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Connecting the new world
(2012)
This article explores the link between the profound technological transformations of the nineteenth century and the life and work of the Prussian scholar Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). It analyses how Humboldt sought to appropriate the revolutionary new communication and transportation technologies of the time in order to integrate the American continent into global networks of commercial, intellectual and material exchange. Recent scholarship on Humboldt’s expedition to the New World (1799-1804) has claimed that his descriptions of tropical landscapes opened up South America to a range of ‘transformative interventions’ (Pratt) by European capitalists and investors. These studies, however, have not analysed the motivations underlying Humboldt’s support for such intrusions into nature. Furthermore, they have not explored the role that such projects played in shaping Humboldt’s understanding of the forces behind the progress of societies. To comprehend Humboldt’s approval for human interventions in America’s natural world, this study first explores the role that eighteenth-century theories of progress and the notion of geographical determinism played in shaping his conception of civilisational development. It will look at concrete examples of transformative interventions in the American hemisphere that were actively proposed by Humboldt and intended to overcome natural obstacles to human interaction. These were the use of steamships, electric telegraphy, railroads and large-scale canals that together enabled global trade and communication to occur at an unprecedented pace. All these contemporary innovations will be linked to the four motifs of nets, mobility, progress and acceleration, which were driving forces behind the ‘transformation of the world’ that took place in the course of the nineteenth century.
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.
Urbanity and literature
(2011)
Transarea studies focus upon spaces as created by the movements that criss-cross them. From this point of view, from its very beginnings, literature is closely interrelated with a vectorial (and much less with a purely spatial) conception of history - and with urbanity, which plays a decisive role in Gilgamesh's travels through a (narrative) cosmos centered upon the city of Uruk. This article explores the city as a transareal space of movement in three examples of literature, with no fixed abode, around the turn of the millennium, i.e. Assia Djebar's Les Nuits de Strasbourg, Emine Sevgi Oezdamar's Istanbul-Berlin Trilogy, and Cecile Wajsbrot's L'ile aux musees. These three writers project, in a very specific way, cities in motion as anagrammatic and fractal structures.
Transarea studies focus upon spaces as created by the movements that criss-cross them. From this point of view, from its very beginnings, literature is closely interrelated with a vectorial (and much less with a purely spatial) conception of history - and with urbanity, which plays a decisive role in Gilgamesh's travels through a (narrative) cosmos centered upon the city of Uruk. This article explores the city as a transareal space of movement in three examples of literature, with no fixed abode, around the turn of the millennium, i.e. Assia Djebar's Les Nuits de Strasbourg, Emine Sevgi Oezdamar's Istanbul-Berlin Trilogy, and Cecile Wajsbrot's L'ile aux musees. These three writers project, in a very specific way, cities in motion as anagrammatic and fractal structures.
This essay shows in what sense Alexander von Humboldt created a new discourse on the New World. In his view of the Americas, he was able to subvert the dominantly spatial history of the 'new hemisphere' found in Cornelius de Pauw or Guillaume-Thomas Raynal by introducing dynamic and vectorial structures that allow us to focus on the Americas not as 'the other' but as a highly interrelated part of the world. Humboldt's Weltbewusstsein ('world consciousness') develops a new discourse that can be best understood as a complex answer to the second period of accelerated globalisation.