“Domani è un altro giorno” (Tomorrow is another day): the translation of “Via col vento” (Gone With the Wind) as an idiomatic channel – Gone With the Wind has contributed to the planet’s collective memory, not only because a great percentage of the world’s population has identified with the characters and the stories within, but also because, on a linguistic level, the novel has set in motion considerable reuse phenomena. One wonders how much and in what way the phraseology within the text has influenced contemporary Italian and how translators have approached the original text when preparing the Italian editions of the novel.

Traces of the idea of verbal valency structure in nineteenth-century grammars – This paper aims to show how K.F. Beckers’s notion of “subjektive” and “objektive Verben” (i.e. those always used with an “ergänzende Objekt”, a ‘completive object’) is a rough forerunner to the modern idea of dependency grammar. In Italy, this theoretical core was assumed by Raffaello Lambruschini in 1840 (and, after him, by the basic school grammar La grammatica del mio Felicino written by Ulisse Poggi, 1865, 18722), but with a huge trivialisation: subjective verbs were identified with intransitive verbs and objective verbs with transitive ones.

From multi-dialogue to monologue in spoken Italian: the pragmatic/prosodic basis of multi-dialogue and its transformation in narrative and descriptive monologues – The paper summarizes the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT), according to which spoken texts are analysed and aligned per utterance to the acoustic source. Three stretches of spoken Italian taken from the LABLITA Corpus (multi-dialogue, dialogue, monologue) are described according to L-AcT as regards turn-taking, information structure, and illocution. The above texts are then compared to a short literary excerpt showing the different syntactic architecture of the two language varieties.

“Questa è parte, che ua incatenando, et ordinando il parlamento”. Conjunctions in Italian grammatography – The present essay examines how conjunctions are discussed in Italian grammatography from the 15th to the 20th Century.

The present paper is a case study of the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series: “The Italian Americans” (2015). It is argued that the series’ authors have aimed to deconstruct the anti-Italian stereotype, widespread in the United States. In exchange, they have proposed a new, positive image of the Italian community in America promoting the accomplishments of its prominent members. The entire PBS project, “The American Experience”, reflects an evolution of U.S. identity patterns from the homogeneous “melting pot” toward the diverse “salad bowl”, and hence – from monologue to polylogue.

Words and images of the Republic: Italian political propaganda (1946–1948) – The article intends to highlight how the transition from monarchy to republic represents a significant boundary in Italian history not only from the institutional point of view but also from that of national political propaganda, in which words and images – the expression of a harsh ideological confrontation – contributed to the building of a national collective memory of which there are still evident and rooted traces in current political confrontation.

Which lexical typology does the Italian language have? A comparative study with French – This paper sets out to show the lexical and typological differences between the French and Italian languages. French is the only Romance language without morphology in words. Italian continues to build words while including morphology. This phenomenon can be explained by the diacronic process of deflexivity, which is more advanced in French. The consequence is that French words are more compact and unanalyzable. French is becoming a “neoisolating” language.

Polite talk – The paper aims to analyze the role that books of manners from different historical times assign to language in defining politeness. It also tries to find differences and similarities among them and to explain principles that books of manners share with theoretical models on politeness, notwithstanding the descriptive perspective of the first and the normative point of view of the latter.

“How come you’re not shipping them??? They’re canon”: a look at the language of Italian fandom – The aim of this article is to examine a relatively recent phenomenon in the language of fandom, i.e. various communities of fans that form around a cultural event or artifact, such as a book, a TV show, a movie, etc. This research is located within fan studies, however, it mainly investigates the linguistic aspects of being a fan in Italian. The distinctive feature of the language of fandom as a specific variety, associated with a particular topic and activity and mediated by Internet communication tools, is a specialist lexicon, understandable only to community members. The article concentrates on loanwords from English which in the case of Italian primarily comprise the vocabulary of fandom.

A silent language: imagining the dialect in Ferrante’s novels – Elena Ferrante’s novels are not examples of plurilingual literature; in fact they do not mix diatopic varieties of Italian and dialect, even if, above all in the stories in My Brilliant Friend, Italian readers can perceive the sounds of the Neapolitan dialect. To achieve this effect, Elena Ferrante uses metalinguistic glosses, which alert the reader when the characters pass from one language to another. The essay examines the features of the glosses, which are cleverly inserted, do not hinder reading, and manage to transport the reader to among the houses and the sounds of Naples.

Post-truth and parody in old and new media – This paper presents a description of a few issues of the satirical magazine Il Male, published in Italy in the second half of the 1970s. These special issues – somewhat parodies – copied the typographic format of the main Italian newspapers of that period and were filled with odd and invented news. In some respects these publications anticipate parody and falsification in the digital era. In particular, some Internet sites that play on the slight distinction between false and true reports, and make us reflect upon the reliability of the information, can be considered as heirs to this experiment.

LABLITA-Suite. Resources for the acquisition of Italian as a second language – LABLITA-suite provides technology-enhanced learning resources for the acquisition of Italian L2. IMAGACT allows for mastering the semantic properties of action verbs in the early phases of language acquisition. The LABLITA corpus of Spoken Italian can be used for training learners for face to face conversations. RIDIRE and CORDIC provide corpus linguistic tools for accessing Italian phraseology, which is useful for enhancing writing capabilities in the various domains of language usage.

Successful slogans in Italian political discourse – This paper aims to describe the notion of ‘sloganisation’, with special regard to the fortune and circulation of certain slogans in Italian public discourse. An analysis of their forms, contexts of occurrence (political propaganda, advertising, football supporters) and means of diffusion (street talk, electoral manifestos, traditional and new media) shows an increasing desemantisation of this kind of message. Slogans are routinely used by political parties and are widely quoted, regardless of their ideological content, merely in order to create identification or to increase the polemical attitude of their leader.

Gender and representing the feminine in legal and administrative texts in Italy – The paper examines the linguistic treatment of the genre (delimiting the concept to ‘female’, ‘woman’) at various levels of legal communication, through the analysis of legal and administrative texts of different kinds produced in Italy in the 20th and 21st centuries (codes, sentences, regulations, etc). The survey focuses on lexical aspects and is supported by lexicographical research.

In search of the invariant semantics of the preposition “da”: a cognitive analysis of the predicative context – The purpose of this article is to verify whether the semantic invariant of the preposition da [starting point allowing physical or mental movement] in the nominal context remains valid in the context of the verb. The analysis of the content of predicates that link to the preposition da will help to answer the question of the extent to which the choice of a preposition is determined by the knowledge of the experienced activities and/or the predicate itself (its selective features) or if it is the result of convention.

Notes about a handbook of Italian grammar by a Croatian philologist Dragutin Antun Parčić – A handbook of Italian grammar, written in Croatian by Croatian philologist Parčić, confirms that in the past educated Croatian-speaking people were bilingual and at the same time it proves that lower classes aimed to study Italian as well. The paper analyses the functionality and appropriateness of topics presented in the Parčić manuscript because it is obvious that the author was keen to help his Croatian-speaking students in the acquisition of Italian.

Notes on Foscolo and the English language (1816–1827) – Foscolo never managed to master his host country’s language during his years of exile in London (1816–1827). The vast production of his English years consists almost entirely of works intended to be translated by other people and thus to be considered as provisional drafts. In this paper, the relationship between Foscolo and the English language is analysed and discussed, focusing in particular on his interactions with his translators and on his linguistic vision.

An unpublished Musical by Pirandello: a polysemic and multicultural kaleidoscope – The fact that Pirandello conceived the idea of writing a Musical was well know, but the recent discovery of the actual text and the musical score, in the archive of Guido Torre Gherson, agent of the writer while he lived in Paris, has shed some light on his final years and writings. The findings are discussed in the context of his late theatrical and fictional works, such as I giganti della montagna.

Mario Puccini between Italy and Argentina – The Italian writer Mario Puccini travelled to Argentina in 1936 to attend the Pen Club Congress. In the essay, the results of Puccini’s stay in Argentina are studied for the first time in Italy: books, stories, articles, translations, correspondences, unrealized projects. Puccini is confirmed as an important cultural mediator in relations between Italy and the Spanish-speaking nations.

Based upon the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which language influences thought, we may affirm how social stereotypes remain bound by stereotyped usages of language. Hence, speaking is never neutral as it is underpinned by a way of thinking, of communicating, of being. The sexist usage of language encapsulates a function of emphasis at the semantic level and an obscuring function in morphological terms. We thus question what sexism in language means in order to inquire as to how the ways we make use of language may influence our ways of thinking and, consequently, our ways of acting.