Search

In the logical-psychological-linguistic contributions of the German area between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, Philipp Wegener is the scholar who stresses the role of ethics as the precondition for the acquisition and use of language. His considerations are embedded in a theoretical framework that focuses on the concrete acts of speech in situations, as well as on the active interaction between speaker and hearer for the construction of meaning. Within this dialogical approach, sympathy should be considered as the “most fundamental prerequisite” for understanding speech (Wegener 1885: 68). Wegener’s view never gained unanimous coeval fame either in linguistics or in the psychology of language; nonetheless he was appreciated later by scholars of the caliber of Karl Bühler and Alan Gardiner. Our paper investigates the attention Wegener pays to the connection between language, speech, and ethics and considers how this concept may have paved the way for a social notion of language.

This volume collects a selection of papers concerning the history of linguistics spanning the centuries from the 17th to the 20th. These contributions were presented and debated at ICHoLS XV (Milan, 23 – 27 August 2021). The essays focus on various contexts across the modern and contemporary ages in Europe, Asia, and the United States. This collection offers an accurate exploration of linguistic topics and metalinguistic traditions across diverse historical and geographical settings.

It is the editors' Introduction to the vol. Insights into the History of Linguistics. Selected Papers from ICHoLS XV ((Milan, 23 – 27 August 2021)

This paper addresses the status of the act of sharing a message in a social network. Scholars do not agree on what kind of act sharing is and what kind of communicative and illocutionary act is performed when a post is shared. We defend the view that sharing is an act similar to photocopying and distributing a document. Such an act is a basic act that can be used for communicative aims in certain contexts but that is not necessarily communicative. One can repost for several reasons—to manifest agreement or derision, to inform, to please the author, to show activity on social networks, to have an economic return—and only some of them are communicative. However, even when reposters do not perform a communicative act, they are not relieved of every responsibility; in fact, the responsibilities of reposters are like those of the persons who copy and distribute something.

In natural face-to-face interactions, verbal communication always occurs in association with expressions of nonverbal behavior. The functional contribution of these multimodal aspects to the meaning of the message and to its effects fulfils multiple communicative functions that differ according primarily to the speaker’s intentions, to the interpersonal relations between the speaker and the addressee, to the nature of the message, and to the context. When nonverbal behavior is reproduced in a written literary text, it becomes functional to the textual and narrative process as it serves as a signifier for the reader. A fictional character is never fixed and unchanging. Through writing, each author encourages the explicit or implicit evocation of a multisensory world, which readers decode and reconstruct, inevitably conditioned by their cognitive and cultural environment. In this paper, we refer to Salinger’s famous novel "The Catcher in the Rye" to analyze the literary valence of representing the characters’ multisensory communication, focusing on the core relationship between the explicit and the implicit parts in reconstructing the psychological depth of a literary character.

Il lavoro propone una analisi dei termini peggiorativi sulla base di alcuni criteri necessari e sufficienti per definirne la semantica ed evidenziare le strategie tramite le quali tali termini diventano veicolo di stati emozionali.

In this essay, a multi-act view of the meaning of slurs is defended. According to it, when a speaker utters a sentence containing a slur, she simultaneously performs two different speech acts, one of which, following Searle’s taxonomy, is an expressive one. Some of the advantages of this version of expressivism are reviewed. First, it can explain some properties of slurs such as ineffability and redundancy. Second, it allows a clearer understanding of the mistake made by those who use a slur: they do not say something false but do something wrong. Third, it can respond to some criticisms directed against expressivism: that of being too subjective and that of not accounting for the prescriptive dimension of slurs.

The lexicon of natural languages includes both connoted and neutral terms. Connoted terms express the speaker’s attitude towards the referent of the term. By contrast, neutral terms do not express any such attitude. Connotation can be positive or negative. Hate speech (HS) is understood as any message that expresses contempt or hatred towards an individual or a target group. Hence, a quite natural hypothesis would be that HS contains a high number of negatively connoted terms. Our work aims at verifying this hypothesis. To do this, we use the model developed by Montefinese et al. (2014), which classifies the affective connotation of 1121 Italian words based on three different parameters: valence, arousal, and dominance. We calculated the mean value of these three dimensions in an already annotated Italian HS corpus (HaSpeeDe 2020). The result is quite unexpected as there seems not to exist any meaningful correlation between HS and negatively connoted terms. Not only negatively connoted terms are not necessary to classify a message as HS, but they are not sufficient either. Consequently, HS detection software must take other dimensions into account.

Slurs are pejorative epithets that express negative attitudes toward a class of individuals sharing the same race, country of origin, sexual orientation, religion, and the like. The aim of this paper is to show what happens in communication when slurs are reported. It focuses on the derogatory content of such expressions and on the persistence of their performative effects in reported speech. In this respect, the question concerning the attribution of responsibility for the derogatory content conveyed by the slurs is relevant. Indeed, reporting a slur involves quoting not only the content but also the speaker’s personal commitment and (negative) attitude. Different theories on the status of the derogatory component of slurs make different predictions about their offensiveness in reported speech and about the speaker’s “responsibility” for the attitude and feelings conveyed by that word, be she the original speaker or the reporter. The results of a questionnaire show empirically that no single theory can provide a conclusive statement on this matter., Slurs sind abwertende Bezeichnungen, die eine negative Einstellung gegenüber den Eigenschaften ausdrücken, die den betreffenden Personen oder Gruppen auf der Basis der Rasse, der Herkunft, der Religionszugehörigkeit usw. zugeschrieben werden. Dieser Beitrag zielt darauf ab, zu zeigen, was in der Kommunikation passiert, wenn slurs wiedergegeben werden. Im Fokus stehen der abwertende Bestandteil der Bedeutung solcher Ausdrücke und die Wirkungsdauer ihrer performativen Effekte in der Redewiedergabe. In dieser Hinsicht wird auch die Frage der Zuschreibung von Verantwortung bezüglich der abwertenden Bedeutung, die das verunglimpfende Wort vermittelt, relevant. Verschiedene Theorien über den Status des abwertenden Bestandteils der slurs treffen unterschiedliche Vorhersagen über deren Offensivität in der Redewiedergabe und über die Verantwortung des Sprechers (sei er/sie der originale oder der wiedergebende) für die durch den Ausdruck vermittelte negative Einstellung. Anhand einer empirischen Umfrage wird gezeigt, dass keine Theorie eine eindeutige Erklärung dafür liefern kann.

In questo contributo vengono presentate alcune riflessioni linguistiche di Philipp Wegener, contenute in "Exposition und Mitteilung" del 1911. In questo breve saggio, Wegener si avvale di esempi tratti da materiale presumibilmente utilizzato in ambito didattico per illustrare, in modo sintetico, alcune delle tematiche che aveva già affrontato e approfondito nel suo contributo più noto e significativo, le "Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens (1885)". In particolare si sofferma sulla nozione di "Exposition".

A quite neglected question pertaining to the classification of the different theories on slurs concerns their extendibility to other pejoratives and expressives in general. In this paper, we show that the linguistic behaviour of pejoratives is similar to that of slurs. Therefore, a theory on slurs that is also extendible to other pejoratives and expressives is, other things being equal, preferable to a theory that is not applicable to other classes beyond slurs. Slurs seem to differ from other pejoratives as the latter seem to target single persons and not a class of persons. This implies that the derogatory component of slurs does not seem to project outside negative, conditional, modal and interrogative contexts. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that this difference is deceptive due to some specific features of the other pejoratives, such as targeting negative characteristics or having a fuzzy extension.

Breve presentazione del testo in oggetto

Breve presentazione del testo in oggetto

Breve presentazione del testo in oggetto

Breve presentazione del testo in oggetto

This contribution aims to introduce Wegener’s defense of the notion of Wortsatz (word sentence) as a construction having a sentence status within the debate about the notion and the definition of sentence and its structure that developed in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the 20th century. This period was marked by different approaches towards this issue. In his work, Wegener foreshadowed some of the topics which would be central in the later pragmatic theory of communication, but on the other side he still related to the psychologistic view of the sentence structure.

L'articolo presenta un'analisi del contenuto denigratorio dei cosiddetti slur nell'ottica della teoria degli atti linguistici.

Si tratta di una breve presentazione del testo in oggetto

In questo contributo viene spiegata la scelta di rendere il termine "Umfeld" utilizzato da Bühler con il termine italiano "campitura" nella traduzione del saggio "Das Strukturmodell der Sprache" del 1936. Vengono prese in esame precedenti proposte traduttive di questo termine e si cerca di giustificare la scelta operata.

Si tratta di una recensione del volume: Janette Friedrich (ed.): Karl Bühlers Krise der Psychologie. Positionen, Bezüge und Kontroversen im Wien der 1920/30er Jahre. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts Wiener Kreis, Bd. 26. Springer International Publishing, Basel 2017.

Si tratta di una breve presentazione del testo in oggetto

Breve presentazione del testo in oggetto

Si tratta di una breve presentazione del testo in oggetto

Si tratta di una breve presentazione del testo in oggetto

Si tratta di una breve presentazione del testo in oggetto

Quanto più una comunità è grande e complessa, quanto più l'esigenza di comunicare a distanza e a molti si fa necessaria: nel corso della storia umana si sono cercate risposte via via più efficaci e raffinate a tali esigenze di comunicazione. La prima parte, scritta da Maria Paola Tenchini, offre un approfondimento sulla comunicazione in generale e su alcuni aspetti dello studio del linguaggio, Aldo Frigerio si focalizza sulla comunicazione digitale, dai primi tentativi all'avvento di internet.

This article aims to advance a theory of the semantic status of ethnic epithets able to account for their use in acts of verbal aggression. The starting point of the analysis is the use in discourse of the epithet "Zigeuner", which identifies mainly the traditional “nomadic” Roma and Sinti people in a derogatory way. In this paper, the current approaches to the topic ethnophaulism, and slur in general, are considered and some of their drawbacks are illustrated. A solution based on the speech-act theory is then advanced. On this view, by uttering e.g. "Zigeuner" in a declarative sentence, a speaker performs two different speech acts: a representative one corresponding to that performed by means of the sentence containing the neutral counterpart of “Zigeuner” (i.e. member of the Roma or Sinti people) and an expressive one, by which the speaker expresses her/his contempt toward Roma and Sinti people. This approach explains why the uttering of a sentence containing an ethnic slur always conveys a derogatory content (apart from their “appropriated” use in certain contexts), independently of the sets of stereotypes, (negative) images, emotions or prejudices a speaker can associate to them over time. The defended theory is thus in line with those which consider the connotative meaning of ethnic epithets as semantically expressed and part of the linguistic meaning.

Breve presentazione del testo in oggetto

Breve recensione del testo in oggetto

Breve presentazione del testo in oggetto

Si tratta di una breve recensione del testo in oggetto

This paper proposes a semantic interpretation of slurs based on a multi-speech act theory. According to this perspective, when a speaker utters a sentence containing a slur, he or she performs two different speech acts, one of which, following Searle’s taxonomy, is an expressive one. Therefore, slurs have two semantic components, the first being identical with the intension and extension of the corresponding neutral term. The second is an expressive speech act by means of which the speaker expresses derogation and denigration towards the class of individuals designated by the neutral component. This interpretation is in line with those theories which regard slurs as having a mixed semantics. However, unlike these theories, in this proposal slurs are not regarded as a type of conventional implicature.

Tra Otto- e Novecento il tema della Wortsatz nella riflessione linguistica si colloca all’interno del dibattito sulla concezione e definizione di frase: la crisi del modello logicizzante di stampo portorealista pone infatti in discussione anche il “dogma” della concezione della frase intesa come giudizio necessariamente bimembre. All’interno di questo dibattito le posizioni riguardo al tema della Wortsatz sono fondamentalmente riconducibili a due diversi paradigmi. La prima posizione, maggiormente legata a criteri formali e grammaticali, ritiene che per essere tali, le frasi debbano essere bimembri, cioè formate da un soggetto e da un predicato. Essa si trova quindi a dover rendere in qualche modo conto delle Wortsätze. L’altra tradizione di pensiero, di stampo più pragmatico, si basa su una concezione “olistica” della frase come unità essenzialmente comunicativa. Su questa base si ritiene che le Wortsätze siano, a prescindere, frasi a tutti gli effetti perché mediante esse si riesce comunque a comunicare qualcosa di compiuto; pertanto anche a strutture unimembri (come le interiezioni, i vocativi, gli imperativi, le frasi nominali, aggettivali o avverbiali) viene riconosciuta la dignità di frase. Nel nostro intervento vorremmo proporre una teoria della Wortsatz che medi fra queste due tradizioni di pensiero articolando la risposta a questo problema a partire dal tipo di atto linguistico che viene compiuto mediante l’enunciato., Um die Wende vom 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert wird das Thema Wortsatz innerhalb der sprachwissenschaftlichen Überlegung über die Satzbegriffsbestimmung entwickelt: Durch die Krise des an der Logik orientierten Modells wird nämlich auch das Dogma des Begriffs „Satz“ als notwendigerweise zweigliedriges Urteil in Frage gestellt. Innerhalb dieser Debatte sind die Positionen, die den Horizont des Wortsatzproblems bestimmen, im Wesentlichen auf zwei verschiedene Denkschulen zurückführbar. Die erste Denktradition ist eher formal-grammatisch orientiert und ihr zufolge kann ein Satz nur zweigliedrig sein: Er besteht also immer aus einem Subjekt und einem Prädikat. Offensichtlich stößt der Begriff Wortsatz in diesem theoretischen Rahmen auf Schwierigkeiten und infolgedessen wird entweder solchen Äußerungen der Satz-Status verweigert oder diese Strukturen werden als elliptische Sätze erklärt. Die andere Denktradition ist eher pragmatisch orientiert. Sie basiert auf einem Verständnis des Satzes als eine im Wesentlichen kommunikative Einheit und auf der Trennung zwischen grammatischer und psychologischer Ebene. Infolgedessen hält sie die Wortsätze für in jeder Hinsicht authentische Sätze, weil man durch sie einen vollständigen Sinn mitteilen kann. In unserem Beitrag möchten wir eine Theorie des Wortsatzes vorschlagen, die zwischen den o.a. Denktraditionen “vermittelt“. Unsere Antwort auf dieses Problem geht von dem Sprechakttyp aus, der durch den Satz vollzogen wird.

Breve recensione del testo in oggetto

Breve recensione del testo in oggetto

Negli studi sul linguaggio condotti in ambito tedesco dalla seconda metà dell’Ottocento fino agli anni Trenta del Novecento ha avuto un ruolo significativo il dibattito sulla natura della frase, sulla sua struttura e sulla sua definizione. Uno dei nodi centrali di questo dibattito riguarda la nozione di “frase-parola”, ovvero delle espressioni costituite da un unico elemento (singola parola o sintagma) verbalizzato. Ci si chiede se tali espressioni abbiano dignità di frase oppure no, e se sì in quali forme. Un’interpretazione ampia e articolata delle espressioni unimembri aventi dignità di frase è avanzata da Philipp Wegener nel saggio "Der Wortsatz", pubblicato nel 1921 nelle "Indogermanische Forschungen". Il presente lavoro è suddiviso in due parti. La prima parte consiste in un saggio ("La frase-parola come strategia comunicativa") che introduce alla lettura del Wortsatz contestualizzandolo all’interno del dibattito sulla nozione di frase e presentando i capisaldi della teoria wegeneriana allo scopo di fornire una cornice e un apparato terminologico utili per leggere il contributo teorico di Wegener. Nella seconda parte del volume trova spazio la traduzione italiana integrale del saggio "Der Wortsatz" ("La frase-parola"). In appendice, una nota bio-bibliografica su Philipp Wegener., The debate about the notion and the definition of the sentence and its structure played a significant role within the linguistic reflection in Germany from the second half of the 19th century until the beginning of the 20th. One of the central issues of this debate deals with the topic of “word-sentence”, i.e. utterances in which only one element (either a single word or a phrase) is phonetically expressed. The question is whether such utterances have a sentence status and under what conditions. An exhaustive analysis concerning the different variants of the one-word sentences is provided by Philipp Wegener in his essay "Der Wortsat"z appeared in 1921 in the "Indogermanische Forschungen". This volume is divided into two parts. The first ("La frase parola come strategia comunicativa") introduces Wegener’s essay, contextualizes it within the debate of his time and discusses those aspects of his linguistic thought (in particular, the view of the language as action and interaction, the relationship between utterance and situation or context, the dialectics between form and function, the text informational organization in psychological subject and psychological predicate) which are the backbone of his theoretical proposal. The second part of the work consists of the translation of "Der Wortsatz" ("La frase-parola"). The Appendix contains a short bio-bibliographic note on Philipp Wegener.

Breve recensione del testo in oggetto