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School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures

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 sought 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 in 2008/2009 I was awarded both institutional and matching (AHRC-funded) research leave to work on a project entitled Existential constructions: discourse, semantics, and syntax. The project 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

In past years, I 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 Italo-Romance vernaculars (this project is financed by the AHRC) and Francesco Casti, who is working on Van Valin and LaPollas (1997) Interclausal Relations Hierarchy with first-hand data from modal and aspectual periphrases of Modern Sardinian (this project is financed by the Sardinian Regional Council).

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Books (authored)

Books (edited)

 

Select Refereed Journal Articles

Other Recent Articles

Papers

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). Within the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, I currently hold the position of Director of the Institute for Linguistics and Language Studies

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.

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.

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