ATTENDĔRE:

Tra attesa e attenzione

International Doctoral Conference

FLUI2024 - Filologia, Linguistica, Umanistica Digitale e Italianistica

Ph.D. course in Philology, Italian Literature and Linguistics

University of Florence

Florence, 19-21 June 2024

Ph.D. candidates of the XXXVII and XXXVIII cycles of the Ph.D. program in Philology, Italian Literature, and Linguistics at the University of Florence announce the opening of the Call for Papers for the FLUI Doctoral Conference, addressed to doctoral students, young researchers and scholars.

 The main topic of the conference focuses on two terms, "waiting" and "attention", that are derived, both semantically and etymologically, from the Latin verb attendĕre, which indicates the action of directing mind, thoughts, and hopes towards a specific object, encompassing both the meanings of 'to apply' and 'to wait'. According to the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (TLIO), attendĕre is used by Dante in the Commedia  with the meaning of 'being focused on something' (not only mentally, but also aurally), and 'waiting'. This topic can be analyzed from the point of view of philology,literature and linguistics, even  through the innovative tools of the so-called digital humanities. Some possible submission topics are listed below.

In Philology and, more broadly, about the textual tradition, these research themes could concern the following aspects, inviting the development of ideas in a comparative perspective and/or based on specific cases:

• Authors’/scribes’ attention in writing practices, considering the possible variety of linguistic-textual outcomes determined by different degrees of oversight in drafting/copying, the use of paragraph markers and distinctive capitalization, the nature of ductus;

• Printers’ attention to texts, to their lessons, to their graphic and orthographic facies, to authors’ intentions, concerning any declarations of intent: paradigmatic is Aldo Manuzio’s epistolary preface to Theodorus Gaza’s Grammar (1495);

• Attention as a product of a new philological sensibility in the Renaissance, e.g. in revising and correcting copied texts, as reflected in Poggio Bracciolini's letter of December 25, 1429, expressing the need to correct certain passages of Plautine comedies before transcribing them;

• Readers’ attention, who may interfere with the text - manuscript or printed - with marginal notes, indices, manicule and other signs of attention, aiming to highlight specific parts of the text: exemplary is Petrarch's manicule with a pointed finger on Parisinus Latinus 6802, recommending to himself: "Attende, Francisce, dum scribis!" ("Pay attention, Francesco, while you write!"), and the note "Attende, impatiens studiose" ("Pay attention, eager scholar") on Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria.

In Linguistics, the topics listed above could be analyzed from two perspectives: on one hand, the mechanisms used by speakers to emphasize or pay attention on the most interesting element in the communication; on the other hand, the selection and control processes made on language in the act of communication, focusing on the connection between reality and the speaker.

• Concerning the first meaning, numerous studies have highlighted how voice modulates intensity, fundamental frequency, or duration to give prominence to specific segments of a communicative act. From a syntactic point of view, there are numerous strategies to mark certain elements rather than others, including topicalization. In pragmatics, the study of attention getters signals, for example in perception verbs, allows for a broader view not only towards a comparative-contrastive study but also towards research in a diachronic perspective. Attention-getting strategies can also help to discern between pathological and non-pathological speech, as shown by recent works on schizophrenia. 

• As for the second meaning, a paradigmatic example is found in sociolinguistics, where attention is a fundamental aspect for evaluating stylistic variation. Two models are mainly used for this task:  the attention-to-speech one, according to which a more prestigious variety is used in a controlled situation, and the attention-to-self model, whereby a speaker, in a situation of high communicative attention, may choose to use a minority language variety to emphasize their cultural identity. Furthermore, hypercorrections originated from the influence exerted by a prestigious variety, constitute valuable synchronous and diachronic evidence to understand linguistic selection processes.

In the field of Digital Humanities, the theme of attention inevitably intersects with the possibility, given by automation processes, to handle and analyze large amounts of data in a short amount of time. Depending on the research focus, digitization allows for the easy identification and quantification of elements,  their occurrences and their mutual relationships,  possibly highlighting relevant features for the task:

• In Machine Learning (ML), Attention is the mechanism Artificial Intelligences (AI) use to assign a relevance value to a word within its context. The advent of Transformers, the neural network architecture based on the Attention mechanism underlying Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, LLAMA, and Mistral, has profoundly revolutionized computational linguistics (CL): these architectures  set a new turning point in many CL tasks, from machine translation to parsing, from generative AI tasks such as Q&A (question answering) and Text Generation to Summarization. 

• Data annotation at multiple levels finds full application in the field of linguistics, for example in collecting corpora of spontaneous or semi-spontaneous speech, leading to the need to diversify among multiple communicative contexts, in which speakers’ attention and pragmatic-linguistic strategies vary.

In the field of Italian Literature, the dual semantic valence of attendere can be understood both stylistically and thematically:

• Regarding stylistics, it is possible to reflect on the strategies and rhetorical narrative mechanisms of waiting that aim to keep the reader’s attention alive, such as suspense, dilation and/or slowing down of the narrative time, entrelacement. Lexical elements, formulaic expressions, appeals to the reader, repetition phenomena, and all those devices aimed at highlighting parts of the text can also be objects of study. 

• From a thematic point of view, at the center of the most frequent situations, there is tension or hope on an event. Italian literature is often marked by anxieties of waiting and religious renewal - such as medieval prophecy, messianism, and millenarianism - and political one, from Dante and Machiavelli to the Risorgimento and the wartime upheavals of the Twentieth century. Amorous lyricism finds in the idea of waiting for the encounter with the loved one its central motifs, both with the idea of death as a moment of liberation from suffering or reunion. Further declinations may concern the treatment of time and space: narration and storytelling could constitute forms of entertainment to occupy the wait, even to exorcize fear. Waiting itself can represent an existential reflection, as in Leopardi, but especially in the Twentieth century, for example in existentialist philosophy and psychoanalysis; it is also possible to delineate a topography of places related to the theme of waiting, from landscapes described in lyrics to the place of modernity, such as trains or lounges.

Based on the suggestions provided so far, we encourage proposals that consider the topic of waiting and attention from an interdisciplinary perspective. Proposals (in Italian or English) on all aspects of these topics will be considered.

Guidelines for Participation

The application is open to PhD students, post-docs, and young researchers. Interested parties may submit a maximum of two intervention proposals: one as a single author and the other as a co-author, or two as co-authors. Talks of max. 20 minutes are expected, and proposals in Italian and English will be accepted. Please submit your anonymous proposal paper (300 words max., excluding title, tables, graphs, and bibliography) as one PDF file via the Google form (https://forms.gle/CgMttGAiABgf69ZY9).

The deadline for submitting proposals is set for April 5, 2024. Notification of proposal acceptance will be sent by April 29, 2024. The conference will be held in person. Information regarding registration will be communicated later and will be published on this site.

NEW DEADLINE FOR SUBMITTING PROPOSALS: APRIL 12

For further information, please write to the Organizing Committee at convegnoflui@gmail.com

Organizing Committee:

Lorenzo Cambi

Francesco D’Agostino

Gloria Fiorentini 

Gianluca Furnari                                         

Shuai Luo                                                  

Francesca Maltagliati

Maria Naccarato

Walter Paci

Alessandro Privitera

Carlo Scalia

Simona Trillocco

Scientific Committee:

Monica Ballerini

Francesco Bausi

Marco Biffi

Irene Gambacorti

Maria Sofia Lannutti