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We present the results of an experimental study designed to investigate the acceptability of bare participial structures in spoken Italian. These sentences, despite being extremely reduced, have full illocutionary force. For the study, we proposed a technique to elicit grammaticality judgements suitable for structures that, although productive, are not used in the written form of the language. Our aim is to investigate the validity of the structural analysis of these sentences (Cecchetto & Donati 2022) according to which they are generated as small as VPs and they are not elliptical structures, i.e., they are not the result of phonological deletions from full-fledged sentences. The findings globally confirm the predictions of that account, as only require the activation of projections beyond the VP-layer, are rated as fully acceptable. However, the corresponding negative structures and some reduced structures with active transitive predicates received intermediate judgments of acceptability, contrary to the predictions. In the paper, we try to account for these unexpected results and argue that phonological deletion is available as well but is subject to tight constraints; most notably, it is restricted to the top of the tree.

Bimodal bilinguals master languages in two modalities, spoken and signed, and can use them simultaneously due to the independence of the articulators. This behavior, named code-blending, is one of the hallmarks of bimodal bilingualism. Lexical experiments on production and comprehension in American Sign Language/English showed that blending is not cognitively costly and facilitates lexical access. In this work, we replicated the blending advantage in lexical comprehension for hearing bimodal bilinguals with two other language pairs, French Sign Language (LSF)–French and Italian Sign Language (LIS)–Italian, and we explored whether the facilitation is also found at the sentential level. Results show that blended utterances for languages with incongruent word order like LIS–Italian were processed slower than monolingual utterances, while no difference was found when the word orders were congruent (LSF–French). We discuss these findings in light of linguistic theories of syntactic structure derivation in bimodal bilinguals.

In this article, we analyze five reduced structures in Italian that display morphological agreement between their past participle and their internal argument. Three of the five structures have full illocutionary force despite lacking the middle field and the left periphery. We explain this fact (and the differences with the two remaining participial structures) by extending to object agreement cases Chomsky’s (2019) hypothesis that clauses are exocentric but can be labeled by a mechanism of feature sharing. This goes against the hypothesis that all reduced structures interpreted as clauses must be elliptical.

Attitude role shift is a sign language strategy to report someone else’s utterance or thought. It has been analyzed either as a kind of demonstration or, alternatively, as a complex construction involving subordination plus a context-shifting operator. The present work reports the results of a sentence-to-picture matching task developed in three different sign languages (Italian Sign Language, French Sign Language and Catalan Sign Language) with the aim of providing experimental evidence about the nature of role shift. The task assessed the comprehension of indexical first-person pronouns in various syntactic contexts with and without role shift. We showed that constructions with role shift, which require context-shifting for the first-person pronoun, are never easier to comprehend than constructions without role shift that do not require context-shifting. In some cases, they are even more difficult. Additionally, we show that, in Italian Sign Language only, sentences in which the role shifted first-person pronoun is in object position are more difficult than sentences in which it is in subject position. We argue that this can be interpreted as an intervention effect and that this is an argument in favor of positing a context-shifting operator in the periphery of the role shift clause. Considering that the population of adult Deaf signers includes, besides native signers, a majority of individuals with a more or less severe delayed first language exposure, the second goal of this paper is to study the effects of age of exposure on comprehension of sentences with role shift. In the three languages under investigation, we found that native signers generally outperformed non-native signers in sentences with role shift and in subordinate clauses without role shift. This confirms that delayed language exposure has a lasting impact on adults’ comprehension of subordinate clauses of various degrees of complexity.

Among the existing sign language assessment tools, only a small number can be used in clinical settings. This contribution aims at presenting three comprehension assessment tests (two lexical and one syntactic) that offer a solid basis to build tools to assess language impairments in deaf signing adults. We provide the material and guidelines, based on psychometric analyses of the items, to make these tests suitable for clinical assessment. They are available for French Sign Language and Italian Sign Language. So far, the three tests were administered to three groups of deaf participants based on age of exposure (AoE) to sign language: native (AoE from birth), early (AoE = from 1 to 5 years), and late (AoE = from 6 to 15 years) signers. The results showed that the three tests are easy for the typical deaf signing population, and therefore, they can be adapted into tests that assess a deaf signing population with language impairments. Moreover, the results of the syntactic test reveal a categorial difference between native and non-native signers and therefore show the need for baselines that mirror the effect of AoE to sign language when assessing language competence, in particular in clinical assessment.

Relative clauses are subordinate clauses acting as nominal modifiers. They can be finite or nonfinite in Romance languages, with finite relative clauses largely more productive and widespread across varieties. Relative clauses contain a position interpreted anaphorically to the modified noun phrase (NP) that can correspond to a gap (as in most standard varieties) or to a resumptive pronoun, as in Romanian and in many substandard varieties. In most Romance languages, relative clauses are introduced either by the invariant element che/que or by some relative pronoun (il quale/lequel/el cual . . .) depending on the grammatical function of the variable it refers to.

In this paper, we analyze five reduced structures in Italian that display morphological agreement between the past particle and the internal argument. Three out of the five structures have full illocutionary force despite lacking the middle field and the left periphery. We explain this fact (and the differences with the two remaining participial structures) by extending to object agreement cases Chomsky’s (2019) hypothesis that clause are exocentric but can be labeled by a mechanism of feature sharing. This goes against the hypothesis that all reduced structures interpreted as clauses must be elliptical.

Secretory immunoglobulin A (SIgA) interaction with commensal bacteria conditions microbiota composition and function. However, mechanisms regulating reciprocal control of microbiota and SIgA are not defined. Bacteria-derived adenosine triphosphate (ATP) limits T follicular helper (Tfh) cells in the Peyer's patches (PPs) via P2X7 receptor (P2X7R) and thereby SIgA generation. Here we show that hydrolysis of extracellular ATP (eATP) by apyrase results in amplification of the SIgA repertoire. The enhanced breadth of SIgA in mice colonized with apyrase-releasing Escherichia coli influences topographical distribution of bacteria and expression of genes involved in metabolic versus immune functions in the intestinal epithelium. SIgA-mediated conditioning of bacteria and enterocyte function is reflected by differences in nutrient absorption in mice colonized with apyrase-expressing bacteria. Apyrase-induced SIgA improves intestinal homeostasis and attenuates barrier impairment and susceptibility to infection by enteric pathogens in antibiotic-induced dysbiosis. Therefore, amplification of SIgA by apyrase can be leveraged to restore intestinal fitness in dysbiotic conditions.

The study of articulatory complexity has proven to yield useful insights into the phonological mechanisms of spoken languages. In sign languages, this type of knowledge is scarcely documented. The current study compares an error-driven measure and a model-driven measure of complexity for signs in French Sign Language (LSF). The former measure is based on error rates of handshape, location, orientation, movement, and sign fluidity in a repetition task administered to non-signers; the latter measure is derived by applying a feature-geometry model of sign description to the same set of signs. A significant correlation is found between the two measures for the overall complexity. When looking at the effects of individual phonological classes on complexity, a significant correlation is found for handshape and location but not for movement. We discuss how these results indicate that a fine-grained theoretical model of sign phonology/phonetics reflects the degree of complexity as resulting from the perceptual and articulatory properties of signs.

Who is a native signer? Since around 95% of deaf infants are born into a hearing family, deaf signers are exposed to a sign language at various moments of their life, and not only from birth. Moreover, the linguistic input they are exposed to is not always a fully fledged natural sign language. In this situation, is the notion of native signer as someone exposed to language from birth of any use? We review the results of the first large-scale cross-linguistic investigation on the effects of age of exposure to sign language. This research involved about 45 Deaf adult signers in each of three sign languages (Catalan Sign Language, French Sign Language, and Italian Sign Language). Across the three languages, participants were divided into three groups – those exposed from birth, those between 1 and 5 years of age, and those exposed between 6 and 15 years of age – and received a battery of tests designed for each language targeting various aspects of morphosyntactic competence. In particular, the tests focused on both those morphosyntactic phenomena that are known from the spoken language literature to be good detectors of language impairment or delay (i.e., wh-interrogatives and relative clauses) and on morphosyntactic phenomena that are sign language specific (i.e., role shift and directional verbs). The results showed a clear effect of being native, with significant differences across languages and tests between signers exposed to sign language from birth and those exposed in the 1st years of life. This confirms the life-long importance of language exposure from birth and the reliability of the notion of “nativeness”, at least for syntax. On the other hand, while in most domains the differences observed between populations might be differences in performance, for some specific constructions, signers belonging to the three groups may have different grammars. This latter finding challenges the generalized use of native signers’ grammar as the baseline for language desc

This is a reply to Caponigro 2019, which argues that the phrase structure theory proposed in Donati and Cecchetto 2011 and Cecchetto and Donati 2015 falls short of accounting for the attested patterns of free relative clauses. Caponigro questions the reliability of the data supporting D&C’s hypothesis that ever-relatives introduced by a phrase (ev-er+NP relatives) should not be assimilated to free relatives. This reply reports the findings of four controlled experiments in English and Italian and discusses five properties that set free relatives apart from full relatives (occurrence with a complementizer, occurrence with a relative pronoun, infinitival use, absolute use, adverbial use). Crucially, ever+NP relatives do not pattern like free relatives in any of these five domains, either in Italian or in English. This clearly shows that ever-relatives are not a counterexample to D&C’s phrase structure theory. Another potential counterexample, Romanian free relatives, is also discussed. As for ever+NP relatives, in Italian they are shown to be garden-variety headed relatives, while in English they are headed relatives that involve a D-to-D movement that is responsible for the syntactic formation of the complex determiner what+ever.

We argue that the counterpart of Marantz's generalization does not hold in the nominal domain, because there are idioms in which the determiner and the noun receive an idiomatic meaning while the PP that modifies the noun is not part of the idiom (we call these "PP-less idioms"). We show that PP-less idioms are fully expected if the hypothesis of parallelism between nominal structure and clausal structure is dropped and it is assumed that the first step of the derivation in the nominal domain involves merge of D and N. As for the mirror image of PP-less idioms, "PP-containing idioms", namely DPs where N and the PP that follows the noun receive an idiomatic reading while D does not, we suggest that they are not generated by syntax but are rather the output of the morphological component.

Introduction: An education strategy was employed in our department to increase the rate of patients with uncomplicated painful bone metastases undergoing single fractionation radiotherapy (SFRT). The purpose of this report is to analyze the results of this strategy over a 5 year period. Materials and Methods: In January 2015, two meetings were organized in our department. In the first, data from an audit on the current SFRT rate were shown. In the second, evidence of SFRT efficacy in the relief of pain from uncomplicated bone metastases was presented. In addition, during the weekly discussion of clinical cases, the opportunity to use the SFRT was systematically recalled. Using our institutional database, all patients treated with radiotherapy for uncomplicated painful bone metastases in the period between 2014 (year considered as a reference) and 2019 were retrieved. Data regarding treatment date (year), radiotherapy fractionation, and tumor, patients, and radiation oncologists characteristics were collected. Results: A total of 627 patients were included in the analysis. The rate of patients undergoing SFRT increased from 4.0% in 2014 to 63.5% in 2019 (p < 0.001). At multivariable analysis, the delivery of SFRT was significantly correlated with older patients age (>80 years), lung cancer as the primary tumor, treatment prescribed by a radiation oncologist dedicated to palliative treatments, and treatment date (2014 vs 2015–2019). Conclusions: This retrospective single-center analysis showed that a simple but intensive and prolonged departmental education strategy can increase the rate of patients treated with SFRT by nearly 16 times.

Relativization is a robust subordinating type across languages, displaying important typological variability concerning the position of the nominal head that the relative clause modifies, and sign languages are no exception. It has been widely assumed since Keenan & Comrie (1977) that the subject position is more accessible to relativization than object and oblique positions. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the extension of this famous generalization both across modalities (sign as opposed to spoken languages) and across relativization typologies (internally as opposed to externally headed relatives), and to verify how it interacts with age of first language exposure. We here report the results of a sentence-to-picture matching task assessing the comprehension of subject and object relative clauses (RCs) in three sign languages: French Sign Language (LSF), Catalan Sign Language (LSC), and Italian Sign Language (LIS). The results are that object RCs are never easier to comprehend than subject RCs. Remarkably, this is independent from the type of relative clause (internally or externally headed). As for the impact of age of exposure, we found that native signers outperform non-native signers and that a delay in language exposure emphasizes the subject/object asymmetry. Our results introduce a new potential diagnostic for LF movement: the existence of a Subject Advantage in comprehension can be used as a reliable and measurable cue for the existence of long-distance dependencies, including covert ones.

Existing evidence suggests that the parser avoids positing a movement dependency if the grammar does not require doing so. By investigating the processing of two syntactic ambiguities that have not been the subject of processing studies before, we provide more conclusive evidence for this parsing bias in two Romance languages: French and Italian. In two acceptability‐judgment experiments and two self‐paced‐reading studies, we found that sentences that involved a filler–gap dependency (indirect questions in Italian and free relatives in French) were dispreferred compared to sentences involving the same lexical material but no filler–gap dependency (declarative complement clauses in both languages). Crucially, the filler–gap dependency was not dispreferred when there was no available competitor. We conclude by discussing the relevance of these results for syntactic theory, in particular for the questionable status of Merge over Move as a grammatical principle.

The polyphyletic group of black fungi within the Ascomycota (Arthoniomycetes, Dothideomycetes, and Eurotiomycetes) is ubiquitous in natural and anthropogenic habitats. Partly because of their dark, melanin-based pigmentation, black fungi are resistant to stresses including UV-and ionizing-radiation, heat and desiccation, toxic metals, and organic pollutants. Consequently, they are amongst the most stunning extremophiles and poly-extreme-tolerant organisms on Earth. Even though ca. 60 black fungal genomes have been sequenced to date, [mostly in the family Herpotrichiellaceae (Eurotiomycetes)], the class Dothideomycetes that hosts the largest majority of extremophiles has only been sparsely sampled. By sequencing up to 92 species that will become reference genomes, the “Shed light in The daRk lineagES of the fungal tree of life” (STRES) project will cover a broad collection of black fungal diversity spread throughout the Fungal Tree of Life. Interestingly, the STRES project will focus on mostly unsampled genera that display different ecologies and life-styles (e.g., ant-and lichen-associated fungi, rock-inhabiting fungi, etc.). With a resequencing strategy of 10-to 15-fold depth coverage of up to ~550 strains, numerous new reference genomes will be established. To identify metabolites and functional processes, these new genomic resources will be enriched with metabolomics analyses coupled with transcriptomics experiments on selected species under various stress conditions (salinity, dryness, UV radiation, oligotrophy). The data acquired will serve as a reference and foundation for establishing an encyclopedic database for fungal metagenomics as well as the biology, evolution, and ecology of the fungi in extreme environments.

The present work reports the results of a comprehension task on verb directionality in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and French Sign Language (LSF) considering native and non-native signers. Our goals were to study age of first language exposure effects on the comprehension of verb agreement in LIS and LSF, to verify whether a significant difference between forward and backward directionality was found, and see if our results may provide insight about the nature (gestural vs. linguistic) of verb directionality in sign languages. In both languages we found that the ability to comprehend verb agreement is affected in non-native signers. This indicates that delayed first language exposure has long lasting effects in adulthood. We argue that our results support analyses of verb agreement as a fully grammatical phenomenon.