Actes del VII Congrés de l'Associació Hispànica de Literatura Medieval : Castelló de la Plana, 22-26 de setembre de 1997

An index, in addition to its main function as a ready reference of information, also serves as a kind of monument—an opportunity to see where we have been and how far we have come. Looking over the following pages, we have come a long way indeed in sixteen years. We can take pride in having contributed over 150 articles and documents on the Romance epic, over 100 book reviews, and nearly 250 article reviews and abstracts, not to mention bibliographies and other forms of contributions.

Comprehensive Index to Olifant, volumes 1-16

This research unites the theory of formulaic language—prefabricated sequences of words believed to be stored as holistic units—and the practice of forensic authorship attribution with a view to developing a new marker of authorship. It stands to reason that since formulaic sequences are holistically processed as single lexical items, they are likely to elude a writer’s attempts to disguise their style. Furthermore, evidence suggests that individuals have different stores of formulaic sequences. Therefore, research into differences in formulaic language usage may assist in the development of new tools for authorship attribution. In order to test this assertion, a reference list containing 13,412 formulaic sequences was compiled from multiple online sources. This was then used to identify formulaic sequences in a 20 author corpus containing 100 personal narratives. After exploring the types of formulaic sequences used by authors, statistical tests were used to determine whether the count of formulaic words was sufficient to establish variation between authors and to attribute a Questioned Text to its author.

/pdf/a-preliminary-investigation-into-the-use-of-fixed-formulaic-2zb4pb54yy.pdf

A preliminary investigation into the use of fixed formulaic sequences as a marker of authorship

When literary scholars first began in the nineteen-sixties to explore the possible uses of the computer in furthering their work, they greeted it as historians of science, in retrospect, imagine that astronomers greeted the advent of the telescope; but the cosmology of literary study has not yet been turned inside out, and some critics are beginning to wonder why. Susan Wittig, for example, attributes the failure to a "New-Critical" mental set on the part of computationally oriented scholars.1 But the problem, as I propose to argue, lies deeper within our basic assumptions about our discipline. To explore these assumptions and the resulting problem, let me begin with the matter of terminology. The English language, it has often been said, utterly lacks a general word for the activity of studying literature, in the sense that "chemistry" is a word for the activity of studying the nature and interactions of the elements. Though Northrop Frye defines the former activity as "an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field,"2 he is forced to call it criticism, a term both etymologically and connotatively inapproprise.3 The French language offers little help: belles-lettres and edtudes litteraires are awkward constructions at best, and even the German term Literaturwissenschaft is a clumsy compound in comparison with Chemie. The nineteenth century called our discipline "philology," which seems nicely parallel to such disciplinary terms in the natural sciences as "geology"; but whereas the latter's etymological meaning is, with laudable objectivity of denotation, "words about the earth," the former means "the love of words," and objec-

Measurement and the study of literature

Law II.9.2 of the Siete Partidas contains a fleeting representation of the poor as a covetous and dangerously intelligent class. Other early Castilian works also warn the powerful of the potential wiles of the poor, encouraging prudence when dealing with them. The idea that poverty often leads to a state of self-serving depravity was not a Castilian invention, but rather was present in the literature that Arabic speakers had amassed and brought to the Iberian Peninsula. Both the scholars of Alfonso X’s scriptorium and Don Juan Manuel made use of the trope of the conniving poor as they sought to pass on “wisdom” to their powerful audiences. The entrance of the motif into early Castilian literature owes its existence to the pluralistic nature of Iberian intellectual culture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The Conniving Poor in Early Castilian Wisdom Literature

findings initiated the polemic which has at least been discussed, if only in passing comment, by most ciddfilos in any lengthy treatise on the poem. The main ideas of his article are as follows: (1) the style in the first half is sober and historical, the second is fantastic, less serious, and mostly fictitious; (2) differences in the use of epithets in the two parts for the Cid and Alfonso; (3) difference in the use of verb forms and synonyms in the two parts; (4) confusion in the use of so and su; (5) differences between the Primnera crdnica general and the poem; (6) the predominant use of the assonance in 6 in the second part; and (7) the localizacidn of the poem. Mack Singleton, in his article, "The Two Techniques of the Poema de Mio Cid: An Interpretative Essay,"2 does not directly state that there is more than one author of the poem. He does, however, suggest that his opinions may lend some weight to this supposition: "It is my feeling that there are two poems here, if the technique is any guide" (p. 227). The technique Singleton refers to is his conclusion that the second part of the poem is the technique of the modern novel while the first is that of the com-

Formulaic Expression and Unity of Authorship in the "Poema de Mio Cid"

A Concordance to Juan Ruiz: "Libro de buen amor"

The "Libro de los buenos proverbios"

to believe that there is perhaps more than one poet responsible for the composition of the poem. The differences in usage may be considered the choice of one synonym over another and/or incidence of appearance. In his article, "The Unity of the Poem of the Cid," Hills begins by indicating some common differences. He arbitrarily divides the poem into two equal parts. For purposes of this division, lines 1-1820 belong to the first half and lines 1821-3730 to the second.

Franklin M. Waltman

Papers

Formulaic Expression and Unity of Authorship in the "Poema de Mio Cid"

A Concordance to Juan Ruiz: "Libro de buen amor"

The "Libro de los buenos proverbios"

Synonym Choice in the "Cantar de Mio Cid"

Dido en la literatura espanola: Su retrato y defensa