Accumulation of words: lists in the Italian public discourse

Marburg Journal of Religion, 2020

Introduction Omen compendia, lists of gods, lists of the names of one god, catalogues of saints, lists of canonical books, lists of angels, catalogues of things that are forbidden and things that are allowed, lists of heresies... Religions would have looked very different without the aid of lists. And where had science been without taxonomies, registers, lexicons, catalogues, statistics and scientific bibliographies?

Italian Journal of Linguistics, 2018

This article presents a study of List Constructions in a corpus of spoken Italian, in particular those that end with a general extender, a functional class of expressions. They widen the scope and the meaning of what has been previously said: for example, or something / and everything / and things / and stuff (like that), etcetera. The main aim is to show that List Constructions exhibit some basic features that are particularly suited to the online process of spoken communication, although they also constitute a specialised means of text progression to give order to objects and concepts, which resembles the use of written catalogues. *

The papers focuses on the practice of using lists in the digitized society, where we do not only deal with lists on the web, but since a few decades tend to observe objects and services in general in the form of evaluative orderings like ratings and rankings. The difference and the relationship between lists, ratings and rankings are illustrated and discussed in historical perspective. In a second step, the paper specifically addresses the web and digital data processing, asking why lists are spreading right now, especially in the last three decades. It analyses the relationship of the form of the list with the web and with algorithms, which are its central tools of information processing.

Italian Journal of Linguistics. https://www.italian-journal-linguistics.com/app/uploads/2021/05/5_Barotto.pdf, 2018

The aim of this paper is to analyze list constructions as linguistic tools to build categories in discourse, identifying the inferential processes leading from list constructions to categorization and examining the semantic and morphosyntactic elements that activate abstractive reasoning within lists. Based on real occurrences of lists in written and spoken Italian, we will first of all propose a crucial distinction between exhaustive and non-exhaustive lists, arguing that (non-)exhaustivity determines the layer at which the construction of a category occurs, namely the layer of presupposition or the 'what-is-said' part of the utterance. We will then focus on non-exhaustive lists, arguing that they directly communicate a bottom-up, exemplar-driven abstraction, characterized by the presence of an inherently indexical reference (i.e. reference to further Xs characterized by some underlying Property P), which will lead us to call it 'indexical categorization'. The linguistic analysis of how indexical categorization is expressed in discourse will show a major distinction between i) elements characterized by an indexical semantics, which trigger the abstraction process, and ii) elements providing semantic clues towards the correct construction of the indexical category. We will conclude by taking a broader perspective and by explaining the patterns observed for indexical categorization in the light of the wider process of online reference construction.

Lists provide a peek into infinity. Even numbered lists imply the possibility of another entry. Between entries one can hear the silent “and” that makes each entry equal to another. Placing a hierarchical structure makes an outline or file directory with lists inside other lists. Given that a database is data structured to be accessed in various ways, the list offers the most simple and neutral ordering that can be rearranged (alphabetically, by date modified, by file size). The aesthetic of the database exemplified in the list both challenges narrative and has been a part of literary tradition, from the Bible to James Joyce’s Ulysses and beyond. The list marks an accumulation of things not narrative’s trajectory through time or space. In a way, narratives are guided tours through the database of the dictionary. However, there are several instances where narrative’s tour guide leaves the reader with a list from which that reader is tasked with deriving meaning. Action in a story stops or comes to a crawl when it collides with a list. Now the reader must practice the most significant action and that action isn’t an active verb (jump, run, scale, detonate) but a contemplative one (reflect, ruminate, consider). As innane as lists can be – grocery lists, to-do lists, meeting agendas, genealogies, dictionaries, BuzzFeed lists – they hint at the stories between the entries, behind the rationale for the chosen order, of the motives and state of mind of the list maker. In this presentation, I will read two literary lists – George Perec’s An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris and Alexandra Nemenov’s “My Motorola” – as proxy landscape or portraits. Lists can be used to displace the human to swallow up our existence in the larger ecology beyond human society. But lists can also amass items, actions, or facts that come to reveal an intimacy with the list maker. Perec provides an example of the former and Nemenov of the latter. This dual ability of lists exemplifies key reasons why humans are afraid of their digital technologies: that those technologies will suppress the centrality of humanity or that technologies expose too much of ourselves.

A Crosslinguistic Perspective on Clear and Approximate Categorization, 2022

Mauri, C. & E. Goria & I. Fiorentini (2019). Non-exhaustive lists in spoken language: a construction grammatical perspective. "Constructions and Frames" 11(2): 290-316., 2019

The aim of this paper is to analyze how speakers refer to non-exhaustive sets in spoken discourse, by means of open lists. We will propose an analysis of non-exhaustivity in terms of indexicality and we will therefore consider open lists as having an inherently pragmatic component. Based on corpus data of spoken Italian, we will identify three main types of non-exhaustive lists, showing different structural properties and non-compositional semantics. In order to account for the observed variation, we will take a construction grammatical perspective, arguing that what may appear as a heterogeneous set of strategies is instead an inheritance-based network of constructions sharing a schematic core (cf. Goldberg 1995). We will elaborate on the most recent approaches to list constructions, along the lines proposed by Masini, Mauri & Pietrandrea (2018), and will identify three types of non-exhaustive list constructions, which inherit the core properties from the upper-level list construction, but show more specific features and constraints.

Italian Journal of Linguistics, 2018

Lists are a cognitive resource for speakers and have a wide range of semantic and pragmatic functions. One of the main objectives of this paper is to further clarify the links between lists and language proficiency. To do so, we focused on lists produced by native and non-native Italian speakers during a lexical search in the context of spontaneous spoken language. The study presented here is based on a corpus of oral productions elicited through a task. As the paper will show, some elements usually considered in the literature as completely disparate can be considered together within the framework of lists. Furthermore, it will show the gradual emergence as construction of a particular subset of lists of lexical searches. *

Lists have long held a place of great historical and literary importance. This paper studies the essays and diaries of Susan Sontag, her proclivity for list-making. It also questions how lists as an organizational tool function differently when written with ink on paper versus when they are uploaded to Internet and typed in malleable hypertext.