The languages of postcolonial ireland and their potential for cultural expression

Ireland is a country in which two languages are spoken: English and Irish. This thesis analyzes the historical relationship between the languages, the cultural codes and meanings attached to each of them, as well as how much of the culture of its speakers each is able to carry. Beyond that, the influence the two languages have exercised on one another and their mutual entwinement is taken into closer examination.

Il child language brokering a Ravenna e provincia: la parola agli studenti e ai professori

The main aim of this study is to provide a description of the phenomenon defined as Child Language Brokering (CLB), a common practice among language minority communities but which has received less attention in the academic literature. As the children of immigrants often learn the host language much more quickly than their parents, they contribute to family life by acting as language and cultural mediators between a family members and different language speakers. Many immigrant families prefer a language broker from within their own family to an external mediator or interpreter, even though there is a well-found resistance to the use of these young interpreters by professionals. In this study I report some findings from surveys of teachers in schools in Ravenna where there has been some use of students as CLBs and of students who have acted or are still acting as mediators for their families in different contexts, not only while at school. This dissertation is divided into five chapters. Chapter one aims at providing an overview of recent migration to Italy and of the differences between first-generation immigrants and second-generation immigrants. The chapter also discusses the available professional interpreting facilities provided by the municipality of Ravenna. Chapter two presents an overview of the literature on child language brokering. Chapter three provides a description of the methodology used in order to analyze the data collected. Chapter four contains a detailed analysis of the questionnaires administered to the students and the interviews submitted to the teachers in four schools in Ravenna. Chapter five focuses on the studies carried out by the researchers of the Thomas Coram Research Unit and University College London and draws a general comparison between their findings from on-line surveys of teachers in schools and my own findings on teachers’ points of view. The results of this study demonstrate that CLB is a common practice among immigrant children living in Ravenna and, although almost all students reported positive appreciation, further work is still needed to assess the impact of this phenomenon.

Le disfluenze e la percezione degli ascoltatori. Valutazione di tre interpretazioni consecutive.

This study aims at exploring listeners’ perception of disfluencies, i.e. ungrammatical pauses, filled pauses, repairs, false starts and repetitions, which can irritate listeners and impede comprehension. As professional communicators, conference interpreters should be competent public speakers. This means that their speech should be easily understood by listeners and not contain elements that may be considered irritating. The aim of this study was to understand to what extent listeners notice disfluencies and consider them irritating, and to examine whether there are differences between interpreters and non-interpreters and between different age groups. A survey was therefore carried out among professional interpreters, students of interpreting and people who regularly attend conferences. The respondents were asked to answer a questionnaire after listening to three speeches: three consecutive interpretations delivered during the final exams held at the Advanced School of Languages, Literature, Translation and Interpretation (SSLLTI) in Forlì. Since conference interpreters’ public speaking skills should be at least as good as those of the speakers at a conference, the speeches were presented to the listeners as speeches delivered during a conference, with no mention of interpreting being made. The study is divided into five chapters. Chapter I outlines the characteristics of the interpreter as a professional communicator. The quality criterion “user-friendliness” is explored, with a focus on features that make a speech more user-friendly: fluency, intonation, coherence and cohesion. The Chapter also focuses on listeners’ quality expectations and evaluations. In Chapter II the methodology of the study is described. Chapter III contains a detailed analysis of the texts used for the study, focusing on those elements that may irritate listeners or impede comprehension, namely disfluencies, the wrong use of intonation and a lack of coherence or cohesion. Chapter IV outlines the results of the survey, while Chapter V presents our conclusions.

La competenza comunicativa in giapponese: indagine empirica sulle difficoltà frequenti degli apprendenti italofoni in interazioni orali

Smooth intercultural communication requires very complex tasks, especially when participants are very different in their cultural and linguistic backgrounds: this is the case of native Italian and Japanese speakers. A further difficulty in such a context can be found in the usage of a foreign language not mastered perfectly by speakers, which is the case for Italian intermediate learners of Japanese. The aim of this study is therefore to identify the linguistic difficulties common among Italian learners of Japanese as a foreign language and to further examine the consequences of incorrect pragma-linguistic deliveries in actual conversations. To this end, a series of linguistic aspects selected on the basis of the author's experience have been taken into consideration. Some aspects are expected to be difficult to master because of linguistic differences between Italian and Japanese, while some may be difficult due to their connection to the specific Japanese cultural context. The present study consists of six parts. The Introduction presents the state of the art on the research topic and defines the purpose of this research. Chapter 1 outlines the linguistic aspects of the Japanese language investigated in the study, specifically focusing on the following topics: writing system, phonology, loan words, numbers, ellipsis, levels of speech and honorifics. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the environment of teaching Japanese as a foreign language in the university setting in Italy. In Chapter 3 the first phase of the research is described, i.e. an online survey aimed at identifying the most problematic linguistic aspects. Chapter 4 presents the second phase of this study: a series of oral interactions between Japanese and Italian native speakers, conversing exclusively in Japanese, focusing on the management of misunderstandings with the use of actual linguistic data. The Conclusion outlines the results and possible future developments.

Lo sviluppo linguistico (L1): L'acquisizione degli articoli nei bambini italiani e spagnoli

This project focuses on the acquisition of Italian and Spanish as mother tongues. Chapter 1 explores some of the main theories concerning language acquisition in order to give a general overview about this field of investigation. Chapter 2 presents the main steps of the acquisition of Italian and Spanish during childhood as described by Camaioni (2001) and Hernández Pina (1990). Chapter 3 contains an analysis carried out on several transcripts of natural conversations between children and their parents. Particular attention was paid to understand how Italian and Spanish children acquire definite and indefinite articles between 18 and 30 months of age. The goal of this paper is to understand whether Italian and Spanish children follow the same pattern of language acquisition when articles are considered, given the undoubtable similarity of these two Romance languages. The results of this study suggest that the acquisition of articles by native Italian and Spanish speakers mirrors such similarity. Yet, Spanish children seem faster at learning new uses of articles (i.e. articulated prepositions), but at first they make many more mistakes compared to Italians. This suggests that Spanish children tend to make experiments with the linguistic items they already know in order to increase their linguistic competences. On the other hand, Italians seem slower at learning new features of their mother tongue, but the number of mistakes they make is generally lower, which suggests that they rather stabilize their competences before learning new ones. The analysis also highlights the importance of imitation in the process of language acquisition: children tend to repeat what they hear from their parents to learn new features of their mother tongue. Needless to say, this paper only aims at serving as a springboard for further investigation, since language acquisition remains a fascinating and largely unsolved process.