Thesis title: Tempo, modo e perifrasi aspettuali nella comunicazione istantanea della messaggistica
The thesis is set in the framework of studies on the relationship between the development of new media and speakers’ linguistic choices. The specific focus of the research concerns the expression of tense, mood, and aspectual periphrases in a corpus of WhatsApp instant messages collected for this study and analyzed using Sketch Engine. After the presentation—in Chapter I—of the state of the art, the research questions, and the corpus design and measurement, Chapter II introduces the analysis of the linguistic phenomena. The aim of the study is to investigate certain neostandardization phenomena related to the verbal system, such as the competition between the Present and the Simple Future both in general terms and in futurate contexts determined by adverbs and other expressions, the concurrence between the Passato Prossimo and the Passato Remoto, and the distribution of the uses of the Imperfetto between modal and temporal values. Overall, the results show, in addition to a predominance of the Present even in futurate contexts, only a marginal presence of the Simple Future and the Passato Remoto. With regard to modal uses, however, it is worth noting that not only the Imperfect but also the Simple Future maintain a significant proportion of temporal uses.
The thesis also includes a section devoted to the use of the Subjunctive, which shows that this mood, contrary to common belief, is well attested even in informal peer-to-peer communication such as that examined here. The second section of Chapter II focuses on the frequency and functions of certain aspectual periphrases, including stare + gerund, andare a + infinitive, and stare a + infinitive. Given the high frequency of progressive periphrases in the corpus, Chapter III explores in greater depth the uses of stare + gerund from a comparative perspective with other new media such as blogs, forums, and SMS. Specifically, the application of a generalized linear model demonstrates that the degree of synchronicity of a medium is a statistically significant predictor of the presence of the progressive periphrasis. Following the statistical analysis, the second part of Chapter III offers a semantic investigation of the verbs occurring in the gerund within the periphrasis. In particular, the verbs were analyzed according to W. Klein’s classification into 0-state, 1-state, and 2-state verbs. This analysis, too, was followed by a comparison across new media, which revealed that progressive periphrases in the WhatsApp corpus include a higher proportion of 2-state verbs than those found in other media. Finally, Chapter IV presents a summary of the conclusions, along with a discussion of its limitations and an outline of possible directions for future research.