Alternating Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions

In this article we study the alternation between the two most prominent Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions, viz. the Syntactic Inversion Construction (henceforth: SIC), e.g. Arriva il treno (‘The train is arriving’), and the Presentational Cleft (henceforth: PC), e.g. C’è il treno che arriva (‘The train is arriving’). Based on the existing literature on the two constructions and drawing inspiration from a number of cognitive-functional hypotheses pertaining to constraints on the amount of referentially new constituents that can be conveyed in a single clause, we put forward the hypothesis that Italian language users are more likely to prefer the PC over the SIC if the utterance involves a high number of referentially new constituents. To assess this hypothesis, we constructed a pilot experiment consisting of a 100-split forced choice task that was administered by means of an online questionnaire to 66 native speaker participants. The results of the experiment indicate that the preference for the PC indeed increases if the number of referentially new constituents is higher. This is however not the only factor involved in the alternation and the preference of the language users seems not only to be determined by the number of referentially new constituents, but also by their syntactic status.

Learning Algorithms of Sentiment Analysis

The uncritical application of automatic analysis techniques can be insidious. For this reason, the scientific community is very interested in the supervised approach. Can this be enough? This chapter aims to these issues by comparing three machine learning approaches to measuring the sentiment. The case study is the analysis of the sentiment expressed by the Italians on Twitter during the first post-lockdown day. To start the supervised model, it has been necessary to build a stratified sample of tweets by daily and classifying them manually. The model to be test provides for further analysis at the end of the process useful for comparing the three models: index will be built on the tweets processed with the aim of detecting the goodness of the results produced. The comparison of the three algorithms helps the authors to understand not only which is the best approach for the Italian language but tries to understand which strategy is to verify the quality of the data obtained.

Positive and Negative Lexical Transfer in English Vocabulary Acquisition

The aim of the paper is to explore the appearance of positive and negative lexical transfer of plurilingual learners in English vocabulary acquisition. Cross-linguistic influences in the study are examined by word translation tasks from Croatian into English, including true, partial, and deceptive cognates or false friends in English, German, and Italian. The results have revealed different language dominances and positive or negative transfer manifestation. Lexical transfer from L4 German is manifested positively, but the Italian language seems to play a dominant role in the acquisition of English vocabulary. The effect of Croatian is manifested both positively and negatively. The study has confirmed previous psycholinguistic studies on the complexity of lexical connections in plurilingual learners and the dynamic interaction of various learning-based factors, such as language recency, proficiency, exposure to languages, the order in which languages are learned, and the formal context in language learning.

Introduction of Movement Into Classes of the Italian Language and an Analysis of the Most Common Linguistic Issues

The aim of the paper was to address the concept of movement and its introduction into tertiary education in classes of the Italian language during COVID-19 times. In the paper we address the importance of introducing movement in language learning giving an insight to the presence of physical activity in educational curricula where examples of good practice are presented. The paper focuses on the concept of language acquisition with the preparation of video resources and how such concept can benefit movement and avoid sedentarism in tertiary education. The survey was composed of an experiment where students from the Faculty of Tourism, University of Maribor prepared videos in the Italian language as part of their study requirements. In this research 14 three-minute-long videos were analysed in terms of language usage and the most common linguistic issues are presented.

Metamodernism and Language: Pandemic Era Advertising

In cultural theory, metamodernism becomes a new cultural paradigm of the twenty-first century, epistemologically with (post) modernism, ontologically between (post) modernism, and historically beyond (post) modernism. It appears in the context of political changes following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the environment of digital progress, but also in periods of financial and ecological crises. Rather than simple “zeitgeist”, metamodernism as an arriving cultural paradigm is to be understood more as a “structure of feelings” or sentiment so pervasive that it becomes structural. Metamodernism is symbolically presented by the dual nature of God’s messenger Eros, who operates between the worlds of mortals and immortals. Another metaphor to illustrate metamodernism is a pendulum that constantly fluctuates between opposites such as modern hope and postmodern melancholy, empathy and apathy or enthusiasm and irony. This paper examines Italian advertisements during the largest contemporary health crisis, the SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak. The semiotic textual analysis is performed on the audio-visual commercials of well known companies, such as Vodafone and Barilla. In addition to this, several print advertisements of a local company for funeral services Taffo are considered. Different metamodern characteristics are recognised in all examined texts. In already confirmed pandemic narratives (such as “the celebration of being Italian and patriotic solidarity”, “the juxtapositioning of the “inside” and the “outside”, and the “humanization of technology at the service of human affections and emotions''), now the metamodern characteristics, as a new structure of feeling that brings hope, continuous oscillations between contrasted polls and a certain quirkiness, are being identified. The most relevant morphosyntactic, lexical and semantic traits of the Italian language in pandemic advertising are being compared with the same language tools in postmodern Italian advertising. Finally, different stylistic and pragmatic, rhetorical and semiotic tools are being interpreted and analysed, defining more closely the unique characteristics of “metamodern” pandemic advertising.

Die Größe ‚Gewicht‘ im deutsch-italienischen Sprachvergleich

The topic of this article is ‘weight’ in the German-Italian language comparison. Which linguistic means are used to refer to weight in German (Gewicht) and what are the Italian equivalents? The material which has been collected is based on monolingual German and Italian dictionaries, reference works and text corpora as well as on bilingual German-Italian dictionaries and text excerpts. The classification of the so-called weight designations including derivatives, composites and word combinations is carried out from an etymological and lexical perspective. In addition to the dictionary entries, German-Italian translation examples show further equivalents of terms and expressions with regards to ‘weight’ in this language pair.

Aspektualität in deutschen Partikel- und Präfixverben

Prefix and particle verbs are part of a systematic way of expressing aspectual structures in German. This article proposes an aspectual analysis of German particle and prefixed verbs, regarding especially their polysemic characteristics, and will give a contrastive comparison with the Italian language. This can be useful given that Italian does not have developed a system of prefixes and particles as German does. Therefore, the Italian translations of German prefixed and particle verbs turns out to use different kinds of expressions, often of a periphrastic nature. This is seen here as an indication in favour of the strongly polysemic verbs in German. The aspectual comparison of both languages will be done using an onomasiological model of aspectuality, which allows the analysis of different kinds of expressions without using specific formal categories. The first part of this article gives a short introduction and definition of the German verbs. Part two concerns the question of what aspectuality in German is, followed by part three, a quick overview of actual research in the field. Part four explains how a contrastive perspective may be helpful to discover and illuminate the polysemic German prefixed and particle verbs. Part five presents the empirical data used for the purpose of this work. Part six, then, contains the aspectual analysis of the German verbs in their given context. Every German example will be described and compared to its Italian translation. The article will close with a quick summary of the results, focussing especially on the usefulness of a contrastive approach.

Soziogeographische Variation im Deutschen und ihre Übersetzung ins Italienische

The translation of multilingual texts, in which diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic varieties contribute to the characterization of the figures and their milieus, poses the problem of the sociolinguistic adequacy of the translation. It is well known that the greatest challenge lies in the varieties caused by the spatial variation of the language, since it is practically impossible to establish perfect equivalence between dialects. However, the reproduction of diamesic varieties, in particular the written reproduction of the spoken language, can cause great difficulties for translators. The article presents the TRADIVARIO project, the aim of which is to investigate strategies and tendencies in the translation of multilingual literary texts for the German-Italian language pair that are characterized by a pronounced sociolinguistic stratification or representative of the variety structure of the spoken language of the present. In addition, the concrete goal of the project is the creation of a parallel corpus as well as the development of a digital platform, which makes the results of the investigation researchable and which can serve as a tool both for translators and learners and as an empirical basis for contrastive linguistic research.

Fraseologismi con la componente somatica cuore nella lingua croata e italiana. Approccio contrastivo

The article provides a cognitive analysis of phraseological units with the heart component in comparative terms. The purpose of the analysis is to show the similarities and differences in expressing emotions (positive, neutral and negative) between two languages originating from different linguistic groups: the Croatian language (South Slavic group) and the Italian language (from the group of the Romance languages). Phraseological units are analysed on the basis of three criteria: identical in both languages; partially adequate in both languages; idiomatic for one language. The research presents the motivation of phraseologisms and aims to prove that the heart is related to human emotional life and is a container for feelings.