THE SPACE OF TUSCAN DIALECTAL VARIATION: A CORRELATION STUDY

The paper illustrates the results of a correlation study focusing on linguistic variation in an Italian region, Tuscany. By exploiting a multilevel representation scheme of dialectal data, the study analyses attested patterns of phonetic and morpho-lexical variation with the aim of testing the degree of correlation between a) phonetic and morpho-lexical variation, and b) linguistic variation and geographic distance. The correlation analysis was performed by combining two complementary approaches proposed in dialectometric literature, namely by computing both global and place-specific correlation measures and by inspecting their spatial distribution. Achieved results demonstrate that phonetic and morpho-lexical variations in Tuscany seem to follow a different pattern than encountered in previous studies.