This book analyses gendered language in Italian, shedding light on how the Italian language constructs and reproduces the social imbalance between women and men, and presenting indirect and direct instances of asymmetrical constructions of gender in public and private roles. The author examines linguistic treatments of women in politics and the media, as well as the gendered crime of femminicidio, i.e. the killing of women by their (former) partners. Through the combination of corpus linguistics, surveys, and discourse analysis, she establishes a new approach to the study of gendered Italian, a framework which can be applied to other languages and epistemological sites. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, language and gender, discourse analysis, Italian and other Romance languages.

Using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage methodology, Gian Marco Farese presents a comprehensive analysis of the most important Italian cultural keywords and cultural scripts that foreign learners and cultural outsiders need to know to become linguistically and culturally proficient in Italian. Farese focuses on the words and speech practices that are used most frequently in Italian discourse and that are uniquely Italian: both untranslatable into other languages and reflective of salient aspects of Italian culture and society. Italian Discourse: A Cultural Semantic Analysis sheds light on ways in which the Italian language is related to Italians’ character, values, and way of thinking, and it does so in contrastive perspective with English. Each chapter focuses on a cultural keyword, tracing the term through novels, plays, poems, and songs. Italian Discourse will be an important resource for anyone interested in Italian studies and Italian linguistics, as well as in semantics, cultural studies, linguistic anthropology, cognitive linguistics, intercultural communication, and translation.

This series offers a wide forum for work on contact linguistics, using an integrated approach to both diachronic and synchronic manifestations of contact, ranging from social and individual aspects to structural-typological issues. Topics covered by the series include child and adult bilingualism and multilingualism, contact languages, borrowing and contact-induced typological change, code switching in conversation, societal multilingualism, bilingual language processing, and various other topics related to language contact. The series does not have a fixed theoretical orientation, and includes contributions from a variety of approaches.

Cultural keywords are words around which whole discourses are organised. They are culturally revealing, difficult to translate and semantically diverse. They capture how speakers have paid attention to the worlds they live in and embody socially recognised ways of thinking and feeling. The book contributes to a global turn in cultural keyword studies by exploring keywords from discourse communities in Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong, Japan, Melanesia, Mexico and Scandinavia. Providing new case studies, the volume showcases the diversity of ways in which cultural logics form and shape discourse. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach is used as a unifying framework for the studies. This approach offers an attractive methodology for doing explorative discourse analysis on emic and culturally-sensitive grounds. Cultural Keywords in Discourse will be of interest to researchers and students of semantics, pragmatics, cultural discourse studies, linguistic ethnography and intercultural communication.

This book draws together a rich variety of perspectives on discourse as a facet of contemporary social change, representing a number of different disciplines, theoretical positions and methods. The specific focus of the volume is on discourse as a moment of social change, which can be seen to involve objects of research which comprise versions of some or all of the following research questions: How and where did discourses (narratives) emerge and develop? How and where did they achieve hegemonic status? How and where and how extensively have they been recontextualized? How and where and to what extent have they been operationalized? The dialectical approach indicated above implies that discourse analysis includes analysis of relations between language (more broadly, semiosis) and its social 'context'.

Many of the great writers of modern Italian fiction--Manzoni, Verga, D'Annunzio, and others--share a strong belief in the transformational power of the written word. According to Robert Dombroski, each embraces literature as an institution and convention, and each adopts the novel form as a means of affirming life in the face of troubled reality. In Properties of Writing, Dombroski explores their work and the social, political, and historical issues that have emerged in recent Italian fiction. In each of nine critical readings, Dombroski offers an original interpretation, reconsiders past assumptions, and redefines unresolved critical problems. The result is the first book in English to focus on the Italian novel from the perspective of ideological criticism. "Such an informed and comprehensive history of the modern Italian novel has simply not been available in English. Properties ofWriting is well documented, extremely convincing, and takes into account all of the useful recent criticism. This is not surprising, since Dombroski is one of the leading U.S. experts in the field of modern Italian fiction--indeed, an expert whose recognition is international."--Anthony Oldcorn, Brown University

This cutting-edge collection of articles provides the first organised reflection on the language of films and television series across British, American and Italian cultures. The volume suggests new directions for research and applications, and offers a variety of methodologies and perspectives on the complexities of "telecinematic" discourse – a hitherto virtually unexplored area of investigation in linguistics. The papers share a common vision of the big and small screen: the belief that the discourses of film and television offer a re-presentation of our world. As such, telecinematic texts reorganise and recreate language (together with time and space) in their own way and with respect to specific socio-cultural conventions and media logic. The volume provides a multifaceted, yet coherent insight into the diegetic – as it revolves around narrative – as opposed to mimetic – as referring to other non-narrative and non-fictional genres – discourses of fictional media. The collection will be of interest to researchers, tutors and students in pragmatics, stylistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, communication studies and related fields.