Spanish and Italian Diminutives Compared: Two Alternatives of a Single Diasystem

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-78
Author(s):  
John M. Ryan ◽  
Víctor Parra-Guinaldo

The relexification of diminutives has been one of the most productive ways to create new words in the Romance languages. The phenomenon is defined as the historical reanalysis of a lexical item composed of root plus diminutive suffix, whereby the original semantic value of the suffix is bleached over time and its combined form is subsequently reanalyzed as part of a new single morphological root carrying new meaning. This study provides a quantitative lexicographic analysis of the entirety of diminutives that have relexified in the history of Italian. When compared to results for Spanish by Ryan and Parra-Guinaldo (2016), data of this study suggest that Italian followed a very different trajectory of diminutive relexification from Latin than that for Spanish. Specifically, Italian appears to have developed a preference for the alternate ad hoc diminutive suffixes -ino/a and -etto/a (based on non-diminutive Latin forms) at a much earlier period than did Spanish, allowing for greater absorption and the time necessary for relexification. Contrastively, lexicographic data for Spanish suggest that Spanish instead continued to favor reflexes of the original Latin diminutive suffixes. The reasons proposed for this divergence is the relatively early colonization of the Iberian Peninsula and continued preference for traditional Latin diminutive endings over innovative endings that were being adopted Empire-wide, beyond Castile, including other regions of Hispania Keywords: morphology, lexicon, diminutives, Italian, Spanish

2019 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 553-566
Author(s):  
Antonio Punzón ◽  
Lucia Rueda ◽  
Augusto Rodríguez-Basalo ◽  
Manuel Hidalgo ◽  
Pere Oliver ◽  
...  

Abstract Long fisheries time series allow the review of baselines and inform our knowledge of past events that have conditioned the recent history of the stocks. In this study, we investigated trends in fisheries landings data for the most representative Atlantic and Mediterranean demersal fisheries off the Spanish Iberian Peninsula and the Balearic Islands (1933–1986). The aim was to analyse the evolution of demersal species exploitation and detect changes in landings and fishing tactics. Ten species were selected, which included teleosts, crustaceans, and cephalopods. Results indicated a decrease in Landings Per Unit of Capacity (LPUC) in six of the species examined. While in the Atlantic the process of substitution or incorporation of new species to the fisheries occurs progressively, in the Mediterranean this incorporation occurs simultaneously for many of the species. Four main fishing tactics (landing pattern obtained from the classification analysis of landings per species) were identified. Geographically nearby and connected regions developed similar fishing tactics to each other, and also changed over time. While the fleets from isolated regions were more specialized, and only carrying out one fishing tactic during the study period. Improvements in LPUC with the implementation of new technology and legislative and management measures were not observed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-132
Author(s):  
Ryan Szpiech ◽  
Katarzyna Starczewska ◽  
Mercedes García-Arenal Rodríguez

AbstractThis essay studies the translations of the Qur’ān into Romance languages in anti-Islamic treatises written by Christians in the Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth century. It compares three such works (here calledAntialcoranesor ‘anti-Qur’āns’) that contain citations of the Qur’ān in Arabic, either in Arabic script or in transliteration, or both. These include theConfusión o confutación de la secta Mahomética y del Alcorán(1515) of Juan Andrés, theLumbre de fe contra la secta mahometana y el alcorán(1521) by Martín de Figuerola and theConfutación del alcorán y secta mahometana(1555) by Lope de Obregón. It also considers glosses found in the Latin Qur’ān made at the behest of the Italian cardinal Egidio (Giles) da Viterbo (1518). We argue that these works merit detailed study, along with more studied Latin translations, as part of a history of the translation of the Qur’ān in the early modern period.


Author(s):  
Daniel Pascoe

Chapter 6’s case study on Indonesia, as with the previous three chapters, begins with a description of Indonesia’s death penalty laws, the country’s recent history of executions, and a list of publicly known clemency grants from 1991 to 2016. Thereafter, as with the previous chapter covering Malaysia, Chapter 6 lists several counterbalancing explanations for Indonesia’s ambivalent clemency practice from 1991 to 2016. Of the four jurisdictions under study, Indonesia’s clemency practice is easily the most irregular, seemingly defined more by ad hoc case-based factors and immediate political considerations than by long-term, consistent policies on particular crime and offender categories. As Chapter 6 documents in detail, the inconsistency of clemency over time and between cases is in itself the notable trend in Indonesia. Chapter 6 argues that the medium rate of clemency in Indonesia’s death penalty system is potentially explained by several theoretically informed factors: leniency exercised at earlier stages of capital cases’ progress through the criminal justice system; democratization and Indonesia’s ‘rule of law’ politics in the post-Suharto (1998–) Reformasi (reform) era; the collective pardon of the remaining 1965 ‘coup’ political prisoners by President Habibie in 1999; and finally, Indonesia’s uniquely languid clemency procedures before streamlining reforms in 2010. The first two factors serve to inhibit clemency, whereas the latter two lift Indonesia’s clemency rate to 26–33 per cent, at the very minimum.


2010 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katalin Nagy C.

This paper aims to identify the role of pragmatics in grammaticalisation and to highlight the particular steps in the process of the conventionalisation of conversational implicatures on the basis of a historical pragmatic study concerning the grammaticalisation of the Catalan anar ‘to go’ + infinitive construction. It also provides some comparative considerations with similar constructions in other Romance languages. The corpus contains occurrences taken from medieval Catalan chronicles. In order to reconstruct the history of anar + infinitive, the paper also considers morphological facts and other Catalan medieval periphrases. The paper concludes that implicatures play a double role in semantic change. On the one hand, they can become part of the semantic meaning attached to a certain construction as a new semantic component. On the other hand, they can promote the salience of a certain semantic component within the semantic structure of a lexical item.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-115
Author(s):  
Sindorela Doli Kryeziu

Abstract In our paper we will talk about the whole process of standardization of the Albanian language, where it has gone through a long historical route, for almost a century.When talking about standard Albanian language history and according to Albanian language literature, it is often thought that the Albanian language was standardized in the Albanian Language Orthography Congress, held in Tirana in 1972, or after the publication of the Orthographic Rules (which was a project at that time) of 1967 and the decisions of the Linguistic Conference, a conference of great importance that took place in Pristina, in 1968. All of these have influenced chronologically during a very difficult historical journey, until the standardization of the Albanian language.Considering a slightly wider and more complex view than what is often presented in Albanian language literature, we will try to describe the path (history) of the standard Albanian formation under the influence of many historical, political, social and cultural factors that are known in the history of the Albanian people. These factors have contributed to the formation of a common state, which would have, over time, a common standard language.It is fair to think that "all activity in the development of writing and the Albanian language, in the field of standardization and linguistic planning, should be seen as a single unit of Albanian culture, of course with frequent manifestations of specific polycentric organization, either because of divisions within the cultural body itself, or because of the external imposition"(Rexhep Ismajli," In Language and for Language ", Dukagjini, Peja, 1998, pp. 15-18.)


Author(s):  
Olga Lomakina ◽  
Oksana Shkuran

The article analyzes methods of explication of the traditional and widely used stable biblical expression «forbidden fruit». The study is based on a diachronic section – from the interpretation of the biblical text to the communicative intention of dialogue participants in the media space illustrating nuclear and peripheral meanings. The analysis includes biblical texts that realize the archetypal meaning of the biblical expression «forbidden fruit» in which it is called the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The secularized interest in the kind of tree, on which forbidden fruits grew, is motivated by a realistic presentation of a sad history of the first people’s fall in the Book of Genesis. Scientific hypotheses have their origins since the Middle Ages, when artists recreated the author’s story of eating the forbidden fruit. For religion, the variety of the fruit is not of fundamental importance, however, visualization in the works of art has become an incentive for the further use of the biblical expression with a new semantic segment. Modern media texts actively represent the transformation of the biblical expression«forbidden fruit» for different purposes: in advertising texts for pragmatic one, in informative, educational, ideological texts for cognitive one, in entertaining textsfor communicative one, lowering the spiritual and semantic value register of the modern language. Therefore, the process of desemantization and profanization of the biblical expression results in the destruction of national stereotypes in Russian people’s worldview.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Susan M. Albring ◽  
Randal J. Elder ◽  
Mitchell A. Franklin

ABSTRACT The first tax inversion in 1983 was followed by small waves of subsequent inversion activity, including two inversions completed by Transocean. Significant media and political attention focused on transactions made by U.S. multinational corporations that were primarily designed to reduce U.S. corporate income taxes. As a result, the U.S. government took several actions to limit inversion activity. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) significantly lowered U.S. corporate tax rates and one expected impact of TCJA is a reduction of inversion activity. Students use the Transocean inversions to understand the reasons why companies complete a tax inversion and how the U.S. tax code affects inversion activity. Students also learn about the structure of inversion transactions and how they have changed over time as the U.S. government attempted to limit them. Students also assess the tax and economic impacts of inversion transactions to evaluate tax policy.


Author(s):  
Jürgen Schaflechner

Chapter 3 introduces the tradition of ritual journeys and sacred geographies in South Asia, then hones in on a detailed history of the grueling and elaborate pilgrimage attached to the shrine of Hinglaj. Before the construction of the Makran Coastal Highway the journey to the Goddess’s remote abode in the desert of Balochistan frequently presented a lethally dangerous undertaking for her devotees, the hardships of which have been described by many sources in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Sindhi, and Urdu. This chapter draws heavily from original sources, including travelogues and novels, which are supplanted with local oral histories in order to weave a historical tapestry that displays the rich array of practices and beliefs surrounding the pilgrimage and how they have changed over time. The comparative analysis demonstrates how certain motifs, such as austerity (Skt. tapasyā), remain important themes within the whole Hinglaj genre even in modern times while others have been lost in the contemporary era.


Author(s):  
Marko Geslani

The introduction reviews the historiographic problem of the relation between fire sacrifice (yajña) and image worship (pūjā), which have traditionally been seen as opposing ritual structures serving to undergird the distinction of “Vedic” and “Hindu.” Against such an icono- and theocentric approach, it proposes a history of the priesthood in relation to royal power, centering on the relationship between the royal chaplain (purohita) and astrologer (sāṃvatsara) as a crucial, unexplored development in early Indian religion. In order to capture these historical developments, it outlines a method for the comparative study of ritual forms over time.


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