Italian Grammar Research Articles

Enforcing Linguistic Transformation: The EU Parliament’s Role in Italian Grammar and Lexicon Revision

Enforcing Linguistic Transformation: The EU Parliament’s Role in Italian Grammar and Lexicon Revision

V1 clauses and EPP in Old Italian

This work discusses some aspects of the so-called “relaxed verb-second hypothesis” for Old Romance languages focusing on Old Italian data. Although the idea that Medieval Romance varieties displayed some kind of verb-second grammar is often accepted in the literature, careful consideration of the data and the predictions casts some doubts on this hypothesis and suggests pursuing a different road to account for word order phenomena in these varieties. The focus here is on verb-first main clauses, which result from merging a null element in the left periphery according to Wolfe’s (2015) influential work. If this approach is adopted, problems arise for the definition of the null categories that can occupy the left periphery of the clause: there is no motivation to postulate such elements unless a rule of obligatory pre-field occupation is independently justified, and the data speaks against such a rule. The question then arises whether a further weakened version of the relaxed V2 hypothesis is still preferable to a non-V2 analysis of Old Italian Grammar.

Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) romanista: La rilevanza della sua analisi dei Passive tenses in italiano ed altre lingue

Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) was a Danish linguist, best known for his studies of English, of phonetics and ofgeneral linguistics. In my paper, I introduce a lesser-known side of Jespersen, i.e. as an Italianist and aRomanist. A special focus is on how he deals with the passive tenses in Romance languages, in particular Italianand French. Drawing on the theory developed by the German Romanist Friedrich Diez (1794-1876), whonotably differentiated between perfective and imperfective verbs, and subsequently connecting thisdifferentiation to the general discussion of aspect and Aktionsart around 1900, Jespersen in a few pageselaborates a rather advanced analysis of the passive tenses in the Romance (and some other) languages. Isuggest that Jespersen's statement forestalls an important part of the description of the passive tenses in Italianelaborated by the Danish Italianist (and Romanist) Jørgen Schmitt Jensen (1931-2004) and published in acomprehensive Italian grammar (1990). I further propose that even though Jespersen’s text probably is not adirect source for Schmitt Jensen, it helps understanding the general frame of the latter's presentation of thesubject. Finally, I claim that the relevant pages in Jespersen (1924) are interesting concerning the historiographyof the concept of Aktionsart.

Classroom Introduction of a Video Game on Italian Grammar

Despite Italian teachers’ strong interest in the use of games, especially the digital ones, there are several critical issues due to their lack of familiarity with games/video games thus making games’ adoption in teaching complex because teachers have only limited time to prepare and play a game-based learning game. Therefore they feel uncertain about using games in class due to their limited knowledge of digital games and find it difficult to identify appropriate assessments, they also find it difficult to integrate video games effectively and efficiently into their classroom, it is also difficult for them to choose appropriate games for teaching. Additionally the school/administration doesn’t assist their effort to support and improve their skills in game-based learning. The learning of the fundamentals of the Italian language and grammar are described and defined by the Italian Ministry of Education within the “National Indications for the ‘Italian Language’ Curriculum”. However, multiple difficulties often make it arduous to learn the basics of the Italian language. The video game “Ross and the Sgrammanebbia” - which can be translated as “Ross and the Un-grammar-Fog” - is a didactic grammar web video game that has a correspondence between the levels and the topics of the textbook as well as giving the teacher a valid help to organise a didactic path studied on the curricular skills. In order to define the useful guidelines for an effective introduction of the game in the classroom, participatory qualitative-quantitative research was prepared on the methods that a small group of teachers put in place to design the training activity with video games. The research focused on: analysis of the educational design skills for the use of games: definition of learning goals, assessment methods and identified teaching strategies; evaluation of the pedagogical activities implemented to facilitate the introduction of games in the classroom; analysis of the roles played by the teacher during all the phases of the training activity - from the design of the training activity to the introduction of the game in the classroom, to evaluation.

Luigi Donato Ventura, a Trilingual Self-translator

Luigi Donato Ventura, a Trilingual Self-translator

La rappresentazione dei significati preposizionali locativi nelle grammatiche italiane: una valutazione dalla prospettiva delle grammaticografia croata

The starting point of this study stems from the two assumptions that are commonly accepted and, to a great extent, proven within cognitive linguistics: 1. members of the category of prepositions are bearers of autonomous meanings, and 2. prepositional meanings are conditioned significantly by the concepts pertinent to the domain of space. In the light of the theoretical model of the semantic representation of prepositions previously developed by the author (2022) and his reflections on the nature of prepositional meaning in general, this article presents the results of an analysis conducted on a corpus of 13 Italian grammars published in the last 70 years. Specifically, the representations of spatial meanings of Italian prepositions as proposed by grammarians are examined. Since a clear prevalence of approaches characterised by the use of the terms of logical analysis to provide the semantic description of a preposition is identified, the author compares this trend with some models used within Croatian grammaticography. In conclusion, the author indicates some potential alternative evolutionary paths of Italian grammaticography that might lead it to a higher level of cognitive plausibility of representation of the semantic structure of a preposition.

A multi-level methodology for the automated translation of a coreference resolution dataset: an application to the Italian language

In the last decade, the demand for readily accessible corpora has touched all areas of natural language processing, including coreference resolution. However, it is one of the least considered sub-fields in recent developments. Moreover, almost all existing resources are only available for the English language. To overcome this lack, this work proposes a methodology to create a corpus for coreference resolution in Italian exploiting knowledge of annotated resources in other languages. Starting from OntonNotes, the methodology translates and refines English utterances to obtain utterances respecting Italian grammar, dealing with language-specific phenomena and preserving coreference and mentions. A quantitative and qualitative evaluation is performed to assess the well-formedness of generated utterances, considering readability, grammaticality, and acceptability indexes. The results have confirmed the effectiveness of the methodology in generating a good dataset for coreference resolution starting from an existing one. The goodness of the dataset is also assessed by training a coreference resolution model based on BERT language model, achieving the promising results. Even if the methodology has been tailored for English and Italian languages, it has a general basis easily extendable to other languages, adapting a small number of language-dependent rules to generalize most of the linguistic phenomena of the language under examination.

Pseudo-clefts in Italian talk-in-interaction and in interaction-as-represented

This article examines Italian pseudo-clefts (PCs) as documented in diverse settings of interaction (ordinary, institutional, multiparty, etc.), as well as in interactions reported by daily newspapers. After an overview of the grammatical and semantic properties of PCs, mainly based on the literature and Italian grammars, the article empirically analyzes attested PCs from two different vantage points, interactional linguistics and text linguistics. By focusing on two different kinds of data, it (i) provides a fine-grained description of PCs in present-day Italian, and, more specifically, (ii) highlights the differences in PCs occurring in talk-in-interaction vs. journalistic texts, in particular in reported speech. It shows that the way in which linguists conceptualize PCs is largely informed by the specific features of the data considered, such as temporality, sequentiality, and embodiment for talk-in-interaction, and spatiality, hierarchy and textual structures for newspaper articles. Finally, the article provides an overview of the most significant properties of PCs as they appear in both sets of data. It highlights the theoretical and empirical differences between the two frameworks chosen to analyze PCs, and reflects on the heuristic benefits and difficulties in combining different research traditions.

L'uso dell'articolo determinativo davanti ai singenionimi affettivi preceduti da un possessivo: un quadro statistico

Among the most complex rules of Italian grammar are those relating to the use of the definite article with possessive adjectives followed by kinship names: in this case, the article is not employed, but its omission is subject to various structural, syntactical, and semantic restrictions concerning the noun / phrase in question. Grammar books usually highlight the use of the article with plural nouns or with the possessive form loro, but they are much less careful about other features of the kinship noun / phrase in which possessives are involved (compound nouns, nouns followed by prepositional complements, etc.). Furthermore, they disagree with regard to the syntax of affective names, in which case the use of the article is often considered optional. With this study, then, I intend to analyze the use of the definite article with possessive adjectives followed by the affective kinship names mamma and papà (therefore, nouns without suffixes) in the largest corpus of written Italian, Italian Web 2016 of the Sketch Engine system. The results of this research are interesting because, statistically, the use of the article depends on the possessive adjective used in the text (mio, tuo, suo, etc.) and, therefore, on the degree of the speaker's emotional involvement.

How Gabriel Harvey read tragedy*

AbstractIn 1579, Gabriel Harvey bound together in a composite collection a surprising group of texts: an Italian grammar, an Italian translation of Terence’s comedies, Lodovico Dolce’s Italian rifacimenti of Euripides’ Medea and Seneca’s Thyestes, and Euripides’ Hecuba and Iphigenia in Erasmus’ Latin. The volume is now dispersed, but all its parts survive. This essay explores the story of this hitherto unknown artefact and what it reveals about Harvey’s reading practices and his engagement with drama, especially Greek tragedy. Parsing the elaborate system of signs with which Harvey multifariously annotated these works, it argues that he read tragedies with an emphasis on situation and utterance rather than extractable sententiae, as has been suggested. Harvey probed local detail in the tragedies with attentiveness, and with an eye to recurring observations that revealed the ‘thought’ of these works. He was drawn especially to the political dimension of this ‘thought’. Reading tragedies in juxtaposition, he became interested in their different exploration of rulers’ obligation to rule by their people’s consent. And he found Euripides’ plays particularly endowed with political wisdom, no doubt partly because he believed that they had been co‐authored by Euripides’ mentor and Harvey’s own icon of pragmatic wisdom, Socrates.

Grammaticalia: hommage à Bernard Colombat éd. par Jean-Marie Fournier, Aimée Lahaussois et Valérie Raby

Reviewed by: Grammaticalia: hommage à Bernard Colombat éd. par Jean-Marie Fournier, Aimée Lahaussois et Valérie Raby Bryan Donaldson Fournier, Jean-Marie, Aimée Lahaussois, et Valérie Raby, éd. Grammaticalia: hommage à Bernard Colombat. ENS, 2019. ISBN 979-10-362-0085-4. Pp. 318. The list of Bernard Colombat's publications that opens the volume testifies to his productivity as a scholar, in areas including corpus linguistics, linguistic historiography, historical grammar (and historical grammars, especially of Latin), the diachrony of French, grammatical categories, and translation. To a large degree, these interests are reflected in the contents of this volume, whose 27 contributions center predominantly on French but also discuss other languages, from European languages, like Russian, Portuguese, Sanskrit, and Ancient Greek, to indigenous languages of the Americas. This review is by necessity not exhaustive. If I highlight certain contributions, it is not my intention to marginalize others. Fournier argues that Maupas's grouping of verbs into classes (by thematic vowel), a departure from his models, advanced the treatment of French grammar. Romanelli's discussion of seventeenth-century Italian grammars destined for French speakers reveals the longstanding concern to make language learning as painless as possible. Peters introduces us to the sixteenth-century philologist Conrad Gessner, source of early observations about social correlates of dialects. Kibbee discusses the grammarian Jean de Chabanel, a link between the Latin grammatical tradition and the French tradition instantiated for example by Vaugelas, from whom Chabanel's remarks often differ, reminding us of the artificiality of prescriptive norms. Mazière's contribution provides an introduction to the seventeenth-century grammarian Jean Macé, whose views similarly sometimes diverge from Vaugelas'. A glimpse of historical pedagogy appears in Archaimbault's analysis of Jean Sohier's eighteenth-century Russian method for French learners, with its use of the contrastive method. Clerico's contribution examines methods for teaching French pronunciation, through the intermediary of Latin, to English and German speakers at the end of the sixteenth century, revealing a clear awareness of the role of first-language transfer in language learning centuries before the advent of second language acquisition as a field of inquiry. Relatedly, Caron discusses an early phonetic alphabet and influences of French pronunciation on Latin pronunciation in France (including regional variation). Ayres-Bennett documents rare cases of women authors of grammatical works in the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries and also shows how women are somewhat present in grammatical works, albeit in a far more discrete way, as dedicatees, intended audiences, and sources of bon usage. Overall, the contributions question certain idées reçues in the field, emphasize how grammars and linguistic thought need to be understood in their historical context, remind us of the rich tradition of grammairiens aside from Vaugelas, and offer glimpses of tantalizing observations of—and reactions to—cases of historical linguistic contact. As with other such volumes, the interest of the contributions (admittedly a subjective measure) varies, as do their approaches and objectives. Nonetheless, readers with interests in historical linguistics, the history of linguistics, and socio-historical [End Page 287] linguistics—and especially readers with an interest in historical grammars—will find much stimulating reading. Bryan Donaldson University of California, Santa Cruz Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

ITALIAN GRAMMATICOGRAPHY BETWEEN TRADITIONAL AND CONTEMPORARY LINGUISTICS

The aim of this paper is to show the current situation in contemporary Italian grammaticography, i.e., to analyse grammatical models (traditional, generative and dependency model) grammar reference books for different purposes are based on. By means of diachronic and synchronic analysis of grammar reference books, we have examined and showed to what extent traditional theories and terminology are retained, i.e., to what extent generative grammar and valency theory are present. The introductory part of the paper shows the development of Italian grammaticography from the first generative research conducted in Italy to this day. The first Italian generative grammar books were published in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Costabile 1967, Saltarelli 1970, Gamberini 1971, Parisi, Antinucci 1973), i.e., shortly after Noam Chomsky’s first monographs on generative grammar theory were published. However, although it can be said that Italian grammaticography kept up to date with the research carried out worldwide in the field of linguistics, the first comprehensive descriptive grammar book (Comprehensive Consultative Italian Grammar Book) was not published until 1988, when the most comprehensive traditional Italian grammar book by Luca Serianni was published as well, which is the reason why that year is considered to be a turning point in Italian linguistics. Following this turn of events, which is frequently described as revolutionary, grammar book production has flourished while authors have begun to turn to new linguistic theories more and more, i.e., mostly to the fruits of generative grammar and other theories formulated within its framework, although not for want of work dedicated to traditional grammar. Therefore, for the last two and a half decades, Italian grammaticography has abounded in traditional grammar books mainly for the purposes of school use and “new” (Andreose 2017), i.e., „modern” (Vanelli 2010) grammar books primarily for the purposes of pursuing linguistic issues professionally, as well as studying languages at the university level. The central part of the paper is dedicated to analysing individually some of the most renowned grammar books published during the first decades of the 21st century (Salvi, Vanelli 2004, Andorno 2003, Sabatini et al. 2011, Ferrari, Zampese 2016) with the aim of showing their new features in relation to tradition (the reference point of traditional linguistics was the Serianni's grammar book) regarding terminology, the norm, topics and the organisation of the very grammar books. The main conclusion of this research is that contemporary grammar books actually show the greatest departure from tradition concerning the norm and the examples sentence analyses are based on, since normative grammar books, whose goal is to establish certain grammar rules, are completely rejected and replaced by detailed descriptive grammar books aiming at describing fully all registers of the Italian language and all its possible linguistic constructions, regardless of their grammatical accuracy. A somewhat minor, but still quite significant, departure from tradition can be seen in the organisation of grammar books and topics they deal with, since syntax has surely taken precedence in analysis, but also that some traditional topics have been rejected, while some new topics have been included in grammatical analyses (e.g. phonetics and textual linguistics). The characteristic which, nonetheless, has undergone minimal changes in that “transition” from the traditional to the modern way of linguistic analysis is terminology that can be concluded to have been brought up to date and expanded rather that completely changed.

TÖRÖK NYELV TANULMÁNYOZÁSA A KORAÚJKORI EURÓPAI EGYETEMEKEN

A tanulmány az európai török stúdiumok kialakulását és fejlődését tekinti át a kezdetektől az 1754-ben alapított bécsi Keleti Akadémia létrejöttéig. Az arab és perzsa nyelvhez képest a török tanulmányozása viszonylag későn indult meg Európában. Az arab kutatását a teológiai háttér indokolta, a perzsa nyelv tanulmányozását gazdag irodalmi hagyatéka inspirálta, míg a török nyelv vizsgálatát két tényező segítette elő. Az egyik az Oszmán Birodalom egyre növekvő politikai és kereskedelmi súlya Európában, a másik pedig a keresztény misszió. A cikk a téma rövid összefoglalását adja, így a tárgyalt időszakban csak a legfontosabb nyomtatott török grammatikákat és szótárakat veszi számba. A 16. századi alkalmi kezdemények után az első Európában megjelent török nyelvtant (Megiser 1612) tárgyalja, majd Harsányi Nagy Jakab munkáját (1642) veszi vizsgálat alá. Ezután a 17. századi francia, olasz és angol szótári és grammatikai munkák vizsgálata következik (du Ryer, Molino, Maggio, Bernardo de Parigi, Pietro d’Albavilla, Mascisci, Seaman, Vaughan). Ezután hosszabban időzik a tanulmány a 17. bécsi turkológiánál, amennyiben két legfontosabb alakjának, Meninskinek és Podestànak munkásságát elemzi. A lipcsei török szótárak és nyelvtanok áttekintését követően az 1754-ben alapított bécsi Keleti Akadémiáról esik szó. Végül a 17. századi török nyelvű bibliafordítások áttekintésére kerül sor, melyet egy rövid összegzés követ.

Manuscrisele slavone de la biblioteca filialei Cluj-Napoca a Academiei Române. Studiu monografic şi antologie de texte

Even if Romania takes its name from ancient Rome and its inhabitants speak a Romance language, its Slavic heritage is of considerable importance. Situated between Serbia, Bulgaria, and Russia, medieval Moldavia and Wallachia adopted Slavonic both as the language of public administration and as the liturgical language of the Orthodox Church.1 As such, it was also used by Romanians living in Transylvania.2 Until the nineteenth century, the Romanian language was written in Cyrillic characters, then superseded by a Latin alphabet.3This Slavic heritage is reflected in rich collections of Slavonic manuscripts conserved in Romanian libraries, such as the Library of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest and its branch in Cluj-Napoca, the country’s second-largest city. This book by Anca Libidov, based on her PhD thesis and recently published by Editura Etnologică, presents and analyzes the thirty-seven Slavonic manuscripts conserved in Cluj. Among them are epistle books, gospel books, psalters, prayer books, hymnals, lives of saints, collections of religious and philosophical writings, and an Italian grammar written in Russian. Overall, these texts were compiled between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries in countries such as Transylvania, Moldavia, Wallachia, and Russia. Displaying vast erudition, Libidov accurately defines their peculiarities from various perspectives, with reference to structure, content, and language.More precisely, in the first part of the book, she describes every manuscript based on the following scheme: dating, geographical provenance, format, number of pages, language, paper, watermark, binding, decoration, ink, index of contents, margin notes, state of preservation, and places where the manuscript was conserved before reaching the Library of the Romanian Academy branch in Cluj. Bibliographical references complete each summary.The second part of the book examines about fifty different kinds of watermarks on the paper of the manuscripts with the goal of more precisely dating the texts. Watermarks also offer interesting information on the economic, political, and cultural relations between the Romanian lands and the rest of Europe. Those of Venetian origin, for example, refer to the extensive trade between the Italian city and the Balkans in medieval and early modern times. As is well known, Venice played a leading role not only in glassmaking, but also in papermaking and book production. In addition to paper, Latin, Greek, and Slavonic books printed in Venice reached Romania (as their presence in libraries of Wallachian metropolitans and princes demonstrate),4 not to mention other luxury articles like Venetian silverware, which were purchased by Wallachian noblemen.5The third part of the book investigates the language of the manuscripts, ranging from stylistic problems to linguistic aspects. In particular, the author dwells upon the peculiarities of five gospel books conserved in the collection. This highly technical section is especially useful for scholars and readers with a good command of Church Slavonic.The book concludes with an anthology of facsimile texts, an exhaustive bibliography in various languages, and a rich iconography.Beyond its contents, the monograph by Libidov confirms and strengthens the image of Romania as a bridge “between East and West.”6 The provenance of some manuscripts from Russia, as well as watermarks from Polish, German, and Italian paper mills, clearly reflect the international relations of Romanian principalities, with their identities balanced among the Latin, the Byzantine, and the Slavic worlds.

Osnovna slovnica miljskega istrskobeneškega govora: glagolski časi in izbrane glagolske oblike

V prispevku so prikazane glagolske oblike, ki jih govorci miljske istrobeneščine uporabljajo v vsakodnevni komunikaciji. Za posamezne načine upovedovanja prikazujemo spregatve pomožnih glagolov ˈeṡer ‘biti’ in γaˈver ‘imeti’ ter spregatvene vzorce za pravilne glagole s končnicami -ar, -er in -ir. Pravila rabe miljskih glagolskih oblik so podobna pravilom, ki jih narekuje italijanska slovnica, izvzemši rabo konjunktiva in pogojnika, predvsem pri tako imenovanem hipotetičnem dogodku.

"L'aglio mettilo tagliato": definire il participio passato predicativo attraverso la lingua della cucina

The 'predicative' function of Italian past participles is dealt with in this article, a function that has not yet been taken into account in Italian grammars. More precisely, we analyse constructions like l’aglio mettilo tagliato (‘add the sliced garlic’). As some constituency tests clearly show, such participles neither fall under the definition of «attributive» participles, nor under the «circumstantial» function: they rather behave as modifiers of the verbal phrase. Within the frame of secondary predication studies, the participles under consideration can be counted among the «depictives». Depictive predicative participles recur very often in the language of cookbooks and recipes: therefore we use such texts as a source for our purpose.

Subjective Observations on the Teaching of Italian Grammar

In the teaching of Italian in Germany, grammar is nowadays considered as a tool that serves language acquisition, but that is subordinated to the communicative goals of the language lessons. Teachers have to take these as a starting point for their didactic decisions. However, decision procedures do not only depend on educational policy or scientific findings, but also on individual hypotheses of various types. Based on 31 interviews of (future) teachers of Italian (2016-17), the present study aims at analysing (future) teachers’ decision making considering the teaching of grammar. The results show that a dialect and migrant background can play a significant role for didactic decisions.

Language history from below: Standardization and Koineization in Renaissance Italy

AbstractThe paper returns to the complex question of the sociolinguistic history of Italy during the Renaissance. The traditional historiography of the Italian language adopts a teleological perspective, often defining the codification of Italian in 1525 with the publication of Pietro Bembo’sProse della volgar lingua. This approach means that less attention has been devoted to other processes of language change, as well as less focus on areas outside Tuscany. Using the major historical grammars of Italian, I highlight cases of variation which emphasize the non-uniformitarian nature of the standard. One major process while the standard was evolving was the formation of a koine or ‘common language’. This was the main feature of language change throughout much of north Italy. Recent research into the histories of non-Italo Romance varieties have suggested that standardization and koineization are not mutually exclusive processes. Rather, they are best characterised by a ‘top-down’ vs. ‘bottom-up’ approach respectively, with many points of intersection. The paper transposes these notions onto the sociolinguistic landscape of Renaissance Italy, allowing for further insight into how Italian was codified in particular, and the relationship between standards and koines more generally.

“You will be richer, but I very much doubt that you will be happier”. Antonio Panizzi professor in London, 1828-1831

The paper offers an overview of the complex, not easy period in which Antonio Panizzi was teaching at London University (1828-1831), innovatively suggesting that “a uniform program be adopted for the study of all modern languages and literatures” and nevertheless dedicating himself to research with care and passion. In the article, the teaching materials and custom tools he quickly provided to his students for learning italian language and culture are analyzed regarding concept, structure and target: The Elementary Italian Grammar 1828, and two anthologies of prose writings: Extracts from the Italian Prose Writers, 1828, and Stories from Italian Writers with a Literal Interlinear Traduction, 1830.

Su alcuni metodi applicati a grammatiche di italiano per polacchi tra il XIX e il XX secolo

On some methods applied to Italian grammars for Poles between the 19th and 20th centuries The article aims to compare and analyse Italian grammars and manuals for Polish users published between the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The purpose is to observe the general trends on the methods proposed, the changes taking place and the possible influences on teaching of Western languages as foreign languages in a historical moment when after the Third Partition Poland had ceased to exist as a sovereign state.