Volume 136, Issue 1

Studies of individual languages rarely discuss in any depth the question of how, or to what extent, the positioning of word stress in polysyllabic words is motivated functionally although addressing this issue would mean relating the structural levels of phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics systematically to each other. Given that in French practically all (Latin) syllables following the syllable which carries the main stress have been muted, words and word forms are oxytones, generally carrying stress on the last syllable. As a result, endings and suffixes which constitute the morphological head of a word and are, as such, normally unstressed, now also carry stress. This can be seen in faisait or nageur , which in English would correspond to was *doíng or * swimmér or in German to * machté or *Schwimmér respectively. Since stress is normally positioned on the lexical stem, which carries more information, a morphoprosodic mismatch leading to a countericonic stress pattern obtains in French. Interestingly, this phenomenon has hardly attracted serious attention in linguistics so far, and speakers of French have apparently remained undisturbed by the mismatch . The same is true of the counter-intuitive stress placed on enclitic pronouns in prends-lé! – táke it – nímm ( e ) s! or vient-íl? – is he cóming? – kómmt er? Apparently, language as an instrument also works when the encoding is suboptimal or dysfunctional. The reason for this must be that language is also supported by the (lexical) content of the signs, which nevertheless makes an appropriate interpretation possible.

The article represents an attempt to reconsider the exceptional linguistic status of the manuscript Esp. 44 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, containing the Old Catalan translation of Jacopo da Varazze’s Legenda aurea . First studied by Joan Coromines, its language appeared remarkably conservative and vernacular to the great philologist, however now, more than a half-century after his judgment, the comparison with other products of what has been defined the earliest Catalan scripta leads to relativize linguistic traits of the Parisian manuscript. In particular, it is shown that the manuscript 713 in the library of the University of Barcelona is also distinguished by its linguistic features, and yet it is studied here for the first time.

The main objective of this research is to characterize the form and the semantics of the transitive arguments lexical subject and direct object in transitive constructions throughout the history of the Spanish language. Firstly, this paper presents the analysis of the internal structural complexity of the subject and the direct object. Secondly, it shows the evolution of the features ± human and ± concrete of both arguments. The hypothesis is that Spanish has experienced a weakening of the typical lexical-semantic features of transitive arguments in parallel to an increase of their internal structural complexity. The quantitative evidence is supported by z statistic proof.

The spoken Spanish in Leon and Palencia, in the northwestern part of the Iberian Peninsula, bears traces of the historical development at various different linguistic levels. The main aim of this study is to describe the prosody of open questions in the speech of each of the two cities and compare these prosodic patterns with those of other points in the Peninsula and islands (the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands), and those of the Asturian accent of Oviedo. The research falls within the general framework of the projects undertaken for the AMPER (Contini 1992) and the methodology employed in so called dialectometry (Goebl 1981) based on the tool ProDis (Elvira - García/Balocco/Roseano/Fernández Planas 2018; Fernández Planas 2016 a, 2016 b; Fernández Planas/Roseano/Elvira-García/Balocco 2017a). The work is being carried out with data from 20 informants from 12 survey points, with a large corpus of more than 4000 open questions. The results show that the two above-mentioned survey points have different intonation melodies. We would like to see this work as a contribution to the study of diachronic prosody using instrumentation.

Yeísmo has been accounted for as a merger process occurring in Spanish irrespective of language contact effects though some scholars have claimed that the interference between Spanish and the variety of Catalan spoken in Majorca (Balearic Islands, Spain) has an inhibiting effect on yeísmo . This paper focusses on whether this inhibiting effect can be demonstrated at the perception level and whether it has an effect in the linguistic behaviour of bilinguals. To examine these effects, we conducted an identification experiment with three groups of listeners (Majorcan Catalan-dominant bilinguals, Spanish-dominant bilinguals and a control group of Spanish monolinguals). Results show that Catalan dominants do recognise [ʎ] stimuli, but Spanish dominants only identify [ʎ] at chance level. Consequently, it would seem that bilingual subjects display a bimodal performance at the perception level.

The textual transmission of the Crónica de Iria (a historical text written in Galicia in the 15th century) has been controversial in recent years. Its latest editor, José Souto, holds that the original text is the oldest manuscript (C), written in the 15th century by Rui Vázquez. On the other hand, David Mackenzie considered that this manuscript (C) and the seventeenth-century copy (V) come from the lost archetype with different degrees of manipulation. The historical data provided by Fernando López Alsina analysing the reasons for the composition of the Crónica de Iria supports Mackenzie’s analysis. The present article examines the indirect tradition and carries out a careful collation of the texts, aiming to draw more effective conclusions as regards the existing filiation.

Brissos (2014) and Brissos/Rodrigues (2016) draw on the data of the Acoustic Atlas of Portuguese Stressed Vowels (AVOC) to describe the stressed vowel systems of, respectively, central-southern and northwestern Portuguese dialects. This paper presents the AVOC data for northeastern Portugal, thus completing the picture for the country’s northern dialects. The vowel systems of the three areas are compared and systematized, and a synthetic depiction of the Portuguese cardinal dialectal areas (north vs. south) is put together. The importance of acoustic data for providing new, more accurate characterizations of Portuguese dialects is also evidenced.

The 17th century poem called Historia della guerra del Monferrato is generally deemed to be written in a Piedmontese dialect (specifically, in a variety from Monferrat) and for this reason it is included in Piedmontese anthologies and treated as a Piedmontese text by scholars. This paper aims to show, by a comparative linguistic analysis, that this text it is not actually written in Piedmontese, adding evidence to some neglected suggestions by Carlo Salvioni in this regard. In fact, he believed that the Historia was a text from Bergamo, but even this claim is inaccurate, because the main linguistic features of this text can show that its place of origin is probably an area between eastern Lombardy, Emilia and Venetia, perhaps in the surroundings of Mantua.

The Italian preterite ( passato remoto , PR) is the only verb tense that has two series of equivalent endings for a single group of verbs ending in - ere . In the PR’s actual use, one notes, however, a strong preference for choosing one of the two inflexional paradigms of a given verb, which remains unattested in Italian grammatical studies. With this article, then, I intend to examine 1) what the actual usage is of the regular inflected forms of the PR in the largest corpora of written Italian; 2) how the regular second conjugation of the PR is presented in the most important Italian dictionaries. I believe that the results of this examination provide an important contribution regarding the formation of grammatical rules pertaining to the PR, but they also contribute to the debate on grammatical norms and on the actual usage of the Italian language.

The word cocuyo ‘luminous insect originating from central America’ appears in Italian texts of the last few centuries in a variety of forms. In the article, we analyse the historic events that allowed the creation and spread of the ghost-word acudia (from the original word cocuyo ) and how this is present in various Italian dictionaries.

Judging from the cultural and linguistic facts, an etymological relation between Italian utel / utello ‘oil jar’ (which is first recorded in the Decameron ) and Arabic al-uṯāl ‘sublimation vessel’, as assumed by Alessio, must be rejected. The European reflexes of the Arabic term are marginal and strictly limited to the technical terminology of medieval alchemy. Italian utello shows significant semantic and morphological differences with respect to Arabic al-uṯāl . In addition, its presence in Tuscan dialects and its early metaphorical uses are clear indications of the popular roots of the term. Consequently, the utel of the Decameron is not to be considered a learned technicism of foreign origin, but a popular term that Boccaccio probably took from Tuscan colloquial speech. Etymologically it belongs to the family of Latin uter ‘leather bag for holding liquids’. For utello , an unattested * utellus is to be postulated, which corresponds to the well-known Latin derivational pattern of ager > agellus , niger > nigellus , culter > cultellus , etc.