The Impact of St and ard Italian on the Central Italian Dialect of Moricone (Sociolinguistics, Lenition, Transcriptions, Metaphony, Contact).

This thesis focuses on the linguistic variation found in the Central Italian dialect of Moricone, a small agricultural town located only thirty miles northeast of Rome. The dialect is in process of merging with the Italian st and ard language. As the socio-economic reality of Moricone changes, speakers look to the st and ard language more and more as a source for new ways of expressing themselves when speaking dialect. The structural affinity which results from having shared a common ancestor (Spoken Latin) facilitates the incorporation of St and ard Italian forms into Moriconese. Speakers are eliminating certain inherited features that differ from the st and ard language, and this process of st and ardization is reflected in the speech of all generations. The dissertation demonstrates how contact with St and ard Italian is changing the dialect, and how the speech community forms a sociolinguistic continuum. An individual's ability to function along the continuum depends on non-linguistic factors such as age, education, continuous residence in the town, dialect loyalty, etc. The author, an American of non-Italian family background, spent a year and four months as a participant observer in Moricone, eliciting casual speech. The eventual corpus consisted of approximately 45 hours of tape recordings. Using data from the entire corpus, she describes the phonology, morphology, and syntax of verbs. The speech of fourteen informants is represented in a series of sample texts in phonetic transcription. In the linguistic and sociolinguistic commentary on the texts it is pointed out how speakers intermingle dialect and st and ard forms and it is posited that, in fact, this intermingling is the most typical form of dialect speech in the community. Included are 17 maps which serve to classify the dialect geographically and to give a comparative view of the historical development of consonants. A lexicon with semantic and etymological information, a bibliography and a subject index are also included to facilitate use of the material by others wishing to study the dialect.PhDLinguisticsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161175/1/8621388.pd