Agenda

Relatore:
Massimo Cerruti (University of Turin)

This talk draws on data (ca. 36 hours of semi-structured interviews and casual conversations) collected during two fieldwork sessions (in 2019 and 2022) for a research project aimed at documenting Heritage Piedmontese in Argentina (i.e., the PILAR Project). In particular, two different aspects of the use of Heritage Piedmontese will be dealt with: (i) Piedmontese/Spanish bilingual speech, with special reference to the emergence of recurrent patterns of code mixing, and (ii) sociolinguistic variation of Heritage Piedmontese, with a focus on the effects that the contact between different baseline varieties has had on Argentine Piedmontese. It will be discussed how Heritage Piedmontese appears to be experiencing (i) a phase of ‘language mixing’ (as defined by Auer 1999, 2014), characterized by the conventionalized insertion of Spanish-origin words and word classes (especially utterance modifiers) and (ii) a phase of ‘dialect leveling’ (as per Siegel 2001; cf. Trudgill 1986, 2004), distinguished by convergence towards the variety of the demographically dominant group of speakers.

References
Auer, P. (1999). From codeswitching via language mixing to fused lects: Toward a dynamic typology of bilingual speech. International Journal of Bilingualism, 3(4), 309–332. Auer, P. (2014). Language mixing and language fusion: When bilingual talk becomes monolingual. In J. Besters-Dilger, C. Dermarkar, S. Pfänder, & A. Rabus (Eds.), Congruence in Contact-Induced Language Change (pp. 294–334). De Gruyter. Siegel, J. (2001). Koine formation and creole genesis. In N. Smith, & T. Veenstra (Eds.), Creolization and Contact (pp. 175–197). Benjamins. Trudgill P. (1986), Dialects in contact, Blackwell. Massimo Cerruti Is professor of General Linguistics and Sociolinguistics at the University of Turin. He was Assistant of Italian Linguistics and then Lecturer at the University of Bern and, more recently, Visiting Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Emile Lorand Chair). He is co-coordinator of the KIParla Spoken Italian Corpus (www.kiparla.it) and coordinator of the DigitALI project - Digitization of the Italian Linguistic Atlas (as part of the PNRR PE5 CHANGES Programme). He is Secretary of the Italian Linguistics Society. His research activity focuses mainly on the sociolinguistic variation of Italian, with particular reference to morphosyntactic phenomena, and on the structural aspects of the contact between Italian and dialect, also from a theoretical perspective. His most recent publications include Sociolinguistics in Italy (with S. Dal Negro, in M. J. Ball et al., eds., 2024, The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics around the World. 2nd Edition, Routledge, pp. 518-529) and Sociolinguistic variation in spoken Italian (with S. Ballarè, eds., Special Issue of Sociolinguistics. European Journal of Sociolinguistics 37/1, 2023).

Trudgill, P. (2004). New-dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh University Press.