Travel Bursary Report April 2024- Bruno Spadi
Bruno Spadi is a Final Year PhD candidate in the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences, in the Centre for Language and Communication Studies.
Thanks to the funding awarded from TRiSS, I was able to participate in the 18th Cambridge Italian
Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting (CIDSM18) at the University of Manchester. I presented the
paper: ‘Verb Movement in Sicily: Some New Empirical Evidence’ which focussed on part of my research project at the School of Linguistic, Speech, and Communication Sciences here at Trinity College Dublin.
CIDSM is a vital place for the academic exchange of every aspect of the languages spoken in Italy. It is a unique conference as it brings together researchers working on different aspects and frameworks on the grammar of the languages of Italy (e.g., Neapolitan, Palermitan, Ladin, Venetian).
I presented some new data I have collected over the past three years through fieldwork in loco. My research has greatly benefited from this experience: I received feedback and comments from an expert audience and was also able to compare my findings and analysis against other data from different languages spoken within Italy (and beyond).
Abstract of the paper:
In my talk, I describe and discuss some new empirical patterns of verb placement found in some Italo-Romance languages spoken in Sicily. More precisely, I focus on the placement of finite lexical verbs, the auxiliary verb 'to have', and past participles with respect to several adverbs (i.e., quickly, often, already, always). I present new data from a selection of languages spoken in Sicily – which I collected in loco through interviews with native speakers – and put it in a comparative perspective against other Romance languages such as Spanish, European Portuguese, Neapolitan, and Cosentino. One of the main parts of my talk is dedicated to the adverb sempre which can be translated as 'always' in English. This adverb, depending on the context and the verb which it is used with, can also mean 'still' or 'really'.