AUFSÄTZE

IMME KUCHENBRANDT
Zur Häufigkeit von Argumenten und Adjunkten in deutschen, französischen und spanischen Zeitungstexten

Various studies in the field of German-French contrastive linguistics report a higher number of valency-dependent constituents in French than in German (cf. Blumenthal 1997, 10). The present investigation compares the proportion of arguments vs. adjuncts in German, French and Spanish newspaper texts, showing that the three languages do not differ significantly in this respect. However, other contrasts do prove to be significant: in the German texts, we find more monovalent verbs, but a lower proportion of passive constructions than in the samples from the two Romance languages.

STEFAN RUHSTALLER
Un aspecto poco investigado del Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. La contribución de Covarrubias al estudio de los nombres de lugar

In his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611) Sebastián de Covarrubias gathered hundreds of place names, etymological interpretations and historical data from different kinds of sources, with the intention of making the knowledge accumulated on the subject at that time easily accessible. This material is enriched by original etymological interpretations (of particular interest are those concerning proper names based on Castilian Spanish) and perceptive descriptions of specific toponomastic phenomena as well as phraseological and literary data. The analysis of numerous articles containing place names highlights, on the one hand, the strong interest in the topic at the time, and, on the other hand, Covarrubias’ distinctive working method and his contribution to a specific area of the history of Spanish linguistics.

MARIE COMER, RENATA ENGHELS, CLARA VANDERSCHUEREN
De verbos de colocación a pseudo-copulativos: procesos de gramaticalización en los cuasi-sinónimos poner/meter y pôr/meter en español y en portugués

Most studies on locative verbs focus on (a) the internal organization of this verbal category and its position within various verb classifications, (b) the syntactic analysis of their arguments, and more particularly the status of the locative complement. The aim of the present paper is to compare the syntax and semantics of the frequently used locative verbs poner and meter esp in Spanish with their Portuguese cognate counterparts pôr and meter ptg. We examine to what extent the use of these near-synonyms goes beyond the basic locative meaning and extends towards other, more grammaticalized, domains. More particularly, on the basis of translation corpus data and comparable corpus data, we empirically analyze the semantic features of their transfer use, their causative/inchoative uses and their (pseudo)-copulative uses, and we shed light on their frequencies. It will be shown that the Spanish verbs present a higher degree of grammaticalization compared to their Portuguese counterparts, and that intralinguistically, poner and pôr are far more grammaticalized than their near-synonyms meter esp / meter ptg.

CRISTINA BUENAFUENTES DE LA MATA
Variación morfosintáctica en los dialectos del español: un análisis desde la diacronía

In this research, we analyze some Spanish grammatical phenomena which, according to the Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española of Real Academia Española (2009), are characteristic of some of its dialects. For instance, the adjectivation of adverbs such as medio and bastante, the combination of un otro, the sí propio ‘sí mismo’ construction, the placement of unstressed personal pronouns, the pronominal use of recordar, and the expression cada que ‘siempre que’. Taking their presence in two corpus (CORDE and CORPES XXI) and the fact that dialectology studies, grammars or linguistic atlas barely pay attention to morphosyntactic variation, this study demonstrates that such grammatical structures are to be considered the result of linguistic change as they do appear in earlier stages of Spanish, with more or less vitality according to period and text typology. Thus, this paper shows that diachronic analyses can provide valuable information on the issue of Spanish dialectal morphosyntactic variation.

ROSA ANA MARTÍN VEGAS
Morfofonología del verbo en Español. Análisis sincrónico

Spanish irregular verbs have been described in the grammars and works of reference according to the nature of the vowel, consonant or mixed alternations. But the complexity in the conjugation of many verbs, which have alternations of different type in the different paradigms, and the mixture of morphological and phonological criteria in their classification, impedes the homogeneity of the groups in this kind of descriptions. In this paper, Spanish irregular verbs are classified by models of well defined morphonological alternations and by verb tenses: models of irregularity in the present, past and future paradigms, and models of irregularity in the gerunds. This division is necessary to classify homogeneous groups of verbs that share the same scheme of irregularity. Likewise, a second classification shows the different models of irregular conjugation derived from the combination of the aforementioned alternation models. Both groups complete the classification of the irregular Spanish verbs of morphonological character. These schemes or models of irregularity are very useful for learning paradigms, because they group verbs that share formal (phonological) and morphological features (schemes of irregular conjugation).

FRANCESCO CARAPEZZA
Il rigo musicale in fondo alla Bataille d’Annezin e i dispositivi di chiusura della lassa epica

The discovery, made by Ernest Langlois in 1910, of a notated musical staff at the end of a little-known parodic laisse probably written within the 13th century by an otherwise unknown Thomas de Bailleul (MS London, BL, Royal 20 A XVII) immediately raised the interest of medieval musicologists, who have debated its function and interpretation until recent times, whereas Romance philologists haven’t payed due attention to this intriguing and unique musical evidence, undoubtedly related to an Old French chanson de geste. In this paper I shall defend Georg Schläger’s forgotten hypothesis that the musical staff could well represent a vocalized ‘short line’ (petit vers), arguing that this question should be brought back to the issues concerning the formal aspects of epic laisse and to the field of Romance philology as a whole.

GIACINTO DAVIDE GUAGNANO
L’implicito e l’esplicito linguistico in forme diverse di testi umoristici

This paper is aimed at testing an important linguistic difference between two kinds of humorous text in Italian language, jokes and funny stories, via the concept of implicit. This goal has been reached by means of an experiment: 9 funny personal anecdotes has been analysed and selected (Study 1) and then 7 humor authors have been asked to turn the 9 funny stories into 9 jokes (Study 2). The texts analysed in Study 1 and the texts written by the authors and analysed in Study 2 have been examined following the principles of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo/Raskin 1991; Attardo 2001) and of the Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora 1991, 2003). These theories have been taken into account in order to find out which information is implicit in jokes and explicitly verbalized in funny stories and in order to experimentally verify the distinction between the two types of text.

DEBORA DE FAZIO
I nomi della follia. Premesse per un’indagine storica sulla terminologia della psichiatria in Italia

We present the results of a research on the language of psychiatry in Italy between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. In it, we describe the origins of the terminology of this branch of medicine and the network of synonyms, hypernyms and hyponyms which were used to describe mental illness in the beginnings of modern psychiatry. Furthermore, we give an overview on the names of the psychiatric hospitals and of the asylums, as well as on the description and the names of the instruments used in the observation or in the treatment of mental illness. What emerges from the study is a rich and differentiated terminology, part of a terminological framework in which the international language of science still predominant at the time, the French, plays a leading role, accompanied in psychiatric ambit by German and English.

MISZELLEN

FRANZ RAINER
«Was zieht man, wenn man einen Wechsel zieht?». Zum Ursprung von frz. tirer une lettre de change sur qqn

The present article elucidates the origin of the French idiom tirer une lettre de change sur qqn. ‘to draw a bill of exchange on sb.’, which is totally opaque from a synchronic point of view. It is shown that the idiom arose by way of a metonymic shift from the collocation tirer une somme d’argent (par lettre de change) ‘to draw a sum of money (by means of a bill of exchange)’, where tirer roughly meant ‘to bring back home’. This use of tirer, furthermore, is identified as a loan translation of the synonymous Italian verb trarre ‘to draw’, while the metonymic shift occurred in French and was only later on loan-translated back into Italian.

GIANLUCA LAUTA
Caciara

The word caciara ‘noise’ entered Roman dialect in the late 19th century; it was adopted by everyday Italian language during the second half of 20th. The origin of this word is not entirely clear: some refer it to the cheese factory (in Italian, precisely named caciaia), others rather explain this phrase as a distortion of the substantive gazzarra ‘high noise’. These two hypotheses have never been subjected to close discussion. This essay represents, then, the first attempt to deal with the etymology of caciara: the traditional interpretations are investigated and, eventually, the ancient noun sciarra (‘wrangle’ or ‘noise’) is proposed as a new possible base for caciara.

WOLFGANG SCHWEICKARD
ribeba ‘misura di capacità’

This brief note shows that Italian ribeba ʻmeasure of capacityʼ that first occurs in Balducci Pegolottiʼs Pratica della mercatura (c1347) is a borrowing from Arabic irdabb / ardabb.

BESPRECHUNGEN

James Noël Adams, Social Variation and the Latin Language (JOHANNES KRAMER)

Leah Tether, The Continuation of Chrétien’s Perceval. Content and Construction, Extension and Ending (FRIEDRICH WOLFZETTEL)

Les Paroles Salomun, ed. Tony Hunt (STEPHEN DÖRR)

Thomas Hinton, The Conte du Graal Cycle: Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, the Continuations, and French Arthurian Romance (DARON BURROWS)

Sharon Kinoshita / Peggy McCracken, Marie de France: a Critical Companion (DARON BURROWS)

Richard Waltereit, Reflexive Marking in the History of French (ULRICH DETGES)

Giuseppe Paternostro, Discorso, interazione, identità. Studiare il parlato attraverso i parlanti (PHILIPP BURDY)

Alvise Andreose, La strada, la Cina, il cielo. Studi sulla Relatio di Odorico da Pordenone e sulla sua fortuna romanza (LIDIA BARTOLUCCI)

Maria Teresa Vigolo / Paola Barbierato, Glossario del Cadorino antico dai Laudi delle Regole (secc. XIII–XVIII) con etimologie e forme toponomastiche (JOHANNES KRAMER)

Maria Iliescu / Victoria Popovici, Rumänische Grammatik (HEIDI SILLER-RUNGGALDIER)

Adina Dragomirescu / Isabela Nedelcu / Alexandru Nicolae / Gabriela Pană Dindelegan / Marina Rădulescu Sala / Rodica Zafiu, Gramatica de bază a limbii române + Caiet de exerciţii (OTTO WINKELMANN)

NACHRUF

Alberto Vàrvaro (13. März 1934 – 22. Oktober 2014) (MAX PFISTER)