Gloria Cappelli | Università di Pisa (original) (raw)
Papers by Gloria Cappelli
A Linguistic Approach to the Study of Dyslexia
The article investigates the discourse of guidebooks in terms of popularization, that is, in term... more The article investigates the discourse of guidebooks in terms of popularization, that is, in terms of the ways in which specialised and culture-specific concepts are reconceptualised and recontextualised to meet the needs, tastes and background encyclopaedia of the ideal reader. English and Italian guidebooks for adults and for children were analysed in order to compare the communicative strategies used in the two languages and in materials meant for different age groups. Whereas guidebooks for adults are a well-established genre in both lingua-cultural systems, guidebooks for children are a relatively new subgenre in the Italian market and the first popular instances were, in fact, translations of English guidebooks for young travellers. Some noticeable differences were found crosslinguistically in guidebooks for adults. Such differences are significantly levelled out in guidebooks for children, which display a tendency towards simplification and informality in both languages. However, some of the distinctive features of the genre in Italian are preserved. For this reason, the last part of the article focuses on the impact of translation on the popularization strategies identified in guidebooks for children.
Book chapter included in the volume "A Linguistic Approach to the Study of Dyslexia", e... more Book chapter included in the volume "A Linguistic Approach to the Study of Dyslexia", edited by G. Cappelli & S. Noccetti and submitted to Multilingual Matters. The chapter presents an overview of research on pragmatic efficiency and dyslexia in children and adults.
L’articolo affronta alcune questioni poste dalla traduzione di siti internet, con particolare rif... more L’articolo affronta alcune questioni poste dalla traduzione di siti internet, con particolare riferimento alla traduzione del contenuto testuale di siti turistici. Molti sono i problemi aperti in questo settore che ha iniziato a suscitare l’attenzione degli studiosi solo di recente e che spaziano dalla natura dei generi testuali del web fino alla distinzione fra traduzione e localizzazione, dal ruolo del traduttore di contenuti ipermediali al problema di valutare la qualita del prodotto finale. La complessa problematica e esemplificata attraverso lo studio delle parole chiave in un corpus di testi di argomento turistico che fornisce la base su cui fondare alcune proposte per la ricerca futura.
Lingue e Linguaggi, 2016
– The article reports on the preliminary results a project aimed at developing the writing skills... more – The article reports on the preliminary results a project aimed at developing the writing skills of elementary and lower-intermediate learners of English for Tourism. Coursebooks for the global market include writing activities and resources, but they usually do not take into account the learners’ L1 and their natural tendency to resort to it in the language classroom. As a consequence, in spite of progress in grammatical and lexical accuracy, learners’ written production often remains largely influenced by their L1 syntax, vocabulary and rhetorical strategies. This may have a negative impact on their ability to communicate effectively in the professional domain. Translation has been successfully used with advanced learners of ESP to exploit this tendency to relate the L1 and L2 lingua-cultural systems. However, translating can be too challenging for low-proficiency learners. To overcome this difficulty and obtain the same benefits offered by translation tasks, learners were asked ...
Travel blogs are becoming very common and so are the expatriates, who, after a holiday “under the... more Travel blogs are becoming very common and so are the expatriates, who, after a holiday “under the Tuscan sun”, decide to move to Italy for good and live the “Italian Dream”. This paper summarizes the results of a case study which shows how humour and irony are commonly used in their online travel journals as preferred rhetorical strategies to carry out several social and rhetorical functions (Attardo 2000; 2001a, Yus 2003). The article is a case study and is divided into two main sections. First, I identify and discuss the linguistic means through which irony and humour are coded at different levels of the language system in a small corpus of blog entries. This aims at unveiling the indissoluble interaction of semantic and pragmatic processes at play in irony and humour, as is predicted by the General Theory of Verbal Humour (Attardo 1994, 2001a) and by the Relevance-theoretic account of humorous phenomena (Giora 2003, Wilson and Sperber 1992). The final part of the article discusse...
This paper discusses the nature of vocabulary learning and suggests how to enhance lexical input ... more This paper discusses the nature of vocabulary learning and suggests how to enhance lexical input processing in adult students with dyslexia through activities adapted in multimodal and multisensory perspectives. Research on vocabulary acquisition has focussed on how lexical knowledge is encoded and stored in the brain (Aitchison 1994, Meara 1997, Jiang 2000). Learning vocabulary results in a complex cognitive operation which involves perception, attention and memory. Learners must be able to select different types of auditory or visual stimuli among a multitude of stimuli, segment units in the speech stream through orthographic or phonological processing, create memory traces, which will then be modified when new input is met. Moreover, once acquired, vocabulary must be consciously retrieved from long-term memory stores. Research on dyslexia has highlighted that this is a condition characterized by biological, cognitive and behavioural differences (Nicolson and Fawcett 1998, Frith 1999). Such differences have been correlated to difficulties in language processing and in the access and retrieval of the lexicon stored in long-term memory. Therefore, second language vocabulary learning, and its use in communication and in text comprehension, might be severely disrupted in dyslexic people. Some multimodal and multisensory activities are used to enhance specialised vocabulary learning in adult Italian students with dyslexia. Two groups of students, an experimental and a control one, were taught new specialised vocabulary using two different strategies. The experimental group received multimodal and multisensory instruction, including an adapted training application to develop first-language lexicon used with dyslexic children. The control group, instead, was taught following the guidelines discussed in the literature on foreign language teaching to dyslexic learners (cf. Nijakowska 2010, Kormos and Smith 2012).. Three final tests were administered to the two groups. A text-comprehension reading task and two lexical retrieval tasks, a matching task and word recall task. The experimental group performed better than control, and was particularly better in the word recall task. The results of this preliminary study seem to confirm the beneficial impact of multimodal and multisensory teaching methods for specialised vocabulary acquisition in learners with dyslexia.
Travels and Translations, 2013
Strumenti per la didattica e la ricerca, 2017
Ce livre est le deuxième volet de l’ouvrage consacré au guide touristique en tant que lieu de ren... more Ce livre est le deuxième volet de l’ouvrage consacré au guide touristique en tant que lieu de rencontre entre lexique et images du patrimoine culturel, ouvrage issu du colloque qui s’est déroulé le 11 et 12 juin 2015 à Pise et Florence. Ce volume porte l’attention sur l’image, en tant que représentation du réel mais aussi en tant que lieu à partir duquel l’imagination peut s’exercer en évoquant des représentations mentales (l’imaginaire). Les trois parties proposées (I. Les images du voyage; II. L’art dans le guide; III. Les guides entre imaginaire et propagande) entendent suggérer des parcours de réflexions autour du guide touristique, un objet qui n’a cessé de se transformer et qui, à travers le lexique et les images, a su transmettre les patrimoines culturels le plus différents et les plus pittoresques.
Dyslexia (Chichester, England), 2018
The study assessed the pragmatic skills of 19 well-compensated Italian-speaking young adults with... more The study assessed the pragmatic skills of 19 well-compensated Italian-speaking young adults with dyslexia compared with controls. A comprehensive pragmatic assessment tool was employed, targeting production and comprehension (Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates [APACS]). Participants were also administered a series of standardized tests to assess verbal and non-verbal cognitive abilities, including executive functions and social cognition tests. Data were analysed with the aim of understanding whether pragmatic abilities are compromised in dyslexia and of exploring associations between pragmatic performance and other cognitive domains. The performance of the dyslexia group was poorer than that of the control group in both expressive and receptive modalities. Data showed diffuse problems across several domains, with the greatest challenge posed by inferring nonliteral meanings, which indicates that pragmatic inefficiency is an important aspect of the linguisti...
Translating is always a very complex task, even when two languages seem to display a very similar... more Translating is always a very complex task, even when two languages seem to display a very similar organization of the linguistic resources for the expression of certain conceptual domains. If we adopt a view of the lexicon as a complex dynamic system, the reasons behind these difficulties are immediately evident: when we decide to translate, we are essentially faced with the task of mapping one complex system onto the another, an operation which is not always easy, even when the systems are apparently “similar”. I will exemplify this claim through the analysis of some of the problems arising in the translation of some verbs which lexicalise universal conceptual domains, fundamental both in communication and cognition: epistemicity and evidentiality. In particular, I will first apply the theory of lexical complexity to the class of English verbs of cognitive attitude, and then I will address the problem of translating these verbs into Italian. I will then focus on problems relating t...
This paper discusses the results of a micro-study on the possibility for the verbs know, think an... more This paper discusses the results of a micro-study on the possibility for the verbs know, think and believe to be explicitly opposed in the syntactic pattern “I don’t think/believe so, I know so” and to be considered as antonyms. Despite the fact that hypothetically, in such a context, other verbs of cognitive attitude (e.g. suppose) might fill the slot occupied by think and believe, as a matter of fact, none seems to occur in this type of opposition. This opens the path for a number of interesting questions relative to the special status of the relationship between know, think and believe within the wider class of English verbs of cognitive attitude (Cappelli 2007b). In what follows, this preference observed in both naturally occurring and elicited data is discussed and explained through suggestions provided by dynamic approaches to meaning construal underlying both the theory of Lexical Complexity (Bertuccelli Papi and Lenci 2007) and the principle of Relation by Contrast – Lexical...
Propositional attitudes represent a highly debated topic within the philosophical semantic tradit... more Propositional attitudes represent a highly debated topic within the philosophical semantic tradition of research, as well as within the truthconditionally oriented branch of semantics, and they have persistently provided very lively and problematic areas for discussion. Although propositional attitudes is a general term indicating attitudes of various sorts towards the propositional content of the sentence, this "label" has been commonly used to refer to the attitudes encoded by verbs like believe, and know, and it has been increasingly identified with the domain of epistemology and belief. Despite the considerable attention devoted to the problems arising from the presence of these verbs in report contexts, very little has been said about the linguistic semantics of these lexical items and their role in ordinary communication. The philosophical literature resorts systematically to know and believe for the exemplifications, and (very rarely) to few other verbs such as supp...
A Linguistic Approach to the Study of Dyslexia
The article investigates the discourse of guidebooks in terms of popularization, that is, in term... more The article investigates the discourse of guidebooks in terms of popularization, that is, in terms of the ways in which specialised and culture-specific concepts are reconceptualised and recontextualised to meet the needs, tastes and background encyclopaedia of the ideal reader. English and Italian guidebooks for adults and for children were analysed in order to compare the communicative strategies used in the two languages and in materials meant for different age groups. Whereas guidebooks for adults are a well-established genre in both lingua-cultural systems, guidebooks for children are a relatively new subgenre in the Italian market and the first popular instances were, in fact, translations of English guidebooks for young travellers. Some noticeable differences were found crosslinguistically in guidebooks for adults. Such differences are significantly levelled out in guidebooks for children, which display a tendency towards simplification and informality in both languages. However, some of the distinctive features of the genre in Italian are preserved. For this reason, the last part of the article focuses on the impact of translation on the popularization strategies identified in guidebooks for children.
Book chapter included in the volume "A Linguistic Approach to the Study of Dyslexia", e... more Book chapter included in the volume "A Linguistic Approach to the Study of Dyslexia", edited by G. Cappelli & S. Noccetti and submitted to Multilingual Matters. The chapter presents an overview of research on pragmatic efficiency and dyslexia in children and adults.
L’articolo affronta alcune questioni poste dalla traduzione di siti internet, con particolare rif... more L’articolo affronta alcune questioni poste dalla traduzione di siti internet, con particolare riferimento alla traduzione del contenuto testuale di siti turistici. Molti sono i problemi aperti in questo settore che ha iniziato a suscitare l’attenzione degli studiosi solo di recente e che spaziano dalla natura dei generi testuali del web fino alla distinzione fra traduzione e localizzazione, dal ruolo del traduttore di contenuti ipermediali al problema di valutare la qualita del prodotto finale. La complessa problematica e esemplificata attraverso lo studio delle parole chiave in un corpus di testi di argomento turistico che fornisce la base su cui fondare alcune proposte per la ricerca futura.
Lingue e Linguaggi, 2016
– The article reports on the preliminary results a project aimed at developing the writing skills... more – The article reports on the preliminary results a project aimed at developing the writing skills of elementary and lower-intermediate learners of English for Tourism. Coursebooks for the global market include writing activities and resources, but they usually do not take into account the learners’ L1 and their natural tendency to resort to it in the language classroom. As a consequence, in spite of progress in grammatical and lexical accuracy, learners’ written production often remains largely influenced by their L1 syntax, vocabulary and rhetorical strategies. This may have a negative impact on their ability to communicate effectively in the professional domain. Translation has been successfully used with advanced learners of ESP to exploit this tendency to relate the L1 and L2 lingua-cultural systems. However, translating can be too challenging for low-proficiency learners. To overcome this difficulty and obtain the same benefits offered by translation tasks, learners were asked ...
Travel blogs are becoming very common and so are the expatriates, who, after a holiday “under the... more Travel blogs are becoming very common and so are the expatriates, who, after a holiday “under the Tuscan sun”, decide to move to Italy for good and live the “Italian Dream”. This paper summarizes the results of a case study which shows how humour and irony are commonly used in their online travel journals as preferred rhetorical strategies to carry out several social and rhetorical functions (Attardo 2000; 2001a, Yus 2003). The article is a case study and is divided into two main sections. First, I identify and discuss the linguistic means through which irony and humour are coded at different levels of the language system in a small corpus of blog entries. This aims at unveiling the indissoluble interaction of semantic and pragmatic processes at play in irony and humour, as is predicted by the General Theory of Verbal Humour (Attardo 1994, 2001a) and by the Relevance-theoretic account of humorous phenomena (Giora 2003, Wilson and Sperber 1992). The final part of the article discusse...
This paper discusses the nature of vocabulary learning and suggests how to enhance lexical input ... more This paper discusses the nature of vocabulary learning and suggests how to enhance lexical input processing in adult students with dyslexia through activities adapted in multimodal and multisensory perspectives. Research on vocabulary acquisition has focussed on how lexical knowledge is encoded and stored in the brain (Aitchison 1994, Meara 1997, Jiang 2000). Learning vocabulary results in a complex cognitive operation which involves perception, attention and memory. Learners must be able to select different types of auditory or visual stimuli among a multitude of stimuli, segment units in the speech stream through orthographic or phonological processing, create memory traces, which will then be modified when new input is met. Moreover, once acquired, vocabulary must be consciously retrieved from long-term memory stores. Research on dyslexia has highlighted that this is a condition characterized by biological, cognitive and behavioural differences (Nicolson and Fawcett 1998, Frith 1999). Such differences have been correlated to difficulties in language processing and in the access and retrieval of the lexicon stored in long-term memory. Therefore, second language vocabulary learning, and its use in communication and in text comprehension, might be severely disrupted in dyslexic people. Some multimodal and multisensory activities are used to enhance specialised vocabulary learning in adult Italian students with dyslexia. Two groups of students, an experimental and a control one, were taught new specialised vocabulary using two different strategies. The experimental group received multimodal and multisensory instruction, including an adapted training application to develop first-language lexicon used with dyslexic children. The control group, instead, was taught following the guidelines discussed in the literature on foreign language teaching to dyslexic learners (cf. Nijakowska 2010, Kormos and Smith 2012).. Three final tests were administered to the two groups. A text-comprehension reading task and two lexical retrieval tasks, a matching task and word recall task. The experimental group performed better than control, and was particularly better in the word recall task. The results of this preliminary study seem to confirm the beneficial impact of multimodal and multisensory teaching methods for specialised vocabulary acquisition in learners with dyslexia.
Travels and Translations, 2013
Strumenti per la didattica e la ricerca, 2017
Ce livre est le deuxième volet de l’ouvrage consacré au guide touristique en tant que lieu de ren... more Ce livre est le deuxième volet de l’ouvrage consacré au guide touristique en tant que lieu de rencontre entre lexique et images du patrimoine culturel, ouvrage issu du colloque qui s’est déroulé le 11 et 12 juin 2015 à Pise et Florence. Ce volume porte l’attention sur l’image, en tant que représentation du réel mais aussi en tant que lieu à partir duquel l’imagination peut s’exercer en évoquant des représentations mentales (l’imaginaire). Les trois parties proposées (I. Les images du voyage; II. L’art dans le guide; III. Les guides entre imaginaire et propagande) entendent suggérer des parcours de réflexions autour du guide touristique, un objet qui n’a cessé de se transformer et qui, à travers le lexique et les images, a su transmettre les patrimoines culturels le plus différents et les plus pittoresques.
Dyslexia (Chichester, England), 2018
The study assessed the pragmatic skills of 19 well-compensated Italian-speaking young adults with... more The study assessed the pragmatic skills of 19 well-compensated Italian-speaking young adults with dyslexia compared with controls. A comprehensive pragmatic assessment tool was employed, targeting production and comprehension (Assessment of Pragmatic Abilities and Cognitive Substrates [APACS]). Participants were also administered a series of standardized tests to assess verbal and non-verbal cognitive abilities, including executive functions and social cognition tests. Data were analysed with the aim of understanding whether pragmatic abilities are compromised in dyslexia and of exploring associations between pragmatic performance and other cognitive domains. The performance of the dyslexia group was poorer than that of the control group in both expressive and receptive modalities. Data showed diffuse problems across several domains, with the greatest challenge posed by inferring nonliteral meanings, which indicates that pragmatic inefficiency is an important aspect of the linguisti...
Translating is always a very complex task, even when two languages seem to display a very similar... more Translating is always a very complex task, even when two languages seem to display a very similar organization of the linguistic resources for the expression of certain conceptual domains. If we adopt a view of the lexicon as a complex dynamic system, the reasons behind these difficulties are immediately evident: when we decide to translate, we are essentially faced with the task of mapping one complex system onto the another, an operation which is not always easy, even when the systems are apparently “similar”. I will exemplify this claim through the analysis of some of the problems arising in the translation of some verbs which lexicalise universal conceptual domains, fundamental both in communication and cognition: epistemicity and evidentiality. In particular, I will first apply the theory of lexical complexity to the class of English verbs of cognitive attitude, and then I will address the problem of translating these verbs into Italian. I will then focus on problems relating t...
This paper discusses the results of a micro-study on the possibility for the verbs know, think an... more This paper discusses the results of a micro-study on the possibility for the verbs know, think and believe to be explicitly opposed in the syntactic pattern “I don’t think/believe so, I know so” and to be considered as antonyms. Despite the fact that hypothetically, in such a context, other verbs of cognitive attitude (e.g. suppose) might fill the slot occupied by think and believe, as a matter of fact, none seems to occur in this type of opposition. This opens the path for a number of interesting questions relative to the special status of the relationship between know, think and believe within the wider class of English verbs of cognitive attitude (Cappelli 2007b). In what follows, this preference observed in both naturally occurring and elicited data is discussed and explained through suggestions provided by dynamic approaches to meaning construal underlying both the theory of Lexical Complexity (Bertuccelli Papi and Lenci 2007) and the principle of Relation by Contrast – Lexical...
Propositional attitudes represent a highly debated topic within the philosophical semantic tradit... more Propositional attitudes represent a highly debated topic within the philosophical semantic tradition of research, as well as within the truthconditionally oriented branch of semantics, and they have persistently provided very lively and problematic areas for discussion. Although propositional attitudes is a general term indicating attitudes of various sorts towards the propositional content of the sentence, this "label" has been commonly used to refer to the attitudes encoded by verbs like believe, and know, and it has been increasingly identified with the domain of epistemology and belief. Despite the considerable attention devoted to the problems arising from the presence of these verbs in report contexts, very little has been said about the linguistic semantics of these lexical items and their role in ordinary communication. The philosophical literature resorts systematically to know and believe for the exemplifications, and (very rarely) to few other verbs such as supp...