Volume 135, Issue 3

Abstract  The topic of this paper revolves around the links that unite the motif of the Waste Land with the wound of the Fisher King in the Conte du Graal . These links are based, on the one hand, on ancestral beliefs that connect the land’s fecundity with the goodness of the king, while his faults are punished with its sterility, and on the other, with Augustinism. The ills of the Grail’s family constitute a deserved castigation derived from a chain of sins, originating in the previous generation with the commission of a sin of origin. The punishment embraces all the members of the family, and, in the very same way that Original sin is the cause of both mortality and the earth’s aridity, its punishment presupposes the king’s impotence and the kingdom’s barrenness, Perceval’s matricide , and his silence in front of the Grail. The awaited irruption of Perceval in the Fisher King’s domain signified for the Grail’s family the same as that of redemption for mankind. Perceval thus redeems his lineage, and with it, the earth, in the line of the old belief that linked the king’s sins with the earth’s sterility, in conformity with the pattern of the Fall, Punishment and Redemption.

This paper deals with the interrelation between the concept of linguistic insecurity described by Labov (1966) and the irregular formation of Spanish superlatives based on Latin roots such as paupérrimo , celebérrimo etc. instead of the analogue formation pobrísimo or celebrísimo . After a brief overview on the frequency of these forms and their alleged regular equivalents in Spanish corpora, a closer look is taken on the speakers’ internal and external aspects of linguistic (in)security. Finally, it is shown by an acceptability test that there are forms on - érrim *, which are not exclusively restricted to the norma culta in Spanish.

In this article, I will seek to explain a very widespread phenomenon in colloquial Spanish: the use of the imperfect ( andaba ) in contexts for which, in a more formal register, it would be preferable to use the so-called condicional ( andaría ). An example is «Yo que tú me lo pensaba» (meaning If I were you, I would think about it ) instead of «Yo que tú me lo pensaría». To this aim, this paper will sketch out a semantic characterization of the Spanish simple tenses that does not build on the idea of a timeline or time axis , and that therefore does not include notions such as past , present or future or even anteriority , posteriority or simultaneity . As will be shown, this characterization allows a simple and intuitive explanation of the aforementioned phenomenon.

This paper deals with two types of quantitative constructions in which un huevo occurs: (a) In certain contexts, it functions as a quantifier noun ―that is, an inherently relational noun quantifying a nominal phrase in pseudo-partitive constructions: el libro tiene un huevo de páginas [‘the book has a hell of a lot of pages’]. The value of un huevo as a quantifier is evaluative, and the quantitative assessment is based on pragmatically or contextually established criteria. (b) In other contexts, the construction un huevo can be considered an example of minimizer , and more specifically, a vulgar or taboo minimizer . The minimizers are scalar elements which seems potentially sensitive to negative polarity, and become quantifiers after a grammaticalization process: under the scope of the negation, they can be reanalyzed as negative emphatic markers ( no le importo a nadie un huevo [‘Nobody gives a toss about me’]). From the examples provided by the corpora of the RAE, the functional characteristics of the two constructions will be analyzed, and their origins will be explained. More generally, it will be shown that these two types of constructions constitute two examples of subjectification, a process by which the pragmatic meaning can become grammaticalized and become a conventional construction.

Over the past few years, the comprehensive study of syntactic variation across both the Germanic and the Romance branches of languages in relation to the unmarked word order pattern has meant a more in-depth knowledge of the nature of the verb-second phenomenon – an extremely intricate typological concept because of the complex factors that give rise to such a word order restriction. The aim of this paper is to investigate word order phenomena in the Asturian language (Romance, Western Iberian: Spain) from a comparative perspective 1 by examining the word order patterns found in a number of documents written over the course of two centuries, with a view to determining what constitutes the unmarked word order and gaining a better understanding of its core syntax. Such a study has entailed collating research on the verb-first, verb-second and subject-verb-object orders. Finally, it aims to shed more light on the evolutionary development of the Romance languages.

The Maldit is Joan Roís de Corella’s only poem that appears in all of the manuscript witnesses of his poetry, which is a good indication of its literary success. This article reviews the variations of the poem throughout these manuscripts in order to focus on the process of rewriting, which reaches its maximum development in the version transmitted in the cancionero known as the Jardinet d’orats . The variants of all of the witnesses are discussed from ecdotic perspectives and the focus is on the double version of the tornada . The article demonstrates that the maldit is Joan Roís de Corella’s poem in which there is the greatest development and the greatest adherence to troubadouresque techniques. The person responsible for the version in the Jardinet d’orats does not notice these formal characteristics, which disappear in the process of rewriting, and this is the principal argument for considering it apocryphal. The literary character of the poem, like the Valencian environment in which it was produced, respond to a certain collectivity, which a different poet took advantage to generate the rewriting of Joan Roís de Corella’s maldit .

This paper deals with extant written records from Portuguese past stages (Medieval period) that are explored as sources for linguistic diachronic studies. Its objective is to argue that, complementarily to the retrieving of data from (smaller or larger) text corpora, the close analysis of an individual «witness» (as opposed to the somewhat vague concept of «text», in particular in the medieval domain) may enable the retrieving of relevant linguistic data. To support this claim, two types of examples are presented: the close analysis of some editorial corrections (in editions of late 13th century texts) and the comparison and description of variants from two witnesses of the same text (late 15th century). In both cases, the linguistic data which are described are only accessible in the editions’ critical apparatus, which leads to the discussion of how to eventually make this data accessible also in text corpora.

This paper is a contribution to the study of negative imperatives in Romance. The paper starts from Raffaella Zanuttini, who, like other researchers, notices that most of Romance languages display, under certain conditions, an asymmetry between certain positive and negative imperatives. She holds that, historically, the asymmetry reflects a tendency in Romance of maintaining the early illocutionary Latin distinction between negations nōn and nē (Zanuttini 1997, 128 s.). The present study proposes, too, a historical explanation of this asymmetry. To this purpose, the analysis takes into account negative imperatives in three varieties of Latin, pre-Classical, Classical and Vulgar Latin. The approach leads to a reformulation of Zanuttini’s hypothesis. It is argued that the asymmetry in Romance amply documented in her study is due to the inheritance of the Vulgar Latin imperative system, which turns out to be “incomplete” in the sense that it does not incorporate either the illocutionary distinction nōn / nē or the early behaviour of nē (both visible in pre-Classical and Classical Latin). It is further argued that, if considered from the viewpoint of the Vulgar Latin system of imperative, some Romance innovations managed to independently reconstruct the pre-Classical Latin distinction, on another level of the historic evolution and under a different form. Data from Eastern Romance languages are adduced in support of this view.

The Romanian language is characterized by an extremely prolific paradigm of greeting and farewell formulae, used in various communicational contexts and able to fulfil complex communicative functions. Starting from the assumption that the selection of greeting and farewell formulae performed by the speakers is determined by extralinguistic factors such as their educational background, professional status, social relationships and the like, this study attempts a description of the variation registered by the use of greetings and farewells in contemporary Romanian, in formal and informal communication contexts, in relation to three sociolinguistic variables: age, gender and level of education. The resulting analysis indicates that the subjects’ age and level of education generate the highest variation at a formal level, whereas their gender is, on the other hand, responsible for differences at a functional level, as the respective greeting and farewell formulae display different degrees of affective load.

The terms seda ardass and seda ardasina ‘variety of silk’ frequently appear in the letters of the Venetian merchant Andrea Berengo written in 1555/1556. The etymon is not Persian ārdan ‘raw silk’, but the name of the city of Ağdaş / Aġdaš (with the nisba adjective aġdašī ) in central Azerbaijan which was located on the Silk Road and is still known in modern times for its silk production.