Revue Romane. Langue et littérature - Volume 58, Issue 2, 2023

Firstly, this paper aims to provide new theoretical insights in the study of literary symbolism with the support of Relevance Theory, Lexical Pragmatics and some contributions of second-generation cognitive sciences. Specifically, it proposes that the meaning of literary symbol consists on the tension between a “literal” meaning and a not paraphrasable abstract meaning. Furthermore, literary symbol needs of a specific communicative context: the “symbolic reading”, whose features are defined.

In order to analyze the meaning of literary symbol a perspective close to contextualism has been taken. So, we consider that meanings are underdeterminated and context is always needed to obtain them. The tension between the literal and the abstract meaning is explained with the aid of Rayo´s grab bag model of language mastery and Relevance Theory accounts of metaphor comprehension.

Lastly, this framework is applied to the analysis of Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s works, with special attention to his permutation poetry.

Les œuvres d’Édouard Levé sont encadrées par un dispositif de lecture qui nous permet de les situer en rapport avec la biographie de l’auteur, de dégager les principaux traits de sa poétique, de formuler des hypothèses génétiques. Ses travaux se révèlent ainsi d’une grande cohérence, comme autant de variations sur une série de gestes et de questionnements à la fois très simples et très radicaux.

En s’inspirant largement du Procédé de Raymond Roussel Levé a fondé une partie de son œuvre sur une poétique des décalages consistant à brouiller les rapports des mots aux images. Cette poétique est mise en œuvre dans trois séries Homonymes, Angoisse et Amérique, produites par une même contrainte linguistique et des protocoles de réalisation semblables, mais chacune répond à des attitudes et des effets différents de ces contraintes et de ces protocoles. Il s’agit dans Angoisse de créer une fiction, dans Homonymes d’interroger le panthéon culturel et dans Amérique d’offrir un négatif de l’american dream.

In this article we focus on the multimodal novel, a genre category with virtually no tradition in Portuguese literary theory and criticism. By exploring multiple strategies of plurissemiotic convergence, multimodal narratives aren’t restricted to verbal expression, as conventionally associated with literary fiction, but creatively resort to different modes and/or media, which synergistically cooperate with the printed word in the production of literary meaning. In the light of the theoretical framework laid down by the thriving field of multimodal narratology, we propose a reading of Hífen (2021), the latest novel by Portuguese writer Patrícia Portela, undoubtedly one of the contemporary novelists in whose fiction multissemiotic cross-fertilization is more blatantly explored.

In this article we study the alternation between the two most prominent Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions, viz. the Syntactic Inversion Construction (henceforth: SIC), e.g. Arriva il treno (‘The train is arriving’), and the Presentational Cleft (henceforth: PC), e.g. C’è il treno che arriva (‘The train is arriving’). Based on the existing literature on the two constructions and drawing inspiration from a number of cognitive-functional hypotheses pertaining to constraints on the amount of referentially new constituents that can be conveyed in a single clause, we put forward the hypothesis that Italian language users are more likely to prefer the PC over the SIC if the utterance involves a high number of referentially new constituents. To assess this hypothesis, we constructed a pilot experiment consisting of a 100-split forced choice task that was administered by means of an online questionnaire to 66 native speaker participants. The results of the experiment indicate that the preference for the PC indeed increases if the number of referentially new constituents is higher. This is however not the only factor involved in the alternation and the preference of the language users seems not only to be determined by the number of referentially new constituents, but also by their syntactic status.

The first- and second-person plural oblique pronuns in modern standard Italian are ci and vi; other varieties of Italo-Romance present ne (rarely ni) and ve. The pronominal clitics ci, ne and vi are often identified etymolo­gically with the local adverbs ci, ne and vi, reflecting Latin (*)hince, inde and ibi. According to a competing view only ci has an adverbial origin, whereas the pronominal clitics ne and vi reflect Latin nōs and uōs. In this study I present the material and analyse it historically. I conclude that the latter hypothesis is more plausible: it was precisely the accidental merger of pronominal ne and vi (from Latin nōs and uōs) with adverbial ne and vi (from Latin inde and ibi) that triggered the replacement of ne with ci (from Latin (*)hince).

Les énoncés passifs ont traditionnellement fait l’objet, en français, d’études descriptives visant à distinguer les emplois des auxiliaires être et se faire (Tesnière 1988; Le Goffic 1993; Riegel et coll. 1994; Le Bellec 2014). L’espagnol possède deux auxiliaires formellement équivalents : ser et hacerse. Or, à la différence du français, leur emploi n’est pas concurrent puisque hacerse est sémantiquement restreint à l’expression d’actions bénéfiques (e.g., Se hizo masajear la espalda ; Il s’est fait masser le dos). L’objectif de notre étude est de comparer les moyens grammaticaux et lexicaux utilisés en français et en espagnol pour thématiser le patient dans des actions désagréables, à l’oral. Nos résultats montrent que les locuteurs francophones emploient le passif dans 59,3% des réponses, alors que les hispanophones préfèrent des conceptualisations à la voix active où le patient-victime est marqué sous le cas grammatical d’un objet (37,5%). Au sein des conceptualisations passives, le français montre une préférence pour se faire + infinitif (78,9%) alors qu’en espagnol le patient-victime est thématisé à l’aide du complément d’objet d’affectation introduit par la préposition « a » (58,8%). Notre étude montre que la thématisation du patient-victime est un trait distinctif entre ces langues et suggère, dans ce domaine conceptuel, une saillance de la perspective passive pour le français.

This conversation analytic study aims to describe the actions performed by speakers of Italian and Trevigiano – a northern Italian dialect – by using the particle dai in everyday conversations. Our analyses draw on a corpus of formal and informal phone calls, where dai appears as preface and at the end of turns that initiate new courses of action, at the end of some responsive turns (or Turn-Constructional Units) and in post-expansions (that is, turns in third position). The actions embodied by these turns – requests, proposals and assessments – have in common the momentary deontic imbalance in favor of the speaker, who tells, asks or proposes to the coparticipant to do something. The particle also accompanies assessments of events to which the speaker has no direct experience (thus from an epistemically subordinate position). This study highlights the fuzziness of the boundaries between deontic and epistemic rights in everyday talk.