Description
Book SynopsisWhen I entered her shop, my friend turned to me and said: «Arà, che si dice?» (‘Hey there, how you doing?’). This was not a full-fledged sentence in Italian, as she had thrown a little Sicilian word in – arà. It was a greeting, of course, but also a way of expressing her surprise at seeing me there, and a way of prompting me to start our conversation. The fact she used Sicilian had a clear meaning too: the vernacular indicates a shared social identity. In a nutshell, this book analyses the cases of Sicilian arà and mentri to understand the complexity of discourse markers: what functions they perform, how they evolve historically, and what their social meaning is in a bilingual speech community.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Figures Introduction 1 The Theoretical and Methodological Framework 1.1 Discourse Markers (DM s) as a Research Object 1.2 Methodology: Approach, Area, and Data of the Research 2 Synchronic Analysis 2.1 The Case of arà 2.2 The Case of mentri 3 Diachronic Analysis 3.1 The Evolution of DM s: General Issues 3.2 Reconstructing the Evolution of arà 3.3 Reconstructing the Evolution of mentri 4 Sociolinguistic Analysis 4.1 DM s and Language Contact in the Repertoire 4.2 DM s and Social Meaning in the Community Conclusion Appendix 1: List of Diachronic Sources Appendix 2: List of Transcription Symbols Appendix 3: Socio-demographic Information About the Speakers (cf. § 4.2.1) Bibliography Index
