Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri

Roma Tre University | UNIROMA3 · Lingue, Letterature e Culture Straniere Moderne

I concetti con un correlato significativo nei fatti che potrebbero guidare gli interventi di natura educativa e legislativa non dovrebbero essere (o almeno non solo) quelli di “femminicidio” e “violenza sulle donne”, ma quelli di “violenza del maschio” (su entrambi i generi), “violenza sessuale” (quasi solo da parte di maschi su femmine) e “violenz...

This study investigates the neurophysiological correlates of presupposition processing in conditions of satisfaction and accommodation, comparing two types of triggers: definite descriptions and change-of-state verbs. Results showed that, for both types, the accommodation of presuppositions is associated with a biphasic N400-P600 pattern at the pro...

The language of new political élites has often been described as characterized by a preference for a sub-standard variety of language, full of vulgarisms and “swear words”. In this contribution the authors propose two innovative ways to investigate it: in the first section, through a cognitive and quantitative approach to the lexicon of anti-politi...

Circa 5.000 persone ogni anno vengono uccise in base alla condanna di un tribunale ritenuto legittimo: USA, Giappone, Cina, Isis e altri 55 stati adottano questo modo per punire i reati più gravi, nonostante una moratoria votata dalle Nazioni Unite nel 2007. Di solito in questi casi si adopera il termine giustiziare. La cosa non può rallegrarci, pe...

Semantic change, conceived as the rise of new meanings for existing words, can be studied while it happens. We present here some cases of Italian words whose recent non-canonical and in principle incorrect meanings are gaining such a high frequency also in diastratically and diaphasically high contexts, that it is no longer possible to consider the...

Le parole della lingua sono gravate da componenti che ci impongono una visione del mondo molto di parte. Spesso questa visione ci danneggia, e arriva a impedirci (anche per tutta la vita) di vivere le cose per quello che sono. Se diciamo Pia va con tutti, o è stata con Mario, quello che gli altri capiscono da predicati così generici (andare, stare)...

Diversi lettori chiedono se l’inglese brand, ormai in uso nel linguaggio commerciale, significhi ‘marca’ o ‘marchio’, e se in italiano gli vada attribuito genere maschile o femminile. Un lettore chiede anche se sia legittimo usare i derivati brandizzare e brandizzazione

This study investigates the processing of presupposition in discourse through the Event-Related Brain Potential technique. While theoretical linguistics has largely described the phenomenon of presupposition, there is little empirical investigation, mainly from behavioural studies. Here we employed the Event Related Potential (ERP) technique to sea...

QUESITO: Chiedono diversi lettori se sia sbagliato usare il verbo realizzare nel senso di ‘capire, accorgersi, rendersi conto’, di cui correttamente ravvisano l’origine inglese

In Keith Allan, Alessandro Capone & Istvan Kecskes (eds.). Pragmemes and Theories, Springer, 2017, pp. 725-748. DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-43491-9. ABSTRACT: Implicits of content (typically, vague expressions and implicatures) and implicits of responsibility (mainly presuppositions and topical/backgrounded information) are presented here with regard to...

Quesito: Secondo l’insegnamento ricevuto a scuola da alcuni lettori, l’espressione fare il/un bagno sarebbe sbagliata, mentre sarebbe giusto dire prendere il/un bagno, come si legge anche inavvisi ufficiali – solitamente inviti alla prudenza – delle capitanerie di porto. Ci si chiede dunque se l’espressione più semplice, con fare, sia dialettale o...

Implicit strategies are known to increase persuasion performances. Implicits of content (vagueness, implicatures) and implicits of responsibility (presuppositions, topics) will be compared semiotically to non-linguistic implicits such as images and sounds. The results of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments will be used to propose that...

In this chapter, Italian free conditionals are located within the general framework of Insubordination (Evans 2007). By means of the data contained in spoken and non-spoken Italian corpora, a series of questions related to the issue are addressed. The question regarding the extent to which the use of such constructions can be considered conventiona...

La redazione dell'Accademia della Crusca ha ricevuto alcune domande su quale sia il modo migliore per esprimere in italiano l’idea di ‘fratelli’ senza specificazione del sesso, cioè riferita sia ai fratelli maschi sia alle sorelle, per cui l’inglese ha la parola sibling (plurale siblings). Un lettore chiede se in espressioni italiane come “quanti f...

Call for papers to be presented in a panel on: Automatic and controlled processes in language (AISC 2016 International Conference, Torino, 24-26 November 2016)

Qual è il ruolo dei suoni delle parole nella formazione dei significati? Tutti sanno che onomatopee come miao, botto e tic tac possono imitare suoni ambientali. Ma molte lingue usano ideofoni come zigzag, lemme lemme o quatto quatto per raffigurare eventi non sonori, come movimenti o stati d'animo. Persino parole comuni come scivolare o incespicare...

Alcuni lettori (Alessandro Gui da Latina, Stefano Radiconcini da Roma) chiedono se sia dell’italiano il verbo ricognire, che incontrano sia nel parlato sia nello scritto, soprattutto con riferimento ad attività topogra‚che e militari. Sara Kelany da Roma vorrebbe anche sapere se sia possibile usarne il participio passato. Partendo dal sostantivo di...

Implicits of content (typically, vague expressions and implicatures) and implicits of responsibility (mainly presuppositions and topical/backgrounded information) are presented here with regard to their persuasive function, which consists in reducing the addressee’s attention, and consequently his tendency to critical evaluation and possible reject...

"In this paper, Italian free conditionals are located within the general framework of Insubordination (Evans 2007). By means of the data contained in spoken and non-spoken Italian corpora, a series of questions related to the issue are addressed. The question regarding the extent to which the use of such constructions can be considered conventional...

Sono pervenute alla redazione molte domande sulla legittimità dell'uso delle parole meteopatico e meteopatia invece di meteoropatico e meteoropatia. C'è anche chi chiede se sono accettabili le forme metereopatico e metereopatia.

Quesito: Diversi lettori chiedono se il verbo orizzontarsi sia corretto e possa essere usato come sinonimo di orientarsi.

Quesito: Diversi lettori lamentano la diffusione e la presunta bruttezza del verbo approcciare, attribuendone la causa alla provenienza dall'inglese. Alcuni chiedono se sia lecito usarlo anche nel senso di 'affrontare'. Altri vorrebbero sapere se possa formare l'intransitivo pronominale approcciarsi.

SOMMARIO: Premessa. – 1. Estetica come misura nell’uso dei forestierismi. – 1.1. Misura nella pronuncia. – 1.2. Misura nell’attribuzione del genere. – 1.3. Misura nella formazione del plurale. – 2. Estetica della non-ripetizione. – 3. Evitare le forme pesanti. – Bibliografia.

Sono pervenute all'Accademia domande su come si debba scrivere la parola stakeholder, se vi sia un equivalente italiano e se al plurale si debba aggiungere la-s. Un lettore chiede anche conferma dell'idea che la forma " più corretta " sia proprio quella plurale, visto che nella maggior parte dei casi gli stakeholder sono più di uno.

The ways language encodes information depend on when and how the preceding linguistic and non-linguistic context has established it in the participants’ working memory. Information-Structure categories such as Focus and Topic are used to signal that the conveyed information is, respectively, the contribution of the message to the addressee’s knowle...

he ways language encodes information depend on when and how the preceding linguistic and non-linguistic context has established it in the participants’ working memory. Information-Structure categories such as Focus and Topic are used to signal that the conveyed information is, respectively, the contribution of the message to the addressee’s knowled...

Questo lavoro descrive a diversi livelli una modalità specifica di focalizzazione del giudizio epistemico, che avviene mediante la ripetizione in inciso di un contenuto appena esplicitato. Dopo un’introduzione sul fenomeno del verum focus (§2), che consiste nel focalizzare il valore di verità di una predicazione, si descrivono le caratteristiche f...

This volume gathers together for the first time contributions from the most relevant approaches in discourse segmentation developed in the last fifteen years in Romance languages. All these approaches share the assumption that discourses (either oral or written) can be fully divided into units and subunits: just like sentences are fully analyzed wi...

On peut classifier les prédicats complexes japonais du type "Nom Verbal + suru ('faire') (i) comme unités lexicalisées ou bien comme comme constructions syntaxiques, et (ii) comme mots composés activés à un niveau morphologique ou bien syntaxique. Les prédicats-suru se présentent sous deux formes: NV-suru et NV-o suru (-o étant une marque d'accusat...

The article proposes a strictly structural hypothesis on the marking of information structure (IS) by means of prosodic prominence, based on experimental data from spoken Italian. Main prominence can be conceived of in a "topological" way, where its location effects demarcation between different units, rather than their identification and culminati...

Are Appendixes to be considered the same as Right Topics, or as a different kind of information unit, with different illocutionary function? The paper tries to shed some light on this general issue, aiming at crosslinguistically valid results, by testing the affinity between «Tail» (right-dislocated) constituents and -wa marking in Japanese. The st...

La scuola ha fra i suoi compiti fondamentali quello di educare al senso di realtà. L'articolo sostiene questa tesi dando alcuni esempi di mancanza di senso di realtà, e alcuni esempi di come si può insegnare, insieme alle nozioni delle varie discipline, un atteggiamento che cerchi sempre la realtà concreta sottostante.

One of the most interesting aspects of linguistic facts is what they can tell us about the organism that supports them, and in particular about the brain. The article tries to sketch a brief overview of some phenomena that linguistics “delivers” to the knowledge of the mind/brain: facts that we know about thanks to linguistic studies, which at the...

Human information processing is managed by a resource-limited system. For this reason, information in utterances must be packed in a way that prevents it from being lost in decoding. A developmental model of information structure units is proposed according to which Topic-Focus articulation has emerged in order to comply with this constraint. The b...

Implicitness, besides being an indispensable feature of language whose primary function is economic in nature, also plays a major role in persuasive communication. Contents are conveyed as implicit mainly by means of implicatures, while the responsibility of the speaker is kept implicit mainly by means of presuppositions and topicalisations. We pro...

Regularities in position and level of prosodic prominences associated to patterns of Information Structure are identified for some Italian varieties. The experiments' results suggest a possibly new structural hypothesis on the role and function of the main prominence in marking information patterns. (1) An abstract and merely structural, “topologic...

Regularities in position and level of prosodic prominences associated to patterns of Information Structure are identified for some Italian varieties. The experiments' results suggest a possibly new structural hypothesis on the role and function of the main prominence in marking information patterns. (1) An abstract and merely structural, “topologic...

Regularities in position and level of prosodic prominences associated to patterns of Information Structure are identified for some Italian varieties. The experiments' results suggest a possibly new structural hypothesis on the role and function of the main prominence in marking information patterns. (1) An abstract and merely structural, “topologic...

Regularities in position and level of prosodic prominences associated to patterns of Information Structure are identified for some Italian varieties. The experiments' results suggest a possibly new structural hypothesis on the role and function of the main prominence in marking information patterns. (1) An abstract and merely structural, “topologic...

Abstract: This article starts from the claims of Simone-Lombardi Vallauri (2011), and further develops them. The list of natural constrainst imposed to language by the structure of the world, the human body and communication situations is completed by proposing constraints imposed by the need for representation of reality and events, the ergonomics...

Conditional clauses in spoken Italian and other languages are often uttered with no main clause. It will be argued that in this case they constitute a construction in a technical sense, namely in the sense proposed by Simone (2006a), which is mainly reliant on the presence of specific pragmatic functions. The functions free conditionals actually co...

The paper deals with Japanese complex predicates made of a Verbal Noun and the light verb suru 'to do'. It tries to shed light on the question whether they should better be classified as lexicalized units rather than syntactic constructions on the one hand, and as compounds activated morphologically rather than syntactically on the other hand. It t...

Neste artigo as premissas fundamentais da visão inatista da capacidade lingüística humana são examinadas. Com base em diversos argumentos, o princípio da pobreza de estímulo é desafiado, assim como outros postulados da teoria que defende uma faculdade da linguagem específica. Argumentos que enfocam a plausibilidade de capacidades cognitivas gerais...

Anaphora (A) and Deixis (D) are often classified as separate forms of reference, though their being related in some way has been often recognized. The article discusses relevant literature and several linguistic parameters in order to show that the boundary between D and A as they are usually defined is not much relevant in the language(s), other b...

This article tries to show some specifically linguistic weakpoints in the Poverty-of-the-Stimulus Argument (PSA). Besides some quantitative considerations, from a qualitative point of view it is shown that the innatist tradition underestimates analogy as a resource for children to build their own grammars from the incomplete stimuli they receive fr...

Many subordinate clauses introduced by se (= engl. if) in spoken Italian are not actually embedded in any (overt) main clause. The “missing” main clauses assume a number of semantic values, such as (1) the generic question: "what will happen?", (2) the statement that there is either no point or no hope in acting in the situation: "everything's fine...

Many subordinate clauses introduced by se ('if') in spoken Italian are not actually embedded in any (overt) main clause. Instead, the "missing" main clauses assume a number of semantic values that have become conventionally associated with the se clauses under examination. It is argued that such clauses should no longer be described as unembedded,...

Riforma (e rovina) dell’università Negli ultimi dieci anni la vita negli atenei italiani ha subito profondi cambia-menti, la cui parte più visibile va spesso sotto il nome di «riforma dell'università». Si tratta soprattutto di peggioramenti, almeno nella qualità di uno dei servizi tradizionalmente affidati al sistema universitario, l'offerta di for...

Résumé/Abstract L'A. examine la variation de l'expression du caractère défini des syntagmes nominaux dans l'histoire du grec ancien, en portant une attention particulière à l'usage de la forme ο, η, το. Au cours de son évolution, de Homère au Nouveau Testament ...

The paper compares broad focus, narrow focus and contrastive focus in English and Italian. It concludes that a focus cannot have a contrastive meaning unless some precise syntactic and discourse features “preliminarly“ make it a narrow focus. The comparison between broad and narrow focus should be made on a syntactic and discourse level, whereas th...

Résumé/Abstract The category Adjective is represented in different ways cross-linguistically. The case of Japanese illustrates the difficulties that can arise when trying to distinguish this category from that of Noun on the one hand and from that of Verb on the other. This article ...