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In many European languages the National Standard Variety is converging with spoken, informal, and socially marked varieties. In Italian this process is giving rise to a new standard variety called Neo-standard Italian, which partly consists of regional features. This book contributes to current research on standardization in Europe by offering a comprehensive overview of the re-standardization dynamics in Italian. Each chapter investigates a specific dynamic shaping the emergence of Neo-standard Italian and Regional Standard Varieties, such as the acceptance of previously non-standard features, the reception of Old Italian features excluded from the standard variety, the changing standard la...
This innovative collection brings together a range of perspectives on the notions of "orderly heterogeneity" and "social meaning", shedding light on how structured variation and indexicalities of social meaning "cohere" within linguistic communities. This book fills a gap in research on language variation by critically considering the position articulated by Weinrich, Labov, and Herzog in 1968 that linguistic diversity is systematically organized in ways that reflect and construct social order. The volume investigates such key themes as covariation and co-occurrence restrictions; indexicality, perception and social meaning; coherence and language change; and the structure and measurement of ...
The Continuity of Linguistic Change presents a collection of selected papers in honour of Professor Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda. The essays revolve around the study of linguistic variation and the mechanisms and processes associated with linguistic change, a field to which Villena-Ponsoda has dedicated so many years of research. The authors are researchers of renowned international prestige who have made significant contributions in this field. The chapters cover a range of related topics and provide modern theoretical and methodological perspectives, addressing the structural, cognitive, historical and social factors that underlie and promote linguistic change in varieties of Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish and Swedish. The reader will find contributions that explore topics such as phonology, acoustic phonetics and processes deriving from the contact between languages or linguistic varieties, specifically levelling, koineisation, standardisation and the emergence of ethnolects.
This book is a collection of innovative studies on language contact. It contains novel works on unexplored issues related to language contact in different settings and aims to contribute multi-perspective insights to the current state of the art on language contact. Novel approaches to contact-related change, variation, attrition, and emergence of new varieties are explored from the lens of sociolinguistic, typological, synchronic, and diachronic perspectives. The contact settings vary from official and majority languages to minority, endangered and/or non-official varieties in different parts of the world.
What do Cesare Pavese, Beppe Fenoglio and Primo Levi have in common? Apart from their obvious Piedmontese origins, they and other writers coming from this Italian region share a certain tendency towards multilingualism, which is a characteristic that has not been comprehensively investigated over the years. This study presents a linguistic analysis of a group of modern and contemporary narratives written by Piedmontese authors. The novels and short stories here examined are notable for the intriguing way in which they move between a variety of idioms – Standard Italian, regional vernaculars, English and pastiches (with rare excursions into French). With the support of linguistic and philos...
Linguistic variation, loosely defined as the wholesale processes whereby patterns of language structures exhibit divergent distributions within and across languages, has traditionally been the object of research of at least two branches of linguistics: variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic typology. In spite of their similar research agendas, the two approaches have only rarely converged in the description and interpretation of variation. While a number of studies attempting to address at least aspects of this relationship have appeared in recent years, a principled discussion on how the two disciplines may interact has not yet been carried out in a programmatic way. This volume aims to fill this gap and offers a cross-disciplinary venue for discussing the bridging between sociolinguistic and typological research from various angles, with the ultimate goal of laying out the methodological and conceptual foundations of an integrated research agenda for the study of linguistic variation.
This study investigates the properties of a set of Italian adverbs (among others: pure ‘also’, solo ‘only’, un po’ ‘a bit’) that, in specific contexts of use, modify the speech acts in which they appear. On the one hand, these elements specify the way in which a speech act should be interpreted with reference to the specific interactional context, modifying its illocutionary force. On the other hand, they index presupposed/inferred meanings active in the common ground of the interaction, integrating the speech act in the common ground. These functions closely resemble those of the elements that, especially in the German linguistic tradition, are called modal particles. Drawing ...
This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of spatial configurations of language use and of language use in space. It consists of four parts. The first part covers the various practices of describing space through language, including spatial references in spoken interaction or in written texts, the description of motion events as well as the creation of imaginative spaces in storytelling. The second part surveys aspects of the spatial organization of face-to-face communication including not only spatial arrangements of small groups in interaction but also the spatial dimension of sign language and gestures. The third part is devoted to the communicative resources of constructed spaces and the ways in which these facilitate and shape communication. Part four, finally, is devoted to pragmatics across space and cultures, i.e. the ways in which language use differs across language varieties, languages and cultures.
Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages and social settings, The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics Around the World was originally the first single-volume collection surveying the current research trends in international sociolinguistics. This new edition has been comprehensively updated and significantly expanded, and now includes more than 50 chapters written by leading authorities and a brand-new substantial introduction by John Edwards. Coverage has been expanded regionally and there is a critical focus on Indigenous languages. This handbook remains a key tool to help widen the perspective on sociolinguistics to readers interested in the field. Divided into sections cover...
This book presents a contrastive analysis of the lexicalization of motion events in Polish in comparison with Russian. The study, set in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, adopts a usage-based approach to language analysis. Consequently, it draws on data derived from a wide variety of sources, namely modern novels, translated texts and elicitation tasks. Besides describing the distribution of path and manner information in and outside the verb in the two languages, the book addresses questions concerning the place of Polish and Russian on the continuum of the salience of the manner of motion as well as cognitive mechanisms reflected in the lexicalization patterns of motion events.