Italian Grammar Research Articles

Les exercices dans les grammaires de l’italien à l’usage des Français de N.G. Biagioli (première moitié du XIXe siècle)

Ce travail propose l’analyse des exercices contenus dans les grammaires de l’italien à l’usage des Français de Niccolò Giosafatte Biagioli, publiées à Paris de 1805 à 1822. S’inscrivant explicitement dans le sillage de Dumarsais et de Condillac, l’auteur confirme en même temps le respect de la tradition grammaticale italienne qui s’était construite – à partir du modèle fondateur des Prose della Volgar Lingua (1525) de Pietro Bembo – sur le prestige de la norme littéraire et sur une conception de la langue comme voie d’accès aux meilleurs auteurs et à la formation du style. Notre attention se porte plus particulièrement sur le statut accordé par Biagioli à l’exercice du « thème » comme instrument clé de l’apprentissage et sur la typologie des échantillons linguistiques utilisés pour les exemples et pour les exercices.

An Italian Grammarian between Paris and London: tradition, competition and methods of pedagogic transmission in the works of Vincenzo Peretti (1795–1803)

ABSTRACT This paper offers some thoughts on Vincenzo Peretti’s Italian Grammar (1795). We shall see how Peretti promotes the legitimacy of his work on the basis of an explicit ‘horizon de retrospection‘ made up of the most representative authors of the tradition, notably Benedetto Buommattei, author of Della Lingua toscana (1643). Peretti’s respect for the auctoritates is accompanied by a commentary on the inadequacy of the competition (Veneroni’s Maître Italien). Our aim is to identify both the language model as presented in the Italian Grammar and its relationship with its reference model, and we will also account for the treatment of two categories that Buommattei had elevated to the rank of ‘parts of speech‘: ’segnacaso’ and ’ripieno’. Finally, we will conclude with an analysis of the pedagogical methods proposed by Peretti.

The ellipsis in Italian grammars between the late 18th and early 20th century

The ellipsis in Italian grammars between the late 18th and early 20th century

L'italiano L2 e le regole che non si insegnano a scuola

A number of topics in Italian L2 grammar are notoriously difficult to acquire, even for students with an overall good level of proficiency. Some constructions are clearly ungrammatical; others sound odd and betray a non-native use of the form. This paper examines two of such examples − the use of definite determiners with plural nouns in (preverbal) subject position and the alternation of null and overt subject pronouns − and it compares and combines insights from generative grammar and rules of normative grammar taught in school. The aim of this approach is twofold: First, to understand why these constructions may be difficult to acquire for a second language learner. Second, to encourage awareness about variation in language and to provide new insights for second language teaching.

Rasmus Rask og det italienske verbalsystem

The great Danish linguist Rasmus Rask (1787-1832) published a short Italian grammar in 1827. His work is analytic and discursive. In my article I shall present and discuss Rask’s exposition of the Italian verbal system. I shall focus on two elements: 1) Rask’s use of a Danish terminology which has some similarities with Reichenbach’s system; 2) Rask’s allocation of condizionale as an indicative tense, in contrast to a long Italian grammatical tradition of having condizionale as an independent mood. I shall show that Rask’s consistent use of his tense terminology throws a critical light on the Reichenbach system and further argue that the study of Rask’s treatment of condizionale can give us a basis for some clarification and inspiration in the didactics of teaching the Italian language.

The Creation and Reception of Fortunio's Regole Grammaticali (1516)

The first printed grammar of the Italian vernacular, Fortunio's Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua (1516) responded to a need for guidance in imitating Tuscan authors of the Trecento, in line with the doctrine whose most authoritative proponent was Pietro Bembo. The Regole emerged on the fringes of the cultural mainstream. Fortunio conceived the work in Venice but he came to be suspected of treachery against that state. The structure of the Regole does not follow slavishly that of the Regulae grammaticales used to teach Latin. Fortunio owes much to the work of Bembo, but he does not follow him in every respect. The Regole appeared in a relatively minor centre, Ancona, where shortly afterwards Fortunio died violently. The nature of the Regole, and indeed its very existence, did not meet with universal approval. However, it was reprinted frequently in the Cinquecento and had a formative influence on the early study of Italian grammar.

Dalle Regole del Fortunio a una grammatica ‘dell'utente’: l'italiano fra norma e uso

This essay follows the development of the history of Italian grammars from the earliest manifestations to the present, offering a wide-ranging analysis of the relevant linguistic debates across the centuries, as well as focusing on the role that texts such as Fortunio's Regole have played in the Italian grammatical tradition. The discussion outlines and examines the methodologies and approaches of different theorist of language as expressed in their works, with the aim of clarifying various aspects of the Italian grammatical tradition and highlighting new scholarly paths. Reflecting on grammar and grammar production is far from being a sterile and dry elaboration of research and teaching methods and perspectives. It is, on the contrary, a fertile and fruitful field of investigation.

Płynna gramatyka. Wybrane problemy metodologii i dydaktyki gramatyki języka włoskiego

LIQUID GRAMMAR: SOME PROBLEMS REGARDING THE METHODOLOGY AND DIDACTICS OF ITALIAN GRAMMAR Italian grammar today is still subject to change and reinterpretation. In this article, I attempt to introduce some problems regarding Italian grammar from the point of view of the methodology of grammar didactics. It is not, therefore, a study of the standard Italian language; rather, it is mainly a reflection on the creation of grammar rules and their explication in grammar textbooks that are dedicated primarily to foreigners. the problems that students of Italian grammar may encounter are the following, among others: the presentation of outdated grammar structures (the differences between standard grammar and actual language practice); a lack of explicitly expressed rules for various language problems; a lack of discussion about grammatical differences that result due to sociolinguistic variations; and a lack of appropriate comments for some grammar issues, which cause difficulties for foreigners. I seek to suggest some methodological solutions and to define the features of grammar (textbooks) on an academic level that could help to overcome—at least partially—similar problems. All questions that I discuss in the present text are illustrated with examples taken from popular academic grammar textbooks written by Polish and Italian linguists.

Evviva La Musica: The Music of Language

Three years ago, I applied for and was successful in receiving a grant from Brisbane Catholic Education. This was for an action project to investigate how Information Communication and Learning Technology (ICLT) resources could enhance language learning. From my first project, reflecting on student responses to my questionnaires, many indicated that they enjoyed learning Italian through music or songs. The focus for my second language grant, “learning Italian grammar through songs”, evolved from reflecting on my student responses on their learning and listening to student voice. From my observations of student engagement and again consulting students’ ideas, it was evident that the students’ enjoyment of the learning experiences was the driving factor which engaged them in their learning. Analysis of the quantitative data taken from a grammatical pre-test and post-test, revealed that the frequency of listening to and singing the songs influenced the students’ recall, understanding and being able to identify the grammatical terms for specific words, in particular, the songs that the students had been learning for many years, even from Prep, Years one and two. For my next project, I shall be investigating “having an ear for languages” and “having an ear for music” and how the two correlate.

Parallel developments: the Mandarin of Chinese Muslims and Jewish languages

Judeo-Italian, a typical Jewish language, is a group of closely related dialects consisting of a basically Italian vocabulary and grammar but including a component of words of Hebrew or Aramaic origin and occasionally words borrowed from other languages, e.g orsai ‘anniversary of a death’ from Yiddish and negro ‘wretched’ from Ladino. The language was traditionally written in the Hebrew alphabet but today is written in Latin letters.Xiao’erjing is a group of closely related dialects spoken by Chinese Muslims living in Mandarin-speaking parts of China. Its vocabulary is largely Chinese, but it includes words borrowed from Arabic. It was written in the Arabic alphabet but today is almost always written in Chinese characters. The borrowings from Hebrew and Arabic frequently are for terms connected with religion, such as cascer in Judeo-Italian and kosher in Yiddish are analogous to halal in Xiao’erjing for food that is ritually permitted. However, the borrowings are not restricted to religion but may fall into any semantic category.Most Jewish languages and Xiao’erjing were widely used a century ago, and both are disappearing today, reflecting political and social changes in Europe, the Americas, and China.

La «Fedra» di Seneca-Sanguineti: rilettura di una traduzione per la messinscena

The purpose of this study is to fill a gap about Edoardo Sanguineti’s translations in the current bibliography. Despite the fact that Friedmar Apel’s method brings a sweeping change to research in the field of translation studies and many works about Sanguineti’s activity have been published in recent years, an overall analysis regarding Seneca’s Phaedra still doesn’t exist. The drama was translated for Luca Ronconi’s theatrical production, performed at Teatro Stabile di Roma in 1969. Both play and translation were harshly criticized for their rhetoric, declamation and forceful emphasis: the same critics were directed to the original text. This study tries to show that Sanguineti perfectly knows that in the Seneca’s play – as Eliot said – «the drama is all in the word». Therefore Sanguineti creates a new style of translation, that he calls «oracolese»: its idiosyncratic syntax (caused by reproduction of ordo verborum ), assonances and alliterations, alienating commixture between high literal tradition and colloquial Italian grammar are strictly related to the mise-en-scene. Sanguineti realizes that Seneca’s dramas’ static plot has a special strength and – because «in translation there is no other speaker than translator» – this is the strongest relation with the original, the only point of contact possible.

L’uso dei tempi e dei modi, traduzione delle espressioni fisse, idiomatiche e metaforiche e cambiamenti dei costrutti frasali nella versione polacca de «I dodici abati di Challant». Come superare i limiti di un sistema linguistico

The purpose of this paper is to present a comparative analysis of a novel written in Italian by Laura Mancinelli, 'The Twelve Abbots of Challant', and its translation into Polish prepared by Maciej Brzozowski. Focusing on a few examples, such as the use of grammatical tenses and moods, differences in the syntax, and the problems of translating idiomatic and metaphoric expressions, the paper aims to compare the author’s style with that of the translator. The task undertaken by the translator seems very hard indeed from the very beginning due to considerable differences between the Italian and Polish languages in the use of tenses and moods. While the Italian grammar uses four moods, eight simple and seven compound tenses, the frugal Polish grammar makes with just three modes, one compound and three simple tenses. The discussion will clearly illustrate that thanks to some modifications it was possible to translate and preserve the meaning and the spirit of the Italian grammar and style.

Tra percezione e lingua: alcune osservazioni sul funzionamento dei complementi che fanno riferimento alle proprietà fisiche degli esseri umani

The paper explores a wide variety of complements that in Italian syntax happen to have the same reference. The case in point is their ability to evoke two physical features, e.g. on the one hand, 'to be bald' (to have no hair), 'to have little hair', 'to have lost one’s hair', and on the other, 'to have grey hair', 'to have gone / grown grey', 'to have plenty of grey hair on one’s head', 'to be grey-haired', 'to have hardly any grey hair'. The present remarks start by pointing at the close proximity between a way some particular reality is perceived (involving, with respect to concepts, schemata, preconceptions and imaging) and the form of putting it into words. This proximity explains why in Italian grammars numerous interchangeable complements are applied – the reason for their diversity comes from concurrent perceptions of the same reality.

Acquiring the syntactic constraints on auxiliary change under restructuring in L2 Italian

This paper reports the findings of an experiment into the syntactic constraints on auxiliary change under restructuring in Italian L2 grammars which are possibly at the end state. Its aim is to test the prediction of the original version of the Interface Hypothesis that narrow syntactic properties are fully acquirable in the L2. In Italian restructuring constructions with embedded unaccusatives, the change of auxiliary fromavere(‘have’) toessere(‘be’) is either optional or obligatory depending on clitic presence and placement. A group of highly proficient L1 Croatian adult L2 learners of Italian and a group of adult Italian native speakers used Magnitude Estimation to express their auxiliary preferences in restructuring constructions with embedded unaccusatives. The L2 learners were shown not to know when auxiliary change is optional and when obligatory. Such findings are not consistent with the version of the Interface Hypothesis tested. Possible reasons for the incomplete acquisition of the phenomenon under scrutiny are discussed in the paper.

Tipologia degli errori linguistici riscontrati fra i discenti di italiano di madrelingua polacca

The material presented is the result of years of observations as well as notes taken while teaching several generations of Poles at various kinds of courses. Mostly, however, they were the 1st and the 2nd year students at the Faculty of Italian Studies of Warsaw University. The academic course covers the entire Italian grammar – from the present tense to reported speech. The error analysis was carried out following the chronological criterion: starting from the 1st class in the 1st year, i.e. the easiest topics, to the end of the 2nd year. The review of typical errors begins with spelling (e.g.spelling “gi”) followed by the most common morphological errors (the plural form of nouns and verbs that, in the singular, end in “e”) and ends up with grammatical errors (wrong use of past tenses Passato Prossimo, Imperfetto, problems with pronouns and their use). A large number of examples covers the type of interferential errors as well as those related to hypercorrection. The material presented is intended to sensitize the teacher to certain grammatical issues which, together with a skillful methodological approach, can be implemented so as to avoid the most common errors.

Anaphora resolution in near-native Italian grammars: Evidence from native speakers of Croatian

This paper reports the results of an experimental study on the resolution of intra-sentential anaphora in Italian, by native Italian speakers and near-native Italian speakers whose L1 is Croatian. In a picture-selection task, the two groups of speakers had to identify the antecedents of third person null and overt subject pronouns in ambiguous forward and backward anaphora sentences and their unambiguous counterparts. In all contexts under investigation, near-natives expressed native-like antecedent preferences, indicating that they have acquired not only the syntactic, but also the discourse-pragmatic constraints on the realisation of pronominal subjects in Italian. Given that Croatian and Italian do not differ with respect to the licensing and distribution of pronominal forms, the results provide additional evidence for an account attributing the well-attested tendency of bilingual speakers of a null subject language and a non-null subject language to overuse and misinterpret overt subjects in the null subject language to crosslinguistic influence.

Theoretical and developmental issues in the syntax of subjects: Evidence from near-native Italian

This article reports the results of experiments targeting the production and interpretation of postverbal subjects, and null and overt pronominal subjects, by near-native speakers of Italian whose native language is English. The results directly bear on both theoretical issues and developmental acquisition questions. It is argued that properties related to the null-subject parameter are sensitive to discourse factors that determine the use of both postverbal subjects and pronominal subjects. More specifically, it is claimed that the availability of null pronominal subjects and the availability of postverbal subjects do not necessarily correlate. The near-native grammars analyzed here illustrate a special instance of this lack of correlation. Furthermore, near-natives show non-native-like behavior in the use of postverbal subjects, and in the overuse of overt pronominal subjects in tensed clauses. The proposal is put forward that, although resetting of the null-subject parameter has taken place in the speakers’ L2 Italian grammar, the relevant L1 computations are preserved and accessed in L2 use, without violating any formal conditions; this is the source of non-target behavior. The analysis proposed exploits cartographic insights on discourse-related computations, and suggests that the principles of economy may be instantiated differently in native and near-native grammars.

Sull'omissione del pronome clitico oggetto in italiano antico

In conjoined structures in Modern Italian, clitic pronouns are to be repeated, even if exceptions from this rule are to some extent acceptable, as in lo leggo e rileggo. The Old Italian grammar appears to have been considerably more liberal on this point. In a 13th century text such as Il Libro de' Vizî e delle Virtundi, the omission of clitic pronouns in the second conjuct of a conjoined structure is highly frequent. This pronominal system, however, is not generally valid for the entire Old Italian period. Arguably, some 13th and 14th century authors cancel clitics in context where null objects cannot be recovered in Modern Italian. This indicates that some alternative recovery strategy was indeed available at an earlier stage of Italian.

Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua by Giovan Francesco Fortunio, Brian Richardson

MLR, 98.2, 2003 473 Manuel de linguistique romane. By Jacques Allieres. (Bibliotheque de Grammaire et de Linguistique, 10) Paris: Champion. 2001. xxii + 323 pp. ISBN 2-74530439 -9. Jacques Allieres sets himself the task of providing an introduction to Romance linguistics , the intended readership being French students ofthe subject, using this term in its broader as well as narrower sense. Indeed, the back-cover blurb refers to a pub? lic cultive, while the foreword invokes, no doubt more realistically, the need felt by a teacher fora coursebook that should fillthe gap between, on the one hand (to a French undergraduate), foreign-language texts of a compass similar to the present volume, and more comprehensive but less wieldy tomes, on the other. In other words, this is an intermediate-sized French-languagetextbookof comparative Romance linguistics. Allieres starts the book where any linguist would, with a short firstchapter discussing the origins ofthe Romance languages. This chapter takes a sprint through the relevant varieties of Latin and the substrate, adstrate, and superstrate languages in question. The second chapter is rather mysteriously called 'Les grandes divisions' but, again quite conventionally, compares the Romance languages on the phonetic, morphological , syntactic, and lexical levels, devoting most space to morphology. Chapter 3 takes the complementary approach of providing a linguistic description of each of the languages, with the same breakdown by linguistic level within each language. This is a good idea, as it fills in gaps left in the previous chapter, as well as providing a synthetic overview of each language. The author apologizes early on, and quite unnecessarily, forthe format ofthe book, which was prepared as camera-ready copy. The format is in fact unexceptionable, but this is a furtherexample of cheese-paring by publishers, who have obliged the author to solve the often quite formidable problems of typography inseparable from a book of this sort. The maps are good and plentiful. The redoubtable impression of density that emanates from the volume is largely due to the subject matter and the relentlessly compressed way in which it is treated. All the same, the line-spacing has been squeezed to save on pages, and this gives a cramped look. This book deserves to do well in the niche into which it settles; the most obvious is the French undergradu? ate market, but lecturers of French in anglophone countries might wish to append the volume as supplementary reading, perhaps to improve reading fluency in the linguistics register. Romance linguistics is really too large a subject to lend itself to compendious treatment in a handily sized volume, so that the present book will above all be useful in supplementing the large standard texts. Alternatively, the book will be suitable in offeringa brief, clear treatment of topics discussed in a less searching undergraduate course, but, as ever, the teacher who employs this book will need to be conversant with the bibliography to which it refers. University of Leeds Nigel Armstrong Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua. By Giovan Francesco Fortunio. Ed. by Brian Richardson. Padua and Rome: Antenore. 2001. lxxxv + 254 pp. ?30. ISBN 88-8455-520-5. This is a critical edition of the firstprinted Italian grammar (1516), recently published in facsimile by Claudio Marazzini and Simone Fornara (Pordenone: Accademia di San Marco, 1999). The introduction develops Carlo Dionisotti's studies on Fortunio and deals with the biographical circumstances surrounding the composition of the Regole ('II contesto e la genesi delle Regole', pp. ix-xxvii), the sources and purposes of the text ('II Fortunio grammatico', pp. xxviii-lxi), and its reception ('La fortuna delle Regole', pp. lxii-lxxiii). After recallingFortunio's links with Venice, Brian Richardson 474 Reviews suggests the reasons forboth the delay in the publication of the work (the book privilege was requested in 1509) and its distance from the Venetian cultural environment. An examination of archival sources and of Sanudo's Diarii reveals that Venetian suspicions about the treachery of Fortunio's brother, Matteo da Zara, harmed Giovan Francesco too: he was probably forced to leave the Serenissima and moved to Ancona, where the grammar was published one year before his mysterious suicide. Fortunio's proem addresses 'gli studiosi della regolata volgar lingua', for whom the...

Review: Modern Italian Grammar Workbook * Anna Proudfoot: Modern Italian Grammar Workbook

Journal Article Review: Modern Italian Grammar Workbook Anna Proudfoot : Modern Italian Grammar Workbook Get access Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 37, Issue 4, 1 October 2001, Page 478, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/37.4.478-a Published: 01 October 2001