The project aims at investigating lists along different lines of research and from different perspectives.
The phenomenon of lists is pervasive in grammar and is associated to a variety of functions, having to do with the construction of sets and categories, with meaning intensification and modulation, and with the construction of event frames. In other words, listing is the linguistic answer to the basic cognitive and communicative need of combining items (entities, properties of events) into something bigger (a set or category, a frame, an intensified property).
Lists manifest themselves at different syntactic levels (prosody, morphology, syntax and discourse), going far beyond the notion of coordination to which they have traditionally been associated. However, despite their pervasiveness, lists have not been analyzed extensively and systematically within a unified framework, nor have they been investigated with respect to their synchronic and diachronic variation, that is in language change and in linguistic typology.
Within this project we aim to adopt a 360° perspective on listing in natural languages. We will address:
- the very definition of lists,
- their structural and functional properties,
- the processing of lists in discourse,
- lists annotation
- their cross-linguistic variation,
- grammaticalization phenomena involving lists
More detailed discussions and exemplifications are available in the pages dedicated to the various research directions. However, it is important to note that the interconnection between the different approaches, perspectives and levels of analysis is so close that we envisage a continuous exchange between functional, structural, cognitive, computational and empirical studies.
A deeper understanding of listing phenomena in natural languages may have a significant impact on theories of grammar, on cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches to grammar and on natural language processing.