ITALIAN LINGUISTICS I

This course is part of the Bachelor Degree in Humanities (Lettere), curriculum of Science of the literary text and communication. The course aims to provide students with a basic knowledge of the internal structures and socio-linguistic uses and contexts of Italian. The second part of the course will analyse the relationship between common and literary Italian in the 20th century. The achievement of these objectives will enable students to apply autonomously the methods and tools of general and historical linguistics to the Italian language.

By the end of the course students are expected to be able to:
- acquire the main principles of linguistics, as far as different levels of analysis are concerned (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon etc.), with regard to the specific features of the Italian language;
- be aware of the socio-linguistic contexts of use of Italian and of the dynamics of variation, especially as far as the diaphasic and diamesic axes are concerned;
- be able to use the proper linguistic terminology concerning the internal structures of Italian and its different social uses;
- know the basic bibliographical instruments of the discipline;
- analyse an Italian literary text from a linguistic point of view, paying attention to the relationship between literary and common language.

Students planning to attend this course should have already attended at least one course of Principles of Linguistics and/or History of the Italian language.

The history of the Italian language is often presented as the history of a language that, after having had just a written existence, without having had correspondence in speech, has finally become a commonly spoken language, although its written usage is getting more and more problematic. This is particularly true with regard to the second aspect, concerning contemporary written Italian. This course aims to provide students with a basic knowledge of the internal structures and socio-linguistic uses and contexts of Italian. The second part of the course will analyse the relationship between common and literary language, drwaing particular attention to the 20th century.

P. D’ACHILLE, L’italiano contemporaneo, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2019.
P.V. MENGALDO, Storia dell’italiano nel Novecento, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2014 (selection of texts).

Handouts given in class, which will be also available on Moodle.

Further readings:
Storia dell'italiano scritto, vol. 3, Italiano dell'uso, ed. by G. Antonelli, M. Motolese, L. Tomasin, Roma, Carocci, 2014.

Non-attending students will study entirely D’Achille’s and Mengaldo’s textbooks.

Students will have to pass a written exam of one hour. Students should demonstrate their knowledge of the topics discussed in class and illustrated in the reference texts. In particular, students are expected to demonstrate their knowledge on the one hand in the general field of Italian linguistics, by recognizing the specific features of Italian on a phonological, morphological, and especially textual and lexical level; on the other hand of the relationships between common and literary Italian. Students should be able to analyse texts produced in different historical, geographic and socio-linguistic contexts, and to make use of a convenient scientific terminology.

Frontal lessons; all the texts discussed in class will be available on the e-learning platform moodle.unive.it.

Italian

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