New Perspectives on Italian Dialects

Dear Colleagues,

While typology is the telescope of linguistics, dialectology has always been its magnifying lens, and with the new cartographic methodologies and online databases (see the SAND, ASIt, etc.) it can even become like a microscope to observe very detailed facts that often put into question well-established generalizations. Traditionally, dialectological work has always raised a fundamental problem for all those approaches to language that presuppose that language is akin to other phenomena of the physical world in being described by inviolable rules. Since the time of the neogrammarian school, which was the first attempt to establish linguistics as a scientific domain of inquiry, dialectological work has put this very basic assumption into question on the basis of microvariation data.

Dialectologists knew two centuries before the Chomskyan turn that language is a phenomenon of the individual, and not only of the community, because in studying local languages they had already observed that each person has a subtly different language with different grammatical properties. The sheer notion of “idiolect” is a confirmation that language is unique to the single person. Traditional dialectologists took into account marketplaces, parishes, the presence of roads, bridges, rivers, and mountains which could hinder or favor contact and, therefore, variation, earning the term “geolinguistics”.

This tentative detailed picture of the streams of microcontact had, at the root, the same idea of formal linguistics that assumes the existence of an “ideal” speaker and the possibility to describe linguistic behavior on the basis of rules (which at the time were phonological rules of diachronic change from Latin to Romance). Dialectology has always sought to establish regularities in the domain where it is most difficult, i.e., where you really observe the language of the single speaker, since the so-called “dialects” are not influenced by the normative pressure provided by standardization. Pushing this idea to the limit, one might say that dialectology studies the only languages that are worth being studied, i.e., those that have not been “tampered with” by a self-conscious attempt to make the language different from what it naturally is. In the last twenty years, dialectological work has had important recognition even in formal approaches, like generative grammar, through the work initiated by Kayne and a number of Italian and Dutch linguists, who created a network of dialectological projects based on the generative approach to language variation. It has long been noticed that comparing languages that are very similar to each other provides for the best possible experimental scenario, since it is possible to study a single phenomenon as a variable keeping all other grammatical factors as a constant due to the similar grammars of the languages investigated (see Kayne 2013 for a discussion of this topic on the basis of specific examples). More recently, there have been attempts to exploit geolinguistics in a formal sense by providing geographical maps illustrating the way phenomena correlate, exclude, or include each other in a homogeneous dialectal area (see Barbiers and Goeman 2013, Garzonio and Poletto 2018).

For this volume, we invite contributions on any empirical phenomenon of syntactic microvariation concerning dialects spoken on the Italian territory. We encourage contributions that can have an impact either on the general theory of syntax or on methodological issues that might help any advancement in syntactic research.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400-600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to Balsemin@em.uni-frankfurt.de. Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purpose of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Tentative completion schedule:

• Abstract submission deadline: 1 September 2021
• Full manuscript deadline: 30 April 2022

References

ASIt = Atlante Sintattico d’Italia. http://asit.maldura.unipd.it/ .

Barbiers, S., & Goeman, T. (2013). Research results from on-line dialect databases and dynamic dialect maps. Language and Space. An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation. Volume 3: Dutch.

Garzonio, J., & Poletto, C. (2018). Exploiting microvariation: How to make the best of your incomplete data. Glossa, 3(1).

Kayne, R. S. (2013). Comparative syntax. Lingua, 130, 132-151.

SAND = Syntactische atlas van de Nederlandse dialecten / Syntactic atlas of the Dutch dialects, Sjef Barbiers, Leonie Cornips, Jan Pieter Kunst, 2000-2008.

Prof. Dr. Cecilia Poletto
Dr. Tommaso Balsemin
Guest Editors

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• Italian dialects
• microvariation
• geolinguistics