Giuliana Fiorentino

Romance Objects: Transitivity in Romance Languages

The volume brings together the papers read at the international conference on Romance Objects organized by the Linguistics Department of the Roma Tre University. It is characterized by a striking uniformity of approach, which is functional, and of methodology. The various case studies regarding the object focus on the syntax/semantics and syntax/pragmatics interfaces. The common denominator of the ten enquiries is the identification of the object category, the DO in particular, in Romance languages; at the same time some of the contributors relate the specific topic to more general questions of linguistic typology. Some of the essays are based on the analysis of data from a corpus and present a diachronic picture of the evolution of the specific topic investigated. Thus this volume is addressed not only to scholars interested in the Romance languages but also all those who study the object category in a cross-linguistic perspective.

Le clausole relative ''deboli'' in italiano

In this study the author analyses the realisation of the Italian relative clause. She points her attention on a particular alternation that takes place in spoken Italian so that a relative clause on an indirect object can be introduced not only by the relative pronouns cui and il quale preceded by a preposition (non conosco nessuno di cui / del quale mi possa fidare), but also by an invariable element, the complementizer che, historically deriving from the weakness of the relative pronoun (non conosco nessuno che mi possa fidare). This study aims to describe the characteristics of this particular type of relative clause in a functional approach, to evaluate their presence in Italian spoken language and to look for explanations of the alternation of different types of relative clauses