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The exaltation of Italian national identity in the discourse of Matteo Renzi
74-95Views:220Nations are one of the most well-established constructs in our society, and they represent a very attractive benchmark for personal and social identification. Political speeches, as well as, for example, media discourse and popular culture, constantly reiterate myth, culture and history of nations in order to reaffirm and preserve their positive image, and this tendency doesn’t seem to be weakened by some contemporary events like globalization and the reinforcement of transnational systems.
As a proof of this trend, the present work proposes an in-depth analysis of the speech held by the then Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi at the European Parliament on the occasion of the inauguration of the Italian semester of presidency on July 2, 2014, aiming to demonstrate that also supranational contexts are exploited to reiterate national identity and priorities.
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Insults, medical terminology and metaphorization in a corpus of Facebook comments: an investigation of some ableist slurs
14-33Views:311The aim of this article is to analyse a corpus of Facebook comments extracted by the public pages of Luigi Di Maio, Matteo Renzi and Matteo Salvini concerning the year 2018 (Orrù 2020). The analysis aims to focus on three Italian ableist slurs about cognitive impairment (cerebroleso, handicappato and ritardato) used as metaphors in online speech acts. Comments will be analysed with a multifaceted approach. The theoretical point of view will involve studies about insults as linguistic and pragmatic acts (Brown & Levinson 1987; Culpeper 1996; Alfonzetti 2017), slurs and hate speech (Bianchi 2021; Cepollaro 2020), ableism built by medical terminology (Gualdo & Telve 2011), and finally metaphor (Mortara Garavelli 1988). With these theoretical bases, inquiries will be conducted with a corpus-based methodology, focusing on metaphors and cluster, syntax, and pragmatics of the linguistic acts involving target words.
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Translate or not, foreign words
8-37Views:283In the early twentieth century, Gabriele D’Annunzio successfully proposed tramezzino instead of the English sandwich. Equally successful are some proposals formulated by Bruno Migliorini in the 1930s: autista and regista for the French chauffeur and régisseur. However, the original coinages of Arrigo Castellani in 1987 fail to take root: fubbia for smog, guardabimbi for babysitter, intredima for weekend, velopattino for windsurf, and vendistica for marketing. At the beginning of the 2000s, the volume by Giovanardi, Gualdo, and Coco Italian – English 1-1 reopened the debate among scholars. In 2015 the petition “Dillo in italiano”, launched by Annamaria Testa, achieved enormous success and demonstrated the intolerance of a large part of public opinion towards the massive influx of anglicisms. Following the petition, the Accademia della Crusca established the Incipit Group, a group of experts responsible for monitoring the entry of new anglicisms and suggesting possible Italian alternatives. In 2017, the Nuovo Devoto-Oli dictionary included in its lemmary the section Per dirlo in italiano, containing over 200 cards, that trace a brief history of as many English words or phrases that have penetrated Italian, explaining their meaning and context of use and suggesting a possible Italian equivalent. Il Nuovo Devoto-Oli broadly welcomes the most common anglicisms, helping those who do not know their precise meaning; but at the same time it has no reluctance to propose an Italian alternative, in the profound belief that such an approach is helpful to the reader and makes a positive contribution to the Italian language itself.
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Cogas, janas and the others: mythical and fantastic creatures in Sardinian literature and cinema
56-76Views:426Sardinian contemporary literature and films have recently recovered an extensive heritage of folk myths and legends taken from the oral tradition. Legendary figures, such as accabadoras (female figure who was enabled with the task of easing the sufferings of the dying people), and fantasy creatures, such as cogas, surbiles (‘vampire witches’), janas (‘fairies, pixies’), and panas (‘the ghosts of women who died in childbirth’) are being revived by writers and film directors with the purpose to bring their memory back to life and share it with a wide audience of readers and spectators.
The analysis of imaginary and legendary creatures in Sardinian contemporary literature cannot overlook orality and its central role in shaping popular imagination over the centuries. Writing has replaced orality, whilst mass media and digital media are getting the upper hand over storytelling as a practice of community and family aggregation, meant to mark the long working hours and scare the children, amongst the most common functions of Sardinian oral storytelling.
The literary corpus includes fairy tales, novels, tales and legends dealing with the Sardinian oral tradition, whilst on the cinematic side I will examine short films, feature films and documentaries made in Sardinia over the last fifteen years.
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Dictionaries, synonymies and usage labels
108-122Views:401The extraordinary richness of the Italian language is not always adequately enhanced by dictionaries. In the era of the digitization of the dictionary, while outdated some definitional procedures continue to survive. Present or past participles that also have adjective functions (e.g. nascente) are sometimes defined with the formula “In the meanings of the verb”. The nouns indicating quality, condition or status (e.g. ordinariness) are often defined with the formula “being + basic adjective (ordinary)”. These definitions, whose informative value is practically zero, certainly do not help to the reader. The structure of a dictionary of synonyms is completely different, which must try to guide the reader in the maze of possible lexical alternatives with the aim of helping him to find the most suitable terms to express the different nuances of the same concept. The search for semantic equivalences thus becomes a discovery of the relevant differences that exist between one word and another. Of essential importance in this regard is the function of the usage labels: the distinction between basic words, words of high use, words of high availability and common words, very useful in many areas, is not of great help for a writer interested in information stylistic. The classification by frequency bands does not warn us e.g. that volto is of higher register than faccia, autovettura is of more formal register than macchina, cinematografo in the sense of ‘cinema hall’ is antiquated compared to cinema
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Populism: A Controversial Historiographical Category
80-94Views:449The note stems from the need to carry out a survey on recent international literature dedicated to populism, starting above all from the considerations contained in The Populist Temptation by Eichengreen, and in From Fascism to Populism in History by Finchelstein, as well as the results from the Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Rovira Kaltwasser, Taggart, Ochoa Espejo and Ostiguy. The contrasting reflections recorded around a phenomenon so debated allow to delineate the elements, that justify the introduction of a historiographical category in its own right and to project some definitions on the entire history of the Italian political system. The intention of this overview is to construct a catalog of the various interpretations of populism that have emerged in recent years. It is noteworthy that in the years following World War II until the present day, publications on populism have been produced in a discontinuous fashion, thus rendering the subject even more elusive and unclassifiable.
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Narrating the crisis and legitimizing the use of emergency legislation: political crime as a premise of the authoritarian state
18-29Views:76During the liberal era, from unification to the rise of fascism, many governments experimented with emergency legislation to control public order or repress the mobilization of opposing political groups. With the approval of the new penal code, political crimes remained an ill-defined offense. Consequently, Crispi and Di Rudinì implemented a state of siege on two separate occasions to condemn any attempt to spread values and principles contrary to the old constitutional foundations of the Albertine Statute.