Old Spanish

RESUMEN: El artículo ofrece una descripción pormenorizada de la historia, características de funcionamiento y contenidos de la Biblioteca Digital de Textos del Español Antiguo (BiDTEA) preparada por el Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. BiDTEA ofrece acceso interactivo a transcripciones semi-paleográficas de testimonios concretos de obras producidas en el periodo medieval, una serie de índices (alfabético, frecuencia, alfabético inverso) y concordancias en formato KWIC.

The article offers a detailed description of the history, operating characteristics, and contents of the Biblioteca Digital de Textos del Español Antiguo (BiDTEA) prepared by the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies. BiDTEA offers interactive access to semi-paleographical transcriptions of texts produced during the medieval period, a series of indices (alphabetic, frequency, reverse alphabetic), and KWIC concordances.

En este trabajo, primero se explica el sistema vocálico del latín, para luego estudiar la evolución de las vocales átonas al español desde el punto de vista fonológico. Se presenta el análisis vocálico de segmentos átonas y tónicas, limitándose a la influencia de la yod en la evolución de estas últimas, y un posterior resumen de la evolución del sistema vocálico átono de acuerdo con la posición de cada segmento.

This paper presents an overview of the Latin vowel system, and then an analysis of the yod-influenced phonological diachronic change of the stressed vowels from Late Latin to Old Spanish. Additionally, the evolution of the unstressed vowel system as a function of the position of each segment is discussed, in order to round-up the analysis of the evolution of both stressed and unstressed vowels from Late Latin into Spanish.

Este artículo presenta el hallazgo de un texto medieval desconocido hasta el momento: fragmentos de un códice que contiene un romanceamiento bíblico neotestamentario de finales del siglo XIV distinto de todos los demás romanceamientos medievales identificados. La descripción del códice y la edición del texto se acompaña de un exhaustivo estudio lingüístico del texto que permite fecharlo hacia 1400, así como un análisis  exegético que me ha posibilitado identificar parte del texto como una traducción de la Catena aurea de Tomás de Aquino al castellano, la primera identificada hasta el presente.

En este trabajo ofrecemos un breve panorama histórico del desarrollo de OSTA, desde la idea inicial (Nitti 1978) hasta la Biblioteca Digital de Textos del Español Antiguo (Gago Jover 2015), su más reciente  precedente. Exponemos además los problemas encontrados y las soluciones propuestas para el procesado de transcripciones, códices y obras.

In this paper we offer a brief historical overview of the development of OSTA, from the initial idea (Nitti 1978) to the Biblioteca Digital de Textos del Español Antiguo (Gago Jover 2015), its most recent precedent. We also discuss the problems encountered and the proposed solutions for the processing of transcriptions, codices and works.

Las bases de datos informatizadas se han convertido desde finales del siglo xx en una herramienta fundamental en las diversas face-tas del trabajo filológico, con aplicaciones valiosas en el estudio del libro antiguo. En este capítulo repasaremos los principales recursos disponibles y daremos ejemplos de sus posibilidades para la investigación filológica. En particular nos centraremos en la caracterización lingüística de los textos para establecer aspectos como la data cronológica y geográfica del ejemplar que se pretende analizar. Asimismo exponemos para cada técnica o recurso los problemas, cautelas y limitaciones metodológicas que conlleva su empleo.

The present study investigates the factors controlling the distribution of syllabic and asyllabic clitic pronoun variants in three medieval Spanish texts. Previous studies disagree on the question whether vowel elision affects only <e> (me > m, le > l etc.) or also <o> (lo > l), and they observe considerable vacillation between realisation and elision of the vowel. The present analysis proves that vowel omission affects exclusively <e>, i.e. the forms me, te, le, se. Furthermore, the appearance of the asyllabic form requires that the pronoun build a graphic unit with another word, and that there be an immediately adjacent vowel within this unit. Under these conditions, me, te, le and m, t, l are in strictly complementary distribution. Se features a special form sse which alternates with the asyllabic variant s after verbs ending in a vowel. As /e/ acts as the epenthetic default vowel since proto-romance times, it seems plausible to analyse the oscillation in the clitic pronouns as epenthesis instead of elision. Under this view, it cannot be unified with the process of apocope observed in major lexical categories during that period. The decline of the asyllabic forms parallels the decreasing tendency to integrate function words into graphic units with neighbouring words. Prosody loses its influence on the graphic representations, which fosters the consolidation of the syllabic clitic forms me, te, le, se till modern Spanish.

The Poema de Alfonso Onceno, composed around 1348 by Rodrigo Yáñez, narrates the principal events of Alfonso XI’s life and reign (1312-50), from his childhood until his triumphal entrance into Algeciras (1344), and it is one of the best sources for the study of mid fourteenth-century military terminology. This article is divided into two parts. The first constitutes a complete glossary of the military terminology contained in the Poema de Alfonso XI. The second is a more detailed study of twenty terms that have not been recorded into any existing dictionaries or that have presented interpretation problems in some of the editions of the Poema.

The book undertakes to contrast and analyse how the communicational contexts in which borrowing from the indigenous languages of Latin America and the indigenous language of the Canary Islands ('Guanche') took place. The authors summarize the results from existing monographic lexical studies, focusing on the period between 1492 and 1550, known as the 'Antillean stage'. The methodological approach is based on quantitative and qualitative lexical analysis of the corpora.

The first five decades of territorial conquest saw the establishment of a Canarian and American society. The authors' leitmotif is that the documents reflect 'the socio-cultural structure of the members that produced them' (p.133), thus their goal is:
a) To identify trends and word selections to explain why some words are chosen and not others. The factors that affect word selection include prestige, education as well as the existence of already established communities.
b) To highlight the underlying beliefs and attitudes -- motivational factors -- of the participants in the communicative situation that could have motivated lexical borrowing.
c) To reconsider the role of register and intertextuality when studying the impact of the indigenous lexicon on the Spanish languages of that period.

The book is divided into five chapters plus a conclusion, bibliography and index. The chapters are: 1. 'Introduction' ("Introducción"), 2. 'The documentary sources in the American context' ("Las fuentes documentales en el contexto  americano"), 3. 'Procedures of lexical incorporation by the chroniclers of the Americas' ("Procedimientos de incorporación léxica en cronistas americanos"), 4. 'Borrowings from indigenous languages in the documents from the Canary Islands' ("El indigenismo en la documentación canaria"), 5. 'The missionary vision in the description of the Canary Islands' ("La visión misionera en la descripción de Canarias").

Este trabajo expone los aspectos relacionados con el procesamiento de las formas, lemas, análisis gramatical y textos en el Old Spanish Textual Archive (OSTA), un corpus lingüístico de más de 32 millones de palabras, basado en las más de 400 transcripciones semi-paleográficas de textos medievales escritos en castellano, asturiano, leonés, navarro-aragonés y aragonés realizadas por los colaboradores del Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (HSMS). Se describe además el proceso de etiquetado y lematización mediante el uso de Freeling, una herramienta de Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, y de HSMS-app, una herramienta de análisis textual desarrollada para este proyecto.

This paper presents aspects related to the processing of forms, lemmas, grammatical analysis and texts in the Old Spanish Textual Archive (OSTA), a linguistic corpus of more than 32 million words, based on the more than 400 semi-paleographic transcriptions of medieval texts written in Castilian, Asturian, Leonese, Navarro-Aragonese and Aragonese prepared by the collaborators of the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (HSMS). It also describes the process of tagging and lemmatization using Freeling, a Natural Language Processing tool, and HSMS-app, a textual analysis tool developed for this project.

“A Political History of Spanish. The Making of a Language” edited and presented by José del Valle, is made up of a series of working papers that focus on the “metalinguistic discourses that, under different sets of ideological and material conditions, have produced politically relevant representations of Spanish” (p.19). The work falls within the field of study of language ideologies research (Blommaert 1999), a field of study that takes an historical approach to the social spaces and material conditions in which practices and metalinguistic discourses are deployed (p.15).

The book comprises twenty five essays from a group of authors from diverse geographical areas and disciplinary backgrounds. The essays are ordered into four parts or chapters. Each part is preceded by an introductory essay.

Part I presents an overall introduction; Part II focuses on the Spanish language in the Iberian Peninsula (essays 2–8); Part III focuses on Spanish in some Latin American countries or regions (essays 9–16); Part IV is about Spanish in the USA (essays 17–21); Part V (essays 22–25), presents three geographical areas where Spanish was present: in the Ottoman Empire, in Equatorial Guinea and in the Philippines. The book includes a list of references and an index.

The presence of two forms of the future and conditional paradigms in Old Spanish is well-attested. The analytic form, marked by a mesoclitic, was more syntactically restricted; while the synthetic form, surfacing with either a proclitic or an enclitic, was essentially free to appear in any syntactic context. It is notable that the analytic form was only acceptable in contexts within which finite verbs obligatorily hosted enclitics. In this paper, I test various morphosyntactic factors to determine the level of variation between the analytic and synthetic future and conditional forms across six centuries of Old Spanish.

El trabajo que presentamos consiste en el análisis grafemático de un aspecto concreto de la documentación medieval procedente de Miranda de Ebro (Burgos): una descripción de los casos de -t y -d finales que presentan los manuscritos; nos fijaremos asimismo en las posibles implicaciones fonéticas de las diferentes grafías –por ejemplo, el discutido valor diatópico de la -t y -d a final de palabra–, así como la evolución de la tradición escrituraria a lo largo de los dos siglos y medio que abarca el corpus. Finalmente, esbozaremos algunas conclusiones a raíz de los datos obtenidos.
El corpus que sirve como base es el CODOMME (Corpus de documentación medieval de Miranda de Ebro). Esta documentación ha sido reunida y editada por el Grupo de Estudio de Documentos Históricos y Textos Antiguos de la Universidad de Salamanca (GEDHYTAS: http://campus.usal.es/~gedhytas/) –al que pertenezco– por su valor como fuente de datos para un mejor conocimiento del castellano medieval, con criterios de edición de la Red CHARTA (http://www.charta.es/criterios-de-edicion-/).

Comunicación presentada en IX CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL DE
HISTORIA DE LA LENGUA ESPAÑOLA. Cádiz, 10-14 de septiembre de 2012 (en prensa).

This research provides evidence in favour of the fact that Old Spanish, as well as other Old Romance languages (Portuguese and Italian, for example) accommodate to Rivero and Terzi’s (1995: 301, e.g. 1) pattern II in which imperative structures of the languages do not display a different syntax from the one exhibited by main clauses, whereas Modern Spanish should be classified as belonging to pattern I, the imperative constructions of which present their own specific syntax. We put forward that the changes undergone by the word order of imperative sentences through time should be attributed to a syntactization process that tended to detach imperatives from a specific verbal morphology (and also from the syntax of main clauses) and brought about new specific syntactic requirements for them to be licensed. Furthermore, our data allow us to shed light on the theory of linguistic change and the necessary conditions to have transference phenomena from Old Spanish to Hispano-American Spanish. Our data show that, so as to posit that Old Spanish constructions of any sort have been transferred to Hispano-American Spanish, there should be similar configurations in the indigenous languages that enable this transference through language contact and can bring about an increasing use of the structures that already were receding in Peninsular Medieval Spanish.

La apócope es un tema ampliamente reseñado en la Historia de la Lengua Española. En nuestro caso, tras una somera introducción sobre el estado de la cuestión, proponemos un trabajo de corte más bien descriptivo en el que realizaremos una descripción grafemática de la situación que reflejan los testimonios en lo referente a la apócope de las vocales finales, -e y -o, con especial atención a los casos de la llamada «apócope extrema» en el Corpus de documentación medieval de Miranda de Ebro (CODOMME). Finalmente, trataremos de esbozar algunas conclusiones a raíz de los datos obtenidos que pueden contribuir a detallar la situación lingüística de una zona de la que hasta el momento no ha habido muchos estudios exhaustivos, el norte de Burgos.

The Biblia Medieval website (www.bibliamedieval.es) is a collection of interactive electronic resources for the study of the Spanish biblical translations composed during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This online resource includes the newly created Biblias Hispánicas corpus which contains normalized editions of all the medieval and sixteenth century Spanish translations of the Bible next to their Latin and Hebrew sources. The edition features a triple presentation that includes paleograhic transcriptions, texts with normalized spelling, lemmatization and POS tagging as well as facsimilar images of the original manuscripts and printed books. This article presents an overview of the technical and philological features of this corpus and it includes examples of some of its applications for the study of Spanish biblical translation in the medieval and Renaissance periods.

Resumen: En la bibliografía generativista es habitual distinguir las llamadas dis-locaciones a la izquierda con tema vinculante de las dislocaciones a la izquierda con clítico a partir de varias propiedades sintácticas y pragmáticas. En este estudio se ave-rigua si la accesibilidad referencial, una de las propiedades discursivo-pragmáticas de las dislocaciones postuladas, es de importancia para el español medieval. Se demuestra que las dislocaciones medievales difieren considerablemente de las contemporáneas y que, por lo tanto, la distinción entre las dislocaciones con tema vinculante y las que aparecen con clítico es difícil de defender para el español medieval del siglo xiii usando los criterios actuales.

Abstract: In the generative bibliography, it is common to distinguish between the so-called Hanging Topic Left Dislocations (HTLDs) and the Clitic Left Dislocations (CLLDs), based on various syntactic and pragmatic properties. This study investigates whether referential accessibility, one of the discursive-pragmatic properties of the postulated dislocations, is important for Mediaeval Spanish. It is demonstrated that Mediaeval dislocations differ considerably from their present-day counterparts and that, therefore, the distinction between HTLDs and CLLDs is difficult to uphold in 13th century Mediaeval Spanish using the current criteria.

In meinem Beitrag werde ich zeigen, dass die Getrennt- und Zusammenschreibungen in den unter Alfons X erstellten Texten keinesfalls zufällig sind. Das Vorkommen ‘graphischer Klise’ lässt Rückschlüsse auf die Prosodifizierung der Funktionswörter und auch auf die phonologische Phrasierung der altspanischen Sätze zu, denn Zusammenschreibungen geschehen nur innerhalb der phonologischen Phrasen, nicht aber über ihre Grenzen hinaus.

En la bibliografia generativista es habitual distinguir las llamadas dislocaciones a la izquierda con tema vinculante de las dislocaciones a la izquierda con clitico a partir de varias propiedades sintacticas y pragmaticas. En este estudio se averigua si la accesibilidad referencial, una de las propiedades discursivo-pragmaticas de las dislocaciones postuladas, es de importancia para el espanol medieval. Se demuestra que las dislocaciones medievales difieren considerablemente de las contemporaneas y que, por lo tanto, la distincion entre las dislocaciones con tema vinculante y las que aparecen con clitico es dificil de defender para el espanol medieval del siglo XIII usando los criterios actuales.

Abstract
This PhD thesis investigates the grammaticalization of se-constructions in some of the Medieval Romance varieties of Spanish, French, Catalan and Occitan. It combines different theoretical approaches as well as in-depth corpus studies in order to shed new light on a matter that has intrigued many linguists for decades.
More concretely, it unites the insights on the development of the different se-constructions we get from typological studies, grammaticalization theory and generative syntax. The combination of the historical dimension and studies on the syntactic status of se seems to provide vital information in order to bring about a more profound understanding of the processes that are involved in the grammaticalization of se. The following grammaticalization path has been suggested for the reflexive: reflexive > middle > anticausative > passive > impersonal.
The results of the extensive corpus studies that have been conducted as an integral part of this work show i.a. that i) the re-organization of the (Late) Latin voice system and SE/SIBI spreading to new domains (as described in typological literature) have left a residual system of se occurring with intransitive verbs of all sorts and marking impersonality. ii) While the Medieval null-subject varieties, such as Spanish Catalan and Occitan, show quite similar results, Medieval French (whose null-subject status has been repeatedly questioned in the last 20 years) behaves differently sticking to older and lexicalized (middle) uses with animate subjects rather than exhibiting a fully functional range of se-constructions. Syntactically active constructions, such as the passive or impersonal active constructions involving se are only sparsely found and mainly come in towards the end of the Middle Ages in texts that are translations from Latin originals.
On the basis of the data situation and insights gained from previous studies, the present thesis seeks to explain the differences in connection with the unclear null-subject status of Medieval French, the abundant use of the highly grammaticalized indefinite pronoun on and the missing reanalysis of se as an agreement marker that is able to head its own projection or to become involved in absorbing the [+Def] feature in finite T as in the other Medieval Romance varieties that show no restriction in their null-subject properties.

Este trabajo expone los aspectos relacionados con el procesamiento de las formas, lemas, analisis gramatical y textos en el Old Spanish Textual Archive (OSTA), un corpus linguistico de mas de 32 millones de palabras, basado en las mas de 400 transcripciones semi-paleograficas de textos medievales escritos en castellano, asturiano, leones, navarro-aragones y aragones realizadas por los colaboradores del Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies (HSMS). Se describe ademas el proceso de etiquetado y lematizacion mediante el uso de Freeling, una herramienta de Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, y de HSMS-app, una herramienta de analisis textual desarrollada para este proyecto.

This paper addresses a number of methodological problems related to corpus-based research in language variation. It is shown through a number of case studies using data from Biblia medieval (a parallel corpus of Old Spanish bible translations) how this kind of research can profit from parallel texts. To begin with, the perspective afforded by parallel corpus methodology is more open as it is possible to analyze all the forms used to express contents in the source language. Likewise, parallel texts offer direct comparability of concrete examples across different historical periods, as translation equivalents are likely to be inserted in the same or very similar syntactic, semantic and pragmatic contexts of occurrence. Finally, in a parallel corpus it is possible to analyze stylistic variation in a more controlled manner by examining how the same translator selects different linguistic options depending on the genre of each text.

espanolEn este trabajo ofrecemos un breve panorama historico del desarrollo de OSTA, desde la idea inicial (Nitti 1978) hasta la Biblioteca Digital de Textos del Espanol Antiguo (Gago Jover 2015), su mas reciente precedente. Exponemos ademas los problemas encontrados y las soluciones propuestas para el procesado de transcripciones, codices y obras. EnglishIn this paper we offer a brief historical overview of the development of OSTA, from the initial idea (Nitti 1978) to the Biblioteca Digital de Textos del Espanol Antiguo (Gago Jover 2015), its most recent precedent. We also discuss the problems encountered and the proposed solutions for the processing of transcriptions, codices and works

Sebastian Greußlich offers a historically-oriented linguistic and textual analysis of the “Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos en las islas i tierra-firme del mar oceano” (“History of the Castilian people on the island and on the mainland”; also called “Décadas”), written by Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, a court chronicler (Cuellar, 1549--Madrid, 1625).

This historiographical work consists of eight 'Décadas', or books, published in Madrid between 1601 and 1615 during the reign of Philip III. The work was intended as a source of information for the king and his court. The 'Décadas' deal with the history of the New World ('las Indias Occidentales') from the time of its discovery in 1492, to 1554. Originally written in Spanish, it was so successful that shortly after its publication it was translated into Latin (Amsterdam, 1622) as well as into other European languages: French (Amsterdam, 1622), German (Frankfurt, 1623), Dutch (1706), and English (London, 1724).

As the main source for his study, Herrera used material and information from other authors' works. He selected, ordered and/or linguistically adapted it -- lexically, morphologically or syntactically -- utilising his own system. Quoting or even taking long passages from other authors was a common historiographical practice that lost favour with the advent of positivist science and lost its validity with the birth of modern historical science in the 19th century. Thus, in the compiling/preparation of this extensive work, Herrera followed a discourse tradition of his time.

Greußlich’s intention is to address certain questions that have until now not been adequately answered; for example, the question of just how many historical references Herrera took from other authors and what criteria he used to make his decisions. Greußlich's starting point is the reconstruction of what Herrera's historical knowledge might have been. In a “hermeneutical approach to the pragmatics of a discourse tradition” (p. 10), the author brings together two perspectives, the textual and the epistemological. His linguistic analysis results in a qualitative reconstruction of Herrera's historiographical practices.

The book is divided into an introduction, seven chapters, an index and bibliographical references.

This article examines the use of the future subjunctive in two corpora of colonial Mexican texts. The first corpus consists of 255 documents dated 1561–1646 pertaining primarily to the historical area of New Galicia and dealing with matters of the Real Audiencia of Guadalajara. The second consists of 191 documents dated 1681–1816 written in the altiplano central of Mexico, which covers a large geographical area from Mexico City to Zacatecas. After describing the syntactic distribution of the future subjunctive in Medieval Spanish, we examine the evidence of its patterns of usage in Peninsular Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From there, we analyze the quantitative and qualitative data related to the 428 tokens of -re forms found in our corpora and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The data support findings that the future subjunctive first fell out of use in temporal adverbial clauses, while exhibiting the most apparent productivity in relative clause...

En este trabajo investigamos el aumento de frecuencia textual de los diferentes tipos de clíticos pronominales a lo largo de la historia del español mediante un análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo de un corpus paralelo de traducciones bíblicas. Para ello, se ha realizado un cómputo exhaustivo del número y función de los clíticos pronominales que aparecen en versiones de los mismos fragmentos bíblicos compuestas en los siglos XIII, XVI y XX con representación de varios géneros: narrativo, lírico-sapiencial y profético. La comparación de las diferentes versiones permite comprobar que el aumento de frecuencia textual se da en todas las épocas y géneros analizados. El análisis revela que, si bien todos los tipos de clíticos, excepto los de objeto directo, experimentan un aumento de frecuencia textual, el mayor incremento se da entre los clíticos reflexivos, especial-mente en los casos en que el reflexivo es un marcador de diátesis. Los resultados refuerzan empíricamente los estudios que proponen el aumento de frecuencia de aquellos clíticos que han desarrollado nuevos significados. De este modo, la evolución observada constituye un caso más de la concomitancia de pérdida de significado referencial y aumento de frecuencia textual atestiguada en un gran número de procesos diacrónicos de gramaticalización en lenguas diversas.

This article examines the use of the future subjunctive in two corpora of colonial Mexican texts. The first corpus consists of 255 documents dated 1561–1646 pertaining primarily to the historical area of New Galicia and dealing with matters of the Real Audiencia of Guadalajara. The second consists of 191 documents dated 1681–1816 written in the altiplano central of Mexico, which covers a large geographical area from Mexico City to Zacatecas. After describing the syntactic distribution of the future subjunctive in Medieval Spanish, we examine the evidence of its patterns of usage in Peninsular Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From there, we analyze the quantitative and qualitative data related to the 428 tokens of -re forms found in our corpora and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The data support findings that the future subjunctive first fell out of use in temporal adverbial clauses, while exhibiting the most apparent productivity in relative clauses. However, the corpora examined provide no evidence that the paradigm survived longer in Latin American Spanish than in Peninsular Spanish, as has been argued. Rather, this study suggests that by the eighteenth century, the future subjunctive was a highly stylized marker of formality or politeness in written Spanish.