BILINGUISMO E TRADUZIONE. DALLA NEUROLINGUISTICA ALLA DIDATTICA DELLE LINGUE

The book is the result of a grant project on “Neurolinguistics and Bilingualism” (at Genoa University, 2005-06) carried out by Mariani under the supervision of Salmon. In the first two chapters, Mariani offers a syntetic picture of contemporary Neurolinguistics with some criticism on the leading postulate of left-lateralisated linguistic abilities, wich is in fact a corollary of the idea that human language turns out to be morpho-syntax plus lexicon. Salmon estends the research to translation theory and adult L2 teaching: in the third chapter, a theoretical model of how humans translate from/into natural languages is proposed, which is economic, consistent to the up-to-date data of other scientific fields, general (appliable to any kind of text, language pair and format) and predictive; in the fourth chapter is discussed a new approach to adult bilingualism and the use of oral translation in adult L2 teaching. All through the book runs the idea that perception systems, emotions, memorized experiences, and motivation are of great importance for a complete functioning of the human language device and in the improvement of language proficiency. The book gives indeed logical evidence of the role of both the emispheres in any kind of linguistic communication: for instance, prosody and metaphoric bias are shown to be as important in language as syntax and lexicon. The book (which already had some reprints) is finally an attempt to reconsider the controversial thesis of a defined genetic treshold in language acquisition.