TY - JOUR

T1 - Revisiting the classification of Gallo-Italic

T2 - a dialectometric approach

AU - Tamburelli, Marco

AU - Brasca, Lissander

PY - 2018/6/1

Y1 - 2018/6/1

N2 - While Gallo-Italic varieties clearly belong to the Romance language family, theirsubgrouping as either Gallo-Romance or Italo-Romance has been the source of disagreement in the classificatory literature. While earlier analyses tended to classify Gallo-Italic as Gallo-Romance (notably Schmid, 1956; Bec, 1970-1971), later work has either argued for or tacitly assumed a classification of Gallo-Italic as part of the Italo-Romance branch, a view that is both different from as well as irreconcilable with the earlier Gallo-Romance classifications. In this paper we aim to contribute to the development of an empirically-based classificationof Gallo-Italic through the use of dialectometry applied to atlas corpora, and specifically through the measurement of Levenshtein distance. Using three wordlists (Swadesh 100, Swadesh 200, Leipzig-Jakarta) and comparing twenty-six linguistic varieties across Italy and south-eastern France, we show that Gallo-Italic is best classified as a third subgroup within the Gallo-Romance branch. Our results also clearly identify all the major bundles of isoglosses established through traditional dialectological methods and confirm Gallo-Italic as a relatively homogenous group distinct from Italo-Romance.

AB - While Gallo-Italic varieties clearly belong to the Romance language family, theirsubgrouping as either Gallo-Romance or Italo-Romance has been the source of disagreement in the classificatory literature. While earlier analyses tended to classify Gallo-Italic as Gallo-Romance (notably Schmid, 1956; Bec, 1970-1971), later work has either argued for or tacitly assumed a classification of Gallo-Italic as part of the Italo-Romance branch, a view that is both different from as well as irreconcilable with the earlier Gallo-Romance classifications. In this paper we aim to contribute to the development of an empirically-based classificationof Gallo-Italic through the use of dialectometry applied to atlas corpora, and specifically through the measurement of Levenshtein distance. Using three wordlists (Swadesh 100, Swadesh 200, Leipzig-Jakarta) and comparing twenty-six linguistic varieties across Italy and south-eastern France, we show that Gallo-Italic is best classified as a third subgroup within the Gallo-Romance branch. Our results also clearly identify all the major bundles of isoglosses established through traditional dialectological methods and confirm Gallo-Italic as a relatively homogenous group distinct from Italo-Romance.

KW - Gallo-Italic, dialectometry, Levenshtein, Gallo-Romance, Italo-Romance, lexicostatistics

U2 - 10.1093/llc/fqx041

DO - 10.1093/llc/fqx041

M3 - Article

VL - 33

SP - 442

EP - 455

JO - Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

JF - Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

SN - 2055-7671

IS - 2

ER -