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In the context of Judiciary or Forensic Linguistics, this paper shows the results of a study on rhotic consonants in prepausal position (in the spontaneous speech of central peninsular Spanish) in order to assess their forensic value for identifying speakers. The variables that have been analysed are the number of components and the acoustic features of the first and second components of the consonant, which correspond to the closure and opening phases, respectively. The results have shown some significant differences amongst speakers, which is why the rhotics are considered a useful segmental element in comparing speech samples on judiciary purposes

U.S. involvement in both theatres of WWII, i.e., in Europe and in the Pacific, has been widely reflected in literature, film, music, and art. This paper investigates the way American intervention in the Pacific is showcased in Terrence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line (1998) and the miniseries The Pacific (2010), directed by, among others, Jeremy Podeswa, and produced by, among others, Tom Hanks. I seek to analyze the aesthetics and ethics of U.S. war in the Pacific that these two media project. Do the chosen examples justify American intervention? How was the war in the Pacific different from that one in Europe? Were U.S. soldiers ready to fight in the Pacific? How did the war influence its participants? These are some of the questions the paper will meditate upon in large detail.

Through the analysis of the incunable and postincunable editions of Plautus’ comedies, this paper establishes that Francisco López de Villalobos uses a 1497 Italian edition (even a 1495 one) as source text for his translation of Amphitruo. This paper also sustains that Villalobos translated Amphitruo into Spanish –at least an initial version of it– in Salamanca before August 1498. This hypothesis is supported by the analysis of Villalobos’ glosses, by his translation of verses (attributed to Italian humanist Ermolao Barbaro) that Villalobos inserted in the abovementioned edition Amphitruo, and by several characteristic features of the life and work of the Zamoran doctor. Therefore, the first translation into Spanish of a comedy by Plautus coincides in time and space with the production of the first printed version of La Celestina.

In the northwest of Cáceres there is a Romance variety with controverted affiliation. The recent book of Costas (2013) gathers several works that defend a Galician origin, explained by medieval processes of repopulation. One section contains a selection of words that have acquired a meaning in that variety; this list could be used as an evidence of the special character of this language with respect to its neighbours and to point out its distance from Portuguese. Nevertheless, this paper proposes a contrastive analysis between those words and Castilian and Portuguese dialectal materials that reveals that the situation is far from Costas’ description. In fact, almost half of the meanings that were presented as specificities of the fala are well documented in dialectal Portuguese. This paper aims to claim the need to consider dialectal materials produced close to the Valley of the Ellas, since they are essential to reach rigorous conclusions about the origin of the fala.

Fernando de Herrera wrote and published his Relación in 1572, after having passed less than one year since don Juan de Austria had achieved the famous victory of Lepanto against the Ottoman fleet of galleys, on 7th October 1571. Herrera´s account, at once historical and fictitious, due to its author ´s propagandistic and subjective impetus, promotes a correspondent view on the island of Cyprus, initially seen from the perspective of its fame as “the most blissful” of the Mediterranean and “consecrated to Venus”, and subsequently represented as a hostile space, because of the fall of Famagusta under the Turkish power. The current paper aims at reflecting upon those elements that, reunited, sum up to such conversion of the representation of the island and its inhabitants, as it is being portrayed in the Herrerian account.

The publication of the tetralogy Palimpsesto (2016) by the Portuguese poet Ricardo Gil Soeiro represents an amazing contribution within the literary field of the Iberian studies to the relationship between philosophy and literature. In front of the nihilistic consequences of the deconstruction, it tests the powerless possibilities that the poetic creation could contain yet. This paper tries to highlight two of its aspects: the hermeneutic base for a dialectics of the personal pronouns and the spectral traces of the Greek-Roman classical tradition.

In this paper special attention is paid to the impressions of some German travel writers who visited the Monastery and the area of Yuste between 1884 and 1973, moved by their interest in the place of the Emperor’s last retreat. The variety of backgrounds and personal preferences of these writers results in a mixed and multicoloured picture which is an invaluable material not only for the writing of guidebooks but also for local history.

this paper aims to show how Bob Fosse’s Cabaret reflects the atmosphere in Germany during the advance of Nazism, from Cristopher Isherwood’s book Good bye to Berlin. For this purpose, it analyzes the diegetic function of musical numbers conceived as microcosms re-creating in abyme the society who watches them. Furthermore, we will see how this realistic treatment of the musical cinema contributes to the renovation of the genre itself.

This paper examines how Melvyn Bragg, British journalist, broadcaster and writer, portrays the aftermath of World War Two on family and community in The Soldier’s Return (1999) and Son of War (2001). I contend that Bragg’s apparently simplistic and minimalist style approximates what Michael Rothberg (2000) terms as traumatic realism. By blending the ordinary and the domestic with the extraordinary, he manages to evoke a meaningful absence and traumatic undertones at the same time as resonating with historical ‘truth’. Thus, I conclude that through the tension between an outer naivety and underlying disturbances, Bragg’s post-memorial discourse achieves a public disclosure which hitherto remained, primarily, in the intimate realm of postwar family life.

The Prague Spring was the culmination of a process of cultural, economic and political opening up which, despite its disappointing end, was a turning point in the Cold War and questioned the Europe of Yalta by the way of highlighting the contradictions within the Soviet bloc and reminding the international public of the existence of a central European geopolitical and cultural space that claimed its own dynamics irrespective of the USSR guidelines. The abundant fiction and non-fiction literature generated by the Prague Spring also reached Spain in the form of a large number of translations of Czech and Slovak authors. In addition, the event generated a few original works by Spanish narrators and journalists. These works, both translated and original, are the main object of this paper.

In this paper we have investigated the presence of the World War II, the deformations of Nazism and the war strategy as obsessive themes of Roberto Bolaño from the beginning of his literary career to the novels published after his death. Focusing on his literary games and analyzing Nazi Literature in America (1996) and The Third Reich (started in the eighties under the title The Mediterranean Strategy but published in 2010, seven years after the death of the author), referring to the articles written by Roberto Bolaño and about him, as well as to the interviews and other available evidences, we have tried to show the impact of war both in his literary vigor as in his private life, and to identify war games as a metaphor for the literature and life of the Chilean writer, fond of wargames and owner of a large collection of them.

The same as literature or films, video games can also express a positive view of the war. For example, they are part of the propaganda of armies, such as the US army, or terrorist groups, such as Hezbollah. Related to Japanese video games, they are interesting due to their unusual strategic communications within a country which promotes pacifist culture. This paper analyses which are these rhetorical strategies in two video games: Squishy Tank (2010), by Success, and Valkyria Chronicles (2008), by Sega. In order to achieve it, it will employ the Japanese aesthetic concepts of kawaii, cuteness, and moe, the identification and fetishism with a fictional character.

The present paper establishes a dialog between Paul Celan’s poetry and Slavoj Žižek contemporary thought, centered on the Shoah and its repercussions as its focal point. By means of the analysis of three aspects in particular —the notion of evil, the sense of darkness and the idea of an absconding God— it also approaches questions of the poetic representability of the Shoah and the aesthetic accessibility of Celan’s poetry, which eventually leads to a slightly broader conclusion on the role and importance of aestheticization of trauma, in the Lacanian sense, in general

This paper presents a critical study of the problem of the representation of extreme horror and particularly the Nazi Holocaust. The purpose of this analysis is inquire into the classic –and perhaps even more relevant today than ever– subject of the ineffability of horror from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, with particular attention to the possibilities of transgressing the representative interdict of the Shoah and the causes that encourage this hypothetical need for transgression. To do this we have focused in the comparative analysis of the work If This Is a Man (1947) by the Italian writer Primo Levi, and the film Son of Saul (2015) by the Hungarian director Lázsló Nemes.

As US bombardments caused death and destruction, common people realized that the fascist ads of a quick war without penalty were a tragic governmental lie. After the propagandist frenzy of military exaltation documentaries like Ali fasciste (Fernando Cerchio, 1941), directors and employees of Cinecittà held back their support for an aggressive military policy. In 1941 Pavolini, the Popular Culture Minister, approved immediately funding for a series of films that instilled a vision of war as a condition serenely accepted by soldiers. It was proposing a new form of heroism that alienated the belligerent attitudes and rewarded solidarity, selflessness and sacrifice. This paper wants to analyse how this new course, and in particular The White Ship (1941, the first feature of Rossellini), contained the first neorealist aesthetic seeds.

This paper reviews and rethinks both the existence of the signifier Ongotituero for a toponym found in Linás de Broto (Huesca) and the etymology (FONTE *GUTTATŌRIU) given by the British philologist W.D. Elcock, issues typically accepted by researchers. As a result of evidences of a different signifier, Engotituero, that is nowadays recognized by locals, it can be set another linguistic origin that does not present so many problems for acceptance. Hence, this second term can be explained as a -tuero (< -TŌRIU) derivate, now unproductive suffix in Aragonese, built on the archaic and not documented verb *engotir, corresponding the old Castilian engollir, 'gobble', whose /t/ is result of the final evolution of the geminate -LL- present in the original basis of that verb.

It is known that Basque is a non-Indo-European language, and that Romance and Slavic languages are Indo-European. Relative clauses are one of the aspects in which the Basque language has best preserved its non-Indo-European nature. In this paper, we focus on reduced relative clauses, i.e. with participle, which stress the uniqueness of Basque (for example, in the left-branching structure of its relative clauses as something typical of many non-Indo-European languages). The characteristics that Basque shares with the two other researched languages (Spanish and Czech) regarding reduced relative clauses are scarce.

The Valencian-Castilian dictionary by Josep Escrig, Diccionario valenciano-castellano (1851), has been one of the most condemned works in the history of the Catalan lexicography. However, current studies have shown that most of the expressed opinions about it are the result of prejudices, and reveal a questionable rigour in the research. In this paper, we aim at commenting on the traditional orthographical proposal of Josep Escrig’s dictionary (1851), which represents an additional merit of this work and comes to reassert its value.

This paper proposes a relationship between the productivity of the {-nauta} morpheme in Spanish and a series of metaphors that have, recursively, expanded their scope. The analysis takes under consideration studies addressing the processes of word formation from a perspective of diachronic morphology (Rainer 2002; Pharies 2002, 2004), as well as the contribution to the study of neologisms of studies that highlight the relevance of metaphor in the organization of thought and everyday communication (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and allow to address them in relation to social representations (Rodríguez Salazar, 2007). All sources are written texts representing different varieties of Spanish, with special attention to the peninsular and argentine varieties. Online searches were used to identify examples of particular words and lexicographical works (DRAE, DEA, DUE, DVUA, VOX and those integrating the Nuevo Tesoro Lexicográfico de la Lengua Española [online]) are also considered as secondary sources.

Mircea Eliade’s Noaptea de Sânziene and Mircea Cărtărescu’s trilogy Orbitor (Aripa stângă, Corpul and Aripa dreaptă) rewrite some of the most important events of the 20th Century History of Romania. The aim of this paper is to analyze, from a comparative perspective, these novel’s fictional treatment.

The aim of this paper is to present the synchronic effects of voicing assimilation in Romance languages and analyze the principles - the regularities - that underlie the observed variation. As the exegesis of the phenomenon will be determined by the application domain within a word or between words and their gear with changes affecting obstructing in coda position and in attack, we aim, firstly, to show the common features of the assimilation phenomena

This paper tries to analyse some of the interpretational keys of Zero grade Kelvin, a novel written by Romanian young novelist Adrian Schiop, thanks to which the topic of homosexuality was introduced in the Romanian literary market in an uncensored and brutal way. The eroticism represented by Schiop in the book lacks of positive elements, the sexual relationships of the lonely main male character are marked by a constant search of lovers and dissatisfaction.

Phonetic change has been described for almost a century though from an articulatory perspective and only taking into account written documents. Recently, new theories have claimed that diachronic change could be explained throughout synchronic variation phenomena, related to processes of hipo (and hyper)articulation which lead to co-articulation. One of them is Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins 2004), even if it does not give satisfactory justification for the spread of newest phonetic solutions. In this paper, this kind of theories are used to enlighten the evolution of two particular contexts: /nj/ and /lj/, which resulted in the phonologization of the phonemes // and // in early Spanish.

In this paper, we try to approach the cultural, social, religious and moral values contained in As Pupilas do Senhor Reitor, a novel by Portuguese writer Júlio Dinis (Porto, 1839-1871). In order of that, we have selected some fields and issues whose presence in the text becomes specially prominent, because of their decisive importance in the tale as well as because they are representative of the 19th century society, immersed in deep changes: we are referring to the impact of urban culture in rural world, the treatment of the woman, the experience of the religious fact and the question of the social mobility. In this way, we try to detect the more or less explicit positionings which can be observed in the novel, and to put them into the context of those discourses which are turning gradually into hegemonic in the Portuguese society at that time, stablishing – provided that it is possible– connections with other works and authors of the same period.

The language of rural communities is under great pressure to change, both by the presence of the standard language as, in the case of Galicia, of the Spanish language. Among the linguistic changes involved, some concern the phonetics and the phonology and go in the direction of convergence with standard Galician and, in part, with Spanish. In this paper we will explore one of these rural varieties, which presents a set of sibilant different from Galician Standard and Spanish, through the analysis of the sibilants of two groups of speakers from nearby places, with people from two age groups in each place, we will try to determine whether some of the changes described in previous studies take place, to what extent and in what direction are detected, and whether it exists a perceived resistance to change in the members of the youngest groups.

In this paper, we intend to show –by means of diachronic justification– the procedure followed by the team working on the DICCA-XV in the treatment of the preposition de. Semantic criteria are evaded when formalizing the different meanings of this preposition as an entry in the dictionary, because we consider that voices without a meaning of their own should be treated functionally. However, the very own nature of the Latin preposition from which these words originate like the cases that substitute them, make this impossible in certain functional definitions: those that come from the ablative, for example, intrinsically possess a related semantics.

City of love is an epithet that appears often associated with the name of Venice. The objective of this paper is to analyse the possible origin of this topic and to state how tourism advertising has exploited this idea of the city of love to sell «romantic» travels to Venice. Firstly, it is neccesary to investigate where this topic comes from analysing the testimonies of some travellers who visit Venice at different times, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The following are examples of advertising for travel agencies, airlines or companies organizing weddings that continue to exploit the idea of the city of love in order to sell their products.

This paper is intended to discuss aspects of durational variability of V-to-V intervals in Italian from a phonetically based perspective. Recently, the interest in the phonetic properties underlying rhythm typologies has been growing, also as a consequence of the repeatedly observed weakness of phonological factors in the explanation of rhythmic differences. Timing is only one of the many aspects contributing to language rhythm. The speaker and the text are fundamental sources of variation, in the sense that rhythm depends far more on individual timing strategies than on the phonological structure of a language

Andreu Martín is one of the most important crime fiction’s authors in Spain, since he started his literary career in the late 1970’s. However, Martín won the Sonrisa Vertical Prize –an international prize for erotic novel– for Espera, ponte así. In this paper we analyze why an author specialist in crime fiction writes an erotic novel in order to present it to the award that finally won. Furthermore, we analyze if this novel implies a break with his production, or if, on the contrary, it is the continuation of Martín’s topics and motives in a different genre.

Since in the sixth century Irish monk St. Brendan forged the myth of San Borondón, this imaginary territory has been part of hundreds of stories of travelers and different artistic expressions. In this paper we will make a tour of its origin and the speeches of travelers because, especially between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, they helped to social consolidation of this mysterious island of Canary Islands. In addition, we will study how the myth was reflected in Spanish literary works from different genres as well as other types of artistic representations, such as music.

The Catalan poet Jacint Verdaguer composed bucolic works during his youth, and described the Vic Plain according to the characteristics of the locus amoenus and the Arcadia, as described by Roman poet Virgil. In this paper we are going to study the history of his admission to the Roman Arcadia, thanks to his friend and poet Jaume Collel.