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The aim of this paper is to highlight an aspect of Mozart's production that has long been neglected by contemporary musicology: the strong influence of Orientalism in some of the composer's works. After a brief focus on musical antecedents related to Orientalism, mostly composed in France, Austria and Germany, we will then examine four of Mozart's most famous works in more detail: the Violin Concerto in A major K219, the Piano Sonata in A major K331 and the two renowned Singspiele: Die Entführung aus dem Serail K384 and Die Zauberflöte K620. For each of these works, all of them replete with Turqueries and exotic elements, different aspects will be examined with the aim of providing a multifaceted review of the main manifestations of Orientalism in European musical production of the 18th century. It is worth clarifying that what will be examined constitutes the original core of a series of elements that, in Art music production of the following centuries, will become a compositional norm with explicit reference to the Middle East, although derived from cultural and musical stereotypes. Furthermore, when discussing the East in a musical context, we do not refer to well-defined geographical and cultural boundaries. In this paper, we will also offer a brief analysis of this highly stereotyped and antithetical Eastern world, from a perspective strictly linked to the musical context, but one whose influences also partially extend to literature and visual arts.

The aim of this paper is to explore the presence of Cultural References in animated films and to investigate the approach adopted by Italian dubbing professionals to deal with such culture-specific elements. The analysis is based on a corpus of twelve American animated films released between 1955 and 2018 by companies such as Disney, Disney-Pixar, DreamWorks, 20th Century Fox, Illumination Entertainment, Universal Pictures. By analysing the transcriptions of the English and Italian dialogues and the films, the paper identifies food and drink Cultural References and examines the translation strategies used in Italian dubbing. A comparison of older and more recent films throws light on differences through time as well as on translation patterns. The linguistic analysis of the English and Italian dialogues is complemented with comments by two Italian dubbing professionals on dubbing practice in Italy.

Using W. J. Thomas Mitchell’s concept of the “pictorial turn” as a starting point, this paper assesses the impact of the digital world and new media on the body of current migration narratives within the field of anglophone postcolonial literature. In a culture dominated by images, new media, particularly the Internet, have increasingly complemented written language as the primary means of conveying storytelling. In regard to migration narratives, as it happened at the dawn of cinematography when the human face attained a multidimensional, visual and emotional focus, this shift in the messenger has conferred a digital life to the human face itself. Given this new media reality, the human face is now able to communicate simultaneously across distances, across time and to a wider audience. This quality, referred to as “facialization” by Thomas Macho, enables individuals to take a predominant role as real-life protagonists in their own real-life stories engendering in return an online community. Furthermore, as put forth by Hilde C. Stephansen, this online community also takes a stand against the mainstream narrative of present-day migrations and directs attention to marginalized human beings prevented from entering Western societies. In this paper, these real-life stories are explored in the visual-digital storytelling by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie of her experience as a migrant; by Reni Eddo-Lodge as a descendant of earlier migrants; by Lucy Popescu as an activist working for the publishing industry as well as by activists engaged in the Refugee Tales Statement. This visual-digital production of migration narratives and their consequent availability also render the human rights issues facing stateless persons pressing and immediate.

This paper revisits Walter Benjamin’s unpublished “Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus,” one of relatively few texts Benjamin is known to have written in 1922, European modernism’s widely recognized annus mirabilis. The announcement followed numerous, transformative essays and fragments of 1921 and was written alongside his dissertation on The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, encompassing a pivotal moment in Benjamin’s philosophical maturation. Heralding the new, never realized journal, the announcement articulates what might be deemed “the task of the editor,” which it describes as a quest for “philosophical universality”. The Angelus Novus journal would proceed form the fact of modern social discontinuities toward the elaboration of universal philosophical truths through the criticism of literary works. This paper reconsiders Benjamin’s editorial ambitions as part of his individual philosophical development and within a broader context of “total modernism,” discussing the announcement’s continued relevance for our contemporary world.

Centred around six exceptional Danish linguists: Vilhelm Thomsen, Otto Jespersen, Kristian Sandfeld, Louis Hjelmslev, Knud Togeby and Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, this paper analyses the development of linguistics in Denmark from mid-19th century to the end of the 20th century. The paper makes evident that these linguists, through their scholarship, research area, choices and methodology, together with their reciprocal interactions and joint affiliations, had a strong influence on the evolution of Danish linguistics.

It is a well-known fact that J.R.R. Tolkien’s training as a philologist had a very strong impact on his work as a creator of languages. This paper aims to identify the influence of Tolkien’s academic background in the field of linguistic studies on the creation of his Elvish languages. Taking into account Tolkien’s earliest works on Qenya (the first of the Elvish languages to be conceived) and based on our knowledge of Tolkien’s readings in linguistics and philology, the paper analyses some peculiar uses by Tolkien in describing the language and traces them back to their likely sources. The aim of the paper is twofold: on the one side, it hopes to show that this kind of source criticism can lead us to a better understanding of Tolkien’s conception of his Elvish tongues. On the other side, the systematic comparison between Tolkien’s writings on his constructed languages and the scholarly sources that constituted his linguistic background may represent a step towards acknowledging Tolkien’s place in the history of linguistic thought.

Communication is one of the most important tools through which man can build his universe, because, through language, man creates and shapes realities. But the reality is constantly changing, which is why the language must respect the same rules and evolve with it. This paper aims to demonstrate the emergence of a new discursive genre, in response to social, cultural and even religious changes in recent decades. The new genre, deeply influenced by the structure of classical religious discourse, distances itself from it both formally and lexically. For this, we have selected and transcribed an excerpt from a public speech of the one we consider the initiator of this new genre, Father Constantin Necula. The paper will mention the reasons that led to the need for a new type of discourse, the specific elements of the genres that underlie it, as well as the elements of innovation.

This paper examines a fifth-century B.C. obscure ceremony: the libations to Dionysus poured by the ten generals during the Athenian Dionysia in the theatre – a practice attested only by Plutarch’s Life of Cimon. The investigation here conducted firstly contextualises the libations as a religious ritual and, secondly, analyses its performers from a historico-political perspective. While highlighting the problematics for assessing and interpreting the libations as an unambiguous event, the paper investigates: (a) what the performers did during a libation; (b) who were the ordinary officers of the libations; and (c) to what extent democratic ideology was involved during the ritual.

Paul Valéry and literary interpretation: form, history, diacrony. The paper aims to address the dialectic between morphology and diacrony canon based on the theoretical reflections of Paul Valéry. The paper will start by observing his project of generalized morphology – the premises of which recall the Goethian studies – which remained incomplete but carried forward in different works and forms through all his intellectual work and his reflections. Starting with a few examples, the paper will measure how the analysis of form, understood as Bildung, runs through all of Valéry's intellectual work from the Cahiers to his public speeches. Valéry’s reflections still offer interesting insights and open up to reflection on very lively issues in the current debate around literature.

This paper covers three separate topics. All three concern Cicero and his first-century AD commentator Q. Asconius Pedianus. The chief contribution of parts one and two is to identify sources consulted by Asconius that have previously not been revealed or suspected. Part one will show that the multiple errors committed by Asconius in recounting the circumstances of the death of Cicero’s daughter Tullia in 45 BC are to be attributed to a source that misunderstood a letter of Cicero. Prior to publication, the letters to Atticus appear to have been accessible in a private archive, and on at least one, and probably two occasions, Asconius reveals that the historian Fenestella was misled by identifiable letters of Cicero to Atticus. Therefore, it is plausible that Fenestella was the conduit by which the content of yet another letter left its imprint on Asconius. In part two, it will be demonstrated that Asconius is likely to have relied upon, and been misled by, the invective against Cicero that has come down to us under the name of Sallust. This borrowing provides an earlier terminus post quem non for the circulation of that pseud-epigraphic work. At the same time, it demonstrates that Asconius, like Quintilian after him, almost certainly accepted the invective as a genuine work by Sallust. Lastly, part three challenges the communis opinio that a hostile reaction of a theatre crowd to the praetor L. Roscius Otho in 63 was caused by their resentment of his law of 67 which conferred on knights the privilege of occupying the first fourteen rows of seats. According to the prevailing view, Cicero’s no longer extant oration De Othone persuaded the throng to set aside their anger over being barred from the front rows. This paper argues that the angry outburst was triggered instead by the role Otho played as urban praetor in overseeing cases involving the repayment of debts, which in 63 had become a politically charged issue.

This paper will try to grasp and elucidate the main developments and tendencies characterizing the contemporary global city by employing the concepts of place and non-place. I will start from the assumption that the interaction of lieu and non-lieu may work as a heuristic tool suitable for sociological analysis. In the first part of the paper, the notions of place and non-place will be discussed from a theoretical point of view, while highlighting, at the same time, their spatial, temporal and symbolic dimension. Then, several characteristics of the contemporary city will be addressed: from spatial differentiation and social segregation to the Disneyfication of places, from the global homogenization of downtowns to the sub-urbanization of the city’s surroundings. I will show how the ongoing tendencies in global economy, urbanism, and planning are filling the cities with non-places. Nonetheless, new forms of geographical and social imaginative outlets are springing up in the interstices of contemporary cities, in the common attempt to rebuild places of social exchange and mutual recognition.

Milan is no longer an industrial city. This paper traces the story of a once industrial city that never truly was a place solely made of factories. The paper focuses on the final decades of the 20th-century, when, one by one, all the large factories closed, leaving a scar behind their disappearance, a social trauma that caused the disintegration of the working class, which had been an important component of Milan’s population till then. That event symbolizes the beginning of a drastic urban metamorphosis. This was a process that has left deep marks in the urban fabric itself, marks that the city of Milan only recently started to metabolize. This happened thanks to the development of a modern tertiary sector followed by urban regeneration and gentrification processes, mainly led by the interests of large real estates.

The topic of trees is usually overlooked in narrative in spite of their being a ubiquitous element of any landscape. When it comes to Palestinian trees, though, a further consideration is due. In recent times, trees have actually become a common topic in any political discourse regarding both Palestinians and Israelis. Hence, their presence in Palestinian writings is usually interpreted as applying to one of the two political positions involved. By tracing and analysing the representation of trees in Palestinian literature, this paper will demonstrate how intrinsically important trees are, not only in the everyday lives of Palestinian people, but also within Palestinian culture, to the point that the respect for trees is passed down to the new diasporic generations of Palestinians scattered around the world. What is about to be discussed aims at showing the strong connection that all Palestinians have with the places and culture of their origins, this feeling of belonging emerging especially from writing dedicated to trees. By doing so this paper intends to offer a reading of Palestinian literature that looks beyond political and historical claims.

This paper examines a selection of poems on nature by Margaret Cavendish, an English poet and natural philosopher active in the mid-seventeenth century. Cavendish’s conception of nature was “organicist”, meaning that all creatures – humans, animals and plants alike – share similar abilities in terms of feeling and reasoning. In this essay, Cavendish’s organicism will be discussed as the philosophical framework of her collection Poems, and Fancies (1653), especially those poems in which beasts, plants or nature herself engage in dialogue with human beings about their relationship with the environment. It will be argued that Cavendish’s choice to give voice to nature works as a fictional strategy to help readers imagine an alternative idea of nature, one different to that of nature as resource that was becoming increasingly widespread with the advent of early modern science. In the final section, it will finally be suggested that reading Cavendish’s poetry through the lens of post-humanism can contribute to present-day discussions on the Anthropocene.

Occasional short switches to creaky voice are common in spoken discourse of numerous languages without either the speakers or the recipients being highly aware of them, which is the reason the creaky voice phenomenon is, under the best of conditions, considered by them as a phenomenon of going down to very low or even the lowest part of their vocal range. In this paper, it is proposed that creaky voice when it comes to spoken conversations in German and Croatian serves as a short-term mechanism for a relatively delayed formation of completional prosodic patterns that, until the manifestation of the creaky voice, to that point also comprise, among other features, accents with rising or flat tonal components. Such completional patterns may accompany utterances that immediately precede the decision to allow the interlocutor to take turn, utterances that do not immediately precede it, or utterances that immediately precede a change in the speech act by the same speaker. The creaky voice, however, sometimes occurs in other sequences, i.e., within prosodic patterns without the accents bearing rising or flat components of the tonal movement, which is, however, considered as a result of an unintentional ''slipping'' into creaky voice due to the speaker's to low value of the subglottal pressure at the given moment.

This paper focuses on one of the most famous episodes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, that is the great choral scene set at the Opera at the beginning of The Guermantes Way (1920). In these pages a link is established between the drama Phèdre, played on the stage by the actress Berma, and what takes place over the audience, in the boxes where the blue-blooded world of faubourg Saint-Germain is staged. To define the fascination that both representations wield on him, Proust employs the term “prestige:” a word originally rooted in the field of magic, as witnessed by many Grand-Siècle writers as well as by 17th-century dictionaries. By investigating the word’s etymology, the paper shows the reasons why the ‘prestige’ of the aristocratic condition is put on display through mythology. Indeed, in Marcel’s eyes, the Princess of Guermantes becomes a sea goddess, Diana, and Juno. In this respect, The Guermantes Way reproduces, metaphorically, what happened in 16th and 17th-century ballets and festivities, in which those in power played the role of the pagan gods, and wore mythological disguises to embody the most ‘prestigious’ symbolic capital of the West.

This paper deals with the protagonist of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Throughout the whole play, Salome is a dominant figure, and her soft power ends up annihilating any other form of power – that of Narraboth, that of Herodias, that of Herod, and ultimately even that of Iokanaan. The paper analyses Salome’s power instance by means of a close reading of her rhetorical strategies: by refusing dialogue as a form of interpersonal and dramatic development, Salome halts the dramatic time of the play.

The paper examines how Giovanni Pascoli portrays Cicero as both poet and critic in his school-room anthologies Lyra and Epos, published between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. In the foreword to both textbooks, Cicero emerges as an accomplished orator but a poor poet, a versifier who clings to tradition and whose verses show little sensitivity to the innovations of the so called Neoterics. The paper argues that Pascoli’s opinion is to be understood within the context of the ongoing debate in Italy about approaches to classical studies. Such debate took shape in opposition to the stance taken by German scholars of the Altertumswissenschaft, in particular by Theodor Mommsen who, in his Römische Geschichte, harshly criticises Cicero’s political and literary career. As part of the analysis, the paper studies the criteria underpinning Pascoli’s edition, translation and commentary of epichistorical fragments collected in Epos, with a focus on excerpts from De consulato suo (fr. II S = 10 Court).

Riassunto L’articolo prende spunto dal “mito” di Cicerone, le opere, gli insegnamenti, finanche la sua vita, per dimostrare la straordinaria importanza della cultura romana classica nel diritto processuale civile moderno, in tutto il mondo occidentale. In particolare, se da un lato la migliore dottrina, ma anche la giurisprudenza, richiamano spesso l’esperienza giuridica del mondo antico, dall’altro l’articolo sottolinea l’estrema utilità, ancora oggi, della retorica ciceroniana nell’attività forense, sia scritta sia orale. In questo contesto, si affrontano temi fondamentali come la ricerca della verità nel giusto processo e la tensione che esiste tra “fare presto” e “fare bene”, anche in applicazione del principio costituzionale della ragionevole durata previsto dall’art. 111. Da ultimo, in una prospettiva de iure condendo, si auspica un ritorno agli antichi fasti del processo orale, concentrato ed immediato, magari con l’aiuto delle più moderne tecnologie informatiche. Abstract The paper draws inspiration from Cicero’s “legend” (treatises, advices, even his life), to demonstrate the extraordinary importance of classical Roman culture in the modern legal practice of civil procedure, everywhere in the Western world. In particular, the paper argues that the best doctrine, and also jurisprudence, often recall the juridical experience of the ancient Roman world, and it also underlines the tremendous usefulness, even today, of Ciceronian rhetoric in a lawyer’s actions, both written and oral. In this context, this paper deals with fundamental issues such as the uncovering of truth in a fair trial and the tension that exists between “doing quickly” and “doing well”, even in application of the Italian constitutional principle of reasonable delay provided by clause 111. Finally, in a de iure condendo perspective, it hopes for a return to the ancient glories of the condensed, immediate and oral trial, perhaps with the help of the most modern technologies.

This paper analyses the relationships between literature and land art, in a comparative and cooperative perspective. A feeble monument in Kenya, erected by Karen Blixen and dedicated to her beloved, finds echoes in a paper installation by Canadian artist Marlene Creates. Both monuments present a strong gender signature. J.M. Coetzee's novel In the Heart of the Country (1976) includes writing with stones in the Karoo desert not dissimilarly from what children do in a popular game, where they draw with stones. Finally, Margaret Atwood provides a memorable example of bioart and ecoart in her novel The Year of the Flood (2009), where insects co-participate in the artistic project, right as South African artist William Kentridge managed to produce drawings and a film with ants. All these examples show a cooperative approach to art between humans and non-humans, be they rocks, insects, bones.

A corpus of the Italian local press. This paper introduces CoSIL, a corpus of articles from Italian local newspapers containing about 180,000 texts and 66,000,000 words. The corpus was built to provide researchers with a freely downloadable balanced corpus of journalistic texts and a material for linguistic research on online local press, a nowadays-pervasive source of information. Besides the objectives behind the construction of the corpus, the paper describes its design and development, focusing on its representativeness and balance.

This section gathers some of the papers presented at the Translating Europe Workshop held in Turin on April 15th 2019 organized by the Turin research group in Environmental Humanities. The papers deal with the manifold aspects of translating environment related texts, ranging from the terminological problems to the legal aspects concerning the theme.

This paper aims at investigating the usage of present subjunctive (Konjunktiv I), which is traditionally labelled as a feature of standard written language and therefore as typically occurring in communication genres based on it such as press texts and reporting, in everyday spoken German. Through an analysis of corpus data performed according to theory and method of Interactional Linguistics and encompassing private, institutional and public interactional domains, the paper will show how this particular verb form expresses different epistemic stances according to its syntactic embedment.

Il contributo si concentra sul racconto tacitiano del discorso tenuto da Claudio nel 48 d.C. a favore dell’ammissione in senato dei primores della Gallia Comata, esaminando le argomentazioni usate dallo storico per chiarire le reazioni suscitate dalla loro richiesta e la linea argomentativa adottata dall’imperatore per convincere i senatori ad accettarla. Oltre ad esprimere la consapevolezza dell’efficacia dei criteri usati dai romani per istituire un ordinamento imperiale a carattere sopranazionale, il passo mostra l’abilità di Tacito nel sottolineare la pregnanza politica dell’intervento di Claudio e nel renderlo un modello meritevole di sopravvivere ed essere menzionato molti secoli più tardi nella cultura moderna. In questa prospettiva, la seconda parte del lavoro analizza alcuni riferimenti al discorso dell’imperatore nel corso del Cinquecento e del Seicento da parte di autori come Justus Lipsius, Scipione Ammirato, Jean Bodin, Traiano Boccalini, Hugo Grotius. Nel contesto delle loro opere, talvolta dedicate anche all’esame di temi come la nascita, lo sviluppo e il declino degli stati, si nota che oltre a richiamare l’episodio occorso molti secoli prima, alcuni intellettuali di spicco usarono il resoconto ricavandone un esempio utile per promuovere un modello di governo efficace nel favorire l’integrazione quale mezzo di consolidamento degli stati moderni. The paper focuses on Tacitus’ account of the speech made by Claudius in 48 CE in favour of the admission of the primores of ‘long-haired’ Gaul to the senate, examining arguments used by the historian to clarify the reactions to their request and the reasoning adopted by the emperor to convince the senators to accept it. Besides expressing awareness of the efficacy of the criteria used by Romans to create a supranational imperial order, the passage shows Tacitus’ ability to highlight the political meaningfulness of Claudius’ intervention, making it a model worthy of surviving and being mentioned many centuries later in modern culture. In this vein, the second part of the paper analyzes some 16th and early 17th century references to the emperor’s speech in authors such as Justus Lipsius, Scipione Ammirato, Jean Bodin, Traiano Boccalini, Hugo Grotius. Within their works, also dedicated to examining the birth, development and decline of States, we see that besides recalling an episode occurring many centuries before, some key-intellectuals made utilized the story into a valid exemplum to promote a model of efficacious government favouring integration as a means of consolidating modern states.

L’articolo propone una nuova interpretazione delle norme contenute nella Lex Coloniae Genetivae Iuliae relative all’elezione degli auguri e dei pontefici locali. Tramite l’analisi della legge Ursonense alla luce delle norme vigenti a Roma per l’elezione dei sacerdoti, si vuole dimostrare che a livello locale due erano le vie per essere eletti sacerdoti: una (regolare) prevedeva un’elezione comiziale; l’altra, da applicare solo in determinati casi, che prevedeva una nomina diretta, che poteva appuntarsi anche su individui non domiciliati nella colonia. The paper aims at providing a new interpretation of the rules prescribed by the Lex Coloniae Genetivae Iuliae as to the election of the local pontiffs and augurs. Thanks to a comparative analysis between the Lex Ursonensis and analogue norms in force in Rome as to the election of the major priests, the paper shows that the law of Urso prescribed two ways to become priest: either through an election, or through a nomination; the latter, unlike the former, was only applied in specific cases and could also concern persons not belonging to the civic body of Urso.

The paper questions the assumption that the woman referred to as regina in Cicero’s letters to Atticus of 44 BC is Cleopatra VII. The paper argues that there are historical grounds for doubting that Cleopatra and her son were in Rome in 44 BC, and it suggests that the term regina is more likely to be a pseudonym than a title. By consideration of other nicknames used by Cicero, the paper posits Clodia Metelli as the regina. The paper then analyses Cicero’s comments about the regina in the light of this new identification and concludes that Cicero, having struggled in 45 BC to find a suitable property near Rome to serve as a personal retreat and to house a shrine to his recently deceased daughter Tullia, engaged in negotiations to buy Clodia’s Transtiberine horti in early 44, but withdrew his offer after a personal disagreement with Clodia. In addition, Cicero’s reference to Caesar ille (Att. 14, 20, 2), previously identified as Cleopatra’s son, should be understood as mocking Octavius’ recent adoption of Caesar’s name. L’article remet en question l’hypothèse selon laquelle la femme appelée regina dans les lettres de Cicéron à Atticus de 44 av. J.-C. serait Cléopâtre VII. L’article revendique qu’il y a des raisons historiques de douter de la présence de Cléopâtre et de son fils à Rome en 44 av. J.-C., et suggère que le terme regina a plus de chances d’être un pseudonyme qu’un titre. En prenant en considération d’autres surnoms utilisés par Cicéron, l’article propose Clodia Metelli comme étant la regina. L’article analyse ensuite les commentaires de Cicéron au sujet de la regina à la lumière de cette nouvelle identification et conclut que Cicéron, ayant lutté en 45 avant J.-C. pour trouver une propriété convenable près de Rome pouvant servir de lieu de retraite personnel et abriter un sanctuaire pour sa fille Tullia récemment décédée, s’engagea dans des négociations en vue d’acheter les horti de Clodia dans la région Transtibérine au début de 44, mais retira son offre après un différend personnel avec elle. De plus, la référence de Cicéron à Caesar ille (Att. 14, 20, 2), précédemment identifié comme le fils de Cléopâtre, doit être comprise comme se moquant de l’adoption récente du nom de César par Octave.

Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold is a novel in which photography, or to be more specific, a photograph, seems to have the power to shape, obfuscate, and frame narrative. In what is primarily a close reading of the book, this paper will highlight the ways in which a photographic portrait alienates, emulates, and finally embodies its subject, the protagonist Iris Vegan. In maintaining a focused textual analysis, this paper is ultimately able to excavate the photograph’s role in the novel, with particular regard to narrative, temporarily, and subjectivity. Central to my argument is that the photographic portrait becomes a character it its own right. An antagonist and copy of Iris, which, through its photographic properties, seems to supersede Iris’s sociality, health, and reality. Following the close reading, the paper concludes in a more reflexive tone as it asks and answers what The Blindfold’s affective portrait could mean for our own contemporary moment of proliferate and instant photographic social media, dubious provenance, and “fake” news.

This paper aims to present the start and the development of the first Italian archive of voices of Italian poets. It is mainly dedicated to the collection of original recordings and allows also the comparison among different recordings of a same text by many readers, together with a deep observation of many recordings of each author, through studies of Expeerimental Phonetics. The platform is part of the Voices of Italian Poets project, aimed at the Research on Phonetics applied to poetry, and is described in its structure and purpose, together with an introduction to the general methodology used. The different phases of devolpment of the project, its different potentialities and also its distinguishing features in an international panorama will be presented, as well as the current situation of the poetry vocal archives and the state of the studies connected to the poetry readings. In this paper we will explain the main consultation approaches of the archive and the operating methods adopted in the selection, collection, processing and analysis of data.

This paper aims at analysing, in terms of intonation and overall utterance patterns, different ways nowadays available for poetry reading. A comparison is offered between a syntactic interpretaion of the text and reading styles which pay more attention to its layout. Quite different poetic texts have been chosen in order to show this kind of variation, since they belong to different traditions and periods: “I wandered lonely as a cloud” by William Wordsworth (1798) and “Digging” by Séamus Heaney (1966). Speech samples are collected through to web and include in one case the reading by the poet himself. Data are labelled through a three-level annotation and the acoustic account is especially reserved to segmentation and tone units’ detection. After a short discussion about the main theoretical points and the new perspectives deriving by the accessibility of spoken poetry data, the paper dresses a few proposals on how to classify a selection of different reading styles.

This paper reads in tandem two major poems: Giacomo Leopardi’s canzone Alla Primavera, o delle favole antiche (“To Spring, or on the ancient myths”) and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Composed almost exactly one hundred years apart, the two works display some curious affinities in the “rites of Spring” they ironically enact. Eliot never expressed interest in Leopardi, but both poems meditate on classicism, romanticism, and myth, and both are produced in a period of personal and national turmoil for their writers. Read together they might be taken to dramatize the passage between the “modern” work of 1822 and the “modernist” one of 1922, each legible (as Eliot wrote of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough) either “as a collection of entertaining myths, or as a revelation of that vanished mind of which our mind is a continuation.”

When The Waste Land was published in 1922, David Jones, a 27-year-old Anglo-Welsh painter, was living in the English countryside with a monastic community of artists. A World War I veteran who had been injured in the tragic battle at the Somme, Jones had converted to Catholicism and was developing a modernist aesthetics, producing paintings and engravings where scenes from the gospels (the flagellation, the crucifixion, the empty tomb) were set on the French front, carried out by helpless British infantrymen. The Waste Land was a transformative read for Jones, who thought it embodied the ‘metaphysical disaster’ (Musil 1922) of the war. In later years, Jones began writing about his own wartime experience (Dilworth 1994, 2017): with Eliot’s help and encouragement, he published In Parenthesis (1937), an epic poem (praised by W.H. Auden and Igor Stravinsky, among others) that moved the modernist myth of the waste land from Eliot’s London to the literal wasteland of the trenches. This paper examines Jones’s mythic method, underpinned by his conception of the artist as a ‘maker’ (Jones 1959); it shows how his works blurred the boundaries between artforms by juxtaposing paintings and inscriptions to prose and verse. Jones’s singular perspective as a modernist soldier-bard, drawing from Christian liturgy and Arthurian myth, and the intertextual dialogue with Eliot’s poem, suggest an original reading of the waste land as a ritual space for remembrance, representation, and re-enactment: a useful critical category for a theory of modernism, and a metaphor for the work of art itself.

Our paper aims at illustrating specific ways of mapping surrounding landscape using the Parish Maps. Named after the parish, the smallest unit in a community-based area, they appear as a subjective means to render the outer space. In fact, since they were first experimented by the English Association "Common Ground", they have been used with the specific purpose of revealing the dwellers' point of view on the area they live in: the underlying idea, in fact, is that our landscape is made of different and unique points of view conveyed by those who concur to its making. On the basis of our research experiences over a span of almost 20 years of work using the Parish Maps within the framework of local communities, we believe that these maps can prove to be a useful tool in education contexts too

This paper has the dual purpose of outlining the case history related to paralepsis in literary texts, highlighting the different possibilities of application and the narrative effects that derive in any case towards a transgressive fantastic alteration, and of trying to update the referential system drawn by Genette in 1972. For that, we will draw on some postulates and principles of linguistics and cognitive narratology, applying them to two specific stories by Michele Mari, Josef K. and Lamento del guerriero, when we will show how unexpected informations offered by a particular character (bottom-up vertical paralepsis and internal horizontal paralepsis) produce metaleptic shifts that dis-locate and re-locate the reading around different attractors that transgress the fictional logic (Remorini 2023).

This paper is an introduction to FLE, French as a Foreign Language, as it has been illustrated to secondary school teachers during the TEdu course. In this brief overview, we present the potentialities of this disciplinary and research field, highlighting the articulation between theory and didactic practice, so as to enrich the pedagogical practices of teachers, with a specific focus on the linguistic corpus and the didactic application of large oral corpora of spoken French.

The paper presents the TEdu (Teacher Education Course) proposed by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures of the University of Turin in the academic year 2021/2022. The author, coordinator of the Course, briefly illustrates the idea, the structure and the outcomes of the first edition, dedicated to the topic of inter-personality.

In this paper, the ways in which public spaces of Athens are used in the display of imperial power will be analyzed. The aim is to provide a complete and updated outline of the documentation, which lacks, until now, organicity, in order to reconstruct a general trend of the phenomenon and the political meanings of Augustus’ program in Athens. The focus on altars and statue bases, often confused in the Athenian archaeological record, is for sure the best start to understand in which sense we can speak of ‘imperial cult’ in Athens. Altars and statue bases communicate, for their nature, with the observer, that moves every day in an ‘allusive space’. The inscriptions placed on the supports give an additional supply within this communicative process. The favorite place where erecting statue bases was, not by chance, the Acropolis (but we should also add the equestrian statue base of Lucius Caesar above the entrance of the West Gate of the Roman Agora and the dedication to Tiberius of the pillar in front of the Stoa of Attalus), whereas imperial altars seem to be distributed in a less selective way, since they were mostly found in the area of the Odeon, of the Eleusinion, and around the Roman Agora. Even though they were not, in most of the cases, in situ, defining particular areas where the ‘imperial presence’ was predominant is still possible. This study wants to give a useful contribution to the comprehension of the Athenian urban landscape at the time of Augustus, that surely carried out a well-planned dynastic policy, in order to transform the public space in a meaningful stage where was the new authority of Rome exhibited and promoted.

The aim of this paper is to present the doctoral project underway at the University of Turin, which aims to offer a study of best practices for the dissemination of Greek epigraphy in context, using selected groups of Athenian public inscriptions as case studies. In the first part, the state of the art in the dissemination of epigraphy is noted, with some problematic considerations underlying this reflection. The second part presents an illustrative proposal for a dissemination methodology applied to one of the case studies adopted in the project, namely the decree in honour of the comic poet Philippides of Kephale (IG II3 1 877).

The aim of this paper is to identify the original locations of dedications of ephebes, their magistrates and gymnasiarchs in the Attic landscape based on their findspots. The analysis covers the early period of their dedication practice (from the end of the 5th century for the gymnasiarchs and from the time of Lykourgos for the ephebes and magistrates) until the end of the 4th century. The close relationship between the categories of dedicators studied (which, in the case of fragmentary texts, sometimes makes it impossible to identify the actual dedicators) allows a parallel analysis of the topographical distribution of their dedications in order to identify similarities and differences, reasons and implications of the presence of these documents (which testify to a cultic act, but also serve as a means of making oneself visible in the social fabric of the polis) in specific locations.

In the late 5th cent. BCE, after a legislative reform, the Stoa Basileios became a symbolic space to house all the Athenian laws. In the 4th cent., the portico lost its ideological significance and the criteria for displaying nomoi shifted. The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the 4th-cent. laws to gain an understanding of the new motivations behind their publication in the urban space. Such a study builds on the groundbreaking work of M. Richardson (2000), who identified two primary criteria that influenced the choice of display locations: the content of the laws and the intended audience. While this observation remains valid, a more detailed analysis of each nomos, focusing on its content, findspot, and historical context, reveals that the two criteria may have different implications for the choice of exhibition sites in public space, and may even be mutually exclusive.

This paper explores how the notions of “translingualism” and “translingual imagination” (Kellman) can by applied to the understanding of Beckett’s bilingual work. To do so, the first part of the paper focuses on the interrelated issues of bilingualism and self-translation within his oeuvre and on the possible uses of the concept of “translingualism” to better define both their nature and their results. The focus is then shifted, in the second and third parts of the article, on Imagination morte imaginez and on the English version of this text, Imagination Dead Imagine. The purpose of these analyses is to explore one of Beckett’s representations of imagination and to underline, through a comparison of the different versions of this short work, its unique translingual nature.

Anche dopo l’intenso dibattito che, a partire dagli anni '80 del secolo scorso, ha mirato a dar conto dell’impatto della diffusione della scrittura e della «literacy» sulla cultura tradizionalmente orale del mondo greco, lo statuto e il significato dei documenti epigrafici rimangono ancora non sempre ben chiariti. Gli studiosi hanno analizzato le dinamiche dell’«abitudine epigrafica» ateniese ma la questione fondamentale del perché i testi venissero iscritti su materiale durevole, se con valore funzionale oppure con significato simbolico, ideologico e religioso, è tuttora dibattuta. L’articolo si propone di contribuire alla discussione su questi aspetti collocando il fenomeno epigrafico nel quadro più ampio della produzione di documenti su materiale deperibile per l’affissione pubblica, che dobbiamo immaginare come un regolare strumento di comunicazione e di diffusione delle informazioni ufficiali, e per la conservazione in archivio – pratiche scrittorie rispetto alle quali già un passo delle Supplici di Eschilo (942-949) rivela la familiarità del pubblico ateniese. Si insiste sul carattere selettivo della pubblicazione epigrafica, su come la conservazione dei documenti in archivio sia anteriore alla creazione del Metroon alla fine del V sec. e appaia anzi presupposta dalla procedura della graphe paranomon e dai processi dell’iter legislativo e giudiziario, e sull’importanza, come strumento euristico, dello studio dei dossier e dei titoli epigrafici. Nell’ultima parte della relazione si confrontano i risultati di tale indagine con il contemporaneo uso dei documenti nell’opera di Tucidide. A titolo esemplificativo vengono considerati il trattato tra Argo e Sparta (5,41), il dossier di testi relativo alla tregua di un anno stipulata da Sparta e Atene nel 423 (4,118-119) e i decreti ateniesi sulla spedizione in Sicilia del VI libro. Following the past decades when scholars have attempted to come to terms with the emergence and impact of literacy and literate culture in Greek society, and, in particular, with the ways orality and literacy interacted in the different political, cultural and religious contexts, the status and meaning of epigraphic documents still remains difficult to pin down. Recent investigations have focused on the «epigraphic habit» and examined the somewhat anomalous case of classical Athens so as to highlight, and account for, the differences from other epigraphically productive centres. However, the question why inscriptions were produced at all, whether with functional value to make information available to the public or with symbolic and ideological significance still remains highly controversial. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion by placing the epigraphic habit within the larger context of the production of documents both for posting and temporary display, which must have played a significant role in the dissemination of public information, and for storing as archival records. Familiarity with such literate practices appears to be already reflected by Aeschylus in a locus of the Suppliants, most probably produced in the late 460s (942-949). It is stressed that publication on stone was selective, that archival texts were already kept in the Bouleuterion before the Metroon was established (and e.g. is taken for granted by the procedure of the graphe paranomon), and that so-called «dossiers» and «epigraphic titles» can be useful heuristic tools to shed light on archival practices. The last section of the paper compares the results of the first part with the use of documents in Thucydides. By way of example, the text of the aborted treaty between Argos and Sparta (5,41), the dossier of texts concerning the one-year truce between the Spartans (and their allies) and the Athenians of 423 (4,118-119) and the Athenian decrees for the Sicilian expedition in book 6 are briefly considered.

Il dossier sulla conflittualità tessalo-focidese comprende tradizionalmente oltre ad alcune fonti letterarie due epigrafi delfiche alquanto lacunose: Syll.3 202B e Syll.3 203A. I primi editori non hanno esitato a connetterle alle battaglie arcaiche descritte da Erodoto (VIII 27-28), Pausania (X 1, 3-11) e Plutarco (mul.virt. 2). Di recente è prevalso un atteggiamento di cautela suggerito soprattutto dalle pesanti integrazioni con le quali in passato si è intervenuto talora con disinvoltura eccessiva. D’altro canto questa cautela sconfina in certi casi in una deriva ipercritica che va di pari passo con una rigida separazione tra considerazioni epigrafiche da un lato e considerazioni storiche dall’altro, a discapito delle seconde. Questo studio si propone in primo luogo di riesaminare le due iscrizioni da un punto di vista epigrafico, comparandole con iscrizioni rinvenute a Delfi, Kalapodi, Elatea e Panopeo; in secondo luogo di riconsiderarle in un quadro complessivo cercando un equilibrio tra la suggestiva ma meccanica connessione di testimonianze epigrafiche e letterarie da un lato e l’ipercriticismo dall’altro. La combinazione di considerazioni di ordine epigrafico con un esame della storia delle Focide così come è riflessa nelle fonti letterarie di IV secolo e in quelle successive rende assai probabile l’ipotesi per cui le due epigrafi risalgano al IV secolo ma commemorino una vittoria arcaica sui Tessali. The dossier about the wars between Thessalians and Phokians also includes two very fragmentary inscriptions found in Delphi: Syll.3 202B and Syll.3 203A. The French and German epigraphists who edited them in the first half of referred to by Herodotus (8.27-28), Pausanias (10.1.3-11) and Plutarch (mul.virt. 2). In recent times, scholars have become more cautious because of the large amount of lacunae in the inscriptions that were rather freely restored in the past. On the other hand, this caution runs the risk of hypercriticism and goes hand in hand with a strict separation of historical remarks on the one side, and epigraphical ones, on the other side. This paper first tries to look for further clues by closely comparing Syll.3 202B and Syll.3 203A with other Phokian inscriptions found in Delphi, Kalapodi, Panopeus and Elateia. The paper then aims to combine the epigraphical approach with the historical one and to strike a balance between hypercriticism and positivistic inferences. A close consideration of the history of fourth-century Phokis confirms the results of a strict epigraphical analysis and provides further evidence supporting the restorations proposed by nineteenth-century epigraphists: Syll.3 202B and Syll.3 203A most probably date back to the fourth century but commemorate the archaic Thessalian-Phokian battles.

Due oracoli prodotti nel santuario di Klaros e datati al II sec. d.C. si articolano in sezioni di metro differente secondo una struttura polimetrica che, in mancanza di una analisi approfondita, potrebbe apparire inconsueta, o quantomeno singolare. Tuttavia, passando in rassegna le raccolte epigrafiche a nostra disposizione, si rinvengono epigrammi lunghi di età imperiale, composti sia in latino sia in greco, che presentano un’alternanza metrico-ritmica accostabile ai due oracoli clarii provenienti rispettivamente dai centri di Kaisareia Troketta, in Lidia, e Kallipolis, nel Chersoneso tracico. Nel presente articolo ci si propone di dimostrare che sia negli ‘oracoli polimetrici’ sia negli epigrammata longa di età imperiale l’alternanza metrica è funzionale all’articolazione semantica, prendendo brevemente in esame le più significative attestazioni della polimetria nella produzione poetica, letteraria ed epigrafica, dal IV sec. a.C. all’età imperiale; tale analisi conduce ad ipotizzare un legame tra i compositori di epigrammi polimetrici e i poeti che operarono nel santuario colofonio. Dopo una precisazione terminologica iniziale tra polimetria che si manifesta all’interno di un’opera organica, quale una silloge poetica, e quella che invece si riscontra all’interno di una composizione poetica di una certa lunghezza, viene presa in esame la struttura polimetrica dei due oracoli clarii, dimostrando come essa si lasci ricondurre al contesto letterario della Seconda Sofistica. Nella seconda parte dell’articolo vengono brevemente analizzati i più significativi epigrammi epigrafici, sia greci sia latini, che possono accostarsi, in virtù della loro struttura polimetrica, agli ‘oracoli polimetrici’, soffermandosi, in particolare, sulla funzionalità dell’alternanza metrica rispetto alla articolazione tematica del componimento. Two oracles from Klaros, produced in the second century A.D. and inscribed in the consulting cities, display an elaborate polymetric pattern which may seem, at least apparently, strange or unique. Nevertheless, a systematic survey of the available collections of inscribed epigrams shows that a number of Greek and Latin epigrams dated to Imperial age is polymetric, with multiple sections composed in different metres. The paper points out the intentional and functional use of polymetry in the Clarian oracles coming from Kaisareia Troketta, in Lydia, and Kallipolis, in the Thracian Chersonese as well as in the epigrammata longa of the Imperial age, taking into account the most relevant testimonies of polymetry in the literary and epigraphic poetry from the fourth century B.C. to the Imperial era; the analysis lead to suppose a connection between poets who operated in the Clarian sanctuary and composers of polymetric epigrams. After a preliminary distinction between a polymetry applied to an organic work, like a collection of poems, and a polymetry which can be recognised in a single poetic composition of a certain length, the polymetric patterns of Clarian oracles are examined in detail, showing that they are attributable to the literary context of the Second Sophistic. The second part of the paper focuses on the most relevant epigraphic parallels, both Greek and Latin, for the ‘polymetric oracles’, analysing the use of polymetric patterns in relation to the content of each epigram.

Schlüsselwörter: Cicero; patronus; orator; emotions. Zusammenfassung: Warum überzeugten Tränen vor Gericht, obwohl jeder wusste, dass es sich dabei um eine Strategie handelte? Der Beitrag nimmt Ciceros Pro Plancio als Ausgangspunkt, um dessen Habitus als patronus zu diskutieren. Cicero betonte immer wieder, wie eng er mit seinen Klienten und Freunden verbunden sei. Bei seinen Auftritten bekannte er sich zum allgemein geteilten Ethos, das bei Patron-Klient-Verhältnissen und Freundschaften wahre Hingabe verlangte. Da amicitia und Patronage auf geteilten Werten beruhten, die letztlich auf das Ethos der republikanischen Elite verwiesen, musste jeder, der sich diesen Werten verpflichtet fühlte, Ciceros Argumentation folgen. Zumindest war es das, was seine rhetorischen Fähigkeiten auf rationaler und emotionaler Ebene forderten. Aber wie verhält es sich mit der Annahme, dass Redner selbst emotional bewegt sein mussten, wenn sie ihr Publikum überzeugen wollten? Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass Ciceros lebenslanger Einsatz als patronus ihn letztlich selbst glauben ließ, dass er der emotional aufgewühlte, hingebungsvolle patronus war, der er zu sein vorgab und der er wirklich war, wenn er vor Gericht trat. Abstract: Why did tears in Roman courts convince though everybody knew them to be a strategy? By departing from the case of Pro Plancio, the paper discusses Cicero’s habits as a patronus. Cicero continued stressing his close personal links to his clients and friends. In his performances, he subscribed to the shared ethos of patronage and friendship demanding true dedication. As amicitia, and patronage, were rooted in shared values that ultimately referred to the ethos of the republican elite, everybody addicted to these values also had to follow Cicero’s argumentation. At least this is what his rhetorical skills demanded on a rational, and an emotional, level. But what about the assumption that orators had to be emotionally moved themselves when wanting to convince their audience? The paper argues that Cicero s lifelong acting as a patronus ultimately made himself believe that he indeed was the emotionally moved, truly dedicated patronus he pretended to be, and he really was when performing in court.

With a view to exploring the concept and practice of friendship in Cicero’s work, the paper conducts a systematic review of the epistolary corpus with a focus on the portrayal of social relations, namely Cicero’s relationship with his friends, with political figures, and the more intimate connection with Atticus. One of the paper’s claims is that affectivity is not only a constitutive element of friendship but that it is present across representations of all social relations, albeit to different degree in different specific relations. Cicero is personally invested and deploys emotive language even in relationships with individuals who exist outside of his private sphere. Dictating Cicero’s behaviour across these engagements is his concern with a general code of ethical conduct, the specific parameters of amicitia established in the Laelius, or the responsibility Cicero feels towards the res publica. Allo scopo di definire il significato dell’amicizia in Cicerone si esaminano, attraverso un’indagine sistematica dell’epistolario, le sue varie relazioni sociali: il rapporto con i familiari, quello intimo con Attico, i rapporti politici. L’affettività, che deve essere considerata elemento essenziale nell’amicizia, risulta presente, in gradi molto diversi, nei diversi casi. Anche quando le persone qualificate con la terminologia dell’amicizia siano le più esterne al suo mondo privato, nel rapporto con esse Cicerone impegna la propria personalità e la propria affettività, confrontandosi ogni volta sia con un codice di comportamento morale di valore generale sia con lo specifico codice etico dell’amicizia quale viene descritto nel Laelius, sia ancora, costantemente, con le responsabilità che egli sente di avere nei confronti della res publica. Afin de définir le sens de l amitié chez Cicéron, à travers un examen systématique de ses lettres, on examine ses différentes relations sociales : le rapport à la famille, l intimité avec Attique, les relations politiques. L affectivité, qui doit être considérée comme un élément essentiel de l amitié, est présente à des degrés très différents dans les différents cas. Même lorsque les personnes qualifiées avec la terminologie de l amitié sont les plus extérieures à son monde privé, dans sa relation avec eux, Cicéron s engage sur sa personnalité et son affection, confrontant constamment à la fois un code de comportement moral de valeur générale, le code d éthique spécifique à l amitié décrit dans le Laelius, et enfin les responsabilités qu il estime avoir vis-à-vis de la res publica.

The paper intends to compare three Italian translations (Bompiani 1949-2014, Blonk 2016) of the French masterpiece The Little Prince, following its entry in the Public Domain. As the original text has been included in an internet platform (https://via.hypothes.is/http:/wikilivres.ca/wiki/Le_Petit_Prince#annotations:ePix5C76EeaFHK_nd4qRsA) open to comments, discussion and opinions, the paper also looks at the novel's "new" digital life. Finally, the comparative study will look at a further translation, which recently came out on the Internet (https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Il_piccolo_principe).

The article postulates a tour on Latin American culture that begins in the resistance of Haitian slaves against French power, which is the independent and republican model established in the 19th century on continental countries. From this vocation to resistance, this paper comes to terms with postcolonial theory and its aim to establish a model study for Latin America, based on metropolitan patterns, relegating literary production to “testimony” or “non-fiction”, restating in this field the international division of labour existing on the economic and political level. In order to oppose the imperial labels imposed on the continent, the last segment of the paper deals with the emergence of a Latin American canon, underlying its most productive alternatives.

This paper analyzes the representation of bullying in literature, focusing on the story told in Musil’s Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906). The analysis focuses on the behavior of the victim and his observer, showing how identification with the fate of the bullied person is the conditio to sharpen the observer's cognitive and critical skills, which are useful in spurring the victim to react proactively and effectively to the bullying suffered. Törleß’s ‘second sight’ – a key principle for understanding the complexity of the real, grounded in the idea of the “vivisection of the soul” – allows for the establishment of correspondences with today’s ‘second-hand’ viewing by the viewer who, through the ‘technological gaze’ made possible by the display, enjoys episodes of school violence. Finally, resorting to the argument set forth by Vattimo and Rovatti in Pensiero debole, the present contribution shows – mutatis mutandis – how today’s phenomenon of cyberbullying is animated by dynamics already explored by literature more than a century ago and yet still capable of providing ethical and empowering responses even to the so-called Millennials and the Generation Z.

The construction of languages has always been related to linguistics. Most of these initiatives address real scientific questions but from a non-academic point of view. The fact that Ferdinand de Saussure's own brother, René de Saussure, wrote a theoretical essay on the construction of the Esperanto word (de Saussure 1914) is an amusing illustration of this. In this paper, we propose a method inspired by experimental archaeology. The experiment consists in trying to obtain an artifact similar to the one observed using this or that construction method. An equivalent approach in linguistics would be the generation of linguistic systems based on explicitly formulated principles. Trying to generate similar systems pushes the linguist to explicitly define the principles that are needed and to explore all their consequences. In this context, we show that the use of notions induced by the observation of natural languages leads to a certain degree of circularity and that it is therefore more interesting to explore a priori principles based on very general assumptions.

Reading Poetry in Invented languages. Prosodic-Syntactic Analysis of Some Cases. In various linguistic domains the prosodic study of poetry has been conducted in different settings with independent methodologies and in recent years revealed the presence of a rich stylistic typology in the spoken version of this literary form. However, the encoding of rhythm and intonation in the reading of poetry in invented languages remains to be explored. This paper aims at analysing the link between prosody and syntax that emerges in the oral rendering of texts with such features. For this research, four texts were selected from the works of four different authors, both Italian and foreign, representative of fictional Italian-like language creation. Two readings of each text were collected, one male and one female, by professional actors. The VIP methodology (Colonna, 2021) was employed to provide a general framework and allowing to account for the relationship between the syntactic level and the constructions uttered reading aloud. Prosodic strategies adopted by different speakers were mainly examined at syntactically critical points. Although the corpus is quite limited, a qualitative analysis at a phonetic level suggested new ways for syntactic understanding and text comprehension and provided a valuable discriminating tool in some cases. Only a quantitative approach extended to a larger corpus – which we aim to develop in the future – would allow a broader picture of this fascinating research topic.