The poets deploy to its maximum the flexibility of language, its capacity to still carry meaning when flexed, replenished with external elements, filled with threads of significance. They use varieties of the Tuscan dialect of Italian, mixing aulic, literary and poetic registers with everyday speech and scatological terms to obtain strikingly satiric effects. Characteristic of the genre is the deployment of archaisms, particular formulas and insertions of special lexical elements. Moreover, the poets make extended use of metaphors, metonyms, similitude, and allusions. The poetic language of the Contrasto allows a high degree of semantic and grammatical creativity to the point of seemingly ignoring grammar and phrase formation in Italian. The linguist Giannelli calls it "a-grammatical" (1988:48-50). The prominence given to the sound, to the internal organization of the genre itself against the constraints of grammar, is striking. Giannelli concludes that “An element of consistent presence in the production of the octets is that of the infringement of the rules of everyday language” (1988:58). They continuously change the morphological shape of words, recover ancient words that have lost their meaning over the ages and attribute them new meanings, or create new words whose meaning has to be reconstructed by the listeners, often through semantic assonances. According to the poets, the poetic license overrides the need for expressing themselves through a commonly understood code. In a certain way, it is up to their audience to learn, to become knowledgeable enough to be able to understand them. They negate language as pure means of communication and construct it as sacred, free from human rule and obeying only to the will of Calliope, the Muse of poetry. In Bakhtin’s term, the Contrasti operate as a centrifugal force toward language, they actively “de-standardize” it. The poets’ tongues multiply, making manifest and bringing to its extremes the heteroglossia present in language, reinventing language in song, showing to their public that language, poetry and art are something you can play with, something that “ain’t necessarily so.”
