Elaborazione e cambio linguistico: considerazioni sulle ‘lingue minori’ sull’esempio della scritturalità friulana

Abstract

Since Friulian has been recognized as a minority language by the region Friuli-Venezia Giulia (1996) and by the Italian Republic (Law 482/1999), the elaboration process has been accelerated and intensified. Friulian has advanced into text types in which it had not been used before, such as scientific papers, administrative texts, journal articles, etc. In order to fulfill the needs of these new communicative purposes, an extensive and intensive elaboration of language is needed. This happens on the one side through a conscious codification process, especially by intense lexicographical activity, and on the other side “by doing”. In both cases, the influence of more elaborated languages – mainly of Italian, but partially also of other languages, especially English – plays a central role. Lexical items, but also morphological processes and syntactical structures are borrowed from these languages. This fact has structural consequences on Friulian, and, in the long run, could cause a typological change. After a brief outline of the recent history of the elaboration of Friulian and its legal framework, I will focus on some morphological and syntactical structures: the formation of relational (denominal) adjectives instead of prepositional phrases (which also triggers some less productive morphophonological patterns) and the borrowing of Italian adjectives and nouns derived from a present participle, provoking Friulian loan formations, although in Friulian present participles are no usual grammatical structures. In the end, I will focus on stâ+gerund periphrases, which are built on the Italian model. These are compatible with some aktionsart verb classes that the ‘genuine’ Friulian aspectual periphrases jessi che+indicative present or imperfect and jessi daûr a+infinitive cannot be used with and therefore it can be seen as a change in the semantic-syntactic system of Friulian.