Ludovico Franco

Ergative case, aspect and person splits: Two case studies

Ergativity splits between perfect and imperfective/progressive predicates are observed in languages with a specialized ergative case (Punjabi) and without it (Kurdish). Perfect predicates correspond to a VP projection; external arguments are introduced by means of an oblique case, namely an elementary part–whole predicate saying that the event is ‘included by’, ‘located at’ the argument. A more complex organization is found with imperfective/progressive predicates, where a head Asp projects a functional layer and introduces the external argument. Our proposal further yields the 1/2P vs. 3P Person split as a result of the intrinsic ability of 1/2P to serve as ‘location-of-event’.

Axial Parts, Phi‐Features and Degrammaticalization: the Case of Italian Presso/Pressi in Diachrony

In this paper, I will provide a possible syntactic characterization of (a subset) of so-called degrammaticalization processes, based on the case of the diachronic evolution of presso/pressi (near/at, in) in Italian. Moreover, with an empirical study on the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI) corpus, I will support Svenoniuss idea of Axial Part as an independent category in the lexicon (and not a mere spatial subset of relational nouns), providing a new kind of evidence i.e. of the diachronic type, to this claim.

Some notes on Italian ethnic adjectives

In this paper, we deal with ethnic adjectives in Italian, arguing against the dichotomy between ‘thematic’ and ‘classificatory’ ethnic adjectives, recently assumed by Alexiadou and Stavrou (2011). Building on Manzini and Savoia (2011), Manzini and Franco (2016), Franco and Manzini (2017), Savoia et al. (2017, forthcoming), we provide a unified characterization of Italian ethnic adjectives and we take the derivational morphemes shaping this kind of items to be a derivational counterpart of the genitive adposition di (of) (and other kinds of obliques), sharing with the latter a common predicational core and a common signature. The proposal advanced for ethnic adjectives can be broadly extended to relational adjectives in general.

(De)Legitimization Strategies in the "Austere Prose" of Palmiro Togliatti *

This article illustrates the specific linguistic ways which introduce the pragmatics and semantics of de-legitimization and symbolic power in political discourse. We will show that the words produced in political discourse, represent an enabling tool to create the effects of meaning related to the process of (de)legitimization as a slip/change of meaning. Taking into account the few previous studies on de-legitimization strategies, our intention is to analyse this discursive practice in the political discourse of Palmiro Togliatti, considering as the focus of our analysis three speeches delivered in the period 1947-1952. We will show that Togliatti employed many different discursive strategies that can be included within the (de)legitimization spectrum

A TYPOLOGICAL RARUM IN SOGDIAN: OVERT COMPLEMENTIZERS IN INDICATIVE ROOT CLAUSES

Abstract The purpose of this work is to illustrate an extremely rare linguistic feature, namely the overt present of a root complementizer in assertive/indicative (i.e. unmarked) matrix clauses, of the Sogdian language, an Eastern Middle Iranian Language once spoken in a region located in the valley of rivers Zaravshan and Kashkadarya (roughly corresponding to the territory of modern day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan). This linguistic fact is very interesting because it represents an overt evidence of the principle of endocentricity inferred in the Generative tradition since the early 80s. In comparative perspective, this uncommon feature of the Sogdian language may be associated to the mechanism of para-hypotaxis, previously studied in many different Romance languages (e.g. Old French, Old Italian, Old Catalan) and recently discovered in other genetically unrelated languages (e.g. Swahili, Zamucoan languages)