Keywords:
Venetan, Italian, bilingualism, dialect, identity, language vitality, language documentation, minority languages
Abstract
Research on understudied dialects holds significant importance in unraveling the complexities of bilingual and multilingual environments that often remain overlooked in sociolinguistic inquiry. Dialects can serve as windows into linguistic diversity, shedding light on unique language interactions and sociocultural dynamics. This study focuses on Venetan, a dialect spoken in the Veneto region of northeastern Italy. Employing established bilingualism research methodologies, we examine Venetan use in relation to Italian, analyzing demographic, socio-political, and sociolinguistic factors that influence patterns of dialect use. Our findings reveal that while older individuals still utilize Venetan, the younger population favor Italian, leading to a decline in the dialect's prevalence, despite a strong sense of local pride and community membership. Parents predominantly communicate with their children in Italian, thereby limiting their exposure to the dialect. Additionally, gender disparities emerged, with women exhibiting a greater shift toward Italian than men. These findings contribute to understanding the evolving status of Venetan and underscore the broader sociolinguistic processes shaping language maintenance and shift. We conclude by discussing the implications of these patterns for cognitive science, noting that recent research on Venetan offers valuable insights into the interplay between cognitive mechanisms and language use.
This book investigates Polarity Mood (PM) in Peninsular Spanish and how the phenomenon has evolved diachronically. In particular, it explores from a theoretical and empirical perspective the interaction of PM with five other linguistic phenomena: (i) the verb class of the matrix predicate, (ii) the presence of a first-person subject; (iii) the type of matrix clause, (iv) information structure, and (v) the presence of Negative Polarity Items. Drawing inspiration from the competing grammars framework, the book starts by proposing an account of mood morphology in terms of three competing systems: one in which mood morphology is used as a hedging device to express the degree of commitment; another in which mood is analyzed as a pronoun which indicates that the world of evaluation lies in some accessible Context Set; and another in which mood is used as a purely grammaticalized syntactic marker. The second part of the book shows how the historical competition between these systems explains the diachronic development observed in corpus data, as well as the present-day mood selection patterns.
Raquel Montero Estebaranz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a member of the project TURING (The Language Understanding of Artificial Intelligence Applications). She defended her PhD Thesis at the University of Konstanz in September 2024. Her main research interests include the Syntax-Semantics interface, language change over time, experimental methods and language models.
