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In the mid 1920s, Virginia Woolf was engaged in a dispute with the American critic Logan Pearsall Smith on “the ethics of writing articles at high rates for fashion papers”. Harper’s Bazaar, a commercial magazine to which Woolf contributed four short stories between 1930 and 1939, was a feminine periodical that exploited modernism’s distinction and high cultural capital to captivate a sophisticated, but essentially middle-class, readership by selling the illusion of upward cultural mobility. Although Woolf referred to her high-quality contributions to Harper’s Bazaar as “pot boiling stories for America” written “to make money”, it seems clear that her own engagement with a middlebrow publishing venue did not in the least affect her reputation as a highbrow intellectual and was indeed typical of the multifaceted, reciprocal relationship between the magazine and high modernism in a context in which mobility also meant redrawing the boundaries between intellectual and popular culture. The publication of modernist content within the glossy pages of Harper’s Bazaar was advantageous to both modernists seeking to maintain their celebrity status and the periodical itself, which attempted to cultivate and sustain a refined audience. Much in line with her work of the 1930s, Woolf’s short stories engaged with social and ethical issues such as the righteousness of penetrating other people’s lives and innermost truths (“In the Looking Glass”), violence and decay (“The Shooting Party”), capitalism and antisemitism (“The Duchess and the Jeweler”), human and non-human worlds (“Lappin and Lapinova”). Though often considered as non-canonical in terms of both their rather prosaic plot as well as characterisation, and the commercial venue in which they appeared, the stories Woolf wrote for Harper’s Bazaar reflect the preoccupations of the last decade of her career and are indicative of the tensions between high and low in modernist culture.

Well-being in academia is obviously tied to levels of burnout experienced by academics. Why are these levels increasing and how is their increase related to the marketization and neoliberalisation of universities? What should we, as academics, do in order to counter this trend and improve both our well-being and that of our students as well as society? These questions are addressed through experimental writing, employing techniques that are unusual for linguistics, namely autoethnography, in order to reflect on academic careers and the problems of mental health and harassment experienced by PhD students. Drawing inspiration from “transformative praxis”, this paper describes the approach of social justice teaching and conscientization. Focusing in particular on the theme of environmental education, the paper reflects on how introducing social justice teaching in academic courses is likely to prove helpful to prevent burnout and dissatisfaction. The second part of the paper describes the author’s experience with university courses about ecolinguistics and the feedback received from students, including a selection of their comments.

The present paper functions as an introduction to this special issue of mediAzioni, which brings together selected papers presented at the Translating Europe Workshop entitled "L'intelligenza artificiale per la traduzione verso una nuova progettazione didattica?" (3 December 2021), focusing on the pedagogical implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a particular emphasis on Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The article revolves around three main themes. First, it considers the impact of emerging neural technologies on language services, redefining the traditional role of the translator and creating new responsibilities and tasks. Despite the considerable progress that NMT has made compared to previous models, it still has shortcomings that are almost "invisible" because they often lack clear grammatical or morphosyntactic marking. Such errors require a certain cognitive effort to identify, since they involve problems that are less obvious to the untrained eye, such as textuality or inadequacies at the level of discourse. Secondly, the article looks more closely at professional practices, especially those related to pre-editing, post-editing and proofreading. Particular emphasis is placed on the indispensable role of the human in translation workflows that integrate NMT not only at the level of post-editing and text revision, but also at the level of translation project management. Finally, the paper moves on to the implications of NMT for the training of translators and beyond, discussing key insights from the workshop participants regarding future teaching practices at university level. The article concludes by outlining the structure of this special issue and providing a brief synopsis of the collected papers.

The paper is concerned with some aspects of politeness in the request act by the pragmatic connotations of syntactic structures in Hindi and Persian. Considering the role of politeness as an explanation for the deviation from the Grice’s cooperative principle, the main question of the paper is whether Leech’s maxims of politeness operate on the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations and whether there is any hierarchy in their manner of application. To answer the abovementioned question the main hypothesis of the research posits that Leech’s maxims of politeness have a structure of hierarchy in both Persian and Hindi. Considering the Pandharipandes' (1979) hierarchy of the degree of politeness proposed for Hindi, this paper aims to develop a similar hierarchy of the degree of politeness for Persian and to analyze the Leech’s maxims operating in the respective hierarchies of politeness. The general theoretical framework adopted for the present study is based on Lakoff (1972), and Leech (1980). Whereas the findings of this research indicate a hierarchy in Hindi and Persian at the syntagmatic planewith regard to their respective Leech’s maxims,no such hierarchyis detectable for paradigmatic relationwhichholds good for all types of social situations.

From a semantic perspective the relation of concession can be defined as a specific type of contrast between two states of affairs, i.e. counterexpectative contrast, in which the conflict originates by the denial of an assumption, generated by the first state of affair or by the context. The semantic domain of concessivity has been investigated by a fair amount of studies that have explored the variety of connectives used to express concession in an Italian-Russian contrastive perspective (Biagini/Latos 2010; Biagini 2016; Biagini/Mazzoleni 2017; 2018). In this paper we focus on the Italian adverbial connective tuttavia and its Russian most frequent counterparts, i.e. odnako, tem ne menee and vsë že. The data are taken from the Italian-Russian and Russian-Italian parallel sub-sections of the Russian National Corpus. For our research we considered contemporary original texts (from 1945 until today) and we analyzed a total of 377 examples with their translations: 87 for tuttavia, 195 for odnako, 16 for tem ne menee and 79 for vsë že. The aim of this paper is to shed light on language-specific tendencies in relation to the semantic and textual expression of concession. The present Italian-Russian contrastive analysis, that exploits both qualitative and quantitative methods, investigates three different aspects: (a) the type of coding of the relation (full coding, undercoding or inferential bridging, in terms of Prandi 2004; 2006), (b) the syntactic distribution of connectives, and (c) the combination of connectives and punctuation (cf. Ferrari/Pecorari 2018; Pecorari 2019). Although interference can play a role in translation, we observed interesting differences in the data of the two languages. The results of the multi-perspective analysis show that Russian seems to assign a major semantic and textual relevance to the concessive relation than Italian, by using a richer semantic coding and by giving it a key role in the textual architecture.

The paper reviews Bulgarian conjunction bez da and Italian conjunction senza (che), introducing the subordinate clause with the relating to an unaccomplished action. The paper explores grammatical, syntactic, and semantic properties of these constructions in both languages. The similarity of semantic and functional potential of Bulgarian and Italian constructions as well as their intralingual specificity are shown.

The aim of this paper is reporting an experience of theatrical translation that lies halfway between translation theory and practice. The project «Tradurre per la scena» is the result of a partnership between three institutions in the city of Bari – the Alliance française, the Kismet OperA theatre and the former Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Romanze e Mediterranee of the University. In 2008, a theatre translation team was formed at the University department to work on an Italian version of Olivier Cadiot’s Fairy Queen (P.O.L., 2002). The team thus confronted on the many problems posed in the play translation due to the author’s unbridled writing: diverse issues concerning rhythm, speed, voice, tone, wordplay, etc. Beyond the actual translation experience, the team participants had the opportunity to meet the directors and actors responsible for performing Cadiot’s text, but also to attend rehearsals and to make corrections to the translation prepared during the group translation sessions. The play, in fact, was not only represented on stage. The Italian text was published in a bilingual edition in a collection specifically created by the University department. The author of this paper believes that an illustration of this experience could be of interest to specialists in theatrical translation for several reasons: a) because it brings into play a wide range of cultural skills (linguistic, stylistic, dramaturgical, semiotic, pedagogical, etc.); b) because it constitutes one of the rare examples of collective translation, and moreover in a field that has been rather neglected by theoretical reflection; c) because it offers the rare opportunity to follow the ideally complete path of a foreign play from the stage to the publisher; d) because it closely examines the complexity of the relationship between the translator and the playwright, the actor, and even the author.

The fields of Italian finance and economics are particularly rich in the use of English loanwords, as both non-adapted and adapted Anglicisms can be retrieved in general Italian monolingual dictionaries. If we consider the specific case of audiovisual translation, it is possible to observe an increasing use of Anglicisms in the Italian dubbed versions of audiovisual products set in the world of finance. Firstly, this paper will analyze the case of the first season of Devils (2020), a financial thriller drama television series. The analysis will investigate the translation strategies used to transpose the specialized financial terminology used in the dialogues, focusing in particular on the significant presence of new Anglicisms in the target text. Secondly, the presence of these Anglicisms in the Italian dubbed version of the film The Big Short (2015) will be analyzed, in order to compare their use in both productions. Finally, the paper ends with a practice-based interlingual study involving a number of Italian undergraduate students in Economics, aiming at establishing whether they use the new Anglicisms identified in the Italian dubbed version of Devils.

The paper explores basic political relations between the European Union and India which are at theoretical level almost “terra nullius”. The paper starts from the present epochal situation and enters the realm of EU–India geopolitics from the perspective of Gandhian moral practice on one side, and challenges presented by the impact of Coronavirus politics on the other. Our question is – on which platform is strategic negotiating between the EU and India possible? Despite their Lisbon summit in 2000 as well as virtual summit in 2020, it is obvious that until today the EU and India could not find a common denominator. Our idea is that the missing link of a better understanding partly lays in the new perspective that may be unexpectedly found from the Balkans’ point of view. Only unprecedented cognizance today may set up the roadmap for the times to come.

Several organisations have recently started to pay more attention to their employees’ happiness since they have realized the tight relationship between employees’ well-being and productivity. In fact, research studies (Adams 2019; Kossek et al. 2014) have demonstrated how staff job satisfaction can be influenced by work-life balance and consequently help increase the profits of organisations. Since the growth of job stress among academics has been endangering their well-being (Bhatia and Mohsin 2020), a few scholars (Bailey and Phillips 2016; Bell et al. 2012; Heiden et al. 2021) have analysed the link between job pressure stress and health and the negative implications for both the performances of academics and the outcomes of students. In order to fight against the feeling of living in a threatening work context, some universities have begun to promote some initiatives and stress management practices to help their members to cope with increased symptoms of ill-being and psychological distress. As it is becoming increasingly usual that non-academic organisations include in their organigrams a new professional profile, the Chief Happiness Officer (CHO), in order to monitor their employees’ well-being, the present paper is intended to be the starting point of a debate on the potential role of the CHO in academia to promote a new academic culture based on happiness, satisfaction and sustainable positivity. In particular, the interest in this new profession raises the question of whether a CHO can actually contribute to improving well-being in academia or whether it can be more beneficial to focus on a “chief happiness officer mentality”, rather than a chief happiness officer person.

Medicine is undoubtedly one of the most important domains of specialised translation; its terminology is therefore paramount for translators. A significant niche consists in the language of clinical studies. However, to date there are no extensive terminological resources for translators in this field. The purpose of the present paper is to try and fill this gap by conducting a contrastive terminological analysis in German, English and Italian.

This paper presents the findings of a comparative discourse analysis of the linguistic representation of the phenomenon of ‘gentrification’ in three cities: London, São Paulo and Moscow. Gentrification is generally understood (see Chris Hamnett, 2003) as the social and spatial transition to a post-industrial economy, usually associated with displacement of lower income groups from the gentrified area. The study observes how discussions of the topic are linguistically shaped in different languages over the same period (pre-Covid, 2015-2018). The material was selected from open sources, following hashtags and keywords in three languages, limiting the material to the genre of public conversation transmitted by the media about the phenomenon under study. The study compares the circulation of the term ‘gentrification’ in selected discourses and shows a conceptual discrepancy between them. This is exemplified through the use of synonyms, substitution for the term, description and interpretation of the notion. This analysis covers the representation of the concepts of ‘community’, ‘collectiveness’ and, in contrast, ‘ghettoization’ for London, São Paulo and Moscow. The different ‘winners’ and ‘victims’ of gentrification for the three cities studied are revealed. The results show that gentrification is openly discussed in London, where changes are considered positive, whereas the Russian discourse on gentrification questions the validity of the term and the process itself in Russian cities. Brazilian urbanists agree that similar processes to gentrification are taking place in São Paulo, emphasizing the role of the Brazilian state and the so-called hidden unofficial powers within informal territories.

In this paper, we explore the practical and theoretical status of revision in the context of a Masters-level website translation project integrating machine translation (MT) for teaching purposes. We use textometric analysis to explore the nature of modifications made at each of the different stages of revision during the lifetime of one particular project. Computation of characteristic elements and Correspondence Analysis (CA) reveal regular patterns of linguistic intervention, with significant differences observed between the initial stages of the project (MT-EN0 generated by SYSTRAN Pure Neural Machine Translation and post-edited MT-EN1) and subsequent revision cycles. We combine quantitative and qualitative research methods to study characteristic revision patterns in different project cycles (chronological textual series). While some of these patterns represent unpredictable “punctual” edits, the majority are “progressive”, involving modifications that are predictable or gradually built up throughout the project. More generally, it appears that different types of revision closely mirror the guidelines that are presented to students during the teaching workflow. This observation leads us to posit an “evolutive” view of the translation project: just as each webpage in the project has to undergo several cycles of revision, so each stage of revision needs to be carefully primed during the preparation of the project with the clients as well as the students.

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems have made tangible progress in recent years, making them usable for an increasing number of domains and language pairs. The development of neural systems is based on machine learning algorithms and requires large electronic corpora of parallel texts, aligned at the sentence level. Such resources however only exist for a small number of language pairs and domains. To overcome this problem, a recent proposal is to develop so-called “multilingual” translation systems. These developments have been driven in particular by major Internet players, who need to develop automatic language processing tools for as many languages as possible. The main characteristic of these systems is to process multiple languages, both on the source and target sides, with a single translation engine. In this paper, we present the general principles underlying these systems and the innovations that have made them possible, before discussing their main strengths and weaknesses.

Translation technologies are widely used in the translation process and the market is witnessing a radical change in translation practices, with a significant impact on the translation professions. It is important that translation programmes adopted by universities consider the rapid advances in language and translation technologies and devote specific theoretical and practical courses to this topic. Students need to develop specific competences and skills and acquire an advanced mastery of the technologies. In particular, given the current dominant paradigm in machine translation, namely Neural Machine Translation, they need to be aware of the benefits but also the challenges it poses to translators. This paper discusses the concept of “human parity”, which has been proposed in the field as the main goal of current machine translation systems, and presents the teaching and learning of translation technology, with a particular focus on what has been developed at the University of Naples L'Orientale.

Since the first studies observing pedagogical activities related to quality in translator training, many evolutions have taken place, in training programmes as well as in the professional world. Revision has gained a more streamline position in translation processes, and post-editing more and more visible, aided by the improvement of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) quality. These two activities, which aim at upgrading human translations, for revision, and machine translations, for post-editing, still respond to different expectations, practices and document types. However, the role of the skilled expert is acknowledged in normative texts about both activities, and the sealed barriers that existed before between human translation, assisted translation and machine translation, are increasingly blurred. In this paper, we will endeavour to set an integrated and balanced positioning of post-editing in translation training, leveraging the strengths and weaknesses of human translation as much as machine translation, in order to contribute to the long-lasting value of the professional translation specialist.

This paper aims to investigate how empathy and assertiveness are expressed linguistically in two corpora (MUJERES y HOMBRES) of fifteen TED talks each, with a view to identifying whether the women in the sample adopt a more empathetic communicative style than men. The frequency and use of deictics, and a number of intensifiers and hedges will be analyzed starting from the comparison of key POS lists in the two corpora. The results of the study suggest a marked preference of the women in the sample for the use of affiliative, empathetic mechanisms, since they employ first person narratives associated with affective vocabulary, inclusive nosotros, question tags and verbs in the second person plural more often (although for the same purposes) than men.

Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.

Linguists argued that the Cockney dialect, in London, is expected to be replaced by Multicultural London English in the years to come. However, this does not imply that Cockney is dead, as recent research revealed that it just moved to Essex. This paper aims at examining whether (l) vocalisation, a common feature of Cockney, is still present in the London district of Bermondsey. Ten working-class English speakers, stratified by age and sex, have been recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews. The results, discussed both quantitively and qualitatively, show that: (a) (l) vocalisation is present in all age cohorts, with young speakers favouring the non-standard feature; (b) preceding long vowels trigger (l) vocalisation.

The so-called indirect passive, where the subject is not the argument of the underlying verb that bears the Theme/Patient role, is generally understood to be a bi-clausal phenomenon (cf. Kuno 1973; Shibatani 1978; Kuroda 1979). In other words, the passive morpheme rare is merged with a clause, and then the resulting item is combined with the subject. In this paper, however, we argue that the indirect passive is best understood as a mono-clausal phenomenon. We first point out that with some instances of the indirect passive, the passive morpheme rare is not understood as being combined with a verb or clause in syntax. Thus, we are led to assume that the lexicon contains numerous instances of the Vrare form. This implies that even when the passive morpheme rare is combined in syntax, it forms a constituent with the relevant verb; hence, the indirect passive is a mono-clausal phenomenon. We furthermore maintain that when the indirect passive involves the merging of rare with a verb in syntax, the verb must be a volitional verb, and demonstrate that this generalization, as well as the case particle alternation involved in the indirect passive, poses a challenge to the bi-clause analysis but not to the mono-clause analysis. Finally, we review one of the main arguments for analyzing the indirect passive to be a bi-clausal phenomenon, which concerns the antecedent of zibun. We show that it is inconclusive at best.

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.

Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel about war. It is a historical novel set in the years 1793-1800 during the Napoleonic wars, and written by Elizabeth Gaskell in the years 1859-1862 when the American Civil War broke out, in April 1861. Examining Gaskell’s correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in the years 1861-63 and the articles Norton wrote in support of the War and the anti-slavery cause, this paper explores the way in which the news coming from America and the debates on the contemporary events left a significant mark on the second part of the novel. The implied reference to the context of the American Civil War would shed new light on Gaskell’s narrative choices concerning the plot and the main male character’s development, which has been substantially overlooked.

Linguists argued that the Cockney dialect, in London, is expected to be replaced by Multicultural London English in the years to come. However, this does not imply that Cockney is dead, as recent research revealed that it just moved to Essex. This paper aims at examining whether (l) vocalisation, a common feature of Cockney, is still present in the London district of Bermondsey. Ten working-class English speakers, stratified by age and sex, have been recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews. The results, discussed both quantitively and qualitatively, show that: (a) (l) vocalisation is present in all age cohorts, with young speakers favouring the non-standard feature; (b) preceding long vowels trigger (l) vocalisation.

The so-called indirect passive, where the subject is not the argument of the underlying verb that bears the Theme/Patient role, is generally understood to be a bi-clausal phenomenon (cf. Kuno 1973; Shibatani 1978; Kuroda 1979). In other words, the passive morpheme rare is merged with a clause, and then the resulting item is combined with the subject. In this paper, however, we argue that the indirect passive is best understood as a mono-clausal phenomenon. We first point out that with some instances of the indirect passive, the passive morpheme rare is not understood as being combined with a verb or clause in syntax. Thus, we are led to assume that the lexicon contains numerous instances of the Vrare form. This implies that even when the passive morpheme rare is combined in syntax, it forms a constituent with the relevant verb; hence, the indirect passive is a mono-clausal phenomenon. We furthermore maintain that when the indirect passive involves the merging of rare with a verb in syntax, the verb must be a volitional verb, and demonstrate that this generalization, as well as the case particle alternation involved in the indirect passive, poses a challenge to the bi-clause analysis but not to the mono-clause analysis. Finally, we review one of the main arguments for analyzing the indirect passive to be a bi-clausal phenomenon, which concerns the antecedent of zibun. We show that it is inconclusive at best.

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.

Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.

Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel about war. It is a historical novel set in the years 1793-1800 during the Napoleonic wars, and written by Elizabeth Gaskell in the years 1859-1862 when the American Civil War broke out, in April 1861. Examining Gaskell’s correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in the years 1861-63 and the articles Norton wrote in support of the War and the anti-slavery cause, this paper explores the way in which the news coming from America and the debates on the contemporary events left a significant mark on the second part of the novel. The implied reference to the context of the American Civil War would shed new light on Gaskell’s narrative choices concerning the plot and the main male character’s development, which has been substantially overlooked.

My paper takes as its focus the semantic variation of the pre-modifying adjectives happy and glorious which resulted from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent triumphal representation of Britain as a champion of freedom and emancipation. By adopting principles of corpus-assisted discourse studies (Stubbs 2001; Partington 2004), I shall examine the collocational patterns of the two lexical items in the British periodical press, covering the period from 1620 to 1789. Before the Glorious Revolution the meaning of the two premodifiers appears consistent with the definitions provided in the OED but from 1688 onwards changes in the phraseology affect their semantics. In particular, after the Revolution, happy and glorious show a semantic preference for words referring to liberty and (universal) rights which enriches their meaning with a sense of freedom from oppression and corruption. Given that the two adjectives already had a positive meaning, the libertarian semantics acquired after 1688 can be interpreted as a further amelioration in the direction of liberalism and, at the end of the century, Enlightened universalism. In order to investigate the changing semantics of the two adjectives throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, I shall make use of the Florence Early English Newspapers Corpus (1620-1649), the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus (1653-1654), the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (1671, 1681, 1691) and the British Newspaper Archive for the period from 1700 to 1789.

This article focuses on a translation proposal of the novel Tropique de la violence by Nathacha Appanah. An analysis of the source text and a stylistic comparison between the different narrative voices are carried out, as well as an overview of the use of the neo-standard in Italian literature and Italian translation. By means of specific examples, this paper proposes to argue that the use of a marked language and the inclusion of grammatical and structural “errors” constitute a valid translation strategy for the rendering of the marked language of one of the five narrators of this novel.

In this paper we deal with linguistic and cultural otherness, as shown in the Italian translation of the French graphic novel L’Arabe du futur, by Riad Sattouf, an autobiographical saga taking place between France, Libya and Syria. Differences between comics and graphic novel are not clear-cut, the latter being above all an editorial label. Orality, cultural references and variational aspects are more and more studied, within the translation of graphic novel. Our analysis tries to shed light on some phenomena related to linguistic and cultural contact, as well as on their translation: the orality of non-Francophone speakers, diatopic variaiton, realia, brand names, multilingualism and its representations, code-mixing.

The purpose of our paper is to highlight that extensive and cohesive reading has an important role to play in EFL learning. Extensive reading broadens and increases the students’ vocabulary exposing them to various registers of the target language. Cohesion refers to the relations of meaning that exist within the text and that define it as a text. The teacher can help the students use various cohesive chains, which form the backbones of different types of texts. He also needs to monitor each student’s reading and offer guidance and encouragement. Besides, the selection of the reading material should be appropriate to the learners’ linguistic level and their cultural particulars.

This paper examines the hypothesis that, in the languages which developed articles and in those which have grammaticalized the verbal aspect, the two categories perform similar functions in the coding of referentiality. In particular, the research is focused on the construction [Verb - Object] referring to so-called typical and usual events; it takes “READ THE NEWSPAPER” as an example, both in Italian and Russian. The contrastive analysis, based mainly on the comparable corpora of the Araneum family and, due to the scarcity of data, only partly on the Russian-Italian parallel corpus of the NKRJA, confirmed the hypothesis, at least as regards the construction under study. The investigation showed that in Italian there is a very strong correspondence between the [-referential] interpretation of the object and the definite article, while Russian exhibits a rather strong correspondence between the [-referential] interpretation of the object and the imperfective aspect. The assignment of a [± referential] value to the object nouns in Russian, a language without articles, and to nouns with the definite article in Italian, which in constructions referring to typical events receive a [-referential] reading, was based on context. In fact, in both languages, in order to identify the [± referential] status of nouns, it was necessary to take into account the temporal, modal, and actional characteristics of the respective verbs, the typical or occasional nature of the event, and the role of other elements of the sentence, such as adverbs or nouns that refer to customs and habits. The generalization resulting from the research can be extended to other typical events, mainly those referring to activities involving information, entertainment, and leisure, which are similarly marked with the definite article in Italian and the imperfective aspect in Russian. However, the notion of “typicality” turns out to be elusive, as it is strongly culture-specific and determined by the verbal and situational context.

This paper discusses the Polish and French infinitive operating as a predicate in a sentence and one appearing in some call-to-action speech genres. The analysis was made in three steps. In the first one, the author describes the Polish and French infinitive based on the criterion of syntax dependencies. The use which is of interest to her, constituting a distribution equivalent of the imperative mode, is presented as one of semantic values of independent infinitives. The chapter devoted to interpretation of an acting entity not expressed in the argumentation structure – the subject of the infinitive – connects the syntax part with the description referring both to the methodology of speech acts theory and to discourse analysis. Thus part two shows utterances built around an infinitive as an execution of various types of directive acts, while the third part focuses on call-to-action speech genres whose textual executions contain the here-discussed form.

In this paper I investigate the role of language contact in the expression of potential and counterfactual hypothetical meanings in Resian, Tersko and Nadiško, three Slovenian varieties spoken in the province of Udine and in contact with Romance languages (especially Friulian and Italian) for centuries. Standard Slovene serves as a point of comparison. In hypothetical utterances Slovene uses the same forms of the conditional mode both in apodosis and protasis: the present conditional in the case of potentiality; the past conditional for the expression of counterfactuality. However, the latter is only used in the literary language, whereas in colloquial speech it is practically avoided. Its functions are fulfilled by the present conditional, which is thus ambiguous. The three examined Slovenian varieties are able, instead, to differentiate between potential and counterfactual meanings. They use the forms of the present conditional in the first case and the past tenses of the indicative in the second. More precisely, in the case of potential utterances, in protasis all three varieties use the conditional of the type bi + -l participle; in apodosis Resian and Tersko often opt for the present conditional of ‘to want’ followed by the infinitive of the main verb. Nadiško, on the other hand, omits the verb ‘to want’. To express counterfactual value, Resian, having retained the forms of the imperfect, uses in apodosis this tense (rarely) or constructions containing it; Tersko generally uses the perfect or the construction “perfect of the verb ‘to want’+ infinitive”; while Nadiško prefers the pluperfect II. The tendency to keep the two values separate and the use of forms that somehow replicate the Romance model may be seen as an enrichment of the original system and at the same time a departure from the Slovene group.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the expression of imminentiality in Russian by collecting equivalents of the Italian periphrasis stare per using the Italian-Russian parallel corpus of the Russian National Corpus. Firstly, the way in which imminentiality is expressed through verbal aspect is considered, and it is shown that with non-durative telic verbs the present imperfective (such as umiraet) and future perfective forms with an adverb expressing imminentiality (such as skoro umrët) are both frequent and interpreted as quasi-synonimic. Subsequently, constructions are investigated in which imminentiality is semantically coded by means of modal verbs and those of intention, where constructions with sobirat’sja-sobrat’sja are the most frequent in the corpus. Lastly, past perfective forms with an approximative adverb (such as edva ne, čut’ ne), or with the particle bylo expressing the so called “past with no present relevance” or “discontinuous past” are taken into account and conclusions are drawn.

This article focuses on the anaphoric use of the demonstrative pronoun in Czech and in Italian. While the use of the Czech demonstrative ten is quite frequent and is perceived as neutral, the choice of the Italian demonstrative is influenced by various contextual factors. The purpose of this paper is to characterize the relevant factors that lead to the use of demonstrative pronouns questo and/or quello in Italian, and the possibility, or not, of replacing the personal pronoun by the demonstrative pronoun, either in Czech and in Italian. Attention is paid to the type of reference in which the omission of Czech demonstrative doesn’t seem to be possible. The research is based on Czech literary texts translated into Italian.

In the face of the theories that dismiss digital arts for being facilitated by the capitalist system, this paper argues that a critical awareness on the dangers of new technologies does not necessarily lead to the condemnation of technological arts. Indeed, the evidence suggests that digital technologies are an excellent medium through which literature can voice a nuanced and critical consideration about the world in which it appears. The analysis focuses on Spanish-Argentinian writer Belén Gache’s transmedia project Kublai Moon (2013-2019) in order to demonstrate that hypothesis. Firstly, it is shown that the novel reflects on the compatibility between humans and machine, in its content as well as in its forms. Secondly, it is contended that the axiological judgments on literature must be based on updated criteria when it comes to evaluating digital works.

This paper emphasizes the comprehension difficulties relating to the technical vocabulary present in the courses for learners of public health- nurses at the National Institute for Higher Paramedical Training. By following an engineering approach, we tried, first of all, to detect the flaws encountered by these learners when understanding specialized vocabulary and, secondly, to set up a system of assistance to the understanding.

This paper demonstrates that T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land is a magic incantation to restore the lost values of the Western culture on realistic foundations. The poem’s intertextuality, together with its versification are analyzed in order to show Eliot’s view on Western man’s history: one of sin, fall and increasing decay. The main argument is that, through his poem, Eliot is attempting to restore humanity and its destiny away from the sad history in which it was cast from the beginning.

The paper aims to present group discussions as an efficient means for raising the students’ motivation level and increasing their involvement in the language learning process. Problem-solving discussion is a task-based activity viewed as a structural language endeavor, which leads to a range of outcomes for those undertaking the task. An organizational framework plays the key role for determining successful discussions. There are procedural steps of the group discussion sessions: the chairperson is chosen; the teacher selects the discussion topics; after formulating solutions, the chairperson directs the students to give an oral summary of the discussion proceedings; the teacher acts as a language consultant. Taking into consideration the students’ individual needs, we may use some techniques in order to deal with the uncooperative students.

In this paper aspects of the sibilant system in the variety spoken in the Germanic language island Sauris/Zahre in north-eastern Italy are presented. I investigate whether an intermediate, postalveolar “shibilant” (from Protogermanic */s/) in preconsonantal position is preserved from Middle High German as observed in other German minority languages in northern Italy. In Sauris/Zahre, in preconsonantal position a postalveolar realization is sometimes mentioned in literature, while in Modern Standard German and most related varieties in this position historical, postalveolar */s/ is retracted to palatoalveolar /ʃ/.

Audiovisual translation has long struggled to strike a balance between corpus-based analysis of large amounts of text and the need to systematically integrate multimodality in its research scope, in order to fully acknowledge the complex nature of the audiovisual product. This paper aims to relate on the experimentation that is currently being conducted at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, with the collaboration of the University of Basel (Switzerland): using an existing software (created for pragmatics) for audiovisual translation. The main aim is to make sure this software is able to support the researcher in transcribing, annotating, adding metadata, managing and querying text and video files. The experimented software has never been used for parallel aligned audiovisual text so far. The contribution here presented first briefly describes a framework developed to analyse language variation and multimodality (with a focus on character design) in audiovisual translation, which was then immersed in the software. Subsequently, the software itself is described in detail, with specific attention to its potential and limits in the use within the field of Translation Studies and audiovisual translation. This is done by showing examples from a pilot study that belongs to a broader corpus currently under construction.

This paper explores connections between Ecolinguistics and Positive Discourse Analysis, focusing on an eco-friendly farm in Norfolk which features in a long-running BBC programme, ‘the Countryside Hour’. Both ecolinguistics and positive discourse analysis, as relatively new disciplines, stand in some need of definition, especially regarding their relationship with the more consolidated paradigm of CDA which, of course, is itself not characterised by general agreement on methodological matters (Flowerdew 2008, Stibbe 2017). This study applies some of the notions found in the practical toolkit of CDA such as framing, presupposition, metaphor analysis, pragmatics and relevance theory and explores their functioning as heuristic methods in data that is regarded as ecologically ‘positive’. Unlike traditional critical studies of harmful environmental practices which expose deviant discursive practices, the starting point is discourse that concords with current mediated notions of environmental sustainability. The aim is not simply to give such contexts, and such discourse, publicity, and nor is it to seek solace in ‘discourse that inspires, encourages, heartens, discourse we like, that cheers us along’ (Martin 1999, pp. 51–52). Rather, it is to shed light on underlying processes at the level of ideologies (in the sense of Fairclough 2003: 9); to make manifest thoughts, feelings and discourses which are felt to be ‘positive’, in a mirror image of what occurs in CDA studies.

The present paper illustrates the preliminary findings of a CORECOM-funded project called “The representation of the image of women in advertising: interlinguistic and multimodal perspectives”. Its aim has been to identify, analyze and deconstruct semantic asymmetries which continue to proliferate in the field of information and communication, thus perpetrating discursive constructions of stereotyped and discriminating gender identities. Drawing on the most influential contributions to the study of language and gender (Lakoff 1975, Goffman 1979, Cameron 1995; Christie 2000, Lazar 2005, Jeffries 2007, Baker 2008, Mills 2008, 2012, Machin & Caldas-Coulthard 2016), the present research has identified possible pragmatic characterizations leading to the identification of subliminal, discriminating or degrading advertising messages which provide the audience with the image of a stereotyped woman or allusively associated, for example, with an aesthetic canon based on beauty as an absolute value. To this end, the comparison between advertising messages disseminated on the regional, national and international territory has brought out quantitative and qualitative data that have allowed us to define the extent to which the presence of gender stereotypes and sexualization of the female body are occurring in regional and national advertising in relation to some European countries. Reference has thus been made to advertisements in English in both English-speaking and non-English-speaking countries. Consequently, the results of interlinguistic and comparative research have also brought out useful data for the definition of pragma-linguistic patterns characterizing ELF (English as a Lingua Franca; Seidlhofer 2001) in advertising.