Volume 139, Issue 3

This article focuses on the use of the deliberative interior monologue in Ramon Muntaner’s Crònica and is based mainly on an analysis of Chapter 230 of the work. In this chapter, Muntaner employs this narrative technique in order to convey the thoughts of Bernat de Rocafort, one of the key characters in his account of the Catalan expedition to Byzantium (1303–1311). Other examples of similar monologues in the Crònica , attributed to characters such as King Charles of Anjou (Chapter 72) or Roger de Flor (Chapter 199), are also taken into account. In all these cases, the article provides an examination of the narrative context, the main rhetorical and literary characteristics of the monologue, and its role in the psychological characterization of the character. The analysis reveals a common compositional pattern in the fragments studied, as well as the fact that the deliberative monologue is chiefly employed by Muntaner to describe the plans or schemes of characters who are described as wise or astute in the narrative.

Alongside the evolutionary phenomena that arose in the transition from Latin to Romance, there were educated reactions that rescued the original voices to accommodate them, with minor adjustments, to the systems of the Romance languages, at the same time as the patrimonial words, evolved from the same etymons, managed to stay in the spoken register and from there passed to the linguistic system. Such processes gave rise to the development of doublets in the language, pairs of duplicates that, from a common etymological base, gave different results, such as the one formed by the correcto / correcho pair, whose history and geographical distribution (with the exclusive presence of the patrimonial result correcho in the provinces of León and Asturias) itself illustrates phonological processes that, on occasion, go beyond the territorial boundaries established by historical grammars. The derivative adjective escorrecho is related to these words, which enjoyed remarkable vitality in the 13th century and began to decline later until it fell into oblivion, since the Dictionary of Authorities (1929) already defines it as an outdated term whose appearance in lexicographical works does not exceed the margins of the first half of the 19th century. The processes that led to these evolutions will be explained in the present study with the support of databases on Spanish and the main tools of our lexicographical tradition.

The neuter interrogative pronouns el qué and lo qué alternate with qué ‘what’ in conversational Spanish in certain contexts and types of wh-questions (e.g., – No me lo puedo creer – ¿No te puedes creer qué / el qué / lo qué? ). This paper describes geographical, register and social variation in the use of el qué and lo qué and analyses the interpretive and distributional properties of these complex forms. Building on corpus data and speakers’ judgements, it is shown that the form el qué is common to all Spanish dialects and is used in all registers and at all social levels, whereas lo qué is only found in Spain, Argentina and Uruguay: in Spain and Argentina, this form belongs to lower class people with little education and speakers in rural areas; in Uruguay, it does not have a social bias and occurs in both formal and informal situations. It is also argued that el qué and lo qué are used to indicate that the target of the question is identifiable in the context of utterance, and it is thus claimed that el and lo in el qué and lo qué are overt definiteness markers.

The subject of this article is the expression of causative movement events in German and Spanish. It is hypothesized that, being respectively a satellite frame language and a verbal frame language, it is likely that both differ in the syntactic order with which the semantic material of the aforementioned events is expressed, a question already studied for this pair of languages in the intransitive movement events. It is especially interesting to analyse this possible interlingual difference in statements with types of verbs that cannot necessarily be expected to develop the triargumental scheme of these causative events (agent subject, affected object and dynamic locative complement) due to their basic argument structure. This contribution specifically studies the possible development of these triargumental structures by the so-called verbs of contact by impact . To do this, a one-way contrastive analysis is carried out, from German to Spanish, of a corpus of pairs of statements extracted from the PaGeS corpus. The results certify the existence of the phenomenon in both languages, but also point to important interlingual differences in their productivity.

The study of pseudo-English words arising as translations of Spanish lexemes and expressions has been largely overlooked, if not deliberately ignored, by scholars working in the field of Anglicisms. There are several reasons for this, but the most important is surely that the type of translation involved in the coinage of these words goes right against the grain of what is deemed conventional, common-or-garden calquing. A lexical or phrasal unit coined as a calque of a Spanish word or phrase may look English, but is actually Spanish. On occasion, a Spanish word or word element may also be jocularly interpreted as if it were English, thus lending itself to playful calquing into Spanish. Drawing on a corpus of over 2,000 citations from the microblogging site Twitter, this article provides a detailed analysis of the processes used to create Spanish-based false Anglicisms, usually for playful or humorous effect. The bottom line of this analysis is that these calqued formations are generally motivated by a desire to undermine the sophistication and prestige associated with the use of English loanwords in Spanish.

This paper focuses on the analysis of unpublished documents from volume number 0457 of the Archivio Storico della Comunità Ebrea of Pisa (Italy), the oldest atti civili mammotrect preserved (1660‒1691). In the first critical approach to this corpus, Ariza (2015) studied the letters and their possible phonetic implications, but his work considered the linguistic features of the Pisa book in overall terms. This contribution focuses on the study of the letters from the comparison of different documents, once their 16 authors have been identified. The study is structured in five sections corresponding to the most frequent phenomena, namely, vacillation of unstressed vowels, especially between e / i ; the loss of /h/ < Lat. f -, reflected in the lack of the letter h ; the merger of voiced bilabials as proof of the use of b for v ; and the confusion between /s/ and /θ/ [i.e. seseo ]; finally, the merger of /r/ and /ɲ/, two innovations in Judeo-Spanish (Penny 2000). The main goal is to explain to what extent the preserved texts reflect the phonetic variation of the Hebrew community of Pisa in the second half of the 17th century.

Sephardic texts show a wide variety of adverbial forms ending in - mente , where the etymological scheme of adjective (fem.-sing.) + - mente has been broadened with formations such as verdadmente (‘truly’) or cercamente (‘closely’), in which the suffix -mente is attached (respectively) to a nominal and an adverbial base to form new adverbs of mode/manner. Now, the form cualmente deserves a whole new chapter. Thus, as it has been shown so far (García Moreno 2004, 264‒265, and Hernández González 2012, 196‒197, and 2018), this form of original adverbial character – with a similar meaning to that of its parallel talmente – shows in Judeo-Spanish a process of grammaticalization that has led it to function as a conjunction to introduce completive subordinate clauses.Having said that, such conjunctive uses – mainly documented in Sephardic texts of the so-called «rabbinical prose» of the 18th and 19th centuries – are practically absent in more modern texts. However, as we have demonstrated in this contribution, the form cualmente appears again reanalyzed in journalistic texts from the 1930 s as a type of a relative adverb with a value equivalent to that of ʻaccording to whichʼ and agglutinating the values + relative and + manner of their respective formants cual and - mente .

Marital love is one of the major themes in medieval French literature. The paper aims to investigate this theme in Christine de Pizan’s heterogeneous collection of poems entitled Autres Balades . In particular, this contribution proposes a critical edition of two Ballads, namely No. 8 ( Dieux! On se plaint trop durement ) and No. 26 ( Doulce chose est que mariage ). The results of the study show the persistence of the theme in the female lyric tradition. Moreover, the resulting commentary reveals important influences of the Old French chansons de malmariée on Christine de Pizan’s Ballads.

This paper attempts to motivate the distribution of the string r(V) in the forms of contemporary Romanian conjugation, which attests it in other than the distribution we expect proceeding from desinential rV , its origin in Latin conjugation, e.g., ră in the plural of the contemporary preterit (i.e., the paradigm traditionally designated perfectul simplu originating in the Latin perfect ) and thus occurring in forms like contemporary văzură ‘they saw’ . Such forms should attest final r arising via apocope of u , in this instance in Late Latin videru(nt) yielding Romanian * veder , the unattested immediate origin of văzură via both phonetic and morphological innovation. The analytic focus of my treatment is exaptive change or exaptation , an innovation predicated on the assumption that phonemic substance made available by compromised paradigms or parts thereof (i.e., paradigms partly or wholly in the process of being eliminated reflecting the systemic loss of their grammatical content) may remain and be re-assigned to instantiate systemically relevant grammatical meaning not already instantiated. As part of my analysis, I will suggest clarifications of our present understanding of exaptive change which I believe to be justified by the Romanian data.

The article deals with four types of 16th/17th-century Romance boat-terms: (1) Port. lanchara ‘a kind of small rowing boatʼ, known in South-East Asia since the early 16th century, from Malay lanǧaran (< lanǧar ‘to pass, proceed swiftly, quicklyʼ); (2) Port. lancha , a shortened variant of lanchara , which originated in Portuguese (1553) and then also passed into Italian (1561), Spanish (1577) and French (1621); (3) Port./Sp. lantea ‘a small galleyʼ, used in the 16th century in Chinese contexts, of uncertain origin (maybe it is derived by metonymy from Malay lantei / lantai ‘floorʼ, lantai perahu ‘bottom of the shipʼ, or from Chinese ling-t'ing ‘a small boatʼ), and (4) It. lentino and Port. lan chuem ‘a small Chinese boat used by people of rank or used to transport people of rankʼ, which go back to Chinese ling-t'ing (with its variant lang t'eng ).