The Romance LanguagesWhat is a Romance language? How is one Romance language related to others? How did they all evolve? And what can they tell us about language in general? In this comprehensive survey Rebecca Posner, a distinguished Romance specialist, examines this group of languages from a wide variety of perspectives. Her analysis combines philological expertise with insights drawn from modern theoretical linguistics, both synchronic and diachronic. She relates linguistic features to historical and sociological factors, and teases out those elements which can be attributed to divergence from a common source and those which indicate convergence towards a common aim. Her discussion is extensively illustrated with new and original data, and an up-to-date and comprehensive bibliography is included. This volume will be an invaluable and authoritative guide for students and specialists alike. |
Contents
INTRODUCTION | 1 |
What do Romanists worry about? | 7 |
Conclusion | 30 |
What is a Romance language? Part 2 | 71 |
Convergence interinfluence and parallel development | 155 |
How many Romance languages? | 189 |
When did the Romance languages differentiate? | 227 |
How did the Romance languages differentiate? | 282 |
Sociolinguistic factors | 329 |
| 346 | |
| 356 | |
| 367 | |
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Common terms and phrases
accusative adjectives adverbial appears attested auxiliary borrowed Catalan clause clitic clitic doubling colloquial consonant creoles dative definite article derived differentiation diphthong distinction early Engadine especially evidence feminine forms Francoprovençal French creoles frequent Friulian geminate gender Germanic grammatical guages Iberian Iberian languages infinitive inflections influence instance intervocalic Ital Italian dialects Italian varieties Italy Latin lexical linguistic literary loanwords marker masculine medieval metaphonic modern French modern period morphological nasal nasal consonant neuter nominative non-standard noun object Occitan Old French origin palatalization participle person phonetic phonological plural popular Portuguese creoles preposition pronominal reference reflexes regional Rhaeto-Romance Romance languages Romance varieties Rumanian Sard seems seen semantic sequences similar sixteenth century Slavonic sometimes Span Spanish Spanish and Portuguese speakers spoken standard Italian standard languages stress subject pronoun subjunctive suggested Surselvan survives syllable syntactic tense texts tion unaccusative usage usually variation verb vocabulary vowel whereas word
References to this book
Historical Linguistics Theodora Bynon,Professor of Historical Linguistics Soas Theodora Bynon Limited preview - 1977 |
Classifiers: A Typology of Noun Categorization Devices Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald No preview available - 2003 |