Pier Marco Bertinetto

The speech audio documents are in danger of disappearing, because of the poor quality of the material on which they were recorded and the rapid evolution of the recording formats. Moreover, the speech recordings were often made with non-professional systems or in fieldwork circumstances (i.e. with low quality), and in particular cases even risk being forgotten, due to widespread lack of well-established archiving procedures. The paper will describe the protocols defined in some projects carried out by the authors (with particular attention to the project focusing on Carta dei Dialetti Italiani, a unique open reels archive of Italian dialects). The experimental results prove the effectiveness of the preservation protocol defined by the authors

... et al. 1991: 489): (i) Gianni disse a Giorgioi di PROi uscire (ii) Giannii dice di partire PROi domani. Benché l'orientamento sia prospettivo in entrambi i casi, (i) esprime senso iussivo, (ii) senso intenzionale. Page 11. 19 IFS di ...

Mentre storici orali e antropologi hanno da più parti sottolineato l’urgenza di procedere alla tutela degli archivi sonori raccolti in ambiti non solo accademici (e.g. Contini-Martini 1993; Andreini-Clemente 2007), solo di recente il problema della conservazione dei beni vocali è diventato urgente nella comunità dei linguisti, che pure ha accumulato nei decenni una mole considerevole di materiale audio. Un archivio sonoro preziosissimo, in grado di fornirci in maniera capillare e dettagliata una fotografia dei dialetti italiani all’altezza degli anni Sessanta e Settanta, quale quello rappresentato dalla Carta dei Dialetti Italiani (CDI) non è al momento fruibile alla comunità scientifica. L’impresa della CDI ha rappresentato una delle più importanti iniziative di raccolta dialettale dell’ultimo dopoguerra. Il suo primo impianto, ideato da Oronzo Parlangèli, prevedeva un’inchiesta di fonetica e di morfologia in ogni comune italiano. Negli scritti del dialettologo salentino (vd. almeno Parlangèli 1970) si possono trovare molte informazioni relative al concepimento dell’impresa, alle riflessioni teoriche e metodologiche sull’inchiesta, alle difficoltà pratiche (anche di tipo ‘istituzionale’, nei rapporti con la Discoteca di Stato e con il CNR) incontrate durante l’allestimento di un progetto di così vasta scala e, per la prima volta nel panorama italiano, veramente ‘collettivo’, come ebbe a scrivere Carlo Battisti (1967). Con la scomparsa improvvisa di Parlangèli, il coordinamento dei lavori passò da Bari al Centro di Studio per la Dialettologia Italiana istituito a Padova nel 1971 e diretto da Manlio Cortelazzo. La Carta dei dialetti italiani ha rappresentato senz’altro “il primo caso in Italia di grande raccolta di geografia linguistica, con annesso archivio sonoro, realizzata con l’uso del magnetofono”, su cui “si è fatta le ossa una schiera di dialettologi” (Telmon 1999: 29). Eppure, questo prezioso giacimento sonoro è stato ignorato dalla comunità scientifica e rischia di essere perduto per sempre (le bobine sono ora parcellizzate in singoli centri di studio o presso singoli studiosi): non esiste, a nostra conoscenza, un censimento pubblico complessivo che renda conto del numero totale delle inchieste svolte, della qualità in cui versano i supporti sonori, nonché dei verbali esistenti. Per queste ragioni il progetto Gra.fo (Grammo-foni. Le soffitte della voce), condotto dalla Scuola Normale Superiore e dall’Università degli Studi di Siena, finanziato dalla Regione Toscana (PAR FAS 2007-2013 Regione Toscana Linea di Azione 1.1.a.3.), ha avviato la digitalizzazione delle inchieste toscane relative alla CDI. In parallelo è stata condotta in tutta Italia una ‘campagna di sollecitazione’ presso i singoli dialettologi che all’epoca parteciparono alle inchieste per ricostruire il quadro complessivo delle audiobobine ancora esistenti. L’intervento si propone, da un lato, di descrivere la struttura e la composizione dell’archivio futuro di Gra.fo (nastroteca e documentazione cartacea delle inchieste toscane), e dall’altro di presentare alla comunità scientifica un saggio dell’utilità, ai fini di una ricerca dialettologica diacronica, di documenti sonori che rischiano di venire inevitabilmente perduti (e che purtuttavia hanno rappresentato la base empirica delle monografie nella collana Profilo dei dialetti italiani). Per quanto riguarda gli aspetti più propriamente tecnici, sarà presentato un protocollo relativo alla digitalizzazione del materiale sonoro. Per quanto riguarda gli aspetti archivistici, verrà fornito un inventario pressoché definitivo delle bobine originali presenti al CNR di Padova, delle copie conservate a Firenze e del materiale presente nei singoli centri di studio e gruppi di ricerca contattati; sarà inoltre presentata una proposta di classificazione e catalogazione del cosiddetto ‘materiale di corredo’ (verbali, ‘diari di campo’, annotazioni sparse), su cui al momento non esistono standard riconosciuti: non a caso l’archivio sonoro, un’etichetta che per certi versi è quasi un ossimoro, “supera il concetto tradizionale di archivio e investe un sistema di memoria più ampio” (Gentile 1999)

Tuscany is a privileged area for working on oral documents, as it abounds with both public and private sound archives, collected in different fields of research by scholars as well as amateurs. The majority of these archives are analog and therefore risk deterioration unless they are transferred to the digital domain. Grammo-foni. Le soffitte della voce (Gra.fo), a two-year project jointly conducted by Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Siena (Regione Toscana PAR FAS 2007-13), has undertaken the challenging task of putting together different kinds of expertise and building a digitization and cataloguing system with the aim of creating a regional management system for sound archives. With over 2,100 hours of digitized recordings and the incredibly vast range of type of documents (biographies, linguistic questionnaires, folk songs, etc.) and topics covered (history, politics, economy, anthropology, linguistics, folk literature, etc.), the Gra.fo archive is a unique and exemplary accomplishment in the Italian panorama

The Zamucoan family consists of two currently spoken languages, Ayoreo (= AY) and Chamacoco (= CH), plus a language spoken in the 18th century in the Jesuit missions of south-eastern Bolivia, Old Zamuco (= OZ), of which we have the relatively detailed documentation provided by Father Ignace Chomé (see Lussagnet 1958 [= ante 1745], Ciucci 2018, Ciucci forthcoming a). Although other Zamucoan dialects/languages have existed in the past according to historical data (Hervás y Panduro 1784: 32), very little is known about them except for a few word lists. However, the whole group must have been quite small at any time. Ayoreo and Chamacoco speakers presently number approximately 4,500 and 2,000, respectively. Their traditional settlement was in the Northern Chaco lowlands, between Bolivia and Paraguay, where they used to have a seminomadic life, still pursued up to the present by a tiny group of Ayoreo. Ciucci & Bertinetto (2015, 2017) proposed a plausible reconstruction of the Proto-Zamucoan (= P-Z) person inflections in pronouns, verbs and possessable nouns (a paper on the reconstruction of nominal suffixes is in preparation). The following diagram assigns Old Zamuco and Ayoreo to the same branch of the family, as suggested by the large overlap of their lexicon. By contrast, Chamacoco (with its two dialects, Ebitoso and Tomaraho) shows no more than 30% of lexical similarity with the sister languages. The split of the two branches must therefore have occurred a long time ago, as also confirmed by the glottochronological computations of Wichmann et al. (2016). In terms of grammatical structure, however, there are several features selectively shared by Old Zamuco or Ayoreo on the one hand, and Chamacoco on the other hand. Hence, despite its tiny size, this linguistic family can be regarded as an ideal training field for reconstruction exercises. This is what this paper aims to show with specific focus on the verbal system

The paper analyses the conflicting issues in action when dealing with Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) shielded in audio digital archives, as the demand for open access conflicts with ownership rights and ethical issues. It describes two case studies in order to evaluate the procedures used for doing research on oral materials respecting the rights of others: the first refers to the activities carried on at the Phonothèque de la Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme, a French sound archive; the second refers to the solutions envisaged by an Italian research project, Grammo-foni. Le soffitte della voce (Gra.fo), jointly conducted by Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and the University of Siena, and financed by Regione Toscana (PAR FAS 2007-13)

Research on Speech Rhythm (SR) entered a new phase around the turn of the new Millennium, when an entirely new algorithm to compare the rhythmical inclination of individual languages was proposed (see Ramus et al. 1999). The suggestion was soon followed by other scholars, suggesting revised or modified versions. The present authors will not even attempt at quoting them all. Among the revised versions, one should especially consider the Varco (Dellwo 2004) and the " semi-syllable " models (Rouas & Farinas 2004). These, like the Ramusian proposal, may be called " static " models, for the actual sequence of the relevant intervals (consonantal and vocalic) does not play a role. The results are not affected by any possible permutation of intervals; the algorithms provide an overall measure characterizing any speech stretch in its entirety, be it the standard variation of the relevant interval's duration, their mean error, the global percent value etc. Among the mo...

It is generally assumed that, within an inflectional paradigm, some forms are cognitively more salient than others. Although this effect is the result of various concomitant factors to which all forms of the given paradigm concur, the existence of salient forms is crucial to assist the speaker in predicting the remaining forms of the paradigm. The notion of ‘salient form(s)’ was implicit in the so-called Kennform(en) proposed by Wolfgang Ullrich Wurzel as inflectional class marker(s). A possible candidate to salience is the so-called citation-form, i.e. the form by means of which lexemes are referred to in a dictionary, but this should be checked on a language-by-language basis. The present paper addresses the task of defining the most salient form(s) within the Italian verb paradigm. By means of three lexical decision experiments, the performance on the Infinitive (the citation-form) was compared with the performance on its most likely competitors, i.e. the Present Indicative 3SG, ...

This paper presents a comparative analysis of the verb system of the three known Zamucoan languages, namely Old Zamuco, described by the Jesuit father Ignace Chomé in the first half of the eighteenth century, plus Ayoreo and Chamacoco, still actively spoken in the Chaco area between Bolivia and Paraguay. The analysis has confirmed the internal consistency of this language family, allowing us to build a plausible reconstruction of the Proto-Zamucoan verb system. The analysis has unsurprisingly pointed out Old Zamuco as the most conservative language among the three; Chamacoco, by contrast, appears to be the most innovative. This notwithstanding, Chamacoco also has conservative features that turn out to be particularly relevant for the purpose of linguistic reconstruction.

This contribution is concerned with the interplay between the lexical meaning of predicates (actionality) and the semantics of aspectual morphology. It tries to explain why the Imperfect in Italian (and by extension its counterparts in other Romance languages) is aspectually ambiguous, in that it can be assigned, for instance, both a progressive and a habitual reading. The general hypothesis is that progressivity and habituality represent different manifestations of the imperfective aspect, whose main difference with respect to the perfective aspect consists in the fact that its semantics involves the introduction of 'strong' quantifiers over times and event

This paper addresses the articulatory realization of repeated identical vowels in Italian, such as they exist in root-internal position (e.g. coorte ‘cohort’, Sahara ‘id.’) or across a morpheme boundary (atee ‘atheists.f’, coordinare ‘to coordinate’). In structural terms, these vowel sequences give rise to a hiatus, but their actual realization is variable. At fast speech rate, they may collapse into a single vowel also in terms of total duration. In careful speech, however, they retain a much longer duration than their single vowel counterparts (cf. corte ‘court’, Sara ‘id.’). In addition, and crucially for our purpose, they may exhibit some hints at rearticulation at the boundary between the first and the second vowel. Some evidence that this may indeed occur was found by means of the UTI technique in a corpus of carefully produced speech.

Page 1. Pier Marco Bertinetto, Patrizia Sorianello, Irene Ricci SULLA GERARCHIA DEI FATTORI CHE GOVERNANO LA GORGIA. ... della gorgia nelle desinenze dei participi perfetti. Per contro, le simulazioni analogiche relative alle altre variabili considerate, di ...

Il contributo fa tesoro dell'esperienza di ricerca maturata nell'ambito del progetto Gra.fo (https://grafo.sns.it) affrontando due temi che a nostro parere rivestono un certo interesse per l’ambito delle cosiddette Scienze Umanistiche Digitali: a) il legame tra supporto materiale e documento; b) l’identificazione dell’unità documentale “di base” all’interno di un archivio orale digitale

The main goal of the experiments described in this paper was to compare the behavior of Bulgarian words with vs. without «vowel/Ø» alternation. The Ø-form may for instance be observed, within the relevant word paradigms, in noun plurals, in adjectives’ gender and plural inflections, and in derived nouns. The materials in experiment 1 consisted of six sets of frequency controlled Bulgarian words, contrasting with respect to the following factors: Alternation (sets A1, B1, C1 with alternation vs. A2, B2, C2 without alternation), Morphology (set A with plural formation, an inflectional process, vs. set C with abstract noun formation, a derivational process), and Stress pattern (set A with first syllable stress vs. set B with second syllable stress). The experimental paradigm was based on repetition priming with visual-input lexical decision. Alternation had a clear effect on the lexical decision time, while Morphology (in the specific manifestation of this parameter) was virtually inef...

Speech rhythm is a popular research topic but a still poorly understood phenomenon. A critical assessment of the algorithmic tools developed in the last two decades to analyze rhythm in natural languages shows that they can at best lead to a topological arrangement of the languages to be compared, with no ambition to actually offer objective and absolute measures. Besides, all available tools are heavily influenced by any source of variability, in particular: speech rate, speech style (most notably, spontaneous vs. read), and even speaker identity. Although this shows their high sensitivity to the input details, it raises severe doubts as for the actual relevance of the comparative results obtained in the study of different languages. Future research will have to learn to overcome these weaknesses. Most importantly, readers should be alerted to the false idol of a common Romance rhythmic footprint. Close inspection of the prosodic characteristics of the main Romance languages indica...

This contribution shows that the notion of 'aspect' and 'Aktionsart' must be carefully distinguished. It develops an in-depth analysis of different classes of temporal adverbs as a diagnostics for assessing aspect and Aktionsart value

Después de definir el concepto de tenselessness ‘atemporalidad’, este artículo presenta argumentos para tratar el ayoreo (con morfología verbal altamente pobre) como una lengua extrema que carece de marcadores de tiempo. Además del modo, que se manifiesta concretamente por la oposición realis vs. irrealis, todos los posibles candidatos como exponentes temporal-aspectuales resultan, a luz de una inspección más acurada, en no más que elementos adverbiales. Sin embargo, el dialecto tomaraho, un cognado de la lengua chamacoco estaría al borde de gramaticalizar un morfema temporal. Luego después, se compara el ayoreo con otras lenguas indígenas de América del Sur que han sido caracterizadas como carentes de tiempo gramatical (Mueller 2013), sugiriendo que esas lenguas presentan diversos grados de tenselessness, pero sin llegar al nivel de atemporalalidad extrema que el ayoreo.

The pieces with which my game starts concern the behaviour of Italian subjects in psycholinguistic experiments. As summarized in Bertinetto (to appear/a), in segment(s) substitution tasks Italian subjects do not show any strong syllabic effect., This contrasts with the behaviour of English subjects, who consistently provided evidence of a robust structural hierarchy within the syllable., Indeed, as repeatedly demonstrated by Rebecca Treiman and Bruce Derwing's teams (Treiman 1983, 1986; Derwing et al. 1988; cf. Bertinetto, to appear/a, for more references), English presents a sharp inclination towards Right-Branching internal geometry (henceforth R-B), where the Rhyme node dominates Nucleus and Coda, while the Onset remains undominated. However, when Italian subjects were asked to perform time-compressed blending tasks, the syllabic effect emerged very neatly. That this is not purely coincidental, possibly due to undiagnosed failures of experimental procedure, is shown by the b...