The Slovene Dialect of Resia: San Giorgio

Book excerpt: The study contains a synchronical description of the San Giorgio variety of the Slovene dialect spoken in the Resia valley (Val Resia/Rezijanska dolina) situated in north-eastern Italy. The following linguistic levels are analysed: phonology, morphonology and morphology. Apart from this some remarks on syntax and a lexicon have been included. The first chapter contains an overview of existing descriptive publications on Resian. Taking this overview as a starting point the choice of exactly the San Giorgio variety as the topic of this study is accounted for and the need for not only phonological, but also morphological analysis is made pointed out. The chapter further contains information on the native speakers whose speech is analysed and on the various methods used to obtain the dialect material. In the second chapter the phoneme inventory is presented, along with information on realisations, (optional) neutralisations and sandhi phenomena. Notwithstanding the considerable amount of phonetic detail given, the first and foremost aim of this chapter remains the quest for phonological oppositions and their functioning. In the third chapter the morphonological alternations that occur in the substantive, adjective and verb categories are being treated. Instead of dividing this information over the respective chapters on these categories, the alternations are presented together in a separate chapter, because some of the more frequent of them occur in all these word classes. However, through a classification by accent classes alternations concerning the location of stress are treated together with the word class they occur in. The third through seventh chapter inclusive contain the morphology of the substantive (chapter 4), the adjective (chapter 5), the pronoun, the numeral and the article (chapter 6) and the verb (chapter 7), respectively. In each chapter, together with an inventory of the attested desinences, an overview is given of rare desinences, of irregular declinations/conjugations and of the distribution of alternative desinences.