Volume 76, Issue 1

This study explores some aspects of the linguistic expression of evidentiality and epistemic modality in the legislative texts of the Lombards, focusing on the Edictum Rothari and the laws of Liutprand. The research examines how verbal constructions in these legal documents encode information sources and contribute to the process of judicial truth-finding. Lombard laws, structured primarily around specific cases rather than general principles, place significant emphasis on the means of verifying offenses, the characteristics of the inflicted damage, and the modalities of defense. A key hypothesis of this study is that both evidentiality and epistemic modality (and their interactions) play a crucial role in the syntax and textual construction of Lombard legislation.

This article deals with the discourse-functional distribution of the so-called periphrastic passive (formed with être / essere or venire + past participle) in the French and Italian scientific language of the late 18th century. The comparative and translational study takes a frame-based approach and investigates from a cognitive perspective how the French and Italian periphrastic passives are used to conceptualize given real-world situations. It will be analyzed to what extent the French and Italian periphrastic passive show the same range of uses with regard to the encoding of certain situation frames, that is, mental configurations containing a bundle of semantic properties and discourse conditions concerning the participants and the nature of the situation referred to. The study is based on a corpus of French scientific texts and their Italian translations published in seven Italian scientific journals between 1771 and 1791 as well as a comparable corpus of non-translated Italian scientific texts published in the same period and in the same journals.

This article deals with the continuations of the Late Latin words commater and compater which, first documented in the 6th century in the Frankish Kingdom, denoted the newly developed concept of ‘co-parents’, referring to the relationship between the godparents of a baptised child and the child’s parents. Commater and compater persisted into the Romance languages and they entered some Germanic, Slavic and other European languages at an early stage, resulting in various developments of meaning. A particularly interesting case is Rom. cumătră / cumătru , where it is debated whether they originated directly from Latin or were borrowed from Slavic. Against the background of the international spread of the words, both linguistic and ecclesiastical-historical arguments are put forward to support the assumption of an inheritance from Latin.

In this article, I present the main research objectives, questions, and data elicitation methods used in a project regarding the acquisition of word-internal geminates in Italian as a second/foreign language (L2). Extending beyond geminate consonants, a corpus-based approach to document various segmental and suprasegmental phenomena in L2 Italian is proposed. The study introduces the research protocol, which entailed multiple tasks to collect both perception and production data efficiently within a manageable timeframe. A detailed description of the individual tasks, the selection of the materials and the participants, and the practical aspects of the data collection are provided; the limitations and challenges associated with collecting data pertaining to the acquisition of L2 speech are also discussed. While the primary focus is on L2 Italian, the method can also be adopted for research on first language (L1) Italian varieties, thus making it widely applicable. The ultimately aim of the project is to present a transparent and adaptable methodological approach that can serve as a foundation for future research.

This article examines reported speech in retellings and explores the relationship between local emergence and sedimented model. Our multimodal investigation shows that the sequences of reported speech remain relatively constant and that they are gradually intensified and elaborated on different levels. This finding is relevant (1) with regard to partner orientation or dialogicity in the conversation: it is not a priori ‘present’ in the interaction but must be understood and analysed in its respective, gradual manifestation. It can be assumed (2) that the orientation towards a sedimented model comes at the expense of the room for manoeuvre that such narratives potentially offer. For the narration of autobiographical stories, the question arises (3) as to what extent the modelling can lose its interpretative openness. The data are drawn from three audio-visual corpora of autobiographical interviews with bilingual speakers who are familiar with both French and German cultures.

In a passage from Sodome et Gomorrhe by Marcel Proust, the narrator verbalizes his painful erotic passion for Albertine through the image of love’s wound. In order to understand the passage in its depth, the article develops a ‘stratigraphic’ analysis, showing that this passage from Proust presents many points of contact, on a thematic as well as lexical level, with a poem by Charles Baudelaire, Harmonie du soir . Some elements of the description of the sunrise, on the other hand, may echo a polyptych by Roger van der Weyden, which Marcel Proust saw in Beaune. Thus far, Proust expands important elements of a ‘modern’ and early modern cultural tradition. However, the Proustian passage presents a central element that is not found in the Baudelairean text: love’s wound. This element in fact refers to an ancient tradition, which finds its moment of greatest intensity in medieval romance literature. The article consequently elaborates an ‘archeology of love’s wound’, showing how Proust reuses and redefines this concept, especially in the sense of a strong psychosomatic dimension. Thus, Marcel Proust brings about an important innovation by a ré-écriture of important discursive and artistic traditions.

Cultural memory is constantly reshaped across various media, with intertextuality and intermediality being crucial concepts in postmodern literature, which crosses media boundaries by incorporating elements from different arts to convey collective memories. Many texts follow a specific aesthetic: contemporary writers often appropriate and reinterpret diverse intertexts and images from other arts – painting, music, poetry – turning them into dynamic formulas of memory. Culturally relevant personalities – e. g. Borges – can also be used as figures of memory to negotiate the meanings of the texts. This paper focuses on the appropriation of these elements in Tomás González’s La luz difícil , Héctor Abad Faciolince’s “Un poema en el bolsillo” and Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s La forma de las ruinas , in order to examine how intermediality, postmodern questions about the authorship of a work and the heritage of cultural memory in literature relate to each other. In the examined cases, an intermedial aesthetic can be observed that corresponds to the concept of relational art , which is characteristic of recent narrative fiction and in which multiple artistic, lyrical and musical elements are integrated.

Early Modern Italian literature was significantly shaped by the principles of imitation and (literary) authority. This article focuses on the latter and explores the main tendencies of self-authorization in Tommaso Sardi’s Anima peregrina , a hitherto little-known terza rima poem written between 1493 and 1509 and situated within the tradition of Dante’s Commedia and subsequent allegorical-encyclopedic poetry. Self-authorization in Anima peregrina , however, takes a rather implicit form, allowing the text to deploy related strategies while ostensibly aligning with strict Christian poetics such as Savonarola’s. This (implicit) self-authorization is revealed here through a close reading of chapters 21 and 22 of Book I of Anima peregrina , which address Poesia and the protagonist’s encounter with the soul of ‘Dante’. The article also considers the significance of Dante and the Commedia for Sardi by analyzing mentions of Dante within the poem and its paratexts, including its extensive self-commentary.

This essay examines Gabriel Lasso de la Vega's epic project on the conquest of Mexico, which had two versions: Primera parte de Cortés valeroso y Mexicana , published in 1588, which the author rewrote and published in 1594 under the title Mexicana . The study focuses on the first-person narrator's interventions to analyze how Lasso de la Vega presents the exhaustion he feels in sticking to a narrative of events close to historical discourse and how, through a respectful yet ambitious imitation, he offers a different response from Alonso de Ercilla to introduce variety and fiction. Through the narrative twist introduced in the 1588 poem, which clears the path leading to Mexicana , Lasso accommodates the latest theoretical approaches and poetic models, adopting a strategy that provides a heroic idea of the poetic task. From the perspective of self-affirmation writing, his work constitutes a prominent example of late-century epic writing and the aspiration, through its cultivation, to literary and social authority.

Eldorado, the legendary ‘golden land’ in the middle of the South American rainforest, has fuelled the fantasies of the European population since the discovery of the New World. It developed into a geographical myth in the chronicles of the early conquerors. As a place of longing, Eldorado has ever since served not only economic dreams of a land of inexhaustible material wealth, but also social ideals of happy coexistence. In terms of spatial theory, this utopian non-place is characterised by a chronotopic specificity, whose fictional potential has been taken up by many artistic works since 2000. Using three exemplary novels and films, different postcolonial approaches will be discussed that present contrasting Spanish and Latin American perspectives on Eldorado. By reflecting on the respective choice of genre, it is also shown to what extent the initially fixed spatiotemporal localisation of Eldorado in the tropical geography and the early modern age of discovery, still evident in the historical film, undergoes an increasing decontextualization: while the utopia in the present-day adventure novel remains anchored in the jungles of South America, in the current French migration novel it becomes an indefinite dream destination within Europe and a hopeful metaphor for a better life of African migrants.