Andrea sansò

University of Insubria | UNINSUBRIA

In Malayic languages, prefixes derived from Proto-Malayic *(mb)AR- are characterized by an unusual multifunctionality pattern. On the one hand, continuators of *(mb)AR- may encode functions that are typical of middle markers across languages. On the other hand, they are used as denominal verb formatives. The aim of this article is to provide a diac...

Much of the typological research on the middle voice has so far largely focused on the cross-linguistic definition and status of the middle as a voice category and its relationship to other voice operations such as reflexives and passives. Diachronic research on the middle, especially in a cross-linguistic perspective, remains to these days compara...

The essays collected in this book are based on rigorous qualitative and quantitative analysis of different corpus-based and corpus-driven data with diachronic, typological, sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, educational objectives and integrate different points of views to understand whether and to what extent speech features affect the grammatical...

Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads (LTC) is a new journal dedicated to the crossroads where linguistic typology meets its neighboring fields. Thanks to the advanced infrastructure provided by ABIS-AlmaDL<https://sba.unibo.it/it/almadl/> at the University of Bologna, LTC provides immediate and free open access to all publications, with no embargo...

In this introduction we propose an agenda for working towards a diachronic typology of individual person markers. Rather than tracking the development of entire paradigms, our goal is to arrive at a better understanding of the diachronic pathways of those source constructions that end up as a conventionalized means of marking a particular person or...

This commentary discusses some aspects of Haider’s model of grammar change that are problematic from the perspective of usage-based approaches to language change. These aspects include (i) the postulated equivalence between intentionality and teleology, (ii) the metaphorical nature of Darwinism when applied to other domains, and (iii) the nature of...

This paper provides a diachronic typology of what we call ‘heterogeneous plurals’, an overarching term comprising associative plurals (expressions meaning X [person] & company) and similative plurals (expressions meaning X and similar entities). Based on a 110-language sample, we identify the most recurrent sources of these two types of plurals by...

Irrealis markers are characterized by the rampant heterogeneity of their distributional patterns and by the tendency to appear as portmanteau morphemes encoding other grammatical categories (e.g. person). These and other characteristics may find an explanation in diachronic terms, by taking into account the sources from which irrealis markers deriv...

A morphosyntactic peculiarity that separates proper names from (most) other noun types is their ability to occur in a special type of plural, called associative plural, whose meaning is X and X’s associated person(s). In this paper, we apply a ‘converging evidence’ methodology to the analysis of associative plurals, by providing a diachronic typolo...

This paper aims to investigate the uses and functions of the phrasal adverb tra parentesi (literally ‘in brackets’) in present-day Italian. Tra parentesi is the verbalization of the punctuation mark < ( ) >. It is used both in written and spoken texts as a strategy to signal a slight digression from the main topic, in which secondary, non-central i...

Ad hoc categorization is the bottom-up abstraction of a category starting from concrete exemplars of the category itself. When we observe linguistic data, we find various phenomena that provide evidence for the ubiquity of such an on-line, goal-driven and context-dependent categorization in everyday communication. Beyond offering concept labels in...

Riassunto L'uso indefinito di elementi lessicali che significano uomo (il tipo man sagt, on dit < homo dicit) si configura, in virtù della sua diffusione nelle lingue d'Europa, come un tratto-finora misconosciuto-dello Standard Average European (Giacalone Ramat e Sansò 2007). Tale uso, sconosciuto alle varietà italo-romanze contemporanee (eccezion...

Antipassives have different structural and semantic properties and are used under different conditions across languages. They also show a few universal tendencies: For instance, they generally correlate with imperfectivity. Both the diversity and the universal tendencies of antipassives have fostered a variety of analyses of this construction type...

This book offers new perspectives into the description of the form, meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages, along with new methods for identifying their ‘prototypical’ instances in situated language contexts, often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collecte...

This book offers new perspectives into the description of the form, meaning and function of Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles in a number of different languages, along with new methods for identifying their ‘prototypical’ instances in situated language contexts, often based on cross-linguistic comparisons. The papers collecte...

This article aims to investigate the uses of two Italian reformulation markers (henceforth RMs) that have recently developed a range of functions that go beyond their core reformulating function. The two markers in question are nel senso (lit. ‘in the sense’) and voglio dire (lit. ‘I want to say’, i.e. ‘I mean’). Both expressions display other uses...

This book is the first collective volume specifically devoted to the multifaceted phenomenon of intensification, which has been traditionally regarded as related to the expression of degree, scaling a quality downwards or upwards. In spite of the large amount of studies on intensifiers, there is still a need for the characterization of intensificat...

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the main sources of antipassive constructions based on a 120-language sample. The sample includes the 48 languages with an antipassive in the WALS (Polinsky 2013) + 72 further languages in which an antipassive or a functionally equivalent construction is attested (e.g., deobjective constructions,...

Nominalized verb phrases have been identified as a possible source of passive and impersonal constructions by Langacker & Munro (1975), Langacker (1976), and Givón (1981), with exemplification drawn almost exclusively from Uto-Aztecan languages, but have received relatively less attention than other sources (reflexive markers, generalized subject c...

The two deictic motion verbs ‘go’ and ‘come’ serve as passive auxiliaries in a handful of languages, in combination with non-finite participial forms of the main verb. Some passive constructions involving deictic motion verbs as auxiliaries are infused with special aspectual or modal meanings, even in the absence of overt aspectual or modal operato...

In this article, we present a historical survey of linguistic typology in Italy from the mid-sixties on. The main stages of development of linguistic typology in Italy are reviewed diachronically, and the specific profile of Italian typological linguistics is briefly sketched.

We present an annotation model of modality which is (i) cross-linguistic, relying on a wide, strongly typologically motivated approach , and (ii) hierarchical and layered, accounting for both factuality and speaker's attitude, while modelling these two aspects through separate annotation schemes. Modality is defined through cross-linguistic categor...

In languages in which there is an opposition between realis and irrealis markers, directives (i.e. forms encoding positive directive situations: imperatives, hortatives, jussives, etc.) happen to be encoded by irrealis markers, by realis markers, by both, or they may be neutral with respect to this distinction. This apparently messy behaviour raise...

Directive strategies, i.e. strategies through which the speaker orders someone to do something, are very frequent in everyday speech, and are particularly subject to processes of diachronic renewal. Based on a 200-language sample, this paper provides an extensive survey of the most frequent diachronic processes of emergence of positive directive st...

The grammaticalization path reflexive > middle > anticausative > passive (> impersonal) has long been recognized as a well-attested pattern in grammar evolution (Kemmer, The middle voice, John Benjamins, 1993, Cennamo, The reanalysis of reflexives: A diachronic perspective, Liguori, 1993, Wehr, SE-Diathese im Italienischen, Gnter Narr, 1995, Parry,...

In Ancient Greek, two terms meaning 'man' (aner and anthropos) combine with common nouns referring to human occupations, ethnic groups, and ranks in a generic-specific construction (e.g. aner hiereus 'priest' [lit. 'man priest']; aner Spartiates 'Spartan' [lit. 'man Spartan']). This construction is used to refer to male human referents in a clearly...

The question addressed in this paper is whether (and to what extent) a semantic map aimed at repre-senting the multifunctionality of a given construction (or set of constructions) in discourse can be thought of as endowed with conceptual reality. To be considered as a mental representation that is essentially similar in all human brains, such a map...

This volume is a collection of 12 papers which originated from a research project on ‘Europe and the Mediterranean from a linguistic point of view: history and prospects’. The papers deal with specific morphosyntactic aspects of language structure and evolution. The comparative perspective is adopted both from a synchronic (typological) and a diach...

Is the passive a unified universal phenomenon? The claim derived from this volume is that the passive, if not universal, has become unified according to function. Language as a means of communication needs the passive, or passive-like constructions, and sooner or later develops them based on other voices (impersonal active, middle, reflexive), spec...

In contemporary Italian, two constructions with the reflexive marker si coexist, a passive and an impersonal one. The co-occurrence of the two constructions is the result of a long-lasting process by which an originally passive construction has gradually acquired some syntactic properties of an impersonal construction such as, e.g., the possibil-it...