The Translation of Repetition in Shakespeare’s Sonnetsts

While formal features constituting the outer form of the poem in Spanish, such as the stress pattern or the rhyme, are usually the most evident to the reader and may be particularly relevant to the translator, other mechanisms based on repetition are essential in the rhythmic configuration of the poem. Based on a corpus of sixty-two Spanish translations of Shakespeare's Sonnets, this article analyses how anaphoras, alliterations and parallelisms have been translated and highlights the significant role that some of these figures play in the target poems.

COVID-19 in Polish Women’s Press. Preliminary research

Women’s press has been analysed as an element of the Polish media system by representatives of various fields of research. There have been studies of press content, formal features of individual magazines, ownership and definition issues, and internal segmentations, amongst others. This research attempts to fill a gap in the study of women’s press content; it aims to show how the COVID-19 was presented in women’s press. As an introduction to the main research, this article examines a carefully selected study sample with individual sub-segments of women’s press each represented by a leading magazine. Research objectives include determining the ways in which COVID-19 is presented in certain women’s press titles belonging to different sub-segments, analysing the selection and presentation of information to potential readers in regards to their needs, and establishing the functions of COVID-19 guidance in women’s press.

The Neo-Futurists

Interest in the Russian Futurist poetry of the first two-and-a-half decades of the twentieth century was revived in Soviet literary circles in the mid-1950s. Initially focused on the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky, interest spread to other writers. At the turn of the fifties and sixties, this revival resulted in regular “unsanctioned” poetry readings at the Mayakovsky monument in Moscow, which were eventually banned by the authorities. Against this backdrop, several young poets tried to build on the creative strategies of the Futurists. Gennady Aigi, who debuted as a Chuvash-language poet, was the first of these poets to arrive on the literary scene. Vladimir Kazakov and Vadim Kozovoy, poets who came onto the literary scene in the sixties, consciously established their styles at the intersection of the Russian and international avant-gardes, trying to overcome the isolationism of Soviet poetry. In the seventies, poems by their elder contemporary, Elizaveta Mnatsakanova, claiming to complete the project of a revived Futurism, were published abroad. All four poets borrowed numerous formal features of their work from Russian Futurism and sought to see themselves as its successors, while setting aside the avant-garde’s socio-political agenda and its desire for a radical transformation of culture and society.

“Shall I (compare) compare thee?”

This paper presents the results of a corpus-based analysis of a special type of modification of the English (as) Adj as NP similes. The modification involves filling the property slot with a cognate noun-adjective compound, i.e., a compound adjective consisting of the original adjective and the noun representing the original source of comparison, and inserting a new source of comparison into the construction (red as blood vs blood-red as a raw steak). Our data come from three sources: the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the iWeb Corpus, and material published on the Google website. Using quantitative methods we first explored whether there is a relationship between various distributional and formal features of the “original” as-similes and their likelihood of exhibiting this type of modification behavior. We then performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the semantic and, to a lesser extent, discourse-related features of authentic examples of this type of modification. Our results indicate that while these modifications are not abundant, the as-similes that have been found to modify in this way are significantly different from the as-similes that have been found not to modify in this way, on a number of formal and distributional features. The analysis of the semantic and discourse-related features of the modifications themselves revealed (i) the typical semantic domains of the three nominal entities featured in the modified simile: the original source, the new source, and the target, including the semantic fit among the domains of those entities; (ii) the typical semantic domains of the properties for which the three nominal entities are compared, including the semantic fit among the domains of those properties; and (iii) the typical text varieties accommodating these modifications. The latter results confirm, and to some extent elaborate on, some earlier findings about the semantic and discourse-related profiles of similes at large.

Word-order variation in a contact setting: A corpus-based investigation of Russian spoken in Daghestan

This paper deals with word-order variation in a situation of language contact. We present a corpus-based investigation of word order in the variety of Russian spoken in Daghestan, focusing specifically on noun phrases with a genitive modifier. In Daghestanian Russian, the nonstandard word order GEN+N (prepositive or left genitive) often occurs. At first glance, this phenomenon might be easily explained in terms of syntactic calquing from the speakers’ left-branching L1s. However, the order GEN+N does not occur with the same frequency in all types of genitive noun phrases but is affected by several lexicosemantic and formal features of both the head and the genitive modifier. Therefore, we are not dealing with simple pattern borrowing. Rather, L1 influence strengthens certain universal tendencies that are not motivated by contact. The comparison with monolinguals’ Russian, in which prepositive genitives sporadically occur too, supports this hypothesis.

Formal Features and Notation

Part II addresses the formal features of the prosula genre. After a first chapter that is devoted to a general discussion of prosulas and their textual and notational elements that highlights how the genre is a special window in the modes of chant learning and teaching, it examines the repertories of prosulas for the different genres of the Proper of the mass and the interplay between textual and melodic prosody. In so doing it reveals that prosulas for graduals and tracts (a relatively small repertory) display similarities with the genre of Latin songs and those for alleluias and offertories (the most extended corpuses) reveal a wide array of stylistic features and disclose insights on the local cults of saints.