Claudia Ricci – författare

It's 1883 in northern California. A young Dominican nun is dragged from her convent, accused of seducing and murdering her cousin, Antonie. He suffers from syphilis and has written a pile of erotic fantasies, spnning her into a flamenco dancer and incriminating her for the crime. More than a century later, Gina Rinaldi, a writer suffering from depression, finds herself literally immersed in the story. Gina's link to Sister Renata is an old Mexican housekeeper, Senora Ramos, who lures Gina back to the past with a plea to save the nun from the twin monsters that are her cousin and the men-only courtroom. Is Gina as delusional as Antonie, or is she living a past life, reincarnated as the nun? Is she whisked back through time on a mission to save her soul, and the nun, or has she begun to unravel? How will writing the nun's story heal her? Sister Mysteries is a murder mystery that doubles as a #MeToo tale. It zeros in on the power of men, and their fantasies, to dominate and destroy women. Beautifully written, the novel's many secrets make it a page-turner. Told in three voices, the book's poetic language and haunting images guarantee a delightful and memorable read.

The studies collected in this volume deal with pragmatic factors involved in the evolution of grammatical or lexical forms or in the emergence of complex syntactic structures in various languages (Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian and Spanish). They are set against the theoretical framework of grammaticalization. The main methodological tools are cross-linguistic contrastive analysis and diachronic perspective. The two main issues that emerge from these studies are the place of pragmatic factors in language change (input, output or setting/frame of the process) and the existence or otherwise of a prevailing mechanism for explaining change phenomena.