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The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime candidates to test the interaction between syntax and pragmatics, and we compared the distribution of subjects and objects in the Italian and English of a bilingual child (1;10-4;6) with that of two groups of MLUw-matched monolinguals. All arguments were coded for syntactic function and for a number of discourse pragmatic features predicted to affect their realisation. Our main prediction was that unidirectional crosslinguistic influence might occur for the English-Italian bilingual child with respect to pronominal subject and object use after the instantiation of the C system. Specifically we predicted that in Italian the bilingual child might use overt pronominal subjects in contexts where monolinguals would use a null subject, and that he might use postverbal strong object pronouns in Italian instead of preverbal weak pronominal clitics. Conversely, we did not expect the overall proportion of overt objects, whether noun phrases or pronouns, to vary crosslinguistically as objects are always obligatorily overt in both languages regardless of discourse pragmatics. Our results confirmed these predictions, and corroborated the argument that crosslinguistic influence may occur in bilingual first language acquisition in specific contexts in which syntax and pragmatics interact.

Emine Sevgi Özdamar, one of the authors most representative of contemporary German literature, defies the easy cataloging and categorisation which tends to be the fate of an artist such as herself, who observes, perceives and represents, in a personal and original way, our multifaceted and multicultural society. Her work, rich in autobiographical detail, mainly portrays female protagonists against the backdrop of events unfolding in Turkey and Germany, and partly in France. This contribution aims to focus on the game of identities that emerges as the primary theme in her latest novel Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum (Özdamar 2021), the writer's most mature and complex work to date. The identity of the protagonist - actress, theatre assistant and writer - is the result of a particularly profound work of observation of near and distant worlds, of listening, of internalization and of continuous elaboration. The result is a representation of the world both past and present, of Turkish rural reality and that of the great contemporary European metropolis that demolishes the concept of identity, where such an identity is linked to its host nation and is a consequence of political decisions. Özdamar's is a 'minor' literature in the sense of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, but this is not to say it is of lesser value. It goes beyond what Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak had to say on the subject in the 1980s. It goes beyond the boundaries of centrality that the West attributes to itself and those of the hierarchy inherent in the 'center-margins' concept. It interprets the overcoming of conventions and beliefs according to which knowledge radiates outwards from the West with the consequent subordination of those civilisations geographically located on the margins or distant from central Europe and the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This contribution is an investigation of the distribution and nature of a structure found across Northern Italian varieties, a reflex of Latin habere to which a locative particle g has been added, within the contexts of the relation between microvariation and gradual language change. A detailed morpho-syntactic description forms the basis for an analysis that suggests a probable path of univerbation of the two elements. Driving the analysis is the consideration of the original semantic features of the Latin element from which the locative particle has developed, in particular of the order of their weakening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]