Volume 134, Issue 4

Hermann Suchier, since the year 1876 Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Halle, was one of the most prominent scholars of his generation. Since he preserved all his correspondence, we are able to study his various international written relationships with his French colleagues, including Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer. However, a temporary disagreement between Suchier with Paris and Meyer did arise. This conflict was due to Suchier supporting the work of Wendelin Foerster, whose edition of Aiol et Mirabel was severely criticized by Paris and Meyer. Subsequently, Suchier once again changed support back to Paris and Meyer and then was invited to publish in their house journal, Romania , and additionally to contribute two editions in ancient French to the Société des Anciens Textes Français which had also be founded by Paris and Meyer. In this way Suchier became one of the most important intermediaries between German and French Philology in the years following the Franco-German war and the outbreak of World War I.

Based on textual evidence from Jean de Joinville’s Vie de saint Louis , this article argues that the Old French rhotic consonant /r/ had a dorsal pronunciation for at least some groups of medieval Francophones. This argument counters the prevailing view that medieval French /r/ was uniformly apical, and that the now-standard dorsal pronunciation only emerged in the early modern period. The article then develops the hypothesis that dorsal /r/ came into Old French as a result of Germanic influence, and not as a spontaneous development. For this purpose, it first surveys the current state of the debate about the origins of dorsal /r/ in the Germanic languages and evaluates the merits of its principal arguments in the light of Joinville’s testimony. The article then advances a sociolinguistic argument in favor of the Germanic-origins hypothesis. Using the available evidence for the interactions between Germanic- and Romance-speakers at the dawn of the written French language, it proposes that Carolingian-era nobles who were native speakers of Franconian dialects brought this pronunciation of /r/ into Old French, and that this sound subsequently persisted in some Old French aristocratic speech as part of a prestige accent.

In this paper we describe the French adverb visiblement in synchrony as well as in diachrony on the basis of all its occurrences in the data base Frantext . We show how and when it developed into an evidential marker. We examine the various distributional, syntactic and semantic changes the adverb underwent, from Old French until now. Regarding its evidential meaning, we show that visiblement , despite the presence of the perception element visible in its morphology, belongs to the category of evidential markers of inference (on the basis of perceivable or cognitively clear evidence) and not to that of evidential markers of direct perception. Finally, on a more theoretical level, we show in this study that in the case of visiblement semantic change precedes syntactic change, which seems to be rather uncommon.

This paper provides a description of the use in Spanish of the discourse particle respecto as a topicalizer. Although it has undergone complete grammaticalization from Latin in Spanish it appears in many forms. The distribution of the different forms involved is analysed using synchronic data from the CREA corpus and other lexicographical evidence.

This work offers an in-depth description of the main morphosyntactic features found in present Nicaraguan Spanish, a lesser known Central American variety despite being the subject of one of the pioneering dialectological studies on Spanish (Barreto 1893). With the help of text corpora and sociolinguistic surveys, an updated grammatical overview is provided, which takes into account most categories: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and locutions (coordinators, subordinators, among others), and illustrates with examples taken from both formal and informal settings. By comparing these features with previous grammatical descriptions, this study helps in identifying some common American features ―such as the use of medio as an agreeing adjective instead of an adverb particle― as well as some specific patterns ―such as the prominence of ‑ udo /‑ uda and ‑ oso /‑ osa suffixes― in present-day Nicaraguan Spanish, some of which remain to be incorporated in the Academy grammar.

The article analyzes the way to introduce glosses in the vernacular treatises and it therefore concentrates both on Tuscan texts of the 13th and 14th centuries dealing with astronomy, physics, natural philosophy, moral and religious arguments and on the comments of Latin and vernacular works. Corpus OVI database (www.ovi.cnr.it) was used for text search. The study focuses on the connectors between the definiéndum and the defìniens and then deals with the particles or expressions that introduce a gloss and that we have named definition operators . Three operators in particular are used systematically in the vernacular treatises: cioè , tanto è a dire quanto e non è altro che . Cioè introduces a gloss that either simplifies the term being glossed, or provides a variant that facilitates the reader’s comprehension. Whereas tanto è a dire quanto is employed to define loan words from Latin, Greek, Arabic, sometimes even from French, namely terms external to the vernacular language in which the author is writing, while non è altro che introduces a definition based on authority, an undisputable truth, or one that is believed to be undisputable. The constancy and the frequency with which we find especially the last two operators ( tanto è a dire quanto and non è altro che ) in the genre of texts analyzed make us think of ways followed with awareness by authors, commentators and translators and easily recognized by readers.

Our knowledge of the structural features of Lingua Franca (LF), a Romance-based contact language of the Mediterranean, is heavily dependent on a single publication, the Dictionnaire de la langue franque ou petit mauresque published anonymously in Marseille in 1830. Various aspects of the Dictionnaire have been explored in previous studies, including the lexical makeup and the structural features of the LF variety it records and the orthography that it employs for LF. This study advances our understanding of the Dictionnaire and of its place in the LF scholarship by focusing on a previously unexplored aspect of this important but understudied publication: its sources.

The present paper aims to present an inventory of Romanian middle contructions ( se ‑verbal constructions), and to extend the analysis to other structures (with or without se ) that were not previously investigated, but exhibit the same characteristics, and seem to allow middle reading ( adjunct middles ). Since Jespersen (1927), middles were attested cross-linguistically, and the focus on middles is justified if we consider the fact that this is an interesting testing ground for theories of syntax, semantics and their interaction (Fagan 1992). Starting from Grahek’s definition (2008, 44), in this paper, middles are a heterogeneous class of constructions that share formal properties of both active and passive structures: on the one hand, they have active verb forms, but, on the other hand, like passives, they have understood subjects and normally display promoted objects. The corpus analysis will focus on the particular contexts in which the middle reading is triggered: i) the adverbial modification; ii) the modal/procedural interpretation of the event; iii) the responsibility of the subject; iv) the arbitrary interpretation of the implicit argument which follows from the generic interpretation (Steinbach 2002).

Edition of the erased marginal note of the first page of the manuscript of the Chanson de la croisade albigeoise (BnF fr. 25425). This note seems to indicate the name of the person responsible for the text as a whole, who is very likely the same as the – hitherto anonymous – author of the second part of the Chanson . It was probably added in order to correct the information given by the first lines of the text in this manuscript.

The purpose of this article is to give a philological edition of a short oral text in the oïlic dialect of the Franche-Comté (Saint-Sauveur, Haute -Saône), known through a transcription by Paul Passy (1896). The notes aim towards a detailed explanation of the text’s meaning. A brief linguistic analysis shows how influenced by French is the Saint-Sauveur vernacular. The commentary shows that the informant turns upside down his relationship with the linguist.

The Italian locution meno male is widely used in several usages to express relief or to asseverate ironically. It appears in the 16th century in the now obsolete form manco male and becomes widespread since Goldoni (1707–1793). It has very few cognates in the other European languages; the Sp. menos mal , although very close in form and meaning, must nevertheless be interpreted as an independent formation.