Slovene A2/B1 Students’ Morphosyntax

The aim of this article is to make an error analysis based on a corpus consisting of 58 written tests in Italian on the vocational maturity exam of Slovene mother-tongue students at an A2/B1 level. The objective of the qualitative and quantitative analysis is to identify the most frequent errors in the field of morphosyntax, to find out the causes, and to compare them with the results that emerged from previous research studies. The qualitative analysis was carried out on the basis of a grid created after I had completed a contrastive study of Slovene and Italian and later adapted to the data that emerged from the corpus. The causes of errors are negative transfer from L1 and in a small percentage from other foreign languages such as English and Spanish, but also the generalisation strategy. Quantitatively, the most problematic part of speech is the article, a part of speech that Slovene does not have, followed by the erroneous form or use of verbs and prepositions. The other categories, which exceed 1% of all errors and are therefore included, are the agreement between constituents, word order, and errors related to different uses of the pronoun, adjective, noun, and adverb. This frequency of errors matches other similar research studies carried out in the past with the difference that other studies included students with different Slavic languages as the L1. This suggests that all Slavic learners have the same problems in Italian written production, therefore the first cause of morphosyntactic errors is the difference in the grammatical structure between L1 and L2.

The blame is on interference: a contrastive analysis of errors in the writing of Slovene-speaking university students of Italian

This contribution aims to address and show the crucial points of mother-tongue interference in the writing of Slovene-speaking learners of Italian. The issue is presented on the basis of a comparison between the language rules in Slovene and Italian in relation to the difficulties encountered in concrete contexts. The goal of this article is to identify the hypotheses underlying learners’ language choices. The article illustrates the mistakes made in the choice of verbal paradigms (consecutio temporum; doubts regarding choosing between the perfect and the imperfect and the explicit and implicit forms; some passive constructs; and the subjunctive) as well as the difficulties in using articles and certain adjectives and pronouns (possessive, demonstrative, and relative ones). The work also contains documented and commented examples of errors in the use of the comma and cases of interference that can be attributed to “false friends” (errors of spelling and of a morphological-syntactic, derivational, and lexical nature). The results of this analysis confirm the need for a conscious integration of direct teaching, noticing linguistic mechanisms, and a focus on form in learning processes in order to regulate the input, facilitate understanding, and stimulate natural processes of acquisition.

È stato un mezzo disastro… Points of Convergence Between Approximation and Intensification: A Contrastive Italian-Russian Study

Based on the case-study of the Italian downtoner mezzo, ‘half of’, the present work aims to highlight, through a usage-based approach, interesting points of semantic and functional convergence between approximation and intensification, which are traditionally considered divergent meaningconstruction strategies. Mezzo functions both on the semantic level, by modulating the referential force of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and on the pragmatic level, where it acts as a discourse marker, enabling the speaker to reduce the illocutionary force of their assertions and helping the receiver to make the inferences necessary to recognise the speaker’s communicative intentions in cases of “loose talk” (in Relevance Theory terms), such as understatement and overstatement. In the second part of the article, the results of a contrastive analysis with Russian are discussed, based on the assumption that the identification of functional equivalences between different languages is a valid heuristic method to explain the semantic and pragmatic multifunctionality of certain lexical elements, also from a cross-linguistic perspective.

A Model for Presentation of Italian Prepositions Expressing Cause and Serbian Cases in Didactic Material

The aim of this paper is to propose a model for a didactic representation of Italian prepositions and their Serbian equivalents that could facilitate 1. the comprehension and acquisition of Italian prepositions by Serbian learners of L2 Italian, and 2. possibly also the comprehension and acquisition of Serbian cases by Italian learners of L2 Serbian. Italian prepositional constructions and Serbian morphological cases may express the same syntactic and semantic functions. Taken separately, both Italian prepositions and Serbian cases have been studied in great detail and in depth, not only from the point of view of inflectional morphology, but also from syntactic and semantic perspectives. However, the functions that these categories perform in the two languages have to date been compared only sporadically and in very general terms, without any attempts of a systematic and exhaustive contrastive analysis. Additionally, the authors of didactic materials intended for Serbian speakers learning Italian, as well as Italian speakers learning Serbian as an L2, often do not pay sufficient attention to a contrastive representation of Italian prepositions and Serbian cases. For this reason, they still represent one of the most frequent error types during the process of acquisition of the languages in question. Therefore, this paper compares the Italian prepositional constructions consisting of simple prepositions followed by nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs on one side, and their Serbian equivalents on the other side, by means of contrastive analysis methods. The results of our analysis could be applied in the creation of grammars, dictionaries, textbooks, and additional didactic materials for L2 Italian for Serbian learners and for L2 Serbian for Italian learners.