The work analyzes the contributions that two research fields such as phonological theory and recent researches in the field of natural grapholinguistics can offer to clarify the functioning of ancient syllabic scripts, with particular reference to the syllabic scripts of the Aegean of the first and of the second millennium B.C. Starting from this theoretical basis, a method is developed to identify possible cases of writing of consonant groups attested in a syllabic writing with open syllables such as Minoan Linear A; an analysis extended to the whole corpus of this writing highlights both the lack of standardization in the spellings adopted and the tendency to extensively note the segment of each consonant group, with a certain preference for progressive spellings, independently of the syllabic structure underlying. The results of the Linear A spelling are compared with the analogous strategies adopted by the other syllabic scripts which are connected in a more or less direct way with Linear A, namely Linear B, Cypro-Minoan and Classical Cypriot Syllabary; this comparison makes it possible to identify a line of continuity, characterized by the tendency to write as accurate as possible each segment of a consonant group, a line which unites Linear A with Cypro-Minoan and the Classic Cypriot Syllabary; with respect to this orthographic tradition, the spelling strategy adopted by Linear B, which is characterized by the omission of the coda-segments and by the spelling of only the onset segments, appears as an isolate episode, which has been related to the particular bureaucratic-administrative purpose of this writing. Finally, some possible explanations of the different orthographic strategies are proposed, both from the perspective of the typology of the writing systems, and in relation to the specific historical coordinates and the literacy that characterizes the different scripts examined.

Oral narrative skills have shown to be a valid measure of the linguistic competence of preschoolers and a significant predictor of their academic achievements. A deficiency in this area can lead to long-term sequelae in socio-emotional well-being
\nin their adult life. This paper aims to provide a complete communicative picture of narrative discourse produced by monolingual preschoolers with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical peers matched by age, taking into account around fifty verbal and non-verbal features, computed on the spoken productions elicited by retelling tasks. The main finding is that although traditional standardized neuropsychological tests fail in capturing communicative deficits of DLD children, subtle but persistent language production difficulties are demonstrated by speech disruptions, reduced syntax complexity, and overt gestural signs of discomfort. This last finding is quite intriguing, considering that self- and hetero-adaptor gestures result from uneasiness and anxiety, usually escaping awareness. Taken together, the present results suggest that the observed deficits in DLD are not exclusively linguistic in nature, but may be associated with deficient planning abilities and monitoring processes difficulties.

The aim of this article is to confront dichotomic terms that have been used in order to describe and understand the forces operating in language. It will be shown that they are not equivalent and, on the contrary, refer to different approaches to language. Consequently, a different approach is suggested that goes beyond the dichotomies underlying traditional linguistic types.

Raddoppiamento fonosintattico (RF) is a consonant lengthening phenomenon that is observed at word-boundaries in different Italo-Romance varieties, Standard Italian included. RF is also a peculiarity of Sardinian. Sardinian RF is triggered by few monosyllables that displayed a final coda in Latin (i.e., ad > a, et > e, non > no). This kind of RF originated from consonant assimilation. The paper aims at tracing the origins of Sardinian RF through the analysis of the written evidence for consonant gemination in RF contexts in Old Sardinian texts, by showing which dialectal areas were more affected, which monosyllables induced RF, and which consonants were more often geminated. A linguistic explanation of the observed differences in Southern and Northern Sardinian texts will be proposed with reference to other phonological processes of the respective varieties.

Because of the less-resourced nature of historical languages, non-standard solutions are often required for natural language processing tasks. This article introduces one such solution for historical-language lemmatization, that is the Ensemble lemmatizer for the Classical Language Toolkit, an open-source Python package that supports NLP research for historical languages. Ensemble lemmatization is the most recent development at CLTK in the repurposing and refactoring of an existing method designed for one task, specifically the backoff method as used for part-of-speech tagging, for use in a different task, namely lemmatization. This article argues for the benefits of ensemble lemmatization, specifically, flexible tool construction and the use of all available information to reach tagging decisions, and presents two use cases.

This paper presents the structure of the LiLa Knowledge Base, i.e. a collection of multifarious linguistic resources for Latin described with the same vocabulary of knowledge description and interlinked according to the principles of the so-called Linked Data paradigm. Following its highly lexically based nature, the core of the LiLa Knowledge Base consists of a large collection of Latin lemmas, serving as the backbone to achieve interoperability between the resources, by linking all those entries in lexical resources and tokens in corpora that point to the same lemma. After detailing the architecture supporting LiLa, the paper particularly focusses on how we approach the challenges raised by harmonizing different strategies of lemmatization that can be found in linguistic resources for Latin. As an example of the process to connect a linguistic resource to LiLa, the inclusion in the Knowledge Base of a dependency treebank is described and evaluated.

The present article presents some challenges posed by lemmatization and PoS tagging of Latin, with reference to the ongoing work to revise the Latin Dependency Treebank. Current options available for lemmatization and morphological analysis of Latin are reviewed and discussed. The pipeline to annotate the morphological layer of the Latin Dependency Treebank is shown to consist of three main steps: (i) tokenization/sentence split, which is performed via a documented rule-based algorithm, (ii) pre-population by means of COMBO, a state-of-the-art joint lemmatizer, PoS tagger, and parser trained on the data of the Latin Dependency Treebank 2.1, and (iii) manual error correction informed by the attempt to identify and document lemmatization and morphology annotation rules.

This paper discusses the theoretical bases as well as the pragmatic implementation of the lemmatization of the Late Latin Charter Treebanks (LLCT). LLCT is a set of three dependency treebanks (LLCT1, LLCT2, LLCT3) of Early Medieval Latin documentary texts (charters) written in Italy between AD 714 and 1000 (c. 594,000 tokens). The original model for the lemmatization of LLCT was the Latin Dependency Treebank (LDT), which is mainly Classical standard Latin and based on the entries of Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary. Since LLCT reflects later linguistic developments of Latin and contains a plethora of non-standard proper names, particular attention is paid on how non-standard lexemes are lemmatized systematically to make the lemmatization maximally usable. The theoretical underpinnings to manage the lemmatization boil down to two principles: the evolutionary principle and the parsimony principle.

Review of Diego Poli (2019, a cura di), In limine. Frontiere e integrazioni, Il Calamo, Roma, ISBN 9788898640379, pp. 1-809.

Semantic equivalence between German and Italian: a contrastive analysis of bis (zu) and fin(o) (a) Bis and fin(o) are considered in bilingual dictionaries to be semantic equivalents of translation as the one represents the word translation of the other one. Moreover, both lexemes share another semantic property as they indicate the final point of an interval in space between tow objects, people or in time between two events or actions. This article aims at verifying and proving whether bis and fin(o) can actually be considered as semantic equivalents on the basis of specifically described semantic features of both lexemes. Specifically, we carried out a qualitative contrastive investigation into comparable corpora of German and Italian so as to have an empirical means to support the objective of the present study. The contrastive analysis will be extended to other languages, such as English and French, in order to get a generalization across different languages of the same semantic features.