The aim of the paper is to present the results of a research project called 'Tell Me', conducted from October 2018 to March 2020. The project focused on Bengali children living in Venice, Italy, and aimed to describe (1) children's languages in the home environment and at school; (2) the quality and quantity of input they receive in every language…

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…

It is proposed that, although lexical derivation has received some attention among linguists, little interest is shown in its pedagogical implications. Hypotheses about the mechanisms of derivation are outlined, current pedagogical applications are described, and further practical suggestions are made, using examples from English, French, and…

Children with specific language impairments (eight learning Italian, eight learning English as a first language) were studied for grammatical deficits. Italian-speakers used noun inflections, verb inflections, copula forms more than English-speaking counterparts, matched by utterance length. Articles were used similarly. Results were consistent…

A study investigated the linguistic behavior of three groups of speakers in reacting to accusatory complaints: (1) native speakers of Italian residing in Italy (SI); (2) native speakers of Canadian English residing in Toronto (CE); and (3) speakers of Italian residing in Toronto, first-generation immigrants, defined as speakers of Italian as a…

The properties of one of the structures of politeness in the romance languages, the deference system connected with the use of conditional tenses, are analyzed in this paper. Although only Spanish examples are given, the conclusions also apply to French, Italian and Roumanian. The first part of the paper analyzes politeness in relation to its…

Student papers presented at a sociolinguistics conference include: "La variation phonologique [d'une voyelle] a Hull"; "La force illocutoire des pronoms personnels 'je' et 'tu' en tant qu'insignes des places d'ou parlent les femmes et les hommes"; "L'emploi des modes indicatif et subjonctif dans le francais parle de la…

Children and adults speaking English, Hungarian, and Italian were asked to describe sets of pictures which manipulated the pragmatic category of givenness. The working hypothesis was that there exist rule-governed relations between the perception of certain categorical aspects of the communicative situation and the use of certain conventional…