Volume 135, Issue 2

Abstract  Le Naufrage de la Pucelle is a work written by Jean Molinet in 1477 to relate, in allegorical form, the attack of Louis XI to Mary of Burgundy’s States at the beginning of that same year. The text presents a vessel adrift, an image of Burgundy itself, manned by a duchess who is incapable of steering it and with a divided crew, which is also a true reflection of the inner situation of the territories ruled by the daughter of Charles the Bold. The crew members are surrounded by sea animals that seek to sink them, an image of the brutality of the French attack, but they are finally rescued by eagles that embody the imperial power. The text, which is faithful to the Burgundian chivalric ideology, is built through various levels of interpretation, where the allegory not only reflects the political situation, but it also conveys religious motifs that will be common in other later works by Molinet himself, indiciaire of the duchy during those terrible years.

This contribution analyses the role French may have played as a model language in the development of the indirect passive (or recipient passive) in Middle English. It is based on diachronic corpus data showing that the construction appeared in Middle English predominantly with verbs borrowed from French and spread to native verbs only later. The fact that French did not have a recipient passive construction speaks against contact influence, whereas the data as well as the situation of close language contact between Old French and Middle English speak in favour of contact-induced change. The hypothesis of internal change will be contrasted with several explanations in a language contact scenario. The first one is syntactic and regards the type of dative case : English integrated the French structural dative into its native grammar, which so far only had an inherent dative. Passives with structural datives were prior to native constructions and may have triggered them. The transfer may have been facilitated by the reanalysis of certain bridge constructions (proclitics and clausal complements). The more conceptual second part discusses current psycholinguistic research in order to identify methods which help overcome the methodological deadlock that historical linguists are facing when they want to assess the validity of competing explanations.

Pierre-Ignace Chavatte did not write his chronicle of the city of Lille ( Chronique memorial , 1657–1693) exclusively in his own words and based on his personal experience. Instead, he incorporated rather frequently second-hand information (taken especially from historical pamphlets) on events that took place in other regions of Europe. This also applies to aspects of the Christian-Ottoman antagonism in the 17th century. As a consequence the Chronique contains a number of lexical elements of Turkish origin, which are of particular interest from the point of view of historical language contact. As a rule the historical sources used by Chavatte cannot be identified with precision. However, precise identification is possible in the case of the Relation exacte des vaines Prieres & Jûnes, ordonnés par le Grand Seigneur, dans tout l’Empire ottoman , which extends over two folio pages in the original manuscript. This passage is based on a printed French original dating from 1686, which was translated from Italian. The Italian version in turn insinuates that the whole text is ultimately based on a Turkish original. Significant historical inconsistencies, however, clearly prove that the Relation was, in actual fact, part of the Christian anti-Muslim propaganda.

The aim of this paper is to study the process of linguistic change recently detected in the pronominal system of the Spanish variety from the Canary Islands. According to a number of parameters which define the domain of study, such as age, gender, sociocultural level, origin, residence and possible influence of other varieties, the survey makes use of data extracted from the social network Facebook comments to try to find out to what extend the pronominal system generally used in the Canary Islands has undergone a relevant change and what kind of system(s) can best represent the linguistic competence of at least some part of this speech community. Finally, it discusses whether or not the attested change can be related to linguistic self-esteem problems or the influence of peninsular Spanish.

This article addresses a particular characteristic of the variety of Spanish spoken in Majorca (Balearic Islands, Spain): the /ʎ/-/j/ merger ( yeísmo ). This island is home to a Catalan-Spanish bilingual community, meaning that Spanish speakers are in close contact with a system (Balearic Catalan) which is supposed to largely retain the /ʎ/-/j/ contrast. Given this context, our focus is to acoustically verify whether there is an interference from Balearic Catalan to Spanish in the sense of inhibiting yeísmo or, at least, favouring phonetic realisations other than those found in mainland Spanish. Our study concludes that a transfer in terms of allophonic variation does exist: in Majorcan Spanish lenited sounds ([i̯], [j]) are more common than in mainland Spanish.

The aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand, to point out the various typographical devices used in writing to highlight Anglicisms due to their specific form or meaning. On the other, to examine the different factors contributing to the choice of a particular model which are of two kinds: linguistic, based on the nature of the borrowing and its degree of integration in the language; and stylistic and sociolinguistic, in relation to the attitude of the journalist or writer, which can vary depending on his/her experience, the type of text, its textual function and the semantic field of the Anglicism in question. There are times when variation is found within one single writer, and even within the same text.

This article deals with a relatively unusual word-formation process in modern Spanish whereby a new lexeme is created by shortening a phrase, clause or sentence, rather than simply clipping a single word-form. Although this process has been mentioned in passing by several authorities as merely another way of shortening words, the fact that it affects units larger than a single word has been overlooked thus far, hence this detailed consideration. Creating a new lexical item from a larger linguistic unit implies solidifying at least two of its elements into a single form, the final part of which may itself be a clipped word. The process becomes even more complex or playful when homonymy or paronymy is thrown into the mix. Drawing upon a wealth of examples from a range of sources, this study examines the motives for their use, their structure and the relationship between morphology and stress-placement patterns. The last section presents a collection of shortenings of this type which have been documented from various parts of the Spanish-speaking world.

The central object of the present research is the constituent order of head and modifier in auxiliary constructions, namely infinitive + finite auxiliary vs. finite auxiliary + infinitive and participle + finite auxiliary vs. finite auxiliary + participle. The texts under investigation are the llati medieval of Catalan diplomas of the 10th to 13th century, the Usatici Barchinonae of the 12th century and the Usatges de Barcelona of the 13th and 15th century. The issue is whether and to what extent the syntax of the documents edited in the llatí medieval and the Usatici Barchinonae shows features of the developing Catalan syntax, in which the order head + modifier , i.e. finite auxiliary + infinitive and finite auxiliary + participle, becomes the preferred argument structure.

Within the long-standing, and yet still lively debate over the origin of Romance poetry in general, and of regular rhyme in particular, one key element appears to have been often overlooked: music. Although it is very well known that Troubadour lyric poems were meant to be sung, their melodic form has so far indisputably been considered to be independent from the formal structure of the texts. However, a radical reconsideration of this common belief, based on a brand-new approach that takes orality into account, leads to the opposite conclusion that regular rhyme schemes, at their origins, were indeed closely related to the musical form of the songs. Linking rhymes to music may therefore represent a potentially decisive argument in the quest for the origin of Romance lyric poetry. For, even if rhymes and rhyme schemes may be found in many different and independent literary traditions, their structural relation to musical form is by far much rarer, hence offering a much more specific hint about the origin of Vernacular lyric forms, which are based on regular rhyme schemes. Tracing this metrical-musical technique back to its roots, may validate once and for all one of the two main theories competing around the origin of Vernacular lyric poetry, namely the Medieval Latin and the Andalusian Arabic theory.

This article aims to reconstruct the history of eravassimo (first-person plural of the imperfect indicative of essere ) and other Italian verbal forms ending in - vassimo . These rare verbal forms began to appear in grammars and dictionaries in the 17th century and in some literary and non-literary texts in the 18th century. Some examples of the verbal forms in - vassimo can still be found in texts produced in recent years on the Internet.