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This article seeks to analyse urban representation in José Cardoso Pires’s Lisboa – Livro de Bordo (1997), a book dedicated to the author’s home city Lisbon, by focusing on its prevailing nautical and maritime imagery. This imagery as well as its tendency to design Lisbon as a city-ship shall be examined with regard to spatial construction in the Livro de Bordo. Urban sailing as well as the recurrent representations of the Portuguese capital’s spaces as heterotopias will be interpreted as approaches to subvert institutional and homogenic discourses on Lisbon.
The two articles of «Langage» and «Langue», published in 1765 in the 9th volume of the great French Encyclopédie by Diderot and D’Alembert, treat some essential philosophical questions on the human ability of communication with linguistic signs. Nevertheless, as the two authors Jaucourt and Beauzée did not share completely identic points of view, the comparative lecture of both articles reveals a complementary perspective, particularly relating to the origin of language as a divine gift or humans’ creation for communicative needs. A further aspect of divergence concerns the textual composition of the article « Langage » as a structured informative text, and the article « Langue » as a long and freely composed writing including personal remarks by the author. The following article deals with the potential of approaches to the Encyclopédie in modern linguistics, concretely demonstrated in the comparative analysis of these two articles.
Die Zeitschrift promptus – Würzburger Beiträge zur Romanistik richtet sich an alle NachwuchswissenschaftlerInnen im Bereich der romanistischen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft sowie der Fachdidaktik. Das Ziel der Zeitschrift ist die Förderung der romanistischen Forschung im Allgemeinen und des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses der Romanistik im Besonderen. Sie versteht sich damit als Impulsgeber für junge romanistische Forschung, ohne sich dabei thematisch zu beschränken.
Diese Arbeit schildert auf der Basis einer Analyse der intermedialen Struktur der Werke zweier Künstler aus unterschiedlichen Jahrhunderten die Transportierung eines mystischen Selbstverständnisses, das als Tiefenstruktur der zugrundeliegenden Werke ausgemacht wird. Deshalb sieht diese Arbeit beide Künstler als christliche Mystiker an, deren Weltbild keine grundlegenden Unterschiede aufweist. Darüberhinaus wird über diese beiden Autoren versucht die kontrovers diskutierte Aktualität von Mystik in der Gegenwart herauszustellen. Zentraler Teil und Ausgangspunkt der Ergebnisse ist hierbei die Analyse eines mystischen Wertesystems, das sich in den Prophecies von William Blake finden lässt und das sich in wesentlichen Punkten auf die Werke von Van Morrison übertragen lässt.
This article deals with the reception of Dante and Goethe in Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s and Hector Berlioz’s compositions La Vita Nuova and La Damnation de Faust. Although Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nova and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust belong to completely different genres and epochs, the texts provide the basis for the oratorio-style works from the Romantic era, which justifies a comparative analysis of the latter. The examined reductions, extensions, modifications and rearrangements of the texts in the libretti – which were compiled almost entirely by the composers themselves – as well as the instrumental parts and the use and functions of the orchestra, the choir and the soloists, portray the intermedia relations between literature and music in the selected compositions. The chosen examples will show that the common idea of setting literature to music and the translation studies concept of intersemiotic translation are not appropriate for all literature-based pieces of music, as the analysis of both works demonstrates that with regard to vocal music a distinction should be made between the musicalization of literature and the literarization of music.
The present study is concerned with a critical discourse analysis of the speeches of the Italian politicians Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Renzi in different situations. The aim of the study was to find out how historical and speech contexts influence discourse structures and argumentations, and if any similar speech patterns or speech strategies were used. The results show that both politicians in many cases tend to utilize similar speech patterns to achieve different aims; each of them shows a preference for particular words, structures and strategies. It is noteworthy that one of the important differences between speeches of Berlusconi and Renzi is the use of various speech strategies. While Renzi uses these strategies to create an image of himself as a young and honest politician, Berlusconi makes use of them to defend himself or attack his opponents.
Unaufhörliches Suchen – Gaddas Roman Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana als carmen perpetuum
(2016)
Gadda’s novel Quer Pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana tells the tale of two crimes committed in Rome in the 1920s. The search for the perpetrators turns into a pasticciaccio brutto (an awful mess), challenging the reader with its linguistic complexity and a myriad of references to history and culture; the large number of allusions to antiquity is particularly striking. References to Virgil’s Aeneid and to Rome’s mythical past do not constitute a mere transfer, but document a creative approach of transformational nature. Deformation and inversion are part of this process, changing the μορφή not only in formal terms, but also within the plot itself. These transformations of both form and content are read as Metamorphoses and analysed in comparison to Ovid’s homonymous work. The perpetual, never-ending quest for truth in Gadda’s novel necessitates a perpetual, never-ending narrative, which is conceptually related to Ovid’s carmen perpetuum.
Economic, academic or artistic cooperation among actors of different countries or disciplines offers numerous new perspectives, but it also confronts the ones profiting from it with several challenges. First, identity has to be firmly established, which requires intercultural skills, such as role-distance, empathy and tolerance for ambiguities. Secondly, a third space is required in which meaning can be newly negotiated to make the partnership succeed. This paper proposes that even within one and the same language-group, one can speak of intercultural communication. A particular collaboration between Portuguese-speaking comic artists will be introduced, raising questions of the conditions necessary to make such a cooperation work. Answers will be provided according to the decisions the artists made in their publications.
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-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.
Women in Caribbean culture traditionally occupy the role of guardians of collective memory, as tellers of stories, legends and myths. Through oral tradition, they transfer the cultural and family knowledge from one generation of women to the next. We will offer an analysis of oral transmission as a way of preserving a memory of women in Le livre d’Emma (2001) by the Québec author of Haitian origin, Marie-Célie Agnant. We will primarily analyze the transformation of communicative memory into cultural memory, following the distinction by Jan Assmann. We will interpret the oral transfer as a possibility to stabilize, to legitimize female memory and to inscribe it into the female body.
After the terrorist attacks on November 13th, the French public, the whole of Europe and many parts of the world were waiting for president François Hollande to address his fellow “citoyens”. Being the most important political figure – both by constitution and by influence on public discourse – the president’s words bear great importance for the subsequent debate and interpretation of the events. Therefore, the question arises: How did the president shape the debate in the hours and days after the attacks? To answer this question, we have identified typical structures in Hollande’s rhetorical reaction to the attacks, performing a topos as well as a keyword analysis of the speeches the president held within two weeks after November 13th. In a contrastive analysis we have compared Hollande’s speeches to the Europarl Corpus. Using the software programme sketch engine, we have filtered out the 100 most frequent keywords and classified them into semantic fields (data-driven approach). All in all, terrorism, action and nation/identity are the three predominant semantic fields, whereas references to victimhood barely appear. These findings are congruent with the results of our topos analysis that reveals a predominance of argumentative structures that form a strong main topos of resilience, emphasising the greatness of France and its people and culture, calling to action and avoiding any tendencies of resignation.
In this paper, the different uses and functions of (yo) pienso (que) are analysed. The examples demonstrate that (yo) pienso (que) fulfils various functions. It is used as a marker of cognitive attitude concerning the proposition (that is, the speaker expresses his validative attitude or an inference), as a pragmatic marker or as a cognitive particle. In this study, we introduce the term ‘cognitive particle’ in order to describe the use of (yo) pienso (que) when its use serves to gain time in processing the enunciation or to structure the speaker’s thoughts. The empirical data are on the one hand retrieved from the corpus programme CREA, of debates and interviews focusing on peninsular Spanish, and on the other hand from GlossaNet, more precisely from the newspapers El País and El Mundo. This analysis is a qualitative one because we do not focus on the frequency of the different functions. Instead, we want to illustrate the various functions (yo) pienso (que) fulfils.
The study uses the category of disgust in order to analyse the representation of the human body and the corpse in one of the most influential medieval treatises, the De Miseria Condicionis Humanae (1195) written by Pope Innocent III, and its little known old French adaptation Double lay de fragilité humaine (1383) by Eustache Deschamps. Analysing how both use disgust as an aesthetic means, which appeals to emotions and turns off reason, helps to point out the pedagogical and moral function of the texts. The comparison between them shows that Deschamps stays faithful to his Latin model, but that he nevertheless has to make certain modifications in order to adapt the prose text into a lyrical form. Furthermore, this approach clearly elucidates what differences there are between the conceptions of the human body and death in the two texts, revealing at the same time divergent theological points of view.
The novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887) and the essays collected in Japoneries d’automne (1889) written by French travel author Pierre Loti offer a paradoxical view of Japan during the Meiji period. In both travel writings, the author is torn between aesthetic japonism – which spread all over Europe at the end of the 19th century – and exotic expectations, i.e. the picturesque fascination of the Other. The latter, however, remains unsatisfied throughout his stay. In both writings, Pierre Loti provides an insight into Japan that entirely reflects the spirit of his time. Thereby, he contributes to an image of Japan, which will long remain vivid in the Occident. Contemporaries perceive Loti’s representation of Japan as a realistic testimony, tinged with both sensory impressions and his highly ambiguous feelings towards the distant country, which in the end remained incomprehensible to him.
This article concentrates on the Argentine author Esteban Echeverría who is known as the founding father of Romanticism in the River Plate region. The author of this article intends to show that the importance of Echeverría for the development of Argentine national literature goes beyond the spreading of Romanticist aesthetics. Especially his poem La cautiva (1837) has been regarded as the national epic poem of Argentina because it represents national landscape and the early days of national history. However, as the classification of this narrative poem as the national epic poem already indicates, Echeverría also contributed to the presence of this prestigious genre at the River Plate region. By investigating Echeverría‘s less known verse texts – namely the texts which were read by all Romantics but which have been neglected by literary studies so far – this article illustrates that Echeverría gave decisive impulses for the presence of the epic poem at the River Plate.
Frank-Rutger Hausmann war Professor für Romanische Philologie (Schwerpunkt französische und italienische Literatur) in Freiburg, Aachen und wiederum Freiburg. Hausmann hat sich zudem intensiv mit der Fachgeschichte der deutschen Romanistik und der Geisteswissenschaften allgemein beschäftigt. Für die zweite Ausgabe der promptus-Interviewreihe durften wir ihn nach seiner Perspektive auf die historische und aktuelle Situation der Romanistik befragen. Er arbeitet momentan u.a. an einem Romanistenlexikon, das online veröffentlicht wird, und hat das Romanistenarchiv in Augsburg gegründet.
Prof. em. Dr. Theodor Berchem (*1935) promovierte 1963 in Paris und habilitierte sich 1966 an der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Von 1967 bis 2003 war er Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Romanische Sprachwissenschaft an der Universität Würzburg. Daneben bekleidete er eine große Anzahl weiterer Ämter: Er war Präsident der Universität Würzburg (1975-2003), Präsident des DAAD (1988-2007), Vorsitzender der Bayerischen Rektorenkonferenz (1978-1982) sowie Vizepräsident (1979-1983) und Präsident (1983-1987) der Westdeutschen Rektorenkonferenz. Zu seinen Forschungsschwerpunkten gehören Dialektologie, Phonetik/Phonologie, Morphosyntax, Stilistik und Wortgeschichte.
Die Zeitschrift promptus – Würzburger Beiträge zur Romanistik richtet sich an alle NachwuchswissenschaftlerInnen im Bereich der romanistischen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft sowie der Fachdidaktik. Das Ziel der Zeitschrift ist die Förderung der romanistischen Forschung im Allgemeinen und des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses der Romanistik im Besonderen. Sie versteht sich damit als Impulsgeber für junge romanistische Forschung, ohne sich dabei thematisch zu beschränken.
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Verbalkomplexe im \(Jarama\)
(2015)
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Maß und Exzess: Emotionalität in den Amor-Lauden des italienischen Mystikers Jacopone da Todi
(2015)
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Verstreut über den ganzen Text der Göttlichen Komödie kommen verschiedene geographische Namen vor, die sich auf Spanien beziehen. In mehreren dieser Fälle hat Dante die im wörtlichen Schriftsinn verwendeten toponymischen Zeichen als Elemente hermetisch wirkender Aussagen und damit offenbar als Indizien einer verborgenen Botschaft konzipiert. Zum Nachweis dieser These soll in den folgenden Betrachtungen erkundet werden, welche Funktion den im wissenschaftlichen Weltbild des Dichters verankerten spanischen Land- und Städtenamen in der Komposition des Epos zukommt. Damit möchte ich meinem Kollegen und Freund Gerhard Penzkofer für die vielen anregenden Gespräche danken, die wir – in den Jahren der gemeinsamen Tätigkeit in der Würzburger Romanistik – vor allem über cosas de España führen konnten. Da der vorliegende Band unter den von seiner Lehre inspirierten Leitbegriffen Kommunikation und Repräsentation steht, bietet es sich am Schluss an, die beiden Konzepte mit den vom Dichter diskutierten Termini sensus litteralis und sensus allegoricus in Beziehung zu setzen.
Kommunikation und Repräsentation in den romanischen Kulturen. Festschrift für Gerhard Penzkofer
(2015)
Diese Festschrift ehrt den Romanisten und Slawisten Gerhard Penzkofer anlässlich seines 65. Geburtstags. Kolleginnen und Kollegen sowie Schülerinnen und Schüler, die Gerhard Penzkofer auf seinem bisherigen Weg unter anderem in München, Bamberg und Würzburg sowohl fachlich als auch persönlich nahestanden, publizieren hier Beiträge, die von seinen Forschungen inspiriert sind. Im Zentrum dieser Untersuchungen, die den italienischen, französischen und spanischen Sprachraum umschließen, steht das Verhältnis von Kommunikation und Repräsentation. Dabei umfassen die Beiträge Aspekte, die historisch vom Mittelalter bis zum 20. Jahrhundert und thematisch von der mittelalterlichen Exempelsammlung bis zur postdiktatorialen Geschichtskonstruktion reichen.
Work is seen by many thinkers as the fundamental dimension of man`s existence on earth. Through work, he provides his basic necessities on earth and co-operate with God in the work of creation.
He received this mandate to work from the very beginning of creation by God. In carrying out this mandate, man every human being reflects the very action of the creator of the Universe.
God worked and intended that man who is created in His image and likeness continues the work of creation by working.
Even though Man suffers and sweats through work and yet, in spite of all this toil-perhaps in a sense because of it – work is a good thing for man. It is not only good in the sense that it is useful or something to enjoy; it is also good as being something worthy, that is to say something that corresponds to man's dignity that expresses this dignity and increases it.
This project examines man as a creature called to work and born into work. It is true that through work, man provides himself and his family with the basic necessities of life and everyday needs for the reason he charges wages for his sweat. Work goes beyond and should exceed the boundaries of the material benefit that comes out of it to the satisfaction and fulfilment for the very purpose we should work. The modern society has attached so much importance to money and material possession, the question then is how do we go along working in the spirit of improvement and renewal of the earth? The modern man understands work only as a means of making his daily bread. For this reason, he engages himself in an occupation that he has little or no interest in. He ends up quarrelling everyday with the people that he or she is supposed to serve through work. The result is low work output and waste of talents and the society loses an opportunity for improvement as every creature is supposed to contribute uniquely.
A good example is Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation with a population estimate of about over 170,000,000 people and the sixth Oil producing Nation.
While French Enlightenment seems philosophically dominated by a pejorative idea of the medieval past as the ‘Dark Ages’, this is only one conception among others. This article focuses on a different, a positive, representation of the Middle Ages in eighteenth-century literature, analyzing the chivalric novella Bliombéris (1784) by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian. On the one hand, the eponymous hero is considered a ‘noble savage’ who develops into an ideal knight by education and successful learning – two central ideas of the Enlightenment period. On the other hand, the study shows how the medieval topic of the Matière de Bretagne, exclusively required by English literature for a long time, is finally regained by the French and is reintegrated into their national memory.
Präpositionalphrasen mit der Präposition de im Französischen – Struktur und Realisierungsformen
(2015)
This paper investigates the linguistic properties of prepositional phrases containing de in the French language by means of a comprehensive compilation of possible formal realizations, for which examples are provided out of a chosen sample text. Special attention will be paid to the most frequently-cited formal realization, namely the combination of a preposition and a noun phrase. The corresponding forms will be divided into two classes, one with nominal phrases containing a phonetically realized or at least an underlying determiner, and one with nominal phrases in which no determiner is assumed to occur. This distinction will shed light on some of the difficulties that can arise in the assignment of the elements to either category due to the special interaction between the preposition de and the French system of determiners.
Much research on first language (L1) acquisition carried out in the last decades has proven that language acquisition is based on a biological endowment, the language faculty, which is triggered by the exposure to linguistic data. The language acquisition process undergoes similar stages in the same time span, independently of the specific language. Non-native acquisition differs from L1 acquisition, as the speaker already has an internal grammar with all parameters set. Transfer should therefore take place, bringing the learner to analyse the new input according to the properties of the L1, but a reanalysis is possible because of the availability of UG (Schwartz/Sprouse 1996). This article explores a syntactic domain, namely the properties of the functional categories constraining the verb position in main and subordinate clauses, by means of empirical data from Italian L1-speakers acquiring German as a second language (L2). It will be shown that the interlanguage grammars reflect properties of L1 and that resetting can be achieved, although optionality still exists and full convergence to the target language cannot be guaranteed.
In Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau’s 1887 science fiction novel El anacronópete, comedy presents itself in a variety of guises. One of the central comic elements of the book is the playful way in which the lower class characters, namely the maid Juana and the soldier Pendencia, engage with language. This article will compare Gaspar’s El anacronópete with two of its official translations, Leyla Rouhi’s The Anacronópete and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán and Andrea Bell’s The Time Ship: A Chrononautical Journey, in order to ascertain to what extent the Spanish author’s comic touch is preserved in the English translations of Juana’s and Pendencia’s speech. The maid’s and the soldier’s use of double meaning, the mondegreen, and code-switching will be the specific focus of our analysis. We will see that, as Salman Rushdie claims, although «[i]t is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation […] something can also be gained» (1991: 17).
This article seeks to analyse the volume of poems Vapor de foto (2006) written by the young contemporary poet Luciana Romano from Buenos Aires. Romano is also an activist of the politically engaged artist collective Etcétera… founded in the late nineties. Her poetry reveals a certain correlation with the aesthetics of the actions and interventions developed by Etcétera… in the streets and public spaces not only of Argentina but also of Europe. Furthermore, the creation of Vapor de foto is based on the collective’s experiences and practices. Using a methodological approach that combines close reading and a cultural and socio-critical focus, several poems will be exemplarily analysed in order to examine the interrelation between Romano’s style of writing and her activism. Assuming that her poetry, as well as the work of Etcétera…, belongs to a postdictatorial contemporary aesthetics characterized by the complex interplay between dadaistic and surrealistic dis/continuities, this article will focus on the analysis of different forms of relations between text and image.
French-Madagascan colonial history is full of dark chapters. After Madagascar’s independence the French general public forgot the country very quickly. In Malagasies collective memory, the wounds of colonial injustice are still open even if they are generally considered as fady (‘tabooʼ). Désiré Razafinjato is the first Malagasy author writing in French who dares to approach the difficult relations between Malagasy-French and indigenous Malagasy as well as between indigenous Francophiles and indigenous anti-French nationalists. In his tale «Tahiry. From Madagascar to the Algerian djebel, the bitter-fatherland», the narrator speaks about the painful loss of any fatherland for all those Malagasy who during the War of Algeria got involved as French soldiers. Indeed, it is the sad history of the despoliation of an ideal Motherland on the French side and of the refusal of membership in an ancestral fatherland on the Malagasy side. What remains for those ancient French-Malagasy combatants is the feeling of a ‘bitter-fatherlandʼ and the feeling of living in ‘between everywhereʼ in some kind of ‘non-fatherlandʼ.
captar – cap(i)tar, facto – fato: Variation und Wandel bei Plosivsequenzen im Portugiesischen
(2015)
The present study is concerned with the production and perception of the stop consonant clusters /pt/ and /kt/ as well as CVC-Sequences /pVt/ and /kVt/ in European and Brazilian Portuguese (EP and BP, respectively). European and Brazilian Portuguese have the same syllable structure (Bisol 1999: 731, Mateus/d’Andrade 2000: 39), but are postlexically affected by contrary phenomena. After the occurence of phonological processes such as vowel reduction and deletion in European clusters and vowel epenthesis in Brazilian consonant clusters, the difference between lexical consonant clusters and CVC-sequences would be diminished in both varieties, so that EP would realize both as CC, while BP would realize both as CVC. In order to test whether clusters and CVC-sequences can be distinguished in production and perception, we discuss a physiological experiment and a perceptual study with participants of both varieties. The results show less overlap in BP than in EP. The reason for which is seen in the perception of intervocalic epenthetic elements even in lexical clusters in BP and more consonant clusters in EP.
In 2013, three hundred years had passed since the foundation of the Real Academia Española (RAE). The celebrations accompanying this anniversary were extended across the year and came to a closure with the publication of the 23rd edition of the Diccionario de la lengua española in 2014. Spanish media followed the above-mentioned festivities with a detailed coverage. The purpose of this article is to study the image of the RAE conveyed through the media and the Internet, which can be subsumed under the three terms ‘diverse, democratic and modern’. This form of representation is put into a broader context by considering the linguistic politics pursued by the RAE and the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE) under the keyword of panhispanism. Finally, a closer look is taken at El buen uso del español, a student manual published by the RAE and the ASALE in 2013, in relation to panhispanism and prescriptivism.
Die Zeitschrift promptus – Würzburger Beiträge zur Romanistik richtet sich an alle NachwuchswissenschaftlerInnen im Bereich der romanistischen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft sowie der Fachdidaktik. Das Ziel der Zeitschrift ist die Förderung der romanistischen Forschung im Allgemeinen und des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses der Romanistik im Besonderen. Sie versteht sich damit als Impulsgeber für junge romanistische Forschung, ohne sich dabei thematisch zu beschränken.
Hotels are popular settings in European and American literature. They fire readers’ imagination and many of them have a personal relationship to hotels. These institutions are not only alive in the realm of literature but are real existing buildings which have become fixed parts of modern society. Conrad Hilton (1887–1979), founder of the international hotel chain of the same name, was very aware of the glamorous aspects of his field of profession and published his experiences in the autobiography Be My Guest (1957). One copy of the book was placed in each room of the Hilton chain. Due to this Hilton was reaching an enormous audience which inspired other writers to fictionalize Hilton and turn him into a character in their own books. In this paper I will show how Conrad Hilton achieved world-wide fame, partly with the help of his life account. Furthermore, the methods will be explained that he used to present himself as a prototypical American of the Cold War era. I will then focus on two fictional texts, Arthur Hailey’s novel Hotel (1965) and the TV-show Mad Men (2007) by Matthew Weiner, which both incorporated Hilton as a character, yet in very different ways. The aim of this article is to show the potential of celebrity autobiographies to inspire other cultural creations and how authors react very differently to these texts according to their own socio-historical background.