Quantifying trends of indefiniteness strategies in bilectal speakers of Sicilian and Italian

In this contribution, we use quantitative methods to account for trends of indefiniteness strategies (e.g. Italian Bevo del vino ‘I drink some wine’) in bilectal speakers of central Sicilian and Italian. These varieties differ in the available set (in terms of grammaticality and productivity) of indefiniteness strategies. The usage of these strategies may vary across speakers in this particular linguistic environment, showing tendencies towards one or the other variety. These trends can be easily quantified exploring relevant indices, such as the Index of Language Dominance (ILD; Birdsong et al. 2012). We perform a data analysis on the set of data collected, curated and annotated from two experimental situations by Di Caro (2023). In this respect, we also take into consideration the values annotated for the ILD, a quantitative measure to map grammars of bilinguals, although originally designed for linguistic scenarios where the two varieties are both official languages in the same country or in different countries. The strongest hypothesis we test is a clear correlation between the ILD and sets of syntactic strategies in Deliano. However, our results found no strong correlations between these two variables. We suggest that new parameters should be created to assess language dominance in bilectal speakers of Italian and other Italo-Romance varieties.