Videotaped interaction of six infants, some deaf and some hearing, shows comparable stages and sequences of communicative development; the use of performative gestures or single vocalizations; use of referential gestures; combination of signs, gestures, and words; and signs combined with signs or words with words. (MSE)

Theoretical questions on the functional relationship between personality and social systems are extended to a consideration of social change. The analysis is made in terms of the interaction of personality structure and varying modes of social reform. (Author)

Discusses recent analyses of the adjective in Italian and stresses the importance of the position of the Italian adjective for second language learners of Italian and for Italians learning foreign languages. (CFM)

Provides guidelines for the teaching of aspect in the Italian verb system. (AM)

States that reading and written spelling skills for words and nonwords of varying length and orthographic complexity were investigated in normal Italian first and second graders. Finds that reading and written spelling are nonparallel processes and that developmental asynchrony reflects a partial structural independence of the two systems. (PA)

Focuses on language contact phenomena at the borders of Switzerland's four language communities (German, French, Italian, and Romansch), the legal status of the four Swiss national languages, and the language policies of individual bilingual and trilingual cantons. Describes the historical movements of the language boundaries, with particular…

The aim of this paper is to give a systematic account of the cases where there is no straightforward equivalence between an s-genitive and a "di" PP and to assess the relevance of such an analysis for the teaching of Italian as a foreign language in an English-speaking environment. (Author)

Martoglio's work is discussed in terms of the relationship of dialect literature and sociolinguistics in Sicilian culture. His ability to inform the speech of a character with the qualities of a particular code, somewhere between dialect and standard, is noted. (31 references) (Author/LB)

This paper argues that split-intransitive phenomena are better explained in semantic terms. A semantic analysis is carried out in Role and Reference Grammar, which assumes the theory of verb classification proposed in Dowty 1979. (49 references) (JL)

After reviewing previous research on speech acts, this article describes a study that analyzed the behavior of speakers of standard Italian in refusing an offer of food. The importance of "face" is explained, and the refusal strategies are classified into four categories: explicit, tactical, decisive, and conclusive. (CFM)

This study seeks information on the mental representation of Verb-Noun (VN) nominal compounds through neuropsychological methods. The lexical retrieval of compound nouns is tested in 30 aphasic patients using a visual confrontation naming task. The target names are VN compounds, Noun-Noun (NN) compounds, and long morphologically simple nouns…

Italian speakers were asked to name pictures of actions (e.g. "bere", to drink). Pictures were presented at the same time as distracter words that were semantically related or unrelated to the picture names, and were of the same or different grammatical class (verbs or nouns). Half of the participants named the actions as verbs in citation form,…

In this article the linguistic features of three Italian Sign Language (Lingua Italiana dei Segni, or LIS) registers are analyzed focusing on iconic phenomena. Previous treatments of iconicity and motivation in spoken and signed language are discussed. Iconicity is defined as a regular mapping between expressive form and meaning that can be active…

A detailed analysis of an Italian-American woman's speech is presented, and her interlanguage patterns are discussed in relation to a pidginization hypothesis. Data are presented on the following speech characteristics of the woman: free speech negatives, interrogatives, and present and past tense constructions. Her language is shown to be…