This handbook brings together in a single volume detailed accounts of all facets of the Italian language from a wide range of perspectives. It will be a valuable resource not only for Italianists and Romance linguists, but for general linguists interested in the insights that Italian has to offer.
This handbook brings together in a single volume detailed accounts of all facets of the Italian language from a wide range of perspectives. Data from Italian have always been prominent in the linguistic literature, thanks to the language's richly documented diachronic and synchronic variation. This perennially fertile yet still under-explored testing ground has a central role to play in challenging linguistic orthodoxies and shaping and informing new ideas and perspectives about language change, structure, and variation.
The volume is divided into six parts that explore, respectively: the making of Italian, historical changes, structures of Italian, sociolinguistics of Italian, Italian outside of Italy, and Italian in contact. The data and analyses featured across the chapters demonstrate that our knowledge and understanding of many fields of linguistics continue to be enhanced through the study of Italian. This handbook will therefore be a valuable resource not only for Italianists and Romance linguists, but also for general linguists - undergraduate and graduate students and established scholars - interested in the insights that Italian has to offer
Part I. The making of Italian 1: Adam Ledgeway and Martin Maiden:
Defining Italian 2: Paolo D'Achille and Domenico Proietti: Tuscan,
Florentine, and Italian: External history 3: Claudio Marazzini: The history
of Italian: The roles of literature and economics 4: Brian Richardson: The
questione della lingua in the Renaissance 5: Nigel Vincent: The questione
della lingua: Nineteenth and twentieth centuries 6: Alvise Andreose:
Grammaticography 7: Helena Sanson: Women in the history of the Italian
language Part II. Historical linguistics 8: Lori Repetti and Jordan Kodner:
Historical phonology 9: Martin Maiden: Historical morphology 10: Adam
Ledgeway: Historical syntax 11: Lorenzo Renzi: Address systems and their
history 12: Nigel Vincent: Archaism and innovation Part III. Structures of
Italian 13: Pietro Maturi: Orthography and writing 14: Antonio Romano:
Phonetics 15: Laura Vanelli: Phonology 16: Franck Floricic: Inflexional
morphology 17: Maria Grossmann and Anna M. Thornton: Derivational morphology
and compounding 18: Maria Silvia Micheli: Evaluative morphology 19: Luigi
Andriani and Giuseppina Silvestri: The nominal group 20: Adam Ledgeway:
Verbal group 21: Eva-Maria Remberger: The clause 22: Sandra Paoli and
Jacqueline Visconti: Pragmatics 23: Delia Bentley and Silvio Cruschina:
Information structure 24: Chiara Gianollo: Semantics 25: Luca Lorenzetti: The
lexicon: Onomasiology and semasiology Part IV. Sociolinguistics 26: Massimo
Cerruti: Standardization 27: Gabriele Iannaccaro, Vittorio Dell'Aquila, and
Simone Ciccolone: Multilingualism 28: Anna-Maria De Cesare: Diamesic
variation and registers 29: Mari D'Agostino: Diastratic variation 30:
Francesca Dovetto: Gender and language Part V. Italian outside of Italy 31:
Laura Baranzini: Italian in Switzerland 32: Daniele Baglioni: Italian in the
Mediterranean area 33: Raffaella Bombi: Italian around the world Part VI.
Italian in contact 34: Lorenzo Tomasin: Italian in contact: The Middle Ages
35: Alessandro Carlucci: Italian in contact: The modern period 36: Francesco
Goglia: Italian and immigrant languages 37: Maurizio Dardano and Emanuele
Ventura: Popular Italian and its history 38: Diego Pescarini: Northern
regional Italian 39: Tania Paciaroni: Central regional Italian 40: Francesco
Avolio: Southern regional Italian 41: Lucia Molinu and Simone Pisano:
Regional Italian of Sardinia
Adam Noel Ledgeway is Professor of Italian Linguistics at the University of Bergamo, and before that was Professor of Italian and Romance Linguistics at the University of Cambridge (1996-2024). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and Member of the Academia Europaea. His research interests include the comparative history and morphosyntax of the Romance languages, Italian dialectology, Latin, Italo-Greek, syntactic theory, linguistic change and language contact.
Martin Maiden is Professor of the Romance Languages at the University of Oxford and Director of the Oxford Research Centre for Romance Linguistics. He is a general Romance linguist with particular research interests in Italian and Romanian linguistics and dialectology, historical linguistics, and morphology. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Corresponding Member of the Italian Accademia della Crusca, and President of the Société internationale de linguistique et de philologie romanes.
