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.
