Acceso usuarios
Gaetano Berruto
Two main approaches can be said to characterize sociolinguistic research in Italy since its beginning in the Sixties. One approach is more system-oriented and is mostly inspired by the qualitative variational (socio)linguistics in the poststructuralistic vein of the work of E. Coseriu (Labovian quantitative sociolinguistics is somewhat underrepresented in Italian sociolinguistics). The other approach, largely followed since the Nineties, is speaker-oriented, and has its basis mainly in the perspective of interpretive sociolinguistics. This paper aims at drawing a critical state of the art, discussing, in the light of the basic distinction above, the methods and findings of significant research done on some selected topics characterizing the manifold sociolinguistic situation of Italy, as for instance the contact between Italian and Italo-Romance dialects (the dialects being not locally spoken varieties of Italian, but ‘primary dialects’ in the sense expressed by Coseriu), their distribution in use, the standardisation of the national language, and related phenomena. In a first section we deal with the general theoretical issue about the relationship between the speaker and the linguistic system, and an outline of the differences between a system-oriented and a speaker-oriented approach in linguistics is tentatively sketched out. In a second step the most interesting results of some recent Italian works on different topics in a system-oriented perspective will be pointed out; the same will be made with a choice of recent Italian works developed in a speaker-oriented perspective. As a conclusion, we argue that a better or more adequate way to carry out sociolinguistic research is a cooperation between the two perspectives: due to the nature of language and language behavior, there is no real reason indeed to oppose a speaker-oriented approach to a system-oriented one, or vice versa.
