Historical Romance Linguistics: Retrospective and Perspectives

405 Pages·2006·5.53 MB·English

by  Randall Gess (Ed.), Deborah Arteaga (Ed.)

HISTORICAL ROMANCE LINGUISTICS
AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
General Editor
E.F.K. KOERNER
(Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie
und Universalienforschung, Berlin)
Series IV – CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY
Advisory Editorial Board
Lyle Campbell (Salt Lake City); Sheila Embleton (Toronto)
Brian D. Joseph (Columbus, Ohio); John E. Joseph (Edinburgh)
Manfred Krifka (Berlin); E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.)
Joseph C. Salmons (Madison, Wis.); Hans-Jürgen Sasse (Köln)
Volume 274
Randall S. Gess and Deborah Arteaga (eds.)
Historical Romance Linguistics: Retrospective and perspectives
HISTORICAL
ROMANCE LINGUISTICS
RETROSPECTIVE AND PERSPECTIVES
Edited by
RANDALL S. GESS
University of Utah
DEBORAH ARTEAGA
University of Nevada
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
�� The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Historical Romance Linguistics : Retrospective and perspectives / edited by Randall S. Gess and Deborah
Arteaga.
p. cm. -- (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series IV, Current issues
in linguistic theory, ISSN 0304-0763 ; v. 274)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
. Romance languages--History. I. Gess, Randall Scott, 963- II. Arteaga, Deborah L. III. Series.
PC45.H57 2006
440.09--dc22 2006042755
ISBN 90 272 4788 9 (Hb; alk. paper)
© 2006 – John Benjamins B.V.
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CONTENTS

Editors’ Foreword
Randall Gess & Deborah Arteaga vii
Introduction: From Romance Philology to (Historical) Romance Linguistics?
Jürgen Klausenburger 1

Part I: Phonology

Systemic Contrast and the Diachrony of Spanish Sibilant Voicing
Travis G. Bradley & Ann Marie Delforge 19
The Myth of Phonologically Distinctive Vowel Length in Renaissance
French
Randall Gess 53
Glide Strengthening in French and Spanish and the Formal Representation
of Affricates
Haike Jacobs & Robbie van Gerwen 77
Rhythm and Prosodic Change
Michael L. Mazzola 97
Contrast Preservation Theory and Historical Change
Jean-Pierre Montreuil 111
On the Phonetics of Rhymes in Classical and Pre-Classical French: A
Sociolinguistic Perspective
Yves Charles Morin 131
Is the ‘Word’ Still a Phonological Unit in French? Evidence from Verlan
Douglas C. Walker 163

Part II: Morphology

Proclisis and Enclisis of Object Pronouns at the Turn of the 17th Century:
The Speech of the Future Louis XIIIth
Paul Hirschbühler & Marie Labelle 187
The Emergence of Marked Structures in the Integration of Loans in Italian
Lori Repetti 209
On the Life and (Near) Death of a Morphophoneme
Margaret Winters 237
German Influence in Romanian
Wiecher Zwanenburg 253
vi CONTENTS

Part III: Syntax

Il Était une Fois: Diachronic Development of Expletives, Case, and
Agreement from Latin to Modern French
Deborah Arteaga & Julia Herschensohn 269
‘Synthetic’ vs. ‘Analytic’ in Romance: The Importance of Varieties
Brigitte L. M. Bauer 287
Intra-System Variability and Change in Nominal and Verbal Morphology
Barbara E. Bullock & Almeida Jacqueline Toribio 305
Aspects of Infinitival Constructions in the History of Portuguese
Ana Maria Martins 327
Morphosyntactic Functions of Italian Reflexive si: A Grammaticalization
Analysis
Cinzia Russi 357
From Adverb to Discourse Marker and Beyond: The Status of là in
Franco-American French
Jane S. Smith 375

General Index 389
EDITORS’ FOREWORD

In February, 2003, the editors of this volume, former students of Jürgen
Klausenburger, put out the following call for papers.

As former students of Jürgen Klausenburger, we are planning a volume
dedicated to him, entitled Historical Romance Linguistics: Retrospective and
Perspectives, and we are writing to invite you to submit an article for
inclusion in the volume. It is not a festschrift per se, as Jürgen Klausenburger
is aware of the project, and has agreed to provide the “retrospective” referred
to in the title; moreover, the volume will be refereed. It is not necessary that
you know Professor Klausenburger personally in order to contribute to the
volume. If you do not know him, our invitation to you is simply a reflection
of our admiration of your work on diachronic Romance.
Professor Klausenburger’s retrospective will include references to
contributions in the volume, and how they fit into the overall development of
the field of historical Romance linguistics over the past thirty years or so, as
he sees it. In the volume, we intend to include a broad range of theoretical
perspectives, and we hope to include work on a wide variety of Romance
languages. We are looking for substantial studies, not previously published,
on the historical development of one or more Romance varieties that
contribute to linguistic inquiry in one or more of the following ways:
• by investigating cognitive, functional and/or sociolinguistic
constraints on the historical development of language systems.
• by informing current theoretical models of language and/or lan-
guage change, including models of grammaticalization.
• by enhancing our understanding of specific language systems of the
past, related to either their structure or use.

In reflecting now on the outcome of this project, for which we cast a fairly
broad net, it is clear to us that our original goals have met with great success.
The reader will see that each of the accepted contributions, which underwent a
two-stage review process, indeed conforms to our request that it inform
linguistic inquiry in one or more of the ways mentioned above.
In 1972, Yakov Malkiel wrote that the decisive issue in Romance
linguistics will be “the ability of the pacesetters to rejuvenate the methodology,
to set new goals (clearly defined and attractive to talented, ambitious workers),
and to re-establish a much-needed rapport with general linguistics” (1972:835).
In his final paper for a Romance Linguistics course with Klausenburger in the
winter of 1993, Gess argued that Malkiel’s goals had been met with “some
success,” but lamented the dearth of research into diachronic research,
viii EDITORS’ FOREWORD

expressing the hope that this lack would be remedied in future. The present
volume is intended in part as a contribution to such a remedy.
The studies in the current volume represent well an established rapport
with general linguistics, while at the same time focusing on diachronic issues.
As such, it is interesting to consider how this volume stands with respect to
Malkiel’s (1961) first definition of Romance linguistics, according to which
the field has a primary allegiance to general linguistics and is only valid
diachronically. This definition, considered “classic” by Klausenburger (2001),
has largely supplanted Malkiel’s other two definitions of Romance linguistics
(the second involving the application of analytical methodologies originally
acquired through the study of Romance languages to non-Romance data; and
the third referring to the analysis of Romance languages by persons who are
themselves of Romance background, which may entail a “national style of
doing linguistics.”). At the same time, the field of Romance Linguistics has
witnessed the growing importance and eventual dominance of synchronic
studies at the expense of diachronic studies. The focus on diachrony in this
volume, then, contributes to an as yet modest (but hopefully growing) resurg-
ence of the importance of historical studies outlined in Malkiel’s first
definition of Romance linguistics. Whether diachrony will ever completely
reassume its definitional status in Romance linguistics remains to be seen.
Since the conception of this project, major life events (both positive and
negative) have imposed themselves at various points along the way. We would
like to thank the contributors for their willingness to participate in this project,
and for their assistance in helping it come to fruition. In closing, and as
promised in our original call for contributions, we dedicate this volume to
Jürgen Klausenburger, whom we admire and respect greatly.

REFERENCES

Klausenburger, Jürgen. 2001. Coursebook in Romance Linguistics. Munich:
Lincolm.
Malkiel, Yakov. 1961. “Three definitions of Romance linguistics”. Romance
Philology 15.1-7.
Malkiel, Yakov. 1972. “Comparative Romance linguistics”. Current Trends in
Linguistics, ed. by Thomas E. Sebeok, vol. IX: Linguistics in Western
Europe, 835-925. The Hague: Mouton.
INTRODUCTION
FROM ROMANCE PHILOLOGY TO (HISTORICAL) ROMANCE LINGUISTICS?

JURGEN KLAUSENBURGER
University of Washington

I summarize the contributions of this volume and situate them within the
discipline of Romance linguistics at the beginning of the 21st century. The
papers exemplify the major Romance languages, French, Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, and Romanian, and they deal with all levels of linguistic
analysis, phonology, morphology, and syntax. My review groups the essays
into clusters, determined by subject matter. In phonology, the split concerns
the history of vowel length in French, incarnations of Optimality Theory,
and the role of prosody. In morphology, I consider the themes of ‘variation’,
loanword morphology, and morphophonology. Finally, the syntax section
deals with grammatic-alization and the Minimalist Program. Globally, I
integrate the work reflected in these papers into a continuation of the
‘classical’ definition of Romance linguistics: they actively participate in
current theoretical advances, in the same way that 19th-century Romance
linguistics and philology represented the dominant Neogrammarian
paradigm of the time.

0. Introduction
The purpose of these introductory comments is three-fold. First, I will
examine the contributions of this volume in the context of recent work in
Romance linguistics, specifically in the past thirty years. Second, I will briefly
trace the historical grounding of such research back to the origins of the
discipline in the 19th century. Finally, I will attempt to construct a workable
definition of Romance linguistics for the 21st century.
This introduction may be visually outlined as in the following schema:

History of Romance Linguistics Current work Definition of field
(19th / 20th c.) (ca. last 30+ years) (today / tomorrow)

Papers of this volume

It is therefore necessary to begin with brief sections on aspects of Romance
linguistics in general, showing their relevance for an understanding of the
contents of the papers contained in this volume.