Abstract
Following Lass’s suggestion that, in Germanic, the labels traditionally used in periodization (‘Old’, ‘Middle’, ‘Modern’) are best viewed as typological rather than temporal, this chapter attempts to assess the potential universality of such a claim by applying Lass’s methods to Romance, in the light of Coșeriu’s hypothesis that the Romance languages are distinguished from Latin by an iconic typology whereby relational concepts receive relational, ‘syntagmatic’ (i.e., analytic) exponence and non-relational concepts receive non-relational, ‘paradigmatic’ (i.e., synthetic) exponence. The results are mixed. Whilst many languages can be situated on what Lass describes as a typological ‘cline of change’, Romanian cannot; and, paradoxically, Old Spanish and Old Portuguese turn out to be more ‘modern’ than the respective modern languages. These findings require a diachronic explanation (which, it is tentatively suggested, may lie in Trudgill’s sociolinguistic typology of language contact). Lass’s claim that the categories of periodization are atemporal cannot therefore be universal.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
For ease of exposition, I am following the tradition of treating the vocative as a case, although there are good arguments for regarding it as something else (see, for instance, Blake 2001: 8). Nothing in the following discussion hinges on this decision.
- 2.
Traditional grammars of Romanian describe the language as having three genders, but the third, so-called ‘neuter’, gender is in fact a large class of ambigeneric nouns which are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. It could be plausibly claimed that Romanian in fact has just two genders; and, even if it is regarded as having three, they are not the three genders of Latin (see Maiden 2016).
- 3.
- 4.
Compare Blake (2001: 1): ‘Case is a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of relationship they bear to their heads’.
- 5.
The form concerned is conventionally referred to as the superlative, but this is a misnomer, as its meaning does not involve an explicit comparison. The terminology arises from the fact that the original function of the Latin suffix -issimvm, from which the Romance forms are derived, was to encode a true superlative (“biggest”, etc.). I therefore prefer to describe the Romance forms as elatives. (Note that, here and elsewhere, Latin etyma are given in the accusative case when this is the form which yields the modern Romance item.)
- 6.
Maiden (2015) suggests that, whilst the case-marking of Romanian determiners is inherited from Latin, the case-marking of Romanian nouns and adjectives may in fact be an innovation.
- 7.
It cannot be argued that there is any consistent marking of gender on French nouns themselves; gender-marking is manifest only on items which agree with nouns.
- 8.
The cognate form in Spanish, hiciera, is also a pluperfect indicative in Old Spanish, but is a past subjunctive in the modern language, alongside hiciese (which derives from the Latin pluperfect subjunctive, and is now largely absent from South American Spanish). The original value of the hiciera form has left a trace in its use as a ‘backgrounding’ device (see Lunn and Cravens 1991 and Klein-Andreu 1991); but it can no longer be considered a pluperfect tense.
- 9.
An analytic pluperfect, using a “have”-auxiliary, existed along the synthetic form in sixteenth-century Romanian, but is no longer found in modern Daco-Romanian.
- 10.
Portuguese does have a compound past tense formed with the auxiliary ter “have” (tenho feito), but this is not equivalent to an unmarked perfect—it has an imperfective or iterative interpretation. See Oliveira (2013: 528–530).
- 11.
There are varieties of Spanish (such as the speech of Buenos Aires) which favour the simple form as the exponent of both preterite and perfect; but the norm is the distribution described here. For a full discussion and references, see Gutiérrez Araus (2001).
- 12.
- 13.
A semi-learned elative suffix -isme existed in Old French, and the learned cognate -issime was highly productive in Middle French (see Sect. 12.4). However, there is no synthetic elative in Modern French. Occasional forms in -issime are found in the contemporary language (for instance, rarissime “extremely rare”, richissime “extremely rich”), but they are either lexicalized forms or else jocular extensions of the suffix (compare the title of the 2018 film Brillantissime, “incredibly brilliant”), which is not otherwise productive.
- 14.
In contemporary Romanian, a non-productive elative prefix prea- exists in a number of words, such as preaiubit “much loved” (compare iubit “loved”). Precisely because it is non-productive and the forms in which it appears are to a large extent lexicalized, we ignore it in this discussion. We may also note the existence of an elative prefix stra- in Italian, as in stravecchio “very old” (compare vecchio “old”). This prefix is also found with nouns and verbs, and can have a variety of evaluative interpretations. It will not concern us here—for discussion, see Napoli (2012).
- 15.
These suffixes may also have more subjective functions, such as encoding value judgements and hypocorism—for a detailed discussion and analysis, see Fortin (2011).
References
Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua. (2006). Gramàtica normativa valenciana. València: Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua.
Alfonzetti, G. M. (1996). Valori aspettuali del passato semplice e composto nel siciliano. In M. T. Navarro Salazar (Ed.), Italica matritensia: Atti del IV Convegno SILFI (pp. 37–59). Roma: Franco Cesati.
Alfonzetti, G. M. (1998). Passato prossimo e passato remoto: dimensioni di variazione. In G. Ruffino (Ed.), Atti del XXI Congresso internazionale di linguistica e filologia romanza. Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, Università di Palermo 18–24 settembre 1995. Volume II, sezione 2, Morfologia e sintassi delle lingue romanze, pp. 27–37. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Alfonzetti, G. M. (2018). Usi e funzioni del passato prossimo e remoto nell’italiano di Sicilia. In A. De Angelis & A. Chilà (Eds.), Atti del XIII Cambridge Italian Dialect Syntax-Morphology Meeting. Palermo: Supplementi al Bollettino del Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani.
Alibèrt, L. (1935). Gramatica occitana segón los parlars lengadocians. Tolosa [Toulouse]: Societat d’estudis occitans.
Auer, P. (2005). Europe’s sociolinguistic unity, or: a typology of European dialect/standard constellations. In N. Delbecque, J. van der Auwera, & D. Geeraerts (Eds.), Perspectives on Variation: sociolinguistic, historical, comparative (pp. 7–42). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Blake, B. J. (2001). Case (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bloemendal, J. (2009). Introduction: bilingualism, multilingualism and the formation of Europe. In J. Bloemendal (Ed.), Bilingual Europe: Latin and vernacular cultures—examples of bilingualism and multilingualism c. 1300-1800 (pp. 1–14). Leiden: Brill.
Coșeriu, E. (1971). Essai d’une nouvelle typologie des langues romanes. Sinaia: Universitatea din Bucureşti.
Coșeriu, E. (1988). Der romanische Sprachtypus: Versuch einer neuen Typologisierung der romanischen Sprachen. In J. Albrecht (Ed.), Energeia und Ergon: Sprachliche Variation, Sprachgeschichte, Sprachtypologie. Band I, Schriften von Eugenio Coșeriu (1965–1987) (pp. 207–224). Tübingen: Narr.
Drinka, B. (2017). Language Contact in Europe: the periphrastic perfect through history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fortin, A. (2011). The Morphology and Semantics of Expressive Affixes. Unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford.
Gutiérrez Araus, M. (2001). Caracterización de las funciones del pretérito perfecto en el español de América. Segundo Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española: el español en la sociedad de la información. Published online at: http://congresosdelalengua.es/valladolid/ponencias/unidad_diversidad_del_espanol/2_el_espanol_de_america/gutierrez_m.htm.
Haiman, J., & Benincà, P. (1992). The Rhæto-Romance Languages. London: Routledge.
Haspelmath, M., & Michaelis, S. M. (2017). Analytic and synthetic: typological change in varieties of European languages. In I. Buchstaller & B. Siebenhaar (Eds.), Language Variation—European Perspectives VI: Selected papers from the 8th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 8), Leipzig 2015 (pp. 3–22). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Haugen, E. (1966). Language, dialect, nation. American Anthropologist, 68, 922–935.
Hornstein, N. (1990). As Time Goes By: tense and Universal Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Klein-Andreu, F. (1991). Losing ground: a discourse-pragmatic solution to the history of -ra in Spanish. In S. Fleischman & L. R. Waugh (Eds.), Discourse-Pragmatics and the Verb: evidence from Romance (pp. 165–178). London: Routledge.
Labov, W. (2007). Transmission and diffusion. Language, 83, 344–387.
Lapesa, R. (1959). Historia de la lengua española. Madrid: Escelicer.
Lass, R. (2000). Language periodization and the concept ‘middle’. In I. Taavitsainen, T. Nevalainen, P. Pahta, & M. Rissanen (Eds.), Placing Middle English in Context (pp. 7–42). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ledgeway, A. (2012). From Latin to Romance: morphosyntactic typology and change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lipski, J. (1994). Latin American Spanish. London: Longman.
Lunn, P., & Cravens, T. D. (1991). A contextual reconsideration of the Spanish -ra indicative. In S. Fleischman & L. R. Waugh (Eds.), Discourse-Pragmatics and the Verb: evidence from Romance (pp. 147–164). London: Routledge.
Maiden, M. (2015). The plural type cărnuri and the morphological structure of the Romanian feminine noun in diachrony. In G. Pană Dindelegan, R. Zafiu, A. Dragomirescu, I. Nicula, A. Nicolae, & L. Esher (Eds.), Diachronic Variation in Romanian (pp. 33–54). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.
Maiden, M. (2016). The Romanian alternating gender in diachrony and synchrony. Folia Linguistica Historica, 37, 111–144.
Maiden, M. (2018). The Romance Verb: morphomic structure and diachrony. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mattos e Silva, R. V. (2013). O português do Brasil. In E. B. Paiva Raposo et al. (Eds.), Gramática do português, (pp. 145–154). Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
Napoli, M. (2012). Uno stra-prefisso: l’evoluzione di stra- nella storia dell’italiano. Rivista italiana di linguistica e dialettologia, 14, 89–112.
Nebrija, A. de. (1492). Grammatica Antonii Nebrissensis, etc. Salamanca: s.n.
Nyrop, K. (1908). Grammaire historique de la langue française: tome 3. Copenhague: Gyldendal.
Nyrop, K. (1924). Grammaire historique de la langue française: tome 2 (deuxième édition revue et augmentée). Copenhague: Gyldendal.
Oliveira, F. (2013). Tempo verbal. In E. B. Paiva Raposo, et al. (Eds.), Gramática do português (pp. 509–553). Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
Pellegrini, G. B. (1960). Tra lingua e dialetto in Italia. Studi mediolatini e volgari, 8, 137–153.
Pope, M. K. (1952). From Latin to Modern French with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman: phonology and morphology (2nd ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Pountain, C. J. (2011). Latin and the structure of written Romance. In M. Maiden, J. C. Smith, & A. Ledgeway (Eds.), The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages: Volume I, Structures (pp. 606–659). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ramajo Caño, A. (1987). Las gramáticas de la lengua castellana desde Nebrija hasta Correas. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca.
Reichenbach, H. (1947). Elements of Symbolic Logic. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Sandfeld, K. (1930). Linguistique balkanique: problèmes et résultats. Paris: Champion.
Saralegui, C. (1992). Un aspecto lingüístico de la Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias de Bartolomé de Las Casas. In I. Arellano (Ed.), Las Indias (América) en la literatura del Siglo de Oro: homenaje a Jesús Cañedo (pp. 285–308). Kassel: Reichenberger.
Schlegel, A. W. von. (1818). Observations sur la langue et la littérature provençales. Paris: Librairie grecque-latine-allemande.
Schøsler, L. (1984). La Déclinaison bicasuelle de l’ancien français. Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag.
Segura, L. (2013). Variedades dialetais do português europeu. In E. B. Paiva Raposo, et al. (Eds.), Gramática do português (pp. 85–142). Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
Smith, J. C. (2002). Middle French. When? What? Why? Language Sciences, 24, 423–445.
Smith, J. C. (2016). French and northern Gallo-Romance. In A. Ledgeway & M. Maiden (Eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (pp. 292–318). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sutherland, D. R. (1939). On the use of tenses in Old and Middle French. In Studies in French Language and Mediæval Literature Presented to Mildred K. Pope by Pupils, Colleagues and Friends (pp. 329–337). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Teyssier, P. (2014). História da língua portuguesa. Lisboa: Martins Fontes.
Trudgill, P. (2010). Contact and sociolinguistic typology. In R. Hickey (Ed.), The Handbook of Language Contact (pp. 299–319). Chichester & Malden, MA: Wiley–Blackwell
Trudgill, P. (2011a). Sociolinguistic Typology: social determinants of linguistic complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Trudgill, P. (2011b). Social structure, language contact and language change. In R. Wodak, B. Johnstone, & P. Kerswill (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (pp. 236–248). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.
Vincent, N. (1997). The emergence of the D-system in Romance. In A. van Kemenade & N. Vincent (Eds.), Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change (pp. 149–169). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Adam Ledgeway, Martin Maiden, Domenica Romagno, Sam Wolfe, and three anonymous referees for comments and discussion. Shortcomings and errors are my own.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Smith, J.C. (2020). Old, Middle, and Modern: Temporality and Typology. In: Allan, K. (eds) Dynamics of Language Changes. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6430-7_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6430-7_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-15-6429-1
Online ISBN: 978-981-15-6430-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)