Search results for "Linguistica"

Some Reflections on the Gothic Optative

2015

The verbal systems of the earliest Indo-European languages are not so congruous with one another as the nominal paradigms. The reconstruction of IE is conformably fraught with far greater difficulty, and there is plenty of room for doubt. In this paper a particular morph will be dealt with, which does not go back as such to Indo-European. The proto-language must have possessed the linguistic unit employed in Gothic to form the verbal endings that are discussed here. Traces of this unit are found in other IE languages, as a matter of fact, and Gothic has utilized it in its own way. The issue will be discussed inside what is called the Greco-Aryan model. Indeed, based chiefly on Greek and San…

From Thinking to Raging: Reflexes of Indo-European *men- Polysemy in Homer

2020

This paper aims at investigating the semantic value of the verb μαίνομαι “to rage, to be furious” in Homeric Greek, in order to clarify the striking semantic relationship between the common ‘irrational’ meaning of the verb and the original ‘rational’ meaning of the Indo-European root *men- “to think”, to which the verb traces back. The corresponding words for μαίνομαι in other Indo-European languages (e.g. OInd. mányatē; Av. mainyeite; OIr. (do)moiniur; OCS mъnjo; Lit. miniu) can be translated as “to think”, thus showing an opposite meaning. From a textual analysis of all the occurrences of μαίνομαι in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the study aims at finding semantic traces of the original mean…

Homeric k-aorists and/or k-perfects?

2013

In classical Greek the aorist indicatives of dído:mi, je:mi, and títhe:mi end in -ka, -kas, -ke following a long vowel in the singular. Homeric Greek utilizes k-forms, both augmented and non-augmented, of these three verbs, and attests to third person plural forms ending in -kan and even to a first person plural form such as êne:kamen. There is a broad consensus regarding these forms as typical of Greek, while their relation to the k-perfect is still discussed. The paper considers the -k- to have a phonetic origin deriving from a laryngeal root,viz from *h1 or *h3, when they come into contact with *h2,the laryngeal of *-h2e, the ancient first person singular ending of the original perfect. …

"Tea for two": the Archive of the Italian Latinity of the Middle Ages meets the CLARIN infrastructure

2020

This paper aims at showing how integrating the Archive of the Italian Latinity of the Middle Ages (ALIM) into the ILC4CLARIN repository can provide mutual benefits. Making ALIM available to a large community of scholars and researchers, on the one side, represents the first step to reduce the lack of resources for Medieval Latin in CLARIN and, on the other side, constitutes an unprecedented contribution to not only linguistic investigations, but also to the studies of the culture and science at the basis of the Western European society. The paper describes the adopted approach aiming to keep intact the structure of the archive and its metadata, which are both accurately mirrored into the IL…

Lingue e culture della montagna: le Madonie nell’esperienza dell’Atlante Linguistico della Sicilia (ALS)

2015

The cultural context of the Madonie — a hilly and mountainous territory near Palermo with about 60,000 inhabitants distributed in 22 little villages, some of which overlook the Tyrrhenian Sea — results from the influence of three external areas (those surrounding three of the most important towns in Sicily: Palermo, Caltanissetta, and Messina). The most relevant effect of such a complex multidirectional influence is the presence of three different micro-areas, each marked by different linguistic and cultural peculiarities. Since a situation of complex and “ordered” ethnolinguistic variability may be observed in the Madonie, the area and its micro-areas are currently investigated in a resear…

Sorella neve. Anatomia dell'intellettuale di riporto

2010

Excursus storico sul mito metropolitano dei cento nomi della neve presso gli Inuit

Ipocoristici italiani di nuovo conio

2021

this essay examines hypocoristica in Italian by drawing a comparison between one of the traditional models and an innovative one. In recent decades the latter has grown in importance and has thus become hegemonic in everyday language. the diachronic, historical, and sociolinguistic aspects of this innovation are discussed along with a functional and formal analysis and a number of related empirical and theoretical issues.

Synonymy: The unbearable ficklness of meaning

2010

Standard definitions of synonymy become problematic under close scrutiny of nouns occurring in two contexts of Italian: clauses with Negative Polarity Items and noun phrases with Complex Nominal Determiners. Such nouns are non-referring expressions, do not carry literal meaning, often give rise to metaphor and intensity, and preclude decomposition into elementary semantic features as conceived in Componential Analysis. The inconsequence of semantic features and a number of syntactic constraints suggest that these nouns are best analyzed as parts of multi-word expressions working as function phrases.

Ragionando sull’insegnamento dell’italiano come lingua non materna

2014

Un’idea di lingua: modelli, teorie e prospettive acquisizionali

2014

La questione del dialogo e della concreta cooperazione tra didattica della L2 e linguistica acquisizionale resta – nella pratica delle classi più che nell’ambito della riflessione teorica – aperta. E resta aperta, se non addirittura problematica, tanto sul piano metodologico (che cosa deve fare un docente per migliorare le capacita naturali di acquisizione?), quanto su quello dei contenuti linguistici che dovrebbero essere parte attiva della competenza del docente (che cosa deve sapere un docente d’italiano come lingua non materna?). L’articolo focalizza l’attenzione sul profilo delle competenze teorico-linguistiche del docente d’italiano come lingua non materna, così come esso è delineato …