CRÀ, PESCRÀ, PESCRÌDDI E PESCRÙDDE: sui marcatori di cronodeissi temporale nei dialetti di area apulo-barese

This study deals with the temporal deictic adverbs concerning the fundamental calendar units: yesterday, today and tomorrow and days before or after the moment of enunciation, respectively. Most Central-Southern Italian dialects display conservative lexical forms for indicating both past days, such as nestèrze (< NUDIUS TERTIUS) (the day before yesterday) and diatèrze (< DIES TERTIA) (the second day before yesterday), and future days, such as crà (< CRAS) (tomorrow), pescrà (< POSTCRAS) (2 days after today), pescrìdde (3 days after today) and pescrùdde (4 days after today). Drawing on evidence from dialects of Puglia, a South-Eastern region of Italy, we considered data available from two linguistic atlases (AIS and ALI) and from a sample of 25 dictionaries based on dialects of Puglia. Later, new evidence on the degree of lexical vitality of these deictic forms was provided. To this end, a lexical questionnaire was distributed among 371 Italian native students from Apulian area. According to our analysis, only some of these conservative forms are still dominant in the dialect of younger generation speakers, others are no longer in use and others have almost disappeared from their lexical repertoire under the increasing pressure of the Standard Italian. Nevertheless, other factors seem to affect this process of lexical substitution, such as the distance (proximal or distal) of the deictic form from the point of enunciation, its degree of semantic transparency and its orientation (past vs. future).