Revue Romane. Langue et littérature. International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures - Volume 50, Issue 2, 2015

An understudied property of Spanish grammar is the possibility of obtaining a directional reading with a PP introduced by con ‘with’, as in Ven con papá ‘Come to daddy’. This work explores this construction taking into account both the properties of the verb and the prepositional phrase, identifying as one of the restrictions that the preposition must in such cases introduce an animate noun; this relates such cases to standard Differential Object Marking (DOM). The proposal, which closely follows the analyses of DOM based on animacy, is that con is able to grammaticalise the [person] property of an animate noun.

This article presents an analysis of synchronic variation and diachronic change in verbal agreement with the French noun foule. This noun, like many collective nouns in French and other languages, can show variation between singular and plural verbal agreement (la foule des habitants exulteSING de joie dans les rues vs. une foule de gens pressés s’attardentPLU). A novel combination of data, including data from sociolinguistic interviews, a gap-fill exercise, and a corpus of written French, is used to investigate this variation and change, to elucidate some of the factors that play a role in this type of agreement, and to examine the differences between this form used with the definite and indefinite determiner (la foule vs. une foule). Some theoretical issues concerning the definition of collective nouns are also addressed.

This study examines forms and functions of higher-order anaphora in a corpus of Italian news reports. Quantitative analysis shows a correlation between the size of the text and the subtype of anaphora (anaphoric encapsulation is more frequent in shorter texts, strict coreference in longer ones). A very common pattern of encapsulation is realised by the clitic lo as the topical object of a verb of saying, with the function of ascribing the news to an external source. As far as lexical encapsulations are concerned, information structure and syntactic form display unexpected results: non-topical and definite NPs outnumber topical and demonstrative ones. Finally, the relation between anaphora and the logical dimension of texts is highlighted through the analysis of relational encapsulations.

In the Canary Islands, the Spanish Atlantic regional lexicon shows resemblance to the lexicon from Andalusia and west mainland Spain. This shared vocabulary is a result of the common history of these varieties since the sixteenth century. This research aims at finding Spanish Atlantic common vocabulary, a superdialect understood as encompassing the Spanish of Spain and America, from which we have no numerical data. Canarian Spanish shows many common Hispanic voices from all the different areas and becomes a case study. The research is designed with a quantitative methodology applied to a corpus formed by different dialect dictionaries. The results show evidence of a Koine in several stages through the analysis of shared voices and the verification that Andalusian Spanish has not been the only means of dissemination.

In the last years of the Spanish dictatorship and transition to democracy, the journal Antorcha de Paja developed an intense work on the Spanish culture from a position of rebelliousness and heterodoxy. Forty years after its appearance, we analyze in this article the references to the cultural conditions and the sociopolitical context where it is developed. The study starts from the editorials published in each number of the journal. A bibliographical review of the contributions of other experts in the topic is also carried out.

In this paper we analyze Salomé de chacra, a play written by the very renowned Argentinian dramatist Mauricio Kartun. We intend to make a reading of this work based on the irony that arises from the oscillation between the piece and other texts. To study the dialogue that the play establishes with other texts we review some of its relations of transtextuality linked in the piece to metathatricality. We argue that Salomé de chacra, in its incorporation of the ironic difference based on transtextuality and its relationship with metatheatricality, moves away from a passive reception of the myth and translates it to local circumstances. From this translation and thanks to the author’s own poetics, the piece allows an approach to a worldview of Argentina’s history and an unmasking of some of its underlying values.