Search results for "linguistica"

Two Types of pseudo-clefts?

2010

Sentences such as 'What Fred does is complain' and 'What Fred does is important' have both been labeled as pseudo-clefts, though of two distinct types. We provide four tests to structurally distinguish such constructions. Entailment patterns and a number of structural ties between the post-copular constituent and specific constituents of the pre-copular relative clause suggest using the label ‘pseudo-cleft’ for the former type only. This paper also examines certain cases of pseudo-clefts with no simple correlates, and vice versa, to argue – contra Higgins 1973 – that these do not necessarily contradict the existence of a structural connection (a transformation, in the sense of Z. S. Harris)…

Starting from the Origin: the Early Latin preposition de (and its companions)

2015

This paper explores the semantic network of the Early Latin preposition de (“from”) on the basis of an extensive investigation of the electronic corpus of Comedies by Plautus and Cato’s de Agricoltura, which represent a substantial sample of the oldest Latin attestations in an extensive and non-fragmentary form. Our approach is heavily based on Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987; 1991; Luraghi 2003), although we complement it with considerations on the use of prepositions in Latin elaborated in the framework of Functional Grammar (Pinkster 1990; 1991), as well as with arguments proposed in Linguistic Typology (Croft 1991). This approach allows an explicative account of the interconnections a…

Spatial Frames of Reference in Old Latin

This paper investigates the spatial Frames of Reference (FoRs) in Old Latin within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics (cf. Talmy 1983; Levinson 2003; Levinson & Wilkins 2006). Differently from modern Indo-European languages, which are heavily based on the so-called relative or egocentric FoR, ancient Indo-European languages such as Vedic and Homeric Greek did not make use of such an egocentric orientation system at their earliest stage, since the relation between FIGURE and GROUND was not specified by imposing an external deictic observer’s viewpoint (cf. Bartolotta 2018; 2021). The historical-comparative analysis of the most ancient literary texts in the Indo-European tradition giv…

Aspectual suppletion and paradigm defectiveness in the Proto-Indo-European verbal system

2009

The existence of suppletion in the Proto-Indo-European language is still a question of debate (García Ramón 2002). While the evidence for such a phenomenon has been widely recognized within the verbal system of most Indo-European languages, some scholars describe it as a recent monoglot development which characterizes the history of each single language without involving a previous common stage (Van der Laar 2000). According to Strunk (1977), the hypothesis of a PIE suppletive paradigm based on the alternation of basic verbal root pairs such as *es-: *bhū- “be”, or *ei/i-: *gwā/ gwem- “go”, must be ruled out because it violates what he calls b-criterium, i.e. the complementary distribution …

On temporal deixis and cognitive models in early Indo-European

2013

Crosslinguistic evidence suggest that there are two different (often coexistent) basic cognitive models for time, on the basis of which the world’s languages express time in terms of conceptual metaphor from the source spatial domain to the target temporal domain: i) the Time-based (Time-Reference-Point) model, in which time is conceptualized in terms of sequentially arrayed objects moving in space, so that a temporal event is relative to another earlier or later temporal event; ii) the Ego-based (Ego-Reference-Point) model, which is considered to have a more complex structure in which times are conceptualized as objects relative to a canonical deictic observer (Ego) located at the hic et n…

The Tense-Aspect system between ontogeny and phylogeny: Evidence from the Proto-Indo-European “Injunctive”

2006

This paper examines early inflectional morphology related to the tense-aspect system of Pre-Indo-European by establishing a correlation between ontogeny and phylogeny in language acquisition and development. It will be argued that historical linguistics can shed light on the long-standing debate over the emergence of tense-aspect morphology. More specifically, the so-called Injunctive forms, which are assumed to be the most ancient verbal inflected items tracing back to the Pre-Indo-European language (see, among others, Lehmann 2002), permit us to infer that the initial grammar of the Proto-language was lacking tense morphology. In other words, the residual category of the Injunctive, which…

Towards a reconstruction of Indo-European culture: semantic functions of IE *men-

2002

Indo-European language reconstruction has allowed us to advance some hypotheses with regard to possible reconstructing cultural contents of what has been defined “Indo-European ideology” (Campanile 1992). The method of textual comparison, which compares no longer and not merely single lexical items or single syntactic constructions, but the whole literary systems too, is able to bring out linguistic and extra-linguistic reference contexts. The interest in reconstructing the Indo-European “basic lexicon” is renewed in the light of recent typological criteria of root classification (according to their active or stative meaning): the focus today is on drawing up the so-called “global etymologi…

L'inafferrabile criminale! Il punto (e gli altri segni) su Diabolik

2019

Analisi della punteggiatura in due fascicoli distanti alcuni decenni della pubblicazione a fumetti Diabolik, come esempio dell'evoluzione dei sistemi di punteggiatura di varietà dell'italiano scritto

Recensione a: A. Colobo (a cura di), Il curriculo e l'educazione linguistica

2007

Discontinuity as defocusing. A cognitive interpretation of the so-called discontinuous reciprocal constructions

2011

I intend to analyze a peculiar kind of reciprocal construction, in which the natural symmetry of the complex event is split due both to the defocusing of one participant (O), coded as a comitative, and the foregrounding of the other one (A), coded as a subject controlling the agreement with the verb. This construction (“discontinuous reciprocal construction”, Dimitriadis 2004), involves a “natural reciprocity” (Kemmer 1993) or “mutual configuration” (Haspelmath 2007) of the event (kissing, marring, meeting). Found in many languages, it is well attested in Italian too, both at standard level and at the informal one (1), alongside the prototypical reciprocal one (2): 1. Gianni si sposa/incont…