Academic literature on the topic 'ITALIAN CORPUS'

Previous work on learner language has highlighted the importance of having annotated resources to describe the development of interlanguage. Despite this, few learner resources, mainly for English L2, feature error and syntactic annotation. This thesis describes the development of a novel parallel learner Italian treebank, VALICO-UD. Its name suggests two main points: where the data comes from—i.e. the corpus VALICO, a collection of non-native Italian texts elicited by comic strips—and what formalism is used for linguistic annotation—i.e. Universal Dependencies (UD) formalism. It is a parallel treebank because the resource provides for each learner sentence (LS) a target hypothesis (TH) (i.e., parallel corrected version written by an Italian native speaker) which is in turn annotated in UD. We developed this treebank to be exploitable for interlanguage research and comparable with the resources employed in Natural Language Processing tasks such as Native Language Identification or Grammatical Error Identification and Correction. VALICO-UD is composed of 237 texts written by English, French, German and Spanish native speakers, which correspond to 2,234 LSs, each associated with a single TH. While all LSs and THs were automatically annotated using UDPipe, only a portion of the treebank made of 398 LSs plus correspondent THs has been manually corrected and released in May 2021 in the UD repository. This core section features also an explicit XML-based annotation of the errors occurring in each sentence. Thus, the treebank is currently organized in two sections: the core gold standard—comprising 398 LSs and their correspondent THs—and the silver standard—consisting of 1,836 LSs and their correspondent THs. In order to contribute to the computational investigation about the peculiar type of texts included in VALICO-UD, this thesis describes the annotation schema of the resource, provides some preliminary tests about the performance of UDPipe models on this treebank, reports on inter-annotator agreement results for both error and linguistic annotation, and suggests some possible applications.

The object of study of this thesis is the linguistic input in textbooks of Italian as a foreign language (FL). The intent is to study whether the linguistic changes, observed in contemporary Italian, have become part of the Italian offered as input to the learners. To identify the variety of language presented in the textbooks, some features of contemporary linguistic changes were chosen as verifiable indicators. These features, listed by Sabatini (1985: 155) as a basic part of "italiano dell’uso medio", and by Berruto (1987: 62) as part of "neostandard", are not occasional changes but are features that are gradually expanding and stabilizing into Italian standard (Sobrero 2005). A corpus consisting of 38 Italian textbooks published in Sweden and 8 in Italy in the years 2000-2012 were used to verify the manifestation of these features. The results show that the presence of neostandard features in the textbooks of Italian FL is conditioned, at first, by the rate of acceptance of those features by the linguistic norm. Thus, features that are nowadays commonly considered as normative have a high number of occurrences in the corpus. This is the case concerning lui, lei, loro as subject pronouns, the use of gli instead of loro, the use of the present tense for the future and the use of temporal che. On the other hand, features that are not considered as normative have no or very few occurrences. This is the case with gli instead of le and the use of imperfetto ipotetico. Secondly, the presence of the neostandard features in textbooks is conditioned by the instructive function of the textbooks, which shapes the typology of input introduced. Thus, occurrences of features such as cleft clauses and dislocations are mainly presented in authentic texts, oral texts, or introduced explicitly, but are rare or absent in textbooks characterized by simplified language.

This thesis carries out a corpus stylistic study of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and four of its Italian translations. It investigates the role of textual patterns as building blocks of the fictional world and triggers of literary themes. It also investigates the effects of translation on the relation between textual patterns and the fictional world, and discusses the potential consequences of translational alterations on the text’s themes. Heart of Darkness is a complex and multifaceted text that deals with a multitude of themes and has been interpreted in many different ways. By offering an overview of the text’s literary reception, I foreground two major themes that emerge from the contemporary critical debate as particularly central to the discussion about Conrad and his text: “Africa and its representation” and “race and racism”. Through a keyword analysis, I establish a connection between these themes and the lexical level of the text. Adopting Mahlberg & McIntyre’s (2011) model, I group keywords into categories that reflect specific aspects of the fictional world and the thematic concerns of the text. I then select groups of keywords that relate specifically to “Africa and its representation” and “race and racism” for more in-depth examination. Specifically, I analyse how the African jungle and the African natives are linguistically represented in the text. I demonstrate that repeated lexico-semantic patterns shape these fictional representations and play a fundamental part in the interpretation of the two themes related to them. I then focus on the Italian versions and compare them in order to show the effects of translation on the lexico-semantic patterns. I show that alterations made at the linguistic level affect the interpretational level of the translations, with potential consequences for the reception of the major themes in the target context. Finally, I use computational methods to compare the original and the translations at the level of whole texts, as opposed to feature-specific comparisons. I claim that together these two perspectives provide a more nuanced understanding of the relation between source and target texts. Through this analysis, the present thesis explores how the fictional world and literary themes are constructed and conveyed in literature and in its translation. It also contributes to the critical discussion on Heart of Darkness and proposes a methodology to analyse and compare literary translations. Finally, as an interdisciplinary project, this thesis builds on the interaction between corpus stylistics and translation studies, and strengthens this relation further.

The present paper investigates the use of two high–frequency verbs: make and take. These verbs are particularly interesting since they express basic meaning (the meaning of the verb is mostly determined by its combinations). Therefore, they do not constitute a problem in learners’ comprehension. However, because they have little semantic content, learning how to use them appropriately has proved to be tricky even for advanced learners (Howarth, 1998; Altenberg & Granger, 2001; Nesselhauf, 2003; Futgi et al. 2008). The aim of this study is to analyse learners’ ability to produce the two high-frequency verbs to uncover features of non–nativeness of learner language in relation to the use of these verbs, such as overuse/underuse of certain verbs, nouns, collocations or structures, focusing on Spanish and Italian learners of English. Corpus Linguistics (CL) is particularly useful for looking for this type of non–native usage patterns. Learner Corpora will be studied using CIA, Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger, 1998) as a method, more specifically NL/IL comparison (native language vs interlanguage) to be able to compare native and non–native speakers’ performances in comparable situations. A second type of comparison will be made between two interlanguages (Spanish and Italian). Including a second L2 variety allows to distinguish general L2 features from characteristics that are exclusive to one particular language. Authentic learner data has been retrieved from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE). ICLE contains argumentative essays produced by advanced second language learners of English from different mother–tongue backgrounds. The Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) is used as a control corpus to compare it with the learner corpora. Results bring further evidence that high-frequency verbs are difficult items even for advanced English learners. In addition, the two learner groups share some of the problems, while others, despite the similarities between the two languages, are related to the L1 of the learners. These results have pedagogical implications: teachers should aim to improve learners’ productive capacities of those items that have not been fully mastered yet, such as high-frequency verbs.

This dissertation offers a comparative study of two key figures of the Italian Renaissance, the ambassador and the courtesan, and the place of their bodies in relation to the Renaissance body politic. In studying myriad textual spaces of the body natural within writings by and about these two seemingly opposite figures, I find that these spaces range from the material to the metaphorical. In the Renaissance material spaces were increasingly allocated to both figures, urban confinement for the prostitute, and the establishment of the embassy for the ambassador. Metaphorically, the prostitute becomes the "body" of the state, while the ambassador personifies its "mind". My dissertation proves that by allocating such material and metaphorical spaces to these figures, the early modern state effectively denies them the possibility of ownership over their own bodies. This ownership, however, is rhetorically reclaimed, I argue, through the bodies of their own texts.<br>Romance Languages and Literatures

As the number of coronavirus cases increased globally, governments started to introduce restrictive measures which many individuals had never experienced before. Heads of state started to use expressions referring to ‘war’, encouraging citizens to help the ‘fight’ against the ‘invisible enemy’. In the cognitive linguist approach, metaphors are believed to involve the ‘thinking’ as well as the ‘talking’ (or writing) of one thing in terms of another. That is, similarities (or correspondences) are perceived between two different ‘domains’ such as ‘covid-19’ and ‘war’. Therefore, ‘fighting the disease’ can be ‘translated’ into ‘reducing infection, illness and death’. This dissertation aims to identify metaphorical expressions, and the associated conceptual mappings, in the coronavirus media discourse of three countries – Italy, France, and the United Kingdom – over the period of the ‘first wave’. If metaphorical expressions can highlight how we ‘think’ about an event, it is interesting to investigate if all three countries are ‘thinking’ about the novel coronavirus in the same terms. In order to tackle this question, this dissertation has five chapters. First, the cognitive linguistic approach to metaphors is discussed, focusing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). In chapter two we turn to the corpus linguistic approach and its application to metaphor research. On the basis of this theoretical background, chapter three introduces the methodology employed for this study. Chapter four presents the main results for English, French and Italian. In particular, this study found that the coronavirus is conceptualised as WAR, SUBSTANCE IN MOVEMENT, SUBSTANCE IN A CONTAINER, and OBSTACLE in all three language corpora, while WATER, FAMILY and POSSESSION are unique to the French, Italian and English samples, respectively. Finally, chapter five discusses the findings and the limitations of this study, closing with possible directions for future research.

Le but de cette thèse est d’étudier six marqueurs discursifs (désormais MDs) épistémiques du français et de l’italien, spécialisés dans l’opération dialogique qui permet d’accepter la valeur de vérité d’un contenu propositionnel proposé par l’interlocuteur et d’inscrire ce contenu propositionnel dans le savoir partagé. L’originalité de notre étude réside dans la manière non préconçue dont elle aborde les MDs épistémiques du dialogue. Après avoir défini de façon rigoureuse les notions de MD, d’épistémicité et de négociation intersubjective, nous avons recueilli un corpus représentatif de d’accord, mh, voilà en français dialogique et ho capito, mh, esatto en italien dialogique. Ce corpus est composé de 60 occurrences épistémiques par forme et prend en compte plusieurs locuteurs et situations communicatives différentes. La démarche d’annotation manuelle de notre corpus a ensuite fait émerger que les six MDs possèdent un éventail large et complexe de fonctions, agissant à plusieurs niveaux de l’architecture du discours. Dans le cadre d’une approche modulaire et guidée par les corpus, nous avons ainsi cherché au fil de notre recherche à concilier aspects théoriques, opérationnalisation de choix théoriques dans un schéma d’annotation, et analyse des données. Une comparaison entre les MDs du français et de l’italien, appuyée par des tests de significativité statistique, nous a permis finalement de constater la similitude frappante, aux niveaux local et global du dialogue, entre d’accord et ho capito, mh et mh, voilà et esatto<br>This dissertation proposes to study six epistemic discourse markers (DMs) of spoken French and Italian, specialized in the dialogic operation that allows for accepting the truth-value of a propositional content proposed by an interlocutor and for grounding the propositional content in the common ground of the speakers.The originality of our research lays in our non aprioristic approach to the epistemic DMs of dialogue.Starting from a solid definition of the notions of DM, epistemicity and intersubjective negotiation, we collected a representative corpus of d’accord, mh, voilà in spoken French dialogues and ho capito, mh, esatto in spoken Italian dialogues. The corpus is composed of 60 epistemic occurrences per form, and takes into account several different speakers and contexts.The manual annotation process of the corpus revealed that the six DMs have a large and complex spectrum of functions, belonging to different levels of discourse structure.Accordingly, in the framework of a modular and corpus-driven approach, we tried to combine theoretical aspects, operationalization of theoretical choices in an annotation scheme, and analysis of the data.A comparison between the DMs of French and Italian, supported by statistical significance tests, finally showed the remarkable similarity, at the local and global levels of dialogue, between d’accord and ho capito, mh and mh, voilà and esatto

This thesis considers the role that proper names play in British mass market women’s fiction (genre generally known as Chick Lit) by means of an analysis of the way in which those proper names have been translated into Spanish and Italian. The relationship between source text and target text is explored in terms of the procedures employed to translate each proper name. Our main hypothesis is that Toury’s (1995) law of growing standardization would prevail in the translated text in an attempt to bring the connotations and foreign elements of the source language text nearer to the target language readership. This hypothesis is tested by creating a parallel trilingual corpus containing three novels in their original English versions as well as their translations into Spanish and Italian. Using corpus processing tools, such as named-entity recognition programs and trilingual concordancers, a total of 1500 distinct proper names are extracted from these texts which means that 3000 translation instances are available for analysis. These names are categorised using a novel faceted taxonomy, and the translations are classified using a purpose-built map of translation procedures. These categorisations are then analysed using corpus processing measurements such as raw and relative frequency to detect any possible patterns in the translation of proper names in modern literature. The research shows that translators attempt to identify an ‘equilibrium’ between conserving certain elements and explaining others; while attempting to bring the connotations and foreign elements closer to the target language culture a wide variety of procedures are used. The data also reveals a more marked tendency to conserve the proper names in their original form in the Spanish target texts than in the Italian target texts, where there is more variation in the range of procedures employed. In addition to these results, a major contribution to knowledge of this research is the creation and successful application of the taxonomy and map of procedures and the processes devised for the analysis which are now available to be used in other investigations.

After experiencing an early phase of vivid interest in the 1980s and the 1990s, the search for "universals" of translation and interpreting, i.e. general features of translated and interpreted language, seems to have slipped into a phase of stagnation in the past few years. On the one hand, it seems questionable to speak of "universal" features of translation and interpreting, since both activities are inseparable from their direction and context. On the other hand, the search for "universals" can be regarded as an attempt to universalize historically and culturally determined practices. The present study focuses on Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit's "unique items hypothesis", according to which translators tend to underrepresent target-language specific items, i.e. items that lack a straightforward (lexical or grammatical) counterpart in the source language, and to replace them with alternative items, which are not incorrect, but less idiomatic and more adherent to the structure of the source language. The present study extends the hypothesis to interpreting and sets out to test it on a possible "unique item" of the language pair Italian-English, namely the 's-genitive. To this end, the 's-genitives are extracted from four sub-corpora of the European Parliament Interpreting Corpus - EPIC (interpretations from Italian into English, original English speeches, official translations from Italian into English and official transcriptions of original English speeches). The present study compares the frequency of the 's-genitives across the four sub-corpora from a monolingual intermodal perspective, to check whether interpreted and translated English actually underrepresents 's (while overrepresenting "of", which is closer to the Italian preposition "di") and whether there are differences between interpreting and translation.