Revue Romane. Langue et littérature - Volume 50, Issue 1, 2015

We signal the retraction of articles signed R.-L. Stephen Barnett published in Revue Romane between 2004 and 2013. It turned out that these articles (a list of which is included) are plagiarized. A brief summary of events is given.

Nous vous signalons le retrait des articles signés R.-L. Etienne Barnett publiés dans la Revue Romane entre 2004 et 2013. Il s’est avéré que ces articles (dont une liste est incluse) sont des plagiats. Un bref résumé des événements permettra au lecteur de mieux comprendre notre décision.

The discourse marker cachái (‘y’see?’) has in a rather short time span become one of the most frequently used in colloquial Chilean Spanish, especially in the talk of young speakers. Being a recent addition to the language, it is not surprising that the history and use of the marker remain in large part to be described. The etymology which is commonly presented (Real Academia Española, 2014, s.v. cachar), according to which cachar is a loan of the English verb catch, is problematic as it fails to account for the uses attested for cachái in modern Chilean Spanish. The present study adopts a historical pragmatic perspective to track the development of the verb, proposing an alternative origin, namely in the verb catar (‘look (for)’, ‘see’). By contrasting this explanation with authentic, situated, uses of cachái, the study argues that such an origin can account for the uses we see today more adequately and convincingly.

The aim of this paper is to examine the distribution of presentative constructions in contemporary Italian and to verify whether their occurrence depends on language external factors. Presentative constructions have been studied particularly by Italian linguists during the Eighties, and were defined as being ‘typical’ of so-called Neostandard Italian. The analysis is based on three corpora of contemporary Italian, viz. two oral corpora (LIP and CLIPS) and one written corpus (CORIS/CODIS).Counter to expectations, presentative constructions are far from frequent in contemporary Italian and therefore cannot be considered as being ‘typical’ of Neostandard Italian. They are, however, attested both in written and oral Italian, with a clear preference for the latter context, in which they are evenly distributed in formal and informal registers. We conclude by discussing the differences between the linguistic phenomena traditionally included into the ‘feature pool’ of Neostandard Italian.

The main aim of this article, based extensively on corpus evidence, is to describe a particular system of constructions denoting metaphorical showing in Italian: PPs introduced by a complex preposition headed by a and containing a deverbal noun, and corresponding PPs of the <;a + infinitive> type. The most frequent forms are a dimostrazione che/di and a dimostrare che/NP. Such expressions are typically, but not exclusively, used as parenthetical comments in written texts. Constructions of this kind, which have gone largely unnoticed by lexicographers and grammarians alike, are widespread in (journalistic) Italian and can be found, to some extent, also in French and, to a lesser degree, in Spanish.

Four types of lies will be analyzed in the novel Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. Each one stems from a specific area: space, time, love and death. These lies are complementary; the first two permeate into the other two and these complement each other forming a circle of ambiguity and uncertainty in the narrative.

By reviewing two famous episodes, in which the Narrator fails to efficiently communicate with Gilberte and Albertine, we attempt to construct a theory, able to explain Marcel’s communicative strategy. In order for a desired meaning to appear in the addressee’s mind, it first behooves the issuer to present the latter with a hermeneutical problem. The article argues that the communication, envisioned by the Narrator, can succeed only if the issuer of the message also becomes an interpreter of himself. As soon as this scattering of Ego happens, a hermeneutic situation presents itself as an operating room, where a fragmented Ego undergoes its reconstitution back into a coherent communicating entity.

The paper focus on the ‘scénario-type’ of Amélie Nothomb’s novels, which consists in a dialectic confrontation between the Protagonist and the Neighbor. This confrontation dramatizes what Slavoj Zizek calls overproximity which is the effect and the sign of the inconsistency of the symbolic order in contemporary societies. In Nothomb’s novels, the Protagonist has to handle the massive and unbearable presence of the Neighbor threatening its subjective structure. With Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek and René Girard, we propose an interpretation of the ontological and ethical meanings of the necessary border between the Protagonist and the Neighbor in the novels of the most popular Belgian writer. The suppression and the resurgence of the border are understood in the larger framework of the antinomic tension between desire and enjoyment (jouisance), which affects the stability of the subjective and social structures.

This study aims at exploring the various semantic effects of the French temporal conjunction avant que (“before”). It shows how avant que, as a simple marker of anteriority, reacts to its linguistic context in such a way that new meanings emerge, which cannot be directly attributed to the conjunction. Via a presuppositional analysis that takes into account factual as well as “counterfactual” or “suspensive” readings of avant que, and through numerous attested examples, it reveals the mechanisms which are responsible for generating specific semantic effects. These effects are divided into three major categories, ranging from preventing (avant que P as “in order that not P” or “in such a way that not P”) to allowing (avant que P as “in order that P”), or deliberating (avant que P as “in order to decide if P”).