Being itself: On German selbst in synthetic compounds

German synthetic compounds containing selbst have traditionally been treated as reflexive in nature. However, this view cannot cope on the one hand with the basic value of selbst as focus particle and not as pronoun and on the other with the non-reflexive value of many compounds whose meaning range from purely intensification of the understood agent of the activity as in Selbstbau ‘do-it yourself-construction’ to anti-causativity like Selbstentzündung ‘self-ignition’. In this paper, we will consider a different option, namely to interpret the focus particle selbst as a flag for signaling contrastive coreference. This option can be concretely operationalized in constructional terms as a case of constructional idiom.German synthetic compounds containing selbst have traditionally been treated as reflexive in nature. However, this view cannot cope on the one hand with the basic value of selbst as focus particle and not as pronoun and on the other with the non-reflexive value of many compounds whose meaning range from purely intensification of the understood agent of the activity as in Selbstbau ‘do-it yourself-construction’ to anti-causativity like Selbstentzündung ‘self-ignition’. In this paper, we will consider a different option, namely to interpret the focus particle selbst as a flag for signaling contrastive coreference. This option can be concretely operationalized in constructional terms as a case of constructional idiom

Gli effetti del contatto croato-italiano nelle produzioni di un bambino bilingue

In questo contributo viene considerato il mescolamento di codice e il transfer nelle produzioni di un bambino bilingue nel periodo tra 3 e 5 anni. Analizzeremo i dati del diario tenuto in questo periodo dai genitori. Uno degli effetti della presenza e quindi del contatto di due lingue nella mente di un bambino bilingue è il mescolamento di codice. Nel presente studio vengono esaminati esempi del mescolamento di croato e italiano all’interno delle frasi nonché all’interno delle parole osservato nelle produzioni del bambino. I dati smentiscono alcuni dei vincoli del mescolamento proposti da alcuni linguisti (es. Poplack 1980; Sankoff/Poplack 1981; Belazi et al. 1994). Un altro importante effetto sotto esame è il trasferimento delle regole di una lingua nelle produzioni nell’altra lingua

Corpora e varietà minoritarie: le isole walser in Italia

In the paper, the problems of building a corpus of a low-density variety are considered in the light of two projects - DiWaC and ArchiWals - built to preserve the linguistic and cultural heritage of the Walser German communities of Piedmont and Aosta Valley. In the paper it is argued that similar problems affect the task of working on spoken and written data of low-density varieties. On the one hand low-density varieties are defined by the absence or scarcity of ready-to-use language resources for automatic processing. On the other hand, written and spoken data of low-density varieties are both characterised by a high degree of granularity at different levels. The solutions proposed for DiWaC and ArchiWals are an attempt to conjugate computability and granularity by stratifying the information retrieved in the original texts constituting the corpora

“Going standard” on a blank page. A corpus-based approach to the written varieties of the Italian Western Alps minorities (Occitan, Francoprovençal and Walser)

This chapter investigates non-standard languages, i.e., those which are dialectal, non-standardised – or standardised to a very limited extent, repre- sented by the local linguistic varieties that populate the Italian Western Alps. Despite the fact that these have almost exclusively existed as spoken lan- guages throughout their history, our particular aim is to discuss methods and problems raised by the investigation of written corpora of these vari- eties from a corpus linguistics perspective. This is especially challenging because corpus linguistics usually employs methods and standards elabo- rated for standard(ised) written varieties. Focusing the Occitan and Franco- provençal varieties, it is shown that the different historical backgrounds of the two languages also have an impact on their speakers’ attitude towards standardisation and on how texts are produced and accordingly made accessible for corpus linguistics methods