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The Routledge Introduction to Italian Linguistics offers a systematic and comprehensive overview of the linguistic structure of the Italian language, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, syntax, semantics, and sociolinguistics.The manual includes a historical sketch of the Italian language, which outlines the central phases of its emergence and process of standardization. Written in clear, concise language and taking a descriptive, theory-neutral approach, this is the ideal companion for advanced students of the Italian language and those studying Italian and Romance linguistics. After sketching the most important phases of the process of standardization of Italian and introducing the main varieties of Italian as classified from a social and geographical perspective, this introductory text addresses the core topics of Italian linguistics as pertaining to the sound system and word and sentence structure.The text adopts a descriptive approach and requires no previous knowledge of linguistics since technical terms are carefully explained and illustrated by numerous examples. Thus, it can serve as a reference tool for instructors of Italian and anyone interested in advancing their knowledge of the Italian language or familiarizing themselves with Italian linguistics.

The Routledge Introduction to Italian Linguistics offers a systematic and comprehensive overview of the linguistic structure of the Italian language, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, syntax, semantics, and sociolinguistics.The manual includes a historical sketch of the Italian language, which outlines the central phases of its emergence and process of standardization. Written in clear, concise language and taking a descriptive, theory-neutral approach, this is the ideal companion for advanced students of the Italian language and those studying Italian and Romance linguistics. After sketching the most important phases of the process of standardization of Italian and introducing the main varieties of Italian as classified from a social and geographical perspective, this introductory text addresses the core topics of Italian linguistics as pertaining to the sound system and word and sentence structure.The text adopts a descriptive approach and requires no previous knowledge of linguistics since technical terms are carefully explained and illustrated by numerous examples. Thus, it can serve as a reference tool for instructors of Italian and anyone interested in advancing their knowledge of the Italian language or familiarizing themselves with Italian linguistics.

This book examines the alternation between accusative-dative and dative-accusative order in Old Florentine clitic clusters and its decline in favor of the latter. Based on an exhaustive analysis of data collected from medieval Florentine and Tuscan texts we offer a novel analysis of the rise of the variable order, the transition from one order to the other, and the demise of the alternation that relies primarily on iconicity and analogy. The book employs exophoric pragmatic iconicity, a language-external iconic relationship based on similarity between linguistic structure and the speaker/writer's conceptualization of reality, and endophoric iconicity, a language-internal iconic relationship where the iconic ground is construed between linguistic signs and structures. Analogy is viewed as a productive process that generalizes patterns or extends grammatical rules to formally similar structures, and obtains the form of the analogical relationship between the masculine singular definite article and the third person singular accusative clitic, which shared the same phonotactically constrained distribution patterns. The data indicate that exophoric pragamatic iconicity exploits and maintains the alternation, whereas endophoric iconicity and analogy conspire to end it.

Sicilian Elements in Andrea Camilleri’s Narrative Language examines Camilleri’s unique linguistic repertoire and techniques over his career as a novelist. It focuses on the intensification of Sicilian linguistic features in Camilleri’s narrative works, in particular features pertaining to the domains of sounds and grammar, since these have been marginalized in linguistic-centered research on the evolution of Camilleri’s narrative language and remain overall understudied. Through a systematic comparative analysis of the distribution patterns of selected Sicilian features in a selection of Camilleri’s historical novels and novels of the Montalbano series, the author identifies the individual features that have become most widespread and the lexical items that are targeted with highest frequency and consistency. The results of the analysis show that in the earlier novels, Sicilian features are rather sparse and can be attributed to linguistic situational functionality; that is, they function as indices of salient, distinctive aspects of topics, settings, events/situations, and characters. Conversely, in the latest novels, Sicilian elements pervade the entire novels and the texts are written almost entirely in Camilleri’s own Sicilian, vigatese, so that Sicilian is stripped of any linguistic situational functionality.

After reviewing, from a grammaticalization perspective, the main stages in the evolution of Italian object clitic pronouns, the book discusses the distinctive morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features of Italian clitics.In particular, the book offers an original study of the most common examples of so-called verbi procomplementari, verbs which are characterized by the incorporation of clitics that no longer function as pronouns, and which are widely used in present-day Italian. Their emergence involves both grammaticalization of the clitic pronoun into an obligatory element, and lexicalization of the verb+clitic sequence. This study is essentially descriptive and maximally data-driven. The discussion of grammaticalization and lexicalization is reduced to the essentials and aims primarily at defining how these terms, which have received different and at times divergent interpretations, are employed in the book. The book is accessible to a wide and varied readership, which includes Italian and Romance linguists of functional and formal orientation, Italian language scholars, grammaticalization scholars interested in new case studies, as well as students of language change and variation.

Historical sociolinguistics has now established itself as a separate independent field of linguistic inquiry, and the impact of its theoretical and empirical advances are reflected in a thriving body of publications of various types. This volume adds to this flourishing array by presenting nine original studies by highly accomplished scholars holding a prominent reputation in the field. The overarching objective of the volume is to call attention to contemporary trends and innovative developments in the discipline and, more generally, to highlight current research on the relationship between sociolinguistics and historical linguistics, social motivations of language variation and change, and corpus-based studies. The overall interdisciplinary nature of the contributions, the variety of languages they examine and the range of themes they address are distinguishing features of the book, which also make it appealing to a wider readership. The general themes covered by the volume include how to define the historical and social dimensions in historical sociolinguistics research, historical second-language use and multilingualism, the role and relevance played by linguistic ideologies and attitudes in language choices, usage, policy (standardization and preservation), and language death. More specific topics addressed are the linguistic strategies employed to convey and defend religious ideology or to heighten the overall persuasiveness of the information provided. Controversial and/or under-researched issues are tackled, such as authorship and gender in the study of private documents, the regularization and standardization of English orthography, and the issue of speakers’ awareness of the dissociation between spoken and written language. In addition, several contributions are methodologically linked by employing data from epistolary correspondence.