Giovanna Marina ALFONZETTI
Keywords
SOCIOLINGUISTICS:
Contact between Italian and dialect. Macro and micro-analysis research on code switching between Italian and dialect The use of dialect by young speakers Spoken and popular Italian: the structure of relative clause Regional Italian: the simple past in Sicilian regional Italiana Dialect and languages in the linguistic landscape
PRAGMATICS Verbal politeness and impoliteness: compliments and insults Compliments and gender The concept of face in compliments Historica politeness: analysis of galatei in relation to conversation Social deixis: the switching of allocutive pronoun in Italian theatre
Giovanna Alfonzetti is full professor in Italian Linguistics at the Dipartment of Humanities – University of Catania (Italy). After graduated, she carried out research on Malinowki and the London School of Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, under R. H. Robin’s supervision. She got her Diploma di Perfezionamento in Discipline Lingustiche at the University of Pavia (1987) and her PhD in Scienze Linguistiche, Filologiche e Letterarie (1991) at the University of Catania (1991). She has participated in numerous international scientific conferences in Italy and abroad and participated in various national and university research projects. She is a member of the teaching staff of the PhD program in Interpretation Sciences. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Sicilian Philological and Linguistic Studies.
Her research interests fall within the fields of sociolinguistics and pragmatics. In particular, she studied code switching between standard Italian and the Sicilian dialect (Il discorso bilingue: Italiano e dialetto a Catania. Milano: Franco Angeli 1992, [reprinted in 2012] and I giovani e il code switching in Sicilia, Palermo, 2012); the non standard relative clause in spoken Italian (La Relativa Non Standard. Italiano Popolare o Italiano Parlato? Palermo 2002). More recently she has started to carry out research on verbal politeness and impoliteness, especially on speech acts such as compliments and insults (I Complimenti nella Conversazione. Roma: Editori Riuniti University Press, 2009) and on historical politeness through the analysis of a wide corpus of Italian books of manners written in different periods, from Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo (1558) to today’s galatei, showing both changes and interesting and unexpected continuity (“Mi lasci dire” la conversazione nei galatei. Milano: Bulzoni 2016). A new topic of her research activity is the geosemiotic analysis of the linguistic landscape, whose results were published in a book in 2023 (Vuciata Kitchen Market Palermo Il dialetto nel paesaggio linguistico siciliano, Palermo, Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani).