D’Achille, P., 2010. L’italiano contemporaneo. Bologne : Il Mulino

Abstract

We make here the review of Paolo D’Achille’s L’italiano contemporaneo. The author deals with a lot of themes concerning contemporary Italian in this book: the situation of Italian language today (the fact that it is spoken along with dialects, its main characteristics, the italiano standard and the italiano dell’uso medio or neostandard); the onomastics (the first names, the ergonyms…); the lexicon (the basic Italian, the loan words…); the phonetics and the phonology (the Italian phonemes and the question of the consonant’s length, the structure of the syllable…); the inflected morphology (the system of the pronouns and the system of the verb and their innovations…); the lexical morphology (the formation of the words by derivation, by composition…); the syntaxis (the dislocations, the interrogative phrase, the coordination and the subordination…); the spoken varieties (the main characteristics of spoken Italian from a phonetic and morphosyntactic point of view, the regional Italian, the Italian spoken by young people…), the written varieties (the Italian of literature, the Italian of the newspapers, the Italian of the semicolti…) and the varieties of the italiano trasmesso, that is to say the Italian “spoken from distance” (by telephone, at the radio, in the films or at the television) and the Italian “written from distance” (the Internet sites, the e-mails, the chats and the sms). Paolo D’Achille takes particularly into account the notion of variation in his description of Italian language and thus gives of this one a complete view. We sum up and analyse each chapter of the book.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.24.6152