I segnali discorsivi nel parlato di emigrati italiani in Germania

This exploratory study focuses on the use of discourse markers (128 occurrences of DMs) in the languages of two groups (31) of Italian emigrants in Munich. The DMs taken into account are: allora “then”, “well” (partly overlapping with the German also), magari “perhaps”, “if only”. The corpus has undergone a functional and distributional analysis. Research questions are aimed to understand what kind of changes emerge in the use of these DMs in the two generations of speakers and the mechanisms that trigger these changes. The analysis shows that differences in the linguistic behavior are linked to the sociolinguistic context as well as to the elements of the two linguistic systems that are susceptible to the influence of contact.