Key Concepts in Language, Literature, and Pre-Renaissance Spain
Conversations
Conversations: Oral texts are unresponsive to pre-planning or pre-arrangement.
- Structure: Based on the turns of speech that are not granted in advance and are being taken or ordered through different verbal and nonverbal resources.
- Verbal features: The appellate function that serves to draw attention to the other and the phatic that verify the operation of the canal.
There is a flexible use of language. Speakers adapt their speech to the communicative situation, using a colloquial register.
The Rules of Conversation
- Principle of cooperation: The partners should cooperate. This principle is developed in four maxims:
- Quantity: The information transmitted is necessary, neither more nor less information.
- Relevance: The information relates to the topic of conversation.
- Quality: The information is true and not false.
- Mode: The information is sorted, accurate, and not ambiguous.
- Comity: Allows you to show respect.
Subject
Semantics is the syntactic element that performs the action of the verb to be something which is predicated.
Syntactically, the subject is the constituent of the sentence whose core agrees with the verb in number and person.
Narrative
A text is a sentence or a coherent set of statements, oral or written, which have a communicative purpose.
Narrating is relating events to characters in time and space. Its intention is to explain, tell, inform, or entertain, and if it has an aesthetic purpose, it is a literary narrative.
Elements of Narrative
Narrator: The narrator is a fictional character who tells the facts. You can present the story from different points of view.
First person: In what may be the protagonist or witness.
In third person: With unlimited knowledge of the facts or being knowledgeable of them.
Narration: It corresponds to the argument, with a basic linear structure divided into presentation, middle, and end.
Characters: Living history and physical features appear, psychological and social.
Space and time: It is situated in space and time. The former may be external or internal, real or fictional. The second are two kinds of time:
- Historical time and external: Time in which the action unfolds.
- Time of the story or internal: Duration of the narrative.
The Language of the Narrative
- Lexical features: The prevalence of verbs. These may be moving and thinking.
- Morphological features: A predominance of verbs in the past tense, as perfect as imperfect. It is also frequent to use the historical present.
- Syntactic features:
- Use of narrative styles, comes in direct or indirect style.
- Prevalence of declarative sentences and supplements.
- Abundance of adverbial subordinate clauses.
- Textual features: The most characteristic is the use of discourse markers. The most frequent refer to the frame.
Description
Describing is representing someone or something through language, referring to its qualities and its parts. The intent of the description can be varied.
Classes of Description
Objective or scientific description: It reflects reality as it is. Uses precise language and denotative.
Subjective description or literature: An aesthetic purpose and dominated the poetic function.
According to the item described:
Prosopography: This involves the physical description of the person.
Ethopoeia: Refers to the character, habits, and actions of a person.
Portrait: A combination of prosopography and ethopoeia. The description is complete.
Self-Portrait: The description by the issuer itself.
Cartoon: It involves the exaggeration or ridicule of a person’s traits.
Grotesque: Distorted exaggeration of the traits of a person.
The Language in the Description
Lexical features: The most prominent
Noun phrases surrounding the use of both specified as explanatory.
- Use of state verbs.
- Presence of adverbial phrases. Circumstantial complements abound of time, place, and manner.
Morphological features: Features indicative in use. The more tense verbs used are the present and imperfect indicative.
Syntactic features: Prevalence of simple sentences.
Textual features: An important textual feature are literary figures.
- Metonymy: Class of metaphor.
- Hyperbole: Exaggeration.
- Simile: Comparison.
- Personification: Applying human qualities to things or objects that do not have them.
Dialogue
It is a communicative process in which two or more partners take turns using the word. The role of the issuer is important. Therefore, the two most important qualities of the dialogue are succession and hierarchy.
The partners are interested in exchanging information correctly. To ensure phatic function is frequently used. Other features include the expressive function and appellate.
Features
Way round: There is dialogue. This transmitter and receiver have to exchange their roles.
Dialogical tension: Initiated and maintained by dialogical tension.
- Supply voltage: They have to have a starting point.
- Voltage Information: Keep the conversation and makes this progress.
- Silence: It means the end of the dialogue.
Consistency:
Each piece of information must be connected to the previous.
Dialogue Class
Direct style words are transcribed literally each partner.
A narrator transcribes indirect style interventions characters through subordinate clauses introduced by the conjunction “that.”
The Language in Dialogue
Lexical features: Language and thinking verbs to introduce the activities of the characters.
Morphological: The employment index. The most common are present, the past tense, and present perfect, all indicative.
The main syntactic features are:
- Prevalence of interrogative and exclamatory sentences, interjections, and vocative.
- More spontaneous language.
Textual features dialogue are all related to the cohesion of the text.
Predicate
Predicate expresses an action, event, or situation involving the subject. Predicative function is always performed by a verb phrase.
The Form of the Verb
- The lexeme contributes the lexical meaning and determines the combinatorial possibilities of the verb.
- The set of verb endings make up the verb conjugation.
Verbal periphrasis is a verbal construction of meaning formed by a single verb and a main verb in the infinitive, participle, or gerund.
The Pre-Renaissance
The fifteenth century meant the disintegration of the medieval world. The power of the feuds are concentrated in the hands of the king. The local nature of medieval society breaks down the barriers of guilds and cities. The growth of the bourgeoisie entails the dissemination of its mentality and values.
On the cultural level is of great significance to the invention of printing. Fortune, love, and death are central themes. There are two attitudes, disappointment. On the other enjoyment.
Pre-Renaissance Poetry
Fifteenth-century literature is characterized mainly by the large number of poets, his works have been included in numerous collections called songbooks.
We distinguish two lines of poetry cancioneril:
The love poetry of Provençal troubadour tradition of origin. Courtly love is a gentleman is subject to the domain of the lady.
Moral didactic poetry is characterized by a high and solemn tone of scholarly references and language latinizante reflect the interest in the classical world.
The Marquis de Santillana
He was one of the most powerful nobles of the first half of the century. Italian and Latin works translated into Castilian.
Juan de Mena
He was considered the greatest poet of his time. It is characterized by the abundant scholarship and the heavy latinizante language.
Jorge Manrique
He was a gentleman who actively participated in the civil strife of the time. His masterpiece is Verses on the Death of His Father.
Structure
It consists of 40 songs. It warned three parts:
- A general reflection about life and death.
- The exemplification of the power of death.
- The evocation of Don Rodrigo Manrique master of that praise their virtues and achievements.
Style
The language is both cultured and natural, simplicity prevails in the language.
The entire composition is dominated by great artistic sobriety.
Use a judgmental tone.
To materialize abstract ideas with metaphors uses simple but very expressive.
The repetitions give the poem a leisurely pace and grave, in keeping with the theme.
Frequent use of parallels.
Pre-Renaissance Theater
Religious drama. We emphasize:
Gómez Manrique (1412-1491) author of the Representation of the Birth of Our Lord that still falls within the medieval tradition.
Above Juan who is now close to new tastes and Renaissance forms.
The dances of death death is calling to participate in their dance to different characters.
Pre-Renaissance Prose
The fifteenth-century theater collecting new paths of Renaissance. A work halfway between prose and drama, La Celestina, which marks the change from period literature.
Didactic prose medieval remains faithful to the objective of educating and changing behavior. El Corbacho, Alfonso Martínez is a treatise on the sin of lust or love crazy.
Historical prose takes on a major development in this century as an imitation of the historians of antiquity and in imitation of the ancient historians as propaganda for nobles and kings. Biographies of famous people.
Prose fiction developed during this century, through two different genera.
Romances recount the adventures of a gentleman. The heroism and love of a lady make you triumph over any obstacle. The ideals are the same.
Sentimental novel responds to new tastes and ideals of the bourgeoisie. Emotions and feelings run high, characters and environments are refined, courtly and conventional religion and language is very elaborate.
Humanistic Prose
- In 1492 appears in Spain the first Spanish Grammar. Directed for linguistic studies of importance to philosophy. This grammar has a double interest: on the one hand as the first study of Spanish grammar and the other as a document of early printing systems.
- The work would be continued by Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas.
La Celestina
The matchmaker is the most representative of the fifteenth century. With it ends the Medieval and Renaissance is announced.
The Author
In the dedication, Fernando de Rojas said he found the first act is unknown. Fernando de Rojas know who was born in Puebla de Montalban, who studied at Salamanca.
The Literary Genre
The matchmaker is a work difficult to categorize. Due to its staging consider a novel dialogue. Today it is regarded as essentially dramatic in it’s dialogue. The change in the title of Comedy for Tragicomedy indicate a concern for the talks to be within the theatrical genre.
The Argument or Issue
The narrative axis are the loves of coves and Melibea. Calisto falls by chance in the garden of Melibea to declaring the passion that has awakened in him but the girl refuses. Advised by his servant Sempronius, uses the arts of a bawd, Celestina. Celestina uses his powers of persuasion and his magic to change the will of Melibea, but when you receive the prize of Callisto, the murder Sempronio Parmeno and not share it with them. Meanwhile, Callisto continues his romantic encounters Melibea until night falls from the garden wall and dies. Melibea declares all of what happened to his father and commits suicide by jumping from the top of a tower. The play ends with the cry of Pleberio by the death of his daughter.
Structure
The work consists of twenty-one acts. Distinguish the following parts:
Act I: Approach to Action.
Acts II-XII: Development of conflict between the characters.
Act XIII-XX: Proceedings of the passionate love of Calisto and Melibea.
Act XXI: Crying Pleberio.
Characters
Calisto: Absorbed by the passion of love, insecure, selfish, dominated by the servants and Celestina.
Melibea: Passionate, has to save face, hence rejects Calisto first and then act from their parents.
Celestina: A sort of magical, clever and able to flatter and deceive, his only goal is to take advantage of any situation. Intermediary in the love of Calisto and Melibea has become the symbol of the bawd.
The servants are motivated only their own economic interest, the lack of emotional connection makes them false and disloyal to his master.
Topics
Young people are slaves Melibea Calisto and love and Celestina is the stirring of that irrepressible passion that will lead his misfortune.
A Celestina and Calisto’s servants greed overpowered, which also end up destroying them.
Death is the bitter end to most of the characters. They want to live fast and enjoy the pleasures of life. But they are victims of their own passions.
The events are governed by fortune, the actions are chained in the most plausible.
Style
On the tongue are two linguistic registers:
Cult language latinizante high tone with abundant parallelism, antithesis, mythological allusions, quotations, reworkings of philosophical thoughts, and maximum use of sentences.
Popular speech, spontaneous, direct, and with plenty of sayings and expressions, broken phrases and exclamations.
The Author’s Intention
The author states in the preface that he wrote the work from the mad love. The death of the characters seem to reinforce the moralizing intention. However, the ambiguous attitude Rojas due to erotic content of the work.