Sulla segmentazione delle parole in lettere di semicolti

This paper aims at describing and analyzing the word segmentation in texts of an Italian substandard variety commonly referred to as italiano popolare ‘popular Italian’ (De Mauro 1970, Cortelazzo 1972). Our corpus is made up of two epistolary collections: the First World War correspondence of the Italian prisoners of war (Spitzer 2016) and the letters, dating back to the sixties, written by Italian emigrants in Germany addressed to Radio Colonia (Sala / Massariello Merzagora 2008). After touching upon the linguistic debate on the notion of ‘word’, we address the graphic reanalysis processes of the spoken chain identified in the letters, i.e. agglutinations and deglutinations. We focus on the criteria regulating such processes and on the specific properties characterizing the words involved.