Linguistic variants in Matavulj’s short story “Povareta”

Simo Matavulj’s literary language, richly enhanced and stylized due to the realist tendency to portray the local colour of a wide range of literary characters, and shaped by the diversity of the environments in which the author lived and worked, is fertile ground for research into the intentional and unintentional use of linguistic variants, especially from the perspective of narrative positions and the relation between the narrator’s and characters’ speech. From a historical linguistic perspective, this paper explores lexical, word-formation, morphological and phonological variants in a short story in which the narrator’s Stokavian dialect comes into contact with the characters’ Cakavian dialect. The story reveals both the intention to reduce linguistic distance and the production of blended forms that belong neither to the author’s speech nor to the speech of the represented society. As such, they represent a valuable example of mimesis as an act of creative expression operating also at the level of structural linguistic features. At the lexical level, erudite Romanisms stand out, in morphology and word formation, there are forms that have no basis in either the literary language or actual linguistic practice and may therefore be regarded as the author’s own creations, while at the phonological level, one encounters forms that combine elements originating from different linguistic systems and registers. The author’s shaping of the characters’ speech takes place through a dialectical interplay between salient distinctive features and hybridized forms, while a particularly important aspect of authorial stylization is the establishment of symmetry in the use and distribution of linguistic variants. Through all these procedures, Matavulj’s “Povareta”, as a lapidary sketch-like prose form, emerges as a repository of diverse linguistic material from which it developed and which is determined and constrained, among other factors, by the author’s reflections on multilingualism and multidialectalism.