Performance of road bridges during the 14 November 2016 Kaikōura earthquake

The transport infrastructure was majorly affected by the 14lh November 2016 Kaikōura Earthquake. Severe vertical and horizontal peak ground accelerations generated high inertial forces, land-slides, and liquefaction. Most of the bridges in the Hurunui, Malborough and Kaikōura districts were critical nodes to the railway and road networks. In total, 904 road bridges across those districts were affected. Two reached the life safety limit state, suffering severe damage, however, most of the affected bridges experienced only minor to moderate damage. This paper describes the structural performance of the most severely damaged bridges based on observations made from site inspections. In addition to this, several performance issues have arisen from this event and are posed in this paper, hopefully to be addressed in the near future

Morphological complexity without abstractness: Italo-Romance metaphony

This paper considers some selected cases of stressed vowel alternations arisen from the application of metaphony in Italo-Romance dialects. While similar cases are often reported in the literature, the ones picked up here stand out because they resist, for several reasons, any analysis treating metaphony as a synchronic phonological rule (albeit opacized), deriving the surface alternants from abstract underlying representations. Such analyses, as standardly practiced in the Generative paradigm from the 1960s to this day, would face insurmountable problems in accounting for the morphological paradigms that capitalize on the metaphonic alternants putting them into service as exponents of morphosyntactic categories. Thus, the study of morphological complexity yields supporting evidence for phonological theories like Natural Phonology, which severely constrains the amount of abstractness permitted to underlying representations

The sound pattern of Standard Italian, as compared with the varieties spoken in Florence

This paper is a condensed presentation of the phonetics and phonology of Standard Italian, compared to the most prestigious local accents, viz. those of Florence, Milan and Rome. Historically based on the Florentine pronunciation, and traditionally identified with it, Standard Italian is nowadays used by trained speakers such as stage actors and (but less and less so) radio and TV speakers. The present paper aims at depicting the most salient features of Standard Italian, still a matter of primary reference in language courses, comparing them with the characteristic features of the three most prominent local varieties, with which the foreign learner is most likely to be confronted. All traditional (and sometimes widely debated) issues of Italian phonetics/phonology are addressed in the most ecumenical setting possible

Itinerari salvioniani : per Carlo Salvioni nel centocinquantenario della nascita

Il volume propone al lettore un accostamento alla figura e all'opera di Carlo Salvioni (Bellinzona 1858-Milano 1920), affrontando diversi aspetti della sua vicenda biografica e intellettuale e della sua produzione scientifica. Allievo a Lipsia dei neogrammatici, poi collaboratore di Graziadio Isaia Ascoli all«Archivio Glottologico Italiano» rivista con cui Ascoli gettò le basi della moderna linguistica italiana all'Ascoli succedette nella direzione dell'«Archivio» e poi sulla cattedra milanese, dopo aver insegnato a Torino e Pavia. Accademico della Crusca e Linceo, membro di varie società scientifiche e accademie europee, Salvioni è figura chiave per la linguistica in Italia a cavallo tra Otto e Novecento, e non è meno importante per la nativa Svizzera, dove fondò nel 1907 il Vocabolario dei dialetti della Svizzera italiana. Lasciò centinaia di studi che tuttora fanno testo sui più diversi aspetti della storia linguistica italiana e della struttura dellitaliano letterario e dei suoi dialetti, nonché studi di argomento gallo- ed iberoromanzo, tutti ripubblicati negli Scritti linguistici stampati dalle Edizioni dello Stato del Cantone Ticino per il centocinquantenario della nascita (2008)