Making Democracy Speak : Linguistic Foundations of Social Capital
Type
presentation
Date Issued
2013-05-24
Author(s)
Abstract
In linguistics, northern Italy is widely known for the fact that the dialects spoken in this area, including all regions north of the Appennines as well as part of Tuscany, require overt subject clitics in declarative sentences. This parallels the situation in many European languages, where, unlike the majority of languages worldwide, mandatory subject pronouns have been grammaticalized since about the late Middle Ages. Given this particular distribution and timing, and in the light of recent insights in the field of cognitive linguistics, I suggest that mandatory subject pronominals (together with a number of similar grammar features) reflect and convey modern (Western) concepts of agency, topicality, and transitivity. These, in turn, form the cornerstones of all kinds of advanced competitive and cooperative behaviour in modern societies. Grammar thus seems to represent an important catalyst of social capital. Language structures carry cultural information and play a crucial part in the inter-generational transmission of habits and attitudes. As for Italy, it is natural to assume that the observed differences in dialect syntax have contributed to the well-known persistence of the North-South-divide in social capital endowments over the centuries.
Language
English
Keywords
Social capital
Italy
dialect
grammar
subject
subjectivism
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
No
Event Title
MatchPoint Seminar
Event Location
Aarhus University
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
223222
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
open.access
Name
aarhus_alexandria.pdf
Size
847.28 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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