Languages, Cultures and Linguistics Research Collection

Sonia put on one of her white mini-shorts and her pink tank top that had LOVE written in black block letters on it. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her small, round, tight breasts and nipples protruded under the taut cotton, similar to unripe mangoes that gave the promise of maturing again and again, until they produced a smooth juice that you would never get tired of having in your mouth. She had squeezed herself into those shorts and – she was only too aware of it – her buttocks, which her tight shorts held up high under the denim, aspired to taunt people and tempt the devil. If her old aunt had something to say about her clothes, or her navel that looked scornfully at the world like an arrogant eye rooted in the midst of her belly, she would shorten her visit, free in no time from the burden that had been imposed on her.

We investigate Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants' acquisition of the variable (ing), which occurs in progressive tenses, participles, noun phrases, etc., and which can be pronounced [iŋ] or [In]. A VARBRUL 2 program analysis of native speaker speech shows that the production of (ing) is constrained by phonological, grammatical, stylistic, and social factors. An analysis of the nonnative speakers' acquisition of these norms shows that [In] is more frequent before anterior segments (reflecting ease of articulation), and that males use [In] more frequently than females, especially in monitored speech (perhaps reflecting their desire to accommodate to a male native speaker norm rather than to an overall native speaker norm). The analysis also shows evidence of grammatical constraints which are different from those in the native speakers' speech. This difference may reflect the fact that it is easier to acquire the [In] variant in “frozen forms,” such as prepositions, than in productive rules.

Leonardo Padura Fuentes oggi è uno dei giallisti cubani più conosciuti e letti all’estero. I suoi romanzi interpretano la realtà in modo critico e disincantato. Lo scrittore svolge la sua critica dall’interno dell’Isola e utilizza la sua arte per descrivere la complessità sociale habanera tramite una nuova forma di romanzo poliziesco.

This chapter analyses the representation of food, cooking and its related convivial aspects in the detective novels written by the Cuban author Leonardo Padura. These novels inscribe themselves into a long tradition of detective novels which consider the description of food and meals as one of their distinctive features (such as the ones written by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Andrea Cammilleri, just to name a few). I argue that in Padura's novels the mention of food and cooking performs many different functions within the text. First of all food complement the social backdrop of the story and set the Cuban character of the novel, bringing in the elements of syncretism, mestizaje and hybridity which are essential to fully understand Cuban identity. The author always presents classical dishes of the Cuban tradition, recovering the cultural roots of its characters and of his nation. However in Padura's novel cooking and food are also an important indicator of the specific historical moment in which the story is set and they provide important elements to understand the social situation of the time. References to cooking and food are used here to describe the food shortage affecting the island, as a consequence of the US embargo, and to denounce the hidden or semi-hidden presence of the black market economy in Cuba. Secondly food contributes strongly to the characterization of the protagonist of Padura's novels: the detective Mario Conde. In this case food, is used to describe the personal and psychological world of the protagonist and his affective sphere. Finally the convivial aspect of food allows Padura to represent the emotional bond between his characters and to trace the profile of a specific generation of Cubans born just before the Revolution and educated in the Revolutionary ideology. Food provides, thus, the opportunity to bridge the national tradition and memory with a specific generational experience and identity.

This article examines the published translations into Italian (1701) and Spanish (1702) of Pierre Le Moyne's Gallerie des femmes fortes (1647). Through an analysis of a number of peritexts, rather than the text itself, it aims to examine how Le Moyne's Gallerie, a volume fundamentally rooted in the political, ideological and aesthetic climate of 1647 France, was appropriated in other socio-cultural and political climates. Freed from its original moment of creation and, to a lesser degree, from its creator, the book becomes a changing entity to be shaped at will by a new creator or creators, within a new set of sociocultural parameters. Analysis of the prologues, in particular, of translators Laura Maria Foschiera and Fernando Bravo de Lagunas y Bedoya, throws light on their respective socio-cultural contexts and intended readerships, and highlights the importance of peritexts in shaping the book-as-object and its reception. Of particular interest is the Lima translation (1702) largely believed to have been lost up until now.

Over the last 30 years or so, a significant amount of research has been carried out on the genesis and development of creoles. This research has shown that the creators of creoles’ first languages made an important contribution to creole grammars, but that their overall role in any specific case was largely dependent on the social circumstances in which the creole emerged. This suggests that substrate influence always interacted with other sources. However, to date, relatively little research has been done on the various ways in which the creators’ first languages influenced specific creole features and how this interaction was determined or constrained by other processes and sources. The aim of this paper is to investigate these issues in more detail in the light of ongoing research on the formation and development of the Tense, Mood and Aspect system of the creoles of Suriname.

Recent anthropological and socio-historical research on Maroon populations suggests that Maroon communities have undergone significant social change since the 1960s spurred by processes of urbanization. However, to date very little is known about how these social changes are impacting on the Maroon Creoles as there is very little sociolinguistic research being carried out in the region. The aim of this paper is to examine the sociolinguistic context of the Maroon Creoles in the light of data from two recent sociolinguistic surveys carried out in Suriname and French Guiana. The findings demonstrate that the sociolinguistic status of Maroon languages has undergone various changes. Several of them are now well represented in French Guiana and, as additional languages, are gaining speakers both in Suriname and French Guiana. While their speakers increasingly practice them together with other languages, thus displaying their multilingual repertoire, there is little indication that their survival is threatened because their speakers predominantly hold positive attitudes towards them.

Narco/sicaresque novels with a female killer at their core are uncommon, indicative of society’s gendering of violence which marks female killers as deviant and the macho-posturing of narco-culture which marginalizes women. This article examines two narco-novels about female killers propelled into the drugs business to avenge violence, but who wield power very differently, according to their status in the cartel and the narrative strategies adopted. Rosario Tijeras’s violence is sexualized around her femme-fatale allure which undermines her agency, particularly as she is spoken for by an infatuated male narrator. Rosario, controlled by cartel bosses, exercises little control over her textual representation or her life. La Reina del Sur offers parallel narratives: from the perspective of the main character, Teresa Mendoza, and from a journalist who is researching her story for his novel. Teresa thus gains a measure of control over her narrative representation and her life and progresses to lead an international drugs network. These texts turn readers into detectives, not to find the killers, but to unravel the motivations of women in the drugs trade and to debate the ways they can exercise power in these violent hyper-masculine worlds which become, both in Spain and Mexico, an eternal crime scene, implicating law enforcement, local government and any other supposedly legitimate agency willing to be ‘bought’.

This paper proposes a new analysis of the formation of the TMA system of the Surinamese Maroon Creoles based on a wide range of both contemporary and historical sources. The paper first provides a brief synopsis of the socio-historical context in which the Creoles of Suriname emerged and developed, and a broad overview of the TMA systems of those Creoles and of varieties of Gbe. It then discusses four processes that were involved in the emergence of the creole TMA system: substrate influence, internal change from a substrate calque, superstrate influence, and shift of form and category correlated with innovation. The paper then concludes that Creole formation is to be considered as a gradual and multi-layered process (Arends 1993, Bruyn 1995), involving processes of language change that also operate in other so-called normal contact settings (Thomason & Kaufman 1988).

The work of Navid Kermani and SAID frequently engages with religious themes and their respective oeuvres foreground the diversity within Islam and blur religious dividing lines. In spite of their differences, the short stories “Von der Zärtlichkeit” (Of Tenderness) by Kermani and “ich, jesus von nazareth” (i, jesus of nazareth) by SAID invite comparison because they share a deconstructive engagement with the figure of Jesus, conveying a spirituality felt in the material, rather than the metaphysical world. Whereas the former depicts a mystical experience in which Jesus’s presence is felt without him being glimpsed, implying an ambiguous sense of the divine in withdrawal and of empty sacred space, the latter is an at times angry monologue delivered by Jesus, in which holiness is located in righteous action against injustice. Hence the former evokes issues of spiritual absence and presence through Jesus’s resurrection, whereas the latter conveys a sense of insurrection, underlining Jesus’s role as a social radical. Both texts, however, shift meaning away from a transcendent God and toward the world, suggesting a religiosity beyond identity and ideology which can be illuminated by bringing Jean-Luc Nancy’s non-dualist concept of the “deconstruction of monotheism” into dialogue with the texts’ Christian and Sufi allusions.

This book has been in the making for a long time: Jacques Arends spent two decades researching it and after his untimely death in 2005, it took another decade to appear. The wait was not in vain though as the final product goes well beyond Arends’ previous work, shedding new light on Suriname’s early period and sociolinguistic matters. Although aspects of the volume are by now inevitably somewhat dated, it still constitutes the most comprehensive historical treatise on the emergence and early development of the Suriname creoles, and significantly enhances current knowledge on creole genesis.

This essay discusses the uses of and responses to pedagogical methodologies developed during an introductory course on contemporary Caribbean literature taught to undergraduate English majors at the Université de La Réunion. Offering a brief overview of La Réunion and the context of the course, it discusses students’ responses to a transversal approach adopted for the teaching of Caribbean literature. Trans-local readings of Caribbean and Indian Ocean histories invited students to analyze intersecting narratives of key topics such as resistance to enslavement. The parallel teaching and integration of translation seminars allowed for further exploration of the situatedness of Creole and non-Creole languages and generated strategies to transpose Caribbean and Indian Ocean specificities for various audiences. Student responses surfaced lingering legacies of (neo)colonialism in La Réunion, and suggest how the teaching of trans-pelagic connections can create spaces for their analysis and critique.

This paper sets out to identify the categories underlying Irish verbal inflection and to explain why they have their observed morphological and semantic properties. Assuming that the semantic range of a tense is a function of the whole clause, it derives the tenses of Irish from three syntactic features. Their basic value and position in the clause, along with that of other independently justified formatives, determines the attested range of interpretations for each tense, while the way they are spelled out determines the observed morphological patterns. Since the analysis of verbal categories is based on their syntactic realization, the same explanation accounts for the paradigmatic structure of Irish conjugation and for various syntagmatic phenomena of contextual allomorphy. A language-specific investigation thus claims a broader theoretical significance as an exploration of the interconnected workings of syntax, morphology, and semantics.

Several factors, including the Bologna process, the embargo on university posts and a larger student population pursuing degrees, have contributed to radical changes in teaching, learning and assessment in Irish higher education in the last few years. Challenges to academics have resulted in curriculum reform and, most importantly, in innovative practices in which the curriculum is delivered and assessed. It was in this context that a collaborative component has been introduced into Level 2 Spanish language modules at University College Dublin. A small action research project has been undertaken to explore the students’ views about this innovative way of learning. This article addresses the extent to which collaborative learning outside the classroom contributes to the enhancement of student learning and it examines the obstacles encountered by the students during the semester. The discussion of the findings focuses on feedback from the students and on group reflections submitted via Blackboard, the university’s VLE (virtual learning environment).

Since Booij (1994, 1996) it has become increasingly clear that inflectional morphology can take part in lexeme formation and compounding. Booij (1994) recognized the need for substantive constraints on the ways inflection can feed derivation, and restricted its derivational use to deictic categories, including Number. Pursuing this search for constraints, I propose that Number is a single morphological category covering two abstract functions (cf. Beard 1995), and that it can be inherent only when it expresses the more “lexical” of those functions, and thus means more than the grammatical feature would. This “lexical” Number expresses properties of the lexeme but stands halfway between the lexical core and the properly inflectional categories. It encodes mereological (part-whole) properties of the noun’s interpretation, thus paralleling the role of Aspect in the verbal domain, and like Aspect it can be integrated to different degrees in the grammatical system of a language. In some languages, this type of information has a specific morphological expression (so-called collective affixes). In others, it appears only as non-canonical semantics (and sometimes form) for Number inflection. Inherent Number, both as a component of lexemeformation and as fixed Number value on certain nouns, consists in the expression of Nominal Aspect through the morphology of Number. Morphology is not “split”, but its uses are. Inherent inflection, specifically Number, arises in certain languages as a by-product of the separation of (morphological) form and meaning. The article develops these views by presenting first a relatively detailed exemplification from several sources (section 1), followed by some critical reflections on the peculiarities of these constructions, to the effect that inherent Number must be qualitatively different from inflectional Number (section 2). Section 3 sets out in detail the hypothesis that inherent Number is the inflectional expression of Nominal Aspect, and section 4 concludes the argument by hypothesizing that Number not only can, but must have a distinct interpretation as a lexicalized property than as a regular inflectional one.

The ideal of human happiness is doubtless as old as mankind itself and the history of this tradition is rich and varied. However, across the globe, particularly in the postindustrial ‘developed’ world, people are preoccupied, perhaps more than they have been at any other point in history, with the “unquestioning certainty” that they should be happy. This “duty to be happy” is reflected in the huge amount of research literature on the topic, carried out in diverse fields such as neurology, psychology, sociology and, particularly, in economics, where the number of scholarly articles has increased exponentially, especially in the early years of the twenty-first century. The heightened scientific interest in what makes happy individuals and happy societies, and in how such happiness is to be measured, certainly seems set to continue, as is indicated by international, longitudinal studies monitoring life satisfaction and ‘social well-being’.