Cross-Linguistic Influence in L2 Italian Bilingual Families: A Comparison between Conversations in a Croatian and two Romanian Families

This work aims to study cross-linguistic influence phenomena at morphological and pragmatic-discursive levels in a Croatian-Italian and two Romanian-Italian bilingual families, all residents in Piedmont (Italy). The analysis is based on a corpus of 11 conversations within the Croatian family and three long conversations within the Romanian families. This paper deals with a wide range of cross-linguistic influence phenomena that arise in the sequential development of conversation, as source and context of all the analysed phenomena (see Auer, 1984). We first introduce the corpus and our informants, to then investigate the morphological adaptation in the corpus of the occasional loanwords in the context of the conversations, by also taking into account the different patterns of integration of the article in the two sub-corpora. After analysing the loans, we move towards contact phenomena such as code-mixing, considering them as a part of the conversation they belong to. In particular, by looking at the code-mixing phenomena, it can be noticed that in all analysed occurrences the matrix languages (Myers-Scotton, 1997; 2002) are always Romanian and Croatian, the L1 of the families, as the «outside system morphemes» (Myers-Scotton, 2002), especially the verbal inflectional morphemes, come regularly from these languages. The constant selection of a matrix language could point towards a slight dominance of bilinguals in the matrix language of their code-mixing rather than a total balanced bilingualism.