Volume 135, Issue 4

This paper retraces two waves of palatalization in the forming of Western Romance varieties. The postulated processes are framed within the context of the general evolution of the phonological system, in the belief, too often disregarded, that the only good reconstruction is a structural one. The results may bear fruit for typological reflection. The paper also provides new evidence of an ancient division between a northern ( Lugdunensis ) and a southern part ( Narbonensis ) of Western Romania, as proposed by Lausberg.

This corpus-based research uses a set of 895 private letters written by almost seven hundred different individuals to analyse the variation between the Spanish adverbs allí and allá in the sixteenth century. The figures found in this study are quite different from those of previous research. Whereas some researchers have highlighted the common prevalence of allí , our data reveal a greater prominence of the form allá in this period, which was found to be more frequent in every single context taken into account in the analysis. This study considers the differences in the textual framework as a probable cause of these important quantitative divergences. At the same time, the paper uses tools from historical sociolinguistics to examine the incidence of the variable context in the selection of the adverbial forms. Our results confirm the influence of some constraints previously highlighted in the literature, but contradict others. Moreover, even the former need to be reinterpreted in variationist terms, and never as an expression of differences in the linguistic system.

The process of grammaticalization of Italian tuttavia and Spanish todavia , from Latin tota via , is an interesting case study because both adverbs converge and diverge at different points along the history of Italian and Spanish. Both adverbs inherited the temporal values of late Latin tota via (‘always’) and developed adversative values when reanalysed as connectives in some contexts where contemporary events could be reinterpreted as opposing one to another, However, It. tuttavia went further down this path of grammaticalization and lost its temporal values, while Sp. todavía , due probably to the emergence of new adversative connectives in the 17th century such as sin embargo and no obstante , abandoned the adversative uses in the 18th century and consolidated the phasal temporal value developed since the 16th century. In present Italian, tuttavia is a discourse connective with an antioriented argumentative function and no continuative or phasal temporal value, while in present Spanish, todavía is a phasal temporal intrapredicative adverb. This study tries to highlight how the comparative approach adopted here enriches our knowledge on the history of Romance Languages and allows for a better understanding of non-linear grammaticalization processes.

This work offers an in-depth description of the main morphosyntactic features found in present Panamanian Spanish, a lesser known Central American variety. Text corpora and linguistic surveys help us to provide an updated grammatical overview, which takes into account most categories: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and locutions, 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― as well as some specific patterns ―such as the prominence of - azón and - azo suffixes― in present-day Panamanian Spanish, some of which forms remain to be incorporated in the Academy dictionary.

The term schena / schina ‘measure of length in use in the field of cloth trade’ mainly appears in Venetian sources. The meaning derives from the special terminology of cloth manufacturing, where schena / schina refer to the centre of the surface of the cloth and to its central vertical fold. So far the etymology has not yet been explicitly and convincingly explained. In consideration of the material history of cloth production, the respective terminology, the equivalents in other languages and the forms of the word ( schena , schina , schiena , ischiena ), however, there is no doubt that the Venetian group has the same origin as It. schiena ‘back’.

The paper provides a state of the art in research on prepositional adverbials in Romance that combine a preposition with an adjective, e.g., Sp. en breve ‘in short’ (= PA-pattern ). It therefore reviews the existing bibliography on Romance in general, Latin, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. The theoretical background is the hypothesis that the PA-pattern could have played a relevant role as a third way of forming adverbials in the diachrony of Romance, paralleling adverbial adjectives (e.g., breve used as an adverb: hablar breve ) and derived adverbs (e.g., brevemente ). The review confirms that the PA-pattern is marginal in (written) Latin but rises abruptly in early Romance, suggesting a “hidden” past in spoken Latin. This is corroborated by the fact that similar PA-patterns are used in all Romance languages. However, these insights have often to be deduced from marginal observations on the adverbials in use. As yet, research has not systematically studied the role of PA adverbials in the diachrony of Romance.