VARIAZIONE LINGUISTICA: ALCUNE CONSIDERAZIONI SULLA COSTRUZIONE DEL DATO NELL’ATLANTE LINGUISTICO DELLA SICILIA

As the sociolinguistic surveys of the Linguistic Atlas of Sicily started to be carried out, the research team obviously planned the sound recording of those parts of the interviews including the tests on language proficiency facilitated by stimulating moments of performance of the interviewee. Not so obvious, instead, seemed to be the opportunity to record even the phases in which the biographical and sociocultural data of the interviewees were collected, or those concerning their self-evaluation, sociolinguistic behavior, customs and ideological position. However, it is precisely the sound recording of a few moments of negotiation of responses and several occasions of “digression” by the interviewee that has allowed to build the documentation whose interest from the point of view of general sociolinguistic analysis was unexpected. As matter of fact it has constitute an essential part of the information base for the theoretical considerations expressed so far, within the sociolinguistic section of ALS, about a linguistics of speech and of the speaker, in the so called “speaker based” perspective. The data collected in the atlases, as a whole, may be therefore pregnant with information useful to capture different aspects of language variation and polymorphism, if we are willing to recalibrate the methodological paths and even the perspectives of analysis themselves along the way. This is possible only if an atlas is conceived as a permanent laboratory, open to receive continuously and, above all, to give the right place to the widest documentation of communication events. The atlas enables us to build large speech corpora and an apparatus of tools, not just theoretical ones, which make it accessible and analyzable: from the transcription criteria, adequately thought out, to the determination of mark-up systems for those phenomena recognized as relevant. After more than twenty years since the beginning of the information collection for the preparation of a regional geo-sociolinguistic draft, the desire of the authors is, “simply”, to complete the Atlas. This is not, as it could seem, in contradiction with the concept of a “permanent laboratory”. To complete the atlas would mean to define a useful system where new information could quickly communicate with the old one, gradually revitalizing those data which can represent an update of the status of sociolinguistic trends in a given territory. An “atlas” is made of the data and the maps, and all the possible analysis on the data and on the maps. However, today an “atlas” is also something more: it is an information system able to provide data for new answers to old questions and (old and new) data for answers to new questions.