Processi di semplificazione della morfologia verbale in una varietà di italiano parlato

Abstract

This article focuses on the forms some verbal system categories take in the speech of the Sicilian regional variety. In particular, some expressions of Transitivity, Tense and Aspect are analyzed from the point of view of the simplification processes that are fulfilled in the shift from synthetic to analytic forms as a way to disambiguate temporal, modal and aspectual meanings. The Sicilian regional variety seems to show two opposite tendencies: on the one hand, the use of the passato prossimo instead of the passato remoto confirms the development of the analytic forms in spite of the vitality of the simple past in the Sicilian dialect. On the other hand, some synthetic verbs used in an unusual way (i.e. intransitive verbs followed by a direct object) instead of the analytic ones, do not follow this tendency. For the data analysis, we have used the answers to some translating questions and spoken passages supplied by a sample of native speakers and collected within the inquiries carried out by means of the sociolinguistic questionnaire of the Atlante Linguistico delta Sicilia (ALS).