Paola Benincà

Is “Hit and Run” a Single Word? The Processing of Irreversible Binomials in Neglect Dyslexia

The present study is the first neuropsychological investigation into the problem of the mental representation and processing of irreversible binomials (IBs), i.e., word pairs linked by a conjunction (e.g., “hit and run,” “dead or alive”). In order to test their lexical status, the phenomenon of neglect dyslexia is explored. People with left-sided neglect dyslexia show a clear lexical effect: they can read IBs better (i.e., by dropping the leftmost words less frequently) when their components are presented in their correct order. This may be taken as an indication that they treat these constructions as lexical, not decomposable, elements. This finding therefore constitutes strong evidence that IBs tend to be stored in the mental lexicon as a whole and that this whole form is preferably addressed in the retrieval process.

A Digital Library Effort to Support the Building of Grammatical Resources for Italian Dialects

In this paper we present the results of a project, named ASIt, which provides linguists with a crucial test bed for formal hypotheses concerning human language. In particular, ASIt aims to capture cross-linguistic variants of grammatical structures within a sample of about 200 Italian Dialects. Since dialects are rarely recognized as official languages, first of all linguists need a dedicated digital library system providing the tools for the unambiguous identification of each dialect on the basis of geographical, administrative and geo-linguistic parameters. Secondly, the information access component of the digital library system needs to be designed to allow users to search the occurrences of a specific grammatical structure (e.g. a relative clause or a particular word order) rather than a specific word. Thirdly, since ASIt has been specifically geared to the needs of linguists, user-friendly graphical interfaces need to be created to give easy access to and make the building of the language resource easier and distributed. The paper reports on the ways these three main aims have been achieved.

The ASIS enterprise: a view on the construction of a syntactic atlas for the Northern Italian dialects

In this article we intend to illustrate how the ASIS (Atlante Sintattico dell’Italia Settentrionale “Syntactic Atlas of Northern Italy”) project has been created and developed. We discuss the theoretical, empirical, and practical problems that we encountered working on such an enterprise, and the choices we made in order to solve them. We have created a layered methodology, which has proved useful in gathering more and more detailed data in an interplay between theoretical analysis and field work. As no method is perfect, we will here also outline some of the problematic aspects of our project.

ASIt: A Grammatical Survey of Italian Dialects and Cimbrian: Fieldwork, Data Management, and Linguistic Analysis

ASIt aims to observe, collect and analyse the linguistic variation displayed by the dialects of a language. The main theoretical hypothesis is that linguistic variation is not due to chance, but depends on the combination of a finite number of parameters. It is a first step towards the creation of a European digital library for recording and studying linguistic micro-variation.