Volume 133, Issue 3

Medieval literature and especially heroic poetry seem to irritate modern readers in many ways, which also poses a serious challenge to narratological description. The protagonists of heroic poetry are particularly challenging as they are usually perceived as «flat», due to their lack of psychological depth, and thus do not seem to be able to motivate the events on the storyline. Drawing on examples from the Chanson de Roland and the Rolandslied , the article scrutinizes this perceived flatness and passiveness of character from the perspective of the semi-orality of medieval literature. It proposes to replace a modern reading that privileges the written word with a more flexible, performance-related approach. Such an approach invites reading between the lines and can disclose passages of irony and related phenomena. As a consequence, what the protagonists claim to do – and what, in its literal sense, often appears to be illogical or even absurd –, becomes psychologically plausible or at least understandable against the backdrop of performance.

The typology of language contacts is an important issue of contact linguistics. Different configurations of contact situations, such as of creoles, interlects between standard languages and dialects, or even the emergence of Romance languages have been tried to be explained by ecolinguistic parameters, such as the rapidity of evolution or geographical distance. Contemporary urban vernaculars, i.e. the contact variety spoken in French peripheral urban districts, and the postcolonial contact in Maghrebine Francophony with Arabic varieties can be joined to the list of specific contact cases. The notion of « limit » can be considered an essential category in contact typology, and it turns out that Juri Lotman’s semiotic approach can assign a specifically dynamizing function to the limits of language contacts. Under globalization conditions, even apparently very different outcomes of language contact can be explained by common underlying principles, even if we may accept the idea of a rupture in sociological terms.

Romance texts translated from Latin – especially in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance period – are supposed to contain numerous syntactic phenomena which can be explained as direct calques from the source text. Nevertheless, scholars often refer exclusively to this phenomenon ‒ i.e. the calque itself or Latinism ‒ when talking about Latinate constructions. Hence why other interesting related phenomena which are very significant in relation to the attitude adopted by the translator towards the syntax of the Latin text still remain almost neglected. Indeed, having an all-inclusive panorama of the syntactic possibilities available to the translator with regard to the original text also requires taking into account translational solutions other than the calque – Latinism –, which is the reason for the introduction of the terms Anti-Latinism , Hyper-Latinism , and Hetero-Latinism in my paper. The present study, based on a corpus of nine different 16th-century Romance translations – Spanish, Italian, French – of Erasmus’s dialogue Uxor mempsigamos , aims to verify the extent to which Latinate syntactic strategies are actually common in the translations under analysis as well as to check whether the reason for such strategies stems from the source text itself or they occur regardless of the latter.

The article focuses on certain cases in which the use of the compound perfect (CP) of Peninsular Spanish presents problems of interpretation, or apparently contradicts the norms for the use of this form, i.e., the CP is used together with a prehodiernal expression of time (e.g., hace X días / semanas / años ). Nevertheless, the use of the CP in those cases seems to be accepted by most speakers. We analyse examples derived from different sources from a perspective that combines the lexical meaning of the verbs with their syntactic and discursive context and propose a global solution for all of them that, from a temporalist rather than aspectualist viewpoint, offer a coherent picture of the Spanish PC. The common denominator in many of the cases analysed is that the PC expresses the Resultative Perfect. On the other hand, also the prehodiernal «aoristic» PPC appears in some of them, which underlines the close connection of this tense with the moment of utterance.

The verb insistir occurs frequently in contemporary Spanish. This paper focuses on its form insisto and analyses its use in five corpora of spoken and written language (CORLEC, C‑ORAL‑ROM, CREA, HCM and HUSNC). The form is employed with or without complements or modifiers, the latter syntactic configuration predominating in the data. The form without complements or modifiers occurs in almost all positions within the sentence (initial, intermediate, final), is semantically reduced and is used mainly to underline and intensify the propositional content of (parts of) the utterance. These features suggest that insisto is developing into a discourse operator.

This article focuses on the analysis of the adjectival and adverbial values of mero in contemporary Spanish, with special attention to its American varieties. The data, which includes examples of formal and spontaneous written texts, shows that the adverbial adjective mero has two main values, one as an intensional adjective and other as a focusing adverb for expressing exclusivity. Although only found in some Spanish varieties, mero can also function as a focusing identifier. The corpus findings confirm previous accounts of mero as an adjective, adverb and argumentative operator; on the other hand, the linguistic evidence points out semantic and syntactic properties not reported before, such as nominalization ( los meros del lugar ), the admittance of quantifiers ( al más mero estilo ) or definite article ( las meras mujeres ), and its value as an adverb in postposition ( irse mero allí enfrente ). Thus, a more complete inventory of its semantic values, uses and grammatical properties is provided.

This diatopic study examines the characteristics of the locative adverb constructions that select possessive pronouns as complements in Peninsular Spanish oral corpora. Firstly, the range of locative adverbs that take part in this construction are scrutinised, as well as their frequency of use with respect to that of their counterparts, in which a prepositional phrase appears as a complement to the locative adverb. Secondly, the geographic spread within Spain and the diatopic differences between the various autonomous communities are discussed. Thirdly, this paper also explores the variation in use between the possessive affixes ‑ o and ‑ a and the motivations traditionally given for this variation: to wit, the analogy with the final vowel of the locative adverb and the agreement with the referent of the possessive pronoun. Finally, it is proposed that diatopy, not previously considered in the literature, might be an influencing factor in said variation, given that there appears to be a strong link between the region and the use of one or another desinence of the possessive. This is, for instance, the case for Andalusia, where the vast majority of the locative adverb cases with possessives exhibit the suffix ‑ a .

This article describes the sociolinguistic traits of Cuban-American Spanish, especially in south Florida. By revising already-built corpora and dictionaries, the study aims at examining the correlation between linguistic borrowing, and sociocultural and pragmatic elements in an attempt to shed more light on the concepts of Spanglish and code-switching. This revision is complemented by a historical account of Cuban-American migration, a normative study of this dialectal Spanish variant, and the collection of indigenous multiword phrases. Some of the earlier findings indicate that Cuban-American Spanish reflects the variability of this form of Spanglish as its usage and conventions are highly reliant on the pragmatic features of Cuban-American Spanish speakers. Culturally speaking, Miami-based Spanish reveals the existence of a differentiating sentiment, which contrasts with the inevitably assimilated American codes, i.e. a strong sense of bicultural identity.

This article presents the project of an on-line atlas of Old Italian based on the corpus of the Opera del Vocabolario Italiano . The «points» on the atlas are the places which have testi significativi («significant texts», i.e. those which better represent the local variety). The forms are provided with different types of information: lexical (belonging to a lexical item of the corpus), morphosyntactic (inflexional categories) and historical-phonological (e.g. relationship of legno with Latin l‑ , tonic ǐ, -gn‑ , -u ). The atlas will help both the editor and the linguist: the first will find a grid which will assist him in localizing texts, the latter will have a tool to observe geolinguistic patterns or to reconstruct the system he is studying.

This paper examines the reflexes in Romanian conjugation of Proto-Romance palatalization in radical-final position, i.e., the final consonant of lexical morphemes. It offers an explanation for instances of the absence of the expected reflex, which is relatively frequent in palatalization via the palatal glide as opposed to palatalization via front vowels. It considers both phonetic and non-phonetic factors, including, in its consideration of the present tense, the possibility of Slavic influence, arguing that contact within the Balkan Sprachbund provides an explanation, otherwise unavailable, of the distribution of radical-final palatalization in that paradigm. In view of the likelihood of such influence, it concludes with a general discussion of morphological interference in situations of language contact, a type of interference – as opposed to lexical, derivational, and syntactic interference – which some have questioned.

The present contribution aims to give its etymology to a French toponym previously regarded as of unknown origin : Ternuay (Haute-Saône). A survey of the written testimonies and of the dialectal forms leads to posit that the word is built on * ternua , itself derived from Lat. ternūca , n. f. ‘wildrye ( Elymus spp. L.)’, with the collective suffix *‑ ei ( o ) from Lat. ‑ ētu . This formation appears to be dated from the Merovingian era. It is reasonable, at any rate, to assess that the type ternūca , whose derivates are attested (only since the 16th century) in the West and the Center of the Oïl zone and in a part of Occitania, has been previously diffused in the East of Roman Gaul. Moreover, this article discusses some additional aspects of this toponym’s history.