“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.

“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.

Crossing borders: between literature and science – Italian culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has offered significant examples of renewal through crossing boundaries between different disciplines. Several writers (Levi, Calvino, Gadda, Sinisgalli, Del Giudice, Giordano, Arpaia, Odifreddi) have overcome the dichotomy between the two cultures that was denounced by Charles Snow in 1959. Sixty years after the famous essay by Snow, the paper will show several examples of connections between literature and science, by using the concept of the “four frontier customs”: “the transit”, “the trespass”, “the alliance”, and “the conflict”.

Celebrating patron saints as an element of the Sicilian character: the foreign travelers point of view – This article will look at descriptions of some patronal festivals in Sicily drawn from the works of the most important foreign travelers and will try to show how such celebrations represent a fundamental aspect of Sicilianity.

Messina in the stories of Polish travelers over the course of centuries: the double face of the city – The article presents Messina’s ‘verbal postcards’ left by Polish participants in the Grand Tour and travelers who visited Sicily in later times. Travelers whose accounts are widely known, such as Anonymous (1595), Michał Borch, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Chrystian Kamsetzer (XVIII c.), Zygmunt Krasiński (nineteenth century), but also less well-known ones such as writer Zofia Sokołowska, arriving in Sicily in the tragic year of the earthquake (1908), left descriptions from their stays in Messina about the emotional charge they felt, one closely related to the historical moment in which they arrived on the island. This will therefore be a thorough analysis of a fragment of the Sicilian journey concerning Messina left by some Polish travelers, taking into account their professions, areas of interest and the period in which they were in Sicily.

Based on theatricality, humour and camp aesthetics, the novel Lubiewo (2005) by the Polish writer Michał Witkowski recounts the tragicomic lives and adventures of Polish queers under Communism. One of the main features of the novel is the meaning-bearing nicknames of the characters, which result from the camp practice of “queer renaming”. This relies on transforming or substituting male proper names with ironic and witty female nicknames. The paper analyses the German, French, English and Czech translations of the novel to explain the strategies used to render such “talking nouns” in new linguistic-cultural contexts.

Characters with split personalities in Nessuno torna indietro by Alba de Céspedes and the German-Polish history of the novel – This paper focuses on the Polish reception of Nessuno torna indietro, a novel by Alba de Céspedes. In Italy the novel was a bestseller between 1938 and the eighties, however it was impossible to publish it in Poland due to the fact that negotiations failed. Nevertheless, the book was translated into Polish on the basis of the German version and published in a newspaper in 1947. The presentation of the Polish history of this novel will be based on archival materials.

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.