Tra il dire e il fare: grammatica e pragmatica a scuola. Su costituenti, significati e referenti

In this paper I discuss two issues that bring into play interrelations between pragmatics and general linguistics, and linguistic education at school. They are: a) the relationship between sentence constituency and speakers’ acts of reference (plus information dynamics), b) the problems that two “simplified” grammar models, currently in fashion in Italian schools, pose to the understanding of sentence structure and meaning, especially with regards to reference resolution

Interfacing Neurons with Nanostructured Electrodes Modulates Synaptic Circuit Features

Understanding neural physiopathology requires advances in nanotechnology-based interfaces, engineered to monitor the functional state of mammalian nervous cells. Such interfaces typically contain nanometer-size features for stimulation and recording as in cell-non-invasive extracellular microelectrode arrays. In such devices, it turns crucial to understand specific interactions of neural cells with physicochemical features of electrodes, which could be designed to optimize performance. Herein, versatile flexible nanostructured electrodes covered by arrays of metallic nanowires are fabricated and used to investigate the role of chemical composition and nanotopography on rat brain cells in vitro. By using Au and Ni as exemplary materials, nanostructure and chemical composition are demonstrated to play major roles in the interaction of neural cells with electrodes. Nanostructured devices are interfaced to rat embryonic cortical cells and postnatal hippocampal neurons forming synaptic circuits. It is shown that Au-based electrodes behave similarly to controls. Contrarily, Ni-based nanostructured electrodes increase cell survival, boost neuronal differentiation, and reduce glial cells with respect to flat counterparts. Nonetheless, Au-based electrodes perform superiorly compared to Ni-based ones. Under electrical stimulation, Au-based nanostructured substrates evoke intracellular calcium dynamics compatible with neural networks activation. These studies highlight the opportunity for these electrodes to excite a silent neural network by direct neuronal membranes depolarization

State recognition for ‘contested languages’: a comparative study of Sardinian and Asturian, 1992–2010

While the idea of a named language as a separate and discrete identity is a political and social construct, in the cases of Sardinian and Asturian doubts over their respective ‘languageness’ have real material consequences, particularly in relation to language policy decisions at the state level. The Asturian example highlights how its lack of official status means that it is either ignored or subjected to repeated challenges to its status as a language variety deserving of recognition and support, reflecting how ‘official language’ in the Spanish context is often understood in practice as synonymous with the theoretically broader category of ‘language’. In contrast, the recent state recognition of Sardinian speakers as a linguistic minority in Italy (Law 482/1999) illustrates how legal recognition served to overcome existing obstacles to the implementation of regional language policy measures. At the same time, the limited subsequent effects of this Law, particularly in the sphere of education, are a reminder of the shortcomings of top-down policies which fail to engage with the local language practices and attitudes of the communities of speakers recognized. The contrastive focus of this article thus acknowledges the continued material consequences of top-down language classification, while highlighting its inadequacies as a language policy mechanism which reinforces artificial distinctions between speech varieties and speakers deserving of recognition

Grammaticalizzazioni polifoniche o “verticali” e sintassi dialogica. Dagli enunciati-eco ai temi sospesi: l’infinito anteposto in strutture del tipo “mangiare, mangio”

Dialogical repetitions (e.g., different kinds of echoes and echo-utterances in general) have important effects on grammar and discourse which are often neglected or overlooked: on the one hand, they are often the trigger of “polifonic” or “vertical” types of grammaticalization, i.e. grammaticalization across clauses from different turns in conversations; on the other hand, they can provide one of the plainest explanations for the emergence of marked constituent orderings (e.g., left dislocations, hanging topics, etc.) in many responsive clauses. Some uses of the “free” infinitive are a good case in point. There are, in Italian as in many other languages, a number of apparently idiosyncratic but very productive constructions that require a free (non subordinated) infinitive. I will take into consideration two different types of free infinitive constructions which are usually considered unrelated: i) those generically known as “Exclamative infinitives” in Italian, “Incredulity response constructions” and “Mad Magazine sentences” in English, “Dense Constructions” in German; ii) those with a preposed infinitive which functions as a kind of hanging topic in a Topic-Comment utterance articulation. Through the analysis of their (con)textual conditions in dialogical discourses, I will argue that the infinitives display echo-functions in both types of constructions and, especially in the (ii) case, it is precisely this fact that allows the infinitive to act both as a (hanging) Topic and an ana(cata)phoric encapsulato

Dialogicità

Qualsiasi forma di comunicazione verbale e non, salvo particolari situazioni per lo più di ambito patologico, è sempre di per sé dialogica perché comporta necessariamente l’azione consapevole di un emittente (l’autore, nel caso dello scritto) diretta a uno o più interlocutori, o anche, in certi casi, solo (apparentemente) a sé stesso. Per poter ragionare sulla dialogicità di un testo scritto è dunque necessario mantenere in primo piano le strategie di interazione consentite o rappresentabili dalla scrittura, distinguendo subito due forme diverse di dialogicità: quella “primaria” in atto tra autore e lettore, e quella “secondaria” relativa ai diversi tipi di interazione parlata e scritta solo “raccontati” o rappresentati nel testo, ossia alle diverse manifestazioni del discorso riportato, o, più in generale, della polifonia. Si tratta di una distinzione importante: la dialogicità primaria, che nello scritto è sempre interazione “a distanza” tra autore e lettore, riguarda l’intero testo e si manifesta in modi diversi da quella di “secondo grado”, o secondaria, riconoscibile attraverso citazioni e ricostruzioni di discorsi, parole e dialoghi (sia altrui, sia dell’autore che cita sé stesso). Le manifestazioni testuali della dialogicità primaria, per es. il diverso tipo di interazione con il lettore che trapela dall’articolazione informativa e soprattutto dal metadiscorso dell’autore, restano aree di studio ancora quasi del tutto inesplorate. Il taglio del capitolo, la quantità dei testi e la specificità dei fenomeni in gioco suggeriscono perciò un approccio che privilegi il confronto diacronicamente e “diagenericamente” trasversale. La prospettiva sarà perciò quella di una panoramica a campo lunghissimo, con alcune brevi zoomate su un certo numero di fenomeni e di testi ritenuti rappresentativi o funzionali anche ai fini di una riflessione diacronica più ampia, a cui questo lavoro può solo aspirare di fornire alcuni spunti iniziali.This study aims to highlight the pragmatic features of written texts that most reveal the author’s interaction with the reader, namely personal deixis and the set of linguistic and rhetorical strategies that globally correspond to the authorial metadiscourse, with special attention to ancient and contemporary Italian texts. The work discusses the semiotic and material peculiarities of written texts, focusing on the role of metadiscourse as a form of “anticipated feedback” from the author. Starting from the recognition of the different enunciative planes of the text (author-reader interaction vs. others’ interactions reported in the text), I will distinguish two different types of dialogicality (primary and secondary), observing how they interact whenever the author counter-argues with the reader. In the final part of the paper, I will briefly discuss how the greater or lesser explicitness of primary and secondary dialogicity may characterise the different discourse genres over time

Indicare, rappresentare e dislocare. La 'Deixis am Phantasma' di Karl Bühler e i modi del Discorso Riportato

Deixis am phantasma’ or imagination-oriented deixis is a mode of reference, originally described by Karl Bühler, that direct-ly brings into play one of the distinctive properties of human language, namely the unlimited capacity to dislocate in space and time the referents and situations that are the object of discourse. Since representing and reporting other people’s speech is a discourse situation in which speakers must represent, transpose and dislocate referents, situations, and other people’s words, reported speech is a very suitable area in which to observe this particular type of deixis. In this paper, after briefly re-stating the main points of Bühler’s theory of language, i.e., the two-field theory and the different modes of reference within the deictic field, I discuss the three different types of imagination-oriented deixis (as identified by Bühler). I then try to point out what I consider to be their systematic correlations with the two main deictic modes of reporting speech (direct vs. indi-rect), while, conversely, noting the unsystematic correlations with that intermediate or hybrid form of reporting that is free indirect speec