Between “Qui” and “Qua” and “Lì” and “Là”: Some Observations on Locative Adverbs and Linguistic Space in Italian

In Italian language, the atonic pronouns ci and vi are mainly personal pronouns or reflexive personal pronouns of the first and second persons of the plural, acting as a direct object or as an indirect object. Moreover, ci and, more seldom, vi, which is felt as a scholarly term, can be used as demonstrative pronouns or locative adverbs. They are also used with a reinforcing value in some set phrases.As Romanian language does not have atonic pronouns corresponding to the particles ci and vi acting as demonstrative pronouns or locative adverbs, we first present a synthesis of the characteristics and use of ci and vi in Italian and then we describe how they are translated into Romanian.

Spatial deixis is the language utterance that is employed by the speaker to convey the location of objects or events in space. The purpose of this research is to look into the aspects of specific deixis that exist in both Bimanese and English, as well as how individuals use them in natural conversation. This study next looks at the parallels and differences between spatial deixis in Bimanese and English. To collect data on the use of spatial deixis in Bimanese, the study used qualitative research methods such as semi-structured interviews and direct observation. In the meantime, documentation such as books, articles, or movies is employed to examine particular deixes in English. The subjects of this research were drawn from five distinct locations in Bima regency: Pela, Wawo Rada, Bima City, Wera, and Sila. The data was then descriptively evaluated by identifying, categorizing, describing, and explaining related to the people employing specific deixis in Bimanese. This study found that the aspects of spatial deixis in Bimanese can be seen from the deictic system namely; locative adverbs are marked by ta (ta ake, ta ede, and, ta aka), demonstrative pronoun (ake, ede, and aka), topography system (ese, awa, dei ari, and ipa), four corners direction (ɗa, ɗo, ɗi, ele), and political dimension (ese and awa). In English, there are various types of spatial deixis: demonstrative pronouns (this, that, and with plural forms), locative adverbs (here and there), and topography systems (up and down). The three aspects of spatial deixis that are similar between English and Bimanese are demonstrative pronouns (proximal and distal), locative adverbs (proximal and distal), and topographical system (up and down). Although the 'medial' concept in Bimanese has additional form in terms of demonstrative and locative adverbs. While there are distinctions between them, the Bimanese has many more spatial deixis aspects than English in terms of directions, topography systems, and socio-political dimensions.

This paper focuses on the variety of Italian spoken in Bozen (South Tyrol, Italy) by Italian L1 speakers. Due to the peculiar multilingual situation of South Tyrol, Italian speakers are concentrated in the big towns of this area (e.g. Bozen), whereas the majority of Tyrolean people speak German or German dialects. Leaving apart the interaction problems between the two speaking groups, this work focuses on Italian community settled in Bozen by emphasizing the composition of their linguistic repertoire, and the differences among the districts of the town, also in terms of linguistic identity. For this purpose, the few data actually at disposal on this linguistic variety will be analyzed, in order to highlight the presence and use of Italo-Romance dialects by Italian speakers. A field work on this variety has never been carried on before, thus all previous statements were based only on aprioristic assumption (i.e. they were not data-driven). Without data of sort, scholars assumed the absence of spoken Romance dialects in the variety of Italian spoken in Bozen, basing on the belief that Italian speakers were not originally settled in this town. Arguing against those previous assumptions, this paper will show how dialects constitute a central part of Italian linguistic identity in the multilingual setting of South Tyrol, as it emerges from a collection of expressions collected in the so-called “Slang of Bozen”, and from speakers’ linguistic perceptions recorded during face-to-face interviews. The results of this study point out that a large number of dialects are used inside the family, and sometimes also for informal communication, whereas some words and expressions are more largely used as part of a we-code characteristic of the Italians of Bozen.

ABSTRACTThis article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the expression of motion events in these languages showed that Romance languages do not always follow the same pattern; for example, Italian tends to express the component of Path more frequently than French and Spanish. The results of the present study highlight evidence of intra-typological differences, even between languages that are genetically very close. These differences seem to lead speakers to produce cases of conceptual transfer into their second language, Spanish, even when their first language is another Romance language.

This chapter explores language contrasts among Romance languages in the semantic domain of motion events. Romance languages are verb-framed languages in the typology of motion events by Talmy (1985, 2000). However, some intratypological differences have been observed among them, regarding the expression of certain components such as Path, Cause, and Deixis. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it discusses how these semantic contrasts have implications for the theoretical framework of the study of motion events. Second, it examines how these intratypological contrasts impact on the acquisition of a second language by speakers of a typologically-close and genetically-related language. This is illustrated with examples from Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French and Italian.

The starting point of this paper is the observation of an unequal frequency of the additive particle auch in German as compared to the paucity of its French counterpart aussi, in L1 and L2 developmental data as well as in adult native speakers' production, which leads to an investigation of the reasons for the observed difference in language use. The paper brings together findings on the structure and discourse integration of utterances containing additive particles (translation equivalents of also) in written sources from French and German and in oral production data from speakers of French and Italian, German and Dutch. Next to data from native speakers, developmental data from learners of French and German (as L1 and L2) are shown to be relevant sources of information about the integration of the optional particles into utterances and at the discourse level. The developmental data reveal a difference between Romance and Germanic languages, concerning not only the frequency of additive particles, but also their interaction with early markers of assertion: auch/ook function as precursors of the assertive value, in competition with the expression of assertion through finiteness, whereas no such interaction is attested for aussi/anche. A comparison of native speakers' preferential choices concerning the information unit highlighted to enhance discourse cohesion confirms the differences between the two language families: speakers of Germanic languages preferentially use particles and Verum Focus, i. e. anaphoric links operating on the assertion value of the relevant utterances, whereas speakers of Romance languages choose anaphoric links operating on the utterance's descriptive content (entities and predicate). Although additive particles across languages share a similar basic meaning, only the Germanic ones are integrated in a system of assertion-related items that push their speakers to apply a discourse perspective oriented towards a comparison of assertions.

This article deals with some aspects related to the relict languages from the Paleo-Balkan cultural and linguistic space, highlighting some defining features of the studied area. Aspects are revealed about the place occupied by the Thracian language and Paleo-Balkan idioms are revealed following the dismemberment of the Indo-European linguistic domain. Special attention is paid to the Thracian idiom and the place it occupies among the relict languages of the Paleo-Balkan area. The article emphasizes the Indo-European and Paleo-Balkan character of the Thracian idiom, of its northern branch, Thraco-Dacian, and its participation, along with Latin, in the formation of common Romanian/of the Romanian language. For the most part, the article presents a synthesis based on some important works in the field concerned.

Unlike communities of speakers of other Romance languages such as French and Spanish, it has often been noticed that many Italian speakers are not particularly concerned by the inflow of foreign (mainly English) words. One reason for this, according to some scholars, is that standard Italian does not stir up linguistic identity for many native users, while English enjoys great prestige as the international language. In this paper, positions on neologisms of foreign origin are illustrated, using recently updated monolingual Italian dictionaries and also comments on neologisms collected from blogs and websites. Although they have a different status and degree of representativeness, the latter respond faster than dictionaries to doubts concerning the use of loans in Italian texts.

This paper examines the evolution of double article systems in two Romance varieties, Balearic Catalan and Picard. In these languages the two definite articles have different syntactic distributions. We account for these double article systems with a multi-layered DP analysis that maps semantically onto Löbner’s (1985, 2011) Uniqueness Scale, further developed in Ortmann (2014). We trace the origins of the present-day definite articles to the Latin demonstrative ille (Catalan, Picard), emphatic pronoun and adnominal ipse (Catalan), and emphatic interjection particle ecce (Picard).The development of the present-day definite articles involved a stage where an emphatic form competed with the demonstrative. In the majority of the present-day Romance languages, a single definite article emerged from the competition that was already underway in Latin. In the Romance varieties considered here, two different forms emerged, but they took on different semantic interpretations. We show how the relevant semantic properties of the three Latin forms are discernible in the distribution of the definite articles that developed from them and that still exist in the present-day varieties.

Use of the demonstrative pronoun ese “that, that man” in familiar North American Spanish speech is traced to Andalusian Spanish and the influence of Caló, the cryptolect of the Iberian Roma. In early para-Romani, the inherited four-term deictic system (situational/contextual, general/specific) yields to the very differently organized Romance three-part paradigm (este, ese, aquel), as, concurrently, Caló locative adverbs often replace personal pronouns. Yet, even after the wholesale replacement of Caló demonstratives by Spanish forms, the function of an earlier deictic vocative phrasing is maintained in ese, to be understood as you, right there, my conversational partner.

Use of the demonstrative pronoun ese “that, that man” in familiar North American Spanish speech is traced to Andalusian Spanish and the influence of Caló, the cryptolect of the Iberian Roma. In early para-Romani, the inherited four-term deictic system (situational/contextual, general/specific) yields to the very differently organized Romance three-part paradigm (este, ese, aquel), as, concurrently, Caló locative adverbs often replace personal pronouns. Yet, even after the wholesale replacement of Caló demonstratives by Spanish forms, the function of an earlier deictic vocative phrasing is maintained in ese, to be understood as you, right there, my conversational partner.

Abstract: The Spanish exclamation olé is traced to Caló and is one result of the interaction of the paradigms of demonstrative pronouns, personal pronouns, and locative adverbs, when Common Romani was confronted with Andalusian Spanish. Not a compliment or hortatory exclamation directed at the flamenco performer or bullfighter, it was initially an ostensive deictic comment addressed to other members of the public and meant "(look at/listen to) that person (artist) over yonder" and thus promoted community pride and cohesion.

This chapter undertakes a critical review of the various traditional and more recent classifications of the Romance languages which have been proposed within the literature, examining both external and internal cohesion within the family. In relation to the former, the chapter examines whether Romance forms a typologically coherent linguistic grouping, highlighting to what extent the Romance languages form a continuum of mutually intelligible speech varieties, and the shared features, if any, which serve to bind the group together. In terms of internal cohesion, the chapter examines the linguistic nature of the major divisions and classifications among the Romance languages (whether proposed on historical-comparative grounds, in relation to socio-geographical criteria, historico-geographical criteria, typological criteria, or theory-internal criteria). Specific topics dealt with include: cultural dialects; problems of internal classification; subdivisions of Romance; phonetic reduction and stress type; the partitive; aoristic drift; historical and typological criteria; eastern and western Romània;types of vowel system.

Several attempts have been made to classify Romance languages. The subgroups created can be posited as intermediate entities in diachrony between a mother language and daughter languages. This diachronic perspective can be structured using a rigid model, such as that of the family tree, or more flexible ones. In general, this perspective yields a bipartite division between Western Romance languages (Ibero-Romance, Gallo-Romance, Alpine-, and Cisalpine-Romance) and Eastern Romance languages (Italian and Romanian), or a tripartite split between Sardinian, Romanian, and other languages. The subgroups can, however, be considered synchronic groupings based on the analysis of the characteristics internal to the varieties. Naturally, the groupings change depending on which features are used and which theoretic model is adopted. Still, this type of approach signals the individuality of French and Romanian with respect to the Romània continua, or contrasts northern and southern Romània, highlighting, on the one hand, the shared features in Gallo-Romance and Gallo-Italian and, on the other, those common to Ibero-Romance, southern Italian, and Sardinian. The task of classifying Romance languages includes thorny issues such as distinguishing between synchrony and diachrony, language and dialect, and monothetic and polythetic classification. Moreover, ideological and political matters often complicate the theme of classification. Many problems stand as yet unresolved, and they will probably remain unresolvable.

Cross-linguistic differences in gender congruency effects: Evidence from meta-analyses