STUDI ITALIANI DI LINGUISTICA TEORICA E APPLICATA

Come si parla italiano a Malta?

2026-03-06T12:35:37+00:00

This article investigates phonetic variation in Italian as spoken by native Maltese speakers, born and raised in Malta, a country with a long history of multilingualism, where Italian was an official language once and is still a prestigious and highly accessible language, largely due to its widespread diffusion through the media. The study is based on data retrieved from ten Maltese-English bilingual adults, all highly proficient in Italian. After completing an ethno-sociolinguistic questionnaire, participants took part in a semi-structured interview in Italian and completed tasks designed to collect both controlled and semi-spontaneous speech data. A contrastive phonology approach was used to select potentially relevant phonetic features, assessed via a preliminary auditory and acoustic investigation based on their perceptual salience. Consequently phonetic-acoustic analyses were carried out and the results focus on the realisation of the target /r/ in Italian as a second language and on the phonetic variants of this phoneme that can be considered a specific phonetic marker, typical of Maltese-accented Italian.

Differential object marking in Northern Calabrian dialects: between argument properties, classes of predicates, and pragmatic contexts

2026-03-06T10:49:53+00:00

This paper analyses the uses and the distribution of so-called differential object marking (DOM) in the dialects spoken in Cosenza, Rende, San Fili, Aprigliano, Rogliano, Santo Stefano of Rogliano, and Scigliano, in the province of Cosenza, in northern Calabria, with the aim of clarifying how object properties interact with both the telicity of the predicate and the pragmatic configuration of the event. Data were collected from 42 informants, through the recording of spontaneous and induced speech. The results of the study reported here show that: 1) both object properties (specifically, animacy and individuation) and the telicity of the predicate play a pivotal role in the use and the distribution of DOM; 2) the probability for an animate argument to be differentially marked relies on an interplay between the telicity of the predicate and the individuation of the object; 3) the presence vs. absence of DOM is related to an interaction between morphosyntactic context and pragmatic context; 4) both thematic and information structure can influence the distribution of DOM; 5) pragmatico-informational factors interact with object animacy and individuation, as well as with the telicity of the predicate

Un genere dentro le parole. Caratteristiche formali e pragmatiche di alcune neo-formazioni online

2026-10-21T09:52:17+00:00

The language level most exposed to variation is the lexical level (Muñoz-Basols & Salazar 2016). Variation on the lexical level mirrors changes in society (Stepanyan 2019; Foubert & Lemmens 2018). Recent trends include the creation of gendered neologisms (NG), linguistic neoformations that include meaning about some gender in a lexeme (Szymańska 2022: 260). The present work aims to describe some NGs with member -girl-, loans from English, in the Italian X, through occurrences collected through manual extraction. The database consists of 4488 posts with occurrences of girlie, girly, girl math, girl dinner, girls’ girl, girl boss. The novelty of the study lies both in the language chosen, Italian, since there are no studies on NGs in Italian yet, and in the subject matter, since even in English for this type of neologisms, neoformations with boy and man members have mostly been considered (Lutzky & Lawson 2019; Palacios Martinez 2023), few are the studies on woman. The analysis will first look at semantic and formal features (grammatical gender, syntactic structures, morphological properties) and then at pragmatic functions.

L’analisi distribuzionale tra semantica e sintassi. Il caso dei sinonimi e degli antonimi

2026-03-16T09:32:34+00:00

The paper investigates the relationship between syntax and semantics through the lens of Harris's Distributional Hypothesis, a framework revitalized by the success of Large Language Models. Focusing on the linguistic phenomena of synonymy and antonymy, the study analyzes the distributional profiles of five Italian predicative nouns. The methodology combines a traditional linguistic analysis of these terms within support verb constructions with a computational approach. The results indicate that terms sharing similar meanings often exhibit distinct syntactic behaviors and distributional frequencies, suggesting that "pure" synonymy is operationally rare. Ultimately, the study confirms that distributional analysis effectively bridges the gap between lexicon and syntax, demonstrating that a word's specific context reflects both its semantic nuance and its syntactic properties.

Morphological segmentation and lexical processing of nouns and verbs: evidence from Segment Shifting in Italian

2026-05-26T12:18:23+00:00

Some psycholinguistic models (e.g., Taft, 1994) emphasize the role of morphological structure in lexical access and describe lexical processing as the result of the activation of individual morphemic constituents. Distributional data suggest that the morpheme access process is sensitive to the differential tendency of affixes to also appear as pseudoaffixes, i.e. orthographic patterns that do not play a morphological role and may act as confounding factors in morphological analysis.
The probability that letter patterns of Italian are processed as morphemes during lexical access was tested in two segment shifting tasks (Feldman, 1991). This technique can be used to highlight the internal structure of words by asking participants to shift a final letter segment from a source word (e.g., “-en” in “garden”) to an isolated word (e.g., “hard”) and produce a new output (e.g., “harden”, see Feldman, 1991).
Using final segments with varying degrees of morphological (and orthographic) confusability, we test the effectiveness of morphological parsing and the mechanisms of (pseudo-) suffix shifting with or without (pseudo-)morphological structure. The results support the hypothesis that verbs are more likely to activate morphemic components. The reliability of “suffix consistency” in predicting the shifting is discussed in terms of an interplay between sublexical and lexical information during processing.

Gualberto Alvino, Maledetta grammatica, Pref. di Claudio Giovanardi, Eboli (SA), Caffèorchidea 2023

2026-10-21T12:34:34+00:00

Salvatore Claudio Sgroi, recensione a: Gualberto Alvino, Maledetta grammatica, Pref. di Claudio Giovanardi, Eboli (SA), Caffèorchidea 2023, pp. 275

Francesca Ferrucci, Parole per orientarsi nella società della conoscenza. Il vocabolario epistemologico dell’italiano contemporaneo, Firenze, Cesati, 2025

2026-10-21T12:38:23+00:00

Davide Mastrantonio, recensione a: Francesca Ferrucci, Parole per orientarsi nella società della conoscenza. Il vocabolario epistemologico dell’italiano contemporaneo, Firenze, Cesati, 2025, pp, 147

L’itinerario scientifico e l’impegno editoriale di Enrico Arcaini

2026-10-21T09:29:31+00:00

A cinque anni dalla sua scomparsa (9 gennaio 2021), Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata (SILTA) apre l’annata 2026 con una nota biografica dedicata alla figura di Enrico Arcaini, che della rivista ha visto la nascita presso l’Università di Bologna nel 1972 come condirettore di Luigi Heilmann. A partire dal 1987, Arcaini ha poi assunto la guida di SILTA come titolare e direttore unico. Desiderando che continuasse a essere un centro di riflessione e di elaborazione in grado di coagulare intorno a sé le nuove energie necessarie alla sua prosecuzione e al suo arricchimento, nel 2015 Arcaini ha fatto atto di donazione della rivista all’Università degli Studi Roma Tre, sua ultima sede accademica, continuando a far parte della direzione – divenuta collegiale – fino a tutto il 2020. A partire dal 1992 la continuità della rivista è stata possibile grazie alla disponibilità dell’editore Pacini, che ne ha curato da allora la stampa e, più recentemente, le diverse fasi del processo di diffusione online.

The adjective class in Homeric Greek and in Proto-Indo-European

2026-05-11T08:01:11+00:00

This paper addresses the debate regarding the status of the adjective class in Proto-Indo-European and its reconstruction. To address this issue, we adopted a functional- typological definition of the adjective as the most typical quality modifier in a corpus of text, gathered all quality modifiers in Iliad I and Odyssey I, and classified them into seven classes (simple adjectives, de-adverbial adjectives, denominative adjectives, deverbal adjectives, participles, compound adjectives, and prefixed adjectives). Finally, we evaluated the frequency of each class in terms of both type and token frequency. Our analysis shows that Homeric Greek is a non-typical language of the [N, A, V] type, in which verb-based adjectival constructions are more common than expected in standard languages “with adjectives” (e.g. Latin, English). The paper concludes with some reflections on the reconstruction of the PIE adjective class in the light of these data, suggesting that the classification of PIE as a language with “verb-like” adjectives deserves some attention.

Negative concord in Postclassical Greek: impact and functions of formulaic expressions in documentary papyri

2026-03-06T12:26:20+00:00

This paper deals with Ancient Greek and investigates the functions and role of formulaic expressions involving the occurrence of one or more negative indefinites and/or a negative marker, offering methodological insights into the analysis of language change in historical corpus data. The analysis combines quantitative and qualitative approaches and is based on a corpus of documentary papyri of the early Roman period (i.e., 1st–2nd centuries CE). Due to the high number of occurrences of oudeís (‘no one’) found in formulaic multi-word sequences in the corpus, the paper discusses the methodological choices adopted to minimize the impact of such occurrences on diachronic analyses based on quantitative data. In addition, the paper illustrates the formulaic expressions identified in the corpus, together with an overview of the discourse types in which they occur. Finally, it explores the behaviour and role of these formulaic multi-word sequences and offers a discussion of their sequential placement.