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This book explores the linguistic expression of identity, intended as the social positioning of self and others, by focusing mostly on a scenario of prolonged language contact, namely the ancient Mediterranean area. The volume includes studies on language contact and on identity strategies developed at different levels of analysis, from phonetics to pragmatics, in, among others, Latin, Greek, Coptic, Syriac, (Cypriot) Arabic, Medieval Sardinian.
The notion of light verb constructions has been traditionally related to the ‘insignificance’ of the verb, which is described as a grammatical item only codifying TAM system and φ-features, whereas the whole predicative content is thought to be conveyed by the noun. This book deals with the light verb constructions as instances of complex verbs, intended as multi-predicational but monoclausal structures. This allows to deepen the actual verb lightness, the effective noun predicativity, as well as their effect on the cohesion of the construction. The papers in this volume reflect on the concrete contribution of noun and verb to the event and argument structure, and on the relevance of se...
Since the first written documents in the history of mankind (produced at the end of the 4th millennium BC), translation has always played a pivotal role in human societies. Translators were needed whenever the need for contact between different-speaking communities arose, such as for the purposes of communication, commerce, and declarations of war, or peace. Translation is even more important in today’s world. Globalization has brought the nations of the Earth closer, to the extent that books, movies and television programs released or aired far away in the world are just a click of the mouse away. However, such cultural products still have to be translated in order to be enjoyed by a wide...
Pathos as Communicative Strategy in Late-Medieval Religious Drama and Art explores the strategies employed to trigger emotional responses in late-medieval dramatic texts from several Western European traditions, and juxtaposes these texts with artistic productions from the same areas, with an emphasis on Britain. The aim is to unravel the mechanisms through which pathos was produced and employed, mainly through the representation of pain and suffering, with mainly religious, but also political aims. The novelty of the book resides in its specific linguistic perspective, which highlights the recurrent use of words, structures and dialogic patterns in drama to reinforce messages on the salvific value of suffering, in synergy with visual messages produced in the same cultural milieu.
This volume is a collection of 12 papers which originated from a research project on 'Europe and the Mediterranean from a linguistic point of view: history and prospects'. The papers deal with specific morphosyntactic aspects of language structure and evolution. The comparative perspective is adopted both from a synchronic (typological) and a diachronic (historical) angle, focusing in particular on possible contact phenomena. Therefore, methodological key words of this book are areal typology and linguistic area. The issues addressed cover such diverse aspects of language structure and change as verb morphology, relative clause formation, Noun Phrase determination, demonstrative systems, possessive markers in Noun Phrases, conjunctive, disjunctive and adversative constructions, non-canonical object marking, impersonal constructions, reduplication and early translations of the Gospels. These topics are discussed particularly in relation to Romance, Germanic, Celtic and Semitic languages, both modern and ancient. This book will interest researchers in typological, historical, functional and general linguistics.
Is grammatical gender merely stored as a syntactic property of nouns, or is it computed according to a noun’s semantic, morphological and phonological properties every time it is required? In many languages, gender appears to resist systematic treatment and can even cause problems for non-native learners. Native speakers of these languages appear to have no difficulty in assigning the correct grammatical gender to thousands of nouns in their language. Being an offshoot of Arabic, Maltese inherited a system comprising two gender categories, masculine and feminine. Numerous nouns were introduced in Maltese through contact with Sicilian and subsequently with Italian, two languages that also h...
This handbook explores multiple facets of the study of word classes, also known as parts of speech or lexical categories. These categories are of fundamental importance to linguistic theory and description, both formal and functional, and for both language-internal analyses and cross-linguistic comparison. The volume consists of five parts that investigate word classes from different angles. Chapters in the first part address a range of fundamental issues including diversity and unity in word classes around the world, categorization at different levels of structure, the distinction between lexical and functional words, and hybrid categories. Part II examines the treatment of word classes acr...
This volume includes fourteen original articles, written by a diverse group of distinguished scholars in honor of Philip Baldi (Penn State University). The contributions all focus on some aspect of classical linguistics, by which is meant Latin, Greek, Etruscan, and Indo-European. Some focus more on historical linguistic issues, while others deal with synchronic grammatical or semantic problems. The volume also offers a complete bibliography of the works of Philip Baldi, as well as a personal sketch.