Mother Tongues and Other Reflections on the Italian Language

Mother Tongues and Other Reflections on the Italian Language PDF Author: Giulio C. Lepschy
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802037299
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
In this collection of six scholarly essays on the Italian language, Giulio Lepschy discusses issues ranging from Italian literary and spoken history to prosody and a play of the Italian Renaissance.

Mother Tongue

Mother Tongue PDF Author: Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
Publisher: North Point Press
ISBN: 0374720851
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
A probing and poetic examination of language, food, faith, and family attachment in Italian life through the eyes of an American who moved to Parma with her husband and family. In the 1980s, the American writer Wallis Wilde-Menozzi moved permanently with her Italian husband and her daughter to Parma, a sophisticated city in northern Italy, where he became a professor of biology. Her search for rootedness in the city that was to be her home introduced her to complexities in her identity as she migrated into another language and looked for links beyond the joys of Verdi, Correggio, and Parmesan cheese, which visitors have rightly extolled for centuries. The local resistance to change perceived as individualistic led Wilde-Menozzi to explore the pull and challenge of difference and discover the backbone she needed for artistic freedom. In Mother Tongue, Wilde-Menozzi offers stories of far-sighted lives, remarkable Parma men and remarkable women, including the Renaissance abbess Giovanna Piacenza, the fighting Donella Rossi Sanvitale, and her own indefatigable mother-in-law. Framed with a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Patricia Hampl, this classic on diversity and tolerance, family, faith, and food in Italy and the United States is at once timeless and timely, a “large, beautiful window into the intelligent, literate, reflective life of Italy” (Shirley Hazzard).

The Works of Elena Ferrante

The Works of Elena Ferrante PDF Author: Grace Russo Bullaro
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137575808
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
This book is the first dedicated volume of academic analysis on the monumental work of Elena Ferrante, Italy's most well-known contemporary writer. The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring the Margins brings together the most exciting and innovative research on Ferrante's treatment of the intricacies of women's lives, relationships, struggles, and dilemmas to explore feminist theory in literature; questions of gender in twentieth-century Italy; and the psychological and material elements of marriage, motherhood, and divorce. Including an interview from Ann Goldstein, this volume goes beyond "Ferrante fever" to reveal the complexity and richness of a remarkable oeuvre.

Dante's Plurilingualism

Dante's Plurilingualism PDF Author: Sara Fortuna
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351570196
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Dante's conception of language is encompassed in all his works and can be understood in terms of a strenuous defence of the volgare in tension with the prestige of Latin. By bringing together different approaches, from literary studies to philosophy and history, from aesthetics to queer studies, from psychoanalysis to linguistics, this volume offers new critical insights on the question of Dantes language, engaging with both the philosophical works characterized by an original project of vulgarization, and the poetic works, which perform a new language in an innovative and self-reflexive way. In particular, Dantes Plurilingualism explores the rich and complex way in which Dantes linguistic theory and praxis both informs and reflects an original configuration of the relationship between authority, knowledge and identity that continues to be fascinated by an ideal of unity but is also imbued with a strong element of subjectivity and opens up towards multiplicity and modernity.

La Bella Lingua

La Bella Lingua PDF Author: Dianne Hales
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767932110
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A celebration of the language and culture of Italy, La Bella Lingua is the story of how a language shaped a nation, told against the backdrop of one woman’s personal quest to speak fluent Italian. For anyone who has been to Italy, the fantasy of living the Italian life is powerfully seductive. But to truly become Italian, one must learn the language. This is how Dianne Hales began her journey. In La Bella Lingua, she brings the story of her decades-long experience with the “the world’s most loved and lovable language” together with explorations of Italy’ s history, literature, art, music, movies, lifestyle and food in a true opera amorosa — a labor of her love of Italy. Over the course of twenty-five years, she has studied Italian through Berlitz, books, CDs, podcasts, private tutorials and conversation groups, and, most importantly, time spent in Italy. In the process the Italian language became not just a passion and a pleasure, but a passport into Italy’s storia and its very soul. She invites readers to join her as she traces the evolution of Italian in the zesty graffiti on the walls of Pompeii, in Dante’s incandescent cantos and in Boccaccio’s bawdy Decameron. She portrays how social graces remain woven into the fabric of Italian: even the chipper “ciao,” which does double duty as “hi” and “bye,” reflects centuries of bella figura. And she exalts the glories of Italy’s food and its rich and often uproarious gastronomic language: Italians deftly describe someone uptight as a baccala (dried cod), a busybody who noses into everything as a prezzemolo (parsley), a worthless or banal movie as a polpettone (large meatball). Like Dianne, readers of La Bella Lingua will find themselves innamorata, enchanted, by Italian, fascinated by its saga, tantalized by its adventures, addicted to its sound, and ever eager to spend more time in its company.

Foreign Language Made Easy

Foreign Language Made Easy PDF Author: Ken Jeremiah
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595348629
Category : Grammar, Comparative and general
Languages : en
Pages : 111

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Book Description
Many high school and university students find foreign language classes difficult. Although learning a language is a natural process, students study languages inefficiently and they lack effective strategies for language learning. Foreign Language Made Easy is designed to make studying a foreign language an easy and enjoyable experience. The best techniques for foreign language success are explained in a simple format that anyone can follow. Effective techniques for note taking specifically designed for the foreign language classroom are addressed, as are successful methods to learn grammatical structures and effectively increase vocabulary. The last sections of Foreign Language Made Easy are language-specific, and include the most common languages taught in the United States, such as Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, German, Japanese, and Chinese. Common errors are explained, and simple techniques are presented that will help students to succeed. Everyone can learn a foreign language. By following the suggestions presented in this text, even students that previously found learning a foreign language difficult will meet with success.

The Routledge Introduction to Italian Linguistics

The Routledge Introduction to Italian Linguistics PDF Author: Cinzia Russi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000839575
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The Routledge Introduction to Italian Linguistics offers a systematic and comprehensive overview of the linguistic structure of the Italian language, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, syntax, semantics, and sociolinguistics. The manual includes a historical sketch of the Italian language, which outlines the central phases of its emergence and process of standardization. Written in clear, concise language and taking a descriptive, theory-neutral approach, this is the ideal companion for advanced students of the Italian language and those studying Italian and Romance linguistics. After sketching the most important phases of the process of standardization of Italian and introducing the main varieties of Italian as classified from a social and geographical perspective, this introductory text addresses the core topics of Italian linguistics as pertaining to the sound system and word and sentence structure. The text adopts a descriptive approach and requires no previous knowledge of linguistics since technical terms are carefully explained and illustrated by numerous examples. Thus, it can serve as a reference tool for instructors of Italian and anyone interested in advancing their knowledge of the Italian language or familiarizing themselves with Italian linguistics.

Towards a New Standard

Towards a New Standard PDF Author: Massimo Cerruti
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501501046
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
In many European languages the National Standard Variety is converging with spoken, informal, and socially marked varieties. In Italian this process is giving rise to a new standard variety called Neo-standard Italian, which partly consists of regional features. This book contributes to current research on standardization in Europe by offering a comprehensive overview of the re-standardization dynamics in Italian. Each chapter investigates a specific dynamic shaping the emergence of Neo-standard Italian and Regional Standard Varieties, such as the acceptance of previously non-standard features, the reception of Old Italian features excluded from the standard variety, the changing standard language ideology, the retention of features from Italo-Romance dialects, the standardization of patterns borrowed from English, and the developmental tendencies of standard Italian in Switzerland. The contributions investigate phonetic/phonological, prosodic, morphosyntactic, and lexical phenomena, addressed by several empirical methodologies and theoretical vantage points. This work is of interest to scholars and students working on language variation and change, especially those focusing on standard languages and standardization dynamics.

Literary Multilingualism in the Borderlands

Literary Multilingualism in the Borderlands PDF Author: Marianna Deganutti
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000910431
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This book focuses on literary multilingualism and specifically on the challenging condition of writing in Trieste, a key European borderland located at the intersection between the Latin, Germanic and Slav civilisations. By focusing on some of the most representative modern writers operating in the area, such as Italo Svevo, Boris Pahor, Claudio Magris and James Joyce, this work offers a wide-ranging discussion of multilingual practices deriving from the different language choices made by these writers. Along with the most common manifest strategies, such as code-switching and hybridisations, Deganutti highlights how Triestine writers found innovative latent practices to engage with multilingualism, such as writing in an analogical way or exploiting internal linguistic stratifications. Moreover, she shows how they provided answers to the several linguistic, cultural and even political challenges they were subjected to, with the result of redefining linguistic boundaries that clearly separate different tongues. This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers and academics interested in literary multilingualism in the fields of sociolinguistics, borderland studies and comparative literature.

My Two Italies

My Two Italies PDF Author: Joseph Luzzi
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374298696
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
A child of Italian immigrants and scholar of Italian literature paints an intimate portrait that blends together history and the unusual to show how his 'two Italies' join and clash in unexpected ways.