Volume 70, Issue 1

The paper looks into the question of whether Romanian is a mono- or a pluricentric language and investigates its relation to so-called Moldovan. The first part outlines the formation of the Romanian Academy as a standardizing authority. It was founded in the second half of the 19 th century when the territory of today’s Republic of Moldova did not belong to Romania but to Russia. The second part therefore casts an eye over the linguistic situation in this region which has gone through a varied history during the last 200 years. As a result, it appears that the efforts to establish Moldovan as a separate language were politically motivated. The question – if we have to deal with two languages (Romanian, Moldovan), one (Romanian) with two centres (Bucharest, Chişinău), or one language with only one centre (Bucharest) – is therefore also a political question which creates different answers depending on political constellations.

This article focuses on the practice of listing in Talk-in-Interaction. Lists are frequently used in spoken language as a discursive resource and can be considered as a universal, cross-lingual practice for structuring ideas. As such, they have been given attention in several fields of linguistics, mainly in intonation research, conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. However, the role of gestures and other physical forms of expression in listing has been mostly disregarded so far. For this reason, we attempt to cast light on the form and function of gestures and other bodily resources that are embedded in this practice. We argue that lists are multimodal and that bodily resources play a major role in establishing the format and in organizing the interaction. In order to do so, we use a broad collection of examples from different sources in French, Italian and Spanish.

In this paper we deal with a specific subset of direct speech markers, to which little or no attention has been given so far: the expressions which codify the ending of the direct speech (“marcatori conclusivi del discorso diretto”). We analyse these markers in Old Italian texts, comparing them with their Latin and, in some cases, Old French equivalents. In the introduction (§1), we take into account various general issues related to ancient texts, namely the practice of spoken-word reading and the lack of systematic punctuation marking that helps text segmentation. After that (§2), we classify the different strategies ancient writers had at their disposal to signal that a direct speech is over, hence that what follows has to be interpreted as the narrator voice; the markers are organized in a range from most explicit to most implicit ( disse > quando ebbe detto > a queste parole > allora > [Ø]). Thereafter (§3), we focus on two specific markers, the participial marker ( detto questo ) and the “connector + finite tense” marker ( quando ebbe detto questo ) in a corpus of nine texts. Though these two markers are roughly synonymic, their occurrence is not uniform among the analysed texts. The explanation of their unequal distribution is that they belong to different discourse traditions ( Diskurstraditionen ): “ quando + finite tense” is a typical expression attested in Romance narrations (the so-called “ quand -Satz”), whereas detto questo appears to be dependent on Latin tradition.

This paper addresses the debate on the existence of specifically syntactic restrictions on one of a larger set of structures available in Modern French for information-requesting questions with a non-subject wh -phrase: the so-called wh -in-situ interrogative construction, in which the wh -phrase occurs in post-verbal position. From a comprehensive investigation of the applicability of such restrictions that is based on a large number of instances of the wh -in-situ interrogative construction from a specially designed large-scale corpus instantiating the present-day French of Metropolitan France, the paper essentially establishes that, in this variety, a fair number of these restrictions do not hold. Additionally, the paper explores the existence of morphological as well as syntactic restrictions not yet thoroughly explored in the literature and, fundamentally, uncovers that, in the variety looked into, various issues pertaining to the verb (tense, mood, passive voice, verb class, non-finite clausal complements) do not bear on the felicity of the wh -in-situ interrogative construction, while a restriction possibly holds that relates to the specificity of the subject.

The article, following a suggestion of Barthes, attempts to outline a semiotics of the technique of rhyming considered as a sub-code of poetic language, in order to better understand the important contribution provided by rhyme, on many levels, to the strategies of signification of the literary text. This semiotic approach is inscribed in a general theory of rhyme under development by the author, which aims at explaining the raison d’être and fortune of this poetic device in relation to its decisive contribution to the rhetorical and figurative elaboration of the poetic text. In a semiotic perspective, three fundamental levels of structuring rhyme as a sign can be distinguished: its signifier (the partial phonic identity which, in the current view, is considered to be rhyme’s exhaustive definition), its meaning (the semantic interference between rhyming words only) and its sense (the relation between rhyme’s meaning and context). A short reference is also made to further aspects of the the sub-code of rhyme, such as its syntax (strophic patterns) and the role of pools of rhymes. This leads to a reappraisal of some significant questions raised by the technique of rhyme, e. g. whether or not it always makes a semantic contribution, or what the interplay between its limitations to freedom of expression and its contribution to the expressiveness and poetic value of the text is. The theoretical tools are finally put to the test in a short analysis of the rhyme-words in the form of the sestine.

Despite being only a minor member of the Neapolitan Accademia degli Incogniti and being far less known than prominent members of the academy such as Laura Terracina, Giovan Domenico di Lega published the highly significant sacred tragedy Morte di Christo in 1549. The text mirrors the classicist poetics of an Aristotelian tragedy and emphasises the belief of partial adaptability of Aristotelian concepts to the neotestamentarian content of Christ’s passion and crucifixion. Thus transforming the traditional Sacra rappresentazione into a “tragedia sacra”, di Lega choses not only a typical approach of Renaissance poetics to biblical texts, he also stages mainly the gospel according to John. In doing so he not only shows to be a philologist rather than a teller of pious legends like the authors of Sacre rappresentazioni, but he also presents himself as a supporter of a free circulation of the New Testament in its vernacular version, which was suppressed in Naples being part of the Spanish territories. In clear opposition to Spanish politics of religion in Naples, but in accordance with other members of the Accademia degli Incogniti and the former group of ‘spirituali’ around Juan de Valdés, who died in Naples in 1541, di Lega combines the major texts of a not only ‘Lutheran’ reform – the gospel according to John and the letter of saint Paul to the Romans – with the spirituali’s manifesto Il beneficio di Cristo , prohibited and burned shortly afterwards. In an increasingly orthodox environment such as Naples during the 1540 s di Legas Tragedia sacra with its combination of Renaissance poetics and explosive elements of religious reform could not be of great success, therefore there exists no further edition after the one of 1549. Nonetheless it witnesses the aborted attempts of Catholic reform in mid sixteenth century Naples.

Focusing on the historico-cultural context of the Affair of the Poisons (1676–1682), the following article deals with the complementarity of magic and theatre which manifests itself on the one hand in the spectacular features of magic rituals and on the other in the illusionary effects of the comedy La Devineresse written by Thomas Corneille and Jean Donneau de Visé. Under recourse to New Historicism , the transitions between magical and aesthetic illusion are examined as well as the different conditions of building credibility which are specific for both phenomena: While the theatricality of magical acts contributes to their authentication as it appears in the case files of the affair, magical effects on stage produce two opposite views: the creation of illusion and credibility on the intratextual level and the breaking of illusion and the concomitant challenge of credibility on the extratextual level. Due to the two levels of theatrical communication, La Devineresse represents an important contribution to the demystification of magical practices during the scandal of poisons.

The aim of the present paper is to determine the category of locutions recognized by the Real Academia de la Lengua Española in the general academic dictionary, the Diccionario de la lengua española ( DRAE ). The research proves that throughout history the types of locutions established by the Academy have not been the same. On the contrary, classification changed over the years especially from the 19 th edition dated 1970 up to the 23 rd dated 2014, including the Diccionario esencial de la lengua española , dated 2006 (as it is indicated in the annex). The edition of 1970 was the first to establish a list of the types of locutions, with only five: adjectival, adverbial, conjunctive, prepositional, and interjective locutions. The edition of 2001 determines nine types of locutions: nominal, pronominal, verbal, adjectival, adverbial, conjunctive, prepositional, quantifier, and interjective locutions. The latest edition (2014) establishes eight types: nominal, pronominal, verbal, adjectival, adverbial, conjunctive, prepositional, and interjective locutions (the quantifier type is deleted). These hesitations are due to the unstable definition of “locution” given by the Academia.

In Medieval Latin, the adjective armelinus, -na and the noun armelinus are attested in notarial documents and other texts from different regions of Western Europe, in a wide chronology. At first glance, both the name and the adjective are related to the classical Latin demonym Armenius , but this etymon does not explain several aspects of its form and function. The present paper reviews all the etymological hypotheses suggested so far and arrives at the proposal that armelinus could be the result of the adaptation of the Andalusian Arabic armaní ~ arminí ‘Armenian (tissue)’, after converging semantically with armini ~ ermini , derived from the Latin armenius ‘(skin of the) Mustela ermine ’. The authors suggest that both terms – adjective and noun – could arise in the territories corresponding to the linguistic domain of Catalan and that they passed from there to Italy and the rest of Western Europe.

The staging of the Calderonian auto sacramental The Great Theatre of the World during the Salzburg Festival of 1922 marks the beginning of the discovery of this form of religious drama for the dramatic practice and theatre writing in the 20 th century. The present paper aims to deal with the recuperation of this genre by well known Spanish, French and Mexican authors (Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti; Albert Camus and Emilio Carballido). They use this obsolescent genre, paradoxically, to renovate contemporary theatre. It is the allegorical structure of these plays that provides them with a pattern for the construction of an intentionally antinaturalistic theatre. The post-Tridentine obsession with the free will dogma is substituted by a more philosophical, non religious and, sometimes even irreverent, debate of human liberty. In the modern Mexican autos sacramentales the tendency to a syncretistic mixture of Christian and indigenous ideas and forms, inaugurated by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the famous nun from New Spain, finds an ironic continuation.

This article focuses on the importance of the notion of divine knowledge in Leone Ebreo’s Dialogues of Love , Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s translation of the same work, and Garcilaso’s The Royal Commentaries . The Neoplatonist theory of divine knowledge, rooted in Pauline, Aristotelian and Platonic thought, held that God had imparted his sacred secrets to mankind in textual form, but only a select few would be able to understand it fully. Elements of divine knowledge were also progressively lost, it was believed, as the knowledge was passed from person to person. This shouldered translators with the great responsibility of representing divine knowledge faithfully: they thus placed high importance on close translation, but also felt it right to bend the translated text closer to their particular conception of divine truth. We will also see indications that Neoplatonist ideas of knowledge were the foundation of a political theology.*