Revue Romane. Langue et littérature. International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures - Volume 46, Issue 2, 2011

This article tackles the question of point of view carried by lexicon. Whereas this subject is often considered from a paradigmatic perspective, this article proposes to describe it from a syntagmatic perspective. The word guerre (war) and the three syntagms la guerre (de X) avec Y, la guerre (de X) contre Y or la guerre entre X et Y are described in a press corpus. It appears that these syntagms configure a way of seeing the conflict relation (as reciprocal or not). Whereas at a paradigmatic level, the locutor is often considered as an explanatory factor for point of view, this study of point of view at a syntagmatic level points out different factors regulating occurrences: at a linguistic level, the characteristics of the prepositions, from which depend how far away X is from Y, and at a mixed textual and referential level, the salience of the event.

This article explores the interaction of Tense, Aspect and Modality in French, Italian and Spanish, languages in which Modals are inflected as main verbs. Imperfective modals are a-averidical, as modals are expected to be, but when they appear in a perfective tense, unexpected entailments and implicatures appear. For example, the following example is three-way ambiguous in Spanish; the corresponding example is two way-ambiguous in Italian and French:P. may have won, could have won, managed to win the raceThe three readings, epistemic, counterfactual and implicative, are derived from the alternative orderings of three heads, Tense, Aspect and Modal; any ordering in which Modal scopes over Tense is out on semantic grounds; these leaves three possible orderings which result in the three readings. In the epistemic construal, Modal has scope over Tense and Aspect, which are read on the infinitive. As a result, Modal Evaluation Time is at Utterance Time and the lower infinitive is Past and Perfective. There is no interaction between Modal and the other two heads and averidicality is the result. In the counterfactual reading,Tense scopes over Modal, which in turn scopes over Aspect: the result is a past Modal Evaluation; Perfective Aspect makes the interval in which verifying instances of the lower event are sought bounded, which contributes settledness. These are the crucial ingredients for counterfactuality. When Tense and Aspect are both read on the modal, the lower event is entailed and an implicative reading ensues. Italian and French do not have the counterfactual reading because their only surviving perfective past is a morphological perfect which, since it involves a resulting state, is incompatible with counterfactuality. Spanish perfecto also lacks this reading.

In the Nouvelles françaises, the designation of characters is remarkable for its high frequency of indefinite expressions. Many occurrences of such expressions are non-standard, insofar as they aim at referents which have already been identified and named. On the basis of the semantic implications inherent to indefinite descriptions, our study aims at understanding the discursive effect produced by these turns of phrase and at accounting for their choice within the frame of the literary genre used by Segrais.

This paper describes the syntactic behaviour, the different possible semantic values and some pragma-textual functions of dependent clauses introduced by come in contemporary Italian. These clauses may occur as arguments of a predicative element (a verb, or a relational noun or adverbial element) or as sentence margins — i.e. adverbial clauses, in traditional terms: in the first case they are embedded as objective/subjective clauses or indirect wh-questions, with a modal meaning ; in the second case the subordinating conjunction come expresses an inter-clausal link between the two connected propositions, with a modal or “analogy” comparative meaning, but it may be also inferentially interpreted in a range of other values. Finally, at the discourse level these clauses may be used by the speaker to comment upon his/her utterance, and assume an inter- or intra(meta)-textual function.

Montaigne prefaces the works of Etienne de la Boétie with a letter that Montaigne supposedly wrote shortly after the sudden death of his friend, whose last enigmatic words to Montaigne were: “make a place for me”. A close examination of the intertexts and rhetoric of the letter reveals that it can be read as a failed attempt by Montaigne to respond to his friend’s wish. The letter, indeed, fails to offer a true literary place to his friend who ceased to be a privileged addressee or reader, to become an absent object of discourse mentioned in the third person. Montaigne will try to “make a place” for his dead friend elsewhere, while writing his Essais, by developing a polyphonic mode of writing functioning as a substitute to the lost friendship. It will be argued that in the Essais, friendship, more that a mere content of discourse, becomes a form of expression.

The first chapters of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio were printed in 1881, the same year as the publication of the novel I Malavoglia, Giovanni Verga’s masterpiece of verismo. While every critical reader of Verga’s realism has pointed out his particular narrative interpretation of evolution, Collodi’s has novel very seldom been connected to the theories of evolution, even if Darwin’s ideas were highly present in the public debate in Florence during the last decades of the 19th century. The reasons for this silence are primarily to be found in the genre of Pinocchio, in the fact that it is children literature, and therefore primarily related to the narrative mechanisms of the fairy tales and pedagogical literature. Focusing on Pinocchio, the article discusses to which degree Darwinism can be traced in Collodi’s literature for children, and questions if the continuous metamorphoses of Pinocchio can be read also in connection with the naturalist conception of the literary characters as unstable, in continuous evolution, and not only as part of the mechanisms of fairy tales and mythological narratives.

This article deals with adjective-to-noun conversion in French, namely the case of -aire derived lexemes. It is argued here that the intermediate and hybrid status of certain bi-categorial adjective/noun items can be viewed as an intermediate theoretical step on the way to actual conversion; we call this general process “transcategorisation” rather than “conversion”. After describing the two main types of -aire derivation, and the corpus constituted by adjectives and bi-categorial -aire items, we suggest two adjective-to-noun “transcategorisation” models according to the two types of -aire derived lexemes: a model “A”, where the fundamental nominal value is abstract and refers to a generic or collective notion, such as l’alimentaire “alimentary stuff”; and a model “B”, involving ellipsis, where the nominal value is concrete and refers to a class of human individuals or objects.