Volume 138, Issue 3

The lexeme travail(lier) , well-known in Medieval French, pertains in limited use to the notion of travel, in the specific sense of ʻ(to) travelʼ. Our work shows that this precise meaning could be identified as a regionalism that first appeared in Anglo-Norman during the second half of the 12 th century, quickly spreading on the continent to the other regional areas of the Oïl territory. Adopted in Middle English by the end of the 13 th century, it survives in Modern English as travel and its derivatives. The present paper recounts the journey of this semantic regionalism during the past centuries, establishes a syntactic-semantic synthesis of its different uses and formulates a hypothesis on the modalities of its origin.

This study proposes that Gonzalo de Berceo’s “El prior y el sacristán”, the twelfth miracle in the collection known as Milagros de Nuestra Señora , is a rejection of heretical beliefs based on interpretations of Aristotelian thought, which flourished throughout Europe in the thirtheenth century. These ideas, for example, questioned the immortality of the soul as proposed by rationalists thinkers who were heavily influenced by Aristotelian philosophy in an interpretation following Averroes’s commentaries, which started being translated into Latin in the first half of the thirtheenth century. Aristotelian ideas, particularly those derived from the libri naturales , were condemned as early as 1210 and 1215, when the Iberian origin of some of their protagonists were explicitly addressed by Parisian ecclesiastical authorities. Berceo’s response, based on Augustinian ideas on the soul’s life after death, is an indication of the Iberian participation in a broader discourse against Aristotelianism. Thus, “El prior y el sacristán” situates Berceo’s work in the larger European context of the thirtheenth century. Finally, Berceo’s main point of departure for his response is found in eschatology, which he elaborates following Julian of Toledo’s Prognosticon futuri saeculi ( c . 688).

The Spanish construction lo que pasa es que ‘what happens is that’, ‘the thing is’ is used in a wide variety of contexts and with a range of different meanings. Linguistic research that has been carried out on this relatively common construction often fails to include empirically collected data and, as a result, the diasystematic markers thereof have only been described to a very limited extent. The main focus of this article is to investigate the use of the construction lo que pasa es que and its phonetically reduced forms lo que pasa que and lo que in two Spanish-language oral speech corpora collected in Getxo (Basque Country) and Barcelona (Catalonia). These data are used to carry out a quantitative and qualitative study of the presence or absence of this construction in both regions of language contact, something which has yet to be considered or systematically analysed in the relevant research. The study identifies a statistically relevant diatopic markedness of the forms lo que pasa es que , lo que pasa and pasa que while also providing empirical proof for the pragmatic use of these constructions within the varieties investigated. Furthermore, it confirms the use of additional reduced forms of said constructions and describes their development.

This paper deals with a set of idiomatic expressions in Spanish which typically display a non-referential feminine clitic la / las as a constituent (e.g. pasar la bien ‘to have a good time’). In opposition to the conventional mainstream theories, which account for the non-referential status of this clitic by the ellipsis of a previously existing feminine NP (e.g. cosa , ocasión ), I will argue that this lexicalized feminine clitic la / las can be diachronically related to the Latin neuter plural demonstrative illa denoting abstract discourse referents, and thus its apparent non-referentiality should be viewed as a kind of global anaphor. On the basis of Ojeda (1993)’s Mereological Taxonomy of Kinds and the typological evidence reported by Espinal (2009), I will suggest that in these constructions the feminine clitic la / las expresses the so-called «conceptional neuterality» and is semantically equivalent to the neuter lo (e.g. pasar lo / la bien ). Lastly, following Loporcaro’s work on the evolution of the Latin neuter in Romance languages (2018), I will defend that the Latin neuter plural demonstratives ( ea , haec , ista , illa ) survived into early Hispano-Romance and were preserved in lexicalized constructions due to high token frequency, as also evidenced by additional cross-linguistic data from other Romance languages.

This paper addresses the grammaticalization of Spanish en definitiva as a discourse marker. The objectives are threefold: to enquire about previous changes and discourse traditions that took place, to outline the path to the new values that were acquired, and to ascertain whether the French construction en définitive had an influence on the Spanish one during the grammaticalization process. To do so, we examined the cases found in Frantext for French, while for the Spanish data, we used Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española and Corpus diacrónico del español . Additionally, Gallica and Hemeroteca Digital were used to fill the gaps in the documentation for the 18 th and 19 th centuries. The results show that en definitiva might have undergone a vernacular evolution fixing as a ritual formula that gave rise to a modal construction and later assimilated new discourse uses as loan translations from the French construction en définitive . This finding leads to deeper consideration of the evolution of Modern French discourse markers and 19 th century Spanish press.

The article examines the use of estar in Portuguese expressions of permanent location, which runs counter to normative grammar, according to which ser and ficar should appear in those cases. This use of estar is not mentioned in grammatical descriptions, either. Yet, it occurs in contemporary Portuguese (both Portugal and Brazil). The same goes for the Portuguese- and Spanish-lexified creoles, some of which use tá / stá ( < estar ) , to express location. However, almost all rely on a single verb in these contexts. The research question was studied empirically in a corpus (N=1,037) based on Google searches with seven exact phrases including estar , ser , and ficar , subsequently complemented with an analysis of two other Portuguese corpora. The results show that estar appears in expressions of permanent location, both in Portugal (22,5%) and Brazil (17,5%). However, there is a statistically significant difference, ficar being more frequent in Brazil and ser in Portugal. Moreover, the higher frequency of estar in Portugal may indirectly explain the popularity of ficar in Brazil. In addition, estar appears in written nonfiction, pointing to expressions of the type estar localizado / situado as its possible origin, also taking into account that no instances of its use were found in older documents.

Critics have interpreted Don Denis’ cantiga Proençaes soen mui bem trobar as a diatribe directed against Occitan troubadours who associated in their poems springtime exordium and song for love. Although some have considered the particular piece of the Portuguese king an aesthetic recreation of the cansós that rejected the début printanier cliché, in this contribution a different reading is proposed. Given that in the entire corpus of the cantigas de amor there is only one text by the Galician clergyman Airas Nunez ( Que muito m’eu pago d’este verão ) that unites spring, euphoric love, and lyrical activity, this article argues that Don Denis’ poem emerged as a polemic and ironic response to the eccentric verses of his colleague. From the proposed perspective, the king’s cantiga is contextually situated and understood as part of a series of texts that integrate the king and the clergyman’s metaliterary debate on the conception of love.

The first edition of Os Lusíadas , by Luís de Camões, has long attracted the attention of scholars, and its surviving copies are mysterious objects. Over the years, different hypotheses have been proposed and a range of methodologies employed, in attempts to explain their mysteries. This study is based on the analysis of twenty-five copies, applying techniques from the field of material bibliography. Using mechanical collation, it argues that two different editions were printed, bearing the same date. It proposes a classification system and terminology, which affects the editions, the copies and the sheets which constitute each copy. This study seeks to make an initial contribution to the ongoing debate on the number of editions dated 1572; further observations, which could make the ultimate answer more nuanced, will be published in future.

The letters of the Venetian merchant Andrea Berengo, written in the mid-16th century, are not only a precious testimony of Venetian commercial history, but also a particularly rich source for linguistic and lexicographic studies on Renaissance Venetian. The present paper examines selected oriental elements of Arabic, Turkish and Persian origin from the point of view of historical lexicography. The special linguistic interest of Berengo's letters is confirmed by the fact that most of the terms studied are early or even first attestations in Italian.