Études de linguistique française en Italie: Guide bibliographique 1960–1997

Around forty Italian studies of French grammar running from the early 60s to 1997 are described in this Guide bibliographique. They are all undoubtedly noteworthy for their scientific interest, but in Italy the subject they deal with is in need of further exploration. Not only do such studies represent individual initiatives (no large common project has ever been carried out), they also take different approaches, which is inevitable in so far as grammar encompasses phonetics, lexicon, comparative analysis and teaching. In fact, the degree of diversity is not as high as one might expect. Only six trends are observable: pedagogic grammars, psychomechanical, pragmatic and énonciation-oriented studies, lexicon-grammars and manuals. In spite of this, the works in Schena’s Guide clearly show the evolution which the concept of grammar has undergone during the last three decades; research into meaning and the introduction of the human being into language have undermined the widely accepted priority that generativism and formalism give to syntax, since all levels — syntactic, semantic and pragmatic — are now treated as a sort of continuum which excludes any global model. The author’s aim is to present the key ideas of the studies mentioned above and to point out their innovative function in the Italian panorama of French linguistics.