This paper discusses various anaphoric expressions and the textual dependency and cohesion that they convey, with a special focus on the anaphoric ellipsis. On the basis of a classification model distinguishing between anaphoric, cataphoric and exophoric “reference valency”, anaphoric NPs, pro-forms and ellipses are compared with NPs that establish an exophoric reference parallel to, but not depending on, that of an anteceding NP, i.e. cases which should not be termed anaphoric. The paper examines the co-textual restrictions linked to the different expressions investigated (including null forms) and distinguishes between four co-textual dependencies: thematic, referential, lexical, and structural. Unlike the other anaphoric expressions, the ellipsis exhibits all four dependencies and is therefore defined as the strongest cohesion marker of the ones investigated.

On the background of three major pairs of Saussurean categories, namely arbitrariness and motivation, langue and parole, synchrony and diachrony, the impact of the seminal Cours de linguistique generale on the functional approaches to the study of language is evaluated in the 100th anniversary of its publication. The functionalist approaches are shown to have privileged the study of the motivation of linguistic signs, of the phenomena observable in the speakers’ speech acts (parole) and of the developments they trigger in the course of time. The concentration on these three poles in the consideration of language phenomena has resulted in the neglecting of the aim of linguistic research mentioned in the last statement of the Cours, namely the study of language in se and per se.

Baṅgāṇī, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the so-called Baṅgāṇ area, a land enclosed by the Pabar and the Tons rivers (Uttarkāśī district, Uttarākhaṇḍ state), shows in its grammar and lexicon some peculiar features still rather controversial. The debate is still in course, due to the lack of enough documentation available, as the majority of scholars complains about. Moreover Baṅgāṇī, among the Western Pahāṛī languages of New Indo-Ayan, is now esteemed as a critically endangered language by the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. The paper presents the preliminary results of a fieldwork research with Baṅgāṇī mother-tongue speakers and the unique elicited text available. In particular a description of Baṅgāṇī pronominal and nominal declension, focusing on the case marking and agreement system of the Subject-like and Object-like arguments of intransitive and transitive clauses (in perfective and non-perfective tenses), is offered. The comparison between the data that I collected enabled me to offer a good amount of Baṅgāṇī sentences exemplifying the function of the different forms, and thus to understand their use in depth, that is to shed light on the peculiarities of Baṅgāṇī case marking system.

For modern readers of the Chanson de Roland (late 11th c.) and of its German version, the Rolandslied (late 12th c.), the Archbishop Turpin is an intriguing but bewildering character: he is a member of the Church who despises the idea of a life meant to fight evil only by means of prayers, and at the same time he takes active part in the war against the infidels. This paper briefly retraces the process that led to the convergence of oratores and bellatores, and analyzes the different forms of representation of Turpin in the two poems, in order to throw light on the attitude of each author to the thorny issue of militarized clergy in the 11th and 12th centuries.

The text of the so-called Zurcher Arzneibuch, one of the earliest medicine books written in German (end of the 12th century), is completed by three interlinear (two German/German and one German/Latin) glosses. The first gloss presumably offers a common synonym for a rarer verb contained in the main text, the second one explains a portion of text otherwise not immediately understandable, due to two subsequent abbreviations, and the third one appears as a grammatical note to a word whose form could be ambiguous.

Research on collocations – words that show a marked propensity to occur in association with each other – has proven that their analysis can yield interesting results; not only does it allow us to gain insight into their semantics, but it also permits a better understanding of some aspects of the Old English art of poetry. In this perspective, the occurrences in verse of the noun nearu ‘confinement’, ‘oppression’, ‘affliction’, and its derivatives have been analysed, paying special attention to their original use by Cynewulf, who exploited this device to develop and to strengthen the major thematic threads of the poems in which his signature in runes is embedded. The survey of nearu and its associated words has illustrated that in some contexts, especially where the light versus darkness imagery is pivotal, nearu may have a further denotation, namely that of ‘darkness, obscurity’. Until now, this aspect has only been considered in relation to the formula nihtes nearowe/nihtes nearwe ‘in the confinement/anguish/darkness of the night’ (and to its Old Saxon version, which occurs in the Vatican Genesis). Evidence has been added to this hypothesis from the analysis of some further Old English poetic contexts and from Old Norse literature, where the connection between narrowness and darkness is present with reference to some mythological characters.

Learning a second language is a process that takes place in daily conversation and is therefore observable in its turn-by-turn unfolding during free occurring interactions. In this contribution, we present a single-case analysis of one conversational excerpt taken from the audio recordings of a German-speaking au-pair girl learning French in Switzerland. Drawing on Conversation Analysis, we address the phenomenon of back-linking (Schegloff 1996) as regards its sequential placement and the linguistic resources employed, and we then discuss the functions the L2 speaker accomplishes through it. The analysis supports the idea that everyday interactional data need to be integrated in the studies on L2 acquisition as they uncover the online deployment of linguistic, as well as action resources. These, we argue, help us better understand the concept of L2 interactional competence and, more generally, the process of L2 acquisition.