Dr Delia Bentley
Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies
Phone: +44 (0) 161 275 3123
Email: delia.bentley@manchester.ac.uk
Office Hours: see office door (W.305)
Research
Research specialisation
I conduct historical and synchronic research on the Romance languages spoken in Italy (Italo-Romance and Sardinian) and on theoretical linguistics. Whilst working as a Research Associate on the project entitled Archaism and Innovation in the Linguistic History of Europe (September 1997 - August 2002), I published individual and collaborative work on the development of perfective, modal, and future auxiliaries in these languages. I also investigated conditional constructions in the early attestations of these languages. This work is part of the grammar of the early vernaculars of Italy which is the primary output of the AHRC-funded project Strutture degli Antichi Volgari d'Italia (SAVI).
More recently, I investigated a cluster of linguistic phenomena which support the hypothesis that intransitive constructions are not homogeneous, but rather divide into at least two broad classes. The study of these phenomena has engendered much controversy in theoretical linguistics in the last thirty years, and I have contributed to this debate with first-hand evidence and analyses of the selection of the perfective auxiliary, agreement, si contructions, experiencer predicates, the cliticisation with partitive / genitive ne, and word order in Italo-Romance. My research seeks to provide a unified account of these diverse manifestations of split intransitivity, suggesting that they result from the tension of a semantic principle and a syntactic principle, which interact with information-structure factors. My principal research output on split intransitivity is a research monograph entitled Split intransitivity in Italian (Mouton the Gruyter, EALT 30, 2006).
The work which I conducted on split intransitivity stirred my interest in existential constructions, and I have been awarded both institutional and matching (AHRC-funded) research leave to work on a project entitled Existential constructions: discourse, semantics, and syntax. The project has involved field-work in various areas of Sardinia. The principal outputs are two refereed journal articles: "Harmonic alignment and the definiteness effects of existential constructions" (ms. under review) and "Sui costrutti esistenziali sardi. Effetti di definitezza, deissi, evidenzialità" (to appear in the first issue of Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 2011).
Research students
I have contributed to the supervision of PhD theses on various aspects of the morphosyntax of dialects of central and southern Italy. I currently have two PhD students: Francesco Ciconte, who is working on a doctoral project entitled Existentials in early narratives of the vernaculars of Italy (this project is financed by the AHRC) and Francesco Casti, who is working on a thesis entitled Modal periphrases in modern Sardinian (this project is financed by the Sardinian Regional Council).
Select publications
Books (authored)
Split intransitivity in Italian. Mouton de Gruyter, EALT 30, Berlin, 2006, 452 pp.
Books (edited)
Delia Bentley and Adam Ledgeway eds., Sui dialetti italoromanzi: saggi in onore di Nigel B Vincent, The Italianist 27 (2007), special supplement 1.
Refereed Journal Articles
2004. Ne-cliticisation and split intransitivity. Journal of Linguistics 40: 219-262.
2004. Definiteness effects: evidence from Sardinian. Transactions of the Philological Society 102/1: 57-101.
(with T. Eythrsson) 2003. Auxiliary selection and the semantics of unaccusativity. Lingua 114:447-471.
2001. Propriet sintattiche dell'oggetto diretto in siciliano antico: la distribuzione della particella partitiva (in)di. Bollettino del Centro di Studi Filologici e Linguistici Siciliani 19:101-119.
2000. Metonymy and metaphor in the evolution of modal verbs: evidence from Italo-Romance. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 14:1-22.
2000. I costrutti condizionali in siciliano: un'analisi diacronica. Revue Romane 35/1:3-20.
2000. Semantica e sintassi nello sviluppo dei costrutti condizionali: il caso del siciliano. Revue Romane 35/2: 163-176.
1999. On the origin of Sardinian ere a plus infinitive. Medioevo Romanzo XXIII/III: 321-358.
1998. Modalit e tempo in siciliano: un'analisi diacronica dell'espressione del futuro. Vox Romanica 57:117-137.
Professional biography
After graduating in Modern Languages at the University of Palermo, Italy, I spent one year teaching Italian in primary and secondary schools of the Strathclyde Regional Council. I then did an MA and a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Manchester. Between 1997 and 2002 I worked as a Research Associate on the AHRB-funded research project entitled Archaism and Innovation in the Linguistic History of Europe (the principal investigators of the project were Nigel Vincent and Richard Hogg, University of Manchester). To carry out the research for this project, I conducted field-work in Sicily and Sardinia, interviewing native speakers of the Romance languages spoken on these islands, and collecting and analysing large corpora of vernacular texts dating from 11th to 19th century. From September 2002 to January 2004 I was a Lecturer in the School of Languages of the University of Salford, where I taught historical linguistics and English syntax at undergraduate level, and translation into Italian at graduate level. Whilst working at Salford, I acted as a consultant on the AHRC-funded project called Strutture degli Antichi Volgari d'Italia (SAVI). Since February 2004, I have been a Lecturer in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures of the University of Manchester.
I am a member of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain and an Honorary Secretary for Publications of the Philological Society (with sole responsibility for the editing of books). I am responsible for the two sections on Italian Dialectology and Sardinian of The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, which is an annual critical bibliography of the Modern Humanities Research Association which covers work on Romance, among other language families.
Teaching Areas
Since my appointment as a Lecturer in Italian Studies in the School, I have developed a linguistics pathway through the program for students of Italian at Manchester. At undergraduate level, this includes a level-1 introduction to Italian linguistics, two level-2 course units on Italian sociolinguistics and syntax, and a level-3 unit on Italian stylistics. In collaboration with colleagues in the School, I also offer a level-3 unit on Romance linguistics which is open to all suitably-qualified students in the School, and which deals with aspects of the diachronic development, the synchrony, and the sociolinguistic status of the languages of the Romance family.
At Postgraduate level, I currently offer a 15-credit course option on aspects of the linguistic history of Italy up to the fifteenth century and another 15-credit option on the theory of linguistic analysis which is called Role and Reference Grammar.