| Popis: |
Following Lass’s suggestion that, in Germanic, the labels traditionally used in periodization (‘Old’, ‘Middle’, ‘Modern’) are best viewed as typological rather than temporal, this chapter attempts to assess the potential universality of such a claim by applying Lass’s methods to Romance, in the light of Coșeriu’s hypothesis that the Romance languages are distinguished from Latin by an iconic typology whereby relational concepts receive relational, ‘syntagmatic’ (i.e., analytic) exponence and non-relational concepts receive non-relational, ‘paradigmatic’ (i.e., synthetic) exponence. The results are mixed. Whilst many languages can be situated on what Lass describes as a typological ‘cline of change’, Romanian cannot; and, paradoxically, Old Spanish and Old Portuguese turn out to be more ‘modern’ than the respective modern languages. These findings require a diachronic explanation (which, it is tentatively suggested, may lie in Trudgill’s sociolinguistic typology of language contact). Lass’s claim that the categories of periodization are atemporal cannot therefore be universal. |
