11

Italian dialects – or, more technically, Italo-Romance varieties, a label that makes explicit the fact that they are not geographical dialects of Standard Italian but independent sister languages arisen from local developments of Latin – are a subdivision of the Romance language family.

There is little agreement among linguists on the definition of language and dialect, a problem which is customarily mentioned in introductions to linguistic typology, as e.g. in Song's (2001:1) incipit: "There are generally estimated to be about 4,000 to 6,000 languages in the world. Depending on where the distinction between languages and dialects is drawn, the total number of the languages of the world may easily shoot up to 7,000". Whatever the solution adopted for this practical problem, in principle one thing should be clear: for typological purposes, linguistic systems that we call, for historical reasons, 'dialects' (primary dialects, at least) should be considered on a par with what we call 'languages', as candidates for typological sampling. In practice, however, this seldom happens: in the case of Italian dialects, they are never taken into account in typological surveys, although many of them display phonological and/or grammatical features which diverge from the standard language.

This unfortunate situation is favoured by the fact that many of the peculiarities of Italo-Romance varieties are described in a huge but rather traditional 'dialectological' literature. Thus, a general survey of structural properties of these varieties, that may be of interest to the language typologist, still remains a desideratum of reaserch.[1]

This course is intended as a preliminary step to help bridge this gap. It is also meant to show how much can still be done in this field, thus inciting further research.

In the first part (units 1-2), it will offer a general overview of Romance dialects spoken in Italy (including Sardinian, which counts as a separate branch of the Romance family in most classifications) and provide some basic information for listeners not previously acquainted with these varieties. Phonetics and phonology will be dealt with in this introductory section, as they traditionally play a central role for purposes of classification (charts of Italian dialects divide subgroups mainly on the basis of phonetic isoglosses: cf. Pellegrini 1977). Unit 3 will also briefly address issues of phonological typology, mainly elaborating on recent work in this field carried out by Schmid (1997, 1999), who provides a synthesis of phonotactic regularities and compares phoneme inventories described for several italian dialects with those surveyed in Maddieson (1984) (based on the UPSID sample). In this section, some phonetic curiosities will be also reported on, such as the existence of speech sounds missing in standard surveys on the phonetics of the languages of the world (like Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996), but present in Italo-Romance dialects, such as a voiced interdental lateral approximant (Northern Calabria).

The rest of the course (units 4-10) will be devoted to morphology and syntax. (Cross-dialectal differences in) alignment properties will be focused on, in the first place. While most large-scale typologies still consider Romance languages as prima facie examples of the nominative/accusative type, a growing literature (inspired by Perlmutter 1989) has shown that a host of central syntactic properties (auxiliary selection, participle agreement in perfective periphrases, ne-syntax, causative syntax etc.) are more insightfully described as obeying to the active/inactive alignment type. Much influential work in linguistic typology nowadays implies that these categories (alignment, voice and the like) must be treated as semantically based gradients (cf. e.g. Croft's 2001:317 'conceptual space for voice and transitivity'). In my analysis of Italo-Romance data I will explore an alternative route, showing that the impressive variation displayed by Italo-Romance dialects in this central domain of syntactic structure can be reduced to a very simple picture, through the individuation of a few relevant parameters.[2]

In this connection, argument marking will also be considered, covering topics such as prepositional marking of the direct object, a feature displayed by southern Italian dialects as well as Sardinian (alongside other Romance varieties such as Spanish, Engadinian and Rumanian).

The course will next consider typological peculiarities displayed by Italian dialects in the domain of agreement, both in the noun and in the verb phrase. Also here, Italian dialects hold quite a few surprises in store for scholars acquainted 'only' with Romance standard languages. The list includes gender agreement on finite verbs (usually not found in Indo-European, but attested in several northern Italian dialects), asymmetrical gender/number agreement within the NP, 'split' pronominal clitics, etc.

The reference work on Italian dialects is Rohlfs (1966-69). More recently, both Holtus et al. (1988) and Maiden & Parry (1997) present an overview (with sketches devoted to the main dialect areas).

Berruto, Gaetano (1990), Note tipologiche di un non tipologo sul dialetto piemontese, in Gaetano Berruto e Alberto A. Sobrero (curr.), Studi di sociolinguistica e dialettologia italiana offerti a Corrado Grassi, Galatina: Congedo, 3-24.

Blasco Ferrer, Eduardo (2000), La tipologia linguistica del sardo, «Revista de Filología Románica» 17: 15-29.

Croft, William (2001), Radical Construction Grammar. Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Holtus, Günter, Michele Metzeltin & Christian Schmitt, eds. (1988), Lexicon der Romanistischen Linguistik, vol. 4, Italienisch, Korsisch, Sardisch, Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Ladefoged, Peter & Ian Maddieson (1996), The Sounds of the World's languages, Oxford – Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.

Loporcaro, Michele (1998), Sintassi comparata dell'accordo participiale romanzo, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier.

Loporcaro, Michele (1999), L'ausiliazione perfettiva nelle parlate di Zagarolo e di Colonna e lo studio della sintassi dei dialetti mediani, «Contributi di Filologia dell'Italia Mediana» 13: 203-226.

Loporcaro, Michele (2001), La selezione dell'ausiliare nei dialetti italiani: dati e teorie, in Federico Albano Leoni, Rosanna Sornicola, Eleonora Stenta Krosbakken & Carolina Stromboli (eds.), Dati empirici e teorie linguistiche, Atti del XXXIII Congresso della Società di Linguistica Italiana, Napoli, 28-30 ottobre 1999, Rome: Bulzoni, 455-476.

Maddieson, Ian (1984), Patterns of sounds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Maiden, Martin & Mair Parry, eds. (1997), The Dialects of Italy, London: Routledge (Routledge Romance Linguistics Series).

Pellegrini G. B. (1977), Carta dei dialetti d'Italia, «Profilo dei dialetti italiani», Pisa: Pacini.

Perlmutter, D.M. (1989), Multiattachment and the Unaccusative Hypothesis: The Perfect Auxiliary in Italian, «Probus» 1: 63-119.

Renzi, Lorenzo (1997), I dialetti italiani centro-meridionali tra le lingue romanze. uno sguardo alla sintassi, in Lesser used Romance languages, Tokyo, April 16-23, 1997.

Rohlfs, Gerhard (1966-69), Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, 3 voll., Turin: Einaudi.

Schmid, Stephan (1997), A typological view of syllable structure in some Italian dialects, in Pier Marco Bertinetto, Livio Gaeta, Georgi Jetchev & David Michaels (eds.), Certamen phonologicum III, Papers from the Third Cortona Phonology Meeting, April 1996, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 247-265.

Schmid, Stephan (1999), Per un'analisi del vocalismo italo-romanzo in chiave tipologica, in Paola Benincà, Alberto M. Mioni & Laura Vanelli (eds.), Fonologia e morfologia dell'italiano e dei dialetti d'Italia, Atti del XXXI Congresso della Società di Linguistica Italiana, Padova, 25-27 settembre 1997, Rome: Bulzoni, 249-267.

Song, Jae Jung (2001), Linguistic typology. Morphology and syntax, Harlow etc.: Longman.

[1] Some work has been done, in this respect, mainly on specific areas: cf. e.g. Berruto (1990) on Piedmontese, Renzi (1997) on southern Italian dialects, Blasco Ferrer (2000) on Sardinian.

[2] In doing this, I will elaborate on Loporcaro (1998) on participle agreement in Romance, and follow the outline of a parallel forthcoming monograph on auxiliary selection (cf. Loporcaro 1999, 2001).