{"title":"L’espressione del futuro in altotedesco protomoderno sulla base della testimonianza della tradizione manoscritta dello Sprachbuch italo-tedesco","authors":"M. Caparrini","doi":"10.6092/LEF_24_P85","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_24_P85","url":null,"abstract":"La questione delle origini della formazione del futuro analitico tedesco espresso dalla perifrasi werden + infinito, che nel corso del XIV e del XV secolo prese il sopravvento sulle consuete perifrasi altotedesche medie werden + participio presente e verbo modale + infinito, e stata oggetto di numerosi studi. Il presente contributo si apre con una sintesi delle varie ipotesi avanzate negli anni circa l’insorgere e la diffusione della nuova perifrasi per poi passare ad esaminare ed approfondire quanto la formazione werden + infinito venisse effettivamente impiegata nel periodo protomoderno e se, al contempo, continuassero o meno a coesistere anche le altre modalita per rendere il futuro in uso in epoca media (indicativo e congiuntivo presente, verbo modale + infinito). Base della ricerca e data dalla testimonianza offerta dalla tradizione manoscritta del cosiddetto Sprachbuch italo-tedesco di Meister Jorg. In particolare l’analisi, condotta sulle sole sezioni dialogiche, mira a dimostrare come la nuova perifrasi fosse gia ampiamente usata in testi scritti del XV secolo, sebbene l’uso del presente indicativo, non solo come tempo dell’attualita, ma anche come tempo indicante l’azione futura, fosse ancora particolarmente diffuso, soprattutto in quei testi dall’evidente finalita pratica del tipo dello Sprachbuch in cui e forse possibile riscontrare costruzioni piu orientate sulle forme parlate della lingua tedesca dell’epoca.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"24 1","pages":"85-107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71267337","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 Thousand Years Of Model Letter-Writers","authors":"Frances Austin-Jones","doi":"10.6092/LEF_25_P7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_25_P7","url":null,"abstract":"Starting from letter writing as a part of rhetoric, this article seeks to trace the development of model letter-writers in England from their origins in Latin and French formularies to the present day. The first letter-writers in England appeared in the thirteenth century but it was not until the sixteenth that they were written in English. Gradually, they became directed more towards the requirements of ordinary working people rather than towards scholars. There are two main types of model letter-writer: those intended for serious use and, a later development, those aimed at entertainment. The formulas for opening and closing letters, as well as some others are examined. Dating from the fourteenth century and earlier, these survived into the twentieth century among less educated writers. In conclusion there is a brief look at the continuing publication of model letter-writers today.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"25 1","pages":"7-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71267840","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":"Contact vs. internal dynamics in the typological shift of English","authors":"A. Bertacca","doi":"10.6092/LEF_25_P21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_25_P21","url":null,"abstract":"The shift of the English language from synthetic to analytic is still often attributed to contact: with Scandinavian – e.g., Poussa (1982) – or with early Brittonic – e.g., Tristram (2002); on the other hand, others – e.g., Diensberg (1998) and Mufwene (2000) – point to the Norman Conquest as the turning point in the history of the language. Both assumptions, however, seem to be basically unwarranted, because (i) ‘attrition’ was definitely very limited, and (ii) because natural phonological processes had dramatic consequences on morphology. West Saxon itself was already weakly inflecting, and a considerable number of endings were absolutely ambiguous and, therefore, practically useless. Moreover, a considerable reduction in the number and type of inflectional categories had been a feature of Proto-Germanic in comparison with Indo-European. What is argued here is that Old English was in a very unstable equilibrium, and contact (especially with Norman French) can at best have accelerated its progress towards analyticity, but certainly did not trigger it. In terms of Complexity Theory, English did not undergo ‘sudden ignition’ (Nicolis & Prigogine 1989: 175), but rather a steady loss of systemic stability. All these changes can be explained if we apply Naturalness Theory, and the Theory of Complex systems, and that is the main purpose of my paper.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"25 1","pages":"21-39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71267667","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":"Il September-Testament nell'officina di Adam Petri","authors":"Federica Masiero","doi":"10.6092/LEF_24_P109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_24_P109","url":null,"abstract":"This paper is concerned with the first reprint by Adam Petri, a printer in Basel, of Luther’s September-Testament, published in Wittenberg in 1522. The essential aim of the work is to compare the reprint with the original, in order to highlight the chief variations. The paper introduces the results drawn from a close analysis of the two texts. The linguistic phenomena regarded as the most important ones will be taken into consideration, with particular reference to those of phonological and graphematic kind, and a fair number of examples will be given. Therefore, the phenomena of diphthongization, monothongization, metaphony, vowel lengthening as well as of apocope will be analysed, with the necessary considerations of graphematic kind. Such phenomena are considered by linguists as fundamental both for the formation of a first nucleus of Modern German and for the development of written German from the Middle High German period to the New High German one. The results of the comparison will enable us to make some remarks about the degree of diffusion of the over-dialect features of the Lutheran language as well as more general observations about the development of the German language at the beginning of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, some aspects regarding morphology and word-formation will be the subject of a narrower analysis. Lastly, some occurrences of lexical variation will be introduced, which have resulted from the comparison of the two texts and which pre-announce the glossary attached by Adam Petri to the edition following the reprint, published some months later.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"24 1","pages":"109-135"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71267444","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":"Virtual Touring: The Web-Language Of Tourism","authors":"S. Maci","doi":"10.6092/LEF_25_P41","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_25_P41","url":null,"abstract":"The World Tourism Organization defines tourism as one of the fastest growing economic sectors in the world: the business volume of tourism has surpassed that of oil export, food products and automobiles. Tourism has thus gained an ever-increasing importance and acquired a prominent position in international business markets. This aspect has promoted extensive research on tourism from various fields of economics, geography, sociology, psychology and anthropology. However, little attention has been devoted to tourism from a linguistic perspective because of the difficulty in perceiving its language as different from general discourse. As a matter of fact, this is the impression that the language of tourism gives when targeting a wider audience than tourist-industry specialists. However, in-depth linguistic analysis provides a different picture. This paper aims to discuss the strategies exploited by the tourist industry to structure texts into specific genres, carefully combining features that derive from both the iconic and the verbal codes. The study, based on a corpus of English texts taken from the web-pages of tourist offices located mainly in the UK investigates in what ways such texts achieve strong generic coherence by successfully fulfilling the encoder’s intentions, contextual exigencies and structural linguistic rules, thus outlining how the registers of tourism discourse are organised.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"25 1","pages":"41-65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71267715","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":"Lexical Aspect and Auxiliary Selection in Italian Learner Corpora","authors":"Stefano Rastelli","doi":"10.6092/LEF_25_P67","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_25_P67","url":null,"abstract":"The Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy Hypothesis (henceforth ASH, Sorace, 1995a; 2000; 2004) correlates the aspectuality (meant as lexical aspect or Aktionsart) of predicates with the selection of avere or essere as auxiliary verbs. This hypothesis also predicts with which verbs the correct auxiliary will be acquired first by foreign learners. This article explores whether learners are equipped to figure out the aspectuality of L2 predicates and to use this semantic notion in order to target the right auxiliary. A sampling from Italian learner corpora shows a non-negligible percentage of errors and omissions of the auxiliary of so-called \"core verbs\". This percentage possibly increases in L2 predicates whose actional content is unstable and difficult to detect and appears to remain higher than expected in intermediate and in advanced learners. If one can move away from important factors such as the kind of elicitation-task and L1 pressure on performance data, there may exist a \"period of latency\" during which learners find hard to recognize, or even fail at recognizing verb actionality because of the interaction with the tense-aspect system and with other pragmatic factors. Presumably, when this period is over, the ASH would account for how verb aspectuality also results in split intransitivity in performance data . If this view is correct, the predictive validity of the ASH could be postponed in the learning process or - alternatively - it should not always be expected to be indisputably confirmed by performance data. In the event of which, the expression \"primacy in acquisition\" could be defined in more abstract terms as \"primacy of representation rules\" and not necessarily in terms of \"emergence in data\".","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"25 1","pages":"67-97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71267781","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":"The progressive aspect in simultaneity as and while-clauses","authors":"C. Broccias","doi":"10.6092/LEF_24_P39","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_24_P39","url":null,"abstract":"Recent research into simultaneity as and while-clauses has shown that they tend to be used differently. As-clauses usually code events with a high degree of susceptibility to change whereas while-clauses tend to evoke more stable temporal configurations. Following this insight, the present paper studies the interaction between the progressive aspect and as and while-clauses. It is claimed that the progressive aspect in as-clauses is prototypically used as a slowing down/stretching device (i.e. an imperfectivization mechanism). It is used to establish an aspectual contrast between a prolonged as-event and a (relatively) punctual main event. By contrast, progressive while-clauses seem to behave more similarly to main clauses. The progressive is primarily used as a transience marker, i.e. to signal that the (relatively) stable event coded by a while-clause is a temporary state.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"24 1","pages":"39-63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71267126","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":"Un dimenticato problema ecdotico del Muspilli: le trascrizioni di Docen, Maßmann e Schmeller","authors":"Verio Santoro","doi":"10.6092/LEF_25_P207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_25_P207","url":null,"abstract":"The complexity of problems concerning the reconstruction of the Muspilli text arose ever since the editio princeps of Schmeller in 1832. It is a well known fact that the intricate events linked to the discovery of the text have extended the already long list of its ecdotic problems. In this paper three different handwritten transcriptions of the Muspilli made by Docen, Masmann and Schmeller between 1817 and 1832 are examined. Considered of irrelevant ecdotic value by Elias von Steinmeyer (1892), these three transcriptions have disappeared from the studies on the Muspilli since then. The present paper instead, will show their indisputable ecdotic merit.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"25 1","pages":"207-235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71267649","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":"The Episode of Finn in Beowulf. Discharging Hengest","authors":"Nicola Zocco","doi":"10.6092/LEF_24_P65","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_24_P65","url":null,"abstract":"The article analyzes the text of a passage taken from Beowulf commonly known as \"The episode of Finn\" putting forward an interpretation of the narrated facts that is detached from those generally adopted. On the basis of some linguistic studies about the poetical syntax of Old English, some crucial points in the narration are analyzed in order to evaluate under a new light the behaviour of one of the main characters, Hengest. More precisely, the aim is to demonstrate how his conduct does not imply the breach of the deal made with Finn, but, on the contrary, that he adopts a more subtle strategy in order to get the same result yet within the juridically established terms.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"24 1","pages":"65-83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71267215","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":"Vagueness and precision in contracts: a close relationship","authors":"Patrizia Anesa","doi":"10.6092/LEF_24_P7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.6092/LEF_24_P7","url":null,"abstract":"This paper deals with the relationship between linguistic indeterminacy and precision in legal texts (Endicott 2000, Bhatia et al. 2005, Cacciaguidi-Fahy / Wagner 2006) and, more specifically, it analyses how these aspects are conveyed in contracts, a specific type of legal document. The study offers a comparative description of contracts and other legal texts, with particular regard to the presence of vagueness and precision, and describes the linguistic strategies used to convey these elements. These aspects have been extensively studied, especially in texts that are characterized by a general applicability, such as laws, rules and statutes (Bhatia et al. 2005, Endicott 2000). The purpose of this study is, instead, to analyse the complexity of the relationship between vagueness and precision in documents that are not usually applicable to society as a whole, such as contracts. The analysis shows the coexistence and inter-dependence of elements such as linguistic indeterminacy and precision in contracts, even though these kinds of texts do not have to meet the need of conveying general applicability to the extent that laws, rules and statutes must.","PeriodicalId":40434,"journal":{"name":"Linguistica e Filologia","volume":"39 1","pages":"7-38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2007-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71267269","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}