Synchronic and diachronic analysis of prepositional multiword modifiers across Romance languages

Lexicological and lexicographical studies on multiword expressions in Romance languages have significantly increased in recent years. Even though some attention has been paid to Multiwords functioning as adjectives and adverbs, the structural and the functional relation between them has not been clarified yet. Employing both a qualitative and quantitative approach, this corpus-based investigation aims at exploring the diatopic distribution and the evolution of Romance multiword lexemes having the form of a prepositional phrase and the function of an adjective or/and an adverb (or both functions). According to data taken from corpora of Latin, Old Italian, Old Spanish and Middle French, this contribution investigates the relationship between the different degrees of schematicity and the productivity of this kind of multiword lexemes in order to highlight the evolutional path and the diachronic/diatopic principles engaged in the multiword modifying system across the different Romance languages taken into consideration.

The Development of Exceptional Case Marking in Romance with a Particular Focus on French

This paper traces the development of so-called Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) under perception, permissive and causative verbs in Romance. Synchronically, we can observe various patterns in the distribution of ECM complements under these verbs. In Portuguese and Spanish, ECM is often possible under all permissive and causative verbs, whereas in French, Catalan and Italian it is usually restricted to perception and permissive verbs. A detail that has not been much discussed is the fact that, for many speakers, ECM with a given verb is often restricted to contexts in which the embedded ‘subject’ is a clitic. Some speakers of Modern French display this pattern with the verb faire ‘make’, for example (Abeillé, Anne, Danièle Godard & Philip Miller. 1997. Les causatives en français : Un cas de compétition syntaxique. Langue Française 115. 62–74. https://doi.org/10.3406/lfr.1997.6222). In this paper, I claim that laisser ‘let’ probably also displayed this pattern in Middle French. In Old French, however, what appears to be the opposite pattern is observed. Following (Pearce, Elizabeth. 1990. Parameters in Old French syntax: Infinitival complements. Dordrecht: Kluwer), I attribute this to the morphological variability of dative case in Old French. I propose a case-based analysis of the clitic ECM pattern, whereby ECM complements in Romance are phases unlike clause union complements (see Sheehan, Michelle & Sonia Cyrino. 2018. Why do some ECM verbs resist passivisation? A phase-based explanation. In Sherry Hucklebridge & Max Nelson (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 48 (vol 3), 81–90. University of Massachusetts). Where such complements are embedded under light verbs, the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken hale: A life in language, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) prevents accusative case from being assigned to the lower subject except in instances of cliticization. When the matrix verb is reanalysed as a full verb, however, v becomes the case-assigning head and so ECM becomes generally available, regardless of the clitic/non-clitic status of the causee.

MOTIFS OF THE “MIRACLES OF OUR LADY” IN PUSHKIN’S POEM “THE LEGEND”

This study is devoted to the identification of sources of Pushkin’s original poem “There Lived a Poor Knight ...” (“The Legend”). Through revealing the “traces” of a literary source in the drafts of “The Legend,” the details of the narrative “Will Taken for Deed,” going back to a Middle French transcription of the poetic collection “The Miracles of Our Lady” by Gautier de Coinci, have been found. Perhaps, while working on “The Legend,” the poet used a motif of the Virgin Mary’s mystical names in the collection of Marian miracles by Caesar of Heisterbach. Both “The Legend” and Franz’s song in “Scenes from Knightly Times” consistently moved away from the Marian narrative. This substantiates the interpretation of both versions as an evolution in the same direction originally chosen by the poet.

Nation and Empire in Northern Atlantic History

Nation and empire are intriguing conceptual frameworks for the study of the historical persistence of Atlantic entanglements—especially in the northern hemisphere. The Atlantic might generally be understood to have interlocked the Americas, Africa, and Europe from the beginning of European westward exploration until the official end of both slavery and European imperialism on Northern American soil. But Atlantic ideological battles extended well beyond the 19th century. Today, they are alive and kicking once more. As conceptual frameworks nation and empire organize ideas of belonging, community building, and social cohesion. In addition, they are short-hands for distinct, in fact competing, forms of political and economic hegemony. Since mechanisms of exclusion and seclusion have forged, delimited, and expanded nations as much as empires, this bibliographical essay will focus on studies that draw attention to the commonalities of nation and empire. Within the framework of the (Northern) Atlantic, nations and empires lose their cohesive and exclusivist aura, inviting persistent, if contrastive, comparisons of connective as well as divisive modes of transportation, exchange, and intellectual as well as cultural transformation. The idea of nation evokes several meanings: First used in Anglo-Norman and Middle French to denote birth, lineage, or family, the idea of the nation helped to lay the ground for modern-age ideas of race and biological descent. As a social and cultural concept, the nation organizes communities around questions of kinship, belonging, and culture until today. From the 19th century onward “nation” simultaneously described a political formation established by and for its diverse population. Empire likewise has many layers: etymologically speaking the word is used to speak about extensive territories controlled by a single ruler; politically speaking the term describes a system governed by ideas of supreme sovereignty and extensive subjection or domination; socially speaking it relates practices of command and control. Culturally speaking, empire denotes complex communication among communities with various degrees of authority and power. Scholarly analysis often delineates historical trajectories. From a Eurocentric perspective the New World attracted competing communities of settlers, planters, and traders, rewarding both an unbridled sense of possibility and the ambition to emulate and yet outdo European models. In this ambiguous setting the idea as well as institutional offsprings of empire proliferated long after empire officially ended with the First World War. With the return of empire (and nation) as imaginaries for new forms of coercion and collaboration, future scholarship will need to trace the Atlantic and its history of entanglements well into the 21st century.

The semantic development of borrowed derivational morphology

This study investigates the effects of borrowing on the semantics of a derivational suffix. It presents a case study that compares the borrowed Middle English suffix -ery to Middle French -erie, paying special attention to their respective semantic structures and analysing them with semantic maps. The semantic structure of the borrowed suffix -ery is very similar to that of its origin -erie and there is no evidence for semantic reduction as a result of the borrowing process. This stability is linked to sociolinguistic aspects of the contact situation. Substantial semantic changes do occur in the recipient language after the suffix has become an established word formation process, however. On the basis of empirical data, this paper makes a contribution to the study of derivational semantics and contact linguistics by proposing a methodology for the analysis of the semantic structure of (borrowed) derivational morphology.

John Bellenden's Livy and Les Decades of Pierre Bersuire: The French in Bellenden's Scots

When producing a Scots translation of Livy's History of Rome in 1533, John Bellenden harnessed Les Decades, the Middle French translation of Livy prepared by Pierre Bersuire in 1358. The French intermediary offered Bellenden not only a rich store of lexical possibilities when grappling with Livy's Latin, as has been partly recognized before, but also a way of structuring and presenting his translation. Inspired by the glosses with which Bersuire furnished Les Decades, Bellenden prepared his own commentary, explaining similar items of political, cultural, and religious interest. Following Bersuire's example, Bellenden's commentary encouraged the reader to approach Livy's History alongside a series of comparative texts, especially Ovid's Fasti and the Memorabilia of Valerius Maximus. Above all, Bellenden took from Bersuire the urge to understand antiquity, as far as was possible, on its own terms.

FRANCIEN AS A STUMBLING BLOCK IN HISTORY OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE

Criticism of the concept of the formation of the French language on the basis of the francien dialect, presented in the works of XIX-XX centuries, has led to the fact that the term and the concept of «Francien» has become a kind of stumbling block in solving many questions of the formation and evolution of the French language. Analysis of the criticism of the traditional history of the French language, of the discussions about the formation of the French language and the role of the Francien dialect in this process, of the questions of the diatopic variation of the French and Old French showed the theoretical and methodological importance of consistently separating the language and writing, dialect and scriptа, text of the work and text of the manuscript. The analysis of the arguments given by the opponents of the Francien dialect and its special role in the history of the French language showed their failure. The selection of the Francien dialect and the Francien scripta as dialect and scripta of Ile-de-France is necessary for an adequate description of the linguistic situation in the Old and middle French periods.

Law, Policy, and the Social Construction of Disaster

Emerging in the English language during the 1590s, the etymological origins of the word “disaster” are found in désastre from Middle French (1560s) and disastro from Italian, meaning “ill-starred,” with “dis-,” a pejorative and “astro” meaning “star” or “planet”—from the Latin astrum and from the Greek ástron. The notion was of “an unfavorable aspect of a star or planet,” a “malevolent astral influence,” or a “calamity blamed on an unfavorable position of a planet.”