RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

Informatics an geo-linguistic research: ALS: micro-areal atlases and data base fruition

University Co-ordinator

Università degli Studi di PALERMO - SCIENZE FILOLOGICHE E LINGUISTICHE - PALERMO(PA)

Research Unit Leader

Giovanni RUFFINO

Description

ALS operating group is developing simultaneously different parts that are presented as integrated dynamical working sites and that are open to disciplines which integrate linguistics and computer technology (linguistics of corpora, data banks, computational linguistics, etc).
The entire programme cannot leave out of consideration the computerised implant of the whole geo-linguistic project, and also the formation of a large digital archives of spoken dialects and of regional Italian.
The actual perspective is orientated on the structuring of different areas or sectorial micro atlases into which apply these new addresses.

1. Ethnic-dialectical section.
The exploring and the geo-linguistic documentation of the island's tradition lexicon and ethnical uses will concentrate on the following aims:

a) Micro-atlas and lexicon of children's games

The module of "traditional children's games" will be completed using the huge amount of material already gathered in seventy points of revilement. To the published works (cf. bibliography) will be added:
- a cartographic corpus regarding fifteen playing concepts which are particularly productive: "to count", "even and uneven", "playing leapfrog a. (scarica canali)", "playing leapfrog b. (travu longu), "playing leapfrog c. (unu monta la luna)", "playing hide and seek", "playing hopscotch", "playing five stones", "playing sussi", "playing tipcat", "piggyback", "roley poley (to turn a summersault)", "swing", "catapult", "kite";
- a lexicon of traditional games in Sicily, based on models of diatopic sectional lexicography, already experimented inside the ALS programme.

b) Sectional lexicon of alimentary culture

The completed surveys regarding the module of alimentary culture are yet to be completed. To the data that have already been obtained with the ethnical dialectical questionnaire (cfr Ruffino and Bernardi in bibliography), will be added some not purely linguistic ones that will be obtained with a social alimentary questionnaire, yet to be completed. The aim is to treat the ethnical dialectical data (lexicon, procedures, alimentary traditional rules) referring them to the new cultural contexts, to the emerging "tastes", to the new rules and to the new practises.
Regarding the editorial production, a first module on bread lexicon is going to be produced (including material associated to "schiacciate e focacce") articulated in a cartographic series of really productive concepts and in a special lexicon.

c) Antroponomastic micro-atlas
A repertoire of popular antroponims in 100 survey points are expected to be gathered. It will find an adequate publication in a series of typological maps and in a popular antroponomastic lexicon.
Interpretative parameters considering creative and motivational processes in a spatial dimension will be applied to both (quality and quantity variation of antroponomastic lexicon in relation to the different sub-areas), overtaking the simple alphabetical or semantic presentation. The classification of this material will be based on the distinction between connotative and denotative antroponims.

2. Socio-variational section

The analysis in this sector will be concentrated on single areas or on single portions of the questionnaire in order to verify the usefulness of the BD maps of complex materials and projecting implants in its wholeness. We are going to concentrate on two areas that show different problems.

a) Micro-atlas of the metropolitan area of Palermo.
The metropolitan area of Palermo was the object of attention for Alessandra Colonna Romano in 1995. Her work aims to verify to which extent and in which way the different diastratic (and diatopic) varieties of Palermo dialect and regional Italian are in expansion on the phonetic, morphological and lexicon front. The area was circumscribed even on a legislative level in 1997 and contains 27 points. The definitive network of the variation points of ALS only includes some of them, selected for their "representativeness" of the various features of the area.
The centres analysed within a doctorate thesis are, from west to east: Terrasini, Cinisi, Carini, Monreale, Palermo, Bagheria, Casteldaccia, Misilmeri, Altavilla Milicia and Termini Imerese. The aim is to verify how the selected areas react to the models of linguistic behaviour coming from the capital, to see if they are receptive to the linguistic novelty from the city or if they use defensive strategies. Important, in this spatial view, is the success and the mingling of dynamic linguistic analysis inside the city with the external ones, moved by the city working as an irradiation centre.

b) Micro Atlas of the Madonie.
The Madonie area from the coast of Cefalù to the north west internal area towards Alimena and the many villages of Petralia Soprana, is a territory characterised by mountains–low land, internal land–coast, city–countryside dynamics. It has a territory and anthropological articulation with a characterised area, which has a very clear-cut, known as the "Madonie Park".
A system of sub–areas characterised by intense everyday professional and scholastic relationships emerges from the coast to the mountain, strengthened by homogeneous territorial, human and financial dynamics.
The points considered by the areal atlas are: Gangi, Geraci, Caltavuturo, Cefalù, Sclafani Bagno and Scillato. For the above shown features, the area allows an organic consideration. In particular the materials allow a crossing considaration of perceptive view of the speakers, who identify themselves with their town and -in general- with the Madonie area, and their actual linguistic productions which show some dynamical changes.

c) Syntactical micro atlas.
The ALS questionnaire contains a part in which two sets of translation queries are presented: from Italian to Sicilian and from Sicilian to Italian. Every single sentence suggested to the informers contains a particular phenomenon of nominal, adjectival, pronominal or verbal morphology and, on a syntactical level, facts concerning the order of sentence constituents, the performance and the position of the negative form.

The collecting technique of the syntactical material has shown that the reaction of speakers changes in relation to their social features and to their different behaviour in front of an unknown interlocutor. Thus the reconstruction of the linguistic knowledge of the informers takes place by considering the previous texts, the variants and the corrections appearing during the interviews. In this perspective, the pragmatic analysis of interactions between researchers and informants will be developed together with the quantitative as well as the qualitative analysis of informants linguistic productions. The latter is infact essential for a morphosyntactic and grammatical description of Sicilian linguistic situation; on the other hand, the interference between the language code (national and standard language) and the dialect code can be also investigated and caught by taking into the right account the quantitative level in relation to the traditional sociolinguistic classes (age, education, mother tongue, etc.). These represented the basis for the choice and the construction of the sample. In both cases it is not possible to leave the pragmatic component behind. By projecting the DB, a series of label graph concerning the phenomena that will be studied has been created in order to permit to classify the various realizations of speakers.The variety of phenomena to investigate and the considerable amount of different answers given by informers for every single query has made both the structuring of the syntactical part of DB and the creation of a label system allowing to understand the complexity of data particularly delicate.At the present stage of research a pragmatic / interactive label graph has also been produced. It is correlated to the very syntactic label graph. Those labels have been conceived in such a way that people inserting data in the electronic file must firstly fill in a part regarding the pragmatic analysis of the interactive shifts of the researcher and of the informer. The latter is in turn organized in different sections:
translation typology, translation strategy, discourse comments and signals, conversational signs.
The part concerning the syntactical analysis is organized in such a way that it will be possible to choice among a series of analysis options linked with the different possibilities of tranlation suggested by informants. By checking the first stage of inserting data, the necessity to modify and modify options has raised. The analysis of translations from Sicilian to Italian permits to find out that panItalian constructions are often reinterprated and enlarged. On the other hand, the analysis of translations from Italian to Sicilian allows for interpretations concerning the degree of conservation of dialect, the relation between dialectal structures and standard structure.
In this perceptive, the actual labelling system will be checked and checked again, while in a second a first quantitative interpretation of phenomena will be made, correlating them usefully with the quality of the input and with the interactional dynamic that produced them.
Only after having crossed the quantitative data with the pragmatic analysis it will be possible to select and analyse the most meaningful syntactical phenomena from which the tendential lines of linguistic changes are noticeable in a more precise way.

d) Regional Italian Micro- Atlas.
The interpretative models and the methodological definition which must be used while gathering data is still the object of considerable debate.As far as Sicily is concerned, works by Tropea (1976) and Leone (1982) have revealed a big list of phonetic, morph- syntactical features and in particular, of lexicon and idiomatic forms; However a systematic analysis in a diatopic perspective is still neglected. Moreover, these works, do not use a structured instrument like a questionnaire, but they are mainly moulded on the direct observation of the speaking or on written texts concerning economical warnings, advertisements and shop signboards.
Among the various models of empirical research, the model employed by ALS is the first one characterized by a project oriented to investigate systematically the Sicilian linguistic repertoire in its whole, with the aim of tracing the general tendential lines that today cover the island's territory. Particular interest of investigation is given to the intermediate varieties between the two extreme linguistic poles represented by the local dialect and by the national/standars language: italianised dialect on one hand, regional Italian on the other.
Queries XIII, XIV and XV of the socio-linguistic questionnaire are devoted to the analysis of regional Italian, which is extremely complex and protean. There are some questions, which through various strategies of collection of data, have the aim to let gathering informations about the knowledge, the meaning and the diffusion of some lexical and semantical Regional forms as well as about words belonging to the language employed by young people.
The construction of a database here turned out to be very complicated and full of problems because of the necessity to render the mechanisms of the linguistic data construction explicit, together with the represantation of psychological and social behaviour of speakers.
The final goal of the module is to use the gathered data in order to: delineate the areas in which innovations are widespreading; individuate irradiation centres and classes of speakers (young people/educated people) leading and spreading linguistic change; trace the directions and the possible results of the inter-linguistic convergence; build a vast repertoire of the systematic forms of contact between Italian and dialect; observe if for some lexemes there have been a resemantizations or a partial change of previous semantic features.
d) Micro- Atlas of the spoken language and of contact.
Even if in the original implant this perspective of analysis was not considered, in the gathered material, it is possible to extract a vast documentation of spontaneous spoken texts even in the structured parts of the interview.
We had thought of organizing a module with the aim to analyzing this material in relation to the speaker's perceptions of their own competence in the two enquired code compared to the quality of their actual productions, distinguishing the ones introduced by specific inputs (monologues), and the unseen ones (mostly dialogic).
Firstly it will be necessary to select the moments of the interview in which the discards occur more systematically compared to the rigid sequence of typical questions and answers of an interactive form strongly structured like the interview based on a sociolinguistic questionnaire.
In this perspective, the reconstruction of a map on a wide scale of main phenomena cannot be left out of consideration. Such phenomena as code mixing, code swithching, hybridisation will be put in correlation with diatopic and social variables. It is necessary: a) to accept the actual consistency and the distribution of the different contact phenomena, both dia-topic (dimension and dynamic of the centre) and diastratic (social stratum, education level and age class) of the interviewed speakers. B) To come to the implications of the diachronic phenomena of the raised contacts, trying to capture the processes in course, the tendency lines and the dynamism that interest the entire regional space.
The analysis will be divided into three different phases: 1) the analysis of the self evaluation answers referring to the social- varational questionnaire; a sort of linguistic identity card will be given for every speaker, from which it will be possible to see a) his mother tongue language, the main code he uses, his favourite code; b) the rules that govern the alternation of the codes, i. e. the conditions and the contexts of use of the two codes in relation to the different contexts and interacting speakers; c) the awareness of the use of code switching and code mixing and the reasons given from speakers themselves concerning these phenomena. 2) The analysis of the real behaviour conducted on the texts of spontaneous speaking gathered during the questionnaire. The unseen texts will inevitably have a bigger degree of spontaneity compared to the labelled ones because the latter are bonded to the requested code (Italian or Sicilian), while the former are free.