To account for the onomastic interest of Geoffroy de Monmouth and Wace in the Historia Regum Britanniae and the Roman de Brut, especially concerning toponyms, one can run the risk of anachronism and speak of a real theory of the proper name. Their toponymic reflection is less interested in what might refer to an essentialized origin of the name than to what is downstream, to changes brought about by the passage of time. Their perspective as chroniclers who evolve in a multilingual environment makes them sensitive, especially at Wace, to linguistic variability. A genealogy is established between these two works and Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec and Énide through the list of guests to Arthur’s coronation to which he echoes with the episode of Enide’s reception at the court of Arthur and with the celebrations of their marriage. In a more obvious way than Geoffroy and Wace who are limited by their essentially historical perspective, Chrétien deploys an onomastic imaginary that allows him to assert the literarity proper to catalogues.

This article focuses on the technique of autonominatio in the poems of Occitan troubadour Marcabru (ca. 1125-1150). The essay considers the distinctive features of the verbal and pronominal structures of Marcabru’s vers and examines the social context of his poetry taking into account the passages in which the name Marcabru appears: where does Marcabru name himself? to which social group does he address? to which social group does he declare to belong? Thanks to this enquiry, we propose a new interpretation of some vers, based on the difference between the textual ‘I’ and the persona designating himself with the name ‘Marcabru’. Moreover, we present some new hypothesis concerning the social context of the troubadour’s poetical activity.

The article proposes a survey on the proper names mentioned in the Donatz proensals (anthroponyms and toponyms), in order to acquire new information on the production context and on the features of the author and of the clients: the result is a fairly clear drawing of the literary culture and historical political reality that are the background to the composition of the work.

The article examines the use of proper nouns in the Galician-Portuguese ‘cantiga de escarnio e maldizer’; in particular, it focuses on a text by the troubadour Fernan Soarez de Quinhones, where the satirical purpose of onomastic references can reveal the literary and cultural background of Iberian troubadours, especially their knowledge of Old French epic.

In the Old French epic poem of the Chanson de Roland, neither the distinct opposition nor the intersection of both the notion of pröesce and sagesse can be substantiated. To describe the character of Olivier, it is thus necessary to downplay the importance, or, at least to de-emphasize the significance of his wisdom, especially in the context of the new ideal of perseverance that establishes itself towards an imminent Crusade. The Chanson de Roland is rather a thoroughly Christianised text that depicts Roland – despite, or, because of his desmesure – ideologically as the most important protagonist. It is in fact merely for his foolishness that Roland can fight an exemplary battle against the pagans that is to be continued till the very end. Only the heroic conception and behavior of Roland can illustrate the call to future martyrdom. The literary message of the Oxford version of the Chanson de Roland is thus primarily associated to Olivier’s secondary role that represents a clear contrast with the ancient tradition, of which different traces can be found, for example in an earlier version of the Girart de Vienne. 

The Chronique that goes under the names of Ernoul and Bernard the Treasurer is a good example of the problems raised by the study of how characters are mentioned in a chronicle where, proper names refer to historical figures. The interplay between named and unnamed characters in the Chronique is not only due to the kind of historical information available to the author: it also reveals the author’s point of view on the narrative. The study of variant readings in the manuscript tradition shows how some tendencies in rewriting the text that are constant in some groups, and in some individual copies. Scribes mostly relied on the context to gather the information on the character’s names, and sometimes on a more extensive knowledge of the text. There is only small evidence pointing to the use of external sources.

The three great French cycles of 13th-century prose narrative (Lancelot, Tristan and Guiron) share a common feature: at a given moment, important male characters are involved in a love affair with two women of the same name. If at least two of these homonymies can possibly go back to Celtic tradition, it is also true that this particular narrative expedient is exploited by French authors in very different ways within their works. By comparing the texts, the essay points out how, in different Arthurian romances, homonymy responds to a specific strategy: in the Tristan it develops an affective and psychological theme; it questions the problem of identity and factual truth in the Lancelot; in the Guiron it takes into account the relation between love and chivalric companionship.

The article is dedicated to an interpretation of one of the texts forming what James I. Wimsatt has called «the Marguerite poetry of Guillaume de Machaut». Its aim is to show that the French poet, in the verses of Mon cuer, m’amour, ma dame souverainne, not only exploited the meaning of the Latin noun margarita, ‘pearl’, in order to make use of it in the praise of a lady bearing that name, but also seems to have taken account of a patristic tradition that assimilates the margarita mentioned in a parable of the Gospel of St Matthew to the sweetness of celestial life. The hypothesis that Machaut, a canon of Reims cathedral, had this allegorical interpretati on in mind when conceiving his poem, offers an explanation of the insistence on the lady’s unique sweetness in several passages of the poem, especially in its conclusion. Besides this, the article illustrates Machaut’s brilliance in the employ of a rhetorical artifice that sets Mon cuer, m’amour, ma dame souverainne, apart from the rest of his poetic production: the acrostic.

The paper focuses on the use of proper names in the fifteenth-century anonymous Catalan novel Curial e Güelfa, the identity of whose author has recently been questioned with new hypotheses. More specifically, the paper analyses some functions of the proper names in the direct speeches of the novel. The presence or absence of courtesy epithets together with the proper names are readable as guides for understanding each character’s approach to her/his interlocutor (the use of the mere proper name, for instance, often recurs in expressions of anger or contempt). The narrator sometimes displays deliberately the strategy of retardatio nominis, according to which a new character is not called by name by her/his interlocutor until the name is ‘unveiled’ by the narrator himself. The use of proper names in the ‘duel’ and ‘love scenes’ is also discussed.

The social and cultural fabric of Québec has been profoundly transformed for about twenty years. Québec, and in particular Montréal, have now become increasingly plural. As countries of immigration, Canada and the United States have established and recognized traditions of immigrant and minority literature. But for Canada this tradition has been mainly if not exclusively expressed in English. The historical context of Quebec literature, reflecting the close association between the French language and a single cultural community, made the inclusion of minority voices within the framework of the Quebec literary institution impossible until recently. Certainly, in the younger generation, as in the previous ones, identities are still only defined by starting from a pre-established cultural and family background, perhaps Québécoise, but perhaps also Haitian, Algerian, Chinese, or Polish. In an almost irreversible way, the borders move or are reduced. It is necessary to remember that integration is created slowly, like stratifications that are layered one on top of the other. The immigrant, be s/he man or woman, becomes “illiterate” again, forced to learn new codes in all fields. This recurring image highlights the difficulty of the immigrant who rapidly has to decode a new culture: sometimes it means his survival. As Québec literature begins to look forward by undertaking exploratory journeys to “foreign” lands, difference at home has become the province of minority writers. The provocative blend of continuity and difference, affiliation and dissidence expressed in the work of these writers, as well as the importance they give to language, mark this writing as a significant development in Quebec literature. 

This article examines the particular relationship that the German-Japanese writer has with the language. For this reason, I will analyze some texts that are included in the three works and that constitute a kind of summa of the main linguistic aspects that emerge throughout the Tawadian literary corpus: Talisman, 1996, Überseezungen, 2002, and Akzentfrei, 2016. Talisman is still considered the most famous book written by the author in German, Überseezungen is defined as a sort of logbook of a journey that starts from Japan and leads through different continents and Akzentfrei that combines linguistic associations and surreal images.

The paper goes into the notion of “multi-competence” thought out by Vivian J. Cook, now a professor  emeritus of applied linguistics in New Castle University. This notion, of which the definition has slightly been revised by Cook with frequency in the course of time, describes the overall system in the mind of a speaker or a community able to use more than one language, and therefore it involves both the knowledge an individual or a community have of two or more languages and the use an individual or a community make of them. As regards language acquisition, the difference is properly examined between the multicompetence approach and the SLA viewpoint. The fall-out effects of multicompetence on foreign language teaching are also examined in detail. Finally, the notion of multi-competence is convincingly said to have percolated through the ideas going around the debate on the scientific study of language during the 20th century.