Stimmversagen, Sprachinfarkt und Zungenbremse? Posttridentinische Betrachtungsliteratur Italiens zwischen orazione mentale und orazione vocale

In the following, the literary potential of a counterreformation-minded uncertainty will be in focus which in turn resulted from the distinction in orazione orale and orazione mentale made in the context of the Council of Trent. The differentiation of inner-mental and external-vocal voice as well as one’s own word and the prescribed or appropriated word was accelerated by the Council and lead to a self-reflection of prayer literature and meditations concerning their voice and voicing. Whose voice speaks in prayers and contemplation and by which aesthetic qualities are they characterized? The literary crystallisation of standardization, domestication but also the emancipating obstinacy of the meditation-voice ought to be made visible hereafter in an exemplary way. Promoted by the Council of Trent, the revaluation of the spiritual ‘inner’ prayer, in comparison to the textual prayer spoken with an external voice, has become effective in the Catholic counterreformation literature as creative-conceptual freedom, but also as a practical-aesthetic challenge. Literary and lyrical meditations – as will be shown here using the example of Antonio Grillo, Gabriele Fiamma and Loreto Mattei – not only implement the spiritual voice of contemplation discursively and thematically, but also textually and performatively. The specific relationship between production aesthetics (meditating lyrical self) and reception aesthetics (meditating contemplative poetry appropriating self) has a supporting function. Conflicting voice-discourses do not become effective in the sense of reciprocal prevention, but in the sense of symbiotic coexistence. The lyrical considerations analysed here do not solve the interferences of vocal regimes conceptually-fundamentally, but performatively-concretely.

Comunicación epistolar y colaboración científica entre especialistas alemanes en Sudamérica a fines del siglo XIX. Un estudio de la correspondencia entre Rodolfo Lenz y Robert Lehmann-Nitsche

The following paper undertakes the presentation and subsequent analysis of the initial section of an extended, although only partially preserved letter exchange between two salient German scholars settled in Argentina and Chile from the end of the 19th century on, and during the first decades of the 20th century: Rudolf Lenz, trained in linguistics and Romance languages at the renowned Romanistik School of Bonn, who worked at the Instituto Pedagógico in Santiago de Chile, and Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, a Prussian physician and anthropologist who was in charge of the Anthropological Section of a brand new modern Museum in Argentina’s recently founded city of La Plata. The letter exchange between them lasted from 1897 until 1928 and the analysis of its initial pieces (1897–1898) allows us to see how personal and scientific networks were constructed, and how German science and sociability managed to settle down in such distant locations and still remain connected with its system of origin.

Spanisch in Afrika/Afrika in Spanien. Sprachliche Charakteristika von Spanischsprecherinnen und Spanischsprechern aus Äquatorialguinea in Madrid

In this paper, from the perspective of the migration context in Madrid, we look at the only officially Hispanophone country in Africa: Equatorial Guinea. After a detailed introduction to Equatorial Guinea’s history and languages, we offer an overview of the Equatoguinean migration to Spain and its current situation. In the main part of the article, we discuss three linguistic characteristics of Spanish spoken by people of Equatoguinean origin. In order to do so, we use a corpus of 24 sociolinguistic life-story interviews, conducted in Madrid in 2017 and 2018. The selected features represent different linguistic levels: syntax (variable use of prepositions in the construction ir ‘to go’ + preposition a or en + destination), semantics (use of the verbs oír ‘to hear’ and escuchar ‘to listen’), and pragmatics (discursive use of tío/tía ‘[literally:] uncle/aunt’). To gain a better understanding, we consider the sociolinguistic context of Equatorial Guinea and compare our results with other contact varieties of Spanish. Altogether, this study offers an insight into the Equatoguinean diaspora in Madrid and at the same time makes a contribution to the modern description of Equatoguinean Spanish.

Zur Beziehung von progressiven Verbalperiphrasen und states. Ein erster Bericht aus Studien zu romanischen Sprachen

This paper deals with properties and restrictions of progressive markers (Romance progressive verbal periphrases, PVP) and relates these to the question of the degree of grammaticality these constructions have reached in the respective languages. In analysing the process of grammaticalisation of PVP, a distinction is drawn on two levels: on the level of internal structure and the level of system. After introducing progressivity as a subcategory of imperfectivity, and progressive markers as the means of expressing it (§ 2), the (in)compatibility of Romance PVP with states is examined in more detail (§ 3). This investigation is based on French, Italian, (European and Brazilian) Portuguese and Spanish data elicited in several broad-based acceptability studies conducted as part of the SFB 833 project “Verbal and Nominal Aspectuality between Lexicon and Grammar” (2017–2020). As opposed to common interpretations, different states and state-types are shown to be compatible with progressive verbal periphrases to varying degrees. Romance languages differ in their levels of acceptability of states in PVP – and the degree of compatibility correlates with the degree to which the construction is integrated in their respective language systems. The concluding remarks (§ 4) summarise the theoretical implications of the data analysis, which can be seen as an empirical verification of existing theses concerning the degree of grammaticalisation of Romance PVP.