Edited by José Ignacio Hualde, Joseba A. Lakarra and R.L. Trask
Questions related to the origin and history of the Basque language spark considerable interest, since it is the only surviving pre-Indo-European language in western Europe. However, until now, there was no readily available source in English providing answers to these questions or giving an… read more
Edited by José Ignacio Hualde and Jon Ortiz de Urbina
In part due to its exotic place within the languages of Europe, but mainly because of its basic typological differences with better-described languages, Basque has often attracted the interest of linguists of very different theoretical persuasions. This book presents a collection of articles which… read more
The aim of this paper is to advance our understanding of the diachronic development of Basque prosody and related segmental processes. The discovery of regular correspondences between the distribution of aspiration in northeastern varieties and accentual patterns in the dialect of Goizueta (in… read more
This paper elucidates the role of internal and external factors in the semantic evolution of Basque zu from ‘you.pl’ to exclusively ‘you.sg’ and in the development of Basque zuek ‘you.pl’. Transparently, zuek involves suffixation of the demonstrative hek ‘those’ to zu. The neighboring Romance… read more
We examine the historical reanalysis of the Spanish sequence es que (lit. ‘is that’) as a discourse particle with justificatory and even purely emphatic functions. We argue that the diachronic process involved first the appearance of non-coindexed pro as subject of the copula es ‘is’ and, at a… read more
The sound change from Latin /f/ to Old Spanish and Gascon /h/ has often been attributed to stratal influence from Basque. The motivation would be that Old Basque lacked /f/, and instead had a phoneme /h/, with which bilingual speakers replaced it when speaking in Romance. However, this… read more
Concessive conjunctions show a tendency to be often recycled and replaced along certain specific grammaticalisation patterns. Here, after examining those general properties of concessive conjunctions that explain their historical instability, we focus on the history of two such elements in Spanish… read more
This chapter offers an overview of geographical variation in Basque. After discussing several proposals for the classification of Basque dialects, the main phenomena showing dialectal variation are introduced. Variation in morphosyntactic features, nominal inflection, verbal inflection,… read more
The lenition of intervocalic consonants is typically phonologized in sound change only within word domains. At first blush, this morphological restriction might seem to contradict the Neogrammarian hypothesis of exclusively phonetic conditioning in sound change. In this paper I examine the… read more
It has been claimed that in Majorcan Catalan /b/ tends to be realized as a stop in contexts where Central Catalan /b/ has approximant realizations. Here we test this claim using two continuous dimensions that we take as acoustic correlates of degree of constriction. We also examine the relative… read more
We present acoustic evidence bearing on the articulation of the palatal nasal consonants in Portuguese and Spanish. We outline the etymological origins of these consonants, some of which are shared by the two languages. One class of Portuguese palatal nasals arose from a nasalized palatal… read more
The least understood aspect of Palenquero phonology is its intonational system. This is a serious gap, as it is precisely in the realm of prosody that the most striking phonological differences between Palenquero and (Caribbean) Spanish are apparent. Although several authors have speculated that… read more
The standardization process of the Basque language presents some unusual characteristics. Although some of the first authors to publish in Basque in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries explicitly remarked on the difficulties brought about by dialectal diversity, very little progress in the… read more
SUMMARY From a diachronic point of view, the study of Basque accentuation presents the problem of accounting for the very different accentual systems that are found nowadays within the Basque-speaking territory. Whereas in a large central area there is no contrastive word accent, systems with… read more
