Usi di dove nell’italiano contemporaneo: costruzioni relative e dinamiche di ristandardizzazione

In this paper, we aim at describing and analyzing relative constructions realized through dove (‘where’) from a sociolinguistic perspective. We focus on both written and spoken data of the so called italiano giornalistico (‘journalistic Italian’), i.e. a variety that can be considered close to the neo-standard one and thus can be located in the sociolinguistic center of the contemporary Italian architecture. In particular, we consider the occurrences in which dove covers functions that are not taken into account by grammars. Through the chi-squared test, we verify the correlation between non-standard variants and both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. In the last part of the paper, we show that dove has undergone a semantic widening not only in sociolinguistically marked varieties, but also in the neo-standard one (Berruto 2012 [1987]); furthermore, we discuss how this process can be related to the notions of changes from below and demotization of the standard variety.