The object of study of this thesis is the linguistic input in textbooks of Italian as a foreign language (FL). The intent is to study whether the linguistic changes, observed in contemporary Italian, have become part of the Italian offered as input to the learners. To identify the variety of language presented in the textbooks, some features of contemporary linguistic changes were chosen as verifiable indicators. These features, listed by Sabatini (1985: 155) as a basic part of "italiano dell’uso medio", and by Berruto (1987: 62) as part of "neostandard", are not occasional changes but are features that are gradually expanding and stabilizing into Italian standard (Sobrero 2005). A corpus consisting of 38 Italian textbooks published in Sweden and 8 in Italy in the years 2000-2012 were used to verify the manifestation of these features. The results show that the presence of neostandard features in the textbooks of Italian FL is conditioned, at first, by the rate of acceptance of those features by the linguistic norm. Thus, features that are nowadays commonly considered as normative have a high number of occurrences in the corpus. This is the case concerning lui, lei, loro as subject pronouns, the use of gli instead of loro, the use of the present tense for the future and the use of temporal che. On the other hand, features that are not considered as normative have no or very few occurrences. This is the case with gli instead of le and the use of imperfetto ipotetico. Secondly, the presence of the neostandard features in textbooks is conditioned by the instructive function of the textbooks, which shapes the typology of input introduced. Thus, occurrences of features such as cleft clauses and dislocations are mainly presented in authentic texts, oral texts, or introduced explicitly, but are rare or absent in textbooks characterized by simplified language.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-106807 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Tabaku Sörman, Entela |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Romanska och klassiska institutionen, Stockholm : Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Italian |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, monograph, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Forskningsrapporter / Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för franska och italienska : cahiers de la recherche, 1654-1294 ; 53 |
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