formerly L-FIL-LET/12 Italian Linguistics.
Studies on Italian in all its varieties, including the dialects of Italy and minority languages, with reference to written, oral, and media-transmitted texts. Research involves the description and analysis of graphic phenomena; phonetic-phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical structures; the historical development of these systems; and their relationships with other linguistic systems. In particular, the History of the Italian Language investigates the processes of formation and evolution of Italian from its earliest stages to the contemporary period. Italian Dialectology and the Sociolinguistics of Italian explore the dynamics of geolinguistic configurations, language contact, and the social and specialized uses of the language. Special attention is devoted to literary language and its formal structures, including stylistics and metrics.
Other research areas within the field include lexicography, grammarography, the debate on linguistic standardization and language policies for Italian, the spread of Italian abroad, the theories and methodologies of Italian language teaching for both native and non-native speakers, computational analysis of texts and corpora, and the editing of texts for linguistic analysis. The field also encompasses studies of textuality and pragmatics, which contribute to defining the style, communicative functions, and meaning of texts.