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Medieval Romance texts in the Greek alphabet are generally considered a very reliable source of information about spoken vernacular varieties, mainly due to the intrinsic independence of their writers from the Latin graphic tradition. Nevertheless, as first observed by Alberto Varvaro and Anna Maria Compagna in 1983, these valuable documents, like any other kind of written evidence, are not immune from some degree of conventionality. This paper will focus on the problems raised by the codification of Romance languages in the Greek alphabet, which requires the study of multilingualism, language contact and coexistence of different (written and oral) cultural traditions. Exemplification will come from Italo-Romance texts produced in Sicily and Southern Italy before 1500, but also from texts of other Romance areas like the Gallo-Romance 13th Century Credo studied by Rocco Distilo (1990).

The manuscript fragment of the Prose Tristan that belongs to the Salzburg University Library is republished here with an extensive critical apparatus taking into account almost every accessible manuscript and every textual variant. This study, possible thanks to the brevity of the fragment, provides a clearer picture of the relationship between the Tristan manuscripts for this part of the romance, and examines how some witnesses that have barely been considered before in scholarship are linked. As for the text of the Salzburg manuscript itself, it occupies a rather unexpected position, since it proves difficult to classify as one version or another and may bear witness to a very early stage in the rewritings of this short episode.

Based on the « dialogisme » theory developed by Jacques Bres, this paper focuses on the pragmatic effects produced by the use of Spanish verbal periphrases, particularly by the use of « llegar a + infinitive » versus « venir a + infinitive ». It also takes into consideration the characteristics of each auxiliary within the respective periphrasis. With the ongoing process of grammaticalization leading to periphrases, some spatial semantic elements are retained by the auxiliary and the preposition a , which contribute to the utterance-construction. In fact, the respective auxiliary operates as an indicator of the type of relations between the major utterance (E) and the minor ones (e) convoked by the major utterer E 1 . The analysis of over a thousand authentic examples taken from two corpora of the database Sketch Engine , as well as the classification of the verbs preferably appearing in the infinitive position allows a more precise description of both periphrases. By restricting the analysis to one « shared » infinitive verb ( decir ), we focus on different pragmatic effects, showing that « venir a + decir » and « llegar a + decir » involve a different type of argumentation. By choosing llegar , E 1 indicates that it rejects the minor utterer e 1 without providing any rational arguments ; by choosing venir , (a) E 1 indicates that it rejects one anterior (e) – effectively produced by e 1 – and introduced by « venir a decir » or (b) E 1 mentions it rejects a series of minor utterances by providing an exaggerated synthesis the verbal periphrasis introduces. It is a synthesis built by E 1 but presented as summarizing a series of minor utterances (e) attributed to e 1 utterer. The aim is to dismiss the other’s statements by summarizing them in a magnifying trait synthesis.

The present article is an attempt to conceptualize Senghor’s poetic writing from a point of view of contact and variational linguistics. According to Senghor’s own formation in linguistics and anthropology, we take into account a perspective of anthropological linguistics of language contact between French and African languages in Senegal. By virtue of the colonial and postcolonial contact situation emerges an interlectal variety of French which impacts the literary writing. At the same time, Senghor’s poetic writing in an interlectal variety, which integrates also elements from Arabic and classical and modern European languages, enriches the repertoire of Francophony, one of his main political projects. The emerging French literary interlect represents a form of appropriation of African culture as a strategic aspect of Senghor’s civilizational project of Négritude .

In two of his letras Raimon de Cornet offers a vivid satirical description of the worldly-minded life of clergy, proposing moral and educational purposes. Particularly, in A sels que vol , here published, the author satirizes prelates. The new critical edition has represented the opportunity for a thorough examination of this work: the author, even though he maintains his own originality, shows his indebtedness to previous century’s Provençal literature – both in subjects and in form, of which we propose, here for the first time, a critically based analysis –, but also to medieval Latin tradition.

The singularity of Francesc Alegre’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into Catalan has been associated with its dependence on the Latin poem in contrast to the other versions of this text that circulated in print prior to 1500. This article argues that the Catalan translation is the work of a learned author who places himself in relation to the Italian tradition and draws on different sources to complete a work influenced by humanist ideas. Moreover, the evidence strongly supports the impact of Giovanni Bonsignori’s Ovidio Metamorphoseos Vulgare (c. 1375–1377) throughout the fifteen books of Alegre’s translation and in his allegorical interpretations in the second part of the work. I also contend that he may have known the Expositio and the Allegorie written by Giovanni del Virgilio (1322–1323).

The article focuses, from a textual-bibliographical viewpoint, on the testimonies of the Viaje de America a Roma written by Jose de Castro and published during the second half of the 17th century. The lack of any editorial information in the testimonies required a deep analysis to establish their relationship in order to proceed to a critical edition of the text. The methodology followed in this study included three main aspects, 1) the material study of the text, 2) collecting archive data and 3) the information provided by the text itself. By joining all this information, it has been possible to identify the printer, place and year of the first edition of the text as well as the second edition. Besides that, the article provides information about the textual and bibliographical description of each edition, its bibliographical tradition and the libraries in which the remaining copies are kept.

Based on a corpus of ego-documents (mainly private letters) from the 18th century, we offer the results of a variationist analysis about the insertion of the article in relative clauses headed by preposition («la casa en (la) que...»). The data show that, despite the remarkable vitality that still enjoys the form without the article (almost categorical in the Golden Age Spanish), several contexts begin to favor the diffusion of the innovative variant in that seminal period. As usual in early stages of language change, the explanatory hierarchy begins with structural factors, several among which are selected as significant by the regression analysis. Nevertheless, the selection of time as well as some distributions in the social and stylistic axes of variation allow us to guess the existence of various phases in this incipient change. The first one, developed throughout the first half of the century, is set up as a spontaneous change from below, at the request of the subaltern classes, the younger people, and the most spontaneous contexts. However, towards the end of the century, this change seems to have been stabilized and even reversed in some way, driven now by the privileged classes, who favor the return to the old variant.

Vocatives play an important role for establishing and maintaining social contacts in human communication. Given the functional and formal diversity in their culture-specific realisation, this study, based on two spoken corpora of everyday conversations in Spanish and German, compares the use of different types of vocatives in these two languages, especially from a pragmatic and sociolinguistic point of view. Firstly, we present a brief review on the communicative functions of vocatives and describe the tertium comparationis, the methodology and the corpora used for this study. Then, we compare the frequency of Spanish and German vocatives in different conversational settings. What emerges is greater tendency to use vocatives in the Spanish data, especially for reinforcing social contact within the conversations. As far as the variation of vocative-forms is concerned, this contrastive analysis reveals different pragmatic and sociolinguistic functions of last-name-vocatives, endearment-terms and the use of the pronouns tú and du , whereas both languages share the proclivity to recur to vocatives for attenuating face threatening speech acts.

This article fills a gap in the existing descriptions of Italo-Romance diachronic phonology. It does so by offering a geographical and historical account of the emergence of voiceless stops replacing etymological voiced stops in the final syllable of proparoxytones, as in the widespread Tuscan variant stùpito ‘stupid’. Within a broadly-defined Labovian framework, this development is discussed according to two main options: as due to finely-conditioned articulatory processes, typical of the initial stages of regular sound change, or as a case of lexically sporadic, substitutive change. The second option is tentatively favoured, also on the basis of the possible links to another change – the much debated, irregular voicing of intervocalic /p/, /t/ and /k/.

Until the 16th century, the European words for ‘coffeeʼ reflect exclusively the Arabic and Turkish type qahwa / kahve . The first Italian – and at the same time the earliest European – record appears in 1579 ( cava ) in the Viaggio da Creta in Egitto ed al Sinai of Filippo Pigafetta. From the 17th century onwards, the type It. caffè , Fr. café , Germ. Kaffee , Engl. coffee , which today is predominant all over Europe, begins to make its way. Phonetically, the genesis of the voiceless variants in Western Europe is possible on the basis of both the Turkish and the Arabic model.