There have been at least two major debates on Catalan: the first, concerning its status as a language in its own right, was resolved in the affirmative by Meyer-Lubke; the second, on the subagrupacion romanica del catalan between Ibero-Romania and Gallo-Romania, was settled by Badia i Margarit by means of the formula lengua puente. Our article takes a critical look at this second debate. It begins by criticising the absence of syntax from the original discussions. Furthermore, the bridge metaphor is rejected as misleading: 1. All Romance languages are 'bridges'. 2. The beginning and end of the bridge remain unclear. 3. The metaphor presents a dynamic millennial process as a state. In the Middle Ages, Catalan and Occitan formed a dialect continuum represented by two scriptae; however, they drifted apart under the massive influence of their respective national languages ('advergence'). The bridge metaphor obscures the dynamic nature of the problem: two languages developed from the medieval Catalan-Occitan variational space, and modern Catalan therefore now has a largely fossilised Gallo-Romance core and a productive Iberian Romance periphery.
Two almost identical Occitan oaths of fealty were sworn consecutively one around 1100 and the other at the beginning of the 12th century to two abbots of Saint-Geraud d'Aurillac, both by the same Viscount of Carlat. This article offers a commentary on the oaths, focusing on grapho-phonetic, lexical and syntactic aspects, as well as on phraseology and pragmatics. The analysis reveals several cases where the spelling has been modernised and dates after 1200, necessitating editorial amendments. It further highlights the stereotypical character of the style of the two oaths and exposes the particular influences of the monastic environment in which they were produced. Notwithstanding their formulaic veneer, the analysis allows conclusions to be drawn regarding the contemporary nature of the linguistic substance of these two short texts, which may be justifiably considered as being among the earliest witnesses of the Aurillac variety of Languedocian Occitan.
The Italo-Romance construction tutti e + cardinal numeral is of uncertain origin and appears to lack direct equivalents in other Romance languages. After reviewing the various explanations previously proposed for the expression, this paper highlights several parallels with other Romance constructions exhibiting a similar structure. Building on an insight of Louis Emil Menger's, it then reconstructs the complex analogical process that likely led to the emergence of this formation and related constructs.
The distinction of three target genders in central-southern Italian dialects is a matter of debate between those who advocate an analysis in terms of grammatical gender particularly for the contrast between the N(euter) - hosting only mass nouns and the M(asculine), and those who prefer to consider the nouns traditionally labelled as neuter as a subclass of masculine defined semantically as [ count]. In this debate, one argument supporting the first (morphosyntactic) analysis over the second (semantic) has been the establishment of a N not equal M contrast on the indefinite article in some dialects of the area: Agnonese [n(sic) 'm(sic)il(sic)] 'a honey' not equal [nu 'miur(sic)] 'a wall'. Loporcaro (2018, 159) charts what was known about the topic up to that point, listing eight Italo-Romance points, half of which present a fully functional N not equal M contrast on the indefinite article as in the case of Agnonese exemplified above while in the other half there are lexically fixed residues, an indication that the opposition existed in the past. Since then, the empirical picture has become richer thanks to a series of newly-acquired data that this article reviews. We propose a classification of the different types of N not equal M contrast (functional or residual; dependent or not on phonological and/or lexical factors; concomitant or not with an N not equal M contrast on other agreement targets, etc.) and reiterate its centrality in the debate on the status of the neuter in central-southern Italian, given that co-occurrence with the indefinite article is generally incompatible with non-countability, which is irreconcilable with a purely semantic analysis of the class of nouns in question but perfectly in line with an analysis in terms of gender class.
The article presents the overall results of the project Repertoire critique des manuscrits litteraires en ancien occitan('Commented inventory of literary manuscripts in Old Occitan'). It focuses in particular on the electronic system (the database Documents et analyses linguistiques de la Galloromania medievale) within which the collection and processing of the data took place, as well as on the structure of the electronic file used to catalogue the manuscripts and on methodological issues relating to the development of the catalogue index. It concludes with an inventory of the 150 manuscripts that have been added to the approximately 360 catalogued by Clovis Brunel in 1935.
The present article is dedicated to a detailed description of Catalan desiderative nouns derived from verbs with the suffix -era, such as badallera ("desire to yawn, yawning fit"), and to the clarification of their origin. Regarding synchrony, it is shown that the available descriptions do not account for the complexity of the suffix's characteristics today, nor for the uses of the derived forms. In the diachronic section we defend the hypothesis that the starting point was constituted by collective nouns in -era that were reanalyzed as deverbal, following the model of badallera ("series of yawns (badalls)") > ("action of yawning (badallar) repeatedly"). This evolutionary stage is still found in Occitan and especially in Gascon, as well as in Aragonese, Spanish and the Valencian variety, but only marginally in other Catalan varieties, while in Central Catalan the suffix has been reinterpreted as desiderative, a meaning pragmatically implied by nouns that denote physiological impulses, such as yawning. Use of the new desiderative meaning remains limited in Central Catalan but it has seen notable productivity in the Balearic varieties.
This article deals with the geolinguistic metaphor of the Croissant, coined in 1913 by Jules Ronjat (1864-1925), who used it to refer to a relatively small zone of transition between the linguistic domains of Oc and Oil, located mainly in the departments of Haute -Vienne. Creuse and Allier. Ronjat assigned eight survey points to his Croissant, taken from the ALF grid already in existence at the time. This transitional area between Oc and ail undergoes further study here using the methods of Salzburg dialectometry and the data from an extensive dialectometrisation of the ALF carried out between 1997 and 2000. A consistent transitional zone emerges, made up of 42 ALF survey points, the circumference of which metaphorically evokes a dolphin leaping from cast to west.
This paper maps and studies the different names for lizards, geckos and salamanders in Ibero-Romance languages based on the answers contained in the Linguistic Atlas of the Therica Peninsula (ALPI) and in later regional atlases. The cents peninsular knows derivatives of *LACARTU, -A, while in Portugal these were replaced by an innovation based on the term SARDA "dermal spot", which refers to the mottled skin of lizards. In the eastern peninsula (Navarre, Aragon and Catalan-speaking areas), *LACARTO was crossed with the Arabic term harden "lizard" and *LACARTA with SA LAMANDRA, *SA LACARTA, to give rise to the Catalan and Aragonese names for lizards. The dialectal names reveal the existence of similar crosses in other peninsular areas. The proposed new etymology is based on a detailed analysis of the multitude of phonetic and morphological variants of these three lemmas.
Over the last two decades, a significant quantity of texts written between the mid -eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century has become available thanks to the systematic publication and study of the first collections of homilies in Friulian. Not only does this enable us to transcend the fragmentary and sporadic nature of previous investigations, but it also allows us to deepen our knowledge on the basis of more appropriate methods, taking into account a wider range of perspectives. In this contribution, the discursive and linguistic norms of the homilies are interpreted through the analytical method of the Diskurstradition. Its application to texts which are not literary in the strict sense of the word allows us to observe how Friulian, through the practice of preaching, was subjected to an expansion process typical of communicative distance. Furthermore, this contributed significantly to the first phase of the standardization process, selection, and laid a solid foundation for the codification phase.
In this article, a number of sound changes shared by the languages of the Iberian Peninsula and originating from an earlier stage of Western Romance are chronologically ordered. Taking into account the importance of shared innovations as a criterion for analysing the historical trajectory of languages, it is observed that most of these changes are also displayed by Catalan and Gascon.
The present article aims to improve the onomastic tables in Clovis Brunel's Plus Anciennes Chartes en langue provencale, primarily by offering new suggestions for the identification and/or localisation of over two hundred toponyms, some of which are based on new readings or interpretations. We hope these gleanings will be helpful for all those who use the work as well as for anyone who might venture to subject the tables to a thorough update or even a complete revision.
In this article, we analyze fifteen linguistic features (mostly lexical) extracted from a collection of Quebecois folktales published in 2002 by Richard Levesque, an author coming from a region called Bas-du-Fleuve in Canada. Some of these features, no longer in use in France but still prevalent in Quebec (and sometimes elsewhere), are referred to as 'retained traits' (<< maintiens >>) while others, definitively extinct in spontaneous Quebec French, represent 'archaisms', based on our typology. Contrasting these two sets of features and their differences reveals that one set anchors the tales in a specific setting, while the other associates them with a more or less distant past.
In some Romance languages, the suffix -one has, among others, the function of deriving action nouns which convey the additional notion of suddenness, such as Pg. empurrao, Sp. empujon, It. ruzzolone. In the literature on Spanish, this pattern has been considered the result of analogical extensions of the leader word empujon, attested since the Middle Ages. The leader word itself, in turn, is said to stem from the encounter of the supposed descendants of lat. IMPULSIONEM empujon) and *IMPULSIARE empujar). In the present article, I argue that this explanation, which is already dubious from an etymological perspective, cannot account for the existence of parallel patterns in the Italoromania, where the supposed IMPULSIONEM/*IMPULSIARE constellation is missing. As an alternative, I propose to regard these action nouns as the outcome of a reanalysis of augmentatives in -one based on postverbal nouns: to return to the above example, empujon was originally an augmentative of empuje, reanalysed in a second step as a direct derivative of empujar. This explanation has the advantage of being equally applicable to the Italoromance data, and, at the same time, of explaining why French, Occitan and Catalan do not have action nouns of this type: contrary to the other Iberoromance languages and to Italian, the Latin suffix -o, -ONIS did not develop an augmentative, but a diminutive meaning in these three languages.
The present article examines the nature of the linguistic variety used in vernacular texts written in Romandy towards the middle of the 14th century. To this aim, an empirical analysis of two documents was conducted, one written in Fribourg, dated 1363, the other in Porrentruy, dated 1343. Previous research has found both these documents to be based primarily on an Oil variety, claiming that the text from Fribourg was written in a Francoprovencal-speaking environment, and the text from Porrentruy in a French-speaking environment. However, the analysis of the phonetic, graphematic, morphological features as well as of the etymology of each lexical unit shows a large degree of similarity between the two documents, and reveals that very few of the lexemes they contain can be considered as belonging purely to French. In fact, the two texts turn out to be written in a scripta typical of the Francoprovencal area of Switzerland. They rely on a shared vocabulary, for the most part etymologically both French and Francoprovencal, facilitating oral proclamation in both languages. In addition, the texts contain a relatively high proportion of Francoprovencal lexemes as well as grapho-phonetic and morphological traits which can be attributed to Francoprovencal textual traditions. In conclusion, the author postdates the moment at which Oil varieties replaced the former Francoprovencal varieties throughout the Swiss part of Jura and in Franche-Comte (with the exception of Haute-SaOne) to after the 14th century, and emphasises the extent to which texts originating from these regions - up to now considered as linguistically French retained their Francoprovencal character.
