Partitive determiners in Piedmontese

A case of language variation and change in a contact setting

Bibliographic Data

ID7913516
AuthorsMassimo Cerruti (Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici , Università di Torino , via S. Ottavio n. 50 , Torino , Piemonte 10124 , Italy, corresponding author), Riccardo Regis (0000-0002-8162-635X, Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici , Università di Torino , via S. Ottavio n. 50 , Torino , Piemonte 10124 , Italy)
Year2020
Volume58
Issue3
Pages651-677
Publication date2020-05-26
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/ling-2020-0080
OpenAlexW3030764610
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited16

This paper addresses the use of partitive determiners in Piedmontese as a case in point for the interplay of language variation and change in Italo-Romance. Firstly, a brief diachronic account will be provided of the development of partitive determiners in Piedmontese, ranging from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; such an overview will rely upon the results of recent studies on this subject. Next, the behavior of partitive determiners in contemporary Piedmontese will be examined; we will draw primarily on some unpublished materials collected within the ALEPO research program (ALEPO stands for Atlante linguistico ed etnografico del Piemonte Occidentale , “Linguistic and Ethnographic Atlas of Western Piedmont”), which consist of both responses to a questionnaire survey and spontaneous speech data. The study will help to shed light on the similarities and differences not only between different varieties of Piedmontese, but also between such varieties and Italian. The main paradigmatic differences identified will be argued to relate to two different ways of categorizing the relationship between mass nouns and countable plurals, one in which quantification prevails over classification, and the other in which classification is foregrounded. This state of affairs will then be discussed against the backdrop of the sociolinguistic situation under scrutiny, paying special attention to the contact between Piedmontese and Italian (as well as with French up to the end of the nineteenth century) and to the “superposition” of both an official standard language (i. e., Italian) and a regional koine (based on the variety of Turin) over local varieties of Piedmontese

Art · Geography · Humanities · Language contact · Linguistics · Noun · Political science · Scrutiny · Sociology · Variation (astronomy) · Variety (cybernetics) · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

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