Italian Verbs Research Articles

Teaching the uses of Italian verb forms to Slovene speakers

Goethe's paradoxical aphorism concerning our knowledge of complex phenomena could be used to identify the feelings which may prevail at two different stages oflearning a foreign language, at an early and at an advanced one. So, for example, it is not surpris­ ing when our students, back from an exchange visit abroad, complain about having felt blocked by their thorough structural language awareness, noticing at the same time that some other foreign students showed off their fluency and richness of vocabulary, while calmly violating certain grammatical conventions. 1 Such self-conscious learners seem to miss their past lack of inhibitions, when they still naively thought oflanguage differ­ ences principally as neatly observable dissimilarities in language forms, feeling that their present awareness of more hidden foreign-language properties is rather a disadvantage in communication; so much so that they wonder whether it would not have been better to have invested all that time and energy into the acquisition of the lexicon instead.

Task related modulation of the motor system during language processing

Recent neurophysiological and brain imaging studies have shown that the motor system is involved in language processing. However, it is an open question whether this involvement is a necessary requisite to understand language or rather a side effect of distinct cognitive processes underlying it. In order to clarify this issue we carried out three behavioral experiments, using a go-no go paradigm. Italian verbs expressing hand actions, foot actions or an abstract content served as stimuli. Participants used their right hands to respond. In Experiment 1, in which a semantics decision task with an early delivery of the go signal (during processing language material) was used, slower responses were found for hand action-related verbs than for foot action-related verbs. In Experiment 2, using the same task with either an early or a delayed delivery of the go signal (when language material had been already processed), no difference was found between responses to the two verb categories in the delayed delivery condition. In Experiment 3, in which a lexical decision task with an early delivery of the go signal was used, again no difference between the two verb categories was found. The present findings demonstrate that during language processing the modulation of the motor system crucially occurs while performing a semantics decision task, thus supporting the notion that this involvement is a necessary step to understand language rather than a side effect of upstream cognitive processes.

Italian split intransitivity and image schemas

This paper explores the choice between the auxiliaries BE and HAVE with Italian intransitive verbs. Most attempts to account for split intransitivity in Italian, as well as in other Romance languages, can be roughly grouped into two categories: the syntactic perspective and the semantic view. In this article I propose that instead of attempting to identify one single parameter responsible for the choice between BE and HAVE, the Romanists should, as our colleagues in other language families have already done, consider the auxiliary selection in terms of a combination of motivations related to the speakers’ conceptualization of the event and to their access to the relevant image schema. This proposition prompts us to reassess the conclusions previously reached by researchers working with aphasic subjects. In addition, it fosters integration between cognitive linguistics and neuroscience by providing a solution to the so-called “Granularity Mismatch Problem.”

Semantic interference effects in the production of verbs

Picture–word interference studies have consistently shown semantic interference effects with nouns. However, only few contradictory results are available at present with verbs. Two experiments on the production of Italian verbs were conducted in order to clarify the issue. Experiment 1 replicated Roelofs (1993). Experiment 2 showed that semantic interference effects obtain regardless of whether or not the distractor verbs are part of the response set. The results are interpreted as evidence that similar processes occur in the production of nouns and verbs. An explanation of the discrepancies present in the current literature is suggested.

On the locative component of French weather -ça

French admits two types of pronominal subjects with weather verbs: il (‘it’) and ça (‘that’). Some eminent authors such as Dauzat et al. (1964: 118), Picoche (1983: 99) and Grevisse (1993: 1024) assume that the centripetal locative adverb çà has in some way influenced the development of the pronominal form ça. In this paper, it is argued that the weather ça is provided with a centripetal locative feature like the adverb çà and that this feature is compatible only with the directional interpretation of weather verbs. Given that the weather ça can enter an unaccusative structure where the argumental subject of the verb occurs in a post-verbal position, it is claimed that the locative weather ça is generated in a specific syntactic position as the predicate of a small clause complement to the verb. In contrast to French weather verbs, which are unaccusative (Ruwet 1989) and which take only the auxiliary avoir (‘to have’), Italian weather verbs can take both the auxiliary essere (‘to be’) and the auxiliary avere (‘to have’) – that is they can take both an unaccusative and an unergative structure (Benincà and Cinque 1992). From an analysis comparing French and Italian, it is shown that French weather verbs taking ça as subject correspond to the unaccusative-directional version of Italian weather verbs using the auxiliary essere. It is also shown that French weather verbs which take il as subject and which do not manifest an explicit unaccusative syntax are ambiguous between an unaccusative and an unergative interpretation.

On the Italian and the English Finite Verb form from Their Communicative Value Point of View

The article deals with the Italian and the English finite verb form observed in their communicative value, i.e. from the functional sentence perspective (FSP) point of view. The Italian inflectional verbal form is confronted with the English finite verb form with the aim of demonstrating their function within the communicative units of the sentence viewed as a communicative field. The Italian finite verb form, expressing all the grammatical categories, may represent several communicative units: the categories of person and number constitute the theme while the categories of tense and mood constitute the transition proper. The notional component of the verb may have the function of transition or rheme. The grammatical and semantic components are included within one verbal form. Thus the Italian finite verb form may participate in several communicative units and reach high communicative value. The communicative value of the English finite verb form, characteristic for poor inflection and tending to loose its lexical meaning, is lower. Both grammatical and non-grammatical components are conveyed by separate elements. The differences observed between Italian and English on the FSP level reflect the morphosyntactic characteristics of both languages.

Modal italien dovere au conditionnel: évidentialité et contraintes sur l’inférence des relations de discours argumentatives

This paper proposes a semantic analysis of the "epistemic" interpretations of the Italian modal verb dovere with the conditional tense, taking as a starting point the underspecified modal semantics of both the modal verb and the conditional form. The analysis focuses in particular on the difference between epistemic readings of dovere in the indicative and conditional moods. We observe a number of constraints imposed by the "epistemic" reading of the conditional form of dovere over argumentative sequences in discourse, which are not imposed by the indicative form. On this basis, we suggest that the "epistemic" reading with the conditional emerges as a pragmatic free enrichment after alethic or deontic saturation of the modal basis of dovere in a hypothetical frame, whereas with the indicative, the modal saturation is truly doxastic, implying a metarepresentation of speaker’s beliefs, and thus transforming dovere into an evidential for the concerned inference.

Concurrent speech disturbs word generation: Semantic, associative, and grammatical processes in picture naming: A pictureword interference study

In pictureword interference (PWI), a picture of an object to be named is presented with a distracter word. Most PWI studies showed semantic interference between a target picture and distracter word (noun). Recently, Vigliocco et al. (2005) studied grammatical effect in naming a picture of action. They found that generation of an inflected form of an Italian verb was disturbed by a distracter in the same grammatical class. In experiment 1 of the present study, naming an object with an auditorily presented noun or verb distracter in Japanese was investigated, and grammatical class but not semantic effect was found, which is incongruent with previous findings. Analyzing the distracters revealed that familiarity of the verbs was lower than that of nouns, and half of nouns classified as semantically close were associative (e.g., garage versus car). In experiment 2, familiarity was matched across distracters, and association effect was examined separately. To see time course of interference, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was changed from −300 to +200 ms. Again, grammatical effect was observed, and associative as well as semantic effect was found for negative SOAs. Possible factors producing grammatical and associative effects in PWI will be discussed cross-linguistically.

Trilingualism in Malta: Maltese, English and ‘Italiano Televisivo’

Malta has experienced various linguistic influences over the course of time. Maltese and English are presently the official languages of the island. Nevertheless, Italian was never completely erased from the Maltese linguistic scene and over the past years its popularity has increased considerably because of the influence of Italian television programmes. In this study the impact of input from television programmes is investigated, as well as the extent to which the ‘italiano televisivo’ variety is acquired in Malta. Fifty-two subjects, including guided and spontaneous learners of Italian L2, provide an oral narrative account by means of which their degree of competence in Italian verbs is investigated. Results reveal that there are no statistically significant differences in the performance of the two groups of learners and that the influence of the Italian media has been far-reaching. Whilst acknowledging the fact that the degree of spontaneous acquisition via television varies between one learner and another, many Maltese learners develop refined linguistic skills after being regularly exposed to Italian L2 via television. The input from television programmes is also a useful reinforcement tool both for students who are still learning the language and for those who have completed their schooling years.

The role of phonology in the inflection of Italian verbs

We investigated the performance of two connectionist neural networks with different architectures to explore the degree of learning in generating the past participle form of Italian verbs on the basis of phonological characteristics. The networks were trained to generate the past participle form of verbs from different inflected input forms. We examined the degree of learning relative to the type of inflection given as input, the type of suffix produced, the classification of each verb according to the thematic vowel, the regularity of the stem and of the suffix. The networks were able to learn both regular and irregular forms, but the effect of regularity depended on the distributional properties of the conjugation to which a verb belongs, and on information provided by the input.

Underspecification in the semantics of word formation: the case of denominal verbs of removal in Italian

This article analyzes a case of Italian word formation in which the semantics of the derived words appears to contain mutually exclusive ambiguities. Italian productively derives verbs of removal from nouns. These verbs have the general semantic form A removes X from Y. There are two subtypes that differ in whether the nominal base is taken to be the FIGURE or the GROUND: scremare 'to skim' (crema 'cream') is a FIGURE verb, and scarcerare 'to release from prison' (carcere 'prison') is a GROUND verb. Current analyses are at a loss to give a uniform account for the semantics of derivational processes of these two kinds. In this article, such an analysis is proposed. It is based upon the model of lexical semantics known as two-level semantics. Two-level semantics makes a distinction between a layer of meaning, which is defined by grammar, and a level of interpretation, which is based upon conceptual knowledge. We propose that the derivation of Italian denominal verbs of removal of both types starts from a single underspecified representation, which is then specified at the conceptual level; depending on the concept type of the base, the denominal verb is either a FIGURE verb or a GROUND verb. This study is an example of how the semantics of language-specific morphology may be embedded in cognitive structure.

On knowledge and development of unaccusativity in Spanish L2 acquisition

Many studies have reported that L2 learners have persistent problems with unaccusative verbs in English, Japanese, Italian, French, and Chinese. Oshita (2001) proposed the ‘‘unaccusative trap hypothesis’’ (UTH) to account for the observed developmental trends crosslinguistically. According to the UTH, initially, L2 learners assume that all intransitive verbs are unergatives. At intermediate and advanced stages, learners realize that unaccusative and unergative verbs have different representations, and typical errors become common. Depending on the robustness of the target language input, advanced L2 learners may or may not reach native-like knowledge. This study tested the UTH with 71 English-speaking learners of Spanish of advanced, intermediate, and low-intermediate proficiency using a grammaticality judgment task. Results partially support the UTH: the lower proficiency group did not discriminate between unaccusatives and unergatives in most constructions; intermediate learners distinguished between unaccusatives and unergatives with most constructions, but also incorrectly accepted passives with unergative verbs, while advanced learners behaved like the native speakers. Analysis by semantic subclasses of unaccusative and unergative verbs indicated that the low level learners were not sensitive to lexical semantics either. Such sensitivity appears to emerge at the intermediate level, a result that lends further empirical support to Sorace’s (2000) ‘‘unaccusativity hierarchy.’’

Regularity and/or consistency in the production of the past participle?

In the present study we have investigated the acquisition of the past participle of Italian verbs of the second (including mostly irregular verbs) and third (including mostly regular verbs) conjugations in school age children, and with simulations with an artificial neural network. We aimed to verify the extent to which children are sensitive to regularity, as opposed to the consistency in the mapping from the infinitive to the past participle. In particular, we predicted that children would learn at some point that verbs of the second conjugation tend to be irregular, and therefore they would be more likely to produce irregularizations for verbs of this class, compared to the verbs of the third conjugation. However, they should also show sensitivity to the phonological mapping consistency within each subclass, learning to produce correct forms on the basis of phonological similarity. In contrast, children should be more likely to produce regular forms for verbs of the third conjugation. Thus, a larger regularity effect would be expected for verbs of the third than of the second conjugation, leading to the prediction of a regularity by conjugation interaction.

Representation of grammatical properties of Italian verbs in the mental lexicon

The present study focuses on the representation of verbs in the Italian mental lexicon and investigates some grammatical properties: inflectional class, mood, tense, and person. Two experiments based on free recall of single inflected forms are reported. The patterns of recall and error are taken as evidence for the grammatical and morphological information exploited in the access to the verb forms. The pattern of results provides support for the hypothesis that in the mental lexicon the information about conjugation and mood is an organizational criterion for the representation of verbal forms. An interaction between mood and conjugation, likely to arise from the difference in productivity between conjugations, is also observed.

«Venire» vs «andare» - distinzioni pragmatiche

The paper presents an explication of semantic differences between the two Italian verbs, venire and andare, in a pragmatic perspective, i.e. referring to the presupposition. A distinction is initially made between presuppositions, on the one hand, inherent in some lexical items, syntactic structures and prosodic features and, on the other, those "generated" by specific speech acts. The presuppositions inherent in both of these verbs permit an exhaustive contrastive description of their occurrences, even in non-deictic uses and transpositions from direct to indirect speech, which constitutes a contribution to the didactics of Italian as a foreign language.

The Syntactic Structure of French Auxiliaries

The Syntactic Structure of French Auxiliaries Anne Abeillé and Danièle Godard While a consensus has been reached about the monoclausality of the Romance construction with an auxiliary verb and its verbal complement, questions remain about its syntactic structure. We focus here on French auxiliaries—the past tense auxiliaries (avoir and être), and the passive auxiliary (être)—which are unique in French in contributing only tense and aspect and triggering obligatory clitic climbing. Three syntactic structures have been proposed for such auxiliaries: a VP complement analysis, a verbal complex analysis, and a ‘flat’ VP analysis. We show here, working within a head-driven phrase structure grammar framework and basing our arguments on classical constituency tests, bounded dependencies, and lesser-known properties of a subset of manner adverbs, that the flat-structure analysis is to be preferred for tense auxiliaries, which take as their complements the bare participle as well as the complements subcategorized by this participle and ‘inherited’ from it. In contrast, the passive auxiliary, which we identify with the copula, has a predicative complement with different realizations: either an ordinary phrase, ‘saturated’ for its complements, or a ‘partial’ complement, where the predicative head lets some or all of its complements be inherited by the auxiliary. Our analysis allows for a solution to the well-known problem of auxiliary selection, which, we argue, should not be taken as an indicator of syntactic structure but is best handled via lexical constraints.* 1. Romance auxiliaries Auxiliary verbs have been extensively studied in Romance languages. A consensus has been reached about the monoclausality of the construction with an auxiliary verb and its verbal complement (Aissen & Perlmutter 1976/83, Davies & Rosen 1988, Fauconnier 1983, La Fauci 1994) but not about its syntactic structure. This is the case more generally for the set of complex predicates, to which auxiliary constructions belong. In the Romance languages, heads of complex predicates include restructuring verbs (absent from modern French), causative and perception verbs, and verbs with a predicative complement, in addition to auxiliaries. We focus here on French auxiliaries, which are unique in French in contributing only tense and aspect and triggering obligatory clitic climbing: they are the past tense auxiliaries (avoir and être), and the passive auxiliary (être).1 Three syntactic structures have been proposed for auxiliaries in the Romance languages, and French in particular: they have been analyzed as taking a VP complement (Guéron & Hoekstra 1988, Moore 1991 for complex predicates in general, Pollock 1989 for French auxiliaries), or forming a verbal complex (a subconstituent) with the participle (Emonds 1978 for French), or heading a ‘flat’ VP (Legaré & Rollin 1976 [End Page 404] for French). We show that the flat structure analysis should be preferred for tense auxiliaries, which take as complements the bare participle, as well as the complements subcategorized by this participle and ‘inherited’ from it. Our arguments are based on classical constituency tests, on bounded dependencies, and on lesser-known properties of a subset of manner adverbs. The passive auxiliary, though, which we identify with the copula (Couquaux 1979, Milner 1986), has a predicative complement with different realizations: either an ordinary phrase, ‘saturated’ for its complements, or a ‘partial’ complement, where the predicative head lets some or all of its complements be inherited by the auxiliary. This partial complement analysis makes sense of some generally overlooked cliticization and extraction facts. Our proposals are formalized in the framework of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG, Pollard & Sag 1987, 1994), but they are largely independent from the chosen framework: It would be possible to implement other analyses of the French auxiliaries in HPSG, and conversely, our analysis could be implemented in other frameworks. Crucial to our treatment are the conception of lexical items as specifying precise syntactic and semantic information about their arguments, and the use of typed feature structures, where information can be shared between partial structures. This allows a straightforward representation of the sharing of subcategorization (argument inheritance), which has proved successful in the analysis of Italian restructuring verbs (Monachesi 1993, 1999), and for modal and auxiliary verbs in German (Hinrichs & Nakazawa 1994, Kiss 1992, Pollard 1996), Dutch (Bouma & van Noord 1998) and Korean (Chung 1998). But argument sharing per se...

The Influence of Age of Acquisition, Root Frequency, and Context Availability in Processing Nouns and Verbs

In the Italian language there is a higher number of inflectional suffixes in verbs than in nouns, and this might imply that verbs are more likely to undergo a morphological analysis in terms of root and suffix as compared to nouns (Traficante & Burani, unpublished observations). Moreover, verbs tend to be more abstract than nouns, and this aspect might make verb processing more difficult. Finally, the developmental gap in the production of nouns and verbs suggests that age of acquisition might affect noun and verbs differently. Nouns and verbs were presented in a lexical decision and in a naming task. The morphological variable root frequency in addition to word frequency, length and word age of acquisition, and the semantic variables concreteness and context availability (Schwanenflugel, Harnishfeger, & Stowe, 1988) were used as predictors in multiple-regression analyses in which lexical decision and naming latencies were the dependent variables. The results showed that age of acquisition, context availability, and root frequency are all important in predicting both lexical decision and naming latencies for nouns and verbs, but age of acquisition and root frequency are better predictors of the differences in processing Italian nouns and verbs.

The Retrieval of Syntactic and Semantic Information in the Production of Verbs

In Italian, there are two aspectual auxiliaries: essere (to be) and avere (to have). According to the syntactic hypothesis, aspectual auxiliary assignment in Italian is a syntactic phenomenon. Using the picture–word interference paradigm, Experiment 1 tested the predictions of this view. Results failed to support the syntactic hypothesis but could be explained within a semantic framework: A verb's thematic grid is involved in aspectual auxiliary assignment. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis. The findings corroborated the predictions. The evidence is interpreted as suggesting the involvement of thematic information in the assignment of the aspectual auxiliary during the production of Italian verbs.

Italian children's understanding of the epistemic and deontic modal verbs dovere (must) and potere (may).

This study assesses children's understanding of the Italian modal verbs dovere (must) and potere (may) in their dual function of qualification of the speaker's beliefs (epistemic modality) and behaviour regulation (deontic modality). 192 children and 60 adults participated in the experiment. Children aged 3;0 to 9;2 were presented with two tasks: one assessed their understanding of modal expressions in the epistemic domain--looking for an object by following the information contained in a sentence; the other assessed their understanding of modal expressions in the deontic domain--acting according to obligations, permissions and prohibitions in the context of a game. Half of the subjects carried out the tasks in a single-sentence format and half carried out the tasks in a double-sentence format. In the single-sentence format the subjects had to follow the directions supplied by a modalized sentence; in the double-sentence format they had to follow the directions supplied by the sentence containing the stronger modal verb. Our results show that the understanding of deontic modal forms precedes the understanding of epistemic modal forms and that a full understanding of the strength of different modal forms is achieved only at eight years.

Verbes de sentiment « figurés » de la classe N0 V N1sujet_intentionnel

Summary This paper accounts for French and Italian figurative verbs of emotion. These verbs are ambiguous in so far as they have a “physical » and a “psychological » meaning. French verbs are extracted from LG Table 4. I will consider the idea put forward by Lamiroy that the psychological use a of given verb can be determined by a reduction of syntactical flexibility in comparison to the physical use. Evidence will be given that at least as far as Table 4 verbs are concerned this is not the case. The approaches of Bouchard and Van Voorst who propose general semantic rules concerning the relation of physical and psychological meaning also fail to account for the data. This will be illustrated by a closer look on French and Italian verbs of anger. Although the devices of metaphorical interpretation can be explained, these devices are not general rules that permit the derivation of a psychological use from a physical use in a given context. Lexicalization seems to be idiosynchratic. Hence, LG has to provide separate lexical entries for the two constructions of any existing ambiguous verb.