Negation in Italian and German

Starting date
January 1, 2012
Duration (months)
24
Departments
Foreign Languages and Literatures
Managers or local contacts
Cantarini Sibilla
Keyword
attenuated negation, interrogative sentences, translation

In this project I will focus on the meaning of several occurrences of the negation non in Italian interrogative sentences which have the characteristic of not inverting the polarity of the sentence expressed in the speech act. Following that, I will evaluate the possibility of translating the mentioned occurrences of the negation non with the occurrences of the negation nicht in German. Several properties of the negations non and nicht will be analysed and corresponding classes of sentences in the two languages identified, in which the negations non and nicht seem to occur with the same meaning. Only in the last class of interrogative sentences analysed, that is, in the wh-interrogatives with rhetorical meaning, does the negation with attenuated function non turn out to be better translated, in some cases, with the Abtönungspartikel wohl, which becomes a rhetorical indicator in place of the negation. Spese partecipazione e/o organizzazione di convegni: Euro 1500

Sponsors:

Funds: assigned and managed by the department

Project participants

Sibilla Cantarini
Associate Professor
Jacopo Torregrossa
Research areas involved in the project
Lingua e linguistica tedesca
Lexico-grammar – Lexikalische Grammatik
Publications
Title Authors Year
Dialogue: State of the Art. Studies in Memory of Sorin Stati Cantarini, Sibilla 2012
Introduction Cantarini, Sibilla 2012
Translatability into the German language of some attenuated uses of the Italian negation "non" Cantarini, Sibilla 2012

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