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Article published In: Revue Romane
Vol. 49:2 (2014) ► pp.177–203

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Whatever happened to the Occitan go-past?

Insights from the dialects of Gascony and Guardia Piemontese

 | Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
 | Università della Calabria
Published online: 9 February 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rro.49.2.01jac
This article explores the history and present state of the Occitan go-past. Also known as the perfet perifràstic, this is a characteristic and well-studied feature of the Catalan grammar (vaig cantar go.1sg.pres.ind-sing ‘I sang’), but its existence in Occitan has been ignored to the extent that Catalan is often erroneously thought to be the only Romance language with a go-past. In this article, we first explore the rise and distribution of the go-past in Old Occitan (ca. 13th to 16th centuries) and then focus on the presence of the construction in the contemporary Occitan dialects of Gascony and Guardia Piemontese (a village in Calabria, Italy). We discuss the semantic and morphological particularities of the construction in some detail for both dialects using data from a variety of (little-known) sources, including, for Guardia Piemontese, our own field data. Finally, we provide arguments for the hypothesis that the go-past developed first in Occitania and subsequently diffused into Catalan-speaking areas.
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