Volume 73, Issue 1

It is well established that speech flow is segmented into prosodic chunks which are crucial for accurately interpreting utterances. Since the eighties, several proposals have been formulated, mostly within Prosodic Structure Theory and the Autosegmental Metrical Model , to account for how prosodic chunks are derived and organised. These theoretical frameworks usually consider prosodic units as phonological primitives and domains within which segmental and suprasegmental phenomena are analysed. Due to the variability observed in the chunking obtained, which partly results from the various criteria used to derive these prosodic units, their exact nature and status can be questioned. In this contribution, it will be argued that prosodic structure and the chunks observed are best analysed as resulting from two types of structure-creating mechanisms, intonation and its relation to meaning on the one hand, and rhythm and its manifestations in languages on the other. This proposal is based on an analysis of French, a language with a strong syncretism between accentuation, metrical patterns and intonation.

This paper describes some peculiarities of use of the indefinite pronouns of free choice ( chiunque , qualunque , qualsiasi , etc.) in medieval Italo-Romance varieties. After discussing the semantic and pragmatic specificities of free-choice indefinites in current Italian and their evolution from classical Latin to Vulgar Latin and late Latin, the study discusses the data that emerged from the examination of the corpus of the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI). In most occurrences, free-choice indefinite pronouns behave as relative-indefinite pronouns (i. e., as introducers of relative clauses). Their absolute use (i. e., outside the relative clauses) seems instead marginal and concentrated in juridical texts, and in contexts in which the draftsman of the statute or act needs to maximise the scope of a rule or prohibition. It thus seems possible to hypothesise that the absolute use of free choice indefinite pronouns originated as an effect of the process of elaboration of the vulgar Italo-Romance varieties and started from formulary sequences, which by virtue of their high occurrence in particular types of texts gave rise to phenomena of ellipses and the use of relative-indefinite pronouns as “pure” pronouns.

An essential task of contemporary witnesses in oral history interviews is to remember past events and to communicate these memories to others. This is all the more challenging, as it often involves narrative reconstructions of virtually ‘indescribable’, ‘unspeakable’ or ‘unimaginable’ events. The present study is interested in videographed narratives of French contemporary witnesses of National Socialist forced labour. By verbatim and thus explicitly indicating that they ‘remember something’ (in French they do this with je me souviens or je me rappelle , among others), the witnesses authenticate their memories and reveal their memory process to others. Our analysis shows two different form-function designs: softly articulated forms of memory markers with retrospective syntactic scopus have the communicative function of indicating what exactly is remembered and what is not, in order to be credible as a contemporary witness. Emphasised, clearly articulated memory markers, on the other hand, have a prospective syntactic scopus and have the communicative function of opening an episodic narrative sequence. If the multimodal analysis is extended to the physical movements of the eyewitnesses during narration, it can be shown that the different levels of expression (especially syntax, prosody and posture, direction of gaze as well as gestures) together give rise to an expressive multimodal gestalt.

Jacques Réda’s collection of prose poems Les Ruines de Paris (1977) can be related to a long tradition of literary works about the French capital evoking its transformation, setting out the contradictions between new industrial and still remaining older areas. These are also the urban topographies where the lonely stroller explores the ‚ruins of Paris‘, discovering less known streets and indeterminate wastelands on the edge of a rapidly changing city. However, precisely these strange zones produce often a vague feeling of epiphanies for the observer, the periphery thus acquires its own suggestive aura as it already did in surrealist writers like Aragon and Leiris, but also in the early Borges. Putting it in a more theoretical way in Les cinq points cardinaux (2003), Réda distinguishes between the different ways places may appear to an attentive mind, finding a sort of transcendental surplus in the specific atmosphere of the outskirts. Our essay shows this aesthetic fascination as a medium of poetic energy in Les Ruines de Paris , linking it to a historical moment after modernism when intuition and imminence have become supplements of plenitude.

Starting from the most varied interpretations to which Collodi’s masterpiece has been subjected, the present study proposes a reading from a socio-political point of view that, compared with De Amicis’ Cuore , highlights the opposite opinion of the two authors regarding the possibility (and the will) of the Italian people to realize the foundation of a nation following the unification of their country. At the end of the study, a working hypothesis is presented as a reading of Pinocchio as “Pinocchieide” and proposed as a parody (and overturning) of the Virgilian poem as the founding of the natio romana .

This article offers an insight into life and work of the French author and politician Olympe de Gouges as well as an analysis of her positions on the French Revolution and on other contemporary issues such as anti-colonialism, class differences and women’s rights. The article argues that the author used literature as a space to develop a political stance that, due to the legal situation, she could not carry out professionally. In her play “L’Esclavage des Noirs, ou l’Heureux naufrage” (1792) and in the essay “Réflexions sur les hommes nègres” (1788), de Gouges openly criticizes the brutality of white plantation owners, invokes the equality of all people, and condemns human trafficking. In “La Nécessité du Divorce” (1790), the author demands the right to divorce, a fair division of property, protection of one’s own property also for women, and a financially secure future for the children born out of wedlock. In her famous “Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne” (1791), the author called for truly universal suffrage, as well as for the right to liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

The aim of this contribution is to examine the contact situation between Spanish and indigenous languages in historical Paraguay, using a corpus of one hundred texts written by Jesuits in the 18th century. To overcome cultural and linguistic barriers, the members of the Jesuit Order used various strategies, especially learning the two lenguas generales Guaraní and Quichua for missionary work, which resulted in a certain multilingualism among the religious. The main focus is on the linguistic influences on colonial Spanish, coming from older indigenous varieties and especially from the lenguas generales Guaraní and Quichua, both widespread across the region in historical Paraguay. The traces of this historical contact situation can be found in toponymic designations, and as lexical and even morphological borrowings, which are still vital today, especially in the American varieties of Spanish.

The present study tackles agreement mismatches triggered by a distributive phrase with cada (‘each’) potentially functioning as syntactic subject in rural European Spanish. The study has two main and mutually compatible goals. First, it aims at linking this phenomenon with the vernacular tendency of “externalization of plurality” in Spanish. The second goal is to demonstrate that, on the basis of the most recent theories about the semantics of distributivity, mismatches evidence the existence of a covert distributivity operator (silent cada ) in Spanish syntax. The information structure of rural varieties of Spanish and the connections between topics and subjects prompt the emergence of a preverbal distributive operator. The data support the idea that Spanish exhibits “distance distributivity” as an additional mechanism to “floated quantification”. Data are extracted from the Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural ( COSER ).

The Latin present participle in ‑nte(m) did not survive systematically in Romance. In Spanish, although a small number of forms in ‑nte may be considered inherited words, the overwhelming majority are cultured borrowings ( cultismos ) which hugely contributed to the elaboration of the written language; many have also diffused into everyday usage and are amongst the commonest words in the contemporary language. Such substantial cultural borrowing also paved the way for internal creations and later morphological calques from English forms in ‑ing , as a result of which forms in ‑nte are continuing to grow in both numbers and frequency. However, despite what may be seen as cultured experiments in the more systematic elaboration of a true present participle category in Spanish, forms in ‑nte came into competition with adjectives formed with the agentive suffix ‑dor , in which they were subject to restrictions of both an aspectual and pragmatic nature. This article traces the successful diffusion of ‑nte forms and suggests reasons which hindered their regaining total productivity.

The European travel narratives that follow the discovery of the New World have already been extensively studied, from historical, anthropological and literary perspectives. However, we would like to reread them from the perspective of the tension between a “marvellous possession” (Greenblatt 1991) and a more profound failure. The early travelogues show a complex discursive architecture with a textual subject facing an absolute Other, seeking to establish on the one hand an analogy based on a reassuring fictional intertextual horizon and on the other an exaggeration of otherness, symbolised by anthropophagy and monstrosity. If, as Todorov (1982) thinks, such an architecture was indispensable to the enterprise of conquest, it is nevertheless at the root of a triple failure. If the undeniable intercultural failure has already been widely studied, we will develop two others: the failure of the genre of the travelogue from the Middle Ages as an interpretative matrix, and, more profoundly, the failure of a Western knowledge paradigm, which will be shown in an exemplary way by the criticisms of las Casas and Montaigne.

This article examines the extent to which Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios display a specific textuality which can be described as a narration of resilience. The focus is on how Cabeza de Vaca portrays himself and his environment in retrospective, which events (for example, anthropophagy among Spaniards) he selects for his (micro‑)narrative(s), how he frames them and to what extent literary means are used. Of specific interest are possible models of affect and questions about the constitution of space and time. It will be shown that Cabeza de Vaca exhibits a manifest potential for adaptation, acting in the face of highly aversive living conditions. In the face of permanent threats, Cabeza de Vaca builds up the capacity for change – his relación is characterised by a high degree of resilience.