THE MEANING OF DESTRAL AS 'GO-BETWEEN' IN THE CATALAN "FACET" AND IN OLD OCCITAN

In the 12th and 13th centuries, the troubadours in Occitania and the trouvères in northern France composed songs with texts in the vernacular and monophonic melodies. For the troubadours, the vernacular was Old Occitan; for their northern counterparts, Old French. This difference in idiom is sometimes held to mark a distinction between two separate but analogous traditions of medieval song. The medieval practices of compiling multilingual lyric anthologies and of borrowing melodies seem instead to affirm the contiguity of song culture across different languages. The term “lyric” during this period typically designates a text set to melody, but not all manuscripts of troubadour and trouvère lyric preserve song melodies. Music survives for nearly half of the trouvère repertory (about three thousand songs) but only about 10 percent of the twenty-six hundred extant troubadour songs. The compositional period for troubadours and trouvères is conventionally defined rather rigidly as 1100–1300, and the songs themselves as strophic and monophonic. However, the troubadours and trouvères also composed in non-strophic genres (lais and descorts), and the trouvères composed in non-musical lyric genres (congés, dits) as well as in polyphonic forms. Adam de la Halle and Jehan de Lescurel, for example, produced small but significant collections of single-text polyphonic pieces. Of course, the composition of French and Occitan song also continued beyond 1300, albeit in different social and cultural contexts, by which point the long history of its study and reception had already begun. Some of the most important reference works, such as the Pillet-Carstens Bibliographie, date from the early 20th century and come from France and Germany, while Anglophone publications on troubadour and trouvère music only began to emerge in the second half of the 20th century. Modern scholars continually renew this material by bringing it into conversation with critical theory (Giving Voice to Love: Song and Self-Expression from the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut, cited under General Studies), feminist theory (Songs of the Women Trouvères, cited under Anthologies), and social history (The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France 1100–1300, cited under Musical, Literary, Social, and Political Studies; The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100-c.1300 and Parler d’amour au puy d’Arras: Lyrique en jeu, both cited under Regional Studies). The vibrancy in troubadour and trouvère scholarship also comes from interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange among musicologists, historians, paleographers, and literary scholars. Despite their shared primary sources, the fields of musicology and of literary studies have approached troubadour and trouvère material differently, and with different emphases. In part, these differences can be ascribed to the difficulty of defining a corpus of study, which does not always overlap for the two fields. The organization of this article echoes some of these tensions between older but fundamental reference works and newer directions of inquiry, and the sometimes separate, sometimes unified, treatment of troubadour and trouvère song.

Download Full-text

Dante the Scribe and Dante the Commentator II: The Old Occitan Poetry Collections and the Vita Nova

Dante and the Dynamics of Textual Exchange ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823270231.003.0004 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. 102-134

Author(s):

Jelena Todorović

Keyword(s):

Old Occitan

Download Full-text

The V2 syntax of Medieval Romance

Verb Second in Medieval Romance ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198804673.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 17-34

Author(s):

Sam Wolfe

Keyword(s):

Old French ◽

Romance Languages ◽

Medieval Romance ◽

Quantitative Evidence ◽

Old Spanish ◽

Qualitative And Quantitative ◽

Old Occitan ◽

Old Portuguese ◽

New Evidence ◽

Detailed Presentation

This chapter provides a detailed presentation of the main data and arguments which have been proposed in favour of claiming that the Medieval Romance languages were V2 systems and considers data from Old French, Old Occitan, Old Italo-Romance varieties, Old Spanish, and Old Portuguese. It provides new qualitative and quantitative evidence to show the nature of the prefield, Germanic inversion, matrix/embedded asymmetries, and the precise types of verb-first and verb-third-or-greater orders provide new evidence in favour of the V2 hypothesis. It also suggests that the diachronic emergence of a V2 grammar is entirely plausible on the basis of the available data. The main objections to the V2 account proposed in the literature are evaluated and argued to face empirical and theoretical problems.

Download Full-text

Grammar of An Uncodified Language: The Old Occitan Grammar of Guilhem Molinier

Tenso ◽

10.1353/ten.0.0010 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 25 (1-2) ◽

pp. 23-35

Author(s):

Roy Hagman

Keyword(s):

Old Occitan

Download Full-text

Clitic position in Old Occitan affirmative verb-first declaratives coordinated by e

Journal of Historical Linguistics ◽

10.1075/jhl.19002.don ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 389-426

Author(s):

Bryan Donaldson

Keyword(s):

Logistic Regression ◽

Recent Work ◽

Medieval Romance ◽

14Th Century ◽

Level Data ◽

Old Occitan

Abstract This paper offers a variationist analysis of object and adverbial clitic position in coordinated affirmative verb-first main declaratives introduced by e(t) “and” in Old Occitan. In this context, clitics occur in either preverbal (e·l vestit “and clothed him”) or postverbal position (e perdonet li “and pardoned him”). Following recent work on Medieval Romance coordination, I posit that proclitic and enclitic examples reflect different coordination structures at the underlying syntactic level. Data from complete analyses of five major 13th- and 14th-century texts, analyzed in a variationist approach using logistic regression, reveal that the choice between coordination structures – and hence, between proclisis and enclisis – is principled rather than random and depends on the degree of continuity or rupture/discontinuity between the conjuncts.

Download Full-text

WHEN THE PAST BECOMES THE PRESENT: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE OLD OCCITAN PASSIVE VOICE

Revista da ABRALIN ◽

10.5380/rabl.v2i1.52679 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Bianca SLOBBE

Keyword(s):

Small Clause ◽

Passive Voice ◽

The Past ◽

Old Occitan

Este trabalho é uma análise, do ponto de vista da sintaxe gerativa, do desenvolvimento do presente perfeito passivo em Occitano Antigo. No Latim Clássico, o presente perfeito passivo era expresso pela combinação de um particípio perfeito passivo com uma forma do verbo SER no presente. Em Occitano Antigo, o mesmo particípio perfeito passivo era combinado com uma forma do verbo SER num tempo perfeito. A hipótese de Giorgi & Pianesis (1997), que explica tal desenvolvimento postulando a ocorrência de uma Perfect Shift na transformação do Latim para as línguas românicas, é rejeitada. Em seu lugar, argumenta-se que as mudanças descritas acima foram causadas por uma mudança semântica que afetou a forma verbal latina fuit no Latim tardio, e que resultou no abandono das construções de particípio verbal em favor de estruturas de Small Clause.

Download Full-text