The expression of indefiniteness in Sardinian and the Regional Italian of Sardinia

Abstract

This work aims at investigating the expression of indefiniteness in bilectal Sardinian-Italian speakers. Previous studies conducted on Italo-Romance varieties and the informal Italian spoken in such areas revealed a great variation of forms, with four determiners (ZERO, ART, bare di and di+art) being the most frequent ones; such studies investigated also syntactic, sentential, and semantic features that may influence the occurrence of one rather than another determiner, in order to determine whether they undergo true or apparent optionality. In the present study, two forms on the online software Qualtrics were created, one in Campidanese Sardinian and Italian and the other one in Logudorese Sardinian and Italian. A total of 132 participants took part in the experiment that consisted of a battery of sociolinguistic questions, a battery of questions adapted from the Bilingual language profile (BLP) to assess the language dominance of the participants and a Forced-Choice (FC) task consisting of 72 multile choice items. In this last set of questions, the participants had to express acceptability judgments of the determiners’ occurrence in different contexts. In absolute terms, the most selected determiners were unsurprisingly respectively ZERO and ART both in the two Sardinian varieties and in Italian and no notable variation was found to be dependent on clause type, noun class or semantic specialisation. However, interesting results were found in the resumptive clitics in a CLLD context: both ZERO and bare di were accepted combined with a resumptive accusative clitic in Sardinian. This may lead to hypothesise a difference in the case marking of such clitics in Sardinian.