Reduplicazioni nominali nell’estremo Meridione d’Italia: il ruolo del greco a contatto col romanzo

In the italo-romance dialects of southernmost Italy, noun reduplications such as Navigare riva riva ‘to sail along the bank’ show a higher degree of productivity, compared to the other italo-romance varieties. In fact, they convey a broader range of meaning – Location, Path, quantification, resultativeness –, all of them linked in different ways to the semantics of distribution. The contribution focuses on the possible role of Greek in reinforcing the vitality of these reduplicated constructions, relative to the dialects of Sicily, south Calabria and Salento. A geolinguistic and corographic interpretation is offered, by placing noun reduplications within the frame of the whole Mediterranean region : Navigare riva riva shows the same features, as to frequency, variety of meanings and lexical selection, both in Southernmost Italy and the Balkans, i.e. two linguistic areas in which the contact with Greek had significant effects on the linguistic and cultural side.