The Sicilian present perfect: an experimental investigation on the dialectal variety of Partinico

Abstract

A common cliché regarding the distribution of the Simple Past and the Present Perfect seems to divide the Italian peninsula into two different areas. In the northern part of Italy, it is evident an almost exclusive use of the compound form, whereas in the South, the Simple Past is dominant. After a cross-linguistic semantic and syntactic analysis of the present perfect, I focus on this cliché, taking into account the existence and the usages of this tense in the dialect of Sicily. Since the literature written so far on this topic displays some discrepancies and gaps, I decided to carry out an experimental investigation on the distribution of the present perfect in the dialect of Partinico, a town near Palermo. The test, submitted to 30 speakers divided into two different age-categories, investigated seven different conditions, considering the possible expression of the current relevance. The results show aspectual peculiarities of the Sicilian present perfect, which differ from the standard uses of the corresponding Italian tense. The Sicilian compound past form has, in fact, a durative and iterative meaning, similar to the one expressed by the Portuguese present perfect. I noticed, moreover, that the two languages, i.e. Sicilian and Portugues, share various similarities in the domain of the verbal system, in which the distribution of the simple and compound past forms suggests that their simple past is the results of a parallel evolution of the Latin perfect.