Academic literature on the topic 'Gallo-Romance languages'

Catalan is unique among the Romance languages in having a relatively large number of speakers in a thriving speech community but not being the dominant language of a major nation-state. It is also unusual in that its position within the Romance subfamily is a matter of some debate. I argue that the application of the principle of contact linguistics to data from Catalan dialects, especially the Alguerès variety, support rejecting the traditional treatment of Catalan as Ibero-Romance and Occitan as Gallo-Romance in favor of placing Catalan and Occitan together in a separate subbranch.

Summary Within the Gallo-Romance domain, Franco-Provençal and its western correlate Poitevin have been variously labeled ‘independent languages’, ‘dialects of French’, or ‘dialects of oc’. At least one attempt has been made to link these two lateral entities against both the north and the south. A historical survey of these conflicting claims encompasses non-partisan methodologies such as dialect geography and linguistic atlases as well as theoretical developments affecting Romance studies during the last one hundred years. Late 19th century research had not yet resolved antinomies between speech and script or between dialect study and historical grammar. Recent research into time and direction of Romanization, significantly clarifying the bi-(or tri-)partitioning of Gaul, has complemented increasingly sophisticated work in all these fields. Yet frequent overemphasis on segmentation, coupled with a failure to distinguish shared linguistic fate from ‘language’ in its general Romance acception, cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that both FP and Poitevin belong to Gallo-Romance; the successful investigation of either must continue to mesh grammar, lexis, scripta, and geohistory.

AbstractWe discuss a potential case of borrowing in this paper: Breton a- ‘of’, ‘from’ marking of (internal) verbal arguments, unique in Insular Celtic languages, and reminiscent of Gallo-Romance de/du- (and en-) arguments. Looking at potential Gallo-Romance parallels of three Middle Breton constructions analyzed in some detail (a with indefinite mass nominals in direct object position, a-marking of internal arguments under the scope of negation, a [allomorphs an(ez)-/ahan-] with personal pronouns for internal arguments, subjects (mainly of predicative constructions) and as expletive subjects of existential constructions), we demonstrate that even if there are some semantic parallels and one strong structural overlap (a and de under the scope of negation), the amount of divergences in morphology, syntax and semantics and the only partially fitting relative chronology of the different constructions do not allow to conclude with certainty that language-contact is an explanation of the Breton facts, which might have come into being also because of internal change (bound to restructuring of the pronominal system in Breton). More research is necessary to complete our knowledge of a-marking in Middle Breton and Modern Breton varieties and on the precise history of French en, in order to decide for one or the other explanation.

This article investigates the contact-induced reorganization of the possessive system in the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken from around the 12th century in the villages of Celle and Faeto in North Apulia and Guardia Piemontese in North-West Calabria. Gallo-Romance possessives exclude the article in the prenominal position, whereas in the Southern Italian dialects, possessives follow the noun preceded by the definite article. This original contrast is no longer visible in the varieties of Celle, Faeto and Guardia which changed the original prenominal position to the postnominal position combining with the article, except with kinship terms, preserving the original prenominal position. At the heart of contact phenomena, there are bilingualism and transfer mechanisms between the languages included in the complex knowledge of the speaker, suggesting a test bed for the treatment of language variation and parameterization. We propose an account of morpho-syntactic and interpretive properties of possessives, making use of the insights from the comparison of contact systems with prenominal (Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties) and postnominal (Southern Italian dialects) possessives. The final part examines the distribution of possessives, tracing it back to the definiteness properties of DP and proposes a phasal treatment based on syntactic and interpretive constraints.

Abstract All modern Basque dialects have at least 5 contrastive vowels /i, e, a, o, u/. One Basque dialect, Zuberoan, has developed a contrastive sixth vowel, the front rounded high vowel /y/. This development is arguably due to sustained contact with neighboring Gallo-Romance languages. This paper supports empirically the historical development of the /u/ vs. /y/ contrast and provides a detailed analysis of the contexts that inhibited the /u/ > /y/ sound change. Fronting was inhibited when the vowel was followed by an apical sibilant, a tap /ɾ/ or an rT cluster (where r is a rhotic, and T an alveolar obstruent), arguably due to coarticulatory effects. Fronting occurred when /s̻/, /r/ or non-coronal rhotic-obstruent clusters followed /u/. Zuberoan /u/-fronting illustrates the importance of language contact and phonetics in the phonological analysis of historical developments.

Summary This article is a contribution to the long-standing discussion of subject marking in Romance. Its originality lies in its systematically considering data from Oïl-Galloromance dialects, i.e. non-pro-drop varieties, which had been ignored because they were thought to pattern like French. On the contrary, a detailed survey of the means of 1sg and 3sg.m. Marking in these dialects reveals that the obligatoriness of the subject clitics in all grammatical persons does not guarantee the absence of ambiguous marks, since cases of syncretism between these two persons were found, besides cases of marking even more redundant than in French. I then conclude that it is yet another refutation of the now generally abandoned wisdom according to which the subject pronouns exactly compensate the loss of verb endings. Moreover, the results make the pro-drop parameter and parametric theory hard to maintain, as has been observed from other microvariational studies. I also argue against a functionalist interpretation of the correlation between the different means of subject marking based on the assumption of avoidance and repair strategies underlying language change/dialectal fragmentation. My own analysis then relies on the assumption of a strong and stable typological property of accusative languages like Romance, called here the principle of recovery of the subject. The surface microvariation within (Oïl)-(Gallo)romance is simply seen as the result of non-deterministic properties of language change/dialectal fragmentation.

Abstract A Pan-Romance analysis of Sp. buscar ~ provides sufficient data to reconstruct a Proto-Romance etymon */ˈbʊsk-a-/ ~ */ˈbusk-a-/ (assigned to Italo-Occidental continental Proto-Romance), whose meaning can be reconstructed as ‘to go into the forest’ (with various purposes). Although the meaning ‘to look for’ seems to be restricted to Ibero-Romance buscar, the other Romance reflexes show strong links with this semantic area. A considerable number of Gallo-Romance and Italo-Romance verbs carry the meanings ‘to hide’ as well as the opposite, ‘to chase (someone) from their refuge’, ‘un-cover’, and therefore, ‘dis-cover’. It is also possible to recover traces of a specialized use related to hunting outsides the boundaries of Ibero-Romance.

In mediaeval Gallo-Romance, due to regular sound change, the reflexes of Latin perfectum forms develop stem allomorphy linked to alternation between rhizotonic and arrhizotonic stress. Both the allomorphy and the stress alternation are subsequently eradicated. By contrast, in early Italo-Romance, existing stem allomorphy is redistributed by analogy so that, in the reflexes of Latin perfectum forms, stem alternation and stress alternation have the same distribution, a situation which persists into modern Italo-Romance. These developments illustrate a tendency for the exponents of morphomic distributions to be aligned with one another, facilitating reliable inferences about the forms realising different paradigm cells.

The region of Béarn denotes the historically Romance-speaking part of the modern-day Pyrénées-Atlantiques département in south-western France. The langue d’oc or southern Gallo-Romance variety historically spoken in Béarn, commonly referred to as ‘Béarnais’, is a dialect of Gascon. This variety may also be referred to by its autoglossonym ‘Biarnés’ though the French term is the most widely used designation for the regional language. The number of Gascon speakers in south-western France increases steadily from north (Bordeaux) to south (the Pyrenees) and because Béarn is the area of linguistic Gascony with the highest recorded number of Gascon speakers (Moreux 2004), Béarnais may be considered the principal surviving dialect of Gascon, though other surviving dialects, such as ‘Gascon de Chalosse’, and ‘Landais’, are still spoken and written.

L'objectif de cette thèse est de combler des lacunes scientifiques dans la connaissance de l’histoire du francoprovençal et de son lexique. En effet, à l'heure actuelle aucun travail de synthèse ne regroupe les matériaux anciens du francoprovençal et dans le Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (FEW), qui pourrait remplir cette fonction, les états anciens du francoprovençal sont sous-représentés en raison de l'absence d'un tel travail. La conséquence est un grand déséquilibre avec la connaissance que nous avons de l'ancien français et occitan qui sont les langues romanes anciennes les mieux décrites. Les sources en francoprovençal sont relativement peu nombreuses parce que cette langue a été de tout temps confiné à un usage essentiellement oral. La littérature ancienne se borne à quelques textes d'édification et un traité juridique, surtout des traductions. À partir du XVIième siècle se développe une littérature en patois le plus souvent fortement ancrée localement. Les auteurs qui voulaient toucher un publique plus large ont très tôt opté pour le français. Les sources documentaires sont plus nombreuses, mais très inégalement réparties dans l'espace. Les sources issues de la partie française du domaine ont pour la plupart été éditées, mais beaucoup d'entre elles sont difficilement exploitables en l'absence de glossaires. La situation est plus favorable en Suisse romande où le Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande (Gl.) documente non seulement les dialectes modernes, mais aussi leurs états anciens. Pour cette raison nous nous sommes concentrée sur la partie française du domaine et nous nous sommes basée sur le Gl. pour la partie suisse. En collaboration avec une autre doctorante, Laure Grüner, nous avons rassemblé les sources intéressantes pour l'étude de l'ancien francoprovençal de France et nous avons procédé à des dépouillements étendus. Sur cette base, nous avons élaboré un modèle de description lexicographique adapté à l’ancien francoprovençal et nous avons rédigé la tranche f de ce Dictionnaire de l'ancien francoprovençal, qui représente environ un vingtième du dictionnaire complet, afin de prouver la faisabilité du projet et d'évaluer son apport à la connaissance de l’ancien francoprovençal. Plus de la moitié de nos articles documentent des unités lexicales qui n'étaient pas encore attestées en ancien francoprovençal de France dans le FEW et dans une bonne partie des autres cas nous pouvons compléter les matériaux. Sur la base des 386 articles rédigés, nous évaluons la nomenclature complète du dictionnaires à 7’500 articles et le temps de rédaction à une bonne douzaine d'années de travail d'une personne à temps plein. Nous avons aussi envisagé plusieurs possibilités pour obtenir des résultats tangibles dans des délais plus courts
The aim of this thesis is to fill in the scientific gaps concerning the knowledge of the history of Francoprovençal and its vocabulary. Currently, there is no synthesis of the available documentation of Old Francoprovençal. In the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (FEW), that could fulfil this function, the older states of Francoprovençal are underrepresented because of the lack of this kind of work. The consequence is a huge imbalance with the knowledge we have for instance of Old French and Occitan which are the best known Romance languages of the past.There are few sources in Francoprovençal because this language has always been mostly oral. The oldest literature consists of a few religious texts and a legal treaty. Most of them are translations. From the 16th century onward, a locally based literature emerges generally with modest ambitions. Authors wanting to reach a larger audience chose French at a very early stage. The documentary sources are more numerous but very unevenly spread. Most sources from the French part are edited, but many of them lack a glossary and are difficult to handle. The situation is better in Switzerland, where the Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande (Gl.) provides documentation not only regarding the modern dialects but also their older stages. For this reason, we concentrated our work on the French part and relied on the Gl. for the Swiss part. Together with an other PhD student, Laure Grüner, we gathered the sources and extracted the interesting lexical forms.Based on this documentation, we elaborated a lexicographical description template suitable for Old Francoprovençal. We wrote the articles of this Dictionnaire de l'ancien francoprovençal beginning with the letter f which represents about one twentieth of the whole dictionary. Not only did this provide a proof of its feasibility, but it also assessed its contribution to the knowledge on Old Francoprovençal. More than a half of the articles gather evidence for lexical units not yet documented in this language regarding the French part of the linguistic area, whereas for most of the others we could complete the existing documentation. Based on the 386 articles written, we estimate the complete nomenclature at approximately 7’500 articles and the time needed to write them at about twelve years. We also considered various possibilities to get tangible outcomes in a shorter amount of time

The chapter explores the earliest attested stages of the different Romance branches, elaborating on the picture which has emerged in Chapter 4 and showing that the traces of more-than-binary gender contrasts grow increasingly significant, and geographically widespread, as one proceeds backwards in time. Thus, even Northern Italo-Romance and Gallo-Romance, which have no traces of a functional neuter today, still featured in their medieval stage not only a non-lexical neuter adjective inflection for default/agreement with non-lexical controllers (Gallo-Romance), but neuter agreement on (overdifferentiated) lower numerals (Italo-Romance), and scattered remnants of neuter plural agreement on determiners. The latter gradually increase as one moves to Tuscan, Romansh, and, finally, Southern Italian, where the four-gender system is still observed today, with Old Neapolitan even showing a four-target/four-controller gender system, with the two genders in addition to masculine and feminine both going back to the Latin neuter.

This study presents a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of the expression of future temporal reference (FTR) in two related varieties of Gallo-Romance, French and Gascon, that find themselves in a situation of long-term language contact. In both languages, the inflected and periphrastic futures are used as alternative ways of expressing FTR; this study identifies the linguistic and social constraints that condition variability between the two forms in spontaneous speech data, with the aim of investigating bilateral grammatical transfer between French and Gascon. The discussion considers the ongoing grammaticalization of periphrastic constructions in both languages, as well as evidence for the existence of a bilingual grammatical system in which cognate variables in each language and constraints on variability are stored in the same abstract mental representation.

This paper examines the claims made by Ledgeway (2012) concerning the existence of a North-South Continuum. After an examination of the theoretical issues in connexion with this claim, I present evidence from the Gallo-Romance area—the southern varieties of Occitan and Catalan and several northern oïl varieties, especially Wallon, Lorrain, and Norman—in an attempt to discover the motivations for the north / south distribution. I argue that the contrast represented by the be and have perfects is not only a retention of an ancient pattern, but also represents a reinvigoration of this dichotomy which occurred especially in the territory ruled by Charlemagne in the eighth and ninth centuries, coinciding with the growth of deponent use witnessed in scribal writing. Ledgeway’s northern languages thus participate in the ‘Charlemagne Sprachbund’ (van der Auwera 1998), while the southern languages lie outside its influence. I claim that the expansion of the be / have contrast resulted from the ‘roofing’ effect of Latin upon the language of speakers and writers of the eighth and ninth centuries, and that it left its mark on the languages of the Carolingian realm, Ledgeway’s northern varieties. Many of the Gallo-Romance varieties examined here provide evidence for this multi-stage development, while several participate only partially.

The introduction to the volume lays out its conceptual, theoretical and empirical background. It highlights how grammatical change has been a major area of interest within French linguistics, but that standard French is too often the exclusive empirical focus, while insights from comparative Gallo-Romance data tend to be lacking. Sociolinguistic theory has traditionally formed a modest part of linguistic research on both historical and contemporary French, but the introduction highlights a renewed interest in variationist sociolinguistics, issues of language contact, and the status of minority languages with France. The introduction concludes with an overview of Smith’s contribution to linguistics and summaries of the chapters that together form the volume.

The status of the language found in the Clermont-Ferrand manuscript of the Passion and St Leger is unclear. Should it be regarded as French, or French with an admixture of Occitanisms, or something else? A concordance of the early mostly short texts shows that they share a range of common forms, across all three Gallo-Romance languages. A study of the books and manuscripts which have preserved these texts show that they are part of the learned culture of their day. Reading and writing are done in Latin, and the early texts are both innovatory in writing literary vernacular and conservative in keeping as close to Latin conventions as possible, as expected by the church institutions in which these materials were used and preserved.