Cover not available
Part of
It's different with you: Contrastive perspectives on address research
Edited by Nicole Baumgarten and Roel Vismans
[Topics in Address Research 5] 2023
► pp. 340–372

Chapter 14
Investigating address in regional varieties of Italian

Contrasting methodologies

| La Trobe University
In the context of great linguistic diversity characterising Italy, the case of singular V pronouns is a prime example of regional variation. Surprisingly, an updated and geographically comprehensive account – after Rohlfs’s study (1968) – is missing. This chapter contrasts the methodologies employed in two relevant studies, namely the LinCi project (Nesi & Poggi Salani 2013), and Bresin (2021). Common methodological issues are: comparability of data from the various research sites, authenticity of data, and generalisability of findings (connected to representativeness of samples). However, geographical comprehensiveness emerges as the most compelling methodological challenge in the Italian context. This chapter outlines the basic characteristics of an ideal methodology that would produce a geographically comprehensive account of address in Italian.
Keywords: methodology, regional variation, Italian, address pronouns, singular V pronouns, voi, Italian dialects
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodological background
    • 2.1Comparability of data
    • 2.2Authenticity and other validity considerations
    • 2.3Generalisability
  • 3.Linguistic background
    • 3.1Why regional variation in Italian
    • 3.2Local languages and regional varieties of Italian
    • 3.3Singular address pronouns in Italian and in local languages
    • 3.4Gap in the literature
  • 4.The LinCi project
  • 5.Bresin (2021)
  • 6.Discussion: Contrasting methodologies
    • 6.1Comparability in LinCi and Bresin (2021)
    • 6.2Authenticity, depth, and generalisability in LinCi and Bresin (2021)
    • 6.3Geographical comprehensiveness in LinCi and Bresin (2021)
    • 6.4An ideal methodology
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tar.5.14bre
References (89)
References
D’Achille, Paolo. 2002. L’italiano regionale. In Manlio Cortelazzo (ed.), I dialetti italiani: storia, struttura, uso, 26–42. Turin: UTET.Google Scholar
Angouri, Jo. 2010. Quantitative, qualitative or both? Combining methods in linguistic research. In Lia Litosseliti (ed.), Research methods in linguistics, 29–45. London/New York, NY: Continuum.Google Scholar
Ashdowne, Richard. 2016. Address systems. In Adam Ledgeway & Martin Maiden (eds.), The Oxford guide to the Romance languages, 897–906. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bates, Elizabeth & Laura Benigni. 1975. Rules of address in Italy: A sociological survey. Language in Society 4(3). 271–288. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bataller, Rebeca. 2019. Corner-store interactions in Cartagena and Bucaramanga: A variational pragmatics study. In J. César Félix-Brasdefer & María Elena Placencia (eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world, 35–54. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beebe, Leslie M. & Martha Clark Cummings. 1995. Natural speech act data versus written questionnaire data: How data collection method affects speech act performance. In Susan M. Gass & Joyce Neu (eds.), Speech acts across cultures: Challenges to communication in a second language, 65–86. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Berruto, Gaetano. 2012. Sociolinguistica dell’italiano contemporaneo. Rome: Carocci.Google Scholar
De Blasi, Nicola. 2014. Geografia e storia dell’italiano regionale. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
Boberg, Charles. 2018. Surveys. The use of written questionnaires in sociolinguistics. In Christine Mallinson, Becky Childs & Gerard Van Herk (eds.), Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications, Second Edition, 134–143. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
. 2019a. Perceptions of address practices in Italian interregional encounters. A case study of restaurant encounters. The Journal of Pragmatics 143. 185–200. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019b. Nord e Sud, ma anche Centro. Trend contrastanti nella percezione delle pratiche allocutive in Italia. In Paolo Orrù (ed.), Il dualismo Nord-Sud: vecchie e nuove questioni in Italia e nel Mediterraneo, 151–169. Florence: Cesati.Google Scholar
Brown, Roger & Albert Gilman. 1960. The pronouns of power and solidarity. In Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in language, 253–276. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Brunet, Jacqueline. 1987. Grammaire critique de l'italien (Vol. 9). Paris: Presses universitaires de Vincennes.Google Scholar
Bruni, Francesco. 1996. Introduzione. In Francesco Bruni (ed.), L’italiano nelle regioni. Storia della lingua italiana (Vol. 1), XXV–LXXIII. Milan: Garzanti.Google Scholar
Cardinaletti, Anna, & Nicola Munaro (eds.). 2008. Italiano, italiani regionali e dialetti. Milan: Franco Angeli.Google Scholar
Cerruti, Massimo. 2011a. Regional varieties of Italian in the linguistic repertoire. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 210. 9–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011b. Italiano e dialetto oggi in Italia. In Enciclopedia Treccani. [URL] (10 May 2020)Google Scholar
Chambers, Jack K. 1998. Inferring dialect from a postal questionnaire. Journal of English Linguistics 26. 222–246. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clyne, Michael, Catrin Norrby & Jane Warren. 2009. Language and human relations: Styles of address in contemporary language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
CLIPS (Corpora e Lessici di Italiano Parlato e Scritto, ‘Corpora and Lexicons of Spoken and Written Italian’). Available at [URL]
Copland, Fiona. 2018. Observation and Fieldnotes. In Aek Phakiti, Peter De Costa, Luke Plonsky & Sue Starfield (eds.), The Palgrave handbook of applied linguistics research methodology, 249–268. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Danesi, Marcel & Michael Lettieri. 1983. The pronouns of address in Italian: Sociolinguistic and pedagogical considerations. Studi italiani di linguistica teorica ed applicata 12. 323–333.Google Scholar
Dardano, Maurizio. 2005. Nuovo manualetto di linguistica italiana. Bologna: Zanichelli.Google Scholar
De Pascale, Stefano, Stefania Marzo & Dirk Speelman. 2017. Evaluating regional variation in Italian: Towards a change in standard language ideology? In Massimo Cerruti, Claudia Crocco & Stefania Marzo (eds.), Towards a new standard, 118–141. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dewaele, Jean-Marc. 2018. Online questionnaires. In Aek Phakiti, Peter De Costa, Luke Plonsky & Sue Starfield (eds.), The Palgrave handbook of applied linguistics research methodology, 269–286. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dollinger, Stefan. 2012. The written questionnaire as a sociolinguistic data gathering tool: testing its validity. Journal of English Linguistics 40(1). 74–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dörnyei, Zoltán. 2007. Research methods in applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dörnyei, Zoltán & Tatsuya Taguchi. 2009. Questionnaires in second language research: Construction, administration, and processing. Abingdon, Oxon/New York, NY: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Edley, Nigel & Lia Litosseliti. (2010). Contemplating interviews and focus groups. In Lia Litosseliti (ed.), Research methods in linguistics, 155–179). London/New York, NY: Continuum.Google Scholar
Farese, Gian Marco. 2018. The cultural semantics of address practices. A contrastive study between English and Italian. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Félix-Brasdefer, J. César & Allison B. Yates. 2019. Regional pragmatic variation in small shops in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Seville, Spain. In J. César Félix-Brasdefer & María Elena Placencia (eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world, 15–34. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Formentelli, Maicol & John Hajek. 2015. Address in Italian academic interactions: The power of distance and (non)-reciprocity. In Catrin Norrby & Camilla Wide (eds.), Address practice as social action: European perspectives, 119–140. Basingstoke/London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Francesco, Antonino. 2012. La palla al piede. Una storia del pregiudizio antimeridionale. Milan: Feltrinelli.Google Scholar
Geluykens, Ronald. 2019. Pragmatic variation in service encounter complaints: Some methodological issues. In J. César Félix-Brasdefer & María Elena Placencia (eds.), Pragmatic variation in service encounter interactions across the Spanish-speaking world, 265–277. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Golato, Andrea. 2003. Studying compliment responses: A comparison of DCTs and recordings of naturally occurring talk. Applied Linguistics 24(1): 90–121. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hajek, John, Heinz L. Kretzenbacher & Robert Lagerberg. 2013. Towards a linguistic typology of address pronouns in Europe – past and present. In John Henderson, Marie-Eve Ritz & Celeste Rodríguez Louro (eds.), 2012 conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (Perth, 5–7 December 2012)., 1–15. [URL] (10 September 2020).
Holstein, James A. & Jaber F. Gubrium. 2004. The active interview. In David Silverman (ed.), Qualitative research: Theory, method, and practice, 140–161. London: SAGE.Google Scholar
Johnson, Keith. (2008). Quantitative methods in linguistics. Malden, MA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Jucker, Andreas H. & Larssyn Staley. 2017. (Im)politeness and developments in methodology. In Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh & Dániel Z. Kádár (eds), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (Im)politeness, 403–429. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kasper, Gabriele. 2000. Data collection in pragmatics research. In Helen Spence-Oatey (ed.), Culturally speaking: managing rapport through talk across cultures, 316–341. New York: Cassel. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kasper, Gabriele & Merete Dahl. 1991. Research Methods in Interlanguage Pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 13(2). 215–247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ledgeway, Adam. 2015. Varieties in Italy 1. In Konstanze Jungbluth & Federica Da Milano (eds.), Manual of deixis in Romance languages, 75–113. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey N. 2014. The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lepschy, Anna Laura & Giulio Lepschy. 1998. The Italian language today. New York: New Amsterdam Books.Google Scholar
MacKenzie, Laurel. 2018. Dialect Surveys and Student-Led Data Collection. In Christine Mallinson, Becky Childs & Gerard Van Herk (eds.), Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications, Second Edition, 151–153. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin & Mair Parry (eds.). 1997. The dialects of Italy. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin & Cecilia Robustelli. 2000. A reference grammar of modern Italian. Chicago: NTC.Google Scholar
Marazzini, Claudio. 1994. La lingua italiana: profilo storico. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
De Mauro, Tullio. 1986. Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita. Bari: Laterza.Google Scholar
. 2014. Storia linguistica dell’Italia repubblicana: dal 1946 ai nostri giorni. Rome/Bari: Laterza.Google Scholar
Merlo, Clemente. 1925. L’Italia dialettale. L’Italia dialettale 1. 12–25.Google Scholar
Molinelli, Piera. 2010. Allocutivi, pronomi. In Treccani l’enciclopedia italiana. [URL] (10 September 2020).Google Scholar
. 2015. Polite forms and sociolinguistic dynamics in contacts between varieties of Italian. Contatto interlinguistico fra presente e passato. 14. 283–313. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2018. Sociocultural and linguistic constraints in address choice from Latin to Italian. In Kate Beeching, Chiara Ghezzi & Piera Molinelli (eds.), Positioning the self and others. Linguistic perspectives, 51–79. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019. Forme di cortesia nella storia dell’italiano: cambiamenti nella lingua e nei rapporti sociali. In: Ulla Åkerström (ed.), L’italiano e la ricerca. Temi linguistici e letterari nel terzo millennio. Atti del Convegno internazionale, Università di Göteborg, 15–16 giugno 2017, 53–71. Rome: Aracne.
Musumeci, Diane. 1991. Ciao, professoressa! A study of forms of address in Italian and its implications for the language classroom. Italica. 68(4). 434–456. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nesi, Annalisa & Teresa Poggi Salani. 2013. La lingua delle città. LinCi. La banca dati. Firenze: Accademia della Crusca.Google Scholar
Niculescu, Alexandru. 1974. Strutture allocutive, pronominali, reverenziali in italiano. Florence: LS Olschki.Google Scholar
Orioles, Vincenzo. 1983. Aspetti dell’interazione friulano-italiano. Identità 4(2). 107–115.Google Scholar
Orlando, Anna Maria. 2015. Permettete una parola, Signora? Il voi allocutivo nell’italiano regionale di Calabria tra rispetto e identità. L’Italia dialettale. Rivista di dialettologia italiana 76. 149–162.Google Scholar
Parkinson, Amber & John Hajek. 2004. Keeping it all in the family: tu, lei and voi A study of address pronoun use in Italian. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 18. 97–114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pellegrini, Giovan Battista. 1977. Carta dei dialetti d’Italia. Pisa: Pacini.Google Scholar
Petraccone, Claudia. 2000. Le due civiltà. Settentrionali e meridionali nella storia d’Italia dal 1860 al 1914. Rome/Bari: Laterza.Google Scholar
Placencia, María Elena. 2011. Regional pragmatic variation. In Gisle Andersen & Karin Aijmer (eds.), Pragmatics of society, 79–113. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prior, Matthew T. 2018. Interviews and Focus Groups. In Aek Phakiti, Peter De Costa, Luke Plonsky & Sue Starfield (eds.), The Palgrave handbook of applied linguistics research methodology, 225–248. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rasinger, Sebastian M. 2010. Quantitative methods: Concepts, frameworks and issues. In Lia Litosseliti (ed.), Research methods in linguistics, 49–67. London/New York, NY: Continuum.Google Scholar
Renzi, Lorenzo. 1993. La deissi personale e il suo uso sociale. Studi di grammatica italiana. 15. 347–390.Google Scholar
. 1996. “Ma la diga, no xela venezian èla?”. Per una storia delle forme allocutive nei dialetti italiani. In Paola Benincà, Guglielmo Cinque, Tullia De Mauro & Nigel Vincent (eds.), Italiano e dialetti nel tempo. Saggi di grammatica per Giulio C. Lepschy, 259–271. Rome: Bulzoni.Google Scholar
Rohlfs, Gerhard. 1968. Grammatica storica dell’italiano e dei suoi dialetti. Vol. 2: Morfologia. Turin: Einaudi.Google Scholar
Sabatini, Francesco & Vittorio Coletti (eds.). 2013. Il Sabatini Coletti: dizionario essenziale della lingua italiana. [URL] (10 May 2020).Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah, Deborah Tannen & Heidi E. Hamilton (eds.). 2001. The Handbook of discourse analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Schneider, Klaus P. 2018. Methods and ethics of data collection. In Andreas H. Jucker, Klaus P. Schneider & Wolfram Bublitz (eds.). Methods in pragmatics, 37–93. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Klaus P. & Barron, Anne. 2008. Where pragmatics and dialectology meet: Introducing variational pragmatics. In Klaus P. Schneider & Anne Barron (eds.), Variational pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages, 1–32. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Serianni, Luca. & Alberto Castelvecchi. 2006. Grammatica italiana: italiano comune e lingua letteraria. Turin: UTET.Google Scholar
Sidnell, Jack & Tanya Stivers (eds.). 2013. The Handbook of conversation analysis. Chichester, U.K./Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sobrero, Alberto 1992. Indicazioni stradali: modello urbano e modello rurale. In Alberto Sobrero (ed.), Il dialetto nella conversazione. Ricerche di dialettologia pragmatica, 161–172. Galatina: Congedo.Google Scholar
. 2015. L’italiano nelle regioni. In Mariuccia Salvati & Loredana Sciolla (eds.), L’Italia e le sue regioni. L’età repubblicana. Vol 3:. Culture, 547–567. Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia italiana.Google Scholar
Suomela-Härmä, Elina. 2013. Analisi dei questionari italiani. In Elina Suomela-Härmä, Juhani Härmä & Eva Havu (eds.), Representations des formes d’adresse dans les langues romanes, 151–171. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
Talmy, Steven. 2010. Qualitative interviews in applied linguistics: From research instrument to social practice. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 30, (128–148). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Telmon, Tullio. 1990. Guida allo studio degli italiani regionali. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso.Google Scholar
Telve, Stefano. 2011. Allocutivi [Prontuario]. In Treccani l’enciclopedia italiana. [URL] (10 May 2022).Google Scholar
Tempesta, Immacolata. 1995. Tecniche di rilevamento e procedure d’analisi. Il caso della deissi sociale. In Maria Teresa Romanello & Immacolata Tempesta (eds.), Dialetti e lingue nazionali: atti del XXVII Congresso della Società di linguistica italiana, Lecce, 28–30 ottobre 1993, 432–453. Rome: Bulzoni.
Timm, Christian. 2001. Das dreigliedrige Allokutionssystem des Italienischen in Neapel. Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Tosi, Arturo. 2001. Language and society in a changing Italy. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Trifone, Pietro. 2010. Storia linguistica dell’Italia disunita. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
Tropea, Giovanni. 1985. I pronomi allocutivi in area catanese. Lingua e storia in Puglia 27. 57–80.Google Scholar
Vignuzzi, Ugo. 1997. Lazio, Umbria and the Marche. In Martin Maiden & Mair Parry (eds.), The dialects of Italy, 311–320. London: Routledge.Google Scholar