Volume 140, Issue 1

The radical social, political, and economic changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are clearly reflected in language use through the appearance of numerous neologisms, most of which can be considered borrowings from English. In this article, we take a contrastive linguistic approach and focus on the emergence of new lexemes in the press language of four Romance languages (European Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian and European French) with a special focus on language contact. Since no press corpora were available with specific data on the COVID-19 pandemic, we created our own corpora for the entire year 2020 using Python in order to compare how lexical innovation is dealt with in the four languages. Our results show that conceptual innovation, especially when it occurs abruptly, can lead to equivalent, often phonotactically adapted neologisms in the case of neighbouring languages. However, the integration of foreign words and the formation of neologisms also show language-specific peculiarities which are not only related to structural characteristics of the respective languages, but also to sociolinguistic and sociocultural factors. Our study elaborates on the relationship between these factors and shows the potential of contrastive and computational approaches for the study of lexical repercussions of language contact.

For centuries, France and the French-speaking areas of Belgium and Switzerland have been home to a large minority of Gypsies and Travellers, comprising about 300,000 individuals who all speak a form of French as their native language and form a close-knit sociolinguistic community. Their French sociolect, hitherto never described by linguists, differs from other varieties of French through a wide array of phenomena at all levels of language structure: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics and morphology. Diachronic and contrastive analysis shows that these features are either (1) non-standard, archaic or regional characteristics now lost in other varieties of European French, but kept by the Travellers as diastratic variants; (2) internal innovations within the diasystem of Traveller French; (3) outcomes of contact with heritage languages of some of these groups (Sinti Romani, Jenisch, and Alemannic and Gallo-Romance dialects). Using predominantly new fieldwork I provide here the first description of this important set of diastratic varieties of French, which represents an outstanding case of linguistic variation in a context of social separation yet with sustained contact.

The presence of francos settlers in Navarre and Aragon left abundant administrative and legislative documentation in the Occitan language. This presence of settlers of different origins, both lengua d’oc and lengua d’oïl, with also differentiated dialectal modalities, who carried out commercial activities, produced intense linguistic contact between the different dialectal modalities. The paper tries to determine the type of language reflected in the aforementioned administrative and legal documents, which use the graphic system of the scriptae of Navarre and Aragon, conveying the romance varieties. Although the term koine has been used to define this language, the concept of koineization more adequately defines the dynamic process of leveling and blending of dialects, whose formation of a stabilized koine may be one stage. Thus, within the scriptae of Navarre and Aragon in the Occitan language, different linguistic norms and stable as well as diffuse language varieties can be identified.

Alongside the standard irregular preterite of Sp. andar ( anduve ‘I walked’) there exist non-standard regular forms ( andé ‘I walked’). Scholars have assumed that the non-standard regular forms have resulted from analogy with the preterite of regular -ar verbs, agree that the irregular preterite of andar was formed by analogy with the etymological irregular preterite of estar , and have assumed that the earliest forms were the irregular ones. But if the preterite of andar was formed by analogy with that of estar , what were the etymological forms of the preterite of andar inherited from Latin? This question has not been raised hitherto because of “standard language bias”, a phenomenon recently introduced by Maiden (2022). It will be revealed here that non-standard forms in and- appear by the early thirteenth century. Their early appearance, together with comparative Romance evidence, points to the likelihood that they were not formed by later processes of analogy and regularization, but that they were, and are, direct descendants of one of a number of possible Latin etyma. Finally, it will be explained why forms in anduv- eclipsed the original forms in and- , eventually becoming the standard, as well as why they have persisted as such to date.

Middle markers (such as reflexives in Spanish) are used to encode both semantically connected situations and some semantic properties of the subject participants. Previous literature on the topic usually mentioned two of these properties: affectedness (Klaiman 1988 and 1991; Kemmer 1993; Maldonado 1999; Zúñiga/Kittilä 2019) and control (potential control, Klaiman 1991; non-canonical control, Kaufmann 2007). Middle marking in Spanish has been also related to both affected/patient subjects (García-Miguel 1985; Mendikoetxea 1999; Jiménez Juliá 2016) and agentive/intentional subjects (Martín Zorraquino 1979; Morimoto 2011; Di Tullio 2012). Nevertheless, there is not a comprehensive study on affectedness, control and middle marking in Spanish. This paper seeks to shade some light on the topic offering a detailed analysis of affectedness, control, and their correlations within a verbal sample from 13 semantic classes of the middle domain. In particular, we claim that middle marking changes the status of the subject entity, which can be [+affected], [+control], or [-control] depending on the semantics of the verb, the semantics of the sentence, the status of the entity in the active voice, and on our world knowledge. Lastly, we argue that the general function of middle marking is to encode non-canonical subjects on the control construct.

This work offers an in-depth description of the main morphosyntactic (and lexical) features found in present Costa Rican Spanish, a lesser-known Central American variety. Text corpora and sociolinguistic surveys help us to provide an updated grammatical overview, which takes into account most categories: nouns and adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and idioms, and is illustrated by examples taken both from formal and informal settings. By comparing these features with previous grammatical descriptions, this study helps in identifying some common American features – such as the use of hasta and una mi amiga – as well as some specific patterns – such as the prominence of several suffixes and parasynthetic verbs, as well as some adverbs – in present-day Costa Rican Spanish, some of which remain to be incorporated in the Academy grammar.

During the Middle Ages, a new verb class was formed within the Catalan 2nd conjugation, characterized by the presence of a velar augment (/g/ or /sk/) in the L-pattern (first-person present indicative and present subjunctive) and PYTA (preterite, old conditional and imperfect subjunctive). In this paper, we study three verbs that avoided, totally or partially, the analogical velarization undergone by most 2nd conjugation verbs: haver ‘to have’, ser ‘to be’, and voler ‘to want’. Based on a corpus of Catalan works ranging from the 13th to the 19th century, we test the extent to which the L- and PYTA-patterns of these three verbs are psychologically real for speakers. The results confirm what some authors have already observed for other languages, pointing out that the high frequency of these specific verbs or the need for phonological congruence could inhibit the morphomic pattern or even block analogical levelling.

The article aims to investigate two fragmentary manuscript witnesses to Bono Giamboni’s vernacular Italian translation of Paulus Orosius’ Historiae . Neither of these witnesses has been studied until now. The article provides an edition of the shorter fragment, preserved in MS Vatican Library Barb. Lat. 4119, and a full description of the second codex, MS British Library Add. 16554, a multi-text codex that contains a large anthology of Orosius’ Historiae . Among the works preserved in this latter manuscript, particularly noteworthy is the presence of an unknown vernacular Italian version of Sallust’s De coniuratione Catilinae . The article also provides some new insights into the early printed editions of the Italian vernacular translation of Orosius and the authorship of the printed text.

Les Anduits , the name of a territory comprising parts of three Haute-Saône villages (Lavigney, Malvillers, and Melin), is the sole example of its type in French toponymy. Examination of the area leads us to postulate an Old Franc-Comtois (or Regional Middle French) * enduit ‘dry well’, nominalisation of the past participle of Old and Middle French enduire ‘seep in the ground (of water)’. This formation is parallel to the suffixal derivative ˹ enduisoir ˺ ‘dry well’, which is formed from the present participle stem of the same verb and is abundantly attested in the northern part of Franche-Comté (lexicon and microtoponymy).

Contrary to what is assumed in German lexicography, Italian provianda ‘provisions, food supplyʼ is a borrowing from German and not vice versa. The numerous historical variants in German ( provante , provande , provandie , proviant , etc.) have their starting point in late Latin provenda < praebenda .