Lingue e linguaggio 25(1), Special issue : Evaluating in Italian new perspectives
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2026 |
| Druh | Editorství tématického sborníku |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Přiložené soubory | |
| Popis | Recent research on evaluative morphology has undergone a substantial shift, moving beyond the traditional focus on diminutives and nominal morphology towards a broader understanding of evaluation as a multidimensional semantic domain. This special issue contributes to this development by exploring the expression of evaluation in Italian and, to a lesser extent, in other Italo-Romance varieties. The volume brings together studies that investigate underexplored evaluative forms, functions, and interfaces, with particular attention to approximation, categorisation, and the interaction between evaluation and neighbouring semantic domains. The contributions adopt predominantly corpus-based and data-driven methodologies to examine both morphological and non-morphological strategies. They address verbal evaluative morphology, prefixation, historical varieties, prosody, discourse markers, and constructions expressing prototypicality, highlighting the diversity of linguistic resources involved in evaluative meaning. Across these phenomena, evaluation emerges not as an isolated grammatical category but as a dynamic conceptual space where categorisation, scalarity, temporality, aspect, modality, manner, and subjectivity converge. A central thread connecting the articles is the notion of approximation, understood as a mechanism for grading category membership rather than simply expressing vagueness or attenuation. At the same time, the volume expands the discussion to include the opposite pole of the evaluative continuum, namely prototypicality, thereby offering a more comprehensive view of how speakers negotiate category boundaries. Taken together, the studies illustrate the vitality of current research on evaluative semantics and argue for a conception of evaluation as a fundamental cognitive and linguistic process that operates across levels of linguistic structure. The issue aims to provide new empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives capable of informing future research on evaluative phenomena within Italian and beyond. |