Volume 69, Issue 1

In this paper we present a selection of preliminary results of our research project “Intonation and Meaning”, in which we compare recurrent intonation contours in German and Italian regional varieties. We apply the method of German Interactional Prosody Research (Interaktionale Prosodieforschung), which in turn is based on Conversation Analysis, to a sample of selfcollected empirical data. Our aim is to show the value of intonation as a resource to contextualize speech activities and to point out form-function relationships between intonation patterns and speech act types. In this respect, we observe the usage of intonation contours with rising accent (L*H) and with falling accent (H*L) in the utterance of question activities, and provide evidence for the fact that the latter represent a distinctive type of questions with epistemic presupposition, whereas L*H correlates rather with default, modally unmarked questions.

Both in Guadeloupe and in the Seychelles a French-based Creole coexists with French. In addition to this shared main ecological parameter, the two areas diverge in several other points of their contact ecology: First, due to the different timing of French colonization, the French variety exported to Guadeloupe in the 17th century differed from the variety exported to the Seychelles a century later. Second, while the Seychelles were a British colony from 1814 to independence in 1976, Guadeloupe always remained French and is still a French overseas department. Therefore, the contact ecology in Guadeloupe may be characterized as a reciprocally dominant monocontact situation (see Gadet/Ludwig/ Pfänder 2009), while the situation in the Seychelles is one of polycontact (Seychelles’ Creole-English-French), with Seychelles’ Creole and English being dominant in their influence on French (while the reverse is not the case). Using data from several corpora of spoken and written French in the Seychelles and Guadeloupe, this paper shows instances of code copying (e.g. Johanson 2002, Kriegel/Ludwig/Henri 2009) from the two Creole languages (and English) on the morphosyntactical level.

The aim of this contribution is to reposition a key notion to the centre of Wulf Oesterreicher’s theoretical disciplinary reasoning: grammar, or more generally, ‘rules and norms’ specific to single languages and varieties the linguist deals with. This includes contingent, non-motivated structures, and claiming the necessity to analyse their existence ‘as such’ (i.e., also independently of communicative, social etc. factors) as the core task of linguistics. This point is illustrated with a much debated variable in French descriptive linguistics: past participle agreement. Combining theoretical and corpus linguistic observations, the distribution of the two variants (absence vs. realization of agreement) in constructions with the auxiliary avoir shows that a grammatical analysis interested in the derivation of certain rules and their application in actual language usage permits to understand the logic of linguistic variation - at least the one observable alongside the standard - non-standard opposition in French.

In Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, heroism represents the heart of ethics, it drives the plot, and is at the very center of intertextual reference - yet, it is very difficult to grasp. After a brief definition of the term, this article analyses the link between heroism, the literary tradition, and the question of literary genre as it is evoked in canto I. In a second step, the representation of heroism as well as its comic subversion will be discussed in an overview of the text. Thirdly, and fourthly, the analytical scope is narrowed down to the heroism of Orlando and Ruggiero, the central figures of Orlando furioso. The depiction of Ruggiero as the fictitious founder of the Este-genealogy, then, raises the central question of the interaction between narrative irony and encomiastic intention. The penultimate part will introduce the context of the contemporary evolution in military technology: as this article shows, this context in fact determines the function of heroic representation.

Francis Petrarch has developed many diverse strategies to present himself as an author. When constructing his own figura auctoris, he refers to a highly stylized version of his autobiographical ego to which he ascribes a particular epistemic competence. Indeed, such competence serves as the basis of both authority and authorship. In his De otio religioso, Petrarch addresses the community of the Carthusian monks of the Abbey of Montrieux in Southern France. Paradoxically, he introduces himself to them as being competent with regard to questions of monastic life, although in this respect his addressees should be much more competent than Petrarch can be. At the same time the author depicts himself as a great sinner. As such, he cannot dispose of considerable knowledge in religious matters. Instead, he points out his extraordinary cultural expertise as a philologist, humanist and owner of books, a knowledge that makes him, the sinner, become an author able to instruct the monks. Petrarch negotiates the claims to validity asserted by two different cultures (Christian vs. pagan, late antique/medieval vs. antique/early-modern) and seeks to position himself as an author with authority in both fields.

Literary criticism has mentioned some affinities between Guy de Maupassant’s literary work and Freud’s psychoanalysis, without ever reflecting on Maupassant’s literary anticipation of the Oedipus complex. The latter is particularly evident in the short novel Hautot père et fils (1889), which has not received much attention to date. The article aims to illustrate some evident parallels between Maupassant’s literary representation of a father-son conflict and Freud’s scientific approach. In doing so, it does not intend to deliver a demonstration of the emergence of Freudian concepts from naturalistic fiction. It shall rather be considered as a literary case study, which illustrates the discourse-historical process of transformation from the physiological paradigm of naturalism to the psychological paradigm of the arising psychoanalysis.

That Gustave Flaubert found inspiration for his Tentation de saint Antoine in a painting ascribed to Breughel the younger, which he saw during his Italian travels in Genoa, has often been noted and commented on. Yet while the source has been named regularly, it has often been reduced to a mere thematic inspiration. This article seeks to show how the painting, together with an etching by Jacques Callot owned by Flaubert, informed seminal structural decisions, above all the dramatic form. The article provides a discussion of both the images of the saint conceived in the textual tradition of Saint Anthony’s legend and the pictorial tradition that proliferated in the early modern period. While both underpin the text, it is the pictorial tradition which, together with a musical rendering of the legend by Jean-Michel Sédaine, provides the seminal clues for the psychology of Flaubert’s Antoine. For the first time, it will also be shown how the Callot print may have informed the incongruous juxtaposition of religious temptation and scientific microscopic vision in Antoine’s final temptation.

This paper develops a corpus-driven analysis of wh-interrogatives in Castilian Spanish. Combining methods from variationist and interactional linguistics, it is demonstrated that both the distribution of the variants and their discourse functions can be described in terms of the degree of mental accessibility of the interrogative proposition (P) and the referent of the interrogative pronoun/ adverb (X). In contexts in which both P and X have a low degree of accessibility, wh-interrogatives establish a new Question under Discussion; in contexts in which P has a high and X a low degree of accessibility, wh-interrogatives are used to elaborate a current Question under Discussion; in contexts in which both P and X have a high degree of accessibility, wh-interrogatives are used to repeat, clarify or challenge a previous utterance. Given that the wh-interrogative variants differ in their restrictions regarding the accessibility of P and X, they typically also fulfil different discourse functions. The analysis moreover demonstrates that due to these functional differences, the type of response to the interrogatives produced by the listeners differs systematically depending on the wh-interrogative type.

As a phenomenon at the syntax-pragmatics interface, focus marking can cause particular difficulties in adult L2 acquisition and may never be fully acquired, whereas native-like competence can be achieved with formal syntactic properties. The present study examines this so-called Interface Hypothesis by analysing the strategies that monolingual German-speaking learners use to mark information focus in Spanish. Analyses of the test results show that around 97 % of the test subjects prefer to maintain the unmarked constituent order and mark focus in situ, irrespective of their proficiency level. In comparison with Spanish natives (Gabriel 2010, Heidinger 2014), the results show a divergence from the behaviour of native speakers, as the latter use various strategies. This indicates that the German-speaking learners do not make use of the variation of focus marking strategies the Spanish language provides, but rather adhere to in situ focalization, which is also the dominant focus-marking strategy in German. Furthermore, the results of the present study highlight that strategies for marking focus are scarcely taken into account in language teaching classes.

From Seneca’s letter 84,12 to Lucilio to the narrative plot of Kafka’s El Castillo going through the stanzas 426-442 of Pero López de Ayala’s Libro rimado del Palaçio, there is a thematic thread that explains the impossibility to reach a superior authority.

The analysis of four poems written by the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade allows different approaches to the love theme in the initial phase of his poetry. The poet’s oscillations between the collective and the individual perspectives also appear in the love poems: at first, traditional forms of relationships are confronted with the new experiences that the big city and the newly established industry in Brazilian society provide. In this context, the amorous incompleteness, a thoughtful subject to the universal literary tradition, gains new contours, and the mismatched love becomes the only possible love experience. In a second move, Drummond leaves aside these proper individual conflicts and dilutes his longings of completeness in a project of social transformation, whose presupposition is the love in the form of friendship, called philia.

This article explores the connection between fascist writing and modern colonialism through the analysis of several works produced by F.T. Marinetti, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, and Ernst Jünger. Each of them visited Africa at some point in their lives. Marinetti spent fall 1911 in Libya, where he reported on the Turco-Italian War; his chronicles were collected in La Bataille de Tripoli (1912). Sánchez Mazas was sent to Morocco in fall 1921 as the war correspondent for El pueblo vasco, a daily that published his series of articles - “La campaña de África” - on the Rif War. Jünger went to Algeria in 1913 to receive training as a new member of the French Foreign Legion, an episode that he would novelize in Afrikanische Spiele (1936). This study contends that the stay of these three writers in Africa was an event that, together with other factors, determined their fascism.