Volume 136, Issue 4

Abstract  This paper examines the semantics of French éthique (as opposed to moral[e] ) on the basis of its etymology, its history, its combinatorial properties and a semantic analysis based on the semantic-logical notion of validity (linked to the notion of conditions of validity).

Giovanni Codagnello, a notary from Piacenza (c.1154–c.1234), wrote in his Liber rerum gestarum (1219–1222) a very personal re-elaboration of the defeat at Roncevaux, which he entitled Gesta Carli Francorum regis . Codagnello’s account is one of the oldest witnesses to the circulation in Italy of the legend of Roncevaux, but it has so far escaped the notice of scholars who have studied the Roland tradition in Italy. This article examines which version of the legend Codagnello knew. According to the author, he was familiar with a rhymed redaction of the Chanson de Roland . If this is the case, then it means that an exemplar of the Roland rimé was already circulating in northern Italy at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

Abstract  Van Emden executed numerous corrections in his edition of the Cambridge version of The Song of Roland (2005). However, these amendments are often insufficiently justified and cannot stand up to a rigorous and detailed examination from the standpoint of historical linguistics. In most cases, van Emden modified the text of the manuscript in order to « restore » metrically correct verses that, to his mind, should have been included according to the model followed by the Cambridge copyist. Van Emden accomplished his stated task by simultaneously rejecting and retaining modernized forms or words. Sometimes, he substituted an archaic form or word for a modernized term, even when the former had fallen into disuse long before the time the Cambridge manuscript was redacted. This paper does not merely list such contradictory or unsuccessful amendments. Instead, it shows that a common methodological problem is present in all the problematic corrections: van Emden was not entirely aware of the stage of textual evolution that he aimed to reinstate. By contrast, the author of the present paper began elaborating the methodology for his new edition of the Cambridge manuscript with precisely this question.

Renaissance songs are full of sexual content, which, however, generally appears in an encoded manner. Based on a corpus of 278 texts from an anthology representing a broad range of French Renaissance songs, the article analyses the excerpts that show clear traces of sexual content from both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective. In a qualitative analysis, the study presents the images that describe male and female body parts, the coitus, and orgasm. It categorizes them according to the underlying techniques of codification, such as metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, metalinguistic reference, and projection, and further subdivides the metaphors into the semantic fields they originate in, such as flora and fauna, physical activity (playing, dancing, planting, fighting), objects (spear, instrument, and others) or fainting and death. Using a quantitative approach, the article shows the distribution of these images, techniques, and sexual content. The metaphor is the most frequently used technique, in terms of tokens, followed by metonymy and synecdoche. The coitus appears, again in terms of tokens, as the dominant encoded content, followed by the orgasm, and male and female body parts. The article hence delivers a corpus-based presentation and evaluation of common euphemisms used for the coding of sexuality, thus allowing a deeper understanding of French Renaissance songs as well as a systematic grasp of the early use of sexual euphemisms in French.

Abstract  This article analyses the correction work carried out by Charles Nodier, one of the most important French lexicographers of the 19th century, as editor of the Dictionnaire universel de la langue française (1834) by P. C-V. Boiste, also known as the Pan-Lexique . Based on a selection of entries from Nodier’s Examen critique des dictionnaires de la langue française (1828), where he critically commented on the different editions of Boiste’s dictionary (1800, 1803, 1812 and 1823), we study whether Nodier followed his own recommendations and corrected these entries in his work as editor of the Pan-Lexique (1834).

In recent years, within the cognitive linguistics approach there has been a trend of scholarly research committed to exploring the motivation for language change. The way in which people use language in communication, together with principles of human categorization, are the locus where language change and innovations are to be found. Interactional contexts in particular, seen as playing a crucial role in bringing about syntactic change (Traugott 2010b), have figured prominently in recent contributions on diachronic micro-changes, bringing to the fore the role played by dialogue as both the manifestation of the participants’ own voices and the realization of the constant negotiation that characterizes human communication. Against this background, this contribution focuses on a particular use of the Occitan post-verbal negator pas in negative rhetorical questions, which was very productive in fifteenth-century collections of religious theatrical texts. It is claimed that these dialogic contexts allowed a polyphonic use of pas , crucially restricted to this post-verbal negator, which is key to identifying the reasons behind the eventual establishment of pas as the generalized sentential negator in the modern language.

Simple metathesis can be found in numerous Ibero-Romance arabisms compared with their Andalusi Arabic etyma. The analysis of a corpus of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan arabisms illustrates its effects on syllable structure and syllable weight. It can be shown that Arabic-Romance simple metathesis constitutes a motivated structural change that provides for typologically unmarked syllable weight relations within the word. After the resyllabification it entails the involved unstressed syllables no longer excede the stressed syllable in weight. However, it is not an obligatory, systematic process, but merely an optional tendency, which corresponds to the universal tendency expressed by the Weight Law.

This paper aims to investigate the specific mechanisms that contribute to formalizing the rhetorical interpretation of interrogative sentences throughout the history of Spanish. To this end, data from a corpus of biblical translations from the 13th to the 20th centuries are analyzed. As Biblical Hebrew and Latin use explicit elements to signal direct polar questions, it is relatively easy to locate a large number of passages with interrogative sentences, and then, examine the distribution of the translation equivalents used in the Spanish versions. The interrogative particles of Hebrew and Latin thus articulate a grammaticalized procedural meaning for which Spanish does not have an equivalent explicit marker. The systematic examination of the strategies that Spanish translators use to adapt these structures to their vernacular is therefore a way of accessing the intuitions of speakers from different periods in the history of Spanish in regard to the formulation of the rhetorical interrogative.

This paper traces the developments of the noun bocado as it participates in two polarity-sensitive constructions in the history of Portuguese: the minimizer bocado ‘[not even] a bit’, a negative polarity item in Old Portuguese, and the degree adverbial um bocado ‘a bit’, which emerges in the 1700 s and is a positive polarity item. I adopt Israel’s (2011) grammar of polarity based on two lexical features, a quantitative value (q-value) and an informative value (i-value), in order to analyze the properties of these constructions as they reveal the interaction between lexical meaning and the logic of scalar reasoning. By applying this model in diachrony, I show how the logic of pragmatic scales underlies the patterns observed: a low q-value (lexical meaning) constrains the possible contexts of use of the expression in terms of the informativity of the propositions conveyed. Diachronic studies can thus shed light on the types of meaning associated with scalar terms as well as on types of scalar items.

Abstract  Thanks to Burgundy’s toponymy we are able to postulate the existence of about ten complex lexical units (unattested in the dictionaries) formed on poirier and denoting different types of pear tree.

It. ostare ‘obstruct, hinder’ is considered a borrowing from Lat. obstare . However, some Old Italian occurrences bear the meaning ‘take off, remove’, which is far from the Latin sense. After an introductory section (§1), in which methodological problems are discussed, the article analyses the occurrences of o(b)stare derived from the OVI databases (§2), containing Old Italian texts. A final section focusses on the origin of the verb and its meanings (§3).