Volume 138, Issue 2

This study examines the history of reflexes of Latin fieri ‘become’ in Romance, focusing particularly on Romanian, where this verb provides the subjunctive and some other forms of the verb ‘be’. Contrary to general assumptions, I offer comparative-historical evidence from other Daco-Romance varieties and from other branches of Romance that, in the earliest Daco-Romance, fieri had a different paradigmatic distribution from that of modern Romanian, and that most (conceivably all) forms of the subjunctive of this verb are in origin present indicative forms, which probably still conserved into early Daco-Romance the meaning ‘to become’. I argue that these findings demonstrate how our understanding of the mechanisms of language change is liable to be distorted by a “standard language bias” whereby, in the process of linguistic reconstruction, structures most familiar to us from the standard languages are tacitly or explicitly assumed to be ‘basic’ and ‘normal’. In illustration of this claim I will also sketch some other examples from Romance languages of the undesirable effects of such bias, showing how it can lead to misunderstandings of the history of the standard languages themselves, as well as of the history of their cognate varieties.

The aim of this study is to document the scriptae of the ancient Velay, a historical region belonging to the Northern Occitan linguistic space (Auvergne), which are not represented in the scriptological syntheses on Gallo-Romance. The critical updating of the inventory of texts produced in Velay, initiated by Pierre Nauton for his thesis published posthumously in 1974, allows us today to present the characteristic scriptological features of the written language of this area. Starting from the notion of contrastivity efficient in scriptology, we have in particular proceeded to the systematic comparison of lexemes and grammatical words of the Velay corpus with the lemmas of the DOM ( Dictionnaire de l’occitan médiéval ), which offers a minimal contrastive basis. From this, it is possible to highlight at least fifty-eight graphic, phonological and morphological features which are the clearest markers of the language of these texts. The results of this study are intended to place Velay in the linguistic historiography of the Gallo-Romance area in a historical perspective. The inventory of texts also provides evidence for a sociolinguistic history of the written varieties in North Occitan up to ca. 1600.

Despite Church prohibitions, almost twenty medieval Bibles in Spanish survive. The Old Testament versions derived in many cases from translations from Hebrew made by Jews. These were characterized by a unique rabbinical “calque-language” that would be preserved by Sephardim for centuries after the Expulsion in 1492; but the Inquisition destroyed the medieval Jewish copies. This article studies a new witness, the oldest known: a thirteenth-century Hebrew commentary on the Hagiographa with Spanish glosses. These fully confirm the amazing continuity of the Ladino scriptolect.

The «emphatic» possession has been traditionally related to American Spanish, specially, surfacing in language-contact situations. Taking this for granted, the present paper explores the sociolinguistic and dialectal distribution of this possessive construction in European Spanish and attempts to characterize it both semantically and syntactically. This paper analyzes over 20,000 tokens of possessive pronouns. Data are extracted from two corpus representative of the spoken varieties of urban and rural European Spanish. The analysis confirms the colloquial-familiar character of this syntactic construction and supports that the so-called «redundant» possessive acts as an index of type-shifting from a sortal to a relational noun.

This research aims to analyze a hypothetical higher profitability of ‑ miento in the interior Romania, compared to the preference for the derivative ‑ ción in the exterior Romania. Therefore, the analysis is based on a thousand words ending on ‑ ción and ‑ miento that appear in the Diccionario del castellano del siglo XV en la Corona de Aragón (DICCA-XV), since its texts represent specific linguistic features that are between the western and eastern variety – referring to the Iberian Romance group –​ and, at the same time, between interior and exterior Romance languages. The research’s goal is multifactorial and takes into account historical-etymological, morphological, semantic, syntactic questions and the textual typologies in which the different elements usually appear and aims to investigate both the operation of words without morphological doublet and those units that do compete with some morphological variant.

This article addresses the most important syntactic issues related to the imitative constructions of Latin Accusativus cum Infinitivo in Renaissance Spanish. I opt to subsume this label coming from Latin syntax under the more encompassing denomination of Latinising Infinitive , which refers to the use of infinitive constructions directly or indirectly inspired by syntactic schemes typical of classical, medieval or Renaissance Latin literature. Finally, some cases of Latinising Infinitive in a corpus of doctrinal prose written by 16th-century Erasmist authors are considered. The analysis aims to account for the difficulties of delimitation of the Latinising Infinitive in translated and non-translated texts, as well as to show that, in the consideration of syntactic Latinism, it is only possible to operate on a gradual conception that explains the existence of Latinisms with a more or less marked variational status within the domain of communicative distance.

The numerous studies on the perfect compound form in Spanish lack a detailed analysis of the subjunctive and future forms ( haya cantado and habré cantado ), which under certain syntactic and pragmatic conditions are parallel to the indicative one, he cantado . Based on our knowledge of the Spanish indicative present perfect and its use in different Spanish-speaking areas, this paper deals with the distribution and functions of these two “modalised perfects” and their relationship with the corresponding simple forms ( cantara and cantaría ). The aim is to determine the extent to which these two pairs of forms are functionally and diatopically similar (or not) to the pair he cantado – canté . Our findings help us to better understand the functions of all simple and compound perfect forms in Spanish and their development in eight Spanish-speaking cities in Spain and the Americas.

This contribution attempts to show that a small number of toponyms in Jura continues Latin derivatives in -ĀNU (most often inflected in the plural) based on nomina gentilicia in - ius . The use of this technique of formation has never been reported in this department. The author suggests that this characteristic Latin model of naming fundi spread in the southern part of the city of Sequanes from the Rhodanian Narbonensis, under the influence of Vienne. Its use denotes foundations and eponymous families who played a pioneering role in the process of romanization.

From the point of view of the historical sciences, inventories of movable property constitute a particularly interesting type of text since they include more detailed information of the material realities of past epochs. The lexical study of 14th-century Venetian inventories carried out in the present paper provides relevant new evidence for Italian historical lexicography.