Southern Romance Research Articles

Southern Romance: Relationship Quality, Consensus, and Context among Cohabiting Couples in the Gulf States

Relationships are significantly stressed in the Southeastern United States. Of the six states in the Gulf region (Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas), four are in the top-third of the nation's highest divorce rates. Threats to relationship household stability cause a myriad of social problems and public expenses of approximately $24 billion in increased spending in benefit programs to offset family hardship following divorce and relationship dissolution. This study analyzed associations between relationship quality and satisfaction, consensus, and a series of contextual variables among three types of cohabiting homeowners across the Gulf States (unmarried, married, and married with additional family members), surveying variables of interest. Findings indicated that dyadic couple relationships in this sample are generally distressed relative to other states and that significant negativity is present, but that a large portion of the variance in relationship quality is consistently predicted by certain factors. Using an instrument of increased sensitivity, these factors (consensus, negative interaction, household composition, etc.) have been parsed into specific components (types of consensus, types of interaction, etc.) for improved individual analysis. Specific relationship problem areas are outlined, clarified, and discussed.

‘The Realm of Maiden Beauty’: Spectres of Slavery, Rebellion, and Creolisation in the Landscape of Cable’s Louisiana

Using a creative interdisciplinary method of enquiry, this article seeks to exorcise the spectres of revolutionary creolisation embedded in George Washington Cable’s 1880 novel The Grandissimes. It probes, in particular, the secreted traces of the Creole diaspora triggered by the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, and attempts to peel back the manifold layers of ideological occlusion embedded in the (ostensibly white, Anglo-American) narrative frame of Cable’s omniscient narrator and his protagonist Joseph Frowenfeld, which suppress the connections between inter-American identities across diverse, revolutionary, creolistic worlds in Louisiana and the Gulf South. Unlike other studies examining traces of the Haitian Revolution in The Grandissimes, which tend to focus on the parallels between fictional and historical figures in Cable’s southern romance, this article dissects the subtle allusions to the revolution and the attendant diaspora found in the plantation infrastructures and the urban landscape of Cable’s Louisiana. In so doing, it demonstrates how Saint-Domingan migrants affirmed and reinvigorated the cultural landscape of the ‘Creole’ South and ‘circumvented’ the ideological spread of ‘Americanness’ at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, and during successive moments thereafter.

DEATH DIVINATION WITHIN A NON-DELUSIONAL MYTH:THE PROCESSION OF THE DEAD FROM THE ALPS TO HIMALAYAS…WHEN A THEORIA OF “PHANTOM-BODIES” MEETS ITS NEURAL VERIDICTION THEORY

One of the avatars of the Return of the Dead occurs in Europe as their Procession. It is attributed to the so-called Birth of the Purgatory in the 12th–13th centuries, which reinvested older cohorts of “Phantom-Bodies”, say the Wild Hunt. Related to this “theoria”, motif D1825.7.1. Person sees phantom funeral procession some time before the actual procession takes place, is endowed with D1825.6.: Magic power to “see” who will die during coming year. In spite of their disbelief in the Purgatory, Protestant countries, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Germany, England, etc., currently meet this Procession of the Dead (compare Totenprozession, in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, 13, 820, which forgot more Southern Romance Processions). As precursors of the Reformation (since the 12th-13th century), Waldensians were more efficient in wiping out revenants from their Refuge in the Piedmont Alps. As for India, except an indexing by Thompson and Balys (1958) for a pair of narratives, there was nothing else available. Present fieldwork in Hindu and shamanisic Nepal elicited new data, including ones with death divination. And the least surprising was not that Tibeto-Burman Newar tradition made of the five Hindu male Pandavas a cultural melting “theoria” of five malevolent female spirits, the Panchabhāya, which meets Tibetan Dākinīs. All these Phantom-Bodies’ Processions were not considered as deliration, but as non-delusional reports, as neurally real as phantom limbs. The BRAINCUBUS model framework offers an interface between Folkloristics and Neuroscience, a theory allowing the grounding of such over-intuitive experience-centered narratives, giving fair prevalence, worldwide, to the “4th brain state” diagnosed as sleep paralysis.

Subjunctive mood in Griko: A micro-comparative approach

We present an analysis of subjunctive complements in Griko, a Modern Greek dialect spoken in Southern Italy. Despite the obvious similarities with the properties of subjunctive clauses in Standard Modern Greek (SMG), introduced by na in both varieties, we capitalize on the contrasting distribution of verbal forms in each case: while in SMG all temporal-aspectual combinations are allowed in na-clauses and no specific subjunctive morphology is used, Griko only features perfective non-past in the same context. This fact is argued to instantiate the specialization of aspectual morphology in Griko for the marking of subjunctive on the verb. We propose that the morphological marking of subjunctive that had been lost in earlier stages of the diachronic development of Greek re-entered Griko as a result of contact with Salentino, the southern Romance variety spoken in the same area, which also exhibits mood concord between a subjunctive complementizer and dedicated subjunctive morphology on the verb. Although the realization of subjunctive in Griko and in SMG appears to be an instance of microvariation in the syntax (mood concord in the former, no mood concord in the latter), we argue that it ultimately reduces to the feature specification of particular elements, namely inflectional morphemes.

Tennyson’s ‘metre of Catullus’: The ambivalent hendecasyllable

This article argues that quantitative verse can be no more than an intellectual exercise in English because of the language’s strong dynamic accent and tendency towards stress-timing. The case focuses on Tennyson’s experiment entitled ‘Hendecasyllabics’, which he described as being ‘in a metre of Catullus’. The article offers a detailed comparison of the supra-segmental features of Tennyson’s poem and its model and concludes that the English poem lacks an essential component of the Latin metre: a variable relationship between ictus and accent. As a result, Tennyson unwittingly composed lines with a regular accentual configuration, one that English poets had been studiously avoiding for 500 years. In contrast, poets of the Southern Romance languages have cultivated this type of line assiduously, and the article pursues the historical reasons for the divergence. It concludes that the difference is almost entirely due to individual aesthetic choices, and that this line structure, known as the endecasílabo melódico, is a viable option as a verse design for English poets.

Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle (2008). Meter in poetry: a new theory (with a chapter on Southern Romance meters by Carlos Piera). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. x+297.

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Foundation Gala to Spin Night of Southern Romance

Foundation Gala to Spin Night of Southern Romance

Meter in poetry: A new theory (review)

Reviewed by: Meter in poetry: A new theory Paul Kiparsky Meter in poetry: A new theory. By Nigel Fabb and Morris Halle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 312. ISBN 0521713250. $45. The publication of this joint book by the founder of generative metrics and a distinguished literary linguist is a major event.1 Fabb and Halle take a fresh look at much familiar material, and introduce an eye-opening collection of metrical systems from world literature into the theoretical discourse. The complex analyses are clearly presented, and illustrated with detailed derivations. A guest chapter by Carlos Piera offers an insightful survey of Southern Romance metrics. Like almost all versions of generative metrics, F&H adopt the three-way distinction between what Roman Jakobson called verse design, verse instance, and delivery instance.2 F&H’s theory maps abstract grid patterns onto the linguistically determined properties of texts. The mapping imposes constraints on texts, which define their metrical form. In that sense, it is a kind of template-matching theory. Recitation may or may not reflect meter, according to conventional stylized norms, but the meter of a text itself is invariant, however it is pronounced or sung. Where F&H differ from everyone else is in denying the centrality of rhythm in meter, and characterizing the abstract templates and their relationship to the text by a combination of constraints and processes modeled on Morris Halle/William Idsardi-style metrical phonology. F&H say that lineation and length restrictions are the primary properties of verse, and rhythm is epiphenomenal, ‘a property of the way a sequence of words is read or performed’ (242). This seems inconsistent with their use of bracketed grids to characterize metrical patterns and stress, for bracketed grids represent—indeed are designed to represent—rhythm as periodic alternation of prominence at a hierarchy of levels. F&H’s point is probably that metrical rhythm and textual rhythm are not necessarily articulated in recitation, since meters constrain texts, not performance. [End Page 923] The thesis of the primacy of lineation leads F&H to suggest that rhythm arises as a by-product of counting syllables to fix the length of lines. Traditional doctrine conversely derives lineation and line length from constraints on the hierarchical rhythmic structure that meter imposes on texts (Chen 1980, Kiparsky 2006).3 An argument for the latter view is that it explains the conventional character of lineation. Any place where an obligatory major prosodic break in the verse design divides equivalent units may be a line break, by convenience or tradition. F&H themselves illustrate this point nicely by splitting the half-lines of Arabic verse into separate ‘lines’ forming a ‘couplet’,4 likewise Sanskrit ślokas (222). 4343 ballad quatrains can be printed as fourteener distichs and vice versa, and similarly 3343 quatrains are interchangeable with poulter’s measure. Some editions of the Kalevala print its eight-syllable parallel couplets as single sixteen-syllable lines, and nobody minds.5 Another argument for the primacy of rhythm is that meters constrain only those categories that are prominence-defining in language. For example, meters may require that syllables in certain positions must be stressed or heavy, never that they must have onsets. The idea that meter regulates rhythmic patterns of prominence explains this, for (as we know independently from phonology) onsets are not prominence-bearing. More interestingly, consider empty positions (catalexis). Quatrains typically combine four-and three-foot lines in 4343, 4443, or 3343 patterns, not in 3434 or 3334 patterns. The short lines can be perceived as metrical realizations of four-foot lines with a missing final beat. In songs and other isochronous performance styles, they are typically realized by lengthening the last word, producing a saliency effect characteristic of terminal elements (Kiparsky 2006). F&H’s theory cannot explain the perception of 4343 and 4443 stanzas, and the preference for them, in this way, because it does not assign gridmarks to empty positions. The second leading idea of the book is that the abstract templates are constructed by a bottom-up parsing procedure, from the smallest groupings to the biggest, and that template-to-text mapping is governed by a combination of rules...

The clausal left periphery in child Spanish and German

Evidence from child language development supports the position that overt subjects in Southern Romance languages are left-peripheral, Topic-Focus constituents. Specifically, overt subjects begin to be used at the same time as other less controversially left-peripheral, Topic-Focus constituents, such as fronted objects and wh-questions. However, this interpretation of the data would be much more compelling if it could be shown that these constituents do not emerge at the same time in the speech of children learning languages in which overt subjects are obligatory and largely independent of discourse considerations, such as German. To this end, we examined the speech of three longitudinally studied Spanish-speaking children, Carlos, Eduardo and Graciela, and the speech of two longitudinally studied German-speaking children, Simone and Caroline. We also examined the German data of Katrin and Andreas, which was collected on a single day for each. While the Spanish-speaking children begin productively using overt subjects, fronted objects and wh-questions at a statistically similar point in development, the German-speaking children's data show that overt subjects begin to be used significantly earlier than do fronted elements and wh-questions. This supports the argument that child Southern Romance and child German are different with respect to the timing of the development of these constituents. We believe that this reflects the children's early knowledge of the structure of their target adult languages, which in the case of Southern Romance, includes left-peripheral, discourse-sensitive subjects.

Los arabismos del léxico hispánico primitivo

The editorial board of the recently issued Léxico Hispánico Primitivo, an indeed impressive first-rate tool for the study of the Early Hispanic lexicon, has chosen not to reproduce or update the etyma, often suggested by the initial authors and extant in their previous drafts, for a significant number of Arabic loanwords and technical terms found in their sources. Such a decision, taken in view of the difficulties met upon handling of this second ingredient of Hispanic Romance languages, must be respected as wise and preferable to taking unnecessary risks on shaky grounds, were angels fear treading. However, the absence of Arabic scholarship and expertise in this project has taken a certain toll of inaccuracies, namely, wrong attribution of borrowings in both ways, i.e., labelling as Arabic loanwords some terms of another origin (e.g., alcor, alpe, bufunaria, fatel and gardunio), and omitting to do so rightly in other instances (e.g., albar, alhodera, atursihala, bocren, cafal bafal, facenzal, mascul, etc.) or, which is worse, missing the correct meaning of not a few passages of those early documents (e.g., alfada, alguecale, alhiçem, almandra, artarfa azaguaria, azaquia, heite, hotege, oveite, racua, saibi, zamor, etc.) in the lack of access to the semantics of Arabic items. The same shortcomings are at times noticed in the case of Andalusi or Southern Romance items (e.g., armolaita, lahtag, parsair, patín, poplina[ria] and ribel). As a tribute to the memory of tihose great scholars who concerned themselves with gathering and explaining the lexical wealth of our Hispanic languages since their very beginnings, the present writer has tried to contribute a number of remarks that might fill some of those gaps.

Verbal Complement Clauses: A Minimalist Study of Perception Constructions (review)

Reviewed by: Verbal complement clauses: A minimalist study of perception constructions by Claudia Felser Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach Verbal complement clauses: A minimalist study of perception constructions. By Claudia Felser. (Linguistik actuell/linguistics today 25.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. Pp. xiv, 278. Perception verbs and sentences have been often studied from a philosophical perspective and a logical point of view by authors such as Jaako Hintikka, Fred Dretske, and Jon Barwise. The study of the syntactic properties of this class of constructions has proven more elusive despite the fact that they have been the focus of attention in transformational grammar since the standard model. Nevertheless, recent developments in generative syntax in general, and in the minimalist program in particular, such as the VPinternal subject hypothesis and the expansion of the category system with the postulation of new functional [End Page 639] projections, have allowed for a new outlook on these constructions. There are two main types of perception complements. When the verb selects a bare infinitive (without a subject) or a participial complement, it induces a direct perception interpretation. When the perception verb is followed by a finite clause or a full infinitive, the associated interpretation is of indirect perception, in Fred Dretske’s terminology (Seeing and knowing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Direct perception constructions require direct physical perception of the perceived event whereas indirect perception constructions normally describe the conclusion that the speaker has arrived at on the basis of what he perceived. Claudia Felser focuses on the first class of constructions and proposes a minimalist analysis which integrates syntactic and semantic concerns. She studies the general conditions under which verbal complements are licensed and provides an explanation for their limited distribution. In the first chapter of the book, F introduces the key concepts of the syntactic framework she adopts. In Ch. 2, she overviews the syntactic and semantic properties of nonfinite perception complements in English, especially with respect to the relationship between bare infinitives and participial complements. The third chapter addresses previous analyses of verbal small clauses. The author presents an alternative in which direct perception complements are treated as maximal projections of the functional head aspect. Bare infinitive and participial complements differ only with respect to the value of the aspectual feature [+/− progressive] located in aspect. Ch. 4 presents the main hypothesis of the book, what F calls the ‘event control hypothesis’. According to this hypothesis, verbs that express direct sensory perception behave as a specific type of control predicate. What distinguishes these verbs from subject or object control verbs, such as promise and persuade, is that the control relation is established between two event arguments. F claims that the syntactic and semantic properties of this construction follow from the interaction between the lexical properties of perception verbs and minimalist principles. For example, perception verbs semantically select an individual or a proposition. In their stage-level use, perception verbs select events, whereas in their individual-level use they select propositional complements. This avoids the need to invoke a separate mechanism of c-selection. In the final chapter, the author examines the crosslinguistic validity of her analysis. She concludes that there are two groups of languages. In the first group, which includes English, German, Dutch, and French, direct perception complements are realized as aspectual phrases. In the second group, comprised by Southern Romance languages, such as Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, these complements are realized as projections of a temporal head. Several properties are shown to follow from this contrast, which corresponds to the fact that in the languages belonging to the second group the infinitival suffix is actually a tense inflection projecting a tense phrase. To conclude, this book is an important contribution to the study of the properties of perception verbs at the syntax/semantics interface. The ideas presented by F, in a careful, elegant, and detailed manner, will probably be also influential in the current theoretical debate concerning the comprehensive theory of the syntax of tense and aspect, and its cross-linguistic repercussions. Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach Ohio State University Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America

Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance by Jan Bakker (review)

Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance by Jan Bakker (review)

Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance: Southern Literary Studies.

Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance: Southern Literary Studies.

Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance.

Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance.

Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance by Jan Bakker

Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance by Jan Bakker