 1972. Avviamento critica allo studio della dialettologia italiana, III, Lineamenti di italiano popolare. Pisa: Pacini.
Cristofaro, Sonia. 2005. Subordination. Oxford: Oxford academic.
Cristofaro, Sonia & Anna Giacalone Ramat. 2007. Relativization strategies in the languages of Europe. In Paolo Ramat & Elisa Roma (eds), Europe and the Mediterranean as linguistic areas: Convergences from a historical and typological perspective, 63–93. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Croft, William. 2022. Morphosyntax. Constructions of the World’s Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Mauro, Tullio. 1970. Per lo studio dell’italiano popolare unitario. In Annabella Rossi (ed.), Lettere da una tarantata, 43-57. Bari: De Donato.
Fiorentino, Giuliana. 1999. Relativa debole. Sintassi, uso, storia in italiano. Milano: Franco Angeli.
Henderey, Rachel. 2012. Relative clauses in time and space: a case study in the methods of diachronic typology. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hosmer, David W. & Stanley Lemeshow. 2000. Applied logistic regression. New York: Wiley.
Inglese, Guglielmo & Silvia Ballarè. 2023. Analyzing language variation: where sociolinguistics and linguistic typology meet. In Silvia Ballarè & Guglielmo Inglese (eds.), Sociolinguistic and typological perspectives on language variation, 1-28. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
itTenTen20 corpus, available on https://www.sketchengine.eu/ittenten-italian-corpus/
Keenan, Edward L. & Bernard Comrie. 1977. Non phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic inquiry 8. 63-99.
Kidd, Evan (ed.). 2011. The acquisition of relative clauses: processing, typology and function. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Labov, William. 1984. Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation. In John Baugh & Joeal Scherzer (eds.), Language in use: readings in sociolinguistics, 28-54. Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice Hall.
Ledgeway, Adam. 2016. The dialects of southern Italy. In Adam Ledgeway & Martin Maiden (eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance languages, 246-269. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ledgeway, Adam & Martin Maiden (eds.). 2016. The Oxford Guide to the Romance languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lepschy, Giulio. 2002. Popular Italian: Fact or Fiction?. In Giulio C. Lepschy (ed.), Mother Tongues and Other Reflections on the Italian Language, 49-69. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Levshina, Natalia. 2015. How to do Linguistics with R. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mauri, Caterina, Silvia Ballarè, Eugenio Goria, Massimo Cerruti & Francesco Suriano. 2019. KIParla corpus: a new resource for spoken Italian. In Raffaella Bernardi, Roberto Navigli & Giovanni Semeraro (eds.). Proceedings of the 6th Italian conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it, Torino, Accademia University Press.
Murelli, Adriano. 2011. Relative constructions in European non-standard varieties. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Renzi, Lorenzo. 2000. Le tendenze dell’italiano contemporaneo. Note sul cambiamento linguistico nel breve periodo. Studi di lessicografia italiana XVII. 279-319.
Renzi, Lorenzo. 2012. Come cambia la lingua. L’italiano in movimento. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Serianni, Luca. 2010 [1989]. Grammatica italiana: italiano comune e lingua letteraria. Suoni, forme, costrutti. Torino: UTET.
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & R. Harald Baayen. 2012. Models, forests and trees of York English: Was/were variation as case study for statistical practice. Language variation and change 24(2). 135-178.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Silvia Ballarè
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.