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The starting point of this article is the occurrence of determiner-less and bare que relative complementizers like (en) que, ‘(in) that’, instead of (en) el que, ‘(in) which’, in Yucatecan Spanish (southeast Mexico). While reference grammars treat complementizers with a determiner as the standard option, previous diachronic research has shown that determiner-less complementizers actually predate relative complementizers with a determiner. Additionally, Yucatecan Spanish has been in long-standing contact with Yucatec Maya. Relative complementation in Yucatec Maya differs from that in Spanish (at least) in that the non-complex complementizer tu’ux (‘where’) is generally the only option for locative complementation. The paper explores monolingual and bilingual data from Yucatecan Spanish to discuss the question whether the determiner-less and bare que relative complementizers in our data constitute a historic remnant or a dialectal recast, possibly (but not necessarily) due to language contact. Although our pilot study may not answer these far-reaching questions, it does reveal two separate, but intertwined developments: (i) a generally increased rate of bare que relative complementation, across both monolingual speakers of Spanish and Spanish Maya bilinguals, compared to other Spanish varieties, and (ii) a preference for donde at the cost of other locative complementizer constructions in the bilingual group. Our analysis thus reveals intriguing differences between the complementizer preferences of monolingual and bilingual speakers, suggesting that different variational patterns caused by different (socio-)linguistic factors can co-develop in parallel in one and the [same] region.
Presentacion
(2002)
This study adopts a cognitive approach to the analysis of the use of the Spanish imperfecto as a construal form for the conceptualization of state of affairs in certain journalistic texts. In doing so, the main focus of the study is to investigate cognitive processes like modalization and subjectivization, which are related to the speaker’s standpoint and to his subjective, not grammatically motivated, decision to use the imperfective instead of the perfective form. By the help of the corpus programmes GlossaNet and CREA (corpus of the Real Academia Española) we analyze the imperfective use of some Spanish verbs, which are semantically perfective in nature so that the normative use would require a perfective form. In other words, we investigate how the speaker/journalist construes a reality or situation to be expressed by means of the imperfecto and show that this use of the imperfect is typical for journalistic discourse.
The paper aims at considering characteristics from one field of contemporary visual studies that has for a long time been neglected in academic research: Pictorial signs on Social Network Sites (SNS) are an outstanding class of semiotic resources that is greatly shaped by processes of technological and collective sign production and distribution. A brief examination of the scholarly research on the pragmatics and semiotics of pictorial signs on SNS shows that the heterogeneity of visual signs is often neglected and that it mostly concentrates on one aspect of these pictorial signs: their technological production or their purpose for individual self-disclosure. The paper therefore considers the semiosis of pictorial signs on SNS in a holistic perspective as one the one hand produced by individual and collective meaning making as well as on the other hand a product of technological framing. It therefore develops a techno-semiotic pragmatic account that takes into consideration both processes. Starting from a prominent class of pictorial signs on SNS during Tunisian Revolution, the Tunisian Flag graphics, the paper than shows that communicative and social interaction functions on the graphic interface of SNS (‘like’-function, sharing and commenting option) are not only directly inscribed into the pictorial frame, but also greatly influence the reading of a pictorial sign. The location of images on the SNS’ interface has an impact on its meaning and on the social functions of a pictorial sign, as profile pictures are directly linked to the online identity of the user. Through technological sign processing, the polysemy of the image is reduced. We therefore consider the images on the one hand as individual self-narratives and on the other as instances of SNS’ visual culture that brings out dominant visual codes but also allows social and political movements to spread.
In this paper we discuss how Alexander von Humboldt conceived a past to New Spain in his Political Essay on New Spain (1811) and how this text was, in turn, appropriated by the Mexican historiography during the 19th century.
In order to do so, we analyze how the Prussian drew from American sources, particularly from the text of the Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero, written shortly before. We also study Humboldt’s conceptions of text and of history, highlighting the place of the indigenous in the composition of his reasoning. Finally, we give examples of how the Mexican nationalist historiography read and reinterpreted the Political Essay.
Languages about Languages
(2018)
In the history of Humboldt research both brothers have been traditionally seen as representing the dichotomy between the humanities and the natural sciences. Today however, their similar approach to using and forming scientific language could be used as a starting point for conceiving a university, museum and even forum under one single Humboldtian science.
As the world cannot be adequately understood from the vantage point of a single language, the literatures of the world can no longer be trimmed to a single world literature in the Goethean sense. This recognition bodes well for the future of philology and of literary production. Through multiperspectival writing, knowledge of life may be attainable without being reduced to a single political, medial, cartographical, geocultural, or aesthetic logic. As a laboratory for polylogical thinking, literature does not represent reality, as Erich Auerbach put it. Rather, it represents multiple lived, experienced, or relivable realities. Whoever is open to a polylogical reception of the literatures of the world can perceive and experience how life knowledge transforms into lived knowledge and how knowledge for survival turns into knowledge for living together. However, literature can be more than it is only if it stays aware of the void, of lack, of privation, of the interminable: aware of the end that never is an end. Such a planetary concept of the literatures of the world offers valuable opportunities to all those who do not fall into the trap of contenting themselves with a supposed abundance of text.
Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, for several centuries doubtlessly the most discussed and most eminent writer of Andean America in the 16th and 17th centuries, throughout his life set the utmost value on the fact that he descended matrilineally from Atahualpa Yupanqui and from the last Inca emperor, Huayna Cápac. Thus, both in his person and in his creative work he combined different cultural worlds in a polylogical way.1 Two painters boasted that very same Inca descent – they were the last two great masters of the Cuzco school of painting, which over several generations of artists had been an institution of excellent renown and prestige, and whose economic downfall and artistic marginalization was vividly described by the French traveller Paul Mancoy in 1837.2 While, during the 18th century, Cuzco school paintings were still much cherished and sought after, by the beginning of the following century the elite of Lima regarded them as behind the times and provincial, committed to an ‘indigenous’ painting style. The artists from up-country – such was the reproach – could not keep up with the modern forms of seeing and creating, as exemplified by European paragons. Yet, just how ‘provincial’, truly, was this art?
This article presents and discusses João Guimarães Rosa as an outstanding Brazilian author whose literary work, especially Sagarana, expresses aesthetically different ways of life-forms between human beings, animals, plants, and landscapes. Movement and transformations are the basic principles in which the melody of prose expresses itself as a language in and as motion. Although based in Brazilian culture, Rosa shows the conviviality of different logics which are not reduced to one myth of the Brazilian people, but produce multiple ways of co-existence between different life-forms and culture narratives. The translingual title “Sagarana” already alludes to the transitions between two languages, regions, and cultures: the Icelandic “saga-” and the Tupic-Word “rana” which means “similar” or “alike.” The interpretation figures out the correlation of different provenances (“Herkünfte”) which emerge from Rosa’s craft of storytelling. In its center, the Sertão arises as a region of nature whose forces are connected with the life of human beings. As fractal of the world, it symbolizes Brazilian relations as a world of its own and at the same time as a part of the world of others. From this point of view the essay turns world literature upside down: it emphasizes on the one hand that the epoch of world literature since Goethe has come to an end and that the meridian has shifted to Latin America. On the other hand it can be observed that the lusophonic world between Brazil and Angola, Portugal and Kap Verde develops new perspectives on literatures of the world beyond the fixed coordinations of periphery and center. Rosa’s ways of world making already shift the perspective from the local to the global as a miniatured model of a universe which reveals interpretations of a better understanding of the world as world fractals.
Everything is interrelated, even the errors in the system : Alexander von Humboldt and globalization
(2010)
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.
La polisemia prohibida : la recepción de José Martí como sismógrafo de la vida política y cultural
(1995)
Alexander von Humboldt
(2020)
Welterleben/Weiterleben
(2017)
Welterleben and Weiterleben are what determine the second globalization (of four previously explored) whose constantly accelerating dynamic, vectorization, this essay explores. On the basis of selected writings of Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, and Adelbert von Chamisso, the author highlights the increasing speed with which knowledge, especially in the experiential sciences, is produced and disseminated following the routes of ever-widening trade speeded along by globalization. The notion of ‘vectopia’ stands for the connection of utopia and uchronia in space and time in such a way that the experience of the world, expanded worldwide, contains within it a Weiter-Leben, a ‘living-further’ that is to be understood first in a spatial, and not yet temporal, sense, of what Forster called Erfahrungswissen, or ‘experiential knowledge.’ Vectopia, as elaborated here, has a material dimension that relates to the physical person, the body, the experience of the world that cannot occur without the constant changing of place, without a journeying that is again and again recommenced. Vectopia develops the projection of a life not from space or from time alone, but by their combination. Vectopia is more than a concept, it is a thought-figure: it is vitally connected to life, and thus a life-figure. It opens itself to a type of knowledge that stands almost at the threshold of a further life, indeed, of a Weiterleben that, opening itself to a ‘living-onward,’ resides beyond space, time, and movement.
TransArea Tangier
(2018)
From its very beginnings, Cuban literature has been a literature with no fixed abode: written between Cuba and Mexico (Jose Maria Heredia), Cuba and Spain (Gertrudis Gomez de Avellanedo), Cuba and the US. (Cirilo Villaverde), or between Cuba, Europe and the Americas (Jose Marti), but to mention the outstanding figures in Cuba's 19(th) Century. This article tries to unfold and develop the consequences of this new perspective by insisting on the specific "frictional" character of Cuban literature and culture today
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.
The scientist as Weltbürger
(2001)