Volume 137, Issue 2

This article provides an overview of the Romance-Latin continuum, inherent to the Durham Account Rolls (DAR), and contextualises the learning and teaching of French and Latin in medieval England: an understanding of the socio-historical context and the underlying pedagogical framework enables us to better assess the data presented in this article. In line with a detriment to the learning of French in the late 14th century and a progressive loss of linguistic competence, the definite article in these multilingual texts started to develop an independent course from its French model which is herein discussed. The parameters for identifying lexis as coming only from French, Latin, or both are also revisited. The occurrences in the DAR usually encompass a whole spectrum of possible morphological manifestations ranging from Latin to French. This article concludes with some notes on the main semantic domains to which Anglo-French contributed in the DAR.

A new project has just been launched to write a synchronic, descriptive grammar of Niçois, the Occitan dialect of Nice. In this article, I define the corpus of the research. To do so, I first review written production from the Middle Ages to the present. I then analyze the linguistic features of Niçois over time, in order to determine the precise starting point of the current language state. But because of reinforced normativism and the decreasing social use of Niçois among the educated population, written language after WWII became artificial and does not really correspond to recordings made in the field. The corpus will thus be composed of writings from the 1820’s to WWII and recordings from the last few decades.

Exemplum XI of Don Juan Manuel’s Libro del Conde Lucanor (“De lo que contesçió a un deán de Sanctiago con don Yllán, el grand maestro de Toledo”, ca. 1331‒1335) relates the encounter of Don Yllán de Toledo, a learnèd necromancer, and the ambitious Dean of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Exemplum XI is one of the best known and most celebrated stories in the book for its seemingly preternatural turn in the plot’s action and the characters’ visit to the Other World. The article seeks to identify Don Yllán with Archbishop Julian of Toledo (642‒690), author of the Prognosticon futuri saeculi (687), an important theological tract that circulated widely during the Middle Ages and that served as the basis for the doctrine of Purgatory. The Prognosticon contains illustrative anecdotes of dialogs with the dead and journeys to and from the Other World. As such, it endowed Julian with the legendary reputation of necromancer and probably served as inspiration for Don Juan Manuel’s Exemplum XI of El Conde Lucanor .

In this paper, three cases of grammatical variation in Spanish are studied in which a subjunctive verb alternates with another verbal mood in a main clause: optative main sentences with a bare subjunctive verb (alternating with optative main sentences introduced by a conjunction or an adverb); declarative and interrogative sentences with a subjunctive verb (alternating with a conditional verb); and «retrospective imperative» sentences (where the subjunctive mood alternates with a perfect infinitive). It is proposed that, in the varieties where these main clauses with a subjunctive verb are possible, the subjunctive mood has a performative value and satisfies the illocutionary properties in Force associated with sentential modality. The performative value of subjunctive is associated with an irrealis modal base, which is provided by the lexical meaning of a modal verb or by the past perfect temporal anchoring of tense. The proposal shows that the same conditions constraint the three constructions under study and explains the coincidence between the varieties that allow the performative subjunctive (or use it more frequently).

In this article, the dialectal complexity of Cantabrian Spanish is shown through the traces left by the different stages of the yeísmo variation and change process, for which —for the first time— a systematic analysis is proposed. These linguistic varieties, which are part of the dialectal continuum that stretches across northern Spain, have a clear Leonese base, which has been altered by the incorporation of Castilian features, both dialectal and standard. The evolution of yeísmo in the region is a clear example of this trend.

Manuel Alvar published the only linguistic work known on Spanish from the island of La Graciosa (Canary Islands) in 1965, focused on the town of Caleta del Sebo, to document, in the field of Linguistic geography, the ALEICan ( Linguistic and ethnographic atlas of the Canary Islands [1975–1978]). Alvar’s studies used to cover the lexical, grammatical (morphology and syntax) and phonetic levels of the segmental type, but he did not consider prosodic aspects of speech which would later be incorporated into a new generation of atlases, which would go from paper format to multimedia. As the main exponent, the AMPER project ( Atlas Multimédia Prosodique de l’Espace Roman ) was created in 2001 and, within its framework, we intend to describe the melodic characteristics of a group of sentences emitted by a man and a woman from Caleta del Sebo, completing thus the study started by Alvar fifty-five years ago. In this way, the results will show for the first time if there is a prosodic proximity between the eighth island and the seven main islands, which have been widely described in previous works both in formal and in informal speech.

The article analyses the loss of agreement between the dative clitic and its plural nominal referent in indirect object clitic-doubling in Spanish spoken in Galicia. On the basis of the previously defended hypothesis that number disagreement makes part of a grammaticalisation process whereby the clitic becomes a case affix, the paper examines some internal factors which lack consensus in previous studies, such as the relation between (in)transitivity and position of the clitic or animacity of nominal referents of the IO, and other external factors. Data analysis reveals that the percentage of disagreement in this area is much higher than in other Spanish speaking areas. This fact might be a consequence of language contact with Galician, a language where number inflection in the dative clitic is neutralised. To verify this hypothesis, the paper explores the relation between the number of occurrences of disagreement and the level of bilingualism of the speakers.

Phraseography, understood as the discipline that deals with phraseological units in general or specialized dictionaries of one or more languages, is still an area to be discovered, especially in bilingual contexts. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to propose an electronic lexicographical work of phraseology in Spanish‑Catalan, given that currently there is no such dictionary for the two mentioned languages. Based on the previous studies on phraseology and electronic phraseology, we reflect on the characteristics that these works should contain, and we examined the dictionaries already published in this format in the Hispanic context. Taking into account the above, the study that follows will focus on the proposal of a dictionary that combines the most significant novelties in both current lexicography and computational linguistics, in order to create a work that collects efficiently, novel and dynamic, the information corresponding to the phraseological units of the two languages concerned here. In short, the contribution of this article aims to fill a gap in the field of lexicography, in general, and bilingual phraseography, in particular.

It. fa ‘ago’ represents a rare case of grammaticalization of a finite verbal form and a typical example of what we call ‘preadaptive change’. Its present categorical status, however, is an object of dispute between the different approaches of historical and theoretical linguistics: on the one hand fa is considered an adverbial, on the other hand a postposition, becoming a sort of test of the explanatory power of both the approaches. After a reconsideration of the data throughout the history of Italian and a scrutiny of the literature, we come to the conclusion that in the case of a grammaticalization process both the structural features and the inherited properties are necessary to assign the categorial status and in the case in question converge towards the adverbial function.

Both proper names and common nouns, when used as terms of address in Romanesco, can be preceded by the particle a ( a Nando! ‘Hey, Fernando!’) and undergo truncation of the poststress material ( (a) dottó’! ‘Hey, doc!’). The article presents a panchronic study of this construction in Romanesco, showing how and when truncation and the vocative particle a first arose and providing a synchronic analysis of the conditions under which they occur today. Vocative truncation is widespread in Central-Southern Italo-Romance, where it obeys conditions that vary subtly across time and space and that the article will touch upon based on the studies available to date. These conditions will be described in detail for Romanesco, showing that they are hierarchically organized and involve all levels of linguistic analysis: the list includes (a) a part-of-speech condition, (b) a condition referring to the syntactic constituent, (c) a semantic/pragmatic condition, (d) one of prosodic minimality, and finally (e) one of lexical semantics, relative to the animacy/definiteness hierarchy. Also the occurrence of the a particle is subject to conditions which are syntactic-textual, pragmatic and phonological in nature and which identify preferences rather than clear-cut (un)grammaticality, contrary to those that constrain truncation.

It. palandaria ‘cargo shipʼ is formed on the basis of Gr. πλάτη ‘id.ʼ, according to the common pattern of ship names in - aria ( griparia , sagittaria ).