Yakov Malkiel

Perspectives on historical linguistics

1. Prefatory note 2. Table of contents 3. Charts, figures and tables 4. Abbreviations 5. 1. Introduction: diachronic linguistics (by Lehmann, Winfred P.) 6. 2. Building on empirical foundations (by Labov, William) 7. 3. A semiotic model of diachronic process phonology (by Dressler, Wolfgang U.) 8. 4. Semantically-marked root morphemes in diachronic morphology (by Malkiel, Yakov) 9. 5. From propositional to textual and expressive meanings some semantic-pragmatic aspects of grammaticalization (by Traugott, Elizabeth Closs) 10. 6. Romance Etymology (by Dworkin, Steven N.) 11. 7. Indo-european etymology with special reference to grammatical category (by Justus, Carol F.) 12. Bibliography 13. Subject index 14. Author index

Lexical Borrowing in the Romance Languages: A Critical Study of Italianisms in French and Gallicisms in Italian from 1100 to 1900

Reviewed by YAKOV MALKIEL, University of California, Berkeley Hopes exceptionally serious book, which may well embody the fruit of ten years or more of sustained research, has so far produced a weak impact. Perhaps a study devoted, in the main, to French and Italian should for practical purposesi.e. out of consideration for the vast majority of its prospective readers-have been submitted in one of these two world languages; thirty-odd years earlier another Englishman, William D. Elcock, achieved a major success with his monograph on Pyrenean dialects (1938), a probe phrased in splendid French. A weak alternative might have been to offer such a study in German as the traditional medium of comparative Romance linguistics. Weightier reasons for the relative indifference of critics have been the two facts that Elcocks light-winged book, at the time of its appearance, seemed to stand very close to the front-line of research, whereas Hs far more cumbersome investigation, except for the concluding pages, does not give the impression of echoing any part of the spectrum of tastes of the early seventies, however liberal ones interpretation of that spectrum; and, further, that the heavy architecture of the two volumes obstructs, rather than facilitates, the view.

A tentative typology of romance historical grammars

Abstract This exploratory essay applies the typological method to the classification, not of languages, but of diachronic linguistic analyses, most of which may be subsumed under the traditional label of “historical grammar”. In this pilot study the material tends to be limited to Romance, but the method, after certain adjustments, lends itself to discernibly wider application. The purpose of the inquiry is to establish a number of frequently recurrent distinctive features whose varying constellations — some of them fairly unusual or even potential rather than real — are apt to characterize, with formulaic brevity, the peculiar slant of each such diachronic study. The full bibliographic clues to those researches which have here deserved mention — not infrequently, oblique or parenthetic — have been assembled in a Supplement.

Multi-conditioned sound change and the impact of morphology on phonology

Two ill-defined and controversial sound developments of late Old Spanish, namely the asymmetric diphthongizatigns ie > i and ue > e, become better understandable if one selects as starting points a set of morphological rather than phonological conditions. Both verbal inflection and suffixal derivation can be invoked, including the rivalry of certain characteristic groups of preterits (-iemos, -ieste(s) beside -imos, -iste(s) etc.) and the competition of pairs or clusters of functionally more or less related suffixes: -ero beside -uero, -enio alongside -uenio-in addition to the pressure exerted, in the ranks of hypocoristics, by the close-knit series -ico, -ito and -in(o) on isolated -iello.

Excessive self-assertion in glottodiachrony: Portuguese sofrer and its Latin and Spanish counterparts

Abstract In certain cultural contents of bilingualism one should expect an occasional over-reaction to the linguistic pressure exerted by the dominant language on the weaker, endangered language desperately struggling for survival. The tendency will be for speakers of the embattled language to purge their speech of any feature obtrusively reminiscent of its aggressive cognate. Precisely such a situation obtained in late medieval and 16th-century Portugal constantly exposed to uncomfortable Spanish pressure. One difference between the two Peninsular tongues being the preference for -er verbs in the West and for -ir verbs in the Center, within the vernacular level, the Lusophones could well have ‘overasserted’ their identity by selecting -er beyond the foreseeable norm.

Studies in the transfer of a word to a different lexical family: the case of spanish "apurar"/"apuro"

* mologists, it is nothing short of a miracle that, , I with a cluster of words as rich in semantic nearincompatibilities as has been the lexical group Nm centering about the verb apurar and its nominal offshoot apuro, there should nevertheless have prevailed for centuries a virtually complete unanimity of scholarly opinion. That this has actually been the case will at once follow from consultation of two sources chronologically as distant from each other as the Tesoro by the pioneer lexicographer Sebastian de Covarrubias and, at the opposite end of the line, the revised 20th edition (1984) of the standard normative dictionary, not devoid of etymological elaborations, by the Real Academia Espaniola. Covarrubias, not insignificantly, busied himself with apurar on two occasions, listing the verb, first, for its own sake, with special attention to the infinitive and the past participle; providing the much-needed etymon; and setting off the different semantic nuances

Two issues of authorship and influence in turn-of-the-century French linguistics

Abstract Our grasp of two important episodes in the history of linguistic science, with heightened attention riveted to the French arena, invites certain corrections or, at least, qualifications. First: semantics clad in its new grab was launched, almost a century ago, not by Breal in splendid isolation, but by the triumvirate A. Darmesteter/Littre/Breal, with the original gambits made before Littres death in 1881. Second: medical, especially pathalogical, metaphors in the analysis of word histories, favored by J. Gillieron and his school of dialect geographers and diachronic lexicologists, go back to a once famous, but later practically forgotten essay by Littre, a scholar known for his finely chiseled style. This idiosyncrasy makes excellent sense once it has been placed in the framework of Littres professional aspirations: for many years his dream was to become a medical doctor.

Esbozos de dos estudios de lexicología diacrónica

This essay consists of two different studies. First, it resumes the discussion about matar and its derivatives that has lasted for centuries. Rematar y arrematar are different verbs, but its usage is almost the same. It is suspected that there was a secondary association between (a)rrematar and two other verbs in Medieval Spanish: (a)rremeter and (a)rrebatar. (A)rrematar has lexical developments in Jewish-Spanish, Old Spanish and Modern Spanish in dialectal areas. Secondly, this essay deals with the problem posed by menudencia in Spanish and miudeza in Portuguese. In spite of the fact that menudencia does not pose etymological problems, the origin of the Portuguese term miudu (related to miudeza) is surprising. It is also exceptional that the suffix -eza, typical of the Western parts of the Peninsula, should correspond to -encia in the Central region. Around 1400 both the norm of compatibility and the coincidence of d and z were altered (as in menud- and menuz-) and this circumstance led the speaker to coin a new abstract term in order to match menud-o in Spanish (and meudo, miudo in Portughese). Since -encia in Spanish and -eza in Portuguese were in vogue at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the speakers constructed menudencia and miud-eza, though there remained traces of this dual operation of composition.

Erratic Derivational or Compositional Designs as Clues to Word Origins

Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1989), pp. 379-390

Latino, grammatica, volgare: storia di una questione umanistica

Presentation de la controverse a Florence au 15e siecle sur la langue latine parlee a Rome, suivie des principaux textes