Diachronic Studies in Romance Linguistics

JANUA LINGUARUM
STUDIA M E M O R I A E
NICOLAI VAN WIJK DEDICATA
edenda curat
C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD
Indiana University
Series practica, 207

DIACHRONIC STUDIES
IN
ROMANCE LINGUISTICS
Papers presented at the
Conference on Diachronie Romance Linguistics
University of Illinois, April 1972
edited by
MARIO SALTARELLI
and
DIETER WANNER
University of Illinois
1975
MOUTON
THE HAGUE · PARIS
© Copyright 1975
Mouton & Co. B.V., Publishers, The Hague
No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm,
or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.
ISBN£9027934738
Printed in The Netherlands by Zuid-Nederlandsche Drukkerij N.V., 's-Hertogenbosch

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to express our thanks to all the persons and institutions that made the
venture of the Conference on Diachronie Romance Linguistics possible. In the first
place, thanks are due to the participants in CDRL, especially to those who presented
papers and thereby created this volume; thanks are also due to the organizers of the
Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages I (University of Florida, Gainesville;
February 17-21, 1971) for creating this forum, and to the organizers of LSRL III
(Indiana University, Bloomington; March 29-31, 1973) for carrying on this tradition.
The generous efforts of the following departments and centers at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provided the necessary financial resources for CDRL:
The Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese; The Department of The
Classics; The Department of French; The Department of Linguistics; The Center for
Latin American Studies. We would like to thank them for their support. We also wish
to thank the Center for Advanced Study for its hospitality. Finally, our thanks go to the
graduate students of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese for their
help in the organization of the meetings, and to Saul Wax for his assistance in the
preparation of the abstracts of the papers published in this volume. For constant
aid in editing the manuscript we wish to thank Susan Gonzo.
M.S.
D.W.
CONTENTS
Preface EX
Abstracts l
FREDERICK B. AGARD
A New Look at Linguistic Split in Romance 11
JEAN CASAGRANDE
Fossilization in French Syntax 23
JAMES FOLEY
Latin Origin of Romance Rules 37
GEORGIA M. GREEN
Tracing the Source of a Lexical Gap 55
DANIEL E. GULSTAD
Syntactico-Semantic Reconstruction in Romance 63
JAMES W. HARRIS
Diphthongization, Monophthongization, Metaphony Revisited 85
HENRY KAHANE
The Etymologist as a Transformationalist 99
JÜRGEN KLAUSENBURGER
Latin Vocalic Quantity to Quality: A Pseudo-Problem? 107
ROBIN LAKOFF
Contextual Change and Historical Change: The Translator as Time Machine 119
3. PETER MÄHER
The Situational Motivation of Syntax and the Syntactic Motivation of
Polysemy and Semantic Change: Spanish-Italian Bravo, etc 135
CARLOS OTERO
The Development of the Clitics in Hispano-Romance 153
REBECCA POSNER
Semantic Change or Lexical Change? 177
SANFORD A. SCHANE
Some Diachronie Deletion Processes and Their Synchronic Consequences in
French 183
VIII CONTENTS
ROYAL SKOUSEN
The Verbal System of French 195
PAOLO VALESIO
Hysteron Proteron and the Structure of Discourse 207
BRUCE WILLIS
That Erudite Enigma Revisited 235
PREFACE
The papers contained in this volume were presented at the Conference on Diachronie
Romance Linguistics held at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, on April21-22,
1972. The conference, directed by the editors of this volume, was sponsored by The
Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, The Department of The Classics,
The Department of French, The Department of Linguistics, and the Center for Latin
American Studies.
The idea behind the conference was not entirely new, but was, rather, a continuation
of the notion set forth at the first Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages
which was held at the University of Florida, Gainesville, in February 1971. The
meeting was very well attended, drawing scholars from all over North America and
Europe as well. Its proceedings, Generative Studies in Romance Languages, edited by
J. Casagrande and B. Saciuk, were published in 1972. The general philosophy behind
the renewed interest in romance languages which has prompted the institution of
these symposia was recently described by Jean Casagrande as follows:
The Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages... is aimed at encouraging studies of and
providing a forum for exchanges of ideas about the area of linguistic research defined loosely
as the intersection of current theoretical thought and the Romance languages. There is not a
priori exclusion of any of the Romance languages, or any areas of studies such as synchronic,
diachronic, descriptive or applied. Any of the modern competing theories, revision of
theoretical views, and the like should be welcome. The overriding principle is that work
presented at LSRL's should be novel.
The success of LSRL I led both the organizers and participants to consider the
possibility of repeating such a meeting in the following year, and with the organization
of LSRL II at the University of Illinois began the establishment of the Linguistic
Symposia on Romance Languages as an annual tradition. In the planning of CDRL
the editors felt it would be advisable not only to repeat an event like LSRL I, but also
to try to expand its formula in such a way that the two meetings together could
cover the potential range of interests represented in the field of Romance linguistics.
As a result, LSRL II concentrates on questions of historical linguistics, an aspect of
Romance linguistics which has been the dominant direction of research for a long
X PREFACE
time. Since the focus of the conference was on historical problems, LSRL II became
known as the Conference on Diachronie Romance Linguistics.
It is evident from a superficial inspection of the table of contents of this volume
that CDRL follows the tradition begun by LSRL I in that it focuses on the Romance
languages in their linguistic implications. But in order to counterbalance the restriction
on diachrony it was decided to interpret the two delimiting bounds of the LSRL idea
— the Romance languages and generative transformational grammar — in a some-
what broader sense than had been the case for LSRL I. In terms of Romance languages,
this meant that Latin could be included within the scope of the conference. In terms
of generative grammar it was felt that the focus in LSRL I should be broadened for
this conference to make room for other theoretical approaches. The editors believed
that the newness of the generative transformational approach to historical questions,
especially in contrast with the long-standing tradition of Romance philology and
linguistics, is an open invitation to try a multifaceted approach which would hopefully
prove fruitful. As has long been recognized, the important aspect is not the technique
producing the results nor the formalism expressing them, but the degree to which
linguistic analyses and theoretical constructs are amenable to significant questioning.
Thus, questions dealing with etymology, a field which is non-existent in transforma-
tional theory, share equal status with syntactic or phonological problems.
The offical call for abstracts for CDRL stated with emphasis that since recent
studies have dealt primarily with phonology and morphology, this conference wished
to encourage investigations in syntax and semantics from a diachronic point of view
as well. In addition it was hoped that attention would be directed to lately neglected
areas of study such as Classical and Vulgar Latin, Sardinian, Provengal, Latin
American dialects, Catalan, Rheto-Romance, and Macedo-Romanian. The response
to this was clearly positive as the reader may see in running through the titles of the
published contributions.
The fact that the papers in this volume are arranged in alphabetical order is not
intended to reveal a failure to detect a common denominator or to find some more
expressive principle of sequencing the individual papers. But given the structure of the
field, the openness of most of the questions, and the diversity of the approaches to a
given problem, it seemed to the editors that they should not impose a premature
classification and evaluation of the ongoing, or even barely beginning, process of
investigation.
The written versions of the conference papers, including additions and corrections
made after the meeting, are published as prepared by the authors except for minor
editorial adjustments. Professor Eric P. Hamp's paper on "Relatives in Albanian and
Latin" did not reach us in time for inclusion in the volume. Professor James A. Foley
could not be present to read his paper but sent the text for inclusion in the proceedings.
In addition to the formal reading and discussion of papers, CDRL also featured a
panel discussion by invited speakers on a number of prominent topics in general and
Romance historical linguistics. The record of the discussions that took place after
PREFACE XI
each paper and during the workshop is on tape. Because of the expense and the
difficulty involved in transcribing the material, it is not included in this volume. An
abstracted version of each paper is provided at the beginning of the book for the
reader's convenience.
The sixteen papers gathered here do not constitute an organic whole to any higher
degree than do the Romance languages and their historical evolution. The editors
feel that the value of this collection will stem primarily from the continuation of the
tradition of Romance linguistics in its many shapes, and from the attempts to probe
into new territory. The purpose of CDRL is fulfilled if it can serve to stimulate
renewed interest in forgotten topics as well as promoting interest in topics not yet
discovered, and if it can provide some new insights in previously well investigated
areas.
February 1973 Mario Saltarelli

University of Illinois Dieter Wanner
ABSTRACTS
A NEW LOOK AT LINGUISTIC SPLIT IN ROMANCE
Agard refers to the second and fifth postulates of his article "Language and dialect:
some tentative postulates" Linguistics 65 (1971) as his starting point. The first of the
two states: "any two coexisting linguistic systems... are BY STRUCTURAL CRITERIA
either dialects of the same language or separate languages." If structural parameters
can be developed and validated, then the means of differentiation will have diachronic
implications, allowing a linguistic change to be identified as the creation of two or
more languages from two or more dialects of one language. Historical linguists have
long tried to do this, constructing Stammbaüme on the general look of comparative
data, but they have confused the concepts of language and dialect. Thus there are no
objective bases for their geneologies. One way the data can impose an empirically
determined solution is illustrated, based on phonological data. The second of the
relevant postulates identifies the mechanism by which an antecedent language with
two dialects splits into two descendent languages. Two languages result when different
synchronic rules trigger a restructuring of the set of underlying phonemes in each
dialect so they do not meet the criteria of the first postulate of interest here. This
split may then be reformulated in terms of diachronic phonological rules. Agard
considers the split of (1) Latin into Insular and Mainland Romance, (2) Mainland
into Eastern and Italo-Western, (3) Italo-Western into Northern and Southern
Romance, (4) Southern into Italo- and Southwestern Romance, (5) Southwestern
into South-Gallo, East Ibero-, Central Ibero- and West Ibero-Romance, and (6) West
Ibero-Romance into Galician and Portuguese.
FOSSILIZATION IN FRENCH SYNTAX
Casagrande proposes that the notion of fossilization be included among the categories
relevant for both diachronic and synchronic description of language: "Fossilization
is a trend towards the freezing-up, the coagulation into a rigid form of one or more
2 ABSTRACTS
otherwise viable items." An example of what Casagrande understands as a synchronic

(= derivational) fossil is si 'if. It is argued that this surface conjunction is best
viewed as an underlying world-creating verb, which, however, in contradistinction to
most other such verbs fails to undergo a number of rules, surfacing therefore in the
invariable shape si which has no superficial formal traits of a verb. The nature of a
diachronic fossil, on the other hand, can be illustrated by the evolution of void/voila.
These now rigid forms derive historically from normally inflected verbal constructions
vois ci (sg.), voyez ci (pi.) 'look here!' which subsequently lost most of their syntactic
freedom in the evolution of French. Although the synchronic and diachronic fossils
are not identical, they would, according to Casagrande, be treated identically in a
synchronic grammar since both are the result of a failure to undergo general rules.
The adoption of fossilization as a grammatical process would then provide a natural
way to incorporate into a synchronic grammar of language those elements which are
the result of synchronically opaque diachronic events. On the same scale, this mecha-
nism would explain the parallelism of items which do not have earlier non-fossilized
manifestations. It is also speculated that the concept of fossilization correlates signifi-
cantly with the availability of lexical items for borrowing from one language into
another: Fossilized forms (mainly adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions) are the least
likely to be transmitted among languages, whereas free forms (nouns, adjectives,
verbs) could flow unhindered. Casagrande finally points out some difficulties which
remain with the concept of fossilization.
LATIN ORIGIN OF ROMANCE RULES
Foley claims that the phonological processes responsible for the historical evolution
from Latin to Romance did not come into being de novo but that they belong to a
universal set of rules: "Since the set of universal rules is a small subset of the set of
possible rules, the universal rules of Language occur repeatedly in particular lan-
guages." He illustrates the relation between the Latin and Romance grammars with
representative examples of various types of rule repetition, rule generalization, and
rule persistence. The reoccurrence of rules can take many forms: (a) simple repetition
(h deletion in Latin and French); (b) repetition with a different phonetic manifestation
(the inchoative suffix *tk becomes, through the operation of the same rule, but
resulting in different realizations, sk in Latin and &k in Castilian); (c) repetition
involving different elements (Grassmann's Law eliminates consecutive aspirates in
Latin; in Spanish consecutive labiovelars were changed as in quinque to *kinkwe);
(d) restricted repetition (Early Romance underwent gradation of geminates, inter-
vocalic voiceless and voiced obstruents; later on Spanish underwent gradation again
which affected only voiced obstruents). Rules may also generalize in different ways:
(a) The rule itself generalizes (in Latin z before a voiced consonant deletes; in French s
and z before any consonant are dropped); (b) the rule environment may generalize
ABSTRACTS 3
(Lt. Vns > Vs (> Vs), Fr. VNC > VC); (c) the rule environment generalizes by
dropping an intervening morpheme boundary (Lt. #s+C becomes #es+C by
prothesis; in Spanish the rule applies to all #sCyielding #esC); (d) the generalization
can affect the similarity requirement (in Latin only like vowels are contracted, e.g.
a + o > o, but not e+o, i+o; in Spanish all these vowel sequences contract to o).
Finally a rule may persist rather than being repeated or generalized. This also means
that it is possible for a rule not to operate in Latin but to be documented in an earlier
and again in a later phase. (Labial dentalization is attested for Greek and Spanish,
-m# > -n#, but it is apparently absent from Latin.) Such rules are to be considered
not absent from, but rather latent in the intermediary stage.
TRACING THE SOURCE OF A LEXICAL GAP
Green observes that French lacks the instrumental causative type of adjective com-
plement construction which is very common in English. The claim is that there is a
gap, perhaps lexical, derivational, or syntactic between some French words and their
English counterparts. English also has instrumental constructions with adverbs and
particles, and other causative or resultative idiomatic expressions, similar to the
instrumental causative constructions with adjectives. French has few of these con-
structions. If this gap is not coincidental, and a lack of coincidence is suggested by
similar gaps in Spanish and Italian, but not in German or Danish, then it must be
explained by systematic differences between Romance and Germanic languages. Latin
lacks the instrumental causative construction too, further indicating a lack of
coincidence for the gap between French and English. In Green (1970), it is suggested
that the existence of numerous particle and adverb constructions in the three Germanic
languages mentioned above makes it natural that adjectives could be used with
instrumental verbs in a parallel causative construction. In this paper it is suggested
that this relationship is a consequence of still to be understood principles of derivational
morphology peculiar to the language family, and that the instrumental causative
S-V-O-Adj constructions in the Germanic languages have nothing to do with other
S-V-O-Adj constructions which are common to both Germanic and Romance
languages.
SYNTACTICO-SEMANTIC RECONSTRUCTION IN ROMANCE
The three areas of greatest success in 19th-century comparative linguistics were

phonology, morphology, and semantics. Apart from the identification of case in-
flections and other functives, however, little progress has been made in comparative
syntax. In semantics, too, progress was limited to the sort discussed by Breal in 1897
and catalogued in Buck's monumental Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the
4 ABSTRACTS
Principal Indo-European Languages, which are masterly works but not at all formalized.
Since syntax implies synchrony and semantics is equally synchronic, it is reasonable
that both should have defied previous comparative efforts, which were surface-
structure oriented. When we apply modern linguistic insight, however, the circum-
stances are reversed. Despite the abundance of exciting reconstructions that have
resulted from the comparison of lexical and morphological elements among the
Romance languages, there is reason to doubt that the surface case system, the system
of synthetic passives, the synthetic future, and so on could be deduced without the
aid of intermediate or ultimate documentation. On the other hand, with the aid of
deep grammar and discourse-sensitive semantic primes, it is possible to synthetically
reproduce a reasonable facsimile of the Latin system. [Author's abstract]
DIPHTHONGIZATION, MONOPHTHONGIZATION, METAPHONY REVISITED
Harris refers to Malkiel's article "Diphthongization, monophthongization, metaphony:

studies in their interaction with the paradigm of Old Spanish -ir verb". Harris con-
centrates on three related points: the role of metaphony in the history of Spanish
third conjugation, the genesis of a rule of dissimilation, and the cleavage into diph-
thongizing and non-diphthongizing stems from Vulgar Latin. Approaching metaphony
first, the Vulgar Latin paradigm ofmetio, metire 'to measure' is posited. At the earliest
stage the stem vowel was invariably long e. This paradigm was replaced in early
Spanish by one in which e is replaced by i in the subjunctive and first person singular
of the indicative, where the raising phenomenon is attributed to the effect of Phonetic
Metaphony. Harris posits, in addition, a Third Conjugation Metaphony rule which
accounts for the divergence between third conjugation forms and other forms. The
account presented is supported by the fact that modern Spanish second conjugation
may be viewed as a generalization of Third Conjugation Metaphony presented as
Stem-Theme Harmony. The Old Spanish dissimilation class of verbs consisted of
stems with etymological mid-vowels and reflexes of long i and u. Malkiel considers a
change in the paradigm of Old Spanish due to analogical diffusion. Harris adds an
Analogical Metaphony rule, in addition to Phonetic Metaphony which cannot
account alone for the high vowels of the new paradigm. At this stage, it is posited,
the grammar is restructured in terms of a single general rule of Third Conjugation
Metaphony plus a Dissimilation rule. Finally, diphthongs and monophthongs are
considered. They coexisted for a considerable period in Old Spanish. Malkiel claims
that diphthongs were converted to monophthongs by sound change. Harris discusses
difficulties in this analysis and concludes that sound change is not involved. Rather,
at one time there were two variant pronunciations one of which simply disappeared.
ABSTRACTS 5
THE ETYMOLOGIST AS A TRANSFORMATIONALIST
Kahane presents a tongue-in-cheek redefinition of etymology into transformational

terminology, where an underlying form, or an historically antecedent form is called
deep structure, and the latest stage which one is interested in is called surface structure.
This recasting of etymology is presented by Kahane in a wonderfully entertaining
and erudite manner. An outline of the paper follows. (1) In spite of the humble role
that this subfield plays in present-day linguistics, etymology has remarkable vitality;
it involves the transformationalist's steps that relate the deep structure to surface
structure. (2) Empirically the etymologist starts from the surface forms and arrives
at the underlying forms; theoretically 'elegance' or simplicity but not directionality
is the relevant criterion. (3) The mechanism connecting etyma to present-day forms
is a function of phonological, semantic and cultural phenomena, (4) where the relevant
development is from culture to meaning to symbolization. (5) The identification of the
phonological components is prior: from a posited Latin etymon to a proto-Romance
canon to a present-day form. In the process, the concepts of exception and inter-
ference are developed. (6) The semantics of the etymon follows according to develop-
ments in semantic fields and actual word usage. (7) The language-culture link is
studied through linguistic geology, geography and sociology. (8) In conclusion
etymology is in accordance with linguistic transformationalism, which is only one
facet of intellectual history.
LATIN VOCALIC QUANTITY TO QUALITY: A PSEUDO-PROBLEM?
Klausenburger reopens the question of the Vulgar Latin vowel shift from distinctive
vocalic length in Classical Latin to distinctive vocalic height in Vulgar Latin by
contending that the question does not amount to more than a pseudo-problem once
it is translated from the wrong taxonomic formulation aiming at the phonemic
distinctiveness into the more relevant category of the phonetic reality of Latin. On
the basis of data from all stages of Latin evolution Klausenburger argues that it is
fully sufficient to posit one abstract feature of tenseness which, through the mediation
of two conversion rules, is able to specify two phonetic features, vocalic length and
openness, expressing thereby the concomitance of these phonetic properties for all
stages of Latin. He quotes as evidence the inscriptional data of Old Latin which show
frequent merger of Cl.Lt. / and u with e and ä respectively. Similarly, the other italic
dialects, especially Oscan, demonstrate the same mergers in their sound and writing
systems. On this basis it is possible, according to Klausenburger, to include Classical
Latin into the data relevant for the natural evolution of Latin and to solve the puzzle
of the Vulgar Latin vowel shift within a framework of phonetic plausibility.
6 ABSTRACTS
CONTEXTUAL CHANGE AND HISTORICAL CHANGE: THE TRANSLATOR AS

TIME MACHINE
In addition to the traditionally recognized areas of historical change — phonology,

morphology, syntax, semantics — Lakoff argues that contextual change is also of
relevance to the historical and synchronic researcher. She states that in the same way
that non-denotative, 'psychological' factors (such as presuppositions, implications)
actually are at the base of many syntactic peculiarities of a language, the changes in
the material, cultural, emotional, intellectual space ('context') surrounding a language
may have an effect on the language. Consequently this aspect of change cannot be
disregarded by linguistics because it has its direct repercussions on the meaning of the
utterances made in a given language. Thus, since meaning is very much a part of
language, context is also a part of it and therefore must be incorporated into any
relevant linguistic theory. The aim of historical linguistics is to provide a model of
how language changes in and through its context. Lakoff illustrates the need for the
inclusion of contextual dimensions with the problems confronting a translation of the
Aeneidby Virgil. Through its heavy reliance on contextual assumptions relating to the
Roman culture of the first century B.C. this work constitutes a particularly thorny
problem. The translations usually fail on the same problems since it is not possible
to translate the context. If translation difficulties arise on the phonological, syntactic,
and lexical levels through the operation of linguistic change, it is compelling, according
to Lakoff, to view the contextual problems as being on the same linguistically signifi-
cant level. Since the work of poetry, here the Aeneid, exists through language, the
inability to recreate it in and through another linguistic medium is a problem which
concerns linguistics directly. The field of contextual change and its function in language
change awaits, therefore, systematic exploration.
THE SITUATIONAL MOTIVATION OF SYNTAX AND THE SYNTACTIC MOTIVATION

OF POLYSEMY AND SEMANTIC CHANGE: SPANISH-ITALIAN BRAVO, ETC.
Mäher discusses the etymology of Spanish and Portuguese bravo, Italian bravo,
Provencal brau, Catalan brau, and congeners as a problem not yet resolved. The
likeliest etyma are Latin barbarus and prauus. Bravo a barbarus exacts too high a price
on both the phonological and syntactic-semantic scales. Bravo a prauus is salvageable,
but Meyer-Lubke's account is wrong. It is shown that the contention that prauus
nowhere means 'untamed' is wrong. Prauus is embedded deep in a stratum of words
that relate to horse-raising. In reference to humans, it is as much like bravo as it is in
reference to animals. The syntactic-semantic plausibility of the etymology bravo a
prauus established, the phonological relationship is established if the relevant syntax
and morphology is considered. In the Ibero-Romance and Italian section of the
derivation there is simple continuity of the Latin system. No satisfactory theory
ABSTRACTS 7
exists to establish the relationship between bravo in Ibero-Romance and in Italian.

Mäher thus examines the views of semantics held by Chomsky, and by Breal, Paul,
and Jesperson. He argues that there is leakage of semantic features across the
syntagmatic axis; that deletion of one of the terms of the syntagma with retention of
its semantic reading is possible; that syntax precipitates change in the semantic
reading of lexical items; and that, most importantly, lexical items normally receive
their full complement of semantic features only in syntax.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF CLITICS IN HISPANO-ROMANCE
Otero examines critically what seems to be the most reliable evidence for the evolution
of the Hispano-Romance pronominal and articular clitics and the relation of this
evolution to the deep structure of the Romance verb phrase. In the first section the
author argues that the clitic pronouns developed at a stage that can be characterized
as SOV (i.e. subject-object-verb), with the verb in final position (as is generally
assumed for Latin), and that the clitic articles developed at a later stage, properly
Romance stage, which can be characterized as SVO, with the verb in medial position
(as is generally assumed for the Romance languages). Since present-day forms of
Galego-Portuguese dialects and the oldest Castilian records reveal a situation of
general enclisis, the second section deals with some of the rules that might account
for the basic difference between the Enclisis Phase of the SOV stage and the present
day or Proclisis Phase of Castilian. Finally, a concluding section outlines some
possible implications of the paper's findings for the theory of language in general.
The data presented in this paper are examined in view of some controversial questions
of the day: the question of the surface constraint on clitics (Emonds vs. Perlmutter),
the question of the so-called pronouns (Delorme-Dougherty vs. Postal), and the
question of the relation between the syntactic and the phonological components
(Bresnan and Maling vs. others).
SEMANTIC CHANGE OR LEXICAL CHANGE?
Posner examines views of semantic change through history. Recent theories of

generative semantics which throw out the lexeme as the basic unit by implication
discard the whole idea of semantic change. Semantic configurations do not by defini-
tion change, all that can change are the superficial abbreviations (the lexical items)
sometimes mapped onto one configuration, sometimes onto another. The author
expresses a sense of dejä vu toward these analyses which are roughly equivalent to the
'ideas' of Locke and the eighteenth-century thinkers. It was maintained that a
linguistic item is an abbreviation for an arbitrary configuration of semantic primes.
The author continues with a historical discussion of homonymic versus polysemic
8 ABSTRACTS
models of explanation for the usage and acquisition of lexical items. The doctrinal
differences which influence a preference for one or the other are briefly explored with
reference to Saussureans. The only way it can be studied in linguistic terms, Posner
says, is to acknowledge the synchronic vagueness of a lexical item, and then attempt
to ascertain an item's limits of extension, in accordance with the structural semantics
of John Lyons. Diachronie study of semantics should also emphasize limits by tracing
loss of semic content. This approach favors the lexical rather than the semantic model.
How and why a word loses an effet de sens may be explained functionally, or by
replacement by a more attractive item. Two additional factors operate: the tendency
to use as vague a term as possible in a context which elucidates the effet de sens, and
the tendency of the two forms in free variation to specialize in different contexts.
SOME DIACHRONIC DELETION PROCESSES AND THEIR SYNCHRONIC

CONSEQUENCES IN FRENCH
Schane investigates some aspects of the relation between diachronic processes in

phonology and their subsequent synchronic reflections. He distinguishes between two
typical situations. First in the case of Old French imparisyllabic nouns (e.g. nom.
sg. cuens vs. nom. pi., ace. sg. and pi. conte(s)) the conditioning of the vowel alterna-
tion was originally dependent on the openness vs. closedness of the stressed syllable
(*comes vs. *conte). But this cannot be recovered uniquely in Old French. Therefore
it becomes necessary to express the alternation in terms of morphological conditions.
Second, the historical deletion of initial h creates for Modern French a group of
words (with so-called h aspire) which are phonetically vowel initial but which act
phonologically as if they were consonant initial since they trigger schwa- and final
consonant deletion of the preceding word as consonant initial words do. A satisfactory
description will have to state that these words indeed have underlyingly an initial
consonant, not fully specified, which then can explain the behavior of such items. The
statement of this problem in terms of morphological conditions will, however, not
reveal the true character of this case. Third, another case involving consonant deletion
(infinitives of the third conjugation, /ekriv + re/ -» [ekrir], but /viv + re/ -> [vivr])
seems to be amenable to both types of solutions, morphological and phonological.
Schane concludes from such cases that a morphological solution seems to be motivated
in those cases where the affected forms are held together by strong paradigmatic
bonds (Old French imparisyllabics), whereas in the other cases (e.g. with h aspire) a
phonological solution seems to be more appropriate. A principled decision on the
third type (third conjugation infinitives) with both open-ended and paradigmatic
aspects must be postponed until more such cases can be investigated systematically.
ABSTRACTS 9
THE VERBAL SYSTEM OF FRENCH
Skousen presents evidence from French that speakers do not (exclusively) account
for morphological regularities along the lines assumed in generative phonology, i.e.
by postulating unique underlying representations and by the application of phoneti-
cally plausible rules. He demonstrates on the basis of data drawn from diachronic
evolution and language acquisition by children that the patterning of morphological
systems according to surface forms has psychological validity. As an example, the
statistically overwhelming identity between the infinitive and the future/conditional
stem has led speakers to restructure cases of etymologically justified differentiation of
the stem on the two functions along the line of the surface regularity of identity: An
original croire vs. crerr- has given way to the Mod. Fr. coire, croir-. Similarly, in the
case of the unstressed present indicative and subjunctive stems, the majority of cases
with superficial identity have brought original voul- vs. veuill- to the modern voul-,
VOM/- in 1st and 2nd plural. Clear support for such a position comes from the fact that
the expected parallelism between a noun and verb from the same stem is not preserved:
In the case of Old Fr. je parole/ nous parlons and la parole the evolution affected the
verb stem exclusively but left the noun intact (Mod. Fr. pari- invariable verb stem vs.
unchanged la parole). This indicates that not all forms related in the generative sense
stand in a psychologically real paradigm. In such a way, Skousen argues, it is possible
to constrain analogy to mean that a speaker gives up a surface alternation within a
paradigm in favor of an actually perceived pattern of surface identity.
HYSTERON PROTERON AND THE STRUCTURE OF DISCOURSE
Linguistic change, Valesio argues, cannot be confined to changes manifested in

specific entities of a language, but it must also include the evolution undergone by the
whole set of traits characterizing a language which may differ interestingly from one
period to another. An example of such change which in this view is directly relevant
to linguistics and not just to 'style', is the complex of the so-called figures (of speech).
According to Valesio they are universal to language such that their evolution cannot
be studied in terms of their discrete presence vs. absence but only with respect to their
continuity and specific manifestation. He then presents evidence for the independent
status of Hysteron Proteron ('the last [is put] first') in Latin and Old Proven?al.
The separation of those aspects of HP which merely duplicate otherwise needed
processes of the language makes evident the incorrectness of equating HP with the
directionless process of permutation, since HP is characteristically direction specific
(from right to left). The importance of the unidirectionality of HP can be shown in
three areas: (1) If HP moves a constituent out of its originating clause into a higher
structure the case assigned to the shifted element corresponds to its function in the
higher clause (e.g. scio equidem te animatus ut sis for ...animatus tu...); (2) In
10 ABSTRACTS
structures affected by conjunction reduction/gapping the shared element should come

at the end of the compound sentence; however HP may bring it back to the middle of
the compound sentence. Only the assumption of HP allows the preservation of an
unmodified conjunction reduction/gapping process (e.g. volfe refranh ez aplana son
dous chantar et afina for ...ez aplana et afina son dous chantar); (3) The applica-
tion of HP may result in the secondary assignment of a semantic feature [+emphasis]
to the constituent shifted from its normal position into prominence (e.g. sai venc lo
reis, domes aunitz, esser soudadier logaditz for sai venc lo reis esser soudadier logaditz,
don es aunitz). Valesio concludes that HP has a separate status in syntax and that
it is more than a 'stylistic' figure since it interacts significantly with syntax and
semantics.
THAT ERUDITE ENIGMA REVISITED
Since the phonological relation between learned and popular words (in Spanish e.g.
apertura vs. abrir) has been treated in generative studies of Spanish only in its syn-
chronic aspects, Willis proposes to consider the effects which the introduction of an
increasing number of learned words must have had on the grammar of speakers of
Spanish at any given time. Starting from the assumption that a child learning his
native Spanish would relate the conflicting surface manifestations of a given stem in a
linguistically significant way, Willis presents a descriptive device which postulates
that the speaker sets up categories in the lexicon reflecting the individual applicability
of a phonological rule to a given word, thereby translating the extralinguistic categories
of 'learned' vs. 'popular' into grammar specific ones. The description requires that
each lexical entry be individually marked with arbitrary morphological features. A
combined reading of the mutually independent specifications on the component
morphemes of a word would then be interpreted by a general convention in terms of
rule applicability features to which the phonological rules would be sensitive. In this
way, Willis claims, it was possible for speakers of any stage of Spanish to systematize
the varying surface representations and thus effectively to learn the newly entering
Latinisms.
FREDERICK B. AGARD
A NEW LOOK AT LINGUISTIC SPLIT IN ROMANCE
The present paper takes as its starting point the writer's recent article "Language and
Dialect: some Tentative Postulates" (Linguistics 65 [1971]). I am concerned for the
moment with two of the postulates — the first and the fifth. The first states that "any
two coexisting linguistic systems, regardless of whether their speakers are in contact,
are BY STRUCTURAL CRITERIA either dialects of the same language or separate lan-
guages." If such structural parameters can be developed and validated, then the means
of differentiation will have diachronic implications. That is to say, linguistic changes
can be identified as constituting actual splits of one language with two or more
dialects into two or more separate languages. More precisely, a sequence of linguistic
changes observed within a given system through time can be sorted into those which
merely alter the rules operating within a language and those which actually bring
about a new language with new rules.
Let me say right here that this study has no psycholinguistic interest or implication
at all; it is intended entirely as a methodological contribution to Romance historical
linguistics and does not aim beyond 'descriptive adequacy'. I would agree that we
must view linguistic change as a vast continuum, over which every individual child
learns to speak by rules most probably somewhat different from those of the older
speakers who are his models. But if there is such a reality as a 'generation of speakers',
each adding, dropping or reordering rules, a model of this process1 is not presently
relevant to my quest for a model which will discretize (if 1 may add a rule) the long-
term continuum of linguistic change, that is to say LANGUAGE change in the sense that
one language with a given structural description becomes a new language with a new
structural description.
Actually, this sort of search has long been the preoccupation of historical linguists,
who have constructed Stammbäume on the theory that the nodes in it represent
discrete language branchings along the continuum. But in my opinion they have
mixed up the basic concepts of language and dialect and have therefore been unable
to discover truly objective bases for their genealogies. They have merely tried to
1
Like that in Otero, "Modelo del cambio lingiiistico" (1971: 110).
12 FREDERICK B. AGARD
decide, from the general look of comparative data, which of these should weigh most
heavily in determining splits and relationships. So for example (Hall 1950; Leonard
1960; Hall 1964); and what linguist has ever constructed a tree for any family of
languages that some other linguist has not found fault with? What I am doing now
is finding fault with them all for trying to speak for the data instead of letting the
data speak for themselves.
It is therefore my purpose here to illustrate one way in which the data can impose an
empirically determined solution upon the investigator. Once again the exercise will
be the construction of a Stammbaum for Romance, based on phonological data only.
This brings us then to my fifth postulate, "the phonological criterion", which says
that "a pair of systems whose cognate lexical items can be represented uniformly with
a single set of morphophones, not exceeding in size the inventory required to represent
either one of them singly, meet the phonological criterion for being dialects of a single
language." (p. 7) In the ensuing paragraph I equate the term "morphophone" with
"underlying phonological unit", and I think we can now safely say that what we mean
is SYSTEMATIC (as distinguished from AUTONOMOUS) phoneme. With this criterion as a
point of departure, I later (p. 22) go on to identify the mechanism by which an ANTE-
CEDENT language with two dialects SPLITS into two DESCENDENT languages: "It is to
be seen as a process of partially intersecting merger, such that the morphophones
required for each descendent language are reduced to the same stock... Thus from
the moment two intersecting mergers have been completed — with identical reduction
of the stock2 — one language has become two: the original single language has become
an antecedent language and the resulting two have become descendent languages.
As soon as the split has occurred, each descendent language is to be rewritten [i.e.
restructured, relexified] in terms of its own systematic requirements." It is, then,
these moments of the completion of two intersecting mergers3 — these 'moments of
truth' as it were — that we shall seek as we work our way downward in time from
Latin as our first antecedent language (itself a descendent, of course, of an earlier
antecedent), constructing our Stammbaum as we go, establishing every node and
illustratively tracing the restructurings down one branching — arbitrarily, the one
that leads to modern Portuguese. The basic assumption is that each new (descendent)
language in its turn develops dialects, each dialect having an ever-growing number
of ordered SYNCHRONIC phonological rules (P-rules, of the type /X/ -» [Y]), many of
them shared of course by two or more of the dialects, reflecting phonetic changes that
have succeeded one another until the last ones trigger the split. The subsequent
restructurings of the antecedent dialects as descendent languages may then be
2
I shall now add that the condition "identical reduction of the stock" may be revised to include
reduction IN A PARTICULAR ENVIRONMENT — e.g. that of final vowels, medial clusters or the like —
even when the phonemes eliminated in that environment may persist in other environments. The
reason for this restatement will become apparent in the course of the paper.
3
For example, that of Old Spanish /z/ with /z/ in Judeo-Spanish versus that of /z/ with /c/ in New
Castilian.
A NEW LOOK AT LINGUISTIC SPLIT IN ROMANCE 13
formulated in DIACHRONIC P-rules — i.e. phonemic changes, also ordered at least

partially, specifying mergers, splits, shifts and the rest.4
We may now position ourselves at Latin, noting first its phonemic inventory:
Vowels Consonants
i u pb td kg
e o f s h
a m n
+ [long] w 1 j
r
1. THE SPLIT OF LATIN INTO INSULAR AND MAINLAND ROMANCE
When, in insular varieties of Latin, a SYNCHRONIC P-rule is eventually added to the

grammar, which specifies that
(1) fi:lu -» ['filu] like pilu -> ['pilu]5
as part of the general process whereby all long vowels become short, i.e.
Ã+voc] -» Ã+voc], 6 thus falling together with their respective short correlates,
L+lngJ L-lngJ
insular has come to need only /i/ to underlie both ['filu] and ['pilu].
And when, in Mainland varieties of Latin, a synchronic rule is sooner or later added
which states that
(2) pilu ->· ['pelu] like welu -> ['velu]
as a result (after the feature [long] has become the feature [tense]) of non-tense [i]
lowering and tensing to fall together with tense [e], Mainland has come to need only
/e/ to represent both ['pelu] and ['velu], while /i/ becomes sufficient for ['filu] since
the tenseness there is now redundant. Thus insular ['pilu] and mainland ['pelu]
constitute a correspondence without an available underlying stressed-vowel phoneme.
In other words we have:
(3) Insular Mainland
['filu] ['filu] <- filu
['belu] ['velu] «- wSlu
but ['pilu] ['pelu] <- no one underlying form accessible
4
See especially Moulton (1967).
5
Stress is not written in the underlying phonemic representations of items which are unmarked for
stress placement. See Agard (1967) for principles which are, I assume, applicable to the present data.
6
All our rules could, and doubtless should, be written in distinctive-feature terms; but to save time
and space in the present situation I dispense with this formalization and trust that the time-honored
typographical symbols will be sufficiently unambiguous.
This sets up a zigzag configuration of potential underlying forms:7

(4) pilu, filu -« —— filu
, welu
(kelu), belu'^— (kelu)
according to which the two systems fail to meet the phonological criterion for unifica-
tion as dialects of a single language. And I shall therefore say that the antecedent
language Latin has split into two descendent languages: Insular Romance and Main-
land Romance.
Concomitantly with the above split, the 'relexification' — i.e. the restructuring of
the lexical items — of the new Insular and Mainland Romance languages are governed
by respective sets of diachronic P-rules stated in terms of the underlying phonemes of
the antecedent and the descendent language. A sampling of the diachronic rules
describing the transition from Latin to Mainland Romance:
(Ml) Mergers of /i/ with /e/ and of /§/ with /a/, reducing the vowel system to
/i § e a o 6 u ü/ after old /i/ is rewritten as /i/ (tenseness becoming redundant, as
illustrated above)
(M2) h > 0, a loss reducing the consonant inventory (e.g. Lat. ho:ra > Mid. öra)
(M3) Various partial losses, partial mergers or redistributions of existing phonemes,
resulting from the deletion of former synchronic rules (e.g. /palia > palja, puteu >
putju, anima > anema,8 pariete > parete, battue- > batte-, okulu > oklu, hi:k >
i/...).
How many languages Insular Romance has by now successively split into I do not
now attempt to say, though in all probability the present-day Campidanese, Logu-
dorese, Gallurese and Sassarese of Sardinia, not to mention Lucanian in Southern
Italy (cf. Leonard 1969), could be separated from one another by our phonological
criterion.9
2. THE SPLIT OF MAINLAND INTO EASTERN AND ITALO-WESTERN (IW) ROMANCE
When, in eastern varieties of Mainland Romance, a synchronic rule is ultimately

added which says that
(5) müru -» ['muru] like gula -» ['gula]
as part of the general process whereby tense back vowels become lax, thus falling
7
See Agard (1971: 9) for this graphic concept.
8
Stress placement is still predictable here, with non-tense /e/ as the penultimate syllabic.
9
Where [k] comes to alternate morphophonemically with [ ], as in [a'mik-] ~ [a'mic-] or ['kresk-]
~ [kresfi-], the underlying phoneme can be /k/ just as long as [k] remains in the paradigm. But to
generate [celu] from /kelu/ — which would entail deriving [ki] from /kwi/ and indeed [kwi] from
/ku+i/ — is to reject out of hand the principle of relexification.
together with their respective lax correlates, Eastern needs only /u/ to represent both
['muru] and ['gula].
And when, in IW varieties of Mainland Romance, a rule is added which says that
(6) gula -» ['göla] like sole -» ['sole]
as a result of non-tense /u/ lowering and tensing to fall together with tense [o],
Italo-Western now needs only /o/ to represent both ['göla] and ['sole], while /u/
becomes sufficient for ['müru] since the tenseness there is redundant. Thus Eastern
['gula] and Italo-Western ['göla] constitute a correspondence without an available
underlying stressed-vowel phoneme. In other words we have
(7) Eastern Italo- Western
['muru] ['muru] «- muru
['sole] ['sole] «- sole
but ['gula] ['göla] <- no one underlying form accessible.
This, again, sets up a zigzag configuration of potential underlying forms according to
which the two systems fail to qualify phonologically as dialects of one language and
thus become two separate languages.
The question of how many more descendent languages ultimately result from the
further successive splitting of Eastern Romance I am not now prepared to answer,
and the extant data are scant for ever being able to answer it precisely. However,
preliminary evidence from the author's field notes and from a thesis he recently
directed (Walls 1971) indicates that Balkan Romance soon after the turn of the
millennium (cf. also Bourciez 1946) binarily split by our present criteria into what
survives as the (Daco-) Romanian language on the one hand and the Macedo/
Megleno/Istro-'Romanian' language (with its three named dialects) on the other.
The relexification of Italo-Western Romance (IW) entails a set of diachronic rules
of which the following are examples:
(IW1) The merger of/u/ with /o/, reducing the vowel system to /i e e a o ö u/ after
old /ü/ is rewritten as /u/ (tenseness becoming redundant, as illustrated above)
(IW2) The split of /k/, adding the palatal obstruent / / (e.g. /kelu > celu, brakkju
> braocu/)10
(IW3) The split of /n/, adding the palatal nasal /ft/ (e.g. /legnu > lennu, winja >
winna/)
(IW4) Various redistributions (e.g. /odje > odje, kwetu > ketu/).
3. THE SPLIT OF ITALO-WESTERN INTO NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN ROMANCE
In the splits thus far described we have seen nothing essentially new: do we not all
10
See note 9.
know that this was the way Italo-Western came to be? The split about to be detailed,
however, hinges upon factors more complicated than simple coalescences of X with Õ
in one dialect and with Z in another. When, in Northern varieties of Italo-Western
Romance, a synchronic rule is ultimately added which says
(8) oelu -> [ce:l] like fele -> [fe:l]
as part of the general truncation process wherein all post-tonic vowels except /a/
are deleted, Northern obviously needs no final vowel to represent all items of the sort
illustrated, including those in which an earlier rule has fronted the stressed vowel [o]
in the environment of a high vowel (or glide) in the following syllable, for example
(9) nowu -» ['n0:vu] -> [n0:f] or folja -> [T01ja] or oklu -» [0jlu] -» [0jl]
as opposed to nowe -» ['no:ve] -» [noif] 11 or okto -> [Ojtu] -» [ojt] or nokte -»
['nojte] -> [nojt].
Now then, when in Southern varieties of Italo-Western Romance a rule is added
which says that
(10) oklu -> [Oklo] like okto -> [Okto]
as a result of post-tonic [u] lowering to [6] in that position, Southern needs only /o/
to represent both [Oklo] and [Okto]. Thus Northern [0jl] and Southern [Oklo]
constitute a correspondence without an available underlying stressed-vowel phoneme.
We note that /0/ is not accessible, as it was not in the IW inventory to begin with. In
other words we have:
(11) Northern Southern
[nojt] ['nokte] <- nokte
[ojt] [Okto] <- okto
but [0jl] [Oklo] <- no one underlying form available.
And this sets up a zigzag configuration of potential underlying forms according to
which the two systems must be separated.
In the relexification of Northern Romance, of particular and controversial interest
are, among other things, the split of the seven IW vowels into short and long correlates:
/i > i, i:/, /e > e, e:/, etc. according to closed versus open syllable structure (examples
above) and the further split of [ + long] /o/ into /o/ and /0/ by means of an umlauting
mechanism (examples above). This latter split is not to my knowledge generally
accepted, but it is the well-considered hypothesis of Leonard (1960) as a spin-off of
his reconstruction of Proto-Rhaeto-Romance. The related positing of vowel length —
related since both this and the fronting of [o] are upgraded to phonemic status in the
relexifying of Northern Romance as a descendent language by the loss of final vowels
11
Although I know of no way to demonstrate that the reflexes of /nowu/ and /nowe/ contrasted in
Old North French, Proto-Rhaeto-Romance as reconstructed by Leonard (1960) shows them to be
distinct, and it is on the strength of this that the present contrast is posited for undifferentiated
Northern Romance.
other than /a/ — also underlies Leonard (1970), where he posits a 'Proto-Vowel-
Length Romance' as a common reconstructible source for North French and Rhaeto-
Romance as well as Gallo-Italian, Franco-Provensal and some oddments including
Vegliote. Although I do not now agree with certain aspects of his proposed Stamm-
baum, I do tentatively equate his 'Proto-Vowel-Length' grosso modo with the Northern
Romance we have in view here, and I hope that the other systems besides North
French and Rhaeto-Romance will prove amenable to derivation by the present
criterion from the structure of this one intermediate language as posited.
How many intermediate splits there are between Northern and (a) contemporary
North French, (b) the systems now used in the Orisons, the Dolomites, and Friuli,
(c) modern Genoese, Piedmontese, Lombard, Emilian, etc. I have no way of stating
at the present time; I have simply not examined the data yet.
The relexification of Southern Romance appears to involve nothing more than the
post-tonic (therefore partial) merger of /u/ with /o/ which results from the split-
triggering synchronic rule reported above with example (10).
4. THE SPLIT OF SOUTHERN INTO ITALO- (IR) AND SOUTHWESTERN (SW)

ROMANCE
When, in Italo- varieties of Southern Romance, a rule is introduced which says that
(12) oklo -> [Okjo]
as part of the general yodization of/!/ [1] after an obstruent (cf. also klawe -> ['klave]
-»· ['kjave]), IR needs no /Cl/ clusters at all.
And when in SW varieties of Southern a P-rule is added which states that
(13) oklo ->· [Olio] like folja -» ['folia]12
as a result of the assimilation of both [jl] (from [kl], parallel to [jt] from [kt])
and [Ij], SW needs only /Ð/ to represent both [Olio] and ['folia] and has no use for
medial /kl/. Thus IR [Okjo] and SW [¼ÚÚï] constitute a correspondence without an
available underlying medial cluster. In other words we have
(14) IR SW
['kjave] ['klave] <- klawe
['folia] [folia] <- folja
[Okjo] [Olio] <- no one underlying form available.
Once again, this sets up a zigzag according to which the two systems are separate.
How many later splits occur between IR and contemporary Tuscan-based standard
Italian, remains to be investigated. Asked in another way, the question is: How
12
Earlier rules specifying intermediate steps are omitted here.
many LANGUAGES are represented by the so-called DIALETTI of Central and Southern
Italy — Toscano, Romanesco, Marcheggiano, Napoletano, Calabrese, Siciliano —
to name the more obvious ones?
The relexification of SW reflects the following:
(SW1) Fusion of/tj/ > /c/ followed by merger of/ / with /c/ (e.g. /potjo > pocco,
bracco > bracco, celo > celo/)
(SW2) The splits of /w d g s c/, adding the respective voiced obstruents /v d z z z/.
Three of these splits are occasioned by the redistributions resulting directly or in-
directly from two sweeping phonetic changes: (1) the lenition, and ultimate voicing,
of post-vocalic voiceless obstruents; (2) the subsequent reduction of geminate ob-
struents to singles. I see no way to locate this dual phenomenon, which is also operative
in Gallo- and Rhaeto-Romance, prior to the split of Italo-Western, structurally
speaking, given the failure of Italo-Romance to share fully in it. Moreover, it is
alleged (cf. Bourciez 1946: 165) to have been a 5th century innovation, out of Southern
territory, which lost little time in penetrating across the Southern-Northern language
boundary in France. (Examples: nudu > nu4u, mutu > mudu; mese > meze, esse >
ese; ratjone > razöne, fattjone > facöne). As for /z/: the velar /g/ had long been
phonetically [g] before front vowel (or yod), but there is insufficient motivation for
lexifying this in Italo-Western along with the voiceless correlate /k > c/. Now it
emerges without affrication after coalescing with a /z/ resulting from the fusion of
/dj/ (as [4j] if after the spirantization of post-vocalic [d]); e.g. /geNte > zeNte/,
/odje > oze/). And as for /v/, the sole motivation for splitting /w/ is one of patterning:
pre-vocalic /w/ had long been [v], but there was no point in lexifying it until an entire
class of voiced fricatives had emerged, namely at the stage in view with its /\4zz/.13
5. THE SPLIT OF SOUTHWESTERN INTO SOUTH-GALLO (SG), EAST IBERO- (Elb),

CENTRAL IBERO- (Clb) AND WEST-IBERO-ROMANCE (Wlb)14
At this stage the data do not, to the best of my observation, give evidence for a less
than four-way split of SW — i.e. there is no way of uniting any three varieties (the
Iberian ones, for example) as separate from the fourth, nor of uniting any two (say
Clb and Wlb) against the other two. This is very enlightening in view of the gallons
of ink that have been let flow over the question of where Catalan belongs; even
Otero (1971) says resignedly (p. 146): "En cuanto al Catalan, no puede ser incluido
en el romance lingiiisticamente hispano mientras no se demuestre que la inclusion
13
Actually, /v/ may be seen as resulting from the split of both /w/ and /f/, since we also find a few
items like /defesa > deveza/ (Port, devesa).
14
Our Southwestern is to be equated with Leonard's "Proto-Isochronic Romance", which includes
Venetian because of its vocalism. I suspect, however, that it will eventually prove out as a descendent
of Italo-Romance. As for Mozarabic, the meager evidence points to its being an extinct dialect of
Southern, not of Southwestern, Romance.
estä justificada." The data looked at from the present point of view seem to reflect
the historical fact that Northeastern Iberia in Charlemagne's day was politically the
Spanish Marches, was culturally facing north across the Pyrenees, and surely was
sharing dialectal innovations with Provence; then a few centuries later, with Charle-
magne's empire long gone and the Reconquest on, Catalonia about-faced politico-
culturally and continued its linguistic developments in common with expanding
Castile-Aragon. In any case our four-way split is based on the four different coales-
cences of the Southwestern phoneme /4/, as follows:
(15) SW SG SW Elb SW Clb SW Wlb
4_
A
w
Random examples are the following: (Old) Provencal lauzar, suzar, cazer, vezer,
auzir; Catalan cau, creu, riu, niu, pen; Spanish sudar, yedra, nido, nudo, grado, merced;
Portuguese suar, grau, merce, mi, km, era 'ivy'. 15
Time or lack of data requires us to pass over in silence the question of how many
languages SG and Elb and Clb have by now split into — though let me mention in
passing that my postulates article demonstrated illustratively the separation of
present-day Madrid standard and Judeo-Spanish (Sephardic).
The relexification of Wlb involves:
(Wlbl) The fusion-and-merger of/pi fl kl/ as / /, adding a new palatal consonant
(e.g. /plujva > 2ujva, afla > aoa, klama > cama/)
(WIb2) Redistributions in two major domains. (1) The raising of the diphthongs
/aw > ow/ and /aj, ej > ej/ — the latter merger being part of a larger merger with the
existing diphthong in, say, SW /strejto/, but the former being wholly new. (Examples:
SW awro > Wlb öwro, lajte > lejte, lejto > lejto.) This is of course shared with
Clb and (partially) with Elb. (2) Loss of intervocalic /!/ and /n/, and reduction of the
geminates /ll nn/ to the corresponding singles. The case of the lost /n/ is com-
plicated, accompanied as it is by the development of a vowel nasalization that cannot
be analyzed out at the deep level. I shall represent this nasal element by /N/, profiting
by the same symbol which I use from Latin down to represent a nasal consonant
assimilated to a following obstruent, with its own other phonetic features redundant.
Thus, while we may have an item like /aNte/ unchanged all the way from Latin to
Wlb, ignoring the phonetic nasalization that ultimately penetrates the vowel in
[?"te], I shall also say that we may write /sono > SONO/ [SQO] in contrast to /sonno >
sono/ and of course /sonno > sono/. Whether or not there is phonetic nasalization
in the stressed vowels of the latter items, I take to be a question of little or no impor-
15
There are reasons for holding that the /v/ in Port, /löwva-/ or /öwvi-/ is not a direct phonetic
reflex of the SW /4/.
tance. As a consequence of the reduction of all other geminate resonants to singles,

we may rewrite /rr/ [f] as /f/ (e.g. karro > kafo). 16
6. THE SPLIT OF WEST-IBERO-ROMANCE INTO GALICIAN AND PORTUGUESE
The triggering coalescences for this split are those of SW [z] with [z] in Portuguese,
as in
(16) veze+z -> ['vezes] like meze + z -» ['mezes]
and with [£] in Galician, as in
(17) veze+z -» ['vejfes] -> ['be6es] like parece -» [pa'rSGe]
which is part of the unvoicing of Galician voiced sibilants to merge with their voiceless
correlates. This change within Wlb evidently radiated out from its true focal area of
innovation in Clb, where it first spread from Castilian dialects to Asturo-Leonese
ones and thence moved on across the language boundary into Wlb, thereby causing
the split of that sister language — an arresting aspect of languages in contact: the
case of a sound-change originating in Language A and overlaying a dialect of neigh-
boring Language B and, by doing so, causing Language B to split. * 7
The relexification of Portuguese entails the merger of /c/ with /§/ (e.g. oaNo >
saNo). Otero (1971) says of this "proceso tardio" that it "contribuye a separar el
portugues del gallego"; but it does not do so in the sense that I wish to insist on: until
the antecedent language split on the basis indicated above, the synchronic rule /c/ -»
[s] for Portuguese dialects of Wlb was perfectly viable; Galician dialects needed (and
the Galician language still needs) the /c/. Redistributions are numerous — as for
example in root vowels of verbs: /deve > deve/ (despite ['devu] or ['devs], which is
predictable morphophonemically) or /köre > kofe/. I no longer hold as I used to that
/a/ as a systematic phoneme is necessary for Portuguese, even though its occurrence
in lexical items will in fact make stress-placement far more predictable (e.g. in /passro/
or /bNpada/ stress would be automatically assignable but not in /pasaro/ or /laNpada/
(see Agard 1967).
7. Grammatical parameters for the uniting of dialects versus the separation of

languages were also postulated in my (1971) article, and the stipulation was made that
two systems must meet both the phonological and the grammatical criterion to
qualify as dialects of a single language. Actually I have not yet applied the gram-
16
Word-initial [t] — dating from far back in the Romance stream? — can remain represented by
underlying /r/, valid for all other positions and in opposition to the trill intervocalically only.
17
Galician remains separate from Clb because of other persisting zigzags, e.g.
vino, baüo—s^—-—vino
ano—-—^=»afio, bafio
matical criterion to Romance in any concerted way, and therefore have no notion as
to how the results would correlate with the splits posited on phonological grounds.
I now hypothesize that an 'either-or' requirement will prove more fruitful than a
'both-and' one. But I am unable to elaborate on this at the moment. It will doubtless
take us several life-times more to validate, or invalidate, the method here proposed,
and I permit myself the hope that younger scholars will have the curiosity, backed
perhaps by an intuition that this just could be the right track, to undertake some
serious following up.
Cornell University
REFERENCES
Agard, Frederick B.
1967 "Stress in Four Romance Languages", Glossa 1, 150-200.
1971 "Language and Dialect: Some Tentative Postulates", Linguistics 65, 5-24.
Appel, Carl
1920 Provenzalische Chrestomathie (Leipzig: O. R. Reisland).
Bourciez, Edouard
1910 Elements de linguistique romane (Quatrieme edition, Paris: Klincksieck, 1946).
Elcock, W. D.
1960 The Romance Languages (London: Faber & Faber).
Entwhistle, W. J.
1936 The Spanish Language (Second edition, London: Faber & Faber, 1962).
Hall, Robert Á., Jr.
1950 "The reconstruction of Proto-Romance", Language 26, 6-27.
1964 Introductory Linguistics (Philadelphia: Chilton).
Leonard, Clifford S., Jr.
1960 "Proto-Rhaeto-Romance and French", Language 40, 23-32.
1969 "A reconstruction of Proto-Lucanian", Orbis 18, 439-471.
1970 "The Romance 'Stammbaum' in the West", Romance Philology 23, 261-276.
Moulton, William G.
1967 "Types of Phonemic Change", To Honor Roman Jakobson (The Hague: Mouton), 1393-1407.
Otero, Carlos-P.
1971 Evolution y revolution en romance (Barcelona: Seix Barral).
Walls, William R.
1971 "A Historical Phonology of Proto-Rumanian and Four of Its Descendants", Ph. D.
dissertation (Cornell University).
Williams, E. B.
1938 From Latin to Portuguese (Second edition, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962).
JEAN CASAGRANDE
FOSSILIZATION IN FRENCH SYNTAX1
1. Fossilization is a trend towards the freezing-up, the coagulation into a rigid form
of one or more otherwise viable items. Evidence for the rigidity of fossils can be found
in the inability of these forms to undergo rules which they would undergo if they were
not fossilized. This paper is concerned with both diachronic and derivational fossiliza-
tion. A derivational fossil will be shown to be the exclusive product of derivation in a
grammar while diachronic fossils will be identified as fossils whose rigidity is due to
mutation in time. These two concepts of fossilization will be shown to be closely
related. The problem of est-ce que will be reviewed in light of fossilization. Finally,
fossilization will be suggested to have bearing on borrowing.
2. DERIVATIONAL FOSSILIZATION
Linguists who assume a highly abstract underlying structure for language also assume
derivational fossilization. In this section I would like to consider one particularly clear
case of derivational fossilization and to mention a number of other possible fossils.
I will not develop arguments for the latter cases.
2.1. In her paper on conditionals in Spanish, Maria-Luisa Rivero (1972) claims that
si 'if is a world-creating verb. She gives eleven arguments in support of that claim.
I will only outline three of them. Also, since this paper is concerned with French
syntax, I will provide French examples for Rivero's arguments.
One of Rivero's arguments in favor of si as a world-creating verb is based on the
behavior of si and world-creating verbs with respect to sentence pronominalization.
(1) Si tes parents arrivaient a l'improviste et t'attrapaienf a faire de telles chases,
fa ne te fer ait pas de mal.
1
I wish to thank Donald Albury, Chauncey Chu, Thomas Pyles and Thomas Weeks who were
kind enough to discuss with me some of the topics of this paper. I am thankful to Jean-Hugues
Boisset, Ronald W. Langacker, Marie-Louise Moreau, John R. Ross, and Susan Schmerling who
made very helpful comments on the conference version of this paper.
24 JEAN CASAGRANDE
'If your parents came unexpectedly and caught you doing such things, it
would do you some good.'
(2) A supposer que tes parents arrivent l'improviste et t'attrapent faire de
telles choses, òá ne teferait pas de mal.
(3) Imagine que tes parents arrivent l'improviste t'attrapent faire de telles
choses, òá ne te fer ait pas de mal.
(4) Supposons que tes parents arrivent a l'improviste et fattrapent a faire de telles
choses; òá ne teferait pas de mal.
The pronoun òá does not refer to si or to the world-creating verbs. Rather, it refers
to the S embedded in si, which in (l)-(4) stands for two conjoined S's. Contrast to
(l)-(4) sentences like (5) and (6)
(5) Pourquoi il est alle en Chine, voila ce que je voudrais savoir.
'Why he went to China, that's what I'd like to know.'
(6) Ou eile a passe la nuit, voila ce qui m'Interesse.
'Where she spent the night, that's what I am interested in.'
where S-Pronominalization applies to pourquoi and ou. The difference between

sentences (l)-(4) on the one hand, and (5) and (6) on the other, is easily explained if
we assume that si is a world-creating verb. Rivero's claim about the relation of si to
the S which can be pronominalized is that si, a verb, is followed by an NP: "the con-
ditional particle is a verbal form with transitive complementation". The S dominated
by that NP is pronominalized.
Another argument given by Rivero to show that si is a world-creating verb is
concerned with factive verbs. Factive verbs are known to loose their factivity when
embedded in an S with a world-creating verb. The same is true of factive verbs em-
bedded into the protasis of a conditional structure.
(7) Imaginez que je me rende compte qu'ils mentaient.
'Imagine that I realize that they lied.'
(8) Supposons qu'il soit evident qu'ils copiaient.
'Suppose that it is evident that they copied.'
(9) Je me rends compte qu'ils mentaient.
º realize that they lied.'
(10) // est evident qu'ils copiaient.
'It is evident that they copied.'
(11) Sijamaisje me rends compte qu'ils mentaient je le leur ferai savoir.
'If I ever realize that they lied I will let them have a piece of my mind.'
(12) S'il etait certain qu'ils mentaient je les punirais.
'If it were certain that they lied I would punish them.'
The two sentences of (9)-(10) presuppose that some people lied and copied, but si
and world-creating verbs in (7)-(8) and (11)-(12) neutralize the factivity of the verbs
FOSSILIZATION IN FRENCH SYNTAX 25
se rendre compte, evident, and certain. Rivero concludes that treating si and world-
creating verbs as a unique phenomenon will simplify the task of the grammar.
The third of Rivero's arguments which I will outline here has to do with the
semantic similarity of si and world-creating verbs. She points out that it would be
incorrect to assume a deep structure with si to account for the behavior of world-
creating verbs. She shows that such a solution would be incorrect by contrasting
(13X15).
(13) A supposer que Jean soit venu, nous aurions ete preis.
'Supposing that John had come, we would have been ready.'
(14) Si Jean etait venu, nous aurions ete preis.
'If John had come we would have been ready.'
(15) Si nous avions suppose que Jean etait venu nous aurions ete prets.
'If we had supposed that John had come we would have been ready.'
(13) and (14) are paraphrases of each other but (15) is not a paraphrase of (13) and (14).
It is clear, then, that much can be gained in terms of simplicity and naturalness by
assuming that si is a world-creating verb.
2.2. In the preceding section, we found good reasons to claim that si is a verb. It
should be noted that the very reason that we argued that si is a verb in semantic
structure is that it does not look like a verb in surface structure. Linguists who
emphasize language diversity, language-specific rather than universal processes, or
strictly syntactic rather than syntactico-semantic relations will object to this view.
They will argue that si does not behave like a verb in all instances. They will show
that the b sentences of (16)-(18) are ill-formed because si fails to be a verb.
(16a) Je suppose que Pierre arrivera bientot.

º suppose Pierre will arrive soon.'
(16b) *Je si que Pierre arrivera bientot.
(17a) En imaginant qu'il arrivera tard ...
'Imagining he will arrive late ...'
(17b) *En si (ant) qu'il arrivera tard ...
(18a) J'ai souvent imagine ...
º have often imagined ...'
(18b) *J'ai souvent si...
They will argue that si cannot take a subject, that it cannot be used as participle, that
it cannot take an auxiliary or have adverbial modification, and they are right. One
might then conclude that there is no way to decide for either alternative.
Suppose, however, that we assume a process of fossilization. Then we can maintain
that si is a verb as shown by Rivero. This verb is fossilized, hence it loses some of its
freedom, thus accounting for (16)-(18). In other words, arguments for verbhood are
26 JEAN CASAGRANDE
maintained (si is a verb) and arguments for non-verbhood are also maintained (si is a
fossilized verb).
2.3. Other derivational fossils

A number of other cases of derivational fossilization can be drawn from recent work
in linguistic theory by generative semanticists. Arguments have been given pointing
to the belief that prepositions which need to figure in semantic structure are treated
as predicates (V's) in semantic structure. The same holds true for adverbs which are
the intransitive equivalents of prepositions and for quantifiers. The claim of verbhood
has also been made for auxiliaries (Ross 1969), and for conjunctions like et and ou
(McCawley 1971). All the above derived items are limited syntactically. Since similar
arguments can be given for the following as were given for si, I suggest that adverbs,
prepositions, auxiliaries, quantifiers, syntactic markers and conjunctions are fossils.2
3. DIACHRONIC FOSSILIZATION
In essence, diachronic fossils are the historical parallels of derivational fossils. A

diachronic fossil is an item for which the form it is derived from can be shown to have
been a non-fossil in a stage of the language previous to the fossilization of the item
in question. It goes without saying that a grammar which is aimed at reflecting natural
processes of language will reflect this diachronic change in the derivation of the fossil
in question. Let us consider a concrete example of diachronic fossilization, the case of
voici/voilä.
3.1. Void and voila
3.1.1. Void/voila is a verb.3

First, voici/voilä can be shown to be transitive, taking sentence complementation and
NP's of various sorts as objects.
(19a) Voilä que V komme s'approcha d'elle.
'The man came closer to her.'
2
Actually, this is too strong a claim. There are degrees of fossilization, and adverbs, prepositions,
auxiliaries, quantifiers, conjunctions, syntactic markers, etc., are not fossilized to the same degree.
3
John R. Ross pointed out to me another piece of evidence showing that voicijvoila shares another
quality with verbs: it takes the repetitive prefix re-.
(i) Revoir Paris!
(ii) Refais ce lit!
(in) Les revoilä!
(19b) Void I'homme.

'Here is the man.'
(19c) Voila Pierre.
'Here is Pierre.'
(19d) La dame que voila s'appelle Mme Latomate.
'This (here) woman is Mme Latomate.'
As can be done with other transitive verbs, the object may be deleted.
(20a) Va ehereher!
'Fetch!'
(20b) Donne I
'Give!'
(20c) Voila!
'Here you are!'
Voici/voila is generally used sort of imperatively, which accounts for its having no
subject (cf. 21) and for its not being questioned (cf. 22).
(2la) Regardez!
'Look!'
(21 b) Tenez!
'Here you are!'
(21c) Voila!
'Here you are!'
(22a) *Est-ce que regardez ce que vous faites!
(22b) *Est-ce que voila ce que vous faites!
Voici/voila also has another function. It can serve to cleft sentences somewhat like
c'est.
(23a) Voila que I'homme s'approcha (Teile.
'The man came closer (to her).'
(23b) C'est que I'homme s'approcha d'elle.
'The man came closer (to her).'
This is a non-imperative use of voici/voila. As such, voici/voila cannot occur alone

(24a, b) nor can it be embedded in a question (contrast 25a with 22b).
(24a) *Voici
(24b) * C'est
(25a) *Est-ce que voila que vous faites des affaires?
C25b) *Est-ce que c'est que vous faites des affaires?
Note that (25b) is grammatical only in the causative meaning and not in the clefted
meaning.
28 JEAN CASAGRANDE
At any rate, voici/voilä has at least two functions: one as an imperative-like verb,
the other as a clefting construction. We will now concentrate our attention on the
former type, namely the fake imperative voici/voilä.
3.1.2. Voici/voila is a fossil.
As in the case of si, voici/voilä can be shown to be a verb (cf. 3.1.1.) but it can also be
shown to have lost some features of verbhood.
Its syntax does not reflect the imperative word order. On the one hand, there is no
subject but, on the other, clitics occur in the declarative word order.
(26a) Le void.
'Here he is.'
(26b) *Voici-le.
(21 a) Regardez-le!
'Look at him!'
(27b) *Leregardez!
(28a) Les voilä!
'There they are.'
(28b) Je les vois la.
see them there.'
(28c) Vous voilä enfin!
'You're here at last.'
(28d) Je vous vois enfin.
see you at last.'
Voicijvoilä cannot take negatives, which also distinguishes it from verbs. Hence in
(29) entrez can be negativized but in (30) and (31) voici/voilä cannot.
(29a) Entrez!
'Come in!'
(29b) N''entrez pas!
'Don't come in!'
(30a) Void le sei et le poivre.
'Here is the salt and pepper.'
(30b) *Ne void pas le sei et le poivre.
(3la) Les voilä.
'There they are.'
(31b) *Ne les voilä pas.
Furthermore, voici/voilä is morphologically invariant. Consequently it cannot take

tense, mood, or aspect inflections, which are characteristic properties of French
verbs. I conclude that voilä/voici is a fossil.
3.2. Now to the claim that it is a diachronic fossil.

First, consider imperativeness. It is not possible to claim that voici/voilä is derived
from the verb voir + ci/lä because voir cannot be imperativized.
(32a) * Vois ce verre plein.
(32b) Regarde ce verre plein.
'Look at this full glass.'
This is due to a restriction which applies to all stative verbs.
(33a) Ecris ä tes parents.
'Write to your parents.'
(34) *Coüte eher a tes parents.
This restriction is often blurred when stative and non-stative verbs are homophonous.
(35a) Think!
Reflechissez!
(35b) *Think that Paul will come.
In Old French, voir was used in the sense of 'look' as well as in the sense of 'see'.
Due to homonymy voir could be imperativized.
(36) Ves moi chi (Courtois d'Arras, v. 610)
'see me here'
Ves in 36 is a second person form, it has no subject, and it is followed, as are all
imperatives, by the clitic pronoun.
(37a) *Tu ves moi chi!
(37b) * Ves chi moi!
(37c) *Moi ves chi!
Nyrop (1925) notes that, as the imperative meaning of ves (voi) was lost, the clitic
hopped over to its declarative-sentence position, accounting for the change from
(36) to (38).
(36) Ves moi chi!
(38) Me void!
'Here I am!'
Further evidence of the diachronic nature of the voici/voilä fossil can also be found
in the application of the number agreement rule.
(39a) Voyez-cy le contract! (Rabelais, I, 32)
'see here the contract'
(39b) * Voyez-ci, Mesdames et Messieurs, le president de notre club, M. Mediterran-
nee.
30 JEAN CASAGRANDE
(39c) Void, Mesdames et Messieurs, le president de notre club, M. Mediterrannee.

'Here is, Ladies and Gentlemen, the president of our club, Mr. M.'
Middle French allowed voici/voila to inflect, indicating through agreement that this
modern fossil was then still conceived as an imperative. I conclude that voici/voilä is a
diachronic fossil because its syntactic and morphological freedom was lost over a
period of time.
3.3. A number of similar cases of diachronic fossilization come to mind. I will not
attempt here to develop arguments to show them as such. I will simply mention some
of them.
It is likely that the metatag n'est-ce pas is a diachronic fossil. I haven't yet been
able to find evidence of greater freedom in Middle or Old French for this modern
fossil. Another candidate for the honor of diachronic fossilization is the question
marker //, which is found in a number of (geographic and social) dialects of French.
Vive, in Modern French, and more clearly Viva, in Modern Italian, also seem to be
resulting from diachronic fossilization. Note that viva in (40b) is not inflected for
number agreement.
(40a) Viva la patriot
'Long live our country!'
(40b) Viva i nostri soldati!
'Long live our soldiers!'
The meaning of Vive and Viva has evolved from a strict wish of long life to an
exclamation of support, of admiration, like Hourra "Hurrah", etc... Example (41)
would not be inappropriate, in a certain context. Imagine, for example, a medical
school which, after a particularly wanting period, receives a large allotment of
corpses for the purpose of dissection. Elated, the students might cheer:
(41) Vive les macchabees!
'Long live the stiffs!'4
3.4. Let us return to the distinction between diachronic and derivational fossils.
Derivational fossils will be marked (somehow) to fail to undergo some rules. They
are the product of grammar: predicates in logical structure, they become fossils in the
derivational process. An interesting question which poses itself regarding diachronic
4
Another example which shows that the v/ve-type does not carry a literal meaning:
(i) Long live the eternal triangle.
Chauncey Chu tells me that in Chinese long live is a fixed expression too. It literally calls for a life of a
thousand years, but its syntax is fossilized. It cannot occur with a first person subject in Chinese,
English or French.
(i) "Long live me!
(ii) *Vive moi!
fossils is whether there is anything in their derivation which distinguishes them from
derivational fossils. The only evidence that has been shown in this paper between the
two types of fossils derives from the history of the language: diachronic fossils are
historical reflexes of non-fossilized forms. Only this distinction can be drawn in light
of present evidence. As illustration, consider the case of vive. This fossil will be a
predicate in logical structure but it will fail to undergo a number of rules and will
therefore become fossilized. That this modern fossil fails to have the same restriction
as the verb (vivre) from which it is fossilized diachronically is a fact that need not be
reflected in the grammar. Present evidence, then, leads one to conclude that the
grammar will not formally distinguish between diachronic and derivational fossils.
This conclusion sounds right intuitively (1) because knowledge of previous stages
is limited to scholars and not available to the average speaker and (2) because other-
wise the diachronic/derivational distinction would depend on how well earlier stages
are known, thus varying with our knowledge of earlier stages of different languages
and language families.
4. EST-CE QUE
French interrogatives have occasioned a particular fascination among transforma-

tionalists (cf. Langacker 1965, 1966, forthcoming, Hirschbuhler 1970, Kayne forth-
coming, Casagrande 1969, Roulet 1969). Although qu'est ce-que, qui est-ce qui, etc...
are also interesting from the point of view of partial fossilization, I will address myself
to the problem of est-ce que only. Langacker has maintained (1965, 1966, forth-
coming) that est-ce que and other similar forms of the question markers of French
are to be derived transformationally. To him, the sentences of (42) are to be related
by rule.
(42a) C'est que vous avezfini.
'It's that you are finished.'
(42b) Est-ce que vous avezfini?
'Are you finished ?'
This claim has been criticized (Roulet 1969, Hirschbuhler 1970, Huddleston and Uren
1969). Criticism of Langacker's rule solution as opposed to a solution which would
give est-ce que as a deep structure interrogative marker, appears to be based on the
fossilized nature of est-ce que. Among the various arguments leveled at Langacker's
proposal is one pertaining to the types of answers one may expect from est-ce que
questions. If an appropriate answer to a question like (43) is (44)
(43) Ted porte-t-il des calecons?
'Does Ted wear undershorts ?'
(44) Oui, il en ports.
'Yes, he does.'
32 JEAN CASAGRANDE
then one would expect (45) to be an appropriate answer to (46).

(45) C'est que Ted porte des calefons.
(46) Est-ce que Ted porte des calefons?
But it isn't appropriate. Instead, (44) is an appropriate answer to (46). In his (1972)
paper, Langacker admits to having no principled explanation for this phenomenon.
The problem which now poses itself to us is similar to the one about si. There are
arguments in favor of the transformational analysis (i.e. Langacker's) and arguments
in favor of est-ce que as a deep structure marker for yes/no questions (Roulet's).
There appears to be no empirical way out of this dilemma, unless... one assumes
fossilization. Assume then that, operative in a grammar, there exists a process of
fossilization which makes rigid (i.e. less or not at all affected by rules) certain other-
wise free constructions. The rules of semantax will provide its interrogative meaning
to the construction in question, effect the inversion which relates sentences like (45)
and (46), etc..., and language specific rules of fossilization, quite possibly lexical rules,
will freeze-up the est-ce que construction. The fossilization of a construction, a
process similar to what happens to idioms, will require special rules. One of the effects
of these rules on an idiom or on a fossilized construction will be such that none (or
fewer) of its nodes can be referred to in rules. From this, it follows that partial
idiomatization and partial fossilization can be characterized by the number, or
percentage, of nodes which can be referred to in these forms. With such an apparatus
in a grammar of French, (44) and not (45) is an appropriate answer to (46).
5. FOSSILS AND BORROWING
One of the extras that the notion of fossilization may buy us is a principled way of
predicting what may or may not be borrowed.5 For some reason, which may or not
be dependent on fossilization, those items which I have characterized as fossils may
not be borrowed. The relationship between fossilization and borrowing is a paper in
itself, and a detailed account of that relationship is outside the scope of this survey.
I will therefore simply make a few remarks about this topic. Examples of borrowed
vocabulary abound. Bloomfield, for example, devotes three chapters of his Language
to the topic. Most, if not all borrowing applies to nouns, adjectives and verbs. Under
nouns I am including also derived nominals. If my hunch is right, no conjunction,
5
Susan Schmerling pointed out to me at the Conference that there are cases of borrowing of
prepositions. She referred in particular to a case where a post-positional language borrowed the
whole prepositional system of Spanish. Ronald Langacker also pointed out (personal communication)
that similar facts exist in Yaqui, Cupeno, and Luiseno. I have no explanation to offer for these facts.
Although productive processes are more likely to be generalized there are cases of very limited classes
which have generalized. These are puzzling and unexplained facts. One thing is clear: more work is
needed on the hierarchy of fossilization and on its relationship to borrowing.
FOSSIL1ZATION IN FRENCH SYNTAX 33
prepositions, adverbs, auxiliaries, quantifiers, or markers like inflections are borrowed

as such. In other words, fossilized items are not borrowed. Some apparent counter-
examples come to mind. They are of two types: one type is borrowed in specialized
vocabulary. Examples in English are via, per, qua as in (47)-(49).
(47) John came from California via Boston.
(48) Let's bomb this tiny country at a rate of no more than five tons of explosives
per person.
(49) Italian qua Neo-Latin.
Per is limited to expressions of ratio and qua and via are not likely to replace as and
by way of in everyday speech. The other type of apparent counterexample to the
claim about borrowing is that illustrated by during, pending, except, etc... These are
forms which were borrowed as verbs or adjectives from forms like durant, pendant,
exceple, and given their gerund ending by calquing the French. It seems then that
borrowing may be predicted on the basis of how fossilized a form is.
6. DEGREES OF FOSSILIZATION
Another large topic into which we will have to dip quickly is the matter of degrees
of fossilization. It is clear that fossils derived from a V in logical structure will
fossilize to various degrees. For example, auxiliaries will be less fossilized than the
conditional particle si. Auxiliaries, for example, are subject to agreement, to negative
placement, and to conjunction deletion but si is not. A hierarchy of syntactic freedom
should be established on which all categories might be placed. The result would
likely be a scale going from verbs or nouns to syntactic markers via adjectives,
auxiliaries, adverbs, etc... This project is also outside the scope of this paper.
7. In conclusion let us review the motivations for a grammar that incorporates

fossilization.
(1) The degrees of fossilization are inversely proportional to the likelihood of
borrowing. The more fossilized a form, the less likely it is to be replaced. Borrowing
always takes place in the least fossilized or the non-fossilized forms.
(2) If we assume fossilization, we can explain the development of prepositions like
durant, pendant as historically derived from a V. Similarly, during and pending, which
are said to be borrowed, can be explained as borrowed V's which have undergone
fossilization. That they first had to be integrated in the English system is evident
from their ending in ing; borrowed directly from French as prepositions they could
not have had -ing as their gerundive inflectional marker.6
(3) To claim that there is a synchronic derivational process called fossilization is to
* I owe this observation to Donald Albury.

34 JEAN CASAGRANDC
make more natural the grammar of language by allowing it to reflect, as do rules like
assimilation, metathesis, epenthesis, etc..., the diachronic processes of language. In
connection with this point, it is instructive to contrast one of the differing claims of
generative semantics and of interpretive semantics, namely the question as to the
place and form of the lexicon. Because it maintains the lexical information as a sub-
component before syntax, the interpretive approach in its present form cannot provide
a conciliatory and intuitively satisfactory solution to the problem of est-ce que and
of idioms in general. Generative semantics on the other hand because it assumes pre-
lexical syntax lends itself to accounting easily for fossilization.
8. ADDITIONAL REMARKS
I will now turn to some doubts I have about fossilization as a means of predicting
borrowing and as a unified process.
Recently, a number of people have turned their attention to the degree of particular
entities in individual items. In particular, Ross has been identifying degrees in what
are referred to as our traditional parts of speech. In a paper (Ross forthcoming) he
shows degrees of nouniness and in another read at the 8th meeting of the Chicago
Linguistic Society, he identified degrees of syntactic freedom between verbs, adjectives
and nouns. Squishiness is the technical term given by Ross for hierarchy in syntactic
freedom. The present paper has been an effort in the same direction, but as I conceived
of fossilization it differs from squishiness. For one, I tried to show that fossilization
may well provide criteria for distinguishing borrowable from non-borrowable
vocabulary. I ran into a problem with regard to derived nominale, which are derived
forms of S's, and with abstract nouns, which are also derived, because they can be
borrowed just as easily as can concrete nouns. Since there is, in traditional terms, a
change from one part of speech to another between the deep and surface structure of
si, void, est-ce que, etc., I felt that another requirement for fossilization would be a
change of category. I now think that nominals are high enough in the scale of
fossilization to be borrowed. The lower on the scale, the more fossilized and the more
unlikely an item is to be borrowed.
My other problem with fossilization is that I cannot find a general principle to
account for processes like the derivation of si, on the one hand, and processes like the
derivation of est-ce que on the other. Si, it seems, might be a squished predicate. No
structure is altered (i.e. deleted or added) in the portion of trees that dominate si.
The same is true of other cases of fossilization which involve the derivation of a fossil
from a single node in logical structure.
On the other hand that there is a loss (or coagulation) of structures taking place in
the derivation of est-ce que is clearly shown by examples (42)-(46). In other words,
it is necessary to block the C'est que S sentence from being an answer to Est-ce que S.
Fossilization (i.e. the coagulation of est + ce + que into a single question marker)
accomplishes just that. It isn't clear to me how these two types of fossilization (i.e. the
s/ type and the est-ce que type) can be treated similarly. Further investigation may
show the present proposal to be wrong on this very point. The obvious alternative
to my proposal would make si the result of a squish and est-ce que a special case of
idioms.7 Unfortunately such a proposal would not provide a singulary means of
predicting likelihood of borrowing.8
University of Florida.
REFERENCES
Casagrande, Jean
1969 "On the Source of Some Universals", PJL l, 76-90.
Casagrande, Jean, and Bohdan Saciuk (eds.)
Forthcoming Generative Studies in Romance Languages (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House).
Fräser, Bruce
1970 "Idioms within a Transformational Grammar", Foundations of Language 6, 22-42.
Hirschbuhler, Paul
1970 Traitement transformationnel de interrogation et de quelques problemes connexes enfranfais
(Bruxelles: these Universite Libre de Bruxelles).
Huddleston, Rodney, and Ormond Uren
1969 "Declarative, Interrogative and Imperative in French", Lingua 22, 1-26.
Kayne, Richard S.
Forthcoming "Subject Inversion in French Interrogatives", in Casagrande and Saciuk (Forth-
coming).
Langacker, Ronald W.
1965 "French Interrogatives: a Transformational Description", Language 41, 587-600.
1966 A Transformational Syntax of French (Urbana: University of Illinois thesis).
Forthcoming "French Interrogatives Revisited", in Casagrande and Saciuk (Forthcoming).
Newmeyer, Frederick J.
Forthcoming "The Insertion of Idioms", Papers from the Eighth Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic
Society.
Nyrop, Kr.
1925 Grammaire historique de la langue francatse (Paris: Alphonse Picard & fils).
Rivero, Maria-Luisa.
Forthcoming "On conditionals in Spanish", in Casagrande and Saciuk (Forthcoming).
Ross, John R.
1969 "Auxiliaries as main verbs", in Todd (1969).
Forthcoming a "Nouniness".
Forthcoming b "The category hierarchy: Endstation Hauptwort", Papers from the Eighth
Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.
Roulet, Eddy
1969 Syntaxe de la proposition nudeaire enfranfais parle (Bruxelles: AIMAV).
Todd, William (ed.)
1969 Studies in Philosophical Linguistics, Series One (Evanston, 111.: Great Expectations).
7
In connection with this, it might be instructive to review the pioneering work of Frazer (1970)
on idioms, and to examine closely Newmeyer's proposal (Newmeyer forthcoming) about the deriva-
tion of idioms.
8
A word of caution about this paper. This paper is to be viewed more as a blueprint for further
work than as a formal proposal. The road to a clearly elaborated theory of fossilization is a long one.
JAMES FOLEY
LATIN ORIGIN OF ROMANCE RULES
The continuity of modern Romance Languages with Latin is reflected in the utilization
of Latin rules in the modern languages. Latin rules are repeated or generalized to give
the modern Romance rules. The types of repetition are:
(1) simple repetition
(2) repetition with different phonetic manifestation
(3) repetition to different elements
(4) restricted repetition
The types of generalization are:
(5) generalization of rule
(6) generalization of environment
(7) generalization of environment (morpheme boundary)
(8) relaxation of similarity requirement
We consider also:
(9) persistence of rules
The rules of a language must belong to the set of universal phonological rules. They
cannot be created ad hocally and justified by workability or simplicity. Since the set
of universal rules is a small subset of the set of possible rules, the universal rules of
Language occur repeatedly in particular languages.
The emphasis in this paper is not a detailed treatment of Latin or Romance
phonology, but the relations between the two. Hence many of the processes will be
discussed only in enough detail to show the relationship. A more complete discussion
of the Latin and Romance phonological processes which is beyond the scope of this
paper can be found in James Foley "Prothesis in the Latin verb sum" (Language 1965),
"An interpretation of Lachmann's Law" (Proceedings of the 10th International
Congress of Linguists, Bucharest 1967), "A systematic phonological interpretation of the
Germanic consonant shifts" (Language Sciences 1970). For the theoretical basis of the
phonological system used in this paper consult Foley Theoretical Phonology (unpub-
lished).
38 JAMES FOLEY
1. SIMPLE REPETITION
The modern Romance rule h -» 0 (Lt. habere, Sp. haber, FT. avoir) repeats the identical
Latin rule nihil > nil, *ne-hemo > nemo, *hanser (Skt. hansah) > anser, bihimus >
bimus.
The Romance rule // -> kl (Lt. vetulus > *veklo > Sp. viejo) repeats the Latin rule
(*potlom > poculum).
The Spanish rule uo -> ue (med. Sp. puodo > Sp. puedo) repeats the Latin rule
(vor t o > vert ï).
The Latin Reverse Holtzmann gy -> y (*magior > maior) repeats itself in Spanish
(*hugyo (cf. fugaz) > huyo).
In Spanish the Romance cluster dg (from tk) inserts z: portaticu > portazgo ('toll'),
judicare > juzgar ('judge'). This repeats the Latin rule which inserts s in the inchoative
suffix: *cogno-tk-o > cognotsko > cognosce. The rule
tk -» tsk
applies in both Latin and Spanish, with the voicing of the sibilant determined by the
voice of the neighboring elements.
2. REPETITION WITH DIFFERENT PHONETIC MANIFESTATION
Sometimes the repetition of a rule is disguised by differing phonetic manifestations.

Latin and Romance kt clusters both insert an epenthetic element, though the
element differs. The Latin cluster inserts a glide (y) while the Romance cluster
inserts a sibilant (z), as in nocte > nokyte > Fr. nuit, butplacitu > plagdo > plag'do
> plazdo > Sp. plazo. The rule is
kt -» k"t
where ÷ = y for Latin clusters
where ÷ = z for Romance clusters.
The Romance rule is a repetition of the earlier Latin rule (epenthesis in kt cluster),
though this similarity is obscured by different epenthetic elements.
Spanish medieval sibilant devoicing is a repetition with different phonetic manifesta-
tion of the Latin rhotacism rule (tempus, temporis), which occurs in two stages:
1. s -> z
2. z-> r
The stage z -> r is in turn analyzable into two stages
1. strengthening
LATIN ORIGIN OF ROMANCE RULES 39
2. phonetic manifestation
z+ -> r
After z strengthens, it is manifested phonetically as r.
In the medieval Spanish sibilant devoicing (dezir > desir) s arises from z by the
same process that Latin r arises from z:
strengthening
phonetic manifestation
z + -» s
5 and r are both strengthened reflexes of z. In medieval Spanish z does not undergo
rhotacism, but rather devoices to s. This phonetic devoicing is a phonological
strengthening, substituting for the Latin rhotacism which no longer applies in Spanish:
strengthening
phonetic manifestation
z+ ->· r for Latin
z + -» s for Spanish
Corresponding to the Latin inchoative suffix in sk (cognosce) is the Castilian in-
choative suffix in Qk (conozco), illustrating the general principle that the Latin
phonetic output is not the source of the modern Romance phonetic output, for Latin
sk does not normally become Castilian Qk (scala > escala). The Castilian phonetic
form does not come from the Latin phonetic form, but rather both come from an
abstract underlying form which appears in neither language. The inchoative suffix
is -tk- (as appearing phonetically in Tocharian). To this form applies the rule
tk -» t"k
where Ë: is a release on the t. This rule applies both in Latin and in Castilian, but with
different manifestations of x. For Latin ÷ = s but for Castilian ÷ = h:
Latin tk -»· tsk
Castilian tk -» thk
followed by phonetic manifestations of t" as s and of th as È:
tsk -» sk
t h k -»· 6k
The Castilian Qk suffix results from the repetition of a Latin rule with different
phonetic manifestation.
40 JAMES FOLEY
3. REPETITION TO DIFFERENT ELEMENTS
Sometimes the repetition of a rule is obscured by its application to different elements.

The Spanish rule which deletes w in cinco from Latin quinque is a repetition of a
Latin rule which deletes h as in Lt. barba from *bhardha.
Spanish cinco is anomalous, for from Latin qu we do not expect a Spanish assibilated
reflex (quintus > quinto, quern > quien), and from a Spanish assibilated reflex we do
not expect a Latin form with qu, for normally only Latin k appears as s in Spanish
(centum -» ciento). The assibilation in Spanish cinco results from deletion of the first
w under the influence of the second: *kwinkwe (quinque) -* kinkwe -» sinko (Grass-
mann's Law). The deletion of w is a repetition of the same rule in Latin, though the
Latin rule applies to different elements, as in barba from *bhardha (Eng. beard) with
first *bhardha -» bardha, or else initial bh -»/ (Skt. bharami, Lt. fero). For Spanish
and Latin we have the same rule
C" -> C / _ VC1
but with
÷ = h for Latin
x = w for Spanish
4. RESTRICTED REPETITION
Rules commonly start in a restricted form and then generalize. The development
of the Latin intervocalic occlusives into Spanish is analyzable into two stages. In the
first shift geminate voiceless stops degeminate (bucca > boca, mittere > meter,
cuppa > copa), voiceless stops devoice (amicus > amigo, vita > vida, sapere > saber),
and voiced stops spirantize (lego > *leyo, credo > * credo, h here > ha er).
With reference to the á and â parameters
4 kk tt ÑÑ
3 k t Ñ
2 g d b
1 ã â
1 2 3
á
these shifts represent a weakening of one position on the â parameter;

âç -» âç-1
where 1 < n < m
for the first lenition m = 4
In the second shift voiced stops spiranize (amigo > amiyo, vida > vioa, saber >
sa er) and (with the exception of â) voiced continuants are elided (*leyo > lea,
* credo > creo).
The second lenition represents a weakening of one position on the â parameter:
âç -* âç-1
where 1 < n < m
for the second lenition m = 2
The second shift is an incomplete repetition of the first shift. Though it does not yet
apply to 3 we predict that in the future it will generalize to include m = 3 with
boca > *boga, meter > *meder, copa > *coba.
5. GENERALIZATION OF RULE
Many rules which have a restricted application in Latin generalize to a more extensive
application in Romance. We consider
A. Spanish diphthongization
B. French s deletion
C. rhotacism origin of lenition
D. vocalization (generalization of consonant)
E. vocalization (generalization of glide)
F. vowel shortening
5.1. Spanish diphthongization

In Spanish short stressed mid vowels diphthongize: terra > tierra, nova > nueva.
The interpretation of diphthongization is:
(1) Short vowels move down one position: cibum > cebo, bucca > boca, terra >
tarra, nova > nova. This is a strengthening on the ê parameter
êç -» êç+1
with reference to the ê and ë parameters of Romance vowel strength,
42 JAMES FOLEY
l U
e o
l 2
ë
(2) Stressed vowels of ê strength 3 diphthongize

ê3, ã3 -» ê3, ã3Ç—» ê3ã4 -+ ê3ã!
That is
£ -» ia
ü -»· ua
There is no requirement that these vowels be short. Note for example that Sp. cielo
is from Lt caelus with ae -» & -> ßá with long <? diphthongizing.
(3) Unstressed a? and 3 revert to e and o. Recall that the vowel shift does not refer
to stress of the short vowels. All short vowels shift one position, then e and o (from /
and M) remain whether stressed or not, but a and o (from e and o) revert to e and o
if unstressed but diphthongize to ia and ua if stressed.
(4) The diphthongization is not immediately to ie and ue but to ia and ua since
these are the constituents of the vowels e and o. In some dialects these reflexes remain,
but in the standard language assimilation occurs to ie and uo with subsequent un-
rounding of uo to ue (recall Latin vorto > verto).
The origin of the Spanish vowel shift rule
êç -* êç +1
which constitutes the first part of the Spanish diphthongization is the Latin rule
which lowers / to e (êÀëÀ -» ê2ë!) before another vowel
as in the verb ire

eo imus
is itis
it eunt
and the demonstrative pronoun
masc. fern. neuter

is ea id
eius eius eius
ei ei ei
eum earn id
eo ea eo
The Latin rule generalizes by deleting the environmental restriction and also by
increasing the number of vowels which shift.
V
Ã 1
êç -> [ ê ç + l j / _ V =* êç Ð 1
lJ
ëñ. UP.
where 1 < n < m
l < p< q
for Lt. m = 1 and q = 1
for Sp. m = 2 and q = 2
5.2. In French s is elided before a consonant: schola > eschola > ecole, nosier >
notre,festa > fete. Though s is not elided before a consonant in Latin, z is: *nizdos >
nidus, *mazdos > m lus. The Latin rule
[ + cnt, + strident, + voice] -» 0 / C
generalizes to the French rule
r+cnt "I -» 0/_C
[ + strident]
5.3. Rhotacism origin oflenition
Latin rhotacism (genus, generis) occurs in two stages. First s voices between vowels
s -> z / V__V (lenition)
and then z converts to r
z -» r (rhotacism proper)
The first part of rhotacism, the intervocalic voicing of the continuant s, is the origin
of the modern Romance intervocalic obstruent voicing (Lt. sapere, vita, arnica;
Sp. saber, vida, amiga).
Ã + cons] -> [ +voice] / V_V => [+cons] -» [ +voice] / V_V
[ + contj
44 JAMES FOLEY
The Romance lenition arises from Latin lenition by dropping the requirement that the
consonant be a continuant.
5.4. Vocalization (generalization of consonant)
In Latin liquids vocalize when followed by a consonant as in the conjugation of velle

volo volumus
vis vultis
vult volunt
Though there is no direct phonetic evidence for vocalization of / in vult, vultis the
raising of the vowel provides indirect evidence. First the liquid vocalizes
1 -» Ã / _ C
followed by raising of the vowel (assimilation to the following w glide)
o -»u / _ r
and finally phonetic manifestation of the Ã as /
Ã->1
Where there is no consonant directly following the /, vocalization does not occur,
and the vowel is not raised: volo, volumus, volunt.
The 2sg. vis is from vel-s with root vel (inf. velle) and the usual 2sg. ending s (amas)
differing from the thematic verbs only in not possessing a thematic vowel. When
followed by a consonant / vocalizes as in vult and vultis, but with a y offglide instead
of a w offglide (the character of the glide is apparently determined by the preceding
vowel)
1 ->!*
followed by raising of the vowel (assimilation to the following y glide)
e -» i / _ ly
followed by phonetic manifestation of I" as y
V -»y
in contradistinction to the phonetic manifestation of Ã as /.
vels volt
vePs volwt vocalization
vilvs vulwt assimilation
viys vult phonetic manifestation
(vis) (contraction)
Though in Latin vocalization is restricted to /, in Romance it generalizes to include

other consonants: Lt. alter > Fr. autre, Lt. debitum > *debda > Sp. deuda, Lt.
dubitare > *dubdar > *duwdar > Sp. dudar, Lt. node > Fr. nuit.
w
i->r/_c=>c-»c /_c
5.5. Vocalization (generalization of glide)

Three superficially disparate processes are related by vocalization.
(1) In Roumanian Latin k converts to p before /: node > noapte, lacte > lapte,
octo > opt. This otherwise anomalous development comes from vocalization of the
k to kw
k -» kw / _ C
parallelling the vocalization o f / (vult), followed by coalescence
kw -»· p
repeating a common IE rule (Gk. hepomai, Lt. sequor).
(2) In French Latin k converts to y before a consonant: nocte > nuit, lacte > lait,
octo > huit. k does not convert directly to y, but rather first vocalizes
k -» k* / _ C
parallelling the vocalization of / in vis, followed by deletion of k
ky -» y
again parallelling the development in vis.

(3) In Latin vowels lengthen before a voiced segment followed by a continuant,
as dens > dens, but dentis.
V ··-» V / [ + voiced] [ + continuant]
The lengthening of the vowel in sänctus > sänctus (cf. säncio) indicates that though
the orthographic c of sancio presumably represents a stop, the orthographic c of
sänctus represents the continuant X
k -» kh / _ C
followed by coalescence as in Roumanian,

kh -» X
These three Romance processes have in common the addition of a glide to a velar
stop when followed by another consonant.
46 JAMES FOLEY
k -* k1 / _ C
where = h for Latin
where = y for French
where = w for Roumanian
Historically speaking, the rule has generalized from restriction to = h to include
= y and = w.
5.6. Vowel shortening

A characteristic development from Latin to the modern Romance languages is the
shortening of long vowels, as Lt. amäs > Sp. amas, Lt. arnica > Sp. amiga. The
Spanish rule is
V-»
or
V length 2 -> V length 1
Latin vowels are lengthened when followed by a voiced segment in turn followed by a
continuant (dens, dentis), thus from cado, the past participle is cäsus:
cad-tus
cadstus epenthetic j
cadstus vowel lengthening
cässus dst -» ss by rules which do not concern us here
cäsus shortening of consonant cluster after long vowel
From lüdo one expects parallel development: lüdtus > lüdstus > lüssus > lüsus by
the general rule
V length n => length n + 1 / [ + voice] [ + cont]
But lüsus does not appear phonetically with an overlong vowel since there is in Latin
a vowel shortening rule
or
V length 3 -» V length 2
or
V length n -» V length n-1
where n = 3
The Spanish vowel shortening rule arises from the Latin vowel shortening rule
V -> v = > V -» V
or, more accurately, Latin and Spanish have the same rule, but with different con-
ditions on its application.
vowel length n -> vowel length n-1
where n > m
(this condition ensures that vowel shortening applies first to the longest vowels)
m = 3 for Latin
m = 2 for Spanish
6. GENERALIZATION OF ENVIRONMENT
Many rules which apply in only a restricted environment in Latin apply with less
restriction in Romance. We consider
A. French nasalization
B. vowel lowering
C. syncope
D. vocalization
E. vowel shortening (before vowels)
F. vowel shortening (before stops)
6.1. French nasalization

In Latin nasalization occurs only before continuants, but not before stops, as dens,
dentis.
VN -* V / continuant
converting dens to dSs. (The n of dens is apparently only orthographic, indicating a
preceding long vowel, as in thensaurus for Gk. thesauros.) Nasalization is succeeded
by denasalization
leaving in Latin simply a long oral vowel.

The French nasalization rule is a generalization of the Latin rule. In French
nasalization occurs before both continuants and stops, as chantons > Sato.
VN -> V / _ [+cons, +cnt] => VN -> V / _ [+cons]
French does not have the denasalization rule of Latin, but presumably it will eventually
be added, converting [sätö] to [sato].
48 JAMES FOLEY
6.2. Vowel lowering

In Spanish short vowels lower one position:
i > e: cibum > cebo

u > o: cuppa > copa
e > ffi (> ie): terra > *tcerra > tierra
ï > ï (> ue): nova > *nyva > nueva
The Latin origin is the lowering of i to e before another vowel as in the conjugation
of the verb ire (cited above) and the declension of the demonstrative pronoun is, ea,
id (cited above). The Spanish rule
i, e, u, o -> e, ae, ï, ï
derives from the Latin rule
i ->-e/_ V
by generalization of the rule proper to include not only the vowel / but /, e, u, and o,
and also by generalization of the environment by removing the environmental
restriction.
i -» e / V => i -> e
6.3. Syncope
In Latin short unstressed vowels drop if preceded by a liquid (unless followed by a
nasal which strengthens the vowel)
fero
fers from *feris
fert from *ferit
ferimus
fertis from *feritis
ferunt
but not if preceded by a nonliquid consonant
duco
duds
ducit
duciumus
ducitis
ducunt
whereas in Spanish short unstressed vowels drop after any consonant, liquid or not.
delicatus > delgado ('slender')

semita > senda ('path')
debitum > *debda > deuda ('debt')
dubitare > dubdar > dudar ('doubt')
The Latin rule
V -» 0 / [ + cons, + resonant] _
has generalized to the Spanish rule
V -» 0 / [+cons]_
by deleting the environmental restriction to resonants.
6.4. Vocalization
In Latin / is deleted before morphemic s (velys > veys > vis)
V -» y / _ + [ + cons, +cont]
but not before morphemic t (vult), whereas in French /is deleted before any consonant,
continuant or not (Lt vult > Fr veut)
lw -» w / _ + [+cons]
The French rule arises from the Latin rule by generalizing the environmental restric-
tion from only continuants to any consonant
-» w / _ +s => -·· w / _ +C
6.5. Vowel shortening (before vowel)

The Romance shortening of Latin long vowels
arises from the Latin rule which shortens vowels before other vowels (vocalis ante
vocalem corripitur) as in moneö (cf. monere) > moneö.
V -> V / _ V = > V-> V
6.6. Vowel shortening (before consonant)

Another source of Romance vowel shortening is the shortening that occurs before
tautosyllabic stops as in Latin present tense
amö amämus
amäs amätis
amät amänt
50 JAMES FOLEY
and Latin past tense

amäbäm amäbämus
ainäbäs amäbätis
amäbät amäbänt
where original long vowel is shortened before tautosyllabic stop (but not before
tautosyllabic continuant or heterosyllabic stop):
V -> / — stop %
The generalization of this rule by abolishing the environmental restriction gives the
Romance vowel shortening rule.
7. GENERALIZATION OF ENVIRONMENT (MORPHEME BOUNDARY)
A special case of the generalization of the environment is by abolishing the requirement

for the presence of a morpheme boundary. Many rules apply only in the presence of a
morpheme boundary. Rules which are restricted in their application by the require-
ment of a morpheme boundary greatly expand their applicability in Romance when
this requirement is dropped. We consider:
A. lenition
B. prothesis
C. vocalization
D. nasal effacement
7.1. Lenition
Another source of Romance lenition is the restricted Latin lenition of the weakest
consonant on the parameter (k) in the environment of a morpheme boundary:
*nec-otium ('not leisure') > negotium, though intervocalic k without morpheme
boundary (arnica) does not lenite. The Romance rule arises from the Latin rule by
deleting the morpheme boundary:
k->g/V_+V=>k->g/V_V
7.2. Prothesis
In Latin initial s followed by a consonant acquires an epenthetic e if s is separated
from the consonant by a morpheme boundary as in the verb esse:
sum sumus
es estis
est sunt
The root is *s with the addition of a prothetic vowel when followed by a consonant
(thus no prothetic vowel in sum, sumus, sunt) but 2sg. *s-s > ess > es, 3sg. *s-t >
est, 2pl. *s-tis > estis. Prothesis does not occur where there is no morpheme boundary
(scala, schola, stare)
s -> es / # _ + C
In Spanish the morpheme boundary is no longer required for the operation of the
rule, rather any initial s followed by a consonant acquires a prothetic e (escala,
escuela, estar).
s -> es / # _ C
The Spanish rule arises from the Latin rule by deleting the morpheme boundary.
7.3. Vocalization
In Latin liquid vocalization is restricted to the presence of a morpheme boundary:
vis from *vel+s
vult from *vol+1
In French this restriction has been dropped, so that vocalization occurs before
consonants without an intervening morpheme boundary Lt. colpu > coup, Lt. alter >
autre, Lt. illos > eux.
The French rule arises from the Latin rule by deleting the morpheme boundary
i-> r / _ + c = > i - > r / _ c
7.4. Nasal effacement

Latin intervocalic nasal does not generally drop, as manus, bona, but it does drop in
the presence of a morpheme boundary, thus cum + ago > cö-agö > cögö.
In Portuguese intervocalic n drops without the presence of a morpheme boundary:
manus > mäo, bona > boa. The Portuguese rule arises from the Latin rule by deletion
of the morpheme boundary.
N->0/V_+V=>N->0/V_V
8. RELAXATION OF SIMILARITY REQUIREMENT
Contraction has a condition that elements be sufficiently similar before the rule
applies.
In Latin the thematic vowel and desinential vowel contract if sufficiently similar.
Thus*a/wao > amo (cf. amare) but *moneo > idem and *audio > idem.
52 JAMES FOLEY
The universal rule for contraction is

Vi V 2 -» V 3
where |V t - V 2 | < ä
The condition |Vj — V 2 | < ä requires that the absolute value of the difference
between the vowels be sufficiently small, that is, that they be sufficiently similar.
Though the value of ä varies from language to language, the universal condition
remains invariable.
With reference to the Romance vowel strength parameter
1 2 3 4 5
the value of ä for Latin is 1, since
|a - o| = |5 - 4| = 1
with contraction of a + o but
|e - o| = |2 - 4| = 2
|i - o| = |1 - 4| = 3
with no contraction of e + o or i+o.
In Spanish the similarity requirement has been relaxed, for not only do a + o
contract *amao > amo (amar) but so do e + o *comeo > como (comer) and i+o
*vivio > vivo (vivir).
universal rule: V t + V 2 -> V 3
universal condition: \Vl — V 2 | < ä
parochial condition: ä = 1 for Latin
ä = 3 for Spanish
The Spanish contraction rule arises from the Latin contraction rule by relaxing the
similarity requirement, i.e. by increasing the value of ä:
ä = 1 => ä = 3
The Latin noun plural of the first and second declensions is formed by adding é,
thus amid from *amico-i (cf. amicus) and amicae from *amica-i (cf. arnica). Contrac-
tion occurs to o + i but not to a + i since the former combination is more similar.
|o - i| = |4 - 1| = 3
|a - i| = |5 - 1| = 4
For Latin noun plurals, ä = 3 in the universal contraction rule.
In Italian noun plurals the similarity requirement has been relaxed, so that both
o+i and a + i contract, thus *amico-i > amid and also *amica-i > amiche. The
Italian rule is the same as the Latin rule, but with a larger value for ä.
ä = 3=> ä = 4
9. PERSISTENCE OF RULES
The repetition of rules in language can occur only because there is a basic set of rules
which belongs not to any individual language, but to Language. This set of rules
recurs repeatedly in Language, and the repetition of rules in particular languages is
simply a manifestation of this phenomenon.
Rather than say that Latin rules repeat themselves in Spanish, it is more accurate
to say that universal rules appear both in Latin and Spanish. Thus, we are not surprised
to find Spanish rules for which there is no apparent Latin origin, but which appear in
other Indo-European languages. For example, there are Greek rules which do not
appear in Latin, yet appear in Spanish. Metaphysically speaking, these are Indo-
European rules which manifest themselves in Greek, but go through a latency period
in Latin, only to appear again in modern Romance languages. We consider four
instances:
A. labiovelar contraction
B. nasal dentalization
D. nasalization
D. Holtzmann's Law
9.1. Labiovelar contraction
IndoEuropean kw contracts to p in Greek (Lt. sequor, Gk. hepomai). This rule repeats
itself in Roumanian, with Lt. lingua > Rm. limbä, Lt. *interguo (interrogo) > Rm.
intreb.
9.2. Nasal dentalization
In Greek final nasals become dentals, as *lukom > lukon (cf. Lt. lupurri). This rule
occurs in Spanish where Adan for Adam, albun for album.
9.3. Nasalization
In Greek « drops when followed by a consonant, as hekaton from *he-kent-om (cf.

Lt. centum):
hekenton
heketom nasalization
hekätom vowel strengthening (lowering)
hekaton denasalization
The same process occurs in French cent (sä) from Lt. centum
54 JAMES FOLEY
sent
set nasalization
sä vowel strengthening
though denasalization has not yet applied in French.
9.4. Holtzmann's Law is the addition of a stop onset to a glide. Though originally
formulated for North and East Germanic (Skt. priya, ON Frigg) it applies also in
Greek, though with further phonetic developments. Thus Gk. dzugon < *yugom,
(cf. Lt. iugurri) by
*yugon
dyugon Holtzmann's Law
dzyugon sibilant epenthesis
dzugon deiotation
The same rule applies in Spanish where joven from Lt. iuvenis
*yoven
dyoven Holtzmann's Law
dzyoven sibilant epenthesis
dzoven syneresis
Here the Spanish development differs from the Greek development, with combination
of y with the preceding z instead of simple deletion. This stage represents the Italian
development (giovane).
zoven lenition (stop deletion)
This stage represents the French development (jeune). From here Spanish develops
further
soven medieval Spanish sibilant devoicing
Xoven velarization
The Romance strengthing of y to dz is not a direct continuation of a Latin overt rule,
but of a rule which must have existed latently in Latin.
10. SUMMARY
Modern Romance rules do not arise de novo, but rather develop either directly from
Latin rules or indirectly through latent Latin rules. Phonological change is not caused
by the addition of rules to a grammar, but by the repetition or modification of rules
already existing in the language.
Simon Fräser University.
GEORGIA M. GREEN
TRACING THE SOURCE OF A LEXICAL GAP*
In a paper presented at the 1970 winter LSA meeting,1 I showed that French lacked
an adjective complement construction which was very common in English, namely
that exemplified by sentences (la) and (2a), even though French seemed to have as
great a variety as English of other constructions with this same superficial form, as
demonstrated in (3-10).
(la) He sponged it clean. We painted it red.
(Ib) *// Ãá epongee nette. *Nous I'avons peint rouge.
(2a) She shouted herself hoarse.
(2b) *Elle s'est ecriee enrouee.
(3a) I found her alive.
(3b) Je Ãáú trouvee vivante.
(4a) She will bring them to me alive.
(4b) Elle me les apportera vivantes.
(5a) / saw her happy last night.
(5b) Je Ãáß vue heureuse hier soir.
(6a) He likes them thin.
(6b) // les aime minces.
(la) They buried her alive.
(7b) Us Ãïçß enterree vivante.
(8a) / consider her alive.
(8b) Je la considere vivante.
(9a) The doctor declared her dead.
(9b) Le medecin Ãá declaree morte.
(lOa) It made her sick.
(lOb) // Ãá rendue malade.
* I am grateful to Kenneth Andrews, J rgen D llein, Rina Gal, Eric Hamp, Henry Kahane, Renee
Kahane, Adrienne Koermendy, Merete Mitchell, Philip Mitchell, Mihaela Susan, Jerry Morgan,
Mario Saltarelli, Dan Taylor, and Dieter Wanner for acting as informants.
1
A longer version of that paper (Green 1973) will appear in Papers in Linguistics in Honor of
Henry and Renie Kahane, edited by Braj B. Kachru et al. (University of Illinois Press).
56 GEORGIA M. GREEN
The difference between (1) and (2) on the one hand, and (3-10) on the other is that the
adjectives in (1) and (2) describe an effect on the direct object brought about by the
subject's performing on the direct object the activity described by the verb. I will
refer to these constructions as instrumental causative constructions, even in such
cases as (2) and (11-13), where the verbs do not refer, strictly speaking, to instruments.
Whatever they are called, they refer to special ways of getting things done. Sentences
like (3-10) do not have these properties. This is obvious in (3-6). In (7), the adjective
describes not an effect on the direct object, a result of the action described by the
verb, but a description of its state prior to and during the action described by the verb.
In (8), what the adjective describes is not even asserted to be a property of the noun
it refers to. In (9), the adjective may describe a state the direct object is in after the
performing of the act described by the verb, but not as a result of that act — a doctor
doesn't cause a woman to be dead or insane or whatever by declaring (her). In (10),
the adjective does describe a state which the subject has brought about in the direct
object, but not by performing on the object an activity described by the verb — 'make'
and rendre are simply general verbs of causation. They don't specify particular methods
the way 'sponge' and 'shout' do in (1) and (2).
I claimed (1973) that this was a lexical gap in that the French words which, from
the English language point of view, ought to have a sense which would permit them
to occur in these constructions seemed to lack such a sense. Perhaps the difference is
more syntactic than lexical or derivational; the important question is, why is there a
gap at all ? I pointed out that in addition to instrumental causative constructions with
adjectives, like (1) and (2), English had similar constructions with adverbs and particles,
like (11), and other causative or resultative idiomatic expressions of various sorts,
as in (12) and (13).
(11 a) We sent them away.
(lib) We turned it off.
(lie) We swept that aside.
(12a) John ate it up.
(12b) He finished it off.
(13a) You're putting me on.
(13b) That loused him up.
(13c) It did him in.
The adverb and particle expressions of (11-13) are quite characteristic of English,
and probably outnumber the adjective expressions, which are restricted in curious
ways.2 French, on the other hand, has very little in the way of adverb complements
like (11), and almost all are with mettre, a very general causative verb, almost as
general as rendre or faire, in some contrast to the expressions in (11-13). French has
nothing to compare to the preposition-like adverbial particles at all. I suggested that
2
Cf. Green (1972) for some discussion.
TRACING THE SOURCE OF A LEXICAL GAP 57
this wasn't a coincidence, and that the absence of the resultative adjective construction
and verbs that could permit it was somehow related to the lack of 'particles' and the
absence of parallel constructions with adverbs.
If this isn't a coincidence — and the fact that Spanish3 and Italian lack just those
constructions which French lacks (causative verb + result adjective, particle, or
adverb), while German and Danish have all of them just as English does, suggests that
it is not a coincidence, a peculiarity of English or French — then the explanation for
the difference between English and French must be sought in some systematic differ-
ences between the Romance languages and the Germanic languages. Given that the
western Romance languages lack this instrumental causative construction, one might
expect Latin to lack it also, and indeed it does. Although sentences like (14a-f) are
grammatical Latin, I have been unable to find cited examples like (15) and (16),
and my informants, though not native speakers, did not hesitate to reject sentences
like (15) and (16) as possible Latin sentences.
(14a) Caesarem mortuum/vivum invent.
(14b) Si Jugurtham vivom out necatum tradisset...
(14c) Eos sanas fecitjreddidit.
(14d) Deos aeternos et beatos habeo.
(14e) nines collegas suos vivos cremare...
(14f) Amico vivo non subvenisti.
(15a) *Eam apertam rupit.
(15b) *Eas occlusas defixit.
(15c) *Eum mortuum occidit.
(16a) *Se stultum bebit.
(16b) *Se plenum edit.
(16c) *Se raucam clamavit.
The verb + adjective constructions seem to be lacking also with verbs of ritual
declaration in Latin, as they are in German and Danish, which languages also lack
the construction with verbs of judging, as shown in (17) and (18).
(17a) Sie fanden sie krank vor.
(17b) Bringt sie lebend oder tot zurück.
(17c) Ich halte sie (für } schön.
M ^
(17d) Der Arzt erklärte sie r(für j inkompetent.
1*0}
(17e) Sie streichen sie rot an.
(17f) Sie haben sie lebendig begraben.
3
I have been advised that in at least one variety of New World Spanish there occur expressions
such as beberse tonto 'drink oneself foolish', comerse pobre 'eat oneself poor', gritarse ronco 'shout
oneself hoarse'. Many speakers of Spanish, however, express disbelief at this.
58 GEORGIA M. GREEN
(17g) Ich sah sie glücklich.

(17h) Er hat sich heiser geschrieen.
(17i) Es hat ihn glücklich gemacht.
(17j) Er liebt seine Frauen fett.
(18a) Defandt hende syg.
(18b) Bring hende levende tilbage.
(18c) Jeg holder hende (for \ smuk.
|*0j
(18d) Lagen erklcerede hende (for \ dod.
j*0 }
(18e) De malede det rodt.
(18f) De har begravet hende levende.
(18g) Har De (nogensinde) set ham glad?
(18h) Han drak sigfuld.
(18i) Det gjorde dem glad.
(18j) Han drikker sin kaffe sort.
The instrumental causatives are alive and well in German and Danish (ex. 17e, 18e).
The reflexive constructions (17h, 18h) are possibly even more common in German
than in English, and all three languages are characterized by an immense set of
constructions with adverbs and so-called particles, including many idiomatic con-
fections, such as 'tell off', 'bawl out', 'chew out', 'louse up', 'do in'; umbringen 'kill',
abkanzeln 'teil off', reinlegen 'put on', abfressen 'eat off, at', abessen 'eat off', etc.
The question boils down then to this: why are the instrumental causative +
adverbial/adjectival constructions like the (e) and (h) examples so characteristic of
these three Germanic languages, and so foreign to the Romance languages ? In Green
(1973), I made a rather vague suggestion that the existence of the numerous particle
and adverb constructions of varying degrees of semantic transparency made it natural
somehow that adjectives could be used with instrumental verbs in a parallel causative
construction, even though they might appear to require somewhat different deriva-
tions. I would like to suggest here that this relationship follows from principles of
derivational morphology peculiar to the language family. Specifically, in the Germanic
languages there is a well-established principle for forming what we may call complex
verbs out of plain old ordinary verbs plus adverbs which are identical to prepositions.
But notice that even in these complex verbs, in both English and German, many of
these preposition/adverbs are bound only very loosely to the verbs. In English they
may freely occur either adjacent to the verb or following the object, and in German
they occur separated from the verb except in nominalizations, infinitives after modals,
and in subordinate clauses. In Latin and the Romance languages there is no possibility
of loosely joining prepositions or adverbs to verbs. Transitive verbs formed from a
preposition and a transitive verb stem are as characteristic of Latin and French as
so-called particle verbs are of English and German, but once a prefix gets stuck onto a
Latin or French verb stem it is there for good, even being assimilated phonologically,
in contrast to the German construction: even when the German adverb/preposition
is directly juxtaposed to the verb, it doesn't assimilate: you get [PapPesan] not
[Pabesan]. Thus, in Latin we find such examples as occido 'kill' ('cut about, in the
neighborhood of), interficio 'kill' ('do between'), tra(ns)iacio 'throw across'; and in
French, such examples as surmener Overwork' ('lead over'), encadrer 'frame' ('square
in'). But I don't think I would want to claim that 'shoot dead', 'paint red', totschiessen,
rot anstreichen etc. are single verbs in the same sense that 'do in' and umbringen are,
and are derived in the same way. For one thing, this would seem to entail claiming
that 'paint green' was a verb, as was 'paint ochre, paint Forest Green 63', and so on,
and this would be absurd. Nonetheless, it is surely indicative of a sort of autonomy
for these expressions that we can speak of "expressions like 'shoot dead, paint
magenta, sweep aside'" while it would be ludicrous to speak of "expressions like 'see
alive, prefer fat, find sick, consider beautiful'." Furthermore, although there is an
infinite class of color names that can occur with 'paint', the adjectives and adverbial
expressions that can occur with the other verbs are severely restricted. We have no
*'shoot lame', no *'shoot paranoid', no *'do out', no *'eat down'. Both kinds of
expressions, those with adjectives and those with 'particles', exhibit lexical idio-
syncrasy as well as syntactic and morphological regularity, and a degree of semantic
uniformity also. The other verb-object-adjective constructions do not seem to be so
restricted. Almost any adjective that can occur in the frame (19) can occur in con-
structions like those in (20).
(19) B was .
(20a) Have you seen B
(20b) It made B
(20c) Vd consider B
(20d) Bring B back
(20e) They found B
What I am suggesting then is that the instrumental causative S-V-O-Adj constructions
in the Germanic languages have nothing to do with other S-V-O-Adj constructions,
which are in fact common to both Germanic and Romance languages, but rather that
the instrumental causative constructions are much more closely related to the so-
called verb-particle constructions, by some still-to-be-understood principles of
complex verb morphology.
An interesting test case is provided by Rumanian, which, mirabile dictu, has the
instrumental causative construction, as in (21).*
(21 a) A sters-o curat. 'He wiped it clean.'
(21b) L-a vopsit ro?u. 'He painted it red.'
4
I have recently been informed that Rhaeto-Romance has this construction also, mainly in areas
with contact with German speakers, but I have been unable to verify this with an informant.
60 GEORGIA M. GREEN
According to my informant, Rumanian doesn't have this construction in its most

striking form, with a reflexive object which originates (semantically, and I would
claim also syntactically) in another clause, i.e. constructions like (2), say something
like *(22).
(22) *S-a fipat rägusit. 'He shouted himself hoarse'.
Nor was my informant able to give me idioms with parallel form. Rumanian does
have a few 'free' adverbs in some constructions, such as a se dajos 'get down, descend'
('give oneself down'), a aruncajos 'throw down', but then so does French (se pencher
dehors 'lean out', compter quelqifun dehors 'count someone out', mettre has 'take off;
pull down; overthrow; lay down', mettre quelqu'un dehors 'turn someone out', mettre
quelqiiun dedans 'put someone on'). The point remains that what we would normally
express in English by an adverb/preposition/particle would be a prefix in Rumanian —
as in French and Latin. Even without evidence that forms like (21) were lacking in
Latin (cf. *(15)), this would lead us to suspect that this construction was not native
to Rumanian. So the question arises, where might the Rumanians have gotten this
construction from? Do any of the other Balkan languages have this as a pattern
strong enough to affect a language to which it would seem to be a rather foreign
construction ? While none of the Balkan languages I have scratched seem to exhibit
the instrumental causative V-O-Adj/Adv/Ptcl construction in anything like the
abundance they occur in a Germanic language, there seem to be parallel construc-
tions in Hungarian and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in modern Greek.
To return to the nature of these instrumental causative constructions and related
causative or resultative constructions, I have not said what kind of rules these
principles of derivational morphology must be, or how, exactly, they could treat
adjectives, prepositions, and adverbs in the same manner, or even whether these
principles are synchronic or diachronic. One fact that suggests a diachronic nature is
that present-day PRODUCTIVE English verb morphology is much more like Latin word
formation than French verb morphology is. 'De-, inter-, trans-, re-' and probably
several other prefixes are at least as productive in Modern English as the particles 'up,
down, off, over, out, back, etc.' Latin prepositional-prefix morphology seems to me
less productive in French than it is in English, and the purely French prepositions
do not seem to participate in it at all; there are no verbs like *horsjeter 'throw out',
no *avantmettre or *avantposer 'prepose', no *basmettre 'put down'. Nor I think, is
there any likelihood of their appearing in the near future. If French speakers have
a need to talk about proposing, it is many times more likely that they will 'coin' a
verb preposer than a verb avantposer. Whatever nature these principles have, they
ought to be such that they explain not only (1) why the causative instrumental
S-V-O-Adj constructions are absent in the Romance languages aside from Rumanian
and perhaps Rhaeto-Romance, and (2) why they are so un-Romance, but also (3) why
the unattested forms I have just cited are so un-French, especially in the face of their
Latin equivalents ejicio, praepono, and dimitto.5
University of Illinois.
REFERENCES
Green, Georgia M.
1972 "Some observations on the syntax and semantics of instrumental verbs", to appear in the
Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting (Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society).
1973 "A Syntactic Syncretism in English and French", in Issues in Linguistics. Papers in Honor
of Henry and Renee Kahane, edited by B. B. Kachru et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press).
5
It is interesting to note that etymologies of many of the 'purely French' prepositions trace them
to Latin adverbial expressions: derriere < de retro, apres < ad pressum, avec < apud hoc, avant <
ab ante. One might suppose that their phrasal nature has been covertly retained, and that this is what
prevents them from being prefixed to verbs. However, unless there is independent evidence for such a
phrasal nature distinguishing between apres, avant, avec, etc. on the one hand, and pour, en, sur, etc.
on the other, it is difficult to imagine how speakers could learn this distinction as such, and as a
synchronic claim it would not be very explanatory. Furthermore, if words like avant are synchronically
phrasal, the analysis of phrases like en avant de 'ahead of will verge on syntactic nonsense (= 'in
from before of'?).
DANIEL E. GULSTAD
SYNTACTICO-SEMANTIC RECONSTRUCTION IN
ROMANCE.
PROBLEMS AND PROGRESS
1. LINGUISTIC CHANGE, RECONSTRUCTION, AND RULE ADDING
Since the days of Jacob Grimm and Rasmus Rask, reconstruction in linguistics has
gone through several phases. Each phase has had its own goals, more or less explicit,
and its own implicit philosophy of language. Romanticism and nationalism prompted
the initial essays into comparative linguistics, but soon the search for an Ursprache
was spurred on by Darwinian naturalism, with languages thought of as living organisms
capable of responding to natural selection. Comtian positivism and the sociological
method, especially as outlined by Emile Durkheim, led to further modifications in
linguistic theory, especially to the Saussurean dichotomies of langue/parole, external/
internal linguistics, and diachronic/synchronic linguistics.1 From the early 20th
century to the 1950's the Saussurean restrictions generally held. Language was
treated as an abstraction — a set of signs. Evolution could be accounted for only as a
phenomenon growing out of parole, resulting perhaps from collective negligence or
frailty in the actualization of the abstract langue. This gave a boost to studies in
dialectology, psycho-linguistics, and socio-linguistics, but it left historical linguistics
in a predicament.
Such psycholinguistic hypotheses as Zipf's "principle of least effort" (Zipf 1949)
were actually encouraged by a sharp distinction between langue and parole (with
sound change seen as the product of collective failure to utter the same sounds
repeatedly without progressive divergence from the original sound), but any attempt
to see change as the outcome of systemic determinism was completely ruled out.
Transformational theory did not depart markedly from this position at first. By the
early 1960's transformationalists began to invade the field of diachronic linguistics.
Although some of the earlier publications dealt with comparative syntax (e.g. Klima,
1964 and 1965), it was Halle's phonological theory (Halle 1962) that had the greatest
immediate consequences for diachronic theory. Three reasons might be adduced for
this: (1) historical linguistics has always been more secure when dealing with phonology
1
See my discussion of Durkheimian influences and the Saussurean theory in Gulstad (manuscript).
64 DANIEL E. GULSTAD
and morphophonology; (2) the combinatorial configurations in a phonology are

much more finite than those in a syntactic system; (3) Halle's generative phonology
truly captures the processes underlying phonological systems, while Chomsky's
syntactic theory was substantially infelicitous.2 Synchronic phonology continued to
apply Halle's system (with only minor changes) throughout the 1960's, while that same
decade saw the earlier syntactic model integrated with semantics (Katz and Postal
1964), given a more powerful base (Chomsky 1965; Lakoff 1965; Gruber 1967, etc.),
then all but discarded for any of several theories of so-called generative semantics
(Lakoff 1969, 1970a, 1970b, 1971; McCawley 1968a, 1968b, 1968c, 1970a, 1970b;
Postal 1970, 1971; Chafe 1970; etc.). The inadequacies of early transformational
grammar deprive of any real importance attempts to apply it diachronically (in this
respect King [1969] is weak, since the small section of his book that he dedicates
to syntax [pp. 140-53] offers nothing more insightful than a rehash of Klima [1964,
1965] and Closs [1965]). Obviously if autonomous syntax has given way to a prop-
osition-based generative semantics there is nothing meaningful to be gained from
continuing to compare syntactic structures qua autonomous syntactic structures
across related dialects.
At least in regard to syntactic change diachronic linguistics is destitute of either
methodology or philosophy. There is, of course, the feeble argument that syntax
like phonology evolves by the addition of rules, but such an assertion is as vacuous
as it is unsubstantiated. A primary reason for this dearth of theory is the uncertainty
in synchronic grammar as to the respective roles of syntax and semantics in sentence
generation, coupled with perplexity over the status of transformations in respect to
level of application, ordering, pre- or post-lexical privilege of occurrence, meaning-
preservingness, etc. But a second reason is just as important, namely the fact that
there is little parallel between the adding or deleting of rules in syntax and phonology.
Phonological rules are of the nature of
H
0) -A +A
+B
+C L-oJ,
where A, B, C, ... represent phonological features like Vocalic, Consonantal, Front,
Rounded, etc. The phonological environment may represent a certain degree of
abstraction (e.g. 'slighting' contrasts in speech with 'sliding' on a basis of vowel
contrast ([aj]) vs. [aj]), but the underlying contrast is [th] vs. [d], which places the
two variants of [aj] in contrasting underlying environments (even though their surface
environments are identical), but this abstraction in no way approaches that of the
syntactico-semantic structure.
Suppose, for example, we wish to account for the development of new passive
forms in Vulgar Latin, what rules must we add ? Our first task would be to decide
2
On this latter point see Gulstad (1971; 1972a; 1972b; 1972c; forthcoming; manuscript).
SYNTACTICO-SEMANTIC RECONSTRUCTION IN ROMANCE 65
what level of abstraction we wished to represent. If we wish, for example, to consider

both
(2) Marcella videtur ä Lucretiä
and
(3) Marcella est visa ä Lucretiä
to represent a deeper
(4) Lucretiä videt Marcellam,
then we are confronted with the dilemma of deciding whether the changes involved
are syntactic or merely morphological. In Figure 1 sentences (4), (2), and (3) are
represented as (4'), (2'), and (3'), respectively.
NPag Aux Verb NPou

(4') Lucretiä Present viD Marcellam
(2') A Lucretiä Present viD Marcella -ur
(3') A Lucretiä Present viD Marcella es-
FIGURE 1
What I have attempted to do is to associate with the underlying form and order
(represented by (4')) the morphological markers by which their surface forms are
marked. Assuming that Lucretiä is marked as agent by underlying word order and
nominative case inflection, on the one hand, and by ab + ablative case inflection on
the other, I list its three occurrences under NPag. Under Aux we see Present Tense in
its abstract form only, since low-level morphophonological rules will assign its surface
structure. Verb is represented in all three instances as viD for the same reason. The use
of NPobj to label Marcellam, Marcella -ur, and Marcella es-, is based on the assump-
tion that the underlying relation of this NP to the verb is variously marked by word
order, affix -m, verb-affix -ur, and particle es-.3
Chomsky's transformational grammar originally gained popularity because it
was believed to have solved the synchronic problem of relating strings resembling
assertion sentences in active voice to their passive, interrogative, emphatic, etc.,
transforms. Few manuals published since 1960 have failed to make use of the so-called
passive transformation to illustrate the efficacy of transformational grammar. As a
synchronic solution Chomsky's theory has been attacked, modified, and even entirely
rejected by some linguists recently (cf. Fillmore 1968b, Chafe 1970, Gulstad 1972a
and forthcoming). Certainly this Latin example exposes its inadequacy in accounting
3
This is slightly exaggerated, since es- following a nominative could be read as a nominative if the
verb is intransitive: e.g. Marcella est adventa 'Marcella has arrived'.
for syntactic change, since despite their surface dissimilarity, (2) and (3) must be
assumed to have identical deep structure if (4) is the active counterpart of both.
Suppose we say that NPobj consists of a N + Obj, where Obj is a marker of objective
case. In (4) Obj surfaces as -m, in (2) as -ur, and in (3) as es-. There would have to be a
rule to bring Obj to the left of Aux in (3) and first Aux and then Obj to the right of
Verb in (2). Since (4) can be rendered also as
(5) Marcellam Lucretia videt
or
(6) Marcellam videt Lucretia,
we may presume that a topicalizing rule is independently motivated. This rule could
be stated as
(7) SD: NPag - Aux - V - NPobj
1 2 3 4
SC: 1 2 3 4 - > 4 2 3 1.
One more common rule would apply, one which rewrites NPobJ as N + Obj, to get
the case marker referred to above. From this point on the rules differ for the grammars
that generate sentences (6), (2), and (3), respectively. (6) would be derived by the mere
application of low-level rules, (2) and (3) would require a rule that removes Obj
from under NPobj, that is, that changes the boundary between N and Obj into a
'word boundary'. A further rule incorporates Obj in Aux. With the application of low-
level rules to this marker we get sentence (3). Sentence (2) requires an additional
Ëé/x-attachment rule that moves Aux into post-verbal position and attaches it to the
verb. Low-level rules render Aux as -etur in this instance and est in the case of
sentence (3). A copying rule marks the CS for V to take the perfect form in the
environment Aux .
If this tentative analysis is even remotely similar to what an expert on Latin and
transformational grammar would adduce, then several inconsistencies with the rule-
adding theory of language change are revealed. First of all, note that it is the chrono-
logically prior sentence that requires an additional movement rule (ËÌ÷-attachment),
thus reversing the notion of rule addition (although the possibly greater complexity
of selection rules might be argued as counter evidence, if there is any way of measuring
economy at different rule levels). Secondly, this analysis fails to relate the Classical
Latin perfect passive structure to the new present passive structure, and it does not
show the shift of the pluperfect passive to the perfect passive. But the most serious
argument against such an analysis is its intuitive unacceptability. No one who has
studied Classical Latin would accept sentence (3) as a derivative of (2), but that (3)
is a substitute for (2) is universally accepted. It is for these facts that we must account,
and if we wish to achieve a comparative theory capable of reconstructing proto-
languages we must have a more sophisticated understanding of language change than
the rule-addition theory implies.
Similar arguments can be raised against considering the development of quod-

clause complements in place of the accusative plus infinitive (i.e. Dicit se venire >
Dicit quod venit) as derivatives of the former by rule addition, despite the assumption
that the embedded sentence in either case has an identical structure. One could go on
listing such instances indefinitely, but these examples suffice. It is clear that the notion
of rule adding, which works well enough in certain clear-cut cases (e.g. in showing
the reduction of case inflections by the use of collapsing rules), fails to account in an
intuitively acceptable manner for syntactic change. This is not a refutation of the rule
addition theory, however, but rather an argument against the homogeneous view of
language that motivates the type of rules we have been looking at.
We do not have space here to run through the entire set of arguments that motivate
a heterogeneous view of language (cf. Gulstad [manuscript] for a detailed discussion),
but we have already encountered sufficient evidence to suspect that syntactic change is
not a series of rule changes among the transformations that provide surface structures
for a finite set of unchanging deep structures.
2. STATUS OF THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
If the comparative method in linguistics is a reliable tool, then it must not rely on
attestation from contemporary documents. Perhaps less than 5 percent of all languages
have written records going back more than a few generations at the most. Either
languages are reconstructible by comparative methods or our chances of ever achieving
an adequate classification of the genetic relations of the world's languages are nil.
On the other hand, no-one who has given any thought to the nature of language would
view the reconstructed proto-languages as a faithful resurrection of the dead language
in all its intimate details. Obviously proto-languages are abstractions. But the Indo-
European languages and the Semitic languages are not typical, and the use of the
comparative method as j ust one of several tools in diachronic studies of these languages
leaves open the question whether a diachronic study of the more numerous until
recently unwritten languages is possible, given that they have no documented older
forms (like Germanic), parent forms (like the Romance languages), or elder sisters
(like Armenian in relation to Sanskrit, Old Persian, Greek, Latin, Old Church
Slavonic, etc.). That is, the issue is whether a close comparison of the dialects of a
given language will lead to progressive stages of reconstruction which, compared
with similarly reconstructed stages in related languages will lead to still further
reconstructions, and they to further still, etc., or whether reconstruction is doomed
to stop at the level where the most archaic aspects of current stages have been
internally reconstructed and compared to the similarly compared current stage of
related languages.
The Romance languages have been considered ideal for testing the comparative
method because the results of comparison can usually be checked against attested
forms in Classical Latin. To my knowledge, however, no sincere effort has been

made to apply comparative methods to the modern dialects of the Romance languages
in an effort to reconstruct the ancient language by comparative methods alone. Only
such an effort would be a valid test of the comparative method, since it would be a
simulation of the conditions under which 95 percent or more of all reconstructive
efforts will have to take place. Reconstructing Proto-Romance by comparing Old
Provengal, Old French, Old Spanish, Old Portuguese, Old Catalan, Early Sardinian,
Early Italian, Early Daco-Romance, etc. does not represent a realistic approach
either, since the languages being compared at that stage have much more in common
with the parent language than their 20th-century descendants.
It seems obvious that two phenomena must be accounted for in any syntactic
reconstruction. One of these is the permanence of deep grammatical relations, like
active to passive, and the second is the set of shallow relations among fluctuating
intermediate and surface forms. As an example, suppose we pursue the question of the
passive, but looking back this time from present-day Romance. All the Romance
languages have a passive of the BE + Past Participle type, even though none uses this
form exclusively. We thus may either isolate the passive as an underlying relation and
merely enumerate the syntactic structures by which it is realized, or we may focus our
attention on the structures, seeking relations among these. Suppose we begin by
establishing that one underlying structure will account for any of the derived structures,
regardless of which language they occur in.
Sentence (8) is a Rumanian sentence quoted from Seivers (1953: 135):
(8) Casa a fast cläditä de un vecin al nostru.
'The house was built by a neighbor of ours'.
Compare with it the following:
(9) Italian: La casafu costruita da un vicino nostro.
(10) French: La maison a ete construite par un de nos voisins.
(11) Catalan: La casafou edificada per un vei nostre.
(12) Spanish: La casafue construidapar un vecino nuestro.
(13) Portuguese: A casafol construida por urn vizinho nosso.
Following Gulstad (1972a), let us represent sentences (8)-(13) as in figure 2. It is
obvious here that the transformational view of the passive as a transform of the
active, as well as the Fillmorian notion of the passive as topicalized object when agent
is at least implicit, are rejected.4 We want to account not only for the passive but for
'passives of state' and other related structures.
Let us look first at level 6 in the tree of Figure 2. Tense is marked as Past in
4
Among interesting works in which passive is derived via topicalization of the object are Fillmore
(1968b et al.), Chafe (1970), and Postal (1971). In reference to a Romance language, Mark Goldin's
little monograph on the case structure of Spanish (Goldin 1968) treats passivity along Fillmorian
lines.
SYNTACTICOSEMANTIC RECONSTRUCTION IN ROMANCE 69
A NEIGHBOR A NEIGHBOR
OF OURS OF OURS
A NEIGHBOR
OF OURS
F
CTop)
Past
accordance with sentences (8)-(13), but it could be present, future, etc. (probably a
mere pronoun or vestige of a temporal adverb [cf. Kiparsky 1968]). The output in,
for example, Spanish would be
(14) Se construyo una casa.
When levels 5 and 6 are topicalized together, however, the output is
(15) Una casafue construida.
If levels 1, 5, and 6 are topicalized we get sentence (12). The agent phrase is a mere
reiteration in a super-adjunction of the nuclear causative of the left branch of level 2.
Another type of sentence that occurs in all the Romance languages is exemplified
by the Portuguese sentence
(16) A casa esta construida de ladrilhos.
To account for (16) we have to assume that the tree of Figure 2 is collapsed from a
more extended tree that has several intervening stages between the agentive and the
patient. One of those stages is the Material stage, and its tree in relation to the patient
would look as in Figure 3. An active sentence based on level 2 would be
(17) * Ladrilhos fazem a casa.
This is an asterisked sentence because surface semantic constraints rule it out, but a
similar sentence, for example
(18) Os ladrilhos fazem urn monte 'The bricks make a heap',
demonstrates that when the Topic ladrilho is not generic as in (17) the active sentence
can be topicalized. However, the underlying presence of a string similar to (17) is
revealed by the superadjunction de ladrilhos which is topicalized as an adjunct in
(19) A casa esta feita de ladrilhos
which shows levels 5 and 6 activated under the Topic of level 1, whose right branch
gives the superadjoined Comment de ladrilhos, a reiteration of * ladrilhos fazem as in
level 2. The verb in levels 3 and 5 is labeled BE in order not to commit us to a choice
between SER and ESTAR, since such a choice is completely absent in some Romance
languages (e.g. French), and is not uniform even in Hispano-Romance. There is a
difference in function between the verb in level 3 and that of level 5 which in general
accounts for the choice of ser or estar in Portuguese and Spanish, but such a choice
is merely a lexical peculiarity. That is, topicalization of levels 3 and 4 under the Topic
of level 1 in Portuguese would produce
(20) A casa foi feita de ladrilhos
while levels 5 and 6 under the same Topic would give (19). The reason for the
difference in choice of verb is syntactic, not semantic. There are no semantic features
Top Com
F
Top
2 Tpp Cora
de ladrilhos
ladri
associated with ser and estar that govern their use. Rather, it is the syntactic fact that
an active sentence underlies feita when it lexicalizes level 4 that selects SER as the
verb of level 3, and that a passive sentence underlies feita when it lexicalizes level 6
that selects ESTAR as the verb. Those languages that do not happen to have separate
lexical forms for these two levels of BE are not extremely handicapped, since con-
textual conditions ordinarily disambiguate a sentence like English
(21) The house was made of bricks,
which out of context means either that someone made the house of bricks or that
bricks were what the house was made of; moreover, the existence in the Romance
languages of a perfective/imperfective contrast in verbs reduces further the possible
ambiguity (contrast French a ete construite with etait construite).
But to understand properly how these lexical forms relate to underlying structures,
and to achieve a satisfactory reconstruction of the Proto-Romance system, we must
extend our examination of verb 'conjugations' to the so-called past participles,
gerunds, and modals. To facilitate this survey figures 4 and 5 have been prepared.
Recall that Figure 2 is merely a collapsed tree, showing only that structure necessary
to illustrate the desired agent/patient relation. Figure 3 is a collapsed view of the
structure essential to account for a material patient relation. A tree capable of
accounting for any of the numerous sentence classes that are implied by several-
argument verbs would be very extensive.5 Each stage has five basic levels, and there
would be one stage for each case class associated with the verb. For Spanish construir
we could posit something on the order of (24), that is, an agentive stage, an in-
strumental stage, a material stage, a dative stage, a patient stage, and a resultative
stage. Each stage in (24) represents a five-level tree with levels similar to levels 2
through 6 in the tree of Figure 2, which is collapsed insofar as the aspectual and
modality predications are concerned. Figure 4 shows just one level of the tree of
Figure 6, namely level 1. We see from Figure 4 that even the tree of Figure 6 is much
simplified, since each level must be expanded as in Figure 4 to account for aspectual
and modality choices. Figure 5 is the aspectuality and modality expansion of level 2
in the tree of Figure 6.
Let us now examine the tree of Figure 4. The labels in upper case are symbols for
underlying forms or features. In level l, HAB and VOL represent the same modal,
identical in function throughout the Romance languages, but deriving in Rumanian
from *volere rather than höhere.6 In passing we should mention that this modal is
5
Anyone familiar with current literature on verb syntax will understand exactly what is meant
here by 'several-argument verbs'. For anyone lacking background on these matters, a few useful
sources would be: Fillmore (1968a, 1968b, 1970, 1971a, 1971b), Lakoff(1969, 1970a, 1970b, 1971),
McCawley (1968a, 1968b, 1968c, 1970a, 1970b), Bellert (1970), and Kay (1970). I use the term
'several-argument' rather than 'multiple-argument' in order not to imply vast numbers.
6
Additional symbols could have been used to symbolize the reflexes of debeo and habeo ad in
Sardinian.
Si
Top
1
CAROLUS
Com
CAROLUS / >
F Top
V Tns
STA
Top Com
CAROLUS
F S2
V Tns
I
APER
Sa
l Top Com
ILIA BUTTICULA
V
I
HAB
VOL
SYNTACTICOSEMANTIC RECONSTRUCTION IN ROMANCE 75
Sr«,
special in that it is obligatorily attached to the infinitive it dominates and that it

dominates all other modals, while it is never dominated (and therefore has no non-
finite forms). Futurity, thus, is expressed by a modality-aspect category, the funda-
mental function of which is not merely to relate temporality to the verb it agglutinates
with, but to relate that verb to a subordinate clause in such a manner as to underscore
the consequence of the verb in question. Consider the Spanish sentences:
abrira „ . (puede }
(25) Carlos la botella si < ,, >
abriria (podia j,
(26) Carlos
abrira
abriria {te?ii
tuviera}
V tiempo,
and
(27) Carlos \ , . , I la botella a las siete en punto.

[abnna)
Clearly there is more involved than an abstract time relation in these sentences.
Contrast these with
r , \
(28) Carlos < , . ,\ la botella manana.
abrira
The so-called 'future' is much more optional in (28) because only futurity (not
syntactic consequence) is involved.
Top Com
CAROLUS F Top
Tns
APER
Top Com
ILLA BUTTICULA
F Top
V Tns 1
S
1
ES <X\
Top Com
CAROLUS
F Top
V Tns
APER
Top Com
com
\
ILLA BUTTICULA
A
ILLA BUTTICULA
(Top)
APER
Level 2 of the tree in Figure 4 has a verb labeled DEB as the abstract representation
of French devoir, Italian dovere, Catalan deure, Spanish deber, etc. In those languages
in which this modal is in full use it must dominate POT because of the ungrammati-
cally of, for example, the Spanish sentence:
(29) *Puedo deber ir.
Level 3 contains the verb POT (=Rum. a putea, Span., Port., & Cat. poder, Fr.
pouvoir, etc.); level 4 uses HAB or ES to represent the verb usually considered
auxiliary to the so-called perfect, and level 5 uses STA as a general symbol for the
traditional auxiliary to the progressive. Level 6 corresponds to level 1 in Figure 6,
where APER is the abstract symbol for French ouvrir, Italian aprire, Spanish &
Portuguese abrir, Catalan obrir, etc. (the question of accounting for Rumanian a
deschide is a lexical matter that would not influence the main syntactic reconstruction).
Figure 5 shows a tree representing the modality-aspectuality expansions for level 2
of the tree in Figure 6. ILLA BUTTICULA is the abbreviation for an abstraction
that is realized as la bouteille in French, la botella in Spanish, la bottiglia in Italian,
etc. Level 6 of the tree in Figure 5 is equivalent to level 2 of figure 6. The verb ES
represents the copula-type verb that heads the surface VP of a passive sentence.
At this point an important generalization must be made, namely that all non-
finite verb forms are lexicalizations of underlying sentences. In the tree of Figure 4,
level 6 shows APER as a finite verb. Tense can be either past or non-past (we have
eliminated future). Nothing further need be said about this. If levels 5 and 6 are
activated, however, then since both have the choice of past/non-past the output in
Spanish can be
(30) Carlos esta abriendo la botella
or
(31) Carlos estaba abriendo la botella,
where tense is overt only in the finite verb but is understood to be simultaneous and
therefore past or non-past, respectively as the finite verb is past or non-past. Level 4
can be activated with level 6, giving in Spanish
(32) Carlos \ , ,, \ abierto la botella,
or it can be realized with levels 5 and 6, producing the Spanish
(33) Carlos < , ,, > estado abriendo la botella.

[habia)
Whereas STA restricts the sentence subsumed under level 5 to simultaneous tense,
HAB restricts the level subsumed below its lower right branch to past tense. Level 3
can be activated with level 6, producing Spanish
(34) Carlos \puefe \ abrir la botella,

[podia J
with levels 5 and 6, producing
(35) Carlos < ,. > estar abriendo la botella,

\podia J
or with levels 4, 5 and 6, giving
(36) Carlos < „ > haber estado abriendo la botella.

[podia J
Level 2 can be activated with level 6, giving
(dehe 1
(37) Carlos \"L, [ abrir la botella,
[debia}
with levels 5 and 6, producing
(debe )
(38) Carlos < _ , , , > estar abriendo la botella,
[ debia J
with levels 4, 5, and 6, producing
(debe ]
(39) Carlos < , ,, } haber estado abriendo la botella,
[debia)
or with 3, 4, 5, and 6, giving
(debe ]
(40) Carlos < > poder haber estado abriendo la botella.
[ debia J
Level 1 can be activated with level 6, giving
(41) Carlos \ab"ra 1 la botella,

[abnna)
with levels 5 and 6, giving
,A^ ^ , (estara ) , . , , , „
(42) Carlos < > abriendo la botella,
( es/Üðá]
with levels 4, 5, and 6, producing
(43) Carlos < , , > estado abriendo la botella,

[habria)
with levels 3, 4, 5, and 6, giving
(podra 1
(44) Carlos < , \ haber estado abriendo la botella,
[podriaj
Top Com
1
S
I
Top Com
Mario
ab (Mario)
I (por)
Marius
(Mario)
(escribe)
Top Com
litterae
(una carta) Top
sunt »
(es) ^X"V
Top Com
1
litterae //
(una carta) (Top)
1
scribunt
(escriben)
or with levels 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, giving
(45) Carlos < , , > poder haber estado abriendo la botella.

\debena \
There are two reasons not to run through Figure 5 with the same thoroughness with
which we have gone through Figure 4. The first is the obvious redundancy of citing
examples illustrating all the modalities applying to the sentence underlying level 6,
and the second is the fact that some of the output is blocked by surface constraints
which there is no space here to discuss.
Now, suppose we examine the tree of Figure 7 keeping in mind what we have
observed thus far, and taking into account some observations made 31 years ago by
Mario Pei (1941). Pei called attention to the fact that (1) the synthetic passive of Latin
did not disappear entirely until long after the analytical passive became prevalent,
(2) that the 'true passive' of Latin (Occiditur vir — "a man is being killed"') was never
replaced in Romance by the analytical form, and (3) that the nearness in meaning
of 'domus aedificatur, or aedificata est, in monte — la casa e costruita sulla montagna'
(i.e. perfect versus adjectival [?] function) is already observable in Classical Latin
(Pei 1941:110). Pei's argument is that the synthetic passive was not the only form of
passive in use in Classical Latin, and that the analytical passive, on the other hand, is
not exclusive in Romance. We might add to this the further arguments that Latin
had several alternative ways of expressing passiveness, that the Empire was not
homogeneous in its language and neither was ancient Rome during its preliterary
days, and that Classical Latin to some degree preserved and cultivated the most
naturally transitory morphological elements (e.g. the preservation of the synthetic
future despite the popular preference for modals). Keeping these facts in mind, if
we turn to Figure 7 we observe that Latin had to have the framework we posited for
Proto-Romance, even though Classical Latin read levels 3 and 4 in the present tense
as a perfect and in the past tense as a pluperfect. As for the difference between
modern Spanish
(46) La carta se escribe
and Latin
(47) Litterae scribuntur,
it is a matter of surface lexical assignment. In either case it is a combination of
levels 5 and 6 that are activated. Just as the active sentence
(48) Marius scribit litteras
involves realizing the sentence of level 3 by raising the left-branch Topic and adding
the accusative case ending, so the Comment of level 5 is replaced on the surface by
scribunt- plus the -ur that relates Htterae to an undisclosed agent. Spanish utilizes
morphological equipment that existed in Latin but was not commonly used as a
passive — the se from the reflexive. However, as this form is used in Spanish it has no
more association with the reflexive in function. The se of se escribe has exactly the
function of the -ur of scribuntur, namely as a surface marker of the undisclosed agent
that performs the act of which la carta is the patient. One could go on to mention
numerous other correspondences in Romance in uses of the passive, but space is
restricted. This sketch is sufficient to illustrate the close similarity in underlying
syntactic structure between Latin and Romance, as well as to point out that progress
in reconstruction must take place over a theoretical framework abstract enough to
relate deviating forms but not so abstract as to represent merely a universal language
framework.
CONCLUSIONS
I began with the assertion that transformational diachronic syntax is without methods
and an adequate theory of syntactic structure. If we are to use the Romance languages
as a testing ground for comparative methods, then we must simulate the conditions
most common where comparison would take place, starting with current levels of
dialects and languages believed to have genetic relations. By establishing tentatively a
broad frame based on the reconstructed syntactico-semantic traits of the languages
in question, we can gradually reconstruct layers of change based on associations
other than deep grammar or semantics, such as the tendency gradually to replace a
disappearing synthetic passive in -ur with a new clitic form drawn from related uses
of reflexives; syntax is the least-studied level in diachronic linguistics, yet there is
considerable reason to believe it to be the most reconstructible of all. Reconstruction
would disclose that a very old form of Proto-Romance had some kind of synthetic
passive even if phonological reconstruction of lexical forms were unable to provide
us with their phonological forms.
University of Missouri, Columbia.
REFERENCES
Bellert, Irena
1970 "On the Semantic Interpretation of Subject-Predicate Relations in Sentences of Particular
Reference", Progress in Linguistics, ed. by Manfred Bierwisch and Karl Heidolph (The
Hague: Mouton), 9-26.
Chafe, Wallace L.
1970 Meaning and the structure of language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Chomsky, Noam
1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
Closs, Elizabeth
1965 "Diachronic Syntax and Generative Grammar", Lg. 41, 402-15.
Fillmore, Charles J.
1968a "Lexical Entries for Verbs", Foundations of Language 4, 373-93.
1968b "The Case for Case", Universals in Linguistic theory, ed. by Emmon Bach and Robert
T. Harms (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), xii-88.
1970 "The Grammar of Hitting and Breaking", Readings in English Transformational Grammar,
ed. by Roderick A. Jacobs and Peter S. Rosenbaum (Waltham, Mass.: Ginn and Co.),
120-33.
1971a "Types of Lexical Information", Semantics: an Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy,
Linguistics, and Psychology, ed. by Danny D. Steinberg and Leon A. Jakobovits (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), 370-92.
1971b "Verbs of Judging: an Exercise in Semantic Description", Studies in Linguistic Semantics,
ed. by Charles J. Fillmore and D. Terence Langendoen (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston), 272-96.
Goldin, Mark G.
1968 Spanish Case and Function (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press).
Gruber, Jeffry
1967 Functions of the Lexicon in Formal Descriptive Grammars (Santa Monica, Cal.: Systems
Development Corp. TM-3770/000/00).
Gulstad, Daniel E.
1971 "Verb Classes, Adverbs, and Case: Some Observations on Explicitness and Redundancy",
Papers from the Fifth Kansas Linguistics Conference, ed. by Frances Ingemann (Lawrence,
Kansas: Dept. of Linguistics, University of Kansas), 54-65.
1972a "Functions and States in the Deep Structure of Spanish", Generative Studies in Romance
Languages, ed. by Jean Casagrande and Bohdan Saciuk (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House).
1972b "A Model of Sentence Projection", Transactions of the Missouri Academy of Science,
Vol. 5 (1971), 89-93.
1972c "Universals of Predication: the Branching Structure of Discourse", Prepublications of the
llth International Congress of Linguists,
forthcoming "A Generative Discourse Model", Linguistics.
manuscript "A Modern Theory of Langue".
Halle, Morris
1962 "Phonology in a Generative Grammar", Word 18, 54-72.
Katz, Jerrold J., and Paul M. Postal
1964 An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
Kay, Martin
1970 "From semantics to syntax", Progress in Linguistics, ed. by Manfred Bierwisch and Karl
Heidolph (The Hague: Mouton), 114-26.
King, Robert D.
1969 Historical Linguistics and Generative Grammar (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall).
Kiparsky, Paul
1968 "Tense and Mood in Indo-European Syntax", Foundations of Language 4, 30-57.
Klima, Edward S.
1964 "Relatedness Between Grammatical Systems", Lg. 40, 1-20.
1965 "Studies in Diachronie Transformational Syntax", unpublished doctoral dissertation
(Harvard).
Lakoff, George
1965 "On the Nature of Syntactic Irregularity", doctoral dissertation (Indiana University).
Published in 1970 under the title Irregularity in Syntax (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston).
1969 "On Derivational Constraints", Papers from the 5th Regional Meeting of the Chicago
Linguistic Society, 117-39.
1970a "Pronominalization, Negation, and the Analysis of Adverbs", Readings in English Trans-
formational Grammar, ed. by Roderick A. Jacobs and Peter S. Rosenbaum (Waltham,
Mass.: Ginn and Co.), 145-65.
1970b "Natural Logic and Lexical Decomposition", Papers from the 6th Regional Meeting of
the Chicago Linguistic Society, 340-62.
1971 "On Generative Semantics", Semantics: an Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics,

and Psychology, ed. by Danny D. Steinberg and Leon A. Jakobovits (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), 232-96.
McCawley, James D.
1968a "Concerning the Base Component of a Transformational Grammar", Foundations of
Language 4, 243-69.
1968b "Lexical Insertion in a Transformational Grammar Without Deep Structure", Papers from
the 4th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 71-80.
1968c "The Role of Semantics in a Grammar", Universals in Linguistic Theory, ed. by Emmon
Bach and Robert T. Harms (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), 124-69.
1970a "Where do Noun Phrases Come From?", Readings in English Transformational Grammar,
ed. by Roderick A. Jacobs and Peter S. Rosenbaum (Waltham, Mass.: Ginn and Co.),
166-83.
1970b "English as a VSO Language", Lg. 46, 286-99.
Pei, Mario
1941 The Italian Language (New York: Columbia University Press).
Postal, Paul M.
1964 See Katz and Postal (1964).
1970 "On the Surface Verb Remind", Linguistic Inquiry 1, 37-120.
1971 Cross-over Phenomena (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston).
Seiver, George O.
1953 Introduction to Romanian (New York: Hafner Publishing Company).
Zipf, George K.
1949 Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley
Publishing Co.).
JAMES W. HARRIS
DIPHTHONGIZATION, MONOPHTHONGIZATION,
METAPHONY REVISITED
1. INTRODUCTION
The present paper owes its title, its inspiration, and a large share of its content to
Professor Yakov MalkiePs article "Diphthongization, Monophthongization, Meta-
phony: Studies in Their Interaction in the Paradigm of the Old Spanish -/> Verb",
which appeared in Language (1966). As will be seen below, I find certain aspects of
Professor MalkieFs argument unconvincing, but this fact in no way diminishes my
indebtedness to his spectacularly documented article, which I wish to acknowledge
at the outset.
The general topic of Malkiel's article and of this paper is the history of stem vowels
in -ir(e) verbs (the Spanish 'third' conjugation), from Latin to Spanish. The highwater
marks of this complex story are sketched in (1). The top rows of the three columns
give Latin vowels and their Spanish reflexes that would result from regular sound
change, in stressed and unstressed syllables. In row A are representative Vulgar Latin
stems with each of the three categories of vowels. Row B contains Old Spanish forms;
they are first person singular and plural present indicative, and first person plural
present subjunctive, in that order. The stems in this group share the peculiarity that
their high stem vowel, front or back, optionally dissimilates to a mid vowel if the
following syllable contains stressed / (stress is penultimate in all the forms illustrated).
It is important to note that the optionally dissimilating class of Old Spanish stems in
row B is made up of some stems from each of the primitive classes of row A.
The (optionally) dissimilating class of row B subsequently split into the modern
(obligatorily) dissimilating and (obligatorily) non-dissimilating classes of row D.
This split, however, did not simply restore the primitive classes. For example, the
first stem, serv- (which could have been expected to produce a diphthong in stressed
syllables like the third stem, sent-), ends up in the non-diphthongizing dissimilating
modern class; but the second stem, moll-, also in the first column of row A (and which
could have been expected to produce a diphthong in stressed syllables like the fourth
stem, dorm-), ends up in the non-diphthongizing non-dissimilating modern class.
Similar vagaries may be traced through chart (1) for other stems.
86 JAMES W. HARRIS
(1) e 0 el
í í
Stressed: ie ue e ï u
Unstressed: e ï e ï u
A. 1. sSrv- 5. met-
2. rnoil- 6. s b-
3. sent-
4. dorm-
B. 1. sirvo s^rvimos sirvamos

2. mullo m^llimos mullamos
5. mido m^dimos midamos
6. subo s"bimos subamos
7. vivo v^vimos vivamos
8. ri(d)o r^(d)imos ri(d)amos
9. sumo sumimos sumamos
C. 3. siento sentimos sintamos

4. duermo dormimos durmamos
D. 1. sirvo servimos sirvamos 2. mullo mullimos mullamos

5. mido medimos midamos 6. subo subimos subamos
8. rio reimos riamos 7. vivo vivimos vivamos
9. sumo sumimos sumamos
10. luzco lucimos luzcamos ·
ie/e/i i/e/i i/i/i
ue/o/u u/u/u
DIPHTHONGIZATION, MONOPHTHONGIZATION, METAPHONY REVISITED 87
What can be said in general about the development outlined in (1) is that (a)
etymological stem vowels and regular sound changes fail to predict the modern
patterns of alternation, and (b) even different stems with the same etymological vowel
fall into different subclasses in the modern language. Thus, in a sense, the phenomena
in question seem to have been doubly irregular.
Malkiel's treatment of these matters is extremely rich in issues, and the accumula-
tion of data is massive; study of his article is essential for a grasp of the luxuriant
detail involved. My efforts will be in precisely the opposite direction: I will take up
only three interrelated points; and in order to place the main questions in sharp
relief, I will pare the data down to a crucial minimum. (The present oral report is the
tip of a not-quite-finished iceberg to be titled something like "Spanish /-theme verbs:
synchrony and diachrony".) The three points are the following:
(i) The role of metaphony (what Menendez Pidal called el influjo de la yod)
in the history of the Spanish third conjugation,
(ii) The genesis of a rule of dissimilation, alluded to above in connection with
row B of (1).
(iii) The cleavage into diphthongizing and non-diphthongizing subgroups of the
set of stems in the first column of row A in (1): siento and duermo versus
sirvo and mullo. For Malkiel, this is the nuclear puzzle around which the
myriad satellites of his article revolve.
2. METAPHONY
For the earliest relevant stage, we may safely posit Vulgar Latin paradigms like those
shown in (2) for metiö, metire, 'measure':
(2) Present indicative Present subjunctive
metiö mettmus metia(m) metiämus
metis metitis metiäs metiätis
metit metent/-unt metiat metiant
All the forms in (2) are penultimately stressed; the stem vowel is invariably long e,
in both stressed and unstressed syllables. Paradigms like those in (2) were replaced
at an early date in Spain by those illustrated in (3):
(3) mido medimos mida midamos
medes medides midas midades
mede meden mida midan
The invariable stem e of (2) has been replaced by / throughout the subjunctive and
in the first person singular of the indicative. Raising of e to / in these forms is generally
attributed to the effect of metaphony, nee yod in Menendez Pidal. Although some
88 JAMES W. HARRIS
of the details are elusive, the phenomena in question can be interpreted as a rule that
we shall call Phonetic Metaphony, formulated roughly as in (4):
(4) Phonetic Metaphony

e, 1, U
/ C0y (y < !, adjacent to another vowel)
6,6 e, ö
Phonetic Metaphony raises and tenses vowels, as shown, separated by any number
of consonants (including zero) from a following y (palatal glide), where this y is
in turn due to the loss of syllabicity of long or short / and long or short e. Let us now
see how metaphony plays a role in the transition from the Vulgar Latin paradigms
of (2) to the early Spanish paradigms of (3). Sample derivations are given in (5):
(5) Subjunctive Indicative

metia metiämus metio metis metlmus
I I I
metya metyämus metyo Loss of syllabicity
\ 1 i
mityo mityamus mityo Phonetic Metaphony (4)
mida midamos mido medes medimos Other changes
The mid stem vowel e is metaphonized to high in just the forms whose endings
have a sequence of vowels that gives rise to a yod or j-glide.
The assignment to metaphony, or yod, of the role shown in (5) is traditional, and
strikes me as eminently plausible. In fact, one is hard put to imagine an alternative
account. There are problems, however, to which we now turn, whose importance has
not been sufficiently appreciated in Malkiel's article, or anywhere else in the literature,
to my knowledge.
It is quite clear that the alleged metaphonic effects observed in third conjugation
verbs — to be identified directly below as Third Conjugation Metaphony — became
differentiated at an early date, subsequent to the stage shown in (5), from the effects
of Phonetic Metaphony, which are observed in nouns, adjectives, non-third conjuga-
tion verbs, etc. as well as in third conjugation verbs, as in (5). The examples shown
in (6) illustrate quite strikingly the eventual divergence of Third Conjugation Meta-
phony from Phonetic Metaphony:
(6) a. Latin
First conjugation indicative Third conjugation subjunctive
mölliö mölliämus mölliä(m) mölliämus
mölliäs mölliätis mölliäs mölliätis
mölliat mölliant mölliat mölliant
b. Spanish
mojo mojamos mulla mullamos
mojas mojais mullas mullais
moja mojan mulla mullan
Although their Spanish reflexes are radically different, the two Latin paradigms,
except for first person singular, were phonetically identical. It follows then that the
changes involved cannot be stated in terms of phonetic or even phonemic representa-
tions, but rather must make reference to the inaudible, abstract differences in morpho-
logical structure shown in (7):
(7) Theme Subjunctive Personal
Stem vowel marker ending
1st conj. mojas < mölli ä s
3rd conj. mullas < moll ä s
1st conj. mojamos < mölli mus
3rd conj. mullamos < moll ä mus
In the first conjugation forms, the yod (< i) belongs to the stem; in the third conjuga-
tion forms, on the other hand, the yod comes from the theme vowel f.
Crucial points in the relatively well-known, straightforward, and non-controversial
development of the first conjugation forms mojo, mojas, mojamos, etc., are given in (8):
(8) mölli + ä + ö mölli - mölli + a + mus
4
mölli ö Theme V deletion (in
4 4 4 env. -I -+V)
mölly ö mölly a s mölly ä mus Loss of syllabicity
4 4 4
mölly mölly mölly Phonetic Metaphony (4)
4 4 4
moj moj moj
mojo mojas mojamos Other changes
As will be seen directly, the derivations in (8) differ fundamentally from those of
mulla, mullas, etc., in the following ways:
(i) Theme vowel deletion does not effect stem-final /', which is the source of the
yod. (Theme vowel deletion was morphologically restricted in Latin — cf.
first conjugation amo, amem versus second conjugation debeo, debeam —
but is not so restricted in modern Spanish — cf. amo, ame; debo, deba.
The rule of theme vowel deletion, when properly formulated, incorporates
Menendez Pidal's repeated observation that flexional yods, i.e. those derived
from theme vowels, disappeared earlier than radical yods, such as the stem-
final segment of mölli-.)
90 JAMES W. HARRIS
(ii) Phonetic metaphony, rule (4), changes to o, with the eventual result that
the diphthong ue, the normal reflex of <5 under stress, does not appear in the
stem-stressed forms.
Now, in contrast to (8), the development of third conjugation mulla, mullas, mullamos,
etc. must have contained at least the steps shown in (9):
(9) möll+I+ä möll+I+ä + s möll+I+ä+mus
I I I
mull a mull I a mull I a Third Conjugation
I I I Metaphony
mull ä mull ä mull ä Theme V deletion (in
env. + +V)
mulla mullas mullamos Other changes
Here stem is raised to u. This raising cannot be attributed to Phonetic Metaphony.
Also, ly does not change to j, precisely because thematic / — the would-be source of
the y — is deleted early by the process of theme vowel deletion.
It is clear from the above that the key to Third Conjugation Metaphony is precisely
the theme vowel of the third conjugation, the abstract segment /I/, and not the
corresponding phonetic segment [y], which at the early Latin stage illustrated in
(6) happened to coincide with phonetic [y] from other sources, but which at later
stages does not appear phonetically at all.
In short, the rule of Third Conjugation Metaphony must have roughly the form
shown in (10):
(10) Third Conjugation Metaphony
C0 [ + high]l
J Verb Theme
To summarize, the rule of Phonetic Metaphony, rule (4), no doubt applied in the
derivation of third conjugation paradigms, as illustrated in (5), at an early date; and
the rule of Phonetic Metaphony no doubt thus provided the initial impulse, the
phonological motivation, for a rule of Third Conjugation Metaphony. Third Con-
jugation Metaphony, however, differed from Phonetic Metaphony not only in gross
effect but also in that Third Conjugation Metaphony, unlike Phonetic Metaphony,
depends on something more abstract than phonetic representations, namely the
identification of the metaphonic stimulus as not just any high front segment in a
certain environment, but as precisely the theme vowel of the third conjugation.
The account just given of metaphonic effects in third conjugation verbs receives
rather strong support from the following entirely unexpected bonuses. It is a surprising
fact about the modern Spanish second conjugation (thematic e) that it contains no
verbs with the stem-vowel / or u. (There are nouns like mujer, alfiler, bachiller, etc.
but no verbs whose infinitives have this general shape.) Thus, the second conjugation
is the 'mid conjugation' in the same sense that the third is the 'high conjugation'. This
property of the second conjugation may be viewed as a generalization of Third
Conjugation Metaphony (10) into a constraint on Spanish verb forms that can be
expressed informally as in (11):
(11) Stem-Theme Harmony
V I fhighj c fhighjl
lowj ~" [mid j ° [mid J J Verb Themc
Constraint (11) has interesting consequences. Consider the following doublets:
(12) 2nd conj. 3rd conj.

cürrere > correr dis-, es-, in-, re-currir
rümpere > romper inter-, pro-(r)rumpir
mlttere > meter ad-, re-mitir
The second conjugation forms belong to the so-called 'vulgar' vocabulary, that is, the
portion of the lexicon that has enjoyed unbroken vernacular transmission. The
third conjugation forms, on the other hand, are 'erudite', that is, relatively late
learned borrowings from Latin. Inasmuch as such borrowings are generally faithful
to their respective etyma (at least in all respects relevant to the present discussion),
and inasmuch as the learned men who introduced them into Spanish no doubt knew
what conjugation they belonged to in Latin, we may well wonder why they joined
the -ir conjugation rather than the etymologically closer -er conjugation. The most
persuasive answer that I can think of is that the introducers, being native speakers of
Spanish, had constraint (11) as a part of their linguistic competence, and thus knew
tacitly that verbs with stem u or / could not possibly go into the second conjugation.
3. DISSIMILATION
It will be recalled that the Old Spanish dissimilating class of verbs illustrated in row B
of (1) was not historically homogeneous. It was made up not only of stems with
etymological mid vowels, but also of stems with reflexes of long i and u. If the latter
stems had developed regularly, they would have invariable high vowels in all forms.
Nevertheless, these stems joined others in the pattern of dissimilation described
earlier (mid vowels before / in the following syllable, high vowels elsewhere). Why
should long i- and w-stems have irregularly and unexpectedly participated in this
pattern, and why indeed should such a dissimilatory phenomenon have appeared in
any set of verbs in the first place ?
Paradigms of the type illustrated in (3) were replaced early in Old Spanish by
paradigms like those shown in (13):
92 JAMES W. HARRIS
(13) Present indicative Present subjunctive (no change)

mido medimos mida midamos
mides medides midas midades
mide miden mida midan
Malkiel and others have considered the change of stem-stressed indicative medes,
mede, meden to mides, mide, miden as due to analogical diffusion of the high vowel
of stem-stressed first person singular mido, supported no doubt by the presence of
high vowels in the stems of all subjunctive forms. I see no objection to this traditional
position, and I accept it. I would find it objectionable, however, to say nothing more.
We must seek to determine the effect of this assumed analogical spread on the syn-
chronic grammar at the relevant stage. This stage was that of (3), when the synchronic
grammar contained the rule of Phonetic Metaphony (4), as suggested in (5), but,
N.B., did not yet have Third Conjugation Metaphony (10). Now, Phonetic Metaphony
accounts for all the high vowels in (3), but it obviously cannot do so for all the high
vowels in (13), the immediate successor of (3). This follows from the fact that there
has never been a yod in the forms from which mides, mide, and miden are derived
(historically and diachronically), as can be seen by inspection of (2) and (5). Therefore,
if Phonetic Metaphony remains intact in the synchronic grammar that generates
paradigms like those of (13), it must be supplemented by another rule that we may
call Analogical Metaphony. Analogical Metaphony is formulated crudely in (14):
(14) Analogical Metaphony
(e, o) -» (i, u) / _j_ stress in 3rd conjugation verbs
The derivation of the forms in (13) would then proceed as illustrated in (15):
(15)
Indicative Subjunctive
med + i + o med + i + (s/n) med+i + mos med + i + a + (s/n)
é é
med y ï - - med y a Loss of syllabicity
i 1
mid y ï - mid y a Phonetic Metaphony (4)
i i
mid ï - - mid a Theme vowel deletion
i
mid - Analogical
Metaphony (14)
mido mide(sjn) medimos mida Other rules
This synchronic derivation has, among others, the following properties:
(i) The high vowel in first singular indicative mido and in all subjunctive forms
is due to one metaphony rule, namely Phonetic Metaphony (4).
(ii) The high vowel in mides, mide, miden is due to another metaphony rule,
namely Analogical Metaphony (14).
This is a perfectly reasonable way to interpret the putative analogical spread in
question. An older generation of speakers who once said mido, medes, mede may
have begun to say mido, mides, mide; these speakers, being adults for whom extensive
restructuring of their grammars is impossible, may have simply added rule (14),
Analogical Metaphony, to their grammars.
Of course, (15) is not the only way to generate the paradigms of (13), nor is it the
best way. A language learner, say a child, encountering the data of (13) for the first
time would have no reason at all to suppose that there are two metaphony rules at
work. Such a learner can construct a better grammar that says, in effect, that a single
rule is responsible for all the high vowels in question. This rule is, of course, Third
Conjugation Metaphony (10). Rule (10), however, since it is totally general, will
incorrectly derive high instead of mid vowels in the stems of medimos and medides.
The correct forms can be derived, however, without reducing the generality of (10),
by the addition of the simple rule of Dissimilation shown in (16):
(16) Dissimilation V -> [-high] / C0i
The paradigms of (13) are now derived as illustrated in (17):
(17)
Indicative Subjunctive
med+i + o med + i+(s/n) med+i + mos med+i + a med+i + a+mos
I I
mid i o mid i s/n mid i mos mid i a mid mos Third Conj.
I I Metaphony
(10)
mid mid a mid mos Theme vowel
I deletion
med i mos Dissimila-
tion (16)
mido mide (s/n) medimos mida midamos Other rules
To recapitulate briefly, the primary mechanism responsible for the replacement of the
paradigms of (3) by those of (13) was presumably the analogical spread of the high
vowel of first singular indicative forms like mido, plus all of the forms of the subjunc-
tive, to the remaining stem-stressed forms of the indicative. Once paradigms like
those of (13) are established, the grammar with the two metaphony rules (4) and (14)
is not optimal; the distribution of high and mid vowels is now interpreted as being
due to the single general rule of Third Conjugation Metaphony (10) plus the extremely
simple Dissimilation rule (16).
94 JAMES W. HARRIS
I cannot fail to stress that the preceding argument, if correct, provides the basis
for a principled account of the origin of the rules of Third Conjugation Metaphony
(10) and Dissimilation (16): these rules came into existence as a result of the
restructuring of a non-optimal grammar. This account, along with the principles
that underlie it, will be supported or disconfirmed to the extent that it has empirical
consequences that are found to be correct or incorrect. In the case of Third Conjuga-
tion Metaphony (10), it was argued at the end of the previous section that there is
quite surprising and unlikely, hence strong, support for this rule. Let us see what can
be said along these lines about the rule of Dissimilation (16).
Once the rule of Dissimilation (16) has become part of a synchronic grammar,
it applies not only to forms like those of (17), whose alternations motivate the rule
in the first place, but also, and automatically unless something is done to stop it,
to forms that previously did not participate in the alternation in question. In particular,
Dissimilation (16) will apply, without special proviso, to stems like those of vivir and
sumir, whose long high / or u had heretofore been invariable. These become vevir
and SQmir, with vevimos and somimos but vivamos and sumamos.
This proposal — which 'explains', in a good sense, the origin of the Dissimilation
rule — is more interesting, because it is based on principle, than the most attractive
alternative, that espoused by Malkiel and others. This alternative, which has a high
degree of a priori plausibility, is that Dissimilation was simply a 'phonetic' accretion
at the end of the existing grammar, which perhaps responds to some euphonic demand
for the avoidance of high vowels in consecutive syllables. The inherent weakness of
this alternative, in the case at hand, is that the observed facts are compatible with the
alleged euphonic principle but do not follow from it: high vowels in consecutive
syllables could have been avoided just as well by dissimilation of the second rather
than the first. (This way, dissimilation would have had the further beautifully euphonic
consequence of total regularization of the paradigms: the stem vowel is invariably i,
the theme vowel is invariably e. But this is not what happened.)
4. DIPHTHONGS VERSUS MONOPHTHONGS
Of the stems in the first column of row A of (1), only sent- and dorm- fall into the
modern diphthongizing class illustrated in row C. Of the rest, serv- falls into the
modern dissimilating subgroup in row D, and moll- goes into the class with non-
alternating high vowels. This is a fair sample: most third conjugation verbs with
reflexes of stem short e or ü are like modern servlr and mullir, without diphthongs;
only a small residue are like sentir and dormir, with diphthongs.
All of the documentary material available suggests that monophthongal and
diphthongal paradigms like those illustrated in (18) coexisted for a considerable
period during the early stages of Old Spanish:
(18) Indicative Subjunctive

sirvo/siervo servimos sirvajsierva sirvamos
sirves/sierves servides sirvas/siervas sirvades
sirve/sierve sirven/sierven sirva/sierva sirvan/siervan
Monophthongal and diphthongal paradigms seem to have coexisted in neighboring

dialects, and perhaps even idiolectally at some stage. From around the 13th century
on, however, diphthongs increasingly lose ground to monophthongs. Some stems
with reflexes of short e or ä remain in the diphthongizing subclass; most, in particular
scrvir, become non-diphthongizing, as we have seen.
This movement out of the diphthongizing class is the target at which Malkiel's
impressive arsenal of documentation and argumentation is aimed. The specific
problem for which he provides a novel and ingenious solution is the conversion of the
diphthong of sierve, and similar forms, into the monophthong of sirve, and so on,
via sound change, in exactly the sense in which the expression 'sound change' is
normally and traditionally understood. It seems clear to me, however, that this
problem does not exist.
Let me approach the point with a hypothetical example. It is well known that the
pronunciations \ji\conomics and [\y~\conomics coexist in modern American English.
Now suppose that at some future time, \z\conomics disappears from the standard
language, leaving only \\y~\conomics, although words with initial [å] are in general
unchanged. In this case, surely nobody would claim that \E\conomics becomes
[Iy~\conomics by 'sound change'. There is no problem requiring an ingenious solution;
one of two variants has simply disappeared, and there is nothing further to say.
So it was, I believe, with sierve versus sirve, and analogous forms. Diphthongal
paradigms existed alongside monophthongal paradigms. Most, but not all, of the
diphthongal paradigms disappeared. But this of course does not mean that for a
particular stem, a diphthong was converted into a monophthong by 'sound change'.
Rather, the diphthongal variant of a particular stem simply disappeared. But in this
case, a good bit more can be said. There is, as Malkiel observes, a clear difference in
the distribution of diphthongs and monophthongs, on a geographical basis: monoph-
thongal forms predominate in the central Castilian dialects, while diphthongal forms
are more commonly found in the peripheral Leonese and Aragonese dialects. There
is a crucially important related difference between Castilian and peripheral dialects,
which Malkiel neglects to bring into his account. In Castilian, short e and are
lengthened or raised in the environment of Phonetic Metaphony, as we know, and
thus fail to diphthongize under stress. Not so in the peripheral dialects: the noun
folia gives undiphthongized hgja in Castilian, but diphthongized fuella in Aragonese
and fueya in Leonese (Menendez Pidal, Manual pages 57-58, 62-63). What this
suggests of course is that the peripheral dialects, not having a rule of Phonetic
Metaphony like that of Castilian, never developed from it a rule of Third Conjuga-
tion Metaphony. Thus diphthongal sierve and so on may be safely assumed to be of
96 JAMES W. HARRIS
peripheral origin, as opposed to the patrimonial Castilian origin of monophthongal

sirve and similar forms.
As is well known, Castilian eventually dominated all of Spain as the prestige
dialect. Correspondingly, monophthongal forms like sirve drive out diphthongal
sierve and so on more rapidly in Castilian proper than in the adjoining dialects. But
the dominant position of Castilian was not consolidated overnight nor without the
acceptance into Castilian of features that originated in dialects that were to assume
second-class status. Thus it is quite straightforward to attribute the increasing
predominance of monophthongal forms to the spread of Castilian as the prestige
norm, and at the same time to view the small class of diphthongizing verbs that
remains in modern Spanish as a residue from other dialects that was never completely
dislodged.
Let us digress a moment to consider the solution proposed by Malkiel for the
problem that I have argued does not exist. The particular sound change proposed
to account for the putative monophthongization of the diphthong of sierve, etc. is
the well known but poorly understood one responsible for the changes castiello >
castillo and priessa > prisa, sieglo > sigh, etc. There are three major difficulties
with this proposal:
(i) The process of monophthongization exemplified in castiello > castillo, that

is, in the environment —//, is quite regular. On the other hand, the conditions
on the remaining cases involving nouns and adjectives are so complex as to
be virtually unstatable except as an arbitrary list of forms affected by the
process. It is not immediately obvious why the very same process should
have had the wide-spread and regular effect on verbs that Malkiel would
have us believe it had. Particularly embarrassing for Professor Malkiel's
position, it seems to me, is the fact that the nouns siervo, sierva were not
affected by the very process that placed the cognate verb servir, according
to Malkiel, among the leader words that contributed to the crystallization
of the non-diphthongizing type.
(ii) The process of monophthongization reflected in sieglo > siglo, etc., affected
only front vowels; yet a number of o-stem verbs that once diphthongized,
left the diphthongizing class. Thus the monophthongization of these verbs
is totally beyond the reach of Malkiel's proposal.
(iii) The replacement of diphthongs by high monophthongs in verbs forms
occurs only in the third conjugation, never in the first or second. For example,
third conjugation seguir: siegue/sigue but first conjugation segar: siega/*siga;
third conjugation servir: sierve/sirve but first conjugation serrar: sierra/
*sirra, and so on. It is an utter mystery why the process of monophthongiza-
tion reflected in sieglo > siglo, etc. should have singled out the third
conjugation, as Malkiel proposes, leaving the first and second conjugations
untouched.
In short, Malkiel's proposed solution is unable even to bear on precisely the systematic
aspects of the problem: the pervasiveness of monophthongization in verbs compared
to its sporadic effects in nouns and adjectives, the loss of both front and back
diphthongs, and the restriction of monophthongization, among verbs, to the third
conjugation.
Returning now to the main thread of the exposition, we observe that the very
earliest texts record monophthongal (and metaphonic) forms like pitent, sirve, visten
(modern piden, sirve, visten), all with etymological short e. Thus, no doubt many
stems have enjoyed an unbroken existence in Castilian as non-diphthongizing. The
grammar of an early Castilian dialect unsullied by borrowing, if such ever existed,
would be, in relevant respects, of the sort illustrated in (17). Incorporation of diph-
thongal forms from other dialects introduces complications into the grammar of
Castilian. We are too far removed from enough relevant data to know exactly what
these complications were at the earliest stages, but we do know their general nature.
Since diphthongizing stems presumably constitute an exceptional minority class in
Castilian, each such stem must carry some lexical mark that accounts, in one way or
another, for the occurrence of a diphthong in stem-stressed forms, where the Castilian
norm is a high vowel produced by the rule of Third Conjugation Metaphony. There-
fore, migration out of the diphthongizing class receives a very natural interpretation
in terms of grammatical rules, if viewed along the lines I am proposing: when a stem
ceases to diphthongize, it becomes more regular, by losing the special lexical mark
that triggers the unexpected stem diphthong.
In short, no appeal need be made to sound change in order to account for the
observed attrition of diphthongizing third conjugation verbs in the history of Spanish.
The only appeal necessary is to a regularizing tendency, of which the associated
grammatical machinery is of a particularly simple type, namely the loss of an excep-
tion-marking feature.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
REFERENCES
Malkiel, Y.
1966 "Diphthongization, Monophthongization, Metaphony: Studies in their Interaction in the
Paradigms of the Old Spanish -ir verbs", Language 42, 430-472.
Menendez Pidal, R.
1962 Manual de gramatica historica espanola (Madrid, Espasa-Calpe).
HENRY KAHANE
THE ETYMOLOGIST AS A TRANSFORMATIONALIST
1. Among the contemporary favorites of linguistic enquiries, the subfield of etymology

plays a humble role, as we all recognize, some with pleasure and some with melancholy.
The reasons, good or bad but above all procedural, are fairly obvious: the etymologist
needs intuition, association, impressionism, and, increasingly, a knowledge of as
many languages as possible. The tremendous etymological activity of the past twenty-
five years or so, particularly in our area of Romance, leaves our fields less and less
green; thus, the etymologist must cope with a fearful bibliographical explosion and
be familiar with a host of techniques. He has no comfortably rigid methodology,'
and the computer is not his tool. Even the synchronic analysis of the word, i.e. the
study of its function at any given time, of equal importance with the diachronic to the
word historian, is likewise suspect: it is largely a humanistic undertaking, requiring
the interpretation of texts and of the impact of culture, present or past, on language
and the impact of language on culture. Despite all this, the vitality of the field is
remarkable. It is being stressed again, in a new form, by adherents of structuralisme.
To Merleau-Ponty, for example, diachrony is synchrony in motion; development in
itself has meaning; the potentialities of change are present, latent or incubating, in a
linguistic form. 2 This, in the last analysis, is simply a redefinition, in terms of trans-
formation of the underlying form, of what we have been calling, traditionally,
etymology. I shall describe the various steps which transform the deep structure into a
surface structure.
2. Etymological procedure needs a brief comment. Empirically, the etymologist

starts with the surface and looks for the deep structure. But in terms of presentation
1
(Kiparsky 1966: 70-75). The systematized presentation of etymological methods has frequently
engaged the attention of Yakov Malkiel, e.g. "Etymology and General Linguistics"; "A Tentative
Typology of Etymological Studies"; "The Uniqueness and Complexity of Etymological Solutions"
(all three reprinted in his Essays on Linguistic Themes [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968], 175-256).
For a general survey of lexicological problems, see Ladislav Zgusta, Manual of Lexicography (Prague:
Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1971).
2
(Lewis 1966: 28-29).
100 HENRY KAHANE
and method, either direction is possible, as demonstrated by our etymological

dictionaries, which move either from Latin to Romance or from Romance to Latin.
Take a typical Romance story of deep structure to surface, the case, say, of Lat.
tabula 'board'.3 You find the original 'board' still extant in the marginal areas of
Romance, in Ibero-Romance, and you find it in some of the de-Latinized areas of
the Empire (defined as the ones abandoned by the Roman legions before the end of the
5th c.), as in Grk. tavla. Then you find the shift from 'board' to 'table', involving the
elimination of mensa, around the 12th c. and, at first, in the center, in France and
Italy. You have Ital. tavola, proparoxytonic, Span, tabla, paroxytonic, and Fr. table,
oxytonic. You abstract a set of phonological rules and area rules and semantic
observations from these changes. Or you can work from the surface to the deep
structure. The Spanish word for dog, perro, e.g. remained unexplained for a long time
until Corominas,4 discarding onomatopoeic phantasies and the like in favor of
phonological rules, reconstructed an unrecorded underlying form *pirro. Later he
was vindicated by the subsequent discovery of the record of a Sicilian tyrant's pet
dog called precisely Pyrrhus 'brownie'.5
Another procedural concept, dear to the heart of the transformationalist, is 'ele-
gance'. A standard ideal in mathematical analysis, it denotes a preference for the
direct, economical, aesthetically pleasing arrangement of key steps in a proof. In
etymology, taken here in its narrow sense of morpheme identification, something
similar exists: the ideal solution should be simple. Simple means optimal directness
and optimal quality of statement. The real distinction between descriptive and historical
linguistics lies, of course, in the definition of truth: to the descriptivist it is truth
within the system, systemic truth. Truth to the etymologist is historical truth, some-
thing that is almost never verifiable. Etymological truth cannot be more than etymo-
logical probability. A great etymologist, Max Leopold Wagner, formulated it well
in a personal discussion: an etymology is good only so long as no better one is found.
3. The rules which describe the transformation of deep structure to surface structure
are complex; they represent an intersection of three subsets of rules, distinct yet
interlocking: phonological, semantic, and cultural.
The neo-grammarians neglected the semantic subset in favor of the phonological;
the words-and-things adepts, the phonological in favor of the semantic;6 but, in
order to be acceptable, an etymology must satisfy all three subsets. Spanish hurtar
'to steal' has to be rejected as the basis of English to hurt (as suggested in a paper
fortunately unpublished), in spite of its phonological and semantic potentialities:
because at the time of the early records of the English verb, in the 12th century,
Spanish influence had simply not yet occurred. A derivation of Western tone, cake,
3
FEW, s.v. tabula, cols. 24b and 25a.
4
S.v. perro.
5
Kahane, Glotta 39 (1960), 134.
â (Kiparsky 1966: 74).
THE ETYMOLOGIST AS A TRANSFORMATIONALIST 101
from a feminine participle iorla 'the thing twisted', may be acceptable historically and
semantically, but it flounders on phonological grounds: the open quality of the ï
in the participle clashes with the closed ï of the noun in Romance; Hellenistic tourta
avoids this difficulty.7 Paganus is clearly the base of pagan and its cognates, un-
objectionable as far as language and phonology are concerned, but it remains an
unsatisfactory suggestion so long as the semantic bridge remains unbuilt.8
4. Thus, three components of the etymon, in various interlocking patterns, determine

the surface. The hierarchy of their impact in the process of transformation, i.e. their
stratification, certainly needs clarification.9 The development may be essentially from
culture to meaning to symbolization, i.e. phonological and phonetic incarnation,
closest to the surface. In any case, the etymologist, who empirically moves backward,
from surface to underlying structure, usually identifies the phonological component
first.
5. In this step, he is faced with a complex hazard of circularity. On the one hand,
without etymology no diachronic phonological rules can be posited; on the other
hand, the persuasiveness of an etymology depends largely on its conformance to
phonological rules. As students of Romance, we establish two phases, overtly or
covertly. First, we posit a Latin deep structure which leads to the proto-Romance
surface: in other words, we document or reconstruct a Latin etymon, stating (or
implying) the rules of transformation from the written form of the classical tradition
to the spoken proto-Romance stage of the pertinent area. Second, as students of one
particular Romance language, we posit the proto-Romance form of our area as the
deep structure, which leads to the modern form, the surface, by the application,
explicit or implicit, of certain rules. The sequence in which the changes occur, the
hierarchy of the rules, familiar to us as ordered rules, has rarely been described for
an entire language; but Elise Richter, who will be honored posthumously in a forth-
coming issue of Romance Philology, made an ingenious attempt in her Geschichte der
Romanismen. 1 °
Now, every phonological transformation that is not covered by the rules is an
exception. The concept of exception is an interesting one. If we embed this concept
historically, * 1 it stems from Jacob Grimm, and is adopted by Humboldt, Schuchardt,
Whitney, and Chomsky. What we call rule and exception, Grimm called Naturgesetz
and Freiheit. And he coined the famous synonym for exception, "Every word has its
own history". The polar dogma, which excludes exception, is that of the neo-gram-
marians, promoted in this country by Bloomfield.
7
Kahane, Revue de Linguistique Romane 31 (1967), 127-129.
8
Kahane, Harvard Theological Review 57 (1964), 33-35.
9
See the recent discussion by Langacker (1972: 139 if.), apropos of Chafe.
10
(Richter 1934).
11
(Christmann 1971: 122).
102 HENRY KAHANE
The concepts of exception and interference reveal the close relationship between
the diachronic and synchronic approaches. Each single instance of deviation from the
rule can occur within the system of language only as it exists at a certain time. History,
to quote Merleau-Ponty again,12 consists of succeeding synchronisms; the assumption
of linguistic stability (which is the basic assumption of synchrony) must be discarded,
and structure turns into a dynamic concept. The various patterns of phonological
interference can be systematized in transformational terms, (a) The psycholinguistic
ones: These are essentially the results of the principle of the least effort, and the least
effort may be either that of the speaker or of the listener. The speaker's least effort
leads to assimilation, haplology, echo-words13 and metathesis; the listener's to
dissimilation, to the expansion of lexemic substance, to lexemic disappearance due to
homonymy. (b) The sociolinguistic factors of change: These are such factors as euphe-
mism and taboo. OFr. face could survive in Eng. face, but it was largely replaced in
French by visage or figure because of the phonological similarity of face to fesse,
the buttock.14 Popular Germ, blümerant 'giddy' continues Fr. *bleu-mourant,
apparently 'dying blue', but certainly a taboo variant of *Dieu mourant 'dying Christ',
(c) The ethnolinguistic causes of phonological exceptions: These are generally the
cultural correlations of psycholinguistic phenomena, such as changes caused by sub-
stratum or superstratum, or by the many facets of borrowing, (d) Finally morpho-
logical interference: This is often subsumed under the heading of analogy. We call
it blending or Volksetymologie and, as Freud himself has pointed out,' 5 it is largely
psychoanalytic. It involves interference by other members of the same (real or
supposed) semantic field, either synonyms or antonyms.
6. The second component of the etymon is the semantic. The root morphemes of the
etyma are symbolizations of conventional concepts, trivial or ambiguous; they
represent the relatively few items selected by man from the endless and amorphous
world of reality. These basic concepts represent the deep structure of the semantic
component. They carry in themselves a potential for transformation. In principle, this
transformation may proceed in either of two directions.
In one direction, the underlying concept realizes, through incarnation by one (or
more than one) of the root morphemes, one or the other or many of its potentials,
which then appear on the surface as bundles of semantic features. This semantic
expansion gives us insight into the phenomenon of perception, as it reveals which
facets of a 'thing' are seen and stressed, to provide its name. This is the familiar kind
of semantic analysis used in Wörter und Sachen, and is equivalent to Buck's concept
of Derived Meaning.16 In the genre of onomasiological studies, which organizes the
12 (Lewis 1966: 29).

13
(Morin 1972).
14
(Wandruszka 1971: 565).
15
In the second, third, and fourth of his Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse.
18
(Buck 1949).
17
etyma according to a concept (such as the 'woods' in Romance), the word historian
shows (if he can) how a root morpheme enters a given semantic field: the 'jaw',
for instance, is perceived as the 'chewing apparatus', mächoire.
The second direction of semantic transformation proceeds from language (rep-
resenting the actual use of the word), which affects the concept. It gives us insight
into the creative energy of language by showing which facets of a word are apt to
create for the user a new reality. This kind of approach dates roughly from the middle
of this century and derives largely from psychoanalysis and Ernst Cassirer's theories
on symbolism. It is particularly useful in social contexts and plays an important role
in existentialist literature, as in Camus. A recent essay by Murray Edelman on Politics
as Symbolic Action16 shows in detail, with explicit reference to the model of the two
levels of structure, how strongly the political concept is shaped by the political term.
Just one quotation (p. 77): "If a few classical themes are surefire for engaging the
emotions of large numbers of people, leaders will predictably interpret events in
these forms, and their audiences will eagerly cooperate in creating the world in the same
configurations." Just one example: the term peuple had a neutral (or positive?)
value for the common folk or 'people' of France; but it took on a negative value in
the speech of their class-conscious German neighbors, in whose parlance, from about
the 17th century on, the Gallicism Pöbel turned into a name for the 'mob'.19
7. The third component of the deep structure is the cultural. Certain features linking
language and culture are of importance for the reconstruction of a word history,
three in particular: linguistic geology or stratification, linguistic geography, and
linguistic sociology, (a) Linguistic geology refers to the layers of the lexicon, to the
various languages which have contributed to it through heritage or borrowing. The
etymologist relies heavily on the fact that at certain periods only certain languages
(and often only certain cultural fields within those languages) can be considered as
potential sources of lexical items. He must transform cultural contact into word
history; and if sufficient parallel word histories evolve, he may transform the word
histories into cultural heritage. The rules are complex, as can be seen in the systemati-
zations by Vidos (1965) and Weinreich (1953). (b) Linguistic geography refers to the
geographic distribution of a linguistic feature. The etymologist transforms the central
or marginal or isolated distribution of a feature within a given area into a dynamic
story of linguistic Darwinism, a story of origin, expansion, and spent energy. The
rules of area linguistics were elaborated by Bartoli early in this century, and re-
elaborated recently by his disciple Bonfante. 20 (c) Linguistic sociology refers to
language levels, of obvious significance in etymology. Take the interesting example
17
(Soil 1967).
18
(Edelman 1971).
19
Trübners Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v.
20
(Bonfante 1971), with bibliography, p. 51, fn. 1.
104 HENRY KAHANE
of the Latinisms. In etymological jargon, Latinisms denote those words of the Latin
language which were borrowed, not inherited; they have not undergone the phono-
logical changes characteristic of the words inherited from Latin. This feature of the
deep structure, the non-working of the phonological rules, appears in the surface
transformed into such features as learned or written, in contrast with the opposite
poles of popular or spoken. Linguistic dichotomies of this type dominate many
cultures, with frequent borrowing of learned elements by the spoken language.
8. Let me end with a question. What is the real nature of the concept of an under-
lying structure and its transformation into a surface structure? So far I have been
discussing it from the specific standpoint of the etymologist, and within this particular
frame, the history of linguistics hints at the specific answer. In ancient Greece, in the
era of Hellenism, when the grammarians established the principles of analysis, which,
often under the label of Traditional Grammar, is still largely valid today, the term
etymos meant 'true, real'.21 To the Hellenistic grammarians the original meaning
of a word was its true meaning.22 On the other hand, the Greek term for 'word' was
lexis, a derivative of lego 'to speak';23 thus, the name is based on the speech act, the
performance. This binary opposition of the Hellenistic grammarians, etymon vs.
lexis, i.e. 'true thing' vs. 'articulated word' expressed their perception of word history
as precisely the process recognized today, a transformation relating deep structure
to surface structure. Obviously, and with the use of transformation at every step, the
etymologist has always been the most orthodox of all transformationalists.
But the transformational basis of etymology is just one facet of this most significant
linguistic concept of intellectual history. Transformation in its broadest sense was at
the basis of the exegesis of Bible, Koran, and Talmud; it was a significant feature of
Gnosticism and Hermetism; it constituted the backbone of the so-called levels of
meaning, fashionable in the Middle Ages and most familiar to you from Dante; it
was the central technique of Kabbalah, the mystical Jewish movement, which started
in the 13th century in Provence and Spain. What is common to all of these phases
is the belief that the underlying structure, call it inner meaning, in facto, allegory,
system, competence, contains the truth; and that the surface, call it outer meaning,
in verbis, sensus litteralis, actualisation, or performance, is our way of symbolizing
and representing the truth in metaphor or myth 24 or fiction25 or, in the last analysis,
in just about every one of our utterances. Let me quote, out of many, just two inter-
pretations of the relation between underlying structure and surface: "The literal sense
21
(Frisk 1960: s.v. eteos).
22
Records apud Diodorus of Sicily, 1.11 (I, 37-39 Loeb), 1st c. B.C.; Plutarchus, Moralin II.278c
(IV, 92-93 Loeb), lst-2nd c.; Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists XIII.571d (VI, 86-87 Loeb), 2nd-3rd c.
Etymology in antiquity and in the Middle Ages is extensively discussed by I. Opelt, Reallexikonfür
Antike und Christentum 6 (1966), 797-844.
23
(Frisk 1960: s.v. legö).
24
(Pepin 1967: 142).
25
(Singleton 1954: 95-97).
is the body, while the soul is the secret sense underlying the written word" 26 and:
"Let us not be led astray by the words [p/æóçáß], but let us examine the meaning which
underlies them [ßá di'hyponoidn semainomena']."21 The speaker, in both instances, is
Philo of Alexandria, who lived from the first century, B.C. to the first, A.D. The
distinction between the levels of analysis goes back primarily to him, in a combination
of Greek and Jewish traditions;28 and he used laws and rules [nomoi and kanones}
to derive the one level from the other.29
This, then, is the tradition, of long and respectable standing, into which we can
embed so many of our analytical procedures. When we assert that every word has its
own history, we are merely translating into scientific prose the saying of the Zohar:
"In every word shine many lights".30 The Zohar or Book of Splendor, the great
mystic Book of the Kabbalah, goes on to say that those who are able to read the
hidden meaning, i.e. the transformationalists, are the favored of the Lord.31
REFERENCES
Bonfante, Giuliano
1971 "Le norme della linguistica areale", Festschrift Harri Meier, 51-76 (M nchen).
Buck, Carl D.
1949 A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages'. A Contribution
to the History of Ideas (Chicago).
Christmann, Hans Helmut
1971 "Lautgesetze und Wortgeschichte: Zu dem Satz 'Jedes Wort hat seine eigene Geschichte'",
Festschrift Harri Meier, 111-124 (M nchen).
Edelman, Murray
1971 Politics as Symbolic Action (Institute for Research on Poverty Monograph Series) (Chicago).
Frisk, Hjalmar
1960 Griechisches etymologisches W rterbuch (Heidelberg).
Kiparsky, Valentin
1966 "Etymologie gestern und heute", Kratylos 11, 68-78.
Langacker, Ronald W.
1972 Review of Chafe, Meaning and the Structure of Language, in Language 48, 134-161.
Lewis, Philip E.
1966 "Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Language", in J. Ehrmann (ed.), Structuralism
(New York, 1970) (reprint).
Morin, Yves Ch.
1972 "The Phonology of Echo-Words in French", Language 48, 97-108.
28
Philo, De vita contemplativa 78 (VI, 67 Cohn and Wendland); transl. by Scholem 1965: 45.
27
Philo, De Congressu eruditionis gratia 172 (III, 108 Cohn and Wendland); transl. after Pepin
1967: 149.
28
(Scholem 1965: 52).
29
(Pepin 1967: 133 and 160, fn. 1).
30
(Scholem 1965: 63).
31
Jean de Pauly, Sepher-Ha Zohar V. 518 (Paris, 1909).
106 HENRY KAHANE
, Jean
1967 "Remarques sur la theorie de l'exegese allogorique chez Philon", Philon d'Alexandrie
(= Collogues nationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) (Paris), 131-167.
Richter, Elise
1934 "Beiträge zur Geschichte der Romanismen", Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie
(= Beiheft 82) (Halle).
Scholem, Gershom G.
1965 On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (Citations after the edition of 1969) (New York).
Singleton, Charles S.
1954 "Dante's Allegory", Reprinted in Robert J. Clements (ed.), American Critical Essays on the
Divine Comedy (New York, 1967), 91-103.
Soll, Ludwig
1967 Die Bezeichnungen für den Wald in den romanischen Sprachen (= Münchener Romanistische
Arbeiten 25) (München).
Vidos, B. E.
1965 Prestito, espansione e migrazione dei termini technici nette lingue romanze: problemi, metodo
e risultati (= Biblioteca dell'Archivum Romanicum II, 31) (Florence).
Wandruszka, Mario
1971 "Lexikalische Polymorphic: Diachronie und Synchronie", Festschrift Harri Meier (Mün-
chen), 563-574.
Weinreich, Uriel
1953 Languages in Contact (New York).
JÜRGEN KLAUSENBURGER
LATIN VOCALIC QUANTITY TO QUALITY:

A PSEUDO-PROBLEM?
It is practically a requirement for every book on historical Romance linguistics to

include some sort of description of the presumed shift from a Classical Latin vowel
system with distinctive length to a Vulgar Latin vocalic structure in which the degree
of aperture of vowels was pertinent. The quantity to quality change-over has been
called by Heinrich Lausberg '... der einzige wirklich revolutionierende Vorgang in
der romanischen Lautgeschichte...' (Lausberg 1947:296), and other Romance scholars
(Lausberg's student, Weinrich, Haudricourt and Juilland, Straka, and Spence, to
name just a few) have proposed various theories to explain this 'revolutionary process'
in the history from Latin to Romance. The most important accounts of the problem
can be roughly divided into two types, (a) the structural phonological analyses of
Haudricourt-Juilland and Weinrich, both subscribing to a kind of Martinet structur-
alism, and (b) the more purely phonetic descriptions of Straka and Spence. I will first
review briefly these statements, which are all pre-generative. In my opinion, the
common failing of all is to have assumed that a linguistically pertinent shift had
occurred in the first place. Myself, I will consider the quantity to quality question a
pseudo-problem, or non-problem.
Haudricourt-Juilland (1970: 31-42) posited the following three phases in the switch
from quantity to quality:
A. Latin phase: Quantity exclusively

i ü ü
e ö e ö
ä ä
B. Pre-Romance phase: Co-existence of quantity and quality

i ü
108 JÜRGEN KLAUSENBURGER
C. Romance phase: Quality exclusively

(a) 12. 3. ü
Ü
1 I
e e ö ö
1. ae. -» 5 5 <- au 4.
ä ä
(b) East (after l. + 2.) West (after 3. + 4.)

i u i u
e o e o
a a
I have illustrated the Romance quality system by the Eastern (Rumanian) and Western
(most other Romance languages, except Sardinian and Sicilian) systems, leaving out
the other developments. Haudricourt-Juilland's explanation consists of four events,
which form a chain reaction:
1. Monophthongization of /ae./ -> / /
2. Lowering of /I/ -> /e/
3. Lowering of /O/ -> /ö/
4. Monophthongization of /ay/ -» /o/ (rare occurrence)
The starting point of this chain is the monophthongization of the Latin diphthong
/ae/, and we may assume that Haudricourt-Juilland intend to say that quality became
distinctive in Latin vowels at the time that the / / resulting from /ae./ was brought into
functional opposition with the existing long /e/, i.e. /§/:/ / (36), since a vowel with
both quality and quantity had been introduced.
A number of objections can be raised concerning this theory. (1) If quantity was
distinctive at the time, why would the monophthong from /a?/ not be integrated into
such a system (as either /e/ or /e/), rather than creating a new qualitative opposition ?
(2) All we really know is that the Romance reflexes of /ae./ and /e/ are identical. This
fact says nothing about the length of /8/</ae/, but only confirms that the two had the
same vowel quality. (3) It is highly implausible that the monophthongization of /ae./,
which was a diphthong of low functional yield, constituting a weak point in the system,
should have such an earth-shaking effect, restructuring all Latin vowels.
In his excellent book, Phonologische Studien zur romanischen Sprachgeschichte,
H. Weinrich devotes Chapter II, "Quantitätenkollaps" (12-42) to what is probably
LATIN VOCALIC QUANTITY TO QUALITY: A PSEUDO-PROBLEM? 109
the most intriguing theory proposed about the quantity to quality change-over. His
analysis is ingenious in that he does not seek a solution in the vowels alone, but bases
it on the linking of vocalic and consonantal quantity. In Classical Latin the following
four vowel plus consonant combinations existed (1969:18):
1. VC (short vowel + short consonant) rota
2. YCC (short vowel + long consonant) gütta
3. VC (long vowel + short consonant) solus
4. VCC (long vowel + long consonant) stella
Through a variety of events, however, these four combinations were eventually reduced
to two (24):
a. VC (long vowel + short consonant) solus
b. YCC (short vowel + long consonant) bücca
It is clear that the resulting two combinations disallow both vocalic and consonantal
quantity as distinctive: either one says that vowel length is predictable from the
following consonantal length, or one assigns phonemic status to vowel quantity,
calling the length of the consonants allophonic. Weinrich decides that the first
conclusion is the correct one, basing himself on the many long consonant formations
in Late Latin, in particular of types of expressive gemination, like cupa - cuppa,
baca - bacca, etc. (31) He summarizes his theory thus: "Da sich in bedeutend mehr
Fällen die Konsonantenquantitäten behauptet haben als die Vokalquantitäten, und
zwar nahezu immer unter den Bedingungen der expressiven Längung, sind die
Vokalquantitäten als abhängig und damit als irrelevant, die Konsonantenquantitäten
aber als phonologisch relevant anzusehen." (33) Of course, the loss of vocalic quantity
was only the first step. To replace the loss of vocalic length, speakers then found
recourse in differentiating vowels qualitatively, arriving at the well-known equivalences
of long = close, short = open. (36)
The main problem with Weinrich's hypothesis is his late introduction of quality
differences, only AFTER vowel quantities had become dependent on consonantal
length, in order to prevent the merger of certain vowels. This is less realistic than the
Haudricourt-Juilland view, which did allow for a co-existence of quantity and
quality for a period. If we follow Weinrich, this is the approximate chronology of
events: (1) The reduction of four vowel-consonant combinations to two; (2) The
abandonment of distinctive vocalic quantity due to expressive consonantal gemination;
(3) The introduction of qualitative differentiations in order to replace lost quantities;
(4) The merger of some vowels (7 + e, U + o in the West) reducing a presumably
intolerable five-height system to four. These are neat and distinct steps. But if (3)
and (4) are supposed to follow (2), then how can one explain vowel mergers of (4),
seen in the inscriptions of Pompeii ? How far back is the collapse of vowel quantities
to be placed? The facts seem to be described better if qualitative differentiations are
assumed to have preceded (1) and (2) above, thus making the subordination of vowel
length to consonantal length possible. But then distinctive quantity was not lost
BECAUSE of consonantal developments, and Weinrich's theory, though important
because it focuses on the vowel-consonant relationship, diminishes in value: it does
not explain how or why vowel quantity was abandoned in favor of quality (cf. Spence
1965: 6-9).
Straka (1959) is built on his universal phonetic claim that every long vowel, in any
language, including Classical Latin, must be more close than the corresponding short
one. Of course, according to Straka, this qualitative difference was only minimal in
Classical Latin, and unnoticed by native speakers. He explains the quantity to quality
shift by assuming that quality "... a fini par s'entendre dans la prononciation populaire
qui devait exagerer les ecarts entre les deux durees et par consequent aussi entre les
deux apertures" (287). Thus, Straka has really only described the phonetic side of the
change-over; presumably we are to conclude that as soon as popular speech had
exaggerated quality distinctions strongly enough, they then became pertinent, replacing
quantities.
Spence (1965) is the most recent and most comprehensive study on quantity and
quality. He not only gives his side on the problem, but first critically reviews previous
analyses, including the ones I have gone through. His own theory cannot be called a
theory in the sense of Haudricourt-Juilland and Weinrich, since, very similar to
Straka, he only describes various phonetic stages in the transition from a quantity
system to a quality system:
A. Stage I: Quantity both phonologically and phonetically (Classical Latin)
B. Stage II: Quantity phonological, quality phonetic (cf. Pompeii)
Phonological Phonetic
: ü: ü ü
e: e ö: ö I~e Ü~ö
ä: ä e ö
5
ä: ä
C. Stage III: Quantity and quality phonological simultaneously
i u
e :e ö: ö
ä: ä
This would be the situation after the merger of / + e, and U + . According to Spence,
one can even assume that in Stage III, both the phonological quantity, and the
phonological quantity-quality systems co-existed.
D. Stage IV: Quality phonological, quantity phonetic (Romance)
"The final break with functional quantity comes only when vocalic length is sub-
ordinated to the position of the stress accent and to syllabic structure" (Spence
1965:13). Although Spence claims that his description motivates the structural change
from quantity to quality by "ascribing due importance to the factors of allophonic
variation and linguistic economy as causes of change" (14), it is not very obvious how
this is so. On the other hand, his outline contains uncontroversially sensible phonetic
steps, also accounting for inscriptional evidence.
All analyses just reviewed mention, at different stages and with different emphasis,
two phonetic features which characterized Latin vowels: long and short, and (more)
close and (more) open. One of the key steps in taxonomic phonology was to establish
which one of two phonetic manifestations was "distinctive", which one "redundant",
in order to explain how surface oppositions were maintained. And, of course, it is
claimed that it was first quantity, then quality, which was functional, in Latin vowels,
the redundancy being located first in quality and later in quantity. The jump from
one to the other called for some linguistic acrobatics, all of which, though mostly
quite interesting, failed to convince. Actually, it has never been obvious on what basis
it was claimed that first quantity, then quality, was distinctive in Latin vowels. From a
general stand point, if two phonetic features can be shown to be always co-extensive,
there is really no solution as to which is redundant, which is not! This has been
pointed out by Lehiste (1970:30): "Certain problems arise in determining whether a
length difference is distinctive when a difference in vowel length is accompanied by an
equally noticeable quality difference." For Latin, this particular problem was raised
by Straka (1959:287-288): "La duree et le timbre devaient etre si intimement lies
qu'on peut se demander lequel des deux caracteres etait au fond distinctif." It seems
that the only definite way to decide on the allophonic status of a feature is if it is
contextually determined. Thus, although some English vowels are 'long', quality is
no doubt distinctive, since length is determined by the voice of the following consonants.
If it could be shown that Latin quality differentiations were also shaped by some
environment, then quantity could easily be recognized as distinctive. This, of course,
cannot be done. Notice that it is possible, however, to establish quality as distinctive
in Late Latin, since vocalic quantity was contextually predictable from the consonant
structure. From these considerations it follows that the traditional assignment of
distinctive quantity to Classical Latin vowels is really on shaky grounds. I am not
going to pursue this line further, since it does not bear directly on the point I will
make. However, it does seem that our notions about quantity in Latin vowels have
been influenced by such non-linguistic factors as metrical concerns in Classical Latin
poetry, which often lead to a confusion between syllable and vowel length (cf. Zirin
1970:50-52).'
1
Or we read such puzzling statements as Kelly (1967: 73): "Obviously this feature (i.e. length) is
to be defined by measurements of time; lacking, however, access to native speakers and consequently
the possibility of statistical studies of the actual times that were involved, we must be content with
the knowledge that there did exist a phonological opposition between long and short vowels in the
language."
I believe that every attempt to 'explain' a shift from distinctive quantity to distinctive
quality is doomed from the outset since it is built on the premise that Latin vowels
first contained the distinctive feature of length, and then distinctive degree of aperture.
My proposal consists of two parts: (1) The (abstract) feature TENSENESS was always
part of the underlying vowel structure of all Latin dialects; (2) length and degree of
aperture must be considered co-extensive, inseparable, phonetically realized charac-
teristics at all times of Latin. Thus, the quantity-quality problem can be seen as a
purely phonetic question, with no need to look for a phonemic restructuring. The
following is a distinctive feature matrix for the underlying vowel system of Latin
(the dot after each vowel signifies that it is tense):
Phonological features
e. a. o.
tense +
high
low +
back +
Phonetic features
e ä ä ö Ü ü
long + + + +
open + + +
(For surface realizations, the two additional features just given are necessary.)
The following phonetic realization rules are necessary in order to convert the phono-
logical feature [tense] into the phonetic features [long] and [open]:
long ]
Rule A - low ->
L[-a openJJ
.a tensej
V
_^ a long "I
Rule B + low
L a openj
a tense.
(Rule B may or may not be necessary, though. According to most scholars, the Latin
vowel a did not show quality distinctions of long and short ones. However, Straka
(1959:282) not only suggests that this pair was also differentiated by degree of
aperture, but claims (as a universal) that the opposite correspondence holds, i.e.
unlike the other vowels, long a is more open than short a.)
Both rules must be considered obligatory: they describe 'intrinsic' characteristics
of Latin vowels, context-free. These surface forms are derived from underlying tense:
non-tense vowels:
LATIN VOCALIC QUANTITY TO QUALITY: A PSEUDO-PROBLEM? 11 3
1. |i.|->[i] 6. | a | - » [ a ]
2. |i | -> [I] 7. |o | -» [5]
3. |e.| -» [e] 8. |o.| -» [ ]
4. |e | -> [6] 9. |u | -> [Ü]
5. |a.| -» [ä] 10. |u.| -> [ü]
Since I have claimed that phonetic quantity and quality co-existed inseparably,
intrinsically, in all Latin dialects of all times, I must now show evidence for (1)
quality distinctions in Latin vowels in pre-classical and classical periods; and (2)
quantity differentiation (aside from syllable considerations) in post-classical stages.
(There is, of course, ample proof and agreement on quality in Vulgar Latin vowels,
cf. Väänänen 1963 and Gaeng 1968.)
Many Old Latin inscriptions contain examples of vowel mergers / + e, and U + ,
which have proved embarassing to explain, since they are supposed to show up only
at Pompeii or later. It is a reasonable analysis to say that if they occur so early, they
prove vowel qualities existed in pre-classical Latin (except for possibly infrequent cases
of archaic spellings). The best single source for these is one of Scipio's epitaphs from
the middle of the 3rd century B.C. (CIL 1.2.8,9, found in Warmington 1940:4, among
others). The following Old Latin - Classical Latin correspondences can be listed:
Old Latin Classical Latin

fuel fait
hec Me
dedet dealt
filios filius
Cornelia Cornelius
cosol consul
Due to such inscriptional facts, it is possible to compare the vowel system of Old
Latin to that of Late Latin (West), both conceivably being four heights, seven vowels:
Pertinent evidence for Latin vowel quality may be uncovered by (a) determining the
vowel systems of Oscan, Umbrian, and Faliscan, the contemporary dialects of Old
Latin; and (b) comparing them with the Latin equivalents. (My sources are Buck
1928, Giacomelli 1963, Poultney 1959, and Vetter 1953.)
Oscan
Alphabet Sound Latin equivalent
l i
Ki) e
3 e
A a ä, ä
V (u) 0,0 ä,ö
v u ö, ü, ü
Umbrian
l i-ü i-ü
3 e , ,e
A a ä, ä
V o, u ö, ö, ü
Faliscan
I i i
3 e
A a ä,ä
, ö, ü
V u ü
Oscan Umbrian Faliscan

i u i u
e e e o
a a
a
If we look at the Latin equivalents, we can see that all Italic dialects show mergers
from the Latin ten vowels (which are also those reconstructed for Proto-Indoeuropean)
to seven in Oscan, six (five) in Umbrian (the status of M is unclear), and five in Faliscan.
A key position in the quantity - quality question is held by Oscan, it seems to me.
As is well known, Oscan orthography knows double writing for long vowels (a
practice unsuccessfully carried over into Latin by Accius in the 1st century B.C.).
However, it no doubt also shows four heights in vowels, the symbol l· (also transcribed
as i) being equivalent to both Latin and e, and V merging Latin ö and ü (there is
no O in Oscan writing). I would analyze this situation as simply indicating co-existing
phonetic quantity and quality. Since all three Italic dialects form one development
with Latin from Proto-Indoeuropean, it is only natural to draw some conclusions
about Latin vowels from them, as I have done.
How was Classical Latin pronounced ? Most scholars agree that there were quality
differentiations of long and short vowels. This is attested by statements of grammarians,
who equate long with (more) close, and short with (more) open (Sommer 1948:56-69).
Allen (1965:49-50), in fact, suggests these Latin-English correspondences:
Classical Latin English
as in feet (but without glide)
ü fool
\ pit
ü put
e pet
ö pot (not American)
e bait
ö boat
The only question about Classical Latin pronunciation, really, is not "Were there
quality distinctions in vowels ?", but, rather, "To what degree did CL vowels diverge
in aperture, and was this divergence noticed by the speakers?" Naturally, any answer
to the second question can only be speculative.
Since vowel quality has always been recognized for Late Latin, can it be demon-
strated that quantity still co-existed then, that is, can we posit this phonetic system
for Vulgar Latin (West):
ü
e ö
ä
Very convincing evidence for such a state has been uncovered by Jonathan Butler.
In an analysis of Vegliote, Butler shows that when Latin came in contact with Slavic,
speakers of Slavic must have perceived Latin i, e, o, and u longer than , L, and a
(Butler 1971:9, manuscript). The whole picture is summarized in this chart (Butler
1971:4, hand-out):
free syllable checked syllable
(i, e, o, u) long half-long }
, \ , . , _ <· paroxytones
( , , a) short extra-short j
half-long0 half-long 1
° } proparoxytones
short extra-short j
Before concluding, it is worth mentioning that the quantity to quality shift may be
considered a non-problem for the history of Romance independently of my proposal
in this paper. Certain scholars (cf. Pulgram 1950) attribute a history only to spoken
dialects of Latin, characterizing Classical Latin as a codified off-shoot used in literature.
If (1) Classical Latin is not accepted as the ancestor of the Romance languages (and
historically it is hard to see how this view can be disputed) and if (2) Spoken Latin
of all times can be shown to have had definite quality differentiations in vowels, then
the quantity to quality shift is clearly a non-problem, since it concerns the develop-
ment from Latin to Romance, and the Latin involved in this evolution has never been
Classical Latin, but Spoken Latin! Thus, one may admit that in Classical Latin
quantity was distinctive, but would also claim that in Spoken Latin quality was
always distinctive (cf. Klausenburger 1970:6).
Instead of such a solution, which may be considered an easy way out by some, I
am proposing that one should look at all dialects of Latin, including Classical Latin,
and recognize quantity and quality as phonetically co-extensive features in all of them.
It is not necessary to choose one or the other as 'distinctive' but posit, rather, phono-
logical tenseness for Latin vowels, phonetically (intrinsically) realized by Rules A and
B into length and degree of aperture.2
University of Washington.
REFERENCES
Allen, W. Sidney
1965 Vox Latina (Cambridge: At the University).
Buck, Carl D.
1928 A Grammar of scan and Umbrian (Boston).
Butler, Jonathan
1971 "A Distinctive Feature Approach to Diachronie Romance Vocalism", paper read at the
MLA Winter Meeting (Chicago) (unpublished).
Gaeng, Paul A.
1968 An Inquiry into Local Variations in Vulgar Latin (= University of North Carolina, Studies
in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 77) (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina).
Giacomelli, Gabriella
1963 La lingua falisca ( = Biblioteca di Studi Etruschi, 1) (Florence: Leo S. Olschki).
Haudricourt, Andre, and Alphonse Juilland
1970 Essai pour une histoire structurale du phonetisme francais, 2nd ed. (= Series Practica, 115)
(The Hague: Mouton).
Kelly, D. H.
1967 "Distinctive Feature Analysis in Latin Phonology", AJPh 88, 67-77.
Klausenburger, Jürgen
1970 French Prosodies and Phonotactics. An Historical Typology (= Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für
romanische Philologie, 124) (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer).
Lausberg, Heinrich
1947 "Zum romanischen Vokalismus", RF60, 295-307.
Lehiste, Ilse
1970 Suprasegmental (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
2
Walker (1971:143) and Schane (forthcoming: 12 manuscripts)arrived at essentially the sameresult,
but for different reasons, in that they established the same underlying vowel system, based on tenseness,
both for Vulgar and Classical Latin.
Poultney, James W.
1959 The Bronze Tables of Iguvium (Baltimore: The American Philological Association).
Pulgram, Ernst
1950 "Spoken and Written Latin", Lg. 26, 458-466.
Schane, Sanford A.
Forthcoming "How Abstract is French Phonology?", Generative Studies in Romance Languages,
ed. by J. Casagrande and B. Saciuk (Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House).
Sommer, Ferdinand
1948 Handbuch der lateinischen Laut- und Formenlehre (Heidelberg: Carl Winter).
Spence, Nicol C. W.
1965 "Quantity and Quality in the Vowel System of Vulgar Latin", Word 21,1-18.
Straka, Georges
1959 "Duree et timbre vocaliques. Observations de phonetique generate, appliquees ä la phone-
tique historique des langues romanes", Zeitschrift für Phonetik und allgemeine Sprachwissen-
schaft 12, 276-300.
Väänänen, Veikko
1963 Introduction au latin vulgaire (Paris: Klincksieck).
Vetter, Emil
1953 Handbuch der italischen Dialekte, Vol. 1. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter).
Walker, Douglas C.
1971 "Old French Phonology and Morphology", unpublished Doctoral Dissertation (University
of California, San Diego).
Warmington, E. H. (ed.)
1940 Remains of Old Latin IV: Archaic Inscriptions (London: William Heinemann LTD).
Weinrich, Harald
1969 Phonologische Studien zur romanischen Sprachgeschichte, 2nd ed. (= Forschungen zur
romanischen Philologie, 6) (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung).
Zirin, Ronald A.
1970 The Phonological Basis of Latin Prosody (= Series Practica, 99) (The Hague: Mouton).
ROBIN LAKOFF
CONTEXTUAL CHANGE AND HISTORICAL CHANGE:

THE TRANSLATOR AS TIME MACHINE*
Discussions of diachronic linguistics have generally revolved around several issues:

(1) phonological change: what is the history of the sound-system of a language or
language family ? How can one describe the changes that occur in time to a sound or
a set of sounds ?
(2) morphological change: how do morphological systems change: how, e.g. does
a language switch from synthetic to analytic tenses ? develop a system of articles ?
lose a subjunctive ? a case system ? (These problems, it is now generally recognized,
are most satisfactorily dealt with as syntactic changes combined with phonological
changes.)
(3) syntactic change: how do the syntactic rules of a language change, and why?
Does the statement of a rule itself change ? its sphere of applicability ? Is the domain
of a rule extended? contracted? merely shifted? Are rules added, or dropped?
(4) semantic change (or lexical change): have the meanings of individual words
changed ? or are there shifts in whole semantic classes ? is it the connotative or deno-
tative meanings that change? and how, incidentally, does this affect the syntax and
morphology ?
These, as I said, are the traditional questions, which are still being asked and are
far from being answered. But I should like now to discuss another area of change
which some will perhaps call 'non-linguistic'. But my contention is that the kinds of
changes I will be talking about are as much in the domain of linguistics, and as much
the linguists' responsibility to account for, as any of the categories listed above; and
in fact, the phenomena I will discuss cannot be understood at all without reference to
the others; and besides, very often a thorough understanding of the four 'really
linguistic' categories cannot be achieved without some consideration of this fifth.
Even if we were to weasel out of calling this linguistics, it impinges on inescapably
linguistic concerns at every turn. If we are to attempt to develop linguistic theories
to account for the first four types of change, they will fail eventually if we don't take
* The author would like to acknowledge the support of the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences, where this paper was written.
120 ROBIN LAKOFF
this poor stepsister category into account. In my discussion, I will talk about this
category of linguistic change, and how one is to integrate it into a theory of linguistic
change, and why one wants to do so.
I refer to what we might call 'contextual change'. By this I mean changes that occur
in the minds of the users of language, which shape the final form of their utterances,
and govern their interpretation of the utterances they encounter. It is my feeling that
this sort of change is the impelling force behind many of the other kinds of linguistic
change; we will be able to perceive the widespread patterns of these other changes —
rather than as has been done too often, looking at them piecemeal — only if we see
this overriding motivating force at work behind the scenes.
We can identify contextual factors at many points. A speaker may view an event
in many different ways: he can view it as important, or not; factual, or not; good, or
bad; natural, or unnatural; new information, or old; and in many other ways.
Linguists have studied in detail some of the ways in which this supposedly 'non-
linguistic' psychological information manifests itself in superficial differences in
linguistic structures. These differences have mostly been examined synchronically,
in English. What I want to do now is extend this concept of the situational influence
on superficial linguistic form, to show that it can change over time and affect linguistic
patterns when it does. It is, of course, harder to identify than other types of change,
since it so often depends on subtleties of usage that are at the command of the native
speaker alone. But I want to try to identify some of these contextual factors, and I
beg your indulgence if I do it in an unorthodox (for linguistics) way.
Of course, context manifests itself in every utterance, from the loftiest works of
poetry to my weekly shopping list. But some types of language use are richer than
others in connotation — that is, more dependent on a sympathy with context between
speaker and hearer, or writer and reader. As I say these last words, my hearers
undoubtedly think, 'poetry', which is, clearly, the right answer. Certainly what we
mean by 'poetry' is a particularly allusive way of speaking — a means of forcing the
hearer to employ his unconscious knowledge of contextual information, to a much
greater extent than is done in any other form of communication I can think of. So
let us look at poetry, the better to identify contextual uses of language, and let us look
at it with this end in mind: to see how contextual sympathy — if we can call by this
name the reader's reaction to what the writer says — changes in time.
Actually, we should not talk as though time were the only changer or distorter of
contextual sympathy. ANY sort of distance, real or metaphorical, will have a parallel
effect. So if we go from one culture to another that works very differently, the effect
will be much as if we had traversed several millennia, in terms of affecting the under-
standing of the reader. Understanding Chinese poetry, for instance, may require as
much mental contortion, on the part of the unsophisticated American reader, as
understanding Greek lyrics. And of course, if we cross both time and culture — and
crossing large boundaries of time practically guarantees we will experience some form
of culture shock — the effect is doubled. But here I want to confine myself to changes
CONTEXTUAL CHANGE AND HISTORICAL CHANGE 121
that can be observed in time. I will do so by looking at a poem that is often called
the hardest poem of any to translate, Virgil's Aeneid. I suggest — as has been done
elsewhere, in less formal terms — that what renders its poetry so elusive to the non-
native speaker of Latin is the fact that so much of its intended effect depends on writer
and reader sharing a context — linguistic, psychological, social, call it what you will,
or a combination of these — and that, if this shared context is absent, the result is
that the poem becomes unintelligible, in the sense that the writer's purpose is not
clear to the reader, though the reader may understand the WORDS of the poem
perfectly, and consequently the Aeneid in translation is one of the world's best in-
somnia cures. We will examine the original work, and several translations of it, to see
what contextual information is lost, and whether it can be restored; and then we will
talk about the consequences for linguistic theory, if it is indeed the case that our
understanding of language at least sometimes depends on factors apparently outside
the domain of purely linguistic information.
I think we can all recognize that we are none of us native speakers of Latin, and
hence none of us participants in Roman culture, though some of us may be very
interested observers. But just as there is a difference between eating Peking Duck and
watching someone else eat it, there is a difference between being in a culture and
watching someone else being in it. No matter how we steep ourselves in someone
else's customs, if we don't actually participate we are interpreting rather than acting,
getting our information from footnotes, whether supplied by ourselves in passing or
someone else. So let us say, for instance, that we KNOW from our reading that the
typical Roman citizen of Virgil's time attached a lot of symbolic importance to the
toga, the formal garment he wore. Then we see, or think we see, the way in which a
line like the following was intended:
Romanos, rerum dominos, gentemque togatam (i, 282)
but never having worn one ourselves, or intimately known anyone who wore one,
we simply cannot recapture the feeling the Roman himself had on reading that line.
For him, in a sense, the idea contained in togatam was an implicit assumption. But
we must make the idea explicit for ourselves as we read it, explaining it to ourselves
however allusively or subconsciously. It is the difference between telling a joke right
and ruining it by explaining the punch line. The hearer of a ruined joke can still see
that it was funny, or could be or must have been funny. But it is not funny to HIM.
Similarly we can see that the line in question must have had a special kind of covert
meaning to the Roman reader, and can even, if we are deeply steeped in the culture
at second hand — maybe even feel a tingle of awe as we read the line. But it is awe
at second hand, since we are not members of the gens togata. One might say that the
word togata along with toga has undergone a form of lexical or semantic change in
which its connotative force changed, its denotative value staying constant. There is
also a problem, for many modern readers, with rerum dominos: it's hard to respond
to that as Virgil expects his readers to, with unabashed pride and awe: imperialism is
122 ROBIN LAKOFF
not fashionable these days as it was then. And even if we are comfortable with the
concept, we cannot really identify it with the Romans anymore. They aren't 'rerum
domini': if we feel anything, we feel ironic.
A translator, then, will find himself with no satisfactory solution when he comes to
deal with a line like this. Either it will seem half-meaningless (the togatam part) and
half almost a parody, or certainly not totally serious (rerum dominos) or else he must
resort to long-winded explanation which both destroys the literary effect and is also
far from capturing the author's own intention. Most translators will translate such a
line pretty literally, and leave it to the reader to figure out what the writer meant.
But in the case of such a line (and this one is scarcely unusual in Virgil) if the reader
is well-enough versed in Roman customs to understand how a Roman felt reading
the line, he is almost certainly able to read the line in the original; and if not, the
translation will be senseless to him. What can a poor translator do ?
The Aeneid is perhaps an especially good choice for our present purpose in that,
since it does present such a monstrous challenge, it has tantalized some first-rate
English poets to attempt translations. Now sometimes a translation can be faulted
because it is done by a hack with no literary sensitivity; but we can select with no
trouble several translations for comparison, all done by people who know how to use
English, and also, we can assume, understand as well as any non-Roman what Virgil
had in mind. We can see how these translations differ and where they are the same,
how their authors came to grips with the problems of social and psychological context,
and how well they solved them. The translations I will be looking at are the following:
(1) John Dryden's 18th Century translation into heroic couplets;
(2) C. Day Lewis' (1952) translation into a loose hexameter, the closest
approximation of the three to Virgil's dactylic hexameter;
(3) Rolfe Humphries' (1951) translation into rough iambic pentameter.
I could have chosen a prose translation, on the grounds that the translator could
have stayed closer to the literal sense in prose, without the exigencies of rhyme or
meter to constrain him; but since we are concerned with poetic language, and since
poetic language always seems a bit ludicrous in prose, I felt that more of the effect
of the Aeneid was likely to be recaptured in verse than in prose. I chose Dryden's
translation because Dryden, I feel, was living at a time when the usual cultural
assumptions were much closer to those of Virgil's time than they are now. The idea
of feeling reverence toward an emperor was quite plausible then, perhaps even a part
of Dryden's own heartfelt beliefs. Most Americans would find it a foreign concept,
and therefore much of the emotional force of the Aeneid comes through for them
highly diluted. And the assumption that the reader and the writer share a pious belief
in the same deity — that there is only one religious system for a reasonable man, and
that atheism is unthinkable —· is common to Virgil and Dryden, but no longer
tenable today. And in Dryden's time, there was a generally agreed-on style for epic
poems: the heroic couplet was to that time what dactylic hexameter was to Virgil's.
The suitability of the style — both in terms of the verse form and the actual diction —
plays a great role in determining the reader's response to the work.
The modern translations, however, have their merits. As each of the translators in
fact points out in his preface, contemporary Romans were able to respond to the
Aeneid personally because it was written in the language of their times. It is clear that
this is not LITERALLY true: there is much conscious archaism and poetic diction, and
lofty words that were certainly not part of the first-century Roman's conversational
idiom. But the Aeneid WAS in the idiom that the first-century Roman expected of his
epic poetry; the style was not archaic, as it would be if, for instance, Virgil had chosen
to write in Saturnian meter. Now as I said above, Dryden's choice of heroic couplets
was a perfectly reasonable choice for his time: this was one well-accepted style of epic
poetry. But we no longer write heroic couplets, at least not as serious poetry. (Or if we
do, we are consciously archaizing, like the first-century Roman using Saturnian meter.)
We cannot respond to Dryden much more spontaneously, really, than we can respond
to Virgil in the original: too much time has elapsed, too many changes have been
made. So although Dryden, of our three translators, is the closest to Virgil in spirit,
he is the farthest from us. If we hope to get any approximation of how the typical
Roman reader of the Aeneid responded to it, we must find a translation more con-
temporary in form. This will be farther from the original in spirit, but nearer to us.
C. Day Lewis is of especial interest because of his strong religious belief. While he
is not in the same position as Virgil or Dryden — for whom it was possible to assume
that there was only one religion and that the reader, like the writer, was an adherent —
at least he shares part of that assumption, and is therefore more likely to feel a
sympathy with Virgil with respect to one of the most pervasive themes of the Aeneid.
And finally, the Humphries translation is probably the freest and most colloquial —
in some ways the most like an original work, and therefore perhaps the one the
modern reader might respond to most spontaneously, although certainly the Lewis
translation is not far behind.
Then we will expect different things from the different translations, but it will be
unfair to expect to get, from any of them, the same feeling the Roman reader derived
from reading the Aeneid when it was written. Let us take for a first example the line
we discussed above, and see how each of the translators has rendered it. Dryden,
first, says:
The subject world shall Rome's dominion own
And, prostrate, shall adore the nation of the gown.
Dryden has taken Virgil's five words and made two lines, one extra-long, of them.
In that alone the translation loses already: Dryden, as it were, has to impress on his
readers' minds again and again the supremacy of Rome to which Virgil alludes almost
in passing. Virgil can take the feeling of domination for granted in his readers;
Dryden must clarify and explain, make sure his readers understand the position of
Rome. But this is overexplaining and we feel bludgeoned rather than inspired. The
124 ROBIN LAKOFF
same problem arises again (as in many other places) in another famous passage, vi.
851-3:
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento:
hae tibi erunt mores, pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.
which three lines Dryden has expanded to five, one again hypermetric:
But Rome, ''tis thine alone, with awful sway,
To rule mankind, and make the world obey,
Disposing peace and war by thy own majestic way,
To tame the proud, the fetter''d slave to free:
These are imperial arts and worthy thee.
It is particularly troublesome that the problem of the credibility of Roman supremacy
occurs cheek-by-jowl, or in the same line, with the problem of the translation of
togatam which has been noted already. The toga, the formal garment worn by men
on solemn occasions (the very weightiness and discomfort of the garment further
dignifying the occasion) had, for its wearers, much symbolic significance. Only a
free man could wear it, and it was worn for the first time at a solemn investiture
ceremony. It was associated with public office and important ceremonial functions,
as well as suggesting the status of the person wearing it as a person important in his
own right, a figure of authority, someone to be reckoned with. In fact, it occurs to me
that there is a possible English equivalent, valid for modern readers, as there is one
for rerum dominos. To suggest to the modern reader what this line meant to the
Roman, we might translate it:
The Romans, cops of the world. They'll wear the pants.
But by so doing we lose at least as much as we gain. 'Wearing the pants' suggests
authority and prestige, but hardly solemnity; and 'cops of the world' is generally
derogatory. Perhaps it is because the societal assumptions under which we live are
so different from those of Virgil's time; perhaps we cannot find an equivalent. But
neither, for whatever reason, did Dryden. In particular, 'the nation of the gown'
approaches ludicrousness for the naive contemporary reader. In Dryden's time as
ours, the men wore pants; women wore gowns, and foreigners1, and men perhaps for
sleeping. But women and foreigners are just the people who, to the Romans, were not
togati: a good part of the point of the word as used by Virgil is to exclude these two,
1
Just the reverse of this difficulty occurs elsewhere in Latin. The Romans (among whom Archie
Bunker would have felt perfectly at home) had numerous derogatory terms for foreigners based on
their strange ways. Among their favorite objects of deprecation were the Gauls who, as it happened,
wore trousers (bracae) instead of the dresslike garments favored by civilized races like the Romans
and the Greeks. Hence the epithet bracati was often applied to the Gauls, with Galli bracati having a
contemptuous flavor akin to pigtailed Chinamen or the like. The problem for the modern translator
is how to capture the sneer: 'trousered Gauls' is meaningless to us.
confining the discussion to Roman males. Toga connotes virility, gown just the
opposite. And Romans wore the toga to perform the most significant public events —
not, surely, to sleep. So both the connotations of gown differ from those of toga
about as much as can be imagined. Again, the denotative translation is correct: the
toga is a kind of gown. But connotatively, this translation could not be more mis-
leading to the audience for whom it was intended. Certainly it would be better to
retain the original word toga which, if it has for speakers of English none of the
connotations it had for the Romans, at least has none of the wrong connotations.
The modern translators realize this and fare somewhat better. Lewis writes:
The Romans, lords of creation, the togaed people.
Again here, 'lords of creation' sounds almost sarcastic to the modern reader; and
though he may catch himself in time to remind himself that the Romans made very
different assumptions in these cases, the damage is done on the first impression in
poetry. 'The togaed people' here is bad in that it fails to convey the sense of pomp
and majesty suggested by the original: people is a less impressive word than gens or
race: this line seems merely to say that the Romans have a typical mode of dress,
of no special importance beyond this, and unrelated, as far as the reader can tell, to
the fact that they are 'lords of creation'. So without footnotes or special knowledge,
the modern reader will certainly not respond as Virgil intended to this line: it will
seem to contain a non-sequitur, to be grandiose on the one hand and flat on the other.
When Virgil wrote it, rerum dominos seemed less the words of a race having delusions
of grandeur, and gentem togatam more suggestive of a people with innate majesty,
and the two halves of the line meshed.
Humphries tries with:
The race that wears the toga, Roman masters of all the world.
In the phrasing of the translation of gentemque togatam (using race and expanding
the adjective to a relative clause) Humphries manages to suggest that there is some-
thing important going on here, which is more than Lewis does. But of course, it does
not tell us what that is, so the ignorant reader (that is, the one who profits from
translations) is left in the dark. And here once more, the translation of rerum dominos
seems to inflate the phrase unduly because the world for whom the translator is
translating cannot take the concept casually.
Here, then, is one striking instance where a line, perfectly intelligible and obvious
to its contemporary reader, was rendered untranslatable through changes in the
assumptions society makes over the centuries: changes in its view of imperalism (for
Virgil this would have been a good word, had it existed) and in styles of dress. The
denotative meanings do not change, but it is not denotative meanings that make poetry,
but rather the poet's forcing the reader to supply a certain set of connotations on his
own. But this works only so long as the poet can count on the reader's connotations
being the ones he had in mind. Here this two-way communication breaks down. Yet
126 ROBIN LAKOFF
it is not true that any word, or phrase, is 'untranslatable'. We can assign a precise
English meaning to anything we care to. It's just that the meanings of the meanings —
the contexts into which they are put — are so different that we and the Romans, with
the same input, get a different output.
Is this linguistic? Yes, insofar as meaning is linguistic — as I assume everyone
agrees it is. Suppose someone objects by saying that connotations aren't part of the
lexicon. Suppose he wishes to define toga, in his lexicon, as 'a white woolen garment'.
This is, let us say, the denotative meaning of the word. Then he would be able to
find sentences aberrant that would translate as:
(1) Marcus is wearing his corduroy toga.
(2) Cicero'1 s plaid toga looks rotten with his complexion.
But other sentences, equally aberrant for the Roman, would come out as perfectly all
right.
(3) Tullia hates to wear her toga in hot weather.
(4) Of course 1 always wear a toga to bed: should I sleep NAKED ? ?
Now all these sentences seem to me bad for the same reason: something in them
violates what the Roman knows about the function and form of the toga. Is it logical
to say that the first two are linguistically aberrant, and the latter two outside the
realm of linguistics, bad for other than language-related reasons? This seems to me
totally illogical. Denotation and connotation here, as elsewhere, go hand in hand,
and no linguistic theory is going to get very far in discussing translation and its
inherent difficulties that does not take social psychological context into account,
along with 'strictly linguistic' context and denotation.
One might say, returning to the hard lot of the translator, that there ARE untrans-
latable passages in the Aeneid as in all poetry, for other than societal reasons. These
would be more purely semantic: cases where a word in one language had a sense
lacking in the other. I am not talking about problem words like pietas, which are,
if you think of it, societal (we will return to this problem shortly). But we can look
at other sorts of cases, where social factors are not relevant. Consider the justly
famous, or infamous
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. (i, 462)
The problems here are that the Latin words (especially rerum mentem and mortalia)
have many more connotations, or in any case very different ones, from any possible
English equivalents. Res is literally 'thing', metis, 'mind', and mortalis, 'relating to
death'. But res also has overtones that make it semantically a much richer word than
the English thing: 'business, matter, concern, deed, suffering', and so on. And mens
goes beyond the purely intellectual mind: it suggests 'heart, sympathy', etc. Mortalia,
from its literal meaning, comes to mean also: 'having to do with men, having to do
with those creatures that must die'. Then a line like i, 462 is meaningful on several
levels, none of which, we may assume, were lost on the sensitive Roman reader
(supposing there was such a thing). But none of them, except for the very starkest and
least poetic, were overtly present: the poeticness, the evocativeness, of this line —
the qualities that make it memorable — are due precisely to its allusiveness, as
opposed to its literal sense. Then what is the translator to do ? Dryden takes the easy
way out — this passage is missing entirely in his translation, perhaps the best move
under the circumstances. For the translations of Humphries and Lewis seem almost
nonsense unless one knows the original and its connotations (in which case, again,
who needs the translation ?)
Humphries says:
There are tears for things, and what men suffer touches
the human heart.
Lewis puts it:
Here too we find...
Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human
transience.
The trouble with both of these is that sometimes they say too much, sometimes too
little. 'There are tears for things', I think, has no meaning in English — surely very
little of the meaning of the Latin, and 'tears in the nature of things' I find almost pure
gibberish, without consulting the original. The translations ofmentem mortalia tangunt,
on the other hand, say too much: they make explicit what Virgil merely hinted at:
human mortality, men's suffering, the intellect and emotions somehow connected.
By coming out and saying these things, we both overexplain and, by the same token,
prevent the reader from sensing almost unconsciously the numerous possibilities
lurking in the senses of the words. We have created prose from poetry, and rather bad
prose, since it is imprecise. But not poetry, since it is not allusive.
So we can run into difficulties in translating on other than contextual levels. We
have given an example of a semantic pitfall: we can find them at other purely linguistic
levels too. For instance, everyone knows that one problem is that poetry creates
effects through its sound patterns. And it is rare indeed that a special sort of sound
effects carries over in translation. So the poetic effect is lost. One example is the line
suadentque cadentia sidera somnos (ii, 9)
in which the intertwining of the sounds, and their phonetic nature, are soporific in
effect. What happens in translation ?
Dryden says:
And setting stars to kindly rest invite.
This is not bad at all. Dryden has recaptured part of the phonology, at least (the
128 ROBIN LAKOFF
many s's, the repetition of the vowel in kindly ... invite reproducing the repetition of
-ent). Humphries says:
And setting stars urge slumber,
where he, too, uses the repetition of s's. Finally, Lewis:
the declining stars invite to sleep,
which seems in many ways the weakest of the three, first because the alliteration is less
marked than in the others, and also because of the syntactic awkwardness in modern
English of 'invite to sleep', with no direct object. But these attempts show that a
partial phonological equivalence may be achieved, though something is irretrievably
lost.
We can also consider syntactic non-equivalence. A free word-order language like
Latin can do many things that a fixed-order language like English cannot even
approximate except in a crude way. Consider, for example, the line,
natum ante ora patris, patremque obtruncat ad aras (ii, 663)
Now here, Aeneas is seeking to horrify his father (and the reader), and the horrifying
factors are twofold: first, that Pyrrhus has killed both father and son, the son with
the father watching helplessly, and second, that it was done before the altar. So these
are the points he wants to emphasize. There are two good means of emphasis: first,
repetition, in as close a range as possible; second, putting a word at the end of a
sentence, letting suspense increase its emotional value. Virgil employs both these
devices. But he can do this only because Latin's freedom of word-order allows it.
The translations ?
First Dryden:
— the wretch who slew
The son (inhuman) in the father's view
And then the sire himself to the dire altar drew.
We can see why Dryden did what he did, but as an attempt to reproduce the effect
of Virgil's lines, the attempt is a failure, Dryden tries to increase the emotional force
of the lines by making them a triplet (we saw him do this above, with vi, 851-3) one
of the lines hypermetric. He also adds a word for shock effect, (inhuman), but loses
the effect of lexical repetition by the use first of father, then sire, and the two separate.
He does save altar till the end, but the verb drew irretrievably weakens the entire
sequence.
Humphries:
he slays the son before the father,
the sire at the altar-stone.
Humphries too uses two lexical items where Virgil used one, diluting the effect;
and again, while saving altar for the end, slays is far removed from it, again lessening
the effect. And finally, Lewis:
he loves
Butchering sons in front of their fathers, fathers at the altar.
This translation seems the most successful of the three, preserving most of the effect
of the Latin; but by putting butchering at the beginning rather than near the end, some
of its effect is dissipated. There seems no natural way to achieve the same effect as the
Latin. So we must include syntactic loss as well as the others in the perils of translation.
We see then that loss in translation takes place at all levels of linguistic use, from
the contextual to the phonological. A theory of translation that did not treat these
as parallel and, in some ways, closely related, would be an inadequate theory. A
theory of linguistics that forced one type of loss to be treated as unrelated to the others
would therefore be very damaging to the emergence of a serious theory of translation:
the linguist, like the translator, must deal with contextual difficulties as he deals with
other types. This is especially true since often they are inseparable; often as not,
we find several levels intermingled, a difficulty on several levels at once, which we
cannot account for or theorize about unless we consider all the levels together.
Two of the words that cause the greatest problems for translators of the Aeneid
are the very frequent (ne) fas and pietas. The problem is that these words each have a
constellation of meanings shared by nothing in English. Sofas can refer to human as
well as divine law: nefas may be a crime (a violation of civil law), an ethical mistake
(a violation of moral laws between men) or a sin (a violation of the laws of the gods).
English must decide which is the strongest sense in a particular case, but the strength
of the word in Latin is that, whichever one sense is primary in a particular case, the
other senses are always there in the background. You cannot commit an offense
merely against god, or merely against your fellow man: to do one is, by implication,
to do the other; both are nefas. Pietas is similar. Piety, the English derivative, concerns
a man's behaving with due respect to the Deity; it does not, except rather self-
consciously as in Wordsworth, refer to one man's treatment of another, out of natural
ties (a parent, a child, or a leader of a charismatic sort). Pietas carries all these
connotations; if you are pius in your relationship with the gods, it is hard for the
Roman to imagine that you will not also be pius toward your parents and your
country. It is one concept; as with the idea of fas, there is in the Latin lexicon no
clear semantic division between behavior toward men and behavior toward divinities.
So these words would be lexically not equivalent in Latin and in English: their logical
structures would be different. But it is not an accident that both these concepts
behave this way (and many others as well, no doubt); the reason for the difference
between Latin and English in these lexical items stems from the different assumption
made by the societies in which these languages are spoken: the Romans viewed the
relationships between men and gods differently from the way we do. This societal
assumption has colored the logical structures of these words in the lexicon; so once
130 ROBIN LAKOFF
again, it would be missing an important generalization to say merely that these words
did not correspond lexically, and that the facts about nefas were independent from
those regarding pietas. (We would have to say this if we excluded social context
from linguistics.) The generalization is only possible if we talk about context on a par
with semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology — all parts of linguistics, all pitfalls
to the translator.
Knowing about these hurdles, we might say that the Aeneid presented to the
translator as well as to the linguist a problem from beginning to end. The beginning,
as everyone knows, is:
Ar ma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
and the end is
vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras (xii, 952)
And neither of these is translatable, in the sense in which we have been using the
word: 'able to be understood in the other language in the same spirit in which it
was intelligible in the original'. The difficulties are partially lexical, but mainly due to
differences in social context.
In the first line, we come first to vir. This is traditionally translated 'man', the
denotative sense, but we have to remember that vir also means 'hero', 'super-man',
almost. But not quite. To translate it as hero is again making explicit what Latin
leaves implicit, weakening the poetic force. Cano is problematic: the use of the term
goes back to Homer, to the time when epic was oral and chanted to a musical
instrument. When Homer began his epic
ìçíéí Üåéäå èåÜ
he was not speaking 'poetic language' — the muse was to sing to him, as he was to
sing to his audience. By Virgil's time, the use of cano was a conscious archaism, but
one the audience probably understood without much difficulty, since they were
thoroughly steeped in Homeric poetry and not that far in time from oral poetry
themselves. (They would have to be very much aware of the entire Homeric — and
post-Homeric — opus to get very much out of the Aeneid, and in any case we know
that Homer was a large part of the Roman literary education.) But the modern reader
is several removes from this, and cano is not too intelligible to him unless, again, the
oral tradition has been specially explained to him. Finally, Troiae...oris seems to take
it for granted that the audience knows about Troy, its fall, its relation to Rome, and
Aeneas' relation to all of these, as the literate Roman no doubt did; but for the
American reader, translation of the translation is necessary again. How is this line
translated? Dryden's is probably the one that most speakers of English associate
with Virgil:
Arms and the man I sing, who...
left the Trojan shore.
Humphries does something similar:

Arms and the man I sing, the ßrs t who came...
an exile out of Troy.
It seems as though it is not possible to think of beginning the Aeneid in any other way,
however difficult this way is. Lewis boldly innovates:
/ tell about war and the hero who first from Troy's frontier.
This is probably closer in feeling to the original than the others, in that it sounds
natural and is meaningful to a modern reader, rather than a collection of familiar
sounds. But even here, hero hammers in what vir suggests; and the Trojan problem is
as real as ever.
As for the last line, similar problems emerge:
vitaque cum gemitufugit indignata sub umbras.
Here we must enter into the spirit of a whole different world-view: one in which lives,
on the deaths of people who have possessed them, seem to assume a personality of
their own, and behave as human beings (this is of course metaphorical here, but the
metaphor is not possible in English; the concept is too foreign); where the dead go to
'the shades', 'the darkness', concepts which have no equivalent in Christian tradition.
Dryden says:
And the disdainful soul came rushing through the wound.
Here vita is changed to the Christian 'soul', but there is still an anomaly, since souls
in Christian theology are not, I believe, 'disdainful'; moreover, Dryden has omitted
the whole notion of umbras, thus sidestepping that issue. Humphries preserves a strict
literal rendering:
the spirit
Went with a moan indignant to the shadows
which seems very un-American, or at least un-English. Lewis says:
with a deep sigh
the unconsenting spirit fled to the shades below.
Again this sounds somewhat archaic, and is probably marked by the reader as not in
keeping with HIS religious mythology, thus destroying some of the poem's final effect.
These are just some of the ways in which context gets the translator in trouble.
But the very notion of translation ought, by now, to be suspect; can it work at all?
Although the linguistic theorist — the one most in vogue of late, anyway — would
rush to deny this, the style of a literary work as a whole must be considered a linguistic
artifact, depending as it does on the linguistic effects it seeks to create. Part of the
point of Virgil's writing the Aeneid was to instill a sense of national pride and purpose;
132 ROBIN LAKOFF
he does this, as we have seen, largely through linguistic means — by the way he refers
to the Romans, as opposed to other peoples — and by the events he narrates and the
history he has various characters foretell, but just as significantly by the creation of an
epic itself. To create a national epic is to say 'we are a people worthy of an epic'.
But an epic is associated with a particular style: a kind of lofty, consciously archaic
language, and a particular meter. It is important that these strike the reader as natural
for epic: further, that epic be a living art form. If these conditions are not met, the
translation will simply not work. Then too, the reader must accept the point of the
epic. Here is one way in which Homer comes off better than Virgil: his point is simply
the difficulties of men waging war with or without the connivance of higher powers:
a situation that is still valid today. He had no particular point about national destiny
to make, so he didn't make one. For Virgil on the other hand, national destiny is the
main issue; so if we don't go along with him on the magnificence of the Roman state,
the importance of the founding of Rome, and the significance of Augustus Caesar,
we simply will not be able to read the Aeneid-with much appreciation, regardless of the
other virtues of the poem. Moreover, formal versification as well as the whole idea of
epic poetry are now distinctly old-fashioned, and in consequence, hard for the modern
reader to appreciate. While for Dryden both the point of the Aeneid (with the Roman
references perhaps partly transferred to England) and its style were intelligible and
meaningful, this is not so today. So it is really, in the final analysis, questionable
whether it can be translated at all.
If the whole is questionable, what of the parts that make up the whole? The Aeneid
was written essentially as a propaganda document for the aggrandizement of Rome
and its rulers. It can 'work' or succeed only to the extent that it accomplishes this
aim. It can accomplish this aim only insofar as the readers go along with the assump-
tions made by the author so that his conclusions follow naturally from them.
As we have seen, there are very few of Virgil's assumptions that the modern reader
can sympathize with — much less, share in. Yet the translator can, in all but a very
few instances, find English WORDS that can be matched, denotatively anyway, to their
Latin counterparts. This creates the illusion that the 'meaning' of the Aeneid can be
transmitted to a modern reader so that he, reading the work in translation, will
experience much the same esthetic sensations that the Roman reader of two millennia
ago did. I have tried to show that such an assumption rests on an inadequate view of
language and the connection among different aspects of language use — whether
this view is explicitly formulated and based on a particular and explicit linguistic
theory, or whether it is merely the impressionistic result of hope. The Roman reader
had a different set of experiences that he brought to his reading of a poem, from any
an American reader could hope to have. These experiences mold his linguistic
behavior; enable him to decide which words describe things that are good or bad;
which things he can expect to occur, which not; what is true, what false, and so on.
The world he is born into irretrievably shapes the language of the person who speaks
it. And as the world changes, and assumptions change, language changes, more or
less perceptibly. This kind of linguistic change is parallel to the other types that I
mentioned at the beginning, yet it is not considered so. No one in his right mind
would try to retain the syntax of Virgil in translating into English — or even Italian;
to do so would be to create gibberish. No one would insist that the meaning a lexical
item had in Latin must be assigned to its derivative in English — or Italian.
Obviously, we are not going to equate pietas: piety: pieta, or we will be in bad
trouble in three languages at once. Yet we hold naively to the hope that we can keep
contextual meaning stable: that a concept thought of one way by a Roman could be
thought of the same way by an American, that there is no need to 'translate' contexts,
as there is a need to translate lexical items and syntax. The result of not translating
context is perhaps not seen so vividly as with the others, but they are present none-
theless. The Aeneid, taken out of its first-century social context, is very largely meaning-
less, almost as meaningless as the translation 'arms and the man I sing' is meaningless
for syntactic and lexical reasons.
My thesis, then, is that we must recognize new levels of meaning, and recognize
that these new levels are as much the business of linguistics as the familiar lexical,
syntactic and semantic levels of meaning. In mediating between two languages, we
can lose meaning or distort it on any of these levels, and our linguistic theory must
be able to predict this for all these levels and tell us why they work as they do. We
cannot, as many examples in this paper have shown, separate these components: the
meaning of a poem — or a sentence in a colloquial conversation, for that matter —
is a composite of many levels; each adds to the whole. I have talked about poetry
here because it provides the clearest examples of contextual change of meaning. But
any other level of language will be rich in examples of the same sort of thing, and all
levels of language should be studied with all these types of meaning in mind. The
historical linguist, then, has a rather new task in store for him: rather than confining
himself to one aspect of semantic change — the syntax, the semantics, the lexicon —
he must ask how they all work together, what the overall pattern of change is within
the language. He will find that groups of words change their meaning together, based
sometimes on a clear and direct change in the assertive meanings of the words, but
perhaps more often the change is occasioned by a gradual and relentless shift of
assumptions that speakers make at various points in time. Sometimes, no doubt, these
shifts are random, one unrelated to another and each arising for independent reasons.
But perhaps just as often (I use perhaps a lot here, since this whole area has been so
little studied, and since I hope the word will serve as a stimulus for further research)
we will find we can make a generalization: as society gradually changes its behavior
in some area, as it changes the normal or preferred way of viewing things, as new
concepts are added to the store of knowledge shared by a society, or as others obsolesce,
the words that refer to these concepts change their meaning, by changing the assump-
tions underlying their use. In time, the assertive meaning too may be changed this
way, but we should look for changes in underlying assumptions first.
Looking at linguistic change this way is unlikely to help us do better translations;
134 ROBIN LAKOFF
as I have tried to show, the only adequate translator of Latin poetry is the time
machine. But at least we will understand why we fail and where we fail, and we will
be better able to understand the workings of language. At the very least, we will have
gained a new perspective on some of the most intriguing areas of language change.2
University of Michigan and Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.
REFERENCES
Dryden, J.
1909 Virgil's Aeneid (= The Harvard Classics, Vol. 13), ed. by Charles W. Eliot (New York:
P. F. Collier & Son).
Humphries, R.
1951 The Aeneid of Virgil (New York and London: Charles Scribner's Sons).
Lewis, C. Day
1952 The Aeneid of Virgil (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co.).
Vergilius Maro, P.
1900 Aeneis, in P. Vergilt Moronis Opera, ed. by F. A. Hirtzel (Oxford: The Clarendon Press).
- The problems discussed in this paper are familiar to anyone who has done, or thought about,
serious translation. There is a rich and rewarding — if often depressing — literature on translation
and its unattainability. The interested reader is referred, for a start, to the following works: A. D.
Booth et al., Aspects ofTranslation (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1958). R. Browr (ed.), On Translation
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). E. A. Nida, Toward a Science of Translating
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1964).
J. PETER MÄHER
THE SITUATIONAL MOTIVATION OF SYNTAX AND

THE SYNTACTIC MOTIVATION OF POLYSEMY AND
SEMANTIC CHANGE: SPANISH-ITALIAN BRAVO ETC.*
A problem not yet resolved to the general satisfaction of Romanists, and one with
strong implications for the theoretical relationship of syntax and semantics, is the
etymology of Spanish and Portuguese bravo 'fierce, wild, angry, brave etc.', Italian
bravo 'wild' and 'good', Proven9al brau 'bull', Catalan brau 'bullock' and congeners.
It is surprising that no solution has been reached here, considering the favorable
conditions of evidence in Romance philology, with the wealth and great time depth
of its documentation, not to speak of the illustrious scholars who have toiled there.
Someone, it is reasonable to suspect, has been doing something wrong. The lack of a
solution is attributable more to assumptions, theories, and methods than to deficiencies
of evidence.
The competing etymologies. A prime evidential problem in the etymology of bravo

is an embarassment of riches. This word and its congeners exhibit such a wide range
of polysemy that scholars have let their Lautgesetze slip in efforts to map it onto a
number of earlier words of more or less close phonic-semantic similarity. Latin words
and non-Latin words, words in fact and non-words have been adduced as etyma.
The imaginative *b-rabidus is an ad hoc solution, whether with an asterisk in our day,
to signal its mancanza di latinitä, or asteriskless in a document of A.D. 1061 (cited
p. 29 in Menendez Pidal 1956, hereafter MP). Such was nonetheless the early prefer-
ence of Meyer-Lubke (he still signed himself "W. Meyer") until he swung over to
Körting's (1891) equally difficult derivation from *brabus < *brabams < barbarus.
This *b-rabidus is a Lewis Carroll style portmanteau on the model of slithy, from
slimy plus lithe (as Carroll tells us himself in the Annotated Alice): it is thus a case of
cart before the horse. Even a putative Gothic blaggwus (*?) and Welsh brau were
seriously considered in the difficult days before Diez, in whose etymological dictionary
* For their helpful advice and information, their friendly criticism and encouragement, I am
indebted to Raimo Anttila, Jose Luis Aria, Dwight Solinger, Ranko Bugarski, Henry Collins, Emily
Ellison, Eric Hamp, Henry Kahane, Saul Levin, Yakov Malkiel, Alo Raun, Don Seigel, Edward
Stankiewicz, Antonio Tovar, and Paolo Valesio. Responsibility, however, for the positions taken here
is of course solely my own.
136 J. PETER MÄHER
(1887) these early etymologies are registered. Diez tells us that Jakob Grimm toyed
with Slavic prav 'just' (after discussions, I presume, with Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic,
from whom Grimm learned Serbo-Croatian). Within the Latin lexicon even -fru-,
of defrutum 'mulled new wine' was considered. — The likeliest etyma are Latin
barbarus and prauus.
Taurus barbarus or taurus prauus 1 There are problems with both etymologies. Körting
(1891) and Meyer-Lübke (1935, henceforth ML), as we have seen preferred bravo a
barbaro, while Diez and MP opted for bravo aprauo. Only the latter do I find salvage-
able. Let us consider both in detail.
Bravo a barbaro: This etymology exacts a high price on both the phonological and
the syntactic-semantic scales. In terms of segments, especially when conceived of as
bundles of features, the phonological cost is massive, in metathesizing and haplo-
logizing from barbarus to *brabarus to *brabus. The asterisks also cost a lot. MP (loc.
cit.) has also pointed out the excessive syntactic price of this etymology: in the earliest
records bravo shows up abundantly in syntagmata collocated with words for animals,
while Latin barbarus does not. Acceptance of the etymology bravo a barbaro is
gratuitous then unless the disparity in the selectional rules of barbarus and bravo is
accounted for.
Bravo a prauo: Regarding the syntactic question ML falsifies history, no matter how
unwittingly, when he asserts that, regarding prauus, "...nirgends liegt der Sinn des
Ungezähmten vor...". This is at once a semantic and a syntactic question, and the
best approach to the semantic study of a lexical item is in representative syntax. ML
has been too trusting of received lexicography regarding prauus. That tradition, I
contend, is dead wrong. This is one cause of the failure to come up with an explanation
of bravo. (The other lies in widespread notions on the theoretical relation of syntax
to semantics, which I deal with below.)
In re-opening the question of the meaning of Latin prauus, let us consider the word in
contexts, first in classical (and later) loci, then in the context of Latin morphology
and semantic fields. To start with, take the famous passage in Horace, Satires 2.7.71,
after reviewing the background of the piece. ·— Taking advantage of the licence of the
Saturnalia, a slave tells his master that he, the master, is more a slave to whims and
status considerations, than the slave is to the master. The contradictions are played
off one after another: though he claims to yearn for the good old days, he would
decline to return to them if some god should magically appear and offer to take him
back; in the city, he yearns for the country, and vice versa; professing to glad for a
quiet evening at home, he jumps at the late invitation of Maecenas. The slave, with
no fear of loss of status, can step out for an uninhibited evening of kinky sex, with
the lights on, with his favorite whore; but his honor has to slink out in nondescript
disguises for a tryst with another gentleman's wife. The "master" risks whipping and
THE SITUATIONAL MOTIVATION OF SYNTAX 137
death if the lady's husband finds them out. In fact, the lady's slave girl once has to
hide the worthy in a chest, where he squats, head between his knees, to avoid
discovery. — This brings us to our first locus:
"Euasti! credo, metues doctus- 'So you got away! I suppose you've been taught
que cauebis./quaeres, quando a lesson and you'll watch out now. But no,
iterum paueas iterumque perire you'll go looking for another chance to risk
possis. Ï totiens seruus! the same terror, and even your life. Ï you
quae belua ruptisjcum semel slave a dozen times over! Not even a dumb
effugit, reddit se praua catenisT' animal, a wild one, goes back to a trap it has once
escaped from!'
Here we have a substantive (belua) 'wild animal' and an adjective (praua) sharing a
semantic feature: praua is to belua just as bravo to toro, or as black to night. Belua
praua is a 'wild animal still untamed, unbroken'. There is a syntactic parallelism here
of 'wild animal + escaped + untrained, unbroken' with 'gentleman + escaped +
chastened (doctus)': the philandering gentleman, but not the wild animal living by
instinct and needing no lessons, will return to the bait. Semantically there is an
antithesis of doctus and praua.1
The conventional translation for praua here is the same as the one warranted for
adverbial praue (i.e. 'perversely') and human subjects and for adjectival prauus with
nouns like animus, mens, ratio, opinio, which are equivalent to verbs with human
subjects. But adjectival prauus in concord with head nouns specifying animals is to be
translated 'unbroken, fierce, untamed'; with human nouns, prauus means 'cruel,
mean'. Latin authors are full of such loci, against which my theory can be tested.
Meyer-Liibke trusted his authorities too much.2
There is further evidence against ML's contention that prauus "nowhere means
'untamed'": Latin authors distinguish between prauus 'wild, untamed (of animals)'/
'cruel (of humans)' and the derivative deprauatus, participle of deprauare 'brutalize,
deprave'. The two terms serve to express, without the ambiguity of the English, the
difference between 'animal' behavior (= the behavior of animals) and 'animal'
behavior (= the behavior of debased humans); cf. bete/bestial, Tier/tierisch, br te/
brutal. Cicero (de Finibus 2.33) writes: "bestiarum uero nullum iudicium puto. Quamuis
enim deprauatae non sint, prauae tarnen esse possunt" — º do not consider animals to
possess any moral judgment. Although they can never be debased (deprauatae), they
can still be dangerous (prauae)'.3
Prauus in the context of Latin morphology, lexicon and cultural heritage. Going
1
There is also rhyme in the syllables of cauebis and catenis, assonance in the consonants.
2
Students who think that all the problems have been solved or are unsolvable are both, obviously,
quite wrong.
3
Bestia is 'animal', belua specifically 'wild animal'; thus one can choose between a substantive or an
adjective (praua) to make the specification.
138 J. PETER MÄHER
from exegesis of immediate textual citations to the place of this word in Latin
morphology and derivation, as well as in the synonymy and antonymy of the language,
it stands out clearly that prauus in the time perspective of Latin language and culture
is embedded deep in a stratum of words that relate to horse-raising. In Cicero the
opposite of deprauare 'to spoil (an animal, a person), deprave (a person)', is corrigere
'to train, set straight, correct'. Dirigere is 'to direct, steer, ride, guide' (with equum,
currum). In the same semantic field are frangere 'to break' and domare 'to tame', as
well as the simplex that underlies corrigere, dirigere, and (the antonym of prauus)
rectus: this is the verb regere 'to reach out, stretch, control, guide (animals, vehicles)
etc.' Note the metaphors here: frangere, domare, regere nationes 'to break, tame, rule
nations'; and in (Quintilian): "frangascitiusquam corrigas, quaeinprauum induruerunt"
— in effect, 'if you try to break him rather than bend him, you'll only turn him into
a rogue (prauus!)'.* The underlying cultural context here is unmistakably horse-
raising: all the cited terms, frangere, domare, regere, dirigere, corrigere, collocate
naturally with equum 'horse' to express 'breaking, taming, riding, directing, training'.
Rectus, domitus stand opposed to prauus, as 'tame' to 'wild, untamed'; the rest of the
familiar meanings are basically metaphors. Finally, to show just how wrong ML was
here, cf. Cicero's beluam regere 'to hold a wild animal in check': in Horace we have
already seen the companion piece to this: cf. again belua...praua 'a wild animal, still
wild, untamed': beluam regere = belua recta / beluapraua.5
These loci, I will assume, disprove ML's unfortunately authoritative pronouncement
on the syntax and semantics of prauus. If anything, we have seen, "der Sinn des
Ungezähmten" is historically the fundamental meaning of this word. And it is, I
contend, a meaning that has endured without substantial change to the present day,
especially in Ibero-Romance. Let us now see if prauus in references to humans is as
much like bravo as it is in reference to animals.
The similarity is shocking, after the assurances of our authorities that bravo has an
unclear etymology. Cf. (Seneca): "Cn. Piso fuit uir a mult is uitiis integer, sed prauus,
et cui placebat pro constantia rigor" — 'Gnaeus Piso was a man untouched by many
faults, but a cruel man, and one who preferred harshness to steadiness'. Cf. also
Horace, Satires 1.4.79: "Laedere gaudes...et hoc studio prauus fads" — 'You like
to inflict pain... you're mean, and you really work at it!' Substantival praui are
'cruel men', improbi homines 'evil people'; Tacitus calls impulsores 'instigators'
"praui". In Sallust we read: "prauus et callidus bonos et modestos anteibat" — 'the
wicked and crafty man got ahead of good and honest people'. The transition from
prauus/praui here to medieval Latin bravarii 'assassins' and even more to Italian
4
"In prauum" is conventionally misparsed as an adverbial syntagma with the neuter substantive
'evil' rather than the masculine ([+ animate]) prauus in this passage.
5
Latin rex (< *reg-s), just as the Celtic and Germanic cognates, plainly reflects the 'leader' ex-
pression of a horseriding aristocracy (no less than equites), quite as the match pecu/pecunia reflects a
pastoral economy.
bravi 'body-guards, toughs, assassins' in the service of north Italian feudal lords
(fifteenth century) is straightforward.
We could not get a closer correspondence between prauus and bravo than in
"prauissimus homo" (Velleius) and the Pompeiian inscription "HOMO PRAVES-
SIMVS ET BELLVS", which says of the referent that he is 'a real tough guy and a
lady-killer'.6 Onto this we can easily map the substantival Spanish bravo 'guapo,
valenton'.
I will assume that the syntactic-semantic plausibility of the etymology bravo apravo
is established. The "price" of this is in fact a bonus, not an expenditure. An important
area of Latin lexicon is seen under a new light. The phonological crux however
remains.
Latin V-pr- Spanish br. An exceptionless sound law expresses the diachronic
correspondence between capra 'goat' and Spanish cabra 'idem': intervocalic Latin
pr becomes Spanish br. This change affects not only word-clusters, but also works on
-V + pr-, i.e. where '-V is a vowel-final morpheme and ' + ' is a morpheme boundary:
MP (p. 324f.) shows examples of this from documents of the early eleventh century:
cf. probria (for classical propria) and mea brobria (for classical mea propria).7 It is
obvious that in close sandhi, just as with word-medial consonants between vowels,
voiceless stops and clusters with voiceless stops undergo voicing. Latin morphology
and syntax easily precipitate this phonetic environment; consider the examples seen
above: the very frequent deprauare and its perfect participle deprauatus and nominali-
zation deprauatio. Cf. also homo prauus and the demonstrative-plus-substantive that
underlies Romance NP's with article-plus-noun: e.g. ille prauus, illi praui etc. To
object to the phonological argument here is tantamount to denying the fact that etic
variants get lexicalized.
Conclusions so far. Upon a review of the Latin lexicography sub verbo prauus, the
view of Diez and MP that this, not barbarus, is the source of Spanish bravo has
everything to recommend it. What appears to be a crux in the phonology is resolved
â
In the inscription homo is clearly used as uir 'man', where earlier it had been 'person'. The destruc-
tion of Pompeii, A.D. 79, is thus a terminus ad quern for the competition in which, eventually, uir
disappeared.
7
Such scribal practice, contrary to the sketchy and uninformed remarks in Chomsky & Halle
(1968: 49), hugs the phonetic surface. Aside from purely orthographic questions, cases like French
hors Outside', from the syntagmatic *deforis, show how etic variants can be lexicalized. Cf. also
Romontsch part 'part', vart 'side', the latter reflecting Latin - V + part- (Rom. da vart, da mia vart
etc.). Cf. also such a case as Latin cum 'with' being reflected in Spanish as con, but also in the bound
form -go, which occurs in conmigo and contigo: the latter of course reflects postposed cum in Latin
mecum, tecum 'with me, with thee', with a later pleonastic con tossed in. Examples, are especially rife
when the syntax makes heavy use of given variants: cf. English of (where the laxed vowel and the
voiced / reflect, respectively, atonic, prepositional use and intervocalic position). Parallel is the set
through/thorough.
A particularly compelling example of lexicalization of a syntactically motivated etic variant is
Veronese bra, reflecting (to cite only the dictionary entry form) Latin pratum 'meadow'. The phonetic
environment K+ prat- is to be sought in locative and ablative syntagmata like in illo prato or de
prato; cf. meadow < OE on meadwe (locative), vs. mead.
140 J. PETER MÄHER
by resort to perfectly regular developments: but this means that to describe and
explain phonological developments correctly and fully, the investigator has to deal
with the relevant syntax and morphology, not just with words in isolation.8 There is
no longer any obstacle on the Latin side of the watershed to the etymology bravo a
prauo. On the Ibero-Romance side, and in the conservative forms of the Italian
material, there is simple continuity of the Latin system. Let us now consider the
evidence in Romance for a relationship of bravo with prauus, in addition to the self-
evident facts that have emerged from a re-assessment of the Latin material.
Diez spied a tell-gap in the derivational morphology of Romance, a gap that can
only be explained if we assume the etymological connection of prauus and bravo.
Given the pattern of nominalizations derived from underlying adjectives, in -edadj
-ita, Diez noted that the adjective bravo lacks an expectable *bravedad/*bravita and
that pravedadj-ita have no underlying *pravo.9 This relationship is identical to e.g.
ojojOcular, occhio/oculare, oeil/oculaire, and eyejocular: the derived form is no deriv-
ative of the semantically corresponding base word, but of a Latin word (a 'tatsama',
to adopt a helpful term from Indie philology). In sorting out the derivational mor-
phology of a grammar, such complementarity is a sure sign of etymological relation-
ship. — At the same time, if phonological rules relating such mates had a shred of
psychological validity, everyone would automatically have known the etymology of
bravo. — In sum, bravo: pravedad = cobra: capricorno.
The relationship of bravo in Ibero-Romance and Italian in the light of current theory.
There isn't much light, so we must attempt a theory of our own, after looking into
mainstream ideas, as well as opposition views in the earlier literature.
Chomskyan linguistics is in vintage, if not in historical inspiration, Cartesian or
Newtonian. The object of study, be it the Universe or Language, is conceived of as a
mechanism, and those who see it this way think they are theorizing on a dynamic
reality. And their mechanism must operate without outside interference, as an auto-
maton. But this is dynamic as clockwork is dynamic; it is really a static mechanism.
Such a machine changes only by tinkering as a teen-ager tinkers with his hotrod, by
stripping down and adding on. Language as it really functions changes as objects in
8
MP thus comes off as a stronger methodologist and theoretician than those Neograrnmarians
whose work inspired the Praguian term of opprobrium 'atomistic' or the devastating 'Lautschieber'.
Here is Jespersen (1922: 86f.) on phonology not founded in syntax (and syntax not based on speech
reflecting cultural situations): "...sound laws were discovered, and those found were more and more
rigorously applied, with the result that etymological investigation was attended with a degree of
exactness of which former generations had no idea. But... isolated vowels and consonants were
compared, isolated flexional forms and isolated words were treated more and more in detail and
explained by other isolated forms and words... The speaking individual and the speaking community
were too much lost sight of." This is as damning of 1968-vintage Generative phonology as it is of
Neogrammarian Lautschieberei.
9
He was thus a transformationalist ante litteram.
nature do, not as machines in workshops. It is time for linguistics to move ahead with
Darwin and Mendel into the nineteenth century.
The mechanist position. "It is clear", as Katz and Fodor have emphasized, "that
the meaning of a sentence is based on the meaning of the elementary parts and the
manner of their combination. It is also clear that the manner of combination provided
by the surface (immediate constituent) structure is in general almost totally irrelevant
to semantic interpretation."10 Context-sensitive polysemy is strong refutation of this:
if one gives money to a child and says "go get a loaf of bread" the effective meaning
differs from the same instructions given to a thief; get, in syntax, with e.g. watchdog
or bodyguard would mean 'attack, wound', even 'kill'. The burden of proof is on
anyone who argues that these are in some way exceptional cases. I will assume they
are normal examples of language. Chomsky's statement is an assertion that the only
interesting or semantically functional operations are such processes as negation,
interrogation, or embedding. Which happens to be that part of language that interests
mathematicizing, or 'numerate', linguists. But equating one's interests with what is
supposed to be legitimate to be interested in is gratuitous at least; beyond that it is
either sloppy or megalomaniac. Humanistic, or 'literate', linguists find that their
interest in such areas as lexis is ignored at best, stifled at worst, by the Chomskyan
equation. Until now they have had to work outside the establishment pale. But now
this exclusive distribution emerges as complementarity, not contradiction, to apply
an insight of Jose Luis Arria (private communication): the processes that the Chom-
skyans have found interesting fall under the "statement" markers of Fillmore's case-
grammar (the "modality" constituent of the 1968 model), while problems of the sort
dealt with in this paper fall under "sentence" markers, i.e. they deal with lexical
elements that are collocated in the case roles of sentences.
The opposition. Michel Breal (1900), Hermann Paul (1920/1968:322f.), and Otto
Jespersen (1917 and 1922:388) all opposed the Euclidean thesis that the meaning
of lexical items is unaffected by their place in surface structure. They all argued that
it is the rule, not the exception, for lexical items to receive their full "semantic in-
vestiture"11 only when collocated in syntagmata.
Jespersen, most impressively in his 150-page article on negation in various languages
(1917), argues this, too. If lexical items in negative predicates regularly take on
semantic features that they do not exhibit elsewhere, the principle is established. If
possible in negative syntax, it is in principle conceivable elsewhere too.
But even with them this was no new idea. Breal (1900:150f.) writes: "Old fashioned
philologists, who had noticed a certain number of facts of this kind, invented an
10
Careful reading here will turn up three repeated hedgings (Chomsky 1965: 161).
11
For this inspired phrase I am indebted to Henry E. Collins, who suggested it to me in conversation
in 1968. The principle of feature-leakage along the syntagmatic axis works not only in the syntax
of free forms, but also of bound ones. Cf. variability of meaning in the "agentive" suffix -er in e.g.
egg-beater, ditch-digger, Londoner, outsider etc.; cf. also the variable -ier ofpommier, bananier, poirier,
but laitier, portier etc.
142 J. PETER MÄHER
original denomination in order to describe them. When the verb absorbed into itself
the signification of its complement they said it was 'pregnant'."
In his rich discussion Breal uses the terms "irradiation" and "contagion". Jespersen
(1922:388) speaking of this leakage from base to suffix, calls it "tainting".
This process, a regular leakage of features across the syntagmatic axis, has brought
about surprising semantic shifts in the history of lexical items. But such shifts could
not take place if the principle were not operative all the time in the syntax of a natural
language and at any given moment in time. The formal apparatus for Generativist
restatement of the principle is available in Chomsky (1965:175f.). Yet Chomsky
failed to see the relevance of the notational device to semantics, considering it only
in regard to phonology and morphology. Hamp (1970, for example) has seen more
clearly, in my opinion, than anyone else on the scene today the sameness of feature-
and-rule operations in semantics with those in phonology and morphology. And I
follow his example below in attempting to apply the Greek letter convention to the
phenomenon of semantic concord.
Another principle that operates in concert with the above-discussed feature leakage
is the deletion of one of the terms of a syntagma, with retention however of its semantic
reading. This further complicates semantic theory in a non-trivial probabilistic way.
Thus e.g. the compound flesh-meat was not simply replaced by meat. Rather the
development was like this:
flesh-meat -> 0-meat
'flesh' 'food' 'flesh-food'
Breal calls this "condensation".'2
For another example of the semantic investiture of lexical items in syntax, which is
motivated by the context of situation, followed by "condensation" consider English
static^ (the adjective, antonym of dynamic) and the homophonous static2 (the sub-
stantive, technically 'interference with radio signals' for those who learned the word
in the 1920's, '30's, or early '40's; just Opposition, interference' for younger speakers).
From all our information we know that the adjective is the older form, but the
meaning of the substantive cannot be predicted from that of the adjective. Speakers
with richer vocabularies (and concomitant technical knowledge) can paraphrase the
noun as static electricity. Such speakers might also know that this term was motivated
by the fact that this refers to a charge of electrons standing ('static', not flowing) on a
12
Some well-known examples: Latin locus desertum 'abandoned place' > desertum 'desert'; iecur
ficatum 'liver (of pigs fattened on) figs' > It. fegato/Fr. foie; Fr. a la mode X > ala X. Some are less
noticed: E. (auto salesmen's) air < air conditioning ("factory air" — 'air conditioning installed at the
factory' (vs. "Hang-on units" — 'air conditioning units installed — hung on — after purchase of a
car')), (military men's) air < air support; (fishermen's) browns, speckleds, rainbows (sc. trout), (ranchers')
golds, balds < golden eagles, bald eagles, (housewives') Idahoes < Idaho potatoes, (smokers') Havanas
< Havana cigars, NB: a difference in English between NP's from condensation vis-ä-vis purely
nominalized adjectives: cf. the Danish drink Tuborg, but the baker didn't send any Danishes (which I
heard a waitress using).
surface. They certainly know that static electricity interferes with reception of all but
ultrashort radio waves.13 I assume that speakers with less technical competence would
have to write the adjective and the noun off as separate, but homophonous, lexical
items, if indeed they ever learned the adjective. Radio-tinkerers of recent decades,
we can see, "condensed" the syntagma into a noun, the old adjective taking the
nominal features of the deleted substantive, including its morphology, its mass
feature, and its reference. Given all that, speakers used the term as the input to a
metaphor, one that has already faded for many speakers.
A couple brief examples illustrate the point further. Cf. reference to auto shock
absorbers in mechanics' speech: they are shocks. Or cf. sailors' word for shroud lines:
shrouds. (Parachutists have borrowed this from sailors' speech, too.) The generative
process behind such examples is ceaseless; the examples abound in everyday speech,
but because too few linguists appreciate this I will multiply examples.
Locutions, like Spanish embarazada, encinta, French enceinte, Italian incinta, for
'pregnant' are clear cases of the effects of collocation. Their morphology shows that
these terms, etymologically meaning 'encumbered' and 'beltless' referred to women;
their semantic reading is possible only in a syntagma with a word for 'woman'. (In
Latin, though, there must have been a delightful pun available when an obese man
happened to go beltless.) Such collocations are motivated by the context of situation:
a woman 'in a delicate condition' is 'hindered' in her movements, wears beltless
dresses. Euphemistic expressions advert to these, and not the gross anatomical
symptoms.
English topless has come into use in the last few years as a synonym of 'bare-
breasted'. This reading is only possible in syntax with go-go girl, waitress, etc. and
has been around only since such syntax came into use. We still have topless trees
('crownless') and topless beer bottles ('unsealed, open').
Consider the polysemous noun heavy: he always plays heavies; a flight of heavies
droned over the city. Obviously these are explainable as nominalizations of proto-
phrases heavy role and heavy bomber, with deletion of the respective head nouns.
Heavy in the former sense is quite usual as a noun pure and simple, albeit para-
phrasable by theatre buffs as heavy role. (See the next paragraph for a radically
different lexicalization of heavy.) The other sentence has a decidedly World War II
feel. The same era gives another example of "Condensation" that shows all kinds of
syntactic elements could play the game: for the duration (sc. of the war).
In the past couple of years "hip" whites have borrowed from black English the
use of heavy meaning 'good' or 'impressive'. Cf. a heavy chick 'a good looking girl',
a heavy scene 'an exciting moment, event'. The latter phrase, along with heavy role,
is the syntactic matrix in which (et sine qua non) the lexical item heavy absorbs this
meaning 'good'. As we see in relativization and elsewhere, the input to many syntactic
13
Even the condensed radio term has dropped out to a degree because of the appearance of
FM(UKW) after World War II,
144 J. PETER M HER
processes is not only, say, a noun, but also a sentence. Thus phrases like heavy role
and heavy scene can be embedded in a prediction " is good". For actors and
spectators heavy roles and heavy scenes are gratifying. It goes like this: a heavy scene
is a 'good' scene; heavy = 'good'.
Such examples do not trivially show that syntax CAN precipitate change in the
semantic reading of lexical items or that seemingly capricious leakage of semantic
features across the syntagmatic axis CAN take place. The whole point is, rather, that
lexical items normally receive their full complement of semantic features only in syntax.
An attempt to fashion a theory capable of explaining the historical relation of
Ibero-Romance and Italian bravo.
The lesson, to start with, of colorless green ideas was held for some dozen years to
prove the autonomy of syntax from semantics. The facts are now just the opposite:
the deviance of that famous phrase, as opposed to the well-formedness e.g. of, pitch
black night, snow white complexion, raven tresses, or toro bravo, lies in its violation of
the constraint according to which syntagmata must be filled out by semantically
concordant, or compatible, or redundant, lexical items. In toro bravo, the adjective
replicates not only the number and gender, but also a salient semantic feature (SSF)
of toro 'bull'. Diagrammatically, after Chomsky (1965:175), this state is:
Noun
á 'fierce'"! á +SSF: 'fierce'
Adjective â mas. / â +mas.
ã sing. J ã +sing.
Toro bravo is thus out of the same grammar as sharp knife, black night, sore afflicted, etc.
The holistic sentence patterns of Babcock and Fillmore present the same kind of
compatibility-redundancy of the concatenated elements. But as much an improvement
as it is over autonomous syntax, case-grammar is still static mechanism; though
necessary to explain historical change in language, it is still not sufficient because
generative grammar, Lexicalist or whatever, wants to see meanings mapped onto
phonetic realizations. Langendoen e.g. has suggested that we consider writing a
computer program to appreciate the process. All well and good, but computer read-
outs have further effects. They are used in other realms than computer programming
and even there the output of one process can well be input to a subsequent process.
We may as well consider grammar like Henry Ford's Model-T production line: this
gets bolted on to that until a Tin Lizzy rolls off the line. Then what ? The epiphenomenal
side of the automobile, its proliferation is all too well known. And after a while the
"program" is altered, given experience with earlier outputs.
In linguistic theory we must get back to the study of language in its natural settings
to avoid colorless green ideas, and we must investigate the epiphenomena, not just the
phenomena, of real syntagmata in settings.
The situational motivation of syntax (again) and the syntactic motivation of the
epiphenomenal polysemy of bravo 'fierce' and 'good'. There is a point in language
and culture from which the differentiation of Italian bravo from the conservative type
persisting in Iberia can be explained. At his national spectacle, the corrida de toros,
the Spaniard shouts his approval of a good bull, which must be a fierce bull: "/que
bravo!". The Italian too, at his national spectacle, the opera, shouts approval of a
great singer, not of a bull. The same elements, the crowd, the spectacle, the enthusiastic
shouts, are there in both settings; all elements that is but the bull in the Italian
spectacle. Hispanic culture is the conservative one here, Italian the innovating.
Spaniards shout their "/bravo!" at bullfights, and bullfights antedate opera. Over in
Italy, although opera has supplanted the old animal-baiting, the linguistic component
of the roles played at the public spectacle has not changed: the opera enthusiast's
bravo! is thus a fossil, and the cry bravo! must thus be taken as a loan word from an
earlier etat de langue', and also the derivative bravura with it. This nominalization,
exported along with the whole institution of the opera itself, can only be derived
from the opera lover's shout of approval and not from other uses of bravo.
From the conservative Hispanic culture and language we can see that 'good' is
only the meaning by extension of a term that by intention means 'fierce'. Sachwandel
explains how the Italian bravo has lost its old intentional meaning while retaining only
the old extensional meaning. This is one aspect of Darwinian history: selection of
some given variants, loss of others.
Italian bravo and morphological derivatives. Iberian bravo remains fundamentally
like the Latin prauus, an adjective 'fierce, wild, cruel' opposed to a substantive (Latin
belua 'wild animal', Spanish toro 'bull').14 But the Italian congeners manifest both
semantically conservative and semantically innovative forms. There is an extreme
range of polysemy, from bravo ragazzo 'good boy' to substantival bravo 'assassin'.
Una brava ragazza is 'a good girl', while una notte brava is 'a wild night'. The paradox
is so great that in the Italian press those unceasing reports of "notti brave", nights of
street-fighting, rioting, vandalism always find this set phrase encased in quotation
marks, typographic rubber gloves. Our purpose here is to explain the historical origin
of this polysemy of opposites, after briefly looking into the "old" and the "new"
bravo.
The "old" bravo. Italian bravo 'assassin' maps in a straightforward way onto Latin
(substantival) prauus 'evil man, cruel man'. The nominalization bravata lacks, in
modern Italian, a proper underlying verb; but Old It. bravare 'to brave, dare' is the
clear antecedent here. This verb in turn requires an underlying brav- with two
conceivable senses: either something like *bravo 'dare-devil', whence *bravare 'be a
bravo'; or else bravo 'wild, angry', whence bravare 'to make some person, animal angry,
wild'. Cognates of the Old Italian bravare settle the question in behalf of the latter
14
Cf. the expressions: ser un toro = ser bravo — 'to be a bull' = 'to be ill-tempered, easily angered'
and serfiero (farioso) como un toro — 'to be as mean, cruel, merciless (irascible, violent) as a bull'.
146 J. PETER MÄHER
choice: Spanish abravar is 'to enrage'; Italian dialects have abbravar 'to turn (the
cows)' (Jaberg & Jud 1928ff:VI.1188.658) and bravare 'to yell at (the cows to keep
them from damaging trees)' (op.cit.VI. 1188.771), cf also braveggiare (cavalli) 'mettere
in brief. From the rural context or setting, metaphor leads directly to the urbanized
senses of bravaccio 'swaggerer' (also bravazzone) registered in the dictionaries. — In
conclusion, the "old" stratum of bravo-v/ords in Italian, as in Ibero-Romance, is
largely a continuance of the Latin heritage of prauus and derivatives.
The "New" bravo in Italian. In recent times the Italian bravo 'good' has been
exported to France, and from there to the German-speaking world, together with
opera and a good deal of the models and theory and terminology of music in general
and the visual arts etc. etc. At home in Italy the "new" bravo did not simply replace
the "old", but coexists with it in a bewildering relation. That is, the relation is
bewildering to anyone who ever thinks of it; but speakers do not often bother with
the problem, a nontrivial principle for any grammatical theory that claims to be
interested in language.
It is of the highest interest that since the emergence of the "new" bravo in Italy the
Church has lost the word buono, or rather buona, to the hedonist ethic: una buona
ragazza is 'a good girl' — in bed. 15
The polysemy of the Italian material can be easily understood if we assume that
the new bravo springs from the old by the same process as gives us the semantic
reading 'good' e.g. in English wild (parties, women's hats, lovers: tame ones disappoint)
in the 1950's slang crazy was coined in an era when popular music was frenetic; other,
but commensurable, situation and syntax can also motivate this sense: pimps praise
actively participating girls as crazy. German toll, English mad, and presumably the
corresponding words in any language, permit of this development. But the principle
that generates these most numerous cases needs to be explained.
What we have here is an epiphenomenon. A generative grammar that simply maps
deep structures or meanings onto phonetic representations and does not recognize
epiphenomenal meaning is inadequate to explaining the commonplace language
phenomenon we see here. A purely phenomenal approach can explain how the syn-
tagma toro bravo is generated (see below) by a semantic concord rule (salient feature
copying). Things do not stop with the output toro bravo, however. A syntagma con-
15
The same distinction is expressed in Spanish with resort to the 'permanent/temporary' contrast
of ser/estar: la muchacha es buena 'the girl is (the Judeo-Christian) good', vs. esta buena 'she's a good
lay'. Because of the lack in English of a univalent expression for each of these kinds of 'good',
English speakers enjoy a pun, as the sex-symbol Mae West demonstrated in her parody of a Mother
Goose rhyme, the original of which goes: "There was a little girl/ who had a little curl/ right in the
middle of her forehead./ And when she was good, she was very, very good./ But when she was bad,
she was horrid." Miss West's redaction: "when I'm good, I'm very very good, but when I'm bad
I'm better". The non-trivial principle here for language theory and psychological theory, pace the
theologians, seems to be that the effective meaning of 'good' is relative to the collocate of the word
for 'good'. Dwight Bolinger's (personal communication) summation is: "we like our ice cream cold,
our enchiladas hot, our children virtuous, and our women sluttish."
sisting of semantically concordant lexical items is subsequently inserted into a pred-

ication: " + be + good". Early in life every normal human knows that a sharp
knife is a good knife, while a sharp spoon or toy is bad, and a sharp sphere is a con-
tradiction. (Even Cheshire cats know it.) In certain syntactic settings the lexical item
sharp gets an added semantic reading 'good', which it lacks in other collocations. The
(1940's ff.) slang term sharp can only be understood if we assume such a genesis. The
re-lexicalized sharp 'good' in such locutions as "he wore sharp clothes, velvet is real
sharp, he drives a sharp car and has sharp girl friends". A pun offers itself when the
pleasing object actually, physically has points: "that's a sharp dagger" or "she wears
a sharp sweater".16
The theory sketched so far suffices to explain the material of Spanish, Portuguese,
Catalan, and Provengal. It remains to propose a formal theory for the intuitive
argument that bravo 'good' is a relexicalization of the older bravo 'fierce', on the lines
of such locutions for 'good' as crazy, wild, toll, etc. A typology of etymologies was
elaborated by Hamp and aphorized by Kahane at this meeting: "there are two kinds
of etymologies: new ones and old ones". True to this scale, I offer an old one. Not
only do I attempt here to shore up the foundation of the Diez-MP etymology "bravo
a prauo", I also offer an old, but very modern theoretical explanation for the particular
development.
Although seemingly a Euclidean for insisting on the rarity of syntactic motivation
in regular semantic change, Edgar Sturtevant (1917:94) nevertheless understood the
relevant phenomenon perfectly, and without benefit of formal notation he set it forth
clearly in discursive terms: "Everybody is familiar with the attempt to make ideas
clearer or more striking by expressing them twice. In such pleonastic phrases one
word is shorn of a part of its meaning." In the phrase fight with, he is saying, there is a
concept paraphrasable as Opposition' (a complex, or bundle, of features including
'concomitance' and 'hostility') expressed redundantly (= pleonastically) in both
words. "But in the phrase fight with the idea of Opposition' was fully expressed in the
verb, and there was nothing left to the preposition but 'accompaniment'. 17
A diagram might permit a clearer appreciation of epiphenomenal semantic change,
let us call it "redundant feature erasure", worked on the semantic readings of two
collocated words:
16
An analogous pun is apparently always possible, playing on the old and new senses of the given
phonological word: "that's a heavy book!" The same is, mutatis mutandis, the case with re-lexicalized
cool, hot, crazy, all meaning 'good' in addition to the traditional reading.
17
"The new meaning," he adds, "has now supplanted the old meaning, except in the compounds
withstand, withdraw, withold." Besides him, cf. also Breal, who calls this erasure "deterioration" and
"discoloration" (1900: 103), his examples include sehr leidend 'suffering sore' > 'very sick'. Cf. also
G. Stern (1931: 380: 420) quoting Stöcklein on "adequation".
148 J. PETER MÄHER
feohtan wid => fight with

verb prep'n verb prep n
action action
'hostile' 'hostile' 'hostile' 0
('accompaniment') 'accompaniment'
('Hostile' redundantly involves 'accompaniment', or 'copresence'.) The same circum-

stances were precipitated in the syntax of OE wio-metan 'measure against (put against
to measure)' => 'measure with', wid-sacan 'strive against, resist' => 'struggle with'.
The erasure of the feature labelled 'hostile' here had the result of turning wiö into a
preposition with purely sociative value. It went back into the dictionary with the
reduced meaning, where it — embarrassingly to simplistic versions of synchrony —
co-exists with the "old" with, as Sturtevant noted.18
So Sturtevant, Stöcklein, Breal et al., anticipated our generation in explaining
semantic change with rules and features. The formalism is now there as a convenient
format to tell us what was intuitively known and discursively portrayed long ago.
Not only for the bull, but also the torero, the spectators, and their language, the
bullfight produces a moment of truth: the rule-produced redundancy of the phrase
tor bravo results in epiphenomenal polysemy: a 'fierce bull' is a 'good' bull; ergo
'fierce' is 'good'. Both meanings, phenomenal and epiphenomenal, are still there in
Spanish. In Catalan and Provencal the predictable noun toro is deleted, while the
synonymous adjective stays on, now given the reference to the 'bull' as a trace feature
of the deleted collocate. In Italy, through displacement of the bullfight, only the
epiphenomenal meaning 'good' could be mapped onto the relevant context of
situation. All in all, the etymology of Italian bravo 'good' from prauus 'fierce' is a
perfectly regular, infinitely paralleled development, albeit one that theories or schools
have failed to come to grips with.
Summation: The Spanish phrase toro bravo 'fierce (=good) bull' has now been
explained by the principle that well-formedness of syntagmata (in declarative sentences
with truth value) requires collocation of lexical items that replicate a feature of each
other; in other words, lexical items in a well-formed syntagma manifest taugologous
18
Besides the parallels already mentioned, the famous case of the negativized particles of French
and other languages is also the result of "redundant feature erasure", following semantic feature
copying. II ne va pas 'he doesn't go' reflects Latin ille non vadit passum 'he doesn't go a step', where
possum 'step' is a content-object (= semantic copy in nominal surface form of the same notion as
underlies the verb of going). II n'ecrit point, reflecting ille non scribit punctum in exact parallel reflects
first a salient feature copying, then a trace-feature 'negative', followed by erasure of the notion 'write'.
Mutatis mutandis cf. OF mie, Italian mica, Romontsch buc(a); the latter involves a negativized
syntagma 'eat' + 'mouthful': (Plautus') non inveni buccampanis... — Bolinger (private communica-
tion) relates that his daughter coined pitch-red; what traditionally was an old "salient feature copying"
comparison (black as pitch) was parsed, epiphenomenally, as 'intensifier + color'. As a boy I thought
erstwhile, as in "his erstwhile friend" simply meant 'false, disloyal'.
features. To paraphrase still further, well-formed syntagmata are generated by juxta-

posing to a given lexical item another that semantically copies a salient feature of the
first. Such "salient feature copying" is also exemplified by: coal black (= substantive/
'black' + adjective/'black'), pitch black, jet black, snow white; qualifying syntagmata
like rose red, sea green, lemon yellow differ somewhat, though they still reflect under-
lying comparisons.
A. The situational motivation of the syntax: the syntagma 'fierce bull' is motivated
by perceptions involved in the cultural context of situation, the bullfight.
B. The syntactic motivation of polysemy and semantic change:
(1) The collocation of reflexes of taurus and prauus consists of lexical items that
share a semantic feature 'wild, fierce' in a kind of semantic concord commensurate
with morphological and phonological concord: I propose this be called "salient
feature copying".
(2) Since cultural contexts of situation are re-enacted again and again, the syn-
tagmata that map onto these situations are extremely frequent; this frequency is
produced not only during the re-creation of the culture pattern, but also in announcing
them, relating them, re-evoking them, and in alluding metaphorically to them.
"Toro bravo" is hence a very frequent output of the syntax.19
(3) What is predictable is deletable, without loss of information. Ellipsis of
redundant words is thus commonplace and results in no loss of their information
value. When diachronically or synchronically the ellipsis of a predictable or suppliable
lexical item takes place the result is, to use Breal's apt term, "condensation".
(4) When ellipsis of a lexical item in commonplace syntagmata (with retention of
the various features of meaning brought to the syntagma by that item) occurs, I
propose we designate features that survive the ellipsis of their proper surface expres-
sion "trace features".20 The reference e.g. to 'bull' in Catalan brau < taurus prauus
is such a trace feature.
(5) The same proto-phrase, taurus prauus, required to explain the Catalan-
Provengal brau, serves also to explain the epiphenomenal sense of approval in Ibero-
Romance bravo in collocation with toro, as well as the synonymy of bravo and toro
as complements of ser (see note 14, above): Kolbe (1929:16) captures perfectly the
19
Chomskyans err seriously when they stress novelty or uniqueness as the correlate of creation in
grammar. (It is ironic that this doctrine is so oft-repeated.) Syntactic outputs can be novel, but they
needn't be, and in fact they seldom are. No matter how little creation of brand-new, unprecedented
sentences there is, there would still be creation (Erzeugnis) in Humbolt's sense. Syntactic creation
typically involves re-creating what may have been said numberless times before. But each time the
speech act is a new (act of) creation. Speaking a language in its traditional aspect is thus like practicing
cults or customs.
20
For the felicitous terminology "trace feature" I am indebted to Emily Ellison. Such features can
be phonological (e.g. Romontsch part/vart, French hors, English of/off, and our bravo from V-pr-),
morphological (e.g. It. abita nella vicina [sc. cittä] Portofino, Span, el [sc. rio] Magdalena), as well as
semantic. (My thanks to Ruth Busse for the last example.) Cf. note 12, et alibi in the text above for
further examples.
150 J. PETER MÄHER
"mean is good" paradox: "Der Spanier liebt und zugleich fürchtet seinen Stier:
'Ique torol Ique fuerte! Ique bravo esT". This "(ad)-equation" of'fierce' and 'good'
is the genesis of the 'new' bravo in Italian: un toro bravo e toro ottimo; bravo = ottimo
in the "epi-syntax", but only in such syntax, where bravo 'fierce' is collocated with a
semantically concordant noun that names an animal, which in the nature of things is
fierce.
(6) With Sachwandel, here the displacement of the bullfight by the opera, the
traditional syntax continues to be mapped onto a public spectacle and the epiphe-
nomenal meaning 'good' persists. But there is nothing in the cultural context of
situation against which the etymological meaning 'fierce' can be mapped; the etymo-
logical meaning is erased, and the fossil bravo now admits of collocation with any
noun etc. whether or not it names a 'fierce' animal. The relations in Italian are now
the reverse of those in Ibero-Romance: un bravo toro is 'a good bull' and, since bulls
are supposed to be fierce, bravo in such syntax (toro bravo) becomes in epi-syntax a
synonym offiero.21
NE Illinois University.
REFERENCES
Breal, M.
1900 Semantics: Studies in the Science of Meaning, tr. N. Cust, with a preface and appendix by
J. P. Postgate (republished 1964 with an Introduction by J. Whatmough. New York:
Dover Books).
Chomsky, N. A.
1964 Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (The Hague: Mouton & Co.).
1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge., Mass.: MIT Press).
Chomsky, . ., and M. Halle
1968 The Sound Pattern of English (New York: Harper & Row).
Corominas, J.
1954-1957 Diccionario critico-etimologica de la lengua castellanna (Madrid: Editorial Gredos).
Diez, F.
1887 Etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Sprachen, 4th ed.
Hamp, E. P.
1970 "Morpho-syntax as Proof in Etymology", Papers from the Sixth Annual Regional Meeting
of the Chicago Linguistic Society (Chicago).
Jaberg, K., & J. Jud
1928ff. Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz (Zofingen).
Jespersen, O.
1917 "On Negation in English and Other Languages", Historisk-Filologiske Meddeleser 1,5
(Reprinted 1968 in Selected Writings of Otto Jespersen [Tokyo]).
1922 Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin (London: Macmillan) (Republished 1964,
New York: W. W. Norton & Co.).
21
Recognition of epiphenomenal-episyntactic polysemy goes back to classical rhetoric, where it
was dubbed "amphibolia" (subsequently also "amphibology"). Etymologically the term seems to
be a metaphor from net-fishing: the phonetic surface, like a cast of the net (glossed in Latin as
coniectura) covers and retrieves rather different "fish".
Kolbe, W.
1929 Studie über den Einfluß der "corridas de toros" auf die spanische Umgangssprache (Hamburg:
Universität Hamburg).
Körting, G.
1891 Lateinisch-Romanisches Wörterbuch (Paderborn: Schöningh).
Menendez Pidal, R.
1956 Origenes del espanol: estado lingüistico de la peninsula iberica hasta el siglo xi, 4th ed.
(Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, S. a.).
Meyer-Lübke, W.
1935 Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg).
Paul, H.
1920 Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, 4th ed. (Republished 1968: Tübingen: Max Niemeyer
Verlag).
Stern, G.
1931 Meaning and Change of Meaning (Republished 1962: Bloomington: Indiana University
Press).
Sturtevant, E.
1917 Linguistic Change (Republished 1962: Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).
CARLOS OTERO
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CLITICS IN

HISPANO-ROMANCE*
Questions about the development or the grammar of the pronominal unstressed

forms often referred to as clitic pronouns were raised by the very first students of the
Romance languages. The two founding fathers of Spanish grammar, Vicente Salvä
(1780-1849) and Andres Bello (1781-1865), already considered this matter "one of the
most difficult and complicated in the Spanish language", as Bello puts it (cf. Salva
1830, Appendix; Bello 1847, ch. 33). But although Salva's and Bello's treatments are
still among the fullest to be found anywhere, both are entirely traditional, as is the
earlier treatment given by Soares Barbosa (1737-1816) for Portuguese (Scares
Barbosa 1822). It was, we are told, a man of a later generation, Friedrich Diez (1794-
1874), who was "the first to devote himself seriously to the problem, in [the third
volume of] his Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen" (Ramsden 1963:1), published
in Bonn in 1844, three years before Bello's grammar was published in Santiago de
Chile, but fourteen years after Salvä's grammar appeared in Valencia, Spain, and
almost a quarter of a century after that of Soares Barbosa was printed in Lisbon. A
perhaps decisive contribution came in a series of articles published between 1875 and
1889 by Adolf Tobler (1835-1910). "He observed that atonic pronouns never stood in
initial position in Old French and that if the group of verb and pronoun object began
a sentence the pronoun always followed the verb and was enclitic. Other Romance
scholars seized upon this observation and developed it. Between 1882 and 1893
Völcker examined Tobler's findings in French, Pape applied them to Provencal
[1883], Tiktin to Rumanian [1885], Mussafia to Italian [1886], and Gessner to
Spanish [1893]" (Ramsden, 4). But it wasn't until the work of Rudolf Thurneysen
(1857-1940) and Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke (1861-1936) that it became fairly clear that
the so-called 'Wackernagel's law of enclisis' could neatly account for the intricate
facts of clitic pronoun collocation in early Romance.
In his 1892 study of verb position in Old French, "Thurneysen observed that in
* I have profited from the many discussions about Spanish clitics I had with Judith Strozer since
1970, and from the more recent ones with Joseph Emonds, who in addition brought several recent
papers and very relevant observations to my attention. I am greatly indebted to both of them. I'm
also indebted to Linda Tweed for her invaluable help during the hectic preparation of this paper.
154 CARLOS OTERO
general the verb was not placed immediately after a conjunction that in Latin bore
little stress, but that it almost always came directly after a stressed element" (Ramsden,
6; cf. Menendez Pidal 1908, par. 205, esp. pp. 412-414). This observation led him to
conclude that the position of the verb "was governed by the same influences that
Wackernagel established for verb position in Germanic, namely, that as the verb lost
its accent it came to be placed, together with other atonic elements, immediately
after the first stressed element of the sentence. Consequently, the juxtaposition of the
verb (become enclitic) and the pronoun (already enclitic) was originally fortuitous
and only later became generalized, and the atonic pronoun continued not to stand in
initial position in the earliest Romance texts" (Ramsden, 12). This can of course be
true of the auxiliary verb only.
In 1897, writing in the same journal, Meyer-Liibke noted that in Old Portuguese,
which remained unstudied at the time, unstressed pronouns usually occupied the
second position in main clauses, unless they were preceded by a stressed word (cf.
Meyer-Liibke 1897:315). This led him to conclude that the pronouns were enclitic
and that they joined with a preceding word, if there was one. A theory of enclisis
(strongly suggested by the spellings, he observed) would account for clitic pronoun
collocation and for some otherwise puzzling phonetic forms and would help to under-
stand the somewhat strange intercalations typical of the westernmost Romance
languages long after intercalations were no longer found outside the Hispanic Penin-
sula. With, I believe, great insight he went on to suggest that Old Portuguese revealed
an earlier stage through which all the Romance languages (or rather a single 'Ur-
romanische') have passed.
Although this theory was contested by several scholars, most notably by E. Lerch
in 1934 and 1940, and by H. Ramsden a decade ago (Ramsden 1963: 17-24), I believe
that most of these scholars' criticisms miss the mark or are beside the point. So it was
with no small amount of deep satisfaction that I discovered, somewhat a posteriori,
that Meyer-Liibke had anticipated my work in important respects. His theory seems
to me correct in its essentials. In fact, a not inaccurate way of characterizing the ideas
I'm about to present is to say that they aim at completing, sharpening, and making
a little more explicit those of "il maggiore teorizzatore della linguistica romanza",
if Carlo Tagliavini is correct (1949, par. 6) — and there is no doubt in my mind that
in general Meyer-Lubke's work is still superior to and far more suggestive than a good
number of things published afterwards, up to and including our own day.
In this unfortunately sketchy presentation I'll proceed as follows: the first section
will be concerned mainly with extracting from the phonological evidence as many
useful clues as possible about the evolution of Romance syntax; the second section
will deal with the syntactic analyses suggested by the oldest and the contemporary
forms of two quite different Hispano-Romance languages, namely, Galegan and
Castilian; finally, in a concluding section I'll comment briefly on some possible
implications the paper's findings might have for the study of language in general.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CLITICS IN HISPANO-ROMANCE 155
I. PHONOLOGY
It seems fairly certain that the clitic pronoun developed in a structure which in its
simplest form could be represented as in (la) below, and there is no doubt that the
clitic article developed in a pre-noun position. What is not immediately obvious, but
seems to be strongly suggested by the phonological evidence and the earliest written
records, is that the clitic articles developed much later than the clitic pronouns. I'm
going to argue that the clitic pronoun developed at a stage which can be characterized
as SOV (i.e. subject-object-verb), with the verb in final position in the base (as is
generally assumed for Latin), and that the clitic articles developed at a later, properly
Romance stage, which can be characterized as SVO, with the verb in medial position
in the base (as is generally assumed for the Romance languages).
On the other hand, the NP structure of the subject pronoun might be supposed to
have been similar to that of the object pronoun; however, the subject pronoun never
developed into a clitic either in Galego-Portuguese or in Castilian. To this day, the
subject pronouns continue to be stressed in Hispano-Romance.
In order to facilitate the understanding of this presentation, I give in (1) the
simplest representation of these three structures together with a derivation of the
subject pronoun ilia down to, say, the XIII century, both for Galego-Portuguese and
for Castilian (the numbers of the processes refer to those listed in the appendix to
Otero 1971):
(1) a. Object pronoun
VP
NP
\
/ \
DET N
ittu 0
b. Article
VP
V
/\NP
/\
DET N
Ä
I
illu
I
Ä
156 CARLOS OTERO
c. Subject pronoun
5
NP VP
DET
ille
a. Derivation for stressed ilia

Galego-Portuguese Castilian
Proto-Romance ilia lila
Lowering (P 15) ella ella
Degemination and palatalization (P54) ela e'la
Spelling ELA ELLA
Consider now tentative derivations for the Galegan direct object pronoun in isolation
(2) and for the string indirect-direct (3). In order to increase the perspicuity of the
derivations, the first or Latin Stage (a) is set apart from the second or Romance
Stage (b). Two phases can be distinguished in each stage, although the fourth or
Proclisis Phase has never been reached by Galegan (as against Castilian, French or
Italian):
(2) a. State I (SOV)
A. Stressed form
Gloss: '[I] said it'
Proto-Romance Ulu dtkls
Spirantization (PI2) dixsi
Lowering (PI 5) ello
B. Unstressed form
Proclisis ellodixsi
Apheresis lodixsi
b. Stage II (SVO)
'[I] didn't say it' non lodixsi

C. Enclitic form
Enclisis nonlo dixsi
Assimilation nbnno
Vocalization (P33) diisi
Palatalization (P47) diSi
Lowering (P50) dlSe
Degemination (P54) nono
n-Suffixation disen
Spelling NON-O DIXEN
(3) a. Stage I (SOV)

A. Stressed forms
Gloss: '[I] said it to him/her'
Proto-Romance UK illu diksi
Spirantization (PI2) dixsi
Lowering (PI 5) elli ello
B. Unstressed forms
Proclisis elliellodixsi
Glide-formation elliellodixsi
Apheresis liellodixsi
Palatalization (PI7) lellodixsi
Reanalysis ~le-lodixsi
b. Stage II (SVO)
'[I] didn't say it to him/her' nön 'lelodixsi
C. Enclitic forms
Enclisis nonlelo dixsi
Vocalization (P33) diisi
Palatalization (P47) disi
Lowering (P50) diSe
1-Deletion nonle-o
Synalepha nonTo
n-Suffixation disen
Spelling NONLL'O DIXEN
It seems natural to postulate that ello and elliello were proclitic at the time apheresis
took place but enclitic at the time of assimilation. * The persistence of these spoken
1
The n-Suffixation rule is highly significant for the question of the paradigmatic relations. It
emerges phonologically in the reflexes of venire, and then 'spreads' to the first person singular of the
preterit of both 'marked' conjugations (those with thematic vowels e and /).
For earlier treatments of the questions related to (2)-(6), see Menendez Pidal (1908), pars. 60-61,
73, 109-17, 128-34; (1941), pars. 93-94, and (1950), 330-43; Hanssen (1913), par. 171; Williams, pars.
139-43; Lausberg, II, ch. 171 (among others). Cf. Badia (1945).
158 CARLOS OTERO
forms down to our own day leaves no doubt about the Enclisis Phase in Galego-
Portuguese. That the same is true for Castilian seems to be evident in fossil forms such
as hay, helo aqui, etc., and from the written record (cf. Menendez Pidal 1908); even the
Galegan par collela finds its counterpart in Garcilaso's par cogella and in similar
expressions among the so-called Golden Age writers, perhaps the most typical being
sostenello y no enmendallo. As Cuervo pointed out in 1895 (p. 226), these assimilated
forms still have some sort of existence today in many areas, especially in Andalusia,
as in this popular song:
Como Sevilla tiene

Fuertes murallas,
No pueden mis suspiros
Atravesallas.
On the other hand, derivation (3), besides hinting at why the order of those two
clitics in the present day languages is the one it is, also provides some evidence that
this order was fixed at the SOV stage, if Maling's Universal is right. According to this
principle, "the Direct Object occurs closer to the verb than the Indirect Object (in
the unmarked or dominant order). In a language with dominant order SOV, the
Indirect Obj. precedes the Dir. Obj.; in a language with dominant order SVO or
VSO, the Indirect Obj. follows the Dir. Obj." Maling observes further that "the
traditional terminology (direct vs indirect) may be thought to reflect this principle"
(Maling 1970:139-140).2 Note that the principle seems to account for the positional
symmetry shown by the indirect and direct third person objects at the left and the
right of the verb, respectively. Schematically:
-NP -NP +NP +NP
+PRO +PRO +PRO +PRO

-DIR +DIR - V — +DIR -DIR
1 1
Consider next a tentative derivation for the masculine article in Castilian (4), set
against that of the third person masculine subject pronoun (5):
2
It should be pointed out that this passage doesn't appear in the revised version of the paper
(Maling 1972).
(4) a. Stage I (SOV)
A. Stressed form
Gloss 'that elbow'
Proto-Romance lllu kubitu
Lowering (PI 5) ello kobeto
b. Stage II (SVO)
B. Unstressed form
Proclisis ellokobeto
Lenition (P27) ellogobedo elloskobedos (PL)
Reanalysis ellokobedo
Spirantization (P30) ellokovedo
Syncope (P45) ellokovdo
Syncope ellkovdo
Simplification elkovdo
Apheresis loskovdos (PL)
Vocalization (P56) elkoudo
Monophthongization (P49) elkodo
Spelling EL CODO
(5) Gloss 'he sings'

Proto-Romance ille kanta
Lowering (PI 5) eile
Syncope ell kanta
Simplification el kanta
Palatalization (P54)
Spelling EL CANTA
If the derivations are close to correct, the Syncope which brings about the article el,
reminiscent of the well known second Syncope (P45), seems to have preceded Aphe-
resis, otherwise the form cannot be explained phonologically (cf. Fr. le, Pg. o). On
the other hand, the fact that masculine words such as goto, gabinete (cf. cabina),
bagre (if Corominas' suggestion is correct), etc. seem to have undergone initial
lenition just as gamuza, garza, grasa, grieta, gruia, etc. did, would indicate that their
initial consonant was still preceded by the final vowel of the masculine article.3
Furthermore, if it is the case th at before a noun beginning with a vowel, say, emperador,
the spelling ell was pronounced [Ú] (cf. Menendez Pidal 1908, 232, 1167), this would
3
Otherwise the environment for Lenition would not have been met. See Lausberg, I, pars. 574-82,
and Hall (1964) (cf. Di Pietro 1966); see also Dauzat (1949) and Lapesa (1961: 30-1). I'm assuming
that P56 (at least in part) preceded P49, as the derivation of codo in (4) and that of semana seem to
indicate (cf. Otero 1971: 70).
160 CARLOS OTERO
mean that the shortening of the singular form of the masculine article took place in
time for P54 to apply, as in, say, ella.
But even if the emergence of the short forms of the article occurred fairly late, say,
about a millenium ago, the article in its full form (ella, etc.) preceded it by centuries.
The most recent study of this topic reaches the conclusion that the non-deictic use of
the forms of ille has to antedate the Vulgate, i.e. A.D. 390, since examples of the non-
deictic use are found in all versions of the Latin Bible (Abel 1970: 206). Here again
phonological evidence might turn out to be of help. Observe that although Galego-
Portuguese, Spanish, and apparently Provencal have [k] in both, say, aquella and
que, in French we find cells as against que, and in Italian quella as against ehe (besides
do). This seems to indicate that the Italian quella is just the feminine counterpart of
quello, and that quello derives from the agglutination of ecco ello, but that the glide
in quello was formed after the deletion of the glide in que and in similar Proto-
Romance words.4 For French, on the other hand, we have to postulate the agglutina-
tion of ecce ello (cf. Abel, 207), since the deletion of the glide in words like que,
quattre, etc. could not have taken place before Affrication (P21). Finally, for Hispano-
Romance (and perhaps for Provencal as well) we have to assume that the formation
of the glide in the forms reinforced by ecco was completed before Glide Deletion
(P22). A fuller picture of the emergence of the new Hispano-Romance demonstrative
determiner that assumes the deictic meaning of the earlier ille-forms is sketched in (6):
(6) Gloss 'that hawthorne there' 'four'

Proto-Romance ekku illu spinu kuattor
Prothesis (P14) ispinu
Lowering (PI5) ekko ello espino
Affrication (P21)
Agglutination ekkoello
Glide Formation ekkuello
Glide Deletion (P22) ekkello kattor
Degemination (P28) ekello kator
Dissimilation and metathesis akello katro
Syncope akell espino
Reanalysis akel
Spelling AQUEL ESPINO CATRO
(Castilian) (Galegan)
Derivation (6) suggests that by the time of Glide Deletion (P22), the simple ille-forms
were already articles, and that their former deictic meaning had been taken over by
the reinforced forms, that is, by the ancestors of quello, aquel, eel, and the like, even
4
I'm assuming that P20 preceded P22 (as in the appendix to Otero 1971), since I know of no cogent
reason to assume the opposite ordering.
if the deictic system of the time had only the two degrees that French has today
(cf. Abel, 205).
II. SYNTAX
I will not say much about the first or SOV stage (but see Emonds 1972 on the
abstractness of word order). It seems reasonable to assume that the base rules for
Latin included a Verb Phrase rule which can be stated in part as in (7). It also seems
reasonable to assume that at the time the pronominal clitics developed the trans-
formational component of Latin included a rule which made the pronouns 'syntactic
dependents' of the Verb (in the sense of Bresnan 197la), Chomsky-adjoining them
to V to yield a structure such as (8):
+Í
(7) VP - » . . . - / Ã +ÍÑ 1 \ - / Ã +ÍÑ É \ - V
(ÃºÃ(ß º)
U-DIR]/ U+DiRj/
(8)
Ã+PROI
L-DIRj
It should be kept in mind that two very early rules (P6 and PI5 in Otero 1971)
practically wipe out the case distinctions between subject and oblique forms and
between the oblique forms themselves, but not in the case of elli and ello. It seems
reasonable, then, to assume that after the time of PI5, position relative to the verb
was often the only surface indication of functional grammatical relations. It also
seems plausible to assume that Bolinger's 'principle of linear modification' might
have interacted with other pressures in the change from a basic SOV order to SVO,
but a thorough consideration of Bolinger's important studies on word order and
intonation would in itself require a whole paper (see also Kahane & Kahane 1950
and Kiefer 1967).
It seems evident from the record and from a study of the present day languages
that the reflexes of the Latin string UR illu still appeared in this order before the Verb
in the second or SVO stage, although presumably the counterpart to (7) was (9):
(9) FP-> ... - V -

(ÃºÃ(Ãº)
U+DIRj/ VL-DIRj/
162 CARLOS OTERO
Also to be noted is that after the Reanalysis which is part of (3), the forms of the
pronominal clitics are no longer derivable from the full forms of the pronouns by
strictly phonological rules. These observations suggest that from the very beginning
the SVO Verb-Phrase rule included a new node (which I'll designate as PRON) for
pronominal clitics before the Verb, this new node being further analysed in part as
in (10). On the evidence from present day Galegan we could further assume that the
system of base rules in the first or Enclisis Phase of the SVO stage (cf. Hanssen 1912,
1913) included those in (11), which are essentially the ones found in Emonds (1970)
for contemporary Spanish:
(10) + HI
PRON
-DIR + DIR
PRON = preverbal object PRONoun
III = third person
DIR = DIRect object
(11) (SVO Stage, Enclisis Phase)
VP -» (PRON) - V -
PRON
RFL = ReFLexive
Consider now that, as Meyer-Liibke pointed out in 1897 for written Old Portuguese
and Menendez Pidal shortly thereafter for written Old Castilian (1908, 403), present
day Galegan doesn't allow a VP with a pronominal clitic in absolute initial position
or after unstressed coordinate conjunctions such as e 'and', mats 'but', as in (12).
(Cf. Carballo Calero, 234-242; Dunn, 261-279.) Assuming that, even if the sentences
appear after a period in writing, the structure of sentences such as (12c) is (13), we
can account for the post-verbal position of the clitic in the root sentence by means of
root transformation (14), which in effect states that PRON cannot be the first element
of the highest VP of a root sentence. This rule ensures that the clitic will never go out
of the VP structure, thus exemplifying the tendency towards the preservation of the
phrasal structure (but see note 5). After Tl applies, we can account for the enclisis
of all pronominal clitics in (12) with the cyclic transformation (15). Note that only
after T2 applies do we have a clitic.5
(12) a. (e) non-me dixo qu'os vira

'(and) he/she didn't tell me that he/she had seen them'
b. (e) dixo-me qifos vira
'(and) he/she told me that he/she had seen them'
c. (e) o vecino dixo-me qu'os vira
'(and) the neighbor told me that he had seen them'
(13)
vecino me dixo quos vira
(14) ºé-.PRONINVERSION (last cyclic)

s [# + (NP) - PRON - y - X]
1 2 3 4 ^ 1-3-2-4
(15) T2: ENCLISIS (cyclic)

W - PRON - Õ
1 2 3 => 1 + 2 - 3
where W is a single formative
5
There are present day speech forms such as
(a) iconocel-o crego? 'do you know the priest?'
The assimilation of the initial / of the earlier form of the article seems to leave no doubt about the
enclisis, although it is strange to see the article as a "dependent" of V. Cases like todol-os omes 'all
the men', eu mail-as outros (i.e. mats + los) º and the others' (Bobby Chamberlain has timely reminded
me of this example) are to be expected.
164 CARLOS OTERO
This seems to have been more or less the general situation for most Romance languages
down to the Xlth century, perhaps until the Xllth century in Castilian. What we find
today, however, is something quite different. Although a special case of Tl still seems
to prevail even outside Galego-Portuguese, T2 (Enclisis) is only found now in (roughly)
the non-Brazilian varieties of the westernmost Romance dialects such as Galegan and
northern Peninsular Portuguese. Williams (1962, 148) has suggested that this general
state of enclisis, that is, leftward adjunction in these dialects, was "the result of a
stronger stress accent" (on stress in Latin, see Allen 1965). What leaves little room for
doubt is that the general intonation pattern of today's Galegan is what first strikes
the Castilian ear as being totally alien, even if it rides on the cognates of a sister
dialect (the Basque intonation is much less shocking, strange as it might sound to the
uninitiated). This is not surprising. The comparative experimental phonetic studies
carried out by Pierre Delattre led him to conclude that the substantially rising
intonation of Spanish (and French) is in sharp contrast with the predominantly falling
intonation of American English (1966: 91, 80). That enclisis is not alien to English
has been made abundantly clear in Bresnan's paper on contraction, but it had been
observed long before that, in English, direct object pronouns without contrastive
stress cannot be separated from their verb by an indirect object or a postverbal
particle (*bring out it, *bring John them).6
For the purpose of this essentially programmatic paper, it is not necessary to
investigate the possible relation between enclisis or proclisis, as the case may be,
and intonation pattern. That no general rule like T2 is part of the present day grammar
of Castilian can safely be taken as an indisputable fact. Nor is it entirely accidental
that down to our own day Castilian and several other Romance languages have
preserved an analogue to Tl restricted to imperatives (on the French clitics, see
Kayne 1969, 1971). Imperatives are usually more heavily stressed than other verb
forms. It is apparently this which is behind the formation of the Romance future and
the so-called 'conditional'. As Menendez Pidal notes in his study of the Cantar de
Mio Cid (1908, 344), the future was used at the time of the Cid (and also in Latin)
as an imperative: iredes, odredes i azredes 'you'll go, hear and carry out'. It is natural,
then, to find edes forming one word with ir, and even more so in a command. For a
time it was natural even to place clitics after the infinitive, as in azer-los-edes (instead
of azredes-los, now los hareis), a construction which is found as a fossil in literary
texts (a known repository for linguistic archaisms) as late as the XVIIth century
(cf. Menendez Pidal 1908, 1178, 411; cf. Valesio 1968, 1969).7
6
In a book published in 1928, J. Melander, reinterpreting Meyer-Lübke, states: 'C'est dans les
combinaisons monosyllabe + pron. regime + verbe que la proclise a pris naissance, et c'est par les
phrases de ce type qu'elle a peu ä peu gagne les autres combinaisons, ou selon moi 1'enclise devait
persister. Et je tombe d'accord avec M. Rydberg qu'il faut chercher la cause du changement dans
l'affaiblissement de l'accentuation de ces mots monosyllabiques" (Ramsden 1963: 120).
7
It should be noted that the intercalations between pronoun and verb as in si los non acorria
(Ramsden, IV, esp. 142 and 149) that incited Meyer-Lubke's curiosity three quarters of a century
ago and have astonished many others since then are, in my view, a related but not quite grammatical
If T2 is not a part of the contemporary grammar of Castilian it is logical to ask

what took its place. It has generally been assumed (Perlmutter 1970, Emonds 1970,
Strozer 1970) that the distribution of the clitics is in some way dependent on tense or
lack of it. I am not convinced. For one thing, the pronouns never appear enclitic on a
past participle in the spoken language, as the following paradigms show (the ex-
clamation mark indicates acceptance as a 'literary' or somewhat 'fancy' specimen):
(16) a. Pepe lo ha saludado

b. ! \Pepe halo saludado
c. *Pepe ha saludadolo
(17) a. *Pepe dice lo haber saludado

b. Pepe dice haber lo saludado
c. *Pepe dice haber saludadolo
(18) a. Pepe lo esta hacienda

b. ! IPepe estalo hacienda
c. Pepe esta haciendolo
(19) a. *Pepe dice lo estar hacienda

b. \Pepe dice estarlo hacienda
c. Pepe dice estar haciendolo
(20) a. vi asesinarlos º saw them killed'

b. los vi asesinar º saw them kill'
c. los vi asesinarlos º saw them kill them'
Only in paradigm (18) are there two fully acceptable sentences. Example (18a) is the
only case in (16)-(20) where the clitic is not with its own verb. This seems even more
suspicious (cf. Strozer 1970, IV) in view of (20). A comparison of (18) with (19)
suggests that at least (18c) is a fully grammatical sentence. Observe also that the rule
which moves the clitic up before a higher verb in (18a) has to somehow 'know' that
it cannot apply to (20a) and similar sentences because vi (but not estar) has the
feature [+ NP~\; moving the clitic up before vi would change the interpretation
of the sentence to that of (20b). To investigate this question any further would take
us too far afield. In what follows I will not try to account for sentences such as (18a),
so for the purposes of the present discussion paradigms (16)-(19) can be reduced to
(21X22):
matter. As is well known, examples of intercalation are not rare today in Galegan or Portuguese
speech. Ronald Harmon is inclined to think (personal communication) that it appears more often
in utterances such as ...que SEnon cree... '...that PRO doesn't believe...' than in those with a possible
ordinary subject. (Cf. Bresnan's discussion (1971a) of the insertion of parentheticals in English.)
166 CARLOS OTERO
(21) a. Pepe lo ha saludado

b. Pepe dice haberlo saludado
(22) a. Pepe esta haciendolo
b. Pepe dice estar haciendolo
The interesting asymmetry the clitics show with the past participle and the nonpast
participle (the ndo-form) is now clearly brought out. Since both participles are
nontensed (nonfinite) verb forms, it seems that we have to look elsewhere for an
explanation. A close examination of (21)-(22) suggests to me that the answer might lie
in the way we analyze (22a). In brief, is estar part of the Auxiliary in the sense of
Syntactic Structures or is it the Main Verb? Without attempting to give here a full
analysis of these constructions, I'll simply call your attention to paradigm (23) and
assume that the structure of sentences (21)-(22) is as in (24)-(25). This suggests that
the A UXiliary rule I proposed in 1965 and again in my Spanish translation of Aspects
of the Theory of Syntax, although perhaps not as wrong as other versions of the
Spanish AUXüiary proposed quite recently, should be revised as in (26). Following
Emonds (1970), I'll also assume that the grammar of Spanish contains in addition
rules (27) and (28).
(23) a. *Pepe lo ha alii saludado
b. Pepe esta alii haciendolo
c. sentado haciendolo
(24) a. Pepe [lo ha saludado~\VP
b. Pepe dice {haberlo saludado~\VP
(25) a. Pepe esta {_haciendolo\VP
b. Pepe dice {estar haciendolo~\vf
+ PARTI
(26) AUX -> hoher -
, + PAST.
PART = PARTiciple
(27) VP -> V - VP
(28) PP -> P - S
PP = Prepositional Phrase
The VP rule we assumed in (11) for the Enclisis Phase of the SVO stage predicts that
the basic word order in (25) and in (29) is as in (30):
(29) a. Pepe vino para saludarlo
b. Pepe via a Luis saludarlo
c. Pepe censuro (acerbamente) a Luis par haberlo saludado
d. Pepe censuro (acerbamente) (al doblar la esquina) al individuo que lo
cruzo en la calle par haberlo saludado
(30) a. Pepe - esta - lo - hacienda

b. ... - para - lo - saludar
c. ... - par - lo - haber - saludado
This is, in fact, the surface order in (24a) and in most declarative sentences. Since
phrase structure rules are slow to change, it doesn't seem unreasonable to suppose
that the rules in (11) are still part of the grammar of Castilian. The likelihood of the
correctness of this hypothesis increases substantially if it is in fact true that we can
account for the post-positions in (20)-(22), (23)-(25), and (29), with a fairly un-
complicated cyclic transformation of CLITIC MOVEMENT which can be very
tentatively formulated as T3 in (31). Hopefully, a general condition on transformations
insuring that the rule applies to the minimal phrase of the type S, as Chomsky (1968,
ch. 2, fn. 23) has suggested, will readily select the third formulation (or something
along the same lines). This rule T3 is to be preceded by a fairly complex cyclic rule
of PRONOUN COPYING (which I leave unformulated) and by a simple cyclic rule
of rightward adjunction (PROCLISIS), and followed by a last cyclic transformation
(IMPERATIVE CLITIC MOVEMENT). Note that the ordering of PROCLISIS
with respect to T3 (as against that of (14) and (15)) seems to correlate with the fact
that we still have enclitic elements in the Proclisis Phase. In addition to Tl, T2, T3,
and T4, a PRONOUN DELETION rule is needed to delete the nonemphatic pronom-
inal NPs at the right of the verb. I give tentative formulations of these rules, in the
order suggested, in (31). As in (9) above, I assume that the Indirect Object is an NP
(as in Strozer 1971; see also Isenberg, 38-40), which, if correct, would simply mean
that in this respect the VP rule in (11) has not changed since the time when the rule
partially stated in (7) came into effect, that is to say, it hasn't changed in a very long
time.
(31) (SVO Stage, Proclisis Phase)

Grammar of present day Castilian (fragment)
T t : PRONOUN COPYING (cyclic)
T2: PROCLISIS (cyclic)
X - PRON - V - Z
1 2 3 4 => 1 - 2 + 3 - 4
T3: CLITIC MOVEMENT (cyclic)
X+V+(ADV)* + (NP) + (P) -\CL-V- Z]VP
1 2 3 4 => 1 - 3 + 2 - 4
Alternatively,
X + K + Y - W - [CL - V - Z]KP
1 2 3 4 5 => 1 - 2 - 4 + 3 - 5
where 2 + 3+4+5 ^ 5
168 CARLOS OTERO
But preferably,
S [X+F+Y -\CL-V- Z]YP]
l 2 3 4 => l - 3 + 2 - 4
T4: IMP-CL MOVEMENT (last cyclic)

V
s[# - CL
l 2
T5: PRONOUN DELETION (cyclic)
/ Ã + Í Ñ 1\
+PRO /[ +
X+F
- \L-EMFJ / - U-r
l 4 =» l - 0 - 0 - 4
III. IMPLICATIONS
Without wanting to read too much into the preceding observations, which as sketched
are highly speculative, I would nonetheless like to suggest that several points might
prove correct upon further investigation.
Since the organizers of this conference called specifically for papers on the evolution
of syntax, it will not be out of place to summarize here the potential import of the
development of the clitics. It is to be remembered that in chapter 6 of King (1969),
which begins with the remark that "syntax has always been something of a stepchild
in the family of historical linguistics", the only examples of syntactic change that are
presented have to do with very particular changes in the transformational rules and
in the lexical redundancy rules.
Against this perspective, this paper has offered for consideration a quite wide array
of grammatical changes. Thus (i) the change from Stage I to Stage II outlined above
seems to be a case of a different type, similar to that which took place in English in the
Medieval Period (cf. Berman 1970), involving a major change in the phrase-structure
rules, a change whereby an SOV language becomes SVO. I would claim that this is
directly correlated with the introduction of a PRON node under the VP (see (11))
which determines the surface order of the clitics, (ii) The several transformational
changes that result in the replacement of rules (14)-(15) by rules (31) illustrate pos-
sibilities which go beyond those studied beginning with the pioneering work of Klima.8
8
Other recent papers on diachronic syntax are Traugott (1969), Berman (1970), and Bever &
Langendoen (1971).
(iii) The crucial change that takes place in the determiner system goes well beyond the
redundancy rules, resulting in the development of a new category ARTICLE from an
earlier demonstrative. In addition, the emergence of the ARTicie correlates with
changes in the lexical component, since the feature composition of the new ART
(for, say, GENERICNESS and DEFINITENESS) can be assumed to be different
from that of the demonstrative from which it derives, (iv) Passing reference was made
to a significant change in the verb system, which resulted not only in a new set of
tenses (future or post-present and post-past, to use Hello's terminology), but also
in a major modification of the phrase-structure rules: the emergence of the new
A UXi\ia.ry rule (26) or something of this sort. And (v) in the phonological component
the changes that took place so eroded the original formatives that reanalysis was
necessary, so that thereafter the reflexes are no longer derivable by strictly phono-
logical rules. Perhaps the most striking phonological development is the persistence
of the assimilation that enclisis of the pronominal clitic brought about in Galego-
Portuguese, which still appears in several present day dialects a thousand years after
the clitic evolved from the stage Éï, Éá, etc. still characteristic of Castilian, to the stage
o, a, etc. characteristic of Galego-Portuguese. This, incidentally, poses an interesting
question: How are structures like the çïçÉÃï dixen of (3) to be derived in the synchronic
grammar of present day Galegan?
Finally, sketchy as they are, the data presented in this paper seem to have some
bearing on several controversial questions of the day. I'll consider briefly the question
of the surface constraint on clitics (Emonds vs. Perlmutter), the question of the so-
called pronouns (Delorme-Dougherty vs. Postal), and the question of the relation
between the syntactic and the phonological components (Bresnan and Maling vs.
a number of people of different persuasions).
Consider first the order of the clitics in surface structure. Perlmutter has written
(1970, 249) that 'what is striking about Spanish is the fact that the clitics are arranged
in surface structure by person, and grammatical function plays no role whatever in
determining their surface structure position'. It is true that the clitics are arranged by
person, but it also seems to be true that the relative position of the nonreflexive third
person clitics might be predicted by Maling's Universal, if it is correct. In any case,
(3) seems to make it abundantly clear that their relative order was apparently maintained
for at least two millenia. Furthermore, the historical evidence seems to lend support
to Emond's proposal (1970, V.l.4) that the clitic sequences subject to Perlmutter's
output constraint (85) are a constituent introduced by the phrase-structure rules.
To ensure, however, that only grammatical sentences are generated, I believe we
need in addition a "surface exclusion rule" (to use the terminology of Chomsky 1971)
such as (32):
(32) The structure [se + se + X + V — ...]VP,
where X can be a set of clitics, is excluded.
This 'filter', whose effect on strings would be "to facilitate perceptual strategies",
170 CARLOS OTERO
and in this sense might be "regarded as a point of contact between a performance

theory and a competence theory", is surely necessary to block sentences such as
(33c), even if we were to argue that sentences such as (34), a natural counterpart to
(35), were automatically excluded by the PRON rule of (11), which allows only one
ReFLexive. It is well known, however (Otero 1969, 1970), that Italian gets around the
phonological impasse by means of a substitution transformation (or so it seems)
with the effect of (36):
(33) a. se dijo \_que la paz y prosperidad nixoniana no duraria hasta 1984]Si
'PRO said that Nixon's peace and prosperity would not last until 1984'
b. se le dijo [que S']Si
'PRO told him that ..."
c. *se 'se' /£>; dijo
'PRO told it to him'
(34) *se se humilla
'PRO humiliates him/herself
(35) a. on s'humilie
b. man erniedrigt sich
(36) *si si umilia => ci si umilia
The contents of this paper seem to have some bearing also on the questions raised by
Postal's reanalysis of what he calls the so-called pronouns. This is not the moment
to attempt a more exhaustive commentary, nor do I think this to be very urgent after
Delorme and Dougherty's recent article. But since at the end of his paper Postal
states that his analysis is to him "even more obvious for languages like German and
Spanish", where the similarities between pronoun and article "are evidently no
accidents" (or at least not nonhistorical accidents), I would like to make a few
comments. I scarcely need to remind you that Postal is echoing Bello, who in turn
was echoing Destutt de Tracy's analysis of French (knowingly, since he has a footnote
on it). To quote Bello's own words (par. 273): "la estructura material de varies
nombres se abrevia en situaciones particulares: parece, pues, natural que miremos las
formas el, la, los, las, como abreviaciones de el, ella, ellos, ellas, y estas ultimas
como las formas primitivas del articulo. Sin embargo, a las formas abreviadas es a
las que se da con mäs propiedad el titulo de articulos." And he goes on to add in a
footnote, with a touch of self-righteousness and even dogmatism which sounds far
more strange in him than in some of our contemporaries: "Destutt de Tracy reconoce
la identidad del articulo le y el pronombre // en francos, Como es que en castellano,
donde salta a los ojos la de el y el, tienen algunos dificultad en aceptarla?" In spite
of my respect for Bello as a grammarian, as I believe the record shows, I for one am
not convinced that he is right on this point, though he does make the discovery of
this Mediterranean more than a century after 1847 not quite the novelty that it has
been proclaimed to be in some quarters.
The first thing that should be obvious to everyone is that the similarity appears in
Romance only in the third persons (cf. Postal, 215, 217). It is also unquestionable that
this is due to the historical fact or accident that both the forms of the article and the
forms of the clitic and nonclitic pronouns derive diachronically from the very same
forms of the Latin demonstrative ille, ilia, illud (cf. (2)-(6)), although it should be kept
in mind that the shortening of the articles seems to have taken place much later, at a
time when syntactic reanalysis meant that the pronominal clitics could no longer be
phonologically derived. What Postal is proposing, in fact, is that we accept the
structures sketched in (1) for contemporary Spanish also, even though the most
obvious basis for (1) are constructions such as (37), which are not admissible in
Spanish (38). Since there is no time to elaborate on this now, I'll just emphasize that
Postal himself states that it is 'fundamental' to his analysis that, 'in the plural, non-
third person elements can occur with both nonpronouns and/or restrictive relative
phrases'. As paradigms (39) and (40) show, this is not the case in Spanish (notice also
that the Spanish ARTICLE los must co-occur with the so-called 'articles' nosotros and
vosotros, originally nos and vox, as in Galegan today):
(37) a. ilia (mulier") cantat

b. |0 ]
'that woman sings/she sings'
c. mulier cantat
'a/the woman sings'
(38) a. aquella mujer canta

'that woman sings'
b. ella canta
'she sings'
c. la mujer canta
'the woman sings'
d. una mujer canta
'a woman sings'
(39) a. nosotros (los | norteamericanos somos may altruistas con los indochinos
j*0j
'we Americans are very altruistic with the Indochinese'
b. vosotros (los \ linguistas sois muy dados a lucharpor lajusticia, la libertad
j*01
y la decencia
'you linguists are very given to fighting for justice, freedom and decency'
(40) a. (nosotros) [ los | que vivimos

j*01
'we the living'
172 CARLOS OTERO
b. (vosotros) J los \ (que sois) criminates de guerra

1*0}
'you (who are) criminals of war'
With much regret I leave this topic without saying anything about Postal's (implied)
theory of segmentalization (cf. Delorme & Dougherty), although the questions it
raises are directly related to the ones I'll presently sketch.
I think it is fair to say that, in general, the tentative outlines presented in this paper
seem to lend additional force to Bresnan's and Maling's recent proposals concerning
the interaction of certain phonological and syntactic rules and concerning questions
of lexical insertion. Consider Bresnan's proposal that "word-stress is assigned in the
lexicon" or the "morphological component" (1970, ffnn. 11 and 12; 1971, ffnn. 8 and
10). This seems unavoidable in the case of the Galego-Portuguese and Spanish forms
where the clitic is attached at the end of a verb to form a single word with it. Any
stress assignment rule of some generality would assign the main word stress to the
wrong syllable if it were to operate after encliticization. If we now turn to the insertion
of the clitic forms, it becomes immediately obvious that it has to follow the PRON
COPYING cyclic transformation referred to while considering the rules in (31). This
in itself offers no insurmountable difficulty. But when we add other facts involving
verbal inflection and stress we might discover that Bresnan's reference to the "morpho-
logical component" has to be taken a little further. To explore this possibility would
require another paper, of course. I'll just mention that, if I'm not mistaken, a later
insertion of the phonological matrices leaves the level of deep structure as such
intact, though perhaps a little more abstract.
In closing I would like to suggest that the data we have considered argue in favor
of a long needed 'rapprochement' between the study of language and the study of
literature. It is well known (Sorrento 1950) that the enclisis of pronouns in cases
which the ordinary native speaker considers either highly affected and stilted or 'literary'
increased substantially during the Romantic period in every Romance country. It
became extremely common in some writers (a variety of enclisis not found in speech,
which in addition often goes beyond the cases allowed during the Phase I of the SVO
stage, pervades the writings of Leopardi and Carducci in Italy, Castelar in Spain —
to say nothing of Valle-Inclan —, and so on). If one remembers that the Romantics
were extremely fond of the 'popular purity' of the Origins' ("la letteratura popolare
delle origini"), this is not surprising. There is little doubt that sentences (16b) and
(18b) owe their survival to the impact of literature and oratory on everyday speech.
We will do well to keep in mind at all times that these speech phenomena and many
others, although quite interesting for a theory of performance and even for a theory
of language (especially for heuristic purposes) need not be taken as unchallengeable
paradigms of grammaticality in Chomsky's technical sense.
University of California, Los Angeles.

REFERENCES
Abel, Fritz
1970 L'adjectif demonstratifdans la langue de la Bible latine; etude sur la formation des systemes
diictiques et de article defini des langues romanes (= Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische
Philologie, 125) (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1971).
Allen, W. Sidney
1965 Vox Latino; a Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin (Cambridge: At the University
Press).
Badia Margarit, Antonio M.
1945 Los complements pronominalo-adverbiales derivados de IBI e INDE en la peninsula
Iberica (= RFE, Anejo 38) (Madrid: CSIC, 1947).
Bello, Andres
1847 Gramatica de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los Americanos, Vigesima ed.
(Paris: Roger & Chernovitz, 1921).
Herman, Arlene
1970 "Relative Clause Construction in Old and Middle English" (Report No. NSF-26, The
Computation Laboratory of Harvard University).
Sever, T. G., & D. T. Langendoen
1971 "A Dynamic Model of the Evolution of Language", Linguistic Inquiry 2, 433-63.
Bierwisch, Manfred, & K. E. Heidolph (eds.)
1970 Progress in Linguistics (The Hague: Mouton).
Bolinger, Dwight L.
1954a "English Prosodic Stress and Spanish Sentence Order", Hispania 37, 152-6.
1954b "Meaningful Word Order in Spanish", Boletin de Filologia (Chile) 8, 45-56.
1965 Forms of English; Accent, Morpheme, Order (Harvard University Press).
Bresnan, Joan W.
1970 "Sentence Stress and Syntactic Transformations", Lg. 47, 257-281.
1971a "Contraction and the Transformational Cycle in English", Mimeo (MIT).
1971b "Stress and Syntax: a Reply", Mimeo (MIT).
Carballo Calero, Rocardo.
1966 Gramatica elemental del gallego comun, 3. ed. (Vigor Galaxia, 1970).
Chomsky, Noam
1957 Syntactic Structures (= Janua Linguarum, 4) (The Hague: Mouton).
1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (MIT Press).
1968 Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.) (Enlarged ed., 1972).
1971 Conditions on Rules (The Hague: Mouton, 1972).
Cuervo, Rufino Jose
1895 "Los casos encliticos y procllticos del pronombre de tercera persona en castellano",
Romania 24, 95-113, 219-263. (Reprinted in his Obras Completas, vol. 2, 167-239, Bogota,
Institute Caro y Cuervo, 1954.)
Dauzat, Albert
1949 "L'article existait-il au V" siecle?", Word 5, 123-125.
Delattre, Pierre
1966 Studies in French and Comparative Phonetics (The Hague: Mouton).
Delorme, Evelyne, & R. C. Dougherty
1972 "Appositive NP Constructions", Foundations of Language 8, 2-29.
Di Pietro, Robert J.
1966 "Juncture and the Preservation of Voiceless Consonants in West Romance", Orbis 15,68-72.
Dunn, Joseph
1928 A grammar of the Portuguese language (Washington, D.C.: National Capital Press).
(Reprinted in 1970 by the Hispanic Society.)
Emonds, Joseph
1970 "Root and Structure-Preserving Transformations", MIT dissertation. (Reproduced by the
Indiana University Linguistic Club.)
174 CARLOS OTERO
1972 "How Abstract is Word Order; English as an SVO Language", Mimeo (UCLA).
Hall, Robert A., Jr.
1964 "Initial Consonants and Syntactic Doubling in West Romance", Lg. 40, 551-556.
Hanssen, Federico
1912 "La colocacion del verbo en el Poema del Cid", Bulletin Hispanique 14, 47-59.
1913 Gramatica historica de la lengua castellana (Paris: Ediciones Hispano-Americanas, 1966).
Isenberg, Horst
1968 Das direkte Objekt im Spanischen (= Studia Grammatica, IX) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag).
Kahane, Henry, & Renee Kahane
1950 "The Position of the Actor Expression in Colloquial Mexican Spanish", Lg. 26, 236-263.
Kayne, Richard S.
1969 "The Transformational Cycle in French Syntax", MIT dissertation.
1971 "Subject Inversion in French Interrogatives", Mimeo.
Kiefer, Ferenc
1967 On the Problem of Word Order (Bierwisch & Heidolph 1970), 127-142.
King, Robert D.
1969 Historical Linguistics and Generative Grammar (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.).
Klima, Edward S.
1964 "Relatedness Between Grammatical Systems", Lg. 40,1-20. (Reprinted in Reibel & Schane.)
1965 "Studies in Diachronie Transformational Syntax" (Harvard University dissertation).
Lapesa, Rafael
1961 "Del demostrativo al articulo", Nueva Revista de Filologia Hispanica 15, 23-44.
Lausberg, Heinrich
1956 Lingüistica romanica. Trad. esp. (Madrid: Gredos, 1965-1966).
Maling, Joan M.
1970 "On 'Gapping and the order of constituents'", MIT Quarterly Progress Report 97,135-143.
1971 "Sentence Stress in Old English", Linguistic Inquiry 2, 379-399.
1972 "On 'Gapping and the order of constituents'", Linguistic Inquiry 3, 101-108.
Menendez Pidal, Ramon
1908 Cantor de Mio Cid (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe). (Reprinted, with additions, in 1944-1946.)
1941 Manual de gramatica espanola (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe).
1950 Origenes del espanol, 3. ed. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe).
Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm
1897 "Zur Stellung der tonlosen Objektspronomina", Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 21,
313-334.
Otero, Carlos
1969 "Chomskian Romance Linguistics: A Reply to Professor Robert A. Hall, Jr.". Paper read
at the Annual Meeting of the MLA in Denver.
1970 "Acceptable Ungrammatical Utterances in Spanish", Linguistic Inquiry 3: 2.
1971 Evolution y revolution en romance; minima introduction a la fonologia (Barcelona: Seix
Barral).
Perlmutter, David
1970 "Surface Structure Constraints in Syntax", Linguistic Inquiry 1, 187-255.
Postal, Paul M.
1966 "On So-called 'Pronouns' in English", in Reibel & Schane 1969: 201-24.
Ramsden, H.
1963 Weak-pronoun Position in the Early Romance Languages (Manchester University Press).
Reibel, D. A., & S. A. Schane (eds.)
1969 Modern Studies in English (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.).
Salvä, Vicente
1830 Gramatica de la lengua castellana segun ahora se habla, ordenada par Don — (Paris).
S[oares] B[arbosa], J.
1822 Grammatica philosophica da lingua portugueza, ou principles da grammatica geral applicados
a nossa linguagem (Lisboa: Na Typographia da Academia das Sciencias).
Sorrento, Luigi
1950 Sintassi romanza (Varese-Milano: Istituto Editoriale Cisalpino).
Strozer, Judith R.
1970 "Clitics in Spanish", UCLA M.A. Thesis.
1971 "Observations on Direct and Indirect Objects in Spanish", Mimeo (UCLA).
Tagliavini, Carlo
1949 Le origini delle lingue neolatine. Introduzione allafilologia romanza, 5. ed. (Bologna: Patron,
1969).
Thurneysen, R.
1892 "Zur Stellung des Verbums im Altfranzösischen", Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 16,
289-307.
Traugott, Elisabeth Closs
1969 "Toward a Grammar of Syntactic Change", Lingua 23, 1-27.
Valesio, Paolo
1968 "The Romance Synthetic Future Pattern and its First Attestations", Lingua 20,113-161 &
279-307.
1969 "The Synthetic Future Again: Phonology and Morpho-syntax", Lingua 21, 181-193.
Williams, Edwin B.
1938 From Latin to Portuguese; Historical Phonology and Morphology of the Portuguese Language,
2. ed. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962).
REBECCA POSNER
SEMANTIC CHANGE OR LEXICAL CHANGE?
When invited to this conference, I responded to the plea for talks on semantics, only
to find that papers concerned with related subjects — those of Professor Kahane and
Professor Mäher — have already said most of the things I want to say, much better
than I can do myself. Professor Kahane's masterly survey emphasized the historical
roots of currently fashionable theories, penetrating deeper into the past than my own
meagre scholarship will permit. Even within my own limited experience, I have again
and again the sense of deja vu when I read brand-new analyses and theories: I am
certainly conscious that most of the views I want to advance myself are well-known,
and only worth restating because they seem to have been forgotten in the present
recirculation of ideas.
Studies of semantic change are often regarded as na'ive and superficial — because
they are usually concerned primarily with lexical units (whereas synchronic semantics
tends nowadays to study longer utterances); because they often ignore the complexities
that baffle synchronic semanticists; and because their methods are as much extra-
linguistic as linguistic, with some tendency to descend to anecdotal detail, rather than
to stay with stern theory.
What inspires me with the foolhardiness to tread in this quagmire are recent
pronouncements of generative semantics, which is, it appears, throwing out the
lexeme, just as generative phonology attempted to dispose of the phoneme. There
are, we are told, no molecule-sized chunks of meaning: lexical items are treated as
almost accidentally mapped on to certain semantic configurations rather than others.
Incidentally, accompanying the lexeme on to the garbage heap must go the whole
idea of semantic change — for surely deep structure semantic configurations cannot
by definition change; all that can change are the superficial abbreviations sometimes
mapped on to one configuration, sometimes to another.
Here the sense of deja vu becomes overwhelming. Thus the view that a linguistic
sign stands for an 'idea', both cutting up reality into the same shape — a view found
in Saussure and much traditional linguistics, including (pace Chomsky) the Port-
Royal grammar — gives way to the view already eloquently expressed by Locke, and
developed by such eighteenth-century thinkers as Condillac, that a linguistic item is an
178 REBECCA POSNER
abbreviation for an arbitrary configuration of semantic primes. If I may quote the

well-known words of Locke:
The use of language is by short sounds to signify with ease and dispatch general conceptions,
wherein not only abundance of particulars may be contained, but also a great variety of
independent ideas collected into one complex one.
Locke, however, went further and claimed that the abbreviations were sometimes
mere surface manifestations of empty categories in the deep structure — a view which
had great success in the eighteenth century (and, if I remember right, was mentioned
by Professor Kahane as having a respectable history):
I ask whether it be not the ordinary method that children learn the NAMES of mixed modes
before they have their ideas...
Thus, he says, speakers use such words as 'glory' and 'ambition' without any clear
idea of what they mean by them.
Locke's reference to the language acquisition process has a modern ring. Indeed
it does seem plausible to suggest that children learn lexical items as such, often (from
the age of about three) asking "what does ÷ mean ?", with many false starts when they
come to use the items, which, when left uncorrected may continue to characterize
their individual usage.1 However true it may be that children have acquired their
syntax at an early age, we all know (or so I thought before hearing some of the other
papers at this conference) that acquisition of lexical items continues through life.
'Precise' use of such items is a mark of education and experience: only when errors in
usage are of a gross noticeable kind — like calling a chair, a 'table' — is comment
made, outside the schoolroom atmosphere. Usually we all talk somewhat at cross-
purposes; because we have all heard our lexemes in a different set of contexts, we
have a different 'idea' of what they mean. When the question does arise, we usually
rush off to our authoritative dictionaries to find out what a word REALLY means. But
without a dictionary or a teacher, only context indicates the meaning of any new
word we come across: given the size of the lexicon, many items are bound to occur
rarely in the experience of one speaker, who may develop a non-standard idea of a
meaning.
Precision of use of lexical items was especially emphasized by the arbiters of
European national languages who bewailed the looseness of vernacular usage com-
pared with literary Latin. Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France saw the
culmination of the process, with the cult of the mot juste compared with the 'hit or
miss' methods (or perhaps, more exactly, 'successive approximation' or tatonnement)
that the characteristic accumulation of synonyms in earlier texts seems to imply.
1
My own three-year-old daughter, having asked "What does 'dream' mean?" and received the
response "It's something you do when you sleep", then declared next morning at breakfast "I had a
funny snore last night" — showing an interesting association between two lexical items that can be
'defined' in the same (inadequate) way.
SEMANTIC CHANGE OR LEXICAL CHANGE? 179
Indeed, fine discrimination became more a jeu d'esprit than an exercise in linguistic
description.
At the same time, in French lexicography, there was a change in attitude to defini-
tions of words. Whereas sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century dictionaries accu-
mulated homonyms, using a different entry for each different gloss2 (which typically
was given in Latin, as supplying a degree of precision not attainable in the vernacular)
at the end of the seventeenth century (in the Furetiere and Academic dictionaries)
one item was described in terms of 'principal' and 'subsidiary' meanings — initially
'most frequent' compared with 'less frequent', and afterwards as 'logically or chrono-
logically antecedent' compared with 'derived' (rather like the Katz-Fodor tree structure
in some instances). Thus a 'homonymic' model gave way to a 'polysemic' one: at the
extreme, one surface lexical item is described as having one (necessarily vague)
meaning, from which specific uses in given syntactic and situational contexts can be
derived.
Preference for homonymy or polysemy is part and parcel of certain profound
doctrinal differences in linguistic semantics. For the extreme Saussureans one signifiant
has necessarily a single signification — a signifie de puissance — from which can be
derived all effets de sens (to use Guillaumian terminology). The signification is, of
course, to be defined distinctively — a difficult job with the comparatively unstructured
lexicon.
Most 'semantic field' studies in this tradition resemble eighteenth-century syno-
nymies, where the 'field' is defined extra-linguistically. Pierre Guiraud 3 stands
virtually alone in using a more linguistic approach to the semantic field, studying
the interaction of signifiant and signifie, and demonstrating the existence of primitive
semantic structures in a language, which account for certain 'extensions of meaning'
and leads to greater precision in etymological studies. Thus, French tirer (convincingly
derived from the substantive tire 'rank, file, line', rather than the more colourful
martyr) acquires the signification of its predecessor and rival traire, via other syno-
nymic associations, as between tire and trait. The sixty-four senses for tirer listed by
Littre can mostly be derived from a single vague theme that Guiraud labels traction.
However, finding no synchronic link between e.g. tirer un coup de fusil and tirer du
vin, he talks here of 'change' of signification (i.e. of semic content).
Other Saussureans would claim that the change here is more an effect of Guiraud's
analysis than of real-world phenomena, and would attempt to incorporate both
examples into a near-maximally vague tirer unit. Thus what would have taken place
is less CHANGE than further stretching of an already elastic signifie.
If the polysemic model leaves little room for semantic CHANGE, the homonymic model
allows for it even less — for, by definition, any effect that might loosely be called
"change of meaning" must result from LEXICAL creation or loss.
2
Though some lexicographers, like Nicot, preferred the "one form — one entry" principle, whether
or not the diverse 'meanings' listed could be associated.
3
Structures otymologiques du lexique franfais (Paris, Larousse, 1967).
180 REBECCA POSNER
Is there, then, any way we can study semantic change, in linguistic terms ?
First, I should maintain that synchronic 'vagueness' of lexical items — often treated
as polysemy — is a fact of life and that the only practical way to study it is in terms of
LIMITS of extension (e.g. tirer is differentiated from pousser in virtually all contexts,
etc.). That is to say, structural semantics ä la John Lyons4 is an appropriate method,
though it might appear that the designation of the method should, to be more exact,
emphasize the LEXICAL rather than the SEMANTIC aspects of the model.
What, then, should be the object of diachronic semantics — study of the "change of
meaning" ? Again I should put the emphasis on LIMITS, on loss rather than on acquisi-
tion of semic content, with, as an extreme case, loss of the lexical item altogether (or
its restriction to limited, often stereotyped or stylistically marked contexts). Let me
here cite the example of French noise eventually ousted by bruit on the one hand and
querelle on the other.
This approach is, again, more lexical than semantic and depends little on the
findings of theoretical semantics — especially where "word-and-thing" methods are
applicable. Thus, ville has changed in that it no longer designates an agricultural
estate of some importance, and 'to train', in that it is used only in specific contexts
such as 'train horses' or 'train vines' and no longer in the more general contexts where
trainer might occur. Such theoretical problems as do arise are lexicological rather than
semantic: most important, we may ask "How could, and why should, an item have
ceased to convey an effet de sens through time?"
In attempting to answer this question we might make two alternative assumptions:
(1) The effet de sens is no longer conveyed in the language by a specific lexical item.
Sometimes a functional explanation comes readily to mind: physical objects, like the
haubert, cease to be used; out-of-date social attitudes, implied by such words as
culvert or her, cease to be mentioned or have only comic connotations (like feal or
prud''komme). But sometimes quite useful semantic configurations are left without a
convenient abbreviation: why, for instance, did seventeenth-century French divest
itself of words that denoted, of human beings, 'law-abiding, honest, conforming to the
legal code'? — words that abounded in Old French, but which had by this time
disappeared — like dreiturier, justisier — or had specialized in other senses — loyal
replacing near-obsolete leal, or honnete coming to mean 'conforming to social con-
ventions' (though some syntactic jiggery-pokery did introduce the opposition honnete
komme / komme honnete in this one limited context). Can we attribute this change to
the fundamental amorality of seventeenth-century polite society, or is it a mere
accident ? Certainly eighteenth-century writers felt the need for a word, but the terms
they introduced, like komme de bien (probably a caique on the Italian) and Latin
borrowing probe, had little success in the colloquial language.
(2) More often the effet de sens is conveyed in the language by another lexical item,
which, for some reason, is more attractive and ousts the original item. But what
4
Structural Semantics (Oxford, Blackwell, 1963).
SEMANTIC CHANGE OR LEXICAL CHANGE? 181
makes it more attractive? Why, for instance, should Italian introduce a French
borrowing mangiare for such a vital activity, to replace perfectly good native words ?
The whims of fashion to which Postal5 apparently attributes all linguistic change
are undoubtedly a factor (and remember that Hoenigswald6 had already claimed that
'semantic change' is normally a form of borrowing from more prestigious dialect
usage) but obviously other more formal factors — morphophonological irregularity,
homonymy, unfortunate associations (especially tabu) or formal isolation from
associated items — come into play, as amply illustrated by Edmond Huguet7.
Among the factors that do operate I would include what I call the 'thingamebob'
effect — the tendency to use as vague a term as one can get away with, in a context
where the effet de sens can be readily inferred — like tirer les vaches, following the
footsteps of traire in this as in other ways.8
The opposite effect — to the delight of addicts of the dialectic — also operates: I
call it the chaise/chaire effect, because here we have a well-documented example of
two forms in free variation, issuing phonetically from different social dialects, being
specialized, in the seventeenth century, in different contexts. Why a special word should
be needed for the combination 'pulpit' + 'episcopal or professorial chair' (incidentally
endowed with separate terms in most Romance languages) is a matter for conjecture:
perhaps the popularity of the sermon in seventeenth-century France had something
to do with it.
Examples of words of similar semic content being used, to all appearances, inter-
changeably, before specializing apparently randomly, are numerous. Words for a
'bit of cloth' are particularly fascinating — what with towels and napkins, tablecloths,
aprons, handkerchiefs, not to mention skirts, capes and the part of the body we call
the 'lap'. But here is not the place to go into the detail that a discussion of such a
question would require. Anecdotal niceties tend to take over from theoretical con-
siderations once actual examples are discussed and there seems to be no end to the
possible ramifications of the history of even a single item (though we should not allow
the 'interesting' examples to blind us to the fact that some words have no semantic
history to speak of).
So I shall try to sum up as briefly as possible, leaving examples to be discussed at
more length elsewhere:
(1) Semantic change as the term is classically used is a misnomer for lexical change.
(2) Lexical change is most conveniently studied in terms of lexical loss and
replacement.
5
In Aspects of Phonological Theory (New York, Harper and Row, 1968).
6
H. M. Hoenigswald, "Are there Universals of Linguistic Change?" in J. H. Greenberged. Universals
in Language 2nd ed. (M.I.T. Press, 1966), 30-52.
7
Mots disparus et vieillis depuis le 16e siecle.
8
Spanish ordefiar, Franco-Provencal arya and dialectal French adjustar etc. initially used another
'vague' term meaning 'to do, or put, in order', to replace mulgere which, of course, survives in other
parts of the Romance area.
182 REBECCA POSNER
(3) The hows and whys of lexical change require study of detailed examples in all
their complexity: something resembling the methods of field semantics, or, rather,
Matore-type lexicologie is particularly appropriate.
(4) The normal use of lexical items in vague contexts makes for a large degree of
misunderstanding (though in most cases not pathological) and of wide, but limited,
differences of semantic content between different individuals' usage, as well as in
different syntactic contexts. 'Change' is therefore an inherent feature of such content.
No wonder, then, that what is classically called 'historical semantics' is a more
manageable discipline than synchronic semantics. Certainly I should regard it as more
within the technical competence of a linguist, than synchronic semantics which may
better be regarded as a branch of philosophy.
Columbia University, New York, and the University of York, England.

SANFORD A. SCHANE
SOME DIACHRONIC DELETION PROCESSES AND

THEIR SYNCHRONIC CONSEQUENCES IN FRENCH
Within generative phonology it has frequently been shown that there are paral-
lelisms between a synchronic description and a diachronic one. Synchronic underlying
forms are often similar to earlier attested forms for the language; the synchronic rules
frequently reflect the historical changes; and the rule ordering required for the
synchronic description may recapitulate the chronological order of the changes. This
statement does not imply, of course, that the synchronic solution has to correlate with
the diachronic, otherwise grammars would keep getting longer. Changes involving
rule loss, rule reordering, or lexical restructuring, for example, are of the type which
would break the parallelism.
I raise the parallelism issue, not because it is the central concern of this paper, but
because it does have some bearing on the data I shall be treating. We will consider
three deletion processes within the history of French — vowel syncope, vowel apocope,
and h deletion, and their interactions with other phonological processes. In all cases
the historical evolution is straightforward. The changes are completely phonologically
conditioned and have been well documented and agreed upon by Romance scholars.
I will then look at the synchronic consequences of these processes. Where a phono-
logically based description is still possible we will see that the synchronic analysis
recapitulates the diachronic. But a phonological analysis is not always feasible, so
that what may have been phonologically conditioned historically turns out to be
morphologically conditioned synchronically, where the morphological description no
longer reflects the diachronic story. I will then discuss those factors responsible for
the different synchronic treatments.
Two well-known vowel deletion processes occurred in the development from Latin
to French. The first was syncope: the penultimate vowel was deleted in words with
original antepenultimate stress.
184 SANFORD A. SCHANE
Latin French
arbore(m) arbre
perdere perdre
merula(m) merle
äsina(m) asne (äne)
The other vowel deletion rule was apocope: a final unstressed vowel was dropped
under one of two negative conditions — either the vowel was not a or it did not
support certain consonant clusters; on the other hand, final unstressed or a vowel
supporting consonant clusters was converted to schwa.
Latin French
pärte(m) part
dormis dor(m)s
cläru(m) clair
clara(m) claire
barba(m) barbe
febre(m) fievre
duplu(m) double
These vowel deletion processes interact with a third phenomenon — diphthongization.
Diphthongization affected certain stressed vowels which occurred in OPEN SYLLABLE;
stressed vowels in closed syllable did not diphthongize.
Latin French Latin French
cläru(m) clair barba barbe
flore(m) fleur porta porte
pede(m) pied perdis perds
Let us consider how these rules affected the Old French declension. Old French had a
two-case system. The following paradigm shows a diphthongized vowel in the
nominative singular but not in the other forms.
Singular Plural 'count'
Nominative cuens conte
Oblique conte contes
At first it appears strange to find a diphthongized vowel preceding a consonant cluster.
However, given the corresponding Latin forms and the appropriate chronology of the
processes — syncope, diphthongization, apocope — the Old French reflexes are
straightforward. We contrast the nominative and oblique singular forms.
comes comite(m)
syncope — comte
diphthongization cuemes —
apocope cuems —
nasal assimilation cuens conte
SOME DIACHRONIC DELETION PROCESSES 185
The deletion of the penultimate vowel in the case of comite produces a closed syllable;
because of the consonant cluster neither diphthongization nor apocope applies. On
the other hand, syncope does not affect comes, as comes does not have antepenultimate
stress; the stressed syllable remains open, diphthongization applies, and only sub-
sequently is the final vowel deleted.
Although the historical evolution of these forms raises no real issues, there are
some interesting problems for a synchronic analysis of Old French. What happens
in a generative description when one attempts to derive the alternate forms of the
stem from a unique underlying representation? I propose the following derivation,
where cont is the underlying representation of the stem, and s and 3 are inflectional
markers.
cont + s (nom. sg.) cont+ 3 (obi. sg.)
stress cont + s cont+s
diphthongization cuent + s —
cluster simplification cuen + s —
The cluster simplification rule is well motivated. Walker (1971) has shown the necessity
for such rules within Old French. The effects here are similar to the well known
morphophonemic rule of Latin which deletes ß before inflectional s. The interesting
rule is, of course, diphthongization, for it is not so obvious how this rule is to be
applied. It appears that at this stage of Old French, diphthongization is applicable
before consonant clusters, but then how are we to constrain the rule so that it applies
to cuens but not to conte ? The only phonological difference between the two underlying
forms is that one terminates in s whereas the other ends in 3. However, it would be
ludicrous to claim that diphthongization now occurs before three underlying con-
sonants but not before two — if anything, one would expect the longer consonant
sequence effectively to block diphthongization. Furthermore, as Walker has shown,
the Old French synchronic diphthongization rules apply uniquely to stressed vowels
NOT followed by more than one consonant, so that for all intents and purposes,
diphthongization should not apply anywhere within the paradigm.
Alternatively, one might argue that we have posited the wrong underlying representa-
tions, that the underlying forms rather are similar to the earlier Latin forms — in
particular, for cuens there is some vowel between the nasal and following consonant —
and that the synchronic grammar of Old French has rules of syncope and apocope.
In short, the synchronic description is a recapitulation of the diachronic. Although
such a solution is attractive, unfortunately, there is no motivation for it. In the case of
cuens-conte there is no synchronic evidence for the particular vowels which historically
underwent syncope and apocope. For example, we find no related forms containing
the missing vowels, forms to suggest that these vowels should appear in the underlying
representations throughout the paradigm. Because the vowels have been lost without
leaving any trace (other than the diphthongization before a consonant cluster) we
must conclude that the Old French underlying representations of cuens-conte are not
identical to their Latin antecedents but have been restructured. What this means is
that diphthongization in Old French is no longer entirely phonologically conditioned —
that is, the number of consonants following the stressed vowel cannot be the sole
criterion for determining whether or not it takes place. Consequently, within a
synchronic description of Old French the diphthong of cuens requires a nonphono-
logical explanation.
The difficulty exemplified by cuens-conte is part of a larger problem within Old
French morphology — the treatment of the so-called imparisyllabic declension.
Imparisyllabics are stressed on one vowel in the nominative singular, but on a different
vowel for the other three forms.
Singular Plural
Nom. pästre pastor 'pastor'
Obi. pastor pastor
Nom. suer surour 'sister'
Obi. surour surour
Walker proposes the following type derivations for imparisyllabics, illustrated here
with suer-surour.
soror (nom. sg.) soror (obi. sg.)
stress soror soror
diphthongization sueror sorour
apocope suerr —
pretonic vowel raising — surour
degemination suer —
Of particular interest is the stress rule, which must apply to what is ostensibly the
same underlying form; yet it has to assign stress to two different vowels. Walker notes
that the standard stress rule for Old French is identical to that assigning surface stress
in Modern French:
Stress the final vowel unless it is schwa, in which case stress the penultimate.
Within the imparisyllabic paradigm this rule handles all forms except the nominative
singular. Consequently, Walker was forced, and rightly so, to recognize a special
morphologically conditioned stress rule, which he called IMPARISYLLABIC STRESS:
In forms which are lexically marked as belonging to the imparisyllabic class, stress the
penultimate syllable in the nominative singular and the final syllable elsewhere, (p. 48)
It appears to me that a morphologically conditioned solution is also going to be the
only viable one for dealing with the cuens-conte alternation, so that the grammar of
Old French must contain, in addition to its phonologically conditioned rule for
diphthongization, a morphologically conditioned one, which I shall call IMPARI-
SYLLABIC DIPHTHONGIZATION:
In certain lexically marked forms the stressed vowel undergoes diphthongization in

the nominative singular, but not elsewhere.
Notice that this rule and Walker's imparisyllabic stress rule mutually support each
other. Both rules apply to restricted lexically marked items. In both instances it is
the nominative singular which exemplifies the 'aberrant' behavior and which neces-
sitates the morphological conditioning. I also believe it is the only solution with any
psychological validity. There are four forms within the Old French paradigm. For
the imparisyllabics, three are more or less identical, and one — the nominative
singular — may differ in several possible dimensions — where the stress occurs, the
number of syllables, the vowel alternations and deletions. Hence, the learner of Old
French was confronted with a situation where the nominative singular frequently was
quite different from all other forms of the paradigm. A synchronic description
embodying morphological conditioning for stress and diphthongization precisely
pinpoints the unusualness of these nominative singular imparisyllabics.
II
Let us turn now to another deletion process within the history of French — that which
affected the evolution of the so-called 'h aspire' words. These are words which, in
Modern French, phonetically are vowel initial but do not permit a preceding word
to enter in elision or liaison with them.
[b ero] le heros [la as] la hache
[le ero] les heros [le as] les Haches
The peculiarity of 'h aspire' words is that they behave like consonant initial forms and
not vowel initial.
[b gars5] le garcon [1 ami] ami
[le garsS] les garcons [le/ ami] les amis
In a synchronic analysis of Modern French elision and absence of liaison can be
handled by two rules. A rule of vowel truncation deletes a morpheme final vowel
(usually schwa) before a following vowel.
/la ami/ -» [1 ami] farni but /b gars5/ le garcon
/la am/ -> [1 am] fame but /la fij/ lafille
There is also a consonant deletion rule which deletes a morpheme final consonant
(usually an obstruent) before a following consonant.
/lez gars3/ -» [le gars3] les garcons but /lez ami/ les amis
/lez fij/ -» [le fij] lesfilles but /lez am/ les ämes
The consonantal behavior of 'h aspire' words has a straightforward historical ex-
planation. These are words which are mostly of German origin or influenced by
Germanic. In Old French they actually began with h, a sound which was dropped in
the course of Later Middle French.
b hero lez hero

vowel truncation — —
consonant deletion — le hero
h-deletion b ero le ero
Now for Modern French we know that many words which, on the surface, terminate
in a vowel, such as [pati] petit, actually have a final consonant in the underlying
representation, because the consonant surfaces either elsewhere in the paradigm or in
related forms — e.g. [patit ami] petit ami, [patit] petite (fern.), /patites/ petitesse.
Hence there is ample morphological evidence — both inflectional and derivational —
for these underlying final consonants. However, the situation with 'h aspire' is quite
different. Historically the h was lost everywhere (although it has been retained in a
few Eastern dialects), so that in most Modern French dialects there are no surface
occurrences of A at all. This means that we cannot argue for its presence in underlying
representations on the basis of its phonetic occurrence elsewhere in the paradigm or in
related words. The only synchronic claim for an initial consonant segment for 'h
aspire' words is a structural one. Although these words phonetically begin with vowels
they behave like consonant initial words. One might then argue that the underlying
forms contain an initial consonant, which is deleted only after the vowel truncation
and consonant deletion rules have been applied. Such a synchronic analysis is nearly
a direct recapitulation of the diachronic development.
Is this the only synchronic analysis available ? Could we not say, for example, that
the 'h aspire' words, synchronically, are vowel initial, but are marked as exceptions
to the vowel truncation and consonant deletion rules? Let us pursue such an analysis.
First, it is not true that the 'h aspire' words are exceptions to these rules; rather what
precedes them is. Consider the vowel deletion rule. This rule normally applies to an
underlying form such as /b ami/, deleting the schwa. Now if we were to posit an
underlying form /b ero/, we would have to prevent the schwa of /b/ from being
deleted. Of course we cannot mark /b/ as an exception to the vowel truncation rule,
since it is not most of the time. Coats (1970) and Kisseberth (1970) have suggested
that a theory of rule exceptions must be able to mark not only segments which are
exceptions to a rule but contexts which are exceptional. Given our vowel deletion rule:
V -» 0 / #V
we want to say that in the case of /b ero/ it is the underscored vowel in the environ-
ment which is exceptional (that is, the initial vowel of /ero/) and which blocks
application of the rule. Hence, the rule will not apply and the vowel of /b/ will not be
deleted.
Although a solution encompassing exceptional contexts could conceivably deal

with lack of elision with the so-called 'h aspire' words, it cannot account for the failure
of these words to undergo liaison. Consider now the consonant deletion rule:
C ^ 0 / -# C
This rule normally applies to an underlying form such as /lez garsS/, deleting the final
consonant of /lez/. If we posit underlying /lez ero/ we will also need to delete the final
consonant. Yet the rule does not allow a consonant to be deleted before a vowel.
Furthermore, there would be no point in marking the initial vowel of /ero/ as an
exceptional context to this rule since it is not even a possible context. The only
alternative is to postulate a second consonant deletion rule, one stating that a mor-
pheme final consonant can be deleted before a following vowel. Of course we cannot
allow this rule to apply indiscriminately before any vowel; otherwise it would in-
correctly convert, for example, underlying /lez ami/ to *[le ami]. Therefore, we need
to say that this new rule deletes a morpheme final consonant before a following vowel
only on condition that the vowel is one (such as the initial vowel of /ero/) which has
been marked as constituting an exceptional environment to the earlier vowel trunca-
tion rule.
I believe that such a solution is not tenable. First, it requires adding to the grammar
a special consonant deletion rule, one which has no overt relationship to the normal
consonant deletion rule. The new rule could perhaps be tolerated if it were not for the
peculiar constraints which need to be imposed on it. In order for the rule to operate
it requires reference to another rule of a different sort — vowel truncation, and, to
compound the difficulties, only forms which provide an exceptional context to that
rule can undergo this rule. Finally, allowing such a rule removes all constraints from a
theory of exceptions so that in essence anything goes. We want to tighten our theories,
not loosen them.
If an exception mechanism is inadequate for dealing with 'h aspire' words, so is
a solution using diacritic features. Assume that words such as /ero/ bear a diacritic
feature — for example, [+ H]. Then we could say that vowel truncation fails to
apply before any vowel marked [+ H]. We would still need a special consonant
deletion rule, one which deletes consonants before vowels marked [+ H]. The
diacritic treatment is nothing other than the exception solution in disguise. It requires
that items be marked as not undergoing a general rule of the language — vowel
truncation — whenever the preceding word terminates in a vowel, and that they
undergo a special rule unique to them — the new consonant deletion — whenever
the preceding word terminates in a consonant. With this solution the real relationship
between vowel truncation and consonant deletion is completely obscured.
The use of exception features and diacritics misses the most important trait about
'h aspire' words: they behave as though they were consonant initial. The only
realistic synchronic analysis is one which recognizes this fact, an analysis positing
an underlying initial consonant which is subsequently deleted after the vowel trunca-
tion and consonant deletion rules have been applied. Only a solution with an abstract
consonant obviates the need for adding strange 'new' rules or referring to the ex-
ceptional nature of other rules. Instead the data are accommodated by already
existing rules. But most important, only the solution with an abstract consonant
offers any explanation for the peculiar behavior of 'h aspire' words. So far as I can
see it is also the only reasonable hypothesis entertained by the language learner. The
French child finds that he cannot say [1 ero] or [lez ero], that for purposes of elision
and liaison [la ero] — [le ero] work like [b garsS] — [le garsS] and not like [1 ami]
— [lez ami]. He must discover that words such as [ero] behave as though consonant
initial, for, ultimately, he will have to produce, for example, [m5 ero] man heros,
[ss ero] ce heros, [psti ero] petit heros — not to mention innumerable other possible
combinations — even though he may never have heard of any of these particular
forms. Again, postulating an abstract underlying consonant is the linguist's formal
means for capturing this observation. Incidentally, here is another piece of data for
the 'how abstract is phonology' controversy.
Throughout the discussion I have been talking about an abstract consonant and
have avoided calling it h. This is because I find no compelling synchronic evidence
(other than dialectal) that it is h, rather than 9 or something else. Nor do I think that a
French speaker has any basis for deciding it is h. Of course once he becomes literate
and sees that such words have an orthographic h, from then on he may consciously
think of it as such. Although this is not the place to delve into this idea, I would like
to propose that phonology needs dummy segments much as syntax has need of certain
dummy elements. For example, a dummy consonant would not be specified for place
or manner of articulation, but in rules it would still function much like any other
consonant. It would be postulated precisely in cases such as 'h aspire' and would be
the formal counterpart of the notion 'behaves as though there were a consonant'.
Since the dummy consonant is an abstract entity without full phonetic content, by
convention it can have no realization at the phonetic level.
Ill
Within the synchronic grammar of French a phonologically based analysis — one

with an abstract consonant — is the only viable one for 'h aspire'. On the other hand,
we saw that for the cuens-conte alternation of Old French a phonological solution
could not be synchronically motivated; rather a morphological analysis was called
for. Yet in both cases the historical evolution was phonologically conditioned. I
should now like to examine a third case, where synchronically, either a phonological
or a morphological solution is feasible but where I do not believe it is really possible
to make a choice.
Consider again the syncope rule and its effect on Latin third conjugation infinitive
forms.
Latin French
perdere perdre
vendere vendre
vivere vivre
mittere mettre
The historical evolution is straightforward: the penultimate vowel is dropped and

that is the whole story. However, the synchronic analysis of the Modern French
third conjugation is more problematic. If the underlying forms of these verbs are
similar to the surface forms — that is, the stem followed directly by the infinitive
marker — /perd + ra/, /viv+ra/, etc. the stem final consonant ought to be deleted
because the consonant deletion rule cited previously applies between morphemes as
well as between words — e.g. /viv + t/ -> [vi(t)] (il) vit. In fact this rule is actually
involved in the derivation of certain infinitive forms: [ekrir] ecrire from underlying
/ekriv + ra/ (where [ekriv] is the stem elsewhere in the paradigm, e.g. [ekriv3] (nous)
ecrivons), or [dir] dire from underlying /diz + ra/ ([diz5] (nous) disons). Consequently,
for /viv + ra/, /perd + ra/, etc. we will need to block the consonant deletion rule.
Now if in the underlying representation, there were a vowel between the stem and
the infinitive marker, this vowel would be sufficient to prevent the consonant deletion
rule from dropping the stem final consonant. Only after the consonant deletion rule
had been applied would the vowel be deleted. It is this solution which I proposed in
French Phonology and Morphology: vivre had the underlying representation /viv + e + ra/,
whereas ecrire was /ekriv+ra/ without the thematic vowel. Fine and good, but can a
thematic vowel, which is never overtly manifested, be motivated synchronically ? It
can be argued for indirectly. First, there is a patterning argument. The third is the
only conjugation without a thematic vowel; all others have an overt vowel in the
infinitive: I parl+e + r, llfin + i+r, IV voul+oi+r. An underlying thematic vowel
for the third conjugation would explain this surface gap. Next, the third conjugation,
like the others, does manifest a thematic vowel in certain past tenses, so that there is
evidence for a thematic vowel elsewhere in the paradigm.
Preterite Imperfect Subjunctive Past Participle
I (tu) parlas (tu) parlasses parle
II finis finisses fini
III perdis perdisses perdu
IV voulys voulusses voulu
An analysis postulating a thematic vowel for the infinitive is phonologically based
and again recapitulates fairly well the historical evolution, but we could just as easily
propose a morphological analysis, one which is much more concrete. We could say
that the underlying representations for vivre, perdre, etc. are as first proposed:
/viv+ra/, /perd+ra/. We would then require a readjustment rule stating that third
conjugation stems do not generally undergo consonant deletion in the infinitive (nor
in the future or conditional tenses which are similar to the infinitive). In addition, we
need to recognize a handful of exceptions, such as /ekriv + ra/ and /diz + ra/, where the
consonant is deleted (Schane 1973). The phonological solution incorporating an
underlying thematic vowel which is later wiped out is parallel to the 'h aspire' analysis,
whereas the morphological solution referring to third conjugation infinitives is
analogous to mentioning nominative singular in the treatment of the imparisyllabic
declension of Old French. I know of no good arguments for preferring one solution
over the other.
IV
We have looked at some historical deletion processes, all of which were phonologically
conditioned, and then considered how the effects of these processes are to be treated
synchronically at a later stage in the language. I have chosen deletion, rather than
some other processes, because the surface consequences of deletion are fairly easy
to see — that is, the surface syllable structures of the later forms are no longer the
same as the earlier ones. I have also tried to find examples where the deleted segment
is not recoverable, where, in the synchronic grammar, there are no morphological
alternations between the presence and absence of that segment, so that the standard
arguments about morphophonemic alternation cannot be used for establishing the
deleted segment in underlying representations.
Although the deleted segment is no longer necessarily recoverable, it has none-
theless left its effects on the system. The deletion of the penultimate vowel created
diphthongs before consonant clusters in Old French, the deletion of h led to vowel
initial words which did not behave as such, and vowel deletion in the third conjugation
produced stem final consonants before a consonantal inflectional ending. If the
deletion processes had left no side effects there would have been no synchronic
problems and lexical restructuring would be the only consequence. Yet the presence
of a side effect is not sufficient for setting up the deleted segment in a subsequent
synchronic grammar. Where other internal criteria could be found for postulating the
missing segment, such as for 'h aspire' or the third conjugation vowel (if that is the
appropriate analysis), we saw that the synchronic solution was still phonologically
conditioned and that it more or less recapitulated the diachronic changes. On the
other hand, where there is no evidence for the missing segment, as with the Old French
diphthongization or the other analysis for third conjugation, a morphological solution
was called for, one not paralleling the historical changes, one where the underlying
forms are closer to the surface ones.
What theoretical conclusions can be drawn from these observations ? I should like
to offer a few suggestions although I am aware that they are based on rather limited
data. It seems to me that the morphological solution is heavily dependent on the
concept of paradigm. The forms of a paradigm comprise a close-knit, psychologically
tight web of relations. In synchronic descriptions, wherever the stem shows alternation
one tries to show that it has a unique underlying representation throughout the
paradigm, and that there are phonological rules accounting for the alternants. A
morphological solution appears to be required wherever the forms are exceptional
in some sense and cannot be derived from the expected rules. This is the situation
with the Old French imparisyllabics. The paradigm contains four forms, three of
which are similar, and one, the nominative singular, which is anomalous. Yet the
anomaly tends to be a consistent trait of this paradigmatic class. On the other hand,
the 'h aspire' phenomenon has nothing to do with the paradigm. The processes
affecting these forms, namely elision and liaison, are highly productive for they come
into play every time a word, 'h aspire' or otherwise, is in syntactic construct with a
preceding word. Although there are syntactic constraints governing liaison, when
applicable it nonetheless happens under strictly phonological conditions, depending
entirely on the consonantal or vocalic nature of the segments involved. Because the
rules apply only to words of the appropriate phonological shape, 'h aspire' words
have to be consonant initial.
It is not so clear what is happening with third conjugation infinitives. The anomalous
forms are part of the paradigm. They retain their stem final consonant before a
consonantal inflectional ending and so cannot be derived in the normal fashion. To
this extent they warrant a morphological analysis. Yet the consonant deletion rule
to which these infinitives are exceptions is a general rule of the language, one whose
effects are not restricted to this paradigm. This supports a phonological solution.
Hence, there is simultaneously paradigmatic and nonparadigmatic pressure on the
third conjugation infinitives. It may be for this reason that either a morphological
or a phonological synchronic analysis is possible.
Kiparsky (1971), in discussing again the ABSOLUTE NEUTRALIZATION problem, cites
Piggot (1971) as noting that an abstract underlying segment which subsequently
undergoes absolute neutralization (i.e. a phonologically based synchronic analysis)
may be allowed just in those cases where the segment is relevant for the operation
of MORE THAN ONE PHONOLOGICAL RULE. If we apply this reinterpretation of the STRONG
ALTERNATION CONDITION to the French data, we find that it allows an abstract under-
lying segment for 'h aspire' but not for third conjugation infinitives, where, to my
knowledge, the only relevant rule is consonant deletion. This proposal has the virtue
of eliminating the indeterminacy of my analysis of the third conjugation. However,
I am not sure how to interpret the Old French imparisyllabics. If postulating a
'dummy' vowel were sufficient to do away with the morphological constraints on the
stress and diphthongization rules, then an abstract solution would appear to be
preferable in that the operation of more than one rule is involved here. It is not certain
that a 'dummy' vowel could resolve all the problems associated with imparisyllabic
stress, but even if it could, I am not convinced by the abstract analysis. As was noted,
in the case of both stress and diphthongization, an 'anomalous' nominative singular
is opposed to the remaining three paradigmatic forms. It seems to me that an appro-
priate synchronic analysis ought somehow to zero in on this morphological environ-

ment.
A theory of phonology must be compatible with both diachronic and synchronic
data. The Romance languages have much to contribute to elucidating diachronic-
synchronic relationships. The crucial historical facts are frequently available and
fortunately do not depend totally on hypothesized reconstructions based entirely on
preconceived theoretical notions. We now have a fair number of generative descrip-
tions for the contemporary languages as well as for earlier stages of some of these
languages. We are in a good position to begin testing our theories.
University of California, San Diego.
REFERENCES
Coats, Herbert S.
1970 "Rule Environment Features in Phonology", Papers in Linguistics 2, 110-140.
Kiparsky, Paul
1971 "Historical Linguistics", in A Survey of Linguistic Science, edited by William Orr Dingwall
(University of Maryland).
Kisseberth, Charles W.
1970 "The Treatment of Exceptions", Papers in Linguistics 2, 44-58.
Piggott, Glyn
1971 "Some Implications of Algonquian Palatalization", Odawa Language Project (= Anthropo-
logical Series no. 9) (Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto).
Pope, M. K.
1961 From Latin to Modern French (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
Schane, Sanford A.
1968 French Phonology and Morphology (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press).
1973 "The Treatment of Phonological Exceptions: The Evidence from French", Papers in
Linguistics in Honor of Henry and Renee Kahane, edited by Braj B. Kachru, et al.
Walker, Douglas
1971 "Old French Phonology and Morphology", unpublished doctoral thesis (University of
California, San Diego).
ROYAL SKOUSEN
THE VERBAL SYSTEM OF FRENCH
The problem that I wish to discuss in this paper is how do speakers account for the
data that they are confronted with in learning a language. I will limit myself to the
question of how speakers handle morphological alternation. In particular, I will deal
only with the verbal system of French and will consider various proposals that have
been made to account for the verb alternations in French.
For example, generative phonologists have tried to account for the various morpho-
logical alternations found in the French verbal system by postulating (1) unique
underlying representations and (2) phonetically-plausible rules relating underlying
representations to surface representations. But the linguistically-significant question
is not whether generative phonological solutions can actually account for the French
verbal system. Instead, the question is: Do speakers themselves account for the verb
alternations in this way? Is there any evidence that speakers actually postulate
phonetically-natural rules and unique underlying regularities to account for the verb
system ?
In this paper I will try to show that speakers are rather limited in their ability to
capture underlying regularities; instead, they tend to capture surface regularities. In
fact, the phonetically-plausible regularities that they do capture tend to be on the
surface rather than underlying.
By just looking at static data, there is no inherent way to determine what kinds of
regularities speakers will be capturing. In this paper I will therefore restrict myself
to evidence that is external to static data. In particular, I will use evidence based on
changes in linguistic data. Most of my evidence will come from historical change. By
looking at how the verbal system of French has changed over time, we will get evidence
for how speakers have accounted for the data. Similarly, language acquisition will
provide substantive evidence for the regularities that speakers are capturing. By
investigating the ways in which children's language differs from adult speech, we can
gain insights into the processes new speakers are using in order to account for linguistic
data.
Consider, for example, the future, conditional, and infinitive forms in French. In
many pedagogical works on the French language, it is noted that among the irregular
196 ROYAL SKOUSEN
verbs the stem for the future and the conditional tenses is, in most cases, identical to
the infinitive. For example, all verbs whose infinitives end in a syllabic r show this
regularity:
infinitive future
battre battra
suivre suivra
parattre paraitra
prendre prendra
Most verbs with infinitives ending in a non-syllabic r also take future and conditional
forms identical to the infinitive:
salir salira
partir partira
plaire plaira
dire dira
ecrire ecrira
Verbs ending in rir are exceptional to this regularity:

courir courra
conquerir conquerra
mourir mourra
Numerous verbs ending in oir take a different kind of future-conditional stem, as in the
following examples:
avoir aura
mouvoir mouvra
pouvoir pourra
vouloir voudra
savoir saura
voir verra
devoir devra
valoir vaudra
pleuvoir pleuvra
Nonetheless, there are some verbs ending in oir that do have a future-conditional stem
that is identical to the infinitive:
boire boira
croire croira
pourvoir pourvoira
prevoir prevoira
THE VERBAL SYSTEM OF FRENCH 197
There are only a few other exceptions to this regularity:

etre sera
aller ira
tenir tiendra
venir viendra
Now the linguistically-significant question is: Do speakers of French ever realize this
surface regularity between the infinitive and the future-conditional stem ? Traditionally,
the theory of generative phonology has denied any direct relationship between surface
forms like the infinitive and the future-conditional stem. Instead, generative phonol-
ogists have postulated unique underlying representations and phonetically-plausible
rules to account for morphological variation. In the generative phonological approach,
the future saura of the verb savoir would not be considered exceptional, even though
the two forms are so different on the surface. Generative phonologists would typically
postulate a unique underlying representation such as save for this verb and then allow
phonetically-plausible rules to convert save to the correct surface forms depending
on the particular suffixes added to save. The underlying representation for the future
would be something like save + ra, where ra represents the future. The underlying
infinitive would be something like save+r, where r stands for the infinitive marker.
First of all, stress would be assigned to the last syllable, and then natural (phonetically-
statable) rules would apply in sequential order. A representative derivation of savoir
and saura might be like the following:
save + r save + ra underlying representation
saver savera stress assignment
savwar e -> wa
savara e -» a / [-stress]
savra a -» 0 / [sonorantJC CV
saura av -» au
sora au -> ï
Even though we get [sora] in one case and [savwar] in the other, the generative
phonological solution claims that the speaker accounts for the underlying regularity
and does not view the surface variation as being exceptional.'
Of course, the generative phonological solution is not the only one. Another possible
solution would be that speakers directly account for the surface regularity; they do
not memorize the future-conditional stem for each irregular verb, but instead they
learn that the future-conditional stem is the same as the infinitive. In other words,
for most irregular verbs, the future or conditional form is made by adding the proper
future or conditional suffix to the infinitive. Exceptions to this regularity will have to
be memorized. This second theory would predict that in language acquisition,
1
See Schane (1968) for a generative phonological treatment of French.
198 ROYAL SKOUSEN
speakers would tend to remove exceptions to this regularity. In addition, adult speakers
will comprehend the 'incorrect' forms children are using since they too will have
learned this regularity when they learned the language. In studying the historical
development of the language, we should see a random loss of exceptional forms in
favor of the regularity.
In the historical development of French, there have been numerous verbs that
originally had future-conditional stems that were not identical to the infinitive, but
which have now been changed so that the regularity holds. For example, the verb
boire, according to the normal historical development, should have a future-conditional
stem buvr-. This stem (or a variant thereof) was retained by some speakers down to the
17th century, but has now been replaced by the stem boir-. In a similar way, the future-
conditional stem of croire should be crerr-, but again this stem has been replaced by
the stem croir- (Fouche 1967:395). Another example is voir, which even up to the
modern language retains the historical future-conditional stem, verr-. During the
16th century, however, speakers frequently used the future-conditional stem voir-,
based on the infinitive form voir. Of course, the old stem verr- is still retained in this
commonly used word, but in the words pourvoir and prevoir, the regular future-
conditional stems pourvoir- and prevoir- did overcome the old historical stems
pourverr- and preverr- (Pope 1961:367; Fouche 1967:410).
Finally, even the now irregular future-conditional stem ser- for the verb etre
historically replaced an exceptional form in accordance with this regularity. In Latin
the future forms were based on the exceptional stem er-, so that the form era, for
example, would have developed into ier in modern French. But on the basis of the
infinitive *essere, a new future-conditional stem esser- was created and later the
initial syllable was dropped, giving the new stem ser-. This replacement took place
very early in French; the old future forms (like ier) were quite rare even in the 12th
century (Fouche 1967:424). IrTother words, throughout the history of French, there
has been a tendency to make the future-conditional stem agree with the infinitive.2
Gregoire's analysis of the speech of his children gives further evidence that speakers
are capturing this regularity. In acquiring the language, his children predicted various
future tenses on the basis of the infinitive. For example, they created future forms like
tenirai, mourirons, and voirai in place of the exceptional futures tiendrai, mourrons,
2
There is also historical evidence that some speakers have learned the reverse pattern, that the
infinitive is based on the future-conditional stem. For example, in Old French, infinitive forms like
ardoir and saillir were replaced by ardre and saudre. The future forms of these verbs were historically
ardra and saudra (Pope 1961: 338). In dialects there have been similar analogical changes. For example,
the infinitive form venir has been replaced by viendre on the basis of future forms like viendra (Fouche
1967: 227). Such historical changes are not surprising since there should be no strong directional
relationship (syntactic, semantic, or otherwise) between the infinitive on the one hand and the future
and conditional forms on the other. It would seem, however, that a given individual speaker accounts
for the regularity in a single way; speakers make a choice between taking the infinitive form or the
future-conditional stem as basic. We noticed (see below) that Gregoire's children consistently base
the future forms on the infinitive, never the other way around.
and verrai. Each of these future tenses were formed directly from the infinitives tenir,
mourir, and voir, and were used for some time until the exceptional forms were
memorized. The fact that Gregoire himself could easily comprehend the forms that
his children were using is itself evidence that he too had accounted for the future-
conditional stems on the basis of the infinitive (Gregoire 1947: 125-6).
There is evidence for other surface regularities in French. Consider, for example,
the present subjunctive. The stem for the first and second person plural forms is, for
most verbs, identical to the non-stressed indicative stem, as in the following examples:
esperer esperons esperions
semer semons semions
aller allons allions
salir salissons salissions
tenir tenons tenions
mouvoir mouvons mouvions
valoir valons valions
prendre prenons prenions
boire buvons buvions
The only difference is in the endings. There are only a few exceptions to this regularity:
avoir avons ayons
Stre sommes/etes soyons/soyez
pouvoir pouvons puissions
savoir savons sachions
faire faisons fassions
We can, in fact, find substantive evidence that speakers account for this regularity and
actually learn that the non-stressed subjunctive stem is the same as the non-stressed
indicative stem. For example, the verb vouloir originally had the following forms:
indicative subjunctive
voulons veuillons
voulez veuilliez
These subjunctive forms were later replaced by forms based on the non-stressed
indicative stem vow/-:
veuillons/veuilliez -> voulions/vouliez
Similar examples are found in the following verbs:
tenir: tenons/teignons -» tenons/tenions
venir: venons/veignons -» venons/venions
prendre: prenons/preignons -» prenons/prenions
valoir: valons/vaillons -» valonsy'valions
200 ROYAL SK.OUSEN
In other words, throughout the history of French, speakers have eliminated exceptional
subjunctive forms in favor of forms that are based on the non-stressed indicative
stem (Fouche 1967:88).
A third example of a surface regularity is that the imperfect stem is the same as the
non-stressed indicative stem. In the modern-day language, there are no exceptions
at all to this regularity:
avoir avons avais

etre sommesletes etais
esperer esperons esperais
acheter achetons achetais
aller aliens allais
salir salissons salissais
tenir tenons tenais
savoir savons savais
prendre prenons prenais
boire buvons buvais
faire faisons faisais
Historically, there was an exception to this regularity; namely, the verb etre. The
Latin form corresponding to etait was erat, and according to the normal historical
development, this form appeared in early French as either ieret or eret. Later, the
second e was elided, giving either iert or ert. Nonetheless, these forms do not appear
in French after 1300. In their place, we find forms like estei(t). The second person
plural form was estes (> etes). Since the only exception to the regularity between the
non-stressed indicative stem and the imperfect stem was the verb estre, we should not
be surprised that speakers would eliminate forms like iert in favor of forms like esteit
(Fouche 1967:421-2).
Some historical linguists have claimed that the imperfect stem est- was introduced
because of the infinitive form estre (Fouche 1967: 422). This analogical change would
claim that speakers postulated a regularity between the infinitive and the imperfect
stem. For regular verbs, the infinitive stem is the same as the imperfect stem, as in
esperer I esperais and acheterI achetais. But among the irregular verbs, no such relation
is at all obvious (nor was it obvious at the time the old historical forms like iert were
replaced):
hair haissais haissons

partir partais partons
devoir devais devons
voir voyais voyons
battre battais buttons
paraitre paraissais paraissons
coudre cousais cousons
moudre moulais moulons

craindre craignais craignons
dissoudre dissolvais dissolvons
lire lisais lisons
ecrire ecrivais ecrivons
Moreover, there are absolutely no examples (except for the purported change in etre)
of imperfects that have been analogically changed to agree with the infinitive stem.
There are too many exceptions to this regularity for speakers to capture it. A more
compelling reason why speakers cannot capture this supposed regularity is that there
is already an exceptionless regularity available.
The use of analogical change as evidence for a psychologically-real regularity is
somewhat different from the normal usage of analogy in historical work. The neo-
grammarians proposed that there are two types of linguistic change: (1) unexceptional
application of sound laws, and (2) analogy. In most instances, sound laws tended to
create surface irregularity, and analogy was viewed as the means by which speakers
would make the surface forms more regular. Unfortunately, there were no limitations
placed on analogy and so in the neo-grammarian framework any form that could not
be explained as a result of a phonetically-plausible sound change must be due to
analogy and almost anything might be used as the impetus for the analogical change.
There was no real attempt to restrict the power of analogy, and as a consequence
almost any non-phonetic change could be accounted for by any number of possible
analogies.
In this paper I am using a restricted theory of analogy. In particular, analogical
changes are not random, but tend to occur in directions. For instance, Gregoire's
children consistently replaced exceptional forms for the future by forms based on the
infinitive. Such analogical changes can be used as evidence for a psychologically-real
regularity between the infinitive and the future-conditional stem. Analogical changes
occur when speakers remove exceptions to psychologically-real regularities. In
particular, the analogies considered in this paper are based on surface patterns of
alternation. New speakers are accounting for surface regularities rather than under-
lying phonetically-statable rules. Sometime in the past, speakers may have accounted
for the underlying phonetically-plausible regularities, but at a later time, speakers are
unable to get these underlying regularities and instead learn a surface regularity
that may not be statable in phonetic terms. Exceptions to the surface regularity must
be learned, but such exceptions may be occasionally lost over a period of time.
Analogical forms introduced by new speakers replace exceptional forms. In this sense,
analogical change is not viewed as the speaker's attempt to create a surface regularity,
but rather to eliminate exceptions to a surface regularity that he has already captured.
On the other hand, if he were capturing the phonetically-plausible rules based on
underlying regularities, there would be no tendency for analogical changes to take
place. In many cases then, analogical changes are additional evidence that speakers
202 ROYAL SKOUSEN
are no longer capturing rules that reflect the historical development of the language.
Another area in the French verbal system where generative phonologists have
postulated rules in order to account for surface alternations is in the present indicative.
Although most of the phonetically-plausible rules postulated account for the surface
alternations of irregular verbs, there are rules also postulated to account for the
alternation of regular verbs such as acheter, which has the following forms in the
present indicative:
achete [ajst] achetons [ajt3]
achetes [ajet] achetez [afte]
achete [ajst] achetent [ajet]
Two phonetically-plausible rules might be postulated in order to account for these
forms. The first rule would reduce a non-low front vowel like å to a neutral a vowel
in a non-stressed position. Then the 3 vowel would be deleted in certain environments.
These rules would apply to derive the surface forms of regular verbs like acheter.
underlying representation ajet ajst+S ajet+e
stress assignment ajet ajeto afete
vowel reduction afatS ajbte
schwa deletion ajt5 ajte
Although phonetically-plausible rules like these may actually be postulated by some
speakers in order to account for the surface alternations in regular verbs, as a whole
speakers have nonetheless tended to eliminate such alternations. In the regular
conjugation, speakers have generally favored a predominant form and have eliminated
competing forms rather than postulating phonetically-plausible rules (or, in fact,
any kind of rules) in order to account for the alternation.
One historical rule that has altered the surface forms of the present indicative is a
vowel deletion rule. In stems of two or more syllables, if the last vowel in the stem
was unstressed, it was frequently deleted. For example, liberal > livre and liberare >
livrer. In the present indicative, such a rule allowed the final vowel of some verb
stems to be deleted in the first and second person plural forms, since in these cases
the ending rather than the stem received the stress. In the other persons, the vowel
was not deleted because it was stressed. Thus, in early French, we find the following
forms for parier:
parol parlons
paroles parlez
parole(t) parolent
Later levelling took place, with the form pari generalizing. Thus, in modern French,
we have a unique surface representation for this verb: je parle, nous parlons, etc.
This generalization was not blocked, even though there existed an independent noun
in the language, parole, that retained the ï vowel. The levelling in this case shows that
the rule deleting o was not really productive any longer. Otherwise, there would be no
reason to explain why the levelling took place. The fact that the noun parole did not
change to parle shows, in addition, that the noun was morphologically disconnected
from the verb at the time the levelling took place. The important fact is that the French
speaker removed a surface irregularity (parol ~ pari) from the present indicative and
ended up with a uniform surface stem pari (Fouche 1967:12-15).
An example of a verb which generalized in favor of the stem with the vowel is
araisonner. Due to the same vowel deletion rule, this verb had the following forms in
the present indicative prior to the fifteenth century:
araison(e) araisnons
araisones araisn(i)ez
araisone(t) araisonent
Again, there was a surface irregularity; there were two competing forms (araison ~
araisn). In this case, the form araison was generalized. The traditional explanation is
that araison was generalized because of the independent noun raison. However, as we
noticed from the previous example, the stem parol did not generalize in the present
indicative, despite the existence of the nounparole. If there really is a principle of inter-
connection between noun and verb forms in French, it is quite weak and influences
changes sporadically and infrequently (Fouche 1967:15-16).
More recent examples of this rule of vowel deletion are verbs like ach(e)ter, which,
as we have already seen, can occur with two surface stems, [ajet] and [ajt]. In
popular speech during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, there
was a tendency to generalize the reduced form, in spite of the attempts of grammarians
such as Mauvillon to prevent such levellings: "[beaucoup de Fransais] disentfachete,
fepoussete, f empaquete, il empaquete, Us depaquetent, en prononcant Ye de la penul-
tieme muet, comme s'il y avait fachte, fepousste, fempacte... au lieu qu'il faut
ecrire et prononcerfachete, fepoussete, il empaquete... parce que deux e muets ne se
peuvent jamais rencontrer de suite" (Fouche 1967:20). In general, there is a strong
tendency to eliminate the results of vowel deletion in French, even though the result
may not seem phonetically plausible.
Another historical change that caused surface irregularities in the present indicative
involves changes in stressed vowels. For example, an a vowel was diphthongized in
stressed position, so that a verb like aimer originally had the following forms:
aim amons
aimes amez
aime(t) aiment
In this case, the stem with the diphthongized vowel generalized, giving nous aimons,
for example. The stem variation aim ~ am was replaced by a single surface stem aim.
Again, this change took place despite the existence of the noun amour (Fouche
1967:61). An example of a verb that generalized the stem with the undiphthongized
vowel is darner.
204 ROYAL SKOUSEN
claime damans
claimes clamez
claime(t) claiment
The modern language now has je clame rather than je claime. In this case the com-
peting stem claim was replaced by clam (Fouche 1967:59).
Other examples of vowel alternations in the present indicative that were due to
phonetic rules include:
M/ ~ oi enuie enoions
i ~ oi prie proions
In the first example, emu was generalized, so that nous enoions has been replaced by
nous ennuyons in modern French (Fouche 1967:41). In the second example, the
singular stem is again generalized, so that we now have nous prions instead of nous
proions in modern French (Fouche 1967:40).
We can explain the steady loss of surface alternation in the regular conjugation if
we assume that French speakers postulate a single underlying representation for
regular verbs and, if necessary, rules to produce any surface variation. But if speakers
do not capture the rules and learn only the surface alternations, then the tendency
over time is to take one of the surface forms for the underlying representation and
simply eliminate the competing form. When the rule deleting o in parol/parlons was
no longer captured by speakers, then speakers eliminated one of the forms in favor
of the other. Similarly, the fact that some speakers had replaced [ajet] by [ajt]
is evidence that those speakers did not capture rules to account for the alternation.
In this paper I have considered only a few of the possible regularities that speakers
might be postulating in order to account for the verb morphology of French. Several
points, it would seem, are rather clear. First, speakers tend to account for surface
regularities in preference to underlying regularities.3 Some of the regularities are not
unlike statements found in pedagogical works on French. Second, analogy, if properly
constrained, can be used as substantive evidence to show that speakers are accounting
for certain non-phonetic surface regularities. In this regard, the unrestricted use of
analogy in historical work should be re-examined, so that the concept of analogy may
be more closely related to the concept of psychologically-real regularity. In the original
sense of the word, analogy refers to the systematic regularity and not to the analogical
change itself. The analogical change is actually a change into the regularity that the
speaker has already captured.
3
In my articles "Evidence in Phonology" and "On Capturing Regularities" I give further evidence
for this conclusion and discuss more fully the notion of substantive evidence in phonology.
REFERENCES
Fouche, Pierre
1967 Le verbe frartfais, etude morphologique (Paris: Klincksieck).
Gregoire, Antoine
1947 L'apprentissage du langage, 11. IM troisieme annee et les annees suivantes (Liege: Bibliotheque
de la Faculte de Philosophie et Lettres de l'Universite de Liege).
Pope, M. K.
1961 From Latin to Modern French with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman (Manchester:
Manchester University Press).
Schane, Sanford A.
1968 French Phonology and Morphology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).
Skousen, Royal
1972a "On capturing regularities", Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting of the Chicago
Linguistic Society, 567-578.
1972b "Evidence in phonology". To appear in Studies in Generative Phonology, ed. by C. W. Kisse-
berth (Edmonton, Alta.: Linguistic Research, Inc.).
PAOLO VALESIO
HYSTERON PROTERON AND THE STRUCTURE OF

DISCOURSE
Today when it has become clear that historical linguistics has made a comeback and
occupies a position not too removed from the central one that it used to have in the
past century, one also notices that linguists are acutely aware of the problematic
nature of all basic notions in historical linguistics.
Thus, there is probably no linguist today who would claim that we have a full-
fledged theory of the diachronic aspect of language, or that the position of diachronic
linguistics vis-ä-vis the other fields of linguistic research is clearly defined. This sense
of the problematic nature of the field is perfectly appropriate. However, it seems to
me that there is a blind spot, an area of excessive optimism, in this general picture
of caution. This is the assumption that the task of diachronic linguistics is to account
for the way linguistic entities change, coupled with the assumption that it is clear
which are the linguistic entities involved.
Of course, this is A basic problem in diachronic linguistics, and perhaps (although
this is doubtful) it could be seen as THE basic problem in this field. But I would like to
question the idea that it is the only one. If we assume that diachronic linguistics is
concerned with all aspects of language development through time, then it does not
seem true that the study of the changes undergone by specific entities exhausts all
aspects of this development. To be sure, it is possible to say that even the aspect of
language development about which I am going to formulate some observations here
can be expressed by the general notion of change; but if so, then the notion is different
enough from the one current in historical grammars to warrant some discussion.
An important aspect of the development of language is the complex of distinctive
features that can be assumed to differentiate a given stage in the development of a
given language (or group of related languages) from its (their) preceding and following
stages.
The specific problem that I am going to discuss in the following pages (and which,
although narrowly defined, cannot be exhausted here) makes sense, as a significant
problem in diachronic linguistics, only on the background of the articulated idea of
208 PAOLO VALESIO
linguistic development suggested above; that is only on the background of an idea

that does not equate linguistic development exclusively with a series of changes in a
set of specific entities in the grammar. This problem (which could be studied in any
linguistic group at any stage in its history) will be treated here with reference to the
early stages in the history of the Romance languages (in particular, with reference to
Old Provengal) and to the relationships of this early stage with Latin.
There can be no doubt that the general characterization of which I talked above is
felt as a problem in Romance linguistics. Some statements referring to it will illustrate
the paradoxical (and unsatisfactory) nature of our understanding of complexes of
linguistic features at the present time. The simplest and most straightforward ap-
preciation in this sense can be exemplified by Lausberg (1971.1:108):
Non appena i volgari romanzi vengono impiegati essi stessi in funzione letteraria, non
mancano di cadere, a loro volta, sotto 1'influsso formativo del latino letterario contemporaneo,
il latino medievale, e delle sue norme grammatical! e retoriche.
A questo influsso le lingue letterarie romanze del medioevo e dell'epoca moderna devono
la loro evoluzione come strumenti dello spirito, come latrici di valori cultural! — allo stesso
modo in cui le letterature romanze si riallacciano alle forme della letteratura latina medievale
e della liturgia. — Linguisticamente, tale influsso si manifesta soprattutto nei latinismi dotti
del lessico e della sintassi romanzi.
The first thing to notice here is that, while the reference to lexical latinisms is corro-
borated by specific instances, the appreciation about syntax remains undeveloped, and
no linguistic phenomenon is quoted in its support.
A more balanced and realistic view is expressed in Zumthor (1971):
... d'une maniere generate, ce n'est que par Fintermediaire du latin que la grammatica put
influencer les langues litteraires romanes.
Celles-ci, quand elles emergent au niveau litteraire, sont ainsi dejä marquees par un
prealable. Mais ä mesure qu'elles affermissent leurs structures et developpent leurs traits
originaux, elles tendent ä s'emanciper. Tout en restant, dans une large mesure, tributaires du
latin, elles obeissent ä un dynamisme propre, createur de formes d'expressions particulieres,
sans equivalent dans la tradition classique ... mais qui, parfois, purent exercer quelque
action sur I'ecriture latine.
The trouble is that as soon as one starts elaborating a more balanced description,
one is faced with contrasting evaluations, and the attempt to find a compromise
between them is scarcely persuasive, although this kind of purely formal compromise
has been, and still is, the preferred solution in Romance linguistics.
Notice, for instance, the potential contradiction between the 'dynamisme' described
in the quoted passage and the 'rusticite' pictured in the following sentence, which is
the continuation of the preceding quote:
les langues romanes resterent longtemps genees, specialement dans l'emploi des figures, par
la rusticite de leur syntaxe, inhabile ä rendre les articulations de la pensee.
A distinction of functional dialects is only of limited help to solve this conflict, although
HYSTERON PROTERON AND THE STRUCTURE OF DISCOURSE 209
the following description by Sutherland (1959) gives an appreciation of the strategic

importance of Old Provencal in this respect:
Latin being the language of all the domains of intellectual activity, the vernacular is not truly
integrated into the life of the community, and lacks the breadth and vigor which could have
come from being used in all classes and in all activities of life: it is, on the other hand, free
from restricting traditions. It is not subject to the rulings of normative grammar, and it can
modify and develop means of expression according to its needs without offending against
established canons.
Old Provencal is a particularly interesting example of this type of language, as it became
the medium of a highly sophisticated society in literature, while still cut off from functioning
as the medium of intellectual disciplines.
Now, appreciations like these raise more questions than they can answer. Thus,
Romance linguists could and should ask themselves: (a) can the syntactic structures
of the early stages of the Romance languages best be characterized as 'complex and
sophisticated' or as 'naive'? (b) should the transition from the earliest, preliterary,
period to the period of literary maturity be seen as the passage from a native simplicity
to a more complex structure, this latter being a consequence of the increasing in-
fluence of Latin structure (which is apparently the implication of the Lausberg state-
ment), or should this transition rather be characterized as such that there is no
'primitive' period, but rather the development from a Latin-based complexity to a
more original kind of complexity, which at the beginning is 'clumsy' but later becomes
so subtle and mature as to influence Latin syntax in its turn ?
I think that questions like these (and the related and more detailed ones that can
be added) are basic for any extensive research in diachronic syntax, and that they
imply something more than the simplistic idea of change that underlies even the more
detailed analyses developed in contemporary diachronic linguistics.
What is required is, at least, the realization of the complex relationship between
conservation and innovation in syntactic structures (a relationship that is so much
more intricate than that relevant to diachronic phonology and morphology),' and the
willingness to submit to systematic analysis, accepting them as matters of linguistic
significance, facts that are traditionally treated (or better, traditionally hinted at in a
generic way) as pertaining to a very loosely defined idea of 'style'.
1
The following distinctions by Collinson (1959) are relevant to the analysis proposed here (Collinson
is speaking of Germanic syntactic structures, but of course everything he says can, mutatis mutandis,
be applied to Romance):
The term 'tradition' as used here comprises the following types of phenomena: (1) those which form part
of the classical heritage, especially of Latin modes of expression; (2) those which arose in medieval times in
cultural centres, e.g. in France, Northern Italy or Germany and were disseminated in neighbouring countries
through cultural contact and thus became part of a common European tradition; (3) in a few cases the survival
of forms going back to primitive Germanic or even to Indo-European and still shared by several languages
of the branch or family. The contrastive term 'divergence' may be used (1) for developments outside the
European cultural traditions and unique to the language concerned, consisting sometimes in the modification
of the traditional form and sometimes in a spontaneous creative act; (2) for syntactical procedures, which
though common to many different languages, may be considered to have an independent origin in view of
their very universality and thus are not under suspicion of influence from the Classical, European or even
Indo-European corpus of tradition.
210 PAOLO VALESIO
This, in fact, is one of the principal obstacles that explains the scarcity of diachronic
syntactic research, at least in the Romance domain. It is necessary, then, to avoid
confusion between the analysis of syntactic structures and the characterization of
literary devices. The latter, of course, may be relevant to linguistic research, and in
fact it would be naive to think that the fact that the data I am going to discuss are
taken from literary texts does not have any relevance to their analysis.
But a fruitful interchange between these two dimensions can be established only
after they have been clearly distinguished. In fact, one of the most important theoretical
implications of a research like this is the possibility to test in what sense philological
information is relevant for the linguistic analysis of certain types of discourses.
Another obstacle that must be avoided is the confusion between objective linguistic
facts and statements by grammarians. The contemporary reflex of this is the systematic
ambiguity between the two senses of the notion 'grammar' (the speaker's competence,
and the account of this competence), but it must be remembered that in the tradition
of Romance philology, we face a situation that (as noted above) is often one of plain
confusion between straightforward linguistic analysis and vague normative evaluations.
It is time now to define, against this general background, the method and scope of
my research.
I want to examine a part of that area in the linguistic development between Latin
and Early Romance that has to do with figures of speech. I have tried to show else-
where (Valesio 1971 and Valesio, to appear a) that the so-called figures of speech
(better, figures of rhetoric, and better still, figures tout court) are not a literary super-
structure; on the contrary, they are basic linguistic structures, constituting an integral
part of every grammar at every level of usage (spoken or written, literary or non-
literary, formal or informal, etc.) and they must be accounted for basically in the
same way as other phonological, syntactic and semantic structures are accounted for.
The fact that in order to account for them in a systematic way more or less radical
modifications have to be introduced in the mechanism of linguistic description (cf.
Valesio, to appear b) does not mean that these figures are extralinguistic entities, but
rather points to the fact that contemporary methods of linguistic description are still
far from capturing the structure of language in its actual complexity.
Thus, as far as Romance linguistic history is concerned, my contribution, in its
initial part, is intended as a 'negative' one: the first thing I would like to show is that
it does not make sense to characterize different stages of linguistic development on the
basis of the presence versus (supposed) absence, or even of the richness versus scarcity,
of figures of speech. Figures are universal elements in the grammar, and thus they
cannot be seen as the expression of a more or less sophisticated use of language.
It is not by chance, then, that the quoted statement by Zumthor (1971), to the
effect that "les langues romanes resterent longtemps genees, specialement dans 1'emploi
des figures, par la rusticite de leur syntaxe", is not supported by any reference to
specific phenomena. The point is that it cannot be supported, because it is false by
definition, if figures are taken seriously as linguistic entities.
Specifically, the figure I am going to discuss, once it has been proven to exist as an
autonomous linguistic entity (which is far from being obvious, and thus requires a
detailed analysis), can be considered as a universal syntactic process. Thus, it falls
into the last point in the quoted classification by Collinson (1959), the one concerning
the syntactic processes that "may be considered to have an independent origin in view
of their very universality".
This, however, is a weak point that should be restated in Collinson's classification:
while the author is correct in contrasting processes like this with the processes
subsumed under the category of 'tradition', he seems to be wrong in putting such a
phenomenon under the label of 'divergence'. This latter notion is appropriate to the
phenomenon described in the preceding point in the author's list.
But in the case of the (putatively) universal syntactic processes neither the category
of tradition nor that of divergence (or innovation) are relevant, because both reflect
the notion of history as a limitation on the appearance of certain phenomena (which
either continue to exist on the basis of a specific body of tradition, or diverge from
this body as the results of some later innovations).
What is relevant here is the alternative notion of history (usually neglected, especially
in the various brands of philosophical historicism, in favor of the preceding one),
as the repeated appearance through time of certain phenomena that should be taken
as reflecting general processes in the human mind, and thus as giving us an image of
certain aspects of its nature.
The importance of this negative contribution to the general syntactic characteriza-
tion of stages in linguistic history should be emphasized. It is conceivable, in fact,
that future research will show that such a characterization is in itself impossible (and
this will be an advance in the elaboration of the theory of language, since at present
it seems that there is no way of showing this).
But, whether or not this is the ultimate result, it is very important, at the present
moment, to restrict this characterization in a meaningful way, eliminating apprecia-
tions that are too vague because they refer, without making this explicit, to universal
processes.
But a discussion such as the one I am going to develop here also embodies a positive
contribution to diachronic linguistics and to the general theory of language, along the
following two lines: on the one hand the exploration of whether there are significant
differences, in the realization of the figure in question, between Latin and the other
Romance languages; and on the other hand, the examination of the insights into the
structure of language that result from bringing together traditional linguistic analysis,
as reflected in the definition and illustration of figures of speech, and contemporary
linguistic analysis.
As soon as any figure of speech is approached from a systematic linguistic point of
view, the need for critical evaluation becomes apparent. The domain of a figure of
speech seems always to be more or less artificial; the figure brings together hetero-
geneous facts without coordinating them in a clear way, so that Occam's razor has to
212 PAOLO VALES1O
cut deep into this conglomerate before any figure can be systematically used as a
linguistic notion.
The analysis that follows concentrates on the various components of the figure of
HYSTERON PROTERON (henceforth HP), with the purpose of distinguishing those parts
of its domain that merely duplicate well known linguistic processes (and thus do not
need to be assigned to a specific linguistic construct called HP), and those parts that
constitute a special area (and a little explored one) within the grammar, and thus
justify the existence of this figure as an autonomous and significant linguistic entity.
This redefinition of HP will result in a better understanding of various syntactic
and semantic phenomena.
II
As it happens with all other figures of speech, the figure we are dealing with comes
down to us through a multiform tradition of different definitions and terms. As far
as terminology is concerned I will stick to the most widespread one: Hysteron
Proteron, that is (in a literal translation of the Ancient Greek phrase), 'the last [is
put] first'.
More substantial is the problem of the different definitions,2 and in fact to try to
understand the limits and the implications of the definitions of HP is to start analyzing
its structure.
One traditional definition of HP is based on a purely syntactic notion: in this
definition any change in the order of two or more constituents within a sentence,
with respect to some order of these constituents conceived of as the basic or normal
one, constitutes an HP. (A distinction is sometimes made between HYSTEROLOGIA,
interchanging one word with respect to another, and Hysteron Proteron proper,
interchanging more than two words, but I will subsume both cases under the general
category of HP.)
This definition raises two problems: that of the distinction of two levels of syntactic
structure, and that of the nature of the process of permutation. As for the first aspect:
in a theory of syntax in which the only relevant syntactic level is that of the strings
of sentence constituents in their surface order the scope of the notion of HP is
relatively restricted, because it only concerns deviations from the normally accepted
patterns of surface word order.
But in a theory of syntax which recognizes at least two levels, the surface one and
the underlying one (leaving unprejudiced here the problem of the nature of the deepest
level), the scope of the notion of HP is much enlarged, because in the derivation of
surface structures from underlying structures, where the order of the constituents is
often not the same order in which these constituents will appear on the surface, there
2
Here as well as in the following pages the implicit reference is to the standard collection of
definitions in the field of rhetoric; namely Lausberg (1960). Almost all the data are my own. In the
few cases in which I use examples referred to in other works, I will indicate this.
is ample room for the kind of interchange that HP describes. Since it is the latter
theory of syntax that constitutes the framework of the present discussion, it would
seem that the reality of HP as a significant linguistic entity is automatically affirmed,
But this is not the case, because the enlargement of this notion tends to make it useless,
bringing it to coincide, or apparently coincide, on the one side with another figure
traditionally recognized in rhetoric, namely the figure of ANASTROPHE, which is
generally subsumed under the category of HYPERBATON,3 and on the other side with
one of the processes most frequent in transformational syntax, that of permutation.
This would seem to show that HP is a duplication of other notions, which are
already well established in the rhetorical tradition as well as in contemporary linguistic
analysis. Since anastrophe is actually another term for permutation, we could say
that HP is synonymous with permutation. But the situation is more complex: HP,
as the term itself shows, imposes a constraint that cannot be normally applied to
permutation.
The specification of this point shows the first sense in which HP, a figure of classical
rhetoric, may be said to give us some insights into linguistic structure: it makes us
aware of a feature in the process of permutation which is not usually made explicit.
Permutation of any two constituents is not oriented; in other words, it is indifferent
whether the permutation is seen as a shifting of the initial element to the right of the
following element, or as a shifting of the following element to the left of the initial one.
Now, from the point of view of HP the only relevant movement is the latter, while the
former would have to be defined as a PROTERON HYSTERON ('the first [is put] last'), a
term and a notion which are absent from the tradition of classical rhetoric. To be sure,
one could treat HP as a general term covering both HP proper and PH, but this would
be simply a terminological trick, which does nothing more than bring to light the
duplicative, parasitic nature of the concept of HP with respect to that of permutation.4
Permutation, as it is well known, appears in numerous transformational rules,
optional or obligatory. For instance: Adverbial Movement (e.g. I see her sometimes -+
Sometimes I see her); Indirect Object (e.g. He sent a billet-doux to her -* He sent her a
billet-doux); Yes/No Question (e.g. You are happy -» Are you happy 1); ff7/-Ques-
tion (e.g. You are unhappy -» Why are you unhappy'!); Negative (e.g. / am happy -*
/ am not happy); Passive (e.g. The cook breaks the eggs ->· The eggs are broken by the
cook); etc.5
In all of these cases, the direction of the movement of the constituents is not
3
The greatest obstacle standing in the way of any modern systematic approach to figures of speech
is the intercrossing of two opposite kinds of confusion: on the one hand different terms are used to
designate linguistic entities at least partially similar, and on the other hand there are cases in which
the same term is applied to different linguistic entities.
4
This feature is seen in Lausberg's (1960, paragraph 462) definition of anastrophe: "Besteht ein
Ganzes von zwei Bestandteilen in der Reihenfolge xy, so liegt in der Umstellung yx eine anastrophe
vor".
5
Of course these examples are merely allusive: there is no direct passage from sentence to sentence;
rather, the sentences are simplified representations of the underlying structures involved.
214 PAOLO VALESIO
specified; indeed it seems to be intrinsically non-specifiable, and the term of permuta-

tion (which is neutral as to direction) is the symbol of this. The most that can be said
is that there seems to be an intuitive tendency to conceive of permutations as such that
the shorter constituent gets moved around the longer constituent, rather than vice
versa (this could reveal an intuitive search for economy in the handling of linguistic
entities). This seems to be the reason why the rule of Adverbial Movement is normally
called in this way: the adverbial constituent (even when it involves a prepositional
phrase) is shorter than the rest of the sentence. This, then, would be an HP.6
On the other hand, the Negative rule is usually conceived of as involving the
movement of an initial sentence modifier (thus, a short constituent) into the sentence
that follows it, thus constituting a PH. But this, although interesting for a theory of
performance, is too thin a foundation for the recognition of HP: after all the rule of
Adverbial Movement could be called simply the rule of Adverbial Switching, or the
Adverbial rule.7
In this way we are prepared to look critically at some of the examples traditionally
proposed for HP, and some of those that can be added to the traditional ones.
(1) Transtra per et remos

'Across the thwarts and the oars' (Virgil, Aeneid 5, 663).
(2) ... Impius ex quo/Tydides sed enim ...
'But in fact the son of Tydeus, impious because of this act' (Virgil, Ibid. 2,
163-164).
(3) Paues parasitus quia non rediit a Caria.
'You are afraid because the parasite did not come back from Caria' (Plautus,
Curculio 225).
(4) Quoi homini di sunt propitii, lucrum ei profecto obiciunt.
'To the man whom gods regard with favor, indeed to him they offer gain'
(Plautus, Ibid. 531).
(5) ... Pistoclerum, quern ad epistulam/Mnesilochus misit ...
'Pistoclerus, to whom Mnesilochus sent a letter' (Plautus, Bacchides 176-177).
(6) Mirum quin te aduorsus dicat.
'It's really surprising, that he does not speak against you!' (Plautus,
Amphitruo 750).
6
Actually there might be more serious reasons for considering adverbial movement as an HP:
namely the possibility for the Adverbial Phrase to occupy different positions in the sentence. This
would make an HP notion, shifting the Adverbial Phrase, more natural than a PH notion, shifting
the rest of the sentence. I owe this suggestion to Donna Jo Napoli.
7
The typology of permutations in Dubois et al. (1970) is relevant here:
1 ° On peut separer deux elements de la sequence pour permettre 1'insertipn d'un ou de plusieurs autres.
2 ° On peut extraire un voire plusieurs olements de la sequence pour les 'proieter' en son debut ou en son fin.
3 ° On peut encore intervertir I'ordre en procedant ä l'inversion de deux ou de plusieurs eloments.
But, as the authors observe,
Deux de ces processus ou les trois peuvent agir conjointement dans la permutation d'une meme sequence;
il arrive au'une meme permutation s'explique aussi bien par 1'un que par l'autre de ces processus.
(7) E si-us deschanton, me qu'eri cau ?

'And if they mock you, what does it matter to me ?'
(Bernart de Ventadorn, "Be-m cuidei", 1.48).
(8) Qe molt per fan genta sa fis
'Because his end was very noble' (Cercamon "Lo plaing comenz", 1.18).
Of these eight sentences (the first two from Classical Latin, the following four from
Archaic Latin, and the last two from Old Provencal) the first two are quoted in the
tradition as instances of HP, and the following six have been put in by me in order to
show the same process at work in analogous situations.8
If we concentrate on these putative HP's leaving aside the other figures involved,
like the ANACOLUTHON (Quoi ... ei) appearing in (4),9 we notice that all these are
permutations where there is no criterion for establishing the existence of a backward
or left-oriented movement of the second constituent (thus, an HP) rather than a
forward (or right-oriented) movement of the first constituent, whether the moved
constituents are single words (as in most of the examples) or whole phrases as in (2),
whose underlying structure is reflected by:
(2bis) Sed enim Tydides impius ex quo.
What all cases like these show, therefore, is that HP here is not relevant as a linguistic
concept: the notion which is relevant here is that of Anastrophe, that can be considered
as a synonym of permutation, provided that the traditional notion of Anastrophe,
which points to interchanges of single words (as it actually happens in most of the
quoted sentences), be enlarged so as to include interchanges of whole phrases, as it
happens in (2). A substantial distinction of some interest, in this set of sentences, is not
that concerning HP, but rather that opposing what happens in (8) to what happens in
the preceding seven sentences.
In the first seven sentences the permutation involves two adjacent constituents,
while in (8) the permutation, although switching two adjacent constituents as it
8
Sentences (1) and (2) are taken from Lausberg (1960), while the other sentences are firsthand data.
The editions used for the authors quoted are the following: for Plautus, Lindsay (1956); for Bernart de
Ventadorn, Lazar (1966); for Cercamon, Jeanroy (1966). Here as in the following sentences the
emphases indicating the constituents involved in the described processes, are mine. All translations
are mine; they have no other function than to serve as glosses to the text.
9
Anacoluthon, which is the locus of various important syntactic processes, would require a special
research. It can be defined (tentatively and informally) as the surface structure arising from the
deletion of a personal pronoun antecedent (when there is no Noun Phrase antecedent) OR from the
ADDITION of a personal pronoun after the relative pronoun, when there already is a Noun Phrase
antecedent (the latter is the type of anacoluthon represented by (4)). Here again we face the vagueness
of the greatest part of the traditional definitions. Consider, for instance, Riffaterre (1960) defining
anacoluthon as "breaking off of the sentence when it has reached the point where readers can guess
the rest". In the first place, the definition is of limited use, being presented in terms of performance
rather than competence. But above all, it cannot be accepted because it is a definition of ELLIPTIC
sentences rather than anacoluthon: as we see from (4), anacoluthon does not imply any interruption
in the sentence.
216 PAOLO VALESIO
happens in all other cases, involves three constituents, the underlying structure being
reflected by:
(8bis) Qe molt per gentafon safis.
In other words, the permutation in (8) has as a result the intercalation of another
constituent between the two constituents of a phrase. This difference could be ex-
pressed by using the traditional notion of TMESIS. In the rhetorical tradition Tmesis
is defined in a too narrow way, as the intercalation of another constituent between the
constituents of the compound word (cf. Lausberg 1960:358), and a more general
definition is preferable, like the following:
Tous les cas ou deux morphemes ou syntagmes que 1'usage grammatical unit otroitement se
trouvent separes par 1'intercalation d'autres elements (Dubois et al. 1970: 83).10
It would seem, then, that the conclusions to be reached in the case of HP, although
methodologically useful, are of a negative character: it looks as if the application
of the notion of HP does not lead to a better understanding of the structure of language.
In fact, this would seem to be a case in which a systematic linguistic approach, when
applied to a traditionally recognized figure of speech, shows that this figure is a pseudo-
construct, apparently delimiting a specific linguistic domain but actually providing
no more than a picturesque label for a variety of processes, some of which have long
been recognized in traditional syntactic analysis, and which should be kept distinct
and assigned to different areas in the grammar and different types of rules, especially
transformation rules.
I want to show, however, that such a conclusion would be premature and false, and
that in fact the research on HP has just begun. It is possible to show that there are
several groups of permutations where the direction of movement is relevant to the
definition of the rule. In all cases in which the direction is relevant, and the movement
is from right to left, HP is a significant linguistic notion. HP, then, affords interesting
insights into the structure of language because it shows how complex and richly
articulated the process of permutation really is.
The arguments that follow, showing how various types of permutations have to be
restricted as far as the direction of movement is concerned, are based on a broad idea
of naturalness in linguistic rules. The theme of naturalness in linguistic descriptions is
10
Another possible analysis would be to define Anastrophe as operating without crossing phrase
boundaries, that is, as operating either within the boundary of one and the same phrase or with the
switching of whole phrases, while Tmesis would operate across phrase boundaries. Thus, in the
quoted set: (1), (2), (4), (5), and (6) would realize Anastrophe while (3), (7), and (8) would realize
Tmesis. But it is doubtful whether this distinction is really useful. It must be noticed, also, that there
are rules which can operate indifferently within phrases or across phrases: for instance, the so-called
"flip-flop rule" which interchanges affixes and verbs. If we analyze Auxiliary as a constituent separate
from both Noun Phrase and Verb Phrase, we see that the "flip-flop rule" operates within the
Auxiliary (in all the cases where the Auxiliary is constituted by something more than Tense) as well
as across phrase boundaries, when it interchanges an affix in the Auxiliary with the Maul Verb in the
following Verb Phrase.
a very delicate one. Naturalness is evoked in many conflicting analyses, without being
specifically defined. Yet an evaluation of naturalness seems inescapable, if one wants
linguistic descriptions to be realistic statements rather than abstract manipulations.
I propose the following tentative definition of a criterion (or rather, a complex of
two criteria) for evaluating ONE aspect of naturalness in syntactic descriptions:
Given two (or more) versions of the same rule, that version is to be preferred that
accounts for the syntactic processes involved in a more unitary way, and/or that can be
more directly connected to the assignment of semantic features.
I will consider some groups of data for the analysis of which this broad conception
of naturalness is relevant.
Ill
At first sight, this group of sentences appears to realize the same process as the one
at work in the (l)-(8) set.
(9) Scio equidem te animatus ut sis
'Indeed I know what your intentions are' (Plautus, Trinummus 698).
(10) Illaec aduorsum si quid peccasso, Venus,
'If I will sin in anything against her, ï Venus' (Plautus, Rudens 1348).
(11) Cupio dare mercedem qui illunc ubi sit commostret mihi.
º want to offer a reward to the person who can show me where he is'
(Plautus, Curculio 590).
(12) Patronus qui uobis fuit futurus perdidistis.
'You have just lost the man who could have been your protector' (Plautus,
Asinaria 621).
(13) Si inuenio exitiabilem ego illi faciam hunc ut fiat diem.
'If I find him I will make sure that this will be a fatal day for him' (Plautus,
Epidicus 606).
(14) Ei ne noceret quam domui habui capram.
'So that the goat I had at home would not hurt her' (Plautus, Mercator 230).
In fact these sentences represent a different syntactic phenomenon: precisely, they reflect
a constraint on the direction of a permutation, which was absent in the (l)-(8) set,
where the permutation was neutral as to direction.
The contrast is seen most clearly when one compares (6) with (10). Sentence (6)
reflects one of the most widespread cases of Anastrophe in Plautine Latin: the
permutation of the preposition aduorsusj-um with the Noun Phrase to which it is
connected (cf. Bacchides 127, Amphitruo 936, Aulularia 690, Persa 200, Poenulus 400,
and so on).
In all such situations, the case feature of the Noun Phrase remains unchanged,
thus showing that the Noun Phrase is still governed by the preposition. But, as we see,
the situation in (10) is different: the Noun Phrase represented by the /'//- pronoun is
not in the accusative case (as it would be if it were still governed by the aduorsum
218 PAOLO VALESIO
preposition, as in fact it is in the underlying structure), but in the nominative case.

Suppose that we consider this as an Anastrophe, just like the (l)-(8) cases, that is,
as a direction-indifferent permutation. This would mean, in the present case, that it is
indifferent whether we conceive of the permutation as a shifting of aduorsum to the
right of the ill- pronoun, or as a shifting of ill- to the left of aduorsum. But let us
consider the implications of each one of these two shifts in different directions. In
the first alternative, we would have two processes between which there is no natural
connection: first aduorsum shifts to the right of ill-, then (in a separate development)
ill- acquires the nominative case feature. But in the second alternative we have a
natural connection between the two processes: the fact that it is /'//- that is moved out
of the adverbial clause to which it belongs (the underlying structure is, of course, of
the form: Si quidpeccasso aduorsum illanc, Venus,), gives the only natural motivation
for its anomalous treatment from the point of view of case features; its extraposition
to the front of the sentence leads naturally and directly to its reinterpretation as the
sentence subject.
Thus if we want to describe this process in a natural way, we have to impose a
constraint on the direction of the permutation, requiring that it be realized as a left-
oriented movement; but a left-oriented permutation is an HP. The HP is thus justified
as an autonomous linguistic concept, describing a specific kind of direction-con-
strained permutation.
Mutatis mutandis, the same reasoning must be applied to all other cases, from (9)
to (14):
animatus tu -» te animatus
ubi illic -»· illunc ubi
perdidistis patronum -* patronus ... perdidistis
ut exitiabilis hie fiat dies -» exitiabilem ... hunc utfiat diem
capra quam domui habui -» quam domui habui capram
As it can be seen from my summary descriptions of the changes taking place in the
derivations of these sentences, there are many specifications to be made for a full
typology of HP processes. This full typology cannot be developed here, and I will
confine myself to the following observations.
While HP takes place at a relatively shallow level, very close to the surface structure,
it may apply at different sublevels, and it may operate more than once in a sentence
(I will return to this later): for instance, in (9) it applies once, after the process extra-
posing tu animatus from the right ofut has already taken place, while in (12) it applies
twice, first shifting the Noun Phrase patronus to the left of perdidistis, then shifting the
whole relative clause qui uobis fuit futurus to the left of perdidistis. Also, the HP may
have effects on case feature reassignments without the necessity that an HP operates
for each reassignment: for instance in (13), after HP has applied twice, extraposing
exitiabilis and then hie to the left of ut, the case reassignment involves also dies,
which is not moved.
Finally, we see that the HP permutation, like the Anastrophe permutation, can be
more or less radical: (9), (10), (11), and (14) show a permutation which leaves the
involved constituents adjacent, while (12) and (13) show a permutation with an inter-
calation of constituents, that is (as it was specified above with respect to Anastrophe)
a Tmesis. 11
If we turn from this analysis to the rhetorical tradition, we find that there is a
figure which is sometimes referred to the cases listed above: the figure of PROLEPSIS.12
At this point we get an idea of the insights that a recognition of HP can give.
Prolepsis as traditionally employed (cf. for instance Bennett 1966) basically refers to
the shifting of personal pronouns, especially in indirect questions. Thus, in a traditional
treatment, out of the (1)-(14) set of sentences: (3), (9), (11), and perhaps (13), would
be analyzed as realizations of Prolepsis and opposed to the rest. For these reasons,
such a distinction is not significant, on the contrary it obscures the linguistically
relevant facts.
On the other hand, once HP is recognized as a constraint on permutations, Prolepsis
becomes a useless reduplication, and we are led to see that the apparently different
processes going on in the (9)-(14) set share the same basic feature that opposes them
to the processes in (l)-(8). In particular, we see that the process in question does not
have to be restricted to single Noun Phrases (as it is the case with the traditional
treatment of Prolepsis), but can involve whole clauses, as it happens with the relative
clause in (12), and especially with that in (14), where it is only the HP shifting the
quam clause to the left ofcapra that explains the reassignment of the case feature to the
latter Noun Phrase.
These facts are sufficient to justify the recognition of HP as a significant and
autonomous linguistic notion. One set of grammatical phenomena which require a
concept like HP is both necessary and sufficient to guarantee its existence. But there
are many more groups of linguistic facts which require HP and thus show other
insights deriving from the application of this notion. The second group of facts if
represented by the following sentences.
(15) Sed neque Medorum siluae ditissima terra/nee pulcher Ganges atque auro
turbidus Hermus / laudibus Italiae certent, non Bactra neque Indi / totaque
turiferis Panchaia pinguis arenis.
'But neither the land of the Medes so rich of woods nor the beautiful Ganges
11
There are other figures in these sentences on which it is impossible to elaborate here. Suffice it
to say that sentence (11) illustrates the second type of Anacoluthon, that is, the type arising from the
deletion of a peisonal pronoun antecedent: here, the deletion of ei (or iff/) before qui (see sentence (4)
illustrating the other type, and footnote 9).
12
Here again we face the unsatisfactory state of the tradition: in Lausberg (1960) a definition of the
syntactic process of Prolepsis is not found; instead we read (p. 425) a definition of Prolepsis which is
far too generic to be of real use, since Prolepsis is denned as a synonym of the broad process of
ANTICIPATION, which has to do with the general meaning of discourses (the technique by which the
speaker quotes, and refutes, in advance some of the arguments that could conceivably be presented
by his adversaries).
220 PAOLO VALESIO
nor the Hermus whose waters are dark with gold, let them not compete for
praise with Italy, nor Bactra, nor India, nor Panchaia all covered by incense-
filled sands' (Virgil, Georgica 2:136-139).
(16) Volf e refranh ez aplana / son dous chantar et afina,
'Modulates and repeats and softens his sweet song and refines,' (Jaufre
Rudel, "Quan lo rius", 11.5-6).
(17) Quar anc genser crestiana / nonfo, ni Dieus nan la vol, / Juzeva ni Sarrazina;
'Because there never was a more beautiful Christian lady, and God does
not allow it, nor a more beautiful Jewess or Saracen;' (Ibid. 11.17-19).
(18) Bo-m saup quar gens Peitavina / de Berri e de Guiana / s'esgau per lui e
Bretanha.
am glad because the people of Poitou and Berry and Guyenne rejoice
because of him, as well as those of Brittany' (Ibid. 11.33-35).
(19) Pro ai del chan essenhadors / entorn me, et essenhairitz
have many male teachers of songs around me, and many female teachers'
(Jaufre Rudel, "Pro ai del chan", 11.1-2).
(20) Ben entendon subtils ditz ni ben pauzatz
'Well understand subtle and elegantly articulated utterances' (From the Vida
of Guiraut de Borneill).
(21) Farä, troncando i sudditi, tal danno, / e distruggendo il bei paese ausonio,
'He will cause, by cutting down his subjects, such damage and by laying
waste the beautiful Italian land,' (Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso 3:33,3-4).
(22) I rilevati fianchi e le belle anche, / e netto piü ehe specchio il ventre piano,/
pareano fatti, e quelle coscie bianche, / da Fidia a torno, o da piü dotta mano.
'The high waist and the beautiful hips, and the flat stomach smoother than
a mirror, seemed to have been shaped, and those white thighs, by Phidias
in a well rounded sculpture, or by an even more skillful hand' (Ibid. 11:69,1 -4).
(23) Muitos tambem do vulgo vil sem nome / väo, e tambem dos nobres ao
profundo
'Also many among the nameless rabble go, as well as many among the
noblemen, to the infernal depths' (Luis de Camöes, Os Lustadas 4: 41,1-2).
(24) corpo , e os membros genitais / por näo ter ao nadar impedimento;
'His body naked, and his private parts / in order not to be slowed down in
swimming;' (Ibid. 6:18,1-2).
(25) Ou como banhar possa ferro bruto / no sangue auorrecido, estaua vendo, /
ou como as naos em fogo Ihe abrasasse
Or how he could bathe the cruel blade in that hated blood, he was thinking,
or how he could burn up the ships' (Ibid. 8:83,5-7).13
13
Editions used: for Virgil, Funaioli (1938); for Jaufre Rudel, Jeanroy (1915); for the Vidas of the
Troubadours, Boutiere and Schutz (1964); for Ariosto, Debenedetti and Segre (1960); for Camöes,
Rodrigues (1921). The enumeration of stanzas and lines, absent in Rodrigues (1921), has been checked
on Ford (1946). The Virgilian and the Old Provencal examples are my own; the Camöes examples
are signaled by Rodrigues, and he also points to the Ariosto sentences.
The analysis of (15), the first sentence in this group (and also the most complicated
because of the quantity of its conjuncts) would be valid, mutatis mutandis, for all
the others in the set. (Again, my attempt here is to extract the basic mechanism; to be
sure, each sentence would require some specific qualifications and remarks.)
Sentence (15) is a compound sentence, whose underlying structure is constituted by
a series of sentences conjoined by copulative conjunctions (neque, or nee, or non,
or a mixture of the three), for a total of six sentences. Thus, in a simplified version
which omits constituents irrelevant here, the underlying structure is of this type:
(15bis) Neque Medorum terra laudibus Italiae certet, neque Ganges laudibus Italiae
certel, neque Hermus laudibus Italiae certet, neque Bactra laudibus Italiae
certet, neque Indi laudibus Italiae certent, neque Panchaia laudibus Italiae
certet.
The alternatives available in order to account for the presence of the sentence laudibus
Italiae certent at that point (and at no other points) in the surface structure are
essentially three: (a) discontinuous deletion (gapping); (b) direction-indifferent
permutation; (c) HP. The interpretation by means of a gapping rule (along the lines
of Ross [1970], and cf. Koutsoudas [unpublished]) would be artificial: why would
the deletion operate before and after that conjunct, and not on it ? It would be equally
artificial to assume a direction-indifferent permutation. What would the motivation
be for shifting the neque Bactra — neque Indi — neque Panchaia complex to the right
of the laudibus Italiae certent sentence, thus leaving a series of Noun Phrases hanging
in the air ?
In contrast with these, the HP interpretation appears to be the most natural one.
The HP rule that (as already noted) is very close to the surface operates after the
conjunction reduction has operated, and the only remaining laudibus clause is at the
end of the whole compound sentence; HP shifts this clause back to the middle of the
compound sentence. This, I repeat, comes at the end of the derivation, when the
general structure of the sentence has been already made clear. The difference in
naturalness between HP and Proteron Hysteron here is clear: to shift forward a
series of Noun Phrases beyond the Verb Phrase at the end of a sentence does not have
any particular justification, while the shift of the final Verb Phrase backwards in
between the preceding series of Noun Phrases can be functional to the obtainment
of a more varied structure in a long compound sentence.
This can be extended to all sorts of constituents, as the quoted sentences show:
whole clauses, as in (15), (18), (22), and (25), or even complexes of coordinated
clauses, as in (17); Verb Phrases, as in (23); Noun Phrases (including Adjectival
Phrases), as in (16), (20), and (24); Adverbial Phrases, as in (19) and (21). The justifica-
tion for HP in these cases can be seen even more clearly if we contrast the quoted
sentences with sentences that do not require such a shift, but can be accounted for by
means of a deletion rule. Consider, for instance:
222 PAOLO VALESIO
(26) Ambae auro, pictis incinctae pellibus ambae,

'Both wrapped in golden ornaments, both in furs of different colors'
(Virgil, Georgica 4:341-342).
(27) Anc no fetz semblan vair ni pic / la bela ni forfachura
'Up to now my beautiful lady never showed me a changing or inconstant
attitude, nor an offensive attitude' (Bernart de Ventadorn, "Lancan folhon",
11.25-26).
(28) Bernartz de Ventador si fo de Lemoisin, d'un chastel de Ventador, de paubra
generation, fils d'un sirven e d'una fornegeira,
'Bernart de Ventadorn was of Limousin, of the castle of Ventadorn, of low
lineage, son of a servant and of a bakerwoman' (from the Vida of Bernart
de Ventadorn).
Here one must distinguish between (26), where the best interpretation is that based on
a Proteron Hysteron, shifting incinctae forward, and (27) and (28), where the best
interpretation is that of deletion, of fetz in (27) and efo in (28).
In particular in (28) any permutation of the constituents as they now appear in the
surface structure would lead to structures equal in their difficulty to the one presented
here.14 Examples like the immediately preceding ones reinforce, a contrario, the
validity of the notion of HP.
In arguing for HP in (15), and by extension in the other cases, I spoke of a 'more
varied structure'. This could be called a stylistic appreciation; but what has been
said at the beginning should be recalled, about the dangers of confusion between
analysis of linguistic structures and other kinds of analysis.
In particular, style should not be confused here with the notion of literary devices
or with the idea of personal idiosyncrasies (the latter can always lead to the sweeping
of intricate linguistic facts under the rug).
As far as this research is concerned, style points to general features of the languages
as such, independently from peculiar uses in individual authors; in this way, style is
seen as part of the grammar.
In order to show the independence of these factors I presented in (16), (17), and
(18), three lines taken from the same poem and written by a poet whose work is
characterized in the following way:
Le style n'est pas moins simple que la versification: on n'y constate aucune recherche du mot
rare ou de l'expression originelle (Jeanroy 1915).
This characterization seems to me to be valid, and it shows that HP should be treated
14
This is an interesting case of how philological information helps in analyzing the underlying
structure of sentences. First of all, abundant and explicit coordination is one of the distinctive features
of these texts. For instance: Girautz de Borneill sifo ... Efo ... mas ... fo ... Efo ..
But, even more important, there is a parallel and contemporary version of the life of Bernart de
Ventadorn, which is closer to the underlying structure than the quoted version: Bernartz de Ventadorn
sifo de Limozin, del castel de Ventadorn. Homfo de paubra generation, fils d'un sirven qu'era formers,
(both sentences are from the respective Vidas in the quoted Boutiere and Schutz 1964).
as a general linguistic feature. 'Stylistic' considerations are very often connected to

semantic considerations and in fact the cases just analyzed introduce my discussion
of another group of cases in which the argument for HP is based on the treatment of
the feature [+emphasis]. Here again, to treat [+emphasis] as a stylistic feature
does not seem particularly helpful, and it is more consistent to consider it a semantic
feature. Consider the following sentences:
(29) Que Carles diet e trestute sa gent, / ligentilz quens, qu'il fut mort cunquerant.
'So that Charles can say, and all his knights, the noble count, that he died
a winner' (Chanson de Roland 174:2362-2363).
(30) Que la neus, can ilh es nuda, / par vas lei brun'et escura.
That snow, when she is naked, seems beside her brown and dark' (Bernart
de Ventadorn, "A! tantas", 11.39-40).
(31) Sai venc lo reis, don es aunitz, / esser soudadies logaditz
'Here came the king, for which he is shamed, to be a mercenary soldier'
(Bertran de Born, "Puois lo gens", 11.8-9).
(32) El mon tan bon amic non ai, / fraire ni cozi ni paren, / que, srm vai mo joi
enqueren, / qu'ins e mo cor no-l n'azire.
º have no such a good friend in the world, nor brother cousin or relative
that, if he insists in asking me about the object of my love, that I don't
hate him from the bottom of my heart' (Bernart de Ventadorn, "Lone terns
a", 11.19-22).
(33) Cist sirven fals fan a pluzors gequir / pretz e joven e lonhar ad estros, / don
proeza no cug que sia mays, / qu'escarsetatz ten las claus dels baros;
'These false servants lead many to abandon valor and noble liberality and
voyaging afar, and thus I do not think that nobility is going to survive,
since avarice rules the barons' (Cercamon, "Puois nostre temps", 11.25-28).
(34) 1st trobador, entre ver e mentir, / afollon drutz e molhers et espos, / e van
dizen qu'Amors vay en biays, / per que'l marit endevenen gilos, / e dompnas
son intradas en pantays, / cui mout vol hom escoutar et auzir.
'These troubadours always oscillating between truth and falsity, debauch
lovers and wives and husbands, and keep saying that Love proceeds in an
oblique fashion, because of which husbands become jealous, and ladies
have often fallen prey to anguish, [these troubadours] that people are so
eager to listen and to lend an ear to' (Ibid. 11.19-24).
(35) Mas car pres al segle tan de dampnage, / taing qifom l'azir, e car ergoillz
ha pres / forz'e consir d'aunir prez e parage.
'But since the world tolerated such an offense, I believe that one should
hate it, and since pride has found enough strength and enough cunning to
shame merit and nobility' (Bertolome Zorzi, "SH monz fondes", 11.9-11).
(36) Quar dregz fora, segon ma conoissenza, que-1 membramenz ses retrar
m'aucies / e tot home qu'es de valor abrics,
224 PAOLO VALESIO
'Because it would be proper, in my opinion, that the remembrance [of it],

[even] without my telling, would kill me, and every man who is a follower
of valor'(Ibid. 11.15-17).
(37) Pero deportz m'es e d'auzir volers
'But it is a pleasure for me, and [it is] my desire to hear' (Arnaut Daniel,
"L'aur'amara", 1.12).
(38) E fo horn de bas afar, mas savis horn f o de letras e de sen natural
'And he was a man of humble birth, but he was a learned man of letters and
of natural intelligence' (from the Vida of Guiraut de Borneill).
(39) ... Fara-1 per fol tener / Qecs, car dis tan gran vilania.
'He will make him, Queu, appear as a fool, because he made such a vulgar
statement' (Jaufre 1672-1673).
(40) Cy gist et dort en ce sollier, / qu 'amours occist de son raillon / ung povre petit
escollier, / qui fut nomme Frangois Villon.
'Here lies and sleeps, in this attic, whom Love killed with his arrow, a poor
humble scholar, who was named Frangois Villon' (Frangois Villon, "Epi-
taphe", 11.1-4).
(41) Ventos soltos Ihe finjäo e imaginem / dos odres, e Calipsos namoradas,
'Escaped winds they represent and imagine for them, from the goatskins,
and loving Calypsos' (Luis de Camöes, Os Lusiadas 5:89,1-2).
(42) Que a troco do metal luzente, e louro, / entrega aos inimigos a alia torre, /
do qual quasi afogada empago morre.
'That in exchange for the shining yellow metal she betrays the high fortress
to the enemies, from which [metal], as if drowned, she died, as a punishment'
(Ibid. 8:97, 6-8).
(43) Ce que nulle autre n'eut pu faire, eile fendit, en y posant un bougeoir, le
marbre de la cheminee.
'What nobody else could have done, she broke, while putting a taper-stand
on it, the marble of the mantelpiece' (Anatole France 1927).
(44) Calculatrice, la societe industrielle est condamnee ä former des consom-
mateurs qui ne calculent pas.
'With all its scheming, industrial society is condemned to shape customers
who are incapable of scheming' (Roland Barthes 1967).
(45) Ces illogismes, qui ont ete enonces et denonces ici au fil des jours, faut-il
les rappeler, et d'abord ceux des communistes?
'These illogical attitudes, that have been described and criticized by us day
by day, is it necessary to recall them, and first of all those of the Communists ?'
(From Le Monde: Selection hebdomadaire, March 9-15, 1972).
(46) Teoricamente quanta un orario, la pronuncia dovrebbe essere omogenea e
autoritaria.
'Theoretically like a timetable, pronunciation should be homogeneous and
authoritative' (Giacomo Devoto 1971).
(47) So far there has been a discouraging lack of progress made in carrying out,
which the world expects, of the political decisions which we reached at the
conference (Roosevelt 1945).15
In all these cases it would be possible to generate the phrases or sentences involved
in the switches by means of a general, non-oriented, rule of permutation; but this
analysis would present the rule of permutation and the assignment of a semantic
feature of [+emphasis] to one of the constituents involved in the switch as separate
and independent processes. On the other hand, the analysis of these switches as
instances of HP presents the assignment of the [ +emphasis] feature to a given
constituent as the direct consequence of the movement of that constituent. The latter
treatment is the more consistent and natural one, since it gives an explanation of the
feature assignment; therefore it should be preferred.
Thus, in (21) if we conceive of the switch in the second sentence as such that it shifts
the complementizer que to the right of the Noun Phrase // gentilz quens we need two
separate and not specifically motivated rules to attribute the feature [ +emphasis]
to the Noun Phrase and to insert the personal pronoun il after the complementizer.
However, if we analyze this switch as an HP, extraposing the Noun Phrase to the
front of the complement clause, we have a natural motivation for the emphatic inter-
pretation of the Noun Phrase (that, so to speak, puts the Noun Phrase in a more
dramatic position with respect to the preceding sentence), and for the appearance of
the personal pronoun which is inserted to fill the void left by the extraposed Noun
Phrase.
Sentence (29) is interesting also because it shows the possibility of the rule of HP
applying twice in the same sentence, with two different justifications: first, the same
syntactic justification which is valid for the analyzed (17)-(25) sentences, then the
justification pertinent to the [+emphasis] assignment. However, the first application
of HP is doubtful, because the structure could also be generated by a deletion, as in the
case of (27) and (28).16
15
Editions used: for the Chanson de Roland, Mortier (1940-1949); for Bertolome Zorzi's poem,
Schultz-Gora (1919); for Cercamon, Jeanroy (1966); for Arnaut Daniel, Cavaliere (1938); for Jaufre,
Lavaud and Nelli (1960); for Fiancois Villon, Thuasne (1923); for Bertran de Born: Hamlin,
Ricketts, and Hathaway (1967).
19
The following is an interesting illustration of the kind of relevance that philological information
can have for linguistic interpretations; in the other main version of the Chanson de Roland besides the
Oxford one, namely the 'Franco-Italian' one we have the same structure:
(29bis) Che Carlo die e stretote sa gant, / ligentils cans qu'il seit mort conbatant. (195: 2526-2527;
cf. Queirazza 1954)
The presence of the same HP rule, with the same possibility of interpreting it as applying twice with
different conditions in the same sentence, operating on constituents which are morphologically
different because of dialectal variations, evokes two theoretical important possibilities:
(a) that the components of the grammar can be differentiated from the point of view of the intensity
of their dialectal variation, phonology and morphology being more exposed to this variation than
syntax;
(b) that the systematic comparison of variants of the same text permits to assess in a non-im-
pressionistic way the relative solidity and diffusion of grammatical rules.
226 PAOLO VALESIO
An analogous doubt on the double application of HP exists in the case of sentence

(37). If we analyze the underlying structure as:
(37bis) Pero deportz nfes e voters m'es d'auzir
we can claim that we simply have a deletion of the second of the two identical Verb
Phrases. But if we analyze the underlying structure as:
(37ter) Pero m'es deportz e nfes volers d'auzir
then we have to assume an HP (applying either before or after the deletion) to explain
the [ + emphasis] feature of deportz.
In any case we have to assume at least one HP in another section of the sentence.
What we have in the underlying structure after the deletion (if we analyze it as (37bis))
or after the first application of HP (if we analyze it as (37ter)) is a CHIASMUS: the e
conjunction coordinates a Noun Phrase and a Verb Phrase (while in the underlying
structure, it coordinates two Verb Phrases). When we have a structure like this, both
the preservation and the modification of this structure are to be conceived as functional
to it: in other words, if the surface structure is the same, we must be ready to recognize
its chiastic nature, and if it is different, we must be ready to analyze the change as
pertinent to the Chiasmus.
Here, the Chiasmus has been eliminated from the surface structure; thus the most
natural way of analyzing the derivation is to describe it as functional to this blocking
of the Chiasmus. The simplest way to do that, generating the surface structure in
which e coordinates two Verb Phrases (thus coming back to the underlying situation,
at least in this respect) is to shift the Verb Phrase (or better, the Prepositional Phrase
containing the Verb Phrase), d'auzir, to the left of the Noun Phrase, volers; and this is
an HP.17
The situation of (38) is related to this. But here (unlike (37)) the Chiasmus is
preserved on the surface; moreover, it is clear that HP applies twice. The underlying
structure is:
(38bis) E fo horn de bus afar, mas fo horn savis de letras e fa horn de sen natural.
If one argues for two successive applications of direction-indifferent permutations,
the shift of horn to the right of savis and of fo to the right of both the preceding words
is not motivated, and one would need a separate statement for the assignment of the
feature [ +emphasis] to the Noun Phrase savis horn, a feature that is here structured
in the framework of the Chiasmus (Verb-Noun-Adjectival Phrase: Adjective-Noun-
17
Presenting this poem Cavaliere (1938) classifies (37) as an instance of the figure of apö koinou. But
this does not seem correct. A concise classical definition of apb koinou (see the Greek original in
Lausberg 1960) is: 'a diction that is uttered once, and then taken out'. (A Latin example from Cicero,
quoted there, is: Uicit pudorem libido, timorem audacia, rationem amentia 'Lust won over decency,
boldness [won over] fear, folly [won over] reason'.) But in (37) nothing is missing: there has been
no deletion, but a rearrangement of the constituents.
Verb). On the other hand, the analysis is natural if we assume two successive applica-
tions of HP: the first operates as a constraint on that general permutation that is the
Adjectival Switch, and the second shifts the new Adjective-Noun Phrase complex
(savis horn) to the left of the Main Verb (fo).
The naturalness of this explanation is confirmed by the fact that the same functional
justification is valid for both steps of the HP, and that this justification is established
on the basis of the process (Chiasmus) which is relevant to the same sentence and is of
the same type as HP, but at the same time is independent from HP. This is the frame-
work for the analysis of the remaining sentences in this set, and in the remarks that
follow I will try to show how the technique proposed above can be naturally extended
to account for the other sentences.
Sentence (39) is analogous to (29): note that the nominative case in Qec-s shows
that in the underlying sentence Qecs belongs to the car clause, not to the preceding
clause (this also explains better the presence of the object personal pronoun -/ in the
first clause). Another aspect of sentences (28) and (29) connects them to sentence (31):
the nature and extent of the relevance of philological information for the linguistic
analysis of sentences. The two lines constituting sentence (31) are followed, in the
poem, by these two lines:
(48) Quar per el fo mortz e träitz, / don es sos linhatges aunitz.
'Because by his agency he was killed and betrayed, a fact for which his
family is shamed' (Bertran de Born, "Puois lo gens" 11.53-54).
Sentence (48) is closer to the underlying structure, and shows the basis for the opera-
tion of the rule that generates sentence (31). The general methodological implications
of the contrast between the relationship linking (29) and (29bis) on the one hand, and
the relationship between (31) and (48) on the other hand, should be pointed out: what
we have seen is that morphologically different sentences belonging to different but
related texts ((29) and (29bis)) may show the same kind of derivation on the basis of
the same kind of underlying structure, while sentences belonging to the same text
((31) and (48)) and with the same general meaning may diverge in the kind of deriva-
tion they represent. Thus we see a possibility of applying to sentences the same kind
of comparison, and of permutation tests, that are traditionally applied in phonology
to isolated sounds. The relevance of philology is this: while comparison and permuta-
tion between sounds can (indeed, have to) be carried out without reference to extensive
contexts, the reference to these extensive contexts is indispensable for the comparison
of sentence types in diachronic linguistics. Note that sentence (48) exemplifies, with
the pair mortz e traitz another type of HP, which will be investigated in another work.
This same type of HP has been presented by some as functioning in sentence (35),
and this, too, will be studied separately.
What interests us here is to note that (35) and (36) exemplify the HP we are analyzing
in this set, insofar as the HP movement explains in the most natural way how the
underlined constituents (a complex sentence with an embedded relative clause in (35),
228 PAOLO VALES1O
and a Verb Phrase in (36)) imply the assignment of the [+emphasis] feature. The
qualification is important because the constituents are not assigned this feature in their
entirety. These two sentences show how the constituent receiving [ +emphasis],
while always including the moved constituent, may be either smaller or larger than
this latter; and precisely: what receives the feature [+emphasis] in (35) is the Verb
Phrase azirar 'to hate' within the relative clause (thus, a part of a part of the moved
constituent), while in (36) it is the whole moved Verb Phrase aucir 'to kill' PLUS the
personal pronoun me.18
The problem of the size of the moved constituents, evoked in my discussion of (35)
and (36), is illustrated in its complexity by (34): here, in order to account for the
structure of a sentence and the assignment of the [ +emphasis] feature it is necessary
to assume an HP anteposing at least the central compound sentence (ranging over
lines (21) and (23)), containing in its turn a complex sentence (because of the embedded
per que('l) relative clause); this is the most conservative interpretation, which assumes
that HP applies after the extraposition of the cui clause which thus begins after espos',
but if this possibility is discarded, then we have an even longer compound sentence,
starting with afollon.19
Problems of comparison and classification of sentence types are also relevant to
(30). The HP (justified, as usual, by the assignment of the [+emphasis] feature to the
underlined sentence) is possible only if we assume that the mechanism operates on the
underlying structure, where the can sentence comes at the end, after the par sentence.
But there is another possibility; namely that (as the result of a previous transformation)
the can sentence comes as a 'parenthesis' at the beginning, immediately after the
complementizer que. In this latter case the surface structure of (30) would be the
result of a Proteron Hysteron (PH).
It would be interesting to try and establish an hierarchy of 'normality', frequency,
etc. between these three structures. A first impression is that the 'pre'-HP structure is
18
Actually, (36) also illustrates the fact that it is not necessary that there is a clear-cut distinction
between HP operating as an alternative to discontinuous gapping (cf. the (15)-(25) set), and HP
justified by the assignment of the [+emphasis] feature (cf. (29)-(47)); and this is true not only in the
sense that the two mechanisms can coexist in the same sentence (a coexistence, which, although not
sure, is a possibility in the interpretation of (29)), but also in the sense that one and the same constituent
may illustrate the shift exemplified in (15)-(25) and at the same time be assigned the [+emphasis]
feature. This is the case in (36). However, the distinction between the two mechanisms is, in general,
necessary.
19
Note, again, the relevance of philological information: this discourse, unlike all the others quoted,
includes a whole cobla, or stanza, and the rhyme schema seems to point in an interesting way to the
underlying structure. In fact, the -ir rhyme, connecting the surface-initial and the surface-final
sentence (and only these) evokes their direct succession in the underlying structure. This raises the
problem, which cannot be dealt with here, of the linguistic level at which rhymes are generated.
Note that the translation of this cobla in Jeanroy 1966 is adequate insofar as it implicitly recognizes
the HP, while the translation in Hamlin, Ricketts, and Hathaway (1967: 61-63) is incorrect, because
the editors base their translation on the surface structure, and thus analyze the cui of the last sentence
as referring to the dompnas of the preceding sentence.
the most frequent, and that it is followed by the 'pre'-PH structure and by the 'post'-
HP (or 'post'-PH) structure, in this order.
In other words, it seems that there is a tendency to leave the clauses in question
either at the beginning or at the end of the complex sentence of which they are a part.
But of course this impression should be checked on an extensive corpus of sentences,
starting with Latin.
As far as this latter language is concerned, a very late Latin example is the following:
(49) Cum ilium, veluti belluam insulsam, Dantes, vir doctissimus, sapiens ac
modestus, ut aequum erat, contemneret,
'Since Dante, a very learned, wise, and modest man, as it was proper,
despised him like an obtuse animal' (Bracciolini c. 1438-1452).20
At the other extreme of this spectrum the modern English structure represented by
(47) shows the vitality of this mechanism: the only natural hypothesis here is that the
which clause comes at the end in the underlying structure. Since we have come to
contemporary data, let us briefly consider sentences (43)-(46), containing Modern
French structures (with an instance from Modern Italian).
The clearest case of emphasis seems to be that of (44) in which the emphasis is
naturally connected to the movement of the Adjective Phrase to the left of the subject
Noun Phrase. The naturalness is confirmed by the fact that the HP here does not
generate merely a general increase of emphasis but specifically an emphasis framed
within the figure of Chiasmus (thus we have here a structure parallel to the one present
in (38)), although the Chiasmus here is not realized in terms of full syntactic symmetry
(that is, involving the same 'parts of speech') but is, so to speak, a Semichiasmus,
involving a mixture of lexical and syntactic relationships.
We have, then: 'calculating' (the Adjective calculatrice): Noun Phrase (la societe
industrielle): Noun Phrase (des comommateurs): 'calculating' (the Verb Phrase ne
calculent pas).
The situation is analogous in (43) and (46). Note that in each of these sentences a
different constituent is subject to HP: in (44) it is an Adjective Phrase (the close-to-the-
surface result of the reduction of a relative clause in the deeper underlying structure),
in (43) it is a whole relative clause, and in (46) it is an Adverbial Phrase.
One of the theoretically interesting implications of the preceding remarks (one that
here can be only stated, but should be applied in the future to a large corpus of data)
is this: first of all there are, in the feature [ +emphasis] as connected to HP movement,
as well as in other realizations of this feature, various relative degrees of intensity (so
that it should be treated as an n-ary feature: [1 emphasis], [2 emphasis], etc.);
in the second place it seems possible in the case of the [+emphasis] feature as con-
20
In the underlying structure, the ut aequum erat sentence could come before Dantes or after
contemneret. As it is, there is a danger of ambiguity, although meaning and context make it clear that
the sentence cannot refer to the preceding Noun Phrases, but must refer to the following Verb Phrase.
230 PAOLO VALESIO
nected to the HP movement, to consider its intensity as directly proportional to the

size of the moved constituents and of the other sentence constituents over which the
movement ranges, and/or to the presence of an independent framework (especially
the framework of some figure, and thus akin to HP) of which the constituent with the
[+emphasis] feature is a part.
We saw the latter case in (44) that can be contrasted from this point of view with
(43). Although in (44) only one word is moved, as against the whole clause moved in
(43), the emphasis appears to be stronger in (44) and this is connected to the fact that,
as noted, the [+emphasis] constituent in (44) is part of the Chiasmus.
As for the former alternative (relative size of the moved constituents and/or of the
space over which they are moved), compare the two (early) Portuguese sentences
constituting (41) and (42): in the former one the HP implies two adjacent constituents,
one of them (the one around which the emphasized constituent is moved) constituted
by an Adverbial Phrase,21 while in the latter a whole clause is moved. Now, the moved
constituent in (42) shows a greater emphasis than the moved constituent in (41),
and this is probably related to what I just observed.
In fact, a distinction based merely on the size of the constituents is not enough:
what I really mean is that showing that the grading of emphasis is connected to the
relative length of the sentence constituents involved in the emphasis-connected shift,
is equivalent to showing that the grading of emphasis is (at least in part) based on
semantic factors. As the comparison between (41) and (42) clearly shows, the two
coordinated Verb Phrases moved in the former sentence do not have the same semantic
'strength' as the clause moved in (42), which describes the central event in the sequence
depicted by that microtext.22
The situation is analogous in the Middle French microtext constituting sentence
(40): the particularly strong emphasis of the shifted relative clause is related not
simply to the fact that a whole clause has been the object of HP, but also specifically
to the fact that this clause describes the central event referred to in the text.
21
Notice that, in (41), the one just described is the only clear HP in the sentence; one could argue
that there is a double HP here, if one interprets the two coordinated verbs as coming after namoradas
in the underlying structure. But this is not necessarily true, since the level of underlying structure
immediately preceding the application of HP could very well be one in which the second occurrence
of the coordinated verbs has been deleted and only the first occurrence remains, immediately after
odres. In this case, only one HP is at work here.
22
These two Portuguese examples are the only ones in this set that are not firsthand, because, as
already noted these and other (putative) instances from Os Lusiadas are listed by Rodrigues, who puts
them under the general category of 'esquema de intercalacäo', in his edition of the text. The basic
limitation of Rodrigues' listing is a general one that keeps appearing in the analyses of figures of
speech: namely the tendency to follow a too narrow semantic model, in which several structures are
treated as manifestation of a peculiar figure which actually show a straightforward sequence of
linguistic elements.
I reexamined all the instances quoted by Rodrigues in Os Lusiadas in this connection and considered
that the only acceptable instances of this movement are the ones I quoted. Those I discarded are:
1:12,1-3, 6; 1:57,5-8; 3:27,2-4; 3:66, 1-4; 3:69,1-4; 4:46,4-8; 6:96,1-6; 10:32,5-8; 10:131,5-8.
The length of the moved constituent and its semantic complexity are also related to
another fact which is of interest for the inquiry into the relevance of philological
information for linguistic analysis: the HP involving long and semantically important
constituents often leads to surface ambiguities. This appears clearly in (40) and (42),
in both of which cases there is the syntactic possibility (unacceptable for semantic
reasons) that the relative clause refers to its immediate surface antecedent (the Noun
Phrase ce sollier and the Noun Phrase alia tone, respectively).23
Of particular interest from this point of view (linguistic evaluation of philological
information) is also sentence (33); in this sentence perhaps more clearly than in all
the other quoted ones the evaluation of HP has important consequences for the
translation. If we do not interpret this complex sentence (or microtext) as continuing
an HP, then we accept the surface order of the sentences as basically reflecting the
underlying order. Thus we can mark explicitly in the translation the causal connection
between the don(t) sentence and the immediately preceding one, translating don(t)
as 'because of which'.
But if we accept the HP interpretation (as it seems necessary to do in order to
explain in a natural way the [+emphasis] feature of the don(tj), then the explicit
causal translation of don(t) would be misleading, because it would suggest that the
relationship between the sentences is just that present in the surface, while in fact
this is not the case.
Thus, we either invert the order of the sentences in the translation (which thus
comes to reflect, at least in this respect, the underlying structure): 'since avarice rules
the barons, because of which I do not think that nobility is going to survive'; or we do
not give an explicit causal translation of don(t), but (reflecting a possibility that is
part of Old Provengal grammar) we translate it as a generic sentence connective, 'and
thus' (which is the solution I adopted).
Finally, sentence (32) is important because it gives us the possibility of looking in a
new way at a phenomenon which, present in the early stages of the Romance languages,
seems today to be blocked (but it is attested in informal English usage): the repetition
of the 'that' complementizer, when this complementizer is separated from the sentence
it introduces by the insertion of another, parenthetical sentence.
If we analyze the si clause as shifted by HP to a position immediately after the
complementizer que we explain in a natural way its semantic value of emphasis, and
the appearance of the second occurrence of the complementizer. The rest of the
complement clause, now, is at the end of the sentence, and the result is that (at a very
shallow level, immediately before the operation of the phonological rules) the que srm
sequence is interpreted as a unified phonological phrase, que si being treated as a
compound complementizer with the meaning 'if. The que complementizer then needs
to be reinserted; it is only now that the phonological rules apply (leaving que before
23
In (40) it is the shifting of the relative clause itself that causes the ambiguity, while in (42) it is
the shifting of the 'coordinated' main clause following the relative clause in the underlying structure.
232 PAOLO VALESIO
initial consonant in its base form, while deleting the final vowel of que before initial
vowel).24
This interpretation goes beyond the case of (32), becoming a generalization on
complementizer-repeating syntactic structures, both Romance and non-Romance:
the repetition of the complement is not the result of a general permutation, but comes
from a specific, direction-constrained permutation; that is, from an HP.
The area of the HP is thus very large, and its hermeneutic capacity is considerable.
To summarize, the existence of HP was proved on the basis of three different groups
of syntactic facts, for all three of which HP furnishes a natural explanation:
(a) Anomalous assignment of case features (cf. sentences (9)-(14));
(b) Intercalation of a constituent in conjoined sentences (cf. sentences (15)-(25)); and
(c) Assignment of a feature [ + emphasis] to certain clauses in complex sentences
(cf. sentences (29)-(47)).
Harvard University.
REFERENCES
Barthes, Roland
1967 "Avant-propos" to Systemes de la mode (Paris: Seuil).
Bennett, Charles E.
1966 Syntax of Early Latin (Hildesheim: Olms) (reprint of the original 1910-1914 ed.).
Boutiere, Jean, et A.-H. Schutz, eds.
1964 Biographies des troubadours: textes provenfaux des A7//e et XIVe slides (Paris: Nizet).
Bracciolini, Poggio
c. 1438-1452 Facetiarum libellus, ed. by F. J. M. Noel (Londini [Amsterdam] 1798).
Cavaliere, Alfredo, ed.
1938 Cento liriche provenzali (Bologna: Zanichelli).
Collinson, W. E.
1959 "Tradition and divergence in the syntax of some Western languages", Transactions of the
Philological Society. 1-13.
Daniel, Arnaut
1938 See Cavaliere.
Debenedetti, Santorre, e Cesare Segre, eds.
1960 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua).
Devoto, Giacomo
1971 (November 30) "Areugario", La Nazione.
Dubois, Jean, et al.
1970 Rhetorique generate (Paris: Larousse).
Ford, J. D. M., ed.
1946 Luis de Camöes, Os Lusladas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
France, Anatole
1927 Le mannequin d'osier (= Oeuvres completes 11) (Paris: Calmann-Levy).
24
Notice that, if we do not accept the HP interpretation, and see this as the result of a direction-
indifferent permutation, we must think of the PH movement as being as plausible here as the HP
movement, but a PH is less natural, because: if the whole complement clause is shifted to the right,
then how do we explain the quel And if the que is left behind, what is the justification for this particular
segmentation of the clause?
Funaioli, Gino, ed.

1938 Pubtti Vergilt Moronis Bucolica, Georgica, Aeneis (Mantuae: Opera Acaderniae Vergilianae).
Hamlin, Frank R., Peter T. Ricketts, and John Hathaway, eds.
1967 Introduction Ü É'ÝßééÜå de fanden provenfal: Textes d'etude (Geneve: Droz).
Jeanroy, Alfred, ed.
1915 Les chansons de Jaufi-Ý Rudel (Paris: Champion).
1966 Les poesies de Cercamon (Paris: Champion).
Koutsoudas, Andreas
1970 "Gapping, Conjunction Reduction, and Coordinate Deletion" (Indiana University
Linguistics Circle: Unpublished MS).
Lausberg, Heinrich
1960 Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik (M nchen: Hueber).
1971 Linguistica rontanza (Milano: Feltrinelli).
Lavaud, Rene, et Ren6 Nelli, eds.
1960 Les troubadours (Bruges: Desclee de Brouwer).
Lazar, Mosh6, ed.
1966 Bernard de Ventadour, Chansons d'amour (Paris: Klincksieck).
Lindsay, W. M., ed.
1956 Titi Macci Plauti Comoediae (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press).
Mortier, Raoul, ed.
1940-1949 Les textes de la Chanson de Roland (Paris: Editions de La geste francor).
Queirazza, Giuliano G., ed.
1954 La chanson de Roland (Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier).
Riffaterre, Michael
1960 "Stylistic context", Word 16, 207-218.
Rodrigues, J. M., ed.
1921 Os Lusiadas. Reimpress o 'fac-similada' da verdadeira V edif o de 1572 (Lisboa: Biblioteca
Nacional).
Roosevelt, Franklin D.
1945 (April 1). Letter to Stalin. Roosevelt and Stalin: A revelation, New York Times, March 27,
1972.
Ross, J. R.
1970 "Gapping and the Order of Constituents", Progress in Linguistics, ed. by Manfred Bierwisch
and K. E. Heidolph (The Hague: Mouton).
Schultz-Gora, Oskar
1919 "Zorzis Gedicht auf den Tod Konradins", Provenzalische Studien, I. Texte (Strassburg:
Tr bner).
Sutherland, D. R.
1959 "Flexions and categories in Old Provencal", Transactions of the Philological Society, 25-70.
Thuasne, Louis, ed.
1923 Francois Villon, Oeuvres (Paris: Picard).
Valesio, Paolo
1971 "On Poetics and Metrical Theory", Poetics: International Review for the Theory of Literature
2, 36-70.
To appear a "Style et grammaire", Proceedings ofTreizieme Congres International de Linguistique
et Philologie Romanes (Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada).
To appear b "The Articulation of Phonological Rules", Proceedings of the Eleventh International
Congress of Linguistics (Bologna Italy).
Zumthor, Paul
1971 "Rhetorique medievale et poetique", Poetics 1, 46-82.
BRUCE WILLIS
THAT ERUDITE ENIGMA REVISITED
When analyzing a Romance language scholars have always been aware of the existence
of the difficult problem of how one should treat that segment of the lexicon which
does not undergo the traditional phonological processes established for that particular
language. These exceptional words have been classified and labeled as 'foreign-
learned layers', 'Latin type', 'erudite', or 'learned'. In recent years generative trans-
formational linguists have dealt with this area of study on a synchronic basis, e.g.
Foley (1965), Harris (1967), Schane (1968), Willis (1969), Saciuk (1969). Very little
has been written about this subject in a diachronic perspective. Ramon Menendez
Pidal states in his Manual de Gramatica Historica Espanola (14):
In this historical study of the language one must grant distinct importance to these two classes
of words. As the popular forms used today are the latest evolutionary phase of those that
composed the living Latin language, they deserve a preferential attention by their complicated
development and by forming the richest background of Spanish and its patrimonial heritage;
the learned forms, on the other hand, by the lack of their development, do not offer as large
an interest for study, and we will not speak of them except by note, [translation mine, BW.]
Perhaps the history of learned forms is transparently easy to trace, but the manner in
which these forms were incorporated by the evolving grammar of a language such as
Spanish is a very interesting area of investigation. In the remainder of this paper I
would like to discuss how successive generations of speakers might have restructured
their grammars in order to account for the ever increasing number of 'Latinisms'
which they encountered in their daily speech.
Some of the phonological criteria most often used to determine learned or semi-
learned status are found in sections A through E.
A. Lenition
1. p/b populacho 'populace' poblar 'to populate'
leoorino 'like a hare' liebre 'hare'
agertura Opening' abrir 'to open'
operar 'to operate' obra 'work'
236 BRUCE WILLIS
2. t/d natation 'swimming' nadar 'to swim'

monetario 'monetary' moneda 'money'
lateral 'lateral' lado 'side'
3. k/g clerical 'clerical' clerigo 'clergyman'
secundario 'secondary' segundo 'second'
B. Syncope
1. u~0 regular 'to regulate' regla 'rule'
vocabulario 'lexicon' vocablo 'word'
2. i~0 nobilidad 'nobility' noble 'noble'
umbilical 'umbilical' ombligo 'navel'
3. o~0 diabolico 'devilish' diablo 'devil'
mezcolansa 'medley' mezclar 'to mix'
4. e~0 literal 'literal' letra 'letter'
apertura Opening' abrir 'to open'
C. Initial Consonant Modification

1. pl~ll plenitud 'abundance' Jleno 'full'
2. kl~ll clamador 'shouter' Jlamar 'to call'
3. fl~ll f lamero 'torch bearer' Jlama 'flame'
4. f~0 fatal 'fatal' hado 'fate'
fabulador 'story teller' hablar 'to speak'
fumar 'to smoke' humo 'smoke'
D. Medial Consonant Modification

1. kt~6 lacteo 'milky' leche 'milk'
nocturnal 'nightly' noche 'night'
2. gn~n signar 'to mark' seaa 'mark'
pugnante 'fighting' puno 'fist'
E. Vowel Lowering
1. i~e virginal 'virginal' virgen virgin
lingual 'lingual' lengua 'language'
silvestre 'wild, rustic' selva 'forest'
2. u~o lupino 'wolfish' lobo 'wolf
lumbar 'lumbar' lorno 'back'
bucal 'pertaining to the mouth' boca 'mouth'
The categories illustrated in the above sections correspond to some of the evolutionary
changes in the phonological development of Spanish. These changes took place over
THAT ERUDITE ENIGMA REVISITED 237
many centuries and therefore many generations of speakers are represented. No

attempt will be made to establish the chronology of these changes for that is outside
the scope of this paper. The learned and semi-learned forms in Spanish are generally
believed to have not been part of the vernacular at the time when some of these
processes were active (i.e. lenition, syncope, vowel lowering, etc.). Learned forms
appear in the spoken language in later periods after these processes had ceased being
productive.
It seems to be that as a child restructured his grammar to incorporate these new
forms his vocabulary would have been divided into classes of items determined by
their special behavior under certain phonological rules. This is based on the assump-
tion that a child forming his grammar would want to relate the pairs of examples
given in sections A-E to a single basic underlying form for each pair. How might a
child have looked at this data ? He probably assigned various morphological features
to certain items in his lexicon and the simplest way of marking these features would
have been with a binary +/— notation. As Chomsky and Halle (1968:373) have
pointed out "if a certain classification is functional in a particular language then it
is assumed to be represented somehow in the internalized grammar of a speaker of
that language. The classification is justified not by the historical development of the
language but by the applicability of phonological rules."
In section A we see that the process of lenition operated on certain underlying forms
resulting in voiceless/voiced contrasts in noncontinuant segments. The child con-
fronted with the new later forms would somehow have to restrict the environment
of his lenition rule so that it would not affect the forms such as operar, apertura,
monetario, and umbilical, but would apply to forms like obra, abrir, tnoneda, and
ombligo. From these examples it appears that it would not be possible to mark only
the root, as some linguists have suggested, since lenition may or may not apply to the
same root depending on the ending it happens to have, e.g. moneda vs. monetario.
Other linguists have suggested listing the root twice, once with one morphological
feature value and the other listing with the opposite value. This approach seems
counter-intuitive and the speaker would have been better off to list two variant forms
of the root with the idiosyncratic information about which form is used with which
affixes. Perhaps another method would have been the possibility of marking the
endings or affixes and have this feature determine whether lenition applies to that
form. But this also fails when one considers the forms opEr + arE [operar], pOpUl +
arE [poblar], and not + arE [nadar]. (Capitals are used to indicate lax vowels.)
Here the speaker found the same formative affix but lenition applied in some forms
and not in others. This approach would have forced the grammar to contain long
lists of exceptions. A third possibility was that the speaker solved his problem by
marking BOTH the root and the affixes and had the combination of markings determine
the behavior of that particular form with regard to a process such as lenition. If
this approach was a reasonable solution 1200 years ago there would have to have been
some type of convention in the grammar to interpret these combinations of markings.
238 BRUCE WILLIS
One such convention would have been to establish the procedure where given a is
any morphological feature and
[oca] and [oca] yields [+ A]
[oA]
[aa] and [-oca] yields [- A]
In our historical model individual lexical items would have been marked with lower
case letters and the appropriate phonological rules would have been sensitive to upper
case letters. The features predicting rule application are the result of both the root
and the formative affixes being marked. This combination marking would then refer
to properties of the entire word rather than of the individual formatives which com-
pose the word.
In section A in the examples that undergo lenition the affixes are: -E, -irE, -a, -o,
and -arE. The affixes of the forms which do not undergo lenition are: -aco, -ura, -ino,
-syonE, -aryo, -alE, -iko, and -arE. The child might have tentatively assigned the
first group the morphological features Ã — 1 1 and the affixes of the second group
L+PJ
1. The infinitival ending -arE appears in both groups and might have had a
[-P]'
third set of features Ã — 1 ]. The choice of / and ñ as the features was arbitrary at this
point. If the speaker assumed that the lenition rule was responsive to a combination
of such features he could have formulated this rule as requiring the features Ã —
in its environmental specification.

Lenition /
[Àñ
Having suggested markings for the various affixes and also for the environment of the
lenition rule, we can see how the roots would have been marked to arrive at the
correct combination of features. For example, lEpOr would have been assigned
as the form lEpOr + E lEpOrE would have undergone lenition, thus
[+P]
.+p [+P]
+p
accounting for the b in liebre. With the ending -ino the form would have been
lEpOr + ino lEpOrino
_ , ,,
r and lenition would not apply. The remainder of the
Ã+Ð r + n r + L1
L+pJ>J L-pJ L-pJ
roots found in section A would have the feature values as follows: Ã + 1 ] lEpOr,
L+pJ
apEr, opEr, monet, lot, klerlk, sekund; and Ã +1 ~| pOpUl, not. Some derivations would
L-pJ
now be in order.
pOpUl + a o pOpUla o
-pJ L-p +P
(inapplicable) lenition
pOpUl + arE pOpUlarE
-PJ L-PJ
(poblar) lenition
opEr + arE opErarE
+ 1
[L+pJ
º L-pJ
ß'º'Ã'L-pJ'!
(inapplicable) lenition
opEr + a opEra
r+n
L+pJ + P J L+pJ
(obra) lenition
It now appears that perhaps this approach would have been the most logical one for
speakers to have internalized. Mark both the roots and the endings and have rule
application determined by a combination of these morphological features. He could
correctly predict when lenition would apply to those forms which appear in the
alternations that have characteristically been referred to as learned/popular by later
linguists. In each of these cases the root or stem did not change its markings, nor
would it have been necessary to give a long list of those items that were exceptional
in that they did not undergo the rule.
At this point we have only looked at the one process of lenition. Perhaps these
same features would have proved helpful when the speaker analyzed the forms in
which syncope played a role. In section B in the popular forms the vowel is deleted
in the syllable containing a lax vowel bounded by a primary and a secondary stress.
From the list of examples we discover that several roots have already been marked in
the discussion of lenition. All of the new roots would be Ã +1 1. The new endings are
L+pJ
-ansa Ã ++11 "1,], and
and -itatE
-itatE ÃÃ-—1
1 1.1. The syncope rule will not be precisely formulated
L-pJ 1-pJ
here, but it would also be sensitive to the same morphological features as the lenition
rule, namely Ã —
240 BRUCE WILLIS
Syncope /
How would these features predict the behavior of forms for the syncope rule ? Several
examples will illustrate. Again many of the irrelevant details will be left out of the
derivation.
umbllik + alE umbllikalE

Ã+Ð Ã+1] =
L+pJ L-pJ
(inapplicable) syncope
umbllik + ï umblliko
Ã+Ð Ã-Ð =
ß+pj L+pJ ' [ + Ú ]
(ombligo) syncope
regUl + arE regUlarE
, Ã-LI
[+P] [-*] ' L-pJ
regUl + a regUla
Ã+1] Ã-11 = _L"i
UP] UP]
[ +pj
(regla) syncope
nobll + itatE nobllitatE
nobll + Å nobllE
+
ßL+PJº L+PJ
ßß~º
+PJ
(noble) syncope
Again we see that the evolving grammar of Spanish could have utilized these same
morphological features to account for the phonological alternations caused by syncope.
In section C there are examples of several initial consonant segments which were
modified in the popular forms. The stems flam, fat, and fum would be (" +1 ], while
the stems plen, klam, and fab Ul are Ã + 1 1. The affixes -itudE, -dorE, and -ero are
L-pJ
[
The rule that assimilates/», k, and/to the following lateral needed Ã—cont]
— cont]
~L J
or Ã+cont] in its environment, and the rule for deleting initial/was sensitive to
L+p J
Ã+cont]
L+P J
Ã-cont]
L-L J
/deletion / Ã-I/I
Ã—
L+pJ
For example:
plen + itudE plenitudE
Ã+Ð +
+1n - r + L]
L+pJ L -pJ L -pj
(inapplicable)
plen + 0 pleno
Ã+1]
1+pJ
(lleno) ñ/-* //
flam + ero flamero
] I-il (inapplicable) fl-* II

flam +a flama
[+p]
[;i] *r-Li
L+pJ
(llama) fl^ll
fat + alE fatalE
Ã+Ð Ã+Ð ^ \ +L1
l + PJ l-pj L-pj
(inapplicable) /-* 0
fat + 0 fato
ß+º
L+pJ [«] ""[ + P]
(hado)
In section D we noticed that medial -kt- in learned forms alternates with -c- in popular
forms, and likewise medial -gn- alternates with a palatal -«-. All of the roots in these
examples would be Ã +1 ]. The affix -eo is Ã +11, and -antE is Ã +11. The grammar
1-pJ L-pJ 1+pJ
242 BRUCE WILLIS
would have needed several rules to account for the palatalizations found in this
section, but let it suffice to state that the rules would have been sensitive to a Ã — L]
L-Pj
feature matrix.
lakt + eo lakteo
(inapplicable) kt
lakt + E laktE
Ã +ii Ã-Ð-Ã-Ll
,-pJ L+pJ L - p J
L'
(leche) kt
sign + arE signarE
-p -p +p
(inapplicable) gn -> ç
sign + a signa
Ã+Ð
L-pJ +PJ -p
(sena) gn -» ç
Vowel lowering is illustrated in section E. The learned forms retain the high vowel
é or u while the popular form exhibits an e or o in that position. The vowel lowering
rule would have been sensitive to the features Ã — LI.
Vowel lowering / _
L+pJ
Ã + Ð . Toilillustrate:
Ã:º·
The new affix presented in section E is -estrE, which is |" — 1 ], and all of the roots are
L-pJ
L+PJ
lingw + alE lingwalE
Ã+Ð
L+pJ -p -p
(inapplicable) vowel lowering
h'ngw + a lingwa
L+PJ L+PJ L + PJ
(lengua) vowel lowering
lup + ino lupino

r+n
L+pJ -p -p
(inapplicable) vowel lowering
lup + o lupo
r+n
L+pJ +p
(lobo) vowel lowering
In this paper I have sketched an analysis of a number of lexical items which exhibit
phonological alternations often used to make the traditional distinction between
learned and popular vocabulary. Presumably the so-called learned forms came back
into the spoken language over a period of many centuries, and therefore many
generations of speakers restructured their grammar in order to account for these
forms. The learned forms have rarely been discussed in depth, but they must have
been a very real part of the grammar of a Spanish speaker in the days when Spanish
was in its infant stages, struggling for its own identity. The child acquiring his language
during this period obviously had no knowledge of the history of the forms he dealt
with. The assumption was made that in almost all cases a speaker would internalize
a single base form from which to derive these learned/popular pairs. The precise
phonological rules were not discussed, but part of the environment for the application
of most of these rules could have been determined by using two morphological
features whose values were determined by a combination of markings on the root
and affix. It was shown that the way a lexical item was marked for one rule could
have predicted its behavior with respect to other unrelated rules. It is this overlap
that tends to support this explanation of how a speaker of Old Spanish explained
these 'Latinisms' in his grammar.
One of the benefits of the type of classification system presented here is that it
gives us a certain amount of insight into the gaps in the lexicon of Vulgar Latin and
Old Spanish. Of course, not every stem will combine with all affixes. Somehow the
lexicon would have provided the information concerning the combinations that did
exist. What we can do with this system is predict with some accuracy those rules that
hypothetical gap-filling forms might have been subject to.
It is not entirely accidental that the distinctions made with the aid of the morpho-
logical features / and p coincide at times with the distinction made in historical
studies among 'learned' and 'popular' words. But one cannot infer a great deal by
looking only at the way in which a particular formative is marked. One has to look
further to the combination of feature's and also to the particular rule in question.
Luther College.
244 BRUCE WILLIS
REFERENCES
Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle

1968 The Sound Pattern of English (New York: Harper and Row).
Corominas, Joan
1961 Breve diccionario etimologico de la lengua castellana (Madrid: Gredos).
Elcock, W. D.
1960 The Romance Languages (London: Faber and Faber).
Foley, James
1965 "Spanish Morphology", unpublished doctoral dissertation (Cambridge: MIT).
Harris, James
1967 "Spanish Phonology", doctoral dissertation (Cambridge: MIT).
Kiparsky, Paul
1965 "Phonological Change", doctoral dissertation (Cambridge: MIT).
McCawley, James
1967 "The role of a Phonological Feature System in a Theory of Language", Langages 6.
Menendez Pida], Ramon
1941 Manual de gramätica historica espanola (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe).
Postal, Paul
1968 Aspects of Phonological Theory (New York: Harper and Row).
Saciuk, Bohdan
1969 "Lexical Strata in Generative Phonology (with Illustrations from Ibero-Romance)",
unpublished doctoral dissertation (University of Illinois, Urbana).
Schane, Sanford
1968 French Phonology and Morphology ( = Research Monograph No. 45) (Cambridge: The
MIT Press).

Diachronic Studies in Romance Linguistics

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Diachronic Studies in Romance Linguistics

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

JANUA LINGUARUM

Series practica, 207

Printed in The Netherlands by Zuid-Nederlandsche Drukkerij N.V., 's-Hertogenbosch

February 1973 Mario Saltarelli

A NEW LOOK AT LINGUISTIC SPLIT IN ROMANCE

FOSSILIZATION IN FRENCH SYNTAX

otherwise viable items." An example of what Casagrande understands as a synchronic

LATIN ORIGIN OF ROMANCE RULES

TRACING THE SOURCE OF A LEXICAL GAP

SYNTACTICO-SEMANTIC RECONSTRUCTION IN ROMANCE

The three areas of greatest success in 19th-century comparative linguistics were

DIPHTHONGIZATION, MONOPHTHONGIZATION, METAPHONY REVISITED

Harris refers to Malkiel's article "Diphthongization, monophthongization, metaphony:

THE ETYMOLOGIST AS A TRANSFORMATIONALIST

Kahane presents a tongue-in-cheek redefinition of etymology into transformational

LATIN VOCALIC QUANTITY TO QUALITY: A PSEUDO-PROBLEM?

CONTEXTUAL CHANGE AND HISTORICAL CHANGE: THE TRANSLATOR AS

In addition to the traditionally recognized areas of historical change — phonology,

THE SITUATIONAL MOTIVATION OF SYNTAX AND THE SYNTACTIC MOTIVATION

exists to establish the relationship between bravo in Ibero-Romance and in Italian.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CLITICS IN HISPANO-ROMANCE

SEMANTIC CHANGE OR LEXICAL CHANGE?

Posner examines views of semantic change through history. Recent theories of

SOME DIACHRONIC DELETION PROCESSES AND THEIR SYNCHRONIC

Schane investigates some aspects of the relation between diachronic processes in

THE VERBAL SYSTEM OF FRENCH

HYSTERON PROTERON AND THE STRUCTURE OF DISCOURSE

Linguistic change, Valesio argues, cannot be confined to changes manifested in

structures affected by conjunction reduction/gapping the shared element should come

THAT ERUDITE ENIGMA REVISITED

A NEW LOOK AT LINGUISTIC SPLIT IN ROMANCE

formulated in DIACHRONIC P-rules — i.e. phonemic changes, also ordered at least

1. THE SPLIT OF LATIN INTO INSULAR AND MAINLAND ROMANCE

When, in insular varieties of Latin, a SYNCHRONIC P-rule is eventually added to the

This sets up a zigzag configuration of potential underlying forms:7

2. THE SPLIT OF MAINLAND INTO EASTERN AND ITALO-WESTERN (IW) ROMANCE

When, in eastern varieties of Mainland Romance, a synchronic rule is ultimately

3. THE SPLIT OF ITALO-WESTERN INTO NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN ROMANCE

4. THE SPLIT OF SOUTHERN INTO ITALO- (IR) AND SOUTHWESTERN (SW)

5. THE SPLIT OF SOUTHWESTERN INTO SOUTH-GALLO (SG), EAST IBERO- (Elb),

tance. As a consequence of the reduction of all other geminate resonants to singles,

6. THE SPLIT OF WEST-IBERO-ROMANCE INTO GALICIAN AND PORTUGUESE

7. Grammatical parameters for the uniting of dialects versus the separation of

FOSSILIZATION IN FRENCH SYNTAX1

where S-Pronominalization applies to pourquoi and ou. The difference between

(16a) Je suppose que Pierre arrivera bientot.

2.3. Other derivational fossils

In essence, diachronic fossils are the historical parallels of derivational fossils. A

3.1. Void and voila

3.1.1. Void/voila is a verb.3

(19b) Void I'homme.

This is a non-imperative use of voici/voila. As such, voici/voila cannot occur alone

3.1.2. Voici/voila is a fossil.

Furthermore, voici/voilä is morphologically invariant. Consequently it cannot take

3.2. Now to the claim that it is a diachronic fossil.

(39c) Void, Mesdames et Messieurs, le president de notre club, M. Mediterrannee.

French interrogatives have occasioned a particular fascination among transforma-

then one would expect (45) to be an appropriate answer to (46).

5. FOSSILS AND BORROWING

prepositions, adverbs, auxiliaries, quantifiers, or markers like inflections are borrowed

7. In conclusion let us review the motivations for a grammar that incorporates

* I owe this observation to Donald Albury.

LATIN ORIGIN OF ROMANCE RULES

2. REPETITION WITH DIFFERENT PHONETIC MANIFESTATION