Carla Bazzanella

'Modal' uses of the Italian Indicativo imperfetto in a pragmatic perspective.

Abstract Some atypical uses of the Italian indicativo imperfetto are listed in the first section of the paper. They are unified under their assumed common function, the modal one, for the most part according to Bertinetto (1986). Emphasis is placed on the imperfetto di pianificazione , a dub here proposed to cover a recent use, characterized by a planning component, which is becoming widespread in every-day spoken Italian. Having briefly touched on aspectual values, background function, and ‘Temporal Distance’ (Fleischman (n.d.)) in order to motivate the ‘modal’ uses of the indicativo imperfetto , ‘Displacement’ (Randriamasimanana (1987)) and ‘Negative Politeness’ (Brown and Levinson (1978)) are discussed in relation to some of the above-mentioned uses.

The complexity of context: guest editors’ introduction☆

As with other widely used notions that are commonly referred to in everyday activities without much hesitation, context is difficult to analyze scientifically and grasp in all its different demeanors. In our routine communicative activities, context is exploited both in production and in comprehension, and is strictly related to another problematic notion, viz. meaning. Thus Bateson (1979: 15): ‘‘Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all. This is true not only of human communication in words but also of all communication whatsoever, of all mental process, of all mind, including that which tells the sea anemone how to grow and the amoeba what he should do next.’’ Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 321–329 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

The relevance of prosody and context to the interplay between intensity and politeness. An exploratory study on Italian

Abstract The linguistic feature of intensity, lying “at the heart of social and emotional expression” (Labov 1984: 43), is significantly intertwined with politeness. In relation with intensity (that is, both upgrading and downgrading), the role of context and prosody in modifying and expressing politeness is discussed here in a pragmatic perspective. The complex interplay between intensity, politeness and prosody is explored with reference to several examples related to Italian, showing both the crucial role of prosody in conveying politeness and intensity and the relevance of global and local context parameters. In the paper, prosody acts as a pivot, with regard to which we discuss the status of the other components. In particular, it is shown to play an important role in constructing politeness and its variations of intensity under the influence of contextual parameter. Prosody may perform a primary distinctive function, or may jointly with other convergent or divergent cues express the meaning and politeness intended by the speaker. However, the overall effect of a speech act in terms of politeness is shown to be due to the variegated intertwinement between context, intensity and prosody, which is at play with or without other linguistic forms of politeness and accounts for the lack of a one-to-one correspondence between politeness and single utterance features.

Black as night or as a chimney sweep? Color words and typical exemplars

Abstract Color is a key feature, crucial for recognizing and categorizing objects. Even though color appearance tends to be perceived as stable, and universal tendencies have been found, color lexicon is subject to both intercultural and intralinguistic variations. Within a general hypothesis of integrating universalistic assumptions with a relativistic view, color terms and comparative color-based expressions (e.g., white as snow) were studied. Data were collected through questionnaires and corpora; the languages studied included Italian, Danish, and English. Our data provide a picture of the variegated intertwinement between nature and culture in the investigated languages. From a universalistic perspective, natural objects (e.g., sea, sky), which appear to be more stable across time and space, are more frequently mentioned as typical exemplars than artificial ones. From a relativistic perspective, some typical exemplars, which are not common interlinguistically, are mainly related to the linguistic representation of local history and traditions of the specific nation and culture. Instead of positing a single (either universalistic or relativistic) explanatory model, different interfaces and several contextual parameters are hypothesized to work jointly with universalistic constraints in lexicalizing the chromatic experience.

Context and Multi-media Corpora

In the recent research work on multi-media corpora the notion of context appears to be crucial both on the theoretical level and the applied level. The aim of this paper is to analyze the three levels which are relevant to the treatment of contextual information in multi-media corpora (i.e. annotation, storage, retrieval), and the different solutions which are resorted to in recently implemented systems to meet the need for a multi-layered, multi-linked annotation, and a hierarchically organized retrieval of contextual data.

Morphological Future in Italian Children

Before we discuss the topic of acquisition, it will be useful to provide non-Italian readers with a basic description of the morphology of Future, its possible substitutions with other tenses (and forms), and its use in standard Italian,1 in order to illustrate some peculiarities of this tense in adults’ language. Adults’ language plays a role not only as the standard language to be acquired, but also in the actual interactions, where some children’s occurrences of Future are “primed” (cf. 2.4), according to textual constraints.

Vicoli testuali e funzioni dei segnali discorsivi in Gellio

A prototype taxonomic model is applied to Aulus Gellius’noctes Atticae, a miscellaneous work of the 2nd century, in order to better analyzing the specific features of a polymorphic text, wich is not adequately dealt with by using traditional classifications. The reference of Gellius to his sources is in fact dynamic, based not on mimetic intentions but on a blend of different kind of report and different text parts, namely incipit, quotation, commentary, narration, dialog. The strict relationship between text types and linguistic devices is investigated as a recursive feature, focusing on discourse particles, wich both indicate the interactional development and impose an internal textual hierarchy. Nam and sed perform a significant function in the commentaries and in several short chapters of noctes Atticae, and in this function they cannot be replaced by other coniunctiones, wich belong to the same class in the normative latin grammars (respectively, nam and enim to the causal, and at, autem, sed to the adversative class). Discourse particles seem to reflect the kind of text: while in the narrative structure discourse particles do not occur, in the incipit and quotations metatextual discourse particles are prevalent; in commentaries and dialogs interactional discourse particles signal both agreement and disagreement.