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The expression of time is fundamental in communication and languages have developed a variety of means to encode temporal relations. When learning a new language, learners are often faced with the challenging task of discovering a new system of temporal relations. The present study investigates the development of tense and aspect marking in the interlanguage of L3 Italian learners enrolled in university language courses. It examines how the tense-aspect system develops in the interlanguage and how the acquisition process is shaped by factors such as the lexical aspectual value of the predicates and discourse grounding. The data indicate that both lexical aspect and discourse grounding influe...
This book is a collection of innovative studies on language contact. It contains novel works on unexplored issues related to language contact in different settings and aims to contribute multi-perspective insights to the current state of the art on language contact. Novel approaches to contact-related change, variation, attrition, and emergence of new varieties are explored from the lens of sociolinguistic, typological, synchronic, and diachronic perspectives. The contact settings vary from official and majority languages to minority, endangered and/or non-official varieties in different parts of the world.
What can stories of magical engraved rings or prophetic inscriptions on walls tell us about how writing was perceived before print transformed the world? Writing beyond Pen and Parchment introduces readers to a Middle Ages where writing is not confined to manuscripts but is inscribed in the broader material world, in textiles and tombs, on weapons or human skin. Drawing on the work done at the Collaborative Research Centre “Material Text Cultures,” (SFB 933) this volume presents a comparative overview of how and where text-bearing artefacts appear in medieval German, Old Norse, British, French, Italian and Iberian literary traditions, and also traces the paths inscribed objects chart across multiple linguistic and cultural traditions. The volume’s focus on the raw materials and practices that shaped artefacts both mundane or fantastical in medieval narratives offers a fresh perspective on the medieval world that takes seriously the vibrancy of matter as a vital aspect of textual culture often overlooked.
In this collection of six scholarly essays on the Italian language, Giulio Lepschy discusses issues ranging from Italian literary and spoken history to prosody and a play of the Italian Renaissance.
In many European languages the National Standard Variety is converging with spoken, informal, and socially marked varieties. In Italian this process is giving rise to a new standard variety called Neo-standard Italian, which partly consists of regional features. This book contributes to current research on standardization in Europe by offering a comprehensive overview of the re-standardization dynamics in Italian. Each chapter investigates a specific dynamic shaping the emergence of Neo-standard Italian and Regional Standard Varieties, such as the acceptance of previously non-standard features, the reception of Old Italian features excluded from the standard variety, the changing standard la...
In recent years, prosodic competence has become increasingly important in second language acquisition studies, as it is a crucial element in the identification of non-native pronunciation and message understanding. This volume is the first attempt to provide a survey of interlanguage prosody research in L2 Italian. It begins with an overview of the possible approaches to the study of rhythmic-prosodic skills acquisition in an L2. The second part of the book emphasizes the relationship between the mother tongue and a second language, and investigates the presence of transfer in prosody interlanguage development. The third part illustrates prosody’s role in the interpretation of pragmatic meaning in native-non-native interaction, and its influence on message persuasiveness. And in the fourth part, technology meets prosody in the areas of second language teaching and speech synthesis.
This collection of critical essays addresses literary discourses on the mobility of women writers in various Atlantic regions of Europe. These literary systems (Ireland, Galicia, and Wales) experienced a rebirth in the second half of the twentieth century through their respective modern cultural artefacts, and the first decades of the present century have seen new research exploring emergent literatures in Europe, new European identities on the move, and even the dialogue between the various cultures of the Atlantic archipelago. This book centres on women writers and how they deal in their work with the issue of mobility. Authors and critics have tended to analyse travel by focusing on the t...
Analyzing the literature on art from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, The Spiritual Language of Art explores the complex relationship between visual art and spiritual experiences during the Italian Renaissance. Though scholarly research on these writings has predominantly focused on the influence of classical literature, this study reveals that Renaissance authors consistently discussed art using terms, concepts and metaphors derived from spiritual literature. By examining these texts in the light of medieval sources, greater insight is gained on the spiritual nature of the artist’s process and the reception of art. Offering a close re-readings of many important writers (Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari, etc.), this study deepens our understanding of attitudes toward art and spirituality in the Italian Renaissance.
Investigating the interrelationships between orality and writing in elite and popular textual culture in early modern Italy, this volume shows how the spoken or sung word on the one hand, and manuscript or print on the other hand, could have interdependent or complementary roles to play in the creation and circulation of texts. The first part of the book centres on performances, ranging from realizations of written texts to improvisations or semi-improvisations that might draw on written sources and might later be committed to paper. Case studies examine the poems sung in the piazza that narrated contemporary warfare, commedia dell'arte scenarios, and the performative representation of the d...