Volume 141, Issue 2

The complexity trade-off hypothesis suggests a balance between different linguistic features across human languages. This study investigates this hypothesis by quantitatively examining the evolution from Latin to Modern Romance languages. We focus on the trade-off between morphological richness and word order freedom, providing insights into their dynamic interrelations during linguistic evolution. Our analysis demonstrates that morphological richness and word order freedom are distributed along a continuum, with Latin exhibiting higher morphological complexity and freer word order and Modern Romance languages having lower morphological richness and more rigid word order. This evolution reflects the principles of efficiency in complex adaptive systems, showing a significant complexity trade-off where increases in one feature often result in decreases in the other. These findings indicate the adaptive nature of linguistic systems and offer valuable insights for diachronic typological research, enhancing our understanding of the complexity trade-off from a quantitative perspective.

Le dit de Menage is a short dialogic poem in Middle French which only survives in a single manuscript, namely Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français, 24432. It remains underexamined by scholarship on account of the lack of any satisfactory scholarly edition. This edition fills this lacuna, presenting the first full edition of the text since the nineteenth century, and the first to present the text as it is likely to have been performed: split into a series of dialogues between three characters. We examine the manuscript context of the poem, as well as its content, form, and themes, before presenting the full edition with accompanying glossary.

This work considers the question of borrowing in the field of syntax. The literature suggests that syntactic phenomena are the least susceptible to borrowing; syntactic borrowing occurs where the borrowed structure exists in the target language whose source language inflects certain modalities of realization; and where the target language is under sustained contact with the source language. These ideas are assessed by studying the verb in second position word order (V2) in Old French. A putative difference between V2 in Medieval Romance languages and that in Germanic languages lies in the resumptive constructions characterizing the latter. The resumption of a clause by a particle directly preceding the verb in second position is said to be absent from Romance languages ( pace Meklenborg’s work). Is this construction found in varieties of French in contact with V2 Germanic languages such as Old English? Our corpus study shows that the resumptive construction is not attested in French outside a late 13th-century dialogical text from the Anglo-Norman region. This study supports the idea that syntax is impervious to borrowing outside of inflections given to existing constructions under conditions of sustained contact, suggesting that syntactic evolution can only be endogenous.

This paper deals with the function of the construction ¡Qué A ni qué B! , as well as with its origin and development. This study is based on the examples extracted from the CDH and CORPES corpora. The construction ¡Qué A ni qué B! is used to show rejection of something previously uttered. The relevant cases are those where the construction does not have a function within a verbal phrase, since in those cases it would be analyzed as a rhetorical question with a negative implication. By contrast, it is argued that the ¡Qué A ni qué B! construction constitutes an expressive speech act of rejection – rather than a declarative one –, due to the exclamative nature of the construction, and it is consequently linked to emphasis and intensification. There are two causes that explain the origin and the development of this construction: constructions with the structure qué A ni qué B functioning as rhetorical questions with expletive negation, and the value of rejection triggered by the negative binomials ni X ni Y . It is precisely an increase of expressiveness which displays the evolution of the construction.

First of all, this article draws up the inventory of Gascon designations of the sink according to data from the Atlas linguistique de la Gascogne and attempts to briefly establish their etymology (which until now, to our knowledge, had not been done), but it is mainly interested in the terms used in Val d’Aran, where we have obtained a lot of oral information over the last two decades. It turns out that, for this corner of the upper Garonne basin, previous works have identified several names which seem to be inaccurate. In fact, there are only four Aranese nouns for the sink, two of which ( poladèr and puladèr ) represent the same lexical type and are not used – apparently – anywhere else. According to Joan Coromines, the first component of poladèr and puladèr would be podiu . If puladèr can be explained by poi , a normal form in Aranese, our hypothesis is that poladèr contains pog , with an affricate consonant that we find in Haute-Garonne and particularly in Ariège, and which is attested in toponymy.

In order to review the transgression rule proposed by Freixa (2010) regarding the possibility of new creations becoming established in a language, alphanumeric neological constructions from Spain and Argentina from the period 2015 to 2023 are analysed following a mixed methodology involving database and corpus analysis, contrasts with positions in the relevant literature and consultations with speakers and experts in morphology. The analysis of four types of alphanumeric compounds showed that alphanumeric compounds form a minuscule part of the neologisms computed in the period in question. While proving that alphanumeric compounds transgress neological rules, it is also documented that this position does not prevent their use beyond the level of occasionalism predictable for transgressive forms and that they even lead to the formation of new lexical patterns. It is concluded that the mechanism of analogy, the fact that many of the alphanumeric compounds are loans and that they have passed from technical registers into the common language through comercialisation influenced the lexicalisation of the neologisms in question.

Within the Romance languages scope, Leonese stands out because of the numerous variants presented by the tonic personal pronoun in the first person singular: eu , io , yo , yeo , yao , yeu , yau , you and even ho. We analyse them through the data provided by the main documentary collections up to the year 1300 and the electronic corpora CORDE and CORHEN, which provide the elements used in bordering areas.Once the data have been reviewed, we take into account the opinions expressed on the matter by different specialists and we try to present an explanatory hypothesis that contributes to give an overall vision of this pronoun variants distribution in this zone compared to those of bordering territories and with the results obtained in other Romance languages.

The aim of this paper is to describe the meanings of daw and its variants dao and dol in Zamboanga Chabacano, a Spanish-based creole language spoken in and around Zamboanga City. As a result of the contact between Spanish and Filipino languages, Chabacano retains a significant number of particles of Filipino origin, including daw , which is present in the Filipino languages that constitute the main substratum or adstratum of the varieties of Creole, and whose origin has not yet been clarified. However, it does not appear to be a simple transposition of the uses of homonymous particles from Filipino languages to Zamboangueño. Instead, the Zamboanga Chabacano particle has developed its own usage patterns, showing a greater influence from Visayan languages than from Tagalog. The study of the function of daw in the latter, together with the characterisation of the three main meanings of the Zamboanguean particle —evidential and epistemic, comparative modal and politeness with imperative verbs— will allow us to analyse the semantic evolution it has undergone in creole.

The article offers an edition of seven letters from the 1340s written by Venetian merchants trading in the eastern Mediterranean as part of a liga overseen by Fresco Quirini, a well-known figure in the study of Venetian economic history. The edition of each document is followed by a linguistic and content commentary.

This paper aims to discuss and classify the phenomenology of borrowings in Marco Polo’s Milione toscano in comparison to the Franco-Italian version.

This article aims to analyze the adverbial expression un po’ , which shows different syntactic uses in contemporary Italian (e.g. pseudo-partitive quantifier, degree adverb and pragmatic particle), from an interactional and illocutionary perspective. The analysis focuses on its use as a pragmatic particle and argues that its meaning can be described as a specific form of modification of the illocutionary force of the utterance. Based on a qualitative analysis of examples from oral corpora (C-ORAL-ROM and KIParla), it will be shown that at least four types of use of this particle can be identified, all of which are characterized by a common semantic feature that is also inherent in the other uses of un po’ : [INCOMPLETENESS]. The purpose of this paper is to show the pragmatic properties of this archiseme in interactional contexts. In addition, the formal and functional criteria for modal particles will be used to examine the potential of un po’ as a promising candidate for this word class in Italian.

In the wake of the Ottoman expansion during the early modern period, many Turkish loanwords made their way into European chronicles and travelogues. A special category of borrowings consists of compounds with the element ‑ başı , which is formed from baş ‘head, chief’ and the possessive suffix ‑ ı . Since the peculiarities of the Turkish language system were generally opaque to European authors, ‑ başı was often confused with the Ottoman honorific title başa ‘pashaʼ (as seen in Italian casnadarbascia ‘head of the treasurers’ for haznadar başı or chapicibassa ‘head of the palace doorkeepersʼ for kapıcı başı ). A particular issue arose with the Turkish term subaşı ‘bailiffʼ, ‘police superintendentʼ (< su / sü ‘army’, ‘soldier’ + ‑ başı ). In this case not only was ‑ başı misinterpreted, but also the initial element su , which was understood as Latin sub or French sous in the sense of ‘under’ or ‘subordinate’. This led to the emergence of new forms such as soubascha in French, subpascha or unterwascha in German, and sottobassa in Italian, with the meaning ‘subordinate pashaʼ, a concept that is foreign to Turkish.