Research Products
The Research Products Repository – part of the Cineca platform for research management – is a tool that allows the archiving, consultation and promotion of products resulting from various research activities. With this tool, the University has a unique system that is integrated with other University systems and capable of communicating with national and international central systems to manage and disseminate publications by the requirements of the MIUR and the European Commission for Open Access.
Link to the Institutional Research Archive of the University of Palermo: https://iris.unipa.it/
Linguistic Atlas of Sicily
Edited by the Centre for Sicilian Philological and Linguistic Studies (CSFLS)
The Linguistic Atlas of Sicily is considered one of the most advanced research programmes currently underway in Italy in linguistic geography and areal sociolinguistics and is highly regarded internationally. The ALS aims to document the linguistic repertoire of Sicilians between the second and third millennia, from the most archaic stage of the dialect to the most advanced levels of Italianisation. The aim is to present an overall picture of the current linguistic situation in Sicily, documenting the dynamic coexistence of archaism and modernity. The ALS is divided into two sections: ethno-dialectal and socio-variational, representing a meeting point between traditional dialectology and sociolinguistics. The overall activity (geo-ethnolinguistic and geo-sociolinguistic perspectives) is reflected in the three collections ‘Materiali e ricerche dell'Atlante linguistico della Sicilia’ (Materials and research from the Linguistic Atlas of Sicily), ‘Piccola Biblioteca dell'ALS’ (Small Library of the ALS) and ‘L'ALS per la scuola e il territorio’ (The ALS for schools and the local area).
http://atlantelinguisticosicilia.it/cms/
The Homeric Greek Compounds Project
The ‘Homeric Greek Compounds Project’ is a linguistic research project partially funded by the University of Palermo FFR-2012-ATE-0164 (2013-2015). The project aims at creating a free open-access online database containing the Homeric compounds found in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The research group is currently composed of people ranging from graduate to Ph.D. students, from post-doctoral researchers to associate professors, from the Department of Scienze Umanistiche of the University of Palermo and from the Department of Studi Letterari, Filologici e Linguistici of the University of Milano Statale. At present, the group is composed of the following people: A. Bartolotta (project coordinator), L. Aliffi, V. Amico, L. Coccia, A. Cuva; N. De Pasquale, M. Giuffrè, M. Longo, R. Melazzo, C. Nigrelli; F. Dedè, M. Cardella. The main purpose of this working group is to collect and analyze all the compounded Nouns and Adjectives occurring in the Homeric poems, in order to share and make linguistic data re-usable and available to the scientific community. The ultimate goal of this project is to reconstruct, as far as possible, the unifying criteria that are at the basis of the process of composition in archaic Greek. In fact, both definitions and classifications of compounds are still a debated issue in the linguistic literature. Research into the explanation of this complex linguistic phenomenon must be integrated by not only making cross-linguistic comparisons, but also considering the diachronic perspective. Thus, an interdisciplinary perspective is needed, that gives value to the historical-comparative dimension as well. By virtue of the conservative nature that characterizes compound forms, the diachronic development and prehistory of compounds in the oldest Indo-European languages reveals valuable information about the syntactic structure of the IE proto-language. In particular, although Ancient Greek composition has been dealt with since the beginning of the XXth century, there is still no reference database that gathers and describes all the compounds attested in Homeric Greek, a language that, along with Sanskrit, is the basis and the starting point for the reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language. Hence, the idea of a database containing a description of morphological, syntactic, semantic and lexical features, and etymological interpretation of each compounded word in the Iliad and Odyssey. The database contains more than 1500 entries, which are arranged alphabetically from Α to Ω. The database encodes information about the syntactic category of the compound and its morphosyntactic structure, including its part of speech and the lexical category of both first and second members (categorization). The linguistic description also contains the compound meaning and the features that have been considered relevant, i.e. its etymology, each word occurrence and the corresponding inflectional information, including case and number, the headedness (endocentric vs exocentric), the classification of each compound (subordinate, determinative attributive, coordinate). When necessary, some specific notes are added about linking elements (i.e. those functional structures that serve to link the two members of compound, and which can find expression in specific inflectional endings of the non-head member within the complex word), case forms of the first/second member, other morphological or semantic useful information. The database website will be available free on the Department page