Mother Tongues and Other Reflections on the Italian Language / / Giulio Lepschy.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UTP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2015
• VerfasserIn: Lepschy, Giulio,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©2002
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Toronto Italian Studies
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Italian is unique among modern European languages, for although it has a history going back eight centuries, it has only consolidated as a spoken national language during the twentieth century. Previously, it was a written, literary language, and people spoke regional dialects that were strikingly different from each other. This has intriguing implications for understanding notions such as mother tongue, native speaker, and literary language, and Giulio Lepschy discusses these and other issues in this collection of six scholarly essays on the Italian language.Lepschy also explores a little understood aspect of Italian prosody (the system of secondary stresses), and analyzes a Venetian play of the Renaissance, La Veniexiana, in which a 'gendered' reading helps to clarify some grammatically controversial passages. These aspects of the play had been examined by Carlo Dionisotti, the eminent Italianist whose life and works are the subject of the final essay. Lepschy's approach combines the insights of modern linguistic theory and the findings of fresh and original philological investigations. His essays will be essential to anyone interested in the Italian language.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Preface -- 1. Mother Tongues and Literary Languages -- 2. The Languages of Italy -- 3. Popular Italian: Fact or Fiction? -- 4. Secondary Stress: Surface Contrasts -- 5. La Veniexiana: A Venetian Play of the Renaissance -- 6. Carlo Dionisotti, 1908-1998: A Memoir -- Index of Names