This study traces the development of the Noun + Verb compositional pattern, e.g., Latin manutenere, in four western Romance languages, providing listings of medieval and modern examples. The pattern has disappeared from literary French and Spanish, yet continues to show surprising vitality in Catalan, the dialects of Occitan, and even in non-standardized varieties of northern Gallo-Romance.
This is the first book devoted entirely to the history of compound words in Spanish. Based on data obtained from Spanish dictionaries and databases of the past thousand years, it documents the evolution of the major compounding patterns of the language. It analyzes the structural, semantic, and orthographic features of each compound type, and also provides a description of its Latin antecedents, early attestations, and relative frequency and productivity over the centuries. The combination of qualitative and quantitative data shows that although most compound types have survived, they have undergone changes in word order and relative frequency. Moreover, the book shows that the evolution of compounding in Spanish may be accounted for by processes of language acquisition in children. This book, which includes all the data in chronological and alphabetical order, will be a valuable resource for morphologists, Romance linguists, and historical linguists more generally.
What 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.
Nominal apposition—the combining of two equivalent nouns—has been a neglected topic in linguistics, despite its prominence in syntax and morphology in some languages. This book presents an extensive comparative and diachronic analysis of nominal apposition in Indo-European, examining its occurrence, characteristics and functions in early languages, identifying parallels with similar phenomena elsewhere, and tracing its evolution in Latin-Romance.
This volume contains 23 papers selected from those presented at the 22nd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. The papers address issues in phonology, morphology, syntax/semantics from contemporary theoretical perspectives. In addition, in keeping with the symposium's US-Mexico location and commemoration of the twin quincentenaries of Columbus' first voyage and the publication of Nebrija's grammar, several papers focus on the history of linguistic theory, language contact, variation, and change.
The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Morphology presents a state-of-the-art, detailed and exhaustive overview of all aspects of Spanish morphology, paying equal attention to the empirical complexities of the morphological system and the theoretical issues that they raise. As such, this handbook is relevant both for those interested in the facts of Spanish morphology and those interested in general morphology that want to explore how the Spanish facts illuminate our understanding of human language and current theories of morphology. This volume is also unique in its extent and coverage. Written by an international team of leading experts in the field, it contains 42 chapters divided into four sections, covering all synchronic and diachronic aspects of Spanish morphology, including inflection; derivation; compounding and other processes of word formation; the interaction of morphology with other modules of grammar and the role of morphology in language acquisition, psycholinguistics and language teaching.
Both compounds and multi-word expressions are complex lexical units, made up of at least two constituents. The most basic difference is that the former are morphological objects and the latter result from syntactic processes. However, the exact demarcation between compounds and multi-word expressions differs greatly from language to language and is often a matter of debate in and across languages. Similarly debated is whether and how these two different kinds of units complement or compete with each other. The volume presents an overview of compounds and multi-word expressions in a variety of European languages. Central questions that are discussed for each language concern the formal distinction between compounds and multi-word expressions, their formation and their status in lexicon and grammar. The volume contains chapters on German, English, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Finnish, and Hungarian as well as a contrastive overview with a focus on German. It brings together insights from word-formation theory, phraseology and theory of grammar and aims to contribute to the understanding of the lexicon, both from a language-specific and cross-linguistic perspective.
The focus of Paradigms in Word Formation: Theory and applications is on the relevance of paradigms for linguistic description. Paradigmatic organization has traditionally been considered an inherent feature of inflectional morphology, but research in the last decades clearly shows the existence of paradigms in word formation, especially in affixal derivation, often at the expense of other word-formation processes. This volume seeks to address the role that paradigms may play in the description of compounding, conversion and participles. This volume should be of interest to anyone specialized in the field of English morphology and word formation.
This Cambridge history is the definitive guide to the comparative history of the Romance languages. Volume I is organized around the two key recurrent themes of persistence (structural inheritance and continuity from Latin) and innovation (structural change and loss in Romance).
Central Hill Nisenan was spoken in the hills northeast of Sacramento, California, but like many other California languages, it is no longer spoken. This monograph includes texts recorded by the late Richard Smith, a brief description of the language (with chapters on phonology, morphology, and syntax), and a short word list.
