It is universally recognized that in the fragments of Hipponax there are many references to Homer, in both language and content. In this paper I analyse the relationship between Hipponax’ poetic persona and the character of Odysseus.

Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.

In this paper I analyze the rhetorical function of compositional neologisms in Cercidas’ versification, in order to provide a new semantical and/or syntactical explanation for single words that have not been correctly interpreted before. In particular I analyze the fragments 1.41–50 Lom., 2.25–7 Lom. and 60 Lom., focusing especially on the correct interpretation of τεθνακοχαλκίδης, συοπλουτοσύνη and μεταμελλοδύνη. At the end of the paper, final considerations on the rhetorical function of neologism in Cercidas’ text are offered.

The logic of proofs was introduced by Artemov in order to analize the formalization of the concept of proof rather than the concept of provability. In this context, some operations on proofs play a very important role. In this paper, we investigate some very natural operations, paying attention not only to positive information, but also to negative information (i.e. information saying that something cannot be a proof). We give a formalization for a fragment of such a logic of proofs, and (...) we prove that our fragment is complete and decidable. (shrink)

In the eighties of the nineteenth century Ubu comes into the world. Thanks to Alfred Jarry, in around ten years this imaginary tyrant with unrestrained longings will rise to an outstanding position in the Parisian theatrical arena. Ubu, anyway, is not a mere culture phenomenon: he is also – better, he is first of all – the outcome of an unprecedented and primitive reflection on power. So Ubu, from the beginning, is the embodiment of the excess, the expression of tyranny (...) as the childish power par excellence, driven by a bulimic imagination and dragged by overwhelming yearnings, always associated with the denial of any decorum and mediation. Ubu is, to a certain extent, one of the most prophetic and accurate anticipations of that imbalance between the autocrat’s longings and the endurance degree of the environment around him: a political pathology which will be the eminent and dramatic feature of the terrible catastrophes of the 20th century. Jarry’s work is even more significant when, in the last of its plays, describes an institutional system protected by a brittle glass bell, unbreakable only by those who hesitate to strike it, and an administrative apparatus so much subject to arbitrary power that it seems built «by the tyrant himself». (shrink)

Answering a question raised by Shavrukov and Visser :569–582, 2014), we show that the lattice of \-sentences ) over any computable enumerable consistent extension T of \ is uniformly dense. We also show that for every \ and \ refer to the known hierarchies of arithmetical formulas introduced by Burr for intuitionistic arithmetic) the lattices of \-sentences over any c.e. consistent extension T of the intuitionistic version of Robinson Arithmetic \ are uniformly dense. As an immediate consequence of the proof, (...) all these lattices are also locally universal. (shrink)

Antonio Genovesi is known as the thinker who raised a whole generation of Southern Italian intellectuals, among them Francesco Pagano and Gaetano Filangieri. One of the most influential of his works was the notoriously difficult Diceosina, o sia della filosofia del giusto e dell’onesto , a textbook destined for use in the universities. The Diceosina was a powerful, if controversial, attempt to mediate between the history of moral philosophy on the one hand, and the specific problems encountered by eighteenth-century commercial (...) society on the other. In fact, it contained the greater part of Genovesi's political, philosophical, and economic thought; a synthetic guidebook for Neapolitan economic and social development. This essay explores the work's context, rich intellectual origins, and ultimate significance through its long and complicated reception. The cultural and political connotations of Genovesi's Diceosina become particularly evident through an engagement with the works of Ermenegildo Personè, one of the book's most arduous critics. (shrink)

An educational philosophy that appeals to the immutable element in things, to their eternal properties, to the truths that hold in any age, and simply urges that empirical methods are not the only methods, really is defending a negative position.

The essay deals with the subject of the curriculum as it was elaborated by the philosopher Jaques Maritain during the period of his stay in the United States and condensed above all in the 1943 text Education at the Crossroads. Maritain, above all a political philosopher, intends to present a line of personal and social education to the generations emerging from the Second World War. It was necessary to rethink education not only in the theoretical field but also in the (...) operational one, in particular in the main formative structure of the community: School and University. The design that comes out is very structured: aimed at proposing a new order of studies both with regard to the School and the University. (shrink)

SummaryWhen analysing François Véron de Forbonnais's translation of Gerónimo de Uztáriz's Theórica y Práctica de comercio and Louis-Joseph Plumard de Dangeul's translation of Bernardo de Ulloa's Restablecimiento de las fábricas, the first important point to consider is that the two cousins, who had decided to bring the works to a French public at the suggestion of Vincent de Gournay, were working with a language and within a political and cultural environment which they had already experienced in person. A second important (...) consideration concerns the linguistic challenge inherent in the fact that the Spanish did not yet have an economic lexicon equal to that developed by French thinkers. The choices of terminology made by Forbonnais and Plumard bear witness to this different development and reveal the peculiarities of economic epistemology in the two countries. This essay will shed light on the translation strategies adopted by the French writers, focusing on a number of key concepts of the new science of commerce, such as consumption, exportation, importation, population, commerce, trade, money, and work. (shrink)

Reduced forms such as the pronoun he provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as the lead singer of Coldplay. Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade‐off between the informativity of a form and the prominence of its referent. For example, Italian adults generally interpret informationally empty null pronouns as in the sentence Corre (meaning “He/She/It runs”) as referring to the most prominent referent (...) in the discourse, and more informative overt pronouns (e.g., lui in Lui corre, “He runs”) as referring to less prominent referents. Although children acquiring Italian are known to experience difficulties interpreting pronouns, it is unclear how they acquire this division of pragmatic labor between null and overt subject pronouns, and how this relates to the development of their cognitive capacities. Here we show that cognitive development can account for the general interpretation patterns displayed by Italian‐speaking children and adults. Using experimental studies and computational simulations in a framework modeling bounded‐rational behavior, we argue that null pronoun interpretation is influenced by working memory capacity and thus appears to depend on discourse context, whereas overt pronoun interpretation is influenced by processing speed, suggesting that listeners must reason about the speaker's choices. Our results demonstrate that cognitive capacities may constrain the acquisition of linguistic forms and their meanings in various ways. The novel predictions generated by the computational simulations point out several directions for future research. (shrink)

Locality is a key concept not only in linguistic theorizing, but in explaining pattern of acquisition and patterns of recovery in garden path sentences, as well. If syntax relates sound and meaning over an infinite domain, syntactic dependencies and operations must be restricted in such a way to apply over limited, finite domains in order to be detectable at all. The theory of what these finite domains are and how they relate to the fundamentally unbounded nature of syntax is the (...) theory of locality. The papers in this collection all deal with the concept of locality in syntactic theory, and, more specifically, describe and analyze the various contributions Luigi Rizzi has made to this area over the past three and a half decades. The authors are all eminent linguists in generative syntax who have collaborated with Rizzi closely, and in eleven chapters, they explore locality in both pure syntax and psycholinguistics. This collection is essential reading for students and scholars of linguistic theory, generative syntax, and comparative syntax. (shrink)

Different summarized shape indices, like mean shape index (MSI) and area weighted mean shape index (AWMSI) can change over multiple size scales. This variation is important to describe scale heterogeneity of landscapes, but the exact mathematical form of the dependence is rarely known. In this paper, the use of fractal geometry (by the perimeter and area Hausdorff dimensions) made us able to describe the scale dependence of these indices. Moreover, we showed how fractal dimensions can be deducted from existing MSI (...) and AWMSI data. In this way, the equality of a multiscale tabulated MSI and AWMSI dataset and two scale-invariant fractal dimensions has been demonstrated. (shrink)

Grodzinsky's Tree-Pruning Hypothesis can be extended to explain agrammatic comprehension disorders. Although agrammatism is evidence for syntactic modularity, there is no evidence for its anatomical modularity or for its localization in the frontal lobe. Agrammatism results from diffuse left hemisphere damage – allowing the emergence of the limited right hemisphere linguistic competence – rather than from damage to an anatomic module in the left hemisphere.

Guaspari (J Symb Logic 48:777–789, 1983) conjectured that a modal formula is it essentially Σ1 (i.e., it is Σ1 under any arithmetical interpretation), if and only if it is provably equivalent to a disjunction of formulas of the form ${\square{B}}$ . This conjecture was proved first by A. Visser. Then, in (de Jongh and Pianigiani, Logic at Work: In Memory of Helena Rasiowa, Springer-Physica Verlag, Heidelberg-New York, pp. 246–255, 1999), the authors characterized essentially Σ1 formulas of languages including witness comparisons (...) using the interpretability logic ILM. In this note we give a similar characterization for formulas with a binary operator interpreted as interpretability in a finitely axiomatizable extension of IΔ 0 + Supexp and we address a similar problem for IΔ 0 + Exp. (shrink)

This study presents a web-based sentence comprehension test aimed at identifying high school students who are at risk for a language delay. By assessing linguistic skills on a sample of high school students with Italian as an L2 and their monolingual peers, attending a vocational school, we were able to identify a subgroup of L2 students with consistent difficulties in sentence comprehension, though their reading skills were within the average range. The same subgroup revealed to experience a lack of support (...) within the school context, suggesting that poor L2 skills might be a critical variable to consider in order to identify students at risk for school exclusion. Regarding the test, accuracy to the on-line sentence comprehension task was significantly predicted by reading abilities and vocabulary skills, thus indicating that this test might represent a rapid but efficient way to assess linguistic abilities at school. We recommend that establishing a valid and practical procedure for the evaluation of linguistic skills in bilingual students who struggle with their L2 is the first step towards promoting social inclusion in the multilingual classroom, in order to increase their ability to actively participate in school and social activities. (shrink)

In her recent article “The Ontology of Social Groups”, Thomasson (Synthese 196:4829–4845, 2019) argues that social groups can be characterized in terms of the norms that surround them. We show that according to Thomasson’s normativity-based criterion, the dead constitute a social group, since there are widespread and well-defined social norms as to how to treat the dead, such as the norm expressed in the title (“Speak no ill of the dead”). We argue that the example of the dead must not (...) be interpreted as a counterexample to this criterion, and that, rather, there are good reasons to think of the dead as a genuine social group. Furthermore, the dead as a social group exist, regardless of whether or not the dead (i.e. the members of this social group) exist as persons. This view is clearly incompatible with the idea that social groups can be explained by citing features of their members, which is why we take the case of the dead to pose a challenge for the thesis of individualism. We consider the ontological implications of this example and suggest that social groups ought to be seen as reifications of social norms. Another implication of taking the dead to be a social group is that the presence of external norms is sufficient for the existence of a social group, and therefore internal norms are not necessary. We defend this implication against some potential theoretical and moral problems. (shrink)

This paper is part of a project that is based on the notion of a dialectical system, introduced by Magari as a way of capturing trial and error mathematics. In Amidei et al. (2016, Rev. Symb. Logic, 9, 1–26) and Amidei et al. (2016, Rev. Symb. Logic, 9, 299–324), we investigated the expressive and computational power of dialectical systems, and we compared them to a new class of systems, that of quasi-dialectical systems, that enrich Magari’s systems with a natural mechanism (...) of revision. In the present paper we consider a third class of systems, that of p-dialectical systems, that naturally combine features coming from the two other cases. We prove several results about p-dialectical systems and the sets that they represent. Then we focus on the completions of first-order theories. In doing so, we consider systems with connectives, i.e. systems that encode the rules of classical logic. We show that any consistent system with connectives represents the completion of a given theory. We prove that dialectical and q-dialectical systems coincide with respect to the completions that they can represent. Yet, p-dialectical systems are more powerful; we exhibit a p-dialectical system representing a completion of Peano Arithmetic that is neither dialectical nor q-dialectical. (shrink)

Rapid Automatized Naming is considered a universal marker of developmental dyslexia and could also be helpful to identify a reading deficit in minority-language children, in which it may be hard to disentangle whether the reading difficulties are due to a learning disorder or a lower proficiency in the language of instruction. We tested reading and rapid naming skills in monolingual Good Readers, monolingual Poor Readers, and MLC, by using our new version of RAN, the RAN-Shapes, in 127 primary school students. (...) In line with previous research, MLC showed, on average, lower reading performances as compared to mGR. However, the two groups performed similarly to the RAN-Shapes task. On the contrary, the mPR group underperformed both in the reading and the RAN tasks. Our findings suggest that reading difficulties and RAN performance can be dissociated in MLC; consequently, the performance at the RAN-Shapes may contribute to the identification of children at risk of a reading disorder without introducing any linguistic bias, when testing MLC. (shrink)