Pier Marco Bertinetto

Architecture, methods and purpose of the Gra.fo sound archive

The web-portal is configured to query the database and the server archive containing the preservation copies and to allow the end user to search all the documents (cataloguing records, .mp3 files, transcriptions and accompanying materials .pdf files) collected in Gra.fo. Two distinct types of search are supported: (i) linguistic area (an interactive map allows the users to click on the area of interest and access the corresponding records), and (ii) content (users can search by topic, genre, type of document, etc.). A huge number of oral texts which have been known, until now, to a very limited number of users is now available to the large public.

Boundary strength and linguistic ecology (mostly exemplified on intervocalic /s/-voicing in Italian)

This paper addresses the issue of intervocalic /s/-voicing in Italian along the lines of the recent proposal put forth by Loporcaro (1995; 1999), and adds further arguments to support his plea for the use of a hierarchy of morpheme boundaries instead of the now prevailing approach consisting of assigning the various phonological processes to different prosodic tiers. It is shown that none of the attempts carried out within the framework of prosodic phonology captures the linguistic data in a satisfactory way. The problem of intervocalic /s/-voicing is viewed in light of the strategy most often adopted by natural languages, which consists of protecting morpheme-initial segments from the operation of phonological rules that might alter their identity, hence posing a challenge to the task of language understanding. However, apart from the existence of various exceptions, it is claimed that this functional strategy is no more than a tendency, for even in the case at issue the efficiency of the system is far from perfect. Ultimately, the lexical competence of the speaker plays a decisive role in recognising morpheme-initial segments in the flow of speech, even though the application (or lack of application) of the relevant morphophonological rule provides useful information

Phonological representation of morphological complexity: alternative models (neuro- and psycholinguistic evidence)

The paper addresses the issue of phonological representation, from the standpoint of morphologically complex words. Theproblem which is at stake here is the notion of morphological compositionality, which is assumed by all models of generative phonology, However, the now considerable body of experimental research, in such areas äs language acquisition, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, provides a much more variegated view. In quite a number ofcases, it seems indeed more parsimonious to assume direct access of complex words, without internal decomposition (andrecomposition). It will be claimed that theoretical linguistics should greatly profit from paying more attention to experimental work. It will also be shown, however, that the suggestions put forth by psychoand neurolinguistics couldbe more stringent than they often are, were these disciplines less conditioned by the still prevailing generative framework.

The Acoustics of Lexical Stress in Italian as a Function of Stress Level and Speaking Style.

The study is part of a series of studies, describing the acoustics of lexical stress in a way that should be applicable to any language. The present database of recordings includes Brazilian Portug ...

The semantics of degree verbs and the telicity issue

This paper addresses the formal representation of Degree Verbs (DVs), also known as degree achievements. After assessing the similarities and differences of DVs vis-a-vis the accomplishment predicates within the set of “incremental theme verbs”, a double scale system is proposed to account for the telicity calculus. It is shown that DVs should be regarded as telic even though in most cases ,they do not imply culmination, but rather the mere attainment of a “contingent” telos. This formalism can be exploited to account for related phenomena, such as the so-called “conative oblique constructions” and “non-culminating” telic predicates

Identifying actional features through semantic priming: Cross-Romance comparison

This paper reports four priming experiments in Italian and Spanish, whose main goal was to empirically verify the psychological reality of two aspectual features crucially involved in event type classification, resultativity and durativity. The participants performed two semantic decision tasks targeting these features: in the durativity task, they were asked whether the verb referred to a durable situation, and in the resultativity task whether it denoted a situation with a clear outcome. The results obtained prove that both features are involved in online processing of the verb meaning: achievements and activities (respectively classified as [+resultative, durative] and [-resultative, +durative]) were processed faster in certain priming contexts. This suggests that resultativity and durativity belong to the mental representation of verbal semantics. The pattern of priming effects obtained in the Romance languages presents some striking similarities (in the resultativity task, only * We gratefully acknowledge the financial and technical support of Laboratorio di Linguistica (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) and the assistance of its staff members (Irene Ricci and Chiara Bertini). We thank all participants from Pisa and Madrid, who agreed to donate their time to take the tests (undergraduate students in Translation and Interpretation, Modern Languages, Anthropology, Geography, History and Science of Music, Political Science and Law, Food Science and Technology), and all the colleagues and friends who did not hesitate to help ‘recruiting’ them (Elena de Miguel, Fernando Arroyo, Maria Jesus Zamora, Carmen Valcarcel, Mohamed El-Madkouri Maataoui, Esperanza Molla y Jesus Penalosa Olivares). Many thanks to Elena de Miguel for her insightful and encouraging comments on this study. This project was partially financed by the research project “Diccionario electronico multilingue de verbos de movimiento con significado amplio (andar, ir, venir y volver)” (FFI2009-12191, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid). Some of the results reported in this paper have been discussed in Zarcone (2008), Zarcone and Lenci (2010), and Batiukova et al. (2012). QUADERNI DEL LABORATORIO DI LINGUISTICA – VOL. 13/2014 2 achievements benefited from priming) alongside some intriguing differences, and clearly contrasts with the behaviour of another language tested, Russian, whose aspectual system differs in significant ways. Two hypotheses can be proposed to account for these results, both pointing to some sort of processing advantage for the achievements. The first hypothesis invokes the nature of the features involved: durativity is continuous and contextually malleable, whereas resultativity is binary and hence more stable. The second hypothesis focuses on the ontology of events, predicting that priming emerges when the target verb is actionally ambiguous. In this respect, transitively used activity verbs should occasionally yield priming, for they may be used as accomplishments. However, transitivity was not systematically controlled in the experiments reported below. Achievements, on the other hand, are inherently ambiguous: they can refer either to the moment at which a change of state occurs or to the resultant state itself.

The acquisition of tense and aspect in a morphology-sensitive framework: Data from Italian and Austrian-German children

Abstract This article criticizes the wide-spread view, sometimes referred to as the “aspect first hypothesis” (initiated by Antinucci and Miller 1976 and supported by Bloom et al. 1980; Bickerton 1981; Weist et al. 1984; Shirai and Andersen 1995, among others), according to which a universal acquisition path is postulated in the tense-aspect domain, based on the leading role of actionality (or Aktionsart) and aspect. According to this view, children build their competence starting from the pervasive correlations atelic∴imperfective∴present vs. telic∴perfective∴past, before gradually learning to disentangle (i.e., freely combining) the various actional, aspectual, and temporal components. The alternative view advocated here (typologically-oriented and morphologically-sensitive) claims, instead, that children start out with no predefined strategy and extract the relevant information out of the individual language’s morphological structure. The data stem from four longitudinal corpora relating to three Italian children and one Austrian German child, showing that: (i) the strong correlation between actionality, aspect, and tense can only be supported if activity and stative verbs are lumped together within the category of atelic predicates. Once activities are separately examined, their behavior stands out as absolutely incompatible with the traditional view. (ii) In the relevant languages, there can be earlier understanding of the temporality-oriented morphology as contrasted with the aspect-related categories. (iii) The analysis does not support the so-called prototype hypothesis (Shirai and Andersen 1995), since the examined children were strongly affected by their linguistic input from the very beginning. (iv) The children presented (to a greater or lesser extent) a notable verb spurt that very briefly preceded the first uses of the Past tenses. In conclusion, the actual acquisition path followed by the analyzed children undermines the hypothesis of a universal acquisition pattern, supporting instead the view that acquisition depends on the specific morphological shape of the target language.

Perfectives, Imperfectives, and Progressives

This article provides a definition for the most basic divide within the domain of aspect. Perfectivity refers to events viewed as a whole, that is, from beginning to end, independently of whether they have or have not yet occurred (because aspect is independent of temporal reference). Imperfectivity, on the other hand, refers to open events, that is, events that may continue beyond the temporal point, or interval, focused upon, again irrespective of whether the speaker knows the actual state of affairs. This is especially prominent in the progressive aspect, which may be considered the quintessence of imperfectivity and which is often (but not exclusively) expressed by specialized periphrases, such as be V-ing in English. Another topic discussed is the structure of the verbal system in Slavic languages, where the opposition perfective versus imperfective may receive different interpretations in different languages. This opposition originated as a systematic device to express the contrast between telic and atelic types of events (i.e., events involving or not involving a resultant state). Thus, this contrast originally belonged to the domain of actionality. However, although this is still, by and large, the situation to be observed in Bulgarian, in most Slavic languages, such as Russian, this contrast has been reinterpreted in purely aspectual terms due to the collapse of the original tense system, which conveyed aspectual as well as temporal information.

An analysis-by-synthesis study of Mandarin speech prosody

In the present paper an analysis by synthesis study of mandarin speech prosody is carried out. The mandarin prosodic features are discussed from two salient perspectives, specifically: the function of prosody and the form of prosody. The symbolic representation of prosodic form with the INTSINT (INternational Transcription System for INTonation) system [1] reduces the surface complexity of a prosodic contour to a simplified model, which contains the essential information expressing the functions of speech prosody. A proposed mapping rule between the representation of prosodic function and the representation of prosodic form is discussed and further evaluated in ProZed [2, 3, 4, 5] by generating synthesized utterances. It is suggested in the study that the synthesized mandarin data derived from the prosodic coding of INTSINT symbols can not only closely mirror the melodic features of the original utterances, but also correctly express the prosodic functions of tones and the global intonation.

Sound Archives Accessibility

The paper analyses the conflicting issues that arise when dealing with Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) held in audio digital archives, when the demand for open access conflicts with ownership rights and ethical issues. It describes two case studies in order to evaluate the procedures used for doing research on oral materials while respecting the rights of others. The first refers to the activities carried on at the Phonotheque de la Maison mediterraneenne des sciences de l’homme, a French sound archive; the second refers to the solutions envisaged by an Italian research project, Grammo-foni. Le soffitte della voce (Gra.fo), jointly carried out by Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and the University of Siena.