La competenza fraseologica in italiano lingua straniera tra i livelli elementare e intermedio

Phraseology constitutes an indisputably important area of language proficiency. Among the methods devised to explore this domain, semiautomated analysis of learner corpora has yielded important findings, especially in the case of intermediate and advanced levels. This paper investigates phraseological competence in Italian as a Foreign Language between the A2 and B1 levels of the CEFR. We collected 160 texts based on different combinations of task difficulty and learner level and we compared, through two-way Anova tests, the different groups. Results show that A2 leaners produce more non-collocational bigrams with respect to other groups, but when they attempt a B1 task they experience difficulty in producing high frequency bigrams. Implications for instruction and further research are discussed.

Topic unit detection in spontaneous speech

This paper deals with an inter-annotator agreement test involving the identification of the information unit of Topic as defined within the framework of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT). Fleiss’s kappa statistic was used to measure the agreement among the four annotators who took part in the test. The data used was sampled from C-ORAL-BRASIL II, a spontaneous speech corpus of Brazilian Portuguese. The paper begins by outlining of the theoretical underpinnings of L-AcT, dedicating special attention to aspects directly related to the notion of Topic. Section 2 presents the pilot test and discusses methodological and theoretical issues that were relevant for the design of the protocol that was eventually used in the actual test. Sections 3 and 4 deal with the test, its protocol and results (the kappa coefficient for the general agreement was 0.79, which by usual standards represents a substantial agreement). Section 5 first provides a brief review of a few studies conducted according to other frameworks which have dealt with inter-rater agreement on the annotation of information structure categories. Finally, the errors observed in the test are analyzed qualitatively.

La Stanza nella Teoria della Lingua in Atto

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of Italian spontaneous speech in the theoretical framework of Language into Act Theory (Cresti 2000; Cresti & Moneglia 2010; Moneglia & Raso 2014). A selection of IPIC database (Panunzi & Gregori 2012) has been studied to describe the syntactic behaviors of specific structures named stanzas. Stanzas are terminated sequences prosodically recognizable in the speech flow as chains of nuclei on the same prosodic level. This structure marks nearly 10% of the spoken communication and it is typical of monologues, stories, and life narrations. The analysis shows an additive and flat syntax mostly composed by chained clauses and juxtapositions, without a hierarchical order: stanzas are usually formed by main clauses one after the other or connected through coordinative conjunctions; subordination is not so common and mostly in the form of causal or relative subordinate clauses.

I connettivi perché e weil come introduttori di enunciati autonomi nei giornali di oggi

The aim of this paper is, first of all, to outline the contemporary uses of causal structures in Italian writing, focusing on some less canonical syntactic and textual manifestations. These non-prototypical constructs will be, then, compared with the corresponding ones in German. The analysis that will be presented are based on qualitative and quantitative data derived from corpora of Italian and German newspaper writing. As far as the Italian language, the paper will focus on the causal connective perché: after presenting its frequency of use compared to the other causal connectives, we will discuss some of its most common syntactic and informative-textual configurations, with particular reference to the case in which perché introduces an independent utterance, preceded by a strong punctuation mark. Right this last use will be observed also in German newspapers, thanks to a preliminary survey that will focus on the causal connective weil. For both languages we will consider the frequency of this peculiar use, as well as its possible forms and textual functions, in order to highlight analogies and differences between German and Italian.

Ancora sulla paratassi dello scritto letterario

The paper presents a corpus-based research (GRITTEXT) on modern Italian literary texts. According to a writer-oriented framework, it is aimed to analyse the writer's thought movements while he is composing instead of considering the communicative effects of the text on the reader. The period is the linguistic unit of reference chosen for analysis and is identified by strong punctuation marks (dot, question mark, exclamation point, sequence of dots). It is not necessarily composed by a sentence, since it can correspond to a set of clauses and any kind of phrases. The research made emerge the pervasiveness of parataxis in literary texts. Two or more independent syntactic constituents can be connected within a period only through weak punctuation marks (comma, semicolon, colon). Each constituent corresponds to a semantic scene characterized by an autonomous point of view depending on the protagonist, the narrator or the same writer. The paratactic period is a style device to express within a same representation the narrative joints arising to the writer in the course of writing but above all the different perspectives of each scene that are also temporally ordered. The paratactic period corresponds to a unitary multi-focus, multi-modal, multi time representation whose truth value cannot be verified unlike a proposition