Marta Lupica Spagnolo

This article addresses key issues related to diverse cases of migration to complex multilingual environments within Europe. Data came from three case studies carried out within the scope of the MIME project: (ex-)Yugoslavian refugees to South Tyrol (Italy); Portuguese work migrants to Andorra; and international managers in Vasa (Finland). Data were elicited using qualitative methods (biographical narrative interviews and focus groups) and thematically analysed to identify emic causes of ‘linguistic unease’, the speakers’ perception that their linguistic repertoire is inadequate for communicating with others and the consequent fear that their linguistic performance will be met with judgemental and negative attitudes. Our results show that in all situations, irrespective of the diverse conditions that exist prior to migration or in the destination country, the complex linguistic environment of the recipient society is puzzling for mobile people. In all cases, numerous migrants target the language that they perceive to be easier and most accessible to them, but this also exposes them to some level of linguistic unease. Crucially, migrants’ learning choices rub salt in the wounds of old conflicts that have roots in the historical dynamics of multilingualism of the recipient societies. We argue that raising sociolinguistic awareness about this is crucial to mitigate unease and discrimination in the most vulnerable sections of the migrant population.

This paper describes a continuum of Italian-based multilingual practices
we label ‘Italian in Transit’. Italian in Transit competencies are acquired by multilingual migrants and refugees in Italy and are occasionally reactivated after moving to other countries. Our dataset consists of twenty interviews with street vendors in Berlin (Germany) who speak basic up to post-basic Italian learner varieties. Generalized present infinitives (inf.prs) constitute a shared fossilized feature in fifteen interviews. Sociolinguistically, their overall frequency may be related to Italian in Transit learning modalities in Italy. However, generalized inf.prs show morphological, semantic, and pragmatic peculiarities in our corpus compared to other Italian learner and contact varieties. First, inf.prs tend to be generalized for past (vs future or present) tenses and to have a perfective-perfect (vs imperfective or perfective-aoristic) value. Along with the fact that the Italian in Transit verb system is more complex than the bipartite one featured in numerous Italian contact varieties, this distribution is explainable by inf.prs’ higher morphological transparency compared to verbs generalized in past constructions. Second, inf.prs are usually generalized with durative verb phrases and in irrealis propositions, thereby often conveying background information. Consequently, Italian in Transit speakers innovatively exploit inf.prs’ alternation with other moods/tenses to evaluate and structure the information flow, especially in narratives.

This paper investigates how thirty-eight people who emigrated from the former Yugoslavian countries to trilingual South Tyrol represent and negotiate language power relationships in their narratives of language learning and use. Power relationships are strictly mediated through language competencies at both the community (i.e., with regard to the institutional distribution of resources) and individual levels (i.e., with regard to how individuals can get access to them) in the province of Bolzano/Bozen. As for our dataset, several participants declare having at least low competencies in both Italian and German, while a few of them also understand a local Austro-Bavarian dialect. Specifically, four types of stories are identified in the interviewees’ language biographies. These are labeled as narratives of i) exclusion, ii) assimilation, iii) empowerment, and iv) emancipation. In the first two types of stories, narrators mainly reproduce master narratives concerning newcomers’ languag...

L’âge avancé en perspective longitudinale et ses outils : LangAge, un corpus au pluriel. En marge des groupes d’âge habituellement représentés dans les échantillons sociolinguistiques, LangAge se positionne comme un recueil d’entretiens et d’enregistrements vocaux consacré à l’âge avancé de la vie. Les participantes et participants sont issues de différents milieux et appartiennent pour la plupart à la tranche d’âge des 70 ans et plus. De plus, le corpus documente jusqu’à dix ans de la vie d’une partie de ces personnes âgées. Il est ainsi possible de suivre l’évolution des mêmes individus à travers plusieurs années et d’éviter, dans la comparaison de différentes couches d’âge, les difficultés habituelles des échantillons en temps réel qui ne peuvent jamais équilibrer les particularités biographiques des individus inclus. Le sous-corpus « couples » regroupe les rencontres avec dix couples durant cette période, ce qui permet d’aborder un domaine rarement étudié. LangAge est conçu, dan...

In this paper, the functional category of domain adverbials (DAials) in Italian is investigated in a contrastive perspective with German. The first part examines how German DAials are translated into Italian in the Europarl Corpus. As a result, we compile a list of formation patterns for creating DAials in the two languages. In addition, we point out a difference between DAials occurring as adverbs (AdvPs) and prepositional phrases (PPs) with adjective, on the one hand, and as PPs with noun and clauses (CPs), on the other hand: only the latter two introduce a referential expression that can be modified by adjectives, nouns, and/or other PPs. In the second part, we focus on the interrelations between form, position in the clause, semantic value, and pragmatic function of a series of DAials – referring to the domain politics/policy – in a corpus of online newspapers. DAials and, among these, AdvPs are more frequently used in German than in Italian. Moreover, independently of their morphosyntactic complexity and informational weight, DAials mostly occur in mid-clause position in German. By contrast, in Italian, AdvPs, PPs with noun, and PPs with adj. tend to show a more variable distribution in the clause and to have different semantic and pragmatic properties. Particular attention is reserved for the textual functions of DAials at the beginning of clauses with Verb-Subject order in Italian.

Oggetto del volume sono le biografie linguistiche di persone trasferitesi in Alto Adige (Südtirol) dai paesi successori alla Jugoslavia dal 1985 al 2015. Esaminando a livello contenutistico e formale i discorsi epilinguistici di parlanti che hanno vissuto e vivono in spazi sociolinguistici altamente complessi, la ricerca si propone di contribuire allo studio della ristrutturazione dei repertori in situazioni di contatto. Due sono le unità di analisi specifiche, identificate tramite i metodi della sociolinguistica interpretativa. Da un lato, si analizzano i glottonimi e le apposizioni usate per riferirsi alle varietà linguistiche d’origine. Ne emerge un quadro dei modi di posizionarsi dei partecipanti nei confronti dei recenti interventi di pianificazione linguistica in area balcanica. Dall’altro, si ricostruiscono gli spazi comunicativi narrati di tre intervistate attraverso l’esame delle loro storie di dialoghi. Questi racconti mostrano come le narratrici, attingendo a schemi interpretativi circolanti nella società altoatesina o resistendo loro, diano un senso vis-à-vis con la ricercatrice al cristallizzarsi di nessi più o meno inamovibili tra codici, luoghi e interlocutori nella regione d’arrivo.

This article examines the functional category of domain adverbials (DAs), which arose fairly recently in the European languages and is claimed to occur frequently in the written press. In order to better understand this category, we investigate the form, use and meaning of DAs in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish and highlight important intra- and cross-linguistic differences by means of a qualitative and quantitative empirical study based on a corpus of journalistic texts drawn from online daily newspapers. Our results show that cross-linguistically DAs are mainly realized as adverbs formed through a standard word-formation rule. Our results also point to important cross-linguistic differences in the frequency and types of domain adverbs used in the five languages. We explain these differences by taking into account grammatical, sociolinguistic and discourse-related parameters.

The aim of this contribution – functioning as preface to the special issue of Linguistik online entitled Formal and functional perspectives on sentence adverbials in the Romance languagesand beyond – is to give a general overview of its research object and agenda. We start by providing a morpho-syntactic definition of the category of adverbials and then present a functional classification of these expressions, paying particular attention to the category of sentence adverbials. After having clarified the research object of this special issue, we present the content of the ten contributions collected, by identifying the lines of analysis which they address.

This study compares the productivity of word formation patterns involving the affixes -ung, -keit/-igkeit/-heit, -bar and ver-. The comparison is between non-native and native German writers, using the Chamisso corpus and a comparable corpus. The creative use of the German language in non-native literature, a literature of migrant authors who write in German as a foreign language, is widely considered the most prominent feature of this writing. According to critics, this creative use of language is related to the fact that authors switch from the native language to German. Such an assumption is plausible from a linguistic standpoint: empirical studies in language acquisition and in sociolinguistics support the hypothesis that linguistic creativity could consist of an over-use of productive morphological categories. My results reject the hypothesis that the non-native authors differ from German authors in the productivity of the observed morphological categories. This negative result...

Eine Haupteigenschaft der deutschsprachigen „interkulturellen Literatur“ – einer Literatur von ausgewanderten Autoren, die auf Deutsch als Fremdsprache schreiben – erkennen einige Kritiker in einem kreativen Umgang mit der deutschen Sprache, der mit dem Sprachwechsel zusammenhangt. Aus einer linguistischen Perspektive ist eine solche Annahme nachvollziehbar. Empirische Untersuchungen aus der Spracherwerbsforschung und der Soziolinguistik sprechen fur die Hypothese, dass die wahrgenommene linguistische Kreativitat in einem Ubergebrauch produktiver morphologischer Kategorie bestehen konnte. In Anlehnung an die Baayen᾿schen Formeln der realized und potential productivity untersucht die vorliegende Studie Variationen in der Produktivitat der Wortbildungsmuster auf -ung, auf -keit/-igkeit/-heit, auf -bar sowie auf ver-, und zwar im Vergleich von interkulturellen und deutschen Schriftstellern (Chamisso- und Vergleichskorpus). Die Ergebnisse der korpuslinguistischen Analyse lehnen die Hypo...