Search

L'article examine le trait -u- qui apparait et se developpe en tant que marqueur perfectif a trois periodes separees du latin et de l'espagnol. Les conditions du developpement etaient = une tendance au marquage de l'aspect verbal au moyen de voyelles distinctives, = un systeme de cinq voyelles, avec u relativement rare. Les processus examines fournissent quelques explications sur le choix de la voyelle u pour exprimer la perfectivite

Nobody believes the claim made in our epigraph. Even if the speaker's assertions were trivial, and especially if they were not, each listener's interpretation was inevitably different from all others, depending on cultural baggage, tacit presuppositions, vagaries of common sense, experience, intelligence, perceptions of group interaction during performance-on factors innumerable and often imponderable. Yet it is most important for a presenter working before a group to achieve a consensus regarding at least some aspects of the content or the form of his presentation. Without it he loses group acceptance and fails as a performer. An aid to success is the adept integration of ritualistic elements into the presentation. Doing, even if only symbolic, does not err in the way words can err, and the familiarity of ritual, defined as repetition of acts and words in a given kind of place, and on a particular kind of occasion, by an authorized or self-authorized person, carries an audience along.' A further effective mode of narrative presentation is to depict the characters of the tale-gods or epic heroes especially-as themselves acting ritualistically. In this mode the

Rhyme, rhythm, syllable-count, vocalic echoes, specific conventions of phraseology, and preference or distaste for certain forms, endings, and word-combinations—and besides these primarily acoustic effects, aspect, affirmation/negation, number, context, markedness, time-reference, deixis, dialogics, preference for variety, and poetic privilege—all these dimensions and elements and undoubtedly others, in complex interaction, affect the choice of present, imperfect, and preterite tenses in the narrative portions of the Poema del Cid. These distinctive conditioning and modifying factors of the narrative voice, combined with analogous peculiarities in the use of other deictic elements such as demonstratives, contrast with the determiners of the direct discourse reported in the poem, in which the characters or actants (Benveniste's term), envisioned as speaking at a given moment in time, observe rules for the use of the three tenses which differ little from those of other medieval texts, and are familiar in to...

En este número no se incluyeron resúmenes ni palabras clave.

The Poema del Cid presents its message in a manner that is compelling in its apparent simplicity. Many readers have felt the poem's force, yet the means by which it is achieved still invite systematic examination from a number of vantage-points. Appreciation of the work's persuasive techniques must center on the hero. His exemplarity, his power as a model of ideal attitudes and behavior, attracts the reader, as it did the original audience, because of the wholeness of his character, in which actions and feelings are so closely identified as to be scarcely distinguishable. This unity of characterization, reinforced by the poem's harmony of form and content, leaves little room for deviant interpretations of the work by individual hearers. The poem holds firmly before them the hero's steadfastness and the seasoned maturity that gives him the strength to meet any challenge or reversal, and so draws them into the orbit of his personality and his world of values. His feelings and goals-the proper goals of the warrior society of twelfth-century Spain-become theirs. Through this dual identification, the poem achieves deep human significance and fulfills a valuable educational function.' It conveys those feelings and goals not by means of commentary, reflection, or abstraction, but through action. Audience identification accordingly implies not inactive ad

ELS IN THE SONNETS OF GARCILASO q THOMAS MONTGOMERY ' The harmony of sound and sense which is essential to most poetry is usually studied and appreciated as the individual, personal achievement of the poet. His medium, the language in which he composes, is taken as a given entity, from which he selects and orders to produce the linguistic sub-form known as his oeuvre. But his creation must ultimately derive from the everyday language of his society. Even if it is highly artificial, even if in a lately-acquired language, it is conditioned by his childhood experience with a mother-tongue which gave him his first awareness of the communicative power and the acoustic resonances of speech. His art does not emerge from a void, or independently from his consciousness; the fact that poetry can be written implies poetic qualities in language itself. Those qualities are difficult to isolate and define. Any effort to do so involves mechanical operations which are not easily reconciled with the subtleties of language. Superficially interpreted, they can appear to disprove the very harmonies they set out to discover. Yet it is general knowledge that each language has its own poetic potential,' and the fact is quickly confirmed by any attempt to translate poetry. Existing sound-patterns provide a wealth of possibilities, and are also inescapable. English, for instance, offers a wide variety of consonantal groups which cause variations in syllabic length. They have been put to many uses; consider the cadences of Paradise Lost, Latinate though syllabic duration was often independent of consonants in Latin. Such an effect is not available to the Spanish poet, but the very simplicity of Spanish vocalic and consonantal structures leads to echoes, repetitions, and contrasts of sounds, allowing a great diversity of acoustic effects. The poet cannot fail to use them.

THE phonetic match between the Latin future TU ERIS and the Castilian present tu eres is exact. The only possible objection, that the short eshould have produced a diphthong (hence *yeres), disappears in the light of the imperfect forms: era eres has met with general acceptance, some authors of historical grammars have recorded it with less than total conviction. ERIS, if retained in Spanish, would be an isolated vestige, and an irregular one, of a Latin tense that otherwise vanished completely. The shift from future to present, moreover, lacks parallels in the spoken language, and a change involving a single form, independent of the verb system in general, has no precedents in Spanish or, apparently, in any other Romance language. This article proposes to show still another objection, one grounded in chronology, which makes the traditional derivation quite unacceptable. The historical grammars may register surprise or reservations regarding the derivation ERIS > eres, but by advancing no alternative they imply at least tentative acquiescence. Meyer-Liibke, usually no enemy of atomistic explanations, injects a grain of salt by noting that eres "must be" from ERIS.1 Others, such as Hanssen and Elcock, report the change without comment.2 Bourciez, perhaps more skeptical, acknowledges "un remarcable transfert du futur au present."3 Garcia de Diego remains noncommittal: "Eres co