Voices of the great war: A richly annotated corpus of Italian texts on the first world war

Voci della Grande Guerra (“Voices of the Great War”) is the first large corpus of Italian historical texts dating back to the period ofFirst World War. This corpus differs from other existing resources in several respects. First, from the linguistic point of view it givesaccount of the wide range of varieties in which Italian was articulated in that period, namely from a diastratic (educated vs. uneducatedwriters), diaphasic (low/informal vs. high/formal registers) and diatopic (regional varieties, dialects) points of view. From the historicalperspective, through a collection of texts belonging to different genres it represents different views on the war and the various styles ofnarrating war events and experiences. The final corpus is balanced along various dimensions, corresponding to the textual genre, thelanguage variety used, the author type and the typology of conveyed contents. The corpus is annotated with lemmas, part-of-speech,terminology, and named entities. Significant corpus samples representative of the different “voices” have also been enriched withmeta-linguistic and syntactic information. The layer of syntactic annotation forms the first nucleus of an Italian historical treebankcomplying with the Universal Dependencies standard. The paper illustrates the final resource, the methodology and tools used to buildit, and the Web Interface for navigating it

Lute, Vihuela, and Early Guitar

Producción CientíficaLutes, guitars, and vihuelas were the principal plucked instruments in use in Europe until around 1800. Ancient forms of the lute existed in many parts of the ancient world, from Egypt and Persia through to China. It appears to have become known in Europe, where its earliest associations were with immigrants such as the legendary Persian lutenist Ziryab (b. c. 790–d. 852), who was established in Moorish Spain by 822. The origins of the various flat-backed instruments that eventually became guitars are more difficult to trace. The vihuela is one such instrument that evolved in the mid-15th century and was prolific in Spain and its dominions throughout the 16th century and beyond. Very few plucked instruments, and only a handful of fragmentary musical compositions, survive from before 1500. The absence of artifacts and musical sources prior to 1500 has been a point of demarcation in the study of early plucked instruments, although current research is seeking to explore the continuity of instrumental practice across this somewhat artificial divide. In contrast, perhaps as many as thirty thousand works—perhaps even more—for lute, guitar, and vihuela survive from the period 1500–1800. The music and musical practices associated with them are not well integrated into general histories of music. This is due in part to the use of tablature as the principal notation format until about 1800, and also because writers of general histories of music have for the most part ignored solo instrumental music in their coverage. (For example, the Oxford Anthology of Western Music, Vol. 1 (2018), designed to accompany chapters 1–11 of Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, does not contain a single piece of instrumental music prior to Frescobaldi [1637]). Contrary to this marginalized image, lutes, vihuelas, and guitars were a revered part of courtly musical culture until well into the 18th century, and constantly present in urban contexts. After the development of basso continuo practice after 1600, plucked instruments also became frequent in Christian church music, although the lute was widely played by clerics of all levels, particularly during the Renaissance. It was also one of the principal tools used by composers of liturgical polyphony, in part because tablature was the most common way of writing music in score. From the beginning of music printing, printed tablatures played a fundamental role in the urban dissemination of music originally for church and court, and plucked instruments were used widely by all levels of society for both leisure and pleasure. After 1800, the lute fell from use, the guitar was transformed into its modern form with single strings, and tablature ceased to be the preferred notation for plucked instruments.Este trabajo forma parte del proyecto de investigación “La obra musical renacentista: fundamentos, repertorios y prácticas” HAR 2015-70181-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE

Finnish Parliament on the Semantic Web: Using ParliamentSampo Data Service and Semantic Portal for Studying Political Culture and Language

Peer reviewe

The Italian Retranslations of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: A Corpus-based Literary Analysis

The research goal is to clarify how and to what degree the modernist style and features of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse are rendered in the eleven retranslations into Italian of this novel and whether these can be characterised as modernist novels themselves. A suitable methodology has been developed, which is drawn on the existing corpus methods for descriptive translation studies. Empirical evidence of the differences between target texts have been found, which in many cases have been interpreted as due to the translators’ voice or thumb-prints. The present research uses a systematic literary comparison of the retranslations by adopting a mixed-method and bottom-up (inductive) approach by developing an empirical corpus approach. This corpus is specifically tailored to identify and study both linguistic and non-linguistic modernist features throughout the texts such as stream of consciousness-indirect interior monologue and free indirect speech. All occurrences will be analysed in this thesis in the computations of inferential and comparative statistics such as lexical variety and lexical frequency. The target texts were digitised, and the resulting text files were then analysed by using a bespoke, novel computer program, which is capable of the mentioned functions not provided by commercially available software such as WordSmith Tools and WMatrix. Not only did this methodology enable performing in-depth explorations of micro- and macro-textual features, but it also allowed a mixed-method approach combining close-reading qualitative analysis with systematic quantitative comparisons. The obtained empirical results identify a progressive source-text orientation of the retranslations of Woolf’s style in a few aspects of a few target texts. The translators’ presence affected all the eleven target texts in register and style under the influence of the Italian translation norms usually attributed to the translation of literary classics

Finnish Parliament on the Semantic Web: Using ParliamentSampo Data Service and Semantic Portal for Studying Political Culture and Language

Peer reviewe

The Baroque Concertato in England, 1625–c.1660 Volume I & II

English concertato music of the seventeenth century has remained a relatively neglected area of musicological scholarship and has yet to receive the attention it deserves. More specifically, the period between the death of William Byrd (1540–1623) and the rise of Henry Purcell (1659–1695) remains something of a historiographical lacuna and is often disparaged for the decline in English musical standards. It is demonstrated in this dissertation, however, that in certain Royalist and court-related circles English composers were conversant in the stile nuovo and remained absolutely up-to-date with the latest Italian methods of composition. An attempt is made to construct a paradigm of influence that can be used profitably when considering the appropriation and assimilation of the techniques of the stile nuovo by English composers. The first composer to be examined in this dissertation is Richard Dering (1580–1620), who should be considered the progenitor of small-scale concertato music in England. The chief pioneer of Italianate sacred music in mid-seventeenth-century England, however, was George Jeffreys (1610–1685), who has been marginalised by traditional constructions of English music history. It is hoped that this dissertation is, in part, remedial, drawing attention to the significant achievements made by Jeffreys, while simultaneously promoting English concertato music. In the latter part of this dissertation the music of William Child (1606/7–1697), Henry Lawes (1596–1662) and William Lawes (1602–1645), Walter Porter (c.1587/c.1595–1659), and John Wilson (1597–1674) is considered in a series of case studies, all of whom demonstrate Royalist allegiances and a commitment to the stile nuovo. The complexities of the political and religious concerns of the period are also highlighted and detailed alongside the music of these composers

The music in the Spanish Baroque theatre of Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Thesis (D.M.A.)--Boston UniversityTonight we will recreate musical moments from the plays of Don Pedro Calderon De La Barca, who lived from 1600 until 1680. During his long span of life he dominated the brilliant Baroque playwrights and poets for several generations. He took the rich heritage of drama forms which Juan Del Encina, Tirso De Molina, Lope De Vega and many others had created, and under the magnificent patronage of the Hapsburgs--Philip III, Philip IV, and Carlos II--Calderon brought the one-act sacred plays, called autos sacramentales, to their definitive form. For us he is particularly interesting for the enormous amount of music he employed in his plays, and the creative ways in which he used the musical forms , and because he wrote the first librettos for Spanish opera and for the musical comedies, called zarzuelas. Calderon produced three types of plays: the one-act sacred plays, the three-act comedies and three-act dramas [TRUNCATED

Gabriel Harvey and the History of Reading: Essays by Lisa Jardine and others

Few articles in the humanities have had the impact of Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s seminal ‘Studied for Action’ (1990), a study of the reading practices of Elizabethan polymath and prolific annotator Gabriel Harvey. Their excavation of the setting, methods and ambitions of Harvey’s encounters with his books ignited the History of Reading, an interdisciplinary field which quickly became one of the most exciting corners of the scholarly cosmos. A generation inspired by the model of Harvey fanned out across the world’s libraries and archives, seeking to reveal the many creative, unexpected and curious ways that individuals throughout history responded to texts, and how these interpretations in turn illuminate past worlds. Three decades on, Harvey’s example and Jardine’s work remain central to cutting-edge scholarship in the History of Reading. By uniting ‘Studied for Action’ with published and unpublished studies on Harvey by Jardine, Grafton and the scholars they have influenced, this collection provides a unique lens on the place of marginalia in textual, intellectual and cultural history. The chapters capture subsequent work on Harvey and map the fields opened by Jardine and Grafton’s original article, collectively offering a posthumous tribute to Lisa Jardine and an authoritative overview of the History of Reading