Clara on language contact and expressives in Italian

Borrowing the f-word in toto.

Now out from De Gruyter in a collection on Speakers and Structures in Language Contact, "Language contact and expressives in Italian" by Clara Cuonzo. Clara reports a study of conversations among young Italians, on the borrowed expressive use of English expletive "f---ing", as in Mi potete dare la f---ing foto?. Her abstract is below.

Abstract

Considering data from spontaneous conversations among university students and sentences retrieved via the Twitter search engine, I investigate a case of linguistic contact in youth varieties of Italian. When the word f---ing is transferred from English into Italian, it retains its ability to behave as an expressive adjective, an expressive degree-modifier and expressive adverb. I maintain this is a case of global copying (Johanson 2002), in which phonological content, semantic/pragmatic meaning, and syntactic structure are all together copied from English into Italian. The data presented in this chapter provide initial evidence that the transfer of phonological content can co-occur with transfer of syntactic structures, something cannot be easily accounted for in approaches to language contact like Kuteva (2017) where there is a clear distinction between phonological content and syntactic structures.