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La romanistica è il terreno d'incontro e di dialogo tra ambiti diversi della cultura europea, decisiva per la ricerca delle radici storiche, letterarie e linguistiche dell'Europa intesa come aggregato culturale. È una costellazione di discipline accomunate dal riferimento a lingue, culture e letterature romanze, discese dal latino e irradiatesi in tutto il mondo attraverso migrazioni, adattamenti e mutamenti. Lorenzo Tomasin ne disegna il profilo in una lezione di rara bellezza ed efficacia.

Der Sammelband hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, neue Aspekte und Perspektiven in Bezug auf die historische Entwicklung der romanischen Sprachen und ihrer Varietäten darzustellen und dabei die verschiedensten Arten des Sprachkontaktes miteinzubeziehen. Die historische Bandbreite reicht dabei von der Genese der romanischen Sprachen über die Renaissance und das Zeitalter der Aufklärung bis in die aktuelle Gegenwart. Thematischer Schwerpunkt ist in diesem Zusammenhang der Kontakt von einzelnen diatopischen Varietäten, auch außerromanischen, untereinander und in Relation zu Standardsprachen. Ein weiterer Fokus liegt auf sprachhistorischen Konstellationen von Mündlichkeit und Schriftlichkeit, gerade auch im Kontext der Schrift- und Verkehrssprache Latein. Ebenfalls prominent ist dabei die Frage nach der Verbreitung einer Norm- und Standardsprache und die diesbezügliche Kompetenz einzelner Sprechergruppen

Der Sammelband Geschichte der romanischen Länder und ihrer Sprachen ist dem bekannten Daco-Romanisten Rudolf Windisch gewidmet. Die Leserinnen und Leser dürfen also zurecht viele Informationen zum Balkanromanischen und zur Geschichte und Geographie Südosteuropas erwarten. Einen weiteren thematischen Schwerpunkt bilden Frankreich, seine Sprache, seine Ideengeschichte und seine Literatur. Nicht zuletzt informiert der Band auch über die Geschichte der romanischen Sprachwissenschaft und vermittelt Einblicke in die lebhafte, nicht immer emotionsfreie Diskussion, die zwischen den führenden Vertretern dieser Disziplin geführt wurde.

Zu Beginn des dritten Bandes werden die Persönlichkeiten gewürdigt, die den Übergang von der Renaissance zur nächsten Epoche, der Barockzeit, kennzeichnen: Celso Cittadini mit seiner Arbeit zum Vulgärlatein sowie die Sprachhistoriker Bernardo Aldrete in Spanien und Duarte Nunes de Leão in Portugal. Danach werden Arbeiten zur Sprachgeschichte in Italien (u.a. Muratori), Spanien und Frankreich (Ménage und Bonamy) behandelt. Ausführlich werden dann die zahlreichen Arbeiten zur französischen Phonetik berücksichtigt, die Entwicklung der französischen Grammatik, besonders im 18. Jahrhundert, immer in Abgrenzung zur Allgemeinen Grammatik.

Der zweite Band von Coserius Geschichte der romanischen Sprachwissenschaft umfasst die Epoche der Renaissance und des Humanismus. Es entstehen die ersten nationalen Grammatiken in Spanien, Portugal, Italien und Frankreich, aber auch zahlreiche Traktate über die ideale Rechtschreibung und über Phonetik. Auch die ersten zweisprachigen Wörterbücher Latein-Romanisch erscheinen. Vor allem werden in England, Flandern und Deutschland Lehrbücher des Französischen, Spanischen und Italienischen geschrieben. Überlegungen zur Herkunft der romanischen Nationalsprachen begründen die Sprachgeschichte der frühen Neuzeit.

This volume provides the first book-length study of the controversial topic of Verb Second and related properties in a range of Medieval Romance varieties. It presents an examination and analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data from Old French, Occitan, Sicilian, Venetian, Spanish, and Sardinian, in order to assess whether these were indeed Verb Second languages. Sam Wolfe argues that V-to-C movement is a point of continuity across all the medieval varieties - unlike in the modern Romance languages - but that there are rich patterns of synchronic and diachronic variation in the medieval period that have not previously been observed and investigated. These include differences in the syntax-pragmatics mapping, the locus of verb movement, the behaviour of clitic pronouns, the syntax of subject positions, matrix/embedded asymmetries, and the null argument properties of the languages in question. The book outlines a detailed formal cartographic analysis of both the attested synchronic patterns and the diachronic evolution of Romance clausal structure. The findings have widespread implications for the understanding of both the key typological property of Verb Second and the development of Latin into the modern Romance languages.

This book explores grammatical gender in the Romance languages and dialects and its evolution from Latin. Michele Loporcaro investigates the significant diversity found in the Romance varieties in this regard; he draws on data from the Middle Ages to the present from all the Romance languages and dialects, discussing examples from Romanian to Portuguese and crucially also focusing on less widely-studied varieties such as Sursilvan, Neapolitan, and Asturian. The investigation first reveals that several varieties display more complex systems than the binary masculine/feminine contrast familiar from modern French or Italian. Moreover, it emerges that traditional accounts, whereby neuter gender was lost in the spoken Latin of the late Empire, cannot be correct: instead, the neuter gender underwent a range of different transformations from Late Latin onwards, which are responsible for the different systems that can be observed today across the Romance languages. The volume provides a detailed description of many of these systems, which in turns reveals a wealth of fascinating data, such as varieties where'husbands'are feminine and others where'wives'are masculine; dialects in which nouns overtly mark gender, but only in certain syntactic contexts; and one Romance variety (Asturian) in which it appears that grammatical gender has split into two concurrent systems. The volume will appeal to linguists from a range of backgrounds, including Romance linguistics, historical linguistics, typology, and morphosyntax, and is also of relevance to those working in sociology, gender studies, and psychology.

The Enciclopedia de Linguistica Hispánica provides comprehensive coverage of the major and subsidiary fields of Spanish linguistics. Entries are extensively cross-referenced and arranged alphabetically within three main sections:Part 1 covers linguistic disciplines, approaches and methodologies. Part 2 brings together the grammar of Spanish, including subsections on phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Part 3 brings together the historical, social and geographical factors in the evolution of Spanish. Drawing on the expertise of a wide range of contributors from across the Spanish-speaking world the Enciclopedia de Linguistica Hispánica is an indispensable reference for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Spanish, and for anyone with an academic or professional interest in the Spanish language/Spanish linguistics.

This book investigates the changes that affected vowel length during the development of Latin into the Romance languages and dialects. In Latin, vowel length was contrastive (e.g. pila'ball'vs. pila'pile', like English bit vs. beat), but no modern Romance language has retained that same contrast. However, many non-standard Romance dialects (as well as French, up to the early 20th century) have developed novel vowel length contrasts, which are investigated in detail here. Unlike previous studies of this phenomenon, this book combines detailed historical evidence spanning three millennia (as attested by extant texts) with extensive data from present-day Romance varieties collected from first-hand fieldwork, which are subjected to both phonological and experimental phonetic analysis. Professor Loporcaro puts forward a detailed account of the loss of contrastive vowel length in late Latin, showing that this happened through the establishment of a process which lengthened all stressed vowels in open syllables, as in modern Italian casa ['ka:sa]. His analysis has implications for many of the most widely-debated issues relating to the origin of novel vowel length contrasts in Romance, which are also shown to have been preserved to different degrees in different areas. The detailed investigation of the rise and fall of vowel length in dozens of lesser-known (non-standard) varieties is crucial in understanding the development of this aspect of Romance historical phonology, and will be of interest not only to researchers and students in comparative Romance linguistics, but also, more generally, to phonologists and those interested in historical linguistics beyond the Latin-Romance language family.