Dialettologia e storia: alcune questioni di metodo

Although dialectological and historical research are each characterized by principles and methods that are not reconciled easily, they may interact in a fruitful way. In particular this can happen when fundamental issues of historical linguistics are concerned, like the interplay of internal and external factors of language change, the monogenesis vs polygenesis of structures diffused in certain areas, the development of descriptive and explanatory models of change. While interdisciplinary cooperation is highly desirable, it is by no means obvious for various reasons, for instance especially problematic is the fact that an integrated methodology can hardly be elaborated once and for all. In this paper some of the difficulties that arise in conjugating dialectological and historical research are debated starting from a reconsideration of three problematic case studies of Italian dialectology: (a) the striking correspondence of vowel qualities and diphthongs in the dialects of the Upper-Southern Adriatic coast and those of the Phlegraean area on the Tyrrhenian coast; (b) the origin of the Gallo-Italian linguistic colonies of Sicily; (c) the disputed development of the Sicilian adverb/complementizer unni as an indigenous continuation of Latin UNDE or as a borrowing from Gallo-Romance (Gallo-Italian) varieties. In different ways all three cases raise the question of studying the complex interplay of historical facts (conceivable as events of external history or as features of the historical dimension of texts) and internal linguistic developments.