The present inquiry is a qualitative case study of conversations and attitudes of students participating in a non-required, second-year conversation section offered as a voluntary adjunct to required second year courses in Italian. The findings in this dissertation support calls by policy makers in foreign language education who advocate for a more integrated and holistic approach to foreign language education. Through this empirical qualitative case study, I have used the construct of Third Space (Gutiérrez, 2008) to examine students’ development of multiple literacies (Swaffar & Arens, 2005) in a foreign language conversation-based classroom. The theory of Third Space is seen as a kind of authentic intersubjective space, where students’ ways of knowing and learning are accepted and expanded in the learning environment. The study describes the results from the implementation of a language pedagogy based on the model of multiple literacies in an Italian conversation class. Students in the class read and viewed a wide variety of authentic materials, around which they anchored their class discussions. Through activities involving multiple readings of the given text, the students co-constructed their interpretations based on personal experiences and on the socio-cultural background of the text. Students also engaged in self-reflective exercises documenting their own learning processes. Through interpretive analysis of student work produced in the class, the ecology of learner developments and the corresponding classroom talk are assessed. I have identified three major themes that are evident as essential elements to the students’ developing trans-linguistic proficiency in conjunction with their evolving cultural literacy. In particular, self-reflection and identity, expanded practices of knowing and learning, and the influence of semiotic mediation on classroom interactions are the three elements that define how these students articulated their Third Space in conjunction with this particular language learning context. / text

This thesis investigates the development of the present-day linguistic hegemonies within Italy and Norway as products of ongoing linguistic ‘wars of position’. Language activist movements have been key actors in these struggles, and this study seeks to address how such movements have operated in attempts to translate their linguistic ideologies into de facto language policy through mechanisms such as political agitation, propaganda and the use of language in public spaces. It also reveals which other extra-linguistic values and ideologies have become associated with or allied to these linguistic causes in recent years, how these ideologies have affected language policy, and whether such ideological alliances have been representative of language users’ ideologies. The study is informed by an innovative methodological framework combining the theories and metaphors of Antonio Gramsci (including hegemony and wars of position as well as his linguistic writings) with the theories of Stein Rokkan on cultural-political cleavage structures and the relationships between centres and peripheries. These constructs and relationships are thereafter documented as ideologically defining strands running through the history of the movements studied, through reference to activist periodicals and party newspapers. In Italy, the focus of the research is on the Lega Nord (Northern League), a far-right populist autonomist political movement. The Lega has sought to legitimise its imagination of a northern nation (‘Padania’) by portraying the dialects of northern Italy as minority languages, emphasising the hegemonic relationship between the Italian national language and northern dialects. The movement has also used this perception of northern dialects as peripheral and suppressed by Italian to bolster its depiction of ‘Padania’ as a wealthy periphery allegedly held back by central and southern Italy. Although this campaign has achieved some successes in increased visibility of dialects in public spaces, dialects largely remain restricted to ‘low’-status domains. In Norway, the thesis devotes special attention to the post-war efforts of the counter-hegemonic campaign for the Nynorsk standard of Norwegian, which was devised as a common denominator for Norwegian dialects, as opposed to the hegemonic standard Bokmål, which is a Norwegianisation of written Danish. In opposing the challenges of globalisation and centralisation, the Nynorsk movement has retained a radical character and is generally associated with a left-wing variant of nationalism, a key part of the Norwegian cultural cleavage structure. The social argumentation of the Nynorsk movement was instrumental in its successful promotion of dialects, now seen as an unstigmatised means of spoken communication in all social contexts.

This thesis focuses on the cross-linguistic differences between Italian and Spanish regarding the pragmatic restrictions on the resolution of null and overt subject pronouns (NS and OSP). It also tries to identify possible links between such cross-linguistic differences and morpho-syntactic differences at the level of the verbal morphology of the two languages. Spanish and Italian are typologically related and morpho-syntactically similar and have been assumed to instantiate the same setting of the NS parameter with respect to not only its syntactic licensing conditions, but also the pragmatic constraints determining the distribution of null and overt subject pronouns, and this assumption has had important implications for cross-linguistic research. The first aim of this study was to test directly for the first time the assumption about the equivalence of Italian and Spanish; in order to do so, I run a series of self-paced reading experiments using the same materials translated in each language, so that the results were directly comparable. The experiments were based on Carminati’s (2002) study on antecedent preferences for Italian NSs and OSPs in intra-sentential anaphora, testing the Position of Antecedent Strategy. The results suggest that while in Italian there is a strict division of labour between NS and OSP (confirming Carminati’s findings), this division is not as clear-cut in Spanish. More precisely, while Italian personal pronouns unambiguously signal a switch in subject reference, the association between OSPs and switch reference seems to be much weaker in Spanish. These results, which are interpreted in terms of Cardinaletti and Starke’s (1999) cross-linguistic typology of deficient pronouns, highlight an asymmetry between the strength of NS and OSP biases in Spanish that could not have emerged through the traditional methodology used by the numerous variationist studies on the subject, based on corpus analysis. A subsequent pair of experiments tested the hypothesis that the cross-linguistic differences attested might be related to the relative syncretism of the Spanish verbal morphology compared to the Italian one with regard to the unambiguous expression of person features on the verbal head. The results only provided weak support for the hypothesis, although they did confirm the presence of the cross- linguistic differences in the processing and resolution of anaphoric NS and OSP dependencies revealed by the previous experiments.

No description available.

<p>U ovom istraţivanju bavimo se kategorijom koncesivnosti u francuskom, italijanskom i srpskom jeziku. Ovoj kategoriji pristupamo sa stanovi&scaron;ta sintakse i semantike: utvrĊujemo inventar formalnih sredstava i sintakstiĉkih postupaka kojima se koncesivnost formalizuje u posmatranim jezicima, a pritom analiziramo i semantiĉki sadrţaj tih struktura. Cilj ove studije jeste da se najpre ustanove razliĉiti postupci izraţavanja koncesivnosti na svim sintaksiĉkim nivoima, a zatim, u skladu sa kontrastivnim pristupom, da se utvrde i sistematizuju strukturne podudarnosti i nepodudarnosti u francuskom, italijanskom i srpskom jeziku, kao i da se utvrdi stemen semantiĉke ekvivalencije izmeĊu njih. Na teorijskom planu, rezultati ovog istraţivanja objedinjuju postojeća lingvistiĉka saznanja o ovoj problematici, a na praktiĉnom planu moguća je njihova primena u nastavi francuskog i italijanskog jezika kao stranih jezika, kao i u prevodilaĉkoj praksi.<br />GraĊa za ovo istraţivanje ekscerpirana je iz dela napisanih na francuskom jeziku, i njihovih objavljenih prevoda na italijanski i srpski jezik.<br />U prvom delu rada daje se pregled teorijskih stavova francuskih, italijanskih i srpskih lingvista o kategoriji koncesivnosti, kao i o njenom odnosu sa drugim semantiĉkim kategorijama, pre svega sa kategorijom kauzalnosti. U drugom delu rada navodi se inventar konstrukcija i leksiĉkih sredstava kojima se koncesivnost iskazuje u tri posmatrana jezika. Pri tom se pravi poseban osvrt na upotrebu glagolskih naĉina u zavisnim koncesivnim reĉenicama. Centralni deo rada predstavlja deo u kome se ustanovljeni inventar analizira na primerima iz korpusa. Pri tom se posebna paţnja posvećuje onim sredstvima za koja korpus beleţi upotrebe koje do sada nisu zabeleţene u literaturi. Zakljuĉna razmatranja sistematizuju dobijene rezultate, i ukazuju na mogućnosti daljih istraţivanja u ovom domenu.</p> / <p>This research deals with the category of concessionality in French, Italian and Serbian. This category is approached from the point of view of syntax and semantics: the research establishes the inventory of formal means and syntactic procedures by which concessionality is formalized in the languages being analyzed, while the semantic content of these structures is also analyzed in the process. The goal of this study is to first identify various procedures for expressing concessionality at all syntactic levels and then, in accordance with the contrastive approach, to determine and systematize the structural congruences and incongruences in French, Italian and Serbian, as well as to determine the level of semantic equivalence among them. At the theoretical level, the results of this study merge the existing linguistic knowledge on this issue, while at a practical level they enable its application in teaching French and Italian as foreign languages, as well as in doing professional translation.<br />The corpus for this research was complied from literary titles written in French, as well as from their published translations into Italian and Serbian.<br />The first part of the thesis provides an overview of theoretical approaches to the category of concessionality by various French, Italian and Serbian linguistcs, as well as of its relationship with other semantic categories, in particular with the category of causality. The second part enumerates the inventory of constructions and lexical means by which concessionality is being expressed in the three languages being analyzed. In doing so, a particular focus is placed on the use of the verbal category of mood in subordinate clauses of concession. The central part of the thesis is the one in which the identified inventory is analyzed on the examples from the corpus. In this part, a special attention is given to the means found in the corpus the use of which has so far not been mentioned in reference titles. Concluding remarks systematize the results and point at possible directions for further research in this field.</p>

Following the Second World War, there was an increase of Italian immigration to Vancouver. Many Italians found their way to Vancouver through informal social networks established by earlier migrants. Once there, Italians turned to those networks to find work, housing, and familiarity. Italians also continued to produce and consume foods in Vancouver in similar ways to Italy. By looking at Vancouver Italian foodways, this thesis seeks to understand how food contributed to Italian Canadian identity. Postwar Italian immigrants brought established cuisines with them to Vancouver. They then actively sought to maintain those food customs. Nevertheless, in order to continue living in Vancouver Italians adapted their livelihoods, familial gender divisions, and the ways they acquired foods. They cooperated with immigrants from other regions of Italy and accepted foods with Italianità (Italianess) when they could not acquire foods from their hometowns. The result was a complicated identity that included social interactions between Italians, as well as a combination of Italian and Canadian foods. / Graduate / 2017-08-15 / 0334 / 0335 / 0326 / sambiagioni@gmail.com

The vast majority of work on question formation examines interrogatives from the perspective of just one single component of grammar, usually the syntax or the prosody. The present dissertation offers a comprehensive account of question formation addressing both the syntax and the prosody of interrogatives and the interaction between these two components of grammar in signalling the question meaning of an utterance. The present work examines question formation on the basis of four genealogically related and geographically closely located Romance varieties spoken in northern Italy: Gherdëina, Badiot, Fascian and Nònes. Given that these varieties differ only with respect to certain microparametric values whereas others remain constant, they constitute an ideal research area to study the interaction between the syntax and the prosody in question formation. The syntactic and prosodic analyses proposed are based on new empirical data. The syntactic analysis is couched within the cartographic approach and the prosodic analysis is based on Autosegmental-Metrical Phonology. This dissertation is motivated by five main research goals: <ol type=i><li>to provide a detailed description of the syntactic variation found in interrogatives in the four varieties Gherdëina, Badiot, Fascian and Nònes based on data collected by the author;</li> <li>to propose a unified syntactic analysis of the interrogatives;</li> <li>to offer a prosodic analysis of statements and questions providing new data from varieties not studied up to now in the literature;</li> <li>to establish the relation between the syntax and the prosody in question formation;</li> <li>to determine how the syntax and the prosody interact in providing clues to interrogative force for the listener as well as the speaker.</li></ol> The main conclusions are as follows: The syntactic structure and the intonational tune are autonomous in question formation. Three aspects matter for interrogative clause typing: (i) syntactic marking, (ii) prosodic marking and (iii) tune-text-alignment.

Belief in prophetic inspiration and the possibility of discerning the future was a cornerstone of medieval conceptions of history and of God’s workings within that history. But prophecy’s significance for the Middle Ages is due as much to the multiplicity of its meanings as to its role as an engine of history. Prophetia was described in terms ranging from prediction and historiography to singing and teaching. This thesis examines the attempts of medieval thinkers to wrestle with these ambiguities. The nature and implications of prophetic inspiration were a crucial area of contention during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as scholastic theologians, with their particular techniques and standards of rationality, attempted to make systematic sense of inspired speech and knowledge. These attempts reveal a great deal about medieval structures of knowledge, and about theological reflections on the Church’s place in history. The stakes were high: ‘prophecy’ not only was the subject of Old Testament exegesis, but also, in its various forms, was often the basis of authority for exegetes and theologians themselves, as well as for preachers, visionaries, saints, and even writers of secular works. Those who claimed the mantle of the prophet came just as easily from inside the institutional structures as from outside. Theologians began legitimating a moderate form of inspiration that justified their own work through ordinary activities such as teaching and preaching, while trying to keep at bay perceived threats from powerful assertions of prophetic authority, such as Islam, female visionaries, and schismatic and apocalyptic Franciscans. This study argues that, as theologians sought to determine the limits of prophetic privilege, and to shape prophecy for their own purposes, they actually opened space for claims of divine insight to proliferate in those ordinary activities, and in a way that went beyond their control.

This thesis explores the notion of opposition in the Sonetti romaneschi by the Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791-1863). It sees the poet as a warring rebel on the literary scene and examines his poetics and rhetoric of war through his choice of form (the hallowed sonnet structure), language (the ‘rotten’ vernacular) and subject (the downtrodden, previously voiceless underclass); it shows that these cornerstones of Belli’s opus are in polemical response to literary stimuli and intimately connected to the political, religious and sociological upheavals in and beyond Rome in the troubled run-up to Unification. Chapter one, entitled ‘Breaking the mould’, draws on Belli’s explicit declaration of war on his literary predecessors, and considers the influence of the Milanese writer Carlo Porta, arguing that Belli is more inimical than amicable, and not the simple imitator as thought to date. Chapter two, ‘A passage of arms: possessing the dialogue sonnet’, maintains that the fulcrum of Belli’s antagonistic poetics and his realist enterprise lies in his unprecedented use of the dialogue sonnet form and the staging of direct debate. Chapter three, entitled ‘The Battle of the Sexes’, treats opposition at a thematic level, applying gender studies and related theory to Belli for the first time. Chapter four, ‘War and peace: the silent revolution’, examines Belli’s creation of a totally new literary language, fulfilling the criteria for what Deleuze and Guattari, within broadly Marxist parameters, would identify as a ‘minor literature’ in the work of Kafka, in which a major language is somehow wrested from its anchors of power, or ‘deterritorialized’, to subvert the literary world from within. The thesis shows that Belli is more revolutionary than previously thought as a literary innovator, and an understudied giant of modern European literature as opposed to the marginal figure the historiography is wont to maintain.

This thesis examines the presence of modernist ideas regarding identity, language and narrative in the work of the neglected Sardinian author, Grazia Deledda (1871-1936). It has the overall aim of redefining Deledda’s later work as modernist for she has been disregarded by most critics and is generally classed as a minor, veristic writer. Drawing Deledda out of these restricted interpretations, this thesis demonstrates that Deledda straddles two literary modes, for she matures beyond veristic influences and looks forward to modernist ideas, particularly regarding the complex nature of the self. The thesis approaches Deledda from an entirely new perspective in that it focuses upon the crisis of identity in Deledda’s work, and its construction in the narrative of her novels, and its integral relationship with the theme of language. The theoretical framework of Julia Kristeva, Paul Ricoeur and Adriana Cavarero enables an innovative study of identity as a linguistic and narrative construct in Deledda’s work. I maintain that Deledda’s characters construct, control and understand their identities through their application of language or their command of narrative perspective, voicing their inner selves through linguistic self-expression. This study engages in a close textual analysis of three of Deledda’s key texts. La madre (1920) and Il segreto dell'uomo solitario (1921) illustrate Deledda’s movement away from verismo. Their protagonists suffer a crisis of identity which is bound up in linguistic expression and/or narrative control. Cosima (1937), which is Deledda’s most autobiographical text, displays the author’s close affinity with her writing. Creating a fiction of her own life, Deledda becomes both narrator and protagonist, self and other in the exploration of her own identity, which is integrally connected to the act of writing. The very composition of this text demonstrates the construction of identity in language and narrative which is illustrated within Deledda’s other works.