Indefinites Between Latin And Romance

This book investigates the syntactic and semantic development of a selection of indefinite pronouns and determiners between Latin and the Romance languages. It uses data from Classical and Late Latin texts and from electronic corpora of early Romance to propose a new account of the similarities in the grammar of indefinites across Romance.

This book investigates the syntactic and semantic development of a selection of indefinite pronouns and determiners (such as aliquis 'some', nullus 'no', and nemo 'no one') between Latin and the Romance languages. Although these elements have undergone significant diachronic change since the Classical Latin period, the modern Romance languages show a remarkable degree of similarity in the way their systems of indefinites have evolved and are structured today. In this volume, Chiara Gianollo draws on data from Classical and Late Latin texts, and from electronic corpora of the early stages of various Romance languages, to propose a new account of these similarities. The focus is primarily on Late Latin: at this stage, the grammar of indefinites already shows a number of changes, which are homogeneously transmitted to the daughter languages, leading to parallelism in the various emerging Romance systems. The volume demonstrates the value of using methods and models from synchronic theoretical linguistics for investigating diachronic phenomena, as well as the importance of diachronic research in understanding the nature of crosslinguistic variation and language change.

This book makes available for the first time in paperback the results of an important interdisciplinary conference held at Rutgers University in 1989. Eighteen internationally known specialists in linguistics, history, philology, Latin, and Romance languages tackle the difficult question of how and when Latin evolved into the Romance languages of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Catalan. The result is a stimulating and open exchange that offers the most up-to-date and accessible coverage of the topic. Contributors are Paul M. Lloyd, Tore Janson, J&ózsef Herman, Alberto Varvaro, Thomas D. Cravens, Harm Pinkster, John N. Green, Roger Wright, Marc Van Uytfanghe, Rosamond McKitterick, Katrien Heene, Michel Banniard, Birte Stengaard, Carmen Pensado, Thomas J. Walsh, Robert Blake, Ant&ónio Emiliano, and Marcel Danesi.

This text explores grammatical gender in the Romance languages and dialects and its evolution from Latin. It outlines the significant diversity found in the Romance varieties in this regard and uses this variation to show that traditional accounts of the loss of neuter gender cannot be correct.

Available again, this book discusses nine Romance languages in context of their common Latin origins and then in individual studies. The final chapter is devoted to Romance-based Creole languages; a genuine innovation in a work of this kind.

For many years, we have been taught that Romance languages come from Latin. Historical grammar has described this process on the basis of a complicated theoretical framework of successive changes that caused a deep transformation of the parent tongue, which degenerated into the so-called Vulgar Latin. However, as shown in recent research, on a morphosyntactic structure level, linguistic change is a very slow process. Some of the internal changes of a language do not occur over centuries but rather could be traced back over millenia. Why does historical grammar attribute to external influences the evolutionary process from Classical to Vulgar Latin and disregard the fact that it could be caused by the substrate language or languages? Some features of those languages would have survived the Romanization and point to an older common ancestor, an agglutinative and compositional language shared by the various Mediterranean peoples and from which the so-called Romance languages would stem. This work presents some new research hypotheses, which show that Romance languages share a high percentage of phonetic, lexical, morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics, showing a close kinship to a linguistic typology that relates them to each other but distances them from Latin. It is focused on Spanish although some examples are included in different Romances, such as the Romanian language which retains some aspects that help us to get closer to this common parent tongue. How can it be that the Romanian language has survived isolated so many tough, non-Romance invasions? The structural, lexical, phonetic and conceptual similarities between Romanian and the rest of Western Romance languages -distant languages whose people have not been in direct contact for at least two thousand years- suggests an earlier common language which must be much older than Latin. Therefore, the characteristics of the Romance languages might have evolved directly from this common, previous language, without having to justify this development through Latin. The relationship between Romance languages and Latin would then be of kinship and not filiation. The evidence is increasingly conclusive: Romance languages do not originate in Latin. Foreword by Cristina Brescan.

From Latin through the Romance languages, which types of past participle survived? Which older, "irregular" types disappeared and which older, "regular" types proliferated? Which new types of past participles emerged, which proved popular in standard Romance languages, and which exist in a wide range of dialects? The author explores reasons for the expansion or contraction of each type, in each area.

This book examines grammatical changes during the transition from Latin to the Romance languages and the factors proposed to explain them. It challenges orthodoxy, presents new perspectives on language change, structure, and variation, and will appeal equally to Romance linguists, Latinists, philologists, and historical linguists of all persuasions.