164 Giovanna Marotta
with zero degree of social awareness by the speakers, since they are “never com-
mented on or even recognized by the listeners”. By contrast, the markers are lin-
guistic variables which have acquired a social recognition (usually in the form
of social stigma) and which show a consistent and layered structure along the
diastratic and the stylistic dimensions; speakers select one variable or another,
according to the formality of the communicative context. Finally, the stereotypes
are linguistic variables strongly marked and normally “overt topics of social com-
ment”; they are employed by some special groups of the speech community, usu-
ally of a low socio-economic level; speakers producing stereotypes cannot be
aware of realizing a stereotype form themselves, whereas speakers of a higher
social level clearly exhibit a stigma towards them.
With respect to the parameters taken from the metaphor of solids, degree of
awareness and context sensitivity may be covered by the parameter of thickness,
whereas the dimension of weight is mostly represented by the behavior of the
stereotypes, although it might be on the background of the other two classes too.
Some doubts have been casted on the discreteness of these Labovian classes
as well as on their corresponding levels of salience (see for instance Docherty
2007: 22). In our opinion, discreteness is needed, in sociophonetic analysis too, if
we do not want to run the risk of losing ourselves in the wide sea of surface varia-
tion. The metaphorical parameters presented here should indeed help us in finding
out the way to discriminate between the relevant social-indexical information and
the irrelevant one. The conceptual nature of the parameters, despite their meta-
phorical source, is that of descriptive and discrete entities. To express the same
concept in the metaphorical terms of Accademia della Crusca (a historical institu-
tion originally devoted to the preservation of the purity of Italian language), we
could say that we propose to do sociolinguistic research separando il grano dalla
crusca, i.e. “by separating the wheat from the grain”.ReferencesAgostiniani, Luciano. 1989. “Fenomenologia dell’elisione nel parlato in Toscana”. Rivista Italiana
di Dialettologia 13. 7–46.
Agostiniani, Luciano. 1992. “Su alcuni aspetti del ‘rafforzamento sintattico’ in Toscana e sulla
loro importanza per la qualificazione del fenomeno in generale”. Quaderni del Dipartimento
di Linguistica dell’ Università di Firenze 3. 1–28.
Agostiniani, Luciano & Luciano Giannelli. 1990. “Considerazioni per un’analisi del parlato
toscano”. L’italiano regionale. Atti del XVIII Congresso Internazionale della Società di
Linguistica Italiana ed. by Manlio A. Cortelazzo & Alberto M. Mioni, 219–237. Roma:
Bulzoni.
Albert, Abraham A. 1949. Solid Analytic Geometry. Chicago: McGraw Hill Book Company Inc.