The Knights of Science: Medicine and Mythology

In this chapter Taylor-Pirie examines how parasitologists invoked myths of British nationhood in their professional self-fashioning to frame themselves as knights of science fighting on behalf of Imperial Britain. Analysing scientific lectures, political speeches, letter correspondence, obituaries, medical biographies, and journalistic essays, she draws attention to the prominence of Arthurian legend and Greco-Roman mythology in conceptualisations of parasitology, arguing that such literary-linguistic practices sought to reimagine the relationship between medicine and empire by adapting historical and poetic models of chivalry. In this way, individual researchers were lionised as national heroes and their research framed as labour that could command the longevity of legendary stories like those recounted in Homeric poems and medieval romance. In acclimatisation debates, the tropics were frequently conceptualised in relation to the Greek Underworld, a suite of references that together with dragon slaying and the quest narrative helped to position parasitology as a type of ‘crusading fiction’ in the context of the Victorian medieval revival.

‘V2’ and clitic placement

In medieval Romance, as well as in present-day western Ibero-Romance, enclisis and proclisis alternate in finite main positive clauses. Such alternations are usually subsumed under the so-called Tobler-Mussafia law, which has been subject to several reformulations in order to relate clitic placement to other syntactic properties. This chapter shows that the hypothesis linking enclisis and verb movement is ultimately correct, although the examples supporting the hypothesis are relatively rare, the correlation between enclisis and verb movement is a bit more complicated than assumed in part of the literature, and no formal machinery proposed so far accounts adequately for clitic placement. This chapter endorses Benincà’s (1995, 2006) hypothesis, according to which the verb moves in two steps, yielding, respectively, subject inversion and V2 orders, when the verb targets a lower position in the left periphery, and enclisis, when the verb climbs higher.

Topicalization in the Romance Languages

Topic and topicalization are key notions to understand processes of syntactic and prosodic readjustments in Romance. More specifically, topicalization refers to the syntactic mechanisms and constructions available in a language to mark an expression as the topic of the sentence. Despite the lack of a uniform definition of topic, often based on the notions of aboutness or givenness, significant advances have been made in Romance linguistics since the 1990s, yielding a better understanding of the topicalization constructions, their properties, and their grammatical correlates. Prosodically, topics are generally described as being contained in independent intonational phrases. The syntactic and pragmatic characteristics of a specific topicalization construction, by contrast, depend both on the form of resumption of the dislocated topic within the clause and on the types of topic (aboutness, given, and contrastive topics). We can thus distinguish between hanging topic (left dislocation) (HTLD) and clitic left-dislocation (ClLD) for sentence-initial topics, and clitic right-dislocation (ClRD) for sentence-final dislocated constituents. These topicalization constructions are available in most Romance languages, although variation may affect the type and the obligatory presence of the resumptive element. Scholars working on topic and topicalization in the Romance languages have also addressed controversial issues such as the relation between topics and subjects, both grammatical (nominative) subjects and ‘oblique’ subjects such as dative experiencers and locative expressions. Moreover, topicalization has been discussed for medieval Romance, in conjunction with its alleged V2 syntactic status. Some topicalization constructions such as subject inversion, especially in the non-null subject Romance languages, and Resumptive Preposing may indeed be viewed as potential residues of medieval V2 property in contemporary Romance.

The author's strategies of the communicative paradigm in the medieval romance

The research is devoted to the study of the actualization of meanings in a literary text. The study is based on the material of a medieval novel. The subject of the study was the corpus of texts of chivalric novels. In the aggregate, the study of (linguistic-rhetorical) works. The analysis was carried out from the position of studying the author's strategy of influencing the reader in order to have a certain attitude to the hero or plot of the work. The author's influencing strategy in novels is conceptually different from the strategies in works of other genres. The fact that in the works of different authors, united by one image of the main character, use similar elements of influence on the reader, which indicates a special perception of the image of the main character in the minds of people of the XII–XV centuries. This perception is formed both from the totality of literary techniques that pass from work to work, and at the level of linguistic means.