Volume 74, Issue 1

This paper is about the distribution of null and strong pronouns in French prepositional phrases in relation to the humanness of the preposition’s complement. The existing literature suggests that the mapping between pronoun type and humanness is characterized by soft complementarity, linking human complements to strong pronouns, and non-human complements to null pronouns. In the empirical coverage of the phenomenon experimental studies are still underrepresented: so far, no data on pronoun choice is available, and regarding interpretation data, the only existing study does not include null pronouns. Two experiments were conducted with the goal to fill this research gap. The results show that soft complementarity only applies to pronoun choice: human complements are typically referred to by strong pronouns, and non-human complements by null pronouns. As related to interpretation, however, both strong and null pronouns are preferably interpreted as human. We account for this asymmetry based on the general preference of pronouns to be interpreted as human unless prevented by strong constraints (as in the case of Engl. it ).

Since Friulian has been recognized as a minority language by the region Friuli-Venezia Giulia (1996) and by the Italian Republic (Law 482/1999), the elaboration process has been accelerated and intensified. Friulian has advanced into text types in which it had not been used before, such as scientific papers, administrative texts, journal articles, etc. In order to fulfill the needs of these new communicative purposes, an extensive and intensive elaboration of language is needed. This happens on the one side through a conscious codification process, especially by intense lexicographical activity, and on the other side “by doing”. In both cases, the influence of more elaborated languages – mainly of Italian, but partially also of other languages, especially English – plays a central role. Lexical items, but also morphological processes and syntactical structures are borrowed from these languages. This fact has structural consequences on Friulian, and, in the long run, could cause a typological change. After a brief outline of the recent history of the elaboration of Friulian and its legal framework, I will focus on some morphological and syntactical structures: the formation of relational (denominal) adjectives instead of prepositional phrases (which also triggers some less productive morphophonological patterns) and the borrowing of Italian adjectives and nouns derived from a present participle, provoking Friulian loan formations, although in Friulian present participles are no usual grammatical structures. In the end, I will focus on stâ +gerund periphrases, which are built on the Italian model. These are compatible with some aktionsart verb classes that the ‘genuine’ Friulian aspectual periphrases jessi che +indicative present or imperfect and jessi daûr a +infinitive cannot be used with and therefore it can be seen as a change in the semantic-syntactic system of Friulian.

The analysis of differences and analogies that the (synthetic) epistemic future exhibits in two varieties of the Italo‑Romance dialect of Verbicaro contributes to uncover uncharted aspects of its morphosyntax and uses. The case study presented in this paper is based on different degrees of competence of the speakers of the indigenous variety of north-western Calabria as well as the corresponding exported variety spoken in São Paulo (Brazil). The grammar and use of the epistemic future is fully captured if the analysis of the data is pursued alongside an assessment of the acquisitional history of the speakers. Based on the sociolinguistic account of three different groups of speakers of the exported Verbicarese (monolingual Verbicarese L1, bilingual Verbicarese‑Portuguese, Verbicarese heritage speakers), I provide a structural interpretation of the development of the synthetic epistemic future in both the exported and the indigenous variety. More specifically, I show how glaring parallels can be established between the three relevant groups of speakers of the exported speech community and three distinct stages of evolution of the epistemic future in the indigenous variety. This study also serves as a documentation task for the epistemic future which is rapidly disappearing in Verbicarese.

Pietro Aretino constantly flaunts his originality and uniqueness as a writer. This essay seeks to show that, on the contrary, his authorial figure arises from a rewriting and a ‘refiguring’ of Lucian, especially as far as the centrality of paradox and of parrhesia are concerned. The present study reinterprets or adduces hitherto ignored evidence (consisting of both textual and iconographic materials, such as portraits, marche editoriali , and medals) in order to reconstruct some key aspects of Aretino’s relationship to Lucian, thus questioning the traditional idea of the writer’s unfamiliarity with the processes of imitatio of antiquity. Aretino’s approach to Lucian is investigated on three different levels, i.e. the level of intertextuality, of themes and genres, and of authorship. Firstly, the analysis inspects how Aretino’s Dialogo was influenced by a specific collection of vernacular translations of Lucian ( I dilettevoli dialogi , 1525). Furthermore, the essay unveils the close relationship between Dialogo and Lucian’s De parasito as a model of paradoxical eulogy, thereby showing that Aretino’s text not only reverses the structures of relevant literary genres (e.g. the Platonic dialogue) but also originates from a ‘positive’ imitation of other generic templates (such as the Lucianistic paradoxical encomium). Finally, new findings about the sources of Aretino’s motto veritas odium parit and of its iconography shed light on the way Aretino fashions himself as a parrhesiastes by reproducing and transforming – and therefore imitating – Lucian’s figura auctoris .

For the most part, Machiavelli’s Libro dell’arte della guerra has been studied as a military treatise, which had produced different interpretations and applications. Whereas military historians assumed that Machiavelli somewhat underestimated the role of the so-called gunpowder revolution, recent scholarship stresses the political dimensions of the text and its reception in different contexts. This article focuses on the poetics of the dialogue, which cannot be reduced to propositional contents. Instead of teaching specific strategies and tactics of warfare, the Libro engages its readers in a military dialogue in a more radical sense. It enacts the very dynamics of war and battle by staging the complex and often contradictory conditions and foundations of speech and (military and political) theory on the one hand and its potential interactions with conflicting historical realities on the other. By combining different generic traditions of the literary dialogue from Plato to Cicero and Petrarch it performs a Machiavellian arte della guerra as the very form of military and militant intervention which concerns not only the practice of warfare, but human activity as such.

Most studies on the languages of the Jews in the tenth to thirteenth centuries in the Iberian Peninsula concentrate on Arabic and Hebrew, leaving the romance aside. It is the purpose of this article to reassess this. It does so by assembling and interpreting evidence of language usage at that time and place. In some cases, the evidence has been relatively known in an isolated manner but is analyzed differently here. In others it has been ignored or is too recent to have been taken into consideration. The conclusion is that the romance was far more central in that culture than imagined before.

An important part of an argumentative text is to anticipate the potential criticisms made by the opponent and refute them with new arguments. This paper focuses on the linguistic strategies used to fulfill this pragmatic requirement in a corpus formed by representative works of the emerging Spanish economic thought in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. These texts, called in Spanish “arbitrios” and “proyectos”, form a new type of specialized discourse, which, placed at the service of the State, assumes the function of dealing with the phenomena that affect the economic system and proposes measures that guarantee its stability. Throughout the expositive sequences, the author introduces external voices to pretend doubts and objections and provide answers to them. Based on the studies on textual polyphony and the model of discourse relations, a diachronic analysis of this construction is conducted and patterns of linguistic traditionality are identified. The analysis leads to new data about the elaboration processes that took place in the non-literary high prose during the transit from the classical to the modern stages of the Spanish language.

This paper describes the way in which the magnificence of the figure of Emperor Charles V is shown through the comparison of theatrical pieces from the first and last third of the sixteenth century, with special attention to the Égloga real (1518) by Bachiller de la Pradilla and the Comedia del saco de Roma y muerte de Borbón y coronación de nuestro invicto emperador Carlos V (1579) by Juan de la Cueva. We will thus see how the royal ceremonial, which was developed at length in the first texts, is simplified and becomes more symbolic in the later ones.

Teleological thinking dominates in the early modern period. According to Aristotle, man’s goal is happiness in the community. For Hobbes, who sees man as a wolf, there is no such goal. Whereas in antiquity Xenophon had spoken of a universal purposefulness in which the goal of all things is usefulness to man, the goal cause pre-exists as thought in the consciousness of man, whereby idleness is to be rejected. The merchant pursues the goal of supplying the community with goods that are not locally available. In money lending, the main goal can be charity and the hope of profit is only the secondary goal. The military’s objective is to prevent peace and to restore the disturbed order in a just war. If, according to Perez de Moya, the multitude of stars have the purpose of serving illumination at night, decorating the sky, or influencing things on earth, for example, by causing disease in humans, then they are also relevant to medical activity. Since the soul is purpose for the body, diseases are reactions to negative affects of the soul, such as anger or fear.