Revue Romane. Langue et littérature - Volume 51, Issue 2, 2016

This paper presents a survey of the diachronic corpora available online for the study of the Romance languages. In the first place the makeup of each corpus is described, indicating the number of texts and tokens included and the manner of classification of the documents following chronological, typological and diatopic criteria. After having examined the problems involved in lemmatization and morphosyntactic annotation, the paper will look at query options with a view to possible research into lexicon, morphology, syntax and semantics. A short conclusion will consist in the presentation of the MIDIA corpus, published in June 2014, which represents the first tool devised for the study of Italian from a lengthy diachronic perspective (from the earliest texts to the mid-twentieth century).

These pages describe how Celso Cittadini in 1601 and Scipione Maffei in 1732 explained the loss of case system and the parallel development of the article in the passage from Latin to Italian.

The aim of this paper is to provide a corpus-based analysis of right dislocation constructions in spontaneous spoken French. Previous researches describe these constructions mainly as a possibility to signal continuation or maintenance of an already established topic relation, contrary to left dislocations that signal announcement or establishment of a new topic relation between a referent and a predication. We will show that if topic continuation or maintenance remains a frequent function of right dislocation of noun phrases, it can nevertheless encode new topic relations of referentially active or accessible entities, particularly in interrogative constructions. We will also provide some elements of analysis of right dislocation of pronouns.

This study examines the distribution and function of ‘augments’ within modern Occitan verb paradigms. Most augments in Occitan are reflexes of the Latin ingressive infix -(Ī/Ē)SC-, as in other Romance languages; but Occitan has also developed novel inflectional formatives which display similar behaviour. Like the reflexes of -(Ī/Ē)SC-, these formatives serve as inflectional class markers, and their paradigmatic distribution conforms to existing morphomic templates. The study provides an overview of the diverse paradigmatic distributions of augments encountered in Occitan; proposes an account of the origin of the novel formatives; and discusses the apparent correlation between the spread of augments and the neutralisation of conjugational class distinctions in inflectional desinences.

Although the fourth of Quevedo’s Dreams and Discourses (Sueños y discursos), The World from Within (El mundo por de dentro), has been characterized as one of his most ‘skeptical’ texts, few critics have explored how skepticism functions in the text. Based on my doctoral research that takes into account recent revisions of Renaissance skepticism as a ‘multi-purpose tool’ and examines the text as a Menippean satire, this article offers a new interpretation of the ‘abrupt ending’ of the princeps version where a beautiful woman is compared to a wooden statue. The underlying premise of this interpretation is that through his Menippean satire Quevedo responded to epistemological challenges of the early seventeenth century when the notion of knowledge was subject to great changes.

This article analyzes the representation of nature in Aníbal Núñez’s poetry, halfway between the ecological commitment and the elegy for the environmental disaster. While the poet’s initial books show the parallels between nature-based fables and advertising codes, since Naturaleza no recuperable there is a continuous transformation of landscape into culture, as well as a progressive loss of nature’s real sense and a degradation of its moral substance. From then on, the depiction of nature adopts the descriptive neutrality of historical chronicles (Estampas de ultramar), takes refuge in art (Figura en un paisaje), or is dissolved in the funerary performance of ruins (Alzado de la ruina). More generally, Aníbal Núñez’s symbolic world offers a metaphorical transposition of postmodern vacuum and advances the role that certain topoi (locus amœnus, beatus ille) play in contemporary Spanish poetry.

The way the theme of the oppressor is inscribed in El lugar perdido by the Argentinian Norma Huidobro is analized based on Angenot´s social discourse theory. It is argued that the social discourse about the oppressor enters El lugar perdido by the discourse of gender. The way in which the discourse of gender is absorbed by the novel and inscribed in it functions as a possible way to humanize the figure of the repressor and, ultimately, as an attempt to understand it in a different way than other social discourses, even aesthetic ones, have done until now.