Revue Romane. Langue et littérature - Volume 60, Issue 2, 2025

Abstract

The second-person singular tú in Spanish usually extends its reference to the speaker as well as to the audience, turning into a communicative resource that invests the content with an objective meaning. This investigation analyzes the linguistic elements that help to construct the second-person singular tú as an objectivizing viewpoint. To create such a viewpoint space builders play an essential role. Their function is to create a cognitive viewpoint of the event, placing the content on an imperfective temporal axis which provides it with a regular and continuous meaning. The infinitive, the clitic se, unspecific NPs, the pronoun uno and temporal markers cuando and si are the space builders considered to promote the objectiving meaning of the second-person singular tú.

Abstract

This article provides new observations on où est-ce que (lit. ‘where is-it that’) in headed relatives (i.e. relatives with a nominal antecedent) in Quebec French from two different data sources (corpus research and acceptability judgements). These observations will be interpreted as an indicator for a more advanced stage of grammaticalisation of où est-ce que in this variety of French than in its European counterpart. Moreover, it will be shown that où est-ce que is more advanced in grammaticalisation in Quebec French than qu’est-ce que (lit. ‘what is-it that’). I will argue that this contrast is due to the adverbial function of où est-ce que, which leads to structural ambiguity between appositive and restrictive relative clauses. This ambiguity creates the possibility of structural reanalysis of clauses beginning with où est-ce que as headed relative clauses. I will support this analysis diachronically by comparison with other languages and with a related form oùsque, which is diachronically related to où est-ce que and has a distribution similar to that of où est-ce que, in that it is also used in headed relatives.

The article is structured as follows. In Section 1, I will describe the distribution of où est-ce que and related forms in French both synchronically and diachronically and present the steps of grammaticalisation that have been undergone by où est-ce que. In Section 2, I present new data from Quebec French that will show a more advanced stage of grammaticalisation of où est-ce que in Quebec French. In Section 3, I suggest an informal analysis to explain this new observation. Section 4 provides a detailed analysis of the informal suggestion based on a formal distinction between restrictive and appositive uses of relative clauses. Section 5 offers a summary and discussion.

Abstract

This paper presents and discusses various discourse-linguistic approaches to the description and analysis of the French connector “puisque”, casting some light on crucial lines of research on the role of connectors in the domain of discourse linguistics. Highlighting some limitations of the existing proposals, a new approach that inscribes itself into a linguistic theory of argumentation is presented and illustrated with examples taken from the Europarl Corpus. In our study, which takes Toulmin’s model of argumentation as its starting point, the crucial notions of topoï and enthymeme, in particular, are exploited for the analysis of the discourse-functional role and profile of the French connector “puisque”.

Abstract

This article aims to trace the grammaticalization and recent social diffusion of the intensifier mazo (de). Despite its high frequency in the language of Madrilenian teenagers, this linguistic innovation of the late 20th century has not been studied in detail to date. To this end, a real-time analysis is carried out, based on two highly comparable samples of youth speech data, recorded at two different moments in the 21st century: Corpus Oral de Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid or COLAm (2003–2007) and youth conversations from the Corpus Oral de Madrid or CORMA (2019). The results highlight that mazo (de) passed through a process of grammaticalization from collective noun to multifunctional intensifier, including reanalysis and host class expansion (Traugott, 2008), and bring to light innovative pragmatic uses. The sociolinguistic analysis suggests that the social diffusion of mazo (de) can be understood as a “change from below” (Eckert, 2003).

Abstract

The paper aims to present some lesser-known evidence relevant to the phonological history of French gathered through the bilingual texts in the Opera Jocunda by Giovan Giorgio Alione, published in Asti, Piedmont, Northern Italy, in 1521. In these texts, French is spelled using the graphemic system that the author employed primarily to write in his native Gallo-Italian dialect, thus rendering French phonetically transparent through linguistic comparison. This makes it possible to sketch a phonetic profile of the French known to the author at the end of the Middle French period. The evidence gathered seems to point to a more conservative variety if compared to the commonly reconstructed relative chronology of the phonological history of French. Some hypotheses in a framework of historical sociolinguistics and language contact are put forward to explain this discrepancy.

Abstract

The taste for myth of Pierre Klossowski, Pascal Quignard and Roberto Calasso is expressed, among other things, in their common passion for Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In this article, we are going to analyse the ephemeral relationships established by the metamorphoses of Diana-Artemis: guardian of chastity, formidable seductress, sovereign of the hunt. Thus, we will be trying to emphasise the specific perceptions of the goddess: an involuntary temptress for Klossowski, an exhibitionist predator for Quignard, a pitiless amazon for Calasso. Our goal is to prove, on the one hand, that the fascinating beauty exerts an irrepressible attraction, which incites the desire to penetrate the unknown, the unrevealed, the concealed, and to demonstrate, on the other hand, that her metamorphosis offers the opportunity to go back to the original animality.

This article reviews Études de sémantique et pragmatique en synchronie et diachronie. Hommage à Amalia Rodríguez Somolinos978-2-37741-089-7

This article reviews Einführung in die Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung. Deutsch, Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch978-3-8233-8580-6