Italian Language in the Media

6 ECTS credits
180 h study time

Offer 2 with catalog number 4020117FNR for all students in the 1st semester at a (F) Master - specialised level.

Semester

1st semester

Enrollment based on exam contract

Impossible

Grading method

Grading (scale from 0 to 20)

Can retake in second session

Yes

Taught in

Italian

Faculty

Faculty of Languages & Humanities

Department

Linguistics and Literary Studies

Educational team

Stefano De Pascale (course titular)

Activities and contact hours

13 contact hours Lecture
15 contact hours Seminar, Exercises or Practicals
156 contact hours Independent or External Form of Study

Course Content

The main objective of this course is to familiarize students with the variety of genres in which contemporary Italian manifests itself and how register and genre variation correlate with structural aspects of the language. To this end, we take as our starting point the theoretical and methodological framework of corpus linguistics. More specifically, we will devote the first lessons to, on the one hand, the corpus-based research on register variation and stylometry from the school of Douglas Biber (Grieve, Biber, Friginal, & Nekrasova, 2010; Biber & Conrad 2019) and, on the other hand, Italian corpus linguistics (Cresti & Panunzi 2013; Cresti & Moneglia 2016).

In the second part of the course unit, students will explore sample texts and datasets using qualitative and quantitative analysis. The qualitative component will focus on identifying the different (lexical, syntactic and pragmatic) strategies that characterize each register, genre and text type (journalistic prose, legal prose, social media posts, spoken Italian, etc.). In the quantitative component, students will have to operationalize the previously identified features in order to examine those on a larger scale in Italian corpora and datasets (e.g., the genre-balanced Perugia corpus [Spina 2014]). Students will also learn the basic notions of Excel for data processing.

Course material

Handbook (Recommended) : Essere #matteorenzi, C. Giunta, Il Mulino, Bologna, 9788815257291, 2013
Handbook (Recommended) : Parole al potere, Discorsi politici italiani, G. Pedullà, Rizzoli, Milano, 9788817025201, 2015
Handbook (Recommended) : L'italiano al voto, R. Vetrugno, C. De Santis, C. Panzeri e F. Della Corte (a cura di), Accademia della Crusca, Firenze, 9788889369128, 2017
Handbook (Recommended) : Politolinguistica, L'analisi del discorso politico, L. Cedroni, Prefazione di T. de Mauro, Carocci, Roma, 9788843073979, 2017
Handbook (Recommended) : Linguistica italiana, M. Palermo, Bologna, Il Mulino, 9788815284891, 2020

Additional info

This course is taught in Italian.

Learning Outcomes

General competencies

The student learns to motivate the building blocks of empirical and, more specifically, corpus linguistic research and to operationalize them into a concrete study. At the end of the course, each student presents the research hypotheses and/or preliminary results of his a personal paper during a seminar.

Grading

The final grade is composed based on the following categories:
Oral Exam determines 50% of the final mark.
Written Exam determines 50% of the final mark.

Within the Oral Exam category, the following assignments need to be completed:

oral exam with a relative weight of 50 which comprises 50% of the final mark.

Note: The oral exam, will be based on the analysis and the description of a specific case study, similar to those treated in class: the students will have to apply the instruments and the notions learned during the course to answer precise questions about the contents, the goals and the features of the text.

Within the Written Exam category, the following assignments need to be completed:

written exam with a relative weight of 50 which comprises 50% of the final mark.

Note: The students will have to produce a written text following precise parameters set within the context of a simulated scenario

Additional info regarding evaluation

Oral examination: open and closed questions and discussion of the paper.

Individual paper: paper that elaborates on a corpus linguistic issue.

Allowed unsatisfactory mark

The supplementary Teaching and Examination Regulations of your faculty stipulate whether an allowed unsatisfactory mark for this programme unit is permitted.

Academic context