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The present paper focuses on the travel notes by Michel Vieuchange (1904-1930), a young Frenchman who decided to reach Smara, a holy Muslim city located in the middle of the desert, to describe it, and to draw a map. His notes are to be analysed through the prism of autobiogeography. The term used by Michel Collot means telling your life through the places that has affected you. In the case of Vieuchange’s notes the geographical descriptions intervene with the description of the personality of the traveler and form a whole. The paper shows that three cities, Tiznit, Tigilit and Smara, mark three stages of the travel and correspond to different aspects of Vieuchange’s personality.

This paper is made in continuation of the article of Fabrice Marsac, Witold Ucherek and Magdalena Dańko “De l’infinitive de perception dans la pratique traductologique” (Studia Romanica Posnaniensia 46/1, 2019); both papers fall within the framework of the bilateral Polonium program “On the translation of French perception structures into Polish” (n° PPN/BIL/2018/1/00181), implemented and financed by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA), the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE) and the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI). In the present case, we intend to report on the content and progress of the part “multi-dimensional labelling” of this long-term French-Polish project. Therefore, we describe the formal encoding of structures, categories and functions of the items in the large multi-label corpus (French-Polish) we have been collecting since 2019.

This paper arises from the subject Errors in Spanish as a Foreign Language, taught in the Master of Teaching Spanish at Masaryk University of Brno, Czech Republic. Its main objective is to show how the analysis of lexical errors can be used as a tool in the training of non‑native teachers of Spanish, in this case, Czech and Slovak. To achieve this goal, firstly, the paper presents a brief review of the trends that have investigated errors in foreign language learning, such as contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage studies. Secondly, it analyzes a corpus of texts written by learners of Spanish according to the error analysis methodology (Corder, 1967), as an activity for the Master students. Thirdly, it shows a typological classification of different lexical errors found in the texts and it reflects on the possible connection between mistakes and teaching methodology. Based on the results of the analysis, the paper discusses the usefulness of the analysis of these errors not only for the training of non‑native teachers of Spanish as a foreign language, but also for a better understanding of vocabulary teaching.

In the Italian academic discourse research, Master’s degree theses used to be studied mainly from the perspective of linguistic competencies of their authors. However, strictly linguistic skills are not the only challenge for undergraduate, who must also convey intellectual content in appropriate discursive and rhetorical forms. The paper explores the patterns of a peculiar form of “collaborative writing”, i.e. the cooperation between the thesis supervisor and the student. Using the example of Master’s theses in linguistics, written in Italian as a foreign language, three basic didactic approaches are discussed in the paper. In the didactics of content the supervisors emphasize knowledge, i.e. linguistic concepts expected to be applied in a Master’s thesis. In the didactics of forms, the supervisors focus on the linguistic code, that is, on grammatical and lexical correctness of the Master’s thesis. In the didactics of forms of content the supervisors use regularities observed in academic discourse, such as genre and rhetorical structures, as valuable teaching resources likely to help students develop metacommunicative awareness.

This paper discusses two topics which are very popular nowadays among the academics dealing with foreign language teaching, namely: intercultural competence and pragmatic error. The author notes the fact that those two notions appear separately, because the starting points for discussing them are usually different fields of science. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that on one hand the two notions need to be treated uniformly, and on the other, that the pragmatic error should be included in error classifications which are references for both the authors of handbooks as well as people educating future teachers. For that purpose, the author defines intercultural competence, presents various approaches to error and its classification in teaching, and then explains what pragmatic error is and describes its linguistic characteristics.

The paper deals with Italian helping verbs (modal, aspectual, causative verbs) and light verbs which form complex predicates and with the rules that guide its use in Italian descriptive grammars published in Italy between 1953 and 2005. The author shows that those forms in both – traditional and contemporary Italian descriptive grammars are treated at the level of word classes whereas it could be more appropriate to discuss them as clause elements as they form complex predicates. In our opinion this way of describing such verbs is due to the tradition in Italy to focus on a form and not on function of an element. What is more, Italian grammarians tend to omit in Italian descriptive grammars noun predication and the role of semantic predicate (n pred.). The goal of the paper is to present the advantages of an integrated approach to helping verbs (modal, aspectual, causative verbs) and light verbs in modern Italian. The author emphasizes its importance for contemporary Italian FL syntax teaching

The aim of this paper is to address the issue of teaching politeness in textbooks dedicated to learners of Italian as a foreign language. It is assumed that in today’s ever-changing world, full of conflicts and challenges of various kinds, polite communication has become of increasing importance as it helps overcome differences between the participants of the act of communication and promote a peaceful coexistence. Politeness is a phenomenon particularly sensitive to the situational context: the forms considered appropriate vary according to the parameters such as place, channel, age or status of the interactants. Since the complexity of politeness and the variability of its exponents make it difficult to teach, the purpose of this research is to analyze if and how the current textbooks of Italian deal with this aspect of communicative competence. The paper examines which aspects of politeness are taught and with what methods. The analysis is based on the selected textbooks of Italian published in Italy and Poland, in order to compare their approaches.

The present paper is aimed to analyze how certain concepts of political identity are translated into poet-ics of identity in contemporary Spanish narrative. The analysis covers four novels published since 1998, written by Spanish authors and which achieved high rates of sales and positive critical recognition. The study was not limited to specific immigrant groups in order to reflect a variety of experiences and political positions represented in the texts. The paper is a study of the image and functions of immigrant characters in selected Spanish novels of the last three decades: Háblame, musa, de aquel varón (1998) by Dulce Chacón, Ventajas de viajar en tren (2000) by Antonio Orejudo, Cosmofobia (2007) by Lucía Etxebarria and En la orilla (2013) by Rafael Chirbes. Sociologists and psychologists indicate three main classes of negative attitudes towards immigrants (citizen insecurity, threat to cultural identity and competitiveness in obtaining resources). Within this context the article aims to determine to what extent the literary representations of immigrant characters constitute reproductions or transgressions of culturally prefabricated images of the Other and explores the different narrative and ideological functions these characters play. The paper also studies the presence of discourses that support social exclusion of immigrants and the means of subverting them.

The conjunction como si select usually in the subordinated adverbial clauses (modal, conditional and comparative) the tenses of the subjunctive mood cantara / cantase and hubiera / hubiese cantado. However in some papers is mentioned the possibility of the construction of como si with the tenses of indicative mood. This paper contains the analysis of the modal selection after como si and, particularly, the possible substitution of subjunctive by the indicative tenses. The analyses is realized on the ground of the corpus of Real Academia Española (CORPES XXI, CREA, CREA. Versión anotada).

The paper aims to present the potential, for foreign language students, of the exolingual interactions online in public and open forums. For the analysis of students’ commentaries, I apply the observation categories that were first elaborated for the analysis of posts published in press sites. I focus on narrative commentaries in which web users organize phenomena and events discussed in public discourse and try to give them their individual interpretation. I consider this kind of interaction on press sites as contrib-uting to the civic debates: I argue that they can be also integrated in observation categories used to describe and analyze exchanges between students discussing social issues in reference to foreign lan-guage media information. In the paper I present two kinds of commentaries: those written by native speakers in public forums and those written by FL students in response to public commentaries.

There are different formal structures which requests can be made with depending on the register used and the degree of courtesy. During the teaching process, these structures are introduced according to their recursiveness and difficulty, and not necessarily due to their courtesy. This can cause mismatches between the perception of requests in L2 and in L1. In this paper we intend to analyze if this is really the case, or if there are no differences in the perception of these structures in L1 and L2.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of applying the Invited Inferencing Theory of Se-mantic Change in order to establish the semantic evolution of idioms with literal correlates, in particular somatisms or kinegrams. The methodology is applied to analyze the testimonies (until 1700) of Spanish somatism cerrar los ojos in a diachronic corpus of Spanish language (CORDE), so as to find out what inferences generated contextual meanings that conditioned its lexicalization as idiom, semanticizing sym-bolic meanings related to death, sleep, knowledge, irrationality, submission or trust.

The paper analyzes the stylistic variation of implosive /s/ in Guayaquil Spanish. The aim is to verify the sociolinguistic status of /s/-weakening according to Labov’s three-level hierarchy: linguistic indicators, markers, and stereotypes. It is argued that the aspired allophone [h], by representing a clear pattern of stylistic variation, can be qualified as a marker, and since it receives metalinguistic commentary from the speakers, it is also a stereotype in the Guayaquil speech community. The analysis contains a quantitative study of /s/ variation on a corpus of radio speech (CHARG) and a qualitative confrontation of the results with responses gathered in a language attitudes survey.

This paper aims at examining the causes of the emergence of French subordinate Noun-Noun com-pounds. It is well known that the Noun-Noun pattern in French remains marginal compared to other lexicogenic processes, especially N-PREP-N or N-A, and it is supposed that its appearance as well as its progressive development took place during the last two centuries (19th-20th). The aim of this paper is to examine more in detail when and why French Noun-Noun structures emerge. As for the first question, empirical data from the Frantext corpus allow to hypothesize that both the type and the token frequency of French Noun-Noun compounds remain stable since the thirties of the nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War and that after this period, especially during the sixties, it begins to grow exponentially. Contrary to Arnaud’s estimate (2003, p. 141), no significant change in frequency or productivity was observed around the middle of the 19th century. As for the second question, the author claims that the emergence of subordinate N-N compounds was triggered by an increase in the productivity of the attributive N-N compounds, for which there is no competitive pattern in French. The theoretical rationale of this hypothesis is anchored in paradigmatic approaches to word formation, with specific reference to the formalization made according to the Construction Morphology framework (Booij, 2010).

Acronyms are lexical units that have been thoroughly explored in terms of their morphology or pronun-ciation. However, their semantic value has not been entirely determined yet. The present paper aims at investigating the manner in which a semantic value of an acronym, and particularly a difference between proper and common acronyms, influences techniques applied to translating them. In order to achieve the aforementioned objective, on the basis of the cognitive theory of proper names, the authors have distinguished Polish and French acronyms being ergonyms as well as acronyms belong-ing to proper names and these designating item classification. The paper concerns the analysis of both Polish and French translations of ergonyms in foreign language press and French common acronyms in the Polish press. The performed analysis allows observing a tendency towards transferring acronyms-ergonyms that play the role of a rigid designator rather than full names in the target text. By contrast, the techniques of translating common acronyms differ, depending on whether they designate phenomena typical of the source culture or universal ones.

This paper proposes a contextualization of the didactic comic book Aguinha!! De Cabo Verde às Canári-as... e vice-versa. The comic book in question emerged as part of the institutional project financed by European funds, but at the plot level it hides any explicit affinities with Europe. For this reason, we chose to analyze the contents of the book in the transinsular order and to draw both on the concept of environ-mental education and on border thinking. It is also proposed to frame this comic book as a complementary, non-autonomous didactic material

This paper presents an analysis of mythopoeic elements in three novels by Mia Couto. Starting from Mircea Eliade’s definition of myth, we look for elements of the Living Cosmos with its axis mundi, centre and periphery, chaos and harmony and quest in the novels. Such structure of the analysis allows us to consider the cultural colonization and decolonization of contemporary Mozambique. We conclude that the analysis of the mythopoetic schema in Mia Couto’s novels demonstrates a crisis of cultural harmony in the contemporary Mozambican state and nation. On the other hand, however, the mythopoetic reveals a horizon of cultural and traditional models of persistence that save not only from chaos but above all from the dehumanization of society.

The studies on Polish francophone literature put an emphasis on a selected group of authors (Potocki, Mickiewicz, Krasiński) and on some literary genres (diary and travelogue). The aim of this paper is to study the work of a lesser-known feminine writer, Anna Nakwaska, member of cosmopolitan literary milieu and author of several short stories and novels, written in French. Applying selected concepts of spatial literary studies, the first part of the article proposes to perceive the publishing strategies of Nakwaska as a tool for introducing Polish feminine literature in a broader European context. In the second place, the study of some Nakwaska’s short stories show her interest for a literary presentation of several geographical problems, including demography (put in the context of antisemitism) and regional ecology. The use of Polish toponymy brings a foreignization of the francophone fiction.

In our paper we show how Black writers (those of Africa and those of the Black diaspora in Europe and America) have contributed to the intellectual work centered on the idea of Africanity. We explain to what extent literature, as one of the domains of culture, reflects different visions of Africa, as formulated in the discourse of the World Congresses of Black Writers and Artists (Paris, 1956 and Rome, 1959). With refer-ence to the official texts presented or elaborated during these events, we expose in which way literature is involved in the decolonial remapping of the geocultural place of Africa and in the remodeling of the postco-lonial literary geography while pointing out the precursory or heralding character of certain postulates whose echoes will be heard during the festivals of negro and pan-African art of the 1960s and whose relevance is also confirmed nowadays.

The paper is an attempt at showing how the mentions and quotations of contemporary geographic dis-courses inserted in the Balzacian texts and paratexts are there to outline the features of a new novelistic æsthetic. We will start from the following observation: the Balzacian novel and its encyclopedic ambi-tion are contemporaneous with the first attempts of some geographers to found a unified science from a diversified set of knowledges and practices. Therefore, modern geography may appear as an adversary of Balzac’s own ambition of totalization and we will show that geographic discourse, rather than being a model for him as other scientific discourses are, is distorted in his novels, deprived of its epistemological value and reduced to a science without knowledge.

This paper discusses the stages of the translation process and their ideological features. Teaching transla-tion, which includes an explanation and a simulation of the whole process, is supposed to acquire a new ideological dimension since it takes place in the classroom. The translation process is defined as a series of negotiations and decisions made by several “ideological subjects” involved in carrying out a particular translation service. The simulation of this processis suggested as a didactic method of teaching translation and indicated as a useful introduction into the market of professional translation. The study emphasizes a more active performance of students in learning translation. It also includes some didactic recommendations and explanations of the ideological burden always present in the practice of transla-tion. The paper is mainly based on the Manipulation School approach in Translation Studies.

This paper aims to investigate the Classical proverbs listed as equivalents to the Catalan proverb L’amic, prova’l primer ans que l’hages menesterby Sebastià Farnés in his volume entitled Paremiologia catalana comparada. In this paper, I will establish these Classical proverbs’ sources, consider their authenticity and correspondence withthis Catalan proverb, and increase the number of Classical sources, since this Catalan proverb bears witness to its Classical tradition and is related to philosophical and literary passages that can be considered as previous manifestations of this tradition. These Greek and Latin passages are compiled and compared so as to determine the different ways in which the idea included in this Catalan proverb was expressed over time. The conclusion is that the consideration about friendship presented by this proverb is embedded into a long textual/ideological tradition whichultimately refers to the sage Solon, the poet Theognis and the philosopher Theofrast, although there may be connections with the Judeo-Christian tradition as well.

The aim of this paper is to compare the methods of identifying the direct and indirect object in Spanish and Polish. From the author’s point of view, Spanish relies more on semantic methods, while Polish relies more on formal ones, especially those related to the category of case. As the article strives to demonstrate, the two approaches can be significant for the different interpretations of objects in both languages.

This paper presents the role a specialised corpus can play in the ontoterminological modelling (Roche 2007b) of the balance of payments (IMF, 2009). It presents the domain of the balance of payments and the characteristics of a corpus of texts produced in English, in French and in German by thirteen central banks and statistics offices, which will be used for terminological work. The analysis leads to a typology of the texts grouped in the corpus. Far from only providing examples for knowledge collected from experts, this corpus will be analysed from the very stage of elaborating the concept system.

Imaginary genres have always played with language and lexicon in order to build their worlds. The sci-ence fiction genre, in particular, creates a lexicon on the borderline between literary creation and scientific and technical terminology so the stories can be framed elsewhere or in the future. The translation of these invented words can be a real challenge for translators because of their very nature as hybrids, but also because of the science fictional megatext. The translation treatment from English into French of these neologisms, known as “fiction terms”, shows different strategies of lexical (re)creation. Following a terminological approach, this paper presents a contrastive analysis of lexical creation strategies and morpho-syntactic structures between the two languages on a list of science fictional terms from the audiovisual field and extracted from a corpus of science fiction novels.

This paper examines the profiles of the concept of Poland based on a corpus of foreign propaganda texts published in French and Slovak in 1968. The texts analysed come from three magazines: La Pologne, Polsko and La Revue Polonaise, created by political decision of the communist leaders to disseminate a positive image of Poland abroad. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that the three profiles of the concept of Poland, aimed at first, second and third-world audiences, are different from each other due to differences motivated by extra-linguistic factors, and in particular, the various objectives of the country’s foreign policy. The study is inspired by the work of the Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics on the linguistic representation of reality. Its methods make it possible to identify variants of the representation of an object through the examination of textual data, such as the ways of naming it, the semantic relations of synonymy and antonymy, or the series of its aspects mobilised in the discourse.

In this paper, we present the problems encountered during our research in the field of nominal predication in Polish, in particular concerning nouns referring to properties and character traits. In a previous work on predicates referring to various activities and behaviors, carried out with the use of electronic corpora (the National Corpus of Polish Language, as well as electronic sources available on the Internet), we obtained a dictionary of verb-noun collocations with high lexical coverage comparing to traditional dictionaries (not based on electronic corpus research). Using the same corpus data and methodology as before, we conducted a study of the class of predicative nouns referring to properties and character traits. However, the results obtained following the application of this method proved to be unsatisfactory. In this article, we consider the reasons for this in order to optimize research methods later in our work.

The aim of this paper is to present a first dialectometric approach to the geolinguistic distribution of the Romance varieties using a new corpus based on the Atlas Linguistique Roman (ALiR) which is currently being developed at the Centro Ramón Piñeiro para a Investigación en Humanidades. However, the dialectometrization of ALiRwill allow us not only to analyze the linguistic distance among the varieties of Romania Antiqua, but also to shed light from a quantitative perspective on several issues that have historically raised controversy. Specifically, this paper deals with the Romance subgrouping of the Catalan language, an issue that has been recently reopened by Radatz (2012).

The essay aims to analyze the writings of Gianni Celati and his way of ‘re-narrating’ and ‘re-mapping’ the environment in contemporary times, focusing on two trilogies, namely Narratori delle pianure (1985), Quattro novelle sulle apparenze (1987) and Verso la foce (1989), as well as on the collections of short stories Un eroe moderno (2008), Il benessere arriva in casa Pucci (2008), and Selve d’amore (2013). The paper discusses how the themes addressed by the author, who assumes the role of a flâneur of postmodernism, are a way to express his continuous nostalgia for the naturalness, simplicity, and originality of living and narrating.

The purpose of this paper is to uncover the mechanisms used by the Francoist regime to seize the children of its political opponents, as well as to discuss the problem as depicted in contemporary historical novels. In order to achieve these goals, the paper begins with an inquiry into eugenics, as interpreted by the infamous Spanish psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera. Further, the author reviews the processes through which biological parents (and/or family) lost the legal control over their children, many of whom had their identities changed. Consequently, the analysis focuses on three new historical novels (La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón, Mala gente que camina by Benjamin Prado, and Si a los tres años no he vuelto by Any R. Cañil), which use the mediation of historical memory to recover the remembrance of the lost children of the Francoist regime.

The present study concerns the analysis of semantic relationships that exist between legal concepts in Czech and French law. The study combines textual approach, which is necessary for identification of relationships, and the approach of constructing conceptual fields by applying the theory of semic analysis, which help to distinguish terminological and conceptual units from other linguistic units in the texts. Two corpora of legal texts serve as source of legal concepts. These corpora concern the same thematic domain and were established for the purpose of this study. After the theorical and methodological delimitations of the key notions (the definition of concept and term, conceptual field, semic analysis, content of corpora), the study proceeds to a detailed description of linguistic relations within the corpora. This paper focuse on semantic relationships and analyses the following ones: synonymy, opposition (antonymy and contrastivity) and hierarchical relationships (hyperonymy, meronymy and hierarchy of conceptual fields). The analysis concerning two languages and two legal systems enables to compare the data related to the given corpora. For each relationship this study offers a short explanation of the nature of the relationship, its frequency in the two corpora, examples borrowed from the corpora and, if present, the description of other phenomena encountered during the research. These phenomena include, among other things, different types of synonymy, the absence of hyperonyme or holonyme in some hierarchical structures or different types of meronymy.

Past tenses present an objective difficulty in the learning process for most students of Spanish as a foreign language. This paper provides a comparative analysis of three Spanish methods: Nuevo Español en marcha, Embarque ELE and Nuevo Sueña, at levels A1-A2. The textbooks belong to three prestigious and internationally established Spanish publishers. The analysis focuses on the presentation of three verb tenses (pretérito perfecto simple, pretérito perfecto compuesto and pretérito imperfecto), the similarities and differences that the textbooks share in their exposition and the successes and errors perceivable in them. The main objective is to make a constructive proposal to improve the teaching of these verb tenses in SFL classes

As an intellectual task, academic writing is not reducible solely to language skills or adequate writing techniques. The paper aims to compare the research results related to the cognitive and discursive aspects of expertise in academic writing to determine the key elements that contribute to its special character. These elements are intended to lay the foundation for the teaching of academic writing in tertiary education. The analysis focuses on the development of cognitive skills among novice researchers

The aim of the paper is to identify the methods of teaching academic discourse in French on the example of a selected written text whose subject matter is concerned with linguistics in connection with other disciplines. The analysis uses as its starting point the assumptions of the theory of the linguistic image of the world (J. Bartmiński) and of the cognitive linguistics (G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, R.W. Langacker) as applied in glottodidactics. While reading and understanding a written text, students activate the process of schematization (abstraction) and categorization/recategorization (R.W. Langacker). Teacher’s role is to explain specialized lexis to students and make an attempt with them to analyse scientific texts from an interdisciplinary perspective. It is also important to familiarize students with the editorial rules applicable to diploma dissertations, both bachelor’s and master’s in French as well as the criteria of textuality, in-cluding cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality (R.A. De Beaugrande, W.U. Dressler)

In the last three decades there has been an increasing interest in the study of the interaction between the author and the reader in written texts. In this paper, we propose to focus on the analysis of the authorial presence in the internship reports. To this end, we analysed a corpus of L1 French students’ internship reports. The occurrences of JE, NOUS and ON allowed us to establish a list of different functions of these pronouns by observing how trainee-writers are using these three pronouns. These observations enabled us to put forward certain hypotheses concerning training of the future language teachers.

The issue that we aim to investigate in this paper is related to the design of lexical resources which Polish university students use in the process of writing an academic text in French. In the course of the research, we concentrate on the transdisciplinary lexis composed of, on the one hand, cross-disciplinary terminology typical of scientific writings, and, on the other hand, of abstract, non-specialised vocabulary. In this regard, special focus is given to transdisciplinary collocations referring to scientific objects and procedures. The research is conducted on a corpus consisting of BA and MA theses written by Polish university students of French in Romance philology and applied linguistics faculties.The work progressed as follows. Firstly, the types of transdisciplinary collocations present in students’ theses were identified. They were then juxtaposed with the lexical resources gathered in the corpus of scientific texts in French (CorpusÉcrits scientifiques en français). Finally, the manner in which students used the investigated collocations was analysed so as to identify the possible difficulties faced by non-native students of French. The objectives of this research are linguistic and didactic at the same time. Specifically, it aims to inven-tory students’ lexical resources, their scope and, as a result, to consider pedagogical solutions intended to enrich transdisciplinary vocabulary used in the process of writing scientific texts in university context. The analysis performed shows a weak presence of collocations containing scientific names. The students’ repertoire of lexical resources is relatively poor and not very varied. It is necessary to undertake more in-depth work on the linguistic correction of the items mobilized.

The paper proposes to link French (or Francophone) and Polish university didactics, in a context where their linguistic and cultural roots differ. The reflexion is based on the articulation of two theories: an object-theory (the Językowy Obraz Świata), which is borrowed from the field of polonistics, and an instrument-theory, (Perelman’s New Rhetoric). The didactic challenge is to propose a neo-rhetorical platform where prior agreements on concepts and theories are negotiated in order to finally raise students’ aware-ness of the problem of transfers of concepts and theories in the context of philological studies. These agreements must be made first within the same scientific community (Polish community), then between scientific communities representing different cultures (Polish and French communities).

The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive, theoretical overview of how proverbs are used as a communicative and discursive strategy, taking into account the speaker’s communicative intention. I will pay attention both to the benefits of the use of this type of formulaic sequence in the construction of the speech, and to the illocutionary force and pragmatic implications entailed by these utterances. In order to do so, some considerations will be required – the encoding of the meaning of the proverbs, the decoding process by the addressee, and the way proverbs are inserted in the discourse. This paper inspects the importance of such factors as the need for articulation of fluent speech, the assumption of cultural patterns, the appeal to proverbiality that aligns the speaker with power structures of the community, or the masking of the speaker’s voice behind a collective entity in order to socialize and release tensions related to interpersonal contact.

The present paper aims at analysing the trajectories of the Romanian intellectuals immediately after the Revolution in 1989, and the fall of Communism. During the Communist years, the term itself (intellectual) had been used with ideological connotations. The intellectual (as a social value) was discussed according to the Marxist ideology, taking into consideration his concrete usefulness and his contribution to the Communist society. Immediately after 1989, the fundamental dilemma faced by the Romanian intellectual represents the necessity of the implication of the intellectuals inside the society or, on the contrary, the isolation in an Ivory Tower of creation. The second challenge aimed at the necessity of synchronizing the Romanian elite with the European one; the topics for debate in Western and Eastern Europe during the Cold War were fundamentally different. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the influence and the commitment of the Romanian intellectuals in reshaping the Post-Communist Romanian society.

Epistemic modality indicates the degree of certainty or doubt a speaker has for the proposition expressed by their utterance. Evidentiality, on the other hand, is the indication of the kind of evidence for a statement in question. Given the eminently persuasive character of homiletic discourse, it frequently makes use of epistemic and evidential markers. The preacher emphasizes his high degree of certainty about the content of what he says and, in order to gain credibility, he supports his reasons citing the Bible or other reliable sources. This paper aims to analyze the markers of epistemic modality and evidentiality in Catholic sermons in Spanish. Moreover, it intends to defi ne the limit between different kinds of evidence. In order to carry out this analysis, twenty homilies pronounced in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City have been examined. First of all, the defi nitions of epistemic modality and evidentiality are presented and the relation between these concepts is explored. Then, a classification of evidential values, based on the one by Plungian (2001: 351, 353), is illustrated. After that, the results of the analysis of epistemic modality and evidentiality in twenty sermons are discussed. Finally, the paper touches upon some problematic issues resulting from the classifi cation of different kinds of evidence.

This paper proposes the reading of Ruxandra Ceseranu’s novel Un singur cer deasupra lor as a modern apocrypha presenting a historiosophic vision of Romania’s fate in the second half of the 20th century with the use of apocalyptic themes and symbolic imagery. The analysis consists of tracing references to the Book of Revelation which is a key element to the interpretation of the novel, and to other biblical books and themes. The analysis is supplemented with an attempt at describing the most significant archetypical and cultural symbols, and the remnants of bygone traditions that provide the second reading to those historically-grounded stories. References to folk tales based on Christian imaginary world further strengthen the proposition of the apocryphal nature of the work. The additional argument supporting my thesis is the polyphonic and multilayer structure of the novel that combines subjective visions and mythical interpretations with the factual layer, and the use of palimpsest technique consisting of interweaving texts of other authors into the main narration. The paper does not address the question of the conformity of the literary vision with the source documents and historical prototypes of certain episodes and persons. Those matters were partly commented on by the author in the afterword.

The aim of this paper is to analyse and comment on the meaning of Portugal in three novels of the Italian writer: Requiem: Un’allucinazione, Sostiene Pereira, and La testa perduta di Damesceno Monteiro. The author of the paper demonstrates how Tabucchi uses the image of Portugal to discuss the ethical dimension of three issues: language, the individual vs. the state, and literature vs. law.

It is a well-known fact that the etymology of the French lexicon is mostly Latin. But this apparently obvious consideration hides a signifi cant amount of unsure, if not biased, etymologies. This paper aims fi rst at criticizing the laxity of the etymological method : use of reconstructed vulgar Latin and old Frankish etymons upon unclear principles, huge distortions of meaning, phonetic irregularities, ignorance of the historical context, etc. In a second time, this paper aims at showing that the neglected Gaulish substratum can sometimes afford better explanations to some of these doubtful and impressionistic etymologies, and proposes new etymologies based upon attested Gaulish etymons.

The paper is an attempt at shedding light on the issues related to the dystopian vision of postmodern society metonymically represented by Vado, an imaginary city, in the novel Un incendio invisible written by Sara Mesa. This abandoned urban space causes us to reflect on crucial topics in postmodern society, such as incorporation into unknown place, redefinition of the concept of parenthood, liquid and perverse love, social inequalities, abandoned elders, consumption, role of shopping malls and their significance, human alienation, all phenomena that we find in the novel. The city of Vado plays symbolic role in that piece, hence its devastation and ruin show a close connection with the consumer society and the actions of Homo consumericus. We base our analysis on the philosophical and sociological postulates of Gilles Lipovetsky, Zygmunt Bauman, Erich Fromm and anthropological one of Marc Augé, as well as on the proposal of how to read a novel by Javier del Prado Biezma in order to describe the nature of all these mentioned problems and expose the criticism of Homo consumericus concealed in the novel.

This paper analyses urban spaces of crisis in Isaac Rosa’s novels La mano invisible (2011), La habitación oscura (2013), and the graphic novel Aquí vivió. Historia de un desahucio (2016) by Cristina Bueno and Isaac Rosa. It explores the dystopian and realistic elements in Rosa’s fiction and proposes to read his works through the lens of Michel Foucault’s essay on other spaces. The article argues that the unusual, quasi-dystopian spaces are of a double nature, typical for heterotopias, and play a significant role in the manner in which Rosa depicts the consequences of the economic crisis in Spain at the beginning of the 21st century.

Literature as a cultural product refracts socio-historical and political conjunctures. Therefore, the political and social crises that began in Latin America in the 20th century, which printed a new cartography of cities, is reflected in the Latin American narrative from the mid-twentieth century to contemporary literature. It is important to highlight that in this new social cartography emerge minorities and marginalized groups, which are being focused in order to show that they are characters crossed by surreptitious violence, which has accompanied the Colombian nation since the 40’s. A violence towards that different other, who becomes the target of a society that establishes borders in the face of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity. The goal of this paper is to show how in the novel Rosario Tijeras by Jorge Franco, published in 1999, the urban space – Medellín – represents a body territorialized by the violence of drug trafficking, and the protagonist – Rosario Tijeras – constitutes a body crossed by the violence of the hitman and the violence of the masculine.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comparative analysis of a novel written in Italian by Laura Mancinelli, 'The Twelve Abbots of Challant', and its translation into Polish prepared by Maciej Brzozowski. Focusing on a few examples, such as the use of grammatical tenses and moods, differences in the syntax, and the problems of translating idiomatic and metaphoric expressions, the paper aims to compare the author’s style with that of the translator. The task undertaken by the translator seems very hard indeed from the very beginning due to considerable differences between the Italian and Polish languages in the use of tenses and moods. While the Italian grammar uses four moods, eight simple and seven compound tenses, the frugal Polish grammar makes with just three modes, one compound and three simple tenses. The discussion will clearly illustrate that thanks to some modifications it was possible to translate and preserve the meaning and the spirit of the Italian grammar and style.

The linguistic description of possessives is controversial. In traditional grammar they are defined as carriers of the meaning of possession or belonging; however, this paper intends to prove that in many cases such a meaning does not appear, and therefore, the possessive semantics of adjectives and pronouns known as possessives is a myth. Moreover, this article’s aim is to show the importance of context in the interpretation of the real meaning of a possessive. in order to confirm these hypotheses, and given the scarcity of works concerning Portuguese possessives, studies on English, Spanish and Polish ones carried out by various authors have been analyzed. What is more, some data from Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese (CRPC) have been examined. First of all, two different classifications of possessives are presented. Then, some cases of possessor deletion are shown, special attention being paid to the forms of expressing inalienable possession. After that, some structural characteristics of possessives are described, as well as their function as determiners. Finally, the paper shows the role that cultural and situational contexts play in the interpretation of the meaning of possessives.

The present paper aims at discussing selected syntactic aspects of cognate objects in European Portuguese, along the lines of Distributed Morphology (Haugen, 2009). Cognate objects may be readily discovered in numerous human languages, including European Portuguese (Chovia uma chuva miudinha). It is assumed in papers devoted to their English counterparts that they belong to various subclasses. Indeed, some of them are genuine cognates (to sleep a sleep...) or hyponyms (to dance a jig; Hale & Keyser, 2002). It turns out that in European Portuguese, they can be split into four different categories: (i) genuine cognate objects (chorar um choro...), (ii) similar cognate objects (dançar uma dança) (iii) objects hyponyms (dançar um tango) and (iv) prepositional cognate objects (morrer de uma morte ...). There are, then, significant differences between various classes of cognate objects: whereas the genuine ones call imperatively for a restrictive modifier and a definite article, the remaining ones admit it only optionally. It might be concluded, then, that a lexicalist theory set up along the lines of Hale and Keyser is unable to deal successfully with distributional facts proper to various classes of cognate constructions in European Portuguese. That is why the present study is conducted more in accordance with syntactic principles of Distributed Morphology, with a strong impact of hypotheses put forward by Haugen (2009).

In an age when the global dissemination of digital information is transforming the way we read and write by foregrounding the interdependence of visual/verbal elements and languages, the reconstruction of identity and history in digital environments challenges binary translation processes. From this perspective, we interrogate the integration of visual and verbal elements in three Wikipedia articles, written in Polish, English, and Portuguese, about the topic “Polish death camp”. What is the role of translation in the semiotic construction of historical discourses in these articles? What are the conflicts generated by translated denominations? How do Wikipedia communities engage with the production of these cognitive representations? This paper attempts to answer these questions.