Dal Partitivo Latino al Partitivo Romanzo: Alcuni Problemi di Analisi Diacronica e Storica nelle Trasformazioni delle Strutture Partitive

This paper focuses on some problems that emerge in the analysis of Latin partitive structures of various times and in the study of their diachronic relationship to Romance partitive structures. It especially deals with constructions of the form V + NP (with NP marked by the Genitive Case or governed by the preposition DĒ) which are examined in their formal and functional properties. Starting from a critical reconsideration of how they are described in various prominent grammars and studies, this paper underlines their non-homogeneous character. In particular, it casts doubts on the association of some of the constructions with V + Genitive NP to partitive function. As to the structures with NP governed by DĒ, it is argued that in the sample of sentences considered, which includes passages from Plautus, Cicero, Martial, Petronius, the preposition fundamentally retains its original value that expresses spatial movement from a place (physical or mental), and therefore assigns to the prepositional phrase a function of spatial origin that is inextricably interwoven to a possible partitive value. This brings to the conclusion that the spatial value may have been a main path to the development of the partitive function in the constructions with DĒ. This paper also questions the equivalence of the constructions with NP marked by Genitive and those with NP governed by DĒ. It comes to the conclusion that no direct functional continuity from the first to the latter can be envisaged if one accepts the traditional typological description whereby the structures with DE gradually came to replace those with the Genitive. However, some Late Latin constructions with DE show formal and functional similarities with the older Romance partitive constructions. The influence of Greek on Latin is discussed as a possible factor that affected the shaping of Latin partitive constructions over time, though it is arguably difficult to prove it in a satisfactory way and this issue deserves further research

Spatial agency bias and word order flexibility : A comparison of 14 European languages

The spatial agency bias predicts that people whose native language is rightward written will predominantly envisage action along the same direction. Two mechanisms contribute jointly to this asymmetry: (a) an embodied process related to writing/reading; (b) a linguistic regularity according to which sentence subjects (typically the agent) tend to precede objects (typically the recipient). Here we test a novel hypothesis in relation to the second mechanism, namely, that this asymmetry will be most pronounced in languages with rigid word order. A preregistered study on 14 European languages (n = 420) varying in word order flexibility confirmed a rightward bias in drawings of interactions between two people (agent and recipient). This bias was weaker in more flexible languages, confirming that embodied and linguistic features of language interact in producing it.Peer reviewe

Il nome di Calibano (Calibano ritorna nel Mediterraneo)

There is a wide established tradition whereby Shakespeare’s "The Tempest" is interpreted with respect to the Caribbean environment, despite the fact that the action of the comedy explicitly takes places in the Mediterranean sea. Consistently with this tradition, the name of Caliban, the monstrous and deform native of the island and one of the play’s fundamental characters, has been interpreted as the anagram of “cannibal”, thus reinforcing a connection with the Caribbean indigenous populations discovered by the first European travellers to the New World. In this paper new arguments are provided to reject the “Caribbean” interpretation and the Caliban / Cannibal equation, preliminarly arguing that the scene of "The Tempest" is the literary elaboration of the geographical and historical features of the islands situated in the Mediterranean between the African coasts and Sicily. The main objective of the work isto give a new etymology for Caliban’s name, whose origin could be traced back to the Greek words καλύβη ‘hut, cabin’ and καλύπτω ‘cover; hide, conceal’. This etymology better agrees with the image of Caliban as a character of a pastoral drama of "Commedia dell’arte" (a source of Shakespeare’s play conveniently suggested by some scholars) and above all is decisive to the comedy’s interpretation

Rappresentazione categoriale ed esponenza: il caso delle definizioni sintagmatiche della categoria di genere

The representation of gender raises interesting problems that concern the multiple manifestations of the category at the semantic, morphological and syntactic level. The main focus of this paper is a criticism of the definition of gender in terms of agreement. It is argued that agreement is only an exponent of the category and as such it pertains to the empirical and descriptive level of representation. The category of gender in itself requires a more abstract representation. It primarily concerns paradigmatic morpho-semantic properties, whose relationship to the various manifestation properties of exponence is not easy to be determined. These problems are also debated by reconsidering some of the prominent perspectives on gender in the history of linguistics