{"title":"On Italian past participles with -issimo: the superlative of events between intensification and pluractionality","authors":"Maria Napoli","doi":"10.6092/LEF_33_P85","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_33_P85","url":null,"abstract":"In Italian, past participles may form the absolute superlative by adding the same suffix as adjectives, i.e. -issimo. However, when used as superlatives, past participles may still occur in passive sentences to denote events rather than simple properties. The aim of this paper is to examine the semantics of past participles with -issimo by using corpora of written Italian. The discussion will show how the different aspectual features of verbs, which are connected with the type of scale structure of corresponding participles (Kennedy and McNally 2005), may influence the meaning of these forms as superlatives: with past participles taken from telic verbs and encoding a closed scale -issimo may have the same function as an endpoint-oriented degree modifier, by emphasizing that the final state expressed by the participle is reached; with past participles taken from atelic verbs and encoding an open scale -issimo may have the same scope as a scalar degree modifier, by denoting a high degree (not necessarily the apical degree). It will be further suggested that when -issimo is applied to past participles sometimes we may observe a shift from a pure intensive meaning to a pluractional meaning. In other words, superlative participles may denote an action intensified not only in terms of quality but also in terms of quantity, more precisely an action which is represented as distributed over an unspecified set of participants (distributive reading) and/or as repeated in time (habitual/iterative/frequentative reading).","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"33 1","pages":"85-126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71268650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Recensione di Francesca Cocco, “L’italiano dei cruciverba”","authors":"E. Miola","doi":"10.6092/LEF_33_P163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_33_P163","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"33 1","pages":"183-186"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71268920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Surgeon or Lexicographer? The Latin-German Glossaries in Addendum to Hans von Gersdorff's Feldtbuch der Wundarzney","authors":"C. Benati","doi":"10.6092/LEF_33_P35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_33_P35","url":null,"abstract":"At the end of his Feldtbuch der Wundarzney (Strasburg / Schott 1517), Hans von Gersdorff inserts three Latin-German glossaries (anatomy, pathology and medical herbs). It’s the first time a printed German surgical handbook includes a glossary, thus explicitly recognizing the existence of a potential understanding problem posed by the abundance of classical terminology in these specific semantic fields. In this study, the structure and organization of these three glossaries are analysed, paying particular attention not only to the selection of the Latin headwords and the choice of the vernacular rendering(s) of the Latin headwords, but also to their relation to the surgical technical terminology employed by the author in the treatise itself. In this way, it is possible to ascertain whether this, in nuce, specialized dictionary had been conceived as simply instrumental to the didactic purposes of the handbook, or aimed at pursuing a more universal goal, in the same way as today’s technical dictionaries.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"21 1","pages":"35-57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71268971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Antico indiano víbhakti- e greco πτÒσις : preistoria di due diverse metafore della flessione nominale","authors":"Rosa Ronzitti","doi":"10.6092/LEF_33_P7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_33_P7","url":null,"abstract":"The present paper aims to show how the idea of ‘nominal inflection’ and ‘grammatical case’ arose in India and Greece. Starting from a different milieu, it is also linked to different metaphors: the dismembering of the sacrificial fire in India and the falling of a body from an erected position (or from above) in Greece. While the first metaphor is perfectly clear in its lines of development, the second one gave rise to many explanations. Its birth could be due to a peculiar lecture of Homeric and Platonic texts made by Aristotle himself.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"33 1","pages":"7-34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2013-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71268588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Per una tipologia della struttura informativa: il caso delle frasi scisse in un dialetto italo-romanzo","authors":"A. Valentini","doi":"10.6092/LEF_32_P75","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_32_P75","url":null,"abstract":"This contribution studies cleft sentences in Bergamasco, a Gallo-Italian dialect. Its empirical basis is a collection of 54 fairy tales (Anesa / Rondi 1981) told orally by 26 speakers. Two types of clefts, IT-clefts and WH-clefts, are available in Bergamasco. Their structural properties and their information structure features are described. Typological studies about the use of clefts in discourse (cf. Miller 2006) show that the relation between IT-clefts and contrastive/corrective focalization is very tight. In our data, however, most cleft sentences actually focus a temporal adverbial (e.g. a duration adverbial such as doi noc ‘(for) two nights’ or tace agn ‘(for) many years’) which corresponds to a new information focus. I will show that clefts with duration adverbials as focus phrase are highly grammaticalised in Bergamasco. In discourse these temporal clefts set a temporal frame, i.e. a topic time (cf. Klein 1994), for the subsequent sentence, that is background material subordinate in importance to what follows.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"32 1","pages":"75-117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71269025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Eternal Sanskrit and the meaning of the tripartite Prakrit terminology tatsama, tadbhava and deśī","authors":"Andrea Drocco","doi":"10.6092/LEF_32_P119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_32_P119","url":null,"abstract":"The majority of scholars have used the well-known traditional classification of Prakrit words in tatsama, tadbhava, deśī in the context of historical linguistics. Therefore they have the tendency to identify tadbhava words with words inherited from Old-Indo-Aryan by Middle-Indo-Aryan and/or New-Indo-Aryan and deśī words with non-Indo-Aryan element in Indo-Aryan. The aim of this contribution is to explain that they are not completely correct through the study of the meaning of the term deśī according to ancient Indian grammarians, in particular according to Hemacandra in his deśī-kośa, the Deśīnāmamālā. From the analysis of the typology of words covered by the definition of deśīśabda provided by this author, it is possible to assert that deśī words are not all non-Indo-Aryan. Hemacandra wanted to teach Prakrits on the basis of knowledge of Sanskrit. Thus, with his Prakrit grammar, the Siddha-hema-śabdānuśāsana, he offers a set of rules to “convert” Sanskrit into Prakrits, whereas for all Prakrit neologisms he offers his Deśīnāmamālā.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"32 1","pages":"119-136"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2012-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71268851","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Persuasive discourse and language planning in Ireland","authors":"Geoffrey Gray, G. Mazzon","doi":"10.6092/LEF_31_P37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_31_P37","url":null,"abstract":"Colonial language discourse typically consists of evaluations concerning the respective merits of two or more languages, and the cultures they represent. This can serve as a warrant for imposing a ‘superior’ language. Although such discourse tends to be associated with the conquest of the New World and subsequent European expansion, there is evidence that in the case of Ireland – England’s first overseas colony – an adversarial relation between English and Irish languages existed even before the Elizabethan period. Referring to English legislation, chronicles and other documents, this paper examines the norms, arguments and rhetorical strategies that were used to exert the dominance of the English language in Ireland during late-medieval and early-modern times. In the latter half of the paper, the focus will shift to attempts to create, especially from the seventeenth-century onwards, a ‘pro-Irish reversal’ that used similar arguments and rhetoric to reclaim this denigrated language. Our suggestion is that these pro- and anti-colonial language discourses anticipate those that were used later on in colonial and postcolonial environments.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"31 1","pages":"37-64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71268609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A proposito di recenti lavori sulle comunità di emigrati: comportamento linguistico e identità (Studi italiani di linguistica teorica e applicata, 36/3, 2007)","authors":"A. Valentini","doi":"10.6092/LEF_31_P168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_31_P168","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"31 1","pages":"168-172"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71268943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Journeys to Rome and Jerusalem in Old Norse-Icelandic Sagas","authors":"John D. Shafer","doi":"10.6092/LeF_31_p7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LeF_31_p7","url":null,"abstract":"Many Scandinavian characters in the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas travel south to the distant cities of Rome and Jerusalem. This paper examines the literary uses sagas make of accounts of travel to Rome and to a lesser extent Jerusalem and compares their functions and significances in the saga-mindset. The context of this paper is my larger study over the last five years, which have focused on accounts of “far-travel” in saga-literature, that is, by Norse saga-characters to lands recognisably outside the area of familiarity. Of the three main destinations of southern far-travel in sagaliterature, Rome, Jerusalem and Byzantium, the latter two, being self-evidently conceptually “distant” from the north, were covered at length in a previous thesis on the subject. Rome, however, is also at least at the southern edge, if not actually beyond the border, of cultural familiarity, and this paper thus treats Rome as a destination for far-travel as the others that were analysed in the thesis, examining what characterises journeys there. Jerusalem and the Holy Land will feature in this paper to a more limited extent, as travel to Rome and Jerusalem is in saga-literature characteristically taken for the same purposes – pilgrimage and absolution – and accounts of travel to the two places exhibit some of the same characteristics. The two sites are not equal, however, and some of the conclusions of this paper will draw out the differences between Rome and Jerusalem as far-travel destinations.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"31 1","pages":"7-35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71268742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“‘Fully refurbished end terraced house’. A Corpus Study of Online Classified Ads”","authors":"P. Pierini","doi":"10.6092/LEF_31_P93","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_31_P93","url":null,"abstract":"Advertising is a versatile and dynamic genre incorporating a constellation of subgenres, most of which are short messages subject to spatial or temporal restriction. One of them is the classified ad, a form of small, local advertising that, like other forms of written communication, has found its way on to the Web. The present article, which investigates online classified ads offering properties for sale, is based on a qualitative and Quantitative analysis of a small corpus of texts downloaded from UK-based websites. The aim is to explore their main textual, discursive and linguistic features by combining corpus linguistics methodology with discourse analysis and genre analysis approaches. The study first outlines the evolution of the genre from print to the Web; then, it profiles the general features and structure of online classified ads, discusses variation across the texts in the corpus, and identifies the linguistic features by analysing frequencies and collocations of function words, verbs, nouns, adjectives, abbreviations and acronyms. The analysis also sheds some light on the phraseology of classified property advertising.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"31 1","pages":"93-117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2011-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71268785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}