Uè, ma che staje facenno? (Hey, but what are you doing?): Expressing Expectation and Surprise/Disapproval in Neapolitan Dialect.

Abstract

The topic of this master dissertation is the syntactic representation of counter-expectational and surprise/disapproval questions in Neapolitan Dialect. Previous studies on Italian as well as on Asian languages (Giorgi & Dal Farra, 2019; Petrocchi, forthcoming) have shown that this type of construction is realized with a specific prosodic contour and gestural pattern, which turned out to be aligned. On the basis of their results, the authors propose a theoretical model under a minimalist approach in which the sensorimotor interface and the conceptual interface are not directly connected, but they are related by means of syntax. For this reason, special emotional interpretation associated with these sentences should be visible in syntax. A previous pilot study on Neapolitan dialect has given interesting results. On the one hand, the findings seem to confirm the theoretical model proposed by Giorgi (2014) and Giorgi & Dal Farra (2019). On the other hand, it has also shown that speakers made a wide use of interjections in this context, whose semantic and syntactic statuses remain almost unknown. Interjections like «uè», «uà» or «azz» are not etymologically related to a lexical item, but they express speakers' emotional reaction to a linguistic or extra-linguistic event. Another research question discussed in this work would therefore investigate the role of interjections on counter-expectational and surprise/disapproval questions observing Neapolitan speakers’ production.