This study outlines the development of Portuguese and Spanish verbal morphology from Latin in the context of the Hispanic branch of Romance, with a focus on the conjugational classes, whose number has been reduced to only three in this branch of Western Romance. It is innovative in approaching the topic as a study of sequential productive grammars…

This dissertation offers new approaches to an old and well-known problem in the study of the development of Romance varieties: duplicate lexis or doublets. Traditional analyses of duplication are narrow in scope both in what qualifies as a doublet (the popular/learned opposition has dominated, to the exclusion of other pairs) and in channels of…

The usage and disappearance of the Central Ibero-Romance future subjunctive have been extensively researched through Old Spanish texts. Studies on the future subjunctive as it evolved in the farther Western Ibero-Romance languages, represented by Galician and Portuguese, have been scarce, if not incomplete. This dissertation partially fills the…

Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin, and Romance vowel sounds and their production are discussed. (RM)

A study analyzed the emergence of the definite article in language history from classical Latin to vulgar Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, and Rumanian. It traces the grammaticalization of demonstratives into both nominative and accusative definite articles, both pre- and post-nominal. It is shown that based on documents from the fourth to sixth…

Drawing on the analogy between the linguistic Romanization of Europe and the Hispanization of America, this paper attempts to investigate the validity of the so-called substream theory to account for the development and diversification of the Romance languages. Phonetic peculiarities of Spanish in America are analyzed, and it is concluded that…

Translated from the English; special issue on "Changing Linguistics." (DD)

The study discusses the position of the protolanguage in the hierarchy formed by idiolect, dialect, and diasystem. The article emphasizes that linguistic study contains a great many diachronic events and hypothesized synchronic features that are implausible, yet possible. (30 references) (CK)

This paper presents an overview of current trends in a new discipline called diachronic sociolinguistics. This perspective leads to an original retrospective look on a thousand years of linguistic evolution, from classical spoken Latin to protoromance. The article exhorts romanists to consider the research carried out by sociolinguists who study…

Derivations of the term "gerund" are examined as they pertain to native English speakers learning French, Italian, and/or Spanish. The form's etymology is chronicled from Latin, and its current usage in student textbooks in the three languages is examined. A solution to the terminological confusion surrounding the term is proposed. (41…

Sometimes descriptions of known facts about a language fail to be explanatory in a satisfying way, because they ignore parallelisms in related languages, including chronologically earlier stages of the same language. This article examines several Romance languages and dialects in terms of similarities in morphological evolutionary development.…

Historical conditions determined that the Romanian language developed independently of the other Romance languages; the language thus remains behind in its development. In the eighteenth century the activity of the Transylvanian School of philologists established the Romanian language's own linguistic bases for the assimilation of borrowings from…

Compares indirect "wh"-questions and independent relatives, points to the absence of a clear-cut boundary between these two types of construction, and argues for the indispensability of semantic and pragmatic analysis for syntactic theory. The article emphasizes that it is the answer to a question that supplies the determinate element…

A sixth- and seventh-grade program "Latin Vibes," developed in response to a rising demand within the community for more student understanding of the evolution of the English language, is outlined. The courses for each grade chronicle the influences of Latin and the romance languages on the development of English over the centuries. The program…

Articles in this issue focus on language evolution, variation, and heterogeneity. The following are English translations of the French article titles appearing in the issue: "Irregular Phonetic Development Due to Frequency; Regional Traits in Proto-Romance"; "Linguistic Evolution and Evolution of Perspective in the Comparative…