Il sardo parlato a Cagliari: uno studio sociofonetico

This thesis focuses on the study of Sardinian spoken in Cagliari, from a sociophonetic point of view. In particular, the research aims at studying two sociophonetic variables of this Sardinian dialect: the realization of the voiceless and voiced alveolar fricative /s, z/ as a postalveolar fricative [ʃ], in preconsonantal position (also across word boundaries), e.g. tostau [toʃˈtau] ‘hard’, disgràtzia [diʃ'ɡrattsja] ‘bad luck’, and the palatalization of the voiceless and voiced velar plosive /k, ɡ/ in front of /a/, e.g. cani ['kjani] ‘dog’, gatu ['ɡjatu] ‘cat’. Since that Cagliari Sardinian is an endangered and underdocumented variety, this research also provides a documentation on this urban dialect. The thesis, made up of seven chapters, deals with the different phases of the research. The first chapter contains a sketch of Sardinian, from a dialectological and sociolinguistic point of view, and an illustration of the (socio)linguistic context of Cagliari Sardinian. After this introductive part, the second chapter focuses on the methodological issues connected with the data collection and it aims at illustrating the different techniques used for the ethnographic work and for the data elicitation. Among the techniques used, a particular attention is paid to the semi-structured ethnographic interview, which allowed to gather a rich corpus of semi-spontaneous speech. The third chapter describes the phonetic and phonological system of Cagliari Sardinian. In the forth chapter, sociolinguistic theoretical issues connected to the analysis are presented: on the one hand, the concepts of speech community, social network and community of practice are described; on the other hand, I discuss the fundamental paradigms of the different approaches to stylistic variation. The sociophonetic analysis of the two variables is dealt with in the chapters 5 and 6. The fifth chapter focuses on the realization of the voiceless and voiced alveolar fricative /s, z/ as a postalveolar fricative [ʃ], in preconsonantal position (also across word boundaries), while the analysis of the palatalization of /k, ɡ/ in front of /a/ is the argument of the sixth chapter. These two analytical chapters are characterized by the same structure: firstly, they offer a description of the variable from a dialectological, articulatory-phonetic and acoustic-phonetic point of view. This descriptive part is followed by the spectrographic illustration of the phenomenon and the acoustic analysis. After the acoustic investigation, the sociolinguistic analysis is presented, with particular attention to the stylistic variation. This kind of analysis, which constitutes the main focus of the whole research, provided interesting results, that is, the activation of specific sociophonetic variants in relation with particular topics. Finally, the aim of the last chapter is both to show the general conclusions of the research and to propose some possible prospects for future study.