John Kinder

Letters and Other Gifts: On a Nineteenth-Century Italian-Australian Epistolary Network

Letters are one of the kinds of things that people send each other while they are physically separated. All these gifts, beyond the contingent value they may have, are presents that metonymically represent a relationship as they come into the presence of the recipient. Exchange and forwarding of gifts serves crucially to gain ‘regard’ from others, which may be used immediately for tangible gain or may be its own reward or may be stored for future use. The giving and receiving of letters and other gifts is often not restricted to two persons but takes place and has meaning within and between networks. Brokers create new connections and act as catalysts for the formation of new networks. The gift of letters may lead to gifts of other kinds, which in turn may set in motion networks of epistolary (and other) correspondence. These ideas are explored here in relation to an epistolary network that operated, during the nineteenth-century, between a group of missionaries in Western Australia and various persons in Italy. Exchanges of letters within an ever-expanding network led to a consignment of Aboriginal material culture objects, the first such collection to reach Europe from Western Australia. This consignment originated as a gift to repay kindness from a friend of a friend, and in turn set in chain fresh cycles of writing and giving.

Auxiliary Verbs, Dictionaries and the Late Evolution of the Italian Language

The use of be as an auxiliary verb with intransitive verbs has declined in all the Romance languages over the past five centuries. Today, Spanish and Portuguese use only have, in Catalan and Romanian be occurs in marginal contexts, and in French, be is used with approximately 40 verbs. Italian is a notable exception, since be is still used as the auxiliary of nearly 300 intransitive verbs, as well as with all transitives in the passive and with all reflexives. This well-known fact is a notorious source of difficulty for language teachers and students, partly because there have been few adequate descriptions or even taxonomies of the semantic classes of intransitive verbs which take be. This paper reports an attempt to describe the selection of auxiliary verbs in Italian in terms of contemporary dictionaries of Italian. The paper offers a description of auxiliary selection based on the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy proposed by Sorace (2000), using some recent monolingual dictionaries as sources. This raises some issues about the use of dictionaries as source material for grammatical descriptions.