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By Domenico Pacitti Since Mrs
Bertuccelli's text was published two years ago, it has been staple
required reading for some 300 first-year Italian students of
English who follow her courses and take her final examination.
These students pay annual fees of €1,100 for the privilege
of studying at the University of Pisa's modern languages faculty
but are they getting value for money? Mrs Bertuccelli's
book consists in a haphazard and rather disjointed attempt to
re-state familiar descriptive material on a number of topics
relating to English linguistics. These include (in order) spelling
and pronunciation, morphology, syntax, semantics and some notes on
the history of the English language. Mrs Bertuccelli also adds
erroneous examples of 'model sentences' and misleading exercises
that appear to be entirely original. The preface, which in
customary Italian academic style contains no acknowledgements,
expresses the author's hope that her book will prove stimulating.
But although most of the facts appear to have survived their
re-statement by Mrs Bertuccelli, the result is sloppy, confused
and decidedly discouraging for students. Mrs Bertuccelli
seems to be ignorant of basic English sentence formation. This
takes the form of consistently using commas instead of
conjunctions to join main clauses, as in the following examples: “Statement
(1) is not explicit enough to be tested and therefore proven or
disproven, it is verifiable." (p.1); "The sequence of
words 'The dog bit the man' is a grammatical sentence of English,
the sequence of words 'Dog the man bit the' is
ungrammatical." (p.5). It also takes the
form of consistently failing to end a sentence in a full stop: “English
is easier than other European languages" (p.1); English is a
more beautiful language than German" (p.5); or else of
combining both: "English
is genetically related to Swedish, it is not related to
Finnish" (p.5). Conversely, Mrs
Bertuccelli erroneously uses full stops to punctuate phrases: "Make
frame from steel tubing." (p.8); "Attach handlebars to
frame." (p.9) Despite a chapter
on spelling, Mrs Bertuccelli's own misspellings include the
following: "Hjelmeslev",
"Andrè Martinet", "archaelogy",
"cangaroo", "copyst", "embarassing"
and "mimicing". Nor does Mrs
Bertuccelli fare much better at lexical choice: "Time
is what you do of it." (p.175) or prepositions: "[...]
J.L. Austin [...] attracted the attention of linguists and
philosophers on the fact that [...]." (p.177) She also manages
to confuse students on use of the apostrophe: "When
I go away next week, I'am taking the car" (p.127), again, naturally,
without the final full stop. Not content with
murdering English, Mrs Bertuccelli proceeds to murder French. In
the course of a paragraph on loanwords she writes: "deraciné",
"maitre d'hótel", "cháteau",
"soi-disan" and "esprit de corp" (p.225). Perhaps in a
last-ditch attempt to cut down on the howlers, Mrs Bertuccelli has
decided to scrap a number of pages from her book altogether. Even
the most determined student who has reached page 67 will hardly
find it "stimulating" to see that page 68 has been
completely omitted, as have pages 71, 74, 75, 78, 79, 82, 83, 86
and 216. Given the large
number of excellent textbooks on the subject, given Mrs
Bertuccelli's conspicuous inability to produce anything of
remotely similar quality and given the fact that Italian students
deserve value for money rather than a course for semiliterates,
one wonders exactly whose needs are being served here. Following the publication of this book, Mrs Bertuccelli was officially recommended for a promoted post in English linguistics at the University of Pisa's faculty of modern languages. Note: This review was first published by JUST Book Reviews on June 8 2003. |
