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(Romani) Biofiction as World Literature: A Case Study of Núria León de Santiago’s Mahler’s Angel
No full textThe following article analyses the biofiction El ángel de Mahler (Mahler’s Angel), published in 2014, by the Spanish Romani female author Núria León de Santiago to illustrate the extent to which a productive overlap exists between the genre of biofiction on the one hand and that of Romani literature as world literature on the other. León de Santiago’s biographical novel offers an excellent example of cross-cultural representation: a world-famous Jewish-Austrian musician, Gustav Mahler,
becomes the protagonist of a work by a Romani author writing in Spanish. Moreover, Mahler’s Angel is a “veiled autobiography” (Layne/Tóibín 2018, 151), in so far as the book not only presents a new perspective on Mahler’s life but also negotiates the writer’s autobiographic concerns regarding ethnic minorities in general and the multiple in- and out-group discriminations of Roma-women in particular. Thus, León de Santiago’s biofiction is a paradigmatic example of contemporary world literature “on the move” (Ette 2003) in a globalized world
The role of perseveration in acquisition
No full textThe current study examines the development of variable subject expression in Spanish across multiple proficiency levels of second language learners, and compares their patterns with a group of native speakers from the same speech community. A cross-sectional design and a written contextualized preference task are employed to explore the differences in rates of subject form selection, the degree to which the linguistic and psychological construct known as perseveration, constrains the acquisition of subject expression, as well as the potential interaction between perseveration and other linguistic factors. Our analysis examines null and overt pronominal subjects as well as full lexical noun phrase verbal subjects. Theresults show that as proficiency level increases, learners’ selection rates of subject forms and rates of perseveration become gradually more native-like, and an increasing number of linguistic factors (prime form, gender continuity, tense mood aspect continuity) predict the occurrence of perseveration. In addition, for learners from the two most advanced levels and native speakers, feminine primes are more likely to perseverate than masculine primes, suggesting the effects of psychological processes (i.e., surprisal) on perseveration
Roma Art as Postcolonial Contact Zone: Re-Enchanting the World by Malgorzata Mirga-Tas
No full textThis essay presents analysis of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s work Re-Enchanting the World, presented in the Polish pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2022. As an interpretative tool it uses the term “contact zone”, created by Mary Louise Pratt, to describe the hybridity of post-colonial culture. Like post-colonial art, contemporary Roma art also makes use of visual and textual images of people called “Gypsies” produced by European ethnologists and historians in the 18th and 19th centuries. This gesture of transformation is characterised by a critical perspective and an intention to restore the subjectivity of the people affected by this image. By way of comparison, the essay presents an example of current conceptualisations of the history of Romani literature, in which the heritage of “Gypsy studies” is uncritically acknowledged as the historical heritage of the Roma
Overt vs. null subjects in infinitival constructions in Colombian Spanish
No full textStandard approaches predict complementary distribution between referentially free (overt/null) subjects and referentially dependent PRO-type null subjects. This generalization is challenged by Colombian Spanish non-finite adjuncts, which allow
both overt subjects and referentially free null subjects. We uncover an intricate pattern of distribution and interpretation along two criteria: Obligatory vs. Non-Obligatory Control (OC vs. NOC) and whether the controllee is silent or an obligatory-
controlled overt pronoun (covert vs. so-called “overt PRO”). The distribution of sloppy readings with null subjects provides arguments for analyzing NOC as DP-ellipsis. We also show that both covert and overt PRO display the canonical diagnostics of OC except in one context. While they both only allow bound variable construals under ellipsis, overt PRO also allows co-reference when its controller is associated with focus. This paradox follows on the assumption that while both null and overt anaphors must be syntactically bound, only null anaphors are necessarily semantically bound.50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Language
Variation in der mittelniederdeutschen Substantivflexion. Empirische Untersuchung und grammatikographische Darstellung
No full textVariation stellt eines der zentralen Merkmale historischer Sprachstufen dar. Im Projekt zur Erarbeitung einer neuen wissenschaftlichen mittelniederdeutschen Grammatik, das sich in einer ersten Phase der Flexion der Substantive widmet, steht daher die Untersuchung von Variation und die Frage nach ihrer geeigneten grammatikographischen Darstellung methodisch im Zentrum. Eine unabdingbare Voraussetzung für variationssensitive Studien ist ein korpusbasiertes Vorgehen. Die Analysen stützen sich auf die Daten des nach den Parametern Zeit, Sprachraum und Genre strukturierten Referenzkorpus Mittelniederdeutsch / Niederrheinisch (1200–1650), das Annotationen zur Wortart und Flexionsmorphologie sowie zum Lemma enthält. Am Beispiel der Nullmarkierung im Genitiv und Dativ der konsonantisch auslautenden Maskulina und Neutra im Singular wird die Untersuchung flexionsmorphologischer Variation im Mittelniederdeutschen veranschaulicht.1 Einleitung
2 Zum Umgang mit Variation in der Grammatikographie des Deutschen
3 Konzept und Datenbasis der Mittelniederdeutschen Grammatik
3.1 Grammatikkonzept
3.2 Datenbasis
4 Forschungsstand zur Nullmarkierung der Kasus bei Maskulina und Neutra im Singular
5 Analyse der Nullmarkierung im Genitiv und Dativ der konsonantisch auslautenden Maskulina und Neutra im Singular
5.1 Das Variantenspektrum
5.2 Ermittlung potentieller Einflussfaktoren
5.3 Quantitative und qualitative Analyse einzelner Faktoren
5.3.1 Genitiv
5.3.2 Dativ
5.4 Zusammenfassung
6 Ausblick: Grammatikographische Darstellung flexionsmorphologischer Variation
7 Literatur
7.1 Quellen
7.2 Forschungsliteratur
7.3 Online-Ressource
Emerging inclusive impersonals
No full textIn both Brazilian and European Portuguese, a pessoa (‘the person’), uma pessoa (‘a person’), as pessoas (‘the persons’), o povo (‘the people’), o pessoal (‘the people’) and some other, more colloquial expressions such as geral ‘general’ (Ornelas de Avelar 2023 [this volume]) are currently developing new impersonal uses (see Afonso 2008, Amaral & Mihatsch 2019, Posio 2021). In this contribution we will analyse the functional changes of a pessoa and uma pessoa, with a focus on Brazilian Portuguese. Interestingly, all these expressions are originally third person noun phrases excluding reference to speakers and addressees. In impersonal contexts, however, a pessoa and uma pessoa are predominantly used in non-referential contexts where speaker and addressee may be included. We will try to shed light on the evolution of the functions of the emerging impersonal pronouns a pessoa and uma pessoa in Brazilian Portuguese, starting with a macro-diachronic analysis tracing the earliest impersonal uses on the basis of the Corpus do português (CDP, Genre/Historical) by Mark Davies and by comparing Brazilian oral colloquial data from the 20th century based on the comparative subcorpus of NURC RJ with contemporary corpus data from Rio de Janeiro (CORPORAPORT) and Minas Gerais (MOC). The corpus analysis will be complemented by acceptability judgments. The different data types will be combined in order to trace the diachronic development of the restrictions determining the impersonal uses and the differences and parallels between the two expressions. We will close by comparing our results with existing studies by Posio (2017, 2021) and Martins (2022) on parallel developments in European Portuguese
On pronominal uses of geral in Brazilian Portuguese
No full textThis paper analyzes the impersonal use of geral ‘general’ in Brazilian Portuguese, in the light of investigations dealing with impersonalization strategies in the generative literature. I will show that geral behaves as a φ-featureless impersonal pronoun with regard to agreement patterns and to generic/arbitrary interpretation, but as a pronoun with φ-features if we take its syntactic distribution into consideration. Despite this incongruity, I will argue that geral must be analyzed as an item that is devoid of φ-features, similarly to man in Swedish, si in Italian and on in French, according to Egerland’s (2003) proposal. The analysis provides evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the distribution of impersonal pronouns in different sentential positions is better captured in terms of case marking instead of syntactic function (Fenger 2018). I will also show that geral can be used as a first-person plural pronoun, which seems to depend on strictly pragmatic factors, as a result of the lack of φ-features
Variation and change in reference to discourse participants in Catalan parliamentary debate (1932–1938 and 1980–2020)
No full textThis chapter summarises the results of an ongoing study on the discourse strategies used by speakers to refer to the participants in political debates in the Parliament of Catalonia during two time periods: the period spanning 1932 and 1938, under
the Spanish Second Republic, and from 1980, the year of the recovery of Catalonia’s democratic institutions, until 2020. The study’s theoretical background is the seminal work on deixis and politeness carried out by Levinson (1983) and followed by others, together with the foundational studies on participation frameworks by Goffman (1981), and the research into these subjects with reference to Catalan and other languages. Data from a corpus including the transcriptions of debates taken from the Diari de Sessions of the Parliament of Catalonia (more than 600,000 words) are classified and analysed
Frequency and efficiency in Spanish proverbs
No full textZipf’s law states that there is an inverse relationship between a word’s length and its frequency; the more frequent words tend to be the shortest. Following this premise, I investigate if this universal property in language can extend to domains beyond the word. As such, the present study analyzes the use of proverbs, a specific type of fixed expressions, in a Spanish corpus of news language. The motivation for this study is to determine if more frequent proverbs are more likely to be shortened, relative to their lower-frequency counterparts. The results of this study indicate that there is a positive correlation between a proverb’s general frequency in a corpus and its reduction rate. This paper argues that usage-based models of language representations are better equipped to account for the mechanisms used in the production of proverbs, compared to the traditional view of fixed expressions as enlarged single words50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Language
For an integrative approach to variation and change in French nasal vowel systems
No full textThe complex dynamics driving the evolution of phonemic nasal vowels have long puzzled linguistic historians. This paper, focusing on French, discusses some of this rich complexity through a glimpse at internal (linguistic) and external (social) dynamics that led to the development of multiple nasal vowel systems. It suggests that parallel findings from acoustic and articulatory phonetics (production), psycholinguistics (perception), and computational modeling could be aligned to shed new light on some of the mechanisms behind well-attested historical and ongoing changes. Comparative historical and experimental data, coupled with computational modeling, could provide new ways of approaching the evolution of nasal vowel systems in Romance.Ja50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Language