Tag: Romance

Waldef A French Romance from Medieval England


Free Download Ivana Djordjevic, "Waldef: A French Romance from Medieval England "
English | ISBN: 1641894067 | 2020 | 352 pages | PDF | 13 MB
This first English translation of Le Roman de Waldef makes a significant representative of the French literature of medieval England accessible for the first time. Its wide-ranging content provides an ideal introduction to a number of themes in medieval literature, making it suitable for a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. The fast-moving romance Description of this early thirteenth-century tale recounts the ancestry and exploits of Waldef and his two sons, set against a history of pre-Conquest England. The narrative shares themes and incident types with other important insular romances, including the Lai of Haveloc, Boeve de Haumtone, and Gui de Warewic. Waldef’s scope, interest in battle, and political stratagems bear reading alongside medieval chronicles, while secret love affairs connect it with other romance literature of the period, and adventures across a wide area of the known world provide affinities with medieval travel narrative.

(more…)

Waldef A French Romance from Medieval England


Free Download Ivana Djordjevic, "Waldef: A French Romance from Medieval England "
English | ISBN: 1641894067 | 2020 | 352 pages | PDF | 13 MB
This first English translation of Le Roman de Waldef makes a significant representative of the French literature of medieval England accessible for the first time. Its wide-ranging content provides an ideal introduction to a number of themes in medieval literature, making it suitable for a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. The fast-moving romance Description of this early thirteenth-century tale recounts the ancestry and exploits of Waldef and his two sons, set against a history of pre-Conquest England. The narrative shares themes and incident types with other important insular romances, including the Lai of Haveloc, Boeve de Haumtone, and Gui de Warewic. Waldef’s scope, interest in battle, and political stratagems bear reading alongside medieval chronicles, while secret love affairs connect it with other romance literature of the period, and adventures across a wide area of the known world provide affinities with medieval travel narrative.

(more…)

Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar


Free Download Sam Wolfe, "Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar "
English | ISBN: 0198840179 | 2020 | 496 pages | PDF | 10 MB
This volume offers a wide-range of case studies on variation and change in the sub-family of the Romance languages that includes French and Occitan: Gallo-Romance. Both standard and non-standard Gallo-Romance data can be of enormous value to studies of morphosyntactic variation and change, yet, as the volume demonstrates, non-standard and comparative Gallo-Romance data have often been lacking in both synchronic and diachronic studies. Following an introduction that sets out the conceptual background, the volume is divided into three parts whose chapters explore a variety of topics in the domains of sentence structure, the verb complex, and word structure. The empirical foundation of the volume is exceptionally rich, drawing on standard and non-standard data from French, Occitan, Francoprovençal, Picard, Wallon, and Norman. This diversity is also reflected in the theoretical and conceptual approaches adopted, which span traditional philology, sociolinguistics, formal morphological and syntactic theory, semantics, and discourse-pragmatics. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for researchers and students in French and (Gallo-) Romance linguistics as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics.

(more…)

Romance Object Clitics Microvariation and Linguistic Change


Free Download Diego Pescarini, "Romance Object Clitics: Microvariation and Linguistic Change "
English | ISBN: 0198864388 | 2021 | 352 pages | PDF | 3 MB
This book offers an empirical and theoretical exploration of the development of object clitic pronouns in the Romance languages, drawing on data from Latin, medieval vernaculars, modern Romance languages, and lesser-known dialects. Diego Pescarini examines phonological, morphological, and especially syntactic aspects of Romance object clitics, using the findings to reconstruct their evolution from Latin to Romance and to model clitic placement in modern Romance languages. On the theoretical side, the volume engages with previous accounts of clitics, particularly in generative theory. It challenges the received idea that cliticization resulted from a form of syntactic deficiency; instead, it proposes that clitics resulted from the feature endowment of discourse features, which initially caused freezing of certain pronominal forms and then – through reanalysis – their successive incorporation to verbal hosts. This approach leads to a revision of earlier analyses of well-known phenomena such as interpolation, climbing, and enclisis/proclisis alternations, and to new approaches to issues including V2 syntax, scrambling, and stylistic fronting, among many others.

(more…)

Palatal Sound Change in the Romance Languages Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives


Free Download Andre Zampaulo, "Palatal Sound Change in the Romance Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives "
English | ISBN: 0198807384 | 2019 | 256 pages | PDF | 8 MB
This book presents a thorough investigation of the main diachronic changes that have taken place in the palatal sounds of the Romance languages, as well as their current patterns of synchronic variation. Andre Zampaulo draws on extensive data not only from diachronic sources, but also from a range of current phonetic, phonological, and dialectal studies to motivate a formal, constraint-based account of palatal sound change. The analysis takes into account the role of phonetic information in the shaping of phonological patterns, approaching sound change from its inception during the speaker-listener interaction and formalizing it as the difference in constraint ranking between the grammar of the speaker and that of the listener-turned-speaker. The volume offers insights into how and why similar types of change may take place in different varieties and/or the same language at different times, and will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, Romance linguistics, and dialectology more broadly.

(more…)

Indefinites between Latin and Romance


Free Download Chiara Gianollo, "Indefinites between Latin and Romance "
English | ISBN: 0198812663 | 2019 | 352 pages | PDF | 4 MB
This book investigates the syntactic and semantic development of a selection of indefinite pronouns and determiners (such as aliquis ‘some’, nullus ‘no’, and nemo ‘no one’) between Latin and the Romance languages. Although these elements have undergone significant diachronic change since the Classical Latin period, the modern Romance languages show a remarkable degree of similarity in the way their systems of indefinites have evolved and are structured today. In this volume, Chiara Gianollo draws on data from Classical and Late Latin texts, and from electronic corpora of the early stages of various Romance languages, to propose a new account of these similarities. The focus is primarily on Late Latin: at this stage, the grammar of indefinites already shows a number of changes, which are homogeneously transmitted to the daughter languages, leading to parallelism in the various emerging Romance systems. The volume demonstrates the value of using methods and models from synchronic theoretical linguistics for investigating diachronic phenomena, as well as the importance of diachronic research in understanding the nature of crosslinguistic variation and language change.

(more…)

Comparative and Diachronic Perspectives on Romance Syntax


Free Download Gabriela Panäƒ Dindelegan, "Comparative and Diachronic Perspectives on Romance Syntax"
English | ISBN: 1527504018 | 2018 | 463 pages | PDF | 3 MB
The volume brings together fifteen papers focusing on the morphosyntax of different Romance varieties. It is based on papers presented at the workshop bearing the same title held at the University of Bucharest in November 2015 and is dedicated to Professor Martin Maiden of the University of Oxford in honour of his 60th birthday. The contributions tackle different theoretical issues concerning current linguistic theory (relevant both for comparative and diachronic approaches), including parameters, features and their hierarchical organization, word order changes, the level of verb movement in different varieties, inflected infinitives, clitic placement and clitic doubling, ethical datives, and personal subject pronouns, among others.

(more…)

Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales


Free Download Susan Crane, "Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales"
English | 2016 | pages: 242 | ISBN: 0691634963, 0691606145 | PDF | 11,5 mb
In this fresh look at Chaucer’s relation to English and French romances of the late Middle Ages, Crane shows that Chaucer’s depictions of masculinity and femininity constitute an extensive and sympathetic response to the genre. For Chaucer, she proposes, gender is the defining concern of romance. As the foundational narratives of courtship, romances participate in the late medieval elaboration of new meanings around heterosexual identity. Crane draws on feminist and genre theory to argue that Chaucer’s profound interest in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity arises in large part from his experience of romance.

(more…)