Revue Romane. Langue et littérature - Volume 48, Issue 2, 2013

Our goal is to analyse the role played by irony, litotes and hyperbole in humour. Our theoretical perspective is that of discurse analysis. We study the different forms of irony in journalistic texts as well as their relation with litotes. We also study the forms and functions of hyperbole, depending on whether it magnifies the positive or the negative. Furthermore, we propose to divide the figures of speech analysed in this paper into three broad categories of polyphonic play : parody, irony and caricature. We take our examples from a sample of newspaper columns published on the French newspaper le Monde between 2000 and 2003 and between 2006 and 2009.

In this paper I will analyze two subordinate clauses which can be frequently found within free indirect reported speech (FIRS, in the paper DIL): relative and causal clauses. After a short illustration of FIRS I will examine the two clauses with an analysis of the passages in FIRS from Italian narrative literature of the XIX century (especially Manzoni and Verga). A relative or a causal clause can recur within a FIRS passage, can open it or can constitute on its own a FIRS passage becoming, respectively, free indirect relative clause (FIRC, in the paper RIL) and free indirect causal clause (FICC, in the paper CIL). FIRC and FICC share two peculiarities: a) They have a rhematic function; b) They are cases of “hypotactizated parataxis” (FIRC and FICC, as subordinate clauses, connect a FIRS passage to the diegesis without the break of the normal FIRS, paratactically juxtaposed to the narratum). For this last peculiarity FIRC and FICC represented two important stylistic means for the novelists of the Realism to attain the impersonality of the author in the novel through a close fusion between the voice of the author and the voice of the characters.

The article compares the use of the so called close apposition (e.g. le Premier ministre israélien Benjamin Netanyahou) with that of the two types of loose apposition (le Premier ministre israélien, Benjamin Netanyahou and Benjamin Netanyahou, le Premier ministre israélien) in a corpus consisting of French and Swedish newspaper articles. It is suggested that, in many cases, rather than being a result of any particular information structure, the choice of apposition depends to a large extent on the form of the expansion in the common noun. There is a clear difference in the use of the close and loose types between French and Swedish texts. In French, the loose appositions are more common. In Swedish, the close apposition is the most frequent construction. This is due to the fact that, prototypically, the expansion of the French noun phrase is positioned after its head, whereas in Swedish, it is normally positioned before its head.

The paper traces evolutionary pathways of various methods of expressing reciprocity found in Old French (12th century) and Old Portuguese (13–15th century) texts. Most of grammaticalization patterns responsible for the emergence of reciprocal markers and documented in human languages are demonstrated to have been active in Old Romance, too. Medieval reciprocal exponents are first compared with their Latin ancestors to show what Romance innovations consisted in and what formal means were retained throughout. Then, an account is given of how the two languages were different from each other. Finally, two suggestions are made on how current grammaticalization theory can be modified so as to grasp more efficiently the origin of reciprocal markers found in European languages.

This article intends to apply Jung’s hypotheses of the collective unconscious and his conceptualization of the archetypes as a theoretical framework to analyze the notion of the feminine in the work of Teresa de la Parra and two additional short stories by María Luisa Bombal and Elena Garro, focusing particularly on the symbolism of the archetypal image of the tree. From a psychological point of view, the image of the tree in these works transforms the unconscious contents of the psyche that is profoundly and properly feminine in her quest to discover the essential female identity through her imaginary consciousness. This creative force (the creative power of the imagination) enables her to connect “intuitions” to “conscious life” and as a result configure her own subjectivity (the maturation of the ego, of the self-consciousness, or what in Jungian terms is known as the individuation process).

From the so-called «fin de siglo» to the thirties some of the Spanish poets relied on the folk song –and more specifically on the «cante jondo» or flamenco– to define an alleged Andalusian soul. In opposition to the cheerful, colourful and folkloric Andalusia described by poets like Reina and Rueda, there are other Modernist authors like Villaespesa, Sánchez Rodríguez, Juan Ramón Jiménez or Darío who refined the literary image of Andalusia from the distinctive notes of sadness or grief, thus initiating a thematic chain which from the twenties extended Lorca’s image of «Andalucía del llanto» under Neopopularism and the Vanguard movement. This trend continued in the next decade, when Cansinos Assens and the Caba brothers placed similar emphasis on tragic Andalusia, based on an analysis of the «cante jondo» in which metaphysical, social and historical aspects were mixed. This paper aims to examine some of the key aspects of the relation between the sadness of the Andalusian song and Spanish poetry in the first third of the 20th century.