La pragmatica del senhal trobadorico e la sémiotique des passions

This contribution maintains that the senhals, the fictional allocutives used by many provençal troubadours to address their recipients or the noblemen and noblewomen celebrated in their poems, are rhetorical features which aim at establishing a tight connection between the body of the song and the tornadas, the contextual appendix that typically concludes the poem. Such connection depends on repetitio, since the senhal chosen by the troubadours to address the dedicatee of their poems are very often based on the very same words they use throughout the coblas of the same cansos for describing the emotional and affective modulation of love passion. In such terms, the survey leads to the conclusion that the troubadours cast and disguise the audience of their composition into the key-concepts of the courtly love lyrics.