Italian: General Guide

Award-winning author Hermann W. Haller has prepared the first critical edition of A Worlde of Wordes, which features 46,000 Italian entries - among them dialect forms, erotic terminology, colloquial phrases, and proverbs of the Italian language.

This rigorously compiled A-Z volume offers rich, readable coverage of the diverse forms of post-1945 Italian culture. With over 900 entries by international contributors, this volume is genuinely interdisciplinary in character, treating traditional political, economic, and legal concerns, with a particular emphasis on neglected areas of popular culture. Entries range from short definitions, histories or biographies to longer overviews covering themes, movements, institutions and personalities, from advertising to fascism, and Pirelli to Zeffirelli.

The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studiesis a two-volume reference book containing some 600 entries on all aspects of Italian literary culture. It includes analytical essays on authors and works, from the most important figures of Italian literature to little known authors and works that are influential to the field.

The Development of Latin Post-Tonic /Cr/ Clusters in Select Northern Italian Dialects offers an explanation of the disparate outcomes of similar consonant clusters within several related Northern Italian dialects through application of optimality theory and frequency effects. It features a new approach to previously underrepresented phenomena in Italian dialectology in that it combines previously separated changes into one single theory. This volume is particularly useful for scholars within the fields of Romance languages and linguistics as well as for advanced students of the Italian language with an interest in dialects or advanced students of linguistics specializing in Romance languages or Italian.

This volume brings together the papers published in Historiographia Linguistica 9:3 (1982), which was devoted to the history of linguistics in Italy, with Marazzini's paper first published in Historiographia Linguistica 10:1/2 (1983), and an original article by Franco Lo Piparo expressly written for this volume. The present volume provides in addition an index of subjects, as well as an index of names, which supplies bio-bibliographical references to authors discussed.

This book examines the alternation between accusative-dative and dative-accusative order in Old Florentine clitic clusters and its decline in favor of the latter. Based on an exhaustive analysis of data collected from medieval Florentine and Tuscan texts we offer a novel analysis of the rise of the variable order, the transition from one order to the other, and the demise of the alternation that relies primarily on iconicity and analogy.The bookemploys exophoric pragmatic iconicity, a language-external iconic relationship based on similarity between linguistic structure and the speaker/writer's conceptualization of reality, and endophoric iconicity, a language-internal iconic relationship where the iconic ground is construed between linguistic signs and structures. Analogy is viewed as a productive process that generalizes patterns or extends grammatical rules to formally similar structures, and obtains the form of the analogical relationship between the masculine singular definite article and the third person singular accusative clitic, which shared the same phonotactically constrained distribution patterns. The data indicate that exophoric pragamatic iconicity exploits and maintains the alternation, whereas endophoric iconicity and analogy conspire to end it.

Morphology, and in particular word formation, has always played an important role in Romance linguistics since it was introduced in Diezâe(tm)s comparative Romance grammar. Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in inflectional morphology, and current research shows a strong interest in paradigmatic analyses. This volume brings together research exploring different areas of morphology from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. On an empirical basis, the theoretical assumption of the âe~Autonomy of Morphologyâe(tm) is discussed critically. âe~Data-drivenâe(tm) approaches carefully examine concrete morphological phenomena in Romance languages and dialects. Topics include syncretism and allomorphy in verbs, pronouns, and articles as well as the use of specific derivational suffixes in word formation. Together, the articles in this volume provide insights into issues currently debated in Romance morphology, appealing to scholars of morphology, Romance linguistics, and advanced students alike.

After reviewing, from a grammaticalization perspective, the main stages in the evolution of Italian object clitic pronouns, the book discusses the distinctive morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features of Italian clitics. In particular, the book offers an original study of the most common examples of so-called verbi procomplementari, verbs which are characterized by the incorporation of clitics that no longer function as pronouns, and which are widely used in present-day Italian. Their emergence involves both grammaticalization of the clitic pronoun into an obligatory element, and lexicalization of the verb+clitic sequence. This study is essentially descriptive and maximally data-driven. The discussion of grammaticalization and lexicalization is reduced to the essentials and aims primarily at defining how these terms, which have received different and at times divergent interpretations, are employed in the book. The book is accessible to a wide and varied readership, which includes Italian and Romance linguists of functional and formal orientation, Italian language scholars, grammaticalization scholars interested in new case studies, as well as students of language change and variation.

Deixis as a field of research has generated increased interest in recent years. It is crucial for a number of different subdisciplines: pragmatics, semantics, cognitive and contrastive linguistics, to name just a few. The subject is of particular interest to experts and students, philosophers, teachers, philologists, and psychologists interested in the study of their language or in comparing linguistic structures. The different deictic structures - not only the items themselves, but also the oppositions between them - reflect the fact that neither the notions of space, time, person nor our use of them are identical cross-culturally. This diversity is not restricted to the difference between languages, but also appears among related dialects and language varieties. This volume will provide an overview of the field, focusing on Romance languages, but also reaching beyond this perspective. Chapters on diachronic developments (language change), comparisons with other (non-)European languages, and on interfaces with neighboring fields of interest are also included. The editors and authors hope that readers, regardless of their familiarity with Romance languages, will gain new insights into deixis in general, and into the similarities and differences among deictic structures used in the languages of the world.

This book provides an overview of the phonology of Italian. It covers the different levels of analysis from individual sounds up to the phrasal level. It focuses on the most widely dispersed features of the language reflecting its significant regional and social variation and its most prominent regionally restricted patterns.Martin Krämer provides a critical survey of the generative literature on Italian phonology. He reports on current debates in the field, considers their particular and general theoretical interest, and provides both syntheses and original analyses.

This collection of essays addresses translation as an evolving thread that metaphorically represents the essence of contemporary society. As translation is the main tool for global information flow, the constant necessity of negotiating meanings evokes the complex issues of contact, interaction and change. Starting from a theoretical overview of Translation Studies, the volume explores the development and main changes that have characterized the field in the contemporary world, with a specific focus on the concepts of translation as hybridity, as a basis for sustaining intercultural communication and translation as cultural mediation. The essays provide an updated look at English/Italian translation across genres and cover a wide range of topics including linguistic typology; language appropriation, adaptation, manipulation and rewriting in literature and music; elusiveness and ambiguity in legal texts; humour and culture-bound language in audiovisual translation.

This volume offers novel insights into linguistic diversity in the domains of spatial and temporal reference, searching for uniformity amongst diversity. A number of authors discuss expression of dynamic spatial relations cross-linguistically in a vast range of typologically different languages such as Bezhta, French, Hinuq, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Serbian, and Spanish, among others. The contributions on linguistic expression of time all shed new light on pertinent questions regarding this cognitive domain, such as the hotly debated relationship between cross-linguistic differences in talking about time and universal principles of utterance interpretation, modelling temporal inference through aspectual interactions, as well as the complexity of the acquisition of tense-aspect relations in a second language. The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Language, culture, and cognition (HCP 37) which discusses spatial and temporal constructs in human language, cognition, and culture in order to come closer to a better understanding of the interaction between shared and individual characteristics of language and culture that shape the way people interact with each other and exchange information about the spatio-temporal constructs that underlie their cognitive, social, and linguistic foundations.

This book was first published in 2010. The study of Romance languages can tell us a great deal about sentence structure and its variation in general. Focusing on the dialects of Italy - including the islands of Sardinia and Sicily - the authors explore three thematic areas: the nominal domain, the verbal domain and the left periphery of the clause. The book gives fresh attention to the dialects, arguing that they offer an unprecedented degree of variation (not found, for example, in Germanic languages). Analysing a host of data, the authors show how the dialects can be used as a test-bed for investigating and challenging received ideas about language structure and change. Coherent and wide-ranging, this is a vital resource for those working in syntactic theory, historical linguistics and Romance languages.