A contrastive perspective on French and Italian wh-in-situ. A discourse-pragmatic approach

This paper offers a qualitative and quantitative analysis of French and Italian wh-in situ questions based on spontaneous spoken data. A pragmatic analysis relying on two parameters, propositional activation and pragmatic functions, reveals that the licensing conditions and the use of this structure largely differ in the two languages. While French wh-in situ do not require an activated proposition and can introduce a discourse-new topic, Italian wh-in situ mostly require an activated proposition and, at least in the analyzed corpus data, do not introduce discourse-new topics. An examination of the context also reveals that the different licensing conditions influence the interactional uses of these questions. All in all, both French and Italian wh-in situ require a pragmatic condition, which is their ‘anchoring’ to given, or at least inferable, information in the linguistic context (as is typical of Italian) or to predictable situations in the extralinguistic context (such as expected discourse moves in social interactions, as is the case for French)

"No duration without intonation": The interplay of lexical and post-lexical durational differences

Current research in typology has shown that durational effects at the phonetic level can have a profound impact on vowel length. Quantity languages, for instance, often display constraints on final lengthening in order to maintain contrasts between short and long vowels. We contribute to this typology by considering two closely-related Italo-Romance varieties, Genoese and Ventimigliese, which differ in one crucial feature: vowel length. According to the literature, quantity contrasts should be well-attested in Genoese but not in Ventimigliese. An acoustic analysis based on the duration of stressed syllables suggests that the two varieties may be different not so much in vowel length as in their intonation. Unlike Genoese, Ventimigliese displays longer syllables in the utterance-internal than in the final position. This could be due to the pressure of the Ventimigliese utterance-internal position to adjust to a higher F0. It remains to be seen whether this is due to differences in tone structure. All in all, we claim that only a comprehensive study of prosody and intonation can enlighten durational patterns in language typology

Is implicit communication quantifiable? A corpus-based analysis of British and Italian political tweets

Twitter is nowadays a powerful means of political propaganda. Its effectiveness can be easily appreciated in the large amounts of messages exchanged by politicians every day. This wealth of data, together with the interactive nature of the social medium, provides an ideal basis for the analysis of a striking feature of political messages, i.e., their implicitness, often achieved using presuppositions, among other strategies. The present work proposes a comparative analysis of British and Italian politicians' use of Twitter by focusing on implicit communication (notably, presuppositions) and the pragmatic functions of tweets. Based on a sample of about 400 tweets, our analysis shows that some of these functions tend to associate either with presuppositional or non-presuppositional communicative devices. Moreover, a critical methodological discussion is offered in order to address the main challenges of quantitative corpus-based pragmatics

On the status of exhaustiveness in cleft sentences: An empirical and cross-linguistic study of English also-/only-clefts and Italian anche-/solo-clefts

The goal of the paper is to shed new light on the semantics and pragmatics of cleft sentences by discussing the exhaustive interpretation typically associated with these complex syntactic structures. Based on a fine-grained analysis of the contexts in which "exhaustiveness” can be cancelled as well as reinforced by English also and only and Italian anche and solo, we claim that this meaning component associated with clefts in English and Italian is best accounted for in terms of a conventionalized conversational implicature. Our analysis is based on a corpus of authentic cleft occurrences collected from different written sources

Vowel length in Intemelian Ligurian: an experimental and cross-dialectal investigation

According to the non-experimental literature, Intemelian Ligurian, unlike closely-related dialects such as Genoese and Western Ligurian, does not display vowel length distinctions anymore. This research is the first attempt to carry out an experimental analysis of temporal and spatial correlates of vowel length (i.e. vowel and post-tonic consonant durations; F1 and F2 formant values) in Intemelian, compared with the neighboring dialects and across different prosodic contexts (i.e. utterancefinal position and discourse focus). Two patterns were detected: the first one represented by Genoese and Western Ligurian, where temporal differences between long and short vowels are consistently implemented, and the second one by Intemelian, in which such opposition is not found, thus confirming the impressions provided by the previous literature. Finally, we discuss some variation observed in the Intemelian vowel space and we assess the impact of different prosodic contexts on both vowel quantity and quality