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.
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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).
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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.
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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
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