Nominal Agreement in L2 Speakers of Italian: Suggestions for a Teaching Plan

This paper addresses the topic of adult acquisition of nominal agreement in Italian, a crucial issue in teaching Italian as Second/Foreign Language. Building on a corpus containing spontaneous and semi-spontaneous production data from two advanced L2-speakers of Italian, I show that nominal agreement can be problematic even in the last stages of the acquisition process. The discussion of the instances of missing agreement in the corpus suggests that these are not due to a missing knowledge of the agreement rules in Italian, but instead on processing and production. In particular, some contexts prove to be more difficult than others: gender agreement (i.e., agreement with feminine nouns) is more difficult than number agreement, and the presence of two or more modifiers that refer to the same noun increases the error rate. Another difficulty is offered by the cases in which an item external to the determiner phrase (DP) has to agree with the subject of the clause. All these issues are tackled from a teacher’s perspective: I highlight how the various contexts could be addressed and considered in the classroom, in order to help the learners to improve their production. Therefore, this paper argues that the best way to tackle this issue is by coupling knowledge of the formal rules of the language and of the acquisitional process with practical application in the context of second/foreign language teaching

A syntactic analysis of the subject clitic a in the Friulian variety of Campone

This article presents a syntactic analysis of the third person subject clitic a in Camponese, a heretofore unstudied Friulian variety. Following Poletto's (2000) map of subject clitics, we argue that it bears [+third person] features, and is, in fact, the spell-out of the functional head Subj°, located in the highest projection of TP (following Rizzi & Shlonsky 2007). In the first part of the article, we offer a detailed description of the distribution and syntactic properties of the subject clitic a, identifying its position in relation to the other elements that occur in the CP and TP. In the second part we discuss two proposals put forward to account for split clitics like a-l in the related variety of Forni di Sotto, where a and l are held to be part of a single clitic al (Manzini & Savoia 2009, Calabrese & Pescarini 2014). We show that such an account is incompatible with the case of Campone, where the clitics a and l are clearly separate: l is a [uφ]-clitic (Roberts 2010) and is located lower in the TP than the clitic a. We conclude with an analysis, which proposes the integration of Poletto's (2000) typology with a fifth type, corresponding to the clitic a of Campone

Microvariation in the Distribution of Resumptive Pronouns in the Left Dislocation Construction in Two Tyrolean Dialects of Northern Italy

In this paper we document a so-far neglected case of microvariation involving resumptive pronouns in the left-dislocation construction in Meranese, spoken in South Tyrol, and Mòcheno, spoken in the Fersina valley (Trentino). While in standard German resumptive elements in this construction belong to the class of D-pronouns, the two Tyrolean dialects considered in the paper exhibit, as resumptive pronouns, both (i) D-pronouns and (ii) pronominal usages of the distal demonstrative formed by the definite article (D) and sèll corresponding to ‘that one’. We show that in both languages D+sèll forms overlap with German D-pronouns in most contexts, whereas D-pronouns only superficially, but not functionally, correspond to German D-pronouns, and have undergone a weakening process. While the weakening process is in nuce in Meranese, it seems to be nearly completed in Mòcheno, where D-pronouns appear to have acquired a status close to that of subject clitics of Northern Italian varieties

The Syntax–Pragmatics Interface in Heritage Languages: The Use of anche (“Also”) in German Heritage Speakers of Italian

This paper deals with the use of anche (“also”) by German heritage speakers of Italian (“IHSs”). Previous research showed that anche and its German counterpart auch share many features but also display language-specific characteristics. According to previous research on bilingualism, heritage speakers show cross-linguistic influence (“CLI”) when a linguistic phenomenon is at the syntax–pragmatics interface and there is a partial overlap in the two languages at stake. Therefore, we expect the use of anche in IHSs to be influenced by CLI. By analysing data from a semi-spontaneous corpus, we investigate the production of anche in order to understand which factors shape the grammar of the IHSs. Our results indicate that a subset of IHSs uses anche in the same way as in homeland Italian. The other informants display CLI effects of different types: on the one hand, they have two positions in the clausal structure for anche dedicated to different syntactic–pragmatic contexts, as in German, and they overextend the use of anche as a modal particle. On the other hand, the intonational properties of anche are not affected by CLI

Pseudorelative, gerundi e infiniti nelle varietà romanze: affinità (solo) superficiali e corrispondenze strutturali

The main topic of this dissertation is a comparison among sentential predicative constructions in the Romance languages. Whereas Pseudo-relative clauses are almost universally used in the Romance domain (with some parametrical differences), predicative gerunds and prepositional infinitives, the other two sentential predicative constructions, are restricted to some varieties. This comparative view, which takes into account both the different Romance varieties and the different constructions, is missing in previous studies on this topic. The aim of my work consists in filling this gap and in comparing these three constructions among them and with respect to the bare infinitive, which has been considered sometimes as another predicative structure like the Pseudo-relative clause. Finally, I will analyse the use of gerundive (and parallel infinitival clauses) in the Ladin varieties, where a highly conservative nature is displayed, as is already shown by the fact that this type of clauses is maintained - within Italy - only in Ladin and in Sardinian. The thesis defended in this dissertation is that Pseudo-Relatives, predicative gerunds and prepositional infinitives are to be all analysed as predicative Small Clauses. Each of these constructions can enter three different syntactical structures, depending on the context, as proposed in Cinque (1992) and as shown by numerous tests. Gerunds and predicative infinitives seem to have a particularly close structural correspondence, the only difference consisting in verb movement: when the verb raises above a phonetically empty position located in CP, the incorporation of the two elements takes place generating the gerundial form. When the verb cannot move to the preposition, the result is a prepositional infinitive, the preposition a being realised. This analysis does not hold for the Ladin data, though, because the gerunds and the prepositional infinitives of these varieties show some differences with respect to the corresponding constructions in the other Romance varieties. This peculiar behavior in Ladin exactly matches the one observed in bare infinitive clauses with perception verbs. Therefore, I hypothesize that Ladin gerunds and prepositional infinitives enter the so-called 'ECM' structure, like the bare infinitives of the main Romance languages. This dissertation is relevant for the comparative Romance research field, where a comparison among different predicative constructions has never been proposed before. Moreover, I show that Ladin varieties are also syntactically conservative. Further interesting points for future research can be found in a new analysis of the gerunds (not only the predicative ones) as the result of an incorporation process involving both a non-finite verb and a zero preposition. Finally, my account reveals that the traditional analysis interpreting the Romance bare infinitives as ECM structures cannot account for all the characteristics of this construction in the Romance languages

OpenML Benchmarking Suites

Machine learning research depends on objectively interpretable, comparable, and reproducible algorithm benchmarks. Therefore, we advocate the use of curated, comprehensive suites of machine learning tasks to standardize the setup, execution, and reporting of benchmarks. We enable this through software tools that help to create and leverage these benchmarking suites. These are seamlessly integrated into the OpenML platform, and accessible through interfaces in Python, Java, and R. OpenML benchmarking suites are (a) easy to use through standardized data formats, APIs, and client libraries; (b) machine-readable, with extensive meta-information on the included datasets; and (c) allow benchmarks to be shared and reused in future studies. We also present a first, carefully curated and practical benchmarking suite for classification: the OpenML Curated Classification benchmarking suite 2018 (OpenML-CC18)

Documenting Italo-Romance minority languages in the Americas: Problems and tentative solutions

This article describes the process of preparation and implementation of a data collection enterprise targeting Italo-Romance emigrant languages in North and South America. This data collection is part of the ERC Microcontact project, which aims to understand language change in contact by examining the language of Italian communities in the Americas

Contemporary research in minoritized and diaspora languages of Europe

This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ranging from Romance, to Germanic, Greco and Slavic languages in situations of contact and diaspora. Most of the contributions are empirically-oriented studies presenting first-hand data based on original fieldwork, and a few focus directly on the methodological issues in such research. Owing to the multifaceted nature of contact and diaspora phenomena (e.g. the intrinsic transnational essence of contact and diaspora, and the associated interplay between majority and minoritized languages and multilingual practices in different contact settings, contact-induced language change, and issues relating to convergence) the disciplinary scope is broad, and includes ethnography, qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, descriptive linguistics, contact linguistics, historical linguistics, and language acquisition. Case studies are drawn from Italo-Romance varieties in the Americas, Spanish-Nahuatl contact, Castellano Andino, Greko/Griko in Southern Italy, Yiddish in Anglophone communities, Frisian in the Netherlands, Wymysiöryś in Poland, Sorbian in Germany, and Pomeranian and Zeelandic Flemish in Brazil