Lessico familiare

Rita Fresu

First

2023-01-01

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Abstract

The contribution aims to define and describe the familiar lexicon, understood as a set of usual words and expressions, that is, customary and shared, that allow people linked by emotional bonds and by relationships of trust and intimacy, to communicate by recognizing each other, and to (re)establish, through language, a complicity that hinges on a dense network of allusive references. Starting from the famous 1963 novel by Natalia Ginzburg (to which the dictionaries trace the expression familiar lexicon), the essay addresses the notion of register and critically discusses the wide area of overlap between colloquial Italian and the language used in restricted and private contexts, to then focus on the privileged sources of the familiar lexicon, such as diaries and letters, which due to their intimate and private dimension can provide forms of language that are less controlled and affectively marked, and on the functions of communication to which the colloquial/familiar language responds: on the one hand the need to talk about events, relationships, generic, everyday, sometimes banal objects; on the other hand, the need and the will to affectively and/or expressively mark what one is talking about, showing one's participation and emotional involvement. These (socio)linguistic aspects, together with the areas of use and common situations, which tend to repeat themselves in affective and friendly relationships, allow us to identify semantic spheres, lexical reservoirs, recurrent and often co-present strategies, which characterize familiar language, and which are reviewed in the essay, through a case study which, intersecting the past with the present, allows us to discern the constant traits and elements of continuity of colloquial and familiar communication.