Notes and updates on language contact between Sardinian and Italian/French: A corpus-driven analysis

This contribution provides a description of language contact phenomena of heritage Sardinian in migration contexts. The analysis takes into account original data collected in the period 2008-2010 among Sardinian communities of immigrants in continental Italy and France. The paper particularly focuses on the outcome of contact phenomena in lexicon, syntax and pragmatics, in order to demonstrate how these levels of analysis operate in language contact and how strictly they interact. Among lexical features, this analysis takes into account the presence of: (i) integrated and adapted borrowings, (ii) the nature of borrowed items in terms of vocabulary stratification (e.g. specialised/technical terms vs more commonly used terms), (iii) collocations and multiword expressions. As far as syntactic features are concerned, the areas of linking words and pronominal structures introducing subordinate sentences are investigated. The field of information structure is also investigated through the analysis of the use of cleft sentences by Sardinian speakers living in France. As far as pragmatics is concerned, the role of discourse markers in language contact is discussed and their different functional classes are identified and examined.