Revue Romane. Langue et littérature - Volume 49, Issue 2, 2014

This article explores the history and present state of the Occitan go-past. Also known as the perfet perifràstic, this is a characteristic and well-studied feature of the Catalan grammar (vaig cantar go.1sg.pres.ind-sing ‘I sang’), but its existence in Occitan has been ignored to the extent that Catalan is often erroneously thought to be the only Romance language with a go-past. In this article, we first explore the rise and distribution of the go-past in Old Occitan (ca. 13th to 16th centuries) and then focus on the presence of the construction in the contemporary Occitan dialects of Gascony and Guardia Piemontese (a village in Calabria, Italy). We discuss the semantic and morphological particularities of the construction in some detail for both dialects using data from a variety of (little-known) sources, including, for Guardia Piemontese, our own field data. Finally, we provide arguments for the hypothesis that the go-past developed first in Occitania and subsequently diffused into Catalan-speaking areas.

In this paper, we present the results of a corpus-based synchronic study of the formal and semantic functioning of the French speech-act related referential adjectives actuel and présent. By analyzing different parameters, such as semantic use, position, gradability, coordination and lexicalization, we are able to distinguish between different polysemy and homonymy phenomena related to actuel and présent, to study more in detail their interchangeability capacities for their temporal uses and to show that, with respect to a prototype-based delineation, présent, and in a lesser way actuel, deviate on certain criteria and can be considered as less representative of the speech-act related referential adjective class in French.

This article focuses on the development of the French adverbials au fait, de fait and en fait. Although they share the same origin, the three cognates are not interchangeable in present-day French which suggests that they have followed divergent paths of language change. A contrastive analysis is of interest for several reasons: (1) A comparison of the development of the three cognates can help capture the differences in their use; (2) On a theoretical level, the evolution of au fait, de fait and en fait is of particular interest to the study of the relation between lexicalization, grammaticalization and pragmaticalization. The modern uses of au fait, de fait and en fait are indeed the result of three different grammaticalization processes.

This article examines the evolution of the adverbial phrase en efecto (in truth) and of the adverb efectivamente (truly), which while originating from a common semantic base, have followed different evolutionary processes. Eventually, they have come to share a common function as discursive markers to indicate a confirmation of the discursive message or a reinforcement of an assertion.Our goal is to describe the evolution of the acquisition process for the discursive value of these forms. We also analyze whether these changes are the results of a grammaticalization process and we describe the impact of discursive traditions in the incorporation of certain values. Finally, we show how this evolution is influenced by the paradigm changes caused by the incorporation, elimination or modification of the various lexical units in these forms through out the different stages in their development.

We study and edit a poetic chapbook of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, whose current signature is [R/41101]. Although, through a copy of the Duke of T’Serclaes of Tilly, this issue was already known by several bibliographers since the nineteenth century, the whereabouts of the original of this Sevillian noble had been ignored for decades and might well be the same which now belongs to the aforementioned Biblioteca Nacional. For the first time, we offer a complete description of this chapbook, with the reference to some hitherto unknown works.

The work of Carmine Abate is characterised by the presence of certain thematic structures. Among these the motif of a journey should be emphasised, which plays an important role in the writer’s novel, Scanderberg’s Motorcycle, analysed in the article. Apart from the journey, another key structure appears in the work — that of identity. The aim of the text is to demonstrate the relation between the past and the present. Abate sketches this issue in the light of the influence which a journey exerts on identity.

The discussion on Italian identity has recently been brought to the attention of the public opinion in Italy as an outcome of the so-called “fine della prima Repubblica” (“end of the first Republic”). Literary identity has soon become a core issue, in order to promote a reflection on the idea of Italy independently of its political unity. This essay aims to reconstruct the various positions pro and contra the hypothesis of a literary identity, which can be seen, on the one hand, as an outcome of Risorgimento and Fascist propaganda, but also, on the other hand, as a means to overcome political divides and develop a shared rather than ethnical community.