RICERCA ITALIANA     

Linguistic Atlas of Sicily. The Geolinguistic-Anthropological Dimension in Sicily: Cartographic Representation, Diatopic Lexicography, Iconic Representation, Archives and Data Warehouse

Università degli Studi di Palermo

Abstract

The Linguistic Atlas of Sicly-ALS working group is still developing various and interrelated modules, opened to the new knowledge coming from the disciplines integrating linguistics and informatic technology. The perspective is orientend to the building of a large archives of local spoken dialects with regards to the field of food habits and traditions, aiming at producing a corpus both of sectorial diatopic lexicons and geolinguistic maps. That is linked with the difficult attempt to put together lexicography and diatopy, with the application of new informatic possibilities. A complete and informatic standardization of linguistic data (textual, pragmatical, syntactical, lexical, phonetic) and iconographic (by meas of the cataloguing and organization of the audiovisual heritage regarding traditional Sicilian food will be made. A Particular attention will be devoted to the ”Galloitalic” Sicilian Communities for which a Dictionary-Atlas of Food Culture in “Lombard” Sicily, accompanied with pictures (representing concrete “things”) and geolinguistic maps, will be made. The section of the ALS concerned with Alimentary Culture and Food Habits is working in a general situation characterized by a deep attention on food universe, but such an attention is often deviated and manipulated by food industry and press. The plan of the research concerns a very important area (Sicily) and it results from a series of scientific relations and interests linked with food history (cf >>>

Principal Investigator

Giovanni Ruffino Università degli Studi di PALERMO

Research Objectives

The aim of the ALS group is to give an Atlas-Tool as a multifunctional archives, including:

a)LEXICAL MAPS (onomasiological and semasiological)
This module will have the aim of representing the most important anthropological procedures by starting from linguistic data (cultural areas and linguistic areas) with a special attention to diachronic aspects. GIS (geographical information systems) Cartographic toll will be employed for this purpose, in order to provide integrated facilities for digital cartography generation.

b)ETHNOGRAPHIC MAPS (Tools and practices)
This module will provide with information and documents about the variety and complexity of flavours which characterize Sicilian gastronomy, but also about the symbolic resources of alimentary language, able to set up a “world order”, not only the one relating taste. The sites chosen for the research are both urban centres having particularly relevant markets and places where culinary practices still reveal their traditional functions when associated to celebrating systems.

c)SYSTEMATIC GATHERING OF ETHNOTEXTS
This module will include the texts of imprompted speech collected on the field, on a net of about 70 sites, by using the entire Questionnaire (see Bibiography)

d)DIATOPIC SUB-AREAL LEXICONS
1. A Dictionary-atlas of Food Culture in “Lombard” Sicily will be created with the aim of showing the intercultural dynamics involving >>>

First Results

In contemporary and 20th century geolinguistic projects it is easy to notice that their questionnaire only cover a little part of alimentary field. Moreover, this poor attention is often eterogeneous in the varios atlas where some crucial questions are absent or rarely represented (for example a base question such as EATING is present neither in ALI nor in AIS; but also cf. “biting”, “cooking”, “sweet”, “bitter”, “tasty”, “spicy” etc.). This has some reasons: in geolinguistics even more than in diatopic lexicography, the selection procedure goes from the questions to the choice of maps. This is especially true for surveys like the ones on food habits in which survey problems depend on extreme variation forms which can reach micro-local and even familiar variation levels. Within these variation conditions scholars need survey strategies corresponding to the complexity of the research object (questionnaire with many open answers, useful to collect ethnotextes), with many semasiological questions starting from the cultural aspects rather than from the general conception under investigation. Traditional geolinguistic material often do not appear so good to give an accettable and consistent picture of alimentary procedures. As Louis Marin observed: “Cuisine is structured as a language and it obeys the same functional and structural rules”. It means that we work with an alimentary structured “grammar”, with its “tastemes” and “smellemes”, with its repertoire of coded actions and >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The entire project of the ALS has been defined thanks to the active contribution of the national and international scientific institutions working on geolinguistic enterprises both on Romance area and other interesting areas.
The complexity of the project within the international horizon has been appreciated in many occasions.
In the Ethnolinguistic and Sociolinguistic sections of the Atlas the primary aim has remained unchanged along the years: to reveal the polymorphism of the area, the deep relation between traditional-material culture and dialectal culture as well as the deep relations linking linguistic structure and social-areal pattern. Thus, the whole projects is oriented towards the knowledge of the entire linguistic repertoire in its diachronic and synchronic complex stratification. This theoretical approach has been the focus of many reflexions of the ALS research group (ALS RG)on the occasion of several Conferences held in Palermo and with the publications of Volumes on methodology marked by the contributions of al lot of important scholars working on geolinguistics.
After the survey on Traditional Children's Games and the first essays of representation of data (cfr. Ruffino 1997 and Matranga 2004), the ALS RG is now working on the analysis and representation of further available data. Since 2004 ALS RG ha been working on the field survey concerning Alimentary Culture and Food Habits. The section of the Atlas concerned with food habits >>>