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This paper aims to present observations on the pragmaticalized use as well as the concomitant functions of the demonstrative este in Mexican Spanish. Este seems to serve an additional range of functions in Mexican Spanish in particular, but also in other Hispanic American varieties, as it has turned into a quite productive discourse marker that can be considered, among other things, as a hesitation element, an outline signal, and probably also as an evidentiality marker. The specific functional domains (especially with regard to possible evidential functions) will be illustrated in more detail in the paper using oral language data from the speaker community of the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca de Juárez. The study also includes a sociolinguistically oriented quantitative analysis, the results of which will also be discussed in the context of language ideological attitudes towards este.

Tourism communication, especially since the digital turn, has registered several attempts to open to new forms of multilingualism. For instance, the traditional multilingual experience offered by guided tours and audio guides has now been enhanced by social networking tools. Recent research points to the need of interdisciplinary work at the crossroads of linguistics, media sciences and museum studies to investigate communication strategies and linguistic devices by means of which an international audience of tourists can be addressed and get involved in museums in the digital age. The present paper illustrates the first findings of the project “Museo poliglotta”, a project run by two universities in the Italian towns of Bergamo and Brescia in cooperation with local museums with the goal of producing digital multilingual contents for international museum visitors. The empirical part of the paper describes a workshop activity in which students developed Instagram reels in Italian, German and English on the figure of the well-known Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. A number of observations lead to the conclusion that synergies between language research and foreign language teaching on the one hand and museum institutions on the other can bring about important benefits for all parties involved, in particular the possibility to offer professionalising training in the academic world and stimuli to innovate and improve multilingual communication in the museum sector.

In the introductory article to this special issue, the two editors first provide a brief insight into how it arose and then give an overview of the contents of the individual papers, all of which are dedicated to phraseography or metaphraseography. These two fields of linguistic research belong to both phraseology and (meta-)lexicography and deal with the inclusion of phrasemes in dictionaries and the corresponding practical and theoretical issues. The articles also have in common that they focus on various diatopic Romance varieties spoken in Italy (Genoese, Trentino, Piedmontese, Tuscan, regional Italian of Rome, Sardinian, Catalan of Alghero), Croatia (Istriot), Spain and Latin America (regional varieties of Spanish). Since the term phraseme is used in a broad sense in this publication, numerous different phraseological categories are discussed in the papers, including, for example, syntagmatic verbs and partially lexically filled constructions, in addition to more classical categories such as idioms, proverbs and collocations. Finally, it will be briefly argued why this special issue, which is inspired by the two research projects GEPHRAS and GEPHRAS2, can be regarded as particularly innovative.

This paper explores the potential of JASP (Jeffreys’s Amazing Statistics Program, https://jasp-stats.org/) as a robust statistical tool in advancing Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, with a specific emphasis on its application within the domain of L2 writing. Second language writing proficiency is a complex and multifaceted skill, demanding rigorous empirical investigation to uncover nuanced patterns and insights. JASP, known for its user-friendly interface and advanced statistical capabilities, emerges as a promising instrument for researchers seeking to unravel the intricacies of L2 writing development. The paper begins by providing an overview of the features embedded in JASP and continues to discuss some of the extant research within the field of SLA that implements JASP as a data analysis tool. Follows is a detailed description of the use of JASP in two L2 writing papers, in which the data analysis decisions are discussed. Furthermore, the discussion delves into the practical implications of utilizing JASP in L2 writing research, including its ability to accommodate small sample sizes, handle complex interactions, and facilitate transparent and reproducible analyses. The paper concludes by advocating for the widespread adoption of JASP in SLA research, positing that its integration holds the promise of advancing our understanding of the intricacies of L2 writing development and contributing to the refinement of pedagogical approaches in second language education.

Research on regiolects commonly concentrates on phenomena of traditional dialectology. In his talk at the 6th IGDD congress in September 2018 Michael Elmentaler whatsoever plead to rather focus on characteristics of regiolects by themselves. As a scientific approach he mentioned regional phraseology. The following research project now focuses on the regional distribution of phrasemes and tries to find out whether participants are aware of these and which influence age has. Therefore 26 phrasemes, based on the Rheinisches Mitmachwörterbuch, an interactive online tool of the LVR-Institut für Landeskunde und Regionalgeschichte (ILR), that are not codified or coded „landschaftlich rheinisch/westmitteldeutsch“ in relevant lexicons are presented to participants. They then rated whether they knew and used these phrasemes or whether they were unknown to them. Moreover, participants were able to fill in variants of the idioms in question. First results from the study concerning awareness and age will be presented in this paper.

Language experiments have a long tradition in the field of dialectology to investigate phonological, lexical and syntactic variation. Methodologically, the repertoire ranges from written test procedures to standardized language production tests and interviews whereby different types of tasks (e. g. translation, picture-naming, evaluation tasks) are used. In order to investigate the variation and perception of morpho(phono)logical phenomena (e. g. the variation of the superlative dat schéinst/dat schéinsten/dat schéinstent Meedchen ‘the most beautiful girl’) in Luxembourgish, I developed a new test procedure, which is based on test procedures and tasks already used in other dialectological and variationist projects (e. g. Syntax Hessischer Dialekte (SyHD), cf. Fleischer/Lenz/Weiß 2015, Sprachvariation in Norddeutschland (SiN); cf. Elmentaler et al. 2015)). The development of a new method was indispensable, since firstly, it must be adapted to the analysis of morpho(phono)logical phenomena that are not linked to regional variation and secondly this test aims to analyse salience and pertinence, two relevant concepts within the scope of language perception and evaluation (cf. Purschke 2011), separately. This paper thus presents an experiment that aims to investigate the perception of morpho(phono)logical variation and its variants in Luxembourgish. The individual test procedures, a salience test, a specific form of scale-based test, a translation task and a supplementary questionnaire are described, contextualized and discussed in detail. The focus also lies on the special design of the test, which is able to ascertain the salience and pertinence of certain variants and to correlate them directly with the production of the variants and the self-evaluation of the individual participants.

Autonomous verbs in Irish are special verb forms incompatible with the surface realization of a subject. Previous studies have suggested to postulate empty categories such as pro, PRO or expletive pro to fill the subject position (cf. Stenson 1989; McCloskey 2007; Bondaruk/ Charzyńska-Wóicjk 2003), thus rejecting the idea that these verbs might be classified as completely subjectless. A series of syntactic tests bear out the hypothesis that, at least for Irish, these verbs behave as actually lacking a subject. I first suggest correlating this state of affairs to the fact that, with autonomous verbs, no argument role to be promoted to subject position is selected at the valency level, although it is “implied” in the unfolding of the event. Secondly, I argue that both valency reduction and syntactic non-realization of an argument role is driven by information structural constraints; notably, the focal nature of autonomous verbs (as advocated elsewhere, cf. Nolan 2012) causes the subject (together with the argument role it is associated with) to be informationally downgraded, thereby leading to its suppression in the sentence. The position held in this paper is that autonomous verbs of the Irish type epitomize an interesting phenomenon of semantic-pragmatic interface, with the pragmatic level of the utterance “mediating” between the semantic and the syntactic level; in such a perspective, the pragmatic (information structural) level of an utterance would determine either the number and type of argument roles a verb can take in a particular discourse context (cf. DuBois 1987; Goldberg 2006) and their syntactic encoding.

The paper aims to propose a reflection on the importance of German varieties in the preparation of interpreters. Like many other languages, German is classified as a pluricentric language, i. e. a language officially spoken in more than one centre or nation. This makes it a very variegated language that boasts a multitude of both standard and non-standard varieties. The task of interpreters who choose German as a foreign language is therefore to be able to understand and translate into another language what is spoken by native speakers of German, many of whom, according to the previous statement, often speak different varieties. To do this, the interpreters’ preparation must consider the inclusion of the different language varieties of both standard and non-standard German, especially at the level of auditory decoding, in order to facilitate the understanding of the message at a receptive level. Starting from the definition of a pluricentric language, this contribution will highlight the main difficulties of interpreters at the level of listening comprehension, most of which are found at the level of auditory decoding, before proposing training aimed at decoding the different varieties of standard and non-standard German realised through the use of new technologies.

The present work aims at showing the didactic potential of the novel Zweinhalb Störche: Roman einer Kindheit in Siebenbürgen, written in 2008 by the German-Romanian author Claudiu M. Florian, for multilingual learning in GFL classes. The paper focuses on the possible use of corpus-based learning tasks and consists of two parts: the first will introduce the main features of multilingual didactics and multilingual competence and the possible teaching approaches of inter- and transcultural literature through the use of corpora; the second will focus on the use of the novel to promote multilingual competence within the GFL classroom. In particular, specific tasks will be suggested to achieve a didactic surplus through the use of corpus compilation and analysis tools such as Sketch Engine.

The paper deals with the role of lexicographic resources in the South Tyrolean (i. e. the Autonomous Province of Bolzano/Bozen, Italy) educational context against the backdrop of legal provisions (Das neue Autonomiestatut 2019/1972) and the relevance of language education on the part of educational institutions (Rahmenrichtlinien DE, Rahmenrichtlinien IT), taking into account both normative requirements and their application in practice. The focus is on two questions that have been little researched so far, not only in the specific context but also internationally (cf. Abel 2022; Nied Curcio 2022): To what extent are lexicographic resources represented in the school framework guidelines? How are they actually used in schools? For the case study presented here, the South Tyrolean framework guidelines provided by the German and the Italian school boards at all levels of education for German and Italian as first (L1) and second (L2) languages, as well as for English as a foreign language (L3) were examined by means of a document analysis. In a second step, a questionnaire survey with language teachers at all school levels (German and Italian as L1/L2, English as L3; number of survey respondents: 644) determined the actual use of lexicographic resources.

Studies on the Linguistic Landscape (LL) have become a particularly prolific object of study and research in the last fifteen years. The most recent research perspective has led to new categorizations for the LL, which not only form the basis for further empirical research, but are also of great use in foreign language teaching (Malinowski/Maxim/Dubreil 2020). Indeed, working with the LL that is also interculturally specific fulfils one of the primary goals of foreign language teaching, as the close relationship between language and culture also promotes intercultural communicative competence. Our paper will examine in particular the great potential of this tool in the context of teaching German as a Foreign Language in Italy, in order to stimulate greater language awareness and linguistic reflection in the processes of learning and teaching German in which learners are involved. By means of the administration of didactic sheets prepared by us, we will consider the possibility of applying to a didactic context data on both the German language and culture, taken from the observation of the LL of Alto Adige/Südtirol and collected on several occasions within a corpus, the LLSÜDTIROL, which will be discussed below.

As already shown in a newly published article (Autelli/Caria 2022b), the phraseological studies on the Catalan of Alghero are still in their infancy, and there is an urgent need for documenting more phrasemes in this diatopic variety. One can already find some of them in dictionaries and amatorial collections. The aim of this paper is to give a brief overview of the written sources and dictionaries of Algherese, then to analyse the terminology used in the latter in reference to phrasemes and, most importantly, to find out what kind of phrasemes are provided, trying to pinpoint their main morphosyntactic, semantic and cultural features.

This article aims to present a proposal for the lemmatisation of Hispanic phraseology in a digital multilingual phraseological dictionary. Indeed, in the current lexicographic panorama, bi- or multilingual electronic dictionaries capable of comprehensively presenting the phraseology of the different diatopic varieties of Spanish are still lacking. For this reason, within the framework of the Digital Multilingual Phraseological Dictionary (DFMD) project, currently being developed at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, a preliminary study illustrated in this paper has been carried out. This focuses on the inclusion of Spanish phraseology in a Spanish-Italian/ Italian-Spanish bilingual repertory. In the following chapters, I first outline the state of the art as regards the presence of Hispanic phraseology in existing digital lexicographic works (chapter 2), and then move on to the presentation of the elaborated phraseographic proposal: in particular, I will set out the parameters adopted for the selection of the phraseological corpus under investigation and its subsequent lemmatisation in the Venetian repertory (chapter 3). Subsequently, I will examine some examples of lexicographic entries in which the proposed methodology is applied (chapter 4). Finally, I will offer some points of re-thinking for possible future studies (chapter 5).

The paper is devoted to the analysis of partially lexically specified constructions in different diatopic varieties of Italian. These word combinations can be defined as constructions since they are pairings of form and meaning characterized by the presence of fixed and empty positions. The investigation examines examples of partially lexically specified (phrasal and sentence) constructions in Sardinian and in the regional Italian of Rome. The analysis shows that this combinatorial type is widespread within the national language as well as in local varieties. The phenomena which have been considered mainly concern: i) the presence of indigenous constructions in the local variety; ii) the presence of constructions modelled on the roof language; iii) the lexicalisation of forms in the local variety from roof language constructions, which radiate back as fixed sequences into the national language. The analysis also considers the lexicographic perspective and shows that these constructions are generally underrepresented in lexicographic tools, even though their single instantiations are often recorded in the corresponding entries.

In this paper, the treatment of phraseological elements in four bilingual dictionaries of Istriot varieties – Gallesanese, Vallese, and Rovignese – and Italian is analyzed. First, an overview of the sociolinguistic situation of Istriot in the complex linguistic reality of Croatian Istria is provided. This is followed by a concise outline of Istriot lexicography. In the empirical part, after describing the analyzed dictionaries, the research results of the treatment of phraseology in the latter are presented and discussed. Finally, some concluding remarks are made.

Dialect phraseography is, generally speaking, still in its early stage; however, it is booming with some of the first studies in this direction as far as some diatopic varieties of Italy are concerned (additionally to the articles in this special issue, cf. also those contained in Autelli/Konecny/Lusito 2023a). As to Genoese phraseography, it has been living great development thanks to the Genoese-Italian projects GEPHRAS and GEPHRAS2, whose lexicographic entries can be found in one single, freely accessible online dictionary. As the latter project shows some additional innovative features, those will be further investigated in this paper, paying particular attention, within the numerous innovations, to the new sources and metalinguistic information integrated in the dictionary, to the phonetic transcriptions of the phrasemes as well as to the criteria chosen for creating sample sentences containing selected phrasemes.