«Transizione» e «transizioni» dal latino al romanzo: il progetto di analisi linguistica dei documenti cavensi del IX secolo

The chapter presents a general introduction to the problems and methods posed by the linguistic investigation of 9th century Cava documents. It shortly describes the cultural and sociolinguistic background of the centres of writing of Langobardia minor and sums up the state of the art in the study of the language of the early medieval documents from Southern Italy. The main models put forward to represent the transformations of Latin into the Romance vernaculars and the notion of ‘vulgarisms’ are considered in their potentialities and problems. It is argued that the difficult task of analysing the language of the documents calls for a new integration of multiple perspectives of research.