Spoken Latin behind written texts
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Timo Korkiakangas
Abstract
This study uses treebanking to investigate how spoken language infiltrated legal Latin in early medieval Italy. The documents used are always formulaic, but they also always contain a ‘free’ part where the case in question is described in free prose. This paper uses this difference to measure how ten linguistic features, representative of the evolution that took place between Classical and Late Latin, are distributed between the formulaic and free parts. Some variants are attested equally often in both parts of the documents, while perceptually or conceptually salient variants appear to be preserved in their conservative form mainly in the formulaic parts.
Abstract
This study uses treebanking to investigate how spoken language infiltrated legal Latin in early medieval Italy. The documents used are always formulaic, but they also always contain a ‘free’ part where the case in question is described in free prose. This paper uses this difference to measure how ten linguistic features, representative of the evolution that took place between Classical and Late Latin, are distributed between the formulaic and free parts. Some variants are attested equally often in both parts of the documents, while perceptually or conceptually salient variants appear to be preserved in their conservative form mainly in the formulaic parts.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction. The added value of diachronic treebanks for historical linguistics 1
- Split coordination in English 15
- A corpus approach to the history of Russian po delimitatives 41
- Non-configurationality in diachrony 69
- Text form and grammatical changes in Medieval French 95
- Spoken Latin behind written texts 129
- Subject index 149
- Index of languages 151
- Index of authors 153
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction. The added value of diachronic treebanks for historical linguistics 1
- Split coordination in English 15
- A corpus approach to the history of Russian po delimitatives 41
- Non-configurationality in diachrony 69
- Text form and grammatical changes in Medieval French 95
- Spoken Latin behind written texts 129
- Subject index 149
- Index of languages 151
- Index of authors 153
