Livio Gaeta

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• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Turin

Una lettrice di Roma ci sottopone il termine doveristico, che ha sentito usare durante una discussione in Tv tra “specialisti di geopolitica odierna”; si parlava in particolare di “una visione doveristica della vita, della società” contrapposta a una visione che privilegia solo i diritti.

In Töitschu, a variety of Walser German spoken in the language island of Issime in Aosta Valley, a verbalizing suffix - urun is found with a significant number of verbs. In the paper, its enhanced productivity is argued to result from the merger of two different patterns. This is the consequence of the leveling of the native Germanic and of the non...

This volume comprises a selection of papers that were presented at the 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL24), which took place at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra from 1-5 July, 2019. The volume’s aim is to reflect the breadth of research presented at the conference, with each chapter representative of...

The general tendencies regarding the gender of nouns are dealt with in the paper with the specific aim of building a contrastive microtypology of German, Italian and English. In particular, up to six different types and functions of gender will be distinguished and will be tested against the background of empirical data drawn from the three languag...

Alcuni lettori ci chiedono quale sia il sostantivo derivato dal verbo tramandare; in particolare uno di loro segnala l’uso di tramandazione sia in luogo del raro tramandamento, sia come sinonimo di tradizione.

German synthetic compounds containing selbst have traditionally been treated as reflexive in nature. However, this view cannot cope on the one hand with the basic value of selbst as focus particle and not as pronoun and on the other with the non-reflexive value of many compounds whose meaning range from purely intensification of the understood agen...

Corpus Dialectology combines the fields of corpus linguistics and dialectological mapping. It concerns documentation of linguistic variation and mapping of linguistic spaces and boundaries, while ascribing renewed importance to the methodology and the material itself, especially data processing and statistical analysis. This approach considers phen...

This volume reflects the centrality of the existential construction in current linguistic research and offers studies that both consolidate and challenge established research agendas. It addresses (i) a variety of constructions related to ‘prototypical’ existentials (including the have-possessive construction), and investigates (ii) the relationshi...

Alcuni lettori ci chiedono se “esista” in italiano il termine eclatanza, altri domandano se sia legittimo l’uso del sostantivo coprenza impiegato soprattutto nell’àmbito della cosmesi, altri ancora chiedono chiarimenti sull’uso di eminenza ed eccellenza.

The focus of Paradigms in Word Formation: Theory and applications is on the relevance of paradigms for linguistic description. Paradigmatic organization has traditionally been considered an inherent feature of inflectional morphology, but research in the last decades clearly shows the existence of paradigms in word formation, especially in affixal...

In the context of the Alps – a broad region characterized by common geographical and cultural features – the isolation caused by the geographical setting makes it possible for conservative strategies to survive from the Middle Ages through present times. This isolation, however, does not exclude that conservative patterns evolve into innovative str...

As is well-known, the Alps are a zone of long-standing, intensive contact and multilingualism among Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages and varieties. In this introductory paper, some reflections are presented on the viability of the Sprachbund hypothesis to encompass the occurring phenomena of convergence observed throughout the whole area.

This chapter discusses the growing effect of loanwords on the word formation of Titsch and Töitschu, two Walser German varieties spoken in the Aosta Valley in the Northwest of Italy, in Gressoney and Issime, respectively. Even if both communities of speakers are surrounded by a Romance-speaking area, the two varieties display strikingly different r...

When a new name is necessary for a concept, word formation and borrowing are possible ways to produce one. As such, they are in competition for the creation of neologisms. However, borrowings can also interact with existing word formation rules. The reanalysis of a borrowing can result in its attribution to an existing word formation rule. The rean...

The collected articles in this volume address an array of cutting-edge issues in the field of historical linguistics, including new theoretical approaches and innovative methodologies for studying language through a diachronic lens. The articles focus on the following themes: I. Case & Argument Structure, II. Alignment & Diathesis, III. Patterns, P...

The collection of articles presented in this volume addresses a number of general theoretical, methodological and empirical issues in the field of Historical Linguistics, in different levels of analysis and on different themes: (i) phonology, (ii) morphology, (iii) morphosyntax, (iv) syntax, (v) diachronic typology, (vi) semantics and pragmatics, a...

This contribution aims at showing how paradigms and associative relations can be integrated into word-formation, with special attention paid to compounding. In this regard, we will take into account a phenomenon at the border between derivation and compounding, namely formations like süßherzig ‘sweet-hearted’, in which -ig is an adjective-forming s...

Morphology, the science of words, is a complex theoretical landscape, where a multitude of frameworks, each with their own tenets and formalism, compete for the explanation of linguistic facts. The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory is a comprehensive guide through this jungle of morphological theories. It provides a rich and up-to-date overvi...

Morphological differentiation is defined as the development of morphological variants which can be considered by speakers to shape the transition to a new, different category. After discussing different cases of morphological differentiation, the paper will focus on the accompanying changes that facilitate the process of category formation. This re...

Language contact, which has gained a central role in the research on grammati-calization over the last years, lies in the background of this paper on the passive voice in some heavily endangered language varieties found in the Walser communities of Piedmont and Aosta Valley. The peculiar character of these dialects can be seen in the highly complex...

This paper is concerned with the classification and analysis of different types of German synthetic compounds headed by deverbal agent nouns in -er, such as Romanleser ‘novel reader’ or Gedankenleser ‘mind reader’, where the non-head is seen to saturate an argument of the head lexeme while adhering to the semantic interpretation found in correspond...

N + N compounds in Italian as well as in other Romance languages are differently judged in the current literature. Most scholars agree that only a subset should be treated as true compounds, while the rest is mostly rejected. However, it is not clear what the right criteria are for assessing their status as compounds or as syntactic units. In this...

The universal and typological status of the notion of word class — closely related to part-of-speech systems, morphology, syntax and the lexicon-syntax interface — continues to be of major linguistic theoretical interest. The papers included in this volume offer a fresh look at the variety of current theoretical and descriptive approaches to word c...

The interaction of several cases of grammaticalization going back to different source constructions may have dramatic consequences on a linguistic system. This paper discusses the so-called German scandal construction, which consists of a verbal complex displaying a number of synchronic form-meaning mismatches. The scandal is solved if a diachronic...

The status of conversions is a long-standing question within morphological theory. Investigating the selectional properties of conversions may help us to shed light on their controversial status as compared to the other morphological processes. In the paper, conversions in two different but cognate languages, Italian and German, are investigated wi...

Die Komposition nimmt eine zentrale Position in der Wortbildung (nicht nur) der germanischen Sprachen ein und gilt insbesondere im Deutschen als hochproduktives Wortbildungsmuster. Trotz der Fülle an Literatur zur Komposition im Allgemeinen stellt jedoch eine umfassende Auseinandersetzung und Darstellung der Komposition im Deutschen in der aktuelle...

The study of compounds is currently at the center of attention in many areas of both theoretical and applied linguistics. This volume brings together contributions by experts involved in a wide range of such areas, based on a large number of diverse languages – spoken and signed. The fact that compound constructions are at the interface of the vari...

The papers in this volume derive from the 13th International Morphology Meeting (Vienna 2008). They all address the main topic of the meeting, viz. variation and change in morphology. Inflectional and derivational morphology are represented on equal terms. The focus is on cases of language-internal variation, such as pattern competition, base varia...

The paper addresses the question of the correspondence between constituent order in compounds and in syntax. While a strictly synchronic perspective does not lead us to any significant generalization as ascertained by Bauer (Language typology and language universals, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin 2001), adopting a diachronic point of view allows us to...

Which criteria can be invoked to identify compounds? This paper suggests a quadripartite approach which carefully distinguishes between compounds and phrases, by treating the properties of being a lexical unit and being the output of a morphological operation as independent. Elaborating on Bauer's (2001) idea of formal isolation as a basic criterio...

Inflection is generally considered to be more productive than derivation. To justify such an assumption, the syntactic function of inflectional morphology is contrasted with the mainly lexical function of derivational morphology. In this paper, the whole question will be carefully discussed with the help of recently developed quantitative approache...

The paper aims at providing an expanded model of grammaticalization, where the term is understood as the process through which a language develops grammatical means of coding various formal, semantic or pragmatic functional domains. It thus subsumes the traditional scope of grammaticalization, but also covers the development of devices such as line...

How many inflectional classes displays the German substantive? As basic as this question may be, a satisfactory answer is still lacking. In this paper, the question will be tackled again, taking into consideration the contribution provided by several recent theoretical approaches to an adequate description and comprehension of the German inflection...

Markedness plays a central role within Natural Morphology and, more generally, in any functionalist approach to language. This is not intended to deny that other forces, more or less conflicting or competing with markedness, may also play a role in shaping a natural language. However, the main concern of this paper is that identifying naturalness,...

The quantitative approach to morphological productivity first proposed by Baayen crucially refers to the relation between the number of hapax legomena formed with a given affix occurring in a sufficiently large corpus and the total number of tokens of that affix sampled in the corpus. Most criticism against this measure focuses on its neglecting th...

The quantitative approach to morphological productivity developed by Baayen and collaborators is crucially based on the count of hapax legomena in a given, very large textual corpus. In this paper, Baayen's main idea is applied to the little explored domain of Italian prefixation, on the basis of a 75,000,000-token newspaper corpus, and a significa...

Although frequency is claimed to be a relevant parameter in order to evaluate the productivity and the availability of word formation processes, regrettably few studies primarily deal with it. Italian is no exception in this respect. In this paper, frequency data (both in tokens and types) are provided concerning 58 Italian derivational affixes tot...

Grammaticalization has provoked a recent movement for new descriptive insights into grammar writing. Two recent books testify to this movement, particularly for German. The first volume to be discussed here is devoted to a typical grammaticalization subject, namely prepositions. Di Meola, on the basis of wide underlying materials, has explored a nu...

The umlauted forms of the German modals dürfen, mögen, müssen and können are unexpected from the viewpoint of the sound laws, and must be therefore explained in other ways. Despite more than one century of research, a convincing solution to this problem is still lacking. In this paper, a new solution is proposed, which attempts to consider the seve...

The order of gapping has repeatedly been connected with the basic word order of a language. Such a view is inadequate for free word order languages, such as Classical Greek. Classical Greek allows both right- and leftward gapping; besides, some cases of bi-directional gapping are also attested. All types of gapping can occur both with VO and with O...

Action nouns are often claimed to be sensitive to the actional propertiesof verbs. In this paper, an attempt will be made to consider the possibleinteractions between the morphological rules that form action nouns and theactional content of verbs. In this respect, a notion of internal and of externalactionality of an affix will be distinguished, wh...

Modern Standard German (= MSG) has recently been portrayed as dominated by a fixed word stress rule, which is either restricted to the non-native lexicon or to the whole set of simplex words. This proposal is very innovative with respect to the traditional approach, for it assumes that MSG has completely given up the feature of initial-stress (the...

Italian loan words constitute a broad and homogeneous subset within the German lexicon. On the basis of Natural Morphology, they will be used to provide a coherent description of the much debated German inflexional noun system. The notion of Paradigm and of dominant Paradigm Structure Condition are in this perspective very useful for the study of t...

AG-Abstract Die Komposition ist ein hochproduktiver Wortbildungsprozess des Deutschen, zumindest im Be-reich der nominalen Komposition. Weit weniger deutlich ist jedoch, wo die Grenzen zu anderen Wortbildungsmustern zu ziehen sind. Unklar ist außerdem, welche Auswirkungen diese Kompositi-onsfreudigkeit für das gesamte (etwa prosodisch-phonologische...

The dichotomy nature vs. nurture has been defined as "(t)he fundamental question of the developmental sciences" (MacNeilage 1997: 302). Nature has to do with the cognitively-grounded endowment specific of human beings, whereas nurture can be seen as the result of a learning process, which only indirectly reflects cognitively-grounded properties of...