Christian Koch

• This article deals with the outstanding linguistic character of Salvatore in Umberto Eco’s novel Il nome della rosa. The first section is a critical review on problems and potentials of linguistic analyses of fictional texts, especially of those which have been written in uncommon or inexistent languages. The text-based analysis of Salvatore’s polyglot idiolect shows that this is more than a simple and confused mixture of Latin, German, and some Romance dialects and languages. Based on the linguistic concepts of intertextuality, frame-dependentThis article deals with the outstanding linguistic character of Salvatore in Umberto Eco’s novel Il nome della rosa. The first section is a critical review on problems and potentials of linguistic analyses of fictional texts, especially of those which have been written in uncommon or inexistent languages. The text-based analysis of Salvatore’s polyglot idiolect shows that this is more than a simple and confused mixture of Latin, German, and some Romance dialects and languages. Based on the linguistic concepts of intertextuality, frame-dependent text styles, and diaphasic variety several language choices in Salvatore may be explained in a new way. The analysis of four concrete text fragments also envisions the possibilities of a deeper comprehension of Salvatore’s utterances through attentive context reading.…