Claudia Crocco

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Linguistics

In recent research on discourse markers (DMs), it has been shown that these elements collaborate with prosody to convey crucial information about the organization of the discourse, both at the level of a single turn and the level of the overall conversation. In this article, we analyze the DM allora ‘then’, occurring in turn-initial position and fo...

This article aims to examine whether Italian has theticity and sentence-focus among its grammatically encoded categories. After the categories of theticity and sentence-focus are introduced, the concepts of grammatically encoded category and category of language use are operationalized along the lines of Integral Linguistics. For a functional categ...

In this article we study the alternation between the two most prominent Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions, viz. the Syntactic Inversion Construction (henceforth: SIC), e.g. Arriva il treno (‘The train is arriving’), and the Presentational Cleft (henceforth: PC), e.g. C’è il treno che arriva (‘The train is arriving’). Based on the exis...

This article deals with Italian questions with a post-verbal wh-element, which are generally defined as in situ . We show that post-verbal wh-questions can be interpreted as information-seeking questions, and provide syntactic arguments supporting the hypothesis that the post-verbal wh-element is only apparently in situ . We claim that, in certain...

This article contributes to the study of the relationship between Latin and Tuscan vernacular in the 16th century. We examine a set of almost neglected grammatical works (the Concetti, Supplimento , and Il grammatico ) published between 1557 and 1567, and related to the Italian humanist Aonio Paleario. We adopt both a linguistic and literary approa...

We are looking for a candidate for a PhD position within the project “Prosodic cues to syntactic reanalysis: experimentally tracking Jespersen's cycle in progress”. The project is embedded in the research group DiaLing (Diachronic and Diatopic linguistics), and forms a multinational collaboration between the universities of Ghent (Belgium), Kent (U...

This article deals with clitic right dislocation (CLRD) structures. The interface examination of the interpretative, syntactic and prosodic properties of CLRDs shows that these constructions can be ordered on a scale based to the minor or greater degree of prosodic and syntactic integration between verb and post-verbal object. This scale of integra...

The Section of Italian Studies, Ghent University, is looking for competitive candidates to apply for PhD (BOF and/or FWO) Fellowships. These two Flemish sources of PhD funding offer to the winning candidates a competitive salary (ca. 1900 EUR/month net, 2+2 years) and research funds. UGent, a top-100 institution worldwide, offers a dynamic and inte...

In many European languages the National Standard Variety is converging with spoken, informal, and socially marked varieties. In Italian this process is giving rise to a new standard variety called Neo-standard Italian, which partly consists of regional features. This book contributes to current research on standardization in Europe by offering a co...

Contemporary Italian shows noticeable regional differences from the phonetic and phonological point of view. This fragmentation has its roots in the differences in the dialectal substratum and in the way Italian has spread as a spoken language after the political unification. Traditional standard pronunciation of Italian is the so-called "amended F...

This chapter provides an overview of the main topics concerning the restandardization process of Italian. We will first discuss some general issues related to the Italian sociolinguistic situation, paying special attention to the status of Italo-Romance dialects and their relationship with Italian, the demotization process entailed by the twentieth...

In this article, we propose an analysis of the so-called echo wh-questions in situ in Italian at syntax–prosody interface. We conduct a prosodic analysis under an experimental approach, showing that a focalized wh-word in echo wh-questions shows its own peculiar properties, different from informative and corrective focus, so that we can analyze it...

Long version of the presentation delivered at the XII Congress of AISV (Associazione Italiana di Scienze della Voce)

In this paper we explore the prosody of regular and echo wh- questions in Este Italian. We analyzed 40 regular and 40 echo wh- questions introduced by dove, collected by means of a Discourse completion task and produced by 4 native speakers. Regular questions are phrased in two φ separated by a L-. The first phrase has an H+L* L- tune with the pitc...

The aim of this paper is to examine the distribution of presentative constructions in contemporary Italian and to verify whether their occurrence depends on language external factors. Presentative constructions have been studied particularly by Italian linguists during the Eighties, and were defined as being ‘typical’ of so-called Neostandard Itali...

Questo capitolo raccoglie informazioni sulle principali varietà dell'italiano contemporaneo e fornisce uno strumento per orientarsi nella selezione di un corpus per una ricerca empirica sull'italiano. Nella prima parte del lavoro si presentano in modo sintetico alcune varietà dell'italiano attuale, illustrando le caratteristiche prin-cipali della v...

he chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means such as syntactic constructions and discourse particles in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence types a...

This paper illustrates the results of a corpus-driven analysis on the translation from Italian into Dutch of “realia” in subtitles. In Translation Studies, “realia” are generally defined as words and expressions with culture-specific meaning. In the present paper, we focus on a particular type of “realia”, namely honorifics. The analysis of “realia...

This paper provides a first outline of the historical development of the definition of syllable in the Italian grammatical production. First, it focuses on a number of treatises written between the fifteenth and the seventeenth century, starting from Leon Battista Alberti‟s Grammatichetta vaticana and ending with Benedetto Buommattei‟s treatise Del...

The aim of this paper is to examine the distribution of presentative constructions in contemporary Italian and to verify whether their occurrence depends on language external factors. Presentative constructions have been studied particularly by Italian linguists during the Eighties, and were defined as being 'typical' of so-called Neostandard Itali...

The Italian language is characterized by an extremely strong phonetic and phonological variation that differentiates the language across space, communicative situations, social groups and socio-economic classes, and means of communication (Berruto 2010, 2012). In this chapter, we consider the phonetic and phonological variation at the intonational...

This study examines to what extent native speakers of Dutch, who are beginning learners of Italian, have acquired the perception and production of the Italian contrast between singleton and geminate consonants. In Italian, but not in Dutch, consonants can be phonemically long and minimal pairs like dita ('fingers') – ditta ('company') differ only i...

This paper analyses the intonation of Italian yes/no questions and statements containing a Clitic Right Dislocation (CLRD) to determine whether this construction shows evidence of grammaticalisation at the prosodic level. We examine 251 CLRDs taken from task-oriented dialogues, showing that the prosody of the CLRD is strongly affected by the modali...

In this paper we analyze the position of the elbow point L in a corpus of YN questions produced by Dutch speaking learners of Italian with five different competence levels in L2. The analysis shows that latency values increase in the groups with higher competence level in L2, confirming the preliminary results obtained in previous work on dialogica...

In this paper we present an application of AGTK to a corpus of spoken Italian annotated at many different linguistic levels. The work consists of two parts: a) the presentation of AG-SpIt, a toolkit devoted to corpus data management that we developed according to AGTK proposals; b) the presentation of corpus’ structure together with some examples a...

In this paper the relation between prosodic form and meaning is investigated in a sample of polar questions in Neapolitan Italian, taken from four Map Task dialogues. The sample is analyzed from both the informational and the prosodic point of view. The analysis of the information structure led to the constitution of four groups of questions which...

Right dislocation (RD) is usually included in the linguistic features of the so-called neo-standard Italian. This pan-Italian variety is used in relatively informal contexts by speakers with education ranging from average to higher. Although neo-standard linguistic features have been studied from different points of view, their actual geographical...

1. INTRODUZIONE Nel presente lavoro, nato da esperienze maturate all'interno di diversi progetti di costituzione di corpora di parlato segmentati ed etichettati a diversi livelli 2 (AVIP-API – Crocco et alii, 2003 -e CLIPS – quest'ultimo ancora in corso), saranno presentati e discussi problemi della segmentazione e codifica in relazione ad alcuni p...