A Database for the Study of the Language of Young People: a Semantic-Rhetorical Analysis.
(Fabrizio Franceschini, Elena Pierazzo)

Fabrizio Franceschini

franceschini@ital.unipi.it

University of Pisa

Pisa

Italy

Elena Pierazzo

elena.pierazzo@kcl.ac.uk

King's College London

London

United Kingdom

A project devoted to the study of the language and culture of young people is in progress at University of Pisa. The enquiries were held in Tuscany and in the district of La Spezia, in the Liguria region, in towns and big villages that host secondary schools. A questionnaire was distributed among secondary school students (around 18 years old), which includes:

1. a socio-linguistic section enquiring on the social condition, cultural preferences and style of life; use of the dialect inside family and use of forms which are (or are felt as) exclusive for young people;
2. a lexical section that counts 36 onomasiologic questions (“How would you say something ”) referred to the different spheres of the life of young people (family, school, external world, interpersonal relations, judgements, etc.);
3. open fields for spontaneous linguistic insertions.

The enquiries involved 2.500 informants and produced over 70.000 forms that can be traced to about 3.100 lemmas. These data were stored in a relational database called BaDaLì (acrostic for Banca Dati Linguagiovanile, available at <http://dblg.humnet.unipi.it>), able to retrieve information about dialectal persistence, sexual distinctions and lexical composition (Franceschini et al. 2006).

Our first queries on BaDaLì highlighted the existence of “hot” and “cold” semantic fields; the firsts are characterized by multiplication of individual and sporadic lemmas and normally involve interpersonal relations among young people; the latter are characterized by the concentration of forms around a restrict number of lemmas and normally involve relations of young people with institutions and grown-up people.

The lemmas that can be called occasional (3-5 occurrences) and sporadic (1-2 occurrences) are often neologisms or, in case of known lemmas, embrace innovative meanings, in comparison with those witnessed by dictionaries. These lemmas are, in many cases, the outcome of young people’s creativity and invention. In fact, at least 20% of the lemmas in our database show different levels of semantic innovation.

In this frame, we pointed our attention on semantic and rhetorical aspects, aiming to understand mechanisms underlying the creation of new meanings. We built our analysis grid following the model proposed by Mavellia 1991, in order to compare our data with the results of her enquiry about the language of young people in Milan.

Tropes or semantic figures:

1. metaphor
2. metonymy
3. synecdoche
4. antonomasia
5. irony / antiphrasis
6. hyperbole
7. allusion
8. oxymoron

According to Lausberg 1967, those “stand alone” figures can assume the form of

1. periphrasis
2. emphasis
3. litotes

The above listed figures are effect of a substitution mechanisms, except for synecdoche that assume a certain degree of subtraction; hyperbole can involve an addition of meaning.

These figures can have pejorative senses or incorporate euphemistic or dysphemistic usages; more rarely the so called “understatement” can be found, i.e. non-marked word with a positive or negative meaning (e.g. passabile ‘tolerable’ for “nice person”).

We chose to focus our attention on the answers obtained by eight questions, four for “cold” and four for “hot” semantic areas:

1. Cold: relations with institutions and grown-up people
   1. How would you say "parents"?
   2. … "to skip school"?
   3. … "school"?
   4. … "police"?
2. Hot: interpersonal relations among young people
   1. How would you say "ugly girl"?
   2. … "to have intercourse"?
   3. … "stupid"?
   4. … "whacks"?

To exemplify, we can consider some of the forms produced by the question: “How would you say "school"?”. We obtained 570 forms, traced to 63 lemmas with an aggregation rate (forms/lemmas) of 9.5, where the non marked form scuola ‘school’ alone reaches 427 occurrences (75%). Anyway, we also obtained answers like:

• galera ‘jail’ (25 occurrences): metaphor, pejorative
• carcere ‘prison’ (12): metaphor, pejorative
• incubo ‘nightmare’ (3): metonymy, pejorative
• edificio buio ‘dark building’ (1): synecdoche, with a pejorative shade
• istituto di istruzione statale ‘public institution for education’ (1): periphrasis, with an ironic shade.

Let us now consider the answers to the question: “How would you say "whacks"?”. We obtained 1198 forms, traced to 216 lemmas with an aggregation rate of 5.55, sensibly lower than for ‘school’; for this question we got answers like:

• legnate ‘thrashings’ (125 occurrences): synecdoche
• tonfi ‘thuds’(62): metonymy
• prenderle ‘to be beaten’(40)
• nebulosa di pattoni ‘slaps nebula’(3): metaphor, periphrasis
• riscuotere ‘to collect’ (1): metaphor, euphemism

The lemma prenderle (‘to be beaten’) is elliptic, standing for prendere le botte. The same structure is detected for lemma farlo (‘to do it’) for “to have intercourse”. In this latter case the formal ellipsis is connected with censorship as well.

Censorship is also a productive mechanism in our corpus; informants (girls, in particular, as shown in Franceschini et al. 2006) seem to be self-censored in specific fields (sex, death, negative judgments); perhaps they may be retained by the written medium or by having filled the questionnaire in a controlled circumstance (a classroom of a school) and possibly they are more free in speaking in peer groups. In any case, it is worth to focus on different kinds of censorship which emerge from the corpus:

1. allusion (farlo ‘to do it’)
2. euphemism (fare le cosine ‘to do little things’)
3. reticence (non lo dico ‘I do not say it’)
4. ellipsis (testa di c…o ‘dickhead’)
5. periphrasis (andare nei campi ‘to go in fields’ meaning “to have intercourse”).

Finally, BaDaLì not only stores and presents pure lemmas, but also the exact and complete utterances written by the informants in answer to the different questions, often including portions of dialogues. Such potentiality enables further analysis aiming to find correlations from a textual point of view between “cold” or “hot” semantic fields and other answers.

References

• BaDaLì. Banca Dati Linguagiovanile. <http://dblg.humnet.unipi.it> (13 April 2006)
• Franceschini, Fabrizio, Elena Pierazzo and Donatella Turri. 2006. 'The language of young people in Italy: a digital system for lexical analysis' . In Perspektiven der Jugendsprachforschung / Trends and Developments in Youth Language Research, eds. Christa Dürscheid and Jürgen Spitzmüller, 427-44. Frankfurt: Lang.
• Lausberg, Heinrich. 1967. Elemente der literarischen Rhetorik. München: Max Huber Verlag.
• Mavellia, Clara. 1991. Die Sprache der Jugendlichen in Mailand. Untersuchungen zur Semantik und Wortbildung des aktuellen Italienischen. Frankfurt: Lang.