Neuphilologische Mitteilungen

„Es ist eine Sprachbarriere.“

Claudia Jeltsch — 2024-12-13

Im Beitrag wird der Zusammenhang von Identität und Sprache anhand von Aussagen untersucht, die 31 Personen in Interviews über ihre sprachliche Identität und das Thema Heimat getätigt haben. Allen befragten Personen ist gemeinsam, dass sie aus Familien stammen, deren einer Elternteil Finnisch und deren anderer Elternteil Deutsch als Muttersprache hat. Nach der Einführung folgt ein Abschnitt über den Forschungsstand zum Thema sprachliche Identität im Zusammenhang mit Migration, danach ein Abschnitt über die Datenerhebung und Analysemethode. Die Analyse erfolgt mit der Methode der qualitativen Einstellungsanalyse, die international vor allem in der Tradition von Goffmanns Frame analysis sowie den Forschungsarbeiten von Billigs und Kärkkäinens Stance/stand taking steht. Zentrale Forschungsfragen sind, wie sich die Interviewten zu ihren Sprachen positionieren, welche Begründungen sie dafür liefern, mit welchen Einschränkungen. Eines der zentralen Ergebnisse ist, dass eine selbstzugeschriebene finnische Identität nicht unbedingt finnische Sprachkenntnisse erfordert, jedoch um so wahrscheinlicher ist, desto bessere Finnischkenntnisse vorliegen. Subjektiv fehlende Finnischkenntnisse erschweren es den Befragten, sich selbstbewusst eine finnische Identität zuzuschreiben. Grund dafür könnten die Konzepte einer idealisierten Muttersprache und eines idealisierten Native speaker sein. Einige der Befragten verwenden große Mühe und viel Energie in das Projekt, Finnischkenntnisse zu erwerben.

Narrating and focalizing the Book of Margery Kempe

Mark Amsler — 2024-12-13

Narratology can profit from more historicized attention to premodern texts. This essay opens an extended narratological analysis of the fifteenth-century Middle English Book of Margery Kempe. Modifying narrative theory (Genette, Bal) to suit a medieval narratology, I use discourse analysis to explore the language, focalization, and temporality of the narrating discourse. The text, seemingly without a narrator, deploys multiple focalizations to construct an intricate third-person narrative rather than a strict autobiography of the life of a lay, extravagantly pious, and visionary woman. Some focalizations are internal (Experiencers), while others are external (Summarizer, Commentator, Scribal-Textualist). The lively narration weaves together homodiegetic and heterodiegetic perspectives. The narration constructs multifocalized accounts of the protagonist’s everyday struggles and interactions and her interior experiences and visions of Jesus suffering in the Passion and “fresch” on the streets. Narratological analysis uncovers the textual power of narrating the protagonist’s life story with transplacing temporalities of Apostolic past, near past, and present reading time.

Epistolary skill and discourse management: the use of metapragmatic utterances in 18th-century Scottish letters

Christine Elsweiler — 2024-12-13

Studies using present-day English data have demonstrated that speakers and writers show reflexive awareness of their own language use by employing metapragmatic comments to monitor and organise their discourse. This study explores to what extent this also applies to historical data and therefore investigates the use of metapragmatic utterances for discourse management purposes in 18th-century Scottish letters. It establishes the different types of metapragmatic utterances attested in the correspondence data and, moreover, assesses the influence of the letter-writers’ epistolary skills on the use of such utterances. The study finds that 18th-century writers applied metapragmatic utterances, mostly realised as set strategies, to prevent misunderstandings by clarifying and structuring their own discourse for the addressees and by judging the appropriateness of their own communicative acts. The findings further indicate that writers were aware of the conventional requirement to employ such metapragmatic utterances irrespective of their level of epistolary skill.

Defining Amerindian terms in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Nauigations (1589) or when the explorers became lexicographers

Sara von der Fecht-Fernández — 2024-12-13

This paper deals with the incorporation of Amerindian loanwords in Early Modern English through travel literature, a genre that made essential contributions to the Age Discovery. Specifically, it focuses on those texts included in the third volume of Richard Hakluyt’s The Principall Nauigations (1589), the first great travel compilation written in English, which comprises the reports of the American expeditions and, thus, the descriptions of a foreign environment full of unknown elements whose indigenous names were adopted and reproduced in the adventurers’ narratives.

A previous work on this matter has revealed the presence of 25 Amerindian loanwords in the corpus. But what kind of words are these? In order to find an answer, this research aims to classify the Amerindian terms according to the lexical fields they refer to. Thereafter, the analysis of these borrowings in their contexts determines the strategies used by the English travellers to explain their meaning to the readers. Finally, this study explores the similarities between the aforesaid strategies and the defining practices provided by 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century dictionaries, establishing the relevance of English travel writers as active agents in the definition of Amerindian loanwords at the moment of their entrance into the English language.

Changes of perspective and focus in the Peterborough Chronicle as reflected in the use and distribution of place elements modifying titles paired in apposition with personal names

Seiji Shinkawa — 2024-12-13

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was first composed in retrospect over the important national events of the previous millennium probably in Wessex in the late ninth century and continued separately in multiple ecclesiastical centers across England contemporaneously or near-contemporaneously until as late as 1154 in the Peterborough Chronicle, one of its seven main extant versions. There was inevitably a shift in perspective from retrospective to contemporary after annals began to be recorded in real or near-real time, and this has implications on the use and non-use of place elements modifying titles paired in apposition with personal names, such as of Wessex in Alfred, king of Wessex. Titles help identify or introduce persons named, and the accompanying place elements assist in doing so. The amount of information deemed necessary for effective communication ultimately depends on the writers’ perspective and focus. From a contemporary perspective, with more out-of-text contextual information shared with readers, national matters may have been backgrounded and local matters foregrounded, potentially reflecting the aims and biases of the institutions in which the records were made.

Lexical combinatorics and meaning profiling of the French lexeme 'embryon'

Ana-Maria Cozma — 2024-12-13

This article studies the lexical combinatorics of the French word embryon and how the meaning of this word is profiled from one phrase to another. The study is based on a bioethics corpus made up of institutional discourses on the one hand, and internet users' comments on the other. A concordance tool was used to extract all the phrases in which the word embryon occurs, whatever their frequency. The phrases thus listed are presented first from the point of view of syntactic combinatorics, then from the point of view of lexical combinatorics, and constitute the data that we will analyse. Thus, although extracted from actual discourse, the phrases have undergone simplifications that place them more at a prediscursive level. To carry out the study of these syntagms, the analysis model chosen is Olga Galatanu's Semantics of Argumentative Possibilities (SPA), to which we have added the notion of profiling (Cadiot and Visetti), understood as the result of a process of convocation-evocation, according to Victorri’s vision of gestalt compositionality. The actual analysis consists of identifying the argumentative associations activated by the phrases: the DAs, on the one hand, and the associations evoked by the lexical combinatorics, on the other.

La vérité des Lais de Marie de France

Leena Löfstedt — 2024-12-13

Marie de France is famous for her Lais, which are short stories, rhymed and performed to musical accompaniment. When describing their origin, she tells the reader that she based them on Celtic lais which she claims reported true events. However, Marie de France's Lais included decidedly un-Celtic elements, among them material taken from Anglo-Norman legal procedure, or details found in Ovid, and formulaic introductions reminiscent of techniques learned in twelfth century grammar schools. Collecting and analyzing these novel elements of her Lais might shed light on Marie's own person.

This study uses A.Ewert's edition bsed on the MS H (BL Harley 978).

L’expression artistique par la voix et les gestes

Claudia Schweitzer — 2024-12-13

L'article propose un regard sur la théorisation et sur les instructions pour la mise en pratique de ce que les auteurs français de l'âge classique appellent actio : la modulation de la voix et des gestes à des fins expressives. Partant des descriptions des définitions établies par les philosophes de l'époque (école cartésienne et Lumières sur les effets d'un sentiment éprouvé et transmis, l'étude proposée concerne la dans différents domaines artistiques (acteurs et démarche chanteurs, en passant par la référence aux peintres) pour donner des règles pratiques afin de transformer ces analyses en une expression artistique qui plaît, qui convainc, qui touche et notamment qui émeut.

Formulae, gender and writing experience in Renaissance Florence

Eleonora Serra — 2024-12-13

With private letters having become a genre of choice in historical sociolinguistics, epistolary formulae have attracted increasing attention. Cross-linguistically, studies showing that women letter-writers relied heavily on formulae have hypothesised that formulae served primarily as aids for little experienced writers. However, other studies have shown that formulae could perform different functions, related to group practices and self-representation. I investigate this issue in the context of sixteenth-century Florence, where letter-writing was becoming increasingly codified. Drawing on little-known archival material and focusing on the epistolary closing, this article tracks the use of formulae across the private letters of three women from subsequent generations of one family, the Ricasoli, and compares it to the use of their brothers. These three women differed markedly in their degree of writing experience, in keeping with the increase in female literacy that was affecting the patriciate. The results show that the woman of the last generation used more formulae, suggesting that these items functioned more as social conventions than formulation aids. The comparison with men’s letters further suggests that different models were available to women and men, and that upper-class women might have been more receptive to the new epistolary model that was promoted in those years.

Andarsene alla francese e all’inglese, to take a French leave e filer à l’anglaise: a brief historical survey of a European phraseological expression:

Emanuele Ventura — 2024-12-13

Il presente saggio, ricorrendo soprattutto alle numerose fonti oggi facilmente accessibili grazie a Google Libri, cerca di ricostruire la storia dell’espressione idiomatica andarsene alla francese ‘andarsene alla chetichella, senza salutare’: tale locuzione italiana, assieme alla sua principale variante andarsene all’inglese, mostra stretti rapporti con espressioni analoghe vive in molte altre lingue europee, e si presenta a tutti gli effetti come un europeismo fraseologico, che è stato variamente interpretato in studi precedenti. Fornendo informazioni aggiuntive sulla semantica dell’espressione e sulla sua diffusione in diacronia, e ragionando contemporaneamente sui legami osservabili fra lingue diverse, si ricava la sostanziale anteriorità dei fraseologismi fondati sull’etnonimo francese, ma anche la presenza ancora precedente di altre espressioni, semanticamente affini e portatrici di scortesie linguistiche che hanno spesso contrassegnato i rapporti fra popoli.

Pronouns separating the UK from the EU

Jenni Räikkönen — 2024-12-13

The author defended her doctoral dissertation Pronouns separating the UK from the EU: We and us in British newspapers and parliamentary debates in 1973–2015 (Tampere University Dissertations 989) at the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences of Tampere University on 19 April 2024. The opponent at the public defence was Professor Gerlinde Mautner (Vienna University of Economics and Business), and the defence was chaired by Professor Päivi Pahta (Tampere University). The article-based dissertation is available at https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-03-3365-2 .

Markku Filppula 29.11.1949-9.4.2024 In memoriam

Juhani Klemola — 2024-12-13

Jean-Christophe Pellat : L’orthographe française. Histoire, Description, Enseignement. Paris : Ophrys. 2023.

Henrik Ruotsalainen — 2024-12-13