L'é ciaro che se dise cusì. On Change in the System of Expletive Subject Clitics in Opitergino.
Expletive subject clitics (ESCs) are pronominal elements that occur in impersonal contexts with which no individual reference is associated. Their presence strikingly distinguishes northern Italo-Romance varieties from standard Italian. We target this structural incongruence by studying the occurren...
| Publicado en: | Journal of Linguistics Vol. 61; no. 2; pp. 397 - 438 |
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| Autores principales: | , , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
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Cambridge University Press
Apr2025
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=184928156&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 184928156 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00222267 LIG jtl: Journal of Linguistics issn: 00222267 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Apr2025 vid: 61 iid: 2 pid: 15979 pub: Cambridge University Press artinfo: ui: 184928156 10.1017/S0022226723000282 ppf: 397 ppct: 41 formats: tig: atl: L'é ciaro che se dise cusì. On Change in the System of Expletive Subject Clitics in Opitergino. aug: au: ZANINI, CHIARA BATTISTELLA, GRETA GARDANI, FRANCESCO affil: Institute of Romance Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland su: Linguistic change Clitics (Grammar) Dialects Sociolinguistics sug: subj: Linguistic change Clitics (Grammar) Dialects Sociolinguistics keyword: clitics dialect of Oderzo/Opitergino expletive subject clitics Italo-Romance optionality ab: Expletive subject clitics (ESCs) are pronominal elements that occur in impersonal contexts with which no individual reference is associated. Their presence strikingly distinguishes northern Italo-Romance varieties from standard Italian. We target this structural incongruence by studying the occurrence of ESCs in present-day Opitergino, a virtually unstudied Venetan variety. We explore the question of whether, in the wake of a profound transformation in the sociolinguistic environment that occurred between the first half of the 20th century and early 2020 years, the contact between Opitergino and now-dominant Italian has induced change in the Opitergino ESC system. To test whether change has occurred and to what extent, we compare the results of an extensive online survey we conducted in 2022 with the baseline rules we extracted from speakers born before 1942. We observe that while the system is overall stable, a thread of change is ongoing and manifests in (a) rule weakening in declaratives and (b) erosion of the obligatoriness of ESCs in interrogatives. We argue that this change is likely to be an effect of contact, resulting in structural convergence but not in loss, and affected the part of the ESC system that features more optionality, namely, the domain of declarative clauses. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y dt: @attributes: year: 2025 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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