RESTRIZIONI STRUTTURALI E TEORIA LINGUISTICA NEL DISCORSO BILINGUE ITALIANO/CAMPIDANESE IN APPRENDENTI ITALIANO L2.

The objective of the present study is to offer an overview of a phenomenon pervasively diffuse in Sardinia: code-alternation in the linguistic production of immigrants during their various interactions with Sardinian speakers. Indeed, code-switching represents one of those linguistic strategies to which immigrants turn to in the different phases of L2 acquisition, in order to fulfill their communicative needs and compensate for their lack of linguistic competencies in the interethnic communication in the country in which they temporarily live. In this survey, however, the purpose is not that of analyzing code-alternation Italian/English, Italian/Spanish, etc., but rather the inclusion of the Sardinian dialect variety among the languages that the immigrants adopt during their different social interactions with the natives. The use of the Sardinian dialect variety on the part of immigrants undoubtedly represents one of those discourse procedures to which migrant people resort to assimilate culturally and linguistically as rapidly as possible with the dominant group (Loi Corvetto 2000).The study is based on taped interviews from a corpus of naturallyoccurring speech composed of almost thirty hours of conversation, in which the participants were unaware that they were being recorded, since it is believed that only in these circumstances could the recorded samples be considered to illustrate spontaneous and unselfconscious speech. From a methodological point of view, the aim is to take into consideration the bilingual discourse Italian-Campidanese of the Italian L2 learners from a morpho-syntax perspective; more specifically, the objective is to identify: (a) the morphological and syntactic characteristics of the Italian-Campidanese bilingual discourse of the Italian L2 learners and attempt to characterize which morphological and syntactical categories can be switched and with which frequency; (b) which syntactical boundaries are considered 'grammatical' and which on the other hand are those considered as 'non-grammatical' or 'impossible', (c) the possible existence of grammatical constraints and models that may govern the compatibility of constituents of the two codes in contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]