Spanish Renaissance Literature and Phonetic Analysis

Renaissance Lyric and Petrarchan Influence

Petrarch inherited the Provencal lyric, cultured and classical literature, influencing the poets of his generation. Regarding formal Italian aspects: although the hendecasyllable was used in the previous century, Juan Boscán was definitely the one who introduced and recommended its practice to Garcilaso de la Vega.

Renaissance Stanzas and Style

In this way, Renaissance lyric compositions established stanzas and types usual in Italian lyric, such as:

• Chained triplets
• The lira
• The octava real
• The sonnet
• The Sapphic stanza

There was also a change in style, utilizing epithets, metaphors to characterize the physical traits of the lady, hyperbaton, enjambment, personification, and extensive cultismo.

La Celestina and Narrative Genres

The Tragicomedy of La Celestina

La Celestina follows the tragicomedy model, narrating love stories where the help of servants and a bawd develop the plot, featuring a marked erotic character. Without being fully realistic, it provides a credible picture of the society of the time.

Chivalric and Moorish Novels

Chivalric narratives had an extraordinary development, modeled after popular medieval stories. This narrative lasted until the early decades of the 17th century. In the rebirth of Amadís, continuations were written featuring knights in love and Palmerines. To the medieval heroic stories, the Christian knight is joined. The Moorish novel evokes life on the frontier of Castile and the last Muslim kingdom of the 15th century. The toponymy of these works is real. Notable works include the history of Abencerraje and the Beautiful Jarifa, where both characters have features of male chivalry.

Linguistic Analysis: Phonetics and Phonology

The Level of Phonetics

Phonetics is the discipline of linguistics that studies the nature of linguistic sounds in the physical field. It covers three branches:

• Articulatory phonetics
• Acoustic phonetics
• Auditory phonetics

It studies the emissions of concrete sounds belonging to speech, unlike the discipline of phonology, which is in charge of the language system. Phonology studies the abstract or mental aspects of language.

Phonemes and Suprasegmental Elements

Sounds are the minimal elements that have no meaning in themselves but distinguish meanings, called phonemes. Phonology deals with phonemes and segmental phenomena, but also studies accent and intonation, called suprasegmental elements.

Narrative and Descriptive Linguistic Features

Narrative Style

Narrative features declarative sentences, coordinate copulatives, and verbs in the preterite, perfect simple, compound, and pluperfect. It includes circumstantial markers of time and place. The style can be direct, indirect, or free indirect, utilizing verbs of action and movement, as well as descriptive and specifying adjectives.

Descriptive Style

Description is characterized by a predominance of declarative sentences, nouns, and the present or imperfect indicative. It uses circumstantial markers of time, place, and mode, often in the third person. It includes exclamatory sentences, verbs defining nature, status or membership, specifying descriptive adjectives, technicalities, and evaluative or expressive resources.