Author:

Keywords:

presentative clefts, Neostandard Italian, variation, Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities, Language & Linguistics, Literature, Romance, Linguistics, Literature, 2005 Literary Studies, 4704 Linguistics

Abstract:

© John Benjamins Publishing Company. The aim of this paper is to examine the distribution of presentative constructions in contemporary Italian and to verify whether their occurrence depends on language external factors. Presentative constructions have been studied particularly by Italian linguists during the Eighties, and were defined as being 'typical' of so-called Neostandard Italian. The analysis is based on three corpora of contemporary Italian, viz. two oral corpora (LIP and CLIPS) and one written corpus (CORIS/CODIS). Counter to expectations, presentative constructions are far from frequent in contemporary Italian and therefore cannot be considered as being 'typical' of Neostandard Italian. They are, however, attested both in written and oral Italian, with a clear preference for the latter context, in which they are evenly distributed in formal and informal registers. We conclude by discussing the differences between the linguistic phenomena traditionally included into the 'feature pool' of Neostandard Italian.