Volume 140, Issue 4

The main objective of this work is to contribute to the study of grammatical reception and linguistic attitudes by examining some marginal sources of the Spanish language in Colonial America and during the first years of independence. The temporal delimitation that underlies this geographical space is another variable for determining the traces that grammatical thought has left in its historical development, since it seems that its transmission was justified or modified by certain socio-cultural and political conditions that have little to do with the successes or failures manifested in a specific grammatical theory. In other words, an approach to the allusions to grammatical treatises manifested in the different spaces of public opinion of a specific time and place, as well as to the set of linguistic attitudes that determine the concern for the methods leading to the teaching of languages, both dead and living, as well as languages in contact, would entail the study of a set of socio-cultural and ideological variables that will undoubtedly help to clarify why and how the transmission and reception of grammatical theories and linguistic attitudes was channeled in the period and geographical space under study.

This article examines the spread of mainly lexical andalusianisms in the 19th century and their perception in the press. On the basis of various journalistic texts, the ideas and linguistic attitudes towards these provincialisms and their place in the general language will be analysed with the usual reference to academic work and its criteria. The conclusions underline the importance of these textual sources for the study of the history of linguistic dialectalisms in relation to the creation of a national linguistic standard and show the emergence of a centralist ideology and its multiple contradictions.

The importance of the press in the 19th century has been analysed from a variety of perspectives and is of great interest for a better understanding of the diachrony of Spanish, as it relates to a relatively recent period that has been neglected until a few years ago. But it also provides interesting data on the attitudes of speakers towards the most varied issues of linguistic change or, even, on the evolution of the discipline. For this reason, the aim of this paper is to approach the nineteenth-century press in the region of Murcia and to find out what attitudes it had towards language, whether the progress of the discipline was reflected in its pages or how it was perceived in terms of the uses attributed to the geolectal variety. In this way, it will be possible to check whether the smallest and least geographically widespread newspaper showed interest in the current linguistic uses and, consequently, whether any kind of debate was established in this respect. The main interest is to relate the results to one of the most unknown peripheries of Spanish.

This article focuses on the process of institutionalising academic school grammar in mid-19th century classrooms in relation to the social, political and educational context of the time. The central aim of this research is to analyse the economic, doctrinal or pedagogical reasons given by various authors in the contemporary press for rejecting the imposition of the Moyano Law of 1857, which mandated the teaching of grammar through academic texts. The different textual expressions in a medium such as the press will serve to gain a more precise understanding of the struggle and challenges faced by the academic institution and the government in achieving the widespread adoption of their teaching doctrine through their works Compendium and Epitome . The chronological framework of this analysis comprises two periods: the first begins in 1857, with the first publication of these two manuals, and ends in 1868, which coincides with the beginning of a second period during the six-year democratic period and the establishment of educational freedom, and ends in 1875, when the compulsory use of the Real Academia Española grammatical texts in schools was reinstated.

Dictionaries are lexical corpora that reflect the socio-cultural reality and power relations at the time of their publication. They provide information on how to use words and at the same time contain statements about individuals, ethnic groups or social classes who are supposed to use them. These kinds of judgments are known in sociolinguistics as linguistic attitudes, and dictionaries are a legitimate source for studying them, capable of providing new data and innovative methodological approaches. This paper studies linguistic attitudes in the Diccionario de Autoridades (1726–1739), which has not yet been analysed by our discipline. We will focus on negative attitudes represented by terms identified as “low social class”, “plebeian”, or “vulgar”. We will be interested in whether they refer to idiomatic registers, social classes or regional varieties of Spanish, and we will pay attention to the texts that refer to them. In the case of definitions without textual documentation, we will focus on patterns that may have influenced the lexicographers’ decisions and whether they may have been politically or ideologically motivated. As mentioned above, this work is a pioneering sociolinguistic study in the field of the Real Academia Española lexicography.

From the point of view of a language purist, the presence of indigenous terms in Latin American Spanish is a very important dilemma, since they can be seen as a problem for the unity of the Spanish language, but at the same time they are also part of the national identity of the Central American people. In this sense, the aim of this paper is to describe the difficult and paradoxical attitude that Antonio Batres Jáuregui shows towards these words in his Vicios del lenguaje y provincialismos de Guatemala (Guatemala City, 1892). Thus, we will proceed to analyse the value judgments that he exposes in his dictionary, in order to detect the ideologems that define his linguistic thoughts. The results show that Batres Jáuregui’s thinking about indigenous terms is highly complex and ambiguous, so that he does not appear to be the linguistic purist that he has been portrayed in the academic literature.

Within the field of Hispanic lexicography, there is still a significant —and largely unnoticed— gap in the historiographical study of a specific type of dictionary. We are referring to the so-called “orthographic dictionaries”, which flourished in the nineteenth century, but gradually disappeared (or transformed) during the twentieth century and have survived to the present day as a remnant that has been incorporated into doubt dictionaries. Telling their story may require an analysis that has not (at least partially) been carried out in historiographical works. In addition, we have carried out an in-depth study of a previously unstudied dictionary that has not yet been included in lexicography, the Diccionario ortográfico. Parónimos y vocablos semejantes compilados y ordenados . This work was published in Montevideo in 1906 by a Uruguayan justice of the peace, Serafín Ledesma. The importance of rescuing this work from oblivion lies in the potential impact it could have had, as we could have just discovered one of the most ambitious and comprehensive dictionaries in its category.

This paper provides an overview of the lexical changes that have occurred since 1970 in the paradigm of lexemes referring to measurement in Québec French spoken in informal and semi-formal contexts. The study is based on an exhaustive inventory of lexical units, specific to the British Imperial System or English System (ES ; e.g., pouce ‘inch’, livre ‘pound’) and the Metric or International System (IS ; e.g., mètre ‘metre’, kilo(gramme ) ‘kilogram’), present in 7 oral corpora, of which the recordings were made between 1970 and 2020. In addition, a survey was carried out in spring 2023 with 12 speakers to determine their use of ES or IS in various everyday situations. It is generally thought that older speakers are partly responsible for the remarkable preservation of a small group of imperial units in Québec French. The data collected in the corpora and in the survey show that this perception is at odds with reality. The paper points out that there are referential contexts in which speakers, regardless of their age, are naturally inclined to use imperial units, and other contexts in which they are led to opt for metric units.

Linguistic atlases’ data are an essential source for the diachronic study of languages. The digitization of these materials and their online publication (as traditional geolinguistic maps and diverse databases) are a valuable complement to textual, oral and lexicographic corpora. In fact, they all permit the development of research on language evolution. In this sense, the Corpus of Linguistic Atlases (CORPAT) is designed to complement other linguistic tools for the study of linguistic variation and to offer data of Oral European Spanish, which has been collected throughout the 20th century. CORPAT includes information from nine regional linguistic atlases (ALEA, ALEICan, ALEANR, ALECant, ALCyL, ALeCMan, ADiM, ALBi, CaLiEx). The present paper aims to demonstrate some of the potential contributions of this corpus to the historical study of Spanish from two different perspectives: sound change (more specifically, the case of yeísmo) and lexical semantic change (in particular, the study of designations of the concept ‘to be pregnant’). The use of CORPAT allows to illustrate their evolution in the geographic space, and the results show that the study of these dialectal linguistic materials can help to contextualize variation phenomena and to describe and explain language change processes more accurately.

Germ. Kartaune ‘a siege gunʼ is based neither on Italian cortana nor on Italian or Medieval Latin quartana , as has been unanimously assumed up to now in German historical lexicography. In actual fact, it is a borrowing from the synonymous French courtal , pl. courtaux . The earliest German evidence appears – in the context of the Burgundian Wars – in the form kortauwen and cortauw in 1475 and in the form curtal and curtan in 1476. The variant with the final - n , which is limited to southern Germany, constitutes the basis for the later German standard form Kartaune . In the late 15th century, the term also passed from French into Italian, where the types cortaldi < French courteaux and cortale < French courtel can be distinguished.