10.30-12.30
Biblioteca di Studi Letterari e Linguistici, Edificio D3, 3°piano

E. Calaresu
Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Dialogue strategies to reactivate shared knowledge and introduce a new topic: the exemplary case of «(do you have) present X?» And «do you know X?»
In this presentation I will discuss some conversational routes of two Italian expressions (“(hai) presente X?” and “Sai X?”) and how they can grammaticalize into two different types of markers (topic-introducer markers and meta-knowledge parenthetical markers). I will especially dwell upon their function of introducing new topics in conversation, and argue the need of critically re-thinking both the (too often taken for granted) relations between topic and referent, and the rather too simplistic clear-cut divide between sentence-topic and discourse-topic.
 

14.00-10.30
Biblioteca di Studi Letterari e Linguistici, Edificio D3, 3°piano
Maria Elena Favilla
Dipartimento di Educazione e Scienze Umane, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Repetitions and resonance in class discussions
The presentation will be devoted to analyzing repetitions in class discussions and in other conversations between primary school pupils and their teachers, with the aim of discussing some first data on the presence and role of repetition in children’s conversations and of investigating the relations between repetition and cognitive and psycholinguistic factors (in particular, priming effects) which may facilitate repetition and, therefore, determine or condition this type of functional correlate. Repetition will be considered in the perspective of Du Bois’ dialogic syntax, as generating “dialogic resonance” between the utterances produced during an interaction, with the effect of activating affinities across the utterances and of linking them “along multiple dimensions of linguistic form and meaning” (Du Bois 2014).

Brochure 2019