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The morpho-syntactic configuration auxiliary (have or be) + past participle known as the have-perfect functions as a tense-aspect category in many Western European languages. Synchronic variation within Romance nicely illustrates the developmental pattern described as the aoristic drift, whereby the perfect develops over time into a perfective past with full-fledged past meanings. A parallel corpus study of L’Étranger by Albert Camus (1942) and its translations using the Translation Mining methodology provides empirical data supporting the view that modern French, Romanian and Italian make a more liberal use of the perfect, whereas the perfect distribution in Spanish is closer to (but not identical to) English. Catalan occupies an intermediate position and Portuguese has the most restricted perfect among the Romance languages. We argue that this variation is best captured by a perfect scale, without a clear cut-off point between perfect and perfective past meaning. The meaning ingredients that govern the distribution of the have-perfect across Romance languages emerge from the parallel corpus. They include lexical, compositional and discourse semantics, and range from sensitivity to aspectual class, pluractionality, hodiernal and pre-hodiernal past time reference to narration.

En el presente artículo nos ocupamos de refranes meteorológicos y del calendario, representados en una treintena de variedades romances, que tienen como protagonista el mes de junio, ya sea solo o bien relacionado con otro (en particular, con mayo) o más meses (en este sentido, destaca una retahíla portuguesa que contiene los doce meses). En nuestro corpus de estudio, cabe señalar la atención prestada, entre otros aspectos meteorológicos, a la dicotomía entre lluvia (mal augurio) y tiempo seco (buen augurio), a los fríos tardíos, a los consejos de abrigo, a la duración del día y a la siega en tanto que labor característica del mes, como demuestra el recurrente paremiotipo «junio + hoz en (el) puño» o similares.

Acknowledgements. This work was supported by national funding through FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology - within the strategic project of the Linguistics Research Centre of NOVA University of Lisbon (CLUNL) UID/LIN/03213/2019, and the strategic project of the Linguistics Research Centre of the University of Porto (CLUP) UIDB/00022/2020. The present study investigates how adult native speakers of two null subject Romance languages, European Portuguese (EP) and Italian, interpret null and overt pronominal subjects in intrasentential contexts. Participants were 30 speakers of EP and 30 of Italian. Each language group was administered two multiple-choice tasks (speeded and untimed), which crossed the following variables: 'animacy of the matrix object' ([+ human] vs. [- human]) and 'type of pronominal embedded subject' (overt vs. null). Our results show that there is microvariation in the resolution of overt pronominal subjects in EP and in Italian: the position of the antecedent is the most relevant factor in EP, whereas, in Italian, the animacy of the antecedent is the preponderant factor. Moreover, our results reveal that the resolution of null subjects is an area of microvariation: the bias for subject antecedents is weaker in Italian than in EP. Possible reasons for the observed microvariation are discussed in detail.

Although there is a growing body of research on inferential sentences (Declerck 1992, Delahunty 1990, 1995, 2001, Koops 2007, Pusch 2006), most of this research has been on their forms and functions in written discourse. This has left a gap with regards to their range of structural properties and allowed disagreement over their analysis to linger without a conclusive resolution. Most accounts regard the inferential as a type of it-cleft (Declerck 1992, Delahunty 2001, Huddleston and Pullum 2002, Lambrecht 2001), while a few view it as an instance of extraposition (Collins 1991, Schmid 2009). More recently, Pusch’s work in Romance languages proposes the inferential is used as a discourse marker (2006, forthcoming). Based on a corpus study of examples from spoken New Zealand English, the current paper provides a detailed analysis of the formal and discoursal properties of several sub-types of inferentials (positive, negative, as if and like inferentials). We show that despite their apparent formal differences from the prototypical cleft, inferentials are nevertheless best analysed as a type of cleft, though this requires a minor reinterpretation of “cleft construction.” We show how similar the contextualized interpretations of clefts and inferentials are and how these are a function of their lexis and syntax.

The study investigates the reflections on tempo-aspectual morphology in Italian expressed by undergraduate multilingual learners with previous knowledge of Swedish and a Romance language (N=22). The reflections of the participants, who were divided into four groups depending on a combination of proficiency in their background Romance language and in Italian, were analysed using a qualitative content analysis. From the analysis categories and subcategories emerged, and their occurrences served to display group tendencies. Four categories (explicit rules, intuition, other languages and uncertainty/unknown), and seven subcategories were found and their occurrence was differently distributed across groups. Further, the reflections of the learners became more sophisticated as proficiency in Italian increased. In fact, the reflections progressively incorporated different layers of information connected to explicit knowledge about tenses: temporal, aspectual and, finally, lexical, that is, the inherent semantics of the predicates. Finally, while the reflections of low-proficiency learners referred to different L2s (e.g. English and French), high-proficiency learners made comparisons with Swedish more consistently, regardless of their proficiency level in the Romance language. These results are discussed in the light of research on second/additional language learning of aspectual distinctions in Romance languages.

When it comes to negation, the Romance languages have generally stuck to the Latin model (non), which remains unchanged in Italian and is only slightly different in Spanish (no). In French, however, it’s a different story and a more inventive one, involving two negative particles, the second of which originally provided a literal and precise meaning. For example, je ne marche pas(“not a single step”), je ne vois point(“not even a dot”), je ne bois goutte(“not even a drop”), je ne mange mie“not the slightest crumb”… The discontinuous monemes that survive in French today (ne… pas, ne… point, and the less frequent, ne… guere) thus started life in quite a different way. This paper will attempt to retrace their journey from an originally unlimited source of lexical forms to the particularly limited grammatical units used to express negation in French today.

N Prep N constructions such as Sp. bicicleta de montaña ‘mountain bike’ are very productive and frequent in Romance languages. They commonly have been classified as syntagmatic compounds that show no orthographic union and exhibit an internal structure that resembles free syntactic structures, such as Sp. libro para niños ‘book for children’. There is no consensus on how to best distinguish lexical from syntactic N Prep N constructions. The present paper presents an explorative eye-tracking study on N Prep N constructions, varying both lexical type (lexical vs. syntactic) and preposition across three languages, French, Spanish and Portuguese. The task of the eye-tracking study was a reading aloud paradigm of the constructions in sentence context. Constructions were fixated on less when more frequent, independent of lexical status. There was also modest evidence that a higher construction frequency afforded shorter total fixation durations, but only for lower deciles of the response distribution. The (construction-initial) head noun also received fewer fixations as construction frequency increased, and also when the head noun was more frequent. The second fixation durations on the head noun also revealed an effect of lexical status, with syntactic constructions receiving shorter fixations at the 5th and 7th deciles. The probability of a fixation on the preposition decreased with preposition frequency, but first fixations on the preposition increased with preposition frequency. The prepositions of Portuguese, the language with the richest inventory of prepositions, received more fixations than the prepositions of French and Spanish. The observed pattern of results is consistent with models of lexical processing in which reading is guided by knowledge of both higher-level constructions and knowledge of key constituents such as the head noun and the preposition.

This article contributes to the study of the grammar, semantics, expressive values of a very special onymic category, inhabitants names, or demonyms. The authors examine and compare demonyms in two varieties of Romanic languages - South American Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese from both a multi-modal point of view and empirical evidence (synchronic and diachronic data) and systemize them by concentrating on their morphosyntactic distinctive features and semiotic content. The perspective revealed in this paper aims to study, define and analyze the main tendencies in the creation of denominative adjectives functioning as demonyms, to establish the parameters of discrepancies and convergences regarding demonyms of the region in question. The authors based on analyzing the motivation sources, grammar formulae, suffix combinations, socio-cultural varieties and the occurrence of homonymy, as well as their significance, axiological values in forming a group identity and the stereotypes they might lead to. The methodology has included semiotic, cognitive, historic and comparative analysis - a synchronic conceptual transdisciplinary analysis. The results of the study confirm the premise that the demonym suffixes randomly alternate in derivation processes, but also demonstrate the existence of other morphological and pragmatic trends while outlining the role of demonyms in migration processes, formation of a linguistic landscape and axiological values.

The fate of two languages in the Balkans under conditions of language contact is discussed here. These languages, representing different branches of the Romance family, are the Ibero-Romance language Judezmo from the eastern branch and the South Danubian language Aromanian from the western branch. Both have been subject to intense contact with other languages in the Balkans but they show differential outcomes of this contact and thus differential degrees of involvement in the Balkan sprachbund. We document the similarities and differences in these outcomes, offer an explanation of their causes, and discuss the consequences they have for understanding the Balkan sprachbund.

The sound change from Latin /f/ to Old Spanish and Gascon /h/ has often been attributed to stratal influence from Basque. The motivation would be that Old Basque lacked /f/, and instead had a phoneme /h/, with which bilingual speakers replaced it when speaking in Romance. However, this hypothesis presents several difficulties. Most importantly, Navarrese Romance preserves Latin /f/, and in Basque itself, /f/ is adapted as /b/ in loanwords from Latin and Romance, not as /h/. Here we will argue that Old Basque had neither /f/ nor /h/. Instead, modern Basque /h/ derives from older */χ/. Medieval data will play an important role in establishing this. This hypothesis explains a number of morphophonological alternations, as well as some puzzling aspects in the treatment of aspiration in Romance borrowings, and it also makes it more difficult to hold to the stratal hypothesis for the Romance change /f/ > /h/.

Aragonese is a threatened Romance language immersed in a historical process of substitution by Spanish, the official language. The number of speakers who maintained its transmission to younger gene...

This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like comprehension of prosodic focus-marking should be delayed in comparison to the Germanic and Romance languages investigated previously using the same experimental method that we adopted. Our results, confirming this prediction, suggest that the developmental trajectory of the comprehension of prosodic focus-marking may be substantially affected by cross-linguistic grammatical variation in the marking of focus.

Este trabajo estudia monográficamente las voces perródromo, galgódromo, cinódromo y canódromo. Para ello, en primer lugar, se consideran las denominaciones utilizadas en distintas lenguas para referirse al lugar donde se celebran carreras de galgos, con especial atención a las lenguas romances (cynodròme en francés, cinodromo en italiano, canídromo en portugués, etc.). Posteriormente, se muestran los diversos sinónimos que circularon en español para designar dicha pista y se expone la pugna que tuvo lugar entre ellos. Finalmente, se examina cada uno de los sustantivos estudiados atendiendo a su difusión y su distribución geográfica.

Resumo: O estudo ora apresentado presta-se a descrever a trajetoria da familia lexical de usura (constituida pelas formas usura , usurar , usurario , usureiro , usuravel , usurento , usuroso , usurador , zura , zuraco e usurariamente ) no percurso historico da lingua portuguesa. Para a constituicao de seu corpus de analise e como embasamento para a explicacao dos processos de emprestimo e neologia em abordagem historico-diacronica e historico-comparativa, fincou-se na integracao de dados dialetais e de publicacoes da web com uma grande variedade de bancos de dados em diversas linguas românicas e em ingles. Faz o exame etimologico desse grupo vocabular pela analise gradual das transformacoes semânticas e morfologicas de cada unidade que o constitui, fornecendo evidencia textual dos fenomenos discutidos. Definindo-se em um eixo interfacial entre Morfologia, Semântica e Lexico, o trabalho incorpora ao quadro descritivo resultante consideracoes sobre formacao de palavras, sinonimia corradical, sinmorfismo e variacao e mudanca morfolexicais. Palavras-chave: familia lexical; etimologia; morfologia historica; semântica historica. Abstract: This study is dedicated to describing the historical development of the word family of usura (which is constituted by usura, usurar, usurario, usureiro, usuravel, usurento, usuroso, usurador, zura, zuraco e usurariamente ) in the Portuguese language. It takes as a basis for its diachronic and comparative approach the integration of dialectal data and online posts with a variety of other data sources in several Romance languages and in the English language. These sources constitute its corpus and the foundation which underpins the elucidation of borrowing and neology processes. It examines the etymology of this lexical family via the gradual analysis of semantic and morphological changes in each word, which is supported by textual evidence for such phenomena. Being defined from an interfacial standpoint to Morphology, Semantics, and the Lexicon, it incorporates into the resultant etymological description the discussion of themes such as word formation, the synonymy of co-radical words, affix synonymy, and morpho-lexical variation and change. Keywords: lexical family; etymology; historical morphology; historical semantics.

Once at the core of Romance philology, the teaching of Historical Romance Linguistics has all but vanished from university curricula Even though language change is constitutive for any natural language, most bachelor degree programs focus on synchronic studies these days Nevertheless, instead of arguing for the reintroduction of compulsory Old French or Old Spanish courses, this paper promotes another vision of Historical Linguistics in academic education In line with Christmann (1975) and Böckle / Lebsanft (1989), it will be shown that it is possible to include a solid introduction to Historical Linguistics in today's curricula and, at the same time, adapt it both to modern teaching conditions and the needs of bachelor degree students by taking the contemporary Romance languages as a starting point and applying a diachronic perspective on their features In this context, the recently published History of Spanish by Ranson / Lubbers Quesada (2018) will be presented as an example of a textbook that represents this approach in a nearly perfect manner.

portuguesA lingua portuguesa dispoe de duas formas para designar o individuo originario da Polonia: polaco (forma preferida em Portugal) e polones (forma preferida no Brasil), ambas com longa tradicao na lingua e com cognatos em outras linguas românicas. Neste trabalho, buscamos explanar as razoes que levaram ao abandono da forma polaco no Brasil. Identificamos que polaco adquiriu quatro acepcoes, tres delas pejorativas, em decorrencia de fatos historicos ocorridos no Brasil ao longo dos seculos XIX e XX: “prostituta” (na forma feminina polaca), “comerciante”, “a Constituicao de 1937” e “pessoa loira e/ou de pele muito branca”. Recentemente, tem ocorrido um movimento pela revitalizacao da forma polaco como gentilico, buscando eliminar preconceitos etnicos. Assim, fica evidente a relacao intrinseca entre lexico e fatos historico-sociais. EnglishThe Portuguese language has two forms to refer to the person from Poland: polaco (preferred in Portugal) and polones (preferred in Brazil), both with a long tradition in the language and with cognates in other Romance languages. In this work, we seek to explain the reasons that led to the abandonment of the form polaco in Brazil. We identified that polaco acquired four meanings, three of them pejorative, due to historical facts that occurred in Brazil during the 19th and 20th centuries: “prostitute” (in the feminine form polaca), “trader, salesman”, “the Constitution of 1937” and “blond-haired and/or white-skinned person”. Recently, there has been a movement to revitalize the form polaco as a gentilic, in order to eliminate ethnic prejudice. Thus, the intrinsic relationship between lexicon and historical-social facts becomes evident.

All major Romance languages have patterns of the type jaune paille for expressing shades of colour represented by some prototypical object. The first constituent of this pattern is a colour term, while the second one designates a prototypical representative of the colour shade. The present paper starts with a short discussion of the controversial grammatical status of this pattern and its constituents. Its main aim, however, concerns the origin and diffusion of this pattern. We have not found hard and fast evidence that Medieval Italian pigment compounds of the type verderame influenced the rise of the jaune paille pattern, which first appears in French in the 16th century. This pattern continued to be a minority solution during the 17th century, but established itself during the 18th century. In the 19th century, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese adopted the pattern jaune paille, while it did not reach Catalan and Romanian before the 20th century.

The presence of strong resultative constructions in Romance languages is largely debated. In this paper, we provide evidence of strong resultative constructions with adjectival predicate in Italo-Romance. Data from Southern Italian varieties spoken in the area of Cosenza, in Northern Calabria, are discussed. The usage and distribution of two types of adjectival resultative are accounted for in relation to both structural and functional properties, and sociolinguistic variables.

Renaissance songs are full of sexual content, which, however, generally appears in an encoded manner. Based on a corpus of 278 texts from an anthology representing a broad range of French Renaissance songs, the article analyses the excerpts that show clear traces of sexual content from both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective. In a qualitative analysis, the study presents the images that describe male and female body parts, the coitus, and orgasm. It categorizes them according to the underlying techniques of codification, such as metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, metalinguistic reference, and projection, and further subdivides the metaphors into the semantic fields they originate in, such as flora and fauna, physical activity (playing, dancing, planting, fighting), objects (spear, instrument, and others) or fainting and death. Using a quantitative approach, the article shows the distribution of these images, techniques, and sexual content. The metaphor is the most frequently used technique, in terms of tokens, followed by metonymy and synecdoche. The coitus appears, again in terms of tokens, as the dominant encoded content, followed by the orgasm, and male and female body parts. The article hence delivers a corpus-based presentation and evaluation of common euphemisms used for the coding of sexuality, thus allowing a deeper understanding of French Renaissance songs as well as a systematic grasp of the early use of sexual euphemisms in French.

Simple metathesis can be found in numerous Ibero-Romance arabisms compared with their Andalusi Arabic etyma. The analysis of a corpus of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan arabisms illustrates its effects on syllable structure and syllable weight. It can be shown that Arabic-Romance simple metathesis constitutes a motivated structural change that provides for typologically unmarked syllable weight relations within the word. After the resyllabification it entails the involved unstressed syllables no longer excede the stressed syllable in weight. However, it is not an obligatory, systematic process, but merely an optional tendency, which corresponds to the universal tendency expressed by the Weight Law.

This article analyses the correction work carried out by Charles Nodier, one of the most important French lexicographers of the 19th century, as editor of the Dictionnaire universel de la langue française (1834) by P. C-V. Boiste, also known as the Pan-Lexique. Based on a selection of entries from Nodier’s Examen critique des dictionnaires de la langue française (1828), where he critically commented on the different editions of Boiste’s dictionary (1800, 1803, 1812 and 1823), we study whether Nodier followed his own recommendations and corrected these entries in his work as editor of the Pan-Lexique (1834).

This paper aims to investigate the specific mechanisms that contribute to formalizing the rhetorical interpretation of interrogative sentences throughout the history of Spanish. To this end, data from a corpus of biblical translations from the 13th to the 20th centuries are analyzed. As Biblical Hebrew and Latin use explicit elements to signal direct polar questions, it is relatively easy to locate a large number of passages with interrogative sentences, and then, examine the distribution of the translation equivalents used in the Spanish versions. The interrogative particles of Hebrew and Latin thus articulate a grammaticalized procedural meaning for which Spanish does not have an equivalent explicit marker. The systematic examination of the strategies that Spanish translators use to adapt these structures to their vernacular is therefore a way of accessing the intuitions of speakers from different periods in the history of Spanish in regard to the formulation of the rhetorical interrogative.

This paper examines the semantics of French éthique (as opposed to moral[e]) on the basis of its etymology, its history, its combinatorial properties and a semantic analysis based on the semantic-logical notion of validity (linked to the notion of conditions of validity).

In recent years, within the cognitive linguistics approach there has been a trend of scholarly research committed to exploring the motivation for language change. The way in which people use language in communication, together with principles of human categorization, are the locus where language change and innovations are to be found. Interactional contexts in particular, seen as playing a crucial role in bringing about syntactic change (Traugott 2010b), have figured prominently in recent contributions on diachronic micro-changes, bringing to the fore the role played by dialogue as both the manifestation of the participants’ own voices and the realization of the constant negotiation that characterizes human communication. Against this background, this contribution focuses on a particular use of the Occitan post-verbal negatorpasin negative rhetorical questions, which was very productive in fifteenth-century collections of religious theatrical texts. It is claimed that these dialogic contexts allowed a polyphonic use ofpas, crucially restricted to this post-verbal negator, which is key to identifying the reasons behind the eventual establishment ofpasas the generalized sentential negator in the modern language.

Van Emden executed numerous corrections in his edition of the Cambridge version ofThe Song of Roland(2005). However, these amendments are often insufficiently justified and cannot stand up to a rigorous and detailed examination from the standpoint of historical linguistics. In most cases, van Emden modified the text of the manuscript in order to « restore » metrically correct verses that, to his mind, should have been included according to the model followed by the Cambridge copyist. Van Emden accomplished his stated task by simultaneously rejecting and retaining modernized forms or words. Sometimes, he substituted an archaic form or word for a modernized term, even when the former had fallen into disuse long before the time the Cambridge manuscript was redacted. This paper does not merely list such contradictory or unsuccessful amendments. Instead, it shows that a common methodological problem is present in all the problematic corrections: van Emden was not entirely aware of the stage of textual evolution that he aimed to reinstate. By contrast, the author of the present paper began elaborating the methodology for his new edition of the Cambridge manuscript with precisely this question.

Building up on studies that have revealed L2 transfer of imperfective meaning from one Romance language into another [Salaberry, M. R. (2005). Evidence for transfer of knowledge of aspect from L2 S...

Giovanni Codagnello, a notary from Piacenza (c.1154–c.1234), wrote in his Liber rerum gestarum (1219–1222) a very personal re-elaboration of the defeat at Roncevaux, which he entitled Gesta Carli Francorum regis. Codagnello’s account is one of the oldest witnesses to the circulation in Italy of the legend of Roncevaux, but it has so far escaped the notice of scholars who have studied the Roland tradition in Italy. This article examines which version of the legend Codagnello knew. According to the author, he was familiar with a rhymed redaction of the Chanson de Roland. If this is the case, then it means that an exemplar of the Roland rimé was already circulating in northern Italy at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

This paper is about identifying a nuance of social meaning which, I demonstrate, was conveyed in the Early and Late Modern period by the suffix -oon. The history of non-native suffix -oon is presented by means of assembling non-native suffix -oon vocabulary in date order and sorting according to etymology (according to the Oxford English Dictionary). N = 112 non-native -oon words. Three-quarters are found to be of Romance origin and one quarter of non-European origin, entering English via colonialisation. Standard non-native -oon words are identified by appeal to Trudgill’s stabilisation definition, together with an entry in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. It turns out that Standard non-native -oon words (which are few) tended to stabilise early and be of Romance etymology. A period of enregisterment c.1750-1850 is identified by means of scrutiny of non-native -oon usage in sixty novels, leading to the conclusion that four or more non-native -oons in a literary work signalled vulgarity. A link is made between the one-quarter non-European -oons brought to English via colonial trade, and the use of such -oons by non-noble merchants, traders and their customers splashing out on luxury foreign commodities. Thus, it is found that a suffix borrowed from Romance languages in the Middle English period received fresh input during the Early Modern period via non-European borrowings, resulting in sociolinguistic enregisterment in the Late Modern period.

SummaryThis study compares the Vulgar Latin Raetia, Noricum, Venetia et Histria, Pannónia Superior, Pannónia Inferior and Dalmatia with each other and their provincial capitals in relation to the hypothesized large dialectal isoglosses of Vulgar Latin, and in turn, to the modern Romance languages located in those areas, such as Western Romance, Northern Italian, Southern Italian and Eastern Romance dialects. The analysis is done on the palatal and velar vowels, the V∼B merger, intervocalic V drop, sonorization, degemination, assimilation, palatalization and final /-s/ drop. The territories of the Alps-Danube-Adria region will be classified according to their similarities to each other and their similarity to the Vulgar Latin or Romance dialects.

This paper proposes a minimalist analysis of locative prepositions in Central Catalan, from a comparative perspective. Specifically, I claim that certain semantic and syntactic properties that are usually considered part of the field of the extended projection of PPs in cartographic approaches (categories like Place, Degree, K, and AxPart, for example) are in fact properties of the DP in the complement of a preposition. This claim takes the view that adpositions are a functional projection that relates two DPs, the Figure and the Ground, and not a lexical head that projects a functional domain on its own, as Ns, Vs or As (cf. den Dikken 2010; Koopman 2000). The final part of the paper proposes a model to account for the variation that locative prepositions exhibit across Romance languages following the Conjecture of Borer (1984) (known as the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture since Baker 2008). More precisely, I propose a model in which microparametric differences among Romance simple locative prepositions depend on the particular composition of features in p.

Based mostly on the Romance languages, we provide evidence for the conclusion that oblique adpositions involved in the encoding of location and direction do not contribute a specific, fixed spatial meaning. On the contrary, they are general relators, relating a complement to an event by establishing an inclusion relation between them. Locatives are specializations of the basic relational inclusion content. State-in, motion-to and motion-from interpretations depend on the interaction of these simple relators with the structure of the event. Specifically, the relator may attach at the level of the Result phrase (goal, motion-to) or at the level of the Cause layer (source, motion-from). Furthermore, the Romance languages provide evidence for differential encoding of non-animate vs. animate location, which we refer to as locative DOM, presenting and discussing various instances of it.

This paper offers a qualitative analysis of the responses that 28 advanced learners of Italian in Canada and Italy contributed to a questionnaire asking them to interpret the meanings and functions of six Italian gestures, alone and in combination with dialogues. Participants were also asked to comment on their perception of body language in their L1 and in Italian. The purpose of the exercise was to expand L2 pedagogy towards multimodality, while at the same time accounting for learners’ multilingualism. We found that participants appreciated a multimodal approach to their Italian language learning experience. We also found that knowledge of languages typologically related to Italian (i.e. Romance languages) was no guarantee that our groups of multilinguals would be facilitated in the interpretation of L2 gesture forms and meanings. Rather, the presence of verbal language in dialogues, the form of gesture, and familiarity with the nonverbal characteristics of interactions in the target language, helped participants succeed in this multimodal activity.

This study aims at improving the scarce corpus data regarding the nominal structure N1 N2 in juxtaposition, as in Romanian stat membru, French état membre, Spanish estado miembro ‘member state’. We supply examples from several Romance languages showing that this structure, which initially was a compound pattern formed from terms calqued from other languages, underwent significant expansions that are ignored even in the recent literature. We attempt to point out the disadvantages of treating this structure strictly in morphology, as most of the literature has done until now, and we document the necessity to analyse this structure in syntax, as a restrictive apposition.

This paper intends to compare the functions of the Pluperfect in discourse from a comparative perspective, taking into account the use of this particular tense form in three different Romance languages, namely French, Italian and Spanish. In particular, it tries to elucidate in what way the Pluperfect contributes to the building and structuring of discourse segments or, to put it differently, how it helps to create coherent units of discourse and interacts with other units on a more comprehensive structural level. The analysis also focuses on the interplay of the Pluperfect with competing past tense forms, the perfective Simple Past and the Perfect. The account put forward in this article tries to present a unified analysis by resorting to the tense-in-discourse framework developed by Becker & Egetenmeyer (2018).