Although a growing body of research has sought to understand the relationship between word order and information structure, previous information structure (IS) analyses of verb-subject order have produced conflicting results for Medieval French, which have subsequently led to conflicting claims about the importance of IS to its word order as well…

This article offers a brief overview of historical linguistics and explores the value of historical "sign" linguistics. The specific focus of the article is on the question of the extent to which the concept of "sign language families" is a legitimate and useful one. It is suggested that although lateral transmission and…

Aragonese is a threatened Romance language immersed in a historical process of substitution by Spanish, the official language. The number of speakers who maintained its transmission to younger generations, mainly in rural areas, has extremely declined over the last century. In the meantime, revitalisation efforts have incorporated new speakers,…

This article concerns Northern Catalonia, the part of the Catalan-speaking area that today is in France. A Catalan-speaking region until the first half of the twentieth century, the effects of Frenchification -- the acceptance of the French political and economic project in the contemporary era -- and the multiple demographic changes of the…

The central theme of our research concerns the terms used to define the identity of great boyar families, both ethnic and religious, in the 18th century. We consider the great local boyar families both those who were rooted in Moldavia (as far back as classic Middle Ages) as well as those who became local during the 17th -18th centuries and had…

Predicting the outcome of language contact situations is complicated by the fact that the primary agents of linguistic change--individual speakers--are unpredictable (van Coetsem, 2000; Thomason, 2001). My dissertation examines the variety of Spanish spoken in Galicia, Spain, where individual language choices are often motivated not by utility but…

This regional dossier aims to provide a concise description of the European minority language, Aragonese, in education. Aspects that are addressed include features of the education system, recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements and support structures, as well as quantitative aspects such as the number of schools, teachers,…

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…

For the most part, my study is a descriptive analysis of infinitival complement clauses and the corresponding subjunctive clauses in Romanian, that is, obligatory control (OC) structures. OC is a relation of obligatory coreferentiality between a matrix argument (controller) and the null subject of the subordinate (controlee) of the same sentence.…

The theory of Analogical and Exemplar Modeling (AEM) suggests renewed discussion of the formalization of analogy and its possible incorporation in linguistic theory. AEM is a usage-based model founded upon Exemplar Modeling (Bybee 2007, Pierrehumbert 2001) that utilizes several principles of the Analogical Modeling of Language (Skousen 1992, 1995,…

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…

Examines linguistic criteria that have been adduced on the Middle French period and concludes that there is no real discontinuity that serves to define Middle French. Suggests that the value of Middle French may be typological rather than temporal--specifically that it defines a variety of French that broadly conforms to the Romance…

The use of the terms "substratum" and "superstratum," used in diachronic linguistics to designate linguistic contact, leads to ambiguity, confusion, and specious arguments. Each term carries a chronological-geographic, a social, and a linguistic definition which increases the grounds for misunderstanding. The terms encourage thinking about…

Reviews current work in Romance linguistics and discusses the kind of scholarship the field needs. (RM)