CONCORDIA DISCORS vs DISCORDIA CONCORS

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Authors: Yusuke KANAZAWA

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Authors: Liubov ZHOLUDEVA

Eugenio Coseriu‘s theory of language variation and change that singles out the main parameters of language variation (diachrony, diatopy, diastraty, diaphasy) has been successfully applied by a number of Italian linguists to describe the restandardization of the Italian language. What is now called ―Neo-Standard Italian‖ is, in fact, the modern variety of Italy‘s standard language that has become more versatile, expressive and widely usable than the traditional Standard Italian due to the development of the lower part of register spectrum (diaphasy axis) and a higher tolerance to variation in diatopy and diastraty. The Italian school of linguistic thought completed the Coserian system of dia- terms by another one, namely, ―diamesia‖, that stands for the distinction between oral and written language. In the Italian historical linguistics, the Coserian theory of language norm and variation allowed to explain the reemergence of certain language features, now considered typical of Neo-Standard Italian, attested in Old Italian texts but later avoided in writing and labelled as substandard. Among other Coserian concepts recurrently discussed and cited by modern Italian linguists one can mention the distinction between primary, secondary and tertiary dialects, the idea to juxtapose functional language and historical language, and the concept of language architecture. Coseriu‘s functional approach to language studies, which views language as integral part of human life and cultural milieu, has resulted fruitful and largely congenial to Italian linguistics that traditionally avoids the extreme structural approaches and favors complex, well backgrounded studies taking into account the historical and sociocultural factors.

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Authors: Victor LARA BERMEJO

The future tense and the conditional are said to convey evidential meaning in most Romance languages. Whereas the former expresses conjecture, the latter is used to mark reportativity. However, the evidential readings of both tenses could be a very recent semantic extension at a vernacular level, since they are still frequent to express time and modality in nearly all the vernaculars. This study aims to show the geolinguistic and dialect distribution of both tenses along the 20th century in order to determine whether the future and the conditional were already evidential one hundred years ago or they have become so during the last century. Furthermore, I will also show the likely directionality for these tenses to become evidential and I will discuss whether there is a language that has worked as the focus of the Romance evidentiality. In doing so, I will not only apply the Coserian variables of diatopic and diaphasic restraints, but I will compare the differences among the dialects and the norms that rule all of them, analysing the systemic behaviour that favours the future as well as the conditional for marking evidentiality.

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Authors: Wolf DIETRICH

In spite of the scarce number of papers Coseriu dedicated to problems of functional syntax (Coseriu 1979, 1989), they fully agree with his general conception of semantics, especially grammatical semantics, and Wilhelm von Humboldt‘s notion of ―interior linguistic shape‖. In this paper, Coseriu‘s principles of functional syntax are discussed with regard to publications on ergativity. It is argued that ergative languages are not, first of all, characterized by a specific case marking on nouns, but by a specific behavior of the verb and verbal categories such as voice. Phenomena of syntactical swift in Tupi-Guarani languages will also be described. First and second person pronominal objects in transitive verbal constructions are not allowed. Nominalized existential clauses are used instead.