Roberta Facchinetti - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Roberta Facchinetti
Introduction to the book with an overview of the scientific backgroun
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2021
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 12, 2013
Is the textual type of News-related Blogs (NBs) to be bulked under one single category or, in tur... more Is the textual type of News-related Blogs (NBs) to be bulked under one single category or, in turn, are NBs to be diversified among themselves? And if so, how? More specifically, to what extent does the professional identity of the blogger count in shaping the posts? Do texts posted by professional journalists voicing their media institution differ from those written by independent / freelance professionals or again by citizen-journalism bloggers? Most importantly for the present research, considering that in news-related publications one linguistic aspect diversifying reports from features and commentaries is the presence or absence of modalized utterances, can modality be of help in answering the questions above? How far are modalized constructs present in NBs? Indeed, one might be tempted to hastily conclude that modal verbs in particular are prevalent, but only a deep-down analysis will lead to evidence-grounded conclusions. To address these questions, the present paper investigates a Corpus of News-related Blogs focusing on an international news event occurred in August 2008, that is, the Russo-Georgian war in the Caucasus region. The quantitative study is integrated by an analysis of the corpus data, with special reference to the central modals will/would, can/could, must/should, and may/might. While it is not my aim to discuss the semantic and pragmatic value of each and every modal occurrence, the study primarily intends to foreground those aspects that may help verifying how far, within the superordinate category of NBs, language \u2013 and specifically modality \u2013 can be diversified on account of the differing professional backgrounds of the bloggers
During the Renaissance a great number of Latin-English and English-Latin dictionaries were compil... more During the Renaissance a great number of Latin-English and English-Latin dictionaries were compiled, following a surprisingly long tradition of English lexicography whose dawn can be traced back to between 600 and 700 A.D. At that time, the first Latin glosses of religious and practical treatises appeared with the primary purpose of explaining difficult Latin words; later on, these glosses came to be written in vernacular, especially after English had been sanctioned for general use, and were often collected in glossaries which evolved into authentic Latin-English dictionaries, arranged either alphabetically or under classified entries. Their object was essentially to provide a Latin dictionary for the use of Englishmen. It was not before the fifteenth century, however, that English-Latin dictionaries began to enrich the scene of English lexicography; by that time the aim of lexicographic works had turned from Latin to English, since they were mainly concerned with glossing English entries. It is generally acknowledged that the first English-Latin bilingual dictionaries were more innovative in approach than their Latin-English counterparts. Indeed, Latin-English dictionaries and glosses were heavily indebted to earlier monolingual Latin works and often simply glossed the works of previous scholars. In contrast, most English-Latin dictionaries drew on material from a greater number of sources; for example, John Withals\u2019 Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Begynners (1553) had at least twelve sources, including previously published dictionaries as well as scientific and literary treatises of his century; moreover, in the contents of his work, Withals also registered proverbs, wise sayings, legends, and myths. In 16th- and 17th-century England glossaries and vocabularies gradually gave way not only to monolingual, bilingual and polyglot dictionaries, but also to indexes and glossaries appended to grammar books for pedagogic reasons. The practice of appending small dictionaries and indexes to textbooks was explicitly welcomed by William Bullokar and Richard Mulcaster; as teachers, they knew what their students needed and thus insisted on the importance of joining a dictionary to a grammar book. Yet neither Bullokar\u2019s Booke at large, for the Amendment of Orthographie for English speech (1580) nor Mulcaster\u2019s Elementaire (1582) succeeded in carrying out such a task. In 1594 Paul Graves published his Grammatica anglicana containing also a Dictionariolum of English words with their Latin equivalents; other teachers followed this custom, thus paving the way for a joint productive work between grammarians and lexicographers. These writers were far from being inclusive in their works and quite often ended up writing simplified indexes for the use of their students. In turn, most grammarians assumed that, since Latin was still the official language taught at school, what was pertinent to the description of Latin would be equally pertinent to the description of English. Due to this incorrect belief, their books were often devised in a latinised framework and turned out to be little more than Latin grammars in disguise. Indeed, at that time there was still no codified set of rules for the English language; nor did anyone question the authoritative Latin tradition, which had its main representatives in Varro, Donatus, and Priscian. William Lily was one of the early English grammarians and his Latin grammar (ca. 1540) became so popular that it was imposed by the Tudors as the \u2018authorised grammar\u2019 for England; as such, all subsequent grammarians had to come to terms with its overriding importance and often ended up publishing mere approving annotations of the same text. No doubt, at that time the publication of translations, elucidations and supplements of this book was, as pointed out by Padley (1985), partly a subterfuge allowing publication, which would otherwise have been thwarted by the royal privilege enjoyed by Lily\u2019s grammar. Such royal privilege was still in force more than two centuries later, when the Anglo-American Lindley Murray published his English Grammar (1795). His text was introduced, supplemented, imitated, enlarged, simplified, improved and, as will be seen in this volume, even parodied. Parody is certainly no latecomer to the various genres, its roots being in the Greek world, at the time of Hegemon of Thasos and Hipponax of Ephesus, who are credited to be the first who used a kind of comic imitation and transformation of an epic verse text. After them, Aristotle employed the term \u2018parody\u2019 to qualify Hegemon\u2019s work, while Aristophanes satirically imitated Aeschylus, Euripides and Socrates. Parodies of the liturgy, hymns and the Bible were also in use in the Latin world and later on in the Middle Ages. In England, Chaucer\u2019s tale of Sir Thopas, mocking the chivalry stereotypes of medieval romances, paved the way for a whole host of writers who, with more or…
Linguistica e Filologia, 1997
This book is intended primarily as an introduction to linguistic corpora for any scholar, teacher... more This book is intended primarily as an introduction to linguistic corpora for any scholar, teacher or student who approaches them for the first time. To this aim, the author has provided an overview of their most typical features and contexts of exploitation, both in theoretical and in applied linguistics, together with a discussion on key issues pertaining to corpus design, compilation, and annotation. In so doing, an attempt has been made to clarify and systematize a few still foggy areas in this field, particularly from the terminological point of view. The book also includes three appendices, listing respectively all the corpora cited in the volume in alphabetical order, the software discussed and the other computerized resources quoted in the book. Every effort has been made to present the data and material in a clear, straightforward way, so as to enable the readers to glean information, to deepen their knowledge, and most of all to boost their desire for learning, which is the core of all theoretical knowledge and practical competence
Since the nineteenth century, when it set sail as a new academic discipline, History of the Engli... more Since the nineteenth century, when it set sail as a new academic discipline, History of the English Language (HEL) has grown to encompass a wide range of fields to the extent that, currently, \u201ca HEL course may incorporate material from history, geography, lexicography, philology, literature, grammar, and linguistics, the last of which includes the subfields of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics\u201d (p. 3). No university course will ever manage to tackle thoroughly and in detail all such fields in the limited span of time awarded to HEL, generally a semester. Yet teachers can still structure their lessons in such a way as to allow their students to grasp the versatility of this discipline, along with its value, which largely trespasses the realms of linguistics and literature. Approaches to Teaching the History of the English language helps instructors of HEL to do just that, by viewing the discipline from a variety of perspectives in order to identify the challenges, answer the questions, and fit the needs of both teachers and students. The result is a book featuring 28 contributions by long-standing academics from different parts of the world, who make ample use of their personal experiences, provide practical suggestions and reproducible exercises, and offer different pedagogical approaches to the discipline itself
This is the review of "The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities"... more This is the review of "The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities", a 500-page long book dedicated to the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) Community, an interdisciplinary group of humanists, artists, (social) scientists, and technologists sharing \u201cideas, ne ws, tools, research, insights, pedagogy, methods, and projects \u2013 including Digital Humanities and other born-digital scholarship.\u201d The book starts from the tenet that the interplay between media and digital humanities is by now mandatory, since the two mutually inform and enrich each other in a highly diversified range of fields, as testified to by the 70 contributions to the five sections of the volume: Part I. Access, Praxis, Justice; Part II. Design, Interface, Interaction; Part III. Mediation, Method, Materiality; Part IV. Remediation, Data, Memory; Part V. Making, Programming, Hacking
The text focuses on the role of computerized linguistic corpora in the development of specialized... more The text focuses on the role of computerized linguistic corpora in the development of specialized glossaries by means of a case study pertaining to the jargon of newsrooms. Specifically, it illustrates the state of the art with reference to linguistic/lexicographic studies in this field and describes the process of designing and compiling a glossary for journalists and practitioners in the field
Linguistica e Filologia, 1996
De Gruyter eBooks, Oct 19, 1998
Introduzione al volume con approfondimenti relativi al contesto lessicologico e lessicografico di... more Introduzione al volume con approfondimenti relativi al contesto lessicologico e lessicografico di riferiment
In the paper I endeavour to shed more light on the use of NON at the time when it started to occu... more In the paper I endeavour to shed more light on the use of NON at the time when it started to occur as a prefix in English. As is well known, it entered the language as a loan from Latin in the early twelfth century and was used with adjectival or adverbial function. I start from the data provided by the second edition of the OED and compare them with those obtained from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and Kurah & Kuhn's Middle English Dictionary. It should also be said that a thorough study of NON- cannot overlook the more general, knotty, yet fascinating field of negative prefixation. Therefore, before going into my research in detail, I quickly review the most common means of prefixal negation in Modern English, their meaning and the basic features distinguishing them from the prefix under study
Introduction to the book with an overview of the scientific backgroun
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2021
De Gruyter eBooks, Dec 12, 2013
Is the textual type of News-related Blogs (NBs) to be bulked under one single category or, in tur... more Is the textual type of News-related Blogs (NBs) to be bulked under one single category or, in turn, are NBs to be diversified among themselves? And if so, how? More specifically, to what extent does the professional identity of the blogger count in shaping the posts? Do texts posted by professional journalists voicing their media institution differ from those written by independent / freelance professionals or again by citizen-journalism bloggers? Most importantly for the present research, considering that in news-related publications one linguistic aspect diversifying reports from features and commentaries is the presence or absence of modalized utterances, can modality be of help in answering the questions above? How far are modalized constructs present in NBs? Indeed, one might be tempted to hastily conclude that modal verbs in particular are prevalent, but only a deep-down analysis will lead to evidence-grounded conclusions. To address these questions, the present paper investigates a Corpus of News-related Blogs focusing on an international news event occurred in August 2008, that is, the Russo-Georgian war in the Caucasus region. The quantitative study is integrated by an analysis of the corpus data, with special reference to the central modals will/would, can/could, must/should, and may/might. While it is not my aim to discuss the semantic and pragmatic value of each and every modal occurrence, the study primarily intends to foreground those aspects that may help verifying how far, within the superordinate category of NBs, language \u2013 and specifically modality \u2013 can be diversified on account of the differing professional backgrounds of the bloggers
During the Renaissance a great number of Latin-English and English-Latin dictionaries were compil... more During the Renaissance a great number of Latin-English and English-Latin dictionaries were compiled, following a surprisingly long tradition of English lexicography whose dawn can be traced back to between 600 and 700 A.D. At that time, the first Latin glosses of religious and practical treatises appeared with the primary purpose of explaining difficult Latin words; later on, these glosses came to be written in vernacular, especially after English had been sanctioned for general use, and were often collected in glossaries which evolved into authentic Latin-English dictionaries, arranged either alphabetically or under classified entries. Their object was essentially to provide a Latin dictionary for the use of Englishmen. It was not before the fifteenth century, however, that English-Latin dictionaries began to enrich the scene of English lexicography; by that time the aim of lexicographic works had turned from Latin to English, since they were mainly concerned with glossing English entries. It is generally acknowledged that the first English-Latin bilingual dictionaries were more innovative in approach than their Latin-English counterparts. Indeed, Latin-English dictionaries and glosses were heavily indebted to earlier monolingual Latin works and often simply glossed the works of previous scholars. In contrast, most English-Latin dictionaries drew on material from a greater number of sources; for example, John Withals\u2019 Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Begynners (1553) had at least twelve sources, including previously published dictionaries as well as scientific and literary treatises of his century; moreover, in the contents of his work, Withals also registered proverbs, wise sayings, legends, and myths. In 16th- and 17th-century England glossaries and vocabularies gradually gave way not only to monolingual, bilingual and polyglot dictionaries, but also to indexes and glossaries appended to grammar books for pedagogic reasons. The practice of appending small dictionaries and indexes to textbooks was explicitly welcomed by William Bullokar and Richard Mulcaster; as teachers, they knew what their students needed and thus insisted on the importance of joining a dictionary to a grammar book. Yet neither Bullokar\u2019s Booke at large, for the Amendment of Orthographie for English speech (1580) nor Mulcaster\u2019s Elementaire (1582) succeeded in carrying out such a task. In 1594 Paul Graves published his Grammatica anglicana containing also a Dictionariolum of English words with their Latin equivalents; other teachers followed this custom, thus paving the way for a joint productive work between grammarians and lexicographers. These writers were far from being inclusive in their works and quite often ended up writing simplified indexes for the use of their students. In turn, most grammarians assumed that, since Latin was still the official language taught at school, what was pertinent to the description of Latin would be equally pertinent to the description of English. Due to this incorrect belief, their books were often devised in a latinised framework and turned out to be little more than Latin grammars in disguise. Indeed, at that time there was still no codified set of rules for the English language; nor did anyone question the authoritative Latin tradition, which had its main representatives in Varro, Donatus, and Priscian. William Lily was one of the early English grammarians and his Latin grammar (ca. 1540) became so popular that it was imposed by the Tudors as the \u2018authorised grammar\u2019 for England; as such, all subsequent grammarians had to come to terms with its overriding importance and often ended up publishing mere approving annotations of the same text. No doubt, at that time the publication of translations, elucidations and supplements of this book was, as pointed out by Padley (1985), partly a subterfuge allowing publication, which would otherwise have been thwarted by the royal privilege enjoyed by Lily\u2019s grammar. Such royal privilege was still in force more than two centuries later, when the Anglo-American Lindley Murray published his English Grammar (1795). His text was introduced, supplemented, imitated, enlarged, simplified, improved and, as will be seen in this volume, even parodied. Parody is certainly no latecomer to the various genres, its roots being in the Greek world, at the time of Hegemon of Thasos and Hipponax of Ephesus, who are credited to be the first who used a kind of comic imitation and transformation of an epic verse text. After them, Aristotle employed the term \u2018parody\u2019 to qualify Hegemon\u2019s work, while Aristophanes satirically imitated Aeschylus, Euripides and Socrates. Parodies of the liturgy, hymns and the Bible were also in use in the Latin world and later on in the Middle Ages. In England, Chaucer\u2019s tale of Sir Thopas, mocking the chivalry stereotypes of medieval romances, paved the way for a whole host of writers who, with more or…
Linguistica e Filologia, 1997
This book is intended primarily as an introduction to linguistic corpora for any scholar, teacher... more This book is intended primarily as an introduction to linguistic corpora for any scholar, teacher or student who approaches them for the first time. To this aim, the author has provided an overview of their most typical features and contexts of exploitation, both in theoretical and in applied linguistics, together with a discussion on key issues pertaining to corpus design, compilation, and annotation. In so doing, an attempt has been made to clarify and systematize a few still foggy areas in this field, particularly from the terminological point of view. The book also includes three appendices, listing respectively all the corpora cited in the volume in alphabetical order, the software discussed and the other computerized resources quoted in the book. Every effort has been made to present the data and material in a clear, straightforward way, so as to enable the readers to glean information, to deepen their knowledge, and most of all to boost their desire for learning, which is the core of all theoretical knowledge and practical competence
Since the nineteenth century, when it set sail as a new academic discipline, History of the Engli... more Since the nineteenth century, when it set sail as a new academic discipline, History of the English Language (HEL) has grown to encompass a wide range of fields to the extent that, currently, \u201ca HEL course may incorporate material from history, geography, lexicography, philology, literature, grammar, and linguistics, the last of which includes the subfields of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics\u201d (p. 3). No university course will ever manage to tackle thoroughly and in detail all such fields in the limited span of time awarded to HEL, generally a semester. Yet teachers can still structure their lessons in such a way as to allow their students to grasp the versatility of this discipline, along with its value, which largely trespasses the realms of linguistics and literature. Approaches to Teaching the History of the English language helps instructors of HEL to do just that, by viewing the discipline from a variety of perspectives in order to identify the challenges, answer the questions, and fit the needs of both teachers and students. The result is a book featuring 28 contributions by long-standing academics from different parts of the world, who make ample use of their personal experiences, provide practical suggestions and reproducible exercises, and offer different pedagogical approaches to the discipline itself
This is the review of "The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities"... more This is the review of "The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities", a 500-page long book dedicated to the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) Community, an interdisciplinary group of humanists, artists, (social) scientists, and technologists sharing \u201cideas, ne ws, tools, research, insights, pedagogy, methods, and projects \u2013 including Digital Humanities and other born-digital scholarship.\u201d The book starts from the tenet that the interplay between media and digital humanities is by now mandatory, since the two mutually inform and enrich each other in a highly diversified range of fields, as testified to by the 70 contributions to the five sections of the volume: Part I. Access, Praxis, Justice; Part II. Design, Interface, Interaction; Part III. Mediation, Method, Materiality; Part IV. Remediation, Data, Memory; Part V. Making, Programming, Hacking
The text focuses on the role of computerized linguistic corpora in the development of specialized... more The text focuses on the role of computerized linguistic corpora in the development of specialized glossaries by means of a case study pertaining to the jargon of newsrooms. Specifically, it illustrates the state of the art with reference to linguistic/lexicographic studies in this field and describes the process of designing and compiling a glossary for journalists and practitioners in the field
Linguistica e Filologia, 1996
De Gruyter eBooks, Oct 19, 1998
Introduzione al volume con approfondimenti relativi al contesto lessicologico e lessicografico di... more Introduzione al volume con approfondimenti relativi al contesto lessicologico e lessicografico di riferiment
In the paper I endeavour to shed more light on the use of NON at the time when it started to occu... more In the paper I endeavour to shed more light on the use of NON at the time when it started to occur as a prefix in English. As is well known, it entered the language as a loan from Latin in the early twelfth century and was used with adjectival or adverbial function. I start from the data provided by the second edition of the OED and compare them with those obtained from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and Kurah & Kuhn's Middle English Dictionary. It should also be said that a thorough study of NON- cannot overlook the more general, knotty, yet fascinating field of negative prefixation. Therefore, before going into my research in detail, I quickly review the most common means of prefixal negation in Modern English, their meaning and the basic features distinguishing them from the prefix under study