Daria MOTTA

Keywords

Her studies focus on the history of the Italian language and Italian linguistics, and are divided into four main areas:
- the language of literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a particular focus on the language of Verga and De Roberto and, more recently, Brancati;

- Italian in theater between the 18th and 19th centuries, with a focus on pragmatics; 

- Italian in the mass media
- contemporary Italian. 

In the first area of interest, the study of the language and style of Verismo, and in particular of Verga, she published a monograph based on research conducted during her three-years doctorate: "La lingua fusa. La prosa di Vita dei campi dal parlato popolare allo scritto-narrato" (Bonanno editore for the Verga Foundation). For the National Edition of the Works of Giovanni Verga, she edited the critical edition of the novel "Una peccatrice" (Fondazione Verga, Interlinea).
Other contributions concern the linguistic profile of Catania's authors of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in particular de Roberto and Brancati, whose texts have also been investigated from a sociolinguistic perspective as repertoires of the speech of the time transposed into literary writing, with phenomena of mixing registers, dialectal interference, and actual code-switching. 

A related, but not secondary, area of interest to previous research concerns the language of nineteenth-century theater, represented by Verga's early experiments and, more recently, by dramatic writing between the 1700s and 1800s. 
Since 2003, she has been studying the dubbing of long-running Anglo-American series, focusing on the linguistic interference of the English model on the Italian text. In particular, she aims to identify the dynamics between negative interference, which leads to a deviation from the rules of the target language, and positive interference, which leads to an increase in the use of structures present in the target system. She has also taken an interest in the language teaching implications of television dubbing, investigating how dubbed texts can be exploited for teaching Italian as a second language. Teaching Italian as a second or foreign language is, in fact, a field in which Daria Motta has gradually specialized, starting with the achievement of the CEDILS certification from Ca' Foscari University. 

Also in the field of media language studies, in 2020 she conducted a study on the language of contemporary Italian animated films, published in the A-level journal «Lingue e culture dei media».

Recently, she collaborated with Gabriella Alfieri and Ilaria Bonomi on the new edition of the monograph “Lingua italiana e televisione" (2024, Carocci); in particular, she dealt with the linguistic implications of new intermedial practices of television viewing, especially with regard to fiction and children's and youth television genres. 
Finally, in line with her latest interests, in 2022 she published, with Cesati, the monograph "Scrivere e parlare in italiano oggi. Parla come mangi e scrivi come parli?", in which she focused on some aspects of contemporary communication.