Lawrence B. Kiddle

Bio: Lawrence B. Kiddle is an academic researcher from University of Michigan. The author has contributed to research in topics: Possessive & Grammar. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 8 publications receiving 41 citations.

Spanish Loan Words in American Indian Languages

Abstract: Ethnic or culture groups as well as individuals learn from their neighbors.* The closer and the more intimate the contacts between peoples the greater and the more profound will be the inter influence of one group upon the other. The exchanges or borrowings made between the groups can involve all aspects of the two cultures, whether they be material, such as tools, plants, and animals, or whether they be non-material in nature, such as customs, religious rites, and superstitions. The spread of these items or culture traits is referred to as cultural diffusion and, by studying this aspect of human activity, we are able to understand not only the origin of common objects and practices but also the culture processes by which these traits have been diffused. In the study of the distribution and diffusion of culture traits, linguistics plays a major role.' When two groups speaking distinct languages make cultural borrowings, they frequently borrow the name of the object or practice from the language of the lending group at the same time as they borrow the culture trait itself. This foreign word now used in a new environment is known as a loan word and the study of loan words in languages enables us to appreciate the development of specific cultures. Cultural borrowing can, of course, take place without linguistic borrowing or loan words but it is safe to assume that a word would not be borrowed in a vacuum, i. e. without the object it represents. Thus the presence of a culture element in a given group and the use of a loan word as its name in the language of that group is the strongest type of proof of the source of the culture element in question.2 The Spanish language offers great possibilities for the study of linguistic and cultural diffusion in the period since the discovery of the New World. The first contacts of the New World with the Old we e brought about by Spaniards and their tongue served as the medium for the communication of culture borrowings between the two Worlds. Spanish acted as the only cultural bridge between Europe and America for about fifty years after the discovery by Columbus and most of the languages of Europe, through terms borrowed from sixteenth-century Spanish, remind us of this important epoch in the history of the Spanish language. Similarly indigenous American languages reveal in the large number of Spanish loan words the profound impact made by European culture on New World groups. This study has as its purpose the description of certain aspects of the study of Spanish loan words in American Indian languages. By means of sample semantic categories and, within these, selected individual words, we shall illustrate how widespread and profound the influence of Spanish has been on certain native languages of America. In carrying out our purpose, we shall illustrate also certain aspects of the process of cultural diffusion or acculturation and, especially, the types of layers of loans that characterize the steps in that process. The illustrative examples that we use have been identified as borrowings from Spanish by capable investigators.3 By comparing these testimonials of Spanish loan words, it is * A paper read at the Thirty-Third Annual Meeting of the AATSP, Chicago, December 2627, 1951.

Parameters in the Typology of Clitics in Romance and Old Spanish

Abstract: Old Spanish clitics or weak pronominals differ from modern Romance clitics in their syntactic properties. They are NP's or PP's, share the distribution of other phrasal complements, and undergo the same movement rules. In Old Spanish (ca. 1200-1450), weak pronominals encliticize in Phonetic Form, after syntactic and stylistic rules have applied; i.e. they are phonological clitics. In doubling constructions, including the resumptive pronoun strategy, the pronominal/ clitic is the phrase in Argument-position; the doubling phrase is a topic or focus constituent, base-generated as a left or right adjunct of one of the maximal projections (i.e. VP. S S', S").*

Ministers for a Wise King: the Sun-King and planetary imagery at the court of Alfonso X

Abstract: Alfonso X is well known for being the patron of a large number of works of various kinds. Their common element a strong political component, a desire to use the past to back his power and to control the present and future of his kingdom. Even in its most unexpected corners, Alfonso’s literary project contains markedly political nuances. This is the case of his treatises dedicated to pastimes such as hunting or board games, whose princely quality is clearly highlighted. In this article I will analyze some miniatures where, at the end of his life, the Wise King presents himself as the Sun king. In the folios representing the games played by astronomy -a late-minute addition to the manuscript of his Book of Games- Alfonso X elaborates in figurative terms a declaration of cosmic power rooted in an ancient tradition he knows through islamic sources, the same ones from which he know the iconography of the planets. This metaphorical assertion of universal power contributes to make understandable his subsequent legend as a blasphemous king, who would have dared to challenge the power of God.

Island writing, Creole cultures

Abstract: Is it possible to speak of island literatures in global, comparative terms? Are geography and colonial history both so influential that we can say that they have produced an identifiable body of postcolonial island literatures? This chapter explores methodologies for comparing island writing by turning to contemporary literature in English from the Caribbean, Indian and Pacific archipelagoes, foregrounding the important contributions made by island writers to postcolonial discourse and literature. Although one might arguably define every land mass on the globe as an island, this chapter focuses on the literary production of former European colonies in the global south, particularly tropical islands with plantation, diaspora and creolization histories, as well as indigenous literatures in white settler nations. Although the concerns explored here are not restricted to island contexts, this chapter suggests that the collusion of geography and history has made these particular issues more prevalent in contemporary island writing than in other bodies of postcolonial literature. Colonial narratives and the tourist industry have long depicted island space as remote, isolated and peripheral to modernity. Yet island writers have demonstrated the ways in which centuries of transoceanic diaspora and settlement have rendered island spaces as vital and dynamic loci of cultural and material exchange. Contrary to the assumption that the privileged sites of history and modernity are continental (or generated from the British archipelago), many scholars have demonstrated that tropical islands and peoples were integral to the development of anthropology, botany, environmentalism, plantation capitalism, nuclear weapons and even the English novel.

The narrative forms of postcolonial fiction

Abstract: Introduction There was a knock on the door. I haven’t done this to you too often, have I, Ganapathi? Stretching the limits of coincidence unacceptably far? I mean, it’s not always in this narrative that a character has said, ‘It would be really convenient if the sky were to fall on us right now’ – and the sky has fallen on the next page. Fair enough? So do you think you can excuse me now if a sweat-stained despatch-rider bursts into the room and announces that Manimir has been invaded by Karnistani troops? Since Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) South Asian postcolonial literature in English has not merely become a major publishing success, but it has also acquired the hallmark of academic respectability owing to its exuberant intertextual playfulness, self-reflexive toying with the narrator–reader relation, its sheer inventiveness and expansive magic realist fabulation. Two labels helped to place Rushdie and his followers like Shashi Tharoor, Sunetra Gupta or Arundhati Roy among the literary elite: the affinity to the already canonized magic realism of South American provenance (Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes) and the postmodernist narrative techniques employed by Rushdie and others (selfreflexivity, parody, extensive use of analepsis, metalepsis and paralipsis, montage, subversion of ontological distinctions, metafiction). In fact, in hindsight, Rushdie’s (and Tharoor’s) works can now, more specifically, be categorized as historiographical metafictions, a prominent subcategory of postmodernist writing.

Fanon, Memmi, Glissant and postcolonial writing

Abstract: Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Edouard Glissant are three creative thinkers who share something of a common Weltanschauung . Without taking the more extreme definition from Freud that the latter is the unified solution as generated from a particular perspective of all the problems of the universe, certainly the centrality of the colonial encounter with otherness forms the overt structuring factor for the worldview of each of these formidable intellectuals. However, their creative paths would take different form. The themes that stage the encounter and the timbre of the voice of otherness in the texts of these intellectuals prove to be quite different in each case. In this chapter I will consider the oeuvre of these thinkers as together forming an aesthetic corpus that anticipates the transnational aspirations of a range of postcolonial francophone writers of encounter. A defining moment: literary history and the theme of encounter In considering this material historically I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s idea that: Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking crystallizes into a monad… In this structure [the historicist materialist] recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history.