Volume 68, Issue 1

This article analyses Tullio DeMauro’s linguistic thought and highlights the originality of his contribution to the current linguistic debate, which revolves around two essential questions: 1.What is special about the human language (faculty)?, and 2. Why and how did it arise in the selectional process of evolution? De Mauro’s approach to language between the poles of “nature” and “history” is contrasted with the basic tenets and ideas of two main paradigms of the contemporary Anglo-American linguistic discourse, namely Noam Chomsky’s generative approach (in its minimalist version) and Ray Jackendoff’s theory of the Tripartite Parallel Architecture of language. In this way, the peculiarities and the special value of De Mauro’s approach come to the fore, combining and synthesizing the European tradition of linguistic thought, especially with its strong semiotic imprint, and modern “naturalist” linguistic theory.

The following contribution deals with the research field of language death, that is, language abandonment, language shift, and “niches of language use”. It proposes a number of important theoretical and empirical clarifications, resulting from an extended fieldwork- and corpus-based analysis of the ethnolinguistic situation of Sassarese, a transitional variety between Sardinian and Corsican in the North-West of Sardinia. Sassarese is nowadays considered to be “definitely endangered” (Moseley 32010), as its domains are limited to a few social and situational ‘niches’. This contribution intends to demonstrate the extent to which external setting and speech behaviour are interrelated and how this interaction influences the vitality of the idiom.

The present contribution discusses the legacy of Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher and analyzes the reception of their model of communicative immediacy and communicative distance. It is argued that the model, despite being related to the tradition of research on spoken language and oral communication, does not intend to offer a descriptive matrix of media-related phenomena, but gives a systematic account of the anthropological (and not necessarily mediarelated) parameters regulating the creative, reflexive and social activity of defining the communicative situation. In focusing on the multi-dimensional variational space in between, what may also be called the poles of informal and formal communication, and in highlighting the parameters directly related to the strategies of verbalization, the model offers the possibility to better understand the dialectics between the actual processing of oral or written language and the variational norms regulating the verbal behavior in the consistent but not uniform communicative space.

Ghosts are omnipresent in Early Modern Theatre. Not only in Shakespeare but also in Corneille’s drama these apparitions serve to structure tragedies. The article discusses three functions of ghosts at the beginning of the 17th century: first, their technical aspect as a new form of a ‘deus ex machina’; second, their anthropological dimension as spirits, and third, their Christian equivalent as demons. Ghosts are used to decide the battle between good and evil or - as in Corneille’s Médée - between a king and a witch, that is between mystical and magical power systems. Whereas the king in this tragedy tries to strike the witch with a ban, Medea strikes back with the cunning technique of a ghost. By comparing techniques and functions of the use of ban and ghost, the article shows that Medea’s revenge is part of a duel between two powerful systems of magic and politics.

The article reconstructs the ‘strategy’ used by Dante in the Commedia for solving the problem of love: moving from lust (Inf. V), to the possibility of controlling natural desire through free choice (Purg. XVII-XVIII), to the role of hope in the pursuit of divine love, abandoning cupiditas and embracing caritas (Purg. XXVI). This trajectory is identified through lexical, rhyme-related, and thematic connections. It begins and ends with the first and the last sinners Dante encounters during his journey: Francesca and Arnaut Daniel - both condemned for their lust. The article also explores the reflections of Dante on the previous romance literature dealing with love, providing in particular a more convincing explanation of the presence of Arnaut Daniel - whose courtly love poetry was grounded on the theme of hope - at the end of Purgatory, the supernatural realm of Hope. Moreover, the investigation is set in the context of Dante’s philosophical and theological background - confirming with new elements the coexistence of his Augustinian imagery with the Thomist moral structure of the Commedia.

The genre of Bildungsroman is an ‘invention’ of 19th century German literature, based on specific concepts of ‘aesthetic education’ (ästhetische Erziehung) and on Hegelian dialectics. For reasons to be scrutinized, the pattern was received in cultural contexts with a very different philosophical tradition, as in France. Its two main manifestations are the world-famous novels by Balzac and Flaubert mentioned in this paper’s title. The article will briefly discuss the relation of the French texts to the German prototype, and then proceed to elaborating on the radically different answers to the question of making sense of life they convey.

This paper addresses the production of referentiality in historical fiction. It analyses Jean Echenoz’WorldWar I novel 14 (2012), by identifying textual patterns that generate effects of distance and proximity. These effects concern the metatextual dialogue the novel holds with conventional ways of representing this war, and they also relate to the actual historical past evoked by the novel. In this respect 14 performs a notable inversion. Historical fiction usually produces effects of distance in order to convey historical explanation and achieves historical concreteness by effects of proximity, whereas Echenoz endeavours to provide certain aspects of the war with explicative coherence, registering the material world with great concreteness. In many passages, on the other hand, his minimalist writing produces an ironic distance, which makes experiences of contingency aesthetically evident.

The transition between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been a period of very little, if any, knowledge for the historians of Spanish. Between the classical period of the Siglo de Oro and the beginning of modernity in the eighteenth century there was no event of interest at that time. Modern research on the history of Spanish vocabulary or texts shows that from1675 onwards we can find forms and discursive traditions that are central in modern Spanish, while processes fromearlier periods continued. In this paperwe will analyze some of themost significant (non-literary) texts of those years, and try to establish their defining linguistic and discursive traits.

Camilo Jose Cela always wanted to present his election as an academician of the RAE, in 1957, as a simple process, as the natural consequence of his literary talent. However, the convergence of the epistolary information which he himself deposited in his Foundation with other data provided by the press of the time allows us to reconstruct a whole long process in some detail, and that points to the fact that the onewhowould later receive the Nobel Prize was about to throw in the towel on some occasion, to finally convert the ceremony into a social event that likened him more to a famous bullfighter or a famous actor than to a novelist.

Paulo Rosenbaum’s novel Céu Subterrâneo is narrated by Adam Mondale, a writer, psychologist, animal behaviorist, and collector of cameras. His journey to Israel in search of a particular negative turns into an encounter with a mythical and mystical past, in the process of which Mondale becomes a researcher of himself and his origins, while making the reader his accomplice. As Walter Benjamin has argued, memory itself is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather represents various strata through which one must pass: anyonewho wishes to approach previous experiences must carefully uncover, almost archeologically unearth it. Employing a Benjaminian strategy in his multi-layered text, Rosenbaum has his protagonist face his multifaceted self in an excavation of his past, straining to meticulously inventory and arrange his findings. At the metalevel, Rosenbaum’s archeological poetics inscribe his novel into a contemporary tradition of encyclopedic narratives.

Review of the scholarship on Celestina between 2000 and 2016, with a state of the art and some predictions on its future development.