Il paradosso del mentitore

The liar paradox is an ancient logical paradox (revisited by modern thinkers) which links truth with falsehood and falsehood with truth, and is based on a self-referential mechanism. It has been discussed by a variety of authors, from Aristotle to Bateson. The solution to that paradox, however, can be found by having recourse to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and by, so to speak, getting out of language (because true and false are words which belong to our language) to attain reality. This can be expressed through Wittgenstein’s idea that no proposition can say of itself whether it is true or false. However, experience is also expressible in words – and one can think of propositions which cannot be confirmed or disproved according to experience. Studying the paradox, therefore, leads one to Gödel’s theorem which offers a mathematical demonstration of the existence of undecidable propositions

MULTIPLE AGREEMENT CONSTRUCTIONS: A MACRO-COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PSEUDO-COORDINATION WITH THE MOTION VERB GO IN THE ARABIC AND SICILIAN DIALECTS

I discuss some syntactic properties of GO in verbal Pseudo-Coordination, in which it is followed by an inflected lexical verb and preceded by an optional connecting element. Following the analysis in Cardinaletti and Giusti (2001, 2003), I consider examples from different Sicilian varieties to show that the ones from the Eastern Coast (Di Caro 2015), where GO can become grammaticalized as an aspect marker and thus lose its argument structure and its semantics of motion, are reminiscent of some Multiple Agreement Constructions displayed by most Arabic dialects (Jarad 2014). In both groups of languages, the grammaticalized GO can also occur in an invariant and phonetically eroded version. In the macro-comparison I am proposing, I suggest language contact between Arabs/Berbers and the indigenous people in Sicily from 9th to 13th century as a factor in the productivity of Sicilian Pseudo-Coordination as an isolated case in the Romance domai

Multiple Agreement Constructions in Southern Italo-Romance. The Syntax of Sicilian Pseudo-Coordination

In the present thesis different configurations of Pseudo-Coordination are analysed. This is a monoclausal syntactic construction, formed by two finite verbs with an optional connector a between them (V1 a V2), which can be considered as an instance of the Multiple Agreement Constructions found in most southern Italo-Romance dialects. This thesis discusses the main parameters of micro-variation characterising the Pseudo-Coordination found in the Sicilian dialects: i) the criteria for the selection of the V1; ii) the Moods and the Tenses in which this construction can occur; iii) the criteria for the selection of the V2: iv) the hierarchy regulating the occurrence of the Persons (from 1sg to 3pl) in the different paradigms; v) the grammaticalisation of the V1 "go" with its phonetic erosion and desemanticisation. In the second part of the thesis, the first quantitative study dedicated to Pseudo-Coordination, conducted in Delia (Caltanissetta) with 70 participants during 2017, is presented

Call It What It Is: Genocide Through Male Rape and Sexual Violence in the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda

Genocide and its various iterations have repeatedly been contextualized in narratives assuming that victims are female. Part of this is due to the irrefutable data that shows the overwhelming number of victims are female. The United Nations 1948 treaty known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide provided for a definition for genocide that purposefully included other forms of genocide, particularly genocidal rape and sexual violence. Yet the two most comprehensive genocidal tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), refrained from charging criminals with genocide when their victims are male. This Article will address how males, similarly to female, have been victims of genocide in the forms of genocidal rape and sexual violence, and will argue that the ICTY and ICTR should have used the 1948 Convention’s definition of genocide to achieve the goals of the United Nations

Strategies of Indefiniteness Marking in Central Sicilian—Evidence from the Dialect of Delia

This paper is meant as a contribution to the research project on variation and optionality in the determiner system in Italo-Romance, with novel data from the Sicilian dialect of Delia. The study is based on fieldwork interviews and the construction of a small corpus of 850 observations by 24 native speakers of Deliano (mean age: 36.37; age range: 19–72). The participants were asked to (i) describe in Deliano a 3 min videotape of an Italian speaking woman during her shopping session at a supermarket and (ii) talk about their own shopping routines in Deliano. These activities were designed mainly to detect the following strategies to express indefiniteness: (i) ART, i.e., a definite article with an indefinite interpretation; (ii) ZERO, a zero determiner for bare nouns; (iii) DI+ART, the so-called “partitive article”; (iv) pseudo-partitives such as ‘a bit of’; (v) the grammaticalised cardinal ‘two’; and (vi) the grammaticalised cardinal ‘four’. The data confirm (i) the preference for ZERO in negative episodic sentences in the past; (ii) the general lack of bare DI and DI+ART, and of certo ‘certain’ used as an indefinite; (iii) the use of different specialised forms of pseudo-partitive ‘a bit of’ in older speakers of Deliano; (iv) the neutralisation of this pseudo-partitive specialisation and the consequent emergence of some true optionality in younger speakers

Frequent Use Cases Extraction from Legal Texts in the Data Protection Domain

Because of the recent entry into force of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a growing of documents issued by the European Union institutions and authorities often mention and discuss various use cases to be handled to comply with GDPR principles. This contribution addresses the problem of extracting recurrent use cases from legal documents belonging to the data protection domain by exploiting existing Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs). An analysis of ODPs that could be looked for inside data protection related documents is provided. Moreover, a first insight on how Natural Language Processing techniques could be exploited to identify recurrent ODPs from legal texts is presented. Thus, the proposed approach aims to identify standard use cases in the data protection field at EU level to promote the reuse of existing formalisations of knowledge

The Role of Vocabulary Mediation to Discover and Represent Relevant Information in Privacy Policies

To date, the effort made by existing vocabularies to provide a shared representation of the data protection domain is not fully exploited. Different natural language processing (NLP) techniques have been applied to the text of privacy policies without, however, taking advantage of existing vocabularies to provide those documents with a shared semantic superstructure. In this paper we show how a recently released domain-specific vocabulary, i.e. the Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV), can be used to discover, in privacy policies, the information that is relevant with respect to the concepts modelled in the vocabulary itself. We also provide a machine-readable representation of this information to bridge the unstructured textual information to the formal taxonomy modelled in it. This is the first approach to the automatic processing of privacy policies that relies on the DPV, fuelling further investigation on the applicability of existing semantic resources to promote the reuse of information and the interoperability between systems in the data protection domain