Search results for " LINGUISTICA"

The use of gerunds and infinitives in perceptive constructions

2016

In this article I compare the use of gerunds with perceptive verbs in Spanish and in Gardenese, a Rhaeto-Romance variety spoken in Northern Italy: perceptive gerunds are used as secondary predicates in Spanish, but as defective TP-complements in Gardenese. Following Rizzi’s (2014) account of parametric variation, I propose that the differences are due to the interplay of three parameters: a [+progressive] feature on Gardenese perception verbs, the pure lexical status of perception verbs in Gardenese and a [+Agreement] feature on Spanish gerunds. The discussion of the parameters involved leads to more general considerations, as a new proposal for the structure of perceptive ECMs in Romance, …

About the Use of Tag Questions in Andean Spanish

2021

This paper aims to describe the use of tag questions in the variety of Andean Spanish spoken in Bolivia. In particular, it explores the tag questions that occur in the Corpus oral del español hablado por bilingües de aymara-español. The analysis consists of two levels. On the one hand, it describes the pragmatic functions of tag questions and identifies the correlation between their distribution and their pragmatic functions. On the other hand, it focuses on the impact that social factors (the speakers’ sex, age, and education) have on the frequency of the tags. Along these lines, it displays the lack of a general sociolinguistic trend in the use of tag questions, furthermore, it shows that…

"Il Gattopardo", "Le Guépard", "Der Leopard", "The Leopard"

2009

Present participles in the new Gothic palimpsest

2015

A new Gothic text has recently been discovered and it is contained in a palimpsest bifolium of the Archive of the Board of Trustees of San Petronio’s Basilica in Bologna. Two scholars of Milan, R. Bianca Finazzi and Paola Tornaghi, have studied the palimpsest. The author received their paper directly from the two colleagues, who had received word of the interest the discovery of the new Gothic text had kindled in him. In his examination of the text, the author was able to find two cases confirming and one supplementing what he had written in Melazzo (1992) about the two different Gothic forms of the nominative singular of the present participle in the masculine, of which one ends in -ndaand…

Considerazioni sulla grafia dei testi volgari romanzi in caratteri greci

2008

Grammatica, didattica linguistica, tecniche di scoperta

2021

The study of grammar is not a source of enthusiasm for those who learn a language and the teaching of grammar often frustrates those who teach it. As a consequence, in learning and teaching motivations and results are negatively affected. A lively debate exists on the strategies to be employed in the teaching of grammar and in the metalanguage which teachers use in classrooms. Without the pretense of solving the knots of such debate, this book concretely indicates how an experimental method, made up of observations and reasoning, can be didactically stimulating and profitable.

L’occhio della mente. Un’eredità indoeuropea nei poemi omerici

2002

Introduction

2014

Studying Ancient Greek offers new insights for linguistic theory. Thanks to the amount of available written data of a large corpus at our disposal, it is possible for a linguist to test hypotheses from modern theories in order to explain language phenomena, without disregarding a description according to methodologies adopted in traditional analyses of ancient languages. In particular, the morphological complexity of the Greek verb with its highly intricate inflectional system provide a valuable basis for an in-depth-analysis of the mechanisms which regulate the functioning of a language in the mind of the speaker. Crucially, in recent times also deductive methodologies adopted in the gener…

Homeric Evidences of an Inherently Actional Opposition: ἔρχομαι vs ἦλθον

2020

The paper aims at analyzing the paradigmatic relationship between the verbs ἔρχομαι and ἦλθον in Homeric Greek. Both verbs convey the idea of going within a Homeric suppletive paradigm. Although suppletivism between ἔρχομαι, εἶμι, ἐλεύσομαι (future), ἦλθον (aorist), εἰλήλουθα (perfect) is generally accepted, there is still uncertainty on both etymology and semantic features involving inherent actionality, with particular reference to ἔρχομαι. Therefore, the actional status of ἔρχομαι and its relationship with ἦλθον need further investigation. A textual analysis of the Homeric occurrences of both ἔρχομαι and ἦλθον, focusing on the semantic-syntactic discourse context, has shed light on their…

Sulla corporeità del processo cognitivo nei poemi omerici: il caso di μαίνομαι

2019

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the striking connection between, on the one hand, the cognitive process in Homer and, on the other, the verb μαίνομαι (and the forms from the perfect stem μεμον-/μεμα-), which represents the ultimate example of Ancient Greek verb conveying the idea of “raging, being furious/mad/insane”. Besides those common meanings, the analysis of the Iliad and the Odyssey shows that the semantic complexity of μαίνομαι actually includes the idea of “thinking”, due to the inner polysemy of the IE root *men-, to which the verb at issue traces back, as well as the Homeric lack of distinction between body and mind. More specifically, the verb also refers to a range of…