Revue Romane. Langue et littérature - Volume 43, Issue 2, 2008

The aim of this paper is to describe the two uses of the French adverb d’une certaine manière (CM), one where it is modifies the VP, and one where it expresses modality. On the basis of the French data base Frantext, we detail, firstly, under which syntactic and semantic circumstances CM appears. In a second stage, it is shown that CM can be considered as a kind of hedge, which concerns a constituent or the whole statement, presented as a value judgment of the speaker, whose bases remain deliberately “vague”.

Normally, European languages are considered to express evidentiality only by lexical means, while numerous non-Indo-European languages present specific grammatical items which function as evidential markers. In recent years, numerous studies have pointed out the existence of evidential markers in various Indo-European languages, included Spanish. This article intends to be another contribution to the study of evidentiality in Spanish. My claim is that generalizations expressed with the particle se, on the one hand, and generalizing constructions with uno, 2nd person singular and 3rd person plural, on the other hand, contrast with each other in terms of evidentiality. While the latter constructions express a generalization based on the speaker’s personal experience, the se-construction refers to established rules or hearsay.

The Spanish particle lo can appear in three different syntactic structures which are described in this paper. Depending on the structure in which it is inserted, lo can have three different functions: pronoun, intensifier and emphatic particle/element. At the same time, the Norwegian definite neutrum particle det is analysed, in order to see to what extent the Norwegian det covers the three functions the Spanish lo can have.

This article is centred around the linguistic information supplied by 16th and 18th century Portuguese grammar books, when, using as a basis the Lisbon variety, these works condemn the use of dialect or popular expressions habitually used. Like Galician, the language spoken in the territories lying to the North of the River Miño did not possess grammatical works until the 19th century, and so the information contained in these Portuguese grammars allows us to approach, with a reasonable degree of reliability, certain features of Middle Galician, a period in which the language, in Galicia, was only used at an oral level and was practically non-existent in any educated or written usage.

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo is a multifaceted novel that incorporates Mexican cultural traits into literature and shapes the concept of Hispanic narration. The novel recreates the dramatic struggle for survival and its intriguing maneuvers. The main characters Pedro Páramo and Susan San Juan implement strategies that bring together realism and fantasy in their respective efforts to control the society and remain free. This essay is based on a specific work and tries to raise questions about humanity in general.

This article aims to chronicle the lyrical trend of realistic affiliation labelled “poetry of experience” that dominated the Spanish literary system of the Eighties, establishing a differentiated norm which integrated the paradigm of new creation. From the perspective granted by a certain historical distance, the examination of that process shows its progressive disintegration during the Nineties, due to the institutionalisation of the paradigm, along with stagnation and epigonism, until the moment when younger poets discuss it and look for a change. At that moment, the poetry of experience stresses the meditative overtones and amplifies the space of realism towards a wider imaginative freedom, whilst transforming its characteristic features, such as narrativity and biographical anecdotes.

Claude Simon’s The Battle of Pharsalus (1969) is a verbal patchwork containing heterogeneous narrative fragments and intertextual inserts that are all integrated into a “jigsaw puzzle” structure. The moving complexity of such a fictional device clearly appears when one studies the quotations from In Search of Lost Time used throughout the novel. A detailed stylistic analysis of those quotations (graphic layout, phrasal structure, insertion modes, metatextual marks …) shows that textual collage may be considered as the expression of a specific literary project resting on a reticular conception of writing, a “perspectivist” view of verbal and nonverbal objects, postmodern aesthetic precepts and the use of transsemiotic references to iconic language.

In this article I try to demonstrate Mario Vargas Llosa’s precocious abilities as author in the first short stories he wrote at nineteen-twenty years of age. My particular focus will be on the consciousness from the unconscious in the creative process of this author. There is an implicit presence of Freud’s lectures in Vargas Llosa’s early production, but my analysis will also touch upon the problem of the unconsciousness of the unconscious, primarily in two short stories from the book Los jefes: “El hermano menor” and “El abuelo”.