In this paper, we present an overview of existing parallel corpora for Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) in different languages focusing on the approach adopted for their construction. We make the main distinction between manual and (semi)–automatic approaches in order to investigate in which respect complex and simple texts vary and whether and how the observed modifications may depend on the underlying approach. To this end, we perform a two-level comparison on Italian corpora, since this is the only language, with (...) the exception of English, for which there are large parallel resources derived through the two approaches considered. The first level of comparison accounts for the main types of sentence transformations occurring in the simplification process, the second one examines the results of a linguistic profiling analysis based on Natural Language Processing techniques and carried out on the original and the simple version of the same texts. For both levels of analysis, we chose to focus our discussion mostly on sentence transformations and linguistic characteristics that pertain to the morpho-syntactic and syntactic structure of the sentence. (shrink)

We report the results of a study which tested receptive Italian grammatical competence and general cognitive abilities in bilingual Italian–Sardinian children and age-matched monolingual Italian children attending the first and second year of primary school in the Nuoro province of Sardinia, where Sardinian is still widely spoken. The results show that across age groups the performance of Sardinian–Italian bilingual children is in most cases indistinguishable from that of monolingual Italian children, in terms of both (...) class='Hi'>Italian language skills and general cognitive abilities. However, where there are differences, these emerge gradually over time and are mostly in favor of bilingual children. (shrink)

A vast literature exists on the concept of “linguistic ideology.” Scholars generally agree on defining it as a set of ideas that the members of a community hold about the role of language in the community. Nevertheless, scholars generally disagree on whether these ideas are explicit or implicit. Different views on this point imply different methodologies: the analysis of explicit considerations on language in the first case, that of a more multifarious material in the second one. However, excluding implicit ideas (...) from the analysis is too restrictive. A better option is to distinguish between explicit beliefs and implicit assumptions. Whereas the first ones must be studied through socio- or ethno-logical methods, the second ones must be studied through semiotics: the discourses that are produced in a community are considered as signs of implicit assumptions that such community holds about language. The paper deals with a case-study: the semiotic ideology behind denegation in the contemporary Italian political discourse. (shrink)

Both young children and agrammatic aphasic speakers have difficulty interpreting pronouns, but not reflexive elements. This phenomenon is known as the delay of Principle B effect in language acquisition. The interpretation of pronouns is non-adult-like for children and disturbed in agrammatic aphasia, yet there is evidence that interpretation of pronouns is not always problematic for these populations and that it seems to be governed by linguistic principles. This chapter examines the linguistic principles underlying the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives among (...) children and agrammatic aphasic speakers whose native languages were Dutch, Spanish, and Italian by focusing on two types of sentences: simple transitive sentences and Exceptional Case Marking constructions. It first looks at earlier research on language acquisition and agrammatism before discussing two important linguistic theories, Government and Binding Theory and Reflexivity and Primitives of Binding. (shrink)

The present article is on the linguistic characteristics of a corpus of letters sent to the television broadcast Buona Domenica, transmitted between 1980 and 1995 by RTL Luxembourg. This corpus contains 600 letters sent to the editorial staff by Italians or other nationalities interested in the Italian language and culture, residing in Luxembourg or in the neighbouring countries: Belgium, France and Germany. The vivacity and spontaneity of theses letters presents us a period of time that precedes the globalization of (...) the mass media and is not so far from our present time. Each letter chosen for this article highlights especially the relationship that bound emigrants to the autochthonous language and to the memory of their mother tongue, almost always a dialect. (shrink)

The present article is on the linguistic characteristics of a corpus of letters sent to the television broadcast Buona Domenica, transmitted between 1980 and 1995 by RTL Luxembourg. This corpus contains 600 letters sent to the editorial staff by Italians or other nationalities interested in the Italian language and culture, residing in Luxembourg or in the neighbouring countries: Belgium, France and Germany (the Great Region). The vivacity and spontaneity of theses letters presents us a period of time that precedes (...) the globalization of the mass media and is not so far from our present time. Each letter chosen for this article highlights especially the relationship that bound emigrants to the autochthonous language and to the memory of their mother tongue, almost always a dialect. (shrink)

This contribution thematizes the Gadamerian legacy in the context of the Italian philosophical debate, attempting to understand whether this debate can contribute to rethink the vitality of the hermeneutic tradition and the future of its possible developments. When, in 1972, Gianni Vattimo, one of the key figures in contemporary Italian thought, published his seminal translation of Truth and Method, Gadamerian themes began to circulate, in Italy, based on a specific interpretation: The Italian hermeneutic debate received the project (...) of Truth and Method as a kind of philosophical defense of the humanistic tradition. As the inventor of the "weak thought," Vattimo defended the idea that the 'weakening' of the project of the world's scientific rationalization could enhance other experiences related to truth, namely humanistic, artistic, literary, and religious ones. Just like then, the triumph of scientific rationality and calculative thinking places contemporary hermeneutics in front of a daunting task. One must ask whether hermeneutics, in order to remain faithful to the Gadamerian project, should remain essentially a project of metatheoretical foundations of textual interpretation, endowed with a historically and linguistically informed approach, or it should rather radically rethink its relationship to the problem of 'method.' To avoid this deflation of the Gadamerian tradition, one possible way forward is to orient hermeneutic research toward a 'hard' and philosophically grounded idea of objectuality/objectivity, but at the same time not methodologically sterile, that is, not flattened on the methods of the 'hard sciences'. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Ippolito and Farkas (Linguist Philos, 45(4):943–984, 2022b) (I &F) question the premise that Italian future is epistemic necessity; in this brief response we want to show that there is no empirical motivation for abandoning it once we employ a more flexible framework of modality such as the one advanced in Giannakidou and Mari (Linguist Philos 41(6): 623–664, 2018) (G &M) which posits a ranking meta-evaluation in the modal structure that explains the empirical objections raised by (...) I &F. We show that the core of the account in I &F shares the main ingredients with G &M and that, unlike what I &F propose, Italian future is not pure credence. (shrink)

Philosophy is cosmopolitan and immune to the influence of the idea of nation; it does not depend on some specific linguistic heritage, and, anyway, tends to be in contrast to the various nationalisms. Nevertheless, in front of the crisis of the very idea of national identity, not only the Ueberweg dedicates an entire volume to the Italian philosophy of the Eighteenth century, but also he reconstructs it on a regional level, following the catchment areas of the single universities, academies (...) and scientific societies as a unit of measurement. The volume shows the usefulness of joining the approach of the philosophical history of philosophy, the traditional history of philosophy, together with the historical history of philosophy, according to the interdisciplinary method of survey developed by the history of ideas yesterday and by the intellectual history today. (shrink)

In recent decades, the analysis of phraseology has made use of the exploration of large corpora as a source of quantitative information about language. This paper intends to present the main lines of work in progress based on this empirical approach to linguistic analysis. In particular, we focus our attention on some problems relating to the morpho-syntactic annotation of corpora. The CORIS/CODIS corpus of contemporary written Italian, developed at CILTA – University of Bologna (Rossini Favretti 2000; Rossini Favretti, Tamburini, (...) De Santis in press), is a synchronic 100-million-word corpus and is being lemmatised and annotated with part-of-speech (POS) tags, in order to increase the quantity of information and improve data retrieval procedures (Tamburini 2000). The aim of POS tagging is to assign each lexical unit to the appropriate word class. Usually the set of tags is pre-established by the linguist, who uses his/her competence to identify the different word classes. The very first experiments we made revealed how the traditional part-of-speech distinctions in Italian (generally based on morphological and semantic criteria) are often inadequate to represent the syntactic features of words in context. It is worth noting that the uncertainties in categorisation contained in Italian grammars and dictionaries reflect a growing difficulty as they move from fundamental linguistic classes, such as nouns and verbs, to more complex classes, such as adverbs, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions. This latter class, that groups together elements traditionally used to express connections between sentences, appears inadequate when describing cohesive relations in Italian. This phenomenon actually seems to involve other elements traditionally assigned to different classes, such as adverbs, pronouns and interjections. Recent studies proposed the class of ‘connectives’, grouping all words that, apart from their traditional word class, have the function of connecting phrases and contributing to textual cohesion. From this point of view, conjunctions can be considered as part of phrasal connectives, that can in turn be included in the wider category of textual connectives. The aim of this study is to identify elements that can be included in the class of phrasal connectives, using quantitative methods. According to Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) observation that words are linked by dependent probabilities, corroborated by Halliday’s (1991) argument that the grammatical “system” (in Firth’s sense of the term) is essentially probabilistic, quantitative data are introduced in order to provide evidence of relative frequencies. Section 2 presents a description of word-class categorisation from the point of view of grammars and dictionaries arguing that the traditional category of conjunctions is inadequate for capturing the notion of phrasal connective. Section 3 examines the notion of ‘connective’ and suggests a truth-function interpretation of connective behaviour. Section 4 describes the quantitative methods proposed for analysing the distributional properties of lexical units, and section 5 comments on the results obtained by applying such methods drawing some provisional conclusions. (shrink)

The tradition of Italian Thought – not the political one but the poetic and naturalistic one – finds in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze a way to enter into the new century, the century of immanence and animality. In fact, Deleuze himself remained outside the main philosophical traditions of his own time. The tradition to which Deleuze refers is the one that begins with Spinoza and ends with Nietzsche. It is an ontological tradition, which deals mainly with life and (...) the world rather than with the human subject and knowledge. Finally, the text sketches a possible dialogue between Deleuze and the poet-philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, one of the most important figures of Italian Thought. (shrink)

Theory of language is an important factor in the plans of political and educational reform drawn by Italian philosophers of the eighteenth century. Analysis of language is a technique they often resort to when discussing the foundations of political philosophy and the ways and means of social communication. Interesting suggestions concerning philosophy of language can be found in the works of writers on political economy and philosophy of jurisprudence (Antonio Genovesi, Gaetano Filangieri, Cesare Beccaria, Melchiorre Gioia, Gian Domenico Romagnosi, (...) among others), where subjects such as abuse of words and linguistic arbitrarism are connected to theoretical and practical problems of the transition from feudal to bourgeois régime. (shrink)

In this paper the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic bases for a pattern of conventionalization of two types of iconic handshapes are described. Work on sign languages has shown that handling handshapes and object handshapes express an agentive/non-agentive semantic distinction in many sign languages. H-HSs are used in agentive event descriptions and O-HSs are used in non-agentive event descriptions. In this work, American Sign Language and Italian Sign Language productions are compared as well as the corresponding groups of gesturers in (...) each country using “silent gesture.” While the gesture groups, in general, did not employ an H-HS/O-HS distinction, all participants used iconic handshapes more often in agentive than in no-agent event descriptions; moreover, none of the subjects produced an opposite pattern than the expected one . These effects are argued to be grounded in cognition. In addition, some individual gesturers were observed to produce the H-HS/O-HS opposition for agentive and non-agentive event descriptions—that is, more Italian than American adult gesturers. This effect is argued to be grounded in culture. Finally, the agentive/non-agentive handshape opposition is confirmed for signers of ASL and LIS, but previously unreported cross-linguistic differences were also found across both adult and child sign groups. It is, therefore, concluded that cognitive, cultural, and linguistic factors contribute to the conventionalization of this distinction of handshape type. (shrink)

We know from the literature in theoretical linguistics that interrogative constructions in Italian have particular syntactic properties, due to the liberal word order and the rich inflectional system. In this paper we show that the calculus of pregroups represents a flexible and efficient computational device for the analysis and derivation of Italian sentences and questions. In this context the distinction between direct vs. indirect statements and questions is explored.

The critical linguistic analysis of authorial stance in English news reporting has long been concerned with uncovering the ideological bias embedded in the seemingly objective and neutral representation of people and events. Interest has recently shifted towards the nature of the authorial voice itself and the extent to which this semblance of objectivity is also typical in non-English reporting. This article explores to what extent the most impersonal ‘reporter voice’, as identified by Martin and White in English hard-news reported in (...) the press, is present in Italian reporting. The ‘appraisal’ categories developed by Martin and White are used, discussed and adapted for this purpose. Attention is thereby also given to significant expressive resources that may not be retrievable from English material alone. Similarities and differences in reporting styles are discussed and reference is made to the social and cultural variables that may underlie them. (shrink)

Rarely is the problem of the diversity of languages taken into account whenever population groups are formed into States. When the problem does come up, it is later, in a primarily political context which tries to find political solutions, such as we may presently see them in Canada or in Belgium for instance. These solutions are few and they deal with situations that may contain a host of nuances.Certain countries have chosen a vehicular language while keeping their local languages: the (...) common language in the USSR is the language of one of its republics. In Senegal it is French, which is of a totally foreign origin but has the advantage of avoiding the rivalry existing among the native languages, and it also has a place within the international community. Other countries have accepted as official languages the different languages spoken within its borders. Thus Switzerland is officially tri-lingual (French, German, Italian), giving legal status to what somewhere else may simply be an accepted fact. Many Alsatians speak three languages (Alsatian, French, German). As far as it concerns countries with a strong linguistic heterogeneity, whether it be their history or their size making for a centralizing policy, they have adopted, with the resulting neglect of all others, the language or the idiom of the region which was politically or culturally the dominant one at the time of their unification. Pekinese has been extended to all of China, Florentine to Italy, Hindi to India. Some original combinations can be found: in Israel Jewish immigrants who came from more than seventy different countries, have again taken up the nation's old cultural and religious language, which had been out of use for two thousand years, and have placed it on equal footing with Arabic spoken by the local population, while English is being used for international relations. (shrink)

This paper provides a systematic description and analysis of the non-predictive use of the Italian future. Several authors claim that, on this use, the Italian future is an evidential (Squartini 2001, Mari 2010, Eckardt and Beltrama 2019, Frana and Menéndez-Benito 2019 ). Others argue that the non-predictive future does not directly contribute an evidential signal (e.g., Giannakidou and Mari 2018, Farkas and Ippolito 2022 ). We side with the evidential camp. From an empirical standpoint, we present the results (...) of a battery of tests that show that the non-predictive future patterns with evidentials cross-linguistically. From a theoretical standpoint, we put forward an analysis that combines a slightly modified version of the proposal for evidentials in Davis et al. ( 2007 ) with Schlenker’s ( 2007 ) view of expressive content. On this account, the Italian evidential future (i) lowers the quality threshold required to perform a successful speech act (Davis et al. 2007 ) and (ii) triggers an evidential presupposition relativized to the speaker’s beliefs (modeled after Schlenker’s analysis of expressives). Our treatment of the evidential component as an expressive presupposition opens up a new perspective on the study of evidentiality and highlights the need for further detailed empirical studies exploring the extent to which this perspective is applicable cross-linguistically. (shrink)

Supposition is a controversial logical theory. Scholars have investigated many points of this doctrine such as its historical origin, its use in theology, the logical function of the theory, or the relationship between supposition and signification. In the article I focus on this latter aspect by discussing how some Italian, and in particular Florentine, Dominican followers of Aquinas—Francis of Prato, Girolamo Savonarola, and Georgius Rovegnatinus —explained the relation between the linguistic terms’ properties of signifying and suppositing, and hence the (...) division of supposition. After sketching out Thomas Aquinas, Hervaeus Natalis, and William of Ockham’s positions on the relationship between signification and supposition, I closely examine Francis’s criticism of Ockham. Francis follows Walter Burley’s account of supposition and considers the statement that a term has simple supposition when it is taken not significatively and stands for an intention of mind as the weak point of Ockham’s explanation of supposition. According to Francis, if this were the case, there would be no semantic basis for differentiating simple from material supposition. Francis is however hesitant about the full subordination of supposition to signification, especially with regards to material supposition, when a term, suppositing for itself, is taken to signify itself besides its meaning. More than one hundred years later, Girolamo Savonarola and Georgius Rovegnatinus have no doubt about the fact that terms may supposit only for what they signify. (shrink)

Theory of language is an important factor in the plans of political and educational reform drawn by Italian philosophers of the eighteenth century. Analysis of language is a technique they often resort to when discussing the foundations of political philosophy and the ways and means of social communication. Interesting suggestions concerning philosophy of language can be found in the works of writers on political economy and philosophy of jurisprudence (Antonio Genovesi, Gaetano Filangieri, Cesare Beccaria, Melchiorre Gioia, Gian Domenico Romagnosi, (...) among others), where subjects such as abuse of words and linguistic arbitrarism are connected to theoretical and practical problems of the transition from feudal to bourgeois régime. (shrink)

The thesis we develop in this essay is that all humans are endowed with a moral faculty. The moral faculty enables us to produce moral judgments on the basis of the causes and consequences of actions. As an empirical research program, we follow the framework of modern linguistics.1 The spirit of the argument dates back at least to the economist Adam Smith (1759/1976) who argued for something akin to a moral grammar, and more recently, to the political philosopher John (...) Rawls (1971). The logic of the argument, however, comes from Noam Chomsky’s thinking on language specifically and the nature of knowledge more generally (Chomsky, 1986, 1988, 2000; Saporta, 1978). If the nature of moral knowledge is comparable in some way to the nature of linguistic knowledge, as defended recently by Harman (1977), Dwyer (1999, 2004), and Mikhail (2000; in press), then what should we expect to find when we look at the anatomy of our moral faculty? Is there a grammar, and if so, how can the moral grammarian uncover its structure? Are we aware of our moral grammar, its method of operation, and its moment-to-moment functioning in our judgments? Is there a universal moral grammar that allows each child to build a particular moral grammar? Once acquired, are different moral grammars mutually incomprehensible in the same way that a native Chinese speaker finds a native Italian speaker incomprehensible? How does the child acquire a particular moral grammar, especially if her experiences are impoverished relative to the moral judgments she makes? Are there certain forms of brain damage that disrupt moral competence but leave other forms of reasoning intact? And how did this machinery evolve, and for what particular adaptive function? We will have more to say about many of these questions later on, and Hauser (2006) develops others. However, in order to flesh out the key ideas and particular empirical research paths, let us turn to some of the central questions in the study of our language faculty.. (shrink)

If there is an area of discourse in which disagreement is virtually absent, it is mathematics. After all, mathematicians justify their claims with deductive proofs: arguments that entail their conclusions. But is mathematics really exceptional in this respect? Looking at the history and practice of mathematics, we soon realize that it is not. First, deductive arguments must start somewhere. How should we choose the starting points (i.e., the axioms)? Second, mathematicians, like the rest of us, are fallible. Their ability to (...) recognize whether a putative proof is correct is not infallible. In most cases, disagreement over the correctness of a putative proof is, however, evanescent. Once an error is spotted and communicated, the disagreement disappears. But this is not always the case. Sometimes it is recalcitrant; that is, it persists over time. In order to zoom in on this type of disagreement and explain its very possibility, we focus on a single case study: a decades-long (1921-1949) controversy between Federigo Enriques and Francesco Severi, two prominent exponents of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. We suggest that the instability of the mathematical community to which they belonged can be explained by the gap between an abstract criterion of rigor and local criteria of acceptability. It is this instability that made the existence of recalcitrant disagreement over putative proofs possible. We do not condemn speculative mathematics but rather its pretense of being rigorous mathematics. In this respect, we show that the overly self-confident Severi and the more intuitive, visionary Enriques had a completely different attitude. (shrink)

This book addresses two related questions that have first arisen in Toulmin’s seminal book on the uses of argument. The first question is the one of the relationship between the semantic analysis of modality and the structure of arguments. The second question is the one of the distinctive place, or role, of modality in the fundamental structure of arguments. These two questions concern how modality, as a semantic category, relates to the fundamental structure of arguments. The book addresses modality and (...) argumentation also according to another perspective by looking at how different linguistic modal expressions may be taken as argumentative indicators. It explores the role of modal expressions as argumentative indicators by using the Italian modal system as a case study. At the same time, it uses predictions/forecasts in the business-financial daily press to investigate the relation between modality and the context of argumentation. (shrink)

The recent trend in institutional communication research seems to foster the image of the University as a private organization significantly oriented towards a policy of customer satisfaction. Following the concept of organizational culture, institutional settings too are conceived as organizational contexts, where discourse is a privileged vehicle to convey and spread values, traditions and artifacts, both through internal and external communication practices. Thus, within academic discourse organizational culture is shaped and perpetuated by specific devices of rhetorical argumentation. The corpus of (...) data consists of two different examples of academic discourse: the self promotional endorsement letters of the academic candidates to the chancellor’s position on occasion of the elections and the inaugural speeches proclaimed by the chancellors in charge during the opening celebration of the academic year. The first kind of academic discourse could be meant as an example of political discourse since the candidates use communication strategically and manipulate their academic membership as a rhetorical device to support their aims. On the other hand, the second example is a mere celebration of academic culture which through linguistic rituals recalls and perpetuates the basic values of this microcosm. The data have been analysed with the critical discourse analysis and diatextual analysis which pay particular attention to the context of speech. Moreover, attention has been focused on the metaphors and on the meta-discursive cues. The results show that although with different purposes academic discourse use similar discursive and rhetorical strategies as both belong to the same organization. (shrink)

Perception, corps et mouvement. L’esthétique anthropologique del’expression dans l’inédit Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression de Maurice Merleau-PontyL’article se consacre à une analyse ponctuelle du manuscrit inédit de Merleau-Ponty sur Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, aujourd’hui conservé à la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, et qui correspond au cours du philosophe au Collège de France durant l’année académique 1952-1953. L’analyse exclusive de l’inédit suit des perspectives bien précises : il s’agit de reconstruire, à partir d’une définition (...) merleau-pontienne originale de l’espace culturel comme espace anthropologique, ce qui pourrait ressembler à une nouvelle esthétique de l’expression d’origine anthropologique ; suivant le fil des analyses de La structure du comportement et de la Phénoménologie de la perception – non sans un remarquable sens critique vis-à-vis de ces textes des années quarante – cette analyse reconsidère la notion d’expression à la lumière de celle de mouvement. Les recherches merleau-pontiennes des années cinquante donc, – resquecontemporaines de La prose du monde et qui partagent avec celle-ci l’idée d’une origine saussurienne de la diacriticité des signes linguistiques – donnent naissance, selon nous, à une véritable esthétique du mouvement expressif, solidement fondée sur une philosophie de la biologie et sur une anthropologie philosophique. Au cours de l’article, de façon contextuelle et spontanée, on relie, de manière hypothétique, la pensée merleau-pontienne de ces années-là et celle de certains « auteurs fondamentaux » que Merleau-Ponty cite explicitement ou dont il reproduit la dynamique théorique : Helmuth Plessner, Aldolf Portmann, Jakob Von Uexküll, Friedrik J.J. Buytendijk, et en particulier – en raison de leur parenté philosophique évidente – Vicktor Von Weizsäcker, celui du Der Gestaltkreis et des écrits autobiographiques Anonyma.Perception, Body, and Movement. The Anthropological Aesthetics of Expression in Merleau-Ponty’s UnpublishedThe Sensible World and the World of ExpressionThe article is devoted to a point by point analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished manuscript on The Sensible World and the World of Expression, which is currently found in Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and which corresponds to the course he taught at the Collège de France in the academic year 1952-53. The analysis, exclusively of this unpublished course notes, follows some very precise directions. What is at issue is to reconstruct, on the basis of a definition, which is original with Merleau-Ponty, of cultural space as anthropological space; this definition could resemble a new aesthetic of expression which would have an anthropological origin. Then following the thread of analyses found in The Structure of Behavior and the Phenomenology of Perception – not without a noticeable critical stance in relation to these texts from the 1940s – my analysis considers the notion of expression in light of that movement. Merleau-Ponty investigations during the 1950s therefore – nearly contemporaneous with The Prose of the World and which share with it the idea of a Saussurean origin of the diacriticity of linguistic signs – give birth, in my view, to a genuine aesthetics of expressive movement, solidly grounded on a philosophy of biology and on a philosophical anthropology. Over the course of the article, in a way contextual and spontaneous, we reread, in a hypothetical way, Merleau-Ponty’s thought during this time period, and the thought of “fundamental writers” who Merleau-Ponty had cited explicitly or whose theoretical dynamism he had reproduced: Helmuth Plessner, Aldolf Portmann, Jakob Von Uexküll, Friedrik J.J. Buytendijk, and, in particular – because they are clearly related philosophically – Vicktor Von Weizsäcker, his Der Gestaltkreis and his autobiographical writings called Anonyma. (shrink)

Perception, corps et mouvement. L’esthétique anthropologique del’expression dans l’inédit Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression de Maurice Merleau-PontyL’article se consacre à une analyse ponctuelle du manuscrit inédit de Merleau-Ponty sur Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, aujourd’hui conservé à la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, et qui correspond au cours du philosophe au Collège de France durant l’année académique 1952-1953. L’analyse exclusive de l’inédit suit des perspectives bien précises : il s’agit de reconstruire, à partir d’une définition (...) merleau-pontienne originale de l’espace culturel comme espace anthropologique, ce qui pourrait ressembler à une nouvelle esthétique de l’expression d’origine anthropologique ; suivant le fil des analyses de La structure du comportement et de la Phénoménologie de la perception – non sans un remarquable sens critique vis-à-vis de ces textes des années quarante – cette analyse reconsidère la notion d’expression à la lumière de celle de mouvement. Les recherches merleau-pontiennes des années cinquante donc, – resquecontemporaines de La prose du monde et qui partagent avec celle-ci l’idée d’une origine saussurienne de la diacriticité des signes linguistiques – donnent naissance, selon nous, à une véritable esthétique du mouvement expressif, solidement fondée sur une philosophie de la biologie et sur une anthropologie philosophique. Au cours de l’article, de façon contextuelle et spontanée, on relie, de manière hypothétique, la pensée merleau-pontienne de ces années-là et celle de certains « auteurs fondamentaux » que Merleau-Ponty cite explicitement ou dont il reproduit la dynamique théorique : Helmuth Plessner, Aldolf Portmann, Jakob Von Uexküll, Friedrik J.J. Buytendijk, et en particulier – en raison de leur parenté philosophique évidente – Vicktor Von Weizsäcker, celui du Der Gestaltkreis et des écrits autobiographiques Anonyma.Perception, Body, and Movement. The Anthropological Aesthetics of Expression in Merleau-Ponty’s UnpublishedThe Sensible World and the World of ExpressionThe article is devoted to a point by point analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished manuscript on The Sensible World and the World of Expression, which is currently found in Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and which corresponds to the course he taught at the Collège de France in the academic year 1952-53. The analysis, exclusively of this unpublished course notes, follows some very precise directions. What is at issue is to reconstruct, on the basis of a definition, which is original with Merleau-Ponty, of cultural space as anthropological space; this definition could resemble a new aesthetic of expression which would have an anthropological origin. Then following the thread of analyses found in The Structure of Behavior and the Phenomenology of Perception – not without a noticeable critical stance in relation to these texts from the 1940s – my analysis considers the notion of expression in light of that movement. Merleau-Ponty investigations during the 1950s therefore – nearly contemporaneous with The Prose of the World and which share with it the idea of a Saussurean origin of the diacriticity of linguistic signs – give birth, in my view, to a genuine aesthetics of expressive movement, solidly grounded on a philosophy of biology and on a philosophical anthropology. Over the course of the article, in a way contextual and spontaneous, we reread, in a hypothetical way, Merleau-Ponty’s thought during this time period, and the thought of “fundamental writers” who Merleau-Ponty had cited explicitly or whose theoretical dynamism he had reproduced: Helmuth Plessner, Aldolf Portmann, Jakob Von Uexküll, Friedrik J.J. Buytendijk, and, in particular – because they are clearly related philosophically – Vicktor Von Weizsäcker, his Der Gestaltkreis and his autobiographical writings called Anonyma. (shrink)

In this paper, we study the distribution and interpretation of a non-temporal use of the future tense in Italian, called ‘presumptive’ or ‘epistemic’, which we label here PF. We first distinguish PF from its closest modal relatives, namely epistemic necessity/possibility/likelihood modals, as well as weak necessity modals. We then propose an account of PF in declaratives and interrogatives that treats it as a special comparative subjective likelihood modal, and test its empirical predictions. A theoretical lesson drawn from this detailed (...) study of the semantics of PF is that semantics needs sharpened theoretical tools to be able to capture the fine-grained distinctions languages make when it comes to signaling modulated epistemic commitment to a proposition. (shrink)

Negation can be considered a shared social action that develops since early infancy with very basic acts of refusals or rejection. Inspired by an approach to the embodiment of concepts known as Multiple Representation Theories, the present paper explores negation as an embodied action that relies on both sensorimotor and linguistic/social information. Despite the different variants, MRT accounts share the basic ideas that both linguistic/social and sensorimotor information concur to the processes of concepts formation and representation and that the balance (...) between these components depends on the kind of concept, the context, or the performed task. In the present research we will apply the MRT framework for exploring negation in Italian sign language. The nature of negation in LIS has been explored in continuity with the co-speech gesture where negative elements are encoded through differentiated prosodic and gestural strategies across languages. Data have been collected in naturalistic settings that may allow a much wider understanding of negation both in speech and in spoken language with a semi-structured interview. Five LIS participants with age range 30–80 were recruited and interviewed with the aim of understanding the continuity between gesture and sign in negation. Results highlight that negation utterances mirror the functions of rejection, non-existence and denial that have been described in language acquisition both in deaf and hearing children. These different steps of acquisition of negation show a different balance between sensorimotor, linguistic and social information in the construction of negative meaning that the MRT is able to enlighten. (shrink)

The present paper analyses discursive representations and standpoint-arguments pairs, realized in articles of four mainstream Italian newspapers that report on migrants’ and refugees’ mobilization at the perceived peak of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. We draw on the scholarly agenda of Critical Discourse Studies, employing tools from corpus linguistic perspectives, which allow us to generalize over the way in which the relevant minorities are represented in our corpus. Then, focusing on a smaller sample of negative representations, we outline a methodological (...) synthesis in order to scrutinize instances of representational meaning in newspapers articles and trace what is argumentatively inferred in discursive representations. To that end we exploit tools from systemic functional and cognitive linguistics as well as the Argumentum Model of Topics for the analysis of inference. In this sense, we demonstrate how discriminatory representations do not only portray migrants and refugees in a negative light but also justify discrimination through the argumentative dynamic they develop. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this study, we tested the linguistic relativity hypothesis by studying the effect of grammatical gender on affective judgments of conceptual representation in Italian and German. In particular, we examined the within- and cross-language grammatical gender effect and its interaction with participants’ demographic characteristics on semantic differential scales in Italian and German speakers. We selected the stimuli and the relative affective measures from Italian and German adaptations of the ANEW. Bayesian and frequentist analyses yielded evidence for the (...) absence of within- and cross-languages effects of grammatical gender and sex- and age-dependent interactions. These results suggest that grammatical gender does not affect judgments of affective features of semantic representation in Italian and German speakers, since an overt coding of word gram... (shrink)

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) spent most of his life as a private scholar in Naples. His Estetica, which first appeared in 1902, has remained a seminal work not only for aesthetics but also for general linguistics. As the full title indicates, this is not a narrow work dealing with the theory of art and criticism. For Croce intended this to be the first part of his "philosophy of the spirit" and he thus presents a systematic general (...) theory intended to solve all philosophical problems. The work presents an account of the structure of the human mind and shows how art arises naturally from that structure, as well as introducing the influential notion of the organic unity of a work of art. As a result, art is shown to be integral to any life and an essential aspect of what it is to be human. This new translation of the first and most important part of the work (Theory) supersedes the defective translation by D. Ainslie, first published in 1909. It is based on the most recent Italian edition (1990). In his foreword the translator addresses the difficulties in translating certain key words in the Italian original, "scienza", "fantasia", and of course, "estetica" itself. He also furnishes the reader with helpful explanatory annotation. This publication will be of cardinal importance for all those interested in the philosophy of art, the history of criticism, and the history of linguistics. (shrink)

Material Hermeneutics explores the ways that new imaging technologies and scientific instruments have changed our notions about ancient history. From the first lunar calendar to the black hole image, and from an ancient mummy in the Italian Alps to the irrigated valleys of Mesopotamia, this book demonstrates how revolutions in science have taught us far more than we imagined. Written by a leading philosopher of technology and utilising an interdisciplinary approach, this book has implications for many fields, including philosophy, (...) history, science and technology. It will appeal to scholars and students of the humanities, as well as anthropologists and archaeologists. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the interpretation of the Italian approximative adverb quasi 'almost' by primarily looking at cases in which it modifies temporal connectives, a domain which, to our knowledge, has been largely unexplored thus far. Consideration of this domain supports the need for a scalar account of the semantics of quasi (close in spirit to Hitzeman's semantic analysis of almost, in: Canakis et al. (eds) Papers from the 28th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1992). When paired (...) with suitable analyses of temporal connectives, such an account can provide a simple explanation of the patterns of implication that are observed when quasi modifies locational (e. g. quando 'when'), directional (e. g. fino 'until' and da 'since'), and event-sequencing temporal connectives (e. g. prima 'before' and dopo ' after'). A challenging empirical phenomenon that is observed is a contrast between the modification of fino and da by quasi, on the one hand, and the modification of prima and dopo by the same adverb, on the other. While quasi fino and quasi da behave symmetrically, a puzzling asymmetry is observed between quasi prima and quasi dopo. To explain the asymmetry, we propose an analysis of prima and dopo on which the former has the meaning of the temporal comparative più presto 'earlier', while the latter is seen as an atomic predicate denoting temporal succession between events (Del Prete, Nat Lang Semantics 16: 157-203, 2008). We show that the same pattern of implication observed for quasi prima is attested when quasi modifies overt comparatives, and propose a pragmatic analysis of this pattern that uniformly applies to both cases, thus providing new evidence for the claim that prima is underlyingly a comparative. A major point of this paper is a discussion of the notion of scale which is relevant for the semantics of quasi', in particular, we show that the notion of Horn (entailment-based) scale is not well-suited for handling modification of temporal connectives, and that a more general notion of scale is required in order to provide a uniform analysis of quasi as a cross-categorial modifier. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

In this paper we document the developmental trajectory of the complementizer system (CP-system) in Italian by looking at the earliest spontaneous production of eleven young children, whose transcriptions are available on CHILDES. We conducted a novel corpus analysis, tracking down a number of constructions in which the clausal left-periphery is activated. First, we considered the appearance of the different complementizer particles in the CP-system, which overtly realize the three distinct functional projections ForceP, IntP, and FinP. The analysis revealed that (...) children acquiring Italian correctly use these complementizer particles already in the third year of life. Second, we looked for the simultaneous activation of different functional projections within the CP-system. We went through our corpus searching for complex sentences in which more than one constituent was moved to the left periphery. This option is allowed by the adult grammar of Italian and, as our search revealed, it is also attested in the grammar of young children. Soon after their second birthday, sequences in which a left-dislocated Topic and a Wh- element co-occur are attested, directly supporting the existence of a (high) Topic position above FocusP. Moreover, movement in general conforms to the constraints of the adult grammar, with no attested violation of obligatory inversion (a consequence of the Q-Criterion). Importantly, “why-questions” did not require inversion, much as in the adult grammar of Italian. Taken together, children's use of complementizer particles and their activation of multiple landing sites for movement show that 2-year-olds already possess a richly articulated functional structure of the CP-system, aligned to the layered adult structure. In concluding the paper, we also discuss some temporal differences between constructions activating high and low portions of the CP-system. In particular, we detect a temporal precedence for wh-questions over why-questions. Since the former activate a lower projection, this is consistent with the recently proposedGrowing Treeshypothesis, according to which the development of the CP-system proceeds stepwise. (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)

Recent studies of Italian past definite and past participle forms show that human performance with regular and irregular inflections is not dissociated as Clahsen's model would predict. Some performance profiles, accounted for by dual-mechanism models in terms of an underlying symbol-manipulating combinatorial procedure, are generated in Italian by the higher learnability and generalizability of phonologically regular morphological processes.

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) spent most of his life as a private scholar in Naples. His Estetica, which first appeared in 1902, has remained a seminal work not only for aesthetics but also for general linguistics. As the full title indicates, this is not a narrow work dealing with the theory of art and criticism. For Croce intended this to be the first part of his 'philosophy of the spirit' and he thus presents a systematic general (...) theory intended to solve all philosophical problems. The work presents an account of the structure of the human mind and shows how art arises naturally from that structure, as well as introducing the influential notion of the organic unity of a work of art. As a result, art is shown to be integral to any life and an essential aspect of what it is to be human. (shrink)

The papers in this volume are contributions to a comparative semantics, understood in the context of the theory of Logical Form as a branch of comparative syntax. In contrastively exploring a wide range of languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Navajo, Spanish and Toba Batak, the authors provide new insights into our understanding of the nature of quantificational, WH and anaphoric phenomena, and into the form of constraints, including subjacency and ECP, on the structure of binding at (...) Logical Form. -- Back cover. (shrink)

This paper analyzes a non-temporal interpretation of the adverb sempre “always” in European Portuguese and Italian, in which the adverb expresses persistence of the truth of a proposition over time and displays specific contextual constraints (TP-sempre). Despite an overlap in the contexts in which TP-sempre may occur in both languages, we provide data showing that its distribution is not exactly the same in European Portuguese and Italian. In view of these data, we propose that TP-sempre is a modal (...) operator of confirmation in both languages, but that it is more restricted in Italian in that it has a plan presupposition only in this language. (shrink)

Context: Ernst von Glasersfeld collaborated with the Italian Operational School from the early 1960s when the project on the mechanization of higher human activities began. Problem: To analyze the cognitive processes in terms of a mnemonic-attentional dynamic and to study every thought content in light of the interdependence between observer and observed. Method: The project comprised two research areas: the linguistic translation, in which von Glasersfeld participated; and the semantic analysis of words, in which I participated. The common basis (...) was the analysis of attentional dynamisms. This allowed the syntactic complexity of a sentence to be transferred to the correlational structure of the thought. The semantic analysis, especially of the observational words, was based on the attentional dynamisms used for the categorization, perception, and representation processes. Results: The analysis of visual processes led to the “constitutive structures.” These structures allowed me to establish an operative didactic based on the awareness of mental operations. Implications: The comparison between von Glasersfeld’s and my experiences revealed the equivalence of some analyses, which was due to the common presumption that the experiential units depend on the operation performed by the perceiver. (shrink)