Volume 75, Issue 1

The aim of this exploratory research is to map the presence of the French language in Morocco. To this proposal, we update the linguistic demographic profile of Moroccan francophones on the basis of numbers provided by international organisations and classify them according to the varieties used: basilectal, mesolectal and acrolectal. In this respect, we consider two important factors for the learning and use of French in Morocco: education and migratory flows. In addition, we draw on linguistic landscape studies to examine the traces that these linguistic practices leave in the public space, as this approach provides data on the functions, status and varieties of this language. Our approach is based on data collected in five main Moroccan cities, documenting, on the one hand, the highly standardised display used by public authorities and large private companies and, on the other, signs written in a more or less formatted manner by individual citizens. Our results allow us to corroborate the process of the ‘sédentarisation’ of French in Morocco on the basis of its visible traces. In addition, our sample illustrates the multilingualism displayed and the coexistence of several languages in Morocco. In the future, further in-depth studies could broaden our documentary bases, systematise the results and revise the conclusions that close this article.

The present paper provides a comprehensive model of the various syntactic functions displayed by Romance domain adverbs (DAs), such as Fr. politiquement ‘politically’ or It. economicamente ‘economically’, as well as of the semantic and pragmatic side-effects of realizing DAs in different structural environments. It will be shown that – like their lexical bases, i.e. relational adjectives, from which they are formed by categorial transposition ( political → politically ) – DAs represent a special class of semantically underspecified modifiers whose function in context is to restrict the extension of their modifee by relating it to the extra-linguistic domain they denote ( i.e. to conceptual frames such as politics or economy ). Yet what follows from the fuzzy nature of this conceptual relation is that the interpretation of a DA is systematically enriched by certain grammatical and encyclopedic features of the syntactic context in which it is realized, in particular the [dynamicity/stativity] feature of the given modifee. In a first step, these observations allow us to describe typical effects of contextual adaptation, such as the preference for method or means readings of DAs modifying agentive (necessarily dynamic) verbs ( to treat surgically ). Moreover, the proposed interface approach helps to keep apart the pragmatic effects of contextual enrichment from the proper level of adverbial syntax, where different positions of DAs have to be formally and functionally distinguished even if they do not go along with intuitively diverging interpretations of the adverbial modifier. This will be shown to be the case for those syntactic environments where the DA’s function consists in restricting the validity of the – syntactically twofold and semantically stative – relation between a “predicator” and a “predication base”: Such predication relations actually can be modified by DAs on at least three distinct syntactic levels, to wit (i) within an expanded noun phrase ( economically powerful province ), (ii) within the Small Clause of a copular construction ( The province is economically powerful ) or, most interestingly, (iii) at the discourse level, where the function of a left-peripheral DA is to restrict the applicability of the proposition it frames ( Economically, the province is powerful ) to a particular aspect of the Question under Discussion (QUD). The function of this particular type of discourse-pragmatic “delimitation” (Krifka/Musan 2012) will be described by analyzing examples and corpus data from Italian and French.

This article examines the presence of language(s) in the public space of the Intramuros district in the Philippine capital, Manila, connecting Linguistic Landscape research with heritage tourism and language ideologies. The aim is to analyze the visibility of languages both top-down and bottom-up in the super-diverse, post-colonial context of the Philippine capital, based on a combination of different types of data and methods. The focus is on the former colonial language, Spanish.

This article deals with the learning practices that Portuguese- and French-speaking members of the Jesuit order applied in the two Romance colonies of India and New France to learn local languages for missionary purposes in the 16 th –18 th centuries. The study is based on an interdisciplinary and process-oriented holistic approach to dealing with sources from these two different contexts and allows for a better understanding of the order’s practices in learning, documenting and passing on local languages within the order and beyond. Starting with examining the preparatory phase in Europe, we focus on the Jesuits’ language learning experience, their practices in the field and their attempts and difficulties in describing and documenting local languages against the backdrop of European languages and existing and changing language attitudes. Furthermore, we focus on the Jesuits’ goal of transferring their knowledge within diverse networks and try to provide an outlook on a more holistic way of dealing with sources from missionary contexts.

Based on a theoretical framework of violence largely rooted in the work of Jan Philipp Reemtsma, this paper aims to examine the representation of violence in Lituma en los Andes . Through a nuanced analysis of select passages, I will place special emphasis on the significance of allusions to Greek mythology and the hybrid nature in which these mythical references are presented. Instead of promoting the transcendence of absolute truths, the novel advocates a relativistic aesthetics that challenges clear-cut ideological dualisms such as ‘civilization’ versus ‘barbarism’. While acknowledging that Mario Vargas Llosa's fictional works are influenced by the author’s ideological biases (especially in the case of a novel firmly rooted in specific socio-political contexts like Lituma in the Andes ), the objective of this paper is to underscore the fictional aspect of violence and to dissect certain allusions to myths and texts where the reflection on violence plays a central role.

In Portugal and Brazil, epic poetry is still a prominent genre in the 19th century. However, under the conditions of Romanticism, it must find both its particular position in the literary field and its own aesthetics. Aesthetic innovations are accompanied by a contemporary debate on the epic genre. This debate is held not only in poetological writings and public discussions, but especially in the various forms of paratexts, such as prefaces and annotations, as well as in the poetic text itself. This article focuses on footnotes and endnotes and shows the intricate relationship between Romantic epic poetry and scientific, especially historiographic annotations. The discourse of the annotations is dominated by three topics: epic and history; authenticity; communality and knowledge. These auto-reflective dimensions of footnotes and endnotes illustrate the problematic reconceptualization of the epic genre in the context of nation-building processes.

Often associated with similar fictions of the animal narrator or speaker by Lucian or Plutarch, Apuleius’s Golden Ass remained a vivid model for 17th-century novelists such as Francesco Pona ( La Lucerna , 1625) and Francesco Fulvio Frugoni ( Il Cane di Diogene , 1688), or the French anonymous author of l’Asne ruant (1620), Antoine Torche ( Le Chien de Boulogne , 1668) and Jacques Alluis ( Le Chat d’Espagne , 1669). While Italian authors would favour a Baroque poetics of satire, underlining the bestiality of human behaviours in a sombre tone, French authors tended to give a more positive value to the animal, contrasting its innocent point of view with the depravity of mundane life. Yet, all pay a debt to Apuleius’s art, as metamorphosis (or the alternate device of metempsychosis) serves as a metaphor blurring the line between animality and humanity. The bestiality of sexual desire is more especially at stake, as these narratives form an original trend in the landscape of 17th-century novelistic treatment of love. And contrary to what happens in the Golden Ass , they do not necessarily end by reasserting the limits between (wo)man and beast, echoing the vast trouble raised by the early modern controversy on the animal soul.

The purpose of this contribution is to describe the debates on sexuality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain, its folds and folding, its disseminations and ambivalences; that is: why, who, how and where did people talk about sex, in what places and institutions and media are the various discourses recorded, how is a “discursivity of sex” constructed? how this discursive power penetrates the most intimate and individual behaviors, reproducing the joys of everyday sexual pleasure and at the same time controlling them. Therefore, what I would like to show is that all the negative arguments that mark the state-religious doctrine lead, on the one hand, to the repression and concealment of sex within a system of power, but on the other hand, they are counteracted, by a desire to know that is far from being reduced to mere repression, by the enjoyment and pleasure of talking about sex. In the distribution and circulation of knowledge of sexuality we differentiate a ‘Macro-Mesetas-Spanish-Baroque’, understood as an episteme or macro-concept and the ‘Micro-Sub-Mesetas-Spanish-Treatises-of-Honour’ and the ‘Micro-Sub-Mesetas-Spanish-Dramas-of-Honour’, understood as devices, as a micro-concept, as an operative concept, as real vessels of a ‘micro-politics-of-honour’/‘micro-politics-of-sex’.

This article explores the semantic alterity of the concept of amor de lonh characteristic of twelfth-century troubadour song. To this end, it explicitly refrains from exploring concretely biographical understanding of the concept in the mid-thirteenth-century amor de lonh of Jaufré Rudel, which has been so influential in terms of reception history, and instead considers the Vida in the context of French narrative literature of the twelfth century. Through a close reading of Jaufré Rudel’s song Lanquan li jorn and the consideration of passages from twelfth-century French texts dealing with amor de lonh , the essay posits a new semantic modelling of its concept: ‘love from afar’ does not arise, the essay contends, from a conceptualization of lack and from the potential of the lyric ‘I’ both desiring and catching sight of the longed-for object, two possibilities that cannot coincide. Rather, the lyric ‘I’ should be considered as the final goal of the love (of God) that reaches out from afar. Through the movens of the amor Dieu , amor de lonh is thus reevaluated with new implications that enable it to permeate and overlap with the concept of fin’amor .

This essay aims to analyze some aspects of the triple conjunction between Jewishness, foreignness and Brazilianness in Clarice Lispector. The text Forgiving God is the guide for this discussion, which evolves in the interface of literature and psychoanalysis. The operator of this reading, among other references, is Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche , which discusses the return of unconscious contents previously kept under repression. Clarice’s fiction offers space for the problematization of a unique kind of Judaism, that belongs to the author's particular situation as a Brazilian and a foreigner.