Cover not available

Article published In: Italo-Romance Morphosyntax: Theoretical and empirical issues
Edited by Francesco Maria Ciconte and Michela Cennamo
[Linguistic Variation 26:1] 2026
► pp. 1–23

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB

Truncated vocatives in Romanesco

A crowdsourced study

ORCiD logo with link | University of Zurich
 | Sapienza University of Rome
ORCiD logo with link | University of Zurich
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Zurich.

Published online: 18 August 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.24073.fed
Abstract
This paper addresses vocative truncation in Romanesco (Italo-Romance), which has been described as conditioned by a host of constraints at different structural levels. We crowdsourced the data collection with an online questionnaire devised to ask the three research questions whether the acceptability of truncation depends on (a) grammatical number, (b) the individual lexical items, and (c) speaker’s age. Respondents’ ratings on a 5-point Likert scale were analysed by means of Random Forests and Conditional Inference Trees. The results confirmed the significance of number and lexeme as conditioning factors.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Materials and methods
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Sociolinguistic profile of the sample
    • 3.2Exploratory statistics
    • 3.3Statistical analysis
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (32)
References
Abatantuono, Michele, Marco Navigli & Fabrizio Rocca. 1999. Come t’antitoli? Ovvero Si le cose nun le sai… salle!. Rome: Gremese.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2000. Come t’antitoli 2. Ovvero Si le sai dille! Anacaponzio?. Rome: Gremese.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by itself. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Auer, Peter. 1997. Co-Occurrence restrictions between linguistic variables. A case for social dialectology, phonological theory and variation studies. In Frans L. Hinskens, Roeland van Hout & W. Leo Wetzels (eds.), Variation, change, and phonological theory, 69–99. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald, Anna Endresen, Laura A. Janda, Anastasia Makarova & Tore Nesset. 2013. Making choices in Russian: Pros and cons of statistical methods for rival forms. Russian Linguistics 371. 253–291. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bernhard, Gerald. 1998. Das Romanesco des ausgehenden 20. Jahrhunderts. Variationslinguistische Untersuchungen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Breimaier, Federica. 2022. Il neutro a Molfetta: dialettologia e crowdsourcing. In Laura Baranzini, Matteo Casoni & Sabine Christopher (eds.), Linguisti in contatto 3. Ricerche di linguistica italiana in Svizzera e sulla Svizzera, 39–53. Bellinzona: Osservatorio linguistico della Svizzera italiana.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Christensen, Rune H. B. 2019. A tutorial on fitting cumulative link mixed models with clmm2 from the ordinal package. [URL]. (27 April 2022.)
D’Achille, Paolo. 1995. A Paolo, e falla finita! Una nota sull’a allocutivo nel romanesco e nell’«italiano de Roma». Contributi di Filologia dell’Italia Mediana 91. 251–267 (later updated in Paolo D’Achille & Claudio Giovanardi, Dal Belli ar Cipolla. Conservazione e innovazione nel romanesco contemporaneo, 29–41. Rome: Carocci, 2001.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Mauro, Tullio & Luca Lorenzetti. 1991. Dialetti e lingue nel Lazio. In Alberto Caracciolo (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unità a oggi. Il Lazio, 306–364. Turin: Einaudi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dörnyei, Zoltán. 2007. Research methods in applied linguistics: Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodologies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Endresen, Anna & Laura A. Janda. 2016. Five statistical models for likert-type experimental data on acceptability judgments. Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science 31. 217–250.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ervin-Tripp, Susan M. 1964. An analysis of the interaction of language, topic and listener. American Anthropologist 661. 86–102.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gibson, Edward & Evelina Fedorenko. 2013. The need for quantitative methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and cognitive processes 281. 88–124. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Giovanardi, Claudio. 2020. Sui neologismi della lettera “A” del Vocabolario del romanesco contemporaneo (VRC). In Vincenzo Faraoni & Michele Loporcaro (eds.), « ’E parole de Roma ». Studi di etimologia e lessicologia romanesche, 215–226. Berlin & Boston: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Giudici, Alberto & Chiara Zanini. 2021. A plural indefinite quantifier on the Romance-Slavic border. Word Structure 14(2). 195–225. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2020. On classification trees and random forests in corpus linguistics: Some words of caution and suggestions for improvement. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 16(3). 617–647. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hothorn, Torsten, Peter Buehlmann, Sandrine Dudoit, Annette Molinaro & Mark Van Der Laan. 2006. Survival ensembles. Biostatistics 71. 355–373. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Howe, Jeff. 2006. The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired XIV 6. pp. 1–4.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Incarbone Giornetti, Rossella (ed.). 1991. Benedetto Micheli, La Libberta romana acquistata e defesa. Povema eroicomico in dialetto romanesco del sec. XVIII. Rome: A.S. Edizioni.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kenstowicz, Michael. 2019. The analysis of truncated vocatives in Taviano (Salentino) Italian. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 181. 131–159. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levshina, Natalia. 2020. Conditional inference trees and random forests. In Magali Paquot & Stephan Th. Gries (eds.), A practical handbook of corpus Linguistics, 611–643. New York: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Loporcaro, Michele & Vincenzo Faraoni. 2021. Il costrutto allocutivo a Nando! in romanesco: fonologia, morfologia, sintassi, semantica, pragmatica. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 1371. 561–600. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1955. Ragazzi di vita. Milan: Garzanti (quotations from the digital edition, in CD-ROM, of Letteratura Italiana Einaudi, Turin, Einaudi, 2000).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2020. R: A language and environment for statistical computing (R Foundation for Statistical Computing). Vienna. [URL]
Schmid, Heinrich. 1976. It. Teodò! ‘Oh Theodor!’: vocativus redivivus?. In Germán Colón & Robert Kopp (eds.), Mélanges de langues et de littératures romanes offerts à Carl Theodor Gossen, vol. 21, 827–864. Bern: Francke & Liège: Marche Romane.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sonnenhauser, Barbara & Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna. 2013. Vocative!. In: Eaed. (eds.), Vocative! Addressing between system and performance, 1–23. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Strobl, Carolin, Anne-Laure Boulesteix, Thomas Kneib, Thomas Augustin & Achim Zeileis. 2008. Conditional variable importance for random forests. BMC Bioinformatics 91. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Strobl, Carolin, Anne-Laure Boulesteix, Achim Zeileis & Torsten Hothorn. 2007. Bias in random forest variable importance measures: Illustrations, sources and a solution. BMC Bioinformatics 81. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & R. Harald Baayen. 2012. Models, forests, and trees of York English: Was/were variation as a case study for statistical practice. Language Variation and Change 24(2). 135–178. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vaccaro, Giulio. 2012. Posso fare un unico vocabolarione romanesco? Per un Dizionario del romanesco letterario. il 996 10. 65–85.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vignuzzi, Ugo. 1994. Il dialetto perduto e ritrovato. In: Tullio De Mauro (ed.), Come parlano gli italiani, 25–33. Florence: La Nuova Italia.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue