5. Ladin

Cross-linguistic awareness in an English L4 education setting: Discovering language-specific phenomena in unrelated languages

“…Like English, Ladin has a binary, egocentric, or speaker-oriented locative adverbial system, in which chiló < eccu illoc 'here' and dailó < (de) ad illoc 'there' (Kramer 1989: 112) indicate a location regarded as being inside and outside of the speaker's area 2 . Moreover, the Ladin spatial system has two diametrically opposed particles of direction: ia < via 'thither' and ca < eccu(m) hȃc 'hither' (Kramer 1989: 19), which typically express motion away from and towards the speaker on a level surface, or in a real or imaginary straight line (Irsara 2009(Irsara , 2010(Irsara , 2015. Furthermore, the system comprises an idiosyncratic set of adverbs that begin with ca < eccu(m) hȃc, cora 3 < eccu(m) illac, and la-< illac, which are combined with the dimensions 'thither ', 'up', 'down', 'inside', and 'outside', as shown in Table 1.…”

“…-The ca and cora adverbs can indicate discourse-new locations and be accompanied by pointing gestures. -The la adverbs only indicate hearer-old locations and are not used gesturally (Irsara 2009(Irsara , 2010(Irsara , 2015. Territorial features play a major role in the directional adverbial system of Ladin, in which precise paths can be tracked in a distinctive way by combining a series of locative particles, whose syntactic position is also significant.…”

“…Dialectologists have pointed out that it is common for regional and less standardised varieties to display lower type-token ratios in the verbal and nominal lexicon but more complex structures. They have also argued that the use of complex deictic adverbial systems might be a possible feature of various linguistic varieties spoken in mountainous areas (Berthele 2004(Berthele , 2006Irsara 2015;Prandi 2015). Nonetheless, the students were surprised that a smaller local language, such as Ladin, could have linguistic aspects that are more complex than those in major languages, such as English.…”

9 | 1 | 2020

“…Although most Romance languages are seen as V-framed, Ladin displays S-framed characteristics. It possesses a restricted manner verb lexicon but a wide repertoire of path particles, which is arguably due to its mainly oral nature, as suggested by Irsara (2015). The verb run can occur as a bare verb, providing no further elaboration of path beyond its inherent directionality, e.g.…”