Lorella Viola

List of John Benjamins publications in which Lorella Viola is involved.

Title

Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis

Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff

The socio-discursive landscape surrounding the migration debate is characterised by a growing sense of crisis in both personal and collective identities. From this viewpoint, discourses about immigration are also always attempts at reconstructing the threatened ‘home identity’ of the respective… read more

[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 81] 2019. xi, 360 pp. | open access

Viola, Lorella 2025 Subjectification, subject pronouns and the progressive in Italian The Progressive Revisited: Historical and Quantitative Studies in Germanic and Romance Languages, Carlucci, Alessandro and Jerzy Nykiel (eds.), pp. 327–353 | Chapter

This study addresses the lack of focused research on how subjectivity is formally expressed in progressive constructions. Specifically, it explores correlations between subject pronouns (io ‘I’, lui/lei ‘he/she/it’, tu ‘you’) and the use of the progressive to convey subjectivity. Using both… read more

Viola, Lorella 2022 On the use of sì? (‘yes?’) as invariant follow-up in Italian: A historical corpus-based account of pragmatic language change Journal of Historical Pragmatics 23:2, pp. 175–203 | Article

Follow-ups are elliptical interrogative forms typically constituting an utterance in their own right. They are used to signal attention to the interlocutor, to encourage them to continue or as a reply to a call. This paper investigates the invariant follow-up sì? (‘yes?’) in Italian and it… read more

Viola, Lorella 2020 On the diachrony of giusto? (‘right?’) in Italian: A new discoursivization Journal of Historical Pragmatics 21:1, pp. 83–108 | Article

In Italian, the adjective giusto (‘right’) has performed the discourse function of response marker since at least 1613 (DELI 2008: 671). In this paper, I argue that the adjective has recently undertaken a new process of discoursivization, defined as the diachronic process that ends in discourse… read more

Viola, Lorella 2020 From linguistic innovation to language change: A corpus-based investigation of the response marker non c’è problema Revue Romane 55:1, pp. 95–116 | Article

This study investigates the diachrony of the Italian expression non c’è problema ‘no problem’ when used as a response marker (e.g., Tottie 1991; Ward 2006) to establish if it represents a case of language change (Milroy, 1992: 171). If on the one hand, the expression was indeed reported to be a… read more

Musolff, Andreas and Lorella Viola 2019 Introduction: Migration and crisis identity Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis, Viola, Lorella and Andreas Musolff (eds.), pp. 1–10 | Introduction

Viola, Lorella 2019 Chapter 2. Polentone vs terrone: A discourse-historical analysis of media representation of Italian internal migration Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis, Viola, Lorella and Andreas Musolff (eds.), pp. 45–62 | Chapter

This article explores how the internal conflict between the Italian Northern and Southern regions’ ideologies is linguistically apparent in the use of the discriminating words polentone (literally, polenta eater) attached to people from the North and terrone (literally, person from the land)… read more

Viola, Lorella 2017 A corpus-based investigation of language change in Italian: The case of grazie/ringraziare di and grazie/ringraziare per  Journal of Historical Linguistics 7:3, pp. 372–388 | Article

In Italian, grazie ‘thanks’ and ringraziare ‘to thank’ historically introduce an object by means of the preposition di ‘of’ (Renzi, Salvi & Cardinaletti 1991: 545–548); when grazie and ringraziare introduce a subordinate infinite clause, they may all the same be followed by either di or per… read more