Papers by Pier Marco Bertinetto
Perspective point and textual dynamics
Temporal Reference, Aspect, and Actionality, 1995
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2005
This paper is a condensed presentation of the phonetics and phonology of Standard Italian, compar... more This paper is a condensed presentation of the phonetics and phonology of Standard Italian, compared to the most prestigious local accents, viz. those of Florence, Milan and Rome. Historically based on the Florentine pronunciation, and traditionally identified with it, Standard Italian is nowadays used by trained speakers such as stage actors and (but less and less so) radio and TV speakers. The present paper aims at depicting the most salient features of Standard Italian, still a matter of primary reference in language courses, comparing them with the characteristic features of the three most prominent local varieties, with which the foreign learner is most likely to be confronted. All traditional (and sometimes widely debated) issues of Italian phonetics/phonology are addressed in the most ecumenical setting possible.
Oslo Studies in Language, 2012
This paper reports four priming experiments, in which resultative, processual, and delimitative R... more This paper reports four priming experiments, in which resultative, processual, and delimitative Russian verbs were tested. The experiments were based on the semantic decision task: the participants had to decide whether the target denoted an event / situation with a clear outcome. To assess the impact of morphological cues on the decision latencies, verbs of different morphological complexity (prefixed and unprefixed perfectives) were used. The results obtained suggest that the aspectual feature of resultativity is consistently exploited in semantic priming (processual targets were primed in two experiments), and that the morphological cues facilitate the identification of resultative targets (prefixed perfectives exhibited faster decision latencies than unprefixed perfectives). As far as the delimitative forms are concerned, a category-induction experiment was designed to investigate the subjects’ tendency to group them with resultatives or with processuals, since the delimitatives...
The progressive in Romance, as compared with English
EMPIRICAL APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE …, 2000
Page 1. 559 Pier Marco Bertinetto The progressive in Romance, as compared with English 1. Prolego... more Page 1. 559 Pier Marco Bertinetto The progressive in Romance, as compared with English 1. Prolegomena1 ... In fact, on the one hand we find prototypical contexts where the notion progressive is necessarily present indepen-Page 2. 560 560 Pier Marco Bertinetto ...
Le soffitte della voce. Il progetto grammo-foni
The main goal of the experiment words with vs. without «vowel/ the relevant word paradigms, in de... more The main goal of the experiment words with vs. without «vowel/ the relevant word paradigms, in derived nouns. The materials in e words, contrasting with respect to vs. A2, B2, C2 without alterna with first syllable stress vs. set based on repetition priming wit the lexical decision time, while virtually ineffective and Stress h sets of adjectives contrasting w base-form, inflected (plural) and iment 2 substantially replicate th 2 offer themselves to a relatively a sharp inclination towards full li inflected and derived) of morpho trast, the morphologically mod processed compositionally. As f tiation of this opposition did no the morphophonological compl relatively clear effect in terms of and second syllable stress, invo ified forms, seemed to enhance Key words: alternation, floatin tics; Bulgarian. * We wish to thank Maddalena tistical analyses, as well as C guidance in the preliminary
The indispensable complexity (when harder is easier). Lexical and grammatical expansion in three italian L1 learners
Page 1. Pier Marco Bertinetto, Alessandro Lenci, Sabrina Noccetti, Maddalena Agonigi The indispen... more Page 1. Pier Marco Bertinetto, Alessandro Lenci, Sabrina Noccetti, Maddalena Agonigi The indispensable complexity (When harder is easier). ... 3.3. Rosa Rosa's data present some differences with regard to both order and time of appearance of the various verbal features. ...
Phonologica. Proc. of the 7th …, 1994
The progressive in Romance, as compared with English. In Ö. Dahl (ed.), Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe, Mouton - De Gruyter., 2000
Page 1. 559 Pier Marco Bertinetto The progressive in Romance, as compared with English 1. Prolego... more Page 1. 559 Pier Marco Bertinetto The progressive in Romance, as compared with English 1. Prolegomena1 ... In fact, on the one hand we find prototypical contexts where the notion progressive is necessarily present indepen-Page 2. 560 560 Pier Marco Bertinetto ...
People predict incoming words during online sentence comprehension based on their knowledge of re... more People predict incoming words during online sentence comprehension based on their knowledge of real-world events that is cued by preceding linguistic contexts. We used the visual world paradigm to investigate how event knowledge activated by an agent-verb pair is integrated with perceptual information about the referent that fits the patient role. During the verb time window participants looked significantly more at the referents that are expected given the agent-verb pair. Results are consistent with the assumption that event-based knowledge involves perceptual properties of typical participants. The knowledge activated by the agent is compositionally integrated with knowledge cued by the verb to drive anticipatory eye movements during sentence comprehension based on the expectations associated not only with the incoming word, but also with the visual features of its referent.
The Indispensable Complexity (When Harder is Easier). Lexical and Grammatical Expansion in three Italian L1 Learners
Page 1. Pier Marco Bertinetto, Alessandro Lenci, Sabrina Noccetti, Maddalena Agonigi The indispen... more Page 1. Pier Marco Bertinetto, Alessandro Lenci, Sabrina Noccetti, Maddalena Agonigi The indispensable complexity (When harder is easier). ... 3.3. Rosa Rosa's data present some differences with regard to both order and time of appearance of the various verbal features. ...
La quantità vocalica in italiano
We have shown in earlier studies that the local speaking rate influences the perception of quanti... more We have shown in earlier studies that the local speaking rate influences the perception of quantity in Estonian, Finnish and Norwegian listeners. In the present study, Italian listeners were presented the same stimuli. The results show that the languages differ not only in the relative position – preceding or following – of the units that have the strongest influence on the perception of the target segment, but seemingly also in the width of the reference frame.
Bertinetto, P.M., V. Bianchi, James Higginbotham & M. Squartini (eds.) 1995, Temporal Reference, Aspect and Actionality. I: Semantic and Syntactic Perspectives. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1995
Zamucoan Person Marking as a Perturbed System*
Studia Linguistica, 2021
The Zamucoan family consists of two living languages: Ayoreo (AY) and Chamacoco (CH), spoken in N... more The Zamucoan family consists of two living languages: Ayoreo (AY) and Chamacoco (CH), spoken in Northern Chaco (between Bolivia and Paraguay) by approximately 4500 and 2000 people, respectively. The Zamucoan family also includes the now extinct Old Zamuco (OZ), described in the early 18 th century by the Jesuit Father Ignace Chomé (1958 [ante 1745]). The first stable contacts with the Ayoreos began around the half of the last century, whereas the Chamacocos were already in contact with the Western civilization at the turn of the XIX century, thus undergoing the linguistic influence of Spanish and Guaraní. The Zamucoan family is divided into two branches stemming from Proto-Zamucoan (PZ): According to glottochronological computations (Holman et al. 2011; Müller et al. 2013), CH split long ago from OZ and AY, and indeed it only shares 30% of its lexical roots with AY (Bertinetto 2009). This notwithstanding, all three languages present morphosyntactic correspondences, allowing robust diachronic insights (Ciucci 2013; Ciucci & Bertinetto, to appear). Like all Chaco languages, Zamucoan distinguishes possessable and nonpossessable nouns (Fabre 2007). In most languages of the area, the former employ personal prefixes to agree with the possessor, while the latter cannot host possessive markers. The possessive inflection of the Zamucoan languages is reported in the Table below, based on data from Ciucci 2013. From a merely descriptive point of view, one can detect the Person Prefix, the Thematic Vowel and the Root, in this order. The segmentation in the table shows that the first two components are not always obligatory. In the third person there is a contrast between reflexive third person (RFL), expressing coreference with the subject, and non-reflexive third person (3-person) characterized by remarkable polymorphism. The paradigm also includes a generic-form (GF), indicating unspecified possessor.
Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della SNS, 1994
This work has been supported by a fund 60%, entitled to PMB, provided by the Ministero per la Ric... more This work has been supported by a fund 60%, entitled to PMB, provided by the Ministero per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica at a happier time when it still seemed possible to support this kind of research. PMB is responsible for the theoretical design, and has collaborated with LC for the collection of the data of experiment II. At an early stage, the collection of the data for experiment I was carried out by Cristina Arleo, Mirjan Ghavani e Michela Valcarenghi, as part of the requirements for obtaining the degree in logopedics. The test was administered by LC, who also implemented the computer program. MA did the statistical computations. We wish to thank a number of persons with whom we had the opportunity to discuss several problems concerning this paper, at different stages of development. Namely, members of the Institut für Sprachwissenschaft of the Universität Wien, of the Departments of Linguistics and of Psychology at UConn, of the Department of Linguistics at UCLA, as well as the participants to the workshop on "Italian in a typological framework", organized within the Preinaugural Meeting of the Association for Linguistic Typology (Konstanz, November 1994). 1 Generally, but not unanimously. One should factor out from the mainstream the position developed within Government Phonology, which makes very strong assumptions. According to (at least some recent versions of) this model, a word such as strike would
Word order and quantification over times
This study describes the application of CCI (Control/Compensation Index) [3, 4] to a corpus of sp... more This study describes the application of CCI (Control/Compensation Index) [3, 4] to a corpus of spontaneous Beijing Chinese. CCI is a modification of the PVI algorithm [8], devised to provide an improved representation of the rhythmic tendencies of natural languages. The CCI algorithm was previously applied to the modeling of Italian [3, 5]. The present findings refer to Beijing Chinese.
An experiment with Polish participants was run to shed light on ‘intersegmental cohesion hierarch... more An experiment with Polish participants was run to shed light on ‘intersegmental cohesion hierarchy’, with special regard to CC clusters. This hierarchy regulates the strength of the segments’ mutual attraction, obeying both universal and language-specific tendencies. The results show that Polish speakers, as contrasted to Italian ones, exhibit a finer cohesion scale due to the richer phonotactics to which they are attuned. In the authors’ approach, syllabic structure is assumed to emerge as an epiphenomenon from this hierarchy.
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Papers by Pier Marco Bertinetto