“In quelle montagne lì parlano dialetto”. Deissi e funzioni deittiche nei discorsi sulla differenza linguistica: i dati dell’atlante linguistico della sicilia (ALS)

The theme of this paper, which is divided into three sections, is deixis in the corpus of the Atlante Linguistico della Sicilia (ALS). In the first section, after a brief account of previous ALS studies on deixis, the network of survey centres (“pilot network”) is described, questionnaire input questions and the composition of the data corpus are illustrated. The second section is devoted to the illustration of the theoretical tools borrowed from cognitive linguistics and, in particular, from the semantics of conceptualization in order to define both the theoretical framework of deixis in metalinguistic discourse and the methodological apparatus useful for analysis and interpretation. The data constitute the focus of the third section, in which the deictic modes and typologies detected in the corpus are illustrated. This section opens with an explanation of the ALS theoretical tools used for analysis and interpretation and the reasons for the importance of deixis within the corpus. The complex variables functionally related to the detected deictic types are illustrated and discussed.