Journal | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale
Journal issue | 52 | 2018
Research Article | An Evaluative Head in Romance
An Evaluative Head in Romance
The Palermitan Verbal Affix -vu
Abstract
In this work, we analyse the behaviour of a verbal suffix in Palermitan – the Romance language spoken in Palermo, Sicily – expressing an evaluative meaning with sentential scope. The suffix is (V)vu, where V is the thematic vowel of the verb. The Palermitan dialect we study here is the one spoken in the urban area, approximately by 250,000 speakers. This suffix is interesting for several reasons. In the first place, an evaluative morpheme with clausal scope is quite unusual in Romance and to our knowledge it has not been reported outside Sicily. In the second place, as we will illustrate later, its use is spreading among the youngest generation, showing that the dialect is productive and the form under scrutiny is adopted by larger segments of the population, even if it does not exist in Italian.
Submitted: Aug. 5, 2018 | Accepted: Aug. 13, 2018 | Published Sept. 28, 2018 | Language: en
Keywords Italian dialects • Evaluatives • Speaker • Palermitan • Verbal morphosyntax
Copyright © 2018 alessandra giorgi, Fabrizio Sorrisi. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOc/2499-1562/2018/01/003
