Overview

This study looks at the sociocultural context of five Italian regions and at the situational context of restaurant encounters (a sub-type of service encounters) to examine address variation in spoken Italian-with a focus on singular address pronouns tu, voi and lei. It offers a thorough examination of distance and power dynamics between waiters and customers in a wide range of restaurant types. This book marks the introduction of Italian to the field of regional pragmatic variation and it will be of interest to linguists, Italianists and researchers more broadly working on service encounters. The author offers a new dimension to the understanding of social interaction and language use in contemporary Italy, uncovering cultural and linguistic differences between even adjacent geographical areas within a modern European nation state.

Full Product Details

9789027208125

Table of Contents

Reviews

The novelties of the book are manifold: it adds interesting insights to the field of regional pragmatic variation; it is the first in-depth study drawn on the Italian context on a topic more often investigated in other languages; it makes possible the specification of how much the address system of Italian can be subject to sociolinguistic variation. In fact, not only regional variation emerges clearly from the data, but also the social variation linked to the age of the interlocutors and the differentiation produced by restaurant levels and customers' expectations. Although the volume is devoted to the pronominal address system, there are also interesting references to related nominal address aspects. -- Pera Molinelli, University of Bergamo, in Journal of Pragmatics 187 (2022).

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available