Educazione alla cittadinanza per cittadini immigrati adulti. Il contributo della formazione linguistico-giuridica all'acquisizione di competenze di cittadinanza in lingua seconda

The research examines which cultural and linguistic instruments can be offered to provide adult migrants with formative access to citizenship competences. Starting from the questions: How can individuals of all community groups present in a nation-state acquire high standards of linguistic, sociolinguistic and discourse competences in order to be fully integrated, that is to participate and be included in social activities in the public domain such as work and institutional environments? How are these competencies developed in an educational context? How do adult migrants behave linguistically in this context, according to their needs and motivations? The research hypothesis aimed at outlining a formative project of citizenship education targeted at adult foreign citizens, where a central role is assigned both to law education and linguistic education. Acoordingly, as the study considered if the introduction of a law programme in a second language course could be conceived as an opportunity to further the access to active citizenship and social participation, a corpus of audiodata was collected in law classes of an Italian adult professional course attended by a 50% of foreign students. The observation was conducted on teacher and learner talk and learner participation in classroom interaction when curriculum legal topics were introduced and discussed. In the classroom law discourse two dimensions were analyzed: the legal knowledge construction and the participants’ interpersonal and identity construction. From the analysis, the understanding is that drawn that law classes seem to represent an educational setting where foreign citizens have an opportunity to learn and practise citizenship. The social and pragmatic approach to legal contents plays a relevant role, in a subject which, in non-academic contexts, loses its technical specificity and refers to law as a product of social representation. In the observed educational environment, where students are adults who bring into the classroom multiple personal and social identities, legal topics have the advantage of increasing adult migrants’ motivation to ‘go back to school’ as they are likely to give hints, if not provide solutions, to problems relating to participation in socio-institutional activities. At the same time, these contents offer an ideal context where individuals can acquire high discourse competences and citizenship skills, such as agency and critical reflection. Besides, the analysis reveals that providing adult learners with materials that focus on rights, politics and the law, i.e. with materials which stimulate discussion on concerns affecting their daily lives, is welcomed by learners themselves, who might appreciate the integration of these same topics in a second language course.

La Bukowina e la "letteratura etnografica" di lingua tedesca

La Bukowina è una regione dell’impero asburgico ricordata come “eccezionale” per la compresenza e la tolleranza fra etnie, nonché per l’accoglienza unica della lingua tedesca. Questa narrazione proviene e dai nostalgici ricordi delle ultime generazioni di abitanti del luogo, che in seguito hanno vissuto la fine del “mondo di ieri”; e da un discorso propagandistico della Corona. La presente ricerca si propone di illustrare il paesaggio culturale della Bukowina nonché le reali modalità con cui la cultura dell’imperatore si insinuò nella regione. Nel decodificare il rapporto di superiorità con cui il tedesco si affacciava agli altri popoli – investigato con l’ausilio dei postcolonial studies –, il progetto propone come materia di studio un fenomeno letterario in voga a cavallo tra XIX e XX secolo, la “letteratura etnografica”, ispirato dall’affascinante molteplicità della Bukowina, nonché da una disciplina accademica che in quegli anni attirava molti studiosi e curiosi: l’etnografia. Questo tipo di letteratura si esprime attraverso diversi generi letterari, che spesso condividono il tratto della frammentarietà. Tra queste opere, la presente analisi si sofferma su tre esempi che mostrano un progressivo allontanamento dal metodo “scientifico” della disciplina etnografica, illustrando l’ampiezza dell’insieme “letteratura etnografica”: "Die Völkergruppen der Bukowina" (1884) di Ludwig Adolf Staufe Simiginowicz; "Aus Halb-Asien" (1876-1888) di Karl Emil Franzos; "Maghrebinische Geschichten" (1953), di Gregor von Rezzori.

Lingue meno diffuse e corpora: studio empirico sulla terminologia amministrativa ladina

This study aims to the elaboration of juridical and administrative terminology in Ladin language, actually on the Ladin idiom spoken in Val Badia. The necessity of this study is strictly connected to the fact that in South Tyrol the Ladin language is not just safeguarded, but the editing of administrative and normative text is guaranteed by law. This means that there is a need for a unique terminology in order to support translators and editors of specialised texts. The starting point of this study are, on one side the need of a unique terminology, and on the other side the translation work done till now from the employees of the public administration in Ladin language. In order to document their efforts a corpus made up of digitalized administrative and normative documents was build. The first two chapters focuses on the state of the art of projects on terminology and corpus linguistics for lesser used languages. The information were collected thanks to the help of institutes, universities and researchers dealing with lesser used languages. The third chapter focuses on the development of administrative language in Ladin language and the fourth chapter focuses on the creation of the trilingual Italian – German – Ladin corpus made up of administrative and normative documents. The last chapter deals with the methodologies applied in order to elaborate the terminology entries in Ladin language though the use of the trilingual corpus. Starting from the terminology entry all steps are described, from term extraction, to the extraction of equivalents, contexts and definitions and of course also of the elaboration of translation proposals for not found equivalences. Finally the problems referring to the elaboration of terminology in Ladin language are illustrated.

Language and Embodiment: sensory-motor and linguistic-social experience. Evidence on sentence comprehension

In this work I address the study of language comprehension in an “embodied” framework. Firstly I show behavioral evidence supporting the idea that language modulates the motor system in a specific way, both at a proximal level (sensibility to the effectors) and at the distal level (sensibility to the goal of the action in which the single motor acts are inserted). I will present two studies in which the method is basically the same: we manipulated the linguistic stimuli (the kind of sentence: hand action vs. foot action vs. mouth action) and the effector by which participants had to respond (hand vs. foot vs. mouth; dominant hand vs. non-dominant hand). Response times analyses showed a specific modulation depending on the kind of sentence: participants were facilitated in the task execution (sentence sensibility judgment) when the effector they had to use to respond was the same to which the sentences referred. Namely, during language comprehension a pre-activation of the motor system seems to take place. This activation is analogous (even if less intense) to the one detectable when we practically execute the action described by the sentence. Beyond this effector specific modulation, we also found an effect of the goal suggested by the sentence. That is, the hand effector was pre-activated not only by hand-action-related sentences, but also by sentences describing mouth actions, consistently with the fact that to execute an action on an object with the mouth we firstly have to bring it to the mouth with the hand. After reviewing the evidence on simulation specificity directly referring to the body (for instance, the kind of the effector activated by the language), I focus on the specific properties of the object to which the words refer, particularly on the weight. In this case the hypothesis to test was if both lifting movement perception and lifting movement execution are modulated by language comprehension. We used behavioral and kinematics methods, and we manipulated the linguistic stimuli (the kind of sentence: the lifting of heavy objects vs. the lifting of light objects). To study the movement perception we measured the correlations between the weight of the objects lifted by an actor (heavy objects vs. light objects) and the esteems provided by the participants. To study the movement execution we measured kinematics parameters variance (velocity, acceleration, time to the first peak of velocity) during the actual lifting of objects (heavy objects vs. light objects). Both kinds of measures revealed that language had a specific effect on the motor system, both at a perceptive and at a motoric level. Finally, I address the issue of the abstract words. Different studies in the “embodied” framework tried to explain the meaning of abstract words The limit of these works is that they account only for subsets of phenomena, so results are difficult to generalize. We tried to circumvent this problem by contrasting transitive verbs (abstract and concrete) and nouns (abstract and concrete) in different combinations. The behavioral study was conducted both with German and Italian participants, as the two languages are syntactically different. We found that response times were faster for both the compatible pairs (concrete verb + concrete noun; abstract verb + abstract noun) than for the mixed ones. Interestingly, for the mixed combinations analyses showed a modulation due to the specific language (German vs. Italian): when the concrete word precedes the abstract one responses were faster, regardless of the word grammatical class. Results are discussed in the framework of current views on abstract words. They highlight the important role of developmental and social aspects of language use, and confirm theories assigning a crucial role to both sensorimotor and linguistic experience for abstract words.

The language of action. How language translates the dynamics of our actions.

The general aim of the thesis was to investigate how and to what extent the characteristics of action organization are reflected in language, and how they influence language processing and understanding. Even though a huge amount of research has been devoted to the study of the motor effects of language, this issue is very debated in literature. Namely, the majority of the studies have focused on low-level motor effects such as effector-relatedness of action, whereas only a few studies have started to systematically investigate how specific aspects of action organization are encoded and reflected in language. After a review of previous studies on the relationship between language comprehension and action (chapter 1) and a critical discussion of some of them (chapter 2), the thesis is composed by three experimental chapters, each devoted to a specific aspect of action organization. Chapter 3 presents a study designed with the aim to disentangle the effective time course of the involvement of the motor system during language processing. Three kinematics experiments were designed in order to determine whether and, at which stage of motor planning and execution effector-related action verbs influence actions executed with either the same or a different effector. Results demonstrate that the goal of an action can be linguistically re-activated, producing a modulation of the motor response. In chapter 4, a second study investigates the interplay between the role of motor perspective (agent) and the organization of action in motor chains. More specifically, this kinematics study aims at deepening how goal can be translated in language, using as stimuli simple sentences composed by a pronoun (I, You, He/She) and a verb. Results showed that the perspective activated by the pronoun You reflects the motor pattern of the “agent” combined with the chain structure of the verb. These data confirm an early involvement of the motor system in language processing, suggesting that it is specifically modulated by the activation of the agent’s perspective. In chapter 5, the issue of perspective is specifically investigated, focusing on its role in language comprehension. In particular, this study aimed at determining how a specific perspective (induced for example by a personal pronoun) modulates motor behaviour during and after language processing. A classical compatibility effect (the Action-sentence compatibility effect) has been used to this aim. In three behavioural experiments the authors investigated how the ACE is modulated by taking first or third person perspective. Results from these experiments showed that the ACE effect occurs only when a first-person perspective is activated by the sentences used as stimuli. Overall, the data from this thesis contributed to disentangle several aspects of how action organization is translated in language, and then reactivated during language processing. This constitutes a new contribution to the field, adding lacking information on how specific aspects such as goal and perspective are linguistically described. In addition, these studies offer a new point of view to understand the functional implications of the involvement of the motor system during language comprehension, specifically from the point of view of our social interactions.