Gender from Latin to Romance

Gender from Latin to Romance PDF Author: Michele Loporcaro
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199656541
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
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.

Gender from Latin to Romance

Gender from Latin to Romance PDF Author: Michele Loporcaro
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199656541
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Manual of Deixis in Romance Languages

Manual of Deixis in Romance Languages PDF Author: Konstanze Jungbluth
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110317737
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 790

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Book Description
Deixis as a field of research has generated increased interest in recent years. It is crucial for a number of different subdisciplines: pragmatics, semantics, cognitive and contrastive linguistics, to name just a few. The subject is of particular interest to experts and students, philosophers, teachers, philologists, and psychologists interested in the study of their language or in comparing linguistic structures. The different deictic structures – not only the items themselves, but also the oppositions between them – reflect the fact that neither the notions of space, time, person nor our use of them are identical cross-culturally. This diversity is not restricted to the difference between languages, but also appears among related dialects and language varieties. This volume will provide an overview of the field, focusing on Romance languages, but also reaching beyond this perspective. Chapters on diachronic developments (language change), comparisons with other (non-)European languages, and on interfaces with neighboring fields of interest are also included. The editors and authors hope that readers, regardless of their familiarity with Romance languages, will gain new insights into deixis in general, and into the similarities and differences among deictic structures used in the languages of the world.

Social Variation and the Latin Language

Social Variation and the Latin Language PDF Author: J. N. Adams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107354692
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 957

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Book Description
Languages show variations according to the social class of speakers and Latin was no exception, as readers of Petronius are aware. The Romance languages have traditionally been regarded as developing out of a 'language of the common people' (Vulgar Latin), but studies of modern languages demonstrate that linguistic change does not merely come, in the social sense, 'from below'. There is change from above, as prestige usages work their way down the social scale, and change may also occur across the social classes. This book is a history of many of the developments undergone by the Latin language as it changed into Romance, demonstrating the varying social levels at which change was initiated. About thirty topics are dealt with, many of them more systematically than ever before. Discussions often start in the early Republic with Plautus, and the book is as much about the literary language as about informal varieties.

Social Variation and the Latin Language

Social Variation and the Latin Language PDF Author: J. N. Adams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521886147
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 957

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Book Description
A major history of many of the developments undergone by the Latin language as it changed into Romance languages. A distinction is made between linguistic change emanating from higher social/educational groups ('change from above') and that emanating from lower social/educational groups ('change from below').

The Romance Languages

The Romance Languages PDF Author: Rebecca Posner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521281393
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
What is a Romance language? How is one Romance language related to others? How did they all evolve? And what can they tell us about language in general? In this comprehensive survey Rebecca Posner, a distinguished Romance specialist, examines this group of languages from a wide variety of perspectives. Her analysis combines philological expertise with insights drawn from modern theoretical linguistics, both synchronic and diachronic. She relates linguistic features to historical and sociological factors, and teases out those elements which can be attributed to divergence from a common source and those which indicate convergence towards a common aim. Her discussion is extensively illustrated with new and original data, and an up-to-date and comprehensive bibliography is included. This volume will be an invaluable and authoritative guide for students and specialists alike.

Sexing the World

Sexing the World PDF Author: Anthony Corbeill
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400852463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender—masculine eyes (oculi), feminine trees (arbores), neuter bodies (corpora). Sexing the World surveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and the human hermaphrodite. Beginning with the ancient grammarians, Anthony Corbeill examines how these scholars used the gender of nouns to identify the sex of the object being signified, regardless of whether that object was animate or inanimate. This informed the Roman poets who, for a time, changed at whim the grammatical gender for words as seemingly lifeless as "dust" (pulvis) or "tree bark" (cortex). Corbeill then applies the idea of fluid grammatical gender to the basic tenets of Roman religion and state politics. He looks at how the ancients tended to construct Rome's earliest divinities as related male and female pairs, a tendency that waned in later periods. An analogous change characterized the dual-sexed hermaphrodite, whose sacred and political significance declined as the republican government became an autocracy. Throughout, Corbeill shows that the fluid boundaries of sex and gender became increasingly fixed into opposing and exclusive categories. Sexing the World contributes to our understanding of the power of language to shape human perception.

Gender from Latin to Romance

Gender from Latin to Romance PDF Author: Michele Loporcaro
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191848100
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This text explores grammatical gender in the Romance languages and dialects and its evolution from Latin. It outlines the significant diversity found in the Romance varieties in this regard and uses this variation to show that traditional accounts of the loss of neuter gender cannot be correct.

From Latin to Romance

From Latin to Romance PDF Author: Adam Ledgeway
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199584376
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
This book examines grammatical changes during the transition from Latin to the Romance languages and the factors proposed to explain them. It challenges orthodoxy, presents new perspectives on language change, structure, and variation, and will appeal equally to Romance linguists, Latinists, philologists, and historical linguists of all persuasions.

Romance Languages

Romance Languages PDF Author: Ti Alkire
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521889154
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
This book describes the changes which led from colloquial Latin to the five major Romance languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian.

From Latin to Romance in Sound Charts

From Latin to Romance in Sound Charts PDF Author: Peter Boyd-Bowman
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 9780878400775
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
This handbook offers a synopsis of the regular changes that Latin words underwent in the course of their evolution into modern Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, with their English cognates). Although it is intended for the nonspecialist, students of Romance philology will find it useful as a ready reference and as a source of abundant examples of Latin sound changes. The synopsis is presented in the form of separate alphabetical charts for each major sound change. The rules, stated as simply as possible, do not generally explain the evolution of the changes, but only the end results. For those desiring further information, there are notes after most rules outlining exceptions to or modifications of that rule and often sketching successive stages in the development of the sound. Several minor or sporadic sound changes are also treated in note form. Each chart is supplemented by a list of additional words illustrating the same sound change. From Latin to Roman in Sound Charts has been used successfully as a graduate level text for such courses as History of Spanish, History of French, and Romance Linguistics.