Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction.…

Eritrea does not have one official language and there is experience in using multiple languages in official government communications, education, media and the legal system. Since Eritrean independence in May 1991, Eritrean laws have been promulgated in a mix of Arabic, English and Tigrinya: some are issued in these three languages; some are…

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response…

This paper aims to explore the reasons behind the limited dissemination of Adamczewski's Metaoperational approach to language beyond the French academic sphere. The theory, which developed in and by contrastivity between 1976 and 2005, is built on the basic assumption that utterances exhibit on their surface observable traces of the utterer's…

This cross-linguistic study investigated whether the native language has any influence on lexical composition among Italian (N = 125) and Finnish (N = 116) very preterm (born at <32 gestational weeks) children at 24 months (controls: 125 Italian and 146 Finnish full-term children). The investigation also covered the effect of maternal education…

A cross-cultural approach is taken to analyse Linguistics research articles in English and Italian in terms of 1) the use of exclusive first-person subject pronouns in English and first-person inflected verbs in Italian, and 2) the passive voice in both languages and "si" constructions in Italian. The aim is to determine whether personal and…

In this article, the "multiple voices" of 13-15-year-old German and Italian adolescents in internet guest-books are analyzed. The study is based on guest-books texts with a mixture of different registers, languages and dialects. In particular, the German adolescents from the Augsburg region (Bavaria) display a strong regional linguistic…

Discusses the syntactic differences in expressing wishes or desires in Italian and Russian. (CFM)

Secondary resultatives exist in Italian and English, where both languages exhibit freedom with PP resultatives but semantic restrictions with AP resultatives (strongly in Italian and weakly in English). This contrast between freedom and restrictions is mirrored in the fact that AP arguments in postobject position as sisters to V are marked in both…

Argues that the use of thanks in closing conversations reflects not only situational parameters but also local concerns of conversational management. Analysis of naturally occurring data from English and Italian service encounters suggests that cross-cultural differences in closings may be in part the result of differences in the preferred…

States the differences between the classes of structures that admit a progressive interpretation in English and Japanese and discusses progressive aspect in these two languages on the basis of proposed universally valid definitions. It is concluded that the contrastive behavior of the English "be-ing" construction and the Japanese…

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These…

Focuses on personal pronouns in business discourse, using data from four business meetings: formal and informal, in Dutch and in Italian. The article focuses on the pronouns "I" and "we," commenting on the frequency of Dutch inclusive "we," absent from the Italian data. The article also discusses indexical and…

A collection of papers on contrastive linguistics includes: "Prototypes and Equivalence" (Tomasz P. Krzeszowski); "Comparing the Incomparable? English Adjectives in "-able" and Their Rendering in Modern Chinese" (Arthur Mettinger); "Classification and Distribution of Lexical Errors in the Written Work of German Learners of English" (Rudiger…