“Questa è parte, che ua incatenando, et ordinando il parlamento”. Conjunctions in Italian grammatography – The present essay examines how conjunctions are discussed in Italian grammatography from the 15th to the 20th Century.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the Italian medical terminology, in particular will be taken into consideration the link between names of different illnesses and rhetoric procedures that might have influenced their lexical form. The examples of medical nomenclature will enable to illustrate the attitude towards the concept of illness and to show the complexity of phenomena perception and the impossibility to understand them completely. For this reason literary tropes, especially metonymy, enable to create terminology, although it will be never enough sufficient to guarantee the highest precision of these concepts.

The UK’s decision to leave the EU illustrates some of the tensions embedded in European integration, enabling us to examine how nationalism and cosmopolitanism operate simultaneously, thus reinforcing each other. Furthermore, the prolonged Brexit negotiations have created a climate of protracted insecurity where the only certainty is uncertainty. This is particularly reflected in the migratory experiences of European citizens currently residing in the UK. Academic research has begun exploring the affective impact of Brexit; however, little is known about how processes of connection and disconnection operate simultaneously, nor which coping strategies European migrants have employed to navigate this state of in-betweenness. Using the anthropological notion of liminality as a lens, we draw on participant observation and semi-structured interviews to explore the experiences of Brexit and the coping practices of a range of (new) Bulgarian and (old) Italian European migrants. We argue that Brexit results in a loss of frames of reference for European migrants in the UK – which can be both liberating and unsettling, depending on migrants’ positioning as unequal EU subjects as well as their views on the nature of their future re-incorporation in post-Brexit Britain.

Notes about a handbook of Italian grammar by a Croatian philologist Dragutin Antun Parčić – A handbook of Italian grammar, written in Croatian by Croatian philologist Parčić, confirms that in the past educated Croatian-speaking people were bilingual and at the same time it proves that lower classes aimed to study Italian as well. The paper analyses the functionality and appropriateness of topics presented in the Parčić manuscript because it is obvious that the author was keen to help his Croatian-speaking students in the acquisition of Italian.

Bonaventura Tondi’s “La femina origine di ogni male”: a late XVII century misogynous treatise – This article analyses the treatise La femina origine di ogni male. Overo Frine rimproverata, written by Bonaventura Tondi in 1687. The first part of the article presents the architecture of the treatise and the author’s argumentation. The second part focuses on its distinctive features in the context of treatises about women in XVII-century Italy.

The aim of this article is to illustrate the most frequent conceptualisations of depression in the contemporary Italian media discourse. The analyses presented in the paper are mainly based on the cognitive theory of metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and form a part of a wider research topic regarding the differences in conceptualisation of depression depending on such factors as the language, the type of the discourse and the personal experience of the author concerning the state of depression. The study revealed that depression is represented the most frequently in the analysed corpus through the frame of disease, and by the metaphors DEPRESSION IS AN ENEMY and DEPRESSION IS A LOCATION, often situated down and taking the form of a container. Less numerous and regular were other kinds of its personifications and representations of depression as an object or danger.

Artykuł omawia najważniejszą włoską powieść historyczną i koncentruje się na jej głównych szlakach migracyjnych, zwłaszcza tymi, którymi podążają główne postaci utworu. Omawia również różnorodność przedstawień problematyki krańca i granicy (także w sensie metaforycznym) w powieści.

From multi-dialogue to monologue in spoken Italian: the pragmatic/prosodic basis of multi-dialogue and its transformation in narrative and descriptive monologues – The paper summarizes the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT), according to which spoken texts are analysed and aligned per utterance to the acoustic source. Three stretches of spoken Italian taken from the LABLITA Corpus (multi-dialogue, dialogue, monologue) are described according to L-AcT as regards turn-taking, information structure, and illocution. The above texts are then compared to a short literary excerpt showing the different syntactic architecture of the two language varieties.

The present paper is a case study of the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series: “The Italian Americans” (2015). It is argued that the series’ authors have aimed to deconstruct the anti-Italian stereotype, widespread in the United States. In exchange, they have proposed a new, positive image of the Italian community in America promoting the accomplishments of its prominent members. The entire PBS project, “The American Experience”, reflects an evolution of U.S. identity patterns from the homogeneous “melting pot” toward the diverse “salad bowl”, and hence – from monologue to polylogue.

Gender and representing the feminine in legal and administrative texts in Italy – The paper examines the linguistic treatment of the genre (delimiting the concept to ‘female’, ‘woman’) at various levels of legal communication, through the analysis of legal and administrative texts of different kinds produced in Italy in the 20th and 21st centuries (codes, sentences, regulations, etc). The survey focuses on lexical aspects and is supported by lexicographical research.

In search of the invariant semantics of the preposition “da”: a cognitive analysis of the predicative context – The purpose of this article is to verify whether the semantic invariant of the preposition da [starting point allowing physical or mental movement] in the nominal context remains valid in the context of the verb. The analysis of the content of predicates that link to the preposition da will help to answer the question of the extent to which the choice of a preposition is determined by the knowledge of the experienced activities and/or the predicate itself (its selective features) or if it is the result of convention.

The article addresses the relation between the grammatical gender and the linguistic encoding of sex distinction (natural gender). Our goal is to problematize the category of gender as a multipart and multifunctional linguistic phenomenon operating in diverse dimensions of a language. The analysis of Italian and Polish languages illustrates that grammatical gender – whose main function is to signal syntactic relations between text constituents – and natural gender – whose main function is to encode information about the sex of a referent – are in principle autonomous and independent linguistic phenomena which are however strongly interrelated in a linguistic system through a morphological and syntactic interface.