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Welcome
Edward Mills
Six Galician-Portuguese Satires by Alfonso X, in English
Joseph T. Snow
The purpose of these six translations of Galician-Portuguese satires by Alfonso X is to open a window onto the serious and sometimes ribald satires so popular in thirteenth-century Spain. Poets were also performers, even though other lesser caliber singers could perform them. The six satires include two debate poems where the poets compete even as the second speaker is required to produce the very meters and rhymes of the first speaker. Two more focus on poetic rivals, Alfonso X and Pero da Ponte. Alfonso satirizes Pero for having stolen his songs from another poet, thus ‘burying him’ while Pero parades about in pure arrogance. As king, Alfonso did battle with the remaining Moorish stronghold in Spain and several satires deal with soldier-vassals who proved to be cowards and one of those is translated here. In the final one Alfonso imagines the role of a highly discouraged military man whose sole desire is to go back to being what he had been before, a sailor.
Taking Stock of Support-Verb Constructions in Journalistic French
Victoria Fendel
This article takes a fresh look at support-verb constructions in journalistic French. It takes a novel approach by proposing a working definition that allows for an empirical data collection and thus captures the internal heterogeneity of this widely discussed group of constructions. The proposed working definition acknowledges that support-verb constructions, as many multi-word expressions, operate at the syntax-semantic interface by combining criteria relating to each domain. It also acknowledges that support verbs and predicative nouns can only be defined in relative terms, i.e. relative to the construction. The article assumes support-verb constructions to be a semi-productive pattern and an integral part of the French lexicon in line with Butt and Lahiri’s findings on support verbs as well as Gross’ influential Lexicon-Grammar framework. The article considers specifically the complementation patterns of support-verb constructions and their diachronic development through the lens of grammaticalisation. Grammaticalisation seems to affect the construction as a whole rather than only the support verb. The article shows that the support verb retains a crucial function and meaning in the construction, yet that the degree of its semantic and syntactic weight shifts relative to the combination of components in the construction.
Aestheticized History: Tolstoy’s Homeric Inheritance
Sveta Yefimenko
This inquiry aligns Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace with Homer’s Iliad from a historiographical and philosophical perspective in light of the intellectual category Tolstoy developed and termed istoriia-iskusstvo, or ‘history-art’. By examining Tolstoy’s diaries, notebooks, letters, and novel drafts, I intend to show how Tolstoy regarded Homeric epic as participating in the category of history-art, and investigate the reasons for and methods by which Tolstoy utilized Homeric epic in his own masterpiece. After proposing a Tolstoyan definition of epic, I will consider how Tolstoy’s appropriation of Homeric material legitimized his historical revisionism in spite of its inconsistency with historical facts, enabling it to both achieve the authoritative scope of epic and pass into collective memory.