Linguistics and Philology 13.1

This paper focuses on the plowshare ordeal (phāladivya), the eighth ordeal to be discussed in the Smṛtis. Although the information about its procedure is scarce, I analyze all the textual sources about the phāla ordeal, coming from the tradition of Dharmaśāstra (Yājñavalkya-, Bṛhaspati-, Pitāmaha-smṛti, and Raghunandana’s Divyatattva) and from that of Purāṇas (Viṣṇudharmottara-purāṇa and Kumārikā-khaṇḍa). After considering the sources related to it, I try to demonstrate that the first mention of the phāla ordeal, found in Yājñavalkya-smṛti II, 100, is a later addition to the original core of the text.

The Audiovisual Translation (AVT) sector and the Tech industry have been inseparable, a symbiotic match. In the AVT field, the introduction of the DVD in 1995 was the most significant development in the field of AVT, profoundly influencing the nature of professional practices. It had «repercussions not only in the way audiovisual programmes started to be packaged, marketed and consumed, but also from a quantitative perspective» (Díaz-Cintas 2013: 119). Yet, the greatest catalyst of changes in communications and AVT has always been the Internet (Díaz-Cintas 2013: 119).
In the last decade, the world around us has radically altered. On a daily basis, we are immersed in an audiovisual reality, surrounded by Video Streaming on Demand (SVoD) systems, where players like Netflix spend billions of dollars in new productions reaching volumes of content that were impossible only a decade ago. New experiments with advanced technologies applied to AVT have been consistently carried out since 2000 to meet the demands of SVoD systems: automatic speech recognition (ASR) able to ‘understand’ the voices in a dialogue, and neural machine translation (NMT) processes have been applied to the production of subtitled versions of films and TV shows to a large extent, generating new roles in the industry and creating new debates about the ethics of technology in the AVT industry.

This paper focuses on the analysis of a corpus made up of 69 rap, reggae and rock songs in Sardinian language of four Sardinian artists (Dr. Drer & CRC Posse, Kenze Neke, Menhir, Ratapignata). The aim of this work is to understand if the bands use their own dialect or a koinè. The examination of lyrics shows that these four bands line up to the features of their own dialect, but the language that they use presents also linguistic elements from other Sardinian dialects, from the Italian language and, especially in rap lyrics, from other languages.

The focus of investigation in this work regards religious confraternity charters and statutes. Such confraternities or brotherhoods are essentially religiously-inspired associations of lay people whose members (brothers and sisters) share common practices (charity work: assistance to the poor, the sick and dying; management and organization of rites connected with religious festivals; organization of funeral ceremonies and suffrages). They were originally founded and spread between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age. Here we are presenting a first comparative analysis of the Statutes of some brotherhoods in Romance language areas, from which the following noteworthy data can be summarized as follows: a) notable similarities between lay associations of the Roman Age and semi-religious associations of the Middle Ages; b) identification of common traits between monasteries and brotherhoods and, in general, between several types of loca pia (monasteries, hospitals and brotherhoods); c) identification of recurring central themes, particularly significant for the political-cultural history of devotional societies; d) evidence of behaviors and / or conditions that establish an integrated definition of community of practices, of discourse and text communities. Finally, with reference to male roles, there are interesting semantic shifts, generally produced by contact phenomena.

This article submits a philological and Discourse-based approach to deverbal units. Applied to French language, the study examines to what extent ant-forms (such as suivant, concernant and durant) appear in contemporary linguistic uses as units with a variable verbal consistency. The purpose of the paper consists in demonstrating how the specific features of this category meet a scalar phenomenon, depending on the fact that these elements occur respectively as gerunds, present participles, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, or operators.
After a brief introduction, the article exposes the outlines of the Dik’s functional approach and exemplifies the scalarity trough the cases of partant and disant. The discussion touches upon some borderline cases, and the conclusion puts forward four assumptions for an application of the scalarity hypothesis (SH) in other perspectives.

This paper intends to analyze the Italian and German advertising language from a semantic-pragmatic point of view, with special regard to the link between culture and language. The two dimensions are in fact strongly interconnected: the aim of this study is to verify if, and how, the cultural component finds a way to manifest itself in the linguistic medium adopted for persuasive purposes.