Un confronto tra il sistema tempo-aspettuale del siciliano e dell’italiano regionale di Sicilia

Abstract

The subject of the research to be presented is a comparison between the tense-aspect system of Sicilian and the regional Italian of Sicily, based on the analysis of two code-switched spoken corpora—one in Sicilian and one in Italian—produced by informants with different first languages (Italian or dialect), age and level of education, elicited as part of the socio-variational surveys of the Linguistic Atlas of Sicily (ALS), at fourteen survey points representative of the Sicilian territory. Given the interviewer’s request for the informant to recount a significant episode from their life, particular attention will be paid to the use of past tenses in light of the main models relating to the function of tenses in the text (Benveniste 1971, Weinrich 1978, Lo Cascio 1982, 1984, 1986). This research perspective, previously employed for the analysis of tenses in the regional Italian of Sicily (see Amenta, 2004; 2010), proves particularly fruitful for a synchronic comparison of the ways in which narrative texts are constructed in dialect and in Italian by the same informant, with a view to verifying how, in the transition from one code to another, there may be changes, on the one hand, in the management of narrative levels through the use of verb tenses and, on the other, in the varying weight given to the use of synthetic and/or periphrastic structures (in particular the progressive periphrasis and the ‘aviri a + infinitive’ periphrasis in sic