L’ITALIANO NEO-STANDARD OGGI: STATO DELL’ARTE

In questo contributo si discute, con attenzione a aspetti teorici e empirici, la nozione di italiano neo-standard nel quadro sociolinguistico contemporaneo. Dopo aver introdotto di alcuni contributi che per primi hanno registrato la nascita di questa nuova varietà, si presenta il processo che ha portato l’emergere di un nuovo standard in Italia e la sua relazione rispetto al vecchio standard e agli standard regionali. Successivamente, si discute la compresenza del nuovo e del vecchio standard nella contemporaneità, anche considerando il diverso ruolo assunto dalle forze sociali che determinano cosa sia “standard” e alcuni recenti studi empirici che provano l’esistenza di queste due varietà da una prospettiva soggettiva e oggettiva. Infine, si presentano alcuni tratti linguistici che caratterizzano questa varietà, anche discutendo la loro traiettoria di movimento in relazione ai cambiamenti dall’alto e dal basso laboviani.   Neo-standard Italian today: state of the art This paper discusses the notion of neo-standard Italian in today’s sociolinguistic scenario, paying attention to both theoretical and empirical aspects. After tracing the emergence of this new variety, the process that has led to the emergence of neo-standard Italian and its relationship with the old standard and regional standards is presented. The co-existence of new and old standards is discussed, taking into account the different roles played by social forces that determine what is “standard”, as well as recent empirical studies that show the existence of these two varieties from subjective and objective perspectives. Finally, some linguistic features that characterize this variety, also highlighting the trajectory in relation with the Labovian distinction of changes from above and from below, is discussed

Il corpus KIParla

In questo articolo presentiamo le principali caratteristiche del CORPUS KIParla, una nuova risorsa per lo studio dell’italiano parlato, liberamente accessibile al sito www.kiparla.it. Il corpus è stato progettato per essere gratuitamente consultato attraverso l’interfaccia NoSketch Engine e per essere espanso nel tempo tramite l’aggiunta di nuovi moduli. Il corpus KIParla fornisce l’accesso a una vasta gamma di metadati che caratterizzano sia i partecipanti che le interazioni, utilizzabili come filtri di ricerca. Al momento il KIParla consiste di due moduli (KIP e ParlaTO), che permettono di effettuare ricerche sulla variazione diafasica, diatopica e diastratica dell’italiano contemporaneo. Parole chiave: corpus, italiano parlato, sociolinguistica

KIPoS @ EVALITA2020: Overview of the Task on KIParla Part of Speech Tagging

The paper describes the first task on Part of Speech tagging of spoken language held at the Evalita evaluation campaign, KIPoS. Benefiting from the availability of a resource of transcribed spoken Italian (i.e. the KIParla corpus), which has been newly annotated and released for KIPoS, the task includes three evaluation exercises focused on formal versus informal spoken texts. The datasets and the results achieved by participants are presented, and the insights gained from the experience are discussed.L’articolo descrive il primo task sul Part of Speech tagging di lingua parlata tenutosi nella campagna di valutazione Evalita. Usufruendo di una risorsa che raccoglie trascrizioni di lingua italiana (il corpus KIParla), annotate appositamente per KIPoS, il task è stato focalizzato intorno a tre valutazioni con lo scopo di confrontare i risultati raggiunti sul parlato formale con quelli ottenuti sul parlato informale. Il corpus di dati ed i risultati raggiunti dai partecipanti sono presentati insieme alla discussione di quanto emerso dall’esperienza di questo task

EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian - December 17th, 2020

Welcome to EVALITA 2020! EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC, http://www.ai-lc.it) and it is endorsed by the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA, http://www.aixia.it) and the Italian Association for Speech Sciences (AISV, http://www.aisv.it)

Lo scritto formale di studenti universitari tra vecchio e nuovo standard. Il caso dei pronomi di terza persona singolare

The paper provides a sociolinguistic analysis of the behavior of third-person singular pronouns in formal texts written by university students. In the first part, I present the variety from a sociolinguistic perspective, also in relation to the old and the new standard. Then, I focus on the behavior of the third-person singular pronouns, in terms of function, syntactic distribution and sociolinguistic markedness. In the 3rd paragraph I discuss data and methods and then I move to the analysis. After a brief overview of the scrutinized variety, I compare the frequencies of the third person singular pronouns in university texts and in a corpus of neo-standard example of journalistic Italian; finally, a detailed analysis is presented on the uses of pronouns in university texts. The results show the coexistence in formal written productions of constructions with very diversified sociolinguistic connotations. This scenario can be explained by considering the tensions caused by the coexistence of two standards in the architecture of contemporary Italian

Sociolinguistic variation in spoken Italian: An introduction

In Italo-Romance, as well as in most European scenarios, the current language space between base dialects and standard results from a previous situation of ‘spoken diglossia’ (cf. Auer 2005). In fact, until at least the second half of the nineteenth century, Italian was used by a small minority of the population and almost exclusively in writing and formal speech; the vast majority of the population was composed of nearly monolingual dialect speakers, and local dialects were basically the sole languages for daily use

ParlaTO: corpus del parlato di Torino

This paper aims at introducing ParlaTO, a newly built corpus of spontaneous speech. The corpus is based on a collection of semi-structured interviews conducted in Turin with speakers of various origins and socioeconomic backgrounds, divided by age groups. Italian is by far the most represented language, while Italo-Romance dialects and immigrant languages occur more rarely and are mainly drawn on in bilingual discourse practices. In Section 1, we will give an overview of the main features of the corpus. Among its major advantages is the possibility to access a rich set of speakers’ metadata, concerning the socioeconomic status as well as the geographic origin of the informants, which is meant to allow for sociolinguistic analyses. In Section 2, we will describe the structure of the corpus and discuss the methodology we adopted to build the resource, paying special attention to data collection and data transcription. In Section 3, we will comment on some short excerpts of the interviews in order to exemplify a number of features characterizing the varieties of Italian and the bilingual interactions that can be found in the corpus. Finally, in Section 4, we will outline some prospects for future developments

Sociolinguistic and Typological Perspectives on Language Variation

Linguistic variation, loosely defined as the wholesale processes whereby patterns of language structures exhibit divergent distributions within and across languages, has traditionally been the object of research of at least two branches of linguistics: variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic typology. In spite of their similar research agendas, the two approaches have only rarely converged in the description and interpretation of variation. While a number of studies attempting to address at least aspects of this relationship have appeared in recent years, a principled discussion on how the two disciplines may interact has not yet been carried out in a programmatic way. This volume aims to fill this gap and offers a cross-disciplinary venue for discussing the bridging between sociolinguistic and typological research from various angles, with the ultimate goal of laying out the methodological and conceptual foundations of an integrated research agenda for the study of linguistic variation

Sociolinguistica e tipologia: modelli e strumenti a confronto

La variazione linguistica è oggetto d’indagine privilegiato di diverse branche della linguistica, tra cui la sociolinguistica, che si occupa principalmente di variazione intralinguistica, e la tipologia, che studia invece la variazione interlinguistica. Nonostante le due discipline raramente collaborino nello studio dei fatti di variazione, esse hanno tuttavia sviluppato nel tempo una serie di modelli teorici e strumenti metodologici affini per l’analisi della variazione. In questo lavoro, ci poniamo come obiettivo di discutere alcuni di questi punti di contatto tra le due discipline, con lo scopo di gettare le basi per lo sviluppo di un approccio integrato allo studio della variazione

Sociolinguistic variation, or lack thereof, in the use of the Italian subjunctive: mood selection with factive and semifactive governors

This paper deals with various aspects of the use of the subjunctive in spoken Italian. Firstly, a brief overview is provided of the interplay of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors underlying the selection of the subjunctive in various syntactic structures. Special attention is paid to the differences in subjunctive use in factual and non-factual contexts, pointing out that the former are less studied and less affected by normative injunctions than the latter. The focus then falls on factual contexts, in particular subordinate clauses which depend on factive and semi-factive governors. The investigation is based on KIParla, a corpus of spoken Italian consisting of different types of interactions with speakers of various origins and social backgrounds. It is argued that in the factual context at hand the subjunctive fulfills a specific set of functions, mostly related to the speaker’s stance towards the content of the subordinate clause. Finally, a statistical analysis is performed using conditional inference trees and random forests in order to uncover the linguistic and extra-linguistic conditioning of subjunctive use. The analysis shows that in the context under observation it is only linguistic factors that significantly condition mood selection; the use of the subjunctive is substantially insensitive to socio-stylistic and geographic variation, and therefore a socially shared pattern of variation has emerged