This book aims to offer a description of contemporary Italian, suitable for advanced students as well as teachers and linguists who are interested in the actual usage of the contemporary language. The authors hope they have usefully filled a gap in the available descriptions of the Italian language by providing an account which at every point combines linguistic description with an indication of the sociolinguistic weight that various ways of “saying the same thing” actually have in contemporary Italian society.

The book assumes a reasonable knowledge of the basics of Italian vocabulary and grammar and focusses on a selection of areas which cause difficulty to English-speaking students and/or which are difficult in themselves to explain adequately. This selection covers a wide range from matters of vocabulary to different levels of grammar. Thus the book begins in chapter 1 with an overview of the uniquely complex linguistic situation in contemporary Italy and gives a selection of examples of the types of Italian one may encounter in Italy. This is followed by a number of chapters, 2 to 13, on “Words and their meanings.” These cover areas which pose problems for English speakers and include lists and descriptions of types of words not always covered by traditional dictionaries and grammars. The next chapters, 14 to 24, deal with “The clause – combining words” and describe matters of morphology such as gender and number and some matters often not adequately dealt with in many grammars, such as word order and the choice of auxiliary verbs.