Language and Identity in Multilingual Mediterranean Settings: Challenges for Historical Sociolinguistics

Description

This book explores the linguistic expression of identity, intended as the social positioning of self and others, by focusing mostly on a scenario of prolonged language contact, namely the ancient Mediterranean area. The volume includes studies on language contact and on identity strategies developed at different levels of analysis, from phonetics to pragmatics, in, among others, Latin, Greek, Coptic, Syriac, (Cypriot) Arabic, Medieval Sardinian. Acknowledgments Table of contents 1. Linguistic Representations of Identity. Texts, Contexts, and Methods in Diachronic Perspective I. Linguistic Representations of Identity at the Micro-level of Linguistic Interaction 2. Identity in Speakers’ Discourse 3. Variations of the First Person: Looking at the Greek Private Letters of Ptolemaic Egypt 4. Exploring Linguistic Representations of Identity through the DiSCIS Corpus: Evidence from Directive Acts in Plautus and Goldoni 5. Greek in Rome around the Year 1000 6. Code-switching and Style-shifting in the Anglophone World: Medieval and Contemporary Identity Marking and Interaction Strategies II. Linguistic Representations of Identity at the Macro-level of the Linguistic Repertoire 7. Identity in the Repertoire: A Bottom Line 8. Between Greek and Romance: Competing Complementation Systems in Southern Italy 9. The Syro-Arabic Glosses to Barhebraeus’ Metrical Grammar 10. The Lexical Influence of Italian on Turkish 11. Political Background, Pragmatics and Word Order in the Text of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti III. Relations between Sociolinguistic Setting and Linguistic Data 12. Data from Ancient Languages and Sociolinguistic Analysis 13. ‘Contrata dicta in lingua latina Scandali, in lingua greca Chandachi, et in lingua saracenica Alcastani’. Playing with Identities in the Multilingual Place–names of Medieval Sicily 14 Morphological Productivity in Medieval Sardinian: Sociolinguistic Correlates. Action Nouns and Adverbs of Manner 15. Geminated Consonants in the Vindolanda Tablets. Empirical Data and Sociolinguistic Remarks IV. Identity through Orality, Identity through Literacy 16. The Writer’s Identity and Identification Markers in Writing Code Mixing and Interference 17. The Mediterranean Community of Practices between Speaking and Writing in Early Modern Documents 18. Cypriot Arabic between Orality and Literacy in O typos ton Maroniton 19. Aspects of Polymorphism in Arborea’s Carta de Logu Author index Subject index