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In the second half of the 19th century, the city of Naples underwent impressive urban and social transformations, which were foreshadowed and documented by a wide constellation of literary and nonfiction texts. This essay aims to investigate the ways in which literary and nonfiction texts described and produced the urban transformations of Naples in those years. This story, in fact, can be seen as an example of how literature and urban space are the outcome of a dialectical relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, which is part of the field of studies on Roman dialectal and regional phraseology, analyzes the idiomatic expression tre ppigne e 'na tenaja and its variant tre ppinze e 'na tenaja. This phraseological unit is documented in the 19th century: it is found in a roman poem of G.G. Belli (L'arma de Papa Grigorio, 1836). The aim is to reconstruct the history of this phraseologism and relate it to other expressions of the same semantic area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the contribution of the lexicon of material culture of seafaring origin in the irradiation of the idiomatic language in Italian. After a basic overview of some tools of the sea (hook, anchor, net, oars) from which very common figurative expressions stem, the paper deals with abboccare all'amo, from which interesting historical-etymological features with many semantic implications appear. The investigation shows the lexical and semantic evolution that characterises the passage from material culture word of the seafaring field (concrete sense) to figurative language, with a special focus also on the semantics of verbs frequently used not only in the idiom under investigation (abboccare all'amo), but also in other idiomatic expressions of Italian. By comparing the earliest occurrences of phraseological uses related to amo in lexicographic repertories, such as TLIO and GRADIT, but also in sectorial dictionaries on idioms, some interesting diatopic and diachronic information on lexical and synonymic variants occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

«Why create a work when it is so beautiful to just dream about it?». Pasolini's Decameron ends with this question; and 'dream' is the keyword that summarizes the meaning of the artistic-cultural operation carried out by the first act of the Trilogy of Life. Among the ancient Italian phrases recorded in Francesco Serdonati's paremiographic collection we find «A dream: A vain thing. Somnium». In Pasolini's Decameron the dream is an expression of the poetics of the unfinished, in some respects connectable to the history - sometimes very ancient - of the idiomatic components of current (and recurring) language: fragments of an interminable «force of the Past» of which the poetdirector felt part and expression. Starting from the screenplay, I intend to propose a summary of Decameron's sentences, accompanied by reflections on their typology and reuse techniques, always keeping in mind the comparison, on the one hand, with Boccaccio's model and, on the other, with Serdonati's collection. What emerges leads to new considerations on Pasolini's style, on his relationship with literary models, as well as with erudite paremiography, with the history of the Italian language, with popular tradition and with dialects. There will be no shortage of comparisons with the transcription of the film's speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper investigates the syntactic–pragmatic behavior of two expletive-like elements, namely a and chiru, in Fornese and Cilentano, two Romance varieties spoken in Northern and Southern Italy, respectively. We argue that a and chiru are not bona fide expletive subjects but discourse-pragmatic expletives, which mark zero aboutness or the absence of an aboutness referent in an utterance. The investigation of Fornese and Cilentano points towards the existence of a sub-class of null-subject languages where aboutness as a discourse feature must be structurally satisfied by merging an overt or null topic in the syntactic spine of the clause. In the absence of such an element—for example, in thetic clauses—a discourse-pragmatic expletive is externally merged as a last-resort strategy to satisfy [uAboutness]. We argue that, in these null-subject languages, the satisfaction of the discourse feature [uAboutness] is an LF requirement, which is subject to a parametric choice. We show that, in Fornese, "default" [aboutness] is satisfied in SubjP, which is the canonical syntactic position for overt subjects within a cartographic approach. In Cilentano, on the other hand, [aboutness] is satisfied in a higher position within the C-domain, namely ShiftP, the canonical syntactic position that hosts overt aboutness/shift topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper is meant as a contribution to the research project on variation and optionality in the determiner system in Italo-Romance, with novel data from the Sicilian dialect of Delia. The study is based on fieldwork interviews and the construction of a small corpus of 850 observations by 24 native speakers of Deliano (mean age: 36.37; age range: 19–72). The participants were asked to (i) describe in Deliano a 3 min videotape of an Italian speaking woman during her shopping session at a supermarket and (ii) talk about their own shopping routines in Deliano. These activities were designed mainly to detect the following strategies to express indefiniteness: (i) ART, i.e., a definite article with an indefinite interpretation; (ii) ZERO, a zero determiner for bare nouns; (iii) DI+ART, the so-called "partitive article"; (iv) pseudo-partitives such as 'a bit of'; (v) the grammaticalised cardinal 'two'; and (vi) the grammaticalised cardinal 'four'. The data confirm (i) the preference for ZERO in negative episodic sentences in the past; (ii) the general lack of bare DI and DI+ART, and of certo 'certain' used as an indefinite; (iii) the use of different specialised forms of pseudo-partitive 'a bit of' in older speakers of Deliano; (iv) the neutralisation of this pseudo-partitive specialisation and the consequent emergence of some true optionality in younger speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Southern Italian digital humanist Domenico Fiormonte has argued that DH is...a discipline and academic discourse dominated materially by an Anglo-American èlite and intellectually by a mono-cultural view and has repeatedly called for a digital humanities that improve[s] and cultivate[s] the margins...[giving] more attention [to] variegated cultural and and linguistic cultural diversity. Similarly, Crystal Hall points out that both the Digital Humanities and Italian Studies have struggled with inclusivity and the representation for traditionally marginalized voices...[though] both fields offer tools and materials of study that can assist in [a] transformation. This article takes up the work of these scholars in its investigation of the Neapolitan language on YouTube. According to UNESCO, the Neapolitan language is a vulnerable language because the number of speakers has been decreasing steadily in Southern Italy, forecasting the eventual extinction of the Southern Italian language. UNESCO's categorization of Neapolitan as vulnerable is problematic because it only accounts for speakers in Southern Italy and not in the Italian diaspora, which involves a physical relocation of Neapolitans to other parts of the world such as Australia and the United States. It is also problematic because it indicates that Italians either in Italy or in the diaspora may no longer want to speak Neapolitan. A Neapolitan digital diaspora, unaccounted for in UNESCO statistics, also exists on social media, which may include Neapolitans in Italy and abroad but also may include first-generation Italians, heritage-language speakers, and other-culture people fluent or familiar with the language. In this article, I explore how usages of Neapolitan-Italian language on YouTube might counter the linguistic and cultural subordination of Neapolitans. This article explores how usages of Neapolitan-Italian language on YouTube might counter the linguistic and cultural subordination of Neapolitans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Giornali of the saddler Giuliano Passaro, completed around 1526, have not yet received the attention they deserve. The chronicle, which describes in the Neapolitan vernacular the historical situation of the Realm of Naples, is of considerable interest both from a historiographical and historical-linguistic point of view. Up to now, the printed edition of 1785 has mainly been used for historiographical and linguistic research. However, it presents considerable differences and errors with respect to the manuscripts. A critical edition therefore remains an urgent need. In the present state of our knowledge, the ms. 13324 of the Biblioteca Nacional de España seems to be the closest version to the lost original. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]