Language and Communication Studies

https://benjamins.com/catalog/dapsac.81.03vio
This article explores how the internal conflict between the Italian Northern and Southern regions' ideologies is linguistically apparent in the use of the discriminating words polentone (literally, polenta eater) attached to people from the North and terrone (literally, person from the land) referred to people from the South. The research hypothesis is that, although at first these terms appear to carry a similar derogatory connotation, terrone is in fact more offensive. It is argued here that such difference may find its roots in the Italian central government political strategies which, by historically favouring one part of the country to the disadvantage of the other, have factually aggravated the production and reproduction of discriminatory prejudices against the South. By using the " discourse-historical approach " (Wodak 2001), the study triangulates linguistic, social and historical data to unveil correlations between the discursive discrimination against Italian intra-migrants and the implicit ideologies circulated by governmental choices.

DuFLOR is a parallel corpus which collects the links to the script of 15 dubbed films from English distributed in Italy between 1964 and 2003 alongside their original English version. The films are: Mary Poppins (1964), Dr Strangelove (1964), A Space Odyssey (1968), The Andromeda Strain (1971) Young Frankenstein (1974), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Life of Brian (1979), Shining (1980), Back to the Future (1985), Pulp Fiction (1994), Apollo 13 (1995), Titanic (1997), The Big Kahuna (1999), Spider-man (2001), and The Matrix Reloaded (2003).
These films have been chosen based on their high box office sales and therefore on their potential impact on their viewers language. DuFLOR has been built as a research tool for studying both film dialogues and film translations, with Italian dubbed translations from English as a case study. The corpus has for example been used to study the use of discourse markers in Italian films dubbed from English, and to compare it contrastively with their use in real use Italian (cf. Viola 2016, 2017, in press). However, several other dimensions can be explored, e.g., diachronic, linguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, translational, to name but a few. Moreover, DuFLOR has been created with a historical dimensional structure in mind as on the whole, it covers the period 1964-2003. At the same time, the corpus is conveniently divided into five time slots: 1964-1968; 1971-1979; 1980-1985; 1994-1997; 2001-2003 thus allowing for diachronic comparisons. The corpus contains 223,343 words (115,166 in Italian, 108,177 in English); the metadata document gives more detailed information on the different sections of the corpus as well as on the whole corpus.

To appear on Journal of Historical Pragmatics
In Italian, the adjective giusto ‘right’ has performed the discourse function of response marker since at least 1613 (DELI, 2008: 671). This article argues that, in contemporary Italian, the adjective has undertaken a new process of discoursivization, defined as the diachronic process that ends in discourse (Ocampo, 2006: 317). In particular, it is maintained that giusto may also serve the function of invariant tag (Andersen 2001), a linguistic item appended to a statement for the purpose of seeking mutual agreement, verification or corroboration of a claim (Millar & Brown 1979). Through diachronic lexicographic, quantitative and qualitative analyses carried out over a range of dictionaries and corpora, the results will show that, although the use of giusto? as an invariant tag has not been documented by contemporary Italian lexicography yet, records of such a use are in fact found since 1990.

Revue Romane
This study aims to find out if the Italian expression non c’è problema is a case of language change. If on the one hand, the expression was reported to be a neologism by Radtke in 1990, a careful exploration of the relevant literature on the other has revealed that a diachronic, quantitative and pragmatic investigation of its distribution has not been conducted yet. Through lexicographic, quantitative and qualitative analyses carried out over a range of dictionaries and corpora as well as the use of statistical significance tests, this article investigates the diachrony of non c’è problema. The results will reveal not only that this marker started to be used in 1977, but also that today, it is the response marker preferred by language users, thus qualifying as a case of language change. Furthermore, by analysing its diachronic distribution in English, the article will also explore the possibility that English may have been the source language for such change.

This study develops an innovative method to researching translation interference and language change through dubbing and it takes the Italian language as a case study. By employing an empirical methodology, this research overcomes some of the limitations of previous approaches to the subject and identifies the object of study with much more clarity. The analysis also makes a valid contribution to cognitive research on media-induced language change, indicating that repetition over time, rather than, or as well as, media engagement, is a decisive factor in assimilating and subsequently diffusing innovative linguistic features into the language. First, I carefully explore current practices and identify a number of limitations in the relevant fields of study. Second, I develop a methodology which encompasses the need for a more precise methodology and empirically substantiates the argument of dubbing-induced language change proposed before. Finally, I apply such a method to 73 present-d...

Digitally available repositories are becoming not only more and more widespread but also larger and larger. Although there are both digitally-born collections and digitised material, the digital heritage scholar is typically confronted with the latter. This immediately presents new challenges, one of the most urgent being how to find the meaningful elements that are hidden underneath such unprecedented mass of digital data. One way to respond to this challenge is to contextually enrich the digital material, for example through deep learning. Using the enrichment of the digital heritage collection ChroniclItaly 3.0 [10] as a concrete example, this article discusses the complexities of this process. Specifically, combining statistical and critical evaluation, it describes the gains and losses resulting from the decisions made by the researcher at each step and it shows how in the passage from digitised sources to enriched material, most is gained (e.g., preservation, wider and enhance...

In Italian, grazie ‘thanks’ and ringraziare ‘to thank’ historically introduce an object by means of the preposition di ‘of’ (Renzi, Salvi & Cardinaletti 1991: 545–548); when grazie and ringraziare introduce a subordinate infinite clause, they may all the same be followed by either di or per ‘for’, the latter being the habitual preposition introducing an implicit causal subordinate (ibid.). In light of these considerations, a general lower frequency of occurrence of collocations with per would be expected. This article argues that, in contemporary Italian, there has been an increase in the use of constructions with per and that such an increase is due to an influence from the English thanks/to thank for. Through diachronic lexicographic, quantitative and qualitative analyses carried out over a range of dictionaries and corpora, this article will show that the frequency of use of forms with per has indeed more than octupled in writing from 1200 to 2011 and more than doubled in speech ...

While it is not surprising that English would influence certain domains such as international trade, information technology, and academia, to name a few, the impact of English on non-domain specific elements remains less vigorously studied. In Italian, for instance, an increase in the use of present progressive constructions in dubbed products has been reported by a number of authors (i.e., Ferro & Sardo 2008) who have also hypothesised that such an increase may have passed into real use Italian and that it may be due to the influence from English during the translation process. In consideration of the fact that in Italian the progressive form is not obligatory and that there are limitations on the possible semantic and morphosyntactic combinations, a general low frequency is expected. However, in this study, the diachronic quantitative investigations from written and spoken data of real use Italian have revealed that, from the Unification of Italy (1861) to 2011, the frequency of u...

Crisis narratives shape public understanding and, consequently, the response to the crisis itself. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, when in February 2020 Italy was experiencing more cases than any other country, the Italian response to the crisis originated debates over how to best respond to the outbreak. Informed by Critical Discourse Analysis theory and using narrative networks as a framework for the critical analysis of narratives, this study analyzes the discourse strategies employed by experts, politicians and other social actors from Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the UK when presenting their domestic measures in relation to Italy's response to coronavirus. The analysis shows that the narratives attached to nation-specific decisions were highly culturalized and connected to country-specific shared experiences, such as a sense of national exceptionalism built in opposition with the denigration of Italy as the Other-identity. Attribution of blame and blameworth...

For the past twenty years, digital tools, technologies and infrastructures have been playing an increasingly determining role in framing how heritage is understood, preserved, managed, maintained, and shared. Perhaps the most official indication of the undeniable shift towards the digital in cultural heritage was provided by UNESCO which, in 2003, proclaimed digital heritage as common heritage (UNESCO 2003). The document also officially distinguished between heritage created digitally (from then on referred to as digitally-born heritage), that is heritage for which no other format but the digital object exists, and digitized heritage, heritage “converted into digital form from existing analogue resources” (ibid.). The UNESCO’s statement has had profound implications for both the conceptualization of digital heritage and our very understanding and practices of heritage, material culture and preservation, including traditional notions of authenticity and completeness (Cameron 2021). S...