Discourse Markers in Sicily: A Synchronic, Diachronic, and Sociolinguistic Analysis

By Giulio Scivoletto

When I entered her shop, my friend turned to me and said: Ar , che si dice? ('Hey there, how you doing?'). This was not a full-fledged sentence in Italian, as she had thrown a little Sicilian word in - ar . It was a greeting, of course, but also a way of expressing her surprise at seeing me there, and a way of prompting me to start our conversation. The fact she used Sicilian had a clear meaning too: the vernacular indicates a shared social identity.
In a nutshell, this book analyses the cases of Sicilian ar and mentri to understand the complexity of discourse markers: what functions they perform, how they evolve historically, and what their social meaning is in a bilingual speech community.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9004521054
• ISBN13: 9789004521056
• Release Date: August 2022
• Publisher: Brill
• Length: 218 Pages
• Weight: 1.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"