The Language of Tolerance: Dialogism and Orality in Francesca Duranti's Sogni mancini

Abstract

After the long predominance of a literary tradition, 1 modern Western cultures have returned to orality with a 'leap from the being written-oriented to the being oral-oriented.' 2 In the case of Italian, such shift 'dalla scritturalità verso l'oralità,' 3 culminating in the Eighties, has led linguists to theorise, on the language continuum, the central varieties of 'italiano dell'uso medio,' 4 and 'italiano neo-standard.' 5 Moving [End Page 120] from the assumption of spoken and written varieties as two opposite poles on a changing continuum, 6 rather than clear-cut categories, and from the debate on 'italiano scritto' and 'italiano parlato,' 7 which is paralleled by a revival of literary criticism on the present simplification of 'italiano letterario,' 8 in this study I will consider the spoken, dialogic style of Duranti's 9 fiction, 10 focusing on her latest novel, Sogni [End Page 121] mancini. 11 Duranti's language draws extensively from neo-standard Italian, in syntactic structure, insisted reference to the context (deixis), 12 marked construction of the sentence (including inversion, focalisation, dislocation), and choice of colloquial vocabulary, juxtaposed to more 'literary' expressions. Such spoken discourse structure, together with the great use of reported speech and of the address to the narratee/reader, forms the marked dialogism and orality 13 of the author's texts in a 'style which doesn't seem to be style.' 14