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When it comes to footnotes, Alexander von Humboldt was ahead of his times even though his references leave much to be desired by today’s academic standards. This article examines the footnotes of Humboldt’s Essai politique sur l‘île de Cuba (1826). While it is not always easy to decipher his sometimes cryptic references, the undertaking is worthwhile: Humboldt’s footnotes do not only reveal his vast networks of knowledge. They also provide glimpses of ongoing, contemporary disputes among different scholars that involve Humboldt’s writings. They also present Humboldt’s reactions to such disputes. Exploring Humboldt’s footnotes consequently allows the reader to access both Humboldt the scholar and Humboldt the human being.
Writing travel, writing life
(2022)
The book compares the texts of three Swiss authors: Ella Maillart, Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Nicolas Bouvier. The focus is on their trip from Genève to Kabul that Ella Maillart and Annemarie Schwarzenbach made together in 1939/1940 and Nicolas Bouvier 1953/1954 with the artist Thierry Vernet. The comparison shows the strong connection between the journey and life and between ars vivendi and travel literature.
This book also gives an overview of and organises the numerous terms, genres, and categories that already exist to describe various travel texts and proposes the new term travelling narration. The travelling narration looks at the text from a narratological perspective that distinguishes the author, narrator, and protagonist within the narration.
In the examination, ten motifs could be found to characterise the travelling narration: Culture, Crossing Borders, Freedom, Time and Space, the Aesthetics of Landscapes, Writing and Reading, the Self and/as the Other, Home, Religion and Spirituality as well as the Journey. The importance of each individual motif does not only apply in the 1930s or 1950s but also transmits important findings for living together today and in the future.
This study is based on an editorial report, which was presented at the 2009 working conference »Alexander von Humboldt and the Hemisphere« at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN). It demonstrates the textual genesis of Humboldt’s writings on Cuba through examples, which were obtained from a detailed text comparison of the three existing »original« versions of Humboldt’s Essai politique sur l’île de Cuba. The collation was part of a larger strategy to regain philological ground for the »Humboldt in English« (HiE) project. Since 2007 and funded with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the US-German research team behind HiE has been working on new and unabridged translations and critical editions of three of Humboldt’s most significant texts from his American oeuvre.1 The following observations will outline the most important results of this collation effort as a complementary contribution to the recent release of the HiE project’s first volume, The Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (Chicago University Press 2011), edited by Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette.
The present paper is concerned with the phenomenon of reporting on the speakers’ thinking when both the reporting and the reported clauses originate in one and the same speaker, i.e. the performative uses of the verbs sp. creer and pt. achar (‘think’). The data are retrieved from the CdE-NOW and CdP-NOW. Adopting both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, I concentrate on reporting on thinking with and without the overt expression of the subject pronouns sp. yo and pt. eu. In doing so, the constructions (yo) creo (que) and (eu) acho (que) as well as parenthetic and right-peripheral creo yo and acho eu are studied. According to the corpus data and compared to other possible constructions with creo and acho, creo que and acho que represent the most frequent constructions if searching for the ‘node’ creo or acho, that is, if the non-use of the subject pronoun exceeds its explicit expression.
The present paper discusses the relationship between evidentiality and (inter-) subjectivity and argues that the two semantic-functional categories need not be mutually exclusive. In the use of certain means of expression and in certain contexts, both evidentiality and (inter-) subjectivity may be conveyed simultaneously. I thereby differentiate between two meanings of intersubjectivity, namely ‘intersubjectivity1’ and ‘intersubjectivity2’. Intersubjectivity1 refers to the notion of common or general knowledge: certain means of expression are seen as being intersubjectively used when the speaker shares or assumes sharing knowledge with the interlocutor. Intersubjectivity2 is related to particular discourse functions of certain means of expression in interactional settings, paying attention to the speaker-hearer constellation.
In order to substantiate the theoretical part of the paper, I then present a qualitative analysis of Portuguese, Spanish and English examples, which are taken from the Corpus do Português, Corpus del Español and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
“I mean, no soy psicóloga”
(2019)
This paper is concerned with the qualitative analysis of the use of the English discourse marker I mean in Spanish and Portuguese online discourses (in online fora, blogs or user comments on websites). The examples are retrieved from the Corpus del Español (Web/ Dialects) as well as the Corpus do Português (Web/ Dialects).
This article deals with Spanish modal adverbs and verbs of cognitive attitude (Capelli 2007) and their epistemic and/or evidential use. The article is based upon the hypothesis that the study of the use of these linguistic devices has to be highly context-sensitive, as it is not always (only) the sentence level that has to be looked at if one wants to find out whether a certain adverb or verb of cognitive attitude is used evidentially or epistemically. In this article, therefore, the context is used to determine which meaning aspects of an element are encoded and which are contributed by the context. The data were retrieved from the daily newspaper El País. Nevertheless, the present study is not a quantitative one, but rather a qualitative study. My corpus analysis indicates that it is not possible to differentiate between the linguistic categories of evidentiality and epistemic modality in every case, although it indeed is possible in the vast majority of cases. In verbs of cognitive attitude, evidentiality and epistemic modality seem to be two interwoven categories, while concerning modal adverbs it is usually possible to separate the categories and to distinguish between the different subtypes of evidentiality such as visual evidence, hearsay and inference.
The present study approaches the Spanish postposed constructions creo Ø and creo yo ‘[p], [I] think’ from a cognitive-constructionist perspective. It is argued that both constructions are to be distinguished from one another because creo Ø has a subjective function, while in creo yo, it is the intersubjective dimension that is particularly prominent. The present investigation takes both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective. With regard to the latter, the problem of quantitative representativity is addressed. The discussion posed the question of how empirical research can feed back into theory, more precisely, into the framework of Cognitive Construction Grammar. The data to be analyzed here are retrieved from the corpora Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual and Corpus del Español.
In this paper evidential and modal adverbs will be studied, such as French apparemment, évidemment, visiblement, Italian apparentemente, evidentemente, ovviamente, and Spanish aparentemente, evidentemente and visiblemente. The development of their signification will be discussed, including German adverbs like offensichtlich. In these means of expression, the functional-semantic categories evidentiality and epistemic modality seem to overlap: on the one hand, they are used if the state of affairs talked about cannot be verified, that is, if there is still a moment of insecurity concerning the transmitted information. Then adverbials with a special structure (preposition + article + nominal form of a verb) will be analysed, and we will examine if they behave in the same way.
Humboldtian science aims at an empirically supported transdisciplinary and at the same time transareal development of a world consciousness. In the development of this world consciousness, not only Europe and the Americas, but also Central Asia and especially China play an important role. The Humboldt Center for Transdisciplinary Studies (HCTS) in Changsha, is attempting to address the fact that China has been largely left out of international Humboldt studies and that Alexander von Humboldt was intensively engaged with Central Asia and China for decades. Therefore, the Humboldt Center in Changsha sets itself the goal of expanding Humboldt Studies to include this important aspect, to stimulate and coordinate special research work, and to build scientific and cultural bridges between Germany and China, Europe and Asia.