Revue Romane. Langue et littérature. International Journal of Romance Languages and Literatures - Volume 52, Issue 2, 2017

La originalidad del localismo dialectal en los diccionarios proporciona información sobre la selección léxica de las distintas comunidades de hispanohablantes. En este estudio se ha diseñado una investigación para medir el grado de originalidad léxica en América, según las marcas diatópicas que aparecen en el Diccionario de Americanismos (DA). Las variables analizadas que inciden sobre la originalidad, son el número total de términos, lexías exclusivas, número de hispanohablantes y esfuerzo recolector. El material seleccionado ha sido la ictionimia vernácula registrada en el DA. Nuestra indagación, de naturaleza cuantitativa, nos ofrece evidentes diferencias entre regiones, como es el alto índice de originalidad de Puerto Rico frente al de Uruguay. Las conclusiones que aportamos quieren ser una contribución a la definición y clasificación del dialectalismo desde el análisis diatópico.

Clitic doubling is the phenomenon in which, in a clause, a NP or a stressed pronoun and a clitic pronoun refer to the same entity and have the same syntactic function. Previous studies on this phenomenon in Spanish observe that it takes place when the elements involved have features such as +preposition and +definiteness that make them prone to topicalization, such as with stressed pronouns ( Silva-Corvalán, 1984 ; Melis and Flores, 2009 ; Vázquez Rozas and García Salido, 2012 ). However, we have found that in 19th and 20th Century Spanish, doubling often occurs with elements that are not typically topical, such as indefinite NPs. On the basis of a sample of the Argentinian variety from the CORDE and CREA corpora we found that doubling in ditransitive clauses has two functions: it can mark topical indirect objects, but it can also flag inverse distributions which have unexpected promotion of the direct object and demotion of the indirect object in the accessibility scale.

This paper focuses on deverbal nominalizations with the suffix –ón in modern Spanish, bearing in mind their morphological, syntactic and semantic properties. The suffix –ón gives rise to three types of nominalizations, according to the event structure of the verbal base: resultant object nominalization (rozón), resultant state nominalization (apagón) and punctual action (empujón). These nominalizations do not inherit the event structure of the verb, so they have few verbal properties. All nominalizations with –ón are countable (even nominalizations built on atelic verb, such as acelerón), and all of them exhibit the same meaning related to the sudden and brusque development of the action. In this sense, the suffix –ón fixes the syntactic and semantic content of the nominalization, so that this suffix is semantically specified and it is opposed to other nominalising suffixes because it denotes punctual actions or results reached once the action is developed suddenly and with brusqueness.

Drawing on Antoine Berman’s theory of translation as a critical act, this article analyzes the Swedish translation of Giovanni Verga's masterpiece I Malavoglia. The actual translation analysis therefore takes as its starting point a pre-analysis that highlights the translator’s individual motives to deviate from the source text. The results show that the Swedish translator has done extensive changes to Verga’s polyphonic novel, giving it a more homogeneous form. Drawing on theoretical ideas on the translator’s unconscious and habitus, the article shows that the translator has downplayed the novel’s expressive and vernacular traits as well as the patriarchal perspectives, emphasizing instead the novel’s religious paths.

The article proposes a new reading of Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique with the intent to combine Postcolonial and Animal Studies, beyond the common emphasis on the notion of victim, and to resist the allegorical interpretations of the novel. Firstly, I demonstrate that during the “administrated island”, Robinson imposes an order based on the correlation among capitalism, colonialism and Oedipal sexuality, as if humanity as such could be reduced to the features of Western societies. Then, I explore how the novel relocates the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, challenging the exclusive identification of alterity to a human face. Finally, I focus on the new relation with otherness (both human and animal) experienced by the two characters: a kind of intersubjectivity based on the play, which is a practice that does not presuppose the knowledge of the other and exceeds the traditional categorical antithesis, such as truth/falsity, good/evil, nature/culture.

This article deals with a comparison between Matilde Serao’s short story “Checchina’s Virtue” ( 1884 ) and the homonymous unpublished theatrical script written by Massimo Franciosa ( 1995 ), of which a summary is provided. The comparison between the source text and the adaptation draws on the debate about the narrativity of drama in which many scholars have engaged in the last decades: Richardson (1987) , Chatman (1990) , Jahn (2001) , Fludernik (2008) and Nünning & Sommer (2008) . The analysis focuses on two forms of diegetic narrativity that appear in the short story, i. e. free indirect discourse and the iterative mode, in order to see how the theatrical script deals with them. The analysis shows that the script preserves the narrative contents of the source text and highlights how diegetic and mimetic narrativity collaborate to the reworking and redistribution of those contents.

This study offers an in-depth analysis of the reception in the Swedish daily press (2010–2014) of three Francophone authors: Crowther, Taïa, and Thúy. Through a new approach combining concepts like consecrational transfers (Casanova), cultural transfer (Espagne), and ideologic functions (Moura), the analysis reveals Sweden’s efforts to become a consecrating pole. Firstly, while stressing the “difference” as a principal feature of the commented literature, Sweden tries to foreground its own national project to jointly promote diversity, migrancy and cohesion. Secondly, comparing the Francophone literature with its own, Swedish critics manage to consecrate literature from another dominated country. Finally, comparisons with more international references leave space for self-consecration and access to a more dominant position on the market. Thus, the transmitted literature is less at stake than the receiving country’s own image.