Abstract

Literary multilingualism - or heteroglossia, mistilinguismo, plurivocity or pastiche - is always preceded by multilingualism within the speech community, where the manipulation of the writer is inevitably rooted. The present work aims at investigating the different ways of representing this component, that is essential to a living language, as it is actualized in the works of Stefano D'Arrigo, Andrea Camilleri and Fosco Maraini. These are based on a mixture of heterogeneous linguistic sediments (i.e. Italian, dialect, idiolect and other languages), which are never stored in lexical memory but consistently productive. These sediments achieve 1. different standards of Italian (when not dialect), "interference" between different languages (Sicilian, but also other languages) and "onomaturgy" in D'Arrigo, 2. "language alternation" between varieties of Italian and Sicilian in Camilleri, and 3. a full "onomaturgic choice", based on phonological and morphological resources of the Italian language as well as all the other languages learnt by Maraini during his lifetime, traveling around the world.