La Lingua della narrativa giovanile di Grazia Deledda (1890- 1903)

This paper aims to delineate a linguistic and stylistic overview of the Grazia Deledda’s early prose production. Beginning with a description of linguistic features (particularly phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical) of short-story collections and novels published by Deledda between the years 1890-1903, the study comes to a comprehensive evaluation of her linguistic competence, of her stylistic objectives and, more in general, of effectiveness of her expressive writing variously achieved in this phase. The in-depth analysis of this narrative experience (not yet mature and outlying) wants to be a contribution to reconstruct the variegated mosaic of the Italian language literature of 19thcentury: this is the reason why the author’s choices are always compared with the language of the age, considering both the average writing habits of the time (for instance, the epistolary language or the language of the press) and the most meaningful and common results produced by literature during those days (especially, but not only, the historical novels of the early 19thcentury, together with Manzoni, Verga and D’Annunzio).