Band 137, Heft 1

The 13th-century manuscript Paris, BnF, français 1448 (= D) contains a linking text between Enfances Vivien and Chevalerie Vivien . It can be divided into two nuclei, the first narrating the adventures of a young Rainouart and the second developing the dubbing of Vivien: in both cases, events of the biographies of two popular heroes only hinted at in other major poems, which a compiler decided to narrate extensively to fill the gap in the cycle of chansons on the geste Monglane . This paper, alongside the first critical edition of that text, offers a broad introduction on the literary and cultural features of these two stories (which can be classified as exemplars of the enfances sub-genre of medieval French epic).

Among the distinctive features of Occitan varieties spoken in the vicinity of Toulouse is the existence of preterite desinences with a thematic labial (e.g. cantèbi [kanˈtɛβi] ‘sing. prt.1sg ’), or without a thematic consonant at all (e.g. cantèi [kanˈtɛ.i] ‘sing. prt.1sg ’). Such forms contrast with those ordinarily attested in Occitan, where preterite desinences are typically characterised by a thematic rhotic (e.g. cantèri [kanˈtɛɾi] ‘sing. prt.1sg ’), while thematic labials are associated solely with first-conjugation imperfect desinences (e.g. cantavi [kanˈtaβi] ‘sing. ipf.ind.1sg ’). This study draws on data from textual sources and linguistic atlases in order to elucidate the development of the Toulousain labial preterites, which are shown to emerge during the course of the eighteenth century, replacing earlier forms in which preterite desinences systematically presented a thematic velar (e.g. cantègui [kanˈtɛɣi] ‘sing. prt.1sg ’). Since both intervocalic /b/ and /ɡ/ are subject to deletion in Toulousain varieties, it is argued that the development of the labial preterites is not due to direct analogy from the imperfect indicative, but rather to a perception-based change in which speakers miscategorised tokens of /ɡ/ tending to zero as tokens of /b/, and thereby introduced thematic labials into preterite forms. Forms lacking a thematic consonant result directly from deletion of /ɡ/.

A Pan-Romance analysis of Sp. buscar ~ provides sufficient data to reconstruct a Proto-Romance etymon */ˈbʊsk-a-/ ~ */ˈbusk-a-/ (assigned to Italo-Occidental continental Proto-Romance), whose meaning can be reconstructed as ‘to go into the forest’ (with various purposes). Although the meaning ‘to look for’ seems to be restricted to Ibero-Romance buscar , the other Romance reflexes show strong links with this semantic area. A considerable number of Gallo-Romance and Italo-Romance verbs carry the meanings ‘to hide’ as well as the opposite, ‘to chase (someone) from their refuge’, ‘un-cover’, and therefore, ‘dis-cover’. It is also possible to recover traces of a specialized use related to hunting outsides the boundaries of Ibero-Romance.

The first lexicographic work compiled by the Royal Spanish Academy, known as Diccionario de autoridades (1726–1739), includes a wide range of lexical resources used at the time to perform speech acts of threatening. In the dictionary’s microstructure these mostly phraseological items are characterized both semantically and pragmatically. The dictionary also offers relevant data and reflections on aspects such as the function and procedures of intensification, the role of the interlocutors in the speech act, the limitation of some expressions to certain social groups, or the factors that influence the success or failure of the perlocutive act. The analysis of the dictionary articles that contain relevant information in this regard reveals the extent to which the founders of the Academy anticipated a good number of ideas that would not be systematized until the emergence, centuries later, of modern Pragmatics.

This work offers an in-depth description of the main morphosyntactic (and lexical) features found in present Honduran Spanish, a lesser-known Central American variety. Text corpora and sociolinguistic surveys help us to provide an updated grammatical overview, which takes into account most categories: nouns and adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and locutions, and illustrates with examples taken both from 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 con todo y and the pluralization of impersonal haber ― as well as some specific patterns ―such as the prominence of - ada and - eco suffixes, algotro pronoun and expletive lo ― in present-day Honduran Spanish, some of which remain to be incorporated in the Academy grammar.

The Crónica Geral de Espanha de 1344 is one of the most important historical works of the Iberian Middle Ages, but it presents also a complex and lacunar manuscript tradition. This work presents two new manuscripts of this chronicle, tracing its history and establishing its place in the manuscript tradition. The text of the Crónica de 1344 copied in these two manuscripts, although fragmentary, is of great importance, since it covers the final part of the chronicle, precisely the least well known. The analysis of its text and the comparison with the other manuscripts of the chronicle and its sources reveals that these new testimonies contain a copy of the original version, of which, until now, no copies were known.

This paper deals with the possessive constructions in Italo-Romance dialects compared with the possessive constructions of one Francoprovençal (Gallo-Romance) variety spoken in Faeto (Foggia, Apulia). Francoprovençal possessive constructions are at a first glance distinct from Central and Southern Italian possessive constructions, mainly since in Francoprovençal (as in French) possessive forms (clitics) are prenominal. In Central and Southern Italian dialects, we find instead a split possession: 1) postnominal enclitic possessives (weak possessive markers) associated with parental kinship nouns distinct from 2) prenominal possessives associated with common nouns and postnominal strong possessive forms. Crucially, I claim that enclitic possessives are inflexional affixes, that receive a structural word-internal linearization from the same external (syntactical) linearization identified for proclitic possessive markers (in Faeto). I retain that the distinction between postnominal weak enclitics in Italian dialects and Francoprovençal weak prenominal possessive constructions is based on the inalienability (parental kin nouns + enclitics in DP). All possessive clitics (proclitics and enclitics) show a common syntactic configuration and differ only in Distributed Morphology, according to a “late” feature insertion and operations after syntax. Indeed, the possessive determiners represent three different morphological spells out of the same syntactic object: the bundle of features [Person], [(Gender) Number], [Definite], generated in functional heads.

My article focuses on the Franco-Italian poem Attila Flagellum Dei , composed by Nicolò da Càsola, an Italian notary, in the second half of the XIV century for the Estensi in Ferrara, in order to celebrate the heroic origins of the family: actually, it is the first encomiastic poem dedicated to them, before the major works by Boiardo and Ariosto. The poem is witnessed by a single manuscript (divided into two tomes), supposedly in the hand of the author himself. My study provides a new biographic profile of Nicolò and his family, also through an overview of some archival documents from the Archivio di Stato in Bologna. The article also presents a brief summary of the narration, and outlines the principal characters, the positive ones ( Forest and Gilius in particular) as well as the negative ones (Attila), seen as prototypes alluding to other fictional or historical figures ( Forest = Hector of Troy; Attila = the entire Visconti’s family). At last, my paper offers a sample (the proem) of the critical and commented edition I am working at. The text is preceded by an analysis that illustrates its peculiar linguistic features, with a particular regard on the rhymes: indeed, far from being representative of the generic class of Franco-italian works composed by Italo-Romance authors, the poem Attila Flagellum Dei shows a combination of hypercharacterized French and Italo-Romance dialects of Northern Italy.

The types It. uscieri / Fr. huissier and Venet. schierazo are both derived from Ar. ‛ušɛ̄rī ‘cargo shipʼ. The term arrived in medieval times with the Crusaders in France and in the wake of the Arab conquests in Sicily and was adopted by the Genoese and Venetians in the course of their commercial activities. The second phase of its European history took place in the late 15th and 16th centuries, when the derivative schierazo appeared in Venetian contexts.