La période 1870-1914 est une ère de paix relative pour la France. Apres la défaite de 1870, la politique revancharde française ranime les efforts impérialistes de colonisation en Afrique et dans les iles. Cet élan colonialiste se traduit dans la pratique du sport qui gagne de popularité et devient le moyen idéal d’acheminer les idéaux républicains. L’alpinisme et la course aux sommets des Alpes deviennent alors symboliques de l’imaginaire de conquête présent dans l’esprit de la bourgeoisie européenne. Bien que ce phénomène soit l’objet de plusieurs études historico-culturelles, telles que celles d’Olivier Hoibian, Philippe Joutard et Dominique Lejeune, rares sont les études de la représentation de la mentalité colonialiste dans les œuvres de littérature alpine, qui, selon moi, capturent cette mentalité de façon unique et forte. L’analyse littéraire des deux textes sélectionnés montre comment la mentalité impérialiste se traduit dans l’appropriation et l’exploitation de l’espace montagnard. Les notions de progrès et de civilisation jouent le rôle d’étendards pour une domination évidente du capital et de la modernisation qui caractérise l’Europe du XIXe siècle, et auxquels les Alpes n’échappent pas.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the current linguistic situation of the Venetian language (a minority language spoken in the northeastern Italian region of Veneto) and its relationship with Italian, the official language of Italy. This is a study of Venetian people and how they are reacting to the changes occurring to their language. To research the situation, I traveled to Italy, to the region of Veneto. My objective was to investigate and determine whether or not Venetian is, in fact, a language. If it is, is it on the verge of disappearing, or is there a chance that it might be maintained? Will Venetians shift completely from speaking their vernaculars to using only Italian? To gather data, I used qualitative research including participant observation, open-ended unstructured interviews with consultants, as well as internet and archival research in order to be able to glimpse the situation as seen by those who live it. Because I speak Italian and have relatives in the region, I was allowed to take part in many situations where I was able to observe familial language use, as well as the public attitudes concerning Venetian. I analyzed the Venetian situation by examining the ways in which we look at the words "language" and "dialect" from the linguistic, political and sociolinguistic perspectives, I looked at the situation through anthropological and socio-psychological theories of language choice, and how we understand the indicators of language loss, ethnicity, ethnic group strategies, and changes in identity as they relate to language shift. Although Venetian is a dialect in the political sense, subordinate to the official language, Italian, I found that the Venetian language is not derived from Italian, and so does not fit the linguistic definition of a dialect. However, it has been labeled a dialect and is understood as such by most Italians, including Venetians. This labelization has encouraged negative stereotyping and a measure of disuse. However, the recent secessionist movement has highlighted some of the linguistic issues, and brought more attention to the possibility of preserving Venetian. I recommend changes that alter the negative attitudes towards Venetian and other vernaculars, changes that include focusing on encouraging new and innovative utilization of local languages (art, literature and plays, etc.) and establishing and implementing curricula in the educational system that emphasizes the regional history and its contribution to the present day Italy. Changes such as those mentioned should encourage more acceptance of others and encourage the usage of local languages as well as increase peoples' pride in their ethnic heritage. / Graduation date: 2003

The aim of the present study is to examine the interactional functions of code-switching in plurilingual conversation, with a particular focus on those related to the elaboration of the social identities of the interlocutors, i. e. their identity work. The adopted analytical model was initiated by Auer, and further developed by Gafaranga, who combined it with the Membership Categorization Analysis elaborated by Sacks. The study is based on a corpus consisting of the audio recorded dinner talk of an Italian-Swedish family whose members use Swedish, Italian and a Ligurian dialect, and focuses on the sequential progression of the talk in interaction, thus based on an approach proper of conversation analysis. The participants create and display their different roles (identities), which are related to both group membership and individuality, a subsequent distinction made by Fant. Code-switching is used as a communicative strategy among the speakers and is used to make relevant identities, as well as a tool for the management of the interaction. The analysis is divided in two distinctive parts: one related to the code-switching connected to the organisational management of the conversation, the other connected to the identity work of the interlocutors. The linguistic codes used within the group are either inclusive (Swedish, Italian) or selective (Ligurian) and the analysis indicates a general inclusion rather than exclusion of interlocutors, as the speakers accommodating to the linguistic preferences and competences of the interlocutor. The speakers, when selecting a code, thus make use of recipient design, a concept worked out by Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson. They choose code in order to include a particular interlocutor, adjusting to the language preferences of the other. There are some instances of asymmetrical plurilingual conversation, in which the interlocutors maintain different codes, but since the code choice appears to be anticipated by the addressee the interaction runs smoothly between them. As for the direction of the code switch, two different tendencies emerge: one in the switches connected to the identity work of the participants in which the direction of the switches seems to be highly significant. The other in the switches connected to the management of the conversation in which the direction proves to be reversible.

Diplomarbeit - Universität, Innsbruck, 2002. / University publication. Includes bibliographical references (p. 136-141).

This study is a comparative analysis of the syntax of adverbials in Chinese and Italian in the context of an anti-symmetric view of clause structure. Through a detailed investigation of selected sentence adverbs, aspect adverbs and manner adverbs, various similarities and differences between Italian and Chinese are identified. Chinese adverbials are mostly pre-verbal (with a few exceptions) while in Italian they can also appear after the verb. Such differences are plausibly accounted for through the verb-movement analysis: the Italian verb raises, overtly, to the left of adverbs, probably as a consequence of the rich inflectional morphology, while in Chinese the verb cannot overtly raise out of VP, due to the scarce inflectional morphology of the language. The traditional analysis of adverbs as adjuncts, coupled with directionality parameters, is not needed in order to explain the facts. The study shows that when adverbs such as the Italian adverb presto and the corresponding Chinese adverb kuai (‘quickly’) appear in different syntactic positions, they may receive different interpretations. This fact cannot be properly captured by the adjunct analysis, but it is predicted by the F-Spec hypothesis, according to which each class of adverbs occupies a specific syntactic position within the functional projections above VP. The double analysis of Italian bene (‘well’), which can be an adverb but can also (in specific cases) be interpreted as a predicate, is a clear example in support of the functional vs. predicational nature of adverbs, a fact also noted in the predicational analysis of the Chinese post-verbal V-deconstructions. Finally, Italian adverbs like stranamente (‘oddly’) are ambiguous between a clausal and a manner reading when appearing in post-verbal / pre-object position, while in Chinese the corresponding adverb qiguai shows the same ambiguity in the pre-verbal position. This, again, is associated with the possibility in Italian, but not in Chinese, for the verb to raise to the left of adverbs. Overall, the study supports the view that several word order and interpretative properties which differ between languages can be reduced to a few abstract syntactic principles. / published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Dialects have always had a negative reputation, and have been considered beneath the national language. Even the literature composed in the various regional languages has been considered inferior to the Italian one until only a few years ago, because it was thought that this literature had as an exclusive theme the peasant-popular world. / This thesis will not only demonstrate that dialects are languages deserving of respect, but also that Lucano dialect literature is not bogged down to the peasant-popular world. In fact, it is capable of expressing any concept that any national language is capable of, even if that concept does not originate in the peasant-popular world.

Teaching and learning foreign languages has always been a source of debate. This research begins by tracing the evolution of teaching methods and approaches. It proceeds to describe how the teaching and learning of Standard Italian at the post-secondary level and in adult education in Montreal is affected by the multicultural nature of the community. The analysis of individual textbooks used in post-secondary and adult instruction in Montreal and the surrounding area follows. This study should provide an impetus for further investigation regarding the relationship between foreign language acquisition and the choice of textbooks for classroom use and it could provide solutions for some of the pedagogical problems arising from Montreal's linguistic plurality.

Thesis--Marburg. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 220-253) and index.

Este trabalho pretende contribuir para o estudo da Lexicografia no Brasil e abordar um assunto pouco estudado na literatura metalexicográfica: a informação fônica nos dicionários. Ainda que a principal função dos dicionários seja a de inventariar as palavras de um idioma e oferecer seu significado, é sabido que os consulentes esperam muito mais dessas obras. Além do significado, os usuários desejam encontrar nos dicionários a maior quantidade possível de esclarecimentos gramaticais. Dado que a pronúncia está entre as informações que constam nos dicionários, este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar essas indicações em dicionários monolíngues das línguas italiana e portuguesa e em dicionários bilíngues italiano/português. A pesquisa visa responder, com a metodologia empregada, as seguintes indagações: 1) qual sistema de notação é utilizado para anotar a pronúncia das entradas? 2) como a informação fônica é descrita no guia de pronúncia dos dicionários? 3) os dicionários descrevem as variações de pronúncia existentes nas línguas em estudo? Instruções de como pronunciar as palavras propiciam autonomia para que os aprendizes possam produzir oralmente as palavras. Com as análises, foi possível verificar se os dicionários em estudo conseguem fornecer ao consulente, de forma clara e satisfatória, as informações que ele busca quanto à pronúncia. Por fim, a proposta de melhorias nos sistemas adotados pelos dicionários no que tange a pronúncia tem o intuito de tornar o dicionário uma ferramenta mais útil no ensino/aprendizagem da produção oral das línguas italiana e portuguesa. / This work is intended to collaborate with the study of lexicography in Brazil as well as to address the subject yet little studied in literature metalexicography: phonic information in dictionaries. Although the main function of dictionaries is to relate a series of words from one language and also to offer its meaning it is known that the querents expect a lot more of this kind of publication. Besides the meaning, users wish to find in dictionaries as much grammatical clarification as possible. Since the pronunciation is among the information contained in the dictionaries, this work aims to analyze these indications in monolingual dictionaries of the Italian and Portuguese languages and in bilingual Italian / Portuguese dictionaries. The research primarily aims to answer, with the methodology applied, the following questions: 1) Which notation system is used to annotate the pronunciation of the entries? 2) How is phonic information described in the dictionary pronunciation guide? 3) Do the dictionaries describe the variations of pronunciation in the languages studied? The instructions on how to pronounce the words provide autonomy so the learners can produce words orally. By the conduced analysis it was possible to verify if the studied dictionaries can provide the querent with the information for pronunciation searched in a clear and satisfactory way. Finally, the proposed improvements in the systems adopted by the dictionaries in terms of pronunciation aims to make the dictionary a more useful tool in teaching-learning oral production of the Italian and Portuguese languages.

Prior to the 1848 Revolution in France, a democrat and communist named Étienne Cabet organized one of the largest worker's movements in Europe. Called "Icarians," members of this party ascribed to the social philosophy and utopian vision outlined in Cabet's 1840 novel, Voyage en Icarie, written while in exile. This thesis analyzes the conception of space developed in Cabet's book, and tracks the group's actual spatial practice over the next seventeen years. During this period, thousands of Icarians led by Cabet attempted to establish an actual colony in the wilderness of the United States. Eventually settling in the recently abandoned Mormon enclave of Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1849, Cabet and the Icarians struggled to find meaning in the existing architecture and design of the city. This work describes the spatial artifact that they inherited, and recounts how the Icarians modified and used the existing space for their purposes. The thesis concludes that they were not ultimately successful in reconciling their philosophy with the urban form of Nauvoo, and posits a spatial cause for the demise of their colony.