Volume 137, Issue 3

There are two competing approaches to the change of lexical meaning: the individualizing approach, which focuses on the emergence of each particular meaning in a vocable, and the holistic one, which aims to account for the fluctuations, i.e. the expansion, stabilization and contraction of the range of its meanings. The individualizing approach remains dominant until today, although Arsène Darmesteter paved the way for the holistic approach as early as 1887. The purpose of this article is to extract part of the content of the TLF(i)’s historical records in order to build a diachronic semasiological database that can be converted into a series of trees symbolizing the fluctuations of the polysemy of an item century by century. The study is illustrated by exploring the evolutionary polysemy of the verb prévenir and the nouns terre and monde and results in highlighting the period of “coincidence” between the respective polysemies of these two nouns.

While it is true that the linguistic theory of Gustave Guillaume (1883–1960) is generally designated under the name of psychomechanics because it postulates that the thought in the language action operates through a constantly repeated and formally homogeneous set of movements, which gives it its psychically systematic character, it does not ignore the semiological dimension of language, which also aims at a certain systematization. Hence a place for a psychosemiology, which this contribution aims to define and illustrate from examples taken in the morphological history of French.

The main goal of this paper is to establish an ordered timeline of the phonetic shifts that oral Latin experienced since the split of Sardinian up to the disintegration of the western family; at the same time, some methodological problems about the graphic representation of the relations among languages are discussed. Consequently, we propose a division of the branches of the Romance family and outline the phonological systems that characterized each group.

The recent Dictionnaire des régionalismes du français médiéval de l’Est (DRFM) constitutes an analysis of 389 lexemes contained in the corpus Documents linguistiques galloromans (DocLing, including about 2,350 documentary texts). These words represent concepts linked mainly to administration, commerce, and agriculture in the Eastern part of the Galloromance area (Champagne, Lorraine, Bourgogne, and Franche-Comté). More than half of these words are also attested in over 500 non-documentary texts of religious, literary, and practical nature. Such texts are notoriously difficult to localize, however, the regional words they contain aid this process considerably. In the present article, we distinguish three types of lexical regionalisms: « formal », « semantic », and « integral ». In the first section, we clarify the theoretical and phenomenological aspects of this distinction. We discuss the various roles of lexical regionalisms in the localization of non-documentary texts and, more specifically, the relative usefulness of formal regionalisms in this process. In the following sections, we demonstrate two methodological uses of regionalisms in non-documentary texts: 1. the localization of medieval texts or manuscripts (we provide 24 examples) and 2. the clarification or the resolution of ecdotical problems during the preparation of critical editions.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the affix ‑ m(i)entre of modal adverbs in Medieval Spanish, e.g. fuertemientre . The hypothesis is that the non-etymological, epenthetic r may be analyzed from a phonological perspective only, without grammatical or lexical explanations. The paper first reviews the three traditional explanations for the non-etymological r in modal adverbs, especially the analogical one, which poses that the r of these adverbs is an analogy from the etymological r of the temporal adverb m(i)entre . The paper shows the weakness of these traditional analyses. The paper then presents an alternative analysis on phonological basis, which has greater parsimony than traditional explanations, adding typological evidence outside the grammatical field of modal adverbs, and showing that a non-etymological r appeared in many Spanish words, and in other Romance languages, in the same phonetic and syllabic contexts as the modal affix ‑ m(i)entre . Finally, the paper proposes three causes for the loss of modal ‑ m(i)entre : the weakening of intra-paradigmatic support from modal ‑ miente , a homonymic clash between modal ‑ m(i)entre and temporal m(i)entre , and the generalization of the learned form ‑ mente . The paper places the diachronic loss of the modal affix with r in a theoretical frame of multicausality.

With the -ra / -se -alternation of the subjuntivo imperfecto , the present study takes up a classic topic of Hispanic studies. The focus here, however, lies in the little-researched regional variation of this alternation in Spain, combined with an investigation of the sociolinguistic variables of gender, age and level of education, and their role in that alternation. For this purpose, we analyzed interview data from four cities (Madrid, Málaga, Santiago de Compostela, Valencia) taken from the Corpus del Proyecto para el estudio sociolingüístico del español de España y de América (PRESEEA). The results show significant differences between the locations with Madrid showing the highest use of -se -forms and a large variation between the interviewees, while in Santiago de Compostela the -ra -form predominates; intermediate values are attested for the rest. Regarding the sociolinguistic factors, a higher use of the generally rarer -se -form occurs among men, in the youngest age group and in the middle educational level. The study thus not only shows clear diatopic differences in the -ra / -se -alternation within Spain, but also provides indications of a trend towards a more frequent use of the -se -form among the younger generation.

The Oviedo Hospital was the main charity in charge of caring for foundlings in Asturias (Spain) between the 18 th and the 20 th century. Sometimes these children carried an identity card or document with them containing several pieces of information, such as their name or the confirmation of baptism. These were copied into the hospital register books (‘Foundling Records’). The identity cards are characterized by the repetition of a basic informative scheme and certain linguistic elements located in the area of ‘language of immediacy’. Taking this into account, the aim of this paper is to examine from the perspective of discourse analysis a corpus composed of 1.117 identity cards collected between 1752 and 1782 to determine if these documents are able to constitute by themselves a specific discursive tradition.

The paper deals with the particular linguistic variety spoken by some servants in Stefano De Franchi’s comedies (1714‒1785). After briefly hinting at some fundamental aspects of his production (§1), we examine the text of his comedies (§2) and analyze the servants’ language. This variety presents numerous traits which do not belong to Genoese (§3), some others which will spread in the urban variety only between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (§4) and many others which had been expelled from it between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries (§5). Finally (§6), the linguistic analysis of Gerusalemme Liberata ’s Genoese translation (1755) will allow us to order chronologically the linguistic relics of §5.

The contribution focuses on the historical development, the current situation and the future perspectives of Italian linguistics in German-speaking countries

The comparison of the lexical data gathered by the LEI and the medieval and contemporary anthroponymic data gathered by PatRom makes it possible to measure, on a concrete example (the delexical personal names formed on continuators of regional Proto-Romance */karne-lakˈsare/ ‘Shrove Tuesday’), the contributions, modest but not negligible, of anthroponymy to historical lexicology.