In the course of our everyday lives, we generally take our knowledge of
language for granted. Occasionally, we may become aware of its great
practical importance, but we rarely pay any attention to the formal
properties that language has. Yet these properties are remarkably
complex. So complex that the question immediately arises as to how we
could know so much. The facts that will be considered in this book
should serve well to illustrate this point. We will see for example that
verbs like arrivare 'arrive' and others like telefonare 'telephone',
which are superficially similar, actually differ in a large number of
respects, some fairly well known, others not. Why should there be such
differencces. we may ask. And why should it be that if a verb behaves
like arrivare and unlike tetefonare in one respect. it will do so in all
others consistently, and how could everyone know it? To take another
case, Italian has two series of pronouns: stressed and unstressed. Thus,
for example, alongside of reflexive se stesso 'himself which is the
stressed form. one finds si which is unstressed but otherwise
synonymous. Yet we will see that the differences between the two could
not simply be stress versus lack of stress, as their behavior is
radically different under a variety of syntactic conditions.