Volume 137, Issue 4

Normally, verbs showing allomorphy due to phonological changes become more regular over time through intraparadigmatic analogy. There are verbs, though, such as auxiliaries, modals or basic verbs of movement which stay irregular, obviously due to their extremely high token frequency. Especially studies with reference to Germanic languages show that irregularity often relates to a development leading to a clear(er) distinction of single forms within a paradigm. The article examines the applicability of the concept of relevance developped by Bybee (1985), the significance of token frequency and other factors discussed in studies anchored in the usage based approach with regard to the French and Italian verbs aller / andare , venir / venire and – for Old French – ester (cf. the suppletive paradigm of être ) and Italian stare , considering the development from Latin to modern French and Italian.

There are three extant editions of the Cambridge version of The Song of Roland . However, only the last one – that is, the van Emden edition – has a detailed examination of verses that pose subtle difficulties. Thus, although the manuscript’s text has been established, except for a few incorrect or uncertain readings, a more comprehensive examination of the text has just begun. This paper exhaustively contemplates the nuanced interpretations, unconvincing expansions of abbreviations, lexical and morphologic problems, and linguistic particularities of the copyist of this edition. It also considers modifications of the text, interpretation of problematic verses, and editorial methodology. The aspects listed above are not rigidly categorised because every case involves several points of view. The author of this paper has almost accomplished a fresh edition of the same manuscript, Édition électronique du Roland de Cambridge , which will soon be made available. The present paper offers supplementary information for the readers of this edition.

French is a heavily postdetermining iambic language. This also implies that, in contrast to German, the subject-predicate sequence is dominant even though this is not a relationship of determination in the strict sense of the term. Despite the predominant iambic intonation pattern, postposition of rhematic subjects is only possible under certain conditions in modern French. This contrasts with Italian or Spanish in cases like Domani viene Maria / Mañana llega María. A French equivalent Demain vient Marie instead of Marie vient demain or also Demain Marie vient is no longer common today for reasons to be discussed. The central question to be answered is “By which means does French resolve the conflict of linearisation arising from the tension between the dominant rising intonation pattern and the ‘phobia’ of subject inversion even when the subject is rhematic?” A comparative analysis of translations is a viable method for discovering how French marks rhematic subjects when simple postposition is not a possible strategy. This approach shows how constructions with the subject in postposition, for instance in Italian, are rendered in their French translation.

Catalan started to be used in writing in the 13th century like the other Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula and gradually replaced Latin. This was the case in all its territories, including the County of Ribagorza. However, this written Catalan does not faithfully reflect the oral language of that time because it is very uniform, as can be seen in the 14th century manuscripts of the old archive of Roda de Isábena (Huesca). That written language is far away from the oral speech and the dialectal solutions of the Catalan spoken in Ribagorza, although the oral linguistic reality can be perceived through some features that come up regularly, as occurs in texts from other places in the area known as “Franja de Aragón” (eastern territories of Aragon in the border with Catalonia, with a large Catalan-speaking population). Toponyms are some of those elements that connect us with the Catalan spoken in the 14th century in Ribagorza. For this reason, in this work we offer a study of the place names mentioned in the 14th century documentation written in Catalan and kept in the archive of Roda de Isábena: we analyse linguistically each of the place names noted, and we verify if they have been preserved or if they have undergone any transformation until the present day.

One of the main challenges of Romance etymology is the detection of borrowings from Latin into the Romance languages: a significant number of lexemes have been introduced by the educated classes and in Italoromance especially it is not always possible to distinguish these cases from those of “popular” transmission. Phonomorphological, semantic, diachronic, geo-linguistic, lexicological and other arguments can be implemented from time to time. They are applied here to the most recently published section of the Lessico Etimologico Italiano .