Possessives with kinship terms in Italian and Italo-Romance dialects
Francesca Volpato, Gianluca E. Lebani · 2024 · 46 citationsRead the paper
This study investigates the acceptability of constructions containing third-person possessives combined with singular and plural kinship terms in adult bilectal speakers of Italian and different Italo-Romance varieties spoken in six different geographic areas in northern, central, and southern Italy. The sentences to be judged vary according to the presence and position (prenominal vs. postnominal) of the possessive and the presence vs. absence of the definite article. For Italian, results were consistent with the patterns highlighted by previous studies. For the six dialects, much more variation and optionality were observed. Comparing the results of our questionnaire to data reported in AIS maps (Jaberg and Jud [1928] 1940), we found a situation that only partially replicated the picture presented in these documents in the first half of the last century. Regarding contact issues, we found cases of the influence of the dialect on Italian, instances of the influence of Italian on the dialect, and cases where the dialects have changed independently of Italian. By investigating whether participants’ language dominance modulated the acceptability of certain patterns, we found some influence of Italian on the dialect only for speakers with Italian dominance.
6 ideas Seedlabs derived from this research
A specialized writing assistant that identifies and validates regional kinship possessive constructions in Italo-Romance dialects, preventing the over-correction of dialectal patterns into standard Italian.
AI score 74/100A software tool for linguists and sociologists to map and validate the evolution of regional dialect patterns against historical linguistic atlases.
AI score 73/100A short, validated psycholinguistic instrument — derived from the possessive-construction paradigm — that quickly classifies a student's language dominance (dialect vs. standard Italian) to help teachers adapt instruction.
AI score 54/100A lightweight, validated questionnaire tool that measures which language dominates a bilectal speaker's grammar by probing acceptability of constructions that diverge between the standard language and the regional variety, enabling educators to tailor heritage-dialect instruction to each learner's actual linguistic baseline.
AI score 49/100A digital tool that overlays modern acceptability-judgment survey data onto historical linguistic atlas records (like the AIS) to visualize how regional dialect grammar has shifted over decades, pinpointing where dialects have converged toward a standard language, diverged, or changed independently.
AI score 42/100A web/mobile platform that replicates structured acceptability-judgment surveys (like the one in the paper) at scale, continuously updating historical dialect maps with contemporary speaker data.
AI score 38/100