Post-truth and parody in old and new media – This paper presents a description of a few issues of the satirical magazine Il Male, published in Italy in the second half of the 1970s. These special issues – somewhat parodies – copied the typographic format of the main Italian newspapers of that period and were filled with odd and invented news. In some respects these publications anticipate parody and falsification in the digital era. In particular, some Internet sites that play on the slight distinction between false and true reports, and make us reflect upon the reliability of the information, can be considered as heirs to this experiment.

LABLITA-Suite. Resources for the acquisition of Italian as a second language – LABLITA-suite provides technology-enhanced learning resources for the acquisition of Italian L2. IMAGACT allows for mastering the semantic properties of action verbs in the early phases of language acquisition. The LABLITA corpus of Spoken Italian can be used for training learners for face to face conversations. RIDIRE and CORDIC provide corpus linguistic tools for accessing Italian phraseology, which is useful for enhancing writing capabilities in the various domains of language usage.

Successful slogans in Italian political discourse – This paper aims to describe the notion of ‘sloganisation’, with special regard to the fortune and circulation of certain slogans in Italian public discourse. An analysis of their forms, contexts of occurrence (political propaganda, advertising, football supporters) and means of diffusion (street talk, electoral manifestos, traditional and new media) shows an increasing desemantisation of this kind of message. Slogans are routinely used by political parties and are widely quoted, regardless of their ideological content, merely in order to create identification or to increase the polemical attitude of their leader.

Gender and representing the feminine in legal and administrative texts in Italy – The paper examines the linguistic treatment of the genre (delimiting the concept to ‘female’, ‘woman’) at various levels of legal communication, through the analysis of legal and administrative texts of different kinds produced in Italy in the 20th and 21st centuries (codes, sentences, regulations, etc). The survey focuses on lexical aspects and is supported by lexicographical research.

In search of the invariant semantics of the preposition “da”: a cognitive analysis of the predicative context – The purpose of this article is to verify whether the semantic invariant of the preposition da [starting point allowing physical or mental movement] in the nominal context remains valid in the context of the verb. The analysis of the content of predicates that link to the preposition da will help to answer the question of the extent to which the choice of a preposition is determined by the knowledge of the experienced activities and/or the predicate itself (its selective features) or if it is the result of convention.

Notes about a handbook of Italian grammar by a Croatian philologist Dragutin Antun Parčić – A handbook of Italian grammar, written in Croatian by Croatian philologist Parčić, confirms that in the past educated Croatian-speaking people were bilingual and at the same time it proves that lower classes aimed to study Italian as well. The paper analyses the functionality and appropriateness of topics presented in the Parčić manuscript because it is obvious that the author was keen to help his Croatian-speaking students in the acquisition of Italian.

Notes on Foscolo and the English language (1816–1827) – Foscolo never managed to master his host country’s language during his years of exile in London (1816–1827). The vast production of his English years consists almost entirely of works intended to be translated by other people and thus to be considered as provisional drafts. In this paper, the relationship between Foscolo and the English language is analysed and discussed, focusing in particular on his interactions with his translators and on his linguistic vision.

The first part of the paper concentrates on the motive of desire, strictly related to the concept of will, in two stories from Les Ombres sanglantes [The Bloody Shadows] (1820) by J. P. R. Cuisin. Afterwards, the theme of power, considered firstly in the physical aspect and then in its supernatural dimension, is analyzed in further four stories. The article concludes with thoughts on the literary objectives of Cuisin’s book and on its potentially caricatural side.

An unpublished Musical by Pirandello: a polysemic and multicultural kaleidoscope – The fact that Pirandello conceived the idea of writing a Musical was well know, but the recent discovery of the actual text and the musical score, in the archive of Guido Torre Gherson, agent of the writer while he lived in Paris, has shed some light on his final years and writings. The findings are discussed in the context of his late theatrical and fictional works, such as I giganti della montagna.

The purpose of this article is to present main literary relations between an Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello and his compatriot, modern writer Antonio Tabucchi, which manifest themselves primarily in the subject matter taken up by Tabucchi: an identity crisis of a literary character. Comparative analysis of the content of the novels One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand and Pereira Maintains shows, that the ‘disciple’ of Pirandello not only liked to reach for a similar subject matter, but also referred to the poetics used by the Sicilian.

Mario Puccini between Italy and Argentina – The Italian writer Mario Puccini travelled to Argentina in 1936 to attend the Pen Club Congress. In the essay, the results of Puccini’s stay in Argentina are studied for the first time in Italy: books, stories, articles, translations, correspondences, unrealized projects. Puccini is confirmed as an important cultural mediator in relations between Italy and the Spanish-speaking nations.

The aim of the following paper is to compare the female protagonists of Honoré de Balzac’s novel that dates back to 1842. The comparison is drawn in the context of two philosophical notions which are in opposition: volonté, understood as intent and desire to achieve goals or realize passions, and liberum arbitrium representing the free will to make conscious personal decisions. Mrs de l’Estorade, alias Renée de Maucombe, is the most conspicuous example of a character, who seems to be driven by social determinism. However, this assumption is paradoxically far from truth because the actions she takes reflect the principles of liberum arbitrium. The epistolary form of the novel complements the analysis of the aforementioned concepts. It allows the women to give vent to their feelings and explain the reasons behind their choices.

The Ways of the Diaspora in the narrative of Claudio Magris – One of the themes in the works of Claudio Magris is that of the frontiers between nations which have been divided by arbitrary political decisions. This is the case with Central Europe, which forms a sort of transnational melting pot and which has hosted the Hebrew Diaspora. The theme of the Diaspora plays a key role in many of Magris books, in particular Lontano da dove. In his recent novel, Non luogo a procedere, one of the topics is the slave trade, a sort of African Diaspora.

In his works from maturity, Honoré de Balzac tries to formulate a philosophical system describing the role of the thought and its impact on human life. Those reflections originate already in his early works since 1818, in his philosophical notes, and later in the novels from the 1820s, as well as in other texts. His opinions develop in a certain “economy of thought” through which are expressed dialectics of thought, will and vital energy.

The article aims to investigate the problem of desemanticizing of phrasemes containing names of body parts, and at the same time referring to the emotional sphere. Within the three main research areas (face, heart and body as a whole), and based on three types of semes (spatial, physical and functional), the analysis allows to determine the participation of individual sems in the process of motivating the indicated phraseological relationships.

This paper presents a multidisciplinary model built across linguistics and selected research and hypotheses in the field of quantum physics and molecular biology. The conceptual link between the biological concept of protein sequencing and the anthropocentric assumptions concerning the operationalization of language rules will be discussed. The multidisciplinary model shows the link between the concept of sequencing language rules and constructing textemes.

The myth of Orpheus in the second postwar decade in Italy and Poland – The myth of Orpheus, in the second postwar decade, becomes a paradigmatic tale describing the horror of mourning and separation. Cesare Pavese and Anna Świrszczyńska, in their rewritings, elaborate that mith in a completely original way, tracing a new path of Orpheus’ journey to the underworld.