Volume 71, Issue 1

The aim of this paper is to examine the diatopic variation of some Sardinian complex predicates, mainly from a morphosyntactic (and, secondarily, a semantic) perspective. I will discuss (i) the distribution of Camp(idanese) ai / Log(udorese)-Nu(orese) àere a + inf(initive), lit. ‘to have to’ + inf., and of the agglutinated and univerbated forms of Log.-Nu. dèvere / dèppere + inf., lit. ‘must’ + inf., both constructions expressing (different types of) future time reference; (ii) the diffusion of person and number in the modal complex predicate Camp. fai / Log.-Nu. fàghere / fàchere a + inf., lit. ‘to do to’ + inf., with the sense of ‘being able/allowed to do something’; (iii) cases of double accusative marking of clitic pronouns expressing causee/beneficiary and undergoer , and agreement between these pronouns and the past participle of ‘make’/‘let’ in the causative constructions Camp. fai / Log.-Nu. fàghere / fàchere + inf., lit. ‘to make’ + inf., and Camp. lassai / Log.-Nu. lassare / (dassare) + inf., lit. ‘to let’ + inf.; (iv) the ongoing diffusion of the reiterative and/or purposive values of Camp. torrai a / po / Log.-Nu. torrare a / pro + inf., lit. ‘to return to’ + inf.; (v) the ongoing diffusion of the aspectual complex predicate Camp. (am)megai / Log.-Nu. (am)megare de / a + inf., conveying progressive aspect, according to Blasco Ferrer (1991; 2002) and my data. In conclusion, I will argue that isoglosses of morphosyntactic variation of Sardinian complex predicates seem to be more ‘conservative’ (in the sense of Virdis 1988) and to englobe wider and more homogenous areas, if compared to phonological isoglosses.

Just recently, documents written by less skilled writers constitute an object of investigation in linguistics of different philologies. This contribution valorizes private letters as testimonies from writers of varying social status, as opposed to the elite, and furthermore describes the process and the context of their production. In this perspective, it is important to distinguish the process of acquisition of the written language and the complex cognitive and social process of writing. Dealing with private correspondence of writers with less experience, we focus on circumstances of the writing production in a familial and individual context. We investigate different influences on these texts: the writers’ specific writing socialization, an interrupted process of written language acquisition, specificities of colloquial everyday language as well as a lack of epistolary and writing experience. In order to realize the different writing tasks and to evoke intimacy, less-skilled writers acquire an inventory of creative tricks by following oral representations, by imitating strategies from the immediate communication and by using different linguistic and discursive routines.

The machine theatre in France achieves its peak in the second half of the seventeenth century. It is the construction of machines that permits the adequate representation of the third dimension on stage. This optical illusion is created by flying characters, as heroes, gods, or demons moving horizontally and vertically. The enumeration indicates that only characters possessing either ethically exemplary character traits or incorporating sin are allowed to fly. Therefore, the third dimension indicates bienséance – or its opposite. According to this, the following thesis is deduced: The machine theatre illustrates via aesthetic concerns characterising its third dimension an ethic foundation. Ethic and aesthetics determine each other in the context of both, decorum and in theatre practice. In order to prove this thesis three steps are taken. First of all, the machine theatre’s relationship to imitation and creation is explored. Second, the stage design, representing the aesthetic benefits of the machines in service of the third dimension, are explained. Finally, the concrete example of Pierre Corneille’s Andromède is analysed by pointing out the role of Pegasus and Perseus.

Even in a century so commonly associated with the stage as the French siècle classique , the theatre’s social, political and religious acceptance as a cultural practice remains highly contested. Hence, the recourse to the seemingly obsolete dramatic genre of the martyr tragedy that both Corneille ( Polyeucte , Théodore ) and Rotrou ( Le véritable Saint Genest ) take in the 1640 s must be understood as an attempt to secure a possible alliance between Christian devotion and the stage. Rather than effecting a reconciliation between the two, however, all three plays in question, in their attempt to adapt the martyr play to the emergent aesthetics of bienséance and vraisemblance , point to the irredeemable discrepancy of religion and the theatre instead, arousing doubts about the authenticity of conversion and potentially undermining the credibility of martyrdom itself. Small wonder then that the scathing Jansenist critique of the theatre, launched most forcefully by Pierre Nicole, takes this attempt to renew the martyr play as its point of attack. Yet, a closer examination of this polemic reveals that the seemingly stable ground of Christian faith finds itself haunted by the spectre of simulation.

Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni not only represent the high point of the debate on the paragone between painting and sculpture, but they also bring up the question of the comparison of painting and poetry. Building his argument on their common foundation in imitation, in the second lecture Varchi advocates the superiority of poetry over painting based on its mimetic capacity. My paper investigates this topic in Varchi’s sonnets, focusing on a rhetorically consistent series of poems addressed to the painter and poet Angolo Bronzino, with whom the poet enjoyed a close friendship, and culminating in a correspondence with the medalist Domenico Poggini. In these poems Varchi renovates the Petrarchan model of Rvf 77–78 by setting up a Neo-platonically based dialectic between dentro as the domain of poetry and fuori as the domain of painting, thereby shifting the comparison from the field of their mimetic capacity to that of their glorifying and immortalizing function.

This paper presents a corpus-based interactional analysis of non-embedded indicative que -clauses (IQCs) in three regional varieties of Spanish (Madrid, Spain; Santiago de Chile, Chile; and Buenos Aires, Argentina), using data from the corpus COLA ( Corpus Oral del Lenguaje Adolescente ). On the one hand, we show that IQCs exhibit regional variation regarding the discourse contexts in which they appear: not all contexts are equally available for each regional variety. Moreover, we argue that this variation can be placed on a cline that ranges from high discourse dependency to low discourse dependency, which might, in turn, suggest a divergent evolution of IQCs in the dialectal spectrum of Spanish. On the other hand, our analysis complements previous typologies of IQCs in two respects: (i) it describes the discourse contexts in which different types of IQCs are used, and (ii) it shows specific contexts and interpretations that had not been explicitly acknowledged in existing generative studies.

The paper studies the use of sí que in spoken Spanish from an interactional perspective. It argues that sí que utterances have a polyphonic meaning structure in the sense that they express different points of view which can be attributed to different enunciators (Ducrot 1982, 1984) and are characterized by a specific kind of adversative relation. The paper studies the specific polyphonic structure of sí que utterances examining (a) to which kinds of enunciators the respective points of view can be attributed, (b) in which kind of semantic relation they stand to each other, and (c) how they become manifest within the discourse. It is argued that a description within a theory of polyphony can not only account for cases in which an opposing position is rejected by the use of sí que , but also for the more interesting cases in which no rejection of an alternative proposition is involved.

This essay focusses on two short stories pertaining to that part of the Borgesian œuvre , which has attracted less scholarly attention than his world-famous fantastic stories ( La biblioteca de Babel , El inmortal , El Aleph ). The ‘Argentinian’ stories – such as El muerto , or Tema del traidor y del héroe – impress readers with their laconic diction and cynicism. Ultimately, however, they may seem to be limited to a sort of nineteenth-century mimeticism. Considering these texts in detail, it turns out that the elements conveyed by the narrator insinuate different versions of the respective story—all of which are compatible with the ‘real’ events they refer to. Consequently, the author’s mimetic tales share a conceptual framework with his fantastic yarns – precisely one that is committed to the basic assumptions of skepticism. In what follows, the essay relates Borges’ twentieth-century version of this noetic edifice to its Ancient foundations, as well as to the first ‘wave’ of Skepticism in European Modernity (Descartes; Calderón). The last section addresses the aesthetic dimension of the Borgesian short stories: how does philosophy (and epistemology especially) relate to literary fiction – that is, to a textual genre, whose primary function appears to be entertainment, based on fantasizing? Resuming the discussion of Borges’ philosophical position, the essay concludes by quoting some remarks by David Hume, which seem to give expression to an attitude towards skepticism that is shared by the Argentinian author.

The small oeuvre of Juan Rulfo has triggered myriad interpretations, ranging from a view of the texts as great examples of Latin American magical realism, to a classification of the works as the endpoint of revolutionary literature. The following article investigates the unconventional narrative structure of Rulfo’s texts, which enabled this heterogeneous reception. As will be shown primarily in a close examination of Rulfo’s most famous short story “Luvina”, the Mexican writer’s dominant technique can be described as a continuous combination of ellipsis and recurrence.