Francesco-Alessio Ursini
Biographic Data
| ID | 1453853 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Francesco-Alessio Ursini |
| GIVEN NAMES | Francesco-Alessio |
| FAMILY NAME | Ursini |
| SIGNATURE | URSINI F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Central China Normal University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7042-3576 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The semantics of romance geonyms: Cross-linguistic variation meets context sensitivity
The goal of this paper is to offer a model of the semantics of geonyms occurring in toponyms from Romance languages (e.g. Italian geonym piazza ’square’ in toponym Piazza Grande ’Main Square’). The paper defines this model along the two dimensions of cross-linguistic and context-sensitive variation. Cross-linguistically, the paper focuses on five Romance languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. For each language, data are co…
Wǔxiá and Genre Names in Mandarin: Reconciling Semantic Theories of Names into a Common Framework
The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of the Mandarin genre name Wǔxiá, a name usually referring to a Chinese genre of narratives involving martially skilled protagonists and heroic deeds. We show that Mandarin speakers use Wǔxiá across different contexts as a genre name expressing subtly different degrees of context-based content. For instance, users in on-line conversations may label any fantastic-like fiction as Wǔxiá, but literature …
The principle of anticipation in language use
Anticipation is a psychological phenomenon that refers to the beliefs or desires of cognitive agents with respect to the world surrounding them, and that can influence the behaviour and decisions of such agents. This paper addresses the status and the role of anticipation in the shaping of language structures. We sketch a preliminary theoretical framework for anticipation in language and linguistic research. Anticipation is presented as a neural …
Extracting toponyms from OpenStreetMap and other gazetteers: Comparing representational accuracy in multilingual contexts
The goal of this paper is to investigate OpenStreetMap as a research tool by analysing what pros and cons this platform offers to linguistics and to GIS disciplines. To reach this goal, the paper analyses how this platform represents places as geographical units and toponyms (i.e. place names) as linguistic units referring to places. The paper presents two previous studies that featured a novel procedure for toponym extraction and its application…
Measure Phrases and Spatial Categories in Korean: The Compositional Roots of Measurement
The goal of this paper is to investigate the interplay of Korean spatial categories with measure phrases, and propose a novel analysis based on this distribution. We show that measure phrases (e.g., il mithe‐ey “one metre‐ loc ”) can distribute with spatial phrases if their respective grammatical features define a measurable distance, and lead to uninterpretable sentences otherwise. This is always the case when ground NPs and/or spatial nouns, ma…
Syntactic Cartography meets semantic maps: Charting the polysemy of Italian simple prepositions
The goal of this paper is to account for the polysemy of Italian simple prepositions ( a , da , di , in ) via the integration of two distinct theoretical perspectives: Semantic Maps and Syntactic Cartography. We show that these prepositions can coexpress several spatial and non-spatial senses, via a detailed study of their distribution in web corpora. We then argue that these senses share a common semantic feature: they all introduce ‘general par…
Urbanonyms and Their Linguistic Properties in Italian
The goal of this article is to offer an overview of Italian urbanonyms by analyzing the grammatical and lexical properties of urbanonyms from four cities (Rome, Naples, Milan, and Venice). A classification is offered via data extracted from each city’s PagineGialle ‘Yellow Pages’ street directories, from which three key results emerge. First, Italian urbanonyms mostly involve two distinct constructions: nominal compounds (e.g., Piazza Grande ‘Gre…
On Italian spatial prepositions and measure phrases: Reconciling the data with theoretical accounts
The goal of this article is to offer new empirical evidence regarding the grammatical and semantic properties of Italian spatial prepositions, and to provide a theoretical account based on this evidence. We show that Italian has four grammatical types of prepositions (simple, complex, contracted and uncontracted), and three semantic types (geometric, projective and region prepositions). By studying the syntactic distribution of prepositions and t…
Cyberpunk , steampunk , and all that punk: Genre names and their uses across communities
The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of cyberpunk , steampunk , and other genre names related via the punk element. We study the emergence and popularity of these names among science fiction fans and scholars, comparing them with “mainstream” appreciators. We carry out a corpus study that analyses data extracted from textual corpora in four languages (English, German, French, and Italian) and encyclopedias (fandom communities, e.g., Aes…
Urbanonyms in Macao
The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of urban place names (“urbanonyms”) in Macao, China. This city has a centuries-long tradition of multi-cultural and linguistic integration, with Chinese and Portuguese representing the two oldest linguistic and cultural realities. Due to the considerable growth of Macao as a global commercial hub, English has also become an emergent lingua franca in this city’s territory and society. However, gazette…
Geographical maps meet place names where languages meet dialects: The case of Italian
The goal of this article is to analyse the role of urban place names (‘urbanonyms’) with dialectal origins in the domain of Italian toponomastics. The article offers a gazetteer-based study from which a list of dialectal generic terms is extracted and compiled. From this list, a detailed geographic distributional analysis of these terms is offered, and the dialectal origins of terms are assessed. A questionnaire study is subsequently presented th…
Sociotopography meets Dialectology: The case of Aquilan
The goal of this paper is to offer an argument for the Sociotopographic Model and its extension to dialectal data. It is shown that Italian and one of its dialects, Aquilan, seem to differ with respect to which reference systems their prepositions can describe. Aquilan includes an absolute and an elevational reference system; Italian only includes an absolute system. It is proposed that this difference is strongly correlated to Aquilan being a di…
From separate clause to epistemic adverbial, the neglected source construction and initial-to-medial pathway: Chinese guoran ‘it really happens’
The source construction and the pathway for the formation of English epistemic adverbials are widely discussed in the literature. However, few studies to our knowledge have specifically discussed a hypothetical source construction of separate clauses and a hypothetical initial-to-medial pathway. Chinese guoran was first used as a separate clause, and later developed into an epistemic adverbial meaning ‘it really happens’. Diachronic investigation…
The Polysemy and Hyponymy of Mandarin Spatial Prepositions and Localisers: Building Semantic Maps from the Ground up
The goal of this paper is to offer an overview of polysemy patterns in Mandarin’s chief spatial categories: prepositions (e.g., zai ) and simple and compound localisers (respectively, qian and qian-mian ). The paper presents data from an elicitation study that shows how speakers can access multiple senses and hyponymy relations for the vocabulary items belonging to these categories. The paper shows that while prepositions can potentially cover di…
On the formation of a conjecturing clause-taking predicate in Modern Chinese: A conjoining account of huaiyi
This article claims that the conjecturing clause-taking huaiyi predicate in Modern Chinese (e.g. Renmen huaiyi zheming taoyi de jingcha hen keneng canyu le zheqi anjian. ‘People conjecture that the escaped policeman had probably been involved in the case.’) is actually a parenthetical structure. Diachronically, it does not develop from an NP-taking huaiyi predicate (e.g. Wo hen huaiyi zhe ge shuofa. ‘I doubt the statement a lot.’) or a doubting c…
Prolegomena to a theory of chorophorics
The goal of this paper is to offer a theoretical analysis of chorophorics, a recently proposed pro-formal category that can refer either to “places”, or to locations as arguments of spatial relations. It is suggested that chorophorics are a common category that displays heterogeneous morphological properties but homogeneous syntactic distribution and semantic interpretation. Evidence supporting this argument is offered via eight genetically unrel…
General location across languages: On the division of labour between functional and lexical items in spatial categories
In many languages, it is possible to describe the location of any entity with respect to a landmark object without specifying the exact place that the locatum occupies (e.g. English at in at home ). Such vocabulary items usually contrast with items that belong to the same categories but have more restricted senses (e.g. on top of in on top of the shelf ). Thus, the degree of “abstractness” that such spatial case markers can convey usually depends…
Region Prepositions: The View from French
The goal of this article is to offer a formal account of region prepositions in French. We define region prepositions as prepositions that denote non-oriented locations and resist modification with measure phrases (e.g., au nez de in #dix metres au nez de l'avion ‘ten meters from (in front of) the tip of the airplane’). We show that region prepositions may involve items that include inflected markers or items involving “bare” markers ( au bord de…
Chorophorics in the Aquilan Dialect
This article outlines the properties of chorophorics (“spatial pronouns”) in the Italian dialect Aquilan. It is shown that chorophorics (e.g. pe'nfronte ‘to in front (of the ground)’) display similar morphological properties to spatial prepositions (e.g. ‘nfronte alla machina ‘in front of the car’). However, they differ in their syntactic distribution and their semantic interpretation in intra‐ and inter‐clausal structures, because of their anaph…
Prosody and formation of Modern Chinese parenthetical CTMP ni xiang ‘ you think’: A conjoining pathway account
The Modern Chinese parenthetical clause-taking mental predicate (CTMP) ni xiang (as in Ni xiang yinian huafei duoshao qian a? ‘You think (about it), how much money will it cost each year?’) is used to urge the hearer to give attention to the content of the clause with which it combines. It is argued that its formation does not follow a commonly accepted matrix clause pathway, in which a parenthetical CTMP develops from a corresponding matrix clau…
The anaphoric properties of spatial nouns and prepositions in Mandarin: A formal account
Formation of the Modern Chinese clause-taking imperative ni kan ‘you see’: A Conjoining pathway account
Nouns for visual objects: A hypothesis of the vision-language interface
Spatial categories in Aquilan
The goal of this paper is to offer an overview of the grammatical and lexical properties of spatial categories in Aquilan, an Italian dialect. The paper shows that spatial prepositions (e.g. a ‘at/to’, ‘nfronte a ‘in front of’), pronouns and indexicals (e.g. pe‘nfronte lit. ‘to in front (of a place)’, loc’arrete ‘there behind’, respectively) share two key properties. The first, a lexical property, is their ability to refer to the location of disc…
David Bowie’s Influence on JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure
This article analyses the influence of David Bowie’s work in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, a manga known for its wealth of references to western popular culture. It is argued that David Bowie’s cultural reception can be attested via the presence of three narrative themes featuring in this manga series. The first theme is the exploration of diverse genres and an innovative, genre-defying attitude. The second theme is the use of avant-garde, flamboyant…
Formation of the Modern Chinese clause-taking imperative ni kan ‘you see’: A Conjoining pathway account
Urbanonyms and Their Linguistic Properties in Italian
The goal of this article is to offer an overview of Italian urbanonyms by analyzing the grammatical and lexical properties of urbanonyms from four cities (Rome, Naples, Milan, and Venice). A classification is offered via data extracted from each city’s PagineGialle ‘Yellow Pages’ street directories, from which three key results emerge. First, Italian urbanonyms mostly involve two distinct constructions: nominal compounds (e.g., Piazza Grande ‘Gre…
Nouns for visual objects: A hypothesis of the vision-language interface
On the syntax and semantics of Italian spatial Ps
This paper offers a unified approach to Italian spatial prepositions, such as di fronte a 'in front of', verso 'towards', in 'in', dietro a 'behind', and nel mezzo di 'in the middle of'. Three assumptions play a key role. First, Italian spatial prepositions can differ sensibly in their morphological structure, but share the same syntactic properties. Second, their sentential distribution is in part context-sensitive, thus based on the categories …
Metaphoric and Literal Readings for Spatial Prepositions: The Case of Boolean Phrases
This paper presents an account of how literal and metaphoric readings of spatial prepositions in so-called "Boolean Phrases" can arise. The account aims to explain how metaphoric and literal readings can interact, when two (spatial) prepositional phrases are the arguments of one phrase headed by Boolean connectives and and or (e.g. in front of the car and over his problems). It is shown that these phenomena can receive a more thorough composition…
David Bowie’s Influence on JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure
This article analyses the influence of David Bowie’s work in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, a manga known for its wealth of references to western popular culture. It is argued that David Bowie’s cultural reception can be attested via the presence of three narrative themes featuring in this manga series. The first theme is the exploration of diverse genres and an innovative, genre-defying attitude. The second theme is the use of avant-garde, flamboyant…
Spatial categories in Aquilan
The goal of this paper is to offer an overview of the grammatical and lexical properties of spatial categories in Aquilan, an Italian dialect. The paper shows that spatial prepositions (e.g. a ‘at/to’, ‘nfronte a ‘in front of’), pronouns and indexicals (e.g. pe‘nfronte lit. ‘to in front (of a place)’, loc’arrete ‘there behind’, respectively) share two key properties. The first, a lexical property, is their ability to refer to the location of disc…
Formation of the Modern Chinese clause-taking imperative ni kan ‘you see’: A Conjoining pathway account
Nouns for visual objects: A hypothesis of the vision-language interface
Chorophorics in the Aquilan Dialect
This article outlines the properties of chorophorics (“spatial pronouns”) in the Italian dialect Aquilan. It is shown that chorophorics (e.g. pe'nfronte ‘to in front (of the ground)’) display similar morphological properties to spatial prepositions (e.g. ‘nfronte alla machina ‘in front of the car’). However, they differ in their syntactic distribution and their semantic interpretation in intra‐ and inter‐clausal structures, because of their anaph…
Prosody and formation of Modern Chinese parenthetical CTMP ni xiang ‘ you think’: A conjoining pathway account
The Modern Chinese parenthetical clause-taking mental predicate (CTMP) ni xiang (as in Ni xiang yinian huafei duoshao qian a? ‘You think (about it), how much money will it cost each year?’) is used to urge the hearer to give attention to the content of the clause with which it combines. It is argued that its formation does not follow a commonly accepted matrix clause pathway, in which a parenthetical CTMP develops from a corresponding matrix clau…
The anaphoric properties of spatial nouns and prepositions in Mandarin: A formal account
The Polysemy and Hyponymy of Mandarin Spatial Prepositions and Localisers: Building Semantic Maps from the Ground up
The goal of this paper is to offer an overview of polysemy patterns in Mandarin’s chief spatial categories: prepositions (e.g., zai ) and simple and compound localisers (respectively, qian and qian-mian ). The paper presents data from an elicitation study that shows how speakers can access multiple senses and hyponymy relations for the vocabulary items belonging to these categories. The paper shows that while prepositions can potentially cover di…
On the formation of a conjecturing clause-taking predicate in Modern Chinese: A conjoining account of huaiyi
This article claims that the conjecturing clause-taking huaiyi predicate in Modern Chinese (e.g. Renmen huaiyi zheming taoyi de jingcha hen keneng canyu le zheqi anjian. ‘People conjecture that the escaped policeman had probably been involved in the case.’) is actually a parenthetical structure. Diachronically, it does not develop from an NP-taking huaiyi predicate (e.g. Wo hen huaiyi zhe ge shuofa. ‘I doubt the statement a lot.’) or a doubting c…
Prolegomena to a theory of chorophorics
The goal of this paper is to offer a theoretical analysis of chorophorics, a recently proposed pro-formal category that can refer either to “places”, or to locations as arguments of spatial relations. It is suggested that chorophorics are a common category that displays heterogeneous morphological properties but homogeneous syntactic distribution and semantic interpretation. Evidence supporting this argument is offered via eight genetically unrel…
General location across languages: On the division of labour between functional and lexical items in spatial categories
In many languages, it is possible to describe the location of any entity with respect to a landmark object without specifying the exact place that the locatum occupies (e.g. English at in at home ). Such vocabulary items usually contrast with items that belong to the same categories but have more restricted senses (e.g. on top of in on top of the shelf ). Thus, the degree of “abstractness” that such spatial case markers can convey usually depends…
Region Prepositions: The View from French
The goal of this article is to offer a formal account of region prepositions in French. We define region prepositions as prepositions that denote non-oriented locations and resist modification with measure phrases (e.g., au nez de in #dix metres au nez de l'avion ‘ten meters from (in front of) the tip of the airplane’). We show that region prepositions may involve items that include inflected markers or items involving “bare” markers ( au bord de…
Sociotopography meets Dialectology: The case of Aquilan
The goal of this paper is to offer an argument for the Sociotopographic Model and its extension to dialectal data. It is shown that Italian and one of its dialects, Aquilan, seem to differ with respect to which reference systems their prepositions can describe. Aquilan includes an absolute and an elevational reference system; Italian only includes an absolute system. It is proposed that this difference is strongly correlated to Aquilan being a di…
From separate clause to epistemic adverbial, the neglected source construction and initial-to-medial pathway: Chinese guoran ‘it really happens’
The source construction and the pathway for the formation of English epistemic adverbials are widely discussed in the literature. However, few studies to our knowledge have specifically discussed a hypothetical source construction of separate clauses and a hypothetical initial-to-medial pathway. Chinese guoran was first used as a separate clause, and later developed into an epistemic adverbial meaning ‘it really happens’. Diachronic investigation…
Cyberpunk , steampunk , and all that punk: Genre names and their uses across communities
The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of cyberpunk , steampunk , and other genre names related via the punk element. We study the emergence and popularity of these names among science fiction fans and scholars, comparing them with “mainstream” appreciators. We carry out a corpus study that analyses data extracted from textual corpora in four languages (English, German, French, and Italian) and encyclopedias (fandom communities, e.g., Aes…
Urbanonyms in Macao
The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of urban place names (“urbanonyms”) in Macao, China. This city has a centuries-long tradition of multi-cultural and linguistic integration, with Chinese and Portuguese representing the two oldest linguistic and cultural realities. Due to the considerable growth of Macao as a global commercial hub, English has also become an emergent lingua franca in this city’s territory and society. However, gazette…
Geographical maps meet place names where languages meet dialects: The case of Italian
The goal of this article is to analyse the role of urban place names (‘urbanonyms’) with dialectal origins in the domain of Italian toponomastics. The article offers a gazetteer-based study from which a list of dialectal generic terms is extracted and compiled. From this list, a detailed geographic distributional analysis of these terms is offered, and the dialectal origins of terms are assessed. A questionnaire study is subsequently presented th…
Urbanonyms and Their Linguistic Properties in Italian
The goal of this article is to offer an overview of Italian urbanonyms by analyzing the grammatical and lexical properties of urbanonyms from four cities (Rome, Naples, Milan, and Venice). A classification is offered via data extracted from each city’s PagineGialle ‘Yellow Pages’ street directories, from which three key results emerge. First, Italian urbanonyms mostly involve two distinct constructions: nominal compounds (e.g., Piazza Grande ‘Gre…
On Italian spatial prepositions and measure phrases: Reconciling the data with theoretical accounts
The goal of this article is to offer new empirical evidence regarding the grammatical and semantic properties of Italian spatial prepositions, and to provide a theoretical account based on this evidence. We show that Italian has four grammatical types of prepositions (simple, complex, contracted and uncontracted), and three semantic types (geometric, projective and region prepositions). By studying the syntactic distribution of prepositions and t…
The principle of anticipation in language use
Anticipation is a psychological phenomenon that refers to the beliefs or desires of cognitive agents with respect to the world surrounding them, and that can influence the behaviour and decisions of such agents. This paper addresses the status and the role of anticipation in the shaping of language structures. We sketch a preliminary theoretical framework for anticipation in language and linguistic research. Anticipation is presented as a neural …
Extracting toponyms from OpenStreetMap and other gazetteers: Comparing representational accuracy in multilingual contexts
The goal of this paper is to investigate OpenStreetMap as a research tool by analysing what pros and cons this platform offers to linguistics and to GIS disciplines. To reach this goal, the paper analyses how this platform represents places as geographical units and toponyms (i.e. place names) as linguistic units referring to places. The paper presents two previous studies that featured a novel procedure for toponym extraction and its application…
Measure Phrases and Spatial Categories in Korean: The Compositional Roots of Measurement
The goal of this paper is to investigate the interplay of Korean spatial categories with measure phrases, and propose a novel analysis based on this distribution. We show that measure phrases (e.g., il mithe‐ey “one metre‐ loc ”) can distribute with spatial phrases if their respective grammatical features define a measurable distance, and lead to uninterpretable sentences otherwise. This is always the case when ground NPs and/or spatial nouns, ma…
Syntactic Cartography meets semantic maps: Charting the polysemy of Italian simple prepositions
The goal of this paper is to account for the polysemy of Italian simple prepositions ( a , da , di , in ) via the integration of two distinct theoretical perspectives: Semantic Maps and Syntactic Cartography. We show that these prepositions can coexpress several spatial and non-spatial senses, via a detailed study of their distribution in web corpora. We then argue that these senses share a common semantic feature: they all introduce ‘general par…
Linguistics (21 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (14 works) · History (9 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (9 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (9 works) · Categorization, perception, and language (8 works) · Natural language processing (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)