Status Quaestionis

Old Language(s), New Technologies: Corpus Linguistics and European Languages in the Renaissance, 1400s-1600s

2023-12-21T20:51:19+00:00

Edited by Fabio Ciambella

Elsa Chaarani Lesourd, Le roman kaléidoscope. Confessions d’un Italien d’Ippolito Nievo, Aix-en-Provence, Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2022, 298 pp., € 22,00

2023-12-22T08:57:13+00:00

L’attenzione che Elsa Chaarani Lesourd dedica a Ippolito Nievo in questo volume ha origine negli ultimi anni del secolo scorso, quando la studiosa ha incominciato a occuparsi dello scrittore friulano, dopo aver affinato lo sguardo sul panorama letterario di poco anteriore agli anni in cui visse e operò l’autore delle Confessioni, lavorando a una tesi di dottorato sul romanzo storico italiano minore (1822-1834), discussa presso l’Università di Nancy, dove attualmente insegna.

Michela Compagnoni, I mostri di Shakespeare. Figure del deforme e dell’informe. Roma, Carocci 2022, 172 pp., € 19,00

2023-12-22T09:01:50+00:00

Premiato con il premio AIA/Carocci Doctoral Dissertation Prize 2021, questo volume di Michela Compagnoni è un gradito contributo al dibattito critico sul concetto di mostruosità che si è sviluppato in modo più intenso negli ultimi decenni.

Luca Marangolo, La nascita del dramma moderno. In Shakespeare, Calderón, Racine, Lessing, Milano-Udine, Mimesis, 2023, 420 pp., € 32,00

2023-12-22T09:07:25+00:00

Con un corposo lavoro che tenta una definizione del genere letterario nella sua evoluzione simbolico-formale, Luca Marangolo si inserisce nella folta ed eterogenea tradizione di studi sulla tragedia. L’autore lo fa lavorando, di fatto, sulla lunga durata: da Sofocle a Lessing; ma la tragedia attica e il dramma borghese, rispettivamente nel primo e nell’ultimo capitolo, sono utilizzati come assi prospettici per focalizzare soprattutto le tre esperienze canoniche nella produzione teatrale della prima modernità: Shakespeare, Calderón, Racine.

Giampiero Moretti, Estetica e comparatistica, Brescia, Morcelliana, 2021, 142 pp., € 13,00

2023-12-22T09:17:54+00:00

Tutti gli scritti di Giampiero Moretti – autore ben noto alla germanistica, in particolare per quanto riguarda lo studio del periodo romantico – testimoniano di un magistero intellettuale segnato da un confronto incessante non solo con gli scrittori tedeschi tra fine Settecento e primo Ottocento, ma specialmente con le questioni teoriche sottese al campo disciplinare dell’estetica, che Moretti ha sempre concepito come una nozione filosofica in senso ampio, non solo in chiave storico-artistica.

Emanuela Piga Bruni, La macchina fragile. L’inconscio artificiale fra letteratura, cinema, televisione, Roma, Carocci, 2022, 180 pp., € 19,00

2023-12-22T09:21:54+00:00

La macchina fragile rappresenta un esempio virtuoso di integrazione critica multidisciplinare fra i consciousness studies, i science fiction studies e l’intelligenza artificiale. In questo volume, Piga Bruni propone un’indagine della coscienza riarticolata attraverso l’ipotesi del postumano, a partire dalla trattazione di una selezione di testi letterari, cinematografici, televisivi e d’animazione del genere sci-fi.

Paolo Tortonese, L’uomo in azione. Letteratura e mimesis da Aristotele a Zola. Roma, Carocci, 2023, 196 pp., € 22,00

2023-12-22T09:24:55+00:00

A fine Settecento Schiller confessava a Goethe di essersi reso conto che, fino a quel momento, Aristotele era stato capito male. Il libro di Tortonese – L’uomo in azione. Letteratura e mimesis da Aristotele a Zola, Roma, Carocci, 2023 – parte da una convinzione simile e tenta di fare chiarezza attorno alla nozione di mimesis. Ripercorrendo il tortuoso percorso di questo concetto, l’autore interroga un’idea fortemente instabile partendo dal X libro della Repubblica di Platone e arrivando al Naturalismo francese.

Les langues gbè dans les premiers écrits européens

2023-12-22T08:04:22+00:00

This article looks at the early contacts between Portuguese and Spanish on the one hand, and the populations of the West African coastal area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria on the other, and more specifically at the first two descriptions, in European languages, of the Gbe languages. The former date back to 1658; it bears no author’s name and is entitled: Doctrina christiana; y explicacion de sus Misterios, en nuestro idioma español, y en lengua Arda. Our source is its reproduction in Labouret and Rivet (1929). The latter, by Antonio da Costa Peixoto, dates back to 1741 and is entitled Obra nova de Lingoa Geral de mina traduzida, ao nosso Igdioma. Our source is its reproduction by Silveira (1944). The article deals with the difficulties inherent in these writings, aside the historical interest they represent. The first text, which announces the language of Arda, confuses the glossonym with the name of the Kingdom of Allada, whereas the second text clearly identifies the glossonym. Furthermore, the transcription (segmental and suprasegmental) of the texts in the two documents studied is a source of semantic and syntactic disturbances. The lack of explicit transcription rules adds to the impossibility of highlighting them due to the irregularity of the transcriptions. The methods used are based on the search for semantic equivalents in several current Gbè languages.

“Nice Blighty!” The linguistic representation of the First World War soldier in The Trench

2023-12-22T08:13:01+00:00

Trench talk, the slang used by British soldiers during World War One, has numerous complexities and nuances still unexplored. This article seeks to investigate the linguistic representation of this jargon in the film The Trench (1999). By analysing the linguistic features attributable to trench talk, the present study enquires into how these contribute to the fictional representation of the British soldier in this film. The use of trench talk in this case study fulfils different filmic functions such as “character revelation” and “adherence to the code of realism” (Kozloff, 2000).

L’ornitologo visionario. Lo sperimentalismo ecologico di Paolo Volponi

2023-12-22T08:16:33+00:00

This article first reconstructs the presence and functions of ornithological figures in Volponi’s entire oeuvre, and then focuses on the character of the “Imitator of the Songs of All Birds”, from Il pianeta irritabile (1978), offering a meta-artistic interpretation of his role, supported by the comparison with potential literary models (from St. Francis to Leopardi) and philosophical sources (particularly Marcuse). After having formulated such hypotheses, I analyze the dialectic between language and the body in Il pianeta, that is, the oscillation between the rejection of verbal communication and the goal of its refoundation, already partially achieved by the author through a ‘materialistic writing’, innovative both stylistically and thematically. In an effort to elude (political) repetition, Volponi thus creates a narrative text that experiments with literary structures and genres – an uncanny, ‘unthinkable’, and highly relevant ecological romance.

How passive voice gets affected by popularization. A quantitative analysis of scientific research articles and university press releases

2023-12-22T08:31:17+00:00

The passive voice has been explored for its communicative potential offered by the possibility to omit the agent, which makes it suitable for both ideological and academic discourse. Research has shown that the passive voice is a characterizing element of academic discourse, but there is a gap in the research concerning the incidence of the passive voice in popularized science discourse. In this paper, the presence and form of the passive voice are analyzed and compared in two bijective English corpora: one comprising published research papers (n = 30) and the other their respective popularized versions published as press releases on university websites (n = 30). The results of the quantitative analysis show statistically significant differences with regard to the amount of passive voice constructions between the two corpora; the difference in the use of the be-passives is also significant; the differences of get-passives, conjoined passives, and bare passives are not statistically significant between the two corpora. Additionally, some novel tendencies seem to arise: the scientific texts present instances of get-passives, which might point toward a contamination between academic language and the objects of analysis, such as text corpora, interview transcripts, or other verbal materials analyzed in the articles.

The Intersemiotic Journey of André Marie de Chénier, through Umberto Giordano, Mario Martone and Audio Description

2023-12-22T08:36:20+00:00

The story of André Marie de Chénier is real and well known: he was a poet and a political journalist martyrized during the French Reign of Terror. The way his story is conveyed in Umberto Giordano’s opera Andrea Chénier is realistic, to such an extent that it is often classified as a masterpiece of verism. Mario Martone’s new reading of the opera for his 2017 production of Andrea Chénier is faithful both to the story of the poet and to Umberto Giordano’s portrayal offered in his opera, first performed at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Italy, in 1896. Martone’s reading was staged at Teatro alla Scala for the season première and revamped in 2023, also through a new form of intersemiotic translation, i.e., audio description for the blind and partially sighted. The thread that runs through all these rewritings and retellings is strong, complex and rich. It is precisely this complex journey from history to audio description that is at the core of this essay, with an eye to faithfulness in intersemiotic translation and the creation of timeless texts precisely through faithful readings and transfers.

Raising young learners’ ELF-awareness: An intercultural telecollaboration between Italian and Kyrgyz students

2023-12-22T08:40:14+00:00

This article provides an overview of the strategies aimed at raising young learners’ awareness of English as a lingua franca (ELF), in order to reflect, in language pedagogy, on the profound transformation that English has undergone in recent decades. The main purpose of our research is to explore the efficiency of innovative intercultural activities like telecollaboration in developing young learners’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and ELF-awareness. For the purposes of this research, a project entitled Intercultural telecollaboration: Italy-Kyrgyzstan was conducted by the authors during the school year 2022-2023. This study involved the design and implementation of web-mediated collaborative tasks for an international community of practice (CoP) of young learners, which comprised twenty-six Italian and fourteen Kyrgyz same age pupils (10-11 years old). We concluded that a blended approach that combines ELF and sociocultural theory (SCT) should be integrated into young learners’ English syllabus and should become an integral part of teacher education programmes.

Appunti sulla rappresentazione spaziale. Il Veneto disegnato da Giosetta Fioroni e l’Emilia fotografata da Cuchi White

2023-12-22T08:46:28+00:00

The aim of this essay is to investigate how two female artists, Giosetta Fioroni and Cuchi White, interpreted and represented two Italian real places: the Venetian countryside around the Piave River, and the places around the Via Emilia, an ancient Italian road still essential for communications and economy nowadays. Starting from Westphal’s reflection on geocriticism, this article analyses the book Attraverso l’evento (1988), which contains both Andrea Zanzotto’s poems and Giosetta Fioroni’s illustrations. The relationship between words and images re-creates a Venetian countryside as a place of ancestral memory, where the nature is inhabited by fabulous creatures belonging to old fairy-tales. The second part of this essay analyses Cuchi White’s photographs. These images, as her famous trompe l’oeil, represent both a real space and the way in which the human being perceives, lives, and creates the space.

Due umili verghiani. Strategie della soggettivazione in Rosso Malpelo e Jeli il pastore

2023-12-22T08:52:58+00:00

In their theory, the naturalists excluded the possibility of representing inner lives of the characters of the Fourth Estate. However, narrative practice reveals a different scenario. In the two analyzed short stories of Giovanni Verga, Rosso Malpelo and Jeli il pastore, it is shown that, in the case of the two protagonists, Verga resorts to elegiac forms to delineate their primitive and ferocious psychology.

Introduction: Old Language(s), New Technologies: Corpus Linguistics and European Languages in the Renaissance, 1400s-1600s

2023-12-21T20:34:43+00:00

The six articles included in this monographic section of Status Quaestionis 25 offer interesting perspectives on various levels of linguistic analysis, such as spelling fluctuation, textual pragmatics, morphosyntax, figurative language, etc., and their numerous intersections, using different corpus linguistics tools. Far for being a comprehensive overview of the state of the art on ‘old languages and new technologies’ (which is not the aim of this publication), the case studies presented here provide a glimpse into the potentials offered by corpus linguistics tools when dealing with Renaissance English and Romance languages such as French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

Heark, Hark Ye, Harkee: A History of Forms

2023-12-21T21:10:57+00:00

The present paper investigates the relationship between Early Modern English spelling fluctuation and grammaticalisation, by looking at the evolution of the different forms of the pragmatic marker harkee, which emerged from an imperative matrix clause headed by the verb hearken/hark. The phenomenon of spelling fluctuation intervenes at multiple levels in the data and in the process under scrutiny. Firstly, the verbs that constitute the matrix clause present alternative spelling forms, with or without the digraph <ea>, and with or without final <e>. Secondly, an attentive review of the grammaticalisation process of the pragmatic marker hearkee/harkee reveals that this form emerges from a constellation of alternative spelling forms at the end of the 17^thcentury. This paper offers a quantitative analysis of the occurrences of the different spelling forms of the verbs in the matrix clause from which the pragmatic marker emerged. Furthermore, it provides empirical data towards models of the syntactic development of pragmatic markers, by mapping the frequency of evolution of distinct syntactic environments in Early Modern English.

The Corpus of Early Modern English Trials (1650-1700): Building of the Corpus and Hypotheses of Normalization

2023-12-21T21:15:34+00:00

The present paper discusses the building stages of the Corpus of Early Modern English Trials (1650-1700), henceforth EMET, a 1.8 million words highly specialized historical corpus of trial proceedings. The main purpose of the creation of the above-mentioned corpus is to shed light on the pragmatic aspects of Early Modern spoken English, since trial proceedings are considered records of authentic dialogues (Culpeper and Kytö 2010, 17). More specifically, the EMET was created in order to investigate the pragmatic influences both on the choice of the second person pronoun, which coexisted in the forms thou and you, and of any T- and Y-form used during the Restoration: thee, prithee, prethee, prethy, pray thee, thy, thy self, thyself, thine, you, ye, your, your self, yourself, yours and pray you.

The initial part of the essay will briefly explore the phase of the archives’ consultation, the criteria behind the selection of the trials and the technical stages that are necessary to the uploading of a corpus on #LancsBox and its study. Afterwards, the EMET itself will be presented (number of documents, total number of tokens and average number of tokens per text, and types of charges involved).

Then, the essay will focus on editing, normalization and POS tagging. More specifically, it will be illustrated how trials, and historical documents in general, should be edited in order to successfully analyse them with corpus linguistics tools. Then, different hypotheses of normalization of the EMET will be compared in detail and discussed. After determining which normalization parameters suit best the corpus, the advantages of such process will be highlighted. Lastly, the issues derived from the normalization process – mainly bound to proper nouns, badly preserved documents (i.e., noisy texts), and Latin (and foreign) terms – will be examined.

A Corpus-driven Analysis of the Early Modern English Recipe Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library: Zooming in on Morphosyntax and Pragmatic Interfaces

2023-12-21T21:29:33+00:00

This article analyses a corpus of early modern English manuscript recipe books, denoted here as FEMER (Folger Early Modern English Recipes), digitised by volunteers working in the digital resources section at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Chronological and content-related criteria for the selection of the manuscripts analysed here will be provided, along with norms for the modernisation of the texts that was carried out with the aid of VARD2 software. Next, a detailed corpus-driven investigation through #Lancsbox will be presented and quantitative/qualitative data provided. Specific emphasis will be on the most recurring and peculiar morphosyntactic structures, e.g., initial purpose infinitive clauses, of the culinary recipe text-type in early modern English, and their interfaces with pragmatics.

Complex prepositions in (Medieval) Portuguese: The question of language contact

2023-12-21T21:32:42+00:00

One important question in the current line of research concerning adpositions is how complex prepositions emerged in the diachrony of Portuguese. This is the question we address, focusing on the first centuries of available texts, and aiming to determine whether CPs have emerged independently from other European languages. Starting with definitions and lists of CPs in Modern Portuguese, and with a usage-based approach, we document the presence of several CPs as early as the 13th century. These findings do not exclude the importance of language contact, but are also compatible with an independent emergence of CPs in different European languages.

Light Verb Constructions in Italian: A Corpus-based Analysis of 15th-17th-century Texts

2023-12-21T21:38:47+00:00

This paper aims at analysing the structural and functional features of Light Verb Constructions in Italian. In particular, the investigation is devoted to the analysis of texts written between 1376 and 1691, extracted from the MIDIA corpus.

The Metaphorical/Metonymic Values of ‘Hand’ in Texts of 1400-1600s. A Corpus-driven Investigation of French, Spanish and Italian

2023-12-21T21:42:52+00:00

This contribution proposes a corpus-driven description of the metaphorical/metonymic values of the lexeme ‘hand’ in Spanish, French and Italian in 15th-17th centuries texts. Metaphorical and metonymic reinterpretation of the lexeme is described in terms of embodiment of sensorial experience, namely a shift from concrete to abstract meaning, as several grammaticalisation and typological studies have claimed. Considering data gathered from diachronic corpora and dictionaries, the investigation aims at identifying the extended uses of ‘hand’ in the earlier phases of the languages. On one hand, a qualitative analysis of the semantic mapping, syntactic pattern, lexicalisation degree, and functional value is provided to identify cross-linguistic commonalities. On the other, the quantitative dimension is taken into account to verify the degree of productivity/conventionalisation of each semantic shift and of the cognitive process involved.