Scholarly Works - Italian
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Item Open Access Published version Peer-reviewed Greek and Romance unagreement in Calabria(Brill, 2017-01-01) Höhn, Georg FK; Silvestri, Giuseppina; Squillaci, M Olimpia; Silvestri, Giuseppina [0000-0002-4448-7709]The term ‘unagreement’ describes configurations with an apparent person-mismatch between a typically definite plural subject and non-third person verbal agreement found in several null subject languages. Previous works have suggested that languages which have an obligatory definite article in adnominal pronoun constructions (APCs) allow unagreement (cf. standard modern Greek emeis oi glossologoi “we (the) linguists”), while languages that rule out definite articles in APCs do not allow unagreement constructions (cf. standard Italian noi (*i) linguisti). This article presents new evidence from Calabrian Greek (Greko), which corresponds to the predictions for other varieties of Greek, and two southern Italian Romance varieties (northern and southern Calabrese): these varieties exhibit Italian-type apcs but still allow unagreement, contrary to expectations. We discuss how the Romance data may be accommodated by extending a previous account of unagreement and propose that the hybrid pattern observed in the Italo-Romance varieties is a result of historical contact with local Greek varieties.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed The Expression Of Progressive Aspect In Grico: Mapping Morphosyntactic Isoglosses In An Endangered Italo-Greek Variety(Wiley, 2018) Ledgeway, A; Schifano, N; Silvestri, G; Ledgeway, Adam [0000-0003-1766-1959]; Schifano, Norma [0000-0002-5241-0031]; Silvestri, Giuseppina [0000-0002-4448-7709]AbstractThis article investigates the expression of progressive aspect by means of verbal periphrases in the Italo‐Greek variety known as Grico, spoken in Salento (southern Italy). Building on the extremely valuable, yet out‐dated, description of Rohlfs (), we first present an overview of the array of different patterns brought to light by our recent fieldwork and through a survey of a selection of both early and contemporary sources which include combinations of (non‐)inflected STAND with (non‐)finite forms of a lexical verb, optionally linked by functional elements. After describing the empirical picture, we assess the degree of grammaticalization of the patterns which are still productive today, reconstructing their evolution from earlier periphrases and paying particular attention to the grammaticalization of the ambiguous element pu ‘where; from; that’. Finally, we analyse a hybrid structure currently consistently produced by semi‐speakers from different villages, which seems to instantiate a new ‘third’ option within the local repertoire. The article concludes with of a number of observations about the role of this case study for our knowledge of diatopic morphosyntactic microvariation in Grico and for the nature of language contact and language change.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed I sonetti di Lorenzo Moschi(Fabrizio Serra Editore) Morelli, NMThis article provides the complete critical edition of the known sonnets of the late fourteenth-century Florentine poet Lorenzo Moschi. The edition is based on the only two manuscripts available today, the ms. Riccardiano 1103 and the Florence National Library’s ms. Palatino 359. Considering that most of Moschi’s sonnets have been unpublished until now, this edition will allow us to acquire a better understanding of both the poet himself and the late fourteenth-century literary production in Italy. The profile of a poet of an eclectic culture emerges, one who employed a variety of borrowings from the previous lyrical tradition.Item Open Access Luck stories: Stress-testing contingency and agency at the margins of post-war American literature(Informa UK Limited, 2018) Gordon, RSC; Gordon, Robert [0000-0002-1659-817X]The article examines four mid-20th-century American works of literature that explore and tell stories with notions of luck. It argues that luck in these works is deployed as a means to ‘stress-test’ the possibilities and the resilience of human agency, in the face of the contingencies and uncertainties of the modern. Widely varying in form and genre, and in different ways flawed, neglected or marginal in their author's work or in literary history, each of the four works sets a preternatural or reified force of luck at the heart of a destabilized or displaced vision of the world, and watches the tensions and contradictions that result. Several common motifs and concerns emerge, touching on fundamental issues at stake in 20th-century (capitalist) modernity: questions of power and freedom, economies of property and fertility, the morality of family and fidelity, moral responsibility and the calculus of guilt, the singularity and multiplicity of the self and its interactions with temporality. The four texts are: Arthur Miller, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944); Philip K. Dick, Solar Lottery (1954) and The Game-Players of Titan (1963); and Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man (1971).Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Pressure to Publish: Laura Terracina and her Editors(Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017-12) Papworth, ALaura Terracina (1519–c.1577) was the bestselling female author of sixteenth-century Italy, publishing eight poetry collections, several of which went through numerous reprints. While other female poets attained greater cultural prestige, none was as widely published, nor reflected so well the developing worlds of print, publication, and authorship from mid- to late Cinquecento. Her publication history problematizes the accepted narrative of how women came to print and of their relationship with their editors and publishers. From the time she first appeared in print in 1546 to the writing of her final manuscript in 1577, Terracina proved to be an engaged and headstrong author with a strong sense of ownership of her works. This article will explore Terracina’s relationships with her editors and publishers, analyzing her role in the publication process to argue that she took a much more active part in their production than has previously been appreciated.Item Restricted Accepted version Peer-reviewed La lettura domestica della Bibbia nell'Italia rinascimentale(Brepols) Brundin, AS; Ardissino, E; Boillet, ENumerosi sono gli studi che attestano il ruolo centrale della Bibbia nella devozione domestica dei riformatori inglesi . Il protestantesimo nord europeo del Cinque- e Seicento è stato spesso definito come la religione del Libro: la Bibbia, tradotta in volgare, è lì presentata come l’unico nutrimento necessario perché la gente potesse mantenere in vita la propria fede. Infatti, come osserva, forse in modo eccessivamente ottimistico, William Crashaw nel suo trattato, il nutrimento biblico dovrebbe costituire non solo la colazione, ma anche la cena del lettore devoto.Item Restricted Accepted version Peer-reviewed Primo Levi e il pensiero magico(Marcos y Marcos, 2017-10-01) Gordon, RSC; Gordon, Robert [0000-0002-1659-817X]La ricerca delle radici, l’antologia dei suoi libri preferiti, scelti e commentati da Primo Levi su commissione einaudiana, continua a essere una fonte di interesse eccezionale per aiutare a sondare il retroterra lettarario-culturale di Levi, e per capire in cosa consistessero per lui il piacere e il fascino della lettura, e le modalità più proficue della conoscenza umana.1 A un certo punto nella sua prefazione all’antologia, in cui cerca di spiegare, ai lettori ma anche a se stesso, le proprie scelte, le presenze ma anche le assenze, Levi contempla i risultati dell’esercizio con il suo solito distacco e non senza un certo senso di stupore:Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Late Latin Verb Second: The Sentential Word Order of the Itinerarium Egeriae(Centre de Lingüística Teòrica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona/Institut Interuniversitari de Filologia Valenciana, 2017-12-22) Ledgeway, AN; Ledgeway, Adam [0000-0003-1766-1959]In this article we undertake a systematic study of the Itinerarium Egeriae, one of the best known late Latin texts, to determine the proper characterization of the word order of the text and to consider in particular whether the Itinerarium Egeriae can legitimately be considered to present a verb-second (V2) grammar on the par with the well-studied grammars of medieval Romance. The results, based on detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses of the text and, where relevant, appropriate comparisons with medieval Romance, confirm the innovative nature of the syntax of the Itinerarium Egeriae whose word order patterns are shown to follow an asymmetric V2 constraint. The article therefore offers valuable original evidence for the often claimed, but hitherto unproven, hypothesis that the V2 syntax of medieval Romance represents the continuation of a parametric setting already well established in the grammar of late Latin.Item Restricted Accepted version Peer-reviewed Invitations to Participate : Bernard's Sign(Fabrizio Serra editore, 2017) Powlesland, KLThis essay sets out a case for a ‘participatory’ mode of reading rooted in collaborative engagement with the formal structures of Dante’s $\textit{Commedia}$. Deploying new tools relating to embodied simulation from videogame critical theory, the essay suggests that a programme of invitations to the reader’s pre-rational cognitions is embedded in the narrative mechanics of the poem; invitations that impact the depth and modality of her immersion, her sense of presence, and finally her experience of agential participation in the mutable «io» of the poem. Proposing that such invitations are largely undetectable until their visceral and cognitive effects have been triggered, the essay offers as exemplar a new reading of what is described as Bernard’s «interaction $\textit{manquée}$» with the protagonist in $\textit{Paradiso}$ XXXIII, proposing that Singleton’s diagnosis of an error in Dante’s handling of narrative perspective is a misreading of arguably the most powerful invitation to the reader in the poem.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Holocaust Intersections in 21st-Century Europe: An Introduction(Taylor & Francis) Gordon, RSC; Perra, E; Gordon, Robert [0000-0002-1659-817X]Two vignettes of contemporary memory politics, from the beginning and the end of the very recent period of cultural history that interests us, help to set out in the first part of this Introduction some coordinates for the field of transversal intersections which permeate 21st-century Holocaust legacies and which this special issue of Quest sets out to explore. The first vignette focusses on a strange conjunction at the turn of the millennium between two museum projects, one of them at least obliquely Holocaust-related, both forced to negotiate across fraught transcommunal cultural divides and to relate difficult parallel, convergent and divergent histories. The second picks out an instant, a transient flashpoint from the rolling news media of summer 2016, at which the sites, values and language of Holocaust memory were used to confront, in awkward but powerful ways, immediately contemporary anxieties and atrocities. Following these, the Introduction will move on to address the larger field of intersection between the terms, usages and scholarship of the Holocaust and genocide, including its often problematic aspects. Its aim is to set the stage and provide a framework for the six ‘intersectional’ essays that follow.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Grammatiche dell'italiano ‘Pour Les Dames’ nel Settecento: Antonio Curioni fra Parigi e Londra(Informa UK Limited, 2016-09) Sanson, HelenaAcross eighteenth-century Europe, a number of authors composed grammars, of their own language or of foreign languages, either dedicated to a ‘lady’ or addressed to a readership of ‘ladies’. Grammarians who indicated in the titles of their works that they had written ‘for the Ladies’, ‘pour les Dames’, ‘per le Dame’, ‘für die Damen’ (or ‘für Frauenzimmer’) often further specified, either in the subtitle or in the body of the text, that they meant to address, more broadly, a readership of beginners. The Italian Antonio Curioni, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, published a number of works, first in Paris and then in London, meant to help readers learn the Italian language and its grammar, following a progressive method aimed at beginners and then more advanced learners, including grammars ‘à l’usage des dames’. Most of Curioni’s works were dedicated to female figures, young ‘ladies’ of the higher classes, who represented the predominant part of his intended readership. This essay will examine Curioni’s works within the grammatical production ‘pour les dames’ of the time and against the background of the flourishing, and very competitive, market of grammars meant for a readership eager to learn Italian.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Limitele teoriei și variației lingvistice: Cazul limbii române(University of Bucharest, 2016) Ledgeway, Adam; Ledgeway, Adam [0000-0003-1766-1959]Drawing on Romanian examples, this article explores, in a manner which is accessible to both general scholars of the Romance languages and linguists, how the richly documented diachronic and synchronic variation exhibited by Romanian offers a wealth of linguistic data (often of a typologically exotic nature) of interest not just to comparative Romance linguists, but also to general linguists. This perennially fertile and still under-utilized testing ground will be shown to have a central role to play in challenging linguistic orthodoxies and shaping and informing new ideas and perspectives about language change, structure and variation, and should therefore be at the forefront of linguistic research and accessible to the wider linguistic community. At the same time, the discussion will also highlight how a familiarity with current key ideas and assumptions in theoretical linguistics has a significant role to play in understanding the structures and patterns of Romanian.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed Watching Italians Turn Around: Gender, Looking, and Roman/Cinematic Modernity(Wiley, 2017-03-24) Rhodes, John David; Burke, FrankThis essay focuses on Alberto Lattuada’s short film “Gli italiani si voltano,” an episode in the film anthology L’amore in città (Love in the City, 1953), as a key text for understanding what is at stake in looking at the city—in particular the city of Rome—in postwar Italian filmmaking. The chapter argues that the weight of looking and the attempt to see anew are both structured as much by what we see in the image as by absences that are the inheritance from Fascist interventions in the urban fabric. The chapter concludes by suggesting some of the ways in which practices of looking and seeing in postwar Italian cinema must contend with the invisible presence of the past.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed 1.7: A’ Storia e’ Maria: Gender Power Dynamics and Genre Normalization, (‘Imma contro tutti’, Francesca Comencini)(Informa UK Limited, 2016-05-03) Antonello, P; Antonello, Pierpaolo [0000-0002-7587-7822]The seventh episode of the first season of Gomorra: la serie could be defined ‘Mariological’, for it foregrounds a renegotiation of social and cinematic gender stereotypes in the context of mafia movies, with visual and thematic references to religious, and in particular Catholic, iconography – a recurrent feature in representations of Italian organized crime.Item Open Access Accepted version Peer-reviewed 'Cantavan tutti insieme ad una voce': Singing and Community in the Commedia(Informa UK Limited, 2016) Phillips-Robins, Helena; Phillips-Robins, Helena [0000-0003-2384-6335]This essay argues that in the Commedia song becomes a key means of shaping and expressing modes of communal being. The singing of In exitu Israel that marks the souls’ arrival in Purgatorio and the performance of the Gloria that marks each soul’s departure create multiple communities that stretch across time and space to encompass the purgatorial souls, the angelic hosts and even the readers of the poem. I examine contemporary liturgical practices to suggest that the souls’ sung arrival into purgatory evokes a particular liturgical procession and that Dante’s treatment of word, music and movement offers the reader an opportunity to partake in the communal dynamics of Purgatorio.Item Open Access La retorica di Ulisse contro lapietas, da Dante a Tennyson(Informa UK Limited, 2015-03) Finch-Race, Daniel AIn antiquity, public speaking was based on a set of linguistic strategies for obtaining agreement, with a good command of rhetoric seen as an asset. In the post-classical period, rhetoric was vilified and its status diminished due to the increasing (scientific) demand for tonal neutrality in discourse and the sublimation of oratory into printed material. In principle, Dante would have been respectful of the tradition governing epic speech-making, but ultimately chose to depict Ulysses’ fate in Inferno XXVI as a case of morally suspect rhetoric, exaggerating the hero-sinner’s deceptive skills and wanderlust as concepts antithetical to pietas, the idea of devotion espoused by Aeneas, Virgil’s hero. Tennyson’s depiction of Ulysses conforms in many ways to epic rhetorical conventions, though the post-Romantic incarnation of the Homeric hero does not precisely dovetail with the figure of classical and medieval tradition, instead fitting the Victorian mould of a restless wanderer, more concerned with intellectual pursuits than social pietas and oratorical trickery. By undertaking a comparative analysis of the rhetorical devices and presentation of pietas in these two works, a distilled appreciation of the fluctuating significance of Ulysses and notions of duty from the medieval era to modern times can be achieved.Item Open Access Reading, Devotion and Religious Print in Early Cinquecento Naples: The Case of Francesco Sovaro’s Christiade(Taylor & Francis, 2017-07-03) Faini, MarcoThis article analyses a little known Christian epic poem, the Christiade by Francesco Sovaro. Printed in Naples in 1539, the poem is a mosaic of passages from the Gospels offering a synoptic version of the life of Christ. I argue that the Christiade represents not only a literary work, but also a tool for approaching the Gospels and for practicing domestic devotion. The Christiade could either be read in its entirety as a poem, or be perused as a handbook thanks to its paratextual apparatuses (glosse and tavole) which related passages in the poem to the Sunday Gospels. Readers could thus prepare themselves for Mass or meditate upon what they had heard at church. This article explores the Christiade within the context of contemporary Neapolitan culture, with special attention to print industry, book-trade, religious poetry and the questione della lingua. This article also sets the Christiade against the background of the spread of heterodox ideas in mid-Cinquecento Naples, and considers it as a contrast to such ideas.Item Open Access Published version Peer-reviewed Parallels in romance nominal and clausal microvariation(Editura Academiei Române, 2015) Ledgeway, A; Ledgeway, Adam [0000-0003-1766-1959]This article explores parallels in the dimensions of microvariation characterizing the functional structure and organization of the Romance nominal and clausal groups. Within a parameter hierarchy approach it is argued that observed synchronic and diachronic variation across both domains can be readily captured in terms of a single set of higher- and above all lower-level parametric options. This parallelism constitutes a welcome finding in that it points to how the available parametric space can be constrained and defined in terms of a set of common transcategorial principles and options.Item Open Access Approcci diversi alla dialettologia italiana contemporanea(2014) D'Alessandro, Roberta; Di, Felice Claudio; Franco, Irene; Ledgeway, Adam; Ledgeway, Adam [0000-0003-1766-1959]Item Open Access Manciati siti? Middle constructions with resultative-stative participles in Italian and in the southern Italian-Romance varieties(CAIRN, 2014-07-15) Bentley, D; Ledgeway, A; Ledgeway, Adam [0000-0003-1766-1959]Cette étude examine le problème des participes employés comme épithètes ou prédicats pour exprimer les états résultatifs (par ex. invecchiata ‘vieillie’). Partant de l’hypothèse de La Fauci (1988) selon laquelle de tels participes seraient caractérisés par la syntaxe moyenne, on discute d’une sous-classe de participes qui, à première vue, semblerait infirmer cette hypothèse (par ex. manciata ‘ayant déjà mangé’, litt. ’mangée’). Sur des preuves italo-romanes comparatives, on établit que les participes en question constituent des adjectifs qui manifestent toutes les propriétés diagnostiques de la syntaxe moyenne. Une analyse sémantique et morphologique de la dérivation de tels participes adjectivaux à partir des participes verbaux, corrobore entièrement l’hypothèse originelle de La Fauci à propos de leur syntaxe moyenne.