Search

This paper investigates for the first time the restoration work carried out on the refectory of the monastery of San Michele in Bosco in Bologna, which was supervised by Alfonso Rubbiani between 1892 and 1895. In spite of the vast literature on the ‘restorer’, this work has so far been scarcely considered both because of the chronology of the building (mid-16th century) as well as because it did not entail radical changes. Indeed, the limited size of the room and the numerous documentary traces – carefully tracked by Rubbiani and his patron, the lawyer Giuseppe Bacchelli – were addressing the operation philologically. The discovery of unpublished archival evidence contributed to a more appropriate understanding of the overall work; in particular, it is possible to note how the initial intentions of the architect and the commissioner, which were based on erudite investigations that involved intellectuals and politicians of the time, did not, unfortunately, come to fruition.

This paper aims to investigate the intriguing phenomenon of costumed parties held in Rome between 1880 and 1900 through the study of photographic material. In particular, the essay focuses on two main iconographic aspects: the carnival masquerades, conceived in most cases by the painter and antiquarian Attilio Simonetti and interpreted by some members of the International Artistic Association; and the tableaux vivants, the so-called living pictures, which were figurative compositions usually set up in the patrician residences, including that of the counts Giuseppe and Luigi Primoli, who were an active part in their creation. A crucial role was also played by Henri Le Lieure, a professional photographer of French origin who was responsible for much of the visual documentation of the time.

This article aims to provide a general overview of settlement patterns in Armenia and neighbouring areas from the Early Bronze Age to Early Hellenistic times. The southern Caucasus presents unique features. For those approaching the subject for the first time, this paper aims to summarise the primary evidence for the development and transformation of the human landscape. Starting from the 4th millennium BC, it is possible to trace the outlines of a general process of sedentarisation of communities on the highlands, which took different forms and characteristics. Mobile villages dominated the Bronze Age settlement structure. By the end of the 2nd millennium BC, the highlands were characterised by a general development of fortified settlements, generally referred to as ‘cyclopean fortresses’, which will also be one of the main features of the later Kingdom of Urartu. Following the two centuries of Achaemenid rule, with its elusive settlement pattern, the last centuries of the 1st millennium saw the spread of Greek culture following the conquests of Alexander the Great and his successors. With the creation of large urban sites based on Hellenistic models, the concept and structure of the Mediterranean city spread across Armenia and adjacent areas.

The present article focuses on the replacement of the whole affix Jas by the substitute Śī, when it occurs after a sarvanāman (pronominal stem) ending in the short vowel -a, as taught by Pāṇīni in A 7.1.17 jasaḥ śī. Most commentators attribute the evocation of A 1.1.55 anekālśit sarvasya to the fact that Śī is marked with Ś, while Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita, on the other hand, attributes this evocation to the anekāl nature of śī. This paper analyses the commentaries previous to the Siddhāntakaumudī (SK) to understand when śī started being understood as anekāl, concluding that Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita did not abandon the tradition since this appears to be a fresh reinterpretation of Kātyāyana’s vārttikas.

The phenomenon of Suffixaufnahme refers to a type of morphosyntactic agreement whereby a dependent noun phrase shows case agreement with its head in addition to its functional case marking. The phenomenon is best known from Old Georgian and Hurro-Urartian, but also occurs elsewhere (Caucasus, ancient Mesopotamia, Australia), mainly in agglutinative languages. Classical Armenian shows a very similar type of agreement: dependents of heads in the accusative marked by the direct object proclitic z= may also receive the same proclitic marking regardless of their functional case. This paper explores two dimensions of this agreement phenomenon in Classical Armenian: a classification of its usage in fifth-century texts; and an attempt at explaining its likely origin outside of Armenian.

The aim of this paper is to propose five new emendations to the Armenian translation of George of Pisidia’s Hexaemeron: at v. 172 of the Armenian Mekhitarist edition read բացելով; at v. 584 read նուրբ; at v. 616 read շարադրեալս; at v. 768 read խորացեալ; at vv. 1329‑30 read զայն զարդարէ նոր որպէս. Some remarks on the peculiar rendering of hendiadyses through a single word in the Armenian translation follow. Lastly, two corrections of the editor princeps Tiroyean are reconsidered.

Making use of theoretical insights from ‘history of the bookʼ scholarship, this paper examines the way in which Mxit‘ar of Sebastia made use of paratexts (title pages, frontispieces, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, illustrations, headings, epilogues, appendices, etc.) in his ‘publishing mission’ (to use Sahak Čemčemean’s appelation) to shape readerly taste and influence the way in which his books were read, received, and interpreted. Through introductory poems, illustrations, and playful word games, he presented himself as a second Maštoc‘ and his own students like the famous fifth-century disciples of that vardapet, who were meant to transmit and create in the same Armenian Christian literary tradition, under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church.

In the mid-thirteenth century, the Mongol invasion spread fear from China to France. Yet, over subsequent decades, the threat waned, leading to a need for political and economic rebalancing. The Mongols swiftly conquered Asia and even reached Europe, reshaping the continent’s political landscape and fostering an interconnected trade network. This transformation attracted diverse merchants to new ‘intermediate’ settlements like Tana at the Don River’s mouth. Initially established by the Latins with Mongol Khan’s approval, it became a crucial stop on the ‘Mongol route to China’ in the fourteenth century. Genoese, Venetians, Catalans, Central Asian traders, Mongols, and Armenians settled there. The Armenian community, amidst growing political turbulence, demonstrated integration and sustained commercial activity. This paper explores Tana’s Armenian community in the late fourteenth century amid weakening Mongol power.

This paper examines the small Pacific collection of Peggy Guggenheim, looking at how it became part of a non-Western art collection that exists in addition to her important modernist assembled works. After highlighting Peggy Guggenheim’s collecting practices, I will relate some of her display experiments. Finally, the discussion will explore the use and show of Guggenheim’s non-Western art collection in a twenty-first century exhibition called Migrating Objects. Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection.

In this paper, Old High German mood alternations in the different types of subordinate clauses (complement, adverbial and relative clauses) are discussed. The use of the subjunctive in subordinate clauses is notoriously more frequent than in Modern German and has not yet been thoroughly investigated. Based on a comprehensive corpus study, the paper will show that the licensing conditions for the subjunctive in Old High German are determined by notions such as veridicality and – in relative contexts – specificity. These conditions are thus similar (but not always identical) to those observed for Modern Greek and Romance languages. Furthermore, a syntactic analysis is provided in order to account for the licensing of the subjunctive in each type of subordinate clause.

Japanese ODA has attracted much attention in the last three decades. This paper aims to shed light on the intellectual evolution of the official discourse on Japanese ODA based on the analysis of two main ‘modes of thought’ at the foundation of it, namely national interest and international affiliation. Based on a detailed content analysis of official documents and public debates, the paper will take the role of institutional actors – Japanese political leaders, foreign ministers and intellectuals – into consideration. The role of such “entrepreneurs” has been crucial for shaping the current official discourse on Japanese foreign aid. The paper will argue, in fact, that the official discourse is a juxtaposition of two clashing ideas carefully shaped to enlarge the consensus (both domestic and external) toward the Japanese government’s policies.

In this paper the preparatory stages to the realisation of the onomastic section of Paccagnella’s Vocabolario del pavano are summarised. The main issues of this section regarded the arrangement of the excerpts and headwords. In its second part the paper discusses some stylistic uses of the proper names in Pavan literature, trying to give a general overview of Pavan onomastic expressiveness, and paying particular attention to some onomastic annotations not included in the Vocabolario.

This paper is dedicated to the problem of artists’ signatures in Byzantium and, more specifically, to the question of anonymity, which is often considered to be a basic characteristic of Eastern Christian art. Declaration of authorship is traditionally seen as a sign of sinful vanity, antagonistic to the religious spirit of the Middle Ages. However, work on this material reveals numerous traces of authorship left by Byzantine artists on their work in the form of epigraphical records. Through a selection of the most insightful examples, based primarily on mosaics, murals and icon painting, this paper demonstrates that the tradition of creating inscriptions bearing the names of masters was a phenomenon neither limited to a particular chronological period of Byzantine history nor influenced by specific historical or cultural transformations. On the contrary, it represents a continuous tradition developing from the period of late antiquity right up to the end of the Middle Ages. The range of surviving evidence, the variability of linguistic forms and paleographic aspects, as well as the array of creative approaches taken to the placement of signatures and dedicatory inscriptions, help to reveal a concern for the preservation of memories of individual involvement within the world of the Medieval Christian masters. Whilst not always in line with a contemporary understanding of the role of artists’ signatures, these testimonies nevertheless call for a reevaluation of the question of complete anonymity and the personality of the artist in Byzantine art.

This paper focuses on linguistic and literary intersections between Testori’s Ambleto (1972) and Ruzante’s theatre, with particular attention to the comedy named Moschetta. Moschetta had been recited by Franco Parenti and Testori – as he himself testifies – was crucially influenced by this staging, and especially by the language Parenti used in order to recreate Ruzante’s dialect. This paper tries to document the importance of that experience with respect to the Ambleto and to its contaminated and extremist language, pointing out some specific features that Testori might have taken from Moschetta.

In his novel Allah n’est pas obligé the Ivorian writer Ahmadou Kourouma tries to convey his Malinké identity in the French language through a process of malinkisation – he interlaces Malinké words, syntactic structures and rhythm with French, playing with the two codes that he masters and portraying a fresh linguistic atmosphere. Kourouma exploits the potentiality, the richness of French linguistic varieties and thus legitimises their value. In the first part, this paper tries to analyse Kourouma’s linguistic play by focusing mainly on the language of the narrator, the child soldier Birahima. The second part of the paper attempts at proving how Kourouma’s malinkisation is part of a broader and more general project of legitimisation as regards his language(s), culture, and work as a writer.

Leaving aside historical and mythological dramas, a considerable number of plays written for the Abbey Theatre between 1904 and the outbreak of the Second World War represent emigration. They enjoyed varying degrees of success. In 1904 G.B. Shaw portrayed an Irish émigré as one of the two protagonists in John Bull’s Other Island; in the following two years Padraic Colum’s The Land and William Boyle’s The Mineral Workers were enthusiastically received by Abbey Theatre audience, the former with its depiction of young Irish men and women emigrating to America, the latter, an engineer returning to Ireland from overseas; 1907 saw three plays presenting emigration as one of the great Irish issues, both politically and economically: J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, George Fitzmaurice’s The Country Dressmaker and Lady Augusta Gregory’s The Jackdaw. They were followed by T.C. Murray’s Birthright, Lennox Robinson’s Harvest and Colum’s Thomas Muskerry. Indeed, it is almost impossible to provide an exhaustive list of all the plays dealing with emigration. The present paper aims to discuss a selection of significant plays intended for or staged at the Abbey Theatre in the first decades of the twentieth century, analysing what emigration stood for, and how it was exploited dramatically. The historical boundaries of this research (1904-1939) provide a provisional limit to an otherwise too vast study for the present paper.

The present paper discusses the potential of Cognitive Linguistics in the study of Specific Language Needs, i.e. pupils with specific impairment in the areas of communication and language acquisition. The paper is ideally divided into two parts. Part one provides a brief overview of how Cognitive Linguistics views the relationship between language and cognition and discusses clinical evidence supporting the idea that these are interrelated in developmental disorders. Consequently, Specific Language Needs should be reframed as cognitive limitations that selectively impact the development of language and communication. The second part of the paper shows that adopting a cognitive linguistic view can also be advantageous in the teaching of second/foreign languages to pupils with Specific Language Needs. After discussing the limitations of traditional approaches to the teaching of grammar, the authors present some potential applications which help overcome some typical learning difficulties experienced by pupils with Specific Language Needs.

This paper intends to demonstrate the need for explicit attention to the vocabulary in the accessible teaching of Latin to students with Specific Linguistic Needs. Starting from an examination of the state of the art of teaching Latin with regard to the teaching of vocabulary, it will analyse the role of the latter in the processes of reading and understanding the text; this paper will then proceed to outline some methodological principles that can guide the design of clear and gradual vocabulary paths. This analysis will take into account Specific Linguistic Needs which involve specific reading disorders, but not the comprehension of the text: in particular we will take into consideration students with dyslexia.

Through the study of the preparatory papers of d’Annunzio’s Phaedra preserved in the Archivio Privato del Vittoriale, the article aims to demonstrate the leading role of the medieval vulgarisation of Ovidian’s Metamorphoses by Arrigo Simintendi for the composition of the tragedy. Through a careful work of compulsion and auscultation of the fourteenth-century text, d’Annunzio recovers formal and lexical tesserae to build Phaedra’s hendecasyllables, to recreate congenial images, to provide the most appropriate sounds and musicality, and to suggest psychological insights through the comparison between his characters and the mythological archetypes dear to his theatre, of which Ovid’s masterpiece is an admirable compendium. Ultimately, the essay suggests that the influence of Simintendi’s vulgarization and the method of compulsion extends beyond the tragedy of 1909.

In the second decade of the 20th century, d’Annunzio was introduced to Chinese readers primarily via Anglo-Saxon culture and received as much success as controversy. This article focuses on the reception of d’Annunzio in a specific group in China: the League of Left-Wing Writers, one of the most important Chinese literary associations, which was founded in 1930. Through the analysis of the social-historical context and Chinese literary field during that time, this paper explores the reasons for the initial acceptance of d’Annunzio by the Left-Wing group and for their change of attitude toward the Italian poet.

Theo Padnos published My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun in 2004, when Prison Studies were burgeoning and gaining academic attention globally. Neglected by critics, the book relates the author's experience as literature instructor in an American prison. Engaging methods of pedagogical research and reader-response criticism, the paper investigates the role of literature in the cultural activities of young male inmates in a medium security jail in Vermont. An original amalgam of crime reports, pedagogy of literature, and autobiographical criticism, Padnos' study for the first time confronts young criminals with a literary canon dripping with violence. The experiment sheds light on the reading activities of prisoners, on their and the author's social background, and on the power of American literature to speak to marginal groups.

Linguists argued that the Cockney dialect, in London, is expected to be replaced by Multicultural London English in the years to come. However, this does not imply that Cockney is dead, as recent research revealed that it just moved to Essex. This paper aims at examining whether (l) vocalisation, a common feature of Cockney, is still present in the London district of Bermondsey. Ten working-class English speakers, stratified by age and sex, have been recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews. The results, discussed both quantitively and qualitatively, show that: (a) (l) vocalisation is present in all age cohorts, with young speakers favouring the non-standard feature; (b) preceding long vowels trigger (l) vocalisation.

The so-called indirect passive, where the subject is not the argument of the underlying verb that bears the Theme/Patient role, is generally understood to be a bi-clausal phenomenon (cf. Kuno 1973; Shibatani 1978; Kuroda 1979). In other words, the passive morpheme rare is merged with a clause, and then the resulting item is combined with the subject. In this paper, however, we argue that the indirect passive is best understood as a mono-clausal phenomenon. We first point out that with some instances of the indirect passive, the passive morpheme rare is not understood as being combined with a verb or clause in syntax. Thus, we are led to assume that the lexicon contains numerous instances of the Vrare form. This implies that even when the passive morpheme rare is combined in syntax, it forms a constituent with the relevant verb; hence, the indirect passive is a mono-clausal phenomenon. We furthermore maintain that when the indirect passive involves the merging of rare with a verb in syntax, the verb must be a volitional verb, and demonstrate that this generalization, as well as the case particle alternation involved in the indirect passive, poses a challenge to the bi-clause analysis but not to the mono-clause analysis. Finally, we review one of the main arguments for analyzing the indirect passive to be a bi-clausal phenomenon, which concerns the antecedent of zibun. We show that it is inconclusive at best.

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

This paper analyses Angela Carter’s desecrating tendency to taboo-breaking in thematic and formal terms. By referring to her short-fiction production and focusing on “John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore", I intend to show how gender/patriarchal and genre/authorial taboos are similarly broken and transmuted into daringly subversive outcomes. In line with her feminist agenda and postmodern transformism, Carter superbly challenges, sabotages, violates, de- and re-constructs traditionally codified sexual and gender taboos by mimicking such reversals through new narrative solutions. If diversity, multiplicity and change guarantee the continuity of life, incest can easily metaphorise a taboo relationship based on repetition of the identical, sameness, and immobility, to be finally transformed, if not avoided. Consistent with many of her female characters’ incestuous relationships with parents or siblings, Carter also establishes incest-like relationships with previous authors and narrative discourses, which she predatorily appropriates. Carter’s resulting narrative testifies to the fact that taboos must be first experienced to be eventually broken. It is in the dialectic between rule and infraction, taboo and its violation that Carter’s writing is rooted, constantly looking for borders to be crossed.

Designed as a paper reflecting on the editorial mediation of early modern French literary texts, this article maps the educational activities conducted on the Tragiques Inventions site since 2020. In particular, it delves into the procedures linked to documenting, generating and manipulating descriptive and analytical (meta)data. A new concept of ‘hand-reading’ is being developed – the possibility of using digital technology to prioritize human intervention in the construction of knowledge through textual editing. This concept will bring a fresh perspective on early modern literary texts.

There is a substantial body of scholarship arguing for the relevance of magic realism to Toni Morrison’s fictional production, with one exception being her last novel God Help the Child, which, in that respect, has been remarkably overlooked. The present paper intends to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on what Morrison called “enchantment”, a powerful blend of magic and realism that she employed to represent a host of racial and ancestral issues of Blackness, often of a traumatic kind.

Sylvia’s Lovers is a novel about war. It is a historical novel set in the years 1793-1800 during the Napoleonic wars, and written by Elizabeth Gaskell in the years 1859-1862 when the American Civil War broke out, in April 1861. Examining Gaskell’s correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton in the years 1861-63 and the articles Norton wrote in support of the War and the anti-slavery cause, this paper explores the way in which the news coming from America and the debates on the contemporary events left a significant mark on the second part of the novel. The implied reference to the context of the American Civil War would shed new light on Gaskell’s narrative choices concerning the plot and the main male character’s development, which has been substantially overlooked.

The goal of this paper is to reconcile the definite marking with the indefinite-like semantics of those superlatives that take a relative/comparative reading. Following Szabolcsi (1986) and Heim (1999), we will assume that the difference between absolute and relative readings of superlatives is represented at the syntactic level of semantic representation, LF (Logical Form). We will however depart from Heim’s hypothesis that what raises at LF is the superlative operator itself (EST). We will instead assume a quantificational-determiner analysis of EST, which involves two raising operations at LF: EST-raising to Spec,DP and raising of the whole superlative DP (Determiner Phrase) to a scope position in the sentence. We will examine the relative readings of quality superlatives. The generalizations and the proposed analysis are not assumed to extend to quantity superlatives.

The paper examines the clitic mu ‘it’, an inanimate non-core (3rd singular neuter) Dative pronominal in Serbian, which behaves as a typical expletive (‘dummy’) pronoun in not having an antecedent in the previous discourse or available for deictic reference, and whose main pragmatic contribution is ‘objectivization’ – it implies that the truth value of a given proposition is not to be seen as a subjective ‘judgment’ of the evaluator (the speaker by default). We argue that this ‘expletive’ Dative is a situation pronoun referring to an arbitrary situation different from both the Topic Situation of a given clause and the situation hosting the Speaker, generated in a point-of-view projection at the T–C edge. The analysis explains the ‘objectivization’ effect straightforwardly: by switching the evaluation domain from a Topic Situation, it is indicated that the proposition is not evaluated by any of the referents to whom the Topic Situation is relevant, most prominently the speaker as default evaluator and source of information. On a broader theoretical level, the analysis of the pronominal clitic mu ‘it’ provides support against treating (non-core) animacy/sentience as the core property of (non-core) Datives, as well as support for eliminating ‘expletiveness’ as a relevant concept in grammar.

The present paper gives a description of the forms and functions of the imperfect in Resian, a Slovene-based micro-language spoken in northern Italy, which has been in a situation of language contact with Romance varieties for centuries. The comparison between the imperfects found in the oldest documents (eighteenth and nineteenth century) and those used in modern Resian shows a significant shift of its functions. The imperfect, in fact, has lost its original aspect-temporal values, now expressing mainly counterfactuality and the future in the past. Our analysis includes a discussion on the possible role of foreign influence in these developments.

What differentiates narration with sequential images from narration with single images? Pictorial narration can take different forms, depending on how many images are used to tell a story. This paper questions common usages of the notions single images and sequential images, in order to better understand the differences between them for visual narration. It highlights the specific potential of sequential images regarding storytelling and notes what kinds of inference a spectator needs to undertake to correctly understand such pictorial narratives. The aim is to gain a more thorough understanding of a specific kind of two-dimensional pictorial narration: narration with sequential images.

Between the 1960s and 1970s, art practices such as performance, conceptual, and land art challenged the very possibility of framing the artwork and clearly demarcating the boundaries that enclosed it. In this context, art and artists’ magazines assumed a pivotal role as they became the medium and site for the presentation and dissemination of these new art forms. This essay examines Avalanche, a magazine published between 1970 and 1976 in New York, and analyses how this periodical framed new art within its paper boundaries while at the same time expanding this art in time and space and showing the processual nature of the framing processes.

The paper summarizes the study of St. Petersburg as a center of multifaceted control and management of the adjacent lagoonscape through the perspective of knowledge as a social construct. We argue that the dwellers of the Russian capital knew their surrounding environment in a variety of ways. We can distinguish knowledge based on perception, imagination, and observation, and these three societal mechanisms of dealing with the nature of the Neva inlet, the most eastern part of the Gulf of Finland, shaped the ways of development of St. Petersburg as the center of complicated network interactions that eventually created the St. Petersburg maritime empire.

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that Quirinus in Enn. ann. 100 Skutsch is to be identified with Romulus. In addition to the comparison with Ov. met. 14.849 ss., new arguments are presented: the comparison with Liv. 1.16.6 and the use of the verb venerari, which is connected etymologically with Venus, who is a deity related to Romulus and the origins of Rome.

This paper offers a preliminary study of MS Atheniensis EBE 1089, a neglected lexicographic and grammatical miscellany consisting of several different sections, to be dated between the 13th and the 15th century. Among other texts, this manuscript transmits Phrynichus’ Eclogue and Moeris’ Lexicon. After providing a survey of the contents of this codex, the first part of the article deals with some of its main material features, with a description of its different sections and the scribes who copied them. Additionally, it is argued that the codex as a whole was the product of a single ‘editorial’ project carried out by a certain Μᾶρκος, active in the middle of the 16th century. The second part of the article offers a philological analysis of the folios containing the lexica of Phrynichus and Moeris; that gave the occasion to develop some new thoughts on their texts and manuscript traditions.

The fifth Imago of Philostratus Minor, which portrays baby Heracles’ struggle against the snakes sent from Hera, appears to be inspired by two Pindaric works (Nem. 1 and *Pae. 20). This paper explores the possibility that some linguistic features of Philostratus’ ekphrasis can be borrowed (presumably by secondary source) from Panyassis’ lost Herakleia. By going against the communis opinio, it is suggested that this archaic exametric poem may have survived through Imperial Age, until the 2nd century AD, alongside other mythographic and poetic works about the Heracles’ saga.

The paper investigates the Fascist exploitation of Horatian poetry by analysing the speech held by Ettore Romagnoli in 1935 on the bimillenary of the poet’s birth. Romagnoli’s oration must sacrifice to the demands of the oriented reading of Horace’s work promoted by the regime themes and attitudes characteristic of the poet (the reflections on time and the precariousness of human life, the search for self-sufficiency and aurea mediocritas, the rejection of dogmatism). Instead, the intellectual who moves from a secluded position to full adherence to the new Augustan establishment is exalted, at the cost of historical and literary distortions.

The paper provides a new reading of a mould-made inscription on the back of two clay statuettes found at the end of the 19th century in the Taranto necropolis of Contrada Santa Lucia and dated between the second half of the 1st c. BC and the beginning of the 1st c. AD. The technique of making the inscription, which was imprinted inside the mould after being scratched on the patrix, is not widespread in the Taranto area. The inscription, a Roman anthroponym written in Greek language (a signature), represents an element of complex interpretation, because it remains uncertain whether it is to be attributed to a coroplast or to a workshop owner.

In his treatise on Persian literary theory, al-Muʿǧam fī maʿāyīr ašʿār al-ʿaǧam, Šams-i Qays (13th century) claims that a poem without the main rhyming letter (ravī) is not a poem. However, this letter is not the only recurring letter at the end of the lines of a Persian poem. Šams-i Qays discusses eight other letters (ridf, qayd, taʾsīs, daxīl, vaṣl, xurūǧ, mazīd, and nāyira) as he determines the length and the possible patterns of a Persian rhyme (qāfiya). In this paper, I aim to improve our understanding of the linguistic rationale behind the taxonomy of Persian rhyming letters by providing an annotated Italian translation of relevant passages from the Muʿǧam.

Popular fiction was a particularly successful trend in fiction from the late Qing era through the Republican period. In this fiction, a nostalgic and sentimental preservation of the Ming-Qing cult of qing 情 is clearly visible: romance and freedom of love are the expressions of a modern consciousness which makes individuals out of subjects of the traditional moral code. In a circular move to find solutions to national salvation and social change, sentimental literature searched for a compromise between tradition and modernity. This paper seeks to demonstrate how the Aufhebung of the old contributed to accommodate a still unchartered modernity in two short stories by Bao Tianxiao. The intertextual analysis will show the development of a persistent ambivalence between progress and nostalgia.

This paper looks at two different manifestations of workers’ poetry as a literary tradition: the poetry of workers, peasants and soldiers (gongnongbing 工农兵) and migrant workers’ poetry (dagong shige 打工诗歌) Through a comparison between three issues of Shikan 诗刊 (Poetry Monthly) from 1976 and an anthology of migrant worker’s poetry published in 2007, this study explores some of the most relevant differences between the two in terms of aesthetics and content, before addressing questions about the shifts in the positioning of workers’ poetry vis-à-vis the political and literary authority in China.

This paper aims to analyse A Lover’s Discourse (2020), a novel by Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo, comparing it to A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1978) by Roland Barthe and examining to what degree the French linguist and semiotician has influenced the author’s work. The discourse between lovers developed by Guo resembles that of Barthes on a structural, linguistic, and thematic level, but is set in an intercultural and multilingual context. By reframing the discourse as such, Xiaolu Guo contemplates themes of love, wordlessness, and home, connected to the migrant’s experience.

While predominantly seen as a technical process, environmental planning is in fact largely shaped by cultural and ideological factors. Ecolinguistics offers a coherent approach to analyse these elements, by unearthing their linguistic traces and exposing how they naturalize social-ecological goals. So far, limited efforts have gone into developing tools for a systematic ecolinguistic analysis of Chinese texts informing environmental decision-making. This paper seeks to address this gap, by introducing a novel ecolinguistic framework and the results of its application on a Chinese Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report.

The sōshoku kofun 装飾古墳 (decorated tombs) is a phenomenon of protohistoric art that developed during the Late Kofun Period (475‑710 CE) from Northern Kyūshū. This paper will discuss the data personally gathered from the iconographic and iconological analysis of the subject of the boat in seventeen sōshoku kofun in Northern Kyūshū, i.e. the present‑day prefectures of Fukuoka, Saga, and Nagasaki. The aim of this research is to understand how the subject of the boat developed artistically in this particular phenomenon of protohistoric art, why the boat was reproduced in a funerary context, and what information on the behind culture can be obtained by analysing the style, the iconography, and the links the subject of the boat has with both local and mainland symbolism.

The paper focuses on Japanese female photographers in international art exhibitions. Until recently, Japan’s photographic field was predominantly male‑dominated. Traditionally, women were considered incompetent with technical equipment and this long-enduring stereotype limited them to passive roles as models. However, from the late 1980s/early 1990s, a shift occurred, with female photographers gaining prominence. In parallel, the representation of Japanese women artists in international venues started to rise and more names began circulating in the global art circuits. This essay inspects in particular one of the most important events on the scene: the Art Biennale in Venice, the oldest and most prestigious of these large-scale exhibitions. Two important shows, held respectively in 2005 and 2009 at the Japan pavilion of the Venice Biennale, provide the starting point for this analysis: they were the only exhibitions ever dedicated to women photographers by the pavilion in its 70‑year‑old history. The artworks of Ishiuchi Miyako and Yanagi Miwa were showcased, two of the most important women photographers in recent years.

This paper deals with Latin discontinuous nominal expressions (hyperbatons) both by a diachronic perspective internal to Latin (I-VI cent. A.D.) and compared to Romance languages. A nominal expression can be considered discontinuous when its word order is interrupted by one or more elements. In these cases a violation of the principle of the ‘domain integrity’ takes place. Discontinuity is typical of Latin and sets it apart from Romance languages, in which hyperbatons are not allowed. It is well attested in all phases of Latin so that it is considered one of the most distinctive feature of Latin word order. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that not all linearly discontinuous orders are real hyperbatons. In fact, cases in which the order Modif.-N or N-Modif. is interrupted by the complement of one of the two categories are frequent; in this perspective the domain of hyperbatons results consistently restricted. As regards real hyperbatons, we will propose the following three syntactic configurations: Type 1 due to the extraction of an element within the phrase; Type 2 due to the insertion of a weak element in second position; Type 3 due to the insertion of a verb. A final observation will concern the fact that we find in Latin kinds of hyperbatons that can be considered a clear sign of those that will develop later in Romance because they involve clitics which are absent in Latin.