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This paper presents the results of a pilot study on the distribution of indefinite determiners in contexts with narrow scope interpretation in current informal Italian. It individuates the available forms and presents their diatopic distribution. The research is based on data collected through an online questionnaire designed to detect optionality. The results show that in narrow scope indefinite contexts, i. e., negative statements, both the zero determiner and the definite article are widespread throughout the country. The partitive determiner is only found in episodic sentences and is limited to restricted geographic areas. In all contexts and areas, a large degree of optionality is found. In some context and area, however, it is possible to identify one form more prominent than the others. This can be related to the context, which may favour some specialized meaning of one specific form, e. g., saliency and small quantity, or to diatopic variation due to language contact with the dialect, as shown by comparing present-day informal Italian with the dialectal data reported in AIS and analysed in (Cardinaletti and Giusti. 2018. Indefinite determiners: Variation and optionality in Italo-Romance. In Diego Pescarini & Roberta D’Alessandro (eds.), Advances in Italian dialectology: Sketches of Italo-Romance grammars, 135–161. Amsterdam: Brill).

This study attempts to explain a systematic phenomenon that has been described in interlanguage grammars crosslinguistically: Null-Prep, which consists of omitting the obligatory preposition in certain movement constructions. We propose that Null-Prep is not related to lack of knowledge of wh-movement, as previously assumed, but to structural complexity; indeed, we consider Null-Prep a movement-derived structure. With evidence from prepositional relative clauses, wh-interrogatives, and sluicing constructions in first language (L1) and second language (L2) Spanish (English and Arabic L1s), we predict the potential appearance of the Null-Prep with a two-way complexity hierarchy that takes into account the syntactic position displaced, as well as its derivational complexity, in such a way that we calculate Null-Prep to occur more often in Relative Clauses, followed by Sluicing, and finally by Questions. This scalar phenomenon uniformly applies to all participants, native and L2 learners, emphasizing its universal nature.

This paper deals with cases of apparent enclisis on past participles in North-Western Italian varieties. It is claimed that these cases do not involve clitic pronouns, but weak pronouns in the sense of Cardinaletti and Starke (1999). Both syntactic and morphophonological evidence is discussed. Some varieties display both proclitics and postverbal weak pronouns and use them in different syntactic contexts. Other varieties lack clitic pronouns in their lexicon altogether and only display weak pronouns (alongside strong pronouns), similarly to what happens in e.g. Germanic languages.

This chapter discusses a difference between Germanic and Romance languages in the syntax of subjects: While in Germanic wh-questions, full subjects can occur in the canonical, preverbal position (English: where has John gone?), in Romance, this is impossible, in either order (Italian: *dove è Gianni andato? / *dove Gianni è andato?). The same restriction holds in the Romance languages with overt subject pronouns. Verb – subject inversion is not allowed with full subjects but only with pronouns (French: *où est Jean allé? vs. où est-il allé?). Furthermore, full subjects cannot precede the verb when it does not raise across the subject; only pronouns can (French: *où Jean est allé? vs. où il est allé?). The difference between Germanic and Romance languages is attributed here to the interaction between verb movement and subject placement. In Germanic, the verb/auxiliary raises to C in wh-questions and makes subject movement to Spec-Subj necessary to satisfy the Subject Criterion. In Romance, the verb/auxiliary raises to lower positions, which makes the movement of full subject DPs impossible in wh-questions. Deficient pronouns are exempted from the Subject Criterion, which makes them possible in wh-questions in all languages.

This paper offers a comprehensive discussion of the cardinal numeral system of Italian Sign Language. At the lexical level, we present the different formational strategies used to generate cardinal numerals and we provide evidence that in the younger generations of signers, the signonehas lost the function of indefinite determiner and is now used as a cardinal only. At the syntactic level, we show that the attested variation in the ordering between the cardinal and the noun is in part due to definiteness and contrastive focus. We account for this variation within the cartographic approach to syntax. Finally, we offer a principled explanation for the reason why cardinals inside Measure Phrases are not subject to word order variation, but always precede the measure noun.

This paper provides a syntactic analysis of the indefinite plural determiner dei in Italian, also called ‘partitive article’, as in Ho visto dei ragazzi (I saw de.art boys). It argues that dei is neither parallel to the inflected preposition dei in: Ho visto alcuni dei ragazzi (I saw some of-the boys), nor to the quantifier alcuni in: Ho visto alcuni ragazzi (I saw some boys), contra previous literature. We support a simple DP-analysis which takes dei as the plural counterpart of the indefinite article un, and claim that dei-nominals do not have a QPstructure, as proposed for quantified nominals in Cardinaletti and Giusti, 1992 , Cardinaletti and Giusti, 2006 , Cardinaletti and Giusti, in press . We propose that de- is an uninflected determiner in SpecDP, which cooccurs with an overt morpheme (-i) in D, realizing Gender and Number. This accounts for the apparent morphological similarity of this concord morpheme with the definite article, without the need to attribute referential or kind-denoting interpretation to it. The paper also investigates differences and similarities between dei-nominals and bare plurals.

This paper presents the Deaf Studies developed at Ca’ Foscari in the past 20 years. Teaching activities and research projects are presented and discussed. The goal of the Deaf Studies programme at Ca’ Foscari is not only to advance in the knowledge of sign languages, deafness, and language and communication disorders, but also to offer the teaching of the language and culture of the Italian Deaf community within a public institution, on a par with the spoken languages taught at the university. The Ca’ Foscari team is also engaged in accessibility and inclusion projects, in line with the 17 sustainable development goals of the United Nations (Agenda 2030).

The purpose of this chapter is to propose a unified analysis of a range of “second-position” phenomena that have been attested in various languages, and in so doing to motivate a more elaborated theory of Nominative Case assignment. Because our focus is on the interaction of clause structure with structural Case assignment, the authors concentrate almost exclusively on the processes and properties of S-structure. It is a classic tenet of generative grammar that inflectional affixes may be separate syntactic entities at pre-phonological levels of representation; see the analysis of the English auxiliary system in Chomsky. At the turn of the 1990s, this idea received new impetus, beginning with Pollock. Finally, the appendix is devoted to the discussion of Stylistic Fronting. The authors also added a postscript to this version of the paper, explaining its rather unusual and protracted prepublication history.

This paper investigates the comprehension and the production of passive sentences in Italian-speaking children (aged 3 years, 4 months to 6 years, 2 months) analyzing both the variables observed in previous studies on other languages (verb type and presence of the by-phrase) versus an Italian-specific variable: the use of auxiliary venire “to come.” Because Italian venire is only possible in verbal passives, this property is crucial to determine whether children have full competence of the (verbal) passive structure. The high percentage of accuracy in the comprehension of sentences containing venire suggests that the eventive passive interpretation is fully available in child language, even in 3- to 4-year-old children. Moreover, young children produce passive sentences with either auxiliary venire or essere “to be,” also adding the by-phrase, thus proving unambiguously that children control verbal passive sentences from very early on.

I saggi raccolti in questo volume rappresentano una duplice testimonianza: la lunga tradizione di alcuni insegnamenti di lingue dell’area occidentale presenti fin dalle origini dell’allora Regia Scuola Superiore di Commercio, ma anche l’attenzione all’evoluzione sociale e culturale che richiede un continuo aggiornamento ed arricchimento dell’offerta formativa. Nel volume si ripercorre la storia di insegnamenti di consolidata presenza congiuntamente a quelli di lingue e letterature introdotte in tempi più recenti nei piani di studio. Questo insieme di tradizione e modernità ha fatto di Ca’ Foscari un centro di assoluta eccellenza per le lingue e le culture straniere, oltre che il primo ateneo in Italia ad avere una facoltà specifica per questo genere di studi.

Recently, a test battery was developed with the goal of assessing perception of F0 in linguistic, but language-independent, contexts by listeners from different language backgrounds. Test validation using Dutch, Italian and Romanian listeners generally showed comparable performance. In this study we present cross-language results on how F0 contributes to prominence perception in Dutch (a Germanic language) and Italian and Romanian (Romance languages), as well as on how F0 trades off with duration, a second important cue to prominence. We discuss implications of these results for the language-independent set-up of the test battery.

The auditory speech sounds evaluation 2009 test battery for assessment of speech pitch perception is presented. It was designed to (a) assess perception of pitch in linguistic contexts without the confounds of secondary acoustic cues, (b) be usable with listeners from different language backgrounds, and (c) be suitable for use in a clinical setting. The need for this test battery arises from increased awareness of the importance of prosody in clinical practice, and the development of methods for improving pitch perception in listeners with profound hearing losses.Identification and discrimination tasks based on linguistic contexts were developed to establish listeners' just noticeable differences (JNDs) for pitch changes. Stimuli were pseudosentences and pseudowords based on speech from a female speaker, overlain with stylized pitch contours. Target pitch excursions were varied from the 200 Hz baseline to a maximum of 349 Hz. Ninety normal-hearing listeners participated in test validation that assessed goals (a)-(c), established test-retest reliability, and gathered normative data.The JNDs on non-linguistic, control tasks were lower than on linguistic ones, showing that non-linguistic tasks may overestimate pitch perception in speech. Listeners from different language backgrounds scored comparably on most linguistic tasks, and test-retest differences were non-significant. Test usability as evidenced by task duration and subject experience seemed satisfactory for clinical use.

FOLLOWING A WELL-ESTABLISHED tradition going back to the 1980s (cf. Volterra 1987/2004), we use the name Lingua dei Segni Italiana (Italian Sign Language [LIS]) for the language used by Italian deaf people (and by Swiss deaf people living in the Ticino canton). In addition, LIS is becoming more and more visible, and its status as a minority language in the general Italian community is growing stronger due to various reasons. On the one hand, the research has shown that LIS, as other sign languages, exhibits all of the fundamental linguistic properties of natural languages: It can convey the same range of meanings and has a natural history, as spoken languages do. In particular, its phonology, morphology, and syntax are as complex as those of spoken languages like Italian.1 These facts about LIS are becoming established outside the community of sign language users partly due to the fact that a LIS program is offered by one university (Ca' Foscari Venice), and courses in LIS are now taught in various universities around the country. Another fact that is strengthening the status of LIS is that national television channels are now required to broadcast some news programs with LIS interpreting, making LIS visible to the larger population. Still, LIS has not yet received formal recognition by the Italian authorities, although various bills are sitting in the Italian parliament for the recognition of LIS as a minority language. This lack of formal recognition has serious consequences (e.g., in the educational system). Deaf children are now generally mainstreamed, and there is no guarantee that LIS will be used in their education. Interpreting, not to mention bilingual/bimodal education, is still the exception rather than the rule. In general, LIS is rarely used in institutional settings and is mostly used in private exchanges and informal gatherings. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that existing research on LIS reflects an impressive degree of variation. Still, a comprehensive sociolinguistic study of LIS varieties used around the country has not been systematically carried out until recently. This article describes an extensive collection of data from ten cities with 165 signers, which at the time of writing had just been concluded and reports on some of the data emerging from the LIS corpus resulting from this collection. Initial plans to build a systematic corpus for LIS were made in 2006 thanks to the input of Ceil Lucas, whose contribution was essential for the collection of the ASL corpus (cf. Lucas, Bayley, and Valli 2001). Lucas approached some of the Italian researchers who were working on LIS and discussed with them the guidelines of a research project that would reproduce (with some important differences) the methodology of data collection used for ASL. Adam Schembri, who worked on a corpus for AUSLAN and BSL, and Robert Bayley were also consulted in this preliminary phase. Three universities (Venice, Milan-Bicocca, and Rome- La Sapienza) joined their efforts and applied to the Italian Ministry of University for a grant. The grant proposal (PRIN 2007 project, "Dimensions of Variation in Italian Sign Language") was approved (with some delay) in September 2008, so the actual data collection began in February 2009. Data collection in most cities took place in 2009, although data from two cities (Catanzaro and Milan) were collected in 2010. This article is organized as follows: In the following section we describe the general methodological issues we faced when planning the data collection and which motivated our choice of cities and participants. Then we describe the specific elicitation methods we adopted. After that, we describe in detail both the lexical variations we encountered and the results of the statistical analyses carried out on this part of the corpus. Finally, we present our conclusions. Building the LIS Corpus: Choosing Cities and Participants When we initially planned to build a LIS corpus on which we (and other researchers) could run statistical analyses to explore the sociolinguistics of LIS, we faced two problems. …

(2010). Linguistic Assessment Tools for the Digisonic® Dual Electric-Acoustic Speech Processor. Cochlear Implants International: Vol. 11, Proceedings of the 9th European Symposium on Paediatric Cochlear Implantation, Warsaw, 2009, pp. 306-311.

We argue that preverbal and postverbal subject clitics in northern Italian dialects are the same lexical items. The different forms of proclitics and enclitics can be explained phonologically (i.e., by phonological constraints ranked in a particular order) and by the hypothesis that morphologically neutral vowels may be inserted in final position (what we call morphological epenthesis). The distributional differences in the paradigm derive from a competition between overt clitics and null subjects that is resolved in an intricate way across sentence types and across dialects and that depends on the interaction of clitic and verb movement and on Minimize Structure.

The position of wh-items is one of the most striking features of the syntax of sign languages (SLs). In contrast to spoken languages, where wh-words are generally found either clause-initially or in situ, SLs allow wh-signs in situ, in clause-final position (preferred for many SLs), or repeated in two different positions of the clause. Moreover, in many cases all these options coexist in the same language (and even within a single signer). Several proposals in the theoretical literature showed how grammars are able to generate such constructions; however, none of the proposals addresses the issue of what factors determine the choice of these options. We present corpus evidence showing that both linguistic and social factors constrain the distribution of wh-signs in LIS (Lingua dei Segni Italiana, Italian Sign Language). The result of multivariate analysis suggests that LIS is undergoing a grammatical change and becoming less like spoken Italian with respect to the position of wh-signs.

This paper focuses on those wh-questions in Italian Sign Language (LIS) featuring two lexically identical wh-signs. We show that wh1 (the first wh in linear order) is shorter than wh2 (the second wh in liner order). However, there is evidence that this different duration is due to a phrase-final lengthening, as wh2 occupies a sentence-final position. We therefore conclude that the two wh-signs are identical full copies: one sitting in Spec,CP on the right in LIS and the other one sitting in Spec,FocP on the left. We show that this construction yields a (focused) cleft question interpretation and we speculate that both copies are phonologically realized because the wh-signs in Spec,CP and Spec,FocP are the heads of two distinct chains. Finally, we distinguish identical wh-duplication from improper wh-duplication, namely cases where one of the two wh-elements is what we call qartichoke, an underspecified interrogative sign only surfacing in wh-questions.

This paper contains a discussion of (Italian) Right Dislocation, which seems to instantiate an optional anticipatory clitic pronoun. It will be shown that the distribution of the anticipatory pronoun is not free. When the clitic is absent, we do not have an instance of Right Dislocation, but of Marginalization. The structural analysis of Right Dislocation suggested here is similar to Kayne's (1994) analysis of English Right Dislocation, the structure of Marginalization contains an in situ; destressed constituent. Depending on how optionality is interpreted, it is possible to conclude that clitic pronouns are neither optional nor null.

In this paper, I discuss some apparent violations of locality, namely, instances of clitic and NP movement across a wh-item, pointed out by Rizzi (1982). I suggest that the wh-element, which does not contribute an interrogative meaning, does not occur in the CP layer but in a clause-internal position. The wh-item is to be categorized as a wh-indefinite with the distribution of a polarity item. The construction displays other locality restrictions (i.e., the wh-item cannot be moved long distance), and a very limited productivity, which depends on the type of wh-items involved.

International audience; no abstract