10.30-12.30
Biblioteca di Studi Letterari e Linguistici, Edificio D3, 3°piano

A. Sansò
Università dell’Insubria
The diachrony of discourse markers

When one looks at the diachrony of discourse markers, one has the impression of a rather chaotic picture.There are various factors contributing to such an impression. On the one hand, the well-known limitations of historical pragmatics (limited access to the context, difficulties in selecting documents mirroring the spoken language, etc.) do not always make research on the emergence of discourse markers an easy enterprise. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, such an impression might be the result of the specificity of changes involving discourse markers. The question thus is whether there are patterns of change that are typical of discourse markers and that differentiate their emergence from the emergence of other grams. In this talk, I will address some of these patterns by means of examples from Italian and other languages.

14.00-16.00
Biblioteca di Studi Letterari e Linguistici, Edificio D3, 3°piano

Silvia Dal Negro
Libera Università di Bolzano
Subject expression in contact varieties: spoken Italian, Tyrolean German and Trentino
My contribution, which will take into consideration above all the case of the second person singular, deals with the topic of subject expression  from multiple perspectives. First of all, from a typological-descriptive point of view, the functioning of Italian, German, Tyrolean and Trentino in relation to subject  expression will be taken into account. Secondly, from a variationist point of view, the attention will shift to the distribution of the different forms provided by each system in a spoken corpus, thus verifying the extent of these types in use. Finally, in the perspective of language contact, the concrete context of multilingualism will be taken into account in reconsidering the extent to which grammatical systems are kept apart by multilingual speakers in different speech situations.

 
Brochure 2019