[, IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature]

This volume, which can be considered as a follow-up publication to Pusch & Wesch (2003), contains ten studies on verbal periphrases in a wide array of Romance languages, both in a synchronic and in a historic perspective. Thus, this collective volume addresses the Romance verbal periphrastic system as a whole. The aim of the contributions is twofold: on the one hand, the authors intend to enrich the knowledge about the inventory of verbal periphrases of Romance languages, both in descriptive and analytical terms. On the other hand, the volume seeks to provide new insights for the study of the grammatical, pragmatic, and cognitive foundations of verbal periphrases, in order to enlarge our comprehension of their genesis, their evolution and their usage. Languages treated in the contributions include Catalan, (European) French, Friulian, (European) Portuguese, Romanian, (European) Spanish, and Catalan Sign Language (LSC).

What was a hero in Classical Antiquity? Why is it that their characteristics have transcended chronological and cultural barriers while they are still role models in our days? How have their features changed to be embodied by comic superheroes and film? How is their essence vulgarized and turned into a mass consumption product? What has happened with their literary and artistic representation along centuries of elitist Western culture?

This book aims at posing these and other questions about heroes, allowing us to open a cultural reflection over the role of the classical world in the present, its meaning in mass media, and the capacity of the Greek and Roman civilizations to dialogue with the modern world. This dialogue offers a glimpse into modern cultural necessities and tendencies which can be seen in several aspects, such as the hero’s vulnerability, the archetype’s banalization, the possibility to extend the heroic essence to individuals in search of identities – vital as well as gender or class identities. In some products (videogames, heavy metal music) our research enables a deeper understanding of the hero’s more obvious characteristics, such as their physical and moral strength.

All these tendencies – contemporary and consumable, contradictory with one another, yet vigorous above all – acquire visibility by means of a polyhedral vehicle which is rich in possibilities of rereading and reworking: the Greco-Roman hero. In such a virtual and postmodern world as the one we inhabit, it comes not without surprise that we still resort to an idea like the hero, which is as old as the West.

La integración de la pronunciación en el aula de ELE es una obra colectiva de 23 especialistas que abordan la enseñanza de la pronunciación del español como lengua adicional desde distintas perspectivas con el fin de enriquecer su didáctica. El objetivo es mostrar que la pronunciación encuentra su lugar en el aula de lenguas integrada con los contenidos y destrezas presentes en la enseñanza de idiomas, desde la ortografía, el léxico y la gramática hasta la pragmática y las actividades comunicativas de la lengua. Este libro incluye, además, diversas consideraciones sobre metodología de enseñanza, evaluación, tecnología y factores sociales y afectivos que interactúan con el aprendizaje de la pronunciación del español. Todos los capítulos ofrecen una panorámica de su área de especialidad que contiene la investigación más reciente sobre pronunciación junto con recomendaciones de buenas prácticas docentes para llevar al aula de ELE, estableciendo un fructífero puente entre los estudios sobre este tema y la didáctica del español.

This is a collective work by 23 specialists that addresses the teaching of Spanish pronunciation as an additional language from various perspectives to enhance its instruction. The aim is to show that pronunciation belongs in the language classroom, integrated with the content and skills present in language teaching, from spelling, vocabulary, and grammar to pragmatics and communicative activities. Furthermore, the book includes considerations on teaching methodology, assessment, technology, and social and affective factors that influence the learning of Spanish pronunciation. Each chapter offers an overview of its area of expertise, containing the latest research on pronunciation along with recommendations for best teaching practices in the ELE classroom, establishing a valuable bridge between studies on this subject and the didactics of Spanish.

If, as we believe, the history of languages is the history of the construction of an ideal artefact that permits a specific interpretation of the linguistic reality and helps to approve and assimilate a certain zone of diversity, enabling the accumulation of collective historical knowledge and making us identify it with a social community and a territory, then it must be agreed that languages are extremely complex entities.

The new linguistic diversity that cultural globalisation and recent population movements have installed in most traditional linguistic territories has probably put the ideology of the national language into a state of crisis and, as a consequence, has made the ancient, intrinsic diversity of all languages visible, at least to the extent that this is still possible.

Nowadays, then, the old linguistic diversity of dialects, of parlances, of local lexicons and the cultural forms that are reflected in these, of varieties and previously unsuccessful linguistic entities has been given a new opportunity in a world where the cohesion of societies and the welfare of citizens must be guaranteed using all available means. Looked at this way, the intricacy of languages may even open up an opportunity for local economic and social development.

Metapragmatics of Humor: Current research trends contributes to a new area in the pragmatics of humor: its conception as a metapragmatic ability. The book collects thirteen chapters organized into three parts: Revisions and applications of General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) in a metapragmatic context; Metapragmatic awareness of humor across textual modes; and Metapragmatic practices within the acquisition of humor. Thus, this book provides an up-to-date panorama of this field, where metapragmatic abilities are described in adults as well as in children, on humorous and non-humorous genres — jokes, cartoons, humorous monologues, parodies, conversation, Twitter —, and using several approaches, such as GTVH, multimodality, conversational analysis, eye-tracking methodology, etc.

This is an innovative and distinctive comparative monograph about new word creation in the different varieties of Catalan. In eight chapters, it provides a panoramic analysis of the neologisms documented by the NEOXOC network. Each chapter is dedicated to the qualitative and quantitative analysis, as well as the comparative territorial analysis, of neologisms, differentiated by formation sources: suffixation, prefixation, neoclassical compounding, vernacular compounding and syntagmatic compounding, Spanish loanwords, English loanwords, truncation and semantic change. Two annexes contain the neologisms cited as well as a sample of the data collected by NEOXOC from a corpus during 2008-2010, thus establishing a link with previous studies carried out by the Observatori de Neologia. This book is of interest to scholars of the Catalan language and to anyone involved in lexical neology, or in more specific fields such as morphology or lexical semantics. Moreover, the innovative approach (based on the analysis of diatopic variation in Catalan lexical neology) makes it relevant for those who are interested in the evolution of languages, linguistic variation and language planning. The chapters are written in Catalan, with extensive English summaries.

This book is an enquiry into memory in the Western world. Specifically, memory is the framework of culture, because it links the present to the past - or tradition - and projects it into the future. For this reason, any work focusing on memory involves a double challenge: (1) to reveal the origin of concepts and (2) to glimpse the course of thoughts.

This is the case of the present volume, in which the authors make several tastings of Europe's intellectual heritage, by taking into account both the Greek origin of this legacy and its relevance for understanding the European philosophical heritage.

In particular, these papers focus on the Aristotelian tradition, the true keystone of Europe, and on other currents of thought that have also played an essential role in the intellectual evolution of the Old Continent. In the latter field, there are contributions, for instance, on philosophical-religious traditions such as Orphism or on certain fundamental aspects of Neoplatonism both in the Classical World and in Christian authors.

The volume concludes with various works on the survival of these intellectual trends from the Renaissance to the present day. Consequently, this work offers the opportunity to delve deeper into some of the aspects that define Western civilisation, observed both from its origin and its evolution over the centuries.

The volume contains papers in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and English.

Este libro es una indagación en la memoria del mundo occidental. Específicamente, la memoria es el armazón de la cultura, porque liga el presente al pasado —o tradición— y lo proyecta al futuro. Por ello, toda obra centrada en la memoria entraña un doble reto: (1) revelar el origen de los conceptos y (2) atisbar el rumbo de los pensamientos.

Este es el caso del presente volumen, en el que realizan diversas catas en el patrimonio intelectual europeo. Lo hace teniendo en cuenta tanto el origen griego de ese legado como su relevancia para comprender el acervo filosófico europeo.

En concreto, se centra en la tradición aristótelica, verdadera clave de bóveda de Europa, y en otras corrientes de pensamiento que también han jugado un papel esencial en la evolución intelectual del viejo continente. En éste último ámbito hay contribuciones, por ejemplo, sobre tradiciones filosófico-religiosas como el orfismo o sobre determinados aspectos fundamentales del neoplatonismo en el mundo clásico y en autores cristianos.

Concluye el volumen con diversos trabajos sobre la pervivencia de esas tendencias intelectuales desde el renacimiento hasta nuestros días.

En consecuencia, esta obra ofrece la oportunidad de profundizar en algunos aspectos que definen nuestra civilización, observados tanto desde su origen como desde su evolución a lo largo de los siglos.

This volume gathers chapters related to the condition of women in the ancient novel. To broaden the perspective, it integrates not only papers dealing with the Greek and Roman novel as a literary genre in its own right, but also as a historical document involving aspects as diverse as history, archaeology, sociology and the history of law. The twenty-six contributions in this volume have been divided into thematic blocks, based on the different approaches that the authors have adopted to tackle the subject. The first block is about realia – the reality in which the fiction has been conceived. The second block focuses on the legal problems that can be deduced from the plots of the novels. The third block encompasses deals with the Greek and Roman novel from the point of view of classical philology, literary criticism and literary theory, with chapters dedicated to the tradition of the ancient novel, both in our most immediate cultural area (Middle Ages, Spanish Golden Age) and in other contexts, whether Indo-European (India, Persia) or of a different origin.

This volume contributes a wider approach to word formation processes and sheds light on some unsolved issues. While the formal relationships established between the different constituents of a complex word have been analyzed in great depth, the semantic links have received little dedication. In order to complete the analysis, it is necessary to pay attention to the semantic properties associated to verbalization. The main purpose of the book is to integrate both the semantic proposals and the formal perspectives concerning word formation. This theoretical aim becomes the framework to study several mechanisms of lexical creation and neologisms. Furthermore, word formation is presented as a new source for Applied Linguistics. Although the volume uses Spanish as a starting point, it means to delimit formation patterns which may also be productive in other languages. This book is sure to become an important reference in the controversial field of word formation.