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The relationship between genetic inheritance and recent innovation, and between parallel evolutions and specific particularizations of related languages, is difficult to reduce to an acceptable analytical scheme. No matter how efficient the research methods, specialists cannot firmly decide whether a certain phenomenon can be framed within a relatively linear historical evolution, with visible marks of expected filiations, or is the result of general language laws, acting through specific mechanisms on the phonetic, lexicosemantic, grammatical and pragmatic-stylistic manifestations of languages. Among the strange, difficult phenomena, hard to fit into the morphological systems of languages, at least through some particularities, is, alongside interjections and onomatopoeias, for example, the “perfect passive participle,” as it has been codified in grammars over time. With ambiguous belonging and manifestations – verb and adjective, with possibilities of substantivization, adverbialization etc., with a permanent predisposition to evade the rigour of morphological, syntactic and semantic paradigms, the passive participle seems to carry with it its entire versatility, protean, creative and expressive character – from Indo-European to Ancient Greek and Latin, and from there, into the Romance languages, including Romanian. But we are not very sure that it did not reinvent each time, with small particularities in each language, in accordance with certain springs of human thought and speech, difficult to penetrate at this stage of the development of sciences. In fact, the “oddities” of the participle manifest themselves in other languages as well – not only in Latin and Romance ones and not only in Indo-European languages…

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Copyright of Etudes Romanes de Brno is the property of Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This contribution aims at illustrating the history of the Walser community of Gressoney (Aosta, Italy), where a language belonging to the dialectal space of the Highest Alemannic is still spoken today. The Titsch language, unfortunately, is not only undergoing the influence of the surrounding Romance languages, but its speakers are also disappearing, and a generational change is currently lacking. Secondly, a first scientific description of the phonetic and phonological system of this variety is provided, as well as some peculiar morphosyntactic and lexical characteristics. Finally, some of the most important projects that the scientific community is carrying out for the preservation and valorization of the Titsch language are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we will start from a suggestion taken from Kayne’s proposal (2016) about silent heads, in order to analyse the structure of some specific adverbial PPs in different languages. It will be argued that behind certain manner constructions consisting of a preposition plus an adjective may lie a full nominal phrase, whose head is generally – but not exclusively – silent. This study will show that there is a cross-linguistic tendency to create manner expressions using a nominal head meaning ‘way’ or ‘manner’, and also that this head may change diachronically, either becoming silent to form idiomatic expressions, or being reanalysed and grammaticalised into a productive adverbial suffix.

Copyright of Cuadernos de Filología Italiana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article deals with the treatment of phrasal verbs in the dictionaries of the Trentino dialects, where the sequence verb + locative was - and is still - used widely. An introductory paragraph briefly illustrates the spread of phrasal verbs formed with a locative particle in the Romance languages, and particularly in Italian and in the dialects of Northern Italy. In the second paragraph, eight lexicographical Trentino works are examined, five of which have a digital version. The selected dictionaries, written during the last decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st, cover different areas of Trentino. For each work, the analysis focuses on how phrasal verbs are presented in the macro- and the microstructure. The review shows that all authors provide a rich exemplification of phrasal verbs, but only two present these phraseological units systematically and exhaustively. However, the dictionaries that have an online version offer the possibility of an automatic search which makes up for the absence of a coherent registration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relationship between Classical and Romance philology and methods in linguistic historiography usually adopted in both fields. After an introduction devoted to the relations between the two disciplines in the field of textual criticism, it considers the problem of historical periodization (of Classical and Romance languages), the use of some key terms present in both fields, such as koiné and dialect, and finally the notion of literary vs. non-literary text in its different meaning in the two fields of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the development of a multilingual online dictionary for the Romance languages, called DiCoRom, using an integrative, cross-lingual and pedagogical approach. The dictionary would be based on the database structure and user interface of the existing lexicographic project PORTLEX. The objectives of DiCoRom, its target users and the necessary adaptations to the database and interface are discussed. The paper shows how the structure of PORTLEX can serve as a basis for another lexicographic project, but emphasises the need to redesign the interface to take account of the pedagogical and social orientation of DiCoRom, including the organisation of data and the inclusion of accessible examples for beginners.

The influence of Latin, since the Middle Ages, in shaping Romance languages as vehicles for the expression of discourse traditions characteristic of conceptual scripturality (cf. Koch/Oesterreicher 1990 [2011]) has been analysed from different perspectives by Romance Linguistics scholars. Elaboration processes (Ausbau in German, cf. Kloss 1978) are responsible for the development of the mechanisms needed in vernacular languages to access the domain of communicative distance, which remained for many centuries exclusively reserved for Latin. During the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, the use of Latin became increasingly restricted and was already limited in the 16th century mainly to liturgical manifestations, science, learned literature and international diplomacy. As Latin was excluded from oral communicative interactions, Erasmus’ Christian humanism advocated the recovery of Latin as an effective instrument of communication among Europe’s cultivated youth. The author’s most famous work during his lifetime, the Colloquia familiaria, was conceived as a manual of conversational formulas and motifs to encourage the use of Latin among the European cultured elite of the early 16th century. Although the Erasmian endeavour did not succeed, the influence of the Dutch scholar on vernacular literatures propitiated the triumph of strategies suitable for the textualisation of orality based on the Erasmian Latin model, which led to a manifestation of the ideal of ‘natural style’ (cf. Del Rey 2015b) that is common to numerous European Renaissance authors. In this paper, we reflect on the importance of Erasmus’ influence on the shaping of literary dialogue in the Romance languages of the Early Modern Period (cf. Burke 1989). Important metalinguistic reflections of some of the most relevant authors of the time, such as Baldassare Castiglione and Juan de Valdés (cf. Gauger 1996, Bustos 2011), are also considered with the aim of understanding the influence of Erasmus on their writing and, consequently, the importance of the Dutch author in the evolution of style in vernacular languages in Early Modern Period Europe.

After the Chinese and the Hindu, Spanish is the language with the highest number of native speakers in the world. Mexico is by far the country with the largest Spanish-speaking population. As such, the “mexican Spanish” is called to be the “koiné” or standard dialect. In a way, this happened due to its expansion to the United States and by the development of Mexico’s cultural industry over the last 70 years, which reached the whole of Latin America. This article explores the history of Spanish in the New World as well as its inherent historical and cultural values.

The oldest sermons in a romance language – the Sermoni Limosini, the Homilies d’Organyà, the Homilies de Tortosa, the Sermoni Subalpini, the vernacular sermons of Maurice de Sully – all date around the second half of the 12th century (discounting the so-called sermon “of Valenciennes”). The essay offers a compared analysis of the texts, focussing on the structure of both the collections as a whole, and of the individual sermons, and discussing their style and the occurrence of bilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the pragmatic and syntactic properties of the Italian discourse marker guarda, with comparative observations with its equivalents in other Romance languages and in English. In addition to an overview of its discourse function(s), the syntactic analysis of guarda is provided, based on its distribution (initial, medial, final position), the type of sentence in which it may occur (declarative, interrogative, imperative), and its morphological form (inflected, uninflected). Two different particles guarda should be assumed, one occurring in sentence-initial and the other in sentence-internal position. Sentence-final guarda is subsumed under the latter case by syntactic derivation, i.e., the proposition moves to the left of guarda as it does with right-dislocated constituents. Crosslinguistic evidence suggests that discourse markers are sensitive to the sentence type on a par with modal particles, pace Waltereit and Detges (2007). Sentence-internal (including sentence-final) guarda is indeed sensitive to the type of sentence in which it occurs. It is also suggested that the pragmaticalisation of guarda from verb to discourse marker may be considered to be a synchronic process and not necessarily a diachronic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarly activity of Gerhard Rohlfs represents an indispensable legacy for all scholars of Romance languages. His most important works are dictionaries and linguistic studies on the regions of Calabria, Apulia and Lucania, together with his Historische Grammatik der italienischen Sprache und ihrer Mundarten (1949-1954), translated and published in Italian during the following decade with the title Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti (1966-1969). The importance of these contributions lies in a) the fact that they have provided excellent dictionaries and linguistic studies on the regions of Southern Italy, attracting renewed attention of scholars towards the linguistic history of Southern Italy; b) the author’s extraordinary ability to establish an extremely fruitful and direct contact with those strata of Italian society that have usually remained alien to any dialogue with university culture (Varvaro 1991, p. 141); c) a way of research which combines the historical-comparative method of neogrammatic descent with geolinguistic research (Tomasin 2017, p. 163). In this regard, the present contribution will draw a compendium of the experiences and factors that have helped shape the composite research profile of Gerhard Rohlfs, who, between tradition and innovation, has managed to earn the esteem and gratitude of generations of scholars, attract criticism, and to fuel important - but necessary - debates. Starting from these premises, we will trace the contribution of field research and linguistic geography in the genesis and structure of the Vocabolario dei Dialetti Salentini, a monumental lexicographical work that, sixty years after its publication, remains an unsurpassed point of reference in the history of Apulian lexicography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the Neapolitan-Friderician School of Linguistics, focusing on the establishment of the subject as it was first taught in Italian universities and, in particular, at the University of Naples. A brief profile of all lecturers who taught linguistic subjects (i.e. Comparative Languages and Literatures, Grammar or Comparative History of Classical and Neo-Latin Languages, Sanskrit) is provided, tackling their main research interests; where significant, pupils who brought forward research in the spirit of the School are also listed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Vox Romanica: Annales Helvetici Explorandis Linguis Romanicis Destinati is the property of Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co.KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents the result of an investigation on the development of more abstracted microconstructions based on predicative lexical evidential structured with the prototypical dicendi verb. Three Romance languages were contrasted: Brazilian Portuguese (BP) (dizer), Spanish (ESP) (decir) and Italian (IT) (dire). The evidential semantic domain concerns the source of the enunciated knowledge (Aikhenvald 2004; Casseb-Galvão 2001) and its coding can occur by lexical and/or procedural elements. The main hypothesis involves the recognition that across languages more prototypical lexical uses originate processes of constructional changes of abstract evidentials, with grammatical or discursive meanings, as [diski], in PB, (decir), in ESP and si dice che, in IT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the question of language and the figure of Pulcinella. Multiple of character in his colourful clothes, Pulcinella has crossed time periods, geographical areas and cultural spaces, but his spoken language, Neapolitan, has always been his identifying mark. Wherever he may have gone, he has taken with him this language rich in historical signifiers, full of images and sounds, and representative of a rich heritage of ancestral folk traditions. Even as he travels fluidly about, defying space and times, Pulcinella has contributed to the updating and regeneration of this dialetto which once competed with the Tuscan before the latter became the unifying language of the Italian peninsula. The presence of “linguistic invaders” in the south of the peninsula deeply influenced the pattern of this linguistic variation which not only adapted but also adopted many of their then-unfamiliar linguistic features.

Copyright of Romanica Olomucensia is the property of Palacky University in Olomouc and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study traces the steps that led to the lexicon-semantic change for the indication of "left" and "right" from Latin to modern Romance languages. With the partial exception of Italian, starting from the Middle Ages, the main Romance languages begin to come up beside the words derived from the Latin etymology SINISTRA with other terms that designate the same meaning, but which have non-Latin origin and similar semantic root (idea of what is curved and imperfect). The cause lies in a complex phenomenon of tabooistic interdiction, which leads to the progressive disappearance of the previous forms and the generation of new ones. The change in the way of expressing the "left" would also seem to determine by analogy a new mode of expression of the "right" in most of the Romance area, no longer derived from the Latin ethymon DEXTRA, but from the Latin DIRECTA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review introduces readers to the Manual of Language Acquisition, edited by Christian Fäcke, and part of the “Manuals of RomanceLinguistics” series. The Manual surveys current and central issues in the acquisition of Romance languages and cultures, as well as raises important questions about the relationship between Romance languages and with other languages—Immigrant languages, local dialects, English—across the Romance–speaking world.

Copyright of Cuadernos de Filología Italiana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The lack of recognition of the Roma and Sinti communities in Italy remains a relevant issue. Despite of an evident complexity of unambiguous definition, to date no nationalities have been recognized at national level by the legislator, nor the specificities of the Romance language, let alone the cultural ones. Since the launch of the National Inclusion Strategy of Roma, Sinti and Caminanti, in 2012, however, the debate on the need for a legislative recognition by the State of the Roma and Sinte communities as a minority has intensified. It is the attempt to overcome the condition of a "de facto" identification matured over the years, in which a recognition, implicit, sectoral and variegated has been codified that reflects, in the modality of the interventions, the complexity of the institutional articulation of our system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following different paths, Arsène Darmesteter and Michel Bréal formalize the notions of sémantique and polysémie. Bréal's Essai de sémantique (1897) - in which semantics is set up as an autonomous discipline, independent of etymology, lexicography and even rhetoric - can be seen as a systematization of the emancipation of polysemy as the autonomous science of the meanings of the words - a theory proposed by Darmesteter in La vie des mots (1887). Bréal and Darmesteter share the common point of view of anti-etymologist polysemic multiplication of the meanings of a word, while they disagree on the adoption of the speaker's point of view. Starting from the pre-existent connection in the two authors between polysemy and semantics, aimed at identifying the polysemic factor as a mediating factor in the relationship between etymological and synonymic instances, I intend to analyze the productivity of this connection in the semantic dynamics related to the transition from Latin to Romance languages. In particular, I focused my attention on the following different instances: the enrichment and loss of lexemes; the transfers, extensions or generalizations, reductions or specializations; the rework in the relationship between signifiers and meanings, both for similarity (metaphors) and contiguity (metonymies); shift due to taboo; the restructuring of the semantic fields, with particular attention to the semantic field of colors and of numbers; the resemanticization by re-motivation of meaning (folk etymology). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a question of setting up the etymology of the Aragonese word estrabilla ‘stable, stall” which survives in the Echo valley (western Aragonese). We come to the con- clusion that it springs from the STRAMINEA Latin, derived from STRAMEN “straw bedding”, etymon that has left descendants in several Romance languages and in Basque.

In this study we set forth to present several of the most important aspects regarding the contrastive analysis of a well-defined number of Latin idioms in parallel with their Romanic counterparts (in French, Italian, Spanish and Romanian). Our intent was not to discover, in the Romanic space, all the equivalents of the phrases that form the corpus we work with, for reasons pertaining to material restrictions, but to discuss, based on a certain number of units, the different types of issues they may point to. The most important is to establish the relation between the idiomatic expressions in Latin and their correspondents in the above mentioned languages, regarding their inner form, their meaning and their structure.

The Translations of Leonardo Sciascia's Il Giorno della civetta in Indoeuropean (Romance and Germanic) and non-Indoeuropean Languages (Hungarian, Finnic and Chinese) and the Translation of Dialectalisms: A Paradigmatic Case-Study (Quaquaraqua). This article deals with the translation of the (Sicilian) dialectaism – now pan-Italian – quaquaraquà, spread by Leonardo Sciascia in Il giorno della civetta (1961), mostly starting from the translations (and pluri-translations in the same language) of the novel in Romance languages (French 1962, Romanian 1963, Spanish [19681, 19772, 19903] 20084, Portuguese 19681, 19812, 19953, Catalan 1989), Germanic languages (English 19631, 19842, German 19641, 19852, Swedish 1965), but also non-Indoeuropean (Hungarian 1963, Finnic/Finnish 1984 and Chinese 2004). A typology of the three types of translations is sketched: I) Loan-”sign loan” (Italianism) (of the , adaptable in its phonic/written form, and of the “signified”); II) Iconic equivalent (phonic/written iconic / human(ized)”s.ed “); III) Semanti equivalent.

In the teaching of foreign languages, complex-clause syntax does not seem to have had an established role over the last 20 years, especially within the communicative approach and, of course, the CEFR. It was previously part of methods which stressed formal approaches to foreign languages and their being taught, but not of natural, acquisition-based methods. With the communicative approach, two important premises were introduced: authentic texts and grammar as a tool when necessary. This is one probable reason why explicit, complex-clause syntax is hardly mentioned in the CEFR, even though it is implicitly present in descriptors, even though it is particularly recognisable in those for writing skills, and even though we know that it can be used for all four skills, as well as to guide learners towards some self-directed learning about language features. To date, in the era of the communicative approach, not much is known about the role of complex-clause syntax in foreign/second language classrooms, in particular from the learners’ viewpoint. In order to bridge this research gap, the paper analyses a questionnaire among learners in secondary schools that looked at their perspectives regarding the (possible) role of syntax. The examined aspects consider its role for the four skills, and the benefits of knowing syntax; implicitly, the paper touches on some affective factors and related methodological approaches, along with problems concerning the teaching of syntax. The findings are based on quantitative data; an evaluation of the need for complex-clause syntax is included, and some pedagogical implications are presented.

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article reports a Piedmontese lexicon in which diacritical signs, documentation, etymological research and discussions are provided.