Spoken Italian Research Articles

As small as they seem?

We present the results of an experimental study designed to investigate the acceptability of bare participial structures in spoken Italian. These sentences, despite being extremely reduced, have full illocutionary force. For the study, we proposed a technique to elicit grammaticality judgements suitable for structures that, although productive, are not used in the written form of the language. Our aim is to investigate the validity of the structural analysis of these sentences (Cecchetto & Donati 2022) according to which they are generated as small as VPs and they are not elliptical structures, i.e., they are not the result of phonological deletions from full-fledged sentences. The findings globally confirm the predictions of that account, as only require the activation of projections beyond the VP-layer, are rated as fully acceptable. However, the corresponding negative structures and some reduced structures with active transitive predicates received intermediate judgments of acceptability, contrary to the predictions. In the paper, we try to account for these unexpected results and argue that phonological deletion is available as well but is subject to tight constraints; most notably, it is restricted to the top of the tree.

Sociolinguistic variation in spoken Italian: An introduction

Sociolinguistic variation in spoken Italian: An introduction

The role of prosody for the expression of illocutionary types. The prosodic system of questions in spoken Italian and French according to Language into Act Theory

This article presents a corpus-based study of the correlations between prosodic contours and question speech acts in Italian and French from the perspective of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT). A rich taxonomy of question illocutionary types is derived from two comparable corpora of informal speech taken from the C-ORAL-ROM collection and illustrated through prototypic examples. The number of questions in speech is evaluated as <10% of utterances. Despite their syntactic and accentual differences, the two languages share comparable pragmatic values conveyed by defined prosodic variations. Total questions, which can be answered with yes or no , are expected with canonical rising contours. Still, a good percentage shows the so-called declarative prosody (26% in FR and 36% in IT). They have been supposed to be biased by presupposing the proposition's truth and considered Requests for confirmations instead of genuinely Seeking for information acts . But presupposition, depending on intentional states, is hard to be detected, and no clear linguistic correlation was found. The corpus-based study of the prosody/pragmatics relation allows a better understanding of the system. Total questions should be framed within the larger category of Directives aimed at the addressee's linguistic behavior , which does not foresee seeking information as the only goal. When the speaker makes a hypothesis on what he asks—that is not an actual presupposition—he performs a Request for confirmation . This is true in most Total questions, and prosody complies with the canonical contour. In contrast, declarative contours correlate with corpus contexts in which the speaker does not make any hypothesis but puts pressure on the addressee ( Challenging Questions ). Partial questions genuinely seek information and comprise Open questions , which are verbless utterances where the addressee is requested to freely provide information on a given topic. Tag questions, Double questions , and Alternative questions correspond to Illocutionary patterns that, according to L-AcT, are composed of two pragmatic units framed within one prosodic strategy.

Not Only Anteriority in the Past: The Functions of the Pluperfect in Spoken Italian

Three distinct anaphoric functions and one deictic function are, with fair confidence, associated with the Italian Pluperfect in the existing literature. In recent studies, it has been hypothesized that the Italian Pluperfect may also have an aoristic use. The present study attempts to assess the semantics of the Italian Pluperfect, by a corpus-based methodology. It will be shown that the data do not support the hypothesis of an aoristic use of the Pluperfect: rather, they suggest the need to extend the analysis of the Pluperfect’s semantics to domains other than tense and aspect. It will be argued that (inter)subjectification may have a key role in describing the layered semantics of the Italian Pluperfect, especially concerning its possible modal-evidential developments.

L’uso delle costruzioni marcate nel teacher talk dell’insegnante di italiano L2 del Belgio francofono

The use of marked structures in the teacher talk of the Italian as L2 teacher in Francophone Belgium
 The aim of this article is to present and discuss the first results of a research study on the teacher talk (TT) for Italian as foreign language (IL2) teachers in Belgium. In particular, data from the pilot corpus of the study, conducted in the French-speaking area of the country, are analysed. The TT is examined from a morphosyntactic point of view, in order to track the presence or absence of some spoken features typical of neo-standard Italian: the marked constructions, i.e. structures that present modifications of the canonical order of the subject-verb-object (SVO) elements, to respond to pragmatic communication goals. TT features could be an indicator of the structure and specificity of the teachers' spoken Italian, and at the same time provide information on their linguistic and cultural identity. IL2 teachers in Francophone Belgium are in fact mostly of Italian origin. This suggests that their TT is probably influenced by their socio-biographic profile as well as their linguistic repertoire.

Discourse markers and turn-planning at the pragmatics–prosody interface: The case of allora in spoken Italian

In recent research on discourse markers (DMs), it has been shown that these elements collaborate with prosody to convey crucial information about the organization of the discourse, both at the level of a single turn and the level of the overall conversation.In this article, we analyze the DM allora ‘then’, occurring in turn-initial position and followed by a silent pause in spontaneous monolingual dialogues between Italian native speakers. Various prosodic measures are taken comparing allora with the following intonational phrase (IP), to investigate the discursive relationship between the DM and the rest of the turn.The results show that the DM is peripheric as opposed to the general turn’s prosodic planning: it is produced at a higher articulation rate and with a narrower range of pitch values than the following IP, and a pitch reset is visible between the two.The data suggest that allora and the following IP constitute two distinct units in the turn’s planning. We argue that as much as speakers manipulate their pitch range on the recursive side of the utterance to convey syntactic dependencies, they produce higher or lower turn onset, to express discursive-pragmatics relations between intonation units.

The encoding of irrelevance in discourse: tanto between concession and justification

he paper sets out to investigate the linguistic expression of irrelevance in discourse, by focusing on the functions and uses of the marker tanto in present-day Italian. The marker encodes the irrelevance of a given condition, thus conveying a concessive meaning not distant from the value expressed by concessive conditionals or ‘no matter’ predicates. In the construction [p, tanto q], the marker tanto conveys the fact that q holds in any case, namely whether p, non-p, or any value of p is the case. After discussing how the notion of irrelevance has been treated in the literature on conditionals, concessives and predicates of indifference, we will discuss the results of a corpus-based study on spoken Italian, identifying and annotating all the occurrences of irrelevance-tanto. We will show that irrelevance may be expressed by a number of different discourse patterns, explicitly mentioning the irrelevant proposition, the null-effect and the motivation for irrelevance, or omitting one or more of these components. It will be argued that the cases in which speakers simply refer to the irrelevance of a given proposition are rare in our sample, whereas it is more frequent that they also mention the motivation underlying irrelevance, justifying their indifference and thus crucially acting at the intersubjective level. We will show, indeed, that tanto may also be used alone as a discourse marker encoding the speaker’s attitude of indifference: in these cases, tanto is pronounced with suspensive intonation, and subsumes under its semantics the adversative, justificative, and indiscriminative value, activating meanings that speakers are supposed to share.

Parenthetical Units and Structures in Italian and German spoken language: Prosodic and textual analysis


 This work presents the prosodic analysis of Parenthetical Units in spoken Italian and German within the theoretical framework of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT), which defines such textual units as Parentheses (PARs), i.e. devices used by the speaker to add information to the utterance on a secondary level of the text. Data were extracted from the Italian Minicorpus of the DB-IPIC resource and from the German FOLK corpus. Linguistic content and distribution of Parentheses were analyzed. Furthermore, a subset of approximately 100 PARs was selected for each corpus and these were prosodically analyzed in relation to the mandatory textual units called Comment within the L-AcT framework, which express the illocutionary force of the utterance. The results show similar characteristics for the two languages, such as an overall decrease of f0 values of the PARs and the correlation between the length of the PARs, as well as the presence of additional units separating it from the COM, and frequency values. The authors also noted the presence of Parenthetical Structures that go beyond the level of the simple textual unit, which could suggest that Parentheses are a wider textual strategy operating as inter-utterance.

Annotation of gesture and gesture / prosody synchronization in multimodal speech corpora

This paper was written with the aim of highlighting the functional and structural correlations between gesticulation and prosody, focusing on gesture / prosody synchronization in spontaneous spoken Italian. The gesture annotation used follows the LASG model (Bressem et al. 2013), while the prosodic annotation focuses on the identification of terminal and non-terminal prosodic breaks which, according to L-AcT (Cresti, 2000; Moneglia & Raso 2014), determine speech act boundaries and the information structure, respectively. Gesticulation co-occurs with speech in about 90% of the speech flow examined and gestural arcs are synchronous with prosodic boundaries. Gesture Phrases, which contain the expressive phase (Stroke) never cross terminal prosodic boundaries, finding in the utterance the maximum unit for gesture / speech correlation. Strokes may correlate with all information unit types, however only infrequently with Dialogic Units (i.e. those functional to the management of the communication). The identification of linguistic units via the marking of prosodic boundaries allows us to understand the linguistic scope of the gesture, supporting its interpretation. Gestures may be linked at different linguistic levels, namely those of: a) the word level; b) the information unit phrase; c) the information unit function; d) the illocutionary value.

The representation of action in Italian Sign Language (LIS)

Abstract The present study investigates the types of verb and symbolic representational strategies used by 10 deaf signing adults and 13 deaf signing children who described in Italian Sign Language 45 video clips representing nine action types generally communicated by five general verbs in spoken Italian. General verbs, in which the same sign was produced to refer to several different physical action types, were rarely used by either group of participants. Both signing children and adults usually produced specific depicting predicates by incorporating, through a representational strategy, the object and/or the modality of the action into the sign. As for the different types of representational strategies, the adults used the hand-as-object strategy more frequently than the children, who, in turn, preferred to use the hand-as-hand strategy, suggesting that different degrees of cognitive complexity are involved in these two symbolic strategies. Addressing the symbolic iconic strategies underlying sign formation could provide new insight into the perceptual and cognitive processes of linguistic meaning construction. The findings reported here support two main assumptions of cognitive linguistics applied to sign languages: there is a strong continuity between gestures and language; lexical units and depicting constructions derive from the same iconic core mechanism of sign creation.

Sociolinguística no ensino de línguas: a variação diastrática em manuais didáticos de italiano

As línguas naturais são formadas por um conjunto de variedades linguísticas resultantes das intensas relações entre língua e sociedade. No ensino de línguas estrangeiras, o livro didático se constitui como uma ferramenta que tem como principal função apresentar a língua aos aprendizes. Diante dessa responsabilidade, ele não deve escamotear elementos da língua com a escusa de simplificar a aprendizagem, mas sim preparar gradativamente o aprendiz para a complexa realidade com a qual se defrontará. Com base nesse pressuposto, o presente artigo tem como finalidade investigar como os livros didáticos Rete! e Linea diretta tratam a dimensão diastrática nos diálogos e explicações oferecidas a discentes e docentes. Para isso, foram definidos 28 critérios ligados a três variedades diastráticas, a saber: o italiano popular, o italiano falado por jovens e a variedade falada por mulheres (COVERI et al., 1998). Os resultados mostram a quase total ausência dessa dimensão nos livros e o tratamento insuficiente e inadequado das três variedades.

Non-exhaustive lists in spoken language

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to analyze how speakers refer to non-exhaustive sets in spoken discourse, by means of open lists. We will propose an analysis of non-exhaustivity in terms of indexicality and we will therefore consider open lists as having an inherently pragmatic component. Based on corpus data of spoken Italian, we will identify three main types of non-exhaustive lists, showing different structural properties and non-compositional semantics. In order to account for the observed variation, we will take a construction grammatical perspective, arguing that what may appear as a heterogeneous set of strategies is instead an inheritance-based network of constructions sharing a schematic core (cf.Goldberg 1995). We will elaborate on the most recent approaches to list constructions, along the lines proposed byMasini, Mauri, & Pietrandrea (2018), and will identify three types of non-exhaustive list constructions, which inherit the core properties from the upper-level list construction, but at the same time show more specific features and constraints.

The discursive construction of categories. Categorisation as a dynamic and co-operative process

In this paper, I provide an account of categorisation intended as an action that participants carry out in conversation. As opposed to cognitive theories, which are mainly interested in how language structure can be explained with reference to the human conceptual system, discourse-based theories are interested in studying how linguistic resources are used to create categories on a locally relevant basis. Based on recent contributions within the latter framework, I provide in this article a preliminary overview of a corpus study on spoken Italian (Goria and Mauri, 2018) and I illustrate different types of structurally unrelated constructions that are recruited by the participants to perform categorisation in spontaneously occurring interactions.

La vitalità del congiuntivo nel linguaggio televisivo

The purpose of the article is to examine the relationship between television language and spoken Italian, applying the problem of the subjunctive as a reference point, frequently replaced by the indicative in colloquial contexts. Despite the fact that television language is now considered a reflection of Italian varieties and spoken-spoken language, there is still a heterogeneous language of the type transmitted. As such, it constitutes a set of various styles and registers, characterized by different linguistic phenomena from those of unattended speech. The effect of the study is to show that although in the field of Italian diametric varieties television language has more in common with spoken than written Italian, the dynamics of the processes that take place in both are still not the same.

Luther and the Ethiopian Deacon

Luther and the Ethiopian Deacon David D. Daniels III and Lawrence Anglin The following English translation of two letters from 1534 should be of special interest to scholars of Luther and World Christianity because there are few documents that record dialogues between Protestant reformers and Christians from beyond Europe. Lawrence Anglin has provided an annotated translation of Philip Melanchthon's May 31, 1534, letter to Pauli and Martin Luther's July 4, 1534, letter of recommendation regarding Michael, an Ethiopian Deacon. The first letter was addressed to a specific person, Benedict Pauli, a judge and law professor; the second letter, drafted by Melanchthon and signed by Martin Luther, was for any followers of Luther who received the letter. These letters indicate that Luther and Melanchthon interacted with Christians from at least Africa, making these letters cross-cultural and intercontinental documents. Although this preface will not explore Luther's engagement with Ethiopian Christianity in his writings, his inclusion of Ethiopian and Eastern Christianity within his narrative arc of church history is definitely a backdrop to these letters. The significance of these letters has attracted the attention of a small cadre of scholars: Martin Brecht, Tom G.A. Hardt, and George Posfay. Brecht merges the two letters in his brief interpretation, implicitly arguing that these letters refer to the same person, once called an Arab and once an Ethiopian. The best reasons to assume that the letters concern the same person is that both of them refer to a non-European Eastern Orthodox Christian, and the Trinity is one of the topics. Perhaps Melanchthon was not sophisticated enough to distinguish between Arabs and Ethiopians, given that the Latin terms referred to much broader classes of people than the English terms [End Page 428] and that early-modern European concepts of geography were vague at best. Two such visitors within a month would seem unlikely. There are multiple reasons, however, to argue that these letters refer to two different people. The focus of Melanchthon's letter is an unnamed Arab Christian, whereas the focus of Luther's letter was an Ethiopian cleric named as "Mr. Michael, an Ethiopian deacon." The conversation with the Arab Christian produced hardly any knowledge, whereas the theological conversation with the Ethiopian Christian was much more informative. In addition to citing the name of the Ethiopian cleric, other vivid recollections of Luther's and Melanchthon's informative theological conversations with Michael the Deacon are recorded in the Table Talk entries below. Another signal that these could be letters about two different people is that the tone of Melanchthon's May 31, 1534, letter to Pauli is critical, unflattering, and condescending towards the Arab Christian, whereas the tone of Luther's July 4, 1534, letter is affirming, complimentary, and commendatory towards the Ethiopian Christian. The Arab Christian is presented as unlearned while the Ethiopian Christian is presented as theologically educated. Along with the person in Melanchthon's May letter being an unnamed Arab, Melanchthon stated he had "seen many similar Arabs"; he was familiar with Arabs traveling in Germany. With Melanchthon's interest in Arab writing on astrology, Arabs seemingly were a distinct people for him and not easily confused with Ethiopians, Turks, or a generic non-European; these Arab Christians might be from the Arab Christian community of Cyprus, which was part of the Venetian Republic in 1534. Further, Melanchthon and Luther communicated with this Arab Christian through an interpreter with Italian being the selected language, although the Arab Christian possessed a very limited facility in spoken Italian. They could hardly communicate on other important matters as stated in the other letter. This Arab Christian only communicated with Luther about the Trinity and apparently no other theological topic; in the limited discussion on the Trinity, a comparison was made about the position of the Eastern Church relative to the Western Church without any concluding theological judgments. Since according to Melanchthon they were "not able to converse [End Page 429] satisfactorily," they did not cover other theological articles nor arrive at any theological agreements because in Melanchthon's words he himself was unable "sufficiently [to] judge what he [the Arab] possesses regarding . . . doctrine." In sum, Melanchthon believe this Arab Christian...

List Constructions: a specialised means of text progression

This article presents a study of List Constructions in a corpus of spoken Italian, in particular those that end with a general extender, a functional class of expressions.They widen the scope and the meaning of what has been previously said: for example, or something / and everything / and things /and stuff (like that), etcetera. The main aim is to show that List Constructions exhibit some basic features that are particularly suited to the online process of spoken communication, although they also constitute a specialised means of text progression to give order to objects and concepts, which resembles the use of written catalogues.

Distinctive features of orality in a microlanguage: the Italian language in the plenary sessions of the European parliament. Some preliminary observations

The aim of this observational study is to examine which distinctive features of orality can be found in a particularly interesting microlanguage (Serianni 2004; Marzocchi 1998): the Italian spoken by the members of the European Parliament (EP) in the plenary sessions. To detect these phenomena, a micro-corpus of original Italian speeches delivered at the EP was built; this data collection phase was followed by the analysis of the most significant features of orality, with particular reference to unmodified loanwords, the use of acronyms or procedural routines and formulas used (Marzocchi 2005), as well as all those lexical and syntactic elements putting a strain on oral language (Bakti 2009, Tissi 2000). The observation of the distinctive features of oral language is ultimately aimed at using these data in the teaching of interpreting, a discipline that cannot ignore a fundamental paradigm: a quality interpreted speech is necessarily linked to a deep knowledge of the typical oral features of the source (micro)language.

Contacto lingüístico y transferencia prosódica bajo una perspectiva diacrónica: El caso del alguerés

Abstract The article focuses on some intonational features of three Romance languages spoken in northern Sardinia (Algherese Catalan, Logudorese Sardinian, and the Sardinian regional variety of Italian). The first part of the article shows, by means of both qualitative and quantitative analyses, that the above-mentioned languages share some intonational features that are not present in the dialects of Catalan and Italian spoken in the Iberian Peninsula and the Italian Peninsula, respectively. In the following sections the article puts forward a diachronic explanation for this intonational convergence, basing on the role of Sardinian as a substrate language for both Algherese Catalan and the regional Italian of Sardinia. The final part of the article proposes a generalization of the findings of the case-study and puts forward a diachronic model of prosodic transfer that includes the mechanisms of direct transfer, fusion, and accommodation.

Isabel de Madariaga (1919–2014)

Occasionally, the scholarly world is disturbed by the publication of a book so controversial that it shoots over the historiographical landscape like a comet, leaving trails of sparks behind it in the form of heated discussion and reviews. All too frequently, however, such books soon crash to earth, leaving posterity to wonder what all the fuss was about. Rather less often, a work appears that so transforms our understanding of its subject that it leaves a permanent imprint on everything written in its wake. Isabel de Madariaga's Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great is just such a book. Universally acknowledged as a classic on its first publication in 1981, it was reissued in 1990 by Yale University Press, translated into many other languages (the Russian edition appeared in 2002), and is still in print in a variety of paperback editions. (1) Few historical monographs published in the last 50 years can claim the same longevity; fewer still have had quite such a revolutionary effect on their field. Ignored by the historical establishment on both sides of the Iron Curtain and mocked by generations of popular biographers as a libertine and a hypocrite, Catherine was portrayed instead by de Madariaga as one of Russia's most sophisticated rulers--a tolerant and engaging woman determined, despite the many obstacles in her way, to establish both Russia's place in European civilization and its status as a European great power. Indeed, it was the links that the author established between these aims that gave the book its explanatory power. For this was no ordinary and times: it was a full-scale reinterpretation of the significance of the second half of the 18th century for modern Russian history, placing culture at the heart of an integrated analysis of government, politics, society, and the economy. In the light of the astonishing levels of productivity that Isabel de Madariaga maintained in the last 30 years of her life, it is not always easy to remember that Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great marked the crown of a distinctly unconventional career. Not until 1982, a year after the book's publication, was its author promoted to a personal chair at London University's School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where she had been appointed to a Readership--her first permanent academic post--only in 1971. Academic life had not been made easy for her, and she sometimes made it hard for others by seeming aloof and intimidating. She had few research students before she retired in 1984 at the age of 65, at a time when 60 was the standard retirement age for women. The most notable of her pupils were Janet M. Hartley and Pia Pera, who found it amusing that her supervisor should compliment her on the elegance of her spoken Italian. With celebrity, however, came a degree of relaxation, and in the autumn of her life, when at last it seemed that Russia might be accepted as part of Europe, as de Madariaga had always been convinced it should be, she was feted by scholars there in a way that had seemed impossible to predict for much of the 20th century. Born in Glasgow, where her mother, the economic historian Constance Archibald (1878-1970) had graduated in 1905 and seven years later married a Spanish engineer, Salvador de Madariaga (1886-1978), Isabel had an exceptionally cosmopolitan upbringing as the family followed her father's burgeoning new career as diplomat and liberal statesman. Between 1921 and 1928, Salvador de Madariaga was attached to the League of Nations in Geneva. In 1928, he became the first King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Literature at Oxford before moving briefly in 1931 to the United States of America as ambassador for the Spanish Republic. While he remained as Spain's permanent representative to the League of Nations, there followed a two-year spell as ambassador in Paris and another as a government minister in Madrid before civil war forced the family into permanent exile in England. …

Language development in a bimodal bilingual child with cochlear implant: A longitudinal study

To address the negative effects of deafness on spoken language acquisition, many clinicians suggest using cochlear implant (CI) and oral education and advise against sign language, even when combined with spoken language (i.e., bilingualism), believing that it may slow down spoken language development. In a deaf child with CI who was exposed at an early age to Italian Sign Language and spoken Italian, we evaluated language development and the relationship between the two languages. The number of words/signs produced by the child consistently increased with age, and the vocabulary growth rate in spoken Italian was equivalent to that of hearing peers. Before CI, the child relied almost exclusively on sign language; after CI, he gradually shifted to spoken Italian yet still used sign language when unable to retrieve words in spoken Italian. We conclude that bimodal bilingualism may scaffold the development of spoken language also in deaf children with CI.