Open Access Scientific Journals of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona
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Seis poemas de la “trilogía final” / Six Poems from the “Final Trilogy”
No full textSi presenta la traduzione italiana, realizzata da Tiziano Faustinelli, di sei poesie di Manuel Álvarez Ortega tratte dalle ultime tre raccolte: Heredad de la sombra (2006), Cenizas son los días (2011) e Ultima necat (2012).
.Tiziano Faustinelli presents the Italian translation of six poems by Manuel Álvarez Ortega, selected from his final three collections: Heredad de la sombra (2006), Cenizas son los días (2011), and Ultima necat (2012)
Simplification and Easification of Legislative Provisions: The Way Forward
No full textThis analysis takes into consideration the challenge of writing legislative provisions. Legislative expressions must be clear, precise, and unambiguous, on the one hand, and all-inclusive, on the other. A clever balance between the two is the essence of the craftsmanship of normative texts. The nature and extent of specification of legal scope, moreover, represents one of the most difficult tasks in legislative drafting. Based on the hypothesis that linguistics can provide drafters with a method for assessing the effectiveness of the legislator’s provisions, this study demonstrates that drafters often miss the focus of the policy concepts that they aim to communicate, and discusses the latest techniques to successfully achieve the desired conceptual focus
Positioning the Self in Blog Posts: A Corpus-based Investigation of Food Blogs in English
No full textPositioning Theory (PT) first emerged in the 1980s in psychology studies to investigate how people occupy and negotiate their place—both physical and social—while interacting with other people. Research in this area has also considered the linguistic and discursive practices that position interlocutors in any form of communication and interaction, affecting in turn the reciprocal perception of ‘the other.’ This mutual positioning eventually shapes—and is shaped—by discourse in any kind of communicative context. Positioning, then, becomes crucial in digital communication, in which boundaries and perceptions of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ are in a way distorted by the absence of a physical space that is replaced by a virtual environment. Considering these premises, this study investigates self-positioning strategies in a corpus of food blogs in English. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which the food bloggers employ pronouns to position themselves in the blog posts in order to establish a rapport with their audience, thus creating a peculiar communicative space. Corpus-based methods of investigation are used to explore the corpus, while PT is used to contextualize and interpret corpus data. Results show that the food bloggers in the corpus use pronouns as indexicals that refer to the bloggers’ specific position in the communicative environment to remark their ‘otherness’ with respect to their audience as well as towards specific socio-cultural contexts. In particular, the food bloggers systematically distance themselves both from the community of users following the food blog and from external elements such as brands, institutions, and other cultures’ culinary traditions
Emerging Trends in the Register of Persuasion Considering Appraisal in English
No full textQuesto articolo discute le recenti tendenze che riguardano il registro della persuasione in inglese e come si applicano a una raccolta di testi (dataset) generati da sistemi basati sull\u27intelligenza artificiale (IA). Tali tendenze sono legate a differenze culturali e nuove disponibilita\u27 delle tecnologiche digitali, che hanno anche cambiato le pratiche sociali e professionali. A questo scopo, in primo luogo ho discusso i concetti di costruzione grammaticale e lessicale della presa di posizione ("stance"), includendo forme implicite e esplicite, dirette e indirette che impattano il registro della persuasione. Altri concetti che hanno impatto sulla persuasivita\u27 sono il metatesto, meta-discorso e la distribuzione retorica. In secondo luogo, ho analizzato una raccolta di testi persuasivi generati da un sistema basato sull\u27AI e pubblicato per pubblico uso da Anthropic (2024). La metodologia utilizzata nell\u27analisi e\u27 una versione adattata dell\u27appraisal system framework (ASF), il sistema della valutazione nella lingua inglese di Martin e White (2005), che prende in considerazione le applicazioni nell\u27analisi di testi promozionali (Pounds, 2011; Ho, 2021, 2022), istituzionali (Tupala, 2019), academici (Hood, 2010), e la ricerca sui sistemi complementari del discorso per esprimere opinioni e valutazioni (Biber et al., 2018). I risultati hanno rivelato che i tre gruppi di testi estratti dal set di dati di Anthropic presentano intervalli di frequenza delle parole non dissimili. Inoltre, il campione analizzato inverte il modello attestato come una tendenza recente in inglese di utilizzare prevalentemente valutazioni implicite, ma mantiene un altro modello attestato riguardo al grado di comunicazione in/diretta (ASF \u27engagement\u27 e \u27judgment\u27). Infine, le categorie ASF di "atteggiamento", "graduazione" e "impegno" nel campione non deviano dalla funzione di propagare il metatesto iniziale, tuttavia, costruiscono sistematicamente prosodie semantiche di \u27estremi\u27 col risultato di persuadere in modo convincente e coinvolgente.This paper discusses recent trends in the persuasion register in English. Such trends are linked to cultural differences and technological affordances, which also have an impact on social and professional practices (Bai et al. 2023; Matz et al. 2024; Kapantai et al. 2021). To this purpose, I first discuss the key concepts related to persuasive writing and their link to appraisal in English. Then, I focus on a sample of the most persuasive AI-generated writing extracted from a dataset released by Anthropic (Durmus et al. 2024) and available online. The methodology that drives this study is the appraisal system framework (ASF) by Martin and White (2005), the findings in ASF-based research on promotional texts (Pounds 2022; Ho 2021; 2011), institutional texts (Tupala 2019), academic texts (Hood 2010; 2006), and the research on complementary discourse systems for expressing stance and evaluation (Biber et al. 2019; 2018). The results show that the three groups of highly persuasive texts extracted from the Anthropic’s dataset present non-dissimilar word frequency ranges and a tendency towards the use of low-frequency lexis and appraisal resources. The application of the ASF demonstrates that the AI system Claude 3 Opus masters evaluation scales in English despite the well-documented inconsistencies of such systems in dealing with the numerical scales. The sample analyzed does not really follow the pattern of sparingly using appraisal resources while preferring invoked appraisal, which has been demonstrated to be a recent trend in the persuasion register. Nonetheless, it mostly maintains the proven culture-based recent trend regarding the scale of directness/indirectness (ASF Engagement). Finally, the ASF categories of Attitude, Graduation, and Engagement in the sample do not deviate from the attested function of propagating the meta-text/meta-discourse although with a caveat: they systematically construct semantic prosodies of extremes to persuade compellingly
Text Generation and Other Uneasy Human-Machine Collaborations
No full textSince the rise of mainframe computing, literary authors and critics alike have expressed anxiety about the computer’s ability to write narrative prose and poetry as well as or better than humans. With the recent emergence of publicly accessible AI authoring platforms such as ChatGPT these fears may appear to have been well-founded. In this article I will situate contemporary digital literary practices of reading, writing, rewriting, and performing computer-generated variable texts within broader social and historical contexts. Experimentation with generative, permutational, and combinatory text began long before digital computers came into being. How and why does experimentation with generative or in other ways variable text emerge within certain human and machinic generations? How do our attempts to make writing machines help us understand how we write ourselves?
The Ideology of Spoken English in English Grammaticography
No full textIt is widely and uncontroversially believed that English grammaticography has almost exclusively focused on written language, ignoring the distinctive features of spoken English. Even when spoken language features have been described, an ideological view of spoken English has led grammarians to place more emphasis on written language norms. This paper aims to illustrate the findings of a grammaticographical investigation into the grammar of spoken English as conceived of and presented in a restricted corpus of Italian grammars of English authored by academics and published between the second half of the 19th and the mid-20th centuries. The textual and paratextual materials in the grammars were analysed in order to ascertain whether the presentation of traditional ‘prescriptive’ rules accounts for less formal and spoken usage, what—if any—phenomena of spoken grammar are dealt with and whether evaluative terms are used with regard to spoken English. The results of the analysis show that the authors of the Italian grammar books were able to push the boundaries of pedagogical grammaticography, placing an increasingly greater emphasis on the role of spoken usage in the description of the English language
English: English
No full textThe present contribution examines the use of modal verbs in specialised tourism discourse, with a focus on the Verona Corpus. Modal verbs play a crucial role in expressing modality and conveying information about necessity, possibility, and permission (Maci 2020; Palmer 1990). Through a comprehensive analysis of the Verona Corpus, a corpus of websites promoting the city of Verona (Italy) as a destination, this study categorises modal verbs into epistemic, deontic, and dynamic modalities (see Palmer 1990) and investigates their relative frequencies. Non-parametric statistical tests (Kruskal-Wallis) are employed to determine the significance of differences in modal verb usage, followed by a qualitative analysis. The results show statistically significant differences among the three categories of modality used in the texts: epistemic, deontic, and dynamic, whereas there are no differences between the verb groups (e.g., can, could, may, might, etc.) within the same type of modality. In addition, the use of pronouns shows an attempt at establishing an empathic relationship with the tourists but risks coming across as too artificial and persuasive
Charles Brockden Brown, George Lippard, H. P. Lovecraft, and The Urban Underworld
No full textThis study aims to examine the Gothic representation of the city in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800), George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) and H. P. Lovecraft’s short story “He” (1926). Whereas Brown and Lippard employ rhetorical strategies typical of the European Gothic tradition for a critical exposé of the urban milieu of antebellum Philadelphia, Lovecraft evokes a preternatural topography comprised of underground passageways, secret halls and labyrinthine streets to reveal New York’s underbelly in the 1920s. Drawing on both the notion of spatial proximity (Luck 2014) and the reciprocal relationship between space, plot structure, and meaning, I argue that, although substantially different in style, philosophical subtext and social context, the depiction of urban spaces by the three authors share a profoundly anti-urban rhetoric, which, operating as a deforming lens, fragments the American city into a confusing network of horrors
Presentación
No full textPresentation of Historias Fingidas 12 (2024)Presentación de Historias Fingidas 12 (2024)Presentazione di Historias Fingidas 12 (2024)Presentación de Historias Fingidas 12 (2024
Le Vaisseau d’Hélène ou les fantômes du Romantisme dans La Femme de trente ans de Balzac
No full textRésumé : Nourri des lectures des auteurs romantiques, le vaisseau d’Hélène, avec son cadre : la mer, et ce qui s’y déroule : sur le pont, des combats de pirates ; dans la cabine, l’amour d’une famille riche et unie, est un hapax dans l’oeuvre de Balzac. Devenu l’auteur de La Comédie humaine, cette entreprise littéraire dont l’ambition est de cartographier la société de son temps, Balzac ne peut que désavouer le chapitre de La Femme de trente ans « Le capitaine parisien » rédigé dix ans plus tôt et centré sur le commandant du vaisseau d’Hélène. Mais il le désavoue d’autant plus qu’avec La Comédie humaine, Balzac est désormais l’auteur d’une mythologie maritime moderne car fluviale avec notamment cet autre fleuve des Enfers qu’est la Seine.
Abstract : Nourished by the readings of Romantic authors, Hélène’s vessel, with its setting: the sea, and what takes place there: on deck, pirate fights; in the cabin, the love of a rich and united family, is a hapax in Balzac’s work. Having become the author of La Comédie humaine, the literary enterprise whose ambition was to map the society of his time, Balzac could only disavow the chapter of La Femme de trente ans, « Le capitaine parisien», written ten years earlier and centred on the commander of Hélène’s vessel. But he disavows it all the more since, with La Comédie humaine, Balzac is now the author of a modern maritime and fluvial mythology, including that other river of Hell, the Seine.
Mots Clés : Femme de trente ans ; Hélène d’Aiglemont ; meurtre ; pirate ; corsaire ; mer ; fleuves ; Paris
Key words : Femme de trente ans ; Hélène d’Aiglemont ; murder ; pirate ; corsair ; sea ; rivers; Pari