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Le présent ouvrage aborde l’évolution du mythe d’Hercule au fil de sa transmission textuelle, de l’Antiquité à la fin de l’époque médiévale, en s’intéressant en particulier à la mythographie et aux commentaires des classiques, à l’historiographie et à l’Ovide moralisé.

This chapter reconstructs the traces of an editorial project that in 1829 the publisher Stella, of Milan, intended to dedicate to the most famous women of Europe of his time, having pictorial portraits and in-depth articles about them realized by the most important names of nineteenth-century European culture (in Italy: Giacomo Leopardi). The project, which constitutes an interesting antecedent of the current transnational manuals dedicated to women’s writing, did not see the light of day, or rather: it did not see the light of day in the form initially planned. On the basis of new sources, in fact, the essay shows how, not even a decade later, behind the cover of a French translation—a precaution taken for political reasons—Stella succeeded in carrying out his intent.

Bleorțu (2021) analizó las actitudes lingüísticas en lo que atañe a las dos lenguas habladas en La Pola Siero a partir de las encuestas realizadas a 24 informantes, hombres y mujeres, de distintos niveles formativos (secundarios y superiores) y edades agrupadas comprendidas entre los 18 y los 37 años, los 38 y los 57, y mayores de 58 años. En aquel estudio la autora llegó a la conclusión de que se podían distinguir tres agrupamientos de informantes: 1) aquellos que concedían un estatus superior al castellano, 2) los que se lo concedían al asturiano, y, por último, 3) un grupo híbrido que intenta negociar las dos identidades, es decir, la asturiana y la castellana. Lo que nos proponemos en este trabajo es analizar si las mismas actitudes lingüísticas existen entre los jóvenes polesos. Para ello, utilizamos la misma metodología que la del trabajo de Bleorțu (2021) y una muestra de 40 alumnos de Enseñanza Secundaria Obligatoria.

This study is dedicated to the question whether French possesses (optional) DOM, i.e. direct object marking, which it answers in a negative way. French is traditionally considered to lack a differential marker for the direct object (cf. e.g. Körner, 1987). However, Fagard and Mardale (2014) claim in their large corpus study (12–13 billion tokens) that differential object marking (DOM) is an optional phenomenon in some non-standard varieties of French. Our data, stemming from an acceptability study plus a corpus analysis, do not confirm these findings, as native speakers show a wide range of negative responses in the acceptability tests. As for potential non-standard French varieties more prone to DOM, our data hint to a (very) weak regional effect (South-Western France).

The paper focuses on an unedited wedding speech datable to the middle of the fifteenth century. The author offers both a transcription of the text, which is transmitted by the manuscript BCT1-2312 (F.d.5) of the Biblioteca comunale of Trent, and a comment of its linguistic features. The analysis shows that the document can be regarded as new testimony of the vernacular spoken in ancient East Lombardy.

The cantari were poetic compositions on various topics that would be recited in public places in Italy throughout the medieval and renaissance periods by the so called canterini. The cantari were composed in ottava rima, a metre which was first used successfully in the history of Italian literature both by Giovanni Boccaccio, in works such as Filostrato (1335–9?), Teseida (1339–41?), and Ninfale fiesolano (1344–6?), and by the Florentine poet Antonio Pucci. We know the exact date of Antonio Pucci's death (1388) and this allows us to place within relatively pre¬cise chronological limits his production of cantari in ottava rima: Brito di Brettagna, Gismirante, Madonna Lionessa, Apollonio di Tiro, Reina d’Oriente, and the Cantari della Guerra di Pisa. But the case of Antonio Pucci and his work is an exception rather than the rule: for the rest, we still know very little about the cantari, about their major authors, about the places and times of their oral and written circulation. The cantari have come down to us without the music that must have accompanied the performances and are preserved by very rare manuscript witnesses; for the most part these are late and corrupt, almost always dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, very rarely from the fourteenth. Mainly, we know neither when the original versions were written, nor who wrote them. It is thus not surprising that the cantari have given rise to many critical problems and heated debates. In this chapter I will briefly review them, and also illustrate the results of the most recent critical investigations. I shall deal in particular with some of the cantari related to the narrative tradition on Charlemagne, the ones which have been the focus of critical debate and might turn out to have been circulating – as we will see – since the late Trecento, building a bridge between the time of Giovanni Boccaccio and Antonio Pucci, and the time of Luigi Pulci. These cantari are Spagna in rima, Orlando, the Cantari d

This article examines traces in the works of Proust and Céline that allow conclusions to be drawn about the change in individual and collective memory caused by the catastrophe of the First World War. This change can be described in the works of these authors in the context of the metropolis of Paris as a site of observation. In Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the insertion of the episode of the First World War in the last volume Le Temps retrouvé creates a new view of the social order and the memory associated with it. The inscription of the war into the text corresponds with death, which forms the antithesis of the poetics of memory, leaving its unmistakable traces especially at the end of the novel. In Céline’s novel, on the other hand, the First World War is the starting point of the narrative: Voyage au bout de la nuit begins with the blunt portrayal of the horrors of war from the experiential perspective of the first-person narrator Bardamu. He later finds himself in a hospital in Paris, where he and his comrades convey the war to the Parisian public through narratives and fictional exaggerations. A side glance at the novel fragment Guerre, published posthumously in 2022, completes the analysis. In the works of both authors, war has a central poetological function, since it is associated with processes of experiencing, observing, remembering, and narrating. By making such processes visible, these texts reflect on their own status as novels of memory in a time characterized by an epochal rupture.

This article centers on an analysis of Elio Vittorini’s novel Le donne di Messina (1949, 1964). The novel recounts a new beginning in a country destroyed by fascism and war. The story of an abandoned village that is repopulated and restored by strangers initially appears as a utopia of a society without private property. But this utopia proves fragile as, on the one hand, the former proprietors reclaim ownership and, on the other, a former fascist lives among the villagers. In addition to the story and its ideological significance, Vittorini also showcases the narrative process, resulting in reflexive refractions, ambivalences and uncertainties. The present textual analysis is framed by system-theoretical considerations on the connections between literature and society. In particular, it addresses Luhmann’s concept of symbolically generalized communication media and interprets fictionality as such a medium. Systems theory is employed heuristically to gain a perspective on Vittorini’s novel and the tensions and contradictions manifest in it between utopia and reality, between literary autonomy and political engagement. Finally, against this background, some theses on the place of literary studies in the present are developed and put forth.

Agradezco a los editores del presente volumen que me hayan invitado a decir unas palabras finales. Digo “decir” porque el libro nació a partir de un encuentro de viva voz en el que tuve el placer de participar en plena pandemia. Una pan-demia que creó nuevas tradiciones discursivas, que nos abrió al mundo de las plataformas digitales, que hizo entrar el universo de Zoom en nuestros hogares y conectarnos a través de él con el planeta entero. La pandemia fue uno de esos típicos acontecimientos de catálisis, de aceleración de algo que ya estaba prepa-rado pero que habíamos en gran parte ignorado. Las innovaciones técnicas como el correo electrónico, WhatsApp o Zoom son marcos pragmáticos de continui-dad y de innovación: provocadores de creatividad y de adaptación comunicativa. La fascinación de la pragmática marcó décadas de discusión lingüística, y la noción de tradicionalidad discursiva señala que la pragmática no solo tiene un lado situacional y actual, sino que los hablantes resuelven tareas comunicativas de manera semejante a otras anteriores con las que puede establecerse una com-paración: la tradicionalidad de los discursos no solo sirve para ahorrar esfuerzos y poder recurrir a lo ya dicho, sino que añade un valor semiótico propio a la tradición misma.

This chapter has a strongly theoretical focus and is divided into three sections. The first section tackles the relationship between discourse traditions (DTs)and the general question of language historicity; the second section is dedicated tothe definition and classification of DTs; and the final section addresses the notionof“universe of discourse”and its possible relationship with DTs or discursive tradi-tionality in general. As regards the first matter, a variety of proposals have beenmade to situate DTs within a coherent theory of language. Koch (1997) and Oester-reicher (1997) suggest a duplicated“ historical level” departing from Eugenio Coser-iu’s distinction between a universal, a historical, and an individual level of lan-guage (see Coseriu 1985). Other scholars (Lebsanft 2006) have criticized thisapproach: we will argue here that as early the 1950s Coseriu (s.a.) advocated for ahistoricity of the individual level (Kabatek 2018; 2021). The second section presentsthe similarities and differences of the various proposals and offers a classificationof DTs based on both form and content. Finally, the notion ofuniverse of discourseand its relationship to DTs will be addressed: a more general and more traditionalview on universes of discourse (Urban 1939; Coseriu 1955–1956) considers these asbundles of DTs, whereas an alternative, more recent view (Coseriu 2002) limits thenotion to only four universes based on the semiotic relationship between subjectsand objects.

Eugenio Coseriu counts among the most important linguistic scholars of the second half of the 20th century. He is known mainly as a structuralist and a Romance linguist, but his work is in fact far more expansive in scope, including a comprehensive linguistic theory as well as writings on a wide range of issues, from semantics, syntax, typology, variational linguistics, language change, pragmatics and text linguistics to Vulgar Latin, the history of the philosophy of language and the history of Romance linguistics. Coseriu’s thought is founded on solid philosophical principles, and his life brought him into contact with a number of different academic traditions and cultures. However, for a variety of reasons (among which, the languages in which he tended to publish: Spanish, Italian, French and German), knowledge of his thought is rather marginal in the Anglo-American world. This book aims to go some way to addressing this situation by offering an overview in English of Coseriu’s main contributions to linguistics, and indeed to other disciplines. It is of general interest for the study of linguistics, the history of linguistics, and the philosophy of language, as well as for a broader reading public. . first comprehensive English introduction to Coseriu’s work and thought . compact overview . allows for an initial study as well as for deeper insights

The bestselling dictionary of the late Middle Ages was named after a morphological procedure, “derivations.” It was written by Hugutio (also known as Uguccione) from Pisa, bishop of Ferrara, probably in the 1160s, and its title refers to one of the procedures used in order to explain the origin and meaning of words. In addition, etymological speculation, with the method inherited from Latin Antiquity—from Varro via Isidore of Seville—also has a prominent place in this work, which enjoyed great success. In an epoch when the Romance languages, including Italian, had long ousted Latin in everyday native spoken usage, Hugutio’s book was extensively used and cited as a dictionary, in order to write not only in Latin—still the main language of culture in Western Europe for centuries to come—but also in the vernaculars in the then-incipient Romance vulgar literature; for example, by no less a figure than Dante Alighieri. To us, Hugutio’s Derivations (Derivationes) is valuable as a source both of knowledge of Medieval culture and thought and of information on the Italian lexicon, at a time when written documentation in Italian was still very scarce.

In Fluidità ed evanescenze dialettali in Lombardia nel XX e XXI secolo. Il dialetto vigevanese e l’areale del Lombardo Occidentale, Atti del I Convegno Internazionale di Dialettologia (Vigevano, 20 maggio 2023, Auditorium San Dionigi, Vigevano).

Agreeing nouns, in Italian and the other standard Romance languages, may show gender agreement via derivational morphology, though such cumulation of derivation and inflection is not a necessary condition for a noun to agree. After discussing this issue in the first part, the paper moves on to focus on derivation in the absence of overt derivational morphology (i.e., conversion) and its role in noun agreement in two Romance varieties, Asturian and Ripano, which each display quite rare agreement phenomena that are in fact mirror images of each other. In the former, lexemes such as hermanu ‘brother’ agree either as nouns or as denominal adjectives, while in the latter, words such as freddu ‘cold’, callu ‘hot’ agree either as adjectives or as deadjectival nouns. Discussion of such evidence at the fringes of noun morphology and morphosyntax in Romance shows that careful scrutiny of variation across this well-known language family is bound to reveal many more typologically interesting phenomena than its position at the core of Standard Average European would lead one to suspect.

In this paper, I intend to offer an experimental phonetic and phonological analysis of the quality of the low vowels in the Eastern Lombard dialect of Berbenno (BG). Usually, Bergamasco dialect varieties don’t display a distinction neither in vowel quantity nor in the quality of their lower vowels. The current study, based on read speech data collected through dedicated fieldwork, nevertheless shows that some speakers, mostly due to emigration or long stays abroad (mainly in Switzerland), conserve an archaic distinction between [a] and [æ]. This seems to be not only a phonetic distinction, but even a phonemic one, related to a previous stage of Eastern Lombard for which contrastive vowel length can be assumed.

This contribution investigates the verbal morphology of the alpine-lombard dialect spoken in Val Bregaglia (Canton Grisons, Switzerland), examining the paradigmatic distribution of stem allomorphy in the variety of the upper part of the valley (Sopraporta). The paper consists of a first part aimed at providing an overview of the morphological specificities of the verbal inflection of the dialect under scrutiny and of a second part dedicated to an in-depth analysis of the data focusing on the identification of autonomously morphological or ‘morphomic’ alternation patterns in (moderately) irregular verbs.

The paper analyses the language of a poem written by Paolo Petrone in 1420 in Romanesco and provides a new edition of the source. From a linguistic perspective, this document offers further insights into the complex framework of the 14th-cen-tury language of Rome. In order to better describe the text’s linguistic phenome-nology, comparisons are made with other known texts from old Romanesco.

This chapter reviews literature on linguistic accommodation and discusses the role of accommodation in language change. In the first part, theoretical models of accommodation and linguistic change are introduced and discussed. In these models, linguistic accommodation (also convergence or synchronization) between individuals is regarded as an important mechanism of language change at the community level. However, more research is needed to validate theoretical models of accommodation and language change. The second part reviews the common research methods of accommodation studies, with a focus on dialect contact. The reviewed studies on short- and long-term accommodation used a large variety of methods and data, which makes comparisons across different studies and languages difficult. The third part of the chapter briefly reviews patterns and processes of accommodation found in the reviewed literature, to identify – in the fourth part – the most important linguistic and extralinguistic factors involved in accommodation. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to research gaps in the area of linguistic accommodation and language change, and proposing possible and desired directions for future research.

On the eve of the Middle Ages, slightly more than one century after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, in Spain under Visigothic rule Latin was still the language of culture and everyday spoken communication. In Seville, the bishop Isidore wrote what was to become the reference encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, the Etymologiae, whose very title indicates that speculation about etymology is key to the treatment of all disciplines, from mathematics to theology. This enormously influential treatise established a canon of disciplines and authors that was to last for almost a millennium. As an etymologist, by the standards of modern research Isidore does not count as a full-fledged colleague: he pursues the method adopted in Latin antiquity in Varro, but with less insight than Varro into the mechanisms of language per se. Nonetheless, the Etymologiae are a fascinating cultural object, with speculation on language one of its prime ingredients.