Language Change Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This thesis addresses the language contact situation between the regional variety of Italian spoken in Pescara, in the Abruzzo region, eastern Italy, and the Italo-Romance substratum language of the same area, Pescarese, the nearly extinct local variety of a wider regional class of vernacular languages, referred to as Abruzzese. One of the main goals of the thesis is to carry out a comparative description of the phonological systems of intonation of the two languages and the discussion on their contact situation, also taking into account the possible influence of other varieties of Italian spoken in the surrounding areas.

Even though there are several descriptive studies on the intonational systems of regional Italian varieties and some work on the most alive regional languages (such as Sardinian and Friulan), to our knowledge no studies have dealt with Pescara Italian and with Pescarese so far. Also, to the present data, little work has been carried out on language contact and change in the prosodic field (Elordieta 2003, 2006; Colantoni and Gurlekian 2004; Mennen 2004; O’Rourke 2005; Alvord 2006; Heffernan 2006; Simonet 2008, 2010; Elordieta and Irurtzun 2012, 2016; Romera and Elordieta 2013, Nance 2014, among others), especially in the context of Italian in contact with the substratum Romance languages (Romano, 2000). To my knowledge, apart from general remarks on the matter, no previous studies have systematically compared the prosodic patterns of a regional variety of Italian with its substratum language.

The thesis has a twofold objective. First, it contributes to the Italian studies on intonation, being the first extensive study of the intonation of both an endangered Italo-Romance language and its corresponding regional Italian. Second, it enters the context of studies on prosodic change and contact, as it describes intonational variation in a special situation of language contact, which is the contact between sister languages, one of which (Italian) first entered Pescara only as a written language. Thus, rather than a situation of oral contact between two intonation systems, this study deals with a situation of contact of two sister languages, in which the intonation system of one of the languages (Italian) is being built. This type of

contact situation is common to many areas of the Italian peninsula, and this study could be the first of a long series of analogous comparative analyses.

A cross-sectional production study was carried out with 8 young native speakers of Pescara Italian, 6 old native speakers of Pescara Italian and 6 old native speakers of Pescarese. To elicit the speech. A Discourse Completion Task was used, presenting 57 situations to which the speakers were asked to react orally, in order to record spontaneous versions of various sentence types. The use of different age groups allowed assessing how the intonation system of Pescara Italian intonation has undergone change in time, how this change is encoded in synchronic variation and whether this variation was and is being maintained, undone or reinterpreted.

Auditory inspection and acoustic analysis of the speech productions show that Pescara Italian intonation is influenced by its substratum language (Pescarese), as well as by Central Italian varieties, not genetically related to it. A fair amount of inner variation in Pescara Italian intonation was found, and this study will argue that part of the Pescara Italian system is derived by transfer from substratum, either by direct transfer or by prosodic modification of the Pescarese intonation pattern. A special substratum feature marking the prominent phrase of certain sentence types is found in Pescarese, which has been integrally transferred to regional Italian (ex: Maria beve [il latte di mandorle.] ‘Maris drinks almond milk’ uttered with a salient high plateau joining the first and last stressed syllables of the phrase in brackets); a mandatory rule for Pescarese vocatives was found, adding an extra initial syllable when the name is initially stressed (ex: Cla’! 
A Cla’! “Claudio!”) in order to provide segmental material (the exra syllable [a]) to which to align a pretonic rise.

The patterns that are transferred from Pescarese will be called “conservative” variants. Among them, there are also patterns, in Pescara Italian, that are similar but not identical to the corresponding Pescarese pattern. They have been transferred from Pescarese in early stages of contact, when written Italian first entered Pescara, but have suffered prosodic modification, while

adapting to fit the different metric nature of a new language. Finally, other intonation patterns of Pescara Italian are absent in Pescarese: they have entered Pescara Italian by contact with other Italian varieties, especially from the Rome region. Those patterns are referred to as “standard-like” or “innovative”.

For many sentence types, multiple intonation strategies are documented, even within the same speaker, generally one conservative and one innovative. By comparing the intonational system of young and old speakers of Pescara Italian, this thesis is able to document the process of prosodic change and track the interplay between conservative and innovative variants in time. In some cases, either the conservative pattern, initially transferred from Pescarese, is replaced over time by the standard-like pattern (as, for instance, the vocative contour or the boundary tone of yesno questions), or there is no dominance or evolution of one pattern towards the other and the two are maintained (as for the pitch accent of contrastive statements or that of wh-questions).

Furthermore, when change takes place, the two variants can either gradually approximate their phonetic shapes, resulting in language convergence (Colantoni and Gurlekian 2004, O’Rourke 2005, Simonet 2008, 2010, Romera and Elordieta 2013) or remain phonetically distinct, with one possibly gradually taking over the other in terms of percentage of use, as in (Alvord 2006, Swerts and Zerbian 2010). It may also happen that one of the two variants gradually de-associates with the sentence type and undergoes pragmatic shift, or “reallocation” (Britain and Trudgill 1999), especially when it is already associated with another pragmatic function within the system.

Yes-no questions and contrastive focus statements represent an example of how different pragmatic functions may entail different trends of change: two similar phonetic patterns were found as multiple strategies for both yes-no questions and contrastive statements in Pescara Italian: a rise-fall pitch accent with a peak at the end of the pretonic syllable, (L+H*)H+L*, which is the conservative variant, and a rise-fall pitch accent with the peak fully inside the tonic vowel, H*+L, which is the innovative variant.

When used for questions, they converged to one another in time, into a rise-fall with an intermediate alignment of the peak, in the tonic onset, that is half way between the positions of the conservative and innovative variants. When used for contrastive statements, however, the same pitch accents show a stronger tendency to maintain variation and preserve their distinct phonetic shapes, with a minority of cases of an intermediate contour, which is however not implemented with one unique intermediate peak, like for yes-no questions, but with two peaks, one pretonic and one tonic, as an overlapping of the two variants.

As the coexistence of the same pair of identical phonetic forms evolves differently in the two cases, the only contrast being in the pragmatic sentence type, this example provides evidence that the evolution trend of inner variation does not necessarily depend on the phonetic form of the contours, but may only depend on the pragmatics of the sentence type.