La struttura del lessico emozionale nei dialetti italiani: un confronto fra nord e sud Italia

The study on the structure of emotional lexicon in Italian dialects represents an unknown but interesting field of investigation. A research on this field allows us to explore in which way languages that are nearer to the daily experience influences the way of organizing the knowledge of emotions. The research proposes to analyse whether semantic organization of the emotional lexicon in two Italian dialects, piedmontese and calabrian, presents some specificities or differences with regards to that, widely studied, of Italian and the other neo-Latin languages. More in detail, we wanted to investigate if some peculiarities of the dimensional organization emerged in Italian emotional lexicon were present also in Italian dialects. We collected judgements of semantic similarities between emotional words of the two different dialects. The confrontation of the results, obtained through the statistical technique Replicated Multidimensional Scaling, pointed out a phenomenon that, presumably, characterises, in a specific way, Italian language. Emotional lexicon of Italian language results less nuanced with respect to spoken dialects. In particular, it resulted interesting the meaning organization of dialects terminology around dimensions of significance nearer to physical and physiological experiences with respect to the Italian language, even if some differences are found between the two dialects analyses that point out the influence of regional cultural characteristics on Italian emotional lexicon.